Eureka

(UK)

JF Prods/Recorded Picture. Director Nicolas Roeg; Producer Jeremy Thomas; Screenplay Paul Mayersberg; Camera Alex Thomson; Editor Tony Lawson; Music Stanley Myers; Art Director Michael Seymour

Gene Hackman
Theresa Russell
Rutger Hauer
Jane Lapotaire
Ed Lauter
Mickey Rourke

Even by his own standards, Nicolas Roeg's Eureka is an indulgent melodrama [based on a book by Marshall Houts] about the anticlimactic life of a greedy gold prospector after he has struck it rich.

Gene Hackman performs with predictable credit as the man whose jackpot fortune only leaves him bored, surly and suspicious of being ripped off, by one and all, family included.

Theresa Russell is the girl-woman daughter who rebelliously marries a putative gigolo (Rutger Hauer) whom paranoid papa psychs as a fortune hunter. Mother Jane Lapotaire, meanwhile, driven to the sauce by an uncaring husband, drifts through life in the tropics with sulky sarcasm.

Violent menace permeates pic, radiated by Joe Pesci as a Yiddish-speaking 'entrepreneur' who, foiled in his bid to buy a piece of Hackman's island in order to establish a casino, finally sends the hoods after Hackman, leading up to a gruesome pre-finale.

(Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1983. Running time: 129 MIN.

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