Nancy, ein eiskaltes Playgirl

Taking advantage of the enormous publicity from the small screen when cast members Ryan O'Neal and Leigh Taylor-Young became a small screen Dick and Liz, they were cast in The Big Bounce. Both were cast in roles suitable to each other, but Leigh made far more of it than Ryan.

O'Neal is a rather quick tempered drifter who is a Vietnam veteran and doing farm labor work for lack of something better. It also fits the unsettled character of his nature. As the film opens he's in trouble having stabbed one of the migrants, a fellow known for a nasty temper and the fact he was reputed to carry a knife.

Knowing all that the local town judge Van Heflin persuades the prosecutor to drop the whole thing and Heflin offers room, board, and a job at his motel. But O'Neal finds something Heflin can't compete with in the intriguing and sexy mantrap Leigh Taylor-Young.

Maybe Carroll Baker in Baby Doll made a sexier big screen debut, but she's the only one I can think of. Taylor-Young is a child of the Sixties. She's the kept mistress of Robert Webber manager of the pickle works and the biggest employer in the area. She's also one spoiled rotten and dangerously psychotic woman. What Taylor-Young is is all about kicks, getting them wherever she can.

The question is will O'Neal who isn't the strongest of characters be able to resist this woman and the dangerous things she does just to get what she calls The Big Bounce.

The Big Bounce is an inauspicious debut for O'Neal who would really hit it big shortly with Love Story. But it did guarantee him a lengthy career. But Mrs. O'Neal really runs away with this picture as the kind of woman that ought to come with a warning label.

I'm giving this seven although the terrible music almost makes the picture unwatchable. What is interesting is Leigh Taylor-Young's portrayal of an under-age woman driven mad by being debauched, perverted and corrupted by a string of rich old men to whom she is pimped by her ageing moneybags employer. Dutch Leonard, author of the original novel, got his facts right here, and it gives the movie an underlying force that can't be denied. It's a surprise to find that the principal character is not Ryan O'Neal, who is wooden and sulky as the out-of-place "anglo" farm-worker in rural Monterey, but instead his then-wife and co-star Taylor-Young. Her character has gone over the edge as a result of being seduced by the local Senator at the instigation of her employer and bed-mate, the local landlord. Taylor-Young gets right into it, yipping and chortling as she turns over other cars and pumps bullets into mistaken interlopers. Her plan to rip off her employer for the fortune in his house-safe never comes off (at least not during the picture's action), and she escapes a murder charge, but as Van Heflin's character grimly points out: "Give it a month or ten years: she'll get hers". Worth watching just for Taylor-Young's performance, about one-third of which is in the nude. This film is a rare insight into female psychology, almost in spite of itself.

I watched this movie with curiosity rather than interest inasmuch as I'd seen some comments that it had "bombed" when initially released. The ratings in IMDB, where as many people rated it a four as rated it a ten, clearly showed that it elicits a wide range of individual reactions. Personally I thought that it was worth watching but has a number of weaknesses. Jack Ryan (Ryan O'Neal) is a drifter working as a farm field worker. Fired for getting into a fight he escapes trial due to the intervention of the local judge, Sam Mirakian (Van Heflin). Jack is told to leave town by the farm supervisor Bob Rodgers (Robert Webber). However he stays after meeting the farm owner, "pickle king" Ray Ritchie (James Daly) and his secretary/mistress Nancy Barker (Leigh Taylor-Young). Jack takes a job as handyman at a hotel owned by the judge where he also meets a divorced woman, Joanne (Lee Grant), and her daughter. Unfortunately Jack begins to romance Nancy who turns out to be a thrill seeker (nice 1960's exploitation movie term!). Thrills include vandalism, breaking and entering and more (no sense giving away the plot). The movie is not entirely successful. In large part this is because it was taken from a book by Elmore Leonard. His works have a significant element of black comedy but, when played straight as here, it comes off as absurd melodrama. This movie has none of the sense of fun (i.e. Get Shorty) that this nuanced material needs. Fortunately Elmore Leonard's plots are relatively complex and full of incident so the movie keeps going and doesn't sag. The actors, aside from the pleasure of seeing them all so young, are mixed. Ryan O'Neal is best at light comedy which is to say that his performance here is limited. Leigh Taylor-Young displays a far greater range although, from time to time, a little histrionic for my personal taste (but then again I'm not a big Bette Davis fan either). While I've always looked forward to seeing Robert Webber I have to admit that he has only one expression throughout this movie. James Daly is underutilized but does have one extremely nasty scene, in the delicious sense of the word, pimping Nancy ("How would I know, I'm in produce"). The revelation is Van Heflin who is far more avuncular than I've ever seen him. I swear he was "channeling" Brian Keith! Unfortunately he lived only another two years and we lost what could have been a very interesting career as an older "character" man. RIP. The technical credits are fine and the gorgeous California scenery, I suspect the Monterey peninsula, would convince me to move. Overall the movie is worth watching but shows why Elmore Leonard's novels have a reputation for being poorly adapted to the screen.

If there's ever been a movie ruined by a soundtrack, it's THE BIG BOUNCE: a late-sixties balance of sunny sea-blue and rural-gray tones, adapted from Elmore Leonard's Neo Noir novel beginning with a convict bashing an inmate's face with a baseball bat, and then, on parole and stuck within the small town, he's both feared and revered...

Depending who's around, and where he's at, and, while still in the film's rushed rudimentary stages, he seeks work for a dishonest rancher who exploits cucumber farm workers...

But with the help of a particular friend, he lands a soft job as a maintenance man at a beach side motel, where so much potential, pitting Ryan O'Neal against one of the sexiest sirens of Neo Noir... played by his then-wife and former PEYTON PLACE co-star Leigh Taylor-Young, who's the buried lead here: A seemingly sophisticated femme-fatale, she's bad news and big trouble.

Author Elmore Leonard said all adaptations before GET SHORTY and JACKIE BROWN never got it... But maybe, in critiquing BIG BOUNCE piecemeal, he saw a dark ray of hope in Taylor-Young's Nancy Barker, both effectively sinister and sexy...

The aforementioned crappy music, arranged by the usually capable Tony Curb, sounds like The Beach Boys possessed by folk singers drowning-out an otherwise groovy Jack Nitzsche-like surf music score -- one particularly godawful track repeats Nancy's name over and over... killing whatever edge her character's supposed to have.

But it's not all that bad: the overall vibe is lean and edgy, and there are terrific moments when Jack and Nancy hang out, night and day, discussing an upcoming heist, and possible murder. But Jack spends too much time with his old-timer friend played by veteran actor Van Heflin... so overly (and quickly) helpful to Jack's plight... he hardly has any obstacles in his way, or rungs to climb, or corners to paint himself out of.

It's really all about our femme fatale Taylor-Young being really bad and getting progressively worse (as in, badder and badder): and then, possibly becoming lethal while keeping her ridiculously beautiful poker face intact...

But really, TV director Alex March needed the intentionally flawed heart-of-gold convict ani-hero to take more risky chances, early on, to live up to any manipulative competition. And it wouldn't be the first time Ryan O'Neal would get what was supposedly his first-billed vehicle stolen by a close relative. He probably never got over PAPER MOON belonging solely to daughter and Oscar winner Tatum O'Neal.

Well basically my description says it all... not a bad movie but terrible music, especially from a period of such GREAT music. The music really ruins the movie. It's about a worker who gets in a fight and hits another worker in the face with a bat and well i dont want to ruin the movie if you feel like seeing it, despite the music....