38
Metascore
6 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 50Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertThe Frisco Kid has a certain softness at its center. The Wilder character has a sweetness, a niceness, that's interesting for the character but doesn't seem to work with this material. It's really nobody's movie. The screenplay has been around Hollywood for several years, and Aldrich seems to have taken it on as a routine assignment.
- 50NewsweekNewsweekWilder is best at outrageous moments, teaching an impromptu hora to the Indians or babbling Yiddish to some Amish farmers he mistakes for rabbis. He is, in fact, an actor of moments, less likely to wear him when surrounded by the funny ensembles Brooks used to give him. Aldrich is not Brooks, but he has, in the past, made fine action films in which the male camaraderie was eloquently implicit. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a sledgehammer. [16 July 1979, p.93]
- 40The New York TimesVincent CanbyThe New York TimesVincent CanbyThere's no shortage of talent in The Frisco Kid, but it's the wrong talent for the wrong material.
- 38The Globe and Mail (Toronto)The Globe and Mail (Toronto)The Frisco Kid, billed as a comedy, is about a gentle Polish rabbi of 1850 who is instructed to cross America and become spiritual leader of an eagerly awaiting congregation in San Francisco. But the movie is propelled more by violence - in action, in dialogue and in editing - than by humor. No wonder there are so few good kosher westerns. [24 July 1979]
- 25Washington PostGary ArnoldWashington PostGary ArnoldThe finished film obliterates whatever promise of novelty and human interested existed in the basic idea of Belinski's culture shock. If the rabbi's odyssey was embryonically appealing, the filmmakers have nurtured it along pact from an elephant trying to hatch a robbin's egg. [27 July 1979, p.B1]