Word: scripted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the Faculty approved the amendments--popularly known as the by-pass and "floater" proposals--it changed the script a bit. The new proposals would allow a new group of characters--standing committees--to experiment with a variety of options that may loosen some of the Core requirements slightly...
...Dern's Marine captain character--that got us there in the first place. Those who see this as a rather dated question need only consider the initial reaction of the Veterans' Administration, which refused to cooperate in the filming after its medical director, Dr. John D. Chase, called the script "a tissue of lies, distortions, and misrepresentations." (This policy was later reversed when President Carter appointed Max Cleland, himself a disabled vet, as head of Veteran Affairs.) We can't forget about these problems, the movie is saying, because they still exist...
...fault lies not with Hoffman's performance, but with the movie's narrow, spartan script. The screenwriters are so eager to avoid sentimentality that they turn journalistic objectivity into a form of dramatic Novocain. As we watch Burglar Max Dembo doggedly pursue his career of luckless crime, it is impossible to feel anything but numbness. Apparently the writers believe it is enough to demonstrate that Max is a classic recidivist, trapped forever in a cycle of antisocial behavior, but they can't get off so easily. A character as alienated as Max, however realistically drawn, becomes compelling...
There is no context to Straight Time; the movie is all matter-of-fact incidents. Max gets out of jail on parole, breaks parole, commits burglaries and awaits certain reincarceration. While one is grateful that the script does not explain Max's self-destructiveness with handwringing, Freudian sermons, Straight Time might at least have explored the existential meaning of his criminal joyrides. The movie chooses instead to rub our noses in the sad predictability of Max's life, as if sheer gloom were its own reward...
...mean streets in his usual lucid way. The cast varies from bad to worse. Heroine Tisa Farrow speaks as if she were a spaced-out extra on furlough from Blow-Up. Jim Brown, the subject of a 1971 Toback book, is on hand only to act out the script's juvenile racial-sexual fantasies. As the hero, a schizo prone to gesturing with his mouth while banging at the keyboard, Keitel gives the first terrible performance of his career. He is such a bundle of grating mannerisms that one can hardly blame his angry father (Michael V. Gazzo...