Word: dunaway
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BABET SCHROEDER'S Barfly is about a charmingly diminutive bum named Henry Chinaski (Mickey Rourke), who frequents seedy East L.A. bars, gets into fights, and drinks constantly. He also falls in love with a ravaged but residually beautiful booze queen named Wanda (Faye Dunaway). They meet in a bar, drink, stagger around the streets, drink, go to bed together, get in fights, go to bed some more, and drink a whole lot more...
Similarly, Dunaway's Wanda is a genuinely convincing waste case. She also manages the difficult feat of justifying Henry's initial impression of her as "some kind of distressed goddess." She doesn't overdo her star quality, either, avoiding the seductive trap of a 1940s melodrama performance. Even lines like "We're all in hell. And the madhouses are the only places where people know they're in hell" aren't too offensive coming from her--she has a sincerely manic edge to her that justifies her triteness...
...grow characters like Casanova anymore," he observes. "His kind of life would never happen now, but he is a great deal of fun." No kidding. The script for Casanova, a three-hour abc movie to appear later this season, calls for Chamberlain to seduce such beauties as Faye Dunaway and Sylvia Kristel (Emmannuelle). Nice work if you can cut it, but Casanova may have had an easier time of it. Chamberlain, 51, has to bed all his conquests twice. "We have the classic American and European dichotomy," he reports. "For the American version the women are covered up, and then...
...talent alone. Director Jeannot Szwarc, with the blood of "Jaws II" already on his hands, is carrying out his own niche as a hatchetman of promising sequels. Given a cast of the most talented hams in Hollywood, he squeezes as bland a performance as possible from each one. Dunaway is left to rehash the residue of her Joan Crawfordisms from "Mommy Dearest," charging through some genuinely funny lines with the comic timing...
...repentant Kryptonian Zaltar, reverts to the sloppy mannerisms that only a sloppy director would allow O'Toole is never on screen with Cooke, one of the great missed movie opportunities of many years. For his part, Cooke almost succeeds in catalyzing some comic chemistry with the self-absorbed Dunaway, but he is never on screen long enough to succeed. Hart Bochner plays Ethan, a sort of distaff Lois Lane, with as much quirky nervousness as Margot Kidder brought to Lane. The chubby Vaccarro seems to be the only veteran comfortable with her part, which entirely consists of insults and sarcastic...