Une si belle garce

Unsure of where to go after wounding a vengeful local in baseball match and told to flee town, a Vietnam War veteran takes up with the mysterious young mistress of a produce farm owner in this little seen drama starring Ryan O'Neal in his first screen role. It is not the greatest debut for the Oscar nominated actor, but in what was only her second screen performance, Leigh Taylor-Young is excellent as the tantalising mistress. A femme fatale of the post-Production Code era, she plays a seductress like few others before her, revealing lots of skin and boldly parading around in the buff. She is just as effective with her clothes on too as there is an ambiguity as to whether or not she genuinely likes O'Neal or is just using him for a scheme revealed in the film's final third. That said, the scheme comes too late to provide much vigour, and easy as Taylor-Young is on the eyes, there is little else propelling the first hour. Van Heflin has a nice, understated turn as a justice of the peace, and Cindy Eilbacher is adorable, playing a surrogate daughter to O'Neal, but it is not enough to carry the film. The opportunities for more are all too apparent. Why not explore O'Neal's criminal background in further depth or how serving in Vietnam has affected him? Why not establish his desire for a daughter further? By all accounts though, the film was promoted as a vehicle for its two stars (married in real life at the time) and therefore it is easy to see why the filmmakers took a less exciting route. The film is not worthless as some of its dissenters might say, but it sure could have been a lot more.

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.

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....

In its own sexy, shoddy way, this 1969 film version of an early Elmore Leonard novel is better than the recent "hip" version with Owen Wilson. It mixes film noir conventions with teen exploitation riffs and a fair amount of nudity for a guilty pleasure that's redolent of late 60s/early 70s cheeseball cinema.

Ryan O'Neal is a drifter (good hearted, of course) who hooks up with Leigh Taylor Young, a bad girl out for "kicks." Leigh gets Ryan into bed and then into vandalism and robbery and...well, you know where the film is going. It's the journey that's the fun.

O'Neal had a sort of bruised likability that worked for him on TV's Peyton Place and he uses it effectively here. Young, married to him at the time and his PPlace co star, is sulky and seductive and, oh yes, naked a lot as a girl who just wants to have fun. Their brief love scenes have a fair amount of steam to them and watching them drop their bell bottoms to go skinny dipping gives the whole movie a certain "Boogie Nights" flavor. The (then) O'Neals were one hot couple.

There's a good supporting cast: Robert Webber, Lee Grant, doing a dry run for "Shampoo" as a horny divorcee, James Daly, a nice, slimy villain who pimps out Ms. Young to some business men, and Van Heflin in what may be his last role. On the downside, the direction is a bit flat, lacking in the kind of edge that can really make a crime story cook. And the score, as noted in another post, is atrocious, poured like syrup over scene after scene.

The Big Bounce definetly qualifies as a guilty pleasure, what with Ms. Young going hysterical and smashing a living room up with a fire poker and O'Neal smashing an opponent smack in the face with a baseball bat, and in the credits no less. All in all, this version is preferable to the Owen Wilson one in which you can practically see the actors' tongues push out their cheeks as they condescend to the materail. Here there's a fair amount of sweat, exploitation and a hint of camp as the good looking leads go through their noir paces. Worth a rental.