Films directed by
Robert Aldrich

The Flight of the Phoenix

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Back when I was a kid, this movie used to play on the Saturday afternoon movie about every third week and, being a boy with a jones for all things aviation, I ate it up. Of course, back then I simply got off on the idea of turning a crashed airplane into a new smaller airplane. As I got older, I came to appreciate the movie for what it was: a deeply insightful drama about men under crisis, couched in the format of an action adventure.

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The Frisco Kid

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The Frisco Kid is a genial comedy desperately in search of a narrative thread. This story of a hapless Polish rabbi (Gene Wilder) finding his way across the American Old West with the help of a genial bank robber (Harrison Ford) has a good heart and some funny moments, but no sense of direction. It hits the high points of western clichés, like train robbers, Chinese railroad workers, a hanging posses, horse being spooked by a rattlesnake and a climatic showdown on a dusty street. The real problem is that the central relationship, between Wilder’s Rabbi Avram Belinski and Ford’s Tommy Lillard, has no story arc. They meet, they bicker, they reach San Francisco.

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