Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

          A dark meditation on the Sexual Revolution that caroms wildly between sensitive vignettes and overwrought climaxes, Looking for Mr. Goodbar divided audiences during its original release but has since attained cult-movie notoriety, especially because, as of this writing, it has yet to be released on DVD or Blu-Ray. (Falling into obscurity often boosts a once-popular film’s reputation.) Adapted from a best-selling novel by Judith Rossner and written and directed by uncompromising auteur Richard Brooks, the movie is a cautionary tale, but it’s not entirely clear what Brooks wants to caution viewers against. Sometimes, it seems as if he’s castigating his lead character, a young professional woman with a wild sex life, for the sin of seeking physical fulfillment. At other times, it seems as if the villain of the piece is the lead character’s recklessness. And thanks to a gruesome narrative turn during the story’s third act, an implication is communicated that homosexuality is a malignant societal force. Suffice to say, the sexual politics of the movie have not aged well.

        Yet certain elements of the picture probably seemed damned weird right from the get-go—consider the awkward device of grown-up star Diane Keaton playing her character during college scenes, or such surrealistic flourishes as the trippy visual effect that’s featured during the final shots of the movie. In fact, Brooks takes a gonzo storytelling approach from start to finish simply by pitching the intensity level of key scenes absurdly high. Were it not for the supple textures of Keaton’s performance, Looking for Mr. Goodbar would feel like a cartoon, albeit a nihilistic one.

          The story follows Teresa (Keaton), a good girl from a religious New York City-area family, as she matures professionally and sexually. Following an eye-opening dalliance with her college professor, Teresa takes a job as a teacher at a school for deaf children, so right from the beginning of this young woman’s journey, her intellectual and physical lives are intertwined. Teresa’s older sister, Katherine (Tuesday Weld), is a high-strung swinger who gets in too deep with a sexually adventurous man, but instead of being frightened by Katherine’s experiences, Teresa is titillated.
          Soon, Teresa enters the swinger world and gets involved with men including Tony (Richard Gere), a small-time crook who introduces Teresa to cocaine. (One memorably campy scene features Tony, jacked up on blow, doing push-ups in Teresa’s apartment while wearing nothing but a jockstrap.) Teresa also becomes involved with James (William Atherton), a social worker who represents a “safe” choice of romantic partner. However, she shuns his old-fashioned normalcy in favor of freakier delights. Eventually, Teresa’s sexual wanderlust lands her in bed with Gary (Tom Berenger), a sexually confused young man with a prison record, which instigates the movie’s infamous final scene.

          Looking for Mr. Goodbar is strange on many levels, but the most noteworthy cinematic disharmony is the rift between the story Brooks is telling and the one Keaton is telling. Brooks delivers every narrative assertion with an exclamation point, eschewing subtlety for hand-wringing histrionics. Meanwhile, Keaton does extraordinary work, imbuing her performance with naturalism and spontaneity. In essence, Brooks tries to make a Grand Statement while Keaton sketches a character study. This has the effect of making Keaton feel separate from the rest of the movie, especially when Gere over-acts his way through a ridiculous performance that Brooks should have restrained. And while supporting players including Atherton, Richard Kiley, and Priscilla Pointer all deliver competent work, the only actor who achieves the same level of nuance as Keaton is Weld, a perpetually underutilized daredevil of a performer who is capable of incandescence in the right context. (Her work in this movie earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.) Ultimately, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a uniquely disjointed movie—part melodrama, part tragedy, and part oh-so-’70s bummer phantasmagoria.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar: FREAKY

The Sugarland Express (1974)

          An early Steven Spielberg feature that doesn’t get discussed as much as his breakthrough TV movie, Duel (1971), or his effects-driven blockbusters Jaws (1975) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), this dark adventure arguably represents an instance of Spielberg tackling mature subject matter before he was ready to do so. Even though the film is highly watchable (and intermittently exciting), it’s easy to see how a director with a deeper worldview—and a different cast, for that matter—could have given the story even greater impact. The movie also has tonal problems, since it wobbles between lighthearted escapism and symbolism-drenched tragedy. Therefore, it’s a testament to Spielberg’s innate talent that the movie mostly overcomes its flaws. Especially during the finale, when Spielberg demonstrates his gifts for imaginative camerawork and meticulous pacing, The Sugarland Express packs a punch.

          Based on a real story about a Texas housewife who busted her husband out of jail and then led police on an epic chase in a reckless attempt to reclaim custody of her infant child, who was in foster care, the movie is a forerunner to Thelma & Louise (1991), the polarizing Oscar winner about two women on the run. Like Thelma & Louise, this movie asks questions about what rights women have in a male-dominated society while delivering an exciting yarn about a likeable antihero fleeing an army of cops. Goldie Hawn, taking a huge leap from the sexy-hippie roles that had dominated her career prior to The Sugarland Express, stars as Lou Jean Poplin, a poorly educated Texan married to a likeable petty criminal, Clovis Michael Poplin (William Atherton). Hawn was obviously eager to demonstrate dramatic range, and she’s fairly persuasive when called upon to embody Lou Jean’s turbulent emotions. Nonetheless, a more experienced actress—Ellen Burstyn, for instance—could have rendered a characterization with more dimension.

          Hawn’s costar, Atherton, is similarly underwhelming. Although a fine character actor with a particular affinity for playing uptight assholes—witness his great work a decade later in Ghostbusters (1984) and Die Hard (1988)—he’s neither a natural leading man nor the right choice for portraying a Southern outlaw. And as for poor Michael Sacks, who plays the highway patrolman whom the Poplins capture for a hostage during their long trek across enemy territory, he barely registers, though much of the fault lies with an underwritten role. Rounding out the principal cast is Ben Johnson, who lends gravitas as the conscientious top cop trying to end the chase without bloodshed—a precursor to the role Harvey Keitel played in Thelma & Louise.

          Working from a superficial but well-crafted script by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, Spielberg plays to his strengths, as when he illustrates the reactions of normal people who elevate the Poplins to folk-hero status. It’s also worth nothing that the technical execution of the film is beyond reproach. Master cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond uses the hot Texas sun to sculpt images from long shadows, resulting in one beautiful panorama after another, and The Sugarland Express was the project with which Spielberg and genius composer John Williams began their legendary collaboration.

The Sugarland Express: GROOVY

The Day of the Locust (1975)

          In terms of artistic ambition and physical scale, The Day of the Locust is easily one of the most impressive studio movies of the ’70s. Working with first-class collaborators including cinematographer Conrad Hall, director John Schlesinger did a remarkable job of re-imagining ’30s Hollywood as a dark phantasmagoria comprising endless variations of debauchery, desire, despair, disappointment, and, finally, death. As a collection of subtexts and surfaces, The Day of the Locust is beyond reproach.

          Alas, something bigger and deeper must be present in order to hold disparate elements together, and even though Schlesinger’s film was adapted from a book many regard as one of the great literary achievements of the 20th century, The Day of the Locust lacks a unifying force. Schlesinger and his team strive so desperately to make a Big Statement that the movie sinks into pretentious grandiosity, and Schlesinger’s choice to present every character as a grotesque makes The Day of the Locust little more than an exquisitely rendered freak show.

          Novelist Nathanael West based his 1939 book The Day of the Locust on his own experiences as a writer in ’30s Hollywood, capturing the has-beens, never-weres, and wanna-bes living on the fringes of the film industry. West’s book is deeply metaphorical, with much of its power woven into the fabric of wordplay. So, while screenwriter Waldo Salt’s adaptation of The Day of the Locust is admirable for striving to capture subtle components of West’s book, the effort was doomed from the start—some of the images West conjures are so arch that when presented literally onscreen, they seem overwrought. Plus, the basic story suffers from unrelenting gloominess.

          While employed at a movie studio and hoping to rise through the art-direction ranks, Tod Hackett (William Atherton) moves into an apartment complex and becomes fascinated with his sexy neighbor, actress Faye Greener (Karen Black). Loud, opportunistic, and teasing, Faye accepts Tod’s affections while denying his love, even though Tod befriends Faye’s drunken father, a clown-turned-traveling salesman named Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith). Meanwhile, Faye meets and seduces painfully shy accountant Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), who foolishly believes he can domesticate Faye. The storyline also involves a hard-partying dwarf, a borderline-sociopathic child actor, a lecherous studio executive, and loathsome movie extras who stage illegal cockfights.

          The narrative pushes these characters together and pulls them apart in wavelike rhythms that work on the page but not on the screen. And in the end, ironic circumstances cause Hollywood to erupt in a hellish riot.

          Considering that Schlesinger’s film career up to this point mostly comprised such tiny character studies as Darling (1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), it’s peculiar that he felt compelled to mount a production of such gigantic scale, and it’s a shame that his excellent work in constructing individual moments gets overwhelmed by the movie’s bloated weirdness. In fact, nearly every scene has flashes of brilliance, but The Day of the Locust wobbles awkwardly between moments that don’t completely work because they’re too blunt and ones that don’t completely work because they’re too subtle. Predictably, actors feel the brunt of this uneven storytelling. Atherton gets the worst of it, simply because he lacks a leading man’s charisma, and Black’s characterization is so extreme she’s unpleasant to watch. Meredith’s heart-rending vulnerability gets obscured behind the silly overacting that Schlesinger clearly encourages, and Sutherland’s performance is so deliberately bizarre that it borders on camp, even though he displays fierce emotional commitment.

The Day of the Locust: FREAKY

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