1979 Was A Tough Year For Malcolm McDowell Sans The Charming Time Travel Film, “Time After Time”

HG Wells Watching Tele with Jack The Ripper

In between his brilliant feature film debut in Lindsay Anderson’s prophetic 1968 counterculture film “If” and his current job making “Lunchables” commercials, the wheels came off the career of legendary English actor Malcolm McDowell.

During the late 1970s, with his career booming off of critical and commercial successes such as Lindsay Anderson’s “O Lucky Man,” which Malcolm starred in and co-wrote the screenplay, to portraying Captain Flashman in Richard Lester’s 1975 hit “Royal Flash” to his most famed role as Little Alex in Kubrick’s adaptation of Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange,” it seemed that nothing could unseat him from being regarded as one of the great young talents in British cinema. That is until 1979, when Malcolm appeared in three films, two of which saw small popularity and decent press and one film which saw international headlines but for all the wrong reasons: the Tinto Brass directed and Bob Guccione produced hardcore porn Roman epic, “Caligula.” “Caligula’s” rank violence and often grotesque sexuality offended just about everyone and was relegated to a single screen in a NYC theater that Guccione purchased just so that his X-Rated opus could screen anywhere without incident. “Caligula” starred John Gielgud, Peter O’ Toole, and a young Helen Mirren, all of whom came out of the experience with their careers fairly unscathed, but after all, none of them were playing the title character, and for that, McDowell saw his performance singled out and savaged for its flamboyancy, which frankly was no less flamboyant than the performance that he gave as a ruthless Nazi commander in “The Passage,” which was released the same year. Then again, in our polite society, I guess it’s more acceptable to play a torturing fascist than a Roman leader with a penchant for anal fisting newlyweds.

In the summer of 1979, Caligula had been released in Rome and the word of this bleak, over budget porno had begun to hit the United States with word that the film would be released early the following year. That same summer I was thrilled to head to my local single-screen theater to see McDowell, who I had followed since seeing “A Clockwork Orange” at the age of ten when my friend and I watched it on tape, playing author HG Wells in a new movie called “Time After Time.” In this whimsical, mostly romantic and far less geeky film, McDowell plays Wells with a heartfelt charming conviction. The film opens in the year 1896 with a grizzly killing committed by none other than real life serial killer, Jack The Ripper. Soon, we are whisked to the home of Wells who is hosting a dinner party for his peers where he plans to give special unveiling of a new project later in the evening. Once the last of his dinner guests, Doctor Stevenson (David Warner), arrives, Wells adjourns the group to his basement where he shows them his proud creation, a very ornate almost amusement park ride looking contraption Wells calls “a time machine” (we are to guess that he has not written that book yet). Wells boldly explains the functionality of his creation, but when he is asked if it actually works he sheepishly admits that he has not “worked up the nerve to test it out yet.” His guests laugh off the invention, but the laughter soon ends when Scotland Yard knocks on the door. As we the viewer know but Wells’ guests don’t, The Ripper has struck again, and the proof that Doctor Stevenson is most likely the man that they are looking for sends the austere house into a frenzy, but after a thorough search, the bad doctor is nowhere to be found. It then dawns on Wells that someone had the nerve to use his invention, and that man is Stevenson whom Wells, well known for his utopian ideals, must now stop as he (Wells) is certain that Stevenson will run amok with violence in the future, a place where HG imagines being devoid of war and strife. So, our protagonist must follow Stevenson into the future, 1979 San Francisco to be exact.

After a dazzling time-travel sequence, Wells arrives in swinging 1979 San Francisco. Cleverly the future has allowed him to land his ship in a museum exhibit featuring Wells’ entire study and his time machine which the sign indicates “never worked,” which is odd as the key that only Wells possesses is only needed to prevent the machine from automatically returning to where it came from, meaning that anyone could just type in a date and make it fly. OK, I feel me getting geeky here, so I will move along, but did you notice how I didn’t mention that Wells could’ve simply ended the story at the beginning by taking his time machine back an hour in 1896 to alert the police that Stevenson was The Ripper? Yes, the story does have some gaping holes when playing with its time travel plot, but, as I don’t want to trip out on the sci-fi aspects just yet, I will now really move along.

Wells immediately understands that the utopia he had predicted in the future has not yet arrived. There is violence, mistrust, and poverty, but McDowell shrugs it off and like Sherlock Holmes, who he mentions many times in the film, uses deductive reasoning and goes bank to bank asking about Stevenson as Wells suspects that he will try and exchange Sovereigns somewhere in the city before building up a body count. Wells’ quest leads him to a desk at the Bank of England where he meets a young manager named Amy (a wonderfully ditsy Mary Steenburgen). Amy does point HG in the right direction as she referred Stevenson to the Hyatt, where the nebbish Wells will soon confront the larger serial killing Stevenson and try, through conversation, to get him to return to 19^th Century England to face the authorities (not sure how the screenwriter thought that made any sense). Stevenson tells Wells that their present location and time in the United States is a violent place where Stevenson finally feels at home, and after a scuffle where Stevenson unsuccessfully tries to locate the time machine key on Wells, they take their chase on foot to the streets, where Stevenson is hit by a car and is presumed dead. Wells, believing that his job is now over, seeks out our good bank clerk Amy for a chance at gaining knowledge of this place in time and perhaps the odd chance at a cuddle. Not phased that HG is dressed like a Sherlock Holmes-era dandy, Amy beds and falls in love with Wells, who is in no rush to go back to the days when seeing a woman’s exposed ankle was considered erotic.

Through news reports on the radio, Wells soon realizes that The Ripper is still alive and well and slicing up the women in the Bay area, so he must hunt him down and inadvertently gets Amy mixed up in the quest, so she then becomes hunted by Stevenson as Wells will not surrender his key. Of course Stevenson could just get back into the time machine and go farther into the future or deeper into the past to kill prostitutes but without the key, that would mean that Holmes would still be after him. I, for one, began to wonder, even at the age of eleven, why that would even be of concern to Stevenson unless he is foolish enough to head back to 1896 England. Anywhere else, Wells would be seen as a crackpot having to explain his investigation of Stevenson through the time space continuum.

In this way, “Time After Time” does not succeed as science fiction; in fact the science fiction engine of this film is only there to set up the romance between HG and Amy, which is fine for me. There is a palpable chemistry between McDowell and Steenburgen onscreen, as they did actually fall in love during filming of “Time After Time” and were married the next year, and they stayed married for the next decade. To add to the lovely performances of McDowell and Steenburgen, David Warner is also fantastic as Jack The Ripper, and if the plot had less about the relationship between HG and Amy, it would’ve been an entirely different film, one that would’ve relied more on the facts that we know about Jack The Ripper and HG Wells to further a plot of cat and mouse as opposed to the fictional character of Amy, a perspective that has me curious of the outcome, but, nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed the romantic perspective that director Meyer takes with the story. Adding further to the enchanting mood of “Time After Time” is a lavish old Hollywood score composed by the great Miklós Rózsa, who had scored almost one hundred films in his career from “Ben Hur” to “Spellbound” to “Double Indemnity.” The score for “Time After Time” would mark the end of Rózsa’s magnificent Hollywood career.

The following year in 1980, Steenburgen would deservedly win the Academy Award for her portrayal of Lynda the wife of Melvin Dummar in Jonathan Demme’s classic “Melvin and Howard.” That same year Caligula would open in the U.S., and its presence on our shores would cause immense controversy and forever link McDowell negatively to the titular role. Buried with the controversy that year and now virtually forgotten was another fine performance by McDowell in “Look Back In Anger,” directed by his friend Lindsay Anderson. Two years later, Anderson would direct McDowell in the last of his Mick Davis trilogy in the dark comedy that is “Britannia Hospital.” That film, a smart satire on the British Health Service, also failed at the box office. In the following years, McDowell was mostly relegated to villainous roles, a few notable performances being “Mr. A” from Robert Altman’s ballet drama “The Company” in 2003 and that same year as the heavy in Mike Hodges’ underrated anti-gangster film, “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.”

“Time After Time” Original Trailer

Despite its flaws in storytelling, I always looked at “Time After Time” as that last beautiful moment for McDowell in cinema. Pigeonholing an actor, either positively or negatively, is never a good thing if you have the talent that McDowell exhibited during his career. “Time After Time” proved that Malcolm could be comedic but also romantic and charming while eating up the screen as he did as a psychotic in many films. Sadly, there isn’t a real time machine for McDowell to go back and reconsider his role of a demented orgy-obsessed Roman emperor, but let’s hope that before he leaves this world, he turns down a check to shill for a packaged lunchtime product to make a small film that mattered like his “Caligula” counterpart Peter O’Toole did in 2006’s sublime film “Venus.”

Oliver Reed And Fabio Testi Fight Each Other And The Clock In The Exceptional 1973 Poliziotteschi, “Revolver”

Reed and Testi Are Sporting Serious Outerwear!

If you regularly read my reviews of lost 1970s films, you may have noticed that only two months ago I already reviewed a poliziotteschi (Italian crime film) called “The Big Racket,” and that one also starred Fabio Testi. So, why, you may ask, am I reviewing another film within the same genre so soon?

Most importantly, I really love the early spaghetti westerns of director Sergio Sollima, who sadly passed away back in July at the age of ninety four, so I thought to re-watch some of his best films. High on my list of his work in the spaghetti genre are “The Big Gundown,” “Face To Face,” and “Run Man Run,” all back to back from 1966 to 1968 and all starring the steely-eyed Cuban-born actor Thomas Milian. Director Sollima was never as epic in scale or poetic as Leone or as gruesome as Corbucci; no, what distinguished a Sollima western was the cold solemnness that set him apart from many of his peers. I loved taking a second glance at his work these last few months and was even more motivated to watch his 1973 poliziotteschi, “Revolver,” aka “Blood In The Streets,” the Sollima work with the brooding talents of Fabio Testi, who at the time had just scored a hit in the crime genre with “Gang War In Naples,” and the legendarily erratic and intense English thespian, Oliver Reed. With both actors also ranking high on my wife Lily’s list of 1970s male film star crushes, there was a lot riding on this watch between Lily’s love of Reed and Testi, and my adoration for both actors and Sollima’s films. Luckily “Revolver” delivers on both of our expectations.

“Revolver” opens in the dead of night where Milo Ruiz (Testi) is carrying his partner in crime who is badly wounded after a security guard shoots him during a burglary attempt. Milo clearly cares deeply for his accomplice in crime who is not going to make it and asks Milo for his dying request to bury him secretly and to keep his dead body out of the hands of the coroners. Milo obliges and he sadly buries his friend in a riverside ditch. After the burial, we cut to the next scene where you have the very Anglo Oliver Reed playing (brace yourself) Vito Cipriani, a tough prison official who spends his nights in the arms of his ridiculously gorgeous wife Anna, played by the luminous Agostina Belli. Everything is all well and good, which based on the genre you know won’t last long, until one day Vito gets a call that his wife has been kidnapped. When the abductor calls, he only asks for one item in return of Vito’s wife, and that is the unofficial release of a prisoner being held in Vito’s jail named Milo Ruiz. As Vito loves his wife dearly, he immediately descends on the prison cell of Milo and begins an intense round of questioning and a bit of beatdown on our wisecracking felon who appears to not be in on the kidnapping and has no ideas who his “friends” are who are stealing wardens’ wives to barter for his freedom. After a few more face slaps and armed with the prospect of early freedom, Milo breaks out with the help of Vito and they begin a Walter Hill/”48 Hours” style relationship of putdowns and punches to the head as they race against the clock to try and rescue Anna. Neither Vito nor Milo knows why they want Milo as their ransom, but, as the movie progresses, we start to realize that Milo may be as innocent as Anna in all this, and that his arrival to these mobsters may mean his own demise.

This plot so far sets up Vito as the classic poliziotteschi protagonist in that he is a by the book official who does everything he can legally, but he even must break the law in order to fight the forces of evil. As corruption was rampant in Italy, the poliziotteschi mirrored Italian’s frustration with a system that could not represent or protect them adequately. The unique twist in “Revolver” is the chemistry that forms between Vito and Milo or should I say Reed and Testi? As Sollima would say in his interview for Blue Underground, Testi was cursed by being so damn “good looking” as no one ever asked him to really act. Testi was a fine actor as evidenced by many of his films during his long career, most notably in Andrzej Żuławski’s brilliant 1975 melodrama, “That Most Important Thing: Love.” Reed was quite possibly the finest English speaking actor of the 1970s, an actor who was most noted for his intensity but was also capable of heart wrenching tenderness as evidenced in Ken Russell’s 1969 film “Women In Love” and 1971 film, “The Devils.” You can see a real friendship developing between Reed and Testi, which translates into their characters, Milo and Vito, who must make hard choices as the plot deepens between the care for a friend, the love of a woman, and ultimately their own self-preservation. Unfortunately, as it was the case for many Euro-crime dramas of the 1970s, both actors’ voices were dubbed into English (why does an English actor like Reed need to be dubbed anyway?) in that same fake American-English accent that sounds like Mel Gibson’s suicidal cop in the “Lethal Weapon” films. Still, Reed and Testi carry so much pathos with just their eyes and gestures that it should be shown to young film actors.

Given the talents of the leads’ ability to handle whatever their roles demand, the plot can and does become quite complex and much credit has to be given to Sollima who co-wrote the screenplay with Massimo De Rita, and Arduino Maiuri. This isn’t a simple plot of revenge as was the case with the other Testi film I wrote about back in August, “The Big Racket,” which was an interesting view if only for its sheer level of brutality and non-stop action. No, with “Revolver” Sollima, De Rita, and Maiuri have created a complex plot and a set of characters that carry very different agendas, which propel the story towards a much unexpected ending. Further solidifying “Revolver” as one of the finest Euro crime film ever is the score by Morricone which in my opinion ranks amongst the best of his 1970s work. It is a bold majestic score that seems more designed for a Leone film, but, given the dark nature of “Revolver’s” plot, the music is an excellent counterbalance in tone that pushes the dramatic hit of more than a few small scenes.

Adding to the majestic nature of “Revolver” is the daring cinematography by Aldo Scavarda, who a decade earlier had lensed Michaelangelo Antonioni’s masterpiece, “L’avventura.” Scavarda does very well with the action scenes, especially taking some odd angles with the driving sequences, but he really shines when he focuses on the intimacy between actors. When I set out to write this review, I immediately recalled the first moments of Reed and Agostini on screen which establishes their character’s love for one another via a long, low-level tracking shot of Agostini, in knee high yellow socks, walking around her apartment on the tops of Reed’s bare feet. I also think of a two-shot of Reed and Testi briefly holding hands for a few seconds after they escape an almost deadly encounter: these are simple visual ideas that make this crime drama into an emotionally immersive experience as opposed to just another standard Euro shoot-em-up.

International Trailer for “Revolver”

Based on the interview conducted with Sollima for the DVD release, “Revolver” flopped at the box-office, not because of bad reviews, but for his producers and distributors having foolishly spent all of their ad money when the film was expected to be released in Italy in the fall of 1973 but was not due to unclear delays that pushed the release into spring of the next year. The film was released in the U.S. the following year and was marketed to take advantage of the runaway success of Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” but never found an audience here either. Thanks to Blue Underground for releasing “Revolver,” an exceptional film loaded with exceptional acting by two of the finest acting talents that decade, an excellent score and visuals, and one of the last great films by the late Sergio Sollima.

Vincent Price Does Shakespeare In The Red! 1973’s Theatre Of Blood

Oh Dear, a Bit More Than a “Pound Of Flesh”

I guess I have always loved Vincent Price in the same way that so many others do: in the ghoulish Edgar Allen Poe reciting kind of way. Even we fans of Mr. Price sometimes forget that he didn’t start in films that dripped blood. Sure, early on, he starred in a few horror films such as “Tower of London” with Karloff in 1939 and in “The Invisible Man Returns” in 1940, but Vincent was also an exceptional character actor in film noirs like Otto Preminger’s Academy Award winning “Laura” and “The Web,” starring against Edmund O’Brien. Things changed for Vincent after 1953 when “House of Wax” became a huge hit in the middle of the 3-D fad, and then it was almost all horror after that with the success of “The Fly” and of course “The Return of The Fly” and many more Hollywood horror films from that decade. Come the 1960s and Roger Corman getting his hands on Price for AIP, Price was locked into a feast on the terror train as he made several adaptations of the aforementioned Poe with Corman including, “The Pit and The Pendulum,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Raven.” In fact Vincent and Roger made no less than eight adaptations of Poe’s work, all fairly low budget but always coming in above expectations courtesy of Price in the lead. I have often wondered if Vincent enjoyed being the king of horror as so many people have called him over the years. After all, Price studied Fine Arts at the University of London and began his stage career in Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre, so when I heard that he attempts Shakespeare in “Theatre Of Blood,” I was intrigued. Could Price go back to his roots and perform Shakespeare on screen after almost forty years of stabbing zombies? Well, I am thrilled to write “yes,” but you know that Shakespeare with Vincent Price is going to come with a bit of deliberately served ham and a hefty body count.

Price plays Edward Lionheart, a “serious” actor who attempts suicide by diving into the Thames but is secretly rescued by a pack of riverside hobos. Lionheart’s suicide attempt comes after an evening when he is humiliated by The London Theatre Critics Circle who trash a series of Shakespearean plays that he has just produced, and as far as the theatre community is concerned, Lionheart jumped to his death and is nevermore. With his death a fabrication, our thespian Edward, like so many of the heroes contained in Bill Shakespeare’s works is craving revenge and, with his newfound homeless friends in tow as his band of brothers, sets on the critics who have scorned him by giving them a performance of “The Bard” that they will never forget because it will be the last thing they will ever see. You see, Edward isn’t going to give them a humorous scene from “Twelfth Night” or “Much Ado About Nothing.” No, when Edward performs a scene from “The Merchant Of Venice,” he will bring in our critic and actually take his “pound of flesh” in this translation as payment for the bad reviews that he has always received from his now kidnapped critics in some fairly graphic scenes that come to life in a way that I’m sure would’ve made even Shakespeare himself shudder a bit. The plays are then acted out for Lionheart’s most attentive audience of all, The Theatre of Blood which is his adorning collection of tramps.

Yes, all of your favorite Shakespearean nasties are here for you to witness in living color. One envious critic is conned by Lionheart into murdering his wife just like Othello murders his bride Desdemona. Another critic gets the Julius Caesar Ides of March treatment in the form of a dozen knife-wielding hobos. An alcoholic critic is drowned in a vat of wine and dragged through a cemetery by wild horses à la Richard III. With the bodies of the recently critical reviewers piling up and armed with the suspicion that our non-dead thespian might be behind the killings, our comical Inspector Boot (Milo O’Shea) and Sergeant Dogge (Eric Sykes) scour the streets of London to locate Lionheart, starting with his faithful daughter, Edwina (an always fetching Diana Rigg), a make-up artist. She is defiant in the face of the law which isn’t a surprise as she is in league with her father and his artistic vendetta. Alas, she convinces the last surviving critic to visit the Theatre Of Blood, setting up the final scene of demented pathos.

Original Trailer For Theatre Of Blood

Director Douglas Hickox commands the entirety of the film with a bold vigor and rarely matched lunacy and comedy that keeps the narrative flowing with ease. The scenes of gore are, again, a bit tough to take at points, but those moments are needed to push the comedic back into the horrific. Riggs, O’ Shea, and Sykes are wonderful in their supporting roles, but this truly is the role that Vincent Price was born to play. Outside of the gory mayhem that only the haunting Price could bask in unlike no other, there are the many moments of joy that seem to fly out of Price when performing the myriad of Shakespearean characters that he must play in “Theatre Of Blood.” I had to check myself to see if what I was witnessing was an Edward Lionheart, who gleefully has finally found the audience he was always looking for, or screen actor Vincent Price, who finally gets to read soliloquies that he has always dreamed of performing on screen, even if they are played for a laugh and with some amount of cinematic blood on his hands.

Famed Kubrick Producer James B. Harris Diffuses A Fetish in 1973’s “Some Call It Loving”

“Some Call It Loving” Screened On Sept 23, 2015

Recently, on a very humid Wednesday night, my wife and I traveled to a unusually empty Cinefamily screening of a somewhat notoriously fetishistic and ethereal film by James B. Harris entitled “Some Kind Of Loving.” A few years earlier, I was in the midst of a obsession of the writings of James Ellroy and found a copy of “Cop,” a 1988 film that Harris directed, which was based on Ellroy’s novel , “Blood On The Moon.” I really loved the book and appreciated what Harris had done to bring it to the screen, but I later found out that the film had been mercilessly panned by critics on its release back in the day.

Before going out to see “Some Kind Of Loving,” I had read a few critiques of the film written shortly after its release in 1973 and found them to be equally vicious in their attacks, with many of the reviews simply calling it “pretentious.” I could shrug a few bad reviews off, but unlike “Cop,” the source material was a short story by John Collier whom I have never been that great of a fan of, and the film starred Zalman King, the softcore writer-director of the “Wild Orchid” films of the late 1980s and 1990s, which were one-dimensional twaddle as was his screenplay for the immensely popular Adrian Lyne sex film, “9 1/2 Weeks.” Still, with little else in the theaters, why not see “Some Call It Loving” to see if perhaps Harris had been onto something, directing his second feature film away from producing Kubrick’s brilliant early works; “Lolita,” “Paths Of Glory,” and “The Killing?” After all, Harris’ directorial debut, 1965’s “The Bedford Incident” was a tightly told thriller starring Sidney Poitier that goes down as a lost action gem from a decade packed with excellent films in that genre. It should also be said that of Harris’ five directorial efforts, “Some Call It Loving” is the only non-action film with Harris’ last film being the very average Wesley Snipes police shoot em up, “Boiling Point.”

“Some Call It Loving” has for its center, an exquisitely bored, 70s natural looking adopted jazz saxophone player named Robert Troy (Zalman King giving a purposeful trance-like performance), who one evening attends a carnival to only be lured into the tent to witness an actual “Sleeping Beauty,” who our carny barker claims has been asleep for eight years. Our barker/carnival doctor begins charging a tent of overly creepy men a dollar a person to kiss our comatose yet seraphic maiden in the false hopes of awakening her, but our hero Robert chooses to not pay the dollar for the cheap thrill and instead opts to purchase Sleeping Beauty outright for twenty thousand dollars paired with what appears to be a beneficent set of motives. For his twenty Gs, Robert gets the entire carny act including the fair Sleeping Beauty and the good doctor’s Ford microbus, complete with a hippy’s painting of the act’s star attraction on the side of the vehicle. It is now back to his European-style villa where Robert sets Beauty up with elegant sleeping quarters, which doesn’t seem to phase the two women he lives with, who are coupled together in a bed of their own. One has to wonder from this point forward if Robert’s blasé countenance is due to a constant over-stimulation of libido and what role will Sleeping Beauty play in the further awakening of his own sexual malaise.

Robert’s Goes Numb While Jennifer Awakens

Soon after, with Sleeping Beauty tucked away, Robert goes off to the local jazz bar where he plays a set for a posh audience and for a virtually incomprehensible blathering junkie called “Jeff,” whom Robert considers his best friend, played by none other than Richard Pryor, who had played alongside Zalman King two years earlier in the now forgotten 1971 comedy-drama, “You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose That Beat,” where Pryor plays another substance abusing character against King’s freewheeling hippy. To say that Pryor plays what Spike Lee normally refers to as “The Magical Negro” to King’s Robert in “Some Call It Loving” would be fairly accurate if it wasn’t for the fact that to assume that cliched role, the black character would have to say something that was somewhat philosophical or least coherent. Here Pryor takes his patented wino character to the ultimate extreme and makes him otherworldly in his inability to communicate any distinguishable word. I’m a lifelong Pryor fan, having listened to his albums all through my adolescence, but it was all beeps and buzzes to me here in this film. My best guess is that Pryor represents the unbridled soul that Robert represses with his stoic appearance.

Once back at home, Robert finds Jennifer (Sleeping Beauty’s actual name) awake and begins what would be a romantic and nurturing relationship, which by this point we can assume is less than what will be required based on the carrying on of Robert’s roommates. Bit by bit Jennifer embraces her freedom of sexual expression and becomes a willing participant in the fetishistic games that go on the mansion, which appears to disappoint Robert and his need to satisfy his voyeuristic desire to see her innocence corrupted, causing him to emotionally retreat and one one occasion, to even leave the mansion in order to seek out erotic stimulation from other women, which inevitably ends in failure as their willingness to participate through financial compensation only dampens his voyeuristic tendencies even more. With an acceptance that his sexual desires will not be fulfilled, Robert decides to flee the mansion and its ominous suggestions of depravity behind and takes Jennifer and the micro bus on a short road trip that eventually leads back to the mansion and to a scene of religious repression for the sake of the purification of all involved.

Though the plot of “Some Call It Loving” sounds a bit pretentious, I genuinely feel Harris’ intentions were to create an American version of the films that were successful in Europe during the late 1960s, as there are similar examinations of voyeurism in the Nouveau Roman novels and film work of French director Alain-Robbe Grillet for example. Past the issues mentioned before with a few of the performances, “Some Call It Loving” does possess great merit in its storytelling style and demands a second viewing. The intense diffusion used in the film was lensed by Italian cinematographer Mario Tosi, who a few years later would effectively layer diffusion all over Brian DePalma’s 1976 nightmarish horror classic, “Carrie.” It is clear that the deliberately slow pace of “Some Call It Loving” would not and did not go over well here in the USA, both with critics and audiences in 1973 as stated earlier, but the film was widely applauded in Europe as stated by Harris in this 2008 Q&A done with the director at Cinefamily:

The screening we attended last Wednesday was not a 35mm print, but a recently released Blu Ray from Etiquette Pictures, who did an excellent job with the transfer of this film. I personally am excited to pick up a copy as it possesses commentary and a featurette with director Harris and cinematographer Tosi, which I hope might shed more light on the low budget production of this misunderstood film that broke up a Wednesday evening and fostered an intense discussion and more than a few confused looks between my wife and I on trip home on that tepid evening last week.

Andrzej Żuławski’s 1971 Nightmarish Debut Film, “The Third Part of the Night,” Brings Revelations 8:12 To War

Leszek Teleszynski In The Third Part Of Night

There are moments in war that almost seem too barbaric to have ever happened, and then there are those places such as Weigl Institute in Lwów, Poland, where the work was so completely bizarre yet sanely conducted to make it possible to save lives that it could not be imagined by the brightest minds of fiction. During the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War Two, Polish biologist Rudolf Weigl created the first effective vaccine against typhus, which was killing thousands every day during the war. At the institute, Weigl would place lice into a matchbox sized contraption that had a screen on one side, which would be mounted onto the legs of people who would be paid in extra rations to be blood donors for the lice. The lice would be drained of blood in order to create a typhoid vaccine that was not only given to the Nazis but also snuck out to the ghettos of Poland, saving countless infected people. For his intended lice feeders, Weigl would employ Polish underground agents, Jews, and Polish intellectuals to spare them from being taken to camps. One of these men who would be saved by Weigl by being employed as a “lice feeder” was Miroslaw Żuławski, the father of Andrzej Żuławski, the director of the film I will review this week, “The Third Part Of The Night.”

For anyone who has seen any film directed by Andrzej Żuławski these last forty four years knows that surrealistic imagery and a fantastic narrative are standard in all of his films but never has his work felt as personal as it is here with his debut work. Andrzej was born in Poland in November of 1940, a little more than a year after the German occupation of his homeland, which means that most of the story that plays out here occurred while he was still a young child, while his father Miroslaw (who co-wrote the screenplay) was a member of Związek Walki Zbrojnej, an underground army formed to undermine the invaded Nazi forces in Poland and, as such, was hidden by Weigl and at times “fed lice” in order to keep his affiliation with the underground army a secret.

The title and much of the framework of the film are derived from The Book Of Revelation, which in the mostly Roman Catholic country of the Zulawskis, naturally plays an important part in understanding the immense guilt the protagonist of Michal feels, which starts at the very beginning of the film when Nazi cavalry subbing in for the Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, ride into Michal’s stately country home and slaughter his wife and son. Michal and his father witness the killings from afar and escape to the town of Lwów where Michal (Leszek Teleszynski), an intellectual and violinist like his father, joins the resistance to make a difference in the war. Michal is immediately sent on a mission, which turns out to be a trap and results in his partner being killed and Michal wounded. Seeking refuge from the Nazis, Michal ducks into an apartment building stairwell where he watches in terror as a similarly dressed man is mistaken for him and taken away in a moment eerily reminiscent of a scene from Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film “Generation.” Michal then ascends the stairs into the arrested man’s apartment only to find the man’s wife, who is bears a striking resemblance to Michal’s own wife, Helena, in labor. Michal helps the woman deliver her child and now, due his guilt and complicity in her husband’s capture, must find a way to take care of her and support his new family.

In a way, Michal is given a second chance in life and tries to rectify his past cowardice by being there for his new family, yet his conscience is never truly clear as his dead son appears throughout the film to add to his guilt. These early scenes are punctuated with what would become a staple of all of Żuławski’s work for years to come: the erratic and unchained handheld camerawork and blue-green color scheme, here done by Witold Sobocinski who also lensed films for master Polish director Andrzej Wajda, whom Żuławski worked under for years prior to his feature debut. The music here also deftly adds to the hellish goings on and is scored by Andrzej Korzynski, another Wajda regular, who creates a mix of Ennio Morriconesque over distorted stick guitar and experimental/industrial samples.

Once Michal resides himself to the task of becoming his doppelganger’s wife’s sole support, it is off to the Weigl Institute (the actual institute was used for these scenes), where he is told to sit with a group of men as he voluntarily ties boxes of lice to his legs as to become a human feeding station. These factually based scenes of intellectuals, giving their blood for self-preservation and voluntarily carrying a disease become the perfect metaphor for the absurdity of war. Żuławski and Sobocinski highlight these moments with clinical close-ups of the feeding and subsequent removal of the blood from the lice that seem to come from Dante more than the pages of a history book. Michal’s ascent from simply a feeder to lab technician who extracts the tainted blood seems to happen easily, but it still does not lead to any sort of victory against evil as the world around Michal descends into deeper madness, leading him back the futility of mounting any resistance in the face of the oncoming apocalypse. This sentiment is made clear with the title sequence of the film which references Revelation 8:12-13:

The fourth angel sounded his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. A third of the day was without light, and also a third of the night. Then I looked, and I heard an eagle flying in midheaven, saying with a loud voice, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, because of the remaining blasts of the trumpet of the three angels who are about to sound!”

A Trailer For The Third Part Of The Night

The actual closing of the Weigl Institute was not brought on by the Nazis but by the invading Russian forces whom, due the terms defined by the Pottsdam Conference, would soon claim Lwów, Poland as part of the USSR and eventually as a town in the Ukraine. The Nazis, as brutal as they were to the Jews, would at least allow the Polish Roman Catholics to practice their faith unlike the invading Communists, and Żuławski, in an interview conducted in 2004, finds this fact more distasteful than the Nazi occupation. The oncoming apocalypse may be seen in terms of replacing one Satan with another, making all attempts at defeating the Nazis just so the Soviets could resume a more severe process of dictatorship as futile a gesture as trying the stave off the impending Biblical prophecy of an end of days that will most assuredly come. In this world, for Michal, the only recourse to attain peace is the complete acceptance of his fate in the presence of something greater than it all.

The Erotic Comic Book Series “Valentina” Goes Big Screen In Corrado Farina’s 1973 Film, “Baba Yaga”

Baba "Connects" With Valentina In Baba Yaga

Valentina Is Really Not Feeling Baba Yaga Here

Having just spent the last two days at Long Beach Comic Con, attending panels, wading through a sea of cosplayers (both sensual and non), and speaking with a multitude of comic book writers and artists for our soon to be published Forces Of Geek piece, the inevitable concern of what the final goal of their art might be does come to mind. There are the comic creators who are clearly delving into the world of zombies, solely for the purposes of being pitched a film or television deal as “The Walking Dead” has made the shambolic undead the hottest commodity around. There are also cosplayers who dream of being in the circles of the more famous in their craft like Alodia Gosiengfiao who collects in millions in endorsements or those who simply create because of the reason we all hope for: The need of artistic expression with the final goal of making people laugh, cry, understanding a political leaning of some sort, or to just turn them on via overt eroticism.

Sadly, as far as erotic expression in comic books in the United States is concerned, there has not been a great deal of respect thrown that way, and a lot of what is produced that is sexually themed here is relegated to a niche market, and imports of such material (outside of manga) are currently incredibly difficult to locate in the US much less in the late 1960s. Such was the case with the work of Italian comic book writer, Guido Crepax whose important erotic series “Valentina” barely saw the light of day here in America despite its immense popularity in Europe.

Valentina was originally a character in an earlier science fiction based Crepax series called “Neutron,” who eventually became the protagonist of her own series in 1967 due to the popularity of the issues of “Neutron” in which her character was featured. This is not surprising as Valentina Rosselli was exceptionally illustrated and written as a gorgeous and intelligently opinionated Milanese fashion photographer and left leaning journalist who progressively abandons the more science fiction facets of her persona in “Neutron” for a more enticing and stark mix of promiscuity, sadomasochism, and just about any other kink that you could imagine. Though outrageously explicit, it is clear that Crepax did not want Valentina to be seen as only a sexual being but more as a fully rounded heroine to be admired. Unlike Theresa, the protagonist from “Looking For Mr. Goodbar,” (my review from last week) who is an American single Roman Catholic woman who engages in sexual escapades that end with guilt, condemnation, and death, Valentina’s stylistic fused sexuality is a celebration of her freedom as a woman who during her time could explore sexuality however she wants. I mean she is living in Italy, after all.

After achieving an almost cult status in Italy, Valentina was given a film adaptation by young director Corrado Farina who seemed like a solid choice as he had given Bram Stroker’s “Dracula” a truly bizarre giallo treatment in his 1971 film, “Hanno Cambiato Faccia, (They Have Changed Their Face). Isabelle de Funes (the niece of famed French actor, Louis de Funes) was selected to play Valentina as she bore a striking resemblance to the character that was illustrated in Crepax’s series. And playing the role of the older witchy dominatrix Baba Yaga is the luminous American actress Carrol Baker of “Baby Face” fame, who like many Hollywood stars had moved to Italy a few years before when her career in the States began to wane. So you may be wondering then: If this is the first film adaptation of the “Valentina” series then why is the title “Baba Yaga” and not “Valentina,” the latter title being the obvious choice for an American comic book adaptation. My theory is that given the state of sadomasochism that was depicted in giallos during the early seventies, producers must’ve been thrilled when “Baba Yaga” the 1971 issue of the then popular “Valentina” series was issued, as it was the first in that popular series to introduce the protagonist to the world of B&D.

The film opens with an occultist political theater production that is being staged by hippies in a cemetery (that resembles the graveyard scenes in Bob Clarke’s “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things”), where we first see Valentina taking shots of the scene, which suddenly disbands once the police arrive and gets us to the opening credits and one of the true stars of this film, the jazz/prog score by Piero Umiliani. Soon after Valentina rejects her part time lover, a commercial director named Arno (George Eastman), she defiantly walks home alone and nearly dies while trying to rescue a dog about to be run over by a Bentley-driving society woman named Baba Yaga. Baba takes a more than subtle sexual interest in Valentina, even going as far as stealing a piece of Valentina’s stockings as a keepsake. Baba takes Valentina home but insists that Valentina visit her the following day. The next day Valentina is back behind the Hasselblad snapping picks of a ravenously gorgeous model in the comfort of her modern giallo set designed swanky Italian apartment, which is complete with animal skins on the walls, a blood red tiled kitchen, and glowing orbs for lamps. She discusses her left leaning politics with her clearly fascist model friend before going off to visit Arno on set at a slum where he fishes out a rodent that he films some hot rat action for the sake of symbolically shaming politicians.

Then its off to Baba’s home, a large gothic setting equipped with an old movie spookiness that Norman Bates would feel more than a bit comfortable wheeling around in if not for the scattered bondage gear, fetish footwear, and bullwhips. Valentina spears somewhat concerned and soon she finds a bottomless pit hidden under a Persian rug in the study that somehow doesn’t seem to freak out Valentina enough to leave the apartment screaming in terror. Finally, to make matters over the top creepy, Baba gifts Valentina a fetish doll named “Annette” who will “protect her (Valentina) from danger” because nothing scares away evil more than a sexed up cupie/voodoo doll. Valentina’s luck starts to turn very bad after she begins to photograph (after some incredibly politically incorrect motivational speech) a black man and white woman engaged in some aggressively naughty hand-holding to make a political statement about racial unity. After the shoot, the white model is felled by a puncture wound to the leg that no one can account for. Valentina also takes down a protesting hippy with the lens of her camera after taking his picture. It seems that these people are paying for Valentina’s leftist ways, but why would Baba curse her in that way? When more things go wrong, Valentina is off to return Annette to Baba at her home where we then have a scene of voluntary domination and discipline that is inflicted on Valentina by Baba. It is indeed an erotic turn of events, but Valentina never seems to be the victim, and although she is strapped in for the ride, she never loses control of her sexuality.

Original Trailer For Baba Yaga

I am completely onboard with the style of this film, as I am with many giallos of the early 1970s. It is a slickly shot film that is matched with a hip soundtrack and gorgeous actors, and the sexuality is provocative enough to keep one’s attention during the gaps, but I must admit that the politics of this film are a tad confusing. It seems that Baba Yaga is trying to use her sexuality to tame Valentina of the free sexuality that Valentina exhibits throughout the film, but if that is the case and Baba is some remnant of the right wing, then why would she use deviant sexuality to dominate her? There are a few scenes in the films where Arno knocks Valentina’s politics as well, leading me to believe that this film is a slam against the left wing, but you just cannot be sure as there is evidence to prove the opposite as well. You cannot escape the feeling that Farina’s intention of this adaptation is that politics is just the fodder of the well off, and you should just shut up and watch the sexual fireworks in all its eternal coolness.

There is a key scene early on when Valentina’s intellectual friends argue at a party about the value within the low budget film work of Godard to which Valentina replies, “I prefer Chaplin films, because at least you laugh.” Perhaps that message is the one we must follow when watching “Baba Yaga,” the message being that for the rich, the discussion of politics and art is just conversation for effect that has no real impact and that sometimes your best intention for creating art should what I stated earlier, to make someone laugh, or to cry, or in the this case to turn them on, but perhaps to leave the politics behind for the politicians.

Watching The ABC Movie Of The Week With My Sister: Richard Brooks’ Controversial 1977 Film, “Looking For Mr. Goodbar”

Richard Gere and Diane Keaton in “Looking For Mr. Goodbar

I wouldn’t be the cineaste that I am today if not for my late sister Rosaria. As it was the 1970s during most of my adolescence, movies were an affordable route to an elevated state and one that could exalt an otherwise poor family to experience art for short money. One of my earliest film memories was that of my sister, hiding me under her coat so that I could get in to see Bob Fosse’s “Lenny” when I was all but six years old. Why, you may ask? Well, she had to babysit me, but it was in its last week at the theater, and she so desperately wanted to see this Lenny Bruce biopic that she felt the need to commit such a desperate act.

I couldn’t recall much when I was asked about the movie from my friend Paul, but I did remember seeing two women kiss one another, which prompted a few questions for my sister after the film that were met with the answer “It happens,” but I couldn’t tell you much more than that. On top of that somewhat illegal screening experience, my sister and I watched a lot of films together, both in the theater and on television. Such was the case with Richard Brooks’ misunderstood 1977 film, “Looking For Mr. Goodbar,” which appeared as the ABC Movie Of The Week in 1980, with only a few edits for content. When it aired, I was the wise-old age of eleven, and I in my overconfident mind thought that I got more out of the film than with “Lenny.” I mean I was eleven by that point and the reality that I lived in the inner city made me wise above my years, but more importantly, Rosaria was a woman of twenty two, who loved going to the discos, and was the eldest daughter of a working poor Roman Catholic family.

Disparaging words had been said about “Looking For Mr. Goodbar” during one weekly church sermon as the film depicted a woman who gleefully engaged in promiscuity, rampant drug use, and one the most grievous of sins for a Catholic, a hysterectomy. By 1980, my sister had long since ceased attending mass and was eager to see to see the film as she, like many women of her generation, had been a staunch advocate of women’s rights. She had missed the film’s initial theatrical run so she was excited when it ran on television. As my dad would be asleep before it aired, and my mom was working second shift, we sat down and watched the film together. My sister had heard about Roseann Quinn, the murdered NYC schoolteacher who the novel and subsequent film was based on, which added a more somber element and raised curiosity to the screening. It had a profound effect on both of us that night, and since then, I have gone on to be a huge admirer of Richard Brooks’ films, but as the film has never been released on DVD ( I have a battered VHS copy from back in the day), I haven’t seen it in years, and, frankly, I have avoided seeing it because my sister passed almost two years ago. Just the other day, my good friend Mitch forwarded to me a recently uploaded copy of the film, and I felt that I was finally in the right frame of mind to watch it again.

Watching the film now, and understanding the case as I do, Brooks didn’t take substantial liberties with the story, except that the main character of the film is not as hell bent on destruction as portrayed by the Rossner novel. Brooks and Diane Keaton do a magnificent job in presenting Theresa as a woman who is struggling to find her own way in the world, writhing out of the grips of her smothering family, her self-destructive envy of her gorgeous hedonistic sister and daddy’s favorite, Katherine (Tuesday Weld), and the crippling Catholic guilt that she deals with every day. Theresa is a teacher for young deaf students at a NYC school (just like the real-life Quinn) who begins her sexual explorations by having an affair with her over-intellectual married college professor, but that fails to materialize into anything more than a tawdry fling. She leaves her family home to move into the building that was recently purchased by her sister Katherine’s new husband. Now at new digs, Theresa begins to explore the city proceeding cautiously at first with her new found freedom, choosing to hit singles bars armed with just reading glasses and a good book. She soon meets a hustler, Tony (a wide eyed carnal Richard Gere) who beds her giving Theresa her first positive sexual experience free of emotional hang ups.

She then dates James (an extremely creepy William Atherton) who behaves in a way that most sociologists would call the “good son.” James is an Irish-American welfare inspector who Theresa meets when he appears at the home of Amy, one of her impoverished students who cannot afford a hearing aide. James immediately becomes obsessed with Theresa and infiltrates her family’s home to become a fixture in her life, much to Theresa’s disdain. After another slightly dangerous one night fling with the clearly psychotic Tony, Theresa hits the bars, does some coke, and begins to falter as a teacher. Theresa’s downward spiral goes into overdrive when she begins turning a few tricks with older, unattractive men which also was rumored to be the case with Roseann Quinn. Again, unlike the book, Theresa engages in these scenarios with a certain amount of fear but still with the excitement of expanding her outlook on life, both sexually and philosophically, and ending the cycle of shame and guilt that she has possessed her entire life. In the film’s final scene, Theresa like Roseann Quinn, has her life taken away when she takes the wrong man home for a sexual tryst whom she meets at a New Year’s Eve party. In the film, but unlike the actual case, this man is portrayed as a self-loathing homosexual named Gary (played by Tom Berenger in one of his earliest roles) who meets Theresa shortly after almost being killed by gay bashers on the street. True to the real incident, Theresa is brutally stabbed to death by Gary after he fails to achieve an erection.

Much was made at the time of the film’s release that Brooks had crafted a film that served as a precautionary tale and even worse, as an indictment of 1970s feminism, which is why I feel that this film was completely misunderstood when it first was screened. The normally left of center treatment in most of Brooks’ work would be your first indication that his plan for this adaptation of the Rossner novel was not to condemn women for their new found sexual freedom. If you examine this film carefully, “Looking For Mr. Goodbar” is more of an indictment of the 1970s male than anything else which was eluded to by my sister as she had said at the time. “Look at the men, she dates. They are the screwed up ones aren’t they, not her?” Case in point is Theresa’s first sexual partner, the professor, who despite his intellectual prominence, prematurely ejaculates only seconds after penetrating Theresa. He then throws around clichéd 1970s bravado: “I hate to talk with women I just fucked,” to hide the fact that he is terrified by Theresa’s open sexuality. The character of Tony is what we would now called a PTSD affected veteran, who is more lost than Theresa as he has no idea as to how to function in civilized society. James is a classic “mama’s boy” and a callow liberal who cannot simply sleep with women due to his Catholic repression, and lastly, there is Gary, a violent and repressed homosexual character who would most likely be removed from any current film for his gross political incorrectness. To me, this film is in hindsight a look at the fractured post-Vietnam War American male and not a cautionary tale for sexually liberated women who were finally able to experience free love without the ridicule of the past.

What few negative critiques I offer are in the form of stylistic differences, specifically the use of flashbacks, which act more like filler than anything that truly enlightened Theresa’s inner-self. I feel that those scenes could’ve been replaced with more scenes between Theresa and her sister Katherine, who is the sexual role model for Theresa. Katherine is inserted in some key scenes, but her character was woefully underdeveloped, which is regrettable as her open sexuality could’ve stressed Theresa’s unspoken agenda for freedom. It is a small critique against an otherwise strong film and Richard Brooks’ last good film as his follow up efforts, “Wrong Is Right” and “Fever Pitch” were universally panned and failed at the box office.

Opening Credits For “Looking For Mr. Goodbar”

It is odd seeing this film now with the knowledge of the life that my sister led until her passing. When we saw the film in 1980, Rosaria was dating a man named Bobby, who similar to James, was a good Catholic boy with dreams of domesticity, which my sister firmly rejected. Rosaria’s next long term relationship lasted over twenty years, but its abrupt ending led to a sadness which played a role in her death. True to what she promised me that night, my sister never married because she never wanted a family of her own for reasons that were not too dissimilar from the anti-familial desires of the character of Theresa. One thing that was always certain for both of them is that guilt is usually too powerful an emotion for goodhearted people to ever fully leave behind. To this day, I’ve often wondered if that film played a role in that life choice that Rosaria made. And even though I too have left Catholicism behind and feel that the ending for a life concerned with true freedom doesn’t have to end so tragically, as I get older I do sometimes question, like the character of James, as to how much we truly have gained from possessing the freedoms that we desire away from a traditional family.

This piece is dedicated to Rosaria.

The Sweet But No Less Poignant Comedy Of Claude Goretta’s 1975 Film, “Pas si Mechant Que Ca” (The Wonderful Crook)

Gerard Depardieu In The Wonderful Crook

When thinking about Switzerland’s contribution to the thriving period of European 1970s filmmaking, two names immediately spring to mind; Alain Tanner and the director of the film I will be writing about today, Claude Goretta. Both internationally celebrated filmmakers, these two talented auteurs made their directorial debut together in the 1957 documentary entitled “Nice Time” about the then seedy area known as Piccadilly Circus in London, but since that effort, they have diverged in styles dramatically. As Alain Tanner’s films are usually presented in a dire stark reality with a clear political message; Goretta’s early work is more or less presented in a delicate comedic fashion, with its overall message being no less politically charged and socially conscious as Tanner’s work. After the comedic brilliance of his 1973 Cannes Grand Jury Prize winning film, “The Invitation,” Goretta returned in 1975 and delivered the understated gem, “The Wonderful Crook.”

Pierre (Gerard Depardieu) is living the good life. He’s a married father of one, who barely puts in a day of work at his father’s handmade furniture factory, and wants for very little, living in his seemingly idyllic country town. One day when his father has a stroke, Pierre must assume control of the business and immediately discovers that the factory is steadily dying because no one wants pay for the expertly made furniture they produce anymore. Pierre doesn’t tell a soul about the failing business and responds as any good slacker would, by picking up a gun and robbing banks and postal shops. With his newly acquired gains, Pierre doesn’t try to upgrade his factory for the modern world; instead, he just creates fake orders for furniture for imaginary clients, furniture that he then burns at the dump as to not raise suspicions at the factory or at home with his adoring wife.

At home, it’s business is usual, Pierre plays with his child (played by Gerard’s actual son, the late Guilliame Depardieu) and makes love to his wife Marthe (Dominique Labourier) seemingly without an ounce of guilt for what he has done, but the eventual guilt manifests itself after a failed robbery at a stamp shop where a lovely clerk named Nelly (another excellent performance from Marlene Jobert from Maurice Pialat’s “We Won’t Grow Old Together”) faints after Pierre fires his one bullet into a lamp that is usually meant to “make an impression.”

Pierre then becomes somewhat obsessed with Nelly, or to be more exact, Nelly despite her strong objections at first, becomes the one person he (Pierre) feels the need to apologize to for his wrongdoings, and the one person whom he can tell of the reasoning as to why he needs to be a thief. Goretta smartly leaves open the possibilities of why Pierre confides in Nelly and also why Nelly becomes involved with Pierre’s mission. Nelly resembles Pierre’s wife Marthe, both waifish redheads, which may explain Pierre’s fascination with her, but for Nelly, is it physical attraction for Pierre? Is it sympathy or a longing for a thrill? Or is it just the case of two people who have people who love them, but feel the need for more? It’s clear here that paradise is never is as perfect as people perceive it on the surface. A key to this facade of paradise and the breaking of the myth might be contained in an early scene in which locals at a pub brutishly mock an Italian immigrant for dancing with a vase of flowers to impress a pretty woman. What might be seen in a Rohmer film as a classic moment of French romance, Goretta cleverly distorts in order to make clear that the definition of traditional love in a changing world is vanishing in the same way that the old world craftsmanship found in the furniture that Pierre must now burn to keep up the facade.

Gerard And His Infant Son Guilliame In The Wonderful Crook

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAQ6VI2wN1s

With its superb acting, script, and mostly favorable reviews, it is a somewhat surprising that “The Wonderful Crook” has not survived the test of time. This may be credited to the letdown that occurs when a director tries to follow up a hugely celebrated hit such as “The Invitation,” leaving audiences hoping for another masterpiece, but I feel that it is mostly due to the fact that “The Wonderful Crook” was released the same year as another, more sexually audacious Gerard Depardieu film in which he plays a thief, Barbet Schroeder’s, “Maitresse,” which attracted worldwide curiosity for its depiction of fetishistic sexuality, eventually propelling it to cult classic status. Unlike the subtle nature and comedy of Goretta’s film, “Maitresse’s” hard-edged story of a burglar who breaks into the home of a dominatrix and manages to become not only her assistant but also her lover once he realizes that her employment as a sex worker is primarily driven by the need to support her children may have played more into the growing decadent yet pragmatic mindset of the 1970s, than the understated, yet no less important message about love inside of Goretta’s work.

Riding The Early 1970s Post Apocalyptic Wave In Jim McBride’s “Glen and Randa”

Glen and Randa Huddled Together

One can only imagine the level of artistic prostitution that occurs on any given day in production offices all over Tinseltown. The scene opens with an ambitious, yet sincere young film director who has a couple of acclaimed small budget arthouse films under his belt. Spurred on by the desire to have a meal that isn’t just boiled spaghetti with nothing on it, or the calls from an agent that is tired of only receiving a percentage of his client’s critical well wishes as payment, he takes a meeting with a production house that is interested in making his next masterpiece. Now, let’s say that year is 1970, and two years earlier the riotously popular post apocalyptic mythology of “The Planet Of The Apes” was thrust upon the world. Well, it would seem that no matter what pitch walked in the door, it most likely would be reset in a world after the great wave of nuclear/space travel gone wrong madness. The good news is that you can get a paycheck and still retain the option of not having your leads as ape people as long as they’re cute, and you show some full frontal because that sells as well. There were a bevy of films of varying degrees of quality made after the box office triumph of “The Planet Of The Apes” that seem to fit this scenario and one that always stuck out for me as somewhat positive was Jim McBride’s 1971 X-rated film, “Glen and Randa.”

I should go on record by saying that I have always had an almost unreasonable love for McBride’s work, even to the degree of my declaring that his tawdry 1983 remake of Godard’s classic “Breathless” superior to the original…Yes, even with the slightly more dismal acting talents of Valerie Kaprinsky as Gere’s paramour. I adored the frenetic energy of that version, energy that seemed to be missing from Godard’s story of a pair of shoegazing lovers, one being an obnoxious poseur, the other being a beautiful, yet relatively soulless dolt. Regardless of which version you prefer, “Breathless” is at its core is a love letter to low budget films from a Hollywood that already had disappeared. Before making the big jump to mainstream films, McBride had received accolades for a trio of very personal independent docudramas, beginning with his debut film, 1967s “Henry Holzman’s Diary,” a film that toys with the trappings of cinema vérité. McBride’s 1971 post-apocalyptic film, “Glen and Randa” is also is having a go at cinema but not at something as esoteric as cinema vérité; this is more of an ode to the death of the Hollywood system, whether the producer was aware of it or not.

The film opens with a magician (Garry Goodrow) who wanders the wasteland on his motorbike that is packed with all of the essential vestiges of a world long since destroyed: Comic books, porno, maps, and more which he shows to a group of survivors, including the titular, Glen and Randa. Fueled by his recent finds, a Wonder Woman comic and a map of Idaho, Glen (Steve Curry) drags his apathetic and pregnant mate Randa (the lovely Shelley Plimpton from “Putney Swope”) and a horse like the figures of a lost western through the treacherous forest and mountains to the sea in search of the mythical city of Metropolis described in his comic he carries. The pair eventually reaches the ocean where they meet Sidney (played by Woodrow Chambliss) who gives them shelter (with his wife’s skeleton inside, but it’s the apocalypse so what can you do?), so Randa can give birth. Sidney regales Glen and Randa with stories from the past and even goes as far as to point to the sea in the same way that Charlton Heston would glance at a submerged Statue of Liberty uttering the line, “Howard Hawks owned all the land in there. He grew the best potatoes in Idaho,” an obvious slam by McBride and his writing partner Rudy Wurlitzer, who that same year had also penned the equally elegiac “Two Lane Blacktop,” on the current unimaginative sad state of Hollywood storytelling in the face of its once glorious past.

Similar to “Two Lane Blacktop” much of “Glen and Randa” flows without dramatic intensity as it seems more than happy to give you a meandering plotline that is punctuated with small visual jabs at Hollywood and the awesome character of Sidney, who becomes the most enjoyable part of McBride’s whimsical film. Steve Curry does a decent enough job as the wide-eyed dreamer Glen, but he is limited by his obnoxiously boyish/hippyish dialog that makes him more of an optimistic fool than probably intended by McBride and Wurlitzer’s script. Another unavoidable failing of this film that fits its era is the unjustified X-Rating it received, which places it in the company of a slew of other mainstream films during that era such as “Midnight Cowboy” and “Fritz The Cat” that rode the “X,” except that the latter two films reached a level of popularity that most films given the mark of shame could not replicate. What Jim McBride does particularly well with “Glen and Randa” is its tongue in cheek delivery of what the Hollywood system was wanting while simultaneously showing Hollywood everything that was missing after the fall of the studio system.

Original Trailer For Glen and Randa

Though “Glen and Randa” was not huge box office hit for Sidney Grazier ( I assume the character of Sidney was ironically named after him), who had just successfully produced Woody Allen’s “Take The Money and Run” and Mel Brooks’ “The Producers,” he must’ve been somewhat pleased with the results when Time Magazine picked “Glen and Randa” as one of the top ten films of 1971, helping it to make a small profit on its $500,000 investment. With more films being produced like “Glen and Randa,” it was clear that Hollywood wouldn’t be casually investing on the Cleopatra scale anymore, but it would soon be bailed out by a generation of forward thinking filmmakers who would tell stories in the way that would be more in line with their generation, as opposed to picking through potato fields that had had long since been washed up.

“Il Grande Racket” Is Director Enzo Castellari’s Nastiest Poliziotteschi

Testi and Gardenia Talk Shop In “Il Grande Racket”

In the late 1960s, there had already been many American crime films that were able to let the blood and filth flow to show the true stories reflected in the current wave of rapidly growing street crime. Even the subgenre of the serial killer film saw its birth during this time as the American public was finally ready to hear about real life mass killers, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck in the underrated Leonard Castle film released in September of 1969, “The Honeymoon Killers.” It only makes sense that the public was up for it as the Zodiac Killer was making his murderous way around San Francisco, and the Manson Family had tried their best to start Helter Skelter in March of 1969. The stories that had dominated the evening news in the states were finally allowed to be given the Hollywood treatment in such a graphic way that even the brutally shocking 1960 Alfred Hitchcock film, “Psycho,” had not been able to get away with showing. As far as organized crime was concerned, we had always made gangster films here, but they rarely showed mobsters as they truly were. Even Coppola’s superb 1972 film, “The Godfather,” as violent as it was, still gave the mob a style and even an elegance in the carrying out their wrongdoings that definitely sent the wrong message out to future crime lords living on the East Coast on what the day to day of an organized crime boss was like. Trust me, as an Italian-American growing up in Philadelphia when the Godfather came out, more of my classmates wanted to grow up to be a Michael Corleone than a Richard Nixon.

In Italy during the late 1960s, especially in the south and Sicily, organized crime and the corruption that traveled with it was akin to our street crime in that it was everywhere, especially in urban areas. So during this robust period of the high art films of Antonioni, Fellini, and Pasolini, when the extremely popular genre cinema of the Spaghetti Western was filing box offices in Italy and soon after in the US, the Italians were crafting another genre, The Poliziotteschi, crime films that were reflecting Italy’s growing concerns with the brutality and growth of organized crime that were made without the nostalgia of many of the French New Wave’s low budget crime films. The Poliziotteschis as well as the Spaghetti Westerns took their cues from the new wave of American crime films as far as their brutality was concerned, but it was the realism of the American police films that made the poliziotteschis so intense when it came to revealing the corruption and savagery of organized crime in Italy. As the 1970s rolled in and the Spaghettis started to repeat their plots and even characters (how many Django films were there anyway?), many of the directors of that genre began to also work on the crime film. Such was the case with Enzo Castellari. As far as Italian genre cinema goes, Enzo may be the king with Macaroni Combat films, Spaghetti Westerns, a Giallo here and there and yes, many many Poliziotteschis.

Castellari had scored big with two Poliziotteschis, “High Crime” (1973) and “Street Law” (1974) both starring the original Django, Franco Nero. Franco carried a lot of presence to any film he starred in, but as he was in such high demand, Castellari had to look for another lead for his next entry into the genre, and that actor would be rising international star, Fabio Testi. By 1976, Testi had a few leads in Poliziotteschis, starring in “Blood In The Streets” with Oliver Reed, and “Gang War In Naples” with Jean Seberg. In contrast to Nero’s smoldering sensuality and intensity, Testi was an almost too pretty and brooding actor of the Daniel Day Lewis variety. An accomplished actor, Testi brought a real sadness and empathy to any of the righteous characters of he would play in Italian crime dramas.

In 1976s “Il Grande Racket” (The Big Racket) Testi plays Nico Palmieri, a straight and narrow Rome detective who while witnessing a gang crime is violently attacked and is thrown off a cliff while still in his car in one of the more visually impressive scenes of action in this film. Nico survives, but his righteousness goes into overdrive while in the hospital as he becomes obsessed with taking down this gang who almost did him in and who is also shaking down every local business in the area for protection money. This gang in question, led by an English gangster named Rudy (Joshua Sinclair) is almost surrealistically brutal, almost past the point of most villains in poliziotteschi films, as evidenced in one early scene where a restaurant owner goes to Palmieri to become a prosecution witness after being leaned on for protection. It only takes one cut for the gang to be in possession of the restaurant owner’s young daughter who they gang rape to death in a grotesque scene clearly inspired by the gang rape at the beginning of the American film, “Death Wish.” In a later scene where an Olympic skeet champion aids Palmieri with some shotgun fire during an ambush, Rudy’s gang shows up again to rape and incinerate his wife.

After the gang skips through the judicial system again, Palmieri realizes that he has no ability legally to get Rudy and his posse, so he reaches out to a con friend, Pepe, played by veteran American character actor Vincent Gardenia, the detective in “Death Wish.” The casting of Gardenia is clearly the strongest nod to that revenge film, which was very popular in Italy at the time. He enlists Pepe and Pepe’s nephew to pull a few jobs and guarantees that there won’t be any police interference in order for them to be recruited into Rudy’s gang. When that fails due to some snitch high up, Palmieri is fired from the police force and decides to grab another hood from jail, who is a contract killer, a conman/club owner who had been screwed over by Rudy, the restaurant owner whose daughter had been killed, and the Olympic skeet shooter who lost his wife to form a killing team to wipe out all of the bosses and their henchmen in one spree. As the theme of overall corruption from government, police, and industry is key to many of Castellari’s poliziotteschis, “The Big Racket” has as its final location a manufacturing plant owned by the bosses.

Il Grande Racket Original Trailer

The final scene is done with an immense amount of gunplay, punctuated with the individual revenge fantasies of all of Palmieri’s group. There may not be a better payoff for a revenge film made during the entirety of the Italian crime drama genre. It is a glorious ending to a no holds barred, one hundred minute blast of a movie that for me, goes down as one of the nastiest poliziotteschis. Castellari’s film was indeed a box office hit in Italy, and inspired by the success of this crime film he would reunite with Testi a year later in 1977 and direct, “La via della Droga” (The Heroin Busters), another intensely violent and satisfying poliziotteschi.

Somewhere in between filming “The Big Racket” and “The Heroin Dealers,” Castellari would once again enlist Franco Nero and he would make the last great spaghetti western, “Keoma,” which needs mentioning because as I write this in the summer of 2015, Castellari has announced that he will start filming “Keoma Unchained,” a new Spaghetti where he has enlisted not only his favorite leads, Nero and Testi but also a virtual who’s who of Spaghetti Western royalty: Bud Spencer, Thomas Milian, and American actor John Saxon, the star of one of Castellari’s earliest Westerns, 1968’s “The Three That Shook The West.” Just like Detective Palmieri in “The Big Racket,” no matter what happens, there seems to be no loss of the fight inside Castellari. From Macaroni Combats, Giallos, and post-apocalyptic action films, give the man a genre, and he will crush it no matter what.

LILY & GENEROSO 4EVER!

LOST IN THE 1970s WITH GENEROSO