Robert Trebor has a good monologue in a bar when he's breaking down, and much of the appeal Clarence Williams III's Bobby Shy is seeing what a psycho coke-sniffing hitman might be like if he resembled Dr. Alan, the porno-theater operating mastermind of the crime, is really brought to sleazy, unbearably sleazy, super sleazy life by John Glover. But in terms of the film, the only real appeal is in the performances by some of the cast. The gift for dialogue stays - there are some good exchanges, and the plot is just good enough to not get frustrated with. Sometimes, the plot's pretty decent, but '52 Pick-Up' isn't an example of one of his better plots. One of the main appeals of Elmore Leonard's work is that he's got a way with atmosphere and dialogue, and his books are easy reads that rarely bog down. It's a crime story, and a pretty basic one: blackmail with an unwilling, uncooperative target. Even if you weren't familiar with the story going in (a problem with having literally just read the book like a week before watching the movie), the story is pretty paint-by-numbers. Since this is a movie review blog, lets dig into the movie first.

So the trio up the ante, Harry starts playing mind games, and a blood-bath ensues. Problem is, Harry's kind of a hard-ass, and doesn't want to pay them anything. A trio of enterprising criminals, Alan (John Glover), Leo (Robert Trebor), and Bobby Shy (Clarence Williams III) are in cahoots with Cini, and they blackmail Harry for a tidy sum. The story: Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider) gets caught playing around on his wife, Barbara (Ann-Margret), with a much younger woman named Cini (Kelly Preston). And Leonard actually co-wrote the screenplay, which gave me a little hope. I mean, I'll read Elmore Leonard novels like I snack - pretty much all the time. The reason that it was a coincidence is that I was in the middle of reading the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name at that time, and figured it would be a rare opportunity to compare the source material with the Hollywood version of the same story in a short span of time, which was not what I was expecting when I grabbed the book off the top of my ever-growing to-read pile. Purely by coincidence, I noticed that '52 Pick-Up' was playing on one of the deep cable movie channels, and decided to record it.

52 pick up book