Word: psycho
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Private Benjamin, meet Meatballs. Bill Murray of Saturday Night Live, meet Harold Ramis, John Candy, Joe Flaherty and Dave Thomas of SCTV. Psycho from Taxi Driver, meet martial music from 1941. Tired moviegoer, meet tired moviemakers. And note: Murray, he of the choirboy face and pseudo-hip slouch, is convincing as a soldier who maneuvers his platoon into and out of World War III. Director Ivan Reitman is a canny merchant. He knows that the easy laughs are the surest, that teen-agers love to watch goofballs shape up without losing their shambling style, and that it doesn...
...also features a star turn by Lauren Bacall, the object of the psycho's attentions, that is brave, flashy and riveting. It is brave because she plays a woman on the shady side of 50 who hides neither her wrinkles nor the temperamental manipulativeness so common among aging stars; flashy because, besides singing and dancing, she trades in high-gloss show-biz bitchery that sometimes approaches the level of All About Eve; riveting because she shows a touching vulnerability about her professional and personal insecurities (she is torching for her ex-husband, played by James Garner). Bacall...
...chilling example of the same-even though at the end of a year the headlined crime wave didn't make a real blip in police statistics. The murders of black children in Atlanta captured the press's attention because some killings seemed the work of a demonic psycho. The killings were awful; the concern is real, but the news interest has been exploited. Every violent death of a black child in Atlanta-the kind that wouldn't rate a paragraph nationwide had it happened that day in Memphis or Birmingham-is piled on to the city...
While wrestling with his moral crisis, Newman gets to act all kinds of things: tough, rebellious, weary, angry, loving, even, for a couple of fine moments, absolutely crazy. That is when he has to disarm a psycho who is threatening a crowd with a knife. Newman turns his hat around, pulls faces and starts mumbling wildly to himself, so startling the lunatic that he docilely hands over his weapon...
...Bruce Weitz) thinks he's Serpico; everybody else thinks he's psycho. In charge of the carnage and chaos is Captain Francis Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), a good, strong man breeding an ulcer while trying to do a tough job. At the end of every crisis-strewn day, each superb show, Furillo struggles home in an uneasy truce with his job, his willful woman (Veronica Hamel) and himself. Doubtless, he feels very much like Fred Silverman. Viewers will do him and themselves a favor by visiting Hill Street as often as possible...