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Reni Santoni, the talented star of Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing, heads the cast of this Canadian film. Santoni plays a luckless 23-year-old who has vague plans of becoming a novelist. Unwilling to do anything so mundane as getting a job, he begs, borrows and steals, driving even his best friends to distraction. There were a whole slew of aimless-youth pictures in the late 1960s, many of them as aimless as the youths they were portraying. That The Great Big Thing has a little more coherence than usual can be attributed to the guiding hand of British-born director Eric Till.