Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971)

"Give me an overdose of anything," Dustin Hoffman says in Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, and that, more or less, sums up an audience's reaction to this uneven, but fitfully, fascinating film. The movie keeps promising to take the audience to an interesting, unusual level, but never follows through on its promises, frustrating one into wishing that the director and writer had chosen one path to take and followed it through. The attempts to mix reality and fantasy just don't work, although there are some individually satisfying sequences. The writers provide some juicy lines here and there and the framework of an interesting character study, but they don't flesh it out enough to make it worthwhile. Hoffman's performance is technically assured though sometimes self-conscious and overly mannered, but he makes the most of his big scenes. There's also solid support from Jack Warden, Gabriel Dell, and David Burns, but by far the best performance comes from the mesmerizing Barbara Harris, whose audition scene is priceless. A quirky, unique actress, Harris almost always enlivens any film in which she appears; her touching yet hilarious vulnerability provides a much-needed anchor for Kellerman. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide