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

. . . And Justice for All (1979)

          After a spectacular run in the early ’70s, Al Pacino slid into a long period of mediocrity beginning with 1977’s racecar-themed dud Bobby Deerfield and continuing with this chaotic comedy-drama. Although Justice did okay at the box office and earned two Oscar nominations (including one for Pacino), it’s a perplexing mixture of farce and social commentary. Pacino plays Arthur Kirkland, a Baltimore lawyer described by everyone around him as both an exceptional litigator and a paragon of legal ethics. Yet we never actually see Kirkland do his job well—instead, he regularly breaks confidentiality, fights with judges, and loses cases. In striving to define Kirkland as a moral island in a sea of corruption, screenwriters Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson ended up treating the character as a symbol of righteous indignation rather than a flesh-and-blood person. Worse, their narrative is contrived and overstuffed.

          The story proper begins when a hard-driving judge, Henry Fleming (John Forsythe), is accused of rape. For convoluted reasons, Fleming asks Kirkland to represent him, even though they’re bitter enemies. Kirkland takes the case because he needs a favorable ruling from Fleming in order to exonerate a wrongly imprisoned client. Other plot elements include a judge contemplating suicide, a lawyer going insane because he helped a killer avoid prosecution, and a transvestite living in terror at the prospect of prison. Funny stuff, right? The fact that Curtin and Levinson treat this dark material with sitcom-style dialogue feels cheap and distasteful, especially since the film’s dramatic scenes work so much better than the comedy bits.

          In particular, the interaction between Forsythe and Pacino, two actors with completely different styles, is surprisingly interesting: Forsythe infuses his customary elegant reserve with an undercurrent of hateful menace, so Pacino’s exasperation in Forsythe’s presence is believable. In fact, all of the movie’s performances are good, with Christine Lahti, Lee Strasberg, and especially Jeffrey Tambor giving formulaic characters a degree of flesh-and-blood reality. However, the great Jack Warden is underused as the suicidal judge, because he’s mostly stuck performing stupid comedy like a wild helicopter ride that, one presumes, was meant to be outrageously funny.

          Director Norman Jewison handles individual scenes with his usual skill, but no filmmaker could stitch these discordant pieces together into a coherent whole. Plus, among its myriad other flaws, Justice is arguably the movie that introduced the world to Screamin’ Al, the latter-day Pacino performance style distinguished by vein-popping volume. “Out of order? You’re out of order!” Indeed you are, sir.

. . . And Justice for All: FUNKY

High Anxiety (1977)

          After striking out with Silent Movie (1976), which was a moderate success but still a huge comedown commercially and critically from the twin 1974 hits Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, comedy auteur Brooks drifted back to the sweet spot, more or less, for High Anxiety, a send-up of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense classics. Though High Anxiety has some terrific moments, and despite Brooks’ obvious affection and respect for Hitchcock’s movies, High Anxiety lacks both the manic energy of Saddles and the sweetness of Frankenstein. Plus, by this point in Brooks’ career, the feces jokes were starting to get out of hand, which is indicative that the creative well was starting to run dry.

          The picture’s biggest minus is the presence of Brooks in the leading role as a shrink who must overcome his personal phobias in order to expose corruption at a psychiatric hospital. For although High Anxiety actually has a strong narrative, comparatively speaking, Brooks’ tendency toward overacting makes it hard to develop the emotional investment a subtler actor could engender. It’s true that Brooks gives a much better performance in High Anxiety than he did in Silent Movie, but he’s still the weakest link in terms of onscreen talent.

          Notwithstanding these shortcomings, High Anxiety has many bright spots, including the delightful scene of corrupt psychiatrist Harvey Korman torturing a patient by pretending to be a werewolf, Cloris Leachman’s go-for-broke performance as a nutjob nurse with a bullet bra and a mustache, and Brooks’ lounge-lizard rendition of the movie’s ridiculous theme song (classic line: “Oh—‘xiety!”). For movie buffs, it’s also a hoot to see future director Barry Levinson (who co-wrote this movie) acting in the film’s requisite homage to Psycho’s shower scene. Brooks regular Madeline Kahn is mostly wasted, although she gets to look gorgeous in the thankless role of a seductive/troubled blonde in the Hitchock mode.

          Had this movie been made by anyone else, and had it featured a proper actor in the leading role, High Anxiety might have been embraced by audiences for its easygoing silliness. But since it represents such a big comedown from its predecessors, and since Brooks’ front-and-center role screams of megalomania, it’s merely an enjoyable but minor entry in an important filmography.

High Anxiety: FUNKY