Tony Mastroianni Review Collection
The Game Is Over
Cleveland Press 1966
"The Game Is Over" is a boring exercise in banality that will sell tickets because it has Jane Fonda without clothes. Miss Fonda's husband, Roger Vadin, has directed this movie He also directed the movies of his previous wife, Brigitte Bardot and the emphasis was the same.
One wonders about the abilities of a film director whose primary trick in trade is to pose his wife in the nude. Where will he be when he runs out of beautiful and willing wives?
Miss Fonda portrays the young, second wife of an older man, Michael Piccoli. The third member of the household is the husband's son, Peter McEnery.
IT IS A WEALTHY HOUSEHOLD in which the three drink champagne at breakfast and with a start like that there is bound to be trouble by lunch time.
While the husband is away on business for days at a time the two young people are left alone and with the wife's careless way of wandering around the house it isn't long before she and her step-son are having an affair.
The husband suspects and coolly manipulates affairs so that his wife is left without her lover and his son is safely engaged in a forthcoming marriage of convenience.
With the exception of Piccoli there is nothing outstanding about the acting. Miss Fonda is supposed to be a femme fatale, registers simply as an ingenue trying for the big time. McEnery, whose last role was as the hero-in Disney's "Fighting Prince of Donegal," is rather casual as the step-son.
Vadin may have intended this as a tragic story of moral decay, but all he has achieved is a sexy soap opera, and a dull one at that.
