Inept Dreck

I gave this a try after hearing it somewhat hyped on the Pure Cinema podcast. It's simply bad on every level. The acting is non-existent, the dialogue and story are lumbering and childish, and the direction is, at best, bad '70s-sitcom level. Susannah York cannot act, but she's Meryl Streep compared to Elliott Gould. I was a kid in the 1970s, when Gould was a big star and I remember largely being charmed by him. What I didn't realize as a young child was that the man is one of the worst actors to ever achieve a great success in Hollywood. The eye rolling, the over enunciation, the shouting of lines in normal conversation and his overall woodenness are really pretty remarkable. He literally does nothing right and yet this middle-aged man with the floppy, unkempt hair of a kid was big box office for most of a decade.

If someone enjoys this movie ironically for its badness, i guess I can see it as a contender for something like that, but's also charmless at its core, so it certainly wouldn't be one of my first choices for even that. If someone actually defends this as a good film, then I don't even know what we could say to each other. If someone's convinced that a turd tastes like chocolate ice cream, eat up, I guess.