Tony Mastroianni Review Collection
Maybe "Adam at 6 A.M." should have stayed in bed
Cleveland Press November 13, 1970
"Adam at 6 A.M." is about a young man in search of himself who switches from swinging Los Angeles to square middle America.
Michael Douglas, son of Kirk, is the young man and most of his performance is given to brooding in profile and smiling enigmatically.
The part isn't much so maybe it isn't all his fault.
Douglas is a Ph.D. in semantics who lives in L.A., drives a sports car, shares his pad with willing females and is very, very bored.
The death of a distant relative in Missouri gives him an excuse to head out for the rural world where things are real. That's the impression you get, anyhow, because Douglas never says much about why he's doing anything.
FOR A GUY who abhors the cardboard people in big cities he discovers eventually that there are just as many cardboard people out in the country.
I wonder if this is really the fault of either urban or rural groups or whether the screen writers simply dreamed up a lot of artificial folks and sprinkled them around in the movie.
Actually some of the minor characters tend to emerge with more flesh and blood than the leading characters. One of them is Joe Don Baker as a fellow member of a work crew with which Douglas finds summer employment.
One big trouble with "Adam at 6 A.M." is that the protagonist is a cipher and you care for him no more at the end of it all than you did at the beginning. Another is that the whole thing is terribly dull. A third is that there are several unnecessary raunchy moments in this otherwise spiritless opus.
