Great acting and great director can apparently save a movie with one of the worst scripts I've seen. The dialog made no sense at all. Random gibberish from start to finish. But the movie is worth watching just for the amazingly strange and glorious acting and the cool shots.
shareI have to agree that the screenplay is lacking in this film. And I believe that it is the fault of the author, Robert Stone. He wrote the script based on his novel but inserted lines that seemed to be taken right from the novel. So they don't seem as if real people would speak that way. I'm thinking, in particular, Reinhart himself. We just don't get enough back story about this man. Who is he? How does he somehow come across spouting all of these political diatribes?
And how are we supposed to relate to him? I wanted to root for this film because I love the time period and I love films that have an anti-establishment arc to them. But this film had some contrivances to it that in looking back don't make the film any better. The acting performances are first rate. It's just too bad they are wasted.
Stone did write the screenplay but he got so frustrated with the process involved in making a film that he quit before the end. Judith Rascoe came in to work on the script. Rascoe is not listed in the credits, but her name appears on later revisions of the screenplay. (She also worked on the screenplay of Stone's second novel, Dog Soldiers, which became Who'll Stop the Rain, and the two were nominated for a Writer's Guild Award for best adapted screenplay for that movie.)
Rheinhardt was a difficult character to like even in the original novel, as most of the protagonists of Stone's books are to some extent, and I agree with the general consensus that the acting in this film is good but the film just doesn't work very well for some reason. That certainly could be related to Stone's difficulty with the process and the way things were revised as the movie developed, and also to the fact that Rascoe had to come in to try to rescue the script. Stone said he thought the directing hurt the movie, with too many middle-distance shots so that there was seldom a clear enough focus for any given scene.
Newman did a number of films based on serious literary novels in the 60s: Cool Hand Luke, of course; Hud, which was based on Larry McMurtry's first novel, Horseman, Pass By; Sometimes a Great Notion, based on Ken Kesey's second novel; and this. It's interesting to note that Newman directed the Kesey adaptation, which IMDb lists as being released the same year as WUSA, 1970, but later in the year. It's also interesting that McMurtry, Kesey, and Stone all were at Stanford together in the early 60s, in Wallace Stegner's writing workshop. Rascoe was also in that workshop, only later.
Just saw it today(7/8/10)at 6:00 am on TMC. Great acting. Great direction. Excellent cast.
One problem. This film is painfully underwritten. It almost seems like it was produced from an unfinished script. Lots of interesting ideas that never become fully realized plot points...
Otherwise it's a good example of 70's movie making.
Script has some problems, but film overall is better than most seem to think. Perkins is great and so are Newman and Woodward.
shareThe performances and atmosphere were what made this work for me. The message is pretty muddled here – maybe that's the point – but this captures the mood of a tumultuous era very well. This isn't as successful as earlier counterculture films like "Easy Rider" or later satirical films like "Network" or the works of Michael Ritchie, but I thoroughly appreciated the vision. 8/10 stars.
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