1980 Week: The Final Countdown

        Happy New Year, and welcome to the final 1980 Week of Every ’70s Movie. (Not to fear, we’re back to regular reviews of movies from the 1970s after this special 1980 Week runs its course.) Here's wishing everyone a healthy and prosperous 2018. Enjoy!

          Basically a second-rate Twilight Zone episode stretched out to feature length, sci-fi thriller The Final Countdown unleashes a hell of a lot of firepower to sustain the viewer’s interest, especially considering how little energy was devoted to the storyline. Beyond a kicky premise, The Final Countdown has nothing to offer on a narrative or thematic level, and the movie’s approach to characterization is a joke. Having said all that, the picture has three solid attributes. First is the basic time-travel notion, second is a cast front-loaded with name-brand actors, and third is an eye-popping array of production values and special effects. The movie looks fantastic, and it contains so many stars working in roles suited to their skills that it seems as if it should eventually gel. It doesn’t. By the time that becomes clear, the movie’s over, so The Final Countdown is entertaining by default. It feels, looks, and sounds like a crackerjack popcorn picture despite a hollow center.

          The flick begins in Pearl Harbor as the modern-day crew of the U.S. Navy supercarrier U.S.S. Nimitz prepares for a routine mission. Much to the consternation of skipper Captain Yelland (Kirk Douglas), the ship’s launch was delayed to await the arrival of civilian Warren Lasky (Martin Sheen), an efficiency expert working for the industrialist who designed technology onboard the Nimitz. Once at sea, Warren clashes with the ship’s top pilot, Commander Dick Owens (James Farantino), a part-time history buff working on a book about the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Nimitz encounters a bizarre electrical storm that blasts the ship with strange phenomena, and then the crew discovers they’ve been transported back in time to Dec. 6, 1941, the day before the Pearl Harbor attack. Proof of their circumstances arrives when the Nimitz crew rescues U.S. Senator Sam Chapman (Charles Durning) from his yacht after the boat gets strafed by Japanese Zeroes flying advance reconnaissance for the invasion fleet. What ensues is the usual what-if jazz stemming from the possibility of using modern weaponry to derail a historical tragedy.

          Unfortunately, the filmmakers never take the premise anywhere, so The Final Countdown is all buildup with very title payoff. Adding to the peculiar quality of the movie is the fact that most of the screen time comprises money shots of the Nimitz, because the filmmakers were given almost complete access to the ship. Long stretches of The Final Countdown feel like excerpts from a training film, with vignettes of planes taking off and landing, sailors running drills, and heavy machinery being operated at breakneck speed. The movie is a nautical gearhead’s wet dream. Douglas, Durning, Farantino, Sheen, and nominal leading lady Katharine Ross are left with little to do except convey wonderment and spout exposition. On the plus side, cinematographer Victor J. Kemper has a blast shooting action footage, the dogfight between jets and Zeroes is memorable, and the FX shots of the strange laser/cloud tunnel appearing during the electrical storm are cool.

The Final Countdown: FUNKY

Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975)

          A lovely story about aging, identity, and romance, offbeat telefilm Queen of the Stardust Ballroom features a multidimensional leading performance by Maureen Stapleton, as well as a touching supporting turn from Charles Durning. Both were nominated for Emmys. Tracking the experiences of a woman in late middle age who struggles to build a new life after the death of her husband, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom explores the tender theme of how difficult it is to reconcile the disappointments of life with the desire to live happily, especially when the passage of time creates limitations. The central conceit involves dance, because the widow discovers new joy by visiting a ballroom where old songs provide the soundtrack, so there’s a certain innate elegance to the piece—among other things, the movie revels in the irony that heavyset Durning was light on his feet. Had the filmmakers presented their story without extraneous adornment, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom would have been a near-perfect gem. Alas, the filmmakers elected to make Queen of the Stardust Ballroom into a musical, with characters talk-singing several original tunes by the songwriting team of Marilyn and Alan Bergman. The songs are fine in and of themselves, but they diminish the movie’s verisimilitude instead of adding, as was undoubtedly the intention, to the story’s magic.

          The narrative begins with Bea Asher (Stapleton) losing her husband and beginning a lonely new life in her empty house in the Bronx. Her adult daughter lives in the suburbs, and her adult son relocates to Los Angeles. Determined to stay in the house where she’s lived for decades, Bea opens a junk shop but remains desperately lonely until a friend recommends she visit the Stardust Ballroom. That’s where Bea meets portly mailman Al Green (Durning). They connect through dancing and eventually become a couple, but problems—including judgment from Bea’s relatives—soon challenge their happiness. Through it all, writer Jerome Kass emphasizes the combination of excitement and fear Bea experiences every time she steps outside her comfort zone. Yet Queen of the Stardust Ballroom isn’t some manipulative piece about being young at heart; rather, it’s a bittersweet meditation on finding fulfillment no matter what compromised form it takes.

          Director Sam O’Steen, an Oscar-nominated film editor who helmed a handful of projects for the big and small screens, applies an unobtrusive style to the film’s storytelling, keeping the focus during dramatic scenes on the expressive faces of his actors and letting wide shots during dance scenes display figures gliding across the ballroom floor while lights bounce off the facets of a glitter ball. More than anything, Queen of the Stardust Ballroom is an actors’ piece, with the deep humanity that Stapleton and Durning bring to their roles infusing every scene. As for the songs, some are more jarring than others, though, to the Bergmans’ credit, Stapleton’s first number, “How Could You Do This To Me?”, sets up her character well. The songs are not the film’s best element, but they’re not egregious.

Queen of the Stardust Ballroom: GROOVY

1980 Week: Die Laughing

          An ambitious but failed attempt at creating a Hitchcock-style caper flick for the teen demo, this overstuffed and underdeveloped comedy was a major misfire for leading man Robby Benson, who also coproduced the picture, in addition to writing and performing several songs for the project. Beloved by a generation of female fans for his blue eyes, glorious hair, and sensitivity, Benson was arguably the best actor of the whole ’70s teen-idol set, but he had a tricky time transitioning to grown-up roles. His turn as a young adult in Die Laughing was a half-hearted attempt at making the leap, because even though Benson’s character gets involved with life-or-death issues, he spends most of his screen time acting like an adolescent goofball.
          Set in San Francisco, the convoluted story begins with a shootout in a college laboratory. The scientist who escapes from the shootout ends up in a taxicab driven by Pinsky (Benson), a wannabe singer-songwriter. Thugs catch up with Pinsky’s cab and kill the scientist, but Pinsky escapes with a mysterious box the scientist had in his possession. Borrowing a page from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Pinsky flees the scene because circumstances give bystanders the false impression that Pinsky committed murder. This set-up begins a farcical chase story. Even as Pinsky evades killers and tries to learn why the scientist was killed (in order to clear his own name), Pinsky juggles changes in his romantic life and a series of high-stakes auditions with his band.

          Had Benson and his collaborators gotten a firm grasp on this material, Die Laughing could have been memorably intriguing and silly, very much in the vein of the Chevy Chase-Golden Hawn hit Foul Play (1978). Alas, Die Laughing director Jeff Wener doesn’t have anything close to the sure hand of Foul Play director Colin Higgins, so Die Laughing spirals out of control almost immediately. Beyond basic questions of logic and motivation, huge chunks of storytelling seem to be missing, and the movie’s kitchen-sink approach to physical and situational comedy comes across as desperate. Among other things, the picture includes a deranged taxi dispatcher who runs his company like a military operation, a shadowy figure who watches events from behind mirrored sunglasses, a trained monkey who somehow memorized the formula for a plutonium bomb, and an epic circus sequence that features Benson falling face first into huge piles of elephant excrement. Weirdest of all is the film’s bad guy, Meuller (Bud Cort). He’s a scrawny nerd with the grandiosity of a Bond villain, a raft of eccentricities, and a penchant for such strangely nonthreatening behaviors as squirting his adversaries with a water pistol.

          Despite the picture’s slick look and vigorous musical score, the story is so discombobulated that it’s hard to follow. Given that Benson and co-screenwriter Jerry Segal’s previous collaboration was the charming romance One on One (1977), it’s shocking that they missed the mark so widely. Similarly, it boggles the mind that costars Peter Coyote, Charles Durning, and Elsa Lanchester are wasted in small roles. Die Laughing is not without its virtues, such as Benson’s energetic performance of the hooky soft-rock tune “All I Want is Love” and the bizarre climax of Cort’s performance, but it’s a mess.

Die Laughing: FUNKY

An Enemy of the People (1978)

          Notwithstanding an uncredited bit part in the 1976 B-movie Dixie Dynamite, Steve McQueen ended a four-year screen hiatus by starring in a film that’s the opposite of the glossy action thrillers that made him famous. An Enemy of the People is an unassuming adaptation of an 1882 Henrik Ibsen play, and McQueen plays an intellectual from behind a mask of glasses, long hair, and a thick beard. It’s hard to tell whether his intention was to destroy his own screen person, to prove he could act, or simply to try something new. Whatever the motivation, the experiment was only partly successful, because An Enemy of the People pushes McQueen far beyond his limited range. Nonetheless, his obvious desire to convey intelligence rather than just coasting on charm is admirable, and the film itself is solid, if a bit antiseptic. So while it’s easy to imagine a “real” actor delivering a scorching performance in the same role, the novelty of seeing McQueen stretch is what keeps An Enemy of the People from feeling like a museum piece.

          As written for the screen by Alexander Jacobs, who employed Arthur Miller’s adaptation of the Ibsen original, the setup is simple. Dr. Thomas Stackman (McQueen) is the doctor in a small town known for a spa that draws water from a nearby spring. The town’s mayor is Thomas’ domineering older brother, Peter (Charles Durning). One day, Thomas receives the results of a chemical analysis that he requested, and the information is damning: The spring water has been poisoned by spiloff from a mill, which means the spa must be closed for public-safety reasons. Thomas tries to spread the bad news, but local residents oppose him, fearful the report will destroy the town’s principal source of revenue. Even Peter betrays Thomas, scheming with the town’s wealthiest citizens to have Thomas branded an “enemy of the people.” All of this is powerful stuff, touching on themes of free speech, greed, and persecution.

          Director George Schaefer does little to disguise the material’s theatrical origins, employing soundstages for both exterior and interior scenes. Similarly, the choice to adorn Durning’s face with massive fake eyebrows and an unconvincing beard was imprudent—and indicative of the production’s overall artificiality. Yet bogus trappings are insufficient to suppress Durning’s extraordinary skill, so he elevates all of his scenes, as does costar Richard Dysart, who plays a sly power-monger. (Leading lady Bibi Andersson’s work is earnest but perfunctory.) All told, the pluses of An Enemy of the People outweigh the minuses, though it’s no surprise the film received an indifferent reception; An Enemy of the People delivers none of the things that fans associate with McQueen, and McQueen’s acting is more noble than noteworthy. Still, the movie is an interesting facet of a great screen career, and the inherent quality of the source material makes the experience of watching An Enemy of the People edifying.

An Enemy of the People: GROOVY

Tilt (1979)

          Even though the main bullet point for any discussion of Tilt should be the brazenness with which cowriter/producer/director Rudy Durand ripped off the classic drama The Hustler (1961), moving the original story about pool into the oh-so-’70s arena of pinball, it’s impossible to discuss any of leading lady Brooke Shields’ early films without marveling at the unpleasant influence of the male gaze. Few starlets have been as overtly sexualized as Shields was in the late ’70s, whether she was modeling jeans in print advertisements or striking sultry poses in feature films. Even her most seemingly innocuous movies, like this one or the equally dodgy Wanda Nevada (1979), feature scenes in which men discuss their sexual attraction to the very young Shields. “Distasteful” is too timid a word. Anyway, setting that aside, Tilt is unimpressive for a number of reasons. The pacing is deadly dull, male lead Ken Marshall gives a performance of numbing vapidity, and the film is loaded with aimless montages set to bland singer-songwriter tunes. Plus, close-ups of little silver balls bouncing around inside pinball machines quickly lose their novelty.

          Yet Tilt has one very important saving grace, which is the presence in the cast of the great Charles Durning. He’s so good in his scenes, elevating clichéd material into passable drama, that he’s almost reason enough to watch the movie.
          The plot begins in Texas, where would-be singer Neil (Marshall) tries to hustle obese pinball wizard Harold (Durning), only to be caught cheating. Neil decamps to California, where he meets teen runaway Tilt (Shields), a preternaturally gifted pinball hustler. Neil lies to Tilt by saying he needs money for recording a music demo, when in fact what he really wants is to employ Tilt’s skills for revenge against Harold. A long and uninteresting sequence of Neil and Tilt traveling from California to Texas follows, but things pick up once Harold and Tilt meet. Durning and Shields share a long scene together, which is thankfully bereft of erotic implications, and watching the scene is like watching Durning give an acting lesson to an eager young student. While Durning decorates his lines with subtle gestures and vocal flourishes, Shields provides a gentle sounding board, occasionally reflecting back some subtle nuance that Durning has injected into the scene. Interesting stuff.

Tilt: FUNKY

The Greek Tycoon (1978)

          There are at least three ways to watch The Greek Tycoon, a fictionalized take on the marriage of presidential widow Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. (Well, four ways, if you count the option of skipping the movie altogether.) Firstly, you can watch the film in abject horror at the crass exploitation of human tragedy. Secondly, you can experience the movie as a campy jet-set melodrama. And thirdly, you can cut the filmmakers a whole lot of slack by enjoying the piece as the downbeat character study of a larger-than-life individual whose money bought him everything except lasting happiness and social respectability.
          Released in 1978, just three years after Onassis’ death, The Greek Tycoon is among the most shameless cinematic endeavors ever “ripped from the headlines.” Most of the sensational aspects of the Kennedy-Onassis relationship are replicated here—the assassination of a president, the arrangement of a multimillion-dollar marriage contract, the luxury of life on a giant yacht, the controversial business deals. And for everything the filmmakers subtract from the source material (notably absent are stand-ins for Kennedy’s children), the team behind The Greek Tycoon adds in something just as salacious, because the movie features a conniving brother, a suicidal ex-wife, and a tempestuous mistress. It’s all exactly as glamorously trashy as it sounds, right down to the quasi-lookalike casting of Jacqueline Bisset as Kennedy and Anthony Quinn as Onassis. (Perpetually tanned movie/TV hunk James Franciscus appears, somewhat inconsequentially, as The Greek Tycoon’s version of JFK.)
          In the film’s storyline, Theo Tomassis (Quinn) first meets Liz Cassidy (Bisset) and her husband, James Cassidy (Franciscus), while James is a Congressman prepping a presidential campaign. Later, after Liz suffers a miscarriage while living in the White House, she leaves D.C. for a recuperative vacation with Theo in Greece. Then, a year after an assassin shoots and kills James, Liz accepts Theo’s marriage proposal, but with a slew of conditions—such as agreeing to share Theo’s bed only 10 nights each month.

          The Greek Tycoon is a cartoonish riff on history, but the production values are pleasant—cinematographer Anthony Richmond shoots the hell out of the film’s gorgeous Greek locations—and Quinn overacts with his usual operatic verve. Conversely, Bisset and costars Edward Albert (as Theo’s son), Charles Durning (as a U.S. politician), and Raf Vallone (as Theo’s brother) play the material straight, which is unwise. Versatile helmer J. Lee Thompson, who years earlier directed Quinn in The Guns of Navarone (1961), orchestrates the whole silly/tacky endeavor with his usual impersonal proficiency.

The Greek Tycoon: FUNKY

North Dallas Forty (1979)

          Although its portrayal of professional American football as a drug-addled, morally dubious free-for-all was undoubtedly jacked up for dramatic effect, North Dallas Forty feels credible from start to finish, and it works equally well as a joke machine and a serious story. Based on a tell-all book by former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent, the picture depicts the odyssey of Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte), a wide receiver for the fictional team the North Dallas Bulls. Aging out of his prime and suffering the repercussions of numerous injuries, Phil’s a smart-ass who makes occasional game-winning catches and relies heavily on his close friendship with good-ol’-boy quarterback Seth Maxwell (Mac Davis). Yet Phil clashes with the Bulls’ autocratic coach, B.A. Strothers (G.D. Spradlin), who expects complete loyalty and rigorous research from his players. As Phil’s position on the team becomes more and more tenuous—he spends a lot of time on the bench—Phil starts to envision a day when football is no longer the most important thing in his life. Helping to motivate this transition are a romance with sexy bluebood Charlotte Caulder (Dayle Haddon) and the realization that Bulls owner Conrad Hunter (Steve Forrest) is willing to risk players’ health for a winning season.

          Screen time in North Dallas Fortty is divided fairly evenly between sports rituals (games, locker-room conferences, practices) and the other parts of Phil’s life. These worlds bleed into each other, so a sense is conveyed that pro players are modern gladiators who rely on dope to get through physically demanding games and then party hard to release tension. Woven into the picture is a melancholy thread of bold men watching their good years slip into the rearview mirror. Furthermore, players lament how middle managers like Emmett Hunter (Dabney Coleman) have replaced old-fashioned values of dignity and sportsmanship with profit-driven agendas. One suspects that the author of the source material stretched things a bit by portraying his onscreen surrogate as the Last Good Man in Football, but the characterization provides an effective viewpoint for observing the strangeness of professional sports.

          Director Ted Kotcheff, always a competent craftsman no matter the genre, excels on and off the field in North Dallas Forty, using atmosphere and pacing to illustrate how frat-boy chaos and merciless competition fuse into the unsustainable lifestyles of top players; Kotcheff also creates harmonious ensemble acting, no easy task. Nolte is at his very best here, prickly and sympathetic all at once, and singer-turned-actor Davis complements him with an amiably pathetic sort of me-first pragmatism. As the villains of the piece, Coleman, Forrest, Spradlin, and the great Charles Durning form a brick wall of corporate resistance, each representing a different color of uptight intolerance. Bo Svenson and real-life NFL player John Matuszak are very funny as a pair of Neanderthal linebackers, and if comely model-turned-actress Haddon gets lost amid the movie’s male energy given her flat acting, her deficiencies are not enough to detract from the picture’s overall effectiveness.

North Dallas Forty: RIGHT ON

Twilight's Last Gleaming (1977)

          While it's easy to see why Twilight's Las Gleaming tanked at the box office during its original release and remains, at best, a minor cult favorite to this day, the movie is a lively addition to the venerable tradition of loopy conspiracy flicks. Featuring an outlandish plot about a crazed U.S. general seizing control of a nuclear-missile launch site in order to force the president to reveal secret documents about America's involvement in Vietnam, the picture is far-fetched in the extreme. It's also ridiculously overlong, sprawling over two and a half hours. Furthermore, gonzo director Robert Aldrich filigrees the story with such unnecessary adornments as split-screen photography, which he uses to simultaneously show the goings-on at the launch site and the reactions of power-brokers in Washington, D.C. Plus, of course, the storyline is downbeat in every imaginable way. For adventurous moviegoers, however, these weaknesses are just as easily interpreted as strengths, particularly when the entertainment value of the acting is taken into consideration.

          Burt Lancaster stars as the general, memorably incarnating a macho idealist who uses duplicity and strategy to manipulate enemies and subordinates alike. Charles Durning, rarely cast as authority figures beyond the level of middle management, makes an unlikely president, his innate likability and the darkness that always simmered beneath his persona offering a complex image of humanistic leadership. Also populating the movie are leather-faced tough guy Richard Widmark, as the officer charged with wresting control of the launch site from the general’s gang; Paul Winfield and Burt Young, as two members of the gang; and reliable veterans Roscoe Lee Browne, Joseph Cotten, Melvyn Douglas, and Richard Jaeckel (to say nothing of Blacula himself, William Marshall). Quite a tony cast for a whackadoodle thriller that borders on science fiction.

          Based on a novel by Walter Wager, Twilight's Last Gleaming represents Aldrich's bleeding-heart storytelling at its most arch—the goal of Lancaster's character is revealing that the U.S. government knew Vietnam was a lost cause but kept fighting, at great cost of blood and treasure, simply to intimidate the Soviet Union. If there's a single ginormous logical flaw in the picture (in fact, there are probably many), it's that Lancaster's character could have achieved his goal through simpler means. But the ballsy contrivance of the picture is that seizing the launch site is a theatrical gesture meant to capture the world's attention. As such, the operatic bloat of Twilight's Last Gleaming reflects the protagonist's modus operandi--like the crusading general, Aldrich swings for the fences. Twilight's Last Gleaming is a strange hybrid of hand-wringing political drama (somewhat in the Rod Serling mode) with guns-a-blazin' action—for better or worse, there's not another movie like this one. Genuine novelty is a rare virtue, and so is the passion with which Aldrich made this offbeat picture.

Twilight's Last Gleaming: GROOVY

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

This movie scared the crap out of me before I even saw the thing. I should explain. When a Stranger Calls is based on an urban legend about a babysitter who keeps receiving calls asking her to “check the children,” only to discover the calls are emanating from the house where she’s working, and that the kids in her care have already been murdered. Around dusk one evening in the mid-’70s, when I was a preteen living in Michigan, I was walking through my suburban neighborhood with a gaggle of fellow youths. One of the older kids in the group told a version of the “check the children” story, adding (of course) that the story really happened, and that it happened nearby. Cue freaked-out little me. For many years afterward, the experience of hearing the urban legend (which I completely believed) and the subsequent release of When a Stranger Calls blurred. Thus, once I finally sat down to watch the flick as an adult, I was prepared for a terrifying ordeal. During the beginning of the picture, I almost got what I expected. The first 15 minutes or so, which dramatizes the whole “check the children” bit, is hella creepy. How could it not be, especially with such a nihilistic climax? Alas, the movie’s energy drains afterwards, because it becomes a drab stalker picture in which the killer (Tony Beckley) torments the babysitter (Carol Kane) once more. Even with the fabulous Charles Durning playing the cop who tries to protect Jill, When a Stranger Calls cannot overcome a lifeless script, and first-time director Fred Walton’s work is competent but painfully unimaginative. Poor Kane, a gifted actress who should have known better than to appear in a psycho thriller, is left floundering through one flat scene after another, unable to showcase her charming idiosyncrasies. All in all, a missed opportunity—and yet for some reason, Durning, Kane, and Walton reteamed for a made-for-TV sequel, When a Stranger Calls Back (1993), and the original picture was remade in 2006, with Camilla Belle in the Kane role.

When a Stranger Calls: LAME

Starting Over (1979)

          James L. Brooks was at the apex of his spectacular run as a TV showrunner when he penned his first theatrical feature, Starting Over. Adapted from a novel by Dan Wakefield, the movie is shot through with the same funny/sad humanism Brooks brought to his award-winning TV shows—The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, etc.—so even though Starting Over features a trio of brand-name actors and was helmed by A-lister Alan J. Pakula, the movie is primarily a showcase for Brooks’ sharp observations about human frailty. (Brooks and Pakula co-produced the picture.)

          Stepping way outside his comfort zone and scoring with a charming performance, Burt Reynolds plays Phil Potter, a magazine writer who is abruptly dumped by his wife, Jessica (Candice Bergen), a beautiful narcissist embarking on a new career as a singer-songwriter. Suddenly thrown back into the dating scene, Phil takes solace in the company of his amiable brother, Mickey (Charles Durning), a touchy-feely psychiatrist. Mickey introduces Phil to divorced schoolteacher Marilyn Holmberg (Jill Clayburgh)—this happens during a funny scene involving mistaken identities and foul language—and they become a couple after a few false starts. However, their second-time-around romance is complicated when Jessica decides she wants Phil back.

          Sensitively examining the complexities of relationships during an era of shifting gender roles, Starting Over is smart and touching, with likeable people riding the amusing currents of confusing situations. Brooks’ dialogue is incisive, and his ability to shift the tone of a scene from ominous to promising and back again is spectacular; although Starting Over is one of Brooks’ lightest efforts, essentially just a romantic comedy made with exemplary skill, the movie is filled with insights and wit.

          It’s also filled with great acting. Reynolds ditches his usual macho swagger to play an everyman trying to find his way through life without hurting anyone—thereby ensuring he causes lots of inadvertent damage—while his female counterparts play to their respective strengths. Bergen revels in humiliating herself for the sake of a joke, especially when giving cringe-inducing performances of her character’s songs, and Clayburgh takes neuroticism to a Woody Allen-esque extreme. The women also create distinctly different personas, so it’s easy to see why Phil’s torn. Durning makes a great foil for Reynolds, and supporting players Frances Sternhagen, Mary Kay Place, and Austin Pendelton enliven minor roles.

Starting Over: GROOVY

Breakheart Pass (1975)

          Though he spent most of the ’70s starring in ultraviolent thrillers, Charles Bronson also displayed a lighter touch in occasional escapist adventures. One of the most diverting of these efforts is Breakheart Pass, adapted by bestselling novelist Alistair MacLean from his own book. Breakheart Pass is a Western thriller gene-spliced with bits and bobs from the espionage and murder-mystery genres, set primarily on a passenger train barreling through the wintry wilds of the Midwest. Governor Fairchild (Richard Crenna) is on board the train to oversee the delivery of medical supplies to a fort that’s suffering an outbreak of diphtheria. During a routine stop in a frontier town, U.S. Marshal Pearce (Ben Johnson) talks his way into passage on the train, bringing along his prisoner, medical lecturer-turned-suspected murderer Deakin (Bronson). Once the train gets moving again, several passengers are mysteriously killed, so Deakin sniffs around and discovers that the diphtheria outbreak is a ruse invented to cover a heinous conspiracy to which the governor is party. So, in the classic mode, Deakin has to figure out whom he can trust as he smokes out the bad guys, all while racing the clock before the train arrives at a rendezvous with destiny.

          Breakheart Pass is enjoyably overstuffed with manly-man excitement: The picture has bloodthirsty criminals, fistfights atop moving trains, marauding Indians, revelations of secret identities, shootouts in the snowy wilderness, unexpected double-crosses, and even a spectacular crash. As with most of MacLean’s stories, credibility takes a backseat to generating pulpy narrative, so trying to unravel the story afterward raises all sorts of questions about logic and motivation. Still, Breakheart Pass is thoroughly enjoyable in a cartoonish sort of way. Veteran TV director Tom Gries keeps scenes brisk and taut, and he benefits from a cast filled with top-notch character players, including Charles Durning, David Huddleston, Ed Lauter, Bill McKinney, and others. As for the leading players, Bronson presents a likeable version of macho nonchalance, while Crenna essays his oily character smoothly. Predictably, the female lead is Bronson’s real-life wife, Jill Ireland, who costarred in a dozen of her husband’s ’70s pictures.

Breakheart Pass: GROOVY

The Hindenburg (1975)

          A generation before James Cameron put Kate and Leo aboard the Titanic, transforming a historical tragedy into the colorful backdrop for a silly fictional story, the makers of The Hindenburg used a similar gimmick for their movie about history’s most famous airship disaster. Based on a speculative book by Michael M. Mooney, the picture presents one of the sexiest theories for why the famous zeppelin crashed while docking in New Jersey after a 1937 transatlantic voyage from Nazi Germany, where the ship was considered a powerful symbol of Third Reich accomplishment. According to the movie, anti-Nazi conspirators planned to destroy the ship after the passengers were safely away, but then a perfect storm of circumstance led to the deaths of 36 people.

          Completely missing every opportunity presented by this edgy storyline, The Hindenburg is a slow-moving bore filled with drab subplots, trite characterizations, and woefully little action. Using a tired Agatha Christie-type structure, the movie introduces Col. Franz Ritter (George C. Scott), a German pilot sent by the Nazi high command to spy on crew and passengers because of a bomb threat that was issued prior to the ship’s departure from Germany. (In typical disaster-movie fashion, every sensible person in the story recommends delaying the trip, but the expeditious high command insists on a timely liftoff.)

          Once the Hindenburg is airborne, Ritter pokes around the lives of various people, looking for clues of bad intent, so the picture quickly falls into a clichéd cycle of melodramatic vignettes that are supposed to make the audience wonder (and care) who’s going to live and who’s going to die. Unfortunately, none of the characters is interesting—not the German countess who shares romantic history with Ritter; not the songwriter and clown performing anti-Hitler routines; not the twitchy crewman whom the audience can identify as the saboteur the first time he appears onscreen. It doesn’t help that the supporting cast almost exclusively comprises character actors: William Atherton, Robert Clary, Charles Durning, Richard Dysart, Burgess Meredith, Roy Thinnes, and Gig Young are all solid performers, but they’re not exactly the mid-’70s A-list. (Lending a pinch more marquee value is Anne Bancroft.)

          The film’s production values are impressive-ish, including vivid re-creations of the Hindenburg’s interiors, and some of the flying shots feature handsome old-school effects, but director Robert Wise’s dramaturgy is so turgid that even these quasi-spectacular elements are for naught. Viewers who soldier through the whole movie are rewarded with a 20-minute climax featuring a detailed re-enactment of the Hindenburg disaster, which Wise presents in black-and-white so he can intercut his footage with newsreel shots of the real Hindenburg. This laborious denouement offers thrills, but it’s all too little, too late.

          If nothing else, the filmmakers get points for the sheer nerve of ending this bloated whale of a movie with vintage audio from the famous “Oh, the humanity!” radio broadcast: The last thing viewers hear before the credits is a voice announcing, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.” Cinematic self-awareness?

The Hindenburg: LAME

Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972)

          With its focus on low-level drug peddlers and “tune in, turn on, drop out” college culture, the lengthily titled Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues could easily have been made in the mid-’60s instead of the early ’70s, and the picture’s approach to characterization is so Spartan that the people in the movie feel like counterculture-era abstractions instead of flesh-and-blood individuals. That’s not a bad thing, however, since Dealing is like an injection of pure period vibe, from the pervasive theme of lawlessness to the happenin’ lingo to the potent male fantasy of a with-it hippie chick who grooves on the hero’s scene.

          Dealing isn’t deep or provocative, and it isn’t really about anything except the vague implications of a contraband-fueled adventure in the anything-goes ’70s, but it’s atmospheric, attractively shot, and loaded with far-out tunes (including drop-the-needle pop cuts and an eclectic score by Michael Small). Stripped of any aspirations to redeeming social value, the movie is like a sleek catalog of vintage textures.

          The story was adapted from a novel by “Michael Douglas,” the shared pseudonym for bestselling author Michael Crichton and his brother, Douglas Crichton. Peter (Robert F. Lyons) is a directionless Harvard law student not particularly interested in his studies. He regularly makes cross-country trips to fetch dope for his pal John (John Lithgow), an urbane drama teacher/dealer with a talent for coldly exploiting young people. In Berkeley for a connection, Peter meets pretty druggie Susan (Barbara Hershey), and before long, they get together in a recording studio, bonding over a few lines of coke and a bit of the old in-out. (He playfully introduces himself to Susan as “Lucifer,” having rocked out to the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” on his Buck Rogers-looking stereo headset earlier in the movie.)

          Eventually, once Peter makes his way back to Boston, he persuades John to hire Susan for a run so she can join her new lover on the East Coast. The plan goes awry when Susan gets busted at Logan Airport by a corrupt detective, Murphy (Charles Durning), who swipes half her cargo. Realizing the cop stole drugs, John and Peter try to hustle Murphy in order to get Susan released, and this endeavor soon evolves into full-on intrigue: After John bails when the danger level gets too high, Peter finds himself stuck between corrupt cops and vengeful drug dealers in a violent showdown. The movie ambles through mellow situations until Peter’s predicament percolates, at which point a fair amount of suspense develops, and the big finish in a snow-covered nature preserve is exciting and weird.

          Although journeyman TV actor Lyons is a weak link, the stiffness of his performance is partially negated by the fact that his character is a cipher, and the rest of the cast is strong. Hershey comes across well in a mostly ornamental role; Durning is appropriately insidious; and Lithgow’s amusing characterization runs the gamut from perverse to pathetic. Adding considerably to the movie’s offbeat appeal is the complete absence of sympathetic characters—Peter and Susan are more appealing than the killers and sleazebags they encounter, but they’re still losers, which makes them unique choices to occupy the romantic center of a Hollywood movie. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues: GROOVY

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

          Riveting from its first frame to its last and infused with equal measures of humor and tragedy, Dog Day Afternoon is a masterpiece of closely observed character dynamics and meticulous dramaturgy. It also contains two of the most powerful performances of the ’70s, from leading man Al Pacino and co-star John Cazale, to say nothing of one of the decade’s most memorable moments, the “Attica, Attica!” bit in which Pacino riles up a crowd gathered around the movie’s central location by invoking a then-recent tragedy at a New York prison.

          The story is a riff on a real-life bank robbery that was comitted by crooks with unusual motivations. Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik, an intense ne’er-do-well who recruits his dim-witted buddy, Sal (Cazale), to help with a brazen heist in broad daylight. The robbery quickly evolves into a hostage situation as cops, led by Sgt. Moretti (Charles Durning), congregate outside the bank. Then, as we watch various communications between Sonny and the outside world, we discover why he planned the heist: for money to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. So, while the anxious afternoon darkens into an excruciating evening, viewers develop deep compassion for Sonny’s peculiar plight—on top of everything else, he’s married to a woman and doesn’t want to hurt her, even though his heart belongs to Leon (Chris Sarandon).

          Working from a Frank Pierson’s Oscar-winning script and guided by Sidney Lumet’s sure directorial hand, Pacino reveals dimension upon dimension of his offbeat character, never once making a cheap ploy for audience sympathy; the actor illustrates such deep and profound emotional truths, through behavior and dialogue and physical carriage, that Sonny feels like a living and breathing human being in every scene. The performance is not for every taste (the Method-y screaming and general demonstrativeness is a turn-off for some viewers), but it’s impossible not to recognize Pacino’s work as some of the most impassioned and meticulous performance ever committed to film.

          Cazale, the haunted-looking Bostonian who died at age 42 after appearing in just five films (all of which were nominated for Oscars as Best Picture), is terrific as Sal, a slow everyman who can barely grasp what’s happening at any given moment, much less the future implications of his actions; in the classic moment, he’s asked what country he would like to flee to after the robbery, and he says, “Wyoming.” Durning offers humanistic support as a cop trying to keep a bad situation from exploding, Sarandon is funny and sensitive during his brief appearance as Sonny’s lover, and a young Lance Henriksen shows up toward the end of the movie.

          But it’s almost completely Pacino’s show, or, more accurately, Pacino’s and Lumet’s. As they did to an only slightly lesser degree on Serpico (1973), the two men lock into each other’s creative frequencies perfectly—Lumet creates complex, lifelike situations to frame Pacino’s emotional explorations, and Pacino fills Lumet’s frames with as much vitality as they can contain. Detractors might argue that the movie drags a bit in the middle, but because each scene enriches our understanding of Sonny’s inner life and his strange predicament, complaining about too much of a good thing seems petty—few movies offer as much in the way of believable pathos and varied tonalities as Dog Day Afternoon, and few movies sustain such a high level of artistry and craft for the entire running time. Exciting, frightening, moving, surprising, and unique, Dog Day Afternoon is as good as it gets in ’70s cinema.

Dog Day Afternoon: OUTTA SIGHT

Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976)

          Despite a fantastic cast, the would-be farce Harry and Walter Go to New York falls flat because only a handful of the movie’s myriad one-liners, sight gags, and slapstick routines actually elicit laughter. A failed attempt to blend the Vaudevillian style of silent-era comedy with the elaborate con-man plotting of The Sting (1973), the ineptly written but lavishly produced picture follows a pair of nincompoop 19th-century crooks who fall into the orbit of a world-famous master criminal, then try to rob a bank before the criminal gets there first.
          James Caan and Elliot Gould play Harry and Walter, small-time robbers who get caught picking pockets during one of their low-rent song-and-dance routines. Meanwhile, gentleman thief Adam Worth (Michael Caine) gets tossed into the same jail as our heroes, but Adam’s so rich that he gets a private cell appointed with velvet curtains and silver table settings. Harry and Walter discover—and accidentally destroy—Adam’s prized blueprints for an ambitious bank job, then escape and get enmeshed with activist reporter Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton). Through convoluted circumstances, Harry, Walter, and Lissa end up trying to rob the bank the same night as Adam’s gang, leading to silliness like Harry and Walter stalling for time with an improvised musical number.

          As photographed in a nostalgic glow by Laszlo Kovacs, Harry and Walter looks great, and the leads are complemented by a gaggle of ace supporting players, including Val Avery, Ted Cassidy, Charles Durning, Jack Gilford, Carol Kane, Lesley Ann Warren, and Burt Young. Unfortunately, the material just isn’t there. The characters are underdeveloped, the comedic situations don’t percolate, the dialogue doesn’t sparkle, and the narrative conceit that the idiotic Harry and Walter keep stumbling into good fortune feels like a cheat. Still, it’s impossible not to find commendable elements with this much talent involved, and those high points range from the intentionally awful musical passages featuring Caan and Gould to Caine’s peerless delivery of sardonic dialogue. Providing one of the movie’s few real laughs, he dismisses the heroes by explaining that “They’re not oafs—they would require practice to become oafs.”

Harry and Walter Go to New York: FUNKY

The Muppet Movie (1979)

          True story: When The Muppet Movie came out in 1979, I fell so completely in love with the film that I went to see it every day for a week. Admittedly, I was 10 and therefore just about the perfect age for the picture, but still, there’s a reason the first cinematic outing of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and the rest of Jim Henson’s Muppets got under my skin. Sweet but tart enough to avoid being cloying, the story unfolds like a classic Hollywood fable in the Frank Capra tradition—at the beginning of the picture, Kermit is just another frog playing a banjo in a swamp until a vacationing talent agent (Dom DeLuise) informs Kermit he could entertain millions of people if he went to Tinseltown.

          And that, right there, is what kills me about The Muppet Movie: It’s a story about the one noble reason for making films, which is using the cinematic medium to enrich the lives of others. As someone who has spent his entire professional life involved with movies, I lose sight of that beautiful idea every day, and I would never pretend that all of my reasons for embracing a cinematic existence are admirable. Nonetheless, somewhere inside me is the 10-year-old kid who connected with Kermit’s dream, and we could all do worse than remembering who we wanted to be before life made us who we actually are, with all of our petty flaws.

          If all of this sounds awfully high-minded since the subject at hand is a family comedy starring a bunch of felt puppets, it’s useful to explain that the surfaces of The Muppet Movie delighted my younger self as much as the heart of the film touched me. Brightly colored, fast-moving, sly, and tuneful, The Muppet Movie is a musical comedy alternating between charming dramatic vignettes (oh, Miss Piggy, the obstacles you place in your own path), silly comedy sketches (Gonzo taking a ride on a handful of balloons), and toe-tapping songs written by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher. (As if penning the gorgeous main theme “Rainbow Connection” wasn’t enough, the duo also contribute fun numbers like the jaunty road anthem “Movin’ Right Along” and the Electric Mayhem’s funky jam, “Can You Picture That?”)

          The story about Kermit slowly gathering a surrogate family during his trip to Hollywood is fun (why wouldn’t Fozzie Bear drive a Studebaker?), and the stop-and-start romance between Kermit and Miss Piggy offers an amusing satire of overwrought romantic melodrama. The bad-guy business with evil restauranter Doc Hopper (Charles During) is genius, because what better nemesis for Kermit than a fast-food titan who operates a chain selling frog’s legs? (During is wonderfully flamboyant, and Austin Pendleton is a hoot as his morally conflicted sidekick.) The movie regularly drifts into loopy territory, like the climax in which Keith Moon-inspired muppet Animal plays a bigger role than usual, and on top of everything, the movie is stuffed with amazing cameos by comedy stars and other celebrities. Of special note are Mel Brooks as a nutjob German scientist, Steve Martin as an obnoxious waiter (“Oh, may I?”), and Orson Welles as a Hollywood mogul.

          Decades after my weeklong immersion in The Muppet Movie, I still find it as clever, entertaining, and heartfelt as ever—if not more so, since the intervening years have revealed how rare it is to find a genuine celebration of decency anywhere in the cinema. I doubt I’ll ever tire of listening to Henson’s deeply felt statement.

The Muppet Movie: RIGHT ON

Sisters (1973)

          After cutting his teeth with a series of irreverent comedies that received marginal releases, director Brian De Palma found his calling as a fearmaker—and his first significant box-office success—by merging his lurid fixations with a cinematic style borrowed from Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. An unnerving thriller about a reporter who believes she’s discovered that her docile neighbor has a homicidal twin sister, Sisters owes a huge debt to Hitch (right down to the use of composer Bernard Hermann), but it’s also an impressive demonstration of De Palma’s storytelling gifts. As the author of the film’s original story and the co-writer of its script, De Palma has his fingerprints all over this movie, and Sisters sets the template for his many subsequent sexually charged suspense flicks.

          The story is simple: Staten Island-based investigative reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) happens to look across the street during a frenzied murder in the apartment of French-Canadian model Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder). Collier calls the police, but after a skeptical cop (Dolph Sweet) fails to discover any evidence, Collier enlists a private detective (Charles Durning) to continue the investigation. The deeper Collier goes down the rabbit hole of her neighbor’s strange world, however, the more danger Collier invites. As in all of De Palma’s suspense flicks, the story is less important than mood and theme. With Hermann’s effectively bombastic score creating uncomfortable degrees of tension, De Palma sketches a world of biological abnormalities, dysfunctional sexuality, and rampant conspiracies; he also carefully sets the stage so Collier exists in a milieu of logic and rationality until circumstances quite literally land her in an insane asylum.

          Produced for drive-in suppliers American International, Sisters is brisk and sensationalistic, with plenty of gore and a smattering of nudity, yet it’s also finely crafted inasmuch as De Palma designs each frame with an architect’s precision. Despite dodgy cinematography and set decoration (De Palma later benefited from larger budgets and longer shooting schedules), editor Paul Hirsch’s wonderfully methodical pacing makes the most of the footage. So even though De Palma’s later suspense pictures are more visually impressive, few of them can match the no-nonsense economy of Sisters.

Sisters: GROOVY