utgard14

Seriocomic portrait of a middle-aged teenager. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were a slate of films about sensitive men who "loved" women. Sad attempts by so-called enlightened men to justify how their raging libidos were not at odds with them being feminists. They weren't womanizers, you see. They just loved women so much they couldn't stop at one. The Reese's peanut butter cups approach to adult relationships. Gene Siskel used to really love these types of films. It did not shock me to learn he gave this film three out of four stars.

This is a remake of a 70s film I haven't seen. It already feels like a relic by 1983. Blake Edwards, a director I've never been particularly enamored of outside of Breakfast at Tiffany's, can't seem to decide if we are to take this dreck seriously or not. The film introduces us to our horndog hero, played by Burt Reynolds who at this time was desperate to get away from success and achieve that which all box office stars seek eventually - "to be taken seriously as an AK-TOR!" What follows is an eyerollathon of good looking adults flirting with the finesse of children. There's sex, even some brief nudity from Marilu Henner, but the movie is never sexy. Nor is it fun. It certainly never approaches anything resembling funny. It's a slow, dry exercise in trying to provide sophistication and depth to Andy Hardy. Still, this is Burt before his mid-80s accident that he never fully recovered from. Whatever charms the movie has comes entirely from him.

This one was a real disappointment. I love discovering old films I have never seen before. In the last year I've found many gems from Cannon, who also released this, so I looked forward to adding Ordeal by Innocence to the list. Unfortunately, this film is an incoherent monotonous mess. Scene after scene of Donald Sutherland confronting unpleasant people then being chewed out by the police, all the while sudden cuts to black & white flashbacks that are often confusing. The flashbacks bounce around too, sometimes they are scenes from before the film started and sometimes they are scenes within the film we have already seen. Then there are the ones where the images are from one scene while dialogue from another scene is played over it. It's a mess that will leave you with a headache. I grew very tired and bored with this movie and just wanted it to end. The plot is like Get Carter with brain damage. The only positive is some nudity but even that's undercut by the distracting fact the actress is obviously very cold. All I could think about was how cheap this movie must have been that they couldn't afford to film a nude scene in a room with heat.