Your Three Minutes Are Up (1973) * * * A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 2000 by Serdar Yegulalp
Back in the Seventies there was a spate of films, now horribly dated, about "square" suburban guys getting yanked away from their desks and being asked to experience life. Part of the reason said movies have generally not aged well is because they took themselves too seriously. Yesterday's rebel has become today's pain in the ass.
"Your Three Minutes Are Up" works because it understands that difference, and also because it has no pretentions about its characters: they're doomed, not because they're rebels, but because they're trying to get more than they really deserve, and it blows up in their faces.
Beau Bridges is the workaday drone, a low-key man named Charlie who's about to get married. His wife is wound up and anxious, and only seems to be interested in him as far as when he'll be able to go with her to get furniture for their new house. Charlie's buddy Mike (Ron Liebman) is a swinger who's lost his job and is scamming every credit card he has to keep his lifestyle moving forward. Both men have one thing in common: they can't utter a truthful word about anything. Mike's a liar because it serves him well; Charlie can't speak his mind about anything because he's barely got one.
After getting thrown out of the unemployment office on his ear -- and gets his car repossessed -- Mike calls Charlie at work and asks him to come drive him to the airport. By degrees, and then in an avalanche of events, Mike cuts Charlie loose from his routine and shows him how to rip the system. In an early scene, Mike steals a whole roll of BLue Chip stamps and fills several books with them, then brings Charlie to the redemption center and helps him pick out a selection of (hideously tacky) wedding gifts. It's funny and painful at the same time.
In a film filled with good things, the very best thing by far is Ron Liebman's performance. He's been in tons of movies both good and bad, and in this one he's amazing to watch: he fills the screen with the image of a guy who's been lying for so long that the only way to keep afloat is to spin even bigger whoppers. A scene that involves him telling off a credit card company representative starts off as a cliche, and then turns into a tour de force thanks to the way Liebman delivers his lines. "Because I'm a nice guy, I'm going to take YOUR bill and put it at the TOP of this pile," he blares into the phone, "but if I get one more call from you I'm going to put it at the BOTTOM, where it will simply have to WAIT ITS TURN! Okay? A PLEASURE talkin' to ya." Beau Bridges is more subdued as his buddy, but effective: he's always smiling at the most inappropriate moments, like a coping mechanism gone haywire.
The most striking thing about the movie is its tone. It's a comedy, but it has deeply serious undertones -- something which the very beginning of the movie (which I will not describe) underscores hard. Everything we see winds up becoming poignant and sad because of it, and makes it work all the more. One of the best sequences involves an insurance scam, but by the time the victors walk away with their cash, it's hollow: we've seen enough to know that everyone in their world is on the take, and they employ desperate rationalizations to justify what they did.
"Three Minutes" isn't on video; it's one of those movies that you usually have to set your VCR to catch when it comes on the late show. It's well worth the effort to track it down -- this is a very good, meaningful film that somehow never got wider distribution or a video release, one of the best "self-discovery" films of the Seventies that manages to avoid being trite or pretentious.
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