All the Marbles

Aldrich's last film, a sad summation of his attempts to gauge his contemporary audience, turns out an intermittently hilarious but generally compromised mix of '50s introspection and '70s grand-standing (last pulled off coherently in The Mean Machine). With Falk as manager of a female tag wrestling duo, graduating via broad road movie conventions from the steel town small halls to the MGM Grand Hotel in Reno for a championship bout, it slips in and out of styles and stylisations as if trying on each for size or for laughs, maintaining a tenuous integrity only through its director's self-deprecating self-consciousness.