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.