Hail (1972)

          Toward the end of its scant running time, Hail resolves into a serviceable satire of Nixon-era political paranoia. Getting there, however, requires slogging through lots of meandering and unfunny material. Produced and released before the Watergate scandal, Hail imagines a presidential administration fraught with intrigue because the commander-in-chief is a nutter who thinks all his subordinates are out to get him. The joke, of course, is that they are out to get him, hence the main storyline about a cabinet secretary (Richard B. Shull) drifting from closeness with the president to conspiring against him. The main subplot illustrates why the secretary loses faith—amid growing demonstrations by longhaired young people, the president forms a nationwide police force and imprisons activists in concentration camps. The jarring integration of this heavy material means Hail is dark comedy at best, a tonal quagmire at worst. Yet there’s something almost nobly roughshod about Hail. One can admire what the film attempts while acknowledging how infrequently it succeeds in the endeavor.

          Hampered by an insufficient budget and a first-time director (this is Fred Levinson’s only movie), Hail is disorganized and sluggish. Sequences featuring officials either working with or scheming against the president are coherent in a blunt-instrument sort of way, which is to say the comic intentions come across even when jokes fail to land. Scenes of hippies planning armed revolt lack the same clarity, since it’s unclear whether the film means to celebrate or lampoon the peace-and-love crowd. Not helping matters is a tendency toward overly broad performances. While Schull does well expressing his ambivalent character’s queasiness and Dick O’Neill is appropriately craven as an opportunistic attorney general, Dan Resin is wholly forgettable as the president, and Gary Sandy—years before WKRP in Cincinnati—borders on camp while playing a hippie who masquerades as a soldier. (Watch for Carol Kane in a tiny nonspeaking role.) Still, even if the whole thing spins out of control with overheated allusions to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar—it was the ‘70s, man—it’s possible to see how a stronger director could have done more with the script by Phil Dusenberry and Larry Spiegel. In flashes, Hail almost works.

Hail: FUNKY

Some of My Best Friends Are . . . (1971)

          A year after The Boys in the Band (1970) broke ground with its serious exploration of gay culture, representing a change from previous films in which homosexual characters were coded and/or marginalized, the low-budget ensemble piece Some of My Best Friends Are . . . explored similar terrain—with similar difficulty. Whereas The Boys in the Band was adapted from a well-regarded play and filmed by a promising new director (William Friedkin), Some of My Best Friends Are . . . was a screen original from first-time writer-director Mervyn Nelson, who only made one subsequent picture. His inexperience shows in every frame. The disparity in their technical polish aside, the films have interesting parallels. Some members of the LGBTQ community deride The Boys in the Band for over-the-top characterizations and a generalized theme of self-loathing, as if being gay is a curse. Some of My Best Friends Are . . . now plays gay film festivals somewhat regularly as a camp classic. Which is to say that if the folks behind either picture aspired to get early ’70s gay culture “right,” they were not fully successful—one project struck viewers as too heavy, and the other struck viewers as too silly. Seen today, The Boys in the Band is frustrating but intense and sharp, whereas Some of My Best Friends Are . . . is a bit of a mess.

          Set on New Year’s Eve in the Blue Jay Bar, a gay nightclub in Manhattan, the film tracks several gay men and their straight friends. In one poignant storyline, a nervous waiter named Phil (Nick De Noia) awaits the arrival of his blind date, Tim (Dick O’Neill), who believes Phil is a woman, since they’ve only met by phone. That storyline conveys something touching about the risks gay men in the early ’70s took when reaching outside their social circles for potential romantic partners, but De Noia’s cartoony performance diminishes the pathos. Far less interesting are scenes involving European ski instructor Michel (Uva Harden), who delivers this florid line in dubious English: “Facing death does not take courage—but two men making a life together does!” Again, right idea, wrong tone. And so it goes throughout the movie, which, incidentally, features three future TV stars. Gil Gerard, later to become Buck Rockers, plays a gay man who presents straight; Rue McLanahan, pre-Golden Girls, incarnates a clichéd “fag hag”; and Gary Sandy, a few years away from WKRP in Cincinatti, plays a hustler who experiences a major drug freakout. The other notable in the cast is Warhol-associated drag queen Candy Darling, who, no surprise, portrays a drag queen.

Some of My Best Friends Are . . . : FUNKY

The Great Smokey Roadblock (1976)

          From the title and packaging, you’d think this was a brainless boobs-and-beer action flick, but buried amid the usual scenes of amiable prostitutes and crooked redneck cops is a poignant story about a dying man struggling for dignity. However, if you think 18-wheelers, hookers, and mortality seem like incompatible story elements, you’re absolutely right, based on the evidence of this incredibly erratic movie. Working from a novel titled The Last of the Cowboys (which was also this film’s original title), writer-director John Leone unsuccessfully attempts to cushion the melancholy main storyline with outrageous high jinks, and both elements suffer: The drama feels diminished by the sleazy context, and the comedy feels superfluous.

          At the center of the narrative is “Elegant” John (Henry Fonda), a trucker whose rig was repossessed while he was hospitalized and unable to pay his bills. John busts out of the hospital and steals his rig, heading down the highway to hook up with his paramour, a salty madam named Penelope (Eileen Brennan). Along the way, John picks up a Bible-quoting hitchhiker (Robert Englund) and tries to steer clear of an unscrupulous hustler (Gary Sandy) who wants to sell the stolen truck for illicit cash. For reasons that aren’t exactly clear, Penelope and her girls move into John’s trailer, turning the fugitive’s semi into a brothel on wheels–and for reasons that are even less clear, one of the prostitutes (Susan Sarandon) falls in love with the pious hitchhiker.

          Suffice it to say that the main storyline of John seeking one last adventure before death gets lost in the shuffle, despite Fonda’s valiant attempts to sell crying scenes and testy dialogue exchanges. At one low point, a redneck sheriff (Dub Taylor, of course) arrests John and the women, so the prostitutes claim their cell is too hot and strip, angling to “barter” with the corrupt lawman and his deputy. Taylor cheerfully accepts their proposal, and trust me when I say that you’ll have trouble erasing the image of grizzled old coot Taylor wearing just boxer shorts while he hops up and down and yells, “Where’s that thermostat?!!” Yet a moment later, Taylor delivers genuinely tasty dialogue: When his deputy expresses guilt over having availed himself of the women’s services, Taylor crows, “If that’s the worst thing that ever happens to you in your life, junior, then I’m gonna follow you to the ends of the world, because you’re gonna have remarkable passage.”

          It’s hard to completely dislike any movie containing chatter that colorful, to say nothing of such a robust cast, but there’s a reason this mess of a flick sat on a shelf for two years prior to its release.

The Great Smokey Roadblock: FUNKY