Frank Perry Archives - Parallax View

[Originally published in Movietone News 31, April 1974]

Man on a Swing is one of those anomalous films with a few pretensions to major standing scattered amid the telltale half-measures and slipshod surfaces of a B-picture. Exhibits A, C, and D (B having just been spoken for): Joel Grey, who was probably embarking on this film about the time he carried home a Supporting Actor Oscar for Cabaret last year; Cliff Robertson, an actor of apparent intelligence and integrity who followed up on his own Best Actor award (for Charly) by writing, producing, directing, and starring in his own modest, intriguing movie J.W. Coop, and lending himself to such commercially unlikely but very distinctive experiments as The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid; Frank Perry, onetime Brave Independent Artist who launched himself with the privately financed David and Lisa, then went on to such heav-veee projects as Last Summer, Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Play It As It Lays. Doc (which was pre-Lays) marked his first excursion into genre territory—and a sour, humorless, genre- and self-debasing excursion it was. Man on a Swing indicates a slight improvement: Perry turns in unassuming, if also undistinguished, work on this story about the investigation of a sex murder in a small town firmly entrenched in Middle America.

Read More “Review: Man on a Swing”

[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]

I have to be on the side of any film in which Harry Dean Stanton is ordered to “Hoover the Navajos”—i.e., vacuum-clean the Indian rugs. The line could only have been written by Tom McGuane, who’s made a specialty in recent years of writing almost surreally funny sendups of the New West. The rugs belong to Elizabeth Ashley, bored but miraculously goodhumored wife of rancher Clifton James who, fresh out of empires to build, has recently focused his obsessive attention on apprehending a couple of one-steer-at-a-time rustlers. In this effort he is—or is supposed to be—abetted by horsethief–turned–stock detective Slim Pickens, who manifests a disconcerting preference for sitting in front of a TV set in the bunkhouse and ignoring the clues James finds and the theories he cooks up. The hard guys interfering with James’s peace of mind (or providing him with esoteric entertainment—take your pick) are about as dangerous as defanged garter snakes: Jeff Bridges, a poor little rich boy with a spoiled marriage behind him, and Sam Waterston, an Indian whose militancy is of a benignly comic strain and whose blood traces back to Ohio Cornplanters rather than the warriors who once rode the surrounding Big Skyline.

Tag: Frank Perry

Review: Man on a Swing

Review: Rancho Deluxe