Breezy

Released the same year as Eastwood's High Plains Drifter which earns a joking reference late in this film it is hard to believe that this soft-core romance is by the same director, less because it presents such a familiar older-male-with-younger-woman fantasy as because it's so awfully made.

William Holden plays a crusty divorced real estate agent who lives in a smart (seemingly too smart for a small real estate agent that he is supposed to be) house in the Hollywood Hills. Into his life come freewheelin' young hippie Breezy (Kay Lenz) and incredible as it may seem, before you can say "Electra Complex" they're between the sheets. The main premise of the film lies in the contrast between young and old generations, both personally and socially.

Eastwood, who has a long-standing interest in the dilemmas of growing old does quite well in the latter department with a typically dependable performance by Willam Holden. The director has however an almost bizarre lack of knowledge of being young. The hippie side of things is tackily ersatz with some terrible casting, not least of which is Lenz, bootilicious but unrelentingly annoying as a flower-child, in her first and effectively last, starring role. The score by Michel Legrand is equally tacky. The screenplay by Jo Heims is hackneyed and, directorially, Eastwood manages to match it blow for blow.

 

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