Movie Reviews - 1970s posts

How many '70s movies had title graphics like these? Certainly many of the futuristic dystopian ones. Mouse over: Connery not amused by the future.

WARNING: SPOILERS

We get the tropes of a heist movie—guy gets out of prison, cases a joint, gathers a team, and they pull off the job with efficiency and still come to a bad end—but there’s a distinction: The gang is watched and recorded throughout. Every step of the way. The watchers, though, are different entities who aren’t working together, don’t know from each other, and could care less about the heist. Each is after something else. It’s an in-joke from the Watergate era that speaks to ours. Everything is being recorded and no one sees what it means.

The movie is also shockingly dated: rape and “fag” jokes are peppered throughout.

“The Anderson Tapes” is significant for being the last feature film of Margaret Hamilton, AKA the Wicked Witch of the West, and the first feature film of Christopher Walken, AKA fill in the blank. Plus we get an early turn from pre-“SNL” Garrett Morris as a cop. Oh, and it’s fun. 

Accepting charges
The movie opens with John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery), James Bond to the rest of the world, equating safe-cracking with rape. “I used to blow ’em open and plunge right in,” he says in his slushy Scottish brogue. As he matured, he adds, safe-cracking became more of a seduction. There was more finesse. He seems to be enjoying his monologue.

Turns out it’s on tape. Prisoners, including him (embarrassed by his younger self), are watching it in a group therapy session facilitated by a shrink (Anthony Holland, who had a memorable early M*A*S*H role as a shrink). The footage was taken when he first arrived in prison, and now it’s 10 years later and he’s getting out. Also getting out are the young and the old: The Kid (Walken) and Pop (Stan Gottlieb). The latter reminds me of James Whitmore’s Brooks from “Shawshank Redemption,” saying he was incarcerated in “19 and 32,” and entering a world he can’t fathom nor handle. The former reminds me of no one, since Christopher Walken is already very Christopher Walken—just thinner and fuller-lipped. More jungle cat. When they step out of the bus station (which is being recorded by cops), he shouts, in that Walken manner, “America, man, you know it’s so beautiful I want to eat it!”

Anderson, being Sean Connery, wants to eat something else, and shows up at the swanky pad of the swankier Ingrid Everly (Dyan Cannon). “I haven’t been laid in over 10 years,” he greets her, and she moves her hair aside so he can unzip her dress. Oof. 1970s-era Dyan Cannon does something to me. Post-coital is when Anderson gets the heist idea: Why not rob the entire upper-class apartment complex? Go room to room? Just take? They’re being recorded, too, but by a private detective hired by Werner (Richard Shull) to keep an eye on his mistress. He worries more about the heist of her than of the place.

And so Anderson gathers his team, including The Kid and Pop, as well as Spencer (Dick Anthony Williams), a Black Power activist being watched by the FBI, and Tommy Haskins (Martin Balsam), a fun, swishy antique dealer. It leads to a lot of “fag” jokes but Tommy remains himself and sympathetic throughout. I loved Balsam in this. The operation is being bankrolled by mob boss Pat Angelo (Alan King), who is being watched by the IRS. He owes Anderson a favor but demands one in return: take along Rocco “Socks” Parelli (Val Avery) and kill him. He’s a liability to the mob and becomes one for Anderson.

The apartment complex is fill of characters: a spinster couple, one afraid, one gungho; a fussy shrink (Conrad Bain); an upper-class “I want to speak to the manager” couple. It’s that couple’s son, Jerry (Scott Jacoby of “Bad Ronald” fame), that undoes the gang. An asthmatic paraplegic, they don’t bother to tie him up but leave him alone in his room. Behind cupboards he has an extensive ham radio setup and calls for help. I like the circuitous way it arrives. Someone in the Midwest, like in Kansas, hears him, and phones NYPD to let them know about the robbery in progress, but nobody at NYPD wants to accept the charges. The Kansas dude winds up picking them up. Basically every enforcement outfit is doing the minimum—recording everything and seeing nothing—while the crooks are pros but still lose. They all wind up dead.

Would’ve been great if the only one who survived was “Socks,” but Anderson takes him out. The survivor is Pop, who is more than grateful to return to prison. It’s a world he understands.

And introducing...

Prefiguring
“The Anderson Tapes” was filmed on location in New York City in August 1970 and opened the following June—a year before the Watergate break-in. So all this stuff, bugging, etc., was in the zeitgeist then. It was known. We didn’t need G. Gordon Liddy to show us the way. One imagines movies like this helped the public understand Watergate once it broke.

Based on a 1970 novel by Lawrence Sanders, it was written by Frank Pierson and directed by Sidney Lumet just before his his great run: “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” (with Pierson), and “Network.” Lumet is known for the Pacino movies but actually had a longer affiliation with Connery. Five films in all: “The Hill” (1964), this, “The Offence” (1973), “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and, last but last, “Family Business” (1989).

This one is short: 99 minutes. It did the show biz thing of leaving me wanting more. It’s got a great early ’70s vibe: the city, the culture, filmmaking—including yes, the problematic parts. Despite stars, it’s gritty and chaotic and unfolds like life. It’s New York, man, so beautiful you want to eat it.

Just realized that the overall message of the film—government agencies spying and not connecting the dots—prefigured 9/11 by 30 years. So the movie prefigures both Watergate and 9/11. All the national tragedies. I should watch it again to see how it prefigures Trump.

Oof.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I saw “Silver Streak” when it was first released in 1976—actually spring 1977, since I saw it at the second-run Boulevard Theater in South Minneapolis—and I remember liking it but wondering when Richard Pryor would show up. Wasn’t he the co-star? It takes like an hour. 

I watched it again with my wife after we’d watched “Remembering Gene Wilder.” Beforehand, I was incensed that it had such a low IMDb score: 6.8? C’mon, kids! Turns out, that’s not just generational. My wife thinks that’s about right. Parts of the movie are painful.

I’m not talking Gene Wilder in blackface, by the way—that’s one of the few instances in Hollywood history (maybe the only one?) where blackface works. No, I’m talking the ’70s swinger vibe. I remembered Ned Beatty coming onto Clayburgh and getting comedically rebuffed with a drink to the pants, but I’d forgotten that Clayburgh then comes onto Wilder in a similar manner and everyone’s cool with it. Because she’s female and good-looking, and Ned Beatty isn’t and isn’t. The problem with Beatty’s character, it’s implied, is that he just doesn’t know his place.

Thankfully people begin getting murdered.

WGA nom
I still disagree with the rating; I’d go mid 7s. I don’t know if anyone can be as funny as Wilder repeatedly getting thrown off a train—that exasperated, clumsy, expletive-laden stomping. Meanwhile, Pryor is at that stage of his career when he seems incapable of not acting the truth. When they’re taken to the police station after the third fall from the train (Wilder’s third, his first), Pryor, rather than turn left into the station, keeps walking straight. He has to be redirected by the cop. No way that’s in the script. It’ s a nothing moment but I love such nothing moments. He’s so obviously inside the head of his character.

Why are their lines funny and Clayburgh’s aren’t? They improvised. Pryor would go off-script, Wilder would follow in a funny, believable manner, and then Pryor would riff off that. For their good work, screenwriter Colin Higgins got nominated for a WGA. He wound up having a nice run in the director’s chair, too: “Foul Play,” “9 to 5” and “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.’ Hit, hit, don’t let the door hit your ass.

So George Caldwell (Wilder) is a book publisher taking the Silver Streak from LA to Chicago for a book convention. Is he afraid of flying? “I just want to be bored,” he says with that sweet Gene Wilder smile. 

On board, George meets vitamin salesman Bob Sweet (Beatty), who tells him “the action” on trains is great: “All that motion makes a girl horny,” he says with a horndog smile. It’s supposed to be awful but he’s not wrong here. Hilly Burns (Clayburgh, with a name amalgamated from the leads in “The Front Page”) certainly isn’t shy with George. It helps that they have adjoining rooms with a door that doesn’t quite latch.

But just when skyrockets are in flight, he sees a dead body out the train window—there and gone in a flash. Hilly tries to dismiss it. Probably an old newspaper, she tells him. You just imagined it, she tells him. Is she trying to calm him or just get back to sex? Next morning, as he’s leafing through a book in her bag, like the good publisher he is, he sees the author photo—her boss, Prof. Schreiner (Stefan Gierasch)—and realizes the dead body was him. Is she worried now? “Why don’t you go down the hall and discuss it with him,” she mumbles before turning over. Apparently we’re at that stage when women in film can be sexually aggressive but zero help otherwise.

In the professor’s compartment, no professor, just goons turning the place upside-down. They’re led by Ray Walston as a Runyonesque gangster with perpetually dangling cigarette, who sics Reace (Richard Kiel), a giant enforcer, on George. I like how disbelieving George is as he’s being manhandled and thrown off the train. This is not a thing people do! He winds up walking the tracks until he spots a farmhouse run by Rita Babtree (Lucille Benson), who keeps calling him “Steve” and gets him to milk her cow for her. “Cut the gas, Steve, you’re a grown man, I'm sure you’ve had some similar experience.” Then she takes him into the nearest town by biplane. Benson is great—one of the many fun supporting actors in this thing. And because they actually beat the Silver Streak to the next town, George jumps back on without talking to the cops.

Rushing to Hilly’s compartment, he finds her with supersuave art dealer Roger Devereau (Patrick McGoohan). No, first, he finds her alone, and they argue. Over whether the professor is actually dead. The awful thing? She knows, yet she still gaslights him. To protect him? No, to protect herself. Later she says this:

They told me they’d killed the professor and that, unless I cooperated, they’d kill me, too. And I thought that I’d go along with them and then you’d get away.

Great plan, lady. 

It's Bob Sweet who lets him know he isn’t crazy. Because Sweet isn’t Sweet; he’s Stevens, a federal agent, who’s been tailing Devereau for two and a half years. (So is the horndog personality his cover or his true personality?) The maguffin of it all is pretty funny. The professor’s “Rembrandt Letters” would reveal that paintings the Art Institute purchased on Devereau’s advice were phonies, which is why the professor was killed. Plus Devereau killed 10 in Germany a few years back for similar reasons. The funny thing: I could never tell if Devereau was guilty of fraud or incompetence. The former makes more sense but I love the idea of the latter. He’s an art dealer who has bad taste and kills anyone who realizes it. 

Investigating, Stevens gets it and George is chased onto the train roof, where he kills Reace with a spear gun, stands, and, bango, is knocked off the train a second time. (It’s the shot from the opening credits of Lee Majors’ “The Fall Guy.”) The good news is he finally finds a sheriff. The bad news is it’s Clifton James, who played dipshit southern sheriffs throughout the decade—from “Live and Let Die” to “Superman II.” An APB has gone out on George for murder, so the Sheriff pulls a gun on him. George takes it back and steals a police car. And out of the backseat, emerges—finally!—Richard Pryor.

Grover Muldoon is a car thief who doesn’t mess with “the big M,” for which George is wanted. But then in another nothing moment, Grover looks at him, really checks him out, and figures he’s harmless. Again, that’s all Pryor.

The blackface scene is brilliant. They need to get back on the train, George’s face is all over the newspapers, so how? It’s Grover who figures it out.

George: I can’t pass for black!
Grover: Who you telling? I didn’t say I was gonna make you black. I said I was gonna get you on the train. We got to make them cops think you’re black.

So shoe polish, a derby, a transistor radio for the ear, and Grover’s purple, shiny “82nd Airborne Division” jacket. The jewfro helps. 

The best part is when he gets into it—when he tries to walk and talk black—it’s just so beautifully unrhythmic and wrong. Think Elaine Benes’ party dance. Tons of white guys tried their “black walk” in the ’70s, including me, based on nothing more than Richard Roundtree in “Shaft” or Huggy Bear on “Starsky and Hutch”; and this is that but so hapless that no white guy should’ve tried it afterwards. (We did.) When Wilder says he doesn't see them getting past the cops, Pryor responds, “We’ll make it past the cops. I just hope we don’t see no Muslims.”

Back on the train, we get the confrontation scene with the villain where he details his plans like in a James Bond movie; it’s Grover, dressed as a waiter, who rescues them. Then another shoot-out, with Pryor and Wilder leaping from the train and into a river. They’re pulled out by the cops—but the feds know what’s going down. Indeed, George is chastised for not figuring out that the APB was a way to bring him in. Which: 1) he’s a book publisher, leave him alone, 2) the newspaper headlines could’ve gotten him killed, and 3) his name is forever besmirched. 

I think he might have a lawsuit.

Outwitting businessmen
Why does Devereau keep fighting after the train is stopped by the feds? His goose is cooked. But I guess that’s what villains do. And why does he have the emergency cords cut? Never got that. But it sets up our big finale—a huge selling point when the movie was released in 1976: a train crashing through Union Station in Chicago. Why doesn’t the train keep going even after the crash? Never got that, either. Did the toolbox get knocked off the gas pedal? Or doesn’t it work if the train isn’t on the tracks? At least it sets up another fun cameo: pre-“Fernwood Tonight” Fred Willard as incompetent middleman who insists a runaway train just isn’t possible.

“Silver Streak” was the fourth-biggest box-office hit of 1976. When Wilder/Pryor reteamed for “Stir Crazy” in 1980, it was the third-biggest box-office hit of the year. Why didn’t they keep going? Make as many as Hope/Crosby? Who knows? Schedules, plans. Pryor was on the way up, Wilder on the way down. Plus tragedies for both: Pryor burned his entire body during a freebasing accident in 1980 and was diagnosed with MS in 1986; Wilder acted as caretaker to his wife, Gilda Radner, who died of cancer before the decade was over. The two men reunited twice more, in 1989 and 1991, but it wasn’t the same. The cultural distance between 1976 and 1989 is forever.

But this is the kind of thing I grew up on, a Jew and a Black guy outwitting a corrupt WASP businessman, and I’d like more of it, please. Doesn’t have to be Blacks and Jews, could be whatever, as long as they’re outwitting corrupt businessmen. We deserve it in the movies since we don’t get it much in life.

April 1977

WARNING: SPOILERS

The way Warren Beatty looks on the poster and throughout half the film—that gray track suit and zipper hoodie—may be the first movie “look” I actively pursued for myself. I thought, “That looks good, I could look good in that.” No. Just 15, with a concave chest and narrow shoulders, the track suit I bought was thick and cumbersome and bulged in all the wrong places. I was practically swaddled in it. I looked less Warren Beatty and more Michelin Man.

Back then, I remember my father trying to tell me the movie’s lineage but merely confusing me. It’s a remake of a 1940s film, he said, but not the one called “Heaven Can Wait” (1943), an Ernst Lubitsch comedy about a man reviewing his life in Hades. No, it’s actually a remake of “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” (1941), about boxer Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery), plucked from life 50 years before his time. Turns out it’s even more confusing than Dad knew. “Mr. Jordan” was based upon a play, “Wonderful Journey” by Harry Segall. Segall’s original title? “Heaven Can Wait.”

Initially, Beatty, the producer, wanted Muhammad Ali to star. At one time, he wanted Cary Grant to return from retirement to play Mr. Jordan. He sought Arthur Penn, or Mike Nichols, or Peter Bogdanovich to direct. He didn’t get any of his wishes.

Instead, he just made a great movie.

March 20, 2025
“Heaven Can Wait” is poignant without dragging you down, a love story without hardly seeming to try, plus a not-bad sports movie—football rather than boxing, because Beatty was more footballer than boxer. A box-office hit, it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including four for Beatty: producer, actor, director, screenplay. It won zero. For some reason, current IMDb users give it a 6.9 rating. Fucking kids.

Is this really Beatty’s first directing credit? Part of me thinks Beatty was always directing. But yes, it is. He’s co-director with Buck Henry. Equally shocking, he directed only five feature films in his entire career:

1. “Heaven Can Wait” (1978)
2. “Reds” (1981)
3. “Dick Tracy (1990)
4. “Bulworth” (1998)
5. “Rules Don’t Apply” (2016)

Joe Pendleton (Beatty) is a Los Angeles Rams quarterback on the wrong side of 30 trying to make a comeback via perpetual fitness and a very 1970s So Cal diet of liver and whey. It’s working. “He’s looking awful good” the various coaches say on the sidelines as Joe airs out another pass. One of those coaches, Max Corkle (Jack Warden), is already on his side, and eventually the others come around. Max gives him the good news: The following Sunday he’ll start for the Rams rather than Tom Jarrett. Joe receives the news more worried than happy and goes for another bikeride in preparation. We see him ride into a tunnel and a reckless driver revving it from the other side. Joe doesn’t come out.

Cut to: puffs of clouds, a whimsical score from Dave Grusin (also nom’ed), and Buck Henry leading the track-suited and thoroughly confused Joe toward an airplane to take him (one assumes) to heaven. Joe ain’t having it. He’s starting on Sunday. The manager, Mr. Jordan (James Mason—a helluva backup to Cary Grant), comes over, and amid the back and forth, including Joe doing pushups in the clouds, asks when Joe Pendleton is due to arrive. He’s told: March 20, 2025, 10:17 a.m. The Escort, a newbie, thought the crash looked brutal, wanted to spare him pain, and removed him prematurely. “So just put me back,” Joe says.

Too late. He’s been cremated.

Now it’s a matter of finding a new body for him. And not just any body—one that can play quarterback. Who do they see? 1) A tightrope walker, 2) a German racecar driver, and 3) a millionaire industrialist, Leo Farnsworth, whose wife Julia and right-hand man Tony (Dyan Cannon, with Farrah hair, and Charles Grodin, impeccable), have just poisoned him in his bathtub. Nah, Joe says. Then Betty Logan (Julie Christie) shows up, trying to save the township of Pagglesham, England, where her father lives, and where Farnsworth Industries is threatening everyone’s health. 

Joe: Somebody oughta help her.
Mr. Jordan: You can help her, Joe. You can be Leo Farnsworth.

(I can’t help but hear James Mason’s voice with that line.)

So he agrees—conditionally, temporarily—and Leo’s reappearance causes the wife to scream, and the right-hand man to wonder what games he’s playing as, over the days, his wheeler-dealer boss asks questions that a Business 101 student would be embarrassed to ask. (Ex.: “What’s a stockholder?”) More than pursuing Betty, Joe/Leo, who looks to us like Joe but to everyone else like Leo, tries to get his body in shape so he can quarterback for the Rams. Yes, that dream doesn’t die. When he can’t get a tryout with the team, he buys it for 10 times its value—and a fraction of its current value. And in one of the movie’s most poignant scenes, Joe/Leo brings Max to the estate and convinces him that he really is Joe Pendleton: He fixes his neck as Joe always did, he tells him secrets only Joe knew, and he repeats the line Joe heard Max say at Joe’s gravesite: “They don't have a football team in heaven, so God couldn't make me first-string.”

Did Jack Warden play everyone’s older pal/mentor in the 1970s? Feels like it, but I guess it’s mostly this and “All the President’s Men.” He got nom’ed for this as well as Beatty’s previous film, “Shampoo.” I would’ve given him the nom here just for his reaction shot when Joe says the above line. Beautiful. 

There’s also a love story, seeming effortless, and Julia and Tony are still trying to kill Leo, and eventually succeed. At which point Joe pops up wearing the track suit again and carrying his clarinet. So whose body does Joe get now? Tom Jarrett’s. During the big game, Jarrett goes down and would’ve died; instead, Joe takes his place and leads the Rams to a Super Bowl victory. And then he gets the girl. Well, someone does.

Dazed and distracted
You see, the powers that be, Mr. Jordan, et al., take away his memory of ever being Joe Pendleton. I guess you could say Joe’s essence winds up in Jarrett’s body and with Jarrett’s life history. He thinks he’s Tom Jarrett, but there’s something in his eyes that reminds Betty of Leo Farnsworth—who was, of course, Joe Pendleton. She sees the Leo/Joe in him. It’s a bit of a cheat but I suppose it says something about the eternal aspect of love—if one buys into that kind of thing. 

Anyway, it’s lovely. And smart. Beatty has never gotten enough credit for casting smart actresses in smart roles opposite him, while he always played dumb. The women opposite him were the ones who knew the way the world worked: Faye Dunaway, Julie Christie, Annette Benning, Halle Berry. Compare this with, say, Robert Redford forever showing women the ropes. As a producer, Beatty is a feminist, but since he also loved schtupping them he’s not viewed this way.

As an actor, Beatty’s got a nice light comedic touch. He gives a great line reading on “I’m not really Leo Farnsworth!” with that slight snort. As usual, he plays dazed and distracted throughout. The true revelation for me this time is Charles Grodin. Every line, every look, is funny. How he turns an underling cuckolding and murdering his boss into comedy gold needs studying.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is this the first in-your-face Minnesota accent in a movie? The kind the Coens would make famous, or infamous, with “Fargo”?

More, the guys who sound Minnesotan are the Hanson brothers, bespectacled enforcers on the ice, the opposite of Minnesota Nice, who help a moribund franchise, the Charlestown Chiefs, become relevant again. They help them win games, fans come out, and at one point we hear the following conversation: 

Woman #1: Aren’t those Hansons something?
Woman #2: Aren’t they, though?
Woman #1: They’re sort of funny looking.
Woman #2: Real funny looking.

No way the Coens didn’t see this growing up.

Bad News Chiefs
“Slap Shot” would make a great double-bill not only with “Fargo” but with the original “Bad News Bears,” which was released about a year earlier: April 1976 rather than Feb. 1977.

There, a disinterested coach takes over a moribund little league club that can’t win a game, but the losing, and the damage it’s doing to the kids, eventually gets to him. So he hires some ringers and does what he can to win. They make it to the championship game, where, halfway through, he realizes what an asshole he’s become and puts in all the lesser players he’s held back; they wind up losing, but poignantly. The ending is joyous.

Here, player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) slowly realizes that when the steel mill in Charlestown closes, the moribund Chiefs aren’t long for this world. He also realizes that the weird nerdy guys the team has hired at a discount, the bespectacled Hanson brothers (Jeff Carlson, Steve Carlson and David Hanson), are ringers who bloody noses and win hockey games. And that becomes Reggie’s mantra. The team becomes nasty and brutish, and they make it all the way to the championship game. Except beforehand, Reggie talks to the owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker), who thanks him for making her franchise profitable, but she’s still going to fold the team. Because she can make more money with the Chiefs as a tax write-off than as a championship franchise. So now Reggie decides to go out the right way, and that becomes the mantra. And in the first period they get clobbered. So second period, they come out bloodying noses. Which is when the team’s moral authority, Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), decides to sell sex rather than violence: He does a striptease on the ice, which so disgusts one member of the opposition that he punches the ref. Meaning that team forfeits and the Chiefs win! Plus Reggie gets hired by the Minnesota hockey club! Happy ending!

It's basically the same storyline except for when the coach sees the light and what happens afterward.

“Bad News Bears” is better to me—more poignant—because it’s one of those “we lose but really we win” movies. In “Slap Shot,” the team wins via technicalities, and Reggie wins via another technicality: an 11th-hour job offer in Minnesota.

But it’s still fun. The shocker? This violent, profane film was written by a woman, Nancy Dowd. She grew up in New England, and her brother played hockey for one of these leagues, and she put it all down. “I used the exact same language that the players do,” she told The New York Times in 1977, adding:

“The world has a weird view of women. People seem to believe that we have to write about divorce or suicide or children—so‐called ‘women's topics.’ But we've been around. … You know, when the script first went out in Hollywood. there was talk around town that ‘Nancy Dowd’ was really a man using a pseudonym.”

Shame she didn’t do more. She went uncredited on “Straight Time,” “North Dallas Forty,” “Ordinary People,” “Cloak & Dagger,” and “White Nights.” She got credits for this, “FTA,” “Swing Shift” “and “Let It Ride.” She won an Oscar for “Coming Home,” which was based on her years as an antiwar protester and living in military-base towns, but she hated how they mangled her original script. “It’s message seemed to be that doves are better than hawks in bed,” she apparently said. “And it was pious as well as sentimental.” 

Redford, Newman, Chase
Newman is great here but the part is definitely not tailored for him. At one point a woman tells him, “You look a thousand years old,” which makes you wonder how the rest of us look. Plus, let’s face it, he doesn’t have the legs of a hockey player. But he makes do. He acts. It’s the kind of role Newman seemed to prize: a dude who wasn’t particularly educated but with some smarts, and some persistence, fighting a battle against the powers that be. Cool seeing Strother Martin, Newman’s bête noire in “Cool Hand Luke,” as the hapless, dead-weight manager of the Chiefs.

“Slap Shot” was directed by George Roy Hill, who directed Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy” and “The Sting,” then directed Redford in “The Great Waldo Pepper” and Newman in this. Not a bad run. The ’80s were less kind. After completely reversing course two years later with “A Little Romance,” he had the impossible task of converting John Irving’s “The World According to Garp” onto the big screen, then did a Diane Keaton-led Mossad movie. Four years later, he directed Chevy Chase in “Funny Farm.” He deserved a better end than that. We all do.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In 1976’s “Silver Streak,” written by Colin Higgins, we spend more than an hour waiting for the new hot comic—Richard Pryor—to show up. When he does, we go, “About time!”

In 1978’s “Foul Play,” written and directed by Colin Higgins, we spend more than spend 40 minutes waiting for the new hot comic—Chevy Chase—to show up after a brief, bumbling appearance before the opening credits. When he does, we go, “Uh ... I guess?”

Keeping the big new comedy name at arm’s length, and then springing him on us as if he were Spielberg’s shark, probably wasn’t a theme for Higgins. Just happenstance. Both movies are about innocents (Gene Wilder, Goldie Hawn) caught in someone else’s murderous plot; both comedians are the second-half helpmates. The movies are Hitchcockian homages but this one is underlined. Is that why Higgins began to direct? He felt Arthur Hiller in “Silver Streak” didn’t nail those moments?

Sick transit
This was Chevy Chase’s first movie after leaving “Saturday Night Live,” so I remember it being a big cultural deal: the first Hollywood movie from the first breakaway star of the new big sketch-comedy show. Sadly, my father’s synopsis was echoed by a lot of critics 

Even at age 15 I felt this, but then I didn’t get the game then. I thought “SNL” lampooned the culture because they had better ideas, and once it was their turn, boy, they’d really show everyone. Instead, they became part of the same hypocrisy.

Dad had a whole host of problems with “Foul Play,” I remember. About two-thirds of the way in, the San Francisco cops finally believe Gloria Mundy (Goldie Hawn) that men are trying to kill her because they find evidence of an imminent assassination plot. But who will be assassinated? The cops scratch their heads over this for minutes of screentime. Meanwhile, on a TV in the background, we see that the Pope arriving in San Francisco.

Even after they figure out the Pope is the target—because some radicals have a post-Sixties disappointment in the wealth of religions, or some such—and the venue is the San Francisco Opera House’s performance of “The Mikado,” starting right now, they can’t just pick up a phone and say “Get the Pope out of there!” Chevy and Goldie have to spend, what, 20 minutes of screentime careening through the hills of San Francisco in three different vehicles, while mocking rural America (the “Far out!” dude) and Japanese tourists (“Kojak! Bang bang!”)? It's kind of interminable.

But it was fun revisiting this, because it reminded of all I didn’t know at age 15. Among the remembered revelations:

• I didn’t know who/what the Pope was, and why he was important
• I didn’t know from albinos

Gloria Mundy (god, that name!) is a recently divorced librarian whose friends are giving her polar-opposite advice. One says you need to get back in the game, girl, take chances, while the other, her colleague, Stella (Marilyn Sokol), constantly warns her about being raped. She suggests carrying mace and brass knuckles.

Gloria winds up listening to the former first. Driving home along the California coast from an afternoon party—with Barry Manilow’s “Ready to Take a Chance Again” playing over the opening credits—she decides the way back into the game is to pick up a hitchhiker standing next to a fizzling car. His name is Scotty (Bruce Solomon), and he seems distracted. He’s less interested in the absolutely adorable blonde who picked him up than in the car that seems to be ominously tailing them. Back in town they agree to meet that night at an arthouse cinema showing an old Alan Ladd picture (the non-existent “Killers Walk Among Us”), but not before he leaves his cigarette pack, with some crucial film, in her purse.

Then he doesn’t show. So she goes in alone. Then he shows up mid-movie and bleeds all over the popcorn before collapsing. She screams and runs to get the manager. They stop the film, turn up the lights, and … nothing. No body. No blood on the popcorn. Nothing. No one believes her. No one saw other men hustling the body out.

Let's pause for a second. Later we find out Scotty was an undercover cop, so … why, when they first get in town, doesn’t he get dropped off at the precinct? Or when he gets mortally wounded—shouldn’t he find a cop? Or a hospital? No, remember the cute blonde who suggested a movie date? Much better! Oh, and don’t tell her all you know, like “Hey, they’re going to kill the Pope!” No, be elliptical. Just say: “Beware of the Dwarf!”

Anyway, now the bad guys are after her—and she doesn’t know why. The film in the cigarette pack, by the way, is a true Hitchcockian maguffin. It never factors in. It winds up in a fireplace and no one ever sees it. It only serves to get Gloria in trouble.

The next day at work, she’s told a dwarf came by to see her while she was at lunch. Cue ominous music. For some reason, she still closes up, which is when she encounters not a dwarf but an albino! Who is trying to kill her! Escaping to a nearby singles bar, she asks a hapless man (Dudley Moore, making his Hollywood movie debut) to take her home. He does. Throughout, of course, he keeps getting the wrong idea. She says things that indicate sex, but in a tone that indicates not, and he keeps ignoring the tone. His pad is also a fount of sad ’70s sexual kitsch. Thankfully, she doesn’t have to escape from him. She just has to look at him, stripped to his undies, binocs around his neck, while a porno plays on the wall, and say, “What are you doing?” and he’s properly shamed. Hey, guess what? She encounters him again in a massage parlor! And then again when he's conducting the San Francisco Opera! So wait, shouldn't he have a better apartment then? Isn't that a prestige gig?

Anyway, like this for a while. Her building manager is the kindly Mr. Hennessey (Burgess Meredith) who knows karate. A dwarf shows up (Billy Barty) and she attacks him and sends him to the hospital—even though he’s just a Bible salesman. Turns out Scotty’s message is even more elliptical than we thought: “The Dwarf” isn’t a little person at all but the nickname of an assassin with the improbable name of Stiltskin (Marc Lawrence). He’s working with a clown college of bad guys, including the twin brother of the archbishop we see killed in the cold open (Eugene Roche), and his housekeeper, the severely German Gerda Casswell (Rachel Roberts), who, with the Albino (William Frankfather), is leading the charge. 

Detective Tony Carlson (Chase) eventually figures all this out after many glib remarks while bedding the woman he’s charged with protecting. Chase’s shtick has aged poorly. Lines like this, which had a cutting-edge insouciance back then, come off differently now:

Listen, it’s Gloria, right? You're a really nice girl and I'm a nice guy, and you're very pretty with or without cleavage. And what do you say … would you like to take a shower?

Or this:

Tony: I play Detective. You play Lady in Distress.
Gloria: Hey, wait a minute. It’s my ass they're after!
Tony: I’m sorry. You're right. That was a stupid, glib, chauvinist remark and I apologize. It is your ass they're after. And it's my job to see to it that …  I get there first.

Hyuk.

Old times
The movie caused controversy, I believe, with the albino community, and maybe the little person community. Did Japanese tourists complain? Or hicks who say “Far out!” too much? They all had cause.

But the movie did well at the box office, and Chase and Hawn teamed up again two years later with “Seems Like Old Times.” That one did less well. Both had bigger hits that same year: “Caddyshack” for him, “Private Benjamin” for her. Writer-director Colin Higgins also hit it big with “9 to 5.” Then he did “Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” which tanked. He died young, sadly. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

Is there a more incongruous moment in a guy’s-guy WWII movie than the opening to this one?

It’s a rain-soaked night in Nazi-occupied Europe and we’re witnessing a traffic jam as officials search and question cars trying to get through. Our titular hero, Pvt. Kelly (Clint Eastwood), sits in a Jeep, seeming to hold a German officer hostage. An official with some authority comes by, barking orders, sees Kelly, does a doubletake, and starts shouting in German. That’s when Kelly guns the engines, crashes through a barrier, and as the chase begins, on the soundtrack, we get a military drumroll that shifts, subtly, quickly, and absurdly, into the worst kind of 1970 fluff-rock imaginable—a song called “Burning Bridges” by Mike Curb Congregation. Imagine if the Brady Kids were overtly Christian. Imagine if Up With People wrote their own songs.

Friends all tried to warn me but I held my head up high
All the time they warned me but I only passed them by
They all tried to tell me but I guess I didn't care
I turned my back and left them standing there

In subsequent verses a friend tries to find the dude a job, a girl throws him a party, and years pass before he realizes “I guess I should have listened to my friends.” Reminder: This is playing over scenes in Nazi-occupied France. In a Clint Eastwood movie! With Telly Savalas!

And they repeat it. Good god. The song is reprised halfway through and over the closing credits. You know that look Clint Eastwood gives other characters in movies—like he can’t believe this idiot is still talking? That.

Hockey puck
A lot changed in this movie during its inception. The movie’s original title was “The Warriors” and its original director Don Siegel. It originally had an overt anti-war, or anti-Army, or anti-corporate message—part of the appeal to Eastwood, believe it or not, who never thought much of his time in the service. Plus its studio, MGM, changed hands two times during its making. Per Richard Schickel’s excellent Eastwood bio:

The picture had been green-lighted by a management team headed by Robert O’Brien. But then control of the studio’s parent company, Loewe’s Inc., was acquired by Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Seagrams, whose new managers tried to turn this into a backlot picture. … By the time they were in active production, controlling interest in the studio had been acquired by Kirk Kirkorian, the corporate raider, who installed James Aubrey as head of production.

Meaning the people in charge at the end didn’t have a stake in the final product. Which might explain Mike Curb Congregation.

It’s still a liked movie. Among the movies Brian G. Hutton directed, it’s tied with an earlier Eastwood flick, “Where Eagles Dare,” for highest IMDb user rating: 7.6. Nothing else Hutton directed is above 7.0. (Neither of those Eastwood flicks deserves that high a rating, btw.)

I certainly like the idea of combining a war flick with a heist flick; and it’s a helluva cast— particularly for someone like me who came of age in the 1970s. This might’ve been my explanation of the movie back then:

Near the end of WWII, Dirty Harry finds out there’s a ton of gold in a bank across enemy lines, so he convinces Kojak and the hockey puck guy from Dean Martin roasts to use the Army to get it—and without the knowledge of Gen. Archie Bunker. But the movie version of Hawkeye Pierce overhears, and he’s a tank guy, which they’ll need, and he brings along his right-hand man—Murray Slaughter from “Mary Tyler Moore.” Oh, the “Love American Style” guy is in for the ride, too.

Add Lt. Escobar from “Chinatown,” Uncle Leo from “Seinfeld,” James Dean’s brother from “East of Eden,” and Harry Dean Stanton, and you’ve got yourself a party.

It takes a while to get that party going, but once they’re moving it’s not bad—though, to be honest, Eastwood doesn’t have much to do. You know who pops? Telly Savalas and Don Rickles. They should’ve done nothing but war movies (or heist movies) for the rest of the ’70s. Rickles is the supply sergeant—perfect—while Savalas is the Master Sergeant who doesn’t want to endanger the men. Savalas had a thing. You believe him in the role.

You know who I didn’t believe? Donald Sutherland’s Sgt. Oddball. Per IMDb trivia, the movie has a ton of verisimilitude: this gun is accurate, that tank maybe, they’re part of the 35th Infantry in Sept. 1944 near Nancy, France, which is exactly where the 35th Infantry was in Sept. 1944. And then they give us this hippy with long hair and a beard who talks about negative vibes and calls everyone “baby.” What the hell? And what accent is Sutherland doing anyway?

The enemy is less Nazis than the U.S. military high command. We know Kelly was a lieutenant who was scapegoated and busted back to private, and we know the 35th is led by the nephew to Gen. Colt (Carroll O’Connor), a guy named Capt. Maitland (Hal Buckley), who is spending his time trying to ship a yacht back home. Meanwhile, they cut a German tank commander in on the action. He’s more them than American brass.

My favorite scene is the one where Gen. Colt and his immediates overhear Kelly’s team making their way to Clermont, France, each paranoid that the other is going to beat them to the gold, and Colt takes this as the opposite of what it is—a splendid example of the American fighting spirit and rushes to join them. That made me laugh out loud.

I was intrigued by the “Good, Bad and Ugly” homage, too. Near the end, three of our principles, including Kelly, guns at the ready, face off against the remaining Tiger tank in the village square, while a very Ennio Moricone riff plays on the soundtrack. It makes no sense within the film—why risk their lives in this manner?—but outside the film it’s fascinating. We’re only three years removed from Leone’s film, but apparently the scene was already iconic enough to allow for this. And the scene is only grown in stature.

Most everything goes according to plan: the townspeople think they’ve been liberated, the Gen. arrives to take credit, our guys make off with the dough.

I would’ve liked the more overt antiwar message, though. Per Schickel:

In general Clint felt [after extensive edits] that the film’s comedy now played too broadly, and specifically he was dismayed at the excision of a transition scene between the picture’s second and third acts in which, as he recalls, he and the character played by Telly Savalas “just sort of summed up the philosophy of these loose ends, and what the war had done to them.” He goes so far as to say that “its soul was taken out, a little bit of its soul was robbed.”

Probably helped it get robbed at the box office, too. In 1970, after 5-7 years of Vietnam playing on the nightly news, America was ready for antiwar messages, and flocked to see them. The third highest-grossing film of 1970 was Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” grossing more than $500 million, adjusted for inflation; the fourth, “Patton,” grossed $350+ million. “Kelly’s Heroes,” despite its cast and star, didn’t make the top 25.

More than ever
Has anyone done a study of how WWII movies changed over the years? How they looked during the war, in its immediate aftermath, and during the Cold War? How Vietnam changed them and how Reagan changed them back? I see there are books out there, I’m just curious if any are good. 

And does anyone know much about Mike Curb? A cursory look around the Web, and on newspapers.com, reveals he was not only an anodyne Christian rocker but such a conservative force that he wrote Nixon’s 1972 campaign song, “Nixon Now (More Than Ever).” He and the Congregation performed at the Jan. 1973 inaugural, along with the likes of Pat Boone, the Les Brown Orchestra, Ray Stevens and Hank Williams, Jr. And then he ran for lieutenant governor of California! And won! That was in 1978, just as the conservative movement was gathering steam, but Curb couldn’t turn it to his advantage. In 1982 he shot too high, running for governor but losing the GOP nom to George Deukmejian. He tried for looie again in’86. Lost.

Per Wiki, he got involved in auto racing. He bought the house Elvis lived in before Graceland. He became a philanthropist. Most online bios sing his praises. The singing sounds like “Burning Bridges.”

Mike Curb (at Yamaha upright) and his Congregation sing the title song. Nothing speaks to Nazi-occupied Europe more.

WARNING: SPOILERS

In the 1970s I went from seeing every Gene Wilder movie in a movie theater to not seeing any of them anywhere. It went: “Young Frankenstein,” wow, “Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother,” done, “Silver Streak,” yay, “World’s Greatest Lover,” okay—all of which I’m pretty sure I saw at the second-run Boulevard Theater in South Minneapolis. But after that, nah, I couldn’t be bothered. (Though way later, in the summer of 1989, I did see “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” at the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis. Shouldn’t've.)

So what changed for me? 

“World’s Greatest Lover” debuted in Dec. 1977 and “The Frisco Kid” in July ’79, so I went from being on the cusp of 15 to 16 ½. I went from being a ninth grader at Ramsey to someone getting ready for junior year at Washburn. So I guess priorities changed. I remember some disgruntlement with “World’s Greatest Lover,” too. I remember thinking: “Is this supposed to be funny?” It might’ve been the beginning of my critical thinking about film. 

More than just me, “The Frisco Kid,” rests at an inflection point for the country and culture. In the documentary “Remembering Gene Wilder,” Mel Brooks talks about how the producers of “The Producers” wanted a more traditional leading man to play timid accountant Leo Bloom, but Brooks went with Wilder. The Cisco Kid in “Blazing Saddles” was originally traditional leading man Gig Young, but he was going through the DTs, so at the last minute Brooks called Wilder. The 1970s let this happen. It was an era of untradition. Let’s go a different way, it said. The 1980s was the era of doubling down on the traditions we thought we’d gotten rid of. Let’s go back, it said.

This movie is part of that parting of the ways. Wilder, the star, is the nebbishy past. The second lead, Harrison Ford, is the handsome future. He’s the doubling down on old traditions.

Shockingly unfunny
By the way: How lost, how unsure of their footing, were studio executives in the 1970s? After Harrison Ford co-starred in “Star Wars,” the most popular movie of all time, they stuck him in WWII stuff (“Force 10,” “Hanover Street”), and opposite nebbishy leads (“Heroes,” here). Basically they were saying, “We don’t know what to do with him! Help!"

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to the rescue. Here are the six movies Harrison Ford made after this one:

• 1980: “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” (No. 1 for the year)
• 1981: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (No. 1)
• 1982: “Blade Runner” (No. 27)
• 1983: “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” (No. 1)
• 1984: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (No. 2)
• 1985: “Witness” (No. 6, AA nom)

It was less stellar for the guy with nontraditional leading-man looks:

• 1980: “Stir Crazy” (No. 3 for the year)
• 1982: “Hanky Panky” (No. 69)
• 1984: “The Woman in Red” (No. 41)
• 1986: “Haunted Honeymoon” (No. 82)
• 1989: “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” (No. 27)
• 1990: “Funny About Love” (No. 107)

Richard Pryor helped Wilder in 1980, and a little in 1989. But you see the trajectory. The trajectory's not good.

“The Frisco Kid” didn’t help. It’s shockingly bad. It’s a comedy-western but there’s not a laugh in it.

In 1850, San Francisco’s Jewish community needs a rabbi, and the mucky-mucks in Poland are in disagreement over who to send. For some reason, the leader of the council wants to send Avram Belinski (Wilder), whom we first see ice-skating in back and winking at a kid, but the rest of the council is adamant against him. Why? Too innocent? Docile? We never find out—lessen we speak Hebrew. Anyway the leader overrules the majority and sends him.

How does an innocent Jew do in 1850s America? Yeah, it’s brutal. This might be the real reason I never went to see this. Maybe I saw this scene, or caught whiffs of it, and said “No, thanks.”

In Philadelphia, Avram tries to take a boat to San Francisco but it’s already left. Two men in line, Darryl and Matt Diggs (George DiCenzo and William Smith), then tell Avram a sob story about needing to see their dying mother in SF but now they have no way of getting there—and they’ve already sold their horses and wagon! Ach. So Avram buys the horses and wagon back so he can ride with them to San Francisco. Yeah, you see it coming. They ride off the wagon-train trail—a shortcut, Avram is told—and their partner Mr. Jones (Ramon Bieri) rides up, grabs Avram from behind, pummels him, strips him to his long underwear, takes his Torah, and tosses him out the back. All the while he’s pleading (and bleeding), and all the while the Diggs brothers are laughing.

No way 16-year-old me wanted to see this. I can barely watch it now.

So that’s America, the bad. America, the good, is when he runs into an Amish community—initially mistaking them for Jewish, not a bad bit in theory—and they give him shelter, money, and send him back on his journey.

At this point, the movie becomes rather episodic, as if ticking off the set scenes of Hollywood westerns. Avram gets on a train that is robbed by a masked bandit (Harrison Ford), while Avram is washing up. (Question: Did 1850s trains have washrooms?) Tommy implies his partner is standing behind all the good folks with their hands up, so I assumed everyone would assume Avram was that partner, but that’s not the gag. No, Avram returns to his seat, sees everyone with their hands in the air, and thinks they’re all doing a “Simon Says” bit a little girl had been leading them in earlier. That’s the gag. It falls flat. As does (no pun intended) the bit about the busty lady sharing a seat with Avram. Is she trying to scam him? Is she just an excuse to get more cleavage in the movie? Her scene is there and gone and leaves no trace.

Then Avram works on a railroad, where, driving in spikes with sledgehammers, he keeps hitting the foot of a Mexican (Joe Kaap). It’s not funny. An Asian guy (Clyde Kusatsu) makes fun of Avram’s accent. It’s not funny. These bits last a minute. They’re there and gone and leave no trace.

Avram is attempting to fish in the Terrence Hill manner (holding a thick stick over his head mid-stream, waiting for the right moment) when the train robber, Tommy, returns and decides to help by shooting the fish. Why? It’s an odd team-up. Avram is both hapless and keeps insisting on his own way—and it’s usually not a smart way. Yeah, let’s jump off this cliff on our horses rather than ride a few miles out of our way. Yeah, let’s ride into this mountain blizzard rather than wait it out. Tommy keeps following rather than leading, as if he’s the stranger in a strange land.

At one point, and despite everything that’s occurred, Avram waxes rhapsodic on what a wonderful country America is: “There are no walls around these cities. You don’t have to worry about the soldiers coming in from the next town and killing people.” As he’s doing this, Tommy robs a bank and suddenly they’re on the lam, one step ahead of a lynch mob. But even with Avram refusing to ride on the Sabbath, they get away from this plot only to land in another: they’re captured by Indians. Now Avram is suddenly the stoic, strong one, and this intrigues Chief Gray Cloud (Val Bigoglio), so they have a conversation about life, death, gods. After Avram says his god doesn’t make it rain, it starts raining. After Avram says he doesn’t dance, he leads the tribe in a traditional Jewish dance.

Then they’re in a monastery, where brothers have taken a vow of silence, and where Avram’s garrulousness causes one of them to break his vow. None of it is funny.

Throughout, we keep getting versions of this exchange:

Tommy [angry]: I ain’t going with you!
Avram: Who’s asking you!

Exactly. Avram needs Tommy, not vice versa. It’s like Tommy is the movie’s Magic Gentile. I thought by the end we’d get an explanation about why he does this but we don’t. And just when they do split up, guess who reappears? The Diggs boys and Mr. Jones.

You’re all clear, kid
The movie’s working title was “No Knife”—the Indians are amazed Avram doesn’t carry one—and I assume screenwriters Michael Elias and Frank Shaw, director Robert Aldrich, and Warner Bros. hoped for a bit of “Destry Rides Again”: the inherent strength of the peaceful man. But I barely bought it with “Destry” and I definitely don’t buy it here. A lawless world is a brutal one. You need more than a Torah. You need a friend with a gun.

That’s what Avram gets. He re-encounters his tormentors, demands his money, gets decked, gets back up, demands his money, gets decked, gets back up, and decks Matt Diggs. Which just angers the bad guys. They're about to kill ol’ Avram, or at least maim him on the bar, when Tommy shows up in his longjohns (from whoring upstairs) to save the hero. Hey, just like Han Solo! You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home! Except here he does all the shooting. He demonstrates his sure shot and makes them leave. Why doesn’t he kill them? Because movie. How many more times do they return? Two more times!

The first is when Avram and Tommy are frolicking in the ocean surf because Avram asks Tommy to be his best man at an arranged wedding and Tommy has never had a friend before, let alone a bestie. During the shoot-out, after Avram kills Mr. Jones but runs out of bullets, the big dilemma becomes: Will Avram be able to pull the trigger before Darryl gets a fallen gun and kills them both? He will! Does he feel awful about it? He does! But more, he feels awful that he tried to save the Torah rather than his friend. A stone’s-throw from SF, he decides to give up the rabbihood.

There, it gets even more convoluted. In front of the sister of his betrothed, Rosalie (Penny Peyser), with whom we always knew he’d wind up, Avram pretends to be an American; and when the entire Jewish community descends on the tavern, they assume Tommy is the rabbi. But then Avram owns up. But then Matt Diggs reappears and accuses Avram of killing his brother. We get a classic western duel outside, Matt loses, is banished, wedding. L’Chaim.

Again, there’s not a laugh in this thing.

The screenwriters appear to have done a lot of TV together (“Love, American Style,” Glen Campbell, Pat Paulsen, Bill Cosby, “Co-ed Fever”), while Elias got third credit on “The Jerk,” but overall their CVs doesn’t inspire. Director Robert Aldrich, meanwhile, did good work in the 1950s with “Kiss Me, Deadly,” in the 1960s with “The Dirty Dozen,” and in the early 1970s with “The Longest Yard,” but maybe he was done. This thing is just a mess: unfunny, brutish, long. And the tone keeps shifting. Avram’s inner man keeps shifting—and not in a way that indicates growth. It’s just all over the place.

Neither of the two leads distinguish themselves. But afterward Harrison Ford went on to become Harrison Ford while Gene Wilder faded away. Despite this, I still miss him.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Just as “Pale Rider” was “Shane” with an avenging angel, this is “High Noon” with an avenging angel. You have a town of cowards, newly released prisoners coming toward them, and a lone man with a gun. Right, it’s not exact. In order to be more exact, Marshal Will Kane, rather than imprisoning Frank Miller, would’ve been killed by Miller and his brothers, the town would’ve been complicit in the killing, and as “High Noon” began, Gary Cooper would’ve ridden into town to enact revenge: to humiliate every man and rape every woman, before killing his killers and then riding off into the sunset.

It's a little sick, to be honest.

In Clint Eastwood’s previous film, “Joe Kidd,” he outmans everyone. This is that on steroids. Every man is weak and sweaty but him. Every woman resists him until he kisses them. Nobody can shoot anything and he can shoot everything.

Oh, he also stands up for Indians and little people—as he stood up for Mexicans in “Kidd.” Who knew Clint Eastwood was our original virtue signaler?

Rape and a haircut
I think I first saw “High Plains Drifter” in the late 1970s, edited for television, but probably not edited enough. Even then it was a little unappetizing for me. Maybe I empathize too much with cowards or people who can’t shoot straight.

I’d forgotten the town was next to a picturesque lake. I’d obviously forgotten the name of the town, Lago, which is Spanish for lake. It hardly looks like a mining town—more like a future tourist destination, as it is: Mono Lake in the California Sierras. The shooting location was actually scouted by Eastwood himself. Then he had the town built there. The man in charge of construction/design was Henry Bumstead, who also built the town of Sinola for “Joe Kidd” and Big Whiskey for “Unforgiven.” He was an art director for 30 years, 1949-1979, then kept going with production design—though most of his work in the ’90s and ’00s was strictly for Eastwood. Which speaks well of Eastwood.

This is Clint's first western as director, and there’s an eerie, shimmering quality to it, augmented by an ethereal score, but also a blunt, sweaty palpability. The Stranger rides into town, past a graveyard that includes the names of Clint's past directors—Sergio Leone, Don Siegel—which is either homage or declaration of independence. Or both.

Everyone watches him and no one says a thing. Finally he goes into the saloon, orders a beer and a bottle, says he wants a peaceful hour in which to drink it. He doesn’t get it. Three yahoos interrupt him. Turns out they’re the men the town hired for protection against the three main baddies, Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis in his first Eastwood) and the Carlin brothers (Anthony James and Dan Vadis), who are about to be released from prison. But they’re yahoos, and for some reason—the same reason young subway juvies pick on Charles Bronson—they decide to pick on the tall, quiet stranger. He deflects and walks away—to the barber, a sweaty, shaking, man with a greasy combover (William O’Connell), for a shave and a bath. This is an iconic scene. Mid-shave, the yahoos appear. They taunt and threaten and attack. And the stranger shoots them all with the gun he’s holding beneath the barber sheet. (Hey, a little Han Solo from “Star Wars,” isn’t it?) 

After that, we get the first rape. Callie Travers (Marianna Hill) bumps into him on purpose, chastises him, insults his manhood; so he takes her to a barn. Later, in his room, as he closes his eyes, he sees a man being whipped to death and begging the townspeople for help. This, it turns out, is Marshal Jim Duncan, played by veteran stuntman Buddy Van Horn, and the stranger is either his brother, his ghost or his avenging angel. The town is more than cowardly; it’s corrupt. Its mine is on government land, meaning none of the riches are theirs. Marshal Duncan planned on going public with it, so (I think) the town hired Bridges and the Carlins to kill him, then turned them over to the authorities. That’s why they’re worried about their return.

And that’s why they look to hire the stranger. He’s uninterested … until they say he can have anything he wants. “Anything?” he asks. So he keeps upping the ante. These boots, these blankets and candy for the Indians, a round of drinks on him. He makes the town dwarf, Mordicai (Billy Curtis), the sheriff. When the mayor laughs, he makes him mayor, too. He keeps requisitioning material: your barn, your bedsheets, your wife. He does try to train them—putting snipers on this and that roof—but they’re hopeless shots. Mostly he humiliates them. It gets bad enough that several band together to try to kill him. Instead, lighting a stick of dynamite with his cigar (a la Leone), he blows up most of the hotel.

Oh, and he has them paint the town red (literally), then renames it (unsubtly) “Hell.” And just before the baddies arrive, he leaves, going the other way. 

And now it’s the baddies’ turn with the town.

That night, the stranger returns. Against a hellish backdrop of burning buildings, he whips one to death, hangs another with a whip, and takes down Bridges in a gunfight. As he leaves the next morning, exiting the way he entered, he passes Mordecai making a grave marker for the fallen Marshal. “I never did know your name,” Mordicai says, to which the stranger replies, “Yes, you do.” Then the camera pans to and holds on the tombstone.

So yeah, not the brother.

True spirit
According to Richard Schickel in “Clint Eastwood: A Biography,” the initial script IDed the Stranger as a sibling, and Clint started out playing it that way. But “I thought about playing it a little bit like he was sort of an avenging angel, too.” All of which adds to the ambiguity.

“High Plains Drifter” did well at the box office, while critics were mixed—though its Rotten Tomatoes score is 94%, with one of the rotten reviews ironically coming from Schickel. But it did gangbusters with teens of my generation. That, I remember.

Who didn’t like it? John Wayne. Again, from Schickel: 

Clint recalls Wayne saying to him more than once, “We ought to work together, kid.” So when he found a script in which he thought they might costar Clint sent it on to Wayne, noting in his cover letter that the piece, though promising, needed more work. Too much more, in Wayne’s estimation. But in rejecting the proposal, he launched into a gratuitous critique of High Plains Drifter. Its townspeople, he said, did not represent the true spirit of the American pioneer, the spirit that had made America great.

Schickel sees this as “an argument between modernism and traditionalism, but I think it’s something more specific. “High Plains” riffs off of “High Noon,” which Wayne hated, because it’s a metaphor for the blacklist. Which he was in favor of. I think Wayne was still fighting that fight.

The movie is well-directed, cleverly directed, and the story is tight. It's just the other stuff I have a problem with. But apparently we will never tire of a seething moral righteousness given license to act immoral. We love that story so much we carry it into the world. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The town name is a joke, right? From screenwriter Elmore Leonard? Sinola? Apparently there’s a Sinaloa, Mexico, but this is New Mexico, circa 1902, and I’m not seeing anything. Or maybe I just don’t know shit from Sinola.

This is the movie Clint Eastwood made after “Dirty Harry” and it’s not bad, despite its 6.4 IMDb rating. Maybe it’s so low because Eastwood himself didn’t much like it, or didn’t like making it with director John Sturges, who was often drunk on set. Sturges, for his part, didn’t much like trying to direct Eastwood, either.

Do we even know what the title character does? We know he used to be a tracker and bounty hunter, and we see how he’s dressed, in tweed suit and derby, a more citified look than we’re used to from western Eastwood, but I don’t think we ever find out his current occupation. Cattle rancher, maybe?

Eastwood v. Nosotros
Joe Kidd begins the movie sharing a jail cell with two Mexican yahoos after getting drunk and losing a fight with Sheriff Mitchell (Greg Walcott). He begins down. He then proceeds to outman everybody. Whatever a man is, Joe Kidd is more:

• He protects the townsfolk more than the sheriff
• He protects the Mexican people more than the Mexican revolutionary
• He’s more ruthless than the ruthless landowner

It’s the second one that made me shake my head. “Naw, don’t go there, Clint. Naw … Aw, fuck.”

He’s in the courtroom, sentenced to 10 days for the contretemps with Mitchell, when Mexican rebels, led by Luis Chama (John Saxon), burst in. They’re tired of losing their land to the Anglos; they’re tired of white men going back on their word. So Chama decides to kidnap the judge (John Carter) to make things right. Why the judge? Who knows? But in the confusion, Kidd rescues the judge, then, behind the bar of a saloon, sipping a beer and holding a shotgun, he waits for the Mexican rebels—in particular Naco (Pepe Callahan), with whom he’d had an escalating tete-a-tete in jail. Naco wouldn’t let the hungover Kidd have coffee, Kidd pours slop stew on him, Naco tries to clock him but Kidd knocks him out with the pan. He figures Naco wants revenge. He does. He doesn’t get it. Blam.

In the calm afterwards, the wealthiest man in New Mexico, Frank Harlan (Robert Duvall), shows up with an entourage of sureshots and jerks, and they attempt to hire Kidd to help them track and Kill Chama—whom Duvall keeps calling “Chay-ma.” Kidd begs off. He’s got nothing against Chama. But then he finds out Chama, as payback for Naco, invaded his ranch home, rustled his horses, and hurt his right-hand man. So off he goes with them.

Damn, if Naco had only let Joe have that cup of coffee.

Kidd regrets his decision quickly. The men reveal who they are, killing some Mexicans in cold blood, then, with leers, kidnapping Helen Sanchez (Stella Garcia), who, unbeknownst, is Chama’s girl. They take a small Mexican village hostage and shout out to Chama—hiding in the nearby mountains—that they’ll kill five hostages in the morning unless he surrenders himself. Then five at noon, then five at … .You get the idea. Harlan choose this moment, stupidly, to betray Kidd, who’s disarmed and put in with the hostages. But of course he finds some arms, kills some men, including the loudmouth Lamarr (Don Stroud), and brings the girl to Chama in the mountains.

Which is where she finds out Chama had no intention of sacrificing himself for the people below. Becoming martyrs in his name, he says, would be a good way to die.

The original script wasn’t like that. Per IMDb:

John Saxon said “Clint needed to be the guy who dealt with all the action, so in the end Chama was smeared with self-serving and cowardice, so it was clear who the main hero was.” Saxon attended a NOSOTROS meeting, a Latin American organization opposed to stereotypes, and publicly apologized for playing such a dubious character.

Then it just gets dumb. Chama doesn’t want to sacrifice himself but somehow Kidd convinces him to turn himself in? Kidd shouts down the deal to Harlan and everyone heads back to Sinola, but Harlan and his men stop a train to get there first. Oh right, one of the men, the sharpshooter Mingo (James Wainwright) stays behind to kill Chama and crew before they reach Sinola, but he’s killed instead. By Kidd. Who out sharpshoots the sharpshooter.

Jesus, Clint, leave something for somebody.

Judge, jury, executioner
In town, Kidd sends the rest of Chama’s men away (why?), then rides a train into the saloon and starts killing the bad guys. Then he tracks Harlan to the courthouse, and, from the judge’s chair, kills him in cold blood. After Chama turns himself in, Joe decks the sheriff. He tells him, “Next time, I’ll knock your damn head off.” Don’t really get his anger at the sheriff—who suddenly turns into a goober at this point. I guess it’s payback for the stuff we didn’t see at the beginning? It's outmanning everybody.

Beautiful scenery, though. And apparently the weaponry is very accurate for the time it’s set. Duvall is his usual impeccable, awful, oddball self. The gang is great, particularly Wainwright as Mingo, the sharpshooter, who’s both cool and casually cruel. I like Lynne Marta as Elma, Harlan’s concubine, who is kissed by Kidd in the early going and doesn’t mind at all. She’s cute. Died this year, sadly.

This was the phase of Eastwood’s career when he was popular with the crowd but called a fascist by the critics—before he became a critic and Academy darling whose movies did so-so box office. Before his movies became shitty and no one went to see them.

I get his appeal. It’s just problematic. In his next one, “High Plains Drifter,” it’ll be worse.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I recall watching Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” based on the 1953 Raymond Chandler novel, about 20 years ago, and coming away confused and dissatisfied. Now I get why. The movie is confusing. It’s untraditional. It mixes Chandler’s penchant for complicated plots and hidden motives with Altman’s love of overlapping dialogue and improv, with an early ’70s So Cal loopiness. Add that up and, well, confusing.

This time, though, I liked it.

I mean, who knew Jim Bouton was the Orson Welles of the 1970s?

Go home, Martins
It’s totally an Altman film. It’s Altman doing genre and fucking with the conventions.

Take the yoga-loving, half-naked female neighbors. All the men who come through, the cops and the hoods, stare, gawking, while our man Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) barely notices. He walks by muttering under his breath about his cat. He couldn’t be less interested. Is that why the girls are interested in him? Why they call out to him? It’s the opposite of most detective fiction. There’s beautiful women everywhere and he beds nobody. In the uptight 1940s, with the Production Code staring down furiously, Bogart couldn’t enter a bookstore or take a cab without coming away with a little. But Gould in the free-love 1970s? With naked women everywhere? Not a drop. He doesn’t even seem thirsty.

But he smokes like a chimney. They kept that in. There seems no shot where Marlowe doesn’t have a cigarette going.

The opening is fun, but a little lame if you know cats. The late-night convenience store doesn’t have his cat’s favorite food so he gets another kind, puts it in the tin of the favorite kind, then dishes it out like it’s that one. Why in God’s name does he think this will work? Cats don’t care about tins. Cats care about smell. And it’s the wrong smell. And there goes the cat.

And in comes Marlowe’s friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton). We’d seen him leaving his gated community, scratches on his face, bruises on his knuckles, and now he’s asking Marlow to drive him to Tijuana. Marlowe does. When he returns, cops are waiting. Seems Lennox’s wife, Sylvia, is dead, Terry is the prime suspect, and Marlowe just helped him get away. Accessory after the fact.

When he gets out out of the slammer, certain of Terry’s innocence, he’s got a gig waiting. Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt, a super-tanned Dane) is worried about the disappearance of her husband, an alcoholic, Hemingway-esque writer named Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden). Marlowe finds him in a detox center run by the creepy Dr. Verringer (Henry Gibson) and springs him. Then they drink and argue, and Hayden chews the scenery. Apparently a lot of this was improv. It shows.

What does any of this have to do with Terry Lennox? Turns out the Wades knew the Lennoxes: neighbors and friends. Oh, then mob boss Marty Augustine (actor-director Mark Rydell) and his men descend on Marlowe because Terry owes them $350,000 and they figure Marlowe has it or can get it. There’s a lot of Altmanesque craziness here. Augustine busts his girl’s face with a Coke bottle to show he means business; later, to come clean, he has himself and his men, including a non-verbal Arnold Schwarzenegger, strip to their skivvies. Meanwhile, at a party at the Wades, Dr. Verringer shows up demanding money from Roger, and that night Roger walks into the ocean. Do we see him again? Does he die? Either way, Eileen confesses to Marlowe that Roger was having an affair with Sylvia Lennox. So maybe Roger killed Sylvia and that’s why he was acting so erratic? And Verringer knew?

At some point, Marlowe finds out Terry’s dead—he killed himself in Mexico. But then Marlowe gets a $5,000 bill in the mail from Terry, along with a goodbye letter; and then the $350k is magically delivered, freeing Marlowe from Augustine. I assume all that gives him pause. Because down in Mexico, using the $5k as a bribe, Marlowe discovers Terry isn’t dead. He faked the suicide. More, he was schtupping Eileen Wade. More more, he killed his wife. He’s the guy. Marlowe comes upon him laying in a hammock, and Terry admits it. He’s blasé about it. He didn’t mean to, he says, but he did it.

So Marlowe kills him in cold blood.

Here’s the thing: Before Marlowe arrives to confront him, we see Marlowe walking on a dirt road under a canopy of trees, and I said to my wife, “Looks like ‘The Third Man.’” And then we get the confession and the killing of the killer. Which, yes, is exactly like “The Third Man.” Throughout that movie, Holly Martins is looking for Harry Lime’s killer, and, alley oop, it turns out to be him. Same here, mostly. Throughout, Marlowe is looking to prove Terry innocent; instead he proves him guilty, then acts as judge, jury, executioner.

Altman underlines the parallel again. We return to the canopy of trees, Marlowe is walking away and Eileen is driving in. She stops but Marlowe keeps walking toward the camera. It’s “Third Man” with genders reversed. I’d call it homage if it didn’t seem like such a rip off. 

Anyway, that’s why Jim Bouton is the Orson Welles of the 1970s.

The canopy of trees, and the long walk, after killing the friend whose murder you were trying to solve.

The meaning of yoga
That ending doesn’t quite work, does it? First, it’s too “Third Man” but not nearly good enough. Second, it’s the only time when Marlowe seems awake. He’s focused and in control, but his actions are over-the-top. In cold blood? Really? It’s out of character. It's completely unlike the sleepy, mumbling dude we’ve spent two hours with.

So was the ending imposed upon Altman by the studio? Nope. It was in the original Leigh Brackett script, and Altman liked it so much, or wanted to do the “Third Man” homage so much, he put in a contract clause that the ending couldn’t be changed without his approval.

It’s not, however, the Raymond Chandler ending. In the novel, yes, Terry killed Sylvia and faked his suicide, but he and Marlowe don’t meet in Mexico:

Then on a certain Friday morning I found a stranger waiting for me in my office. He was a well-dressed Mexican or Suramericano of some sort. He sat by the open window smoking a brown cigarette that smelled strong. He was tall and very slender and very elegant, with a neat dark mustache and dark hair, rather longer than we wear it, and a fawn-colored suit of some loosely woven material. He wore those green sunglasses.

It's Terry, with plastic surgery, in his new identity as Señor Maioranos. At some point in the conversation Marlowe figures it out, they wrangle out the rest in the shrugging, elliptical Chandler manner, and say their goodbyes. I guess that’s where the title comes from. “So long, amigo,” Marlowe tells him. “I won’t say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something.”

Chandler's ending makes more sense—for the title, for Marlowe, for everything.

But the movie is still fun. Apparently Bouton was a last-minute replacement for Stacy Keach (Bouton compared it to asking some fan to go play third base for the Yankees). Hayden was also a replacement—for “Bonanza”’s Dan Blocker, who died before filming began. There’s only two songs in the entire movie: “Hooray for Hollywood,” which opens and closes it; and “The Long Goodbye” by John Williams and Johnny Mercer, of which we get about five renditions—including one by Jack Riley, Elliott Carlin of “The Bob Newhart Show,” who has a cameo playing piano at a bar. That made me smile.

So did the moment when the half-naked female neighbor explains what yoga is. Someone should make a reference book about when current everyday items/concepts had to be explained in movies. Yoga in this, the CIA in “Charade.” Others?

WARNING: SPOILERS

In the 1970s, my father was the movie critic for The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, my friend Dan R. was a big Clint Eastwood fan, and rarely the twain met. Eastwood may have been big at the box office but generally not with critics. I believe Pauline Kael even used the f-word for him: fascist.

One day, though, I was happy to report to Dan that my father actually liked Clint’s latest. Dan was unimpressed. “Probably means I won’t,” he said flatly.

I don’t know if Dan ever saw “Escape From Alcatraz,” but it’s not exactly a departure for Eastwood. He plays another strong, silent type dealing with men who want to break him down (Warden Dollison, played by Patrick McGoohan), fuck him up (guards, mostly) or just fuck him (Wolf, played by Bruce M. Fischer). But he survives. He wins. Every battle.

If the movie is a departure it’s because it’s based on a true story—a rarity for Clint in those days. It’s also a procedural, which is probably why my father liked it. It’s methodical and factual. It’s all about the how of a prison break.

The Shawshank distinction
Was “Alcatraz” the first movie I saw where prison rape was implied? I think so. It came out a year after “Scared Straight!” didn’t shy away from the topic.

Clint plays Frank Morris, who was sent to Alcatraz in 1960, and escaped with two others, John and Clarence Anglin (Fred Ward and Jack Thibeau) in 1962. Whether they truly escaped, or drown in the attempt, as the FBI contend, is still unresolved, but the movie leans toward escape. On Angel Island, 2+ miles from Alcatraz, and only a half mile from the mainland, Warden Dollison finds a chrysanthemum on a rock. Chrysanthemums, he’s told, don’t grow on Angel Island, but they were the symbol of hope and freedom for an inmate, Doc (Roberts Blossom), whose life the warden ruined. The flower, it’s implied, is a private message from Frank. A final fuck you.

Bigger point: Did Stephen King see this? He must have. He was a big movie guy and this was a popular movie, the 14th highest-grossing film of 1979. Three years later he published “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” and there are parallels:

• Prisoner protagonists with high IQs
• Working out of the prison library
• Being the target of rape/attempted rape
• A battle of wits with the warden
• The slow chiseling of weakened concrete
• Releasing excavated concrete/dirt in the prison yard via pants legs
• “Nobody ever escaped from Alcatraz/Shawshank”

“Shawshank,” the movie, makes the parallels more explicit. In the novella, Andy Dufresne is short; in the movie, he’s a tall drink of water like Clint. In the novella, Red is white. In the movie, he’s black, like English (Paul Benjamin), Frank’s kinda-sorta best friend in stir in “Alcatraz.” In the novella, Andy doesn’t hide his chiseling tool in a Bible—the way Frank does with the warden’s nail file and the way the movie Andy does with the rock hammer.

Both movies give us the feel-good camaraderie of a group of prisoners. Frank’s group includes:

• Doc, whose painting privileges are rescinded when he paints an unflattering portrait of the warden. He winds up cutting off his fingers in protest.
• Charley Butts (Larry Hankin), a new, dopey prisoner, and Frank’s neighbor, who is in on the prison break but chickens out at the last minute.
• Litmus (Frank Ronzio), who keeps a pet mouse in his shirt.
• English, the black con, who heads the prison library, and who taunts Frank (and is taunted back) with “boy” comments.

That said—and calm down already “Shawshank” fans—they’re completely different movies. “Alcatraz,” as mentioned, is a procedural. The prison break is step-by-step, which means we’re in on it throughout, which means we’re anxious throughout. Will Frank get caught? Can they make it to the water? Can they make it across the water? In “Shawshank,” Andy’s prison break comes as a surprise. We assumed he was leaning toward suicide.

Indeed, the difference in films is the exact distinction Alfred Hitchcock between suspense and surprise. Hitchcock sets up a scene: a ticking bomb beneath a table where two men are talking. Now you could direct it, he says, so the bomb just goes off. Or you could show the audience the men talking, then the ticking bomb, then the men talking.

In the first case, we have given the public 15 seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with 15 minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed—except when the surprise is a twist: that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Which it is in “Shawshank.”

Boy toys
Something else I pondered watching “Alcatraz” in 2024: Was Clint a little racist or did he just keep pandering to his base? Or did he like ruffling liberal feathers?

All of the above?

I’m thinking of “I gots to know,” and that scene in “Jersey Boys”: “Come back when you’re black,” which is one of the most insulting lines in movie history.

Here, Frank not only calls English “boy,” but say to his face, “I guess I don’t like niggers,” and it’s fine. It’s fun. Because English started it both times. English keeps calling Frank “boy” until Frank, amused, responds in kind; and when Frank visits him in the bleachers in the black section of the yard, where he sits on the top step, a king of the hill, and then Frank, maybe out of respect, doesn’t sit with him, English says it’s either because he’s scared or because “You don’t like niggers.” At which point, Frank plops himself down next to him and says the line.

I’m probably overreacting. But the scenes do have a ’70s vibe rather than a 1960 vibe. The dynamic feels post-Black Power, rather than, you know, lunch-counter sit-in.

But the dynamic, and the rapport between the actors, is good, and they become friends. And in the end, Frank lets him know, subtly, that he’s breaking out, and offers his hand through the bars. After that, the day of the escape, Wolf is gunning for Frank in the yard with a shiv but English stops him. He puts him in a headlock and guides him to the black area of the yard. Because in the end black people watch over us? Because Frank represents hope, which is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies?

Anyway, my memory is correct: Dad liked it. Dan has yet to weigh in.

“A man of few words, two fists and the ambling gait of Henry Fonda” pretty much sums up the Eastwood persona.

WARNING: SPOILERS

“It’s people! Soylent Green is made of people!”

Yes. Also sheets. Chuck failed to mention that. Dead bodies go down a conveyer belt draped in white sheets, get dumped into a vat of goo, and the next thing they’re the titular green slabs on another conveyer belt. So I might worry more about the sheets. At least people are organic.

“Soylent Green” came out when I was 10 but I was never drawn to it. The original poster made it seem like garbage trucks were after Charlton Heston, which isn’t exactly thrilling; and once I knew the last-act reveal, which everybody knew soon enough, why bother?

Why bother now? Because the movie is set in 2022. Yes, the future is here and it’s dystopic.

Admittedly they get a few things wrong. 

The end of Rico
For one, they imagine out-of-control population growth, with New York City stuffed to the rafters with 40 million people. Our hero, Detective Thorn (Heston), is forever stepping over the kerchiefed, slightly Sovietish masses sleeping in stairwells. Yet NYC’s current population (8.4 million) isn’t far off from what it was during filming (7.6 million). High rents help. 

Outdoor scenes were shot through a greenish filter, to emphasize the out-of-control pollution, but we’re better off than that. Women's rights? Again wrong. In their world, feminism didn't take. Women are furniture. That’s literally what they’re called—at least the young pretty ones who come with an apartment, such as Shirl (Leigh Taylor-Young, hot), who becomes the Love Interest. She’s Furniture to William R. Simonson (Joseph Cotton), a member of the vaguely governmental body called “the Exchange” that runs things, but he’s killed in the first act. Thorn is the detective working the case. He’s the hero but as corrupt as anyone. Or he’s corrupt in the way those in dire straits are corrupt. He steals to survive—to get a little something-something for him and his partner, a police analyst, or “Book,” named Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), with whom he lives in a cramped apartment.

Aside: It was fun watching Robinson, who was blacklisted 20 years earlier just for being liberal, and future NRA president and GOP darling Charlton Heston acting together and seeming to enjoy each other’s company. This is Robinson’s final movie role: He died of cancer in January 1973—post-production but pre-release. He also dies, via assisted suicide, in the film—a fact that some critics had trouble with back in ’73. They shouldn’t have made him act a death scene when he was dying! Me, I’m just happy Eddie, nee Emanuel Goldenberg, got to play Jewish for once. L’chaim, kid.

What else? No masks in this 2022 world because no global pandemic. But the one portent of the future the movie got right is a good one:

Sol: How can anything survive in a climate like this? 

Sol: A heat wave all year long.

Both: A greenhouse effect.

Apparently it’s the first time climate change was used as a plot device in a film. Thank god we listened to the warning. 

“Soylent Green” isn't bad but it fails to cohere in places. Thorn is forever moaning about the state of the world without knowing what it used to be. And he's not really good at his job. Mostly he’s interested in cadging a strawberry here, smoking a cig there, schtupping Shirl everywhere. Sure, he figures out some stuff. Simonson’s death wasn’t the result of a break-in—more like an assassination—and the orders probably came from the Soylent Corp. He figures the bodyguard (Chuck Connors) was in on it, too. But it’s Sol who realizes why Simonson was offed. Simonson found out something, couldn’t live with it and was ready to talk.

Sol can't live with it, either. That’s another odd moment. Thorn gives Sol two volumes of “The Soylent Oceanographic Survey Report” from 2006 and 2015, Sol discovers their secrets (the ocean’s dying, plankton are dying, Soylent Green is people), and, with no reveal to us, he takes his findings to “the Supreme Exchange”—old people in the stacks of a library. The Exchange Leader (Celia Lovsky, one-time wife of Peter Lorre, who played T’Pau on “Star Trek”) tells him they need proof before they can present it to the Congress of Nations. So Sol goes out and gets that proof.

Kidding. He agrees to be euthanized without telling Thorn what he's learned.

That's an odd turn, right? “Hey, I have earth-shattering news! Oh, you need proof? I'm outta here.” Plus, aren't the book volumes proof enough? Or is the Exchange asking for proof knowing he won't be able to get it, Sol senses this and that's why he opts for death. Either way, Thorn arrives before Sol dies and Sol whispers the secret to him (with no reveal to us) and tells him to get proof. Yet another odd turn: Thorn thinks he gets it! He hops a ride to a plant, sees it all for himself, and at the end, wounded in a crowded church after a final fight with Chuck Connors, he tells his captain, Hatcher (Brock Peters), “You don’t understand. I got proof. They need proof. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it happening.”

Yeah, that's not proof. “I’ve seen it” isn’t proof. And this guy is a detective? Maybe they should’ve sent a journalist.

Anyway that sets up our famous strident outcry at the end:

Listen to me, Hatcher. You've gotta tell them! Soylent Green is people! We’ve gotta stop them! Somehow!

At which point there's a freeze frame and the camera zooms in on Thorn’s bloody hand as it points to the sky. And that’s the end. You gotta love ’70s cinema.

So much is left unanswered. Will Thorn live? Is Soylent going to kill him? Is Hatcher in on it? He stuck him on riot control duty so Simonson's assassin could have a shot at him, yet in the final shots he seems empathetic. So was he just following orders? But whose? I assume the Soylent Corp., but where are they? Who are they? We never see them. They should've shown us. Soylent Corp. is people, after all. It's people, I tell you!

You blew it up, etc.
Strident outcries in the final shot, condemning man’s inhumanity to man, were Heston's bit back then. Cf., “Planet of the Apes.” Dystopias, too. Prior to this he starred in “Omega Man,” based on the novel “I Am Legend,” in which, for much of the film, Heston thinks he’s the last man on Earth. In that one no one’s around, in this one everyone’s around. Some say fire, some say ice.

From here, Heston starred in disaster flicks (“Earthquake,” “Airport 1975”), period pieces (“Three/Four Musketeers,” “Crossed Swords”) and the final refuge of stars of his era, the western (“The Last Hard Men,” “The Mountain Men”). By the early '80s he was done as a leading man, but he'd had quite a run. Adjusted for inflation, two of his films (“The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur”) are  among the 15 biggest box-office hits in U.S. history. Yet it's the striden outcries that keep on ringing. When AFI counted down the top 100 movie quotes in Hollywood history, only two Heston lines made the cut: “Take your stinkin' paws off me, you damn dirty ape!” at 66; and “Soylent Green is people!” at 77. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

You can’t get much more ’70s than this.

It’s a road movie about two mismatched grifters, filmed on location in the small towns of Montana, with dusty car chases, a drive-in movie, nudity and misogyny, and a plaintive Paul Williams song on the soundtrack. The heist goes wrong and no one wins. The ending is downbeat as the era required. 

This was Michael Cimino’s directing debut. His second film, “The Deer Hunter,” would win five Oscars, including best picture and director. His third was “Heaven’s Gate,” and there went his career—along with movie studios’ love/tolerance of auteur directors. That probably would’ve gone away anyway, when movies like “Jaws” and “Star Wars” showed the path, but “Heaven’s Gate” didn’t help. Cimino got to do this one because Clint Eastwood liked his screenwriting for “Magnum Force,” the second Dirty Harry movie, released a year earlier, and basically said “Have a go at it, kid.” Apparently Eastwood wanted to do a road movie.

The inspiration for the film is about as far afield from a ’70s road movie as you can get: a 1955 Douglas Sirk romance/comedy, “Captain Lightfoot,” starring Rock Hudson as the titular Lightfoot and Jeff Morrow as Captain Thunderbolt, a pair of Irish scallywags who have various adventures in 1815. But if you dig a little, there’s a connection of sorts. “Captain Lightfoot” was written by, and based upon a novel by, W.R. Burnett, who basically created the modern gangster tale (“Little Caesar”), and the modern heist tale (“The Asphalt Jungle”), and whose screenwriting credits include 1932’s “The Beast of the City,” starring Walter Huston as a police chief who takes the law into his own hands. That movie is often cited as a forerunner to, yes, “Dirty Harry.”

Bigger than ever
I’m glad I finally got around to watching “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.” It’s one of those movies  my cooler friends saw as kids and talked up all the way through high school. I avoided it for some reason.

It’s good. There’s artistry here. Some of the shots are just beautiful, and the main relationship is fun and off kilter. I love George Kennedy’s line by the river, “Boy, do I feel old,” as he sits there, crumpled. Clint plays a Clint character, but looser than normal. Apparently that was one of Cimino’s directives to Jeff Bridges: Keep Clint laughing.

Bridges would be the film’s only Oscar nomination, for supporting, and I assume he got this because of the scenes near the end, when Lightfoot is kicked in the head and begins suffering the effects of a traumatic brain injury. He starts slurring his words, his arm goes numb, and half his face goes slack. It’s impressive. Even so, for most of the film, I found Lightfoot annoying. He thinks he’s funnier than he is, wilder than he is. He’s just too much. When he spots that female motorcyclist and asks about her hot pants, and, mid-ride, she takes out a hammer and starts pounding dents into his truck, then rides off giving him the finger, he shouts, “You freak!” A second later he adds: “I love you, come back!” I just didn’t buy it. Or care for it. I don’t think there’s many guys like that, and the guys that are kind of like that I find boring.

Most of the movie is itinerant, going from place to place seemingly without reason. It opens on a small one-room church, where, from outside, we hear the singing of a hymn, even as a big American car drives by then doubles back. The driver is Red Leary (Kennedy), who enters the church and starts shooting at the preacher (Eastwood, a grifter in glasses and greased hair), who flees through nearby cornfields. At the same time, elsewhere, Lightfoot steals a white Trans-Am off a used-car lot, and this is our meet-cute for the title characters: Thunderbolt flags down Lightfoot’s car, then hangs on for dear life.

Why do they stick together? I guess the kid comes to admire Eastwood’s Korean war heroism, revealed by and by, while the kid amuses Eastwood. He likes his joie de vivre. They steal a car from a bickering middle-class couple at a gas station, shack up with two girls at a motel (one is Catherine Bach), eat at a diner. Red and his affable partner Eddie (Geoffrey Lewis) keep showing up: at a bus station, shooting at them outside the diner, and then in the backseat of their car outside a schoolhouse. How does Red keep finding them? No explanation. He's just there. Of all the places to be, he guesses right, again and again. This is one of the many reasons I’d make a bad Hollywood screenwriter: I want explanations for what 95% of the audience doesn’t even think about. Just keep it moving, kid.

After Red beats up Lightfoot, and Thunderbolt beats up Red, we get the full story to this seeming itinerancy. Years earlier, Red and Thunderbolt were part of a gang that pulled a successful bank robbery, but then: 1) their gang leader died; 2) the press reported the money had been found; 3) Red went to prison on an earlier charge and assumed Thunderbolt betrayed him. He’s finally set straight on this by the ass-whooping, I guess, and intrigued to learn the money was never found, then bummed that they stashed it in a one-room schoolhouse that no longer exists. A new, modern schoolhouse had been built in its place. 

It’s the kid who figures out the next step and the rest of the movie. Why not just rob the bank all over again? They know it worked once. Just do it again. Both Thunderbolt and Eddie are initially amused at the thought—particularly since Red thinks it’s screwy—but then realize, “Yeah … Why not?”

To get the money for supplies, they take working class/service sector jobs: Eastwood as garage mechanic, the kid as landscaper, Red as janitor, Eddie as ice cream vendor. Among the things they buy? A 20 millimeter Oerlikon cannon to bust through a wall. It’s both used by Thunderbolt and how he got his nickname. And though it’s a small part of the film, it’s also all over the movie posters. You thought a Magnum .44 was big? Check this shit out. It’s the movie’s unspoken tagline: Eastwood’s dick is back, and it’s bigger than ever!

Buying the serendiptiy
What really stands out, 50 years later, is the misogyny. This is the era after the sexual revolution but before women’s lib went mainstream—or before most men took a long dark look at themselves—so women are just there to ogle and fuck and forget. Their bodies are there to be monetized by Hollywood. On the landscaping job, a housewife teases/taunts Lightfoot by standing in front of him (and us) stark naked. There’s Catherine Bach and her friend, who, post-coital, cries rape when Eastwood won’t give her a ride home. There’s rape jokes. Our two heroes ogle a waitress’ ass and Red ogles two teens in the act. That female motorcycle rider had the right idea. 

The second heist works but the attempt to avoid detection in a drive-in goes awry when the ticket lady hears Red and Eddie in the trunk and call the cops. I assume she thinks they’re trying to sneak into the drive-in—as we did as teenagers? For some reason, the cops put two and two together rather quickly. Cue car chase and car crashes. The affable Eddie is shot and pushed out of the trunk by the increasingly nasty Red, who knocks out our title characters and takes the money. He kicks Lightfoot several times in the head for good measure, which is what leads to the brain damage. But Red gets his. Trying to escape, he crashes into a dept. store and runs into the vicious dogs he’d heard about as a janitor. They tear him apart.

As for our heroes? Back to itinerancy. They hitch rides and wander around, Lightfoot increasingly addled. Then we get a kind of glorious moment: In the middle of nowhere, they come across the one-room schoolhouse, which had been relocated as a national landmark, and find the original bank money behind the blackboard. Sure, you have to buy the serendipity of it all, not to mention that in moving the schoolhouse the blackboard was never moved or fell off. But it’s a fun idea: It’s not gone, it’s a landmark. Thunderbolt then buys the Cadillac he always wanted and in the manner he wanted (with cash), but at this point it’s too late for Lightfoot. He dies in the cradle of Thunderbolt’s arm. I couldn’t help but think of “Midnight Cowboy.” Cue Paul Williams.

The movie did well at the box office—17th-best for the year—but Eastwood felt it should’ve done better and blamed United Artists’ promotional campaign and never worked with them again. I’ve also read he felt upstaged by Bridges and felt he too deserved an Oscar nomination. To which I'd said: no. You're good, Clint, but not Oscar good. A man’s got to know his limitations.

WARNING: SPOILERS

I caught this for the first time on HBO the other night and liked parts but didn’t believe the brunt of it. Turns out the thing I didn’t believe the most was true.

“The Sugarland Express” was, of course, Steven Spielberg’s feature-film debut and he already seems like a pro. Certain shots—through windows, or with the principles off center—look great. I do miss this period of American filmmaking when they would use obvious locals for bit parts. The adoptive mother, Mrs. Looby, was played by a professional actress, Louise Latham, but the part of her husband went to Merrill Connally, a county judge and the brother of Gov. John Connally. Apparently the baby that was the focus of everything, baby Langston (son of producer Richard Zanuck and Linda Harrison), took to Connally but not to Latham, which is why Mr. Looby winds up holding him more often. Spielberg also took to Connally and offered him a role in his next movie: playing the mayor of Amity Island in something called “Jaws.” Connally turned him down, saying the part “sounded pretty poor.” Of course, Murray Hamilton got it and did everything with it.

Anyway, I miss obvious locals in bit parts. Bring that back, filmmakers.

Adorbs
Based on a true incident, “Sugarland” is definitely of its time. I was 11 when it was released and I remember the cool, older kids going to see it and talking about all the car crashes. It has a “Stick it to the Man” vibe that was prevalent then—one of the many bastard children of “Bonnie and Clyde.” Despite that, the Man comes off not poorly, while the kids ain’t exactly alright. They’re not the brightest bulbs in the world. Almost everyone’s sweet-natured but we still get this disaster.

The movie opens with Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) visiting her husband, Clovis (William Atheron, 14 years before he became the jerky TV journalist in “Die Hard”), in  prison. Sorry, in pre-release. He has just four months of easy time left, but she’s there to break him out. Their baby has been taken away by the county and adopted by the Loobys, and she wants him back now. So she bullies Clovis into sneaking out during a family prison/pre-release gathering.

Goldie is adorable here—she wasn’t yet 30—but Lou Jean is a piece of work. First she bullies Clovis into breaking out. Then she panics when a state trooper, Slide (Michael Sacks, Billy Pilgrim of “Slaughterhouse Five”), pulls over the elderly couple with whom they’ve hitched a ride—for going 25 on the highway—and she hops into the front seat and drives away, putting the cops on their tail.  Slide gives chase and Lou Jean crashes the car. But when he carries her seemingly unconscious body from the wreck, she takes his gun, and they take him and his patrol car hostage, then drive to Sugarland to get their baby. A day later, when they arrive at the Looby home after everything else, she bullies Clovis into going in by himself even though none of it feels right and Slider himself warns against it. Sure enough, snipers are inside, and Clovis is killed. If not for his wife, Clovis would still be in pre-release, with four months minus a day left of easy time. Instead, he’s dead.

But Goldie is adorable.

The Poplins take Slider hostage about 20 minutes in, and within five or 10 minutes have dozens of patrol cars following behind them, moving slowly and respectfully down the highway. It’s like a precursor to the O.J. Simpson freeway chase. My thought was, “There’s 80 minutes left. What’s the rest?” Just that, it turns out. This slo-mo car chase, with ultimately hundreds of cars behind them, and a benevolent Capt. Tanner (Ben Johnson) ensuring that no wrong moves are made and no lives hopefully lost. It’s the titular Sugarland express, and it’s the part I didn’t quite buy. At the least, they exaggerated the number of cop cars following them.

Nope. According to accounts at the time, and more recently, it was more than 100 patrol cars, a blue caravan crawling across southern Texas. It’s a lot of the other stuff that’s fictional:

• Clovis (real name: Bobby Dent) wasn’t in prison at the time, so Lou Jean (real name: Ila Fae) didn’t bust him out.
• It was Bobby’s idea to kidnap a highway patrolman (real name: J. Kenneth Krone), and it was simply to get a ride, not to get their baby.
• There were two children involved, not one, and they were Ila Mae’s from a previous marriage, not both of theirs, and they were living with Ila Mae’s parents in Wheelock, Texas, not with foster parents in Sugarland, and the goal was just to see them, not take them.
• They didn’t becomes celebrities whose car was mobbed en route.
• All three principles, Bobby, Ila Fae and Trooper Krone entered the home in Wheelock, where Bobby was killed by Sheriff Sonny Elliott of Robertson County and FBI agent Bob Wiatt.

I get some of the changes. You’ve got to give them a goal at the outset. But the county taking the woman’s baby is a movie trope going back to silent films: Surely there were better ideas? And why give all of the man’s bad decisions to the woman? I guess because Goldie was the star. That's what you get when you're the star. Welcome to the party, pals.

Crashes and character
Goldie is great—completely naturalistic, not a false note—and I like the slight odd vibe from Sacks as Slider. And of course Ben Johnson does his Ben Johnson thing. 

According to Wiki, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (pre-“Sneak Previews”) were both lukewarm on Spielberg’s debut, each giving it two and a half stars. Siskel wrote, “‘The Sugarland Express’ asks us to care for Clovis and Lou Jean because they are thick-skulled and because, presumably, every mother has an inherent right to raise her own baby. It doesn't work.” Yep. Ebert wrote, “If the movie finally doesn’t succeed, that’s because Spielberg has paid too much attention to all those police cars (and all the crashes they get into), and not enough to the personalities of his characters.” Yep again. But poor Roger. Ignoring the characters for the crashes is about to enter a new, dominant period—one that has yet to end.

WARNING: SPOILERS

There’s a great story about the screening of a rough cut of “Star Wars” for close friends of George Lucas in late 1976 or early 1977. It was early enough in the process that footage from World War II movies still substituted for the special effects-laden battle sequences. It didn't go well. Afterwards, there was some polite applause but a great deal of awkwardness. Most assumed the movie would bomb. Some compared it to “At Long Last Love,” which had sunk Peter Bogdanovich’s career the previous year. But one friend spoke up for it. “That movie is going to make a hundred million dollars,” Steven Spielberg said, “and I’ll tell you why: It has a marvelous innocence and naïveté in it, which is George, and people will love it.”

I thought about that story during this film because of the WWII footage. What Lucas used as temporary filler, “Midway” used for its theatrical release. According to IMDb:

• Most the Japanese air raid sequences are from “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970)
• Scenes of Doolittle’s Tokyo raid are from “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” (1944)
• Most dogfight sequences come from 1942 newsreels
• Several action scenes were taken from “Away All Boats” (1956)

You can tell, too. “Midway” went with an All-Star cast and grainy stock footage.

Rochefort dressing
The movie begins both well and poorly. Hal Holbrook plays Cmdr. Joseph Rochefort, a goofily cheery cryptographer who, at first glance, has a bit too much of the ’70s in him—thickish hair, moustache, bathrobe, like he’s the intelligence version of Hawkeye Pierce—but some of this is accurate. According to Wiki: “ He often wore slippers and a bathrobe with his khaki uniform and sometimes went days without bathing.” There are internal arguments among the U.S. military brass about where Japan will strike next, and Rochefort tells Admiral Nimitz (Henry Fonda) that the chatter his team hears keeps using the code “AF,” which he thinks is Midway. Other military leaders assume the next big attack will be the Aleutian Islands or even the west coast of the U.S., so a test is proposed: they send out a fake message about a water supply failure on Midway. Sure enough, the Japanese radio about water supplies on “AF.” The surprise the Japanese enjoyed at Pearl Harbor will now belong to the Americans.

I like all that. Unfortunately, the movie also includes is a fictional subplot that is the stuff of soap opera. Charlton Heston plays Capt. Matt Garth, the estranged father of fighter pilot Tom Garth (Edward Albert), who is looking to reconnect with his son. The fact that Matt is divorced feels out of time—that was a ’70s conversation, less a ’30s one. And then there’s Tom’s dilemma. He has to tell his old man: 1) his girlfriend, Hakuro (Christina Kokubo), is Japanese; 2) she and her parents are being held as subversives; and 3) can he help free them? When Matt objects, Tom accuses him of racism. Matt, in that Heston way, says he’s not racist, it’s just that his son’s timing is lousy; then he spends most of the rest of the movie trying to free them. I can’t even remember if he does, to be honest, and none of this is helped by the acting from Heston and Kokubo. Oh, and it turns out that her parents object to the union anyway since they don’t want Hakuro marrying outside her race. So who’s the racist now, huh? That’s the vibe.

Most of the U.S.-side of the cast consists of stars from the 1930s (Fonda), ’40s (Robert Mitchum in a cameo as Admiral Halsey),’50s (Heston and Glenn Ford) and the ’60s (James Coburn, Cliff Robertson). Plus a few young bucks who gained fame later: Dabney Coleman, Tom Selleck, Erik Estrada. We also get an uncredited cameo from Miami Dolphins running back Larry Csonka.

For the Japanese side, it’s almost every Japanese-American TV actor of the time: James Shigeta, Pat Morita, John Fujioka, Dale Ishimoto and Robert Ito. Plus the big gun, Toshiro Mifune, as Fleet Admiral Yamamoto. Unlike in “The Gallant Hours” with James Cagney, filmed 16 years earlier, the Japanese are forced to speak English here, but apparently Mifune’s English was so difficult to understand they dubbed him with Paul Frees, who also voiced the Burgermeister Meisterburger in Rankin/Bass’ “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

They did this to Mifune. Can’t make that stuff up.

The American race
The Battle of Midway is considered a turning point in the war in the Pacific. The Japanese lost four fleet carriers and a heavy cruiser, 248 airplanes and more than 3,000 men. The U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown and a destroyer, 150 aircraft, and 307 men. American morale went way up. Plus our industrial capacity far outstripped theirs. We could replace things, they couldn’t.

As for the soap opera: In battle, Tom Garth gets horribly injured but survives. Heston then steps in for the run at the final fleet carrier, succeeds, but crashes on the flight deck and dies. Glenn Ford closes his eyes in pain for his fictional friend, while Ensign George Gay (Kevin Dobson), the real-life sole survivor of Squadron 8, is pulled from the ocean. Tom, cleaned up and bandaged, is wheeled on a gurney past Hakuro, whose face reveals … who knows? Then Nimitz and Rochefort give us our coda as a large group of people, obviously pulled from some mid-1970s Hawaiian tourist attraction, mingle behind them. Nimitz wonders aloud how they were so successful when the Japanese had so many advantages. “Were we better than the Japanese or just luckier?” he asks. That, too, feels like a ’70s question—something to be pondered after the war is over—rather than spoken aloud in June 1942. Either way it goes unanswered.

Kind of. The movie’s final afterword is a quote from Churchill:

“The annals of war at sea present no more intense, heart-shaking shock than this battle, in which the qualities of the United States Navy and Air Force and the American race shone forth in splendour.”

The American race. Don’t hear that much anymore. 

I first saw “Midway” at the Boulevard Theater in Minneapolis when it was released in 1976, and I remember being confused. Wait, there was a time when we were losing World War II? That was news to my 13-year-old self. The huge cast, many of them unfamiliar (I didn’t know from Glenn Ford or Robert Mitchum), as well as the grainy battle scenes didn’t help me find any kind of clarity, either. I guess I was hoping that this second viewing, 45 years later, might reveal some forgotten or hidden charms.

All-Star cast; extras pulled from the gift shop.