Contract on Cherry Street (1977)

          Notwithstanding a two-year hiatus from showbiz, legendary entertainer Frank Sinatra spent most of the ’70s on music, letting his Oscar-winning movie career go fallow. That was probably wise, given the diminishing returns of such projects as the forgettable comedy Dirty Dingus Magee (1970). By the time Sinatra resumed acting for this telefilm, however, the wiry swinger of yesteryear had been supplanted by a lethargic, middle-aged fellow wearing an iffy gray toupee. At least Sinatra’s performance here in Contract on Cherry Street not as distractingly halfhearted as his drab turn in the 1980 theatrical feature The First Deadly Sin, which marked the final starring role of his acting career.
          A grim and slow-moving melodrama about cops working outside the law to gain the upper hand on criminals, Contract features Sinatra as Deputy Inspector Frank Hovannes, the boss of an elite NYPD organized-crime unit. After seeing one too many crooks escape justice by bribing officials, Frank and his people embrace a dangerous idea—why not murder a crook, frame another crook for the hit, and start a war in which bad guys kill each other? Naturally, this is easier said than done, so the cops face obstacles ranging from sketchy informants to an unstable member of their own team. Additionally, the criminals are more clever than the cops anticipated, so the more the cops stir up trouble, the more they risk exposing their own scheme.
          There’s a nasty little potboiler buried inside this storyline, and someone like Sidney Lumet could have made a crackerjack thriller by collapsing the events down to a shorter running time (Contract runs two and half hours) while giving the leading character more emotional shading. Unfortunately, bloat and shapelessness keep Contract mired in mediocrity, and some of the ego-stroking indulgences associated with Sinatra’s participation hurt the movie. It’s one thing for Sinatra to have his own glamour lighting during closeups. It’s another to burden the movie with various scenes of the protagonist’s wife all but begging him for sex. (Sinatra was 62 when the picture was broadcast.)

          For all its flaws, however, Contract on Cherry Street is basically watchable. Extensive New York location photography lends a sense of place, and some of the supporting performances are strong. Reliable players Martin Balsam, Harry Guardino, and Henry Silva play cops, as does fresh-faced Michael Nouri, although Steve Inwood steals the movie as a twitchy informant/junkie. Having said that, his gritty work is probably more suited to the imaginary Lumet-directed version than this so-so slog.

Contract on Cherry Street: FUNKY

Whiffs (1975)

          The military-themed comedy Whiffs must have seemed promising at the conceptual stage, because the premise is outrageous—a schmuck GI spends years working as a test subject for the Army’s chemical-weapons program, gets discharged because the Army made him too sick to remain a viable test subject, can’t find steady work in the civilian world, and uses his knowledge of chemical weapons to mount a crime spree. A brilliant writer could have taken this material to wicked places, but the skill level of TV-trained scribe Malcolm Marmorstein falls well short of brilliance. His script introduces clever situations without exploiting their full potential, relies upon one-note characterizations, and simply isn’t funny enough. To be fair, Whiffs is infinitely more palatable than S*P*Y*S (1974), another project starring Elliot Gould to which Marmorstein made screenplay contributions. Yet the highest praise one can offer is that Whiffs is pleasant to watch except when it lapses into repetitive silliness, which happens often.

          The picture’s unlikely protagonist is Dudley Frapper (Gould), who enjoys getting bombarded with gases by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, led by straight-laced Colonel Lockyer (Eddie Albert). The implied joke that Dudley is an Army-sanctioned drug enthusiast is among the many pieces of low-hanging fruit that Marmorstein fails to harvest. After his discharge, Dudley fails at several entry-level jobs, succumbs to self-pity, and heads to a bar where he reconnects with Chops Mulligan (Harry Guardino), a career criminal who endured chemical experiments alongside Dudley in order to secure an early parole. Chops picks a fight with the bartender, and Dudley sedates Chops’ opponent with a tube of laughing gas. Chops steals the money in the bar’s cash register, then proposes committing more crimes while using gas to immobilize people.

          It takes the movie far too long to reach this point, and the subplot of Dudley’s romance with a pretty Army nurse played by Jennifer O’Neill doesn’t add much beyond eye candy—and a drab running joke about Dudley’s virility. Meanwhile, the subplot involving Godfrey Cambridge as an opportunistic crop-duster pilot is exceedingly goofy. Gould contributes half-hearted work, and Guardino makes a valiant effort despite being ill-suited for his comic role. The same can be said for director Ted Post, a reliable hand for action pictures and melodramas but not a comedic director by any stretch of the imagination.

Whiffs: FUNKY

Lovers and Other Strangers (1970)

          A significant commercial and critical hit back in the day, the ensemble dramedy Lovers and Other Strangers mixes keen observations about marriage with hit-or-miss sex-comedy vignettes. Based on a play by Joseph Bologna and Renée Taylor, the movie concerns the wedding of a young couple and how the event impacts the couple’s friends and relatives. On a deeper level, the story is an exploration of changing values during the Women’s Liberation era. Does marriage mean anything during a time when young people embrace premarital cohabitation? Is the old notion of accepting contentment in marriage passé for kids who expect to sustain passion forever? And how can young women protect themselves from predatory men who use with-it lingo to pressure women into sex? These were important questions in 1970, so even though time has dulled the edge off Lovers and Other Strangers, the picture is still interesting as a snapshot of a turbulent period. Additionally, some of the characters are rendered so well that they’re timeless.

          The youngsters preparing to marry are Mike (Michael Brandon) and Susan (Bonnie Bedelia). He’s terrified of commitment even though he and Susan have lived together for some time, and he’s nervous that his old-fashioned Italian parents will find out he’s “living in sin.” The engaged couple’s anxieties are juxtaposed with problems plaguing new marriages, troubles faced by single people, and the wisdom of people who have been married for decades. One of the imperiled new marriages is between Susan’s sister, Wilma (Anne Meara), and Johnny (Harry Guardino)—she tries to keep the sexual spark alive while he resents her rejection of the idea that being male entitles Johnny to unconditional dominance. The other endangered new union is between Mike’s brother, Richie (Joseph Hindy), and Joan (Diane Keaton, in her first movie role), who have scandalized the family by announcing plans to divorce. Representing the singles scene is Susan’s friend Brenda (Marian Hailey), who runs hot and cold with fast-talking horndog Jerry (Bob Dishy). There’s also a subplot about Susan’s father, Hal (Gig Young), having an affair with his sister-in-law, Kathy (Anne Jackson). Rounding out the principal cast are Mike’s parents, Frank (Richard Castellano) and Bea (Beatrice Arthur).

          Some threads of the story have more punch than others. The stuff with Bea and Frank is terrific because veteran stage actors Arthur and Castellano give pitch-perfect comic performances; Castellano earned an Oscar nomination for his work, and Lovers and Other Strangers helped pave the way for Arthur’s conquest of television a few years later. The Brenda/Jerry storyline gets old quickly because Brenda is depicted as a mess of catch phrases and neuroses, while Jerry is portrayed as nothing but a compendium of come-on lines. Similarly, the Hal/Kathy storyline is mostly a vehicle for Hal contriving ways to string Kathy along while Kathy endures humiliating treatment because the alternative of being alone is too dismaying. Whereas those two subplots feel shallow and trite, the Johnny/Wilma storyline pays off nicely when the couple embraces compromise.

          Lovers and Other Strangers gives viewers a lot to digest, but despite some honest insights and zippy one-liners, the movie never achieves real depth or hilarity. Although the film is thoroughly respectable, the writers (including David Zelag Goodman, who helped adapt the play) employ comedy as a means of dancing around tough issues. Nonetheless, the mere fact that Lovers and Other Strangers engages with serious topics places the movie a few notches above the average bedroom farce, and the presence of consistently good acting raises the movie’s quality even higher.

Lovers and Other Strangers: GROOVY

Get Christie Love! (1974)

          Perhaps because the fun of the blaxploitation genre was so intertwined with R-rated nastiness—drugs, pimps, violence, vulgarity—none of the various attempts to created blaxploitation-themed TV series met with much success. For instance, Richard Roundtree reprised his big-screen role as private dick John Shaft for a string of toothless TV movies airing in 1973 and 1974, and singer/actress Teresa Graves starred in Get Christie Love!, an hour-long drama that ran for one season from 1974 to 1975. The mildly entertaining pilot movie for Get Christie Love! shares little in common with theatrical blaxploitation flicks except for an African-American leading actress and an urban-crime milieu. Adapted from a novel by Dorothy Uhnak, the 74-minute feature introduces viewers to Christie Love, a funny, self-confident, and sexy plainclothes detective who works narcotics and vice. Christie spends most of the movie investigating the life of Helena Varga (Louise Sorel), the girlfriend of a high-powered gangster, because an informant’s tip leads police to believe that Helena possesses an incriminating ledger. Even though Get Christie Love! opens with scenes that are suitable for a Pam Grier movie—cops witness the murder of their informant, Christie goes undercover as a prostitute to catch a serial killer—the movie quickly loses its edge.

          As portrayed by the wholesomely pretty Graves, Christie is one-third ass-kicker, one-third bloodhound, and one-third therapist, digging though Helena’s past to find leverage with which she can persuade Helena to help the authorities. The movie includes a few quasi-exciting showdowns, like the bit when Christie judo-throws an assailant off the high balcony of a hotel, but for the most part she gets what she wants via painstaking investigation instead of seducing gullible men or strong-arming beefy goons. In other words, Get Christie Love! ain’t Foxy Brown: The Series by a damn sight. Graves has a pleasant touch for light comedy (no surprise, since she was briefly a regular on Laugh-In), and costar Harry Guardino does what he can with the stock role of an exasperated supervisor. As the pilot for a standard-issue ’70s cop show, Get Christie Love! is harmless enough, and it provides a minor historical footnote because Graves was the first black woman to play the lead on a network drama. (She followed in the footsteps of Diahann Carroll, who broke the sitcom barrier with the 1968 debut of Julia.) As an example of the blaxploitation genre, however, Get Christie Love! is laughably tame.

Get Christie Love!: FUNKY

Capone (1975)

Producer Roger Corman milked the gangster genre relentlessly with innumerable rip-offs of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), so by the mid-’70s he was still cranking out flicks about Depression-era goons blasting each other with Tommy guns. Case in point: Capone, a mediocre but watchable attempt to blend the rat-a-tat action of old Warner Bros. gangster flicks with a few stylistic nods to The Godfather (1972). As directed by pulp specialist Steve Carver, who knew how to keep things moving even if logic got crushed along the way, Capone presents a string of zippy episodes tracking the ascension of notorious real-life gangster Al Capone (Ben Gazzara) from New York street hoodlum to powerful Chicago crime lord. There’s not much in the way of depth or insight, but the picture is filled with malevolent power plays and violent shootouts as Capone climbs the organized-crime ladder, first working for tough mentor Johnny Torrio (Harry Guardino) and then seizing control for himself. The picture plays lip service to Capone’s growing pains as a gangster, showing his struggle to slap a layer of political sheen over his animalistic nature, but mostly the film bops from one bloody episode to the next. Adding interest is a passable love story between Capone and drunken moll Iris Crawford (Susan Blakeley); it makes sense that ambitious Iris gloms onto someone in whom she sees the potential for underworld greatness, and Blakely is both gorgeous and believably tough. Unfortunately, Gazzara is terrible. So boisterous and bug-eyed that it almost seems he’s delivering a comedy performance, Gazzara makes it impossible to connect with Capone as a real character. The other fatal flaw is the movie’s episodic nature. Still, there’s plenty for fans of the genre to enjoy despite the problems: A pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone shows up for a sizable role as Capone’s brutal lieutenant, Frank Nitti, and Carver adds style by linking sequences with a cool red-tinted dissolve effect. Capone isn’t particularly impressive, but it’s crudely entertaining.

Capone: FUNKY

They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)

In the years between his TV triumphs on Maverick in the ’50s and The Rockford Files in the ’70s, James Garner enjoyed an admirable career on the big screen, mostly in action flicks and light comedies. One of the pictures from this period, They Only Kill Their Masters, is of unique interest because it offers an early glimpse at the easygoing-detective vibe that made Garner so appealing as Jim Rockford. A slight (and slightly sleazy) whodunit with the offbeat gimmick of treating a Doberman Pinscher as a suspect, the picture takes place in a small coastal town in California, where charmingly grumpy Garner is the sheriff who keeps locals and tourists in line. When a woman is found in the ocean with her Doberman’s jaws clamped onto her body, Abel Marsh (Garner) believes the canine went crazy, but then a deeper mystery unfolds involving adultery, group sex, and, worst of all, out-of-towners. The salacious storyline helps the movie overcome its TV-grade production values, as does the presence of several big-screen regulars: Katharine Ross is alluring as a veterinarian who steers Garner away from rushing to judgment, Peter Lawford is pompous as an L.A. smoothie slumming in the small town, Harry Guardino scowls as a state cop eager to claim jurisdictional authority over Garner, and Hal Holbrook is wonderfully sympathetic as a character whose role in the mystery is, well, a mystery—at least until the surprising conclusion. FYI, the Abel Marsh character resurfaced in a pair of 1977 made-for TV movies, Deadly Game and The Girl in the Empty Grave; for those projects, Andy Griffith took over the role originated by Garner. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

They Only Kill Their Masters: FUNKY