The Big Fix (1978)

Summary is a small point but typical of this poorly thought out script/story. *When Wine knocks on Eppis's door he's shown in because he's mistaken for a soccer coach who's there to instruct Eppis' young son. Sometime later, the world's worst hit men show up, but Eppis' kid is still there. What happened to the soccer coach?World's worst hit men? It's daylight in an upscale California suburb but without any inquiry the two "pro" killers start machine gunning......the outside of the house with no one in sight!Speaking of Eppis, he's being sought for serious crimes committed during *the sixties but is a flamboyant and successful ad man or publicist, hardly a good cover for someone of his notoriety. Oh yes, Eppis is seen, multiple times, in news footage of perhaps no longer than ten years previously. Then he looked a bit like Geraldo Rivera. Well, since in 1974 (the time of the movie, which one character sets by saying, 'I haven't seen so-and-so in six years,since back in '68', Eppis is played by Murray Abraham, he not only must have had plastic surgery, but cranial surgery as well; he doesn't remotely resemble his earlier (and shown) self.We also have Sam, the campaign manager, very public, very visible, Procari, Jr.(John Lithgow), the son of the wicked, super wealthy, super right wing, Procari, Sr. (Fritz Weaver), who a few years earlier had bankrolled a radical group who apparently committed crimes of such enormity that two their members are in prison for life, no parole. Well, doesn't someone, anyone, recognize the long missing (suposedly) Sam, Procari, Jr.? And speaking of being sent to prison for life, how does Eppis, shown in Federal custody in the sixties and found guilty at the same time as the others, escape being sent to prison? This is never dealt with nor explained.Wine's two young children are given dialog that no child this side of Hollywood would ever think of saying and the scenes with them and Wine make one reach for one's pistol.Finally, though there's so much more false and bad in the movie to be mentioned, the main evil second banana, Pak Chung (?), is shown operating an extremely sophisticated remote electronic guidance system that allows him to drive, at a great distance, a van loaded with explosives. When confronted by Wine, known to Chung as a private detective whose once- again girlfriend his group has beaten to death.....confronted with an obviously angered Wine, with a gun drawn, this clever rascal MAKES A CLUMSY MOVE TO ATTACK AND IS SHOT TO DEATH!. What a truly poorly written, ugly movie.

****SOME SPOILERS*****Sharp and feisty movie about ex-1960's radical who's having a hard time making child support payments for his two kids. while trying to support himself as a small time private investigator in LA. Moses Wine, Richard Dreyfuss, at home one night watching a football game that he bet on is contacted by an old flame back from his radical days in collage Lila, Susan Anspach. Lila wants Moses to work for a candidate for governor of California, Milles Hawthorne. Moses goes along with Lila to the Hawthorne campaign headquarters even though Moses is apposed to his policies as well as having a low opinion of Hawthorne's intellect. "This is a guy who thinks that Captain Kangaroo is too controversial" Moses tells Lila about the person she want's to get elected.Told by Hawthorne's campaign manager Sam Sebastian, John Lithgow, that there's a flayer being distributed around the state with a doctored photo of Hawthorne and radical Howard Eppis, who's on the lamb from the police since he was convicted for inciting violence against the government. The phony flayer is telling everyone that Eppis is supporting Hawthorne for governor, which is not true, which will destroy Howthorne's chances for being elected and Sabastian want's Moses, a private eye, to find out who's disturbing it. Moses and Lila go underground in the radical movement to find out who's behind these flayers and this whole Eppis mania. One night Moses goes over to Lila's home for a quite and uneventful dinner dinner and finds her murdered. Moses after overcoming the shock and grief of Lila's tragic death now has a more personal interest in the Hawthorne/Eppis case since he feels that Lila's murder was because of it. Going on his own Moses starts to make inroads in his search for the elusive Howard Eppis and runs into people who in the past were supporters of Eppis who would now want to break Howard Eppis's neck. A group of radical Mexicans farm workers who's leader Louis Vasqaz, who had mysteriously vanished, felt that Eppis is a phony and an opportunist There's also the very wealthy industrialist Oscar Procari Sr. Fritz Weaver who holds Eppis responsible for his son's conviction for attempting to overthrow the government and flight from the law. This is due his involvement with Eppis in what was called the trial of the California Four.Later Moses is picked up by the FBI and grilled by them about what he knows about Howard Eppis. It seems that everyone in the state of California wants to know where is Howard Eppis? It comes out later that someone that Moses came in contact with in the movie came up with an hair-brain scheme to blow up a section of the California freeway and blame in on Howard Eppis. This insane plan at the same time will destroy the Hawthorne campaign for governor by making it look like that Eppis was supporting him but who is it? and why was Lila murdered? did she stumble across something that if made public would blow the whole hair-brain scheme?Richard Dreyfuss was never better then he was in "The Big Fix" With a wonderful supporting cast that carried the story from it's delightful and funny beginning to it's tense and griping final conclusion. And speaking of casts it was hilarious how Moses who was wearing a cast on his right hand, during the entire movie, came up with different reasons when anyone asked him how he broke his hand according to what their political or moral positions were.

This is the best movie Richard Dreyfus has been in. Corruption and dirty tricks in a senatorial campaign directed by John Lithgow, an Abbie Hoffman character played by F. Murray Abraham, not a little comedy and a heaping of social commentary a la 60's style make this a highly recommended movie. I hope it comes out on DVD soon.

When it was released in 1978, there was already a distance built into The Big Fix, based on a detective novel set in the ashes of the counterculture. The story had been commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine from Roger L. Simon, who wrote the script. On its release, the film was already drawing on images of the late 60s that had ceased to be memories but had already entered a misty mythology. Richard Dreyfuss, fresh from the Spielberg hits (Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind) that had made him a star. not to mention his Academy Award for The Goodbye Girl), plays Moses Wine, aonetime rebel who has fallen on hardtimes. His wife, Bonnie Bedelia, has divorced him (though he dotes --rather tiresomely -- on his two sons), and he earns his keep as aprivate investigator when not smoking up and playing solitaire Clue in his -- there's no other word -- "pad." Operatives of a political campaign sign him on to find out who is waging a dirty-tricks campaign to link their candidate to a legendary radical, now disappeared deep into the underground. The story has some interesting twists, particularly those involving Susan Anspach, John Lithgow and F. Murray Abraham, but the plot tends to disappear into holes here and there, as though told in a marijuana haze. Viewed in the new millennium, The Big Fix unfolds behind two scrims of nostalgia: The one in the story itself, where 60s has-beens, unhappy with how the world has turned, yearn for barricades and love-ins; and the one revealed by the talents who made the movie, where that yearning for the heady days of the counterculture -- Berkeley! Vietnam! Hash brownies! -- has developed its own, peculiarly fusty period flavor.