Word: crooked
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...THIS WAY of getting even impresses us as cynical, Malle certainly helps the decadence along. When the thief runs into his family priest during his getaway, one suspects he might repent. No need to, though, because the good curate turns out to be a master crook himself. The hypocrisy of it all sounds funny, but Malle's somber colors and slow pace stop the irony like a wad of lint in our throats. This should be a black humor giggle-fest, but nobody is laughing...
...dark, damp, declining metropolis becomes for Theroux like reading that dark, damp, declining novelistic form of sharp turns and blind alleys, the thriller. As in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, to which The Family Arsenal seems to invite comparison, the characters emerge at first as anonymous voices: a crook prowling a seedy riverside district; an accountant who refuses to yield his house to a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood, an aristocratic woman who collects people like souvenirs. But, as the characters are unmasked with the gradually unwinding plot, each one's terror and terrorizing begins to look and sound more and more...
...MORE], for one. Or less, for that matter. Conspiracy abounds. Takeover conspiracies. Undue influence conspiracies. Creamy peanut butter conspiracies. Extra. Read all about it. Discredited former vice-crook-president charges Jewishes with Zionist sympathies and media control. That's just the cover story. Inside, how (in not so many words) the re-accredited former seed salesman from Plains creamed his way into New York Times headlines, and Memphis-blues-cooed his wormy fishhook into the tangled pickle that is Hunter Thompson's heart...
Some interesting and normally intelligent actors are involved in this nonsense. Robert Shaw is the master crook, and Martin Ritt, better known as a director (Hud, Sounder, Conrack), plays the Swiss cop who is his nemesis. Jon Voight plays Ritt's assistant - and unwitting tool - while Jacqueline Bisset does time as lover to both Shaw and Voight. Their skills are all frittered aimlessly away in a movie that offers slowness of pace as an earnest of artistic integrity. The only emotion that the audience is likely to work up watching this unconscionable bore is an irresistible desire...
...woman. They are long dead and Simpson, who bears some rather sick grudges from his experiences at English boarding schools, is a bitter and nationless failure. He is married to a young dancer who sleeps around on him. He is old, overweight, and cowardly. He is also a petty crook, who acts as a driver for rich businessmen, meeting them at the Athens airport, showing them the sights (including a brothel with which he has connections), and eventually fleecing them of their traveller's checks while they are enjoying the fleshpots of the city...