SHORT TAKES
Across 110th St. — Three black men steal some loot from the mob, only to spend the rest of the movie running from the cops and the wronged crooks. It’s 110 minutes of unrelieved sadism, with a couple of torture scenes guaranteed to make you blow your cookies.
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SHORT TAKES
ADVIIT ONE
Across 110th St. — Three black men steal some loot from the mob, only to spend the rest of the movie running from the cops and the wronged crooks. It’s 110 minutes of unrelieved sadism, with a couple of torture scenes guaranteed to make you blow your cookies. Director Barry .Shear is rather clumsy, but he certainly keeps his movie coming, straight at you. Watching it is like getting mugged. Almost great trash, but a couple of absurd socially conscious speeches blow that angle.
Child’s Play — Beau Bridges is real cool. He’s a great goon, too. Seeing his walrus
face in the beginning of this movie with the conman Music Man, Robert Preston, sets off the action — demented suspense. A Catholic boys school is plagued by the kids killing each other, supposedly because of a meany Latin teacher, Lash (James Mason). The culprit in the movie is the devil all right; however, the movie deceives the viewer: clever idea but undeveloped plot, relying on the sensational. Kinda like an unbelievable trash novel with moral aspirations. Shows to go you — plays should stick to Broadway and games should stay with Milton Bradley.
RC
Pete ’N Tillie — Year’s worst title. And the flick, about the rise, fall and reconstruction of a middle class marriage, is just a couple cuts above “women’s fiction.” What really kills the movie, despite the presence of a couple of pros like Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett, is that pre-fab, studio set look that so many of the Universal releases still have. After sitting through a couple reels of Martin Ritt’s deadening visual compositions, you can practically hear the art director saying: “We’ll make the apartment walls off-beige because that way they’ll blend tastefully with Carol’s red hair.”
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean — Roy Bean was a hangin’ judge who founded a town and this here’s the flick they made about him. It’s one of those tiresome folk fables, loaded with heavy irony and endless cameo star appearances, that seems to end at about five different points — only to pull itself together and start off with yet another vignette. John Huston milks the material dry, but he does get some good mileage out of Stacy Keach (as an albino gunfighter in a blond wig) and Ava Gardner. Of course, Paul Newman’s always great, but this one is still a great big yawn.
