1980 Week: Tom Horn & The Hunter

          Like so many movie stars who epitomize a particular romantic ideal, Steve McQueen’s reign as a box-office champ was surprisingly brief. He found success on television with the 1958-1961 Western series Wanted: Dead or Alive, then became a proper marquee name with his breakout role in the ensemble adventure The Great Escape (1963) before peaking with action/thriller pictures including Bullitt (1968). By the mid-’70s, however, McQueen was basically over. That is, until he mounted a two-film comeback attempt in 1980. Alas, McQueen’s return to glory was not meant to be. The actor died from a heart attack at age 50 while receiving treatment for the cancer that his doctors discovered after McQueen completed production on his last movie, The Hunter. While both of McQueen’s final films are palatable distractions, neither is remarkable, and, quite frankly, neither suggests McQueen had much gas left in the tank. Released in March 1980, Tom Horn is an elegiac Western about a cowboy forced to pay for his violent life. Released in August 1980, The Hunter is the lighthearted story of a modern-day bounty hunter. Both pictures are based upon real people, and both roles suit McQueen well.

          Tom Horn, the better of the two pictures, explores the unique quandary faced by gunslingers during the historical moment when the Wild West gave way to civilization, with all the petty corruptions that word entails. The real Tom Horn was a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt, and he helped capture Geronimo. By 1901, he was a relic—a bit like McQueen circa 1979, when the picture was shot. While drifting through Wyoming, Tom (McQueen) meets gentleman rancher John Coble (Richard Farnsworth), who hires Tom to help roust a troublesome band of rustlers. Working on behalf of John and a consortium of fellow ranchers, Tom dispatches the varmints permanently, killing them one by one. Even though he’s following orders and operating within the law, Tom’s bloody campaign gains unwanted attention, because the ranchers want Wyoming to seem like a peaceful paradise. Therefore, when Tom is arrested for the murder of an innocent man, it sure seems as if some nefarious soul framed Tom in order to make him go away. (The film, with a script credited to Bud Shrake and Thomas McGuane, retains ambiguity about the critical shooting.)

          The second half of Tom Horn comprises a kangaroo-court trial, though the real thrust of the inquiry is exploring the necessity of free-roaming gunmen in the 20th century. Director William Wiard does an okay job of infusing Tom Horn with fatalism (at one point Horn muses, “Do you know how raggedy-ass and terrible the West really was?”), and he tries valiantly to emulate John Ford’s sweeping vistas. However, Wiard isn’t much for generating real dramatic energy, and the casting of vapid Linda Evans in the female lead dooms the film’s romantic subplot. McQueen seems tired throughout the movie, which fits the character, but a distracting sense of listlessness pervades Tom Horn’s 98 pokey minutes.

          Offering a different look at similar subject matter, The Hunter is a more accomplished piece of work, but not in a good way—the movie is so slick and tidy that it feels like the pilot for a TV series instead of a proper feature. McQueen plays Ralph “Papa” Thorson, a gruff but loveable hired gun who chases bail jumpers across the country. Packing a .45 and perpetually griping that he’s too old for this shit, Papa treats bad men without mercy but cuts all kinds of slack for misguided ne’er-do-wells, even providing employment to some of the people he captures. Director Buzz Kulik has fun staging action scenes, including a chase across a farm involving cars and a tractor, as well as the centerpiece sequence revolving around an elevated train in Chicago. Domestic scenes are less impressive, because McQueen and leading lady Kathryn Harrold—as Papa’s pregnant girlfriend—share anemic, sitcom-style banter about commitment and Lamaze classes. Worse, the film’s climax is so trite that it’s nearly comical, and the myriad scenes designed to inform viewers that “Papa” is brave, eccentric, noble, old-fashioned, or just plain wonderful get tiresome after a while.

          Nonetheless, Tom Horn and The Hunter capture something important about McQueen, even if both are disappointing in different ways. In the ’60s, McQueen was the quintessential man of his moment. Just as McQueen did, the moment passed quickly through this world, leaving an indelible impression.

Tom Horn: FUNKY

The Hunter: FUNKY

Mitchell (1975)

One of the least interesting entries in the ’70s cycle of action movies about cops behaving as lawlessly as the criminals they pursue, Mitchell features a disjointed storyline, lackluster action scenes, and perfunctory acting. The movie is more or less coherent, but it’s also boring, clichéd, and stupid. Hulking B-movie star Joe Don Baker plays the title character, a dim-bulb detective who gets mixed up with sophisticated crooks, so the bulk of the story involves Baker’s character trying to outwit people whose intellects greatly surpass his own. This sort of premise worked well in a zillion other movies; for instance, Baker offered an entertaining, Southern-fried spin on similar material in Walking Tall (1973). Yet everything about Mitchell feels half-assed. Baker isn’t the right casting for a tough city cop, since he’s unmistakably a good ol’ boy from Texas, and he plays nearly every scene like light comedy, even though death and destruction follow in his wake. As directed by the normally reliable Andrew V. McLaglen, Mitchell wobbles between escapism and seriousness, so it seems likely that many of the film’s tonal problems emerged during postproduction. After all, there’s no excuse for the inclusion of cornpone country singer Hoyt Axton’s lackadaisical theme song during a lengthy love scene between Baker and leading lady Linda Evans—for several excruciating minutes, Mitchell becomes the equivalent of the worst type of Burt Reynolds romp. Future Dynasty star Evans is as forgettable as always, while the actors playing the villains—the great Martin Balsam and the emphatic John Saxon—are wasted in one-dimensional roles. (Saxon’s big scene is a silly chase involving dune buggies.) Virtually nothing in Mitchell works, and the climax is beyond ludicrous. Baker’s character commandeers a helicopter to chase after bad guys who are in a boat, transfers from the helicopter to the boat, and takes out a henchman with a metal hook. All the while, the main villain simply stands at the boat’s controls, waiting to get shot instead of taking defensive action. But then again, seeing as how he’s stuck in an awful movie, can you blame him?

Mitchell: LAME

Avalanche Express (1978)

A turgid Cold War thriller featuring a sloppy script and underwhelming special effects, Avalanche Express also suffers because of two unexpected tragedies. The film’s director, action-movie veteran Mark Robson, died partway through production and was replaced with an uncredited Monte Hellman. More glaringly, leading man Robert Shaw died before post-production began, so when the filmmakers decided to re-record the dialogue in his first scene, they ended up hiring actor Robert Rietty to dub Shaw’s entire performance; as a result, not a syllable of Shaw’s distinctive English lilt is heard during the movie. Ultimately, however, these are the least of the movie’s problems, because Avalanche Express grinds through a simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped narrative marked by tedious lulls between action sequences. The basic premise is simple enough. When a high-powered Russian general named Marenkov (Shaw) defects to the West, U.S. agents led by Major Wargrave (Lee Marvin) transport Marenkov by train as a means of luring the assassins they know Soviet spymaster Bunin (Maximilian Schell) will send to kill Marenkov. The idea is to flush out long-buried operatives with the bait of a defector whose secrets can unravel important Soviet projects. Unfortunately, the filmmakers smother this workable premise with pointless subplots about double agents, a Middle Eastern terrorist group, a mysterious Russian counterintelligence project, and Wargrave’s on-again/off-again relationship with a fellow spy (Linda Evans). That all of this gets crammed into 88 minutes gives a sense of how superficially each story point gets addressed; the word for every scene in this movie is “perfunctory.” Even the presence of former football great Joe Namath (as Wargrave’s sidekick) and a cheesy avalanche sequence created by Star Wars special-effects guy John Dykstra aren’t enough to overcome the movie’s glaring flaws. Avalanche Express isn’t unwatchable, because there’s just enough action and star power to generate fleeting interest, but it’s a poor epitaph for Robson and Shaw. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Avalanche Express: LAME

The Klansman (1974)

          For those who enjoy charting the outer reaches of bad cinema, the title of The Klansman looms larger than that of most ’70s movies. Featuring an inexplicable combination of actors—Richard Burton, Lee Marvin, O.J. Simpson—and a lurid take on incendiary subject matter, the movie promises a feast of jaw-dropping wrongness. And sure enough, The Klansman is both uproariously terrible and consistently distasteful. It’s also, however, quite tedious.

          The story is appropriately florid. In a small southern town populated by poor Black folks and foaming-at-the-mouth racist whites (narrative restraint is not the watchword here), a young white woman (Linda Evans) is raped, leading revved-up locals to terrorize Black citizens including Garth (Simpson). This culminates with the murder of an innocent Black man while Garth, now a fugitive from the bloodthirsty mob, watches helplessly. The town’s sheriff, Track Bascomb (Marvin), improbably a voice of reason and tolerance, tries to protect Garth, who expresses his rage by picking off white people with an M-16.

          Meanwhile—there’s always a “meanwhile” in overcooked bad movies—local landowner Breck Stancil (Burton) invokes the ire of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter because he won’t let Klan soldiers search his property for Garth, who may be hiding with Stancil’s predominantly Black workforce. Soon, the various forces in the story converge in a violent climax. All of this should be trashy fun, but as lifelessly directed by 007 veteran Terence Young, the movie just kind of happens; it feels as if the production team showed up every day and shot the appropriate screenplay pages without any regard for what came before or what might follow.

          Reportedly, one reason for the movie’s flatness is that it’s the faint echo of a potentially more interesting project: Original writer-director Samuel Fuller conceived the piece, using William Bradford Hule’s novel as a foundation, as a full-on KKK story in which the hero would be a Klan member who learns tolerance. Instead, the studio asked for something less provocative, and Fuller walked. The project was further damned by unwise casting: Burton and Marvin were falling-down drunks at this point, and Simpson, whose character is supposed to come across as a justice-dispensing revolutionary, is, to be generous, not an actor.

          Compensating somewhat for the lackluster work by the leads, Character player Cameron Mitchell livens up the picture with his cartoonish villainy as a hateful deputy. Better still, the priceless David Huddleston gives the best performance in the movie (which is admittedly not saying a lot) as the town mayor, who moonlights as the “Exalted Cyclops” of the local Klan chapter. Yet even Huddleston can’t do anything with hopeless dialogue: “Don’t look at me like I’m the heavy. You want to know who the heavy is, I’ll tell you. It’s the system. And we’re all of us caught up in it.”

          Unbelievably, the dialogue gets even worse later. Lola Falana plays a young Black woman visiting her mother, one of Stancil’s employees, so the rednecks presume she’s sleeping with Stancil and therefore rape her to make a point. “They think I’m your brown comfort,” she says. “They wanted to foul your nest.” Yet perhaps the most (morbidly) fascinating aspect of this whole disastrous enterprise is Burton’s excruciating performance—he’s exactly this awful in plenty of other movies, but The Klansman features his spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at a Southern accent, which sounds different in almost every scene.

          Given how punishingly bad every frame of this movie is, it’s a wonder no one thought to chop it down to a 90-minute highlight reel, because if The Klansman moved faster, it would at least have the quality of a fever dream. Instead, it lumbers along for 112 bludgeoning minutes, forcing viewers to soak up every nuance of its terribleness. In this case, more is less.

The Klansman: FREAKY