Star Wars - (original 1977) A Movie A Day Day 49

Today is the 41st anniversary of one of mankind's greatest achievements. The desire to travel to space, to know what is out there to find what is next,took a giant step on July 20, 1969. Eight years later, the fantasy of space was realized in the most effective Science Fiction/Fantasy film of all time. I chose this day to watch and comment on Star Wars, as a tribute to all the American Heroes that took us to the Moon on the summer day in 1969. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are the names that people remember, but there were thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians and laborers that built the American Space program. To all of them I say a heartfelt thank you for inspiring the world. Film makers draw us in with imagination, you made reality more compelling then our imaginations.

Star Wars (A New Hope-as it was subsequently retitled) opened on May 25, 1977. Dolores and I had gone to a screening of an animated fantasy film called "Wizards" at Bovard Auditorium on the U.S.C. campus in early December of 1976. Before the film started there were a couple of trailers including the one you see above. I know many people in the theater that night had mixed reactions. Some laughed and thought it looked cheesy, some cheered as if it was a firework exploding in the sky above us. My heart soared with the phrase "The story of a boy, a girl, and a universe." When Luke and Leia swing across the chasm escaping their pursers, I knew this movie was for me. If you are not aware of it, my favorite movie is "The Adventures if Robin Hood" with Errol Flynn. I love a swashbuckler and Star Wars looked every inch the modern equivalent of a heroic adventure story, including sword-fights with lasers. This was the first we had heard of the movie, so we put it in our heads for the next Summer. There was not a lot of promotion of the film in the next five months. A couple of posters appeared, but no big stories in the papers, no guests showing up promoting on TV shows. I don't remember seeing an ad for the movie other then the trailer in movie theaters. I think the day the movie opened, it opened on a small number of screens. In the Los Angeles area, it was playing on only one screen. The one screen that really mattered in those days, Grauman's Chinese Theater.

I don't think it was on Dee's radar as much as it was on mine, and frankly, I had not focused on it much since that December evening. John DeBross was the Coach of the Trojan Debate team, a man I admired with all my heart and to this day still inspires me to be a good person. He and several other people from the team decided to go over to Hollywood on opening day and see the movie. I went with them because I desperately wanted to be part of the group and I did not have a lot in common with everyone else on the team. Movies, though, that was my domain, and I was deep in the mix. We got there for the second show of the day, bought tickets and walked right in. You read that right, without advance planning, on opening day, we went to see Star Wars and got right in. The theater was not even completely full. It was maybe two thirds to three quarters full. The phenomena that was about to take over popular culture for the next thirty years had not yet started. It felt like the breath one takes before diving off the high platform into a pool. A long intake of air that will be expelled with force but only after the surface of the water is broken. We sat about in the middle of the theater, a little more then halfway back. I don't remember everyone who went with our group but I do remember everything I felt for the next two hours.

The opening fanfare was loud, and thrilling. The title scrawl of story set up was exciting. Nothing prepared us for the opening shot of a space ship flying across the screen over the audience. It was a huge ship, a space vehicle that would be our escort into this new world, but we were wrong. That first ship is actually being pursued by an even larger ship, the bottom of which consumes the whole screen and moves slowly so that we can take in the immenseness. This is the first surprise in Star Wars, twenty seconds into the movie. There had never been anything like this, and if that was the start of the film guess what was coming. If you are reading this and you have never seen Star Wars in a big theater, I am afraid I have to pity you. A home screening on a big TV is OK but it will never match the sheer audacity of that opening and the impact that it had on the audience. Later on in the movie there are space battles and aliens and robots and heroes and villains, but for that one moment there is just your mind asking you what the hell am I about to see? Holy Criminey this is AWESOME!!!

The story of Star Wars is well known, and there are a hundred other moments that will stand out to different people. I have no intention of writing an analysis or criticism of the movie. Today I'm simply sharing an experience with you that really defined me as a person. That summer, was the year that Dolores and I bonded and were deeply in love enough to know that it was going to stick. We were between our sophomore and junior years in college. We lived in Southern California, the weather was great, we had enough money from working that we could enjoy our leisure time and we were in love. This movie exploded after that first day and for the rest of the summer, if you wanted to see Star Wars, you stood in line, usually for several hours. Friday nights for nearly the whole summer, we did just that. We made the trek down to Hollywood, bought tickets for whatever showing we could get into and waited in line. We held hands, necked, made jokes, and visited with friends and strangers. It was a magical summer.

I have been in theaters for screenings where audience reaction has been amazing, "The Dark Knight" at the midnight show was great. We saw Robocop at a sneak preview and at the end of the movie I thought the audience was going to tear the theater down, they loved it so much. Nothing has ever compared to the audience reaction the first few times I saw Star Wars. The roar of the crowd at the end was like a freight train careening down the tracks at a speed well above what was safe. The first five or six times we saw it, there were standing ovations, and for the rest of the summer there was continuous applause at the credits for the actors, the special effects, the music and every technical category you can think of. This was a movie that was for the most part critically well received, but nothing any critic could say would change the love the audience had for this movie. Late in the summer, I took my Mom, Dad and my brother Kirk, to see the movie , finally at another theater, the Fox Theaters in Century City. Those were showplace movie houses for the 20th Century Fox studio which was basically across the street. We watched the movie, sat in awe at then end, and then my Dad said something I would never have imagined would come from him. He said, "Let's stay and watch it again." I don't know if my brother has seen more then a dozen movies in theaters since then. I can only remember one other time that my parents wanted to to that. That night the four of us sat through Star Wars twice in a beautiful theater, with a gigantic screen and fantastic sound system. It is a great family memory for me.

Over the years there have been sequels, and prequels and I have always wanted to be a part of the experience. When we saw the trailer for the re-release of Star Wars in 1997, with our kids, you don't have to guess what happened. They knew the movies from home video, but back on the big screen, it was almost like reliving that feeling from the summer of 1977. The feeling of falling deeper in love with the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, the feeling of friendships and youth that make us older folks long for our younger days. And the feeling of falling in love with a film, that changed the way you saw the world.

A Movie A Day Video Podcast 3

"They Might Be Giants" A Movie A Day Day 48

(The Above is a Clip From the Movie, Not the Trailer)

This is an example of a film that you don't see much anymore. A small comedy featuring a straight story, based on a play. Today it would be turned into a musical, an animated film, or it would be "re-invented" for a different actor or time. This movie succeeds on three things really; the two lead actors, the whimsical story and a beautiful score. In the 1970s, Neil Simon plays were turned into movies like this on a regular basis; "Plaza Suite", "Same Time Next Year", "The Prisoner of Second Avenue". These were basically two person plays expanded into a movie format. "They Might Be Giants" would have been great to see on stage but I'm sure I would have missed the sequence near the end set in a grocery store. I suspect it was added to make this more of a movie. Those kinds of additions don't always work but in this movie it helped sustain the fantasy really well.

I have looked for this movie for several years. It was once available on VHS and DVD but those copies must have been rare. A used copy was being offered for $60 on Amazon. Even a VHS copy was selling for $40, and I could not give away VHS tapes at our yard sale a month ago. I secured my copy for the blog project by trolling the satellite channels we have coming into our TV. A number of movies have been obtained that way for me to talk about this summer. I will try to post a video cast for you, so you can hear a little bit more about this. Back to our current movie.

They Might Be Giants Features George C. Scott in his first theatrical film after winning and turning down the Academy Award for Patton. If you were to see these two movies back to back, you would understand how much he deserved the award. The two characters are very different in temperament and tone. There are a few grandiose moments in each movie, where the characters are acting out fantasy, but it is clear that although he is charming, Mr. Holmes in this movie is nuts. The story involves a respected Judge going off the deep end after the death of his wife. He loses all real connection to his past life and has assumed the persona of Sherlock Holmes. It would appear that he is doing this as a way of continuing his quest for a better world and for justice, but in a guise that avoids the reality of his loss. His brother is being blackmailed and wants him committed so that he can gain control of a sizable estate. There are some fun scenes where he performs deduction in the same manner as the fictional character. The psychiatrist that has been asked to examine him for the commitment process, is a woman (JoAnne Woodward) who happens to be Dr. Watson. In trying to help him she becomes caught up in his fantasy.

There are a ton of people in this movie that were in the early part of their careers. Rue McClanahan, who died just a few months ago plays his sister-in-law, Oliver Clark who played Mr. Hurd on the old Bob Newhart show is another patient. M.Emmet Walsh is a garbage man, Jack Gilford, nominated for best supporting actor two years later in Save the Tiger, is best remembered as the sad faced man from the Cracker Jack Commercials of the Time, here he is Holmes one true friend and it is revealed, an equally big romantic. I recognized James Tolkan as the blackmailer, from the Back to the Future movies, and future Academy Award winner from Amadeus, F.Murray Abraham plays an usher at a movie theater. The characters in the film are all lost in some way or another, and the shared fantasy of fighting Moriarty and pursuing justice brings them together and sustains them for at least a period of time. The movie has a strange but lovely story of romance between Holmes and Watson. The two stars play it straight and it feels real even though it is fantastic.

I have included for you at the bottom of this post, a video that features the main theme from the movie. It gives a very accurate reading of what the feel of the movie is. Warm with a bit of adventure and romance. I said before that the music was one of the strengths of the film, there is an invigorating march that accompanies the walk to the final confrontation with evil (Reality), and as Holmes and Watson are joined by various lost souls they have encountered throughout the story, the music builds. Their small army is ready to take on Giants if that is what they turn out to be. I saw this film at the Gold Cinema that I have mentioned before, but I remember it best from a TV screening I saw in the late 70s. Watching it today, I had only a vague recall of images and concepts. I was quite pleased to be able see it again as if I was seeing it for the first time. If any of you who know me are interested in seeing it, let me know, I can save you sixty bucks, because I'll bet you won't find this at Blockbuster.

"Frenzy" 1972 A Movie A Day Day 47

This movie came out twelve years after Psycho and repeated some of the horror from that film although it has a much different tone. The use of black and white in Psycho seems to me to make the film more stylized than Frenzy. The murders that occur are disturbing in both films but they seem more mundane and at the same time horrifying in Frenzy. Alfred Hitchcock was the greatest director of cinema thrillers ever. Horror was often a part of the work but he did not really make traditional horror films (although he might be credited as the father of the slasher film). As has often been said, he repeatedly made films about the wrong man in the wrong place being wrongly accused of a crime. When that man runs, the question becomes how will he clear himself or stop an additional crime?

We are given very sympathetic women in this film to fear for. Richard, the wrongly accused has an ex-wife that still cares for him and a casual girlfriend who is falling for him as the plot unfolds.Neither of the women are classic beauties,like Grace Kelly or Tippi Hedrren. They are nice looking English women that anyone in the audience can see are salt of the earth types. These are two of the links that point the finger of justice at our main character. Hitchcock's heroes are usually flawed; Janet Leigh was a thief, Jimmy Stewart was subject to heights, even Cary Grant drank too much in North by Northwest. One of the weaknesses of Frenzy is inherent in it's structure. Richard is the man we are asked to identify with, but he is an angry and bitter man. He drinks too much and becomes abusive of those that try to help him at various points. He needs to have a reputation for violence or a mean streak, to build police suspicion of him. This tendency to lash out though distances him from us as an audience, more than is probably wanted. At the end, when he breaks out of jail, he is not searching for exoneration like Richard Kimble, he is looking for vengeance on a truly evil figure that has put him in prison for the crimes he actually committed himself. This means that he is a lot less sympathetic and the suspense of whether he succeeds is undercut by that.

The first murder we see is extremely unpleasant. More recent films have gone even further in showing the viciousness and degradation and horror of a rape-murder, but in the confines of a mainstream picture from a big time director, this was really unusual. The close ups of the victim and the frenzied whining of the killer of the word "Lovely" as he assaults her is stomach churning for people with a moral conscience. It is needed to show the killer's depravity but also to spare us from having to witness it in subsequent murders. We will be haunted by those events later on. The second murder in fact is not really shown in any detail except in brief storyboard flashbacks. Instead of repeating a sequence that is harrowing, we see the victim innocently being lead into the apartment that she will not emerge from alive. Then the camera pulls slowly back, descends a narrow winding staircase and pulls out onto the street. An everyday street scene is taking place with produce being moved, shop girls going to lunch and business men walking to meetings. The camera pans up to the exterior window of the apartment we just left and we all know what horror is going on there while everyday people walk by unaware. A victim would be tortured just by knowing that outside the window and door are people that might have saved her if only they had known.

Previous Hitchcock films had touches of humor but none as morbid as those found here. There is a terrifically suspenseful sequence in which the killer tries to recover a clue from the body of one of his victims. He ends up wrestling with a body in rigor mortise in the back end of a truck full of potatoes. It is a sick little joke that makes the movie more tolerable, despite this grotesqueness. This terrible circumstance is happening to our villain and although the girl is dead she extracts a little bit of retribution on him. The detective following the murderer has several sequences of unappealing meals that he must somehow get through, while his wife plants doubts in his head about the suspect Scotland Yard is pursuing. These comedic sequences puncture the murder and aftermath at different times. The horrid meals she prepares mean that he is going to focus on something other than the food, and that is the guilt or lack thereof of our titular hero. The closing line of the film actually makes the story sound like a long set up for this punchline. So although it is a pretty violent film, it has more humor in it than many of Hitchcock's other works.

I remember this film from two distinct showings. Neither of the times I saw this in a theater were part of the original release of the movie. The first time I saw it was during the U.S.C. Summer debate workshop. The movie was screening late one afternoon in a large auditorium style classroom in Founders Hall. There was probably a fee to get in but I went in after the movie had started so no one bothered to charge me. This was the summer of 1973 so it was a year after the movie had been released. Later that same year or early in the next, I saw it as a second feature at the Gold Cinema in Alhambra. It might have been playing with one of the sequels to the Magnificent Seven, probably a cheap rental for the theater at that point because that would be an odd pairing. I was too young to have seen Psycho,or The Birds in theaters in the 1960's. So this was my first exposure to Hitchcock in a true theater setting. I also saw his last work,"Family Plot", at the same complex in the much larger Alhambra Theater just a few years later. It was not a summer release so it is not on my list for this project, but I will say that the tone of that movie is starkly different from "Frenzy". I'm just glad I got to see a couple of the great ones's films in a theater while he was still alive.