1980 Week: The Hollywood Knights

          The career of writer, producer, and director Floyd Mutrux took another strange turn with The Hollywood Knights, a shameless—and shapeless—imitation of American Graffiti (1973) with none of that picture’s deft characterization and sociopolitical weight. The movie also cops from Animal House (1978) by depicting anarchistic youth-run-wild vulgarity. Whereas Mutrux’s earlier directorial efforts explored such themes as ambition, disconnection, drugs, and music, The Hollywood Knights is an ensemble sex comedy without any recognizable sense of purpose. The movie has endured on cable and home video largely because some its players achieved fame elsewhere, notably Tony Danza (a costar of the sitcom Taxi at the time this film was made) and Michelle Pfeiffer (who found her breakout role three years later in Brian De Palma’s gonzo drug epic Scarface). Yet it says a lot about The Hollywood Knights that the film’s real star is obnoxious standup-comedian-turned-character-actor Robert Wuhl, who made his big-screen debut here. As goes Wuhl’s charmless performance, so goes the rest of the picture.

          Set in 1960s Beverly Hills, the movie tracks the adventures of the Hollywood Knights, a white gang devoted to antagonizing cops, getting laid, and making mischief. The Knights’ principal prankster, Newbomb Turk (Wuhl), takes endless pleasure in doing things like breaking wind to the tune of popular songs or depositing flaming bags of excrement at people’s front doors. You get the idea. Over the course of one chaotic evening, local parents and police officers try to stop the Knights’ last hurrah, since the burger joint that serves as the gang’s HQ is closing and the gang marks the occasion with epic buffoonery. The “highlight” is Turk grabbing the microphone at a school assembly so he can perform “Volare” using flatulence for percussion. The movie also has anemic romantic subplots. In tiresome scenes that exist almost completely separate from the rest of the movie, macho Knight Duke (Danza) struggles to accept that his pretty carhop girlfriend, Suzie Q (Pfeiffer), has dreams of an acting career and might outgrow him. Elsewhere, Newbomb improbably talks Sally (future sitcom star Fran Drescher) into a tryst even though she spends the whole movie whining about how repulsive she finds his antics.

          All of this stuff is brisk and colorful, but none of it is particularly funny. Quite to the contrary, most of the gags sputter or thud. That said, The Hollywood Knights has a lush visual style that it doesn’t deserve, because top-shelf cinematographer William A. Fraker, the six-time Oscar nominee who shot Hollywood classics including Rosemary’s Baby (1968), lensed all five features that Mutrux directed.

The Hollywood Knights: FUNKY

1980 Week: Bronco Billy

          As the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, Clint Eastwood was ready to expand his range as an actor and as a director, often simultaneously. One of his most admirable experiments was this character study of a modern-day cowboy leading a motley group of participants in a Wild West revival show. Although the picture is so hopelessly old-fashioned that it feels like it could have been made in the ’40s with Joel McCrea playing the lead, Eastwood puts the picture over fairly well. In terms of his leading performance, Eastwood mostly suppresses his familiar screen persona, playing an idealistic dreamer instead of a grim avenger. Yet some of Eastwood’s bad directorial habits trip him up; the pacing is sluggish, the reliance on familiar character actors gives certain scenes a mechanical quality, and there’s a distinctive lack of effervescence, which is exactly the quality the movie needs most badly. Still, the script by Dennis Hackin is a charming throwback, the themes embodied by the central character are meaningful, and the inherent parallels between Bronco Billy and the man who portrays him add resonance.

          Set in the American West, the picture introduces viewers to Bronco Billy’s Wild West Show, an enthusiastic but tacky operation featuring clowns, Indians, and—as the main attraction—Bronco Billy’s expert displays of horsemanship, knife-throwing, and sharpshooting. Billy (Eastwood) is also the manager of the traveling show, spewing a steady stream of can-do aphorisms while demanding that his people give their all for the “little pardners” who come out to see them perform. Never mind that the show is perpetually in the red, and that Billy regularly provides free shows to orphanages. In a plot twist straight out of an old Preston Sturges movie, Billy encounters Antoinette (Sondra Locke), a shrewish heiress dumped in the middle of nowhere by her business manager-turned-husband, John (Geoffrey Lewis), who steals all her money. Billy charms Antoinette into joining his show as an assistant participating in dangerous stunts, ostensibly in exchange for transit back to civilization. Opposites-attract sparks of the It Happened One Night mode ensue.

          The romantic aspects of Bronco Billy don’t quite work, perhaps because Eastwood and Locke had done so many movies together by this point. (Plus, quite frankly, Locke lacks the spunk of, say, a Barbara Stanwyck.) The plotting gets turgid after a while, stretching the movie to 116 minutes when a frothy 90-minute span would have suited the material better. What saves Bronco Billy from mediocrity, besides the consummate professionalism of Eastwood’s presentation, is the late-movie reveal about the true nature of Billy and his people. In this case, pulling back the curtain on an illusion adds magic, because the revelations transform Bronco Billy into a celebration of reinvention. Could the picture have done without a few scenes, such as the bit of Eastwood warbling a tune called “Barroom Buddies” as he drives? Sure. But a few indulgences are small prices to pay for watching an iconic performer stretch with largely meritorious results.

Bronco Billy: GROOVY

1980 Week: No Nukes

          In the wake of the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, a gaggle of politically active rock stars formed Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), then presented several massive concerts in the New York City area under the “No Nukes” banner. Beyond the core group, which includes Jackson Browne, John Hall, Graham Nash, and Bonnie Raitt—all of whom have continued to perform anti-nuclear-energy concerts well into the 2010s—the original wave of “No Nukes” concerts gathered luminaries including the Doobie Brothers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and James Taylor. Highlights from various 1979 concerts were released in 1980 as a concert movie and as a live album, though the roster of artists and songs varies wildly between the film and the LP. Speaking only about the film, No Nukes is more effective as a musical experience than it is as a political experience, but that’s the cost of leveraging celebrity participation to raise awareness of social issues.

          In fact, one of the sharpest moments in No Nukes occurs during a brisk opening montage of fans heading into Madison Square Garden for one of the concerts, because someone cynically observes that most people are there for the tunes instead of the cause. It speaks well of the filmmakers and the MUSE team in general that this clip was included, because it reflects the artists’ awareness that building a grassroots movement requires overcoming deeply entrenched apathy. Indeed, it’s perhaps too easy to watch No Nukes today and gloss over the reason the musicians gathered. Even though the movie features impassioned remarks from famed crusader Ralph Nader and a short film-within-a-film about the danger of nuclear energy that was shown to audiences at the Madison Square Garden shows, and even though deeply committed musicians Hall and Nash perform earnest tunes about “atomic poison” and the like, purely musical passages command the viewer’s attention.

          Much of the hype around the time of No Nukes’ release concerned Springsteen’s mini-set of three songs, since No Nukes was the first time the E Street Band’s already-legendary live act was shown in movie theaters. The Boss kills it with “Thunder Road” and one of the first live performances of “The River.” By comparison, the Doobie Brothers’ proficient readings of “Takin’ It to the Streets” and “What a Fool Believes” seem ordinary, and even Browne’s fierce version of “Running on Empty” fails to match the fire of Springsteen’s performance. That said, any concert movie that contains Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonizing on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” Raitt ripping through her version of Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” and Taylor channeling his inner bluesman on “Your Smiling Face” is doing something right. One could quibble with the structure of the picture, since the shift from the shadowy intimacy of the Madison Square Garden shows to the sunlit sprawl of a Battery Park concert that drew 200,000 attendees is abrupt. What’s beyond reproach, however, is the generosity of the musicians, the importance of the cause, and the wonder of watching people unite beneath the banner of making the world a safer place.

No Nukes: GROOVY

1980 Week: The Ninth Configuration

          Scary, strange, surreal, and yet also very funny at times, the offbeat drama/thriller The Ninth Configuration marked the directorial debut of William Peter Blatty, the Oscar-winning novelist and screenwriter of The Exorcist (1973). Blending themes of madness and militarism with a narrative setup suitable for some old-fashioned haunted-house shocker, Blatty adapted the movie from his 1978 novel of the same name, which was in turn extrapolated from one of his earlier books, the 1966 novel Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane! Employing an exceptional group of actors, some of whom reconvened for Blatty’s only other directorial endeavor—the underrated sequel The Exorcist III (1990)—The Ninth Configuration uses humor and terror to weave a bizarre tapestry of existentialism, spirituality, and violence. Superficially, it’s about psychiatry, space travel, and Vietnam, and there’s even room for a bar brawl. The Ninth Configuration doesn’t always work, because some scenes are confusing, and because parsing what the whole thing means once it’s over is challenging. Nonetheless, this is a unique piece of work from a wildly creative individual unafraid to tackle the heaviest of subject matter.

          Set in the Pacific Northeast, the picture takes place in a castle that the U.S. government has repurposed as an asylum. (If you’re already have trouble buying that outlandish notion, this movie is not for you.) One stormy night, a fierce-looking Marine officer named Colonel Kane (Stacy Keach) arrives to join the psychiatric staff at the facility. He encounters a spectrum of bizarre patients. Major Namimak (Moses Gunn) dresses like Superman and believes he has extraordinary powers. Lieutenant Reno (Jason Miller) fancies himself a theater director as he oversees rehearsals for a production of Hamlet featuring dogs instead of humans. The sensitive Captain Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) trained to be an astronaut until he had a nervous breakdown just before takeoff for his moon shot. And so on.

          In its wildest scenes, The Ninth Configuration features the tightly wound Kane walking through the corridors of the castle with absurd behavior happening all around him, suggesting the idea of an emotionally vulnerable individual grasping for pieces of sanity in a world gone mad. The man responsible for all of the chaos is Colonel Fell (Ed Flanders), the facility’s chief administrator, who believes letting patients act out fantasies helps the healing process. Another nuance? Fell and Kane are tasked with determining which patients are genuinely ill and which are faking to avoid military service. Yet the most explosive X factor in this fraught environment is Kane, whose frightening capacity for rage has surprising connections to an ugly battlefield incident in the past.

          Working with the great British cinematographer Gerry Fisher, whose images mesh intimacy with grandiosity in clever ways, Blatty generates a one-of-a-kind feel. Since anything can happen, owing to the lunatics-running-the-asylum milieu, The Ninth Configuration is consistently surprising even though it’s rarely believable—or, to be more precise, even though it’s rarely believable in terms of logic. On an emotional level, the movie connects big-time, especially because the acting is so robust. Keach’s signature intensity has terrifying power. Wilson reveals heartbreaking vulnerability. Flanders, Gunn, Miller, Neville Brand, Robert Loggia, Joe Spinell, and others populate the hospital with wounded souls distinguished by amusing eccentricities and/or poignant psychological wounds. Does it all spin out of control toward the end? Somewhat. But does Blatty create dozens of unique moments that radiate beauty and pain and wonderment along the way? Absolutely.

          FYI, the picture was released into theaters twice, once as The Ninth Configuration and once as Twinkle, Twinkle Killer Kane. Although it flopped both times, subsequent exhibition on home video and television has earned the picture well-deserved status as a minor cult classic.

The Ninth Configuration: GROOVY

1980 Week: The Jazz Singer

          A mega-hyped remake of the famous 1927 Al Jolson movie, The Jazz Singer was doomed to derision before it even opened, in part because because reviewers love to diss singers who moonlight as actors. It didn’t help that the film’s producers cast the decidedly Gentile Laurence Olivier in the role of an Orthodox Jewish patriarch, despite mixed opinions about Olivier’s performance as a Jewish Nazi hunter in The Boys from Brazil (1978); the actor received an Oscar nomination for that picture but also received a nod from the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards. Viewed with fresh eyes, The Jazz Singer is a slickly produced mediocrity built around a nonperformance by a nonactor, but the pulpy story chugs along in a kitschy sort of way, and the tunes are memorable. In fact, three of Diamond’s biggest hits (“America,” “Hello Again,” “Love on the Rocks”) emerged from the film’s soundtrack, which enjoyed much more success than the film itself.

          Modernizing the original movie’s story while still remaining so deeply rooted in traditions that the narrative feels hokey, The Jazz Singer follows Yussel Rabinovitch (Diamond), a charismatic young cantor at a New York City synagogue. Although outwardly following in the footsteps of his father, Cantor Rabinovitch (Olivier), Yussel longs to explore the secular side of music. After one too many arguments with his rigid father, Yussel leaves New York—and his wife, Rivka (Catlin Adams)—to become a wandering troubadour. Lots of brooding ensues, as does a romance between Jess Robin (the new name that Yussel adopts) and Los Angeles shiksa Molly Bell (Lucie Arnaz). Wanderlust eventually drives a wedge between Jess and Molly, so he hits the road once more, leading to the odd spectacle of a bearded Diamond wearing a cowboy hat and singing “You Are My Sunshine” in a redneck bar. Can Jess reconcile his new life with his old identity as Yussel? Can he repair the damage to his relationship with his father? Can he reunite with Molly? The answers to these questions are never in doubt, since the point of the 1980 Jazz Singer is to transpose Diamond’s crowd-pleasing persona from the radio to the screen.

          In that regard, the movie is indeed the failure its grim initial reception might suggest; Diamond is false and stilted in nearly every scene, except when he’s onstage, and Olivier is hilariously miscast. The picture also has more than a few tonal catastrophes. Inexplicably, Diamond agreed to participate in a rock-era redux of the original movie’s blackface element. Yes, Diamond wearing an Afro and heavy makeup to pass as an African-American dude while croaking a rock song in a black nightclub is as horrific a spectacle as you can imagine. Similarly, when the filmmakers play “Hello Again” on the soundtrack during a reunion scene, the effect is so on-the-nose literal as to be comical. However, a sense of proportion is required when trying to assess The Jazz Singer. Compared to a pair of truly disastrous movie musicals released the same year—here’s looking at you, Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu—Diamond’s movie is positively respectable. By any other measure, of course, The Jazz Singer doesn’t fare quite as well.

The Jazz Singer: FUNKY

1980 Week: Little Darlings

          Despite being utterly conventional in terms of storytelling and technical execution, Little Darlings is unusual because it presents a sensationalistic premise without lapsing into vulgarity. Yet the film cannot be described as sophisticated, because the characterizations are one-dimensional and the picture often gets mired in nonsense along the lines of uninspired physical comedy. So perhaps the best way to describe Little Darlings is to say that it’s not nearly as offensive as it could have been, given the confluence of juvenile actors and salacious subject matter. Set at a typical American summer camp for girls, the film revolves around the tense relationship between Angel (Kristy McNichol), the chain-smoking tomboy daughter of a promiscuous single mother, and Ferris (Tatum O’Neal), the naïve and pretentious daughter of a wealthy couple undergoing a separation as a prelude to divorce. The instant the young ladies meet each other on the bus headed for camp, they hate each other. Upon their arrival in the woods, both girls inadvertently reveal to bitchy beauty Cinder (Krista Errickson) that they’re virgins, so Cinder takes bets on whether Angel or Ferris will be the first to have sex over the course of the summer.

          Angel happens upon Randy (Matt Dillon), a tough kid attending a nearby boy’s camp, while Ferris sets her sights on Gary (Armand Assante), a grown-up counselor at the girls’ camp. The picture unfolds in a lighthearted manner, with brightly lit scenes set to a thumping pop soundtrack featuring tunes by Blondie and the Cars (among other Top 40 acts of the era) until the climactic scene when one of the girls consummates her flirtation with the man she’s chosen. That sequence is handled with restraint and even a kind of unvarnished reverence, thereby elevating the rest of the otherwise pedestrian movie by association. McNichol, who gained fame on the ’70s TV series Family, and O’Neal, who earned an Oscar for her screen debut in Paper Moon (1973), work on different levels—McNichols’ performance is raw and vulnerable, whereas O’Neal plays a amiable caricature. Assante mostly seems as if he’s struggling to avoid looking embarrassed, and Dillon exhibits the brooding quality that made him a star just a few years later, complementing the fine work he does in another 1980 release, My Bodyguard.

Little Darlings: FUNKY

1980 Week: Raging Bull

          Alongside Nashville (1975), Martin Scorsese’s almost universally revered character study Raging Bull is one of the few “great” American movies that I simply don’t get. To be clear, I have no difficulty appreciating the film’s artistry, craftsmanship, intelligence, and passion—Scorsese obviously bled his soul into the very grain of this picture, letting his visual imagination run wild even as he wrestled with personal demons through the prism of professional boxer Jake LaMotta’s rise and fall. Intellectually, I understand that the movie is a significant accomplishment. Emotionally, the movie leaves me so cold that I get bored every time I try to watch the thing. Perhaps because Scorsese and screenwriters Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader elected not to illustrate the central character’s formative years, I can’t connect to the movie’s version of LaMotta. He comes across like an ignorant thug who surrounds himself with awful people, which means his adventures are unpleasant to watch and not, to my eyes, edifying.

          Robert De Niro’s leading performance is supremely committed, so the pain that LaMotta feels as he stumbles his way through life is palpable. Alas, because the pain is mostly self-inflicted, for reasons that utterly escape me, generating empathy is challenging. Compounded with the excruciating brutality of the boxing scenes and the numbing repetition of coarse language, the opacity of the leading character makes me feel like I’m the one receiving constant jabs and left hooks while the movie unfolds, rather than the onscreen pugilists. The funny thing is that I should love Raging Bull because artistically, chronologically, and thematically, it’s the apex of the grungy loser movies that flowered during the ’70s. Yet there’s a world of difference between the humanity of films along the lines of Fat City (1972), a boxing picture I enjoy much more, and the relentless ugliness of Raging Bull. I take it on faith that Scorsese knows whereof he speaks when depicting the anguished lives of Italian-Americans stuck in the quagmires of male identity and religious guilt, and I freely acknowledge that his various movies about New York underworld types speak to a lived experience far outside my own frame of reference.

          Yet at the same time, I look at the way I’ve made connections with movies about other cultures that are foreign to me, so I feel comfortable saying that the problem with some vintage Scorsese—and specifically with Raging Bull—runs deeper. I believe the right word is fetishism.

          It often seems as if Scorsese simply can’t tear his eyes away from scenes of thick-headed men destroying themselves, mistreating women, and starting pointless battles with enemies and friends alike. There’s more than a little bit of a pain-freak voyeur in Martin Scorsese. In the best of times, this tendency allows him to reveal truths in places other filmmakers find too frightening to explore. And, presumably, that’s what his advocates would say he does throughout Raging Bull. In any event, the unassailable elements of the movie include Michael Chapman’s muscular black-and-white photography, which is energized by Scorsese’s unexpected shifts in frame rates and his wizardly camera moves, as well as Thelma Schoonmaker’s meticulous editing. Viewed strictly from the perspective of how the filmmakers exploit and manipulate the very medium of film, Raging Bull is extraordinary. So let’s leave it at that.

Raging Bull: GROOVY

The Black Moses of Soul (1973)

          Setting aside the question of whether the world truly needed a full-length concert movie from Isaac Hayes, The Black Moses of Soul makes for pleasant viewing. The movie is all surface, especially because Hayes never takes off his signature dark glasses, and it’s peculiar that the movie doesn’t feature his biggest hit, the Oscar-winning “Theme from Shaft,” even though songs that Hayes recorded after “Theme from Shaft” are included. As for the movie’s visual approach, minimalism is the order of the day, because director Chuck Johnson employs limited camera angles and, very occasionally, trippy solarized superimpositions. For most of the movie’s running time, the screen is occupied solely by Hayes, either in close-up accentuating his bald head and thick beard or in wider shots showcasing his unique costume of a vest made from gold chains. Johnson periodically cuts to Hayes’ funky band or to his trio of female backup singers. But in keeping with the religiosity of the film’s title, the focus is on Hayes’ preacher-like stage persona. Whether he’s maneuvering through a song with his arrestingly deep voice or sliding his way through an extended spoken-word bit, Hayes plays the role of a soul-music messiah bringing messages of love (both carnal and spiritual) to his adoring flock.

          Many of the tunes are pop songs that Hayes famously repurposed on his best-selling albums as sexualized slow jams. “The Look of Love” becomes an epic meditation on romantic connection, and “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” transforms into a sort of R&B concerto, with horns and Hayes’ crackling organ sounds mixing into something potent and sensual and wild. Hayes and his supporting players are at their best during instrumental passages, because even though Hayes’ singing has a certain charisma, he’s superlative as an arranger, bandleader, and player, finding grooves within grooves and sounds within sounds. He’s also, to be frank, a somewhat comical figure whenever he buys into his own mythology. Routines at the beginning and end of the movie involving Hayes wearing a cape borrow shamelessly from James Brown’s stage shtick, and Hayes loses himself in the wilds of hep-cat verbiage during the long rap session about infidelity that precedes “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” Try to avoid chuckling as Hayes describes himself “sweating profuciously.”

The Black Moses of Soul: FUNKY

Freedom Road (1979)

          First off, the most interesting thing about this epic-length historical telefilm is the man playing the leading role. Boxing legend Muhammad Ali didn’t act often, and he usually played himself, so Freedom Road represents his only proper dramatic performance. To get the bad news out of the way, he’s not impressive, delivering lines in a listless, mush-mouthed style that makes him seem drunk or tired in most scenes. Ali completely fails to channel his signature physical grace and verbal dexterity into a vivid performance, so even though he has a few sincere moments when the context of intense scenes creates meaning, Ali demonstrates the wisdom of his choice to step away from acting for 20 years following this project. Happily, there’s good news. The novelty of seeing Ali act remains strong even as Freedom Road sprawls across four hours; the storyline about freed slaves trying to enter American political life in the post-Civil War South is interesting; and the folks surrounding Ali, both in front of and behind the camera, deliver smoothly professional work. Therefore, while there’s something inherently false about Freedom Road—which is based upon a novel rather than historical facts—worthy themes prevail.

          Ali plays Gideon Jackson, a slave who left his North Carolina plantation to fight for the Union Army. Emancipation happens while Jackson is still in service, so after the war, he returns home to his wife and children, hopeful that life after slavery will be better. It is, barely. Later, when politicians decree that black citizens should have roles in state government, Jackson gets tapped for a position. He bonds with a new friend, educated Northern black politician Francis Cardoza (Ron O’Neal), and he clashes with a new enemy, dogged racist Stephen Holms (Edward Herrmann), who sizes up Jackson as a potentially formidable enemy and eventually rallies the KKK to combat Jackson’s nascent political movement. Over the course of the eventful story, Jackson forms an unlikely friendship with a white farmer, Abner Lait (Kris Kristofferson), and navigates a fraught relationship with President Ulysses S. Grant (John McLiam) upon becoming a U.S. Senator. Informing Jackson’s journey is his achievement of literacy and his gradual shift from innate cunning to political sophistication.

          Given that Freedom Road began its life as a novel by Howard Fast, who also wrote the book that became Spartacus (1960), it’s no surprise that the story evolves into a full-blown war, with freed slaves under siege by ruthless Southerners. Yet even though Freedom Road would have infinitely more meaning if the story had really happened, the film’s progressive politics feel genuine and heartfelt, and the drama works more often than it doesn’t. Helping the story along is narration spoken by the great Ossie Davis. Still, there are many reasons why Freedom Road failed to make a big splash when it was originally broadcast. Ali disappoints, the story is fake history, and the archetypal rebel-hero structure feels convenient and familiar. Within those diminished parameters, Freedom Road has many exciting, insightful, and thought-provoking moments.

Freedom Road: FUNKY

Effi Briest (1974)

          Watching this black-and-white period drama from iconoclastic German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, I found myself getting pushed out of the story almost from the very first scenes. Since he usually shot his films in vibrant color, the choice to film Effi Briest in artsy monochromatic textures removed one of the tools Fassbinder customarily employed to create vivid realism. And while Fassbinder wasn’t averse to stylized compositions, many shots in Effi Briest put deliberate obstacles between the viewer and the subject, whether that means hiding actors behind gauzy curtains or peering at actors through mirrors and windows. Then there’s the peculiar rhythm of the picture’s storytelling. Quite frequently, Fassbinder halts scenes mid-conversation in order to fade to the next scene, interject a title card, or weave in narration. Seeing as how Effi Briest was adapted from a celebrated 19th-century German novel, Fassbinder may have felt obliged to include as much of the source material as possible. Furthermore, perhaps he wanted the style of Effi Briest to reflect a key tenet the original novel—the way social rules suppress emotion. Whatever his reasons, Fassbinder made a cold movie. It’s a respectable piece of work, no question, but it’s more of an intellectual exercise than a visceral experience.

          Based on Theodore Fontane’s 1894 novel, the picture tracks the life of an affluent young woman named Effi Briest (Hanna Schygulla) as she moves from her family’s home to her husband’s home. In clinical vignettes at the beginning of the picture, we learn about Effi’s various contradictions; for instance, she has little use for material things but demands only the best once she finds something she actually wants. Though only 17, the beautiful Effi accepts a marriage proposal from Baron Instetten (Wolfgang Schenck). Life with the Baron renders Effi into something of an art object, because he values propriety more than intimacy. So when Effi meets the charming Major Crampas (Ulli Lommel), she begins a friendship that leads inevitably to an affair. For the Baron, the shakeup in his marriage is a social inconvenience with minimal lasting repercussions, but for Effi, cuckolding her husband proves immeasurably damaging. Informing the storyline is the theme of repression causing misery among the ruling class. Also present is a component of modern-day feminism. Alas, the inherent irony of Effi Briest—a repressed film about repression—ensures that some viewers will have difficulty finding a way into the piece. Even appraising the acting is tricky. Fassbinder clearly asked his performers to underplay every moment, so the attractive visuals created by cinematographers Jürgen Jürges and Dietrick Lohmann sometimes carry more feeling than the portrayals.

Effi Briest: FUNKY

Up in the Cellar (1970)

          Perverse, saucy, and sly, Up in the Cellar tells the satirical story of a college student who takes revenge on his university’s callous president by seducing the women in the president’s life as a means of derailing the administrator’s aspirations to political office. The storyline integrates myriad counterculture-era signifiers, including campus unrest, exhibitionism, experimental filmmaking, free love, the generation gap, political duplicity, underground revolutionaries, and more. So even though the film’s production company, B-movie supplier American International Pictures, apparently envisioned Up in the Cellar as a quasi-sequel to the company’s sexed-up 1968 flick Three in the Attic, the picture works well as a stand-alone entertainment, at least for those with a dark and dry sense of humor. For while some scenes in Up in the Cellar are outrageous, screenwriter-director Theodore J. Flicker, who scored with The President’s Analyst (1967) and later co-created the sitcom Barney Miller (1975–1982), never achieves out-and-out hilarity. Instead, Up in the Cellar takes the piss out of mainstream institutions while presenting a suicidal poet as an antihero.

          Colin Slade (Wes Stern) attends college on a poetry scholarship until a computer program determines that his rhymes fall below the university’s precise mathematical standards. Colin seeks redress with Maurice Camber (Larry Hagman), the cowboy-hat wearing college president, but Maurice proves unsympathetic. Then Colin returns home to the condemned building where he squats and watches in horror as the structure is demolished. Blaming all his difficulties on Maurice, Colin is open to suggestion when approached by a representative of Ultimate Revolution, a student group planning insurrection. Together with the UR guys, Colin makes a grand plan to kill himself by jumping from a radio tower while Maurice dedicates the tower during an opening ceremony. Yet things don’t go as planned—Maurice, sensing a photo opportunity, rescues Colin. That’s why Colin resolves to ruin Maurice’s life by seducing the administrator’s wife, daughter, and mistress. Each woman requires a different approach, so Colin adopts three new personas.

          Among the many jokes embedded into this storyline is the fact that Colin is an average-looking schnook, so the idea that he drives three women wild with desire is part male wish-fulfillment and part skewering of Sexual Revolution iconography. Somehow, Flicker makes Colin seem confused and desperate instead of horny and sleazy, so Colin’s relationship with Maurice’s daughter, Harlene (Judy Pace), is tender—even though he draws the shy girl out of her shell by persuading her to appear in a stag reel. In fact, everything in the picture follows a consistent sort of twisted logic. The performances are mostly just adequate, with, for instance, Joan Collins adding little to the role of Maurice’s astrology-addicted wife. Yet the way Stern seems perplexed by everything that’s happening says something about young people trying to comprehend the true ramifications of power at the very moment they gain influence. Hagman is a hoot, presaging his Dallas days by portraying a giddily self-serving monster.

Up in the Cellar: GROOVY

Beyond Death’s Door (1979)

          Enjoyably dumb fictional entertainment from Sunn Classic Pictures, the company that made a mint off pseudoscience documentaries in the ’70s, Beyond Death’s Door is a loosely plotted compendium of episodes featuring people experiencing visions of the afterlife. The question of what follows mortal existence was a topic of considerable interest around the time this picture was made, seeing as how Sunn released a similarly themed documentary, Beyond and Back, the previous year, and seeing as how the big-budget theatrical feature Audrey Rose explored the same narrative terrain a year before that. Beyond Death’s Door is unquestionably the least of these projects, in terms of ambition and depth and quality, so even most viewers who are curious about the subject matter will lose interest after realizing how goofy the performances and storytelling are in Beyond Death’s Door. For those who dig their paranormal silliness served with a side of Me Decade kitsch, however, there’s a lot of fun stuff here. Amid the usual philosophizing and theorizing about cryptic clues, as per the Sunn Classic formula, some insipid scenes are played so straight as to generate unintentional comedy.

          The film’s de facto protagonist, Dr. Peter Kenderly (Tom Hallick), provides our way into the story, though he’s ultimately just a bystander for most of what happens. During the opening sequence, he watches a stabbing victim suffer clinical death on an operating table, revive long enough to claim she’s just visited Heaven, then die. Shaken, Peter begins an investigation into theories about the afterlife, though the film often leaves him behind to follow other people who slip free of their mortal shells. A bitchy woman injured in a ski accident visits hell—which looks like the sauna of a fetish club—and a pimp played by future Hill Street Blues actor Taurean Blacque has an out-of-body experience while being treated for a gunshot wound. “Hey,” his wraithlike soul yells to the doctors and nurses in the operating room, “I’m up here lookin’ down at all you cats!” In the picture’s most amusing scene, a construction worker who falls from a building becomes a phantom and wanders into a nearby disco. (Sadly, the filmmakers were too cheap or unimaginative to license the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” for this moment.) The ultimate resolution of Peter’s story is, of course, inconsequential and perfunctory, so this one’s all about cheesy special effects and the eerie kick of probing existential enigmas.

Beyond Death’s Door: FUNKY

What? (1972)

          A snarkier person than I could repurpose the title of this film as the entire content of the review, since watching this obscure Roman Polanski comedy is a befuddling experience. First comes the matter of the film’s obscurity. Any time I mention this picture to a fellow cinefile, they’re surprised not only that Polanski made a feature between Macbeth (1971) and Chinatown (1974), but that the feature largely disappeared until a belated video release in the Blu-Ray era. Next comes the matter of the movie itself. Although Polanski had made comedies previously, including The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), this isn’t some brisk cavalcade of jokes. Instead, What? is an epic-length surrealistic sex farce that was rated X during its first American release. (Nothing pornographic happens, but every scene is infused with carnality and/or nudity.) And finally there’s the matter of what this film says about Polanski’s muse.
          Much ink has been spilled theorizing that the gore and violence of Polanski’s Macbeth was an indirect response to the murder of the director’s pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by members of the Manson family. Similarly, one could draw troubling connections between What?, during which men take sexual liberties with an innocent young woman, and Polanski’s subsequent problems stemming from a sexual encounter with an underage girl. If Macbeth tells us something about the filmmaker’s anguish, does What? tell us something about the way he found release while processing grief? On a less worrisome level, it’s also possible to read What? as an homage to Tate, whose screen persona would have suited the film’s leading role of an amiably ditzy sexpot. In any event, What? is too strange to take seriously, and yet it’s not quite strange enough to qualify as some quintessentially ’70s head trip. The vibe is pure debauchery.
          Shot on the grounds of a beachside villa owned by the film’s producer, Carlo Ponti, the semi-improvised film begins with American tourist Nancy (Sydne Rome) catching a ride from a group of swarthy locals in a car. They try to rape her, but she escapes and leaps onto an elevator lift that takes her to the villa. There, she spends several days with a group of sex-crazed weirdos, including ex-pimp Alex (Marcello Mastraoianni). Nancy ends up naked frequently, so much of the film’s dialogue concerns evaluations of her breasts and inquires into her sexual availability. Polanski plays a supporting role as an oddball named Mosquito, who brags about his “big stinger.” (He’s ostensibly referring to a spear gun, but you get the idea.) Like a dumb victim in some bad horror movie, Nancy remains at the villa even though everyone there is insane, and she falls into a twisted sexual relationship with Alex. In one scene, he wears only the skin of a tiger he killed on a hunting trip, then crawls on all fours while Nancy whips him until he’s sufficiently aroused for a tryst. This stuff goes on forever, since the version of What? that I watched was two and a half hours long, even though most sources list the running time as 110 minutes (presumably the length of some edit for the American market).
          What? is pointless and prurient, but the really confounding thing about the picture is that it’s made as well as any other peak-period Polanski film. The camerawork is smooth, the editing is graceful, and some of the dialogue as droll. After Alex complains about “the evil pestilence of this house,” Nancy replies, in her breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, “You’re right—it does have a funny smell!” While many other ’70s movies venture further into the bizarre than What?, few represent such a peculiar chapter in the story of an internationally revered filmmaker at the height of his  creative power.

What?: FREAKY

The Night of the Cat (1973)

Only the hardiest of bad-movie fans will be able to endure all 77 minutes of The Night of the Cat, a crime thriller made on the cheap by director Jim Cinque, whose film career began and ended with this misbegotten project. Filmed with the incompetence of someone who just took a new camera out of the box and flipped it on without reading the instructions, the picture tells the sleazy story of a pretty girl who tracks down the mobster responsible for her sister’s death. He’s a scumbag who kidnaps young women, gets them hooked on dope, and turns them out as prostitutes. Somehow, the protagonist’s sister escaped and was on her way to tell authorities about the mobster’s operation until his goons ran her down on a country road. Enter Beth (Kathy Allen), who dyes her hair black, joins forces with a reporter, and takes karate lessons as part of an elaborate revenge scheme. The title refers to one of the film’s many ridiculous scenes, specifically the bit when locals tell Beth that the mobster has a phobia about cats, meaning he’s been known to pass out at the sight of a tabby. Suffice to say that Cinque ain’t exactly Hitchock when it comes to integrating psychological flaws into his characterizations and storytelling. In fact, Cinque is so inept that after the sister dies, he cuts to a montage of Beth and her sibling cavorting in slow motion through a playground, as full-grown adults, culminating with the sister saying, “Oh, Beth, isn’t it good to be alive?” Because, you see, she’s dead, and that’s like, you know, sad! Just wow. The acting is excruciatingly bad, with unskilled performers struggling through lifeless dialogue; Cinque’s idea of a usable final take is everybody else’s idea of a bad first run-through. Oh, and just to add a scummy patina to the whole project, Cinque seemingly recruited every exotic dancer in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the picture was filmed, because the bad guy’s HQ has a steady supply of strippers and topless waitresses.

The Night of the Cat: SQUARE

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977)

          Made at a time when stereotypes about gays were prevalent in popular culture, pioneering documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives offered a broader spectrum of the gay experience than many straight people had previously encountered, especially when it aired on PBS the year after its theatrical release. Made by a collective of gay filmmakers in a conventional nonfiction style, the picture interweaves excerpts from chats with 26 individuals, some of whom appear on camera with their partners, while telling a moving story about gay men and women slowly emerging from the fringe of American society to live their lives openly and proudly. Whereas many fictional ’70s films about same-sex relationships failed to grab mainstream attention for various reasons, having to do with limited distribution opportunities and the reluctance of some straight moviegoers to look beyond their heterosexual worldviews, Word Is Out takes an unthreatening approach that, impressively, does not diminish the charged political statement made by the film’s very existence. While quietly declaring that gay Americans expect the same consideration and respect as their straight counterparts, Word Is Out invites straight viewers into the conversation.

          The speakers in Word Is Out are men and women of various ages, some young and flamboyant (there’s a drag queen in here), and some older and more circumspect. They tell stories about initially denying their sexual urges because of societal pressure, about forming secret communities with other gay people while assimilating into larger and predominantly straight social systems, and about the spiritual rewards of accepting one’s true identity. In one affecting scene, a man describes going to concerts where audience members sang the comical rallying cry “God save us nelly queens” together, explaining the subtext of those words: “We have our rights, too, is what we were really saying.” Several of the speakers describe the experience of living “conventional” lives before finding themselves, so it’s painful to watch, for instance, a woman describing how she broke from her husband and children once she accepted that she was a lesbian. (Keep in mind that many of the stories described here unfolded in the late ’60s and early ’70s, a time when many still considered homosexuality a form of mental illness.)

          Among the fascinating characters in Word Is Out is Sally Gerhart, an intellectual/theologian who suggests that society transforms each new baby into “half a person” by declaring that a man is not complete until he marries a woman, or vice versa, neglecting the biological fact that we each have feminine and masculine qualities. Another unique personality is Pat Bond, who conveys tremendous humor and insight while describing her experience as a cross-dressing member of the U.S. military, but then reveals profound pain when asked if she feels lonely. Time and again, the filmmakers behind Word Is Out complicate their portraits, making it impossible for viewers to see any particular subject in only one light. And that, more than anything, is the beauty and value of this movie, introducing viewers to a group of people who are contradictory and tough and vulnerable and a million other things, one of which is gay.

          Word Is Out was an important early step toward the inclusiveness and understanding that makes America of the 2010s so hopeful, even as close-minded public figures try to drag the country back to the intolerance of the past. Incidentally, a gay-rights rally appears toward the end of Word Is Out, adding an appropriate and helpful aspect of activism to the film’s content. Those curious to see even more you-are-there footage from the gay-rights movement may wish to explore a documentary from the following year, Gay USA (1978), which focuses exclusively on activism.

Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives: RIGHT ON