ICE-Vision: Fingers (James Toback, 1978)
Thursday, March 29 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“Harvey Keitel plays an aspiring concert pianist who is also a strong-arm guy for his loan shark father. It’s the film that introduced the world to the harsh yet playful sensibility of its director, James Toback, and to the capacity and willingness of Harvey Keitel to embody the darkest of psychological and spiritual conditions. Toback is a filmmaker interested in the clash between lofty aspiration and animal impulse, and Keitel plays a man pulled from both directions and coming apart at the seams.” -San Francisco Chronicle
“James Toback’s Fingers is the best film by any American director since Badlands. Even that is inadequate praise, for whereas Terry Malick’s debut was an inventive ballad about innocent energy run amok, Fingers is ingrowing and wounding…The outward signs of a New York crime movie are only its vehicle—like the body that houses the shivers of a dream. Fingers is that genuine oddity, an American feature movie that treats plot as merely the imprint for compulsive passions of terrible but dramatic force.” -David Thomson