The Grasshopper (1970)

          How campy is the sexualized melodrama The Grasshopper? In one memorable scene, bereaved heroine Christine Adams (Jacqueline Bisset), still dressed in black from a loved one’s funeral, demands that her limo driver pull to the side of the road and pick up two scraggly-looking hitchhikers. Once the longhairs are inside the limo, Christine screeches, “Are you holding? Do you have any shit?” By the next scene, Christine is unconscious from an overdose, and the movie still has another half-hour to go. Based on a novel by Mark McShane and written by the unlikely duo of Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall, whose most famous collaboration was the 1970-1975 sitcom The Odd Couple, this fast and furious soap opera charts the spiritual decay of a wholesome Canadian girl who tumbles into a degrading cycle of drugs, prostitution, and tragedy. Yet because the Belson/Marshall script is peppered with quippy dialogue and because director Jerry Paris films the whole story with the bright visual style of, say, a Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy, The Grasshopper is impossible to take seriously. Plus, with all due respect to the fine acting skills that she later developed, Bisset plays the leading role with a kind of sunny vapidity, smiling blankly through some scenes and unpersuasively mimicking anguish in others.

          When the movie begins, 19-year-old Christine drops out of college and flees her home in British Columbia to join her boyfriend, who has already begun his working life in Los Angeles. Along the way, Christine has car trouble and is given a ride by Danny Raymond (Corbett Monica), a Las Vegas nightclub comedian. Although Christine declines Danny’s sexual overtures, she’s dazzled by Sin City while staying overnight there. So when Christine grows bored with her quietly domestic life in LA, she ditches her boyfriend and returns to Vegas, where she gets a job as a showgirl. Eventually, she becomes romantically involved with Tommy Marcott (Jm Brown), an ex-NFL player now working as the manager of a cheesy football-themed restaurant. For a few moments depicting the heyday of the relationship between Christine and Tommy, The Grasshopper is energetic and fresh—addressing miscegenation without sensationalism, the movie draws a connection between two people who wish to be appreciated for more than just their bodies. Alas, Christine’s chance encounter with a horny, Mob-connected businessman (Ramon Bieri) triggers violence, which in turn begins the spiral leading to Christine’s drug problems and sex work. By the end of the picture, when Christine is juggling relationships with an aging sugar daddy (Joseph Cotten) and a craven young stud (Christopher Stone), the lurid aspects of The Grasshopper have spun out of control.

          From start to finish, the presentation of The Grasshopper is slick but garish, epitomized by Christine’s showgirl costume of a blue wig, a sparkly leotard complete with built-in pasties, and giant feather wings. Meanwhile, the soundtrack features absurdly on-the-nose songs explaining the heroine’s emotional state. Brown elevates his scenes with the casual cool he brought to all of his screen work, and some of the supporting players are excellent, particularly Ed Flanders as a sleazy hotel manager. Nonetheless, The Grasshopper is unrelentingly artificial, a cautionary tale without credibility, and a jokey treatment of bleak subject matter.

The Grasshopper: FUNKY

Brother John (1971)

          Because Sidney Poitier had been playing saintly characters since the 1950s, it was only a matter of time before he portrayed an actual messiah, as he does in the compelling allegorical drama Brother John. Imaginatively written by veteran TV scribe Ernest Kinoy, the movie takes place in the small Alabama town to which long-gone native son John Kane (Poitier) returns on the occasion of his sister’s funeral. The town is mired in racially charged turmoil, so John’s appearance raises eyebrows among conservative whites like Lloyd Thomas (Bradford Dillman), who suspect John of being an outside agitator. Lloyd pressures the local sheriff (Ramon Bieri) to investigate John, which reveals the mystery man has traveled all around the world; this leads to allegations that John is some sort of communist operative.

          The whites’ paranoia is exacerbated when John starts keeping company with a local woman (Louisa MacGill), because if he’s just home for the funeral, they ask, why is he setting down roots? Adding another layer of intrigue, John reveals lethal martial-arts skills when assaulted by local thugs and, later, a redneck cop; though he doesn’t kill anyone, he makes it clear that doing so is well within his bare-handed power.

          Yet not everyone sees John as a threat. Lloyd’s freethinking father, small-town physician Doc Thomas (Will Geer), is nearing the end of his life and feeling spiritual, so he starts to wonder if John is part of a larger design. Eventually, Doc becomes convinced that John is a harbinger come to test the mettle of mortal man—and that man is failing the test miserably. The most riveting scenes of this unusual picture are one-on-one exchanges in which Doc asks for perspective from the celestial realm and John cagily avoids verifying whether Doc has guessed his true identity.

          As directed by workmanlike helmer James Goldstone, Brother John has sensitivity but lacks the visual poetry the material demands, and the story takes a while to get cooking. Furthermore, some viewers will find the cryptic ending highly unsatisfying. However, the concept is alluring and the acting is great. Poitier is effectively restrained, yet he ensures that the soul-deep disappointment behind his eyes is plainly visible. As for Geer, he brings the same avuncular sensitivity that later distinguished his work on the long-running TV show The Waltons. So, even though it’s far from perfect, Brother John presents such an unusual story with such care in front of and behind the camera that its best passages are hypnotic.

Brother John: GROOVY

Badlands (1973)

          Cinematic poetry is hard to achieve in narrative films, because the normal grinding work of developing plots inevitably requires the inclusion of perfunctory elements that make pure artistic expression difficult. As a result, even the best movies enter the poetic realm for only a few minutes at a time. One notable exception to this rule, however, is writer-director Terrence Malick. His scripts are so spare, and his visuals are so elegant, that poetry is the only word that really describes his style. This was never truer than with his directorial debut, Badlands, which has occupied a treasured place among my very favorite films since I first watched it at film school. In fact, Badlands is one of the few movies that I wish I made, not just because the end result is so quietly overwhelming, but because of the sense I get that making the picture was a rarified experience involving like-minded artists helping Malick express something unique. Even though Badlands is a violent crime story, it’s also a  sensitive statement about directionless youths in the American heartland; few films balance savagery and soulfulness with this much grace.
          Malick’s script is a fictionalized take on the real-life odyssey of Charles Starkweather, who murdered 11 people during a 1958 trek across Nebraska and Wyoming, accompanied by his 14-year-old girlfriend. Badlands changes the names and locations, so instead of a docudrama it’s a meditation on the intersection between American wanderlust and the unknowable darkness in the human soul. Martin Sheen plays Kit Caruthers, a handsome but unstable garbage collector living in late-’50s South Dakota. When he meets sheltered teenager Holly Sargis (Sissy Spacek), his latent psychosis and fascination with James Dean’s live-fast-die-young mythology prompt Kit to embark upon a murderous odyssey with Holly as his hapless traveling companion. From the first scene, Malick creates an otherworldly mood, with airy musical compositions, Spacek’s plainspoken narration, and startling audiovisual juxtapositions communicating the idea that Badlands exists somewhere in the limbo between dreams and reality—when Kit and Holly camp out in a remote forest partway through the killing spree, it really does seem as if they’ve escaped the normal world for someplace else.
          Sheen is remarkable in a performance that sits comfortably alongside his acclaimed work in Apocalypse Now (1979); not only does he convincingly play a man far younger than Sheen was during production, but he believably personifies the idea of an twitchy loner who can’t find the right outlets for his angst, charisma, and curiosity. Spacek is unforgettable in a difficult role, because Holly is in some respects the blank slate upon which the audience projects its reactions—it’s to her great credit that we accept her wonderment at Kit’s force of personality, and her slow realization of the horror she’s witnessing. Invaluable ’70s character actors Ramon Bieri and Warren Oates appear in supporting roles, each contributing gritty texture and bringing out different colors in the leads’ performances.
          Although Malick’s subsequent career has produced some of the most beautiful images in American film, he has yet to recapture the focus he demonstrated with Badlands, and that’s part of why it’s the consummate example of his poetic approach: For an intoxicating hour and a half, Malick matches his filmmaking artistry with narrative economy in a gorgeous film without a single wasted frame.

Badlands: OUTTA SIGHT