The Killer Inside Me (1976)

          One of several deeply flawed ’70s films containing an Oscar-worthy performance by Stacy Keach, The Killer Inside Me is the first of two movies, thus far, adapted from the Jim Thompson novel of the same name. (A 2010 version starring Casey Affleck received a more favorable critical response.) The material is strange, tracking the adventures of a small-town cop who secretly harbors homicidal tendencies, so the storyline asks viewers to take an unusual ride from wholesome Americana to deviant ultraviolence. Getting the tone of this one right would have challenged even the subtlest of filmmakers, a group to which rough-and-tumble action guy Burt Kennedy most certainly does not belong. Accordingly, the 1976 version of The Killer Inside Me is a mess from a tonal perspective, because it’s unclear whether the movie is a straight drama, a thriller disguised as a lighthearted character piece, a satire of American values, or some combination of all of those things.

          Keach finds a peculiar sort of true north, both in his onscreen performance and in his wry narration track, so his characterization tells a fatalistic but darkly funny story about a guy trying to make murder a part of his everyday life. Alas, the movie around Keach isn’t nearly as surefooted, even though some of the supporting performances are tasty and even though cinematographer William A. Fraker shrouds the film in evocative shadows. Those excited about exploring weird pockets of Hollywood cinema will be more inclined to cut The Killer Inside Me slack than those looking for straightforward escapism.

          Set in a small Montana town, the story follows Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford (Keach) through a colorful period in his life. To the casual eye, he seems like Mr. Nice Guy, because he romances a local schoolteacher, evinces great skill at de-escalating conflicts, and gets along with people on every rung of the social ladder. Secretly, however, Lou begins an affair with a local floozy, thereby entering into a triangle with his buddy Elmer (Don Stroud), son of rich landowner Chester (Kennan Wynn). All the while, viewers glimpse Lou’s demons thanks to flashes from childhood trauma, so when Lou freaks out and kills two people, we have an inkling why.

          The first half of the picture is all setup, and the second half is all repercussions. Throughout, the filmmakers provide colorful details and grim humor. In one entertaining scene, Lou welcomes a con artist (John Carradine) into his home and proceeds to scare the bejesus out of the guy, seemingly just for sport. In another vivid bit, Lou’s boss, Sheriff Bob Maples (John Dehner), employs unique vernacular to lament his poor marksmanship: “I can’t hit a bull in the ass with a banjo.” Although the movie never coheres, The Killer Inside Me is interesting and odd from moment to moment. Beyond Keach’s beautifully deranged performance, the picture boasts strong work from Carradine, Stroud, Wynn, Tisha Steriling (as the schoolteacher), and—reuniting Keach with a costar from John Huston’s Fat City (1972)—Susan Tyrrell (as the floozy).

The Killer Inside Me: FUNKY

Catch My Soul (1974)

          Mixing folk songs, religious allegories, Shakespeare, and show tunes, the unique musical Catch My Soul is an interesting attempt at . . . something. Originally presented on the London stage by writer/producer Jack Good, Catch My Soul was billed as “the rock Othello.”  Once Good and producer Richard M. Rosenbloom set out to make a film version, they hired folksinger Richie Havens to play the leading role, while retaining Lance LeGault from the original stage cast to portray the scheming Iago. Film actors Season Hubley and Susan Tyrrell were added to the mix, along with singers Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett and Tony Joe White. Overseeing this eclectic cast was director Patrick McGoohan, better known as an actor in such projects as the 1960s TV series The Prisoner. This was his only feature as a director.

          Set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the picture depicts the travails of an evangelist named Othello (Havens). While living with a commune alongside the demonic Iago, Othello falls in love with and marries the angelic Desdemona (Hubley). Iago, whom the film portrays as a manifestation of Lucifer, foments strife by making Othello believe that Desdemona has been unfaithful with Othello’s friend, Cassio (White). Betrayals, lies, recriminations, and tragedy ensue.

          Alternately titled Santa Fe Satan, this picture suffers from an overabundance of thematic ambition and a shortage of credibility. Jumping onto the ’60s/’70s bandwagon of meshing counterculture imagery with religious parables makes Catch My Soul feel heavy-handed from the first frame to the last, which neutralizes most of the subtleties of the underlying text. At the same time, the storytelling is fragmented, as if McGoohan was unable or unwilling to shoot scenes in proper continuity, and the acting is wildly uneven. Havens, appearing in his first dramatic role, has a quietly authoritative presence but seems awkward while delivering dialogue. Hubley and White barely register, and Tyrrell lends her signature eccentricity to a role that ultimately feels inconsequential. (In making room for tunes, the filmmakers gutted Shakespeare’s text.) The film’s standout performance comes from the man who acclimated to his role onstage. For those who only know LeGault from his villainous role in the ’80s TV series The A-Team, watching him in Catch My Soul is startling. Not only can he sing, with a voice as low and dark as an icy wind howling through a cavern, but he’s lithe and loose, and his sleepy eyelids give his visage an otherworldly quality.

          Whereas the film’s tunes are forgettable—though each hits roughly the correct note of menace or longing or wonderment—the picture’s visual component is not. Cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, a three-time Oscar winner, shoots the hell out of Catch My Soul, whether he’s infusing desert scenes with scorching color or sculpting eerie nighttime images from creative juxtapositions of hot accent lights and ink-deep shadows. Although Catch My Soul doesn’t consistently command or reward the viewer’s attention, the virtues of certain elements ensure that every so often, something dynamic happens.

Catch My Soul: FUNKY

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977)

          A lurid psych-ward melodrama produced by Roger Corman in one of his more ambitious moments, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden suffers from schizophrenia, just like its leading character. On one level, the picture is a fairly serious examination of the troubles facing an unbalanced young woman as she seeks to end a cycle of delusions, hysterical episodes, and self-destructive impulses. On another level, the picture is as sensationalistic as an old Sam Fuller flick, because the filmmakers unwisely attempt to depict the imaginary realm that the protagonist visits whenever her mind departs everyday reality. Moreover, the filmmakers’ idea of hard-hitting drama skews toward undisciplined actors performing freak-show antics at top volume, with endless repetition the name of the game. Add in nudity and rape scenes, and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden ends up resembling Corman’s typical drive-in fare, instead of evoking the movie upon which this picture was obviously modeled, Milos Forman’s extraordinary One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Thanks to sincere work by leading lady Kathleen Quinlan and supporting actress Bibi Andersson, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden isn’t completely awful, though it comes close at regular intervals.

          The simple story revolves around Deborah Blake (Quinlan), a disturbed young woman who is admitted to a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. In quiet scenes, she does talking-and-listening therapy with the stalwart Dr. Fried (Andersson). In not-so-quiet scenes, Deborah suffers epic delusions of belonging to some imaginary primitive tribe. Deborah also witnesses the extreme behavior of fellow patients, and the nastiest narrative thread concerns orderlies who rape patients with impunity. The script, credited to idiosyncratic filmmaker Lewis John Carlino and Hollywood wit Gavin Lambert, is a mess in terms of tone, though director Anthony Page and co-producer Daniel H. Blatt must shoulder some of the blame. (Joanna Greenberg, who wrote the novel upon which the film was based, reportedly hated the way her work was adapted.) While Quinlan’s uneven work is tethered to the chaotic storytelling, costars Sylvia Sidney and Susan Tyrrell thrive on the picture’s gonzo energy; Sidney’s work has a touch of black comedy, and Tyrrell’s inhibited performance seems like a transmission from another universe. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is far too tawdry to take seriously, so it’s unsurprising that Greenberg tried to reclaim the material by cooperating with the creation of a 2004 stage adaptation of her book. Almost anything would be an improvement over this version.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: FUNKY

Fat City (1972)

          No genre epitomizes the anything-goes spirit of the best American ’70s movies more than the downbeat character study, because during the ’70s, actors resembling real people were given opportunities to play characters resembling real people. Nothing could be further from traditional Hollywood glamour, for instance, than Fat City, the exceptional drama that revived director John Huston’s career. An ensemble piece set in the agricultural fields and skid-row neighborhoods in and around Stockton, California, Fat City is filled with dreamers, drunks, and losers. It’s a hymn to the hopeless. Whereas Huston had in the immediately preceding years lost his way by making bloated and/or misguided projects including The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), the director used Fat City to return to his core strength of poetic narratives about people living on the fringes of society.

          Although he didn’t write the piece (Leonard Gardner adapted the script from his own novel), Fat City concerns themes that were deeply familiar to Huston, including alienation, boxing, drinking, and failure. So even if one doesn’t get the sense of the director seeing himself in the film’s characters, one intuits that he’s known the type of people whose sad exploits he puts onscreen. Working with a skillful crew including master cinematographer Conrad Hall, Huston generates utterly believable atmosphere, with every dirty location and every tattered piece of costuming accentuating the theme of people whose lives comprise hard-won dignity against a backdrop of desperation.

          Stacy Keach stars as Billy Tully, a washed-up boxer who decides to get himself together by going to a gym, where he meets promising young fighter Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Emboldened by the idea of mentoring a beginner while restarting his own career, Billy initiates a pathetic quasi-romance with a drunk named Oma (Susan Tyrrell). As the story progresses, Billy waffles between his real life, which involves arduous work picking fruit for meager pay, and his imagined life, which involves optimistic notions about a future with a surrogate family including Ernie and Oma. Fat City is primarily concerned with the ways in which people who have nothing latch onto possibilities. Similarly to how Billy entertains foolish notions of being a better fighter in middle age than he ever was as a youth, Ernie buys into Billy’s encouragement, and Oma pretends that what she has with Billy is genuine—even though she’s already involved with another man. Yet Gardner’s story doesn’t oversimplify these desolate characters by focusing myopically on their inability to improve their situations; quite to the contrary, Gardner illustrates every self-destructive tendency of these characters, such as Billy’s habit of blaming his circumstances on bad management. Every person in Fat City seems achingly real.

          Huston cast the picture beautifully, getting letter-perfect work out of nearly everyone in the film. Keach’s unique combination of a bruiser’s physicality and a romantic’s soul transforms the actor into Billy; within his first few scenes, Keach erases any audience knowledge of his aptitude for classical dialogue, creating the complete illusion of a broken-down slob living on the streets of Stockton. Tyrrell gives an equally powerful performance (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), her raspy voice and wild eyes conveying a woman lost to alcohol but not robbed of her humanity, while Bridges and costar Candy Clark provide youthful counterpoints to the main characters. (It’s not hard to imagine the people played by Bridges and Clark becoming like Billy and Oma later in life.) As for Huston, his artistic rejuvenation continued—although he made a few turkeys in the years after Fat City, he also made some of his most interesting pictures, including the challenging chamber pieces Wise Blood (1979), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), all of which are thematic cousins to Fat City.

Fat City: RIGHT ON