The Force of Evil (1977)

          Network appetites for TV movies in the ’70s were so insatiable that lots of recycled material hit the airwaves, hence this low-budget retread of the 1962 theatrical feature Cape Fear—which was more elaborately remade as a 1991 Scorsese/De Niro thriller. Starring Lloyd Bridges, The Force of Evil adds a vaguely supernatural element to the Cape Fear mix because the telefilm’s villain inexplicably survives multiple fatal attacks. Fans of slasher films might find this element moderately interesting since The Force of Evil predates such “unkillable killer” flicks as the following year’s Halloween, though the gore factor is zero and the intensity never rises above a simmer. It should also be noted that writer Robert Malcolm Young and director Richard Lang both enjoyed long careers generating hours upon hours of disposable television. In other words, expectations should be set appropriately low—but if your taste is such that the basic components of The Force of Evil capture your imagination, then you might find it diverting.
          Originally broadcast as a double-length episode of short-lived anthology series Tales of the Unexpected, this piece borrows the Cape Fear premise of a paroled criminal menacing the fellow whose testimony sent him to jail. (Neither the screenwriter of the 1962 movie nor the author of that film’s source novel is credited.) Specifically, in the bleak landscape of a California desert community, grinning psychopath Teddy Jakes (William Watson) terrorizes physician Yale Carrington (Bridges), who has a wife and two kids. At first, Yale feels confident about his ability to repel Teddy because Yale’s brother, Floyd (John Anderson), is the local sheriff. Alas, as in Cape Fear, the criminal studied law books in jail and therefore knows how far to push without incriminating himself. Nonetheless, things get fairly gruesome even before the first attempt on Teddy’s life—and then The Force of Evil kicks into gear by testing how violent Yale is willing to become in order to protect his family.
          The juxtaposition of Bridges’ somewhat restrained performance and Watson’s menacing swarthiness generates decent tension, as do several Hitchcock-style suspense scenes. Yet the movie’s strongest mojo emanates from dramatic camera angles rendered by cinematographer Paul Lohmann, whose impressive CV include Nashville and Trilogy of Terror (both 1975). Using deep focus and low angles, Lohmann takes Dan Curtis-style claustrophobic framing to almost satirical extremes. Oh, and one last point of interest for fans of a certain age—playing Bridges’ daughter is Eve Plumb, appearing between her tenures as a member of the Brady Bunch.

The Force of Evil: FUNKY

Running Wild (1973)

          A well-meaning family adventure with an animal-preservation theme, Running Wild feels like a TV movie that somehow drifted to the big screen and gained 30 minutes of extraneous footage along the way. The cast is strictly B-list, the technical execution is perfunctory, and the storytelling is trite, so this thing would have gone down more smoothly as a 74-minute quickie. Set in Colorado, the movie begins with freelance photographer Whit Colby (Dina Merrill) snapping pictures of wild mustangs near a canyon. Then malevolent Crug Crider (Morgan Woodward) buzzes the herd with a helicopter, startling several horses into running off a cliff. Whit reports what she’s seen to local land agent Jeff Methune (Lloyd Bridges), kicking the story into gear. Jeff is responsible for looking after the animals and people on Indian terrain, where the incident happened, so he’s got a complicated relationship with local fatcat Quentin Hogue (Pat Hingle, who also associate-produced the picture). Quentin wants to buy the land for cattle grazing, so (unbeknownst to Jeff) Quentin enlists goons including Crug to murder mustangs, hoping that elimination of the herd will clear the way for his land grab. Whit, a big-city lefty with an activist spirit, has something to say about all of this.

          Made somewhat in the mode of a Walt Disney picture, albeit without cutesy vignettes and mile-a-minute pacing, Running Wild goes to all the predictable places: Jeff and Whit fall in love; Jeff has bad blood with Crug, leading to a big fistfight; and the climax involves Jeff’s young son becoming endangered while trying to help wild horses. Nothing that happens in the picture is overtly stupid, but nothing that happens in the picture is special, either. Although scenes of mustangs roaming through canyon country are picturesque, way too much time gets chewed up by romantic material involving Bridges and Merrill, especially since the filmmakers fail to construct believable obstacles to that relationship. Bridges’ character is cranky (but not too cranky) and Merrill’s character is icy (but not too icy). Except for harsh vignettes of animal abuse, most of the picture could just as easily be titled Running Mild. And with all due respect to Mr. Hingle, a reliable actor of limited range, it’s not a good sign when he gives the most invested performance in a picture, unless one counts Woodward’s demonic scowling as an actual characterization.

Running Wild: FUNKY

To Find a Man (1972)

          The most intriguing films about teen life avoid oversimplifying young characters, following adolescents through adventures and mishaps as they broaden their worldviews—or don’t. Such is the case with To Find a Man, an offbeat dramedy with the unlikely subject matter of illegal abortion. Making her screen debut, Pamela Sue Martin stars as Rosalind McCarthy, a shallow Catholic schoolgirl who wants to terminate a pregnancy. Hence the title, since the “man” she seeks is not a romantic companion but rather a doctor willing to operate outside the law. Yet Rosalind is only nominally the protagonist, as the story revolves around her best friend, Andy (Darren O’Connor). Their families live near each other in a ritzy Manhattan neighborhood, but even though Andy has developed feelings for Rosalind, he’s never expressed himself. This hidden truth adds yet another layer of emotional weirdness to the situation once Rosalind enlists Andy’s help finding an abortionist. In the film’s best scenes, Andy’s willingness to do anything for Rosalind collides with her inability to behave responsibly. While the film doesn’t overtly slut-shame Rosalind, an understandable sense of bewilderment at her recklessness comes across.

          Based on a novel by S.J. Wilson, To Find a Man was written for the screen by the venerable dramatist Arnold Schulman, whose career includes some spectacular misfires as well as several fine scripts for film and television. He imbues every character in To Find a Man with specificity, from Rosalind’s guy’s-guy father, played by Lloyd Bridges, to a neighborhood druggist, played by Tom Bosley. Yet Schulman achieves his best work where it matters most: Andy and Rosalind. Andy is a bespectacled science nerd who finds the horny blathering of his adolescent pals juvenile, while Rosalind is so spoiled she frets at the prospect of even minor pain. A vivid sketch emerges of two people thrown together by circumstance, challenged by adversity, and changed by their discoveries about each other during the process. It’s a platonic love story of sorts, filled with vivid moments. In one memorable scene, Andy coaches Rosalind through the indelicate matter of providing a urine sample, even as Andy’s savvy housekeeper interrupts several times, sparking comedy-of-errors awkwardness.

          As directed by the reliable Buzz Kulik, To Find a Man strives to balance lighthearted storytelling and serious themes, mostly succeeding in that endeavor. (Some may feel the treatment trivializes the topic of abortion, while others may feel satirical elements don’t go far enough.) In the end, what keeps the piece grounded and interesting is the combination of Schulman’s crisp scripting and the credible performances. Martin does appealingly naturalistic work, incarnating a young woman sure to drive many lovers mad in the future, and O’Connor, who never played another major screen role, is just as good.

To Find a Man: GROOVY

1980 Week: Airplane!

          Not too long ago, I attended a speaking engagement by former Seinfeld writer-producer Peter Mehlman, during which Mehlman spent a few moments discussing Airplane!, the iconic disaster-movie spoof created by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. Mehlman recalled buying a ticket for Airplane! during its original release and watching the movie from his usual cynical remove—until the scene when Captain Oveur (Peter Graves) stops at an airport newsstand. Noticing a sly throwaway sight gag—the newsstand’s adult-magazine section is labeled “whacking material”—Mehlman turned to a fellow moviegoer and said, “I’ve really gotta start paying attention here.”

         And that, in a nutshell, is the genius of Airplane! Some of the jokes are inspired, some are merely okay, and some are silly, but there are so damn many jokes that watching Airplane! is like huffing pure comedy. “Don’t call me Shirley.” “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.” “Give me Hamm on five, hold the Mayo.” “Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?” “Oh, stewardess, I speak jive.” And, of course, “The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing—finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.” (Devoted Airplane! fans will recognize that last line as a straight lift from 1957’s Zero Hour!, the vintage potboiler that Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker used as the template for Airplane!)

          Densely packed into 88 minutes of nostop insanity, Airplane! not only slaughters the disaster-movie genre but takes the mile-a-minute comedy style perfected by Mel Brooks in the ’70s to an entirely new level. Devoting the least possible screen time to an actual story, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker treat every single line of dialogue as either a set-up or a punchline. They also discard logic and reason, as well as most laws of aeronautics and physics, to reach for jokes wherever jokes can be found. Death, drugs, gender, race, sex—it’s all fair game. And it’s all in good fun, because even though countless Airplane! gags are in bad taste, there’s not a mean-spirited millisecond to be found. The most unique element of Airplane! is the brilliant casting of supporting roles. Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker rightly reasoned that hiring dramatic actors to play their scenes with deadly seriousness would maximize the absurdity of the situations. Thus, square-jawed Lloyd Bridges, Graves, Leslie Nielsen, and Robert Stack revived their careers by learning how to spoof their own images. (Nielsen ran the farthest with this opportunity, headlining the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Naked Gun franchise throughout the ’80s.)

          Not everything in Airplane! has aged well, with the disco gags and the bit about the Peace Corps volunteers teaching basketball to Africans feeling especially creaky, but the best stuff in Airplane! still kills. Stack pummeling solicitors while racing through an airport. Passengers lining up, with various weapons, to quiet a hysterical woman. Otto the Autopilot getting the best manual inflation in screen history. A preteen passenger shooting down an age-appropriate suitor by saying she takes her coffee “black, like my men.” The list goes on. Even though Airplane! is about a plane in danger of crashing, the movie reaches cruising altitude immediately and then keeps climbing all the way to the goofy finale. Hell, even the credits are funny: Playing on the familiar “Best Boy” credit, Airplane! acknowledges “Worst Boy: Adolf Hitler.”

Airplane!: RIGHT ON

Disaster on the Coastliner (1979)

          Despite its misleading title, the schlocky TV movie Disaster on the Coastliner is actually a hijacking thriller, not a disaster epic. Executed competently (albeit without much flair) by director Richard C. Sarafian, who usually made theatrical features, the picture has a solid kitsch factor thanks to the presence of hammy actors including Lloyd Bridges and William Shatner. Furthermore, the fast-moving story ticks off every cliché on the hijacking-flick checklist, so the picture sustains interest even though it lacks anything resembling originality. The premise is the usual contrived hokum. The day the vice president’s wife is scheduled to ride a train from LA to San Francisco, a disgruntled railroad employee mucks with the railroad’s computer-guidance system and threatens to crash the train carrying the vice president’s wife into a locomotive unless officials meet his demands. Overseeing the crisis at the railroad’s command station are noble dispatcher Roy (E.G. Marshall) and uptight Secret Service agent Al (Bridges); their unlikely ally is a con man named Stuart (Shatner), who is on board the train and helps try to prevent the crash. Naturally, all of this is spiked with romantic subplots—Stuart woos Paula (Yvette Mimieux), a housewife who’s ready to give up on her philandering husband—and corporate intrigue. You see, the hijacker has an axe to grind because railroad officials skimped on safety inspections in the past, resulting in tragedy, so newly installed railroad CEO Estes (Raymond Burr) has to pressure his people in order to determine whether the hijacker’s claims have validity.

          Even though most of Disaster on the Coastliner is padded with dialogue scenes, the picture pays off nicely with an elaborate action sequence involving helicopters chasing after a runaway train. The control-room scenes with Bridges and Marshall have a fun bickering vibe, with Bridges representing by-the-book rigidity and Marshall representing compassion, and it’s a hoot to see Bridges playing a non-comedic version of a character very much like the lunatic he played in Airplane! (1980). In fact, one of his motor-mouthed Disaster on the Coastliner speeches would have been right at home in Airplane!: “It’s all gone wacko, right? The whole flaky system. You can’t control the train!” With the exception of Shatner, none of the actors in Disaster on the Coastliner breaks a sweat, though each brings the requisite level of comfort-food familiarity. As for Shatner, he seems to have a grand time playing with disguises, courting Mimeux, and climbing atop the runaway train during the finale.

Disaster on the Coastliner: FUNKY

The 5th Musketeer (1979)

          An unsuccessful attempt to piggyback on the success of Richard Lester’s joyous movies The Three Musketeers (1973) and The Four Musketeers (1974), this lavish production is actually the umpteenth screen adaptation of The Man in the Iron Mask, the classic novel that French scribe Alexandre Dumas wrote as part of his ongoing Musketeers series. The storyline, of course, involves real-life French King Louis XIV and the fictional character Dumas invented—Louis’ twin brother, Philippe. (Both characters are played by Beau Bridges.) Upon learning of his twin’s existence, Louis and his underlings lock Philippe in a dungeon, his face hidden behind an iron mask, lest Philippe challenge Louis’ right to the throne. However, because Philippe was protected since childhood by the noble musketeers, the now-aging swordsmen come to their young friend’s rescue.

          There’s a lot more to the plot, such as the clash between Louis’ conniving mistress (Ursula Andress) and the Spanish aristocrat (Sylvia Kristel) set to join Louis in an arranged marriage, but as in all musketeer movies, the palace intrigue mostly exists to motivate thrilling swordplay. The best thing about the movie, by far, is the sumptuous imagery created by legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff. The picture looks great from start to finish, and the most attractive scenes—like a tense standoff between the musketeers and evil nobleman Fouquet (Ian McShane)—boast the visual depth of great paintings. Additionally, screen icon Olivia de Havilland adds dignity during her brief appearance as the Queen Mother, evoking the many Errol Flynn swashbucklers in which she costarred. But then there’s the problem of the movie’s half-hearted storytelling.

          The script, credited to David Ambrose and George Bruce, is humorless and turgid, while Ken Annakin’s direction is serviceable at best; were it not for the movie’s resplendent look, The 5th Musketeer would feel completely second-rate. Casting is another major problem. Bridges seems so modern (and so American) that he’s not believable in either of his roles; he also lacks the effervescence needed to thrill the audience while bounding across the screen with an exposed blade. The quartet playing his mentors is awkward, as well. Alan Hale Jr. (yes, the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island), Cornel Wilde, and José Ferrer all appeared in studio-era swashbucklers, so they more or less suit the milieu, but Lloyd Bridges, like his son Beau, is too contemporary for the period setting. Furthermore, none of them seems the least bit invested in the material. Kristel, better known for her lurid Emmanuelle movies, is pretty but forgettable, so only Andress and McShane set off (mild) fireworks in their cartoony bad-guy roles. As for the other noteworthy studio-era veteran in the cast, Rex Harrison, he’s a bored-looking non-presence.

The 5th Musketeer: FUNKY