Bloodline (1979)

          Audrey Hepburn was so selective in the final years of her screen career, often letting years lapse between projects, that it’s disappointing most of her latter-day output is rotten. She returned from a long hiatus to play Maid Marian in Richard Lester’s wonderfully melancholy adventure/romance Robin and Marian (1976), and it was downhill from there, beginning with this overstuffed potboiler adapted from one of Sidney Sheldon’s lowest-common-denominator novels. As always, Hepburn comes across well, her natural elegance and poise allowing her to rise above even the silliest scenes, but Bloodline does nothing to embellish her well-deserved reputation as one of the most magical performers ever to step in front of a movie camera.

          The story’s hackneyed inciting incident is the death of a pharmaceutical tycoon named Sam Roffe, which pits his only child, Elizabeth Roffe (Hepburn), against myriad cousins who want to sell the family’s massive international operation for some quick cash. Naturally, each of the cousins is some gradation of Eurotrash, plagued by adulterous entanglements, crushing debts, impending scandals, or all of the above. Just as naturally, Elizabeth is the only saint in the family, so not only does she block attempts to liquidate the company—the better to honor her beloved father’s wishes—but she becomes an active participant in the investigation of her father’s death. Oh, and during all of this, she falls in love with an executive at the family company, chain-smoking smoothie Rhys Williams (Ben Gazzara at his most intolerably smug). Yet that’s not quite enough material for Sheldon’s voracious narrative appetite, so Bloodline also follows myriad subplots relating to the cousins. Ivo (Omar Sharif) tries to keep his wife and three children separate from his mistress and his other three children. Alec (James Mason) digs himself into a deep hole with gambling losses, even as his beautiful younger wife, Vivian (Michelle Phillips), whores herself out to placate creditors. And so on. All the while, intrepid European cop Max (Gert Fröbe, the Artist Forever Known as Goldfinger) pieces clues together with the help of a supercomputer—as in, during many of his scenes, Max chats with the computer, which responds in a mechanized voice.

          Anyway, let’s see, what are we forgetting from this recitation of the film’s major elements? Oh, right—the subplot about the bald psycho killing women in snuff films.

          Yeah, Bloodline is that sort of picture, a semi-serious but simple-minded piece of escapism that periodically and ventures into the realm of exploitation cinema, resulting in dissonance. Picture a Ross Hunter movie suddenly morphing into a William Castle production, and you get the idea. To be clear, director Terence Young does his usual slick work within scenes, but the task of reconciling all of Bloodline’s incompatible elements would have defeated any filmmaker. Still, it’s impossible to completely dismiss Bloodline for a number of reasons, Hepburn’s presence being the most important of those. Furthermore, the cast is rich with talent, and Ennio Morricone’s score is characteristically adventurous, at one point going full-bore into a Giorgio Moroder-type disco groove. There’s always something colorful happening in Bloodline, good taste and logic be damned.

Bloodline: FUNKY

Cold Sweat (1970)

          British director Terence Young made a wide variety of action films and thrillers following his triumphant work on the first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962), as well as two follow-up 007 adventures. For instance, in the early ’70s, Young made three pulpy flicks in a row with badass leading man Charles Bronson—in addition to this tense crime thriller, the duo made the offbeat Western Red Sun (1971) and the violent mob movie The Valachi Papers (1972). Like the other Bronson-Young collaborations, Cold Sweat is entertaining if not especially distinctive. Bronson stars as Joe Martin, an American fisherman living in France with his European wife, Fabienne (Liv Ullmann). One day, a crook busts into Joe’s house claiming to know the fisherman from some shady episode in the past. Joe shocks Fabienne by calmly murdering the assailant. Then, the minute Joe and Fabienne discard of the intruder’s body, more unwanted visitors arrive, led by cruel American ex-soldier Captain Ross (James Mason). Turns out Joe and several other men participated in criminal enterprises while they were serving in the U.S. military, but Joe bailed during a robbery. Since Joe’s disappearance led to jail time for everyone else, Ross is back for revenge. Caught in the middle are Fabienne and her teenaged daughter.

          Based on a story by celebrated fantasy writer Richard Matheson, Cold Sweat actually feels a bit more like a narrative that Elmore Leonard might have contrived, which is a compliment—operating outside his usual supernatural safety zone, Matheson establishes a nasty situation fraught with unexpected complications. For instance, much of the picture involves a race to save a dying man (explaining any more would spoil the story), and this suspenseful element gives Young license to film a crazy car chase through a twisty mountain road. Whenever the movie’s action scenes are juiced by exciting music from composer Michel Magne, Cold Sweat becomes an enjoyable exercise in escapism. Bronson gives an uncharacteristically lively performance, playing a even-tempered survivor instead of his usual sociopathic executioner, and Ullmann’s dramatic chops give a strong emotional counterpoint. Not so impressive are Mason, ridiculously miscast as a refugee from the Deep South, and Bronson’s real-life bride, Jill Ireland, who gives a shrill turn as a hippie chick. Compounding the casting problems, Cold Sweat is easily 20 minutes too long. That said, buried amid the bloat and tonal missteps are plenty of adrenalized thrills.

Cold Sweat: FUNKY

The Valachi Papers (1972)

          Although the mob drama The Valachi Papers hit theaters a few months after the explosive release of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, the movie’s origins date back to the early ’60s. In 1963, real-life Mafia soldier Joseph Valachi gave testimony before a Senate committee confirming the existence of the Cosa Notra in America, and during subsequent interviews and testimony, Valachi revealed secrets about the composition and conduct of U.S. crime families. Author Peter Maas, the true-crime expert who later wrote the nonfiction book that became Serpico (1973), gained access to Valachi during the last years of the criminal’s life and wrote a book called The Valachi Papers, which producer Dino Di Laurentiis turned into this film.

          Directed by Bond-movie veteran Terence Young, the picture jams four decades of murderous activity into 125 brisk minutes. The story begins with an aging Valachi (Charles Bronson) in prison, afraid for his life after receiving the “kiss of death” from godfather Vito Genovese (Joseph Wiseman). Willing to trade information for protection, Valachi spills his guts to short-tempered federal agent Ryan (Gerald O’Loughlin), triggering flashbacks that depict Valachi’s indoctrination and integration into the Genovese organization.

          The Valachi Papers has an awkward vibe because some of the scenes were shot with synchronized sound in English on American soil, while others were shot silently on Italian soundstages; the Italian scenes, per the norm of that country’s film industry at the time, are dubbed into English, leading to strange moments of Italian actors mouthing English words in a way that doesn’t quite match the soundtrack. And that’s not the only problem.

          A subplot about Valachi’s relationship with his girlfriend and eventual wife (played, of course, by Bronson’s real-life spouse, Jill Ireland) adds virtually nothing to the movie. Furthermore, the film’s most memorable scene (in which a mobster is castrated for sleeping with another gangster’s woman) was fabricated by the filmmakers in order to spice up the otherwise fact-based narrative. However, the biggest shortcoming of The Valachi Papers is the way the leading character’s nature shifts from one scene to the next.

          Sometimes, Valachi is depicted as an honorable man stuck in a dishonorable world, and at other times, he’s simply a hoodlum who prefers thievery to working for a living. One presumes the idea was to make Valachi seem sympathetic, but since the real-life man was a thug-turned-traitor, nobility was probably not high among his attributes. That said, there’s probably enough pulpy spectacle to make The Valachi Papers interesting to crime-movie fans: In addition to scenes of outlandish violence, the picture features arresting depictions of Mafia rituals, notably Valachi’s somber initiation.

The Valachi Papers: FUNKY

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

Red Sun (1971)

Revealing the pedigree of Red Sun should separate those who couldn’t care less from those who can’t get their eyeballs onto this movie quickly enough. Terence Young, the director of Dr. No (1962) and From Russia With Love (1963), helms this zippy “East-meets-Western” that pits unlikely buddies Charles Bronson and Toshiro Mifune against cold-blooded bad guy Alain Delon, and Dr. No bikini girl Ursula Undress (ahem, Andress) is along for the ride as high-spirited eye candy. If that recitation doesn’t quicken your pulse, then move along to the next movie, but if it does, then praise the movie gods because, lo, ye have just been delivered a prime example of early-’70s manly-man action/adventure cinema. The convoluted plot begins when a train delivering the Japanese ambassador through the Old West is robbed by a group of bandits led by Delon. Overpowering sword-wielding bodyguards including Mifune, the thugs rip off an ancient samurai sword the ambassador was supposed to deliver to the U.S. president as a gift. During the robbery, however, Delon comes to a violent parting of the ways with his accomplice Bronson, so Bronson and Mifune join forces to kick their Gallic adversary’s derriere. The movie is loaded with action right out of the gate, and it delivers exactly what is promised, blending fistfights, gunfights, and swordplay in sequences like the stylish finale, wherein most of the major characters face off against the backdrop of a burning wheat field. At 112 minutes, Red Sun is longer than it needs to be, but the filmmakers devote a fair amount of that excessive screen time to giving Mifune’s character dimension (if a string of earnestly presented samurai-movie clichés, like the inevitable near miss with hara-kari, counts as dimension). Bronson and Mifune do their best to sell the story’s many contrivances, although their real focus is providing swaggering badass coolness, Delon is a solidly hissable villain, and Andress brings the requisite amount of sexy. Red Sun isn’t any kind of classic, but if you’re a fan of vintage action, this is the movie you never knew you wanted to see.

Red Sun: FUNKY