John Goldfarb


Maybe we need to start A MOVEMENT TO BRING BACK THE MOVIE

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The movie shows up from time to time on the FX Movie ch what they should do is release it on DVD

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Count me in, maybe this movement could be stirred into life and actually have the effect you desire.I haven't seen this movie since I was a child in the late '70s and I remember parts of it vividly. I wanna see it again.

shabam! pow! plop! whizz!

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No need to start a movement; this film WAS a movement, from William Peter Blatty's pen, by way of his LGI tract. It's a good thing he conjured up the devil later on; Blatty's track record before "The Exorcist" was pretty abysmal. And that record includes this unfunny piece of tripe, as well as "Promise Her Anything," plus the ghastly, unfunny, undynamic war-comedy duo of "Darling Lili" and "What Did You Do In The War, Daddy?"

Shirley MacLaine overacts all over the place. Astronaut Richard Crenna looks confused the whole time. And Peter Ustinov does what he can as a manic Arab sheik who watns to add snoopy reporter Shirley to his harem.

This film began director J. Lee Thompson's descent into hackdom. Example: he had planned to film the first "Planet of the Apes" movie. But he was helming the now-forgotten "McKenna's Gold" and couldn't get out of it. So he directed the third and fourth "Ape" entries, instead. They weren't a patch on the original. Now, the "Guns Of Navarone" director might have been able to helm the first one, but not the director of "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home." Thompson's problem with this epic was that, with the success of "What A Way To Go," he deluded himself into thinking that he could do comedy. Problem is, "Go" had Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Gene Kelly, and a host of other A-list stars, along with a first-rate script and first-rate musical numbers, while "Goldfarb" had bupkis- a lesser cast and a lame script. Add to this the fact that Thompson, later in his career, never saw a script he didn't like, and ended it directing Charles Bronson action movies which, as you might have guessed, were only as good as their scripts. Some were passable, but most were just awful.

Just to let you know how embarassing this movie was, the University of Notre Dame sued the producers of this film for making their football team and their university look like a bunch of idiots. Perhaps that is why Blatty wrote the blockbuster novel about heroic priests- to avoid getting burned at the stake for sacrelige.

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I saw a different, funny movie.

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