Stepping into the role made famous on Broadway by Tom Conti, Richard Dreyfuss stars as a profoundly handicapped sculptor in Whose Life is it Anyway? Left a quadraplegic after an auto accident, the embittered Dreyfuss feels utterly useless, as both an artist and a human being. He doesn’t want his family’s love, or his doctor’s care, or his nurse’s ministrations. Dreyfuss simply wants to die-but this is impossible, given the legal state of things in the 1970s. Whose Life is It Anyway? may be the only film in which a person’s right to self-destruction is regarded as a happy ending. Not as depressing as it sounds, Whose Life Is It Anyway is perversely hilarious at times, with Dreyfuss at his acerbic best. The film was scripted by Reginald Rose and Brian Clark from Clark’s stage play. —IMDb
Born in England, John Badham became a naturalized American citizen at the age of seven. He received a BA and MFA at Yale University, which he attended before and after his military service. He worked his way up the professional ladder at Universal Studios; his first directorial assignments included the trailers (or coming-attraction reels) of the studio’s features. In the early 1970s, Badham gained a good reputation as an able director of made-for-TV movies. It was his handling of the 1974 docudrama The Gun that won Badham his first theatrical-feature assignment, the 1975 baseball flick The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings (Badham was a last-minute choice when Steven Spielberg suddenly priced himself out of the film’s budget thanks to Jaws). Badham’s first bona-fide—and indeed, one of the biggest moneymakers of the 1970s—was the disco-driven Saturday Night Fever (1977). The director’s striking visual sense and innate gift for montage has served him well in such nailbiters… read more
