The Frisco Kid

In Brief:  Robert Aldrich’s penultimate film (1979) is an easygoing work of some considerable charm that relies far too much on ethnic humor — mostly Jewish, but not entirely — to sit quite as comfortably as it might like. But the main interest in the film is probably Gene Wilder’s performance, which is interesting simply because it’s one of the few times that Wilder played a character that wasn’t essentially Gene Wilder. And, lo and behold, he does a perfectly credible job of being someone else — or at least someone else who isn’t Willy Wonka. (And coming as it did after Wilder’s execrable The World’s Greatest Lover, it seems even more remarkable.) Never a great movie, it’s nonetheless a pleasant one — an old-fashioned entertainment that more than gets by on the unforced (albeit unlikely) chemistry of Wilder and Harrison Ford. And it’s certainly worth catching for Wilder’s performance, as well as for the work of Aldrich, who I don’t think ever made a wholly uninteresting film. This excerpt was taken from a review written by Ken Hanke and published on June 15, 2005.