Daily Inspiration Quote by Eli Wallach

Calling a film "underrated" right before naming its "terrible subject" is a small act of advocacy, and Eli Wallach frames it the way working actors often do: not with auteur theory, but with craft and consequences. "Nuts" (1987) is the kind of movie audiences and awards voters can sidestep because it forces attention onto mental health, sexuality, exploitation, and the courtroom's appetite for turning trauma into spectacle. Wallach’s phrasing acknowledges that avoidance. The subject is "terrible" not because the movie is bad, but because the material is uncomfortable to sit with.

The pivot - "but It's very well done" - is the key subtext. He’s asking you to separate taste from execution, squeamishness from judgment. That matters coming from an actor whose career spanned prestige drama and populist genre work: he understands how easily a film’s reputation gets flattened into its logline. When a movie is about pain, people often treat discomfort as a critique, as if the problem is the film rather than the world it depicts.

There’s also a quiet defense of performances-driven cinema here. "Very well done" reads like respect for the ensemble, the direction, the writing - the invisible labor that can disappear when a project is labeled "issue movie". Wallach’s intent feels less like nostalgia and more like a plea for attention: sometimes the movies we underrate are the ones that demand the most moral patience from us.