User Reviews

A psychotherapist Dr. Judd Stevens realises his life is being threatened but can't understand the reason. He is not helped by two sceptical cops, Lt. McGreavy and Det. Angeli. Several people are killed before he finds out why. The reason long coming in an overlong film is not really plausible and frankly a bit of a letdown. The film ends in a garbage factory which is unintentionally ironic. It should have been better, particularly with that cast.

Rod Steiger as McGreavy over acts, Elliott Gould as Angeli underacts and Roger Moore as Dr Stevens is rather too subdued. Art Carney and Anne Archer are more effective but don't have much screen time. Michael J. Lewis does provide a tense music score which is more dramatic than the story unfolding.

It is not clear why the movie is called 'The Naked Face' but presumably that was made explicit in Sidney Sheldon's original novel.

The naked face is a remarkable film experience. It's not a good film but I recommend it anyway. It's worth seeing the way you see Dracula for Bela Lugosi a performance so filled with conviction that questions of good and bad become meaningless. Saying that Bela Lugosi is campy and over the top is making the assumption that he was trying for something else and landed where he did by accident. No one else in the film other than Dwight Frye as Renfield can even keep up with him. Frye's performance seems far more calculated but he seems to understand that this film is meant to be spooky and fun and that no one is going to stop him from doing exactly what he chooses. He's like the guy in the summer stock theater whose a little bit better than everyone else and inspires the other actors with admiration and envy. Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye know that you've paid money to see them and they are determined to give you what you paid for. Lugosi/Dracula's victims could be moving or charming, the heroes could be dashing and silly, van helsing might be sage and warm and kind but they're not. The brides are creepy and the servants are ridiculous but the rest the living dead of actors. The crazy energy of Lugosi and Dwight Frye seem to sap the rest of the cast of theirs. The Naked Face is like that. It could have been directed by Tod Browning of Dracula fame. It's outdoors but stagey. The incidents in the film are outrageous and unconvincing but no more so than the everyday details. And every actor in the film walks through it like they're on Quaaludes except one. It isn't Roger Moore whose famous for not bringing much energy to wheat he does on screen. He fits into this film as if it were his home. The 007 films are so busy so full of incident and energy this film is like a fish bowl or a gerbil cage everyone is asleep or wandering aimlessly. It isn't Elliot Gould who also fits into the dullness of this film so well he's like a stripe on a dull pattern of wall paper. Why was he put into a film like MASH or it's hard to think of another film of his with much going for it when this is where he has always belonged. Art Carney, Anne Archer, David Hedison all like fish circling around a fish bowl or blobs in a lava lamp we watch them in a stupor. There is one performance that stands out one Lugosi, one Dwight Frye in a crowd David Manners and Everett Van Sloans. It's no surprise who it is, it's Rod Steiger. I want to be clear his performance is not good. He yells and whispers through the whole film like proto Nicholas Cage. He screams at the other actors, bullies them and worries over the turns in the plot as if they mattered to him personally. At times it seems like he's trying to wake the other actors up, trying to rouse them after they fallen asleep or lost interest. There is a crazy wonderful integrity to his performance that goes beyond questions of good or bad. He knows we're out there watching and he wants to give us something. His performance is a critique of dull bad acting. He seems to be seeing if you're going to be bad, if there is no way to be good than go big, don't go down without a fight, struggle against the awfulness. Laurence Olivier and some other highly skilled actors used to get through films like this by underplaying intentionally and quietly kidding and burlesquing the whole enterprise. Steigers performance critiques their approach and calls them cowards. He keeps laying on the energy cowing the other actors until it is not their characters that appeared embarrassed and intimidated but the actors themselves. Rod Steiger shows a crazed integrity. It's possibly the same integrity that allowed him to give so many fine even great performances. Cut loose from quality, artistry even competence, what else could he do?.

In fact the only reason to view this is for the fact that the cast, most of them, drag this tepid melodrama above water.

Roger Moore, I asked myself, what's he doing in this? It must be for the fact that he had a chance to play a role out of type for him. He does a good turn as the psychiatrist who is over his head in attempts on his life.

Elliot Gould is wonderful as the easygoing detective, until he is shown to be a mob sycophant. Then his portrayal becomes routine and hammy. This is typical for Gould, as he always plays serious and laconic characters well, and "yes-men" poorly. It isn't in his nature.

Art Carney is memorable as the private detective. Anne Archer and David Hedison do good work if pretty standard for each.

However, Rod Steiger is a shame. Where was the director when he needed toning down? He is just too overblown and intense to be believable. The fact is that Rod Steiger is a director's actor, he is able to take direction and create nuances when he is given that direction, and when he is let loose, he is not. Point in case, In the Heat of the Night, a similar character for him, alternating appropriately between outrage and understanding, well-done and well-directed role wins him an Oscar. Or how about his role of the Mexican bandit in Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dynamite? Again, directed well, he turns in a stellar performance.

In this movie, it is embarrassing to see, for he's much better than what results are here. Other than the performances, this is a routine cop-mob-murder mystery.

An Early 80's non Bond outing for Sir Roger Moore, slotted neatly between Octopussy and A View to a Kill.

The first thing that gave me some pause that I may not be about watch a masterpiece of cinema was those four words, that a host of movie audiences dreaded seeing in the 80's - Cannon Films and Golan Globus, two people known for torpedoing their own projects and this nearly became another of those casualties. However, to be fair, this film is far from being Superman IV in how bad it is and I actually found it quite entertaining.

Sir Roger Moore Plays Dr Judd Stevens a widowed psychiatrist with his own private practice. However, his life is turned upside down when one of his patients is murdered in what appears to be a motiveless crime and later that same day, his office is ransacked and his secretary is also brutally killed by person or persons unknown,

Stevens is convinced that he is the actual target, but has no idea why and his supicions are confirmed when several assassination attempts are made against him. Just as concerning is the fact that one of the police officers assigned to the case (Rod Steiger), actually view him as the main suspect in the murders, not surprising given that he holds a grudge against the Psychiatrist for his involvement in the defence at the trial of someone who had killed his old partner. His bias and prejudice against Stevens is so blatant that he ultimately gets thrown of the case and his more sympathetic partner (Elliott Gould), takes over.

Stevens hires a low-end gumshoe (Art Carney), to help him uncover who or what is behind these murders and attempts on his life. Who to his credit and ultimately the loss of his own life, makes more progress getting to the bottom of why Steven's has been targeted in a few short days than the police do.

The film is engaging in many ways, but when the real reason is divulged as to why these events have transpired and he has been targeted, it all seems a little too absurd and the movie somewhat destroys whatever momentum it has managed to build up.

The great thing about this movie is Sir Roger Moore, playing very much against type. The wry comedy he was known to usually inject into his roles is totally absent which is great to see and he plays this role as straight as an arrow. Also, unlike Moore's two most famous characters, Simon Templar and James Bond, Dr Stevens is definitely not a man of action and it is great to see Moore play a character well and truly out of his depth when faced with hit men and having to fight to try and defend himself.

On the flip side, there is some bad things to say. The first and most noticeable is Rod Steiger. Already well known for being a bit of an over-actor even on his good days, he is literally chewing the scenery here and lays it on with a trowel and as a result you get a character that you neither like or have any sympathy for.

Carney's performance is also brilliant, but he is so underused here, that for the amount of time he is actually on screen, the producers could have got a lesser known actor to play such a small part for half the price.

There is also an appearance by Sir Roger's close friend David Hedison, and another close friend Bryan Forbes was hired to write and direct.

All in all, it's an entertaining and engaging movie with a few red herrings smattered about to keep you guessing. However, and I sure I'm not alone on this, I feel that the move should have ended 20 seconds earlier than it did as what happens at the very end, needn't have happened and it left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.

Give it a go. Enjoy!

A kind-hearted psychiatrist lends his raincoat to a patient about to leave the building in bad weather. Only a block away, the patient stops to buy some roses. While waiting for his flowers, he is knifed by an assassin. For the unsuspecting psychiatrist, this means the beginning of a roller-coaster nightmare...

Quite a watchable thriller with a prestigious though unexpected cast. There's a nicely classical motif : an innocent man finds himself in a whole heap of trouble, gets treated like a suspect by the police, and goes looking for the culprit(s) himself.

The role of the unsuspecting psychiatrist, a douce and middle-aged man, is held by none other than Roger Moore. Moore does well enough, although there's something about his essential Britishness that makes it hard to understand why he's listening to the sick and the desperate in the USA. It's rather like watching Queen Liz shop for undies at Rodeo Drive... Anyway, the psychiatrist character does not make entire sense. It is difficult to imagine a seasoned psychiatrist, however douce, decent and law-abiding, getting completely flabbergasted by the idea that some people on this Earth only live for antisocial behaviour or sadistic viciousness.

The violence pictured in the movie is often quite graphic : consider yourself warned...

A Sidney Sheldon novel written fourteen years before this was filmed, this also gave Roger Moore the opportunity to get ahead of typecasting, seeing as how 1985's A View to a Kill would be his last time as James Bond.

Instead of a suave British spy or thief, he played a Chicago psychoanalyst named Dr. Judd Stevens. One of his patients is murdered - while wearing the doctor's overcoat no less - which brings Lieutenant McGreavy (Rod Steiger) and Detective Angeli (Elliott Gould) on the case. There's already some bad blood, as McGreavy blames Stevens and his past testimony for a cop killer being institutionalized rather than being sent to prison.

But after Stevens' secretary is killed and McGreavy gets so intense he gets thrown off the force, well, we have a movie.

Written and directed by Bryan Forbes (The Stepford Wives), this film places Moore into the middle of a murder mystery which is very outside his usual unrumpled all things handled way of acting. He even tries to get help from an old detective, Morgens (Art Carney), who saves him from a car bomb.

In fact, the movie ends with a series of goons nearly beating him to death. He's saved because the mob boss's wife that he's been helping with therapy - Ann Blake (Anne Archer) - called the police herself. And notihng she ever told Stevens had anything to do with the family business. All that death - and more coming soon - for nothing.

This movie was made because Cannon saw that they'd get some cachet by working with Moore - and his Bond fame was still box office - so he was able to get this movie made and hire two of his friends, Forbes and actor David Hedison. Despite the fact that it was running on schedule and under budget, Cannon slashed several weeks from filming and took away a hefty chunk of the budget, which may have gone toward paying back some recent losses at the box office. Golan and Globus also were enraged that Forbes gave Moore a week off to visit his family after the death of his mother.