1980 Week: The First Deadly Sin

          A grim policier noteworthy for containing Frank Sinatra’s final leading role—he relegated his acting appearances to cameos and guest roles for the remainder of his life—The First Deadly Sin is a peculiar piece of work, because even though the technical execution is first-rate, the story is hopelessly enervated. What’s more, Sinatra’s manner of depicting his character’s world-weariness comes across as disinterested acting, a problem exacerbated by his character’s murky motivations. The movie also suffers an imbalance because leading lady Faye Dunaway’s scenes are needlessly attenuated, given the underwritten nature of her role, and because most of the central investigation comprises a quest to identify a murder weapon, rather than a murderer. As such, the protagonist lacks emotion, the key secondary character lacks substance, and the main narrative thrust lacks a human element. It says much for the skills of everyone involved that The First Deadly Sin is relatively watchable despite all of these shortcomings.

          Sinatra plays Edward Delaney, an NYPD detective on the cusp of retirement. At the very moment a challenging murder case lands on his desk, Edward’s wife, Barbara (Dunaway), suffers a seizure while hospitalized and undergoes emergency surgery. Furthermore, Edward’s combative new supervisor, Captain Broughton (Anthony Zerbe), orders him not to investigate crimes with connections to other precincts. This set of circumstances creates an existential quandary for the diligent detective—even as his wife’s health becomes more and more precarious, he must defy his supervisor’s orders if he wishes to bring an elusive killer to justice. Eventually, this situation resolves into a scenario of Edward seeking to impose morality onto a capricious universe before impending tragedy strips life of its meaning.

          Director Brian G. Hutton’s pacing is very slow, resulting in myriad shots of Sinatra loitering onscreen with various gloomy facial expressions. The love story between the Delaneys never clicks, partially because the 26-year age gap between Dunaway and Sinatra is so glaring. Furthermore, the hero enlists nonprofessional helpers to aid his investigation, and these folks never face danger; come to think of it, we never really fear for Delaney’s welfare, either. So as a thriller, The First Deadly Sin fizzles. Every so often, however, the movie sparks thanks to a zesty addition from a character actor. George Coe is suitably loathsome as a doctor who lacks empathy, David Dukes contributes twitchy work as a deranged killer, James Whitmore lends amiability and crustiness to his role as a coroner, and Joe Spinell is wonderfully crass playing a doorman who can be bought cheaply.

The First Deadly Sin: FUNKY

The One Man Jury (1978)

          Judged by normal standards, the violent cops-and-criminals flick The One Man Jury is thoroughly pedestrian, yet another saga about policemen who perceive the Miranda ruling as an inhibition on their ability to use any means necessary while apprehending bad guys. Judged by the standards of the schlock that leading man Jack Palance spent most of the ’70s making, often in Europe, The One Man Jury fares much better. Instead of being incoherent junk with bad dubbing and heavy exploitation elements, The One Man Jury is an American production with a clear storyline and passable supporting performances. And while Palance sleepwalks through much of his performance, as was his wont in low-budget productions, he at least gets to participate in a fully rendered action climax complete with colorful locations, double-crosses, shootouts, and twists. If nothing else, The One Man Jury seems very much like a real movie for the last 30 minutes of its running time.

          Set in LA, the picture concerns Detective Jim Wade (Palance), a tough guy who still beats suspects and violates their Constitutional rights, even though post-Miranda laws mean that many of his arrests are voided by the courts. When a psycho starts murdering women, Wade becomes obsessed with catching the guy, so he makes a deal with gangster Mike Abatino (Joe Spinell), In exchange for giving Wade the name of the killer, who is associated with Abatino’s gang, Wade agrees to leave Abatino’s criminal operations alone. Half the movie explores the circumstances leading to the deal, and half the movie explores the consequences. Structurally, this is solid stuff, even though writer-director Charles Martin wanders into narrative cul-de-sacs. For instance, the whole business of Wade’s romantic involvement with a much-younger records officer, Wendy (Pamela Shoop), feels bogus from start to finish. Still, Spinell and actors including Andy Romano make fun hoodlums, and B-movie starlet Angel Tompkins gives the movie a shot of attitude with her brief role as a glamorous gambler. The main takeaway is that there’s a terrific concept buried inside The One Man Jury. In fact, the movie is something of a precursor to the much slicker Michael Douglas picture The Star Chamber (1983), in which a cabal of judges hires killers to take out crooks who get off on technicalities.

The One Man Jury: FUNKY

The Little Dragons (1979)

It should come as no surprise that biker gangs, FBI agents, karate-kicking preteens, love-struck adolescents, psychopathic rednecks, and sparring spouses are incompatible narrative elements. Yet all of those things and more are crammed into Little Dragons, a mess of an action/comedy movie ostensibly designed for family audiences. Perhaps because the picture was an early directorial effort by the skillful Curtis Hanson, who later made winners including The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and L.A. Confidential (1997), the movie has a fairly slick flow within individual scenes. It’s the way all the parts are assembled that creates problems. Beyond the fundamental issue of cramming way too many concepts into one movie, Little Dragons suffers from tonal confusion of the worst kind. Scenes featuring youngsters doing martial arts are played for Disney-style slapstick amusement, and sequences spotlighting the creepy rednecks are borderline horrific, thanks to constant threats of brutal murder. Adding to the dissonance is a running gag about stoners happily singing “The Hokey Pokey.” For any who care, the broad strokes of the plot are as follows. At a rural campsite, a suburban family (Mom, Dad, teen daughter) encounters a backwoods clan comprising mama Angel (Ann Sothern) and her two depraved sons, middle-aged crazies Carl (John Chandler) and Yancey (Joe Spinell). They take a shine to the suburban family’s daughter and kidnap the young lady at the first opportunity. Meanwhile, a grandfather (Charles Lane) arrives at the same campsite with his grandsons (played by real-life siblings Chris and Pat Peterson), who are into karate. The young martial artists, accompanied by a cadre of classmates, try to rescue the kidnapped girl. It’s all as silly as it is slapdash. Although clearly shot in the late ’70s, it’s iffy whether The Little Dragons properly belongs to the decade, since some sources indicate the film was first released in 1980. (Furthermore, it was re-released a few years later as Karate Kids U.S.A., following the success of the unrelated 1984 sports drama The Karate Kid.) In any event, The Little Dragons is harmless but inept.

The Little Dragons: LAME

Starcrash (1978)

How bad is Starcrash? To paraphrase the Bard, let us count the ways. First, there’s the discombobulated, idiotic storyline—an interstellar smuggler gets sent to the monster-filled home world of an evil wizard in order to rescue the son of an outer-space emperor, aided only by a band of outlaws and robots. Yep, it’s all the main signifiers from the previous year’s blockbuster Star Wars, thrown into a blender and transmogrified into nonsense. (Proving the makers of Starcrash have no shame, the flick even features low-rent light sabers.) Then there’s the garish production design, which blends Buck Rogers-style camp (the heroine spends most of the movie in an outer-space bikini) with sub-Star Wars mechanization, resulting in an aesthetic jumble. Next come the godawful special effects, ranging from chintzy stop-motion monsters to weak spaceship shots. And finally, there’s the abysmal acting, which is exacerbated by sloppy dubbing: B-movie stalwarts including Marjoe Gortner, David Hasselhoff, Caroline Munro, and Joe Spinell hiss and preen through ridiculous performances. Throw all of these elements together, and you’ve got junk so dreadful that even producer Roger Corman, whose company released the picture in the U.S., should have been embarrassed. Made in Italy, and variously titled in different international territories as Scontri stellari oltre la terza dimensione and The Adventures of Stella Star, the picture is nominally a showcase for leading lady Munro, a raven-haired beauty who first caught notice in Hammer horror flicks and a kitschy Sinbad picture. She fills out her barely-there costume nicely, but her bug-eyed acting diminishes her appeal considerably. Even more painful than enduring Munro’s work, however, is watching Christopher Plummer’s stupid cameo as the emperor—could he possibly have been paid enough for this humiliation? And for that matter, how the hell did the producers get A-list music composer John Barry, already a three-time Academy Award winner at this point, to do the score? Mysteries, to be sure, but not worth investigating.

Starcrash: SQUARE

Cops and Robbers (1973)

          A lighthearted crime thriller unwisely marketed as an out-and-out comedy, Cops and Robbers features a clever plot, flavorful ’70s atmosphere, and exuberant performances by a pair of actors not customarily cast as leads. The movie has significant tonal inconsistencies, and (like all heist movies) raises the question of why we should care about people who steal, but it’s so brisk and watchable that it’s worth investigating. Joe (Joseph Bologna) is a New York City beat cop exasperated by his inability to get ahead financially. So, one evening, he walks into a liquor store in full uniform and robs the place. Afterward, Joe tells his plainclothes-detective buddy Tom (Cliff Gorman) how easy it is to exploit the power of the badge. Determined to stage a major heist so he and Joe can retire into luxury, Tom approaches mid-level mobster Pasquale Aniello (John P. Ryan) for advice. Amazed at the policeman’s hubris, Aniello says that if Tom and his partner steal $10 million in bearer bonds from Wall Street, he’ll pay the cops-turned-crooks a cool $2 million.

          Written by crime novelist Donald E. Westlake, Cops and Robbers scores on two levels. The central crime is just weird enough to jibe with reality, and the straightforward motivation of the lead characters speaks to universal frustrations with the slow pace of making an honest buck—even though it’s hard to actually like Joe and Tom, since they flagrantly violate the public trust, it’s easy to see what pushes them toward criminality. Westlake also does a clever job of illustrating that everyone in the system is ripping off everyone else (brokers are robbing from brokers, crooks are robbing from crooks), creating the illusion of a victimless crime. In that context, the fun of the movie is watching Joe and Tom work out the particulars of their crime, even as a hundred things go wrong on the big day. The heist scene is meticulously paced and staged, with all sorts of nerve-jangling complications, and the offbeat climax takes place in Central Park on “Bicycle Day.”

          Editor-turned-director Aram Avakian predictably does best in action scenes, when he’s able to shape varied footage into taut vignettes, though he doesn’t quite succeed in coaxing his actors toward matching the jaunty tone of the script. As a result, Cops and Robbers is a bit too serious for its own good, which is compounded by a downbeat score featuring the frequently repeated R&B theme song “A World of Cops and Robbers.” It also feels like a couple of dramatic beats are missing, with characters making confusing leaps forward, and Bologna and Gorman, though both very skilled at expressing their characters’ frustrations, aren’t exactly the most charismatic performers. Nonetheless, more goes right than wrong in Cops and Robbers, and the cast features a slew of interesting Noo Yawk supporting players, like Joe Spinell and Dolph Sweet.

Cops and Robbers: GROOVY

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

          Highly regarded as one of the most faithful adaptations of a Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely is an oddity among the films that comprised the noir boom of the mid-’70s. Unlike, say, Chinatown (1974), which placed a contemporary cast in a period milieu to achieve a postmodern effect, Farewell, My Lovely stars an actor who appeared in several classics of the original late ’40s noir cycle: Robert Mitchum. And while Mitchum’s advanced age creates some storytelling hiccups, like the idea that his character is sexual catnip for a young beauty, his deep association with the genre and the hangdog quality that made him a good fit for vintage noir are used to great effect; Mitchum lumbers around Farewell, My Lovely like he’s the same poor bastard he played in Out of the Past (1947) after another 30 years of rough road.

          In addition to its well-cast leading man, the picture boasts a smooth script by David Zelag Goodman. The screenplay retains Chandler’s pithiest observations (via Mitchum’s world-weary voiceover) and lets the story spiral off into all the right murky tangents without losing narrative coherence. Describing a Chandler plot in the abstract does nothing to capture the story’s appeal, but the broad strokes are that a muscle-bound crook named Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran) hires private dick Philip Marlowe (Mitchum) to track down his long-lost girlfriend. This draws Marlowe into a web of hoodlums, politicians, and whores, so before long Marlowe’s been beaten, shot at, shot up, and generally put through the wringer. Along the way, he commences a torrid romance with a powerful judge’s fag-hag trophy wife, Helen Grayle (Charlotte Rampling). The movie gets seedier as it progresses, with Marlowe serving as the audience’s tour guide through the underworld.

          Director Dick Richards gets preoccupied with aping the visual style of classic noir flicks (lotsa neon and venetian blinds), so the more amateurish actors in the cast don’t get the attention they need, and Richards is pretty inept handling the sequence of Marlowe getting hopped up on dope. Nonetheless, the story is compelling—in Chandler’s universe, bad situations always get worse—and the supporting cast is colorful. John Ireland stands out as Marlowe’s policeman pal, the stalwart Detective Nulty, and Sylvia Miles received an Oscar nomination for her grotesque turn as a boozy ex-showgirl. Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, and Anthony Zerbe show up at regular intervals, and there’s even a brief appearance by a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone. Farewell, My Lovely is uneven, but its virtues are plentiful.

Farewell, My Lovely: GROOVY