A strange Bird indeed: two and a half hours of total commercial hopelessness, commercial suicide even, commercial self-sacrifice (to put the noblest face on it), directed, but not appeared in, by perhaps the single biggest box-office star of the prior two decades. Clint Eastwood, co-opted by the country-western crowd for such dubious reasons as Every Which Way but Loose and Any Which Way You Can (and obliging them openly only to the extent of the commercially hopeless Honkytonk Man, a useful parallel to Bird in its down-the-tubes plotline), was first and always a jazz buff (see Play Misty for Me). And in his obliquely quarter-face portrait of saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" (or just "Bird") (or just "Yard") Parker, he was not about to commercialize and conventionalize a phenomenon that is nothing if not specialized. From one angle it would appear he has made this movie in mortal dread of being thought uncool (insensitive to jazz, moralistic about drugs, unable to relate to blacks), of somehow embarrassing himself: much better to die alone (in an empty theater, that is), bitter, but with dignity, like an alley cat. From another angle the subject-matter, or anyway the sense of solemn responsibility it has instilled in him, would seem to have emboldened him as a filmmaker, freed him from the melodramatic myth-making he is most often allied to. By its very structure and emphasis (nonlinear, and focussed mostly on Parker's private life, and mostly near the end of that life), the movie establishes itself as a textbook example of a "downer" -- a word only a tiny few of us in the English-speaking world are able to use without the accompanying facial expression of having just bit into an unripe plum. Forest Whitaker, Diane Venora. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd