Go Tell the Spartans (1978)

          Although precious few fiction films were made about the Vietnam War while it was still raging, the late ’70s produced a number of thoughtful pictures about the war’s history, impact, and legacy. Yet not all such movies were created equal. Compared to the other 1978 releases Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, for instance, Go Tell the Spartans feels old-fashioned, stylized, and even obsolete. After all, the picture is set in 1964, when U.S. involvement in Indochina was still limited to “military advisors,” so the whole film unfolds as a warning about the dangers and pointlessness of an expanded American role. Had this picture been made in the late ’60s, when the underlying material originated—Daniel Ford’s novel Incident at Muc Wa was published in 1967—Go Tell the Spartans could have been politically incendiary. Arriving three years after the end of the Vietnam War, the picture is elegiac but also something of an unnecessary told-ya-so lecture. This is not to say that Go Tell the Spartans is a weak picture. Quite to the contrary, it’s a brisk and powerful tragedy laced with dark humor and deep pathos. But timing is everything, and the moment for Go Tell the Spartans to influence public opinion passed long before the film was made.

          In any event, Burt Lancaster stars as Major Asa Barker, a lifelong Army man tasked with supervising military advisors in a violent section of South Vietnam. Barker is a cigar-chomping cynic who hates authority, and Lancaster invests the role with an endearing stripe of amused world-weariness. When Barker is ordered to establish a garrison around a seemingly insignificant village called Muc Wa, he sends a group of losers and misfits under the command of inexperienced Lieutenant Hamilton (Joe Unger). Also in the Muc Wa detachment are Sgt. Obleonowski (Johathan Goldsmith), an experienced NCO who’s struggling with battle fatigue, and Corporal Courcey (Craig Wasson), a principled draftee whose naïveté about military conflict fascinates Barker. The soldiers’ tenure in Muc Wa is fraught with unexpected hardships, and it soon becomes clear the village is dead center in the path of a massive North Vietnamese invasion force. Thus, the Army’s entanglement in Muc Wa becomes a metaphor representing America’s involvement in Vietnam—an unwinnable fight against an unstoppable enemy in unfamiliar terrain.

          Were it not for the script’s plentiful jokes, many of which Lancaster delivers with sublime charm, Go Tell the Spartans would feel impossibly schematic and strident. Further, much of the film is TV-sized instead of feature-sized, with director Ted Post obviously inhibited by a tight budget. Happily, interesting performances compensates for the meager production values: In addition to character actors David Clennon, Clyde Kusatsu, James Hong, and Dolph Sweet (all of whom deliver their usual crisp work), supporting players including Goldsmith, Watson, and Marc Singer contribute impassioned portrayals that underscore the film’s theme of war’s terrible human cost.

Go Tell the Spartans: GROOVY

The Wanderers (1979)

          New York City novelist/screenwriter Richard Price didn’t truly connect with Hollywood until his script for Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) announced his expertise at writing tough underworld stories. Yet Price’s association with the movies actually began in the ’70s, when two of his books were adapted into features. First came Bloodbrothers, a small-scale drama released in 1978, and then came The Wanderers, a quasi-epic about Brooklyn street gangs. Co-written and directed by the unpredictable Philip Kaufman, The Wanderers is ostensibly a nostalgic look at teen life in the early ’60s, before the assassination of JFK, the emergence of the counterculture, and the beginning of America’s Vietnam entanglement. The title refers to a gang of Italian-American teenagers who spend their free time chasing girls, fighting with rival gangs, and generally prolonging adolescence. Their exploits are set to a thumping soundtrack filled with tunes by Dion, the Four Seasons, and other doo-wop-influenced groups.

          When Kaufman keeps things simple, focusing on the misadventures of gang leader Richie (Ken Wahl) and his cronies, The Wanderers works well. However, Kaufman takes the movie in strange directions by treating the presence of a gang called the Ducky Boys in an apocalyptic fashion—whenever the Ducky Boys show up to cause trouble, the movie’s tone shifts from playful to terrifying. And since many scenes in The Wanderers approach outright comedy, the presence of the dissonant Ducky Boys vignettes undermines the integrity of the whole piece. And that’s not the only problem with The Wanderers. Much of the picture comprises a romantic triangle involving Richie, his maybe-pregnant girlfriend Despie (Toni Kalem), and Nina (Karen Allen), the new girl who catches Richie’s eye. This coming-of-age material is trite, and a subplot involving Despie’s dad, Chubby (Dolph Sweet), seems overly grim because Chubby’s a wiseguy who does things like dropping a bowling ball onto an enemy’s hand. From start to finish, The Wanderers can’t decide if it’s a wild-youth romp or a gritty portrait of urban violence.

          Nonetheless, the movie has amazing textures. Ace cinematographer Michael Chapman gives the visuals gravitas, and memorable actors add idiosyncratic flavors to the mix. For instance, The Wanderers features diminutive Linda Manz (best known for Terrence Malick’s 1978 mood piece Days of Heaven) and hulking Erland Van Lidth, who plays a massive street tough nicknamed “Terror,” as an unlikely couple. Demonstrating his customary interest in surprising juxtapositions, Kaufman portrays Manz as the tougher of the two, while still leaving room to reveal her character’s fragility. Similarly, Kaufman gets terrific work out of Wahl—a Stallone type with legitimate acting chops—and John Friedrich, who plays the other main Wanderer, Joey. Scenes of these two and their pals cruising the streets of New York are exciting and fun. Alas, for every vivid bit—Terror’s gang memorably threatens the Wanderers during a harrowing trip to a bridge—there’s an improbable moment like the scene in which a teacher (Val Avery) nearly instigates a race war in his classroom. The Wanderers lacks discipline, restraint, and shape, but it explodes with energy and intensity. In modern parlance, the movie’s a hot mess.

The Wanderers: FUNKY

Cops and Robbers (1973)

          A lighthearted crime thriller unwisely marketed as an out-and-out comedy, Cops and Robbers features a clever plot, flavorful ’70s atmosphere, and exuberant performances by a pair of actors not customarily cast as leads. The movie has significant tonal inconsistencies, and (like all heist movies) raises the question of why we should care about people who steal, but it’s so brisk and watchable that it’s worth investigating. Joe (Joseph Bologna) is a New York City beat cop exasperated by his inability to get ahead financially. So, one evening, he walks into a liquor store in full uniform and robs the place. Afterward, Joe tells his plainclothes-detective buddy Tom (Cliff Gorman) how easy it is to exploit the power of the badge. Determined to stage a major heist so he and Joe can retire into luxury, Tom approaches mid-level mobster Pasquale Aniello (John P. Ryan) for advice. Amazed at the policeman’s hubris, Aniello says that if Tom and his partner steal $10 million in bearer bonds from Wall Street, he’ll pay the cops-turned-crooks a cool $2 million.

          Written by crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, Cops and Robbers scores on two levels. The central crime is just weird enough to jibe with reality, and the straightforward motivation of the lead characters speaks to universal frustrations with the slow pace of making an honest buck—even though it’s hard to actually like Joe and Tom, since they flagrantly violate the public trust, it’s easy to see what pushes them toward criminality. Westlake also does a clever job of illustrating that everyone in the system is ripping off everyone else (brokers are robbing from brokers, crooks are robbing from crooks), creating the illusion of a victimless crime. In that context, the fun of the movie is watching Joe and Tom work out the particulars of their crime, even as a hundred things go wrong on the big day. The heist scene is meticulously paced and staged, with all sorts of nerve-jangling complications, and the offbeat climax takes place in Central Park on “Bicycle Day.”

          Editor-turned-director Aram Avakian predictably does best in action scenes, when he’s able to shape varied footage into taut vignettes, though he doesn’t quite succeed in coaxing his actors toward matching the jaunty tone of the script. As a result, Cops and Robbers is a bit too serious for its own good, which is compounded by a downbeat score featuring the frequently repeated R&B theme song “A World of Cops and Robbers.” It also feels like a couple of dramatic beats are missing, with characters making confusing leaps forward, and Bologna and Gorman, though both very skilled at expressing their characters’ frustrations, aren’t exactly the most charismatic performers. Nonetheless, more goes right than wrong in Cops and Robbers, and the cast features a slew of interesting Noo Yawk supporting players, like Joe Spinell and Dolph Sweet.

Cops and Robbers: GROOVY

Sisters (1973)

          After cutting his teeth with a series of irreverent comedies that received marginal releases, director Brian De Palma found his calling as a fearmaker—and his first significant box-office success—by merging his lurid fixations with a cinematic style borrowed from Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. An unnerving thriller about a reporter who believes she’s discovered that her docile neighbor has a homicidal twin sister, Sisters owes a huge debt to Hitch (right down to the use of composer Bernard Hermann), but it’s also an impressive demonstration of De Palma’s storytelling gifts. As the author of the film’s original story and the co-writer of its script, De Palma has his fingerprints all over this movie, and Sisters sets the template for his many subsequent sexually charged suspense flicks.

          The story is simple: Staten Island-based investigative reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) happens to look across the street during a frenzied murder in the apartment of French-Canadian model Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder). Collier calls the police, but after a skeptical cop (Dolph Sweet) fails to discover any evidence, Collier enlists a private detective (Charles Durning) to continue the investigation. The deeper Collier goes down the rabbit hole of her neighbor’s strange world, however, the more danger Collier invites. As in all of De Palma’s suspense flicks, the story is less important than mood and theme. With Hermann’s effectively bombastic score creating uncomfortable degrees of tension, De Palma sketches a world of biological abnormalities, dysfunctional sexuality, and rampant conspiracies; he also carefully sets the stage so Collier exists in a milieu of logic and rationality until circumstances quite literally land her in an insane asylum.

          Produced for drive-in suppliers American International, Sisters is brisk and sensationalistic, with plenty of gore and a smattering of nudity, yet it’s also finely crafted inasmuch as De Palma designs each frame with an architect’s precision. Despite dodgy cinematography and set decoration (De Palma later benefited from larger budgets and longer shooting schedules), editor Paul Hirsch’s wonderfully methodical pacing makes the most of the footage. So even though De Palma’s later suspense pictures are more visually impressive, few of them can match the no-nonsense economy of Sisters.

Sisters: GROOVY