Night Chase (1970)

          David Janssen, the king of the pained facial expression, plays a different sort of fugitive in Night Chase, a somewhat compelling thriller that anticipates the premise of the Tom Cruise movie Collateral (2004), but follows through on the premise with a story that makes a whole lot more sense. Running 95 minutes, long by ’70s-telefilm standards, Night Chase gets repetitive and slow at times, so viewers who enjoy seeing vintage footage of Southern California will get more out of the experience than others. That said, the script is clear and efficient, Jack Starrett’s direction sets an understated tone that suits the material, and costar Yaphet Kotto’s performance is so loose and vivid that he greatly elevates the material. Ultimately, Night Chase isn’t consequential in terms of social relevance or themes, so it’s just a disposable thriller with welcome aspects of humanism. Nonetheless, with so many pointlessly nihilistic thrillers out there, the compassion infusing Night Chase makes watching the picture mildly edifying.

          As in Collateral, the story gets underway when a mysterious white man flags down a black cab driver for a ride. Specifically, Adrian (Janssen) grabs a taxi from the Los Angeles International Airport after his flight gets cancelled. Ernie (Kotto) gets the fare, and he’s surprised when Adrian asks for a 200-mile ride to San Diego. Once the men are in close quarters, Ernie catches disturbing clues—blood on Adrian’s shirt, skittishness whenever police cars pass the cab. Eventually, it emerges that Adrian shot a man in Baltimore, and he’s on the way to Mexico, where he plans to use his gun again.

          The remaining details are best discovered as the story unfolds, but the gist is that Adrian feels tortured by not only what he’s already done but by what he’s contemplating doing next. Although saying that Janssen’s performance is infused with nuance would require considerable overstatement, he mimics anguish well, and his intensity is sufficiently persuasive that it’s believable when he makes everyone around him nervous. Kotto’s work exists on a different level. At the beginning of the picture, he conveys affability and world-weariness in equal measure, and as the story progresses, he hits notes of despair, heroism, and terror. Night Chase is yet another reminder of his incredible power and versatility. While the film is mostly a two-hander, Elisha Cook Jr., William Katt, and Victoria Vetri all do strong work in small supporting roles.

Night Chase: FUNKY

Winterhawk (1975)

          Beautifully shot in wide-open locations throughout the Montana wilderness, Winterhawk has the trappings of a proper Native American–themed Western saga, complete with appearances by such reliable Hollywood character actors as Elisha Cook Jr., Denver Pyle, and Woody Strode. Alas, the film’s merits are almost wholly superficial, because the characterizations are thin and the narrative is trite. One suspects that writer-director Charles B. Pierce knew he’d missed the mark during principal photography, because he adorns the finished film with a corny theme song and prosaic narration (both penned by Earl E. Smith), and those elements provide most of the story’s shape.

          Winterhawk begins on the tribal lands of the Blackfoot Indians, where proud chief Winterhawk (Michael Dante) watches his people suffer from smallpox, which was brought into their lives by white men. Taking the counsel of a friendly mountain man named Guthrie (Leif Erikson), Winterhawk travels to a white settlement seeking medicine. He is not only rebuffed but ambushed, so Winterhawk attempts reprisal by kidnapping two siblings from the encampment—pretty young woman Clayanna (Dawn Wells) and her little brother, Cotton (Charles Pierce Jr.). Then things get convoluted. Finley (Cook), the uncle of the kidnapped youths, forms a posse to chase Winterhawk, enlisting Guthrie as a guide. Shortly afterward, a thug named Gates (L.Q. Jones) attacks Guthrie’s cabin, raping and killing Guthrie’s Indian companion, Pale Flower (played by Sacheen Littlefeather, infamous in real life as Marlon Brando’s Oscar proxy).

          Pierce twists the story into knots to create comic relief from the interplay between the folks in Finley’s posse, to create tension from the various chases, and to disguise the fact that nothing much happens in the main plot. After all, scenes of Winterhawk and his captives include nothing more than shots of people riding across fields, mountains, and rivers. It’s not hard to figure out what went wrong, because Pierce clearly wanted to portray Winterhawk as a noble victim of circumstance, meaning that Winterhawk couldn’t be shown leading raiding parties or mistreating Clayanna. Instead, he does next to nothing. Supporting players deliver entertaining work, but the miscast Dante mistakes sleepwalking for stoicism, and Wells (of Gilligan’s Island fame) simply looks lost. On some level, Pierce’s heart was in the right place. Nonetheless, the countless shortcomings make Winterhawk a slog even though it’s supposed to be a song.

Winterhawk: LAME

Messiah of Evil (1973)

Married filmmakers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were awfully lucky they met George Lucas while all three were film students at USC, because outside of their work as writers on Lucas’ productions American Graffiti (1973) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), the Huyck-Katz filmography is filled with flops and oddities. One example: their misbegotten horror flick Messiah of Evil. Huyck’s directorial debut, which he and Katz co-wrote, includes a handful of quasi-disturbing images, but it’s so amateurishly assembled and conceptually cuckoo that it’s impossible to take seriously. The story begins when a pretty young woman named Arletty (Marianna Hill) travels to the tiny beach community of Point Dume, California, where her missing father was last seen. Just before reaching town, she encounters a strange albino at a gas station, and after she leaves the gas station, we see the albino has a truckload of corpses. Clearly, something’s rotten in Point Dume. Upon arrival, Arletty gets the brush-off from spooked locals, but in true bad-horror-movie fashion, she ignores obvious cues to Get the Hell Out. Soon, Arletty gets embroiled with a swinger named Thom (Michael Greer), who travels with two compliant hotties (played by Joy Bang and Anitra Ford). Then, after Thom’s girlfriends meet grisly fates, the incredibly dim Arletty and Thom finally realize Point Dume is infested with flesh-eating creatures that seem like hybrids of vampires and zombies. All of this grinds toward a bloody climax, and even though the movie briefly flashes back one century to explain the source of Point Dume’s problems, the story never makes much sense. Some bits are fun, like the sequence of Bang’s character getting stalked in a theater (which is modeled after a key scene in The Birds), and some of the images are icky, like the moment when Hill discovers a spider crawling in her mouth, but none of it adds up to anything interesting. Furthermore, the acting is terrible, with second-rate character players Elisha Cook Jr. and Royal Dano embarrassing themselves in bit parts while Hill, though gorgeous as always, delivers an inept leading performance.

Messiah of Evil: LAME

The Champ (1979)

          A shameless tearjerker that some fans of a certain age still hold close to their hearts, The Champ is a remake of the 1931 picture of the same name, and the focus of both versions is the cheap sentiment of a child crying. Directed with gimme-the-paycheck proficiency by Italian artiste Franco Zeffirelli, the 1979 version is lavish inasmuch as Zeffirelli lets scenes run longer than might seem necessary, presumably because he’s trying to build up a head of emotional steam for the bummer ending. For believers who get lost in the story, the overkill approach is probably quite effective, but for the rest of us, it’s just overkill.

          The tale begins on a Florida racetrack, where former boxer Billy Flynn (Jon Voight) works as a horse trainer and raises his angelic little boy, T.J. (Ricky Schroder). Billy’s an irresponsible drunk and gambler, ashamed that he’s not a role model for his son, and he talks a good line about returning to the ring someday so he can earn his nickname: Champ. Through convoluted circumstances, Billy and T.J. cross paths with Annie (Faye Dunaway), a fashion maven who just happens to be T.J.’s mom; she split when the boy was an infant. Annie, now remarried and wealthy, is enchanted by the boy and wants to become part of his life, but Billy won’t forgive her for her past infractions.

          However, when Billy gets thrown in jail after a drunken brawl, he realizes T.J. needs a better home, so Billy pretends to send the kid away to live with Annie. (Cue weeping from Schroder.) After getting out of jail, Billy decides to get himself together and return to the ring. T.J. runs away from Annie to be with Billy during his training. (More weeping upon their reunion.) Finally, the day of the big fight comes, and—well, there’s no need to spoil the finale. (Except to say that there’s more weeping.)

          Voight is pretty good here, trying to infuse Method credibility into a preposterous role, and he realizes his main purpose is triggering Shroder’s waterworks; nonetheless, Voight has strong moments depicting a simple man’s reluctant emotional declarations. Ice queen Dunaway is interesting casting, since we’re supposed to see Annie coming to life before our eyes, but her performance is far too reserved for this sort of thing. Several top-shelf character players (Elisha Cook Jr., Arthur Hill, Strother Martin, Allan Miller, Jack Warden) are underused in supporting roles. Schroder, who has subsequently enjoyed a long career on TV playing juvenile and grown-up roles, is like a Norman Rockwell dream of a perfect child in The Champ, clever and sensitive and smart, all bright eyes and rosy cheeks and tousled hair. He cries a lot and seems properly upset at the right moments. So, if watching youthful anguish is your thing, then The Champ is for you.

The Champ: FUNKY

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

 

          Two different eras of Hollywood filmmaking clash uncomfortably in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, a sloppy but interesting-ish look at one of the Wild West’s most notorious criminal outfits, the James-Younger gang. The picture gets studio-era romanticism from producer-star Cliff Robertson, who plays Cole Younger as a wide-eyed dreamer more reliant on guile than gunplay. Offering a bracing counterpoint of New Hollywood realism is Robert Duvall, who plays Jesse James as a crude sociopath prone to outbursts of messianic frenzy. Unsuccessfully attempting to blend these tonalities is writer-director Philip Kaufman, helming his first big-budget picture.

          Even with veteran action cinematographer Bruce Surtees on his team, Kaufman seems unsure how to orchestrate complex scenes; the camera is often focused behind or to the side of the main action, which is incredibly distracting. Even simple dialogue scenes suffer from clumsy execution, because Kaufman can’t seem to decide whether he wants glossy artificiality or hard-hitting authenticity. Kaufman’s screenplay is as jumbled as his direction, although to be fair, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid feels as if it might have been significantly reconfigured during editing; the film’s choppy montage sequences and clunky narration seem like they were added to clarify story points that were muddy in the original footage.

          Still, the underlying historical facts are compelling, and Kaufman’s method for contrasting James and Younger works. In parallel storylines, the two factions of the James-Younger gang converge on the town of Northfield, Minnesota, giving viewers distinct perspectives on the character of each faction. With an eye on robbing Northfield’s bank, Younger insinuates himself into the local populace, persuading townies to fatten the bank’s value with new deposits. Meanwhile, James suffers delusions of grandeur even though he lacks Younger’s intellectual discipline and strategic acumen. When the factions merge, disharmony between James’ savagery and Younger’s slyness leads to disaster. And while the climactic scene of the Northfield robbery is exciting and imaginative, everything that happens before and after the big scene is haphazard.

          Duvall’s scenes are stronger because his characterization is more believable, a small man drunk on his own fame. Robertson’s scenes are elaborate, though overly reliant on gimmicks like his repeated line, “Ain’t that a wonderment?” Matters are not helped by the preponderance of overly familiar character actors, including R.G. Armstrong, Luke Askew, Matt Clark, Elisha Cook Jr., Royal Dano, and Dana Elcar, which lends the picture the generic feel of episodic television. (The less said about Dave Grusin’s weird musical score, which features everything from bouncy calliope music to acid-rock guitars, the better.) The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid can’t be dismissed because it’s filled with interesting ideas, but it can’t be praised very highly because only a few of those ideas are brought to fruition.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid: FUNKY