Play It Again, Sam (1972)

          The romantic comedy Play It Again, Sam is significant for two very specific reasons: It’s one of only two ’70s movies that Woody Allen acted in but did not direct, and it’s the first screen collaboration between Allen and his definitive ’70s leading lady, Diane Keaton. Adapted by Allen from his own stage play of the same name and directed by the always-elegant Herbert Ross, Play It Again, Sam is a silly trifle about a nebbish who falls in love with his best friend’s wife while receiving advice from an imaginary version of movie icon Humphrey Bogart. The contrast between geeky little Allen and suave, trenchcoat-wearing Bogie (played by Jerry Lacy) is consistently amusing, and the chemistry between Allen and Keaton, who play simpatico neurotics, is terrific. So, even though the movie is never laugh-out-loud funny and even though the story gets overly mechanical toward the end, Play It Again, Samgoes down smoothly.

          Set in San Francisco, the picture stars Allen as Allan, a film critic whose wife, Nancy (Susan Anspach), just left him. Allan finds comfort in the company of his pal Dick (Tony Roberts), a self-involved businessman, and Dick’s amiable but high-strung wife, Linda (Keaton). As Dick and Linda try again and again to connect Allan with new women—most of the blind dates go disastrously bad—Allan daydreams that his favorite tough-guy movie star, Bogart, has materialized to offer romantic advice. This culminates in a complex scene of Allan putting the moves on Linda while arguing with Bogie, who pushes Allan to act more aggressively. Shtick ensues. Giving the sort of super-invested, almost desperate comic performance that marked his earliest films, Allen relies as much on physical slapstick as he does on his trademark wit—and while the trope of Allen bumping into walls and knocking over tables gets tired, his one-liners are great. (“I was incredible last night in bed—I never once had to look up and consult the manual.”)

          From a writing perspective, Allen does a great job of “opening up” the play, using cross-cutting and multiple locations to make the piece feel completely cinematic. Concurrently, Ross finds clever ways to slip the Bogart character into and out of scenes. It all basically works until the end, when Allen twists the story in knots so he can stage a riff on the final scene of Casablanca(1942). (The real thing appears during the opening scene of Play It Again, Sam, when Allan watches Casablanca In a theater.) This forced climax lacks the effortlessness that distinguishes the rest of the film, but it was probably the best means of paying off the whole Bogart angle. Flaws aside, Play It Again, Sam is quasi-essential viewing for ’70s-cinema fans, because a year after this picture was released, Allen and Keaton reteamed for Sleeper(1973), the first in the five Allen-directed ’70s movies they made together. In other words—and you knew this was coming, didn’t you?—Play It Again, Sam was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Play It Again, Sam: GROOVY

Drive-In (1976)

          Given the mixture of silly and sublime pleasures one could enjoy at the neighborhood drive-in theater in the heyday of that particular exhibition format, there was probably a great—or at least highly entertaining—movie to be made about the misadventures of teenagers during one eventful night at a Texas drive-in. Sadly, Drive-In is not that movie, although the picture’s quite harmless as a nostalgia piece. The reason the flick disappoints is that it tries to be a sex comedy but lacks any scandalous content, and that it tries to present an interwoven ensemble story but fails to present sufficiently dynamic characters to sustain interest. As portrayed by a group of no-name actors whose skill levels range from competent to nonexistent, the characters in Drive-In are mostly just clichéd rednecks, with such familiar types as the virginal good guy, the town slut (with a heart of gold), the smartass fat kid, and the mouth-breathing troublemaker on display. Nearly every beat of the movie is predictable, and the comic highlights—the waterbed in a swinger’s van gets knifed by an angry woman, would-be robbers get recognized by a neighbor while committing a crime—are tepid at best.

          The principal storyline involves gangly high-school redhead Orville (Glenn Morshower, who later became a fine character actor) inadvertently wooing raven-haired sexpot Glowie (Lisa Lemole) away from her violent boyfriend, Enoch (Billy Miliken). This romantic triangle culminates in a fistfight at the drive-in. Meanwhile, two local yokels attempt to rob the theater’s box office, but their would-be crime is married by bad lack and incompetence. Sprinkled between these storylines are goofy subplots such as the running gag of a drunken cowboy suffering through a night on the town with his overbearing mother. The only clever element of Drive-In is the movie within the movie, which is displayed onscreen at the main location. Disaster ’76 is an amusing spoof of the disaster genre, so every time a new scene is shown, Disaster ’76 incorporates another epic hardship—plane malfunctions, shark-infested waters, towering infernos, etc. Getting back to the overall movie, Drive-Infeatures such fondly remembered tropes as people sneaking into the theater by hiding in car trunks, and the temporary suspension of the feature attraction during a brief rainstorm. As such, Drive-Indoes an okay job of capturing a social ritual that’s largely disappeared from the American experience.

Drive-In: FUNKY

Directed by John Ford (1971)

          First off, this review is a bit of a cheat—I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing the original 1971 cut of Directed by John Ford, which has been replaced in the marketplace by a substantially re-edited 2006 version. That’s the cut I saw, and it’s something of a hybrid. Although the bones of the piece are the same as in the 1971 version, writer-director (and Ford acquaintance) Peter Bogdanovich not only excised some material and inserted replacement clips, but he also recorded brand-new interviews with contemporary Ford admirers including Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Furthermore, Bodganovich conducted new interviews with still-living Ford collaborators and taped new onscreen remarks of his own. So, while the 2006 version of Directed by John Ford presumably represents the director’s fullest possible vision circa the time of its release, it’s a stretch to say that I’m actually reviewing the 1971 movie. Still, because the best parts of any version of Directed by John Ford are 1971 clips featuring Ford and his famous leading men—Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne—most of what makes the picture interesting has remained unchanged since the original release.

          Anyway, as the title suggests, Directed by John Ford is a product of Bogdanovich’s lifelong crusade to celebrate the contributions of cinema giants. Yet Bogdanovich’s interaction with Ford was complicated. A master of mythmaking onscreen and off, the man considered by many to be the greatest auteur of Western movies was born John Martin O’Feeney, but, to quote a famous line from his 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In other words, the man whom Bodganovich encountered was deeply invested in protecting the reputation of macho filmmaker “John Ford.” Though obviously in physical decline and well into professional twilight—he’d already directed his last feature—Ford comes across as belligerent and virtually monosyllabic, as if discussing his own artistry is unmanly. Watching Bogdanovich tangle with Ford during their interview in Ford’s quintessential shooting location, Monument Valley, is the core of the picture.

          Elsewhere, during the interviews with Ford’s key actors, Bogdanovich asserts himself as much as he showcases his subjects. Taking the unusual approach of mounting his interview camera on a dolly track, Bogdanovich can be seen in many shots motioning for his cameraman to push in or pull back. Most of the star interviews feature puffery, because even when the actors describe Ford’s difficult personality, they’re burnishing his manly-man bona fides. And while the contemporary interviews with Ford-loving filmmakers lend scholarly weight to Directed by John Ford, it’s hard to say they’re essential. Beyond the footage Bogdanovich collected in the early ’70s, the components that really areessential are clips from Ford’s classics—The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath(1940), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), and more. In a profound way, Ford’s work speaks for itself, revealing a world of obsessions that that Ford never articulated for any interviewer. Therefore, Directed by John Ford is illuminating, though not necessarily in the manner that Bogdanovich intended.

Directed by John Ford: GROOVY

The American Dreamer (1971)

          At the historical moment when this lyrical and revealing documentary was made, Dennis Hopper seemed poised for elevation to godlike status in popular culture. Still riding high on the success of his directorial debut, Easy Rider (1969), Hopper had just completed shooting a bold new feature, The Last Movie, which he not-so-humbly envisioned as a revolutionary step forward in world cinema. The American Dreamer captures Hopper during the protracted editing process of The Last Movie, although filmmakers L. M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller are only peripherally interested in the actual method by which Hopper and his cutters assemble footage. Instead, the filmmakers seek to capture the soul of an artist at his creative peak.

          Therefore, much of the documentary comprises Hopper delivering improvised monologues about his aesthetic and spiritual philosophy. And while Hopper is insufferably contradictory and pretentious and self-aggrandizing, creating excuses for indulgent behavior by characterizing every action he takes as a manifestation of his rebellious creativity, the seemingly unrestricted access Carson and Schiller gained to Hopper’s life makes The American Dreamer important. The content of The American Dreamer’s best sequences is so interesting that the documentary’s excesses—not least of which is fawning hero worship—can’t diminish the project’s informational value.

          Set mostly around a home in Taos, New Mexico, where a bearded Hopper supervises editing whenever he’s not indulging in sexcapades with the myriad willing ladies who drift in and out of the place, The American Dreamer is almost equally divided between narrative scenes capturing action as it unfolds, and poetic passages juxtaposing Hopper’s voiceover with shots of the actor/director driving, walking, or, in some cases, pulling performance-art stunts like stripping off his clothes while he strolls through a suburb. (In some of the most bracing scenes, Hopper has group sex with various nubile women, although the doc stops short of depicting anything X-rated.)

          The through-line of The American Dreamer is Hopper’s stream-of-consciousness speechifying, and there’s no question he’s a compelling speaker even when his rhetoric gets ridiculous. In cogent moments, he invents hip slogans, e.g., “It’s very difficult at times if you believe in evolution not to believe in revolution.” Elsewhere, he spews drug-casualty non sequiturs, e.g., “Can you go in a corner and not think about a white bear for five minutes? Is that possible?” And this was beforeHopper reached rock bottom. Much of Hopper’s extemporizing seems consciously designed to burnish the myth of Hopper as a soldier for social change (one of Hopper’s real howlers: “Society’s made me a criminal”). Meanwhile, some of the actor/director’s chitty-chat comprises glorified pick-up lines, as when he explains to a Playboy Bunny that he’s so concerned about female orgasms he thinks of himself as a lesbian.

          At his worst, Hopper embarks on sky-high ego trips, referring to himself in the third person as “the artist” and equating his work to that of Orson Welles. (The filmmakers goose these delusions of grandeur by lacing the soundtrack with original folk songs about Hopper’s quest to reinvent cinema.) The deification gets a bit much, but nestled within The American Dreamer is a poignant portrait of a uniquely talented man testing the outer limits of his universe, thereby inadvertently arriving at the place where maverick artistry becomes megalomania.

The American Dreamer: GROOVY

The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

It’s Showtime (1976)

          After the success of That’s Entertainment! (1974), a slew of anthology films celebrating the Hollywood of yesteryear hit theaters, although few successors matched That’s Entertainment!for sheer ebullience and wow factor. Still, even a second-rate offering in this genre, such as It’s Showtime, has value. After all, where else can viewers survey scenes featuring many of Hollywood’s most famous animal performers, from Flipper to Rin Tin Tin, without having to watch entire movies featuring the performers? Because, let’s face it, after plowing through all 85 minutes of It’s Showtime, you’ll probably feel like you’ve seen enough Flipper and Rin Tin Tin to last the rest of your life. In addition to featuring marquee-name animal performers, It’s Showtime presents obscure bits culled from conventional features (meaning those starring human beings), as well as from shorts and special subjects. For instance, the anthology’s opening number features a chorus and orchestra of dogs performing a routine to “Singin’ in the Rain,” and then It’s Showtime shifts to such random sights as funnyman Joe E. Brown cavorting in an office with a lion; Roy Rogers and his trusty steed, Trigger, doing their thing; and a poodle undulating to the accompaniment of stripper music. Some of this stuff is fun, and a lot of it is odd. (In the case of the bumping-and-grinding poodle, “odd” gives way to “disturbing.”)
          Most of the picture comprises themed chapters grouping clips of particular types of animals (e.g. a section of horse scenes set to “The William Tell Overture,” etc.), but A-list critters including Asta (the Thin Man dog) and Francis the Talking Mule get their own stand-alone chapters. Writer Alan Myerson tries to give the clips some sort of narrative flow, starting with lighthearted comedy before moving into exciting action vignettes and finally tearjerker scenes, but even with this care given to the overall arrangement, the enterprise gets boring after a while. The problem isn’t the clips or the execution, per se, so much as the lack of any storyline. It’s Showtime is the sort of picture where the viewer can walk away from the screen for 10 or 15 minutes and miss absolutely nothing of importance. Aditionally, the tearjerker section gets tiresome thanks to the inclusion of overly long excerpts from Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet(1944). It must be said, however, that seeing highlights of Rin Tin Tin’s myriad screen adventures makes a strong case for the noble German Shepherd as one of the great action stars of the silent era. Watching Rin climb walls, knock bad guys off cliffs, leap off rooftops, and such actually generates real thrills.

It’s Showtime: FUNKY

Madhouse (1974)

Built around a premise that’s too gimmicky to take seriously, Madhouse marked the end of Vincent Price’s run as a leading star of horror movies—after this picture, he mostly drifted into cameos and voice performances that winked at his glory (gory?) days. Considering how many fine shockers Price made, it’s a shame he didn’t bid adieu to the genre with a better movie, although one can imagine that Madhouse might have worked had a wittier director been in charge. Price plays Paul Toombes, a faded movie star known for playing big-screen killer Dr. Death. Following a tragedy, Toombes gets tossed into a mental hospital, thus marking him among potential employers damaged goods. Later, bereft of better options, Toombes accepts a humiliating offer to reprise his Dr. Death character for a tacky TV show. Once the show debuts, someone dressed as Dr. Death starts killing people related to the program. Is Toombes the killer? Or must Toombes unmask a murderer who’s trying to frame him? If you watch Madhouse, you’ll be amazed how little you care about the answers to these questions. Director Jim Clark, a top-notch film editor who briefly left the cutting room to helm a string of undistinguished projects, relies on such obnoxious tropes as fisheye lenses and in-your-face camera moves. Seeing as how the story is innately florid, juicing the action with adrenalized camerawork was not the wisest move, because Madhouse starts to feel grating and loud very early in its running time. It doesn’t help that Price looks bored, or that the actor had just made a very similar film, Theatre of Blood (1973), which was superior in both conception and execution. It’s a measure of Madhouse’s mediocrity, in fact, that even supporting players Peter Cushing and Robert Quarry—both of whom were as prone to onscreen flamboyance as Price—fail to make memorable impressions. Madhouse gets the job done, more or less, by providing bloody kills and perfunctory thrills. Plus, of course, Price is a unique presence even in the worst circumstances. But Madhouse is plagued by a been-there/done-that malaise from start to finish. No wonder Clark gave up on directing and returned to editing—a wise move, seeing as how, a decade later, he won an Oscar a for cutting The Killing Fields (1985).

Madhouse: FUNKY

The Day of the Locust (1975)

          In terms of artistic ambition and physical scale, The Day of the Locust is easily one of the most impressive studio movies of the ’70s. Working with first-class collaborators including cinematographer Conrad Hall, director John Schlesinger did a remarkable job of re-imagining ’30s Hollywood as a dark phantasmagoria comprising endless variations of debauchery, desire, despair, disappointment, and, finally, death. As a collection of subtexts and surfaces, The Day of the Locust is beyond reproach.

          Alas, something bigger and deeper must be present in order to hold disparate elements together, and even though Schlesinger’s film was adapted from a book many regard as one of the great literary achievements of the 20th century, The Day of the Locustlacks a unifying force. Schlesinger and his team strive so desperately to make a Big Statement that the movie sinks into pretentious grandiosity, and Schlesinger’s choice to present every character as a grotesque makes The Day of the Locust little more than an exquisitely rendered freak show.

          Novelist Nathanael West based his 1939 book The Day of the Locust on his own experiences as a writer in ’30s Hollywood, capturing the has-beens, never-weres, and wanna-bes living on the fringes of the film industry. West’s book is deeply metaphorical, with much of its power woven into the fabric of wordplay. So, while screenwriter Waldo Salt’s adaptation of The Day of the Locust is admirable for striving to capture subtle components of West’s book, the effort was doomed from the start—some of the images West conjures are so arch that when presented literally onscreen, they seem overwrought. Plus, the basic story suffers from unrelenting gloominess.

          While employed at a movie studio and hoping to rise through the art-direction ranks, Tod Hackett (William Atherton) moves into an apartment complex and becomes fascinated with his sexy neighbor, actress Faye Greener (Karen Black). Loud, opportunistic, and teasing, Faye accepts Tod’s affections while denying his love, even though Tod befriends Faye’s drunken father, a clown-turned-traveling salesman named Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith). Meanwhile, Faye meets and seduces painfully shy accountant Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), who foolishly believes he can domesticate Faye. The storyline also involves a hard-partying dwarf, a borderline-sociopathic child actor, a lecherous studio executive, and loathsome movie extras who stage illegal cockfights.

          The narrative pushes these characters together and pulls them apart in wavelike rhythms that work on the page but not on the screen. And in the end, ironic circumstances cause Hollywood to erupt in a hellish riot.

          Considering that Schlesinger’s film career up to this point mostly comprised such tiny character studies as Darling(1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), it’s peculiar that he felt compelled to mount a production of such gigantic scale, and it’s a shame that his excellent work in constructing individual moments gets overwhelmed by the movie’s bloated weirdness. In fact, nearly every scene has flashes of brilliance, but The Day of the Locust wobbles awkwardly between moments that don’t completely work because they’re too blunt and ones that don’t completely work because they’re too subtle. Predictably, actors feel the brunt of this uneven storytelling. Atherton gets the worst of it, simply because he lacks a leading man’s charisma, and Black’s characterization is so extreme she’s unpleasant to watch. Meredith’s heart-rending vulnerability gets obscured behind the silly overacting that Schlesinger clearly encourages, and Sutherland’s performance is so deliberately bizarre that it borders on camp, even though he displays fierce emotional commitment.

The Day of the Locust: FREAKY

That’s Entertainment! (1974) & That’s Entertainment, Part II (1976)

          Made to commemorate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 50th anniversary, That’s Entertainment!is a documentary in name only, since the picture comprises clips from old movies that are introduced—through new, scripted footage—by a group of movie actors closely associated with the MGM studio. Anyone looking for behind-the-scenes gossip or insight will be disappointed, but, as the film’s title suggests, providing information isn’t the point. Rather, That’s Entertainment! offers a massive array of show-stopping musical numbers, including such classic moments as Fred Astaire’s graceful dance duet with Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon (1953), Judy Garland’s plaintive rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gene Kelly’s exuberant performance of the title song in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and dozens more. The picture also spotlights rarely scene clips, including Clark Gable performing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Idiot’s Delight (1939), and features montages celebrating the work of such Golden Age stars as Lena Horne, Ann Miller, and Esther Williams.

          The clips are nearly all dazzling, running the gamut from outrageous Busby Berkeley-directed spectacles to simple vocal performances, and the film’s seven editors did a remarkable job of organizing the material into logical sections while also creating a smooth flow. Writer-producer-director Jack Haley Jr.’s use of MGM stars as hosts works, too, because their participation validates the piece; furthermore, seeing the passage of time through their aging faces and physiques amplifies the nostalgia of recalling a magical era from the past. (Accentuating this effect, many of the hosts are shot walking through decrepit sections of the long-unused MGM backlot.)

          The impressive roster of hosts includes Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, Peter Lawford, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, and the late Judy Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, who presents a sweet segment about “Mama.” Each host offers a canned anecdote or two, and then narrates a few minutes of clips, so Haley creates the illusion of old friends sharing memories at a reunion. That’s Entertainment! is total fluff, but it lives up to its title and, in a cheerfully superficial sort of way, provides a history lesson simply by cataloguing the best output from one studio.

          Alas, the film’s first sequel, That’s Entertainment, Part II, is not nearly as charming. Kelly took over the directing chores, and he co-hosts the entire film exclusively with fellow song-and-dance legend Astaire. (Songwriter Sammy Cahn makes an ineffectual appearance during one quick bit.) Kelly and his team cast a wider net for different types of clips, since most of MGM’s best musical numbers were used in the previous film. As a result, this picture features random montages about great movie lines, plus such extended comedy bits as the Marx Brothers’ classic “stateroom” scene from A Night at the Opera (1935). Combined with the lack of organization—the movie jumps around between eras and genres—the inclusion of nonmusical scenes makes That’s Entertainment, Part IIconfusing and unfocused. Worse, Kelly stages all of the hosting bits as musical numbers. While it’s fun to see Astaire and Kelly hoofing together, their age and a general lack of inspiration makes these original production numbers seem second-rate when juxtaposed with classic clips. Nonetheless, the franchise soldiered on with a quasi-official follow-up called That’s Dancing In 1985 and then an official, made-for-TV threequel called That’s Entertainment III in 1994.

That’s Entertainment!: GROOVY

That’s Entertainment, Part II: FUNKY

Hollywood Boulevard (1976)

          The idea of a Roger Corman production spoofing the cheapness and tawdriness of Roger Corman productions is tantalizing, but Hollywood Boulevardis better in the abstract than in reality. Disjointed, sleazy, and underdeveloped, it features many amusing moments but doesn’t hang together well. Reading about the film’s creation, one quickly learns why. Apparently, producer Jon Davison, a Corman protégé, pledged to make the cheapest movie in the history of Corman’s ’70s company, New World Pictures, so Corman gave Davison $60,000 and access to the New World library of footage from previous Corman productions. Enlisting the aid of screenwriter Danny Opatoshu (credited by a pseudonym) and first-time directors Allan Arkush and Joe Dante, Davis contrived a campy story about a would-be starlet (Candice Rialson) who arrives in Hollywood fresh from Indiana, then falls in with a shameless agent (Dick Miller) and a low-budget film crew led by a reckless director (Paul Bartel) whose stunt players tend to die on the job. The movie is part behind-the-scenes comedy, part murder mystery, and part slapstick nonsense, with lots of skin—Hollywood Boulevard has so many topless scenes that even the horniest viewer might get bored of looking at breasts.

          Arkush later went on to create inspired lunacy with Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979), and Dante’s subsequent career includes such irreverent favorites as Gremlins (1984), so it’s easy to see what sorts of comedic ideas were brewing in the young filmmakers’ brains when they made Hollywood Boulevard. However, the amateurish cast, the reliance on recycled footage, and the rushed shooting schedule precluded anything truly inspired from reaching the screen. That said, cinema buffs will obviously find more to like here than general audiences, from the wink-wink depictions of life on a low-budget set to the goofy film-nerd in-jokes (a criminal character is named “Rico” as a shout-out to the 1931 gangster classic Little Caesar, and so on). Plus, the whole enterprise is so knowingly and playfully trashy that it’s hard to dislike Hollywood Boulevard, even though it’s just as hard to feel genuine passion for the flick. Although, it must be said, the running joke about Miller’s character formerly representing everything from an elephant to a meatball sandwich is slightly fabulous.

Hollywood Boulevard: FUNKY

Gable and Lombard (1976)

          Gable and Lombard, a romantic drama about the illicit love affair and subsequent marriage of real-life Golden Age movie stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, is so preposterously fictionalized that it’s a pointless endeavor. Among many other howlers, the movie features a climactic scene in which Lombard (Jill Clayburgh) testifies on behalf of Gable (James Brolin) at a court hearing related to his divorce from the woman to whom he was married when he began keeping company with Lombard. Not only did this testimony never happen, but the filmmakers portray Lombard as such a crude loudmouth that when asked to describe her relationship with Gable, she proclaims, “Me and that big ape over there have been hitting the sack every night, and I’ve got a sore back to prove it!” Yet Gable and Lombard lacks the courage of its convictions—instead of going wholeheartedly down the road of tabloid tawdriness, the movie is meant to be some sort of loving tribute to once-in-a-lifetime passion. Unfortunately, Barry Sandler’s inept screenplay and Sidney J. Furie’s unsophisticated direction makes the leading characters look like sex-crazed buffoons instead of incandescent lovers.

          This tone-deaf portrayal is exacerbated by performances that are, to say the least, uneven. While Clayburgh is grandiose and shrill, it’s possible to discern some of the emotional realities she’s attempting to communicate. However, Brolin is laughable, growling and smirking through a paper-thin impersonation of Gable’s most obvious onscreen tics. When these dissonant performances merge during interminable dialogue scenes—Gable and Lombard runs a deadly 131 minutes—the result is loud, superficial nonsense. It’s also impossible to know whom this movie was meant to please: The picture’s narrative is far too bogus to please diehard Gable-Lombard fans, and far too cliché-ridden to work as a standalone romance. Yes, the movie is handsomely produced, but so what? Even the supposed appeal of re-creating Old Hollywood is wasted, since the only other major character drawn from history is studio chief L.B. Mayer (played unpersuasively by Allen Garfield). As the real Lombard’s onetime secretary told syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner at the time of the Gable and Lombard’s release: “I couldn’t associate a single scene with anything that I’d lived through. Nothing in it is right, not even the clothes.”

Gable and Lombard: LAME

Bugs Bunny: Superstar (1975)

          You might think a fluffy documentary tracing the origins of a popular cartoon character could evade controversy. You’d be wrong. Although it only includes about 30 minutes of original material (the rest of the movie comprises full-length vintage cartoons), Bugs Bunny: Superstarmanaged to aggravate long-simmering tensions among the mad geniuses behind Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Porky, and the other Looney Tunes mainstays. Watching the movie today, it’s not hard to see why—Bob Clampett, one of several prolific Looney Tunes directors, hosts the movie in scripted sequences that suggest he single-handedly oversaw the creation of every major character. Considering the equally important roles of animators including Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, and Chuck Jones, Clampett’s amiably megalomaniacal dominance of Bugs Bunny: Superstar is a major disservice to film history. However, if you can tolerate Clampett’s inexplicable narcissism, Bugs Bunny: Superstar is mildly entertaining.

          The documentary bits, which are narrated by Orson Welles, feature Clampett in an office filled with artifacts like animation cels and character-model statues. He shares interesting trivia, such as the number of cels used in an average ’40s Looney Tune—10,000 drawings for seven minutes of screen time—and he introduces wonderful home-movie footage of the animators who kept “Termite Terrace,” the building on the Warner Bros. lot where the ’toons were made, lively. Clampett’s contemporaries, including Freleng and Jones, appear during brief interview clips, mostly spewing platitudes about how much they enjoyed the working environment at Termite Terrace, so Clampett—with his loud, patch-covered windbreaker and his helmet-like hairpiece—emerges as the only memorable non-animated figure. (Even voice actor Mel Blanc and music composer Carl Stalling, both of whom were crucial to the greatness of Looney Tunes, are relegated to sidekick status.)

          As for the shorts featured in the movie, they’re okay—although even mediocre Looney Tunes are entertaining, Clampett-directed work is favored to a fault. (Seriously, where are the Chuck Jones-helmed masterpieces including What’s Opera, Doc?) Anyway, while Bugs Bunny: Superstar wasn’t actually produced by Warner Bros., Warner Bros. built on the documentary’s minor success by making additional Looney Tunes anthologies, beginning with the 1979 release The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, a compilation flick assembled by Jones; further anthology pictures were released in the ’80s. As for Bugs Bunny: Superstar, it’s best viewed today as an interesting museum piece, since various DVD bonus-feature docs produced by Warner Bros. in the 2000s tell the Looney Tunes story with greater accuracy.

Bugs Bunny: Superstar: FUNKY

Hooper (1978)

          While this may not sound like the most enthusiastic praise, Hooperis better than most of Burt Reynolds’ myriad car-chase comedies of the ’70s and ’80s. However, because Reynolds’ good-ol’-boy charm was among the most appealing textures in mainstream ’70s cinema, noting that he was at the height of his powers when he made Hooperunderscores why the movie works: Despite a story so thin it sometimes threatens to evaporate, Hooper offers 99 minutes of comic escapism driven by the macho charisma of its mustachioed leading man.

          One of several late-’70s/early-’80s film and TV projects celebrating the work of Hollywood stuntmen, Hooperstars Reynolds as Sonny Hooper, an aging daredevil who realizes a career change is imminent because his body can’t take much more abuse. When we meet him, Sonny is employed as the stunt double for Adam West (who plays himself) on the 007-style action picture The Spy Who Laughed at Danger. Despite being a pro who regularly delivers spectacular “gags,” Sonny clashes with the movie’s asshole director, Roger Deal (Robert Klein), since Deal demands impossible results on budget and on schedule, then takes credit for the footage Sonny and his team make possible.

          Sonny is involved with Gwen (Sally Field), the daughter of a retired stuntman (Brian Keith). Because Gwen has seen firsthand what stunt work does to the human body, she’s adamant that Sonny quit, but Deal’s pressure and Sonny’s own vanity become obstacles. Then a hot new stuntman, Delmore “Ski” Shidski (Jan-Michael Vincent), arrives on the scene. Although Sonny recognizes that he’s being replaced with a younger model, he insists on going out with a final super-stunt. The gentle drama of the picture, which obviously takes a backseat to action scenes and jokey interplay, stems from the question of whether Sonny will push his luck too far or succeed in providing Deal with the gag to end all gags.

          Hooper was a bit of a family affair for Reynolds, and the pleasure he presumably derived from making the picture is visible onscreen. The movie reunited Reynolds with his longtime buddy, stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham, following their success with Smokey and the Bandit (1977), and Field was Reynolds’ offscreen paramour in addition to being his frequent costar.

          Needham’s intimate familiarity with the stunt world benefits the movie greatly, because many details—from the preparations of car engines for jumps to the application of Ben-Gay on aching knees—feel effortlessly authentic. And while the character work and dialogue are as simplistic as one might expect from this sort of picture, the key actors are so watchable that we want Deal to get his comeuppance, we want Sonny to succeed, and so on. Plus, of course, the stunt sequences are fantastic, like the elaborate bit during which Sonny and Ski drive a sportscar through an entire town as it’s being demolished.

Hooper: GROOVY

The Last Tycoon (1976)

          Despite an impressive literary pedigree, the participation of a legendary director, and the presence of a high-wattage cast, The Last Tycoonis a lead balloon of a movie, so overcome with its own importance that barely any traces of life show through the artificially imposed veneer of highbrow seriousness. Were it not for the inherently lurid storyline, and the ease with which the varied film professionals involved in the piece skewer their own industry, the picture would be a chore to watch. As is, The Last Tycoon is bearable though not particularly enjoyable.
          Based on an unfinished novel by Jazz Age scribe F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose manuscript was completed by editors for posthumous publication, The Last Tycoon is a veiled biography of Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg, the brilliant but physically frail MGM executive of the 1930s. In Fitzgerald’s narrative, Thalberg becomes the fictional Monroe Stahr (played in the movie by Robert De Niro), a ’30s studio executive struggling to keep various projects on track despite egomaniacal stars, labor unrest among screenwriters, and romantic entanglements.
          Director Elia Kazan surrounds De Niro with a constellation of stars, so the cast includes Tony Curtis, Ray Milland, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasance, and Peter Strauss. In fleeting moments, the script (by esteemed British playwright/screenwriter Harold Pinter) gives these actors material worthy of their skills, as in the tense scenes between Stahr and a crass union organizer (Nicholson). Sequences pulling back the curtain of the Golden Age filmmaking process have some zing as well, since it’s fun to watch Stahr screen rushes of in-progress films and bark out instructions for improving lackluster footage.

          Alas, Stahr’s professional life is only partially the focus of the movie, since Kazan devotes inordinate amounts of screen time to stultifying romantic scenes. It doesn’t help that De Niro gives a weirdly lifeless performance. One suspects De Niro wanted to work a different groove after several years of playing volatile characters, but he’s restrained to the point of catatonia throughout much of The Last Tycoon; combined with Kazan’s chaste camera style and Pinter’s characteristically terse dialogue, De Niro’s non-acting becomes deadly dull. Plus, there’s the basic problem of the source material never having been properly completed. Although the movie’s narrative runs a full course, it’s anybody’s guess whether this was the actual story Fitzgerald would have told if he finished his novel.

The Last Tycoon: FUNKY