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It is a choice between conventional suffocation and smiling criminality, which is to say it is no choice at all. Both alternatives are spurious, both dead ends, although Bogdanovich and Sargent are too busy plucking away at the heart strings to pay attention to such details.
Ryan O'Neal, a stolid leading man, works up a sweat over the few bits of character that he is given to act. Despite a mustache and a rumpled pin stripe, he still looks like the surfer king.
His daughter Tatum (TIME, May 21) is peppy, coarse, funny as Addie, sort of a cyanide Shirley Temple. She is also a little too calculating, a little too coyly self-conscious about being gruff and cute. Madeline Kahn (O'Neal's hapless fiancee in What's Up, Doc?) makes a smashingly dippy Trixie, and Burton Gilliam is so unctuous as a desk clerk named Floyd that he looks as if he showered with a grease gun. Laszlo Kovacs shot the film in muted black and white, a little reminiscent of Gregg Toland's photography in Ford's The Grapes of Wrath. Comparisons end there.
Jay Cocks