Boardwalk (1979)

          A grim story about the everyday humiliations of getting old, cowriter-director Stephen Verona’s Boardwalk leavens its darker aspects by celebrating the love that keeps two people connected after 50 years of marriage. Very much a showcase for the celebrated acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who enjoyed a burst of fame following his memorable appearance in The Godfather: Part II (1974), Boardwalk offers a peculiar mixture of caricature and understatement. The film’s broadest element is its depiction of a street gang as a group of one-dimensional maniacs wreaking pointless havoc on a once-peaceful neighborhood surrounding the Coney Island boardwalk. Nearly every other aspect of the picture is executed with soft-spoken intimacy, so the tension between the gang scenes and the rest of the film can be jarring at times. Yet to Verona’s credit, he integrates the gang element early and keeps it humming throughout the storyline until it becomes crucial to the climax, so one never gets the sense that the narrative has spun out of control. Somewhat like the messy lives it depicts, the narrative of Boardwalk goes where it goes, even if the trajectory sometimes seems capricious and cruel.

          David Rosen (Strasberg) operates a cafeteria near the boardwalk, and his middle-aged kids, three sons and a daughter, all work there. David’s wife, Becky (Ruth Gordon), teaches piano lessons out of the home they’ve shared for half a century. But Coney is changing, mostly for the worse. Muggings and robberies are commonplace, graffiti is everywhere, and seniors are moving out in droves because they don’t feel safe anymore. David stubbornly resists the temptation to flee, partially because he remembers leaving his European homeland as a young man and doesn’t want to get pushed off his turf a second time. His resolve is tested as criminal activity edges closer and closer to his front door, and another complication arises when Becky develops health problems.

          At its core, Boardwalk is about one man looking for dignity in a world that seems determined to strip him of everything he loves, so there’s a powerful individual-vs.-society statement in here somewhere. Other threads, which add tonal variety but not much weight, involve the romantic travails of David’s daughter, Florence (Janet Leigh), and the career woes of her adult son, an up-and-coming musician named Peter (Michael Ayr). Like the gang scenes, these subplots are awkward, but they eventually yield important moments.

          It’s evident that Verona knows his locations well, so whether he’s going wide to use street art as a painterly backdrop or going close to focus on the well-loved tchotchkes inside Jewish homes, he employs the camera artfully. Verona also does a fine job balancing different types of performance energy, juxtaposing, for instance, Strasberg’s quiet resilience with Gordon’s singular mixture of fragility and raunchiness. Withholding background music from many scenes represents another strong creative choice, pulling viewers into the worlds of the movie’s characters. So while Boardwalk is far from masterful, it’s idiosyncratic and impassioned, all the way through to the startling final scene.

Boardwalk: GROOVY

1980 Week: Any Which Way You Can

The box-office success of Every Which Way But Loose (1978) all but ensured that audiences hadn’t seen the last of Clint Eastwood playing Philo, a trucker with an orangutan for a pet and a side career as a bare-knuckle fighter. Whereas Every Which Way But Loose is an awful movie that can be explained away by assuming that Eastwood wanted a break from playing tight-lipped avengers, Any Which Way You Can is inexcusable crap. Rehashing the narrative elements of the previous film and sprawling across an absurd 118-minute running time, Any Which Way You Can is punishingly stupid. The die is cast during the opening-credits scene, a dull montage of a pickup truck driving while Eastwood and Ray Charles croon a ghastly country song titled “Beer’s to You” on the soundtrack. Then comes the insipid storyline. After being dumped by country singer Lynn (Sondra Locke) in the previous film, Philo retires from fighting, but gangsters offer him $25,000 to tussle with Jack (William Smith), a brawler with a reputation for beating his opponents to death. Meanwhile, Philo has misadventures with his drinking buddy Orville (Geoffrey Lewis) and Orville’s foul-mouthed mother (Ruth Gordon). Everything unfolds predictably. Friends ask Philo not to fight, and then criminals blackmail him into participating. At regular intervals, the movie stops dead for musical performances (by Locke, Glen Campbell, and others), as well as scenes of Clyde defecating in police cars and sharing a hotel room with a frisky lady orangutan. At one point, Clyde cavorts to the accompaniment of a song called “Orangutan Hall of Fame.” By the time Any Which Way You Can reaches its nadir—cross-dressing bikers, a 20-minute fistfight, homophobic dialogue—the idiocy has become intolerable. Although Eastwood wasn’t done scratching his comedy itch (please give the 1989 clunker Pink Cadillac a wide berth), at least Any Which Way You Can ended the actor’s orangutan era.

Any Which Way You Can: LAME

1980 Week: My Bodyguard

          Note: While I'm on vacation, please enjoy a double-dose of 1980 movies with two weeks of brand-new posts about the year that brought the '70s to a close. Included in this super-sized batch of 1980 reviews are two movies recently requested by readers. Regular reviews of 1970s features will resume on Monday, July 25. Meantime, keep on keepin' on!
          Charming but slight, this crowd-pleaser about a pair of high-school misfits who yank each other from their doldrums was the promising directorial debut of actor/producer Tony Bill, best known at the time for coproducing The Sting (1973). Seen with hindsight, My Bodyguard is pocked with such imperfections as awkward tonal shifts and threadbare dramatic transitions. However, the endearing work of the two leads blends with an overall humanistic sensibility to cast the movie in a warm glow from start to finish. Therefore, even though the film's basic storyline is a clichéd underdog saga, only the most hard-hearted viewer can resist the pull of My Bodyguard.
          Set in Chicago, the picture concerns nebbish teenager Clifford Peache (Chris Makepeace), who transfers from a private academy to a tough public school. Clifford's father, Mr. Peache (Martin Mull), is the live-in manager of a posh hotel, but Mr. Peache is forever distracted by the antics of his aging mother. Gramma (Ruth Gordon) is a cheerful eccentric who spends her evenings making outrageous sexual overtures to men in the hotel bar. Upon arrival at his new school, Clifford recklessly embarrasses the school bully, Moody (Matt Dillon), thereby making a permanent enemy of the punk who shakes down nerds for lunch money. Meanwhile, Clifford becomes aware of a mysterious classmate named Ricky Linderman (Adam Baldwin), who is rumored to have missed school because he murdered someone. Once Clifford meets Ricky, he recognizes a kindred spirit—someone misunderstood for his sensitivity—even though Ricky is physically formidable because he's bigger and older than his peers. After one too many run-ins with Moody and his goons, Clifford hatches a wild idea and hires Ricky to serve as his bodyguard.
          Although there's little suspense regarding whether the main characters will overcome their differences, somehow it all works. Whenever Clifford and Ricky celebrate their newfound companionship (as in the climactic scene of a long motorcycle ride through city streets), the effect is genuinely uplifting. Similarly, the final showdown between the heroes and their enemy is as thrilling as it is simplistic. Dave Grusin's robust music keeps the movie energetic and propulsive, while judicious editing (credited to Stu Linder) keeps scenes focused and tight. Yet it’s the performances that make My Bodyguard fly. Dillon and Makepeace, both of whom had just begun their film careers, fill the screen with believable emotions, while Baldwin, in his movie debut, tears into the colorful role of a gentle giant with a traumatic past. Others in the solid cast are John Houseman, playing an enjoyably contrived cameo role, and the very young Jennifer Beals and Joan Cusack, both of whom play dorky students.

My Bodyguard: GROOVY

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (1976)

          Don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of this sequel to Rosemary’s Baby (1968), because Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby was made for TV eight years after the original picture was released. Cheap-looking, silly, and featuring only one returning cast member, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby is not without its odd virtues, but it doesn’t exist in the same universe as its illustrious predecessor. When Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby begins, the child whom Rosemary Woodhouse delivered at the end of the first film is eight years old. Raised in seclusion by the Satanists who arranged for Rosemary to be impregnated by the devil, the boy whom Rosemary insists on calling “Andrew” is called “Adrian” by the devil worshippers. Hopeful that she can save her boy from his predetermined fate of becoming the antichrist, Rosemary kidnaps Adrian/Andrew during the first section of the movie, titled “The Book of Rosemary.”

          Suffice to say, her rescue mission fails, which brings us to “The Book of Adrian,” which picks up the story 20 years later. Brooding and impetuous, twentysomething Adrian/Andrew knows that a large number of people consider him special, though he has no idea why. (Or maybe he does—the biggest storytelling problem in the movie is that it’s never clear whether Rosemary’s baby knows his true lineage.) During Adrian/Andrew’s birthday party, the Satanists drug the young man, slather him with mime makeup (!), and perform a ceremony meant to imbue Adrian/Andrew with his biological daddy’s powers. Yet that plan hits a snag, too, leading to the film’s final segment, “The Book of Andrew,” which is the best of the batch because it actually contains a few surprises.

          Director Sam O’Steen, who was the picture editor of the original Rosemary’s Baby, seems utterly confused about how to convey information and where to put his camera, so the movie looks amateurish, and it feels like big chunks of the story are missing. Nominal star Stephen McHattie, who plays Adrian/Andrew as an adult, seems like he’s still emulating the sullen style of James Dean (whom he played in an telefilm broadcast a few months before this one), and he often looks as if he’s about to fall asleep. Worse, it’s deeply distracting to see most of the major roles from Rosemary’s Baby recast, especially since Ruth Gordon reprises her part as chipper Satanist Minnie Castavet. Patty Duke, George Maharis, and Ray Milland replace Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Sidney Blackner, respectively. (Also appearing in Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby are Broderick Crawford, Tina Louise, and Donna Mills.) Predictably, Gordon’s pithy asides add as much humor to this picture as they did to the original. 

Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby: FUNKY

Scavenger Hunt (1979)

          Producers have spent years trying to mimic It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the all-star comedy epic about an international treasure hunt. Lesser attempts, such as Scavenger Hunt, succumb to predictable problems including bloated running times and underwritten characters. Trying to adequately service roles for a dozen or more principal actors seems to vex even the most well-meaning filmmakers. Additionally, trying to maintain the desired level of hellzapoppin excitement for an entire feature film usually drives the people behind pictures like Scavenger Hunt to rely on chases, screaming, and slapstick—all of which get tiresome. Inevitably, the initial sugar rush leads to a crash. Although Scavenger Hunt is largely a disappointment, especially considering the incredible array of gifted comic actors appearing in the film, it has some meritorious elements. Cowriter/producer Steven Vail and his team (mostly) avoid taking cheap shots at ethnic stereotypes, and they play a clean game by opting for family-friendly jokes instead of lurid ones. It’s not difficult to see the frothy confection the filmmakers had in mind.

          The premise, naturally, is simple. When multimillionaire board-game titan Milton Parker (Vincent Price) dies, his would-be heirs are forced to compete in a scavenger hunt that will determine who inherits the Parker fortune. On one team is Parker’s greedy sister (Cloris Leachman), along with her idiot son (Richard Masur) and her slimy lawyer (Richard Benjamin). Another team includes Parker’s son-in-law (Tony Randall) and the son-in-law’s kids. Next up is a duo comprising two of Parker’s nephews (played by Willie Aames and Dirk Benedict). Still another team features Parker’s household help—the butler (Roddy McDowall), the chauffeur (Cleavon Little), the chef (James Coco), and the maid (Stephanie Faracy). The wild-card contender is a dimwitted taxi driver (Richard Mulligan), whom Parker included because the cab driver accidentally killed Parker’s business partner, making Parker rich.

          You can figure out where this goes—as the teams pursue items on their lists, the evil people bicker and steal while the virtuous people help each other. Some scenes that presumably were meant to be comic highlights fall flat, including a lengthy bit of McDowall supervising his team’s theft of a toilet from a hotel bathroom. Cameos from random actors (Ruth Gordon, Meat Loaf, Arnold Schwarzenegger) add little, and the gags are uninspired. Nonetheless, director Michael Schultz keeps everyone upbeat and moving fast, so several sequences generate mild amusement, especially the anything-goes finale. Additionally, while none of the performances truly stand out (excepting perhaps Benjamin’s vigorous turn as a long-suffering schmuck), the vibe is consistently and pleasantly silly.

Scavenger Hunt: FUNKY

Where’s Poppa? (1970)

          With its barrage of surrealistic plot developments and tasteless jokes, Where’s Poppa? would be a weird movie under any circumstances—yet it’s doubly strange when viewed as part of its director’s overall career. Carl Reiner, one of the most likable comedians America has ever produced, is best known for gentle humor of the family-friendly variety, since his professional highlights include creating the beloved ’60s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show and helming such inoffensive comedy features as Oh, God! (1977) and All of Me (1984). Excepting this bizarre movie, the most offensive thing Reiner ever made was probably the Steve Martin vehicle The Jerk (1979), which is incredibly tame by comparison with Where’s Poppa?

          Adapted by Robert Klane from his own novel, Where’s Poppa? depicts the travails of New York attorney Gordon Hocheiser (George Segal), who lives with his senile mother, Mrs. Hocheiser (Ruth Gordon), in a cramped apartment. Momma’s a dottering nut who keeps asking “Where’s Poppa?” because she can’t grasp the fact that her husband is dead, and she smothers Gordon with constant nagging and with inappropriately physical affection. Over the course of the movie, Gordon faces three predicaments: 1) He wants to dump Momma in a nursing home but can’t break a deathbed promise to his father that obligates him to care for his insufferable mother; 2) He wants to marry Louise (Trish Van Devere), the pretty nurse he just hired to care for Momma, but there’s no way the three of them can live together; and 3) Gordon’s high-strung brother, Sidney (Ron Leibman) keeps getting into trouble.

          The tone of Where’s Poppa? is all over the place, so it’s hard to know when the movie is going for absurdist humor, black comedy, nasty satire, or surrealistic farce. One scene might involve a gentle joke like Momma using cola in her cereal instead of milk, and the next scene might involve Sidney committing rape in Central Park while wearing a gorilla suit. Yes, you read that right—the “comedy” centerpiece of the movie is a rape scene, which is as gruesomely unfunny as it sounds. So, too, is the icky sequence in which Momma yanks down Gordon’s pants and chews on his ass while a shocked Louise watches. Underlying all of this is the distasteful central premise: The “hero” of the story wants to break a blood oath and dump his mentally ill mother so he can get laid.

          Segal does what he can, providing a few almost-amusing moments of exasperation, but his character is so ugly it’s hard to find anything Segal does funny. Similarly, Gordon drops the crazy-like-a-fox bit that distinguished most of her late-career roles and hits the same note of annoying senility again and again; her characterization is alternately boring and pathetic, neither of which is much fun to watch. Leibman’s performance is grotesque, and Van Devere seems lost amid the repulsive situations. Where’s Poppa? has a minor cult following, so clearly some people find the picture amusing, and it’s worth noting that a handful of familiar actors—Vincent Gardenia, Barnard Hughes, Garrett Morris, Rob Reiner, Paul Sorvino—make appearances. Yet it’s telling that after making this picture, Carl Reiner mostly left the realm of bad-taste humor behind, gravitating toward stories that reflect the sweetness one associates with his persona.

Where’s Poppa?: FREAKY

Harold and Maude (1971)

          Today, Harold and Maude is so widely regarded as one of the quintessential New Hollywood films that it’s surprising to learn the movie didn’t have an easy path to immortality—especially since the early life of the project seemed charmed. Writer and co-producer Colin Higgins developed the project during his graduate studies at UCLA’s film school and won a major prize for the script. Then, while working as a pool cleaner in L.A. to stay solvent, Higgins met the film’s other producer, Mildred Lewis. The pair tried to set up the project with Higgins directing, but Paramount nixed that plan and hired editor-turned-filmmaker Hal Ashby. Good move. In addition to hitting just the right mix of satire and sweetness, Ashby shot the picture on such a modest budget that the story reached theaters with its darkness and humanism intact.

          Yet Harold and Maude did not catch on during its original release; rather, it took years of home-video exhibition, theatrical reissues, and TV broadcasts for the movie to find its well-deserved status as a minor classic. That said, it’s not difficult to see why the film alienates as many people as it enchants. The premise is perverse, the humor is morbid, and the May-December romance at the heart of the story skirts the limits of good taste. After all, the actors playing the lovers in the movie’s title—Bud Cort (Harold) and Ruth Gordon (Maude)—were in their 20s and 70s, respectively, at the time of filming.

          Higgins’ bold script begins by introducing Harold Chasen, a rich kid so bored with the trappings of everyday life that he spends most of his energy staging outrageous suicide scenes for the kinky thrill of shocking his mother, Mrs. Chasen (Vivian Pickles). Since Harold never actually kills himself, however, it’s unclear whether his activities represent a genuine cry for help or just bizarre frivolity. Undaunted, Mrs. Chasen tries to match Harold with various potential brides, but Harold’s eerie theatrics spook all of them. Meanwhile, Harold amuses himself by visiting funerals, which brings him into contact with Maude Chardin, who also digs watching final farewells to the deceased. Maude is as free and open as Harold is repressed and quiet, so as they spend time together, Maude teaches Harold surprising lessons about making the most of every day; she’s also the only person who encourages Harold to embrace his oddness.

          The evolution of this relationship involves a series of touching revelations and surprises that won’t be spoiled here, but suffice to say that Harold and Maude has boundless integrity—the film is never less than true to its offbeat self, which is, of course, why the picture has become a source of inspiration for generations of independent-minded filmmakers. Each of the major elements in the movie approaches a kind of poetry, from Cort’s hangdog quirkiness to Gordon’s ebullient outrageousness, while Ashby consistently handles the material with sensitivity and style.

          The storytelling is a bit on the schematic side, and some of Harold’s suicide scenes are absurdly grandiose, but the soul of this movie is so utterly unique that asking it to meet normal expectations is foolhardy. Especially with the jubilant soundtrack of Cat Stevens songs giving the piece a gentle heartbeat, Harold and Maude easily ranks among the most unconventional love stories ever filmed. It is also, not unimportantly, a perfect snapshot of the historical moment when mainstream Hollywood studios let young filmmakers run wild so long as they kept costs low. Harold and Maude isn’t perfect, but learning to accept the imperfections of life—no matter how horrific they might be—is a key component of the picture’s inspirational theme.

Harold and Maude: RIGHT ON

Every Which Way But Loose (1978)

          One of those lowbrow hits whose immense popularity defies all reasonable explanation, the Clint Eastwood action-comedy Every Which Way But Loose feels like a bad country song come to life, with random gags about a rascally primate thrown in for good measure. Eastwood plays Philo, a truck driver who moonlights as a bare-knuckle brawler and happens to own a pet orangutan. When he falls for a flighty country singer (Sondra Locke) who skips out on him, Philo chases her from California to Colorado, picking up nasty pursuers along the way: a pair of bruiser cops who hold a grudge after Philo kicked their asses in a bar fight, and a gang of bikers whose members have been humiliated by Philo. The movie comprises a string of stupidly macho episodes, interspersed with charmless scenes of Eastwood romancing Locke, the pale blonde actress who was his paramour in several films (and his private life) from the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s. Every Which Way But Loose also makes room for musical cameos by country singers including Charlie Rich and Mel Tillis, plus a grating supporting performance by Harold and Maude star Ruth Gordon, doing the potty-mouth shtick she contributed to a number of bad movies.

          Every Which Way But Loose drags on forever and can’t maintain a consistent tone, since some of the fighting bits are way too intense for lightweight escapist fare. However, the really confusing thing is that Every Which Way But Loose doesn’t feel like a bad movie. With several Eastwood regulars among the crew—and, more likely than not, Eastwood looking over nominal director James Fargo’s shoulder—the picture has a degree of technical spit and polish its idiotic script simply doesn’t deserve. Still, audiences loved the damn thing enough to warrant a more-of-the-same sequel, Any Which Way You Can (1980). On a happier note, when Eastwood pal Burt Reynolds heard about Every Which Way But Loose, he told his friend to expect payback for infringing into Reynolds’ domain of brawling comedy; true to his word, Reynolds retaliated by making Sharky’s Machine (1981), a terrific cop thriller in the vein of Eastwood’s Dirty Harry flicks.

Every Which Way But Loose: LAME

The Big Bus (1976)

It’s not hard to see why The Big Bus seemed like a good idea at the time. Mel Brooks had just turned spoofs into big business, with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974), and the disaster movie was all the rage, making it an ideal satirical target. But even with good timing, a decent budget, and a cast filled with rock-solid comedy pros, this minor effort from the usually impressive producing team of Julia and Michael Phillips is thoroughly forgettable. From a film-history perspective, however, it’s interesting to examine The Big Bus as the first attempt to do what Airplane! did so much better few years later. The missing secret ingredient seems to be lunatic non sequiturs, because every joke in The Big Bus is hindered a laborious setup. The picture’s intentionally stupid plot concerns the maiden voyage of a giant nuclear-powered bus, which is fraught with problems like a crazed passenger who wants to kill the driver because she thinks he ate her father (and 109 other folks) after a bus crash in the boonies years ago. The caliber of the humor is summed up by a sequence in which the driver accelerates the bus to test whether it overcomes wind resistance, finally exclaiming, “We’ve done it! We’re breaking wind at 90 miles an hour!” The movie is borderline watchable because it’s handsomely produced, blasts from start to finish in 88 minutes, and includes lots of fun people: Rene Auberjonois, Ned Beatty, Joe Bologna, Stockard Channing, Bob Dishy, José Ferrer, Harold Gould, Larry Hagman, Sally Kellerman, Richard Mulligan, Lynn Redgrave, Stuart Margolin. There’s even room for Ruth Gordon of Harold and Maude fame, doing the sort of vulgar-old-lady shtick Betty White does today.

The Big Bus: FUNKY