90° in the Shade. "Character is fate." The Heraclitean precept has been mislaid by a generation of moviemakers more concerned on the whole with their medium than with Man. In this resolutely ordinary yet oddly powerful little picture, a Czech director named Jiří (pronounced Yershee) Weiss, a British scriptwriter named David Mercer
(Morgan!), and a cast half Czech and half English have created an old-fashioned drama in which the action flows like bad blood from the heart of one unhappy man.
The man is a pudgy, middle-aged chap (Rudolf Hrušinski) who works as an inspector for a chain of grocery stores and...