Word: heartlessly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Heartless Thing...
...into the cynical satire he seems to have hoped he was making, he simply botched his assignment. Frankenheimer's flair for action sequences-a chase involving a school bus, a shootout in a giant, steaming laundry-can still be summoned up. But the rest of the film is heartless, tasteless and noisily desperate. It is always sad to see an overreacher turn into an underachiever, but to find the tense talent capable of The Manchurian Candidate busying himself with feckless projects like this is infuriating. When Frankenheimer's contempt for the picture is not seeping onto the screen...
...could not have been worse from the standpoint of radical organizers. Hearst's parents, a conservative publisher and a reactionary regent of the University of California, were made to appear as the warmest and most sympathetic of characters, while the kidnapers--and, by extension, the Left--seemed violent and heartless. California poor people were cast as beggars, taking morsels of food from the rich under the threat of an innocent woman's death, while Randolph Hearst seemed a man genuinely concerned for the welfare of the masses. The SLA's topsy-turvy tactics were condemned by Ramparts and a host...
...there is a lesson to be learned from the SLA, it is that in a society as violently racist, exploitative and aggressively heartless as America's, we cannot afford to be without an organized mass movement of the Left. For what the Left means in human terms is a moral community of hope--the revolutionary possibility of a better...
...apart from the grip of the story and Al Pacino's soulful lead performance, Serpico is superficial, even heartless. The filmmakers have done no original investigations, and accept the reportage of Peter Maas as gospel. In their film, no other cop besides Serpico and an idealistic inspector are at all virtuous; Serpico's Ivy League associate, David Durk, is here preening and pompous, nothing like the dedicated, befuddled naif whom even Maas found sincere. And Lumet, Salt and Wexler never detail the reluctance of police higher-ups to listen to Serpico: New York City and police officials are cardboard figures...