It’s a shit life in ’30s Hollywood as meek set designer Donald Sutherland falls in with extra Karen Black, in one of those period pieces that seemed to turn up all over the place after The Godfather became the spiciest meatball on the block. Best bit is – well, duh – Burgess Meredith as a soused ex vaudeville star reduced to flogging tat with a doorstep dance act.
Matt Patton
July 28, 2010 at 6:08 am
Actually, William Atherton played the Meek Set Designer who has a thing for Karen Black — Donald Sutherland is an Accountant-Made-Good who ALSO has a thing for Karen Black. He doesn’t get what he wants out of it and has to console himself with beating a creepy kid actor to death in the movie’s climactic movie-premiere riot.
By the way,this is the SECOND movie in the space of a year which Black’s grotesque hamming spoiled a major character. She was grotesque and hysterical as Myrtle in Jack Clayton’s remake of THE GREAT GATSBY (whatever its other flaws, the 1949 film has a good performance in the same role by Shelley Winters), and essentially repeated that performance here. Both of the films flopped, but she was in the box-office juggernaut AIRPORT 1975