Word: nicholsons
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...poised to become a star. Trouble is, he has been in that position for a couple of years, ever since he scored a personal hit as the bellicose Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. But the brass ring has never seemed to get any nearer. His friend Jack Nicholson comforted him by declaring publicly that Dern is his only real rival. Even Alfred Hitchcock is compassionate. Dern recently wound up his role as the ne'er-do-well anti-hero in the master's Family Plot. Hitchcock promised: "You're going to be the first actor...
...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 and Sunday disgusting expressions is done with as much relish and skill as Nicholson in The Last Detail. But it must be a sublime pleasure to stand in front of the cameras and yell swear words as hard...
Beatty has also been stripped. His buoyant sensuousness and vulnerability have been sheared off, leaving only sullenness. Cast as the wrong kind of stud, he plays a priggish, humorless, overdressed dandy, with pencil-thin eyebrows and moustache, who acts like an eight-year-old. Nicholson plays a bratty little brother to him. Beatty seems too uncomfortable in this role to play it back. The emotional current that should sparkle between them never connects. Their obsessive bickering, which ought to reveal an underlying affection, is irritable rather than responsive and only makes them seem incompatible. They have no signals in common...
...synch with herself, speaking with her mother's haughty assurance yet still compulsively playing Daddy's girl, that she is instantly, perceptively comical in a way that the men's flabby clowning is not. Her blue-blooded New England accent, sharp and petted, is a perfect edge against Nicholson's nasal, sparwling diction and Beatty's bland tones (though she's mostly allowed to say things like. "You're so je ne sais quoi, I could just eat you!"). She has a great face, amazingly variable: she looks like the cherub on the Gerber Food labels. When she rages about...
...around. There is substance in laughing at their films because the tricks played have moral meaning. Chaplin's imitation is funny, Groucho's anti-establishment pranks on hotel-managers and rich matrons are funny. Gene Wilder's charicature of Dr. Frankenstein is funny; the audience cheers them on. Jack Nicholson dumping the heiress in a birdbath is discomfiting because she's nice and he's a slimy creep. The indignity should be the other way around...