Word: hackman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...film offers other pleasures as well. Hackman, the archetype of contemporary ordinariness, is as usual superb in the central role...
...Gene Hackman again. He is already on view, in rather different roles, in Arthur Perm's Night Moves (see above) and John Frankenheimer's French Connection II, and it is a fair measure of the depth and variety of his talent that he has not worn out his welcome. But although Hackman is just as creditable and fresh as ever in Bite the Bullet, he is at odds with material that hardly gives him an even break...
Writer-Director Richard Brooks made a western called The Professionals in 1966, a hearty, amusing enterprise full of pulp-magazine notions about honor under pressure. Bite the Bullet is made in blatant-indeed, often desperate -imitation of The Professionals, and the character Hackman plays is a virtual reincarnation of Robert Ryan's softspoken, steel-fisted horseman of the previous film. Instead of forming a ragtag commando unit, though, the heroes now make up a party of racers, heading over 700 miles of rugged territory for $2,000 in prize money...
Brooks had the shrewdness and good taste to cast not only Hackman but the excellent, sardonic James Coburn as his buddy and friendly rival. After that, in spiration fails. Pace, so crucial to un dertakings of this kind, is maintained at the approximate speed of a lazy canter. Characters race a piece, dismount, talk things over, get to know each other a little, then start racing again. No one, however, becomes either familiar enough or real enough to make it a matter of much concern who wins the race...
...scenery is nice - mostly New Mexico and Nevada - but Brooks' notion of staging a scene is to plant the actors in the middle of the frame and have them talk. The dialogue is not worth such attention. Coburn is called on to describe Hackman as "the cham pion of dumb animals, women in dis tress and lost causes." Candice Bergen points out to the hotheaded Jan-Michael Vincent (the kid looking to make a reputation) that "killin' someone don't make you a man." Brooks occasionally offers some comic relief (Whore...