Sometimes jazz musicians trade bars. The drummer solos for a bar or two, then back to the tenor man who takes another, back to the drummer, and so on. The listener doesn't really get lost, because it's not a complicated arrangement. And it gives the soloists a chance to take some real chances because his piece is so short that he doesn't have to build anything out of it.
This film is something like that. There's a kind of central theme that we can follow without too much trouble. Garner wakes up nameless and bereft of memory in Central Park, invents a name for himself after seeing a beer truck and an airplane, and wanders around the city running into people who take some kind of interest in him, friendly or hostile, as he goes through flashbacks.
Angela Lansbury gets the first couple of bars as a lead to his identity that turns out to be a dead end. There are a few briefer encounters, including one with Jack Gifford, who is convinced Garner is a Jew who has changed his name and forgotten his original name because he is ashamed of it. (It's a bizarre scene but a very funny one. Anyway, all the scenes have an element of the surreal in them.) If you have to be nearly broke and an amnesiac in a big American city, New York isn't the worst place. The fact that people constantly engage you, kvetching about their mothers-in-law or something, is reassuring. At least when you're arguing with someone or flirting with them you know you're alive. In La-La Land, Home of the Purple Taj Mahal Motels, you can't even make eye contact with strangers. You're not only amnesiac, you're invisible too.
I don't think I'll let New York off the hook so easily though. Almost every city gains in comparison to L.A. In the mid-60s when this film was shot, New York's streets were safe to stumble aimlessly around in. Within a few years you could still easily get attention from others but the nature of the attention had changed.
Come to think of it, this is the second time that James Garner has played an amnesiac, except that in the other case ("36 Hours") he wasn't a real amnesiac and had to be fooled into believing he was one.
The first half hour swung. The rest of it jumped around a lot without really showing us much that's gripping. A good deal of time is spent with Garner and his wife arguing about where they will get the money to provide for the baby that she wants and he does not. The dialog is thin and the scene seems pointless. The final realization comes to Garner at the end of the movie and it seems arbitrary.
Let's call it an interesting experiment. Maybe the novel was better organized.
This film is something like that. There's a kind of central theme that we can follow without too much trouble. Garner wakes up nameless and bereft of memory in Central Park, invents a name for himself after seeing a beer truck and an airplane, and wanders around the city running into people who take some kind of interest in him, friendly or hostile, as he goes through flashbacks.
Angela Lansbury gets the first couple of bars as a lead to his identity that turns out to be a dead end. There are a few briefer encounters, including one with Jack Gifford, who is convinced Garner is a Jew who has changed his name and forgotten his original name because he is ashamed of it. (It's a bizarre scene but a very funny one. Anyway, all the scenes have an element of the surreal in them.) If you have to be nearly broke and an amnesiac in a big American city, New York isn't the worst place. The fact that people constantly engage you, kvetching about their mothers-in-law or something, is reassuring. At least when you're arguing with someone or flirting with them you know you're alive. In La-La Land, Home of the Purple Taj Mahal Motels, you can't even make eye contact with strangers. You're not only amnesiac, you're invisible too.
I don't think I'll let New York off the hook so easily though. Almost every city gains in comparison to L.A. In the mid-60s when this film was shot, New York's streets were safe to stumble aimlessly around in. Within a few years you could still easily get attention from others but the nature of the attention had changed.
Come to think of it, this is the second time that James Garner has played an amnesiac, except that in the other case ("36 Hours") he wasn't a real amnesiac and had to be fooled into believing he was one.
The first half hour swung. The rest of it jumped around a lot without really showing us much that's gripping. A good deal of time is spent with Garner and his wife arguing about where they will get the money to provide for the baby that she wants and he does not. The dialog is thin and the scene seems pointless. The final realization comes to Garner at the end of the movie and it seems arbitrary.
Let's call it an interesting experiment. Maybe the novel was better organized.