Word: code
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Burt Reynolds shoot-'em-up, Stick, is a commercial and cinematic clunker. Charles Bronson has not had a big U.S. box-office success in years. Steve McQueen is long dead. Meanwhile Code of Silence, Chuck Norris' third movie in eight months, sold more tickets in its opening week than any other movie in the country. In his strictly wham-bam B-movie genre, Norris, a former karate champion, has become the undisputed superstar. No longer a cult figure but still well this side of A-list famous, Norris and some of his Hollywood partisans figure his celebrity is analogous...
Norris says he feels that acting ability is less important than "screen presence." Maybe so, but he takes artlessness to an extreme. Gary Cooper seems mannered and fidgety by comparison. As a loner cop in Lone Wolf McQuade (1983) or as a loner cop in Code of Silence, Norris comes across as an expressionless blank, conveying nothing but tenacity and absolute cool. His body is impeccable, but the voice is flat and high pitched. He has instructed writers to give him as few lines as possible, yet he rushes the elemental dialogue that remains. Words slur: "didn't" becomes "dint...
...blandness has its advantages. Norris is seldom off-putting. In Code of Silence, an exceptionally deft movie of its kind, Director Andy Davis has provided a perfect schematic vehicle: a righteous, nice-looking automaton is caught in a lot of crossfire. There are rotten Italian gangsters, rotten Colombian gangsters and rotten fellow police officers. As Sergeant Eddie Cusak, Norris refuses to go along with the cover-up of a killing by a scruffy underling (Ralph Foody) and tries to mediate a gang war. He may be good, but he has no family and no girlfriend, and gets uncomfortable...
...title role, Burt Reynolds has somehow mislaid that cheeky brightness that is the basis of his stardom. His performance is so muted it is sometimes hard to hear his lines, and he has directed the film in the same torpid spirit. This story of an ex-con whose moral code imposes on him a mission of revenge among the drug traffickers around Miami is lazy, dull and told in imagery as murky as its underlying morality...
...Ruhe and William Geissler agreed to surrender most of their shares to the company's creditors and employees. Even that drastic move was not enough. U.P.I.'s four directors voted unanimously last week to authorize Chairman Luis Nogales to file for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code...