Tag: Frederic Forrest

by Rick Hermann, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Conversation

Written by Rick Hermann March 28, 2016

[Originally published in Movietone News 32, June 1974]

Gene Hackman’s quietly desperate face looms huge in so many frames of Francis Ford Coppola’s most recent film that by the end of the movie we know his features just about as intimately as Harry Caul (played by Hackman) knows the lines of the conversation he has bugged. Both we and he are, in a sense, obsessed: we, the viewers, by Harry’s troubled image on the screen; Harry, by the voices he hears and the implications, slowly realized, of what those voices are saying. This hardly seems a coincidence—Coppola obviously intended it that way. Closeups, especially of Hackman, virtually fill the movie, serving perfectly to visually reinforce the theme of violated privacy with which the story is so much concerned. The correlation between those who bug and those who are bugged (bugger and buggee?) is ultimately turned into a nearly inevitable irony as Harry’s situation is reversed and he becomes the one who is watched and listened to. Indeed, the screenplay as a whole moves just a bit too predictably and ends up being too readily reachable, too readily analyzable, what with its neat ambiguities and psychological uncertainties and sticky relevancies (not to mention some of the painfully pointed dialogue: “You’re not supposed to feel anything about it,” a blond seductress says to Harry just before swiping his tapes of the conversation; “It’s just a job”). But if you’re willing to disregard some of the story’s weaknesses as narrative and actually look at the film more closely, you might find it has some visually interesting ways of “saying” things.

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by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: The Gravy Train

Written by Richard T. Jameson August 31, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 37, November 1974]

Gravy Train offers unlimited opportunities for self-congratulation to everyone in front of or behind the camera, and in front of the screen as well. Within that dubious category of experience it’s quite a satisfying show, as amply testified to by the raucous audience reaction during the recent Harvard Exit engagement. Stacy Keach and Frederic Forrest turn in thoroughly researched performances as a pair of West Virginia rubes who reject a life of digging coal and head for the Big Town—the iconographically unbeatable Washington D.C.—to open a seafood restaurant called the Blue Grotto. How to finance it? Why, with their share of the take in a low-comedy armored-car heist—except that the slickeroo mastermind from a bigger town, New York, crosses them up and disappears with the money. The Dion brothers (Keach and Forrest) finish out the film escaping from the trap he’s set for them, running the doublecrosser to earth, and shooting it out with him in a building that’s being demolished about their ears.

Review: The Missouri Breaks

Written by Robert C. Cumbow December 14, 2011

[Originally published in Movietone News 51, August 1976]

I was prepared—by Tom McGuane’s insipid earlier scripts and by Brando’s increasingly self-indulgent performances in recent years—to dislike The Missouri Breaks, and so was considerably surprised to find myself enjoying it. Now I’m just as surprised to find that I am relatively alone in having liked the film. Even people who liked Rancho Deluxe don’t seem to have found much to redeem The Missouri Breaks, which is basically the same story minus the comic touch, the contemporary setting, and the intemperate amoralism of McGuane’s essentially adolescent fantasy. In The Missouri Breaks, McGuane is still in the pat-on-the-ass world of male friendships and lockerroom values; but director Arthur Penn appears to have provided a mitigating, steadying influence on McGuane’s unsure hand where Frank Perry—of an adolescent temperament himself—could not. Penn seems to me more and more not an auteur himself but a skilled craftsman whose strength lies in the intelligent direction of other people’s exceptional scripts. Gore Vidal’s The Left-Handed Gun, Horton Foote’s The Chase, William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker, Newman and Benton’s Bonnie and Clyde, and even Alan Sharp’s postproduction-altered Night Moves are all literate scripts by good, careful writers; and most of Penn’s movies seem to depend as much on the writing that preceded the film (add Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man to that) as on directorial influence and the cinematic process. But if Penn’s films tend to showcase their writing (and, incidentally, consistently fine acting), this does not minimize his personal skill as a creative director. For me, Penn is approaching the stature of William Wyler—a capable director whose personality and vision are subjugated by the dedication of the disciplined craftsman to make the idea at hand into the best film it can be. Sometimes, as with Alice’s Restaurant and Little Big Man, that’s none too good; but more often, the results have been more than satisfactory.

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Film Reviews, Musicals

Review: The Rose

Written by Robert Horton November 20, 2009June 9, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980]

“You know, I’m so tired of the road,” sighs Bette Midler into a telephone near the end of the film. There’s a hesitation in her voice on the word ‘road’ as if she were going to say, “I’m so tired of The Rose” instead. This would not be unusual since the Rose consistently refers to herself in the third person. The film concerns her attempts to slip out from under that suffocating title, and the most intriguing tension within The Rose is that while wanting to make this escape the Rose nevertheless takes refuge behind her misleadingly flowery appellation whenever necessary. She has the ability to snap to brash, acid-tongued life, even from the depths of depression, when she is confronted by an audience: pursuing her sulking lover (Frederic Forrest) through a men’s steambath while keeping up an entertaining banter for the boys; being easily coaxed onstage at clubs she entered as a spectator; and finally, hopelessly drugged at her last concert appearance. This idea of the Rose being more at home while performing than at any other time is underscored by the way director Mark Rydell has filmed an early concert number. “When a Man Loves a Woman,” an exhausting ballad, is shot almost entirely in one long takeâ€”and the interesting thing about this song is that the closer we get to the Rose, the more we realize that she is making love with the microphone, her lips trailing over it, with a greater intimacy than we see in her contact with humans.