Word: slam-bang
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...American dropouts, fighters with four-letter mouths. He plants neon stickers on his key figures. The good guy (Danny Aiello) is Over-the-Hill. The bad guy (Edward O'Neill) is Below-the-Belt. There is an English Eliza Doolittle (Margaret Warncke) for whose favors they stage a slam-bang finale. Too bad someone forgot to throw in the towel...
...would have been easy to make a routinely satisfying little thriller out of The China Syndrome, plenty of slam-bang action coupled with a little cheap preachment about atomic perils. But by keeping the polemic almost entirely implicit, by building solid central characterizations into the plot, and by framing the whole thing with quick, shrewd observations (Fonda's career-girl pad, for example, is perfectly disorganized), the movie tran scends its disaster-thriller origins −and its politics. Proponents of nuclear power are right to be concerned about this picture...
...first-rate film maker, but his world here suffers from a bad miscalculations. Trying for what appears to be an expressionistic style, he has directed the movie at a screeching pitch. He matches the script's verbal and physical violence blow for blow with slam-bang editing and ; pounding musical score; he never give the audience a chance to catch its breath. What is intended to be operatic come out overblown and, at times, overacted Goldoni's Mom is so crazed she seems to have stepped out of Exorcist...
...with the picture. Maybe we have been so brainwashed to expect nothing but implausibilities during the dog days that it is hard to respond to a film that takes itself as soberly as this one does. Or maybe we expect something loopier from Friedkin, who prides himself on making slam-bang movies (The Exorcist, The French Connection) that are expertly designed and executed to appeal to us at a low, visceral level. Or-just possibly-Friedkin, despite the noisy response he made to critical hooting over The Exorcist, is answering it with a distinctly muted picture, which takes its material...
...usual movie, it is at this point that everyone decides to cut away from character and call in the stunt coordinator to wow the audience with a big finish, a slam-bang deployment of men and matériel, all hardware and hard knocks, with nary a thought for such behavioral patterns as the film's earlier sequences may have established for the participants. Not so in Man on the Roof, the Swedish-made policier based on one of the Martin Beck novels by Mãj Sjöwall and Per Wahl...