Word: hackmans
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...John Frankenheimer (Seven Days in May) made the sequel, and his style, while clumsier than Friedkin's, is at least not so sparkly. Now Gene Hackman can be more than a cog in a lulling machine (2 complex contraption with a cash register attached), and this new non-commercial version of the trials of Popeye Doyle in search of Frog One--a major supplier of New York's heroin--is therefore a great deal more interesting. Doyle was originally the kind of cop that would yank people out of phone booths and throw them out on their...
...Hackman's performance is fine, though not so Shakespearean as some have claimed. The withdrawal symptom scene (the villians capture him and turn him into an addict) did not turn out to be a spotlight for fancy-pants acting--they don't go on for too long, and at least he talks: Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues just sat and shivered miserably--one's reaction was "why am I watching this?" But Hackman moves through this film without straining--he's done better work before, and he seems to enjoy Doyle's character. His enunciation of various...
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...