The Noah (1975)

          The counterculture era yielded numerous Biblical allegories and nuclear-apocalypse meditations, so The Noah—which combines these tropes—rose from its moment’s zeitgeist. Yet one-time feature director Daniel Bourla took such a bold approach that The Noah straddles the boundary separating conventional narrative from experimental storytelling. It’s not an easy watch. The Noah often feels rudderless because Bourla over-explains certain elements and under-explains others, making some sequences feel repetitive and others superfluous. Nonetheless, The Noah offers an arresting deviation from the norm—the same peculiarity that requires viewers to carefully parse what Bourla’s trying to say is the source of The Noah’s weird power.

          Elegantly shot in moody black and white, the picture begins with middle-aged soldier Noah (Robert Strauss) exiting a raft onto the shore of a tropical island. Discovering an abandoned Japanese encampment, he transforms the facility into a personal shelter and spends a period of days or weeks in lonely silence until a voice speaks to him. Noah begins conversing with an unseen figure whom viewers eventually realize is a figment of the soldier’s imagination. Noah explains to his new companion that they’re the last two survivors of a worldwide nuclear apocalypse. Eventually, Noah and the imaginary figure he names Friday (voiced by Geoffrey Holder) are joined by another imaginary figure, Friday Anne (voiced by Sally Kirkland), who manifests as Friday’s romantic companion. The gist is that Noah contrives people because solitude is driving him mad. Bourla, who cowrote the script with Avraham Heffner, dramatizes this premise episodically until the end of the movie, which is so poetic it elevates everything that preceded.

          Bourla’s nerviest choice, having only one actor onscreen for the film’s entire running time, tethers the audience’s experience of the movie to Noah’s mental state. Yet Bourla’s related decision to portray Friday through POV shots is iffy. Bourla understandably wanted to aim the camera at Strauss during scenes with the unseen Friday, and Strauss handles fourth-wall breaks well. Yet this method creates ambiguity as to whether Friday is imaginary or a supernatural manifestation; additionally, the combination of Holder’s Trinidadian accent and his character’s childlike speech pattern makes the characterization murky. Bourla’s storytelling is more assured during the second half of the picture, when Noah’s imagination creates a world beyond Friday and Friday Anne, although that’s when the movie really drags—The Noah is stronger when it’s stranger.

          Bourla reportedly shot the movie in Puerto Rico circa 1968 but wasn’t able to finance postproduction until the mid-’70s, by which time Strauss had died. Adding to the slow rollout, a legal dispute halted exhibition soon after the first showing, and The Noah went unseen for more than 20 years. Now readily available, it’s a minor but unique artifact from a crucial time in American film, exploring such areas as the relationship between the individual and society; the ineffability of friendship; the dynamic between civilian and military cultures; and, of course, the crisis sparked when nuclear weapons were introduced to the human experience. More admirable than enjoyable, The Noah is a noble venture that rewards patient viewers.

The Noah: GROOVY

Robert Duvall, 1931-2026 & 10 Million Views

          Another important figure from ’70s cinema has left the stage because the great Robert Duvall died on Feb. 15 at the age of 95. Despite hailing from San Diego, Duvall often rendered his best work playing rural characters, and I’m not alone in rating his performances as a faded country singer in Tender Mercies (1983) and a soulful cowboy in the miniseries Lonesome Dove (1989) as his career-best work. Still, Duvall was essential to the ’70s, not least because that’s the era during which he achieved above-the-title billing. Following his indelible debut as sensitive outsider Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Duvall worked prolifically in features and TV until George Lucas cast him in the lead of THX 1138 (1971), which used the reserved side of Duvall’s screen persona to good effect in the context of an Orwellian parable.
          Duvall’s credits across the ’70s are spottier than you might recall (he appeared in a lot of junk), but the highlights are staggering: mob lawyer Tom Hagen in two Godfather pictures, craven TV executive Frank Hackett in Network (1976), and, in a pair of 1979 releases, domineering dad “Bull” Meechum in The Great Santini and crazed air-cavalry commander Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. This handful of performances represents only a portion of the 23 pictures in which Duvall appeared between 1970 and 1979. (To see him shine in less familiar titles, check out his cold-blooded take on a neo-noir protagonist in 1973’s The Outfit, his droll portrayal of Sherlock Holmes sidekick Dr. John Watson in 1974’s The Seven Per-Cent Solution, or his darkly funny bad-guy characterization in 1975’s The Killer Elite.) Consistently imaginative, spontaneous, and unpredictable, Duvall invested a wild range of characters with fiery energy, frequently expressing more with a shrug or a wince than most actors could with a lengthy monologue. At his best, he was mesmerizing and moving in equal measure. RIP.

          In other news, several weeks ago Every ’70s Movie crossed another readership milestone by notching 10 million lifetime views. As I’ve said before, the time readers spend engaging with this blog is a gift for which I’m immeasurably grateful, and even though other projects often keep me away from Every ’70s Movie for extended periods, I always enjoy returning when my schedule allows. Because notching 10 million views is such a big accomplishment, I will probably refrain from updating readers about future milestones until (fingers crossed) lifetime readership reaches the top of another huge mountain. In the meantime, rest assured that it’s my pleasure to welcome everyone who visits this space—and there’s plenty more to come in the future.

New Podcast Interview

          Once again, thanks to North Carolina-based critic and podcaster Adam Long, who graciously hosted me for another conversation about Every '70s Movie. Continuing his exploration of Me Decade pictures that were popular in their day but have since faded into varying degrees of obscurity, Adam tests my knowledge of films including Billy Jack and Willard. How much did I remember about those movies, and, more importantly, how accurate was my memory? Let's find out together! Check here to listen to my new episode of the Adam's Corner podcast.

Walk the Walk (1970)

          Walk the Walk is unusual—it seems improbable there is another grungy movie about a middle-aged Black seminarian forming an intense psychosexual bond with the blowsy white prostitute who feeds his heroin habit. Alas, Walk the Walk bears little resemblance to serious cinematic portrayals of addiction, such as Dusty and Sweets McGee and The Panic in Needle Park, both of which were released in 1971. Bizarrely conceived and cheaply produced, Walk the Walk feels like an exploitation flick even though, in its most interesting moments, the picture endeavors to tell a resonant story about characters trapped in soul-crushing spirals. Walk the Walk is too sloppy to qualify as serious cinema, and too thoughtful to get dismissed as trash. It‘s either schlock with the soul of a real movie, or vice versa.

          Bernie Hamilton, a few years before achieving prominence with a regular gig as a police captain on Starsky & Hutch, stars as Mike, who inherited heroin addiction from his mother and now seeks salvation through religious training. When his usual dealer gets busted, Mike connects with Judy (Honor Lawrence), an aging hooker who sells dope as a side hustle. Immediately taken by Mike’s intelligence and sensitivity, she tries and fails to seduce him, then promises that someday he’ll need to pay for a fix with romance. Had writer-director Jac Zacha found a producer willing to develop this material into a grim character study, Walk the Walk could have become something offbeat and touching. Instead, Zacha hooked up with Kroger Babb, who produced a few social-problem exploitation flicks in the ‘50s; the script Zacha cowrote with Babb pairs the Mike-Judy storyline with silliness involving a Satanic cult, the cartoonishly swishy leader of which recently changed his name from “Big Daddy” to “The Unholy One.”
           Accordingly, viewers intrigued by the Mike-Judy dynamic must slog through a whole lot of nonsense. In one sequence, Judy officiates a hippie wedding (after Judy asks, “Dost thou take this broad to be thy wife,” the groom replies, “I can dig it”). In another sequence, Mike gets chased through a desert by two cultists, leading to a shot of Mike inadvertently ripping the female cultist’s shirt off as she falls from a high hill. (Presumably Babb was eager to juice the picture with nudity, however fleeting.) Adding to the movie's fever-dream quality is a score comprising shapeless acid-rock grooves (as opposed to a proper score that matches the flow of the storyline). And because this is a random ‘70s oddity, the ending is an ambiguous freakout. It’s hard to know whether the makers of Walk the Walk cynically attempted to weave counterculture signifiers into their movie, whether they couldn’t tell bad ideas from good ones, or both.

Walk the Walk: FUNKY

The P.O.W.

          A microbudget antiwar picture that received a limited release, The P.O.W. is presented as a nonfiction portrait of Howie Kaufman, a Vietnam veteran navigating a return to civilian society after a war wound left him paralyzed below the waist. In fact, Howie is an actor, and so are the filmmakers who follow him around. In fact, everyone who crosses paths with Howie onscreen is performing, with the cast comprising non-actors improvising based on prompts from director Philip Dossick. Given that the meandering picture doesn’t really go anywhere, it’s unclear why Dossick chose the mockumentary route, except perhaps to allow for the intrusion of crew members and film equipment into the frame, thereby facilitating loose production. Arguably, a more purposeful application of this style would have used verité technique to sell a narrative that might otherwise feel bogus, or to pull viewers deep into a world most people don’t usually see. Still, contemplating how The P.O.W. might have been more stylistically or thematically grounded serves little purpose because this modest film is what it is.

          At its best, The P.O.W. dramatizes the challenges of its protagonist’s transition. As played by Howard Jahre, Howie Kaufman is a remarkably sane and together dude, given how massively his life was disrupted—viewers learn that Howie worked in sales before getting drafted, and now he’s faced with the difficulty of resuming a career that usually requires constant travel. In one of the picture’s strongest scenes, an executive says he can’t hire Howie because he might have difficulty reaching file-cabinet drawers from a seated position. Equally interesting are vignettes during which friends push Howie to get his life back on track, as if that complicated task can be accomplished at will; in one sharp exchange, Howie tells civilians they can’t comprehend emotions felt during combat. Too often, however, The P.O.W. gets mired in dull hangout scenes, as when Howie plays word games while on a date. Furthermore, cutaways of Dossick reviewing footage in a cutting room add little.

          Still, the movie has good intentions, and the timing of its release is noteworthy—in 1973, the war was still raging, despite Nixon’s pledges s to wind down the conflict, and pacifistic Americans were still figuring out how to hate the war but not the warriors. (For context, The P.O.W. arrived five years before mainstream Hollywood’s first major exploration of this subject matter, Coming Home.) While this may seem like a patronizing way of complimenting the film, there’s a reason Dossick never directed another picture, instead focusing on a writing career that has yielded numerous books and one produced teleplay—despite its abundant compassion, The P.O.W. lacks dramatic energy.

The P.O.W.: FUNKY