The Streets of San Francisco (1972)

          A solidly made cop show that ran for five seasons and is perhaps best remembered as the vehicle that delivered Michael Douglas to stardom, The Streets of San Francisco made the most of the locations referenced in its title. Rather than living entirely on backlots, familiar Los Angeles locations, and soundstages, as was true for many generic police programs of the ’70s, The Streets of San Francisco used the glorious views and loping hills of the Bay Area as supporting characters. Watching veteran Detective Lt. Mike Stone (Karl Malden) and passionate young Inspector Steve Keller (Michael Douglas) confront crises and probe mysteries every week, it was believable that San Francisco was the home to an endless array of interesting stories.

          That being said, the tale told in the pilot movie is weak. One problem, of course, is that the movie sprawls across an hour and 40 minutes, stretching the routine premise of the show well past the breaking point. Another problem is that producers put way too much focus on guest star Robert Wagner, who plays a lawyer with connections to a murdered woman. Whereas strong pilots situate viewers in the worlds of the leading characters who will drive the ensuing series, The Streets of San Francisco pilot shoves Stone and Keller to the background. (In subsequent episodes that boasted vivid central narratives, this trope worked more effectively than it does here.)

          The pilot begins with the death of a young woman named Holly Berry (Kim Darby). Stone and Keller find a peculiar clue on her body—a laminated business card bearing the name of lawyer David Farr (Wagner). The storyline then trudges along two parallel tracks. In present-day scenes, the cops try to piece together a picture of Holly’s life. In flashbacks, viewers learn about Holly’s affair with David, which is fraught with issues because she’s a hippie living on the fringe and he’s a member of high society with a reputation to protect. Based on a novel by Carolyn Weston, the pilot storyline is really more of a melodrama than a proper mystery. Uninspired work by the so-so supporting cast reflects the tepid nature of the material; beyond Darby and Wagner, the pilot features Tom Bosley, Mako, and John Rubenstein. Throwing the whole thing in a weird new direction is the climax, which switches the tone from police procedural to supernatural thriller.

          Happily, things got better on The Streets of San Francisco once it went to series. Motifs that seemed incidental in the pilot, like Malden’s way of imbuing his seen-it-all character with dogged optimism, grew as the series developed. Concurrently, Douglas found his footing by creating a persona befitting the spectacular head of hair that he sported throughout his run on the series; by the time Douglas left the show, just prior to its final year, he had become an Oscar-winning producer and he was well on his way to becoming a movie star. No surprise that his replacement, Richard Hatch, wasn’t able to keep the Streets of San Francisco going, though Hatch later found cult fame as the star of the original Battlestar Galactica series.

The Streets of San Francisco: FUNKY

The Strawberry Statement (1970)

          Arguably the hippest of several fiction films that dealt with unrest among American college students during the Vietnam era, The Strawberry Statement has not aged especially well. Presented in a freewheeling style and revolving around a protagonist who kinda-sorta shifts from noninvolvement to radicalism, the movie has plenty of attitude and style. Moreover, the way the filmmakers link activism with sex says something interesting about horny dilettantes worming their way into the realm of politically committed youths. Yet by failing to predicate the story on real issues (the motivation for the film’s major protest is a fictional urban-development issue), and by failing to place a true radical at the center of the story, The Strawberry Statement ends up conveying an experience that’s tangential to the chaos pervading American campuses in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

          Set in and around a fictional San Francisco college, the picture stars Bruce Davison as Simon, an apathetic student who digs having a good time, but mostly thinks about grades and post-graduation career opportunities. When he meets an attractive radical named Linda (Kim Darby), Simon slips into the activist community as a way of making time with her. Later, when Linda is away from school for an extended period, Simon dallies with another activist hottie, and he allows the misperception to spread that he was beaten by police during a demonstration. This naturally gets Simon into Linda’s good graces once she returns to school, so the new couple splits their time between radicalism and romance, though Simon remains only marginally interested in actual politics. Finally, events at a major demonstration force Simon to definitively choose a side in the us-vs.-them conflict.

          Based on a book by James Simon Kunen, which documented real-life student unrest at Columbia University, The Strawberry Statement is openly sympathetic with student demonstrators, often portraying cops as faceless paramilitary goons. The most appealing grown-up in the movie is a shopkeeper (James Coco) who happily gives groceries to the radicals so long as they let him pretend he’s being robbed, thus enabling him to file a bogus insurance claim. In fact, scenes with ironic humor often work best in The Strawberry Statement. One hopes, for instance, that the following line was written with a wink: “I’m only 20, so I’ll give the country one more chance.” Other strong elements include the soundtrack, featuring tunes by CSNY and other rock acts, and the visual style, with fisheye lenses and offbeat upside-down camera angles used to accentuate disorientation. Does it all come together for a cohesive expression of a singular theme? Not really. But does The Strawberry Statement’s shambolic structure capture something about a wild time? Yes.

The Strawberry Statement: FUNKY

The Grissom Gang (1971)

          Few filmographies are quite as confusing as that of Robert Aldrich, a prolific producer-director who made a handful of stone classics, including The Dirty Dozen (1967), but also made the occasional picture that missed the mark so widely it seemed as if it was helmed by a beginner instead of a veteran. The Grissom Gang, for instance, is an absurdly long melodrama about a simplistic story that could have been presented with 40 minutes less screen time, and the movie is utterly bewildering from a tonal perspective. Is it a comedy, a drama, or a thriller? And what’s with the musical numbers?

          One of myriad post-Bonnie and Clyde gangster pictures set during the Depression, the movie concerns a group of Midwestern thugs who kidnap an heiress for ransom. Although slow-witted and violent-tempered Slim Grissom (Scott Wilson) is ostensibly the leader of the group, the real power behind the gang is his monster of a mother, Ma Grissom (Irene Dailey). So when Slim takes a liking to the heiress, Barbara Blandish (Kim Darby), Ma endangers the whole group by agreeing to a change in plans. Instead of killing the girl after collecting ransom, thereby protecting the anonymity of the crooks, Ma “gives” Barbara to Slim as a playmate. Then, once Barbara figures out that Slim is the only person keeping her alive, she feigns affection—only to later develop genuine feelings for her brutal lummox of a captor. Sprinkled in between scenes of infighting among the gang members are vignettes that advance tedious subplots involving Dave Fenner (Robert Lansing), a private detective hired to act on behalf of the heiress’ rich father, and Anne Borg (Connie Stevens), a showgirl who dates one of the gang members.

          In terms of on-set execution, The Grissong Gang isn’t bad. Aldrich generates tension with lots of sweaty close-ups, and the actors give intense performances. (Wilson does the best work in the film, though he frequently lapses into cartoonishness, and Darby seems out of her depth in nearly every scene.) The big problem has to do with the way Aldrich assembled the material that he gathered. In addition to retaining way too much footage—the movie seems to drag on forever—Aldrich commissioned a bouncy score that suggests he envisioned The Grissom Gang as light entertainment. Because, really, what says “light entertainment” more than myriad onscreen killings, an attempted rape or two, and the sweet scene of Slim threatening to murder his mom with a switchblade?

          The Grissom Gang has its fans, who undoubtedly appreciate the overall malevolence of the piece and the tasty work of supporting players including Matt Clark and Ralph Waite, but nearly everything that Aldrich attempts to do with the movie was accomplished more gracefully in some other film by some other director. So, while The Grissom Gang isn’t a disaster, per se, it’s a long way from being compelling, original, or satisfying.

The Grissom Gang: FUNKY

Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers (1979)

To avoid any confusion later, it must be stated up front that the TV movie Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers is exactly as awful as its title suggests, though not in the expected way—instead of being lurid or sleazy, the picture is merely dull and insipid. So why note its existence? Well, a number of notable people worked on the project, and in the case of supporting actor Harry Dean Stanton, there’s a minor connection between Flatbed Annie and a famous project that came later. Plus, Flatbed Annie features the one and only acting performance by Billy Carter (pictured), U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s beer-swilling brother. Based on the scant evidence of his one scene, Billy Carter did not miss his calling. To get the synopsis out of the way, Sweetiepie (Kim Darby) is the wife of long-haul trucker Jack (Fred Willard), who gets laid up after an accident and falls behind on truck payments. Sweetiepie decides she needs to deliver a load in Jack’s rig so she can earn money to keep the truck out of hock. In order to achieve this goal, she enlists the aid of Flatbed Annie (Annie Potts), a tough-talking driver. Meanwhile, conniving entrepreneur C.W. Douglas (Stanton) buys Jack’s loan and then tries every angle he can to repossess Jack’s truck so he can sell the rig for cash. That’s the Stanton connection, such as it is—the actor plays a repo man just a few years before portraying another character with the same job in the cult favorite Repo Man (1983). Stanton is the best thing in this terrible movie, whether he’s giving deadpan line deliveries or, in one scene, singing. It’s also (somewhat) interesting to note that Flatbed Annie was directed by Robert Greenwald, whose other accomplishments in fiction films range from the impressive (the 1984 TV movie The Burning Bed) to the mortifying (the 1980 musical flop Xanadu); today, Greenwald is known for his low-budget liberal-fringe documentaries, such as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005) and Koch Brothers Exposed (2012). As for the leading actors, neither Darby nor Potts benefits from her encounter with this material. Both are abysmal. Darby seems distracted and incompetent, while Potts’ weird performance would only make sense if it were revealed that her character was a drug casualty. Summing up, Flatbed Annie is to be avoided at all costs—except by the morbidly curious.

Flatbed Annie & Sweetiepie: Lady Truckers: LAME

Norwood (1970)

          After achieving success on the pop charts, velvet-voiced Arkansas native Glen Campbell displayed a comfortable onscreen presence in the John Wayne movie True Grit (1969), so it was inevitable that some enterprising producer would test Campbell’s viability as a leading man. (Hey, it worked for Elvis, so why not?) In Norwood, Campbell plays upbeat war veteran Norwood Pratt, a good ol’ boy from Texas who bums around the country with his acoustic guitar, crooning innocuous tunes and spewing redneck patois (“Think I’ll mosey on over to the roller rink, see if I can’t pick up a little heifer lookin’ for a ride home”).

          Upon returning from Vietnam to his tiny hometown of Ralph, Texas, Norwood works in a garage and endures sitcom-style quarrels with his sister (Leigh French) and her idiot husband (Dom DeLuise). Eager for escape, Norwood agrees to help a slick used-car salesman (Pat Hingle) transport cars to New York City. He also agrees to transport a sexy would-be performer (Carol Lynley), leading to arguments in which she calls him “peckerwood” and he calls her a “damn squirrel-headed dingbat.” Yeah, it’s like that.

          Eventually, Norwood discovers the cars he’s moving are stolen, so he dumps the vehicles and heads to New York anyway, where he gets laid with a spunky hippie (Tisha Sterling). Sated, he hops on a bus for the long trip back home. Along the way, he forms a bizarre surrogate family with Rita (Kim Darby), a redneck runaway bride; Edmund (Billy Curtis), a little person raised in the carny world; and a chicken. Yes, a chicken.

          To call Norwood inconsequential would be to overstate its value, but some scenes are so random they command attention, like the bit of costar Joe Namath tossing around a football with the dwarf in the backyard of a Southern estate. (Despite his prominence on the poster, former gridiron star Namath has a tiny role.) As for Campbell, he strikes a clean-cut figure with his helmet of shiny hair and his lantern-jawed good looks, but he’s more of a personality than an actor, so assessing his performance is pointless.

          Incredibly, this slight movie was adapted from a novel by True Grit author Charles Portis, though the vapid storyline of Norwood exists a universe apart from the unforgettable narrative of True Grit. Norwood is also notable, if that’s the right word, as one of the gentlest Vietnam-vet stories ever, since the easygoing Norwood seems as if he just came back from a country club instead of surviving a tour in Southeast Asia.

Norwood: FUNKY

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)

          Some of the creepiest movies of the ’70s were actually made for TV, perhaps because the medium’s restrictions against gore forced filmmakers to concentrate on atmosphere and suspense. Additionally, the way TV movies came and went overnight lent a sort of mythological power to the best such pictures, with viewers wondering if they really saw what they thought they saw. Given these factors, it’s understandable why an otherwise unassuming flick like Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark could gain minor cult-movie notoriety: While not a great film, the picture was creepy and strange enough to lodge itself in viewers’ collective memory. (Proving the picture’s enduring appeal, a big-screen remake was released in 2011, with Katie Holmes starring.)

          Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is haunted-house picture notable for the bizarre-looking creatures that harass the story’s heroine. The critters are doll-sized, fur-covered humanoids with ugly little wrinkled faces, and they use simple tools like a rope strung across a stairway to cause lethal accidents. In shots where the creatures interact with normal-sized people, oversized props and careful editing are used to sell the illusion that these tiny tormenters are scuttling around underfoot, trying to drag the humans down to their mysterious realm, which can only be accessed through a basement fireplace. For unsuspecting viewers in 1973, discovering that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark was a full-on creature feature must have been alarming, and even though the supernatural concepts of the movie are both ridiculous and unexplained, the idea of gremlins lurking in the shadows of one’s own home is an irrational fear many people share.

          The story begins when a young couple inherits a musty mansion. The husband (Jim Hutton) is often away on business, so his wife (Kim Darby) is stuck at the house, bickering with a cantankerous handyman (William Demarest) and trying to figure out if the weird creatures she’s seeing are real or imagined. Neither Hutton nor Darby is an acting powerhouse, and Demarest gives a perfunctory turn, so it’s not the acting that gives Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark its mild spookiness; rather, the picture’s potency stems from the filmmakers’ wholehearted commitment to an outlandish narrative. The movie gets down to business immediately and escalates steadily, never pausing for distractions like character development, and there’s always something admirable about a no-frills fright machine. So, while Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark can’t match the nerve-jangling intensity of the best ’70s TV horror, like Duel or Trilogy of Terror, it’s a distracting trifle nonetheless. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: FUNKY

The One and Only (1978)

          Steve Gordon was just beginning an impressive career when he died; after several years of writing for sitcoms, he made an auspicious directorial debut with the beloved comedy Arthur (1981), based on his own script, then suffered a fatal heart attack in 1982 at the age of 43. The only other feature on his too-brief filmography is The One and Only, which he wrote and produced, and which has similarities to Arthur. The story of a self-possessed man-child whose dreams of stardom lead him to a career in professional wrestling, The One and Only shares with Arthur the conceit that a person who lives only for laughter can find a soulmate who sees substance beneath the silliness.

          Henry Winkler stars as Andy Schmidt, a college student who’s convinced that he’s destined for greatness, despite having shown no particular skill for his chosen vocation of acting. Quite to the contrary, Andy’s such an irrepressible ham that during a school production of a classical play, he uses his one line as an excuse for interrupting the show with cheap comedy shtick. Nonetheless, his single-minded determination wins the heart of amiable coed Mary Crawford (Kim Darby).

          Much to the consternation of Mary’s uptight parents (William Daniels and Polly Holliday), the young lovers get hitched and move from the Midwest to New York, where Andy tries and fails to get an acting career going. Crossing paths with a little person who works on the wrestling circuit, Milton (Hervé Villechaize), Andy accidentally discovers his true destiny as a shameless crowd-pleaser who assumes various identities in the wrestling ring, from a psychic who hypnotizes opponents to a Nazi who bops his enemies with a war helmet.

           As directed by old-school comedy pro Carl Reiner, The One and Only goes down smoothly, mixing amiable I-gotta-be-me speechifying with terrific one-liners (some of the short jokes made at Villechaize’s expense are laugh-out-loud funny, though they definitely precede political correctness). Gordon’s script is pure fluff, and the story stops just when it’s picking up steam, but funny is funny, so it’s hard to argue with results. It helps that Winkler is terrific, all charm and comic timing, although Gene Saks (best known as a director of many Neil Simon films and plays) nearly steals the movie with his caustic performance as Andy’s hilariously crude agent.

The One and Only: FUNKY