Death on the Nile (1978)

          The all-star period mystery film Murder on the Orient Express (1974) was such a commercial and critical success that another big-budget Agatha Christie adaptation was sure to follow. And while Death on the Nile is far less posh than its predecessor, it’s still quite enjoyable—more so, perhaps, than the stolid Orient Express. Clever and intricate though they may be, Christine’s books are not high art, and the makers of Death on the Nile treat the source material as pulp, whereas director Sidney Lumet and his Orient Express collaborators took the dubious path of treating Christie as literature. In any event, Death on the Nile plays out like a quasi-sequel to the earlier film, since both pictures feature Christie’s beloved Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Albert Finney played Poirot in Orient Express, but Peter Ustinov assumes the role in Death on the Nile, marking the first of six films in which he essayed the character.

          As per the usual Christie formula, the narrative follows a large number of interconnected characters, all of whom eventually land in the same place—a steamer churning down the Nile River in Egypt—for a long voyage filled with intrigue and murder. The picture begins in England, where penniless Jacqueline (Mia Farrow) begs her rich friend, Linnet (Lois Chiles), to provide employment for Jacqueline’s fiancée, Simon (Simon MacCorkindale). Linnet steals Simon from her friend, marries him, and embarks on a honeymoon trip through Egypt. Yet Jacqueline chases after them, taunting the newlyweds with threats of revenge. Eventually, Linnet and Simon encounter the vacationing Poirot, requesting his assistance in dispatching the nettlesome Jacqueline. Various other characters enter the mix, and before long it becomes clear that everyone except Simon and the neutral Poirit has a grudge against Linnet.

          It’s giving nothing away to say that she dies about an hour into the 140-minute film—after all, the story can’t be called Death on the Nile without a corpse—so the fun stems from Poirot’s ensuing investigation. The pithy detective performs a thorough review of all the possible suspects, even as more people are killed, finally unraveling the true killer’s identity during a Christie staple—the final scene of Poirot gathering all the suspects in a room and then explaining, with the help of elaborate flashbacks, how he connected clues. It’s all quite far-fetched and formulaic, but there’s a good reason why Christie is considered the queen of the whodunit genre. It also helps that Anthony Shaffer, the playwright/screenwriter behind the intricate mystery film Sleuth (1972), did the script, and that director John Guillermin provides a brisk pace and a sleek look.

          As for the performances from the huge cast, they’re erratic. On the plus side, Ustinov is droll as Poirot, David Niven is urbane as his sidekick, and the best supporting players (Jane Birkin, Jon Finch, Olivia Hussey, I.S. Johar, Maggie Smith) provide the varied textures asked of them. However, some players are badly miscast (Jack Warden as a German?), and some deliver performances that are too clumsy for this sort of material (Chiles, Farrow, George Kennedy). That leaves Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury, both of whom treat their parts like high camp; neither tethers her characterization to human reality, but both fill the screen with palpable energy.

          By the end of the picture, one does feel the absence of Lumet’s sure hand, since he did a smoother job of unifying his Orient Express cast members than Guillermin does here. Nonetheless, in the most important respects, Death on the Nile delivers Christie as pure silly escapism, which seems about right.

Death on the Nile: GROOVY

The Towering Inferno (1974)

          The biggest box-office success of 1974 and in many ways the climax of the ’70s disaster-movie genre, The Towering Inferno is terrible from an artistic perspective, featuring clichéd characters and ridiculous situations spread across a bloated 165-minute running time. Still, it’s fascinating as a case study of how Hollywood operates. First and most obviously, the movie represents producer Irwin Allen’s most successful attempt to mimic the success of his underwater thriller The Poseidon Adventure (1972), because Allen outdoes the previous film with bigger spectacle, bigger stars, and bigger stunts.

          The movie also reflects movie-star gamesmanship. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman agreed to costar, then fought for primacy within the story, each demanding exactly the same number of lines in the script. Even sillier, their agents arranged for the actors’ names to appear in the credits in the same size type but at different heights, so each would have “top” billing even when their names were side-by-side. Furthermore, the movie demonstrates the ease with which greed trumps pride in Hollywood. A pair of books with useful narrative elements involving burning buildings were owned by different studios, so Allen persuaded Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros. to co-produce the movie, an industry first; each studio sacrificed the integrity of its respective brand for half of a sure thing.

          Somewhere amid the power plays, an actual movie got made, and The Towering Inferno is the epitome of what later became known as “high-concept” cinema. It’s about a big building on fire, and that’s the whole story. Sure, there are mini-melodramas, like the romantic tribulations of the folks trapped inside the building and the macho heroics of an architect (Newman) and a fireman (McQueen), but the thing is really about the excitement of seeing which characters will get burned to death, which will fall from terrible heights, and which will survive.

          The plot begins when an engineer cuts corners in order to rush the opening of the Glass Tower, a skyscraper in San Francisco. Once the inevitable blaze erupts, further shortcomings in the building process complicate efforts to rescue trapped occupants. (Elevators, helicopters, rope bridges, and other contrivances are utilized.) As per the Allen playbook, an all-star cast trudges through the carnage, trying to instill cardboard characterizations with life. Richard Chamberlain plays the short-sighted engineer, Faye Dunaway plays Newman’s love interest, William Holden plays the oblivious builder, and Robert Wagner plays a smooth-talking PR man. Others along for the ride include Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Dabney Coleman, Jennifer Jones, O.J. Simpson, and Robert Vaughn.

          The Towering Inferno is a handsome production, with director John Guillermin and cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp using their widescreen frames to give everything a sense of opulence and scale. Additionally, Allen (who directed the action scenes) knew how to drop debris onto stuntmen. Nonetheless, The Towering Inferno is humorless, long-winded, and repetitive. Amazingly, the movie received a number of Oscar nominations (including one for Best Picture), and won three of its categories: cinematography, editing, and original song. In Hollywood, nothing earns praise as quickly as financial success.

The Towering Inferno: FUNKY

Skyjacked (1972)

          Perhaps it’s a sign that I’ve spent too many years exploring the dark recesses of ’70s cinema, but the only way I can classify Skyjacked is to label it the second-best ’70s movie about Charlton Heston rescuing an out-of-control airplane. For while Skyjacked has a few entertainingly campy scenes, the picture can’t hold a kitschy candle to the wonderfully awful Airport 1975. The fact that I can draw such distinctions should indicate how high my tolerance is for so-bad-it’s-good ’70s trash, and it should also tell you to avoid Skyjacked at all costs if your tolerance is lower than mine.

          As the title suggests, this flick is a numbingly simplistic thriller about a nutty Vietnam vet hijacking a passenger plane in a storyline that brainlessly follows the standard disaster-movie playbook. Square-jawed Heston stars as manly-man pilot Captain Henry “Hank” O’Hara, who has to protect his passengers from the heavily armed shenanigans of tweaked ex-soldier Jerome Weber (James Brolin). The hijacker’s motivation has something to do with wanting to defect to Russia, but it’s not as if one expects this movie to go deep into characterization. A typically random assortment of actors gets caught in the crossfire, including Claude Akins, Susan Dey, Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier, Mariette Hartley, Yvette Mimieux, Walter Pidgeon, and Leslie Uggams, none of whom should consider this a high point in their screen careers.

          Despite the presence of capable pulp director John Guillermin behind the camera, Skyjacked is so generic that it’s almost undistinguishable from several other made-for-TV and theatrical features about the same subject matter—in fact, it’s especially easy to get Skyjacked mixed up with the carbon-copy telefilm Mayday at 40,000 Feet (1976), featuring David Janssen’s clenched teeth in place of Heston’s rigidly hinged pearly whites. The problem is that instead of going overboard with ludicrous characters and situations, Skyjacked is quite dull for most of its running time. The movie doesn’t come alive until the silly climax, when Brolin and Heston physically fight for control of the plane; Brolin is so screamingly awful, and Heston so outrageously overwrought, that the movie briefly enters bad-movie bliss. But even with that fleeting moment of amusement, Skyjacked is merely a footnote to a subgenre that never produced much in the way of meritorious cinema.

Skyjacked: LAME

Shaft (1971) & Shaft’s Big Score (1972) & Shaft In Africa (1973)

          Richard Roundtree’s lead performance is a triumph of super-cool swagger, director Gordon Parks shoots the streets of New York City with a keen eye for grungy detail, and Isaac Hayes’ Oscar-winning music is nuclear-powered funk/soul, but Shaft thrives on style over substance, because despite these considerable surface pleasures, the quasi-legendary flick is a dramatic washout. Still, it was zesty enough to trigger a slew of sequels and to inspire the blaxploitation craze, so it must be ranked as of the most significant B-movies of the ’70s even though it’s not exceptional cinema. The storyline is standard stuff about tough-talking private dick John Shaft (Roundtree) getting hired to rescue a gangster’s kidnapped daughter, so what makes the picture significant is the characterization of a cocksure black superhero operating outside the law and doing whatever he damn well pleases; in the defining moment, Shaft exits a conference with a pushy white cop by announcing that he’s off “to get laid.”
          Roundtree cuts a great figure with his immaculate facial hair, black turtleneck, and black leather suit, so when he shoots his way through an action scene—or even just strolls through the city to the accompaniment of Hayes’ pulsating music—he’s such an appealing vision of African-American empowerment that he gives the movie more vitality than it probably deserves. Excepting the tasty ’70s lingo and atmospheric Harlem settings, Ernest Tidyman’s script is quite old-fashioned, the sort of convoluted crime story Hollywood has cranked out since time immemorial, so the granddaddy of blaxploitation films doesn’t really have all that much kitschy flava: It’s merely a conventional thriller that happens to feature an memorable lead character and a predominantly black cast.
          The ordinariness is even more evident in the first sequel, Shaft’s Big Score, which finds our hero stuck in the middle of a war for control over a lucrative numbers racket. Shaft gets laid, kills a few people, and lays on the ’tude, but the narrative is so utilitarian that it’s more like a run-of-the-mill TV episode than a theatrical sequel. About the only novelty is that director Parks took over as composer for Shaft’s Big Score, copying Hayes’ style down to the theme song “Blowin’ Your Mind,” which is a shameless rip of the original film’s unforgettable “Theme from Shaft.” Shaft’s Big Score is solid meat-and-potatoes ’70s action, but nothing more.
          The franchise’s last ’70s theatrical entry, before Roundtree took the Shaft character to the small screen for a brief run of telefilms, is the energetic Shaft in Africa. Boasting the most interesting (and logic-defying) storyline of the series, Shaft in Africa gets the main character out of his Harlem comfort zone for a 007-style international adventure in which he busts up a modern-day slavery ring—and with all due respect to the venerable Parks, Shaft in Africa helmer John Guillermin has a more polished approach to action and storytelling, using slick widescreen photography to give the modestly budgeted threequel more lush imagery than its predecessors. Shaft in Africa is also considerably more violent than the other two pictures, including some brutal hand-to-hand combat, so it’s the most intense entry, and Frank Finlay (The Three Musketeers) is an effectively perverse villain.
          Roundtree’s charismatic portrayal is consistently watchable throughout all three movies, so checking out at least one of the Shaft pictures is a necessity for any ’70s completist, but many of the outrageous blaxploitation flicks that followed in Shaft’s wake improved on the prototype.

Shaft: FUNKY

Shaft’s Big Score: FUNKY

Shaft in Africa: FUNKY

El Condor (1970)

          South-of-the-border Western El Condor offers plenty of nasty violence, a splash of bickering-buddies humor, and a show-stopping nude scene, but the characters and storyline are so threadbare it’s impossible to feel more than lizard-brain reactions. If the preceding is enough to pique your interest, or if you dig watching former NFL star Jim Brown swagger his way through dangerous situations, then El Condor will provide an undemanding (and unrewarding) distraction. Otherwise, expect a bit of a slog. Brown plays Luke, an escaped convict who happens upon dimwitted prospector Jaroo (Lee Van Cleef). Together they contrive a plan to lead Apaches in a siege on a fortress containing a huge trove of gold bars. This puts Luke and Jaroo into conflict with the fortress’s sadistic commandant, Chavez (Patrick O’Neal). Further complications arise when Luke becomes attracted to Chavez’s comely companion, Claudine (Marianna Hill).

          Alas, everything before the spectacular climax is just foreplay. Scenes establishing the dynamic between Luke and Jaroo include such queasy vignettes as a “comedy” bit of the dudes getting tarred and feathered. And while Brown’s role basically makes sense—an outlaw with a moral code—Van Cleef’s characterization shifts from scene to scene. Sometimes he’s a master criminal, sometimes he’s a bumbling idiot, and in one eye-roll-inducing sequence, he’s a tender father figure. Yet Van Cleef has it easy compared to O’Neal and Hill. Calling O’Neal’s character one-dimensional would require exaggeration, and Hill’s character is zero-dimensional because her only consequential action defies comprehension. (Spoiler alert!) In the lead-up to the siege, Claudine inexplicably decides to distract the fortress’ soldiers by stripping naked in public view. Why? Apparently she’s intoxicated by the idea of getting intimate with Luke, which tracks with the movie’s retrograde portrayals of Apaches and Mexicans as mindless savages.

          On the plus side, the other memorable component of the siege is the imagery of Brown, Van Cleef, and the Apaches climbing fortress walls with metal claws. Moreover, Brown’s supercool vibe is always watchable, and Van Cleef is effectively squirmy and sweaty. As for behind-the-camera talent, B-movie icon Larry Cohen wrote the shooting script, so his unique style of cheerful sensationalism permeates the picture. (Actual line spoken by O’Neal to Hill: “You’re a crazy, annoying child, bitch—and I love you.”) Additionally, director John Guillermin contributes his usual elegant camerawork, giving this lurid enterprise much more gloss than it deserves.

El Condor: FUNKY

King Kong (1976)

          With director John Guillermin’s austere camerawork and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr.’s tongue-in-cheek wordplay leavening the histrionics producer Dino De Laurentiis obviously had in mind, this notorious picture tries to rethink a Hollywood classic as a blend of social commentary and epic tragedy. (Chances are you don’t need to be reminded that the 1933 original is a creature feature depicting the discovery and capture of a giant ape living on a remote island.) The most effective bit of updating is providing a credible reason for American explorers to visit mythical, mist-enshrouded Skull Island: the promise of untapped oil reserves. The picture was made just after the 1973-1974 gas crisis, so the lust for crude was prominent in the American consciousness.
          The least effective bit of updating is the application of Ms. Magazine feminism onto Jessica Lange’s character Dwan, an admirable but failed attempt to make the female lead more assertive than Fay Wray was in the 1933 original. Playing a shipwreck victim who joins the oil expedition and captures the big primate’s heart once she goes ashore with the crew, Lange is so pretty and curvaceous it’s not hard to understand why the ape goes ape. Unfortunately, her performance is as cringe-worthy as Dwan’s dialogue, so King Kong nearly ended the actress’ career before it began.
          However, the portrayal of Kong is heartfelt in a clunky sort of way, especially with John Barry’s alternately menacing and sweeping score jacking up the emotional stakes, and some the movie’s jolts work just like they should. The hit-and-miss special effects feature silly gimmicks like monkey specialist Rick Baker cavorting in an ape suit, plus impressive animatronic monsters created by Carlo Rimbaldi; one memorable scene features a bloody fight between Kong and a ginormous snake with Dwan caught in the middle of the carnage. All of this made a big impression on me as a ’70s kid, which might explain why I still enjoy the movie—but as it happens, I’ve gotten into an embarrassing situation or two by admitting my admiration, like the time I shared my secret Kong shame with classic-cinema champion Leonard Maltin. He was a good sport as I explained that I first saw the movie when I was 7, but he wasn’t buying what I was selling.
          Nonetheless, in defense of this much-maligned movie, I can attest that the 1976 Kong looks gorgeous because Guillermin knows how to fill a widescreen frame like nobody’s business, and Jeff Bridges, all hippy-dippy shaggy as a bleeding-heart naturalist who stows away on the ship headed for Skull Island, contributes an energized performance. Charles Grodin is terrifically hammy as the villain who unwisely tries to exploit Kong, and familiar ’70s players Rene Auberjonois and John Randolph lend flavor as members of his crew. Furthermore, the ending of the 1976 version amplifies the intensity of the original film’s conclusion, replacing a daytime dogfight atop the Empire State Building with an eerie nighttime shootout atop the then-new World Trade Center.
          So, while not a great movie by any stretch, the 1976 Kong has more going for it than you might remember—but keep the fast-forward button handy for the awkward romantic scenes between Kong and Dwan. You’ve been warned.

King Kong: FUNKY