A Little Romance (1979)

          It’s not hard to understand why the whimsically titled A Little Romance has earned a devoted following over the years—depicting the adventures of two lovestruck teenagers cavorting across Europe, the picture treats young people with respect, whereas most Hollywood movies about teenagers tend to infantilize the experience of adolescence. Moreover, the film reflects wish fulfillment on many levels, from the concept of discovering one’s soulmate early in life to the notion that children can have international escapades without being preyed upon by strangers. Plus, of course, there’s the highly appealing vibe of the picture, which emanates from Pierre-William Glenn’s silky photography and Georges Delerue’s Oscar-winning score. When the movie clicks, it’s charming. Alas, A Little Romance suffers several fundamental flaws—among other things, the story is bloated, meandering, and unbelievable.

          The picture opens in Paris, where 13-year-old Daniel (Thelonious Bernard) lives a peculiar existence. His father is a sleazy cab driver who rarely provides traditional parental guidance, so Daniel finds solace at the movies. Therefore, when he stumbles across a Hollywood film shoot while on a class field trip, Daniel sneaks onto the set to watch the action. He’s beguiled by the presence of veteran actor Broderick Crawford (who plays himself in A Little Romance), but then his head is turned when he meets 13-year-old American Lauren (Diane Lane). She’s the daughter of a crew member, but she’d rather read books than watch a film being made. Impressing each other with precocious patter, Daniel and Lauren arrange to meet again, and before long the pair befriends Julius (Laurence Olivier), an aging man of mystery. As the contrived and convoluted plot unfolds, Daniel and Lauren run away from Paris with Julius as their escort, because Daniel and Lauren become infatuated with the idea of kissing under a famous bridge in Venice. According to Julius, a romantic myth says that lovers who perform this ritual will be together forever. A Little Romance also contains a sizable subplot about Lauren’s mother (Sally Kellerman), who is married, having an affair with the director of the film-within-the-film that’s shooting in Paris.

          Cowritten and directed by the great George Roy Hill (who makes wink-wink references to his past by including clips from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting), this picture has precious little to do with human reality. Daniel and Lauren debate philosophy with the sophistication of college professors, the Julius character is the sort of gentleman con artist who exists only in fanciful fiction, and the thematic heart of the movie—innocent children teach world-weary adults lessons about love—is optimistic but trite. Viewed simply as straightforward narrative, this movie is annoying, overlong, and twee. Viewed as a fable, however, A Little Romance is filled with lovely textures and warm sentiments. Delerue’s gentle guitar melodies create a comforting mood, and the young leading actors give appropriately guileless performances. (This was Lane’s first movie.) So, even if Crawford’s presence is inconsequential, even if Kellerman does her usual haughty number, and even if Olivier delivers one of his campier late-career performances, A Little Romance still manages to beguile—albeit only intermittently.

A Little Romance: FUNKY

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

          Not many films merge existential ruminations, horrific re-creations of World War II tragedies, satirical vignettes about the domestic life of a suburban optometrist, and surrealistic sci-fi interludes featuring a topless starlet abducted by aliens. So it goes in Slaughterhouse-Five, the elegantly made but emotionally distant adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s most celebrated novel. Very much like Mike Nichols’ film of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970), another impressionistic riff on World War II, George Roy Hill’s film of Slaughterhouse-Five boldly attempts to translate uniquely literary devices into cinematic language. And very much like Nichols’ Catch-22, Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five boasts a handful of effective moments amid a whole lot of eclectic sprawl. In fact, Hill conveys certain elements of Slaughterhouse-Five exquisitely, such as the imaginative visual transitions that bounce the story back and forth between different time periods.

          Alas, bravura editing is not nearly enough to compensate for the way Vonnegut Jr.’s fantastical storyline is pulled down to earth by the oppressive realism of Hollywood filmmaking. Very specifically, the fact that very young leading man Michael Sacks plays his character in many stages of life, all the way to late middle age, forefronts artifice. Furthermore, because Hill creates believable images during outlandish scenes, he robs Vonnegut Jr.’s metaphors of their ability to percolate in the reader’s mind. Everything feels numbingly literal. And, of course, because Hill and screenwriter Stephen Geller dropped whole elements of the source novel, it’s hard to imagine this film fully satisfying either fans of the book (who could rightfully lament alterations) and newcomers (who could rightly claim befuddlement at how the reality-based and surrealistic aspects of the movie are supposed to converge).

          In any event, the movie concerns Billy Pilgrim (Sacks), whom we meet as an aging man living alone in the ’burbs following his wife’s death. Billy claims to be “unstuck in time,” so he flashes back to periods including World War II, when he was a POW in the German city of Dresden during its merciless firebombing by the Allies. (Over 100,000 people were killed in the attack.) The movie tracks Billy’s wartime interactions with fellow POWs including Edgar Derby (Eugene Roche), a well-meaning father figure, and Paul Lazzaro (Ron Leibman), a smart-mouthed psychotic. Other threads of the story include Billy’s relationship with his wife and kids, as well as Billy’s abduction by aliens to a distant planet, where he and starlet Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine) are put on display like zoo animals, expected to cohabitate (and copulate) so the aliens can study them.

          Hill shoots every scene of Slaughterhouse-Five beautifully, even if some aspects of the picture undercut his skillful direction. Sacks’ uninteresting non-performance is the biggest flaw, and it’s disheartening that the movie becomes, in its final scenes, a bit of a feel-good homily. Still, Slaughterhouse-Five is fundamentally ambitious and artistic, so there’s a strong temptation to seek hidden virtues, and, indeed, many viewers have found much to praise. The picture won the Jury Prize at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Golden Globe and a WGA Award. The lingering question, however, is whether Slaughterhouse-Five actually does justice to Vonnegut Jr.’s novel—or, for that matter, whether it truly succeeds as a filmic statement.

Slaughterhouse-Five: FUNKY

The Great Waldo Pepper (1975)

          Director George Roy Hill was such a fervent airplane enthusiast that he persuaded two of his most acclaimed collaborators, screenwriter William Goldman and star Robert Redford, to join him in making this passion project celebrating the daredevils who flew biplanes at exhibitions across the country during the barnstorming era. (The trio’s previous joint venture, released in 1969, was a little something called Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.) Set in the 1920s, the picture focuses on Waldo Pepper (Redford), a World War I veteran whose military service was unspectacular. Driven to prove he’s a world-class flyer, Pepper becomes a barnstormer, performing wild stunts for spectacle-hungry crowds that are equally thrilled by crashes and triumphs.

          During this early stretch of the film, when Pepper builds a friendship with fellow flyer Axel Olsson (Bo Svenson) and struggles through a fraught romance with Maude (Margot Kidder)—who hates the risks Waldo takes—Hill achieves two impressive storytelling feats. First and most obviously, he captures the joy of flight with terrific aerial photography. Secondly and more subtly, he captures the lonely quality of men who follow an inner call toward personal achievement. Redford is the perfect actor for communicating this notion; an iconoclast who has spent decades cultivating personal mystique, Redford understands self-definition.

          Considering that Hill could easily have translated his fascination with barnstorming into a lightweight adventure film—in addition to Butch Cassidy, he and Redford made the endearing 1973 romp The Sting (which was not written by Goldman), so frothy entertainment is undoubtedly what audiences expected from this particular paring of actor and star—it’s impressive that Hill elected to go so dark. In fact, some might argue he went too dark. Goldman has often told the story of how a preview audience turned on the movie during a shocking scene involving Pepper and a terrified, wing-walking stuntwoman (Susan Sarandon). Yet viewed beyond the context of its initial release, when audiences wanted Redford to play only golden gods, The Great Waldo Pepper is a nuanced and thoughtful film that unflinchingly depicts the costs of individualism.

          As the story progresses, for instance, Pepper endures a string of accidents that cost him his pilot’s license and force him to pursue work as a movie stuntman under an alias. Goldman’s writing excels in this last movement of the picture, since Goldman has often said the theme that touches him most is “stupid courage”—boldness in the face of certain doom. The Great Waldo Pepper isn’t a perfect picture, with some of its episodes connecting more strongly than others, but it’s a unique celebration of one filmmaker’s romantic visions, seen through the prism of a star and a writer who were eager to help their friend realize his dreams of soaring through the sky, cinematically speaking.

The Great Waldo Pepper: RIGHT ON

Slap Shot (1977)

          It’s all about the Hanson Brothers. There’s a lot to like in George Roy Hill’s foul-mouthed, irreverent, and playfully violent hockey saga, but nothing in the movie clicks quite as well as the sight of Jack, Jeff, and Steve Hanson—three longhaired brothers wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses that probably have higher IQ’s than the siblings—working their mojo on the rink. Savages who win by attrition, the Hansons zoom up and down the ice, high-sticking and punching and slashing their competitors until they’ve left a trail of injured opponents in their wake. These bad-boy antics are at the heart of this movie’s rebellious appeal, because even though Slap Shot has an amiable leading character and a tidy storyline, it is above all a lowbrow jamboree of brawling, cussing, and drinking.

          Set in a fictional Rust Belt town, the story follows the Charlestown Chiefs, a pitiful minor-league hockey team in the midst of an epic losing streak. Player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) tries to rouse his teammates for some good “old-time hockey”—straight playing without fights—but he knows crowds only get excited for bloodbaths. Meanwhile, team manager Joe McGrath (Strother Martin) is sending signals that the Chiefs organization might be on the verge of folding.

          Over the course of the movie, Reggie—who is desperate to elongate his career, even though he knows it’s long past time for him to stop playing and concentrate on coaching—pulls several underhanded maneuvers. He unleashes the Hansons, whose violence raises the level of game-time brutality while also stimulating attendance; he tricks a local reporter (M. Emmet Walsh) into printing a rumor that the Chiefs might have a new buyer; and he tries to seduce the depressed wife (Lindsay Crouse) of a peacenik player (Michael Ontkean) in order to prod his teammate toward violence. Reggie is a rascal in the classic Newman mold, willing to fracture a few laws in the service of a more-or-less noble goal.

          Written by first-time screenwriter Nancy Dowd, whose brother Ned played minor-league hockey, Slap Shot is cheerfully crude, taking cheap shots at bad parents, French-Canadians, gays, lesbians, and other random targets; most of the jokes are funny, but even the ones that aren’t help maintain a genial vibe of frat-house chaos. The picture also drops more F-bombs (and other colorful expletives) than nearly any other ’70s movie. It’s therefore quite a change of pace for the normally genteel George Roy Hill, whose other memorable collaborations with Newman are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). One gets the impression both men had a blast making Slap Shot, since Hill captures the hockey scenes with clever moving-camera shots and Newman elevates the piece with his contagious smiles and entertaining surliness.

          While not a critical hit and only a moderate box-office success during its original release, Slap Shot has since attained enviable cult status, even spawning a minor franchise of inferior straight-to-video sequels: Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice was released in 2002, and Slap Shot 3: The Junior League followed in 2008. Furthermore, a remake of the original film is rumored to be in the works. Until then, fans can content themselves with Hanson Brothers action figures, which hit stores in 2000.

Slap Shot: GROOVY

The Sting (1973)

          Paul Newman and Robert Redford could have followed the blockbuster Western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) with pretty much any onscreen reunion and delivered box-office gold. But the savvy movie stars waited for something special, and David S. Ward’s twisty screenplay about Depression-era grifters pulling the ultimate con on a vile gangster fit the bill. Also rejoining the actors was Butch director George Roy Hill, whose storytelling is close to flawless throughout The Sting. Fast and fun from start to finish, the clever comedy-drama lays out a complex plot with incredible clarity, driving characters inexorably toward one of the most entertaining third acts ever filmed. Redford plays Johnny Hooker, a small-time con man whose mentor, Luther (Robert Earl Jones), gets killed after ripping off a courier in the service of big-time crook Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). Determined to get revenge, Hooker connects with veteran grifter Henry Gondorff (Paul Newman), and together they contrive an elaborate scheme to swindle Lonnegan out of a fortune. The picture is broken up into chapters—complete with hand-painted title cards for segments like “The Set-Up,” “The Hook,” and “The Shut-Out”—and riffs on Scott Joplin’s ragtime classic “The Entertainer” complement Marvin Hamlisch’s original scoring to give the piece a playfully old-fashioned feel.

          The interplay between Newman and Redford is marvelous; they’re so charming that their shared scenes are like intoxicants. Shaw counters them with seething savage-in-a-suit villainy, and the fantastic supporting players fill the movie with delectable flavors: Jones, Dimitra Arliss, Eileen Brennan, Charles Durning, Dana Elcar, Harold Gould, Jack Kehoe, and Ray Walston are wonderful. The Sting scores in every conceivable way, because it’s rare for any movie to meet, much less exceed, high expectations, just like it’s rare for a script full of plot twists to work all the way through, and just like it’s rare for a large ensemble cast to mesh into a seamless unit. At once a throwback to a simpler time in Hollywood history and a celebration of how sophisticated the art of filmmaking had become by the early ’70s, this masterpiece contains just about everything Tinseltown does well. It’s always tempting to express disappointment that Newman and Redford didn’t reunite onscreen after Butch Cassidy and The Sting, but unlike the baddie they bamboozled in The Sting, they were too smart to fall into traps. After all, why blow a good run by trying to hit the trifecta?

The Sting: OUTTA SIGHT