Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Too much of everything

A different way of telling a story

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Dear Harvey Keitel,your performance was the best thing about Fingers - a film about a tough young man torn between his loyalty towards his gangster father (Michael.V.Gazzo) and his ambition to become a piano player. The scenes where you're playing the piano were really intense and beautiful. You must have worked your ass off. You were also at your very best in the scenes where you're collecting debts for your father and living the gangster life. The film is a very deterministic character study about a young man struggling to escape his roots.Made almost ten years after the Manson killings, it is also about the dark side of sexual liberation when a mixed race threesome ends in violence (an alpha male black gangster smashes together the heads of two white women when they refuse to kiss each other). There is also a funny scene when you literally jump on a woman in a restroom and indulge in casual sex.Michael.V.Gazzo is a very talkative and cunning gangster, not too different from the role he played in Godfather 2. Jim Brown is effortlessly menacing and nasty as the black gangster. Spike Lee almost certainly based Radio Rahim in Do The Right Thing on your character who walks around playing loud songs on a tape recorder. There was one remarkable bit of editing when a scene of violence cuts straight to you playing the piano, Harvey. Best Regards, Pimpin.(8/10)

Harvey Keitel is Jimmy fingers, a man divided by his passion for the piano and his day job as a collector for his mobster father. He is the perfect choice for this dark and schizophrenic role, since it matches his personality. His father is Italian, and he wishes him to carry on in the family business, and his Jewish mother hopes for him to become a concert pianist, and so that is what he must choose from. It is pretty straight forward, as he slips back and forth from sitting at a keyboard, performing classical music, and in the next moment, beating someone for not paying his debts in a timely manner. I love Keitel as an actor, but I found Fingers tedious and I didn't really care what happened to the nut case in the end. A 5/10 for Harvey.

Does anyone remember or know the name of the Trailer or Movie preview, or Short or Skit that was shown before the actual movie Fingers began playing in the theater? I remember couples as contestants on a game show, at one point they were naked, then they were farting back and forth. It was pretty funny from what I remember. Maybe it was X rated? I don't know, I was a kid and I remember me and my friend were taken there by his older brother who snuk us in that's why we had access. It may not have been X rated, I only suggest that due to the nudity - this was 1978. I have no idea how to track it down. Internet searches based on descriptions of a nude farting game show proved futile. If someone knows the name or remembers what it was from, please comment I only have a foggy memory of it and that it was damn funny, a lost gem. Thank-you, JOHN

****SPOILERS**** Outlandish motion picture that tries to cover too much ground and in the end gets buried under it. Harvey Keitel, Jimmy "Fingers" Angelelli, comes across as a borderline psycho who's about to explode, which is just what he does at the end of the movie. Jimmy is pressured by wanting to become a Carnegie Hall caliber Bach playing pianist and at the same time doing his job for his dad Ben, Michael V. Gazzo, a Mafia loan shark. Jimmy who's very sexually active with the ladies he even seems to be interested in men as well. We get to see Jimmy early in the film making eye-contact with an obviously gay waiter at a restaurant as if he wanted to pick him up. Jimmy unfortunately has a very severe prostate condition that becomes inflamed and unbearable when ever he has sex. It turns out that having sex for Jimmy is more like rape and his prostate condition drives him almost out of his head. I did like the brutal mobster, debt collector, contrasted by the sensitive artist, pianist, angle of the movie. This contradiction stems from Jimmy's gangster father Ben and pianist mother Ruth, Marian Seldes, who we later see in a hospital ward suffering from a mental breakdown. Writer/Director James Toback seemed to add something in "Fingers" straight out of the movie "Taxi Driver", which Harvey Keitel also stared in, into the story. We have Jimmy falling in love and then wanting to save Carol (Tisa Farrow) who's, when we first see her, a sculpture. Later when we meet Carol's boss or pimp Dreems, Jim Brown, we realize that Carol is hooker which makes her a combination of both Iris & Betsy in "Taxi Driver". You begin to think that Jimmy like Travis Bickel in "Taxi Driver" will in the end dispatch Dreems and his henchmen and save Carol from her life of sin and have her back living with her parents and family. Instead the movie just can't make up it's mind and as it comes to it's brutal conclusion Carol and her pimp Dreems are totally written out or forgotten about! It's as if they were put in the film just to fill in some time to make it a full-length 90 minutes motion picture!I felt that Jimmy's unrestrained brutality in the movie was more due to his failure to become a concert pianist then to his painful sexual experiences due to his prostate condition. Since his prostrate is treatable with medication but his failure as a concert pianist isn't. It's just that Jimmy can't mentally get it all together whenever he's on stage playing th piano and being judged by music critics. We see Jimmy in action early in the film when he cold-cocks the massive and powerful pizza store owner Luchino, Lenny Montana, who owed his lone shark dad Ben money that he lent him. But as the movie goes on it's obvious that Jimmy is getting more and more out of control because his both uncontrolled and painful sexual urges. Jimmy virtually rapes Julie, Tanya Roberts, in order to intimidate mobsters Riccamonza's, Tony Sirico, girlfriend who also owes Jimmy's dad money. Later Jimmy forces himself on Carol who you thought up until then he was trying to rescue from a life on the streets and practically rapes her as well. The worst and most sickening act by Jimmy is when as an act of revenge he savagely beats and murders Riccamonza who had Jimmy's father killed. Jimmy murders Riccamonza by blowing his eyes out of his eye-sockets like he said that he would do earlier in the movie; luckily for Riccamonza he was already dead when that happened! As the movie "Fingers" ends we see Jimmy stark naked playing the piano in his apartment with absolutely no musical skill at all and obviously insane. All alone in the world, everyone that he loved and cared for have either died or left him, Jimmy is just waiting for the men in the white suits to take him away in handcuffs and a straight-jacket.