Goin' South

Fun, but it mugs too hard. Read full review

Picture starts off promisingly enough with Nicholson as a hapless outlaw who makes it across the border but the posse cheats and comes across after him causing his horse to faint. But it never jells, as Nicholson continues to sputter and chomp, acting more like her grandfather than a handsome roue out to overcome her virginity. Read full review

Neither Nicholson nor the talented Miss Steenburgen, in her film debut, could rise above the patched-together script. The promising parody of anti-mythic Westerns, and of mellerdrammers (the railroad wants to snitch Julia's land), decays into a love story whose parameters are all too narrow and all too familiar. [07 Oct 1978]

Nicholson's fatuous leering performance dominates the movie, and because his prankishness also comes out in the casting and directing, the movie hasn't any stabilizing force; there's nothing to balance what he's doing--no one with a strait jacket. An actor-director who prances about the screen manically can easily fool himself into thinking that his film is jumping; Nicholson jumps, all right, but the movie is inert.

Although the premise of Goin' South is clever, the story is unbelievable and, under Nicholson's first grip as a director, is unwieldy and directionless. The tale is presented in disjointed, confusing, poorly set sequences. Nicholson the actor is mildly amusing, as are some of his riotous gang members, DeVito and Belushi (the latter appearing only briefly, irrespective of his high billing). But the whole film deteriorates midway into amateurish mugging and slapstick. Read full review

Jack Nicholson set out to make himself a Treasure of Sierra Madre, but since he is both the director and star of what he came up with no one apparently told him that Goin' South isn't it. [13 Oct 1978, p.22]