1980 Week: Willie & Phil

          Given his well-known admiration for the work of Ingmar Bergman, filmmaker Woody Allen left himself open for easy criticism when he made the Bergman-esque psychodrama Interiors (1978), which many people initially dismissed as a weak homage to the work of a master. Time has revealed the depth of that film, though Allen’s debt to Bergman is inescapable when watching Interiors. Paul Mazursky’s romantic dramedy Willie & Phil has some interesting parallels to Interiors, though the indifference that greeted Willie & Phil during its initial release has not yet given way to critical rediscovery.

          Recycling the basic plot elements from François Truffaut’s beloved French New Wave film Jules and Jim (1962), Willie & Phil represents Mazursky’s sexual satire at its least credible. The characterizations have signs of life, but all three leading actors give underwhelming performances, and the echoes of Truffaut’s style are as affected as the forced insertion of ’70s spirituality into the storyline. It’s not as if Mazursky’s considerable powers failed him here, because some scenes have that special immediacy that distinguishes Mazursky’s best work. As a total experience, however, Willie & Phil is forgettable.
          Like Jules and Jim, this picture tracks the way two men become close friends, only to see their bond challenged by the arrival of a woman whom both men find irresistible. The men are Phil D’Amico (Ray Sharkey), a streetwise photographer with a suffocating overabundance of self-confidence, and Willie Kaufman (Michael Ontkean), a high-school teacher with a debilitating shortage of personal direction. They meet in 1960s New York at a screening of a Truffaut movie (wink, wink), then bond over their mutual desire to avoid the Vietnam-era draft. Soon they encounter Jeannette Sutherland (Margot Kidder), a freespirited beauty recently relocated from her home state of Kentucky to Greenwich Village. When she has money trouble, Willie says she can move in with him, and she and Willie become lovers. Thereafter, the story becomes an episodic litany of ’60s and ’70s signifiers. The friends drop acid and have a threesome. Willie gets into yoga. Jeannette joins the film industry. Phil transitions from shooting pictures to making commercials, so he relocates to California around the time Jeannette and Willie get married and have a child together. Later, when Willie’s spiritual questing takes him out of the country, Jeannette moves to California and stays with Phil. And so on.

          About the only thing that gives Willie & Phil shape is the dense narration track, performed by Mazursky and peppered with remarks along the lines of “10 months later, Willie was confused again.” The film is never difficult to follow, but it’s often difficult to enjoy, not because the characters are unpleasant—they’re all fragile in a relatable way—but because the characters and their experiences are so typical of the hippie era. Although Mazursky delivers the story with his customary intelligence and skill, he never defines Willie & Phil as a necessary artistic expansion of Jules and Jim, and he never proves that his characters merit this level of attention.

Willie & Phil: FUNKY

Pickup on 101 (1972)

          Contrived and hokey, the cross-generational road movie Pickup on 101 depicts the odyssey of three unlikely traveling companions: an elderly hobo, a manipulative musician, and a sexy young woman experimenting with the hippie lifestyle. Beliefs are challenged, relationships are formed, and secrets are revealed as the young people learn about integrity and mortality from their aged friend, and characters spend lots of time accusing each other of wasting their lives. On some level, the picture is respectable inasmuch as it has elements of sociopolitical questioning, with a dash of existentialism. Yet the chaotic tone of the piece—which wobbles between comedy, drama, erotica, and tragedy—reveals that Pickup at 101 is as directionless as its characters. Were it not for the presence of interesting actors in the leading roles, Pickup on 101 would be entirely forgettable.

          Without describing the tiresome circumstances by which the characters converge, suffice to say that the main group comprises Jedediah (Jack Albertson), an old-school vagabond who travels by hitching illegal rides on freight trains; Lester (Martin Sheen), a self-important musician willing to do or say anything in order to get what he wants; and Nicky (Lesley Ann Warren), a beautiful young woman who ditches her uptight boyfriend, Chuck (Michael Ontkean), because he puts down her interest in living on a commune. Jedediah, Lester, and Nicky share misadventures involving an exploding car, hidden cash reserves, hitch-hiking, a night in jail, and plentiful tension emanating from who does and/or doesn’t want to sleep with Nicky. Eventually, the story coalesces into a bittersweet quest, but that doesn’t happen until the last 20 minutes of the picture.

          Despite the skill of the actors involved, a general feeling of artificiality permeates Pickup on 101. For instance, the Nicky character represents the openness and optimism of hippie culture, and yet Warren is largely presented as an ornamental sex object. Similarly, the Lester character seems to represent dilettantes who play the counterculture game for opportunistic reasons, and yet Sheen vents a fair amount of legitimate righteous indignation against The Man. The Jedediah character is the most convincing one in the batch, perhaps because Albertson’s grizzled-wise-man routine is so appealing. Every so often, Pickup on 101 approaches provocative subject matter, as when Nicky contemplates turning tricks in order to survive, but then the movie retracts into blandly schematic storytelling. By the time the film reaches its hard-to-believe sentimental conclusion, the bogus textures of Pickup at 101 have overwhelmed the precious few resonant nuances.

Pickup on 101: FUNKY

Hot Summer Week (1972)

          Also known as Girls on the Road, this muddled thriller involves hippie spirituality, horny teenaged girls, a lecherous guru, a PTSD-addled Vietnam vet, and young love that culminates in tragedy. Not only do the elements clash with each other so badly that Hot Summer Week is confusing and disjointed to watch, but each individual element is handled poorly. Despite possessing a certain measure of traffic-accident allure, this is misguided low-budget filmmaking on every level. The story, such as it is, starts when spoiled white girls Debbie (Kathleen Cody) and Karen (Dianne Hull) hit the road for a week’s vacation at a beach house. Right from the beginning, director Thomas J. Schmidt tries to portray the girls as carefree and spunky, but he actually reveals them to be inconsiderate, reckless, and stupid. They drive like maniacs because they’re distracted by activities like tossing bras into traffic, they treat hitchhikers terribly (stealing a guitar from a musician, shunning two would-be passengers for the crime of being flamboyantly gay), and they talk about nothing but their desire to get laid during their vacation. On the way to the beach house, the girls pick up hitchhiker Will (Michael Ontkean), who was recently discharged from an Army hospital after treatment for psychological problems.

          Despite the fact that Will’s twitchy and the fact that he carries a gun in his duffel bag, all Debbie can see is that he’s handsome. Turns out Will is an on-again/off-again resident at a progressive institute run by John (Ralph Waite), a touchy-feely therapist who helps his charges explore love. Karen digs the can’t-we-all-get-along vibe at the institute, but Debbie just wants to make out with Will—up to a point, since she’s all talk. The middle of Hot Summer Week is a mess of heavy-petting scenes, mind-expanding “experiences” at the institute, and silly PTSD flashbacks. (All of Will’s imaginary scenes are processed with a blue tint and a wobbly optical effect, while his war flashbacks seem to comprise stock footage from D-Day.) In the end, Hot Summer Week tries to be a little bit of everything, without committing sufficiently to any one genre—there’s not enough sex for the movie to qualify as an exploitation picture, the spiritual stuff is cartoonish and superficial, and the final sequence transforms Hot Summer Week into a full-on horror movie, complete with an axe-wielding psycho. Just as Debbie and Karen should have driven right by Will, the wise viewer should give Hot Summer Week a pass.

Hot Summer Week: LAME

Necromancy (1972)

During the post-Rosemary’s Baby boom, countless filmmakers generated schlocky thrillers mixing sex with the supernatural, although only a few of them actually generated movies worth watching. More typical of the trend is this bland offering from director Bert I. Gordon, best known for silly monster movies including The Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977). Featuring a campy plot that’s almost entirely predicated on the heroine being an idiot, Necromancy tells the story of an evil Satan worshipper who wants to harness a young woman’s occult powers in order to bring his deceased son back from the grave. In principle, this concept should be strong enough to support an acceptable frightfest. In practice, however, Gordon makes poor storytelling decisions at every single turn, creating a movie that lacks momentum and overflows with moments that either don’t make sense or fail to engage interest. Even with scenes of all-nude rituals and human sacrifices, Necromancy is dull. Lovely Pamela Franklin, who fared better in later ’70s horror movies—including the creepy theatrical feature The Legend of Hell House and the kitschy telefilm Satan’s School for Girls (both 1973)—stars as Lori, a young woman who moves to the small town of Lilith with her husband, Frank (Michael Ontkean). Upon arrival, Lori discovers that Frank’s employer, Mr. Cato (Orson Welles), is a Satanist with a messianic sway over all of Lilith’s permanent residents. Then Lori learns that she and Frank are expected to join Mr. Cato’s coven, which engages in debauchery and witchcraft. But does Lori, who is already tormented by the loss of a baby, leave town? No, she hangs around until she’s roped into a murder/suicide scenario. Whether she escapes is of zero consequence, because the characters in Necromancy are as forgettable as the storyline. To its credit, Necromancy has quasi-atmospheric photography, a tasty electronic score that’s akin to the sort of mood music later featured in John Carpenter’s movies, and a couple of trippy dream/hallucination sequences. Yet these elements aren’t nearly reason enough to watch the movie, especially since the slumming Welles gives an absurd performance complete with a ridiculous fake nose and an unidentifiable accent. The only magic this movie contains is the ability to put viewers to sleep.

Necromancy: LAME

The Peace Killers (1971)

A clash between hog-riding outlaws and peacenik longhairs is the subject of the mildly provocative drama/thriller The Peace Killers. Unfortunately, because the movie’s abundant violence is so mean-spirited and sleazy, it’s difficult to argue that The Peace Killers is about anything real, despite the way the storyline approaches issues pertaining to moral relativism. The movie begins with commune members Jeff (Michael Ontkean) and Kristen (Jess Walton), who are siblings, pulling their hippy-dippy VW van into the wrong place at the wrong time—Jeff and Kristen encounter members of a biker gang with which Kristen was once associated. It turns out that in her wilder days, Kristen was the squeeze of the gang’s leader, psychotic cyclist Reb (Clint Ritchie). Jeff and Kristen escape the bikers, but when Reb learns that his ex-mama has resurfaced, he vows to capture her for humiliating payback. Eventually, Reb terrorizes the entire commune, so the movie hangs on the question of whether Kristen’s guru/love interest, Alex (Paul Prokop), will abandon his pacifist principles and use force to protect her. The Peace Killers does a decent job of capturing the era’s lingo, as when Alex lays down his touchy-feely Philosophy 101 raps. “Speech is such a poor means of communication,” he blathers at one point. “Words distort so much.” The movie’s verbal verve also manifests in Reb’s nasty screeds: “I’m gonna find that little whore, and when I do I’m gonna give her a special midnight ride—I’m gonna ram into her and tear her wide open.” Ouch. Even though The Peace Killers drags a bit, the lurid scenes have considerable lowbrow potency thanks to plentiful nudity and violence; after all, The Peace Killers is first and foremost an exploitation flick. Leading man Ontkean is fine, displaying the same gentle sincerity that distinguished his work on the TV series The Rookies (which hit the airwaves a year after The Peace Killers was released), while darkly pretty Walton makes an alluring if somewhat vapid leading lady. (One hopes she didn’t have to do many takes of the movie’s unsavory gang-rape scene.) As for the rest of the cast, each actor delivers a one-note performance as needed.

The Peace Killers: FUNKY

Slap Shot (1977)

          It’s all about the Hanson Brothers. There’s a lot to like in George Roy Hill’s foul-mouthed, irreverent, and playfully violent hockey saga, but nothing in the movie clicks quite as well as the sight of Jack, Jeff, and Steve Hanson—three longhaired brothers wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses that probably have higher IQ’s than the siblings—working their mojo on the rink. Savages who win by attrition, the Hansons zoom up and down the ice, high-sticking and punching and slashing their competitors until they’ve left a trail of injured opponents in their wake. These bad-boy antics are at the heart of this movie’s rebellious appeal, because even though Slap Shot has an amiable leading character and a tidy storyline, it is above all a lowbrow jamboree of brawling, cussing, and drinking.

          Set in a fictional Rust Belt town, the story follows the Charlestown Chiefs, a pitiful minor-league hockey team in the midst of an epic losing streak. Player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) tries to rouse his teammates for some good “old-time hockey”—straight playing without fights—but he knows crowds only get excited for bloodbaths. Meanwhile, team manager Joe McGrath (Strother Martin) is sending signals that the Chiefs organization might be on the verge of folding.

          Over the course of the movie, Reggie—who is desperate to elongate his career, even though he knows it’s long past time for him to stop playing and concentrate on coaching—pulls several underhanded maneuvers. He unleashes the Hansons, whose violence raises the level of game-time brutality while also stimulating attendance; he tricks a local reporter (M. Emmet Walsh) into printing a rumor that the Chiefs might have a new buyer; and he tries to seduce the depressed wife (Lindsay Crouse) of a peacenik player (Michael Ontkean) in order to prod his teammate toward violence. Reggie is a rascal in the classic Newman mold, willing to fracture a few laws in the service of a more-or-less noble goal.

          Written by first-time screenwriter Nancy Dowd, whose brother Ned played minor-league hockey, Slap Shot is cheerfully crude, taking cheap shots at bad parents, French-Canadians, gays, lesbians, and other random targets; most of the jokes are funny, but even the ones that aren’t help maintain a genial vibe of frat-house chaos. The picture also drops more F-bombs (and other colorful expletives) than nearly any other ’70s movie. It’s therefore quite a change of pace for the normally genteel George Roy Hill, whose other memorable collaborations with Newman are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). One gets the impression both men had a blast making Slap Shot, since Hill captures the hockey scenes with clever moving-camera shots and Newman elevates the piece with his contagious smiles and entertaining surliness.

          While not a critical hit and only a moderate box-office success during its original release, Slap Shot has since attained enviable cult status, even spawning a minor franchise of inferior straight-to-video sequels: Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice was released in 2002, and Slap Shot 3: The Junior League followed in 2008. Furthermore, a remake of the original film is rumored to be in the works. Until then, fans can content themselves with Hanson Brothers action figures, which hit stores in 2000.

Slap Shot: GROOVY

Voices (1979)

          Had it received the benefits of a careful script rewrite and a more germane selection of musical elements, Voices might have worked, because its simple premise could have been the seed for a sweet romance. Instead, Voices is a well-intentioned but forgettable misfire that, in its worst moments, becomes nearly laughable. Michael Ontkean stars as Drew Rothman, a struggling singer who makes ends meet running deliveries for his grandfather’s dry-cleaning business. While out and about one day, he spots a pretty girl, Rosemarie (Amy Irving), then longs for the day he’ll run into her again. Meanwhile, he wrestles with family dramas—Drew’s dad, Frank (Alex Rocco), is a compulsive gambler, and Drew’s little brother, Raymond (Barry Miller), is getting hassled by school bullies. Then, when Drew finally finds Rosemarie again, he discovers that the dreamgirl he’s been admiring from afar is actually deaf. To the picture’s credit, writer John Herzfeld and director Robert Markowitz aren’t out to make the cheap tearjerker implied by the set-up of a musician falling for a woman who can’t hear. Instead, they’re more interested in the heartening love-conquers-all story of Drew leaving the safety of the hearing world in order to understand Rosemarie’s challenges.

          In the picture’s best scenes, the filmmakers address those challenges through sharp exchanges between Rosemarie and her concerned mother (Viveca Lindfors), who advises Rosemarie to embrace a marginalized lifestyle rather than risk emotional pain in the big, bad outside world. Unfortunately, this sort of interesting material is smothered by promising subplots that aren’t resolved in a satisfying manner; it’s as if the filmmakers can’t decide which path to follow. Furthermore, the arc involving Rosemarie’s dream of becoming a dancer pirouettes too far into the realm of contrived irony. And, much as it pains me to say this since I’m a fan of both men, the music composed by Jimmy Webb (the songwriter of “MacArthur Park”) and sung by Burton Cummings (of the Guess Who) doesn’t work. These two collectively give Ontkean’s character his voice, and their colorations are far too precious to spring forth from a Hoboken street kid trying to make it in grimy nightclubs. So while Voices isn’t a total wash by a long shot—it’s brisk and filled with sincere performances—the movie comes off like a sloppy rough draft. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Voices: FUNKY