Word: gazzara
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film's mode might be described as bargain-basement Graham Greene. The hero, an American expatriate named Jack Flowers (Ben Gazzara), is a pimp who, irony of ironies, has a heart of gold. Jack cares for his clients and his employees, provides for his friends, avoids depraved sex and even talks to cats. He is the proverbial good man in a bad time (1971, approaching the end of Viet Nam) and a first-class bore. Even his day-to-day working life lacks thrills. Most of the time Gazzara just wanders about aimlessly with a rueful grin plastered...
...rated film. Unlike Novelist Theroux, Bogdanovich does not have a particularly keen descriptive eye; he goes for tourist snapshots instead of true grit. Except for Denholm Elliott, who offers a fastidious portrait of a typically down-and-out British colonial, the actors do little to help the proceedings. Gazzara is fairly blameless, given his flat role, but the miscasting of his con-man nemesis is a disaster. Had a strong actor played the villain, who recalls Harry Lime in The Third Man, Saint Jack might have had some tension and dramatic heft. Instead, the director has placed himself...
...problems, his sojourn in Russia and his activities just prior to Nov. 22, 1963. Though Star John Pleshette creates an intriguingly neurotic Oswald, the man remains a cryptic figure. The trial itself, which dominates Part Two, is-well -trying, with fictional lawyers (played bombastically by Lome Greene and Ben Gazzara) wrangling endlessly over their case's voluminous ballistics evidence, Perry Mason-style...
...Russia and his life with Marina, but switches in a key spot to fiction. The script eliminates Jack Ruby and his fatal shot from history, leaving Oswald alive to go on trial-Eichmann-like-in a glass box. The verdict on his guilt is being kept secret from Ben Gazzara, who plays the ambitious prosecuting attorney, and Lorne Greene, the defense attorney. Nor does Pleshette yet know the fate of the character he is playing. But after reading and talking endlessly about Oswald, Pleshette concludes that he was "a mystery man, as much a victim as a villain...
When Strindberg in all his intensity works, he devastates an audience. When he does not, he devastates the actors. Dewhurst and Gazzara auditioned for The Dance of Death by playing together in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but Edward Albee is to August Strindberg what bitter lemon is to vitriol. Uncharacteristically subdued, the stars struggle with the play as if remembering the lines and holding on to sanity required all their energy. One of the curses of guest-star repertory is insufficient rehearsal time for difficult plays...