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...What the moviegoer sees and hears has doubtless been well rehearsed, but there is a commanding sense of improvisation, and one is held on edge by a feeling that this shameless, hyper-imaginative wild man might say or do absolutely anything...

...Pryor goes in for smoker language in a big way, but while the dirty talk adds flavor to the act, his comedy is far from dependent on it...

...But whatever other individual works you might tack on to this contemporary list, it still does not add up...

...a renowned dirty-trickster (Henry Gibson...

...The Long Good Friday Tough, smart, well-paced contemporary gangster-thriller from England...

...The film, based on James Kirkwood's undistinguished novel, is a mess: poorly written and directed, and petering off into a conventional comic heist caper...

...It manages to tell a gripping story and to do for the gangster film what Lonely Are the Brave (signaling the end of the frontier and of the cowboy) did for the western...

...An extraordinarily moving, harrowing recapitulation of the Holocaust, produced by Arnold Schwartz-man and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles as a definitive film record (Lest We Forget), and as an irrefutable reply to those proto-Nazi revisionists who maintain that the destruction of European Jewry never took place...

...You have some sense of a live performance—occasional audience shots lend that air—but no one in the Palladium's fixed seats could possibly have seen so much, or have seen it so well...

...protein adviser to the U.N.," Isabella Garnell (Glenda Jackson), a relentlessly humorless prophet of purity (she's so pure she has all the furniture removed from her suite, and drinks hot water uncontaminated by tea), and Harold Gainey (Paul Dooley), the disadvantaged, attention-seeking independent, who repeatedly stages his own death and resurrection to attract equal coverage...

...Something further is lost, absent the modulations of Pryor's voice and his remarkably expressive facial gestures...

...Health was planned for release during the 1980 election campaign, which would have been altogether appropriate...

...The funny stuff, almost seamlessly stitched together in this performance, runs a thematic range from sex to money, success, lawyers, marriage, prisons, courage, racism, the search for roots, Africa, caged and uncaged animals, cultural relativism, and Pryor's recent, notorious self-immolating "accident...

...President's personal observer ("He's very pro-health," she assures everyone within earshot...

...It's not clear just why it was withheld, although I suspect its sequestration had something to do with changes in Fox's executive management...

...I don't think any other filmmaker, during this period of relative dearth of mirth, has done more for American screen comedy...

...Although the witless pop comedies he's held together single-handedly throughout the past decade (Silver Streak, Greased Lightning, California Suite, Stir Crazy) draw upon his talents in a parsimonious way, he seems to me unquestionably the most gifted and inventive comic working today...

...Stunning performances by Bob Hoskins as the brutal but not unappealing boss, and Shakespearean actress Helen Mirren as his brainy, sophisticated moll...

...This is a film that will satisfy Richard Pryor fans, but I would not recommend it to anyone seeking insight into the experience of the returning Vietnam veteran, or the enjoyment that comes from sitting down before a well-made movie...

...The far-fetched mythical premise of the original, which at least could be understood in psycho-sexual terms, has been revised to the point that it makes no sense at all...

...There is enough truth in the portrayal to make it embarrassing...

...It is not especially well served by the producers' effort to enhance the raw images and words through hyped-up production techniques—a big orchestral score, a wide screen, photographic collage, a sequence in animation, narration by Orson Welles and Elizabeth Taylor— but the photographic and textual documents are so forceful that these occasional lapses of taste do nothing to lessen the impact...

...I doubt this was deliberate (the Eddie role was originally pegged for a white actor in his twenties), but that does not dilute the film's contribution to the erosion of Hollywood's long-deplored color bar...

...Since 1970: M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, Nashville, A Wedding, the much underrated Popeye—and Health...

...British to the core, but the film has all of the visual dynamism and narrative drive of the best in American filmmaking...

...Nothing is extraneous or intrusive: No enhancing special effects, no jazzy, expressive camera work doll up Pryor's performance...

...As a "period," it does not count for much in the annals of film comedy...

...Live on the Sunset Strip, shot over the course of two performances at the Hollywood Palladium, is also an exemplary "in concert" motion picture...

...Astute film buffs will have noted the absence of Robert Altman's work from the summary listing at the head of this review...

...I'd meant to include some examples of Pryor's humor, but in looking over my notes I realize that he...

...It's time to make amends...

...Yes, this suppressed 1979 production, withheld by Twentieth Century-Fox as "unreleasable," is now enjoying a successful run at one of New York's alternative cinemas and will no doubt find bookings elsewhere in the coming months...

...In spite of all this Eddie holds on to his sense of humor, is taken as a lover by a high-priced hooker with a Heart of Gold (Margot Kidder), and finally bounces back on his feet after taking up crime...

...The focus of this politico-social satire might have been more pointed, but Health nonetheless presents a delicious and occasionally wicked portrayal of American election-year rites as burlesque...

...Petersburg, Florida, depicts the annual convention of a national organization of health devotees, meeting to elect a new president...

...Genocide The 1981 Academy Award winner for feature-length documentary...

...While the 1942 film accomplished minor miracles through atmosphere and suggestion, Paul Schrader's revival indulges in explicit depiction of the horrible: bloody dismemberment, fearsome onscreen transformations (from human to savage beast), gory animal surgery, and the like...

...Dick Cavett (who manages to be funny just by playing himself straight...

...It read into the film potential damage to their aged candidate's image and the solemnity of his campaign...

...This well-edited and researched compilation film draws on virtually all known photographic sources (including clips from Alain Resnais's masterful Night and Fog), and welds them into a coherent whole...

...Also on hand are Gloria Burbank (Carol Burnett), the U.S...

...But in the last twenty years or so, the big studios have rarely invoked the antic muse...

...the "U.S...

...forgoes the one-liners, developing, instead, whole comic bits which inevitably lose something when retailed out of context...

...the Steinettes (a kookie singing group named for some reason or other after Gertrude Stein), and many other loonies, some costumed as giant vegetables...

...We have, to be sure, been treated to a line of gross-out comedies spun off from Animal House, the manic slapstick of Jerry Lewis (only the French find something here), the teen cult drug capers of Cheech and Chong, the scatological silliness of Mel Brooks (for sheer comic offensiveness the underground works of John Waters—Desperate Living, Pink Flamingoes—are superior in every way), an interminable flow of insipid frolics of relationships from Neil Simon, Blake Edwards's zany but repetitive Pink Panther series, and the endearing yet parochial New York Jewish humor of Woody Allen...

...It's one of several Paramount films hastily prepared and shot last spring in an effort to pile up a year's worth of product before a Directors Guild strike expected for July 1.) But Pryor, in his most varied dramatic role yet, delivers a wonderfully modulated performance as cuckolded husband, supplanted father, dutiful son, grateful but proud lover, and frustrated "hero...

...He grounds his work on human feelings, often the most intimate sort, and social and psychological perceptions, and I know of no one better at turning such material into comedy...

...Pryor also appears in the concurrently released fiction film, Some Kind of Hero—the story of Eddie Keller, a Vietnam prisoner of war who returns home to find his wife in love with another man, a daughter he's never seen who regards Number Two as her father, his bookstore driven into bankruptcy, and his mother laid low with a stroke and piling up huge bills in a nursing home...

...The best of Pryor is also captured in his earlier solo film—Richard Pryor Alive in Concert, in his increasingly rare night club gigs, on his records, and in a few of his more dramatic screen roles—Lady Sings the Blues, Blue Collar, and Some Kind of Hero...

...The contending candidates are Esther Brill (Lauren Bacall), an astonishingly well-preserved eighty-three-year-old virgin (every orgasm, she cautions, shortens one's life by twenty-eight days) who floats off into disquieting trances...

...The film, set in and around an aging salmon-pink hotel in St...

...The banks won't make him a loan without credit or collateral, and the Army won't unfreeze six years of back pay because he signed a Viet-cong confession to get medical attention for a prison camp buddy...

...Cinematographer Haskell Wexler delivers the goods as sparely as possible...

...Another aspect of Some Kind of Hero interested me...

...The film, nonetheless, boasts some strong and disquieting sequences, awesome footage of big black kitty cats, and Nastasia Kinski, whose otherwise mediocre performance becomes quite affecting whenever she disrobes...

...Pryor's work in Live on the Sunset Strip represents a fusion of his unrestrained abilities as a writer (in addition to his solo material he co-scripted Blazing Saddles, and has written for television's Lily Tomlin Specials, Sanford & Son, and the Flip Wilson Show), stand-up comic, and actor of increasing range and versatility—and it is both unexpectedly moving and wildly funny...

...M Hits and Misses Cat People A sexy> quirky, and notably uneven updating of the Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur horror classic...

...And it's a delightful, zany, entertaining film...

...Health...

...It's the first Hollywood movie I know of which, without the slightest self-consciousness, promotes an erotic interracial coupling (Pryor-Kidder...

...Thank goodness, then, for Richard Pryor, who is at his best in the recently released "concert" film, Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip...