The Trackers (1971)

          Apparently Sammy Davis Jr. spent some time looking for a project in which he could costar with John Wayne, leading to development of The Trackers. Somewhere along the way, the project lost Wayne, director Burt Kennedy, and the potential for a theatrical release, instead becoming an inexpensive telefilm directed by small-screen workhorse Earl Bellamy and costarring Ernest Borgnine. It’s probably for the best a glossier version of this project never materialized for two reasons: 1) Davis seems way out of his element playing a formidable lawman, and 2) the plot follows the familiar formula of Black and White characters who overcome racial animus when thrown together by circumstance. As a brisk TV movie with household-name actors, The Trackers makes for a pleasant 74 minutes of disposable entertainment—but stretching this content out to feature length would have brought its shortcomings into sharp focus.
          Sam Paxton (Borgnine) is an amiable rancher with a wife and two adult children until one day when raiders attack his property, kill his son, and kidnap his daughter. Initial efforts to find the evildoers prove fruitless, so Sam writes to a lawman friend who specializes in tracking. Unable to help because of an injury, the friend sends Ezekiel Smith (Davis), which aggravates Sam’s racism. (He fought for the South.) Nonetheless, once Ezekiel demonstrates his prowess, Sam agrees to ride with the Black lawman even as the trail leads closer and closer to the Mexican border. Since there have been roughly a zillion movies about men from different worlds forced to work together, you know how things go from there—Sam and Ezekiel vacillate between bonding and squabbling. In reflective moments, they share stories and find common cause. In combustible moments, they physically assault each other. A few beats are played for mild comic relief, but for the most part The Trackers aims for a serious tone.
          It’s tricky to buy Davis in his role, not just because he seems so modern but also because he’s so physically slight—in one particularly eye-rolling moment, Davis’s character holds his own in an extended brawl with Borgnine’s character even though Borgnine looks as if he could snap Davis’s spine like a twig. Related, Davis’s performance feels artificial and bland compared to the believable intensity Borgnine brings to nearly every scene. As always, Borgnine’s performance style is more about blunt force than nuance, but his animalistic approach suits the role and the storyline. He’s actually quite engaging here, so it’s moderately satisfying to watch his character describe an emotional arc, however predictable and trite.

The Trackers: FUNKY

Against a Crooked Sky (1975)

So innocuous it’s completely forgettable, this family-friendly Western borrows a plot contrivance from the John Ford classic The Searchers (1956), but instead of the moral complexity found in the earlier film, Against a Crooked Sky is filled with clichés and hokum. When the movie begins, spunky young man Sam Sutter (Stewart Petersen) spends a playful afternoon taunting his pretty sister, Charlotte (Jewel Blanch), while she bathes in a pond on the family’s remote homestead. (Yes, this G-rated flick begins with peekaboo shots of an attractive starlet—go figure.) Soon afterward, the Sutter parents leave the kids alone one day, and a gang of Indians invades, knocking Sam unconscious and abducting Charlotte. Guilt-ridden over his failure to protect his sister, Sam ventures into the wilderness on a rescue mission, eventually stumbling across a crusty prospector named Russian (Richard Boone). Soon, these unlikely allies join forces to search for Charlotte, because Russian believes the Indians who took Sam’s sister know the whereabouts of underground gold. Directed with pedestrian competence by TV hack Earl Bellamy, Against a Crooked Sky feels like it’s cobbled together from bits of other movies, right down to the characterization of Russian as an ornery drunk with a soft side—Boone, generally quite entertaining, does his best with the lackluster material, but he’s following in tracks left by Lee Marvin, John Wayne, and myriad others. Worse, his fellow actors in Against a Crooked Sky are generic C-listers of dubious competence. The only other noteworthy figure in the movie is Brenda Venus, a dancer best known for dating writer Henry Miller toward the end of his life and for, well, her noteworthy figure. Plus, even though Against a Crooked Sky runs a brief 89 minutes, it’s a long slog because nothing unique happens.

Against a Crooked Sky: LAME

Flood! (1976) & Fire! (1977)

          After the success of his lavish blockbusters The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974), producer Irwin Allen tried to keep the disaster-movie momentum going, but most of his subsequent flicks ended up getting made for television on pathetic budgets. Therefore, it’s not surprising that Allen refused onscreen credit for producing the first of these also-ran projects, Flood!—the exclaiming title of which promises more excitement than the movie delivers.

          A random gang of actors, most of whom were on their way down the Hollywood ladder at the time, portray residents of a small town called Brownsville, which gets submerged when the local dam succumbs to pressure after heavy rainfall. Since the movie features an idiot politician who refuses to acknowledge the potential for danger until it’s too late, calling Flood! trite would be giving the thing too much credit. Furthermore, the special effects, normally Allen’s hallmark, are laughable. One silly gimmick involves placing a container of water in front of the camera, then shooting over the container toward a nearby building, as if this bargain-basement illusion can persuade viewers they’re beholding a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. Worst of all, the movie is dull and slow, despite the hearty efforts of actors including Richard Basehart, Robert Culp, Barbara Hershey, Martin Milner, Cameron Mitchell, and Poseidon Adventure survivors Carol Lynley and Roddy McDowall.

          Allen’s next TV endeavor, for which he actually did take onscreen credit, nearly earns its exclamation point. Fire! stars Poseidon Adventure veteran Ernest Borgnine, whose campy acting style always enlivens silly movies, and the simplistic plot gets the job done: When a convict on a labor crew working in a mountaintop forest starts a fire to obscure his escape attempt, the conflagration spreads toward a resort town, forcing guests and locals to flee. Meanwhile, easygoing local Sam (Borgnine) sticks around to help with the evacuation because he’s in love with the local hotelier (Vera Miles). The cast is unimpressive (Alex Cord, Patty Duke, Erik Estrada, Donna Mills, Lloyd Nolan), but Allen and his director, Earl Bellamy (who also helmed Flood!), get the formula right in terms of meshing melodrama with nature-gone-wild tragedy. It helps that the movie relies on practical effects, with real buildings and trees burning on camera, rather than chintzy tricks. Fire! is terrible, of course, but it delivers the goods.

          Clearly, however, the bloom was off the rose, so even though Allen oversaw three additional made-for-TV disaster flicks, they suffered ignoble fates. With C-listers like Bert Convy starring, Allen’s production Hanging by a Thread, in which people flash back to their pasts while trapped in a cable car, aired to no acclaim as a two-night miniseries in late 1979. Next, the self-explanatory The Night the Bridge Fell Down was shot in 1979 but not broadcast until 1983. Then, after Allen’s final big-screen disaster movies, The Swarm (1978) and When Time Ran Out . . . (1980), the end of his cycle finally came with Cave-In, a long-winded TV movie about just what the title suggests, which aired in 1983, shortly after The Night the Bridge Fell Down. (All made-for-television titles available at WarnerArchive.com)

Flood!: LAME

Fire!: FUNKY