The Bears and I (1974)

          One of the better live-action dramas made by Walt Disney Productions in the ’70s, The Bears and I presents the familiar trope of a man who leaves civilization to find solace in nature, then builds emotional bonds with wild animals until he must resolve the inherent problem of living in two worlds at once. Although The Bears and I is a simplistic  homily compared to the best Disney movie of this type— the extraordinary Never Cry Wolf (1983)—it is nonetheless a humanistic film with a credible approach to ecology and race. The movie has some of the usual kid-cinema extremes, notably an excess of cute-animal antics, and leading man Patrick Wayne is hopelessly bland. However, young viewers could do much worse than exposure to a story about treating animals, land, and people with respect.
          The film’s source material is a nonfiction book by Robert Franklin Leslie, who ventured into the woods of British Columbia during the 1930s to work as a trapper, inadvertently becoming the guardian of three cubs after their mother died. In the modernized Disney version, Bob (Wayne) is a Vietnam vet who travels into the wilderness near the Canadian Rockies to find Chief Peter A-Tas-Ka-Nay (Chief Dan George). Bob served with Peter’s son, who died in combat, so Bob returns the son’s personal effects and seeks permission to camp near the small Indian settlement that Peter oversees. Hostile toward all whites, Peter and his tribesmen accept Bob’s money but not his companionship, and the friction increases once Bob adopts the cubs. Peter says his people are a “bear tribe,” so they view the domestication of the bears as sacreligious. Nonetheless, Bob teaches the bears basic survival skills, such as foraging for insects and hiding in trees when stalked by predators. This being a Disney picture, several subplots impact the action, notably the impending transformation of the Indian settlement into the hub of a national park and the one-dimensional villainy of Sam Eagle Speaker (Valentin de Vargas), a drunken troublemaker.

          Presented with dense narration during animal scenes, The Bears and I goes down smoothly. Shot at gorgeous outdoor locations, the picture comes complete with a John Denver theme song {“Sweet Surrender”), so it meshes well with the back-t0-nature ethos of the early ’70s. Is it cutesy and manipulative? Of course. But there’s a bittersweet emotional peak buried inside the movie’s tidy third act, ensuring that the picture ultimately endorses a realistic view of how people and wild animals can safely interact.

The Bears and I: GROOVY

Texas Detour (1978)

Texas Detour is not without its low pleasures. The contrived story of three Californians who become victims while trapped in a small town, the picture is predicated on stereotypes and stupidity, as per the norm for drive-in schlock. Yet the movie knows just which lizard-brain responses to provoke, so the evil guys do evil things, the heroic characters do heroic things, and the sexy starlet gets naked. There’s also an abundance of vehicular action, including a couple of dirt-bike scenes. Much of this is set to original songs by Flo & Eddie, formerly of the Turtles, whose tunes mimic popular Me Decade musical styles. (One number, “The Big Showdown,” is a fair simulacrum of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run vibe.) Alas, the picture’s shortcomings greatly outnumber its trashy thrills. The story begins with the McCarthy siblings—twentysomething Clay (Patrick Wayne) and teenagers Dale (Mitch Vogel) and Sugar (Lindsay Bloom)—venturing from L.A. to Nashville, where Clay has a job doing stunt work on a movie shoot. The McCarthys are run off the road by crooks who steal their van, so the siblings hitch a ride with creepy redneck Beau Hunter (Anthony James). After even creepier Sheriff Burt (R.G. Armstrong) takes their crime report, the McCarthys accept an offer of hospitality from Beau, who lives on the ranch owned by his dad, John (Cameron Mitchell). While on the ranch, Clay falls for Beau’s sister, Claudia (Priscilla Barnes), even as circumstances wend inevitably toward Beau raping Sugar. Reprisals ensue. As in their other films of the same period, Barnes is ornamental and Wayne is wooden, so it falls to Armstrong and James to inject Texas Detour with individuality. There’s only so much they can do, seeing as how the movie’s dialogue was apparently composed for the benefit of viewers perplexed by language past the first-grade level.

Texas Detour: LAME

Beyond Atlantis (1973)

Dull and stupid, this Philippines/U.S. coproduction is a fantasy-adventure story about mainland criminals who venture to a mysterious island populated by fish/human hybrids in order to plunder a cache of priceless pearls. Virtually nothing in the movie works. The principal makeup effect involves pasting fake-looking fish eyes over the faces of the actors playing hybrids. One of the would-be highlights involves a fellow falling into a pit full of crabs. Crabs? That’s the most menacing creature the filmmakers could muster? The hybrids are inexplicably led by two normal-looking characters, an old man and his daughter, and the daughter is a slinky bleach blonde with perfect grooming and makeup. Whatever. The cast features a pair of American actors who spent much of the ’70s making bad movies in the Philippines: John Ashley plays a scuba diver with a mercenary attitude, and Sid Haig plays the crook who discovers the whereabouts of the pearls. (Indestructible Filipino actor Vic Diaz appears in a small role, lending his usual cartoonish corpulence.) Playing the movie’s nominal leading role is John Wayne’s son, Patrick Wayne, whose career peaked a few years later when he starred in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), and if Beyond Atlantis isn’t the nadir of Wayne’s screen career, it’s close. Although most of Beyond Atlantis is boring, fans of bad cinema might enjoy the last 20 minutes or so, which include an underwater catfight, a poorly staged shootout, and the ridiculously long funeral sequence for a key character. One can actually feel the filmmakers straining to fill the screen with any old thing that might flesh out the running time of this insipid schlockfest.

Beyond Atlantis: LAME

The Gatling Gun (1973)

Dull and forgettable, The Gatling Gun is a low-budget Western populated by C-list actors giving mindless performances in the service of a story so thin it barely exists. The title comprises virtually the entire premise, because the gist of the piece is that pacifist priest Rev. Harper (John Carradine) has stolen a Gatling gun from a U.S. Cavalry troop that’s battling an Indian band led by Two-Knife (Carlos Rivera). A group of soldiers under the command of Lt. Malcolm (Guy Stockwell) chases Rev. Harper and his followers into Indian territory, where Rev. Harper realizes that Two-Knife is just as bloodthirsty as the soldiers from whom Rev. Harper was trying to provide protection. A back-and-forth battle for possession of the gun ensues, with heavy casualties on all sides. There’s a teensy bit of “oh, the humanity” gravitas to the end of the story, but getting there isn’t worth the effort. The film’s production values are so bland that The Gatling Gun looks less impressive than an average episode of Gunsmoke, and the picture is marred by several unintentionally funny moments. For instance, at one point, Rev. Harper gives a speech about human compassion even as he’s being impaled with arrows fired from unseen Indian assailants. It’s a little much. Carradine, a fresh-baked ham on the best of days, delivers a performance so overripe that it’s off-putting, and even the normally respectable Woody Strode’s stoic screen persona gets bludgeoned by the overall mediocrity of the endeavor. Leading man Stockwell is a non-entity, while bargain-basement actors including Barbara Luna (a sexy regular on ’60s TV shows) and Patrick Wayne (son of John) deliver amateurish supporting work. At best, The Gatling Gun rises from substandard to mediocre, as when familiar character actor Pat Buttram lays on hokey “charm” as the Cavalry group’s smart-mouthed chef, Tin Pot. But to say that you’ve seen it all before doesn’t come close to communicating how numbingly trite this movie feels as it grinds through 93 long minutes. Finally, it should come as no surprise to learn that The Gatling Gun sat on a shelf for several years—it was filmed in 1969 and originally bore the title King Gun.

The Gatling Gun: LAME

Big Jake (1971)

          Apparently aware that his days were numbered, cowboy-cinema legend John Wayne spent the early ’70s looking for a Western that might serve as his swan song in the genre. He ultimately hit the target with The Cowboys (1972) and The Shootist (1976), yet even the also-rans during this period are interesting, partially because Wayne’s stock Western performance was oiled to perfection by this point, and partially because you can feel him writing rough drafts of his Final Statement. So, while Big Jake is not a particularly distinguished picture—it lacks the poetic impact of The Cowboys and the crowd-pleasing closure of The Shootist—it delivers an enjoyable mixture of action, drama, and humor, laced with sly nods to Wayne’s advancing age.

          He plays Jacob McCandles, a wealthy rancher with an intimidating reputation that borders on myth, given the fact that most people assume he’s dead. In fact, he’s merely been wandering the wilderness in the years since he fell out with his wife, Martha (Maureen O’Hara), who raised their brood in his absence. When varmints led by ruthless John Fain (Richard Boone) attack the McCandles ranch and kidnap Jacob’s grandson, demanding a $1 million ransom, Martha asks Jake to rescue the boy and wipe out the crooks. He sets out on the mission accompanied by two sons he barely knows, James (Patrick Wayne) and Michael (Christopher Mitchum), plus a long-in-the-tooth Indian pal, Sam (Bruce Cabot). The posse has a few colorful adventures on the road, mostly to do with people trying to steal the ransom money, before their final showdown with the kidnappers.

          Written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink, the creators of the Dirty Harry character, Big Jake is bloodier and meaner than the usual Wayne fare, so the climax has real tension, although the edginess makes the requisite comic-relief bits feel out of place. And though Boone is entertaining as an amiable psychopath, he and the Duke (plus O’Hara) are the only formidable performers in the picture; Patrick Wayne, the star’s son, and Mitchum, whose dad is movie tough guy Robert Mitchum, are flyweights. As for Wayne, he’s no more an actor here than usual—his strength was inhabiting a larger-than-life persona, rather than incarnating actual characters—but he delivers the macho goods, strutting ridiculously as he shrugs off bullet wounds and other injuries in the name of doin’ what a man’s gotta do. Big Jake is hokum, to be sure, but it’s a step along the path that Wayne followed to his final reckoning with Westerns.

Big Jake: FUNKY

The Land That Time Forgot (1975) & The People That Time Forgot (1977)

          Based on a novel by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Land That Time Forgot is executed with amiable B-movie aplomb. The outlandish tale begins in the Atlantic Ocean during World War I, when a U-boat sinks a British ship. Survivors from the wreck, conveniently led by American submarine expert Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure), manage to hijack the U-boat, only to have the German commander (John McEnry) covertly steer the ship due south, instead of toward America. Soon, the U-boat reaches Antarctica, where the submarine cruises through a tunnel beneath an iceberg and emerges in, well, the land that time forgot: a continent-sized valley populated by cavemen and dinosaurs. You can pretty much figure out what happens next. Sworn enemies have to work together for survival against hostile natives and hungry dinosaurs, and before long everyone’s in trouble because the land that time forgot is about to go kablooey thanks to persnickety volcanic activity. Hate when that happens!

          A joint presentation of U.S. drive-in supplier American International Pictures and cheapo English outfit Amicus Productions, The Land That Time Forgot is silly but fun, a fast-moving lark with laughably bad special effects, so there’s plenty of harmless amusement to be found watching the heroes and their primitive buddies battle carnivorous mega-reptiles. Discriminating adult viewers won’t have a whit of interest in The Land That Time Forgot, but those who remember the joy of getting whisked away by goofy matinee attractions will get a nostalgic charge out of the flick.

          Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting any sort of a charge out of the sequel The People That Time Forgot, which cops a few tricks from the playbook of the original Planet of the Apes film series. Like the first Apes sequel, The People That Time Forgot kicks the previous film’s leading man into a minor supporting role and goes for a simultaneously darker and more simplistic story. And like the first Apes sequel, The People That Time Forgot lacks nearly everything that made its predecessor enjoyable.

          Patrick Wayne stars as Ben McBride, an adventurer who travels to the site of the first movie in order to find his lost friend, Tyler. Soon Ben and his companions hook up with a sexy cavewoman, Ajor (Dana Gillespie), who somehow has immaculate makeup and a push-up bra built into her animal-skin costume. Excepting an amusingly goofy mid-air fight between an biplane and a pterodactyl, dinosaurs mostly take a backseat to the creepy primitive tribes who capture Ben’s crew. And whereas the first picture had all sorts of plot complications stemming from things like how to fuel the U-boat for an escape voyage, the second picture is just a series of insipid cliffhanger moments, and the production design is so tacky it would barely pass muster in an episode of Land of the Lost.

The Land That Time Forgot: FUNKY

The People That Time Forgot: LAME

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) & Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977)

          Special-effects legend Ray Harryhausen, adored by generations of fantasy-cinema fans for the lovingly crafted creatures he brought to herky-jerky life through stop-motion animation, first dramatized the adventures of Arabic adventurer Sinbad the Sailor with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), a lively adventure featuring a memorable duel between Sinbad and a sword-wielding skeleton. More than a decade later, Harryhausen returned to the character with less beguiling results for a pair of mid-’70s romps featuring juvenile stories, outdated FX, and wooden acting. Even though many ’70s kids feel nostalgic toward these pictures, they haven’t aged particularly well, for a host of reasons—not only was Harryhausen’s take on Sinbad technically antiquated by the mid-’70s, but it was culturally antiquated, as well. Watching American and English actors prancing around with scimitars and turbans now feels borderline cringe-worthy.

          The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the better of the two ’70s Sinbad flicks, stars the attractive but vapid duo of Barbarella stud John Phillip Law, as the title character, and British starlet Caroline Munro, as Sinbad’s slave/love interest. (Her cleavage gives a better performance than either actor does.) The forgettable plot has something to do with an evil sorcerer conspiring to collect magical artifacts, but of course the narrative is merely a line from which Harryhausen strings encounters with fantastical creatures. Some of those creatures are quite silly-looking, such as a gigantic centaur, while others have more cinematic flair, notably a six-armed living statue that makes short work of Sinbad’s crewmen by wielding several swords at once. The movie also benefits from the presence of British thesp Tom Baker, who trades his familiar Doctor Who hat and scarf for a turban and a cape; playing the main villain, he provides an effective degree of gravitas and intensity, even though the script fails to give him much in the way of characterization. Harryhausen and his collaborators deserve credit for delivering a good-looking movie on a budget of less than $1 million, and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad zips along at a brisk pace. Still, it’s hard to get past Law’s bland performance and the cliché-ridden script, no matter how mesmerizing Munro looks in her barely-there costume.

          Things got a hell of a lot weirder with the next installment, Sinbad and The Eye of the Tiger. Whereas the casting of American actors as Sinbad was always problematic, the casting of Patrick Wayne—son of the Duke—seems absolutely perverse. Moreover, Wayne gives such a lifeless performance that he makes Law seem dimensional by comparison. And yet that’s not what makes Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger so bizarre. The trippy plot involves an evil sorceress who transforms a prince into a baboon, then transforms herself into a seagull for spying purposes, only to botch her return to normalcy, thus ending up with a giant webbed foot. Creatures populating Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger include a bronze minotaur, a club-wielding troglodyte, a giant saber-tooth tiger, a massive mosquito, and even an enormous walrus that blasts through arctic ice before spearing victims with its tusks. (Yes, this Sinbad movie ends up at the North Pole—go figure.) There’s also a faint wisp of bestiality because the prince/baboon bonds with the telepathic daughter of a mystic who joins Sinbad’s team during their travels. Some of the film’s special effects are genuinely terrible, particularly green-screen tricks used to match studio footage with location shots, and the pacing is way too slow.

          Yet Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger has one attribute that compensates for nearly all of the film’s flaws, and that’s Jane Seymour, who plays the sister of the prince/baboon. (Her character is also Sinbad’s love interest, naturally.) Whether squeezed into a revealing costume or appearing semi-nude during one scene (quite something for a G-rated movie), Seymour is brain-meltingly beautiful here; even the sight of her twinkling eyes over the rim of a veil is enough to quicken pulses. Taryn Power, who plays the aforementioned telepathic daughter, is also quite lovely, and even more of her figure gets revealed than Seymour’s, so remarking on the film’s sex appeal is appropriate—clearly, someone on Harryhausen’s team advocated for injecting skin into the formula.

          In any event, since both of Harryhausen’s ’70s Sinbad pictures were solid hits relative to their costs, it’s interesting that he didn’t make further episodes, instead shifting focus to the more ambitious Clash of the Titans (1981), his final feature. Although much slicker in terms of production values, Clash of the Titans has some of the same problems as the Sinbad films, from hokey dialogue to wooden leading performances, but the grandiose picture embedded itself in the minds of fantasy-loving Gen-X kids. All of Harryhausen’s latter-day films trigger the same reaction when viewed today. No matter their shortcomings, the movies inspire awe that way back when, Harryhausen rendered cinematic spectacle by creating intricate puppets and moving them one frame at a time. In today’s CGI-dominated environment, there’s something comforting about revisiting crudely handcrafted escapism.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad: FUNKY

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger: FUNKY