The “savage” reviews that broke Burt Reynolds: “I started to wonder what these guys were after”
One of the worst things an actor can do is read reviews of their movies, especially if they know the film is going to take a beating. Burt Reynolds made more terrible pictures than most A-listers, but he couldn’t stop himself from seeing what the critics had to say, and it almost broke him.
Was it really that bad? Yes. Did Reynolds know it sucked? Yes. Did he try to defend it? Not in the slightest. And yet, it was the straw that broke the moustachioed camel’s back. Reynolds’ filmography was no stranger to being dragged through the mud, but for whatever reason, there was a breaking point.
Admittedly, it seems unusual for a guy who told the world he hadn’t made a single half-decent flick until Deliverance, which came 11 years and 11 credits into his big-screen career, to complain about being unfairly singled out for critical scorn when he was the first person to shit on his own work.
Honesty should be commended in most cases, but the fact that Reynolds publicly denigrated so many of his films, even a few of the good ones, hinted that his inability to choose strong material was the biggest issue and not some personal bias that reviewers held against him because he was a household name.
The case in point was At Long Last Love, an ill-judged detour into musical territory that saw Reynolds sticking to type to a certain extent by playing a womanising playboy, albeit in a song-and-dance story set in 1930s New York with Peter Bogdanovich at the helm, only for the movie to be so widely drubbed that the director apologised for it in newspaper adverts.
What did Reynolds have to say for himself? He held his hands up, confessed that agreeing to headline At Long Last Love was “a terrible, terrible mistake,” and that the paltry earnings let him know that his audience never wanted to see him anywhere near a musical ever again, which was fair enough.
He was allowed to trash the film, but not the critics. In fact, after the absolute pounding it took, Reynolds didn’t speak to the press for another six months. When he did, he revealed that his one-and-done excursion into musicals had seen him take a more personable approach to being panned.
“About a year ago, I started writing letters to movie critics,” he told Roger Ebert. “I couldn’t understand why I was being reviewed instead of my films. They kept talking about the new Burt Reynolds pictures, as if you couldn’t tell one from another.”
It’s never a good idea for an actor to reach out to the people who hate their movies, and taking it personally is demonstrably worse. Undeterred, though, At Long Last Love saw Reynolds pen many letters asking why he was being singled out, even though he was the top-billed star and most marketable aspect of the entire production, which is a question that surely answers itself.
“The reviews on the film were brutal,” he lamented. “90% of them were savage. I started to wonder what these guys were after. A lot of the critics said things like, ‘How dare Burt Reynolds sing a Cole Porter song? Well, let me tell you something: I can sing as well as Fred Astaire can act.”
Sometimes, it’s much better to stay silent, and the actor’s vendetta against critics would become an ongoing trend.
