A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Thursday, January 8, 2026

The Hit (Stephen Frears, 1984)

Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth in The Hit

Cast: Terence Stamp, John Hurt, Tim Roth, Laura del Sol, Bill Hunter, Fernando Rey, Lennie Peters, Willoughby Gray, Jim Broadbent. Screenplay: Peter Prince. Cinematography: Mike Molloy. Production design: Andrew Sanders. Film editing: Mick Audsley. Music: Paco de Lucia. 

The acting trio of Terence Stamp, John Hurt, and Tim Roth make The Hit watchable even though they're playing characters with manifest inconsistencies in a story riddled with plot holes. Stamp plays Willie, who ratted on his fellow mobsters to avoid prison and has spent ten years in exile in Spain. Then  two gangsters, the icy, taciturn Braddock (Hurt) and his itchy, naive partner Myron (Roth), show up to bring him to mob justice. What follows is a peregrination through northern Spain, during which Braddock kills another mobster and abducts his mistress (Laura del Sol). As a road movie, it's not bad, but as a gangster film it falls short, never quite finding a consistent tone, wavering between film noir and black comedy. 

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