Word: screenplay
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Directed by Louis Malle, Screenplay by Polly Plan...
...after about the first hour, but it is nevertheless an excellent film. Perhaps its problems lie in the fact that there were too many cooks. Gilbert and Fonda took their original idea to the then untried scenarist Nancy Dowd, who has since won critical acclaim for her original screenplay of Slapshot. Over a year later, Dowd came up with a long, ultimately unusable screenplay. Next they approached Waldo Salt, an Oscar winner for Midnight Cowboy, who ended up writing the screenplay. He suggested producer Jerome Hellman. Hellman and director Hal Ashby (Bound For Glory, Shampoo) eliminated some of the rhetoric...
...Fury. This should have been Brian DePalma's goony epic, a lavish, blood-soaked tale of telekinesis (remember "Carrie"?) and international spies. But John Farris' screenplay turns the sumptuous ingredients into--well, nothing; and although certain scenes leave shivery impressions with their nightmarish silliness, DePalma has paced the film slackly, with none of the mounting horror of his previous efforts. Kirk Douglas, Amy Irving, John Cassavettes, and especially Carrie Snodgrass are wonderful. But don't take a liking to any characters--eventually you will see them lovingly mauled before your eyes. John Williams has provided another goffily bloated score...
Given the limitations of the screenplay, the cast flesh out the characters as much as humanly possible. Harry Dean Stanton, M. Emmet Walsh and Gary Busey all create idiosyncratic lowlifes out of drab dialogue. Theresa Russell (The Last Tycoon), playing Max's all too obligatory love interest, is powerfully sexy. As for Hoffman, he works hard and well to create a man who lives in a state of constant punishment. It's an admirable job, but one sadly wasted in a film that punishes the audience almost as much as it does the people onscreen...
...moment and they really liked each other anyway, but this is implausible if one attends to their characters, which are wonderful and funny, but not the sort that fall in love. In short, this movie delegates to the viewer the creation of a large portion of the screenplay. I personally was disappointed that I could not receive a credit, for I had to work quite a bit to keep the whole thing straight...