Out of print for more than 30 years, now available for the first time as an eBook, this is the controversial story of John Wooden's first 25 years and first 8 NCAA Championships as UCLA Head Basketball Coach. This is the only book that gives a true picture of the character of John Wooden and the influence of his assistant, Jerry Norman, whose contributions Wooden  ignored and tried to bury.

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Click the book to read the first chapter and for ordering information. Also available on Kindle.

The Old Man and the Gun (3/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 90 minutes.

PG-13

Robert Redford has been in some of the more memorable Hollywood movies, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Sting (1973), and All the President’s Men (1976), for instance, although I think his best movie and best performance was in Downhill Racer (1970). So he chooses this plodder as his swan song?

I can see why Redford might want to choose a movie like this for his last performance, though. There are three advantages.

First, there is no acting required. All he has to do is read his lines like Robert Redford and smile a lot.

Second, since he’s sitting down much of the time he doesn’t even have to worry about hitting his marks.

Third, he no longer needs to be shot through the Doris Day filter. The point of the film is that he’s an old geezer and his face needs to look worn and lined, which it is.

There are two agonies for the audience in sitting through a snorer like this. The first is enduring the ordeal. It’s extraordinarily painful to be entrapped in a darkened theater when what’s on the screen is so woefully un-entrancing, unless you get off on looking at Robert Redford, which I guess lots of people do; he is an extraordinarily attractive-looking person. The second is that one expends so much energy trying to stay awake and will the time to pass that one emerges almost completely drained.

The movie says at the outset that it’s “mostly true.” While that might be a pseudo-smart comment, it leaves one pretty much knowing that what one is watching cannot be taken to the bank, so to speak.

It’s based on the life of Forest Tucker (Redford), who spent his life breaking the law by robbing banks and being sentenced to jail innumerable times and escaping an astonishing 18 times. Inspired by a story by David Gann published in The New Yorker in 2003, it shows Tucker as a likeable old coot who just likes to rob banks. But, let’s face it, this guy was a hardened criminal from the time he became a teenager. That’s something to admire, just because he’s charming? I’m sure Lucky Luciano could be charming when he wanted to be, too. Along the way (in the movie, anyway), he comes across a woman, Jewel (Sissy Spacek), and they strike some kind of attraction.

Thrown into the story is a detective, John Hunt (Casey Affleck), whose appearance is a puzzlement because he has nothing to do with capturing Hunter. I guess they wanted to get another Oscar®-winning actor into the mix. But Hunt adds as little to the film as Spacek. All Redford does is act charming. Spacek smiles a lot and Affleck, well, I’m still trying to figure out what he does.

Redford stumbles his way with Jewel as he coyly intimates what he does isn’t nice, but doesn’t tell her exactly what it is, a liar to the end.

Written and directed by David Lowery, It drags and drags and drags as Tucker keeps showing up as a nice old guy who just happens to like to commit felonious bank heists.

Most of Lowery’s credits consist of “shorts.” Here he took what should have been a short and dragged it out for 90 minutes, which seemed a lot longer.