KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Black Bird

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy

The Black Bird

This week is a little different. This is a sequel of sorts to one of the greatest films ever made, but don't take that description seriously, because it is more spoof than follow up. Another thing that is different is that the video above is not the trailer for the film, I could not find that. Instead, you have a YouTube link to the whole movie, uploaded by a random person on the site. I'm OK with sharing this link because the movie is not available in any other way. It did have a VHS release, but as far as I can tell, there was never an official DVD/Laserdisc/Blu-ray edition of the movie. It is currently not streaming although it is listed as being on TUBI, it is not available there at this time. Before I found this link, I purchased a burned copy from a boutique site, and it was not very good. It looks like they had the captions on and I could never turn them off, and the captioning was terrible.  This is probably the best way you can experience the film, should you wish to do so in spite of the comments I am about to make.

The premise of the film is simple, Sam Spade's Son Junior, has inherited the family business, and suddenly, there are people looking for the Maltese Falcon again. George Segal is Spade Jr., and he has always had an easy time delivering smug comic lines in movies. He made a lot of comedies over the years, in fact, it was one of his comedies that introduced the world to Denzel Washington ("Carbon Copy", a movie that may have almost as much blowback on racial politics as this one). Spade Jr. is not particularly successful. His Dad's old offices, which he now occupies, are located in a rundown section of San Francisco, and his clientele are inclined to pay him with Food Stamps. This caustic approach to humor will continue throughout the movie. Characters are mocked because of their ethnicity, size, social standing and a variety of other casually cruel things. This is quintessentially a 70s film. It would never be made in today's environment. Like "Blazing Saddles ", it often steps on the third rail of culture. Unfortunately, it is not as clever as "Blazing Saddles" and it is not a satire which would justify those moments, it is a farce, that simply uses them as punchlines not as commentary.

I will start with a couple of positive things. To begin with, two of the actors from the original film make appearances in this movie. Lee Patrick, who was Bogart's secretary Effie, in the original, is back as the same character, doing the same job for Junior. Her character has undergone an unfortunate transformation in an attempt to create some humor, but it was more off putting than funny and she was ill served by the script.  Elisha Cook Jr. fares a little better, getting a chance to remain trapped in time, spouting lingo from 1940 in the 1975 of the film. The anachronistic patter is one of the jokes that actually works in the film. Segal also has the same sort of insolence that Bogart had but the tone is not "tough guy talk" but "smart ass banter". He looks pretty good in the hat as well. 

Stéphane Audran is the femme fatale of the story, and she amusingly strings Spade along with implied sexual dalliances that never took place. Old hand Lionel Stander is playing a role, the equivalent of Joel Cairo, but with less subtlety or implied homosexuality.  Neither of these characters is needed for the story, they are baubles that are being hung on the framework to make the film more like the original, of course they do no such thing. Little Person actor Felix Silla, who played Cousin It in the Addams Family TV show, is the villain of the story, playing a Nazi who wants possession of the Maltese falcon, and who employs Giant Hawaiian Thugs to carry out his orders. 

There are fight scenes that are staged as slapstick, and others that are just not that interesting. As a former Angeleno, I enjoyed the joke about parking on the streets of San Francisco. Any jab at the supposed more sophisticated town to the North was always appreciated. There are cops in this movie, somewhat like the two in the original, but don't hope for anything interesting in that regard, it all goes nowhere. This is a movie that makes a racial joke out of the lead character's last name, not once but multiple times. That reflects the times but also the lack of creativity in the script. 

I remembered the movie as being more amusing than it turns out to be. I did only see it the one time in 1975, It was a Christmas time release, so I can't say for sure if I saw it at the end of the year or the start of the new year, but it was a film I saw on a date with my future wife, so at least I have that good memory about the movie. Oh, they did do an excellent job on the titles for the film, so you can watch that for ninety seconds and then skip the rest of the film. 

 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Stepford Wives

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy

The Stepford Wives

I did some on-line reading about the reception of this movie at the time of it's release, and amazingly enough, it was objected to by some feminist groups who saw it as anti-woman. My immediate thought was that there is a large continent of the population that does not understand satire. This movie is for all intents and purposes a depiction of a feminist nightmare. It visualizes a world where women are erased as individuals and replaced by stereotypes of femininity. In other words it is mocking the men who want to have women be subservient sex machines with no purpose other than satisfying their mates needs. They are the villains of the piece but somehow in 1975, there were people who did not see this, amazing how ideological blinders can prevent you from recognizing an ally. 

Author and playwright Ira Levin had a big hit when his novel "Rosemary's Baby"   was adapted and filmed by Roman Polanski. No doubt the makers of this film had a similar goal of making a modern gothic horror story into a money making machine. The returns however were modest at best and it is the cultural impact that makes the movie memorable. the phrase "Stepford Wife" immediately produces an image of a docile, attractive, robotic perfectionist and the connotative meaning is all too well known, even by people who have never read the book or seen the movie (including the execrable 2004 remake/reinvention).  Regardless of the controversy or the lack of box office muscle, the film has managed to worm it's way into the culture and influence our thinking about gender roles ever since.

As a movie, this would definitely be a slow burn which is typical of the 1970s and one of the reasons that those movies can be appealing. We get introduced to characters before we get thrown into the plot. We see how Katherine Ross as the protagonist Joanna, slowly realizes that something is amiss. We understand because of her career ambitions and uncertainty about having relocated to Stepford, that the threat is to her being not just to her physical manifestation. As I watched the friendship she develops with Bobbie, played deliciously by Paula Prentiss, I cared about the women, even when I thought there were times that they were being annoying and self centered. The most arcane moment of the film comes when Joanna, Bobbie and their friend Charmaine (Tina Louise) make a deal to get the other local wives to participate in a consciousness raising meeting. Feminist ideas and relationship talk get sidetracked by the programming of the local women. 

The movement to a more horror driven "Body Snatchers" feel, comes in a couple of ways that were nicely set up. Charmaine's surrender of the tennis court that meant personal freedom for her, was a scary moment even though the only horrifying image is a Caterpillar Tractor pulling up some concrete. The Men's Association is visualized as an old dark house, and it is taboo to go there, even though the warning is the politest brush off a cop can give. We know that bad things are coming when Joanna's dog goes missing, and we simply see it in a cage in the bed of a truck driving down the road. These are the creepy moments that make the movie worth sitting through, even if you don't buy into all the social signaling that is going on. 

Screenwriter William Goldman was unhappy with changes made to his work. The well known story in Hollywood is that the Screenwriter has the least amount of power of the major players on a project. Somehow Goldman, had managed to block Brian DePalma as the director of the film and ironically, his replacement, Bryan Forbes, was the source of all of Goldman's subsequent unhappiness. Regardless of the power issues, Goldman's screenplay is a well paced reveal of the plot, with interesting characterizations along the way. Bobbie has the funniest lines, Joanna parry's with her husband and Diz, the head of the Men's Association who is played by Patrick O'Neal. You would expect a lot of gaslighting but Goldman let's the characters with bad intent, play things normally for the most part. The artist who is drawing details of Joanna's face doesn't try to hide them from her, he shares them with her. The stammering vocal designer has a logical reason for her to record his list of words. Her husband concedes that an ambulance did seem to go off in the wrong direction, instead of insisting she is nuts. He also suggests she get help, not at an inappropriate moment but at exactly the right time, he does not insist on a therapist of his choice but defers to her. It's during her first meeting with the therapist that the true horror gets stated, "If I am wrong, I'm insane... but if I'm right, it's even worse than if I was wrong."

The climax of the picture mixes some great moments with some unfortunately trite tropes. Joanna's confrontation with the changed Bobbie is a perfect moment, her running around in the rain and running from Diz in the Men's Association is just woman in jeopardy boiler plate writing. The visualization of the new Joanna is a great creepy moments that reveals the twist and it works without having to go into a lot of detail. Little shots of the town, the industry in the area and the jobs of the local men, were all we needed. An exposition dump is wisely avoided. 

On a side note, I find it particularly satisfying that Paula Prentis as Bobbie, is caught up in a world of artificial persons, since in real life she is married to Richard Benjamin, who two years before this movie, ran into the same problem in "Westworld".  

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: a Boy and his dog

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy

a Boy and his Dog

A dystopian nightmare as a dark comedy, "a Boy and his Dog" has been widely praised and criticized. Based on the novella of Harlan Ellison, This was the second film directed by actor L.Q. Jones, the first being a micro budgeted western 10 years earlier, "The Devil's Bedroom". Good luck finding that film, but "a Boy and his Dog" is available in a beautiful restoration from Shout Factory, and was also released in pan and scan on VHS and Laserdisc, with a later Widescreen Laserdisc Edition as well. 

I saw "a Boy and his Dog" in it's initial release in 1975, when it did not do much business. It did play continuously in repertory houses and by 1982, it had become a cult classic that demanded a second run at theatrical presentation. Jones distributed the movie himself so it played in different areas at different points and he was particular about the theaters that it played in.

The controversy over the film has largely to do with accusations of misogyny because the words of the telepathic dog are dismissive of women, females are seen largely as disposable objects to be taken by force by the men who scavenge the remains of the upper world, and they are treated as factories by the powers of the lower world. It is a science fiction film that is more misanthropic than misogynist, but that requires a perspective that existed in the 1970s. This is not a film that you could make today, it violates too many taboos. 

For those of you not familiar with the story, after WWIV, the surface of the planet is scoured by ravagers who take what they want by force and sustain themselves with leftovers of the previous world. Vic is affiliated with a telepathic dog who aids him in sniffing out danger and food, but for the teen age character Vic, the most important resource the dog can locate is a woman. My understanding is that the widely played video game "Fallout" is based on the concepts of this story. If you are a fan of "mad Max", especially the "road Warrior", you will see much of the foundation of that world in the opening half of this movie. Gangs dominating anyone they find, solo males craftily taking advantage of their own skills to beat others to the punch. It is a brutal world, with very little to recommend it except that Vic has a friend and companion in his dog Blood, who has more intelligence than anyone else in the film, and frankly, more humanity.

L.Q. Jones did a nice job of taking advantage of his main location. Supposedly, the landscape is the remnants of the outskirts of Phoenix after the war, but it is really the high desert of Southern California. The sets are make up of junk that feels like it could be debris from the city. Lean tos are made up of corrugated tin, there are shelters with appliance parts used to make walls or covers for a hole in the ground. In one scene, an overlord with a collection of slaves, is dragged around in a chariot made up of bicycle parts.  Lord Humungus and  Immortan Joe owe a debt to Fellini, the cut rate lord of this wasteland.

Vic falls into a honey trap, set by the underground community of Topeka, a blighted community, trying to survive by rolling back in time and submitting to a fascist regime administered by the elderly survivors . Jason Robards appears in this section as the patriarch of a society that is barren of children and a future. How Vic fits into this plot is one of the big jokes of the movie.  Quilla June, the girl who lures Vic into her underground city, has her own plans. She turns out to be a rebel without a clue and the machinery of the dying civilization is not going to go away simply because she wants it to.

The end of the movie is a notorious joke that is in bad taste and fueled the belief that the screenplay was a misogynist creation. Harlan Ellison's story has a more thoughtful and believe it or not, romantic exit line. L.Q. Jones used a line he and the other screenwriters came up with, and it is the biggest bone of contention that Ellison has with the film. Jones however, understood the audience that this film would be seen by, and he crafted a dark joke to finish off with, rather than the more sentimental commentary on the actual event that finishes the story and remained unchanged from the novella. 

Don Johnson is the star of the film, this is his second feature of the year on this project, and it is also listed on IMDB as coming out after "Return to Macon County". His performance in the gung ho humorous moments of the film, remind me of Kevin Costner in "Silverado" a decade later. He is very good in the movie, but he does get upstaged by the dog, who was one of the best animal performances on screen of the time. The voice characterization of the telepathic canine was supplied by Tim McIntire, an actor who also composed the music for several sections of the movie.

The main tagline of the film is "an R rated , rather kinky tale of survival". It's interesting that the director urged the ratings board to give it an R instead of a PG (this was before PG-13 existed).   It certainly needed to be more closely scrutinized by parents who might think they were going to a family film based on the title. The film is also set in 2024, as the poster proclaims, "a future you'll probably live to see". Well we hopefully will make it to next year, I'm happy to say this fiure is not quite as grim. . 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Death Race 2000

 Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy

Death Race 2000 

In a way, this film itself was a race. The premise is amazingly similar to that of the previously discussed "Rollerball", and it turns out there is a reason for that. The innovative low budget producer Roger Corman had heard about the upcoming film featuring a futuristic society, sated by the bread and circuses of a violent game, and he created his own version of that storyline. The production was rushed to take advantage of the heat that was being generated from advance publicity for "Rollerball", and it beat that film to the marketplace by a couple of months.

We quickly learn that a fascist style bipartisan government has taken over the nation after an economic collapse, and uses an annual cross country road race as a distraction from the totalitarian rule and an appeal to nationalism. Corman wrote the original treatment for the film, but it went through several other hands, as the tone became more often comic in nature. Probably a good choice considering the absurdity of the idea. Five teams of racers dash across the country, from location to location, choosing their own paths and scoring points by running over and killing pedestrians. 

The movie inspired a video game that became quite controversial in the late 1970s, and it is one of the few arcade games I ever played. 

 

I enjoyed the grave markers whenever the players successfully ran over a pedestrian in this game. 

The low budget of the film is hardly a hindrance, since the design of the cars and the outlandish nature of the drivers and navigators is really where the fun is. I was actually impressed that they took shots of an actual race at Ontario Speedway and integrated it into the opening of the film. The futuristic background matte paintings may but be perfect, but they served their purpose in trying to set the world of this film, twenty-five years into the future. Most of the racing that takes place is in open spaces (largely in the SoCal Foothills), only occasionally making it into urban settings where a chance for scoring would be a lot higher. 

The least convincing part of the film is the rebel group trying to either kidnap or kill the favorite driver, Frankenstein, in order to negotiate with the tyrannical "Mr. President". They dress like a bunch of sanitation workers and set up booby traps across the country in order to achieve their ends. They are led by an old woman who is a descendant of Thomas Paine, and she is just not convincing at all. The traps themselves however are some time amusing, for instance, they use a trick right out of Wile Coyote's playbook, a detour through a painting of a tunnel. 

From a logical point of view, the twist with Frankenstein and the rebel group does not make much sense, but as drama it will do. The real goal of the movie is to get the drive in audiences who would eat this kind of stuff up, to show up and buy a ticket. To that end, there are several gruesome deaths featured and a bucketload of gratuitous  nudity. I'm not sure why a massage room is provided for all of the drivers and their navigators, but it does help get them into nothing but a towel, and that will come off for a catfight or a love making session pretty easily.

David Carradine is the lead actor in the film, and he is most effective behind the wheel of the car he is driving. The mask he wears disguises the fact that he is not as mangled as he appears to be to the world, and when driving with his new partner, he takes off the mask frequently and smirks at her naivete or the plodding efforts of the rebels. Sylvester Stallone made this film right before "Rocky" and he was allowed to shout and chew up the scenery as Frankenstein's main rival, Machine Gun Joe Viterbo. Apparently he was allowed to write some of his own lines, and he wisely is not given credit for doing so, because the character is a one note petulant idiot. 

The cars that were used were not actual racing vehicles but kit cars that were modified to look ominous, and it seems that at times they did not run properly and required a push start to get going. The racing footage is very good in the sense that we can see the whole picture, and the close up and fast cut style that is so prominent nowadays is missing. Instead we get to see the cars jockeying for position, spinning out on the road, crashing into pedestrians and generally looking like the mayhem they are supposed to be. I was impressed by the shots of the road from under the front carriage of the cars, which makes the race look faster and comes closer to putting us in the race than if it was all shot from the driver's perspective. 

Paul Bartel was the director of the film, he was a genre veteran actor who did several low budget films over the years, his most well known film he directed being "Eating Raoul".  He was dissatisfied with the interference of Roger Corman, who seems to have cut several comic moments from the film, to emphasize the violence instead. Still there are great comedy moments in the film, as when Frankenstein options for lower points by going after the Doctors and Nurses setting up Euthanasia day, rather than the easy bonus points of elderly people in wheelchairs. My favorite joke however has to be the "hand grenade" that gets revealed near the end of the film. It is both a pun and a visual joke and I laughed hard at it. 

I know I saw this film when it came out, but I don't think it was at a drive in, rather it was in a theater on Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena, I just can't say which one it was. This would have been a summer second billed film since the L.A. release was at a bad time for me, and I would have had to catch it in a second run theater. 

In an earlier post I mentioned Siskel and Ebert, and both of them gave this film terrible reviews, this was before they were appearing together on TV. I seem to remember that Kevin Thomas of the L.A. Times gave it a pretty solid review, at least for the kind of film it was, and Thomas was always one of my favorite reviewers for the Times.

This movie is complexly ridiculous but also a lot of fun, if you can overlook those things that are the usual points of contention in exploitation fare, you know, the objectification of women, the excessive violence, and the glorification of anti-heroes. It is of it's time, but then again, so am I.   

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Drowning Pool

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

The Drowning Pool

At one point, I was set to buy this on ebay, believing that Strother Martin was in the film for a second Harper Story. It would have been for my companion blog, "The Strother Martin Film Project". When I looked closer at the credits, I realized that Strother does not appear in this film, so I skipped it and never ended up seeing it until this last weekend. In 1975, I could easily have skipped this simply because I had limited resources or availability. Although there were six screens within walking distance of where I lived, not everything played in my town.

This is a fish out of water story following Lew Harper, a private detective from California, who ends up in Louisiana, trying to help out a woman that he'd had an affair with several years earlier. The plot at first involves blackmail, but as things roll along, there is political corruption, bribery, kidnapping, murder and assorted other felonies that become part of the story. This is a sequel of sorts to "Harper" which did feature the same character that Paul Newman is playing and in which Strother did have a part. Since it was directed by Stuart Rosenberg, who had done "Cool Hand Luke" and "Pocket Money" with Newman and Martin in each, that's why I was confused. 

Newman is a natural at playing an aw shucks, slightly disheveled, low key private investigator. Harper's persona is not unlike that of Jim Rockford from the TV series, they are both wise guys, eager to talk their way out of trouble rather than fight their way out, but willing to sucker punch someone in the right circumstances. Newman is playing against his real life wife Joanne Woodward, as Iris, his ex-flame. Melanie Griffith is an ingenue in the film, and she is in the middle of a busy year here. In 1975 she was previously in "Smile", and  she will appear in "Night Moves" which was released the same month as this. Character actors Richard Jaeckel, Andy Robinson and Paul Koslo also are in the movie, but the most important other character was played by a co-star in the most important film of the year, decade, era and maybe ever. 

Murray Hamilton plays the not very well disguised villain of the piece, J.H. Kilbourne, a wealthy oil baron, aching for the land that belongs to the family that Woodward's character Iris is a member of. There is a secondary villain that you can probably figure out but is much better hidden for the eventual reveal at the end of the film. Hamilton is an oily, self centered kook, with a slightly Cajon accent. His performance is very distinctive from his role as the feckless mayor of Amity in "Jaws". Hamilton worked primarily in television but had an important part in "The Graduate" and then his two biggest parts were the films that came out this year.

The movie is a diverting piece of slow burn southern mystery, that will not compel you to rewatch it but also will not irritate you for taking the time to check it off of your list. The sequence referred to in the title is actually pretty effective and it is all done in camera so it looks really good. Not an essential film from the era, but definitely has the vibe of all those other 70s films that you remember so well. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Return of the Pink Panther

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Return of the Pink Panther

One of the reasons I am pursuing this Throwback Thursday exercise, is that it allows me to wallow in the nostalgia of my own nostalgia sometimes. Today's film is one of those occasions.  I covered "The Return of the Pink Panther" on my original project in 2010. You can read that post here. My original memories of the film are catalogued there.

One thing that has changed in the past thirteen years is that there is now a trailer for the film available on YouTube, which like on most of my posts, you will find at the top of this essay. Back in 2010, the only thing I could find was the title sequence, and that link is now gone. If you watch the titles, you will get a delightful Pink Panther cartoon, one where the silent feline does impressions of movie characters, including Bogart, Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin. I don't know what the inspiration for this theme was, but it feels completely fitting for a Blake Edwards film. 

At this point in the series, the movies became a vehicle for Peter Sellars to do physical comedy and verbal humor. The plot is not really important, which is why Christopher Plummer feels almost invisible in the movie, he is second billed but completely detached from most of the things that happen in the story. In fact, it is actress Catherine Schell who is most involved in the plot as Sellar's Inspector Clouseau, searches for her character's husband, played by Plummer, and also tries to find evidence of his involvement in the theft once again of the legendary titular diamond.  One of my favorite comedic beats comes from her as Lady Litton, running back into the bathroom where Clouseau and a bellboy are hiding in a sauna. The steam from the sauna has made the floor wet, and Sellars and the bellboy have already gotten some laughs with their feet slipping out from under them. When Schell comes back in, she slips as well, but grabs on to a column in the large bathroom, and does a perfect spin on it. The fact that she is in a bathrobe, almost makes it look like she is doing some pole dancing.

When I read my original article after watching the movie this morning, I noticed I had made mention of a joke about a telephone in the foyer of the Litton Family estate. Clouseau, masquerading ineffectively as a telephone repair person, is trying to get into the office to do some digging, and he has to come up with a reason why the phone right there in the foyer will not work for his repairs. It is a throw away minute that I was not paying attention to this morning. After I read my earlier comments, I went back and looked at the moment again, yep, there it was. A visual joke that Sellar's pantomines through and gave me a huge laugh. Again I will not spoil it for you, but be alert if you get to that moment, don't look away. 

"Return of the Pink Panther" was one of the films my fellow Lamb Dave Anderson used this last week on the Lambcast, when arguing that 1975 was the greatest movie summer. I might well have chosen it myself if I had been defending 1975, which as you can tell from this year long project, is pretty special to me. 

This is the iteration of the films where Clouseau's boss, played by Herbert Lom, goes mad and becomes the antagonist for the next few entries of the series. Lom is very amusing as the frustrated Chief Inspector Dreyfus. His twitching eyebrows and maniacal looks let us know he is on the brink of losing it. In the opening section in his office, he is so flummoxed  by the ridiculous Clouseau, that he almost kills himself and his assistant by accident. So between the bellboy, Lom, Schell, and the continuingly reliable Burt Kwouk, it is clear that the slap stick was not just limited to Sellars, but that Blake Edwards had a lot to do with it as well.

Just as a side note, I saw the actor playing the Hotel Concierge, and kept asking myself where I'd seen him before. Victor Spinetti was not a familiar name, but it suddenly broke through to me that he was the frustrated T.V. director in the Beatles Film, "A Hard Days Night". So if you are looking for a stream of consciousness recommendation for a film to put on today, you can't do better than that. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Three Days of the Condor

 Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Three Days of the Condor

This week's Throwback Thursday is a real treat, one of the great paranoia films from the 1970s Starring Robert Redford and Fay Dunaway. "Three Days of the Condor" is a spy film about a guy who is not really a spy, he just works with them. As an analyst , Redford as Joe Turner, codename Condor, trips over a secret plot by a covert group operating inside of the CIA. 

"Listen. I work for the CIA. I am not a spy. I just read books! We read everything that's published in the world. And we... we feed the plots - dirty tricks, codes - into a computer, and the computer checks against actual CIA plans and operations. I look for leaks, I look for new ideas... We read adventures and novels and journals. I... I... Who'd invent a job like that?"

I like to think there is a job like that, it is something I might have liked doing. I may not quite have been ambitious enough about espionage to become James Bond, but I could probably do this. The opening few minutes of the film establish the mundane existence of most of the employees of the CIA. They file reports, process data, gather statistics and read a lot of things they may have no interest in. Condor is a bit of an iconoclast in his working group. He mocks the security measures that gatekeep the front door of his office, he rises a bicycle with a motor on it to work (and he is consistently late to the exasperation of his superior), and he by-passes the back door security when it rains. His diffident nature is what allows him to accidentally escape the fate that befalls his co-workers. The event that sets up the rest of the story is shown as a brutal, passionless, exercise by professionals to take out a leak, by murdering seven innocent worker bees. 

While Turner is not a field operative, he is still pretty smart and capable. Condor may be a little panicked about what has happened, but he is also now highly suspicious of everyone. That sense of paranoia infuses the film with the suspenseful atmosphere that director Sydney Pollack was certainly shooting for. It takes a while for we the audience to figure out what is going on, Turner is trying to do so while being hunted, and it is a complex plot. The elements of a procedural are there, as Condor ties to fit pieces of information together to understand what has happened. There is also a 007 trope of involving an outsider, as both a ally and a romantic partner, and that is where Dunaway comes in. She does not show up in the first half hour of the film, and the tense and fearful relationship she has with Condor is believable. That period of antagonism and disbelief makes it easier for us to swallow a romance between the two that might otherwise have seemed an illogical contrivance.

Operating on his own, Turner seeks more information about the command structure that might have taken something he wrote in a report as a threat. Once Dunaway is on board, he has a collaborator who allows him to try various means to identify who in the CIA is after him and why. For my money, the best part of the story is the contract agent Joubert, a tall taciturn European, who leads the hunt to wipe out the leaks, especially Condor. Joubert is played by the great Max Von Sydow, who seems to have done a similar role as an unreliable spy in a half dozen other films. There is a terrific shot right at the stary of the attack on Condor's work group, where Von Sydow is crossing the street and we see his reflection in the uneven waters on the street and in the gutter, right after it had been raining. Along with the execution sequence, this is one of those moments when a professional like Pollack was the right choice to put the script on the screen. 

Joubert has two other strong moments in the film. In one, he is riding in an elevator with Condor and a group of unaffiliated people. He knows who Condor is, but Turner doesn't know him, he only suspects the man who is polite in the elevator. It is a scene of tension and a little bit of humor as they play cat and mouse while the elevator descend to the lobby. At the end of the film, in an odd twist, Joubert becomes a different figure and he now does a little bit of talking and mentoring. Von Sydow played Blofeld in the 1983 James Bond offshoot, "Never Say Never Again" and it would have been fun to see him in that role in a series of Bond films. 

Also in the cast is John Houseman, who appeared in "Rollerball" a TBT film I wrote about earlier this year, shows up in another of those roles that would define his later career. After winning the award for Best Supporting Actor in 1973 as the imperious Harvard Law Professor Kingsfield, he was the go to choice for dry, humorless corporate mandarins. The CIA in this film is filled with unreliable types who act ruthlessly in order to achieve their objectives. Houseman is a senior to Cliff Robertson's character, who at first is trying to help Condor, and then suspects Turner, and finally seems to turn into the same kind of man as the rest of the CIA has become. 

Along with "The Parallax View", "The Conversation" and Redford's next film "All the President's Men", "Three Days of the Condor" would lead you to believe that there is always a conspiracy, everyone is watching and listening, and the good guys don't always win. That is definitely 1975 for you.  

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Return to Macon County

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Return to Macon County

On my original project, I did a post on "Macon County Line", an semi-exploitation film that I remembered pretty well and it was surprisingly good. This is a second film with a similar premise, but it is not a sequel and no one from the first film appears in this film. The main connection between the films is that it was written and directed by the same man who co wrote and directed the first film, Richard Compton. Compton was primarily a tv director who did shows like "The Equalizer", "Miami Vice, and "Babylon 5". He was also Married to actress Veronica Cartwright for over 25 years, she of "Alien" and "The Right Stuff" fame. 

The original " Macon County Line"was a big success and it lead to a lot of drive-in material about the dangers of traveling while young in the South. It probably is a descendant of a movie like "Easy Rider", but with a simpler story that is more nostalgic than anything else. Instead of two anti-heros giving the bird to the man, both "Macon County Line and Return to Macon County feature attractive young me, traveling in by car, who acquire an attractive girl for their road trip, and then complications ensue. 

"Return to Macon County" features the debut film appearance of actor Nick Nolte and a second 1975 film from Don Johnson ["A Boy and His Dog" will be featured later this year on KAMAD TBT]. Both of these guys would go on to substantial fame and fortune and they continue to work today. Robin Mattson, the waitress they take with them on the road is played by Robin Mattson, who did a lot of television in the following years and has been feature on numerous soap operas. 

Mattson's character Junel, is a wild card girl, who impulsively joins them on the road and turns out to be a love interest for Nolte, but also the source of the plot complications. She comes equipped with a gun, and she feels compelled to recklessly brandish and  discharge it in a number of situations, that make everything worse for the characters. Let's just say it becomes a chase film, with a few car crashes and clever escapes along the way.

The three of them are pursued by a local gang of toughs who lost a race, welched on a bet and beat up Johnson's character. There is a local sheriff, from Macon County of course, who also gets bested by the hod rod driving fugitives, and disobeys orders to give up the chase and he pursues them across state lines. The movie meanders from incident to incident, with some romantic clutches along the way, including a rendezvous that Johnson has with a woman at a motel. There is a brief moment of nudity in that scene, and it only gets a PG rating in 1975. 

It would be expected that the resolution of the story would be tragic ala "Easy Rider" and "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry". In fact there is a confrontation and a death, and lives ruined at the end, but it goes in a direction that is unexpected and lets us have a happy ending to some degree. It is not nearly as good as "Macon County Line" was, but it is an innocuous way to spend ninety minutes. In 1975, getting out of the house, going to a drive in with a romantic partner, and watching an undemanding movie, was everyone's idea of a good night out. 

The movie is on You Tube, I don't know if it is pirated or not, but below is a link if you want to tale a look. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays Special Edition 1983: Return of the Jedi

 Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies. This week only, we are taking a break from 1975 and jumping ahead almost a decade. This is the fourth day of May, and as many Star Wars fans refer to it, "May the 4th be with You". I happened to have seen a Star wars film in the theater this week, and so in honor of May the 4th falling on a Thursday this year, I decided to post about it today.

Return of the Jedi

Since this is a #TBT post, there will be a lot of nostalgic story telling as well as an assessment of the film as it stands in 2023. I first saw "Return of the Jedi" in it's opening engagement at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood California. 

It opened on May 25th, 1983 and there was a midnight show for everyone who wanted to get the jump on seeing it. My best friend Art Franz and I got in line at two in the afternoon the day before. The line went around the block and we sat on the sidewalk behind the theater for the day. Sometime after five pm, we were joined by our spouses who were equally excited to see the movie. Tickets did not go on sale until an hour before the show was supposed to start. Sometime around 11 pm, the rest of a local fraternity showed up and met with the one pledge they had sent to stand in line. Needless to say, there were a lot of people who were unhappy, and folks who had been there for ten hours already were being bumped from the first show. That included us. However, for the first weekend, the Egyptian was running the film on a 24 hour cycle. So we missed getting into the Midnight show, but there was a 3am screening and we all made it in for that. You would think we would all be fighting to stay awake from three to five in the morning, but the adrenaline was high for us, we had waited three years to see what was coming.  We were all quite stoked when the film was over, and we made arrangements to see Art and his wife Kathy, later that day to see the film again, out where they lived. Dolores and I walked out of the Egyptian, just after five thirty, and saw that the line for the six am show had already gone in, and the box office was open, so we bought tickets, walked in and saw a back to back screening of the film. When we got home at around 10 am, we collapsed for a few hours, and then headed to West Covina, to meet up with our friends for what was out third screening of the film in the first 24 hours. 

Six months earlier, I had gone Christmas shopping for a traditional gift at our house, movie posters. At the shop in Hollywood that I usually went to [Hollywood Book and Poster] I scored a copy of the poster for the upcoming third Star Wars film, "Revenge of the Jedi". I paid a nominal price and went home happy with my purchase. Days later it was announced that the title had changed to "Return of the Jedi" and I now had a collectors item that people were paying a premium for. In 2014, I was able to have my item signed by artist Drew Struzan, the man who painted the famous image. 

Drew signing my poster while I chat.

Enough now with the history, let's talk about the movie. This last week, "Return of the Jedi" has been playing on 475 screens in honor of the 40th anniversary of the film. It ranked number four at the box office as a forty year old film. I think I can tell you why. My screening was a four pm show on a Tuesday, there were maybe twenty people there. Three families with kids, a handful of thirty year old geeks, and three or four of us oldsters. This is a chance for the next generation to see the movies from a franchise they love, in their natural habitat. 

Unfortunately, the version of the film that is playing is the 1997 "Special Edition" which is where George Lucas tinkered with a few elements to tweak the film. I don't think all of the changes are terrible, but I prefer the original version of a film like this, everytime. The two scenes that are most irritating in their revisionism include a music/vocal performance in Jabba's palace, and a beaklike mouth extruding from the sarlacc pit. There is also one final change at the end of the film that makes no sense except for marketing the prequel films. In the 2004 video release, the actor playing Anakin Skywalker was replaced in his "spirit" form by Hayden Christenson, who played Vader at a younger age. It's counter intuitive even if it is ridiculous in the first place.

"Return of the Jedi" is sometimes ranked as the least of the Star Wars films, at least by people who have never seen any of the prequel films. It is criticized for some clunky dialogue and performances that are not always as strong as they could be. Most people object to the Ewoks, as if they were a marketing tool for toys, rather than a twist in the story line. I can't say that the dialogue issues are not there, they are. Han and Lando stumble through some exchanges that just sound awkward. Luke has to skip over exposition to keep the plot driving forward. Carrie Fisher does the best she can with some of the moments that she is given, but her character arc is a little light in exposition during the film.  On the other hand, I will defend the Ewoks, the idea of a primitive culture, fighting against a technologically advanced culture is intriguing.   The reason it is distracting is because the Ewoks themselves are just so darn cute, they look like teddy bears in most of the sequences. That appearance is part of the deception, and it also allows us to invest in characters that are not speaking a language we understand. When some of them go down in battle in the final act, we have to feel that loss and the way they look is a shortcut to those emotional points.

Regardless of the dialogue or the Ewoks, the film is technically amazing. The battle around the second Death star is complex with some spectacular moments. The three tiered battle conflict was managed very well, although the timing on the attack run on the reactor has to be forgiven for taking as long as it does. Meanwhile, there is a fun and effective ground battle sequence that has some clever moments, some comedy moments and a couple of moments to tug on our heartstrings. The best of all however, is the fight between Vader and Luke with the Emperor in the Death Star Throne room. Mark Hamill gets to do his best work in the series in this sequence, tipping between the light and the dark side of the force and finally finding the will to choose and sealing his destiny and creating a redemption moment for Darth Vader. John Williams score here is fantastic, with an ominous undercurrent and a chorus like refrain.   The moment that Vader takes to choose between Luke and the Emperor is played out with great patience and a couple of cuts that magnify the choice, even in the climax of the film. 

The opening sequence of the movie, with the rescue of Han from the clutches of Jabba the Hut is iconic. Han as wall art, Leia passing herself off as a bounty hunter was great, but of course later as a slave in a gold bikini, it is priceless. All of our favorite characters get a moment to shine in this section. The aliens from a thousand worlds are good background and make nice fodder for Luke and his Light saber. Although I watched the Boba Fett  streaming series, I'm just going to believe that he is still being digested inside the sarlacc. The sail barge was so much fun and it has the swashbuckling elements that make these films catnip for me.

I can see the seams and imperfections more clearly now, after forty years of reflection, but the story arc is not a problem, and the characters followed the paths that seem most satisfying. The film looks great, and it does not need those "improvements" that have been added over time. I continue to hope that someday, Disney will find a way to restore the original films and release them on home media, but until then, I still have my Laserdiscs which contain the films in their original form.

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Passenger

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

The Passenger

This film is one of my blind spots from 1975. I badly wanted to see it, but it played in limited engagements on the other side of town and I never made it over there to see it. I remember as a 17 year old kid, looking at the Calendar Section of the L.A. Times, wanting to catch up with this highly praised arthouse film, featuring Jack Nicolson. This came out the same year as "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", even though it had been filmed two years before the release. 

I always thought it was some kind of thriller, but it turns out to be very different in tone than I was expecting. There is almost no violence in the film, except for two brief moments. One of those moments, disturbingly, is not a fictional killing, but was a filmed execution of a bank robber in the African country of Chad. It is shown as part of a documentary that Nicholson's character is supposed to be working on. The other moment of violence involves a single karate style kick to the head of a minor character in the film. There are two pivotal deaths in the story but both occur off screen, and they are not designed to create suspense and tension, that isn't really what the film is about.

As I was watching the first half hour of the movie, I was worried about the pace of the film and the ambiguity of the events being shown. Eventually, most of the uncertainty about characters and their actions gets explained more clearly as the film moves on. The pace also starts to pick up when there is more dialogue. Nicholson plays a journalist, working on a story about conflict and civil war in Africa. In the 1970s, that seems to have been a constant problem, and it doesn't look like the world has changed that much in the intervening years. His character is David Locke, and he is struggling to connect with the fighters in the conflict, but does not seem to be getting anywhere. The metaphor of spinning your wheels is also visualized literally when his Land Rover gets stuck in the sand. Later, in some flashbacks, we see that his homelife is similarly stuck in the mud, and we get a sense that maybe he is looking for a new life. When a fellow resident at his hotel dies, Locke takes over his identity, a man named David Robertson. This changes his life, but maybe not for the better.

Audiences will have to fill in the blanks and suspend a great deal of disbelief, to accept that Nicholson is able to follow through on some of his new identity's plans.  As I was watching, it seemed strange that the man who was so feckless in Africa, was able to bluff his way through with some dangerous types early in the film. It also turns out that his wife, who thinks he is dead, is a lot more determined than he imagined she would ever be. Without credit cards, or cell phone GPS data, she is able to track down Robertson across Europe. Spain must be a small country because they practically trip over one another in the lobby of a hotel, completely by accident. 

Jack plays a disaffected man, seeking a new life, but he is still playing at someone else's life, and getting close to being burned by doing so. I suppose it is karma that brings him together with a similarly disaffected architecture student played by Maria Schneider. They don't quite fully commit to each other, but at times, their mutual presence gives each of them a few moments of pleasure in life that they are seemingly missing the rest of the time. Languid conversations in the car, hotel restaurant, or wherever they happen to be, make up the majority of the story in the second half of the film. There are a few chase scenes, but they are not shot like a thriller, so much as they just move us to the next obstacle. 

All of the film is a set up for a seven minute shot at the end of the movie, where events play out in front of us and behind where we can see. Almost everyone is in a long shot, and it looks to have been done as a single continuous take. One of the things that is very noticeable in the film making, is the absence of  a music score. All the events take place in a vert real world environment, that is not accentuated by movie techniques.    Michelangelo Antonioni is the director, the only other film of his that I know I have seen is "Blow Up" and I think that movie does the same sort of thing. 

One of the reasons that I had not caught up with the film was that for a number of years it was out of circulation. Nicholson himself acquired the home exhibition rights, and it was not until 2005, that the film became available, except for a very limited VHS release in the 80s.  Antonioni was unhappy with several of the cuts he was required to make to bring the film in at a reasonable runtime. The leisurely pace of that opening section might have been a place to trim, and then maybe he could have kept scenes he thought were worthy later in the picture.

I would have preferred to have this film as physical media, but one of the reasons that it is this week's entry on the Throwback Thursday project is that I wanted to include it in my Lambcast Show this coming weekend, and the out of print discs that I could buy, could not be here in time for that show. So this is the first film that I have purchased, rather than simply renting, on a streaming platform. I hope it does not disappear when whoever now controls the video rights, decides to alter the arrangement. I don't know how much I might have appreciated the film in 1975. Probably I would have admired it, but not completely understood it. That is not too dissimilar from my current reaction, but I do think I can make a little more sense of it now that I am older. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Mitchell

 Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Mitchell

It's going to happen a few times more this year, you will get a Throwback Thursday 1975 post on a film that I have never seen before. In addition to revisiting the films of my youth, this project will plug a few holes in the watchlist I have of 1975 films. I don't remember hearing about this film back when it came out, but over the last few years there have been occasional references to it that encouraged me to toss it on the pile. That is an appropriate euphemism because this movie has thew lowest rating on IMDB for any film I have ever written about myself, a 2.7 out of 10. There are a lot of people who don't like this movie very much. 

The low rating is probably a result of the film being the subject of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode back in 1993. The star of Mitchell, Joe Don Baker, took exception to the treatment given to the film by the writers and threatened to "kick their ass". I suspect that fans of this show followed up after another Baker film was mauled by the parody show, by visiting IMDB to kick Baker's ass. The movie is not very good, but it is certainly not deserving of this dismal score. Having never watched MST3K, I am going to stay out of this particular fight and just talk about the movie I watched. That may still be influenced by the TV show because the version of the movie that is available for streaming, seems to be the one edited for the show without the riff track. 

"Mitchell" is a very typical cop movie from the era. A loner detective is doggedly pursing criminals that he refuses to ignore. This cop has integrity but he is also a bit of a slob and definitely not cooperative with his higher ups. There are two crimes being investigated here, one is a self defense killing that Detective Mitchell believes was actually a murder, and then there is the drug case he has been assigned to that no one wants because it involves other agencies and politically connected mafioso types. John Saxon is the sly businessman who used a burglary as cover for shooting a guy for kicks. Martin Balsam is the mid-level crime syndicate guy who doesn't want to cooperate with the family on a drug heist, but also doesn't want Mitchell to nail him. 

If there is a mystery here, it is in how these two cases get connected to one another. I did not think that was clear at all. Eventually it seems that Balsam and Saxon have some business arrangement but it never becomes clear what that is. Their connection does lead to the one cool action sequence in the film, where dune buggy racers are being used to hunt down the cop and try to kill him. It is not a perfect scene but it is believable, unlike the later action scene where Mitchell uses a helicopter, dangling a large compressed gas tank, to attack a yacht and then repel down to the boat for the final confrontation. This must have been the scene that inspired the movie to be selected by the MST3K team, because it is preposterous, despite being a lot of fun.

Linda Evans plays a high priced hooker who shows up at Mitchell's door and takes him to bed, without telling him who is paying her. Their relationship never seems straight, but we are supposed to get the impression that she actually starts to go for him. Baker is not exactly matinee idol material, and his character sleeps on a fold up couch in a crummy apartment, so where the attraction comes from is never credible. She gets paid a lot of money and he will never have any. It is a little amusing that he does bust her over some minor drug possession charges and she keeps showing up anyway. 

Like a lot of 70s films, there are more car chases than needed. The cop also kills a lot of people and there is never a lot of follow up, so it does sometimes feel like we are watching a TV movie rather than a feature, but remember, it is a low budget, drive-n feature, so don't expect much and don't ask too many questions. The one element of the show that has some verisimilitude, is the physical threat from Balsam's character's henchmen. Joe Don Baker is a big dude, so how could someone be intimidating and a real threat to him? By casting Rams Defensive back Merlin Olsen, who was 6'5". Olsen had made three films before this and this was his last feature before he transitioned to television both as commentator and actor. He may not have been much of a thespian, but he looked like he could take Baker, and that's about all that was expected of him. 

Joe Don Baker is one of my favorite character actors of the 1970s. He was in "Junior Bonner", "Walking Tall", "Charlie Varrick", "The Outfit" and "Golden Needles, all right before this film. He continued to work but never had a streak like that again. "Mitchell" seems to be the period at the end of those hard scrabble character parts that I loved so much in that era. There is another 1975 film that he made, "Framed", that I have not seen, so maybe I will catch up with that one later this year as well. 

KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975 "Rollerball"

 

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don't see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy. 

Rollerball

This was one of the films from my original project back in 2010. I was writing about films from the summers of the 1970s, my formative years, and this movie came out the same week that "Jaws" hit the marketplace. In spite of mixed reviews, I suspect it would have been a big hit except that it was overshadowed by the competition. I chose the film this week because it was referenced in a television series I am currently streaming. "Daisy Jones and the Six" is a fictional look at a 70s era band, along the lines of Fleetwood Mac. Two of the band members are obsessed with "Rollerball", actually calling it brilliant, and they are on their way to see it for the eighth time. That fictional enthusiasm was enough for me to go back and watch the film again for Throwback Thursday. 

When I went back to my original post, I was happy to see that it expressed my feelings about the film almost exactly as I was experiencing them this week. You should read that post here. The strength of the film is in the design of the game the movie is based on. The combination of roller derby, soccer and football plus the acceptance of violence that goes well beyond that in hockey and rugby, is a great show that will hypnotize the masses. The production design of the film starts off with a bang by showing off the track, the ball, the teams with their motorcycles and some futuristic fonts that seem to be realistic from the perspective of time. 

The color schemes of the teams are the only distinguishing element. I guess a logo might imply more choice than the proles are entitled to. The combination of the high tech track and the traditional fugue music sets an ominous tone that we will feel every time the game commences. I thought the teams individual struts on the track as they were entering also sets a martial tone and a sense of inevitable clash. 

Houston, the team that Johnathan E (James Caan) plays for, has the simple Houston stride, an in-line synchronized march that is direct, elegant and feels very determined. Other teams seem to have been more artistic, for example the Tokyo team has an arrow wedge that looks fearsome, and as they break out of the formation, they drop down to the center of the rink in a kamikaze style flourish.  The film comes to life the most in the three matches that we see. Of course as the rules are being changed to force Johnathan out of the game, the clashes become more elaborate, violent and ultimately deadly. 

Obviously, the script and the director were trying to say something about the dangers of corporate control over the world. Unfortunately, there are few places other than the game and Johnathan's personal life, that we see the stilting effect of corporate decision making. There is a sequence where Johnathan attempts to discover how corporate decisions are made. His wife had been taken away from him in what he sees as an arbitrary action. He wants to know why. 

The computer system that has replaced all the books, is limited in access and intelligence. There are not really librarians, just clerks who try to direct people but have no ability to find information on their own. It's as if Wikipedia had to be accessed through a human, who did not have any understanding of the information they control access to. Later in the film, Johnathan goes to Geneva, to the main data storage facility. If the director had spent less time at the idyllic party of drug addled executives, there might have been an opportunity to do some interesting exposition with the main computer "Zero". A video of the corporate wars or a quick summary of the current social conditions might have made Johnathan's individualism seem mor meaningful. Instead, there is a mildly amusing Ralph Richardson, playing word games with an A.I. that has a defective memory. It is a lost opportunity to do the thing the film purports to do. 

Early on there was a moment that I thought could be contrasted to the world of today in an interesting way. As the corporate anthem is being played before the first game, all the players are lined up obediently standing at attention, but Johnathan is clenching his fist and lightly pounding it against his leg. It is certainly not the act of defiance that kneeling on the sidelines or staying in the locker room for the anthem would have been. It sems the smallest act of individuality that could exist in the corporate world. 

Throughout the film, Director Norman Jewison uses classical music to set the mood, in a way that seems to deliberately invite comparison to  "Clockwork Orange." The use of some interesting architecture in West Germany (at the time), which is modernistic in the way a futurist might have suggested does the same thing. 

As I said earlier, my original post expresses my feelings about this film perfectly, but I hope that the few extra note here made your visit worthwhile.