Obsession

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SHARKY'S MACHINE Directed by Burt Reynolds Screenplay by Gerald Di Pego

It is an old machine. It is rusty, inefficient, temperamental and stored in the basement, where it is the object of not very affectionate contempt around Atlanta police headquarters. No, it is not a disused mimeograph; it is, in fact, the vice squad. Therefore its components are human beings, full of complaints and crotchets and in need of something more interesting to do than process the night's haul of pimps and prostitutes. They are also in need of a light coating of respect.

This last is provided by the smart, ambitious title character (Burt Reynolds, in his tough-romantic vein), who is a detective being disciplined with a tour of netherworld duty. What sets them all in muttering motion--in its best passages the movie sounds like a Robert Altman film, full of cynical asides and loopy observations--is the brutal murder of a call girl. Since one of the conventions of up-to-date murder mysteries is that pillars of the community must always have a slimy underside, she turns out to have been the victim of sexual perversity among the local power elite.

Nor is it likely that she will be the only one. The machine stakes out the apartment of another potential victim, a gubernatorial candidate's mistress (prettily played by Rachel Ward). That leads to a further excellent passage, for in the course of listening to her bugged conversations and photographing her comings and goings with powerful lenses, Sharky's professionally justified voyeurism turns to romantic longing, not to say obsession, and, eventually, a plot twist that has been good ever since Laura's face was first glimpsed in a misty light.

Thereafter, Sharky's Machine begins to sputter somewhat, since Reynolds seems not quite to trust his fans to turn on for an exercise in pure eccentricity. As a director he is good with violent unpleasantness, but the volume is cranked up too high. It tends to drown out the good and far more surprising minor-key work that has gone before it. Still, the pleasure of watching good character men like Brian Keith, Charles Burning, Bernie Casey and the estimable Richard Libertini going pocketa-pocketa as Sharky's Machine warms up is not to be lightly dismissed. And neither is Reynolds' good sense of the way the sordid and the sleek coexist in Big City life. The man has a feel for the director's craft that could, some day, permit him to break the genre bonds that finally trip him up here.

--By Richard Schickel

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