The Trackers (1971)

          Apparently Sammy Davis Jr. spent some time looking for a project in which he could costar with John Wayne, leading to development of The Trackers. Somewhere along the way, the project lost Wayne, director Burt Kennedy, and the potential for a theatrical release, instead becoming an inexpensive telefilm directed by small-screen workhorse Earl Bellamy and costarring Ernest Borgnine. It’s probably for the best a glossier version of this project never materialized for two reasons: 1) Davis seems way out of his element playing a formidable lawman, and 2) the plot follows the familiar formula of Black and White characters who overcome racial animus when thrown together by circumstance. As a brisk TV movie with household-name actors, The Trackers makes for a pleasant 74 minutes of disposable entertainment—but stretching this content out to feature length would have brought its shortcomings into sharp focus.
          Sam Paxton (Borgnine) is an amiable rancher with a wife and two adult children until one day when raiders attack his property, kill his son, and kidnap his daughter. Initial efforts to find the evildoers prove fruitless, so Sam writes to a lawman friend who specializes in tracking. Unable to help because of an injury, the friend sends Ezekiel Smith (Davis), which aggravates Sam’s racism. (He fought for the South.) Nonetheless, once Ezekiel demonstrates his prowess, Sam agrees to ride with the Black lawman even as the trail leads closer and closer to the Mexican border. Since there have been roughly a zillion movies about men from different worlds forced to work together, you know how things go from there—Sam and Ezekiel vacillate between bonding and squabbling. In reflective moments, they share stories and find common cause. In combustible moments, they physically assault each other. A few beats are played for mild comic relief, but for the most part The Trackers aims for a serious tone.
          It’s tricky to buy Davis in his role, not just because he seems so modern but also because he’s so physically slight—in one particularly eye-rolling moment, Davis’s character holds his own in an extended brawl with Borgnine’s character even though Borgnine looks as if he could snap Davis’s spine like a twig. Related, Davis’s performance feels artificial and bland compared to the believable intensity Borgnine brings to nearly every scene. As always, Borgnine’s performance style is more about blunt force than nuance, but his animalistic approach suits the role and the storyline. He’s actually quite engaging here, so it’s moderately satisfying to watch his character describe an emotional arc, however predictable and trite.

The Trackers: FUNKY

Sammy Stops the World (1978)

          It’s tempting to wonder what sort of box-office expectations the producers of this filmed stage production had, because Sammy Stops the World radiates sensibilities associated with the mid-’60s rather than sensibilities associated with the late ’70s. Did anyone really think the public was hungry for a dated musical starring an old-fashioned entertainer? In any event, Sammy Stops the World failed to restore Sammy Davis Jr. to the big-screen popularity he enjoyed in the ’60s, and has since fallen into obscurity. Seen today, it’s perhaps best appreciated as a record of Davis’ incredible stamina, though casual fans might prefer tracking down concert footage of Davis’ familiar hits. Instead of “Candy Man” and “I Gotta Be Me,” Sammy Stops the World comprises unmemorable songs by UK tunesmiths Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, of Doctor Dolittle and Willy Wonka fame. That’s because Sammy Stops the World records a performance of Davis in the 1966 Bricusse/Newley show Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. The most famous tune to emerge from the musical is “What Kind of Fool,” not to be confused with the Barry Gibb song of the same name popularized by Barbra Streisand.

          Performing against a circus-themed backdrop and accompanied by a small cast of singers and dancers, Davis plays Littlechap, an everyman whose life journey forms a ham-fisted satire about modern existence. He gets married, takes a soul-sucking job to pay the bills, and sells out his principles for professional and social advancement, eventually becoming so adept at telling people what they want to hear that he becomes President of the United States. Periodically, Littlechap addresses the audience by exclaiming “Stop the world!” and uttering introspective asides. Eventually, the story resolves into a moral lesson because Littlechap rediscovers his integrity at a crucial moment.

          The fashionable anti-Establishment lingo of the original play was reconfigured slightly for Davis, hence some awkward references to race relations. (The performance in this film, recorded in Long Beach, California, was part of a national tour.) As a movie experience, Sammy Stops the World is underwhelming at best, exhausting at worst. Davis works his ass off, but he also mugs shamelessly and milks emotional moments—which is to say that he offers his usual shtick. And while his leather-lunged belting is physically impressive, it’s not particularly artful. Worse, the show doesn’t properly showcase his remarkable dancing. Incidentally, mention should be made of costar Marian Mercer, who plays multiple roles, since she performs the show’s cutesy dialogue and lyrics with welcome edginess.

Sammy Stops the World: FUNKY

Poor Devil (1973)

          One of the cinematic rabbit holes I find most alluring is the one containing lost feature-length TV pilots from the ’70s. Sure, it’s fun to revisit the initial episodes of series that later became cult favorites or even iconic boob-tube mainstays, but it’s even more revealing to investigate concepts that almost became series. For instance, it’s astonishing the pilot episode of Poor Devil was actually filmed and exhibited. It’s a broad-as-a-barn comedy about a low-ranking demon who’s desperate to escape his mundane job in Hell, which involves stoking the fires of the underworld by literally shoveling coal into a furnace. The price of getting a promotion? Persuading a mortal to sell his soul. Yep. Had Poor Devil gone to series, every week, the show’s “hero” would presumably have lured some dumb putz into eternal damnation, and/or attempt to do so and suffer a crisis of conscience. Oh, and the project’s star was Sammy Davis Jr.

          In the pilot movie, which has a few moments of pith but never overcomes the innately untenable nature of the premise, the would-be “client” is Burnett (Jack Klugman), a department-store accountant. His wife wants nice things that he can’t afford; his smarmy supervisor, Dennis (Adam West), has the store’s top accounting job simply because he’s better at kissing ass; and Burnett has sunken so low as to attempt robbing the store one night. Meanwhile, ne’er-do-well demon Sammy (Davis) has spent centuries in torment after screwing up previous assignments, so he’s eager to impress Lucifer (Christopher Lee) by getting someone to sign a contract. Sammy talks his way into becoming Burnett’s handler, with the understanding that if he fails, his punishment will be hundreds more years of shoveling. The bulk of the pilot depicts Sammy’s attempts to fulfill Burnett’s every wish, per the terms of the contract, even though Burnett knows he can wrangle out of the deal if Sammy botches anything. Proving how the series premise was never going to work, Sammy deliberately screws up once he realizes that Burnett is too nice a guy for Hell.

          Nonetheless, Poor Devil has a colorful cast, and Davis does his best to sell the wackadoodle idea. He’s charming if perhaps a bit overzealous. Lee and West are fine if uncharacteristically restrained, and Klugman fares best of all, bouncing between comic anguish and exasperated one-liners. For instance, when Sammy magically appears in Burnett’s bedroom, Sammy helpfully explains, “I’m from down below.” Burnett’s response: “You’re from the Feldmans’ apartment?” Or, as Burnett says later, “I don’t wanna go to Hell—I haven’t even been to Europe yet!” You get the idea. By the by, this movie’s vision of the underworld has a very Austin Powers vibe, with lots of medallions and turtlenecks—apparently the road to Hell is paved with polyester.

Poor Devil: FUNKY

Save the Children (1973)

          Equally interesting as a compendium of vibrant musical performances and as a record of an ambitious black-pride event, the musical documentary Save the Children was filmed at the 1972 Operation PUSH exposition in Chicago, a massive convention featuring live music, religion, speeches, and a variety of exhibitors promoting black-owned businesses and causes. The event drew a spectacular array of African-American singers, including some of Motown’s biggest stars, and it was overseen by the fiery Rev. Jesse Jackson, several of whose moving sermons are featured in the documentary. Save the Children is quite long for a film of its type, running just over two hours, but the spectrum of music is amazing, and the beauty of the cause energizes every frame, even if some artists, like the Jackson 5, treat their appearances like generic concerts instead of contributions to a social movement.

          Opening and closing with Jesse Jackson, who also appears intermittently throughout, the documentary cycles through more than a dozen musical performances, some of which are shown in their entirety, some of which are truncated, and some of which are intercut with newsreel-type footage showing the realities of everyday African-American life. Many sequences explode with the pure joy of musicality, while others have serious undertones. The movie’s title stems not only from one of Jesse Jackson’s impassioned oratories, and also from the refrain of a poignant song that Marvin Gaye performs onstage.
          Most of the artists appearing in Save the Children are shown at the height of their powers, so Mavis Staples (fronting the Staple Singers) renders vocals so blistering it’s a wonder she makes it off the stage alive, while soul sirens including Roberta Flack and Gladys Knight lay down smooth grooves. Among those making more frivolous contributions are the Chi-Lites, the Jackson 5 (young Michael Jackson leads a medley including “ABC” and “I Want You Back”), the Main Ingredient, and the O’Jays. Cannonball Adderly represents the jazz world, Isaac Hayes provides his signature hot-buttered soul, and the Temptations deliver a thumping run through “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” Also present on the stellar roster is the great Bill Withers and a relatively obscure R&B thrush named Zulema, who energizes her number with industrial-strength vocals.

           Yet perhaps the most touching performance comes from Sammy Davis Jr. In remarks prior to his tune, Davis all but asks for permission to perform, as if he realizes that his Rat Pack association separates him from the back-to-basics ethos of the black-pride movement. Subsequently, after performing a hokey but impressive version of “I Gotta Be Me,” Davis weeps onstage, basking in the glory of a massive all-black audience. The years have tarnished Jesse Jackson’s reputation, and the ’70s black-pride movement has evolved and splintered, but it’s worth remembering the PUSH event as a model for blending music with social action.

Save the Children: GROOVY

One More Time (1970)

The easygoing entertainers comprising the Rat Pack appeared in lighthearted movies throughout the ’60s, whether separately or together—with the most notable Rat Pack flick being the original Ocean’s Eleven (1960), which features the whole gang. Among the lesser examples of Rat Pack cinema is a pair of frothy comedies costarring energetic showman Sammy Davis Jr. and suave British actor Peter Lawford. The first of these pictures, Salt and Pepper (1968), introduced fun-loving London nightclub operators Charles Salt (Sammy Davis Jr.) and Christopher Pepper (Lawford). Directed by future superstar Richard Donner, Salt and Pepper did well enough to warrant a sequel, One More Time, which probably should’ve been titled One Time Too Many. Whatever charm was present in the original film is absent from the sequel, which compensates for the absence of a real story by bludgeoning viewers with outlandish situations and unfunny jokes. Davis works hard to sell physical-comedy shtick and Lawford delivers urbane charm, but the whole enterprise is so drab, pointless, and silly that star power isn’t reason enough to watch. Plus, because One More Time was directed by comedy legend Jerry Lewis as a particularly fallow point in his creative life, the movie’s gags feel tired even before Lewis milks the gags with irritating embellishments and repetition. For instance, Salt dresses up in a Little Lord Fauntleroy costume and fills his nostrils with snuff—then goes through what seems like an eternity of facial contortions before sneezing so powerfully he knocks over everyone in a crowded ballroom. This is Lewis’ comedy at its worst, simultaneously infantile and overwrought. As for the movie’s narrative, One More Time is nominally about Pepper investigating the murder of his twin brother, but it also concerns diamond smuggling, mistaken identity, and other random nonsense. (How random? At one point, Salt enters a hidden chamber in a castle, only to discover a mad-scientist laboratory occupied by Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein, played in cameos by Hammer Films stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.) Lewis periodically stops the movie cold so Davis can perform musical numbers, and the director goes for cheap laughs with a fourth-wall-breaking gag at the end. In sum, One More Time isn’t worth your time—unless you’re a hardcore fan of the leading players.

One More Time: LAME

Gone With the West (1975)

          Shot in 1969 (under the title Man Without Mercy) but not released until 1975, this inexplicable Western starring James Caan, Sammy Davis Jr., and Stefanie Powers seems like it was edited as an arts-and-crafts project by the residents of a mental institution after they’d been dosed with LSD. The narrative is discombobulated, the style swings between broad slapstick and bleak violence for no discernible reason, and the score seems comprised of outtakes from a no-budget porno. The “story” involves ex-convict Jud McGraw (Caan) and wronged Native American Little Moon (Powers) teaming up for revenge against the corrupt residents of a small town in the Old West; people in the town killed Jud’s family and raped Little Moon. The movie juxtaposes cutesy vignettes of the heroes conjuring harebrained schemes in the desert, like live-action versions of Warner Bros. cartoon characters, with nonsensical scenes of debauched chaos in the town. Davis shows up periodically as a nattily dressed gunslinger, but if he has any legitimate connection to the storyline, it’s undetectable.
         A typical scene in this fever dream of a movie unfurls as follows: The townies gather in the local saloon to watch a ruthless bare-knuckle brawl, and then a female bystander literally chews the ass off one of the fighters, and then a corpse-laden horse wanders into the saloon, and then Caan and Powers use a catapult to launch boulders at the saloon, and then the townies form a posse to chase the outlaws, and then Caan and Powers somehow kill the entire posse without any injury to themselves. While all of this madness happens, the soundtrack hums with boogie-woogie piano played over a sleazy wakka-wakka disco beat. Oh, and is it worth mentioning that the film periodically cuts to a townie crooning an old spiritual number in a basso profundo that would make Lurch proud? Or that Powers tends to yell “Yahoo!” as her Indian war cry even though her character doesn’t speak English? Or that one sequence includes a rape that takes place in a cockfighting pit—while a cockfight is happening?
          In its incompetent and/or unhinged way, the movie seems to be aiming for satirical yuks until the bloody finale, which features hardy-har-har moments like Caan impaling a dude with a pitchfork and Powers using a kite to strafe the town with dynamite. During the melee, one townie gets killed in an explosion while trying to rescue her dog from a burning building, while another gets squashed when the side of a burning building falls and flattens him. Fun!
          The lunacy concludes when Caan and Powers leave the obliterated town, then look back at the camera. In perfect English, Powers says to her costar, “Hey, you killed everybody but the cameraman,” so Caan shoots his gun toward the camera, and the image tumbles as if the cameraman took a bullet. Super fun!
          Amazingly, Gone With the West gets even weirder if you check out the alternate cut that’s widely available on the market under the title Little Moon and Jud McGraw. That version cuts the original movie to ribbons and brackets the story with the lame framing device of a modern-day couple hearing the story of Little Moon and Jud from a dotty old squaw who scams unsuspecting travelers in the Southwest. So much worse than a run-of-the-mill bad movie, Gone with the West is like a postmodernist experiment designed to see how much incoherence 90 minutes can contain.

Gone With the West: FREAKY