KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: Bite the Bullet

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.

Bite the Bullet

I have been extremely busy the last couple of weeks, including travel. This is a repost of two entries on a 1975 film that I love, but did not have time to watch again fore the project. 

Next time someone tells you everything is available on line, try to get them to find the original trailer for this movie. I looked all over the place and could not find it.

[As you can see above, this has changed since the original post]

That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, but I suspect that may be the case.

Sometimes, you have to make due with what you have. I have this movie on a DVD that goes from a letterbox format for the credits to a pan and scan version for the rest of the film. This is really too bad because a lot of the pleasure in this movie are the vistas and wide-screen images of the contestants in this horse race. The scanning seems to take some of the grandeur and a lot of the energy out of the story, (at least as I remembered it.)


I saw this movie at the Chinese theater, on the big screen. Of course at the time there was only one screen at the Chinese Theater. There are actually quite a few westerns on my list, which is a little surprising since the 70's were supposed to be the death of the western. It so happens that this particular Western stars my favorite film actor Gene Hackman. I looked over his filmography, and for a guy who got started in the business in the late 60's, he has actually made a lot of Western Films. Earlier this week, we came across Zandy's Bride, which I had nearly forgotten and came out a year earlier. Gene Hackman was a big star at this point, he was cast as the leading man a couple of years earlier in "The Poseidon Adventure" but he has always been a character actor to me. When he plays a part, he is the charater he is playing not the star. In "Bite the Bullet" he is the first lead but really just one of a dozen characters that make up the story.

This film features a 700 mile horse race across deserts, over mountains and through forests. There are gunfights, action, dramatic twists and a sense of history as things go on. Hackman and James Coburn play two of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders a few years after the Spanish-American War. The modern is mixed with the old west at a time when the world was in fact changing. Ben Johnson basically repeats his role as the last of a dying breed from the Last Picture Show. Candice Bergen is the female lead in a pretty solid part for a woman in a movie like this. This same month she was starring in "the Wind and the Lion", so it was pretty clear she was Box Office at this moment in time. There are other familiar faces as well, but I want to take special note that this was the period of time that Jan-Michael Vincent was ascending and he was very promising in the movie. It is a shame that drugs and alcohol sidelined a guy who could easily have taken over a lot of leading man roles in the next few years.

Opening the movie is a prologue that introduces several character, including the wealthy owner of the favored horse and the newspaper people that are sponsoring the race. It was a little odd that there was so much time devoted to those story arcs and that they basically disappear from the movie. The only thing I felt was unsatisfying about the film was the last ten minutes of the race. The result was fine, but there is no resolution for some characters and it feels like an epilogue would have been appropriate. I recall that the film got a very fine review from the LA times when it opened; probably Charles Champlian wrote the review, he was the main critic at the Times in those days. This movie seems largely forgotten now, which is too bad because it is a good action film with some realistic situations and characters. It runs off the track a bit in the last act, but that can be forgiven pretty easily.

POST #2

This is an update to a post I did nearly two years ago on one of the Original Movie A Day Project Films. I have long wanted to see Bite the Bullet in it's original widescreen form, but it has not been available. The version in the original post was a pan and scan DVD that I acquired for a very modest price. You can find my original comments here. "Bite the Bullet" was a big scale Western at a time that such movies were dying out. It features a brutal 700 mile horse race across deserts and mountains and plains. It is perfect for a director to compose shots that will fill that screen with those vistas and also show the characters in relevant space. A month ago I read a review of a Blu Ray release of Bite the Bullet and went in search of it. It turns out that the film was not being mass marketed but was a specialty release with only 3000 copies being produced. None of them was available at any of my local retail outlets so off to the internet I flew. I could buy a new copy on Amazon for $36 plus shipping. I found a used copy on ebay for thirty and went for it. I am happy to say that it was worth the investment. I still think the last few minutes of the movie are underdeveloped, but the rest of the film looks spectacular.

There is an early shot of two trains passing each other in a railroad yard that would cut out one of the trains in the pan and scan version. Since the character we are following would need to stay in the frame, a severely cropped for television version leaves out a side of the picture. Here one gets a greater sense of the enormous changes that are taking place in the world at this time because of the trains passing each other in what might charitably be called a small town. Later shots of the railway also cut out the whole train in the shots, but here we get to see it as it moves across a bridge or travels though a forest. These are mostly little points in the movie, the real use of the widescreen comes in the horse race scenes, especially those set in some wide desert vistas. In the current widescreen Blu ray, we can see shots that include several of the contestants in the race at once, although they are clearly a great distance from one another. The empty spaces between them emphasize the desolate nature of the environment. In some later scenes, the layout of the territory in a chase and prison break makes more sense because of the way we can view it. There is a scene in which Gene Hackman's character chases down Jan Michael Vincent and lays into him for the negligent way he has treated his horse, it has more drama and excitement in it with the space not being as condensed as in the pan and scan version.

This was one of the first times I remember seeing the death of a horse from exhaustion being visualized in such a dramatic way. John Wayne's horse in True Grit gives up the ghost when he is trying to get Maddie Ross back to the trading post. Here, we see all of the horses perspiring and covered in foaming sweat. Their legs are shaky and the riders are either tender and cautious or reckless and indifferent. As the animals are falling in the sand or rolling down a hillside, the broad view makes us much more aware of how difficult the race really would be. I am very satisfied with the quality of the picture and the extra price was worth it to me. One more comment about the movie that is unrelated to it's presentation. Hackman has a great piece of dialogue about the charge at San Juan Hill that his character was supposed to be a part of. It sounds at first like it is going to be a sucker punch slam at the Spanish American War and Teddy Roosevelt. Instead it reminds me,and I hope you, of why Theodore Roosevelt was in fact one of our greatest leaders. After having his glasses shot off and his arm nicked, Roosevelt rallies the Rough Riders to storm the hill. Hackman's character says that they didn't follow out of a desire for victory, or to promote freedom. They went willingly with Roosevelt into the rain of death from above because they would have been ashamed not to. If it's not a true story, it feels like one.

Book Club

I am afraid I have to admit, I am in the demographic this film is targeting. It felt a little odd being in a theater with so many old people, and then I realized, I'm one of them. So often I see myself as an old guy when talking to my students or other bloggers on a podcast. It is entirely possible that if I post this as a Lambscore, there will only be my review. The youngest star in this movie is sixty-five, so the crowd that craves "The Avengers" and "Deadpool", is well under half that age. This kind of film is counter-programming for the summer. Once in a while, the mature audience likes to be thought of as relevant enough to cater do, and movies like this result. It looks like this will be a successful venture for Paramount Studios, which could use a hit. The screening I attended was packed, and I think I may have been the youngest person in the audience.

Book Club focuses on four women who were friends in college and have stayed in touch with one another in large part to their shared club. They have all reached the stage in life where maybe their romantic life might seem behind them, but they don't seem particularly excited to leave sex behind them. Each one of course has a slightly different problem. Eighteen years after a divorce, one character has gone through the longest dry spell, while another is a serial one night stand as a way of seeming to be in charge but not risking abandonment. A third member has lost a husband a year earlier and is being smothered by her adult children, and the fourth is married but her recently retired husband seems content to retire from bedroom duty as well. Into their life drops a little mommy porn, as they select "Fifty Shades of Grey" as the next months book. Awkwardness, romance and comedy ensue.

The laughter this movie delivers is a result of the character of the women. Jane Fonda is the independent loner who has never been married and prefers to be in control, except she still seems to carry a torch for the man who did ask her to marry him.  It is a little odd that Don Johnson plays the long lost love of her life when he is the father of the woman playing the main character in the films made from the Fifty Shades series. The rekindling of their life is the least comedic of the stories, but it seems to have the most heart. Mary Steenburgen is married to Craig T. Nelson again [they were a married couple in The Proposal a few years ago]. Their story has the cheapest gag in the movie, the equivalent of an adult fart joke. Candice Bergen is the woman who is least comfortable dealing with all of this since she thinks her sex life died with the marriage eighteen years earlier. Since it is a modern story, she gets to monkey around on a dating web site, and she ends up with a couple of fairly charming men, Richard Dreyfuss and Wallace Shawn. Neither of the guys get used to their potential, but the story really is focusing on the women. Diane Keaton gets the best of luck, she gets to date her nephew [Andy Garcia and she were in Godfather III]. There are jokes about body parts, physical infirmity and weight throughout the movie. While they are not always tasteful, they sure as hell are not half as crude as anything in "Deadpool 2".

Much like the social comedies of the 30s and 40s, this story is set among the economic elite of the country. Two of the characters are clearly wealthy and the rest are so well set that it never seems as if working is an important part of what they do. At the start of the film they were all given backstory that emphasized their careers but that is almost the last we hear of those jobs except for a few brief scenes at the workplace. The film is a light comedy with just enough drama to off set things so it does not come across as a farce. Don Johnson almost steals every scene from Jane Fonda, which was a little bit of a surprise. Andy Garcia has one bad pick up line but other than that, he oozes charm and glamour, which is just what Diane Keaton needs. Nelson and Steenburgen are the couple that most of the audience is likely to identify with and their arc ends in a cliche, but it is a happy one so what the heck.

If you are under forty, you are not likely to be interested in this movie. If you are over forty, it was made for you and you have to decide whether to follow up on your interest. When I saw the trailer for this back in February [playing with the final Fifty Shades movie} I did not think it looked very promising. It turned out to be a mildly amusing couple of hours with some great actresses who should get a chance to keep working, and this film afforded them that ability. I can't complain about that .