BORN TO WIN (1971) - ♦♦

Directed by - Ivan Passer

Written by - David Scott Milton, Ivan Passer

Starring - George Segal, Paula Prentiss, Karen Black

"Born to Win is a bleak urban drama about a junkie who meets a girl, falls in love and dreams of a normal life. But his dreams are constantly shattered by his need to get his next fix. His addiction progressively destroys his shadow of a life, and things get even more dangerous when he gets his girl hooked and eventually gets involved in a double game with his employer dealers after he becomes a collaborator to the cops as a way to avoid an arrest. 

Ivan Passer's film came out in the midst of the American New Wave, in which American cinema awakened, among other things, to honest representations of the urban junkie subculture. This is, however, not one of its best specimen. While it has moments of brilliance, as a whole it is marked by a fundamentally underwhelming screenplay which a times recalls the narrative inconsistency and thematic immaturity of the preachy B-movie thriller dramas that dealt with similar themes decades earlier."

Drama, USA