"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.

The Neptune Factor 1973 A Movie A Day Day 46

 

 If you watch any of the above clip you will know that this is not a great film. It is not a good film. It is not a mediocre film. It is a pretty sad excuse for a movie. There is a little bit of hope in the first third of the picture, but the drama dissipates quickly and there is very little reason to hold on until the end. So you can easily bail out on it then, that is unless you want to see the most laughable special effects in the history of cinema. This movie has an OK set up, a lazy middle and the most ridiculous resolution of science fiction adventure ever invented. Let's save all that for a short while because there are other things to talk about.

I remember where I saw this film and who I was with very clearly, because it was a young teenage boys dream to meet girls at the movies. I saw this with Russ Weiner, who was my debate partner my first year of competition in high school. At Alhambra High in those says, it was a little like the NCAA of the time, freshman were not allowed to compete. A year late they changed the rule but it did apply to me at the time so I did not get involved in Speech Competition until my second year of high school. I was randomly paired with Russ which was fine by me, but it turned out that he had very little interest in Debate. We basically went 3 and 15 in debate rounds that year. He had had enough and one year met the speech requirement we had. He was pretty much done with forensics, but we stayed friends for another year or so. During the summer of 1973, before I went the the U.S.C. Western Forensic Institute, I hung out with Russ at his Dad's apartment, at the Aquarium shop that he worked at, and we went to some movies. We saw the Neptune Factor as a second feature that was playing with "Battle for the Planet of the Apes". Almost everything in this movie was new to me because the whole time the movie was on, Russ and I were trying to hit on a couple of girls seated down in front of us. I remember moving down and sitting near them, and then asking if they wanted some of our Jujyfruits (or whatever we had). We kept making small talk and ignoring the movie while it ran on. I was actually a pretty outgoing guy, but my experience with women was very limited. I don't know that Russ was any more expert but he took the lead and we had an OK time. No phone numbers were exchanged and I don't remember anything about the girls at all, names, hair color, nothing. I do know that when we said goodbye in the lobby after the show, one girl kissed me on the cheek and said it was nice meeting us. Whoo hoo! Then we went back in and saw the Apes picture. I don't think I went to a movie again with Russ ever. He was actually friends with Jim Bolton, who was Sheryl Bolton's brother. Sheryl dated my best friend at the time Don Hayes. Later they were married for about six months. Anyway, Jim was older, about 300 pounds and a mean piece of work. He did things that were hurtful and painful to others. I probably stopped hanging out with Russ because he spent time at Jim's. Don ran interference for me but I was a little guy next to all of them so I was a target and it made sense to avoid the scene. I have no idea whatever happened to Russ. 

Now if you thought that story was boring, you clearly have not seen this movie. My brief description of those events is ten times as interesting as anything that happens in this movie. Walter Pidgeon is one of the stars, he was in another film that year called "Harry in Your Pocket", about pickpockets, that was where all of his acting energy for the year went because he does nothing memorable at all in this movie. He was in pictures back to "How Green Was My Valley", so he was well aged at that point and he was typecast as playing well aged types. Yvette Mimieux was the female lead. She had a wooden expression that served her well in The Black Hole a few years later. Her character is supposed to be in love with one of the men lost on an underwater research station, but you would be hard pressed to know she ever loved anyone from this performance. Ben Gazzara, plays the captain of a rescue vehicle named "Neptune", thus the title of the film. Gazarra plays his whole part with a southern accent and a face of stone. The only actor in this movie with any life in him is Ernest Borgnine. You know what, he made a lot of odd films over the years, some great like "Marty" and "The Wild Bunch", some not so great like Convoy","The Black Hole" and this. Regardless of the movie Borgnine was always a professional, doing his best not just there to get a paycheck. 

 I'm going to finish this post by telling you the climax of the picture. If it keeps you from seeing the movie because I give anything away, you can thank me for saving a couple hours of your life. The team goes down in the rescue sub one last time, because it is unsafe to search for the lab in the trench for too long due to aftershocks of the original quake that caused the lab to fall off the edge in the first place. They are tethered to the surface ship for safety. At the first chance she gets, Mimieux's character busts them loose and they plunge deeper into the abyss then they had planned. Here is where the special effects show up, they encounter enormous versions of fish and plant life at the floor of the ditch. These consist of blown up shots of fish from someones aquarium. The people in the rescue sub and the stranded researchers are menaced by clown fish, seahorses and catfish. There are shots of the sub in the movie that look like a plastic toy that a kid would play with in the bathtub, and then we cut back to close ups of fish in an aquarium. This was less suspenseful then an episode of Jacques Cousteau. It is really hard to believe that anyone thought this would cut it even in 1973. The researchers are able to escape because one of them sacrifices himself by distracting the catfish that are probably there to clean the floor of the tank, and letting himself get eaten. The plastic toy rises to the surface, and then everyone on the main boat heaves a sigh of relief. "THE END". Look, the director of this was Daniel Petrie, who a couple of years later made "Lifeguard" a nice little picture that I wrote about earlier. Everyone made it out of this picture and continued to work, which just shows how many chances someone can get sometimes.

The Frisco Kid 1979 A Movie a Day Day 45

THE FRISCO KID: Movie TrailerThe Frisco Kid, Leo Fuchs

Boy did it get complicated finding a post-able version of this trailer. Please watch it so that I feel the effort was worth it. I don't know why someone doesn't have it on youtube, because this movie stars Harrison Ford, the biggest movie star on the planet for 20 years, and Gene Wilder one of the best loved comic actors of all time. Even though it features these two big stars, I don't think many people know of or have seen The Frisco Kid. This is another gem from the summer of 1979. There were quite a few other films out that summer so maybe it simply got crowded out of the marketplace. This movie was directed by Robert Aldrich, one of the great tough guy filmakers of the sixties and seventies. He brought us "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Longest Yard". So it was not put together by amateurs.

We saw it at the Gold Theater in Alhambra; that was the small second screen at the site of the main Alhambra Theater. They claim to be the first multi-plex in the country or at least on the west coast. That theater was heavily damaged by the Whittier narrows quake in 1987, and it never reopened. Four years later the Edwards Atlantic Palace opened and it was the most beautiful theater in the world for a couple of years. Now my kids that went there with me when they were little, think it is creepy. If they had ever seen the Gold Theater they would have freaked out. It had a small screen, maybe 150 seats and a pretty low ceiling. That was the experience we had when we saw this movie. It was on a double bill but I can't recall right now what the other feature was. We loved Gene Wilder and if you look at the trailer, you will see he was the selling point for the film. Harrison Ford had been in Star Wars but not yet the sequel where he really shined and this was two years before Indiana Jones. He was co-billed but definitely the second lead.

The movie is populated with familiar faces from westerns and TV shows of the day. There is a an Indian chief played by the guy who was John Travolta's father in Saturday Night Fever; you know the one who hits his hair. The head of the Jewish group in San Francisco is someone I'm sure I saw on TV a million times in the 1970s. I want to give special notice to William Smith however, because this may be the most memorable role I saw him in in a theatrical film. He is the heavy, and that was the part he usually played. I remember him best from the two Rich Man, Poor Man Mini-series of the 70s. People who have grown up in a world of cable series that had short runs, may think that this was a normal way to tell a story. In the 1970s, when most people had only the three main networks to choose from, and a series might run several nights in a row or over the course of a few weeks they had huge ratings. William Smith was the scary bad guy in the Rich Man, Poor Man series, so he was seen by huge numbers of people and he was quite memorable in the role. In the Frisco Kid he plays the bad guy that tries to get the Rabbi in a gunfight at the end of the movie. He might be hard to find since the Rabbi took San Fransisco and the bad guy gets everywhere else.

Harrison Ford plays his part for laughs for the most part. He is not doing slapstick but he is often the straight man in the comedy duo. He does get a few choice lines and gets to play some very nice emotional moments with Wilder. The heart of the movie is the friendship that springs up between Ford's bank robber and Wilder's Rabbi. It is a buddy picture with a nice twist. It is also a fish out of water story, with the Rabbi encountering con men, Amish, posses, and Indians. For a nice Jewish boy from Poland, it would appear to be overwhelming, but the spirit of the Rabbi is a good one. He is a man trying to live up to expectations, and he doesn't always have the skill but no one would ever doubt his heart. When he telegraphs back the money that Ford stole from a bank in a small town they went through, you know this is a guy with his heart in the right place.

Gene Wilder carries the movie with his spot on accent and hangdog expressions. He puts more emotion in his eyes then ten other actors could muster. True his lines are sometimes delivered like a stereotype, but that is part of the humor from being out of place in the old west. If you don't laugh at the whole sequence when he is chasing a prairie chicken down to when he finally meets up with Ford, there is nothing you will find funny in the movie. I laughed hard at the line"If you had been here yesterday, we could have had chicken." I think the movie was sold as a Mel Brooks style comedy, but it is actually much more gentle and sentimental. Allison said today that this was her favorite Gene Wilder Character, and she loves Willy Wonka and Young Frankenstein. The movie could be a little tighter. It feels about fifteen minutes too long. It is not a bad fifteen minutes, and I want to be honest, the extra time with the two characters is not going to hurt anyone.

Moonraker 1979 A Movie A Day Day 44

As far as I'm concerned, every James Bond Film is a classic. James Bond is my favorite character in movies and fiction and has been since the time I discovered the novels when I was ten years old. We had most of the paperbacks that I found on a bookshelf in our house on Kendall Ave in Los Angeles. I saw the lurid covers and the cool titles and I dove right in. They were a little racy for a ten year old, but the reading level was fine because, well frankly I was an advanced reader. The more sophisticated might say that my reading level would be retarded by spending time with these novel. Anyone who believes that, has not shared a meal with James Bond in an exotic hotel, or played a high stakes game of cards with a desperate villain. I saw my first Bond films before I read the books and was pleased as punch that I did not have to wait another two years to get the next story. Moonraker the film shares almost nothing with the book. The villain's name is just about all they have in common. This movie was moved up after the success of Star Wars, and the 007 franchise decided to cash in on the space craze. The seventies Bond films seemed to be more locked into film trends then a dozen other media put together. Blaxsplotation films led to Live and Let Die, Kung Fu epics featuring Bruce Lee meant that The Man with the Golden Gun would be set in Asia and feature martial arts as a subplot, and then Moonraker jumps on the Science Fiction bandwagon. Many have criticized Moonraker as the worst 007 movie ever. It's not the worst but it did pander the most. There is a set of three musical cues used in the movie for a joke. The opening strains of Also Sprach Zarthura, the Close Encounters communication theme and the Theme from the Magnificent Seven are all used as punchlines. That seems a little excessive.

There are some big set pieces in the movie that work very well on their own, even if they are not essential to the story telling. The pre-credit sequence features a great parachute stunt and looks pretty good. There was only one Bond film in the seventies that did not have a boat chase of some type, that was the last one with Sean Connery. I guess the producers decided Roger Moore looked great on the water. In fact, Moonraker features two boat chase sequences, both are spectacular. In Venice Bond has a gondola that tuns into a speedboat and he maneuvers around the canals until he runs out of room, then it turns into a hovercraft that allows him to float across the piazza and get double takes and slapstick reactions from the crowd. In the Amazon, his vehicle is equipped with counter measures that allow him to destroy most of the enemy speedboats chasing him, and again he has a slick exit when he runs out of room. The writers might be accused of dipping into the same well in this one movie, but I doubt most people noticed because it was so fun.

There are a few technical glitches in the story telling that get glossed over. The hijacking of the Moonraker is a good looking sequence but it makes no sense since the Shuttle that is stolen only flies in free fall, and the engines on it would not allow someone to hijack it like a car on the streets. The explosions in space have to look spectacular, the the film makers ignore that in the absence of oxygen, there would be no huge flames to look at against the black background of space. Even if you have more money than Bill Gates, you could not restore a glass factory in a few hours and replace a laboratory with a renaissance library, complete with art work by the masters, overnight. I don't know anyone who wants to get too wrapped up in that, but it is an illustration of how the series was becoming dislodged from reality. The space marines in the American shuttle that battles Drax's forces, seem to come out of nowhere. I will say that the execution of the launch sequences of the six Moonraker shuttles, closely resemble the real shuttle takeoffs, which would not occur for two years after this movie was released.

This was the very first movie I recorded with the $1100 VCR we bought in 1981. Bond films up through the seventies were lucrative films in re-releases, but cable programming was making all kinds of movies available. It was a huge event when the Bond Films came to TV in the late seventies, and Moonraker was one of the new 007 adventures that would not get a second chance to get an audience in the theaters but would be embraced by those with a good color TV. I suspect that is one reason that Roger Moore's Bond portrayals were widely embraced, they were seen by more people more quickly because of the different TV windows of the day. I am not saying Moore wasn't deserving of praise, but it always surprised me that there were people that preferred his Bond to Sean Connery. At the end of this movie, is the promise that James Bond would return in "For Your Eyes Only". I liked it when we got that promise and there was a particular title to look forward too. Now a days, the promise seems more hollow because they don't really know what the next Bond will consist of and there is uncertainty in the studio. The death of United Artists in 1981, meant that the franchise would be in the hands of the producers but not always backed by a reliable studio. This is why we may not get another Daniel Craig Bond film, and maybe no Bond film for years to come.

There is an interesting personal story about our first screening of this movie. We went with Kathy and Art, a year before they got married and we got married. We saw this at a theater in Westwood, which was the only place it was playing when it first opened (those days were disappearing rapidly). We got there a couple hours before or screening and lined up in front of the theater to wait. While we were waiting, some incident occurred that led me to make a joke about Art being henpecked. Kathy got a bit irritated, but we shrugged it off, it was just an innocuous smart ass comment. While Dolores and I waited in line, holding our place, Art and Kathy walked off to get a drink or some ice cream. They were gone nearly an hour and we got a bit worried. Right before the doors opened to let us in they came back and we all went in and had what I thought was a nice time. It was only later that we found out that Kathy was infuriated about the joke and wanted Art to go with her and take her home. We had ridden with them in Art's little yellow Opal sedan, out to see the movie. Kathy had wanted to abandon us there, she was so mad. We would have been stranded in Westwood, forty miles from my house and without any way of knowing what had happened, remember, no cell phones. It turns out that most of that hour they were gone was spent by Art trying to convince her not to do that. My best friend Art passed away in 1993. He and Kathy were close friends for the length of their marriage. Kathy moved on and seemed uninterested in staying a part of our lives. It hurt a great deal but for five years after his death we basically only got a Christmas card a couple of times. We reconnected in 2000, and actually had a pretty close friendship again, but in 2001, with her kids in tow, she bailed out on us at another movie.We have not seen or heard from her at all in nine years. We sat watching the first Harry Potter movie, wondering what the hell had happened. The answer was simple, Art wasn't there to talk her out of it that time.

Amityville Horror 1979 A Movie A Day Day 43

Amanda watched this with us, and she said it didn't frighten her except for a few jump shots and gotcha moments. Of course she watched this from behind a blanket curled up in a corner of the couch. Even if it didn't get to her, I'm perfectly willing to admit that it got to me. This movie in no way has the intensity or impact of a film like the Exorcist or Alien, but the creep factor was quite high from my point of view. There were several scenes that made me jump and almost a dozen that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It works very well as a fright film, and I thought the intensity at the end was a satisfying finish for the movie.

Haunted House movies usually work for me. I have already written about the Legend of Hell House earlier in the summer. If I ever repeat this project for films of the 1980s, you can bet that Poltergeist will be on the list. We are big fans of the Television show "Supernatural" and my favorite episode usually involve some kind of haunting. It may be that Amanda is such a fan of the show that she is a little jaded in regard to the traditional creaky/spooky house bits. I on the other hand respond to the usual suspects the way the film makers usually are looking for. When I noticed the name of the Director tonight as I was watching the opening, I was not surprised that the movie works. Stuart Rosenberg directed the fantastic Cool Hand Luke in the 1960s, and in the seventies he did a couple of very nice Paul Newman movies and a thriller called the Laughing Policeman that I had always liked. This movie is very competently put together.

Let's start with the script. It is based on the bestselling book of the time. I know there have been a number of follow up stories that debunk the story as being true. It has even been suggested that the whole thing was a hoax. I have never read the book and I did not follow the rebuttal stories very closely. I never went into this thinking it was a documentary. I guess those who did were hoodwinked the same way that people who thought the Blair Witch Project was real were taken in. I just looked at it as a good story. It has all the needed parts to pull us in; a young couple newly married with kids from a previous relationship buying a dream house, a background story that sets up the drama and horror before our main character even take the stage, and several subplots about satanism, Indian burial grounds and just weird local history. There are not a huge number of special effects and the three that stood out might seem a little cheesy. At one point we see a set of glowing eyes, then there is the image of the lead character that floats into a hidden room, and what looks like a giant creepy rat in the little girls room at the end of the film. Two of these worked well despite being a bit iffy. The floating head image of James Brolin is the one photo effect that just falls flat. I'll tell you what image of Brolin does work scaring us, his face staring up at the audience from the year old newspaper photo of the murderer in the opening sequence.

The actors are fine, Margot Kidder did this movie between the two Superman movies she was featured in. She is a nice looking woman that is not beautiful per say but comes across as sexy and appealing in an everyday kind of way. I have not seen the remake that came out a few years ago, but my guess is that it is populated with pretty people. That kind of casting takes us out of the reality of the story. Sure James Brolin is a good looking man, but we see him deteriorate in front of our eyes. The kids are cute but not model cute. And all the supporting players are plain, they were hired for the roles they were playing not their looks. This was a low budget film made by American International Pictures, but they spent the money to make a film competently and to make it creepy. They did not try to sell us on the movie based on how fantastic everything looked. The music was by Lalo Schifrin. He did the music the year before for yesterdays movie "The Cat From Outer Space". Also Rollercoaster, Enter the Dragon and a couple more films on my list for the summer. He is best known for writing the greatest TV theme this side of Hawaii Five-0, The Mission Impossible theme. For this movie he really did a great job, the eeriness kept going even when conventional story elements were on the screen. I thought this evening while I was watching it, that this was one of the better scores I had heard this summer. When I looked it up, sure enough he was nominated for an Academy Award for this score.

Dolores and I went to this movie with Kathy and Art in the legendary summer of 1979. We saw it at the Rosemead Four theater. This was one of the first of the AMC style multiplexes, the theaters were small, the lobby smaller, but the popcorn was good. This theater is long gone and they don't have a screen in the area anymore at all. We all enjoyed it and the girls were particularly creep-ed out. Maybe as I have gotten older, I have lost some of my nerve and I am now easier to scare. I just thought this movie worked. OK, maybe going back for the dog seems tired and stupid to moviegoers today, but that is only because they did it here first and a thousand others followed (Don't forget, Ripley went back for the cat).

1978 Walt Disney The Cat From Outer Space A Movie A Day Day 42

In my class yesterday, I mentioned that I am a sucker for movies with animals. The trailer for Secretariat brings a tear to my eye. What kid didn't want lassie to be their dog, or cry when Old Yeller or Thomasina died? Then someone asked me if I therefore liked Marmaduke. I have of course not seen that travesty, so thirty years from now I won't have to be writing about what movies I saw in the old days and then be forced to mention it. Unfortunately, that is not the case with "The Cat From Outer Space". I saw it, I admit it, and I am embarrassed. Look, it's not that it's a Disney live action film. I still like the Ugly Dachshund and Herbie the Love Bug. The problem is that it is the dregs of the Disney live action films from the seventies. Elements of the story are recycled from other Disney movies, the actors are all encouraged to mug for the camera, and a premise that might be fun for kids is wasted.

This was a year out from Star Wars and Close Encounters. It must have seemed like a brilliant idea to have a space themed kids movie for the summer. The idea of a visitor from another planet, hiding among the humans, who needs our help is not exactly original. My favorite Martian was a TV series that ran in the sixties. The Day the Earth Stood Still was big in the fifties. No one will ever think of this movie as a specimen of good science fiction or good kids movie. I am going to do some finger pointing here and it is not going to be pretty. My girlfriend made me take her to see this movie. I knew that it was not going to be any good. The Disney Studios of the late seventies had nearly run dry of creativity. They were functioning on the fumes of their past success. Most of the box office for their films came from re-releases of their classic animated films. The new animated films were passable but not great. It would be nearly a decade before the take over of Disney by other Hollywood insiders and Wall Street barons would restore the Disney brand to the status of Kingdom. The live action unit must have been a loss leader that they could take write downs on because the fantastic adventure films and clever family comedies of the sixties, gave way to stuff like this.

This movie features some well know performers who deserved better. Sandy Duncan was the go to gal for Disney films in the seventies, and she is OK for what she is asked to do. McLean Stevenson and Harry Morgan were both on the TV series M*A*S*H, in fact, Morgan replaced Stevenson, so it is amusing that they co-star in this movie. I saw Harry Morgan in yesterday's film "The Shootist" and he was a hundred times better. He is growling through this, in sleepwalk mode. The stuffed Cat they used for the flying sequence at the end did a better job than most of the actors. There is screaming and grimacing by the romantic leads, flustered glances from the supporting players and casual robotic appearances my some old timers like Hans Conreid and Jesse White.

The writers lifted the plot from My Favorite Martian, complete with telekinetic powers, transplanted some evil secret organization elements and then grafted in a plot device that Disney had used for years. In Flubber, gamblers are making bets on basketball games, in Blackbeard's Ghost, they have the football game to gamble on. If there is a story that requires quick fund raising, then they just stick in a gambling element and twist it to fit the story. Here it was completely unnecessary to the plot, but it allows some Extraterrestrial magic to be worked on a variety of games to amuse the kids. I just don't think any of it was very amusing. The special effects look like they went out of date in the 1940s.

It may be that Spielberg saw this movie before he did E.T., because there is a scene where the alien (cat) makes a motorcycle fly briefly. If there had been a moon behind it someone could have sued. I told my students that my main criteria for rejecting a movie even when it has animals in it is, is based on whether the animals talk or dance. There are very few exceptions to that rule, but I think I should add one more element to the standard. If the animals have super powers then you should give it a pass also.

The Shootist 1976 A Movie A Day Day 41

I love John Wayne. He was the biggest movie star in the world before I was born, and I saw as many of his movies as I could when I was a kid. Of course I watched him on the afternoon matinee on channel 9, or the Big Picture on channel 2. If there was a late show on a weekend night I'd try to see that too. I didn't think it was enough to see him on TV however, I really felt that the theatrical experience was required. He was an aging star by the time the seventies came along, and the parts did not always fit him well. He tried to match Dirty Harry in films like Brannigan or McQ, but his hairpiece and age made him seem out of place(by the way I saw both of those in Theaters and loved them despite the creakiness). If ever there was a character type made for an actor it was the role of cowboy for John Wayne.

By the 1970's, the Western genre was dying out. Clint Eastwood still made them, but for the most part they had returned to being "B" pictures, and after the influence of Sergio Leone, they were usually bloody as hell. John Wayne made two of his best western pictures in the 70's. "The Cowboys" allowed him to play a realistic part as an aging rancher, faced with leading a group of kids on a cattle drive. He got to be Duke, but did not have to do all of the action scenes, and he is off-screen during the climax of the film. It was a terrific film but it was not a summer release, "The Shootist" was. This was a part that fit Wayne like a glove, they used clips from a dozen of his earlier pictures to set up the back-story of the character that we meet. He is a legendary gunfighter, past his prime but with more dignity, guts and talent than anyone around as the movie starts. The film is set in 1901, so the new century is taking over for the old, and the ways of the past are not always held in high esteem. There were exceptions in this movie; a young kid who knows the history of this particular gunfighter, a couple of wanna-bees that missed the showdown in the street days of the old west, and an ornery man with a grudge who remembers the past too well. J.B. Books encounters all of them in his last days in Carson City. He is dying of cancer and trying to figure a way to do so with some self-respect.

John Wayne plays Books so easily because he had faced cancer himself. He had played all of those parts for fifty years, and he would face cancer one last time in the not to distant future. This was his final screen role and he was exactly what was called for. I love the fact that this movie was directed by the great Don Siegel. Siegel is one of the two directors that Clint Eastwood dedicated his movie "Unforgiven" to(the other being Leone). The guy that made three westerns with Clint Eastwood and directed him in his signature role in Dirty Harry, made the last movie John Wayne was ever in. There is poetry in this, and anyone that thinks the universe is a series of random accidents ought to consider the unique way these circunstance came out. It is just plain cool.

If you watch the trailer, you will see that there is no shortage of talent on the screen. Jimmy Stewart re-teams with Wayne, a co-star in the Man who Shot Liberty Valance. John Carradine has a scene as an undertaker, he must have played such a role before because he seems perfect in it. Hugh O'Brien, has a part that is not huge but it is flashy, and after playing Wyatt Earp on TV for so many years, it was great to see him in a Western on the big screen with Wayne. Richard Boone also was a TV western star, he had worked with Wayne a couple of years earlier in Big Jake. Lauren Bacall, has a really solid part in the film as the boarding house owner that gunfighter Books takes a liking to. They do the bickering flirt dance a bit, but she ultimately has to accede to his request not to argue with him about his final choice. Ron Howard was a good young actor, but in the long run it seems he made a smart choice in moving behind the camera. His earnest manner and face would probably not get him many parts when his youth left him.

It is sad to know that we live in a world where we can't expect a new John Wayne picture, but it is grand to know that even among today's young moviegoers, the name John Wayne still means something (even if they haven't seen any of his movies). I like playing the John Wayne slot machine when I am in Vegas. I don't know if Mr. Wayne would approve, but in a way, it helps us hang onto that image of him as the primo cowboy of the century. I am pretty sure I saw this movie by myself in 1976. I can't explain why that would be the case, but I did luck out because no one I knew got to see me cry at the end of this film. It is even tougher now, knowing how Wayne left us three years later. There are a lot of good quotes from the movie, but I will leave you with this visualization of the values J.B.Books shares with young Ronnie Howard's character...

The gentleman on the left is the producer of "The Shootist" William Self, the one on the right is my Dad, Kirk Kirkham. In the middle is my Dads friend Jim Hamilton. This photo was taken by my friend Ron Pascu, a old buddy of my Dad. He just shared the connection with me when he saw this post. If you click here it will take you to the magic blog for a little more detail.