“HOLMES & WATSON??”

By Raymond Benson

In one of the quirkier movies released in the early 1970s, George C. Scott moves through the streets of New York City with his eyes alight with fire, wonder, and confidence as Joanne Woodward follows him into every don’t-do-that situation like a lovesick schoolgirl.

The thing is—Scott plays a judge who has gone, well, a little funny in the head and thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes. Woodward is a psychiatrist who desperately wants to treat him, and her name just happens to be Dr. Watson.

Directed by Anthony Harvey, the movie is based on a play by James Goldman, who also penned the screenplay. Harvey’s previous film was the superb The Lion in Winter (1968), which garnered him an Oscar nomination for directing, along with a Best Picture nod and a trophy for Katharine Hepburn (for Best Actress). Perhaps more significant is that Harvey was Stanley Kubrick’s editor for both Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). They Might Be Giants indeed contains subtle dark comedy that one might call “Kubrickian.”

Judge Justin Playfair seems to have lost it when his wife died, and his brother, Blevins (Lester Rawlins) is intent on having the man committed so that he can get Justin’s money. Playfair, in complete Holmes getup (deerstalker hat, Meerschaum pipe, tweed suit and shoulder-cape), won’t have anything to do with the psychiatrist until she reveals that her name is Watson—suddenly, he is interested in “collaborating” with her in his quest to find his nemesis, Moriarty. Thus begins a very wacky adventure through the city as “Holmes” and Watson follow “clues,” encounter even more eccentric characters, and ultimately fall in love with each other. That’s it in a nutshell, but there’s much more packed into this bewildering joy of a movie. Needless to say, you’ve probably never seen anything like it before or since.

Both Scott and Woodward appear to be having a ball in the picture, and Scott is particularly charismatic. Besides the keen supporting performances by the likes of Jack Gilford, Al Lewis, and Rue McClanahan, watch for small roles played by other great, very young-looking character actors who will make bigger splashes over the next few decades—F. Murray Abraham, M. Emmet Walsh, Paul Benedict, and Eugene Roche.

Kino Lorber’s new Blu-ray looks fine and sounds great, and it comes with an audio commentary featuring director Harvey and film archivist Robert A. Harris. Supplements include a short vintage promotional featurette and theatrical trailers for this and other Kino Lorber releases.

Apparently, there is some discrepancy regarding the running time of the feature. According to the packaging, Kino Lorber’s presentation (91 minutes) is an “expanded version with additional footage not seen in the original theatrical release.” However, IMDb claims that the theatrical release was 98 minutes. Is there seven minutes missing? Maybe, and maybe not. The picture has a history of being broadcast or previously released on home video with a variety of running times between 87 and 97 minutes. IMDb says that a climactic scene in a grocery store is absent from the shorter versions, but that sequence is visible here in Kino’s release. Perhaps this is a mystery worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

For a vintage look at early 70s New York, two fine performances by Scott and Woodward, and a head-scratching kind of good time at the movies, settle in and have some fun with They Might Be Giants.

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“THE RULER OF AMBROSIA”

By Raymond Benson

Director John Schlesinger emerged from the so-called British New Wave, or “Free Cinema Movement,” of the late 1950s/early 60s, that was typified by pictures made by maverick filmmakers working with low budgets and concentrating on working-class heroes in often bleak settings of smaller towns around Britain.

Billy Liar, based on the novel by Keith Waterhouse and the stage play by Waterhouse and Willis Hall (with a screenplay by Waterhouse and Hall), was Schlesinger’s second film, and it is an exhilarating demonstration of the director’s confidence and talent. Schlesinger would go on to direct such classics as Darling (1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969).

Filmed in widescreen black and white, the tale focuses on Billy Fisher (played by the brilliant Tom Courtenay, who is in every scene of the movie) a young man who still lives with his stodgy parents and a grandmother in a Yorkshire town. He juggles three girlfriends and a job at a mortuary that he hates, but he also has fantasies that unfortunately consume his life. He constantly daydreams scenarios in which he is the ruler of an imaginary country called Ambrosia, and the film abruptly moves in and out of these often-comic illusions in which Billy is the star. In reality, though, Billy simply lies—all the time—to everyone: his parents (Mona Washbourne and Wilfred Pickles), his grandmother (Ethel Griffies), his boss (Leonard Rossiter), his friends, and his girlfriends. In fact, he has become engaged to two of his girlfriends (Helen Fraser and Gwendolyn Watts) without the other knowing, somehow managing to use the same single ring. Both are seriously working-class girls for whom Billy honestly has no affection.

The third girlfriend, though, Liz (played by the luminescent Julie Christie in her breakthrough role in cinema), is a free spirit, someone who has traveled out of their little hometown, has become more worldly, and resignedly accepts Billy’s penchant for lying with a sigh and a smile.

Will Billy Liar, as he is nicknamed by all who sees through his deceptions, “grow up” and face reality? Will he finally turn his back on his family and community and flee to the big city of London to follow his dreams as a “scriptwriter”? Or is he doomed to spend the rest of his life in the dull, dreary existence that he sees as the lot of the generation above him?

With Courtenay’s performance, Christie in a small but winning supporting role, and Schlesinger’s direction, Billy Liar is indeed a winner.

Kino Lorber’s new high definition restoration looks and sounds terrific, and it comes with an audio commentary by film historian Kat Ellinger. The only supplements are theatrical trailers for this and other Kino Lorber releases.

Full of humor as well as pathos, Billy Liar is grand entertainment and today still holds a high place in the list of most admired titles in British cinema.

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“A WHOLE LOT OF SHIRLEY GOING ON”

By Raymond Benson

Joseph E. Levine, head of Embassy Pictures, was at one time a formidable producer and studio head who brought us some outstanding pictures in the 1960s and 70s (The Graduate, The Producers and The Lion in Winter come to mind). In 1967, he managed to persuade the great Italian director Vittorio De Sica (Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Marriage—Italian Style, etc.) to do a picture in English with big Hollywood stars. De Sica had just previously done an English-language flick, After the Fox (1966). So, in 1967, he made a comic anthology movie called Woman Times Seven, starring Shirley MacLaine in seven different roles opposite seven different leading men (and others).

Anthology movies are often a mixed bag. In almost every case, there are two or three stories that are good, and two or three that are less so. Here, we have seven tales of a woman’s relationship with a man (or men) with a distinctly European slant (especially in its attitudes toward adultery and divorce), as well as a potent “swinging sixties” 1967 vibe that recalls movies like Casino Royale (the one with Peter Sellers, who also starred in After the Fox). The entire movie was shot in Paris, and this Franco-Italian sensibility shines through.

MacLaine is quite winning throughout the picture, playing sexpots, innocent housewives, and society ladies, and in fact she was nominated for a Golden Globe as Best Actress for her performance. Her leading men in the tales include the likes of Peter Sellers, Alan Arkin, Michael Caine, Vittorio Gassman, and Rossano Brazzi.

Again, the vignettes here are hit and miss. The opening story, “Funeral Procession,” teams MacLaine up with Sellers in an entry about the family doctor putting the moves on a widow at her husband’s funeral. “Amateur Night” finds our star seeking revenge against a cheating husband (Brazzi) by find camaraderie with the Parisian streetwalkers. “Two Against One” finds MacLaine as a liberal corporate translator whose roommate is away (he’s depicted as none other than Marlon Brando in a photograph!) but entertains two men (Gassman and Scotsman Clinton Greyn) in her apartment—in the nude—but insisting that they can’t touch her. “At the Opera” features the actress as a fashion model who wants to get revenge on a rival. “Suicides” teams MacLaine up with Arkin as lovers who have decided to kill themselves to get away from their respective unhappy marriages and the cold, cruel world in general—but Arkin’s character finds exceptions with the various methods to try, every step of the way. The final episode, “Snow,” finds wealthy MacLaine leading on a would-be stalker (Caine) for the excitement of it, except that the man is really working for her jealous husband (Philippe Noiret).

BY TODD GARBARINI

One of the most frustrating things that I find true of lackluster movies is that following the passage of time, usually several decades, a film that was initially, and often rightfully, considered a stinker is then later touted as “the original classic!” Generally, these accolades are tied-in with advertising to promote and ultimately sell product and give the uninitiated and the curious a reason to buy the film sight-unseen. Efren C. Piñon’s Blind Rage (1976) isn’t necessarily a bad film, it just isn’t a particularly good one. Despite its 82-minute running time, the film feels twice as long and that’s never a good sign.

Blind Rage is a good example of an interesting premise executed in a fashion that can best be described as pedestrian. A product of 1970’s “chopsocky” cinema, the opening credits play over the vocals of Helen Gamboa singing the title track, “The System”, the film’s original title when it was released in the Philippines in October 1976. The song sounds like a cross between the instrumental strains of The Bermuda Depths’s (1978) title song “Jennie” and the vocals of Shirley Bassey’s tune for the James Bond film Moonraker (1979). Johnny Duran (Charlie Davao, a Philippine actor with just over 250 titles to his credit) of the Oriental Bank makes his way over the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, CA and meets with several officials representing the U.S. Treasury Department and chairman of the project Southeast Asia, the Dept. of Foreign Affairs, the Secret Service, and a member of the CIA who looks like the "Dodgson! Dodgson! We've got Dodgson here!" guy in Jurassic Park (1993) with his tourist hat. They discuss the transfer of $15M earmarked by the federal government to prevent countries surrounding Vietnam from falling the way that South Vietnam did to the North. Unfortunately for them, some bad guys are looking to get their hands on the loot and before you can say “The International House of Pancakes”, Duran is followed and approached by Lew Simpson (B.T. Anderson in his only screen credit if you believe the IMDB) with $250K in cash in a briefcase. It’s Simpson’s hope that Duran will agree to help him commandeer the $15M for he and his bosses. It isn’t long before Duran phones Simpson the next day to accept the offer. They meet at the foot of 62nd Street in front of the Bay Yacht Club which is less than five miles from the Palace Theatre in Long Beach, CA where this film opened on Wednesday, March 7, 1979 for a brief engagement under its alternate and better known American title.

Duran senses a catch and his intuition proves right: he must recruit and train four blind men to pull off the bank heist! These men have all suffered a terrible fate that has led to their lack of sight, which the viewers get to see in all its glory: Willie Black (D'Urville Martin), a former mobster blinded by the Syndicate after foolishly cheating them out of money; Lin Wang (Leo Fong), a “liquidator” for a gang and double-crossed hoodlums on an opium deal; Hector Lopez (Darnell Garcia), a matador who was gored in the eyes by a bull (I kid you not); and Amazing Anderson (Dick Adair), a magician who was born blind (I cannot even fathom how that works). A fifth blind man (Ben Guevara) is included to disable the bank’s alarm system. Sally (Leila Hermosa, whose last name in Spanish means “beautiful,” a fitting adjective) is recruited to train the blind men and takes them through a mock robbery, putting them through the right number of paces and utilizing their acute hearing to guide them through the whole affair in a makeshift “bank” complete with the exact layout of the real one with “dummies” to sit in for tellers. Their sense of smell is heightened as well. Sally’s perfume is noticed by one of the men who tries to have his way with her one night while another comes to her rescue, calling the brute a “sex-hungry bastard.” It’s this sort of ludicrous dialog and bad dubbing that usually makes such films a riot to watch. When the bank robbery goes down for real, it’s quite something to see until the action goes south and a walking stick is left behind, behooving the police to catch them. With ten minutes left in the film, Fred Williamson finally shows up to snarl the bad guys!

“PIPE DREAMS”

By Raymond Benson

Back in 1973, producer Ely Landau and his wife Edie launched a daring and unprecedented cinema series that played in the U.S. for two “seasons,” with a total of fourteen titles (but only thirteen were shown), all renowned works—classic and modern—originally produced on the stage. It was called the American Film Theatre. (A review of a DVD box set of the entire series appeared on Cinema Retro previously. Click here to read.)

The concept tried something different. The directive was to take a great stage play, not change a word, and in most cases, use the actual play script as the screenplay. The next step was to hire an accomplished film director to interpret the text for the film medium but stay faithful to the play. Sometimes the director was the same person who helmed the original stage production. A further step was to persuade the original casts from the Broadway or London productions of those plays to star in the film; or, when that wasn’t possible, to cast big-name Hollywood or British actors. Thus, the result was indeed a filmed play—but you as an audience member wouldn’t be watching it from the middle of the orchestra or from the side or from the first balcony; instead you were up close and personal in a realistically-presented world (on studio sets and/or real interior or exterior locations)—just like in “regular” movies. You had the best seat in the house, so to speak, but there’s no proscenium arch. It’s a movie. But it’s a play.

Kino Lorber has slowly been re-releasing the movies from the American Film Theatre in individual packages, upgraded to high definition Blu-ray. One recent title is the picture that opened the series, and it’s one of the best. The Iceman Cometh, from the play by Eugene O’Neill, is directed by the formidable John Frankenheimer (the script was adapted by Thomas Quinn Curtiss), and is a remarkably faithful rendition of this lengthy powerhouse of a stage drama. While the filmmakers indeed made some cuts to the text, the picture still runs just a minute or two less than four hours, and that’s not including two built-in intermissions! (Have you ever seen a film in a theater with two intermissions? It’s not unusual for the theatre, though!)

This is drama with a capital “D.” You get to spend the four hours with a bunch of hopeless alcoholics in a dark, decrepit Irish bar in the big city and listen to their tales of woe and “pipe dreams”—the theme running through the piece that highlights the hopes and wasted lives of men and women on the fringe. The play originally premiered in the mid-1940s, about a decade after AA became a thing. Doesn’t sound like a lot of fun? Stop! It’s true that the tale is terribly depressing, but Iceman is such a masterwork in writing and acting that you come out enlightened and, yes, changed.

An amazing cast dominates the production. Lee Marvin stars in the showy role of Hickey, a traveling salesman who has gone on the wagon and is usually the life of the party when he comes into town—but now he’s preaching abstinence to the motley crew who doesn’t want to hear it. Fredric March, in his last screen appearance, plays Harry Hope, the owner of the bar, but he’s just as damaged and forlorn as the rest of his clientele. Robert Ryan (who co-starred with Marvin in the classics Bad Day at Black Rock and The Professionals), also in his last film role, steals the movie in an amazing performance as Larry Slade, a bitter anarchist and journalist who is really the protagonist of the story and through whose eyes we navigate this precarious jungle of fog and booze. A very young Jeff Bridges, only a couple of years after his big splash in The Last Picture Show, plays Don Parritt, the son of Larry’s girlfriend—a woman who has been arrested for her political activities.

Those are the main four genius thespians on display here, but a supporting cast consists of the likes of Bradford Dillman, Moses Gunn, Sorrell Brooke, Clifton James, Tom Pedi, and Martyn Green, plus the three streetwalking ladies who congregate and cavort with the men, played by Evans Evans, Hildy Brooks, and Nancy Juno Dawson.

“REVOLUTION À LA RENOIR”

By Raymond Benson

French filmmaker Jean Renoir, son of the famous Impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, is often cited as not only France’s greatest director of all time, but he also frequently appears on lists of most important international names as well. This reputation is well deserved, especially for his work in the 1930s, which included Grand Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939).

One of his lesser-known pieces from this period, La Marseillaise, has been restored and released in high definition by Kino Classics, and it is a cause to re-evaluate this benchmark picture.

La Marseillaise is an epic period costume drama (but with plenty of comic vignettes) about the beginnings of the French Revolution, and it sports a broad canvas of many characters and locations. Coming off of the success of Grand Illusion, the picture had a fairly large budget and no less than five cinematographers. The movie runs 132 minutes, but it feels longer due to Renoir’s sometimes episodic and lengthy takes. That doesn’t mean the movie is boring. It just takes a bit of work on the viewer’s part to get through it, for which there is just reward.

The story moves across various settings, from King Louis XVI’s palace (he is played with great vigor by Renoir’s older brother, Pierre Renoir), where Louis and Marie-Antoinette (Lise Delamare de la Comédie Français) cavort in all the bourgeois trappings that eventually got them executed. Most of the tale, though, focuses on the peasants, the countrymen, and the revolutionaries who brought about one of the most significant events in human history. If there are any protagonists of the picture, they are the ordinary citizens-turned-adventurers who drive the plot.

Of course, the song, “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, originated during these times and figures prominently in a key scene during a march to battle. This is a masterful sequence that illustrates Renoir’s gifts of dramatically using history, patriotism, and politics to make a point.

Kino Classics’ restoration is remarkably good, given the age and rarity of the movie. It comes with an audio commentary by film critic Nick Pinkerton. A short archival interview with Renoir from the 1960s about the film is a welcome supplement, but of particular interest is the excellent essay by Yale film scholar Dudley Andrew in the enclosed booklet.

For fans of Jean Renoir, European history, and 1930s international filmmaking, La Marseillaise is a grand soufflé.

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“YEAH”

By Raymond Benson

It’s the most-heard response from Jack Nicholson’s character, Charley Partanna: “Yeah.” Does he swear a blood oath to Don Corrado Prizzi (William Hickey) for life? “Yeah.” Does he want to “do it” on the Oriental [rug] with Maerose Prizzi (Anjelica Huston)? “Yeah.” Does he want to get married to Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner), an assassin who may or may not be working against his own family? “Yeah.”

Is Prizzi’s Honor an amazing, acerbic black comedy that surprises you at every turn? “YEAH!”

It was director John Huston’s swan song, his last film to be released while he was alive (Huston’s final movie, The Dead, was released a few months after his death in 1987). Prizzi picked up Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Actor (Nicholson), Supporting Actor (Hickey), Adapted Screenplay (by Richard Condon, adapted from his novel, with Janet Roach), Costumes, and Editing. The picture won none of those, but Anjelica Huston snatched the award for Supporting Actress for her role. Allegedly she had to fight to get the part, even with her father directing and her boyfriend (Nicholson, at the time) starring.

Prizzi’s Honor is a gangster film with black comedy at its heart. While it’s an engrossing crime picture with colorful and eccentric mobster characters, it is Nicholson’s performance, the absurdity of the “family” life, and the screwball comedy sensibility of the plot that bring an unusual hilarity to the proceedings.

Nicholson plays Charley as a stereotypical Italian New Yorker who, in speech, sounds as if he’s missing a cannoli or two—but don’t let his manner fool you. This guy is smart like a fox, and as deadly as a viper. It’s why he’s the Partanna family’s number one hitman. Nicholson’s characterization is brilliant; it is surely one of his most memorable screen appearances. Irene Walker, who is assuredly not Italian, is also shrewd and dangerous. Turner is also excellent in the part, and she was robbed of a nomination that year. Theirs is a match made, well, certainly not in heaven.

Don Prizzi, now a really old man who also retains a canny mind, controls the family business through his two sons, Eduardo (Robert Loggia) and Dominic (Lee Richardson), and close advisor Angelo Partanna (John Randolph), Charley’s “pop.” Maerose is Dominic’s daughter, and she was once involved with Charley. Unfortunately, she left him from some schmuck, embarrassed the family, and was disowned. Now she’s trying to get back in good graces with the Prizzis, and at the same time snare Charley away from his new-found love, Irene.

Throw in some contract killings and kidnappings with the love story, and you have a mobster movie like no other. Huston’s work is masterful as he handles the violence and comedy with a confidence we hadn’t seen from the filmmaker in some time. When repetitive shots of a passenger airplane traveling west, then east, west, and east again elicit laughter, then you know you’re in the right hands.

Kino Lorber’s new high definition restoration looks fine, but Andrzej Bartkowiak’s cinematography is soft and warm, coming across here a bit grainy. There are English subtitles for the hearing impaired, and an optional audio commentary by film historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson. Unfortunately, there are no supplements other than theatrical trailers for this and other Kino Lorber releases.

Easily one of the audience favorites of the 1980s, Prizzi’s Honor made Anjelica Huston’s career, kept Jack Nicholson in top star status, and gave John Huston a final bow with magnificent acclaim.

Highly recommended? Yeah.

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“I AM GOD”

By Raymond Benson

It’s a line uttered by Dr. Jed Hill (chillingly played by a young Alec Baldwin), during a deposition in which he defends his surgical skill and knowledge as the things people in chapels really pray to when a loved one is under the knife in the operating room. “I am God,” he says with the kind of arrogance that only an actor like Baldwin can deliver.

Malice, the 1993 thriller directed by Harold Becker (whose previous film was the terrific Sea of Love), was adapted from a story by Aaron Sorkin and Jonas McCord, with a screenplay by Sorkin and Scott Frank. That’s powerhouse writing authorship, and the twisty-turny tale that unfolds on the screen is solid evidence the fact. Despite the rather improbable premise behind the con job that is at the heart of Malice, the picture indeed holds your interest and keeps you guessing.

Although he received third billing, Bill Pullman’s character, Andy Safian, is the protagonist of the piece. Andy is a dean at a local college in New England, newly wed to Tracy (Nicole Kidman). There’s a serial killer running around loose on the campus and targeting coeds, but that turns out to be a befuddling subplot, prompting this reviewer to wonder if perhaps there had been more to it in the early stages of the writing. Nevertheless, it serves as a red herring to the main tale, involving the Safians’ relationship with Dr. Hill, a new tenant in their house. He’s handsome, slick, sexy, and projects trouble from the get-go.

Things get complicated when Tracy must have emergency surgery on her ovaries, and it’s Dr. Hill who is called into the operating room. For the first time in his career, Hill screws up, and Tracy is left infertile. Lawsuits fly, and Tracy also leaves Andy because he gave Hill the go-ahead to perform the operation during a life-and-death time limit. To reveal anything else about the story would involve major spoilers.

Malice is surprisingly enjoyable as a guilty pleasure. The three leads are very good, but there is also fine work from Bebe Neuwirth as the local cop, Peter Gallagher as Tracy’s attorney, Anne Bancroft and George C. Scott in cameos as Tracy’s mother and Dr. Hill’s mentor, respectively, and a very young Gwyneth Paltrow as one of Andy’s college students. Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting-lullaby score augments the proceedings.

Acceptable graininess aside, Kino Lorber’s high definition restoration looks good enough, especially since the cinematography is by the formidable Gordon Willis. It comes with English subtitles for the hearing impaired, but alas, no other supplements except a couple of trailers.

Malice may not be a corker, but the picture exhibits solid mid-level Hollywood filmmaking with up-and-coming talent that would go on to bigger and better things. Worth a look.

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“DE SICA VS. SELZNICK = 2 MOVIES IN 1”

By Raymond Benson

Here’s an interesting lesson in filmmaking. Students of the art might learn something by watching the two different cuts of this motion picture to see what happens when a movie is edited down—especially when the original was made by a bona fide artist as opposed to a slick Hollywood producer who, albeit successful, might not know everything.

David O. Selznick was a powerhouse producer and head of his own personal studio (he had, after all, produced Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Spellbound, and many other Hollywood classics). Vittorio De Sica was the purveyor of Italian Neo-realism (along with Roberto Rossellini) and was responsible for such art house masterpieces as Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves (aka The Bicycle Thief). They teamed up in the early 1950s to make a movie together. Selznick would produce—and the film would star his then-wife, Jennifer Jones—and De Sica would direct.

It did not go well. Reportedly, Selznick and De Sica constantly clashed during production. Jones’ co-star, Montgomery Clift, allegedly called it one of the worst experiences of his career.

Terminal Station, the original De Sica film, was first released in 1953 in Italy (as Stazione Termini) in Italian with Jones and Clift dubbed. Another English version with the two actors’ real voices was also made, and all the Italians were dubbed in English. This cut of the film is around 90 minutes in length and has circulated internationally. Based on a short story by Cesare Zavattini, the script was adapted by Luigi Chiarini and Giorgio Prosperi—but Selznick brought in a couple of Hollywood writers for the English dialogue, including Truman Capote, who got screen credit with the two Italians.

When Selznick saw the completed Terminal Station, he hated it. Against De Sica’s wishes, Selznick re-cut the film—throwing out nearly 25 minutes—and adding a silly 8-minute prologue “short” to round out the feature length from 64 minutes to 72. Retitled Indiscretion of an American Wife, the picture was released in America in 1954, and in England as Indiscretion. Selznick’s name does not appear anywhere in the credits (except in the tiny copyright line beneath the title card).

The general contemporary consensus from U.S. critics and audiences alike was that Indiscretion of an American Wife was terrible. It quickly disappeared, despite an Oscar nomination for Best Costumes (black and white) and the creation of a couple of standard songs in the prologue (“Autumn in Rome” and “Indiscretion,” both sung by newcomer Patti Page, making her debut appearance in a movie).

HOWEVER—Vittorio De Sica’s original Terminal Station is absolutely wonderful! It is a heart-wrenching, emotional, and yet simple tale of a married American woman, Mary (Jones) who has just arrived at Rome’s famous Stazioni Termini to catch a train to go back to Paris and then to America. She had been visiting her sister’s family in the city, but she had fallen in love and had an affair with an Italian American, Giovanni (Clift). Guilt-ridden, but also convinced she is in a loveless marriage back home and has finally found her “beau ideal,” Mary is conflicted about returning to her husband and daughter. The entire story takes place in real time as Giovanni attempts to persuade Mary to stay before the inevitable train departure.

“CLINICAL EXPLOITATION”

By Raymond Benson

There have always been what have been termed in the motion picture industry “exploitation films,” even back in the silent days. The late 1930s and much of the 1940s, however, saw a deluge of cheap, not-even-“B” pictures made, usually independently of Hollywood and marketed in guerilla fashion as “educational” adult fare. You know the type. Reefer Madness. Child Bride. Marihuana.

In the 40s, especially in the wake of World War II, the Baby Boomer phenomenon was just beginning, and there was a need for sexual hygiene education for young people—at least, that’s what the makers of these tawdry movies told the public. There most certainly was a necessity for Sex Ed in schools—and some legitimate companies stepped up to the plate to create “clinical” material shown to gender-segregated classrooms dealing with the facts of life, menstruation, and venereal disease. I can remember being in fifth or sixth grade in the early 1960s… all the girls were ushered out of class for an hour for a special screening of some cryptic film that all the boys were curious about, but of course had no idea what it could possibly be. Whenever we asked any of the girls what they had seen, we were met with an emphatic, “I’m not telling you!” This just made the event even more of a mystery.

In the 1940s, a producer who was really nothing more than a snake oil salesman—but a very successful one—named Kroger Babb specialized in making, at the time, sexually frank and sometimes explicit but so-called educational films that were really nothing more than exploitative and an attempt to attract an audience with prurient inquisitiveness. Mom and Dad, first seen in 1945, might be the most successful of any of these pictures. In fact, it was one of the biggest box office hits of the entire decade and beyond, as it was exhibited up until the 1970s.

Babb and his team would come to town, rent a theater for a week or two, and distribute promotional materials and place ads in local papers that hawked the film’s “moral” and educational aspects, and that it was something every young adult must see (no children allowed). There was, of course, push back from churches, public officials, and the law. In some territories the film was banned (the New York State Supreme Court finally allowed it to be shown in their state after years of being unseen). All this served to boost audience interest! And if there wasn’t much of a protest, then Babb intentionally created and distributed his own fake outrage in flyers and such to drum up the enthusiasm!

Screenings also featured a lecture during intermission by a “medical specialist” named Elliot Forbes—who was really a hired actor. This interlude also served as a chance to sell sexual hygiene literature produced as tie-ins to the film. Interestingly, in African American communities, the Elliot Forbes role was taken by none other than Olympic star Jesse Owens (who was most likely handsomely paid).

BY TODD GARBARINI

I cannot stress how much I love the cinema of the 1970s. There’s never been another decade like it. Having grown up during those years watching Disney outings in a long-gone local drive-in and children’s fare in double features indoors, the sudden and unexpected release of Star Wars in the summer of 1977 only whetted my appetite for similarly spectacular yarns. With the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Superman: The Movie (1978), Moonraker (1979), and The Black Hole (1979), my childhood sensibilities weren’t disappointed. If anything, they were spoiled. There were many low-budget films of the period as well, films that were relegated to 2^nd billing following A-listed titles at local drive-ins and for the most part these films rarely, if ever, saw the light of day beyond their short silver screen lives. If they were lucky, they would appear on a local television station during a 2:00 am broadcast, or on HBO in its infancy.

Record City is an extraordinarily obscure film, one of the last from American International Pictures (A.I.P.), that only came to my attention last year. It was shot in 1977 reportedly on video and then transferred to 35mm for theatrical exhibition, more than likely in regional drive-ins. Probably done for reasons of cost than for any visual aesthetic, for the uninitiated the result is fine. I wonder how often this practice was put into place. Alfred Hitchcock used his Alfred Hitchcock Presents television crew to lens Psycho (1960) in 1959 (although that was still shot on 35mm), and six episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone were initially shot on video due to cost considerations and later transferred to 16mm, although they all suffered from a very underwhelming clean “video” look. Record City opened at the long-gone Rialto Twin in Rialto, CA on Wednesday, September 6, 1978 with zero fanfare, with Bud Townsend’s Coach starring Cathy Lee Crosby on the screen next door. It’s an obvious clone of 1976’s Car Wash with the locale moved from a corner car spa to a corner record emporium, an old auto store redressed as a fictitious record store for the film.

Record City is owned by Manny (Jack Carter, an actor whose career spanned over seven decades) who owes the Mafia a lot of dough. Eddie is the manager and comes at attractive women faster than you can scream “Harvey Weinstein!” Eddie is played with considerable licentiousness by Michael Callan, an actor I recall as Father Tommy Connors in the “Santuary” episode of T.J. Hooker in 1985, although that character, amazingly enough, wasn’t a pervert – at least not that we know of. Danny (Dennis Bowen of Van Nuys Blvd. (1979) and Gas Pump Girls (1979) fame) is a store associate with all the charisma and confidence of a fifth grade boy who tries his best to ask out cashier Lorraine (Wendy Schaal who would go on to Where the Boys Are ’84 (1984) and the horrendous 1985 outing Creature) on a date. Ruth Buzzi of Laugh-In appears for good measure, and a there is a frequent gag of a man as old as the hills who keeps fainting at the sight of an attractive woman, as his wife (Alice Ghostly, a veteran actress of over five decades in film and television) tries her best to resuscitate him.

For those of you who remember Sam Grossman’s wonderful The Van (1977), that film’s star, Stuart Goetz, appears here in a strange sequence where he gets advice from The Wiz (Ted Lange in a charming and zealous role) about how to make it with women. The Wiz even sings a song and one of the film’s saving graces is the inclusion of an upbeat and catchy original score that was even pressed as a soundtrack album on Polydor Records. Ed Begley, Jr. and a creepy partner conspire to rob the place (instead of the Bank of America right across the street??) and Sorrell Booke appears as a policeman who patrols the store from inside the men’s room, of all places. Even Rick Dees plays a (here’s a stretch) disc jockey who dresses as a gorilla (!) from the insipidly named radio station KAKA (really??) and stages a talent show in the streets which features Gallagher and his famous hammer. Perhaps the movie could have benefitted from that instead?

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