O Golpe do Baú

Ramshackle farce with a few funny moments, mainly thanks to Nicholson's largely inspired comedic work, but little else. Mike Nichols is adept at coasting along on clever scripts,but he's clearly unable to salvage wayward material like this. In particular, the running gag which comprises the last half hour or so of the film wears incredibly thin. Beatty and Channing seem to be trying,to little avail, while Nicholson walks away with the film. He's particularly adroit in the first 20 minutes,before the film gets lost in it's own series of ambling vignettes. Still can't hold a candle to the old W.C. Fields or Laurel & Hardy films. Watch one of those instead.

I don't know why I sat through this movie. Perhaps I thought there would be some redeeming moment but it just got on my nerves and never left until the end credits rolled. With actors like Channing and Nicholson, I expected a decent film but alas! The direction loses (or has no) focus. The screenplay's a big mess though. The actors are loud. Although Nicholson himself isn't as bad because he's quite different from his other films and does provide a few funny moments. Channing too has one funny moment where she runs away with a chicken. Seeing the positive comments, maybe I missed something but anyway, for me it was a waste of time.

Mike Nichols' last good film that I'm sure bombed at the time. Stockard Channing almost steals the show as the young heiress, Warren Beatty is perfectly cast, and Nicholson is hilarious without doing much (great hair). There were a lot of good films in the 70's and this should have been included on most lists.

A 7 out of 10. Best performance = Jack Nicholson. There are scenes that fall flat, but the ones that work make it worthwhile. Great costumes and art-set direction as well. It's hard to imagine these two actors (Beatty & Nicholson) playing the characters they did in REDS six years later after playing these buffoons. Give it a shot.

A box office failure upon release, it just seems impossible to believe this genuinely hilarious film did not hit with audiences then and now is not the iconic cast and title it deserves to be. Columbia must have been aghast when it didn't set the box office on fire especially given what major stars Nicholson and Beatty were in '75. It is hard to find this film and if you have the time and luck to find a copy, try and also get THE FRONT and THE CHEAP DETECTIVE two other Columbia films around the same time that were reasonable successes and deserve to be major titles in anyone's home library.In Australia each of these films + HIGH ANXIETY suffered from the intro of colour TV and the cinemas all took a nosedive for 4 years 74-78. Very few films in thie period were big hits and cinemas closed in dozens. Pity as so many great films were made then and this comedy genuinely is one.

When I read about "Silkwood" in a movie encyclopedia, the caption said that Mike Nichols's career had come to a halt eight years earlier with "The Fortune". Watching the latter, I laughed but also felt like the movie was a little bit low for the director of "The Graduate" and "Catch-22". Portraying uptight Warren Beatty and over-conspicuous Jack Nicholson transporting Stockard Channing to California for what were deemed immoral purposes by the Mann Act in the 1920s, it seems like much of the flick consists of Beatty getting angry at Nicholson for not taking their predicament too seriously. But the last twenty minutes were a hoot, I will say that.

So, this may be Mike Nichols's only movie that you sit around in your underwear and watch. I gotta pity the characters for having a landlady like the one portrayed in the movie. Also starring Scatman Crothers (that's right, the cook from "The Shining") and a very young Christopher Guest.