The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald (1977)

          A nervy experiment in speculative fiction, this lengthy made-for-television movie imagines what might have happened if Jack Ruby hadn’t killed Lee Harvey Oswald following Oswald’s arrest for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (Interestingly, it’s the third such project, following a 1964 indie movie and a 1967 play, both of which are also named The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, but neither of which were used as source material for this telefilm.) As the title suggests, much of this picture depicts courtroom proceedings, during which such familiar topics as the potential presence of a grassy-knoll shooter and the impossible trajectory of the “magic bullet” are discussed. Before delving too deep, it should be noted that the movie cops out in a big way at the ending, using a convenient narrative contrivance to avoid presenting a verdict. Furthermore, although The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald has nothing approaching the intensity or power of JFK (1991), there’s an unmistakable parallel between this project and Oliver Stone’s controversial movie, so if you only have the appetite for one fictionalized story about whether Oswald acted alone, Stone’s is the better choice.

          The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald opens with historical events strongly suggesting Oswald had the opportunity, if not necessarily the motive, to kill JFK, though the filmmakers deliberately avoid showing the actual shooting. Following Oswald’s arrest, the film makes its big leap by showing Oswald’s infamous perp walk through the Dallas Municipal Building without the Ruby incident, so Oswald (John Pleshette) survives to stand trial. The government assigns Anson Roberts (Ben Gazzara) to prosecute, and flamboyant Matthew Arnold Watson (Lorne Greene) steps forward as defense attorney. Battle lines are drawn quickly. Roberts recognizes the civic benefits of resolving the case definitively and quickly, and Watson hits the same walls encountered by every skeptic who scrutinizes the JFK assassination, because he can’t identify a credible motivation for Oswald and he can’t believe Oswald was such an expert marksman that all three shots discharged from the Texas School Book Depository hit their targets.

          In the film’s most dynamic scene, Watson drags the jury to the depository and has two people, a decorated marksman and an amateur, attempt to re-create Oswald’s alleged shooting pattern while cars filled with mannequins are used to replicate Kennedy’s doomed motorcade. This scene combines logic, research, and style to make a strong argument against the possibility of Oswald acting alone. As with all things related to JFK’s assassination, however, every credible argument has a seemingly credible counter-argument.

          Within these inherently murky parameters, the folks behind The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald do some things well. A scene of Roberts receiving direct pressure from JFK’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, is believable and unnerving; the notion that the government put its hand on the scale to deliver a desired result reverberates for anyone who’s ever questioned the findings of the Warren Commission. Where The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald falters is in the portrayal of Oswald himself. Presenting him as a cipher allows the filmmakers to generate mystery and suspense, but it’s a cheat, since the project’s very title promises insights into Oswald’s psychology. Nonetheless, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald commands a certain measure of attention. The underlying subject matter is fascinating and important, the performances are never less than adequate, and the use of many real artifacts and locations adds gravitas.

The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald: GROOVY

High Velocity (1976)

          If you’re willing to overlook a pointless story and sludgy pacing, you might be able to enjoy some of the surface pleasures in High Velocity, an action thriller shot in the Philippines. Leading man Ben Gazzara and costar Paul Winfield strike up decent male-bonding chemistry during their scenes together as mercenaries on a dangerous mission, and Kennan Wynn conjures a passable degree of intensity playing the obnoxious American businessman whom the missionaries strive to rescue from a jungle hideout. Also contributing more than the movie deserves is composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose incredibly prolific output (he scored five other pictures the same year, including Logan’s Run and The Omen) rarely diminished the quality of his work. Among the major players who fail to impress, Britt Ekland adds nothing to a small role as the wife of Wynn’s character, and director Remi Kramer—well, this was his first and last feature film, so that tells you what you need to know about the caliber of the storytelling. Nonetheless, High Velocity contains an adequate number of action scenes, so every so often the movie rises from its stupor to deliver a fleeting thrill.

          Set in some unnamed corner of the Far East, the picture begins by introducing Andersen (Wynn), a blustery executive who treats his local help terribly and isn’t much kinder to his beautiful trophy wife (Ekland). Militia types kidnap Andersen, so the wife hires Vietnam veteran Baumgartner (Gazzara) to plan a rescue operation. He, in turn, solicits the assistance of former comrade-in-arms Watson (Winfield). Various double-crosses ensue, as does a long trek into remote terrain. Sadly, much of the picture comprises dull scenes of the mercenaries staking out the guerilla’s camp. More lively are bits featuring Andersen in captivity, because his kidnappers force the Ugly American to confront the effects of his company’s imperialism. Excepting the friendship between the two mercenaries, nothing in this picture pings emotionally, and the narrative valleys outnumber the peaks. There’s also the little matter of how the plot doesn’t end up making all that much sense once everything is resolved. Yet somehow the combination of skilled actors in three leading roles and a steady stream of zesty cues from Goldsmith keeps High Velocity borderline watchable.

High Velocity: FUNKY

Bloodline (1979)

          Audrey Hepburn was so selective in the final years of her screen career, often letting years lapse between projects, that it’s disappointing most of her latter-day output is rotten. She returned from a long hiatus to play Maid Marian in Richard Lester’s wonderfully melancholy adventure/romance Robin and Marian (1976), and it was downhill from there, beginning with this overstuffed potboiler adapted from one of Sidney Sheldon’s lowest-common-denominator novels. As always, Hepburn comes across well, her natural elegance and poise allowing her to rise above even the silliest scenes, but Bloodline does nothing to embellish her well-deserved reputation as one of the most magical performers ever to step in front of a movie camera.

          The story’s hackneyed inciting incident is the death of a pharmaceutical tycoon named Sam Roffe, which pits his only child, Elizabeth Roffe (Hepburn), against myriad cousins who want to sell the family’s massive international operation for some quick cash. Naturally, each of the cousins is some gradation of Eurotrash, plagued by adulterous entanglements, crushing debts, impending scandals, or all of the above. Just as naturally, Elizabeth is the only saint in the family, so not only does she block attempts to liquidate the company—the better to honor her beloved father’s wishes—but she becomes an active participant in the investigation of her father’s death. Oh, and during all of this, she falls in love with an executive at the family company, chain-smoking smoothie Rhys Williams (Ben Gazzara at his most intolerably smug). Yet that’s not quite enough material for Sheldon’s voracious narrative appetite, so Bloodline also follows myriad subplots relating to the cousins. Ivo (Omar Sharif) tries to keep his wife and three children separate from his mistress and his other three children. Alec (James Mason) digs himself into a deep hole with gambling losses, even as his beautiful younger wife, Vivian (Michelle Phillips), whores herself out to placate creditors. And so on. All the while, intrepid European cop Max (Gert Fröbe, the Artist Forever Known as Goldfinger) pieces clues together with the help of a supercomputer—as in, during many of his scenes, Max chats with the computer, which responds in a mechanized voice.

          Anyway, let’s see, what are we forgetting from this recitation of the film’s major elements? Oh, right—the subplot about the bald psycho killing women in snuff films.

          Yeah, Bloodline is that sort of picture, a semi-serious but simple-minded piece of escapism that periodically and ventures into the realm of exploitation cinema, resulting in dissonance. Picture a Ross Hunter movie suddenly morphing into a William Castle production, and you get the idea. To be clear, director Terence Young does his usual slick work within scenes, but the task of reconciling all of Bloodline’s incompatible elements would have defeated any filmmaker. Still, it’s impossible to completely dismiss Bloodline for a number of reasons, Hepburn’s presence being the most important of those. Furthermore, the cast is rich with talent, and Ennio Morricone’s score is characteristically adventurous, at one point going full-bore into a Giorgio Moroder-type disco groove. There’s always something colorful happening in Bloodline, good taste and logic be damned.

Bloodline: FUNKY

Pursuit (1972)

          By the time this made-for-TV thriller aired in late 1972, the project’s writer-director, Michael Crichton, was already on his way to becoming a pop-culture phenomenon. Three of the doctor-turned-novelist’s books had been adapted to theatrical features, and Pursuit began his side career as a filmmaker—which subsequently peaked with the hits Westworld (1973) and Coma (1978) before losing momentum. Later, Crichton found his niche as one of the world’s best-selling authors, and, in the hands of other directors, some of his books became massive hits, notably Jurassic Park (1993). He even found time to write original movie scripts and to create the blockbuster TV series ER (1994-2009). Considering the whole of Crichton’s Hollywood career, Pursuit represents a humble early effort. It’s an adequate little potboiler that comes together nicely at the end, despite bargain-basement production values, but it’s unlikely that Pursuit would be remembered today if not for Crichton’s involvement.
          Based on a novel called Binary, which Crichton wrote under one of his many pseudonyms, Pursuit follows a government agent’s surveillance of a potential domestic terrorist. During the first half of the picture, intrepid Steven Graves (Ben Gazzara) tracks the movements of right-wing nutjob James Wright (E.G. Marshall) without knowing exactly what Wright plans to do. During the second half of the picture, once Graves discovers that Wright has built a complex chemical weapon that he plans to detonate in downtown San Diego while the president is visiting the city, Graves and his colleagues use psychology, strategy, and tenacity to prevent Wright’s weapon from detonating.

          Throughout Crichton’s career, he was better at plotting than characterization, and his stories were often convoluted and far-fetched. All of those shortcomings manifest here. What carries the day, as per the norm, is the novelty and strength of Crichton’s concepts. In Pursuit, he dramatizes the ease with which a well-funded criminal seizes dangerous chemicals, and then meticulously illustrates the simple techniques by which those chemicals are transformed into a homemade WMD. So even if the people in the movie are familiar types—Graves is a brilliant hothead, Wright is a dignified psychotic—Crichton puts all the pieces in place for a fun ticking-clock finale. (Never one for subtlety, Crichton actually superimposes countdowns over many scenes.) And while the picture’s visuals are quite bland, the quality of acting is strong, with the leads abetted by supporting players including Martin Sheen, William Windom, and Joseph Wiseman. Just don’t probe the logic of the piece too closely.

Pursuit: FUNKY

The Death of Richie (1977)

          “Ripped from the headlines” TV movies have gotten a bad rap over the years—and deservedly so. After all, most such projects combine sensationalism and superficiality to create stupidity. Yet the law of averages ensures that some timely telefilms are bound to be worthwhile. One example is The Death of Richie, the respectable dramatization of a grim real-life incident during which a suburban father shot his own teenaged son to death. Like so many hand-wringing TV dramas of the ’70s, The Death of Richie illustrates the plight of parents whose teenagers become drug addicts. Doe-eyed ’70s dreamboat Robby Benson stars as Richie Werner, the oldest of two sons in a middle-class American family. Much to the chagrin of his repressed parents, George (Ben Gazzara) and Carol (Eileen Brennan), Richie runs with a gang of dropouts who abuse booze, grass, and pills. Tortured by shyness and upset by his inability to score with girls, Richie even builds a hidden room inside the Werner home, converting a crawlspace into a drug lair complete with blacklight posters and a strobe lamp.

          Once Richie starts getting into trouble with the law, George intervenes by helping Richie get a job, and Carol joins a support group for parents in similar situations. Yet none of the family’s efforts impede Richie’s downward spiral. Eventually, violent clashes occur, with Richie threatening his father at one point by brandishing a pair of scissors. The parents seek an order of protection, deepening the schism with their son, and the tension culminates during a deadly showdown in the family basement.

          In addition to smooth direction by small-screen workhorse Paul Wendkos, The Death of Richie benefits from methodical storytelling. Cause-and-effect relationships between events are clear, so the dissipation of Richie’s mental state is tethered to the frustration his parents feel as they exhaust options for fixing their problem. Benson employs his signature sensitivity to convey the angst of a young man who can’t connect with other people, and Gazzara gives uncharacteristically nuanced work as a man struggling to expand his emotional vocabulary. (Like costars Charles Fleischer and Clint Howard, Brennan gets stuck with one of the film’s underwritten supporting roles.) The Death of Richie gets a bit long-winded at times, and someone should have stopped Benson from doing cutesy movie-star impressions during a lighthearted scene. Generally speaking, however, this is tough stuff made with sincerity and thoughtfulness, sort of a nihilistic alternative to the wholesome Afterschool Special approach.

The Death of Richie: GROOVY

Opening Night (1977)

          Indie-cinema godhead John Cassavetes cranked out his singular movies at a steady pace throughout the ’70s, culminating with this epic rumination on the dissipation of a middle-aged woman’s psyche—not be confused with the director’s previous epic rumination on the dissipation of a middle-aged woman’s psyche, A Woman Under the Influence (1974). Yet while that film earned two Academy Award nominations and is now considered something of a zenith achievement for Cassavetes’ improvisational style, Opening Night is easily the filmmaker’s most interminable movie of the ’70s, running a bloated 144 minutes without ever once revealing to the audience what’s causing the central character’s emotional spiral. As with all of Cassavetes’ films, Opening Night has many champions (the picture earned two Golden Globe nominations), but it’s telling that the picture was such a huge flop during initial engagements that it didn’t receive a proper theatrical release until the ’80s. By the time Opening Night was completed, Cassavetes had already made five previous auteur pieces laden with shapeless angst, including two starring his real-life spouse Gena Rowlands, so the public appetite for the director’s uniquely self-indulgent art had clearly been exhausted.

          Rowlands plays an actress named Myrtle, who’s doing out-of-town previews for an upcoming Broadway show. Following a performance one night, Myrtle encounters a loving but troubled fan (Laura Johnson). Immediately thereafter, the fan dies in a traffic accident that Myrtle witnesses. This event spins Myrtle into a series of meltdowns, from alcoholic binges offstage to bizarre ad-libs onstage. Myrtle’s behavior worries the show’s costar (Cassavetes), playwright (Joan Blondell), and producer (Ben Gazzara), among others. The majority of Opening Night comprises dull, repetitive scenes of Rowlands acting strangely; sometimes she seems obnoxious, and sometimes she seems unhinged. Viewers are also subjected to excerpts from the trite play that Myrtle’s rehearsing. Whereas A Woman Under the Influence slid its title character’s dissipation into a narrative about a marriage under stress, Opening Night fails to surround Myrtle with formidable characters, so it’s as if everyone else in the movie exists only to watch Rowlands’ flamboyant acting. (Incidental scenes of Gazzara’s character with his wife, played by Zohra Lampert, don’t amount to much.) In the end, Opening Night seems more like a parody of Cassavetes’ more-is-more aesthetic than an actual example of the filmmaker’s craft.

Opening Night: LAME

Husbands (1970)

          Actor/director John Cassavetes’ cycle of semi-improvised movies reached a new level with Husbands, a showpiece for the acting of Casssavetes and his pals Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. By melding his signature style of spontaneous performance with the specific energies of established screen personalities, Cassavetes achieved a noteworthy synthesis of Hollywood artifice and verité grunginess. Yet while the picture is historically significant as a formative step for the burgeoning indie-cinema aesthetic—of which Cassavetes is now considered the de facto godfather—Husbands is an acquired taste. Like all of the director’s improv-driven pictures, Husbands is an overlong and repetitive survey of unappealing behavior, presenting endless scenes of self-involved people groping with language and violent physicality as they strive to articulate petty anxieties. The problem, as always, is that Cassavetes fails to explore his fascinations in a balanced way, so there’s no real context around the characters. Thus, viewers are subjected to a world in which men have tacit license to follow every whim, no matter how injurious the results might be to other people—and yet viewers are expected to sympathize with these boors.

          The story is so simple that the film could (and should) have run 90 minutes instead of nearly 140. After a close friend dies of a sudden heart attack, buddies Frank (Falk), Gus (Cassavetes), and Harry (Gazzara) go on a drunken bender as they wrestle with the shocking reminder of their mortality. The first half of the movie comprises the pals meandering from the funeral to various New York dives, drinking and singing and whining all the way. The second half of the picture begins when Harry fights with his wife and impulsively decides to fly to England. Concerned for Harry’s emotional welfare, Frank and Gus tag along, so the pals end up in a London hotel with three women they pick up in a bar. And so it goes from there, up until the inconclusive ending.

          Fans of Cassavetes’ work generally single out the freshness of the acting as a core virtue, but the performances by the three leads in Husbands hardly seem praiseworthy. While it’s true that Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara generate verisimilitude by channeling the sloppy way real people move and talk, there’s a reason screen acting generally involves shrinking normal human behavior down to illustrative indicators—watching “real” people in real time is boring. And that, from my perspective, is the best possible adjective for describing Husbands. Sure, critics have spent decades talking about how the picture captures the unchained id of the male animal, blah-blah-blah, and there’s a kernel of truth within that interpretation. After all, the characters in Husbands are as likely to break down in tears as they are to physically and/or verbally abuse women, so there’s nothing flattering in the picture Cassavetes paints. Whether there’s anything interesting in the picture, however, is another matter.

Husbands: FUNKY

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

          Stepping outside his comfort zone of intimate character dramas, writer-director John Cassavetes took a stab at genre filmmaking with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, which takes place in the criminal underworld of Los Angeles. Regular Cassavetes collaborator Ben Gazzara stars as Cosmo Vittelli, the proprietor of a dingy strip club. After incurring a large gambling debt he can’t repay, Cosmo agrees to murder an Asian criminal on behalf of the mobsters holding his marker, ostensibly to erase his debt. Unbeknownst to Cosmo, the mobsters plan to take him out after the hit.

          The story is simple enough to generate pulpy tension, but Cassavetes explores the narrative through his signature prism of on-the-fly filmmaking and semi-improvisational acting. In fact, the indie auteur’s first cut ran an excruciating 135 minutes, thanks to unnecessary discursions like vignettes of performances at Cosmo’s club. Cassavetes released the original version for one disastrous week in New York during 1976, then pulled it from exhibition and chopped the movie down to 109 minutes for a better-received 1978 re-release. Today, both cuts of the picture are held in high esteem, largely due to the widespread critical contention that everything Cassavettes did was surpassingly wonderful.

          Assessing the 1978 cut, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie offers an interesting spin on the usual tropes of crime pictures. Intense realism heightens the drama in pivotal scenes, because Cosmo comes across as a completely believable character. Therefore, even though he’s responsible for his own problems because he arrogantly places bets he can’t cover, it’s easy to feel sympathy for his plight. (That’s different from actually liking the character, of course, since Cosmo is a sexist pig.) Nonetheless, there’s a strange disconnect between the film’s simplistic action scenes, which include a tense foot chase in an abandoned building, and the picture’s loose conversational sequences. Every time it seems like Cassavetes is about to step on the gas, he slows down to admire the scenery.

          Another jarring element is the overpowering ugliness of the milieu. One doesn’t expect much dignity in a story about killers and strippers, but Cassavetes seems to revel in the unattractiveness of supporting actors with the same zeal he brings to close-ups of strippers’ breasts. There was always more than a bit of the voyeur in Cassavetes’ directorial style, but since the storyline of Chinese Bookie gave him license to film sleaze, one senses a lurid fascination with sex and violence. (For instance, Cassavetes cast pin-up models and strippers for key female roles instead of hiring proper actors.)

          Still, one could argue that Cassavetes was simply capturing the right atmosphere for his story, and, indeed, Chinese Bookie has a seedy vibe of which Scorsese might be envious. It’s not, however, a particularly well-made film. Seeing how poorly Cassavetes handles standard-issue scenes like shoot-outs reveals the crude nature of his visual artistry, even though his ability to create a comfortable working atmosphere for actors is on ample display.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie: FUNKY

Saint Jack (1979)

          After suffering one of the most precipitous falls from grace of any ’70s auteur, Peter Bogdanovich returned to his roots by making a low-budget Roger Corman production of such intelligence and quality that it put him back on the map the same way his first Corman production, Targets (1968), launched his career. Informed by Bogdanovich’s love for old Hollywood but also very modern in content and frankness, Saint Jack feels like the sort of movie John Huston would have made around this period had his favorite leading man, Humphrey Bogart, survived into the ’70s. The protagonist, Jack Flowers, is like a seedier version of Bogart’s Casablanca character, Rick Blaine—an opportunistic American who gets drawn into a crisis of conscience while living abroad.

          The setting is early-’70s Singapore, and Jack is a smooth-talking operator who runs errands for crooks and supervises a loose network of prostitutes catering to foreign travelers. Popular among many of the locals, Jack’s got the run of the island nation, so long as he stays under the radar; Singapore pimps occasionally threaten him for encroaching on their turf, but the fact that Jack doesn’t have an actual brothel keeps him safe.

          Based on a novel by Paul Theroux and filmed in Bogdanovich’s inimitably crisp style, all purposeful long takes and rat-a-tat dialogue, the movie gradually evolves from a pure character study to something of a thriller, tracking Jack’s ascension over the course of several years. He builds relationships with Pacific islanders including a Sri Lankan prostitute (Monkia Subramaniam) and a soft-spoken British bookkeeper (Denholm Elliott), invites violent reprisal by opening a short-lived whorehouse, and gets drawn into shady intrigue by a mysterious American (played by Bogdanovich). Through it all, Jack keeps his amiable sense of humor and maintains a fervent sense of loyalty to his friends; he’s the fascinating paradox of a moral man plying an immoral trade.

          Bogdanovich keeps Gazzara’s usual smugness and tendency toward boisterous over-acting in check, helping the actor give one of the most restrained and effective performances of his career. Particularly in the sly close shots that Bogdanovich creates by having Gazzara walk toward the camera or having the camera slide up to the actor, we’re able to see the play of subtle emotion across Gazzara’s face as he calculates the odds of any particular action. He’s a gambler, but never reckless, and he’s always willing to pay the price when a bluff doesn’t work.

          Saint Jack is filled with interesting textures, from the sweaty vitality of the location photography to the caustic wit of the dialogue, and there’s an interesting mix of unfamiliar Eastern faces and recognizable Western actors (including Joss Ackland and George Lazenby). The film isn’t perfect, suffering minor flaws like a lack of clarity about the passage of time, but it delivers in every way that matters: entertaining dramaturgy, meticulous characterization, provocative moral dilemmas.

Saint Jack: RIGHT ON

The Neptune Factor (1972)

The ’70s generated plenty of “bad” movies that are fun to watch, and on first blush one might expect The Neptune Factor to fall into that category. A thriller about the crusade to rescue a group of people from an underwater research station surrounded by giant sea creatures, the picture should offer a kitschy sci-fi spin on The Poseidon Adventure. Not so. Instead of campy melodrama in the Irwin Allen mode, this interminable flick features bored actors reciting pointless dialogue on cheap sets, plus ridiculous “special effects” shots of real fish swimming around poorly photographed miniature models of submersibles. Were it not for the presence of recognizable actors, this would seem like an inept student film that somehow found its way into the mainstream marketplace. The plot, which makes the picture sound much more exciting than it actually is, involves an undersea lab getting dislodged from its normal position by an undersea earthquake. A high-tech submarine is dispatched to rescue (or recover) the scientists in the lab, resulting in a handful of close encounters with “giant” sea creatures living in the ocean’s lower depths. Painfully boring on its way to becoming absolutely forgettable, The Neptune Factor stars a quartet of actors not generally known for safeguarding their cinematic legacies: Ernest Borgnine, Ben Gazzara, Yvette Mimieux, and Walter Pidgeon. Suffice it to say that none surmounts the worthless material, although Borgnine tries to keep things watchable with his usual indiscriminate intensity. The other performers merely sleepwalk through the stupidity, although it’s amusing to watch Gazarra strut around with his signature smugness—what, exactly, is there to be smug about when you’re sharing the screen with the residents of a household aquarium?

The Neptune Factor: SQUARE

Capone (1975)

Producer Roger Corman milked the gangster genre relentlessly with innumerable rip-offs of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), so by the mid-’70s he was still cranking out flicks about Depression-era goons blasting each other with Tommy guns. Case in point: Capone, a mediocre but watchable attempt to blend the rat-a-tat action of old Warner Bros. gangster flicks with a few stylistic nods to The Godfather (1972). As directed by pulp specialist Steve Carver, who knew how to keep things moving even if logic got crushed along the way, Capone presents a string of zippy episodes tracking the ascension of notorious real-life gangster Al Capone (Ben Gazzara) from New York street hoodlum to powerful Chicago crime lord. There’s not much in the way of depth or insight, but the picture is filled with malevolent power plays and violent shootouts as Capone climbs the organized-crime ladder, first working for tough mentor Johnny Torrio (Harry Guardino) and then seizing control for himself. The picture plays lip service to Capone’s growing pains as a gangster, showing his struggle to slap a layer of political sheen over his animalistic nature, but mostly the film bops from one bloody episode to the next. Adding interest is a passable love story between Capone and drunken moll Iris Crawford (Susan Blakeley); it makes sense that ambitious Iris gloms onto someone in whom she sees the potential for underworld greatness, and Blakely is both gorgeous and believably tough. Unfortunately, Gazzara is terrible. So boisterous and bug-eyed that it almost seems he’s delivering a comedy performance, Gazzara makes it impossible to connect with Capone as a real character. The other fatal flaw is the movie’s episodic nature. Still, there’s plenty for fans of the genre to enjoy despite the problems: A pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone shows up for a sizable role as Capone’s brutal lieutenant, Frank Nitti, and Carver adds style by linking sequences with a cool red-tinted dissolve effect. Capone isn’t particularly impressive, but it’s crudely entertaining.

Capone: FUNKY