Poor John Glover has also got the sort of untrustworthy face, in real life, that you just want to slap! Honours must go especially to John Glover who plays chief blackmailer, John Raimy, who oozes sleaze and slime, and makes for a genuinely nasty, but memorable, bad guy who thinks nothing of raping and killing to make a few bucks. But through all these fashion crimes there shines a great story with great characters brought to vivid life by some at-the-top-of-their-game actors. Set in the eighties the film is a time-capsule full of characters wearing dodgy 80s fashions including shoulder pads, lots of denim and day-glow eyeliner.

The battle lines are drawn and things can only get messier…ĥ2 Pick-up is classic crime fiction writ large, with an excellent central performance from the late, great Roy Scheider and some marvellous hard-boiled dialogue courtesy of the great novelist Elmore Leonard, whose novel of the same name this film is based on. When it’s time for Mitch to make the money drop he pretends to go through with it, but in fact only gives them a few dollars, the rest being paper with the message ‘Bag your ass’ written on it! This angers the gang and they decide to send him a nasty message that they won’t be screwed with, a very nasty message that implicates Mitch in a savage murder, which they show him video evidence of. Barbara confesses that she’s suspected that something was up for a month or so, but she is still shocked and hurt by the revelation. He decides to fess up and tell his wife about the affair since they’ve been married for 23 years.

While his lawyer wants him to go to the cops he refuses as he doesn’t want to hurt either his wife’s or his own reputation. But being sensitive masked thugs they tell him he can pay in instalments starting with an upfront payment of just $10,000 next week! Later, at Cindy’s apartment, Mitch is accosted by masked gunmen who threaten to ‘out’ his affair to his wife if he doesn’t pay them $105,000, which they reckon shouldn’t be a problem due to his company making over $12 million a year. Opening with an impressive aerial shot of Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider) in a swimming pool on a roof-top, we soon learn that Mitchell, or Mitch, is a successful businessman who runs his own company, is very wealthy, has a wife, Barbara, and also a mistress, Cindy. Cast: Roy Scheider, Ann-Margret, Vanity, John Glover, Robert Trebor, Lonny Chapman, Kelly Preston, Doug McClure

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