Heavy entertainment from Sydney Pollack. It spends so much time lining up its journalistic-ethics issues that it is stymied as a romantic thriller, and at the same time, or at a different time, its romantic-thriller obligations sidetrack and dilute the issues. The basic situation here is not hard to imagine as an old-fashioned (i.e., pre-Watergate) thriller in which a man wrongly implicated in the murder of a labor leader would set out to clear his name by solving the murder himself. Such a scenario is even not hard to imagine with Paul Newman still in the leading role: he is very good here, if only because his role is so devoid of character that he is forced to fall back on star presence, of which he has plenty. It is typical of the up-to-date (post-Watergate) issue-conscious thriller, however, that the official investigators of a murder case should be seen as even bigger menaces than the murderer, and that the latter need not even be identified, much less brought to justice. Sally Field, Melinda Dillon. (1981) — Duncan Shepherd