Lenny

Bob Fosse's remarkable film version of Julian Barry's legit play, Lenny, stars Dustin Hoffman in an outstanding performance.

If Fosse's film fails to capture the man or his art completely, it remains a damn good place to start.

Tailored to a point rather than to comprehensive biography, its triumph is its touch upon the public nerve of our most private inhibition. [30 Dec 1974, p.86]

Fosse’s attempt to give us Lenny Bruce as society’s victim and a martyr to noble causes never quite works, and so the movie becomes just several good scenes and a fine Hoffman performance, not a persuasive portrait of a man.

Dustin Hoffman is superb as Lenny Bruce, but he gives an actor's performance where a less declamatory, more comedic delivery would have worked better.

The monochrome photography and pseudo-documentary interpolations can't disguise the basic Harold Robbins material, and the good performances (Hoffman and Perrine) stand little chance against Fosse's withering direction: the subject matter needs far defter psychological handling than it gets.

Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.