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

Summer of ’42 (1971) & Class of ’44 (1973)

          Featuring one of the most lyrical love scenes in all of ’70s cinema, Summer of ’42 is an offbeat romance involving a teenage boy and a grown woman. Compassionately directed by Robert Mulligan, the film takes a bittersweet look at characters moving through profound life changes, conveying a sense of how deeply two people can comfort each other in times of need despite coming from different worlds. Screenwriter Herman Raucher, who adapted his original story into a novelization after completing the script—the book version eventually became a best-seller, just like the movie eventually became a sleeper hit—has said that the tale is autobiographical.

          According to Raucher, he was a confused 15-year-old vacationing with his family on Nantucket Island during World War II, and he became friends with a beautiful woman named Dorothy and her husband, a U.S. soldier. After the soldier was summoned to active duty, young Raucher remained friendly with Dorothy. Then, one afternoon, young Raucher arrived at Dorothy’s house moments after she learned of her husband’s death in combat. Distraught and lonely, she took young Raucher to bed, and then departed the island the next day, leaving her adolescent lover only a note.

          In the film version of this story, young Raucher is “Hermie” (Gary Grimes), a curious and kind-hearted teen spending the summer with his pals Benjie (Oliver Conant) and Oscy (Jerry Houser). Dorothy is portrayed by the mesmerizingly beautiful model-turned-actress Jennifer O’Neill. The teen high jinks that comprise much of the movie’s first half are forgettable, but all of the scenes with O’Neill have a certain magic. Not only does Mulligan guide O’Neill to a higher performance level than she ever reached in another project, but Mulligan captures the wonderment Hermie feels at connecting with a sophisticated adult. The entire movie has a nostalgic feel, with cinematographer Robert Surtees capturing the stark beauty of East Coast shorelines and composer Michel Legrand contributing tender melodies. Yet the appeal of the picture stems almost entirely from that one key scene—handled with unusual elegance and restraint, Hermie’s encounter with Dorothy is beautiful and bewildering and sad. The sequence is poetry.

          Alas, the success of the movie compelled Raucher to write a thoroughly unnecessary sequel titled Class of ’44, which was produced and released two years after the original film. Neither director Mulligan nor costar O’Neill returned, though Grimes reprised his role as Hermie. (Conant and Houser return, as well, portraying Hermie’s pals, but they remain in supporting roles.) Set during Hermie’s college years—which are heavily fictionalized extrapolations of Raucher’s real-life experiences—the bland and meandering picture primarily concerns Hermie’s romance with Julie (Deborah Winters), a high-strung coed. Julie comes off as difficult and domineering, and Winters’ performance is strident, so it’s difficult to get excited about the prospect of these two forming a lasting bond.

          Worse, Hermie emerges as a deeply ordinary collegiate who neither changes significantly during the course of the story nor has a major impact on those around him. Yes, he suffers a few coming-of-age blows, such as the death of his father, but these events feel trite compared with the transcendent experience Hermie had in Summer of ’42. The likeable Grimes does what he can with bland material, however, leavening the story’s inherent navel-gazing quality with admirable toughness. In sum, while the execution of Class of ’44 is more or less acceptable—particularly in terms of period details and production values—the whole enterprise feels perfunctory.

Summer of ’42: GROOVY

Class of ’44: FUNKY

The Spikes Gang (1974)

          Taking themes from the John Wayne hit The Cowboys (1972) to an even darker extreme, The Spikes Gang is a terrific Western drama about a group of young farm boys who emulate an outlaw, with deadly results. Gary Grimes, still fresh off the coming-of-age charmer Summer of ’42 (1971), teams with Ron Howard and Charles Martin Smith, who previously costarred in American Graffiti (1973), to play a trio of young, unsophisticated men who discover a wounded outlaw in a forest near their families’ farms. The gunslinger, Harry Spikes (Lee Marvin), asks for their help, so Will (Grimes), Les (Ron Howard), and Tod (Smith) transport Harry to a barn, feed him, and tend to his gunshot wounds. Once Harry recovers, he promises to help the boys if they ever need anything, and then rides off on a horse Will provides. Will’s stern, ultra-religious father discovers his son’s activities and beats Will, which prompts the young man to run away from home.

          Eager for adventure and seduced by Harry’s grandiose stories about his exciting life as a criminal, Les and Tod join Will. They rob a bank, incompetently, and kill a bystander in the process, so they’re quickly indoctrinated into the dark side of the rebel lifestyle. Eventually, the lads get arrested and land in a Mexican jail, but Harry passes through the Mexican town and honors his debt by arranging their release. Flattered by the boys’ idolization, Harry hires the young men as his new gang and attempts a brazen robbery, during which things start going terribly wrong.

          Even with solid production values and uniformly good acting, the movie’s best virtue is a sensitive screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., the Western-cinema veterans who, not coincidentally, wrote the script for The Cowboys. Equally adept at crafting sparse dialogue and indicating characterization through behavior, Ravetch and Frank create a grown-up style of melodrama, so the storyline feels fresh and surprising as it winds toward a sad climax that’s infused with a powerful sense of inevitability.

          Director Richard Fleisher, a journeyman who worked in nearly every imaginable genre, serves the screenplay well by shooting scenes simply; his economical frames allow the actors to express the script’s relatable emotions in an unfussy manner. Playing the film’s leading role, Grimes does fine work, building on the frontier existentialism he explored in The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972). Concurrently, Marvin’s gruff poeticism perfectly suits the role of a self-serving career criminal. Howard and Smith balance the leading players with their complementary shadings of adolescent angst and affable naïveté. It’s true The Spikes Gang traffics in familiar themes, but graceful execution and heartfelt performances help the movie connect on a deeper level than expected. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

The Spikes Gang: GROOVY

Cahill: United States Marshal (1973)

An entertaining but forgettable entry in John Wayne’s latter-day filmography, Cahill: United States Marshal lacks the tragic poetry of The Cowboys (1972) and The Shootist (1976), the elegiac Westerns that comprise the Duke’s farewell to his beloved cowboy genre. Instead, Cahill: United States Marshal briskly presents a by-the-numbers story punctuated with solid action. There’s nothing here that fans haven’t seen a gazillion times before—Wayne struts through hordes of enemy gunmen like a superhero with a six-gun, barely flinching whenever he’s shot—but then again, novelty and surprise aren’t what people expected (or wanted) when they bought tickets to cowboy movies starring John Wayne. In this flick, the Duke plays J.D. Cahill, a tough-as-nails U.S. Marshal whose young sons fall in with a bad element while he’s away on business. Fraser (George Kennedy), a two-dimensional villain with a tendency to snarl while standing outside in lightning storms, pressures Cahill’s boys Danny (Gary Grimes) and Billy Joe (Clay O’Brien) to help with a bank robbery. When the robbery leads to the murder of a local sheriff, the lads realize they’ve gotten involved with the wrong varmints and try to wrangle themselves free of their predicament without getting killed or letting Dad know what’s happening. Much of the picture comprises Cahill stalking the robbers with the aide of his cranky Indian guide, Lightfoot (Neville Brand), so the drama of the piece, such as it is, stems from the question of how long the Cahill boys can manage to deceive their father. Quite predictably, it all comes to a head when Cahill figures out the truth in time to dole out equal measures of hot lead and life lessons. Efficiently directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and adequately written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink (who also penned the Duke’s 1971 Western Big Jake), Cahill: United States Marshal is pleasant entertainment and nothing more, a well-made but uninspired run through the usual tropes of last-minute rescues, ornery put-downs, tense shootouts, and tough talk about how a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Cahill: United States Marshal: FUNKY

The Culpepper Cattle Co. (1972)

          A solid Western built around the familiar theme of a young man proving himself through the rigors of a dangerous adventure, The Culpepper Cattle Co. benefits from journeyman director Dick Richards’ background as a still photographer. Handsomely filmed in Arizona and New Mexico, the picture has a dusty, lived-in feel that makes the odyssey of a motley crew driving cattle through the American West seem credible and dangerous, even though the nonstop hardships the crew encounters represent unimaginative narrative contrivances.

          Earnest juvenile player Gary Grimes, working at the apex of his brief semi-stardom following the coming-of-age classic Summer of ’42 (1971), plays Ben Mockridge, a wide-eyed farmboy who talks his way onto a cattle drive because he wants to become a man. The drive is supervised by tough Frank Culpepper (Billy “Green” Bush), who makes it plain that he values his stock more highly than the lives of his employees, so the picture asks whether Ben will find a place for himself among Culpepper’s crew of proven cowboys, and whether the crew will make it to the end of the line alive.

          As in most episodic pictures that follow long journeys, some of the incidents in The Culpepper Cattle Co. are more interesting than others. Vignettes of Ben getting razzed by older men are perfunctory, and the picture meanders somewhat until rugged character actor Geoffrey Lewis shows up as Russ, the leader of a gang of replacement cowboys Culpepper hires after a run-in with rustlers.

          Lewis’ forceful work gives the movie old-fashioned entertainment value and sly humor, especially when Russ clashes with Pete (Matt Clark), a quiet cowboy who doesn’t feel like getting killed in exchange for a day’s wages. Another vital utility player familiar from countless ’70s Westerns, Clark is memorably vulnerable here, displaying colors he should have been given the opportunity to explore in bigger roles. The picture gains further intensity when Culpepper’s group gets into a hassle with vicious landowner Thornton Pierce (John McLiam), setting the stage for a bloody showdown. And even though the guns-a-blazin’ finale stretches credibility (characters who have only looked out for themselves suddenly develop nobility), the story ends on a strong note, hammering home the film’s humanistic themes.

          The Culpepper Cattle Co. isn’t unique, and it suffers because neither Grimes nor Bush are particularly dynamic performers, but it’s a thoroughly respectable entry into the genre of early ’70s Westerns intent on debunking old romantic myths.

The Culpepper Cattle Co.: GROOVY