Ash Wednesday (1973)

          Had anyone but Elizabeth Taylor played the lead in this enervated melodrama, it would be completely uninteresting. As is, the minor appeal of Ash Wednesday stems from the way a generation of moviegoers fell in love with Taylor as a child actress, devoured reports of her scandal-sheet lifestyle, and watched with unending curiosity as she evolved from a breathtaking beauty to a merely attractive woman of a certain age. Many of Taylor’s films in the late ’60s and early ’70s concern women struggling to remain sexually vital in their middle years, none more so than Ash Wednesday, which revolves around a woman who gets a facelift in order to win back her unfaithful husband’s affection. Accordingly, those who decode this film for parallels to Taylor’s offscreen personas will find it mildly intriguing. Such was the power of old-fashioned movie stardom. Just as John Wayne fans tolerated substandard movies in order to huff his masculine charisma, so too did Taylor devotees endure hours of aimless Eurotrash just to savor her complicated mixture of fragility and glamour.

          The painfully slow-moving Ash Wednesday opens with Barbara Sawyer (Taylor) visiting a European clinic for a facelift and other cosmetic procedures. Soon, clips from real surgery are shown, so queasy viewers will have to look away. Later, while recuperating, Barbara becomes friends with flamboyant photographer David (Keith Baxter) while awaiting the arrival of her husband, Mark (Henry Fonda). Since she kept her surgery plans secret, all Mark knows is that she’s been on holiday in Europe for several weeks. Unwilling to accept all the obvious clues that her marriage is over, Barbara becomes so lonely awaiting Mark—who delays his arrival several times—that she has an affair of her own, thinking jealousy might shock Mark’s system. Ultimately, the whole storyline is a slow burn to Barbara’s painful reunion with her husband.

          Listing the movie’s shortcomings does not require much effort. The characterizations are thin, the pacing is absurdly dull, and the supporting performances are perfunctory. Furthermore, while we can empathize with Barbara’s anguish, one is hard-pressed to believe that a character played by Elizabeth Taylor at any age has been so starved of romantic attention that she has grown to doubt her own comeliness. (Sure, the deeper reason she gets the surgery is that her self-identity is wrapped up in her marriage, but this isn’t a story about someone getting therapy—it’s about a facelift.) Despite these significant faults, Taylor invests her performance with just enough confusion and pathos to make a few moments feel authentic. Oddly, this is not only one of her most unvarnished performances but also one of her most vain—after all, the real love story here isn’t between Barbara and Mark, but rather between Taylor and her own beauty.

Ash Wednesday: FUNKY

City on Fire (1979)

A drab disaster flick featuring phoned-in performances by faded Hollywood stars, the Canada/U.S. coproduction City on Fire never quite delivers on its title, offering instead a few explosions at a refinery and an extended sequence during which flames threaten the occupants of a crowded hospital. Vignettes depicting the impact of an allegedly citywide fire are anemic at best. Furthermore, the underlying premise is quite sketchy. After getting passed over for a promotion, disturbed refinery worker Herman (Jonathan Welsh) rushes around the facility, releasing fuel into the adjoining city’s water supply so that when sewer workers using a welding torch accidentally ignite the fuel, flames emerge throughout the city. Because, of course, disgruntled former employees are generally allowed free reign at high-security facilities. Oh, well. The nominal hero of the piece is he-man physician Dr. Frank Whitman (Barry Newman). Other characters include an alcoholic newscaster (Ava Gardner), a stoic fire chief (Henry Fonda), an opportunistic mayor (Leslie Nielsen), and a worldly nurse (Shelley Winters). As for the female lead, she’s heiress Diane (Susan Clark), who shares romantic history with Frank and happens to be at the hospital during the crisis. City on Fire is so predictable and sluggish that it’s quite boring to watch, though a few absurd moments amuse. In one scene, Diane scoops vomit from a patient’s mouth while trying to deliver mouth-t0-mouth resuscitation. In another, Frank walks down a row of burn victims, touching each one but never performing medical services or issuing commands to subordinates. City on Fire eventually features a decent fire walk by a brave stunt performer, but that’s hardly reason enough to tolerate 106 minutes of stupidity and tedium.

City on Fire: LAME

Directed by John Ford (1971)

          First off, this review is a bit of a cheat—I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing the original 1971 cut of Directed by John Ford, which has been replaced in the marketplace by a substantially re-edited 2006 version. That’s the cut I saw, and it’s something of a hybrid. Although the bones of the piece are the same as in the 1971 version, writer-director (and Ford acquaintance) Peter Bogdanovich not only excised some material and inserted replacement clips, but he also recorded brand-new interviews with contemporary Ford admirers including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Furthermore, Bodganovich conducted new interviews with still-living Ford collaborators and taped new onscreen remarks of his own. So, while the 2006 version of Directed by John Ford presumably represents the director’s fullest possible vision circa the time of its release, it’s a stretch to say that I’m actually reviewing the 1971 movie. Still, because the best parts of any version of Directed by John Ford are 1971 clips featuring Ford and his famous leading men—Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne—most of what makes the picture interesting has remained unchanged since the original release.

          Anyway, as the title suggests, Directed by John Ford is a product of Bogdanovich’s lifelong crusade to celebrate the contributions of cinema giants. Yet Bogdanovich’s interaction with Ford was complicated. A master of mythmaking onscreen and off, the man considered by many to be the greatest auteur of Western movies was born John Martin O’Feeney, but, to quote a famous line from his 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In other words, the man whom Bodganovich encountered was deeply invested in protecting the reputation of macho filmmaker “John Ford.” Though obviously in physical decline and well into professional twilight—he’d already directed his last feature—Ford comes across as belligerent and virtually monosyllabic, as if discussing his own artistry is unmanly. Watching Bogdanovich tangle with Ford during their interview in Ford’s quintessential shooting location, Monument Valley, is the core of the picture.

          Elsewhere, during the interviews with Ford’s key actors, Bogdanovich asserts himself as much as he showcases his subjects. Taking the unusual approach of mounting his interview camera on a dolly track, Bogdanovich can be seen in many shots motioning for his cameraman to push in or pull back. Most of the star interviews feature puffery, because even when the actors describe Ford’s difficult personality, they’re burnishing his manly-man bona fides. And while the contemporary interviews with Ford-loving filmmakers lend scholarly weight to Directed by John Ford, it’s hard to say they’re essential. Beyond the footage Bogdanovich collected in the early ’70s, the components that really are essential are clips from Ford’s classics—The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), and more. In a profound way, Ford’s work speaks for itself, revealing a world of obsessions that that Ford never articulated for any interviewer. Therefore, Directed by John Ford is illuminating, though not necessarily in the manner that Bogdanovich intended.

Directed by John Ford: GROOVY

Midway (1976)

          This old-fashioned combat flick picks up where the great 1944 war drama Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo left off—Midway dramatizes one of the many retaliatory air strikes the U.S. and Japan exchanged following Japan’s initial 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. When the story begins, the U.S. Navy is struggling to replace ships destroyed at Pearl Harbor. When an intelligence officer (Hal Holbrook) intercepts communications suggesting the Japanese are planning to attack U.S. ships stationed at Midway Island—potentially a devastating repeat of Pearl Harbor—various officers spring into action preparing defensive maneuvers. Like 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, this picture cuts back and forth between American and Japanese strategy sessions. In addition to humanizing the enemy, this technique lets viewers see how luck and tactical errors have as much bearing on military success as heroism and leadership.

          For instance, some of the best scenes take place aboard a Japanese carrier, where Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (James Shigeta) wrangles with doubtful subordinates, resulting in indecisiveness. There’s some great stuff buried in Midway, but, unfortunately, lesser material is given the primary focus—the main storyline involves Captain Matt Garth (Charlton Heston), a strong-willed junior officer whose role in the battle is relatively inconsequential. The filmmakers waste gobs of time, for instance, on the melodramatic romance between Garth’s son and a Japanese-American civilian, which leads to trite discussions about race relations. Plus, once the bludgeoning air/sea battle gets underway, the movie introduces so many characters that text appears onscreen to identify new people.

          Even with these visual aids, however, it’s hard to track which ships are where, whose plane took off from which airstrip, and, for that matter, which side is winning. Still, before things get too hectic, Midway lets a handful of charismatic actors shine in showcase moments. Holbrook is a hoot as the excitable code breaker; Henry Fonda lends authority as the top U.S. admiral; Glenn Ford is effectively stoic as a soft-spoken naval commander; and Robert Mitchum plays an enjoyable cameo as a cranky admiral consigned to bed rest. (Cinema legend Toshiro Mifune essays a small role as Fonda’s Japanese counterpart, but his lines were dubbed into English by actor Paul Frees, the voice of Rocky & Bullwinkle villain Boris Badenov.) While these virtues aren’t enough to lift Midway out of mediocrity, any American war picture that resists the temptation to demonize the opposing side is inherently admirable.

Midway: FUNKY

Rollercoaster (1977)

          Pure escapism, Rollercoaster combines many styles of pulpy entertainment that thrived in the ’70s: It’s a disaster movie, a police procedural, a terrorism thriller, and a theme-park romp all rolled into one. So, while it might be exaggerating to call Rollercoaster a good movie, it’s a lot of fun to watch. The movie begins when a psycho identified only as “Young Man” (Timothy Bottoms) begins a killing spree by blowing up the tracks on a rollercoaster in Virginia. Ride investigator Harry Calder (George Segal) arrives to survey the damage, suspecting foul play instead of a simple accident. Soon, the Young Man strikes again and issues a demand for $1 million to prevent further attacks. Although hard-nosed FBI Agent Hoyt (Richard Widmark) is placed in charge of the investigation, Harry insists on remaining involved, which turns out to be a bad mistake, since the Young Man identifies Calder as his preferred courier for ransom payments.

          Thus begins an enjoyably silly cat-and-mouse game that climaxes with a showdown at the Magic Mountain theme park near Los Angeles (which fans of ’70s kitsch know and love as the setting for the TV movie Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park). Plus, as happens in these sorts of contrived cinematic situations, Calder’s teenaged daughter (Helen Hunt) gets caught up in the danger, so catching the crook becomes a personal matter for Our Hero. Although Rollercoaster is padded with a few tiresome sequences, like an extended concert by the New Wave band Sparks and lengthy point-of-view rollercoaster shots designed to showcase the “Sensurround” format in which the picture was released, the bulk of the movie is suspenseful and zippy.

          Segal’s dry humor fits the thriller genre well, offering a sly wink at the audience whenever the plot gets too preposterous, and the idea of a madman hiding amid the huge crowds at an amusement park is consistently unsettling. (Casting the boyish Bottoms was a clever choice that adds to the queasiness.) Justifying the disaster-movie element of its cinematic DNA, Rollercoaster delivers several harrowing highlights, though the flick never slips into gory excess. After all, producer Jennings Lang was an ace at the disaster genre, having made 1974’s Earthquake and most of the Airport movies. Widmark and fellow supporting player Henry Fonda ground the movie with their familiar personas, and it’s a kick to see future Oscar winner Hunt at the apex of her child-acting career. All in all, Rollercoaster is a tasty trifle with the added benefit of capturing vintage theme-park scenes that will make any former ’70s kid nostalgic for simpler times.

Rollercoaster: GROOVY

My Name Is Nobody (1973)

          One of the best spaghetti Westerns to emerge in the latter part of the genre’s short life cycle, this strangely compelling dramedy was conceived and partially directed by the genre’s grand master, Sergio Leone. The bizarre story begins with the introduction of Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda), an aging outlaw who wants to live out his retirement in peace and quiet. Unfortunately, Beauregard’s reputation precedes him, and young gunslingers regularly challenge him to shoot-outs. One day, Beauregard meets a mysterious young man who calls himself “Nobody” (Terence Hill).

          A lightning-fast shot and a mischievous prankster, Nobody regards Beauregard as a living legend. They share adventures together, and then Nobody says it’s his dream to see Beauregard die in a blaze of glory. (Hey, what are friends for?) Accepting that a violent death is probably his fate, Beauregard agrees to confront “The Wild Bunch,” a giant horde of 150 robbers who ride the West looking for trouble. In the movie’s outrageous finale, Beauregard and Nobody both find the destinies they seek.

          As with the best Leone movies, what makes My Name Is Nobody work is the style, not the story. Through a combination of elaborate editing, histrionic music, and mythic characterization, Leone and the picture’s credited director, Tonio Valerii, create a sense of gods walking the earth, men with gifts and problems mere mortals cannot comprehend. In Leone’s expansive worldview, the people Beauregard and Nobody kill should be grateful to enrich the outlaws’ legacies, and the West is the scroll on which the characters’ inspiring stories are being written. When this kind of hokum connects, as it does many times in this movie, the effect is intoxicating, a larger-than-life opera of bullets and testosterone.

          It helps, a lot, that regular Leone collaborator Ennio Morricone contributes one of his most demented musical scores, employing everything from cavalry charges to elegiac melodies to shrill flute solos and weird vocal shrieks. The sequences that approach surrealism—like a scene of a stilt-walker having his “legs” shot out from under him—are incredibly vivid, even though scenes like Nobody’s painstaking attempt to capture a drowning fly are merely peculiar. (With Leone, you take the bad to get the good.)

          Fonda is strong, investing his performance with a likeable flavor of world-weary bitchiness, and the vivacious Hill blends physical comedy with tough-guy heroics. Reliable supporting players including R.G. Armstrong and Geoffrey Lewis add flavor, as do a slew of Italian character actors, though the real star of the movie is actually Leone. Whether he or Valerii directed the bulk of the film is ultimately irrelevant, since this picture is unquestionably infused with Leone’s unique sensibility. More importantly, the heartfelt ending is deepened by the knowledge that My Name Is Nobody was Leone’s last major statement in a wild subgenre he dominated.

My Name Is Nobody: GROOVY

The Swarm (1978)

          Hollywood’s master of disaster, producer Irwin Allen, was well into the unintentional self-parody phase of his career by the late ’70s, less than a decade after he first started mining mass misfortune for mass entertainment. Instead of the towering infernos and upside-down cruise ships of yore, he restored to demonizing insects in The Swarm, an undercooked comin’-at-ya picture in which killer bees, mostly depicted as animated blotches roaming across the skyline, attack a small town in the Southwest before heading to Houston. Filled with all the usual tropes of Allen’s pictures, from large mobilizations of rescue forces to trite melodramas playing out against the backdrop of tragedy, The Swarm also features one of Allen’s trademark hodgepodge casts.

          Michael Caine, starting his slide into ridiculous paycheck gigs, stars as a bug specialist who takes command of the government’s response to the bees, and he’s accompanied by Richard Widmark (as a general who wants to blow up everything in sight), Henry Fonda (as a wheelchair-bound immunologist), Richard Chamberlain (as a Southern-fried scientist/crankypants whose sole function seems to be scowling at Caine), and Katharine Ross (as a scientist/love interest who gets stung by more than Cupid’s arrow), plus Patty Duke Astin, Olivia de Havilland, Bradford Dillman, Jose Ferrer, Lee Grant, Ben Johnson, and Fred MacMurray.

          Even though a few elements are respectable, like Jerry Goldsmith’s exciting score, The Swarm is, well, swarming with ludicrous highlights, because the movie’s so preposterously straight-faced it plays like a comedy. The plotting is, of course, extraordinarily stupid, with Caine regularly leaving his post as the government’s top man during a major crisis to run inconsequential errands with Ross so they can share cutesy patter while driving around the countryside. Better still, from the perspective of amusing awfulness, is the outrageously limp dialogue, which nails the audience with clunky exposition as mercilessly as the bees zap their victims. “Just because you’re the mayor of Marysville, that doesn’t make you an engineer,” Johnson barks to MacMurray, who replies, “Look, nobody asked you to leave Houston and come here to retire, you know.” Ouch.

           In its most hysterically insipid moments (which are, sadly, outnumbered by long stretches of flat tedium), The Swarm approaches full-on camp, like the bee attack on a nuclear power plant or the colorful bit of Caine running through the small town, screaming, “The killer bees are coming! Everybody get inside!” (On a less amusing note, Widmark takes to referring to the Africanized bees as “Africans,” leading to icky lines like, “By tomorrow, there will be no more Africans in Houston!”) The movie’s best moment, though, is undoubtedly the scene in which Caine coaches a young bee-sting victim through a bout of hysterics by convincing the boy that the giant bee floating in front of his head—depicted, with goofy obviousness, by a giant superimposed bee—is a hallucination.

          For good or ill, The Swarm is no hallucination, because this two-and-a-half-hour venom blast of a gloriously bad creature feature really exists. And, yes, you read that right: Though originally released at 116 minutes, there’s an extended version of The Swarm clocking in at 155 minutes. Rest assured the whole damn mess was endured for the sake of this review. Anti-venom, please!

The Swarm: FREAKY

Sometimes a Great Notion (1970)

          Although author Ken Kesey famously distanced himself from the 1975 movie version of his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he apparently enjoyed the 1970 adaptation of his book Sometimes a Great Notion, even though nearly everyone else regards the film of Cuckoo’s Nest as a classic and the film of Notion as a minor work. Given Kesey’s proclivity for stories about people who resist authority at great personal cost, however, it follows that he wouldn’t line up with popular opinion. Setting the author’s stamp of approval aside, Sometimes a Great Notion, which stars and was directed by Paul Newman, is sometimes a great movie.

          Telling the story of the iconoclastic Stamper clan, a family of independent Pacific Northwest loggers who alienate their neighbors by refusing to support a labor strike, the picture has moments of great insight and sensitivity, plus a climactic scene that’s horrific and memorable. Yet the movie is diffuse and overlong, as if it can’t decide whether it’s primarily about ornery patriarch Henry Stamper (Henry Fonda); his heir-apparent son, Hank (Newman); his estranged child, Leeland (Michael Sarrazin); or the whole family. The movie’s indecisiveness about whose story is being told gets exacerbated by sloppy storytelling at the beginning of the movie, because it takes a while to grasp that the labor strike is the main plot device.

          Even with these frustrating problems, Sometimes a Great Notion is watchable and often touching. Fonda is a powerhouse as a self-made man who refuses to accept that he can’t live by his own idiosyncratic rules: There’s a reason Henry coined “Never Give a Inch” as the family’s motto. The movie expertly depicts how the deficiencies of Henry’s parenting have infected his kids, because Hank has managed to drain the life from his marriage to Viv (Lee Remick), and Leeland is a lost soul who can’t abide his family tradition of psychological abuse. In this fraught environment, only Henry’s simple-minded middle son, Joe Ben (Richard Jaeckel), really thrives, so it’s not a surprise when the narrative punishes Joe Ben for his unquestioning acceptance of God’s will (and Henry’s will).

          The film benefits greatly from vivid location photography, even if Newman lets montages of logging chores drag on a bit too long, and it’s fascinating to watch diehard lefty Newman tell the story of a character who disdains the idea of organized labor. Plus, as noted earlier, the film’s climax—a horrible on-the-job accident that shakes the whole Stamper family—results in an extraordinary sequence that consumes nearly the entire last half-hour of the picture. From the moment the accident happens to the instant the movie ends with a final gesture of defiance from the Stampers, Sometimes a Great Notion is riveting. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

Sometimes a Great Notion: FUNKY

“There Was a Crooked Man…” (1970)

          The prospect of venerable studio-era director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) collaborating with brash New Hollywood screenwriters Robert Benton and David Newman (Bonnie and Clyde) raises curiosity about “There Was a Crooked Man…”, a Western comedy-drama centered around a brutal prison from which convicts conspire to break out so they can recover a cache of hidden loot. Unfortunately, the movie’s narrative is as fussy as its excessively punctuated title—the picture is a sloppy hodgepodge aspiring to run the stylistic gamut from adrenalized drama to insouciant comedy.

          One suspects that protagonist Paris Pitman Jr. (Kirk Douglas) was envisioned as a charming rogue, and Douglas certainly tries to sell the idea that his character is a heartless criminal whom we’ll find interesting because he does everything with a wink and a smile. But unlike the crooks in other Benton-Newman scripts, who evince believable complexity and vulnerability, Pitman comes across as a Hollywood contrivance, partially because Douglas brings so much movie-star baggage, and partially because Mankiewicz can’t decide from scene to scene whether the movie is dark, light, or some nebulous thing in between. The picture is shot in a blown-out, garish style that makes every image seem artificial; the cast is loaded with familiar character actors (Hume Cronyn, Burgess Meredith, Warren Oates, John Randolph), all of whom play silly caricatures; and the cringe-worthy music by Charles Strouse, complete with an awful title song performed by Trini Lopez, brings the movie close to camp.
          Worst of all, the story itself is convoluted and dull. It begins when Pitman robs a rich man for half a million dollars in cash, then buries the money in a desert rattlesnake pit. After Pitman is captured and imprisoned, assorted characters try to find out where the money is hidden, and Pitman builds a team of eccentric convicts so he can stage an elaborate breakout. Meanwhile, a relentless lawman (played by a bored-looking Henry Fonda) chases after Pitman for personal reasons.

          The narrative is such an anything-goes jumble that at one point, Cronyn literally does a slapstick routine by backing toward a hot stove before jumping up and down while shouting, “My heinie is on fire!” Veering completely to the other extreme, a studly inmate played by Michael Blodgett (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls) gets strapped to a pole, shirtless, and whipped for rebuffing the homosexual advances of a guard. Given the presence of that sort of material, it’s possible there was some sort of satirical purpose to the original Benton-Newman script, but as cluelessly directed by Mankiewicz (who couldn’t be further outside his comfort zone of tense verbal jousting), “There Was a Crooked Man…” has no discernible purpose except befuddling viewers.

“There Was a Crooked Man…”: LAME

Wanda Nevada (1979)

Peter Fonda made some truly inexplicable choices in the years after Easy Rider, and one of the most inexplicable was signing on as director and star of this lifeless Brooke Shields vehicle. Fonda plays a modern-day swindler roaming through the Southwest until he wins 13-year-old Shields in a poker game and gets embroiled in a silly quest for a vein of gold that an old drunk claims exists in the Grand Canyon. It’s hard to discern the intended audience for this movie, because while the plot is nominally a kiddie adventure in which the characters trot about on mules while encountering eccentric characters and evading a pair of incompetent crooks, several scenes depict adult men lusting after Shields. Even the basic relationship at the center of the story seethes with implied pedophilia, because it’s never clear if Fonda is Shields’ surrogate father or her would-be lover. Fonda’s performance is even more lackadaisical than usual, which is saying a lot, and Shields seems more suited to a sitcom episode than a feature film, given her canned showbiz-kid acting and jarring painted-lady makeup. (As Fonda says at one point, “I thought you were a good kid under all that hot sauce.”) The only thing that might have saved this picture is the depiction of colorful people who live and work in and around the Grand Canyon, but these minor characters are all contrived and uninteresting, despite being played by energetic actors. B-movie stalwart Severn Darden plays an incongruently pale bird watcher in a pith helmet and jungle khakis, giving a few moments of amusement with florid dialogue and outright perversion (he tries to buy and then seduce Shields); Fiona Lewis appears rather pointlessly as a photographer who gives Shields friendly encouragement; and an unrecognizable Henry Fonda shows up for a brief cameo as a sun-baked prospector. He’s got the right idea by getting the hell out of his son’s misbegotten movie as quickly as possible. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Wanda Nevada: LAME

The Great Smokey Roadblock (1976)

          From the title and packaging, you’d think this was a brainless boobs-and-beer action flick, but buried amid the usual scenes of amiable prostitutes and crooked redneck cops is a poignant story about a dying man struggling for dignity. However, if you think 18-wheelers, hookers, and mortality seem like incompatible story elements, you’re absolutely right, based on the evidence of this incredibly erratic movie. Working from a novel titled The Last of the Cowboys (which was also this film’s original title), writer-director John Leone unsuccessfully attempts to cushion the melancholy main storyline with outrageous high jinks, and both elements suffer: The drama feels diminished by the sleazy context, and the comedy feels superfluous.

          At the center of the narrative is “Elegant” John (Henry Fonda), a trucker whose rig was repossessed while he was hospitalized and unable to pay his bills. John busts out of the hospital and steals his rig, heading down the highway to hook up with his paramour, a salty madam named Penelope (Eileen Brennan). Along the way, John picks up a Bible-quoting hitchhiker (Robert Englund) and tries to steer clear of an unscrupulous hustler (Gary Sandy) who wants to sell the stolen truck for illicit cash. For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, Penelope and her girls move into John’s trailer, turning the fugitive’s semi into a brothel on wheels–and for reasons that are even less clear, one of the prostitutes (Susan Sarandon) falls in love with the pious hitchhiker.

          Suffice it to say that the main storyline of John seeking one last adventure before death gets lost in the shuffle, despite Fonda’s valiant attempts to sell crying scenes and testy dialogue exchanges. At one low point, a redneck sheriff (Dub Taylor, of course) arrests John and the women, so the prostitutes claim their cell is too hot and strip, angling to “barter” with the corrupt lawman and his deputy. Taylor cheerfully accepts their proposal, and trust me when I say that you’ll have trouble erasing the image of grizzled old coot Taylor wearing just boxer shorts while he hops up and down and yells, “Where’s that thermostat?!!” Yet a moment later, Taylor delivers genuinely tasty dialogue: When his deputy expresses guilt over having availed himself of the women’s services, Taylor crows, “If that’s the worst thing that ever happens to you in your life, junior, then I’m gonna follow you to the ends of the world, because you’re gonna have remarkable passage.”

          It’s hard to completely dislike any movie containing chatter that colorful, to say nothing of such a robust cast, but there’s a reason this mess of a flick sat on a shelf for two years prior to its release.

The Great Smokey Roadblock: FUNKY

Tentacles (1977)

The world was awash with Jaws rip-offs in the late ’70s, and for every aquatic amusement like Piranha (1978), there was a bottom-feeder like this Italian/American coproduction about an ornery octopus (or squid, depending on the scene) stalking the shores of Southern California. Since much of the picture was obviously shot in Italy, there’s a logic gap because the coastlines in many scenes don’t look right for the story’s American location, but of course that’s the least of the movie’s problems. The script, presuming there was one, is a string of drab clichés about wooden characters investigating mysterious maritime deaths, with an intrepid reporter trying to blame the trouble on corporate irresponsibility while a fish whisperer correctly identifies the murder weapons as, to quote the movie’s Italian-language title, Tenatacoli. Landlocked vignettes with slumming American actors (Claude Akins, Bo Hopkins, John Huston, Shelley Winters, even Henry Fonda) are juxtaposed with oceanic mayhem featuring Italian bit players, giving the flick a stitched-together feel. And while some of the fright scenes have decent jolts, the FX are pathetic: The illusion of the titular monster is created with crude animatronics, grainy rear projection, shoddy miniatures, and silly inserts of real octopi that look too small to pose any real threat. Things get completely absurd when the barely seen monster attacks a regatta, overturning dozens of boats while zooming through the water like a torpedo. A few stretches of the movie have so-bad-it’s-good zing, but for the most part it’s just depressing to watch Hopkins and Huston (the Hollywood stars with the most screen time) churn through pointless dialogue, often with Italian actors whose English-language lines are dubbed, when all the audience really wants to see is stuff like the climax in which the fish whisperer sics his two favorite killer whales on the giant octopus. No, really.

Tentacles: LAME

The Cheyenne Social Club (1970)

          A charming Western comedy in the vein of Howard Hawks’ cowboy classics, this amiable picture pairs two of the genre’s greatest stars, Henry Fonda and James Stewart, in a lively story that both pokes fun at their wholesome images and suits their advanced ages at the time the movie was made. John O’Hanlan (Stewart) and Harley Sullivan (Fonda) are graying cowpokes working on a Texas ranch when John receives word that he’s inherited a business from his late brother. They travel to Wyoming, where they discover the business is actually a brothel, much to the chagrin of aw-shucks John. Aghast at the idea of running a house of ill repute, John decides to close the Cheyenne Social Club, which makes him a pariah among the business’ loyal patrons, but then he discovers he can’t cash out his inheritance. Furthermore, when the club’s sunny madam, Jenny (Shirley Jones), is attacked by a client, John’s sense of Texas justice kicks in and starts him down the road of developing a proprietary interest in the ladies’ welfare. Unfortunately for John, his noble actions make him a target for a huge clan of no-good varmints, meaning an extended stay in Cheyenne would be hazardous to his health.
          Smoothly directed by studio-era Hollywood pro Gene Kellly, the dancer/filmmaker of Singin’ in the Rain fame, The Cheyenne Social Club is unabashedly old-fashioned, even with a handful of modern touches like location photography and brief nudity, so the dialogue gets a bit corny at times, there’s a great deal of sitcom-style patter between the stars, and the plotting is slick and uncomplicated. The Cheyenne Social Club also features the most whitewashed portrayal of prostitution this side of Pretty Woman (1990), which might make it unpalatable for some viewers. The cheerfully vanilla picture undoubtedly felt archaic in an era of revisionist Westerns, but seen with modern eyes, it’s as diverting as anything Hawks or Henry Hathaway helmed in the heyday of big-screen oaters. Fonda amusingly undercuts his heroic image by portraying a fellow more inclined to run from a fight than run into one, and Stewart uses his signature flummoxed stammer to great effect as a character unaccustomed to being a “man of property.” The Cheyenne Social Club isn’t a laugh-out-loud comedy so much as it’s a lighthearted yarn with comic touches, but that’s a good thing: The picture delivers a broad spectrum of entertainment, from action to jokes to romance, over the course of 103 amiable minutes.

The Cheyenne Social Club: GROOVY