Word: ross
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PERSON who hates mystery movies. So I expected to find myself walking out halfway through Herbert Ross's new murder mystery, The Last of Sheila. But I never did. Sheila has all the equipment of a mystery movie, but it doesn't put that equipment to work. It is a slick production, but bogs down in its slickness, and never gets down to the mystery business. Despite the fact that it fails to deliver its basic promise, Sheila is an entertaining flick...
...ROSS HAS GOTTEN good performances from a cast studded with box-office attractions: Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch, James Coburn, James Mason, Joan Hackett, and Ian McShane. Coburn gives a fine performance as the masterminder of games, supremely certain that his guests will play. His innate arrogance masquerades as razor sharp charm...
...Cannon plays a brassy, bitchy manager, joyfully screwing Coburn and half the crew. You never know whether to toss Cannon off as the sexy starlet "dumb broad" type, or look for intelligence behind her unabashed flattery. She manages to maintain this tension in her role throughout the film, and Ross uses her well as a counterpoint to more mundane dialogue. Richard Benjamin is the sliding writer, questioning and confused about the cruise and its purposes; Joan Hackett plays his clinging wife; and Mason plays the washed up director with an easy ambience and quiet paternalism...
Even Lee Richardson, who was so fine a Ross years ago in a Boston production and who has played the title role at Yale (would he were doing it here!), strikes one as curiously uninvolved. His appearances at the banquet as a ghost, however, are cleverly managed...
...text. The only scene placed in England, which comes well towards the end, is the single instance where its three main participants show a full feeling for the melody and rhythm of their lines as well as the sense. Praise, then, for Michael Levin's Macduff, Alvah Stanley's Ross, and, above all, Philip Kerr's Malcolm. In this colloquy these three men talk to each other, listen to each other, and demonstrate their musicality. But it is a long, long time before we get to this beautifully spoken scene...