there's something of a tolerable movie here. Harvey Hart's The Sweet Ride is what used to be rated "M" for audiences. It's a soap opera covered with the thin candy coating of a "youth" movie, and except for a couple glimpses of Jacqueline Bisset's boobage, and some really snarky Tony Franciosa dialogue, there's not a huge jump from the suds to the somewhat-interesting and the superficially-silly.
The Sweet Ride takes itself too seriously, tries to address too many things, is way too artsy for its own good, but danged if you don't start caring about the characters. Franciosa, an alcoholic tennis bum, pushing 40 and telling a cop that he hangs around young people because of their energy, represents lost youth. Michael Sarrazin does his doe-eyed thing, wanting a relationship, winding up in the folks' hardware store. Bisset, a woman who has never been in a movie that she couldn't trip up with a bad performance (but who has gotten a lot of face time on screen for things other than her face), is the object of Sarrazin's desire. Yet, she won't tell her boyfriend that she's a kept woman, an actress being abused by a TV producer.
Oh, and we've got Bob Denver and Michelle Carey as the sort-of married couple that adds some comic relief.
Throw in some nasty biker dudes, a rape, a near-murder, and Charles Dierkop (an actor everyone my age will recognize) getting his head put through a plate glass window.
Mix with a lot of booze, some hookahs, immorality, amorality, and Tony Franciosa growing some moral fortitude for the big showdown with the bikers.
A pinch of bad rock in a night club. A dash of Bob Denver playing a simpering homosexual to get out of being drafted.
You've got a movie that will, maybe, keep the adults in their seats and the young folks thinking that this is a literate film with deeply intellectual underpinnings.
For me, about the thirty-fifth time Sarrazin asks Bisset why she is so secretive, I'm thinking, "For God's sake, Jackie, tell the man that your owner shows movies of you at home to get his No- Restraining-Order-for-Me rocks off!" She keeps talking in riddles until Sarrazin gets fed up and rapes her.
She's so weird that no amount of bouncing Bisset bosom would be worth it.
And yet, once again, the viewer is probably going to want things to work out between the two kids, for Denver and Carey to find married bliss, for the bikers to bathe regularly, for Franciosa to stop hustling tennis matches and get a real job selling used cars (and stop splashing his hungover face with old beer--ick).
I didn't mention the neighbor who hates Franciosa for his wild lifestyle and his stealing the newspaper because that level of comedy is beneath such an intellectually-underpinned and literate youth film.
The Sweet Ride takes itself too seriously, tries to address too many things, is way too artsy for its own good, but danged if you don't start caring about the characters. Franciosa, an alcoholic tennis bum, pushing 40 and telling a cop that he hangs around young people because of their energy, represents lost youth. Michael Sarrazin does his doe-eyed thing, wanting a relationship, winding up in the folks' hardware store. Bisset, a woman who has never been in a movie that she couldn't trip up with a bad performance (but who has gotten a lot of face time on screen for things other than her face), is the object of Sarrazin's desire. Yet, she won't tell her boyfriend that she's a kept woman, an actress being abused by a TV producer.
Oh, and we've got Bob Denver and Michelle Carey as the sort-of married couple that adds some comic relief.
Throw in some nasty biker dudes, a rape, a near-murder, and Charles Dierkop (an actor everyone my age will recognize) getting his head put through a plate glass window.
Mix with a lot of booze, some hookahs, immorality, amorality, and Tony Franciosa growing some moral fortitude for the big showdown with the bikers.
A pinch of bad rock in a night club. A dash of Bob Denver playing a simpering homosexual to get out of being drafted.
You've got a movie that will, maybe, keep the adults in their seats and the young folks thinking that this is a literate film with deeply intellectual underpinnings.
For me, about the thirty-fifth time Sarrazin asks Bisset why she is so secretive, I'm thinking, "For God's sake, Jackie, tell the man that your owner shows movies of you at home to get his No- Restraining-Order-for-Me rocks off!" She keeps talking in riddles until Sarrazin gets fed up and rapes her.
She's so weird that no amount of bouncing Bisset bosom would be worth it.
And yet, once again, the viewer is probably going to want things to work out between the two kids, for Denver and Carey to find married bliss, for the bikers to bathe regularly, for Franciosa to stop hustling tennis matches and get a real job selling used cars (and stop splashing his hungover face with old beer--ick).
I didn't mention the neighbor who hates Franciosa for his wild lifestyle and his stealing the newspaper because that level of comedy is beneath such an intellectually-underpinned and literate youth film.