Word: benton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BILLY BATHGATE. Over budget and over schedule, with rumors of rancor soiling its production, Robert Benton's movie of the E.L. Doctorow novel arrives in a shroud of doom. Well, surprise! There's rare grace and gravity in the tale of a Bronx kid (Loren Dean, a find) who hitches his hopes to the falling star of gangster Dutch Schultz (Dustin Hoffman, again splendid). Forget the Cassandras. Go see a good movie...
...best seller went over budget and reportedly out of whack, bathgate is what Hollywood figured the Disney studio would take -- in red ink -- when the film finally opened. Its summer premiere was postponed; last month a new ending was shot (then discarded); stories surfaced of clashes between director Robert Benton and his star, Dustin Hoffman. Oh, and Bruce Willis was in it, so it must...
...analyze every movement and moment in 484 pages of headlong streetwise orotundity and subordinate clauses even longer than this one. Tom Stoppard's script daringly dumps that voice (there is no voice-over narration) and puts its trust in other eloquences: Doctorow's story and dialogue, the actors' faces, Benton's tactful direction...
Despite Hoffman's wonderfully gruff, implosive star performance -- he is so in tune with Dutch's desperation that even his murderous rages are sullen -- this is at heart a movie about the power of a beautiful, fearless woman. In Kidman, an improbable amalgam of Sigourney Weaver and Melanie Griffith, Benton found Drew's embodiment. Toward the end, when she flies out of two men's lives, she seems an airborne goddess of artful deceit...
...round of cutbacks. The question is where, after years of budget slashing, these new cuts will come. "They're going to have to go back to the drawing board and look for large, large chunks," says Peter Herford, a former CBS News executive who is now director of the Benton Broadcast Journalism Fellowships at the University of Chicago...