Napoleon and Samantha (1972)

          For every family film made by Walt Disney Productions that hit the bull’s-eye in terms of marrying subject and theme, there seem to be half-a-dozen oddities whose plotting is explicable only if one imagines Disney people pulling random narrative elements from a hat. For instance, Napoleon and Samantha is about preteen runaways who embark on an adventure with a former circus lion until the children are endangered by a psychopath and rescued by a graduate student. Oh, and a huge portion of the film comprises a soulful exploration of mortality, with depressing speeches about death and a lengthy funeral scene. Yet the strangest thing about Napoleon and Samantha is that it’s watchable despite the loopy storyline. Veteran Disney director Vincent McEveety moves things along quickly, as always, and the cast benefits from the presence of seasoned performer Will Geer, as well as that of newcomers Michael Douglas, who was in his early 20s when he shot the picture, and Jodie Foster, who wasn’t yet 10. Alas, none of these people is the lead, with that function instead performed by ’70s kid-flick star Johnny Whitaker. He’s no worse than any other Hollywood kid trained in faking emotions, but his work exists on a plane far below that occupied by his more notable costars.

          The peculiar movie begins by establishing the lifestyle of rural urchin Napoleon (Whitaker), who lives with his kind-hearted grandfather (Geer). Napoleon’s best friend is Samantha (Foster), who resides nearby with her stern guardian, Gertrude (Ellen Corby). One day, Napoleon and Grandpa encounter an old circus clown who is traveling with Major, a tame lion. Inexplicably, Grandpa accepts the clown’s request to become Major’s caregiver. After a few cutesy scenes of life on the farm with a lion, Grandpa dies, so Napoleon goes to a job office and hires graduate student Danny (Douglas) as a gravedigger. Seriously, this is the plot! Lying to Danny by saying that a relative will soon collect Napoleon, the boy instead embarks on a trip with Major—and Samantha, who tags along for reasons that are never particularly clear. Then, once the trio survives near-misses with nasty animals and steep cliffs, they track down Danny—who promptly leaves them in the care of a stranger. Naturally, Danny discovers the stranger is an escaped psychopath (as one will), and runs to the kids’ rescue. For viewers willing to ignore logic, Napoleon and Samantha has a few admirable elements. Douglas, Foster, and Geer elevate their roles as much as possible, given the material, and Major—an animal performer featured in myriad films and TV shows—has an impressive bag of tricks. Plus, truth be told, the scenes about death have a certain lyricism, even if they feel like they belong in a different movie.

Napoleon and Samantha: FUNKY

Black Mama, White Mama (1973)

          Judged by the low standards of the cinematic cycle to which it belongs, Black Mama, White Mama is fairly palatable, thanks to attractive starlets, brisk pacing, steady action, and a welcome sense of humor. However, the aforementioned cycle comprises a series of lurid women-in-prison movies that American International Pictures shot in the Philippines during the early ’70s, so Black Mama, White Mama is an inherently crude enterprise. Think incessant nudity, swearing, and violence—as well as the constant use of women as sex objects. None would ever argue that this genre represents a high point in human achievement.

          Black Mama, White Mama begins when new convicts including African-American hooker Lee (Pam Grier) and white revolutionary Karen (Margaret Markov) are delivered to a prison work farm in the wilds of the Filipino jungle. The women quickly catch the eye of a pair of female wardens, sadistic lesbians who are in a relationship but use convicts as playthings. Naturally, this plot development occasions a scene of a horny female prison guard masturbating while she looks through a peephole at showering convicts. Classy! After the usual scenes of catfights and torture, Karen and Lee escape. Unfortunately, they’re handcuffed together, Defiant Ones-style. Intrigue ensues as the women debate whether to rendezvous with Karen’s guerilla pals or Lee’s criminal chums. Meanwhile, pursuers include Ruben (Sid Haig), a flamboyant hoodlum who dresses like a cowboy, and Captain Cruz (Eddie Garcia), an ambitious policeman. The story also includes something about Lee having stolen $40,000 from a Filipino gangster named Vic (Vic Diaz), who sends bloodthirsty lackeys to chase the women.

          Cobbled together by several people (including Jonathan Demme), the story is hackneyed and laborious, but it’s really just a means to an end. As rendered onscreen by prolific Filipino director Eddie Romero, the narrative is merely the gas in the engine of a vehicle traveling at breakneck speed through episodes of bloodshed, nasty interpersonal conflict, and trashy sexualized content. (A typical scene involves Karen slipping off her panties and then placing them around the neck of a dog, thereby throwing pursuers “off her scent.”) Yet when compared to other movies of its sordid type, Black Mama, White Mama is positively restrained—and even periodically entertaining, especially when Haig fills the screen with his gonzo characterization.

Black Mama, White Mama: FUNKY

Ants (1977)

Delivering exactly what the title promises, the made-for-TV thriller Ants is basically acceptable given the expectations one might reasonably have for such a project. Yes, the special effects are minimal and the storyline is pedestrian, but Ants features decent production values, a cast comprising several familiar faces, and plenty of scenes in which people are killed by insects with poisonous bites. In fact, had the producers seen fit to boost the gore and nudity quotients (which is to say, had either of those things been included at all), Ants probably could have earned as a theatrical release. The movie is dim-witted, like most creature features, but it’s not much worse than many similar films made in the same era with bigger budgets. The story is shaped roughly like that of a disaster movie. The lives of several underdeveloped characters converge at a lakeside resort, and construction around the resort upsets a colony of mutant ants bearing poisonous venom. Then, after the customary first 40 minutes in which Our Hero tries to persuade people that ants are the culprits behind several nasty incidents, a number of characters get trapped in a hotel with marauding insects while emergency personnel try to rescue them. Nothing original or surprising slips into Ants, except perhaps for the silly climax during which (spoiler alert!) Our Hero coaches fellow survivors to meditate and breathe through tubes while killer ants crawl on their skin. The mind reels. Although stolid he-man Robert Foxworth and perky blonde Lynda Day George are the film’s real stars, the most noteworthy cast member is Suzanne Somers, appearing at the height of her Three’s Company-era pulchritude and wearing skimpy outfits during most of her scenes. Chaste as they are, the various shots of Somers being mauled by ants while dressed in nothing but a bed sheet have a certain naughty appeal. It’s also interesting (and/or depressing) to see such virile players as Bernie Casey, Brian Dennehy, and Hollywood legend Myrna Loy trying to class up their scenes. Like the movie’s titular creatures, the pleasures that Ants offers to viewers are so small they nearly escape notice. Nonetheless, there’s goofy fun to be had here.

Ants: FUNKY

Oh! Calcutta! (1972)

          During the late ’60s and early ’70s, several counterculture-themed stage shows attracted attention by featuring total nudity, ostensibly to challenge inhibitions and taboos. (Whether the exposure was truly meant to juice ticket sales remains a subjective matter.) While Hair is undoubtedly the most enduring of these once-controversial shows, Oh! Calcutta! may actually capture the cultural moment even more effectively. Instead of conveying a complete narrative about social issues (as Hair does with its storyline about the Vietnam War), the wildly uneven Oh! Calcutta! comprises a series of comic sketches and interpretive-dance numbers. Accordingly, it’s like a sampler platter of attitudes, ideas, and mannerisms from the era of the Sexual Revolution.

          At its best, the show captures the tension that arose between enlightened women seeking sociocultural equality and narcissistic men who exploited “free love” as a means of avoiding interpersonal responsibility. At its worst, Oh! Calcutta! is like an X-rated version of The Benny Hill Show, with breasts and penises and vaginas thrown at the audience as recklessly as the four-letter words with which the script is infused. Plus, since the historical moment to which the show belongs has passed, Oh! Calcutta! seems strange when viewed with modern eyes. The sheer amount of nudity and sexualized content remains startling, but the sense of daring that one presumes the show had in its original iteration has faded.

          In any event, this film of Oh! Calcutta! isn’t really a film. Rather, it’s the theatrically released version of a pay-per-view TV special that aired in 1971. The special comprised a taped performance of the stage show, with added flourishes including a single exterior scene and lots of cheesy video effects (dissolves, superimpositions, wipes, etc.). In short, nothing fancy. Nonetheless, the cast featured in this production is fairly strong, with the biggest name being Bill Macy—a middle-aged comic actor who later gained fame as a costar on the sitcom Maude. (His high point, unless one counts his presence in full-cast nude dance numbers, is a sketch in which he plays a vulgar swinger who wows a new lover with his oral skills.)

          Each of the comic vignettes has a different style, but two stand out as having something worthwhile to say. A scene set in Victorian England features a man trapping a seemingly virtuous woman in a private room so he can take her virginity. Yet as she tells her life story, it becomes clear she’s sexually experienced. The joke is that because she gained her carnal knowledge outside of society’s view, her reputation remains intact. Sly and wry in equal measure. Representing an entirely different style of comedy is a broadly farcical scene involving kooky doctors supervising a sex experiment—by the time the gypsies and the puppy dog run onstage, the piece has reached an apex of controlled chaos. (“It’s the last time we advertise for help in Screw magazine!”)

          More typical, alas, is the scene of fairy-tale figures Jack and Jill, in which Jack has Jill measure his member with a ruler and then reciprocates by inserting the ruler into Jill. (“I got my imagination and my cock,” Jack exclaims. “I suppose that’s enough for a man to have!”) As for the dance scenes, they’re lyrical enough, but the wall-to-wall nudity is distracting. Many posh individuals are credited with writing Oh! Calcutta!, including Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, and Kenneth Tynan, though one suspects that the bigger names merely contributed notions. And that, ultimately, is the vibe of Oh! Calcutta!—a bunch of notions, some more interesting than others, fused by the overriding theme of sex.

Oh! Calcutta!: FUNKY

At the Earth’s Core (1976)

          Difficult as it may be to imagine today, when seemingly every major movie includes sci-fi elements, there was a time when fantasy-themed feature films were so rare that nearly every one of them developed a cult following. This phenomenon goes a long way toward explaining why At the Earth’s Core isn’t universally derided as an embarrassment for everyone involved. Based on a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, this exceptionally silly co-production of U.K.-based Amicus Productions and U.S.-based American International Pictures features monster costumes that look like they were made for a high school play, background paintings and set dressings that one might expect to find in an old Star Trek rerun, and dramatic situations so infantile that it’s amazing actors were able to play their scenes without constantly bursting into laughter.

          Highlights of At the Earth’s Core include scenes of giant winged lizards leaping from their resting places atop a lava pit so they can grab female humans with their talons—that is, after the lizards have finished hypnotizing the unfortunate ladies with their telepathy powers. And in perhaps the film’s finest moment, a ridiculously fake-looking dinosaur lifts a human with its jaws—at which point the film cuts to a miniature shot of the dinosaur chomping on an inert figure that looks like a Barbie doll in caveman clothes. Oh, and the primitive humans living in a primordial realm nestled deep inside the earth all speak English. On the plus side, British horror-movie stalwart Peter Cushing gives a quasi-amusing supporting performance as a dotty old scientist who treks through the earth’s core with his trusty umbrella always close at hand. Pip-pip, old man!

          The larky plot begins in Victorian England, where British scientist Dr. Perry (Cushing) and his American backer, David (Doug McClure), pilot the maiden voyage of a manned drilling machine. The machine malfunctions, taking Dr. Perry and David into a cave near the earth’s molten core. Our heroes are soon taken captive by the Mahars (the aforementioned lizards), but then David decides to liberate the subterranean humans whom the Mahars use as slaves. Helping motivate David’s decision is the presence of a sexy cave woman, Dia (Caroline Munro), since it appears he’s also eager to liberate her from her clothes. All of this stuff trudges along in the familiar way—battles, setbacks, heroism, betrayal, et cetera—and each special-effects scene is goofier than the preceding. About the only genuinely effective element of the film is the largely electronic score by Mike Vickers, which complements the filmmakers’ trope of using tricked-up mechanical noises as the “voices” of underground monsters. FYI, At the Earth’s Core is the second of three fantasy pictures that onetime TV star McClure made for Amicus. Although the other two movies, The Land That Time Forgot (1975) and The People That Time Forgot (1977), form a continuous story, At the Earth’s Core is a stand-alone.

At the Earth’s Core: FUNKY

The Point (1971)

          Among the myriad reasons why singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson casts such a long shadow, despite producing only a few genuine radio hits, is this made-for-television animated movie. Funny, imaginative, satirical, and thoughtful, The Point feels like the product of a deeply humane artist. When viewed in the context of Nilsson’s self-destructive life, which was filled with episodes of drunken caddishness, The Point reveals the immense complexity of Nilsson’s personality. He was a kind-hearted entertainer who enjoyed longtime friendships with luminaries including John Lennon and Ringo Starr, he was a sharp student of the human condition who wrote eccentric and memorable songs, and he was a violent-tempered asshole when he was plastered. Accordingly, it’s interesting to see how the various facets of Nilsson’s persona inform The Point.

          Nilsson created the “original fable” upon which the project was based, and then he collaborated on the making of the animated movie, cowriting the story and writing and producing the song score. Further, Nilsson generated a companion album. The movie and the album are slightly different, with one noteworthy variation being the spoken narration—although Nilsson does this task on the album, essentially telling the story as a set-up for his own songs, Nilsson does not narrate the movie. Dustin Hoffman, of all people, was the narrator of the original TV broadcast, but the currently available versions of The Point feature Ringo Starr’s voice.

          The Point takes place in a nameless mythical land where everything has a point, as in a sharp spire, until a little boy named Oblio is born with a round head. Society can’t decide what to do about something that doesn’t have a point, so the boy is shunned to the Pointless Forest. Eventually, Oblio comes to realize that he has a point, just not literally, so he teaches everyone in his world a lesson about tolerance and understanding. Although The Point basically repeats the same joke for 74 minutes, with myriad variations, the joke is so thematically rich—and the film’s execution is so endearing—that the picture remains interesting from start to finish.

          Fred Wolf, the principal creative force on the movie besides Nilsson, employs a simplistic drawing style, but he ensures that faces are rendered expressively. Combined with the way Oblio is portrayed as the living symbol of innocence, Wolf’s visual style ensures that The Point feels very much like the popular Peanuts animated specials of the ’60s and ’70s. (Even the subtle wit of the movie’s dialogue—including a gentle skewering of thick-headed grown-ups—is quite reminiscent of Peanuts.) Some lines of dialogue make thematic concerns too overt (like a bit about a man being asked whether he’d let his daughter marry a boy without a point), and some of Nilsson’s lyrical whimsy is obtuse. But when the movie really clicks, as with the key song “Me and My Arrow” (which is about Olbio’s travels with his dog, Arrow), The Point is as meaningful as it is melodic.

The Point: GROOVY

The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

          After making his directorial debut with the gruesome revenge picture The Last House on the Left (1972), filmmaker Wes Craven made an unlikely detour into pornography—helming an X-rated flick titled The Fireworks Woman under the alias “Abe Snake”—before returning to his comfort zone of low-budget horror with The Hills Have Eyes. Infinitely more disciplined than his first movie, but still just as nasty, The Hills Have Eyes concerns an American family that imprudently wanders into the remote desert lair of a wilderness clan comprising inbred psychopaths. In principle, the picture should be extraordinarily frightening, a spiritual cousin to Tobe Hooper’s chilling The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). However, Craven takes the opposite tack to Hooper’s disturbing verité approach, opting for a comic-book style that puts The Hills Have Eyes on a continuum with John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and George Miller’s Mad Max (1979).

          In all three movies, clever writer-directors indulge themselves by depicting the hidden worlds that monstrous people have created. Yet while Carpenter brilliantly employed minimalism and Miller wisely focused on high-octane action, Craven tries to gene-splice adventure and horror. This experiment is only somewhat effective, because parts of The Hills Have Eyes are too cartoonish to be frightening, and others are too frightening to be cartoonish. Still, because Craven eventually found his sweet spot of ironic horror with the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream franchises, it’s interesting to study The Hills Have Eyes as a marker along the path a director walked while perfecting his style.

          When the picture begins, the large Carter family travels through the Southwest in a station wagon pulling a camper. Despite warnings from a crusty gas-station attendant, patriarch Big Bob (Russ Grieve) takes his people into a remote area because he wants to explore a mine. Car trouble leaves the family stranded, making the Carters easy prey for a band of psychos led by Jupiter (James Whitworth). Skirmishes follow, eventually leading to all-out war. Jupiter’s band comprises deformed cannibals who wear animal skins and bone necklaces (even though they use modern devices including walkie-talkies), so the film asks viewers to believe these people could thrive for generations as scavengers. Similarly, like far too many horror movies, The Hills Have Eyes is predicated on One Bad Decision, namely Big Bob’s reckless trek into the boonies. Yet even with these narrative hiccups, The Hills Have Eyes is comparatively credible, since the Carters demonstrate smarts by using strategy and weapons against their assailants. The material involving Jupiter’s people is sillier, especially the excessive scenes involving a jeopardized baby. However, there’s no denying that The Hills Have Eyes possesses a certain pulpy allure.

          As for the actors, future E.T. star Dee Wallace, playing one of Big Bob’s daughters, has the most familiar face, while offbeat-looking Michael Berryman, portraying one of Jupiter’s killer kids, makes a disturbing impression. Like Craven’s The Last House on the Left, this picture became a cult hit and has enjoyed a long afterlife. Craven made a poorly regarded sequel, The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985), and a 2006 remake earned a 2007 sequel of its own.

The Hills Have Eyes: FUNKY

Lady Liberty (1971)

A comedy that’s almost completely bereft of laughs, Lady Liberty stars the venerable Sophia Loren as an Italian factory worker who travels to New York for a reunion with her fiancé, a fellow Italian who moved to America after stirring up trouble with political activism in Europe. Sophia’s character brings along a large sausage as a gift, but when U.S. Customs officials say she’s not allowed to bring the packaged meat into the country, she takes a principled stand. Then, when her fiancé proves to be a coward and a heel by bowing to American law without a fight and by telling Sophia’s character what to do, Our Heroine finds herself adrift—and at the mercy of various predatory men. Suffice to say the sausage benefits from more character development than any of the people in the movie. Lady Liberty is filled with annoying stereotypes, from the leading character (a hot-blooded signora who seems incapable of rationality) to the supporting characters (a conniving journalist, a mama’s-boy policeman, an opportunistic politician, etc.). Much of the film’s comedy comprises scenes of Loren yelling at people or throwing food at them, and the film’s would-be romantic lead, William Devane, plays such a creep that watching him talk Loren into bed is enough to make the skin crawl. Worse, Lady Liberty is so dissonant that there’s even a joke about the Devane character’s kids holding razors to their wrists and threatening to commit suicide. From start to finish, director Mario Monicelli and his collaborators seem unsure about what sort of film they’re trying to make. At various times, Lady Liberty traffics in feminist propaganda, political satire, romantic musicality, and slapstick. Yet not one of these elements is executed well. Further, the movie needlessly portrays early-’70s New York as being populated solely by narcissistic scumbags. Even the character whom a young Susan Sarandon portrays in one scene is nasty and shrill. Had Loren managed to rise above the fray with effortless charm, Lady Liberty would have been moderately watchable. Alas, that’s not the case—she makes her character seem so impulsive, judgmental, and unhinged that one strains to imagine how any of this looked good on paper.

Lady Liberty: LAME

Go Tell the Spartans (1978)

          Although precious few fiction films were made about the Vietnam War while it was still raging, the late ’70s produced a number of thoughtful pictures about the war’s history, impact, and legacy. Yet not all such movies were created equal. Compared to the other 1978 releases Coming Home and The Deer Hunter, for instance, Go Tell the Spartans feels old-fashioned, stylized, and even obsolete. After all, the picture is set in 1964, when U.S. involvement in Indochina was still limited to “military advisors,” so the whole film unfolds as a warning about the dangers and pointlessness of an expanded American role. Had this picture been made in the late ’60s, when the underlying material originated—Daniel Ford’s novel Incident at Muc Wa was published in 1967—Go Tell the Spartans could have been politically incendiary. Arriving three years after the end of the Vietnam War, the picture is elegiac but also something of an unnecessary told-ya-so lecture. This is not to say that Go Tell the Spartans is a weak picture. Quite to the contrary, it’s a brisk and powerful tragedy laced with dark humor and deep pathos. But timing is everything, and the moment for Go Tell the Spartans to influence public opinion passed long before the film was made.

          In any event, Burt Lancaster stars as Major Asa Barker, a lifelong Army man tasked with supervising military advisors in a violent section of South Vietnam. Barker is a cigar-chomping cynic who hates authority, and Lancaster invests the role with an endearing stripe of amused world-weariness. When Barker is ordered to establish a garrison around a seemingly insignificant village called Muc Wa, he sends a group of losers and misfits under the command of inexperienced Lieutenant Hamilton (Joe Unger). Also in the Muc Wa detachment are Sgt. Obleonowski (Johathan Goldsmith), an experienced NCO who’s struggling with battle fatigue, and Corporal Courcey (Craig Wasson), a principled draftee whose naïveté about military conflict fascinates Barker. The soldiers’ tenure in Muc Wa is fraught with unexpected hardships, and it soon becomes clear the village is dead center in the path of a massive North Vietnamese invasion force. Thus, the Army’s entanglement in Muc Wa becomes a metaphor representing America’s involvement in Vietnam—an unwinnable fight against an unstoppable enemy in unfamiliar terrain.

          Were it not for the script’s plentiful jokes, many of which Lancaster delivers with sublime charm, Go Tell the Spartans would feel impossibly schematic and strident. Further, much of the film is TV-sized instead of feature-sized, with director Ted Post obviously inhibited by a tight budget. Happily, interesting performances compensates for the meager production values: In addition to character actors David Clennon, Clyde Kusatsu, James Hong, and Dolph Sweet (all of whom deliver their usual crisp work), supporting players including Goldsmith, Watson, and Marc Singer contribute impassioned portrayals that underscore the film’s theme of war’s terrible human cost.

Go Tell the Spartans: GROOVY

Firehouse (1973)

          Interesting only because of its cast, this brisk TV movie about racial tensions in a Los Angeles firefighting company was intended as the pilot for a series, but most of the name-brand actors disappeared between the initial telefilm and the first weekly episode, which didn’t air until a year after the pilot movie’s debut. Richard Roundtree, still riding high on the success of Shaft (1971) and its sequels, stars as Shelly Forsythe, an African-American firefighter who is tired of facing racism at work, to say nothing of accusations from civilians of being an Uncle Tom. Before Shelly enters the picture, however, viewers are introduced to an all-white company whose senior officer, Spike Ryerson (Vince Edwards), blames the recent death of his best friend on an at-large black arsonist. Thus, when Shelly is assigned to take the dead fireman’s place, Spike and his cronies haze the new arrival terribly. Worse, when one of the firemen witnesses Shelly allowing a black suspect to leave the scene of a crime, Spike presumes that Shelly is unwilling to help capture black crooks. Meanwhile, Shelly navigates the difficulties of his marriage to Michelle (Sheila Frazier), who wants him to succeed so they can improve their standard of living.

          All of this is standard stuff. Furthermore, many scenes in Firehouse look chintzy because the producers interspersed grainy newsreel footage instead of staging full-scale fire scenes. Yet despite the shallow writing and tacky production values, Firehouse is basically watchable thanks to the acting. Roundtree is excellent, proving once again that Hollywood missed a great opportunity by failing to place him in better projects; his mixture of charm and righteous indignation works well. Frazier is good, too, blending sexiness and strength. And while Edwards merely performs his role adequately, familiar actors in smaller parts add texture. Val Avery gives a salty turn as the company’s short-tempered cook, Andrew Duggan is authoritative as the company’s progressive-minded captain, Richard Jaeckel does solid work as one of Spike’s cohorts, and Michael Lerner appears fleetingly as a liberal civilian working with the fire company. (Paul Le Mat lingers on the fringes of the movie, as well.) Of these performers, only Jaeckel stayed on for the Firehouse series, which ran for a few months in 1974.

Firehouse: FUNKY

Angels Hard as They Come (1971)

          Long before he made humanistic dramas and thrillers for major studios, Jonathan Demme paid his dues by generating exploitation films for Roger Corman’s B-movie factory. Demme’s tenure at New World Pictures began with this biker flick, which has some admirable moments but doesn’t make a lasting impression. Scott Glenn, at his most stoic and sullen, stars as Long John, leader of a small gang of drug-dealing cyclists. After escaping cops during an interrupted transaction, Long John and his pals encounter members of another biker gang at a gas station. The second gang has taken up residence in an Old West ghost town, where they’re partying with a group of hippies, so Long John and his buddies are invited to join the fun. Soon after the various factions converge, Long John gets into a heavy rap session with hippie chick Astrid (Gilda Texter). She pushes him to explain why bikers are so violent, and he replies that anyone who flouts society’s rules invites conflict. “Yeah, I dig your problem,” Astrid says, “but I don’t think your solution is right.” “Shit,” Long John says, “What works is what’s right.” In fleeting moments like this one, Angels Hard as They Come almost becomes a thoughtful referendum on the counterculture.

          Alas, Demme (who cowrote and produced the picture) and Joe Viola (who cowrote and directed) can’t linger too long on philosophy. This being a biker flick, the main items on the menu are debauchery and violence. Accordingly, Demme and Viola contrive an iffy plot revolving around the rape and murder of a hippie chick. Eventually, Long John is accused of the killing and subjected to kangaroo-court justice at the hands of General (Charles Dierkop), the demented leader of the opposing biker gang. None of this quite works, since it’s never clear why the bikers are so upset a stranger was killed, or what the General hopes to achieve by incriminating Long John. Plus, the story simply runs out of gas at some point, looping through repetitive scenes of boozing and brawling. That said, Angels Hard as They Come delivers most of the favorite tropes associated with its genre—crazies referring to each other by colorful nicknames (“Axe,” “Juicer,” “Lucifer,” etc.), nasty fight scenes involving broken bottles and other found-object weapons, zonked-out chicks dancing topless on bars, and so on. A young Gary Busey is the mix, too, though he’s rather improbably cast as a pacifist hippie instead of a scary biker.

Angels Hard as They Come: FUNKY

Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

          The image of a child committing murder is evergreen in horror cinema, and with good reason—few visual juxtapositions better encapsulate the confluence of innocence and menace that powers the best fright flicks. Accordingly, it’s peculiar that Alfred Sole, the director/cowriter/coproducer of Alice, Sweet Alice, hedges his bets regarding the use of this image. Alice, Sweet Alice is primarily about a disturbed 12-year-old who becomes a murder suspect when her little sister is killed, but Sole turns the plot in such a way that the extent of the title character’s misdeeds becomes ambiguous. It’s as if Sole wanted the cheap thrill of presenting a preteen with homicidal intent, but lacked the conviction to deliver on the premise. Moreover, the script is confusing, and the performances range from ridiculous to subtle. As such, Alice, Sweet Alice is merely a trifle with some good atmosphere, a few jolts, a measure of visual style, and plenty of disquieting implications.

          This picture was originally titled Communion, and later re-released as Alice, Sweet Alice (in 1978, when the film found its widest audience) and as Holy Terror (in 1981). By any name, the movie is noteworthy for containing the acting debut of juvenile model Brooke Shields—even though she’s in and out of the story very quickly.

          Set in 1960s New Jersey, Alice, Sweet Alice concerns a working-class single mother, Catherine (Linda Miller), who is raising two daughters, saintly 9-year-old Karen (Shields) and sinister 12-year-old Alice (Paula Sheppard). Alice is a weirdo who hangs out in the basement of her apartment building, trapping insects in jars and wearing creepy masks. One day, someone wearing a mask like the one Alice owns kills Karen, triggering a police investigation. Catherine refuses to consider Alice a suspect, but Catherine’s bitchy sister, Annie (Jane Lowry), thinks otherwise. Then someone wearing a similar mask attacks Annie, so police apprehend Alice. Yet things get complicated when another crime occurs while Alice is in custody. The whole is-she-or-isn’t-she contrivance is problematic, because this forces Sole to keep Alice offscreen for long periods, during which he lingers on tedious investigation scenes.

          Nonetheless, because generating visceral excitement the main priority in any horror movie, Alice, Sweet Alice gets decent marks for delivering a number of suspenseful scenes. Plus, Sheppard is genuinely eerie, Lowry gives an enjoyably campy performance filled with wide-eyed overacting, and Miller is elegantly beautiful. And for those who enjoy parsing such things, the film is deeply infused with imagery and themes related to Catholicism.

Alice, Sweet Alice: FUNKY

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

          Exquisitely simple and memorably sad, this culture-clash melodrama was an international breakthrough for prolific and provocative German writer-director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. One of two significant films inspired by the classic Hollywood tearjerker All That Heaven Allows (1955)—the other being Todd Haynes’ beautiful Far from Heaven (2002)—this picture explores the relationship between a middle-aged German woman and a young Moroccan laborer. Exploring themes of duplicity, hypocrisy, ignorance, loneliness, prejudice, and sexuality, Fassbinder’s movie offers a stark vision of desperate souls searching for connection in an unkind world. As the epigraph that appears at the beginning of the movie says, with typical Teutonic flair, “Happiness Is Not Always Fun.”

          In a bar one night, Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) hangs out with fellow Moroccan immigrants, as well as slatternly German barmaids, because getting drunk and having sex are his only reprieves from a life of hard work and incessant racism. He lives in Germany because he can’t find employment in Morocco, but he’s either exploited or resented by nearly everyone he meets in Germany. That is, until he encounters Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a middle-aged and overweight cleaning lady who enters the bar one evening. Sensing a kindred lost soul, Ali asks Emmi to dance, striking up a long conversation that eventually continues in Emmi’s home—and Emmi’s bed. Surprised but delighted by her new romance, Emmi slowly breaks the news to her coworkers, neighbors, and relatives, all of whom shun her like she’s caught a disease. Meanwhile, Ali moves into Emmi’s apartment and the two become engaged. Although Ali harbors traces of his old melancholy personality, he brightens when he sees how happy he makes Emmi. Yet Emmi realizes she can’t live without all the people who’ve abandoned her, so domestic friction emerges—notwithstanding Ali’s wise admonition that fear is cancerous.

          Quickly paced and shot in a minimalistic style, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul presents its offbeat story without adornment. (For instance, there’s virtually no music except for tunes playing on jukeboxes and radios.) Fassbinder also gets in and out of scenes without ceremony, often relying on fade-outs and fade-ins. The pared-down style suits the material perfectly, keeping the focus on subtleties of performance. Mira and ben Salem are heartbreaking in different ways, because she plays a woman trapped by her worldliness and he plays a man inhibited by his naïveté. (Fassbinder’s affection for ben Salem is evident in lingering nude shots of the actor.) Supporting players incarnate various shades of intolerance effectively, with Fassbinder playing Emmi’s thuggish son-in-law. A deeply humane film that respects its audience too much to provide the release of a completely happy ending, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is poetic without being pretentious, and tragic without being treacly.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: GROOVY

Bizarre (1970)

          This UK oddity was original titled Secrets of Sex, and then given the more genteel moniker Bizarre (alternately, Tales of the Bizarre) for its American release. Yet no title could truly encapsulate the anything-goes strangeness of the picture, which comprises several sexual stories held together by interstitial bits during which a mummy delivers snotty commentary about the never-ending battle of the sexes. Yes, a mummy. Why, you ask? Does it really matter? Produced and directed by one Anthony Balch, Bizarre opens with a buxom blonde woman and two male studs, all nude, dancing in a circle while occupying what appears to be the hay loft of a barn. Then a narrator introduces the first narrative vignette, something about a judge in a Far East setting burying a trunk that may or may not contain his wife’s lover.

          Next, the mummy makes his first entrance, looking directly at the camera—although his features are completely obscured by dusty ribbons—and blathering while the film cuts back and forth between the mummy and a woman peeling off her head-to-toe leather outfit. Once she’s shown her wares, the picture cuts to an interminable sequence comprising static shots of various attractive men and women, some clothed and some not, while the narrator repeatedly says, “Imagine you were making love to this girl. Imagine you were making love to this boy.” This goes on and on forever while the men and women do things like playing with guns and—wait for it—watering houseplants.

          Continuing down his road to nowhere, Bizarre cuts to a trick shot of several attractive women standing in a line while optical dissolves magically erase all of their clothes except panties. Eventually, offscreen people throw rotten fruit at the topless babes, and then several studs show up to poke the babes with their guns—literally, as in automatic rifles. Please note that the preceding merely describes the first 20 minutes of the movie. At some point, Balch and his co-conspirators transition from random nudie shots to extended narrative sequences, but the movie wobbles between comic and horrific stories, resulting in a bewildering mess. The “best” episode is probably the one in which a demented female photographer tortures a male model by making him pose with his crotch positioned precariously over a giant blade until the inevitable happens. At least that episode has a point, however gruesome. The rest of the movie includes everything from outright stupidity (something about a dinosaur spying on a pedophile in a public park) to unintelligible nonsense (a sex scene juxtaposed with voiceover about English gardens).

          Ultimately, all of this is quite boring—even “Bedroom Beauties of 1929,” a comparatively good-natured scene that spoofs vintage stag films. Like most badly made sexploitation pictures, Bizarre fails as erotica, since the parade of breasts quickly loses it novelty. (Plus, the overall context of the movie is so exploitive as to be distasteful.) And since Bizarre also fails as commentary, comedy, and/or whatever else Balch had in mind, the whole enterprise feels quite unnecessary. Thus, the only viewers likely to derive any enjoyment from Bizarre are those who are amused by cinematic misfires, of which Bizarre is most certainly an example.

Bizarre: FREAKY

Gulliver’s Travels (1977)

          Interesting mostly for its mixture of animation and live action, this lightweight adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s classic fantasy novel should actually be titled Gulliver’s Travel, singular, since the only adventure depicted onscreen involves the title character’s time in the land of Lilliput, which is inhabited by miniscule people. Since the tale is familiar to most audiences, suffice to say that gigantic and good-hearted Gulliver is perceived by the tiny Liliputians as a god, a hero, a monster, and a political pawn while Swift cycles through various elements of satire and whimsy. Flesh-and-blood Richard Harris plays Gulliver while cartoons are used to represent the diminutive persons with whom Gulliver interacts. Meanwhile, backgrounds and props are a mixture of live-action and cartoons. Yet the meshing of these elements is far from seamless.

          Gulliver’s Travels was made in the days before dimensional shading was a regular feature of mainstream animation, so the hand-drawn characters feel flat, even during scenes when only animated characters are onscreen. Occasionally, the filmmakers achieve a decent effect—for instance, a nighttime scene during which silhouetted cartoon characters drag a giant cart bearing live-action Harris—but for the most part, the whole enterprise looks cheap and unfinished. (This is especially true of fully animated scenes, which suffer from limited animation and unimaginative character design.) The integration of a sticky-sweet song score is equally problematic. Following a brief prologue in England, which is shot entirely live-action, the movie transitions to a title sequence featuring a chirpy song performed by a chorus. Then, later, tunes appear at random intervals, culminating with the predictable upbeat number that Gulliver sings while beguiled by Liliput’s charms. As such, Gulliver’s Travels is not a proper musical, since songs do not drive the plot.

          The only quasi-impressive scene in Gulliver’s Travels is the live-action storm sequence during which Gulliver gets caught in a shipwreck, because director Peter Hunt and his team nimbly combine shots of a main-deck set getting besieged by giant cascades of water with detailed miniature shots of a ship hitting rocks amid a turbulent sea. Since Gulliver’s Travels was made for children, however, it’s useful to concede that some young viewers might delight in shots of Gulliver tied to a beach in Liliput, or of Gulliver stomping through the streets of a Liiputian city like a rampaging giant. And, of course, the pacifist themes of the screenplay are admirable. Still, even with Harris delivering an endearingly restrained performance, nothing in this movie truly dazzles.

Gulliver’s Travels: FUNKY

The Conformist (1970)

          Every so often, a movie defeats me. In some cases, I’m unable to parse the mysteries of a film because the project is so obtuse that it exists outside anything I recognize as reality. (Here’s looking at you, Performance.) In other cases, however, I’m simply not sophisticated enough to receive the message the picture is sending. And so it goes with Bernardo Bertolucci’s political thriller The Conformist. On a textural level, I can say without hesitation that the film is exquisite. Working with frequent collaborator Vittorio Storaro, one of the true magicians of color cinematography, Bertolucci creates one memorable image after another. Using angles, color, framing, movement, production design, and special relationships with masterful precision, the filmmakers present 1930s and 1940s Europe as a living metaphor representing the spread of fascism.

          As the title character moves through his life before and during World War II, he tries to find a niche for himself inside the sleek surfaces of “normal” society, little suspecting that in the process of shaving off his “abnormal” edges, he is sacrificing his soul. Or something like that. You see, the problem is that I felt totally confused within the first five minutes of The Conformist, and never found any true connection with the movie beyond appreciating its beauty on a purely aesthetic level. Apparently, it takes a better man than me to decipher lines of dialogue like the following: “Yes, they would mistake for reality the shadow of reality.” Non capisco, il mio amico.

          Therefore, you might ask, why have I rated The Conformist highly, given my inability to penetrate its storyline? Well, in deference to the film’s reputation and to the unmistakable craftsmanship with which it was made, I’m comfortable heaping praise on what the movie might be—in other words, if The Conformist is half as dense and provocative and symbolic as I suspect, then it’s certainly among the most accomplished and challenging films of its era. Call it benefit of the doubt.

          Based on outside research more than pulling clues from the actual movie, I gather the storyline follows Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a social striver enlisted by a secretive organization to perform an assassination. On his way to the murder, Marcello flashes back through his life, recalling events that brought him to the current circumstances. He recalls a childhood encounter in which he was molested by an adult whom he then shot. He recalls the opportunistic nature of his marriage to a socially well-positioned woman. He recalls his friendship with a blind political activist. He recalls an affair with a married woman (played by the glamorous Dominique Sanda). And in one moment that I actually did understand while watching The Conformist, Marcello tries to confess his sins to a priest—as a condition of marriage—only to discover that the priest is more upset about Marcello having been with a man than about Marcello having committed murder. That particular scene, so chilly and incisive and sad, emboldens me to suggest that The Conformist contains worlds of meaning I was not able to grasp. Or maybe not. If nothing else, The Conformist is the world’s best cinematographer’s reel, because Storaro renders visual miracles during nearly every shot.

The Conformist: GROOVY