He has a problem and he's found a way to try and deal with it. to him in a scene that sounds dictated by the film's technical advisers.įine. He walks out with the leader of the meeting, who explains G.A. So he goes to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, and finds the courage to stand up and identify himself as a compulsive gambler. He realizes he is a degenerate gambler and needs help. O'Neal finally grows convinced that he has a problem. The opening segments of the movie are simply odd, distracting and unconvincing. The crash takes her off the scene, and there's a love interest between O'Neal and Catherine Hicks, as the casino waitress who doubles as the house hooker. Neither does a tortured flashback, in which O'Neal's wife is trapped in a car crash while racing to bring him money so his poker cronies won't break his legs. The movie's hyperkinetic editing style doesn't help. O'Neal looks and sounds so odd in this garish, neon-lit melodrama that he is hardly ever convincing. The filmmaker is Richard Brooks, a veteran of many great movies of the 1940s and later, but this time he hasn't found a style that suits his material. The movie is written and directed in an odd, dated style it's like a throwback to hard-boiled 1940s gangster films, but it has some touches of its own, like dialogue that sounds borrowed from pulp novels, and characters who disconcertingly start talking in rhymed couplets.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |