Rijndri
Load of rubbish!!
Neive Bellamy
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Billy Ollie
Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable
oOoBarracuda
The Frisco Kid was another movie in which Gene Wilder spoke in an accent, more than one, throughout the entire film. The 1979 film directed by Robert Aldrich saw Gene Wilder as a Polish Rabbi and Harrison Ford as a gun slinging bank robber. Wilder's Rabbi was traveling to San Francisco from Poland to become the town's Rabbi. Ford's bank robber was traveling aimlessly from one heist to the next. An unlikely friendship began to form and the two made the trek west in the middle of the 1850 Gold Rush.Avram (Gene Wilder) is a Rabbi who has just completed the schooling necessary to be ordained. Finishing at the bottom of his class, he is condemned to making the trek to America and leave Poland behind. Given little direction and supplies, Avram is beaten and stolen from, but he recovered the Torah he is taking to San Francisco and continues his journey. While trying to catch some fish, an uncouth bank robber Tommy happens upon him and helps him catch some dinner. The two discuss their plans and Tommy, seeing how helpless and naive Avram is, decides to accompany him to California. Of course, Avram has no idea that Tommy breaks the law for a living and is taken aback when he realizes he is now an accessory to a bank heist after "holding the horses" when Tommy runs into the bank. Moving forward Avram rubs off on Tommy, and Tommy cusses less and laughs more. An unlikely friendship forms between the two men as they encounter killers, Native Americans and cocky lawmen in the old west. Getting to Frisco was certainly an adventure in this '79 comedy!Like Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx, Gene Wilder uses an accent through the whole picture, and again, does so very well. Playing a native of Poland, and at times impersonating a western accent while maintaining the Polish accent, Wilder does a great job with his voice in the film. I wanted to love the adventure comedy matching Harrison Ford and Gene Wilder, I just couldn't. The overt Jewish stereotypes were distracting, to say the least. It was fun to see the two play opposite each other, and such opposite characters, but the story was definitely lacking something. Although there were some funny scenes, like the one in which the Torah was delivered to the family Avram was traveling to meet, overall it wasn't a very good comedy and not much of it stays with the viewer upon its completion. I call 75-80 the lost years of Gene Wilder, and this film does little to change my mind about those years. Luckily for fans of Gene WIlder's, 1980 eventually came.
SnoopyStyle
Rabbi Avram Belinski (Gene Wilder) is sent from Poland to lead a congregation in San Francisco. When he arrives in Philadelphia, the naive Avram falls in with three con men who robs him and throws him off the wagon in Pennsylvania. He is hopelessly dependent on the kindness of strangers including a kind hearted robber Tommy Lillard (Harrison Ford) on his long road west.I never even heard of this movie. I am glad that I caught it on TV. Wilder and Ford make an odd couple. That's the point here. Wilder brings a bit of his humor while Ford is Han Solo without Chewbacca. This a funny buddy comedy.The running time of almost 2 hours is too long. It would be better to start the journey with Ford. That way they could build up the chemistry earlier. And they need more jokes. Gene Wilder's mannerism is great, but the movie should be more jam packed with jokes. It's hilarious when Harrison Ford starts yelling at Gene Wilder for not riding on Saturday. They make for a fun duo.
FlushingCaps
I just saw this for the first time (I somehow missed it when it was released) last night. Admiring Gene Wilder (who I most closely associate with Silver Streak and Young Frankenstein, two top comedy favorites), I expected to laugh a lot. I didn't.There were some very funny moments, but this was about 75% drama, with this poor Jewish rabbi having all sorts of serious calamities befall him as he tried to cross the U.S. from Philadelphia to San Francisco in 1850. One early scene has him not just being conned out of $50 trying to help two other men travel west, but as they take him along, they suddenly start beating him up--with a bloodied face of Wilder making this not at all comical--before they take his bags and clothes and throw him off the stage.To make that scene at all funny, you needed no blood and Wilder not being visibly beaten. Maybe a quick scene where the bad guys pull a gun and say, "Now we want the rest of your money" and we suddenly see him sitting on the roadside, in his long underwear, showing the results of their robbery without the unpleasant moments where they rob him.This is the type of thing that seems to dominate this film. Some good comedy, but lots of death-defying serious episodes that take away most of the comedic atmosphere.Other reviewers have gone over the many inaccuracies and illogical portions of this film. They were numerous enough to obstruct my enjoyment--even though I usually overlook things like that in a comedy.Possibly the dumbest scene was where Wilder and Ford have chased away the bad guys (killing one of them) and are now happily swimming and laughing when the remaining bad guys confront them, holding their guns on them. Intent on killing our heroes--for killing the one bad guy's brother--it was idiotic of them to let the good guys get anywhere close to their own guns, just so we could have an extended gunfight. The guns had been left on the beach and the bad guys had the drop on the good guys. The bad guys should have easily been able to grab the guns while the good guys were swimming, or shoot before they could retrieve the guns.Too many poorly-written scenes like this and humor parsed out way too seldom kept me from finding this film worth watching. I think I'll watch Silver Streak again this weekend--it too had some intense drama, but the humor was much more frequent, allowing me to overlook the film's flaws.
MARIO GAUCI
Aldrich's penultimate film is an odd and mildly interesting Western which, given its unlikely alliance between Polish rabbi Gene Wilder and young robber Harrison Ford, actually ties in nicely with the various buddy-buddy Spaghetti Westerns I've been going through this past week or so! Still, the two-hour running-time is too great to sustain its rambling but, ultimately, pointless narrative (Wilder goes through many a misadventure, including being mistaken for Ford's accomplice and then having to depend on him for survival, on his long voyage) and few elements of the typical Western fare are utilized in any significant way (despite trains, banks, shoot-outs, posses, Indians, etc.) - though the landscapes are pleasant enough. Wilder's characteristically energetic performance helps a lot; Ford, however, is both too young and too modern for this type of role (according to Wilder's autobiography, it was originally intended for John Wayne!).
