Charley One-Eye (1973)

          Presumably conceived as a provocative statement about race, this peculiar Western depicts the adventures of a black soldier who’s gone AWOL from the Union Army and the mysterious Indian whom the soldier encounters in the desert. Initially, the soldier makes a hostage of the Indian by threatening him at knifepoint, forcing the Indian into servitude and mercilessly taunting the man. After bonding over their mutual hatred of white people, the soldier and the Indian decide to commit robberies together. All the while, a bounty hunter chases the soldier, so the specter of death is omnipresent. In its broad strokes, this storyline should be serviceable despite its contrived nature. But Charley One-Eye is riddled with peculiarities, like the fact that none of the characters has a name. (The soldier is billed as “The Black Man,” the Indian is billed as “The Indian,” etc.)
          Actually, a slight correction to the preceding remark is necessary, because the film does indeed feature a character named Charley One-Eye. He’s a chicken. And, quite frankly, he’s the most sympathetic character in the whole movie.

          The first hour of Charley One-Eye is a slog, because the soldier (Richard Roundtree) is a sadistic prick given to fits of idiotic laughter, and the Indian (Roy Thinnes) is part pathetic cripple and part wise mystic. Neither character is believable or fun to watch, so the myriad scenes of them shuffling through the desert while being cruel to each other are boring. Eventually, the bounty hunter (Nigel Davenport) arrives, leading to scenes of torture and other violence.

          None of this resonates much beyond visceral impact, though flash cuts to the past indicate that the soldier slept with a white officer’s wife and subsequently killed the officer. The picture fails to provide corresponding illumination for the Indian, except to illustrate that he’s kind to fowl, particularly the aforementioned Charley One-Eye. The story climaxes with a failed attempt at poetic irony, exemplifying that the divide between the content and intentions of Charley One-Eye is so wide as to render the film almost impenetrable. As a result, the film is little more than pretentious pulp, despite Roundtree’s spirited efforts to enliven a poorly conceived role. Chicago native Thinnes, absurdly miscast as a Native American, mostly stares out from beneath long hair and a wide-brimmed hat while hissing his curt lines in a raspy whisper.

Charley One-Eye: FUNKY

The Norliss Tapes (1973)

          Despite overseeing the TV movies The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973), producer Dan Curtis wasn’t involved with the short-lived series derived from those pictures, Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Undaunted, Curtis produced and directed a feature-length pilot for a copycat project titled The Norliss Tapes. Although the proposed series never materialized, the Norliss Tapes feature survives today, via syndication and home video, as a stand-alone thriller featuring Curtis’ favorite monster, the vampire. (Lest we forget, Curtis created the cult-fave bloodsucker soap opera Dark Shadows, which ran from 1966 to 1971.) While The Norliss Tapes is unquestionably derivative, it’s a decent little shocker with a solid cast of reliable B-level actors.

          When the picture begins, publisher Sanford Evans (Don Porter) visits the home of an author who’s gone missing, then finds recordings related to the author’s in-progress book. As Evans listens to the tapes, we see flashbacks depicting weird events the author, David Norliss (Roy Thinnes), witnessed. In true Curtis fashion, things get spooky fast, with little left to the imagination. It turns out Norliss was contacted by a woman named Ellen Cort (Angie Dickinson), who claimed to have seen her dead husband rooting around their house as a vampire/zombie/whatever. (Curtis presents this vignette with full-on monster makeup, offering a nastier jolt than one might expect from a small-screen flick.)

          Meeting Ellen starts Norliss down the road of investigating nefarious types who are bringing the dead back to life for mysterious reasons. Along the way, Norliss encounters a sexy spiritualist (Vonetta McGee), a disbelieving sheriff (Claude Akins), and, eventually, a demon trying to enter the mortal world. Curtis crams a lot of enjoyably silly stuff into 74 minutes, so even though Thinnes is a forgettable leading man, it’s easy to see where this material could have gone with a more dynamic star. It doesn’t hurt that Dickinson looks fantastic, and that Curtis was adept at boosting production value with low camera angles and shadowy lighting. The Norliss Tapes won’t linger very long in your memory, but it’s fun to watch once.

The Norliss Tapes: FUNKY

The Hindenburg (1975)

          A generation before James Cameron put Kate and Leo aboard the Titanic, transforming a historical tragedy into the colorful backdrop for a silly fictional story, the makers of The Hindenburg used a similar gimmick for their movie about history’s most famous airship disaster. Based on a speculative book by Michael M. Mooney, the picture presents one of the sexiest theories for why the famous zeppelin crashed while docking in New Jersey after a 1937 transatlantic voyage from Nazi Germany, where the ship was considered a powerful symbol of Third Reich accomplishment. According to the movie, anti-Nazi conspirators planned to destroy the ship after the passengers were safely away, but then a perfect storm of circumstance led to the deaths of 36 people.

          Completely missing every opportunity presented by this edgy storyline, The Hindenburg is a slow-moving bore filled with drab subplots, trite characterizations, and woefully little action. Using a tired Agatha Christie-type structure, the movie introduces Col. Franz Ritter (George C. Scott), a German pilot sent by the Nazi high command to spy on crew and passengers because of a bomb threat that was issued prior to the ship’s departure from Germany. (In typical disaster-movie fashion, every sensible person in the story recommends delaying the trip, but the expeditious high command insists on a timely liftoff.)

          Once the Hindenburg is airborne, Ritter pokes around the lives of various people, looking for clues of bad intent, so the picture quickly falls into a clichéd cycle of melodramatic vignettes that are supposed to make the audience wonder (and care) who’s going to live and who’s going to die. Unfortunately, none of the characters is interesting—not the German countess who shares romantic history with Ritter; not the songwriter and clown performing anti-Hitler routines; not the twitchy crewman whom the audience can identify as the saboteur the first time he appears onscreen. It doesn’t help that the supporting cast almost exclusively comprises character actors: William Atherton, Robert Clary, Charles Durning, Richard Dysart, Burgess Meredith, Roy Thinnes, and Gig Young are all solid performers, but they’re not exactly the mid-’70s A-list. (Lending a pinch more marquee value is Anne Bancroft.)

          The film’s production values are impressive-ish, including vivid re-creations of the Hindenburg’s interiors, and some of the flying shots feature handsome old-school effects, but director Robert Wise’s dramaturgy is so turgid that even these quasi-spectacular elements are for naught. Viewers who soldier through the whole movie are rewarded with a 20-minute climax featuring a detailed re-enactment of the Hindenburg disaster, which Wise presents in black-and-white so he can intercut his footage with newsreel shots of the real Hindenburg. This laborious denouement offers thrills, but it’s all too little, too late.

          If nothing else, the filmmakers get points for the sheer nerve of ending this bloated whale of a movie with vintage audio from the famous “Oh, the humanity!” radio broadcast: The last thing viewers hear before the credits is a voice announcing, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.” Cinematic self-awareness?

The Hindenburg: LAME