Fools’ Parade (1971)

          A weird adventure story depicting the exploits of three ex-cons traveling through Depression-era West Virginia, Fools’ Parade features such a delicate combination of eccentric characterizations and literary contrivances that it would have taken a director of tremendous artistry to pull the pieces together into a coherent whole. Alas, Andrew V. McLaglen is not such a director. Because he presents the story with the same brisk, unvarnished style with which he made several entertaining action films, the peculiar nuances of Fools’ Parade end up feeling completely false. So while the movie is watchable thanks to the novelty of familiar actors playing offbeat scenes, Fools’ Parade isn’t satisfying—the execution is too straight for fans of idiosyncratic cinema, and the storyline is unlikely to thrill people who prefer conventional narratives.

          Jimmy Stewart stars as Mattie Appleyard, a recently paroled inmate who accrued $25,000 in back pay through 40 years of hard labor behind bars. Mattie has gathered a surrogate family of fellow ex-cons, including Lee Cottrill (Strother Martin), a nervous would-be storekeeper, and Johnny Jesus (Kurt Russell), a naïve youth. The trio’s goal of starting a business together hits a roadblock when they realize their former jailor, a psycho named “Doc” Council (George Kennedy), has conspired to prevent Mattie from safely cashing his $25,000 check. This circumstance precipitates a battle of wills between the ex-cons and their once and future oppressor, who chases after them with gun-toting henchmen. There’s also a subplot involving a blowsy madam (Anne Baxter) and a reluctant prostitute (Kathy Cannon), plus another subplot involving a corrupt banker (David Huddleston) who’s in cahoots with Council.

          Fools’ Parade was based on a book by Davis Grubb, who also wrote the source material for the 1955 cult classic The Night of the Hunter. This is arch material, but McLaglen plays the story straight, missing opportunities for irony, satire, and whimsy. Only the action scenes really work, at least in the conventional sense. Another issue is the clunky dialogue by screenwriter James Lee Barrett, much of which the normally excellent Huddleston is forced to deliver; Huddleston is little more than an exposition machine here.

          Despite these fatal flaws, Fools’ Parade is mildly arresting. Watching Stewart play a stately crook who does things like yank his glass eye from his skull in order to tell fortunes is bracing. Martin squirms through one of his signature performances as a Southern-fried oddball. And Russell plays every moment with the same gee-whiz sincerity he brought to myriad Disney flicks in the early ’70s. Yet Kennedy delivers the movie’s most extravagant performance. Wearing grime over his teeth and wire-rimmed glasses over his face, the bulky actor hunches over like a troglodyte and drags out utterances in the vocal style a tweaked country preacher. His acting is spectacularly bad. (Baxter almost matches him for over-the-top stagecraft, especially since she wears garish whore makeup.) It’s hard to imagine how or why Fools’ Paradegot made, since it must have been nearly as strange on paper as it is on screen. After all, the climax features a sight gag involving a lovable dog fetching a stick of lit dynamite. However, these bizarre flourishes make Fools’ Parade a curio—one can only marvel that the movie exists.

Fools’ Parade: FREAKY

Slap Shot (1977)

          It’s all about the Hanson Brothers. There’s a lot to like in George Roy Hill’s foul-mouthed, irreverent, and playfully violent hockey saga, but nothing in the movie clicks quite as well as the sight of Jack, Jeff, and Steve Hanson—three longhaired brothers wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses that probably have higher IQ’s than the siblings—working their mojo on the rink. Savages who win by attrition, the Hansons zoom up and down the ice, high-sticking and punching and slashing their competitors until they’ve left a trail of injured opponents in their wake. These bad-boy antics are at the heart of this movie’s rebellious appeal, because even though Slap Shot has an amiable leading character and a tidy storyline, it is above all a lowbrow jamboree of brawling, cussing, and drinking.

          Set in a fictional Rust Belt town, the story follows the Charlestown Chiefs, a pitiful minor-league hockey team in the midst of an epic losing streak. Player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) tries to rouse his teammates for some good “old-time hockey”—straight playing without fights—but he knows crowds only get excited for bloodbaths. Meanwhile, team manager Joe McGrath (Strother Martin) is sending signals that the Chiefs organization might be on the verge of folding.

          Over the course of the movie, Reggie—who is desperate to elongate his career, even though he knows it’s long past time for him to stop playing and concentrate on coaching—pulls several underhanded maneuvers. He unleashes the Hansons, whose violence raises the level of game-time brutality while also stimulating attendance; he tricks a local reporter (M. Emmet Walsh) into printing a rumor that the Chiefs might have a new buyer; and he tries to seduce the depressed wife (Lindsay Crouse) of a peacenik player (Michael Ontkean) in order to prod his teammate toward violence. Reggie is a rascal in the classic Newman mold, willing to fracture a few laws in the service of a more-or-less noble goal.

          Written by first-time screenwriter Nancy Dowd, whose brother Ned played minor-league hockey, Slap Shot is cheerfully crude, taking cheap shots at bad parents, French-Canadians, gays, lesbians, and other random targets; most of the jokes are funny, but even the ones that aren’t help maintain a genial vibe of frat-house chaos. The picture also drops more F-bombs (and other colorful expletives) than nearly any other ’70s movie. It’s therefore quite a change of pace for the normally genteel George Roy Hill, whose other memorable collaborations with Newman are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). One gets the impression both men had a blast making Slap Shot, since Hill captures the hockey scenes with clever moving-camera shots and Newman elevates the piece with his contagious smiles and entertaining surliness.

          While not a critical hit and only a moderate box-office success during its original release, Slap Shot has since attained enviable cult status, even spawning a minor franchise of inferior straight-to-video sequels: Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Icewas released in 2002, and Slap Shot 3: The Junior League followed in 2008. Furthermore, a remake of the original film is rumored to be in the works. Until then, fans can content themselves with Hanson Brothers action figures, which hit stores in 2000.

Slap Shot: GROOVY

Hard Times (1975)

          A lean action drama about an enigmatic tough guy who drifts into the lives of several low-rent characters and has a profound impact, Hard Timesborrows a lot, stylistically and thematically, from the cinematic iconography that director John Ford and actor John Wayne developed together. Making his directorial debut, Walter Hill emulates Ford’s elegant but unfussy visual style; similarly, leading man Charles Bronson deomonstrates tight-lipped adherence to a manly code of honor. So, even though there’s a lot of macho hokum on display here—we’re never particularly worried that the hero will lose any of the bare-knuckle boxing matches he enters—Hill effectively taps into the primal themes that made the Ford-Wayne pictures of the past so enjoyable.

          Bronson stars as Chaney, a drifter who wanders into Depression-era Louisiana and encounters Speed (James Coburn), a fast-talking fight promoter. Speed belongs to a network of men who stage illicit bare-knuckle boxing brawls, and Chaney offers his services as a new fighter—quickly proving his mettle by dropping his first opponent with one punch. Although Chaney is a good 20 years older than most men working the ring, he’s in spectacular physical condition and he sparks tremendous curiosity by withholding details about his background. Speed reluctantly agrees to Chaney’s terms (management without a long-term commitment), and Chaney soon lands on the radar of Chick Gandi (Michael McGuire), a successful entrepreneur who lords over the New Orleans fight circuit. Exacerbated by Speed’s bad habit of accruing gambling debts, Chaney’s rise sets the stage for an inevitable showdown between Chaney and Gandi’s chosen fighter.

          Rewriting an original script by Bryan Gindoff and Bruce Henstell, Hill employs incredibly terse dialogue (in one of Bronson’s best scenes, he only says one word: “dumb”), and the director keeps motivations obvious and pragmatic—a Spartan approach that suits the Depression milieu. Bronson benefits tremendously from Hill’s restraint, since the actor is more impressive simply occupying the camera frame than spewing reams of dialogue.  Hill wisely contrasts Bronson with a pair of actors who speak beautifully: Coburn is charming and pathetic as a self-destructive schemer, and Strother Martin is wonderfully eccentric as a drug-addicted doctor enlisted to support Chaney during fights. Bronson’s real-life wife, Jill Ireland, appears somewhat inconsequentially as Chaney’s no-nonsense love interest, though Hard Times is a such a guy movie that all the female players are sidelined. Ultimately, Hard Times is somewhat predictable and shallow—but it’s executed so well those shortcomings don’t matter much.

Hard Times: GROOVY