The Frisco Kid

Director Robert Aldrich has always adroitly mixed comedic and dramatic aspects in his films, and Frisco Kid is no exception. For audiences expecting Mel Brooks belly-laughs amidst the Yiddishisms, however, there’s bound to be disappointment. Read full review

The Frisco Kid has a certain softness at its center. The Wilder character has a sweetness, a niceness, that's interesting for the character but doesn't seem to work with this material. It's really nobody's movie. The screenplay has been around Hollywood for several years, and Aldrich seems to have taken it on as a routine assignment. Read full review

Wilder is best at outrageous moments, teaching an impromptu hora to the Indians or babbling Yiddish to some Amish farmers he mistakes for rabbis. He is, in fact, an actor of moments, less likely to wear him when surrounded by the funny ensembles Brooks used to give him. Aldrich is not Brooks, but he has, in the past, made fine action films in which the male camaraderie was eloquently implicit. Somewhere along the way, he picked up a sledgehammer. [16 July 1979, p.93]

There's no shortage of talent in The Frisco Kid, but it's the wrong talent for the wrong material. Read full review

The Frisco Kid, billed as a comedy, is about a gentle Polish rabbi of 1850 who is instructed to cross America and become spiritual leader of an eagerly awaiting congregation in San Francisco. But the movie is propelled more by violence - in action, in dialogue and in editing - than by humor. No wonder there are so few good kosher westerns. [24 July 1979]

The finished film obliterates whatever promise of novelty and human interested existed in the basic idea of Belinski's culture shock. If the rabbi's odyssey was embryonically appealing, the filmmakers have nurtured it along pact from an elephant trying to hatch a robbin's egg. [27 July 1979, p.B1]