Creeping Shabbiness

The most interesting thing about Fingers —correction, the only interesting thing —is Pauline Kael’s review of it. So let’s save that for the end.

Fingers is a cross between a small boy’s dream of glory and a bigger boy’s masturbation fantasy. James Toback, the writer-director, is the author of the dreadful screenplay for Karel Reisz’s The Gambler; of a book called Jim, about James Brown, the football player turned movie actor, with whom Toback lived and orgied while he wrote this piece of mixed hero-worship and self-love in which the two Jims become fused like the nurse and the actress in Persona; and of a number of magazine articles, including a tribute to that supreme macho megalomaniac, Norman Mailer.

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The most interesting thing about Fingers —correction, the only interesting thing —is Pauline Kael’s review of it. So let’s save that for the end.

Fingers is a cross between a small boy’s dream of glory and a bigger boy’s masturbation fantasy. James Toback, the writer-director, is the author of the dreadful screenplay for Karel Reisz’s The Gambler; of a book called Jim, about James Brown, the football player turned movie actor, with whom Toback lived and orgied while he wrote this piece of mixed hero-worship and self-love in which the two Jims become fused like the nurse and the actress in Persona; and of a number of magazine articles, including a tribute to that supreme macho megalomaniac, Norman Mailer.