What a beautiful movie!

Dreadfully Boring

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

A trite and severely disheartening comedy from '71, 'Bunny O' Hare' stars two tired actors, Bette Davis and Borgnine, who was but a character actor, mastering one routine; and as a redneck melodrama about the misfortunes, loss and misery of the old age, 'Bunny O'Hare' is a rather cheap, unpleasant and essentially vulgar sentimental exploitation, and also, and more gravely and saddening, of geriatric exploitation, and it shows, together with countless other useless movies, that in the '70s the American cinema had already became a mindless business. It is also true this kind of movie goes right against my very notion of cinema, either as art or as _divertissement, so I'm in no position to judge it fairly.We are supposed to laugh at Bette Davis' physical training for the bank robbery. Two old farts pass as two hippies. The satire is uninteresting (Greeley and the hippies' counterculture), the senile romance (B. Davis and Borgnine) is lousy.

I agree with all the other comments that the premise was bizarre, the plot was beyond thin, the acting hammy, and the filming and budget woefully low quality.However, I am walking through 1960's & 1970's movies in an effort to remember and better understand how much our world has changed. The Montgomery Wards? Cars without safety bumpers, banks without safety glass, strip malls without Wal-Mart or Home Depot . . . hippies (the cinema interpretation).But mostly the blatant sexual harassment by Jack Cassidy's character that is eventually met with nympho encouragement, an evil grin, an eye twinkle, and an implied roll in the sheets. That a writer could script and a director could film such scenes reminds me just how far we have come in some 40+ years. The jokes about "A real cop ... a man" were predictable, for guffaws. And while a low brow comedy is not reality; to a much lesser degree, not that long ago, this was.

An aging widow in New Mexico is left homeless after the bank forecloses on her property and tears down the house; she chances to meet a retired bank robber still on the lam and asks him to teach her to rob the bank which took her to the cleaners. Still-relevant sociological observations (occasionally cutting quite deep) played for TV-type yuks, a mixture which had professional critics groaning in 1971. Indeed, the outré bits of business involving the hold-ups are sloppy, and Jack Cassidy gives a grueling performance as a sleazy police lieutenant. Still, Bette Davis is very fine in the lead; natural, unglamorous and earthy, she's not a tough cookie nor a weeping willow--and when she chit-chats with Ernest Borgnine and her famous voice breaks mid-sentence, she's also endearing. Borgnine looks a bit incredulous at being caught in this scenario, but he doesn't embarrass himself and works well with Bette (their second picture together after 1956's "The Catered Affair"). In fact, most of the film is entertaining on a minor level, with something to say about oldsters and their financial plight. **1/2 from ****

Perhaps the worst Bette Davis movie ever. So cheaply shot it looks like a college production. Davis acts with the high-pitched little girl voice that she patented in the final reels of "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and, boy, is it annoying. Worse, Jack Cassidy is woefully unfunny as a conservative cop who sexually harasses and finally seduces his beautiful young assistant. Davis keeps those famed eyes covered with dark glasses for about 90 percent of the time. Skip this one: no entertainment or camp value.