TOUGH GUYS

...In desperation Harold puts the squeeze on stoolies around the city, on the gangland bosses he's kept under his thumb for 10 years, on the policemen he's paid off, on his closest friends one of whom he kills in a frenzy of impotence and frustration...

...It is unfortunate that Milius and Stone did not make Conan a bit more amusing a little more like the real-life Schwarzenegger, who was so slyly and endearingly egotistic in Pumping Iron, the documentary about bodybuilders...

...A series of battle sequences reveal Milius at his best, borrowing liberally and unabashedly from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Sergei Eisenstein's, Alexander Nevsky and Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will...

...The chief problem Rocky now faces is his own success...

...This time Rocky gets some rhythm from Creed, who teaches him to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee...

...we too have been swept along by Barrie Keeffe's literate and ingenious screenplay, Francis Monk-man's pulsating score and John Mackenzie's crisp direction...

...Having defeated Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in the heavyweight title match of the first sequel (replayed at the beginning of this film), he has slipped all too easily into the life of a champion...

...To Rocky's astonishment, though not to ours, he loses to the challenger: If he didn't, there would be no movie...

...in a single long take, Hoskins' expression reveals first astonishment, then the dawning of understanding, followed by anger, fear, resignation, and ultimately chagrin...

...Conan the Barbarian plods along with the leaden grace of its tongue-tied, muscular hero...

...Just as Bogie did, Martin recreates a true archetype here, albeit a comic one to be sure...

...In fact, Rocky has become so comfortable that he doesn't notice the swift rise of a new contender, Clubber Lang (ferociously portrayed by Mr...

...Olympia dwarfs the muscle-bound Stallone (who shouldn't feel bad, since Schwarzenegger easily makes everyone else in the world look puny...

...Preferring action to words and thought, the writers manifest virtually no regard for such matters as characterization or motivation...

...Whereas Rocky's diction is liberally spiced with "deses" and "dems" and other regionalisms, Conan's vocabulary is not large enough for linguistic variety...

...As in the first two films, Rocky trains to Bill Conti's familiar theme song, but with a variation...

...No more feats of brute strength like the one-arm pushups that were so amazing to behold in the original movie...

...Like a player in the popular "Dungeons and Dragons" game, Conan confronts a variety of predicaments that he solves with a combination of strength, cunning and help from an assortment of talented friends...

...An amusing montage shows him appearing in an American Express commercial and doing the Muppet Show, hawking a new candy bar named after him, and posing with President Reagan...

...Much to my surprise, Stallone has devised some surprising twists as a writer, while continuing to do a good job as both director and star...

...The seven-time Mr...

...Schwarzenegger displays far less acting ability, too...

...Shand's empire begins to crumble just when he needs most to impress his American visitors...

...Ian Fried...

...It has been some time since the large screen was so filled with the clatter of swords, the thunder of hooves and the mayhem of primitive hand-to-hand combat...

...Set in the 1940s and photographed in the black-and-white that characterized the decade's films noirs, the "live" action of the movie is periodically punctuated by clips from those old mysteries...

...Missing is any sense of fun...

...These scenes are linked by the flimsiest of plots a mishmash of Greek and Norse mythology, Mongolian history, Wagnerian opera, and a dash of some contemporary satire...

...Needless to say, in the rousing climax Rocky regains the heavyweight crown...

...So it seems perfectly natural for the intrepid private eye Rigby Reardon (Martin) to be carrying on a conversation with, for example, Bette Davis: In one frame he is talking...

...It is nowhere near as successful as the various Rocky installments, though not because of any physical shortcomings of its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger...

...The gag is repeated throughout the movie, involving our hero with the likes of Cary Grant (in a clip from Suspicion), Lana Turner (from The Postman Always Rings Twice), James Cagney (from White Heat) and many others, including, of course, Humphrey Bogart (from a variety of films...

...There is a hilariously (and, for the genre, typically) underwritten and overdressed shady lady (amusingly underplayed by the lovely Rachel Ward), a comic villain (Reiner) complete with a German accent and three stoogelike bodyguards, and some crackling dialogue that deftly parodies tough-guy sentimentality ("Guns don't kill detectives, love does...

...Yet it never wears thin, partly because the story has more strengths than simply this one device...

...Rocky has moved out of South Philly into a mansion in the suburbs, where he lives with his beloved Adrian (Talia Shire) and their young son, Rocky Jr...

...Did anyone see them...

...Although Helen Mirren (as Victoria, Harold's long-time mistress) must be singled out from the outstanding supporting cast, Hoskins is clearly the star...

...A bizarrely charming strongman occupies center stage in The Long Good Friday: Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins), the criminal boss of London, has some grandiose plans for the future of not just the Organization but England...

...Bullet-headed, no-necked, barrel-chested, his Harold is a menacing, strangely compelling mixture of opposites: ruth-lessness and compassion, swagger and humility, arrogance and paranoia...

...Somehow Reiner and his talented crew have managed to "write around" and "shoot around" these inserts, matching the interiors and lighting...

...Somehow larger than life, Rocky III cannot really be faulted for being something less than great art...

...Does anyone remember F. I. S. T. or Paradise A lley or Victory or Nighthawks...

...The final scene of the film, when Harold realizes how he's been had, is a stunner...

...His most difficult match is a charity bout against a gigantic wrestler improbably called Thunderlips (played by an actor with the equally unlikely handle of Hulk Hogan) that turns into a comic brawl...

...He is limited to about a dozen complete sentences throughout the film, while most of the comic strip dialogue is spoken by more talented, or at least more experienced, actors (James Earl Jones, Max von Sydow...

...To win back the title he enlists the help of none other than his old nemesis, Creed...

...Mickey is disposed of too cruelly and conveniently...

...A Mohawk-scalped slugger who behaves like a white racist's worst nightmare of black brutality, Lang is as hungry as the young Balboa was before he first fought Creed...

...T., a former bodyguard for Muhammad Ali...

...The Italian Stallion has even learned that there is more to a wardrobe than polyester leisure suits...

...For better or worse, Stallone has created a persona that has taken hold of the popular imagination as firmly as it has his career...

...The primary gimmick of the film turns out to be the most entertaining one...

...It will be a long time before I can watch one of those films noirs with a straight face...

...Conan's climactic feat is his rescue of a princess (Valerie Quennessen, who has not been seen since French Postcards) from the leader of a snake cult that seems all too familiar in these post-Jonestown years...

...The pieces of the deadly puzzle fall into place for us mere seconds before they do for Harold...

...Gigantic snakes must be slaughtered, vicious warriors killed, witches outsmarted, mountains climbed, deserts crossed, caves penetrated...

...There is not much point in subjecting Rocky III to serious critical scrutiny...

...while The Long Good Friday transcends the crime thriller movie, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid spoohh with a great deal more imagination and with than I would have expected from its star/co-author, Steve Martin, and its director/co-author (with George Gipe), Carl Reiner...

...If we didn't already know that the scenes were from two different films, shot 40 years apart, we couldn't tell from what we see and hear...

...Rocky continues to fight, of course...

...Soon he finds the squeeze being put on him by a corrupt local politician and by a force beyond his understanding or control the IRA...

...Or, properly, indirection...

...in the next, she is responding...

...Wearing a slouch hat, dangling a cigarette from his lips, talking out of the side of his mouth, and maintaining a macho deadpan, Martin is the picture of a hardboiled private eye whose heart, in spite of himself, is always melting into "something warm and mushy...

...He disposes of his negligible opponents as quickly as his faithful manager, Mickey (Burgess Meredith), can line them up...

...Much of the blame for this failing, one suspects, must be laid on the writers, John Milius (who also directed) and Oliver Stone...

...Good Friday turns out to be very long indeed: His mother's car is tailpiped shortly before the Yanks land, an old friend and criminal associate is executed, his posh casino is rigged with a bomb, an explosion rips apart his private restaurant as he arrives with his guests, and worst of all, no one can figure out why these things are happening now...

...Through Keeffe's brilliant characterization and Hoskins' forceful performance, Harold emerges as a very contemporary tragic hero, an underworld Macbeth brought to ruin less by the treachery of his quondam allies or the machinations of his enemies than by the excesses of his ambition...

...It must have been hard to resist making Rocky III, and harder still to dream up a new story...

...I'm a businessman with a sense of history," he announces proudly at a banquet held for the visiting American ma-fiosi he is counting on to bankroll his ambitious scheme to reclaim a rundown sector of the Thames for a hotel/ shopping center complex, a marina and the stadium for the 1988 Olympic Games...

...I enjoyed this sequel almost as much as I liked the original and disliked the second installment, despite some lapses in the story line: Rocky's ever-resentful brother-in-law, Paulie(Burt Young), is appeased too easily...

...The first 15 or so minutes are totally confusing, but everything makes sense retrospectively I think...

...But all that is beside the point...

...Another film with an outsized hero is Conan the Barbarian...