[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979]
“I’ve been waiting all my life to fuck up like this.” That’s the closest we ever get to the motivation of Vietnam War correspondent John (Michael Moriarty), who suddenly, unaccountably decides to buy two kilos of uncut heroin to smuggle from Saigon back to California, there to sell it at enormous profit. By the time his wife Marge (Tuesday Weld) and his old Marine Corps buddy Ray (Nick Nolte, who with a performance like this under his belt is to be completely and unconditionally forgiven for The Deep) are menaced very nearly to death by the mob (or are they the cops? or are they the mob after all?), it’s too late for John to change what he has got them all into. “I can’t believe I’ve done this,” he tells his bookseller father-in-law (a feisty David Opatoshu), who jejunely replies, “A sense of unreality is no defense.”