ChikPapa Very disappointed :(

Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

DipitySkillful an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

moonspinner55 Roger L. Simon adapted his own novel about how the wonderful/volatile, idealistic 1960s evolved into this cynical age, the corrupt and immoral 1970s. One-time student activist from Berkeley, now a weekend-dad working as a private eye, becomes involved in a case of political dirty pool when the liberal elect for California's governor is falsely implicated in a partnership with a fugitive radical. Star Richard Dreyfuss, one of the top actors at the time (following "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and his Oscar win for 1977's "The Goodbye Girl"), also co-produced this mystery yarn, turning it into a wan and wholly unconvincing actor's showpiece. Sporting a shaggy, curly hairstyle and a thick mustache, Dreyfuss isn't quite at home in these plastic, fake-noir surroundings--he doesn't even try to assimilate himself. Whether he's fighting with his ex-wife or romancing a former girlfriend, the actor is relying on externals and shtick (that of a raffish Jewish snookums) to take the place of a performance, something which director Jeremy Paul Kagan appears to be complicit with. Dulled-out and bland, the picture certainly isn't helped by Bill Conti's obtrusive music, nor by Frank Stanley's muddy cinematography. A minor hit, the film was soon forgotten in the wake of Dreyfuss' hot streak coming to an end. *1/2 from ****

balzakschlemp Saw this in the theatre back when it was first released. In a nutshell, my problem with this film is that the entire plot is revealed in the first five minutes with nothing else to show for it. Of course, this was not understood as the film unfolds, so the rest of the hour and a half you're anticipating that something significant, or even interesting, is about to happen, and it never does. Only when the credits start rolling does it become clear that you just wasted an hour and a half of your life. I'm quite certain that I've invested more emotional capital in this film writing this review than anyone involved in making it. Just a crappy film.

tillzen I saw this film when I was 18, and at 51 I realize what a dope I was. This is sloppy 70's film-making at its WORST. Dreyfus is (like the entire film) using cutesy shorthand in lieu of acting. One need only look at the constant continuity errors to realize that everybody must have been either high, or thought making a quality film was too bourgeois. I "got" the 60's. I was a teen in the 70's, and "The Big Fix" is typical of the hipster coding that allowed the excesses that typified Richard Dreyfus "the drug years". What was well written wisenheimer dialog in "Jaws" and "The Good-Bye Girl" is here reduced to winging it, and the wires of laziness clearly show the puppet to be merely in motion; mimicking performance. What a silly, and disingenuous waste of time this film still is!

bmacv When it was released in 1978, there was already a distance built into The Big Fix, based on a detective novel set in the ashes of the counterculture. The story had been commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine from Roger L. Simon, who wrote the script. On its release, the film was already drawing on images of the late 60s that had ceased to be memories but had already entered a misty mythology. Richard Dreyfuss, fresh from the Spielberg hits (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) that had made him a star. not to mention his Academy Award for The Goodbye Girl), plays Moses Wine, aonetime rebel who has fallen on hardtimes. His wife, Bonnie Bedelia, has divorced him (though he dotes --rather tiresomely -- on his two sons), and he earns his keep as aprivate investigator when not smoking up and playing solitaire Clue in his -- there's no other word -- "pad." Operatives of a political campaign sign him on to find out who is waging a dirty-tricks campaign to link their candidate to a legendary radical, now disappeared deep into the underground. The story has some interesting twists, particularly those involving Susan Anspach, John Lithgow and F. Murray Abraham, but the plot tends to disappear into holes here and there, as though told in a marijuana haze. Viewed in the new millennium, The Big Fix unfolds behind two scrims of nostalgia: The one in the story itself, where 60s has-beens, unhappy with how the world has turned, yearn for barricades and love-ins; and the one revealed by the talents who made the movie, where that yearning for the heady days of the counterculture -- Berkeley! Vietnam! Hash brownies! -- has developed its own, peculiarly fusty period flavor.