Hail (1972)

          Toward the end of its scant running time, Hail resolves into a serviceable satire of Nixon-era political paranoia. Getting there, however, requires slogging through lots of meandering and unfunny material. Produced and released before the Watergate scandal, Hail imagines a presidential administration fraught with intrigue because the commander-in-chief is a nutter who thinks all his subordinates are out to get him. The joke, of course, is that they are out to get him, hence the main storyline about a cabinet secretary (Richard B. Shull) drifting from closeness with the president to conspiring against him. The main subplot illustrates why the secretary loses faith—amid growing demonstrations by longhaired young people, the president forms a nationwide police force and imprisons activists in concentration camps. The jarring integration of this heavy material means Hail is dark comedy at best, a tonal quagmire at worst. Yet there’s something almost nobly roughshod about Hail. One can admire what the film attempts while acknowledging how infrequently it succeeds in the endeavor.

          Hampered by an insufficient budget and a first-time director (this is Fred Levinson’s only movie), Hail is disorganized and sluggish. Sequences featuring officials either working with or scheming against the president are coherent in a blunt-instrument sort of way, which is to say the comic intentions come across even when jokes fail to land. Scenes of hippies planning armed revolt lack the same clarity, since it’s unclear whether the film means to celebrate or lampoon the peace-and-love crowd. Not helping matters is a tendency toward overly broad performances. While Schull does well expressing his ambivalent character’s queasiness and Dick O’Neill is appropriately craven as an opportunistic attorney general, Dan Resin is wholly forgettable as the president, and Gary Sandy—years before WKRP in Cincinnati—borders on camp while playing a hippie who masquerades as a soldier. (Watch for Carol Kane in a tiny nonspeaking role.) Still, even if the whole thing spins out of control with overheated allusions to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar—it was the ‘70s, man—it’s possible to see how a stronger director could have done more with the script by Phil Dusenberry and Larry Spiegel. In flashes, Hail almost works.

Hail: FUNKY

Some of My Best Friends Are . . . (1971)

          A year after The Boys in the Band (1970) broke ground with its serious exploration of gay culture, representing a change from previous films in which homosexual characters were coded and/or marginalized, the low-budget ensemble piece Some of My Best Friends Are . . . explored similar terrain—with similar difficulty. Whereas The Boys in the Band was adapted from a well-regarded play and filmed by a promising new director (William Friedkin), Some of My Best Friends Are . . . was a screen original from first-time writer-director Mervyn Nelson, who only made one subsequent picture. His inexperience shows in every frame. The disparity in their technical polish aside, the films have interesting parallels. Some members of the LGBTQ community deride The Boys in the Band for over-the-top characterizations and a generalized theme of self-loathing, as if being gay is a curse. Some of My Best Friends Are . . . now plays gay film festivals somewhat regularly as a camp classic. Which is to say that if the folks behind either picture aspired to get early ’70s gay culture “right,” they were not fully successful—one project struck viewers as too heavy, and the other struck viewers as too silly. Seen today, The Boys in the Band is frustrating but intense and sharp, whereas Some of My Best Friends Are . . . is a bit of a mess.

          Set on New Year’s Eve in the Blue Jay Bar, a gay nightclub in Manhattan, the film tracks several gay men and their straight friends. In one poignant storyline, a nervous waiter named Phil (Nick De Noia) awaits the arrival of his blind date, Tim (Dick O’Neill), who believes Phil is a woman, since they’ve only met by phone. That storyline conveys something touching about the risks gay men in the early ’70s took when reaching outside their social circles for potential romantic partners, but De Noia’s cartoony performance diminishes the pathos. Far less interesting are scenes involving European ski instructor Michel (Uva Harden), who delivers this florid line in dubious English: “Facing death does not take courage—but two men making a life together does!” Again, right idea, wrong tone. And so it goes throughout the movie, which, incidentally, features three future TV stars. Gil Gerard, later to become Buck Rockers, plays a gay man who presents straight; Rue McLanahan, pre-Golden Girls, incarnates a clichéd “fag hag”; and Gary Sandy, a few years away from WKRP in Cincinatti, plays a hustler who experiences a major drug freakout. The other notable in the cast is Warhol-associated drag queen Candy Darling, who, no surprise, portrays a drag queen.

Some of My Best Friends Are . . . : FUNKY

House Calls (1978)

          A comedic piffle elevated by smart dialogue and a terrific cast, House Calls is easily one of the best romantic comedies of the ’70s. Charley Nichols (Walter Matthau) is a recently widowed surgeon who saves a patient, English divorcée Ann Atkinson (Glenda Jackson), from the incompetent ministrations of Charley’s senile boss, Dr. Amos Willoughby (Art Carney). As Charley endures the repercussions of treating another physician’s patient without permission, he also savors his newfound swinger’s lifestyle until he realizes that Ann has gotten under his skin. Ann’s thorny intelligence not only rouses Charley from his midlife-crisis stupor but also emboldens him to confront Amos, who has gotten so addled he’s endangering the lives of patients.

          Despite murky literary origins (four writers worked on the script, which was adapted from a French novel), House Calls is brisk and smooth, throwing credible obstacles between the protagonists and their inevitable happily-ever-after destiny; when it’s really crackling, the movie comes close to the frothy frizz of classic romantic comedy from the ’30s, but with a modern, liberated-woman spin. And though some might question the casting of Matthau as a romantic lead, since overpowering handsomeness was never one of his virtues, the filmmakers weave Matthau’s wiseass humor into the persona of his character, depicting how easily he charms every woman he meets. Jackson matches Matthau’s pithiness perfectly, offering a feminist complement to his macho swagger, and the filmmakers do a fine job of articulating Charley’s realization that companionship trumps casual sex.

          Watching Matthau and Jackson work together is extremely pleasurable, because they’re both so confident and loose; in particular, their physical-comedy scene of trying to figure out whether a couple can copulate while each has one foot on the floor is a delightful demonstration of their vanity-free commitment to meeting any scene’s demands. Carney, at the peak of his terrific late-career revival, is funny and formidable as a man clinging to power because letting go would involve admitting he’s elderly. Additionally, several supporting players contribute fine work: Richard Benjamin gets in a few zingers as Charley’s younger colleague, Candice Azzara is droll as a pragmatic gold digger from Noo Yawk, and the always-entertaining Dick O’Neill is memorably exasperated as a hospital executive doomed to clean up messes created by Carney’s character.

House Calls: GROOVY

The Jerk (1979)

          After becoming a household name with bestselling albums and blockbuster TV appearances, comedian Steve Martin conquered the big screen with The Jerk, which he starred in and co-wrote. Instead of merely recycling audience-favorite routines, Martin and co-writer Carl Gottlieb created a proper narrative for the movie, which gives The Jerk a measure of artistic integrity. Moments like an out-of-nowhere kung fu scene break the mood, but for the most part, The Jerk is a sweet little story about an innocent adrift in the big, bad world: Think Forrest Gump with more deliberate punch lines.
          The absurdist vibe is established in the opening scene, during which drunken bum Navin Johnson (Martin) declares: “I was born a poor black child.” The movie then flashes back to the homestead where Navin grew up as part of a happy but impoverished black family. Shocked to discover he was adopted (“You mean, I’m gonna stay this color?!!”), Navin leaves home to find his destiny. A job at a gas station goes awry when a nutjob sniper picks Navin’s name out of the phone book while looking for random victims, and a job with a carnival veers off-course when Navin becomes the boy toy of a psychotic female daredevil. Eventually, Navin falls in love with soft-spoken Marie (Bernadette Peters), and then he learns that a gadget he invented is a runaway success. Wealth doesn’t bring Navin happiness, however, and the sudden loss of his unexpected riches sends him to skid row, bringing viewers back to a reprise of the opening scene.
          Merely reciting the plot does little to suggest the movie’s wall-to-wall whimsy. Martin’s dialogue is filled with offbeat touches, like his character’s predilection for “Pizza in a Cup” and his belief that a thermos is an appropriate gift for a paramour. Martin spoofs Navin’s ignorance relentlessly, so viewers get gems like the letter Navin writes home to his parents: “I think next week I’ll be able to send some more money as I may have extra work—my friend Patty promised me a blow job.”
          Some of the comedy is forced, like the kung fu scene, but generally, director Carl Reiner lets humor bubble up organically from the interplay between cynical modern life and simple Navin. Better still, the love scenes between Marie and Navin are gentle and sweet, foreshadowing Martin’s deft touch with romantic stories later in his career. Reiner, himself a stone-cold comedy pro, gives Martin room to spin his comic webs. In one particularly effective scene, Peters feigns sleep during a two-shot that runs for several minutes while Martin performs an elaborate routine; the sense that Reiner creates of silly things happening in otherwise realistic setting accentuates Martin’s irreverence.
          Ultimately, The Jerk is a bit too lightweight, because when the movie goes for pathos toward the end of the storyline, the transition doesn’t feel natural. However, Martin’s charm and wit are irresistible; Peters is a fine light comedienne (and a voluptuous knockout); and the supporting cast includes pros like Mabel King, Bill Macy, Jackie Mason, M. Emmett Walsh, Dick O’Neill, and Richard Ward. The Jerk is merely the opening act of Martin’s beloved screen career, but it’s also 104 minutes of silly fun with heart.

The Jerk: GROOVY