Word: crichton
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...also has the voluptuous figure and classic features of an oldtime movie star. When she strips down to black silk undies and slithers under the sheets with Connery, the audience gets a dizzying whiff of pure sex worthy of Loren or Monroe. It is no wonder that Director Michael Crichton's camera all but jumps into bed with...
...GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY Directed and Written by Michael Crichton...
Such moments aside, The Great Train Robbery is a curiously enervated affair. In his previous films, Westworld and Coma, Crichton has shown a gut instinct for creating nasty suspense. His movies looked sloppy, but fiendish humor and scare tactics helped paper over the visual lapses. Train Robbery, paradoxically, looks gorgeous but lacks bite and narrative rhythm. The thieves carry out their complex scheme in a series of repetitive, evenly paced sequences, most of which involve the hijacking of keys to a safe. When you've seen one key theft, you've seen them all. The robberies...
...have nothing to be ashamed of if they don't, you must at least concede that he's flamboyant, like his protagonist in The Phantom of Paradise a virtuoso gone ga-ga, which puts him far ahead of literal-minded bores like Richard Donner and Michael Crichton. His last film, Carrie, was a gory, silly, outrageous, and incredibly beautiful piece of movie-making--far more structured, spare, and cohesive than The Fury, and unfortunately, a far more satisfying movie...
...Hitchcock would have had a ball with Coma, and maybe we'd have seen some of Boston, too, where the story is supposedly set--imagine the climactic operation taking place in Fenway Park, or on top of the John Harvard statue. But instead we get Dr. Michael Crichton, and it's goodbye to wit, to hell with the unseen, and a scalpel to the audience's brain...