Reviews of THE FOREIGNER                                   > Scenes from the film

"I don't deserve this," the title character of The Foreigner is heard to say as he reclines in numb despair on his bed at the Chelsea Hotel. It is a thought likely to be shared by whatever audiences are attracted to the film, which is being shown through Sunday as part of the New American Filmmakers Series at the Whitney Museum.

The Foreigner deals with the "punk" sensibility as manifested at CBGB, the rock nightclub on the Bowery; the streets and lofts and SoHo and the leather bars of the West Village.

The subject is not without interest, although punk seems to have lost some of its spark in the six months or so since the film was made. The trouble is that no one in the cast, which includes a couple of comely young women, has the least idea of how to act, the story is infantile and the photography, sound and editing are primitive in a way that stopped being amusing 10 years ago.

The Foreigner was written, produced and directed by Amos Poe, with the assistance, as a screen credit coyly notes, of a $5,000 personal loan from the Merchants Bank of New York. It seems incredible that a museum that is exhibiting Saul Steinberg on the third floor should be showing the cinematic equivalent of kindergarten scribbles on the second.

—Tom Buckley, The New York Times, April 23, 1978

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In a review of Amos Poe's film The Foreigner [April 27], Tom Buckley conveys exactly part of the attitudes and notions that the movie attacks and that are the film's central themes Ñ carelessness, cowardliness, cynicism, sarcasm, cruelty, killing and murder. Movies like stories like dreams have various layers. If "The Foreigner deals with the streets and lofts of Soho and the leather bars of the West Village," as Mr. Buckley writes, then Julia deals with train journeys and beaches and An Unmarried Woman is about jogging and taxicabs. Instead of at least trying to explore and to understand the film's concern Ñ which the general audience did not fail to see Ñ Mr. Buckley is hiding behind the word "punk" and expressing his rage about the film's penetration into such distinguished grounds as the Whitney Museum. How far would he like to expel the film?

I am not going to discuss here esthetic opinions on acting/camera/editing, which would take hours to write and pages to fill; but I feel like expressing my amazement at Mr. Buckley's cynic remark in reference to the very low budget situation of The Foreigner. I would find it more appropriate to congratulate Amos POE, the author of the film, for the courage and strength to produce independently a full-length feature film on a $5,000 personal-loan basis in a basically big-money and therefore industry-dependent film world.

—Johanna Heer, Manhattan

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"A year later I made The Foreigner, a film about a European coming to New York. In this case Max Menace (Eric Mitchell from Triple Bogey), a German terrorist who is trying to find a place to hide. But you can't hide in jungleland! He is terrorized, and ripped to bits. This is the story of the other side of the American dream; the foreigner who doesn't make it. A nightmare film in an existential philosophical context, a world where less is more."

—Amos Poe, 1982

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