Reception
The film received mostly negative reviews on its opening engagements in New York and Los Angeles. Kevin Thomas said in the Los Angeles Times that the film "strikes and maintains such a relentlessly shrill, bombastic note that it becomes abusive of the viewer. Worse yet, this clobbering approach, compounded by an oppressive use of close-ups and a noisy, often merely crass score, serves only to underline the obviousness of all that Medoff has to say and to make his characters verge all the more upon caricature." [4] Janet Maslin of The New York Times commented that "the beginning of Teddy's attack on a band‐of variously sweet or spineless innocents who are in no way armed against him is conceived in genuine viciousness and executed sharply: this part of the movie gives off its share of sparks. But Mark Medoff, in rewriting his play for the screen, has made structural changes that flatten the latter portion of the story and remove a lot of the sting. The movie comes apart well before it is over." [5] Ernest Leogrande of the Daily News gave it a marginally more positive review, largely on the basis of Gortner's performance. He wrote that the actor "dominates the movie with the intensity of a man with a venom-induced mania. It's easy to see why he was attracted to buy the play as a movie for himself. The central character of Teddy is one of those roles that gives a performer a chance to chew rugs and eat a script alive." [6]
The movie was a box office bomb in both markets, and Columbia Pictures opted not to release it in any other part of the United States. [7]
It was eventually picked up for Canadian distribution by Astral Films, which opened it in Toronto on December 14, 1979. The reviews in that city were equally negative. Clyde Gilmour of The Toronto Star called it "a grisly example of the Bad Luck To All Of Them movie which we've seen, in one form or another, far too often throughout the Septic Seventies [...] After you’ve fretfully endured the first hour of it with another hour still to go a nasty thought starts flickering through your mind: You decide that the only conceivable “happy ending” would be to watch the entire cast go over a high cliff in a bus." [8] He later said the movie was one of the worst films to be released in Toronto during 1979. [9] Jay Scott of The Globe and Mail wrote that "the performers are adequate, and Marjoe Gortner and Stephanie Faracy are something more than that. But the actors cannot overcome director Milton Katselas' weakness for cinematic tricks of the sixties. (Red Ryder is set in 1968—there is no reason it should be filmed in the style of movies of the period.) Katselas' willingness to undercut the climax by (1) taking it out of the roadhouse, and (2) filming it in slow motion, succeeds only in dating the play, and that's unfortunate: at a time when the United States is being held hostage by Iran, a thoughtful treatment the long-range effect wielded by the Vietnam war on American myths of heroism could not be more relevant." [10]
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