ALIEN (1979) A Movie A Day Day 11

I worry a little that we may be peaking too soon. This is the ultimate movie experience from the last summer of the 1970's. There is literally not a single element of this movie that needs to be changed. I saw the revised director's cut a few years ago and it was fine, but it did not add anything essential to the movie. As it is, there is suspense for two hours, while you are in the company of great characters and a old story told exceptionally well. I remember reading when the sequel, "Aliens" came out, that the comparison between the two films was that the original is a haunted house story and the sequel a roller-coaster. I guess I can accept that as long as you accept that when done well, a haunted house story is is a very efficient tool for creating screams and fright.

Alien is iconic. There is not really any need to remind people of the story, the title probably tells you enough to know if you want to see it, and then when you hear it is a horror film, that should seal the deal. Whenever awards are given out, horror movies have had to stand at the back of the line. It is easy to say that the material is lurid or to describe it disparagingly as a "genre" movie, Alien defies those stereotypes. It is about fear, and it is set in a science fiction universe, but it is a well written story with a killer concept. So many things could go wrong and you would end up with a cheesy pile of nothing special. None of those things went wrong. Let's start with the production design of the film. This is one of those movies that pioneered the concept of used space. In other words, the future is not all sterile and anespetic , it is in fact lived in and worked in. The "Nostromo" is on the outside dingy ans scorched. While there are futuristic sterile images in the kitchen and the suspended sleep chambers, the rest of the ship looks like it could be a local garage, with low light, leaks, grime and close quarters everywhere.

Back in 1979, when the movie was a success in theaters, I remember reading a piece in the LA Times, that talked about the allegories of rape and pregnancy in the movie. The author wrote about the set design of the derelict vessel that the crew goes to investigate, and how it resembled the reproductive system of a woman. The ridges and framework, combined with what looks like a moist wall covering, are certainly derivative of some of the physiology involved. I did not become one of the geeks that were hung up on the drawings of H.R. Gieger, but I can see how people would make such a leap based on other art from the man substantially responsible for the look of the movie. The other themes of penetration and birth are pretty obvious. At the time, I thought the article was written by someone who must be trying to get some notice in academic circles for their feminist slant on things. That is probably my opinion still, but it does not make them wrong in this case.

As I have mentioned in an earlier entry, 1979 is one of my favorite summers because of the life I was leading at the time. Alien came out at the start of the summer and I must have seen it a half dozen times. The first two or three times I saw the movie were at the Egyptian Theater on Hollywood Blvd. I guess being older and living outside of the main city area has reduced my visits to Hollywood Theaters over the years. Once upon a time, Hollywood Blvd. was a mecca for film lovers because movies often opened in limited engagements and those were usually in Westwood or Hollywood. My Dad had always taking us to Hollywood for business reasons. At one point he had a Magic Shop on the third floor of a building on the Northwest corner of Hollywood and Cherokee. So, I loved seeing a movie in one of the big Theaters on the Blvd.. I think we saw Alien with my friend Art and his future wife Kathy, at the Egyptian. I remember going to "Peaches" a record store just a few doors down from the theater and seeing the display for the new Kiss album "Dynasty". Of course I had to have it then, so the copy of the LP sitting in a box in my garage right now came from that day. The movie of Alien features music by my favorite film composer, Jerry Goldsmith. I love John Williams and see him at the Bowl every year, but Jerry Goldsmith was the first composer I knew by name because his music for "Patton" so inspired me at age 12. The main score is hypnotic, but there are also dramatic, furious action cues in a number of places in the film that are also memorable.

I can't imagine finishing this post without mentioning the ads for the movie Alien. I chose to watch this today, even though it is early in the summer, because I came across a website I bookmarked a year ago The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time - Lists - News - IFC.com.On the top of the list was the trailer for this movie, and I agree it is one of the best previews I ever saw. There is no dialog and the trailer ends with the tag line that everybody know, even if they never saw the movie. All I know is that they may not be able to hear you scream in space but in Hollywood in the Summer of 1979, everyone could hear you scream because you were watching Alien.

Bite The Bullet 1975 A Movie a Day Day 10

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.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, but I suspect that may be the case. Anyway, the above trailer is a mock-up that someone posted on youtube. You can tell it is not original because the music is from Silverado, which did not come out until ten years later.

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 Couburn 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 sponcering 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.


UPDATE Link/ Blu Ray Widescreen edition

Revenge of the Pink Panther 1978A Movie A Day Day 9

This is the last Pink Panther Movie that Peter Sellars made while he was alive. As strange as it sounds, there were actually two more films featuring Sellars, that were made after his death. There was apparently enough material from the other 1970s Panther films that they could string some bits together and try to make it into a movie. I never saw any of the "FrankenPanthers" but you can tell from this one that the formula was getting tired. "Revenge" is not a good movie and it is only a mildly entertaining one. These films were the equivalent of the Bond films for United Artists during the 1970s. There was a new one every couple of years and they made a bundle. Also, like the Bond films, they got a little tired and needed some juice. I don't know if Peter Sellars had lived if he could have revived the series, but maybe it is a good thing that they never got the chance to disappoint us again. Take a look at the poster below to see how low they went for a joke that is not even funny. The image is not really intriguing at all and there is nothing in this that sells the movie and it's ideas or story. It is just a title.

It is odd to me that this film falls flat. I remember laughing more when I saw it thirty two years ago in theaters. This is one of the reasons that I enjoy working on this blog. I am refreshed when I get a chance to relive a good or great movie, and I am more centered when my nostalgia for the past is cleared away by the reality I am watching. There are still some slapstick laughs to be had here, but they all seem to be straining to achieve the light touch that was present in some of the other Panther films.The most amusing bits are still Sellar's outrageous accent. Since I have a terrible ear for language, you would think I might miss some of the jokes, but the quirky pronunciation made even a tone deaf person like me smile. The costume jokes are only funny for a second or two, they seem to be pushing too hard; and that comes from someone that thought the floating Hunchback outfit in an earlier film was hysterical. The fight scenes have the right Idea, but the timing is off especially on the set ups. In fact the whole movie's timing is off as you can tell from the pre-title set up that hasn't a single laugh or smile in it. I liked all the actors; Robert Webber is always welcome, and Robert Loggia is so young that I almost did not recognize him. Dyan Cannon plays the sexy comedy woman in the film, a part she did a million times in the seventies. Nothing seems to jell as the movie starts off so seriously that you don't even think of it as a comedy.

Another thing that makes me wonder what went wrong is the quality of the production. It was actually top notch for the kind of movie it was. The Animated title sequence is one of the best, and they don't scrimp on location. It is clear they went to Hong Kong to film the final act. So it is not just a backlot and the actors, there was a lot going for the movie that it does not live up to. Speaking of the title sequence, my daughter asked me as we were watching it today, if the cartoon or the movies came first. I am pretty sure that the animated sequence in the titles of the original Pink Panther back in 1964 were the inspiration for the cartoon that came along in the late sixties and early seventies. I don't remember the cartoon series as being anywhere as near as great as the movie titles were, but it was OK. Let's be honest, Henry Mancini should have been getting half the profits from both the films and the cartoon, because his iconic film score is what make the images memorable. Audiences can hear just a few notes, da dum, da, dum, and they are like Pavlov's dogs, ready to be fed some funny. Unfortunately, all we got here were some leftovers and they were a little stale.

The Legend of Hell House (1973) A Movie a Day Day 8

Like most haunted house films that I have seen, there is a lot that is vague about the set up or motivations of the people involved. Too much exposition is going to slow down the story and undermine the creep factor. "The Legend of Hell House" jumps into the events of the story with a minimum of set up. I think this was a bit of a mistake, there is some excellent back story that comes up in the film, and anticipation of the revelations and horrible events that precede the events told here would make the movie even creepier. On the other hand, there is a lot of weirdness that raises goosebumps because you don't quite know what is happening.

The set up is basic, like "The Haunting of Hill House" a dozen years earlier, this is a story of paranormal investigation of a haunting. There are four main characters, a physicist and his wife, and two mediums, one of which survived a deadly investigation twenty years earlier. This seems like the exact plot of the older film, but that is about as far as the mimicry goes. The haunting, events and explanations are very different. I was impressed by the atmospheric electronic score from the opening, it does not sound like a spooky old house, but more like some otherworldly crashing and humming. These are also some differences in the two movies.

Pamela Franklin is the star of the movie, and I saw her in something else recently. After I looked, I think I must just have been remembering this movie. She appears to have been the British version of Jamie Leigh Curtis in the 60s and 70s. A scream queen for horror fans to follow through the story. These is a lot of sexual tone in this movie. In fact it inspired one of my favorite bad puns. As a ghost pulls back the sheets on Miss Franklin's bed, all that came to mind was she was about to celebrate Hollow Weenie. (Sorry, I can't resist this stuff).

This came out the same year as the Exorcist, It does not have the same level of fright but there are two or three good goose bump moments and a shock or two that should keep you interested. I saw this movie with my Dad's Friend Rusty Phipps. He was a magic enthusiast and he worked at the Hollywood Studios as a grip and stagehand. He was as nuts about the movies as I was and it pissed my Dad off sometimes when he would take me to a show, and then we would see two or three. We actually saw this at a drive in, I think it was the one on Rosemead Blvd. that is no longer there. I would put this on the same level as "Poltergeist". Plenty of boogie men to keep you up at night for a while.

Greased Lightning A Movie A Day Day 7

http://videodetective.com/titledetails.aspx?publishedid=973


This is a pretty straightforward biography picture, featuring Richard Pryor in a non-comedic role. He is solid and the movie is competently put together. I thought the opening section with a young bike riding Wendall Scott was a terrific st up for what is to come, and the bus ride home from the war when Wendall returns as an adult to his home town was sweet. As I was watching the credits I was interested to see the number of people that were in the movie that I recognized but did not recall being in the film.

I have never been a big racing fan, to me it was always watching someone go in circles for hours. I am in the minority because I know that NASCAR is huge and that the world is full of people that think cars are the greatest thing ever. I remember hanging out with my friend Don Hayes, he was a gearhead that spent a lot of time tweaking his car (A Chevy Vega). I actually helped him and his Uncle paint a couple of cars. We worked on the Vega and his Uncle's 1968 Camero. We painted both of them Nassau Blue. There was a lot of wet sanding involved and we used a lot of masking tape. They wanted a really deep look, so I think they did at least five coats on each of the cars.

Anyway, this is a movie that will play well for people that love car racing. It is actually a better film for showing the progress of civil rights and the way the world changed. There are some ugly moments of racism in the film, but none was as dark as the lynching scene in "The Great Debaters". Most of the scenes in which race reared it's head involve name calling and a few Jim Crow laws. The "N" word is used a lot more than anyone nowadays would be comfortable with, of course it was Richard Pryor, so you know it is part of the vocabulary. The racing was actually shown from some interesting perspectives. The background with bootlegging also was accurate as a lot of the origins of this type of racing had to do with Moonshiners trying to get away from the cops.

We happened to have watched Vincent Gardenia in "Moonstruck" yesterday, and he plays a cheating Italian Husband, in "Greased Lightning" he is the redneck sheriff that turns politician. His character is actually a pretty good illustration of how attitudes changed. It was less about having an open mind then it was about facing the reality that the world is a different place then it once was and that you need to move on with your life and roll with the changes. He is a little comic in the first part of the movie, and more realistic in the last sections.

Pryor is fine,as is Pam Greer,as Wendall Scott's wife. They are the figures that move us through the story but they are not the characters that you will remember. I liked Clevon Little, doing his jive from "Blazing Saddles" in a different time period. Beau Bridges is actually second billed, but he is only in the middle section of the film for any amount of screen time. Whereas I thought he was stiff and over the top in "Swashbuckler" a year earlier, in this movie he is natural and charming without trying to hold the screen. Exactly the kind of supporting performance you want with an actor like Richard Pryor in the lead. For some reason, Julian Bond and Richie Havens are in the movie. As President of the NCAAP, Bond might have been appropriately cast, here he is in only two scenes. He sticks out like a stiff piece of wood in both of them. The second scene he is in is a view of the Grandstand at the big final race, he has no lines, but still is unconvincing as a human being. Richie Havens was underused, but seemed pretty natural in his part. His biggest contribution was to the soundtrack, where he performs a song that narrates transitions from one period of time to the next in the film. He is basically a musical montage layered on top of the visuals.



The movie was directed by Michael Schulz, one of the rare African American film directors in the 1970s. He directed "Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band", the year after this. We of course are some of the few people that treasure that movie despite it's clunkiness. It will come up later in the summer blog. So a year before John Travolta made the phrase "Greased Lightning" synonymous with his dancing and singing in "Grease", Richard Pryor owned the idea with this charming, simple film.

Soylent Green A Movie A Day Day 6

This is the best movie I have watched so far in my blog project. There are films that have higher production values, and maybe a few greater performances, but this is exactly the movie that the makers set out to produce and film. This is a classic example of how a good Science Fiction Idea was caught and made into a good Science Fiction film, without having to reinvent the wheel. There are no dramatic visual effects, there is not an amazing display of technology, there is a simple idea executed well by people who knew what it was they wanted.

A great many clever SciFi movies came out of the seventies. Obviously Star Wars started off a big trend of visualizing the future and making it part of the story. Soylent Green is from the same mold as "A Boy and His Dog", "The Omega Man", "Damnation Alley" and a dozen more; movies whose ideas are the selling point of the story, not just the production design and special effects. Oh, and buy the way, here is the Greenhouse Effect used as a plot device, nearly forty years ago. This is before all the nonsense that the last 10 years are the hottest on record, or that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone in 20 years. In other words, this boy has been crying wolf for a long time. Chicken Little is going to need to show us that the sky is falling and not just ask us to trust him. Skipping past the dispute over whether this is a real concern, the film simply presents a vision of the world as if it is going to come out this way. I did not find it moralizing and pedantic like so many "message" pictures, I found the ideas intriguing and the sadness of the film very convincing. It does not point a finger at anyone and say, "it's the oil companies fault" or "we need to stop the developers" or "the political system is against saving the planet". The story just suggests that a Malthusian nightmare is upon us, without getting political.

Surrounding the plot are references to environments disaster, the usual Big Company conspiracies, technical breakdowns, blatant sexism, but at it's heart are a couple of great ideas. That we don't know what we have till it's gone, and that people should matter. If that is political, then you might see this film in political terms. I thought it was a well made detective story with a fascinating setting, that makes the characters involved much fresher than they would otherwise be. The relationship between Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson is the love story in this movie. That Robinson's character Sol, remembers what the world was like is the moral center of what takes place. And the journey, Heston makes to see the world in a more humanitarian way, both thru the environment and through people is the point of the story. Most people remember the final line of the movie and use it as a punch line. They say it out loud as if they are revealing the twist in a Twilight Zone episode or telling you that Darth Vader is...you know. What they are ignoring is the individualism that this movie is really about. We humans are something that should matter. We just saw the movies moral center turned into a product, anyone who ignores that doesn't get the movie. Like the sucker punch at the end of "Planet of the Apes" this is a film that is about ideas not action.

I have loved Edgar G. Robinson as an actor, even before I knew who he was. The Bugs Bunny cartoons that used his likeness as a gangster, created the stereotypes that most of us have of mobsters in the 1920s and 30s. This is his final performance and he is as far from a tough guy as you can imagine. It is not hard to see him as the intellectual "Book" that assists the detective in investigating his case load. In essence what he is playing is the equivalent of an internet search engine without the technology. He has two great scenes in the movie, one where he shares a meal with Heston, featuring food that the detective will never have seen before, but that Sol can remember and pine over as the past that is lost. He knows what we have lost, and Heston doesn't, until he shares, with Sol this decadent pleasure. It is Sol's trip home however, that really shows to Thorn, what he is losing and what we have all lost. The trip home is the second great scene and it features the biggest art production of the movie, the L.A. Sports arena. That's about as futuristic as anything gets; OK there is a brief image of a computer video game, that was probably dated two years after the movie came out. Like the rest of the film, the Sports Arena is just background for a story, it is not the feature that everyone should be focused on. As a result, the need for "futurism" stays unobtrusively in the background, while the ideas stand out.

Lots of good actors are in the movie, Joseph Cotton shows up for two scenes, Chuck Conners is one of the bad guys, Brock Peters is Heston's boss. I recognized a lot of character actors in the movie that I have seen a million times over the years; Leonard Stone, Whit Bissel, and Paula Kelly are names most people won't remember, but I have always tried to give credit to the no name, credit after the film performers.

This movie came out in 1973, if I saw it with anyone, it was with a my friend Mark Witt, who I have not seen or heard from since the summer of 1975. Mark was not a big movie fan, but he liked some science fiction stuff and I seem to remember that he and I went to the El Rey Theater on Main in Alhambra to see this. It is also possible that this is one of those movies I saw by myself. I am certain that I saw it more than once in a theater. I had no reservations about going to a movie alone, I guess I still don't. Before I got hooked on Gene Hackman as an actor, Charleton Heston was probably my favorite. In the 1970's I pretty much saw everything he was in. Soylent Green stands out as one of the best movies he made. It was not one of the classic epics that he was a part of, but it was one of the three really smart science fiction movies he made. If I can't get the video to post, here is a link to the great title sequence.



http://www.artofthetitle.com/2008/11/25/soylent-green/

At The Earth's Core-A Movie A Day Day 5

Ok, get out the chips and jalapenos, the cheese has arrived and there are gallons of it. This is a good example of how undiscriminating I was as a film consumer, when the weather was hot, I was bored and the theater was air conditioned. At the Earth's Core brought me in because of the name Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the fact that it was sort of science fiction based. Even at the time I knew what crap this was, but that did not mean that I did not enjoy it. There were in fact two other movies from the same producer and stars, that came out in the mid-seventies. I think they are both on this list so you may be reading about them later. I remembered the People that Time Forgot much better than I remembered this (I guess that would be ironic).

This movie has a couple of things going for it that might make it worth your time. First, there is a Victorian setting for the scientists making this journey, and the production design emphasizes that era. I'm a sucker for that early "Steam Punk" type of design. I loved the Nautilus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the digging machine in this movie is an echo of that design. The costumes of our two heroes are simple but say everything about the fussy professor and the dim but rich and stalwart muscleman that is our lead. A suit like the one Doug McClure wears in this movie would be at home in 1880 England or 1960's or 70's San Francisco.

A second reason to see the movie is the lovely Caroline Munro, a Penthouse Pet that broke thru to B movie stardom in the 1970's. She did several of these cheapo films and had a nice following among male film goers. She is best remembered for a nice part she had in the James Bond film, "the Spy Who Loved Me". I did not have any posters or pictures up on my walls but I have a recollection that she had a nice selling poster like Linda Carter and Farrah Fawcett. That was the last I remember of her although I'm sure she had a fine career that I was just not aware of.

The movie has exploding bird people, giant turtle like dinosaurs, ape like creatures with misshapen skulls, primitive tribal people that don't speak (until after a confrontation scene that would be rendered unnecessary if someone simply said hello and answered) and then they do speak , English (if a bit Tarzanese). The production of the special effects is so cheap that the wires are visible on flying creatures, and the sets are repeated endlessly as our protaganists move through tunnels and jungle that all look the same for a reason.

I can't recall the circumstances of my seeing the movie, I doubt that Dee and I were together, we had just started dating seriously and this would not be a film to impress a date with; although she did make me take her to see Mahogany. The movie is a relic that was creaky when it came out, 34 years later, it has not improved. Still, a lazy evening at a Drive in would be just about right. I can't believe I missed that opportunity with the hot girl I was dating. I'm sure I would remember even less of the movie then.