The End *** (1978, Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Dom DeLuise, Robby Benson, Kristy McNichol, Joanne Woodward, Myrna Loy, Pat O’Brien, Carl Reiner) – Classic Movie Review 7572

The 1978 movie The End is good tasteless, crazy black comedy fun from Burt Reynolds, with the star directing himself as Wendell Sonny Lawson, a Woody Allen-style hypochondriac who however learns he has a year to live with a one-in-a-million blood illness. What can he do? Can he go to confession or try to kill himself, or both?

Written by Jerry Belson, The End is a patchy laughter-raiser, but there are some hilarious bits. Reynolds is endearing in a self-revelatory persona (in real life he is a hypochondriac himself) and there is a hilarious role for Reynolds’s buddy Dom DeLuise as Marlon Borunki, a co-sufferer he tries to get to kill him.

All this, plus Sally Field as Reynolds’s girlfriend Mary Ellen, Robby Benson, Kristy McNichol, David Steinberg and Joanne Woodward, and old-timers Myrna Loy, Pat O’Brien, Carl Reiner and Strother Martin.

Also in the cast are Harry Caesar, James Best, Connie Fleming, Jock Mahoney and Queenie Smith.

It is one of four movies that Burt Reynolds made with his Seventies girlfriend Sally Field, in all of which she played his girlfriend. They are: Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Hooper (1978), The End (1978) and Smokey and the Bandit II (1980).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7572

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