Crazy Joe (1974)

          Highly watchable but also underdeveloped and unoriginal, Crazy Joe is one of myriad ultraviolent gangster films released in the wake of The Godfather (1971). Starring the powerful actor Peter Boyle as real-life New York City mobster Joey Gallo, the picture was produced by trash titan Dino De Laurentiis, and it boasts not only an eclectic cast of familiar ’70s faces but also a fast-moving storyline filled with betrayals, murders, robbery, and even a spectacular suicide. Furthermore, thanks to the lively script by Lewis John Carlino, the picture has flashes of intellectualism and style. The picture doesn’t go anywhere surprising, but there’s some vivid scenery along the way.

          Viewers first meet Joe (Boyle) leading his gang of thugs through an afternoon of hanging out and an evening of committing a brazen hit in the middle of a crowded restaurant. Together, these two sequences effectively situate Joe as a character for whom death is as normal as grabbing a quick bite. Upon reporting the hit to his boss, Falco (Luther Adler), Joe is incensed to discover he won’t earn a bonus. Joe’s older brother, Richie (Rip Torn), intervenes before the argument escalates, but the seeds of a war have been planted. Thus, over the course of many years, Joe splits from Falco and later has an even bloodier battle with Falco’s successor, Vittorio (Eli Wallach). Joe’s ambition, as well as his appetite for danger, cause friction with Richie and with Joe’s wife, Anne (Paula Prentiss), even as Joe expands his operation by hiring African-American thugs controlled by Willy (Fred Williamson), whom Joe meets during a prison stint.

          Excepting the material with Prentiss’ character, which is so anemic that it should have been jettisoned entirely, most of what happens in Crazy Joe is entertaining and lurid. Joe grandstands in front of powerful men. Joe leads his crew on daring criminal adventures. Joe studies philosophy in prison, thereby arriving at high-minded justifications (“The criminal is really just another existentialist expression”). Joe reveals hidden layers of civic-mindedness and decency by saving kids from a burning building. Boyle sinks his teeth into all of this material, portraying Joe as a being of pure id, relying on bravery and instinct even though restraint and strategy would ensure a longer life.

          Yet Boyle’s performance is strangely one-dimensional, as if he can’t figure out how to decelerate for intimate scenes, and that gives the picture a certain degree of monotony. That’s why it helps to have such capable actors as Torn, Wallach, and Williamson bolstering the storytelling. Additionally, it’s fun to spot players including Charles Cioffi, Michael V. Gazzo, Hervé Villechaize, and Henry Winkler in secondary roles. As for the technical execution of the piece, which was handled by an international crew under the helm of director Carlo Lizzani, Crazy Joe is competently shot and effectively paced, allowing the focus to remain on the lively acting and the turbulent storyline.

Crazy Joe: FUNKY

In Hot Pursuit (1977)

Originally titled Polk County Pot Plane and based upon an odd true-crime story about Southerners who used a DC-4 to smuggle weed, this mindless mélange of rampaging redneckery feels like something a bunch of good-ole-boy buddies made for laughs on weekends. Although the picture has decent production values, as seen in lengthy car chase scenes punctuated with extensive property destruction, the cast comprises hapless non-actors and the storyline is feeble. It’s also worth noting that the picture’s leading characters, played by real-life brothers Bobby and Don Watson, are named “Boosh” and “Oosh.” When combined with the fact that most of the characters in the picture don’t even have proper names, you get a fair idea of the effort that was expended on filling the film with fresh ideas. The gist of the piece is that Boosh and Oosh run dope for mobsters who pay to operate the DC-4. When Boosh and Oosh get busted after the noisy chase sequence that opens the picture, the amiable criminals become pawns in a power struggle involving mobsters and other smugglers. Yet this set-up is merely a thin excuse allowing the filmmakers to generate vignettes of, say, an 18-wheeler blasting its way through a mobile home and causing an explosion of glass and lumber. With their jeans, T-shirts, beards and unruly hair, the Watson brothers look as if they should be roadies for the Marshall Tucker Band, while the folks playing cops and criminals seem like neighbors and relatives of the filmmakers who were persuaded to mug inertly while cameras rolled. About the only performer who registers as having a discernible personality is the fellow playing the unnamed DC-4 pilot, because he gets to utter such choice lines as, “I’m gonna get down to the meat of the coconut.” (Translation: “Let me get to the point.”) Adding to the overall sloppiness of the movie is a chaotic score that includes everything from rinky-dink piano music straight out of the silent-film era to rumbling Southern-fried funk that lays delicate flute melodies over chunky R&B grooves.

In Hot Pursuit: LAME

The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979)

          Plaintive, tragic, and wise, The Marriage of Maria Braun is a titanic achievement in the extensive filmmography of provocative German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Setting a peculiar love story against the backdrop of World War II’s final years, the picture says profound things about the damnable cost of pride, the degradation of national identity during times of war, the interpersonal issues that arise whenever women become breadwinners in patriarchal societies, and the mysteries of the female soul. Yet for all the philosophical and sociopolitical weight of the subject matter, The Marriage of Maria Braun unfolds with something that could almost be described as lightness of touch. The leading character is so self-assured and the storytelling is so witty that hints of playful satire sparkle amid the drama.

          Things get off to an amazing start with the frenetic opening scene—beautiful young Maria (Hanna Schygulla) marries German soldier Hermann (Klaus Löwitsch) while the city around them is shelled with enemy bombs. Soon after this perfect metaphor, Hermann and Maria are separated for the duration of the war, forcing Maria to fend for herself without any sure knowledge of whether her husband will return home or even whether he’s alive. Resourceful, smart, and tough, Maria sees everyone else around her fighting for scraps, so she decides to try for something better. Maria takes a job as a dancehall girl. While working at the dancehall, Maria bewitches a stocky black GI named Bill (George Boyd), who supplies her with imported goods, impregnates her, and offers to marry her. Then, fate being what it is, Hermann returns from a long and soul-crushing incarceration in a Russian POW camp. Plot twist follows plot twist until the story expands to include Karl Oswald (Ivan Desny), a wealthy industrialist who hires Maria as a secretary and later assumes an even more important role in her life. Giving away much more would diminish the experience of watching the picture, which is unmistakably arthouse fare but which also has enough pulpy content for a Harold Robbins novel.

          While Fassbinder executes The Marriage of Maria Braun with his usual clinical style, guiding actors to underplay scenes, the movie has a more vivacious editing scheme than other Fassbinder ’70s efforts. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who later became Martin Scorsese’s go-to DP for a period of time, captures actions with inventive angles and nimble camera movements, allowing co-editors Fassbinder and Juliane Lorenz to create brisk pacing. The performances are generally strong, with some actors serving as puppets in Fassbinder’s scheme while others incarnate fully realized individuals. Naturally, Schygulla dominates. Enigmatic and luminous, she makes her character’s contradictions believable and fascinating. (As the heroine says to Karl at one point: “I am who I am. Last night I was Maria Braun who wanted to sleep with you. Today I’m Maria Braun who wants to work for you.”)

          Screenwriters Pea Frölich and Peter Märthesheimer enrich The Marriage of Maria Braun by including dialogue that succinctly encapsulates themes, although it’s likely Fassbinder had an invisible hand in the writing. In one scene, the idealistic Maria says to a fellow dancehall girl, “A great love is a great truth.” The dancehall girl’s response: “The truth is what you have in your belly when you’re hungry.” In a different scene, Maria delivers one of the finest character-defining lines ever spoken: “It’s not a good time for feelings, but it suits me.” In addition to winning numerous international awards, such as a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Film, The Marriage of Maria Braun was the first movie in Fassbinder’s so-called “BRD Trilogy,” which continued with Lola (1981) and Veronika Voss (1982).

The Marriage of Maria Braun: RIGHT ON

Buffalo Rider (1978)

The annals of independently made family films from the ’70s include a few notable successes, such as the canine caper Benji (1974), but more typical of the breed is the cloying and lifeless Buffalo Rider. Apparently based upon the real-life exploits of an unusual character from the Wild West era, the picture delivers exactly what its title promises, and so much less. The movie does indeed feature many scenes of a man riding a saddled buffalo, and the image has considerable novelty the first few times it’s presented. Unfortunately, every other element of the picture’s storyline is beyond trite, and while the actual filming of Buffalo Rider is fairly competent (with special notice due to the production’s animal handlers and stuntmen), the editorial assembly of the piece is rotten. Suggesting there might have been problems with the location recording of dialogue, vast stretches of the picture are smothered in cornpone narration, and by the time 20 minutes of the movie have elapsed, only two inconsequential dialogue exchanges have occurred. That said, once viewers get an earful of the acting in Buffalo Rider, the narration seems like a welcome alternative. Revolving around the exploits of immaculately groomed mountain man Buffalo Jones (Rick Guinn), the story depicts Jones’ caretaking and training of a bison he names Samson. Discovering the animal as a wounded calf, Jones raises the beast in captivity, and then throws a saddle on the buffalo’s back once it reaches maturity. Thereafter, Jones and Samson embark upon a meandering adventure that involves clashes with hunters, scrapes with wildlife, and a vapid idyll with a frontier family. Excepting the fact that hunters try to kill Samson for his hide, and the fact that the buffalo occasionally scares off predators, Samson might as well be a horse, seeing how little impact his specific breed has upon the overall story. Worse, the filmmakers (including three directors and six screenwriters) run out of narrative ideas at regular intervals. For example, one long passage comprises realistic footage of a duel between a cougar and a raccoon, which seems more suitable to a nature documentary than a fictional feature. Oh, and even though an opening credit promises that Buffalo Rider will be “Family Entertainment from Starfire Films,” the climax of the picture involves a character getting trampled to death.

Buffalo Rider: LAME

The Adventurers (1970)

          Per the norm for pictures adapted from the trashy novels of Harold Robbins, The Adventurers is a big, glossy melodrama filled with betrayal, sex, and violence, set against a backdrop of international strife and unimaginable wealth. From a technical standpoint, the movie is impressive, thanks to glossy cinematography by Claude Renoir and swank music by Antonio Carlos Jobim. The Adventurers also features a truly eclectic cast, comprising accomplished veterans (Ernest Borgnine, Olivia de Havilland), colorful international stars (Alan Badel, Charles Aznavour, Rosanno Brazzi, Fernando Rey), and dazzling starlets (Candice Bergen, Jaclyn Smith, Leigh Taylor-Young). Yet the film’s laughable flaws are myriad. The story, reputedly inspired by the exploits of real-life jet-setter Porfirio Rubirosa, is an overheated mixture of bedroom antics and political machinations. The pictorial style, marked by silly metaphors during sex scenes, lacks anything resembling good taste. And the leading performance, by Yugoslavian stud Bekim Fehmiu, is atrocious.

          Nonetheless, it must be said that the film’s three hours breeze by fairly quickly, since director Lewis Gilbert and his collaborators ensure that the screen is almost constantly filled with vivid images of people fighting, scheming, and/or screwing, if not all at once.

          The picture begins in the fictional South American country of Courteguay during a rebellion. After soldiers rape and murder his relatives, Dax Xenos (played as a boy by Loris Loddi) meets Rojo (Badel), leader of the rebellion. Rojo helps Dax kill the soldiers who slaughtered his family, beginning a lifelong relationship. Eventually, Dax is taken from South America by his guardian, Fat Cat (Borgnine), and integrated into a group of wealthy young Europeans. By the time Dax reaches adulthood (whereupon Fehmiu takes over the role), Dax is a playboy with a chip on his shoulder. Over the course of myriad back-and-forth trips from Europe to South America, Dax seduces a series of rich women (including Bergen and de Havilland), thus gathering his own personal fortune. Meanwhile, Courteguay descends into chaos, so Dax returns home and leads a military coup against his onetime benefactor, Rojo.

          There’s enough plot in The Adventurers for three movies, the characterizations are beyond contrived, and the dramaturgy is as subtle as thunder. For instance, it’s never enough for a character in this movie to discover a dead body—the body must have a dagger impaled in the neck or a giant wound in the middle of the forehead. Similarly, the myriad overwrought sex scenes recall the work of skin-flick auteur Russ Meyer. During Dax’s first conquest, Gilbert intercuts lovemaking with close-ups of erotic statues (one of which has a giant erect phallus) and then literally zooms the camera in and out, matching the rhythm of Dax’s thrusts. When Dax beds Taylor-Young’s character, Gilbert uses a rifle and cymbal crashes to symbolize Dax’s potency. And Dax’s first encounter with Bergen’s character begins in a hothouse (get it?) and concludes with actual fireworks. This sort of stuff isn’t credible by a long shot, but neither is it boring.

          Unsurprisingly, The Adventurers was savaged upon its initial release, and today it’s best to regard the movie as big-budget camp. FYI, at least one actor had serious misgivings about making The Adventurers. In his autobiography, Borgnine calls the picture “my worst experience in nearly 20 years of filmmaking.”

The Adventurers: FUNKY

An American Hippie in Israel (1972)

          Incredibly, the canon of ’70s cult movies continues to grow, because every so often some enterprising soul rediscovers a “lost” cinematic oddity and unleashes the thing upon an unsuspecting public. Such is the case with the deeply strange An American Hippie in Israel, which was produced by an Israeli film company in the early ’70s, discarded, and then revived in the 2010s for DVD release and the midnight-movie circuit. An American Hippie in Israel ticks nearly all the boxes required for cult-flick status: dialogue so ridiculous that it’s immediately quotable; a nonsensical story told with great intensity, as if the filmmakers thought they were making something profound; actors who seem to exist outside the normal spectrum of human experience; rebellious themes about the challenges faced by boundary-pushing individuals; and a steady stream of verbal and visual non sequiturs. In sum, An American Hippie in Israel unfolds like a drug experience, with self-contained pockets of weirdness passing through the frame, to the accompaniment of painfully earnest lyrics repeated ad nauseam on the soundtrack by twee folksingers.

          The movie opens with Mike (Asher Tzarfati) sitting on a plane as it heads for Israel. Barefoot and wearing a squat hat, scruffy facial hair, a fur vest, and dirty jeans, he’s a foreigner’s slightly skewed vision of a hippie. Immediately upon arrival in Israel, Mike hooks up with redhead Elizabeth (Lily Avidan), who offers him a ride in her car. Then another vehicle blocks their path, and two men emerge, both dressed like old-time gangsters and wearing weird Kabuki makeup on their faces. Mike berates the men into withdrawing, and then says to Elizabeth, “I think they want my life.” “But why,” she asks. “That’s exactly what I don’t understand,” he replies. And so the die is cast, because An American Hippie in Israel is all about peculiar shit happening without explanation. Despite having just seen that Mike is a target for dangerous-looking men, Elizabeth sleeps with him—instantly becoming a hippie herself—and then abandons her home and job in order to wander the countryside with her new lover.

          During a wordless montage set to overbearing music, Mike and Elizabeth meet Israeli hippies Françoise (Tzila Karney) and Komo (Shmuel Wolf), who take Mike back to their beachfront commune as if he’s some counterculture messiah. After a concert thrown in his honor, Mike delivers a whopper of a speech: “You’re just beautiful people. Man, I assume that our outlook in life is the same, and that’s why we lead the same kind of life. Because that’s how we want to live. All this is good for us. We’re still living in an environment that strangles us. That’s why we’re not really living the way we want to live, and the way we really could live. And I mean an absolute free life in an absolutely isolated place far away from this civilization and culture of violence. Therefore, men, let’s get organized, and find a place in which we can live as we see fit—without clothes, without governments, and without borders. Got it?”

          Naturally, the hippies respond by shouting “Yeah!” and then commencing an orgy—until the weird gangster guys show up with machine guns and kill everyone in the commune except Elizabeth, Françoise, Komo, and Mike. Their reaction? Casually leaving a roomful of corpses and hitting the road in their quest for a place to be “free.” Free from what, you ask? That’s anybody’s guess. Unbelievably, the movie gets even weirder after that point, devolving into a Lord of the Flies-type story about characters turning on each other in the wilderness—because the hippies encamp themselves on a tiny island surrounded by killer sharks. All the while, the scolding Greek-chorus folksingers warn us that “someday they’ll have to pay for taking time to play.”

          An American Hippie in Israel arguably reaches its apex/nadir with a long scene of Mike and Komo “discussing” possible solutions to the shark problem—Komo, who doesn’t speak English, keeps rambling in Hebrew while Mike, who doesn’t speak Hebrew, repeatedly says “I can’t get you” as he spirals into pointless anger against his friend. Indeed, every scene in American Hippie in Israel is stunningly confusing or repetitive or stupid, if not all three, so that’s why, when viewed from a certain ironic perspective, the movie is magical in its awfulness.

An American Hippie in Israel: FREAKY

Lost Horizon (1973)

          Despite the commercial failure of its 1937 adaptation, which was directed by Frank Capra, Columbia Pictures took another shot at bringing James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon to the screen. The bloated 1973 version, featuring twee songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, fared just as poorly at the box office as its predecessor. Key among the 1973 movie’s problems is the way the songs clash with everything else onscreen. For instance, the first properly sung-through number doesn’t appear until nearly an hour has elapsed, which has the effect of suddenly changing the picture from a straightforward drama to a ridiculous musical spectacle. The remaining 90 minutes of Lost Horizon boast such attributes as an inherently compelling storyline and some vivid performances, but it’s impossible to take the movie seriously.

          Lost Horizon begins with diplomat Richard Conway (Peter Finch) fleeing a war-torn country in the Far East, accompanied by several other refugees. The group’s getaway plane is hijacked by a mysterious stranger, who crashes the vessel in the snowy peaks of the Himalayas. Soon afterward, Richard’s party is rescued by the enigmatic Chang (John Gielgud), and then escorted to the glorious realm of Shangri-La. Despite its storm-tossed surroundings, Shangri-La is a tropical utopia where people live in seemingly perfect harmony. Friction divides Richard’s party. Some, including Richard’s swaggering brother, George (Michael York), want to leave Shangri-La in order to resume their old lives. Others, including troubled reporter Sally (Sally Kellerman), embrace the chance to start anew. Meanwhile, Richard is introduced to Shangri-La’s spiritual leader, The High Lama (Charles Boyer), who explains that Richard has the opportunity to fulfill a special role in Shangri-La.

          Narratively and thematically, this is fascinating stuff, even though pundits have spent years parsing political (and even racist) messages from the source material. Ironically, the strength of the storyline is what makes the intrusion of songs so absurd. Had the songs added anything, the result would have been different. Alas, the tunes merely express infantile notions, as when Kellerman and costar Olivia Hussey warble the line “different people look at things from different points of view” during the spirited duet “The Things I Will Not Miss.” As for the movie’s performances, they’re all over the place, an issue compounded by the use of professional singers to lip-sync vocals for many of the actors. Finch is expressive and regal; leading lady Liv Ullmann is luminous, within the constraints of an underwritten role; York is impassioned; and dignified costar James Shigeta is as welcome a presence as ever. Boyer and Gielgud acquit themselves well despite outrageous miscasting. Hussey, Kellerman, and costar George Kennedy, however, play their roles so melodramatically that the actors come across as cartoonish.

          On a technical level, director Charles Jarriot and cinematographer Robert Surtees shoot the movie quite well, providing scope and splendor even if their presentation of singing-and-dancing nonsense feels indifferent. In the end, Lost Horizon is a bizarre mess, though patient viewers can conceivably power through the musical sequences and latch onto the dramatic scenes, which are vastly superior. FYI, the screenplay for Los Horizon is a minor credit for the important writer Larry Kramer, whose activism and creativity coalesced in his iconic play The Normal Heart (1985), which was endured through celebrated revivals and an Emmy-winning 2014 television adaptation.

Lost Horizon: FUNKY

A Gunfight (1971)

          Mostly squandering a terrific premise and a unique combination of leading actors, the offbeat Western A Gunfight is worth investigating for fans of the genre and the stars, though nearly all who watch the film will end up disappointed. The movie feels like a great episode of some vintage gunslinger-themed TV show, unnecessarily stretched to feature length. Still, where else can viewers see country-music legend Johnny Cash and he-man movie icon Kirk Douglas square off against each other? Directed by the skilled Lamont Johnson, A Gunfight begins with imagery so familiar that it’s a Western cliché—the mysterious stranger rolling into town, arousing the suspicions of everyone he encounters. In this case, the stranger is onetime gunfighter Abe Cross (Cash). Despite presenting himself as a peaceable man who just wants to cash in the meager findings from his failed career as a gold prospector, Abe excites the imagination of townsfolk who are itching for the thrill of gunplay. Meanwhile, fellow ex-gunfighter Will Tenneray (Douglas) enjoys a humble existence as a permanent resident in the very same town, sharing humble lodgings with his wife, Nora (jane Alexander), and their son. Essentially a walking-and-talking tourist attraction, Will spins tale tales of his past exploits in a local bar, encouraging patrons to drink up and incur hefty tabs.
          Captivated by the notion of two famous fighters occupying the same place at the same time, townsfolk pester Abe and Will with questions of when they’ll battle each other. At first, neither man has any interest in a duel, but then Abe jokingly suggests staging a fight and selling tickets. The idea lodges itself in Will’s mind, so, eventually, Abe’s need for cash and Will’s need to reassert his manhood cause the idea to become a real plan. Understandably, this causes friction with Nora and with Abe’s newfound girlfriend, a prostitute named Jenny (Karen Black).

          Writer Harold Jack Bloom adds several unexpected wrinkles to the basic premise, displaying how bloodlust, entrepreneurship, and pathos converge in the spectacle of two men facing each other as a form of public spectacle. Alas, Bloom doesn’t conjure an entire feature’s worth of material, so the script stalls repeatedly, and Bloom’s character development is mediocre at best. The movie also suffers for the inclusion of an obtuse and underwhelming final sequence. That said, a convergence of disparate acting styles produces many vivid scenes along the way. Cash is easy and natural, bringing his signature “Man in Black” persona to the screen smoothly. Douglas does well playing the de facto villain of the piece, since his character is a little too eager to court death, and his macho energy serves the piece well. Alexander is marvelously real as always, elevating her scenes to the level of genuine drama, whereas Black is the weak link, though she’s not onscreen enough to inflict much damage. A Gunfight also benefits from the participation of Keith Carradine (whose billing suggests this movie is his debut, although he had appeared a few months earlier in Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller), Dana Elcar, and Raf Vallone.

A Gunfight: FUNKY

Arnold (1973)

          A disastrous attempt at a black comedy that plays like an Edgar Allan Poe story transformed into a idiotic comic strip, Arnold opens with one of the strangest scenes in all of mainstream ’70s cinema. As guests stand nearby to witness the ceremony, sexy young blonde Karen (Stella Stevens) weds wealthy older man Lord Arnold Dwellyn (Norman Stuart), who happens to be propped up inside a coffin because he’s dead. Even within the realm of would-be outrageous comedy, this scene makes absolutely zero sense. Nonetheless, the filmmakers soldier on by presenting a twisty plot that’s predicated upon the exacting demands of Arnold’s will. Karen gets Arnold’s money so long as she lives under the same roof as his corpse for the rest of her life. Yet Karen has other ideas—she’s conspiring with Arnold’s craven son, Robert (Roddy McDowall), with whom she’s romantically involved. When Robert is killed under mysterious circumstances, Karen begins to suspect that Arnold made arrangements before his death to knock off relatives who covet his money.

          The notion of a killer operating from beyond the grave should be exciting, but in the hands of the hacks behind Arnold, it’s just goofy. Arnold “communicates” via prerecorded cassette tapes, but the tapes contain such specific dialogue that it’s as if Arnold somehow knew exactly what each of his friends and relatives would do and say during every minute of every day. Similarly, the traps that the killer sets for victims are contingent upon people taking particular actions at particular times. Despite featuring many colorful big-screen veterans (other cast members include Victor Buono, Bernard Fox, Farley Granger, and Elsa Lanchester), Arnold is a chore to get through. The lighting is flat, the music is ghastly, the sets are flimsy, and Stevens gives an embarrassingly bad leading performance. Worst of all, Arnold is timid. Had the folks at Bing Crosby Productions (yes, really!) bothered to contrive a storytelling style as crass as the film’s underlying premise, Arnold might have become a bad-cinema milestone. As is, it’s just tacky.

Anrold: LAME

A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (1979)

          Inexplicably taking its name from a 1939 romantic ballad that was recorded enough times over the years to become a crusty standard, the weak heist comedy A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square stars the American actor Richard Jordan as an amiable criminal operating on foreign soil. When the UK-made picture begins, Pinky (Jordan) earns parole from a British prison by way of good behavior, promising his jailors that he plans to make an honest living as an electrical engineer. Stretching credibility way past the breaking point, Pinky soon lands a job at a major bank—because, apparently, British financial institutions don’t perform background checks on prospective employees. Anyway, Pinky plays things straight until he inadvertently reconnects with local crime lord Ivan (David Niven), who coerces Pinky into helping Ivan and his crooked gang rob the bank. Various twists and turns ensue, most of which are predictable.

          Although neither writer Guy Elmes nor director Ralph Thomas add much to the vocabulary of heist movies—quite to the contrary, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square is thoroughly forgettable and generic—the filmmakers benefit from a pair of nimble leading players. Jordan, the handsome stage-trained actor who generally fared better with heavy dramatic material, is left adrift throughout much of the movie, because the filmmakers seem unsure about whether to present Jordan’s character as cocksure or sincere. Nonetheless, Jordan lands a few key moments with emotional authenticity, especially during scenes depicting his character under duress. Costar Niven, meanwhile, effortlessly steals the movie with his carefree-urbanite routine, even though the plot requires viewers to accept Niven as having the potential to become a cold-blooded killer. Still, whenever Jordan as the crude and swaggering American is juxtaposed with Niven as the masterful and suave Englishman, it’s possible to see the culture-clash patter the filmmakers presumably envisioned.

          Supporting players Richard Johnson and Oliver Tobias add welcome flavors to the mix as, respectively, a dogged police inspector and Pinky’s best friend. Lost in the shuffle, however, are actresses Gloria Grahame and Elke Sommer. Grahame’s role as the mother of Tobias’ character is inconsequential, and Sommer merely provides eye candy by wearing a succession of slinky outfits and appearing in a laughably gratuitous nude scene. Another problem with the choppily edited movie is the terrible music score by the normally reliable Stanley Myers; the main theme sounds like the house band from Hee-Haw trying to play the theme from The Benny Hill Show.

A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square: FUNKY

Emma Mae (1974)

          Before drowning in the muck of ultraviolent exploitation pictures, independent filmmaker Jamaa Fanaka made this flawed but worthwhile melodrama about a young black woman who moves from the country to the big city and learns tough lessons about men, police brutality, and racism. A prime example of the “L.A. Rebellion” movement sparked by African-American directors who seized the means of production in order to ensure that stories about black life were told honestly—instead of through Hollywood’s reductive prism—Emma Mae features naturalistic acting by a no-name cast, real locations, and semi-documentary vignettes of Compton circa the mid-’70s. Although Fanaka’s weakest contributions manifest in the area of screenwriting, seeing as how Emma Mae spends most of its running time searching for a story, the filmmaker’s alternately compassionate and indignant perspective leads him to capture many things that feel relevant and true.

          The movie begins with recently orphaned teenager Emma Mae (Jerri Hayes) arriving in Los Angeles to stay with members of her extended family. At first, her young cousins resist the notion of a new peer in their household. Emma Mae quickly proves her mettle, however, by standing up to a male bully in a physical fight. She also evinces stronger sensitivity to social codes than her relatives expected, for instance recognizing that she shouldn’t tag along to a house party and drag down everyone else’s fun by becoming a fifth wheel. Eventually, Emma Mae becomes romantically involved with a young man named Jesse (Ernest Williams III), who makes his living as a small-time drug dealer. When he’s arrested and thrown in jail, Emma Mae stands by her man, organizing friends and relatives to work at a car wash in order to raise bail money. When the cash Emma Mae earns at the car wash proves insufficient, she takes even more drastic measures, only to get slapped in the face by harsh realities.

          Fanaka lets the story meander at regular intervals, lingering on peripheral scenes such as a sexy young woman belly-dancing to attract car-wash customers, and some of Fanaka’s narrative choices are downright random, notably the vignette of Emma Mae’s clothes catching on fire during a party. Additionally, there’s only so much any filmmaker can accomplish with amateurish actors and dodgy technical execution. Nonetheless, Emma Mae—which is occasionally marketed under the ridiculous alternate title Black Sister’s Revenge—is worlds away from the ugly trash with which Fanaka is normally associated, particularly the vile Penitentiary (1979) and its sequels.

Emma Mae: FUNKY

Leadbelly (1976)

          Offering a simplistic overview of major events in the life of legendary blues/folk singer Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly’ or “Leadbelly” because of his muscular build, the slick biopic Leadbelly dramatizes the cause-and-effect relationship between Ledbetter’s difficult life and the soulful quality that infused his performances. Born in 1888 Louisiana, Ledbetter grew up in the racially divided South, eventually spending many years on chain gangs and in state prisons because his temper caused trouble and his race ensured that mercy from government officials was in short supply.

          Completely eschewing Ledbetter’s post-prison life, during which he had a complicated relationship with success, the movie kicks off with a long sequence illustrating why Ledbetter left home. After achieving minor local fame as a musician, Ledbetter (Roger E. Mosley) gets into a brawl with a neighbor who lodges a police complaint, so Ledbetter’s long-suffering father, Wes (Paul Benjamin), tells his son to flee in order to avoid imprisonment. Absconding to a red-light district, Ledbetter becomes a kept man for a madam named Miss Eula (Madge Sinclair), who gives him his nickname while also teaching him musical lessons about the blues. Next, Ledbetter hits the road with fellow musician Blind Lemon Jefferson (Art Evans), but another fight lands Ledbetter in prison. He escapes and lives briefly under an alias, but then he’s recaptured and sent to prison at Angola, where he serves a long term for a murder charge stemming from the death of a man whom Ledbetter claims he killed in self-defense. The movie then fudges history by combining major events that actually occurred during two separate stints at two separate jails—Ledbetter charms a governor into issuing a pardon, and Ledbetter’s music is discovered by iconic folk-song archivist John Lomax (James Brodhead).

          As directed by photographer-turned-filmmaker Gordon Parks, Leadbelly is a notch more visually sophisticated than the average made-for-TV biopic of the same vintage, but in every other regard it’s quite ordinary. The script by Ernest Kinoy lacks depth, and only a handful of scenes involving supporting characters display real emotional power. In particular, a vignette of aging Wes visiting Angola and trying to buy Ledbetter’s freedom is a heartbreaker that says volumes about the black experience in the Jim Crow South.

          Having the vigorous Mosley play the title character at various ages is a problem, since slapping some gray into Mosley’s hair can’t mask Mosley’s youth, and the movie pushes Mosley’s talents way past their limits. He’s an appealing an expressive actor, and he does a fantastic job belting out Leadbetter’s tunes, but his range is far too limited for a role of this scope. In his defense, history seems to indicate that the real Ledbetter was often belligerent and self-destructive, so the choice to play the character as an underdog who overreacts to situations that challenge his manly identity is somewhat understandable. For all of its merits, however, Leadbelly leaves too much of the real Leadbetter story untold.

Leadbelly: FUNKY

Up! (1976)

          To create the fever-dream narrative of Up!, unlikely collaborators Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer—forever bonded by their mutual fascination with gigantic breasts—reteamed for the first time since Ebert wrote and Meyer directed the notorious big-studio flop Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). This time around, Ebert wisely used an alias to avoid tarnishing his status as a Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic. Since the crazy plot of Up! is riddled with tropes that Meyer put into nearly all of his movies, including satirical jabs at the Third Reich and vicious portrayals of duplicitous women, one suspects that Ebert’s primary contribution was the nonstop barrage of whimsically overwritten dialogue. (One character is referred to as “Gwendolyn, holy champion of fornication,” and a lurid piece of narration teases viewers thusly: “But where does the killer lurk still? Recall the clues, for there are no more.”)

          Beyond the movie’s weird approach to language, distinguishing characteristics of Up! represent pure Meyer excess—frenetic editing that renders coherence and logic nearly irrelevant; outrageously excessive close-ups of bouncing breasts and female pubic hair; lyrically composed nature tableaux that are really just tarted-up peeping-tom angles of happily humping humans; and, most importantly of all, a playfully perverse melding of sex and violence. Oh, and lest anyone miss the phallic meaning of the title, check out the way the right-side serif of the letter “U” is styled in the movie’s logo. Meyer was a man who embraced his pleasures wholeheartedly, so Up! was clearly designed as a compendium of things that got him off, whether that comprised ogling a pair of massive mammaries or portraying a Hilter-like character as a grotesque bisexual who pays men and women to abuse him. (Brace yourself for the sound effects during the rear-entry scene in “Adolph Schwartz’s” sex dungeon.)

          The weird storyline of Up! begins with the murder of the Hitler character by a masked assailant, and then tracks the adventures of buxom drifter Margo Winchester (Raven De La Croix). After being raped and left for dead, Margo gets a job at a diner run by closeted lesbian Sweet Li’l Alice (Janet Wood) and her put-upon boyfriend, Paul (Robert McLane). Soon, Margo becomes lovers with both Paul and corrupt local sheriff Homer Johnson (Monty Bane), even as the identity of the masked killer remains unknown. While the movie’s  narrative is really just a slender clothesline on which Meyer hangs lots of softcore sex scenes, the story also includes bizarre interludes of ultraviolence. In the strangest such passage, not one but two different men recover from massive axe wounds during a brawl that occurs simultaneously with a gang rape.

          Even at his best, Meyer’s crude and maniacal comic sensibility was hard to take, and Up! does not reflect Meyer at his peak. Rather, the picture arrived near the end of his long run as an exploitation kingpin, since he only made one more fictional feature before retiring his stockpile of dildos and Nazi paraphernalia. Although Meyer displays enough skin for even the most depraved viewer, complete with periodic appearances by famed stripper Kitten Navidad as the film’s nude hostess/narrator, Up! can’t muster the zing of prior Meyer epics. Except for brief interludes of surreal glee, the movie is grotesque instead of irreverent, and trashy instead of titillating. Even the climactic nude knife fight between two bodacious ladies in a riverbed fails to generate the cheap thrills that it should.

Up!: FREAKY

Love and Bullets (1979)

          Executed with considerable polish and filled with familiar faces, Love and Bullets feels suspiciously like a real movie. After all, it’s ostensibly a crime thriller, and it stars Charles Bronson, who enjoyed more than a few successes in the realm of violent cinema. Yet the story has one of the most anemic second acts in screenwriting history, and the characters are preposterously undercooked. Adding to the list of shortcomings is a typically amateurish performance by leading lady Jill Ireland, Bronson’s real-life wife and his onscreen foil is far too many pictures. Having said all that, Love and Bullets has a few enjoyable passages of action and/or suspense, so even if the movie is the filmic equivalent of empty calories, at least some of the scenes have flavor.

          Bronson plays Charlie Congers, a detective based in Phoenix, Arizona. Federal agents show up one day and ask Charlie to travel to Europe, where onetime mob girlfriend Jackie Pruitt (Ireland) is in hiding. The Feds believe Jackie has incriminating information on big-time gangster Joe Bomposa (Rod Steiger), her former lover, but the Feds offer convoluted reasons why they can’t cross international borders in order to collect Jackie. Charlie accepts the assignment, and before long he and Jackie are on the run from Joe’s hit men, who want to prevent Jackie from testifying. Naturally, the fugitives fall in love. The unusual wrinkle, which should have energized the story but never ends up adding much of anything, is that Jackie doesn’t actually have any useful knowledge about Joe’s criminal activities. Therefore, all the danger that arises from Charlie’s mission is pointless, which has the effect of making the movie feel pointless, as well.

          Despite the inconsequential story, the sleek surfaces of Love and Bullets offer minor pleasures—as is true for most of the movies directed by reliable journeyman Stuart Rosenberg, best known for a series of Paul Newman collaborations including Cool Hand Luke (1967). During one imaginative sequence, for instance, Charlie makes a blowgun out of found objects and then uses the weapon to dispatch several would-be assassins. Additionally, the tightly wound score by Lalo Schifrin evokes the menace of Jerry Goldsmith’s music and a bit of the whimsy of Ennio Morricone’s, so the movie has a lively soundtrack. Colorful players including Val Avery, Bradford Dillman, Michael V. Gazzo, Paul Koslo, Strother Martin, and Henry Silva attack their supporting roles vigorously, compensating mightily for Ireland’s tone-deaf acting. Bronson is just Bronson, familiar but formidable. And then there’s Steiger, shouting and strutting through one of his signature overwrought performances. Rarely has so much effort been exhausted to portray a character of so little importance.

Love and Bullets: FUNKY

Pigs (1972)

Throughout film history, enterprising actors have become producers in order to generate highbrow showcases for their talents. Occasionally, however, thespians bereft of marquee names have taken the opposite tack of producing exploitation films, presumably because those are the only types of pictures for which they can raise the necessary capital. So it is with Pigs, one of the strangest vanity projects of the '70s. Actor Marc Lawrence, screen veteran known for supporting roles as gangsters and other such thuggish types, wrote, produced, and directed Pigs, and he even cast his daughter, Toni, in the leading role. It’s worth noting that Pigs is a gruesome horror movie about an insane farmer who feeds murder victims to swine—just the kind of subject matter most people explore while making home movies their kids. Although Pigs eventually provides the gutter-level thrills that viewers might expect, namely gory murder scenes and nasty (but not explicit) images of farm animals chomping on human flesh, there's virtually nothing to recommend in this equally vacuous and vulgar picture. Characterization and narrative tension are barely discernible, the acting runs the short gamut from perfunctory to substandard, and the long wait between "exciting" scenes make the picture's 80-minute running time feel much longer. Amid lots and lots of screaming, the movie also includes several truly ugly scenes, such as the one during which Toni Lawrence’s character castrates a would-be lover with a straight razor. (One can only imagine the therapy bills that arose from Marc Lawrence asking his daughter to play this scene.) Furthermore, to indicate how far removed Pigs is from recognizable human reality, consider this line of dialogue, spoken by the inept sheriff (Jesse Vint) tasked with investigating reports of bloodshed at the swine farm: "I don't think there's a law against turning dead people into pigs." Maybe not, but perhaps there should be a law against making movies like this one.

Pigs: LAME

Scorchy (1976)

          Confusing, dull, and ugly, the crime thriller Scorchy stars sexy actress/singer Connie Stevens as an FBI agent who works undercover as an international smuggler. The general thrust of the story is that the heroine's life becomes complicated once she learns that a wealthy acquaintance has become a smuggler, meaning that to catch a criminal she must betray a friend. Not exactly the freshest story. In fact, the only things separating Scorchy from the average TV movie of the same era are gory kills and topless shots. That said, lurid action movies have their low pleasures, so it's not as if a film of this type needs to accomplish much. Yet meeting even minimal expectations is more than the folks behind Scorchy can manage. The storyline is needlessly convoluted, as evidenced by the presence of at least three major villains; character development and recognizable human emotion are as absent from the script as basic logic; and the stop-and-start pacing makes Scorchy feel disorganized, episodic, and repetitive.

          For example, the movie stops dead halfway through its running time for an epic chase scene that involves characters pursing each other on foot, in a commuter train, on dune buggies, and finally on motorcycles, suggesting the filmmakers wrongly assumed that a big jolt of action would generate a few moments of interest. Alas, because the action is staged as clumsily as everything else in Scorchy, the chase scene does not have the desired effect. The movie’s banter is just as bad. After Stevens' character tells her supervisor that he should relax by saying, "You need a good blowjob," he cheerfully replies, "You're a fruitcake, you bitch." Stevens, who found her biggest success as a Las Vegas entertainer, is attractive but vapid, and the caliber of the supporting cast is reflected by the inclusion of future small-screen player Greg Evigan (BJ and the Bear), who made his big-screen debut with Scorchy. Only B-movie veteran William Smith, playing one of the many villains, delivers the kind of teeth-gnashing intensity one expects from this sort of slop. Adding insult to injury, some available prints of Scorchy feature a godawful synthesizer score that was added to the movie for its VHS release in the 1980s.

Scorchy: LAME