Fast-Walking (1982)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

Pretty Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

In the opening shots we see James Woods, with his mad grin and his cackling, driving along a country road and passing a joint back and forth with his black friend, Charles Weldon. When they reach their destination, they step out of the car and Woods dons the jacket, tie, and cap of a prison corrections officer before stepping through the iron door and going to work. A CO smoking DOPE! This is supposed to shock the audience, and maybe it did, someplace up in the hills.The movie is an quirky mixture of comedy and drama. The prison's physical plant itself is in pretty good shape. It's not a hell hole like Sing Sing. The building and grounds are in Deer Lodge, Montana. They may not be the only man-made structure in Deer Lodge, although close to it, but they're certainly the most impressive, and they're not unpleasant, either inside or out.A flourishing narcotics business is going on among the inmates. It's run by Timothy Carey, looking spookily old, but after Carey is thoroughly beaten, Tim McIntire takes over. All the lower-echelon COs appear to know about it but nobody cares enough to make waves.Not that it's all hunky dory. The black inmates don't like the white inmates, and vice versa, another shock. The dramatic Schwerpunkt of the story is the arrival of a black liberation figure, Robert Hooks, whom the higher-ups plan to have accidentally knocked off. Hooks is treated sympathetically and so are his outside compañeros, who have arranged for Hooks' escape. Woods, seeing that the alternative is that Hooks is killed, involves himself in the escape plan as a matter of principle and of fifty thousand dollars.Woods plays his usual wisecracking self. The movie could have been called "Fast Talking." He not only smokes dope, he confiscates and instrumentalizes it from the madam of the local hang out, Susan Tyrell -- my supporting player in the much-neglected gem of an art house miniseries called "Windmills of the Gods." Or maybe it was "Rage of Angels." I've done my best to forget. Woods also runs a couple of hookers at Tyrell's place and gets to hose them down naked in the back yard after their strenuous labors. One of the hookers is Kay Lenz, who gives what I judged to be a magnificent, artistic performance in the nude, and also masturbating in the visitors room, giving head at her first meeting with Woods, and what not.Tim McIntire gave me a bit of a problem. He's supposed to be the head honcho among the inmates -- ruthless, bearded, a trusty with outside influence, narcotics big wig. Yet he has a low voice with every speech sound clearly articulated. He's a juggernaut of evil but sounds like a Vassar graduate. I understand he was an excellent musician too. He died at 41.The comic moments are a nice relief. In one scene, the sergeant in charge of the COs leads Woods into an office where Woods has left a roach on the desk. After chewing Woods out, the sergeant, M. Emmet Walsh, notices the joint, picks it up, and shouts, "What's going on here?" Woods plucks the joint from his fingers, glances at it sternly, and leaps out of the room, saying, "We'll get to the bottom of this."

James Woods plays his familiar time tested smarmy character as a cocky prison guard who is always playing the angles. Unfortunately this time he is being played. "Fast Walking" is a prison movie that revolves around two plots, one to spring a "Black" activist, and another to kill him. When Woods tries playing both ends against the middle, things don't turn out exactly as planned. The acting in "Fast Walking", especially by Woods is totally acceptable. M. Emmet Walsh is kind of wasted as another corrupt guard, while Kay Lenz is featured,constantly getting undressed. The plot is fine but the movie drags in places, and seems overlong at 115 minutes. - MERK

THE RAP, the book this movie was 'based' on was one of the most difficult books I've ever read. Yet I could not put it down. Raunchy, crude, foul, lewd...you name it, it had it. It also had some of the best characterizations of any novel I've ever read.Well, as for the flick...it was deplorable. I mean, Tim Mcintire as Wasco? Wasco was the baddest mutha...talking 'bout WASCO...Mcintire as Wasco is like casting Tim Conway as Charles Manson.What happened to the MAIN character in the book? Little Arv. He doesn't even exist in the movie...Fast Walking WAS NOT the main dude in the book. Why even name credit this thing with THE RAP? None of the spirit, atmosphere, nastiness, or drama of the book was captured in this movie.For me it was not only a disappointment, but a total waste of time and celluloid.

One of the most exquisitely trashy -- and hence best -- seriocomic crime/prison movies to ever ooze onto celluloid. James Woods, that splendidly spacey, spastic, spindly stringbean who's turned sleazily engaging pent-up intensity into something of a modern science, is very much in his usual mondo nutzoid element as Frank "Fast Walking" Miniver, a lazy, dissolute, laid-back, don't-give-a-s**t-about-nothing, weed-toking, on the take Texas jail-house guard who's got his fingers in several filthy pies: he runs dope for cunning, calculating, double-dealing control freak top con Wasco (a magnificently lordly, mesmerizing, darkly charismatic characterization by the late, great Tim McIntire), helps Susan Tyrell run a south-of-the-border brothel, and has been hired by opposing racial factions to either protect or bump off powerful black civil rights leader Robert Hooks.The bang-up supporting cast smokes in no uncertain terms: a sensationally sassy'n'sexy Key Lenz as McIntire's fiery, fetching hot tramp main squeeze, M. Emmet Walsh, who scuzzes it up with his customary rip-snorting aplomb as the crooked chief of security; and a beautifully battered Timothy Carey as a foolishly obdurate elderly felon with exclusive dibs on the behind bars drug trade (McIntire's fabulously flamboyant spiel in which he explains to Carey how he's going to claim a monopoly on all the drug trafficking and bust it wide open by catering to the individual whims of each ethnic group serving time in the pokey is a real gem), plus colorful bits by such reliable thespians as Lance LeGault (as the ramrod captain of the guard who's itching to fire Woods), K. Callan, Sandy Ward (as the ineffectual warden) and the chronically geeky Sydney Lassick. Writer/director James B. Harris never makes a single misstep, tossing in enough seedy subplots, assorted sordid antics, startling plot twists, and smack dead on the money exploitation movie ingredients (wall-to-wall nudity, sex, illicit narcotics of every kind, seething racial tension, profanity-ridden dialog, lowbrow raunchy jokes -- y'know, the whole gnarly'n'nasty nine yards) to keep this delectably decadent doozy constantly entertaining throughout. Moreover, we've got Lalo Schifrin's flavorful jump band blues score, smashingly clear-eyed cinematography by King Baggott, a uniquely twisted sense of black-as-midnight goof-ball humor, and, natch, even a pervasively cynical and nihilistic edifying moral: If you put a whole bunch of ethically lacking scumballs together under one roof they'll get worse instead of better because they can take full advantage of the opportunity to feed off one another's moral baseness like a pack of leeches. Now, how could any fervent, hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool B-movie aficionado possibly pass this baby up? Well, the answer is you just can't, because this first-rate blithely amoral treat is quite simply the authentic funky article.