Word: flim
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...National Student Association, the Motion Picture Association of America and Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the festival last month showed entries from 37 colleges, which were judged by a panel that included Directors Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night), Irving Kershner (The Flim Flam Man), and Producer Philip Leacock (Gun-smoke). The prizewinners in the contest's four major categories...
...tobacco country, a burned-out grifter (George C. Scott) is shoved from a moving freight car. A young drifter (Michael Sarrazin) dusts him off and helps him to his feet. The two quickly discover that they have some things in common-cunning and duplicity. The grifter is the Flim Flam Man, a wheezy, sleazy slicker who for half a century has taken yokels with potency pills, crooked cards and his smooth Mason-Dixon line. The drifter is AWOL from Fort Bragg, and hungry. Scott proposes a merger, and the two are soon fast-shuffling their way to fortune, until...
...straight. Before he can turn himself in to the MP's, the sheriff catches up with the two tricksters and claps them into jail. There Sarrazin realizes that a cage will kill the old buzzard, and risks his life and love in an attempt to spring the Flim Flam Man one more time...
Half comedy, half drama, Flim Flam is really two films that, superimposed, tend to cancel each other out. The drama tries for realism, indicts mankind for the universal greed and gullibility upon which parasites like the Flim Flam Man prosper. But the actors who play his prey all deliver caricatures instead of portraits in a gallery of outlandish Southern yahoos such as never dwelt outside Dogpatch...
...speaks the language of the contemporary soldier. Like the cars its heroes steal and riotously wreck, the script starts strong but plots its own collision course, and eventually piles up in a harmless heap of miscellaneous parts that no longer mesh. The viewer, who begins by sympathizing with the Flim Flam Man, ends film-flammed as another one of his victims...