King, Murray

This not entirely successful combination of cinema vérité and fiction concentrates on a live wire-type insurance salesman, Murray King. The filmmakers follow him through one business day and several nights of pleasure while he pontificates on his philosophies. Had the film been pure vérité it would have been an excellent documentary of a his spontaneous reactions and relationships. The two ingredients of fact and fiction, however, serve only to water one another down.

King, Murray is a portrait of a Vesuvian character, Murray King, a successful, 46-year-old Long Island insurance man, who plays himself in a series of actual confrontations with clients in staged (fictional) scenes with hired actors and his own friends. King, Murray has captured a different kind of truth in this film, a movie in which the making of the movie is an integral part of the finished product. As we follow Murray from New York to Las Vegas on a junket, the filmmakers talk to Murray from off-screen, sometimes appear with him on-screen, tease him, goad him into making outrageous statements, and set him up in scenes staged to present Murray as he sees himself, though not necessarily as we see him. There is one sequence in which Murray is shown swimming the length of a Las Vegas pool entirely underwater. I believe the film makers weren't necessarily making a movie about what a man really is, but what he thinks of himself as being.

That's what you might call stretching the vérité.

Because Murray is a bumptious, overpowering, aggressive, sometimes vulgar character, the movie has something of the same qualities. How the audience reacts to it will probably be just about the way one would react to a real-life Murray.