Nancy Allen, July 17, 1987

Nancy Allen in "Robocop"

By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff

When movie actors -- even successful ones -- take two years off work, they can't usually be too picky with roles on their return. Often, they are relegated to playing supporting characters in offbeat pictures until word gets around that they're back in circulation.

Nancy Allen, who took a couple years off recently, isn't a very good example of that out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome. The star of such films as "Dressed to Kill" and "Blow Out" has made a career out of playing in quirky and, sometimes, downright goofy movies. Her latest -- "Robocop" -- is no exception. Many national critics are doing back flips in praise of the uproariously funny and exceedingly violent motion picture, in which Allen plays a tough street cop who comes to the aid of a half-man, half-robot cop with an identity crisis.

"I love this movie," Allen said during a telephone interview from Denver. "It turned out even beyond my expectations of it. When I first read the script, I thought, 'Oh, my God, I've never read or seen anything like this before.' For me, it was a real page-turner and I thought this could be a terrific picture."

Billy Drago, July 24, 1987

By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff
 
There's a chilling scene in "The Untouchables" in which Al Capone's hit man, Frank Nitti, sits in a car outside G-man Eliot Ness' home, smoking cigarettes. Ness isn't home, but when he does arrive, after dark, Nitti expounds on the virtues of family life.

It's Nitti's way of letting Ness know that if Capone continues to be harassed, Ness' wife and child will be murdered. It would be easy, Nitti intimates by his presence outside the home, for him to have walked in and snuffed out their lives.

In the movie, Nitti is a dastardly, evil character. But in reality, the actor who played him -- Billy Drago -- is soft-spoken and unassuming. And Drago says he's loving the attention the movie has given him.

"I have literally not been able to go on the street one day since the picture opened without somebody coming up, or being in a restaurant and having someone say something to me," Drago said last week during a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "It happens everywhere I go."