Born To Win (USA, 1971) 84 min color DIR-SCR: Ivan Passer. PROD: Philip Langner. MUSIC: William S. Fisher. DOP: Richard C. Kratina, Jack Priestley. CAST: George Segal, Karen Black, Paula Prentiss, Hector Elizondo, Robert De Niro. (United Artists)
1971 was “the” year for Hollywood to make cautionary drug films. Jerry Schatzberg’s Panic in Needle Park, and Floyd Mutrux’s Dusty and Sweets McGee are the best of them; the worst is Noel Black’s Jennifer on My Mind. Somewhere in the middle is Born To Win, featuring George Segal in a terrific performance as Jay Jay, a hairdresser with a serious drug problem. His troubles get even worse when he is fingered by some narcs (one of them a young Robert De Niro!) to help nab this one dealer (Hector Elizondo) who is also his constant supplier. Karen Black is cast as the girlfriend who helps him through his dry spells. The first American film of Czech director Ivan Passer (his fellow countryman and former collaborator Milos Forman also made his American debut the same year with Taking Off), Born To Win is infused with a documentary feel, as the shaky camera prowls around the characters’ sleazy environments, waiting for the unexpected to happen. Near the end is a horrifying scene where Jay Jay and his friend score some drugs; the latter samples some, and he dies because it is laced with rat poison, and Jay Jay realizes that was intended for him! Although this has a gritty realism similar to that of Panic in Needle Park, it is a muddled though interesting attempt at an impressionistic character study of desperate lives in a squalid surrounding. Even so, the film isn’t entirely without humour. We never see Jay Jay at work as a hairdresser (only his world on the grubby streets, wheeling and dealing for a fix), however during one drug run to an apartment, he tells his buyer that he could give his wife a good hair-do!
Updated from a review originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #10, (“Summer in the 70s”).
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.