I had never heard of this movie until yesterday when it appeared on one of my cable channels. I recorded it and just finished watching it. I must say that I really enjoyed the various dramatic scenes as well as the dialog and issues this movie dealt with. I loved the feel of it too taking place in the late 1970's in the Bronx. Richard Gere was fantastic as well as the characters who played his father and uncle.
If you get a chance to see this movie, I highly recommend it.
i cant believe that no one else has commented on this film!
i saw it a million years ago, and read the book soon after. both are great, tho the book (of course) goes into more details with some of the other characters, such as the mother.
i have a feeling the book was written after the film was made, based on the screenplay. - id like to know if this is right tho.
ive been looking for this film on dvd for years. - hopefully it will be available one day...
kind of reminded me of saturday night fever, (made the previous year) but better, and without the music.
- sometimes the magic works, sometimes the doves die in your sleeves
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This is a superb film. I used to hate Richard Gere, but his performance here is surprisingly naturalistic. If only he had done another picture with Robert Mulligan, maybe his career wouldn't be so down in the dumps as it is today.
This film reminded me of a lot of Mulligan's other films. The condom scene is straight out of Summer of '42, the overbearing father from Fear Strikes Out, the monologue about the dead baby from The Other and Gere's bedtime story about the Comanches a reminder of The Stalking Moon. Curiously, Gere's younger brother has roughly the same haircut Mary Badham had as Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird.
"What I don't understand is how we're going to stay alive this winter."
I agree, but it should have delved more into Gere's sex life w/Marilu henner. That would have made it a classic!
shareOne word: OVERACTING. I almost turned it off during the 1st scene. Paul Sorvino is trying to do his impersonation of a person with an IQ of between 60 and 70. Screaming and yelling. As tho all Italian people have an identity of stupidity, ignorance, loudness, disrespect of women, child abuse...and racism. Can't leave that out. It's one thing to show that a person can have a shortcoming, but not every character, every day, in every mood.... And they all yell incessantly! The mob movies portray Italians like sophisticated, brilliant, generous, wonderful people by comparison. Did we need to see an extended scene of domestic violence, made legally ok because the character hates himself afterward?
The casting is bizarre--age-wise. As though they got the very best actors and then handed out the roles in a raffle. I thought they were 3 brothers and the wives of the 2 older ones and the little son of one couple. I never guessed Gere was the son of one of the other men. And all that talk of remembering the Depression? The film was released in 1978. 49 years after the stock market crash. LoBianco is said to be 44 or 45 in one scene. The Depression reached its height in 1933. So he was born a year later? WWII ended the last vestiges of the Depression--when he was 6? The brothers wouldn't be remembering it well enough to offer an employment analysis of it! Maybe remember some homeless men, or parents not buying great Christmas presents or a tree when they were pre-school--children's memories--but they were not differentiating employment prospects of different professions back in the 1930s. Esp these two. Silly.
SPOILER! I do want to thank you for posting this, or I'd never have stuck with it even 5 minutes. Sorvino and LoBianco would have chased me away in the beginning with their screaming and mentally challenged behavior--what was the director telling them? Richard Gere was great in this movie, as was Marilu Henner--something I'm glad I waited for based on comments here on the board. Bizarre movie and even more bizarre ending...Spoiler. He commits a felony running away from 2 jobs with a child that needs therapy to support and now he has no references and will be wanted for kidnapping? Did Sorvino's character write this?
I can't believe this was nominated for best adapted screenplay for the '78 Oscars. Every other word was a cuss word! Too much taking God's name in vain too. I also wanted to turn it off in the first 10 minutes of about 20 f-bombs, but stuck with it for some reason. I also agree there was overacting.
Haha, I was also doing the math on the Great Depression comment during the movie. I figured he was pushing 50 and talking about circa 1938, so he was about 8-10 in 1938 or something.
The script was awful, but so was the filmmaking. I don't remember 1978 as having such a shallow pool of possible good scripts. So, how this was nominated is beyond belief.
shareThe book had to be infinitely better! Richard Price is known as a good writer. So, this seriously ham-handed film version must have been a major mistake on the filmmakers' part.
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