Fever Pitch

I saw Brooks’s Fever Pitch when it came out, and was instantly smitten...Fever Pitch still delivers the same terse, grim, and ironic power that it had when I first saw it.

Richard Brooks’ Fever Pitch lives up to its title in capturing the frenzied existence of the compulsive gambler...It also resembles its subject in its hit-and-miss quality: Some scenes pay off, others don’t. But it never lets up, and the result is a film that’s always a pleasure to watch even when it’s defying credibility at every turn or moving so fast it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on.

Weak script, poor acting and miscasting aside, it's the power of the subject that makes this an enjoyable ride. Writer/director Richard Brooks thoroughly researched the Territory of the compulsive gambler and captures the obsession with almost a documentary eye.

It waffles constantly, and we never know if the creators are for or against gambling.

That`s right, Fever Pitch receives ''zero stars,'' a rating given infrequently and most often to a film that is morally offensive. There`s no other way to describe Fever Pitch, which, aside from its multitude of filmmaking sins, has the gall to do a complete turnabout with its ending, twisting a supposedly antigambling, message movie into nothing less than a promotional film for casino betting, feeding off the chronic gambler`s pathetic hope to ''get even'' through one more toss of the dice.

YOU could live a long time and never see anything as awful as Fever Pitch, Richard Brooks's shrill, hysterical peek at the world of compulsive gambling.

This movie is sick. It pretends to be a warning against compulsive gambling, but it falls for the oldest dodge in the gambler's book: "I only gambled enough to win back my losses." Maybe I shouldn't have expected anything more from an MGM movie that was shot on location at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas.