Word: filming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Since the film consists of one damnable bungle after another, it tends to lose its comic momentum, but there are enough insanely funny moments to sustain the picture. One bank robbery goes excruciatingly awry when Allen and the bank teller get into a testy debate about whether the piece of paper Allen has shoved through the teller's window does or does not read: "I have a gub." Allen's gub is forthwith confiscated, and he begins one of several jail sentences...
Director John Frankenheimer has exercised his film-making talents on such diverse subjects as The Manchurian Candidate, The Fixer and The Train. However the stories vary, Frankenheimer remains obsessed by the qualities of valor. Even his little-seen comedy, The Extraordinary Seaman, has a ghostly hero condemned to walk the decks of a rotting gunboat until he is able to execute a single act of military courage...
...Malcolm's aunt (Deborah Kerr). Rettig beds the aunt, then commits suicide during a particularly difficult stunt. As a memorial to Rettig, Malcolm attempts the same reckless leap. What he discovers about courage and his own manhood should have been the core of the story; unhappily, the film is too oblique for its own good...
...dialogue lacks the painful intensity that was obviously intended. The interrelationships of the characters make sense but have little emotional resonance, a handicap that only Gene Hackman manages to surmount. His brassy characterization of a free-living sky diver adds a poignant dimension of reality to a film that, like sky diving itself, is an exciting but slightly dubious exercise...
Pregnancies last nine months, and the film is paced to match. The only fire that the film stokes is under the bureaucratically callous procedures of British welfare medics, a group that seems to inspire a special nausea in Scriptwriter Margaret Drabble. Sandy Dennis has curtailed some of her facial acrobatics, but she still speaks some of her lines as if she were blowing them through her gums. Just to fill the new feminists' cup of joy, Sandy's baby is a girl...