The All-American Boy (1973)

          It’s hard to imagine a cryptic, downbeat, pretentious character study like The All-American Boy receiving a major-studio release during any time other than the New Hollywood era of the late ’60s and early ’70s, because everything about this strange picture epitomizes what was wonderful—and frustrating—about that glorious period. Viewed charitably, writer-director Charles Eastman’s movie is like an enigmatic song by, say, Bob Dylan or Paul Simon, inasmuch as the film contains beautiful flashes of humanity and insight, even though the overall meaning is elusive. Eastman divides the film into sequences, even subtitling the picture “The Manly Art in Six Rounds,” and the story unfolds impressionistically. In each “round,” the main character occupies a slightly different stage of life, and the recurring theme seems to be that he’s boxing with existence itself—sometimes he struggles to break free of small-town claustrophobia, and sometimes he acts out against the expectations associated with success. (Central to The All-American Boy is that quintessentially ’70s archetype, the I-gotta-be-me protagonist whose self-involved caprice vexes everyone he meets.)

          Jon Voight, working hard to transform Eastman’s sketch of a protagonist into a fully rendered portrait, stars as Vic Bealer, a thirtysomething guy from a rural community who dreams of becoming a champion boxer. Throughout the movie, Vic moves back and forth between his boxing life, where he achieves success under the tutelage of vulgar trainer Arty Bale (Ned Glass), and his domestic life, where he romances both Drenna (Anne Archer) and Janelle (E.J. Peaker). Vic wins championships and steadily proceeds toward a spot on the Olympic team, then inexplicably walks away from sports. He also builds a life with Janelle, even fathering a son, before destroying that situation, as well. Yet Eastman tries to show Vic manifesting something akin to moral authority, as when he rebuffs a pathetic business overture from his brother-in-law (Art Metrano).

          One assumes the gist of the piece reveals itself in the final sequence, during which someone tells Vic that freedom is an illusion—shades of the famous line from “Me and Bobby McGee”—so it’s possible Eastman was after something about ’60s/’70s wanderers playing a dangerous game by naïvely pursuing individualism. He might also have been after something about masculinity, paralleling the brutality of boxing with the way Vic inflicts pain on the people in his life.

          The All-American Boy is maddeningly vague, but many individual scenes are potent. The edgy surrogate-father stuff with the manager is vivid, as is an uncomfortable sequence of Vic visiting Janelle in a recording studio while she lays down vocals for a pop song. Every so often, The All-American Boy edges into pure grandiosity, particularly during the climax, which involves a helicopter, a marching band, and rolling fields of tall yellow grass, all photographed in glorious long-lens widescreen by cinematographer Philip Lathrop. Since Eastman never directed another movie, The All-American Boy recalls another arty 1973 picture from a one-and-done filmmaker, James William Guercio’s dark Electra Glide in Blue. Although Electra Glide is infinitely more grounded, both are beguilingly offbeat.

The All-American Boy: FUNKY

Conrack (1974)

          Southern novelist Pat Conroy has enjoyed a productive relationship with Hollywood; of the four theatrical features adapted from Conroy’s books, one is a glossy, Oscar-nominated melodrama (1991’s The Prince of Tides), one is a respected character study that also received Oscar-nomination love (1979’s The Great Santini), and only one is middling (1983’s The Lords of Discipline). The other Conroy adaptation (which was, chronologically, the first cinematic translation of his work) is a small-scale charmer drawn from a vivid episode in the author’s early life. Before embarking on his literary career, Conroy worked as a teacher in an impoverished and mostly African-American community located on a tiny island in South Carolina. Adopting a hip, humanistic approach that rubbed conservative administrators the wrong way, Conroy made friends among students and their families but was fired for refusing to treat his charges with the cynicism that was previously the norm. Translating his struggles into art, Conroy wrote an autobiographical book called The Water Is Wide, which formed the basis of this film.

          Adapted by the reliable team of Martin Ritt (director) and Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch (screenwriters), Conrack stars Jon Voight as Pat Conroy, who is portrayed as the quintessential rebel with a cause. Pat drifts into his new job filled with bold educational aspirations and a deep desire to treat the people he encounters as human beings, rather than statistics or stereotypes. Continuing the long tradition of heroic-teacher movies that stretches all the way from Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) to Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995) and beyond, Conrack focuses equally on the noble sacrifices of a dedicated educator and the way students’ lives are elevated by the nurturing qualities of a supportive classroom environment. In lesser hands, this material could have been saccharine, especially given the way racial divisions in the story create opportunities for cheap moralizing. Yet because Ritt and his collaborators approach the story with such realism and taste, shooting the film on real locations and eschewing cheap sentiment, Conrack feels like a believable sketch of a difficult challenge faced by a principled man. (Make what you will of the self-aggrandizement inherent to autobiographical material that positions the author as a saintly figure.)

          Ritt’s conscientious approach is supported beautifully by Voight’s warm and funny performance in the leading role. Whereas Voight sometimes slid into show-boating tearfulness in later dramas, he’s spot-on here, channeling the indignation of a decent man faced with a stubborn system—and the genuine joy of a born leader who finds just the right followers. Marching behind Voight is an eclectic supporting cast (including Hume Cronyn, Antonio Fargas, Paul Winfield, and Madge Sinclair) all of whom hit their respective notes of guilelessness and inflexibility in credible ways. FYI, Conroy’s source material was revisited for a 2006 TV movie, which bore the book’s original title, The Water Is Wide. And, in case you’re wondering, the title Conrack comes from a persistent mispronunciation of his Conroy’s surname that he encountered on the job in South Carolina.

Conrack: GROOVY

The Revolutionary (1970)

          On the plus side, this counterculture-themed drama has a strong sense of time and place. Even though it was shot in England, the movie somehow evokes a vivid sense of America in the student-revolt era, from pristine campuses to trash-strewn ghettos. Furthermore, director Paul Williams and cinematographer Brian Probyn artfully situate characters within painterly shots to provide context for how people relate to different environments. And the overarching narrative is interesting because it tracks how a troubled student shifts from posturing campus demonstrator to radicalized anarchist. Unfortunately, the weakest element of The Revolutionary is the most fundamental one—Hans Koningsberger’s script, which he adapted from his own novel of the same name.

          For instance, the lead character is known only as “A,” even though we see nearly every aspect of his life—his classwork, his home, his lover, his parents—so it’s clear right from the start that Koningsberger can’t decide whether to operate on a metaphorical or realistic plane. Worse, the storyline is logy and meandering, with excessive screen time devoted to uninteresting relationships. Much of the movie comprises A’s romance with Helen (Jennifer Salt), a rich girl whose lifestyle is pure Establishment, so it seems as if the focus is A choosing between creature comforts and political integrity. But then, nearly three-quarters of the way through the movie, A joins forces with Leonard II (Seymour Cassel), a radical whose activism involves outright lawlessness. So if the story is about how far A will go to serve his principles, then why bother with the Helen scenes or, for that matter, the unsatisfying bits with Despard (Robert Duvall), a mid-level organizer who debates politics with A but never has much impact on the overall narrative?

          To be fair, the goal of The Revolutionary may simply have been to raise questions. However, the sponginess of the story is compounded by the middling nature of Voight’s performance. Yes, it’s tough to dramatize a character who’s racked by indecision, but spending 100 minutes watching someone almost do this and almost do that challenges viewers’ patience. Still, the film gets points for tackling worthwhile subject matter, and the technical execution is terrific. (Composer Michael Small deserves special mention for imbuing many scenes with tension.) Yet just like director Williams’ next film, the drug drama Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972), The Revolutionary strives for profundity it never quite achieves. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

The Revolutionary: FUNKY

Coming Home (1978)

          Inarguably the best movie made during the ’70s about the unique difficulties facing American veterans returning from Vietman, Coming Home is at once moving, political, provocative, and tender—and it’s also the apex of actress Jane Fonda’s anti-Vietnam War activism, even though it was released three years after the fall of Saigon. While “Hanoi Jane” alienated as many people as she inspired while the war was raging, she used Coming Home—which she developed—to focus her rage at needless conflict through the prism of war’s impact on individuals. Rather than being polemic, even though some detractors saw the film that way, Coming Home is poetic.

          When the movie opens in early 1968, Sally Hyde (Fonda) is happily married to a Marine officer named Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), and both unquestionably accept the rightness of U.S. involvement in Indochina. Once Bob leaves for his tour of duty, Sally begins to hear different opinions about the war, notably from her feminist friend Vi (Penelope Milford); Sally also begins to question the subservient role she plays in her marriage. Eventually, Sally volunteers at a VA hospital, where she meets returning soldiers including embittered but passionate Luke Martin (Jon Voight), who is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. As part of her larger spiritual awakening, Sally recognizes Luke’s humanity, and they become lovers in a crucial scene that director Hal Ashby executes with a memorable combination of eroticism and poignancy. The fragile world that Luke and Sally build together is upset, however, when Bob returns from Vietnam, having been changed in disturbing ways that echo the film’s theme of how war affects different people differently.

          Placing Sally’s character at the center of the story was a genius move on many levels. First and most obviously, the role gives Fonda a way to express her deep feelings about the war; she dramatizes the ravages of conflict by meticulously charting Sally’s shifting attitudes. Second, making the central character a witness to the horrors of Vietnam—rather than an active participant—allows the audience to see soldiers as real-world people instead of battleground heroes. What does it mean when a draftee is rewarded for his service by wounds that will last the rest of his life? What does it mean when a career soldier encounters horrors during combat for which he wasn’t prepared? How can those left behind in the homeland ever hope to understand the experiences of soldiers?

          Coming Home is a deeply compassionate film, with Ashby and cinematographer Haskell Wexler capturing a spectrum of complex emotions in soft, painterly images; the movie is a tapestry of souls making connections and, alternately, slamming against insurmountable barriers. Coming Home is also a showcase for spectacular acting. Fonda and Voight both won Oscars, Fonda for her precise demarcations of stages in one woman’s life and Voight for his deeply touching openness. (His show-stopping speech to a group of young people near the end of the picture, while a bit of a narrative digression given its length, is among the finest moments Voight’s ever had onscreen.) Dern, unluckily overshadowed by his costars because he’s playing yet another in his long line of screen psychos, gives a performance every bit as powerful as Fonda’s and Voight’s—portraying a man who’s betrayed by the ideals to which he’s dedicated his life, Dern is frightening and yet also completely sympathetic.

Coming Home: RIGHT ON

Catch-22 (1970)

         Director Mike Nichols once described the “green awning effect” of becoming an A-list filmmaker. By notching two big hits in the late ’60s, Nichols convinced Hollywood he knew how to connect with audiences. Testing his newfound power, perpetually mischievous Nichols pitched a movie about a green awning outside a building—the movie would simply train a camera on the awning so viewers could watch different people pass underneath. According to Nichols, some executives expressed interest in this awful idea simply because they wanted to be in the Mike Nichols business.

          This helps explain why Paramount Pictures let Nichols spend a then-extravagant $17 million on an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22. A satirical and surrealistic World War II story exploring topics including bureaucracy, capitalism, and trauma, the book features a disjointed timeline and a sprawling cast—unlikely fare for a big-budget studio picture. Nonetheless, Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry (whose previous collaboration was 1967’s The Graduate) endeavored to focus the narrative by centering attempts by Captain Yossarian (Alan Arkin) to get relieved from his duty as a bomber pilot, his justification being that combat has driven him mad. (The title refers to a Kafkaesque military guideline stipulating that anyone capable of recognizing his own insanity must be sane and therefore suitable for combat.) Surrounding this main plot are myriad deviations, some into subplots, some back and forth through time, and some into the eerie world of dreams. 

          Viewed through the most forgiving lens, Catch-22 captures the chaos and horror of Yossarian’s experience by confronting him with an endless variety of bizarre characters and confounding situations—to watch Arkin drift from hysteria to stupefaction and various emotional states in between is to feel not just his anguish but also his desperate need for human connection. Viewed through a harsher lens—the perspective adopted by most critics during the film’s original release—Catch-22 epitomizes directorial overreach, with clarity falling victim to scale. Strong arguments can be made for both takes because for every brilliant moment that Nichols renders, seemingly a dozen others elicit bewilderment. There’s a lot of seesawing between “How did he think of that?” and “What the hell was he thinking?”

          Aesthetically, Catch-22 is perfection thanks to cinematographer David Watkin’s exquisite high-contrast lighting and Nichols’s startlingly complex shots, such as lengthy unbroken takes featuring actors’ movements choreographed with explosions and flying planes. (The appearance of Orson Welles in a small role feels like a wink to Welles’s penchant for similarly baroque sequences.) The other impeccable element of Catch-22 is a cast overflowing with talent: Bob Balaban, Martin Balsam, Richard Benjamin, Norman Fell, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, Charles Grodin, Bob Newhart, Paula Prentiss, Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, and—pulling double duty—screenwriter Henry. Particularly great are Balsam as a heartless commander and Voight as an officer whose entrepreneurial schemes achieve ghastly proportions.

          Yet the key element of Catch-22 is also the most divisive, and that’s the script. Occasionally the film’s extreme comedy and extreme tragedy mesh in memorably weird scenes, notably the sequence featuring an unforgettably gory onscreen death, but more often the satire is excruciatingly bleak, as when Nichols punctuates a rape/murder scene with an absurdist punchline. Nichols deserves praise for trying to nail such a difficult tonal balance, but whether he succeeded is another matter. The script also suffers for extravagance given that whole characters and subplots could have been removed.

          Because Nichols was one of the first directors to peak during the New Hollywood era, the grandiosity of Catch-22 and the failure of the film to recoup its cost during initial release now seems like a harbinger for subsequent examples of auteur excess—Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975); Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977); Spielberg’s 1941 (1979); and, of course, Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980). Like all of those films, Catch-22 cannot be reduced to a snarky footnote. It’s a window into the creativity of an essential filmmaker, and its best moments are mesmerizing even if, for most viewers, the sum is less than the parts. It’s also weird as hell, which represents a certain kind of perverse integrity. So, whether Catch-22 strikes you as a work of unconventional genius or a case study in what happens when a director buys his own hype, it is unlikely to leave you unaffected. 

Catch-22: FREAKY

Deliverance (1972)

          Even though it contains one of the most infamous scenes of the ’70s, there’s so much more to John Boorman’s shattering action thriller Deliverance than “Squeal like a pig!” Adapted for the screen by poet James Dickey from his own novel, the picture follows four city-slicker Southerners during an ill-fated trip down the (fictional) Cahulawasee River in the dense wilderness of rural Georgia. Lewis (Burt Reynolds) is the de facto leader of the group because he’s a veteran outdoorsman, Ed (Jon Voight) knows his way around the woods but can’t match Lewis’ wild-man bravado, Drew (Ronny Cox) is a soft-spoken urbanite more comfortable with a banjo than a rifle, and Bobby (Ned Beatty) is an overweight everyman along for the ride. Spurred on by Lewis, the men decide to take a canoe trip before the river is dammed to create a lake; for Lewis, the challenge is conquering a disappearing wilderness, and for the others, the kick is escaping the urban grind.

          Right from the opening frames, Boorman creates an ominous atmosphere, best exemplified by the legendary “Dueling Banjos” scene. When the gang pulls up to a riverbank settlement, Drew engages an odd-looking (and presumably inbred) boy in a banjo-picking contest, but the musical bond shatters when Drew tries to shake the boy’s hand; the scene perfectly conveys that Lewis’ group has gone someplace where they don’t belong. Ignoring these portents, the gang hits the river and encounters rougher water than expected, figuratively and literally. Before long, their weekend of “roughing it” devolves into a violent nightmare when the boys find themselves at odds with violent locals.
          In the unforgettable “squeal like a pig” scene, for instance, Bobby is sexually assaulted by a vicious redneck (Bill McKinney), an act that compels Bobby’s compatriots to seek bloody revenge. The great accomplishment of Deliverance is that Boorman and Dickey convey the disturbing notion that nature itself is battling the interlopers—the rednecks are like antibodies battling invading toxins. Boorman also creates a dreamlike quality, notably when a wounded Ed climbs a sheer cliff as the sky undulates with unnatural colors behind him. Throughout the film, Boorman treats merciless rapids like a special effect, showing how easily a river can swallow a man.
          Realizing Boorman’s vision perfectly, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond found innovative ways to shoot in difficult situations and captured the terrifying beauty of a resplendent backwoods milieu. As for the acting, all four leading players contribute some of the best work of their careers. Voight is humane and vulnerable, perfectly illustrating a man driven beyond his natural capacity for violence by an insane situation, while Beatty and Cox present different colors of modern men whose animal instincts have been dampened so thoroughly they cannot withstand nature’s onslaught.
          Yet the picture in many ways belongs to Reynolds, who instantly transformed from a lightweight leading man to a major star with his appearance in Deliverance. Funny and maddening and savage, he’s completely believable as a he-man whose bluster hides a deep need to prove his own virility. The physicality of Reynolds’ performance is incredible, whether he’s steering a canoe or working a bow and arrow, and Reynolds went just as deep psychologically.
          Deliverance is hard to watch given the intensity of what happens onscreen, but the acting, filmmaking, and writing are so potent that it’s impossible to look away. Accolades showered on the film included Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Editing.

Deliverance: OUTTA SIGHT

The Champ (1979)

          A shameless tearjerker that some fans of a certain age still hold close to their hearts, The Champ is a remake of the 1931 picture of the same name, and the focus of both versions is the cheap sentiment of a child crying. Directed with gimme-the-paycheck proficiency by Italian artiste Franco Zeffirelli, the 1979 version is lavish inasmuch as Zeffirelli lets scenes run longer than might seem necessary, presumably because he’s trying to build up a head of emotional steam for the bummer ending. For believers who get lost in the story, the overkill approach is probably quite effective, but for the rest of us, it’s just overkill.

          The tale begins on a Florida racetrack, where former boxer Billy Flynn (Jon Voight) works as a horse trainer and raises his angelic little boy, T.J. (Ricky Schroder). Billy’s an irresponsible drunk and gambler, ashamed that he’s not a role model for his son, and he talks a good line about returning to the ring someday so he can earn his nickname: Champ. Through convoluted circumstances, Billy and T.J. cross paths with Annie (Faye Dunaway), a fashion maven who just happens to be T.J.’s mom; she split when the boy was an infant. Annie, now remarried and wealthy, is enchanted by the boy and wants to become part of his life, but Billy won’t forgive her for her past infractions.

          However, when Billy gets thrown in jail after a drunken brawl, he realizes T.J. needs a better home, so Billy pretends to send the kid away to live with Annie. (Cue weeping from Schroder.) After getting out of jail, Billy decides to get himself together and return to the ring. T.J. runs away from Annie to be with Billy during his training. (More weeping upon their reunion.) Finally, the day of the big fight comes, and—well, there’s no need to spoil the finale. (Except to say that there’s more weeping.)

          Voight is pretty good here, trying to infuse Method credibility into a preposterous role, and he realizes his main purpose is triggering Shroder’s waterworks; nonetheless, Voight has strong moments depicting a simple man’s reluctant emotional declarations. Ice queen Dunaway is interesting casting, since we’re supposed to see Annie coming to life before our eyes, but her performance is far too reserved for this sort of thing. Several top-shelf character players (Elisha Cook Jr., Arthur Hill, Strother Martin, Allan Miller, Jack Warden) are underused in supporting roles. Schroder, who has subsequently enjoyed a long career on TV playing juvenile and grown-up roles, is like a Norman Rockwell dream of a perfect child in The Champ, clever and sensitive and smart, all bright eyes and rosy cheeks and tousled hair. He cries a lot and seems properly upset at the right moments. So, if watching youthful anguish is your thing, then The Champ is for you.

The Champ: FUNKY

End of the Game (1975)

          Ambitious, provocative, and thoughtful—but ultimately jumbled because its reach exceeds its grasp—End of the Game is a twisty whodunit that intertwines the resolution of an epic conflict between two aging enemies with the melodrama of young characters drawn into a scheme beyond their understanding. If that already strikes you as a confusing premise, then you’ve lit upon this highly admirable picture’s main problem: End of the Game tries to tell at least one story too many, and, as a result, all of its narrative elements get short shrift. The movie gets all sorts of points for trying to make a complex statement about morality, but the statement is neither clear nor forcefully expressed.

          Martin Ritt, appearing here as an actor but better known to audiences as a director of sensitive dramas, is appealingly rumpled as a veteran Swiss detective named Baerlach, who has spent decades trying to prove that a powerful industrialist named Gastman (Robert Shaw) once killed a woman. For cold-blooded Gastman, getting away with murder is the ultimate aphrodisiac, so he relishes watching his old adversary struggle with clues and evidence; furthermore, Gastman uses lethal force to protect himself whenever Baerlach gets too close to closing the case. After Baerlach’s aide (Donald Sutherland) dies mysteriously, the relentless investigator decides Gastman was responsible, so he sends an eager young cop (Jon Voight) after Gastman, which unexpectedly draws the young cop’s lover (Jacqueline Bisset) into the intrigue.

          End of the Game was directed by Austrian hyphenate Maximilian Schell, best known as a leading and supporting actor in international movies; unsurprisingly, the flamboyance of his performance style carries over to his directorial approach. (Schell co-wrote the script with German author Friedrich Durrenmatt, upon whose novel the film is based.) Attractive European locations enhance the theme, because it’s as if the “game” has been played since the ancient bridges and buildings surrounding the characters were first erected. More importantly, Schell put together a terrific cast, and the valiant efforts of his leading players make the picture consistently watchable—even when the story becomes impossibly convoluted, the actors ensure that individual scenes are credible and tense.

          The premise of aging adversaries using younger people as pawns is interesting, and the juxtaposition of wise older characters and reckless younger ones gives the picture an existential quality: Everyone in this movie seems to be grasping for the deeper meaning of his or her own life. So, even though End of the Game doesn’t ultimately make all that much sense, it’s worthwhile because what it’s trying to accomplish is so interesting from a psychological perspective.

End of the Game: FUNKY

The Odessa File (1974)

          Adapted from a novel by thriller specialist Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File has all the usual elements of an international-intrigue flick: disguises, investigation, revenge, secrets, suspense, and so on. Furthermore, with its story of a modern-day German hunting down a fugitive Nazi who committed war crimes during the Holocaust, the movie is, for the most part, a brisk morality play fueled by intense emotions. However, significant shortcomings relegate the film to lesser status by comparison with, say, the inspired Forsyth adaptation The Day of the Jackal (1973).

          First, the characterization of leading man Peter Miller (Jon Voight) asks audiences to stretch believability to the limit. A freelance newspaper reporter hungry for a scoop, he discovers a journal left behind by an elderly Jew who just committed suicide. The man had recently learned that his concentration-camp tormentor, Nazi officer Eduard Roschmann (Maximilian Schell), is still alive, and was told that German authorities were unwilling to arrest Roschmann for his past misdeeds.

          As Peter learns from the journal and other sources, Roschmann is among the Nazis protected by the Odessa, a secret pro-Nazi organization that is also supplying arms for attacks against Israel. (There’s a whole subplot in the film about one particular pending missile strike about Israel, but the filmmakers don’t give the subplot enough attention to warrant its inclusion, which is a waste.) Since investigating the Roschmann matter immediately puts Peter and his girlfriend (Mary Tamm) into mortal danger, it’s unbelievable that Peter becomes preoccupied with confronting the aging Nazi; even though the movie eventually provides a last-minute explanation for Peter’s actions, the revelation arrives too late to justify two hours of wondering what’s happening inside the protagonist’s head.

          The Odessa File is also one of those bloated international thrillers in which the good guys take preposterously elaborate measures to accomplish things that, one presumes, could be achieved more simply. Specifically, anti-Nazi secret agents subject Peter to weeks of mental conditioning and physical alterations so he can pretend to be a former Nazi in order to infiltrate the Odessa organization—because, apparently, none of the highly trained operatives working with Peter are as capable of this particular mission as a hotheaded reporter nursing a personal grudge.

          As directed by Poseidon Adventure helmer Ronald Neame, The Odessa File is drably professional, with no real point of view or style, and Voight isn’t particularly impressive; though earnest and intense, he’s constantly on the cusp of over-acting. Given all of these problems, The Odessa File is agreeable entertainment, but nothing more.

The Odessa File: FUNKY