Word: segal
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...GEORGE SEGAL, in my estimation, is born to win, but in this movie he's been given a crooked deal. The scriptwriters (David Scott Milton and director Ivan Passer) can't make up their minds between hilarity and a grim social realism. While real life often veers between the tragic and the ridiculous, a movie needs some sort of coherent outlook--either in the choosing of the scenes themselves (as with slices of life in which the slice is carefully cut) or in their treatment...
Born to Win is a movie where the parts make up two halves. Segal is one of America's best comic actors, and he has ample opportunity to display his talents as a small-time conman and junkie. Captured by a bunch of crooks he has doublecrossed, and locked into a lady's bedroom without his clothes, he dons a pink nightgown and exposes himself through the window to a watching neighbor below, hoping she'll call the police. As he jumps up and down in anguish, opening the nightgown and desperately trying to show enough of himself over...
When he's high, JJ (Segal) can talk sweetly enough to charm an elephant into a birdcage; waiting for a fix, shriveled and twitchy, he is at the mercy of his habit, dependent on others...
...tell you're nice," as he carefully helps himself to loose objects decorating her living room. Mindless she may be, characterless she is not. I can't remember any of her lines, but in spite of a banal script she makes a delightful happy-go-lucky sucker to Segal's dangerous charm...
Passer--I haven't seen his other feature, a 1965 Czech comedy cum pathos called Intimate Lighting--seems able to get what he wants out of actors and settings, including a new side to George Segal--but he hasn't done enough yet to know what he should want. Where Milos (Taking Off) Forman maintains comedy almost consistently, and John Schlesinger in Midnight Cowboy--another New York film by a non-American--invests even his comedy with mournfulness. Passer switches erratically from the theatrical, wisecracking comedy when Segal performs so well to genuine gutwrenching--to say nothing...