1980 Week: The Kidnapping of the President

          An enjoyable blast of formulaic escapism with the slightest touch of camp, thanks to the presence of leading man William Shatner, The Kidnapping of the President is a Canada/US coproduction about exactly what the title suggests. While visiting Toronto, the American commander-in-chief is captured by a terrorist and dragged into an armored van laden with explosives, so an intrepid Secret Service agent—Shatner, naturally—must outwit the resourceful terrorist and rescue the president. Directed in workmanlike fashion by George Mendeluk, the picture offers virtually nothing in the way of character development and political relevance, so the only glimmers of humanity stem from exchanges between the imprisoned president and his anguished wife. That said, the makers of The Kidnapping of the President clearly knew what sort of picture they were making. This is a straightforward potboiler with a cardboard hero, one-dimensional villains, and a foregone conclusion, so those who like unexpected twists in their storytelling should seek their pleasures elsewhere.

          Jerry O’Connor (Shatner) is second-in-command of the security detail protecting amiable President Adam Scott (Hal Holbrook). Ahead of a diplomatic trip to Toronto, O’Connor learns that a violent South American terrorist, Roberto Assanti (Miguel Fernandes), is on the move, so O’Connor counsels the president to limit public exposure. Meanwhile, the film shows Assanti meticulously planning his big scheme, which involves a booby-trapped van. Upon reaching Toronto, the president works a crowd in an outdoor plaza, so Assanti manages to handcuff himself to the commander-in-chief. He then reveals a vest filled with dynamite, allowing him to move the president into the van. This scenario is clever, and notwithstanding the predictable race-against-time climax, the means by which O’Connor and his compatriots address the situation are fairly credible. Still, this is larky stuff, especially with the weak subplot involving a morally compromised vice president (Van Johnson) and his Lady Macbeth-ish wife (Ava Gardner). The best scenes involve Shatner channeling his signature over-the-top intensity and Holbrook demonstrating his avuncular charm. The picture also gets a welcome shot of eccentricity from Maury Chakin’s supporting turn as one of the terrorist’s accomplices.

The Kidnapping of the President: FUNKY

That Certain Summer (1972)

          The significance of this intimate telefilm derives as much from historical context as from the events depicted onscreen, because That Certain Summer is considered the first made-for-TV movie to present homosexual characters as dignified protagonists. Seen today, the picture might strike some people as inconsequential, for while That Certain Summer tells the touching story of a man forced to tell his teenaged son about a profound lifestyle change, the picture lacks dramatic fireworks. Everyone treats everyone else with respect, more or less; no one goes for the jugular during moments of conflict; and the closest the story gets to addressing political issues are a few dialogue exchanges pertaining to the limited rights enjoyed by gay men in early-’70s America. Yet because the narrative takes place in the progressive enclave of San Francisco, That Certain Summer isn’t about the restrictions society places on people. Rather, it’s about the challenges people face when asking others to change their perceptions. Not coincidentally, that’s just what the film itself asked viewers to do by casting mainstream actors in leading roles.

          Hal Holbrook stars as Doug Salter, a contractor who divorced his wife three years ago. Eventually, we learn that he told his ex-wife, Janet (Hope Lange), about his bisexuality before they got married, and that she, like so many women of her generation, presumed she could ease Doug into a permanent heterosexual lifestyle by creating a loving and stable home. By the time their son, Nick (Scott Jacoby), reached adolescence, Doug realized that he needed to live his true identity as a gay man. In the years since the divorce, Doug built a new life with a younger lover, Gary McClain (Martin Sheen), and they moved in together. When the story begins, 14-year-old Nick arrives for an extended summer visit with his father, unaware of how deeply Doug’s life has changed. In fact, Nick—like so many children of divorce—holds onto the hope that his parents will reunite. This summer, however, Doug has resolved to integrate the two halves of his life by introducing Nick to Gary, even though Gary pretends to live elsewhere so Nick isn’t confronted by too many shocking revelations at once. Nonetheless, the sensitive youth puts the pieces together and runs away from his father’s house, riding a trolley through the city while Doug and Gary search for him. Inevitably, the story gravitates toward the moment when Doug must tell the whole truth, despite the painful changes it will bring to his relationship with Nick.

          Writers Richard Levinson and William Link, best known for their work on mystery shows (they created Columbo and co-created Murder, She Wrote), display the same humanistic subtlety here they brought to other made-for-TV movies, including The Execution of Private Slovik (1974) and My Sweet Charlie (1970). Both of those pictures were directed by versatile craftsman Lamont Johnson, as was That Certain Summer. Fine script and direction notwithstanding, this is primarily an actor’s piece. Sheen channels the suppressed tension of a man trying not to make a difficult situation worse until he briefly flashes anger during a confrontation with his brother-in-law (Joe Don Baker, great in a cameo role). Jacoby is good, too, investing the mostly one-note role of a confused kid with palpable anguish.

          Holbrook commands the film, playing gentle notes of ambivalence and pride and regret as a man who masks his identity in professional settings and desperately wants to be truthful in private settings. As seen through the eyes of his character’s son, who has yet to form prejudices but nonetheless receives demeaning signals from society, Doug is not a hero but an everyman. The sheer ordinariness of his situation is what makes That Certain Summer so meaningful.

That Certain Summer: RIGHT ON

1980 Week: The Fog

          Note: Settle in and enjoy a double-dose of 1980 titles for the next two weeks, beginning with a modern-classic horror picture just in time for Halloween . . .

          More than any other of the films he made during his peak period of the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s, The Fog subsists on the special nocturnal vibe that only director John Carpenter could create. Filled with atmospheric shots of killers emerging from shadows, kicky effects depicting the influence of supernatural forces, and the pulsating rhythms of a great synthesizer score composed by Carpenter himself, The Fog is vibe personified. When the movie clicks, which happens a lot, the sheer mood of the thing is intoxicating. And every so often, the picture fulfills its raison d’etre by providing genuine scares. So even if the picture is ultimately quite disappointing, thanks to a anticlimactic ending and the failure to fully utilize a fantastic cast, The Fog is very much a part of the John Carpenter mythos. Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982) are scarier, and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Escape from New York (1981) are more exciting, but The Fog comprises 89 minutes of pure Carpenter style.

          Set in a small town on the California coast, the picture opens with a creepy vignette of crusty senior Mr. Machen (John Houseman) reading a ghost story to kids sitting around a campfire on the beach at night. It seems that an otherworldly fog once crept over the waters near the town of Antonio Bay, claiming the lives an entire ship’s crew—and legend has it that 100 years later, the fog is due to return. That time, of course, is now. Its creepy context established, the picture then gets down to the business of introducing various characters doomed to face the fog: radio DJ and single mom Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), who broadcasts out of a decrepit old lighthouse; easygoing local Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) and sexy hitchhiker Elizabeth Soiley (Jamie Lee Curtis), who become a couple while traveling together; uptight town official Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh); angst-ridden priest Father Malone (Hal Holbrook); and so on.

          Carpenter and cowriter-producer Debra Hill never quite figure out how to manage the sprawling cast, because even though tasty glimmers of backstory and characterization appear here and there, individualization gets lost when people are transformed into potential victims during elaborate fight scenes. Similarly, the mythology behind the fog and its connections to Antonio Bay is both frustratingly unclear and overly simplistic. As a result, The Fog is much more a collection of cool scenes than a properly constructed narrative. That said, cool scenes are the coin of the realm in horror cinema, and The Fog is full of darkly entertaining passages. The eerie assault on a fishing boat. The tense race to save a child from a house that’s being smothered by the fog. The final siege on the lighthouse.

          Abetted by his best cinematographer, master of darkness Dean Cundey, Carpenter generates one menacing image after another, and he punctuates the film with his signature sardonic wit. Barbeau is great, especially considering she performs so many scenes alone (nothwithstanding wraithlike attackers), and it’s fun to spot so many players from previous Carpenter films: Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Curtis, Darwin Jostin, Nancy Loomis. (Carpenter missed an opportunity by keeping real-life mother and daughter Leigh, of Pyscho fame, and Curtis mostly separate, but their appearance in the same film is notable in a Trivial Pursuit sort of way.) The Fog was remade in 2005 amid a rash of new versions of Carpenter classics, and the remake was a critical bomb despite scoring at the box office. 

The Fog: GROOVY

Natural Enemies (1979)

          Natural Enemies is a character study of a man contemplating the annihilation of his own family, and writer-director Jeff Kanew never allows the tiniest sliver of hope to brighten the screen. Working from a novel by Julius Horwitz, Kanew takes viewers deep into the turbulent mind of magazine editor Paul Steward (Hal Holbrook), a man so bludgeoned by the disappointments of everyday life that he views oblivion as the only gift he can bestow upon his loved ones. Had Kanew surmounted this material’s inherent narrative problems, and had he adopted a more kinetic storytelling style, Natural Enemies could have become one of the great cinematic provocations of its day, especially because leading man Holbrook commits so fully to his nihilistic characterization. Alas, those narrative problems create speed bumps at regular intervals, and Kanew’s style is far too minimalistic and static. Some scenes are so flat as to narcotize the viewer. That said, Natural Enemies is a fascinating misfire.

          The picture begins on a fateful morning in suburban Connecticut, where Paul lives with his wife, Miriam (Louise Fletcher), and their three children. Thanks to several minutes of wall-to-wall voiceover, we learn that Paul is contemplating using a gun to kill his family and them himself upon returning home from work that evening. Traveling into New York, where he runs a small magazine catering to intellectuals, Paul speaks with two cerebral friends—a diplomat (José Ferrer) and a therapist (Viveca Lindfors)—and he tells both of them what he’s planning. Each expresses concern, but neither contacts authorities. Additionally, Paul realizes his final sexual fantasy by hiring five prostitutes for group sex, which leads to perhaps the strangest scene in the movie. As the prostitutes recline nude, Paul gives a monologue about the history of his marriage, up to and including descriptions of Miriam’s hospitalization for mental illness, before again revealing—this time, to five strangers—that the death of his family is imminent. The prostitutes engage in talking-and-listening therapy, offering Paul marital and sexual advice, but they, too, avoid notifying authorities. And then, once Paul gets home, Miriam says she knows what he’s going to do, which occasions a numbingly long dialogue scene that Kanew films in the least dynamic fashion possible.

          By the end of Natural Enemies, some viewers might share Paul’s homicidal impulses simply because Kanew has made Paul’s life seem so dreary that escape sounds appealing. Cheap digs about Kanew’s directorial limitations aside, Natural Enemies represents a sincere attempt at digging beneath the surface of an existential malaise that afflicted millions of people during the ’70s. Furthermore, the picture makes the troubling—if not altogether persuasive—argument that a killer lurks inside each of us. Yet dismissing Natural Enemies because Kanew didn’t argue his case well is too easy. Somewhat like Peter Bogdonavich’s Targets (1968), Natural Enemies asks why America is such fertile ground for growing monsters. Incidentally, Kanew’s career took some peculiar turns after this picture. His next project was helming the low-rent actioner Eddie Macon’s Run (1983), and then he scored big with Revenge of the Nerds (1984).

Natural Enemies: FUNKY

Rituals (1977)

          While the prospect of a Canadian thriller made in the Deliverance mode might not seem too tantalizing, there’s a lot to recommend about Rituals, which is occasionally marketed by the alternate title The Creeper. First and foremost, the movie stars the great Hal Holbrook, an actor of such sublime gifts that he’s able to make even the most outlandish material believable. Moreover, the picture is shot quite well, with director Peter Carter and cinematographer René Verzier emulating many of the visual tropes that cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond brought to Deliverance. Like the earlier film, Rituals features a carefully controlled color palette (lots of muted browns and greens), a long-lens aesthetic juxtaposing crisp foregrounds with soft backgrounds, and panoramic shots that convey the overwhelming size of the wilderness surrounding the characters. Adding to the Deliverance vibe is a horrific storyline about “civilized” men falling victim to backwoods crazies, albeit in the varied landscapes of Ontario instead of the thick Southern forests featured in Deliverance.

          In fact, had the filmmakers—including writer Ian Sutherland and producer/costar Lawrence Dane—generated a narrative equal to the picture’s technical proficiency, Rituals might be fondly remembered as a harrowing thrill ride. Alas, the script is repetitive, silly, and tedious, pitting underdeveloped leading characters against far-fetched opponents and culminating with a laughably overwrought finale. At the beginning of the story, five middle-aged doctors catch a seaplane to remote woodlands for a six-day fishing trip. Interpersonal tensions bubble under the surface until the initial weird occurrence—during the group’s first night, someone steals all of their boots. One of the men volunteers to hike to civilization and call for help, leaving the others behind. Then, in the usual way of these things, a tormentor starts tormenting. Eventually, things get gruesome, with one dude’s leg caught in a bear trap and another fellow’s decapitated human head impaled on a pike. There’s no Deliverance-style rape, but Rituals is more than sufficiently nasty.

          Meanwhile, skillful actors elevate the threadbare material. Dane, Robin Gammell, and Ken James offer highly competent work, making gallows humor and nervous tension feel real, while Holbrook’s signature style of world-weariness sets a grim mood for the whole enterprise. Holbrook also gets to embrace primitivism, Straw Dogs-style, during the ultraviolent climax. Holding the whole piece together—as much as possible, given the givens—is a genuinely creepy score by Hagood Hardy.

Rituals: FUNKY

The Girl from Petrovka (1974)

Goldie Hawn’s career took some odd turns between her late-’60s breakout period as a goofy starlet and her late-’70s ascension to A-list status in light comedies. For instance, around the same time Hawn made a credible dive into dramatic material with The Sugarland Express (1974), she toplined this unsuccessful attempt at blending comedy with drama. It’s not difficult to see what might have appealed to Hawn, since her role requires a foreign accent and the character she plays exerts a profound influence on everyone she meets. Unfortunately, Hawn is wrong for the role on nearly every level. Her accent is amateurish (and sometimes completely absent); her hippy-dippy persona makes the film’s central notion of a free spirit in a totalitarian state far too literal; and the fact that she’s 20 years younger than her main love interest, costar Hal Holbrook, gives the whole enterprise a seedy quality. In Hawn’s defense, however, The Girl from Petrovka is so poorly assembled that better casting wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Adapted from a book by George Feifer, the movie takes place in Moscow, where American journalist Joe (Holbrook) meets a community of artists including flighty ballerina Oktyabrina (Hawn). Blonde and giggly and unreliable, Oktyabrina worms her way into Joe’s life, taking advantage of his apartment and his expense account while she operates outside the Soviet legal structure. (She has no papers.) As the turgid storyline progresses, Joe inexplicably falls for Oktyabrina while she directs her affections toward a young lover and an elderly sugar daddy. Eventually, the Joe and Oktyabrina attempt couplehood until her scofflaw status creates problems. Even though The Girl from Petrovka has admirable qualities, such as atmospheric location cinematography (Austria subs for Russia) and mature performances by Holbrook and costar Anthony Hopkins, the failure of the title character to command audience attention derails the film. Worse, the movie’s attempt to shift into quasi-tragic mode at the end clashes with the lighthearted vapidity of what’s come before. Many great stories were told during the Soviet era about the complexities of finding love in the U.S.S.R., but The Girl from Petrovka is not one of them.

The Girl from Petrovka: LAME

Midway (1976)

          This old-fashioned combat flick picks up where the great 1944 war drama Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo left off—Midway dramatizes one of the many retaliatory air strikes the U.S. and Japan exchanged following Japan’s initial 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. When the story begins, the U.S. Navy is struggling to replace ships destroyed at Pearl Harbor. When an intelligence officer (Hal Holbrook) intercepts communications suggesting the Japanese are planning to attack U.S. ships stationed at Midway Island—potentially a devastating repeat of Pearl Harbor—various officers spring into action preparing defensive maneuvers. Like 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora!, this picture cuts back and forth between American and Japanese strategy sessions. In addition to humanizing the enemy, this technique lets viewers see how luck and tactical errors have as much bearing on military success as heroism and leadership.

          For instance, some of the best scenes take place aboard a Japanese carrier, where Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo (James Shigeta) wrangles with doubtful subordinates, resulting in indecisiveness. There’s some great stuff buried in Midway, but, unfortunately, lesser material is given the primary focus—the main storyline involves Captain Matt Garth (Charlton Heston), a strong-willed junior officer whose role in the battle is relatively inconsequential. The filmmakers waste gobs of time, for instance, on the melodramatic romance between Garth’s son and a Japanese-American civilian, which leads to trite discussions about race relations. Plus, once the bludgeoning air/sea battle gets underway, the movie introduces so many characters that text appears onscreen to identify new people.

          Even with these visual aids, however, it’s hard to track which ships are where, whose plane took off from which airstrip, and, for that matter, which side is winning. Still, before things get too hectic, Midway lets a handful of charismatic actors shine in showcase moments. Holbrook is a hoot as the excitable code breaker; Henry Fonda lends authority as the top U.S. admiral; Glenn Ford is effectively stoic as a soft-spoken naval commander; and Robert Mitchum plays an enjoyable cameo as a cranky admiral consigned to bed rest. (Cinema legend Toshiro Mifune essays a small role as Fonda’s Japanese counterpart, but his lines were dubbed into English by actor Paul Frees, the voice of Rocky & Bullwinkle villain Boris Badenov.) While these virtues aren’t enough to lift Midway out of mediocrity, any American war picture that resists the temptation to demonize the opposing side is inherently admirable.

Midway: FUNKY

Capricorn One (1978)

Peter Hyams’ loopy conspiracy thriller has the American government faking a Mars landing to score political points, a storyline so ’70s it almost hurts. The outrageous concept is rich with visual and narrative potential, only some of which writer-director Hyams mines in his entertaining but inconsistent narrative. The main problem with the movie is also its main contrivance: After participating in the hoax, three astronauts learn that the government expects them to crash during their spaceship’s staged return to terra firma, because they’ve got to disappear for real in order to sell the illusion. Quick question No. 1: If the astronauts can’t be trusted, then how can the dozens of technicians involved in mounting the conspiracy be trusted? Quick question No. 2: How does a crash landing give the government the PR win they’re seeking by staging a fake Mars landing in the first place? Don’t look for answers, because logic takes a backseat to pulpy fun as plot twists slam into place so quickly they cause cinematic whiplash. The bits depicting the actual fabrication of the Mars landing are colorful, but oddly enough a long sequence of leading man James Brolin trapped in the deserts of the American Southwest is more vivid. Hal Holbrook shines as the main conspirator, delivering an epic monologue toward the beginning of the picture that lays out the particulars of the plot; with his mesmerizing scowl and lilting voice, Holbrook’s one of the few actors who can make that many minutes of unbroken speech compelling. Elliot Gould plays a combination Woodward and Bernstein as the intrepid reporter who tracks the case, doing his amiable bumbling-schnook routine, and the endangered astronauts at the heart of the story are portrayed by a truly eclectic trio: Brolin, O.J. Simpson, and Sam Waterston. They’re so mismatched that they represent of sliding scale of American acting, from Simpson’s cheerful incompetence to Brolin’s vapid professionalism to Waterston’s earnest skillfulness. Ace character players James B. Sikking and Robert Walden are in the mix too, as is Telly Savalas in a gonzo cameo that adds gleeful absurdity to the climax.

Capricorn One: GROOVY

All the President’s Men (1976)

          Easily one of the most important American films of the ’70s, this spellbinder about the Washington Post reporters whose coverage of the Watergate break-in helped topple Richard Nixon works as an exciting character piece, a meticulous journalism procedural, and a taut political thriller. Producer-star Robert Redford, deep into a run of great movies that proved he was more than a pretty-boy leading man, nurtured the project from day one. He prodded real-life Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to adapt their Watergate stories into the nonfiction book All the President’s Men, which was released in 1974, and coached them through shaping the book’s narrative. For the film adaptation, he recruited screenwriter William Goldman (who won an Oscar for his work) and director Alan J. Pakula, both of whom contributed enormously to the magic act of generating suspense even though everybody already knew the ending. The development of the picture was rocky. At one point the real Bernstein and his then-girlfriend, Nora Ephron, wrote a draft of the script without Goldman’s knowledge, fabricating a scene portraying Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) as a kind of journalistic secret agent who worms his way past a secretary to reach an elusive source. The scene made it into the final picture, and Goldman has lamented that it’s the only made-up moment in the story.
          Despite the offscreen intrigue, All the President’s Men is a watershed moment for its participants. From Redford and Hoffman to Goldman and Pakula to composter David Shire and cinematographer Gordon Willis, everyone involved does some of their best-ever work. Beautifully capturing the haphazard beginnings of the investigation, when Woodward (Redford) wasn’t even sure he’d found a real story, and frighteningly depicting the private conversations among men who realized they were about to take down a commander-in-chief, the movie is as fascinating about process as it is entertaining. Among the spectacular supporting cast, Jason Robards is the Oscar-winning standout as gruffly principled editor Ben Bradlee, and Hal Holbrook is chilling as government informant “Deep Throat,” who meets Woodward a series of shadowy parking garages. Jane Alexander, Martin Balsam, Stephen Collins, Nicholas Coster, Robert Walden, and Jack Warden all excel in smaller roles. As for the above-the-title players, Hoffman and Redford generate palpable oil-and-water friction. Among the many great things this movie offers, perhaps most impressive is the fact that the film never forgets—or overplays—the importance of the history it depicts. Not exactly the easiest needle to thread, but All the Preisdent’s Men accomplishes the task gracefully.

All the President’s Men: OUTTA SIGHT

They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)

In the years between his TV triumphs on Maverick in the ’50s and The Rockford Files in the ’70s, James Garner enjoyed an admirable career on the big screen, mostly in action flicks and light comedies. One of the pictures from this period, They Only Kill Their Masters, is of unique interest because it offers an early glimpse at the easygoing-detective vibe that made Garner so appealing as Jim Rockford. A slight (and slightly sleazy) whodunit with the offbeat gimmick of treating a Doberman Pinscher as a suspect, the picture takes place in a small coastal town in California, where charmingly grumpy Garner is the sheriff who keeps locals and tourists in line. When a woman is found in the ocean with her Doberman’s jaws clamped onto her body, Abel Marsh (Garner) believes the canine went crazy, but then a deeper mystery unfolds involving adultery, group sex, and, worst of all, out-of-towners. The salacious storyline helps the movie overcome its TV-grade production values, as does the presence of several big-screen regulars: Katharine Ross is alluring as a veterinarian who steers Garner away from rushing to judgment, Peter Lawford is pompous as an L.A. smoothie slumming in the small town, Harry Guardino scowls as a state cop eager to claim jurisdictional authority over Garner, and Hal Holbrook is wonderfully sympathetic as a character whose role in the mystery is, well, a mystery—at least until the surprising conclusion. FYI, the Abel Marsh character resurfaced in a pair of 1977 made-for TV movies, Deadly Game and The Girl in the Empty Grave; for those projects, Andy Griffith took over the role originated by Garner. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

They Only Kill Their Masters: FUNKY