Tag: Thayer David

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Save the Tiger

Written by Richard T. Jameson October 23, 2017

[Originally published in Movietone News 22, April 1973]

Save the Tiger is the sort of film that can give a well-intentioned film teacher nightmares. It’s so easy to imagine an equally well-intentioned, beginning student turning in a scene-by-scene breakdown of the narrative that faultlessly demonstrates as serious a thematic—indeed, didactic—purpose and as constant and consistent a stylistic application as one could ask to discover—all without realizing that the film itself remains dead, dead-ended, its conclusion foregone from the first. Producer Steve Shagan’s screenplay themes the viewer right into the ground with its highly unspontaneous collection of invocations of what we have lost as a nation: baseball played on real instead of plastic turf, oriental-dream movie palaces featuring The Best Years of Our Lives instead of skin flicks with selfrighteous, socially redeeming narration, garments cut by a master craftsman, Cole Porter, a sense of what World War II was all about (or even a memory that it was fought)….

Review: The Eiger Sanction

Written by Richard T. Jameson January 5, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 42, July 1975]

Clint Eastwood does his own mountain-climbing rightly enough, as a camera swooping out from closeup to acrophobic helicopter longshot verifies time and again. One tight-lipped smile of appreciation for that, and little remains to be said in favor of Eastwood’s fourth directorial outing. From the behind-the-credits sequence of an unidentifiable supporting player ambling through some locations-for-locations’-sake European streets, The Eiger Sanction lacks shape, rhythm, and any notable tone or point-of-view. Its grotesques—Thayer David as a 100-percent albino named Dragon who directs an international Murder Inc. from a secret red-lit room, George Kennedy as a hot-damn-buddy Western type, and Jack Cassidy as a patently treacherous faggot—are (un)directed so broadly, yet without a true sense of outrageousness, that one is inclined to feel sympathy for the performers (though only Kennedy seems to deserve any). More ordinary sorts are blatantly set up over and over to be knocked down by an incredibly predictable putdown script (Gregory Walcott, as a Dragon man who keeps rubbing Eastwood the wrong way, is such a clod that the only thing conceivably dangerous about the character is his incompetence as a tough guy). After sharing with us his own amusement at being proffered as a professor of art history who has retired from the killing game in order to enjoy the stash of masterworks bought with his ill-gotten gains, Eastwood walks uninterestingly through the rest of his part, counting on the uninflected slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am machismo that didn’t see him through High Plains Drifter either; on the evidence of his second and fourth films (he didn’t take a role in Breezy and I’d appreciate a chance to reconsider Play Misty for Me), he should leave the direction of himself to other people. The story involves the Eastwood character in one of those murky internecine projects wherein, by the time the action has run its course, we’ve had it demonstrated ad nauseam that the potentiality for betrayal is inherent in any relationship a truism that has been worked out more scrupulously in other thrillers where the conclusion didn’t seem so foregone.
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by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: I Will, I Will … For Now / The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox

Written by Richard T. Jameson July 5, 2012

[Originally published in Movietone News 49, April 1976]

Norman Panama and Melvin Frank used to be partners. Since neither of their latest independent efforts is worth reviewing by itself, and since both represent hazards to public health, this joint quarantine report is offered. I Will, I Will … for Now finds Panama blatantly poaching on territory Frank found profitable—and made comparatively tolerable—in A Touch of Class a couple years ago. Frank’s scenario about a salably bittersweet affair between a married man and a plucky divorcee in an expense-account version of the Jet Set has been transmuted into a wishfully trendy bit of fluff concerning a once-married couple who opt for one more try, but this time under the modish umbrella of a cohabitation contract renewable or cancellable at the end of each year. It’s hard to tell from scene to scene whether they’re with-it or congenitally oldfashioned; while that might have made for a revealing approach to the problems of maintaining an honest commitment in these parlous times of sexual revisionism, in this case the confusion bespeaks filmmakers playing both ends against the middle rather than the comic pathos of well-meaning characters. Gould and Keaton—and Paul Sorvino as the family lawyer who’d been having an affair with the new divorcee—supply the enterprise with more gentle whimsy and emotional integrity than their cinematic context deserves. As for the movie side of things, even ace cameraman John (Chinatown) Alonzo performs as if he were lensing a TV sitcom.