By Lee Pfeiffer
Warner Home Video continues to earn the gratitude of movie fans by releasing special editions of films that had limited commercial appeal. The latest example is director Hal Ashby's Lookin' to Get Out, a 1982 comedy that was a notorious box-office disaster - and one that virtually ruined Ashby's career. Like fellow gadfly director Sam Peckinpah, Ashby could be a temperamental personality who prided himself on clashing with studios over issues of artistic integrity. His acclaimed hits include Coming Home, Being There and Shampoo, but -like Peckinpah- he wore out his welcome with his employers and was relegated to filming "by the numbers" movies in return for a paycheck.There has been a renaissance of interest in Ashby's career of late, so hopefully this director's cut of Lookin' to Get Out will find an appreciative audience.
The film stars Jon Voight (who co-wrote the script) as Alex Kovac, a perpetually upbeat but obnoxious compulsive gambler whose insurmountable debts to a local loan shark motivate him to flee to Las Vegas. He is accompanied by his personal Sancho Panza, the dim-witted but loyal Jerry Feldman (Burt Young). In Vegas, Alex reconnects with an old flame, Patti Warner (Ann-Margaret), who finds herself once again smitten by the charismatic loser - even though she is the girlfriend of the multi-millionaire owner of the MGM Grand Casino. Alex concocts an audacious plan to enlist the services of Smitty (Bert Remsen), a once-legendary high stakes gambler now reduced to working as a waiter in the MGM Grand.Alex gets Jerry to impersonate another high roller in order to get an advance on his credit. Using the borrowed $10,000, he plans to have Smitty take the casino to the cleaners through a nerve-wracking game of blackjack. However, the loan shark and his enforcer turn up in hot pursuit - and the plan turns to chaos as Alex and Jerry try to stay alive long enough to win their fortune.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this film. It moves at a brisk pace and makes excellent use of the Vegas locales. It was the first movie allowed to be shot inside the MGM Grand, which boggles the mind since the screenplay calls for the casino to be the setting for con men, cheating, wild chases and gun play. The permission was granted as a personal favor to Burt Young, who called in some chips, so to speak, in order to get the rights to film on location.
The film is far from flawless. The main gripe is that the two lead characters are simply not very likable. Voight's Alex is a non-stop motormouth who laughs at his own jokes, pretends to be a successful gambler when, in fact, he is the ultimate loser, and keeps his old flame at arm's length when it comes to emotional support. Jerry is only slightly more admirable, occasionally trying to talk sense to Alex about enacting another crazy scheme to make a quick buck. He looks like an unmade bed and has to pay women to sleep with him. Without protagonists you can relate to, the viewer never warms to the characters. However, the story is consistently funny and engrossing and when Bert Remsen's washed-up gambler is introduced, the movie goes into high gear. Remsen's scenes at the blackjack table are nerve-wracking and suspenseful - and the 'sting-in-the-tail' ending is as amusing as it is unexpected. Both Voight and Young give yeoman performances as well.
The DVD contains a longer version of the film that was never released to the public. Not having seen the original cut, I can't say how this version differs but the consensus among those involved in the production is that Ashby's cut is far superior. The DVD contains a pleasant but largely uninformative featurette that reunites the three leads, who discuss how much they enjoyed making the film. However, it is light on information about the movie's troubled background. Thus, i consulted writer Nick Dawson's excellent new book, Being Hal Ashby. To say the DVD documentary doesn't touch on the real story would be an understatement. Dawson's book reveals what fiasco the entire affair was. In essence, Ashby ran the budget sky-high and ultimately lost control of the final cut. Jon Voight tried to salvage the project by assisting with the edit of the cut that was released to the public, but even he grew to disdain this version. The documentary does reveal that it was author Dawson who made Voight aware of the existence of the director's cut and WB decided to release it on DVD. The documentary goes into very little of this, avoiding entirely the battle royale between Ashby and Lorimar, the studio that originally produced the film. When the film was released in 1982, it was a monumental bomb, losing most of its (then) extravagant $18 million budget.
Lookin' to Get Out is not a classic, but it deserved a far better fate than it enjoyed. It remains a major work by a major American director and WB deserves praise for allowing retro movie lovers the opportunity to enjoy Ashby's original vision of the story.(Incidentally, the movie marks the screen debut of Voight's real-life daughter 7 year-old Angelina Jolie.)
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