Tag: Lisa Eichhorn

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Cutter and Bone

Written by Richard T. Jameson April 30, 2016

[originally published in Film Comment, July-August 1981]

In March of this year, a film named Cutter and Bone opened in New York under the aegis of United Artists. Vincent Canby of The New York Times panned it, business was bad, and UA, still bleeding from its Heaven’s Gate wounds, yanked the film after one week. That was just in time to miss a number of weekly magazine reviews hailing it as perhaps the most exciting American film of the year, and glowing with praise for its director, Ivan Passer, and its stars, Jeff Bridges, John Heard, and Lisa Eichhorn. At that time UA turned Cutter and Bone over to its difficult-films division, United Artists Classics, where a new ad campaign was devised and a new title imposed. As Cutter’s Way, the film has begun a test market engagement in Seattle. You may or may not get to see it. Here’s a report from someone who did.

***

Richard Bone saw a body being dumped in an alley around midnight. He doesn’t know that yet. Now it’s a couple of hours later and he’s driving home. Not his home, exactly, but where he sleeps. Not quite that, either: where he sleeps until he grows uncomfortable with having been in one place too long—usually around first light; then he gets up and goes down to the marina and finishes sleeping on one of the boats he’s supposed to be hustling to susceptible Santa Barbra wives. But right now he’s driving home, to Alex Cutter’s house, in Alex Cutter’s car, to Alex Cutter’s wife Mo.

From the kitchen come sounds of clunky rummaging in the refrigerator; the light of its bulb is all that shows us Mo, in souvenir Vietnam Oriental jacket, dredging up a fresh bottle. She walks into the living room barefoot and careful, her face set with the concentration needed to keep her head straight on her shoulders. Seeing Bone, she smiles after a fashion. Some of the smile may say Welcome. Some of the smile may say, as she more or less does now, You again! A lot of it is just because that’s what happens to Mo’s face when she’s stoned. You can feel the alcohol and the downers in every delicate, courageous step she takes, sense how the strain of keeping her balance through recent months and years has made her bones frail, understand that the pressure under her skull is like a headachy memory of grace she can’t let go of.

Review: Yanks

Written by Pierre Greenfield November 10, 2009June 9, 2020

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

As the donkey regards the carrot, so John Schlesinger looks on his screenplays: he either follows or swallows them. A follow-my-leader under the deadly misapprehension that he is an auteur, Schlesinger is happiest when partnering writers who share his tendency to scream Look at me, I’m an artist! With a Frederic Raphael (Darling) or a William Goldman (Marathon Man), he’s in show-off’s heaven, and his inability to provide the real impetus, the backbone, the solid core of a movie, the way a real artist would, is snugly disguised amidst a great deal of visual and verbal shouting. The cheesy verbal wisecracks of Darling are fleshed out by Schlesinger’s no less cheesy imagistic ones (e.g., fat ladies wolfing down the eats at an Oxfam bash), just as the greasy, lapel-seizing prose of Marathon Man is aptly pictorialised via such characteristic Schlesinger conceits as the shot of Lord Olivier framed distortingly through a glass tray whilst he slavers hammily at its contents, assorted gems. In both these movies, writer and director are as one in pretentious mediocrity, and each butters up the other. But with Schlesinger’s new film, Yanks, the screenwriters are two gentlemen with reputations for low-key, understated work, who would furthermore seem to have no great keenness for Schlesingerian ego-tripping. Colin Welland (the actor who played the cleric in Straw Dogs, and one of Britain’s best TV playwrights) and Walter Bernstein (The Front) appear only too ready to put their faith in their director and let him be the boss, guiding their scenario where’er he would lead it. And Schlesinger has no idea at all of how to be the leader, with the result that everyone gets swiftly lost.

Review: Yanks

Written by Robert C. Cumbow November 10, 2009June 9, 2020

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

Yanks is probably John Schlesingerâ€™s best movie since Sunday Bloody Sunday, and certainly one of the best of his career. But for me thatâ€™s not really saying much, since I continue to have serious problems with this directorâ€™s approach, a self-congratulatory mock-sensitivity that seems insincere at best and often downright wrong. Here, at least, for the first time in years, Schlesinger has foregone his irritating penchant for unproductive intercuts and flashbacks, opting instead for a straight, period-faithful, romantic storyline about the impact of American soldiers-without-women on a Britain without men. But no matter how polished and relatively controlled he gets, there is always something about Schlesingerâ€™s work that strikes me as shallow and ultimately inconsequential.