Fingers - Under Review
Harvey Keitel's finest Scorsese-free performance?
Fingers (1978)
Jimmy ‘Fingers’ Angeli (Harvey Keitel) is a gifted pianist who also happens to be a dab hand as a hard-hitting repo man. Tortured by his peculiar double life, matters are made ever more complicated for Jimmy by his overbearing parents, his gangland connections, his complicated girlfriend (Mia Farrow’s sister Tisa) and a black stud called Dreams (gridiron legend Jim Brown).
It is upon this sparse story that writer-director James Toback hangs one of the great films of the 1970s. Overshadowed by Martin Scorsese’s work from the same era, it’s Fingers many peculiarities - it was produced by the Faberge perfume company and shot on a ridiculously short schedule - that might explain why it was initially ignored,
