Saturday, April 30, 2011
Heartland (1979)
Friday, April 29, 2011
Breakthrough (1979)
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Cross of Iron (1977)
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Valdez Is Coming (1971)
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Car Wash (1976)
Monday, April 25, 2011
The Omen (1976) & Damien—Omen II (1978)
A massive box-office hit feeding the public’s post-Exorcist appetite for supernatural horror but opting for cartoonish violence over gut-wrenching realism, The Omen is fabulously entertaining nonsense. The film’s premise remains tantalizing even after years of underwhelming sequels and retreads, Jerry Goldsmith’s powerful score set the template for myriad lesser imitations, and some of the creatively staged deaths in the picture have entered the horror-cinema pantheon. So even though The Omen has undoubtedly lost much of its power to shock, the film’s shameless entertainment value survives. Like the previous year’s Jaws, the first Omen movie is a textbook example of pulp disguised as prestige thanks to glossy stars and impressive production values. (Among other parallels, Goldsmith acknowledged that the iconic score John Williams created for Jaws was an influence on his work for The Omen.) Yet while critical admiration for Jaws has only grown over the years, time has put The Omen in its proper place as a guilty pleasure.
Here’s the backstory. Producer Harvey Bernhard saw dollar signs when a clergyman acquaintance pondered what might happen if the antichrist emerged in modern times, so Bernhard commissioned a script by David Seltzer and hired promising director Richard Donner (the success of this picture earned Donner a choice gig helming 1978’s Superman: The Movie). The story that Bernhard and his collaborators contrived involves American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), who adopts a mysterious infant after his own son is stillborn. The ambassador unwisely hides the truth from everyone, including his wife, Kathy (Lee Remick), but once young Damien (Harvey Stephens) reaches his seventh year, things get messy. People around the child die gruesomely, raising Thorn’s suspicions, and then a crazed priest tries to convince the ambassador his “son” is an inhuman beast sired by a jackal.
The beauty of the premise, in terms of generating spooky excitement, is the implication that Satan has both an endless supply of minions and nearly limitless power. Furthermore, the biggest challenge to embedding the antichrist in society is the possibility that someone might take Damien out before he’s old enough to defend himself. That last bit creates a potent moral dilemma for Peck’s character.
Even though the plot crumbles under scrutiny, the movie’s operatic death scenes are enjoyably preposterous (“It’s all for you, Damien!”), and the made-up mythology (e.g., “the seven daggers of Meddigo”) casts an engrossing spell. Peck anchors the picture with anguished determination, while Leo McKern is memorably intense as the dude who says Damien’s gotta die, David Warner adds an enjoyable presence as a conspiracy-minded photographer, and Billie Whitelaw is all kinds of creepy as Damien’s nanny. With respect to Donner, who manages pace and tone expertly, and DP Gilbert Taylor, who provides a master class in the use of filters, the movie’s VIP is Goldsmith. His Oscar-winning score uses eerie chants such as “Ave Satani!” (Latin for “Hail Satan!”) to infuse the picture with palpable menace. His music is the film’s dark heart.
One could argue that the picture’s first sequel, Damien—Omen II, actually makes more narrative sense than its predecessor, inasmuch as teenaged Damien’s circumstances seem better suited to future global conquest; Damien (played in the follow-up by Jonathan Scott-Taylor) accepts his destiny while being raised by his uncle (William Holden), a corporate giant whose empire the antichrist stands to inherit. Alas, Damien is less exciting than the previous picture. It’s not as if Bernhard and co. suddenly decided to take the franchise seriously, but director Don Taylor lacks Donner’s crowd-pleasing flair and Holden, though always watchable, is very much in paycheck mode, whereas Peck committed to the silliness of The Omen. Having said that, the perfectly cast Scott-Taylor is quite disturbing as he grows more and more comfortable in his unholy skin, and the death scene involving an icy lake is genuinely frightening; the scene might even surpass the gruesome kills that made the first Omen notorious. One great scene, alas, does not make a great picture. Neither does behind-the-scenes turmoil. British director Mike Hodges was discharged partway through production and replaced with American journeyman Taylor.
The original Omen series concluded with The Final Conflict (1981), a grisly installment featuring Sam Neill as grown-up Damien trying to prevent the Second Coming, although a quasi-related telefilm called Omen IV: The Awakening followed ten years later. The original film was pointlessly remade in 2006, and a dreary prequel, The First Omen, appeared in 2024.
The Omen: GROOVY
Damien—Omen II: FUNKY
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Night of the Lepus (1972)
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Wanda Nevada (1979)
Friday, April 22, 2011
Cuba (1979)
Thursday, April 21, 2011
The Brotherhood of Satan (1971)
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
California Split (1974)
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
The Projectionist (1971)
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Hunting Party (1971)
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Coffy (1973)
Coffy: FUNKY
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Breezy (1973)
Friday, April 15, 2011
Lady Ice (1973)
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Last Rebel (1971)
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Running (1979)
Monday, April 11, 2011
The Wind and the Lion (1975)
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Joe Kidd (1972)
Possibly Clint Eastwood’s least interesting Western, this threadbare action flick has an impressive pedigree—celebrated novelist Elmore Leonard wrote the screenplay, and macho-cinema veteran John Sturges, of The Magnificent Seven fame, directed. Despite the participation of these boldfaced names plus that of Robert Duvall, who plays the heavy, Joe Kidd tells a forgettable story unimaginatively, so it’s only watchable because of production values, star power, Lalo Schifrin’s assertive score, and Bruce Surtees’s robust cinematography. Also working in the movie’s favor is brevity, since Joe Kidd runs just 88 minutes. After a lugubrious first act, the story gets going when rapacious developer Frank Harlan (Duvall) hires former bounty hunter Joe Kidd (Eastwood) to track Mexican revolutionary Luis Chama (John Saxon), whose rabble-rousing has interfered with Harlan’s schemes. Beyond some minor drama involving Joe’s shifting allegiances, there’s not much more to the plot, so lots of screen time gets consumed by macho posturing and lengthy sequences of characters stalking each other. A probing exploration of frontier morality this is not. One can find glimmers of Leonard’s signature pulpy style in Kidd’s bitchy dialogue, but while the best Leonard-derived Westerns have rock-solid conceits (see both versions of 3:10 to Yuma), the storyline of Joe Kidd is leisurely and unfocused, with characterizations—usually a Leonard strength—given depressingly short shrift.
The movie looks good enough with Surtees behind the lens, though it seems he was asked to light sets more brightly than he usually does and he’s hampered by Sturges’s stodgy compositions. As for the actors, Eastwood conjures a few mildly amusing tough-guy moments, for instance when his character casually sips beer while watching a shootout. Duvall does what he can with a role so trite and underwritten it would stifle any actor, though his trope of mispronuncing the name of Saxon’s character conveys an appropriate level of arrogance. The wildly miscast Saxon snarls lines through a silly Spanish accent, and he also fails to demonstrate the charisma one might expect from a grassroots leader—one imagines that Leonard envisioned a more nuanced portrayal. Adding minor colors to the movie’s canvas are Paul Koslo, Don Stroud, and James Wainwright, who play nasty hired guns. Anyway, while some of the shootouts in Joe Kidd are moderately entertaining, the fact that such incidental details as the use of unusual firearms and an appearance by Dick Van Patten as a hotel clerk stick in the memory more than the main narrative underscore why the watchword here is unremarkable.
Joe Kidd: FUNKY