Word: ontkean
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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John Herzfeld's screenplay concerns Drew Rothman (Michael Ontkean of Slap Shot), a Jewish delivery boy in Hoboken, N.J., and Rosemarie Lemon (Amy Irving of The Fury), a deaf teacher who wins the hero's heart. Drew wants to be a singer, Rosemarie wants to be a dancer, and they both want to be in love. There are obstacles along the path to a happy ending. Rosemarie's stern mom (Viveca Lindfors) feels that deaf people should stick to their own kind. Drew must act as keeper for both his gambling dad (Alex Rocco...
...dissolves, is slightly below the level of a TV perfume commercial. Whenever the action trails off, he brings on a Jimmy Webb theme song that sounds like a cross between You Light Up My Life and I Will Wait for You from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Stars Irving and Ontkean can be vibrant actors, but Markowitz straitjackets them into cutie-pie poses. If Irving comes off the better of the two, it is because of her character's affliction. Somehow silly dialogue does not seem quite so embarrassing when it is relayed in sign language...
Still and all, there are some good things about this movie. One of them is pretty Amy Irving who plays the deaf woman. She falls for Michael Ontkean, a laundry truck driver and strip joint singer. Before she knows it, she has dumped her deaf boyfriend Scott and started spending nights at the Hoboken, N.J. apartment her new boyfriend shares with his extended family of stereotypes--1) hopeless professional gambler father, 2) gang member brother, and 3) kindly, white-haired, tailor grandfather. This crew goes about their stock business as usual (Pa loses $2700 on Sleepwalker in the seventh, brother...
...desire to present an editorial so corrosive that aesthetics, questions of form and proportion simply dissolve. The Chiefs win the league championship on a fluke, when their last holdout against the brawling style flips out. Throughout, this out-of-place Ivy Leaguer has been nicely underplayed by Michael Ontkean. But in the denouement he is forced to go for a broader, cheaper kind of comic response, thus vitiating the power of an energetic and original movie that gamely risks, in its more brutal moments, being mistaken for the very sort of thing it is criticizing. Slap Shot may have done...
...hood in that episode is just a good ghetto boy who has been led astray, and the cop is good old Paddy on the beat. The black punk begins to find the right path, in fact, when the black cop (Georg Stanford Brown) and his white roommate (Michael Ontkean), another rookie, take him home to their apartment to protect him from the really bad guys (white...