Cannon (1971)

          Investigators with offbeat gimmicks were a staple of mystery fiction long before television came along, but by the ’70s, Hollywood had perfected the art of repackaging the same old whodunit storylines by featuring unusual protagonists. Columbo hid his wit behind a façade of simple-mindedness, McCloud was a cowpoke in the big city, Ironside was confined to a wheelchair, Kolchak solved paranormal mysteries, and so on. Yet some of these gimmicks were so threadbare as to be almost laughable. The most notable attribute of private investigator Frank Cannon, who fought crime during five seasons spanning 1971 to 1976 and returned for a 1980 telefilm, is girth. Yep, he’s big. Corpulent, fat, morbidly obese, rotund—take your pick. The character has other traits, but his size is a point of conversation from his first appearance forward. Thanks to smart scripting and a winning performance by star William Conrad, Cannon spends the enjoyable pilot movie that preceded his weekly series coming across as clever and dogged and resourceful. He even gets into brawls and foot chases. Characters remark on his weight, as does Cannon himself, but mostly he gets down to the tricky business of solving a murder and untangling a conspiracy. Particularly because this pilot has such a fine supporting cast of versatile character actors, it’s unsurprising the movie connected well enough with audiences to trigger a series. But, still, the sheer laziness of the whole enterprise—this one’s different, see, because he’s fat! There’s a reason they used to call TV a vast wasteland.

          One day, ex-cop Cannon gets a letter from Diana Langston (Vera Miles), the widow of an old friend. Traveling to the small desert town where she runs a motel, Cannon investigates the man’s death and gets stonewalled by local cops including Lt. Redfield (J.D. Cannon) and Deputy Magruder (Earl Holliman). Turns out the whole small town is under the thumb of crime boss Virgil Holley (Murray Hamilton), and things get even more complicated once Cannon discovers that Lt. Redfield’s sexy wife, Christie (Lynda Day George), has dangerous romantic ties outside her marriage. Despite several attempts on his life as well as threats of incarceration, Cannon helps Diana learn how and why her husband died, cleaning up Diana’s town in the process. Written by series creator Edward Hume, the Cannon pilot has the same qualities as other series from Quinn Martin Productions (The Fugitive, The Streets of San Francisco, etc.), notably crisp characterizations and strong visual interest, so even when the story gets garbled—a common trap for mystery shows—the action, locations, and performances command attention. (Also featured in the cast are Norman Alden, John Fiedler, Lawrence Pressman, Barry Sullivan, and Keenan Wynn.) Is the story about anything? No. And excepting a few twists, is the story genuinely fresh or surprising? No again. But detective shows are comfort food, and in that regard, Cannon is a hearty meal, suitable for the appetite of its protagonist.

Cannon: GROOVY

The Deserter (1971)

          Part spaghetti Western and part Dirty Dozen ripoff, this Italy/US/Yugoslavia coproduction has a serviceable premise, then loses its way thanks to a forgettable leading performance and an overly mechanical plot. Along the way, several colorful actors are subsumed by the overall mediocrity of the piece, delivering half-hearted interpretations of underdeveloped roles. Even the action highlights are ho-hum. Those who want nothing more from adventure pictures than a steady flow of death-defying bravery and tight-lipped macho posturing will be able to consume the picture like a serving of empty calories, but those who expect anything more will get bored fairly quickly. In the Wild West, U.S. Cavalry soldier Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) completes a fortnight-long patrol and discovers that while he was away, Apaches raided the outpost where he lives and killed his wife. Kaleb blames the death on his superior officer, Colonel Brown (Richard Crenna), so Kaleb tries to quit the service and devote his life to killing Apaches. When Brown refuses Kaleb’s resignation, Kaleb shoots the colonel and becomes a fugitive from military justice. Two years later, blustery General Miles (John Huston) arrives on the scene, demanding that Brown illegally cross the Mexican border to slaughter a band of Apache raiders. What’s more, Miles demands that Brown’s men bring Kaleb in from the wilderness, because during the intervening period, Kaleb has made good on his vengeance pledge by slaughtering Apaches heedlessly, thereby becoming the ideal man to lead the mission into Mexico.

          Once all the narrative pieces are in place, Kaleb finds himself supervising a band of soldiers, including Kaleb, who would just as soon kill the notorious deserter as kill Apaches. Among those playing soldiers are Ian Bannen, Chuck Connors, Ricardo Montalban, Slim Pickens, and Woody Strode. (Naturally, Crenna’s character is along for the ride, too.) With this much talent at their disposal, producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Burt Kennedy should have been able to come up with something much more interesting than The Deserter, which is sometimes known as The Devil’s Backbone. Alas, the script is unrelentingly clichéd, predictable, and superficial, and the filmmakers miscalculated, badly, by casting Yugoslavian stud Fehmiu in the leading role. Just one year previous, Paramount tried to make Fehmiu into an international star by toplining him in the epic melodrama The Adventurers (1970), so this picture presumably represented the completion of a two-picture deal. A European equivalent to, say, James Franciscus, Fehmiu is suitably brooding and athletic, but he’s got the depth and range of a statue. With his performance creating a vacuum at the center of The Deserter, the movie is doomed to disappoint from its very first frames.

The Deserter: FUNKY

Mean Mother (1971)

As if his original productions weren’t bad enough, schlockmeister Al Adamson periodically repurposed old footage—from his own past films and from productions for which he acquired the rights—to swindle unsuspecting grindhouse audiences. Bogusly marketed as a brand-new blaxploitation picture, Mean Mother began its existence as Run for Your Life (1971), a Spanish-made adventure flick about a Vietnam deserter who becomes mired in various criminal enterprises. Adamson bought the movie, then shot about 30 minutes of new scenes featuring Dobie Gray, a singer who scored a pop hit the previous year with “Drift Away,” as a second deserter. (Squandering any tie-in opportunities, the singer is billed here as “Clifton Brown.”) Adamson spliced material from the two productions together and created a disjointed hybrid film. Mean Mother starts and ends with the new material, which has a quasi-blaxploitation feel if only because Gray and Marilyn Joi, the leading lady in his sequences, are both African-American. Every so often, Adamson cuts to the Spanish material, which has a totally different vibe. The new scenes are fast-paced and sleazy, whereas the European scenes are leisurely and slick. Tracking the storyline is pointless, though the overall gist has something to do with the deserters trying to raise enough money to leave Rome, where they landed after fleeing Southeast Asia, and relocate to Canada. There’s also some nonsense about drug deals and kidnappings, but, really, everything in the plot is an excuse to trigger fight scenes and sex scenes. Adamson satisfies low appetites with nudity and violence, but the deeply uninteresting Mean Mother disappoints in every other regard. As for Gray, the fact that he only notched one more screen credit—14 years after Mean Mother—correctly indicates that acting was not among his gifts.

Mean Mother: LAME

You’ll Like My Mother (1972)

          In this outlandish but slick thriller, Patty Duke plays a young woman carrying the child of a man who recently died. She travels to rural Minnesota in the middle of a brutal winter to meet her late husband’s mother, who turns out to be a withholding monster living in a house full of horrors. Competently directed by the versatile Lamont Johnson and bolstered by skillful performances, You’ll Like My Mother is a cut above the usual shocker, in the sense that great care is taken with characterization and mood. Nonetheless, some of the genre’s usual problems manifest, notably the peculiar impression that the villain was sitting around waiting for an opportunity to torment someone. After all, since the mother of the title seems determined to preserve her weird circumstances, why not simply make her unwanted visitor go away? It’s the reverse of the old “why don’t they leave?” problem.

          Anyway, a very pregnant Francesca (Duke) treks to the home of Mrs. Kingsolving (Rosemary Murphy), expecting to find the warm embrace of a woman pleased by the arrival of a daughter-in-law and by the news of an impending grandchild. No such luck. Demeaning, harsh, and nearly deaf. Mrs. Kingsolving announces that she doesn’t believe Francesca was ever with her son, and that she has no intention of providing emotional or financial support. Concurrently, Mrs. Kingsolving introduces Francesca to Kathleen (Sian Barbara Allen), whose existence was previously unknown to Francesca—she’s the mentally challenged sister of Francesca’s late husband. Contrivances ensue. Severe weather prevents Francesca from leaving the house on foot, and car trouble keeps Mrs. Kingsolving from driving Francesca to a nearby bus station. Then Mrs. Kingsolving drugs Francesca to keep her hostage, for reasons that are never especially clear, and Francesca pokes around the house to discover the existence of another sibling, Kenny (Richard Thomas). Thought by authorities to be missing, he’s a psycho killer whom Mrs. Kinsolving hides inside her house. As you might imagine, this spells trouble for Francesca and her soon-to-be-born child.

          Even though the plot of You’ll Like My Mother doesn’t work—too many convenient twists, too many slow passages—the movie has a strong mood. The juxtaposition of unforgiving weather inside and intolerable madness inside creates the desired sense of claustrophobia, and Francesca’s vulnerable condition triggers immediate audience sympathy. Duke doesn’t excel, precisely, but she imbues her performance with both compassion and toughness, so she sells the larky aspects of the storyline about as well as anyone could. The same is true of Murphy, who drips acid while wearing a condescending smile. Does it all go way over the top during the climax? Of course. But after too many quiet stretches, the comic-book violence of the final scenes gives the movie a much-needed shot of adrenaline.

You’ll Like My Mother: FUNKY

Night Chase (1970)

          David Janssen, the king of the pained facial expression, plays a different sort of fugitive in Night Chase, a somewhat compelling thriller that anticipates the premise of the Tom Cruise movie Collateral (2004), but follows through on the premise with a story that makes a whole lot more sense. Running 95 minutes, long by ’70s-telefilm standards, Night Chase gets repetitive and slow at times, so viewers who enjoy seeing vintage footage of Southern California will get more out of the experience than others. That said, the script is clear and efficient, Jack Starrett’s direction sets an understated tone that suits the material, and costar Yaphet Kotto’s performance is so loose and vivid that he greatly elevates the material. Ultimately, Night Chase isn’t consequential in terms of social relevance or themes, so it’s just a disposable thriller with welcome aspects of humanism. Nonetheless, with so many pointlessly nihilistic thrillers out there, the compassion infusing Night Chase makes watching the picture mildly edifying.

          As in Collateral, the story gets underway when a mysterious white man flags down a black cab driver for a ride. Specifically, Adrian (Janssen) grabs a taxi from the Los Angeles International Airport after his flight gets cancelled. Ernie (Kotto) gets the fare, and he’s surprised when Adrian asks for a 200-mile ride to San Diego. Once the men are in close quarters, Ernie catches disturbing clues—blood on Adrian’s shirt, skittishness whenever police cars pass the cab. Eventually, it emerges that Adrian shot a man in Baltimore, and he’s on the way to Mexico, where he plans to use his gun again.

          The remaining details are best discovered as the story unfolds, but the gist is that Adrian feels tortured by not only what he’s already done but by what he’s contemplating doing next. Although saying that Janssen’s performance is infused with nuance would require considerable overstatement, he mimics anguish well, and his intensity is sufficiently persuasive that it’s believable when he makes everyone around him nervous. Kotto’s work exists on a different level. At the beginning of the picture, he conveys affability and world-weariness in equal measure, and as the story progresses, he hits notes of despair, heroism, and terror. Night Chase is yet another reminder of his incredible power and versatility. While the film is mostly a two-hander, Elisha Cook Jr., William Katt, and Victoria Vetri all do strong work in small supporting roles.

Night Chase: FUNKY

That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

          The final film of revered Spanish director Luis Buñuel, and also one of his most accessible movies, That Obscure Object of Desire uses several playful storytelling devices while presenting the tale of an older man driven to distraction by his love for a mercurial young woman. Unlike the many May-December movies of the ’60s and ’70s that show middle-aged dudes sharing wisdom with nymphets who open their eyes to new ways of seeing, That Obscure Object of Desire gets after something more, well, obscure. Articulating some of Buñuel’s themes would require giving away the resolution of the story, but in general the picture conveys ideas about class, gender, propriety, and self-image, among many other things. Naturally, Buñuel includes two his favorite tropes, radical politics and surrealism, though they don't render the picture impenetrable, as happened with the director’s previous effort, The Phantom of Liberty (1974). Instead, politics and surrealism function like grace notes, adding ambiguity, complexity, and relevance to a story that’s already rich.

          It should also be noted that Buñuel plays a tricky game by accentuating the breathtaking beauty of two starlets, both of whom play the same role (more on that later). It’s as Buñuel hoped to simultaneously satirize older men who court young ladies and beguile the audience with images of nubile flesh. One can only imagine what feminist critics have discovered while dissecting this picture, which somehow manages to celebrate and demonize women in equal measure.

          The picture begins with a droll vignette. After sophisticated gentleman Mathieu (Fernando Rey) boards a train, comely young Conchita (Carole Bouquet) boards a separate car. Matheiu pays an attendant to kick her off, and then Mathieu dumps a bucket of water on her head. The other passengers in his first-class car express shock at his behavior, so he offers to explain why humiliating the woman was preferable to his first impulse of killing her. Buñuel illustrates Mathieu’s story with extended flashbacks. After encountering Conchita for the first time in his own home, where she served briefly as a maid, Mathieu became obsessed with her, chasing Conchita across Europe, offering money to her mother as a sort of dowry, and eventually persuading Conchita to cohabitate. She drove Mathieu mad by repeatedly offering sexual favors, only to refuse them at the last moment. A final round of indignities led to the episode at the train station.

          Among the many peculiar things about That Obscure Object of Desire is the casting of the Conchita role. For no obvious narrative reason, Bouquet shares the role with the equally alluring Angelina Molina. In any given scene, the audience can’t predict which actress will appear, and sometimes, one actress replaces the other in the same scene, thanks to a convenient exit/entrance maneuver. It’s a typically whimsical touch on Buñuel’s part, forcing the audience to ask questions about identity and perception without providing any fodder for answers. The actresses radiate different types of sexiness, Bouqet icy and Molina sensual, so their collective effect on Rey’s character is more than believable. Still, he’s a tougher nut to crack, part worldly aesthete and part love-addled buffoon. These contradictions make his characterization consistent with Buñuel’s longstanding attitude toward the moneyed class. As to the question of whether That Obscure Object of Desire works, the answer is mostly yes. The movie is mysterious and sly and unpredictable, and the final gotcha moment says something bitterly funny about the ephemeral nature of life—after all the fuss, that’s how it ends? It’s a fitting final statement for Buñuel, frustrating and ridiculous and true all at once.

That Obscure Object of Desire: GROOVY

Bloodthirsty Butchers (1970) & Torture Dungeon (1970) & The Body Beneath (1970) & Guru, the Mad Monk (1970) & The Man With Two Heads (1972, US) & The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here! (1972) & Blood (1973)

A prolific independent filmmaker and theater professional best known for the low-budget exploitation movies he made from the late ’60s to the late ’80s, Andy Milligan was spectacularly devoid of cinematic talent. His shameless use of excessive gore ensured that he found outlets for much of his work on the drive-in and grindhouse circuits, his microscopic budgets kept him productive, and, in the years following his ’70s heyday, he developed a small cult following. A colorful and tragic life story contributes to his current infamous status, because the openly gay director enjoyed S&M, lived for a while in England, spent much of his working life operating out of grungy locations throughout Manhattan, and was a pauper at the time he died from AIDS. Viewed in the abstract, he’s a fascinating subject for further study.

Viewed up close, at least through the prism of his ’70s movies, not so much. Taken as camp, the features Milligan released from 1970 to 1978 might pass muster for purely ironic consumption. Taken at face value, they’re as bad as first-year student films, with dopey dialogue, incoherent storylines, pathetic production values, stilted acting, and terrible camerawork. Editing is a special problem, because scenes start and stop abruptly, continuity and screen direction are chaotic, and Milligan was consistently incapable of generating proper logic, momentum, and pacing. Yet perhaps Milligan’s most egregious cinematic offense is padding his movies with interminable melodrama. Characters in these flicks talk and talk and talk, bombarding each other with repetitious lines that exist on a level below the worst soap-opera chatter. Whenever someone gets a cleaver to the head—a favorite mode of killing in Milligan’s movies—it’s a relief because it means at least one character will shut the fuck up.

So why do some people find Milligan fascinating? According to Jimmy McDonough’s biography The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan—as well as countless online tributes—Milligan was artist in extremis, using independent filmmaking as a form of therapy to work out psychosexual problems. The idea is that watching the incessant deviance, hatred, and violence in Milligan’s movies provides a window into a troubled soul. Fair enough. But since most of us will never find the time to watch all the films made by skilled filmmakers whose work sprang from complex psyches, why waste time parsing the output of someone without talent? Oh, well. To each their own.

After getting his movie career going with releases including The Degenerates (1967), The Filthy Five (1968), and Gutter Trash (1969)—one senses a theme—Milligan entered a new decade at full throttle, releasing five movies in 1970. The pace of his releases gives a good indication of the quality control, or lack thereof, defining Milligan’s output. Bloodthirsty Butchers offers a scuzzy take on the familiar story of Sweeney Todd, a fictional horror character whose exploits are set in Victorian England. As always, the so-called “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” kills customers, then gives the body parts to a baker who uses the human remains as ingredients in pies. Actors ranging from awful to merely mediocre recite florid dialogue in ugly locations amid garish lighting. Something nasty happens every so often, but the FX makeup is laughable. Attentive viewers may detect traces of Milligan’s S&M interests, though even the sex scenes suffer from amateurism; actors seem as if they’re giving each other airport-security pat-downs instead of heavy petting. The film’s most amusing moment involves someone peeling the crust off a pie and discovering a woman’s dismembered breast inside, nipple inexplicably erect.

Torture Dungeon finds Milligan loosely adapting Shakespeare, because the story is a riff on Richard III, with an English nobleman killing people ahead of him in line for the crown. Although he’s playing a duke, leading man Gerald Jacuzzo gives a performance best described as queeny, all bulging eyes, flamboyant gestures, and sing-song vocalizations. The following rant, uttered by the duke in a reflective moment, should suffice as a demonstration of Milligan’s problematic dialogue style. “Let me explain something to you, my dear. I live for pleasure. Only second to power, of course. And I’ll try anything. I’m not a homosexual. I’m not a heterosexual. I’m not asexual. I’m try-sexual. Yes, that’s it. I’ll try anything for pleasure.” Clumsy verbiage aside, you begin to see why some folks perceive deeper meanings in Milligan’s work, but it’s difficult to justify close readings of a 77-minute trash opus with people getting decapitated and impaled at regular intervals.

The Body Beneath is one of myriad vampire pictures in the Milligan oeuvre. (It’s also one of many flicks in which he brazenly steals elements from Bram Stoker, since the estate where most of the action takes place is called Carfax Abbey.) Compared to the director’s other pictures, The Body Beneath is relatively coherent and slick, telling the story of an undead priest who rules a family of vampires that procreates through incest and the use of love slaves. As the flick grinds through quasi-softcore sex scenes and the usual amateurish gore, two elements stand out, but not in a good way. The priest’s vampire brides often appear in ghoulish makeup, but the makeup is so cheap as to be silly rather than sinister—lots of blue gunk slathered across women’s faces. Milligan also goes wild with the old-timey effect of smearing Vaseline across a filter over the camera lens, thereby blurring the edges of the frame. That gets old fast. While The Body Beneath may be Milligan’s best ’70s flick, that’s not saying much.

            Presumably, Guru, The Mad Monk was inspired by movies including Witchfinder General (1968), the disturbing Vincent Price thriller about a monstrous man tasked with rooting out occultists. Like that picture, Guru, the Mad Monk concerns an evil official who uses his position for personal advantage. Specifically, the plot involves prison guard Carl, who falls for Nadja, a peasant woman unjustly accused of murder. Carl enlists the help of Father Guru (Neil Flanagan) and a witch named Olga, who contrives potions that allow Nadja to simulate death and thus escape imprisonment. For her part, Olga wants the prison guard to let her seize blood from freshly executed prisoners because she uses blood in rituals. Meanwhile, Father Guru wants political power of some sort. (The script is so inept that it’s not worth parsing.) In laughable scenes, Father Guru looks into mirrors and talks to himself, turning his head whenever the “voice” of an alternate personality takes control. Predictably, the movie’s gore is goofy. To suggest that someone’s eyes were impaled, Milligan cuts to props that look like ping-pong balls fused with chopsticks and slathered with ketchup. Oy.

            Milligan’s final 1970 release was the X-rated melodrama Nightbirds, a black-and-white picture about counterculture angst featuring lots of explicit sex (putting it beyond the scope of this survey). After disappearing from the marketplace for many years, Nightbirds resurfaced in the 2010s when hip Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn purchased and distributed an old 16mm print. His online remarks to the effect that family members and friends think he’s mad to champion Milligan make for interesting reading.

            Despite hitting screens just months after American-International’s The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971), Milligan’s first 1972 flick, The Man With Two Heads, does not depict a character with dual craniums. Rather, it’s a deranged take on Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal story “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” After about 20 minutes of dull chitty-chat, Dr. Jekyll (Denis DeMarne) finally transforms into “Danny Blood,” a De Sade-quoting brute who gets his kicks torturing a prostitute named April (Julia Stratton). In the film’s longest and most unpleasant scene, “Danny” punches and slaps April, forces her to crawl on the floor and bark like a dog, burns her face with a cigar, and stops just short of raping her, the better to prolong his twisted arousal. “You shouldn’t be allowed on the face of this earth!” He screams at her. “You’re scum! You’re the defecation of the slums of London!” Perhaps more than any other of Milligan’s ’70s films, The Man With Two Heads makes the persuasive case that Milligan used movies to process issues, but in this case, the issue seems to be unrelenting hatred for women. Until it devolves into bloody chaos during an incoherent scene combining an orgy and a killing spree, The Man With Two Heads is almost technically competent, and DeMarne’s leading performance isn’t bad. Thematically, however, The Man With Two Heads is vile.

The title of Milligan’s next opus—The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!—might be the best thing in his entire filmography, though one assumes Nicholas Winding Refn would argue the point. Alas, the movie doesn’t have the same vitality as the moniker, because it’s a painfully boring domestic drama concerning the horrid Mooney family. These 19th-century Brits spend all their time abusing each other physically and verbally; in one scene, repugnant protagonist Monica (Hope Stansbury) visits her mentally challenged brother, whom the family keeps locked in room filled with chickens, then pours hot wax on him and beats him with a broom. Eventually, Milligan gets around to introducing horror elements, with brief scenes of rats (some of which get killed on camera) and a wisp of lycanthropy (translation: a few actors wear hairy masks). Yet most of this interminable film comprises aimless familial nastiness.

            Nineteen seventy-three found Milligan broadening his cinematic horizons, after a fashion, because he did uncredited directing work on a porno film called Dragula—a gay spin on Stoker—and used his real name while making a skin show called Fleshpot on 42nd Street. (Like Nightbirds, both films fall outside this survey’s parameters.) Then it was back to gore for the succinctly titled Blood. Shot in and around the house where Milligan lived at the time of filming, this is low-budget schlock at its least impressive. The discombobulated plot involves a werewolf and Dracula’s daughter hiding out while the werewolf performs arcane scientific experiments. Also featured are amputees, bizarre servants, flesh-eating plants, and a prissy lawyer. Any improvements in technical areas that Milligan achieved while filming The Man With Two Heads seem to have evaporated before he shot Blood, which has nonsensical camera angles, out-of-focus shots, and pitiful sound quality. Milligan also takes the gimmick of killing animals onscreen to a nauseating extreme, because at one point an actress chops a mouse in half, then shoves the tail end into her mouth.

            Milligan’s ’70s output sputtered to a halt with Legacy of Blood, which, title notwithstanding, bears no relation to its immediate predecessor. Rather, Legacy of Blood is a loose remake of Milligan’s 1968 movie The Ghastly Ones. And here’s where things get confusing. Both The Ghastly Ones and Legacy of Blood steal the basic plot from The Cat and the Canary, a 1922 play that has been filmed, officially and unofficially, many times. (Premise: Relatives gather in a creepy house to compete for an inheritance, but a killer stalks them.) Among the other unauthorized versions of The Cat and the Canary is a 1971 movie with John Carradine, Blood Legacy a/k/a Legacy of Blood. Yep. Same title. Although Milligan’s Legacy of Blood was unavailable for review, reports from those who’ve seen the picture suggest it has all the usual flaws, from bad acting to incompetent filmmaking, with dialogue consuming most of the screen time.

On the topic of legacies, it’s disheartening to look at the scope of Milligan’s career and see how little he had to show for his work, the adoration of Nicholas Winding Refn notwithstanding. As of this writing, not one of Milligan’s ’70s movies has a rating above five (out of ten) stars on IMDb, and most online commentary about the man’s work focuses on his remarkable cinematic incompetence. (The same is even more true of his later output; Milligan made a handful of widely detested pictures in the ’80s and died in 1991.) As noted earlier, it’s not as if Milligan’s screen career set him up financially—exactly the opposite. One therefore hopes that he had more fun making his movies than most people have watching them, or at least found some measure of release from his psychosexual hangups.

Bloodthirsty Butchers: SQUARE

Torture Dungeon: SQUARE

The Body Beneath: LAME

Guru, the Mad Monk: SQUARE

The Man With Two Heads: FREAKY

The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!: SQUARE

Blood: SQUARE

Gal Young Un (1979)

          The pleasures of Victor Nunez’s rural saga Gal Young Un hide in plain sight. At first glance, the storyline might seem depressing and predictable, with a cocksure young hustler ingratiating himself to a wealthy older woman and then treating her like dirt once they’re married. Since the film is set in the Florida backwoods circa the 1920s, the hustler uses his bride’s resources to set up a thriving moonshine business, meaning that Gal Young Un traffics in familiar images related to bootlegging and stills. Yet that’s all flash—or as close to flash as this understated movie gets. Beyond the noise of the hustler’s boasting and lawbreaking hides the real heart of the story, which is the intimate character study of a woman responding to life’s indignities with pragmatism and resolve. Based on a short story by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, best known for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Yearling (1938), this film is part character study, part morality tale, and part proto-feminist crie de couer.

          While bird-hunting one day in the forest, Trax (David Peck) and a buddy stumble across the cabin occupied by Mattie (Dana Preu), who is nearly twice Trax’s age. They exchange pleasantries, and soon afterward, Trax returns to mooch a meal off the warm and welcoming woman, who seems flattered by the attention of a younger man. Later, Trax happens upon information that Mattie is a widow sitting on the backwoods equivalent of a fortune. He woos her into marriage and starts his business, then spends more and more time away from home while enjoying newfound wealth. Meanwhile, Mattie remains stuck in the cabin, only now she has the added responsibility of overseeing Trax’s still and the disreputable goons he hires to operate the apparatus in his absence. A further insult to Mattie’s status occurs when Trax brings home a young mistress, Elly (J. Smith-Cameron), then leaves again, forcing the women to awkwardly cohabitate.

          On one level, Gal Young Un is the cautionary tale of a man whose silver tongue allows him to reap rewards while avoiding consequences. On a deeper level, it’s the story of a complicated woman who trades loneliness for something different. Accordingly, the picture can be interpreted as a metaphor representing the compromises we all make. In his directing debut, Nunez—who also photographed and edited the movie—demonstrates the gentle humanism that defines his best-known films, including Ruby in Paradise (1993) and Ulee’s Gold (1997). Like those pictures, Gal Young Un is small and soft-spoken, because Nunez is more interested in describing people’s journeys than defining them. By stripping away the usual Hollywood storytelling devices, he fabricates unadorned reality, often letting his camera linger on ambiguous reaction shots that allow viewers to add meaning. Some might find this approach too benign, and, indeed, Gal Young Un is the sort of the picture that can lull the viewer into passivity. Yet for those willing to luxuriate in its handmade textures, right down to the occasionally lapses in camera focus, Gal Young Un is thoroughly compassionate and even, in an unexpected manner, rather sly.

Gal Young Un: GROOVY

Street Girls (1975)

Noteworthy as an early screenwriting credit for Barry Levinson, then a gag writer for TV shows but later to become an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Street Girls is a wretched exploitation flick with fleeting glimmers of something better. Chronologically and thematically, the picture falls between Joe (1970) and Hardcore (1979), because, like those movies, Street Girls tracks a father’s search for a daughter who has disappeared into a subculture. In Joe, the daughter has become a vagabond hippie, and in Hardcore, the daughter has become a porn actress. As the title suggests, the daughter in Street Girls has become a hooker, and the situation is made worse because her pimp has deliberately hooked the young woman on heroin to keep her enslaved. There’s no reason Street Girls couldn’t have become a real movie, even with the sleazy plot, but the production is so cheap, dull, and ugly that it’s thoroughly unpleasant to watch. Virtually no traces of Levinson’s storytelling skills are detectible, and one suspects that actor Michael Albert Weber improvised much of his performance as the picture’s sole interesting character, a whacked-out academic/transvestite who helps guide the father into the sex-trade underworld. (In one epic spiel, Albert casually opines, “It isn’t very good weather to exist—the warmer it gets, the more multiplicity you get, till you get to South India where you got God with a thousand arms . . .”) Most of Street Girls comprises borderline-pornographic scenes of women dancing, stripping, and turning tricks, with clients ranging from an excitable golden-shower freak to an urbane little person. Yet the element that tips the movie fully into the irredeemable zone is the portrayal of the father. In many scenes, he’s chipper and friendly even though he knows his daughter is getting violated somewhere, and at one point he lingers in a strip club, cheering and clapping while he watches a girl his daughter’s age bump and grind. Not cool, dude!

Street Girls: LAME

The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970)

Another one of those hideous big-studio attempts at depicting the youth culture of the ’60s, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart follows the adventures of a Beverly Hills brat living in a New York City hovel while studying at Columbia and making underground movies on the side. At first, Stanley’s problem is that he feels undersexed, compelling him to masturbate regularly, and later, his problem is that he feels oversexed, since he transitions from a monogamous relationship with the girl of his dreams to a threesome arrangement with two drugged-out hippie chicks. As if that’s not enough, he also gets an insecure girl drunk, talks her into pleasuring herself while he films her, and sleeps with her while she’s inebriated. Nice guy. Based on a novel by Robert Westbrook, who also wrote the script, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart starts out gently, portraying Stanley (Don Johnson) as a shy kid who experiences Walter Mitty-style fantasies of being bold and seductive. Once things start going Stanley’s way, he becomes an absolute jerk. In one scene, he tunes out a monologue by his girlfriend, Cathy (Dianne Hull), by imagining that her voice is the sound of a tape recording being fast-forwarded and rewound at high speeds. He lays a heavy I-love-you rap on Cathy to get into her pants, then two-times her the minute another woman shows sexual interest. Even with all the carnal content, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart is quite boring. Johnson’s dippy and unlikeable performance is one reason; with his mouth open in most scenes, he seems lobotomized rather than overwhelmed. The repetitious use of an awful song called “Sweet Gingerbread Man” makes things worse, and the way the story spirals toward a bad-trip freakout is painfully predictable. Excepting perhaps some interesting glimpses at Manhattan back in the day, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart is nothing but a vapid cavalcade of debauchery disguised as a with-it melodrama.

The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart: LAME

The Day of the Wolves (1971)

          Zippy low-budget thriller The Day of the Wolves has one of the coolest premises you’ll ever encounter in the heist genre, but the combination of a generic cast, a low budget, and threadbare storytelling keep the picture from living up to its potential. That said, there’s a lot to enjoy here for fans of ’70s crime cinema, and it’s unlikely anyone will ever attempt to remake the picture, since the existence of cellphones renders the premise obsolete. The setup goes like this. Several criminals receive letters in the mail instructing them to grow beards and report to their nearest airport for prepaid flights. Upon arrival, each criminal is collected by a driver, blindfolded, and driven two and a half hours to somewhere. Their benefactor, who identifies himself as “Number One,” assigns each crook a number, then explains the reason for secrecy. None of the criminals is to know the location of their headquarters or the names of their colleagues, because anonymity will offer protection during the federal manhunt that will inevitably follow their heist—of an entire town. Through careful strategizing, cutting phone lines, and so on, Number One plans to simultaneously plunder every business in the small community, committing multiple robberies in one brazen action. Writer, producer, and director Ferde Grofe Jr. lays out the particulars incredibly well, so on a certain level some viewers may find themselves rooting for the bad guys simply because the plan is so ingenious.
          However, the actual hero of The Day of the Wolves is small-town cop Pete Anderson (Richard Egan), who gets fired for political reasons from his job as sheriff—of the town the criminals plan to rob. You can guess where it goes from there. Despite having been stripped of his badge, Pete becomes a one-man army defending his neighbors against the criminals. Watching The Day of the Wolves, it’s frustrating to realize how little work would have been necessary to develop Grofe’s story concept into a proper screenplay. A little character development here, a little plot complication there, some improved story logic, and, bingo, The Day of the Wolves becomes a great piece for, say, Don Siegel to direct. Alas, Grofe took the DIY path, shooting his movie on the cheap in Arizona with an undistinguished cast. Egan does okay meat-and-potatoes work, and Jan Murray is fairly smooth as the cold-blooded “Number One,” but the film’s shortcomings are myriad. The picture looks cheap, the narrative is far too predictable, and the ending is silly. That said, The Day of the Wolves builds up a solid head of steam for most of its 92 minutes, so it’s no surprise to learn that Quentin Tarantino is among the admirers of this imaginative crime picture.

The Day of the Wolves: FUNKY

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974)

          Three years before the miniseries Roots (1977) became an unexpected ratings blockbuster and opened many Americans’ eyes to the breadth of suffering that Africans and their U.S.-born children endured during a century of American slavery, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman explored similar subject matter and earned a reputation as one of the best TV movies ever made. (Accolades showered upon the film included nine Emmy awards.) Based on a novel by Ernest J. Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is purely fictional, depicting a 110-year-old woman as she recalls her life from the Civil War in the 1860s to the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. Gaines’ clever structure, which involves a journalist asking Miss Jane Pittman for her memories, allows the film to present vignettes that illustrate myriad forms of abuse, oppression, and prejudice. Through each harrowing episode, themes of dignity and perseverance dominate, so the movie offers both an indictment of racist social structures and a tribute to the people who survived life within those structures.

          At the beginning of the picture, Jane (Cicely Tyson) is physically frail but mentally sharp, so she’s able to oblige a request from New York reporter Quentin Lerner (Michael Murphy) for a description of her life. Most of the film unfolds in flashbacks, with Valerie Odell playing the title character as a child in a few scenes and Tyson handling most of the performance. Some of the experiences that Jane describes are historic, as when a plantation owner grants young Jane her freedom, and some are horrific, as when racist vigilantes attack a group of ex-slaves, leaving Jane to fend for herself in unfriendly territory. Each time Jane finds joy, tragedy follows. Her happy marriage to Joe Pittman (Rod Perry) ends prematurely, and her guardianship of an orphan named Ned (played by three different actors) takes a dark turn. Jane recalls the tribulations of Reconstruction, during which northern carpetbaggers plundered the demolished American south, and she describes how working as a sharecropper following emancipation was simply another form of slavery. Yet the filmmakers never take the easy path of suggesting that Jane was some pivotal historical figure--excepting her incredible strength of character, she is an everywoman representing the African-American experience. Only at the very end of the story do the filmmakers gift Jane with “importance,” thanks to a climactic scene that encapsulates Jane’s mode of quiet defiance.

          Finding fault with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is not an impossible task, but only the most hard-hearted would try. The film’s politics are humane, and the story’s engagement with history is meaningful and unflinching. If no one real person actually had all of Jane’s experiences, so what? The stories of thousands who lived through the nightmare of slavery and its aftermath remain untold, so this fictional character speaks for them. Tyson does fine work, even when slathered in award-winning old-age makeup created by Dick Smith and Stan Winston. She plays every scene with emotion and sincerity, resisting many opportunities for cheap sentimentality and instead sketching a portrait infused with pride and resilience. The supporting cast is fine, the script by Tracy Keenan Wynn is efficient, and the direction by John Korty is unobtrusive, but the experience of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is all about watching Tyson channel decades of suffering through a prism of embattled self-respect.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman: RIGHT ON

Leave Yesterday Behind (1978)

          Tempting as it is to romanticize Carrie Fisher’s career in the wake of her shocking death at age 60, the truth is that outside of Star Wars movies, she was far more successful as a writer than she was as an actress. In fact, she didn’t properly lead the cast of a feature film until the obscure 1989 indie She’s Back, and most of her major screen credits are secondary roles as best friends and love interests. Acknowledging that drug problems and typecasting contributed to Fisher’s marginalization, it’s interesting to look at one of her first significant performances after the release of Star Wars (1977) to examine the question of whether Hollywood failed to understand her gifts or whether her gifts simply took time to mature. (Lest we forget, Fisher was only 19 when she first ventured to a galaxy far, far away.) In the respectable romantic telefilm Leave Yesterday Behind, Fisher plays a woman whose devotion helps a young man conquer emotional difficulties following an accident that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down.

          Occupying the leading role is the versatile John Ritter, then riding high on the success of his dopey sitcom Three’s Company and undoubtedly eager to display his dramatic chops. Within the film’s predictable and sentimental rhythms, he comes off quite well, conveying anguish and rage and vulnerability in a number of convincing moments. Fisher isn’t given nearly as much room to shine, since most of her repetitive scenes involve expressing sympathy, and she doesn’t elevate the material the way Ritter does. So while it’s likely Hollywood didn’t know what to do with the precocious starlet whom audiences first encountered in Shampoo (1975), it also seems fair to say Fisher hadn’t yet found the right balance between her innate qualities of humor and toughness. In Leave Yesterday Behind, she’s appealing and formidable in some moments, forgettable and shrill in others. As for the movie itself, it’s watchable as far as this sort of thing goes.

          Directed without much passion or style by Richard Michaels, the picture overcomes a choppy opening sequence to settle into a straightforward pattern of vignettes displaying the leading character encountering—and occasionally surmounting—obstacles. After losing the use of his legs because of a fall during a polo match, Paul Stallings (Ritter) becomes depressed and embittered, wreaking domestic havoc on his grandfather, Doc (Buddy Ebsen), whose sprawling farm provides a quiet sanctuary while Paul adjusts to life in a wheelchair. Marnie (Fisher) practices with her horse on the farm, so eventually she has a meet-cute with Paul. Discarding her boyfriend, David (Robert Urich), Marnie spends lots of time with Paul, quickly escalating from friendship to romance until Paul pumps the brakes out of fear he won’t be able to perform sexually. Meanwhile, Doc gives no-bullshit life lessons that force Paul to overcome self-pity so he can explore his potential. This stuff isn’t anywhere near as saccharine as it sounds, but it’s not profound, either. Still, alongside a minor role in the 1977 made-for-TV adaptation of William Inge’s play Come Back, Little Sheba, this humble telefilm is, by dint of her scant credits during this period, Fisher’s most substantial ’70s performance beyond her first appearance as Princess Leia. So there’s that.

Leave Yesterday Behind: FUNKY

Out of Season (1975)

          Even if one ignores the story’s implications of incest, Out of Season is a creepy little number. Cliff Robertson plays an American who visits the seaside British hotel run by his old flame, played by Vanessa Redgrave, then rekindles their affair—even as he sleeps with her adult daughter, played by pouty-mouthed sexpot Susan George. Oh, and more than half the film’s scenes comprise bitter arguments, with the mother and daughter spitting venom at each other while the ex-lovers trade vicious accusations and criticisms. This stuff never quite reaches the level of high art, but Alan Bridges’ stately direction, an intelligent script, and three strong performances give Out of Season a certain dark magnetism. And even though the picture is quite talky, one could do worse than listening to Redgrave and Robertson issuing reams of dialogue. George acquits herself well, compensating for one-dimensional shrillness by raising the movie’s temperature considerably during erotic scenes. It’s not fun to watch three people eviscerate each other, but Out of Season holds the viewer’s attention for nearly all of its 90 moody minutes. As for the film’s provenance, reports differ—some sources indicate that the picture is based on a play, though the credits are vague, and it appears the British dramatist Harold Pinter was at one point set to direct the picture. (He made his cinematic directorial debut with the previous year’s Butley, a similarly cruel film.)

          In any event, Joe (Robertson) shows up one day and surprises Ann (Redgrave), whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years. Both were married to other people in the intervening period, and Ann is caught in a nasty cycle of squabbles with her daughter, Joanna (George), who resents living in a tiny town. Watching Ann and Joe fall back in love drives Joanna mad with jealously, so she throws herself at Joe, who’s too much of a drunken, self-involved cad to refuse her. There’s more to the picture than that, but those are the broad strokes, so Out of Season unfolds like a thriller—how far will Joe take his illicit affair with Joanna, and when will Joanna spring her trap by revealing what’s happening to her mother? The story isn’t quite meaty enough to support an entire feature, so the narrative energy flags periodically; Bridges and his collaborators would have done well to add a subplot or two. Taken for what it is, Out of Season gets the job done. Robertson’s macho intensity strikes sparks against Redgrave’s pained coldness, and George plays sexual games with such uninhibited insouciance that she’s simultaneously seductive and unbearable, just the right toxic mixture for the situation. Pity the filmmakers didn’t stick the landing, but so be it.

Out of Season: FUNKY