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Hustle
Fresh off the success of their smash hit The Longest Yard, Burt Reynolds and director Robert Aldrich re-teamed for a pretentious and moody little crime drama called Hustle, which is well acted but suffers due to a convoluted story.
Reynolds plays Phil Gaines, a divorced, LA police detective who is working very hard at making his live-in relationship with a high class call girl (Catherine Deneuve) work while investigating the death of a teenage girl whose father has decided to take the law into his own hands.
Screenwriter Steve Shagan's story really is two separate stories that could have made two movies, but the attempt to combine both these stories doesn't really work and makes this movie way too long to keep the viewer's attention. The story of the cop and the call girl is quite intriguing, especially with the unusual casting of the roles, but this story eventually gets dwarfed by the murder mystery which is about as predictable as they come.
Aldrich's direction is a little undisciplined and a real disappointment from a director with such a pedigree. I guess he thought after The Longest Yard, he thought audiences would eat up anything that he and Reynolds collaborated on. This was my first viewing of this film since its theatrical release in 1975 and the theater was practically empty. It might have helped if Aldrich had worked a little closer with Shagan, helping him with a story that was more engaging and didn't put up a wall between itself and the audience in an attempt to be deep and hip and trying to make the story of a man in love with a prostitute but not being able to deal with her work actually seem original. And then to try to tell another story on top of that...it was just a bit much.
Aldrich does work well with his star and gets a solid performance from him, and though the casting was an interesting idea, the chemistry between Reynolds and Deneuve is non-existent. Eddie Albert, who also co-starred in The Longest Yard, creates another slimy villain here but the acting honors here really have to go to Oscar winner Ben Johnson, superb as the shell-shocked father of the murdered girl who refuses to accept what his little girl has become. Paul Winfield and Eileen Brennan also makes the most of their roles as Reynolds' partner and Johnson's wife and if you don't blink, you'll catch a cameo from future Freddy Kreuger, Robert Englund, but the whole thing just takes too long to get where it's going and the extra ending is a real downer.
Fresh off the success of their smash hit The Longest Yard, Burt Reynolds and director Robert Aldrich re-teamed for a pretentious and moody little crime drama called Hustle, which is well acted but suffers due to a convoluted story.
Reynolds plays Phil Gaines, a divorced, LA police detective who is working very hard at making his live-in relationship with a high class call girl (Catherine Deneuve) work while investigating the death of a teenage girl whose father has decided to take the law into his own hands.
Screenwriter Steve Shagan's story really is two separate stories that could have made two movies, but the attempt to combine both these stories doesn't really work and makes this movie way too long to keep the viewer's attention. The story of the cop and the call girl is quite intriguing, especially with the unusual casting of the roles, but this story eventually gets dwarfed by the murder mystery which is about as predictable as they come.
Aldrich's direction is a little undisciplined and a real disappointment from a director with such a pedigree. I guess he thought after The Longest Yard, he thought audiences would eat up anything that he and Reynolds collaborated on. This was my first viewing of this film since its theatrical release in 1975 and the theater was practically empty. It might have helped if Aldrich had worked a little closer with Shagan, helping him with a story that was more engaging and didn't put up a wall between itself and the audience in an attempt to be deep and hip and trying to make the story of a man in love with a prostitute but not being able to deal with her work actually seem original. And then to try to tell another story on top of that...it was just a bit much.
Aldrich does work well with his star and gets a solid performance from him, and though the casting was an interesting idea, the chemistry between Reynolds and Deneuve is non-existent. Eddie Albert, who also co-starred in The Longest Yard, creates another slimy villain here but the acting honors here really have to go to Oscar winner Ben Johnson, superb as the shell-shocked father of the murdered girl who refuses to accept what his little girl has become. Paul Winfield and Eileen Brennan also makes the most of their roles as Reynolds' partner and Johnson's wife and if you don't blink, you'll catch a cameo from future Freddy Kreuger, Robert Englund, but the whole thing just takes too long to get where it's going and the extra ending is a real downer.