Directed by Stuart Rosenberg. You've seen his films; among them, Cool Hand Luke, The Drowning Pool, Brubaker, The Laughing Policeman. All films worthy of your time.

This thing, however, is a confused, dreary, meandering mess. TCM and IMDB both categorize the film as a comedy. I don't know where they get that idea, but this film is not funny in the least. Almost an hour into it, the film queues viewers that it is supposed to be a comedy, with typical comedy-style music.

I was shocked to find out that Terence Malick, of all people, wrote the screenplay from the source novel, Jim Kane written by J.P.S Brown.

The following year, Malick wrote the screenplay for Badlands, a film based upon the Starkweather spree killings, and that film and his other screenplays of the 20th Century have been exceptional, so it's not like the screenplay was written by a dolt.

A-list actors, a fine director, a highly competent screenwriter, and yet, this thing really blows.

Here's what Wikipedia says, and this may help to explain things a bit, but not entirely:

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two stars out of four and wrote, "The movie seems to be going for a highly mannered, elliptical, enigmatic style, and it gets there. We don't." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film zero stars out of four and called the performances by the two leads "completely self-indulgent," suggesting that "Maybe Newman and Marvin made it because they wanted to go slumming in Mexico for two weeks. On that basis, 'Pocket Money' can be considered a 35-millimeter home movie of what Paul Newman and Lee Marvin did last summer." Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a fragmented, far-from-great movie, and it won't change cinema history, but in its own odd fashion it celebrates humdrum lives without ever resorting to patronizing artifice." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that Newman and Marvin had "found precisely the right material to enable them not only to play off each other but also to shine individually. This delightful contemporary comedy-western in fact is that most precious of commodities these days: a movie that actually cheers you up and leaves you feeling better when you come out than when you went in."

TV Guide wrote in a retrospective review, “Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Barbra Streisand, Steve McQueen, and Dustin Hoffman formed First Artists, and this was their premier offering. It wasn't as terrible a movie as the first reviews of it indicated, but since so much was expected, anything less than brilliance was a letdown.” The film currently has a 67% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Sixty-seven percent?? Well there'a a clear indication that Rotten Tomatoes should just drop their rating system altogether. It sounds like people are reviewing the film without ever having seen it, instead seeing that it's a Newman/Marvin film from the director of Cool Hand Luke and assuming it must be good. And this stuff about "...since so much was expected, anything less than brilliance was a letdown." Sorry, no. That is not the problem. The film, taken on its own merits, is quite simply very bad- awkward- really awkward all the way through. Unfunny. Frustrating to watch because the film goes nowhere, and I do mean nowhere. I'm glad to have seen it, to get it under my belt as the film snob I am, but for the casual viewer who is not ticking films off a list like a birdwatcher, do not waste your time.

Strother Martin is in the film, and Richard Farnsworth has one brief scene. All the actors appear awkward in their scenes. That's not bad acting. That's not a bad screenplay. That is poor direction ten ways from Sunday, so I lay this dead fish at the feet of director Rosenberg.

I watched it. Stinkeroo. Billed as a comedy western. I did not find any comedy at all. I was looking forward to seeing an underrated actor I like: Hector Elizondo. No real role for him in this. I did like Lee Marvins car.

quote:

Starkweather

Now there's a name I haven't heard in many years.