The Glass House (1972)

          For an early-’70s social-issue telefilm, The Glass House has an impressive pedigree: Truman Capote co-wrote the story, and ace scribe Tracy Keenan Wynn (The Longest Yard) wrote the teleplay. Alan Alda stars as Jonathan Paige, a college professor convicted of manslaughter for inadvertently killing the man who injured Paige’s wife in a car accident. He’s sent to prison on the same day that an idealistic guard, Brian Courtland (Clu Gulager), starts work at the institution, and as these unsuspecting men fall into the web of corruption and violence spun by prison overlord Hugo Slocum (Vic Morrow), a brutal killer incarcerated for life, the heroes come to realize the hopelessness of escaping, much less changing, the merciless status quo inside the big house.

          Paige’s descent is tied to the abuse visited upon a sweet-faced young man (Kristoffer Tabori) whom Paige fails to protect, and Courtland’s disillusionment stems from his realization that the aged warden (Dean Jagger) is content to let inmates kill each other. Unobtrusively directed by journeyman helmer Tom Gries, the picture moves at a strong pace from the bleak opening sequence to the horrific finale, making a simple statement about the seeming impossibility of retaining humanity inside a maximum-security lockup.

          Abetted tremendously by Alda’s characteristically sensitive performance, the script does a strong job of depicting Paige as a man who can’t win: Keeping to himself doesn’t steer the professor clear of danger, and neither does taking a principled stand. What’s more, the script expertly weaves together various strong personalities, with Morrow commanding the screen as a predatory monster, and Tabori giving a poignant turn as innocent doomed by circumstance. Billy Dee Williams shows up in an important featured role, and the film slyly employs his super-cool swagger to present a complex character who’s part peacenik, part revolutionary, and part straight-up badass. Depressing but focused and purposeful, The Glass House is solid stuff.

The Glass House: GROOVY

The Swarm (1978)

          Hollywood’s master of disaster, producer Irwin Allen, was well into the unintentional self-parody phase of his career by the late ’70s, less than a decade after he first started mining mass misfortune for mass entertainment. Instead of the towering infernos and upside-down cruise ships of yore, he restored to demonizing insects in The Swarm, an undercooked comin’-at-ya picture in which killer bees, mostly depicted as animated blotches roaming across the skyline, attack a small town in the Southwest before heading to Houston. Filled with all the usual tropes of Allen’s pictures, from large mobilizations of rescue forces to trite melodramas playing out against the backdrop of tragedy, The Swarm also features one of Allen’s trademark hodgepodge casts.

          Michael Caine, starting his slide into ridiculous paycheck gigs, stars as a bug specialist who takes command of the government’s response to the bees, and he’s accompanied by Richard Widmark (as a general who wants to blow up everything in sight), Henry Fonda (as a wheelchair-bound immunologist), Richard Chamberlain (as a Southern-fried scientist/crankypants whose sole function seems to be scowling at Caine), and Katharine Ross (as a scientist/love interest who gets stung by more than Cupid’s arrow), plus Patty Duke Astin, Olivia de Havilland, Bradford Dillman, Jose Ferrer, Lee Grant, Ben Johnson, and Fred MacMurray.

          Even though a few elements are respectable, like Jerry Goldsmith’s exciting score, The Swarm is, well, swarming with ludicrous highlights, because the movie’s so preposterously straight-faced it plays like a comedy. The plotting is, of course, extraordinarily stupid, with Caine regularly leaving his post as the government’s top man during a major crisis to run inconsequential errands with Ross so they can share cutesy patter while driving around the countryside. Better still, from the perspective of amusing awfulness, is the outrageously limp dialogue, which nails the audience with clunky exposition as mercilessly as the bees zap their victims. “Just because you’re the mayor of Marysville, that doesn’t make you an engineer,” Johnson barks to MacMurray, who replies, “Look, nobody asked you to leave Houston and come here to retire, you know.” Ouch.

           In its most hysterically insipid moments (which are, sadly, outnumbered by long stretches of flat tedium), The Swarm approaches full-on camp, like the bee attack on a nuclear power plant or the colorful bit of Caine running through the small town, screaming, “The killer bees are coming! Everybody get inside!” (On a less amusing note, Widmark takes to referring to the Africanized bees as “Africans,” leading to icky lines like, “By tomorrow, there will be no more Africans in Houston!”) The movie’s best moment, though, is undoubtedly the scene in which Caine coaches a young bee-sting victim through a bout of hysterics by convincing the boy that the giant bee floating in front of his head—depicted, with goofy obviousness, by a giant superimposed bee—is a hallucination.

          For good or ill, The Swarm is no hallucination, because this two-and-a-half-hour venom blast of a gloriously bad creature feature really exists. And, yes, you read that right: Though originally released at 116 minutes, there’s an extended version of The Swarm clocking in at 155 minutes. Rest assured the whole damn mess was endured for the sake of this review. Anti-venom, please!

The Swarm: FREAKY

Breaking Point (1976)

Yet another in the endless stream of vigilante flicks that spewed forth after the success of Straw Dogs (1971) and Death Wish (1974), this Canadian actioner starring long-forgotten ’70s leading man Bo Svenson falls short in terms of characterization, drama, logic, and thrills. The last exploitation flick that eclectic director Bob Clark made before going mainstream with 1979’s Murder by Decree, the picture is competent to the point of utter homogenization, as if an editor threw pieces of similar films up in the air and then assembled the pieces in more or less the right order to create a Frankenstein hodgepodge of a vigilante movie. In other words, everything in Breaking Point was done better elsewhere. As is the norm in the genre, a decent man gets on the wrong side of bad people, then takes all he can take until he reaches his—well, it’s all in the title, isn’t it? Michael McBain (Svenson) is an unassuming judo instructor (convenient!) who witnesses a mob-related crime, then enters witness protection under the care of cop Frank Sirrianni (Robert Culp) while preparing to testify against the soldiers of crime boss Vincent Karbone (John Colicos). Predictably, Karbone’s people reach McBain where he’s most vulnerable, by violently harassing the people he loves, so soon enough McBain has to unleash some of his judo whup-ass on the villains. Lacking the psychological complexity of Straw Dogs and the relentless intensity of Death Wish—or even the go-for-broke excess of a self-respecting exploitation picture—this film offers all of the shortcomings of the vigilante genre and none of the cathartic jolts. Clark’s direction is indifferent, as if he had already left the grindhouse in spirit, and Svenson is believably tough but in every other regard forgettable. Thus, the only reason to watch Breaking Point is to discover how long it takes for you to reach your napping point.

Breaking Point: SQUARE

Sisters of Death (1977)

This silly horror picture begins with a weird ritual scene in which several robed women, part of a group called “the Sisters,” test the mettle of two acolytes with a game of Russian roulette. The gun goes off and one of the would-be sisters dies, cueing a string of freeze-frame screams over the opening credits. Seven years later, the survivors of the ritual receive invitations to a reunion party in the California desert, which they happily accept. So, in the course of about 15 minutes, Sisters of Death raises a multitude of questions it never answers. Why were the women surprised death was a possibility when playing Russian roulette? Why didn’t they just go on about their business after the acolyte died? Why, if the ritual were traumatic enough to break up the group, would they cheerfully reunite? And what, exactly, was the purpose of their organization in the first place? Satan worship? Avon sales? Instead of answers, Sisters of Death presents a goofy revenge plot in which the crazed father of the dead girl traps the survivors in a private estate so he can figure out which one pulled the trigger on his sweet little girl. Also thrown into the mix is pair of horny young dudes hired to drive the women to the estate; they linger afterward because they’re hoping to get lucky. To its very limited credit, the movie features a few colorful deaths (by electric fence, Gatling gun, rattlesnake bite, scissors), plus occasional weird details like the scene in which the villain takes a break from killing people in order to practice his flute playing. (Really!) However, Sisters of Death isn’t exploitative enough to thrill fans of trashy cinema, so the only point of interest is the presence of leading lady Claudia Jennings, a sexy strawberry blonde who turned her status as Playboy’s 1970 Playmate of the Year into a decade of B-movie stardom before dying in a car crash at the age of 29.

Sisters of Death: LAME

Time After Time (1979)

          Boasting an outlandish premise culled form the worlds of history and literature, Time After Time marked the auspicious directorial debut of Nicholas Meyer, who mined similar territory as the novelist and screenwriter of The Seven Per-Cent Solution (1976). Whereas the earlier film imagined a relationship between Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes, Time After Time imagines one between legendary science-fiction author H.G. Wells and notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.

          The movie begins in Victorian England, when H.G. (Malcolm McDowell) discovers that one of his society friends is actually the Ripper. Eager to evade capture, Jack (David Warner) steals the time machine that wells built the basement of his London flat—in Time After Time, H.G. isn’t just a fantasist but also an inventor. Honor-bound to bring his onetime friend to justice, H.G. chases Jack through time to 1979 San Francisco. Once there, the 19th-century gentleman tries to navigate 20th-century culture, with sweetly overwhelmed bank clerk Amy (Mary Steenburgen) serving as his guide and eventual love interest.

          Working from an imaginative story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes, Meyer demonstrates all of his storytelling strengths: clever literary references, pithy light comedy, and pure escapist fun. Despite its preposterous storyline, Time After Time is thoroughly engrossing, an old-fashioned yarn with the classic formula of drama, romance, and thrills. The love story between Amy and H.G. is charming, because he’s a relic unprepared for the concept of women’s lib, and she’s a modern woman who swoons at his traditional manners. We believe they were meant for each other, just like we believe that Jack represents an even greater menace in modern times than he did in his own era: As he says in one of the picture’s best lines, “Ninety years ago I was a freak—today I’m an amateur.”

          Warner is elegantly menacing, creating several moments of genuine suspense because we believe him capable of horrific acts, and McDowell thrives in one of his few romantic leading roles. Plus, if his rapport with Steenburgen seems particularly convincing, there’s a reason: The costars married after completing the movie and were together for a decade. In another interesting footnote, Meyer recycled some unused bits of culture-clash comedy when he wrote the present-day scenes of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), which placed the crew of the Enterprise in, you guessed it, modern-day San Francisco.

Time After Time: GROOVY

The Four Deuces (1976)

An awful gangster-themed comedy/thriller featuring Jack Palance at his all-over-the-map worst, The Four Deuces has a few interesting flourishes that are worth noting, if not necessarily worth watching. The movie uses comic-book text panels during transitions between sequences, plus actual comic-book drawings that morph into live-action photography, so the idea is apparently to present a ’30s-era newspaper strip come to life—if, in fact, “life” is the right word for a movie so utterly lacking in vitality. The story is standard stuff about a mob boss whose main squeeze two-times him while he’s trying to win a bloody conflict with a rival hoodlum, and the generic quality of the picture is accentuated by costumes and props that all look they’re fresh off the rack; one gets the impression that dodgy producers rented everything instead of buying or manufacturing. As for the alleged comedy elements of the movie, not a single funny thing happens, unless enduring sped-up Kesystone Kops-style chases or watching the ghoulish Palance laugh hysterically while he kills people hits your sweet spot. Seeing Palance bounce between cringe-worthy over-acting and limp under-acting is nothing new; nor is watching leading lady Carol Lynley, of The Poseidon Adventure fame, demonstrate an utter lack of dynamism. Thus, the only disappointment is watching Adam Roarke spin his wheels in yet another pointless role: A handsome, intense player from ’60s exploitation flicks who never found his breakthrough role, he’s a cipher as the hotshot reporter who tags along with Palance’s gang and hops into the sack with Palance’s moll (Lynley). Especially since the movie’s only novel element, the comic-book stylization, was used more effectively in other pictures, like the exceedingly weird 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), it’s safe to say The Four Deuces is not a winning hand.

The Four Deuces: LAME

B.S. I Love You (1971)

A pointless comedy about the romantic exploits of a TV-commercial producer, B.S. I Love You is the work of one Steven Hilliard Stern. As with Stern’s other ’70s endeavor as a writer-director, the Michael Douglas sports drama Running (1979), B.S. gets off to a bad start by asking audiences to root for a vacuous protagonist. Paul (Peter Kastner) screws up an expensive commercial shoot, and then compounds his insolence by skipping work for a long weekend that includes joining the mile-high club with a sexy free spirit (Joanna Cameron) during a cross-country plane ride. When he finally returns to his normal life, he’s rude to his boss (Richard B. Shull), whom he just let down, and standoffish with his girlfriend (Louise Sorel), to whom he was just unfaithful. Yet even though Paul is a self-centered twit who follows his bliss no matter the cost, Stern seemingly expects viewers to sympathize with Paul’s angst during endless montages of the character moping around while sensitive singer-songwriter tunes play on the soundtrack. Things get even less interesting when Paul leaves his agency to work for a company headed by beautiful older woman Jane (Joanna Barnes), with whom he promptly goes to bed—only to discover that his erstwhile mile-high partner is actually Jane’s daughter. Thus Our Hero finds himself torn between three attractive women, all of whom seem crazed to possess him, even though he’s a shit. As if this logic gap weren’t enough of a problem, B.S. I Love You is padded to the point of tedium (thanks to those endless montage sequences), and there’s no good reason for the film to be set in the advertising world since Stern misses every opportunity for satire. At least the first part of the movie’s title is accurate.

B.S. I Love You: SQUARE

The Lord of the Rings (1978)

          Years before Peter Jackson adapted J.R.R. Tolkein’s beloved fantasy-book series The Lord of the Rings into an Oscar-winning film trilogy, a bad-boy animator best known for pushing the boundaries of good taste took a stab at the material that was smaller in scale but, in some ways, almost as creatively ambitious. Though ultimately a frustrating misfire, Ralph Bakshi’s movie, The Lord of the Rings, has many commendable virtues and a handful of memorable elements; it’s not difficult to see what the picture was trying to become, and its failure to reach a lofty goal shouldn’t completely overshadow the nobility of the attempt.

          After cutting his teeth as a hired hand on various mainstream projects, Bakshi became an animation rock star with his controversial movie Fritz the Cat (1972), the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll comedy that became the first X-rated animated feature. Suddenly in a position to get financing for his long-held desire to put Tolkein onscreen, Bakshi set out to film the author’s three Rings books as a pair of long features, to be titled The Lord of the Rings: Part One and The Lord of the Rings: Part Two. (Filmmakers including John Boorman had previously tried and failed to get live-action versions off the ground.)

          To execute his vision, Bakshi decided to use an elaborate rotoscoping technique in which live-action versions of scenes are filmed, and then drawings are traced from each frame of live-action footage to form the basis of each frame of animated footage. Had this massive project been fully realized, it might have been extraordinary. Unfortunately, all the usual problems got in the way.

          The script, by Chris Conkling and Peter S. Beagle, is a limp recitation of scenes from Tolkein’s novels, sort of a lifeless Cliffs Notes synopsis, so the absence of a distinctive point of view (either Tolkein’s or Bakshi’s) renders the narrative flat. The rotoscoping delivered some interesting results, but because not every character was animated in exactly the same way, the style of the picture is disjointed; the marauding Orcs look shadowy and surreal, as if comprised of moving Xerox copies, while the principal characters are standard hand-drawn cartoons. Arguably, the most unique and vivid scenes are the big-canvas battles featuring armies of Orcs engaging in bloody swordplay with dwarves, elves, and hobbits—Bakshi creates a weird vibe that’s neither pure animation nor pure live-action, but a dynamic hybrid.

          The biggest problem with the movie, of course, is that Bakshi never got to make Part Two. Therefore, this picture abruptly ends partway through the story, leaving the narrative unresolved. (For those who know the material, the film stops immediately after the battle of Helm’s Deep, leaving Frodo and Sam stuck on the road to Mount Doom.) Yet while the source material isn’t served well by truncated adaptation, some of what Bakshi puts onscreen works. The characterizations of hobbits Frodo and Sam are sweet and infused with lifelike movement (Billy Barty provided the live-action performances upon which the cartoon versions of both characters were based); John Hurt gives a rousing vocal performance as heroic knight Aragorn; and Leonard Rosenman contributes a big, romantic orchestral score. So, for fleeting moments here and there, this Lord of the Rings hints at the grandeur with which Jackson thrilled the world years later.

          FYI, this project should not be confused with an earlier animated take on Tolkein. Famed kiddie-entertainment outfit Rankin/Bass made a dodgy version of Tolkein’s The Hobbit for television in 1977; Rankin/Bass also adapted the final Rings book, The Return of the King, for a theatrical cartoon in 1980, as a sequel to the Hobbit project.

The Lord of the Rings: FUNKY

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972)

 

          Two different eras of Hollywood filmmaking clash uncomfortably in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid, a sloppy but interesting-ish look at one of the Wild West’s most notorious criminal outfits, the James-Younger gang. The picture gets studio-era romanticism from producer-star Cliff Robertson, who plays Cole Younger as a wide-eyed dreamer more reliant on guile than gunplay. Offering a bracing counterpoint of New Hollywood realism is Robert Duvall, who plays Jesse James as a crude sociopath prone to outbursts of messianic frenzy. Unsuccessfully attempting to blend these tonalities is writer-director Philip Kaufman, helming his first big-budget picture.

          Even with veteran action cinematographer Bruce Surtees on his team, Kaufman seems unsure how to orchestrate complex scenes; the camera is often focused behind or to the side of the main action, which is incredibly distracting. Even simple dialogue scenes suffer from clumsy execution, because Kaufman can’t seem to decide whether he wants glossy artificiality or hard-hitting authenticity. Kaufman’s screenplay is as jumbled as his direction, although to be fair, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid feels as if it might have been significantly reconfigured during editing; the film’s choppy montage sequences and clunky narration seem like they were added to clarify story points that were muddy in the original footage.

          Still, the underlying historical facts are compelling, and Kaufman’s method for contrasting James and Younger works. In parallel storylines, the two factions of the James-Younger gang converge on the town of Northfield, Minnesota, giving viewers distinct perspectives on the character of each faction. With an eye on robbing Northfield’s bank, Younger insinuates himself into the local populace, persuading townies to fatten the bank’s value with new deposits. Meanwhile, James suffers delusions of grandeur even though he lacks Younger’s intellectual discipline and strategic acumen. When the factions merge, disharmony between James’ savagery and Younger’s slyness leads to disaster. And while the climactic scene of the Northfield robbery is exciting and imaginative, everything that happens before and after the big scene is haphazard.

          Duvall’s scenes are stronger because his characterization is more believable, a small man drunk on his own fame. Robertson’s scenes are elaborate, though overly reliant on gimmicks like his repeated line, “Ain’t that a wonderment?” Matters are not helped by the preponderance of overly familiar character actors, including R.G. Armstrong, Luke Askew, Matt Clark, Elisha Cook Jr., Royal Dano, and Dana Elcar, which lends the picture the generic feel of episodic television. (The less said about Dave Grusin’s weird musical score, which features everything from bouncy calliope music to acid-rock guitars, the better.) The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid can’t be dismissed because it’s filled with interesting ideas, but it can’t be praised very highly because only a few of those ideas are brought to fruition.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid: FUNKY

Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972)

A fair amount of Neil Simon’s career was spent exploring the angst of middle-aged men, from the newly divorced roommates of The Odd Couple to confused sad sacks like Barney Cashman (Alan Arkin), the protagonist of Last of the Red Hot Lovers. Happily married but bored with his life, he’s preoccupied by fantasies of having a wild romantic affair. So when a self-confident woman named Elaine (Sally Kellerman) propositions him one afternoon, he begins a series of near-miss attempts at extramarital sex, bringing three different women to the unlikely trysting place of his 73-year-old mother’s apartment on the days Mom volunteers at a hospital. The movie primarily comprises three long scenes, one with each potential lover, and the mild amusement of the picture is watching Barney get more crazed each time a would-be rendezvous goes awry. Simon’s rat-a-tat dialogue is as impeccable as ever, with quirky character touches and that special Noo Yawk flavor of neurotic sarcasm, but like many of the pieces he brought to the screen in the ’70s, Last of the Red Hot Lovers can’t quite decide whether it’s going for sly pathos or out-and-out farce. The chatty lulls between big jokes go on too long, and the big jokes aren’t that big (although watching Barney try to smoke pot is a highlight). Arkin’s delivery and timing are impressive, even though his aloofness makes the piece feel too clinical, and his costars are inconsistent: Kellerman is strong as a depressive with a sharp tongue, and Renee Taylor is fun as a desperate housewife, but Paula Prentiss is badly miscast as the sort of space-case hippie Goldie Hawn excelled at playing during this period. So, despite the adjective in its title, this one is strictly lukewarm.

Last of the Red Hot Lovers: FUNKY

Our Time (1974)

          Before establishing a reliable brand with a run of moody conspiracy thrillers and wiseass action pictures, director Peter Hyams took journeyman gigs like helming Our Time, a sensitive-ish youth drama that’s only incrementally better than the average afterschool special of its era. Shot with a photographer’s eye for atmospheric detail (always a Hyams signature), the picture has adequate period texture but nowhere near enough originality or substance. Set in 1955, the exceedingly slight story concerns the romantic travails of private-school students Abby (Pamela Sue Martin), a pretty youth generally found courting trouble through insubordination and tardiness, and Muffy (Betsy Slade), her ugly-duckling best friend/roommate.

          Over the course of several months, Abby takes her romance with prep-school student Michael (Parker Stevenson) to the physical realm, while Muffy endures all sorts of misery as she pursues a stuck-up boy who doesn’t want her and reluctantly accepts the affections of a bespectacled dork who does. The first hour of the movie is quite tedious, since there’s no real dramatic tension—the characters aren’t interesting enough for viewers to get concerned about their romantic entanglements. Worse, Abby’s storyline, which is ostensibly the main thread of the story, is eclipsed by Muffy’s sordid melodrama. It’s not as if the filmmakers failed to select a focus; rather, it’s as if the filmmakers grossly overestimated the dramatic value of Abby’s romantic misadventures.

          This problem is exacerbated by a charisma inequity among the leading players: Martin and Stevenson, who later reunited as costars of the TV series The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, are not well matched, for while Martin offers naturalism and pouty sexiness, Stevenson is so blandly professional that he seems more like a stand-in than an actual performer. Therefore, Slade easily steals the movie from both romantic leads, since she gets to perform nearly every interesting action in the story. (It’s hard to discuss the specifics of her big moments without giving away the only substantial turn in the story, so suffice to say she’s affecting when the time comes.)

          As for Hyams, he delivers characteristically confident camerawork, slinging long lenses low to the ground in order to create scope, and sliding dollies through large spaces in order to accentuate scenes with motion. It seems clear he also created a comfortable space for actors, but the twin shortages of a shallow script and unexceptional acting limit how much he can accomplish. Still, the last half-hour of the picture, when the lives of the characters take a bleak turn, has a little bite, and deft character actor Robert Walden shows up for a memorable one-scene role. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Our Time: FUNKY

Dark Star (1974)

          Ambitious USC film student John Carpenter did such a bang-up job on his 45-minute thesis film, a 2001-inspired sci-fi comedy called Dark Star, that producer Jack H. Harris gave him a few extra bucks with which to shoot another 40 minutes of footage so the picture could become a theatrical feature. The resulting movie didn’t make much noise upon its initial release, but once Carpenter achieved stardom by making Halloween (1978) and other pictures, Dark Star was rediscovered. Given this context, it’s surprising that the movie is much more deeply infused with the personality of Carpenter’s principal collaborator on the project, fellow USC film student Dan O’Bannon. The two wrote the script together, O’Bannon plays the lead role, and O’Bannon both edited the film and supervised the picture’s resourceful special effects.

          Although all of Carpenter’s movies have mordant wit, he tends toward succinct irony. By contrast, the late O’Bannon tended toward overt comedy—so instead of Carpenter’s sly asides, Dark Star has motor-mouthed verbal gags and lots of outright slapstick. In fact, one reason the movie isn’t more effective is that Carpenter’s visual style of deep shadows and wide frames, which was already fully formed at this early stage, drowns the jokes in too much brooding atmosphere.

          That said, Dark Star has a trippy concept and many amusing scenes. The story concerns a space vessel called Dark Star, which zips through the universe blowing up planetoids that stand in the way of man’s development. The crew comprises shaggy hippies who bicker and joke like frat boys, and one of them is a ’70s stoner type who spends all his time in the ship’s observation bubble, silently blissing out on celestial panoramas. Crew member Pinback (O’Bannon), is in charge of feeding the ship’s mascot, a mischievous alien portrayed as a beach ball with feet, and a great deal of the movie concerns Pinback’s comedic misadventures with the critter. As silly as this material is, it’s executed professionally, and O’Bannon shows an appealing flair for physical comedy.

          On a deeper level, the movie riffs on 2001 by depicting a sentient bomb that gets annoyed each time it’s mistakenly pushed out of the ship for dispersal, and then pulled back in once the error is corrected. In the film’s funniest sequence, one of the astronauts gets into an argument with the bomb about the nature of existence as a means of dissuading the bomb from detonating.

          Dark Star drags because of the feature-length padding, the continuity is glitchy, and the visuals are grungy because the picture was shot on 16-milimeter film. But as a snapshot of where the collegiate head was at during the early ’70s, and as a footnote to one of cinema’s most interesting directing careers, Dark Star is a valuable artifact. Plus, it even has an amiable theme song: In addition to creating his first musical score, beginning a tradition that continued throughout his glory years, Carpenter penned the music for the country-and-Western ditty “Benson, Arizona,” which plays over the opening and closing credits.

Dark Star: FUNKY

Operation Daybreak (1975)

          Adapted from the true story of a bold Allied assassination attempt against a high-ranking Nazi officer, Operation Daybreak offers terrific verisimilitude but only so-so dramaturgy. The location photography, period details, and re-enactments of harrowing incidents are persuasive, creating a palpable sense of time and place, and the film’s matter-of-fact recitation of real-life heroism presents a sobering alternative to the usual war-movie derring-do and overwrought battlefield melodrama.

          The leading characters are Jan Kubis (Timothy Bottoms) and Jozef Gabcik (Anthony Andrews), Czech-born soldiers currently stationed in Britain. Given their lineage and other special skills, they are recruited for a mission requiring them to parachute into Czechoslovakia, rendezvous with the local resistance underground, and take out Reinhard Heydrich (Anton Diffing). An urbane but cruel Nazi oblivious to the suffering of civilians under his authority, Heydrich is considered by Allied commanders a potential successor to Hitler and therefore a symbol of Third Reich power; the idea is to shake German confidence by demonstrating that even the highest officials are vulnerable.

          From the first, the Czech commandoes’ mission is fraught with mishaps: They’re accidentally dropped 200 miles from their intended landing zone, and one of them breaks an ankle during the jump. Yet the locals aiding their efforts rise to the occasion, eager to depose a lethal tyrant; underground accomplices include the pastor of a Prague church and fiery resistance operative Anna (Nicola Pagett), who happens into a doomed romance with Kubis.

          As written by Ronald Harwood, from Alan Burgess’ novel Seven Men at Daybreak, the film gets minute-to-minute details so right, generally speaking, that it’s a shame the film’s approach to character lacks similar precision. Though many isolated exchanges are effective, the picture never presents complete characterizations; the film’s people are flatly generic amalgams of whatever qualities seem expedient for the story at any given moment. (The only satisfying character arc is that involving Heydrich and his Czech attendants, who sharply transition from reluctant deference to open contempt after the assassination attempt.)

          Operation Daybreak gains energy as it goes along, since rising tension makes character motivations plain through circumstance, and the twin climaxes of the assassination attempt and the Germans’ retaliatory assault on the conspirators’ hiding place are exciting and expertly filmed. The film’s performances are basically sound (though, of course, inhibited by thin writing), and Bottoms and Andrews generate affectingly bittersweet camaraderie during the final moments. Operation Daybreak doesn’t come close to fulfilling its potential, but watched for its strongest elements—and as a tribute to a significant historical incident—it’s quietly engrossing. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Operation Daybreak: GROOVY

The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973)

          Considering that he had already appeared in a several hard-hitting movies for grown-ups by this point in his career, it’s bizarre that Jan-Michael Vincent was offered a juvenile role in this squeaky-clean Disney comedy; it’s even more bizarre he accepted the offer. The World’s Greatest Athlete is inane even by the standards of live-action Disney pictures, which is saying a lot. Fed up with his losing streak at a small college, coach Sam Archer (John Amos) and his trusty assistant, Milo (Tim Conway), head off for a safari vacation in Africa. (The fact of two adult males traveling without female companions is unremarked upon, as is their subsequent preoccupation with a half-naked young man.)

          During the safari, they discover a white jungle boy, Nanu (Vincent), who possesses extraordinary athletic abilities. Sam learns that, according to tribal custom, a man who saves another man’s life must accompany the rescued man wherever he goes. He thereupon tricks Nanu into such an obligation, or at least believes he does; in actuality, Nanu’s godfather, witch doctor Gazenga (Roscoe Lee Browne), wants Nanu to see the outside world. Accompanied by his pet tiger, Nanu travels to America with Sam and Milo, where Nanu is tutored by pretty teacher/love interest Jane (Dayle Haddon) and groomed for sports competitions. Yes, that’s really the plot—not Disney’s finest hour.

          Making matters worse, the picture is filled with painfully stupid physical comedy. There’s an awful running gag about a nearly blind landlady (Nancy Walker) mistaking the tiger for a person, and there’s an excruciating sequence in which Gazenga shrinks Milo down to three inches in height. The screenplay is so blunt that it’s as if the story’s being told to newborns, not youngsters, and pretty much everything related to Africa is nonsensical and quasi-racist—for instance, why does Nanu speak like Tarzan if his godfather speaks perfect English? The climactic scene, in which Nanu performs several athletic events in succession, is enjoyable, and Vincent deserves faint praise for trying to play the movie straight. But with Amos’ unpersuasive overacting, Conway’s nattering-idiot routine, and the degrading sight of Browne wearing feathered headdresses and, at one point, a bone through his nose, The World’s Greatest Athlete is unrelentingly dissonant.

The World’s Greatest Athlete: LAME

A Town Called Hell (1971)

Yet another unwatchable Western spat forth from the bowels of the low-budget European film industry, A Town Called Hell is one of those simultaneously moronic and pretentious morality tales filled with dialogue about vengeance, and imagery rife with religious significance, yet almost completely lacking in coherence. The confusing picture begins when two Mexican revolutionaries—played by Robert Shaw and Martin Landau, to give you a sense of how far the picture is removed from reality—storm into a town and slaughter the local church congregation. A decade later, for reasons that are never particularly clear, Shaw has become the pacifistic local priest, and Telly Savalas—groomed within an inch of his life and talking in a vaguely Noo Yawk diction that makes no sense for the context—has emerged as a brutal local warlord whose power apparently stems from his willingness to shoot anyone who crosses his path. Into this environment arrives a mysterious black carriage containing a glass coffin, in which rests a white woman (Stella Stevens) who is very much alive; it seems her husband was killed in the town at some point, and she’s come for revenge. Yet her revenge, for some reason, takes the form of hiding out in Shaw’s church while Savalas taunts her with threats of violence. Then, when Savalas’ men abruptly turn on him, he more or less disappears from the story to make room for Landau, now a military official, who wants to find a fugitive hidden somewhere in the town. None of this makes much sense, and none of it is interesting; it’s all just very sweaty and unpleasant. Shaw, a great actor when guided by a strong director, is awful here, glowering and screaming pointlessly, and Stevens is so lifeless it’s appropriate she makes her entrance in a coffin. Savalas postures to a silly extreme, strutting around shirtless for most of the picture, and only Landau tries to give a credible performance, though he’s handicapped by the incomprehensible storyline.

A Town Called Hell: SQUARE

“10” (1979)

          It’s not difficult to identify some of the reasons why writer-director Blake Edwards’ sex comedy “10” struck a nerve during its highly successful initial release. The story of a middle-aged man who can’t stand the fact that young swingers are having wild sex while he’s stuck in a frosty monogamous relationship, the picture spoke to a whole generation of squares who felt like they were missing out on the erotic perks of the counterculture.

          And then there was the Bo factor. Although she had appeared in a couple of minor films previously, sun-kissed starlet Bo Derek made a huge splash with “10,” instantly becoming one of the most iconic sex symbols of the ’70s. The key image, featured in ads and posters everywhere, depicts the actress jogging along a beach in long-lensed soft focus, her cornrow-braided hair bouncing around her apple-cheeked face, and the rest of her, well, just plain bouncing. Epitomizing a certain fantasy ideal of California sexiness, she was the perfect object for the fixation of dirty old men circa 1979, and her casting is a major part of why the movie works as well as it does—which, it must be said, is not all that well.

          The problem isn’t so much the story, standard wayward-male stuff about Hollywood songwriter George Webber (Dudley Moore) skipping out on his lady to chase after a dream girl; the problem is Edwards’ execution. Instead of focusing on his forte of intricate physical comedy, Edwards tries to make a statement on American manhood that’s about as deep as a Playboy editorial, and nothing drags comedy down like shallow social commentary. Thus, the slapstick bits are often very funny—as when Moore tries to walk across a beach toward Derek but keeps hopping up and down like a dolt because the sand is too hot for his delicate tootsies—but the talking bits are tedious.

          Scenes of George arguing sexual politics with his Broadway-star girlfriend, Samantha (Julie Andrews), are pretentious and, now, quite dated. Even worse are the conversations between George and Jenny (Derek), who comes across not as a real character but as Edwards’ judgmental idea of an airheaded free spirit. To be fair, Edwards is just as harsh in depicting George, but that raises another question—if we’re not rooting for George to have a sexual adventure or rooting for Jenny to steer clear of a horndog, whose story are we following? Given that the picture meanders through a needlessly long running time, and given that the takeaway is a trite love-conquers-lust message, it seems Edwards never quite answered that question.

          Still, there are things to enjoy, and not just the ogling shots of Derek (which, in the context of the movie, seem appropriate instead of gratuitous). Robert Webber is funny and touching as George’s (gay) lyricist, working through his own difficulties with a decades-younger love interest; Dee Wallace is affecting as a lonely woman whose near-miss romantic encounter with George reaffirms her self-loathing; and Brian Dennehy dishes out 100-proof wisdom as a beach-resort bartender. A handful of comedy pros show up for enjoyable bit parts, with Max Showalter standing out as a reverend who wants George to hear the little romantic ditty he’s composed.

          These strong elements underline the frustrating thing about “10”—in many ways, Edwards was at the top of his game when he made the picture, but his grasping attempts at “significance” merely reveal the limits of his talent for cultural observation.

“10”: FUNKY

Man in the Wilderness (1971)

          The opening sequence of this strange Western is striking and memorable: A large expedition of fur trappers treks through the rugged American frontier, dragging a giant ship on wheels, the sea vessel’s towering mast dominating the skyline like a crucifix. Things only get weirder from there, and luckily for adventurous viewers, robust actors Richard Harris and John Huston deliver over-the-top performances that suit the bizarre material. Huston plays the expedition’s villainous leader, Captain Filmore Henry, an obsessed adventurer with a tentative grasp on reality and an almost utter lack of morality. With his black wardrobe, lanky frame, and phlegmatic voice, Huston personifies Captain Henry as a vision of sickly death. Harris is Zachary Bass, one of the captain’s trackers. Venturing away from the group at one point, Bass gets mauled by a bear, so Captain Henry orders him left for dead.

          Man in the Wilderness gets trippy after this turn of events, because vast wordless swaths of the movie depict Bass crawling through the woods as he tries to rebuild his strength, drifting in and out of delirious flashbacks all the while. This material exists somewhere on the border between fascinating and interminable, because Harris’ solo scenes are so repetitive and uneventful that at a certain point viewers become as disoriented as the character. Adding to the offbeat nature of the film are interludes of the expedition as it moves on from the site of Bass’ presumed demise; the superstitious trappers get the idea that Bass’ spirit is haunting them, so they guard the wheeled boat in shifts, waiting for some awful apparition to strike at them from the darkness of the forest. Huston goes to town in these sequences, depicting Captain Henry’s decline into guilt-ridden paranoia with gusto. By the time these two extreme characters reunite for their inevitable confrontation, Bass’ desire for revenge has, to a certain degree, become the audience’s desire as well.

          Harris spent much of the ’70s making violent Westerns about characters enduring horrible abuse, and Man in the Wilderness is the most surreal flick of the batch, which is saying something. The actor’s gift for portraying intense physicality makes the picture watchable in a masochistic sort of way, because his evocation of pain and suffering is excruciatingly vivid. With a characteristic lack of restraint, Harris plays to the cheap seats in every scene, even when he’s facedown in sludge, and that, too, adds to the effect: Harris seems like such a powerful force that it’s believable his character could survive an extraordinary ordeal. Therefore, despite the monotony and weirdness, the movie can’t be dismissed because of the fiery performances and because of the lushly textured widescreen images created by British cinematographer Gerry Fisher.

Man in the Wilderness: FREAKY

Sometimes a Great Notion (1970)

          Although author Ken Kesey famously distanced himself from the 1975 movie version of his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, he apparently enjoyed the 1970 adaptation of his book Sometimes a Great Notion, even though nearly everyone else regards the film of Cuckoo’s Nest as a classic and the film of Notion as a minor work. Given Kesey’s proclivity for stories about people who resist authority at great personal cost, however, it follows that he wouldn’t line up with popular opinion. Setting the author’s stamp of approval aside, Sometimes a Great Notion, which stars and was directed by Paul Newman, is sometimes a great movie.

          Telling the story of the iconoclastic Stamper clan, a family of independent Pacific Northwest loggers who alienate their neighbors by refusing to support a labor strike, the picture has moments of great insight and sensitivity, plus a climactic scene that’s horrific and memorable. Yet the movie is diffuse and overlong, as if it can’t decide whether it’s primarily about ornery patriarch Henry Stamper (Henry Fonda); his heir-apparent son, Hank (Newman); his estranged child, Leeland (Michael Sarrazin); or the whole family. The movie’s indecisiveness about whose story is being told gets exacerbated by sloppy storytelling at the beginning of the movie, because it takes a while to grasp that the labor strike is the main plot device.

          Even with these frustrating problems, Sometimes a Great Notion is watchable and often touching. Fonda is a powerhouse as a self-made man who refuses to accept that he can’t live by his own idiosyncratic rules: There’s a reason Henry coined “Never Give a Inch” as the family’s motto. The movie expertly depicts how the deficiencies of Henry’s parenting have infected his kids, because Hank has managed to drain the life from his marriage to Viv (Lee Remick), and Leeland is a lost soul who can’t abide his family tradition of psychological abuse. In this fraught environment, only Henry’s simple-minded middle son, Joe Ben (Richard Jaeckel), really thrives, so it’s not a surprise when the narrative punishes Joe Ben for his unquestioning acceptance of God’s will (and Henry’s will).

          The film benefits greatly from vivid location photography, even if Newman lets montages of logging chores drag on a bit too long, and it’s fascinating to watch diehard lefty Newman tell the story of a character who disdains the idea of organized labor. Plus, as noted earlier, the film’s climax—a horrible on-the-job accident that shakes the whole Stamper family—results in an extraordinary sequence that consumes nearly the entire last half-hour of the picture. From the moment the accident happens to the instant the movie ends with a final gesture of defiance from the Stampers, Sometimes a Great Notion is riveting. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

Sometimes a Great Notion: FUNKY

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

          Screenwriter John Milius crafted this outlandish narrative from the real-life exploits of Old West eccentric Judge Roy Bean, integrating a series of impossibly colorful episodes featuring an albino gunslinger, a lascivious priest, a beer-drinking bear, a legendary stage actress, and frontiersman Grizzly Adams. As directed by the venerable John Huston, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean isn’t remotely believable, but rather so enthusiastically weird that it’s fascinating to realize the movie was released by a major studio.

          Paul Newman stars as Bean, a fanciful drifter who wanders into a bar in the wilds of Texas only to get bushwhacked by unsavory locals. After being nursed back to health by a sweet senorita (Victoria Principal), he returns to the bar and slaughters everyone inside, then establishes the bar as the headquarters of his Wild West fiefdom. Bean declares himself a judge (literally draping himself in the U.S. flag at one point), and makes it a hanging offence for those under his “jurisdiction” to do things like besmirch the good name of Lily Langtry, the actress whom Bean worships from afar. He also attracts a cadre of loyal followers, including pistol-packing “marshals” who enrich themselves by stealing loot from the myriad unlucky souls Bean executes.

          The story eventually becomes a battle of wills between Bean and an ambitious lawyer (Roddy McDowall) who wants to seize the judge’s holdings, but the film mostly comprises a string of strange vignettes. Stacy Keach plays the aforementioned albino gunslinger, strutting around in pasty makeup, an Edgar Winter fright wig, and a spangled cowboy outfit worthy of the Village People. Appearing onscreen as well as directing, Huston plays Adams as a grumpy wanderer who complains the law won’t allow him to die wherever he wants. And so it goes. Huston lets actors run amok with the absurd material, and they look like they’re having a blast; Newman in particular seems thrilled to play a grizzled old coot with a silver tongue and a colossally bad attitude.

          The cast is filled with interesting people, from assorted varmint types (Ned Beatty, Bill McKinney) to those playing random small roles (Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Zerbe). But the real star of this unique show is Milius’ outrageous dialogue, like this rant from Bean after he insults a group of fallen women: “I understand you have taken exception to my calling you whores. I'm sorry. I apologize. I ask you to note that I did not call you callous-ass strumpets, fornicatresses, or low-born gutter sluts. But I did say ‘whores.’ No escaping that. And for that slip of the tongue, I apologize.”

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean: GROOVY

Kelly’s Heroes (1970)

          Entertaining despite an overlong running time and some dubious stylistic flourishes, Kelly’s Heroes is one of the myriad smartass World War II romps that followed in the wake of The Dirty Dozen (1967). Like the earlier picture, Kelly’s Heroes assembles an unlikely crew for an impossible task, all the while mixing anti-Establishment sentiment and broad characterizations in order to present everyman soldiers looking out for themselves instead of buying into the mission that brought them to the battlefield. Yet while The Dirty Dozen cleverly depicted criminals becoming soldiers, Kelly’s Heroes more crudely depicts soldiers becoming criminals; it’s a heist picture in war-movie clothing.

          Clint Eastwood stars as Private Kelly, an enlisted man with an attitude problem who accidentally discovers the hiding place for a cache of Nazi gold worth millions. He convinces his gruff NCO, “Big Joe” (Telly Savalas), to lead an excursion behind enemy lines so they can rip off the loot, and their crew soon expands to include “Crapgame” (Don Rickles), a supply sergeant who outfits the crew with munitions and other gear, and “Oddball” (Donald Sutherland), a space-case longhair who happens to have three Sherman tanks under his command. Sutherland’s characterization is simultaneously the funniest thing in the movie and the hardest element to believe; bearded and, though this is never explicitly stated, apparently high as a kite throughout the story, he’s a ’60s stoner in a ’40s setting, so it’s never clear, for instance, how he rose to the rank of sergeant.

          Yet logic isn’t really what makes this sort of movie work, because Kelly’s Heroes is a big, silly adventure story about entertaining characters blowing stuff up, cracking wise, and pulling one over on the man. The production values are impressive—the picture was shot in Yugoslavia, where a wealth of WWII-vintage gear was available for filming—and everyone delivers the requisite goods in terms of onscreen charisma. Eastwood is sly and quiet, always one step ahead of everyone else; Savalas is a dese-dem-dose tough guy; Rickles does his insult-comic thing, bitching and sassing with every breath; and Caroll O’Connor, going way over the top, appears as a ridiculous general who mistakes Kelly’s mission for a nervy invasion. All of this goes down fairly smoothly in a guy-movie kind of way, though it doesn’t seem unreasonable to lament the lack of anything resembling substance in the movie’s 144 minutes.

Kelly’s Heroes: FUNKY



Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976)

          Despite a fantastic cast, the would-be farce Harry and Walter Go to New York falls flat because only a handful of the movie’s myriad one-liners, sight gags, and slapstick routines actually elicit laughter. A failed attempt to blend the Vaudevillian style of silent-era comedy with the elaborate con-man plotting of The Sting (1973), the ineptly written but lavishly produced picture follows a pair of nincompoop 19th-century crooks who fall into the orbit of a world-famous master criminal, then try to rob a bank before the criminal gets there first.
          James Caan and Elliot Gould play Harry and Walter, small-time robbers who get caught picking pockets during one of their low-rent song-and-dance routines. Meanwhile, gentleman thief Adam Worth (Michael Caine) gets tossed into the same jail as our heroes, but Adam’s so rich that he gets a private cell appointed with velvet curtains and silver table settings. Harry and Walter discover—and accidentally destroy—Adam’s prized blueprints for an ambitious bank job, then escape and get enmeshed with activist reporter Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton). Through convoluted circumstances, Harry, Walter, and Lissa end up trying to rob the bank the same night as Adam’s gang, leading to silliness like Harry and Walter stalling for time with an improvised musical number.

          As photographed in a nostalgic glow by Laszlo Kovacs, Harry and Walter looks great, and the leads are complemented by a gaggle of ace supporting players, including Val Avery, Ted Cassidy, Charles Durning, Jack Gilford, Carol Kane, Lesley Ann Warren, and Burt Young. Unfortunately, the material just isn’t there. The characters are underdeveloped, the comedic situations don’t percolate, the dialogue doesn’t sparkle, and the narrative conceit that the idiotic Harry and Walter keep stumbling into good fortune feels like a cheat. Still, it’s impossible not to find commendable elements with this much talent involved, and those high points range from the intentionally awful musical passages featuring Caan and Gould to Caine’s peerless delivery of sardonic dialogue. Providing one of the movie’s few real laughs, he dismisses the heroes by explaining that “They’re not oafs—they would require practice to become oafs.”

Harry and Walter Go to New York: FUNKY

The Treasure of Jamaica Reef (1975)

Among of the worst movies of the ’70s, this amateur-hour adventure—which tries and fails to deliver comedy, excitement, and underwater grandeur—would almost certainly have disappeared from the face of the earth had its leading lady not achieved fleeting sex-symbol status a few years after the picture was made. The woman in question is Charlie’s Angels beauty Cheryl Ladd (billed here as Cheryl Stoppelmoor), and it says most of what you need to know about this cinematic atrocity that she plays a perky treasure hunter named Zappy. Check, please! But, no, sadly, there’s a movie to watch, or at least endure. Zappy gathers her pals, played by Z-listers including studio-era hunk Stephen Boyd and future game-show host Chuck Woolery (sporting a pimp beard of which Superfly would be proud), for a trip to Jamaica, as it seems Zappy has acquired salvage rights for a sunken wreck in which treasure is supposedly hidden. The plot is virtually nonexistent, with a few throwaway scenes of crooks trying to steal a treasure map from our heroes, so the interminable movie comprises endless diving scenes, often with absolutely nothing of interest happening. Making the whole thing even more painful to watch is clunky narration that’s clearly used to add a measure of coherence to the disjointed footage, plus music that would have been cut from a children’s cartoon for being too cutesy. The only novel element, besides the not-unpleasant sight of Ladd cavorting in a bikini, is the bizarre casting of former football pro Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier as the heroes’ boat captain. He spends most of his time giving Ladd diving lessons (because, of course, the character who initiated the treasure hunt isn’t qualified to dive), and the sight of enormous Grier splashing around with tiny Ladd—well, it’s not exactly interesting, but it’s almost something, which is more than can be said of the rest of the picture. (FYI, this movie was later reissued as Evil in the Deep, and given a silly shark-centric poster, in a crass attempt to hop aboard the Jaws train.)

The Treasure of Jamaica Reef: SQUARE

Skin Game (1971)

          Even in the changing times of the post-Civil Rights era, the prospect of a Hollywood comedy about slavery would seem to promise something wildly offensive, and yet the James Garner-Louis Gossett Jr. romp Skin Game is not only thoroughly enjoyable but, in its irreverent way, respectful. The story, by Richard Alan Simmons, is clever and nervy. In the pre-Civil War South, white hustler Quincy Drew (Garner) travels from town to town “selling” his friend Jason (Gossett), a free man posing as a slave. Exploiting the arrogance of slave owners, they realize nobody expects Jason to slip away after he’s been purchased, so they divide their earnings each time they bilk another rube. The movie finds entertaining ways to address nearly every possibility suggested by this scheme—nefarious types figure out what’s happening and try to hustle the hustlers; Jason ends up getting bought by someone who makes easy escape impossible; Quincy ends up on the receiving end of a bullwhip, making him understand the dangers Jason faces; and so on.

          Even though the picture apparently had some rockiness behind the camera (two directors, a screenwriter working under an alias), Skin Game unfolds confidently, zooming along at a steady pace and revealing witty surprises at nearly every turn. It’s true that some of the twists are a bit too convenient (Jason’s bonding with a group of newly arrived African slaves is a stretch), but the resourcefulness with which the filmmakers complicate the heroes’ lives is impressive. The result is a breezy “another fine mess you’ve gotten us into” buddy comedy, with Garner at the apex of his rascally charm and Gossett mixing lightness into his customarily intense screen persona. Their bickering scenes are thoroughly amusing, and the depth of friendship the story conveys is touching.

          The movie provides love interests for both characters, appropriately a brazen grifter (Susan Clark) for Quincy and a beautiful house slave (Brenda Sykes) for Jason. (Clark, a solid player in a variety of ’70s movies, does some of her best work here, though she’s not in Garner’s league.) However, even with Simmons’ ingenious story and the winning performances by Garner and Gossett, the real star of the show is screenwriter Peter Stone, credited as Pierre Marton. The light-comedy master behind Charade (1963) and Father Goose (1964), Stone fills Skin Game with effervescent dialogue, like this quip from Garner after Clark’s sticky-fingered character offers to safeguard a bankroll: “It’s not you I don’t trust, it’s the money—it begins to act strangely whenever it’s in your possession.”
          FYI, the 1974 TV movie Sidekicks represented a failed attempt to turn Skin Game into a series; Larry Hagman took over the Quincy Drew role while Gossett reprised his Jason character. (Skin Game available at WarnerArchive.com)

Skin Game: GROOVY

Meatballs (1979)

          Mostly notable as Bill Murray’s movie-star debut—and his first collaboration with director Ivan Reitman, of Stripes (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984) fame—the Canadian indie Meatballs is an amiably insouciant comedy. The picture depicts how the counselors and kids at a second-rate summer camp embrace their also-ran status throughout a summer filled with mischief, sex, and sticking it to their obnoxious counterparts at another camp. Although the premise suggests a lowbrow comedy filled with bathroom humor and panty raids, Meatballs is all bark and no bite, at least in terms of the usual teen-comedy tropes. Excepting a tame sequence of dudes eavesdropping on an all-girls cabin, the sex in the movie is discreet and romantic, and the biggest bathroom joke is a toilet flush broadcast over a loudspeaker. Even the naughty language is comparatively innocuous.

          Instead of crassness, the movie focuses on sweet storylines about people nurturing and supporting each other. Murray plays Tripper Harrison, ringleader of the CITs (counselors-in-training) at Camp North Star, an underfunded facility catering to lower-middle-class kids. Tripper’s the quintessential Murray character, a cocky jokester who talks a great anarchistic line even though he’s basically decent; his raison d’être is getting others to loosen up and resist authority. Tripper is also the only properly developed character in the picture, presumably because Murray added interesting flourishes during production. Everyone else is a cliché—the horny nerd, the tweaked pyromaniac, the uptight administrator.

          Most of the story concerns Tripper’s sensitive friendship with a lonely young misfit, Rudy (Chris Makepeace), Tripper’s courtship with fellow CIT Roxanne (Kate Lynch), and Camp North Star’s various run-ins with the stuck-up folks at neighboring Camp Mohawk. Yet the story is primarily just a string of random vignettes until the climax, when the camps face off in a sports competition. (Cue rousing music as unlikely hero Rudy saves the day.) Though generally pleasant to watch, Meatballs lacks anything particularly memorable—excepting, of course, Murray’s wiseass persona—but Makepeace, who later starred in My Bodyguard (1980), does a lot with a little, turning his thinly written character into a empathetic screen presence. Furthermore, it’s hard not to root for the ne’er-do-wells at Camp North Star, and Murray’s appeal is undeniable.

Meatballs: FUNKY