Movie Diary 6/18/2012

“There Was a Crooked Man…” (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1970). What a curious idea for a movie, especially from Mankiewicz and the guys who’d just written Bonnie and Clyde; even as a piece of Western revisionism it’s really odd. In 1970, in the wake of the movie below, it never had a chance.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969). Apparently William Goldman has declared that this movie, which he wrote, suffers from a severe case of the cutes. That’s a pretty good assessment. What’s odd about seeing it now is how little plot there is in it, how prolonged the sequences are, and how depopulated it is.

At What a Feeling!, the Eighties live on with a straggler in the alien-invaders genre, the Chiodo brothers’ Killer Klowns from Outer Space.