Film Comment
"Torn was born to play this part....One of the great ragged road movies of the Seventies..." 01/01/2008 p.76Entertainment Weekly
"[A] corrosive, uproarious 1973 film....PAYDAY both loves its subject and never lets its antihero off the hook." -- Grade: A 01/25/2008 p.59 New York Times
"[I]t does feature a definitive wild-man performance from the young Mr. Torn..." 01/15/2008 Sight and Sound
"[A]n obscure item that must be one of the most merciless showbiz portraits on celluloid..." 05/01/2008 p.97 Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
It's interesting that "Payday" comes along on the heels of Robert Altman's "Nashville," because Maury Dann could have wandered through "Nashville" and fit right in: He's cut from the same cloth as the singers in that movie, but he's a little more desperate...The movie's structure qualifies it as a fairly traditional road picture; we get the series of little towns and sunsets and traffic signs and motels and fast food joints that look about the same in Alabama as anywhere. But the stops along the way are a lot more perceptive than they usually are in road movies, and in particular there's an encounter with a disk jockey that develops genuine corruption...There's a murder -- quick, accidental, almost a surprise -- and Maury gets his driver to take the rap for him. It'll be self defense anyway, but Maury has to make the Birmingham concert. And then his life starts closing in on him. His problems refuse to stay buried; his desperation turns into rage; he has come to the end of the line and he can't fix things anymore -- "Not this time," his manager says, when he tries to get rid of a cop. The movie's ending provides not so much a tragedy as a deliverance for Maury, and "Payday" is very good at making us see why. - Roger Ebert
| 
