Maxie (1973)

Whatever happened behind the scenes of this oddity must be more interesting than what happens onscreen. Writer-director Paulmichel Mielche, who never made another fiction film, attracted some of the folks from Francis Ford Coppola’s filmmaking collective to work on his crew, and three respectable actors—Talia Shire, Vic Tayback, and Robert Walden—appear in the picture. Perhaps Mielche talked a good game about the picture he intended to make. Or perhaps some in the American Zoetrope crowd dug the idea of playing with exploitation-film elements. Whatever the case, Maxie—later sensationally but not inaccurately renamed The Butchers—is interminable. The story revolves around Maxie (K.T. Baumann), a young girl who cannot speak but helps make money for her small family by delivering newspapers. One day, she spots neighborhood butcher Smedke (Tayback) and his simple assistant, Finn (Walden), taking delivery of human corpses. Finn and Smedke spend the rest of the movie debating whether they should be worried about what Maxie saw. In a subplot, Shire plays a social worker eager to get Maxie into a speech-therapy program. Riddled with confusing transitions and pointless scenes, Maxie trudges along so slowly that it’s incorrect to describe the film as badly paced—it has no pace whatsoever. Shire and Walden play a few moments sincerely, and Tayback incarnates a stereotype loudly. But by the zillionth time Mielche cuts to weird shots of chickens and meat grinders, you’ll be more than ready for Maxie to end—that is, if you haven’t taken the wiser course of avoiding the movie entirely.

Maxie: SQUARE

Lepke (1975)

          Pulpy but shallow, the gangster biopic Lepke lacks a distinctive point of view. A compendium of episodes tracking the career of Jewish mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter—played with generic intensity by Tony Curtis—the picture was produced and directed by Menaham Golan, who later found his groove as a producer of glossy action pictures. While Lepke is probably the slickest movie that Golan ever directed, it feels artificial from beginning to end, and it has nothing to say about its subject matter. Thanks to solid production values, a steady stream of violent episodes, and the surprising presence of iconic funnyman Milton Berle in a dramatic supporting role, Lepke is never less than watchable. However, it makes very little impact while unspooling and disappears from the viewer’s memory immediately afterward. Opening in 1923 and covering events through 1944, when Lepke was executed for his crimes, the picture depicts Lepke as a tough street kid who channels his anger at the world into violence, and then discovers that ruthlessness leads to career advancement in the underworld. Lepke eventually teams with—and breaks from—fellow gangster “Lucky” Luciano (Vic Tayback) before helping to form the infamous organization known as Murder Incorporated. In addition to depicting Lepke’s criminal activities, the picture explores his relationship with Bernice Meyer (Anjanette Comer), the daughter of Orthodox businessman Mr. Meyer (Berle). Another component of the story is Lepke’s friendship with lawyer Robert Kane (Michael Callan), who eventually joins the Justice Department.

          A few of the picture’s episodes are mildly interesting. In one scene, Lepke dispatches a subordinate to the Far East in order to collect heroin. In another scene, Lepke has a tryst that Golan and cinematographer Andrew Davis (who later became the director of such outstanding action pictures as 1993’s The Fugitive) stage sexily, with light streaming through windows. And the bit with Berle negotiating for his daughter’s hand in marriage is somewhat droll, thanks to the way Berle channels his legendary comic timing into a crisp sort of dramatic tension. Yet most of Lepke is painfully unimaginative. During a climactic action sequence, for instance, a shootout in a movie theater is intercut with black-and-white gangster action on the movie screen. And thanks to distractingly clean costumes and sanitized sets, much of the gangster material recalls the old Star Trek episode in which the crew of the Enterprise beams down to a planet where society is modeled after Earth’s Depression-era gangster culture. (Adding to the unhelpful visual association, Lepke costar Tayback appeared in that particular Trek episode.) While Curtis scores a few points during his character’s darkest interludes, summoning the edge that he brought to his fine work in The Boston Strangler (1968), his performance is middling overall—just like the movie surrounding him.

Lepke: FUNKY

Blood and Lace (1971)

Entertainingly awful, this kitschy horror picture combines abuse at a home for wayward girls with a serial-killer storyline to create a stew of intrigue, murder, and sex. As a result, the movie’s not boring, per se, but it’s meandering, tonally inconsistent, and underdeveloped. Watched with the right wink-wink attitude, however, Blood and Lace feels a bit like a grimy exploitation flick crossbred with a soap opera. The movie begins with the gruesome killing of two people sleeping in bed after sex, a scene that features a shot taken from the point of view of the murder weapon (in this case, a hammer), years before John Carpenter perfected and popularized that particular camera angle in Halloween (1978). The opening murder makes an orphan of pretty teenager Ellie Masters (Melody Patterson), who gets sent to a home run by Mrs. Deere (Gloria Grahame). Alas, Mrs. Deere is a cruel weirdo who violently abuses the young ladies in her care, even killing some of them. Concurrently, Mrs. Deere uses her sexual wiles to persuade a male social worker to ignore problems at the home. In similarly sexed-up subplots, middle-aged cop Calvin Carruthers (Vic Tayback) monitors Ellie’s case—presumably because of his inappropriate lust for her—and the mysterious individual who killed Ellie’s mother remains on the loose. Blood and Lace contains a few enthusiastically trashy elements, including a catfight, but it’s nowhere near gonzo enough to work as a go-for-broke shocker. (The movie’s rated PG, after all.) Instead, it’s closer to so-bad-it’s-good territory, especially with actors Dennis Christopher, Grahame, and Tayback playing the tacky material straight. Of these players, Grahame comes closest to rendering respectable work, since she channels bitterness and regret with singular clarity, even though her acting is a bit on the stiff side. Then again, considering the shabby nature of this project, who can blame the onetime Hollywood star—Grahame won an Oscar for her supporting role in the 1951 behind-the-scenes melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful—for seeming disinterested?

Blood and Lace: LAME

The Gambler (1974)

          While not a flawless film by any measure, The Gambler is one of the sharpest character studies of the ’70s, combining elegant filmmaking with exquisite writing and an extraordinarily nuanced leading performance. The picture offers a mature examination of addiction, portraying every troubling aspect of deception, manipulation, and risk that addicts manifest in pursuit of their illicit thrills. First-time screenwriter James Toback famously based the script on his own life, so protagonist Axel Freed (played beautifully by James Caan) is a respected college professor from a wealthy family. Driven by self-destructive compulsions, Axel regularly courts danger by making reckless bets with bookmakers. When the story begins, Axel gets in debt for $44,000 after a bad night of cards, and the pain Caan expresses in his face demonstrates that even for someone accustomed to losing, an impossible obligation triggers bone-deep fear. As the story progresses, Axel hustles for cash every way he can, whether that means hitting up family members or placing outrageous new bets.

         This fascinating protagonist’s entire life is a high-wire act, a nuance that Toback’s script explicitly articulates in myriad ways. Whether Axel’s telling a classroom full of students about a self-revealing analogy or explaining his behavior to long-suffering girlfriend Billie (Lauren Hutton), Axel says he’s after self-determination. In the twisted worldview of Toback/Axel, the threat of ultimate failure is the only acceptable proof of ultimate existence—he’s a daredevil of the soul. As such, Axel isn’t a sympathetic character, per se. Quite to the contrary, he’s a scheming son of a bitch whose idea of honor is tied in with revealing that everyone around him is a schemer, just like him. That’s why it’s so painful to see Axel inflict his lifestyle on the few innocents he encounters, such as his mother, Naomi (Jacqueline Brookes). And yet Toback carefully surrounds Axel with people who exist even lower on the moral spectrum, such as jovial loan shark Hips (Paul Sorvino) and vulgar mobster “One” (Vic Tayback).

          Director Karel Reisz, a Czech native making his first Hollywood movie, serves Toback’s script well. Among the film’s many effective (and subtle) directorial flourishes are a trope of slow zooms into Caan’s anguished face at moments of critical decision and the repeated use (via composer Jerry Fielding) of variations on a taut Mahler overture to suggest a life that’s all prelude. (After all, each climax in Axel’s existence is merely a fleeting high soon replaced by insatiable hunger.) Caan is on fire here, playing the cock of the walk in confident scenes (the tic of fixing his hair before important encounters illustrates Axel’s vanity) and quivering with ill-fitting anxiety during moments of emasculation. Vivid supporting players including Brookes, Sorvino, Tayback, Morris Carnovsky, Antonio Fargas, Steven Keats, Stuart Margolin, M. Emmet Walsh, James Woods, and Burt Young echo Caan’s intensity; each player adds a unique texture, whether guttural or sophisticated. Hutton is the weak link, her gap-toothed loveliness making a greater impression than her weak recitations of monologues. And if The Gambler sputters somewhat in its 10-minute final sequence—a love-it-or-hate-it microcosm representing Axel’s risk addiction—then a minor misstep is forgivable after the supreme efficacy of the preceding hour and 40 minutes.

The Gambler: RIGHT ON

The Choirboys (1977)

          The weirdness of this comedy-drama adapted from a Joseph Wambaugh novel about debauched L.A. police officers is epitomized by one particular scene. Hot-tempered redneck cop Roscoe Rules (Tim McIntire) wakes up by a pond in L.A.’s MacArthur Park after passing out from heavy drinking (the characters call their drunken revels “choir practice”). Roscoe looks down and discovers that a duck is, well, enjoying Roscoe’s private parts with its beak. All around Roscoe, his fellow officers bust out laughing. Turns out that practical-joke-loving cop Francis Tanaguchi (Clyde Kusatsu) found Roscoe drunk, opened Roscoe’s zipper, and laid a trail of breadcrumbs from the pond to Roscoe, thereby luring the frisky foul. Unspooling across 119 deranged minutes, The Choirboys zigzags wildly between sub-Animal House humor like the duck scene and horrific moments like the opening sequence, in which Roscoe taunts a potential suicide by shouting, “Go ahead and jump, bitch!” until she does exactly that.
          The theme of this wildly overstuffed ensemble picture seems to be that anything goes if you’re wearing a badge, so one storyline involves a sensitive cop (Perry King) who gets his kicks through S&M, while another follows a Vietnam vet (Don Stroud) perpetually on the edge of a complete meltdown. And then there’s the nerdy beat cop (James Woods) enlisted to entrap hookers because he looks like an accountant, and the fat slob named “Spermwhale” (Charles Durning), whose grudge match with his overbearing superior officer gets serious when the lieutenant threatens Spermwhale’s pension. Most of the storylines include some sort of raunchiness, like the cringe-inducing scene of a slow-witted cop sliding under a glass table to “kiss” the nether regions of a female officer sitting on the table, and the picture also has more than its share of physical and psychological violence. At one point, a mischievous vice cop (Vic Tayback) taunts Roscoe with put-on homosexual advances, triggering a gay-panic freakout in which Roscoe mercilessly pummels the vice cop until other officers intervene.
          What makes all of this so odd is that venerable director Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) exerts absolutely zero control over the movie’s tone. Pathetically sad moments are played for laughs, idiotically silly scenes are played straight, and the film’s sympathies seem to lie with its most depraved characters. The indescribably inappropriate music by Frank DeVol only accentuates the strangeness; DeVol’s sunny tunes punctuate sequences the way rimshots accompany a nightclub comic’s routine, though often with no apparent connection to the actual content of the sequences. Eventually, a plot of sorts emerges from the chaos, but even that is so distasteful as to seem utterly perplexing: The “heroes” scheme to cover up the accidental killing of the most sympathetic character in the movie. The Choirboys is loaded with colorful events and interesting actors, but it’s a sure sign of trouble when the never-subtle Burt Young, playing a disgusting vice cop named “Scuzzi,” gives the most disciplined performance in the movie.

The Choirboys: FREAKY