Word: avildsen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...DIXIE DANCEKINGS Directed by JOHN G. AVILDSEN Screenplay by THOMAS RICKMAN...
Directed by JOHN G. AVILDSEN...
Director John Avildsen, who made Joe, continues to prove himself a master of the visual cliche, the low-slung symbol and the stereophonic anticlimax. He is abetted by Scenarist Steve Shagan, a sort of drip-dry Clifford Odets, who puts klieg lights around every metaphor. According to the credits, Shagan also functioned as the producer. Considering the results, that is a little like running off your unpublishable novel on your own vanity press...
Copulation of Clichés. Director John G. Avildsen directs his actors in the same manner that a red light may be said to direct patrons. No matter. Pornography is customarily, in Nabokov's fine phrase, a copulation of clichés. Not here. Garfield takes this insanely, inanely plotted movie and lends each scene a Rabelaisian gusto and surprise. His movements are reminiscent of the hippopotamus in rutting season; his expressions are unique. Who else could register such dismay when he finds that he has been making love to a corpse? Who else could transmit such concern...
Peter Boyle's neatly turned caricature of the title character adds a great deal to the humor of Joe -as does, in a different way, the atrocious acting contributed by everyone else in the cast. Director John G. Avildsen keeps the whole thing moving, but it is unfortunate that the script's political pussy-footing and fierce determination to touch all the exploitational bases (to the extent of sacrificing all credibility) trip him up from time to time. Perhaps if screenwriter Wexler had spent, say, a month on the screenplay, Joe might have had the uncomplicated force necessary to qualify...