Word: scheiderer
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...story revolves around Dr. Sam Rice (Roy Scheider), a psychiatrist who becomes involved in a mysterious chain of events when one of his patients is found stabbed to death. Shortly after the murder, the victim's mistress comes to Rice's office, apparently curious about what her lover has told him. Brooke Reynolds (Meryl Streep) is a beautiful and very mysterious woman whose nervous desire for secrecy intrigues Rice, leading him to suspect her of complicity in the murder...
...this month's?) Alfred Hitchcock pastiche is of the sober rather than the raffish variety. It is intended not as a knockoff but as an hommage (the French pronunciation on that word, if you please) to the Old Master's late high style. The stars, Roy Scheider and Meryl Streep, are pleasing people; Nestor Almendros' carefully burnished cinematography imparts to Manhattan's streets a theatrically menacing glow that subtly transforms and romanticizes their mean reality. Writer-Director Benton, working from a story he and his onetime partner David Newman concocted a decade ago, proves...
...reverential hush about it. This seems to arise less from a regard for the Hitchcock tradition than from a quiet appreciation of its own classiness. As a murdered man's psychiatrist, drawn into the investigation of his patient's death and also toward his suspiciously nervous mistress, Scheider is sober, stalwart and workmanlike, but one longs for the goofy exasperation Cary Grant used to bring to roles like this, not to mention his wary misogyny. Yet Scheider can play a loony tune or two (see All That Jazz) if anyone bothers to ask him. Streep fares better...
...protagonist, Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider) is Bob Fosse--no point in rehashing the one-to-one correspondences. He is a talented director/choreographer staging a Broadway musical starring his former wife, editing a movie about a stand-up comic, and indulging his active libido in assorted hopeful chorines. He drives everyone hard, but himself the hardest ("To be on the wire is life; the rest is nothing"), waking up with Dexedrine and cigarettes--a tortured, uncompromising bastard. He is also a song-and-dance man, who doesn't know "where the bullshit ends and the truth begins." "I got insight into...
...Scheider is unpretentious and quite likable and there are two or three superb scenes, but in the end one must return to that blind and foolhardy script. Didn't anybody read it before they let Fosse do it? Or is it just that the people who did read it--businessmen, producers, wide-eyed girlfriends, musical comedy writers--had no taste? ("Bob, baby: That's deep.") Bob Fosse needs critics, not to stomp on the man, but to egg on the artist...