Mr. Ricco (1975)

          It’s not wrong to describe Mr. Ricco as disposable escapism featuring a past-his-prime star pandering to cinematic fashion by appearing in a gritty urban thriller with more than a little Dirty Harry in its DNA. And, indeed, very little about Mr. Ricco or leading man Dean Martin’s performance will linger in your memory after you watch the picture. So whether or not you dig this flick depends almost entirely on your appetite for that quintessential ’70s-cinema vibe. Shot in slick widescreen on dingy and glamorous locations throughout San Francisco, Mr. Ricco has a hip attitude, a jangly jazz score, lively supporting performances, plenty of violence, and a smidgen of sarcasm thanks to the title character’s wiseass dialogue. If you go for this sort of thing, you’ll devour Mr. Ricco like a hearty serving of comfort food. If not, you’ll likely—and understandably—dismiss the picture as soulless Hollywood product.

          Martin plays a defense lawyer named Joe Ricco, and the filmmakers embellish the title role with colorful flourishes. Joe’s a smooth-talking widower whose friendships with cops blur ethical boundaries, he cheats at golf, and he tolerates all the weed his young associates smoke while doing legal research, because, hey, live and let live. When the story begins, Joe gets black radical Frankie Steele (Thalmus Rasulala) acquitted on murder charges, earning adoration from the counterculture and enmity from the Establishment. After two cops are killed, Frankie emerges as Suspect No. 1, so Joe gets pulled into dual intrigue—even as he investigates whether Frankie’s really guilty, he tries to track the fugitive down before trigger-happy police find him. Notwithstanding a few subplots, the most important of which involves a mystery figure who might or might not be Frankie trying to kill Joe at regular intervals, that’s basically the plot. What Mr. Ricco offers beyond its serviceable narrative is vivacity. Future sitcom star Cindy Williams appears briefly as Joe’s spunky secretary, and future Miami Vice guy Philip Michael Thomas plays a suspect whose sister hires Joe. Reliable character actor John Quade turns up in a couple of scenes as a grinning pimp. Oh, and Frankie leads an underground group called the Black Serpents. You get the idea.

          Director Paul Bogart doesn’t drench every scene in style, but he uses well-chosen actors and locations to create a world that feels coherent, if not necessarily realistic. Accordingly, all the menacing and posturing and scheming in this movie goes down smoothly, particularly when the nocturnal, small-combo syncopation of Chico Hamilton’s score enlivens the images. Plus, every so often, the picture embraces its own cartoonishness, as in this monologue from Joe’s police-captain friend George, played with gritted-teeth crankiness by Eugene Roche: “I don’t need you to tell me my job. I’ve been doing it for 20 years—20 years of being shot at and beat up on by sick, filthy creeps whose own mothers would’ve flushed ’em down the toilet if they’d known how they were gonna turn out!”

Mr. Ricco: GROOVY

Something Big (1971)

          Jammed with entertaining actors and powered by plot elements that worked better in other movies, the comedic Western Something Big is a slog to watch because it’s episodic, phony, and unimaginative. It says a lot about the picture that the protagonist repeatedly proclaims that he wants to achieve “something big” during his lifetime, but the exact nature of that something is withheld from the audience until the final act. Turns out it’s merely an armed heist. Myriad other films have been predicated on the very same threadbare premise, so why all the obfuscation? The solution to this mystery is as elusive as answers to other questions, like why this would-be comedy contains so few actual jokes. If nothing else, Something Big explains why director Andrew V. McLaglan spent most of his career making manly-man action flicks, because a comic genius he is not.

          Dean Martin, looking quite bored, stars as Joe Baker, an Easterner who fled to the West in search of adventure. After years pursuing an outlaw lifestyle, he’s fallen far short of achieving legendary status, so when he learns that his long-estranged fiancée is on her way to collect him, he decides it’s time for a grand scheme. Baker learns that a local thug named Cobb (Albert Salmi) can get his hands on a Gatling gun, so Baker makes a deal. In exchange for the gun, Baker will furnish Cobb with a woman. Baker then attacks passenger wagons until he finds a suitable candidate, Mary Anna Morgan (Honor Blackman). He kidnaps Mary Anna but doesn’t believe her when she says she has powerful allies. She ain’t lyin’. Her husband, Colonel Morgan (Brian Keith), is the commandant of the local U.S. Army fort. And so the contrived plot goes—Baker contemplates trading Mary Anna for the gun even as he falls for her, and Mary Anna grows to respect Baker even though she knows Baker’s fiancée is en route. Lost amid this romantic silliness is Baker’s grand scheme, which should have been the focus of the movie. Worse, Something Big wastes time servicing goofy subplots, notably the one about two horny frontier dames.

          Set to obnoxiously bouncy music by Marvin Hamlisch, Something Big lurches from one disconnected vignette to the next, the appeal of each scene dependent upon the actors present in the scene. By far, the bits featuring Keith as a blustery military officer and Ben Johnson as a gruff scout are the most rewarding. Conversely, the movie squanders the presence of Robert Donner and David Huddleston, who have tiny roles, and the filmmakers give too much screen time to Blackman, Martin, and Joyce Van Patten, all of whom give pedestrian performances. Despite its title, Something Big offers only small pleasures, at best.

Something Big: FUNKY

Airport (1970) & Airport 1975 (1974) & Airport ’77 (1977) & The Concorde: Airport ’79 (1979)

          It’s appropriate that the last movie bearing the Airport brand name begins with a balloon getting inflated, because this series is filled with nothing so much as hot air. Melodramatic, overlong, and trite, each of the four Airport flicks is a midair soap opera, with characterization and dialogue that would barely pass muster in the worst episodic television. If not for the innate allure of disaster stories and the presence of motley casts comprising former A-listers and permanent C-listers, these pictures would have vanished into obscurity immediately after they were made. However, one should never underestimate the public’s appetite for vapid escapism: The first picture was the biggest moneymaker of 1970 (out-earning M*A*S*H and Patton), and it somehow snared 10 Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. As the people filling that balloon at the beginning of The Concorde: Airport ’79 know, hot air always rises.

          The first flick, simply titled Airport and adapted from Arthur Hailey’s bestselling novel of the same name, is lumbering and dull. An airport manager (Burt Lancaster) and a pilot (Dean Martin) face a crisis when a disturbed passenger (Van Heflin) sneaks a bomb onto a passenger jet. Contrived romantic subplots abound, as do goofy elements like a storyline about an elderly woman (Helen Hayes) who keeps sneaking onto flights as a stowaway. Shot in a flat, ugly style that reveals every location as part of a garishly lit soundstage, the talky movie grinds through so much nonsense that Martin’s plane doesn’t even take off until after the one-hour mark.

          Only about 30 minutes of the movie contain actual disaster-oriented action, so it’s notable that even though Airport was the first hit for the genre, the familiar victim-every-10-minutes formula wasn’t perfected until producer Irwin Allen (who had nothing to do with the Airport movies) made The Poseidon Adventure in 1972. About the only lively element of Airport is George Kennedy’s lusty supporting performance as airport engineer Joe Patroni, who spouts macho lines like, “I’ll have this mother outta here by midnight!” There’s also some mild interest in spotting moments that were later spoofed in Airplane! (1980), like the vignette of a stewardess slapping a hysterical passenger.

          For the imaginatively titled sequel Airport 1975, producer Jenning Lang took the franchise reins and shamelessly copied Irwin Allen’s style; Lang also hired square-jawed leading man Charlton Heston, who previously led the cast of Lang’s Allen-esque disaster flick Earthquake (1974). Although it’s just as insipid as the original film, Airport 1975 is more enjoyable, simply because it doesn’t take itself seriously; the movie is all about cheap thrills and over-the-top storytelling. In this one, a 747 is struck in mid-air by a tiny private plane, blowing out the cockpit and killing the flight crew. After the accident, a stewardess (Karen Black) has to keep the plane steady until her boyfriend (Heston) can reach the plane via helicopter, climb into the cockpit by rope ladder, and steer the jet to a safe landing. About the only thing more absurd than the plot is the cast, which also includes Linda Blair, Sid Caesar, Erik Estrada, Helen Reddy, and Gloria Swanson (as herself!). Kennedy reprises his Patroni role to mostly inconsequential effect.

          After this crescendo of craptastic cinema, the series fell to earth with Airport ’77, a boring thriller about a plane that gets hijacked over the Bermuda Triangle, and then plummets into the ocean. Instead of mid-air suspense, most of the picture delivers dull tight-quarters bickering set in the underwater jet, and everyone in the mixed-bag cast looks bored: Joseph Cotten, Lee Grant, Christopher Lee, Jack Lemmon, James Stewart, and so on. (Kennedy’s back as Patroni, not that it makes much difference.) Airport ’77 is the nadir of a series whose quality level was never high.

          The final entry in the franchise is arguably the most enjoyable, at least from a bad-cinema perspective, because The Concorde: Airport ’79 is preposterous right from the first frames. Cinematic cheese is spread evenly across a ludicrous story, cringe-inducing dialogue, and a parade of laughable performances. In other words, Airport ’79 marks the moment the franchise officially became The Love Boat with explosions. Kennedy finally gets promoted to a leading role, co-piloting the famously sleek French jet of the title with a smooth Gallic flyer (Alain Delon). Meanwhile, an evil industrialist (Robert Wagner) wants to blow up the plane because one of the passengers is carrying evidence that incriminates him for dastardly deeds. Wagner tries to take out the Concorde with a robot drone, a manned fighter jet, and, finally, a bomb smuggled on board when the Concorde conveniently hits the tarmac long enough for sabotage. Several actors who should have known better got roped into acting in this drivel (Eddie Albert, Cicely Tyson, David Warner), but most of the screen time goes to ’70s also-rans like John Davidson, Andrea Marcovicci, and Jimmie J.J. Walker. Cementing the Love Boat parallel, Charo even shows up for a cameo.

Airport: LAME

Airport 1975: FUNKY

Airport ’77: SQUARE

The Concorde: Airport ’79: FUNKY

Showdown (1973)

By the time Showdown was released, the traditional Western had been all but replaced on American movie screens by revisionist Westerns filled with dark characterizations and grimy location photography. So it’s jarring to watch this utterly traditional film featuring two utterly traditional stars (Rock Hudson and Dean Martin), because the picture feels as if it could have been made in the ’60s or even the ’50s. Accepting as a given that the movie is hopelessly out of step for its era, Showdown is harmless enough—an earnest story about two lifelong friends who end up on opposite sides of the law. Hudson plays an Old West sheriff who makes a small but honest living with his spitfire wife (Susan Clark), and Martin plays his long-lost pal, a ne’er-do-well who has fallen in with a gang of thieves. When Martin’s crew robs a train in Hudson’s territory, Hudson has to hunt his old friend. Martin is torn between his desire for freedom and his reluctance to shoot a pal, and the situation gets complicated when Martin’s ex-partner (Donald Moffat) decides he wants revenge, meaning Martin now has two gunslingers after him. Notwithstanding a series of illuminating flashbacks showing the main characters bonding prior to current events (an admirable attempt at deepening characterization), there’s nothing in Showdown that Western fans haven’t seen a hundred times before. The dialogue is decent and the various open-desert shootouts and high-desert chases are okay, though it’s distracting that the film employs antiquated rear-projection techniques. Hudson is a solid presence, especially since the stoicism of cowboy characters suits his limited range, and Martin is charming even if he’s a bit long in the tooth for this sort of thing. Showdown is too innocuous to dislike, but it’s not a cause for much excitement.

Showdown: FUNKY