Word: kotto
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...worst fantasies about shellfish, and his sole aim is to devour each of the crew members. Once this narrative pattern is established, the only suspense involves the question of who will be eaten next. Since the movie's generally good actors (among them Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Sigourney Weaver) all play equally bland technicians, it is hard to make an emotional investment in the alien's pecking order. Indeed, the film's characters are so lifeless that one begins to wonder whether they might not be parodies of space-age bureaucrats...
...seems to have trouble with comedy. Early attempts to wring bitter laughter out of assembly-line conditions and the financial woes of the three central figures (Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto) do not entirely pay off. Still, these scenes help motivate the film's central incident, a robbery of their own union's safe in which the three turn up not the cash they wanted but a ledger hinting at various forms of venality and corruption. Their attempts to capitalize on the information are ambiguous: they would like to blackmail some money out of the union...
...director, Schrader is lucky to have three strong men for his leading roles. Kotto, in particular, gives depth and an odd, worldly-wise dignity to his role as a man who is not as smart as he thinks he is, though in some ways is much wiser than he admits even to himself. None of them, though, gets as much help from Schrader as they could use. He has trouble finding the heart of a scene, trouble keeping the overall tone and tension of his film consistent. There is a power in this story he simply does not realize. Even...
...part, the answers lie in the fact that the so-called entertainment is never really entertaining. A couple of solid citizens, Yaphet Kotto and Geoffrey Holder, are underemployed as an island dictator cum pusher and his witchdoctor hireling while Jane Seymour, Gloria Hendry and Madeline Smith are comely enough but curiously sexless sex objects. They, like Moore, suffer a sort of weightlessness, a lack of humanness, which is what Sean Connery as 007 lent previous Bond adventures. The raunchy adolescent humor that helped audiences giggle past the ugly inhuman stuff in previous Bond films like Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever...
...such a story, they could have produced a kind of Battle of Algiers in Harlem. Director Barry Shear (Wild in the Streets) concentrates mostly on a hoked-up conflict between a fading police captain (Anthony Quinn, also one of the film's producers) and his black successor (Yaphet Kotto). Anthony Franciosa impersonates a notably dumb and vicious Mafia muscle man, whose sole function is to torture various blacks and die spectacularly, providing the audience with opportunity for plenty of indignation and vicarious, bloody triumph...