1978 - FINGERS, well it's certainly unusual

For a while in the 70's and 80's,  James Toback was a hot screenwriter.  Toback wrote The Gambler which got a lot of favorable reviews from the critics. As is usually the case, Toback moved into direction with as they like to say "mixed results."  Fingers certainly fits that description.

The film is about a concert pianist hopeful who is getting ready for an audition at Carnegie Hall.   The pianist is played by Harvey Keitel in a very intense performance.  It's safe to say he out acts Robert DeNiro's Taxi Driver weirdo character Travis Bikel .  Anyway as a favor to his father who is some kind of gangster the Keitel character is also a debt collector when his father's customers don't pay their loans back and he's a very violent debt collector at that.

 

 

In addition to all of that stuff,  Keitel is pretty good at getting sex out of women.  He screws a very young Tanya Roberts in the women's restroom in a kind of repellent scene.  However his chief obsession is with an artist played by the actor Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia).  The Farrow character is also involved with a character played by Jim Brown named Dreems.   In this film women in general appear to be attracted to Jim Brown's character and Brown pays them back by bashing their heads together in a brutal scene.  Toback must have been channeling  Brown's real life issues with women,  Brown at the time had a very extensive history of domestic violence.  

It's hard to know what to make of this film.  Frankly there are so many strange and pointless story lines The whole thing just comes off as a confusing mess, or make that a violent and confusing mess.  Keitel really doesn't seem like the concert pianist type although there is no denying he really gives it his all portraying this very strange protagonist. 

 

I'm impressed James Toback was able to raise the money for this film because as a main stream film it certainly wasn't going to appeal to the public.  Toback himself is what people call an "interesting character."  He is a Harvard graduate, summa cum laude (highest honors) and as of December of 2022 he was charged with the sexual abuse of 38 women.

Fingers runs 89 minutes and as they say no one probably wished it a minute longer.