Film review: Westworld (1973)

Now THAT'S a poster!  Another of the 70's sci-fi collection that Criterion just has until the end of the month.  One of the very few (I imagine) films not only written by Michael Crichton (same plot as his Jurassic Park, basically) but directed by him as well.  And it is a pretty much perfect premise, albeit one you shouldn't think about too much (real bullets in the guns?  Yes, the guns are set up so they won't fire at anything that has body heat, but (a) of course they go haywire along with the robots, and (b) what about ricochets?).  An adult amusement park where you get to play a cowboy (actually you have a choice of three adjacent parks, Westworld, Roman World and Castle World (or maybe Medieval World, I can't remember) and the first death-by-robot we witness actually happens by sword in the third of these.  (Roman World, it's very unsubtly indicated, is basically just for orgies, which of course suggests that the deaths in that world would be super grisly.)  The movie is basically divided in half: the first half sets up the premise and has nerdy Richard Benjamin and hunky James "father of Josh" Brolin (who's the spitting image of Christian Bale, I think) exploring the delights of gunfights, robotic prostitutes and busting out of jail with dynamite, while the second is all hell breaking out and Richard Benjamin being stalked by a very eerie Yul Brynner (somehow they make his eyes glisten in a very nasty way). 

Brynner totally makes this movie, which otherwise is fairly cheese-heavy.  He is an excellent monster and conveys so much with subtle little movements and sometimes just stillness.  And cheesy as this was, it was still better pure entertainment than the HBO series, which seems to have wasted a killer premise on too much navel-gazing.  Crichton's direction is serviceable, although I don't think he really knows how to direct actors, and one strength is that as things go south, there's no attempt at a God's Eye Explanation of why the robots suddenly turn homicidal.  This is the secret of all good disaster stories, from Day of the Triffids to Night of the Living Dead.