Three Kinds of Action

...Possibly the greatest credit is due Roger Moore, the third actor to play Bond...

...Car Wash was a genuine And largely successful?throwback to the service comedies of the '40s and '50s...

...The ski chase is lifted from On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the underwater battle from Thunderbolt, the sleeping-car fight from From Russia With Love...

...Most of all, Moore's Bond is perfectly in keeping with the air of fantasy that animates the entire 007 series...

...Instead, he has Gene Hackman, Catherine De-neuve and Terence Hill portraying stick figures in a puerile pastiche of such desert epics as Beau Geste and Morocco...

...the private-eye thriller (Farewell, My Lovely), and now the Foreign Legion film...

...Only the presence of Robert Mitchum, as Philip Marlowe, kept Richards and the movie from sinking in a swamp of nostalgia...

...The most satisfying movie of the summer, after Star Wars, turns out to be The Spy Who Loved Me, the 10th James Bond film...

...Here, however, Hill has next to nothing to work with, thanks to David Zelag Goodman's flaccid script, taken from Richards' story...

...Greased Lightning is another disappointment, but it is less of a disaster than March or Die and, given the confluence of able craftsmen involved in its making, more puzzling in its failure...

...And Connery's undeniable acting ability paradoxically proved detrimental as well: His contempt for the role led him to undermine it through ironic readings...

...His working-class Scottish brogue and his hairy masculinity contradicted the elitism that was at the heart of the original conception of a dandified spy...

...March or Die fails the challenge posed by its title, expiring in the sand during the first reel, and not even the climactic battle scene can provide any excitement...

...Foremost among the talents is Michael Schullz, who previously directed Cooley High and Car Hash...

...Such fantasies are skillfully and pleasurably fueled by the newest James Bond movie...

...Former fashion model Barbara Bach, who plays a Russian agent (the title role), is less well-endowed than Ursula (Doctor No) Andress, less alluring than Diana (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) Rigg, and, amazingly, a less skilled actress than Jill (Diamonds Are Forever) St.John...

...Both films also exhibited a meticulous attention to the black vernacular, together with confidently brisk direction...

...His wooden delivery, though, must be attributed to something else...

...Even Deneuve, for whom English is a foreign language, reads her lines better than Hackman does his...

...Unfortunately, she sounds much better than she looks...

...In a rare lapse, they chose Sean Connery, an actor who went against the grain of the Fleming character from the very beginning...

...But once Scott begins to challenge the crackers on their home tracks, the tone of the film changes...

...Coauthored by Kenneth Vose, Lawrence DuKore, Melvin Van Peebles, and Leon Capetanos, the screenplay was evidently pulled in too many directions to permit a convincingly life-like or, indeed, consistent characterization...

...Although Bridges' career has been terribly erratic, in Greased Lightning he delivers an impressive and unexpectedly funny performance as a poor white who befriends Scott...

...Hill proves to be the best looking and liveliest member of the cast...

...Still, The Spy Who Loved Me manages to generate as much excitement as did Doctor No, the first Bond flick, in 1962...

...Perhaps this veteran of spaghetti Westerns (who was christened Mario Girotti) can use March or Die as a springboard to better roles in better action flicks...

...Because he is both less able and less inclined to distance himself from the figure, his characterization is more consistent with productions that offer up thrills without condescension...

...Like the other 007 adventures, it offers an audience-pleasing mix of sex and action in a fantasy world of fast cars and high living, pulled straight from the pages of a men's magazine...

...But most of the blame must fall on director/producer Richards...

...When she made her first appearance as Simone, the glamorous and mysterious camp follower, she was so plump and dowdy that I mistook her for Shelley Winters...

...He still doesn't realize that a movie cannot be whipped together, like Jello, from a Technicolor package of big-name stars, a cast of thousands, and some expensive location shooting...

...he is doomed to become such a credit to his race that even Pryor cannot keep the character from ending up about as interesting as a plaster saint...

...Possibly he has been studying with Charlotte Rampling, whose elocution in Farewell, My Lovely was similarly wretched...

...A weaker actor, Moore is a far more suitable Bond...

...Unhappily, most of Greased Lightning moves at a much slower pace than either of Schultz' previous works...

...The continued success of 007 is all the more surprising because by now the thrills have become pretty predictable, and in The Spy Who Loved Me they are almost totally derivative...

...Ian Fleming, who died in 1964, was said to have preferred Moore for the part, and his judgment was to prove sounder than Broccoli and Saltzman's...

...Much of the credit for this belongs to the sound instincts of producer Albert Broccoli, who collaborated with Harry Saltzman on the previous nine Bond movies...

...Goodman, praised by one critic as "a very knowledgeable movie buff in his own right," seems to know old movies better than he understands what moves audiences...

...In March or Die, his latest effort, Richards is blessed with neither a powerful presence like Mitchum nor a mythical hero like Marlowe...

...Still, I regret to report, Deneuve is visibly aging...

...Nevertheless, this sluggish reverence works against the second most talented contributor to Greased Lightning, Richard Pryor, who as Scott, plays his first starring and first dramatic role...

...No doubt I was a little misled by what are meant to be 1920s fashions (but more closely approximate maternity dresses), and by a hairdo framing the actress' face with ringlets that would make Little Orphan Annie jealous...

...In addition, Moore is much more conventionally attractive than Connery, and his obviously imitation upper-class accent meshes with 007's snobbish decadence...

...At the start of the film, when Scott gets his education in highspeed driving by running moonshine on the back roads of the South, Pryor is able to use his considerable comedic ability to enliven the story...

...More "creative" producers are often totally ignorant of both...

...He has an infectious grin that nearly splits his face from ear to ear A reminder of the young Burt Lancaster, whom Hill also resembles in his exuberant prowess at athletic stunts...

...That was certainly the case with his best-known film until now, Farewell, My Lovely, where he managed to remove the edge from Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled novel and reduce it to a visually splendid but dramatically debased and listless affair...

...Apparently her histrionic abilities have been elevated by all those perfume and automobile commercials on television...

...Perhaps a return to the present would keep him from boring us all to death...

...Although it is patently unbelievable that the fate of the world could repeatedly depend on the heroic actions of a lone gentleman spy representing a second-rate world power, there are evidently a great many moviegoers who dream about those good old days when the sun never set on the British empire, and about the kind of sybaritic self-indulgence promoted by Playboy...

...As a result, neither Schultz nor Pryor was able to stamp the production with the mark of his personality...

...Schultz' debut was a kind of black American Graffiti, where the use of teenagers from the ghetto rather than from middle-class suburbia made for a special poignance...

...The director's fluid use of dazzling colors, his soft-focus sentimentality, and his soggy stories usually result in squishy, insubstantial offerings...

...No-nonsense manufacturing of commercial thrillers is hardly an easy task (witness the embarrassing failures of Dick Richards), and Broccoli appears to know what viewers want and how to deliver it...

...The series' longevity is remarkable: Few films survive their first sequel, let alone their ninth (I am already dreading Star Wars II), and the cinematic Bond has been going strong for 15 years now...

...While it concentrated on the workers at a neighborhood car wash rather than soldiers, it offered the same kind of offhanded, insightful depiction of the tension between male camaraderie and class differences...

...Hackman reportedly injured his back while playing the part of Major William Sherman Foster, a West Point reject turned French Foreign Legion martinet, and a back brace would be a reasonably convincing excuse for his zombie-like stiffness...

...For this shallowly imitative film tiresomely resurrects all the cliches of the old sandy spectacles without capturing the slightest hint of their animating spirit...

...It is the true story of Wendell Scott, the first black champion in the world of stock-car racing, a sport almost completely dominated by Southern whites, and I suspect that the excessively deliberate tempo springs in good part from the filmmakers' exaggerated deference toward Scott's undeniable and considerable feats...

...Richards has spent a great deal of time embalming old genres the Western (The Culpepper Cattle Co...

...The latest crop of females hardly seems very fresh either...

...Moreover, a very good acting job by Beau Bridges in a supporting role nearly gets lost in the confusion...