Joe Panther (1976)

          Telling the story of a modern-day Seminole Indian youth torn between the limitations of life in his impoverished village and the potential moral compromises of pursuing opportunities in the outside world, Joe Panther is clumsily effective. The story is eventful, the protagonist’s journey is meaningful, and the themes of assimilation and identity create believable points of conflict. Made with more sophistication, Joe Panther might have earned a place among the best coming-of-age stories from the ’70s. Unfortunately, the film falls short of contemporary standards for racial sensitivity thanks to any-minority-will-suffice casting, and that’s but one of many flaws. Nonetheless, Joe Panther is commendable for a few moments of genuine emotion as well as at least one scene of thrilling action.

          Living in a close-knit but financially troubled Seminole village near Miami, fatherless Joe Panther (Ray Tracey) worries about how to provide for his mother and his younger brother. Joe isn’t thrilled by his prospects in the village, and it galls Joe to watch his best friend, Billy Tiger (A Martinez), put on alligator-wrestling exhibitions for tourists. When Joe hears about a job on a fishing boat owned by kindly Captain Harper (Brian Keith), Joe accepts a wild challenge as a condition of employment—he must venture into the Everglades and capture an 11-foot gator that Harper’s brother can use as a tourist attraction at his resort. The mission becomes Joe’s trial by fire, especially when his wise Uncle Turtle (Ricardo Montalban) offers ominous warnings about the dangers of the Everglades.

          Casting Latin actors in prominent Seminole roles is distracting, and the thriller subplot that dominates the last third of the movie is a bit much. Yet parts of Joe Panther have real grit. The sequence of Joe trapping a giant alligator is frightening, and the bond that Martinez and Tracey convey is persuasive. So even if the movie often edges into drab formulas, as when both Keith and Montalban give monologues about the meaning of life, the picture’s intentions seem pure. Everything right and wrong about Joe Panther is epitomized by the gentle theme song, which is performed by soft-rock hitmakers England Dan & John Ford Coley—the message is there, but the choice of messengers is highly questionable.

Joe Panther: FUNKY

Mission to Glory: A True Story (1977)

          Bad news first—this low-budget biopic about a 17th-century Jesuit missionary who served a parish spreading from northwestern Mexico to southern Arizona and Baja California assumes the moral certainty of his crusade, meaning that all the natives whom the leading character encounters are depicted as savages in desperate need of Christian salvation. Worse, Mission to Glory: A True Story suffers from atrocious storytelling by writer-director Ken Kennedy, who employs clunky blocking and inert camerawork while steering a cast heavy with Hollywood C-listers through their paces. So in addition to being culturally dubious, the film is about as cinematically lifeless as anything you’ll ever encounter. And now the good news—for all of its faults, Mission to Glory: A True Story conveys an interesting narrative, albeit one very likely exaggerated and twisted from the historical events depicted onscreen. Surely it must have taken a unique individual to endure craven political machinations, internal strife among indigenous populations, and near-constant physical danger while trying to better the lives of others. Taken as a tribute to the man whom Kennedy imagines the real Father Kino might have been, the picture feels almost noble.

          According to voiceover at the beginning of the picture, Father Kino spent more than two decades building 19 ranches and 24 missions, suggesting he was spectacularly effective at spreading the gospel while traveling across desert terrain on horseback. At various times Kino clashes with the church, hostile tribes, and violent Spanish soldiers, meeting all adversaries with humility and resolve. Does the hagiographic portrayal stretch credulity? Of course. And does the parade of familiar character actors (Michal Ansara, Aldo Ray, Cesar Romero) add to the overall sense of fakery? Sure. (Playing the leading role, in an inconsequential performance, is 1950s Hollywood stud Richard Egan, quite a bit past his prime.) Yet Mission to Glory has a few vivid-ish moments amid the hokey music, one-dimensional characterizations, and predictable plot twists. Ricardo Montalban, of all people, gives the film’s best performance, an entertaining cameo as a savvy military official. Presumably persons of faith were and are the target audience for this piece, meaning they’re the folks most likely to overlook the picture’s massive shortcomings. For others, Mission to Glory might work best as well-meaning kitsch.

Mission to Glory: A True Story: FUNKY

The Deserter (1971)

          Part spaghetti Western and part Dirty Dozen ripoff, this Italy/US/Yugoslavia coproduction has a serviceable premise, then loses its way thanks to a forgettable leading performance and an overly mechanical plot. Along the way, several colorful actors are subsumed by the overall mediocrity of the piece, delivering half-hearted interpretations of underdeveloped roles. Even the action highlights are ho-hum. Those who want nothing more from adventure pictures than a steady flow of death-defying bravery and tight-lipped macho posturing will be able to consume the picture like a serving of empty calories, but those who expect anything more will get bored fairly quickly. In the Wild West, U.S. Cavalry soldier Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) completes a fortnight-long patrol and discovers that while he was away, Apaches raided the outpost where he lives and killed his wife. Kaleb blames the death on his superior officer, Colonel Brown (Richard Crenna), so Kaleb tries to quit the service and devote his life to killing Apaches. When Brown refuses Kaleb’s resignation, Kaleb shoots the colonel and becomes a fugitive from military justice. Two years later, blustery General Miles (John Huston) arrives on the scene, demanding that Brown illegally cross the Mexican border to slaughter a band of Apache raiders. What’s more, Miles demands that Brown’s men bring Kaleb in from the wilderness, because during the intervening period, Kaleb has made good on his vengeance pledge by slaughtering Apaches heedlessly, thereby becoming the ideal man to lead the mission into Mexico.

          Once all the narrative pieces are in place, Kaleb finds himself supervising a band of soldiers, including Kaleb, who would just as soon kill the notorious deserter as kill Apaches. Among those playing soldiers are Ian Bannen, Chuck Connors, Ricardo Montalban, Slim Pickens, and Woody Strode. (Naturally, Crenna’s character is along for the ride, too.) With this much talent at their disposal, producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Burt Kennedy should have been able to come up with something much more interesting than The Deserter, which is sometimes known as The Devil’s Backbone. Alas, the script is unrelentingly clichéd, predictable, and superficial, and the filmmakers miscalculated, badly, by casting Yugoslavian stud Fehmiu in the leading role. Just one year previous, Paramount tried to make Fehmiu into an international star by toplining him in the epic melodrama The Adventurers (1970), so this picture presumably represented the completion of a two-picture deal. A European equivalent to, say, James Franciscus, Fehmiu is suitably brooding and athletic, but he’s got the depth and range of a statue. With his performance creating a vacuum at the center of The Deserter, the movie is doomed to disappoint from its very first frames.

The Deserter: FUNKY

The Train Robbers (1973)

Quite possibly John Wayne’s least distinguished ’70s Western, The Train Robbers is so enervated that easily one-quarter of the film’s brisk running time is consumed by aimless montages of posses riding across rough terrain. These sequences of horses and riders plodding across deserts or pounding through rivers are pleasant enough, with composer Dominic Frontiere’s lively music complementing lyrical imagery, but after a while it becomes apparent that writer-director Burt Kennedy failed to generate enough plot to sustain a feature film. The overall narrative of the picture is okay, a standard-issue quest involving rough men hired by a lady to recover stolen gold, and there are enough flashes of action and character interplay to more or less justify the movie’s existence. Yet it’s a measure of The Train Robbers’ shortcomings that the closest thing the picture has to a villain is poor Ricardo Montalban, who shows up every 20 minutes or so to glower at Wayne’s gang from a distance, puff on a cigar, and stand still while the image dissolves to another scene; Montalban doesn’t even speak until the very end of the movie. Equally malnourished is the flick’s love-story component, and not just because the gigantic, aging Wayne looks ridiculous when sharing the frame with tiny, young Ann-Margret. The flirtation between the leads comprises the Duke admiring Ann-Margret’s figure and spitfire personality (which is discussed but never really demonstrated) and Ann-Margret, in turn, batting her eyelashes during cringe-inducing interludes such as an unconvincing drunk scene. But, as with so many latter-day Wayne movies, The Train Robbers is really about mythologizing the Wayne persona. In one laughable moment, ornery sidekick Calhoun (Christopher George) is asked what’s wrong with Wayne’s character: Calhoun’s response, delivered with vaguely homoerotic glee? “Not a damn thing!” Alas, such a kind appraisal cannot be made of The Train Robbers, which, it should be noted, never actually features a train robbery. Even the presence of reliable cowboy-movie player Ben Johnson in a supporting role isn’t sufficient to make this one memorable.

The Train Robbers: FUNKY

Wonder Woman (1974) & The New Original Wonder Woman (1975)

          Plans to put DC Comics’ iconic heroine onto the small screen began in the mid-’60s, when the campy Batman show was peaking in popularity. All that remains of the 1967 Wonder Woman is an excruciatingly awful five-minute presentation reel titled “Who’s Afraid of Diana Prince?” and featuring a mousy woman who imagines she’s a voluptuous goddess. (YouTube it if you’re feeling masochistic.) Seven years later, a full-length pilot movie took a deadly serious approach and delivered deadly dull results.
          Starring athlete-turned-actress Cathy Lee Crosby (above left), Wonder Woman is only interesting for how many things it gets wrong. Rather than presenting Wonder Woman as a superhero, the movie shows her as a secret agent in a star-spangled track suit, working at a leisurely pace to foil the plans of an international criminal (Ricardo Montalban) who is ransoming the identities of undercover operatives. Thanks to Crosby’s lifeless performance and sluggish action sequences, the 1974 Wonder Woman movie is drab in every respect. The highlight, such as it is, features Wonder Woman trapped in a tiny room as geysers of rainbow-colored sludge ooze from the walls, threatening to trap her until she improbably kicks open the room’s Plexiglas door. In the end, a defeated Montalban coos, “Wonder Woman, I love you”—but at least as far as this version of the character is concerned, he’s alone in that opinion.

          A year and a half after the Crosby misfire, ABC broadcast the awkwardly titled The New Original Wonder Woman, which introduced viewers to the impressive spectacle of Lynda Carter (above right) crammed into a skimpy costume—although the 1975 movie introduces many kitschy flourishes, including the series’ memorably disco-flavored theme song and a colorful World War II milieu taken straight from the first Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, Carter’s sex appeal is the main attraction.

          Developed and written by Stanley Ralph Ross, a veteran of the ’60s Batman series, The New Original Wonder Woman tries to recapture the previous series’ tongue-in-cheek quality, but instead comes across as insipid because the script isn’t witty enough to trigger an ironic response. Even with comedy pros Henry Gibson, Cloris Leachman, and Kenneth Mars in the cast, The New Original Wonder Woman is tedious, with flaws like cheap-looking sets and schlocky special effects exacerbating the stiff lead performances by Carter and costar Lyle Waggoner. The only time the pilot reaches the desired level of camp is the finale, during which Carter has a catfight with guest star Stella Stevens.

          Nonetheless, Wonder Woman the series finally was off and running, though only one season was set in World War II. After the first run of episodes, the series migrated to CBS and became The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, with stories set in the present day; that version ran for two seasons. In the years since, Wonder Woman has thrived in animation, various attempts at a feature film have stalled, and super-producer David E. Kelley’s 2011 pilot for a new Wonder Woman series didn’t even get on the air. So, for the time being, in addition to being remembered as one of the sexiest pinup queens of the ’70s, Carter remains the world’s live-action Wonder Woman of choice.

Wonder Woman: LAME

The New Original Wonder Woman: FUNKY