Word: evenings
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...David, 24, calls him a "libertarian anarchist" who even raised his children by free-market rules. Friedman once offered David, then ten, and his older sister Janet a choice of Pullman berths for a cross-country train trip, or the extra price of those berths in cash. The children chose to sit up in coaches for two days and take the cash...
Devoid of motivation and imprisoned in the dance hall, the movie hungers for some message from the outside world. The contestants are soon reduced to figures without a landscape, whose despair is often expressed but seldom reasoned. Even Director Sydney Pollack seems to sense the claustrophobic atmosphere-and he restively punctuates the nonhappenings with slow-motion scenes and rapid flash-forwards. Seldom effective and much too mannered, they serve only to bring the wrong kind of poverty to the project...
...Polonsky has conceived of Willie-and as Robert Blake plays him with cold command-he is a symbol of Hemingway's maxim in To Have and Have Not: "A man alone ain't got no bloody chance." Willie has even less than no chance. "I'm only an Indian," he tells his girl (Katharine Ross), "and no one cares what Indians...
...only characters in this despairing vision who are allowed even a trace of self are a Radcliffe-educated Indian agent (Susan Clark) and the sheriff (Robert Redford) who heads the posse that hunts Willie. But the agent's social concern is only a manifestation of her neuroticism, and the sheriff's primitive feelings of empathy with the fleeing Indian are overcome by ingrained habit...
Director Yates knows how to shape even the sketchiest scenario, and if John and Mary is no deeper than an eggshell, it is every bit as functionally designed. Mia Farrow adds an otherworldliness to her character by reciting her lines as if they were cabala. Hoffman, one of the shrewdest young actors in the business, manages to be at once predator and victim. But when the film tries to make the audience care for the characters, it proves bankrupt. For beneath the Manhattan chatter and the glossy confrontations, John and Mary is as empty as a singles bar on Monday...