Word: quaid
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pleasures of this loose, warm, funny movie extend well beyond the plot. Dave has three teen-age cronies (Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern and Jackie Earle Haley), all clearly defined by Writer Tesich and well played by the young actors. The kids' style of hanging out-their scrapes, gags and their frustrations-is observed with a tart affection and a truthfulness that are very refreshing. So is their milieu. The boys are townies, called "cutters," because people of their class have traditionally worked in the nearby limestone quarries in Bloomington, where Indiana University is located. The resentment the cutters feel...
...supporting cast of Midnight Express complements Davis's performance by providing appropriate counterpoints to his character and acting style. Randy Quaid in particular shines as Jimmy Booth, the slightly psychotic American imprisoned for stealing two candlesticks from a Turkish mosque. Like the other actors in the movie. Quaid has taken on a challenging role, a character whose overwhelming survival instincts constantly inspire new getaway plans while a consuming cynicism eats away any remaining humanity left in him. Jimmy Booth's tough-as-nails bearing clashes with the injured pride of Billy when they first meet in the prison courtyard...
...handcuffs and teach him to be tough and manly, they can't reach him. The klepto is too used to stealing affection and cowering with it: the gruff backslaps only make him smile a dreamy and faraway gulp that's almost the choke of a sob. Randy Quaid's performance catches the whippedcur look perfectly, shoulders hunched and forlorn...
...criminal (Randy Quaid) is as petty as his crime, a puffy adolescent kleptomaniac who needs to be fetched up, not sent up, as his two reluctant guards (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) soon realize. Feeling too sorry for him to maintain strict discipline for five days, they start loosening him up with a monumental beer bust in Washington. Next they get him into a nice, maturing brawl with some Marines in a men's room at Penn Station, and finally buy him his sexual initiation in a Boston brothel. By the time they deliver him to the brig...
...adaptation of Darryl Ponicsan's novel can be accused of enormous originality. But there is an un pretentious realism in Towne's script, and Director Ash by handles his camera with a simplicity reminiscent of the way American directors treated lower-depths material in the '30s. Quaid plays dumb with canny appeal. Young, as a black for whom a noncom's career is a big step up, makes you feel his sense of risk when he stops going by the book on this detail. Nicholson's bluster only partly masks his insecurity as he moves...