James Caan battles double-crossers and ninja assassins on the streets of San Francisco in Sam Peckinpah's delirious screw-you to his studio bosses, and to linear Hollywood-style editing. Handed a lowbrow script dubiously inspired by the nation's then-topical infatuations with CIA conspiracies and kung-fu movies, Peckinpah set to work deconstructing it to bits, using a convoluted cut-up montage aesthetic worthy of William S. Burroughs. Peckinpah collapses time and space into a series of edited frenzies: a man taking a shower in one room is intercut with a man's head being shot open in another; a brutal assassination attempt in an airport intercut with a roomful of unrelated individuals blandly describing the event hours afterwards. The Bay Area circa 1975 supplies the film's other attractions (besides, that is, Caan's male pathos and the portly Burt Young using judo to battle ninjas): scenes on the now-demolished Embarcadero Freeway, a furious gun battle in San Francisco's Chinatown, and the final showdown at Suisun Bay's otherwordly mothball fleet.
• Written by Marc Norman, Stirling Silliphant, from the novel by Robert Rostand. Photographed by Philip H. Lathrop. With James Caan, Robert Duvall, Bo Hopkins, Mako. (122 mins, Color, 35mm, From Sony Pictures Releasing)