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| United Artists | Release Date: May 23, 1980 |
Starring:
Bill McKinney, Elisha Cook Jr., Gary Busey, Jodie Foster, John Lehne, Kenneth McMillan, Meg Foster, Robbie Robertson, Teddy Wilson, Tim Thomerson
Summary:
Tired of her dull job as a waitress, Donna decides to join two carnival hustlers and see what life in their field is like.
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Gary Busey, Robbie Robertson, and Jodi Foster star in a romantic triangle about some carnival sharpies and a runaway girl. A beautiful portrait of the carnival as an American institution. [18 July 1980, p.8]
Robertson, the former rock star, is a natural screen presence who's learning how to act; Busey is a sophisticated young actor who makes everything look natural. Best of all is Jodie Foster as a teen-age runaway who joins the carnival. Now 17, she has the wise but innocent smile of a kid Mona Lisa and an irresistible acting style that combines tough realism and pure poetry. [23 May 1980, p.75]
The road movie/buddy movie situations and emotions gain an intriguing perverse edge from the setting, with its genuine freaks and sideshow illusionism, as well as from Alex North's wonderfully unsettling score and Harry Stradling's dark cinematography. Better on electric, eccentric ambience than for its final rush of plotting, but such risk-taking movies are a welcome rarity.
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As the teen-age small-town girl looking for excitement who joins up with a carnival that's traveling through, Jodie Foster has a marvelous sexy bravado. The dialogue, from Thomas Baum's screenplay, is often colorful, but the picture is heavy.
Carny is bursting with more information about American carnivals that it can contain, surrounding a plot too thin to support it. Without knowing much about the reasons why the movie was made, I'd guess on the evidence that the director, Robert Kaylor, was fascinated by carnivals, spent a lot of time with one and shot a lot of film, and then found himself forced, to shape his material into some sort of traditional, commercial story. Inside this movie is a documentary struggling to get out.
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