Penn’s maverick film is all Beatty, jazz score, close-ups. Giant faces loom up out of the screen in black and white, like mountain ranges. The film uses dissolves, fast edits, foregoing regular dramatic scenes for something with shaper edges. The audience is asked to play catch-up as it tries to keep up with the story of Beatty’s paranoia, a comedian who’s got on the wrong side of the mob. It’s filmmaking which is dazzling and exerts a modernism not just stylistically but also in the way it presents its leading man, a lothario who’s gone off the rails, stepbrother to James Caan’s Sonny. Beatty is all wired tension, constantly on the brink of overacting, just as everything in this remarkable film is in danger of going over the brink. Like the weird Yves Tinguely sculpture whose destruction is given an entire sequence with no narrative significance, it’s a machine with so many bells and whistles that you lose count of them all. And yet in this excess, in the intricacies of the edit, the jazz score, featuring Stan Getz, in the machinations of the plot, there lurks a film which feels unique, a high point in the transition from stylised black and white to the lurid colour schemes of the seventies.
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