The Death Squad (1974)

          Minor telefilm The Death Squad shouldn’t merit any attention—the story is so compressed that it feels as if pieces are missing, and the basic premise appeared in the previous year’s hit Dirty Harry movie Magnum Force. Yet good performances, especially Robert Forster’s emotionally committed turn in the leading role, make The Death Squad watchable. If nothing else, the picture provides a poignant reminder that something was lost when Forster’s career failed to gain momentum in his early years as a screen performer. While it’s true he was prone to robotic performances when saddled with sketchy material, moments in The Death Squad remind viewers what he could do when he tried. He’s more poignant here than the situation demands or deserves.
          Forster plays Eric Benoit, a cop tasked with identifying rogue officers responsible for vigilante killings of crooks who got off on technicalities. Although this setup prompts a handful of chases and shootouts, the main focus of The Death Squad is Benoit wrestling with divided loyalties. How deep a rot will he discover in his department? What happens when he learns that a cop who screwed him over in the past is part of the vigilante group? Will digging into the origins of the vigilante group reveal secrets that hit Benoit even more personally? To their credit, the makers of The Death Squad raise all of these questions—and to their shame, the makers of The Death Squad provide satisfactory answers to only a few of those questions. This is the sort of malnourished narrative in which the nominal female lead, played by Michelle Phillips, could have been excised from the storyline and her absence wouldn’t have been felt.
          Nonetheless, the stuff that works in The Death Squad is entertainingly melodramatic and pulpy. Claude Akins, who plays the heavy, provides a potent mixture of menace and swagger. Character actors including George Murdock, Dennis Patrick, Bert Remsen, and Kenneth Tobey lend color to small roles, while the great Melvyn Douglas classes up the joint by playing Benoit’s mentor in a few brief scenes. On the technical side, the picture benefits from unfussy camerawork and a rubbery jazz/funk score in the Lalo Schifrin mode (more shades of the Dirty Harry movies). Best of all, actors and filmmakers play the lurid material completely straight, so every so often a scene—usually involving Forster—provides a glimmer of the great Roger Corman drive-in thriller The Death Squad should have been. Ah, well. We’ll always have Akins.

The Death Squad: FUNKY

1980 Week: Inside Moves

          Although he’s best known for making such big-canvas escapist fare as Superman (1978) and Lethal Weapon (1987), Richard Donner has directed a couple of smaller movies over the years, generally to disappointing commercial and critical results. However, one of these intimate pictures, the offbeat redemption saga Inside Moves, is among the most affecting things Donner has ever made. A story about emotionally and physically handicapped individuals bonding in a seedy part of Oakland, California, the picture boasts playful humor, sensitive performances, and that most durable of themes: the triumph of the human spirit. Yes, Inside Moves is manipulative, saccharine, and unbelievable. For those wiling to follow where the film leads, however, it’s also quite touching.

          The story opens with the sort of spectacle for which Donner is deservedly famous: Depressed everyman Roary (John Savage) ascends to a top floor in a skyscraper, climbs out a window, jumps, and falls in slow motion until he crashes into a car with a horrible cacophony of broken bones and broken glass. Surviving the suicide attempt with major injuries, Roary takes a new path toward self-destruction, gravitating to a dive called Max’s Bar so he can drink himself into oblivion. The unexpected friendships that Roary forms at Max’s bring him back to life. Among others, Roary connects with Jerry (David Morse), the gentle-giant bartender whose promising basketball career was derailed by a bum leg, and Stinky (Bert Remsen), the amiable senior who participates in the bar’s ongoing card game event though he’s blind. Roary also begins a romance with Louise (Diana Scarwid), a barfly with personal demons of her own.

          Based on a novel by Todd Walton and written for the screen by the team of Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson, whose scripts together were distinguished by creaky plots and gentle character-driven humor, Inside Moves pivots on a highly improbable plot point: Charitable friends and innovative doctors fix Jerry’s leg, allowing him to resume his aborted basketball career. Thereafter, the question of the piece becomes whether Jerry will abandon the colorful characters who supported him when he was down, or whether he’ll join the rest of society in shunning “cripples.”

          Even though the story is absurdly contrived, the moment-to-moment flow of the movie is compelling. Morse gives the picture its heart, essaying a man who needs to reconcile ambition with compassion, while Scarwid, in an Oscar-nominated performance, incarnates a woman struggling to fix a damaged self-image. Savage is deeply present in every one of his scenes, though his performance is riddled with so many Method-actor tics that some viewers will find him more mannered than sympathetic; that said, his intensity never wavers, which helps sell the more bogus aspects of the narrative. As for Donner, he occasionally opts for easy uplift with pithy punchlines and tacky visual crescendos, but, generally speaking, he employs his skill for supervising loose and occasionally improvised acting, fusing the denizens of Max’s Bar into an appealing community. It’s also worth noting that Inside Moves has many fans within the disabled community. Given the picture’s subject matter, that seal of approval matters. 

Inside Moves: FUNKY

1980 Week: Borderline

          An action-movie star who prioritized quantity over quality, Charles Bronson made a lot of forgettable movies in his epic career, with the caliber of his projects suffering a precipitous drop in the 1980s as the combination of Bronson’s advancing age and his declining box-office appeal took a toll. Borderline captures the star in transition, because while the horrors of endless Death Wish sequels were still a couple of years in his future, it’s obvious the best material was no longer coming Bronson’s way. Cowritten and directed by Jerrold Freedman, who spent most of his career banging out generic TV movies, Borderline depicts the battle between U.S. Border Patrol Officer Maynard (Bronson) and resourceful human trafficker Hotchkiss (Ed Harris). As the well-financed Hotchkiss gets bolder and more ruthless with each illegal border crossing, Maynard becomes more determined to capture the “coyote,” especially after Hotchkiss murders one of Maynard’s deputies. And that’s basically the whole story.

          Attempts at injecting the people in the movie with genuine characterization are feeble at best: Hotchkiss is a Vietnam vet, Maynard has a drinking problem, and so on. Similarly, Freedman’s supporting characters are feeble. Fresh-faced Border Patrol deputy Fante (Bruno Kirby) drifts in and out of the story without ever making much impact, and the callous businessmen backing Hotchkiss’ operation—rancher Carl Richards (Bert Remsen) and corporate executive Henry Lydell (Michael Lerner)—display slightly less than one dimension each. A glimmer of hope for narrative substance emerges during a sequence in which Maynard travels undercover as a Mexican to Tijuana along with migrant worker Elena Morales (Karmin Murcelo), whose child was killed in the same shootout that left the deputy dead, but like so many other threads in Borderline, Freedman doesn’t take this material anywhere satisfactory or surprising.

          Nonetheless, the subject matter is inherently interesting, the southern California locations suit the story well, and vivid actors pass through the movie. Beyond those mentioned, the cast also includes Norman Alden, John Ashton, Wilford Brimley, and Kenneth McMillan. Plus, since Bronson is strangely absent from many scenes—he’s either offscreen or simply bored—Harris steals the movie without trying. Borderline is sorta/kinda his movie debut, seeing as how he’d played minor roles on television prior to Borderline, as well as a tiny part in Coma (1978). He makes a hell of an impression, personifying Hotchkiss as a believably cold-blooded automaton since the sketchy script precludes the option of forming a proper characterization.

Borderline: FUNKY

Thieves Like Us (1974)

          Watching Robert Altman’s ’70s movies, I often get the sense of a director who believed his own hype—to say nothing of a critical community and a fan base determined to attribute every move Altman made with great significance. Perhaps because his work on M*A*S*H (1970) hit such a sweet spot of political satire, supporters seemed determined to describe each subsequent Altman film as proof of his genius. For instance, Thieves Like Us has long enjoyed a solid reputation as an insightful character piece about Depression-era crooks whose lives are filled with despair, ignorance, and longing. On the plus side, the movie does indeed fit that description. On the minus side, Thieves Like Us arrived midway through a long string of similar movies, all made in the wake of Bonnie and Clyde (1967). So, while Thieves Like Us is unquestionably made with more artistry than, say, the average Roger Corman-produced Bonnie and Clyde rip-off, the subject matter and themes are so familiar that it’s mystifying why people make a fuss over Thieves Like Us. Because, quite frankly, if the most noteworthy aspects of the picture are Altman’s atmospheric direction and the spirited acting of the quirky cast, Altman did atmosphere better in other films (especially 1971’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller) and all of his pictures feature spirited acting by quirky casts. Oh, well.

          In any event, this beautifully shot but overlong and underwhelming drama follows three crooks who break out of a Mississippi prison and begin a bank-robbing spree. They are Bowie (Keith Carradine), a young romantic; Chicamaw (John Schuck), a hot-tempered thug; and T-Dub (Bert Remsen), an old coot with a big ego and a bad limp. Between jobs, the crooks try to build home lives, though everyone in the universe of these characters knows violent death is inevitable. Making the most of his time outside of jail, T-Dub inappropriately courts a much younger woman to whom he’s related. Meanwhile, Bowie romances Keechie (Shelley Duvall), the no-nonsense daughter of a fellow criminal. In his characteristically subversive fashion, Altman demonstrates only marginal interest in the actual criminality of his characters—most of the robberies happen off-camera, with Altman training his lens on cars and streets while the soundtrack features excerpts from old ’30s radio shows.

          This raises the inevitable question of why Altman bothered to make a movie about a subject he found boring, as well as the question of why it took three screenwriters (Altman, Joan Tewkesbury, Calder Willingham) to adapt Edward Anderson’s novel. And for that matter, why does a movie containing so little narrative material sprawl over 123 minutes? The answer to that last one, of course, is that Altman indulges himself on every level, letting scenes drag on endlessly and also including dozens of his signature slow zoom-in shots. That said, the performances are strange and vivid, with several Altman regulars (Carradine, Duvall, Schuck, Tom Skerritt) joined by Louise Fletcher and others. Each does something at least moderately interesting. Taken strictly on its story merits, Thieves Like Us is so threadbare that it’s best to accept the piece as an exercise in cinematic style. Whether you find the style infuriating or intoxicating will determine the sort of experience you have with Thieves Like Us.

Thieves Like Us: FUNKY

Fast Break (1979)

Comedian Gabe Kaplan enjoyed such broad popularity as the star of the 1975-1979 sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter that he got a few shots at starring in movies, beginning with this mediocre basketball comedy. Kaplan is the picture’s weakest link, however, for while he does well delivering one-liners, his acting is pathetic—in some important scenes, it literally seems as if he’s reading dialogue that he’s never previously encountered from some off-camera cue card. In his defense, he’s much livelier whenever he appears to be ad-libbing, coming across as likeable and natural. But Kaplan was never meant to be a movie star, and a movie star is exactly what Fast Break needed to surmount the challenges of its formulaic script. Kaplan plays David Greene, a New York City deli manager who dreams of becoming a college basketball coach. He applies for jobs at every school imaginable, finally getting a bite from a tiny Nevada institution called Cadwallader University. In a sorta-funny negotiation scene between Greene and Cadwallader’s slippery president, Greene arranges a contract contingent upon beating top school Nevada State at the end of his first season. Greene then recruits three street-trained black players and travels to Nevada, where the players are admitted to the school as students despite poor academic records.  Each player has a reason for participating. Hustler (Harold Sylvester) is dodging an arrest warrant, Preacher (Michael Warren) is running from a shotgun wedding, and Swish (Mavis Washington) is a woman who’s dying for a chance to play professional ball—cue cross-dressing hilarity! (Or not.) The movie does an okay job of sketching these broad characters, and there’s some mild fun to be had once the black players start clashing with the lily-white Nevada community. Alas, it’s all very predictable, and even though supporting players including Sylvester and Warren have solid moments, the sum effect is middling.

Fast Break: FUNKY