HUSTLE opens with the discovery of the body of a young girl on the beach at Malibu, but about midway in the picture the two Los Angeles police-officer heroes (Burt Reynolds and Paul Winfield) who have been investigating her death are assigned to go to the airport to meet a plane carrying a suspected terrorist. And in terms of dramatic plotting a very odd thing happens. The plane is delayed, and the heroes go into an airport bar, where they…

“Rumbling”

THE GRADUATE, EASY RIDER, FIVE EASY PIECES, LITTLE BIG MAN, and other American films of the late sixties and early seventies which rejected middle-class values had a special appeal for middle-class college students. The anti-draft, anti-Vietnam counterculture took up movies in such a big way that it was sometimes called the film generation. By now, it's the "Masterpiece Theatre" generation. Some of the biggest recent hits have once again expressed—as movies did up through the fifties—the needs and fantasies…

“Underground Man”

TAXI DRIVER is the fevered story of an outsider in New York—a man who can't find any point of entry into human society. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), the protagonist of Martin Scorsese's new film, from a script by Paul Schrader, can't find a life. He's an ex-Marine from the Midwest who takes a job driving a cab nights, because he can't sleep anyway, and he is surrounded by the night world of the uprooted—whores, pimps, transients. Schrader,…

For seven decades of romantic screwball comedies, sexy, smart, funny women have been waking up heroes who, through fear or shyness or a stuffy educational background, were denying their deepest impulses. The women perform a rescue mission. Sometimes, in earlier eras, they did it in the guise of dumb blondes (like Marie Wilson) or dizzy dames (like Katharine Hepburn in BRINGING UP BABY), but mostly they were wisecracking broads, like Mae West and Joan Blondell, and Jean Harlow in RED…