Director
William Friedkin’s The French Connection, which won Oscars for Best
Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing
at the 1972 Academy Awards ceremony, celebrates its 50th Anniversary
today as it opened in New York City on Thursday, October 7, 1971. On Saturday,
October 7, 1961, exactly ten years earlier to the day, both New York Detective
First Grade Edward Egan and his partner, then Detective Second Grade Salvatore
Grosso, unwittingly stumbled upon what is described in author Robin Moore’s
1969 account of the case as one that would “obsess them night and day for the
next four-and-a-half months and would not end for a year-and-a-half.â€
New York
Gene
Hackman portrayed Mr. Egan and Roy Scheider co-starred as Mr. Grosso, referring
to each other by the sobriquets “Popeye†and “Cloudyâ€, respectively. Acclaimed
by critics and audiences alike for its gritty realism, its cat-and-mouse chase
between Popeye and the mastermind behind the imported heroin (played by
Fernando Rey), the film is best-known for its gripping and inexorable chase
between a 1971 Pontiac LeMans and a subway train.
The
film later opened in Los Angeles on November 3rd in Los Angeles and
on November 17th in Central Jersey.
New Jersey
Issue
#50 of Cinema Retro features this writer’s interviews with William Friedkin,
actor Tony Lo Bianco, and former New York Police Detective Randy Jurgensen who
worked on the actual case. Copies are available at CinemaRetro.com.
Film director Jonathan Mostow began his career in film shortly
after graduating college in the mid-1980’s as a television writer and director for
segments on Fright Show in 1985, Beverly Hills Body Snatchers in
1989, and the TV-movie Flight of Black Angel in 1991. While working as
the executive producer of the Michael Douglas suspenser The Game (1997),
Mr. Mostow was also looking to adapt Stephen King’s short story “Trucks†into a
film. Although it had already been shot in late 1985 by Mr. King (in a
directing capacity) as Maximum Overdrive (1986), there was interest to
do another film version of it – until all involved were told that they could
not use Stephen King’s name with the project. This proved to be fortuitous as
most of the locations had not only been scouted but also secured for filming, although
there was no film to be shot. Mr. Mostow took the locations and fashioned a
story about a couple driving across the country to start a new life when
unexpectedly their life takes a huge wrong turn. The result is Breakdown,
a nail-biting suspense thriller that is Mr. Mostow’s feature film debut as a
director, which is now available on Blu-ray from Paramount Pictures Home
Entertainment. I spoke with Mr. Mostow recently about the film and the new
Blu-ray.
Todd Garbarini: Thank you for having gotten Breakdown made.
I can safely say that this is the most intense motion picture that I have ever
seen. I initially did not want to see it based on the theatrical trailer
because it looked “run-of-the-millâ€, however I found myself at the Glendale 9
Drive-In in June 1997 while in Arizona on business, and Breakdown was the
only title, aside from Jim Carrey’s Liar, Liar, that appealed to me. I
love Kurt Russell and the film completely blew me away. I was not prepared for the
movie at all, and I don't know how you made it the way you did, but I'm
grateful because I think it's extraordinary. It's a film that possesses a level
of emotional tension that I have rarely, if ever, experienced in a
feature film and it also has one of the best movie scores I’ve ever heard.
Would it be fair to say that Steven Spielberg's Duel was an influence on
the film?
Jonathan
Mostow: I'm sure that it was. First off, thank you for the super kind words.
I'm going to guess that since you saw this at a drive-in, you heard the audio
from inside a car?
TG: No, actually I was sitting on the hood of the car, and
the movie was so full of tension and suspense that I honestly thought that my
sweaty palms would pull the paint off the car! The audio was actually very,
very good. The drive-in no longer had those small, tinny speakers. The audio
instead was pumped through the FM radio band, and there were many cars all
around me that were doing that. I didn't even have to listen through my Ford
Taurus station wagon rental car (laughs), and I heard all the music and
dialogue perfectly.
JM: Oh that’s good, because I'm really a stickler about good
sound.
TG: I am, too.
JM: I want to cringe when I hear about drive-ins because I thought
it probably would have sounded terrible! I want to address something that
you said earlier when we began speaking, and that's how you pretty much didn't
want to see Breakdown as a result of the trailer. I will never forget
when I was a young filmmaker at the time because it was my first studio film
and we had just had a test screening that had gone really well. The way that it
works is that they have a test screening and afterwards they ask questions of
the audience. So, the whole audience was still inside the theater, filling out
the questionnaire, and in the lobby a group of the senior executives from the
studio were milling around and asking each other how they were going to market
the movie. I happened to overhear them, and they sort of intimated that this
would be a good movie for the drive-in crowd, so-to-speak. Especially in the
South, they felt that the South would somehow like it more. Since I was a young
filmmaker at the time, I didn't feel that it was really my place to walk up to
the top people of the studio and tell them their business, but I really wanted
to tell them that this is not the crowd that this film was designed for.
I saw the film as really a nightmare for yuppies. This is a nightmare for the
metrosexual, educated, polo-shirt wearing, white collar middle-aged Everyman. That's
who this is a nightmare for and that's who you should be selling this to.
The marketing campaign, in
a way, I believe sent a different message to the audience than what I was intending
about the film and the result was what you said earlier about not wanting
to see it initially, and how the film ultimately surprised you and you came to
like the film a lot more than you initially thought you would.
TG: I must admit, that doesn’t
happen to me often.
JM: I have heard that reaction
from so many people, and Kurt (Russell) heard that from so many
people. The question was, “Why didn't you think you would enjoy it?â€, and the answer
was, “The way that it was originally sold was that the ad campaign set up
certain expectations that were not the expectations that I would have set
up had I been designing the ad campaign.†I have to say that the
studio (Paramount) did a fantastic job with this brand-new Blu-ray transfer. It
looks gorgeous. For so many years, people have been asking me why they couldn't
find this movie on Blu-ray.
TG: Yes, I was one of those…
JM: And I would have to explain to them that it wasn't available
on Blu-ray. I was thrilled when the studio got in touch with me last year and
they told me that they were going to do this movie right, that they would do a
whole new transfer. I went in and sort of supervised it and signed off on what
they did. I was just thrilled with it. Now, to answer your question about Duel,
I'm a little older than you, and I grew up watching TV movies. Duel was
originally a made-for-TV movie, and it did receive a theatrical release later
on. But there were lots of these TV movies at the time, where a couple is
driving somewhere, they're pulled over for a speeding ticket, or there is a
corrupt cop who ends up imprisoning them and embezzling them for money, or the
wife disappears, etc.
TG: Yes, Dying Room Only with Dabney Coleman and Cloris
Leachman was one of the more famous films of that ilk.
JM: Right, and all these horrible things happen. I don't even
remember the names of most of these movies, but I'm thinking of an aggregate of
that, plus the types of themes that you would see in an Alfred Hitchcock
movie, they were all kind of rattling around in my brain. So, when I had an
idea for this, even though this is a quote-unquote “original ideaâ€, and
arguably no ideas are original because everything's been pretty much done in
cinema, because we are all creatures of the culture that we grew up in, I
thought it should be a road movie.
TG: The climax of the film looked like a real nightmare to shoot.
Did it take a long time to shoot that?
JM: Yeah, we actually spent a couple of weeks on that. That was
one of the few things that we shot that was in the Los Angeles area. The rest
of the film was shot in Utah, Nevada, and all over the place.
JM: We shot everything for real in this movie. Nowadays, if you're
going to shoot a car chase, most of it is digital. I have always been a
believer in the idea that even though you can do things digitally, and back
then the digital technology was still sort of in its infancy, it was kind of
cost-prohibitive, too – to make something visceral, you should really go out of
the way and do it for real. The only thing that was truly digital was in
certain cases during the climax when the Peterbilt cab is going over the bridge
and dangling, that was a real truck. But naturally, it was suspended by
construction cranes and we had to digitally remove all of them, the wiring
holding up the cab, etc. If you scratch beneath the surface, of any movie, what
you have is a director who's basically a child playing with a big electric
train set. It's never easy of course, but it was also super fun.
TG: I became a fan of Basil Poledouris after I heard his magnificent
score to John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian which I saw it when it opened
in May 1982. Was he your first choice to score this phone?
JM: Well, Basil had been suggested to me and we had ended up
bringing in a composer I had worked with previously, Richard Marvin, and he did
some of the music as well, and the net result of what we ended up with was a score
that neither one of them would have done on their own. In a lot of cases, where
we recorded a big score with a large orchestra, I went up just taking out the
orchestra completely and leaving in just a kind of percussion track or
something. Scoring the movie itself was an unusual process and everybody was
happy with it at the end. However, the initial issue that I was having with Basil’s
score was that he was capturing the emotion but not capturing enough of the
suspense. That being said, I don't believe that it was a score that anybody
would have devised on the outside.
TG: I think that the score works perfectly. Especially towards the
climax, the end of the film, you have Jeffrey struggling to get to his wife,
and the intercutting between Jeffrey and the kidnappers, that whole sequence is
just incredible. The tension that you built during that sequence was
magnificent.
JM: Well, you should appreciate this story. One night, we were
working very late in Basil’s studio which was in Venice (California). This was
a very dangerous area back then. It was about two in the morning, and he tells
me that he has to go down the street and get some cigarettes. He asked me if I
wanted anything from the corner store. On the one hand I told him no thank you,
but on the other hand, in my head, I'm thinking, “Are you crazy?! You're going
to go to a corner store at two in the morning?†I wouldn't walk out in that
neighborhood at two in the morning even if I had armed escorts. It was at that
moment that I realized that Basil had no personal fear. He was the sort of the
opposite of me. I’m a fairly anxious person and that's how I was throughout
most of the making of this movie, dealing with my own anxiety. What I realized
at that moment was that Basil was connecting with the sadness. Kurt's
character, Jeffrey Taylor, had this feeling of having lost his wife and didn’t
know where she was or even how to find her. He was also facing potentially
losing his wife forever. Basil was capturing that beautifully, but the problem
was I wasn't feeling the anxiety. So that's why I brought in Richard so
he could just nail the anxiety that I really needed for the movie. In the end, the
score ended up being what I really needed, which was a hybrid between the
sadness and the anxiety. That's why I think the score worked so well for the
film. If these composers had done the scores on their own, I don't think that
they would have achieved the effect that I was looking for. It just had to be a
partnership.
TG: Do you have an all-time favorite movie?
JM: No, because it varies. There are movies that you love
tremendously when you are young, and I'm sure that you have probably
experienced this yourself, and then you look at them maybe 15 or 20 years later
and they just don't hold up for you anymore. I remember watching Barbra
Streisand getting a Lifetime Achievement Award, and she said something that has
always stuck with me. She said that it was great to get these awards, it's
great to be recognized for your work, but the real test is if 30 years from now,
which of these films will stand up? Which of these films will still work? And
that's what's amazing to me when I go back and I look at certain films that
were made, you know, 20 or 30 years ago, and they hold up, that's always, to
me, the miracle. Some films hold up and some films simply don't.
TG: I agree. In 1979, I saw two films that I loved very much: Moonraker
and The Black Hole. Both films have really wonderful film scores by the
late great John Barry. But the former is James Bond in outer space and the latter
was really beautiful to look at, but had very little in the way of action. I
really loved both films when I first saw them, but watching them many years
later, I found the former to be puerile and insipid and the latter to be plodding
and boring. And it killed me that I felt that way. One film from that era that
stands the test of time for me is George Miller's The Road Warrior which
was, is, and I think always will be, the best action film that I've ever seen.
I never tire of that film. There are some problems with it, when they overcrank
or undercrank the action and it just looks like a Mack Sennett comedy for a few
seconds, I don't agree with that, they should have left it alone. The
Shining is another one. That film terrified me when I first saw it and it's
still the most beautiful horror film that I've ever seen. What are some of the
other films that you've seen that have influenced your career?
JM: When I was a child, my father took me to see Alfred
Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. We saw it at this old repertory movie
theater near where we lived, and this film plays a little bit like sort of a
light comedy. But to an eight-year-old kid like me, I found the film to be
totally gripping. The idea in that film is that this woman suddenly disappears
10 minutes into the movie. And the audience is wondering where the hell did she
go? I believe that that notion stayed in my subconscious all these years and in
a way, Breakdown was my way of exercising that out of my subconscious.
So, Breakdown is the film that kind of launched my career. Even though
that is one of Hitchcock's lesser works, for me personally, it had a great
influence. That's also a hard question to answer, because truthfully, I didn't
see a great many movies growing up. By the time I had gotten to college, I
don't believe I had seen more than 15 or 20 movies.
TG: What films did you initially not like, then you watched them
again later on and had a different experience and ended up really liking them?
JM: I have to be honest, there are very few films that I've seen
multiple times. Once I've seen a film, that's it. I've seen it. I remember
seeing an interview one time with a filmmaker, and it came out in the interview
that once he was done with the film he never sees it again. And I hadn't
directed any movie prior to seeing that interview. And I remember thinking how
crazy that was! I thought to myself if I'd directed a movie, I would watch it
every week! Sure enough, I found that once I finished the film, I've never gone
back to watch it again. Ever! Breakdown, of course, is the exception
because I watched it with Kurt Russell while we did the commentary for it. You
see it more than once when you're traveling around the world, doing press
screenings and that sort of thing. But psychologically for me, I'm just done.
And I move on. I have seen Goodfellas a few times. That's one that comes
to mind. Other movies that I've seen before, I might catch a few scenes of it
here or there on television. But I generally don't watch it again all the way
through. I tend to not be a big repeat viewer.
In closing, I just really appreciate that Paramount is releasing
this movie on Blu-ray with our commentary track and all the extras. There are
some really interesting interviews on it. We're actually including the
alternate opening to the film on this disc. This is something that has never
been shown to the public before.
TG: For me, that is worth the price of admission alone. Thank you
very much for speaking with me, it’s been a pleasure.
In
Jonathan Mostow’s Breakdown (1997), Jeffrey and Amy Taylor (Kurt Russell
and Kathleen Quinlan) seem like a normal and nice middle-aged couple moving
from New England to San Diego to hopefully start a new life from a past we are
not privy to, though it’s one fraught with financial issues. On the way, Jeffrey
nearly sideswipes a dirty brown Ford F150 while reaching for his thermos and
suffers invective from the driver (M.C. Gainey). A minor confrontation ensues
later when both men refuel at the same gas station. Words are exchanged. Upon
leaving, the Taylor’s new Grand Cherokee soon malfunctions, and they are
temporarily stranded as the F150 blows past them. Fortunately, an 18-wheeler soon
stops to help. The truck’s driver, Red Barr (the fine character actor J.T.
Walsh in his penultimate screen performance), gives Amy a ride to Belle’s
Diner to
call for help – except that she never makes it.
If
you recall Steven Spielberg’s 1971 television film Duel, Dennis Weaver
portrayed David Mann, an Everyman traveling to a sales account when his life
suddenly changes after passing a huge oil truck. Incensed by this perceived
breach of road etiquette, the truck driver chases and taunts Mann throughout
the rest of the film. Duel is arguably the granddaddy of road rage
movies, making riveting cinema out of a cat-and-mouse game that holds the
audience’s attention the entire time. Likewise, Breakdown holds the
equivalent mantle as it pertains to missing persons thrillers. As a horror film
fan of forty years, there is little that I have seen that gets under my skin,
George Sluizer’s icy 1988 Dutch/French character study Spoorloos, known
in the States as The Vanishing, being a notable exception. Mr.
Russell and Mr. Walsh have shared the screen multiples times together,
specifically in Robert Towne’s Tequila Sunrise (1989), Ron Howard’s Backdraft
(1991), and Stuart Baird’s Executive Decision (1994). Here they pair up
again in a frightening game that begins when, following unsuccessful attempts to glean info from the
patrons and owner of Belle’s Diner (a terrific turn by character actor Jack
McGee), Jeffrey catches sight of Red’s truck and pulls him over to the side of
the road. Jeffrey’s interrogation of Red regarding his wife’s whereabouts is
met by a perplexing display of gaslighting when Red claims he doesn’t even know
what Jeff is talking about. For a moment, we feel that perhaps this is even
Red’s twin and that there has been a complete mix-up. Following a search
of Red’s vehicle aided by a passing sheriff (Rex Linn), Jeffrey is, like Cary
Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) as described by
Cliff Robertson in the 1973 documentary on Mr. Hitchcock, “a man alone –
innocent, defenseless…†He realizes that it’s up to him to find Amy – and he
has no idea who to trust or even where to begin. What follows is the most intense
nail-biting thriller I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to oversell the film, but I
will anyway. Jeffrey moves mountains to locate his wife and when he does, the
tension and anxiety could not be more powerful. One thing I noticed: Red has
white wings in his hair like the Paulie Walnuts character on The Sopranos.
The
ending of Breakdown has been shrugged off by some critics as being unworthy
of what comes before, and even “ludicrousâ€. I must respectfully disagree. By
the end of the film, what we are looking for is a massive payoff, and I believe
that we get it in spades. The “ludicrous†ending is, instead, tension-filled
and satisfying. Detractors never seem to offer an alternative. I am personally
thankful to Dino DeLaurentiis for making a go of it and letting Jonathan Mostow
direct this film. Everyone has to start somewhere, and this directorial debut
is remarkable.
In
the days of VHS and laserdisc prior to large-screen televisions, Breakdown
is a film that I owned on the latter format in a letterboxed edition. In 1998,
the film suffered the indignity of a rather lackluster transfer on DVD when it
was window-boxed and lacked 16 x 9 anamorphic enhancement, rendering the DVD
nearly unwatchable. The new Blu-ray from Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment
is part of “Paramount Presents†which is described as a line of Blu-ray
releases for collectors and fans showcasing movies that have generally not made
it to Blu-ray before. Breakdown is number 26 in the list of
titles of
films showcased on Blu-ray in these new special editions. The new transfer is a
revelation.
In
addition to the new transfer, the Blu-ray contains the following extras:
A
feature-length audio commentary with the director and Kurt Russell. If you have
ever heard any of the previous commentaries that Mr. Russell has been involved
with, specifically with director John Carpenter on Escape from New York
(1981) and The Thing (1982), you know that he is one of the most
entertaining people to listen to. He also has a phenomenal laugh and chuckles
through most of the film, even making fun of Jeffrey! Hilarious. They speak
about Dino DeLaurentiis; having gotten cinematographer Doug Milsom who worked on
four films with Stanley Kubrick; Mr. Russell imitating Dennis Weaver in Duel
(“You can’t catch me on the grade!â€); the director discussing how he wrote a
role for Morgan Freeman as a character whose wife was kidnapped and teams up
with Jeffrey, the idea later wisely written out of the script; Roger Ebert
criticized the bank scene, but the commentary states that they were rushed to
get it done on the location but I think it works just fine. Overall, a truly
fun and entertaining listen and easily the best extra.
Newly
commissioned alternative artwork.
The
musical score is isolated on one of the audio tracks, a great feature that I
wish more companies would provide.
Filmmaker
Focus - Jonathan Mostow
(10:45) – This piece is a spotlight on the director that highlights much of
what was said during the commentary.
Victory
is Hers: Kathleen Quinlan on Breakdown
(4:22) – I was so happy to see Kathleen Quinlan included in this edition and
she discusses some of her experiences making the film.
A
Brilliant Partnership: Martha De Laurentiis on Breakdown (8:18) – This is a piece dedicated to
one of the producers of the film. Mrs. De Laurentiis worked with her late
husband, Dino, on the film and this is a look at their partnership.
Alternate
Opening with optional Jonathan Mostow commentary (11:00) – Along with the film’s commentary,
this is a very cool piece to see, as its inclusion changes the whole mood of
the film. The credits run slowly over the opening and the sequence establishes
Jeffrey as all-thumbs – lightyears removed from the Snake Plissken Mr. Russell
played fifteen years earlier. It was the correct decision to remove this
footage, though I feel badly for the other actors in the scene to have been
excised from such a terrific film!
Rounding
out the extras are trailers for Breakdown, Kiss the Girls, and Hard
Rain.
There
are two Blu-rays of this film available, one from the Australian company Via
Vision’s Imprint line and the Paramount Presents disc. Both Blu-rays are worth
owning for die-hard fans of the film as they each contain completely different
extras, but if you have to choose just one, I recommend the Paramount disc as
it contains the director/actor commentary and the excised alternate opening.
Although
Yves Boisset’s 1972 French political thriller The French Conspiracy
boasts an international cast of heavyweight actors, the film moves at a snail’s
pace and is chock full of schematic dialog and little in the way of the suspense
promised in the ads. The film opened on Wednesday, November 14, 1973 at the
long-gone 68th Street Playhouse and The Eastside Cinema, both in
Manhattan, and on Tuesday, December 25, 1973 at the ABC Century City Theatre 2
in Los Angeles. My guess is that this film, originally titled L’Attentat
which translates to The Assassination in English, was so named in the
hopes of capitalizing on the success of Constantin Costa-Gavras’s Z
(1969 and winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and also nominated
for Best Picture) and William Friedkin’s highly lauded The French Connection
(1971 and winner of the Oscar for Best Picture). In contrast, both of those
films were riveting and shot in a documentary style. The French Conspiracy
has so many characters and so much exposition that one can only wonder what
film Judith Crist saw when she proclaimed it as “one of the best post ‘Z’
political thrillers to come our way†in her New York Magazine review of the
film. The convoluted plot, penned by screenwriter Jorge Semprún of Z and
L’Aveu/The Confession (1970, also directed by Constantin Costa-Gavras)
fame, is based upon the true-life events of the October 29, 1965
“disappearance†of Moroccan left-wing politician Mehdi Ben Barka who, as
finally explained in a 2018 book, was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence
operatives and killed by Moroccan agents and French police. Pretty awful!
The
French Conspiracy is
not a terrible film, it’s just not a particularly good film either, which is a
shame considering the presence of Jean Seberg (Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de
Souffle/Breathless, 1960), Bruno Cremer (William Friedkin’s Sorcerer,
1977), and Phillipe Noiret (Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, 1988),
in addition to the main cast who have all appeared in films that I have loved
over the past few decades. Composer Ennio Morricone, who was also scoring Dario
Argento’s first three films at this time, does what he can to lift the action,
however there isn’t much of it to be lifted. Ninety-four minutes into it there
is a foot chase that fizzles out, which is a shame as by this point the
audience is pleading for the men to do anything except sit, stand, walk around,
and talk.
The
film is now available on Blu-ray courtesy of Code Red and released by Kino
Lorber and the transfers are beautiful. I say transfers, plural, as there are
two separate versions of the film on the dual-layered Blu-ray. There is an
English dubbed cut that runs 98 minutes in length and a longer French-spoken
with English subtitles version that runs 123 minutes. The film is a lot to take
in, especially with the additional 25 minutes. The 123-minute cut with
subtitles is the version that played here in the States theatrically, so
perhaps the 98-minute cut played in Great Britain, or on television? The longer
cut features Roy Schieder in a total of four scenes whereas the shorter version
features him in only two.
Unfortunately,
there are no extras on the disc, except for a trailers section consisting of The
Hunter Will Get You (1976), And Hope to Die (1972), Max and the
Junkmen (1971), Last Embrace (1978), Caravan to Vaccares
(1974), The Eiger Sanction (1975), The Tamarind Seed (1974), OSS
117: Mission for a Killer (1965), The Violent Professionals (1973)
and Puppet on a Chain (1970). I would have loved a film historian’s
commentary to explain the movie’s conception and behind-the-scenes tidbits, but
perhaps there just wasn’t enough time to include it. If you’re somehow a fan of
this film, this Blu-ray is a definite purchase.
High
school friends Enid Coleslaw (Thora Birch) and Rebecca Doppelmeyer (Scarlett
Johansson) absolutely cannot wait to be free of the prison of school, defiantly
flipping the bird and squashing their mortarboards following their graduation.
Enid isn’t off the hook just yet: her “diploma†is instead a note informing her
that she must “take some stupid art class†(her words) if she hopes to graduate.
Their fellow classmates are caricatures of everyone we all knew during our
adolescence. Melora (Debra Azar) is inhumanly happy all the time and oblivious
to Enid and Rebecca’s sense of ennui and contempt. Todd (T.J. Thyne) is
ultra-nervous to talk with the insouciant Rebecca at the punchbowl. Another bespectacled
student sits off by himself. Enid and Rebecca are at both an intellectual and
emotional crossroads. They want to share an apartment; however, they seem unaware
of the amount of money they will have to come up with for such a
venture. Instead of finding jobs, their post-graduation afternoons are spent
meandering through life while frowning upon society, following strange people
home, bothering their mutual friend Josh (Brad Renfro) and admiring the Weird
Al wannabe waiter at the new 50’s-themed diner which plays contemporary music.
Seemingly without a care in the world, the women have no plans to attend
college, preferring instead to prank an unsuspecting nebbish named Seymour (Steve
Buscemi) who has placed a personal ad in an attempt to communicate with a
striking blonde he noticed, with Enid feigning said blonde on Seymour’s
answering machine. Rebecca is a dour and solemn counterpoint to Enid’s aloof
yet occasionally jovial demeanor. If
Holden Caulfield had a girlfriend, she might be someone just like Enid,
sneering at the losers and phonies in her midst. Searching out Seymour, they
approach him and his roommate at a garage sale where he is unloading old
records for next to nothing. His affection for collecting 78 rpms begins to
endear him to Enid, who confides in Rebecca that she likes him despite their
25-year age difference. They have some truly funny moments together such as
attending a “party†for guys who talk techno mumbo-jumbo, riding in the car
together as Seymour screams at people walking through an intersection, and a
humorous romp through an adult video and novelty store.
Rebecca grows tired of hearing about Seymour,
and presses Enid to get a job but she only succeeds in getting fired repeatedly,
even from her position at the concession stand at a Pacific Theatre cinema when
she ribs the customers over their choice of movie and their willingness to eat
popcorn with “chemical sludge†poured on it. The tone of the film shifts from
one of comedic commentary on the world to one of disillusionment as Enid begins
to feel her world slowly begin to crumble around her. Her friendship with
Rebecca, an anchor in her life for years, is ending and like so many of us at
that age, she has no idea where her life is going or what she needs to be doing
when she isn’t changing her hair color or her now-famous blue Raptor t-shirt or
donning punk rock garb as a sartorial statement. Her summer art teacher
(Illeana Douglas) shows her students her personal thesis film Mirror, Father, Mirror which itself is a
parody of the pretentious student films submitted to professors. She pushes
Enid to create interesting and powerful art when Enid is only interested in
drawing the people she knows and Don Knotts. In short, nothing seems to be
going well for her. The only person she can rely on is Norman, the well-dressed
man who sits on a bench at a bus stop that stopped service a long time ago and
holds the key to the film’s long-debated denouement. Enid is almost like an
older version of Jane Burnham, the character portrayed by Ms. Birch in American Beauty (1999). In that film,
she barely reacted to her father (Kevin Spacey) and here her contempt for her
father (Bob Balaban) and his girlfriend Maxine (Teri Garr) is even more
perceptible.
Director Terry Zwigoff takes the source
material created by artist and writer Daniel Clowes and fashions one of the
most brilliantly entertaining and poignant ruminations on adolescence the
silver screen has ever seen. Ghost World
also boasts excellent use of music, much of it pre-existing, although the main
theme by David Kitay is an elegiac
piano theme that recalls David Shire’s theme to The Conversation (1974). The film starts with a bang to the
seemingly non-diegetic tune of the Mohammed Rafi hit “Jaan Pehechaan Ho†from
the 1965 Hindi film Gumnaam, the
scenes of which are intercut with images of the apartment complex’s
inhabitants. As the camera tracks from the exterior windows of these
grotesqueries, it settles upon Enid’s bedroom where the night before graduation
she dances to the aforementioned tune which we now see is being played back on a
bootleg VHS tape. The beat is frenetic and infectious. Enid, for the first of
only a handful of times in the entire film, appears to be in a state of joy as
she mimics the moves of the dancers. If only she could always feel this way! With this singular sequence, Mr. Zwigoff
achieves something reserved for only the greatest and rarest of filmmakers – re-identifying
a popular musical piece with his movie. I can’t hear “The Blue Danube†without
thinking of spaceships spinning throughout the galaxy.
Ghost World opened on Friday, July 20, 2001 in
limited release in New York and Los Angeles and garnered immediate critical
acclaim. Filmed in 2000, the film is a product of a simpler and more innocent
time. Before the brutal wake-up call of the September 11th attacks, there is a
complete lack of cell phone usage in the film. It makes a great companion to
2001’s other minor masterpiece of adolescent angst, the cult favorite Donnie Darko.
My love of horror films
dates back forty years. In the fall of 1986, I accidentally stumbled across an
aficionado’s bonanza – a local video store had hundreds of video posters in the
cabinets underneath the movies it was renting. One of the posters was for Mortuary
(1983), a horror film from the Vestron Video label that I knew of from another
video store but had not seen. I liked the poster art but knew nothing of the
film. To my recollection, it never played at area theaters, not even the
2-screen indoor/drive-in three miles from me that showed just about anything
that was low-budget and esoteric.
Mortuary
opened on Friday, September 2, 1983 in Los Angeles and is not a great movie,
but it is not terrible, either. It does, however, move at a snail’s pace, so be
forewarned if you have not seen it. It is one of the longest 93-minute
movies I have ever seen. Director Howard Avedis, who has also gone by the
tongue-twisters Hikmat Labib, Hekmat Aghanikyan, and (whew!) Hikmet L. Avedis,
also directed the 1976 Connie Stevens outing Scorchy; Texas Detour
(1978); and They’re Playing with Fire (1984) with Sybil Danning. Here he
enlists Mary Beth McDonough of The Waltons fame as Christie Parson (the
name taken from the characters of Christie Burns and Brooke Parsons in 1983’s Curtains,
or just a coincidence?), a young woman who lives with her parents in their
beautiful and unhumble abode and shows up just in time to see her father
floating in the family pool after getting walloped with a baseball bat on the
balcony. But who would want him dead?!
Her boyfriend Greg (David
Wallace) and a co-worker go to collect tires from a warehouse owned by a
funeral home, and he stumbles upon what appears to be some sort of weird
cult/devil worship shenanigans in another room with all the figures wearing
black cloaks, headed up by mortician Hank Andrews (Christopher George who sadly
passed away two months after the film’s release). Even 2019’s Black
Christmas featured a bunch of crazies running around in cloaks some 35
years later! Greg’s friend is stabbed and killed with a huge pole used for
embalming by one of the members. Christie gets involved and decides to play
sleuth and attempts to get to the bottom of her father’s murder – she refuses
to believe that he “drownedâ€. Her mother Eve Parson, played by Lynda Day
George, wife of actor Christopher George, wants to play everything off as
though nothing is happening. Meanwhile, Hank’s son Paul (Bill Paxton of all
people) is infatuated with Christie and does his best to win her affections,
even serving her flowers in a cemetery in front of her boyfriend – what a guy!
Mortuary is
one of those funeral home-based films that proliferated in the early 1980s and
out of all of them, my personal favorite has always been Tom McLoughlin’s One
Dark Night (1983), the spooky PG-rated Meg Tilly outing as a high schooler
who attempts to sleep overnight among crypts as part of an initiation. Michael
Dugan’s Mausoleum (1983), which starred a fetching Bobbie Bresee as a
possessed woman who had the misfortune of being married to Marjoe Gortner, is
terrible but great fun. Who could forget William Fruet’s 1980 film Funeral
Home with Lesleh Donaldson? That film has yet to be released on Blu-ray. Like
most horror films made since John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), they all
pretty much follow a cookie cutter pattern which starts with something terrible
that happens as either a flashback or as an event that is flashed back to later
on. Mortuary is one of a handful of horror films that were shot in one
year and released in another, specifically between April and July of 1981, but
released two years later more than likely due to budgetary constraints.
The granddaddy of funeral
home films is surely Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979), wildly imaginable
and one of the scariest and most original horror films ever made, though it is
made up of supernatural elements. Mortuary is more of a murder mystery,
but anyone who is a die-hard horror film fan will see the ending coming from a
mile away. It’s almost a mashup of Jacques Lacerte’s Love Me Deadly
(1972), Tom DeSimone’s Hell Night (1981) and J. Lee Thompson’s Happy
Birthday to Me (1981).
Mortuary
uses location filming to great effect as well. If the sprawling Parson mansion
looks familiar, it’s the former Gulls Way Estate at 26800 Pacific Coast Highway
in Malibu, CA which was used on many other films and television series episodes.
The living room itself is opulent, and a humorous sex scene between Christie
and Greg takes place here. The mansion was purchased in 2002 by Dick Clark and
the beautiful pool that Christie’s father died in was filled in with dirt.
Mortuary
has been released on Blu-ray from the MVD Rewind Collection, an imprint of MVD
Visual, in an upgraded video transfer attributed to Scorpion Releasing. I like
the concept of this release as it contains a slipcover featuring the old Mortuary
artwork as though it was a beat-up VHS rental return. Unfortunately, if you are
a big fan of this film, you will be disappointed with the overall release as it
contains only a fifteen-minute onscreen interview with John Cacavas who provided
the inspired musical score. The only other extra is a trailers section
comprised of The House on Sorority Row (1982), Dahmer (2002), Mikey
(1992), One Dark Night (1983), and Mortuary (2005). One of the
strangest things about this film is the television trailer, and why it is
missing is a mystery. It is comprised of a single scene featuring Michael
Berryman(!) digging a grave and being pulled into it, but the scene is nowhere
to be found in the movie! Nor is Michael Berryman in the film! I wish that I
had seen this trailer as a teenager, but no such luck. Think of the original
teaser trailer for Alien (1979) with the little egg and the piercing
shriek on the soundtrack.
This Blu-ray falls very
short of being considered a “special edition†despite the inclusion of a
fold-out poster of the cover art. I would have loved an audio commentary and I wonder
why this release is so sparse.
One thing is certain –
you’ll never experience Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik†the same way after
seeing the ending of Mortuary.
By
all accounts, Jennie Logan (Lindsay Wagner) has it all – beauty, intelligence,
a loving husband (Alan Feinstein) named Michael, and a good friend in whom she
confides (Constance McCashin). While they do not have children, Jennie and Michael
seem to be unperturbed by the lack of tiny bare feet on the hardwood floors –
there is plenty of time for all of that. Or is there? Looks can be deceiving
and it is not long before we discover that this seemingly “perfect couple†have
their own demons to wrestle with.
Guided
on a tour of the sprawling Victorian manse prior to their eventual purchase by
a matter-of-fact realtor (Pat Corley) who off-handedly remarks that the
unfinished attic is unworthy of even the most cursory glance, Jennie feels
drawn to it, though she cannot fathom why. Following their purchase and move-in,
Jennie ventures into the attic and encounters a dress that is nearly 100
years-old (shades of John Hancock’s 1971 film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death).
Trying it on, it fits her perfectly, as though fashioned just for her.
All
is not well in the household, however. Michael tries to get close to Jennie but
she quickly withdraws, plagued by Michael’s betrayal and infidelity with one of
his students. Jennie’s willingness but inability to get past it puts a crimp in
their marriage. She feels that sex for Michael is like taking a shower or going
out for a jog, but despite his protests to the contrary he practically ignores
her while watching a sports game on television, despite her wearing the old
dress that makes her appear more fetching. The dress is the catalyst, a trigger
for Jennie to see and experience a complete and alternate reality that occurred
80 years prior that consists of an artist named David (Marc Singer) who grieves
the loss of his love, Pamela. After mistaking Jennie for Pamela, David spends
time getting to know Jennie while brushing off the affections of another woman,
Elizabeth Warrington (a nearly unrecognizable Linda Gray). David’s affections
turn towards Jennie, and she becomes fulfilled by him. The question then
becomes does Jennie really see and participate in this reality or is it
all just in her head, a projection for a life and a love that she once had, or thought
she had with Michael and lost, but still longs for? Much of the film reminds
me of the Harlequin romances my grandmother and aunt had stacked in their
basements.
The
Two Worlds of Jennie Logan
is the title of this 1979 made-for-television movie that is based on the 1978
novel Second Chance by David L. Williams. I am probably in the minority
here, but Jennie Logan is an above-average outing with an intriguing
story about love, longing and the perpetual life question of the road not taken,
though contemporary audiences will no doubt find it trite and saccharine. As
someone who grew up in the 1970s, I enjoy even the most basic of television
movies as they were a lot more innocent back then in a time before the
1000-plus cable stations offered us game shows, talk shows with despicable
guests, crime dramas, politics, and the rest of it. The world was slower and
not so crazy. Some of these television films worked (Steven Spielberg’s 1971
film Duel) and many of them did not (Corey Allen’s 1985 outing Beverly
Hills Cowgirl Blues). The innocence of these films is one of the reasons
why television movies were not regarded very highly when they were made, and
certainly not today. For me, less was more and although most audiences
and reviewers look upon the average television movie with disdain, I have
always had an affection for them that holds forth now.
Lindsay
Wagner and Alan Feinstein (who reminds me of Daniel Hugh Kelly as the cuckolded
husband in Lewis Teague’s 1983 film Cujo) give decent television movie-of-the-week
performances as the couple besieged by turmoil. Jennie visits a psychiatrist
(Joan Darling) to get a handle on her issues, leading the doctor to believe
that this is all mental, a diagnosis Michael concurs with, though Jennie
believes otherwise. A trip to a local library and discussions with librarian Mrs.
Bates (Irene Tedrow, who bears a resemblance to Fay Compton, the actress who
played Mrs. Sannerson in Robert Wise’s 1963 thriller The Haunting) puts
Jennie into contact with information that she hopes will alter the course of
David’s life so that she can be with him. Her discussion with an elderly
bedridden invalid is shocking in how frightening the woman’s face is – think of
Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963).
The
late writer and director Frank De Felitta is no stranger to supernatural
material. He directed The Stately Ghosts of England for NBC (1965) and the
beloved Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981). He also wrote the novels and
screenplays for Audrey Rose (1977) and The Entity (1982). Here,
he adapts material from another author. While portions of the film take place
in 1899, Marc Singer’s beefcake stature looks out-of-place as though he is
anticipating the arrival of Fabio, but it should please women and fans
of The Beastmaster (1982), the film he is best known for.
Composer
Glenn Paxton provides a lush and romantic score to complement the onscreen
action.
Jennie
Logan premiered on the
CBS network on Halloween night in 1979 and has been released on Blu-ray from
Australia-based Via Vision Entertainment through their Imprint label, the fine company
responsible for the recent Scarface (1932) and Breakdown (1997)
Blu-rays. Here, they offer up a region-free, pristine transfer with a wonderfully
entertaining commentary by critic Kevin Lyons who speaks eloquently and
knowledgeably about the film. He gives us some interesting on-set anecdotes
about the making of the film, such as modifications made to the set as Ms.
Wagner was unable to reach the handle to the attic; a history of the house in
which the film was shot; director De Felitta making The Stately Ghosts of
England, only to discover that the reels were blank after being developed
and having to plead with the ghosts in the location where they were filming not
to mess with the production!
There
is a nice twist at the end of the film, and if you have ever lost a love in the
fashion that Michael loses Jennie, it will have an impact on you.
I
originally saw the Brian De Palma/Al Pacino version of Scarface (1983) on
laserdisc in 1994 and again in a 20th anniversary theatrical
screening in New York, but not since. Recently, I decided to have revisit it on
Netflix and was amazed that I recalled very little of it. The constant use of
profanity and the intensity of some of the violent set pieces, in particular
the notorious chainsaw scene, are tamer than the language and the most violent moments
of HBO’s The Sopranos (1999 – 2007) and Showtime’s Brotherhood
(2006 – 2008). However, in 1983 Universal Pictures was prompted to release the
film with the following caveat in the newspaper ads when the film was released
in December: “CAUTION – Scarface is an intense film both in its use of
language and depiction of violence. We suggest mature audiences.†While one
might think this was a publicity stunt with the objective to get as many people
to see the film as possible, it could very well have instead been a compromise
to having the film released without the dreaded X rating. Director De Palma was
no stranger to sparring with the then Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) and its president, Richard Heffner. Previously, Mr. De Palma’s 1980 film
Dressed to Kill needed to be altered to avoid an X and he went back and
forth with the MPAA on the violence and overt sexual nature of the film until
it was releasable. It is interesting to note that the X rating, generally
associated with explicit sexual content as opposed to violence, was also given
to John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy when it was released in May 1969
(later changed to an R rating), Stanley Kubrick’s masterful A Clockwork
Orange in December 1971 (also later changed to an R rating following the
removal of several seconds of footage), and most famously, to Bernardo
Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in February 1973 (recently changed to
NC-17). Tango garnered critical acclaim from New Yorker reviewer Pauline
Kael and, arguably because of the promise of sex scenes with the then
45-year-old Marlon Brando, did boffo box office. These are the cinema’s most
notable examples, with Cowboy winning the Best Picture Oscar and Clockwork
being nominated but losing to William Friedkin’s The French Connection
(1971) for that top prize. In the end, Scarface received an R rating and
grossed several million dollars shy of its $23.5M budget but, like so many
films of that period, cleaned up later on from ancillary sources such as home
video and cable television airings. It has become one of the most famous and
beloved motion pictures in recent memory, adding Al Pacino’s famous line about
saying hello to his little friend to the American lexicon, right up there with
Roy Scheider’s quip about needing a bigger boat in Jaws (1975).
It
is interesting to note that the very existence of Scarface began with the
original film of the same name made roughly fifty years prior to it and served
as the blueprint for Mr. Pacino’s interpretation of Cuban arrival Antonio
Montana and his rise to fame in the cocaine-laden backdrop of Miami, FL. Directed
by Howard Hawks between September 1930 and March 1931 and written by playwright
Ben Hecht, Scarface (1932), then billed as Scarface, the Shame of a
Nation, opened at the Rialto Theatre in New York City on Thursday, May 19,
1932 and, like the remake, also suffered its own share of controversy for
violence and sexuality, though not due to the same intensity as the remake. Coming
on the heels of Mervyn Leroy’s Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson and
William A. Wellman’s The Public Enemy, both from 1931, Scarface
is widely considered to be the start of cinema’s depiction of and fascination
with gangsters and crime dramas. We are in 1920s Chicago in the time of Al
Capone (upon whose life the film is loosely based) and gangland wars between
the city’s North Side and South Side. The film begins with a single take that
runs just over three minutes in a setup that sets the tone. This must have been
deemed very suspenseful at the time and, while not nearly as intricate as the
three-minute mobile crane shot that opens Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil
(1957) or the three-minute Panaglide shot that starts John Carpenter’s Halloween
(1978), it manages to build tension for an audience not used to seeing such
cinematic techniques at the time.
The
story gets underway with “Big†Louis Costillo (Harry J. Vegar), the most
successful crime boss on the city’s South Side, talking and laughing with
members of his crew at a restaurant when heads to a phone booth. In the
shadows, still in the same opening take, Antonio “Tony†Camonte (Paul Muni),
Costillo’s own hired muscle, appears in silhouette and kills him in a murder contracted
with him by John “Johnny†Lovo (Osgood Perkins), his new boss. This being the
era of Prohibition, the main source of income is not cocaine but beer to be
delivered to speakeasies. A police officer heads to a barbershop the next day
and brings Tony in for questioning, determined to finger him for Costillo’s murder.
A lawyer pulls some strings and gets Tony out of it, but the police want to
catch him in the act of a crime, and they are more determined than ever. As it
stands Johnny, Tony’s new boss, now controls the South Side, with Tony and the
reticent Rinaldo (George Raft in a menacing performance) at his side. Rinaldo
reminds me of Al Neri, Michael Corleone’s reticent henchman in The Godfather
films, played icily by the late Richard Bright.
The
North Side is run by a man named O’Hara and Tony’s thirst for power begins to
swell. Johnny warns him not to mess with business associates on the North Side
because, in the words of Tony Soprano, “it attracts negative attention†and
potential violence. Tony also has his eye on Poppy (Karen Morley), Johnny’s
girlfriend, who initially shrugs Tony off, but warms up to him later when his
flirtations increase as he becomes more intrigued by her. In his apartment, he
shows her the sight of an electric billboard across the way advertising Cook’s
Tours beneath the slogan “The World is Yours,†taken to excessive extremes in
the De Palma remake.
I
love Joe Dante. He has directed some hugely entertaining films and is an
aficionado of the same genres I adore. Additionally, like most film directors,
he is highly versed in cinemaspeak. My introduction to his work came in 1983
when I bought his werewolf classic The Howling (1981) sight-unseen on
RCA’s now extinct CED system and immediately took to it. That failed stylus-based
videodisc format was severely limited to only several thousand titles, so I had
to rely on VHS to catch up with his Hollywood Boulevard (1976), Piranha
(1978), and Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979) in the mid-80’s following
theatrical viewings of Twilight Zone: The Movie in 1983 and Gremlins
in 1984. For some reason, his July 12, 1985-released outing Explorers,
which concerns the escapades of three young boys making their way through the
battlefield of junior high school, escaped my list of “must see†films during
that summer and I was only vaguely aware of it through a high school friend who
took to it. Looking back at the film’s opening weekend, it was rushed into
theaters almost ten days after Robert Zemeckis’s already phenomenally
successful Back to the Future and was also pitted against the Live-Aid
concert which was seen by nearly 2 billion people on television. Plus, I was
four months away from obtaining my driver’s license, so I still had to
embarrassingly prod my parents for trips to the theater which was some 10 miles
away.
Filmed
between October 1984 and February 1985, Explorers is most notable for
being the feature film debuts of Ethan Hawke and the late River Phoenix, both
of whom were 14 when the film was shot. Mr. Hawke landed the role while
accompanying a friend to the audition and had no previous acting experience. Mr.
Phoenix had already garnered a significant amount of television credits to his
name by the time filming began. Filling out the triumvirate is Jason Presson,
who appeared in Christopher Cain’s 1984 film The Stone Boy opposite
Robert Duvall and Glenn Close.
We
have all have had dreams of flying. A recurring dream of mine from childhood
consists of me flying on the top of a tree over the street I grew up on and
coming crashing down on to the pavement, awakening immediately afterwards. In Explorers,
Ben (Ethan Hawke) is a teenage science fiction aficionado who gravitates to
films of previous decades, such as War of the Worlds (1953) and This
Island Earth (1955). This rang true for me as my father gave me a copy of
the June 1978 issue of Star Encounters magazine when I was ten which
featured films from this era and was my introduction to them. Ben also dreams
of flying – in the clouds, and over a city that looks a lot like a circuit
board, the schematic of which he draws upon wakening. He shows these sketches
to his friend Wolfgang (River Phoenix) who is studious, nerdy and comes from an
eccentric family. Wolfgang does not have time for frivolities such as teenage
crushes, something that plagues Ben with his infatuation with Lori (the late
Amanda Petersen). Darren (Jason Presson) is disillusioned. His parents are
divorced, and his father has a girlfriend whom his dad argues with. He
befriends Ben and Wolfgang as an escape, but they share similar interests.
Using
Ben’s scribblings as a guide, Wolfgang builds a microchip that can create a
huge bubble that encompasses a large space while moving at incredibly fast
speeds. They take it upon themselves to build their own flying saucer out of an
old Tilt-A-Whirl ride, which they christen “Thunder Road†based on the name of
the song by The Boss. More of Ben’s dreams result in answers to limiting
issues, such as finding a way to produce an unlimited amount of oxygen on the
ship in order to leave Earth’s orbit, which they succeed in doing and end up
captured by a huge ship manned by aliens whose understanding of Earth is based
on television reruns. While this notion may have seemed interesting and
original on paper by the screenwriter, it eventually wears a bit thin in an
overly rambunctious episode that lasts longer than it should. Needless to say,
the boys make their way back to Earth and, well, you’ll just have to see for
yourself as to how their adventure ends.
When
I watched the special edition of The Howling on laserdisc in 1996, I
vaguely recalled Joe Dante mentioning that he had had a three-hour cut of Explorers,
but that it went missing, or it was stolen, etc. I often wonder how that
version would have fared in comparison. Watching Explorers now is
bittersweet as it contains performances by several people who tragically left
this world much too soon. Building on the special effects used to atmospheric
effect in Walt Disney’s Tron (1982), Explorers does an admirable
job of pushing the effects a little further. It is definitely an ‘80’s film and
that is something that cannot be faked. Rob Bottin, the genius behind the
effects for John Carpenter’s The Thing, created the aliens in this film,
with Robert Picardo of The Howling donning the makeup and costumes.
A
new special edition of the film is available on Blu-ray from Shout! Factory and it includes the home
video & theatrical cuts of the film, the differences of which were
imperceptible to me but probably stand out to die-hard fans more familiar with
it.
A
Science Fiction Fairy Tale: The Story of Explorers is a piece that runs about 65 minutes
and features new interviews with those involved with the production of the
film. Screenwriter Eric Luke explains having been given a copy of “Worlds of Ifâ€
magazine as a child ended up whetting his appetite, and he later worked at Los
Angeles’s A Change of Hobbit Bookstore which catered to science fiction
aficionados. Darlene Chan, the Junior Executive in charge of production, really
loved the script and how innocent it was. David Kirkpatrick, who was the Senior
Executive in charge of production of the film, reminisces on how the script
made him feel like a child again. Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One,
echoes those sentiments. Ethan Hawke describes how the film got him his start
in acting.
Explorers was a far more ambitious film in
conception than it ended up being in execution. Numerous public screenings with
negative feedback unfortunately resulted in much of the original material
ending up on the proverbial cutting room floor as the studio rushed it into
theaters far too quickly.
Deleted
Scenes with Optional Commentary By Joe Dante – Further character beats enhanced in footage gleaned from a
Betamax-quality workprint found buried in the director’s garage reveals a far
more interesting dynamic than what is alluded to in the final film, truncated
at Paramount’s request due to an unreasonable running time. This segment runs
about 34 minutes and includes the Amanda Peterson birthday party scene; a
dinner scene with Ethan Hawke and his parents; a wordless scene wherein Mary
Kay Place finds the February 1982 issue of Playboy in her son’s room; more
of the alien ad-libs; a cute reference to Poltergeist (1982); and many
more. It can be viewed with on-set audio or alternatively with director Dante’s
comments. It would have been nice if the entire feature contained a commentary
– it’s absence is puzzling.
Interview
with Cinematographer John Hora
– at just under four minutes, this is a discussion of the challenges that the
production ran into while shooting a film with minors during the Fall. Dick
Miller, who passed away in January 2019, comes in at the end, which only made
me want to see more.
Interview
with Editor Tina Hirsch
– this piece runs over six minutes with the film’s editor and really makes me
want to see the full cut of the film!
The
theatrical trailer is also included.
While
watching the film now I cannot help but be reminded of the Netflix series Stranger
Things which takes place beginning in November 1983, and the wonderful
camaraderie among the youngsters on the show. Explorers, despite being
the unfortunate mess that it is, is a reminder of our childhood friendships and
how things truly seemed possible, no matter how farfetched they seemed.
Some of the
best literary achievements and their respective motion picture counterparts had
their genesis in real-life. Robert Bloch made the grave-robber and necrophiliac
Ed Gein into the motel manager Norman Bates in Psycho (1960); William
Peter Blatty took the ostensibly possessed boy in Cottage City, MD and gave him
the identity of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist (1973); and Martin Sheen
and Sissy Spacek breathed celluloid life into Kit and Holly respectively in Badlands
(1973), based upon Waste Land: The Savage Odyssey of Charles Starkweather
and Caril Ann Fugate. Smooth Talk, Joyce Chopra’s brilliant 1985
film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s equally excellent 1966 short story
“Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going?", is no exception. While it may
seem odd to begin this review of what is on the surface, and for all intents
and purposes, a story of a teen-age girl’s sexual awakening, with an overview
of horror films, it must be said that Mrs. Oates based her tale loosely
on the exploits of Charles Howard Schmid, Jr., aka “The Pied Piper of Tucson,â€
a loner and petty thief who seduced young high school girls and was responsible
for murdering at least three of them between 1964 and 1965.
While the
denouement is nowhere near as dark as its real-life roots, Smooth Talk,
the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1986, is a deceptive
film in that it is marketed in what appears to be a coming-of-age film, but it
is not in the traditional sense. At 91 minutes, Smooth Talk is a nearly
perfect film, unlike any other film I have ever seen. Its independent status
and minimal theatrical run have precluded it from deservedly finding a much
wider audience, even today, though it should be required viewing as both an
example of fine independent filmmaking and as a cautionary tale for overly-trusting
young women, especially in the modern age of social media and the #MeToo
movement.
Following
backstory and exposition that was only alluded to in Mrs. Oates’s story, Smooth
Talk, released on Friday, February 28, 1986 at the long-gone 68th
Street Playhouse (I miss that theater!!) in New York with a PBS showing as part
of American Playhouse nearly a year later, is a remarkably faithful film
adaptation that follows the story nearly to the letter. The film gives us
Connie Wyatt, a typical fifteen-year-old girl in a terrible hurry to grow up
and experience life. She lives in the world of the relative but would prefer to
live in the world of the absolute: one bereft of a nagging mother (Mary Kay
Place), an insouciant father (Levon Helm), and her older sister June (Elizabeth
Berridge) who castigates her for transgressions. She envisions one instead full
of sweet and beautiful boys to woo and sing to her. Her summertime vacation
household is one of boredom and antagonism, restlessness, and constant
comparison to other kids. She is a stranger at the dinner table, marginalized
and spoken of in the third person as though she were absent. Her character
changes and comes to life, however, during frequent multiple-hour sojourns to
the beach and the shopping mall (Santa Rosa Plaza and Coddingtown Mall) with
younger friends Laura (Margaret Welsh) and Jill (Sarah Inglis) in tow to the
tunes of James Taylor or Franke & The Knockouts on her boom box. In the
mall bathroom, the homely triumvirate don mascara and lipstick and emerge looking
much older, dressing to impress. Connie metamorphizes from a gawky girl into a
temptress. They yearn after a group of attractive young men with “nice bunsâ€
and poke fun at nerds and generally act older than they really are. Their first
encounter with more than they bargained for is with two muscled-up bad dudes
who lecherously offer them booze and drugs, with the presumption of sexual
interludes to follow. They nervously rush away from the men’s clutches; on
their way home, they stop at an outdoor hamburger restaurant bustling with
older kids. An older man in a shiny golden convertible pulls into the lot, and
his presence goes unnoticed by Connie, but not by the audience. In the days to
follow, Connie and Laura score dates with boys their own age, although Connie’s
catch wants more than she is willing to give when he takes her to a deserted
parking lot – never a good sign – but she manages to extricate herself from his
lust and gets a verbal admonishment from her mother and older sister the
following morning for potentially “getting into troubleâ€.
When
Connie’s family goes to visit relatives, she decides to exercise some rebellion,
opting to remain home instead. She turns on several radios throughout the house
to the same station to hear music anywhere she goes. It is at this point where
the film begins to follow Mrs. Oates’s story almost completely, as the film
takes a 180-degree turn into uncharted territory with the arrival of the
mysterious man in the convertible. He introduces himself as Arnold Friend, and
professes his desire to be Connie’s friend, which is repugnant in and of itself
as he is most definitely not 15 years-old, but much older, at least
twice that age. Bemused, Connie is escorted to his car, a 1960s-something
Pontiac LeMans GTO, which has his name printed in cursive writing on the
driver’s door, and his license plate bears the name AFRIEND. Next to his name
are printed the numbers 33, 19, and 17, the summation of which is synonymous
with a particular sexual act, though its significance is completely lost on
Connie (it could also refer to the ages of the three females killed by the
real-life Pied Piper of Tucson). His last bit of the tour is showing Connie the
left rear fender, smashed in by a “crazy woman driverâ€, as he points out.
What begins
at this point is a slow and deliberate seduction of Connie, like the serpent
tempting Eve into eating the shiny apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
and Evil, except here the serpent is using a shiny convertible for enticement
(note the apple grove in the backyard). Initially flirty, Connie’s demeanor
changes when Arnold behaves as though they already know each other, and he
mentions facts about her family and friends that only someone intimately
familiar with her would know. Arnold’s intentions as a sexual predator are
nefarious and despicable. He almost talks to her in code, and everything points
to a double meaning. Removing the “r†from his name yields “an old fiendâ€;
Santa Rosa becomes Satan Rosa; and his arched eyebrows are devilish.
When Arnold
tells Connie that they are meant to be together, Connie says, “You’re crazy, no
one talks like that.†And she is right – but she does not trust her instincts
enough and goes along with him in an effort to rid him from her family’s home
at 2074 Pleasant Hill Road (in Sebastopol, CA, though the film is set in
Petaluma where George Lucas shot his own adolescent masterpiece American
Graffiti in the summer of 1972). It costs her her innocence in the film,
and her life in the short story.
The film is
most notable for being the breakout performance of Laura Dern, who was
seventeen when filming commenced in September 1984, a full year prior to playing
the virginal Sandy in David Lynch’s controversial Blue Velvet (1986).
Ms. Dern should have received an Oscar nomination for this role as her performance
is a revelation. She also was growing up and her sense of being “unaware†is
what drives her natural reactions. Connie is almost a slightly older and less
wild version of Amy Sims, the out-of-control teenager Ms. Dern portrayed in the
1980 episode of Insight called “Who Loves Amy Tonight?â€
Martin
Rosen, the director of Watership Down (1978), The Plague Dogs (1982)
and the little-seen Stacking (1987) with Megan Follows, produced the
film.
There
is a fair amount of gore spilled in this film and by the end you sort of feel
glad that it’s all over. Madman Marz
could be considered the cinematic brethren of Andrew Garth in Tom DeSimone’s far
more entertaining Hell Night (1981) who
creeps around Garth Manor, or even Victor Crwley in Adam Green’s Hatchet movies. Hell
Night was the first film that Frank Darabont worked on (he’s not a fan of
it!) and it truly deserves a Blu-ray release.
What sets this new Madman DVD/Blu-ray combo set apart is Vinegar Syndrome’s wealth of
extras that appear on both formats:
-The
film boasts two separate running commentaries that run through the entire 90-minute
running time. They feature comments from director Joe Giannone, producer Gary
Sales and actors Paul Ehlers and Tony Fish.
-There
is an intro in HD that runs just under one minute as producer Gary Sales talks
before the Blu-ray presentation.
-Madman: Alive at 35 runs 21 minutes, is shot in HD and
features producer Gary Sales and actors Tom Candela and Paul Ehlers who discuss
the making of the film.
-The Early Career of Gary Sales is an interview with producer Gary Sales.
Shot in HD, it runs 14 min. and 15 seconds in length, but Mr. Sales speaks with
a great deal of energy and explains that he went to film school with director Armand Mastroianniwho,
at that time, had directed He Knows
You’re Alone (1980), a clear Halloween
(1978) rip-off. So, despite the sort
running time, he includes a wealth of info. It seemed like everyone was
making these types of horror films at the time, and Madman is loosely based upon the legend of Cropsey, who became famous in Staten Island,
NY. Mr. Sales also explains how he got his start in the industry by working on
a sex film in New York in 1973 entitled It
Happened in Hollywood. If you were looking to break into the film industry
in the early 1970’s, one way to do it was through the adult film industry. It
was here that he met Wes Craven who edited Hollywood,
as well as Peter Locke. Wes Craven and Peter Locke would go on to make The Hills Have Eyes in 1977, so
networking and making contacts are everything. What makes this
documentary/interview so fascinating is that we are given a first-hand account
by the producer as to what it took for him to not only get into the film
industry, but to get the ball rolling on Madman.
It wasn't like it is today, where somebody can make a film on a cell phone or
an iPad and simply upload it to someone.
-The Legend Still Lives is from 2011, which is strange as Code
Red had just released a 30th anniversary edition DVD at the
time. Shot in SD, it runs an
unbelievable 91 minutes (longer than the movie!) and gives you just about all
you would want to know about the film. Cast
and crew and other experts in the field of horror talk about the film and, in a
maneuver that would make Sean Clark happy, we are taken to the filming
location, only to find that most of the buildings that appeared in the film
have been torn down many years ago.
-There
is a stills & artwork gallery that runs over seven minutes and provides newspaper
ads and reviews.
-Music Inspired by Madman runs just over 13 minutes and consists
of submissions of music by fans. This
film has quite a following!
-In Memoriam runs almost six minutes and discusses
the passing of both Joe Giannone the director Carl Fredericks.
-Rounding
out the extras are brief discussions with Mr. Sales and Mr. Ehlers at a horror
film convention; TV spots, and the theatrical trailer.
I would recommend this to not only fans
of the film, but to fans of the genre who want an insight into filmmaking in
general, and what it took to get a film like this made in the
1970’s/1980’s.
Kurt Russell and the late great character
actor J.T. Walsh have shared the screen multiples times together, specifically
in Robert Towne’s Tequila Sunrise (1989), Ron Howard’s Backdraft
(1991), and Stuart Baird’s Executive Decision (1994). In the Spring of 1997,
I saw the trailer for a new film called Breakdown, also featuring these
two fine actors. I groaned - it looked like just another run-of-the-mill,
headache-inducing, over-the-top testosterone action fest with very little basis
in reality. Foolishly, I avoided it until I found myself at the Glendale 9, an
Arizona multiplex drive-in while in Phoenix on a business trip. Breakdown
was just about the only movie on the marquee that looked remotely interesting,
though I still had serious doubts. Reluctantly, I paid the admission, fearing
the worst. For the first time in a long time, I was wrong. Completely wrong.
My initial reservations about Breakdown were totally erased halfway
through the story. Years of suffering through uninteresting action films with empty,
amusement park-like “thrills†almost prevented me from seeing one of the best
films of the 1990s and a movie that easily lends itself to repeat viewings. I
watched Breakdown while reclining on the hood of my rental car. To say
that I was absolutely riveted would be a huge understatement. I thought the
paint would permanently adhere to my sweaty palms.
For
me, Breakdown is a near masterpiece. To disclose the plot would destroy what
I found to be an utterly nail-biting motion picture experience, which is
something I do not think I have ever truly experienced. There are some spoilers
ahead, so non-viewers please tread lightly. There is such an overwhelming sense
of menace and peril in Breakdown that it almost becomes a cruel
experiment in fear. For a first-time directing job by Jonathan Mostow, who
previously scripted the Michael Douglas/David Fincher film The Game
(1997), Breakdown is awe-inspiring. The opening credits sequence alone
is imaginative and appropriate to the story, utilizing animation to simultaneously
represent a mesh of cartographic interstates and what could also be construed
as cerebral arteries. The film’s title is a double meaning. Kurt Russell and
Kathleen Quinlan are Jeff and Amy Taylor, a forty-something married couple
moving from New England to San Diego in a brand-new Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo
SUV. On their way driving through the empty plains of the Midwest, Jeff is
momentarily distracted reaching for his thermos and just misses crashing into a
mud caked Ford F150 pick-up driven by a large man who shouts obscenities. An
unfortunate encounter ensues later when the man castigates Jeff while refueling.
Speeding away, the new Jeep suffers an electrical difficulty and Jeff and Amy
find themselves stranded in a place befitting of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. The
Ford truck speeds by, cheerfully acknowledging the couple’s plight with a long
horn blow leading to a brief and tense stand-off which is alleviated by the
arrival of Red Barr, a truck driver (the late great J.T. Walsh) who offers to
give Amy a ride to Belle’s Diner some miles down the road to call road service
(his CB blew a fuse earlier and is non-functioning). When she accepts, Jeff
waits…and waits…and discovers an unplugged wire in the Jeep’s undercarriage.
Normally,
I would call out Amy’s foolishness for accepting such a ride as a woman her age
should know the dangers of hitch-hiking, however New Englanders routinely give
rides to one another and this plot point helps explain her action. Jeff makes
his way to the diner and all the patrons and owner (a terrific turn by
character actor Jack McGee) do not recall seeing her, except for a mildly slow
co-worker in the parking lot. This puts into motion a high level of suspense as
Jeff’s cell phone fails to get decent service while he rushes to find his wife.
It turns out that Jeff and Amy have been pegged for financial embezzlement by
Red, Earl (M.C. Gainey as the Ford driver), Billy (Jack Noseworthy, the “slowâ€
diner worker), and Al (the late Rich Brinkley), a husky accomplice. Rex Linn of
TV’s Better Call Saul is also on hand as a police officer who offers
Jeff some recourse.
Breakdown, which opened on Friday, May 2, 1997, might
appear to be an action film, but it is more of a thriller with some action
sequences. It has been a longtime indeed since this level of suspense has seen
the light of day on the silver screen. It is so good, in fact, that it feels
like a Seventies film made in the Nineties. It is amazing that it was not the
blockbuster that it deserved to be. Poor marketing perhaps?
Shooting
in the 2.35:1 Panavision ratio, Mr. Mostow has created a plausible scenario
replete with four of the most frightening villains seen of late. They certainly
give Bill McKinney and Herbert "Cowboy" Coward, the mountain men in Deliverance
(1972), a run for their money. J. T. Walsh, who unfortunately passed away not
too long after this film was released (his death is a real loss to the film
world), appears in one of the best performances of his sterling and memorable career:
a purely evil man who doubles as an everyday Joe who loves his wife and son (Moira
Harris and Vincent Berry, respectively) but commits terrible acts for money. You
get the feeling that these monsters have been doing what they do for a long
time, although there were moments wherein I thought a double-cross would
transpire among them. They all appear to be loyal to one another, making me
wonder how these guys ended up together in the first place. The supporting cast
all do a phenomenal job as well.
Breakdown’s plot is by no means original. This type of
story depicting a person who goes missing has been told over many decades: Robert
Fuest's And Soon the Darkness (1970), Philip Leacock's television film Dying
Room Only (1973), and, in particular, George Sluizer’s icy 1988 Dutch/French
character study Spoorloos, known in the States as The Vanishing. Breakdown
succeeds for the same reason that Steven Spielberg's Duel (1971) does
(though Duel is more cinematic): it takes two ordinary human beings and
thrusts them into a horrendous situation they would never have any reason to
suspect they would ever be a part of. That is not to say that the film does not
have a few convenient plot devices, but even when it does, they can be
forgiven.
Mr. Rush was born on Monday, April 15, 1929 in New
York City and broke into the film industry through the UCLA film program and
later worked for producer and director Roger Corman as the co-writer and
director of Too Soon to Love (1960), alternatively titled High School
Honeymoon, about high school sweethearts who go all the way and the girl
ends up pregnant. This was heady subject matter for the time and Jack Nicholson
has a small role in the film. Of Love and Desire (1963), a sexually
charged film, followed. Hells Angels on Wheels (1967) had Jack Nicholson
as part of a motorcycle gang, and Thunder Alley (1967) starred Annette
Funicello and Fabian. Another teen, heartthrob Tab Hunter, starred in The
Cups of San Sebastien (1967) as a religious artifact thief. A Man Called
Dagger (1968) featured Terry Moore in a film about a scientist’s attempts
to revive the Third Reich. Psych-Out (1968) was a far-out psychedelic
trip about a hearing-impaired runaway searching for her brother in San
Francisco, with Jack Nicholson again along for the ride.
Mr. Rush ended the Sixties with crazy bikers in The
Savage Seven (1968) and began the Seventies with the counter-culture film Getting
Straight (1970), a comedy-drama with Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen. 1974’s
Freebie and the Bean pitted Alan Arkin and James Caan against crime as
cops, one of the earliest buddy/cop films, but it was his ambitious film interpretation
of Paul Brodeur’s 1970 novel of the same name that captivated filmgoers. Years
in the making and the victim of a poor advertising campaign and minimal
distribution, The Stunt Man pits an escaped convict named Cameron (Steve
Railsback) into the middle of an action sequence that is actually the set of a
war movie, unexpectedly causing the death of the stunt man of the film within
the film. The director, Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole), then puts Cameron in the
film, specifically in all sorts of dangerous situations, in order to get truth
onscreen. Cross’s manipulation of Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey) is
exceptionally cruel. The film is a litmus test for audiences as we have to keep
track of what is real and what is in the reel – reality as opposed to the
movie-within-the-movie. I see the film as a challenge and it’s a rewarding
experience.
Mr. Rush was a true maverick director and was
nominated for both a co-writing and directing Academy Award, as was Mr. O’Toole
for his performance of the out-of-control director. Despite not getting the
wide audience that it deserved, The Stunt Man lives on in the world of
home video.
Mr. Rush’s last film was Color of Night with
Bruce Willis and Jane March in 1994.
I
love home video. It has introduced me to the films that have been held near and
dear to me in a far more intimate way than broadcast television ever could. The
first home video system that I ever owned was the RCA SelectaVision Capacitance
Electronic Disc system, a $500M failure that nearly bankrupted its creator, RCA,
just five years after its inauspicious introduction in March 1981, Following 17
years of research and development hell, it proved to be a technological also-ran
even before it left the gate. Star Wars (1977) and Poltergeist
(1982) were the first two films that I owned on a caddie-enclosed 12-inch
capacitive disc that were played over and over again during the spring and summer
of 1983. These were not just movies that
I saw, these were movies that I owned. They were mine and
they became a part of my identity.
I
came of age during the video store rental era. I broke my VHS rental cherry by illegally
duplicating the only store copy of Media Home Entertainment’s A Nightmare on
Elm Street (1984) on Independence Day in 1985 from a local drug store’s video
department. I did this even before I owned a VCR and before the anti-copying
encoding scheme called Macrovision infiltrated pre-recorded tapes, forcing me
to finagle work-arounds. Like so many towns in the surrounding areas, video
stores proliferated with their original scent resulting from a mixture of the
new carpet and the video boxes that adorned the aisles and shelves. Despite the
eclectic assortment of titles, each store was severely limited in terms of the
sheer number of VHS titles that they carried. One store actually rented Beta
cassettes!
In
December 1988, a new and exceptionally large video store with blue and yellow
lettering appeared three miles from my house. It was called Blockbuster Video
and it offered movies I never knew even made it to home video. I managed to see
Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Brian DePalma’s Sisters
(1973), Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978), and James Toback’s Fingers
(1978) all from this one store. I was in heaven! The glaring absence of adult
titles was curious since all the local stores had them, even the corporate
chains like Palmer Video and later on Easy Video. Porn was most definitely a
lucrative part of a store’s weekend intake, but the religious-owned Blockbuster
spurned such fare in favor of unrated violent gorefests like Dawn of the
Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985) and Bad Taste (1986). Little by little, however, Blockbusters
started to show up in neighboring towns sporting multiple key differentiators: having
upwards of 25 VHS copies of the newest releases on hand whereas local stores
generally only had one copy in stock; allowing renters to keep movies for three
days and two nights as opposed to two days and one night; and allowing renters
to return the tape to a store after hours through a drop box.
Once
VHS was supplanted by DVD as the primary method of home video viewing,
Blockbuster was forced to change as well and after having pushed out many of
the local rental shops into bankruptcy, Blockbuster found itself up against
Netflix, a company that Blockbuster was offered to purchase for $50M - but simply
did not have the capital to do so. It is this event (misunderstood by lay
people as Blockbuster simply not wanting to buy Netflix), coupled with poor
management and the elimination of late fees, that sounded the death knell for
the ubiquitous company that at one time had over 9,000 locations. The Last
Blockbuster, a 2020 documentary produced by Netflix ironically enough (ouch!),
directed by Taylor Morden and narrated by Lauren Lapkus, attempts to both chronicle
the rise and fall of one of the most well-known companies in the United States
and answer the questions as to why the company ultimately failed. The film
succeeds for the most part, but my favorite sections of the film are people
reminiscing about renting tangible cassettes and DVDs.
The
title itself refers to the last single remaining Blockbuster Video located at 211
NE Revere Avenue in the town of Bend, Oregon, about three-and-a-half hours
southeast of Portland. It is still a functioning video rental store, run by the
Harding Family. It began life in 1992 by Ken and Debbie Tisher who opened it as
Pacific Video until it was franchised and rebranded Blockbuster Video in eight
years later. Today, the store finds itself in the same dilemma that it put so
many local stores into decades ago – either soldier on or fold. Sandi Harding
has worked for the company for over 15 years and pretty much takes care of the
entire store. The film depicts her coming in early, checking back in the titles
left in the drop box, and disclosing what it takes to keep a store like this in
business. She keeps a collection of old computers salvaged from long shuttered
Blockbusters in an attempt to keep the database and methods of renting titles
up-to-date and running.
The
film is not focused on just this last remaining store but rather bemoans the
lost art of getting in one’s car and going to the video store to peruse the
aisles and pick out something to watch on the weekend. Hanging out with the
person behind the checkout counter on slow evenings to talk about movies is
another casualty in the time of the Internet and movies at our fingertips. Among
the other personalities interviewed in the film are Kevin Smith, Ione Skye,
Brian Posehn, Doug Benson, Paul Scheer, and Samm Levine.
As
with any disruptive technology, the previous methods of watching movies are
invariably swept away and forgotten by the masses. However there is always a
small and significant percentage of people who recall with fondness the halcyon
days of renting movies from a store. Watching The Last Blockbuster, it
becomes clear that video stores were my generation’s equivalent of a drive-in.
Passion River's DVD/Blu-ray package of the film contains an assortment of extras:
The
film’s original trailer.
Eddie
Brandt’s Saturday Matinee
– This is a four-and-a-half-minute piece about a video store that opened in Los
Angeles in December 1968 as a thrift store and over the next few decades
amassed an enormous collection of tapes and discs. COVID-19 forced this store
to temporarily close in May 2020 as they were looking for a new venue.
More
with Kevin Smith – Director
Kevin Smith is the most fun to listen to, as he really has a true love of
movies. His explanation of working as a video store clerk and wanting to do
that for the rest of his life is heartfelt and honest. He talks about renting Bloodsucking
Freaks, a movie that I have heard of but still have not seen despite
growing up with sick friends who loved the 1980 film Mother’s Day. This
bit runs six minutes.
Talkin’
Movies with David McAbee
– Just over two minutes, this is another movie fan who explains the joys of
buying tangible product. I completely agree!
JC
from Scum and Villainy
– This bit is about two-and-a-half-minutes and echoes similar cineaste
sentiments.
Andres
The Last Blockbuster Music Video
– Under three minutes, this is a clever song about renting movies.
Our
Chat with Coach Pete – This
piece runs under one minute and discusses the love of renting. I wish that
these pieces were longer!
MTV’s
Matt Pinfield –
This runs about three-and-a-half minutes – I share Matt’s love of going to the record
stores and video stores, talking with fellow music lovers and movie lovers, and
having other people recommend titles I would not have normally gone for.
Wordburglar
“Rental Patient†Music Video
– At four minutes, this is a clever song about renting movies.
Ska-Punk
show at Costa Mesa, CA Blockbuster Video
– This is something that I think you had to be there in order to appreciate it.
The
Last Blockbuster is a
loving tribute to the extraordinary experience of renting and watching movies.
It will not win the Academy Award for Best Documentary, but it belongs in every
movie lover’s collection.
In
January 1998 I attended a book signing in New York City emceed by author
Russell Banks and film director Atom Egoyan. They were on hand to autograph
copies of Mr. Banks’s 1991 novel, The Sweet Hereafter, which had been
made into a 1997 film of the same name by Mr. Egoyan. Despite varying greatly,
the novel and the film both concern the aftereffects of life in a small town in
the Adirondacks when fourteen children die following an accident involving
their school bus when it careens off a slippery, snow-covered road and sinks
into the frozen waters of a nearby body of water. Mr. Egoyan claimed that he
was inspired to make the film because, he felt, something terrible will happen
to everyone at some point in his or her life, and they will need to find a way
to move on.
A
terrible fate befell nineteen-year-old Jacquelyn M. “Lyn” Helton in 1969 when, just
after giving birth to her daughter, she suffered from terrible leg pain that
was misdiagnosed as bursitis; it turned out to be osteosarcoma (bone cancer). She
sought medical treatment and was dealt grim news: either have her leg amputated
and hope that the cancer did not spread or take a chance on chemotherapy and
radiation. The former was not an option for her, and so in earnest she began
recording her thoughts and feelings about her life with her
photographer/musician husband Tom so that her daughter would hear the tapes and
know her after she died. This tragic and heartbreaking story inspired the
made-for-television film Sunshine which premiered on CBS-TV on Friday,
November 9, 1973 (Mrs. Helton passed before the film was made). Reportedly the
most viewed TV-movie up to that point in time, Sunshine stars former
model turned actress Cristina Raines as Kate, a pregnant divorcee who meets Sam
(Cliff De Young), a photographer/musician who has no real means of supporting her
but manages to assuage her tantrums by singing John Denver songs to her. The
film begins with her death and her ashes scattered, so we know the outcome from
the start.
Sam
agrees to raise her child, Jill, as his own in the midst of their carefree
lifestyle, leftover from the Flower Children of the Sixties, driving around in
a small van painted in carefree love motifs. The film deals sensitively with
the issues that no adult wants to face in their lifetime: adultery, premature
death, and the fear of the unknown. Ms. Raines gives a heartfelt performance as
a woman who is both positive and life-affirming but one who also is angry at
the fate dealt her. Ms. Raines gave up acting nearly two decades after Sunshine
to become a registered nurse, a career path change also shared by former
actress Tisa Farrow. Cliff De Young is also a singer and musician and turns in
a likeable performance as Sam. Meg Foster is also excellent as Nora, the woman
next door who begins an affair with Sam and is ultimately enlisted to help
raise Jill. Brenda Vaccaro is also terrific as the doctor who wants desperately
to help Kate and tries to convince her to stay the course, to no avail.
Director
Joseph Sargent, who honed his craft in directing television series in the 1960’s
and helmed 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project, would follow up Sunshine
with the last project one would expect from him: 1974’s brilliant, hilarious
and completely politically incorrect New York City film The Taking of Pelham
123. Bill Butler, who turns 100 this year and photographed The People
vs. Paul Crump (1962) for William Friedkin, Something Evil (1972), Savage
(1973), and Jaws (1975) for Steven Spielberg, and replaced Haskell
Wexler on both The Conversation (1974) for Francis Coppola and One Flew
Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) for Milos Forman, does his best to make
Vancouver, BC a suitable stand-in for Spokane, WA. Credit should also be given
to twins Rachel Lindsay Greenbush and Sidney Greenbush who both played Jill. The
film was produced by George Eckstein, who also produced Steven Spielberg’s Duel
(1971).
If
the premise of the film seems a bit familiar, a similar story was written by
author Nancy Kincaid as Pretending the Bed is a Raft (1997) and was
filmed by director Sarah Polley as My Life Without Me (2003), in which
Ms. Polley also starred. Whether or not author Kincaid based this short story
on Mrs. Helton’s story, I do not know. Ms. Polley, incidentally, also starred
in the aforementioned The Sweet Hereafter.
Sunshine has been released on Blu-ray from the Twilight
Time sister label, Redwind Productions, however I cannot verify if they
released any other titles. There was talk of releasing Loving You
(1957), the Elvis Presley movie.
The
transfer was made from either the original camera negative, the interpositive
or internegative and was scanned in 4K. It looks like the movie was just made.
The
Blu-ray comes with a booklet discussing the film’s impact on the world and how
it was released theatrically world-wide.
Tsugunobo Kotani is a film director whose
name does not roll off the tongue throughout film circles. A handful of titles
to his credit consist of Hatsukoi (1975), The Last Dinosaur
(1977), The Ivory Ape (1980), and The Bloody Bushido Blade
(1981), and there are a good number of Japanese-language titles that appear in
his early filmography. An Internet search of “Tom Kotani,” the Americanized
variant of Tsugunobo and the director’s name as it appears in some of his
movies, yields even less information. While most people may not recognize him,
there is a small but significant percentage of film viewers, yours truly
included, who have been deeply affected by one of his films in particular: the
made-for-television undersea effort The Bermuda Depths. Filmed in the
British Overseas Territory of the Bermudas in 1977, The Bermuda Depths
is mysterious for several reasons. It is a film that is difficult to categorize
as it touches upon several genres: action, fantasy, romance, and science
fiction. It attempts to mix several elements of the fantastic (a giant turtle
and its relation to a voluptuous young maiden lost at sea) with the realistic
(a young man in search of the truth behind his father’s mysterious and untimely
death).
Arguably the most memorable film “inspired”
by Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), The Bermuda Depths was
originally broadcasted on the ABC Friday Night Movie on January 27, 1978 and
was repeated on Friday, August 29, 1980. A smattering of repeat broadcasts and a
curiously unheralded VHS release followed. It benefits from a touch of myth
from Ambroise Paré’s “On Monsters and Marvels” and plays out in a dreamlike
fashion. Leigh McCloskey stars as Magnus Dens, a drifter who returns to the
scene of his father’s death hoping to find closure. He encounters an old
friend, Eric (Carl Weathers), who is completing his master’s degree in Marine
Biology while working for the avuncular Dr. Paulus (Burl Ives). The scientists
are both interested in abnormalities and gigantism in sea life, technically
known as Teratology, and are looking for any sea creatures that live in the
deepest depths of the ocean to study them. At the heart of all of this is an
enigmatic woman named Jennie Haniver (Connie Sellecca) who may or may not be
real. Jennie lives in the ocean and comes ashore when Magnus shouts her name.
Jennie and Magnus used to play together as children, and on the beach they
found a large turtle upon which they inscribed their initials. Now the turtle
has reached enormous physical proportions and lives deep in the ocean,
occasionally rising to the surface. The last third of the film concerns Eric’s
futile attempts to capture the sea creature and gives the filmmakers the
opportunity to put the three men on a boat a la Sam Quint, Matt Hooper, and
Chief Martin Brody, with the “Panulirus” sitting in the for the “Orca”.
If The Bermuda Depths is about
anything that we can be absolutely sure of, it’s that highly successful films
inevitably spurn imitations. This was certainly the case during the mid-1970’s
when everyone and his brother was scrambling to re-enact the success of Jaws.
The Bermuda Depths takes the unusual step of adding a supernatural love
story into the mix and successfully creates a tragic tale of love and doom. Mr.
McCloskey was a successful television actor by this point, best known for the Rich
Man, Poor Man (1976) mini-series, and sports the natural Southern
California good looks that make Magnus appealing to young women. Carl Weathers
of Rocky (1976) fame embodies Eric with terrific zeal, although his truncated
half-shirt near the film’s ending is a questionable wardrobe choice. Burl Ives
is wonderful as the elder who tries his best to get Eric to look at the
situation through scientific eyes. Connie Sellecca, in her first film role at
age twenty-two, does an exceptional turn as Jennie Haniver. She possesses a
magical, ethereal quality and is achingly beautiful. Julie Woodson, Playboy
Magazine’s Miss April 1973, is remarkably beautiful and quite good as Eric’s
wife Doshan. Ruth Attaway, who played the nurse in The Taking of Pelham 123
(1974) to comedic effect, is mysterious and eerie as Delia, the housekeeper and
proverbial party pooper who warns Magnus about the Legend of Jennie Haniver,
seemingly a believer in the supernatural.
The Rankin Bass team responsible for their
wonderful collaborations in the Sixties and Seventies on the Christmas holiday
television show specials that millions grew up on, especially Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) which also featured Mr. Ives, produced the film.
There is a definite “Rankin Bass” feel to The Bermuda Depths, particularly
in the special effects which today look quite amateurish: the helicopter crash
sequence near the film’s end looks similar to the finale of the Mad Monster
Party? explosion on the island, and close-up shots of the vessel’s
propeller and the trawler crashing against the ocean waves in slow-mo look as
though they was filmed in a bathtub. The special effects-laden ending almost
compromises the intriguing supernatural and romantic mystery that precedes it.
This is a case where the film’s style almost outweighs its substance. Despite
this, however, the low-budget effects add a certain charm to the film, a
reminder of filmmaking from days gone by when less money and more ingenuity was
considered an asset.
The film possesses more than its share of derivations:
Dr. Paulus’s throwaway line about needing “a bigger boat”; Eric’s decision to
pursue the turtle on the Fourth of July of all days; Delia’s unexplained
disappearance from the second half of the film; and Magnus’s inquiry into his
father’s death mirrors Luke Skywalker asking the same of Obi-Wan Kenobi, whom
Dr. Paulus even resembles. Composer Maury Laws provides a beautiful score which
I always wished would appear as a soundtrack album. Hopefully, some independent
label (i.e. Waxwork Records) will give this score its due.
While the film does
appear somewhat corny after more than forty years, it possesses an innocent
quality about it that is sadly lacking in most entertainment product of late.
The slow and languid images of Magnus and Jennie on the beach and in the cave
recall a time in American filmmaking when the audience failed to be bombarded
by fast editing and could actually digest the images presented to them.
Unquestionably there are those who will complain about the film’s slow pace,
but there are plenty of treasures here film to make it one that deserves a new
generation of admirers: the eerie day-for-night photography which Mr. Spielberg
also employed in the opening of his 1975 masterwork; Maury Laws’ soothing title
tune “Jennie” with vocals by Claude Carmichael; and the use of Antonio
Vivaldi’s elegiac “Largo” from his “Concerto for Lute (Guitar), Two Violins
and Basso Continuo in D Major” as the lovers’ theme.
In
the pantheon of great cinematographers there are certain names that immediately
come to mind: Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane, 1941); Robert Burks (Vertigo,
1958); Owen Roizman (The French Connection, 1971; The Exorcist,
1973); Gordon Willis (The Godfather, 1972; The Godfather Part II,
1974); Vittorio Storaro (The Conformist, 1970; The Last Emperor,
1987); and Sven Nykvist (Persona, 1966; Cries and Whispers, 1973)
to name just a few. The late great Carlo Di Palma, who passed away in 2004
after amassing just over 60 screen credits, is one such master and is the
subject of the 2016 documentary Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, The Colours
of Life, which opened in Manhattan on Friday, July 28, 2017.
The
film performs a tightrope act of trying to be both a loving tribute to an
artist by director Fariborz Kamkari, who mixes scenes from the films that
Signor Di Palma cut his teeth on in the business and also an appreciation by his
widow, Adriana Chiesa Di Palma, who appears in much of the film as a gateway to
many film industry people who offer up their thoughts on Sig. Di Palma, often interjecting
their own feelings and impressions of his work. The film is at its most
interesting, however, when looking directly at his career through past
interviews and behind-the-scenes stills, beginning in Italian cinema in the
early 1940s as a focus puller and camera operator – at the age of fifteen no
less! - for notable Neo-Realist director Luchino Visconti (Ossessione,
1943) and later for Vittorio DeSica (The Bicycle Thief, 1948), while
graduating to more high-brow and intellectual fare. Specifically, these were the
films he shot for the highly acclaimed and award-winning Italian master Michelangelo
Antonioni: Red Desert (1964) with its colorful, pollution-drenched
cities swallowing up everyday people; Blow-Up (1966) with the message
that one must create their own reality; and the Cannes Film Festival
Award-Winning Identification of a Woman (1982) with Tomas Milian as a
divorced filmmaker trying to understand women.
Sr.
Di Palma worked most prolifically with Woody Allen beginning with one of the
director’s greatest films, 1986’s Hannah and Her Sisters and the period
films Radio Days (1987), Shadows and Fog (1992) and Bullets
Over Broadway (1994). His hand-held work on Husbands and Wives
(1992) is also dissected. Ample time is allotted Mr. Allen, who recalls his
experiences working with the cinematographer and how they discussed films over
lunch and dinner.
The
juxtaposing of interview footage with the film’s subject and comments from
contemporaries, such as the late great Bernardo Bertolucci who worked with Sig.
Di Palma on 1981’s Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, are insightful and contemplative;
there is also the amazing recollection of how a very young Sven Nykvist happened
upon Sr. Di Palma, a fact verified decades later; and finally, the explanation
for the film’s title.
Alec
Baldwin, who appeared in Mr. Allen’s 1990 fantasy film Alice, makes the
case that movies like the ones shot by Sr. Di Palma are art. It makes one
wonder about the wisdom on the part of the distribution companies that offer up
documentaries about cinematographers, generally only presenting them in the
standard definition format of DVD. Without taking anything away from Disney and
big-screen Marvel Comics epics that rule home video in 4K Ultra High Definition
and Dolby Atmos, would it not make sense to showcase the stories of cinema’s
finest visual stylists on Blu-ray as well? The scenes offered up in Water
and Sugar examples of the beautiful color palettes of Sig. Di Palma’s greatest
works which aided in the accolades bestowed upon these films. The Kino Lorber DVD includes the original trailer as the only bonus feature.
Last
of all, can someone please correct the indignity of Sig. Di Palma’s profile pic
on his IMDB.com page? It erroneously depicts Italian cinematographer Marco
Onorato accepting an award at the European Film Awards on December 6, 2008 in
Copenhagen, Denmark. While no disrespect is meant to Sr. Marco Onorato, who
sadly passed away at age 59, the least that the IMDB can do is correct this
unfortunate and persistent oversight.
The
late Arthur Barron was a New York-based documentary film director perhaps best
known for his two-hour Birth and Death film from 1969, followed by the true
story of the Wright Brothers and their road to flight. Following these projects
but prior to delving into made-for-television documentary fare in the
mid-1970’s, he tried his hand at feature filmmaking, employing similar documentary-style
techniques that William Friedkin used to startling effect in his masterful 1971
film The French Connection. Instead of following around two police
detectives hot on the trail of heroin smugglers, however, Mr. Barron instead turned
his attention to a dramatic subject that, almost unbelievably, was for the most
part untapped at the time. His feature film directorial debut is the teenage
coming-of-age romantic drama filmed in the autumn of 1972 called Jeremy,
starring actor Robby Benson as the titular hero and Glynnis O’Connor in her
debut role as the girl who catches his eye and ultimately wins his heart.
Jeremy
Jones is by no means a stud, nor is he a complete nerd or outcast in the high
school sense of the word. He seems to fall somewhere in between, having been
born into a life that is both spirited and adventurous. He plays the cello in
the school band and wins admiration but also (tender) criticism from his music tutor
(Leonardo Cimino); he plays on the school basketball team; he walks dogs for
extra money; he even has a knack for picking winning horses at the racetrack
but cannot bet because he is too young. While running an errand for his music teacher,
Jeremy catches sight of a new girl in school who has arrived from Detroit following
her father’s (Ned Wilson) fallout from his job. He’s a big shot and they live a
privileged life on Park Avenue off of 73rd Street in Manhattan at a
time when it was affordable to do so. She’s a petite beauty (Glynnis O’Connor) whom
he sees practicing dance moves. She bears a bit of a resemblance to how Linda
Blair looks in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Jeremy is
instantly smitten and cannot get her out of his head but forgets to ask her
name. His best friend Ralph is someone whom he confides in and Ralph is
unconventionally understanding and patient, doing his best to give him advice
on how to approach the girl following their initial encounter. Jeremy follows
her to a record store on West 49th Street in New York, just to get a
glimpse of her. Another meeting following his accolades for his work in a school
recital reveals her name as Susan. The film captures the awkwardness of making
The First Phone Call, something relegated to the side of the road today in the
age of cell phones, text messages, social media, and Tumblr.
Jeremy
and Susan begin dating and quickly fall madly in love with one another the way
that care-free adolescents can at a pivotal time in their lives prior to the
rigors and responsibilities that inevitably befall them following the onset of
adulthood. Jeremy’s parents are sort of wrapped up in their own world. His mother
grows impatient over her husband’s inability to agree with her over choosing
the color of tiles. In fact, all the adults appear to be too busy for much of
anything other than running on the wheel of the rat race.
Jeremy is a breath of fresh air and the lack
of teasing and bullying from fellow students is a welcome relief. What you get
is one of the most honest and moving depictions of high school life ever
committed to film, although the fairy tale view of New York is a little bit
questionable as there is no mention of the Watergate Scandal or the Vietnam
War. New York at the time of filming was even more dangerous than it is now. Lee
Holdridge composes a score that is romantic and effective and provides the
perfect balm to the film’s inevitable and heartbreaking ending which, though
bittersweet, thankfully isn’t the knife-to-the-heart agony felt by the
protagonist in Piers Haggard’s A Summer Story (1988). Look fast for
James Karen of the old Pathmark commercials as Frank in a cameo in the Monopoly
board game scene hosted by Susan’s aunt. This occurs 75 minutes into the film. His
voice is unmistakable. You may also remember him as Craig T. Nelson’s boss Mr.
Teague in 1982’s Poltergeist.
Director
Barron would go on to helm the humorous ABC Afterschool Special “It Must
Be Love (‘Cause I Feel So Dumb)†which aired on Wednesday, October 8, 1975 and
starred the charming Alfred Lutter III of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
fame. This short is worth seeking out as it contains hi-jinks characteristic of
kids finding their way in the world. A quick YouTube search will reveal the
truncated Learning Corporation of America (LCA) version that made the rounds in
middle schools across the country. The longer ABC-TV cut is more elusive.
If
the title Killdozer is familiar to you, you may have seen it before. Originally
a novella by Theodore Sturgeon published in the November 1944 issue of Astounding
Science Fiction magazine, a Marvel Comics book in April 1974, and later appearing
in The Mammoth Book of Golden Age: Ten Classic Stories from the Birth of
Modern Science Fiction Writing (1989), Killdozer was adapted into a
made-for-TV movie which aired on Saturday, February 2, 1974. Sporting the
tagline “Six men…playing a deadly game of cat and mouse…With a machine that
wants to kill them,†and billed as A World Premiere ABC Saturday Suspense
Movie, there is little suspense in this overly silly tale of a Caterpillar D9
that is enlisted by a team of construction workers who have been assigned to build
a landing strip for an oil drilling company on an island near Africa. Were it
not for the movie’s literary origins, I would have sworn that it was an attempt
to rip-off Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971).
Kelly
(Clint Walker), the project’s foreman, and bulldozer driver Mack (Robert Urich)
uncover a meteorite which was buried many years prior – shades of “Who Goes
There?â€, the 1938 novella by John W. Campbell and later the inspiration for the
1951 and 1982 film versions of The Thing. The strange sound emitting
from the object fails to deter the men from attempting to move the meteorite, a
decision which proves to be fatal to Mack who dies several hours later as a
result of radioactive material emanating from the foreign object. In the
company of these men is a mechanic name Chub (Neville Brand) who fails to
ascertain why the bulldozer has been rendered inoperative; it is swiftly barred
from further use. In comes genius Beltran (James A. Watson, Jr.) who forgoes
the caveat and puts the D9 back to work. Unfortunately, the bulldozer becomes
sentient and has a life of its own, going on a rampage to destroy their only
radio communications a la Quint in Jaws (1975), and then it turns into
Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians until the film’s silly finale.
Kino
Lorber continues their track record of releasing nifty and semi-forgotten titles
on Blu-ray, and Killdozer is now available. This Blu-ray release
contains:
A
brand new 2K transfer, and the film image is very clean.
There
is an audio commentary by film historian Lee Gambin and film critic Jarret
Gahan. This is an excellent and informative listen and is truly the reason to
spring for this release, even if you’re on the fence about the actual film
itself.
There
is an audio interview with director Jerry London that runs just over twenty-two
minutes wherein he discusses making the film.
There is also a stills gallery and a set of
trailers for Fear No Evil (1969), Ritual of Evil (1970), More
Dead Than Alive (1969) and Sam Whiskey (1969).
The
disc also includes optional English subtitles.
There
have been several real-life incidents with near impenetrable vehicles
commandeered for ill-purposes with terribly sad and tragic results. On May 17,
1995, a military veteran named Shawn Nelson had suffered many personal
tragedies and stole an M603A Patton Tank and drove it through the streets of
San Diego, CA, wreaking havoc before being shot and killed. Some years later, fifty-one-year-old
Marvin Heemeyer, an avid snowmobiler, welder and automobile muffler repair shop
owner, was living in Granby, CO and got into a dispute with a company wanting
to build a concrete batch plant near his property. Push came to shove following
many acrimonious townhall meetings and arguments with the concrete company that
were either real or imagined depending on whom you speak with. Mr. Heemeyer,
inspired by the vigilante Vin Diesel action film A Man Apart (2003) and passionately
believing that God sanctioned him to do so, purchased a Komatsu D355 bulldozer
and modified it undetected over 18 months into an armored behemoth outfitted
with thick steel and cameras. On June 4, 2004, he bulldozed his way through
town, destroying the main building of the concrete batch plant and caused seven
million dollars’ worth of damage in a two-hour rampage until he was ultimately
stopped by a leaking radiator and an error in judgement, electing to shoot
himself rather than be taken into custody. A well-made documentary was made
about this horrible event called Tread (2020). It was directed by Paul
Solet. Strangely, no mention of Killdozer is ever made during the
88-minute documentary.
I
love podcasts about film, whether they are emceed by critics or by Joe Blows
whose only claim to fame is that they are equally as passionate and as
fanatical about film as I am. There are many podcasts out there that are
dedicated to the science fiction and horror film genres. Some of them are far
too lengthy for their own good and the hosts go off on unintended tangents, but
for the most part the good ones are short and sweet and stick to the subject at
hand.
A
very interesting one that has come to my attention is The Movies That Made
Me which can be found on the Trailers from Hell film website under
the (surprise) “Podcasts†heading. It’s hosted by Josh Olson, author of the scathing,
five-million-plus hits Village Voice article “I Will Not Read Your Fucking
Script†and the Oscar-nominated screenplay of David Cronenberg’s A History
of Violence (2005), and film director Joe Dante, best known for Hollywood
Boulevard (1976), The Howling (1981), Gremlins (1984) and Innerspace
(1987).They are well into Season Three, but one episode that stood out
to me is the first episode from Season Two which features director William
Friedkin. Mr Friedkin is one of the most interesting, knowledgeable, and funniest
people to chat with when it comes to just about anything. The triumvirate engage
in a spirited conversation which includes a brief discussion of Mr. Friedkin’s “Nightcrawlersâ€
portion of The Twilight Zone series revival which aired in the fall of
1985 just weeks before the release of his masterful To Live and Die in L.A.;
the 75 seconds he cut from The Exorcist for the February 1980 CBS-TV
airing; his lack of affection for my favorite horror film, Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980); his flat-out repudiation of film school; his love of
Michelangelo Antonioni (an enthusiasm I share with him); his turning down All
the President’s Men; and an interesting and insightful tidbit about Bob
Woodward all made me want to hear more.
(Look for Todd Garbarini's exclusive interview with William Friedkin on the 50th anniversary of "The French Connection" in Cinema Retro issue #50, coming in May.)
Monday,
January 9, 1978 was an eventful day in my family’s life when childhood friends
of ours from several doors down accidentally locked themselves out of their
house and ended up eating spaghetti with us as their mother gave birth to their
newly welcomed brother. It is an event that we have mentioned time and time
again over the last four decades with fondness and laughter. That same day saw
the broadcast of a MOW, entertainment industry shorthand for a “Movie of the Weekâ€
made specifically for television, of Superdome, a silly, predictable and
pedestrian ABC Monday Night movie about the efforts to throw the Super Bowl at
the Superdome in New Orleans in an effort to make lots of money. This is a
shame considering that Superdome was actually filmed in New Orleans and
a great deal of work was done to ensure high production values. (The Superdome would
become infamous in August 2005 during the Hurricane Katrina fiasco when it
became a makeshift haven for thousands trying to escape high winds, only to
encounter marauders, rapists and overflowing toilets. What a nightmare…) The TV production was one of many films relating to American football that were all the rage in the mid-to-late 1970s. (i.e. The Longest Yard, Semi-Tough, North Dallas Forty, Two-Minute Warning and the best of the lot, John Frankenheimer's Black Sunday.)
The
late great David Janssen, best known for The Fugitive on TV, stars as
Mike Shelley, the general manager of the Cougars, the football team that
everyone wants to win – except for a few. Cue sinister music! Dave Walecki (Ken
Howard of TV’s The White Shadow) suffers from a bad knee, probably
because he drove it into his wife Nancy’s (Susan Howard of TV’s Petrocelli
and Dallas) chest one too-many times. Their marriage is on the rocks
because Dave’s dream is to play football and Nancy is missing the affection her
husband now shows for the sport. If he doesn’t want to lose his wife, he has to
put on his big-boy pants and grow a pair. The New York Mafia strongly
admonishes P.K. Jackson (Clifton Davis of TV’s Amen), a businessman who
once played for the Cougars, that the Cougars must lose…or else! In the midst
of all of this, Donna Mills (of TV’s Knots Landing) pretends to take a
fancy to Shelley but is clearly up to no good.
Superdome sports a supporting cast that includes
Edie Adams, Van Johnson, Ed Nelson, Jane Wyatt, and even an early role by Tom
Selleck in his pre-Magnum P.I. days. I love M. Emmet Walsh, who appears
here as well, though if you blink, you’ll miss him. The first time I ever saw
him was in the theatrical trailer for Ulu Grosbard’s 1978 outing Straight
Time wherein Dustin Hoffman just about pulls his pants down after
handcuffing him to a fence! Not a pleasant sight. He’s well known to audiences
for his role as the racist boss of Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade
Runner.
I
enjoyed watching Superdome for the same reason I enjoy watching adult
movies from the 1970’s: the wall-to-wall sex. Sorry, just kidding, of course. The
locales, the garish colors, the style of the automobiles, the technology of the
time, the wardrobe, the furniture, the ludicrous wallpaper designs, and the
style of the cinematography do their best to make up for the uninspired
direction and overall dearth of excitement. While no one can rightly expect a
film like this to be in the same league as an early Brian DePalma suspenser, it
would be nice if there was some suspense.
David Janssen and Donna Mills.
The
film is now available on Blu-ray from the wonderful Kino Lorber who have raised
the bar on excellent presentations of older films. The picture quality on this
film is immaculate. It has been transferred from the original 35mm negative and
it looks like the movie was just made. Framed at 1.37:1, the image is
complemented by black bars on the left and right sides of the screen to retain
the integrity of the original aspect ratio.
The
extras on this disc consist of an in-depth, feature-length audio commentary
with director Jerry Jameson and film experts Howard S. Berger and Steve
Mitchell. These historians are inexplicably overzealous discussing the origins
and making of the film, reminding me of my own excitement at seeing Heather
Locklear in NBC-TV’s City Killer…in 1984…when I was fifteen. Even
the director bemoans “what a mess this thing isâ€(!) while the film historians
wax nostalgia on how comparable the climax is to a feature film. IMHO, it’s not.
Jameson also remarks Donna Mills’ makeup job and this was nearly nine years
before her VHS release of The Eyes Have It, an instructional video on
how to apply war paint. Her character reminds me of the Rebecca Pidgeon role in
David Mamet’s 1997 film The Spanish Prisoner. All sweetness and light,
but nefarious underneath it all.
The
climax is clearly inspired by Robert Wise’s The Hindenburg (1975). If
you have a soft spot for Superdome,
then this is the release to own – how that for a tag line?
There
is also a section of trailers for Juggernaut, The Silent Partner,
Slayground, and When Eight Bells Toll, all also available from Kino Lorber.
We
hope Kino is eyeing City Killer for a Blu-ray release, as Heather
Locklear might be willing to pull herself away from Instagram for a few hours to
do a commentary track for it.
The
widespread COVID-19 pandemic which took hold at the end of 2019 has made its
way around the globe and looks like the sort of thing one would expect to see
in either a David Cronenberg or George A. Romero film. Mr. Cronenberg has made a
career out of making films which essentially depict human beings experiencing
their bodies revolting against themselves while the late Mr. Romero directed a
series of zombie films wherein droves of flesh-eating, reanimated corpses,
presumably brought back to life by radiation emitted from a space probe
returning from Venus that blew up in Earth’s atmosphere, wreak havoc among the living.
Both directors present simultaneously dark and comedic visions of humanity, and
we all now find ourselves in a precarious scenario that one would equate to the
nightmares conjured up by these filmmakers since the quarantine orders took
hold some seven months ago and show no signs of being relaxed anytime soon. Few,
if any, of the Times Square revelers ringing in 2020 could have foreseen the
rug being suddenly and viciously ripped out from underneath our feet three
months hence.
By
the time he got around to shooting his first feature film between August and
September in 1974, Mr. Cronenberg had already accumulated a good number of
short films and television work under his belt. His most well-known early works
consists of Transfer (1966), From the Drain (1967), Stereo
(1969), and Crimes of the Future (1970). Following three years of
television shorts/documentaries, Shivers (1975) slithered its way into
the Cinerama II in New York on Tuesday, July 6, 1976 under the title of They
Came From Within, a title I always preferred. It was shown on a double bill
with Mark W. Lester’s Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw. Set in the Starliner Apartment
complex, the sort of milieu that today stands as a dreaded COVID-19 petri dish,
Shivers is eerily prescient in its depiction of a virus run rampant. Dr.
Emil Hobbes (Fred Doederlein of 1981’s Scanners) forces his way into
Annabelle’s (Cathy Graham, her sole screen credit) apartment. A fight ensues
and he kills her, then performs a horrific procedure on her body prior to
committing suicide. He is obviously trying to stop the spread of something
ghastly. Nick Tudor (Alan Migicovsky of 1974’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy
Kravitz) is another tenant who suffers from stomach pains and his behavior
is unorthodox. It comes to light when Rollo Linsky (Joe Silver, who would also
appear in David Cronenberg’s Rabid in 1977) confesses to Dr. Roger St.
Luc (Paul Hampton from 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues), the Starliner physician
who finds Hobbes and Annabelle, that he and Hobbes, his medical colleague, were
experimenting to produce a parasite that can be inserted into the body for the
purpose taking over the function of a failed human organ. This may work in
theory, however in practice things go wildly out of control.
Little
by little, we see various tenants get sick as a phallic-like bloody organism
travels from host to host with what initially appears to be an unexpected side
effect: everyone affected becomes sexually aggressive. Linsky later confesses to
St. Luc that sexual arousal was the intention from the get-go. Hobbes’s effort
was to return people to their natural sexual desires and to squash their
over-intellectual tendencies. Nick is now in the same sexual state as the
others and attempts to force sex on his wife Janine (Susan Petrie, who bears a
resemblance to Michelle Pfeiffer in her early years) who seeks refuge from her
lesbian friend Betts (Barbara Stelle in a fun cameo) who passes the parasite
onto Janine, and the other residents, including a dishabille nurse (Lynn Lowry)
who is involved with the doctor. Soon, the infection spreads throughout the
building until it turned into “Night of the Horny Tenantsâ€. The final scene is very
calm and humorous as it suggests that the cure to society’s ills is a “happy
endingâ€, one that director Cronenberg offers the tenants. The same cannot be
said for poor Candy Carveth in the final moments of arguably his best film,
1979’s The Brood.
The
original shooting title was Orgy of the Blood Parasites and the French
title was FrissonsThe Parasite Murders. Audiences may be
surprised to see the inclusion of Ivan Reitman’s name, best known for producing
the comedies Stripes (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984) among many
others, but everyone has to start somewhere. I recall this fact being touted on
the Vestron VHS cassette: “From the makers of GHOSTBUSTERS…†It’s gory kills
notwithstanding, Shivers itself is a comedy of sorts, satirizing society
a gone wild.
The climaxes of these films make one wonder
what is next in store for humanity. It would seem that we all have the
potential of being wiped out not by parasites or flesh eating zombies, but
rather by human indifference and a perplexing failure on the part of citizens
to simply wear a face mask and remain away from one another. It would not
surprise me to see Mr. Cronenberg tackle this motif at some point down the
road.
I’m
a sucker for black and white horror films and thrillers. Hold That Ghost!
(1941) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) are the closest
I ever got to an actual horror film when I was a child. The latter actually
frightened me and gave me more than a handful of nightmares while in kindergarten.
As I got older, I thrilled to the suspense-filled Psycho (1960) by
Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), and George A.
Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) on network television viewings.
I picked up a VHS copy of John Llewelyn Moxey’s masterful The City of the
Dead under the insipid title of Horror Hotel and discovered a
classic that I love to this day. There is an overall spookiness that I
associate with black and white that I wish contemporary horror film directors
would go back to. It’s not all blood and guts – mood and atmosphere go a very long
way.
Following
my discovery of Dario Argento’s work after a theatrical screening of Creepers
in 1985, I began to read about Mario Bava’s work and how it influenced Signor
Argento’s style. Black Sunday, alternately known as The Mask of Satan
and Revenge of the Vampire, is a highly stylized gothic horror film that
is considered to be Mario Bava’s directorial debut despite him having come in
at the eleventh hour to finish up several films in the late 1950’s credited to
other directors: I Vampiri (1957), The Day the Sky Exploded (1958),
Caltiki – The Immortal Monster (1959) and The Giant of Marathon
(1959). Shot in 1960 and released on Thursday, March 9, 1961 in New York City, Black
Sunday is a creepy tale starring the luminous Barbara Steele in dual roles
as both a condemned witch in 17th Century Moldavia named Asa Vajda
and as a melancholic townswoman named Katja Vajda some 200 years later – quite
a coincidence! Asa condemns her persecutors to death for her fate which finds
her body placed into a mausoleum and found by chance two centuries later by a
doctor (Andrea Checci) and his assistant (John Richardson) who are enroot to a convention
and accidentally free Asa from her eternal sleep, giving her the opportunity to
enact evil upon the heads of those unlucky enough to be related to those
responsible for her death. While the plot is similar in theme to Mr. Moxey’s
classic The City of the Dead – I could hear the immortal words of the
villagers “Bring me Elizabeth Selwyn†in that film as I watched Black Sunday
– the time and place is much different and the film benefits enormously from
Signor Bava’s experience as a cinematographer even from the film’s opening
frames. The imagery that permeates much of Black Sunday are the stuff of
childhood nightmares: cobwebs, creepy cemeteries, eerie sounds in the
night…there is even a scene wherein a character fights off a vampire bat in a
fashion that obviously provided the inspiration for Jessica Harper’s Suzy Bannion
to do the same in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), albeit in dazzling
Technicolor.
(RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST ARTICLES FROM THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVE.)
BY TODD GARBARINI
I’m a sucker for car chases. Not the
perfunctory, last-minute “Hey, this movie needs a car chase!†variety, but the
kind that comes as a result of a particular plot point wherein someone or some group has to get away from some other
group. While most new car chases such as TheFast and the Furious sort are usually
accomplished through CGI, I find that this sleight-of-hand fakery virtually
abolishes all tension. The best ones that I have seen all did it for real
through innovative and unprecedented filming techniques and excellent editing: Grand Prix (1966), Vanishing Point (1967), Bullitt
(1968), The Seven-Ups (1973), The Blues Brothers (1980), The Road Warrior (1981), The Terminator (1984), F/X (1986), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), and The Town (2010) all have action sequences that put the full wonder
of film editing on display.
There are two major car chases in the
late John Frankenheimer’s Ronin, which opened on Friday, September 25, 1998, and
it’s the second and longer one that ranks up there in the pantheon of The Greatest
Car Chases Ever Filmed. The French
Connection (1971) and To Live and Die
in L.A. (1985) are the granddaddies of car chases in my humble opinion and Ronin’s is certainly in the top ten,
with a stupendous wrong-way-driving-against-incoming-traffic sequence through a
tunnel in France to composer Elia
Cmiral’s exciting score.
The title of “Ronin†is originally a
reference to the feudal period of Japan relating to a samurai who has become
masterless following his master’s death as a result of the samurai’s failure to
protect him. To earn a living, the samurai wanders from place to place
attempting to gain work from others. For the uninitiated, title cards prior to
the film’s opening credits inform us of this. This name relates to the film as
several mercenaries meet for the purpose of stealing an important silver case.
Sam (Robert DeNiro), Vincent (Jean Reno), Gregor (Stellan Skarsgard), and Spence
(Sean Bean) and several others are the persons for hire. Deirdre (Natascha
McElhorne) is the one who called them all together but she offers little in the
way of an explanation as to what the contents are. Like in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), they don’t know
one another and work under the assumption that all involved are trustworthy
which eventually will be their undoing. Now ya see, if they has listened to the
James Poe episode “Blood Bath†on the old time radio show Escape!, none of this would have ever happened! Yeah…
Sam used to work for the CIA, Vincent
is a “fixerâ€, Spence is a former Special Air Service expert in weaponry, Gregor
is an expert in electronics, and Larry (Skipp
Sudduth) is one of the drivers. Sam is the most inquisitive and probably has
the most to lose. They don’t discuss their past and are eager to get paid. Sam almost
acts like the ringleader, but he has some serious competition after they secure
their objective and are double-crossed. It then becomes a game of who can trust
who (naturally, the answer is no one). There are some really good supporting
performances by Michael Lonsdale (I hadn’t seen him in a theater since Moonraker!) and Jonathan Pryce and the
action always keeps moving forward but unlike today’s films, the action
sequences are well-staged and edited and have depth to them. A terrific
addition to Mr. Frankenheimer’s filmography.
Vinegar
Syndrome is the name of a phenomenon that occurs in motion picture film when
reels of film are poorly stored in hot and humid conditions. The hallmarks of
this unfortunate and inevitable fate to motion picture film consist of physical
degradation of celluloid precipitated by the film development process and
indifferent/poor film storage – such as film stored on rusted metal reels – all
resulting in film bearing the faint or strong smell of vinegar. The film can
become very brittle, suffer from shrinkage and/or take on a contorted shape
making it nearly impossible to run through a projector. In short, the only way
to arrest the process is to make pristine duplicates of the film’s original
camera negative following the developing stage and store them in
climate-controlled conditions. As one can well imagine, however, this type of
care was rarely if ever instituted by low budget movie studios who saw their
assets (i.e. a finished motion picture feature film) as having a limited shelf
life apart from ancillary markets that rarely included life beyond cable and television
broadcasts and foreign cinema exhibition Alternately, they simply didn’t have
the money or space to store the negatives.
Vinegar
Syndrome is also the name of one of the best film preservation companies
working today, located in Connecticut. Their enormous efforts have rescued many
foreign films and drive-in fan favorites from certain death, offering up a
smorgasbord of primarily obscure titles long forgotten from the age of home
video when feature films were released as-is on videocassette (VHS/Beta) and
videodisc (RCA Capacitance Electronic Disc and Pioneer LaserDisc). With
advances made in digital video restoration, films that have never even seen the
light of day outside of a grindhouse theater on 42nd Street in New
York City or a drive-in theater are now available on DVD/Blu-ray/4K Ultra High
Definition Blu-ray thanks to this amazing company.
Zombie
5: Killing Birds,
originally given the equally strange title of Killing Birds: Raptors, begins
promisingly enough before it slows to a craw (sorry, crawl) and interminably
meanders to a sudden and abrupt ending. Filmed in Thibodaux, LA in August 1987,
the plot is schematic and uninspired, light years from the best examples offered
from other Italian thrillers, most notably the giallo genre which the
film seems to be influenced by: Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal
Plumage (1970), Profondo Rosso (1975) and Tenebre (1982) are
among the finest examples to date. However, Killing Birds is by no means
a giallo thriller, and its lack of an interesting cinematic visual style
makes it suffer in the end. Birds concerns a cuckolded Vietnam veteran (Robert
Vaughn, if you can believe it) who murders his wife and her lover upon
returning from the war in 1967, and spares his infant son only to be blinded by
one of the property’s birds. Twenty years later, a group of college students
who study rare birds aim to put another feather in their cap so-to-speak by studying
the rare birds on display in the vast home. It’s the perfect set up for some
crazy though uninspired mayhem. The best thing about Birds is Lara
Wendel, an actress genre fans will recall as the ill-fated Maria who
unwittingly roams into the killer’s house following an attack by a Doberman
pinscher in Tenebre, among many other Italian thrillers. In actuality,
the film is directed by longtime genre favorite Aristide Massaccesi, known
alternately by the much easier-to-pronounce pseudonym of Joe D’Amato (I love
that name), who had his name removed as he had made multiple films in a short
period of time, a maneuver instituted by industry rules. The new Blu-ray from
Vinegar Syndrome includes the following extras:
The
transfer is done in 2K from the film’s original 35mm negative and looks
beautiful.
The
audio includes both the English language track and the Italian dubbed track.
Talons is the name of the video interview with
director Claudio Lattanzi. In December 1985 he began working with Michele Soavi
on the documentary Dario Argento’s World of Horror which is still, as of
this writing, the best documentary on him yet made. In 1986 he also worked with
director Soavi on StageFright and was introduced to Aristide Massaccesi,
aka Joe D’Amato, and the company of Filmirage. He then discusses the writing
process of the film. This is an unusually in-depth interview which runs nearly
50 minutes.
There is a video interview with sound man
Larry Revene who also has worked as a director of photography that runs about
15 minutes and he provides some interesting tidbits on the making of the film
and how the Italian crew was very particular and had their own food catered.
The
real reason to buy this disc is for the package’s standout audio commentary
with film historian and author Samm Deighan who provides a wealth of knowledge and
information on not just the film but the genre and the people involved in the
making of the film. She knows what she’s talking about and she speaks slowly,
authoritatively and is fascinating to listen to. I have heard some other
commentaries with lots of information that the speakers blow through very
quickly, so it was a pleasure to listen to this commentary which is done at a
much slower pace. Ms. Deighan also provides the commentary to the upcoming
Vinegar Syndrome title I Start Counting – I would recommend buying that
Blu-ray sight-unseen just for her commentary alone. I cannot wait to listen to
that one and I haven’t even seen the movie yet!
There
is also reversible cover artwork and newly translated English subtitles.
There
are also the English and Italian trailers included.
If
you’re a fan of Zombie 5: Killing Birds, this is the edition to own. If
you haven’t seen it and are a fan of the horror genre, pick up this disc for
Samm Deighan’s commentary alone. It’s chock full of great info.
By
the time he directed Breezy in November and December 1972, Clint
Eastwood had already proven himself a capable actor with fifteen years of
experience under his belt. He took up the role of director with his debut 1971 film
Play Misty for Me and his follow up, 1973’s High Plains Drifter,
both titles in which he also starred. His third outing is different in that he
set aside his acting hat this time to reside firmly behind the camera of what
is more or less the unlikely tale of a May/December romance between Frank
Harmon (William Holden), a cynical and divorced 54 year-old Los Angeles realtor
and a free spirited teen-aged hippy (Kay Lenz in a wonderful performance) whose
itinerant lifestyle, clearly leftover from the Sixties, lands her in his car one
morning prior to driving to work. Her method of dress, carefree ideals and circle
of friends go against everything he has known and stands for. Breezy (her
nickname suits her as she tends to breeze into and out of Frank’s house) is
imbued with charm, innocence and some worldly experience following a failed
relationship. Frank, conversely, is older – much older – and is tired.
He has achieved success and lives alone in a very nice abode in a respectable
neighborhood overlooking the City of Angels and is unwilling to play the field,
or the fool if you will, when it comes to matters of the heart. Breezy
champions the notion of living life to the fullest and spends a lot of time
lecturing Frank on a variety of subjects. Frank half listens while attempting
to concentrate on his work and their platonic friendship begins to deepen when
Breezy confesses her love for him.
Things come to a head when Breezy is mistaken for Frank’s daughter and the
behind-the-back comments and the looks askance from peers at a High Plains
Drifter (a nice shoutout!) screening prove to be more than Frank can handle
and Breezy is forced to leave in tears.
Onscreen
romances between an older man and a significantly younger woman are nothing new
in cinema. Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) was controversial for its
time and Woody Allen has made a career out of casting attractive young females
opposite himself (as in 1979’s Manhattan) many times to initially
comedic effect, though now in the midst of the #MeToo Movement it’s downright unnerving,
especially in light of the controversies that have ensued in his personal life.
Richard Burton, of all people, gave this storyline a whirl at the age of 60 and
raised the ick factor up to eleven in Jules Dassin’s final film Circle
of Two (1980) where he gets with a 16-year-old Tatum O’Neal who was fresh
off of Little Darlings. Then again, American Beauty (1999) won
the Best Picture Oscar, so who knows what audiences will accept? As William
Goldman famously wrote, “Nobody knows anything.†What sets Breezy, which
opened in New York City on Sunday, November 18, 1973 at the Columbia II, apart
is that it was written by a woman, the late Jo Heims who tragically succumbed
to breast cancer in 1978. The brief nudity is handled matter-of-factly without
licentiousness and as the film progresses Frank begins to open up to Breezy,
though there is a bit of reluctance that is detectable.
The
late Mr. Holden gives his customary excellent performance. Frank is nuanced and
deliberate. His face speaks volumes with no dialog. He is a man weathered and
battered by life. We have an idea of what sort of person Frank is and even he
slowly begins to acknowledge that Breezy has impacted his life in a positive
way. A decrepit dog lying in the street would have gone unnoticed by Frank in
the past; Breezy’s influence compels him to transport the pooch to a
veterinarian and thus save his life. Ms. Lenz, who got her start at the
Pasadena Playhouse at age 13 and also appeared as a student in George Lucas’s American
Graffiti (1973) around the same time, is always appealing and by the end of
the film we really feel for her, though the uncharacteristically “happy†ending
during a decade mired in Vietnam, Watergate and general overall disillusionment
with the country may seem trite and even perfunctory today. (Recall the unusual
freeze-frame ending of Tony Richardson’s
The
Border (1982) with Jack Nicholson), it almost screams “TV
movie-of-the-weekâ€, but ultimately, I was happy to see them end up together –
for how long, who knows?
The
supporting cast is also quite good. The late Marj Dusay co-stars as someone
Frank could easily see himself with, Joan Hotchkis is notable as Paula, Frank’s
bitter ex-wife who regards Breezy with disdain, and the late Roger C. Carmel is
comical as a friend of Frank’s who bickers with his wife at parties. It also
has a score by the late Michael Legrand who won the Oscar for his lush theme to
Robert Mulligan’s Summer of ’42 (1971). There is a romantic interlude
with a song just like in Play Misty for Me, that film’s sole glaring
misstep.
Kino
Lorber presents Breezy with a beautiful high definition transfer. There
is also a spirited feature-length audio commentary by film historian Howard S.
Berger and author/screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner who discuss the making of the
film and where it fits into the director’s career. It also includes the theatrical
trailer for the film.
Look
fast for Mr. Eastwood in a white jacket and blue pants looking over a metal
fence as Frank and Breezy pass him while walking the dog.
In
the history of cinema, it is a known fact that the producers and director of a
film all have their own opinions about what a finished film should be titled.
Movies generally use a working title which rarely ends up being used upon
release. Even the film’s own writer invariably believes that it is his/her
title that should be used with consideration given to no one else. One can only
wonder how Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) would
have fared at the box office had it been marketed under its original title, A
Boy’s Life. Ridley Scott’s initially panned and now revered science fiction
masterpiece Blade Runner (1982), its title taken from a 1979 novella by
William S. Burroughs, would have found difficulty being displayed on movie
marquees had it gone by the jaw-breaking title of the 1968 Philip K. Dick novel
upon which it was based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The
Satanists was one of the
original titles considered for the film that would eventually be called Let’s
Scare Jessica to Death, a beautifully understated piece of filmmaking shot
in October 1970 in Connecticut and released in New York on Friday, August 27, 1971
two months prior to a rollout in suburban theatres and drive-ins and its
eventual ABC-TV premiere on Friday, March 11, 1977 before becoming a staple of
late-night television airings. The 1970s are a by-gone era which followed the
end of the studio system of contracts and obligations and gave way to films
that defined originality of thought and style, permitting both novice and
seasoned filmmakers the freedom to make the kinds of films that they wanted to for
distribution through major studios. This maneuver was driven by two factors: the
desire to make money and film studios not knowing what would bring in the
crowds.
Inspired
by the 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (which itself
inspired the wonderful 1961 Jack Clayton adaptation The Innocents with
Deborah Kerr), Jessica thrives on moments where the audience is forced
to ask themselves if what is happening is really happening, or if it’s only
happening in Jessica’s mind. The film benefits from a slow and deliberate build-up
of mood and atmosphere. Orville Stoeber provides a wonderfully creepy score
which, like Stephen Lawrence’s brilliant music for Alfred Sole’s masterful Communion/Alice,
Sweet Alice/Holy Terror (1977) is unfortunately still not available on a
soundtrack album. Cinematographer Robert M. Baldwin bathes the film frame in
autumn foliage and employs the use of slow camera moves to enhance the film’s
overall mood. The film is far too slow for today’s audiences, but for those
with a mindset for 1970s horror, Jessica fits the bill.
Jessica is one of those titles I have been
wanting to see in a much-needed home video upgrade. A bare-bones DVD was
released by Paramount Home Video in 2006 and now the amazing people at Scream
Factory (an imprint of Shout! Factory) have released the film on Blu-ray with a
considerably improved transfer. There is a welcome feature-length audio
commentary with producer Bill Badalato and director John Hancock, who is arguably
best known for the Robert De Niro vehicle Bang the Drum Slowly (1973). They
offer many memories about the making of the film, one of which is Mr. Hancock’s
recollection of lifting the voiceover device of Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) in
Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) to make the audience identity more
with Jessica. The other extras include:
Art
Saved My Life: Orville Stoeber on Let’s Scare Jessica to Death – this runs 16:25 and consists of an
interview with the film’s music composer who describes growing up all over the
world and how his family influenced his musical impressions.
Scare
Tactics: Reflections on a Seventies Horror Classic – runs 23:44 and is an interview with author
and critic Kim Newman who explains why Jessica is his favorite horror
film.
She
Walks These Hills: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death Locations Then and Now – this runs 6:48 and takes us to the
First Church Cemetery in East Haddam, CT; the “Selden III†Hadlyme Ferry in
Chester, CT; the Pattaconk Reservoir in Chester, CT; the Bishop House in Old
Saybrook, which is beautiful but completely dilapidated, even more so than when
I visited it in 2006. I really wish that someone would buy it and restore it; and
Main Street and Maple Street in Chester, CT (Devoe Paints was still there in
2006, but gone now and the building is for rent).
Theatrical
trailer – a very creepy promo for the film that runs three minutes
Television
spot – this runs 53 seconds and, like the theatrical trailer, gives away much
of the plot while trying to be creepy.
Radio
spot – this is derived from the mini record that was dispatched to radio
stations to play over the air and runs 60 seconds. Creepy!
Thankfully,
the film’s creepy original key art has been reinstated for the cover of the
Blu-ray, unlike the 2006 DVD cover.
Jessica is a film that is bathed in moments of
eeriness and supernatural detachment thanks in part to screenwriter Lee
Kalcheim whose former student, film director Bryan Norton, tipped his hat to
the film by making the movie’s title the byline for his nifty short film Penny
Dreadful (2005).
The
late Patty Duke, who tragically lived a life as a manic-depressive and even
wrote a book about it, gives a performance as the titular heroine that wavers
between pathos, tragic-comedy and self-pity. Ms. Duke is arguably best known
for her work in The Miracle Worker (1962) in her portrayal of Helen
Keller, and then again in the 1979 television adaptation, this time as Anne
Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher. Natalie lives with her overbearing parents
(character actor Philip Sterling as her father and Nancy Marchand best known
for television’s Lou Grant and The Sopranos as her mother) who
set her up with a doctor (Bob Balaban, who also played John Voight’s date in
John Schlesinger’s Midnight
Cowboy (1969), the interpreter in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of
the Third Kind (1977), and Thora Birch’s father in 2001’s Ghost World)
in the hopes of seeing her married. Eventually, she musters the courage to cut
the umbilical cord and strike out on her own, leaving the confines of Brooklyn
for a Greenwich Village flat when such a decision was affordable for a single
person. She throws herself into her new life with zeal and gusto, repainting
her drab new apartment with bright colors and decorative knick-knacks, and
finds inventive ways of moving in through the dumb-waiter she shares with other
tenants, one of whom is a painter, David Harris (James Farentino), whose
apartment she mistakenly enters while he’s painting a nude model. Unlike Edouard
Frenhofer, Jacques Rivette’s protagonist in La Belle Noiseuse (1991) who
puts Emmanuelle Beart through the ringer to get to her quintessence, David is a
painter second to being an architect, though he would like to paint full-time. Natalie
initially regards him with disdain, interpreting his bohemian “profession†as a
poorly chosen excuse for bedding unsuspecting and attractive muses. Her throwing
rocks at the floor in moments of anger, sending plaster onto his head or waking
him early in the morning, is a gag that wears out its welcome. David soon falls
for Natalie, and once she achieves happiness with him her world comes crashing
down once again when she discovers a truth about him that leads to a failed
suicide attempt that is both tragic and comedic.
The films
of John Cassavetes are an acquired taste. Long considered to be the father of
the modern independent film movement, his unorthodox style to acting and
filmmaking notoriously drove some of his performers crazy while also receiving kudos
and accolades from others. Like most filmmakers of his ilk, his work was best seen
in independently owned movie theaters in New York City where films generally
played for weeks or even months on end to a combination of both rave reviews
and decent box office, two ingredients necessary to ensure securing funding for
future projects. His directorial debut, Shadows (1958), depicted a
romantic relationship between a white man and an African-American woman and the
tumult that their relationship brought to their families. The film was
unorthodox not only in its subject matter but in its approach to filmmaking. The
film possesses a unique style and an immediacy that audiences of the time were
not used to seeing in polished Hollywood productions. Following Too Late
Blues (1961) he made A Child is Waiting (1963), which starred Burt
Lancaster, Judy Garland, John Marley, and Mr. Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands. The latter
two would go on to appear in his financially successful and acclaimed Faces
(1968) which would provide the financing for his controversial Husbands
(1970), a searing portrait of middle-aged men, their relationships with women,
with each other, and most of all, with themselves.
Gus (John Cassavetes), Harry (Ben Gazzara), Archie (Peter
Falk) and Stuart (David Rowlands) all appear to be
successful businessmen. They are in their early forties, they are married and
have children, and as the movie opens to snapshots depicting them all at family
picnics, family outings, and general overall goofiness, it becomes apparent to
the audience that these four men are best friends and are for all intents and
purposes inseparable – until Stuart suddenly dies of a heart attack and leaves
his friends behind as a solemn triumvirate questioning their lives and their
places in the world. We never see or meet Stuart outside of the still photos,
but his presence hangs over Gus, Harry, and Archie in everything they say and
do and more importantly what they do not say or do. Following Stuart’s
funeral, the men all decide not to go home, instead electing to set out on a
series of adventures: taking a subway ride; playfully fighting in the streets; playing
basketball at a local gym; swimming; encouraging a woman to sing them a song at
a local bar; getting sick in a men’s room, etc. Harry’s family is the only one we
are privy to when he returns home and has a physical fight with his wife and
her mother. They all make half-hearted efforts to return to their jobs until
the futility of life sparks a decision to travel to London. Harry intimates
that he wants no part of the middle-class life that he has built in his suburban
house.
Arriving across
the pond, they play craps and encounter varying degrees of difficulty picking
up three women (Jenny Runacre, Jenny Lee Wright and Noelle Kao). What
transpires in their hotel rooms may on the surface seem ridiculous and silly, however
something remarkable occurs as the three men are forced to reckon with Stuart’s
death and ultimately, their own mortality. The film is ultimately about
absence: Stuart is gone from their lives, and aside from Harry’s fight with his
wife, the wives are absent from Gus and Archie’s lives, except from the opening
stills. Their behavior with the women they have picked up is far more complex than
their dialog lets on, which anticipates the film’s unexpected yet deeply
poignant denouement. It may be impossible to understand the meanings of the
scenes upon one viewing of the film, but Mr. Cassavetes was a rogue filmmaker
with an originality and honesty to be reckoned with. Some accused him of being
self-indulgent. For the adventurous and curious cineaste who prefers a cerebral
cinematic experience bereft of Marvel superheroes and the requisite explosions,
the rewards in Husbands are plentiful.
Husbands opened in New York City on Wednesday, December 9, 1970, but the
film was shot in the early months of 1969. It was featured on the cover of Life
Magazine in May 1969 but by the time the film was released, the cover story
became a distant memory for readers. The
director’s unorthodox method to shooting provided challenges to those he worked
with, especially Peter Falk who struggled at first with what the director
wanted. Initial rough cuts favored different points-of-view: one favored Gus,
then another favored Archie, and yet another favored Harry. The director shot
roughly 1,300,00 feet of film, which translates to about 240 hours of raw
footage. That is almost an unconscionable amount of takes to sift through to
yield a finished film, the sheer volume taking months simply to view it prior
to attempting to cut it all together.
The new Criterion Collection Blu-ray runs 142 minutes and the film already feels
long, however Ben Gazzara preferred the 240-minute cut, which I would have
loved to have seen as an additional disc. Obviously that cut was answer-printed
and locked, so it must exist in some form, perhaps in either Gena Rowland’s or
Nick Cassavetes’s basements? If the film’s trailer touts it as a comedy, it is
due to the fact that the director took the version well-received by the
audience and recut it into the version that he wanted, to the dismay of
the suits at Columbia Pictures.
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 Systemâ€, 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 Pancakesâ€, 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!
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 2nd
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?
Cinema Retro's Todd Garbarini with Sonny Grosso at a screening of The French Connection in 2010.
BY TODD GARBARINI
Salvatore
Anthony Grosso, known affectionately as Sonny Grosso, passed away on Wednesday,
January 22, 2020 at the age of 89. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, his work
most assuredly did. Mr. Grosso was originally a New York City police detective
who was the partner of Detective Eddie Egan. These two gentlemen both, on a
hunch, broke up an organized crime ring which resulted in the seizure of 112
pounds of heroin. This then-unprecedented bust in 1961 provided the basis for
the 1969 Robin Moore chronicle of their exploits, The French Connection,
and was made into the Oscar-winning classic film of the same name two years
later, resulting in a Best Picture win for producer Philip D’Antoni, Best
Director for William Friedkin, Best Actor for Gene Hackman (he personified
Eddie Egan’s Jimmy “Popeye†Doyle), Best Screenplay for Ernest Tidyman’s
adaptation of Mr. Moore’s book, and Best Editing for Jerry Greenberg, most
notably for the still hair-raising car chase through the streets of Brooklyn.
He also worked on the Philip D’Antoni-directed 1973 film The Seven-Ups
which boasts another terrific car chase.
While
still police detectives, both Mr. Grosso and Mr. Egan had small roles in The
French Connection (the former as Klein and the latter as Simonson) while
working in behind-the-scenes roles as technical advisers on the film. Mr.
Grosso got to learn the ropes of New York filmmaking and appeared in The
Godfather (1972) in the scene wherein McCluskey (Sterling Hayden) clocks
Michael Corleone (Al Pacino). His gun made it into the hands of Michael
Corleone in the famous Louis’s Restaurant scene when he kills McCluskey
Sollozzo.
I
was fortunate enough to see Don Rickles at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in March
2004 and was bowled over when it came to my attention that Mr. Grosso was in
attendance. I commandeered his attention following the show, much like Doyle
wrestled the 1971 Pontiac Le Mans away from the driver in The French
Connection and thanked him profusely for his part in making my all-time
favorite movie a reality. Six years later we met again at a New York City
screening of the film also attended by director Friedkin, and he was kind,
gracious and warm to speak with.
Mr.
Grosso was also a fixture at Rao’s, an exclusive New York restaurant on East
114th Street where grew up around the corner from. Here he hung out
with family and friends, and the establishment was co-owned by the late Frank
Pellegrino Sr. who played Johnny Dio in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas
(1990) and is probably best known as FBI Chief Frank Cubitoso on HBO’s The
Sopranos.
Mr.
Grosso’s new book, a memoir entitled Harlem to Hollywood, My Real-to-Reel Life, will obviously be published posthumously, although I cannot locate a
publication date. I look forward to this book with anticipation, as will all of
us who admire his contributions as a police officer and to the film world.
Long
before a carcharodon carcharias wreaked havoc on Amity Island in New York over
the July Fourth weekend in the 1970s, atomic blast activity in the 1940s
disrupted Mother Nature’s natural chain of events and Hollywood was all too
willing to jump on to the atomic admonition bandwagon, churning out fantastic
tales of miniscule creatures ballooning to hundreds of times their original
size and going medieval on their human counterparts. Gordon Douglas’s Them!
(1954) is my favorite film from this era and I find the overall tone of the
film to be creepy even today. I was eleven when I first saw it and the sight of
oversized, monstrous ants (resulting from nearby military atomic bomb tests) terrorizing
LA from deep within the Los Angeles Riverbed was truly unnerving. James
Whitmore impressed me in his role as the police officer who was determined to
save two small boys captured by the formidable Formicidae. Years later I found
myself smirking when he appeared in the Miracle-Gro lawn ads in the early
1990’s, imagining that the substance would bring these creatures up from the
grass.
Although
the film runs a mere 69 minutes, and the titular monster appears 31 minutes
into the film and stomps around for roughly the remaining 20, there is a great
of deal of dialog and explaining of the scenario at hand. Much of this “actionâ€
is slow in nature, the tell-tale signs of a film on a very low budget. The
acting is what one would expect from a B-movie. Desperate fishermen complain of
dead fish at the height of the season and demand that an answer for the crisis
be forthcoming. Karnes and Bickford are portrayed as intelligent, well-meaning
and earnest investigators determined to unravel the mystery that is plaguing
the area. When the word “radioactive†is used, my thoughts harken back to The
Firm’s 1985 top 40 hit of the same name. The film makes a good double feature
with the aforementioned Beast if for no other reason than to compare the
two.
The
1960s and 1970s had their share of genre films that were popular with
audiences. One of the most prolific was the biker film which, along with the horror
film, were showcased to many audiences through the beloved and nearly extinct
drive-in theatres. The genre reached a level of respectability in 1969 with the
release of Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider which played at the Cannes Film
Festival and went on to gross an estimated 160 times its production budget of
$375,000. Little wonder why producers and filmmakers alike jumped on the biker
film bandwagon. Easy Rider helped put Jack Nicholson on the map
following his appearances in Richard Rush’s Hell’s Angels on Wheels
(1967) and the then-forthcoming The Rebel Rousers (1970) by Martin B.
Cohen.
Lee
Madden’s 1970 outing Angel Unchained came on the heels, or tires if you
will, of Easy Rider and tells a familiar story that dates back many
years, wherein one group helps a second group fight a third group when the
third group makes it known that they don’t like the second group. It’s a
familiar theme that was used to similar effect eleven years later in George
Miller’s 1981 futuristic action film The Road Warrior when the titular
hero, in desperate need of the now difficult-to-come-by gasoline, agrees to
help a group of oil refiners fight against a hostile band of marauders who want
their digs. The proverbial message of Angel Unchained is “Live and let live.â€
Angel, played with characteristic aplomb by Don Stroud, is in his mid-thirties
and is tired of being a rebel-rousing biker following a brutal fight inside an
amusement park. As part of the Exiles MC (short of “motorcycle clubâ€), he wants
to go off on his own and do his own thing, whatever that thing might be. Peacefully
relinquishing his colors to Pilot (Larry Bishop) he successfully leaves the
club and, while stopping for gas, encounters a group of hippies who are told by
the gas station attendant that the station is closed. Sensing disdain for the
hippies, he follows them to their commune and gravitates to Merilee (Tyne Daly mistakenly
wearing a tablecloth for a dress) and starts up a kinda-sorta relationship with
her. It turns out that the gas station thugs headed up by Tom (Jordan Rhodes) and Dave (Peter
Lawrence) don’t take nicely to the hippies and want them off the land,
threatening them with a fight if they don’t leave.
Prodded
into action by a member of the commune, Angel returns to his MC to ask his
former fellow riders to help him fight the thugs on behalf of the hippie
commune members who are, unfortunately, pacifists. They begrudgingly go along
with Angel who introduces them to the commune and what could have been a
serious and introspective look at interpersonal relationships and how factions
and group dynamics operate for a common goal instead becomes an excuse to show
off lots of destructive and adolescent-like behavior and a set piece that
includes, of all things, a battle on dune buggies!
Had
the film been placed in the hands of Monte Hellman this might have been an
existential under-the-microscope look at a drifter meandering around pondering
the meaning of life and trying to figure out what to do next, but his thoughts
and feelings are back-burnered for the ritualistic violence that takes place as
a result of the segue to the storyline dealing with the fighting factions. The
film has a tragic ending that makes the audience wonder if this hippie commune
lifestyle is worth it. Let’s be honest, however; despite any ambitions the
script purports to offer, this is a biker film, one that rises above most
others in strict entertainment value. Bill McKinney is always a joy to watch
and here he’s a dude having a tough time keeping his libido in check. Unfortunately
for Ned Beatty, Mr. McKinney would have the same problem with him in
John Boorman’s Deliverance two years later! Yikes! Another biker looks
like the winner of the Bob Ross Look-a-like Contest. Some of the film takes
place at night and it looks like it was shot day-for-night, which is not
unusual for a film on a low budget and fast-paced shooting schedule.
Ken (Dale Midkiff) and Bob (Preston Maybank) land
in a propeller plane and speed off on motorcycles to a large mansion. Ken calls
Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster) via radio as Bob scales the side of the
building. Julie wants him to give her access to “the mainframe†when suddenly,
somewhere a puppet (yes, a puppet)
begins yelling Danger! Danger!, obviously aware of the imminent
intrusion. Edward Brake (Wellington Meffert) is sleeping in bed in the mansion
while Bob takes off his necklace and lays it on the ledge after reaching the
mansion’s roof. He rotates a parabolic dish and the puppet, operating some sort
of a crude computer and using telepathic powers, makes the necklace turn into a
sphere (think Phantasm). Bob starts
to bleed from the face and falls to his death. The action breaks into the
opening credits to “Nightmare†as sung by Miriam Stockley.
If you’re still reading this, I commend you,
because I would have stopped at the mention of the word “puppetâ€. There are few
films that leave me at a loss for words (Quentin Dupieux’s 2010 film Rubber is hands-down the most
infuriating movie I have ever watched; I might have to re-watch that one as I
must have missed the point completely),
but Henri Sala’s Nightmare Weekend
(1986) is, in the words of the late film critic Gene Siskel in his review of
1978’s Surfer Girls, one of the most
improbably lousy movies I have ever seen. This doesn’t stop one’s viewing of
the film from being a total loss,
however, as Nightmare is if nothing
else that we can be absolutely sure of a time capsule of the 80’s, with
artifacts of the Zeitgeist on full display: girls workout wearing leg warmers,
a guy dances nearly everywhere with a Walkman in his pants, a tough guy and his
Laura Brannigan lookalike chick get it on atop a pinball machine, and computer equipment is
crude, big and bulky. Clocking in at 85
minutes, Nightmare seems longer than
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part
II (forgive me for mentioning them both in the same sentence, I do
apologize). Edward Brake is an entrepreneur/inventor who has created a
computerized “Biometer†which changes naturally aggressive animals into docile
house pets. He ultimately wants it to be used for the betterment of society,
but it’s just not ready for prime time. His partner Julie can’t wait for him
and goes behind his back to team up with a nefarious organization that will pay
her millions for the Biometer. Edward’s daughter Jessica Brake (Debra Hunter) is a Carol Alt
lookalike who, with her friend Annie (Lori Lewis) and another woman, has been
chosen to be part of Julie’s experiment for which they will both be paid 500
dollars each for their involvement. The idea is to see how the Biometer works
on people. The aforementioned puppet, named George, is housed in Jessica’s room
and is operated by a computer named Apache, indubitably the precursor to the Apache HTTP Server (Danger! Danger! Sarcasm!), and is part of
the whole operation. The motley crew, and there are a lot of characters to keep
track of unnecessarily, all find themselves one way or another being affected
by the Biometer.
The
two biggest issues with Nightmare are
the screenplay and the editing. I love bad movies that are entertaining but
unfortunately this isn’t one of them. The
film never seems to make up its mind as to what it wants to be: horror,
soft-core porn, comedy, campy/serious? Scenes and shots are so
short it’s nearly impossible to keep track of the goings-on. It’s also
occasionally insulting to women as they are all pretty much on display simply for
men’s gratification.
Nightmare is a Troma
production which means that it exudes its own special, patented brand of strangeness.
It’s difficult for another film director or producer to attempt to ape the Troma
style as it is a singularly unique, signature and patented style of strangeness.
Shot in July 1983 in Ocala, FL on a budget of ostensibly half a million dollars,
Nightmare defies
description which, in the hands of a seasoned auteur like David Lynch, can be a
good thing. That isn’t the case here. Nightmarefalls into the “so-bad-it’s-badâ€
camp. You feel like you’re watching auditions with an amateur acting troupe,
although amazingly other reviewers have championed the acting in an otherwise
disjointed film. That being said, if you’re a fan of the film, it has been
released as a DVD/Blu-ray combo from Vinegar Syndrome. The image has been scanned in 2K and looks
really nice and is a far cry from the VHS tape from 30 years ago. It also
contains an interview with producer Marc Gottlieb that runs just under 13 minutes.
He’s very engaging and fun to listen to as he describes the making of the film
and how they promoted it at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. Dean Gates, who did
the makeup effects, speaks for nearly 23 minutes and provides us with an
interesting perspective on the effects that he created in the days before movie
companies made the switch to CGI for most of this type of work.
Vinegar Syndrome has put together a really nice
package for this title. It has a reversible cover and very colorful
artwork.
Nightmare
Weekend is best
viewed on a weekend while severely inebriated!
The
Annihilators is a
Spring 1985-lensed action film with lots of action and zero excitement. Coming
on the heels of Ted Kotcheff’s masterful 1982 Vietnam-themed film version of
David Morrell’s 1972 novel, First Blood, which itself spawned several
lifeless sequels including the latest and critically reviled Rambo: Last
Blood a mere 37 years after the superior original. (One cannot help but
think of the Rocky XXXVIII poster seen in 1982’s Airplane II: The
Sequel, and even that film was inferior to its own original). The
admittedly low-budget and bargain-basement Annihilators uses a familiar
theme to string together several long-winded and ultimately soporific action set
pieces that consist primarily of master shots with very little intercutting and
close-ups, but not before we get a credit sequence which sets the appearance of
onscreen names to the sound of machine gun fire. Clever! The 1980s were a time
of teen sex comedies, Freddy Krueger nightmares, and action films. The superior
examples of the latter, Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior (1981), Raiders of
the Lost Ark (1981), and Escape From New York (1981) all paved the
way for the less-than-stellar Invasion U.S.A. (1985) and The Delta
Force (1986).
The
Annihilators concerns
townsfolk and proprietors who find themselves at the mercy of gangs and
hoodlums, specifically The Scorpions, The Turks, and The Rollers. These gangs compete
with each other by coercing the store owners into paying them protection money.
If they’re late or light in the envelope, discipline is doled out with a knife
or a bat. A wheelchair-bound Vietnam veteran, already done an injustice by
returning to a society that has no use for him following fighting in an
unwinnable and unpopular war, is killed when coming to another’s rescue. The
leader of The Rollers is Roy Boy Jagger (Paul Koslo) and I must say that I love
that name. It reminds me of Ernest T. Baxter from “The Andy Griffith Showâ€,
however Mr. Koslo infuses the former with exponentially more schoolyard bully menace
than Howard Morris ever did with the latter in the town of Mayberry. Jagger instigates
a rape and kills a female victim in an egregious scene that was initially
censored by international film boards and should have remained that way.
The
brotherhood that the vets have is a tight and lifelong bond because they have
seen things that the average American cannot fathom. We know this because the
film begins with an intro that takes place in the early 1970s that shamelessly
uses stock footage shot during the Vietnam War interspersed with obvious staged
scenes with actors. If you’re a member of the sleaze-film cognoscenti think
of Antonio Margheriti’s Cannibal Apocalypse (1980) and you know exactly
what I mean. Even the artificial explosions are unimpressive. The effort to
infuse this sequence with camaraderie is admirable though ultimately lacking
and is at times silly, especially when the rugged and late actor Christopher
Stone, in a follow-up role to his work in The Howling (1981) and Cujo
(1983), appears here as Bill, the assigned platoon leader who fires off rounds
of ammo while sporting a very obvious 1985 hairstyle. Flash forward to that
very year and it’s Bill who is called to town along with his confederates, two
of whom are Garrett Floyd (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) and Ray Track (Gerrit Graham),
to avenge their fallen brother following his funeral. They form factions and
teach the laypeople how to fight. At the center of all of this is Lieutenant Hawkins (Jim Antonio) who
has been brought in to keep the gangs in check. Naturally, it’s a losing
battle, especially since the gunfire that erupts in the streets between the
townsfolk and the thugs go on for minutes at a time with the cops riding in
miraculously at the last minute. The unspoken rule of the police department
seems to be to let these people fight it out in the streets and deal with it
all later and take the credit. The whole affair looks more like an extended episode
of The A-Team than a feature film. Even the truant kids look less like delinquents
and more like a group that was told to run around the corner and act bad while knocking
over some trash cans.
Cinema Retro has been apprised of the forthcoming release
of the new film Spirits in the Forest, a documentary that follows six of the
most dedicated fans of the electronic band Depeche Mode, which was formed in
Basildon, Essex, England in 1980. Ranked at number 98 by VH1 in December 2016
on their list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, Depeche Mode has
played to millions of fans the world over, with hits ranging from “Just Can’t
Get Enough†(1981) to “People Are People†(1984) to “Suffer Well†(2005) to
“Precious†(2005) to their latest album Spirit in (2017).
Please read the press release below from Trafalgar
Releasing, the company that released the Rush theatrical extravaganza Cinema
Strangiato in August.
London, UK, September 26: Depeche Mode, along with
Trafalgar Releasing, Sony Music Entertainment and BBH Entertainment, today have
launched the official film trailer for Depeche Mode: SPIRITS in the
Forest, with cinema tickets for the worldwide November 21 release now
available at spiritsintheforest.com.
The brand new feature-length film, directed by award-winning filmmaker and
long-time artistic collaborator Anton Corbijn, Depeche Mode: SPIRITS in
the Forest, delves deeply into the emotional stories of six
special Depeche Mode fans from across the globe, giving audiences a
unique look into music’s incredible power to connect and empower people. Along
with these key fan stories, the film integrates performance footage from the
two final shows of the band’s 2017/2018 Global Spirit Tour, which saw them play
to over 3 million fans at 115 performance dates around the world.
SPIRITS in the Forest will be screened in more than 2,400 cinemas
around the world on November 21. Tickets are on-sale from today at
spiritsintheforest.com, where fans can find the most up-to-date information
regarding participating theaters and sign up for event alerts.
The
Silent Partner (1979)
is an effective thriller that, to the eyes of today's viewer, may not seem all
that intricate or even suspenseful. So many thrillers have been made in the
intervening forty years, specifically heist-based movies, that Partner
may seem derivative, insipid, or even dated given the presence of outmoded
security equipment and the absence of omnipresent cell phones. This could not
be further from the truth as there is a lot of subtext going on for even the
most jaded cerebral viewer to enjoy here.
The
title refers to the protagonist, Miles Cullen, played deftly by Elliot Gould. Miles
leads an unremarkable life as a bank teller in a branch office located inside
of a Toronto shopping mall that is besieged by Christmas cheer and decorations.
As a loner who collects rare fish specimens for his apartment aquarium when he
isn’t cowering from his bank manager, Charles Packard (Michael Kirby), to avoid
being scolded should he make a mistake, he musters the courage to invite his
co-worker Julie (Susannah York) out for a drink only to be rainchecked which
affords him redirecting his attention to the hired and dubious Santa Claus
mascot (Christopher Plummer) who is scoping out the office for nefarious
purposes. Several additional clues tip Miles off that Santa will rob the bank
and he gets the brilliant idea to set aside a huge chunk of the money to take
for himself while Santa takes all the blame. The amount is just shy of $50,000
Canadian dollars which today is roughly four times that amount. The robbery
that inevitably transpires yields little for the police as the security camera
footage fails to capture Santa’s face. One must wonder about the wisdom of the
bank’s sole security guard chasing the perp into the fully attended mall with
his weapon drawn. Recall the security guards unloading their machine guns into
the apartment complex at the beginning of Return of the Pink Panther
(1975) which, incidentally, also co-starred Mr. Plummer? Not smart!
Reikle
(Plummer) gets wind that Cullens stiffed him on the take and he aims to get the
remainder of the money by engaging in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse with
Cullens, who proves to be a worthy adversary, surprising even himself at his
newfound ingenuity and ballsy spirit. Much of their fencing takes place between
the telephone booth outside Cullens’s apartment and Cullens’s landline, the
former an obvious prop as it seems awkward and out-of-place but is placed
geographically for the sake of the story. Cullens outwits and entraps Reikle by
landing him back in jail, filling Reikle with the resolve to get out and kill
Cullens.
For
the first time in any contemporary film that I can remember seeing, main
characters ponder aloud as to the insignificance of their lives, wondering
where they are going and what the meaning of life is all about. Julie has
foolishly permitted herself to become romantically entangled with their boss,
knowing full well that he is a married man. When Cullens asks Julie if she is
in love with him, she says yes and then no. She honestly has no idea. Julie,
like so many other people, is looking for something outside of the repetitive,
then-Nine-to-Five existence that befalls nearly everyone once they graduate
high school or college. She ends up in Miles’s apartment for a nightcap and is
perfectly willing to take their friendship out of the Friend Zone until Miles
shuts the situation down for reasons which become apparent later.
Umberto
Lenzi was one of the most prolific Italian genre directors working in Italy,
but he is virtually unknown here in the States outside of the circles of the most
die-hard of genre fans. In fact, his work is so obscure at times that even adherents
to his most extreme horror movies don't even follow the other dramatic work for
which he is also known despite his roster of titles on the IMDB. Much of
International Cinema is “inspired†by American filmmaking (i.e. outright ripped
off from) and following the Oscar-winning success of William Friedkin’s masterful
1971 crime drama The French Connection, with its astounding subway/car
chase, Italy dove head-first into the Eurocrime, or poliziotteschi, genre headfirst making a slew of action films
where the camera’s point-of-view is inspired by Owen Roizman’s work on the
aforementionedreal-life-inspired crime film. Filmed in late 1975 in
Rome and released in New York in July 1978 under the title of Assault with a
Deadly Weapon, The Tough Ones is yet another one of those films that
is known by multiple titles too numerous to even list. Upon superficial
investigation of the beautiful and colorful poster art for the film, one might
assume (as yours truly did) that actor Franco Nero is the star. Rather it’s the
late Maurizio Merli who, not surprisingly, began his career because he looked
like Mr. Nero when the latter was unavailable for White Fang to the Rescue,
the 1974 sequel to both Challenge to White Fang (1974) and White Fang
(1973).
Mr.
Merli plays Inspector Leonardo Tanzi, a hot-headed, self-appointed crime
fighter who makes Gene Hackman’s Jimmy “Popeye†Doyle and Clint Eastwood’s
“Dirty†Harry Callahan look timid in comparison as he tears up each scene that
he appears in, slapping and kicking bad guys and even suspected bad
guys, at the slightest hint of guilt or provocation. He’s fed up with the crime
plaguing his jurisdiction, dishing out his own version of justice by breaking
up a hidden casino, tackling a pair of purse-snatchers on a motor scooter, and diving
into a bank robbery and killing some of the robbers. One of his best bits is
when he is flagged down by a man whose girlfriend has been raped by a gang
headed up by a rich kid who was released from jail just hours earlier. Taking a
clue from the crime scene, he hunts down the spoiled brat and his cronies, smashing
the ringleader’s face into a pinball machine before kicking all their asses in
a crazy set piece. Anyone who gets in his way of getting to another criminal
gets their ass handed to them. This
doesn’t bode well for his girlfriend who is nearly sent to her death when
criminals drop her car into a car crusher, stopping it just before it crushes
it – with her in it! There’s a weird, typical living-on-the-fringe-of-society
character named Vincenzo Moretto (played wonderfully by the late Tomas Milian) who
seems frail and timid at first, but he proves to be a lunatic and is later told
to swallow a bullet (literally) by Tanzi in a strange exchange at Moretto’s
sister’s house.
I personally have never been a huge fan of sex comedies
as most of the ones that I have seen generally rely too much on infantile
attitudes towards sex or gross bathroom humor as a means of generating laughs
and simply fail to provide a payoff. The good ones are the type that men and
women can comfortably watch together and laugh with rather than at. Porky’s
(1981) and Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) are two examples of this.
Gas Pump Girls, filmed in 1978 and released regionally in
1979, is probably the most entertaining movie ever made in Sacramento,
California. It takes place following a group of seniors’ high school graduation.
The film is big on nudity but soft on sex despite the suggestive ad campaign poster
boasting the tagline “You'll love the service they give…†Girls is the result
of director Joel Bender’s idea to use the tried-and-true film trope of a
dilapidated business that needs a much-needed injection of fresh blood for it
to be resuscitated and to prosper. George Cage’s wonderful Skateboard (1978) similarly
featured an avuncular Allen Garfield doing his best to marshal teenagers and
Leif Garrett into a skateboarding team that would make money for him. In Girls,
Huntz Hall of the “Bowery Boys†fame is Joe, the owner of a gas station desperately
in need of a make-over after his competitor across the street commandeers his patrons
with a souped-up, state-of-the-art service center. His niece June (Kirsten
Baker) enlists the help of her attractive friends Betty (Linda Lawrence), April
(Sandy Johnson), January (Rikki Marin), and Jane (Leslie King). They all give
the gas station a much-needed facelift via a new paint job and a new name:
Joe’s Super Duper. Who better than a group of beautiful and nubile young female
women to come to the rescue and make Uncle Joe’s establishment lucrative? This
premise is by no means original, but it works well in this film as the ladies
find an answer to every hurdle thrown their way through ingenuity, especially
when their tanks are empty and they need to get more gas for their customers,
and quickly!
With the help of skimpy work outfits to showcase their
considerable assets and the hiring of their boyfriends as mechanics, one of
whom is Roger (Dennis Bowen), the group is on their way to saving the day until
a three jerks who call themselves the Vultures, comprised of Hank (Demetre
Phillips), Butch (Steve Bond), and Peewee (Ken Lerner), come in to trash the
place out of a sense of boredom. These guys look like rejects from the Pharaohs
in George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) or gang members from Randal
Kleiser’s Grease (1978). June, however, is very persuasive in getting the
Vultures on their side as tow truck operators when the rival and cigar-chomping
Mr. Friendly (Dave Shelley) vows to shut them down by sending over two
hoodlums, Bruno (Joe E. Ross) and Moiv (Mike Mazurki), to intimidate them. The
ladies turn on their charms in some truly humorous moments which include adorable
April giving the time to a customer (Paul Tinder, who resembles a young Ronny
Cox) as he’s in the garage lift – you won’t look at oil changes in quite the
same way after this scene; April enticing a hilariously excited Bruno to stave
off a robbery; and the whole crew breaking into a dance sequence in the garage
(look fast for the little kid wearing the same Darth Vader shirt that I had in 1978!).
Sandy Johnson is the standout among the ladies. Introduced to the world as
Playboy’s Playmate of the Month in June 1974, Ms. Johnson made a memorable
albeit brief appearance in movies during the 1970’s and disrobes in Girls with
such glee that you cannot help but root for her. She is perhaps best known to horror
film genre fans as Judith Margaret Myers, the ill-fated sister of the indefatigable
killer Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978).
Sprinkled throughout the film is the voice of a radio
deejay, played by New York’s own “Cousin Brucie†Bruce Morrow, a cute device
probably lifted from the Wolfman Jack character in American Graffiti. This
appearance no doubt inspired K-Billy’s Sounds of the Seventies in Quentin
Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992).
The ending of the film is crazy, as the girls and boys
dress as Saudi Arabian oil magnates who feign their way into the office of the
head of the rival gas company. The sequence features a rarity in cinema – a
contrite businessman.
Unsurprisingly, the film wasn’t nominated for any awards
in the acting category and I will say that much of it is stilted and sounds
recited and forced. However, the ladies are so sweet and good-natured that this
is a minor quibble in an otherwise funny and entertaining romp.
Lieutenant Fred Williams (Jack Hedley) is easily the
horror cinema’s most pedestrian, laid back, and disinterested police detective
in recent memory. In Lucio Fulci’s infamous slasher outing The New York Ripper
(1982), a spate of brutal crimes involving young women being sliced up by a
knife-wielding maniac who quacks like a duck (yes, you read that right) lands right
smack into Williams’s lap and he couldn’t be more bored by it. Mr. Hedley’s
characterization of this by-the-book investigator was no doubt in the script,
but his character just meanders through his scenes with such an aloof attitude
that it’s amazing no one calls him out on it. The few times Williams does
appear to spring to life are when the sex lives of his victims are revealed,
which he reacts to with a judgmental shrug and smirk when he’s extricating a
motive from the morgue pathologist (Giordano Falzoni) or informing one Dr.
Lodge (Cosimo Cinieri, credited here as “Laurence Wellesâ€) that the effects of
his open marriage have resulted in the death of his sexually adventurous wife
Jane Lodge. This is a hypocritical reaction considering that he himself
frequents a prostitute named Kitty (Daniela Doria), a fact not lost on the
“quacker†who phones Williams at Kitty’s apartment just to let him know that he
has his eye on him! Williams himself is genuinely confounded by this unexpected
breach of privacy which gives him some resolve to find the killer with slightly
more urgency, but not by much – it also puts Kitty in danger.
The murders in this film are gory, graphic and
protracted. Any seasoned slasher fan will easily differentiate between the
actual performers and the graphic make-up effects created to look like the
female anatomy, be it a decomposed human hand retrieved by a dog at the film’s
start, a young victim named Rosie (Cinzia de Ponti) slashed on the Staten
Island Ferry, a sex performer named Eva (Zora Kerova) who meets a violent end
thanks to a smashed bottle, or the aforementioned Jane (Alexandra Delli Colli)
who gets more than she bargained for when her sexual shenanigans go south. It’s
obvious to both Williams and his police chief (played by Lucio Fulci!) that the
“quacker†is a misogynist. It’s a good thing he isn’t a doctor. A prime suspect
is a sex show spectator with two missing fingers, Mickey Scellenda (Renato
Rossini, credited here as “Howard Rossâ€), who meets Jane at an insalubrious 42nd
Street theater and later engages in some consensual BDSM with her at a flea bag
motel that begins to exceed even her limits. Jane goes from being an aroused
spectator to a willing participant. Scellenda then sets his sights on Fay
Majors (Almanta Keller), a young woman who foolishly rides the graffiti-riddled
subway train alone in the middle of the night, and later attacks her before her
physicist boyfriend Peter (Andrew Painter) comes to her rescue.
Williams enlists the help of a psychotherapy professor,
Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco of Mr. Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery), who is
prepped as the Simon Oakland character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and
creates a psychological profile of the killer. Barbara Cupisti makes her
Italian horror film screen debut and appears briefly as an assistant. She would
go on to star as Alicia in Michele Soavi’s phenomenal Stage Fright five years
later.
More surprising than the violent murders are the sexually
charged scenes that lend a high degree of uneasiness to the whole affair. A
live sex shows plays more like a softcore porn interlude, and the film’s
arguably most disturbing sequence involves what amounts to Jane being raped in
a pool hall by a creepy player (Josh Cruze) egged on by his equally creepy
friend (Antoine Pagan). Even Dr. Davis is portrayed as a closet homosexual,
purchasing a copy of BlueBoy magazine at a newsstand and hiding it inside a
copy of the New York Post (think about that for a minute!). I can only imagine
what the audiences in 1982 must have thought about this film. In 2019, it’s
distressing to say that far worse is available to see on the Web to eyes just
as jaded as Lieutenant Williams’s.
One would think that the duck quacking would have turned
this film into a comedy and while there are moments that do elicit laughter,
the whole thing is actually played straight, so straight in fact that when the
denouement arrives courtesy of the requisite deus ex-machina, the killer is
revealed in one of the bleakest endings in giallo history.
Filmed in New York City between August and October in
1981 during an especially seedy time in Times Square’s history, The New York
Ripper is one of the most controversial and infamous giallo films of the
decade, or perhaps ever. Mr. Fulci’s work has always been uneven to me, lacking
the color that featured so prominently in Mario Bava’s work and the highly
stylized cinematic look that punctuates the best work of Dario Argento. Anyone
who saw this film during its theatrical exhibition on 42nd Street in 1984
probably never would have imagined that the film could look as good as it does
in the new 4K-remastered Blu-ray that Blue-Underground has just released, or
they were probably too drunk and stoned to even care. If you saw it on the
Vidmark VHS release, this new and completely uncut version reveals a film that
none of us have seen before. This transfer is reference quality and reveals
image nuances previously unseen, on a par with the fine work that
Blue-Underground has done previously on William Lustig’s Maniac (1981), another
gory slasher, with full 4K restoration. Any previous versions of the film on
home video pale in comparison to this new transfer.
The new three-disc Blu-ray contains many new extras,
which include:
A very cool lenticular sleeve cover that the Blu-ray case
fits into.
Disc One:
A full-length audio commentary by Troy Howarth who once
again provides a highly detailed and entertaining overview of the film at hand,
making no apologies for being a fan. Extremely insightful and highly
knowledgeable, Mr. Howarth points out interesting tidbits along the way and
allows the viewer to experience the film in a new light.
The Art of Killing (about 30 minutes in high definition,
2019) – This is an onscreen interview with Dardano Sacchetti, a prolific
screenwriter whose is probably best known to the horror film fans as the
screenwriter or story originator of The Cat O’Nine Tales (1971), Shock (1977), Zombie
(1979), City of the Living Dead (1980), The Beyond (1981), The House by the
Cemetery (1981), Demons (1986) and Demons 2 (1988). He speaks at length about
working with Mr. Fulci on a script about progeria, a disease that ages the
cells and tissues to such an extent that the victim dies by age 18. Anyone
remember Ralph Macchio in The Three Wishes of Billy Grier (1984)? He also
explains that Italian horror cinema always has a further ending, a double
ending, and a final ending. Highly entertaining raconteur.
Three Fingers of Violence (about 15 minutes in high
definition, 2019) is an onscreen interview with actor Howard Ross who plays
Mickey Scendella in the film. He recounts meeting Mr. Fulci at a dinner party
and auditioned for the film soon after. He also laughs about being mistaken for
Charles Bronson while filming in Times Square. Spoken in Italian with
non-removable and legible English subtitles.
The Second Victim (about 13 minutes in high definition,
2019) is an onscreen interview with actress Cinzia de Ponti who plays Rosie.
She was discovered after being named “Miss Italia†in a beauty contest. Spoken
in Italian with non-removable and legible English subtitles.
The Broken Bottle Murder (about 13 minutes in high
definition, 2019) is an onscreen interview with actress Zora Kerova who describes
working with Mr. Fulci on this scene, but not knowing that it required sex and
nudity until it was time to film. Spoken in Italian with non-removable and
legible English subtitles.
“I’m an Actress†(about 9 minutes in high definition,
2009) is an onscreen interview with actress Zora Kerova who describes working
with Mr. Fulci on her scene, and also her work with Bruno Mattei and Umberto
Lenzi. This is ported over from the Blue Underground single disc Blu-ray
release from 2009.
The Beauty Killer (about 23 minutes in high definition,
2019) is an onscreen, English language explanation of giallo films from critic
and author Stephen Thrower who explains that these films became more and more
violent for one simple reason: they want to push the envelope and show the
audience something that they haven’t seen yet in an effort to make more money.
Paint Me Blood Red (about 17 minutes in high definition,
2019) is my favorite extra because it introduces us to one of cinema’s unsung
heroes, movie poster artist Enzo Sciotti. This man has created some of the most
stunning and gorgeous artwork ever created for horror films. His work for Dario
Argento’s Phenomena (1985) beautifully captures the spirit of the film, while
his work for Paganini Horror (1989) is the only redeeming thing about that
film. Spoken in Italian with non-removable and legible English subtitles.
NYC Locations Then and Now (about 4 minutes in high
definition, 2009) compares the filming locations from 1981 to 2009 when the
comparisons were made. This is ported over from the Blue Underground single
disc Blu-ray release from 2009.
Theatrical Trailer
Poster and Still Gallery – while there are many images
presented here, I’m not sure if many of them appeared as lobby cards since they
depict graphic sex and violence. Granted, Europe is more liberal than the US,
and when I walked through Times Square for the first time in May 1980, I was
shocked by the explicit images on display when Friday the 13th was in release.
There is also a beautifully illustrated, 18-page booklet
containing an essay, Fulci Quacks Up: The Unrelenting Grimness of “THE NEW YORK
RIPPERâ€, which accompanies the set.
Disc Two:
This consists of a DVD that includes everything that the
Blu-ray offers.
Disc Three:
This consists of a 29-track compact disc of the film’s
original soundtrack album.
The year 1976 was a phenomenal time for films
that went into production. George Lucas’s space opera, Star Wars began principal photography in March; Steven Spielberg,
fresh off the success of Jaws, was
given carte blanche to bring Close Encounters of the Third Kind to
the screen and began shooting in May; and Dario Argento, who became emboldened
by the financial success of his latest and arguably best film to date, Profundo Rosso (known in the U.S. as Deep Red), embarked upon Suspiria, a murder mystery involving a
dance school hiding in plain sight while housing a coven of witches, which
began filming in July. Horror author Clive Barker once described this supernatural
extravaganza as what you would imagine a horror film to be like if you weren’t allowed
to see it. I believe that this is a good description of what is unquestionably
one of the most frightening, entertaining and colorful horror films ever made. Suspiria was edited for its American
theatrical exhibition due to some graphic violence that many would have
considered shocking for its day. Distributor 20th Century Fox was
reportedly so embarrassed by the film that they created a subsidiary company,
International Classics, to release it three months after their phenomenally
successful Star Wars, another film
they had no faith in.
Suspiria opened in New York
on Friday, August 12, 1977 at the long-gone Criterion on 45th and
Broadway before branching out to additional theaters. It’s the first in a
trilogy concerning the nature of Death (Inferno
(1980) and The Mother of Tears (2007)
are the second and third parts, respectively). The film’s quad-syllabic title
quite understandably leaves those who attempt to say it tongue-tied (it’s
pronounced sus-PEER-ee-ah). The word itself
has its origins in Latin and roughly translates into “sighs†or “whispers†and
the film is based upon the writings of British essayist Thomas De Quincey. His
most famous work, Confessions of an
English Opium Eater, was published in 1822. Twenty-three years later he
published Suspiria de Profundis which
is Latin for “Sighs from the Depths†and is a collection of essays, the most
famous of which is Levana and Our Ladies
of Sorrow which Mr. Argento used as the source material for his
trilogy.
In Suspiria,
Suzy Bannion, played by doe-eyed Jessica Harper (who was Woody Allen’s
girlfriend at the time and passed on Annie
Hall because she wanted to go to Italy), arrives in Frieberg, Germany to
begin dance lessons at the famous Tanz Academie (the architecture is copied
from Haus zum Walfisch in Freiberg). From the film’s opening frames, we already
know that we are in uncharted territory as the images are bathed in diffused
primary colors. Upon her arrival
at the airport, things are already not what they seem. Once she leaves the
premises and the glass doors close behind her, she enters a fairy tale in the
form of an unusually violent thunderstorm. Hitching a ride from a taxi
driver played by Argento regular Fulvio Mingozzi (min-GOATS-see), who worked for the director no less than ten times
in both film and television episodes, she makes her way to the school (as a
side-note, eagle-eyed viewers can see the director’s reflection in the glass
partition in the taxi 3:31 minutes into the film and it lasts for two seconds.
He appears, with a large smile on his face, in the lower left-hand corner of
the screen).
Just as she arrives, a hysterical woman, Pat
Hingle (Eva Axen), appears on the school’s doorstep and makes an unintelligible
proclamation before bolting into the deluge-swept streets. Suzy carps with a
woman on the intercom, pleading for entry and refuge from the torrential rain. When
she’s denied, she re-enters the taxi and rides through the Black Forest,
catching a glimpse of Pat as she runs, attempting to make her way past the
trees. What could possibly have set her off on such a perilous journey?
Pat makes her way to her friend Sonia’s (Susanna Javicoli) apartment,
hesitant to disclose what she has come to learn about the school. In what is
considered Argento’s finest hour and the film’s most disturbing and celebrated
sequence, Pat is violently stabbed by some inhuman creature with hairy arms and
long black fingernails and is thrown through a stained-glass window, the shards
of which also kill Sonia. It’s been compared with the shower scene in Psycho (1960) for pure shock effect,
though this one is much more graphic.
The calm following the storm reveals a
strange faculty staff consisting of lead ballet teacher Ms. Tanner (Alida Valli),
headmistress Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett), pianist Daniel (Flavio Bucci), and
Pavlos (Giuseppe Transocchi) the handyman. Suzy is told by the headmistress
that one of their expelled students, Pat, was murdered by a madman the night
before. Wouldn’t that be enough to send one packing their bags? The same scenario
plays out for Jennifer Connelly in the director’s other macabre coming-of-age
horror film, Phenomena (1985), and the
information in that film is met with nothing more than a smile and silence. Unbeknownst
to Suzy, the school is a front for a coven of witches who hold black masses
within the massive building’s stealthy labyrinths. Her suspicions that all is
not right with the school become confirmed when people around her suddenly disappear
or are killed off. Like previous Argento protagonists, Suzy plays sleuth to
gain insight into the bizarre goings-on, especially the teachers’ concerted
effort to hide the directress’s presence from her. When she teams up with Sarah
(Stefania Casini) to find out more about one Helena Markos, more people begin
to die as Suzy learns of a shocking secret that lies behind an imperceptible
door.
Suspiria’s simple premise
permits Mr. Argento to stage some of the most shocking and elaborate death
sequences of his career, all performed in-camera (that is without the use of
opticals or blue-screen technology used later in post-production). The Italian
progressive rock band Goblin provides a phenomenal score that, unbelievably,
was composed before filming began and was played on the film’s soundstages
during shooting to maximize the effect on the performers. It’s an astonishing
concoction with shrieks, whispers and wails, which I always assumed to be
non-diegetic in nature, acting almost as a macabre precursor to the far more
relaxing Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos that have taken YouTube
by storm.
Mr. Argento has also put together an eclectic
cast, the bulk of whom are women. Joan Bennett, who appeared in Fritz Lang’s coincidentally
titled Secret Beyond the Door… with
Michael Redgrave (1947) as well as her stint on Dark Shadows, provides the proper amount of sinister air that the
film requires. Alida Valli is terrific as Miss Tanner, the “stern and surlyâ€
ballet teacher, arguably the most memorable in the cast. Jessica Harper, fresh
off her role as Phoenix in Brian DePalma’s wildly entertaining Phantom of the Paradise (1974), appears
naïve but turns out to be anything but as she goes to greater-than-usual
lengths to uncover The Big Secret.
Suspiria is unique in that it
was shot on Eastman Kodak film but printed using the now-defunct three-strip
Technicolor dye transfer process which divided the negative into three individual
color bands of red, green, and blue. By manipulating the intensities of these
primary colors both on the set and in the lab, cinematographer Luciano Tovoli
was able to create some truly horrific and stunning images. The set design is
garish, colorful and must be seen to be believed. The
color scheme seems to have been inspired by Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) and dance film aficionados
will likely also think of Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s stunning 1948
technicolor film The Red Shoes and their follow-up, 1951’s The
Tales of Hoffman (George A. Romero’s favorite film), but the story seems inspired
by Chicho
Ibáñez-Serrador’s La Residencia, a terrific horror opus from 1970 which pits the borstal’s
headmistress, Senora Fourneau (played brilliantly by Lilli Palmer), against a
school of young women in need of reform. There is a predatory air about
Fourneau that carries over to Ms. Tanner in Suspiria.
A case might even be made that Ms. Tanner is a psychological cinematic
equivalent of the malevolent and sadistic Mrs. Wakehurst in Peter Walker’s House of Whipcord (1974). La Residencia has appeared under such
titles as The Finishing School, The Boarding School and here in the
States as The House That Screamed when
it was released on a double-bill with Anthony M. Lanza’s The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant in July 1971.
Charlie
Smith (Jack Nicholson) is a bored man. Bored with his position as an immigration
enforcement officer in Los Angeles and bored with his eleven-year marriage to
Marcy (Valerie Perrine) in a Sunland, CA trailer park. When Marcy boasts of a
better life in a shared duplex with chum Savannah (Shannon Wilcox) and her border
patrol husband Cat (Harvey Keitel) in El Paso, TX, Charlie doesn’t exactly
protest the change in geography or transfer in job title. With all their
possessions strapped to the roof of their car, they are welcomed with open arms.
It isn’t long, however, before Charlie realizes not only the danger and utter
futility of attempting to stop the migrants from making a run for los Estados
Unidos regardless of the presence of the tortilla fences topped with barbed
wire. But some of his peers and superiors, particularly his boss Red (Warren
Oats), all have their own methods of dishing out “justice†for wayward
immigrants who don’t cooperate following sweeps.
The
Border is a lesser-known
outing by Jack Nicholson and penned by Deric Washburn of The Deer Hunter
(1978) fame. Mr. Nicholson made the film prior to and following the actors’
strike in the summer of 1980. Following his directing and acting duties in Goin’
South (1978), his yearlong shooting schedule on Stanley Kubrick’s The
Shining (1980), and his turn as Eugene O’Neill in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981)
for which he won an Oscar nomination, Mr. Nicholson was tired and looking for a
break. This need for relaxation seems to have influenced his performance here
as Charlie, a man who always appears to be on the outside looking in and never
connected to the action at hand. Marcy comes off as an obsequious shrill who
strives constantly to make her husband happy but is clueless to his
protestations even after she spends money like water (pun intended) that they
don’t have on things that they don’t need, such as a $1600 waterbed and a small
pool in their new backyard. Her notion of love is adolescent: a bizarre,
picture-perfect domesticity that simply doesn’t exist. Ms. Perrine portrays
Marcy with enthusiasm, and one cannot help but think of Karen Black’s Rayette
Dispesto in Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970) and her fractured
relationship with Bobby Dupea (Jack Nicholson). Charlie is genuinely contrite
after he slaps her for her well-intentioned but misguided consumerism, but he realizes
that his position in upward mobility is almost non-existent. It’s this very
circumstance that propels him to go out of his way to aid a young Spanish woman
named Maria (Elpidia Carrillo) who has made it over the border following the
death of her family at the hands of a massive earthquake. Maria knows heartache
and strife firsthand and wants a better life for her newborn baby and her
teenage brother Juan (Manuel Viescas), the latter of whom is killed following a
drug raid by border patrols who work thankless jobs for piss poor pay and who supplement
their income by being on the take. Cat will later defend his position to
Charlie by referring tacitly to these murders as their need to “take care of
businessâ€, a mantra echoed in cinema following the revelation of the Corleone
Family’s business model in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972)
and its sequels. During the argument scenes between Charlie and Cat, Cat holds
his own and there were times I expected him to fly off the handle like Ben
(Harvey Keitel) does with Alice Hyatt (Ellen Burstyn) in Martin Scorsese’s Alice
Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Suffice it to say, Cat eventually gets
what’s coming to him.
Elpidia
Carrillo is wonderful as Maria, giving a humanity to just about the only Hispanic
person in the film who isn’t depicted as a criminal, a drug smuggler, a human
trafficker, or even a baby kidnapper who turns out to a be a woman! She offers
to pay back Charlie with her body after he gives her money and is genuinely
confused when he declines. The theme of the commoditization of humans is ever-present.
The film’s ending falls flat, obviously the result of a test-screening
audience’s desire for a happy one, however it’s so “ABC Afterschool
Specialâ€-ish with very little emotional impact in a scene that truly should rouse
the audience to its feet, that it negates all that preceded it.
"Lucky Brown" (left) with his friend of many years, Douglas Dunning.
BY TODD GARBARINI
Film
producer, director, and sometime actor Ewing Miles Brown, who was known affectionately to legions of performers and
crew members in the industry as “Lucky†Brown, passed away from respiratory
failure on Monday, May 27, 2019 at the age of 97 according to his personal
friend of forty years, actor and film historian Douglas
Dunning.
After
making his acting debut in bit parts in the Our Gang shorts
(which were later titled The Little Rascals for syndication),
Mr. Brown followed up with a stint as the head editor at Emperor Films and was
personally recruited by film producer and movie theater owner Robert L. Lippert
to head up production. Dissatisfied with working for others, Lucky branched out
on his own in the late 1950’s and started his own motion picture film company
called Movie Tech Studios which he built from the ground up. It
was one of the oldest independent movie studios in the United States which
ceased operations last year just prior to his 97th birthday.
Lucky’s father, in fact, was the eponymous Dr. Brown, who was a personal doctor
to the stars in the 1920’s through the 1940’s. He delivered Howard Hughes!
As
an actor, Lucky’s career was extremely varied and far more extensive than the
truncated list than the Internet Movie Database will lead one to believe. In
1976 he produced and directed A Whale of a Tale, the only
family-oriented film that William Shatner made in his career. The film also
starred Marty Allen and Andy Devine.
Lucky’s
last film credit is in the unfinished production of Terror of the
Gorgon which he directed as well as appears in. Mr. Dunning has stated
that he will finish the film as a tribute to Lucky.
Lucky
was also the last surviving cast member of George Stevens’s Shane (1953). He was a
saddle buddy to Alan Ladd in the cattle drive sequence which ran an hour in
length but was cut shortly after the film was previewed in 1953, reducing the
film’s original three-hour running time to 118 minutes.
Lucky,
a true Hollywood legend, will be sorely missed by those who knew him.
Cinemaretro.com
has received the following press release regarding the exhibition of the new
film Rush: Cinema Strangiato 2019, which will be shown in select
theaters on Wednesday, August 21, 2019.
Rush
(pun intended!) to get your tickets now as they are selling out very quickly
(let’s hope that additional dates are added!):
TRAFALGAR RELEASING AND ANTHEM ENTERTAINMENT BRING
‘RUSH: CINEMA STRANGIATO 2019’
TO MOVIE THEATERS WORLDWIDE ON AUGUST 21
THIS FIRST EVER “ANNUAL EXERCISE IN FAN INDULGENCE†FOR RUSH FANS
WILL FEATURE A SPECIAL LOOK INTO R40 LIVE, FEATURING NEW BACKSTAGE FOOTAGE,
SPECIAL GUESTS, AND HIT SONGS “CLOSER TO THE HEART,†“SUBDIVISIONS†AND MORE
Denver, CO – June 11, 2019: Global
event distributor Trafalgar Releasing today announcedRUSH: Cinema Strangiato 2019, coming to select cinemas across the
globe, for a special, limited theatrical engagement on Wednesday, August 21.
Hailed as the first "Annual Exercise in Fan Indulgence" Cinema Strangiato is set to see the Holy Trinity of
Rock return to the big screen bringing RUSH fans together in movie theatres
worldwide.
In partnership with Concord Music
Group and Anthem Entertainment, RUSH: Cinema Strangiato 2019 will feature a special look inside some of the most powerful performances from R40 LIVE,
the band’s 2015 tour and album of the same name.
The theatrical film experience is
set to include top RUSH songs, such as “Closer to the Heart",
"Subdivisions", "Tom Sawyer" and more, as well as
unreleased backstage moments and candid footage previously left on the cutting
room floor.The release also includes
unseen soundcheck performances of the fan-favorite "Jacob's Ladder,†and
exclusive new interviews with Tom Morello, Billy Corgan, Taylor Hawkins,
producer Nick Raskulinecz, violinist Jonathan Dinklage and more.
As a special bonus, fans will get a glimpse into the
madness and passion that went into the making of Geddy Lee's new book, Geddy
Lee's Big Beautiful Book of Bass - featuring a brand-new interview from the
RUSH frontman himself.
“I’m
excited for fans to see some new clips from our R40 tour but also a peek
behind the scenes of making the Big Beautiful Book of Bass,â€
said Geddy Lee.
The news of RUSH: Cinema Strangiato 2019follows
other recently announced upcoming music releases from Trafalgar Releasing including The Cure: Anniversary 1978-2018 Live
in Hyde Park London directed by longtime collaborator Tim Pope, the first
worldwide outing for the ninth Grateful Dead Annual Meet-up at the Movies,
hit Tribeca Film Festival music documentary Between Me and My Mind
featuring Phish frontman Trey Anastasio, and the latest film from Roger Waters
based on the US + THEM World Tour. Other recent music releases from Trafalgar
Releasing have included The Music Center presents Joni 75: A Birthday
Celebration,
Coldplay:
A Head Full of Dreams, Burn the Stage: the Movie, Muse Drones World Tour and Distant
Sky: Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds Live in Copenhagen.
Kymberli Frueh,
SVP for Acquisitions at Trafalgar Releasing added: "Trafalgar Releasing is
thrilled to bring Rush: Cinema Strangiato 2019 to theaters around the
globe for the first of what we’re hoping will become an annual event, bringing
fans together to experience a celebration of one of the world's most popular
rock bands."
The event will be screened in theaters around the
world on Wednesday, August 21. Fans can visit CinemaStrangiato.com to sign up
for news and ticketing updates.
Cinema Retro has received the following press announcement:
Laemmle’s
Royal Theatre in Los Angeles will be presenting the 45th anniversary
screening of Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown which itself takes place in the City of Angels. The film
will be screened on Thursday, June 27th, 2019 at 7:00 pm. Starring
Jack Nicholson in one of the many classics that he made during that phenomenal
decade, the film co-stars Faye Dunaway, John Houston, John Hillerman, Diane
Ladd, and Bruce Glover. The film runs 131 minutes.
PLEASE NOTE:
The following
cast/crew member(s) are scheduled at press time to appear in person, with the potential
for more to be added to the list, so please check the Royal website link at the
bottom for updates as the screening day draws closer:
Actor
Bruce Glover (Hard Times, Walking Tall, Diamonds Are
Forever, Ghost World)
Assistant
director Hawk Koch
Author
Sam Wasson
From the press
release:
CHINATOWN
Part of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.
CHINATOWN (1974)
45th Anniversary Screening
Cast and Crew Q&A
Thursday, June 27 at 7 PM
Royal Theatre
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present a screening of one
of the most memorable films of the 70s, the neo-noir mystery thriller, Chinatown.
Nominated for 11 Academy Awards in 1974 (including Best Picture, Best Director,
Best Actor Jack Nicholson and Best Actress Faye Dunaway), the film won the
Oscar for the original screenplay by Robert Towne. Although it was set in a
beautifully recreated 1930s universe, the film reflected the bitter cynicism
and disillusionment of the Vietnam and Watergate era.
Towne was a Los Angeles native, and he had long been fascinated by the history
of the city, where the sun-dappled beauty belied the underlying greed and
corruption. The inspiration for the story were the water wars that had shaped
the modern life of the place. These struggles over the city’s natural resources
had taken place in the first decade of the 20th century; Towne moved the
setting up to the 1930s, partly in order to combine this scorching social
commentary with the spirit of classic detective novels penned by authors like
Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Nicholson plays J.J. Gittes, a private eye who specializes in sordid cases of
marital infidelity. But he gets himself into deeper territory when an
investigation into a civic leader’s extramarital affair leads to the discovery
of a massive conspiracy by big business interests to seize control of the
city’s oveted water supply. Gittes’s sleuthing also leads him to uncover
shocking cases of sexual abuse among the city’s elite. Dunaway plays a
variation on the classic femme fatale of noir cinema, a beautiful heiress who
is commanding on the surface but is secretly and tragically damaged by events
in her past. John Huston plays her corrupt father, and the supporting cast
includes John Hillerman, Perry Lopez, Diane Ladd, Burt Young, Bruce Glover, and
James Hong.
Robert Evans, the successful head of Paramount Studios at the time, backed
Towne’s screenplay and decided to make the film his first venture as a
producer. When Evans took over as head of the studio in the 60s, one of his
early successes was an adaptation of Ira Levin’s best-selling novel, Rosemary’s
Baby, which became the first American movie of European director Roman
Polanski. That film was a smash hit, and Evans hired Polanski again to
direct Chinatown. Polanski had been reluctant to work in Hollywood
since the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, by the infamous Manson
family in 1969. But Evans persisted and Polanski brought his knowledge of the
underside of Hollywood to his depiction of the city’s past, even changing the
ending of Towne’s screenplay to reflect his own deep pessimism.
The film’s technical team—including cinematographer John Alonzo, production
designer Richard Sylbert, and costume designer Anthea Sylbert—helped to realize
the writer and director’s vision of decay beneath the elegant surfaces of
Southern California. Jerry Goldsmith’s sultry score, highlighted by a
melancholy trumpet solo, clinched the mournful mood.
Variety praised the achievement: “Roman Polanski’s American-made
film, his first since Rosemary’s Baby, shows him again in total
command of talent and physical filmmaking elements.†Derek Malcolm of the London
Evening Standard wrote, “Polanski’s telling of his tale of corruption
in L.A. is masterly—thrilling, humorous and disturbing at the same time—and
brilliantly played by John Huston and Faye Dunaway as well as Nicholson.†The
film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in
1991.
Our panel to discuss the film will include actor Bruce Glover (Hard Times, Walking
Tall, Diamonds Are Forever); assistant director Hawk Koch (who
went on to produce such films as Heaven Can Wait, The
Idolmaker, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Wayne’s World,
and Primal Fear and later served as president of the Motion
Picture Academy); and author Sam Wasson (who wrote the biography of Bob Fosse
that served as the basis of the highly acclaimed miniseries, Fosse/Verdon,
and is writing a new book on the seminal films of the 70s).
Director: Roman Polanski
Writer: Robert Towne
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston, John Hillerman, Perry Lopez,
Burt Young, Bruce Glover, James Hong, Diane Ladd
The 45th anniversary screening of Chinatown will take
place at the Royal Theatre, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd., Los
Angeles, CA 90025 on Thursday,
June 27th, 2019 at 7:00 pm.
I love Asian cinema. During the 1990’s
I discovered a whole other cinematic world in the form of Hong Kong action
films at some great Chinatown movie theaters in lower Manhattan, such as the
long-gone Rosemary Theater on Canal Street which is now a Buddhist Temple. Even
the Film Forum, with its gloriously narrow and Quasimodo posture-inducing seats,
also sported its fair share of Hong Kong festivals with screenings of Siu-Tung
Ching’s beloved A Chinese Ghost Story
trilogy, the Swordsman trilogy, and
the follow-up to Jonnie To’s Heroic Trio
from 1993. Independent video stores situated in Asian and Indian neighborhoods
also offered up these amazing Eastern adventures on VHS and the low picture
quality and poorly displayed white subtitles mattered little to those of us
enthralled by the action onscreen. I was lucky enough to locate a store that
rented imported laserdiscs with letterboxed versions of these amazing films. No
one, however, can have a serious discussion about this genre without including
the inimitable Jackie Chan, a powerhouse of a stuntman who also acts in and
even directs much of his own work.
Jackie Chan is known in the United
States through only a handful of films, the first being Hal Needham’s 1981
comedy The Cannonball Run and its
1984 follow-up Cannonball Run II. He
garnered greater exposure in 1995 with Rumble
in the Bronx and his comedic team-up with Chris Tucker in the three Rush Hour films that he appeared in between
1998 and 2007, and a fourth is now rumored to be in the works. His Hong
Kong-based work, though highly prolific, is much less available here and this
is a great shame as these films are wildly entertaining and even flat out
hilarious, easily lending themselves to repeat viewing. Getting his start in
the Hong Kong film business following the void left by the untimely death of
the late martial arts expert Bruce Lee, Mr. Chan worked his way through many
roles and its his turn as a police inspector in 1985’s Police Story wherein his stunt work really shines.
Crime lord Chu Tao is released on bail
and threatens to kill Selina, though a double-cross by a dirty Police Inspector
who intends to frame Ka-Kui for murder leads Ka-Kui to take Superintendent Li
hostage, but he is eventually freed. In one of the cinema’s first instances of
blackmail via computer files that I can recall, Selina decides to breach her
former boss’s computer system by downloading incriminating files. As a front,
his office is in a shopping mall, and one of the craziest sequences of shopping
mall carnage following John Landis’s The
Blues Brothers (1980) ensues involving some top-notch stunt work. The
film’s ending is abrupt and gives way to the sequel, Police Story 2 (1988).
When
I was asked to review a film from 1975 called Supercock, I immediately thought that it sounded like a film that
may have starred the late adult film performer John Holmes who was known the
world over for being extraordinarily, if not freakishly, well-endowed. An
Internet Google search turned up Supercock
– the film I was reviewing andanotherone that starred John Holmes, a film I only joked about even
existing! The latter didn’t surprise me in the slightest and I breathed a sigh
of relief that I wasn’t being asked to review that film.
Supercock is a comedic outing concerning the
sport of cockfighting with a humorous script that makes as many sexual
inuendoes as you can imagine, to the point of it being a one-note joke that
occasionally draws guffaws, smiles, and even a few rolling eyes. It was usually
double-billed with the Warren Oates/Monte Hellman vehicle Cockfighter (1974). Shot in the Philippines circa 1974, the film
stars the late Ross Hagen as Seth Calhoun, a Western clothing-wearing hotshot
from the United States boasting about his cock, Friendly (a rooster that performs
in cockfights and has a reputation that precedes him). The dialog is insipid as
evinced by the airport scene as Seth walks through Customs and, when asked if
he has anything else to declare, he responds, “Just my cock,†drawing grins
from female onlookers. This is where he meets a taxi driver who calls himself
G.I. Joe (Tony Lorea) and they make an unlikely pairing as they attempt to take
on the highly lucrative industry of cockfighting, with G.I. Joe taking 5% of
the profits. A competitor, Seeno Nono (Subas Herrero), makes a failed attempt
to ingratiate himself with Seth only to find that the latter isn’t for sale.
Seth challenges Seeno Nono to a cockfight with Friendly against three of his best, well, cocks (you get
the picture). You see, Seth’s cock excels at fighting since he has been trained
in a technique called “affection training.â€
In
an effort to sway Seth, Seeno Nono unleashes one of his weapons, an attractive
Asian (Nancy Kwan) who, in typical B-movie narrative style, is not only young
but completely unattached (just like in real life!). Under his orders, she puts
the moves on Seth and wouldn’tcha know it she begins to develop feelings for him.
Her feelings of conflict don’t sit well with her boss who finally pulls out the
big guns in the form of his henchman who make a mad dash to steal Friendly in a
very funny and frenetic on-foot chase sequence that pits them against G.I. Joe
and Seth. The finale consists of a showdown between Seth and Seeno Nono’s cocks
(gosh, that sounds horrible…).
Supercock, like the 1979 horror film Tourist Trap, inexplicably received a PG
rating but rest assured that this is not
a film for children by any means. If the title draws a blank, it was also known
as: Fowl Play, A Fistful of Feathers, and Superchicken.
This is obviously a low-budget affair so you’re not going into this expecting the
cinematic equivalent of Once Upon a Time
in the West. There is no profanity or sex in the film although there is a
significant amount of violence between the roosters that could easily upset
youngsters should they possess the fortitude to get past the dubbed dialog and
“cock†banter that permeates the first two thirds of the film.
If
you can believe it, there is a novelization of the film. I can hear the words of Isaac Davis
in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979)
wherein he essentially describes the writing of novelizations of movies as another
“contemporary American phenomenon that’s truly moronic.†Supercock appears to be no exception.
Directed
by Gus Trikonis, the man responsible for The
Swinging Barmaids (1975), The Student
Body (1976), Moonshine County Express
(1977), and The Evil (1978) among
many other motion picture and television titles, Supercock is an acquired taste (sorry, another awful pun) and is now
available in a limited edition Blu-ray. It has a very good transfer and while
grainy it’s free of scratches, tears and reel-change cue marks. The extras
include trailers for The Intruder (1975),
The Dismembered (1962), The Satanist (1968), Trailer Trauma, Trailer Trauma 2, and Ninja
Busters (1984). The highlight is a feature-length audio commentary with
grade-B movie director Fred Olen Ray who talks a little bit about the film but
speaks at length about low-budget filmmaking in addition to his experiences in
the industry. A very informative and fun listen, worth the price of admission.
Film historian Douglas Dunning has informed Cinema Retro that Laemmle’s
Playhouse 7 and Ahrya Fine Arts will be presenting the 50th
anniversary screening of Sam Peckinpah’s influential 1969 film The Wild Bunch and special guests are
scheduled to appear at both locations. The film stars William Holden, Ernest
Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmund O’Brien, Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, Jaime Sanchez,
Bo Hopkins, Strother Martin, Albert Decker, Emilio Fernandez, and Alfonso Arau
and runs 145 minutes.
Screening #2 is at
the Ahrya Fine Arts on March 2nd at 7:30 pm. Mr. Stratton is also
scheduled to be on hand. In addition, screenwriter Walon Green is scheduled to
appear. He won an Academy Award in 1971 for directing the documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle. He went on to
write such films as Sorcerer and The Brinks Job for director William
Friedkin and The Border for Tony
Richardson.
Actor L.Q. Jones is
on the list, too. He worked on several other Peckinpah movies, beginning with Ride the High Country, along with Major Dundee, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, and Pat
Garrett and Billy the Kid. He co-starred in Hang ‘Em High, Hell Is For Heroes, and Martin Scorsese’s Casino.
Actor Bo Hopkins is
also scheduled to appear. He co-starred in Peckinpah’s The Getaway and The Killer
Elite, and he also appeared in such films as The Day of the Locust, American
Graffiti, Midnight Express, and The Newton Boys.
From the press
release:
The Wild Bunch
Part
of our Anniversary Classics series. For details, visit: laemmle.com/ac.
THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary
Classics Series celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the iconic and groundbreaking
movies of the '60s, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. This graphically violent
and poetic film exploded the very concept of the traditional Western by
focusing on a brutal group of outlaws trying to survive at the dawn of the 20th
century. Featuring four Oscar-winning actors—William Holden, Ernest Borgnine,
Ben Johnson, and Edmond O’Brien—along with a startling supporting cast, the
film clearly established Peckinpah as one of the top directors of the era.
The director’s classic 1962 Western Ride
the High Country had demonstrated his talent, but he ran into conflicts with
producers on subsequent projects in the '60s. The Wild Bunch marked his
triumphant return to filmmaking. He wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay with
Walon Green, from a story by Green and Roy N. Sickner. It is set in 1913, on
the eve of World War I and in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. A botched
robbery in the opening sequence leads the outlaws to seek refuge in Mexico,
where they continue to be pursued by a group of bounty hunters hired by the
railroad company they have robbed. Robert Ryan, cast as a former friend of
Holden’s character, leads the pursuers.
The supporting cast includes Warren Oates, L.Q. Jones, Jaime Sanchez, Bo
Hopkins, Strother Martin, Albert Decker, Emilio Fernandez, and Alfonso Arau.
Lucien Ballard provided the rich cinematography, and Jerry Fielding wrote the
Oscar-nominated score. But perhaps the most crucial creative collaborator was
editor Lou Lombardo, who worked closely with the director to perfect an
innovative editing style that incorporated quick, almost subliminal cuts
masterfully interspersed with slow motion shots.
The film’s violence was shocking to
many viewers at the time, and some critics denounced the film. Others, however,
saw the violence as reflecting the disruptions in American society, along with
the chaos of the Vietnam War. Life magazine’s Richard Schickel called the film
“one of the most important records of the mood of our times and one of the most
important American films of the era.†The New York Times’ Vincent Canby hailed
the film as “very beautiful and the first truly interesting American-made Westerns
in years.†When cuts that had been made shortly after the film’s release were
finally restored for a 1995 reissue, critics were even more ecstatic. Writing
in The Baltimore Sun, Michael Sragow declared, “What Citizen Kane was to movie
lovers in 1941, The Wild Bunch was to cineastes in 1969.†The film was added to
the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1999.
The
Playhouse 7 is at 673 E Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91101.l
The phone number is (310) 478 – 3836.
The
Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre is located at 8556 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA
90211. The phone number is (310) 478 – 3836.
The
1970’s were a time of much spookiness and speculation in this country. Unidentified
Flying Objects (UFO’s), a publicity-shy Plesiosaur called Nessie steaking out
the Scottish Highlands, Sasquatch “sightingsâ€, ghosts, satanic cults, witchcraft,
and the threat of nuclear catastrophe highlighted the newspapers when Vietnam, Richard
Nixon and Watergate weren’t. Between 1977 and 1982, Leonard Nimoy’s narration
provided the basis for nearly 150 speculative and generally outright creepy
episodes of In Search Of…Similarly-themed
television specials were even categorized by TV Guide as “speculation†in their
genre listings. I even recall a scenario in 1979 that was reported in a local
newspaper concerning the discovery of ribcages and bowls of blood at a nearby
campground. Yikes!
May
1970 saw the release of Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson’s book The Late Great Planet Earth, a
grimly-titled caveat in eschatological terms detailing the end of the world and
destruction to humankind as we know it (it was followed up in 1972 with Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth and in 1982 with The
1980s: Countdown to Armageddon). The genesis of this line of
thinking has its roots in the Holy Bible, specifically the Book of Revelation
which is the final book of the New Testament. What better way to get the word
out than in a major motion picture? The book was optioned for a film in 1976 by
Pacific International Enterprises, known as PIE for short, which was both a
film production and distribution company founded two years earlier by Arthur R.
Debs (it folded in 2001) for
the purpose of releasing “family filmsâ€. How they came to the subject of
Armageddon is anyone’s guess. Between 1976 and 1978, interviews were conducted
with renowned thinkers, scientists and religious folks to get their views and
interpretations of the Bible and the promise of pestilence.
The
film sports the same title as the book and was released in a good number of
neighborhood theatres on Wednesday, January 17, 1979. It opens with a sequence
involving a group of men chasing a Gandalf wannabe up a mountain (in reality,
Vaszquez Rocks in California where Captain James T. Kirk fought the Gorn in the
Star Trek episode “Arena†in 1966) and pushing him to his death. These are
actors, of course, and they look like they might have tried out to be the
apostles in Martin Scorsese’s first attempt to bring The Last Temptation of Christ to the screen via Paramount Pictures on
a minimal budget. Orson Welles appears with a skull meant to represent the fallen
man from thousands of years earlier and sets the film’s tone by explaining how
the ancient Hebrews believed that a prophet was God’s Man and spoke the Words
of God, foretelling, many centuries before, of events to come. The prophet was
killed because he wasn’t accurate one hundred percent of the time and therefore
was deemed a fraud.
The
film talks of the Anti-Christ entering the world of politics – shades of Omen III: The Final Conflict (1983)? There
are many predictions made using stock footage to enunciate impending doom. However
interesting or frightening the claims, the orator’s guessing of the timeline is
vague at best. Something that was
correctly predicted at the time of the film’s shooting was the estimate of the
world population 40 years hence to be roughly 8 billion people. It is closer to
7.5 billion, but not a bad estimate.
Earthquakes,
world famine, floods, killer bees (I recall this threat in 1979 and wondered
how they came about. The film provides the not-so-surprising explanation) were
the stuff of disaster movies in the 1970s. I’m not sure if Planet Earth is a statement of veracity or pure bollocks, but it’s
an interesting examination of prophesies, nonetheless.
The
film has been recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber/Scorpion and the transfer is
exceptional. There are two bonus features. The first is a making-of featurette
that runs fourteen minutes and is comprised of interviews with nearly ten
people behind-the-scenes. Roger Riddell is the film’s producer who discusses
how the movie came into being. Alan Belkin, President of American Cinema, a
division of American Communications Industries, shares his memories of the
film. The rough cut was two hours; the film’s running time is 86 minutes. Composer
Dana Kaproff provides an exceptional score that is one of the film’s
strongpoints (it deserves a soundtrack album release) and he explains his role
as a composer. Tom Doddington, head of Sound and Production, explains how Orson
Welles was a consummate professional, going so far as to record his voiceover
at his house. Thomas Nicely, one of the actors running in the opening sequence,
also weighs in. Lynn McCallon and Anne Goursaud were editors on the film. Jean
Higgins, Head of Production for American Cinema, and David Miller, Head of
Distribution, discuss the film’s marketing.
Bonus
features consist of a selection of trailers: theatrical trailer and TV spot for
The Late Great Planet Earth (1979); Go Tell the Spartans (1978) theatrical
trailer, Charlie Chan and the Curse of
the Dragon Queen TV spot; The Apple
(1980) theatrical trailer; and The
Salamander (1981) theatrical trailer.
