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Shamus (1973)
Rate:
5
Viewed:
7/26
7/26:
Burt Reynolds falls prey to the neo-noir movement during the 70's after giving the best performance
of his career in Deliverance.
The slightly funny opening scene has me fooled into thinking of Shamus as another
Harper. Then, it settles down as a mundane gumshoe picture. For a
change, the story is easy to follow while the on-location shooting of New York City is well-done. The
acting is fine as Burt Reynolds establishes a nice rapport with Dyan Cannon. If you remember the bookstore
scene, that's obviously a homage to The Big Sleep.
However, the editing is disjointed. A prime example of what I mean is McCoy is being chased by two guys
after breaking into the warehouse and then the next scene cuts to the pool hall. Another is the heavyset
bald guy letting the Great Dane go on purpose to attack two German shepherds, allowing McCoy to escape
easily. Then, he jumps approximately thirty feet from the bridge to the tree before landing hard on the
ground. Thinking McCoy broke his back, I found it unbelievable that he got up intact and kept running.
By the way, that was Burt Reynolds (even though the trivia section kept saying it was either Hal Needham or
Charlie Picerni) who actually did the dangerous stunt, confessing years later, "I just missed the branch in
the tree I was trying to grab and fell four stories and landed on my upper back—the shoulder blade
region. Had the impact been one inch higher, that would have been it." Between these two incidents, there's a
ludicrous scene of Shamus stealing a truck from the military base. Was security so lax back then?
All in all, Shamus tries to be a combination of The Big Sleep
and Shaft, but it doesn't work.