OVP: The Reivers (1969)

Film: The Reivers (1969)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Sharon Farrell, Mitch Vogel, Rupert Crosse, Juano Hernandez, Burgess Meredith

Director: Mark Rydell

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Rupert Crosse, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Steve McQueen, fitting of a man synonymous with both a sex symbol persona and a cool guy elusiveness, had both a lot of romantic conquests in his life as well as not a lot of press about them, save for his marriage to 1970's superstar actress Ali MacGraw, whom he costarred with in 1972's The Getaway (which I'd already seen, hence why it's not the movie today) and which spanned most of MacGraw's time as a major box office draw post-Love Story.  McQueen, though, would marry three times, including model Barbara Minty very late in his life (they were married less than a year before his death), and would have affairs with Mamie van Doren & Lauren Hutton.  But fitting a man whose onscreen personas rarely are ones that a "woman can tame," none of these relationships really defined his career in the way that Joanne Woodward's relationship with his peer Paul Newman would (or Warren Beatty's legendary bed-hopping would until he married Annette Bening).  

(Spoilers Ahead) I bring this up because the movie we're watching today is something of an outlier in McQueen's career.  The Reivers, based on a work by William Faulkner, is a tale of the South (like all of Faulkner's stories), but one with very little complicated plot and were it not for the presence of McQueen (then a massive star in a way the studio couldn't afford) and the presence of a bordello, there are moments in this that have the vibes of a Disney film, with an unlikely parental guardian in Boon (McQueen) looking after young Ned (Vogel), taking him on an adventure through the countryside along with their friend Ned (Crosse) in a bright yellow 1904 Winton Flyer.  The film itself has multiple chapters, but not a lot of common thread, and is told through a rose-colored nostalgic narration by Burgess Meredith, who plays a grown Ned through voiceover.

McQueen's part here is really uninteresting.  He's not doing anything special-this doesn't have the direness of Cincinnati Kid or the sophistication of Thomas Crown, and doesn't have the gravitas of a western (which McQueen would make three of during his run as a leading man, most notably The Magnificent Seven which we covered for a past season of this series with Yul Brynner).  His Boon is a cad, a likable one, but one who treats his prostitute girlfriend Corrie (Farrell) like garbage, even though he does end up marrying her in the end.  There's nothing really here-it's just blank space, and like I said, were it not for the heavy subject matter, lends itself to the two-dimensional drift of a live-action Disney movie at this time.

The film is notable for its two Oscar nominations, which is a big reason why I picked this one.  Rupert Crosse would become the first Black man to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor for this film (Sidney Poitier at this point had gotten two nominations in the lead category, but no Black person had somehow gotten into Supporting Actor).  His performance is just fine though-he in many ways has a scene-stealing role, but his performance doesn't have enough presence to really steal the scenes away from McQueen even on easy mode, and he likely got the nomination based on a late scene in the movie where he faces off against a racist Southerner.  Crosse would die relatively soon after this nomination from lung cancer, and really this is his only notable role.

The other nomination is from John Williams for Best Score.  Williams' work here is really fun (in many ways it feels like it's paying homage to Aaron Copland, which is not something you would oftentimes say about Williams, and proof of his versatility as a composer).  Williams was still in his Oscar infancy here, getting only his second nomination, and he had yet to win (that wouldn't happen for two more years), but it's also fun to think about the pre-Spielberg years given between this and his even better work in The Cowboys, he was doing a lot more playful stuff onscreen.  He correctly lost to Butch Cassidy, but it's fun to finally see one of his earliest nominations.

Change of Habit (1969)

Film: Change of Habit (1969)

Stars: Elvis Presley, Mary Tyler Moore, Barbara McNair, Janet Elliot, Leora Dana, Edward Asner

Director: William A. Graham

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Mary Tyler Moore: click here to learn more about Ms. Moore (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Mary Tyler Moore was an interesting test for Hollywood coming out of The Dick van Dyke Show.  Before Moore, most of the critically-acclaimed actresses of TV comedy had been women who were already well-known in film & radio like Lucille Ball, Donna Reed, & Gracie Allen.  Also, most of the women that were finding success in television were doing so as sitcom mothers, and were therefore older than your average Hollywood leading lady.  But Moore, when Dick van Dyke ended, was only thirty...certainly not an ingenue's age, but considerably to the north of the ages of women like Jane Wyatt & Barbara Billingsley who were getting their big breaks in TV.  As a result, Moore was given a contract with Universal, but despite a series of leading roles, she never got the kind of film fame that, say, Mia Farrow got for leaving Peyton Place at roughly the same time (Farrow being involved in one of the 1960's most sensational celebrity marriages to Frank Sinatra probably helped her cause a bit too).  Moore made a series of forgettable pictures during this time frame, most notably the Oscar-winning hit Thoroughly Modern Millie with Julie Andrews, but by 1969 she was starring in her final leading part for more than a decade on film (thankfully TV still had the role of a lifetime waiting for her), and that movie was one of the oddest imaginable: one where she's a nun, falling in love with an inner-city doctor...played by Elvis Presley.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about three nuns (Moore as Sister Michelle, McNair as Sister Irene, and Elliot as Sister Barbara), who are instructed to go and work as nurses in an inner-city clinic with Dr. John Carpenter (Presley, and yes, that is somehow the character's name if you ever need a good trivia question for a horror fan friend).  They are to do so in plain clothes, and do not tell anyone that they are nuns, which makes some of the neighbors assume that they are a bunch of loose women living together.  John doesn't like them-he thinks they're too "square" and don't understand what it's like being poor and living "in the ghetto" (his hit song is not sung at any point during this movie, but you feel like it's going to be belted out at any moment), but slowly they grow on him, particularly Sister Michelle, who inexplicably (to him) spurns his advances even though she's clearly taken with him.  Eventually, they are called back to the church, with John realizing that he's been pursuing a woman-of-the-veil, but still wants her.  The film ends ambiguously, with Sister Michelle not sure if she will go after John or stay a nun, and goes to pray in a church...where we see John singing gospel music as she solemnly considers her choice.

This is, and I cannot stress this enough, just part of Change of Habit, a movie that's so weird you almost want to like it even if it's terrible.  There's a subplot with a young girl, depicting what may well have been the first onscreen depiction of autism in a Hollywood movie, and McNair's Sister Irene has a whole subplot over whether or not she has betrayed her "Black roots" by becoming a nun in a wealthy Park Avenue parish.  We also have a really disturbing scene late in the picture, where a troubled young man, on the run from the law, attempting to rape Moore, which, I'll be honest-watching Mary Richards in that situation was way too scarring for me & I seriously considered fast forwarding.

All of this is a lot of plot, and none of it is handled well.  The film's sexual and racial politics are clunky, even in 1969, and Presley is actively awful in this picture.  The star persona is still there, but honestly with a bad script and a weak performance, you can tell that he had not learned much about acting in his 31-film career, and this would be his final movie (and the only one where he would play a character with a college degree).  Moore also doesn't know how to adapt to this.  It's hard to imagine watching this, where she's too spunky and doesn't get the material, that she'd have an Oscar nomination and three more Emmys on her resumé within a little over a decade's time.

OVP: True Grit (1969)

Film: True Grit (1969)

Stars: John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Jeremy Slate, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actor-John Wayne*, Original Song-"True Grit")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We talked a lot about John Wayne's career renaissance last week, with a focus on how Wayne was able to make some of the best movies of his career in the late 1950's & early 1960's by skewering or playing with the mold of his career.  That didn't, however, get him Hollywood's top prize.  Despite being a near constant presence in Best Picture nominees like Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, The Alamo, and How the West Was Won, Wayne was only ever cited for acting once prior to 1969, for his work in 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima (he lost to Broderick Crawford).  By 1969, it was clear that Wayne was starting to age, and the system that had made him a legend had collapsed.  True Grit, a massive hit in a year where traditional Hollywood fare was bombing while New Hollywood pictures were resonating with audiences, was a last gasp chance to give Wayne an Oscar, and AMPAS took it.  It is amusing to me that John Wayne, the conservative embodiment of a past generation, won his only Oscar on the same night as Midnight Cowboy, the lone X-rated film to ever win an Academy Award (a film that he probably hated).  Even the Duke knew he was getting this as a career achievement award more than anything else.  As a visibly moved Wayne accepted his statue from Barbra Streisand, he said "if I'd know that, I'd have put that patch on 35 years earlier"...understanding that it was perhaps the 35 years & not the eyepatch that had gotten him to that stage after decades of trying to reach it.

(Spoilers Ahead) True Grit is not really the tale of Wayne's Rooster Cogburn, but of Mattie Ross (Darby), a young girl who is attempting to avenge the death of her father Frank Ross, who was killed by a man named Tom Chaney (Corey).  She looks for someone to bring him in, picking Cogburn to track down Chaney, and offers to pay him, but with the proviso that she wants to come with him, sporting her father's gun along the way.  Initially he refuses, despite needing the money, and tries to abandon her at one point, but after she fords a river (in an impressive show of strength for Darby & the horse), she is allowed to join, along with La Bouef (Campbell), a handsome but dim-witted man who is familiar with Chaney.  Along the way, they meet a number of men connected to Chaney, including small parts played by Dennis Hopper & Robert Duvall quite early in both of their careers (this would've been the same year that Hopper was becoming a household name in Easy Rider), but eventually find Chaney & kill him, though in the process Mattie is injured and La Bouef killed.  The film ends with Mattie promising that she'll bury Rooster Cogburn in her family plot, meaning he now finally has a family of his own.

The movie, I'm sorry to say, is not good.  I didn't like the remake of this by the Coen Brothers, but by comparison that is better, largely because Hailee Steinfeld is not super annoying in that movie.  Darby's Mattie Ross, as I said, is the true central character of the film, but like most parts portraying children at the time (in real life, Darby would've been 21 when this movie was filmed), she is defiant and stringent in this role, and doesn't really have any sense of humanity.  There's a running joke about her wanting to refer everyone to her lawyer that goes nowhere, to the point where you aren't entirely sure it's supposed to be a joke by the film's end.  Darby left me cold.

The same could be said for Wayne, though in a different way.  As you might've been able to guess four weeks into our look at Wayne, despite the actor's complicated politics, I'm a fan.  Wayne had a sturdiness in his pictures that I find really watchable, and when he's great, he is really something to behold.  Given this won an Oscar for Best Actor, I was hoping for one of those special moments from Wayne, but I didn't get it.  This isn't bad, necessarily, but it's not good enough for an Oscar nomination.  John Wayne deserved an Academy Award at some point in his career, and so I'm glad he got one, but when we get to this year in the Oscar Viewing Project, don't expect to see Wayne's name show up-there were considerably better choices.  The film is pretty much a standard-issue Wayne western, not special in any way except for the title song, beautifully sung by one of my favorite singers (his costar Glen Campbell), which swells and is lovingly used throughout the film's score, and would become synonymous with Wayne in the decades that followed.

100 Rifles (1969)

Film: 100 Rifles (1969)

Stars: Jim Brown, Burt Reynolds, Raquel Welch, Fernando Lamas, Dan O'Herlihy

Director: Tom Gries

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Raquel Welch-click here to learn more about Ms. Welch (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

In the wake of One Million Years BC, Raquel Welch was a major star, but not in the way the actress wanted to be.  Welch desired to be taken seriously as a performer, but she kept being typecast in roles that traded on her crazy physique & beauty.  She turned down the role of Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls (a part that eventually went to Sharon Tate), but still had success with Bandolero! and Bedazzled.  One of the pictures during this phase of Welch's career was 100 Rifles, a movie that weirdly didn't make a lot of money, so you might be wondering in a month where I only get four "Saturday's" with a star that endured as long as Welch did (she regularly made movies into the late-1970's, and we'll get to two of her films from that decade as we close out the month), why I'd pick such a film.  I'm going to get to that below, but first let's ground ourselves in the movie at-hand.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie centers on Lyedecker (Brown), a law officer trying to track down Yaqui Joe (Reynolds), a half-white/half-Native American bank robber who has run off with a large sum of money.  Before he can return Joe to justice, both men are trapped by a Mexican General named Verdugo (Lamas).  It is revealed that the bank money is gone, and that Joe used the money to buy 100 rifles for his people, the Yaqui, to stage an uprising against the general.  They are rescued by Sarita (Welch), a Mexican rebellion leader who is trying to enact revenge against the general, who killed her father.  Slowly, Sarita & Lyedecker begin to fall in love (eventually having sex), but in their rebellion against the general, Sarita dies, leaving Lyedecker bereft.  As a result of his new friendship with Joe, though, he lets him stay in Mexico (to take on the leadership role that Sarita had played), and returns to Arizona alone.

100 Rifles is not good.  The film was considered somewhat revolutionary at the time because of the romance between Welch and African-American actor Jim Brown onscreen.  While we had seen at this point interracial relationships in movies (including The World of Susie Wong, which we discussed in October), few had included sex scenes as explicit as Brown's with Welch.  But that's really the only hallmark of this movie that makes it standout.  The film itself is dull-Burt Reynolds is not always a great actor, but he's always entertaining in a movie, and here his natural star power is muted by a heavy-handed script & a repetitive plot.

The movie is most famous to modern audiences, if it's known at all, for a scene where Raquel Welch showers, in a white tee-shirt, and literally stops a train.  It's played for somewhat comic effect (that Welch's measurements are so jaw-dropping they'll literally stop a locomotive in its tracks), but it's an indication of what Welch was up against at the time.  Welch was asked to do a nude scene, but refused, and she was right-Raquel Welch in a wet tee-shirt is more than sufficient to get the point across here.  But it also was one of the reasons that Welch got a reputation from this film for being "difficult," standing up for herself in not wanting to have her body further exploited.  Welch had tense relationships with both of her male leads, and came off of this film, which flopped at the box office, with a diva-reputation, which in many ways would lead to her downfall in the late 1970's.  Like I said, we'll get to that in the remaining two weeks of this season, but I picked 100 Rifles because so much of Welch's reputation among the public-at-large is as a gorgeous prima donna, but at least with 100 Rifles, her behavior was justified; she didn't need to continue to have her body exploited by male directors to underline the story they were asking her to bring to life.

The Wrecking Crew (1969)

Film: The Wrecking Crew (1969)
Stars: Dean Martin, Elke Sommer, Sharon Tate, Nancy Kwan, Nigel Green, Tina Louise
Director: Phil Karlson
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Nancy Kwan-click here to learn more about Ms. Kwan (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the end of the 1960's, what promise had been contained for Nancy Kwan's stardom had largely gone.  We were nearly a decade away from the seismic success of The World of Suzie Wong, and Hollywood didn't have a lot of imagination with casting her, though they continued to cast her in B-grade movies with high billing for the remainder of the decade.  While we'll talk about what happened after for her below, we're going to thus end our look at Nancy Kwan with a film at the end of the decade, one that definitely has her in a prominent role (arguably more prominent than the last two films we've profiled for her), but is more famous for her costars, and how this movie was the start of one major career...and the tragic end of another.

(Spoilers Ahead) I'll be real-I've never seen any of the Matt Helm films.  During the post-Dr. No years of the 1960's, Hollywood was crawling with James Bond knockoffs in hopes of capturing some of the crazy success of that franchise.  Movies like Casino Royale and film series like the Derek Flint movies (with James Coburn) became regular fare from studios, and one of these parodies were four films starring Dean Martin as spy Matt Helm.  The movies are meant to be parodies of the Bond franchise, played for comic effect, with lots of gadgets & beautiful women.  I haven't seen the others, but it's pretty easy to see continuity isn't going to be an issue here as the plot is anecdotal to the movie. We have Matt trying to rescue $1 billion in gold from the villainous Count Contini (Green), while also avoiding his clumsy partner Freya Carlson (Tate), who continually bumbles into more problems for Matt to solve while also trying to recover the gold.  Contini has a number of beautiful women as his associates (Sommer, Kwan, Louise), all of whom alternate between being turned on by Matt & trying to kill him (all three end up dead for their troubles).  The movie ends with Matt & Friya attempting to make love, but Friya accidentally pulling the emergency brake on the train they're on, with the two of them hurtling toward the screen in a flash frame, and them advertising the next movie (which would never be made).

There was a reason that film was never made, and it had to do not with Kwan, but with one of her costars.  Based on the cast list & the year this was released, you might have put together that this was the last film Sharon Tate starred in that was released during her lifetime.  The film was released in New York in February of 1969, and she was murdered six months later in Hollywood's most notorious homicide, by the Manson Family.  Supposedly Martin was so despondent over her death that he couldn't make the fifth film, and it was scrapped by Columbia.

This is, therefore, the movie that Margot Robbie watches fifty years after it was released in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, her feet up on the seat and gleefully enjoying the actual Sharon Tate onscreen.  The movie itself isn't particularly good, but it's kind of fun.  If you get past the sexism (and oh is there sexism, even by spy film standards), it's cheesy & goofy & Tate's funny in the movie, as are Kwan and Louise playing one-note characters well (I didn't think Sommer's part was as well-drawn as the other three).  It's not a good movie, so it's getting two-stars, but it's not a bad way to kill two hours if you get into spy films.

While the film marked the end of Sharon Tate's career, it weirdly started another film icon's work in Hollywood pictures.  Bruce Lee at this point had starred in his role as Kato in The Green Hornet TV series, but had not worked on a Hollywood movie set until The Wrecking Crew where he was the action choreographer (one of the men whom he choreographed was Chuck Norris, making his screen debut in a small part).  This sparked a friendship between Lee and Kwan, one of the actors he worked with on fight scenes, that would last the remainder of Lee's life; two year's later Lee would become an international superstar with The Big Boss, and four years after The Wrecking Crew Lee would also, like Tate, die tragically young, a Hollywood death that conspiracy theorists still debate.

Nancy Kwan's film career continued sporadically, but never with as consistent of roles as she had during the 1960's.  Like many actresses of her generation, she'd spend the 1980's doing television, including spots on a nighttime soap opera (Knots Landing), and later in the 2000's would appear in a guest spot on ER.  She endured tragedy in the 1990's when her only child, Bernard, died of AIDS, and she turned down what might have been a comeback role in The Joy Luck Club due to problems with the script (namely a line in the film that disparaged The World of Suzie Wong).  Overall, Kwan achieved a success no Asian woman had ever had in Hollywood in the 1960's, and one that only now with Awkafina & Constance Wu are we seeing any Asian women attempt to hit again...but it's hard not to notice that other actresses who were breaking out in 1960 like Natalie Wood or Angie Dickinson got bigger careers than Kwan.  Next month, we're going to continue to look at an actress of the 1960's, one who made her debut near Nancy Kwan's but whose career was afforded a more traditional path to stardom in Hollywood...even though she insisted on taking a lot of detours along the way.

OVP: Cactus Flower (1969)

Film: Cactus Flower (1969)
Stars: Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman, Goldie Hawn, Jack Weston, Rick Lenz
Director: Gene Saks
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Goldie Hawn*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

When my brother and I were young, probably I was 11 or 12, one of our favorite nerdy pastimes was to flip through my almanac, and quickly figure out how many of the "Big 6" Oscar winning films we'd seen (Picture, Director, and the four acting trophies).  We did this with obscene frequency, too often, really, if you think about it, since we did it more than we would actually see the movies (in the era before home computer spreadsheets, this was really the only way you could keep track of such a thing).  I'm not going to go and do the numbers right now of where I stand (suffice it to say I have improved my counts since then), but doing this so often, weird films start to develop a mythic quality to them.  I have relatively few films from, say, pre-1995 (when this habit would've started & therefore were recited the most) that I haven't seen, so when I do, even if it's a minor film in terms of cinematic history, it still feels like a big deal, and it takes a while afterward for me to sort of stop instinctively thinking "well, I haven't seen that" because I've been saying for 25 years that I haven't.  This is probably going to be the case with a movie like Cactus Flower, which I finally saw this past weekend for the first time, and is indeed one of those "Big 6" Oscar winners.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Toni Simmons (Hawn), a young woman who lives in the Village in the late 60's (read-she's kooky & wears a mini skirt), who tries to kill herself because her dentist boyfriend Julian (Matthau) stands her up on their one-year anniversary, presumably because he's with his wife (it gets less depressing in a second).  She is saved by her cute next door neighbor Igor (Lenz), who spends the movie slowly trying to romance her (his naked torso plays a larger role in this movie than you'd think), but she is committed to Julian, particularly after he decides to leave his wife for her.  But first, she wants to make amends with his wife, which is a problem...because he made up the wife to try and get her not to want to marry him (as he's a playboy).  Instead, he convinces his rigid assistant Stephanie (Bergman) to be his "wife," and in the process, he realizes as she lets her hair down around him that she's in fact a beautiful woman (duh, she's Ingrid Bergman) who has been madly in love with him.  In the end, everyone ends up with someone, but not who they started with, and they all live happily ever after.

Cactus Flower is mostly known simply for being the movie that Hawn won her Oscar for today, but it was actually a big hit in 1969, and the score (by a young Quincy Jones) is pretty hip for its time.  Jones features covers of hits by the Monkees and Lulu in his orchestral setup, which feels right for a movie where one of the principle characters works at a record store (and because everything today is through the lens of Covid-19, man I was practically salivating at the idea of browsing through a record store).  The film manages to do something that was occasionally a struggle for American films of the era at that time, especially those focusing on youth culture-feel like it wasn't just of one specific era, but a more universal story.  Weirdly Jones' ability to put timeless hits like "I'm a Believer" and "To Sir with Love," songs that are so iconic they don't feel like part of any era, helps that situation even if they were recent at the time.

The film itself is fine, it's the sort of movie that's easy to know the plot of the second it begins.  Matthau is neither charming nor handsome, so you have to suspend belief as to why two gorgeous women are throwing themselves at him (his "swinging bachelor" is not something he ever really convinces this audience is real).  The women are much better.  Ingrid Bergman is not known for doing comedy, but she's charming as a woman finding herself, and realizing that she doesn't need to devote herself to a man in order to secure one.  This would have been too light to nominate Bergman, a long-time, serious actress for (though she did get a Globe citation), but I kind of wonder if she was closer than you'd think.  Hawn won the Oscar, and brings an innocence to the role that feels authentic.  It's a hard part to play-she has to be both brainy (it's obvious in hindsight that she didn't want to marry Julian the second he became available to her), and dumb, but that's been Hawn's schtick for forty years now so you know she can do it, even though it was brand new then.  I'm a big fan of hers in general, and it's weird to see her so young, to the point where her wealthy Beverly Hills accent hasn't yet developed into what we know from Overboard or The First Wives Club.  A great start to her career, and yet another "Big 6" victor off of my viewing list.

OVP: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

Film: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
Stars: Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Katharine Ross
Director: George Roy Hill
Oscar History: 7 nominations/4 wins (Picture, Director, Sound, Original Screenplay*, Score*, Original Song*, Cinematography*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

We finish off our three-day look at the final AFI 100 Years list with the final film that I saw that completed both the original and the tenth-anniversary editions of the list, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Yes, despite being a film fanatic for some twenty-odd years, I had somehow never seen the classic western before a few weeks ago, and let me tell you, I was excited.  There are very few bonafide American classics I haven't caught-in fact, I think this is the last one left that no one would dispute its importance and relevance.  As a result, I was truly hoping that I would love it as it was closing a long introductory chapter in terms of the world of cinema, and thankfully I did.  The film, warm and funny and still artistically-strong, is a joy to watch and something you'll want to see again and again.

(Spoilers Ahead...though this is based on real-life so spoiler alerts aren't really that necessary) The film is the story of Butch Cassidy (Newman), an intensely-charming bank robber who is joined by a gang that doesn't like his increasingly individualistic ways, but he is constantly supported by his right-hand man the Sundance Kid (Redford).  The two are in charge of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, a group that frequently finds themselves blowing up the safes on trains and taking the loot.  The two gain a bounty on their head about halfway through the film that feels disproportionate to the loot they've taken, but they realize the train owner has a personal vendetta against them and they know that they won't be able to escape the men running after them, so they flee along with Sundance's lover Etta (Ross) to Bolivia.  There they have a mildly successful career as bank robbers before justice catches up with them once again, and they die (presumably) from a flurry of Bolivian bullets.

The film's plot is relatively predictable, but it gains almost all of its power from the strength of the two leads and in particular the splendid cinematography.  Newman and Redford, who would re-team four years later for the Oscar-winning The Sting, have an almost orgasmic chemistry with each other in the picture.  Newman has rarely been so watchable as Butch, someone who flirts with everyone (including Sundance), and can get pretty much anything he wants from anybody (excluding Sundance).  Newman was such a game entertainer but he rarely showed off this comedic muscle-in many ways he reminds me of a classic Jon Hamm-so handsome you can't believe they're also funny.  The wryness with which he infuses Butch is mesmerizing, and really brings the script by William Goldman to life.  Redford is forced to play the straight man, but he finds the silliness in his character (that infamous "I can't swim" cliff scene being probably the best example), and is so beautiful it's easy to see why Katharine Ross can fall for him even if he's constantly a pain-in-the-butt.

The film won seven Academy Award nominations, and all of them were a worthwhile investment, but I want to speak specifically to the cinematography.  It's easy to make the desert look good, but there are techniques here that I don't recall seeing prior to 1969 even in the films of Frederick Young.  The twilight scenes, in particular, are gorgeous and Conrad Hall (who would go on to lens pictures like American Beauty and Road to Perdition late in his career), despite the fact that if IMDB is to be believed he didn't original come up with the idea, gives us a more essential picture by making these scenes darker and richer in color than you'd expect from what seems to be a truly great buddy comedy.  This is wonderfully contradicted with the famed "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" sequence (which Robert Redford originally hated), which turned out to be one of the most celebrated in the film and wouldn't work if it weren't for the quick touch of Hall and Newman.  Overall, the film is a joy from start to finish-it's not a heavy, serious picture but it's one that it's impossible not to respect and admire.

Those are my thoughts on this classic movie, one I highly recommend if you've never gotten around to it-what are yours?  Do you have a favorite between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (I am perpetually loving Paul Newman)?  What is the biggest American classic film you've never seen?  And where does this rank in the (admittedly excellent) list of 1969's best movies?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

OVP: Easy Rider (1969)

Film: Easy Rider (1969)
Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Luke Askew
Director: Dennis Hopper
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Jack Nicholson, Best Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Seeing a classic film is a bit trippy our your virgin viewing.  I've managed to avoid most spoilers regarding Easy Rider, but you can't avoid the iconic impact of the film.  You feel it the second that Peter Fonda rides onto the screen on that giant red, white, and blue Harley with "Born to Be Wild" howling at you.  When you view something as celebrated as Easy Rider, even though it's your first time through the movie, you can feel how familiar it is thanks to its influence on all subsequent cinema.

(Spoilers Ahead for the Uninitiated) The film feels so sincerely like a French New Wave movie that it's difficult to pinpoint down key plot points, particularly for the first half of the film.  The movie starts with Captain America (Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) smuggling cocaine in from Mexico and receiving an enormous amount of money.  After this, we get a bird's eye view of the country in 1968.  While I didn't live through it, and am therefore unable to process exactly what was the stuff of peyote-induced myth and what truly happened, there's an authenticity in having three actors who came-of-age in the decade portraying these biking hippies.

The film takes us to a commune, and an extended portrayal of free love and community.  The film's strongest story element is the way it never really tells us what is going on in the heads and minds of Fonda's Captain America (who doesn't get a real name until the penultimate scene of the movie) and Billy.  While Billy is clearly the more temperamental of the two and Captain America the more mellow, we learn very little about their past and are only focused on the present.  This story-structure absorbs itself so well into the message of the film, about living for the moment, and really allows us as an audience to be sitting on the backs of their hogs, rather than trying to deduce their actions.

About the only character who gets a clearly defined history and sense of purpose is George Hanson (Nicholson).  Hanson is an alcoholic lawyer who clearly was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and with a sense of curious adventure in his heart.  He readily joins their gang, and sets out in the second half of their film on the adventure.  For those who think of this as a Jack Nicholson film (this was his first big break, and it's very rare to think of Jack as anything other than the star of a movie that he's in), he's actually only in the last third of the film in any prominent role.  After an hour of hippie-love and drugs and Route 66, the bikers head into the Deep South, and are greeted in an unfriendly manner.

First, after making eyes at some girls (really, they were making more eyes at our protagonists), the local men come and beat the bikers with bats, injuring Billy and Captain America and killing George.  The film then heads into an acid-induced haze, complete with dancing in a New Orleans graveyard and Fonda reciting a soliloquy to a statue that he confuses with his mother.  The film's final two scenes are left to be very open-ended, with Billy thinking that they succeeded in their journey and Captain America feeling "they blew it" (because of the enigma surrounding the two men, you don't 100% know what their goals of the trip were).  The final scenes involve a pair of Southerners in a truck shooting both Billy and Captain America in cold blood while they drive past them, afraid of their counter-culture status.

The best parts of the film are the breathtaking cinematography, quite frequently playing with the autumn colors of the road, and Nicholson's performance.  Nicholson, in his first big break as an actor, sells George with all of those flourishes that we'd come to associate with Jack, but he has a neophyte calmness to the movie.  There's no Jack Torrance-style flourishes in the film, just a cool, calculated drunken lawyer playing well within the film's boundaries.  Jack is one of the greatest actors in film history, but it's nice to see him before fame had hit and directors catered to him; it's proof that he could also fill the vision of the filmmaker.

The movie's soundtrack bellows pretty fiercely across the entire movie, filling every turn of the film with some great 60's band, whether it be The Band or Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan, it sounds like a Woodstock concert.  The film oddly landed a nomination for Best Screenplay, despite it clearly being quite improvised and rather light on dialogue (these days you'd never see such an out-there nomination in the category).  Really the only thing I can think of in the movie that doesn't play quite right today is the atmosphere of the piece-we've moved beyond communes and hippies and onto Miley Cyrus twerking debates (you can figure out for yourself what direction that's a step into), making this film very much a product of its own era.

But it's still a worthwhile adventure, and a movie I can definitely see the "classic" in.  For those of you who have taken in Easy Rider-what are your thoughts?  Do you think it still holds up some 44 years later?  Do you think that Jack should have beaten Gig Young for the Oscar?  Share in the comments!

OVP: Last Summer (1969)

Film: Last Summer (1969)
Stars: Barbara Hershey, Richard Thomas, Bruce Davison, Catherine Burns
Director: Frank Perry
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Supporting Actress-Catherine Burns)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Occasionally, Oscar throws some uncharacteristic films in your way.  The movies of Frank Perry are not what you would consider "Oscar-Bait," even when the little gold man was going through a bit of a rebellious stage in the 1960's and 1970's.  And yet, Oscar deemed his classic David and Lisa worthy of two nominations, and seven years later, they threw another look his way by nominating Last Summer for Best Supporting Actress.

For those unfamiliar with the film (which I would imagine would be most people-this isn't a well-known film, and honestly I didn't know going in that it had three "name" actors starring in the movie until Robert Osborne told me right before the show), it's a coming-of-age story of three teens on the threshold of adulthood (Hershey, Thomas, and Davison), who slowly develop strong feelings (in a variety of directions) for a fourth member (Burns) who desperately wants into their tight-knit clique.

The film, despite it's 43-year-old date, ages fairly well-the cruelty of Hershey's character in particular is oddly reminiscent of some of the bullying stories that have come out in the last year.  Even at a young age, the beautiful Hershey was able to find that wicked blend of malice and allure that she would later exhibit in films like The Natural and Black Swan.  You can't help but be drawn in to her.

Thomas looks like a cross between Nic Hoult and Taylor Lautner in this movie, and aside from Burns, is probably the best actor on display.  He plays teenage angst with the most believable share of uncertainty, drawn to both the girl that he's supposed to fall for (Hershey) and the girl he is falling for (Burns).  As the film continues, sex and violence start to sneak into the natures of Hershey's and Davison's characters.  (SPOILER ALERT) Toward the end, the film moves back to Hershey's true nature, which is exposed when she kills the bird at the film's halfway point, when she convinces Thomas's and Davison's characters to rape Burns character as punishment for encroaching on her territory.

While the others are all strong, Burns is the obvious reason to invest yourself in the film.  In the best scene in the movie, she does a superb monologue about her mother's drunken drowning death, alternating between confused anger and, in a need to feel accepted, a casualness that only a teenager can muster when faced with emotions they cannot understand.  Burns was making her screen debut in the movie, and after only two more films and a couple of television appearances, would disappear from acting completely.

She also, obviously, received an Oscar nomination for the film, and if you want a smirky treat, go look for her rolling her eyes as Fred Astaire announces her name as a nominee.  Clearly, she didn't care that Goldie Hawn was going to take the eventual trophy.  While Burns is excellent, and I'm still missing two performances (the aforementioned Hawn and Dyan Cannon's spouse-swapping wife in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice), don't worry Catherine, I'm not going to be choosing you as the winner.  That slot for the time being is held by Susannah York, whose excellent and eccentric Alice in They Shoot Horses Don't They? still resonates years after I've seen it (the fifth nominee, blink-and-you-miss her Sylvia Miles, seems destined for fifth place).

What about you-who is your favorite supporting actress of 1969?  Does it seem odd that Richard Thomas never got the Oscar nomination that his three costars eventually did?  What was with the seemingly random gay make-out scene on the beach (were we supposed to recognize those characters?)?  And do you think that Katy Perry has seen this (or any film) in her great uncle Frank's filmography?