paulet

Redford seems to think every plot point has to be hammered home like a tent peg. At Mark van Doren's birthday picnic, his son Charles cuts to the center of a cake inscribed "Happy Birthday Father." A few scenes later he comes come in the middle of the night and eats the last slice while his dad, who thinks the quiz show is on the level and son Charlie is an upright man like him, rattles on about the trials of authorship. A scene in the HQ of a big corporation is introduced with a low-angle shot towards the top of a skyscraper. The four anonymous nuns, shown near the beginning to illustrate the universal popularity of "21," are back once more near the end, watching the Congressional hearings into the rigging of"21." I give the movie six stars, mostly for the acting--Johann Carlo as Toby Stempel is close to perfection--but Redford's direction drags it down from eight.

There's a pretty explicit theme of modernization--the story springboard is that a group of Upper Egypt boatmen pool their resources to buy a fast motorized barge--with the central character (Omar Sharif) coming of age in parallel, as he narrowly evades temptation and trickery; this was Nasser's Egypt, so it's probably fair to see this as a parable about combining economic development with social justice and shunning Western-style decadence. Unfortunately this means the plot resolution is Put the Blame on Mame--a sexy temptress stands in for the fleshpots of the West--but it would probably be unreasonable to expect a more original view of women. Nice camera work, lighting setups and editing; definitely worth seeing.