The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)

          The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings is an enjoyable romp about the good/bad old days of the Negro League, a consortium of baseball franchises that thrived in the 1930s, until the big leagues broke the color line by hiring black players for previously all-white teams. Billy Dee Williams, at the apex of his laid-back suaveness, stars as Bingo Long, star pitcher for the Ebony Aces, an NL team owned by heartless mortician “Sallie” Potter (Ted Ross). Fed up with Potter’s abusive polices (fining players for insubordination, kicking injured players to the curb), Bingo forms his own team for a barnstorming tour of the Midwest.

          To realize his dream, he recruits influential catcher Leon Carter (James Earl Jones), wild-man right fielder Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), and other NL luminaries. Dressing in brightly colored costumes with slouchy satin hats, the newly formed All-Stars swagger from one small town to the next, grabbing pickup games with local teams and building a solid bankroll even as they wrestle with racism and unsavory promoters. Meanwhile, Potter and the other NL owners recognize the All-Stars as a threat to their livelihood, so Poter sends goons out to harass and rob the All-Stars.

          As directed by popcorn-movie specialist John Badham (Saturday Night Fever), Bingo Long is brisk and eventful, with a vibrant mix of comedy, drama, social commentary, and sports action. The story moves along at a good clip, even if the characters are drawn a bit broadly, and there’s an offbeat mix of performance styles. Pryor is more like a guest star than a costar, dropping in and out of the movie periodically, but he’s got a funny running gag about trying to calculate batting averages, and he livens up the picture whenever he’s onscreen. Jones, showing the chops for light comedy that are easy to forget given his impressive résumé as a dramatic actor, is funny and tough, the voice of reason balancing Bingo’s pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

          Williams is hamstrung slightly because writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins let their protagonist get eclipsed by supporting characters; Bingo gets the story going and returns to the fore at the end, but his inner life is never sufficiently developed to make him the start-to-finish focus. Given this shortcoming, Williams does just fine, channeling the charisma that helps Bingo talk friends into joining his crusade.

          The movie is a touch long at 110 minutes, especially considering its thin approach to characterization, but it presents such unusual subject matter, in such an entertaining way, that it’s a solid double even though it’s not a home run.

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings: GROOVY

Dracula (1979)

          Attractive but not subtle, this big-budget version of the deathless Bram Stoker novel boasts fabulous production values, a rousing score by John Williams, a sexy star turn by Frank Langella, and zesty direction by John Badham. These elements add up to a pulpy romantic thriller that borders on camp when Laurence Olivier shows up to give an overcooked performance as the vampire count’s nemesis, Abraham Van Helsing, so even though this Dracula is an enjoyable rendering of a classic story, it doesn’t exactly aspire to high art.

          Just as a successful Broadway show of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi led Universal Pictures to film the story in 1931, a hit revival of the play starring Langella prompted Universal to revisit the character after years in which England’s Hammer Films laid claim to the world-famous bloodsucker. Langella blends aristocratic carriage, mellifluous line readings, and seductive glares to make Dracula into a sort of supernatural swinger who causes women to fall at his feet; the characterization is broad nearly to the point of self-parody, but nonetheless entertaining.

          Given this strong take on the title character, it’s mildly disappointing that other story elements in this way-too-long flick didn’t receive equally imaginative treatment. Screenwriter W.D. Richter mucks about with the specifics of Stoker’s book in order to streamline the narrative and contrive a big action-movie climax, but he relies on overused shock tactics like comin’-at-ya corpses and the tendency of Dracula’s henchman, Renfield, to snack on cockroaches.

          Similarly, director Badham and his team create a beautiful look with elaborate sets and moody photography that’s almost completely drained of color (a clever metaphor given the subject matter), but visual devices like the giant bat sculpture decorating the foyer of Dracula’s castle are indicative of the film’s sledgehammer approach. A vaguely psychedelic sequence using smoke and lasers to illustrate the dream state following a vampire bite is the picture’s most successful venture into figurative imagery.

          Helping viewers overlook the stylistic hiccups is the fact that the picture doesn’t skimp on meat-and-potatoes vampire thrills. Furthermore, leading lady Kate Nelligan is lovely in a refreshingly grown-up sort of way, even if her character’s quasi-feminism ebbs and flows according to the dramatic needs of any particular scene, and eccentric character actor Donald Pleasence is a welcome presence as the asylum keeper who becomes Van Helsing’s partner in vampire hunting. So even with the dodgy storytelling—and, sad to say, Olivier’s awful hamming—this Dracula is a pleasant diversion, albeit one that comes close to wearing out its welcome as the lengthy running time grinds along.

Dracula: FUNKY

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

          Saturday Night Fever is more than just the movie with John Travolta wearing a white suit and dancing to the music of the Bee Gees. It’s also an insightful study of ambition and desperation, and a gritty depiction of life in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City. So while the storyline is melodramatic and some of the musical sequences go on too long, Travolta’s performance is one of the most iconic acting turns of the ’70s, and the movie is filled with moments that have become ingrained into the texture of cinema history. Norman Wexler adapted the script from a New York magazine article titled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” which, ironically, author Nik Cohn later admitted he fabricated, so it’s not as if Saturday Night Fever has any claim to factual accuracy; what the movie offers instead is a palpable sense that its relatable characters are obsessed with scoring on the dancefloor as a means of escaping what they perceive as the suffocating confines of “normal” life.

          Travolta stars as Tony Manero, a twentysomething paint-store drone whose life is headed straight to blue-collar mediocrity except for when he unleashes his prodigious talent for disco dancing. On the multicolored floor of the Odyssey nightclub, he’s a god. Tony’s abilities draw him into a fractious relationship with an ambitious female counterpart, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), and he’s fascinated by the fact that she’s even better at putting on big-city airs than he is, so he studies with her to improve his dance technique, to polish his faux refinement, and to make time with her in order to prove his Neanderthal manhood. Watching dim-bulb Tony realize that there’s more to life than pretending to be a big shot is compelling, and the subplot depicting Tony’s abusive treatment of a simple neighborhood girl (Donna Pescow) adds dark colors to the characterization. The sequences depicting Tony and his buddies prowling for women are especially vivid, with the streetwise dudes spewing foul-mouthed boasts and indulging impulses so primal that they’re forever walking the line between big talk and big, violent action.

           Travolta gives his career-best performance, matching youthful swagger with genuine pathos, and he’s credible even when the movie gets overwrought. However it’s the dance scenes that make the film legendary, and for the most part they don’t disappoint; director John Badham’s exciting visual contributions include the up-and-down camera moves that follow Travolta’s every gyration during his show-stopping routine set to “You Should Be Dancing.” For the whole Saturday Night Fever experience, by the way, avoid the truncated PG-rated version that Paramount released in 1978 so younger viewers could see the movie, because only the R-rated original has the full impact.

Saturday Night Fever: RIGHT ON