Word: medoff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Screenplay by Mark Medoff...
...movie has been adapted by Mark Medoff from his own 1973 off-Broadway play. Like so many well-made American dramas, it is a long day's journey into night: the characters slowly reveal the sad truths of their misbegotten lives. The difference between Medoff s play and other recent exercises in theatrical soul baring (from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to That Championship Season) is the catalyst that provokes the truthtelling. It is not booze that loosens the characters' tongues...
Milton Katselas' direction of Red Ryder does not serve Medoff well. As anyone who saw Katselas' Report to the Commissioner knows, he likes to let actors chew up the scenery. Gortner's portrayal of Teddy is as overblown as Michael Moriarty's star turn in Commissioner, he is such a bundle of stylized theatrical tics that Teddy's unpleasantness never becomes psychologically interesting. He is just a shrieking, obnoxious madman, an unintentional Mad magazine parody of Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon...
...Ryder is at times a brutal, violent play. Teddy savages and humiliates his victims mentally and physically with relentless sadism. He is so belligerent that one wonders how he could have been driven to such a state of mind, and Medoff offers no real explanations. Teddy is a war veteran and a "disaffected youth," but somehow this does not adequately explain his attitude toward humanity. All too often he becomes more of an authorial mouthpiece than a coherent character, and when he says at the end that he wishes he could be sorry for what he has done it really...
...Medoff's play is difficult and taxing, so are parts of the Ex production...