The Sporting Club (1971)

          Things get weird fast in The Sporting Club, a wildly undisciplined adaptation of a novel by Thomas McGuane, who later became a screenwriter of offbeat films with Western themes. Here, the theme is actually Midwestern, though The Sporting Club certainly has enough eccentrics and iconoclasts to resonate with other films bearing McGuane’s name. The basic story is relatively simple. Rich white people gather at the Centennial Club, a hunting lodge in the Great Lakes region, for a drunken revel celebrating the club’s hundredth birthday. One of the club’s youngest members, an unhinged trust-fund brat named Vernur Stanton (Robert Fields), has a scheme to destroy the club from within while making a grand statement about class divisions in American society. Vernur fires the club’s longtime groundskeeper and hires a volatile blue-collar thug as a replacement, injecting a dope-smoking X-factor into the uptight culture of the Centennial Club. Yet the plot is only the slender thread holding the movie together. More intriguing and more prominent are myriad subplots, as well as bizarre satirical scenes featuring the aging members of the Centennial Club devolving into savagery.

          If it’s possible to imagine a quintessentially American film that should have been directed by British maniac Ken Russell, The Sporting Club is that movie. Like one of Russell’s perverse freakouts, The Sporting Club puts a funhouse mirror to polite society, revealing all the grotesque aspects that are normally hidden from view. And like many of Russell’s films, The Sporting Club spirals out of control at regular intervals.

          Here’s a relatively innocuous example. Early in the picture, Vernur and his best friend, James Quinn (Nicolas Coster), wander from the Centennial Club to a nearby dam, where the (unidentified) president of the United States makes a public appearance. Vernur and James sneak onto a tour bus left empty by Shriners watching the president, then trash the bus and commandeer it for a presidential drive-by during which Vernur moons the commander-in-chief. The scene raises but does not answer many questions related to character motivation and logistics. And so it goes throughout The Sporting Club. Outrageous things happen, but it’s anybody’s guess what makes the people in this movie tick or even, sometimes, how one event relates to the next. Very often, it seems is if connective tissue is missing. In some scenes, James makes passes at Vernur’s girlfriend, and in other scenes, he’s involved with the local hottie sent to clean his lodge. Huh? And we haven’t even gotten to Vernur’s fetish for vintage dueling pistols, the time capsule containing century-old pornography, or the climactic scene involving a machine gun and an orgy.

          As directed by journeyman Larry Peerce and written by versatile wit Lorenzo Semple Jr., The Sporting Club has several deeply interesting scenes and a few vivid performances. Coster, familiar to ’70s fans as a character actor, does subtle work in the film’s quiet scenes, even though the nature of his overall role is elusive. Conversely, the great Jack Warden is compelling to watch as the replacement groundskeeper, even though he’s spectacularly miscast—more appropriate casting would have been Kris Kristofferson, who plays a similar role in the equally bizarre Vigilante Force (1976). The lively ensemble also includes Richard Dysart, Jo Ann Harris, James Noble, and Ralph Waite.

          There’s a seed of something provocative hidden inside the bewildering action of The Sporting Club, and one imagines the folks behind the movie envisioned a provocative generation-gap farce. What they actually made is a disjointed oddity with lots of drinking, sex, violence, and pretentious speechifying.

The Sporting Club: FREAKY

The Beguiled (1971)

          Clint Eastwood went to several strange and interesting places, dramatically speaking, during his late ’60s/early ’70s transition from playing cowboys to being the fully-realized icon known as Clint Eastwood. (Dirty Harry, released in 1971, completed his ascendance.) Eastwood’s wilderness years featured everything from musicals to war movies, but there’s something particularly fascinating about The Beguiled and Play Misty for Me, both released in 1971 (quite a year for Eastwood), because these two movies pit Eastwood against the unlikely but formidable opponents of scorned women. Of the pair, The Beguiled is the more provocative, since the narrative of Play Misty for Me provides an escape valve—the villain of that piece is a psychopath. In The Beguiled, the principal antagonistic force is the savagery churning inside Eastwood’s character.

          Set in the South during the Civil War, the picture begins when a young girl, Amy (Pamelyn Ferdin), wanders through a forest and finds a wounded Union soldier, John (Eastwood). She guides him back to the boarding school where she lives with a handful of other young women, some of whom are near adulthood. The school is run by tough but psychologically fragile Martha (Geraldine Page). Initially, Martha says John should be handed over to Rebel soldiers, but, as do the other females in the school, she becomes enchanted by the handsome stranger. While John is nursed back to health, he woos not only Martha but also her second-in-command, the virginal Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman). Meanwhile, coquettish Carol (Jo Ann Harris) makes her sexual desires plain to John. Thus begins a dark odyssey involving betrayal, lies, schemes, and temptation. John plays every angle to his advantage, figuring he’ll soon be well enough to exit the school on his own power, and each woman with whom he builds a relationship accepts the face he shows to her. (As viewers, we know he’s lying to all of them.)

          Director Don Siegel, the reliable B-movie helmer who emerged during this period as Eastwood’s mentor, does some of his best-ever work in The Beguiled, employing the candlelit interiors and mossy exteriors of the Southern setting to create powerful visual metaphors—the school at the center of the story is a fertile place where wild passions grow. Siegel also stages the movie like a slow-burn horror story, and the revenge Martha takes on John once she realizes his true nature is memorably brutal.

          The Beguiled runs a little long, and a director with a subtler touch could have added further dimensions, but nearly everything in the movie works, at least to some degree. Furthermore, the female performances are so good that they sell the story’s premise. Page is stern and twitchy, adding a thread of Gothic grandeur, while Harris, Hartman, and the other supporting ladies present a spectrum of complicated femininity. Eastwood stretches to the outside edges of his skill set, but the role neatly twists his macho energy into menace. While it’s tempting to brand The Beguiled as misogynistic cinema (the same criticism often lobbed at Play Misty for Me), the picture has too many dimensions to support that simplistic a reading. In the world of The Beguiled, everyone is guilty of succumbing to vile impulses.

The Beguiled: GROOVY

Rape Squad (1974)

          Distaff vigilantism was all the rage in low-rent ’70s cinema, whether the avenger was Raquel Welch pumping hot lead into Old West varmints in Hannie Caulder (1971) or Pam Grier giving inner-city drug dealers what for in Coffy (1973). So it was probably just a matter of time before someone took the genre to a contrived extreme with a movie about a gang of women who join forces to strike back after they’ve endured too much abuse. Thus the tastefully titled Rape Squad (occasionally known by its somewhat more restrained title, Act of Vengeance), in which five ladies who were raped by the same criminal mete out justice when the actions of the local police prove unsatisfactory. Excepting its memorably sensationalistic premise, Rape Squad is a generic product off the American-International Pictures exploitation-flick assembly line, meaning that the acting, production values, and storytelling are rudimentary, and that shameless titillation is the highest priority. For instance, one long dialogue scene features an abuse victim explaining to the five members of the rape squad that she’s frustrated by the police department’s inability to catch her attacker—a conversation that would be easier to take seriously if the members of the rape squad weren’t all sitting naked in a hot tub at the time.

          On one level, the movie is crudely watchable because it’s easy to root for the women when they shame a scumbag him by destroying his apartment and dyeing his privates so he’s “marked” for identification the next time he commits a sex crime. But on every other level, Rape Squad is just plain vulgar. At one point, future Dallas costar Steve Kanaly, playing the boyfriend of the squad’s leader, Linda (Jo Ann Harris), berates her with the Neanderthal taunt, “You’re gonna get killed if you don’t stop trampin’ around like a diesel dyke!” The movie’s main criminal, Jack (Peter Brown), forces his victims to sing “Jingle Bells” while he attacks them, and he’s prone to boasts like, “I’m the honcho of the hump!” Plus, of course, the filmmakers seem to believe that lingering close-ups of breasts are somehow compatible with their theme of trauma stemming from sexual violation. Rape Squad is so brazen that the movie occasionally offers unintended amusement, but it’s impossible to find real virtue in a picture that treats this particular topic so crudely. (Available, under the title Act of Vengeance, as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Rape Squad: LAME