The Iceman Cometh (1973)

         Whereas most of the esoteric movies released under the American Film Theatre banner in the early ‘70s were adaptations of then-contemporary plays, this sprawling production puts a 1946 Eugene O’Neill drama onscreen. In some ways, this is a monumental film, because veteran director John Frankenheimer steers an excellent cast comprising several significant Hollywood players. Moreover, while the sets are simple, Frankenheimer shoots scenes as if he’s making a big-budget feature, cleverly employing deep-focus camerawork and shadowy lighting to provide dimensionality and nuance. Excepting the way an unusually long running time makes viewers hyper-conscious that all the action takes place in one location, The Iceman Cometh bears none of the usual signs marking a pennywise stage-to-screen adaptation. However, that running time must dominate any discussion of the picture, since The Iceman Cometh is four hours long, with two intermissions providing respites along the way.
           Amazingly, even this sprawling duration doesn’t include all of O’Neill’s original text, which raises the question of why Frankenheimer and his collaborators didn’t cut even deeper. It’s easy to envision a more condensed version of this same project having even more impact, what with its abundance of fine acting and the innate value of O’Neill’s poetic monologues and tragic themes.

          Set in a New York City bar circa 1912, the story revolves around a gaggle of lost souls who drink themselves into oblivion rather than facing the hopelessness of their everyday lives. On one particular day, the barflies await the arrival of traveling salesman Hickey (Marvin), a bon vivant who enlivens the place with annual visits. Before his entrance, the story introduces several sad characters. Most prominent is Larry (Robert Ryan), an aging political radical now resigned to the inevitable approach of death. Despite his unkempt hair and scraggly whiskers, he comes across as the unsentimental intellectual of the group. Others making their presence known include the bar’s proprietor, Harry (Fredric March), who speaks with a thick Irish brogue; Rocky (Tom Pedi), the rotund bartender who moonlights as a pimp; and Don (Jeff Bridges), a young man whose activist mother was recently thrown in jail, leading him to seek aid from her onetime colleague Larry. By the time Hickey arrives, it’s clear that everyone is mired in some horrific personal crisis. They need the solace of their let-the-good-times-roll friend.

          No such luck.

          Things seem off the minute Hickey walks through the door, and he soon reveals that his wife died. What’s more, he’s adopted a callous new philosophy. In monologue after monologue, Hickey explains that his friends’ “pipe dreams” are merely distractions from the grim reality of life, and should be abandoned. In essence, he’s traded optimism for nihilism and become an evangelist for his new belief system. Revelations ensue, leading to a new tragedy and then, inevitably, to Larry’s painful epiphanies—as the deepest thinker in the group, his reaction to Hickey’s depressing spectacle speaks for the anguish buried inside the hearts of everyone at the bar.

          Setting aside questions of the literary worth—critics and scholars have spent decades debating where The Iceman Cometh belongs in its author’s canon—the film abounds with meritorious elements. Drawing on his experience staging dramas for live television, Frankenheimer uses his camera masterfully, sometimes juxtaposing two characters in tight frames and sometimes defining group dynamics with meticulous tableaux. He also  moves the camera well, especially when he underscores key moments with subtle push-ins.

          The acting is just as skillful. Some performers, including Bridges and March, essay supporting roles with intensity and specificity, providing just the right colors to fill out the painting. Marvin, whom one might expect to be the standout given his flamboyant role and top billing, is good but perhaps not great, playing scenes with exquisite dexterity even though he never quite achieves the desired level of revelation and vulnerability. So it’s Ryan, surprisingly, who provides the soul of the piece. Once maligned as a wooden he-man, he revealed interesting dimensions in his later work, often imbuing villainous roles with cruelty and cynicism. Here, he’s a broken man desperately seeking reasons to put himself back together, then despairing when he can’t find any.

The Iceman Cometh: GROOVY

Black Sunday (1977)

          Full disclosure: Even though I recognize its many flaws, I love this movie for its ambition, intelligence, and toughness—and especially for costar Bruce Dern’s searing performance. Black Sunday is bleak, long, and outlandish, but whenever I watch the picture, I perceive those qualities as strengths rather than weaknesses.

          Based on an early novel by Thomas Harris, who later created Hannibal Lecter and wrote the various books about the cannibalistic shrink’s exploits, Black Sunday is an old-school terrorism thriller. When a Palestinian extremist named Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller) surfaces on the radar of merciless Mossad agent David Kabakov (Robert Shaw), David methodically tracks her down to the U.S. and joins forces with an FBI agent, Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver), to identify her plan and stop her. It turns out Dahlia has recruited a PTSD-stricken Vietnam vet, American pilot Michael Lander (Dern), to fly the Goodyear Blimp into a Miami stadium during the Super Bowl, where Dahlia will activate explosives inside the blimp and send thousands of steel darts flying into the crowd.

          John Frankenheimer, a seasoned pro at tightly coiled action stories, directs the film in an expansive style, taking equal care with intimate scenes of Dahlia manipulating Michael’s fragile psyche and big-canvas action sequences. What makes Black Sunday unique, however, is its sensitive exploration of Michael’s mental state—despite being neither the film’s hero nor its villain, Michael is by far the picture’s most developed character, and this peculiar storytelling choice delivers fascinating results. As the story progresses, we learn that David (the Mossad agent) is a cold-blooded hunter for whom the ends justify the means. Dahlia, meanwhile, is a kind of psychic counterpoint to David, and the biggest distinction between them is Dahlia’s willingness to kill bystanders for dramatic effect. Therefore, the conflict between these characters is a draw, morally speaking.

          Caught between them, literally and metaphorically, is Michael, a haunted man who endured torture as a prisoner of war, only to return home to an ungrateful society. Even when Michael is carefully preparing explosives, he acts more like an artist than a potential mass murderer; we feel his suffocating angst and wish for him to escape Dahlia’s destructive influence. Dern soars in this movie, adding dimension upon dimension to a role that’s perfectly suited to his offbeat gifts.

          Keller is good, too, presenting a creepy sort of sociopathic sensuality, and Shaw, though regularly upstaged by Dern and Keller, has many vivid moments. His is not, however, a true leading man’s performance—his characterization is far too cruel for that. Adding greatly to the movie’s appeal is a robust score by John Williams, which jacks up the tension, and muscular cinematography by John A. Alonzo. Black Sunday goes overboard during the finale, during which the laws of physics take a beating and during which iffy special effects dull the film’s impact, but even with its goofy denouement, Black Sunday is a popcorn flick executed with a rare level of craftsmanship behind and in front of the camera.

Black Sunday: RIGHT ON

The Horsemen (1971)

          Macho and savage, The Horsemen is a sports movie for only the hardiest of viewers. Set in modern-day Afghanistan (circa the early ’70s), the picture concerns the brutal sport of buzkashi—think polo, but with longer playing times and with a headless goat carcass in lieu of a ball. Exploring themes such as male identity and primitive codes of honor, The Horsemen is mildly fascinating as an ethnographic study, but it’s not an easy film for Westerners to embrace. Even though The Horsemen relies on certain clichés that are common to most sports movies (and most stories about fathers and sons), the picture is so thick with virility that it’s a sonnet to manly suffering. In The Horsemen, the best man isn’t the one who wins, per se; it’s the man who endures the most pain in the pursuit of winning.

          Based on a novel by Joseph Kessel and written by the formidable Dalton Trumbo—whose previous collaboration with Horseman director John Frankenheimer, 1968’s The Fixer, was just as tough and uncompromising—the movie revolves around a young man trying to win the respect of his unyielding father. Jack Palace, wearing a mist of old-age makeup over his leathery features, plays Tursen, a retired buzkashi player who makes a humble but respectable living tending horses for a wealthy landowner. After grooming his son, Uraz (Omar Sharif), to become a buzkashi champion, Tursen places a huge wager on Uraz’s performance in a match, only to watch Uraz lose. Never mind that Uraz suffers a broken leg; broken pride is all that matters here. Much of the film comprises Uraz’s excruciating quest to rehabilitate his body for a return to the game, and since this is a merciless Frankenheimer film, the cure is far worse than the disease.

          The Horsemen looks amazing, with cinematographers André Domage, James Wong Howe, and Claude Renoir conveying the stark majesty of the Afghan landscape—to say nothing of the ferocious action during buzkashi matches. Unfortunately, neither Palance nor Sharif is sufficiently expressive to deliver all of the subtle nuances inherent to the material. They convey a certain undeniable primal intensity, and each has affecting moments, but the film would have benefited from performers with broader emotional palettes. Faring even worse than the male leads is beautiful Leigh Taylor-Young, cast as a fallen woman who enters Uraz’s life. While she looks blazingly sexy with her long, dark hair and smoky eye makeup, Taylor-Young is merely ornamental to a story that’s all about men and their animalistic drives to impress each other.

The Horsemen: FUNKY

99 and 44/100% Dead (1974)

          On paper, this action thriller about a hit man drawn into a web of underworld intrigue is completely pedestrian—the story features standard tropes like an antihero rescuing his innocent girlfriend from a fellow hit man in the employ of a mobster whom the antihero has alienated. However, simply describing the plot of 99 and 44/100% Dead doesn’t account for the batshit-crazy storytelling style that director John Frankenheimer uses from start to finish, or the surreal nature of the picture’s awkward attempts at black comedy. On some level, this movie aspires to blend elements of comic books, film noir, and satire into a singular approach—but since the elements clash with each other, and since the movie compounds this problem with dissonant flavors like amateurish supporting players and goofy music, the end result is an odyssey into inexplicable weirdness.

          Richard Harris, adorned with a strange Prince Valiant haircut and gigantic eyeglasses, plays Harry Crown, a hit man hired by gangster Uncle Frank Kelly (Edmund O’Brien) to settle a turf war in some unnamed American city. Uncle Frank wants Harry to rub out goons in the employ of Uncle Frank’s rival, Big Eddie (Bradford Dillman). Meanwhile, Harry is trying to build a life with saintly schoolteacher Buffy (played by vapid model-turned-actress Ann Turkel, Harris’ real-life companion at the time). Also mixed into the storyline are Tony (David Hall), a junior-level crook whom Harry adopts as a sort of apprentice, and Baby (Kathy Baumann), Tony’s voluptuous young girlfriend.

          Frankenheimer treats the whole movie like a comic strip, so gangsters wear stylized outfits—think pinstriped suits and wide-brimmed hats—while Harry brandishes a pair of matching pistols with pearl handles. The setting is a city seemingly populated only by warring gangsters, so gunfights and murders take place in plain sight, and violent scenes are “ironically” scored with upbeat music and cheerful whistling. Everything in 99 and 44/100% Dead is overwrought in the clumsiest way, so the tone of the picture is captured by a scene in which Harry’s arch-enemy torments Baby.

          The villain of the piece is hit man Marvin “Claw” Zuckerman (Chuck Connors), who is missing a hand and therefore carries around a briefcase filled with bizarre prosthetic attachments. Arriving in town and demanding a sexual plaything, Marvin is furnished with Baby, who wears a barely-there yellow dress so sheer her nipples seem as if they’re trying to achieve liftoff. While Baby watches, Marvin affixes whips and other prosthetics to his stump, scowling and threatening Baby with cartoonish dialogue. And so it goes from there—take the standard elements of a crime film, jack them up on crank, and you’ve got this very strange moment in the career of one of action cinema’s greatest directors. 99 and 44/100% Dead isn’t Frankenheimer’s oddest film—that honor belongs to 1996’s insane The Island of Dr. Moreau—but it’s close.

99 and 44/100% Dead: FREAKY

Prophecy (1979)

Creature-feature stinker Prophecy is hilarious because no one involved seems to realize they’re making an awful movie. Set in northern Maine, the story concerns a clash between pollution-generating white folks and tree-hugging Native Americans, with a big-city physician (Robert Foxworth) and his knocked-up missus (Talia Shire) caught in between. So far, so good. But then the Natives start talking about a legendary nature spirit that’s angry with the way the local woods are being defiled, and the titular prophecy comes true when a pollution-spewed monster arrives to take out the reckless palefaces and anybody else who gets in the way of its goo-covered talons. Aside from a generally histrionic tone, the first clue the movie has gone off the rails is the appearance of Irish-Italian actor Armand Assante as a Native American; not only is he preposterously miscast, he overacts like someone put crank in his morning coffee each day. Foxworth is beardy and serious, offering a typical sane-in-a-world-gone-mad routine, while Shire tries to retain her dignity playing an underdeveloped character who’s mostly around to get endangered. Only the terrific Richard Dysart, playing an employee of the polluting mill, hits the right campy tone. John Frankenheimer, the venerable Manchurian Candidate director who spent much of the ’70s and ’80s making trash beneath his station, ensures unintentional humor by playing everything in Prophecy straight, like the scene of a giant mutated salmon leaping from the depths of a lake to chomp on a duck, or the absurd climax in which a mutated bear-thing tromps around while covered in glistening muck. Steadily building from silliness to outright stupidity, Prophecy is a must-see for fans of genre-movie train wrecks.

Prophecy: FUNKY

I Walk the Line (1970)

          Gregory Peck’s campaign to complicate his image throughout the ’70s was admirable, and the public’s expectation that he would always play morally righteous characters gave him an edge whenever he ventured outside of his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, not all of the material he used for his experiments was worthy of the effort. I Walk the Line is a good example. A standard melodrama about a small-town Southern sheriff tempted from morality by the sexual charms of a moonshiner’s young daughter, the picture is salacious, but far too sluggish. Worse, Peck isn’t loose enough to convey the extremes of a man driven beyond his inhibitions by animal lust; instead of coming across as feverish, Peck comes across as psychotic. The blame for this atonal portrayal can probably be shared equally by Peck and by director John Frankenheimer, a wizardly storyteller when handling the right action/suspense material but a hit-and-miss filmmaker in the world of straight drama. Given that he specialized in generating close-quarters tension through mano-a-mano psychological warfare, Frankenheimer probably had no more business tackling this sort of simplistic Southern-fried pulp than his leading man did; Frankeneheimer doesn’t come close to creating the sort of sweaty, melodramatic aesthetic that would have kicked this thing into the realm of, say, Tennesse Williams-style hysterics.
          Still, the picture looks great, thanks to Frankenheimer’s characteristically slick camerawork and the participation of strong artists in front of and behind the camera. As the moonshiner’s daughter, Tuesday Weld brings more than enough wild sex appeal to make her role in the story convincing, and cinematographer David M. Walsh creates a glossy look capturing the untamed openness of the picture’s Tennessee locations. While the device of scoring the movie entirely with Johnny Cash songs is gimmicky, the Man in Black’s haunted drone is an effective sonic signifier for the torment inside the sheriff’s soul. The picture also benefits from supporting actors who sink their teeth into screenwriter Alvin Sargent’s meticulous dialogue. Charles Durning gives a sharp turn as Peck’s sly second-in-command, Ralph Meeker is appropriately odious as Weld’s pragmatic father, and Estelle Parsons suffers poignantly as the sheriff’s cast-aside wife. With all of this talent involved, I Walk the Line offers many rewards for the patient viewer, but lackluster storytelling keeps the picture mired in mediocrity.

I Walk the Line: FUNKY

The French Connection (1971) & French Connection II (1975)

          Cop movies were never the same after The French Connection, a scalding thriller about a New York detective obsessively tracking a Gallic drug smuggler. Once audiences watched morally challenged policeman Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) dress like a Salvation Army Santa Claus to snare a hoodlum, rattle suspects with twisted psychological tricks, and recklessly instigate the most frightening car chase 1971 audiences had ever seen, any subsequent policier with less verve seemed old-fashioned by comparison.

          Based on a bestselling nonfiction book by Robin Moore and directed with docudrama realism by William Friedkin, the movie meticulously tracks how Doyle and his partner, Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), latch onto a small-time hood, Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco), who unwittingly leads the cops to enigmatic European crook Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Among many other things, the film is a respectful but unflinching homage to dogged police work, because surveiling Sol way past the point when superiors see the value in doing so unlocks clues leading to a much more significant target. Ernest Tidyman’s muscular script juxtaposes vivid character-development scenes with explosive sequences of police action, creating just the right ambiguous context for signature moments including the harrowing vignette of Doyle shooting an escaping felon in the back. Throughout, the storyline uses Doyle as a means of exploring of whether Machiavellian law enforcement degrades or protects society.

          Yet beyond its probing questions about right and wrong, The French Connection is breathlessly exciting, particularly during that infamous car chase, which has Doyle pursuing an elevated train carrying a suspect; Doyle’s near-misses with pedestrians are so terrifying that they reinforce the movie’s theme of a cop who’s arguably as dangerous as any crook. Lo Bianco, Rey, and Scheider provide sterling support, with Scheider demonstrating the streetwise suaveness that made him a leading man a few years later. As for Hackman, he’s on fire, alternately ferocious, funny, perverse, and wild, turning scenes like the “pick your toes in Poughkeepsie” interrogation into unforgettable moments. His performance is a master class in channeling the unique energy of the male animal into an expression of complicated sociopolitical concepts. Friedkin, Hackman, and Tidyman all won Oscars for their work, and they each spent much of their subsequent careers trying to recapture the bristling intensity of this film.

          For instance, Hackman continued charting Doyle dark odyssey in French Connection II, for which hard-hitting journeyman John Frankenheimer replaced brash provocateur Friedkin. A respectable thriller in its own right, French Connection II sends Doyle to Marseilles, where he tries to capture the evasive Charnier on the Frenchman’s home turf. In the sequel’s brilliant contrivance, Doyle gets abducted and by Charneri’s thugs, who force heroin into the cop’s system until he becomes a desperate junkie. This eventually leads to an extraordinary sequence of Doyle going through violent DT’s. Another strong moment is the grim finale, which pays off the French Connection journey on an appropriate note of moral ambiguity.

          Overall, however, the storyline of French Connection II isn’t nearly as focused or potent as that of its predecessor. The rivalry between Doyle and his Gallic counterpart (Bernard Fresson) plays well without lodging too firmly in the viewer’s imagination, and too many scenes feature Doyle killing time. As wonderful as it is to luxuriate in character development, leisurely pacing does not an exciting crime thriller make. That said, Frankenheimer plays rough whenever the action starts, and Hackman’s portrayal of Doyle is just as powerful the second time around. So while French Connection II ultimately feels unnecessary, it’s sufficiently well-crafted that both of these movies deserve spaces on the top shelf of ’70s crime cinema. FYI, the real-life cops who inspired The French Connection also inspired two other thrillers, both released in 1973: Badge 373 and The Seven-Ups.

The French Connection: OUTTA SIGHT

French Connection II: GROOVY