Strange. I remember Andrew McLaglen's quaint little Fool's Parade as a bit of period pleasantry that made a Saturday evening comfier and warmer sometime in--I think--1975 on NBC.
And here we are, 2021, and I just watched it on YouTube. Either I had aged well (intellectually) or the movie hadn't. It was cheap and predictable with cardboard cutouts for characters, cheesy 1930s mythos, and George Kennedy sporting gangrenous dental-work.
The difficulty I saw was that I never once bought into the story of three Depression-era ex-cons who try to leave town with the money one of them has earned from 40 years of hard labor. It was all so much antique cars and floppy fedoras, and Jimmy Stewart popping a glass eye out of his skull to weird out the locals.
Throw in some bad language to earn a "GP," and you've got a flick that looks as if was shot as a cheapjack TV movie.
Even an excellent cast and a less-than-gory ending can't save Fool's Parade. Skip it.
And here we are, 2021, and I just watched it on YouTube. Either I had aged well (intellectually) or the movie hadn't. It was cheap and predictable with cardboard cutouts for characters, cheesy 1930s mythos, and George Kennedy sporting gangrenous dental-work.
The difficulty I saw was that I never once bought into the story of three Depression-era ex-cons who try to leave town with the money one of them has earned from 40 years of hard labor. It was all so much antique cars and floppy fedoras, and Jimmy Stewart popping a glass eye out of his skull to weird out the locals.
Throw in some bad language to earn a "GP," and you've got a flick that looks as if was shot as a cheapjack TV movie.
Even an excellent cast and a less-than-gory ending can't save Fool's Parade. Skip it.