Pun Salad

Here's a pretty good trivia question: what actor won two Oscars for the same role in his first movie appearance, then didn't make another film for 34 years? The answer is this guy, and this is his second movie.

It's also one of the movies I watched in bits and pieces when we briefly subscribed to HBO back in the early 80's. It only recently was released on DVD, and thought I'd give it a try.

It's the story of Roary, played by John Savage, a morose loner who attempts suicide by jumping out of the tenth story of a building. He survives, but is permanently crippled. On his release from the hospital, he happens to enter "Max's Bar", a watering hole for various people with nowhere better to go. Roary's mental state is not much better than his physical state, but (as it turns out) the bar is a haven for other folks with various similar predicaments. Most notable is bartender Jerry, who has a messed-up knee, and a trainwreck of a girlfriend, but still manages to play a mean game of basketball.

The movie can get (in retrospect) kind of corny and sentimental in spots, but it's still a decent yarn, and much more fun than you might suspect from my description above. It was directed by Richard Donner, in between Superman and the Lethal Weapon movies.

I found myself asking: whatever happened to John Savage? He was in The Deer Hunter, for goodness' sake. His IMDB page reveals that he's been working steadily since, in well over a hundred movies since then. I think I've seen a grand total of one, Godfather III.