cult film freak: RYAN O'NEAL MAKES 'THE BIG BOUNCE' WITH LEIGH TAYLOR-YOUNG

Leigh Taylor-Young in The BIg Bounce 1969 ***1/2

If there's ever been a movie ruined by a soundtrack, it's THE BIG BOUNCE: a late-sixties balance of sea-purple and rural-gray tones, adapted from Elmore Leonard's noir novel beginning with a white field worker bashing a Spanish migrant's face with a baseball bat, and then, on parole and stuck within the small town, he's both feared and revered...

Depending who's around, and where he's at, and, while still in the film's rushed rudimentary stages, he loses that job with a dishonest rancher who exploits cucumber farm workers. But with the help of a particular friend, he lands a soft job as a handyman at a beach side motel, where so much potential, pitting Ryan O'Neal against a sexy Neo Noir siren, played by his then-wife and former PEYTON PLACE co-star Leigh Taylor-Young, the buried lead here: A seemingly sophisticated femme-fatale, she's bad news and big trouble...

Ryan O'Neal in The Big Bounce

Author Elmore Leonard said all adaptations before GET SHORTY and JACKIE BROWN never got it... But maybe, in critiquing BIG BOUNCE piecemeal, he saw a dark ray of hope in Taylor-Young's Nancy Barker, both effectively sinister and sexy: The aforementioned crappy music, arranged by the usually capable Tony Curb, sounds like The Beach Boys possessed by folk singers drowning-out an otherwise groovy Jack Nitzsche-like surf music score — one particularly godawful track repeats Nancy's name over and over... killing whatever edge her character's supposed to have...

But it's not all that bad: the overall vibe is lean and edgy, and there are terrific moments when Jack and Nancy hang out, night and day, discussing an upcoming heist, and possible murder. But Jack spends too much time with his old-timer friend played by veteran actor Van Heflin... so overly (and quickly) helpful to Jack's plight... he hardly has any obstacles in his way, or rungs to climb, or corners to paint himself out of.

Ryan O'Neal in the pad of Van Heflin in The Big Bounce

It's really all about our femme fatale Taylor-Young being really bad and getting progressively worse (as in, badder and badder): and then, possibly becoming lethal while keeping her ridiculously beautiful poker face intact...

But really, TV director Alex March needed the intentionally flawed heart-of-gold convict ani-hero to take more risky chances, early on, to live up to any manipulative competition. And it wouldn't be the first time Ryan O'Neal would get what was supposedly his first-billed vehicle stolen by a close relative. He probably never got over PAPER MOON belonging solely to daughter and Oscar winner Tatum O'Neal.