Word: viciousness
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INNOCENT BYSTANDERS is like a remnant from Carnaby Street, a vestige of the unmourned days of trendy English film making when everything was sharp angles and bilious color, like a 20-quid suit. It is mostly the usual spy stuff, terse and vicious, with Stanley Baker as an aging agent sent out on his last big job. Its dizzying intrigue of counterplots and triplecrosses probably would have worked better if Director Peter Collinson had not tried to slick it up with a lot of addled editing and improbable violence. Given the prevailing tone of careless hokum, two peformances are triumphant...
...resells it in the States for up to $250,000. A full-scale investigation is under way both in the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. If it bears out these suspicions, the nation-already battered by the sorry conflict-will find itself face to face with the most vicious case of war-profiteering in its history...
...kind of Battle of Algiers in Harlem. Director Barry Shear (Wild in the Streets) concentrates mostly on a hoked-up conflict between a fading police captain (Anthony Quinn, also one of the film's producers) and his black successor (Yaphet Kotto). Anthony Franciosa impersonates a notably dumb and vicious Mafia muscle man, whose sole function is to torture various blacks and die spectacularly, providing the audience with opportunity for plenty of indignation and vicarious, bloody triumph...
...script, which abounds in inane dialogue, is particularly vicious to women, who are portrayed as woefully helpless, weepy creatures who would surely perish without men to pull them through. The actors generally do better by the script than it deserves. Stella Stevens, looking well used but winning, is genuinely touching, Shelley Winters engagingly hammy. Gene Hackman, who seems to have the lion's share of the bad lines, nevertheless acquits himself very nicely indeed. There is one scene in which he is required to pray to God, pleading with him and admonishing him, that Hackman, against all odds, manages...
...compartments and sliding drawers, is a microcosm. At first one is seduced by the greeny blue, aquarium-like interior of Box 17 (Box C). Then the eye discerns the contents, wavering amid their reflections from the walls: a glass goblet filled with a bouquet not of flowers but of vicious glass shards; a morbified pink foot; a small geometrical plastic construction, reclining like a tiny fakir on a bed of nails...