Macon County Line -1973 A Movie A Day Day 72

Watching this today, I am reminded of how differently movies are shot and cut together then they once were. This film moves slowly through the credits, the main confrontation does not happen until two thirds of the way in, and all we are learning in the opening sections are the stories of the main characters. The movie goes down several side paths, all of them are somewhat interesting, but it is not in a rush to get to the action. This is the kind of movie you would see in a drive in, because it let you have enough story to keep you involved, but a lot of time to allow you to make out while it is developing. There is a small amount of titillation, but it is not exploitation cinema you are getting here. It is basically a hangdog story about the tough breaks that come along and can screw up almost anyone.

This was not a movie I saw in a drive-in, and even worse I did not see it with a girl. During the presidential election the year before, I worked on the campaign with a guy from another local high school. Larry VanDeventer was his name, he was a year older than I was so he had his license to drive and access to a car. We did a few things together for a couple of years, but I can't quite say why we stopped hanging out. I know I saw this film with him at the Academy Theater in Pasadena. This was a huge theater with a dramatic carving over the screen. I seem to remember it being Egyptian but that could be wrong. It must have held 1200 seats because there was a balcony in the theater at the time. It has since been carved up into a multiplex. Larry and I saw this and we may have been two of ten patrons that evening. I went to this theater several times after as well since it was just a few miles north of where I lived. I am posting a couple of pictures that I found, I saw both Excalibur and Airplane 2 at this theater. The last thing I know I saw at this movie was An Officer and a Gentleman on our second anniversary.


The movie did not seem slow to me in 1973, it seemed exciting and fun in the first part. The gag with the police car chained up to another car is nearly identical to the gag in American Graffiti that very same year. The suspense starts about mid-way through the film, but you are not sure what the hassle will be until much closer to the end of the film. The artwork and trailer make it sound like this is a malevolent police officer out to get innocent kids, but as you are watching the film, the cop is not really a bad person. He does have a mildly racist moment but the movie is set in Louisiana in 1954, so the way it is treated is fairly benign. There is a good relationship between him and the local townspeople and his family that makes it hard to understand what would result in his going off. Of course when everything comes to a head, it all makes a lot more sense and there is a nice twist at the end that takes a little bit of story and interjects it late into our events. There was quite a bit of suspense in the last fifteen minutes and the director plays it pretty straight.

It was surprising at the time, and still to this day, that the source of the film was Max Baer. The guy who played Jethro on the Beverly Hillbillies, wrote, produced and starred in the picture as the sheriff the protagonists run into. He did a good job acting in the film and the story was told effectively if not entirely in a straight forward narrative. As I said before, it meanders around but you enjoy the two brothers that we follow from the start. The girl they pick up is cute and of course it is every adolescent boys dream to have a pretty hitchhiker end up in a romantic barn setting. I don't recognize the three young leads from any other films, but of course there are some character actors that caught my eye. Once again in a 1970s summer movie, Geoffrey Lewis makes an appearance. He is the comic relief in this piece, working as a lazy garage attendant trying to fix the car for the kids when it breaks down. Every scene he is in is funny because of the way he delivers his lines and the mannerisms he conveys while doing so. The script helps but he is the thing that sells those moments. Once again, a character that has little to do with the main story is the most memorable thing about a seventies film. The other actor I notice was James Gammon, who was really young when he did this part but he was playing someone older. He plays one of the killers that trigger the final incident. His character is craven, and it is a small part. I just enjoy seeing people I have liked in other films in their earlier roles. Mr. Gammon died just a few months ago, and I was trying to remind my daughter who he was. She never saw or at least did not remember "Major League", but "Silverado" is on high rotation at our house and she knew him right away as the outlaw gang leader.

One or two years latter, there was another film called "Return to Macon County". It featured Don Johnson and Nick Nolte and was directed and written by the director of this movie. It is also a pretty good example of a inexpensive movie entertainment geared toward kids in their teens. Neither movie is something that I have held onto for years as a favorite. They were fine for the moment and then it was on to other summer activities. I suppose I would suggest the one we looked at today, since it is a little more distinctive, and it doesn't have the shadow of two future big stars hanging over it, but either will give you a entertaining hour and a half that drips of the times they were made in.

Dracula 1979 A Movie A Day Day 71

Frank Langella should have sued Michael Crawford and "The Phantom of the Opera" years ago for misappropriation of acting. It is clear that the Phantom cribbed his unique sensual gestures and body movement from the performance of Langella as the title character in this film. Frank Langella did the play for a year before they made the movie, so I'm sure all those New York stage actors (paging Mr. Crawford) saw him do it live. Of course the film version keeps it preserved for everyone to see up till this day. All of Dracula's hand gestures are slow, sensual and purposeful. No actions are wasted. His bearing and posture are commanding when they need to be and yielding when needed to convey his love for the bride that he has chosen for himself. I don't want to sound too gay, after all I watched "Xanadu" right before this today, but Frank Langella was a good looking man. He made this movie and the best reason to see it is his presence and performance.

I remember reading about the play while I was doing research on one of the debate topics in college. Remember in the late seventies, there was no internet and if you wanted access to the New York papers in Los Angeles, you went to the library. There I came across the reviews of the stage production and I heard the rumors of a movie being made. As it turns out, the movie is a revision of the Dracula legend from a romantic perspective. The stage play is only partially included, since it was so bound to the format of a Broadway play. The script and the director for this project did an excellent job of capturing the romantic elements of the play while still making this an effective motion picture that has a broader canvas to work on. There are horror elements but they are all very subtle, the focus is on the sexual power that Dracula wields over the other characters. I was quite looking forward to this when it came out and I was surprised how effective it was despite the absence of big action set pieces and the bloody horror you would expect from a film about Dracula. That is not to say it was not frightening, but the scares come from background scenes and cool photography with a splattering of make up effects. To add an expectation of horror, listen to Percy Rodriguez do the voice over for the trailer. This is the same guy that sold Jaws to millions four years earlier.

While the two women that Dracula seduces, do have some horror elements and sport the teeth we come to expect, our lead character never shows fang and blood is not present in any of his scenes. The atmospheric elements account for most of the chills. We see a hand creeping slowly around the top of one of the boxes that carries Dracula's native soil, there are some shots of the dead crew of the ship that brings him to England, but best of all, there is a fantastically spooky scene of Dracula crawling down a wall that raises the hair on the back of your neck. When Van Helsing confronts his own dead daughter, the denouncement is one of the most chilling things that you will experience. There are a couple of other effects and horror moments, but let's get back to the romance. Dracula make his first full appearance in the film after several minutes of set up. It is a grand and sweeping entrance into a dining room by the door, not through the window at night. He is dressed to the nines and ready to lay-down some vampire pipe on the local lovelies. They are all too willing once they get a look at him. His hypnotic powers are enough to cause one woman to collapse and another to leave her fiance. Lucy is so anxious to get her some vampire loving that she does not even wait to greet the father of her dead friend when he arrives, instead she goes rushing into the arms of her dark lover. I think women were very understanding of this the way Langella was shot and dressed.

I looked at Bingo Long's Traveling All Stars and Motorcade a couple of days ago, this movie was shot by the same director. This was John Badham's third feature after "Saturday Night Fever". He is a much more assured director with this movie. All of the first three films he did work because he gets the location of the story correct. 1930's America was evoked very effectively in the baseball movie. Brooklyn in the 70's feels like Saturday Night. The late Victorian era of this movie is wonderful, from the castles that are used as the exteriors for the asylum and the abbey to the sets of the interiors with grotesque faces as doorways, spiders in the foreground and mist in the hills and cemeteries. This movie was not nominated for any Academy Awards but it deserved to be for Art Direction and for one other element. The score of the film is by the great John Williams and it is lush, foreboding and romantic. I think it may have been overlooked because it was not as grandiose as the work he did for Lucas and Spielberg, but it adds the the atmosphere of the movie immensely.

We saw this movie at the Garfield Theater with Kathy and Art a year before both sets of couples married. My memory is that all of us liked it quite well and I think of course the girls liked it especially. I would not be surprised if romance that night got a bit overheated. The theater was huge, the movie was romantic and the crowds were somewhat sparse. I think I expected it to be a huge film with long lines, but it was only a modest hit and we probably saw it later in the week that it opened so on a weeknight the crowd was not great. The theater was not a passion pit drive in, but I think there was some cuddling going on and a couple of sloppy kisses exchanged. Youth of course is wasted on the young, it is so much easier to appreciate the time s of your life well after they occur. This was a late entry into my favorite summer ever and I have not seen it in twenty years, but it still holds up. Dee watched some of it tonight with Amanda and Allison watching as well. They have gone out with their cousin for dinner. I think I'll sneak back in the family room and see if Frank Langella had the same effect 31 years later.

Mother, Jugs & Speed 1976 A Movie A Day Day 70

I picked this movie for today because I just heard from by best friend in college, Dan Hasegawa, and he is in town for a couple of days. We are going to have dinner with him tonight and catch up a bit. I have not seen Dan in 12 years or so and I have not talked with him for about 18 months. He and I saw a lot of movies together while we were both in college and even after I was married, we had time during the day to see films because I taught part-time at night. We saw this movie together when it first played in theaters back in 1976, we saw it on the big screen in Hollywood at the Egyptian Theater. I'm not sure why except sometimes Hollywood was the only place a film would play for a time so maybe we saw it early in it's run. It was promoted like an irreverent comedy with personality plus. I think that is a little misleading. There is quite a bit of humor but it is frequently offset by grim circumstances and some unpleasant characters. I did not care for it much when we first saw it and after today's viewing my position is only slightly less negative.

There are several things going for the movie that ought to make it sing a lot more. For instance it is set in Los Angeles, my city of choice for school and social activities, but you never get much sense of the place. The ambulance crews do not seem to work in one specific neighborhood or with any particular group of people. Part of the drama ends up being about how these guys need to function without feeling too much for the people that they cannot help. The problem with that is there is very little drama if everyone is detached. Harvey Kietel is third billed and his character is supposed to be a suspended police officer. At first it seems that he is the one that will bring some conscience to the group, but not much comes out of that. Bill Cosby is supposed to be the mother hen of the band of pirate ambulance drivers but there is very little to distinguish him from anyone else on the staff. He does not really come across as sympathetic. I loved Bill Cosby albums,and his stand up routine. As a comedian he is fine, but as an actor he just seems a little flat. Sometimes he mugs for the camera, but other then the familiar smart ass grin he gives in the funny scenes, his dramatic expression is blank faced. I think he worked on television better because as a weekly visitor to our homes we get a chance to know the quirks of the character and get used to the way he communicates. Here and in other movies, he just seems to be forcing it or underplaying so much that it doesn't work. His character is underwritten so that he can riff on the part, which should work for a comedian like him, but the story needs a bit more focus and he fails to provide it.

Raquel Welch was never a great actress, but she was good for the roles she was given. She is also lovely to look at but her moniker in this film is only hinted at, there are no sexy shots of her and she is pretty much playing it straight. As a crusading woman seeking equality in the workplace, the character is actually pretty representative of issues that women might have faced in the work environment. She has a love affair with Kietel that needs a little more development. He is almost wasted in the part, but he does have a couple of good scenes and the comic part he plays in Raquel's first ambulance chase is actually a strong motivation for her to overcome her previous ambivalence. Larry Hagman is in the film as a bad guy but he is supposed to be a comic bad guy. Unfortunately he turns out to be a rapist and a potential murderer under the influence of alcohol. He is actually the best performer in his role in the film, but it is not the lead, he disappears for most of the second act, and he is a lousy human being. I remember one thing from the first time I saw the movie that always disturbed me. Hagman basically sexually assaults a comatose coed in the back of the ambulance and it was sort of played for laughs, but I found it disgusting and it was one of the sad things about the movie that turned me off of it.

Bruce Davison from Willard and X-Men, is Mother's first partner, his story is over too quickly. Dick Butkiss is in the background of the movie but barely has any lines, none that are funny and he does nothing in the story. Allen Garfield, has been in a ton of stuff over the years, he was in the Candidate a couple of weeks ago. Here he is the owner of the ambulance company and he is sometimes funny, sometimes obnoxious and sometimes sympathetic. His opening take on the "Patton" type introduction is very effective and they used it in the trailers. L.Q. Jones plays a corrupt sheriff's officer that gets kickbacks for tipping off the ambulance company. He needs to have more to do in the story because there is a lot of charm in his voice and manner, but the part could have been done by anyone.

I hate to dump on Tom Mankiewicz, who we lost just a week ago and who Amanda and I saw last year at the Bond festival, but he is a producer and screenwriter for this movie and it is underwritten. The Director was Peter Yates who did "The Deep" that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago as well. This movie feels like a shaggy dog story that needed to be developed more as a dramatic piece and tightened when it came to the humor. The trailer makes it a much funnier film, so if the editor of the coming attractions can see what is worthwhile in the picture, it befuddles me why the screenwriter and director could not. The actors are a little lazy in their performances and the action is too random to keep us very interested. This is a movie that needed to decide what it wanted to be and then pushed in that direction. As it is it seems aimless.

Bingo Long Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings 1976 A Movie A Day Day 69

We are back from the wilds of the U.S. northernmost state a place of great beauty and bountiful resources. I'd like to thank my padwan learner for taking over while we were gone. I checked in on line several times and enjoyed the posts at 75cents a minute. This is a good reason for her to take over, as slow as I type if I had tried to do the posts from the boat, I'd have spent as much as I did sending her to U.S.C.. It also helps that she did a bang up job on the movies she watched. You can check the comments sections for additional info, I'm sure you all enjoyed them as much as I did.

Today, Lando Calrissian faces down Darth Vader a year before either of them appeared in the Star Wars movies. This showdown tales place right at the start of this movie and you know these two will be the featured stars of the film from the dialogue and set up we get in the first couple of minutes. This movie is set in 1939, before World War II, before the breaking of the color barrier in baseball and well into the depression era. The times were politically charged and there is a strong socialist theme underlying some of the motivations of the ballplayers. The only way that it works though is if they are entrepreneurs and take some risks in order to get a profit. I guess that undercuts the revolutionary talk in the movie, this is really a story about how a group of oppressed people take charge of their own lives and try to make it work the old fashioned way, by building a better mousetrap.

It has been a number of years since I saw the movie but I remembered most of it pretty well. There are good guys and bad guys, tight scrapes, a old time car chase, and some fun baseball shenanigans for everybody. The actors are solid for the parts that they play except on the diamond. James Earl Jones looks like a ballplayer from the times but he can't really swing the bat convincingly. Lando, I mean Billy Dee Williams, is the All Star Pitcher, but there is nothing intimidating about him or his pitching style. He is our hero, the one with the chip on his shoulder that inspires the others to band together to form a barnstorming baseball team to compete with the owners of the negro league teams that they all come from. The Negro leagues had some of the finest players in the history of the game and it is a shame that it took so long for this country to grow up in regard to race. 71 years ago a black man could not play professional baseball with white men. Today, the President of the United States still can't play baseball, but that is because he is a basketball player, not because he is black.

The struggles of the characters against not only economic strife and racism, but against a group of owners that treated their teams like sharecroppers. I don't know how accurate the portrayal of the black owners is, but it helps make the film more accessible because it is injustice that the players are fighting against, not simply another race. The owners scheme to break up the all-stars as a threat to their power, and insensitive bigots take advantage of their racial power to cheat the team. At each juncture, the team comes up with creative solutions and makes a go of their enterprise as best they can. The two leads represent the moral conscience of their situation and are usually in agreement. The final breakdown of the team before it's resurrection, occurs because one of the leads will not tolerate theft, as justified as it might appear to have been. In the end there is a reconciliation because they face a bigger common enemy.

Richard Pryor is in this movie and he plays it mostly for laughs, but he is not mugging it up, his character is just a funny guy. Some of the same themes are in "Greased Lightning" which I wrote about earlier in the summer. There are a lot of familiar character actors working in this movie. One of them, Tony Burton, is best known as Apollo Creed's manager in the Rocky films. He was a customer of Bert Kaplan's insurance office when Dolores worked for Bert in the early 1980's. He is a good actor and was a very nice man as well. I always get Ted Ross and Reginald VelJohnson from "Die Hard" confused with one another. They both have those voices that work so well in these character roles. Ted Ross is the evil team owner in this movie, in "Arthur" a few years later, he plays the very sympathetic chauffeur. This was a mostly black cast in a movie that was designed for a broad audience. Some of that kind of film-making seems to be missing these days. It seems too often that the audiences are targeted too narrowly today. I still want to see the re-make of "Death at a Funeral" because I enjoyed the original, but why is it remade three years later with an all black cast? This is a marketing decision not a artistic choice.

The movie looks really good, the production is very authentic. The baseball parks and automobiles fit the times really well. I loved the uniforms of the team, the way they extended a rainbow theme and the name of the team across each player's chest so that you can see the rainbow and read the title when they stood next to each other in order was really original. I watched this today on my trusty laser-disc player and it was a good print with one terrible jump cut when the disc changes sides.This was the first feature film of John Badham, a director that made a lot of noise in the late seventies and early eighties. Originally, Steven Spielberg was going to do this film, but when Jaws broke open the money flood, he was given a chance to do his pet project "Close Encounters" instead. It is interesting to think how the movie might have been different if Spielberg had directed. I think Billy Dee Williams performance might have been stronger with a director who knew how to get the right emotions out of the actors. Billy Dee is not bad, but this movie could have been great instead of just really good if he had been more effective.