The Jerusalem File (1972)

          Filmed on location in Israel, terrorism-themed thriller The Jerusalem File has enough local color for two movies, familiar professionals in major roles, and a respectable number of action scenes. Accordingly, The Jerusalem File has all the right ingredients for a solid dose of international intrigue. Unfortunately, the filmmakers failed to construct a compelling screenplay populated by dimensional characters. The premise of The Jerusalem File makes sense, but scene-to-scene logic is murky. During several passages, it’s hard to discern what’s happening to whom and why, leaving the viewer with no recourse but to groove on actors glowering menacingly or to passively thrill at scenes of gunplay. Hardly the stuff of a memorable viewing experience.

          David (Bruce Davison) is an American student working on an archaeological dig supervised by Professor Lang (Nicol Williamson). One day, David has coffee with Raschid (Zeev Revah), an Arab militant with whom he is friendly, and representatives of a rival Arab faction commit a drive-by shooting, killing several people but missing their main target, Raschid. This event puts David on the radar of dogged local cop Chief Samuels (Donald Pleasance), who uses David to draw Raschid out of hiding. Before long, David finds himself in the crossfire of various political agendas, so lots of people chase him and shoot at him. Also figuring into the story is Nurit (Daria Halprin), a young Israeli involved in a romantic triangle with David and Lang, and mystery man Barak (Koya Yair Rubin), another participant in the archeological dig.

          Given the lack of depth on the characters, it’s impossible to care much about what happens to them, even though Davison’s mixture of intensity and sincerity creates the illusion that his character has real emotions, if not a fully rounded personality. Williamson is also highly watchable, though it’s never clear where his character’s allegiances lie, and Pleasance sleepwalks through his paper-thin role. (One more note on the cast: This was the last movie role for Halprin, previously seen in just two other movies, 1968’s Revolution and 1970’s Zabriskie Point.) Among this movie’s many wasted opportunities, perhaps none is more glaring than the failure of the filmmakers to meaningfully engage with the fraught politics of the Middle East—seeing as how it’s difficult to understand most of what’s happening onscreen, decoding any messages hidden inside those events is impossible.

The Jerusalem File: FUNKY

French Quarter (1978)

          Since the Crown International logo usually heralds low-budget movies that disappoint in predictable ways, it’s worth singling out French Quarter, which disappoints in unpredictable ways. At first, the movie adheres to the familiar little-girl-lost style, tracking a naïve young woman who stumbles into sex work. Then the picture makes a hard turn into period melodrama, with nearly an hour of the 101-minute film set in the 19th century. Nestled into the period material are subplots about a drug-addicted lesbian, a friendship between a white piano player and his black counterpart, and voodoo rituals. Both timelines feature auctions in which bidders compete for the privilege of deflowering a young woman. There’s a lot going on in French Quarter, so even though the movie is thoroughly contrived and silly, none could accuse the filmmakers of playing it safe.

          After her father dies, Christine (Alisha Fontaine) leaves her rural home and becomes an exotic dancer. One day, she’s drugged by a crook who plans to auction off Christine’s virginity. Then, by way of a hallucination or time travel or whatever, Christine becomes Trudy, the newest arrival at a New Orleans brothel. The same crisis ensues, with Trudy’s virginity getting put up for sale. Hope emerges in the form of a romance with Kid Ross (Bruce Davison), the new piano player in the brothel, who also bonds with black musician Jelly Roll (Vernel Bagneris). For reasons that defy understanding, co-writer/director Dennis Kane takes a prismatic approach to the story, exploring the lives of other prostitutes, some of whom have colorful names including “Big Butt Annie,” “Coke-Eyed Laura,” and “Ice Box Josie.” Yet Kane also makes room for lengthy stripping scenes, a Sapphic makeout session, and the aforementioned voodoo rituals. It’s a mess, with one scene attempting sensitive character work and the next presenting grindhouse sleaze, so French Quarter ultimately has little of interest for serious viewers.

          Those who savor bizarre cinema might find French Quarter more palatable. The cast blends starlets including Lindsay Bloom and Ann Michelle with cult-fave actors Bruce Davison and Lance LeGault—plus Virginia Mayo, a 1940s star appearing here in grand-dame mode. It should be noted that every so often, the picture almost gets something right, as in this hard-boiled voiceover: “If there’s one thing I know about New Orleans, anybody who wants something real bad is gonna get it real bad.” Incidentally, French Quarter came out the same year as Pretty Baby, a controversial studio picture with similar subject matter, and actor Don Hood plays minor roles in both films.

French Quarter: FUNKY

The Strawberry Statement (1970)

          Arguably the hippest of several fiction films that dealt with unrest among American college students during the Vietnam era, The Strawberry Statement has not aged especially well. Presented in a freewheeling style and revolving around a protagonist who kinda-sorta shifts from noninvolvement to radicalism, the movie has plenty of attitude and style. Moreover, the way the filmmakers link activism with sex says something interesting about horny dilettantes worming their way into the realm of politically committed youths. Yet by failing to predicate the story on real issues (the motivation for the film’s major protest is a fictional urban-development issue), and by failing to place a true radical at the center of the story, The Strawberry Statement ends up conveying an experience that’s tangential to the chaos pervading American campuses in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

          Set in and around a fictional San Francisco college, the picture stars Bruce Davison as Simon, an apathetic student who digs having a good time, but mostly thinks about grades and post-graduation career opportunities. When he meets an attractive radical named Linda (Kim Darby), Simon slips into the activist community as a way of making time with her. Later, when Linda is away from school for an extended period, Simon dallies with another activist hottie, and he allows the misperception to spread that he was beaten by police during a demonstration. This naturally gets Simon into Linda’s good graces once she returns to school, so the new couple splits their time between radicalism and romance, though Simon remains only marginally interested in actual politics. Finally, events at a major demonstration force Simon to definitively choose a side in the us-vs.-them conflict.

          Based on a book by James Simon Kunen, which documented real-life student unrest at Columbia University, The Strawberry Statement is openly sympathetic with student demonstrators, often portraying cops as faceless paramilitary goons. The most appealing grown-up in the movie is a shopkeeper (James Coco) who happily gives groceries to the radicals so long as they let him pretend he’s being robbed, thus enabling him to file a bogus insurance claim. In fact, scenes with ironic humor often work best in The Strawberry Statement. One hopes, for instance, that the following line was written with a wink: “I’m only 20, so I’ll give the country one more chance.” Other strong elements include the soundtrack, featuring tunes by CSNY and other rock acts, and the visual style, with fisheye lenses and offbeat upside-down camera angles used to accentuate disorientation. Does it all come together for a cohesive expression of a singular theme? Not really. But does The Strawberry Statement’s shambolic structure capture something about a wild time? Yes.

The Strawberry Statement: FUNKY

Willard (1971) & Ben (1972)

          Easily one of the strangest wide-release pictures of the early ’70s, Willard starts off as the character study of a deranged individual, and then it gradually morphs into a horror movie. Oh, and it’s also a love story of sorts between the lead character, a twentysomething misfit, and an extraordinary rat named Ben. The film’s sequel, Ben, pushes the formula even further by putting the titular vermin together with a new human, a horribly ill young boy who considers Ben a terrific pal even though the rat frequently leads thousands of rodents on murderous rampages. The inherent weirdness of these two films is encapsulated by the most noteworthy element of either picture, “Ben’s Song,” a gentle ballad that’s sung over the closing credits of Ben by Michael Jackson at the height of his early Jackson 5 fame. Like the song, both films approach bizarre subject matter with complete sincerity, which makes for singular viewing experiences.

          Based on novel by Stephen Gilbert titled Ratman’s Notebooks and written for the screen by Gilbert Ralston, Willard compounds the oddity of its premise with a fairy-tale narrative approach. Willard Stiles (Bruce Davison) works for overbearing businessman Al Martin (Ernest Borgnine), who played a role in the business failure and death of Willard’s father. Meanwhile, Willard lives with his aging but smothering mother, Henrietta (Elsa Lanchester), in a stately house. Forgetful, introverted, and nervous, Willard makes an easy target for Al’s bullying and Henrietta’s nagging. One afternoon, Willard meets a group of rats in his backyard, subsequently adopting them as playmates. Then, once he moves the rodents into his basement and starts teaching them tricks—even as the group expands through breeding to include thousands of critters—Willard realizes he can use the rats to exact revenge against his oppressors.

          The movie takes a long time to reach the point when Willard leads his skittering soldiers into combat, but Davison gives such a twitchy performance that it’s interesting to watch Willard spiral into madness. (Good luck shaking the image of Davison hanging out in the basement with a rodent on his shoulder and dozens of other rats literally crawling the walls around him.) As directed by studio-era helmer Daniel Mann, whose so-so filmography includes the Oscar-winning Elizabeth Taylor vehicle Butterfield 8 (1960), Willard evolves from campy to gruesome, so it’s impossible to take the film seriously. Nonetheless, the protagonist is quasi-sympathetic until he goes too far, so the character’s arc is similar to that of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). Better still, the film’s final act is a tastefully photographed bloodbath sure to cause shudders among even the hardiest of viewers. That said, it’s a mystery why composer Alex North scored most of the movie with bouncy comic cues and triumphant marches—although the music certainly adds to the overall peculiarity.

          Ben, which was directed by action specialist Phil Karlson, is an almost completely different type of film from its predecessor. In fact, Ben is really two movies in one. The main relationship story, about Ben’s new friendship with fragile youth Danny (Lee Montgomery), is so gentle that it includes comedy and music scenes. Yet the main action story, about Ben’s nocturnal adventures immediately following the events of the first film, is bloody and violent. Ben’s four-legged army starts claiming victims within the first 10 minutes, and the movie is filled with shots of grown men screaming as their bodies are swallowed by hordes of rodents. Later, once officials track down the culprits for various deaths and incidents of property damage, all-out war ensues. (Key image: City workers advance through sewer tunnels wielding flamethrowers, killing rats by the score.) Yet somehow, these disparate elements hang together in a ridiculous sort of way. As he did with his next film, the redneck-vigilante classic Walking Tall (1973), Karlson keeps things moving so fast that viewers can’t stop to smell the insanity.

          The cast of Ben is strictly C-grade, with future TV mom Meredith Baxter playing Danny’s sister and journeyman players including Norman Alden, Joseph Campanella, Arthur O’Connell, and Kenneth Tobey filling out the various upporting roles. (Although Stephen Gilbert penned Ben as well as Willard, the writer’s character work is much more slack on the sequel.) Since Ben is basically a creature feature, however, the acting is much less important than the work of the animal wranglers and FX technicians who make the murderous monsters look convincing. FYI, Willard was remade in 2003, with eccentric actor Crispin Glover in the lead, though a revamp of Ben has yet to emerge. And in a particularly odd footnote, actress Sondra Locke, who costars in the original Willard, later made her directorial debut with a film titled—wait for it!—Ratboy (1986).

Willard: FUNKY

Ben: FUNKY

Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976)

          With a more coherent script work and a better actress playing the female lead, this insouciant comedy about misfits working for low-rent ambulance companies might have been a solid entry in the M*A*S*H-inspired subgenre of outrageous medical comedies. As is, the picture’s redeeming qualities get drowned out by muddy storytelling and tonal inconsistencies.
          Bill Cosby stars as Mother, a driver at the wildly unethical F+B Ambulance Company. Boozing it up behind the wheel and packing a .357 Magnum for sticky situations, Mother regularly intercepts calls for other ambulance companies so F+B can collect the fares. Raquel Welch costars as Jennifer, better known as “Jugs” (for obvious reasons); she’s the F+B receptionist who longs for gender equality in the workplace. Eventually, Harvey Keitel shows up as Speed, a police detective who needs to make extra cash while on suspension for alleged corruption. These three characters, along with other oddballs like Murdoch (Larry Hagman), a scumbag prone to stunts like trying to rape unconscious female patients, form a tapestry of human weirdness that’s occasionally very funny.

          Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, known for his lighthearted contributions to Roger Moore’s early 007 movies and the first two Superman pictures, contrives lively banter, although the fact that Cosby delivers most of the best lines suggests the actor did some on-set embellishing. When the movie is really cooking, which doesn’t happen very often, Mother, Jugs & Speed cleverly riffs on the idea of trying to remain sane in a world gone mad. Unfortunately, the movie gets derailed as frequently as it stays on track.

          One big problem is the characterization of Jennifer. After she transitions from her secretary role to working in the field, the movie’s focus shifts to the angst she suffers upon encountering the Big Bad World. Jennifer also falls into a sudden (and not particularly credible) relationship with Speed, despite rebuffing the advances of every other dude she meets. Exacerbating matters is the fact that when Mother, Jugs & Speed goes dark, it goes very dark, to the tune of major characters getting shot and killed. Even with reliable director Peter Yates calling the shots, this picture simply isn’t solid enough to sustain whiplash changes in tone.

          Still, there’s plenty for casual viewers to enjoy in the brisk 95-minute film, from Cosby’s impeccable timing to Allen Garfield’s sweaty performance as F+B’s cheapskate proprietor. Fellow supporting players Hagman, Bruce Davison, and L.Q. Jones deliver vivid work, and Keitel is appealing in one of his few real romantic leads. As for Welch, she thrives during light-comedy bits but is startlingly awful during dramatic scenes.

Mother, Jugs & Speed: FUNKY

Ulzana’s Raid (1972)

          On some levels, the bleak Burt Lancaster picture Ulzana’s Raid is what critics used to call a “thinking man’s Western,” since the picture’s screen time is divided between philosophical conversation and open-desert carnage. Starring Lancaster as a McIntosh, a grizzled scout who helps a posse of U.S. Cavalry soldiers hunt for a vicious Apache named Ulzana (Joaquín Martínez), the movie explores a deep ideological rift, because some of the Americans view their quarry as little more than an animal who walks upright. However, the inexperienced lieutenant leading the posse, DeBuin (Bruce Davison), struggles to understand his enemy instead of blindly condemning Ulzana. McIntosh exists somewhere between the worlds of these opponents; as a white man married to an Indian, he realizes how pointless it is for a man like DeBuin to try penetrating the Apache psyche.

          Writer Alan Sharp and director Robert Aldrich do a decent job balancing the movie’s highbrow and lowbrow elements. For instance, in the movie’s best scene, a homesteader’s wife and child hurtle through the desert in their wagon, with a band of Ulzana’s braves in hot pursuit on horseback. The woman and child hail a passing Cavalry soldier for help, and, at first, he wisely rides away. Then, when his conscience gets the best of him, he heads toward the endangered whites—and shoots the woman in the forehead, saving her from the degradations these Apaches visit upon their white captives. Attempting to save the boy, the soldier tosses the kid onto his saddle and makes tracks, but one of the braves shoots his horse. Keenly aware he’ll be tortured if captured, the soldier puts his pistol in his mouth and shoots, leaving the boy defenseless. Yet the boy displays such grit defending his mother’s corpse that the Apaches depart without harming the child.

          This nearly wordless scene says volumes about the disparity between two worldviews, communicating far more than even the best-written dialogue exchanges in the picture. A greater number of scenes in this vein of pure cinema would have gone a long way, but instead, Ulzana’s Raid gets bogged down in repetitive vignettes of DeBuin angsting, McIntosh scowling, and Ulzana scheming. (That said, sturdy character player Richard Jaeckel enlivens the picture with his performance as a cynical NCO disgusted by his lieutenant’s naïveté.) Lancaster works a smooth groove blending a grubby appearance with lyrical vocal delivery, adding a bit of poetry to the generally hyper-realistic movie, and Davison’s personification of a man struggling to comprehend the incomprehensible is affecting. Ultimately, Ulzana’s Raid attempts more than it can actually accomplish, so it ends up being an action movie with thoughtful nuances, but since it never slips into murkiness or tedium, it comes awfully close to achieving something powerful. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

Ulzana’s Raid: GROOVY

Short Eyes (1977)

          The grim prison melodrama Short Eyes teems with authentic behavior and dialogue, and with good reason: Writer Miguel Piñero adapted the script from his own award-winning play, which was in turn extrapolated from a turbulent youth spent in and out of jail. Short Eyes depicts the tumult that arises in a men’s lockup when the prisoners discover a new inmate is a pedophile. As directed by Robert M. Young, a socially conscious filmmaker whose fictional work reflects his background in documentaries, Short Eyes is a gritty travelogue through the complex social dynamics formed by prisoners, and the picture is infused with gruesome textures. So even though the piece features passages of men bonding through pastimes like music and cockroach races, there’s no risk of glamorizing the prison experience.

          Quite to the contrary, Piñero and Young present a horrifying milieu in which danger is omnipresent, the exchange of sexual favors for protection is an everyday reality, and racial divisions are so regimented that there’s a table in the day room for the blacks, one for the Puerto Ricans, and one for the whites, who in this environment are the oppressed minority. There’s also a harshly enforced caste system, with pedophiles at the very bottom, meaning they’re fair game for abuse and violence.

          Piñero introduces several vivid characters, from the speechifying black revolutionary whose boasts eclipse his desire for real violence, to the hot-tempered Puerto Rican drug addict forever angling to make the prison’s youngest inmate his sexual plaything. At the center of the story is Juan (Jósé Pérez), a thoughtful con who adheres to the prison’s class divisions but uses diplomacy to defuse pointless conflicts. So when child-molester Clark Davis (Bruce Davison) arrives in the cellblock, Juan tries to understand Clark instead of leaping to judgment. In the picture’s most harrowing scene, Clark unloads his secret history, describing in excruciating detail how he finds his victims. Juan’s reaction to Clark’s purging is a complex mixture of anger, bewilderment, compassion, disgust, and rage, so it’s painful to watch prison’s hive-mind distill its collective response into a brutal form of vigilante justice.

          Although Short Eyes is undoubtedly amped up for dramatic effect, as seen in the prisoners’ tendencies toward revelatory encounter-group dialogue exchanges, the picture is fascinating and nauseating at the same time. The whole cast is strong, with Davison going deep into the abyss of his tortured character and Pérez providing a strong thread of anguished humanity. Future indie-cinema fave Luis Guzmán appears in a tiny role, and singers Freddie Fender and Curtis Mayfield (who also did the score) show up as inmates; each performs a tune in the day room.

Short Eyes: GROOVY