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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today is my last post. I have had a lot of fun watching these films and writing about them and I hope you all have enjoyed hearing my thoughts and opinions. The film I chose for today is one of my favorites. It's a musical and, it might even be my favorite musical. I always go back and forth on musicals because I think my taste in them is really dependent upon my mood at the time.
Jesus Christ Superstar was released in 1973 and is based on the musical stage play of the same name. Music by Andrew Llyod Webber, lyrics by Tim Rice. I love the music in this film. I've always been really picky about the soundtrack of a musical. If I like the film version, I usually don't like the stage version. I guess that's because I'm usually exposed to the film version first and it's what I base my rating system off of. I do enjoy seeing the stage versions of the stories though, seeing a live presentation of the story and music I enjoy so much. I just don't want their soundtracks. I do have to admit though that I've never seen a stage production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
I took a class on musicals at USC this last semester and we learned about the history of the film musical and the transformations it has undergone. We very briefly spoke abut this film. My professor used it as an example of the genre adapting to changing practices of the industry. After the studio breakup and the breakdown of the star system, musicals lost a lot of funding because they were so expensive to produce. The costumes and sets alone could cost the same as two sets of costumes and sets for two dramatic films. Musicals were all about spectacle, which meant they needed a lot of people and a lot of colorful props and fixings. So, once the studios broke up, musicals weren't affordable any more and it was hard to find a producer who would back such a risky investment. The musical genre had other issues to deal with as well, such as on location films. Musicals couldn't be easily moved from the soundstage to an actual location because of things mentioned before. However, some tried because that's what audiences wanted to see.
So, Jesus Christ Superstar is an example of a "runaway production." it's a film that takes its cast and crew out of the studio, and even country, to go to a location and film there. It was filmed in Beit Guvrin, Israel. It takes everything on location. This is done for many reasons. It helps compete against other genres that can show widescreen landscapes and, it's cheaper to shoot outside the US. So this film adapted to the times it was in.
I like that I was able to take a class that talked about some of my favorite films and teach me new things about them. But back to the film and why I love it. I'm not sure exactly what makes it so enjoyable for me. I love the music, the stylization and the atmosphere of the whole thing. I think its imagery is indicative of the time it was made in, and I don't think that's bad. The tanks and airplanes are war symbols and war and protest were prevalent during this time. Even the "den of thieves" scene was indicative of the time period. The items for sale date the film a little and I wonder what a modern version would have instead of some of the items seen in the film. Perhaps cell phones and iPods would be items for sale in a modern "den of thieves" but I still think guns, other weaponry and drugs would also still be there.
I know a lot of people love it and a lot hate it. Some people don't like what it says religiously, others hate the rock opera aspect of it. For me, both these things make it a movie I never get tire of year after year.
Also, I just have to say I think this is actually a pretty cool trailer.
