Nobody talks about movies and moviemaking more hypnotically than Norman Mailer, but that doesn’t seem to do his own movies a lick of good. When you read Mailer’s An American Dream or Why Are We in Vietnam?, you enter his imagination, and it’s like being in some all-encompassing movie. Mailer’s pop audacity—his melodramatic streak— can easily make you think he’d be a natural as a moviemaker. And you may think that his sense of dread would be just right for a film noir. But Mailer has already made the movie: he’s movie-drunk when he writes a novel; he’s not movie-drunk when he makes a movie...

This is paltry stuff; it has an eerie, dated quality, like a copy of Playboy left out in the sun for fifteen years. The women are subhuman, and most of the actors look stranded—lost and undirected. You can almost see their eyes searching for help. What Mailer provides is an intellectual’s idea of a pulp thriller. You stare at it knowing it’s hopeless yet not really wanting to leave.