Barry Snider Movies

It's 1958, and the producers of the quiz show 21 have a problem. Their current champ, Herbert Stempel (John Turturro), has a phenomenal memory and a broad range of knowledge. He's also a pudgy loudmouth with a grating personality, so Herbert is encouraged to "take a dive" and allow Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes), a handsome and charming college professor, to become the show's new champion. Audiences like Van Doren, and he's certainly not averse to the money he's winning, but the ethics of the situation begin to trouble him, especially when the show's producers begin to give him the questions in advance. Director Robert Redford and writer Paul Attanasio paint a telling portrait of how the network heads and advertising men who manipulated the quiz shows were also able to manipulate the responsibility for the scandal away from themselves. While on the surface a story about the scandal itself, Quiz Show is just as importantly about a turning point in the 1950s when TV and advertising began to change American character and culture. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

A double homicide yields two likely suspects: Melanie Cullen (Shirley Knight), widow of the male victim, and Douglas Phillips (David Lansbury), the obsessive ex-boyfriend of the female victim. The key to the case ultimately rests in the hands of Melanie's son, James (Geoffrey Nauffts). Jerry Orbach, who would later join the series' regular cast as detective Lennie Briscoe, is here seen in the adversarial role of the Cullens' defense attorney, Frank Lehrman. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Larry Cohen wrote the screenplay to this updating of Mickey Spillane's notorious 1947 novel. Cohen was originally engaged to direct the film as well but was pulled from the director's chair after a week's worth of shooting because he had already run up the budget by $100,000; he was replaced by television director Richard T. Heffron. In this 1982 I, the Jury, Mike Hammer (Armand Assante) is a Vietnam veteran who wears hip duds and drives around in a bronze Trans Am in much the same way as Robert Mitchum's Philip Marlowe was refurbished for Michael Winner's re-make of The Big Sleep. After a cheesy rip-off of a James Bond-style credit sequence, the story kicks in. One-armed detective Jack Williams (Frederick Downs) is murdered. Jack was Hammer's best friend, and Hammer decides that he will become a one-man vigilante squad and seek vengeance on the person responsible for his death. He enlists the aid of his vivacious secretary Velda (Laurene Landon) and is also helped and hindered by police-chief Pat Chambers (Paul Sorvino). Hammer latches on to the killer's trail, then the film veers in a radically different direction from the book, introducing government conspiracies and mind-control techniques by the CIA and the Mafia. Also introduced is Hammer's love interest Charlotte Bennett (Barbara Carrera), an administrator of a kinky sex clinic (depicted as a psychiatrist in the original novel). ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

The first part of his "paranoia trilogy," Alan J. Pakula's 1971 thriller details the troubled life of a Manhattan prostitute stalked by one of her tricks. Investigating the disappearance of his friend Tom Gruneman (Robert Milli), rural Pennsylvania private eye John Klute (Donald Sutherland) follows a lead provided by Gruneman's associate Peter Cable (Charles Cioffi) to seek out a call girl who Gruneman knew in New York City. The call girl is Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda), an aspiring actress who turns tricks for the cash and to be free of emotional bondage. Klute follows Bree's every move, observing the city's decadence and her isolation, eventually contacting her about Gruneman. Bree claims not to know Gruneman, but she does reveal that she has received threats from a john. As Bree becomes involved in Klute's search and realizes that she is in danger, she reluctantly falls in love with Klute, despite her wish to remain unattached to any man. When she finally comes face to face with the killer, however, she is forced to reconsider her detached urban life. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi