1980 Week: The American Success Company

          Writer-director William Richert displayed tremendous promise with his first fiction feature, Winter Kills (1979), a strange conspiracy thriller boasting an incredible cast and a lush look. Although the movie has as many problems as it does virtues, the style and verve of the piece seemed to bode well for Richert’s subsequent efforts. Alas, the filmmaker’s sophomore picture repeated nearly everything that was wrong with his debut while replicating virtually nothing that was right. Originally released in 1980 as The American Success Company but now primarily available in a director-approved recut version from 1983 more succinctly titled Success, the picture follows the misadventures of Harry (Jeff Bridges), a dorky young man who secures a comfortable life by marrying beautiful but cold Sarah (Belinda Bauer), the daughter of Mr. Elliott (Ned Beatty). Mr. Elliot runs the American Success Company, a doppelganger for American Express, so even though Mr. Elliot despises Harry, he ensures that Harry gets cushy executive jobs. Tired of being a doormat for his abusive father-in-law and his withholding wife, Harry assumes a new secondary identity as “Mack,” a flashy mobster who dresses in garish clothes, speaks in the Bogart/Cagney/Robinson mode, and walks with a cane. While pretending to be “Mack,” Harry purchases regular appointments with a sophisticated hooker, Corinne (Bianca Jagger), in order to improve his lovemaking. Concurrently, he contrives a scheme to embezzle money from his employer.

          As written by Richert and B-movie icon Larry Cohen, the script never explains Harry’s methods or motives in a satisfactory fashion, and the tone of the piece is awkward. Sometimes Richert goes for broad comedy and fails—the most effective running joke involves premature ejaculation—and sometimes Richert goes for high-minded satire, even though he misses that mark, as well. (In one scene, Harry, posing as “Mack,” proposes selling credit cards to an expanding market—little kids.) Beatty, Jagger, and John Glover give solid turns, benefiting from consistently written characterizations, but the leading performances by Bridges and Bauer are disastrous. Bridges clearly didn’t know whether he was playing a boob or a rake, and Bauer wobbles between incarnating a dolt and a shrew. Almost nothing works in The American Success Company, even with the wall-to-wall exposition of the 1983 version’s voiceover. Unsurprisingly, it took Richert years to score his next feature-directing gig, the middling teen-sex comedy A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988). A decade after that, he helmed his last feature to date, an obscure 1998 version of The Man in the Iron Mask.

The American Success Company: LAME

1980 Week: The Tin Drum

          Allegorical, profane, ridiculous, and surreal, The Tin Drum describes the bizarre life of a character who magically stunts his own physical growth at the age of three because he finds the world of adults repulsive, then becomes first a medical curiosity and later a freak-show attraction who travels with a group of performing dwarves. All of this material is set against the backdrop of the Third Reich’s rise to power, because The Tin Drum—adapted from the Günter Grass novel of the same name—is about politics as much as it’s about childhood, disappointment, fantasy, and other themes. Lavishly produced and sprawling across a 142-minute running time (never mind the latter-day director’s cut that runs even longer), The Tin Drum is challenging at best, impenetrable at worst. It’s a marvel that the picture earned widespread acclaim, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film of 1980 and the Palme d’Or at the previous year’s Cannes Film Festival, because some vignettes contain the sort of grotesque weirdness that one typically associates with, say, the films of David Lynch.

          For instance, what is there to make of the elaborate birth scene that begins with shots of a fully grown boy flopping around a special-effects vision of his mother’s womb, and then continues with a roller-coaster-style POV shot hurtling from the womb, through the walls of a mother’s vagina, and into the waiting hands of a kindly doctor? Or how about the gleefully disgusting sequence in which the protagonist’s father walks along a shoreline and discovers a decapitated horse’s head that’s filled with squirming eels? Just for good measure, the protagonist’s mother stands nearby, vomiting onscreen as the father happily extracts eels through the horse’s mouth and eye sockets, and in the next scene, the father decapitates the live eels before cooking and eating them.

          Anyway, the title refers to a beloved toy that the story’s hero, Oskar, is given on his fateful third birthday. He pounds the drum day and night, even as he inevitably transitions from childhood to adolescence and adulthood. Through actions, dialogue, and voiceover narration, Oskar conveys contempt for the behavior of “normal” Germans, as represented by his father’s enthusiastic participation in the Nazi Party and his mother’s affair with her husband’s brother. Oskar searches in vain for like-minded individuals until he meets the wise, middle-aged dwarf who runs the performance troupe; sensing Oskar’s specialness, the showman makes an attraction out of Oskar’s drum-playing as well as Oskar’s peculiar superpower, the ability to break glass simply by shrieking.

          From start to finish, The Tin Drum is loaded with heaviosity, metaphor, satire, and symbolism, so admirers and scholars can undoubtedly spend inordinate amounts of time unpacking the implications of the film. I must confess that I’m not among the film’s admirers, and whether I’m a scholar is for others to say, so I will instead remark that my attempt to consume the picture as pure narrative was not enjoyable. The movie is so brisk and strange that it commands attention, but the absence of accessibility and warmth created problematic opacity, at least for this viewer. Given that the picture is shot through with betrayal, despair, and tragedy, I’m comfortable acknowledging that The Tin Drum represents the sophisticated delivery of worthy literary material. As to what any of it means, or why the experience of watching the picture should be deemed edifying, I’m at a loss. Like those eels the protagonist’s father extracts from a rotting and waterlogged carcass, this movie is an acquired taste.

The Tin Drum: FREAKY

1980 Week: Inside Moves

          Although he’s best known for making such big-canvas escapist fare as Superman (1978) and Lethal Weapon (1987), Richard Donner has directed a couple of smaller movies over the years, generally to disappointing commercial and critical results. However, one of these intimate pictures, the offbeat redemption saga Inside Moves, is among the most affecting things Donner has ever made. A story about emotionally and physically handicapped individuals bonding in a seedy part of Oakland, California, the picture boasts playful humor, sensitive performances, and that most durable of themes: the triumph of the human spirit. Yes, Inside Moves is manipulative, saccharine, and unbelievable. For those wiling to follow where the film leads, however, it’s also quite touching.

          The story opens with the sort of spectacle for which Donner is deservedly famous: Depressed everyman Roary (John Savage) ascends to a top floor in a skyscraper, climbs out a window, jumps, and falls in slow motion until he crashes into a car with a horrible cacophony of broken bones and broken glass. Surviving the suicide attempt with major injuries, Roary takes a new path toward self-destruction, gravitating to a dive called Max’s Bar so he can drink himself into oblivion. The unexpected friendships that Roary forms at Max’s bring him back to life. Among others, Roary connects with Jerry (David Morse), the gentle-giant bartender whose promising basketball career was derailed by a bum leg, and Stinky (Bert Remsen), the amiable senior who participates in the bar’s ongoing card game event though he’s blind. Roary also begins a romance with Louise (Diana Scarwid), a barfly with personal demons of her own.

          Based on a novel by Todd Walton and written for the screen by the team of Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson, whose scripts together were distinguished by creaky plots and gentle character-driven humor, Inside Moves pivots on a highly improbable plot point: Charitable friends and innovative doctors fix Jerry’s leg, allowing him to resume his aborted basketball career. Thereafter, the question of the piece becomes whether Jerry will abandon the colorful characters who supported him when he was down, or whether he’ll join the rest of society in shunning “cripples.”

          Even though the story is absurdly contrived, the moment-to-moment flow of the movie is compelling. Morse gives the picture its heart, essaying a man who needs to reconcile ambition with compassion, while Scarwid, in an Oscar-nominated performance, incarnates a woman struggling to fix a damaged self-image. Savage is deeply present in every one of his scenes, though his performance is riddled with so many Method-actor tics that some viewers will find him more mannered than sympathetic; that said, his intensity never wavers, which helps sell the more bogus aspects of the narrative. As for Donner, he occasionally opts for easy uplift with pithy punchlines and tacky visual crescendos, but, generally speaking, he employs his skill for supervising loose and occasionally improvised acting, fusing the denizens of Max’s Bar into an appealing community. It’s also worth noting that Inside Moves has many fans within the disabled community. Given the picture’s subject matter, that seal of approval matters. 

Inside Moves: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Private Eyes

For all their achievements in other contexts, Tim Conway and Don Knotts delivered consistently disappointing results in the films they made together, combining dimwitted physical comedy, insipid verbal gags, and truly stupid characterizations into tiresome cinematic experiences. Sure, the Apple Dumpling Gang flicks have a certain goofball charm, but Conway and Knotts are confined to supporting roles. The duo’s final major collaboration, The Private Eyes, reveals why putting Conway and Knotts front and center was unwise. Both actors tend toward bug-eyed reaction shots, overly long pauses (designed, one fears, for anticipated waves of laughter), and voluminous amounts of bumbling. If watching desperate comics pretend to be idiots is your idea of a good time, The Private Eyes might amuse you. If not, it’s more likely to sap your will to live. Something of a riff on Sherlock Holmes, the picture is set in England, with Conway and Knotts playing American investigators who work for Scotland Yard. When a woman is killed at a private estate, the investigators snoop around the mansion, encountering cobwebs and secret passageways and the like, while trying to determine which of the victims' avaricious enemies was responsible for the murder. A typically moronic running joke involves the investigators using carrier pigeons to send messages, throwing the pigeons through windows amid much crashing of glass. There's also juvenile gross-out dialogue, on the order of, “That buzzard pus is backing up on me!” and “You ever have pudding with cat hair in it?” Some young viewers bonded with this movie at the right age, so it’s not as if The Private Eyes lacks advocates. Moreover, the old-fashioned production values recall Universal’s horror movies of the ’30s and ’40s, which is moderately appealing. But if the best one can say about a comedy is that it has a enjoyably musty look, that tells you what you need to know.

The Private Eyes: LAME

1980 Week: Stardust Memories

          Woody Allen’s myriad remarks over the years that Stardust Memories is not an autobiographical movie are at least slightly disingenuous, the understandable backpedaling of a popular artist who was perceived as slighting his fan base. After all, Allen plays Sandy Bates, a neurotic comedy-movie auteur enduring an existential crisis after audiences turn on him for experimenting with drama. Any resemblance to Allen, who followed the crowd-pleasing Annie Hall (1976) with the dour chamber piece Interiors (1977), is purely coincidental. Yeah, right. Allen’s disclaimers notwithstanding, Stardust Memories is an extraordinary exercise in public self-examination. Questioning the purpose of filmmaking and the value of humor in world seemingly zooming toward destruction, Stardust Memories skillfully integrates jokes, melodrama, romance, and what might be called spirituality. (One must tread lightly there, given Allen’s endless proclamations of atheism.)

          Even the rapturous black-and-white images of Stardust Memories have a metatextual kick, since audiences embraced the monochromatic cinematography of Allen’s previous film, Manhattan (1979), broadly seen as his return to comedic form following the failure of Interiors. Like so many other things in Stardust Memories, the repetition of a trope from a prior film defines Allen as an artist not only willing but eager to wrestle with the potentialities of tropes by applying them to varying forms of subject matter. If black-and-white images mean such-and-such in X context, what do they mean in Y context? It’s all about digging deeper and asking more problematic questions. Whereas Allen’s beloved “early, funny” movies mostly eschew cinematic style in favor of gags and narrative speed, Stardust Memories represents the apex of an evolution that began with Annie Hall. While life itself is ultimately Allen’s main subject, with Stardust Memories he fully integrates the complications of his own reputation into his repertoire, and he does so at the very same career moment when he assumes full command of cinema as a storytelling medium.

          While all this critical-studies significance is a lot of weight to drop onto Stardust Memories’ shoulders, the movie can bear the burden.
          Filled with insights and ruminations and witticisms, it’s a singularly alive piece of filmmaking. Once again, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis create striking imagery, and once again, Allen pulls terrific work from an eclectic cast. (Watch for Sharon Stone, making her movie debut, in the opening scene.) Presented in a somewhat freeform style with more than a few touches of classic European arthouse cinema, Stardust Memories explores the fictional Sandy Bates’ life from myriad perspectives. Even as he juggles romances with challenging Daisy (Jessica Harper) and comforting Isobel (Marie-Christine Berrault), Sandy contemplates ghosts from his relationship with a troubled woman named Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling). More pointedly—since Allen spun a similar romantic web in Manhattan—the Sandy character allows Allen to ask what audiences expect from him, and why audiences resist change in his persona. In the picture’s most famous scene, aliens from outer space remind Sandy that his greatest gift is being able to make people laugh, and that humor may well contribute more to the human experience than Bergman-esque ennui.

          Left unresolved, of course, is the question of whether Sandy (or Allen, for that matter) can reconcile his clashing artistic impulses. Witness the incredible highs and lows of Allen’s subsequent output, wherein he has tried to merge what he does well with what he simply wants to do well. Like Bob Fosse’s extraordinary All That Jazz (1979), Stardust Memories is part performance review and part psychoanalysis. Not everything in Stardust Memories works, since Allen periodically succumbs to the very pretentiousness that disgruntled fans perceived in Interiors, but Stardust Memories is an essential chapter of the Woody Allen story. It’s also among the nerviest statements a popular American artist has ever made, a declaration of independence from expectations and preconceptions.

Stardust Memories: GROOVY

1980 Week: Gloria

          Indie-cinema godhead John Cassavetes initially earned fame as an actor in mainstream films, and he spent most of his life parachuting back into Hollywood for paycheck acting gigs even as his pursued his real passion, writing and directing esoteric films exploring dark corners of the human psyche. The two parts of Cassavetes’ cinematic identity converged in Gloria, the most commercially oriented movie that Cassavetes directed, with the exception of two studio pictures he made in the ’60s before finding his arthouse groove with Faces (1968) and Husbands (1970). Starring Cassavetes’ wife and muse, Gena Rowlands, Gloria is a straightforward crime picture with a touch of Hollywood sentimentality—exactly the sort of formulaic schmaltz that Cassavetes generally avoided. Even for an iconoclast, the possibility of reaching a bigger audience (and scoring a financial windfall) must have been impossible to resist. Nonetheless, it’s significant to observe that after Gloria, Cassavetes transitioned back to making art films until his death in 1989. Given its mediocrity, Gloria could not have been the most edifying of experiences.

          The movie opens in the Bronx, where a frantic Latina runs home to her apartment, realizing she’s being chased. Jeri (Julie Carmen) is married to Jack (Buck Henry), a mob accountant-turned-informant, so Jeri and Jack both realize hitmen are on the way to wipe out the couple and their two kids. When Jeri’s friend and neighbor, middle-aged former gang moll Gloria (Rowlands), stops by for a visit, Jeri explains the situation and asks Gloria to hide the kids until after the shooting stops. Gloria reluctantly agrees, but only preteen Phil (John Adames) leaves with her, since his sister elects to die with her parents. Gloria takes Phil to her apartment and listens in horror to gunfire down the hall, then sneaks Phil out of the building and becomes a fugitive—because Jack entrusted his young son with a book containing incriminating facts and figures. Before long, Gloria finds herself yanking her life’s savings from a safe-deposit box and escorting Phil around the country while she works connections with old mob buddies in order to revoke the hit on Phil. The predictable contrivance of the movie is that the more time she spends with Phil, the more she warms to the idea of being the boy’s surrogate mother.

          Because it sprawls across a fleshy 121 minutes and because costar Adames’ performance is quite terrible, Gloria doesn’t work as a zippy little thriller; instead, it’s a weird amalgam of pulp trash and thoughtful storytelling. Some fine things occur along the way, and Rowlands believably incarnates a seen-it-all broad surprised by the emergence of long-suppressed compassion. (Rowlands earned Golden Globe and Oscar nominations for her performance.) As for the movie around her, it’s perplexing. Cassavetes populates scenes with his customary mix of grotesques and oddballs, employing improvisational techniques and nonactors to increase the movie’s realism. Seeing as how the storyline is inherently contrived, the imposition of these indie-cinema tropes feels awkward and unnecessary. Moreover, there’s a disconnect between the meditative nature of the movie and the oppressive noise of Bill Conti’s score. The Rocky composer, never known for his subtlety, drenches action scenes with exciting themes and uses noodly jazz riffs to energize sleepier stretches.
          FYI, Sharon Stone stars in a lifeless 1999 remake, also titled Gloria. Inexplicably, Sidney Lumet directed.

Gloria: FUNKY

1980 Week: Willie & Phil

          Given his well-known admiration for the work of Ingmar Bergman, filmmaker Woody Allen left himself open for easy criticism when he made the Bergman-esque psychodrama Interiors (1978), which many people initially dismissed as a weak homage to the work of a master. Time has revealed the depth of that film, though Allen’s debt to Bergman is inescapable when watching Interiors. Paul Mazursky’s romantic dramedy Willie & Phil has some interesting parallels to Interiors, though the indifference that greeted Willie & Phil during its initial release has not yet given way to critical rediscovery.

          Recycling the basic plot elements from François Truffaut’s beloved French New Wave film Jules and Jim (1962), Willie & Phil represents Mazursky’s sexual satire at its least credible. The characterizations have signs of life, but all three leading actors give underwhelming performances, and the echoes of Truffaut’s style are as affected as the forced insertion of ’70s spirituality into the storyline. It’s not as if Mazursky’s considerable powers failed him here, because some scenes have that special immediacy that distinguishes Mazursky’s best work. As a total experience, however, Willie & Phil is forgettable.
          Like Jules and Jim, this picture tracks the way two men become close friends, only to see their bond challenged by the arrival of a woman whom both men find irresistible. The men are Phil D’Amico (Ray Sharkey), a streetwise photographer with a suffocating overabundance of self-confidence, and Willie Kaufman (Michael Ontkean), a high-school teacher with a debilitating shortage of personal direction. They meet in 1960s New York at a screening of a Truffaut movie (wink, wink), then bond over their mutual desire to avoid the Vietnam-era draft. Soon they encounter Jeannette Sutherland (Margot Kidder), a freespirited beauty recently relocated from her home state of Kentucky to Greenwich Village. When she has money trouble, Willie says she can move in with him, and she and Willie become lovers. Thereafter, the story becomes an episodic litany of ’60s and ’70s signifiers. The friends drop acid and have a threesome. Willie gets into yoga. Jeannette joins the film industry. Phil transitions from shooting pictures to making commercials, so he relocates to California around the time Jeannette and Willie get married and have a child together. Later, when Willie’s spiritual questing takes him out of the country, Jeannette moves to California and stays with Phil. And so on.

          About the only thing that gives Willie & Phil shape is the dense narration track, performed by Mazursky and peppered with remarks along the lines of “10 months later, Willie was confused again.” The film is never difficult to follow, but it’s often difficult to enjoy, not because the characters are unpleasant—they’re all fragile in a relatable way—but because the characters and their experiences are so typical of the hippie era. Although Mazursky delivers the story with his customary intelligence and skill, he never defines Willie & Phil as a necessary artistic expansion of Jules and Jim, and he never proves that his characters merit this level of attention.

Willie & Phil: FUNKY

1980 Week: Heart Beat

          Given the endless fascination that people have for 1950s beatnik culture and especially for the work of Beat author Jack Kerouac, it’s surprising that no one’s attempted a proper biopic about the man. In fact, cursory research suggests this middling melodrama includes the first fictionalized onscreen depiction of Kerouac, who is played by the underrated actor John Heard as an earnest young man striving for meaning and recognition while also trying to reconcile the gap that exists between those two things. Yet Heart Beat isn’t primarily about Kerouac, who is merely one prong in a romantic triangle. The other people involved are Kerouac’s notorious pal Neal Cassady, an inspiration for one of the major characters in Kerouac’s classic 1957 book On the Road, and Cassaday’s wife, Carolyn, who wrote the memoir from which Heart Beat was adapted. The way that Kerouac gets lost in the shuffle is indicative of the narrative problems that plague Heart Beat. Although clearly made with care and conviction, the movie is indecisive and unfocused, trying to tell several stories at the same time and therefore serving none of those stories well.

          In the broadest strokes, Heart Beat explores the friendship between Jack (Heard), a straight-laced guy fascinated with the way Beats ignore the restrictions of Establishment culture, and Neal (Nick Nolte), a wild man who lives the Beatnik lifestyle to an extreme. Caught in the middle is Carolyn (Sissy Spacek), a society girl who impulsively joins Jack and Nick for an adventure into the unknown. Although Jack falls hard for Carolyn, he waits too long to make a move, and Neal swoops Carolyn into a torrid romance that later resolves into a conventional marriage. Before that happens, Carolyn is present for the creation of On the Road, which occasions a parting of the ways between Jack, who longs for mainstream success, and Neal, who resents having his life transformed into prose. Other friends drift in and out of the main characters’ vagabond existence, including Ira (Ray Sharkey), a loudmouth poet based upon the real-life Beat icon Alan Ginsburg. (Ira’s principal shtick involves screaming “cocksucker” in public places, which has the effect of reducing Ginsberg to a vulgar caricature.)

          During the first half of Heart Beat, in which writer-director John Byrum tracks the emergence of the romantic triangle, the movie is dull and meandering. During the second half, things get spicier, because Jack experiences success around the same time that Carolyn, Jack, and Neal attempt living as a threesome, with Carolyn moving between the beds of the two men she loves. Perhaps because of limitations in the source material (meaning Carolyn Cassidy’s book) and perhaps because of a failure of imagination on Byrum’s part, Heart Beat fails to genuinely illuminate its characters, thereby falling into the trap of simply re-creating interesting moments as museum dioramas. At its worst, the movie is a lifeless frame showcasing Jack Fisk’s immaculate production design, and sometimes the shadows cast by venetian blinds are the most compelling things onscreen. At its best, the movie gives Nolte room to portray Cassady as a merry prankster high on exploration and spontaneity.

Heart Beat: FUNKY

1980 Week: Tribute

          Calling a dramatic theater production a “well-made play” carries derogatory implications, not just because the “well-made play” was a popular genre in the 19th century, but because the term implies a certain mixture of predictability, superficiality, and tidiness—nothing earns so much critical enmity as work designed to please everyone. Tribute, based upon Bernard Slade’s stage production of the same name, is very much a “well-made play” in the pejorative sense. Predictable, superficial, tidy? Guilty on all three counts. It’s hardly a coincidence that Slade found great success in the world of TV sitcoms, developing the ridiculous ’60s series The Flying Nun, in addition to writing such plays as Same Time, Next Year, which became the 1978 film of the same name starring Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn. Slade’s signature move as a writer is heading partway down the road toward some emotional place that’s potentially hurtful or meaningful, then tacking sideways with an evasive joke or a simplistic homily.

          Nowhere is this more evident than during Tribute, which plays onscreen as a 121-minute prelude to a cop-out. If the movie didn’t immediately reveal itself as an exercise in jokey sentimentality, it would be a highly frustrating experience. So why is Tribute watchable? The answer is Jack Lemmon, who received a Tony nomination for the stage version and an Oscar nomination for the screen version. He’s wonderful in Tribute, and the match between his character and his screen persona is nearly perfect. Lemmon was uniquely gifted at wriggling out of uncomfortable emotional places by making silly expressions and telling motor-mouthed jokes, so watching him play a man who avoids emotion through humor is satisfying on myriad levels.

          Set in New York, the movie tells the story of Scottie Templeton (Lemmon), a onetime screenwriter now working as a press agent. Beloved by everyone he knows because he’s always quick with a joke and always capable of transforming life into a lighthearted adventure, Scottie has grown estranged from his college-aged son, Jud (Robby Benson), even though Scottie remains friendly with Jud’s mother. She’s Scottie’s ex-wife, Maggie (Lee Remick). Shortly before Maggie delivers Jud to New York for an extended visit, Scottie learns he has a terminal blood disease. Scottie endeavors to fix his relationship with Jud while he still has time, though of course he hopes to shield Jud from the truth lest Jud indulge Scottie out of pity. The complication, of course, is that Scottie doesn’t know the first thing about building real emotional bonds, so his idea of connecting with Jud is arranging for Jud to “meet” pretty young Sally (Kim Cattrall), a recent acquaintance of Scottie’s. The story’s title relates to a grand gesture that one of the characters makes in the final act.

          Directed with pace and polish by Bob Clark, Tribute benefits from fine supporting performances. Cattrall is endearing and Remick is elegant, while Colleen Dewhurst (as Scottie’s doctor) and John Marley (as Scottie’s business partner) add gravitas. Benson does what he can with an underdeveloped role, since his purpose is largely to reflect Lemmon’s light. Ah, but how bright that light is, with Lemmon swerving effortlessly from levity to pathos while stopping at various anguished and confused places in between. He’s reason enough to watch Tribute.

Tribute: GROOVY

1980 Week: Gilda Live

          The distaff cohort of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players fared poorly in terms of translating their success on Saturday Night Live into film careers, even though their (white) male colleagues—Aykroyd, Belushi, Chase, and late arrival Murray—all became huge stars. (Where have you gone, Garrett Morris?) Of the few significant movies starring the first wave of SNL ladies, the concert film Gilda Live is probably the best. Directed by the formidable Mike Nichols, who adapted a stage production originally helmed by SNL head honcho Lorne Michaels, Gilda Live is essentially the feature-length equivalent of a variety show, mixing comedy and music without a whiff of glitz or tackiness.

          Gilda Live comes across as a deeply sincere presentation, which suits Gilda Radner’s reputation as one of the nicest people ever to grace the SNL stage. In fact, despite brief flashes of raunchiness and a drug reference or two, most of the bits in Gilda Live are downright family-friendly. Whereas many SNL performers throughout the show’s history have cultivated rock-star personas by pushing the boundaries of good taste, Radner fills Gilda Live with gently satirical characterizations as well as outright sweetness. To some degree, this first-do-no-harm approach to comedy diminishes the film’s potency, because Radner’s style lacks danger and surprise. Furthermore, because many skits are straight repeats from SNL (such as Radner’s portrayal of a drugged-out rocker with a resemblance to Patti Smith), there’s a bit of been-there/done-that complacency to the whole enterprise. Nonetheless, the staging is so smooth that Gilda Live is a breezy viewing experience.

          Filmed in Manhattan’s Winter Garden Theatre, which later became the home of Cats for a zillion years, Gilda Live captures and condenses Radner’s relatively elaborate show, which features slick set changes, interstitial bits by Don Novello playing his SNL mainstay “Father Guido Sarducci,” and supporting work by musicians and singers. (Paul Shaffer performs onstage in several scenes and also reprises his amusing portrayal of real-life concert promoter Don Kirshner.) Radner plays many of her beloved SNL characters, including Emily Litella, Judy Miller, and Rosanne Roseannadanna (sorry, no Baba Wawa), in addition to performing several songs written for the stage show. One highlight is the cheerfully filthy opener, “Let’s Talk Dirty to the Animals,” though the nostalgic warmth of the ’50s-influenced closer “Honey (Touch Me With My Clothes On)” suits Radner’s persona perfectly. (Both tunes were written by SNL scribe Michael O’Donoghue.) Throughout the movie, Radner’s acting and singing are impressive in similar ways—what she lacks in technical proficiency, she makes up for in commitment, likeability, and versatility. 

Gilda Live: GROOVY

1980 Week: Divine Madness

          Bette Midler’s incredible rise to national prominence lost momentum after the release of this concert film, which failed to match her previous success with albums, concerts, singles, television specials, and theatrical features. Happily, a massive comeback began with several hit comedy movies in the mid-’80s and peaked with the tearjerker film Beaches (1988), which spawned the gigantic pop single “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Since then, Midler has achieved the rarified status of being a pop-culture institution. Understanding this context is helpful when considering Divine Madness, which deliberately encapsulates the first decade of Midler’s mainstream success. Lest anyone forget, before Midler conquered the Adult Contemporary charts with saccharine ballads, she made her mark by acting in stage musicals and by performing raunchy comedy/music routines in gay bathhouses.

          Divine Madness, which contains footage captured during four shows of Midler’s 1979 concert tour, attempts to reconcile the many moods of the Divine Miss M. The movie contains boisterous musical performances, lewd stand-up comedy, and even a few serious moments, like a suite of songs from The Rose (1979), the dramatic film that made Midler a movie star. In any other context, these disparate tonalities would seem incompatible, but the point is to show viewers that Midler is a gutter-mouthed broad, a hellacious belter, a sensitive balladeer, and a tender artiste. The film’s only coherence, therefore, stems from demonstrating Midler’s incredible versatility. Given the anything-goes approach, however, it’s no surprise that some parts of Divine Madness fall flat.

          A pantomime bit in which Midler portrays a bag lady is cringe-inducing because of its hokey sentimentality, and Midler’s voice frays during overblown rock numbers including her spins on Bob Seger’s “Fire Down Below” and Bruce Springsteen’s “The E Street Shuffle.” Yet Midler summons real fire on a medley of the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and her performance of “The Rose,” complete with artful hand movements, is moving. Similarly, many of the crass sequences are droll if not exactly delightful. Midler seems utterly without inhibition as she interacts with the largely male audience at a theater in Pasadena. (Before exposing her bra, she good-naturedly asks the crowd: “Oh, you wanna see more of my tits?”)

          Midler steamrolls through jokes in a machine-gun style borrowing from Mae West and other Vaudeville icons, and she even introduces one sequence by warning that the quality of the jokes is about to dramatically decrease. As the saying goes, it’s all in good fun, and that’s ultimately what Midler provides. Divine Madness is an exercise in upbeat escapism, sometimes in the unlikely form of a smiling diva working her way across the stage in a motorized wheelchair while she wears a starfish brassiere and a mermaid tail, her backup singers the Harlettes and her tight rock band giving every tune a sound as big as the star’s personality.

Divine Madness: GROOVY

1980 Week: The Fog

          Note: Settle in and enjoy a double-dose of 1980 titles for the next two weeks, beginning with a modern-classic horror picture just in time for Halloween . . .

          More than any other of the films he made during his peak period of the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s, The Fog subsists on the special nocturnal vibe that only director John Carpenter could create. Filled with atmospheric shots of killers emerging from shadows, kicky effects depicting the influence of supernatural forces, and the pulsating rhythms of a great synthesizer score composed by Carpenter himself, The Fog is vibe personified. When the movie clicks, which happens a lot, the sheer mood of the thing is intoxicating. And every so often, the picture fulfills its raison d’etre by providing genuine scares. So even if the picture is ultimately quite disappointing, thanks to a anticlimactic ending and the failure to fully utilize a fantastic cast, The Fog is very much a part of the John Carpenter mythos. Halloween (1978) and The Thing (1982) are scarier, and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Escape from New York (1981) are more exciting, but The Fog comprises 89 minutes of pure Carpenter style.

          Set in a small town on the California coast, the picture opens with a creepy vignette of crusty senior Mr. Machen (John Houseman) reading a ghost story to kids sitting around a campfire on the beach at night. It seems that an otherworldly fog once crept over the waters near the town of Antonio Bay, claiming the lives an entire ship’s crew—and legend has it that 100 years later, the fog is due to return. That time, of course, is now. Its creepy context established, the picture then gets down to the business of introducing various characters doomed to face the fog: radio DJ and single mom Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau), who broadcasts out of a decrepit old lighthouse; easygoing local Nick Castle (Tom Atkins) and sexy hitchhiker Elizabeth Soiley (Jamie Lee Curtis), who become a couple while traveling together; uptight town official Kathy Williams (Janet Leigh); angst-ridden priest Father Malone (Hal Holbrook); and so on.

          Carpenter and cowriter-producer Debra Hill never quite figure out how to manage the sprawling cast, because even though tasty glimmers of backstory and characterization appear here and there, individualization gets lost when people are transformed into potential victims during elaborate fight scenes. Similarly, the mythology behind the fog and its connections to Antonio Bay is both frustratingly unclear and overly simplistic. As a result, The Fog is much more a collection of cool scenes than a properly constructed narrative. That said, cool scenes are the coin of the realm in horror cinema, and The Fog is full of darkly entertaining passages. The eerie assault on a fishing boat. The tense race to save a child from a house that’s being smothered by the fog. The final siege on the lighthouse.

          Abetted by his best cinematographer, master of darkness Dean Cundey, Carpenter generates one menacing image after another, and he punctuates the film with his signature sardonic wit. Barbeau is great, especially considering she performs so many scenes alone (nothwithstanding wraithlike attackers), and it’s fun to spot so many players from previous Carpenter films: Atkins, Charles Cyphers, Curtis, Darwin Jostin, Nancy Loomis. (Carpenter missed an opportunity by keeping real-life mother and daughter Leigh, of Pyscho fame, and Curtis mostly separate, but their appearance in the same film is notable in a Trivial Pursuit sort of way.) The Fog was remade in 2005 amid a rash of new versions of Carpenter classics, and the remake was a critical bomb despite scoring at the box office. 

The Fog: GROOVY

The Giant Spider Invasion (1975)

A fair argument could be made that applying critical standards of any sort to a picture called The Giant Spider Invasion is pointless, seeing as how the title is so ridiculous that only an equally ridiculous film could accompany the title. In that spirit, let’s dispel with the usual appraisal of whether The Giant Spider Invasion “works” in any traditional sense. Instead, let’s explore a more relevant topic: whether the movie is fun to watch. That depends. If you’re looking for a few chuckles, mostly at the expense of the filmmakers, then you could do worse than investing 84 minutes in The Giant Spider Invasion. Made in the tradition of the giant-monster flicks of the 1950s, the picture offers old-fashioned silliness with a few concessions to modernity, namely brief nudity and a little bit of gore. The movie’s distinguishing characteristics are its absurd special effects, since the oversized monster of the title is actually a set of flailing legs and a furry body strapped to car as it put-puts through various locations. On some level, The Giant Spider Invasion is endearingly terrible. The plot involves familiar hokum. A meteor falls into a field outside a small town, unleashing normal-sized but vicious spiders. They kill a few folks. Then a human-sized spider claims a victim. Finally, an arachnid the size of a house begins its rampage. All the while, two scientists try to halt the invasion. Envision all the usual clichés executed without energy or imagination, and you’re on target. Directed by one Bill Rebane, the picture relies on stock characters and trite dialogue, though flashes of something resembling wit appear. Gilligan’s Island star Alan Hale Jr. plays a sheriff, and his first line is “Hi, little buddy!” A bumpkin character maligns someone by saying, “You’re so dumb you wouldn’t know rabbit turds from Rice Krispies.” Not exactly Algonquin Round Table banter, but serviceable in this context. The Giant Spider Invasion is cheap, goofy, and shallow, but for insatiable creature-feature addicts, those aren’t necessarily negatives.

The Giant Spider Invasion: LAME

Love & Anarchy (1973)

          Like her mentor Federico Fellini, Italian director Lina Wertmüller generally avoids understatement. Although technically brilliant and unrelentingly intense, her movies are often so loud, overbearing, and vulgar that it’s hard to sift the artistry from the assault. Plus, because she’s among the most deeply political filmmakers ever to achieve international fame, her pictures exist on literal and metaphorical levels, meaning that themes one discovers upon reflection add depth to what initially seem like undisciplined statements. In other words, it’s never prudent to dismiss a Wertmüller movie. Unfortunately, it can often be difficult to actually enjoy a Wertmüller movie. So it is with Love & Anarchy, which I found almost interminable until the final act. Given the film’s rarified critical status, it’s possible that I’m either in the critical minority or that I just plain missed something important during the setup phase of the narrative. In any event, watching Love and Anarchy felt like having Wertmüller scream at me for two hours, even though I eventually found a grudging respect for the way the piece resolved.

          Wertmüller’s favorite leading man, Giancarlo Giannini, plays Antonio, a provincial type who travels to Rome during Mussolini’s reign. (Backstory: Antonio became radicalized when Mussolini’s thugs killed one of his friends, so he’s determined to assassinate Il Duce.) Giving the would-be killer sanctuary while he plans the murder is a prostitute name Salomé (Mariangela Melato). Telling fellow sex workers at a bordello that Antonio is her cousin, she lets Antonio stay in her chambers and even proffers carnal favors. The first two-thirds of Love and Anarchy follow romantic-comedy rhythms as the cynical Salomé falls for the guileless Antonio, even as he becomes enamored of another prostitute, Tripolina (Lina Polito). Eventually, the film catches fire because Antonio reveals that he’s terrified about trying to kill Mussolini, leading the women to passionately argue against Antonio throwing his life away on a likely futile assassination attempt.

          This material gives Wertmüller a fine dramatic vehicle for exploring the costs of idealism and the roles of individuals in oppressive times. Just as the film comes to life in its last stretch, Giannini’s performance crystallizes. His suave good looks buried behind huge freckles and wild red hair, Giannini spends the first two-thirds of the movie looking lost, his eyes bulging stupidly, but then we realize he’s simply been scared out of his wits the whole time. Why withhold that insight from the audience? Why waste time on Fellini-esque scenes at the bordello, replete with grotesque images of painted ladies? And why get so caught up in the romantic-triangle contrivance? Such are the mysteries of Wertmüller’s work.

          Dubious narrative choices notwithstanding, Love and Anarchy is gorgeous from a technical perspective, with Giuseppe Rotunno contributing characteristically vivid camerawork and a number of vibrant locations providing texture. Visual splendor aside, so much of what makes this movie hard to watch is contained in Melato’s performance. Her makeup is extreme, all bleached hair and pale skin, so she looks like a vampire, and she never stops talking or lowers her volume to less than a caterwaul. She incarnates all the extreme things that make Love & Anarchy challenging to endure, even though the film contains many provocative insights.

Love & Anarchy: FUNKY

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977)

The product of a weirdly fraught production cycle, with creative differences leading to firings and recriminations, this tedious cartoon (with a few live-action sequences) has too much cutesiness and not enough heart. Based on Johnny Greulle’s famous stories about a pair of rag dolls with sweet personalities, Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure bombards viewers with cloying voice performances, saccharine songs, and a huge number of uninteresting supporting characters. Beginning in a child’s room and then extending to various fantastical realms, the picture suggests what The Wizard of Oz (1939) might have been like had the filmmakers failed to imbue Dorothy Gale’s journey with meaning. Whereas in that film each new development advances the plot, in this movie, each new development underscores the forgettable nature of the protagonists. If Raggedy Ann and Andy have distinctive qualities in Greulle’s books, those qualities did not reach the screen intact. The gist of the piece is that seven-year-old Marcella (Claude Williams) gets a new doll for her birthday, a ornate French number called Babette. When Marcella leaves her playroom, a pirate toy called the Captain becomes aroused by Babette, breaks free from his snow-globe prison, and kidnaps the French doll. Raggedy Ann and Andy, the leaders of the toy community, make chase, eventually enlisting the aid of a sea monster that uses tickling as a combat technique. Also woven into the narrative are an obnoxious king and a redneck camel. As for the songs, they’re atrocious, with all due respect to composer Joe Raposo, who did lots of wonderful work for the Children’s Television Workship. (His credits include “Bein’ Green” and the Seseme Street theme song.) The tunes in Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure run the unpleasant gamut from brash vaudeville-type numbers to sugary ballads. The nonmusical scenes are just as bad. The film’s design style is lifeless, and Didi Conn gives a nails-on-chalkboard vocal performance as Raggedy Ann, each line delivery more sickeningly sweet than the preceding.

Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure: LAME

The Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978)

          Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Exploitive, grotesque, profane, and racist, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is among the most extreme movies featuring internationally famous actors, so it’s morbidly fascinating in the manner of, say, Caligula (1979), though it pales next to that infamous film’s excesses. Still, it’s impossible to classify The Mountain of the Cannibal God as restrained, seeing as how the picture includes shots of real animals getting slaughtered, as well as abundant over-the-top gore, a simulated scene of bestiality, and, for no particular reason, an unsimulated scene of a young woman—well, let’s just say she looks as if she’s enjoying herself. While it’s not a great shock to see Ursula Andress mixed up in a production like this one, since she spent much of the ’70s adding brazen sex appeal to dubious European productions, it’s jaw-dropping to watch Stacy Keach give a credible performance in between gory kills and nauseating shots of animal carnage.

            Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about The Mountain of the Cannibal God—released in the U.S. as Slave of the Cannibal God—is that it’s entertaining. Telling a simple story in a propulsive way, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is lean and suspenseful, and the score by Guido De Angelis and Maurizio De Angelis is imaginatively terrifying. If the goal of pulpy cinema is to evoke visceral reactions, then The Mountain of the Cannibal God succeeds, shamelessly.

          The narrative is simple, a throwback to xenophobic jungle adventures of the 1930s. When her husband goes missing somewhere in the primitive wilds of New Guinea, Susan Stevenson (Andress) and her brother, Arthur (Antonio Marsina), hire scientist Professor Edward Foster (Keach) to lead a rescue expedition. Edward warns that the area where Susan’s husband disappeared is home to a tribe of cannibals, but Susan dismisses the admonition as silly superstition. Venturing into the jungle with native bearers, the searchers soon learn Edward was right, as cannibals kill the bearers one by one, often absconding with all or part of the bodies. Along the way, the searchers see horrific things, like a python devouring a cute little monkey or natives gutting a monitor lizard while it’s still alive. These scenes are real, and the camera lingers on every disgusting detail. Once the searchers reach the cannibals’ lair, the filmmakers crank up the cinematic volume, bombarding viewers with startling images of ritual sex and violence. Andress getting stripped naked and slathered with body paint is the least alarming of these visuals.

          On the most primal level, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is exciting, because it’s loaded with action sequences and sensationalistic visions, and the film’s technical polish is fairly impressive. On every other level, The Mountain of the Cannibal God is vile. Every nonwhite character in the movie is either a childlike idiot or a vicious monster, and seeing a white woman drives the entire cannibal tribe wild. In the picture’s wildest scene, cannibals mutilate and devour a dude, then celebrate with an orgy. Virtually every racist fear of indigenous peoples finds its way into the storyline, and the kicker is that we’re asked to root for a central character even after it is revealed that the character personifies the worst aspects of white entitlement. An entire Ph.D. thesis could be written about this film’s messaging related to gender and race, but for now, one word shall suffice. Odious.

The Mountain of the Cannibal God: FREAKY

The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher (1979)

There’s a germ of an interesting idea within this no-budget exploitation flick, that being the notion of what might happen if two serial killers crossed paths. Unfortunately, filmmaker Ray Dennis Steckler (who used separate aliases for his writing and directing credits) brings exactly zero nuance and style to the task, so The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher quickly degrades to the grindhouse equivalent of, say, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), inasmuch as the picture tries to compensate for its shortcomings by offering two ghouls for the price of one. While the worst thing about the picture is unquestionably its sleaziness, seeing as how the strangler scenes involve a fully dressed middle-aged man murdering topless young women, the weirdest thing about the picture is its soundtrack. Steckler and his team either failed to record location sound or screwed up the process, because nearly all the dialogue in this picture appears as voiceover. Right from the first scene, when strangler Jonathan Click (Pierre Agostino) takes nudie pictures of a model before killing her, the audience hears his thoughts vocalized as narration. Faint snippets of dialogue appear periodically, though they’re not the sonic focus. The storytelling is just as slipshod. Between strangler scenes, Steckler cuts to the unseen slasher murdering hoboes with a switchblade, eventually revealing that she’s an attractive redhead (Carolyn Brandt). The murderers meet, with predictably bloody results. Although The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher is dull, repetitive, and tacky, some gonzo-cinema fans appreciate the flick for its almost surrealistic trashiness—the disorienting treatment of sound makes the picture feel different from, though not necessarily any better than, run-of-the-mill gorefests. For the most part, however, this one’s for cinematic masochists only.

The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher: LAME

No Way Back (1976)

          Graded on one very specific curve, this blaxploitation joint earns a passing grade, but just barely. The curve in question reflects the sad fact that most films directed by Fred Williamson are awful. Judged by any other standard, the picture would fare poorly. In any event, No Way Back is the second flick to star Williamson as private dick Jesse Crowder, following the character’s debut in Death Journey, which was released the same year. (Sources differ as to which flick came first, but since there’s no series continuity, pinpoint accuracy doesn’t really matter.) Hired from his home base in Los Angeles to track down a missing person in San Francisco, Jesse does his usual thing, seducing babes, smacking down bad guys, and smooth-talking informants. As per the norm for Williamson’s Po’ Boy Productions, the main order of the day isn’t telling a story so much as making Williamson look cool and virile, though whether clothing the star in a series of leisure suits with matching neck scarves actually accomplishes that goal is open to question. No Way Back is standard-issue schlock, a brainless action thriller with R&B jams on the soundtrack, but it’s redeemed by fun elements.

          The story, not that it matters much, involves a bank executive named Pickens (Charles Woolf), who swindles cash from his employers, then takes off with a sexy accomplice named Candy (Tracy Reed). Complicating matters, she actually works for a gangster named Bernie (Stack Pierce). Meanwhile, Pickens’ wife, Mildred (Virginia Gregg), searches for her husband with less than noble intentions. It’s the usual drill of double crosses and twists, with the resourceful Jesse caught in the middle. Where the picture makes up ground is in the realm of vibe. Soul singers the Dells provide smooth tunes for the soundtrack, Reed complements her beauty with respectable acting, and the high-octane scenes have a measure of novelty, as when Jesse literally rides to the rescue, on horseback, during the climax. There’s also a mildly amusing subplot involving a hustler played by the iconic TV host Don Cornelius. Is anything in No Way Back original or special? Not even close. Does the film lag so badly at times that it becomes almost narcotizing? You bet. But is No Way Back infinitely better than Death Journey? Affirmative. And given the incredibly low standards one must embrace when appraising the Po’ Boy Productions filmography, that faint praise earns No Way Back a halfhearted checkmark in the “win” column.

No Way Back: FUNKY