The Young Nurses (1973)

          The wheels came off the bus of New World Pictures’ sexy-nurse cycle with this fourth installment, which substitutes sleaze for story. And while it’s not as if the previous sexy-nurse movies were paragons of narrative ambition, the pictures mostly kept their exploitive elements in check by giving lip service to characterization and social issues. Throughout The Young Nurses, viewers are bludgeoned with confusing plot twists, nasty violence, and ogling topless shots. The only novel element is the presence of iconic B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who contributes one of his occasional acting performances; signature cigar and flyaway hair firmly in place, Fuller plays the main villain in a crime-conspiracy subplot. Alas, the actual direction of The Young Nurses was handled not by Fuller but by actor-turned-one-time-filmmaker Clint Kimbrough, who brought zero aptitude to his work behind the camera. Still, New World cranked out sexy-nurse pictures at the brisk pace of one per year, employing the same basic framework for each picture, so it’s not as if the job description for making The Young Nurses included a reasonable expectation of innovation.

          As per the norm, the picture tracks the exploits of three ladies who work at a hospital.  Statuesque brunette Joanne (Ashley Porter) bristles at restrictions placed upon RNs, getting into trouble by usurping doctors’ authority. Clothing-averse blonde Kitty (Jeane Manson) becomes involved with a spoiled blueblood after he’s injured while watching her sunbathe. And token African-American Michelle (Angela Elayne Gibbs) occupies a subplot that’s like a miniature blaxploitation flick, riding a motorcycle as she investigates drug pushers. The acting in the movie is almost uniformly terrible, the music score largely comprises grinding rhythm tracks, and the ick factor is high—at one point, crooks kidnap Michelle, drug her, and subject her to a weird orgy/gang-rape episode. The picture also approaches softcore status with the sheer number of sex scenes. And in an especially laughable moment, “empowered” Joanne takes an odd approach to soul searching by running along a beach, stripping off her clothes, and bouncing into the ocean.

The Young Nurses: LAME

1980 Week: The Big Red One

          Maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller returned from a decade-long hiatus with The Big Red One, a World War II melodrama based upon Fuller’s real-life experiences as a soldier in the U.S. Army’s First Infantry. The picture closely follows a single squad’s experiences as the squad moves from one deployment to the next, spanning D-Day to the end of the war. Episodic, heavy-handed, and meandering, the picture is deeply flawed but nonetheless interesting. Among other things, The Big Red One doesn’t feature any commanding officers—the highest-ranking major character is a sergeant—so it’s very much a grunt’s-eye-view of combat. The soldiers in this movie follow orders without a sense of the overall conflict’s larger political and/or strategic significance, which makes the brutality the soldiers witness (and commit) seem especially gruesome. Additionally, Fuller has a great eye for locations, putting viewers right there in the muck and rubble with physically and spiritually existed Yanks as they plow through seemingly endless waves of enemy combatants. Because Fuller was not a subtle filmmaker, however, the movie’s realistic textures clash with the clunky themes of the storyline.

          For instance, the main emotional hook involves the squad leader, Sgt. Possum (Lee Marvin), who was traumatized years earlier when he unknowingly killed a German soldier moments after the World War I armistice was signed. Forever cognizant of war’s costs, Possum has zero tolerance for cowardice—and zero tolerance for avoidable bloodshed. Fuller pays off this character arc in the least believable way possible, ending the picture on a false note. Similarly, a subplot about Pvt. Griff (Mark Hamill) turns trite as Griff overcomes his initial cowardice during a highly unlikely moment of heroism.

          Despite all of its narrative excesses and shortcomings, The Big Red One has a hell of a climax, because—as Fuller’s squad did in real life—the movie squad liberates a concentration camp. Demonstrating uncharacteristic restraint, Fuller evokes the soul-shattering horror soldiers must have felt upon encountering the depths of human evil. Photographed in rich color by Adam Greenberg and held together by Dana Kaproff’s efficient musical score, The Big Red One is a grand old mess of a personal statement, which might explain why the film has suffered so much at the hands of outside forces. Although Fuller’s original version ran nearly three hours, Warner Bros. cut the picture to 113 minutes for its initial release. Commercial failure and complaints from Fuller about tampering followed. Years later, well after Fuller’s death in 1997, a restored version running 162 minutes was released to much approval by critics.

          In any form, The Big Red One is noteworthy because it’s so clearly a passion piece, and because the best moments ring true. As for Fuller, he remained undaunted by the box-office stillbirth of The Big Red One, directing one more American feature—the relentless race-relations melodrama White Dog (1982)—before transitioning to the small European films that comprise the twilight era of his long and singular career.

The Big Red One: FUNKY

The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

The Klansman (1974)

          For those who enjoy charting the outer reaches of bad cinema, the title of The Klansman looms larger than that of most ’70s movies. Featuring an inexplicable combination of actors—Richard Burton, Lee Marvin, O.J. Simpson—and a lurid take on incendiary subject matter, the movie promises a feast of jaw-dropping wrongness. And sure enough, The Klansman is both uproariously terrible and consistently distasteful. It’s also, however, quite tedious.

          The story is appropriately florid. In a small southern town populated by poor Black folks and foaming-at-the-mouth racist whites (narrative restraint is not the watchword here), a young white woman (Linda Evans) is raped, leading revved-up locals to terrorize Black citizens including Garth (Simpson). This culminates with the murder of an innocent Black man while Garth, now a fugitive from the bloodthirsty mob, watches helplessly. The town’s sheriff, Track Bascomb (Marvin), improbably a voice of reason and tolerance, tries to protect Garth, who expresses his rage by picking off white people with an M-16.

          Meanwhile—there’s always a “meanwhile” in overcooked bad movies—local landowner Breck Stancil (Burton) invokes the ire of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter because he won’t let Klan soldiers search his property for Garth, who may be hiding with Stancil’s predominantly Black workforce. Soon, the various forces in the story converge in a violent climax. All of this should be trashy fun, but as lifelessly directed by 007 veteran Terence Young, the movie just kind of happens; it feels as if the production team showed up every day and shot the appropriate screenplay pages without any regard for what came before or what might follow.

          Reportedly, one reason for the movie’s flatness is that it’s the faint echo of a potentially more interesting project: Original writer-director Samuel Fuller conceived the piece, using William Bradford Hule’s novel as a foundation, as a full-on KKK story in which the hero would be a Klan member who learns tolerance. Instead, the studio asked for something less provocative, and Fuller walked. The project was further damned by unwise casting: Burton and Marvin were falling-down drunks at this point, and Simpson, whose character is supposed to come across as a justice-dispensing revolutionary, is, to be generous, not an actor.

          Compensating somewhat for the lackluster work by the leads, Character player Cameron Mitchell livens up the picture with his cartoonish villainy as a hateful deputy. Better still, the priceless David Huddleston gives the best performance in the movie (which is admittedly not saying a lot) as the town mayor, who moonlights as the “Exalted Cyclops” of the local Klan chapter. Yet even Huddleston can’t do anything with hopeless dialogue: “Don’t look at me like I’m the heavy. You want to know who the heavy is, I’ll tell you. It’s the system. And we’re all of us caught up in it.”

          Unbelievably, the dialogue gets even worse later. Lola Falana plays a young Black woman visiting her mother, one of Stancil’s employees, so the rednecks presume she’s sleeping with Stancil and therefore rape her to make a point. “They think I’m your brown comfort,” she says. “They wanted to foul your nest.” Yet perhaps the most (morbidly) fascinating aspect of this whole disastrous enterprise is Burton’s excruciating performance—he’s exactly this awful in plenty of other movies, but The Klansman features his spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at a Southern accent, which sounds different in almost every scene.

          Given how punishingly bad every frame of this movie is, it’s a wonder no one thought to chop it down to a 90-minute highlight reel, because if The Klansman moved faster, it would at least have the quality of a fever dream. Instead, it lumbers along for 112 bludgeoning minutes, forcing viewers to soak up every nuance of its terribleness. In this case, more is less.

The Klansman: FREAKY

The Deadly Trackers (1973)

This brutal Western began life as a project for writer-director Samuel Fuller, but the tough-guy auteur was reportedly canned after butting heads with leading man Richard Harris. Although Harris’ volatility produced his fascinating screen persona, the Irish-born actor’s out-of-control alcoholism and violent temper made him a monster of a collaborator during this era—and also more or less eliminated subtlety as a performance option. In other words, The Deadly Trackers is yet another picture in which Harris screams most of his role. The story concerns a sheriff (Harris) chasing the bank robbers who killed his family. Harris’ character is accompanied on his journey by a Mexican cop (Al Lettieri) who doesn’t share his bloodlust, and there’s quite a bit of chatter about Harris’ character being a pacifist. There’s also some attempt at exploring moral relativism by contrasting the righteous indignation of the Harris character with the rampant greed of the lead bank robber (Rod Taylor). What this thematic material was like in Fuller’s original vision is anybody’s guess, but in the final product, the pacifism element is merely an excuse for cheap slow-burn tension predicated on the question of how far Harris’ character will go for revenge. Since stories about gunfighters who don’t really want to draw their weapons are as old as the Western genre, there’s nothing here that viewers haven’t seen before, and as usually happens when directors are changed partway through production, the film lacks coherence and drive. So while there are a few intense confrontations and the picture has a handful of reliable B-movie supporting players (including the indestructible William Smith as an especially savage crook named “Schoolboy”), everything about this mean-spirited misfire is so trite that the picture disappears from the brain as soon as it’s over.

The Deadly Trackers: SQUARE