Burt Reynolds directs ‘Sharky’s Machine’

Press, 19 August 1982, Page 18

Burt Reynolds directs ‘Sharky’s Machine’

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Someone unknown has taken over the underworld of a south-eastern city. Drugs, call girls, street crime, political pay-offs — he is calling the shots. One undercover policeman, Tom Sharky, knows him only as “The Ace." But Sharky blew his cover when he blew away a drug dealer on a crowded bus. He has been kicked downstairs to the vice squad, busting pimps, prostitutes and perverts. He can accept the assignment — or turn a colourful crew of vice cops into a personal police “machine” — and flush out The Ace.

Burt Reynolds stars in “Sharky’s Machine,” his third attempt at directing. The first two were “Gator”- and "The End” — for several reasons, not the least of which is that, it’s not a comedy. “For years, I begged to do

comedy," he recalls. “Then I finally got the chance — and that’s almost all I've done for ten years. “I figured it was time to tackle something more dramatic, as intense in its own way as ‘Deliverance,’ although' they’re obviously nothing alike." "Sharky’s Machine" is not without humour, however. Against an urban landscape that might have been painted by Hogarth or prophesied by Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis," Reynolds injects flashes of humour the flavor of unsweetened chocolate.

Confronting an international drug dealer who has transferred his activities from Hong Kong to Atlanta, Sharky hits him with the most damning denunciation he can think of: “I’m gonna pull the chain on you,” he says, "because you've been screwing around with my

town. You've been walking all over people. And you’re from out-of-state."

During a sleepless round-the-clock surveillance. Sharky and Arch — a towering, black policeman — discuss the value of Zen in police work. Oriental mystics. Arch observes, can transfer themselves to another “space" at will. That could come in handy, a bleary-eyed Sharky

concurs, if someone is holding a gun at your head.

It is this stake-out — on the apartment of an attractive young call girl - that shuffles the deck and turns up The Ace.

Sharky’s machine has come up with a curious fact about the sex-for-sale operation. It numbers seven girls, each of whom has assumed a pseudonym of seven letters. Sharky translates those names into coded telephone numbers and lets his fingers do the walking.

One line is dead — as is its subscriber — an Oriental hooker who was hit, gang-land-style, while giving a local reporter a massage. Another, registered to a "dancer" known as Dominoe, has been put on hold. Sharky is ordered not to check it out, bug it or question it. That is where he sets up shop. Dominoe’s apartment is strewn with hidden wiretaps by Nosh, the Marconi of the machine. From a vacant apartment across the street, Sharkv and company follow

her movements through highpowered binoculars. Conclusions: Dominoe is elegant, expensive, disturbingly beautiful. Her clientele includes a candidate for governor. running on a straight morality ticket. Her procurer is an 'importer of eastern objets d'art* who seems to exert an hypnotic influence over her through drugs, sex and fear. Sharky, who has sublimated any semblance of a social life — in layering on a hard cop s shell — is fascinated.