The Competition

Columbia/Rastar. Director Joel Oliansky; Producer William Sackheim; Screenplay Joel Oliansky; Camera Richard H. Kline; Editor David Blewitt; Music Lalo Schifrin;; Art Director Dale Hennesy

Richard Dreyfuss
Amy Irving
Lee Remick
Sam Wanamaker
Ty Henderson
James B. Sikking

The Competition is a disappointment. Writer-director Joel Oliansky's glibly cynical view of the performing world and his dreary character portraits are matched in clumsiness by his ugly visual style and lack of genuine feeling for music.

The film needed a conductor and composer of background music with a sensitivity to the classical field, but instead it has Lalo Schifrin.

Richard Dreyfuss, an aging piano wunderkind, is reunited at a San Francisco music competition with Amy Irving, a less driven but more gifted young woman he had impressed briefly at an earlier festival. She tries to rekindle their attraction, but Dreyfuss is too absorbed in his music at first to respond.

The film is tedious and predictable, curiously portraying music as a grim and joyless profession for these youngsters.

1980: Nominations: Best Editing, Song ('People Alone')

(Color) Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1980. Running time: 129 MIN.

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