“She was a great-looking chick and whatever was in her eyes, it sure wasn’t love. Was I smart? No, I was dumb. With a capital D. Wow, was I dead wrong! I had no idea what was ahead of me. You try to figure a dame out.”

Mind Games, an Oliver Peoples sunglass ad shot as a film noir satire in luscious monochrome, is an agreeable two-minute hoot. It’s also the classiest looking plot-driven film that Robert Evans has ever physically acted in. (Voicing his Comedy Central animated series Kid Notorious doesn’t count, and neither does Brett Morgen‘s The Kid Stays in the Picture, a doc.) It certainly makes Evans seem like a better, more confident actor than he was in the ’50s when he had small roles in The Best of Everything, Man of a Thousand Faces and The Sun Also Rises.
Evans’ costar is Kate Nauta, a 25 year-old model-actress (Transporter 2, The Game Plan) with great gams. The director/style maestro is ad veteran and photographer Sinisha Nisevic.
You’re supposed to know with me telling you that Evans was a legendary studio exec and producer in the ’60s and ’70s (The Godfather, Chinatown, Marathon Man) who suffered a personal and career crisis in the ’80s only to resurge in the early ’90s as a Paramount-based producer and author (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) while reinventing himself as a kind of iconic-ironic pop figure as the quintessential old-school Hollywood smoothie.