Goodnight, My Love (1972)

          A clue about the right way to watch the made-for-TV detective flick Goodnight, My Love is contained in the title, which is basically a rephrasing of the moniker adorning Raymond Chandler’s classic Philip Marlowe novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940). This picture is a love letter to Chandler, nothing more and nothing less, so even though it’s highly entertaining, stylishly photographed, and verbally witty, it’s not to be mistaken for a truly original piece of work. That said, paying homage to the film-noir literature and movies of yesteryear was a veritable cottage industry in the ’70s, and Goodnight, My Love was ahead of the curve, arriving a year before Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) and two years before Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). This project wasn’t the first neo-noir, since projects including Stephen Frears’ Gumshoe (1971) came earlier, but it wasn’t riding in the back of the bandwagon, either.

          In any event, Goodnight, My Love is significant beyond its connection to similar genre pictures, because it’s among the earliest directing credits for Peter Hyams, a unique populist with a distinctive pictorial style. (He’s among the few Hollywood directors to occasionally serve as his own cinematographer.) Although his stories often crumble toward the end, Hyams has a great flair for pithy dialogue and he’s fantastic at presenting sardonic tough guys, two skills that emerged fully formed here and that suit the noir milieu perfectly. Richard Boone, all craggy bulk and sleepy-eyed cynicism, plays Francis Hogan, a low-rent private dick in 1940s Los Angeles. His partner is Arthur Boyle (Michael Dunn), a little person with a big mouth, and they spend most of their time trying to scam free meals off creditors until a glamorous dame walks into the office. (Isn’t that always how these stories start?) She’s Susan Lakely (Barbara Bain), and her boyfriend has gone missing. Francis and Arthur take the case, eventually uncovering a convoluted conspiracy involving rotund gentleman criminal Julius Limeway (Victor Buono channeling Sidney Greenstreet).

          Yet the narrative is secondary to the style here, as Hyams fills scenes with bitchy repartee that his excellent leading actors deliver in the ideal deadpan mode. Bain is arguably the weak link, a bit long in the tooth to play what amounts to an ingénue role, though that doesn’t matter a whole lot since Hyams is more interested in the amusing rhythms of boys squaring off against each other as friends, enemies, or some combination of both. Goodnight, My Love is also photographed with extraordinary artistry for a TV movie of its vintage, because Hyams mounts ambitious tracking shots and employs imaginative lighting schemes by illuminating actors with practicals scattered throughout his sets.

          In every way except perhaps the most important one—conveying a resonant theme—Goodnight, My Love is an impressive first outing, and it’s also a wonderful showcase for onetime Oscar nominee Dunn. A fabulous actor who always escaped the limitations of novelty roles and seized opportunities like this one to play everyday people, he died less than a year after Goodnight, My Love was broadcast, although this was not his final onscreen performance. 

Goodnight, My Love: FUNKY

The Hobbit (1977)

          Produced around the same time as animator Ralph Bakshi’s doomed theatrical adaptation The Lord of the Rings (1978), this made-for-TV cartoon presents a truncated version of author J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, a prequel to his Rings book trilogy. Wrought by Rankin/Bass Productions, best known for their stop-motion Christmas specials of the 1960s and beyond (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc.), this take on The Hobbit has a beguiling visual aesthetic but suffers from problems of storytelling and style. In terms of storytelling, the filmmakers condense and/or omit so many events that the narrative becomes choppy, and in terms of style, the filmmakers use songs so prominently that The Hobbit is an outright musical. While it’s true that Tolkein’s book features songs as a recurring device, the melodies exist only in the reader’s mind, and the lyrical passages are balanced with other elements. In the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, musicality dominates to the point of distraction. Given all of these problems, The Hobbit feels frivolous, rushed, and unfocused, which is a shame.

          For those unfamiliar with the source material, The Hobbit begins when the wizard Gandalf informs diminutive and friendly hobbit Bilbo Baggins that he’s to accompany a group of dwarves on a treasure hunt through dangerous terrain, with the ultimate destination being the lair of Smaug, a horrible dragon hoarding gold that was stolen generations ago from dwarf royalty. The Rankin/Bass script, penned by Romeo Muller, treats nearly every part of Bilbo’s adventure as a fleeting vignette, lingering at great length only on two colorful episodes—Bilbo’s creepy encounter with the cave-dwelling creature Gollum, and Bilbo’s riddle-filled conversation with the dragon Smaug. To be fair, these are exciting and offbeat scenes, both worthy of close attention, and the ornate illustrations permeating this production nearly compensate for the hiccups in dramaturgy.

          The film’s dwarves, elves, goblins, spiders, and such are drawn beautifully, with expressive lines and meticulous details; even though the animation is a bit rudimentary, characterization and texture come across well. The voice cast is mostly adequate, with Orson Bean giving Bilbo warmth, John Huston lending grandeur to Ganadalf, and New York eccentric Brother Theodore providing the requisite perversity for Gollum. (Richard Boone’s flat American tones seem wrong for Smaug, though these things are of course highly subjective.) Given the strengths of this production, one wishes Rankin/Bass had felt compelled to try for a theatrical release, thereby emboldening them to add a half-hour of screen time and let the story breathe. (Though the songs would have been just as irksome.) But then again, thanks to Peter Jackson’s critically drubbed Hobbit trilogy of the 2010s, we’ve seen that too much Hobbit is not necessarily an improvement over too little Hobbit.

The Hobbit: FUNKY

The Last Dinosaur (1977)

          While the folks at Rankin/Bass Productions are justifiably revered for having made several beloved holiday-themed TV specials—Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), and so on—Rankin/Bass also collaborated periodically with Japanese companies to make monster movies. The results of these creative unions were not pretty. In addition to the abysmal King Kong Escapes (1967) and the bizarre The Bermuda Depths (1978), Rankin/Bass helped create The Last Dinosaur, a boring creature feature in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein. Veteran big-screen tough guy Richard Boone, giving a performance so half-assed he seems like he never rehearsed a single line, stars as super-rich oilman and big-game hunter Maston Thrust. No, seriously. Maston Thrust. Whose last name is emblazoned on jets and underground boring vehicles that look like missiles. Yes, the man’s empire features countless giant phallic objects labeled Thrust.

          Anyway, Maston announces a spectacular new expedition because one of his oil-drilling teams accidentally discovered a hidden valley inhabited by a surviving T-Rex. After disingenuously pledging to study the creature rather than kill it, Thrust and his companions—including an intrepid photojournalist (Joan Van Ark), a mute African scout (Luther Rackley), and a square-jawed scientist (Steven Keats)—head to the dinosaur’s lair. Upon arrival, they discover many prehistoric beasties, as well as a tribe of primitive humans. The less said about the film’s dramatic scenes, the better, since the only thing worse than the acting is the patronizingly stupid writing. (“Maston, please, you’ve done all anyone could, and you’ve been magnificent,” Van Ark says breathlessly at one point. “But let the dinosaur go—it’s the last one!”) The monster scenes are no improvement. Actors in rubber suits flounce around elaborate scale-model sets of caves and jungles, with the leading players badly matted into the foreground.

          The Last Dinosaur is deeply dull, especially when Maury Lewis’ grating score pastiches together blues, jazz, and orchestral flavors into sonic sludge. Plus, God help us, there’s a theme song, performed by noted jazz crooner Nancy Wilson. Although released to cinemas in Japan, The Last Dinosaur originally reached American audiences as an ABC movie of the week in 1977. Whether the folks at Rankin/Bass previously envisioned a U.S. theatrical release is a mystery.

The Last Dinosaur: LAME

Against a Crooked Sky (1975)

So innocuous it’s completely forgettable, this family-friendly Western borrows a plot contrivance from the John Ford classic The Searchers (1956), but instead of the moral complexity found in the earlier film, Against a Crooked Sky is filled with clichés and hokum. When the movie begins, spunky young man Sam Sutter (Stewart Petersen) spends a playful afternoon taunting his pretty sister, Charlotte (Jewel Blanch), while she bathes in a pond on the family’s remote homestead. (Yes, this G-rated flick begins with peekaboo shots of an attractive starlet—go figure.) Soon afterward, the Sutter parents leave the kids alone one day, and a gang of Indians invades, knocking Sam unconscious and abducting Charlotte. Guilt-ridden over his failure to protect his sister, Sam ventures into the wilderness on a rescue mission, eventually stumbling across a crusty prospector named Russian (Richard Boone). Soon, these unlikely allies join forces to search for Charlotte, because Russian believes the Indians who took Sam’s sister know the whereabouts of underground gold. Directed with pedestrian competence by TV hack Earl Bellamy, Against a Crooked Sky feels like it’s cobbled together from bits of other movies, right down to the characterization of Russian as an ornery drunk with a soft side—Boone, generally quite entertaining, does his best with the lackluster material, but he’s following in tracks left by Lee Marvin, John Wayne, and myriad others. Worse, his fellow actors in Against a Crooked Sky are generic C-listers of dubious competence. The only other noteworthy figure in the movie is Brenda Venus, a dancer best known for dating writer Henry Miller toward the end of his life and for, well, her noteworthy figure. Plus, even though Against a Crooked Sky runs a brief 89 minutes, it’s a long slog because nothing unique happens.

Against a Crooked Sky: LAME

God’s Gun (1975)

A boring spaghetti Western arriving so late in the genre’s dubious life cycle as to lack any significance, God’s Gun pairs two of America’s favorite leather-faced B-movie stalwarts, Jack Palance and Lee Van Cleef, for a violent romp through the usual muck of religion-drenched vendettas. Produced by the notorious hacks at Golan-Globus, and co-written and directed by Sabata helmer Gianfranco Parolini (using his Americanized pseudonym “Frank Kramer”), God’s Gun doesn’t look like the usual spaghetti-Western schlock. Instead of rolling hills and parched deserts, the picture is mostly set in an ersatz Western town, complemented with overly lit soundstages that give the picture a Hollywood feel. These contrivances make God’s Gun more garish than grungy, which is not an improvement over the genre’s norm. Yet the worst aspects of spaghetti Westerns are present in full force, such as atrocious dubbing, which replaces the actors’ on-set performances with studio-recorded impersonations by substitute performers. (Why hire name actors and not use their voices?) The embalmed plot begins when a gang led by Sam Clayton (Palance) invades tiny Juno City. Since the sheriff (Richard Boone) is an ineffectual non-presence, the municipality’s real muscle is Father John (Van Cleef), a gunfighter-turned-preacher. Father John acts as a surrogate father for wide-eyed teenager Johnny (Leif Garrett), the son of a buxom saloon hostess (Sybil Danning). When Clayton’s goons kill Father John, Johnny flees into the wilderness and stumbles across his late mentor’s twin brother, Lewis (also played by Van Cleef). And so it goes from there: Lewis exacts revenge, the baddies are brought to justice, et cetera. Ineptly written, haphazardly filmed, and acted with suffocating disinterest, God’s Gun is a chore to sit through and not worth the effort. It says everything you need to know about the picture that the linchpin dramatic performance is given by the talentless Garrett, then at the beginning of his uninteresting run as a teen heartthrob.

God’s Gun: LAME

Big Jake (1971)

          Apparently aware that his days were numbered, cowboy-cinema legend John Wayne spent the early ’70s looking for a Western that might serve as his swan song in the genre. He ultimately hit the target with The Cowboys (1972) and The Shootist (1976), yet even the also-rans during this period are interesting, partially because Wayne’s stock Western performance was oiled to perfection by this point, and partially because you can feel him writing rough drafts of his Final Statement. So, while Big Jake is not a particularly distinguished picture—it lacks the poetic impact of The Cowboys and the crowd-pleasing closure of The Shootist—it delivers an enjoyable mixture of action, drama, and humor, laced with sly nods to Wayne’s advancing age.

          He plays Jacob McCandles, a wealthy rancher with an intimidating reputation that borders on myth, given the fact that most people assume he’s dead. In fact, he’s merely been wandering the wilderness in the years since he fell out with his wife, Martha (Maureen O’Hara), who raised their brood in his absence. When varmints led by ruthless John Fain (Richard Boone) attack the McCandles ranch and kidnap Jacob’s grandson, demanding a $1 million ransom, Martha asks Jake to rescue the boy and wipe out the crooks. He sets out on the mission accompanied by two sons he barely knows, James (Patrick Wayne) and Michael (Christopher Mitchum), plus a long-in-the-tooth Indian pal, Sam (Bruce Cabot). The posse has a few colorful adventures on the road, mostly to do with people trying to steal the ransom money, before their final showdown with the kidnappers.

          Written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink, the creators of the Dirty Harry character, Big Jake is bloodier and meaner than the usual Wayne fare, so the climax has real tension, although the edginess makes the requisite comic-relief bits feel out of place. And though Boone is entertaining as an amiable psychopath, he and the Duke (plus O’Hara) are the only formidable performers in the picture; Patrick Wayne, the star’s son, and Mitchum, whose dad is movie tough guy Robert Mitchum, are flyweights. As for Wayne, he’s no more an actor here than usual—his strength was inhabiting a larger-than-life persona, rather than incarnating actual characters—but he delivers the macho goods, strutting ridiculously as he shrugs off bullet wounds and other injuries in the name of doin’ what a man’s gotta do. Big Jake is hokum, to be sure, but it’s a step along the path that Wayne followed to his final reckoning with Westerns.

Big Jake: FUNKY

The Kremlin Letter (1970)

          Before venturing into the wilds of his fantastic ’70s character pieces, director John Huston punched the clock on this turgid espionage thriller, a half-hearted effort so overstuffed with plot twists and supporting characters that it’s borderline incomprehensible. One of those murky Cold War stories in the vein of John Le Carre’s books, The Kremlin Letter dramatizes efforts by American spies to recover a controversial letter in which a U.S. official agrees to help the Russian government derail China’s nuclear ambitions. The first half of the movie depicts the convoluted process by which the Tillinger Foundation, a front for the CIA, recruits a spy with a photographic memory to lead a covert op inside Russia; next comes the spy’s campaign to build a team of specialists for the mission.

          The unanswerable questions pile up immediately: Why isn’t a properly trained spy available? Why is a newbie entrusted with recruiting accomplices? Why can’t normal channels like bribes and double agents be used to recover the letter, especially since both tools are used for other purposes throughout the movie? The Kremlin Letter never solves any of these mysteries, and one gets the impression the filmmakers were so bogged down in the convoluted plot they barely understood which scene they were shooting on any given day. So as a story, The Kremlin Letter is a complete waste.

          As quasi-sophisticated entertainment, however, it has some amusing moments. Honey-voiced Orson Welles pontificates pleasantly about politics. Bitchy All About Eve star George Sanders plays a cranky old queen, right down to a scene performed in drag. Barbara Parkins essays a sexy thief who demonstrates her skills by opening a safe with her feet while dressed in a leotard. The movie also boasts some kinkiness; Max von Sydow, at his most unnerving, plays a sadistic Russian enforcer with a soft side for his crazed wife, a pain freak who likes rough sex with gigolos. (Cinematic footnote: Playing von Sydow’s wife is Bibi Andersson, his costar in numerous Ingmar Bergman movies.)

          None of this even remotely adds up at the end, and laconic leading man Patrick O’Neal seems far too bored with the material to have much of an impact, but some scenes are quite interesting to watch. The movie’s best element, by far, is onetime Have Gun–Will Travel star Richard Boone as Ward, the amiable overlord of the American operation. Gleefully blending bloodlust and chattiness, he presents the movie’s most interesting vision of a sociopathic spook.

The Kremlin Letter: FUNKY