STRAIGHT TIME ***

Ulu Grosbard was one of the great American directors of the seventies and was certainly among the most underrated. He made "Straight Time" in 1978 and it's a terrific movie about crime and criminals though it's not a thriller nor even a heist movie. It's central character, Max Dembo, (a superb Dustin Hoffman), is a career criminal; crime is built into his DNA. When he's released from prison, where he's served 6 years for armed robbery, he at first seems repentant but it isn't long before he has a run-in with his unsympathetic and vindictive parole officer, (M. Emmett Walsh, excellent). From this point on, it's all downhill.

Were this film in French you wouldn't think twice in saying it was a Jean-Pierre Melville picture. Like Melville's work this film deals in criminal mindsets; it's about the minutiae of crime. Dembo and his associates are professional criminals but they are messy and arrogant, more likely to die an early death or spend more time in prison than out of it.

This is a beautifully acted, highly intelligent picture. Others in the cast include Theresa Russell, Harry Dean Stanton and Gary Busey, brilliant as a young would-be gangster not making much of a job of trying to stay on the straight and narrow. Adapted from the novel "No Beast so Fierce" by Edward Bunker, who also appears as another criminal, and beautifully photographed by Owen Roizman it really deserves to be better known.