Liam Sherwin-Murray at The Paris Review:
Based on Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name, the film is the director Peter Bogdanovich’s Vietnam movie as well as his Casablanca, a wartime melodrama about a raffish American trying to make a buck on the periphery of the conflict. A lot happens to Jack Flowers—he falls in love, finds a kindred spirit (platonic), fulfills his dream of running a brothel, runs afoul of local gangsters, goes into business with the U.S. military, witnesses the death of a friend, and gets roped in to a smear operation by the CIA—but the film’s tone and pacing belie its density of event. Saint Jack is laid-back, even chill. Applied to heavy material, this attitude usually produces a comedy, but Saint Jack, while full of funny moments, achieves something serious: the sublime.
Retrospectives of Bogdanovich’s career tend to describe it as his “loosest” film, a departure to the now for the director, whose interest in the visual style and genre tropes of Hollywood’s studio era, as opposed to those of the French New Wave, had distinguished him from his New Hollywood contemporaries.
more here.