Wolf Lake (1979)

          Shamelessly borrowing elements from Deliverance (1972), Joe (1970), and Straw Dogs (1971), this violent melodrama pits a Vietnam-era deserter against an unhinged Gold Star parent, with various innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. As written and directed by Burt Kennedy, a solid helmer of midgrade action pictures, Wolf Lake unspools smoothly, with every scene focused, purposeful, and tight. Plus, with Rod Steiger giving a relatively contained performance as the deranged dad, the movie’s intensity level never falters, even during the many, many passages when logic falls victim to narrative expediency. The plotting of Wolf Lake is similar to that of a typical horror movie, and like many films in that genre, the whole premise hinges on someone remaining in a dangerous place despite being fully aware of the danger. Which brings up interesting questions regarding what sort of thrill Wolf Lake is meant to provide viewers. The story is too far-fetched to work as social commentary, and it’s too nasty to qualify as escapism, so watching Wolf Lake requires the viewer to revel in the suffering of others. The picture is made with enough skill that it cannot be dismissed, but at the same time, it’s creepy to imagine that Kennedy and his collaborators envisioned 90 minutes of rape and murder as a fun night at the movies.

          Set in Canada circa 1976, the story opens with Charlie (Steiger) and his WWII buddies arriving at a hunting lodge for a getaway. The regular caretaker is away, so shaggy-haired twentysomething David (David Huffman) and his girlfriend, Linda (Robin Mattson), are looking after the place. Once it comes out that David deserted his Army unit, Charlie becomes enraged, because his own son died in Vietnam. Charlie tells David that he plans to kill him, but Charlie inexplicably remains until the inevitable violence explodes. First Charlie goads his men into gang-raping Linda, and then David fights back, leading to a war of attrition that leaves bodies everywhere. Kennedy’s strangest storytelling choice involves peppering the first half of the movie with flash-forwards of bloody finale. While presumably meant to juice tension, these flashes have the opposite effect, removing any mystery about what happens next. On the plus side, Kennedy manages other storytelling tasks well. In addition to staging action expertly, Kennedy keeps Steiger on a tight leash until it’s time to let the chronic overactor loose. Among the so-so supporting cast, Jerry Hardin stands out as the story’s requisite spineless toady.

Wolf Lake: FUNKY

Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971)

          Adapted by celebrated literary figure Kurt Vonnegut Jr. from his own play, Happy Birthday, Wanda June is a laborious farce with elements of absurdity, social satire, and tragedy, tackling themes ranging from male ego to the pointlessness of big-game hunting. Yet Happy Birthday, Wanda June is more effective as a conversation piece than as an entertainment experience. The characterizations are silly, the integration of fantasy elements is awkward, and the tonal shifts feel unearned, as if Vonnegut meant to beguile audiences with rapid-fire jokes before sandbagging them with heaviosity about dead children, Nagasaki, suicide, and the Third Reich. There’s something admirable about the sheer audacity of the storyline, and Vonnegut was unquestionably a hip cat, but, man, this thing jumps all over the place. Rod Steiger’s shouty performance in the leading role doesn’t help, because while the main character was likely envisioned as having animalistic charm, Steiger can’t muster the complexity or gravitas of, say, a Sterling Hayden or a George C. Scott.

          The picture is primarily set in the New York City apartment occupied by Penelope Ryan (Susannah York) and her young son, Paul (Steven Paul). Seven years ago, Penelope’s larger-than-life husband, big-game hunter Harold (Steiger), disappeared while on safari. He’s been presumed dead ever since. Nonetheless, Paul entertains fantasies of a homecoming, fetishizing all the animal heads and skins that decorate the Ryan household. One night, Harold returns, accompanied by his bizarre little friend Looseleaf Harper (William Hickey), one of the pilots responsible for dropping an A-bomb on Nagasaki, Japan. Much of the film concerns light romantic farce, since Penelope has moved on and is now courting two different men, whom Harold predictably berates and intimidates. Another thread concerns Paul’s change of attitude toward his father, from hero worship to something far less flattering. And then there’s the absurd stuff. The film regularly cuts to Heaven, where a little girl named Wanda June (Pamelyn Ferdin) cavorts with Nazis and other unlikely occupants of the afterlife. (This stuff more or less makes sense in context, but it’s too convoluted to explain here.)

          Demonstrating his special skill for blending comedy and tragedy to create offbeat social commentary, Vonnegut writes Wanda as an upbeat ambassador for mortality who says that death was the best part of her life, or words to that effect. In some way that never quite connects, Wanda’s remarks are meant to complement copious amounts of dialogue exploring the nature of Harold’s big-game hunting. Imagine a lot of angst about killing for the sake of killing, and you’re headed down the right track. While most of the performances in Happy Birthday, Wanda June are energetic, York and costar George Grizzard strive to ground the goofy goings-on in some semblance of recognizable human emotion. Unfortunately, this creates dissonance: Is Happy Birthday, Wanda June a fever dream, or is it a realistic piece with exaggerated flourishes? Thanks to flat direction by Hollywood veteran Mark Robson, best known for action pictures and soapy melodramas, it’s hard to tell.

Happy Birthday, Wanda June: FUNKY

Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973)

          On the plus side, the dueling-rednecks picture Lolly-Madonna XXX features elegant cinematography, an impressive cast, a plaintive score, and a whopper of a final act filled with bloodshed and tragedy. For fans of melodramatic pulp, there’s a lot to savor in this fictional story that vaguely evokes the Hatfield-McCoy mythos. Nonetheless, the film’s weaknesses are plentiful. The basic premise is awkward and contrived, the middle of the movie is dull and uneventful, and many of the character relationships stretch credibility to the breaking point. One can feel the filmmakers trying to push all the pieces in place for a spectacular finale, but the elements never cohere dramatically or logically. Considering that the movie was co-written by future mystery-fiction queen Sue Grafton, who adapted Lolly-Madonna XXX from her own novel of the same name, it’s fair to say that Grafton was still learning how to construct plots.

          Here’s the iffy set-up. In backwoods Tennessee, two families have been fighting for years because one bought a piece of a land that previously belonged to the other. The Feathers are led by stoic patriarch Laban (Rod Steiger), while the Gutshalls answer to the highly principled Pap (Robert Ryan). One day, the Gutshall boys leave a postcard in the Feather mailbox, indicating that a young woman named Lolly Madonna is scheduled to arrive in the region, with plans to marry one of the Gutshall boys. The Feathers head to the bus station and kidnap a young woman named Roonie Gill (Season Hubley), whom they mistakenly believe is Lolly Madonna. In reality, there is no such woman, and the postcard was a ruse to get the Feathers away from their moonshine operation so the Gutshalls could vandalize the still. Despite Roonie’s vehement objections, the Feathers refuse to believe she’s not the intended bride of a Gutshall, so they try to leverage her as a hostage. Somehow, even though Roonie has no actual relationship with the Gutshalls, this scheme exacerbates the rivalry, triggering arson, rape, theft, and eventually murder. Does any of this hogwash make sense? No.

          But consider the vivacious actors populating the cast. Jeff Bridges. Gary Busey. Ed Lauter. Randy Quaid. Scott Wilson. Not too shabby. Moreover, director Richard C. Sarafian does his usual frustrating job, rendering richly textured images and staging individual scenes well even as he fails to convey a persuasive overarching story. At least the movie’s final half-hour is memorably grim, and it’s hard to shake the weird vignettes with Lauter—not only does the tough-guy actor pretend to give a rockabilly concert performance while standing alone in a hog pen, but he also plays a rape scene while wearing lingerie and makeup. You don’t see that sort of thing every day. Oh, and for what it’s worth, Bridges is terrific, as usual, giving a better performance than the movie probably deserves, even as Ryan underplays and Steiger thunders for the entertainment of those in the cheap seats.

Lolly-Madonna XXX: FUNKY

Love and Bullets (1979)

          Executed with considerable polish and filled with familiar faces, Love and Bullets feels suspiciously like a real movie. After all, it’s ostensibly a crime thriller, and it stars Charles Bronson, who enjoyed more than a few successes in the realm of violent cinema. Yet the story has one of the most anemic second acts in screenwriting history, and the characters are preposterously undercooked. Adding to the list of shortcomings is a typically amateurish performance by leading lady Jill Ireland, Bronson’s real-life wife and his onscreen foil is far too many pictures. Having said all that, Love and Bullets has a few enjoyable passages of action and/or suspense, so even if the movie is the filmic equivalent of empty calories, at least some of the scenes have flavor.

          Bronson plays Charlie Congers, a detective based in Phoenix, Arizona. Federal agents show up one day and ask Charlie to travel to Europe, where onetime mob girlfriend Jackie Pruitt (Ireland) is in hiding. The Feds believe Jackie has incriminating information on big-time gangster Joe Bomposa (Rod Steiger), her former lover, but the Feds offer convoluted reasons why they can’t cross international borders in order to collect Jackie. Charlie accepts the assignment, and before long he and Jackie are on the run from Joe’s hit men, who want to prevent Jackie from testifying. Naturally, the fugitives fall in love. The unusual wrinkle, which should have energized the story but never ends up adding much of anything, is that Jackie doesn’t actually have any useful knowledge about Joe’s criminal activities. Therefore, all the danger that arises from Charlie’s mission is pointless, which has the effect of making the movie feel pointless, as well.

          Despite the inconsequential story, the sleek surfaces of Love and Bullets offer minor pleasures—as is true for most of the movies directed by reliable journeyman Stuart Rosenberg, best known for a series of Paul Newman collaborations including Cool Hand Luke (1967). During one imaginative sequence, for instance, Charlie makes a blowgun out of found objects and then uses the weapon to dispatch several would-be assassins. Additionally, the tightly wound score by Lalo Schifrin evokes the menace of Jerry Goldsmith’s music and a bit of the whimsy of Ennio Morricone’s, so the movie has a lively soundtrack. Colorful players including Val Avery, Bradford Dillman, Michael V. Gazzo, Paul Koslo, Strother Martin, and Henry Silva attack their supporting roles vigorously, compensating mightily for Ireland’s tone-deaf acting. Bronson is just Bronson, familiar but formidable. And then there’s Steiger, shouting and strutting through one of his signature overwrought performances. Rarely has so much effort been exhausted to portray a character of so little importance.

Love and Bullets: FUNKY

Waterloo (1970)

          Making elaborate historical epics is often a lose-lose scenario. Not only do these films require such enormous budgets that a high degree of financial risk is involved, but the slightest deviations from historical facts can invoke the ire of experts. All it takes is a few highly vocal naysayers to endanger the success of a massive commercial enterprise. And here’s the kicker—even when filmmakers strive to get most of the important details right, there’s a hazard of losing the mainstream audience, because nobody buys a ticket on a Friday night to experience the equivalent of dry textbook. Given these realities, it’s no surprise that film history is filled with middling movies along the lines of Waterloo. Easily one of the most expensive films ever made at the time of its original release (costing a reported $35 million), Waterloo failed at the box office, received zero Oscar nominations, and subsequently slid into quasi-obscurity. Ironic, then, that the picture depicts one of history’s most infamous military defeats.

          Set in 1815, the picture begins with French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (Rod Steiger) being driven from power after enemy forces reduce his domain from all of Europe to just a small part of France. Napoleon accepts defeat bitterly, and then returns from exile less than a year later with a small army of 1,000 loyal soldiers. His attempt to regain power infuriates leaders across Europe during a period referred to by historians as “The Hundred Days.” This period culminates in the Battle of Waterloo, where British commander Arthur Wellesley (Christopher Plummer), otherwise known as the Duke of Wellington, pulverizes Napoleon’s insurgent forces. Nearly half the movie’s running time comprises the battle itself, including preparations, preliminary fights, and the ultimate clash.

          Produced by Dino de Laurentiis in one of his more dignified moments, Waterloo features truly awesome production values. According to the lore surrounding the film, 17,000 Russian soldiers were used as extras during principal photography in the Ukraine (subbing for Waterloo’s real location in Belgium). Wide vistas during fight scenes are spectacular, with columns of men trailing to the horizon, and it’s exhausting just to imagine how much work went into costuming, organizing, and training this many people. Cowriter/director Sergi Bondarchuk and his collaborators strove for accuracy in the areas of formations, techniques, uniforms, weapons, and such—so, from a technical standpoint, the combat scenes are nearly unassailable.

          However, the movie’s dramatic scenes are not as effective. Juicy story threads regarding the shifting allegiances of France’s Field Marshal Ney (Dan O’Herlihy) and the political machinations of French King Louis XVIII (Orson Welles) are undernourished, while a silly romantic subplot involving a British officer adds nothing to the narrative. The filmmakers try to parallel the psychological states of Napoleon and Wellington, but the gimmick never quite works; while Steiger contributes a characteristically overripe performance (envision lots of howling in pain), Plummer is chilly and remote. That said, the debonair Plummer is at his best when delivering such absurdly aristocratic lines as, “Commanders in battle have something better to do than shoot at each other.”

          Ultimately, Waterloo is an unsatisfactory hybrid. It’s not elevated enough to reach the level of cinematic literature (read: David Lean), and yet it’s too educational and mechanical to qualify as pulp entertainment. Even acknowledging that history buffs will find more to enjoy here than general audiences, it seems fair to say that Waterloo’s shortcomings are as prominent as its virtues.

Waterloo: FUNKY

W.C. Fields and Me (1976)

          While not to be taken seriously, seeing as how its attempts at verisimilitude result in campy superficiality, the showbiz biopic W.C. Fields and Me is watchable by virtue of a brisk pace, interesting subject matter, and lush production values. As for the acting, that’s by far the film’s weakest element—ironic, since both leading characters were actors in real life. But then again, star Rod Steiger delivers an over-the-top caricature while playing a man who spent his life cultivating a larger-than-life persona, and costar Valerie Perrine delivers an underwhelming turn while playing a woman who, for 14 years, was overshadowed by her more talented companion. So, in a weird way, the mixture works for creating mindless entertainment, even if W.C Fields and Me is hardly a dilligent replication of history.

          Based on a memoir by Carlotta Monti, a bit player who caught the real Fields’ eye and then spent a decade and a half as his assistant, companion, and occasional lover, W.C. Fields and Me depicts Fields’ trajectory from the end of his vaudeville career to the last days of his life. When he’s introduced, Fields (Steiger) is already a stage star, but his arrogance and drinking alienate him from employers including the legendary Florenz Ziegeld (Paul Stewart). In a weak attempt to portray Fields as psychologically complex, the picture asserts that he used onstage shock tactics (such as risqué humor) to compensate for offstage anxieties, and the filmmakers accentuate Fields’ jealous feelings toward fellow comic Charlie Chaplin. After a financial turnaround, Fields sets out for Hollywood accompanied by his only real friend, a little-person actor named Ludwig (Billy Barty). By writing comedy scripts and submitting them to studios, Fields eventually wins the patronage of studio boss Bannerman (John Marley), who gives Fields his first shot at performing on camera. Stardom follows, as does an excessive lifestyle defined by drunken adventures with pals including John Barrymore (Jack Cassidy). Eventually, Carlotta (Perrine) enters the mix, but her endeavors to wean Fields off booze fail, so she ends up bearing witness to the legendary funnyman’s decline.

          Itemizing all the things that are unsatisfying about W.C. Fields and Me would take an inordinate amount of time, so a few key complaints will have to suffice. The central relationship is inconsequential. Fields never evinces any growth as a character. Every showbiz type presented onscreen is a one-dimensional cliché. Steiger’s performance never achieves liftoff, because the actor wobbles between mimicking Fields’ gimmick of speaking from one side of his mouth—making the character seem like Burgess Meredith as the Penguin on the old Batman TV series—and because Steiger’s few moments of effective nonverbal pathos seem like Steiger peeking through the characterization, rather than the other way around. Worse, director Arthur Hiller can’t seem to decide whether the film is a comedy or a drama, so while some scenes include broad farce, others are mawkishly sentimental. Having said all that, the movie looks gorgeous; cinematographer David M. Walsh uses a glamorous combination of painterly angles, romantic filters, and sweeping camera movement to make Old Hollywood look seductive. Furthermore, the movie zips along at terrific speed, never losing clarity.

W.C. Fields and Me: FUNKY

Duck, You Sucker (1971)

          Unless you’ve got a weakness for spaghetti Westerns and/or the florid style of Italian director Sergio Leone, the man who more or less invented the genre, you might need NoDoz to make it through all 157 minutes of Duck, You Sucker, the last spaghetti Western that Leone directed. (More specifically, this is the last such picture he completely directed; Leone helmed parts of two subsequent entries in the genre without taking onscreen credit.) Alternately titled A Fistful of Dynamite and available in several different versions, some with running times as short as two hours, Duck, You Sucker features the filmmaker’s signature tropes of an intense friendship/rivalry between violent men; big-canvas battle scenes involving explosions and hordes of bullet-ridden extras; pretentious allusions to political ideals; and a kooky musical score by the great Ennio Morricone.

          There’s no question that many of these elements produced timeless cinema in the ’60s, notably The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), and there’s no question that generations of fans consider Leone’s operatic approach to frontier morality intoxicating. For me, alas, Duck, You Sucker is dull and excessive. Beyond the interminable running time, the film is built around a ridiculous performance by Rod Steiger, who is not only absurdly miscast as a Mexican revolutionary/robber but also can’t seem to decide whether he’s in a campy comedy or a dour drama. Flailing his hands like he’s spoofing Latinos, barking dialogue as if he’s playing to the cheap seats, and swaggering like he’s the biggest stud south of the border, Steiger is a cartoon from start to finish. Even though he has a few incisive moments, pantomiming in scenes when his character can’t (or won’t) find the right words, he’s exhausting to watch.

          Steiger’s costar, James Coburn, fares somewhat better in the movie’s other leading role. Playing an Irish saboteur hiding out in Mexico, Coburn is smoothly sociopathic, wearing a duster lined with sticks of dynamite as well as a canteen filled with nitro. Since Coburn plays a man haunted by a betrayal that happened back in his homeland (the details of which are revealed in flashbacks), the actor gets to portray a character instead of a caricature. He’s not exactly dimensional, per se, but he’s a hell of a lot easier to take than Steiger.

          And what about the story, you might ask? Well, if you’ve been down the spaghetti-Western road before, you already know the story is irrelevant—true to the genre’s norms, the narrative of Duck, You Sucker is alternately bewildering and idiotic. The gist is that after Steiger’s character cajoles Coburn’s character into helping with a robbery, they get enmeshed in a revolution—the familiar reluctant-antiheroes routine. However, the narrative is secondary to the style of the piece, since Leone unleashes all of his razzle-dazzle gimmicks—outlandish plot twists, sweaty close-ups, tricky tracking shots, visual jokes, and so on. Therefore, how much you enjoy this picture depends entirely on your appetite for Leone’s comic-book silliness.

Duck, You Sucker: FUNKY

The Amityville Horror (1979)

          In 1975, the Lutz family moved into a beautiful home in the Amityville neighborhood of Long Island, but the house came with a dark history: A mass murder took place there a year before the Lutzes’ arrival. According to the best-selling book that Jay Anson wrote about this notorious real-life incident, the Lutzes heard, saw, and smelled a variety of unexplained phenomena, leading them to believe their house was possessed. Anson took a lot of heat for presenting the Lutzes’ account as pure fact, and director Stuart Rosenberg’s sensationalistic movie adaptation pushes things even further. The Amityville Horror has some scary moments, but the scenario is so overwrought—it’s as if the Lutzes took a sublet from Satan—that the picture regularly creeps into unintentional comedy.

          The main problem is that George Lutz (James Brolin) and his wife, Kathy (Margot Kidder), seem like the dumbest people ever to cross a movie screen. As soon as they move into their home, they start experiencing weird apparitions and sensations, but instead of gathering their three young children and running for safety, they summon a priest (Rod Steiger) to bless the house. The priest endures a horrific scene while the house traps him in a stifling upstairs room that fills with flies. Yet when the priest tells the Lutzes to vacate the house, they ignore the advice. Just a thought: If the demonic voice in your home says, “Get out,” it’s probably a good idea to comply. But, of course, if the big-screen versions of the Lutzes demonstrated any common sense, the movie would be over very quickly.

          Sandor Stern’s silly screenplay tries to weasel around this unworkable plot contrivance by suggesting that George has lost his will to the evil force occupying the house, and Brolin delivers the concept through a performance of embarrassing excess. In his signature moment, a bug-eyed Brolin howls, “Oh, mother of God, I’m coming apart!” Truth be told, Brolin actually outdoes costar Steiger in the bad-acting department, and that’s saying a lot. (As for Kidder, who should have been building on her sassy performance in the 1978 blockbuster Superman, she’s wasted in a vapid victim role.)

          Exacerbating its other flaws, The Amityville Horror is fairly dull through most of its running time, even though the production values are pretty good (the ooze dripping from the walls is enjoyably icky) and the wacky highlights are memorable. Nonetheless, lackluster storytelling didn’t stop the picture from becoming a major hit. The Amityville Horror earned nearly $90 million at the box office, and it kicked off a cycle of sequels and remakes that has continued well into the 21st century. Apparently, audiences are as reluctant to vacate the house at 112 Ocean Avenue as the Lutzes were.

The Amityville Horror: FUNKY

F.I.S.T. (1978)

          Jimmy Hoffa, Action Hero. If that sounds unlikely, then you’ve intuited why F.I.S.T. is such a peculiar movie. The team behind the picture clearly ached to tell the (fictionalized) story of Hoffa, the notorious labor leader whose alleged mob ties made him the target of a government investigation before he disappeared, but with Sylvester Stallone involved as leading man and co-screenwriter, a subtle approach to the material was impossible. Stallone, rewriting an original script by another man allergic to restraint, Joe Ezsterhas, imbues Hoffa doppleganger Johnny Kovak (played by Stallone) with qualities ranging from easygoing charm to operatic guilt to rugged idealism to social consciousness; he’s not just an everyman, he’s literally, it seems, every man Stallone could imagine, placing Johnny among the most absurdly overstuffed characterizations in American cinema.

          One suspects the problem was Stallone’s anxiety about potentially alienating viewers who loved him as underdog Rocky Balboa, but whatever the case, the effort to make Johnny heroic and likeable leads to weird tonal shifts. At the beginning of the picture, he’s a factory worker who mouths off to his odious boss about unfair working conditions, only to get fired for his impudence. Hired by an idealistic union boss (Richard Herd) as a recruiter for the Federation of Inter State Truckers (F.I.S.T.), Johnny quickly rises through the ranks because he’s good at motivating blue-collar workers. Seemingly overnight, Johnny evolves from the union’s hired hand to its most passionate advocate—and it simply doesn’t make sense that he cares about F.I.S.T. more than life itself, especially since the movie repeatedly affirms that Johnny isn’t even a trucker.

          Thus, as the movie gets more and more epic in scale, trying to beat The Godfather at its own game with a decades-spanning story of a man corrupted by power, the nonsensical underpinnings of the central character become so illogical that it’s hard to believe anything that happens. That’s a shame, since everything except Stallone’s characterization is solid. As directed by the versatile Norman Jewison, who obviously had a significant budget at his command, the movie has an impressive scope and vibrant energy; scenes of labor unrest, with picketing workers fighting union-busting thugs, are particularly exciting.

          There’s some enjoyable stuff with Peter Boyle as a union boss who talks a good game about serving the men but ends up dipping into union funds for personal luxuries, and Rod Steiger gets to showboat entertainingly as an ambitious Congressman who puts F.I.S.T. in his crosshairs. Supporting player Kevin Conway’s performance as a low-level mobster who gets his hooks into Johnny offers an amusing throwback to old-school cinematic criminality, and Tony Lo Bianco lays on the marinara as the Mafioso who drags Johnny even deeper into the organized-crime muck.

          Unfortunately, this two-and-a-half-hour opus is all about Stallone, and his performance is as unwieldy as his characterization. He speechifies like every scene is the finale of Rocky, complete with wildly inappropriate musical fanfare by Rocky composer Bill Conti, and his romantic scenes with Melinda Dillon feel like rehashes of the wonderful Rocky interactions between Stallone and Talia Shire. It’s true that all of this is quite watchable—the story covers so much ground, moves so fast, and reaches so many manipulative heights that it’s impossible not to be at least somewhat entertained. But does F.I.S.T. deliver a knockout thematic punch? Not so much.

F.I.S.T.: FUNKY

Hennessy (1975)

A methodical revenge thriller predicated on the tensions between Great Britain and Ireland during the worst of the Irish “troubles,” Hennessy more or less gets the job done. It’s not a particularly efficient or stylish film, but the central premise is dramatic enough to generate suspense, and the leading players all contribute intense performances. Rod Steiger, exercising an unusual degree of restraint, stars as Niall Hennessy, a pacificistic family man who steers clear of IRA involvement, even though his brother is a notorious IRA terrorist. When Hennessy’s wife and child are gunned down in a sloppy street fight between English soldiers and Irish protestors, Hennessy coldly determines to seek revenge by blowing up the British Parliament. The picture then becomes a cat-and-mouse game as the English police and the IRA detect Hennessy’s plan and try to stop him; the Bobbies want to prevent a tragedy, and the IRA fears violent reprisal. As directed by workaday helmer Don Sharp, Hennessy grinds along in a perfunctory manner, with all of the moving parts in all the right places but no special panache of execution. The supporting characters aren’t developed deeply, so a subplot involving Hennessey’s main pursuer, Inspector Hollis (Richard Johnson), lacks the intended impact. Also, because Hennessy has no real emotional ties to any living characters, he comes across as a bit of an automaton, despite his relatable motivation. (Hennessy’s relationship with his sister-in-law, played by Lee Remick, is just a trite suspense device in the Hitchcock mode.) So, while the danger and intrigue are basically fine, there’s no personal story to grasp. This isn’t a fatal flaw, but it keeps Hennessy from being anything more than a brisk diversion. On the plus side, watch out for a quick appearance around the 15-minute mark by a young Patrick Stewart—with hair! (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Hennessy: FUNKY

Breakthrough (1979)

          Watching Richard Burton’s physical decline had been a spectator sport since the mid-’60s, when the ravages of his alcoholism really started to become evident, so by the late ’70s it was mostly just depressing to watch the once-virile actor sleepwalk through lame movies looking like the ghost of his former self. In the World War II thriller Breakthrough, Burton looks especially desiccated, an effect only worsened by the enervated feel of the whole project. A quasi-sequel to the Sam Peckinpah war story Cross of Iron (1977), this picture eschews the moral ambiguity of Peckinpah’s picture for old-fashioned melodrama about a good German trying to help the Americans win the war.

          In 1944, after the Nazis have suffered insurmountable losses in Russia, a German general (Curt Jurgens) joins a cabal of officers planning to kill Hitler and then negotiate peace, so he asks freethinking soldier Rolf Steiner (Burton) to convey information about the plan to Allied officers. Steiner connects with a sympathetic American colonel (Robert Mitchum), who then involves his superior officer (Rod Steiger). However fate intervenes, as does an odious Nazi (Helmut Griem) unwilling to acknowledge that the war is already lost.

          Everyone in this movie looks bored and disconnected, so each actor gives an isolated performance that director Andrew V. McLaglen doesn’t even bother to unify with the other performances. Burton spits out lines quickly, like he can’t wait to walk off camera and drink; Mitchum delivers dialogue flatly, as if he’s simply repeating words that were fed to him before the camera rolled; and Steiger bludgeons his scenes with characteristic bulging-vein intensity. The only moments that have flair are the buddy-movie exchanges between the lead characters and their second-in-command guys (Burton has Klaus Lowitsch and Mitchum has Michael Parks).

          To say that Breakthrough gets off to a slow start is an understatement: The first half-hour of the movie is borderline unwatchable because nothing happens. Steiner doesn’t even get hip to the big plan until the picture is well underway, and then, when things are supposed to get exciting, somnambulistic acting and rote combat scenes add up to tedium.

          It’s amazing that just a year before shooting this turkey, Burton and McLaglen collaborated on the robust action picture The Wild Geese (1978), but apparently their efforts shouldn’t be judged entirely on the evidence of the existing version of Breakthrough. After being released in Europe in 1979, the picture went through several edits (and titles) before limping onto a few American screens in 1982. The currently available version runs a scant 95 minutes (the original was closer to two hours), and the only thing more ghastly than the print quality is the amateurish music score. Given the lifeless performances, however, it’s hard to imagine than any amount of post-production sweetening could have turned this misbegotten flick into something special.

Breakthrough: LAME