Most underrated movie...ST. JACK
Most underrated movie of all time
Ben Gazzara is awesome
I 100% agree , this seems to be a forgotten gem
shareYes, I'm in agreement also. I saw this film on TV last night and enjoyed it thoroughly. Ben Gazzara gives a wonderfully understated performance as Jack Flowers, and Denholm Elliot was amazing (as usual) as William Leigh. Excellent supporting cast too. If you get a chance to see it don't miss it!!
shareThis movie is as good as all of you have said. Although it is at bottom a movie about Jack Flowers and what kind of man he is, the broader theme of the picture is the declining of British imperial domination in southeast Asia and what has been called the passing of the torch to the United States. There is a telling moment early in the film, where Leigh and Flowers are in the back of a Singapore taxicab on Leigh's first trip there from Hong Kong, the last holdout of the British Empire in Asia (unless you count the decadent old English barflies). Leigh is coughing, obviously not a healthy man, and throws his cigarette out the window of the cab. Flowers tells him the Singaporean government has huge fines for littering. Then he chucks his cigar out the other window, signalling the common bond between these very different men.
Sex tourism is really just the ink on this canvas. It's taken for granted that men come in from all over and enter a different moral universe. Leigh is the major exception. Flowers's big break comes when a war profiteer (Bogdanovich's character) hires him to orchestrate a brothel for American soldiers in the Vietnam War. When the war ends and the business dries up, Flowers's next big chance is to participate in the humiliation of a secretly homosexual U.S. Senator (George Lazenby) whose politics have run afoul of the military-industrial complex. The real intrigue is how much of Flowers's metier is machismo and tenacity, and how much of it is real courage.