Harold, a professional gambler, and his girlfriend Bonita, a lounge singer, follow Willie, a young blackjack dealer, around the western U.S. Harold has a jinx on Willie and can't lose with him. Bonita and Willie meet and fall for each other and plot to do away with Harold and collect on his life insurance.
Blackjack, Un giocatore troppo fortunato, Verhext, Наврочили, Сглазили!, Баксуз, La Flambeuse de Las Vegas, Jogando Com a Vida, 징크스트!, Rahan ja rakkauden pelit, Mord i leken
USAR
USA
A sadistic gambler (Rip Torn) and his long suffering lounge singing girlfriend (Bette Midler) follow a cursed blackjack dealer (Ken Wahl) from casino to casino, drawing out the big score. In an effort to break his losing cycle, the dealer attempts to romance his nemesis’ better half – only to get in over his head.
Having zero chemistry makes the Midler & Wahl “trailer park harlequin romance” all the more ambiguous – which plays to the neo-noir’s aspects of our crooning femme fatale. The pitch black humour also feels right at home with Midler’s DeVito flicks – which are my jam. Don Siegel’s final film is by all accounts a troubled production, with little to indicate just how many people suffered to make it. To put it in perspective, Rip Torn was the least volatile element involved – and that’s amazing.
Bette Midler stars in a far less than mid movie.
Like, no one in this has chemistry; the humor (if any) falls flat — and there’s musical numbers, you know, fer reasons?
Every character in this should be taken out to the Las Vegas desert — and left out and starved to death.
I guess this is supposed to be a comedic take on ‘Double Indemnity’?
Just watch that, instead . . .
[Watched on Tubi.]
1982 In Review - October
#10
Bette Midler is on a roll through Reno, Vegas, and Tahoe with Rip Torn as her semi-professional gambler husband, and Ken Wahl as a seductive blackjack dealer.
Bette Midler and Rip Torn in this strange film about a gambler who always wins his bets against the same Blackjack dealer in Vegas. So much so that he starts to think he is jinxed. Bette Midler plays the girlfriend of the gambler and Ken Wahl plays the jinxed dealer. The plot goes in some strange directions and I can understand why this bombed and hasn’t been seen since. But the film does have some charm, although not with Ken ‘anti-charisma’ Wahl.
It’s a failed dark comedy but at least it tries to be a little different.
I have a pretty huge library of physical media — books, vinyl records, and movies. Whatever reservations I had about owning a bunch of stuff has pretty much gone out the window given how much my kids, currently ages 4 and 7, enjoy finding records and listening to them, or reading graphic novels, or popping a disc in the player. (For a while my older daughter was watching Marilyn Monroe Blu-rays constantly.)
So when my older daughter wanted to order something for herself from a DVD/Blu-ray catalog, I said "Of course," and she chose Jinxed!. I had no idea when we put it on last night for family movie night that it was Don Siegel's last movie, or really anything…
35/100
Not that it really matters, what with Muggin' Midler and Wooden Wahl having already created terminal anti-chemistry, but this movie has perhaps the most utterly nonsensical third act I've ever seen. It's not even clear to me whether we're meant to understand that Rip Torn's gambler, having lost his big wager, decides to commit suicide and spends the next [however long it would take, a good fuckin' while] devising a pointlessly elaborate scavenger hunt for the girlfriend he's been abusing, or, alternatively, that he'd previously devised the pointlessly elaborate scavenger hunt just in case of his sudden demise. Did I mention that it's pointlessly elaborate, sending her to five far-flung locations for no good reason whatsoever (even when you graciously factor in his enjoyment of Jumble)? Not Siegel's finest hour, which makes it especially sad that it turned out to be his final hour and 43 minutes.
Demented and flirting with the unknown, which were never descriptors I would use to describe any other Siegel film I've seen. If it wasn't his last film, maybe it'd be easier to completely write off as clunky, aimless, and borderline incomprehensible in its final 40 or so. For the first 40 minutes, however, this movie is about Rip Torn's demonic gambler exploiting a jinx put on Ken Wahl's hapless dealer and getting him fired from more than one job for letting too much money get won. Before Bette Midler's showroom singer becomes the central character, there's an interesting tension in the premise of a decent, ambitious man being tied cosmically to a man who can take everything from him and…
What a tremendously stupid movie. One can't deny Bette Midler's talent, but I had always wondered how she rose up from being a beloved singer of torch songs, to dramatic performer in "The Rose," to suddenly being hailed as a naturally gifted comedian. I suppose she is very funny onstage in concerts, and really flexed a wild persona back in the day, but after starring in this cinematic disaster, it's amazing that she would ever be given the chance to star in hits like "Down & Out in Beverly Hills" or "Ruthless People." Granted, the failures of JINXED are not her fault, but I'm sure she walked away with a bit of a stank on her. The only reason I was…
Birth Year Challenge (21/36)
Rip Torn is a gambler, and he finds a blackjack dealer who he always wins against because of gambling’s supernatural qualities. To break this “jinx”, the blackjack dealer seduces Torn’s girlfriend Bette Midler, and she ropes him into a murder plot. Somehow it ends with Midler on a bizarre, extended scavenger hunt. It’s a strange movie, and it doesn’t quite nail whatever the fuck it is it’s trying to do, but it does still feel like a Don Siegel movie more than I expected, and I had a good time with it. Plus, Bette has a nice relationship with her cat!
É apenas coincidência, mas aparentemente estou numa fase “grandes diretores parceirinhos às voltas com estrelas de grande ego”, o mote da vez é Don Siegel encontra Sam Peckinpah. Tudo começou por conta de uns problemas cardíacos sofridos por Siegel durante as filmagens de Jinxed! e, apesar de uma comédia de humor negro ter pouco a ver com as escolhas profissionais de Peckinpah, estava lá Bloody Sam para dar uma mão ao amigo e mentor, assumindo teoricamente como diretor de segunda unidade, mas indo um pouco além de tal responsabilidade. Na verdade a parceria dos dois começou lá nos anos 50, quando Peckinpah começou a aprender tudo que deveria com Siegel, mas dividindo a direção, esta é a primeira, última e…
Don, what a sizzlin' turd to go out on, for shame. Not even belligerent Rip Torn can save this pile from disaster.
Not to be a totally crude, superficial a-hole, but one of the reasons Double Indemnity makes sense is that Barbara Stanwyck has enough sex appeal to drive Fred MacMurray to murder (and the money helps incentivize things). Bette Midler, umm, does not possess that quality.
The inimitable master thespian Ken Wahl plays the awesomely named Willie Brodax, but even if you're a balls-to-the-Wahl Ken-Head I cannot recommend this one. This is not required viewing to graduate from Wahl-dorf school.
Apparently even Peckinpah had a hand in re-shoots here, or something. Pretty fuckin' sad to imagine these two legendary masters wasting their energy on this pathetic Midler flick.
I'd love to say this one was "Mid-ling," but it isn’t even that good, so the bad pun doesn't apply.
Honestly hard to watch at points, the constant threat of violence or sexual violence played for laughs, terrible characters...really nothing good about this except some shots of Vegas I guess. Even the music parts suck. Bette why did you do this?
I wasn't even going to write a review for this one but today I found someone's VHS tape that they had labeled "Big Business (Bed Midler)" and I know that's a Bette Midler movie did this person think her name was Bed??? Or like is this a weird compliment?? OR a diss?!? Did this VHS belong to Ken Wahl?!?
Edited to add: i did not rewatch this i just don't 100% understand the mechanics of Letterboxd and how to review something separately from initially rating it in a way that doesn't make it think you are logging it as watched again.
Bad in the way that only an airless swan song from a revered old-dog filmmaker can be, which is to say, a lethal comedy gauzily lensed by an exiting-his-prime Vilmos Zsigmond. Literally lethal, by the way, considering that Siegel’s ticker gave out during production and he keeled over. Jinxed, indeed. This whole movie just bummed me out. Thought a lot about Trump’s phrase “washed-up psycho Bette Midler” while watching.
Always interesting to me how eras overlap. Out west beyond this tacky vision of early’s 80s Reno, of broken dreams and cigarette butts, is a young Red Hot Chili Peppers playing their first shows. How is this possible? This movie feels ancient. RHCP are almost at the point now the Stones were at with A Bigger Bang in 2005. Geezers still rule mainstream rock, it’s crazy. I don’t even know what my point is.
