Movie Review: Blue Collar (1978)

Genre: Heist Drama  

Director: Paul Schrader  

Starring: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto  
Running Time: 114 minutes  

Synopsis: In Detroit, car assembly line worker Zeke Brown (Richard Pryor) is experiencing financial hardship and is unhappy with the union leadership's dismissive attitude. His friend and co-worker Jerry (Harvey Keitel) is also struggling to provide for his family, while their colleague Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) has a hefty criminal record. The three disgruntled men plot a seemingly simple heist of the union office safe, but the outcome is not what they expect.

What Works Well: Writer and debut director Paul Schrader taps into working class frustrations and emerges with a forceful story of economic malaise, racial tensions, worker exploitation, and power imbalance. The themes are nurtured organically through the granular experiences of three ordinary men pushed into crime, where they find both less and more than they bargained for. Richard Pryor delivers an energetic career highlight in a mostly dramatic role, and is ably supported by Harvey Keitel and Yaphet Kotto. Assorted supervisors, union reps, and oily bosses represent an entrenched system, and Schrader punctuates the drama with sweaty images of life on the assembly line set to the thumping sound of Jack Nitzsche's Hard Workin' Man. 

What Does Not Work As Well: Smokey's backstory and personal life are deficient compared to Zeke and Jerry, and their wives are reduced to afterthoughts.

Key Quote:

Smokey (voiceover): They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.



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Movie Review: California Suite (1978)

A tactless comedy with dashes of drama, California Suite oscillates between pompous and cretinous.

Four unrelated stories take place over one weekend at the same Beverly Hills hotel. Divorced couple Hannah (Jane Fonda) and Bill (Alan Alda) meet to discuss the future of their 17 year old daughter Jenny. New Yorker Hannah is a highly-strung news editor who thrives on prickly insults and sharp retorts, while Bill has become much more laid back since he relocated to Los Angeles. The couple bicker endlessly.

Veteran English stage actress Diana Barrie (Maggie Smith) is nominated for her first Academy Award for an unworthy role in the frivolous comedy No Left Turns. Her husband Sidney Cochran (Michael Caine), an antique dealer, is her companion for the Oscar ceremony. Diana is nervous about the evening and leans on Sidney for emotional support, but all is not well in their relationship.

Marvin (Walter Matthau) is in town for his nephew's bar mitzvah. His brother Harry (Herb Edelman) is a lecherous womanizer, and arranges for a prostitute (Denise Galik) to entertain Marvin in his hotel room. The situation gets messier when Marvin's wife Millie (Elaine May) arrives the next morning.

Doctors Chauncey Gump (Richards Pryor) and Willis Panama (Bill Cosby) and their wives are on a joint vacation and getting testy. The hotel messes up their booking, with the Gumps confined to a faulty closet-sized room while the Panamas enjoy a luxury suite. The vacation goes rapidly downhill from there.

Writer Neil Simon adapted his own play, and in the hands of director Herbert Ross what may have worked on the stage flops badly on the screen. Essentially four separate 25 minute sketches populated by distinctly unlikable people, California Suite generates a couple of chuckles but otherwise curls up into a small ball and dies. 

Worst of all is the segment featuring the Black doctors played by Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby. Their misadventures descend into low-brow slapstick of the pathetic kind, a miserable and painful waste of talent.

Two of the other sketches are not much better. Jane Fonda and Alan Alda are forced to spout Simon's artificially agitated hyper-intellectual theatrical prose, and their incessant sniping is quickly insufferable. Walter Matthau wrings some humour from the hapless middle-aged man trying to hide a passed-out hooker from his wife, but is ultimately defeated by material stretched too thin.

Maggie Smith and Michael Caine almost save the day with the one reasonably compelling and well-written story. Actress Diana and antique dealer Sidney's marriage is complex, and made more intricate by her propensity for drama and his caustic street-smarts. They both clearly benefit from the union, but barely concealed secrets and frustrations are nibbling away at their contentment. While far from perfect and still saddled with loquacity, this episode at least creates a memorable pair. 

Maggie Smith nabbed a real Oscar for a forgettable movie in which she is Oscar nominated for a silly comedy. From the few snippets shown No Left Turns is indeed dire, but also potentially still better than California Suite.



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Movie Review: Stir Crazy (1980)

A frantic but rarely funny comedy, Stir Crazy bounces along as a wayward vehicle for the mostly tiresome antics of stars Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.

In New York City, waiter and aspiring actor Harry (Pryor) and his best friend Skip (Wilder), a kind-hearted writer moonlighting as a store detective, are both fired on the same day. They pack up their belongings and hit the road, heading to California. But their van breaks down in a small Arizona town, where they are soon framed for a bank robbery. Their court-appointed lawyer is next to useless, and Harry and Skip are sentenced to 125 years in prison.

Once behind bars they make friends with fellow-inmates Rory (Georg Stanford Brown), Jesus (Miguel Ángel Suárez), and eventually Grossberger (Erland Van Lidth). Warden Walter Beatty (Barry Corbin) discovers Skip has a hidden talent for mechanical bull riding, and pressures him into representing the facility in an annual rodeo competition. This leads to a series of confrontations with Deputy Warden Wilson (Craig T. Nelson) and a daring escape plan at the rodeo.

Featuring plenty of improvisation, incomplete scenes, loose narrative threads and just plain silliness, Stir Crazy only rarely rises to mediocre standards. A few laughs are found in the story of two none-too-bright men finding trouble at every turn, but director Sidney Poitier has only a loose grip on the thin script by Bruce Jay Friedman. And at regular intervals everything anyway pauses for Wilder and Pryor to engage in impromptu scenes of physical humour, and these are more often miss than hit.

Embracing a structure of disjointed sketches rather than a cohesive story, the film moves from New York to Arizona, then into prison and finally to the centrepiece rodeo event. As a result the tone is choppy and discontinuous, Friedman lacking the material to invest in any one place or theme. The casualties include barely defined secondary characters, with lawyer Len Garber (Joel Brooks) and his assistant/cousin Meredith (JoBeth Williams) failing to overcome the stature of props.

With Pryor surprisingly subdued and regularly fading into the background, Wilder occasionally prods the movie to life with a decent representation of a joyful man who refuses to allow his troubles to bring him down, frequently too empathetic for his own good. His character may have been interesting, but Stir Crazy never settles down long enough to find out.

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Movie Review: See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)

The third big screen teaming of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a mostly dull on-the-run crime comedy.

In New York City, Dave Lyons (Wilder) is deaf but can read lips and runs a newsstand. Wally Carew (Pryor) is blind and secures a job as Dave's assistant. Both of them refuse to allow their disabilities to slow them down. One morning assassin Eve (Joan Severance) kills a target at the newsstand as she pursues a precious coin with her partner Kirgo (Kevin Spacey). Wally smells Eve's perfume but does not see anything, Dave sees Eve's legs but does not hear anything. Wally inadvertently ends up with the coin in his pocket.

With no witnesses to the murder police Captain Braddock (Alan North) arrests Dave and Wally, but they escape and go on a wild trip to clear their name, a journey leading to the estate of master criminal Sutherland (Anthony Zerbe).

Using disabilities as crutches for comedy is suspect enough, but See No Evil, Hear No Evil also suffers from a limp script and bland execution. Five screenwriters (including Wilder) somehow contrive to create a non-story solely dependent on a couple of set-pieces, and director Arthur Hiller is unable to enliven the material.

Two scenes actually work and salvage some laughs. In the first Dave and Wally team up to engage in a comic fist fight against a boorish opponent. Wally fancies himself a boxer and Dave steers him and provides on-the-fly targeting advice. The second and only other highlight features a long and rowdy car chase, the blind Wally steering at high speed while Dave in handcuffs issues frantic instructions from the passenger seat.

Wilder and Pryor are both surprisingly lacklustre, both stars appearing distracted. Dave and Wally's insistence on marching on with life and mostly ignoring their disabilities is admirable, although in the few moments of reflection the film appears unsure whether to celebrate or criticize their stubbornness. Not that is matters; See No Evil, Hear No Evil is frivolous comedy, best left unseen and unheard.

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Movie Review: Brewster's Millions (1985)

A flimsy comedy, Brewster's Millions introduces a nonsensical premise and proceeds to botch the execution.

In New Jersey, Monty Brewster (Richard Pryor) is the none-too-bright relief pitcher for the Hackensack Bulls. He is shocked to inherit $300 million from a recently deceased great uncle. But he can only claim the inheritance if he spends an initial $30 million in one month without accumulating assets and without telling anyone why he is spending all the money, among other restrictions. Monty accepts the challenge, and his extravagant spending bewilders his friend Spike Nolan (John Candy), the Bulls catcher.

The law firm administering the inheritance appoints paralegal Andrea (Lonette McKee) to keep track of the spending, as well as her fiancé Warren (Stephen Collins) to secretly ensure Monty fails. Monty arranges a friendly baseball game with the New York Yankees, and enters the race for Mayor of New York City, although he encourages everyone to vote for None of the Above.

Based on a novel written in 1902, Brewster's Millions fails miserably in overcoming the plot's inherent wackiness. Why Monty needs to spend $30 million to inherit $300 million is poorly explained, as are all the clumsy rules placed around his spending. And since there appears to be nothing preventing Monty from immediately hiring people to do next to nothing and paying them ridiculous salaries, with minimal fuss he could hire 100 people at $10,000 a day and cruise his way to his inheritance.

Instead, the lame script has Monty running around in a state of constant uncoordinated panic, never once pausing to think. It's all in search of madcap comedy, but director Walter Hill, given too much money and placed in charge of the wrong genre, fails to deliver a single laugh. Hill fills the screen with people milling around Brewster as his celebrity status grows, except that no one actually does anything that makes sense.

With the film devoid of ideas, the 100 minutes feel like the entire month of Monty's imbecility, and the barely coherent side quests into the mayoralty race and the baseball game grow like unwanted weeds and choke the main storyline. The would-be romance between Monty and Andrea never comes close to sparking.

The film is clearly intended to replicate Eddie Murphy's success from Trading Places, here with Richard Pryor as the simple black man suddenly coming into a world of wealth. But Monty is not street smart, he is simply not smart, and Pryor does not come close to saving the material, tackling the wit-free script with a singular expression. John Candy is sharper as the befuddled friend, while Pat Hingle, Jerry Orbach and Hume Cronyn are given little to do in support.

Even with millions to play with, Brewster's Millions cannot spend its way to decent entertainment.

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Movie Review: Silver Streak (1976)

A comedy thriller with buddy elements, Silver Streak is a reasonably slick production but too goofy as a thriller and not funny enough as a comedy.

Book publisher George Caldwell (Gene Wilder) boards the Silver Streak train in Los Angeles for a relaxing two day trip to Chicago, where he plans to attend his sister's wedding. On board he first meets vitamin salesman Bob Sweet (Ned Beatty), and then flirts with secretary Hilly Burns (Jill Clayburgh). In the middle of a passionate encounter with Hilly, George glimpses her boss Professor Schreiner, a Rembrandt scholar, being thrown to his death from the roof of the train.

Nobody seems to believe George but he doggedly investigates, and discovers that Schreiner was about to publish revelations harmful to corrupt businessman Roger Devereau (Patrick McGoohan). George finds himself threatened by Devereau's goons and repeatedly thrown off the train. With the body count mounting, he teams up with street thief Grover T. Muldoon (Richard Pryor) to rescue Hilly and crack the case.

Directed by Arthur Hiller, Silver Streak aims for a madcap action-filled tone, but only rarely flickers to life. A sloppy script by Colin Higgins does not even pretend to care about characters or logic, and so offers a tweedy book publisher happy to fire spearguns and handguns at bad guys without pausing to bat an eyelid. The central plot of the evil Devereau intent on silencing a meek professor does not stand up to even rudimentary scrutiny, and the supposed romance between George and Hilly remains shallow and suffers from a distinct lack of chemistry.

Hiller does better with some of the attempts at humour. The running gag has George repeatedly bundled off the moving train and forced to scramble his way back. An interlude with a crusty farmer (Lucille Benson) works well, but the frantic attempts to re-board the train with Grover feature an unfortunate and clumsy blackface incident.

The laughs dry up as the plot runs out of ideas and Higgins piles on the nonsense, including federal agents supplying Caldwell with a gun and ammunition and inviting him to join the climactic confrontation. Hiller has more budget than good material to work with, and the film ends with a soulless over-the-top helicopter / train chase and a spectacular crash. Silver Streak rolls along the tracks at a fast pace and features plenty of scenery, but delivers a glossy trip to blandsville.

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