Beau Bridges plays a rich white kid who buys a tenement slum in a Brooklyn neighborhood mostly populated by blacks; he quickly butts heads with the ambivalent tenants over his plans for the property. Hal Ashby-directed comedic drama attempts a then-fashionable avant-garde approach to the scenario, with sequences chopped up in an irritatingly 'clever' style and fantasy sequences interspersed which strive to tell us The Truth. It's an ambitious movie with a fine cast (including Lee Grant as Bridges' dotty mother and Diana Sands as his eventual lover), but the picture intrinsically has no style at all--it's a movie made in the editing room, and it is so punctuated with a kind of lazy ambition that there's very little to respond to. *1/2 from ****
Review of The Landlord
