Zachariah (1971)

          The music-driven western Zachariah could have become a touchstone for the stoner crowd, since the picture borrows the framework of Hermann Hesse’s trippy novel Siddhartha, features electrified rock bands anachronistically performing in cowboy towns, and uses the hero’s encounters with sex and violence to illustrate his spiritual growth. Alas, while the concept of Zachariah sounds far-out, the execution is disappointingly mundane. Excepting scenes with contemporary music and/or outlandish production design, the film unspools as a straightforward Hollywood western, complete with slick photography, a straight-ahead storyline, and tense gunfight sequences. As such, Zachariah can’t really decide which audience it’s trying to serve—the movie is too square for hippies, and too offbeat for straights.
          Furthermore, while the relationship between the movies may be coincidental, Zachariah comes across like a hopelessly watered-down American riff on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s demented gunfighter epic El Topo, which hit theaters a year before Zachariah.

          Cowritten by Joe Massot and the four members of comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre (who failed to imbue Zacharaiah with much in the way of humor), Zachariah concerns the title character (John Rubenstein), a country boy in the Old West who dreams of becoming a gunfighter. He buys a pistol through mail order, practices with the weapon, and then embarks on a journey along with his best friend, young blacksmith Matthew (Don Johnson). The lads join a small-time gang (portrayed by Woodstock rockers Country Joe and the Fish), but Zachariah longs to earn fame by defeating celebrated gunslinger Job (Elvin Jones). Eventually, Zachariah’s ambitions derail his friendship with Matthew and send Zachariah into the bed of prostitute Belle (Patricia Quinn).

          Director George Englund weaves music into the entire movie, sometimes stopping the story dead for an onscreen performance (hello there, Joe Walsh and the James Gang!), and sometimes utilizing propulsive tunes as an underscore. It’s all very pleasant to experience, inasmuch as counterculture-era sounds and the outlaw mythos mesh well, but nothing extraordinary takes shape. After all, even though the performances are adequate, the look is colorful, and some the tunes swing, how hip can a movie really be when it includes a supporting performance by future Eight Is Enough dad Dick Van Patten as a carnival barker?

Zachariah: FUNKY

Gus (1976)

Live-action Disney movies from the ’70s often courted abject stupidity but remained watchable thanks to charming acting and energetic physical comedy. Alas, some of the studio’s pictures from this era were so moronic that even the valiant efforts of skilled comic performers were insufficient to maintain interest. For example, Gus is about a Yugoslavian mule named Gus that becomes an NFL field-goal kicker. The folks at Disney loved telling stories about animals becoming involved in human endeavors, with the innate cuteness of, say, chimpanzees or dogs providing much of the appeal. Yet calling a mule “cute” is a stretch—even when the filmmakers dress the titular animal in a custom-built football helmet and jersey. Plus, the mildly amusing image of Gus kicking field goals loses its novelty quickly. The movie’s insipid plot revolves around a dismal NFL team that enlists the mule out of desperation, thereby attracting the attention of nefarious types who don’t want the scheme to succeed. Struggling to make all of this bearable is a solid cast of Disney regulars and familiar actors from the worlds of film and television. Gary Grimes, the earnest young star of ’70s films including Summer of ’42 (1971), concluded his brief feature career by starring as Andy Petrovic, Gus’ handler. Grimes shares most of his scenes with Ed Asner, who plays a team owner; Don Knotts, who plays a coach; and real-life former NFL player Dick Butkus, who plays Gus’ gridiron rival. (Forgettable starlet Louise Williams portrays Andy’s love interest.) Other pros appearing in Gus include Bob Crane, Harold Gould, and Dick Van Patten, with Happy Days guy Tom Bosley and slapstick favorite Tim Conway forming a comic team as crooks hired to menace the mule. Suffice to say that the “highlight” of the movie is the interminable climax during which Bosley and Conway chase Gus through a grocery store, causing lots of property damage in the process. Like many of Disney’s lesser offerings, Gus is harmless and might amuse very small children, but it’s a grim 95 minutes for grown-up viewers.

Gus: LAME

Making It (1971)

          When the lyrics of a movie’s opening theme proclaim, “Everybody’s busy learning yesterday, but I’m into tomorrow—that’s a better way,” you know you’re in for a dated Generation Gap story about a hip kid showing uptight adults what it’s all about, man. And while many movies of this stripe are unwatchable today, thanks to arrogant leading characters and pretentious themes, Making It is more worthwhile than its lurid title might suggest. The hero of the piece is Phil (Kristoffer Tabori), a high-school schemer who’s juggling sexual affairs with Debbie (Sherry Miles), a dim-bulb classmate, and Yvonne (Marlyn Mason), the horny wife of his gym coach. Meanwhile, Phil’s mom, Betty (Joyce Van Patten), is a lonely divorcée looking to start over with bland but reliable businessman Warren (Dick Van Patten), who happens to be married to another woman. The depiction of Phil’s home life explains why he finds monogamy overrated, but as the story progresses, Phil discovers the consequences of cocksmanship—he gets Debbie pregnant, runs into a hassle with Yvonne’s husband, and so on.

          Until his comeuppance, Phil is a self-aware operator who talks the talk of a disaffected ’70s rebel in order to court older women (sample pickup line: “That’s where it’s at, being honest with each other”). Yet the filmmakers ensure that we can always see the naïve young man beneath the swaggering façade. All of this may sound rather ordinary, and, indeed, Making It is a minor film in every way. However, the picture’s acting, direction, and writing are so smooth that Making It ends up exemplifying the entire post-Graduate genre. More importantly, the film follows its storyline to a logical conclusion instead of merely stirring up unresolved ambiguity.

          Tabori, the son of B-movie director Don Siegel, is strong in the leading role, effectively blending innocence with sass, and the supporting players are solid—the cast also includes Bob Balaban, as Phil’s snide crony, and David Doyle, as an exasperated administrator. Prolific character actor Lawrence Pressman is especially good as a teacher who sarcastically challenges Phil’s vision of kids leading the charge for social change: “I propose a new flag,” the teacher says at one point, “no stars, just acne.” A little much, sure, but it gets the point across. Interestingly, the film’s screenplay was penned by then-studio executive Peter Bart, who later gained fame as the editor-in-chief of Variety and as the host of various TV shows about showbiz. Nice to know he made a respectable effort during his brief tenure in the trenches of Hollywood’s creative scene.

Making It: GROOVY

Beware! The Blob (1972)

The 1958 drive-in movie The Blob is fondly remembered for its absurd premise—a giant mass of radioactive goo invades a city, eating everyone in its path—and for the presence of future superstar Steve McQueen in his first leading role. However, the world probably wasn’t crying out for a sequel, much less one that hit theaters more than a decade after the original. Fitting the lack of marketplace excitement that preceded its arrival, Beware! The Blob is a genuinely terrible movie, noteworthy only for the participation of several familiar Hollywood names. Inexplicably, the picture was directed by Larry Hagman, who was at the time best known for starring in the ’60s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. Hagman makes a very brief appearance in the picture, as do fellow cameo players Shelly Berman, Godfrey Cambridge, Carol Lynley, and Burgess Meredith; principal roles are played by second-stringers including Richard Stahl, Dick Van Patten, and Robert Walker Jr. The plot, which couldn’t matter less, involves the blob escaping captivity and attacking another town until our valiant young hero (Walker) traps the gelatinous beastie in an ice-skating rink. The picture was obviously envisioned as a spoof of horror movies, but insultingly cheap special effects and numbingly stupid jokes kill any humor potential, as does the movie’s tendency to wander off on tangents by introducing minor characters who appear onscreen just long enough to get consumed by the Blob. In one particularly pointless bit, a stoned hippie wanders into a barber shop, where the barber toys with him thusly: “I don’t cut hair, I sculpt it. Do you want a hair sculpt? It will be four hundred dollars.” As the saying goes, are we having fun yet? There’s a reason Hagman never directed another feature, and there’s a reason Hollywood ignored this misbegotten flick when it rebooted the Blob franchise more than a decade later with a gory remake of the original movie. Beware, indeed.

Beware! The Blob: SQUARE

Joe Kidd (1972)

          Possibly Clint Eastwood’s least interesting Western, this threadbare action flick has an impressive pedigree—celebrated novelist Elmore Leonard wrote the screenplay, and macho-cinema veteran John Sturges, of The Magnificent Seven fame, directed. Despite the participation of these boldfaced names plus that of Robert Duvall, who plays the heavy, Joe Kidd tells a forgettable story unimaginatively, so it’s only watchable because of production values, star power, Lalo Schifrin’s assertive score, and Bruce Surtees’s robust cinematography. Also working in the movie’s favor is brevity, since Joe Kidd runs just 88 minutes. After a lugubrious first act, the story gets going when rapacious developer Frank Harlan (Duvall) hires former bounty hunter Joe Kidd (Eastwood) to track Mexican revolutionary Luis Chama (John Saxon), whose rabble-rousing has interfered with Harlan’s schemes. Beyond some minor drama involving Joe’s shifting allegiances, there’s not much more to the plot, so lots of screen time gets consumed by macho posturing and lengthy sequences of characters stalking each other. A probing exploration of frontier morality this is not. One can find glimmers of Leonard’s signature pulpy style in Kidd’s bitchy dialogue, but while the best Leonard-derived Westerns have rock-solid conceits (see both versions of 3:10 to Yuma), the storyline of Joe Kidd is leisurely and unfocused, with characterizations—usually a Leonard strength—given depressingly short shrift.

          The movie looks good enough with Surtees behind the lens, though it seems he was asked to light sets more brightly than he usually does and he’s hampered by Sturges’s stodgy compositions. As for the actors, Eastwood conjures a few mildly amusing tough-guy moments, for instance when his character casually sips beer while watching a shootout. Duvall does what he can with a role so trite and underwritten it would stifle any actor, though his trope of mispronuncing the name of Saxon’s character conveys an appropriate level of arrogance. The wildly miscast Saxon snarls lines through a silly Spanish accent, and he also fails to demonstrate the charisma one might expect from a grassroots leader—one imagines that Leonard envisioned a more nuanced portrayal. Adding minor colors to the movie’s canvas are Paul Koslo, Don Stroud, and James Wainwright, who play nasty hired guns. Anyway, while some of the shootouts in Joe Kidd are moderately entertaining, the fact that such incidental details as the use of unusual firearms and an appearance by Dick Van Patten as a hotel clerk stick in the memory more than the main narrative underscore why the watchword here is unremarkable.

Joe Kidd: FUNKY