Word: hackwork
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Great Train Robbery is one of the most cynical "pure escapist" movies ever made. Crichton hasn't even bothered to conceal his disgust for his lifeless hackwork. He crams his screenplay with adventure-movie cliches, but he doesn't poke fun at them; he piles them on as if to show how much he can get away with. Movies like this aren't very entertaining if they're not stylish or suspenseful; Crichton's stupid, stilted dialogue precludes style; the Mission: Impossible predictability, sluggish editing, and surprising number of loose ends strangle suspense. Characters inexplicably appear and disappear--dragged...
...work has admittedly had its detractors. Pepys attended three productions and termed it "a silly play" and "one of the weakest plays that ever I saw." And one of Britain's finest reviewers, Max Beerbohm, branded it "hackwork" and found it "perfunctory and formless," "tedious and frigid." For my money, it's the supreme work of its kind. And Shakespeare, having at last approached perfection, never returned to the genre again, but proceeded to deeper and darker matters...
...resistance that stood out above the typical youth films then being made. He has had as much trouble obtaining backing for films as most talented young directors, but he insists that Sisters is a film he had wanted to do for a long time, not a piece of commercial hackwork. The film appears under the American International Pictures label, and though that company is known mainly for its slick promotion of cheap sex, De Palma insists that the choice of a distributor was a business decision unrelated to his artistic intentions...
...Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ken Kesey's bughouse drama stagified. A few critics call the dramatization hackwork but some Kesey fans swear...
Perhaps, also, we should remember that good, honest hackwork is hard to come by, though I don't expect those brought up on Antonioni to understand this. As written and performed, there is more humanity and intelligence in Caine's and Sharif's characters than those who fall into the snob-trap are apt to admit. I take Clavell's work on these two characters as a good sign for commercial moviemaking. And to hell with the characters in the Gary audience who laughed when Caine's Captain died. May they greet death as gracefully. The sooner, the better...