Enter the Dragon (1973)

Film: Enter the Dragon (1973)

Stars: Bruce Lee, John Saxon, Ahna Capri, Bob Wall, Shih Kien, Jim Kelly

Director: Robert Clouse

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to be doing double duty with Bruce Lee this week since I missed one of his Saturday's earlier this month, and we're starting with Enter the Dragon, which for Lee was also the end.  Enter the Dragon was released in Hong Kong six days after Lee's death to rapturous audience reception (and box office).  Some of this had to have been attributed to the mystery surrounding the martial arts icon's demise.  Lee's health had been, despite seemingly being in peak physical condition (he has the body of a modern Olympic athlete in Enter the Dragon, basically unheard of given the training techniques for actors in the 1970's) in a risky position-he had suffered a collapse attributed to a cerebral edema during recording sessions for Enter the Dragon a few months before he passed away.  He was supposed to meet with film producer Raymond Chow about an upcoming picture he intended to make but he had a headache, and took a painkiller & a nap, and when he didn't show up for the planned meeting, Chow went to his house, where he tried to revive Lee, but it was to no avail-Bruce Lee, then one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, was already dead at the age of just 32.

(Spoilers Ahead) This is a weird juxtaposition against Enter the Dragon (we'll get into more of his death in a second) given this is just a grand movie for him, and likely would've opened up a new level of fame for the actor with global audiences.  For starters, this was his first film since Marlowe (in which he had a bit part) to have an American leading man opposite him.  While John Saxon is not as famous as James Garner, he had headlined a number of B-grade pictures, and was about to have a solid run as a featured player in horror classics like Black Christmas and A Nightmare on Elm Street.  Having two leading men that feel at-odds with each other in terms of acting styles helps Enter the Dragon, a really solid action film, one with sensational fighting sequences (and not always featuring Lee), and a plot that feels a bit more rooted in consistency but not repetition.

My favorite part of Enter the Dragon is the way that it incorporates elements of Blaxploitation into the movie.  At the time that subgenre was also part of the action/crime genre in the same way martial arts were, and having these two stylistically against each other works really well.  It helps that Jim Kelly is in the film, a Black man who was about to have a brief stint as an action leading man, as he has some terrific one-liners (there's an admittedly problematic but still funny joke about halfway through where he picks out four women to have sex with, and apologizes to the remainder for not having sex with them too, primarily because he's "had a long day" as if four women alone won't be a challenge at all).  Kelly, Saxon, & Lee are stylistically really different in their approach to acting, but that fuses together to make something interesting-this is the rare film of this era where combining a lot of styles and approaches in one film actually works and doesn't feel messy.

Lee's death would quickly be followed by a funeral (where action stars Steve McQueen & James Coburn would serve among the pallbearers) as well as a mountain of conspiracy theories.  The official cause of death for Lee is what is known in Britain (remember, Hong Kong was then part of Britain) as "death by misadventure" which insinuates that it's an accidental death caused by a risk taken by the deceased.  In this case, it was taking a medication that, in combination with the cerebral edema that Lee already knew he had, caused his brain to swell, killing him quickly.

This is probably what happened, but that doesn't mean that the public, juxtaposing the seemingly banal death with a man they saw look basically immortal onscreen, didn't want to make up new ideas.  They range from other medical theories, one seemingly compelling one indicating it was heat stroke (Lee had recently had his sweat glands removed because they didn't look attractive onscreen) or an undiagnosed case of epilepsy.  Some have said that he may have had a bad reaction to cannabis, but that was addressed by his physicians at the time, and they said that was not possible.

But the most commonly discussed conspiracy theory about Lee is that he was murdered.  There is no concrete evidence of this, but the suspects in the potential crime run the gamut from the Hong Kong triads (killing him for refusing to pay them off or for exposing martial arts secrets) to accusations he was killed by a jilted lover (he passed away in the apartment of actress Betty Ting Pei, whom some have alleged he was having an affair with at the time) to the truly insane theory that he was killed in a martial arts fight by a rival martial artist using the move "dim mak" (aka the touch of death).  I will own, on a personal level, that none of these make sense as a theory, and all of them (quite frankly) feel, charitably, far-fetched.  But they are a part of Lee's legacy as a celebrity, and to ignore them felt irresponsible, particularly given that if you look at Lee's post-death existence, mysterious tragedy would become something of a trend as we'll discuss later today.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Film: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Stars: James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Richard Jaeckel, Jason Robards, Bob Dylan, Rita Coolidge, Chill Wills, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Harry Dean Stanton

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Kris Kristofferson: click here to learn more about Mr. Kristofferson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we mentioned in our intro this month, Kris Kristofferson had actual cowboy bonafides, something few actors this year we've profiled came with.  He was a military brat who grew up in Brownsville, Texas, and his first touch with fame wasn't in acting-it was in music.  According to legend, he got that start by landing a helicopter in Johnny Cash's front yard (the helicopter seems undisputed, whether he had a beer in one hand & some music in the other when he did it is up to who tells the story).  Kristofferson would spend much of the 1970's as a country act that didn't translate into the US mainstream in a major way, though he did have one big hit with "Why Me."  It was as a songwriter that he gained most of his success, writing for Cash ("Sunday Morning Coming Down"), Gladys Knight ("Help Me Make It Through the Night"), & Ray Price ("For the Good Times").  His biggest hit was for his then-girlfriend Janis Joplin (Kristofferson had been dating her when she died).  Kristofferson had written a song that he had recorded, as had Kenny Rogers & Gordon Lightfoot, but while they had done well, none of them had become synonymous with the ballad until it was released posthumously by Joplin, and became her signature tune: "Me and Bobby McGee,"' a song that would eventually make it on the Rolling Stone list of the greatest of all-time.

(Spoilers Ahead) We are going to end up in a movie today that has a lot of music, though oddly none of it was sung by Kristofferson.  This is another tale of Billy the Kid (Kristofferson), a figure that has been seen repeatedly in westerns of the era in various forms, but this is about the end of his life, when he is being hunted down by his former friend and lawman Pat Garrett (Coburn).  Now that Garrett is the sheriff, he intends to arrest him.  He gives Billy an ultimatum-leave the country & head into Mexico, or face the gallows.  Billy chooses to take his chances with the latter, and a chase ensues.  The two eventually come across each other, and Pat fulfills his promise, killing Billy in a bit of trickery, earning himself the reputation of the "man who shot Billy the Kid."

We see in the opening shots of the movie that this comes with its own set of baggage.  The film starts decades after the incidents in the remainder of the film, and shows the eventual murder of Pat Garrett (this is true to real life-Garrett really did kill Billy, and Garrett was also later murdered) in an ambush.  This is something of the message of the film-you can't outrun your fate.  The beauty of Pat Garrett is that it shows a tale not of the evolution of these men, both of whom are hard-headed and stubborn (as a result, the leads are good but not as good as they should be), but instead about the ways the west pleads with them to let it go.  The film is littered with references to not just a lost Old West, but the dying Hollywood western, with figures from the heyday of the western like Slim Pickens, Chill Wills, & Katy Jurado all appearing in small roles, and showing that the west is dying...why add another corpse to it.

The movie's best scene encapsulates this, with Jurado mourning the death of her longtime companion Slim Pickens (both really good in small parts...this is also the best I've ever seen Chill Wills) after he's shot.  The music playing in the back is a mournful ballad...but it's also a rock classic.  The most famous thing to a modern audience about Pat Garrett is that Bob Dylan is in it, and not only did he do songs for the movie, but he composed the score.  The song playing, a song somehow skipped by the Oscars (it was eligible for Best Original Song), is "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," a Dylan staple, which is original to this movie.  Dylan is not a good actor, but he does get a great moment where James Coburn is about to kill a man, and Dylan is in the background reading the names of different canned goods.  The most famous figure in 1970's counterculture, talking about baked beans...it's just an odd touch in a very good late western from Sam Peckinpah.

Don't Look Now (1973)

Film: Don't Look Now (1973)

Stars: Julie Christie, Donald Sutherland

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

"Elevated Horror" is generally considered to be a new concept, or at least a concept that has gained fame in the past decade.  Films like The Babadook and Hereditary are considered to be classic examples of it, to the point where the movies were mocked in Scream V largely because they were seen as being "too fancy."  But "elevated horror" (I know some people hate that term, and it is pretty insulting to the movies that it clearly is trying to distinguish are "not as good") has been around for decades, as is evidenced by our movie today Don't Look Now.  Made in 1973, it was a horror-thriller that would score a series of BAFTA nominations across all major categories.  It was initially well-received, but in the decades since is considered to be a classic of the genre, and one of the best non-slasher horror films of the 1970's.  It also has maybe the most famous sex scene of the decade this side of Last Tango in Paris.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about John Baxter (Sutherland), an architect and his beautiful wife Laura (Christie) who are in Italy after the tragic drowning of their daughter Christine.  Both of them are grief-stricken, but they're trying to handle it in different ways, with John throwing himself deep into his work, while Laura is attempting to find ways of communicating with her daughter.  She does this through a blind medium that she meets, and slowly becomes enamored with this world, to the point where it puts a strain on her marriage.  Meanwhile, her husband has been seeing visions, possibly of his dead daughter Christine (who wore a red cloak).  As the film progresses, his visions increase, where he's even seeing Laura, who is supposedly in England, throughout the city of Venice.  He starts to suspect that it's his daughter trying to contact him, but when he goes to the medium, she warns him, but it's too late.  The visions that John has been seeing are not of his late daughter or of his grieving wife, but of his own future.  When he confronts a hooded figure in a cloak, it isn't Christine but a killer dwarf, likely the serial killer that they've been mentioning in background scenes throughout the picture.

I'll be totally honest here-the first hour or so of this movie I was in the middle.  The film was kind of slow, and while it was fascinating, I could feel my attention waning.  The look at grief, and how it either becomes an obsession or it becomes something you can no longer ignore is interesting, and Christie & Sutherland were both very good, but I was wondering why this was considered a classic.  However, in the last twenty minutes you realize the investment you've had.  You start to understand that John has basically been trying anything to avoid confronting his own mortality, the fact that his daughter will never return, and that his marriage can never be the same.  That he does this while also getting hacked to bits, ignoring everything everyone around him has said in hopes of avoiding his grief is twisted...made even more so by the fact that with him gone, Laura will undoubtedly never really escape her grief, giving herself over to the existing-between-worlds path of the medium.

The sex scene is unusual not just because of the graphic nature of it and how long it works, but because to begin with, it doesn't have a lot of connection to the plot (Gen Z would have a field day with this if it was released today).  But it looks glorious (Sutherland & Christie look gorgeous...glad they caught that for posterity), and it also gives us a lot of insight into these characters.  They were once a scorching hot, sexy couple, ones who had hours-long sessions in the sack.  By the end of the film, that passion has been replaced by despair, and it shows that they can never get back.  All sex scenes in movies are necessary because sex is part of our lives & should be seen onscreen as a result, but this one is impressive because it informs us about the characters themselves.

Past Horror Month Reviews

1920's: The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera

1930's: The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, Dracula's Daughter, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Invisible Man, Mad Love, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Raven, Son of Frankenstein, Werewolf of London

1940's: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Cat People, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Invisible Woman, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Ghost, The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, Phantom of the Opera, She-Wolf of London, Son of Dracula, The Uninvited, The Wolf Man

1950's: Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, It Came from Outer Space, Revenge of the Creature

1960's: The Devil Rides Out, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead,Village of the Damned

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

1980's: Child's Play, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist

1990's-Present: The Blair Witch Project, Scream

High Plains Drifter (1973)

Film: High Plains Drifter (1973)

Stars: Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Mariana Hill, Billy Curtis

Director: Clint Eastwood

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Clint Eastwood: click here to learn more about Mr. Eastwood (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Inevitably with Clint Eastwood, we were going to get to the films that the actor turned into a director.  Eastwood for modern film audiences is known as a proper movie star, of course, but also as a much-lauded director.  In fact, not counting cameos, Eastwood hasn't starred in a film for another director since 1993's In the Line of Fire (with Wolfgang Peterson).  Eastwood first started directing in the early 1970's, with the thriller Play Misty for Me, but that didn't stop him from wanting to lean into his most iconic genre (the western), and indeed his second directorial effort was the 1973 cowboy flick High Plains Drifter.  The film was a hit, but was noted for being a departure from many of the films that had made Eastwood famous, and indeed, was a step further into the violence that westerns had started to allow in the late-1960's.  John Wayne once said of this film, "this isn't what the West was all about."  The movie came at a turning point in Eastwood's career-two years earlier, he'd made Dirty Harry, which would spawn four sequels and would become the defining role of his career.  In 1973, less-than-a-decade after Rawhide was pulled off of the air mid-season due to low ratings, Eastwood had suddenly become one of the most bankable names in Hollywood.  All of this meant that there were a lot of expectations (for me, and for Clint) going into High Plains Drifter...how could Eastwood find something new to say about the western, now that he was allowed to do so in his own voice?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie features the Stranger (Eastwood), a drifter of sorts who comes into the town of Lago, and quickly kills three men who are protecting the town with little issue.  We see, but the other characters don't, that the Stranger is haunted by the death of a US Marshal named Jim Duncan, who is being whipped to death by several outlaws.  As the film progresses, we understand that Duncan was not a villain but a hero, and the town hired the outlaws to kill him after he threatened to tell that the local gold mine they were getting rich off of was illegally dug on government-owned land.  The town is wracked with guilt, and in trouble because they never paid those outlaws, so they hire Duncan to protect them & kill the outlaws, but for a price...they have to give him whatever he wants, and increasingly we find that he wants chaos, and to destroy the town itself.  As the film continues, several of the townsmen are killed or have their livelihoods destroyed, but in the end both the outlaws (and several townspeople) are killed, with the Stranger telling his only real friend in the town (a little person named Mordecai, played by veteran character actor Billy Curtis who was at one point one of the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, as well as Mayor McCheese) when he's asked "what is your name?" and he responds "you know my name."

The ending makes the film.  In original drafts of the script, it was strongly implied that the Stranger is Duncan's brother, out for revenge, but Eastwood was smart enough to change that so it was more ambiguous, and as written, it reads more like he's Duncan's ghost or spirit come back to haunt the town for betraying him for doing what was right.  This gives the performance a different level, and honestly, it improves it.  Eastwood is not noted as a great actor in the same way that he is a great director, but I personally think he's a strong actor, and this is a good testament as to why-he's able to give this character a sense of enigma that other actors would've wanted to solve in the film, ruining the picture.  He also would've made him more redemptive.  The Stranger, unlike Jim Duncan, is not a good man.  He rapes multiple women, violently ruins the lives of several townspeople, and seems to delight in killing.  He is not a hero, and Eastwood plays him as a villain (barely even an antihero)...someone who is literally coming from hell to punish other wickedness, not to dismiss his own.  You could read the ending as him riding back into the abyss in the closing moments of the picture.

The film itself, with apologies to John Wayne, is therefore pretty darn good.  I loved the framing device of him being evil, and quite enjoyed how unique this film is.  It's also an unusual picture in Eastwood's directorial efforts, given that Jim Duncan, the only truly good person in the movie, is killed for defending the government.  Eastwood, who would enter politics (he'd become the Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, and endorse the Republican presidential candidacies of John McCain & Mitt Romney) is most noted not necessarily for being a conservative figure in Hollywood, but for being a principled libertarian figure (for example, he is a supporter of gay marriage).  As a result, most of his films are critical of the government, but High Plains Drifter still holds it in relatively high regard, with the "people" being the ones at fault here.  That would not be the case as you'd move further into his filmography.

Westworld (1973)

Film: Westworld (1973)

Stars: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin

Director: Michael Crichton

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 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 Yul Brynner: click here to learn more about Mr. Brynner (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

By the 1970's, Yul Brynner's career had steply declined from the heyday that had once brought him classics like The King & I, The Ten Commandments, and The Magnificent Seven in short order.  He was consistently broke, and throughout the 1960's had starred in increasingly bad movies, particularly the 1969 flop musical The Madwoman of Chaillot with Katharine Hepburn & Charles Boyer, desperate for money.  For much of the latter years of his life, he split his time between bit work in movies & television, and doing versions of his King Mongkut role, playing it in London, Broadway, and even a brief run on a TV series (yes, dear friends, The King & I was a 12-episode TV sitcom on CBS in 1972 before it was cancelled, and yes I'm desperate to see it if anyone has the means).  Brynner, though, did have one last classic role in him, an unlikely SciFi hit in 1973 that would also spawn a (much, much more successful series) decades later after his death: Westworld.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in 1983, the film is about a high-tech amusement park, run by the Delos corporation that allows guests to live as figures in either a western, medieval, or ancient Roman world.  Debauchery & violence are encouraged, and because there are precautions, the guests are unable to be harmed.  Our two main protagonists are Peter Martin (Benjamin), who is visiting the park for the first time after a divorce, and his pal John Blane (Brolin), who has been in the park multiple times before.  They enjoy the western motif, hooking up with old-timey prostitutes (that are actually robots) and fighting the Gunslinger (Brynner), a robot that is part of the plot and killed multiple times by Peter.  But as the film goes on, it's clear a type of computer virus has inserted itself into the park, putting the guests in danger, including John & Peter, who are now going to have to fight the Gunslinger for real.

There's a lot to say about Westworld, but let's start with the truly groundbreaking aspects of it.  Written & directed by Michael Crichton (most well-known today for authoring the Jurassic Park novels), despite being made on the cheap, the film is the first movie in Hollywood history to use digital image processing (essentially the forefather of CGI).  The moments are brief (they are essentially seen as the way that Brynner's Gunslinger can see the world), but it's an incredible feat and obviously important to the future of cinema.  It's insane that the film didn't get any Oscar attention, because in addition to this, the art direction, costuming, editing, scoring, and especially the makeup & effects (there's a great scene where Brynner's face looks like it's fizzing that's kind of incredible) all were worthy of recognition (I said to future John, reminding myself to include these in the 1973 My Ballot).

The movie overall, honestly, is really well-done.  Crichton keeps it very lean, focused largely on these three men, and clocking in at less than 90 minutes.  The movie doesn't have the conversations about the morality of the place that would become central to the HBO series (which I loved-full disclosure that I was a huge fan of the series right up until the end, and am still angry that HBO cancelled it, and even angrier that they yanked it from their streaming platform, even though I had the foresight to invest in physical media for it...so I come in with a propensity to love this), but it does have a great, unfolding take on the western.  We're not quite to the point where we're going to talk about how New Hollywood changed the westerns (our July star is very much a Classical Hollywood figure), but Westworld is a good introduction to how New Hollywood would skewer and sometimes upend the legend of the Old West, here introducing science fiction elements.

And it would introduce a great new part of Yul Brynner's lexicon.  This is some of his best work, as a robot that starts to realize not only his own place in the world, but that he is, in fact, as good as his myth.  Brynner's part isn't as big as you'd suspect, but he steals every scene he's in, and I get why this was a sizable hit.  Brynner would return a few years later in the sequel Futureworld, but as I said-this wasn't a new phase for his career, just a brief highlight.  He'd do theater for the remainder of his career, and die in 1985 from lung cancer, though he stayed badass to the end, filming an anti-smoking campaign that he mandated to be released after his death, basically becoming one of the first major celebrities to talk publicly about the link between smoking and cancer.

I hate that this is the transition here, but next month, we're also going to talk about a man who died of cancer before his time (and a lifelong smoker).  But while this actor, like Brynner, would become synonymous with the western, his career didn't have nearly the ups-and-downs.  Indeed, for over 40 years he would be the textbook definition of a movie star, and one of the most successful leading men of all-time.  Stay tuned as we reach the halfway point of our fifth season next Saturday.

The Wicker Man (1973)

Film: The Wicker Man (1973)

Stars: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Brit Ekland, Diane Cilento

Director: Robin Hardy

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

While we are doing this month's films chronologically in terms of publication, the films were not viewed by me, necessarily, chronologically (in fact, the penultimate film I saw months ago).  As I'm watching, learning a bit more, I've found that while the 1980's horror scene was incredibly influenced by Halloween, and therefore was about oversexed young people getting slaughtered by various monsters, the 1970's horror scene in some ways reflects our current one.  Instead of a focus on a final girl, we instead get the "elevated horror" movies that would eventually inspire films like The Babadook, Hereditary, and Midsommar.  That is surely the case with a movie like The Wicker Man, which would be remade (and frequently mocked on the internet...I haven't seen the remake with Nicolas Cage but from the outset he does feel like a bad choice for this type of material), but is far more prevalent in terms of atmosphere and playing with form to other, more lauded horror films than its 2000's direct reimagining.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Neil Howie (Woodward), a police sergeant and more important to the story, a devout, militant Christian, who goes to the island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl named Rowan.  On the island, despite the letter, no one, not even her parents, seem particularly concerned about the missing girl, and in the beginning they pretend she doesn't even exist.  Equally disturbing to Howie is that the island practices pagan religions, rather than being Christian like he is.  Two figures seem to gravitate the most toward Howie: a beautiful young woman Willow (Ekland) with whom he is sexually frustrated but cannot touch as a result of his religion, and Lord Summerisle (Lee), who is the noble who oversees the town, and whom he has a deep-seated mistrust.  The mistrust is warranted, but not for the reasons he thinks.  It isn't a case where, as Howie suspects, they plan to sacrifice Rowan to their god, but instead they plan on sacrificing Howie, someone they view as a fool but with the power of a king (i.e. he works for the law), and because of his religion, he is a virgin.  At that point, he starts to break down, in many ways denying his faith when faced with his own mortality, but it doesn't matter.  He is burned alive in a large wicker statue of a man, hence the title.

The film, if you've seen Midsommar first, is clearly inspired by it.  The idea of a man coming into a village, assuming that he has figured it out & is far more clever than the people who live this life everyday, is present in that film as well as this one.  But where Midsommar has a great metaphor for grief & betrayal, I don't quite think this one works as well.  This film in many ways is about religious intolerance, which is interesting and something that as someone raised in the Christian faith, I will admit it took me a second to catch on (to my embarrassment).  At one point Summerisle says something akin to the fire gods making young women become pregnant, which is scoffed by Howie until it's pointed out that the centerpiece of Christianity is a god making a virgin woman pregnant.  Later, when it's clear that Howie is far more sexually obsessed with his desire for Willow than he is with his religion (even though he cannot consummate the relationship), it shows the strange juxtapositions of his conflicts, and makes them seem quite silly in the grand scheme of things.  

But it doesn't really work for me.  I saw the twist coming very far in advance, perhaps because of Midsommar but also because it's the only logical option here.  Rowan has to be a red herring...taking her literally would make no sense, as why is she the only exception to the rest of the town that is devout to their view of Lord Summerisle?  I am going with three stars because there's nothing particularly bad about the film even if I found it unsuccessful, and I get what it inspired, but I feel like it meanders too much and I think occasionally just decides to be atypical less because it aids the story and more to just confuse the viewer.  This is definitely one of those 2.5 star movies, but as I don't do half stars here, we'll go with three.

Past Horror Month Reviews (Listed Chronologically): The Golem, The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Frankenstein, Freaks, The Mummy, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man, The Black Cat, The Bride of Frankenstein, Mad Love, The Raven, Werewolf of London, Dracula's Daughter, Son of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man Returns, The Mummy's Hand, The Invisible Woman, The Wolf Man, Cat People, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Invisible Agent, The Mummy's Curse, The Mummy's Tomb, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Phantom of the Opera, Son of Dracula, The House of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man's Revenge, The Mummy's Ghost, The Uninvited, House of Dracula, She-Wolf of London, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy, Revenge of the Creature, The Creature Walks Among Us, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, The Blob, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead

Badlands (1973)

Film: Badlands (1973)

Stars: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates

Director: Terrence Malick

Oscar History: The film was actually eligible in 1974, for the record (it is famously a "1973" movie but it was only at film festivals that year), but got no nominations despite a generally enthusiastic reception when it first came out.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

As part of our month-long celebration of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, I am completing all of the remaining gaps in my Terrence Malick filmography (one of my favorite film directors) with what we're calling "Terry Tuesdays" throughout June.

One of the weirder aspects about doing "Terry Tuesdays" (which we'll do chronologically the next four weeks) is that most of the Malick films I haven't seen are the "classics."  While Malick doesn't have a particularly long filmography, by-and-large I've seen the deep cuts.  As a result, you aren't going to get short-changed here with a lot of Knight of Cups, but instead we're going to dive into one of the most important films of the 1970's, Badlands.  While Malick had worked in the film industry before this making short films and as a script revisor (he reportedly was an uncredited contributor to Dirty Harry), Badlands was his first film, and luckily for Malick, he came of age in the 1970's, when major studios were taking a chance on a director as unorthodox as Malick, which is why Warner Brothers was willing to back such an iconic film with actors who were still up-and-coming (though Malick, true-to-form, was able to pick out the legends that would be Martin Sheen & Sissy Spacek).

(Spoilers Ahead) For those who have been raised on modern Malick, it might surprise you that Badlands has a relatively conventional approach to story, one where the script is actually pertinent and it's not just about the natural surroundings & feeling of the film (which would become his trademark in the decades to come in movies like The New World and The Tree of Life).  The film involves Kit Carruthers (Sheen), a troubled young 25-year-old who falls in love with a teenage Holly Sargis (Spacek), whose mother has recently died and is now living with her father (Oates).  Holly falls for Kit because he looks like James Dean (the film is set in the 1950's), and when they decide to run away together, Holly's father stops them, and in a moment of surprise, Kit kills him.  The two run away, burning down their house, and become fugitives on the lam, with Kit increasingly exhibiting bloodlust (killing police officers, and at one point, a friend of his for no reason), until they are caught by the authorities, with Holly getting off (and eventually marrying her attorney's son), while Kit is executed for his crimes, though he's experienced a semblance of fame as a result of his crime spree.

Badlands was not nominated for a lot of Oscars when it first came out, but it was recognized pretty quickly as a remarkable achievement, and it's hard not to see why critics became obsessed with it.  The movie is gorgeous, though because it's 1974 the cinematography might seem underwhelming compared to the ceaseless beauty of The New World.  However, compared to pretty much any other outdoors scenes being shot in 1974, you'd be hard-pressed to find a film that could compare.  The Montana and South Dakota Badlands are a wonder to behold, and there are moments where the camera has taken over, totally telling the story despite the film's relatively conventional (at least for Malick) approach to the screen.  It's a crime that the film wasn't nominated at least for Cinematography.

But Malick's style isn't just about pretty pictures-it's about capturing a mood, about capturing a longing, and that's what he does here.  Badlands finds something really rough but beautiful in the promise of these two young people, who are given the one thing in American culture you can commodify but you can never truly sell: youth...and shows how it comes with an aching to understand that is only possible with age.  The way that the two slowly realize that they are in love not with each other, but with the idea of being young-and-in-love, crossing the plains only for a short time, is glorious.  The film is also not shy about violence, but unlike Bonnie & Clyde (one of my favorite movies, so don't take this as a slight), this isn't glamorized, but instead it's lackadaisically vicious.  It's not entirely clear if romantic, dreamer Kit is just misguided or a full-on sociopath, but it feels like Malick is hinting at the latter, which makes his handsomeness & disarming charisma all the scarier amidst these soft meadows. Badlands understand that the American dream isn't real, and if you admit that, none of the myths about the American experience can hold much water...but that doesn't mean that they aren't important weights that enforce our experience here.

OVP: Papillon (1973)

Film: Papillon (1973)
Stars: Steve McQueen, Dustin Hoffman, Don Gordon, Robert Deman
Director: Franklin J. Schaffner
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're going to conclude our weeklong look at some of my (unseen) films of 1973 with by far the longest movie on the docket, Papillon.  The film clocks in at 150 minutes, and like Scarecrow earlier this week, features two of the most important leading men of the era: Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.  Unlike Scarecrow, though, Papillon was a big hit in its era, keeping Hoffman in the public eye and theoretically moving McQueen into the echelon of the era's top star...though McQueen, infamous for turning down role-after-role-after-role that might have cemented his legend, didn't make much use of the film's success (at some point we'll start featuring male performers in the Saturdays with the Stars series, and McQueen is going to be toward the top of the list of people whose career I want to discuss).

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is loosely based on a true story, about Henri "Papillon" Charriere (McQueen...Papillon is the French word for butterfly), who was sentenced to a prison sentence in French Guiana for a murder he didn't commit.  There he meets Louis Dega (Hoffman), a (guilty) forger & embezzler who needs protection, but doesn't want to escape because he's confident his wife is working to ensure that he will be freed.  Dega helps Papi in several escape attempts, the first of which lands him in solitary confinement for two years, during which time he never once outs Dega as his co-conspirator despite basically being starved and going half insane.  On the second attempt, they enlist the help of Andre Maturette (Deman), a gay man there for murder who one of the guards has developed an infatuation with (yes, there is a gay subplot, yes, it's problematic, but not nearly to the degree of Scarecrow as Maturette is at least given some dignity in his portrayal).  They succeed in escaping, though eventually they are all caught (with Papi lasting longer than the others), and are each sentenced to five years in solitary, which basically kills Maturette.  Papi wants to attempt escape one last time from Devil's Island, but Dega refuses, saying it's too dangerous.  Papi then jumps from a gigantic cliff, near certain to die, but doesn't, and is taken out to sea by a raft made of coconuts.  Somehow, the narrator tells us, he survived and went on to live a free man.

This is an incredible story, and would be even more incredible if it were true.  While Henri Charriere definitely existed, and definitely was a prisoner in the French penal system (which was truly atrocious in its treatment of prisoners, using the guillotine way later than you would have expected, legally ending in 1981 and practically ending in 1977), there's no evidence that the portion of his book where he escaped from Devil's Island is reality (records at the time indicate he was never sentenced to serve there).  This is pure Hollywood fiction, as even at the time they would have been aware that this was disputed.

I don't normally have a problem with biopics taking liberties (the reason I dislike the genre as a whole is because truth is not, in fact, stranger than fiction), but I point this out because it shows the biggest issue with Papillon-it never looks below the surface of its major characters.  This isn't because McQueen and especially Hoffman aren't capable of crafting complex characterizations, but for some reason neither actor looks beyond the page with these portrayals.  We get some incredible action sequences (particularly that final moment of Papillon jumping into the sea, swimming off into the unknown), but there's nothing there.  You spend the movie hoping it'll just be over, as it drags and repeats without any sense of character growth, and Papillon is a character that certainly could grow as he keeps beating against a system that insists on him losing his spirit.  This could've been a great movie-all of the elements are there for it-but it's just dull & pretty.

The movie's sole Oscar nomination was for its score.  The main title here is superb.  This could have been a gut-check nomination for Jerry Goldsmith, who was nominated constantly during the 1970's by the Academy, but the main theme has a windswept quality I loved.  The use of a percussion instrument (I couldn't quite pinpoint what it was, but it sounds like some sort of electrified marimba) adds texture to the music, and invites the gargantuan task that Papillon & Dega are undertaking.  Unfortunately, the rest of the music isn't nearly as inspired-we are, like the plot itself, given the same course over-and-over again, no growth in the music.

Scarecrow (1973)

Film: Scarecrow (1973)
Stars: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Eileen Brennan, Ann Wedgeworth, Richard Lynch
Director: Jerry Schatzberg
Oscar History: No nominations, but it did win the Palme d'Or
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We're taking a mild detour in our conversation about the films of 1973 today.  This film is, indeed, from 1973, but it is not Oscar-nominated.  I keep a list of every Oscar-nominated film that I've never seen, but also on the list is every Palme d'Or winner I've never seen, and I didn't fact check, so we'll have this as one of our five 1973 movies this week (the last one, I promise, will close with an Oscar nominee).  It's a good question as to why this wasn't nominated, though.  At the time, Al Pacino & Gene Hackman were major stars, and had certainly gotten Oscar's blessing.  Two years prior Hackman had won Best Actor for The French Connection and the year before this came out Pacino had gotten his first citation for The Godfather (which he had to have at least been close to winning for).  What was it about Scarecrow that kept Oscar at bay, but made Cannes give it the top prize?  Let's find out.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about two drifters: Max (Hackman), a hot-tempered felon who is just out of prison, and Lion (Pacino), an immature guy (but in an endearing way) who seems to view the world with a weird sense of innocence and hope.  The two set off on an adventure to Philadelphia, where Max has socked away enough money that they can start a carwash together, but in the process they meet multiple women including a girl Max woos at a bar (Brennan) and then another who seems like she might be a more permanent love interest named Frenchy (Wedgeworth).  Max gets into a fight with Frenchy's ex-boyfriend at a bar, which lands them in a prison farm for a month, and on that prison farm Lion, abandoned by Max who blamed him for the arrest, is sexually assaulted by a man who claimed he was trying to be his friend.  Afterwards, Lion is angry and no longer sees the world as a place of hope, and their roles are reversed, with Max now trying to keep Lion happy.  This ends badly-Lion ends up having a breakdown and is institutionalized, with Max, now seeing him as his one true friend, vowing to get him out one day and paying for him to get better.

The film is grim, as you can tell, and was not a hit at the time, which likely made it harder for Oscar to bless (Pacino's other movie that year, Serpico, was a huge hit and much friendlier with AMPAS).  It's also a bit dated, to be honest.  The film runs rampant with homophobia, with Richard Lynch's Riley the only outwardly "queer" character in the film (though there's an element to Max & Lion's friendship that could be read for some Celluloid Closet code), and of course he's the film's rapist.  Additionally, the only thing the female characters are expected to provide is cleavage, and it does have that aura of a Seventies film that the only important things that happen are to people who are miserable.

But this isn't a bad film by any stretch, and the leads are great.  Hackman is probably a bit better, getting the simpler role but making it sing.  There's something weird about seeing the more collected Hackman playing the hothead and Pacino getting the sweet novice (a few years later, these roles surely would've been reversed), but it works for Hackman, whose Max has a sense of entitlement and anger at the world that informs his worldview, but feels well-earned.  Pacino is good, though not quite as good as he'd be consistently at the time-it's hard to grade an Al Pacino performance that's solid but not groundbreaking when you know that there's roles like Michael Corleone and Sonny Wortzik just sitting around within a year or two ready for the taking.  But this is definitely a film that I get why it was both critically-lauded and commercially-unsuccessful...even if I'm kind of in the middle on both.

OVP: Tom Sawyer (1973)

Film: Tom Sawyer (1973)
Stars: Johnny Whitaker, Jodie Foster, Celeste Holm, Warren Oates, Jeff East, Kunu Hank
Director: Don Taylor
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Costume Design, Art Direction, Song Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

As we move forward with our five-day tribute to the films of 1973, we're going to move from Oscar winners to mere nominees, and not ones where we have an acting nominee in sight.  The works of Mark Twain have been countlessly told on the big-screen, but it doesn't appear Oscar cared for an installment of his bibliography more than 1973's Tom Sawyer.  The film is a pretty faithful adaptation to the original novel (which is good fun even if literary titans frequently dismiss it on the way to Huckleberry Finn), but with a catch-this is a musical.  Something I didn't know when I started watching it, to be honest-I assumed the Song Score citation was because we were going to get a bunch of 1800's classics played in the background, not because we'd see actually singing onscreen.  But that's what happened, and honestly-it just enhances the "good fun" angle.

(Spoilers Ahead) For those of you who somehow missed this tome in your childhoods, the story of Tom Sawyer goes as follows.  Tom (Whitaker) is a young scalawag, always into mischief, and being raised by his Aunt Polly (Holm) much to her consternation (even though she loves him).  Tom's only true friend is Huck Finn (East), an orphan boy that is even more on the outskirts of town than Tom.  The two boys witness the murder of the town's doctor, and know that the man accused of the murder, Muff Potter (Oates) was really innocent, and it was Joe (played by Hank, and yes in a sign this was written 150 years ago, his name in the movie comes with a racist moniker that I'm not going to repeat, so he'll be referred to simply as "Joe" in this article), a mean local man, who actually killed the doctor.  Tom eventually confesses despite a blood oath between the two, fraying their friendship, but endearing him to local girl Becky (Foster), who is his love interest.  The film ends with Joe getting arrested, Huck setting off on the Mississippi (the film would get a less critically-successful musical sequel about Huck), and Tom maturing into a young man.

The film, as I said, is really devoted to the original text-almost every major scene in the novel, from the whitewashing to Tom's "engagement" to Becky to Huck nearly being adopted are all there.  But they are set to music.  With one exception these are pretty inconsequential, though they're well-staged.  Celeste Holm and her two onscreen children singing "Tom Sawyer" is witty & delicious (who knew Celeste Holm would take so well to a musical?) and the entire "Gratification" number would make Oliver proud.  The best, though, is "River Song," which to me comes across as a classic-it's refrained multiple times, and is performed by country music star Charley Pride.  The score was written by John Williams (yes THAT John Williams) and the Sherman Brothers, and though it never quite makes it to the same level as "River Song," I enjoyed it.

The film's other two nominations were for Costume and Art Direction.  Neither of these is particularly special.  It's fun to see little Jodie Foster armed with light blonde hair (her hair looks so much like my childhood best friend and next door neighbor when I was growing up that I did a spit take when I first saw her onscreen) in random assorted outfits, but this is fitting if not all that interesting period work.  The art direction is the same-the best set designs were the steamship, which wasn't built for this film specifically (and apparently is something you can still tour/ride in Wisconsin), and the rolling hillsides, which, again, is more a location scout than an art director's job.  Still, this is good, wholesome fun.  Nothing groundbreaking, but enjoyable.

OVP: Paper Moon (1973)

Film: Paper Moon (1973)
Stars: Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, Madeline Kahn, Randy Quaid
Director: Peter Bogdonavich
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actress-Tatum O'Neal*, Supporting Actress-Madeline Kahn, Adapted Screenplay, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

All week long we're looking at films from 1973, with an emphasis on Oscar-nominated films (all of which are movies I watched for the first time while on quarantine).  Yesterday we talked about the Best Supporting Actor winner The Paper Chase, so it felt appropriate to bookend that movie with the Best Supporting Actress winner of that year, the youngest victor in Oscar history, Tatum O'Neal.  Both, weirdly, were at the beginnings of their film acting career, though O'Neal was some sixty years Houseman's junior.  Houseman had become a theater legend at that point, but in terms of film acting he'd only had two bit parts, one of which was uncredited, before he won his Oscar for The Paper Chase.  O'Neal won for her first film proper, playing opposite her dad in the similarly-titled Paper Moon.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Moze Pray (Ryan O'Neal), a devilishly handsome (seriously-the elder O'Neal has never looked better) con artist who sells Bibles to widows for a profit, and a young girl named Addie (Tatum O'Neal) whose mother has recently died, and who has no one to take her to live with her aunt in Missouri.  Moze is basically asked to drive Addie to the train station, but upon realizing that Moze used her dead mother to secure $200 in a con, Addie demands that he pay her back the money, and she won't leave his side until he does.  Thus, an unlikely pair heads off on a road trip, and Addie quickly brings finesse to Moze's schtick, getting him more money and helping him to pull off more sophisticated cons.  Along the way, they meet an exotic dancer named Trixie Delight (Kahn), with whom Moze is smitten, but Addie isn't (she quickly schemes with Trixie's maid on a way to eliminate the "competition"), and they form a bond.  In the end, this is enough of a bond that even though Moze (after a botched bootlegging scheme) is broke-and-beaten-down, Addie picks a life on the road with him rather than the more secure world of her aunt's home.

The bulk of the film is predicated on the relationship between Addie-and-Moze, and whether or not you find it endearing or dangerous.  It's pretty clear, both in casting his actual daughter (who looks like him, though in my opinion she does indeed favor her real-life mother actress Joanna Moore) and in the way they structure the film that we're meant to believe that Addie is Moze's biological child, and thus he does owe her some sort of debt outside of the monetary.  This unspoken truth hangs beautifully over the movie-there's a sense of Moze realizing not just of an obligation to himself to expect more from this life, but of Addie getting a second chance on a parent after her first one dies tragically before the film commences.

The movie itself is not breaking new ground, but I loved it.  Paper Moon is the kind of gemlike picture you can't stop watching, and are just engrossed in fully.  It helps that the movie has a dynamo pair of leads.  Ryan O'Neal has charisma, sex appeal, and just enough rascal in his Moze to make this one of his best performances.  His daughter is a natural, and feeds off of that energy.  It's always hard to tell how much credit you should give a child actor's performance to the director (and it's hard to get a gage on that when the director is as fascinating but immodest as Peter Bogdonavich), but O'Neal is riveting from start-to-finish.  It's not remotely fair to call this a supporting part-she's in virtually every scene of the movie (I'd be willing to bet she has more screen-time than her dad), and it's the most egregious case of category fraud I've ever witnessed...but she's awesome in it.  I totally get the impulse to give her this Oscar, even if when we get to the OVP write-ups I'm going to have to knock a star off of her score to put her competitors on the same field.

The film's other nominations are all well-earned too.  Bogdonavich felt of the era by filming the movie in pristine black-and-white (today this would have gotten a Cinematography nomination), and it crackles with period songs & radio shows, as well as great detail in the sound work.  The screenplay is a delight-quippy one-liners, it manages to feel authentic while never falling into cliche (and this is a road picture, so opportunity for cliche is blooming everywhere).  It had to suck for Madeline Kahn, who is in about 12 minutes of the movie, to compete against someone in her own movie that was in so much of the picture, but she still brings finesse.  There's a wonderful moment where she's trying to win over Addie, and in the process delivers a summary not just of the tricks that you know she's tried on other girl's with handsome fathers, but soon she starts confessing the problems of her life, how men never seem to stick around, even when she hopes they will.  It's the sort of character work that Kahn would bring to all of her performances (such a brilliant actress), and might have even won her an Oscar...were it not for the little girl she finally convinces to smile taking up the rest of the movie.

OVP: The Paper Chase (1973)

Film: The Paper Chase (1973)
Stars: Timothy Bottoms, Lindsay Wagner, John Houseman, Graham Beckel, James Naughton, Edward Herrmann, Craig Richard Nelson
Director: James Bridges
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-John Houseman*, Adapted Screenplay, Sound)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're going to do something weird this week, and I'm not entirely sure why.  I recently caught a double feature of two similarly-titled films from 1973, and thought "I had fun with the Best Actress theme week" so we're going to go through & profile five films from 1973 that were Oscar-nominated and that I had never seen until the past two weeks.  These films, other than the year they were made and their Oscar citations, have nothing in common-black-and-white, color, dramas, musicals-you name it, we're getting to it.  Today we're going to go with a film that, were it not for its Oscar nomination, would almost certainly have disappeared from memory.  Despite inspiring a long-running television series, The Paper Chase is not a movie anyone talks about today.  It's probably because the stars, unlike movies like American Graffiti from the era, didn't become famous (Timothy Bottoms went from starring in two big-name films to disappearing off the face of the earth by the mid-1970's).  Or it's because the movie is about as standard-fare as you can get for a coming-of-age college drama.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie focuses on James Hart (Bottoms), a first-year student at Harvard Law.  He starts rather casually, smart & confident, and is quickly taken down a peg on his first day by legendary law professor Charles Kingsfield (Houseman), a contracts professor who employs the Socratic method.  Hart becomes obsessed with impressing Kingsfield, insistent on gaining his approval.  The film oscillates between Hart's conversations in Kingsfield's class and his rather limited time outside of class with his study group (all assorted young, white men who are rank with privilege, but not necessarily humility and are realizing their stature will only go so far in a land where everyone is "the best"), and an on-again-off-again relationship with recent divorcee Susan (Wagner), who ends up being Kingsfield's daughter.  The movie continues with Hart finally realizing that he can find more happiness in Susan than trying to be something he's not, and impressing a man who cares so very little for him.

There's a lot of promise in the first twenty minutes of The Paper Chase.  Bottoms has the kind of bookish, Eddie Bauer-style handsomeness that would have only been en vogue in the early 1970's or right now(real talk-he looks a lot like the last guy I dated before the Covid outbreak), but he uses that for what it's worth initially-being disarming, and a strong, level-headed counter to the obtuse men in his study group, and Houseman's character has delicious promise initially.  However, it goes...nowhere.  The Paper Chase isn't a bad movie, but it's a movie with very little to say.

Bottoms' Hart becomes pretty much insufferable as the movie continues, his constant cries for attention to the clearly superior Susan becoming more annoying as he learns nothing from their encounters.  Seriously-by the end of the movie when you're supposed to be rooting for Hart, as a modern audience you're hoping that Susan dumps him and gets with someone who is her maturity equal.

Houseman's Kingsfield remains totally unknowable as well.  It's a neat trick-this is the sort of performance that I can totally get being obsessed with, but it goes nowhere.  We never understand anything about his humanity or his daughter, and so much of the film is him reprimanding & destroying the will of different students (pushing one to the brink of suicide) in an impossibly posh British accent.  I get the urge to give such a performance an Oscar, and Houseman certainly was a legend at that point (both for his early work with Orson Welles. eventually splitting irrevocably during a dispute over Citizen Kane, and for his long career in the theater), and this might have been one of those "old age" awards that the Academy randomly decides to bestow, but there's nothing there-there's no hint of anything but surface.  The same can be said for the other two nominations.  The script might give an intriguing look into the damned-to-hell world of Harvard Law School, but it leaves too much out, with the writers not understanding the characters they have written.  The Sound nomination is odd (like, why?)-the only explanation I can get is that they had a crush on John Williams score, but they'd already cited Williams three times in 1973-a fourth would have been a bit much for the Academy.  But this film really only has its Oscar nominations to thank for not slipping into complete obscurity, and none of them are particularly well-earned.

The Long Goodbye (1973)

Film: The Long Goodbye (1973)
Stars: Elliott Gould, Nina van Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Henry Gibson, Jim Bouton
Director: Robert Altman
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

We're now going to be moving away from the classical era of Film Noir, which ended in the late 1950's when movies like Touch of Evil (possibly the last great "classic" film noir movie ever made, and just one of the greatest films ever made in general), and move into the neo-noir style that would emerge in the 1960's with films like The Manchurian Candidate.  Noir as a genre became less of a mainstay and more of a throwback, a way to capitalize on a Hollywood glamour long-lost, and would pop up occasionally in the decades that followed, but with none of the consistency of the 1940's & 50's.  For the last two entries in this series, we're going to take a look at two of the most well-known examples of neo-noir, ending our run in the early 1980's, though of course the genre would continue (we still see examples like Shutter Island, Inherent Vice, and the John Wick trilogy today).  First up is The Long Goodbye.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film, one of Robert Altman's many celebrated films of the 1970's focuses on Philip Marlowe, a character we saw earlier this month played by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep but is here portrayed by Elliott Gould, in a comeback role of sorts after being blackballed by Hollywood for his diva histrionics during the filming of What's Up Doc.  Marlowe, in the film's opening scenes (including an hilarious sequence with his cat, who runs away and never returns about ten minutes into the picture), helps his friend Terry (Bouton, who was far better known as a pitcher for the Yankees than an actor) run to Mexico after a dust-up with his wife.  It turns out Terry may have killed his wife, though Marlowe doesn't believe it of his friend, but he doesn't have time to look into this too fully after he's brought in for questioning by the police, as he's hired by Eileen Wade (van Pallandt) to find her husband Roger (Hayden), who seems to be in some sort of cult run by an evil Dr. Verringer (Gibson).  Marlowe is also being blackmailed by a violent hood Marty (Rydell, in one of his occasional acting roles, though he's best known for directing movies like Cinderella Liberty and On Golden Pond) for money that Terry supposedly ran off with.

The movie runs the line pretty thinly between a proper noir and a parody of the genre.  Casting Gould, who is so good at comedy, in the lead makes this line blurrier, as does the weird juxtaposition between Marlowe's behavior and those of the people around him.  Marlowe smokes in literally every scene of the movie, something none of the rest of the health-conscious beach bodies (there's literally a sea of women who are in various states of undress next door to Marlowe who do yoga & run a candle-dipping store) will indulge.  Marlowe feels of a different time, and you can see that in the ways that Altman uses proper violence in the picture.  There's a scene where Marty is trying to show Marlowe that he's serious about getting his money (the money Terry apparently took) and to prove it, he horribly mutilates his beautiful girlfriend Jo Ann (Jo Ann Brady).  This recalls in a lot of ways The Big Heat where Lee Marvin scars Gloria Grahame as punishment for helping his enemy, but here it's done completely at random, and you actually see Brady's face as it bleeds, Marty not seeming to care what he's done to his "love."  Combined with a musical motif that riffs on classic noir (both by using "Hooray for Hollywood" with a healthy level of irony at the beginning & end of the picture, as well as having a running joke where John Williams-composed song "The Long Goodbye" is rearranged in every musical genre imaginable), it's clear that Altman didn't want to make a more traditional film, instead skewering the genre.

(Weird side story-in true "let's cast a bunch of non-professional actors" fashion that seems employed here with Bouton, Rydell, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in only his second screen role as a mute hitman, Brady was actually the waitress for Altman & Gould at a restaurant when they were shooting, and they cast her in the movie because they thought she was beautiful.  She assumed it was a joke because they didn't have money to pay for their bill at the time since they'd just come from the beach.  This is her only film appearance.)

The problem is that the spoof isn't that funny, and meanders too much if this is supposed to be a proper parody.  It's Altman, so there's still moments of genius-Gibson's great as the creepy doctor, and Rydell is fun & manic in a way that Joe Pesci would perfect years later in GoodFellas, but the movie doesn't quite work, and feels lax, particularly as we catch the twists toward the end of the picture.  It turns out that Terry was alive the whole time, actually tricking Marlowe, and was having an affair with Eileen whom he is going to run off with now that her husband had committed suicide and she's inherited his massive estate.  The film ends with Marlowe killing Terry, but it feels out-of-the-blue.  Gould has played him like a carefree slacker for so much of the film, it's hard to understand why he cares that much that Terry screwed up his life for a while.  The clever, interesting touches make the film passable for sequences, but it's lesser Altman and it's not wink-y enough to feel like it's taking the piss out of the noirs of the 1950's.

Previous Films in the Series: Sweet Smell of Success, The Killing, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep