Word: arkin
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There are flaws in the film: vignettes featuring Lou Jacobi as a past-throttled immigrant judge, Donald Sutherland as the pastor of the First Existentialist Church, and Alan Arkin as a neurotic police chief are all ill-timed. The first is prolonged to an ineffectively surreal note, the second (by far the funniest) turns into roundhouse farce, the last starts and ends hysterically...
Dance now, says Feiffer, pay the piper later. It is a terrible price. Patsy is murdered in Alfred's arms by an anonymous sniper, and a grisly, incoherent tale of urban warfare ensues. Doors are padlocked, windows are shuttered, rifles are broken out. A paranoid detective (Alan Arkin) tries to solve Patsy's murder -and 344 other unsolved killings -amid drumfire volleys of sniper fire. Alfred lapses into catatonia, reviving just in time to command a witless, meaningless shooting spree...
Much of the fault here is probably Arkin's, who directs as well as performs. His film work is grotesquely diffuse. Gould's inability to bring any form or sense to his role is more ominous; lately, perhaps because of overexposure, he seems capable only of self-parody...
...Exposition." To Film Critic Stefan Kanfer, who has been following Ali's career since she first appeared in Goodbye Columbus, her sudden leap to stardom is a classic example of "cinema inventing its own faces. When it needed the gritty reflection of urban reality, it found Arkin and Hoffman. Now, obviously, it is yearning for a sense of beauty in faces and stories...
...also liked Karen Black's performance and a scene where Jack Nicholson sits down to play the piano in Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, a slick film about alienation which seemed to cut away to a Laszlo Kovacs Easy Rider scenic vista whenever something seemed about to happen; Alan Arkin's Yossarian in Mike Nichols' Catch-22; Carrie Snodgress's heroine and Frank Perry's paranoiac camera work in the somewhat overdrawn Diary of a Mad Housewife; Charles Bronson's headstrong investigator in Rene Clement's Rider on the Rain; the dripping decadence and provocative idea behind Performance...