Malcolm X (1972)

          By translating The Autobiography of Malcolm X into a visual document, filmmaker Arnold Perl performed a useful historical service, condensing and contextualizing the turbulent life that transformed troubled orphan Malcolm Little into black-power activist Malcolm X and religious messenger el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Within a tight 91-minute running time, Perl covers many of the important periods in his subject’s life, tracking Malcolm through a rough childhood and adolescence marked by abandonment and crime; a long period serving as an articulate emissary for controversial Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad; an incendiary stretch preaching racial revolution and vilifying the “white devil”; and finally the crucially important final period when, after making a pilgrimage to Mecca, he sought to reconcile his supercharged political rhetoric with the peaceful teachings of his religion.

          Framing the whole story, of course, is the grim reality that Malcolm was assassinated, so instead of being a hagiographic tribute to a mythic figure, Malcolm X represents a passionate delivery of the man’s message. Perl’s portrayal embraces all of the changes and contradictions that made Malcolm intriguing, and this portrayal underscores that Malcolm possessed one of the most agile minds in the history of American political life.

          The film opens on a somewhat heavy-handed note, with Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” (the lyrics of which describe the aftermath of a lynching) playing over a black screen. The opening salvo continues with Malcolm’s famous “by any means necessary” remark, as well as an epithet-filled spoken-word piece by the Last Poets that, prophetically, sounds a lot like rap. Once Perl gets into proper storytelling, he juxtaposes short excerpts from The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as recited in voiceover by James Earl Jones) with a voluminous amount of archival footage. Sometimes, Perl illustrates points with newsreel shots of, say, civil unrest, but mostly he puts Malcolm onscreen.

          Appearing in public and on TV, Malcolm communicates with supreme eloquence and power, whether he’s expressing deference to Elijah Muhammed, disdain for whites, or a sophisticated synthesis of his past belief systems. As in real life, the Malcolm at the end of the story is the truly dangerous man, not because of his ability to drive people apart—anyone can do that—but because of his ability to bring people together. While stopping short of lodging a formal accusation, the film advances the prevailing theory that the Nation of Islam was responsible for Malcolm’s death. The notion that a black revolutionary might have died at black hands reaffirms the eternal truth that anyone with real power to alter the status quo exercises that power at his or her own peril.

          Prior to the release of Spike Lee’s epic biopic Malcolm X (1992), this documentary likely represented the fairest and fullest screen portrayal of its subject, and the existence of Lee’s movie has done nothing to diminish the documentary’s significance. Indeed, Warner Bros. (which released both projects) has on occasion packaged the movies together for home-video consumption. The films complement each other well, with Lee’s picture offering a personal view of a heroic figure and Perl’s documentary letting Malcolm speak his own truth. Accolades received by the 1972 Malcolm X during its original run include an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature.

Malcolm X: GROOVY

The UFO Incident (1975)

          Bolstered by the presence of fine actors in the leading roles, The UFO Incident is a peculiar take on a real historical incident. In the early 1960s, New Hampshire residents Barney and Betsy Hill claimed they’d been abducted by aliens, taken aboard a flying saucer for medical examinations, and brainwashed to forget what happened. Memories of the event haunted the couple’s dreams, so they submitted to hypnosis and provided details while a psychiatrist probed their unconscious minds. Reports of the Hills’ alleged abduction earned widespread attention, but because the Hills were unable to provide evidence, some people dismissed the story as a delusion or a hoax while others believed the incident really occurred. This made-for-TV movie tries to service the believers and the doubters simultaneously, and the wishy-washy approach doesn’t quite work.

          Scenes of the Hills experiencing traumatic flashbacks and/or providing testimony are played straight, whereas scenes with re-creations of alien contact have the eerie quality of a horror movie. It’s understandable why the producers included money shots of actors dressed like weird-looking aliens, because a purely journalistic presentation of this material would have been talky and underwhelming. Still, The UFO Incident is basically two very different movies squeezed into one package, with the grounded stuff coming across better than the fanciful vignettes.

          James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons play the Hills, a middle-class interracial couple. They bicker and bond like normal married people, and the filmmakers take pains to present the Hills as rational and thoughtful individuals, the better to lend credence to their reports of an extraordinary experience. Barnard Hughes plays the doctor who questions them under hypnosis. The overarching story of takes place in the “present,” with the Hills acceding to hypnosis only because their collective memories are so disturbingly synchronized—they dream the same impossible dreams. Dramatizations of the UFO event appear in suspenseful flashbacks.

          Executive producer/director Richard A. Colla and his collaborators drill down fairly deep into the Hills’ personalities, especially considering the film’s brief running time, so we learn about Barney’s fear of losing control and Betty’s fear of the unknown. Parsons shines in conversational scenes, conveying a woman of compassion and moral strength, while Jones excels in hypnosis scenes, sometimes breaking down from the strain of recalling otherworldly violation. The FX scenes are the least effective, not only because the actors and filmmakers seem less invested in those sequences but also because the alien costumes and spaceship look cheap. Perhaps The UFO Incident is best described as respectful, since the filmmakers avoid many opportunities to sensationalize the material; at its best, the picture is a matter-of-fact recitation enlivened by humane performances.

The UFO Incident: FUNKY

Uptown Saturday Night (1974) & Let’s Do It Again (1975) & A Piece of the Action (1977)

          Though he’s best known for his ultra-serious onscreen persona, Sidney Poitier not only starred in but also directed the hit comedy Uptown Saturday Night, the first of three Poitier-helmed ’70s pictures in which the actor shares the screen with funnyman Bill Cosby. The movies are not a series, since neither characters nor storylines recur from film to film. However, the movies all boast impressive casts, slick production values, and a certain kind of moral integrity, since they emulate the blaxpoitation aesthetic without perpetuating blaxploitation stereotypes. They’re celebratory movies designed to entertain and inspire African-American audiences.

          Uptown Saturday Night is the weakest of the trio, partially because of an episodic story structure and partially because Poitier and his collaborators let scenes drag on to excessive lengths. Another issue, which troubles the entire series, is that Cosby rarely gets to embark on comedic flights of fancy. Whenever he does, the movies receive a huge uplift, which means that any time he’s stuck delivering exposition or playing bland dramatic scene, the series’ best resource is untapped. Uptown Saturday Night stars Poitier as Steve, a steelworker, and Cosby as Wardell, a cab driver. One evening, Wardell persuades Steve to visit an expensive brothel/gambling joint/nightclub called Madam Zenobia’s. The blue-collar guys pay dearly for visiting the high-roller establishment, because robbers invade the club and steal personal items from everyone in attendance. The next day, Wendell realizes that his wallet, which was taken by the crooks, contains a winning lottery ticket worth $50,000.

          In order to find the stolen goods, the friends infiltrate the local underworld, which puts them in the middle of a war between gangsters Geechie Dan (Harry Belafonte) and Silky Slim (Calvin Lockhart). Culture-clash gags ensue, climaxing in a goofy finale that involves a car chase, cross-dressing, and a funkadelic picnic. While Poitier displays almost zero control over pacing and tone, the movie features excellent supporting turns by Roscoe Lee Browne and Rosalind Cash. (The less said about Belafonte’s embarrassing Marlon Brando imitation, complete with cotton-stuffed cheeks, the better.) By far, the best scene in Uptown Saturday Night is Richard Pryor’s extended cameo as a nervous con man, because he explodes with the edge and energy the rest of the film sorely needs.

          Poitier and his collaborators righted the ship for Let’s Do It Again, the best of the trio. A straight-up caper comedy filled with colorful characters and crazy schemes, the movie works fairly well almost from start to finish, though it should’ve been 15 minutes shorter. This time, Billy (Cosby) and Clyde (Poitier) are blue-collar types who run a con in order to raise money for their fraternal lodge, a vital community hub. Traveling to New Orleans with their wives—and $18,000 in purloined lodge money—the boys secretly hypnotize prizefighter Bootney Farnsworth (Jimmie Walker), then place huge bets on Bootney before a title match. Scenes of Billy and Clyde dressing like pimps while they pretend to be players are cheerfully outlandish. Predictably, fixing fights gets our heroes into hot water with two New Orleans gangsters, Biggie Smalls (Lockhart) and Kansas City Mack (John Amos). Once again, high jinks ensue.

          Some of the material is wheezy, like the bit of escaping a hotel room with tied-up bedsheets, but most of the scenes are inventive and lively. Cosby also gets to do more pure shtick this time around, and the tunes on the soundtrack are fantastic—soul-music legend Curtis Mayfield composed the score as well as several original songs, recruiting the Staple Singers to perform the songs. Let’s Do It Again has many famous admirers, including the late rapper Notorious B.I.G., who borrowed his nickname “Biggie Smalls” from the movie.

          The quasi-series took a strange turn with the final entry, A Piece of the Action, which is a social-issue drama disguised as a comedy. Running an exhausting 135 minutes, the movie opens with three vibrant heist sequences. The robbers are Dave (Cosby) and Manny (Poitier), who neither know each other nor work together. Enter Detective Joshua Burke (James Earl Jones), a recently retired cop who summons the crooks to a hotel room and blackmails them. In exchange for sitting on evidence that could put them in jail for years, Joshua forces the thieves to volunteer at a community center for at-risk youth. Once this plot twist kicks in, the movie becomes a riff on Poitier’s hit To Sir, With Love (1967). While Dave tries to find jobs for the youths at the community center, Manny becomes the kids’ teacher, giving tough-love lessons about dignity and responsibility.

          Many scenes in A Piece of the Action are downright heavy, such as a fierce showdown during which brash student Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) drives idealistic teacher Sarah (Hope Clarke) to tears by characterizing her as a dilettante exploiting poor African-Americans. Later still, the movie becomes a sort of thriller, because thugs from the heroes’ pasts show up for revenge. Despite featuring strong performances and sincere rhetoric, A Piece of the Action is awkward and unwieldy. Therefore, while it’s easily the most edifying of the three pictures, it might also be the least entertaining. Worse, the movie features Cosby delivering a crass rape joke that now has unwanted associations.

          Rumors have swirled for years that one or all of the Cosby/Poitier pictures would be remade, with Will Smith’s name perpetually floated as a likely participant.

Uptown Saturday Night: FUNKY

Let’s Do It Again: GROOVY

A Piece of the Action: FUNKY

End of the Road (1970)

          Film editor Aram Avakian made his solo directorial debut with this uncompromising phantasmagoria, which was slapped with an “X” rating during its original release. Telling the story of a young man who goes insane after receiving his master’s degree—thus tapping into the zeitgeist of youth-culture ambivalence toward American ideals in the Vietnam era—End of the Road features assaultive editing patterns, crass images, pummeling sound effects, and stylized performances. It’s a deliberately bizarre experience, derived from a 1958 novel by John Barth that fits somewhere on a continuum with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Unlike the movies adapted from those books, one of which is an admirable misfire and one of which is a stone classic, Avakian’s End of the Road doesn’t strike a nerve so much as it gets on one’s nerves. The picture is filled with dynamic visuals, impassioned performances, and offbeat themes, but the style of the piece is so aggressively ugly and weird that it’s a chore to watch.

          Plus, like most counterculture-era films, End of the Road is best defined in terms of what it shuns. The movie avoids conventional storytelling tropes and “traditional” American values at every turn, so it’s something of a position paper railing against the Establishment, delivered in the confrontational and fractured idiom of the generation that brought psychedelia into the mainstream. There’s a germ of something human buried inside the trippy flourishes, but good luck latching onto that simple core while enduring headache-inducing montages.

          Stacy Keach stars as Jacob Horner, who walks from his graduation ceremony to a nearby railway station, where he stands in a catatonic state for what appears to be several days before the arrival of a concerned psychiatrist, Doctor D (James Earl Jones). Combative and sarcastic, Doctor D drags Jacob to a facility called “The Farm,” where Doctor D lets lunatics play out their fantasies as a form of therapy. (One patient cross-dresses as a nun, one endures S&M abuse while crucified, and one rapes a chicken.) Doctor D leads Jacob through harsh therapy sessions complete with heavy audiovisual gimmicks and occasional physical punishment. Then he declares Jacob cured and ready for a job.

          Jacob bullshits his way into a gig teaching English at a university, soon befriending fellow teacher Joe Morgan (Harris Yulin) and Joe’s long-suffering wife, Rennie (Dorothy Tristan). Joe’s a weirdo who spends most of his time wearing a Boy Scout uniform, and he’s prone to slapping Rennie around. Jacob begins an affair with Rennie, and their loveplay includes a strange scene of spying on Joe while he thinks he’s alone—as Jacob and Rennie watch from a hiding place, Joe shoves a gun in his mouth and pantomimes suicide, then masturbates while reciting Shakespeare. Meanwhile, Jacob exhibits loopy behavior of his own, at one point parading around in a toga. Eventually, the story resolves with a painfully detailed abortion scene.

          Avakian, who also edited the picture, benefits from the participation of cinematographer Gordon Willis, who notched his first feature credit with this picture; Willis’ muscular images impose coherence onto the madness of the onscreen events. Avakian also makes ample use of Jones, Keach, and Yulin, all of whom provide frightening levels of intensity. Still, the big question remains: Is End of the Road anything more than a hearty fuck-you to normalcy? Further, even though time has not lessened the film’s ability to shock, has time erased the relevance of the narrative—or whatever it is that Avakian employs in place of a narrative? The answers to those questions are very much in the eyes of the beholder. Nonetheless, thanks to its mercilessly abrasive textures, End of the Road is bold and innovative filmmaking that’s deeply evocative of a certain time. While far from essential, it’s at the very least emblematic.

End of the Road: FREAKY

The River Niger (1976)

          Offering a potent alternative to the stereotypical content in blaxploitation films, a handful of serious dramas with primarily African-American casts were released in the ’70s, including Black Girl (1972), Claudine (1974), and this adaptation of a Tony-winning play by Joseph A. Walker. Originally presented in New York by the progressive Negro Ensemble Company, The River Niger is intense and political but loaded with so many hot-button signifiers that, seen today, it seems a bit more like a highlight reel of the Black Power movement than a proper drama. Walker crams in Afrocentrism, Black Panther-style militarized activism, the resentment felt by black Vietnam veterans, the ravages of alcoholism among urban African-Americans, and myriad other incendiary topics. Thus, even though the story pulls these threads together, more or less, by focusing on the troubles that plague a single black family, The River Niger feels episodic and pretentious, as if Walker felt compelled to address every single subject that was important to African-Americans during the early ’70s.

          In the broadest stokes, the movie depicts what happens the week that Vietnam vet Jeff Williams (Glynn Turman) comes home from the war to his family in Los Angeles. Jeff’s father, Jonny (James Earl Jones), is a drunk who dabbles in writing poetry; Jeff’s mother, Mattie (Cicely Tyson), is a strong matriarch trying to prevent her loved ones from learning she has cancer; and Jeff’s friend, Big Moe Hayes (Roger E. Mosley), is a militant caught up in an ongoing hassle with the LAPD. Suffice to say, tensions are as plentiful as plotlines. Combined with narrative-flow problems in the screen version (also written by Walker), this kitchen-sink approach to dramaturgy makes The River Niger a tough film to slog through. Worst among the narrative-flow problems is Walker’s inability to command pacing and tone; the movie jumps abruptly from intense scenes to light ones, and Walker misses myriad opportunities to group similar scenes together and/or use cross-cutting to create dramatic counterpoint. Director Krishna Shah seems equally adrift, occasionally using interesting devices—flash cuts of African masks, a striking camera angle looking over the barrel of a gun—without ever locking into a consistent style.

          Even the acting, by a cast of normally reliable performers, is inconsistent. Jones has many beautiful moments, especially when reciting poetry, but his belligerent-drunk bits get tiresome. Tyson, perpetually and rightly cast as personifications of principle, is formidable but humorless. Turman, at his best when loosest, is tight in the extreme, delivering rigid body language and stilted line deliveries. Even the always-interesting Louis Gossett Jr. is merely okay, playing the family’s doctor with a campy Jamaican accent. Holding the film together, to some degree, is a funk/R&B score by one of the quintessential ’70s bands, War, though none of their melodies connect as strongly as their loping grooves.

The River Niger: FUNKY

Deadly Hero (1975)

          After the success of films including The French Connection (1971) ushered in a new vogue for stories about cops operating outside the law, misguided projects such as Deadly Hero were inevitable. The grim saga of a psychopath who operates with impunity because he wears a badge—at least until a courageous witness beholds one of his bloody misdeeds—the picture is bogged down in shortcomings. Primarily, the movie has a choppy rhythm owing to underdeveloped subplots and indecision about which character is the protagonist. Moreover, the title character’s actions become so outrageous that his ability to evade capture becomes unbelievable. And then there’s the whole question of tone, since Deadly Hero is alternately a realistic police story, a clichéd thriller about a stalker, and a mildly interesting character study examining the title character’s humiliating involvement with big-city politicians. Deadly Hero is a straight-up mess, albeit a vivid one.

          When the picture begins, Officer Lacy (Don Murray) is a decorated NYPD beat cop riding patrol with his green partner, Billings (Treat Williams, in his first movie role). Lacy has designs on public office, so he sidles up to mayoral candidate named Reilly (George S. Irving). Meanwhile, Sally (Diahn Williams) is a musician who splits her time between teaching children and leading the orchestra for an experimental theater. One night, an eccentric crook claiming to be an ambassador named “Rabbit Shazam” (James Earl Jones) spots Sally at the theater and follows her home. He then threatens to kill her unless Sally’s father pays a ransom, but Lacy and Billings are summoned to Sally’s home by a neighbor who suspects trouble. Lacy disarms Shazam—and then kills the man for no apparent reason. After initially supporting Lacy, Sally eventually comes forward with the truth, becoming a target for Lacy’s revenge.

          Although the plot for Deadly Hero is offbeat and provocative, the filmmakers—including hack feature/TV director Ivan Nagy—can’t pull the disparate elements together. For instance, the performances are all over the place. Murray is wildly undisciplined, going cartoonishly over the top at one moment and trying for frightening understatement the next. Williams barely registers as anything but a pleasantly sophisticated cipher. As for Jones, who’s only in the movie for about 20 minutes, he succumbs to silly flamboyance when trying to channel craziness. It’s worth noting that the picture has credible atmosphere thanks to extensive NYC location photography by DP Andrzej Bartkowiak (who did much better work later in his career), and that film-score nerds will easily recognize the driving synth textures that co-composer Brad Fiedel (of Terminator fame) presumably contributed to the soundtrack.

Deadly Hero: FUNKY

Claudine (1974)

          Charming, engrossing, and socially relevant, the small-scale dramedy Claudine is an anomaly among ’70s pictures about African-American life. Eschewing the militant politics of underground films and the sleazy grit of blaxploitation flicks, Claudine tells a simple human story in an accessible style. Further, the movie is rooted in respect for individuals who survive life below the poverty line with their dignity intact. Although this is an unmistakably a black story, exploring the myriad ways social ills complicate life for a family in Harlem, the themes of Claudine are relatable to anyone who has faced difficulty balancing family and finances. If the movie has a noteworthy flaw, it’s that Claudine sometimes employs sitcom-style cuteness in terms of dialogue and presentation—but the underlying story is so grounded that the cuteness is at most an occasional distraction.

          Diahann Carroll, who received an Oscar nomination for her performance, plays Claudine Price, the single mother of six who’s squeaking by on welfare after being abandoned by every man to whom she’s been married or with whom she’s been romantically involved. The beautiful but tough Claudine catches the eye of jovial trash collector Rupert Marshall (James Earl Jones), who eventually persuades Claudine to go out on a date. Rupert encounters resistance as soon as he meets Claudine’s kids, who haven’t met many trustworthy men. Nonetheless, Rupert wins over all of Claudine’s spirited offspring except her oldest son, Charles (Laurence Hilton-Jacobs), who has a chip on his shoulder the size of Manhattan Island.

          Aside from the lively performances and sensitive writing, the most interesting aspect of Claudine is the film’s exploration of what welfare means in the life of a woman like Claudine. She can’t make enough money through menial jobs to support her children, so she needs government assistance, but even welfare can’t bridge the gap between expenses and income. Therefore, Claudine must lie to her welfare officer once she starts dating Rupert, because, technically, his participation in the family represents additional income—even though his presence in the long run isn’t guaranteed. It’s fascinating to watch a proud woman navigate this moral quagmire, and it’s informative to see how Rupert recognizes that his interest in Claudine carries economic baggage. Given the feather-light premises of most romantic comedies, which tend to involve characters with all the options in the world, Claudine represents an unusually plugged-in take on the rom-com genre.

            It’s also a great pleasure to see the chemistry between Carroll and Jones. Not to downplay the many virtues of Carroll’s leading performance, the mixture of anguish and approachability within Jones’ performance gives Claudine much of its texture. Guiding these actors is director John Berry, a veteran of the studio era who was blacklisted for his left-leaning politics in the ’50s; Claudine was one of several African-American-themed movies Berry directed upon his return from Hollywood exile. Another notable Claudine player is composer Curtis Mayfield, who created the score as well as a handful of songs that are performed by Gladys Knight & the Pips.

Claudine: GROOVY

The Man (1972)

          A true ’70s obscurity that’s well worth tracking down, The Man is a whip-smart imaginary tale about the first black U.S. president. Built around a taut screenplay by Rod Serling and a commanding performance by James Earl Jones, the picture now seems quite prescient—believe it or not, the title character’s campaign slogan is “Change.” Based on a novel by Irving Wallace, the story presents a convoluted chain of events leading to the installation of Sen. Douglass Dilman as president. After the previous commander in chief and the Speaker of the House are killed in an accident, the sitting vice president exits the line of succession because he’s terminally ill. Thus, the presidency falls to the Senate’s pro tem president, Dilman. This doesn’t sit well with white power brokers including Secretary of State Eaton (William Windom), who has designs on the Oval Office, and Senator Watson (Burgess Meredith), an unapologetic racist from an unnamed Southern state. As a result, Dilman is a political target from the moment he takes power.

          Even potential supporters have issues with Dilman, simply because his ascension carries the weight of history. In one of the film’s best quiet moments, Dilman shares an exchange with his activist daughter, Wanda (Janet MacLachlan), the night he inherits the presidency. “They were expecting a black messiah,” Dilman says about African-Americans. Her reply? “What they’ve got is a black president—that’s more than they’ve ever gotten.” Then Dilman delivers the kicker, which resonates strongly in the Obama era: “I can’t be what everyone wants me to be.” The Man poignantly anticipates the gulf between dreams and reality that has been the source of so much anti-Obama criticism and disappointment.

          Yet The Man cleverly sidesteps the question of what a black president might do with a mandate, instead portraying Dilman as a dedicated public servant who inherits a racially charged mess. At the moment he takes the oath of office, a young African-American college student is under suspicion following an attempt on the South African defense minister’s life, and a minority-rights bill is working its way through Congress. Worse, domestic adversaries including Watson, Eaton, and Eaton’s Lady Macbeth-esque wife, Kay (Barbara Rush), forge political wedges with which to dislodge Dilman’s political standing, lest the accidental president decide he wants a full term.

          The Man is preachy and talky—Serling shares with Aaron Sorkin the debate-club approach to dramatic structure—but the plot churns with enough Beltway skullduggery to ground the speechifying in suspense. Director Joseph Sargent, a reliable TV-trained helmer, serves the material well by staying out of the way, and the acting is uniformly vivid. Meredith and Rush are believably loathsome as D.C. barracudas, Georg Sanford Brown lends fire as the impassioned college student, and the great Martin Balsam provides gravitas and warmth as the president’s chief of staff. The whole movie rests on Jones’ shoulders, however, and he meets the challenge with grace. Portraying an intellectual who has channeled his indignation into diplomatic rhetoric, Jones employs his formidable powers to convey charisma, strength, and wisdom—the very qualities that, decades later, distinguish the individual who changed history in the real world the way the Dilman character changed history in the reel world.

The Man: GROOVY

Swashbuckler (1976)

Two depressing facts emerge when one surveys actor Robert Shaw’s career following his breakout performance in Jaws (1975): Shaw’s days on this earth were numbered, so he only had three years in which to enjoy his newfound fame, and almost every post-Jaws movie in which he starred was terrible. Nonetheless, one gets the impression that Shaw had a blast play-acting in macho leading roles, so, for instance, he exudes contagious joie de vivre in this terrible pirate movie. On some metaphysical level, the possibility that Shaw had fun making Swashbuckler compensates for the lack of enjoyment viewers derive from watching the movie. On the plus side, Swashbuckler is a fairly lavish production about an 18th-century buccaneer battling a crazed tyrant in Jamaica. Additionally, even though director James Goldstone can’t come close to matching the lighthearted approach to swordfighting featured in Richard Lester’s Musketeer movies of the same era, at least Goldstone fills the screen with talented actors. Dressed in a silly costume of red tights and a flowing red blouse, Shaw presents a lusty copy of Errol Flynn’s patented derring-do, and he shares mildly amusing interplay with his cheerful second-in-command, played by James Earl Jones. (The cast also includes Beau Bridges, Geneviève Bujold, Geoffrey Holder, and a young Angelica Huston.) However, the material is so generic that copious screen time is wasted on clichés like peg-legged pirates brandishing their cutlasses and growling. Worse, Peter Boyle’s performance as Lord Durant, the aforementioned tyrant, is atrocious. Woefully miscast, his contemporary American patois seeping through the fruity period jargon he’s forced to spew, Boyle tries to enrich his characterization with perverse qualities, but he seems like he’s in a different movie than everyone else. Unfortunately, the movie he’s in isn’t any better than Swashbuckler.

Swashbuckler: LAME

The Great White Hope (1970)

          When African-American boxer Jack Johnson became the heavyweight champion of the world in 1908, white people were so affronted that outrageous tactics were used against him: He was arrested, under dubious legal precedent, for crossing state lines with his white lover, and a retired white boxer was recruited to challenge Johnson in an epic slugfest. Johnson’s opponent was dubbed the “great white hope.” Outside of the ring, Johnson’s life was just as tumultuous, because his marriages were fraught with allegations of abuse, and his third wife had emotional issues culminating in suicide.

          To say that Johnson’s story begs for dramatic treatment is an understatement, so it’s no surprise writer Howard Sackler scored with his late-’60s play The Great White Hope, starring the ferocious James Earl Jones as a fictionalized character named “Jack Jefferson” and costarring the formidable Jane Alexander as his lover. Both actors won Tony awards before reprising their roles in this flamboyant film adaptation, which was written by Sackler and directed by diehard lefty Martin Ritt. The actors received matching Oscar nominations, and Jones and Alexander are the best things about this movie.

          In his first major film role (previous work included a small part in Dr. Strangelove), Jones uses all of the considerable powers at his disposal. In addition to his legendary speaking voice, a thundering instrument infused with authority and passion, Jones displays intense physicality, strutting around with a muscular frame and a shaved head that frames his burning eyes; he incarnates not just Johnson but the very soul of the African-American experience in all of its joy and rage. Alexander paints with softer colors, her role being a somewhat murky amalgam of several real-life inspirations, but she connects strongly when pushed to extremes of anguish and defiance.

          Unfortunately, the movie containing their performances is not as focused. Sackler uses Johnson/Jefferson as a prism for demonizing the white establishment, so the movie sometimes drifts from the specificity of one man’s story to the sprawl of a Major Statement. Worse, Sackler’s dialogue is pretentious and stilted, with Jefferson spewing rat-a-tat runs meshing African-American patois and pidgin English into a slangy stew that’s hard to decipher.

          The stylized writing is exacerbated by Ritt’s direction, which uses opulently fake-looking sets and weirdly affected flourishes like showing fights through quick glimpses rather than full views. Still, Burnett Guffey’s cinematography is rich, and he lights Jones so brightly the actor seems to have heat waves coming off his body. Thus, while the movie’s intentions are noble, the sum effect is middling—the leading actors do great work even as they struggle to enliven an overly politicized history lesson.

The Great White Hope: FUNKY

The Greatest (1977)

          As a keepsake depicting the heyday of one of modern sports’ most celebrated figures, The Greatest is priceless, because boxer Muhammad Ali plays himself in a brisk overview of his illustrious career’s most notable moments. As a movie, The Greatest is, well, not the greatest. Setting aside the issue of Ali’s amateurish acting, since he never claimed thespian skills among his gifts, the picture is so flat and oversimplified that it’s more of a tribute reel than an actual film. At its worst, The Greatest is outright ridiculous. For instance, the opening-credits montage features Ali jogging while George Benson croons a maudlin version of “The Greatest Love of All,” which was composed for this movie even though most people know the song as a Whitney Houston hit from the ’80s. The problem is that the main lyric, “Learning to love yourself/is the greatest love of all,” doesn’t really apply to the former Cassius Clay, whose bravado is as famous as his pugilistic skill; for this man, self-love was never in short supply.

          Nonetheless, it seems the goal of this picture was to portray Cassius/Muhammad as a simple man trying to find his identity while he clashed with racist white promoters and, during his Vietnam-era battle against being drafted into military service, the U.S. government. Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t dig deep enough to feel believable as an examination of the inner man, especially since most of the events depicted in the picture are familiar to everyone, from Ali’s friendship with Malcolm X (James Earl Jones) to his conversion to Islam. The movie’s credibility is damaged further by the filmmakers’ use of actual footage from Ali’s biggest bouts: The movie frequently cuts from shots of a well-fed 1977 Ali to clips of the same man looking leaner in earlier years, even though the disparate shots are supposed to be contiguous.

          Accentuating the cheesy approach are distracting cameo appearances by Jones, Robert Duvall, David Huddleston, Ben Johnson, and Paul Winfield, all of whom breeze in and out of the movie very quickly. (Ernest Borgnine has a somewhat more substantial role as trainer Angelo Dundee.) FYI, cult-fave director Monte Hellman provided uncredited assistance during post-production after the death of the film’s credited director, reliable journeyman Tom Gries; Hellman performed similar duties two years later on the misbegotten thriller Avalanche Express, joining that production after director Mark Robson died.

The Greatest: LAME

The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

          Best known in the U.S. for his hilarious performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein (1974), odd-looking Englishman Marty Feldman was an accomplished comedy writer before he started acting, so it’s not surprising he used his mid-’70s visibility to launch a career as a feature filmmaker. Unfortunately, his directorial debut, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, is a dreary compendium of painfully obvious jokes with only a few flashes of real wit. As the title suggests, the picture riffs on a manly-man tale that was adapted for the screen several times previously, P.C. Wren’s 1924 novel about the French Foreign Legion, Beau Geste. The story concerns a pair of orphaned brothers, Beau and Digby, who are raised in an aristocratic French home. Once they reach adulthood, the brothers become suspects in the theft of a precious jewel, so noble Beau withdraws honorably to join the Foreign Legion. In Feldman’s version of the story, inept Digby gets thrown into prison while Beau is away, then escapes and joins Beau in Morocco for adventures that lead to the recovery of the jewel.

          Feldman assembled a great cast, with Michael York as Beau, Ann-Margret as the brothers’ conniving mother-in-law, and Peter Ustinov as the brothers’ psychotic Foreign Legion commander. (Feldman, of course, plays Digby.) Actors essaying cameos and minor roles include Henry Gibson, Trevor Howard, James Earl Jones, Roy Kinnear, Ed McMahon (!), Spike Milligan, Avery Schreiber, and Terry-Thomas. On the bright side, the picture has a few imaginative gags like an elaborate scene during which Feldman magically travels into footage from a 1939 version of the same story, resulting in a dialogue scene between Feldman and Gary Cooper. These kicky sequences demonstrate that Feldman had a deep knowledge of cinema devices and a vivid comic imagination.  More typical, however, is the bit depicting a commercial for a used-camel salesman whose slogan is “Let Harik hump you.” Ustinov is the only actor who really shines here, since he has a field day with physical gags like interchangeable peg legs. As for Feldman, sporadic funny moments cannot disguise how ill-suited he was for playing leading roles. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

The Last Remake of Beau Geste: FUNKY

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976)

          The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings is an enjoyable romp about the good/bad old days of the Negro League, a consortium of baseball franchises that thrived in the 1930s, until the big leagues broke the color line by hiring black players for previously all-white teams. Billy Dee Williams, at the apex of his laid-back suaveness, stars as Bingo Long, star pitcher for the Ebony Aces, an NL team owned by heartless mortician “Sallie” Potter (Ted Ross). Fed up with Potter’s abusive polices (fining players for insubordination, kicking injured players to the curb), Bingo forms his own team for a barnstorming tour of the Midwest.

          To realize his dream, he recruits influential catcher Leon Carter (James Earl Jones), wild-man right fielder Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), and other NL luminaries. Dressing in brightly colored costumes with slouchy satin hats, the newly formed All-Stars swagger from one small town to the next, grabbing pickup games with local teams and building a solid bankroll even as they wrestle with racism and unsavory promoters. Meanwhile, Potter and the other NL owners recognize the All-Stars as a threat to their livelihood, so Poter sends goons out to harass and rob the All-Stars.

          As directed by popcorn-movie specialist John Badham (Saturday Night Fever), Bingo Long is brisk and eventful, with a vibrant mix of comedy, drama, social commentary, and sports action. The story moves along at a good clip, even if the characters are drawn a bit broadly, and there’s an offbeat mix of performance styles. Pryor is more like a guest star than a costar, dropping in and out of the movie periodically, but he’s got a funny running gag about trying to calculate batting averages, and he livens up the picture whenever he’s onscreen. Jones, showing the chops for light comedy that are easy to forget given his impressive résumé as a dramatic actor, is funny and tough, the voice of reason balancing Bingo’s pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

          Williams is hamstrung slightly because writers Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins let their protagonist get eclipsed by supporting characters; Bingo gets the story going and returns to the fore at the end, but his inner life is never sufficiently developed to make him the start-to-finish focus. Given this shortcoming, Williams does just fine, channeling the charisma that helps Bingo talk friends into joining his crusade.

          The movie is a touch long at 110 minutes, especially considering its thin approach to characterization, but it presents such unusual subject matter, in such an entertaining way, that it’s a solid double even though it’s not a home run.

The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings: GROOVY

The Exorcist (1973) & Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

          Since its spectacularly successful release on December 26, 1973, the public has been divided on The Exorcist, with one audience contingent praising the picture as a powerful drama about faith and another excoriating the movie as sensationalist trash. The beauty of The Exorcist is that both interpretations are justified. While the heart of writer William Peter Blatty’s novel and screenplay is a probing exploration of the notion that definitive evidence of the devil implicitly proves the existence of God, the amped-up grotesquerie of director William Friedkin’s movie is as pandering as the content of any exploitation movie. In fact it’s the very tension between the dark and light impulses of the film that makes it so fascinating and so true to its deepest themes: Like the characters in the story, the film has to battle through the pea soup and spinning heads of manifested evil to reach a hopeful conclusion.
          The movie unfolds simply, with distraught mom Chris MacNeill (Ellen Burstyn) seeking first medical and then religious help when her young daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), devolves into a condition that might be demonic possession. The little girl urinates in front of company, flails violently, and spews guttural obscenities, all while her body disintegrates into a horrific mess of pallid skin, scars, and sores. Helping Chris combat the deterioration are an anguished young priest, Karras (Jason Miller), and a world-weary exorcist, Merrin (Max Von Sydow). Providing a sort of comic relief is the caustic police detective (Lee J. Cobb) investigating a murder for which the possessed child might have been responsible.
          Friedkin’s aggressive verité style imbues the provocative story with as much realism as possible, given the focus on special effects and supernatural occurrences, and he’s aided by powerful performances and a technical crew committed to creating vivid atmosphere. Burstyn is spectacular as a mother in an unimaginable situation, making every scene she’s in emotionally credible, and Miller, a genuinely tortured sort offscreen, fills his performance with such intense emotional pain that some of his anguished moments are as hard to watch as the film’s goriest scenes. The movie is filled with classic moments, from the subtle (Burstyn walking down a Washington, D.C., street while Mike Oldfield’s eerie instrumental “Tubular Bells” plays on the soundtrack) to the vulgar (Regan’s obscene use of a crucifix). So while it’s impossible to say for certain whether the movie is inherently exploitive or inherently provocative, it’s also impossible to deny the film’s otherworldly power.
          The same cannot be said for the picture’s first sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic, an insipid mixture of old ideas that worked better the first time and new ideas that should have been nixed at the development stage. Unwisely working a trippy sci-fi/fantasy groove, director John Boorman leads an impressive but slightly embarrassed and narcotized cast through one profoundly silly scene after another. (Newcomers Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, and James Earl Jones join returning stars Blair—newly curvy but still chipmunk-cheeked—and Von Sydow.) The initial story hook is intriguing, with the Vatican dispatching a priest to investigate whether Merrin was a godly man or a heretic, given his record of spectacular exorcisms, but things spin quickly spin out of control. Not only does the sequel plot indicate that Regan is still possessed, rendering the previous film moot, but Boorman weaves in a bizarre subplot about a primitive African village and its locust-centric religious beliefs.
          Boorman and master cinematographer William A. Fraker shoot nearly everything on soundstages, including scenes in African wheat fields, so the whole movie feels bogus and odd. Seriously, what’s the deal with that high-tech hospital featuring so many transparent walls it resembles a county-fair funhouse? At one point, Jones wears an elaborate bug-shaped helmet, complete with giant eyes. In another scene, 17-year-old Blair lures 51-year-old Burton into bed. And the dialogue! Consider the scene where Regan meets Sandra, a little girl played by future Diff’rent Strokes star Dana Plato. “I’m autistic,” Sandra says. “I can’t talk. What’s the matter with you?” (Never mind that she can talk, or that the filmmakers don’t understand how autism works.) “I was possessed by a demon,” Regan replies. “It’s okay. He’s gone.” Despite being a complete dud as a horror show, Exorcist II: The Heretic is so exuberantly goofy that it’s a sumptuous feast for those who consume movies ironically; bad cinema doesn’t get much better.
          Franchise creator Blatty wisely pretended Boorman’s film didn’t exist when he wrote and directed 1990’s The Exorcist III, the first worthy successor to the original film. As fans of this series know, there’s a lot more to the story of subsequent Exorcist flicks, but that’s a topic for another day.

The Exorcist: RIGHT ON
Exorcist II: The Heretic: FREAKY

Star Wars (1977)

           First off, the title of the damn movie is Star Wars, not Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. No matter how much writer-director George Lucas enjoys rewriting history, there was no way he could have known when he was shooting this film that he would get to make one sequel, much less two sequels and three prequels. Thus, despite its eventual status as the first installment of a long-running franchise, the beauty of the original Star Wars is that it’s a complete, self-contained statement about the thrill of a young man discovering his destiny—and one of the film’s many charms is the parallel between Lucas and guileless protagonist Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Just as Luke becomes an intergalactic hero by embracing previously unknown possibilities, Lucas changed the film industry by combining old-fashioned storytelling with groundbreaking FX.
          The basics of the story are familiar to most moviegoers: When agents of the evil Intergalactic Empire kidnap rebel leader Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher), her trusty robots R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) and C-3P0 (Anthony Daniels) are sent to recruit aging Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi (Alec Guiness) to rescue her. Circumstances instead lead the robots to young Luke, a restless orphan living with his aunt and uncle on a remote farm but dreaming of life as a star pilot, and eventually Luke delivers the robots to Kenobi and discovers their true mission. When soldiers from the Empire wipe out Luke’s family, he joins Kenobi on the quest to rescue Leia, and sets out on the path to becoming a Jedi Knight, which is sort of an outer-space samurai with supernatural powers. Viewers also learn about the Force, an energy field binding everyone in the universe together; Jedis get their powers by channeling the Force.
          The heroic crew soon expands to include self-serving smuggler Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and his hirsute first mate, a gigantic alien called Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew). Their journey leads them to the Death Star, a massive space station, where they must confront villains including the Jedi Knight-turned-bad Darth Vader (physically performed by David Prowse and voiced by James Earl Jones). Along the way, Luke finds a surrogate father in Kenobi, a comrade-in-arms in Han, and a love interest in Leia. This is all fun stuff, of course, but the story is really just part of the appeal; with Lucas at the height of his visionary powers, the real magic of Star Wars is in the physical reality and the storytelling.
          At the risk of hyperbole, there’s simply no explaining what a thrill it was to discover this movie as a child of the ’70s. The production values were intoxicating, and the mixture of archetypes and classic themes made Star Wars feel like a tale that had existed for generations. Yet perhaps the sheer confidence of the filmmaking was the most overpowering aspect on first blush: Leaping from one colorful cliffhanger to the next, the movie was edited to travel as fast as any of the spaceships Lucas put onscreen. At the time, Star Wars hit youthful bloodstreams like a cinematic sugar rush, but with something deeper underneath.
          During my interview for the documentary The People vs. George Lucas, I was asked why I thought the first film had such an impact on kids my age. I noted that the mid-’70s was a murky time in American life, with Vietnam and Watergate topping the list of recent front-page downers, and Star Wars was a much-needed infusion of optimism. As a boy feeling the effects of social change (this movie was released around the time my parents’ marriage became a ’70s statistic by ending in divorce), I think I was primed for the hopeful idea that some Force for good existed in the universe. The movie’s staggering box-office returns, and the decades of devotion showered upon the Star Wars franchise by millions of Gen-Xers, indicate I wasn't alone in my reaction.
          You begin to see why it’s difficult to completely set aside larger examinations of this deceptively simple movie, since anything embraced by untold millions means something, whether good or bad—but beyond its pivotal place in ’70s sociology, Star Wars is simply one of the great rides in the history of popcorn cinema. The monstrous spaceship swallowing the tiny rebel vessel at the top of the movie. The otherworldly cantina. The outer-space dogfights. Han Solo’s last-minute heroism. Darth Freakin’ Vader. Escapist adventure doesn’t get any better, even if the actors (including the preceding plus Hammer veteran Peter Cushing) have to struggle through wooden characterizations and tongue-twisting dialogue. With John Williams’ indelible music giving coherence to all of Lucas’ mad-tinkerer ideas, Star Wars is pure cinematic pleasure from start to finish. And if it means something to you, as it does to me, then so much the better.

Star Wars: OUTTA SIGHT