Film review: The Last Detail (1973)

This film is the epitome of what made 70's Hollywood films so unique.  It's got a huge star, but the star is Jack Nicholson, who is not what any other decade would throw up as a star.  It also ambles fairly non-eventfully from beginning to end, and nobody learns any big lessons or becomes a radically different person, and the world is shown to be fairly unfair, but what are you going to do?
Well, it's perhaps unfair to say that it's uneventful - it's more realistic, in that the things that do happen seem like they really might.  Nicholson plays Buddusky (AKA "Badass") a sailor who is currently between "orders," who is sent, along with another sailor, Mulhall (AKA "Mule") (played by the excellent Otis Young, who should've been everywhere, but mostly seems to have had bit parts in TV) is sent on a "detail" (which seems to mean an odd job between missions at sea) to take a young sailor to prison for a sentence of 8 years, with dishonorable discharge for having attempted to steal $40 from a for-polio charity box.  His penalty is particularly draconian because the charity is the pet project of the wife of the "big man" on base.  Initially Buddusky plans to make it a super-quick trip to Portsmouth (where the prison is) from wherever they start (somewhere down South, but it's cold even there - another sign that this is a 70's film is that everything is dreary) so that lots of money will be left over for a leisurely spree for him and Mule after they deposit the kid, but the kid (played by a 24-year-old Randy Quaid, whose puffy cheeks make him look sufficiently juvenile to pass for the 18 years old his character (Meadows) is supposed to be,

is so pathetic (he can't help himself stealing, and doesn't even need most of the things he lifts) that they take pity on him and try to show him a good time along the way.  They stop off in Washington and New York, they get into fights, Buddusky flashes his gun at a bigoted bar man, they discover new-age chanting (featuring Gilda Radner in a miniscule part), fail to get lucky (featuring Nancy Allen in a slightly bigger part), get wasted, sleep in crappy motels, try out the best sausage sandwiches in the world

take Meadows to a prostitute (featuring Carol Kane in a slightly bigger part still)

and then end up dropping him off in prison slightly the worse for wear as he tries to do a runner at the last minute.  And that's the movie.  Hard to believe it was written by Robert "Chinatown" Townes, except that afterwards you realize how good it was by how much you think about it.  And Jack Nicholson is a star simply because you never for a second doubt the character and you can't take your eyes off him.  It's also sad how Randy Quaid ended up, because he's also a natural goofball and completely believable as a sad-sack fuck up kid.  (A poignant scene is when Buddusky insists they take Meadows to visit him Mom, but she isn't there, but they get a glimpse inside her house of a complete tip, with bottles scattered everywhere.)  But Buddusky and Mule aren't that much better, at least from us "normies'" point of view, because they're self-confessed Navy "lifers" (Nicholson was already in his mid-30s when he made this, which makes him in his 80's now!) and it becomes clear that they couldn't function in the wider world without the structure that the Navy provides.  So what do we take away from this?  You tell me.  All I know is that it couldn't've been made in the '60s because of the copious use of "motherfucker" and it certainly wouldn't be allowed to end as it does today.  I mean, Buddusky basically says to Mule that Meadows isn't going to make it in prison (because Marines are just sadistic motherfuckers) but, instead of them all running away, or Buddusky and Mule endangering their Navy careers out of empathy and letting Meadows make a break for it, they turn him in and walk off, muttering.  But that, of course, is what makes it great.

Film review: Rollerball (1975)

This film holds a special place in my heart because it was one of two films that I saw after school projected using an actual film projector in the classroom we usually met for my "house" meetings (and once we listened to David Suchet explain Shylock to us).  The other film was Life of Brian, so Rollerball had a lot to live up to.  But in the opinion of my sci-fi obsessed early-teen self, it did - it was totally awesome!  So when I saw it included in the Criterion Channel's "70's Sci Fi" collection, I had to see if it held up.  And it sort of did.  Here's the gist: James Caan

(excellent - this was the first thing I ever saw him as, so unlike 99% of people who've heard of James Caan, I don't think of him as Sonny Corleone) is Jonathan E, the sort of Michael Jordan of the futuristic (well, it's set in 2018!) sport of Rollerball, which is sort of like Roller Derby but with motorbikes

and a steel ball and is so plausibly entertaining of a fictional sport that the crew actually played it when not shooting the movie, and the director, Norman Jewison (director of Fiddler on the Roof and Moonstruck!) fielded many, many offers to turn it into a real sport with actual franchises.  However, part of the point of the movie is that it's a terrible sport (it's a sign of how degraded society has become that they watch this kind of thing) so he refused.  A loss to us all, say I.  Anyway, there are three main Rollerball games interspersed throughout the movie, all of them featuring Jonathan and his orange-clad champion Houston team.  The first one is against a European team (I think it's Milan) and is fairly tame by Rollerball standards in that nobody dies.  But then the real point of the movie starts to emerge.  The idea is that the world is run by corporations now (at the start of each contest everyone has to rise for the "corporation anthem") and they control every aspect of people's lives, and distract them with gaudy shows like Rollerball.  They also control Jonathan's life - they provide him with female companionship, for example, but he is pining for his former wife (played by Maud Adams) who was "taken away" by a corporation hotshot.  Jonathan is getting on in years, and a big boss played by Paper Chase actor John Houseman tries to convince him to retire.  He doesn't want to, and doesn't quite understand why anyone would want him to.  The answer is that the point of Rollerball had always been to convince the masses that the individual could not succeed by himself and had to work as a team, but Jonathan had become too big for his britches and destroyed the message.  So, in order to eliminate him, the rules are gradually stripped away from the game, and it becomes more and more lethal.  The second matchup is Houston versus Tokyo, and you get some excellent (albeit absurdly stereotyped) karate-esque action from the Tokyo squad,

which results in Jonathan's main buddy on the team, "Moonpie" ending up in a persistent vegetative state.  The final matchup has no rules and no time limit, and goes until everyone is dead or crippled.  This one's in New York, appropriately enough - if you can make it there...

And you can guess who is the lone survivor, skating around the track as everyone chants his name as the movie ends...
Interspersed between the excellent action scenes are lots of scenes of Jonathan moping around, attending decadent parties that no longer interest him, being visited by his ex-wife and getting mad when she tries to get him to retire, and going to (I think) Venice, where there is a big library curated by Ralph Richardson (in an insultingly small role) and one of those mad talking computers that were everywhere in 70s sci-fi.  So the background message is kind of Ayn Randian: the extraordinary individual must rise above the attempts to crush his exceptionalism, and of course, Jonathan does.  But the set designs are great, Caan underplays it very nicely (he's convincing as an inarticulate Texan jock) and it's drenched in Top Classical Hits like Toccata in Fugue and Albinoni's Adagio, so it doesn't have a super-dated synth score, as it might well have done.  I can see why teenaged me liked it so much (as the Randian implications would have partly flown over my head and partly appealed to the me-against-the-world feeling of every teen).  And one odd scene had stuck with me, where a set of drunk/stoned party guests stumble out into the countryside holding a weird pistol and proceed to fire it at a row of trees, setting each of them ablaze in turn.  Probably means something, but now I was just sad that they set perfectly good trees on fire to make this film.

Film review: Westworld (1973)

Now THAT'S a poster!  Another of the 70's sci-fi collection that Criterion just has until the end of the month.  One of the very few (I imagine) films not only written by Michael Crichton (same plot as his Jurassic Park, basically) but directed by him as well.  And it is a pretty much perfect premise, albeit one you shouldn't think about too much (real bullets in the guns?  Yes, the guns are set up so they won't fire at anything that has body heat, but (a) of course they go haywire along with the robots, and (b) what about ricochets?).  An adult amusement park where you get to play a cowboy (actually you have a choice of three adjacent parks, Westworld, Roman World and Castle World (or maybe Medieval World, I can't remember) and the first death-by-robot we witness actually happens by sword in the third of these.  (Roman World, it's very unsubtly indicated, is basically just for orgies, which of course suggests that the deaths in that world would be super grisly.)  The movie is basically divided in half: the first half sets up the premise and has nerdy Richard Benjamin and hunky James "father of Josh" Brolin (who's the spitting image of Christian Bale, I think) exploring the delights of gunfights, robotic prostitutes and busting out of jail with dynamite, while the second is all hell breaking out and Richard Benjamin being stalked by a very eerie Yul Brynner (somehow they make his eyes glisten in a very nasty way). 

Brynner totally makes this movie, which otherwise is fairly cheese-heavy.  He is an excellent monster and conveys so much with subtle little movements and sometimes just stillness.  And cheesy as this was, it was still better pure entertainment than the HBO series, which seems to have wasted a killer premise on too much navel-gazing.  Crichton's direction is serviceable, although I don't think he really knows how to direct actors, and one strength is that as things go south, there's no attempt at a God's Eye Explanation of why the robots suddenly turn homicidal.  This is the secret of all good disaster stories, from Day of the Triffids to Night of the Living Dead.

Film review: Murder! (1930)

An early Hitchcock, although not silent.  I'd never even heard of this one, but it's leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so we thought we'd give it a go.  As I often find with early talkies, the pacing and structure of the film seems a bit alien, but there are some very good bits.  It begins with a couple waking up in the night to a disturbance a couple of houses down and the wife struggles into her day clothes before they both run to see what's happened.  Turns out they're part of a rather down-at-heels theater troupe and one actress appears to have killed another (the wife of the person who runs it).  She is found rather stunned with a blood-covered poker right by her alongside the corpse and an empty flask of brandy on the table.  She is put on trial, and we get to see the deliberation of the jury.  This is a good bit of Hitchcock comedic shenanigans, as each member is presented as a humorous archetype, except for the one who emerges as our protagonist, renowned actor Sir John Menier.  He is initially one of the three to vote not guilty, but is essentially brow-beaten into changing his vote, assigning the "murderer" to the gallows. He almost immediately feels regret (especially as it emerges that the accused came to see him months before and it was on his advice that she joined the theater troupe) (also the fact that she looks like this

might be a motivating factor) and is troubled by the empty brandy flask, as neither victim nor accused appears to have drunk it.  He recruits the couple we saw at the opening of the film and embarks on some amateur sleuthing.  (So it has a sort of Agatha Christie-esque feel to it, especially as they mention a play called Mousetrap.)  Memorable scenes: a policeman cross-questioning members of the troupe backstage as they come off stage or are about to go on, and you get an impression of a completely bizarre country-house farce (no doubt invented by Hitchcock), when Sir John stays in a boarding house run by the wife of a policeman they want to find out about and is overrun by her children in the morning

and the climax, which is at a circus.  That one has the most quintessentially Hitchcock camerawork and some impressive camera-effects (as well as a shocking denoument).  All in all, far from his worst!  There is a very of-its-time use of a plot device of someone being "half-caste", though, just as a heads up.  Here's Hitch's cameo:

Film review: Death Race 2000 (1975)

This is the granddaddy of all those Running Man/Battle Royale/Hunger Games type plots.  It's also really cheaply made and incredibly heavy-handed.  I would've thought it was GREAT when I was about 11 (maybe 13, because of the nudity).  I knew the plot involved a points system whereby the racers were motivated to run over pedestrians (extra points for the very young or the very old) but I didn't know that there was a subplot about a rebel group wanting to disrupt the race because (a) it's barbaric (although the rebels' tactics are pretty bloodthirsty) and (b) because it's being used as the opiate of the masses by the autocratic president (who keeps blaming France for all that goes wrong, including the collapse of the economy).  There's not half as much gore as I would've expected - only a couple of very quick glimpses of heads being squished or people being gored by the horns on the front of one of the cars, and it's surprisingly egalitarian (every car has a driver and an opposite-sex navigator, who is also more-or-less obligated to satisfy the drivers lusts, but there are two female drivers to go along with three male drivers (David Carradine,

a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone,

and a guy who I recognize from the TV show Cagney and Lacey)

(I know, no same-sex couples, but I guess that was too much for 1975).  Is it entertaining?  Well, it's blessedly short, and there are a couple of good scenes (like when the nurses at the old folks' home leave their most decrepit patients out in the middle of the road for "euthanasia," but our anti-hero "Frankenstein"

(so named because he's supposed to have so many artificial limbs added after past accidents, but it turns out he's actually fine because there hasn't been one Frankenstein, just a succession of people playing him) refuses to run them over and instead cuts over to where the nurses are hiding and mows them down instead), and there's an actual HAND grenade, which is stupidly awesome.  Paul Bartel the director (also of Eating Raoul) is a sort of John Waters for teens, I guess.  Watch it for the pale, flaccid 70's bods and cheesy 70's view of the future (now our past), but don't say I didn't warn you.

Film review: Destry Rides Again (1939)

Jami and Frederick were watching Rango, and it put her in the mood for an actual Western.  I picked this one, and now we've seen it I'm starting to think that Mel Brooks didn't come up with anything new.  Just as watching Son of Frankenstein revealed that Young Frankenstein was pretty much a straight-up remake of that with jokes, so watching Destry Rides Again tells you not just that Lily Von Shtupp is just doing Marlene Dietrich's "Frenchy" (!) but that the plot is basically beat for beat the same.  There is a small town that keeps losing sheriffs.  The town drunk is a deputy sheriff that sends for a new one (in this case he, Jimmy Stewart, is the son of a former legendary sheriff (the titular Destry)).  The town villain (Harvey Korman in Saddles, Brian Donlevy in Destry) has a crooked land deal going on (in Destry's case owning all the land across the valley so that they can charge people driving cattle a fortune for passing through).  And of course, the town mayor in both cases is corrupt.  Granted there's no racial component in Destry (although Frenchy has a black maid who has accompanied her from New Orleans, and with whom she has a relationship much like Barbara Stanwyck has in Baby Face, and there are Cantonese-speaking Chinese townsfolk, which was an interesting touch for a comedic 30's western) but Frenchy does fall for the new guy, to the rage of her evil current lover.  And she sings a song that is almost as funny as Madelyn Kahn's, and with exactly the same outrageous low notes.  It's an enjoyable film, mostly because of Dietrich (who is a revelation) and Stewart (who doesn't overdo his Jimmy-Stewart-ness, thankfully), although the drunk deputy "Wash: (actually, he was deputy to Destry Sr., but Destry Jr. is supposed to be his deputy, even if he never acts like it), played by Charles Winninger is also a scene-stealer. Interestingly, Stewart's character is determined to tame the town without the use of guns (because his father died by being shot in the back, supposedly), and mostly does so, right up to the point when Wash is fatally shot.  Also interestingly, a major set piece is a knock-down, drag-out catfight

and the climax of the film is a riot of the town's women, driven by Frenchy, to stop their men killing one another.  However [spoiler], unusually for a mostly-comedy, Frenchy dies at the hand of her evil ex-lover before Destry shoots him.  A fun romp, and I will never wonder where the idea of Lily Von Shtupp came from again.

Film review: Logan's Run (1976)

This one is a part of a series of '70s sci-fi films currently on the Criterion Channel.  I hadn't seen this since I was about 12 and in some ways it was better than I remember.  It's definitely weird (set in the post-apocalyptic ruins of Washington DC, and starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter and Peter Ustinov - only the last of whom attempts an American accent) and of a type of film that Star Wars more or less wiped out.  The special effects are about of Dr. Who quality (and by which I mean, Tom Baker Dr. Who, not the current slick version) but some of the sets are vast and impressive (although some of them also look very much like a mall, complete with escalators).  As most people know, the plot is that everyone has a gem implanted in their hands at birth that glows a certain color (kids are yellow, then green at puberty, then it switches to red) until you approach 30, at which point it starts to blink

and it's time for you to go to "carousel" - a very bizarre ceremony where people stand in a circle then get sucked upwards and explode - with the idea that some select people survive this (although, of course, they don't really, and it's hard to see why anyone watching the process would believe that they do).  Alternatively, you can "run", which means not accept your fate and try to hide somewhere in the vast cityscape below multiple domes.  At this point, the "sandmen" (like Blade Runners in that film) are tasked with hunting you down and shooting you (with what I thought as a kid were particularly snazzy ray-guns, but now also seem very Dr. Who-esque).  Logan is one of these, along with his pal Francis.  (Or, actually, Logan 5 and Francis 6, to give them their full names.  As each one of their name reaches thirty and is eliminated, their name is given to a newborn baby (produced entirely by artificial means, apparently), so the name represents a generation.)  All goes well until he checks in at the end of one day, which requires depositing the effects of one's victims on a scanner.  One of those items is an ankh, and this means that the computer (that appears to run everything) questions Logan closely and informs him that the ankh is the symbol of "sanctuary" which an underground society of runners believe lies outside the domes.  Rather unwisely, I can't help but think, the computer lets it drop that nobody every survives carousel, and at the same time it makes Logan's light blink prematurely.  The idea is to incentivize him to go undercover and pretend to be a runner, but at the same time it refuses to tell him if he'll get his 4 years back.  (Although York looks a good deal older than 26, and several people in the dome definitely look mid-30s.)  This is where Jenny Agutter's Jessica comes in, because York has already met her and noticed her ankh necklace and habit of mourning friends who've gone to carousel.  Anyway, long story short, Logan and Jessica go on the run, break out of the city, and find that everyone who's come before them has been killed (by a very silly, and yes, Dr. Who-esque "robot" called Box) that they manage to get past.  Meanwhile, however, Francis is on their tail.  They eventually reach what they think is sanctuary, but it turns out to be the remains of the Capital, complete with Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, et al. (which seems like a bit of a rip-off of Planet of the Apes' use of the Statue of Liberty), where they meet Ustinov's "Old Man" who is alone apart from lots and lots of cats.  (He has a habit of reciting T.S. Eliot's Practical Cats, which seemed topical, given the much-derided recent film of the musical.)  It looks like Logan and Jessica can settle down (after dealing with Francis), but Logan feels he has to go back and tell everyone that nobody needs to die at 30 (the life-clock gems go clear (maybe that's what Leonard Cohen meant!) outside the dome.  Will they get back in?  Will anyone listen to them? 

Will there be an incredibly cheesy "computer can't handle what it's hearing and explodes" sequence?  YOU be the judge.  Very silly, but York and, in particular, Jenny Agutter make you believe and care (rather in the manner of a, yes, I'm going to say it again, classic Dr. Who episode transcending its cheapness and silliness by the quality of the performances).  Agutter has an amazingly earnest performing style that led her to being recruited to making very strange shenanigans (e.g. Walkabout) seem human and believable, and boy is it needed here.  Definitely of its time.  There was a very short-lived TV spin off, too, but I believe Star Wars killed that, too.

Film review: The Reptile (1966)

Fun fact #1: A picture of the monster from this film was in a book I had when I was a kid that was a picture book of famous film monsters and it creeped me out.  That whole book made me queasy - I think I may have traded it with Matthew at one point.

Fun fact #2: This film was made at the same time, with the same sets and some of the same actors (Michael Ripper (I just remembered where I first knew him from) and Jacqueline Pearce) as Plague of the Zombies.  To avoid cinema-goers noticing, they were released several months apart, both as the B-picture to a bigger-budgeted Hammer film, the pair of which (a Dracula film and Rasputin The Mad Monk) also shared sets and cast members.  Of the four, however, it was only this one that came in under budget, and I would guess that they saved money on the cast, because it's very limited.  However, Ripper and Pearce are excellent, and it also has John "Dad's Army" Laurie as "Mad Peter", so you get bang for your buck.  (They struggle to explain Laurie's undisguiseable Scots brogue, given that he's a local yokel in a Cornish village, but never mind.)  As with Plague, it's a period piece, and very capably acted, with lush color and fine English country sets (shot at Bray Studios in Berkshire), with a similar plot of Englishmen at the time of the Empire bringing back strange foreign religious customs to disastrous effects in the bucolic native land - in this case it is a Sumatran Lizard-People religion, studied by a doctor of Theology (the effectively creepy Noel Willman).  Again the protagonists are a man and an attractive young blonde woman, only this time they are man and wife instead of father and daughter, the father-daughter pair being the sinister ones they discover when they move into the husband's dead brother's house (the film begins with him dying by the teeth of the shadowy lizard-creature).  The wife, who is almost indistinguishable from Plague's Silvia Forbes, is actually played by a different actress, Jennifer Daniel.  And if Plague's plot is a rip-off of Dracula, this one's plot is heavily influenced by a werewolf picture, only reptilian rather than mammalian.  There is also a hint of the Mummy, only instead of a sinister Egyptian, there is a sinister Sumatran, putatively in the employ of the doctor, but actually controlling him.  Not quite at the very high level of Plague, but still pleasant enough, and, in true Hammer fashion, with some surprisingly shocking moments.  It also ends with (the same) country house burning.  I don't know how they managed to do it twice, as it looks very realistic - maybe it's the same footage.

This time Ripper has a bigger role, as a publican rather than a policeman, but sadly has to wear face fungus.  These two are essentially the heroes of the piece, as her husband is definitely no André Morell, and in fact spends a significant amount of time just lying in bed, recovering.

This scene is very odd: sitar music is used to underpin rising incestuous sexual tension that ends in the angry destruction of the sitar.  Hammer movies don't tend to stint on the Freudian undertones.