Word: voight
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...journalist (played by a grimly floundering Jon Voight) mounts a one-man crusade to avenge that death. But after allowing himself to be beaten up, employed by Israeli intelligence, threatened with quick extinction by murderous closet Nazis, and finally pushed under the wheels of an oncoming train, it becomes hard to believe that it is only the romance of investigative reporting that is driving him drearily on. In comparison to Voight's unswerving dedication, Beatty's mania seems just about as workaday as a deskman collecting box scores from the local high schools...
Indeed, it turns out that there is more than rampant professionalism involved here, but Forsyth and the screenwriters reserve this information for a snapper ending. It seems that Voight's father, long dead, was a . . . but let the movie hold on to its arthritic surprise. It is just about all it has. The Odessa File has lumbering yearnings to be a kind of fictional semidocumentary. It invokes Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, whose name is listed in the credits as an adviser and who even appears, played by an Israeli actor, as a futile attempt to lend the project...
...class a sense of the world beyond Yamacraw--before he is fired. She dunned some of the film's simplifications but saluted its spirit. Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic, applauded the film as entertainment, though he scored its faults more heavily than Kael; he singled out Jon Voight's performance and Martin Ritt's tactful, sympathetic direction, and noted that if the film relies on sentiment, organic, well-dramatized sentiment is always justifiable...
ALTHOUGH JON VOIGHT performs wonders as Conroy--he is both sensitive and charismatic, full-bodied and full of wit--he doesn't have to carry the film. The 21 non-professional kids (all from the Georgia coast) act up a storm. When Voight's Conroy introduces his class to Brahms and Beethoven, or, in an effort to blow the lard from their brains, punctuates his classroom questions with a bike horn, we are gratified not only by the teacher's love and cleverness, but by the responses of his kids--abashed, suspicious, delighted, and finally openhearted...
Based on The Water Is Wide, Pat Conroy's memoir of the year he spent teaching in an all-black elementary school on a backward island off the South Carolina coast, the film features paradisiacal vistas, an enormously engaging performance by Jon Voight in the title role ("Conrack" is the way his students insisted on mispronouncing Conroy's name)-and a profound shortage of dramatic conflict. The children, needless to say, are adorable. They are rendered all the more touching by the superintendent of an inhumane school system and an inflexible principal (the former represented by Hume Cronyn...