Madron (1970)

          Definitive production information on this one is hard to come by, but it appears Madron is an American/Israeli coproduction noteworthy as the first movie to use Israel as a stand-in for the Wild West. And if that doesn’t seem like a particularly significant historical distinction, it’s fitting because nothing about Madron is particularly distinctive. The movie eventually resolves into a palatable opposites-attract love story set against a frontier-vengeance backdrop, but very little of what happens onscreen feels authentic or new, and the filmmaking is perfunctory at best. Viewers who are already susceptible to Richard Boone’s offbeat charm or to Leslie Caron’s delicate beauty will naturally find Madron more enjoyable than viewers immune to the stars’ personas, but even some fans of these actors may find the picture slow going because most scenes feature these mismatched performers struggling to conjure the illusion of romantic attraction.
          As for the picture’s story, there isn’t much. Somewhere in the frontier, Sister Mary (Caron) survives a raid by Apaches and wanders aimlessly until crossing paths with drifter Madron (Boone), who has unfinished business with the very band of Apaches who attacked Sister Mary’s wagon train. Madron says he’ll escort Sister Mary to safety. Every so often, there’s a gunfight or some other violent scene, but mostly Madron and Sister Mary follow the trite routine of a refined female character endeavoring to sand the edges off a thuggish male character. Naturally, love blooms once Madron reveals his sensitive side. About halfway through its running time, Madron shifts from bland TV-style banter to rougher stuff, including a gruesome torture scene. Raising the intensity makes Madron more exciting, but the sleazier elements clash with the comparatively gentle early scenes. The performances are very much on brand, Boone opting for brutal and funny, Caron for mannered and spunky. They both hit the right notes, but they don’t always seem like they’re playing the same tune.

Madron: FUNKY

Nicole (1978)

Some bad movies survive because they’re entertainingly inept, some endure because they belong to popular genres, and others remain as documents of early work by people who later became stars. And then there are movies like Nicole, also known as Crazed, which linger because of boobs. Specifically, lowbrow distributor Troma’s video marketing for Nicole accentuates the fact that supporting actress Catherine Bach, of The Dukes of Hazzard fame, does a topless scene. Yet those who seek Nicole for an erotic charge are in for a shock: Nicole is confusing, strange, and unpleasant. Leslie Caron stars as Nicole, an insane rich bitch who builds a surrogate family of sycophants. She toys with people, for instance compelling Bach’s character to get a nose job and then secretly redecorating the young woman’s apartment and replacing the young woman’s wardrobe. Nicole seems vaguely interested in having a lesbian affair with Bach’s character, and yet Nicole also seems to recruit a young male lover for the woman, and to recruit an age-appropriate male lover for herself. Or maybe some of these people have a threesome. You see, the problem with Nicole—okay, one of the problems—is that cowriter/director István Ventilla employs such a pretentious, splintered storytelling style that it’s often difficult to understand what’s happening. Moments get cut up and fragmented, audio is juxtaposed with picture in seemingly random patterns, and behavior is never explained. Case in point: The movie opens with an everyman (Ramon Bieri) discovering his wife in bed with another man and then killing both of them. Cut to the same man working as Nicole’s driver. How did they meet? Does she know what he did? Were the murders investigated? Who knows? Who cares? As a leading character, Nicole is one of those bizarre screenwriter inventions, a collection of perversions and tics without any psychological glue, so Caron is seductive and urbane in one scene, hysterical and violent in the next. As with all things Nicole, nothing about the performance makes sense, and very little of it is interesting to watch.

Nicole: LAME

Goldengirl (1979)

          If nothing else, the sports drama Goldengirl delivers on its title—the film is crammed with adoring shots of leading lady Susan Anton, a gleaming Amazon with a lustrous blonde mane. Yet Anton, while not exactly horrible, is the picture’s weakest link. The fault is not entirely hers, since screenwriter John Kohn and director Joseph Sargent failed to provide her with a fleshed-out role—but because Anton is in nearly every scene, her superficiality defines the movie.
          Story-wise, Goldengirl is a cautionary tale with a touch of sci-fi. During the run-up to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, top sports agent Jack Dryden (James Coburn) is asked to join the team preparing Goldine (Anton) for an unprecedented feat—winning three gold medals in sprinting events. As Jack is shown around a remote mountaintop training facility, we learn that Goldine—nicknamed “Goldengirl”—has been conditioned from childhood for Olympic victory. Her adoptive father, Serafin (Curt Jurgens), is an obsessed Germanic scientist whose work may or may not have begun during the Third Reich’s grotesque eugenics experiments.

          Jack is considered crucial to the Goldengirl team because he’s got the connections to line up millions in endorsement deals if she wins all three medals, thus recouping the money that’s been invested in her. The more the story progresses, however, the more apparent it becomes that Serafin is a lunatic who’s been pumping Goldine full of dangerous hormones for years, simply to gain an international spotlight with which to showcase his crackpot theories about human evolution.

          Based on a novel by Peter Lear, Goldengirl could (and should) have been a provocative conspiracy movie, with the innocent Goldine caught in the machinations of commerce and megalomania. Unfortunately, the film is diffuse and passive, so no real tension develops until the last 30 minutes, when it’s revealed that running is dangerous to Goldine’s health. It’s also incredibly distracting that Anton looks nothing like an athlete—she’s lean but soft, and she wears dense mascara even during major races. Furthermore, the name actors surrounding Anton—in addition to those mentioned, Leslie Caron plays a shrink and Robert Culp plays a journalist—perform their paycheck gigs indifferently. Compounding Goldengirl’s second-rate status is the fact that America didn’t actually participate in the 1980 Olympics—after this picture was filmed, the U.S. pulled out of the Moscow games in response to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Goldengirl: FUNKY

Valentino (1977)

          The life of silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino would seem ideal for biopic treatment. In addition to the usual rise-and-fall drama associated with any actor’s career, the narrative is infused with sex because Valentino was the greatest heartthrob of his time, driving legions of female fans insane with lust. The same elements that make the story attractive for cinematic treatment invite excess, however, so when producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler teamed with flamboyant British filmmaker Ken Russell, they were asking for trouble. Sure enough, Valentino is loud, silly, and vulgar, stringing together real and imagined episodes from Valentino’s life to create an adolescent fantasy about a superstud driven by supersized passions.

          The picture begins at the actor’s funeral, and each time one of his past lovers approaches the casket, the film flashes back to Valentino’s involvement with that woman. And even though Valentino is relatively tame by Russell’s standards, it’s outrageously lurid and stylized compared to any normal Hollywood movie. Using the fashion excesses of the Jazz Age as their inspiration, Russell and his team fill the screen with decadent décor and ridiculous costumes, ensuring that every frame is suffocated in art direction. Some of the sets are spectacularly beautiful, particularly the interiors of mansions toward the end of the picture, but when characters are walking around with capes the length of swimming pools and hordes of native bearers, it’s clear that historical accuracy wasn’t the guiding aesthetic.

          Again opting for style over substance, Russell cast the lead roles brazenly, to the picture’s detriment. The stunt casting at the heart of the film is the appearance of celebrated Russian ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev as Valentino. Appropriately enough for a story about a silent-film star, the gimmick almost works when the character doesn’t speak, because Nureyev is darkly handsome and his physical grace is spellbinding. Russell plays to the performer’s strengths by accentuating Valentino’s origins as a dancehall gigolo, so Nureyev gets to perform in a variety of dance styles, and his movements are wonderful to watch. Yet the spell is broken whenever he speaks, since Nureyev has a thick Russian accent made even more difficult to understand by his weak attempt at mimicking Valentino’s Italian accent. He ends up sounding a bit like Bela Lugosi, which is more than a little bit distracting. Nureyev is also a terrible actor, mugging his way through scenes with bulging eyes and campy hand gestures.

          As Valentino’s first important patron, narcissistic silent-screen star Alla Nazimova, Leslie Caron is equally bad, giving a performance so cartoonish that it enters the realm of Norma Desmond surrealism. Pop singer Michelle Phillips, of the Mamas and the Papas, is marginally better as Valentino’s second wife, Natacha Rambova, a would-be auteur who derails her husband’s career with her megalomania, but Phillips can’t make Russell’s florid style or the script’s purple-prose dialogue seem credible.

          Beyond the bad acting, what really sinks the movie—or sends it into the I-can’t-believe-I’m-watching-this stratosphere, depending on how you get your cinematic kicks—is Russell’s unhinged dramaturgy. Almost pathologically incapable of restraint, Russell turns everything into an excuse for grotesquerie or opulence, if not both simultaneously. The movie’s sex scenes are laughable, like the lavishly choreographed nude romp with Nureyev and Phillips in a desert tent, echoing Valentino’s signature role in The Sheik (1921).
          In the picture’s most outrageous scene, Nureyev ends up in jail on a bigamy charge—but not just any jail, an over-the-top Ken Russell madhouse. As harpy-like hookers claw at Valentino from the next cell, freakazoid inmates including a toothless masturbator stalk him within the cell until he trips and falls into a giant pile of vomit, and then a malicious guard (Bill McKinney) pokes Valentino’s stomach until the actor, who has been denied bathroom privileges, urinates in his pants. Ken Russell: always a class act. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Valentino: FREAKY