Word: snider
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wants to get too close to. Some say that Fosse's new film Star 80 is merely a violent update of A Star is Born: pretty, naive young Dorothy Stratten (Mariel Hemingway) is discovered working in a Vancouver Dairy Queen by a small-time promoter and pimp, Paul Snider (Eric Roberts). He wines and dines her, wins her away from her mother and younger sister--and gets her into the centerfold of Playboy magazine. Dorothy marries Paul, becomes Playmate of the Year for 1980, and then just as she's beginning a film career and an affair with Director Aram...
That is why Dorothy's response is so unconsciously acute. She instinctively understands that what is developing around her is a tragedy of manners; Snider has read the bottom line shrewdly, but he has a blind eye and a tin ear for the social pieties, even the dress code, by which naked need and manipulative greed must be clothed for the sake of the respectability he desperately desires...
...only approximate, her portrayal of an adolescent girl caught up, giggly and unaware, in the excitement of a surprise party that someone, mysteriously, decided to throw for her is fresh and touching. And one that, in effect, concedes the dramatic center of the film to Eric Roberts, who plays Snider, obviously the object of Fosse's appalled interest from the first. Given the hypnotic power of Roberts' complex performance as this unsympathetic victim, one finds oneself in cringing agreement with the director's emphasis...
...Snider is a man in thrall to the power of the first impression. He is quick with flattery and small gifts. He studies himself in the mirror, practicing smooth self-introductions to strangers. He advises Dorothy to remember the name of everyone she meets for future flattering reference. With his absurd faith in such niceties, Snider puts one in mind of Willy Loman and his need to be well liked, particularly since that modern archetype also practiced his wiles in similarly unpromising venues. Snider's equivalent of the New England territory is the wet-T-shirt contest, the dream...
...course, they will. Snider's rage, turned inward, becomes the depression out of which he kills the uncouth self that betrayed him, as well as the girl who never knew she was supposed to be not just his lover, meal ticket and wife but also his better self, source of the ultimate good first impression. It is a cold Q.E.D. for a chilling movie that opens with shots of freeway traffic hurtling past the murder site, Snider's pad, and closes with shots of Dorothy's intimates going about their mundane business while her naked body lies...