Can you make it anymore golden? [spoiler]

Rating: 7/10 (12 November 2004)

The film drips of filtered sunshine, a hearkening back to some golden past when real heroes could emerge, and that is the problem. It is almost too pat. We know Levinson will not let Roy strike out, like Malamud did in the book, so this throws any tension out the window. To make up for it, he gives us an 1812 Overture of an ending.
But what could Levinson do in 1984? That was the year of "Morning in America" and the great gold haul at the Olympics in Los Angeles. Dutch made everything sunny. The book was written in the early Cold War fifties, when the Joe McCarthy show was the leading television program. Surely Malamud was infected by the mood of the times. Watch the films of 1950-53....so many are about seedy characters, or ambiguous men trying to skirt fine lines. Several Richard Widmark gritty pieces neatly illustrate this, as does Wilder's Ace in the Hole.
I doubt Levinson would have been the director to follow Malamud's tale, but rather he used it as a scaffold. The book would have made a great movie in 1974, but that time was gone.