Story of a Woman (1970)

          According to actor Robert Stack, one of the perks Universal employed while persuading him to star in the series The Name of the Game was the opportunity to headline one theatrical feature a year. Hollywood being Hollywood, only one such feature materialized even tough Game ran for three seasons. Given the uninteresting nature of that one feature, however, things probably worked out for the best. Written and directed by Leonardo Bercovici—a studio-era talent who thrived in the 1940s, lost a decade to the anticommunist blacklist, and never fully rebuilt his career afterward—Story of a Woman is a laughably trite soap opera. One can only imagine how old-fashioned this seemed to audiences when it was released in 1970, especially since the picture was lensed while LBJ was still president (as evidenced by the president’s photo on the wall of a set representing a U.S. embassy).
          Stack’s involvement notwithstanding, the real star of the piece is Swedish actress (and frequent Bergman collaborator) Bibi Andersson. She plays Karin, a Swedish aspiring pianist who meets suave medical student Marco (James Farentino) in Rome. They enjoy a hot romance until Karin discovers that Marco is married. Heartbroken, Karin retreats to Sweden, where she eventually meets amiable American diplomat David (Stack). The couple marries and raises a daughter until, inevitably, David’s work brings the family to Rome, where Karin once again crosses paths with Marco. Nothing remotely surprising happens in Story of a Woman, and the narrative’s major would-be plot twist is so abrupt and convenient that it plays like a parody of melodrama instead of actual melodrama.
          Not much can be said about Bercovici’s directorial style, since his pacing is sluggish and his visuals have the flat quality of bad episodic television. The American/Italian coproduction also bears the hallmarks of an insufficient budget, thanks to stock-footage aerial shots and, in one scene, a distracting cut during a rear-projection shot that amusingly presages a jokey rear-projection scene in Airplane! (1980) featuring . . . Robert Stack. In lieu of cinematic and/or narrative interest, Story of a Woman offers little to entice the viewer except a plaintive score by John Williams. Farentino is genuinely terrible here, whispering whole swaths of dialogue and embarrassing himself while trying to convey overpowering emotion. Andersson, unsurprisingly, fares much better, but even though her scene work is consistently believable, she’s hamstrung by Bercovici’s enervated scripting. As for Stack, he’s way out of his element. Watchable whenever he plays intense characters, he’s as compelling as lint in the role of a sensitive everyman. 

Story of a Woman: FUNKY

Le Magnifique (1973)

          How silly is Le Magnifique, a comedic French/Italian riff on the secret-agent genre? A description of the opening scene should answer that question. First, a man steps into a phone booth. Then villains in a helicopter use giant pincers to lift the booth. Next the villains drop the booth into open water, where it settles next to a cage containing a shark. Divers install a chute connecting the booth to the shark enclosure, then release the shark to attack the guy in the booth. A charitable reading of Le Magnifique would denote that scene as a droll satire on the absurdly baroque violence in secret-agent stories. A less charitable reading? Childish inanity. While Le Magnifique eventually manifests a secondary storyline that is more palatable than dopey spoofery, viewers have to power through lots of tomfoolery in order to enjoy stronger elements.

          Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as both Bob Saint-Clar, a lethal stud in the James Bond tradition, and François Merlin, the shlub who writes quickie novels about Bob Saint-Clar. The Bob storyline involves the usual battle against a ruthless nemesis with an army of henchmen. The other storyline tracks François’s growing disenchantment with his pulp-writer lifestyle, plus his involvement with beautiful neighbor Christine (Jacqueline Bisset). She’s working on a degree in sociology and she’s intrigued by the popularity of schlock novels. As the movie progresses, François uses an in-progress manuscript to lampoon aspects of his real life, so Christine becomes Bob’s adoring companion and François’s condescending publisher morphs into the villain who makes Bob’s life difficult. The most imaginative bits of Le Magnifique jump back and forth between the everyday world and the realm of François’s aspirational fantasies. Because the movie’s premise is that François knows his novels are ridiculous, there’s no limit to how outrageous Bob’s exploits can become. At various times, this results in over-the-top gore, leering shots of Bisset running in slow motion, and broad-comedy slapstick.

          Le Magnifique is the kind of lighthearted movie that tries to get by on density and pace—so many noisy things happen in such quick succession that viewers are discouraged from thinking too deeply about characterizations and narrative logic. This frenetic approach works occasionally, but the fantasy scenes get so goofy and repetitive they lose their charm more rapidly than the “real” scenes. Naturally, one’s tolerance for this sort of material depends on one’s familiarity with and/or affection toward the secret-agent genre (spoofs of which were hardly in short supply by the time Le Magnifique was made). Yet the picture boasts enough colorful production design and inviting location photography to provide a candy-coated veneer, and both leading actors understood the assignment. Bisset is dazzlingly pretty even as she struggles to surmount the degrading aspects of her role, and Belmondo has a blast sending up his Mr. Cool image. Le Magnifique also has a solid behind-the-scenes pedigree: writers Philippe de Broca (who directed), Jean-Paul Rappeneau, and Francis Veber all earned Oscar nominations during their careers.

          FYI, this picture is only tangentially related to the prior Broca/Belmondo collaboration That Man from Rio (1964), another spoof of spy flicks; presumably Le Magnifique was retitled That Man from Acapulco in some markets to piggyback on goodwill toward the earlier movie.

Le Magnifique: FUNKY

Have a Nice Weekend (1975)

Here’s the yawn-inducing plot of no-budget/no-name horror dud Have a Nice Weekend—several people visiting a remote island in the Northeast get preyed upon by a mysterious killer. Yep that’s it, notwithstanding superficial references to a Vietnam vet suffering PTSD, romantic partners sparring with each other, and other random elements. Even describing the people who appear onscreen as characters requires a flexible definition of that word, seeing as how the behavior in the movie ranges from idiotic to inexplicable. Much of the running time gets wasted on amateurish vignettes of folks walking through autumnal forests, exchanging inane chitty-chat, or both. Occasionally a murder happens, but it’s impossible to care about the victims, and the killer’s identity, when revealed, is wholly arbitrary. Yet Have a Nice Weekend contains exactly one so-bad-it’s-good sequence, during which the cast gathers around a corpse to spew vacuous dialogue. Here’s a sample. “I don’t know,” the first guy says, “this looks pretty serious.” The second guy replies: “He’s dead!” Then the first guy fires back: “I can see that he’s dead!” You get the idea. Were one to strain to find something praiseworthy, cinematographer Robert Ipcar frames a few pleasant angles of people surrounded by fall foliage, but multicolored leaves should not provide more interest than a body count. Weirdly, John Byrum has the lead writing credit on this embarrassment even though his other 1975 releases were the legit features Inserts (which he wrote and directed) and Mahogany (which he cowrote). Byrum appears to be the only Have a Nice Weekend participant to achieve much of note.

Have a Nice Weekend: LAME

Teenager (1974)

          More admirable for what it attempts than for what it achieves, Teenager is not even remotely the movie suggested by its poster and title. Instead, this is a lurid but fairly serious-minded story about the risks an obsessive low-budget filmmaker takes while trying to capture onscreen realism. On a thematic level, Teenager is something of a precursor to Richard Rush’s outrageous The Stunt Man (1980), even though Teenager was made with a fraction of the cash and skill brought to bear on Rush’s epic. Providing another link between the pictures, Teenager follows the production of a biker flick helmed by a guy who resembles Roger Corman—the low-budget legend who worked alongside Rush in the biker-movie trenches at American International Pictures during the ’60s. As the preceding suggests, the more one knows about the cinema-history context surrounding Teenager, the more intriguing the film becomes. Considered out of context, it is much less appealing.
          The movie opens with Charlie (Joe Warfield) trying to film a car chase while steering a van down a cliffside road, leading to a fatal crash. Then Charlie narrates from beyond the grave, flashing back in time to explain how he met his dramatic fate. The journey begins when Charlie woos a female financier who demands sex in exchange for the $50,000 Charlie needs to shoot an exploitation flick about bikers harassing the residents of a small town. The gimmick is that Charlie doesn’t tell the residents what’s happening because he wants actors to spark “real” trouble for the benefit of Charlie’s camera. Eventually the teenager of the title gets involved when local 16-year-old Carey (Andrea Cagan) latches onto the film crew and starts sleeping with one of the actors. Soon afterward, a brawl inside a general store results in a death that forces Charlie to suspend production. The remainder of Teenager explores how far he’ll go to finish his movie.

          Although director/cowriter Gerald Seth Sindell and his crew generate amateurish-looking imagery, presumably because they were under budget/schedule restraints just like the characters in their movie, the storyline’s implications are sufficiently provocative to sustain a measure of interest. And while the script is not much more polished than the physical production, Sindell’s choice to cast a Corman lookalike in the leading role seems ingenious when viewed retrospectively—Teenager provides a twisted image of what happens when nervy filmmakers disregard danger and propriety while trying to generate exciting footage. Devotees of vintage cinema will find much to savor here, from shots of filmmakers operating Arri-S cameras to a glimpse at the façade of Rollins/Joffe Productions’ LA office, and so on. Yet it’s the thematic stuff that lands with the most impact. What is realism? What entitles artists to disrupt everyday life in order to indulge the creative process? Which sacrifices are justified, and which ones cross lines? Added to this mix are nuances related to the Generation Gap, because the clash between sexually precocious Carey and her uptight father has important narrative consequences.
          To be clear, Sindell’s reach exceeds his grasp in countless ways. The script is artless, the characterizations are serviceable, and the shooting style is so rudimentary that one longs for richer coverage and slicker editing. Moreover, the acting runs a dispiriting gamut from adequate to amateurish. In other words, it’s clear why Sindell’s only subsequent feature credit is the abysmal sex comedy H.O.T.S. (1979). That said, he was onto something here, as suggested by the picture’s alternate title, The Real Thing (also the name of a recurring theme song). It’s not common for a grungy flick centering bikers and jailbait to double as a conversation piece, but for those already fascinated by the topics explored here, there’s a lot worth unpacking.

Teenager: GROOVY

Cheering Section (1977)

Only someone determined to consume every teen-sex comedy from the ’70s can muster a reason to endure Cheering Section, which is as unfunny as it is unsexy. Corey (Tom Leindeker) and Jeff (Greg D’Jah) are stars on their high school’s football team. Jeff has a steady thing with the sexually uninhibited Terry (Patricia Michelle), but Corey is stuck in a rut of meaningless hookups until he becomes infatuated with voluptuous new cheerleader Melanie (Rhonda Fox). Most of the film’s “plot” tracks Corey’s unsuccessful attempts to score with Melanie, an endeavor complicated by the fact that her father is the football team’s new coach. Name a dopey signifier found in countless similar movies of the same period, and a pathetic version of that signifier is present in Cheering Section. Bikini-clad cheerleaders washing cars to raise money? An alluring substitute teacher giving a sex-ed lecture? Pranks traded between opposing schools? A romantic dune-buggy ride? Multiple (off-camera) trysts in vans? Each of these elements gets stripped of its lizard-brain appeal thanks to maladroit execution—excepting attractive young actors, everything about Cheering Section is ugly, from the narrative to the jokes to the cinematography to the editing. Cheering Section is also relentlessly demeaning thanks to leering camera angles and Neanderthal “characterizations” such as the desperate young woman known by the moniker “Handjob.” Through most of its lifeless span, Cheering Section drives, in a lackadaisical way, toward the big moment when Melanie puts out, and, by extension, the curvy actress playing Melanie loses her clothes. That this moment never happens—the picture freeze-frames for closing credits just beforehand—affirms why virtually any other activity is a preferable way to spend 84 minutes.

Cheering Section: LAME