Inserts

Searching Richard Dreyfuss Inserts online is like playing with a loaded gun.

It's an excellent premise, but the movie is bad. The text is just really, really contrived and poorly written, the characters are flat and unconvincing (the male ones are also loud and annoying), and needless to say, the jokes aren't funny.

I remember when this came out: "Richard Dreyfus in an X-rated movie!" *gasp!* *clutch the pearls* Please. It's not like he gets naked, though it would have been more memorable if he had. Pauline Kael: "The picture should be more fun than it is [...] as the stag-movie star, Veronica Cartwright flings herself into her role in the dissolute, romantic manner of Jeanne Eagels. She's a grown-up talent in a kid's show." In truth, it's a little fun, but that wanes after Cartwright's exit a half hour in.

A pre-fame Dreyfuss impresses as Boy Wonder, a young silent film director who failed to make the transition to talkies and became a porn director shooting adult silents from the (dis)comfort of his living room. Inserts' dialogue heavy screenplay and restricted setting lend the film a play like quality, which isn't a problem due to the talented casts' confident delivery of the risque material and Byrum's steady direction. The black comic approach is refreshing, but it could have cut deeper.

It's difficult not to feel as if we're watching a filmed play, but I'm kept enthralled by unexpected turns by pre-Jaws Dreyfuss, pre-Friday Hoskins, pre-Alien Cartwright, ironically playing has-beens! Cinema is by turns paralleled with bootlegging, grave-digging and meat-wrapping as the sardonic wit of Byrum's muscular original script finds a seriocomic pitch of its own, carried out in long takes in a histrionic confab of spread crotches and wisecracks.

At first I thought this was unbearably stagey, but it really sucks you in. Dreyfuss, Cartwright and Harper are excellent, Hoskins less so, and Davies is godawful. An intense and memorable little oddity.

Excellent.