Goldenrod (1976)

          Arriving a few years after the rodeo-movie boom that included Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner (1972), this humble Canada/U.S. coproduction presents a clear storyline and fairly thoughtful character development. Also working in the picture’s favor are terrific locations, seeing as how events take place at rugged sites throughout Alberta. So in some important respects, Goldenrod—also known as Glory Days—is a commendable film with a humane sensibility and a naturalistic style. If only those things were enough to put it over. Alas, Goldenrod stumbles significantly in other areas. The plot is highly predictable, some of the scoring is so atrocious as to evoke elevator music, and one climactic sequence goes so dark that Goldenrod ceases to be family fare, representing a major miscalculation in terms of tone.

          Set in the early 1950s, the picture follows the adventures of cocksure rodeo star Jesse Gifford (Tony Lo Bianco). At first, he seems a man in full. Winner of Canada’s top prize for all-around cowboy, he lives in a custom trailer with his wife, Shirley (Gloria Carlin), and their two boys, both of whom idolize Jesse. Then things take a turn. Badly injured, Jesse has to quit the circuit for a season, which spins him into a long period of self-pity. Shirley leaves Jesse for a rival cowboy, Keno (Donnelly Rhodes), and even though Jesse inherits sole responsibility for raising his sons, he compounds his problems by drinking heavily. Eventually he enters the employ of an alcoholic dirt farmer, J.T. Jones (Donald Pleasence), before suffering the final indignity—his eldest son’s successful entrance into the rodeo game. The specifics of that aforementioned dark sequence are best left discovered by those who watch the picture, but suffice to say things get much worse before they show any promise of getting better.

          Lo Bianco, a swaggering Italian-American from Brooklyn, was an odd choice for the leading role, but he puts across the character’s machismo and stubbornness persuasively. And while his efforts at conveying pathos are a bit more forced, he eventually finds a sort of hammy soulfulness during Jesse’s moments of greatest anguish. Whereas the actors surrounding Lo Bianco mostly deliver adequate performances, Pleasence contributes his signature brand of bombastic eccentricity, a welcome counterpoint to the film’s otherwise straightforward approach. Incidentally, don’t look for much in the way of hot bronc-busting action in Goldenrod, because even more than some other rodeo movies, this one treats sports as a springboard for intimate character drama.

Goldenrod: FUNKY

God Told Me To (1976)

          Quite possibly the strangest movie that Larry Cohen ever made—which is saying a lot, seeing as how Cohen’s filmography includes the 1974 killer-baby epic It’s Alive—this offbeat horror/sci-fi hybrid starts out like a lurid crime story, then evolves into something very different. Set in New York City, the picture begins when a crazed shooter named Harold (Sammy Williams) takes a perch on a water tower and then shoots more than a dozen strangers walking on the streets far below. Among police officers responding to the incident is Detective Peter Nicholas (Tony Lo Bianco), who climbs onto the water tower and tries to reason with the killer. When Peter asks why Harold started shooting, Harold says, “God told me to,” then jumps to his death. Peter is traumatized by the incident, partially because he’s a devout Catholic, and his aguish deepens when several other people go on killing sprees, all claiming that “God told me to.” (One of the murderers is played by future Taxi star Andy Kaufman.)

          Eventually, Peter’s investigation broadens to include inquiries into his own past, because Peter is an orphan who knows nothing about his biological parents. Concurrently, Peter angers higher-ups in the NYPD by going public with the “God told me to” angle; this revelation leads to riots among warring religious forces. Even after Peter gets suspended, he continues his investigation in an unofficial capacity, and he learns that “God,” in this particular case, might be a single messianic individual who compels followers to kill. Yet just when it seems writer-producer-director Cohen is headed down the road of exposing a Manson-type cult leader, God Told Me To takes a left turn into trippy territory. Peter meets “God,” an asexual vagrant who glows so brightly that his features can’t be discerned the first time he’s shown.

          This meeting leads Peter to find Elizabeth Mullin (Silva Sidney), who may or may not be “God’s” mother. Now living in a senior home, she recalls a horrific incident from the past, when she was taken aboard an alien spaceship and artificially inseminated. She gave up the resulting child, who grew up to be “God,” otherwise known as super-powered alien/human hermaphrodite Bernard Phillips (Richard Lynch). Yes, hermaphrodite. To hammer this particular point home, Cohen provides a loving closeup of Bernard’s matched sex organs, which protrude from the side of his torso.

          None of this makes much sense, but it’s a fun ride, after a fashion, because it’s wild to see how far Cohen goes down the rabbit hole of his own imagination. What other film includes an alien abduction, a crazed sniper, an immaculate conception, an obsessed Catholic, a religious controversy, and a sex mutant? Plus, even if the deranged God Told Me To doesn’t “work” in any conventional fashion, the bizarre movie has vibe to spare thanks to a fantastically ominous musical score by Frank Cordell. Legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann scored Cohen’s previous film (the aforementioned It’s Alive), but Hermann died before working on Gold Told Me To. Cohen clearly guided Cordell toward mimicry, and, in fact, Cohen dedicated the picture to Herrmann. Emulating Herrmann’s propulsive musical style was a genius move, because Cordell’s dark and dense score lends Cohen’s phantasmagorical narrative a degree of macabre grandeur.

God Told Me To: FREAKY

Bloodbrothers (1978)

          At his best, director Robert Mulligan was a uniquely gifted observer of subtle human behavior—witness To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Summer of ’42 (1971), and The Man in the Moon (1991). To his great credit, Mulligan often ventured outside his comfort zone of gentle character drama, even though the results of his artistic walkabouts were inconsistent. As a case in point, Mulligan was not the right person to direct this adaptation of Richard Price’s novel about a family of volatile Italian-Americans, because Mulligan proved incapable of restraining certain actors from venturing into overwrought caricature. Plus, since Bloodbrothers was released at a time when Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were exploding Italian-American stereotypes, the movie feels pointlessly regressive. To be clear, it’s an entertaining picture with many heartfelt moments, and not all of the performances are shrill. Nonetheless, it’s an aberration from the era of The Godfather (1972) and Mean Streets (1973).

          Set in the Bronx, the movie follows the adventures of Thomas “Stony” De Coco (Richard Gere), a young man trying to figure out what to do with his life even though his hotheaded father, Tommy De Coco (Tony Lo Bianco), expects Stony to work alongside Tommy and Tommy’s brother, Louis “Chubby” De Coco (Paul Sorvino), in construction. Whereas Chubby and Tommy are animalistic he-men who spend their time chasing women and getting into fights, Stony is a sensitive sort who wants to work with children. His nurturing instinct manifests in protective behavior toward his little brother, Albert (Michael Hershewe), because the X factor in the De Coco family is Tommy’s wife, Marie De Coco (Leila Goldoni). Worn out from years of Tommy’s infidelity and physical/verbal abuse, Marie has become an abuser herself, so she’s traumatized Albert into developing anorexia. Meanwhile, Stony finds something like romance with women including Annette (Marilu Henner), a barmaid known as the “town pump” because of her promiscuity.

          There’s a lot of story in Bloodbrothers, all of it pitched to a histrionic level, even though modulation and restraint would have been required to find the universal truths in the material. Mulligan films scenes well, but he lets actors run wild. Gere, Henner, and costar Kenneth McMillan (as a local bar owner) deliver nuanced performances, and Sorvino’s over-the-top work would have been more effective had he been the only outsized actor. Alas, Lo Biano’s genuinely terrible performance throws the whole enterprise off-kilter. Playing a cartoonish version of a macho asshole, Lo Biano toggles between screaming, pleading, and whimpering. Worse, his ridiculous energy level causes other actors to amplify their work just to ensure they’re not overwhelmed. By the time the story resolves into a coming-of-age narrative about Stony breaking from his family’s toxic influence, the potential for genuine emotion has been bludgeoned away.

Bloodbrothers: 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

The Seven-Ups (1973)

After producing The French Connection (1971), Philip D'Antoni hopped into the director's chair for this no-frills companion piece to his previous triumph. Boasting the same gritty atmosphere as the earlier film (haphazard violence, homely character actors, garbage-strewn locations, thick Noo Yawk accents), the procedural was extrapolated from the experiences of real-life French Connection cop Sonny Grosso. Leading man Roy Scheider, yet another connection to Connection because he played a different character based on Grosso in the earlier picture, stands in for the real-life cop once again as a plainclothes detective named Buddy. When Buddy and the rest of his crackerjack unit (the “Seven-Ups” of the title) try to intercept a ring of kidnappers who are causing trouble by grabbing mobsters and holding them for ransom, the unit winds up in hairy situations including a genuinely frightening car chase from the scummy streets of '70s Manhattan to the idyllic curves of the Palisades Parkway. This was back in the post-Bullitt era when action directors were out to top each other’s car-chase sequences with ever more harrowing pursuits, so D’Antoni wisely entrusted his sequence to stunt coordinator Bill Hickman, the guy who previously cracked up cars for the aforementioned Bullitt (1968) and, you guessed it, The French Connection. The picture gets off to an awfully slow start, but be patient: Once that bad guy drives into the car wash, things start to get interesting. The tense dialogue scenes between Scheider and ’70s stalwart Tony Lo Bianco (playing a different role than the one he played in Connection) have a strong vibe, and throughout the picture Scheider is characteristically charismatic, sharpening the skills that turned him into a big-time movie star with Jaws two years after this project. Though short on plot and even shorter on character, The Seven-Ups has just enough action, anxiety, and authenticity to warrant a viewing.

The Seven-Ups: GROOVY

The French Connection (1971) & French Connection II (1975)

          Cop movies were never the same after The French Connection, a scalding thriller about a New York detective obsessively tracking a Gallic drug smuggler. Once audiences watched morally challenged policeman Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) dress like a Salvation Army Santa Claus to snare a hoodlum, rattle suspects with twisted psychological tricks, and recklessly instigate the most frightening car chase 1971 audiences had ever seen, any subsequent policier with less verve seemed old-fashioned by comparison.

          Based on a bestselling nonfiction book by Robin Moore and directed with docudrama realism by William Friedkin, the movie meticulously tracks how Doyle and his partner, Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider), latch onto a small-time hood, Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco), who unwittingly leads the cops to enigmatic European crook Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey). Among many other things, the film is a respectful but unflinching homage to dogged police work, because surveiling Sol way past the point when superiors see the value in doing so unlocks clues leading to a much more significant target. Ernest Tidyman’s muscular script juxtaposes vivid character-development scenes with explosive sequences of police action, creating just the right ambiguous context for signature moments including the harrowing vignette of Doyle shooting an escaping felon in the back. Throughout, the storyline uses Doyle as a means of exploring of whether Machiavellian law enforcement degrades or protects society.

          Yet beyond its probing questions about right and wrong, The French Connection is breathlessly exciting, particularly during that infamous car chase, which has Doyle pursuing an elevated train carrying a suspect; Doyle’s near-misses with pedestrians are so terrifying that they reinforce the movie’s theme of a cop who’s arguably as dangerous as any crook. Lo Bianco, Rey, and Scheider provide sterling support, with Scheider demonstrating the streetwise suaveness that made him a leading man a few years later. As for Hackman, he’s on fire, alternately ferocious, funny, perverse, and wild, turning scenes like the “pick your toes in Poughkeepsie” interrogation into unforgettable moments. His performance is a master class in channeling the unique energy of the male animal into an expression of complicated sociopolitical concepts. Friedkin, Hackman, and Tidyman all won Oscars for their work, and they each spent much of their subsequent careers trying to recapture the bristling intensity of this film.

          For instance, Hackman continued charting Doyle dark odyssey in French Connection II, for which hard-hitting journeyman John Frankenheimer replaced brash provocateur Friedkin. A respectable thriller in its own right, French Connection II sends Doyle to Marseilles, where he tries to capture the evasive Charnier on the Frenchman’s home turf. In the sequel’s brilliant contrivance, Doyle gets abducted and by Charneri’s thugs, who force heroin into the cop’s system until he becomes a desperate junkie. This eventually leads to an extraordinary sequence of Doyle going through violent DT’s. Another strong moment is the grim finale, which pays off the French Connection journey on an appropriate note of moral ambiguity.

          Overall, however, the storyline of French Connection II isn’t nearly as focused or potent as that of its predecessor. The rivalry between Doyle and his Gallic counterpart (Bernard Fresson) plays well without lodging too firmly in the viewer’s imagination, and too many scenes feature Doyle killing time. As wonderful as it is to luxuriate in character development, leisurely pacing does not an exciting crime thriller make. That said, Frankenheimer plays rough whenever the action starts, and Hackman’s portrayal of Doyle is just as powerful the second time around. So while French Connection II ultimately feels unnecessary, it’s sufficiently well-crafted that both of these movies deserve spaces on the top shelf of ’70s crime cinema. FYI, the real-life cops who inspired The French Connection also inspired two other thrillers, both released in 1973: Badge 373 and The Seven-Ups.

The French Connection: OUTTA SIGHT

French Connection II: GROOVY