Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory 1971 A Movie A Day Day 76

I sort of put his one off till the end of summer for a couple of reasons. First of all I would need something inspiring and happy when I return to work, which I did today. I love my job but sometimes it gets to be a grind, and it is nice to remember that there are wonderful things out there to sustain us through a lot of the mundane stuff that goes with the job. The other reason that I waited is that this is going to be an emotional post for me. This is the one film on the list that I know I saw with my brother Chris. My brother died in 1975, he was only 24 and he should have had a lot to live for. When my father was living with us after my mother had died, he suffered from Alzheimer's and he never called me by my name. When he would see a picture of my brother he did not remember his name either but he did call him "the lost one". That is how I think of my brother as well. He is the guy we lost who had a great sense of humor, was a good friend to a fault, and was a sweet person all around. He could never get his life together and drug use and despair finished him off. Four years before he died, when he was twenty, he took me, my then 9 year old brother Kirk, and his girlfriend Michelle to see Willy Wonka.


My kids enjoyed Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp, but they were never in doubt as to who Willy Wonka really is. Gene Wilder is the heart and soul of this movie. If you listen to the script, Wonka is sometimes a bit of an ass, he can be thoughtless and mean. I remember feeling jolted when he had his final tirade against Charlie and his grandfather. I was devastated and knew the rage that Grampa Joe felt in wanting to get back at Wonka. Charlie's gesture at the end, the innocent recognition by a child that he was in fact in the wrong, and was not really justified in breaking his promise to Wonka despite his hurt, is the key moment in the film. There are lessons subtlety placed elsewhere in the movie, but this is the point where a good honest act redeems both Charlie and Willy Wonka. It was the kind of thing my brother Chris would have done. He always saw after the fact when he was wrong, and was quick to apologize and make the right kind of gesture. It breaks my heart that he could not learn the other lessons of life before he had to leave us. If he could have recognized limits earlier in his life, things might have gone differently. In the movie we had the magician Willy Wonka, he fools us from the very beginning, but the twinkle in his eye and the physical movements of Gene Wilder, tell us that anything is possible. I like to think that is the case with all of us, that something wonderful can happen and we will live up to that moment.

From my point of view this movie is bullet-proof. It doesn't matter that there is one song too many in the opening half of the film. It never bothers me that the Ompa Loompas can't really dance and that their somersaults are incomplete. I have read from some social critics that Charlie deserved to be punished because he too acted in a manner that was inappropriate, but Charlie knows it, the others would blame Wonka, he blames himself. His wordless apology is a good example of how actions and behaviors often communicate so much more than words can. The effects are not always perfect, but the imagination behind them is, and all you have to do is get carried away by the story of this boy that wants so much to do what is right. If you don't have a tear in your eye when Charlie gives his wages from delivering papers to his mother, except for the few pennies he hold back to make sure his beloved Grandfather can have tobacco, than there is something wrong with your heart, and you need to have it fixed. He never complains about his circumstances, he only tries hard and hopes for the best. If you pay close attention, the second chocolate bar he buys, the one with the golden ticket in it, he actually buys not for himself but for his Grampa. There is another lump in my throat has he dashes off to share his good fortune with his family. I remember all of us in the theater that day cheering, even though we knew it was bound to happen anyway.

The production design on this film is legendary from a kids point of view. Who would not dream of a chocolate factory with edible dishes and wallpaper that is lickable? A chocolate river, and candy with gumballs dropping from the trees is the stuff of dreams and stomach aches. The colors are so vivid and the scene so lush, that it is nearly impossible to believe that it is not real. The golden egg laying geese are huge, and the mysterious machine that makes everlasting gobstoppers may be just cardboard and sheets covering some lame looking contraption, but we all saw a secret that we wanted to be true. The first moments of the movie, the shots from outside the factory at night, with the giant letters spelling out WONKA in the gloom, suggest mystery. I love the line that comes after one of the parents shouts out in frustration, "What is this, some kind of Funhouse?", and Wonka just looks back and asks, "Why, are you having fun?" This is the perfect attitude for the character to have. This is his factory, and it will work the way he wants it to, not the way others think it should. There is stuff for adults in the movie as well. I enjoyed the payoff response from the computer programmer who is trying to locate the golden tickets, when the computer asks what a computer would do with chocolate if the programmer shared the prize. There is a funny shot of a TV reporter with deer horns just because of where he is standing. Mr. TeeVee's one line of dialogue cracks all of us up.

I saw this movie when I was thirteen, I should have been a little old for it. Cynical teenagers are never a good audience for a movie that depends on a sweet natured character, or a sense of wonder that is childlike. I lucked out because my childlike older bother, took us to this movie. My parents were probably at a club date, and we were being watched for the afternoon by Chris and his girlfriend. Both of them were naturally softhearted people and it would just be wrong of me to be a pill because of adolescence. We went to the Alhambra Theater on Main and Atlantic to see it. My little brother loved the movie as well. This is probably the only experience I had with the two of them together, doing the thing I most love in the world. I'm glad that I can still remember it and the "lost one" that gave me that memory.

Night Moves 1975 A Movie A Day Day 75

This is supposedly one of the seminal films of the 1970s golden age. It is directed by one of the darlings of the cinema world, Arthur Penn and it stars Gene Hackman. There is much to admire about it and it clearly fits into the oeuvre of Los Angeles based detective stories. Coming as it does a year after the great Chinatown, it loses a lot of it's emotional wallop because so much of the territory has been covered before, and so recently and frankly more effectively. This is the story of a private detective, in over his head, who is too good at what he does to let things just go on the way they are. There is a moral center to the protagonist that is missing in so many of the other characters in the story.

My kids tease me about having a mancrush on Paul Rudd because I have liked so many of his movies. If that is the standard for a mancrush, then I have a guy obsession with Gene Hackman, because I believe he is the finest actor that was working in my lifetime. Hackman played tough guys, and cads, and ineffectual with equal dexterity. Unlike Jack Nicolson, another great actor of our times, Hackman (with the exception of the Superman movies) rarely took the showcase roles. He was always the best character actor playing a leading man part that you could find. When he wasn't the lead, he made everyone else look better, because he was a supporting player that lent realism to the proceedings. In Night Moves, he plays the lead, and it is one of the few times he is supposed to have a romantic angle in the film. As great a performer as he was, he was not the chiseled hero type, or the ethnic looking exotic that dominated these seventies films. Hackman is an everyman, a nice looking but not handsome performer, who knows how to convey emotions with his face and posture and voice. Here he is supposed to be a former NFL defensive back, that has retired from the game and moved onto private investigation. His wife wants him to do something more stable, and she believes more meaningful, but he likes what he does and is good at it.

The story involves looking for a missing girl and the connections he follows lead him through the film making business and some criminal entanglements. He actually finds the girl early in the picture, but that is just the set up for the real mysteries that begin to unfold. Once the string starts coming loose, all the facts that he has encountered start meaning different things then he originally thought. Some of the follow up is a little confusing. The link between a later murder and the events earlier in the picture are not as clear as they need to be. The motives of all of the characters are a lot murkier than we thought they were going to be. So murky in fact that I'm not sure I can explain how all of the events are connected. The script seems a lot more convoluted than Chinatown was, and the result is not a satisfying explanation of the preceding elements, but only another prism to look through. That may be the intention but it is not particularly appealing as a movie. I don't need to have a happy ending, but I would like to understand what I just witnessed if I am watching a mystery. The notion that some strings are left dangling works better in an experimental film, rather than a hard-boiled genre piece like this.

Two stars that are going to become big in the next dozen years show up in this movie. Melanie Griffin was really young when she played the part of the slutty and confused runaway that Hackman is seeking. She is nude so often in this movie, that at her age under current laws, there might be charges brought against the film makers. James Woods plays a creepy mechanic that may or may not have something to do with the murders, it is still hard to tell what was supposed to have happened. Jennifer Warren is a femme fatale, a woman that may have fallen in too deeply after drifting through some other unsavory messes in her life. She was in Slapshot with Paul Newman a year or two later, but has moved behind the camera for much of her later career. Edward Binns is another one of those character actors that you immediately recognize but have a hard time placing, he did mostly television but I did remember him as General Beedle Smith in Patton. Here he plays a stunt coordinator on a movie set, one that is involved with many of the characters in the mystery.

I saw this film when it came out and I am pretty sure I saw in in Westwood, but more than that I cannot remember. In fact, I recorded it on videotape in the mid-eighties and did not remember much of it then. Watching today, I was surprised at how little I remembered about the film. The most visually arresting shots in the movie are of planes underwater. One night shot was enhanced by the nude figure of Melanie Griffin swimming around a sunken plane with a dead guy in it. The fish eating at the dead flesh was also a little disturbing. The green hue from the underwater lights made the scene quite haunting. The second underwater shot of a plane was haunting for a different reason, we watch as the plane sinks to the bottom of the ocean, with a man struggling to get out as he slowly drowns. Both of those images are the things I recalled about the film before watching it again, the rest of the movie was a mystery for the third time that I saw it. Night Moves has a seventies sensibility, some good visual shots and great performances by a lot of character actors. Gene Hackman is great, but in this movie there is something wrong with his hair as well as the plot line.

The Groove Tube 1974 A Movie A day Day 74

This is the shortest movie on my list for the summer. It clocks in at 75 minutes so it is even shorter than the Animated "The Rescuers". This may also be the shortest blog of the summer since there is almost no substance to the movie to talk about. This film falls into a category of movies that you do not see any more, television parodies. Most productions that do the sorts of things that "The Groove Tube" attempted, are now done on Comedy Central or on web based programming. Saturday Night Live strip mined this material in it's first four years, which is why it has had a hard time being funny ever since. Movies like this are a real good way to see the sensibility of the culture at the time. This movie and others like it were created for the youth culture that was dominated by pot smoking and rebellion.

I know I laughed hard at this when I first saw it. Art, Dan and I saw it at the Century Theater in San Gabriel in 1974. It was a film that had a big reputation in high schools and colleges. If there were still movie theaters that played a variety of films each week, and Rocky Horror on Saturdays at Midnight, this would be in high rotation. There are some very funny bits but there are also some slow developing duds that make it less than rewarding. We got a kick out of imitating Koko the clown on the school campus when talking about something we did not want others (adults) to hear, but the sequence is a long build up to a punchline that is over, well before the joke is. I never thought the TV parody "The Dealers" was funny. The only part of it that was amusing was the sponsorship tag at the very end.

Most of the movie appears to be made up of childish jokes about milk gone bad or crap being extruded from a chrome tube. This is the stuff that a stoner would enjoy repeatedly, but that I cannot recommend highly. It is true that the parody of 2001 was just six years after the Kubrick film came out, but the payoff is better six years later in Mel Brooks' History of the World Part One. The TV commercial parodies only work if you had seen the original commercials and I'll bet no one born after this movie originally came out will remember most of them. The Yellow Pages joke works the best because it has a nice visual payoff on it and it can stand by itself. The Beer and toothpaste ads just come across as stupid.

There are a whole series of sex jokes based on nudity and public observation of it. The Sex Olympics narration is fine but you would get more laughs from Mystery Theater 3000 dialogue. The most memorable visual joke involves Mr. Safety, a puppet with testicles for a face and eyes and a penis for a nose. It is shocking and funny, but it is not really repeatable. So viewing it after the passage of time is disappointing. If anyone is considering watching this, go ahead, but don't expect a lot of entertainment. Instead of enjoying the experience it will be like looking at a freak show in the carnival. You want to look but afterwards you will ask yourself why.

The Eiger Sanction 1975 A Movie A Day Day 73

This movie is sexist, homophobic and probably racist, in other words it is a politically incorrect entertainment from the 1970s. It is not that being these things makes the movie a blast, but it does add to the sense of time and place, and the characters don't have to be apologetic for simply being humans with a perspective based on the times. There are a few laughs that come out of the socially charged dialogue and characters, no one is going to be hurt by any of it and people should take it for what it is. The first time I remember homosexuals being parodied for a joke in a movie was in the 1971 James Bond film, Diamonds are Forever. This is another spy film from the times that mines some of the same stereotypes for comic relief and for character development. The scene where Clint speaks in an effeminate voice with a slight lisp, to throw off the bad guys lookout is clever and funny and today would result in a boycott march in front of theaters where the movie was playing. It gets even more blatant with the appearance of a black character named Jemima. The pancake jokes and ethnic references abound thereafter. Another character is a silent Native American woman, who also evokes some ethnic humor, again not at the expense of the character, but in the way that people might kid each other about being tall or from New York. Nowadays, you don't find many screenwriters willing to take that gamble, and there are not many major actors that would be able to get away with it. If you have seen "Gran Torino", you know Clint is one of those with the cache to carry it off even today.

At the height of his seventies stardom, Clint casts himself as the sexy art professor who is also a reluctant assassin. I was joking with my family today that the most frequent occupation of a person in a movie these days is assassin. We have had Ashton Kutcher in "Killers", George Clooney in "The American", and Ray Winstone in "Edge of Darkness" in just the last few months. Throw in Uma Thurman, Sly Stallone, Bruce Willis and a dozen others from the past and you can see that it is a thriving profession. Which seems strange since the big payoff in 1975 dollars for a "sanction" was only $10,000. Hardly enough to draw in all these world class killers. I don't know exactly where the trend of making your protagonist a paid assassin began, but Clint mines it very effectively in this movie. There is some moralizing to go along with his actions, today, that would be unnecessary because Morgan Freeman would recruit you to kill others for a higher purpose and you'd get to sleep with Angelina Jolie as a perk. It is an overused plot line, but it was still pretty fresh in the 1970s, when you could believe someone like Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood killed people for money and spent their profits on art and music. Here he is Johnathon Hemlock, art professor and mountain climber as well as well heeled killer. He is given a job to do that requires him to kill a spy while climbing a treacherous mountain. We are unsure as he is of which of the other climbers is the target. There is an hour and twenty minute set up of the spy plot and potential intrigue to come before we actually get to the mountain.

While watching the training scene, Allison said she thought Clint was bad-ass enough to actually be doing the climbing. There is one peak set in Monument Valley that looked especially hard. I pooh poohed the idea, but the production notes on the DVD claim that Clint did do the climb himself. He appears to have become a proficient climber for this movie. Whether this is just production hype or the truth, it is clear that all of the climbing done on screen is real, and the vistas are spectacular. No CGI or inside sets substituting for mountain scenes. It is clearly done on location. The mountain climbing itself is plenty suspenseful, but when you add in the spy plot elements the film crackles just a little more. This is the kind of movie that would justify an Academy Award for stunts. By the way, you know you are in the climactic mountain climbing section, when it opens with a shot of Clint, staring at the Eiger, with camera moves stolen right out of "The Sound of Music". Who else could get away with cribbing a musical starring Julie Andrews for a spy movie? I am sure I saw a similar death scene in other films, but this features a bit where a bad guy gets left in the middle of the desert to die slowly,"Quantum of Solace" uses the same tool to suggest a gruesome end to the villain. One other side note, Universal Studios Tour, had an attraction for years that was an ice-cave that rotated 360 degrees as the tram passed through it. It was re-purposed several times but my memory was that it was originally presented as an "Eiger Sanction" feature on the tour. I'm going to look around and see if I can find any info on that.

John William tossed off this score the same year that Jaws was his big hit. It is of course Jazz inflected since it is an Eastwood directed picture. There is nothing particularly memorable about it except that it kept reminding me of a Dirty Harry picture. George Kennedy hams it up as much as Clint does as his buddy who trains him and coincidentally is the ground man for the climb. Thayer David plays the head of the agency that Clint is working for, and he is supposed to be an albino, how he got to that position is never explained, it just seems that the writers were trying to outdo Bond in outlandishness. I spent a bit of time trying to recall where I knew him from. Under the make up and red lights, was a familiar face and voice. I checked and he worked a lot in television and movies up till his death in 1978, but the movie I know I remembered him from was "Rocky". He played the fight promoter than puts Rocky in the ring with Apollo Creed. There were some actresses that were featured as the equivalent of "Bond Girls", but none of them made much of an impression. They were pretty and adequate actresses but their parts basically required them to find Hemlock irresistible.

This opened early enough in the summer of 1975 that it is likely I saw it with my buddy Art before he went into the army. We did go down to Hollywood to see a movie and he drove, it probably was this film we saw. I remember the night he drove however because as he was going up Cherokee and turning on Franklin, he almost creamed a pedestrian while driving us in his Mom's VW bus. It would have been a disaster if I had not yelled after seeing the person in the corner of my eye come out of a blind spot in the dark. We were like most kids still are, loyal to a star that we liked so we saw most of the Eastwood pictures. This must be the sixth or seventh on my summer list. I have one more to do before the summer ends. This may be the only non-western that Clint did in the summer queue of films I'm working on. Not the most memorable but it was plenty of fun and the climbing scenes were excellent. If you have a hard time with the scenario, skip it, but if an albino spy master, sexy mute Indians, a black woman named Jemima, and a mountain climbing assassin interest you, then this is right up your alley.