This movie doesn't seem to have made a significant splash when it was first release, and it's all but been forgotten more than forty years later, rarely getting played on TV. Watching it, I think I understood why the movie hasn't built much of a fan base. Don't get me wrong - it's not a BAD movie. For starters, it has a great performance by Robert Blake in the title role. But Blake plays such an unsympathetic part, a person that puts his own welfare way more than everyone else around him (including his character's family), that I see many people being turned off and wondering, "Why I am watching such an unlikable person dig his own grave?" I also suspect that what happens at the end will turn off people as well - what happens not only is a downer, it seems to come out of another movie entirely. But if you are prepared (and willing) to see a movie about a failure of a person sink deeper and deeper, it's more likely that you'll find the movie interesting on some level.
