Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974) A Movie A Day Day 77

When Quentin Tarantino brought us Deathproof a few years back, it was an opportunity to see the face off those of us from the seventies were denied. The 1971 Challenger vs. the 1969 Charger. His film provided the showdown between the cars featured in two of the big car chase films from the early 1970s; Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry. Each of these movies featured supercharged automobiles on cross country chases. There is mayhem, destruction of police cars galore, and nihilistic endings for each picture. Deathproof solves the puzzle of the negative resolutions of both films, and let's us glory in the chase. There was a lot that irritated me about the Tarantino movie, but once the cars were on the road the movie was perfection. This film has some of the same problems, when not in the chase, it is terrible. Even when the chases are going on though, Dirty Mary,Crazy Larry is held back from the pack by major problems. Instead of being a delight it is a drudge, punctuated occasionally by some good live action car stunts.

The movie starts with disdainful attitude as Larry, played by Peter Fonda, crawls out of bed with Mary, Susan George and proceeds to show off for his partner by making a series of not so clever jokes. The partner, a sulking guy played by an actor I never heard from again, is not amused and he replies with equally lame lines in a verbal pissing contest that no one in the audience will enjoy. It get worse however, because as unclever as these two are, they are sparkling wits in comparison to Mary. Her repartee is annoying and it is delivered in a style that is even more annoying. These are the main characters folks, and if you watch this you get to spend an hour and forty minutes in their company. It is enough to give you a headache.

You might think it's going to be OK, because maybe the story will pull you in and the characters will have something that makes us root for them. No Chance. In Vanishing Point we have Kowaslski, a unfairly disgraced cop, running his car across the country to win a bet that he can deliver it within the proscribed time. He never hurt anyone and is sympathetic although a little pig-headed. The two guys in this movie are a car racing team down on their luck, who decide to steal a bundle of cash, by kidnapping the wife and child of a grocery store manager, holding them hostage, and threatening bodily harm against the preteen daughter. Mary joins them inadvertently and thrills at the mayhem that follows. She is as reckless and dangerous as they are, and late in the film, when she moralizes about how indifferent Larry was in a car crash, it is the most hypocritical character change you can imagine. The Sheriff that is pursuing them is played by Vic Morrow, and he is supposed to be an unconventional, rebellious kind of cop. The problem is that we see no motive and he and his boss exchange unpleasantries with nearly the same frequency as the crooks. The only sympathetic characters in the movie are the victims of the kidnapping, the Dad is played by Roddy MacDowell for no particular reason. He has a couple of scenes and then is out of the picture.

So if the plot is lame, the characters are annoying, and there is no rooting interest, what's left? Easy, car chases. These are non-CGI, real action stunts, put together by a group of professionals to thrill us. The spectacle is pretty satisfying. There are jumps and close calls and crashes that appear every few minutes to give us a reason to stay for the film. I mentioned in an earlier posting that drive-in movie fare was usually just involving enough to avoid interrupting the petting and foreplay that would go on in the cars in the theater. This movie is perfect for that. When the cars are not moving, you make your own action, and then you pause every few minutes and watch the action on the screen. There is an excellent chase by a helicopter in the last part of the film, some of the camera work is really fine, and the chopper pilot must have been really good for what he was asked to do. I had a hard time getting the irony out of my head that Vic Morrow was in the chopper chasing the people on the ground. Those of you unaware of the history of Vic Morrow, should wait to look it up until after you see the movie. Once you know, I suspect it will knock around in your head and distract you as well.

I really wish I could say I saw this at a drive-in with a girl. The memory would be a lot sweeter. I did see it at a drive-in, but not with a girl, instead I saw it with my buddy Don Hayes. The one really great thing about that was that Don's Mom had a 1969 Dodge Charger, and I'm not sure but there is a good chance that was the car we were in when we saw this disappointing movie. Vanishing Point is the pinnacle of 70's car chase movie, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry is a poor imitation that is for completists only.

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

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


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

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

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

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

Night Moves 1975 A Movie A Day Day 75

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

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

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

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

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

The Groove Tube 1974 A Movie A day Day 74

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

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

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

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

The Eiger Sanction 1975 A Movie A Day Day 73

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

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

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

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

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

Macon County Line -1973 A Movie A Day Day 72

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

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


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

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

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

Dracula 1979 A Movie A Day Day 71

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

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

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

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

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