Ash Wednesday (1973)

          Had anyone but Elizabeth Taylor played the lead in this enervated melodrama, it would be completely uninteresting. As is, the minor appeal of Ash Wednesday stems from the way a generation of moviegoers fell in love with Taylor as a child actress, devoured reports of her scandal-sheet lifestyle, and watched with unending curiosity as she evolved from a breathtaking beauty to a merely attractive woman of a certain age. Many of Taylor’s films in the late ’60s and early ’70s concern women struggling to remain sexually vital in their middle years, none more so than Ash Wednesday, which revolves around a woman who gets a facelift in order to win back her unfaithful husband’s affection. Accordingly, those who decode this film for parallels to Taylor’s offscreen personas will find it mildly intriguing. Such was the power of old-fashioned movie stardom. Just as John Wayne fans tolerated substandard movies in order to huff his masculine charisma, so too did Taylor devotees endure hours of aimless Eurotrash just to savor her complicated mixture of fragility and glamour.

          The painfully slow-moving Ash Wednesday opens with Barbara Sawyer (Taylor) visiting a European clinic for a facelift and other cosmetic procedures. Soon, clips from real surgery are shown, so queasy viewers will have to look away. Later, while recuperating, Barbara becomes friends with flamboyant photographer David (Keith Baxter) while awaiting the arrival of her husband, Mark (Henry Fonda). Since she kept her surgery plans secret, all Mark knows is that she’s been on holiday in Europe for several weeks. Unwilling to accept all the obvious clues that her marriage is over, Barbara becomes so lonely awaiting Mark—who delays his arrival several times—that she has an affair of her own, thinking jealousy might shock Mark’s system. Ultimately, the whole storyline is a slow burn to Barbara’s painful reunion with her husband.

          Listing the movie’s shortcomings does not require much effort. The characterizations are thin, the pacing is absurdly dull, and the supporting performances are perfunctory. Furthermore, while we can empathize with Barbara’s anguish, one is hard-pressed to believe that a character played by Elizabeth Taylor at any age has been so starved of romantic attention that she has grown to doubt her own comeliness. (Sure, the deeper reason she gets the surgery is that her self-identity is wrapped up in her marriage, but this isn’t a story about someone getting therapy—it’s about a facelift.) Despite these significant faults, Taylor invests her performance with just enough confusion and pathos to make a few moments feel authentic. Oddly, this is not only one of her most unvarnished performances but also one of her most vain—after all, the real love story here isn’t between Barbara and Mark, but rather between Taylor and her own beauty.

Ash Wednesday: FUNKY

Under Milk Wood (1972)

          Forgive a digression. Over the course of many years spent writing film criticism, I’ve held a number of different attitudes toward rating systems. Generally, I find them reductive and unhelpful except in aggregate, which is to say that only by combining multiple perspectives can one find useful short-take analysis. Then again, to say that the Metacritic/Rotten Tomatoes paradigm has shortcomings is to grossly understate things. So when it came time to apply a rubric to ’70s movies for this project, I was hesitant but ultimately decided some framework would be enjoyable for readers. If nothing else, looking at a spectrum of things I find disappointing or exemplary helps loyal readers compare their attitudes to my own, which in turn allows them to contextualize my appraisals of particular films. Yet any ratings system has special quirks, and mine is no exception. Take the “Funky” rating. In the broadest sense, this rating is given to a mediocre picture with more good elements than bad, hence the explanatory phrase accompanying the “Funky” rating: “You might dig it.”

          Under Milk Wood, a peculiar British film adapted from a 1950s radio play by Dylan Thomas, is a different kind of “Funky.” This time, it’s not so much that I found some things to enjoy—rather, it’s that I found some things to appreciate. For most of Under Milk Wood’s running time, I had no idea what was going on, couldn't figure out what X event had to do with Y event, and sometimes failed to penetrate the thick accents of the speakers. (Much of the piece comprises voiceover in tandem with evocative images, and all the participants employ or replicate Welsh accents.) Quite frequently, when I encounter a picture this befuddling, I label it “Freaky” because I believe others will find it just as bizarre. Not so here. Yes, casual viewers of Under Milk Wood are likely to have a reaction similar to mine—but attentive viewers, and certainly those conversant in British culture and Thomas’ literary oeuvre, will simply find the movie idiosyncratic. Flawed, perhaps, but more poetic than weird. Thus it would seem a disservice to label this film “Freaky,” as there’s nothing plainly disturbing or transgressive here, even though some scenes are kinky and provocative.

          If all of this seems like a laborious effort to avoid discussing the particulars of Under Milk Wood, fair enough. I could parrot interpretations that I gleaned from research, but the movie left me so cold I can’t offer much in the way of original insight. Presented in a dreamlike style, the story features disassociated vignettes of life in a Welsh fishing village. Themes of class and sex and madness and religion are explored. Famous actors including Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, and Elizabeth Taylor appear, some for more screen time than others. There’s a fair bit of nudity, and even a threesome in a barn. In one scene, images of a man pumping his lover’s legs back and forth are intercut with images of the same man pumping draft-beer levers in a pub until fluid spews forth. Perhaps these images, and the accompanying lyrical voiceover, mean something. Perhaps they don’t. Similarly, maybe Under Milk Wood is pretentious nonsense. And maybe it isn’t. But, quite frankly, I can’t be bothered to think about the movie a moment longer. Depending on your tastes, please consider yourselves sufficiently intrigued—or warned.

Under Milk Wood: FUNKY

Victory at Entebbe (1976) & Raid on Entebbe (1977)

          One of the Me Decade’s most startling real-life events occurred on July 4, 1976, when Israeli commandos raided an airport in Uganda to rescue more than a hundred hostages from Palestinians who hijacked a passenger plane. Filled with larger-than-life individuals, notably crazed Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, the story of “Operation Thunderbolt” helped define the era during which international terrorism first took root. Almost inevitably, Hollywood pounced on this material, with the first screen dramatization reaching American airwaves six months after the rescue, and a second version airing a month later. Both telefilms feature big-name casts.

          First to air was Victory at Entebbe, a rushed and schlocky melodrama that mostly focuses on dynamics among hostages during their tense incarceration in Uganda. Filmed by director Marvin J. Chomsky with garish lighting and unimpressive production values, Victory at Entebbe suffers badly for the choice to shove the biggest names possible into various roles, no matter the results. Good luck figuring out the genetic math by which parents Kirk Douglas and Elizabeth Taylor produce daughter Linda Blair—and have fun scratching your head while Anthony Hopkins plays Israeli Prime Minister Ytzhak Rabin opposite Burt Lancaster as his Minister of Defense. Helmut Berger does forgettable work as lead terrorist Wilfried Böse, and those playing the other hijackers stop just short of twirling moustaches.

          Portraying key passengers, Theodore Bikel, Severn Darden, Helen Hayes, Allan Miller, Jessica Walter, and others do what they can with florid dialogue and overwrought dramaturgy. Way too much screen time is devoted to Blair’s alternately cutesy and whiny performance as a young hostage, the Douglas/Taylor scenes feel like clips from a bad soap opera, and Julius Harris looks cartoonish playing Amin thanks to an ill-advised fat suit. Scenes set in Israel are better, though it’s hard to buy doughy Richard Dreyfuss as fierce commando Yoni Netanyahu. Worse, the Israeli scenes focus on procedural matters, mostly sidelining political ramifications. A final strike against Victory at Entebbe is the use of stock footage for airplane scenes, which greatly diminishes verisimilitude.

          Although the star power of Raid on Entebbe is not quite as impressive as that of the preceding film, the performances are much better. Martin Balsam, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz, Peter Finch, John Saxon, Sylvia Sidney, Jack Warden, and others deliver restrained work, letting the story speak for itself. Only a few players—including Tige Andrews and Stephen Macht—succumb to melodramatic excess. More importantly, Raid on Entebbe has Yaphet Kotto. He’s  dazzling as Amin, conveying the madman’s grandiosity, moodiness, and narcissism. Directed by the versatile Irvin Kershner with docudrama simplicity and the occasional subtle flourish—a sleek camera move here, a dramatic lighting pattern there—Raid on Entebbe unfolds methodically. The opening scene depicts the hijacking without sensationalizing events, and thereafter the movie cuts back and forth between Israel, where officials plan their response, and scenes involving hostages and their captors.

          Eventually, the film resolves into three parallel narratives. The first involves Rabin (Finch) rallying support for military intervention, despite his government’s propensity for endless debate. The second involves the hostages, of whom Daniel Cooper (Balsam) is the unofficial spokesman, watching their fates transfer from the hands of religious zealots to those of an unpredictable tyrant. The third involves units of the Israeli military—under the command of Generals Gur (Warden), Peled (Saxon), and Shomron (Bronson)—figuring how to achieve the impossible. The level of detail in Barry Beckerman’s teleplay is extraordinary, so despite its lengthy running time (two and a half hours), Raid on Entebbe is interesting and thoughtful from start to finish. Better still, the presence of marquee-name actors never eclipses the solemnity of the narrative. (Special note should be made of Finch’s fine performance as Rabin, because this was his last project. He died a week after Raid on Entebbe aired.)

          Yet another dramatization of these historic events emerged soon after the dual telefilms, this time from Israel. Directed by Menaham Golan, Operation Thunderbolt features a mostly Israeli cast, although the intense German actor Klaus Kinski plays Böse and the voluptuous Austrian starlet Sybil Danning costars. Operation Thunderbolt received an Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Film.

Victory at Entebbe: FUNKY

Raid on Entebbe: GROOVY

Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973)

          Broadcast on television over consecutive nights as a two-part movie, Divorce His, Divorce Hers represents the last of 11 cinematic collaborations between the most famous on-again/off-again couple in Hollywood history, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The irony that the actors divorced in real life a year after the picture was broadcast, only to remarry in 1975 and divorce again in 1976, is but one of many parallels that makes the project interesting. For while the underlying material is respectable, exploring the dissipation of a marriage first from the husband’s perspective and then from the wife’s, the script is a bit long-winded and superficial, so it’s probable the film would have faded from memory had it not been for the participation of a notorious couple. As is, Divorce His, Divorce His failed to make much noise at the time of its original broadcast (not a single Emmy nomination, for instance), and none would make the argument that it’s essential viewing. Still, those curious to explore whether Liz and Dick still had any of the fire that made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) so powerful could do worse than tracking this one down. As in most of their latter-day projects, the leading actors rely too heavily on old tricks—his sullen scowling, her breathy overplaying—but every so often, something connects.

          Divorce His, the first part, lays out the particulars. International businessman Martin Reynolds (Burton) navigates life after his divorce from Jane (Taylor), his wife of 18 years and the mother of their three children. Present-day action takes place in Rome, where Jane lives with the kids, and the story begins with Martin returning from Africa, where he lives and works, for a visit. Seeing his estranged loved ones triggers flashbacks. From Martin’s perspective, he was in many ways the culprit for the separation, a cold and distant man who forced Jane to demand affection and to provide emotional support for their children. The more he devoted himself to business, the needier she became. In the harshest Divorce His scene, Martin strikes Jane, only to immediately regret the action, and she suffers the blow willingly: “Beat me black and blue,” she moans, “but please don’t leave me.” The implication is that he finds her complicated psychology erotic and maddening in equal measure—which isn’t far from the read most historians provide about the real Burton/Taylor relationship—but of course this dynamic is supercharged with all sorts of troubling connotations related to gender roles. At its best, Divorce His allows Taylor to convey unaffected vulnerability, something sorely lacking from most of her work in the late ’60s and beyond, while allowing Burton to channel the elegant cruelty that eventually became his cinematic signature.

          Things get messy with Divorce Hers, which portrays the end of the marriage far less clinically. Divorce Hers plays out like an emotional horror movie, with Jane pulled in myriad directions at once. The best thing Divorce Hers conveys is the way Jane handles the everyday work of managing her children’s reactions to the breakup. A young daughter asks if the divorce is her fault, and an adult son dismisses his father as a soulless cash machine. As Jane says to Martin in Divorce Hers, “Where are you when things go wrong?” Alas, things go wrong with the storytelling in Divorce Hers, because the filmmakers get mired in melodrama about the ex-spouses’ new lovers and then get totally lost in pointless scenes about Martin’s latest business deal. It should also be noted that Divorce Hers is less watchable simply because Taylor lacks Burton’s precision as an actor. Considering its cumbersome total length of three hours, Divorce His, Divorce Hers rewards the viewer’s time more often than not, especially if the viewer plays along with the game of looking for clues about the real Burton/Taylor relationship. Surely that was the filmmakers’ intention when casting the leading roles as they did.

Divorce His, Divorce Hers: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Mirror Crack’d

          The Agatha Christie vogue that began with Murder on the Orient Express (1974) fizzled quickly, but not before several big-budget mediocrities were unleashed on the public. Of these lesser Christie adaptations, the British-made The Mirror Crack’d is interesting because it doubles as a catty story about Hollywood, complete with performances by several iconic American actors. The Mirror Crack’d doesn’t work for a lot of reasons, ranging from an inconsistent tone to the way the main detective is sidelined throughout most of the action. Viewed as glossy camp, however, The Mirror Crack’d offers minor distractions. Set in England during the 1950s, the story revolves around a group of Hollywood professionals visiting Great Britain for a movie shoot. Christie’s matronly detective Miss Marple (Angela Lansbury) happens upon the shoot at the same time a series of murders begins, so, naturally, it falls to Marple and her intrepid nephew, Inspector Craddox (Edward Fox), to identify the killer. In classic Christie fashion, the investigation reveals years of secrets and lies, all of which Marple explains in a lengthy final scene.

          The murder-mystery stuff is fine, if a bit perfunctory, so what really connects is the showbiz satire. Kim Novak and Elizabeth Taylor play aging screen queens who trade nasty barbs, while Tony Curtis plays the sleazy agent/husband of Novak’s character and Rock Hudson plays the director/husband of Taylor’s character. Naturally, there’s a mistress in the mix, as well. Made without any pretense to sophistication, the film is enlivened by bitchery. Looking in a mirror, Taylor’s character coos, “Bags, bags, go away, come back again on Doris Day.” Another gem: “I could eat a can of Kodak and puke a better movie.” You get the idea. Lansbury is great fun whenever she’s onscreen, and in retrospect her performance seems like an audition for the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996). Yet for much of the movie, she’s absent, with Fox doing the heavy investigative lifting. As for the big names, Curtis, Hudson, and Taylor are cartoonish but appealing, while Novak is embarrassingly bad.

The Mirror Crack’d: FUNKY

Hammersmith Is Out (1972)

A misguided black comedy that bounces between crude farce and silly satire, Hammersmith Is Out loosely retells the legend of Faust, which concerns a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for success. As ineptly written by Stanford Whitmore and clumsily directed by Peter Ustinov, Hammersmith Is Out concerns an ignorant slob named Billy Breedlove (Beau Bridges), who works as an orderly in a mental hospital. Billy agrees to free a psychotic patient named Hammersmith (Richard Burton), who in turn agrees to kill people on Billy’s behalf, thereby imbuing Billy with the victims’ money and power. Along for the ride is greasy-spoon waitress Jimmie Jean Jackson (Elizabeth Taylor), whom Billy enjoys screwing until her vapidity becomes annoying. The narrative of Hammersmith Is Out moves at awkward rhythms, sometimes lingering on scenes as if they’re pieces of theater, and sometimes rushing through important ones by way of perfunctory voiceover. The tone of the picture is inconsistent, complementing sly verbal jokes with a crass gag about flatulence. Bridges gives an exaggerated turn playing an irredeemable scumbag, and Burton dubiously opts for icy restraint, which makes him seem bored. Taylor is awful—all cartoonish artifice—though in her defense, she’s grossly miscast as a salt-of-the-earth type. Given these wholly unsympathetic characters, it’s a drag to watch Hammersmith Is Out, because the flick is a would-be laugh riot about killing and maiming people for no reason other than greed. Furthermore, it’s hard to cut the movie slack as a spoof of 1972-era society, seeing as how Ustinov’s idea of a witty joke is showing an all-female rock band called “The Tits” performing topless. By the time the movie stops dead so La Liz can deliver an interminable monologue, gifting her character with previously unknown soulfulness, Hammersmith Is Out has degraded into pointless sludge.

Hammersmith Is Out: LAME

A Little Night Music (1977)

          Considering his godhead status in the world of musical theater, composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim has been strangely unrepresented in movies. Although most of his major plays have been telecast in some form or another, to date only six have become feature films: West Side Story (1961), Gypsy (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), A Little Night Music (1977), Sweeney Todd (2007), and Into the Woods (2014). The 30-year gap between A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd is partially attributable to musicals going out of fashion, and it’s fair to say that West Side Story is, to date, the only unqualified smash Sondheim movie adaptation. Still, a talent of Sondheim’s stature surely deserves better in general—and better, specifically, than the middling film version of A Little Night Music.

          Adapted from the Ingmar Bergman movie Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which also inspired Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), A Little Night Music premiered onstage in 1973, introducing the bittersweet ballad “Send in the Clowns.” Cover versions by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins popularized the tune. Like many of Sondheim’s musicals, A Little Night Music is a sophisticated collage of intricate musicality and rigorous wordplay, to say nothing of complex plotting, so it was hardly a natural for a mainstream adaptation. Indeed, the movie version was financed by a German company and distributed in the U.S. by, off all entities, Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.

          Elizabeth Taylor, far from the apex of her box-office power but still a formidable presence, leads a cast including Len Cariou, Lesley-Anne Down, and Diana Rigg. Set in turn-of-the-century Austria, A Little Night Music tracks the romantic travails of a group of wealthy but lonely people. For instance, middle-aged lawyer Fredrik (Cariou) has recently married his second wife, 18-year-old beauty Anne (Down), though he carries a torch for middle-aged actress Desiree (Taylor). Meanwhile, Fredrik’s son, priest-in-training Erich (Christopher Guard), wrestles with sexual longing and family friend Countess Charlotte (Rigg) laments the passage of time.

          The movie opens with the characters performing onstage as the song “Night Waltz” presents rarified central themes (one lyric states that “love is a lecture on how to correct your mistakes”). After a graceful transition to location photography, the movie winds through its narrative, and most numbers are staged as intimate dramatic scenes. As always, Sondheim’s language is dazzling. Anne assures the sex-crazed Erich that “my lap isn’t one of the devil’s snares,” and Fredrik offers the following observation: “I’m afraid being young in itself is a trifle ridiculous.” In one of A Little Night Music’s nimblest numbers, “Soon,” Fredrik contemplates ravaging his wife, who remains a virgin nearly a year into their marriage (“I still want and/or love you,” Fredrik sings). Although Broadway veteran Cariou has a strong voice, the best performance actually comes from Rigg, who imbues “Every Day a Little Death” with hard-won wisdom. Conversely, Taylor fails to impress when she delivers “Send in the Clowns.” In fact, Taylor is the film’s biggest weak spot, thanks to her distracting cleavage and flamboyant acting and weak singing.

          Yet the ultimate blame for the mediocre nature of this film must fall on Harold Prince, who directed the original Broadway production as well as the movie, and on Sondheim. Prince’s filmmaking is humorless and mechanical, failing to translate the elegance of the material into cinematic fluidity. And for all their intelligence and sophistication, Sondheim’s songs are frequently cumbersome and pretentious. The film version of A Little Night Music contains many fine elements, but if it served as any viewer’s first introduction to Sondheim, the viewer might be perplexed as to what the fuss over the Grammy-, Oscar-, Pulitzer- and Tony-winning songsmith is all about.

A Little Night Music: FUNKY

Night Watch (1973)

          Old-fashioned save for a gory finale, this adequate little thriller is hampered by leading lady Elizabeth Taylor’s overwrought performance—even though, by the outrageous standards of her usual style, she’s comparatively restrained in this picture. The problem, of course, is that Taylor rarely portrayed recognizable human beings, instead incarnating dream girls and harpies and vamps. Since the storyline of Night Watch is predicated on Taylor’s ability to believably convey the way her character teeters on the edge between madness and sanity, Taylor’s shortcomings nearly scuttle the whole endeavor. Thankfully, director Brian G. Hutton and his collaborators present the story with confident pacing and photography, while composer John Cameron provides an eerie score laden with theremin flourishes straight out of some vintage ’50s shocker.

          Set in England (where the film was produced), Night Watch concerns Ellen Wheeler (Taylor), a troubled woman struggling through a shaky second marriage. Her first husband died under traumatic circumstances, and now Ellen is wed to John (Laurence Harvey), who may or may not be trysting with Ellen’s best friend, Sarah Cooke (Billie Whitelaw). Already considered unhinged by everyone she knows, Ellen raises further worries about her mental state when she claims to have seen a murder committed in the house next door. This leads to all sorts of friction with Ellen’s neighbors and with the local police, who dig up gardens and search vacant houses while looking for clues that never materialize. Eventually, the story becomes a battle of wills between Ellen and John, because once John suggests that Ellen spend time in a sanitarium, she must prove her sanity in order to save her own freedom. Naturally, there’s a big twist toward the end of the picture.

          Most everything about Night Watch is executed at a fairly high level, from the general ambiance to the supporting performances, so Taylor’s acting is the only major weak spot. Furthermore, flashbacks to the time when Ellen’s first husband died are effectively gruesome, long scenes of characters probing mysterious hallways contain a measure of suspense, and the violent finale is exciting. As such, it’s wrong to categorize Night Watch as camp, since the leading lady’s flamboyance is the sole cartoonish element. Nonetheless, how much enjoyment each viewer can derive from Night Watch depends in large part upon each viewer’s Taylor tolerance.

Night Watch: FUNKY

The Driver’s Seat (1974)

          This oddball Italian production stars Elizabeth Taylor as a demented woman searching Europe for the right man to murder her during sex. Yes, La Liz zooms way past the extremes of Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), playing one of the most unhinged characters of her long career. Alas, the underlying material is so artificial that Taylor can’t fully exploit her powerful commitment to investigating dark corners of the human psyche; instead of incarnating a believably sick person, she ends up presenting a caricature of sociopathic behavior. For instance, at one point Taylor berates a store clerk in the following nonsensical fashion: “Who asked you for a stain-resistant dress? Don’t just stand there looking like a chicken with one eye! Help me!” Later, she sholds a would-be suitor who claims he needs to ejaculate daily as part of his macrobiotic diet. (Yes, you read that right.) Taylor’s reply: “When I diet, I diet, and when I orgasm, I orgasm! I don’t believe in mixing the two cultures!” While there’s always camp value in watching Taylor ride the train to Freakytown, The Driver’s Seat is so humorless, repetitive, and sluggish that watching the movie is a chore.

          Based on a novel by Muriel Spark, the picture tracks the adventures of Lise (Taylor), a European woman who embarks on a meandering quest that takes her through several cities and several lovers. Lise is full of contradictions—even though she periodically indicates that she’s on an urgent mission, she also makes time for shopping excursions. Similarly, Lise courts various men, only to repel their physical advances once she determines they’re not right for her purposes. Lise is a mess, but not a credible or interesting mess. Periodically, the filmmakers cut from Lise to interrogation scenes featuring one of her former suitors. This element doesn’t work, either, partially because the temporal relationship between the two narrative threads is murky, and partially because the man being interrogated seems as bizarre as Lise. Since the filmmakers forgot to provide pockets of normalcy amid the pain-freak stuff, there’s nothing for rational viewers to grasp. Adding to the weirdness is the presence of NYC art icon Andy Warhol in a supporting role, though his speaking voice was jarringly replaced with that of an Englishman. So, even though Taylor devours her role—and even though cinematographer Vittorio Storaro gives nearly every scene some level of visual dynamism—The Driver’s Seat ultimately becomes a heap of gruesome nonsense.

The Driver’s Seat: LAME

That’s Entertainment! (1974) & That’s Entertainment, Part II (1976)

          Made to commemorate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 50th anniversary, That’s Entertainment! is a documentary in name only, since the picture comprises clips from old movies that are introduced—through new, scripted footage—by a group of movie actors closely associated with the MGM studio. Anyone looking for behind-the-scenes gossip or insight will be disappointed, but, as the film’s title suggests, providing information isn’t the point. Rather, That’s Entertainment! offers a massive array of show-stopping musical numbers, including such classic moments as Fred Astaire’s graceful dance duet with Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon (1953), Judy Garland’s plaintive rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gene Kelly’s exuberant performance of the title song in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and dozens more. The picture also spotlights rarely scene clips, including Clark Gable performing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Idiot’s Delight (1939), and features montages celebrating the work of such Golden Age stars as Lena Horne, Ann Miller, and Esther Williams.

          The clips are nearly all dazzling, running the gamut from outrageous Busby Berkeley-directed spectacles to simple vocal performances, and the film’s seven editors did a remarkable job of organizing the material into logical sections while also creating a smooth flow. Writer-producer-director Jack Haley Jr.’s use of MGM stars as hosts works, too, because their participation validates the piece; furthermore, seeing the passage of time through their aging faces and physiques amplifies the nostalgia of recalling a magical era from the past. (Accentuating this effect, many of the hosts are shot walking through decrepit sections of the long-unused MGM backlot.)

          The impressive roster of hosts includes Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, Peter Lawford, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, and the late Judy Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, who presents a sweet segment about “Mama.” Each host offers a canned anecdote or two, and then narrates a few minutes of clips, so Haley creates the illusion of old friends sharing memories at a reunion. That’s Entertainment! is total fluff, but it lives up to its title and, in a cheerfully superficial sort of way, provides a history lesson simply by cataloguing the best output from one studio.

          Alas, the film’s first sequel, That’s Entertainment, Part II, is not nearly as charming. Kelly took over the directing chores, and he co-hosts the entire film exclusively with fellow song-and-dance legend Astaire. (Songwriter Sammy Cahn makes an ineffectual appearance during one quick bit.) Kelly and his team cast a wider net for different types of clips, since most of MGM’s best musical numbers were used in the previous film. As a result, this picture features random montages about great movie lines, plus such extended comedy bits as the Marx Brothers’ classic “stateroom” scene from A Night at the Opera (1935). Combined with the lack of organization—the movie jumps around between eras and genres—the inclusion of nonmusical scenes makes That’s Entertainment, Part II confusing and unfocused. Worse, Kelly stages all of the hosting bits as musical numbers. While it’s fun to see Astaire and Kelly hoofing together, their age and a general lack of inspiration makes these original production numbers seem second-rate when juxtaposed with classic clips. Nonetheless, the franchise soldiered on with a quasi-official follow-up called That’s Dancing In 1985 and then an official, made-for-TV threequel called That’s Entertainment III in 1994.

That’s Entertainment!: GROOVY

That’s Entertainment, Part II: FUNKY

X, Y & Zee (1972)

          Yet another shrill melodrama from the bleakest period of Elizabeth Taylor’s screen career—the wasteland between her triumphant performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and her ascension to grande dame status in the ’80s—X, Y & Zee features Taylor and Michael Caine as hateful spouses battling over issues including the husband’s myriad dalliances. In other words, it’s nearly 110 minutes of Taylor screaming, threatening, and whining. Set in London, the movie tracks the relationship between unfaithful architect Robert Blakely (Caine) and his disturbed wife, Zee (Taylor). They fight virtually from sun-up to sundown, with Zee constantly promising to kill herself and/or Robert; meanwhile, Robert alternates between joining the sparring matches and numbing himself with booze. At a lavish party one night, Robert meets Stella (Susannah York), an elegant and seemingly untroubled young woman, with whom he begins an affair. However, as Robert’s feelings for Stella blossom into love, a threatened Zee lashes out by stalking the lovers, tossing Robert’s possessions into the street, and, finally, attempting suicide.

          Then, while recovering in the hospital, Zee requests that Stella visit her, and Stella, quite stupidly, accepts the offer. Zee starts playing mind games with her husband’s mistress, who inexplicably reveals to Zee her deepest personal secret. And so it goes—to quote a line Stella delivers to Robert at one point, “It’s all very brittle and boring and trite.” She’s talking about Zee’s behavior, but she could just as easily be talking about X, Y & Zee itself. Caine is fine here, since he does icy nastiness better than just about anyone, though York is merely decorative, while Taylor is an outright embarrassment. She overacts ridiculously; she’s slathered with whorish eye makeup; she wears flamboyant costumes like muumuus and ponchos, presumably to mask her expanding waistline; and she sports silly fashion accoutrements like, at one point, a gold headband that looks like a leftover from her days playing Cleopatra. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

X, Y & Zee: LAME

Winter Kills (1979)

          By the end of the ’70s, conspiracy thrillers had started to evolve from provocative political thrillers to wild escapist romps, because as fictional conspiracies grew more outlandish, the derring-do required to survive them grew to equally unbelievable proportions. For instance, consider the credibility gap separating the best-known adaptation of a Richard Condon conspiracy novel, 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, and the least-known adaptation of a Richard Condon conspiracy novel, 1979’s Winter Kills. Whereas the former is a chilling story about political assassination made just before the real-life death of John F. Kennedy, the latter is a whimsical oddity made at the end of a decade during which the public overdosed on real-life political corruption. In fact, Winter Kills somehow manages to be both a conspiracy movie and a spoof of conspiracy movies, delivering a narrative so preposterous that it provides sardonic commentary on the whole premise of searching for wheels within wheels while scrutinizing the body politic.

          An obvious riff on the Kennedy clan’s woes, the picture follows directionless young blueblood Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges), the younger brother of assassinated U.S. President Timothy Kegan. Nearly 20 years after the killing, Nick meets a dying man who claims to have pulled the trigger, which starts Nick down an investigative road that reveals how deep the roots of political murders reach. As written for the screen and directed by the clever William Richert, the picture follows Nick into a quagmire involving a crazy millionaire with a private army (Sterling Hayden), a tweaked behind-the-scenes power-monger who operates out of a computerized secret lair (Anthony Perkins), and other strange characters who are all vaguely connected to Nick’s super-rich father, Pa Kegan (John Huston), a modernized doppleganger for legendary patriarch Joseph Kennedy. Nick also gets involved with a mysterious woman (Belinda Bauer) who may or may not be a femme fatale, and he spends plenty of time getting assaulted, shot at, and threatened by various bad guys.

          Richert’s script is brilliant in flashes but muddy overall, providing a number of memorable scenes even though the main narrative is unnecessarily convoluted. Still, the whole thing goes down quite easily thanks to splendid widescreen cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, and thanks to a number of thoroughly entertaining performances. Bridges is exasperated and intense, desperately trying to prove his manhood while he’s digging for the truth, and Bauer is powerfully seductive (that nude scene!) in her first movie role. Huston, by this point in his career a seasoned pro at playing oversized villains, barks and growls in that special style of avuncular menace he did so well. The supporting players are just as good. Hayden is funny as a militaristic kook, recalling his role in Dr. Strangelove, while Perkins is slyly robotic, coolly delivering dialogue even as he withstands physical assault. As an added bonus, watch closely for Elizabeth Taylor, whose droll cameo is one of the movie’s sardonic highlights.

Winter Kills: GROOVY

The Blue Bird (1976)

          Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlink’s fantasy about peasant children drifting through a magical dreamworld, originally titled L’Oiseau blue, provided the source material for two silent films and an Oscar-nominated Shirley Temple movie in 1940, all bearing the English-language title The Blue Bird, before venerable director George Cukor helmed this full-color musical version in 1976. Whatever charms the piece has in its previous incarnations are absent from Cukor’s picture, however, which is awkward, dull, and vapid. The whimsical story has two kids whisked away to a trippy fantasyland by a fairy named Light (Elizabeth Taylor) in order to recover the Blue Bird of Happiness, which will enrich the life of a sick child living near the peasants.

          Accompanying the children on their adventure are personified versions of household items like bread and sugar and water, plus walking-and-talking incarnations of their pet cat (Cicely Tyson) and dog (George Cole). During their journey, the kids meet an obnoxious oak tree (Harry Andrews), a demonic creature called Night (Jane Fonda), a seductive woman representing all things luxurious (Ava Gardner), and even cranky old Father Time (Robert Morley). The sheer amount of hokum crammed into one story is numbing, as are the muddled aesthetics of Cukor’s version.

          The costumes are self-consciously artificial (Tyson wears a leotard, a scarf, and half-hearted cat makeup), the settings fluctuate indiscriminately between tacky sets and lush European forests (the picture was shot in Russia), and the songs are so cloying and insubstantial that they barely register as anything more than background noise. The young actors playing the leads (including Patsy Kensit, who years later costarred in Lethal Weapon 2) are weak, and the adults fail to impress—Cukor, who seems to think he’s making a glossy MGM musical in the ’30s, steers his cast toward florid line readings instead of performances, with only Cole offering a glimmer of characterization as a loyal puppy who digs being able to chat with his master.

The Blue Bird: LAME

The Only Game in Town (1970)

Nineteen-seventy was an interesting transitional year for American movies, because the gulf between traditional pictures rooted in Establishment mores and New Hollywood freakouts created in Easy Rider’s wake was gigantic. Accordingly, it’s amazing that interminable studio pabulum like The Only Game in Town was still being manufactured at the same historical moment as counterculture classics like M*A*S*H, but the fact that both movies were released in early 1970 demonstrates why the New Hollywood made the old Hollywood obsolete. The final film directed by studio-era great George Stevens (Giant, A Place in the Sun, Shane), The Only Game in Town is an unbearably talky adaptation of a play by Frank D. Gilroy (who also wrote the script) about the stormy romance between a Vegas showgirl (Elizabeth Taylor) and an inveterate gambler (Warren Beaty). Gilroy fills the movie with one endless scene after another taking place in the showgirl’s drab apartment, so the picture is a lethargic procession of pretentious conversations in a visually uninteresting setting. The writing is so trite that nearly every character adopts some measure of affected world-weariness; for instance, when the gambler makes a romantic declaration and doesn’t get a response, he quips, “I’m sorry, folks, there seems to be a breakdown in the audio portion of our program.” Dooming the entire endeavor is the catastrophic miscasting of the lead role. Though still very beautiful, Taylor is too old and, with all due respect, too heavy to play a showgirl; the filmmakers try to obscure her zaftig figure with glamour-photography tricks and shapeless dresses, which only exacerbates the problem. She’s also terrible in the movie, screeching during arguments and staring vacantly through the innumerable scenes in which her character struggles with indecision. Beatty’s signature mixture of cockiness and dithering makes sense for the gambler role, but even though he and Taylor are fairly close in age, he comes off seeming far too young as her onscreen paramour. Worst of all, Stevens lets this slight story ramble on for 113 excruciating minutes, making The Only Game in Town an ignominious finale to his important career.

The Only Game in Town: SQUARE