Word: toback
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Directed and Written by James Toback...
...James Toback is the man who wrote The Gambler, a particularly pretentious 1974 James Caan vehicle about a dedicated schoolteacher with a fatal weakness for making dangerous bets. Toback's new film is about a dedicated concert pianist (Harvey Keitel) who runs dangerous missions for his Mafia father. Both movies are cut from the same synthetic Dostoyevskian cloth, but Fingers actually manages to be more obnoxious than its predecessor. Perhaps the reason is that Toback wouldn't stop at writing the new film; he had to go on and direct it as well...
Directed by KAREL REISZ Screenplay by JAMES TOBACK...
Somehow it is all too neat, this balancing of the moral books, just as Axel's character is too contrived for the movie to be emotionally gripping. We are too aware of Writer Toback's undigested intellectual debts as well as his rather adolescent romanticizing of his subject. Nor has London-based Director Reisz (Morgan, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) fully absorbed any of the milieus through which The Gambler moves. Most of the time he seems to be taking snapshots for an album to be called something like "Colorful Habits of the Natives...
Once settled in indefinitely as Brown's house guest, Toback joined the enviable rhythms of a superstar's life. It was the ultimate locker room, a fan's towel-snapping fantasy come true-buddy to the hero, access to exciting places and beautiful people. There are mornings on the tennis court where Toback, an experienced player, barely manages to beat Beginner Brown. There are afternoons at the Black Economic Union, the organization Brown founded to generate capital and talent for Negro enterprises. There are evenings at discotheques that run wildly into all-night parties...