California bail bondsman Alex and the modern-day gypsy he gets of jail on $30K bail after she tried to kill her husband are two very volatile people, and that's the trouble: it's one too many. Genevieve Bujold plays the fortune teller who has a long, colorful history with Jack Lemmon, ably-cast as a cigar-smoking, middle-aged burn-out. Screenwriter Lawrence B. Marcus, adapting Stanley Elkin's novella "The Bailbondsman", takes a past-and-present look at their relationship that is not uninteresting. Years before, Alex became enamored of the virginal gypsy girl after rescuing her from her angry family; today, he's exasperated with her unpredictable behavior, lashing out at her for trying to skip town (and handcuffing her to the bedpost while they make love). This character portrait has a couple of strong scenes but suffers overall from the terrible, often offensive dialogue and from John Korty's pushy direction. It takes a real hack to make a nuisance of Lemmon and Bujold, and neither star comes out of this debacle looking good. Henry Mancini's score--plaintive plucks on a Spanish guitar--underlines the 'introspective' moments, hoping (one presumes) to create sentiment out of the pathos. * from ****
