Review of Steelyard Blues

Given the people involved, it is hard to see why this movie should be so messed up and dull. The writer, David Ward, wrote the amazing caper film "The Sting" two years later, Jane Fonda had just won an Academy Award for Klute, and Donald Sutherland had just done excellent work in films like "Klute," "Start the Revolution Without Me," and "Kelly's Heroes." Plotwise, the movie is a caper tale, with a small gang of bumbling misfits planning a big heist. At the same time the movie wants to be hip satire, a series of comedy sketches of the type that the NBC television show "Saturday Night" would do so well two years later. The bad result is that the plot makes the comedy bits seem awkward and forced and the disconnected comedy bits destroy any kind of suspense that the heist might have. It is quite literally a movie that keeps smashing into itself, just as the cars in the cars in the demolition scenes run into each other.

The only real interest for me was watching Jane Fonda. Her "Iris Caine" is supposed to be a light hearted version of her dramatic Bree Daniels prostitute character in "Klute" Yet, one doesn't believe her for a moment. It is always Jane Fonda pretending to be a prostitute that we are watching. It is as terrible a performance as her performance in "Klute" was terrific. It would be a good lesson for acting teachers to run the two films together to show how the same actress in the same type of role can be great or pathetic. It suggests that actors are only as good as their writers and directors.