Robin and Marian (1976)

Film: Robin and Marian (1976)

Stars: Sean Connery, Audrey Hepburn, Robert Shaw, Nicol Williamson, Richard Harris, Denholm Elliott, Ian Holm

Director: Richard Lester

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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 Audrey Hepburn: click here to learn more about Ms. Hepburn (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Audrey Hepburn's time as America's Sweetheart can pretty much be bookended between two of her signature roles: Princess Ann in Roman Holiday and Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, but that doesn't mean that she stopped acting after these roles.  As New Hollywood was rolling out, she starred in Two for the Road, which is a now-beloved film (that honestly fits the New Hollywood motif better than most films starring Classical Hollywood stars) and Wait Until Dark, a thriller that won Hepburn her fifth and final Oscar nomination.  But Hepburn wasn't a great fit for New Hollywood, and after the stress of two flops (How to Steal a Million and Two for the Road), she was more interested in a quiet life of domesticity with her family.  She only acted occasionally after 1967, working with Steven Spielberg on Always and with Peter Bogdonavich in his famed flop They All Laughed.  The film that feels the most at-home to her style of the movies Hepburn made during this "retirement" period was Robin and Marian, the first film she made nine years after Wait Until Dark, starring then one of the biggest leading men in Hollywood, Sean Connery.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on the legend of Robin Hood (Connery) when he is old.  We are long beyond the days of his youthful dalliances with Maid Marion (Hepburn), and when he returns to England after the death of King Richard (Harris), he finds her to be a nun, and one that's about to be arrested by the Sheriff of Nottingham (Shaw).  This sets in motion a final stand sort of film, as Robin Hood, now an aging legend, having to once again fight for Maid Marion, but both of them are older, wiser, and filled with the regrets that youth cannot understand.  The film also shows the Sheriff, understanding his best days are behind him, and with some regret over having to kill the man who also made him notorious.  In the end, both men die, with the Sheriff giving Robin a wound that will leave him crippled the rest of his life before Robin stabs him through the stomach, and in a twist, Maid Marion kills both herself & Robin Hood (in most stories, this is an Abbess who does it for the reward money), with them soon to be buried by L'il John (Williamson) outside the priory for all time.

The movie is weirdly reminiscent of a lot of films we've seen in the past 25 years.  The idea of taking a lighter story, making it somber & giving it a more modernist gaze has been used on everyone from Batman to Archie Andrews in film and television.  The problem with Robin and Marian is that it doesn't fully go this route.  The 1970's was not a time when we saw a lot of successful historical epics similar to those that had been popular in the 1950's & 60's; arguably the best one was The Man Who Would Be King the year before that also starred Sean Connery.  This meant that the story tries to have some lighthearted moments that don't work at all, and it moves too quickly.  We need more investment in the love story or in the Robin Hood history to make the dramatic, heart-wrenching ending work.  The juxtaposition of Hepburn & Connery is a good pairing.  Despite Connery becoming a movie star a decade later than Hepburn (and continuing to star in movies well into the 1990's), he's just a year younger than Hepburn, and so they pair nicely (and age appropriately).  But the script can't capitalize on the unusual chemistry between the two, chiffon-and-sandpaper laced together beautifully.

Hepburn, as I said, rarely worked in the years that followed, either on stage or on screen.  She did continue to work with UNICEF, though, through charitable work she'd started in the 1950's.  As a child, she had endured the German occupation of the Netherlands, and so had great sympathy for how war & poverty impacted young people, and worked steadily on vaccination & hunger missions throughout the world in conjunction with UNICFE.  She would win the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (a second Oscar) and the Presidential Medial of Freedom for her work, but abdominal cancer cut her life short.  At a funeral where Elizabeth Taylor bought the flowers and Gregory Peck read a poem, Audrey Hepburn, America's Sweetheart, died at the young age of 63.

Next month, we're going to talk about an actress who lived much longer than Hepburn, but was her peer, both in terms of their career peaks occurring during the 1950's, but also in a self-imposed retirement that happened as New Hollywood took away their title of America's Sweetheart.  We will talk about her more on Wednesday.

OVP: A Star is Born (1976)

Film: A Star is Born (1976)

Stars: Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey

Director: Frank Pierson

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Original Song-"Evergreen," Cinematography, Scoring, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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.

Few films live in such storied annals as A Star is Born, a film that has been told 4-5 times depending on how you handle What Price Hollywood?.  It is the quintessential Hollywood story, the public name-check when we talk about the entertainment industry.  But specific to our film today, few productions have the kinds of legendary tale as that which comes from the 1976 A Star is Born, one of the most infamous film shoots in movie history.  Written by the journalist It Couple of the 1970's (John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion), the shoot involved pretty much everyone hating each other.  Kris Kristofferson, then a huge star, hadn't been the first choice for the film (Streisand wanted Elvis Presley, who honestly would've been an interesting choice had that come about even though Kristofferson is the better actor of the two), and by the end of the production loathed both his leading lady and director Frank Pierson.  You've got Barbra Streisand having an affair with colorful 1970's mega-producer Jon Peters (who had just gotten a divorce from Lesley Ann Warren), and using her position as the most powerful person on the set to run roughshod over director Pierson, including getting final cut which may explain how the ending ends with a seven-minute long shot of Streisand.  A production where all of the cast isn't speaking (except the ones who are fucking each other), by the end of it can sometimes become a grand situation if the movie is good (look at Hell's Angels, now considered Howard Hughes' finest movie), but if it sucks, it becomes a Don't Worry Darling-style fiasco.  And A Star is Born sucks.

(Spoilers Ahead) This story is as engrained in Hollywood lore as you can get, so I don't know that I need a spoiler alert, but for those of you somehow unfamiliar, this is the story of John Norman Howard (Kristofferson), a washed-up rock star, who is more familiar with the bottle than the Billboard charts by the time the movie opens.  He meets, at a bar, a young singer named Esther Hoffman (Streisand), who is clearly a talent, and becomes smitten with her.  Eventually, he's producing one of her albums, and she's clearly headed to the top of the charts, and they even get married.  But there's a problem-John's demons are not only still there, but they're exacerbated by his jealousy over his wife's success, and she wants him to join in on it, rather than letting him slip into the background or not fight for what he's got.  In the end, this is the marriage (and John's) undoing, as he dies in a drunk driving accident, though unlike some of the other movies, it's not entirely clear that this is intentional or not.  Esther is now alone, but a fully-transcendent star, one who understands that she'll forever be linked with the man who fell before her.

This has been told very well (Judy Garland, Constance Bennett), solidly (Janet Gaynor), and poorly (Lady Gaga) before.  But this is the worst of the versions, because even with the others, specifically 2018's (I don't think Lady Gaga has proven capable of being a dramatic actress, and I think she's bad in the movie when she's not singing, but she gets coverage because Bradley Cooper is good and also because Gaga is a strong singer who gets one truly fantastic scene with "Shallow") there was something crackling between the two lead actors.  Gaga & Cooper, March & Gaynor, and especially Mason & Garland...there's heat.  But this film has zilch sexual chemistry between Streisand & Kristofferson, to the point where you genuinely don't understand why he fell for her.  This makes the film over-long, boring, and honestly...the leads give bad performances, particularly Streisand, who plays Esther less as an organic character onscreen and more as Barbra Streisand as herself.  Nothing about this works; honestly, I read a comment about how this feels an hour longer than the Garland version even though it's much shorter, and that summarizes my feelings exactly.

The film won four Oscar nominations, but it only earned one of them.  The sound is fine, but not spectacular (the concert scenes in Nashville a year earlier did a much better job of giving you a sense of talking at a performance, and of framing the musical numbers), and the cinematography is a similar situation, needlessly glossy & framed in a way that stops it from being romantic or creative.  The nomination for Best Scoring makes sense given the sales on the soundtrack were insane (I'm surprised it didn't win), but with one exception, none of the songs are either any good or performed organically-unlike Gaga's A Star is Born (where Gaga as a songwriter wrote plausible hits), it's not clear why the public latched onto either John or Esther as performers...save for "Evergreen."  One of the most iconic numbers of Streisand's discography, the song becomes the love theme for the movie, and while the movie's romantic overtones are never believable, lost in a song "as soft as an easy chair" you'd be forgiven for assuming this is a classic (because "Evergreen" is).

OVP: The Omen (1976)

Film: The Omen (1976)

Stars: Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, Billie Whitelaw, Harvey Stephens

Director: Richard Donner

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Score*, Original Song-"Ave Satini")

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.

We've talked about this a lot through the years on this blog, but horror & Oscar rarely mix.  Only a handful (The Exorcist, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense) have competed for Best Picture, and only a couple of actors (Kathy Bates, Ruth Gordon, Anthony Hopkins & Jodie Foster) have won Oscars for acting in horror films.  This is despite the genre boasting a number of truly great performances, scripts, and especially scores.  It is insane that films like Halloween and Scream, whose scores are synonymous with the genre (and movies in general) didn't even get nominated for Oscars.  It also means that when one wins, it's a big deal.  The Omen is one of those wins, and in an even more bizarre twist, it was the only win that Jerry Goldsmith ever got.  Yes, Jerry Goldsmith, the maestro behind Planet of the Apes, Chinatown, and Alien won his only Oscar for a movie about a middle-aged couple who thinks they might be raising the antichrist.  All-of-this-is-to-say The Omen was a must-pick gap when I was selecting the movies for this year's horror lineup.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a wealthy couple Robert (Peck) and Katherine Thorn (Remick).  In the opening scenes, Katherine has just given birth to a son, one who has died during childbirth, and Robert is trying to figure out the best way to tell his wife.  He soon learns he doesn't have to-a priest offers up an abandoned baby for him to raise, and so instead of telling his wife he tells her the baby is in fact their own biological child.  But the child, Damien (Stephens), it turns out, is unusual.  Animals react oddly to him, and strange things happen when he's around, including someone killing themselves in the opening scenes of the movie.  The film progresses with Katherine finding herself tortured and injured by Damien, and Robert getting strange warnings about the child, eventually going on an investigation of sorts where he discovers that Damien is not just any kid-he is the son of the devil, and has come to destroy the world as foretold in the Book of Revelation.  Before the end of the film, Katherine & Robert are both dead, and Damien is living with the President of the United States...where he can easily take over power and control of the world.

I had never seen The Omen, at least not fully through, but it's one of those movies that is so enmeshed in pop culture it's hard to not know where it's going.  It's been parodied repeatedly (off-the-top of my head I can think of American Dad!, but I know there are others), and the name Damien is shorthand for "evil" even more than Hannibal, Freddie, & Chucky are at this point.  The film weirdly functions as a mystery more than a horror, one that surely played better when you didn't know what was about to happen.  Peck, in the twilight of his stardom, is oblivious to what's obvious to the audience, but he is a good stooge, and the ending (where he dies rather than Damien, which wasn't the original choice of the director who wanted them both to perish) makes the film considerably better.

The Oscar nominations are unusual.  Goldsmith's score is great.  This isn't his best score (that would be Chinatown) but it would've been a crime had he never won one, and I love that he got it for quality work (it's eerie), and that a horror film managed to pull off this victory.  The song nomination, though, is so strange.  The song itself is fine, but it's the subject matter that is crazier.  In 1976, while tunes by Barbra Streisand & Tom Jones were up for AMPAS approval, somehow these two pop icons were up against a song that was literally an ode to Satan.  The 1970's, man...I wish we could get back to the days that Oscar was willing to go out there with his nominations.

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, Black Christmas, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, Don't Look Now, 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

OVP: The Shootist (1976)

Film: The Shootist (1976)

Stars: John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, Ron Howard, James Stewart, Richard Boone, John Carradine, Sheree North

Director: Don Siegel

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

By the 1970's, John Wayne as a persona was not something the hip, New Hollywood cinema had an obvious fit for, but the actor was bankable & kept working.  True Grit had been a proper hit, and he actually ended up acting for much of the decade while other headliners of his generation like Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart had to sit back and take supporting parts.  Films like Big Jake, The Cowboys, McQ, and Rooster Cogburn (a sequel to True Grit) all made money, and it was pretty clear at this point that it wasn't going to be changing tastes that eventually stopped John Wayne, but instead Father Time.  That came to pass in 1976 with The Shootist.  Wayne once again donned his cowboy hat and spurs, but this would be the last time that he would.  Fittingly, in many ways it recalls a film that he once turned down (The Gunfighter), and stars a host of major names of the past to watch him in his final ride.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Shootist takes place over the course of a single week, and starts with gunfighter JB Brooks (Wayne) finding out from his physician, Doc Hostetler (Stewart) that he is dying of cancer, and will soon die of that if he doesn't go out in a blaze of glory.  The film then becomes a series of vignettes, with Brooks meeting with a number of people from his past, many of whom are trying to profit off of their connections with a famous gunslinger since he will no longer be able to gain from it himself.  During this time, he lives in a boarding house run by Bond Rogers (Bacall), a widowed mother of a young man named Gillom (Howard) who is fascinated by Brooks' history of violence and death.  As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Brooks will not go down to cancer, but instead (in a very rare moment for a John Wayne film, as the actor only died a handful of times onscreen during his fifty-year career) he is killed in a gunfight, one that hopefully turns off Gillom (who flees rather than engages, despite his obsession with this type of violence) and protects the next generation from the mistakes of the past.

The Shootist on its merits is an oddly-structured film.  The vignettes take a bit to get used to, particularly given that you rarely can tell which characters are going to stick around and which you need to invest into, and honestly, because in many cases actors like John Carradine & Harry Morgan feel less like they are paying tribute to the film itself, and more are there marveling at Wayne, doing his final ride.  That morbid curiosity, quite frankly, is what makes The Shootist worth something.  If you take it just as a movie, it's okay, but forgettable.  But understanding that Wayne, one of the most important figures of the Old Hollywood era, was coming to an end (in many ways taking that era with him), something that Wayne himself likely understood given his age, it makes the film a lot more powerful.  It helps that Wayne is very solid in this movie, playing the part with a type of desperation, a type of bargaining, that feels unusual for the two-dimensional actor, giving a fine performance (a worthier performance to give him an Oscar for than True Grit if the Academy had been inclined).

Wayne never made a movie again.  Contrary to common belief, Wayne wasn't battling cancer when this film was made, though he did struggle with a serious case of influenza during the filming of the movie.  In 1979, though, he was afflicted with it when he was given the task of handing the Best Picture Oscar to The Deer Hunter (a movie, let's be honest, the conservative Wayne probably loathed), and if you look at the clip you can see a visibly shaken Wayne, getting a standing ovation (which in those days of the Academy were quite rare) while longtime colleagues like Gregory Peck & Laurence Olivier look on the verge of tears.  Wayne opened the presentation, a little winded and his voice breaking just slightly, with "(Oscar) and I are both a little weather-beaten, but we're both still here, and plan to be around for a whole lot longer."  The Hollywood icon would be dead just 9 weeks later.

With us finishing John Wayne month, the quintessential cowboy in our year devoted to the leading stars of westerns, next month we're going to move into a new chapter in our series.  For the final five months of 2023, we'll focus on actors who made their name in westerns during the New Hollywood era, when the western went through a transformation and would eventually fall out-of-fashion.  We'll start with an actor who who would become synonymous with the western, despite hailing from a place far from the American West.

OVP: Carrie (1976)

Film: Carrie (1976)

Stars: Sissy Spacek, Amy Irving, Betty Buckley, Nancy Allen, William Katt, John Travolta, PJ Soles, Piper Laurie

Director: Brian De Palma

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Sissy Spacek, Supporting Actress-Piper Laurie)

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.

One of the things that you're not seeing a lot of this month as we profile horror classics from this era is Oscar nominees.  In the long history of the Academy Awards, only six horror films have been cited for Best Picture: The Exorcist, Jaws, The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense, Black Swan, & Get Out, all of which I have seen (in some cases, many times) so they wouldn't qualify for our "new to me" theme.  Despite making boatloads of cash at the box office & occasionally getting major hosannas from critics, horror films rarely get into Oscar categories, even in tech fields like Makeup or Visual Effects where horror has been on the cutting edge for decades.  Today, though, we're going to get into the rare horror film that did get some major Oscar nominations, though perhaps they got them in part because the film, for much of its run, isn't really a horror film at all.

(Spoiers Ahead) Carrie is definitely a film that eventually becomes a horror picture, but for much of its run it is less a traditional "monster" movie and more a film about a young woman named Carrie (Spacek) who is put in an impossible situation in life.  Her religious zealot mother (Laurie) is vicious to her, basically scolding her for existing, and beating her for getting her period (which she says is a mark of shame, something that she gleans from her own pregnancy).  Carrie is treated viciously by most of the girls at school, including cruel Chris (Allen), who works with her boyfriend Billy (a young John Travolta) to ensure Carrie is elected the Prom Queen at the prom (she's been taken by her crush Tommy Ross, who looks exactly like you'd expect a 1970's heartthrob to look), and then is doused in pig's blood.  The film's ending turns into a proper horror movie, with Carrie's telekinetic powers turning her into a blood-soaked villain, enacting revenge on everyone who has been cruel to her all movie, though in the process a number of the people who were kind to her, like her crush Tommy & gym teacher Miss Collins (Buckley), also die.

The movie is an adaptation of Stephen King's first published novel, and is generally considered to be one of his best adaptations.  I have not read the original book, not because I'm not curious after this movie and more because I struggle with King as a novelist (he's a very good writer who frequently is in desperate need of an editor).  Unlike something like The Shining or Misery, the bulk of the horror here is more psychological & relegated to the final twenty minutes, which works well.  You get to see the world that Carrie inhabits, that she's not so much a villain of intention but one who cannot handle the world around her.  The scene where she has feminine care products hurled at her while she's bleeding in the shower, unaware of what is happening to her, is scarier than anything else.  I don't know if you could make a film like this today with this much sensitivity (particularly considering how much violence has emerged in the past 25 years in public schools), but it does make Carrie one of the rare iconic "villains" of this era to be more in the vein of Frankenstein or the Wolf Man, a misunderstood monster, as opposed to a killing machine like Leatherface or Jason Voorhees.

The performances are very good by the three lead women, two of which won Oscar nominations.  Spacek is extraordinary as the damaged Carrie.  I liked that the film plays with our expectations along with Carrie.  For example, you spend much of the picture wondering whether or not Tommy & Amy Irving's Sue are part of the prank or are actually good to Carrie, which lends some caution to Spacek's performance that I thought was really smart.  Piper Laurie, who hadn't been in a film since 1961's The Hustler (meaning that she got back-to-back Oscar nominations for these two movies despite a 15-year gap), has a part that could've been just a bananas, crazy-to-the-rafters performance (and sometimes, let's face it, it is), but it largely works as a religious zealot who gone mad both with overzealous readings of scripture and with using it as an excuse to abuse her daughter.  Rounding out the trio is Betty Buckley, totally underrated as a kind, if occasionally immature gym teacher (look at the glee she gets tormenting Carrie's bullies-that's some good, layered acting even if Oscar wasn't paying attention).  There are moments in Carrie that don't work (the score is too derivative of Psycho, some of the side plots involving Chris & Billy are so cruel to as be unbelievable), but overall this is a controlled horror film featuring fine work from Spacek, Laurie, & Buckley.

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, Village of the Damned, The Innocents, The Masque of the Red Death, Night of the Living Dead, The Wicker Man, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Family Plot (1976)

Film: Family Plot (1976)

Stars: Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane, Karen Black

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: Harris was nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes, but couldn't translate that to an Oscar citation.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Barbara Harris-click here to learn more about Ms. Harris (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are celebrating Barbara Harris all month long on the blog, but as we are seeing a film that was released within several months of Freaky Friday, our movie from last week, we're going to take a little break this week from discussing Harris's career (since we're in roughly the same spot), and instead focus on our other star of the year, Alfred Hitchcock.  I will admit that a new job & the jolt of being back in public has made it difficult to keep up with all of my goals of 2021 (anyone who hits all of their goals every year, teach me your ways), and one of the projects that kind of fell by the wayside was our Sunday Leftovers series.  Though I saw a lot of Hitchcock films this year, I still have twelve remaining so we will not have the synergy of me finishing Hitchcock's filmography completely this week with his final picture.  I will eventually get to those twelve remaining (non-lost) movies, but alas we will just have to chalk off my goal of finishing all of the Master of Suspense's greatest masterpieces a different day.  Today, we will bid adieu to Hitchcock, though we still have one more week left of star Barbara Harris, who continued making movies after they intersected on Family Plot.

(Spoilers Ahead) Our movie is focused on a couple, psychic impersonator Blanche Tyler (Harris) and her long-time boyfriend George (Dern) who are trying to find the long-lost nephew of a wealthy woman who is dying, and wants to give him her fortune before she dies.  Blanche & George try to track down this nephew, Edward (Devane) whom they originally assume is dead when George sees his grave, but they soon discover that he faked his own death and is living as Arthur Adamson.  He's doing this because he and his girlfriend Fran (Black) are involved in a criminal enterprise where they kidnap dignitaries and demand jewels as ransom.  These two intersect, with Edward & Fran assuming that Blanche & George are investigating them due to their involvement in crime, when in reality they are trying to give them a large sum of money (a classic Hitchcockian bit of black comedy).

Family Plot is good.  I think it gets a bit of a bad rap because it's Hitchcock's final film, and because it's not Vertigo (to be fair, few films are).  The movie is silly and occasionally the fun kind of twisty, but it probably needed a starrier cast to work better.  Black & Devane aren't able to pull their characters off the screen quite well enough, and in both cases we need them to pop more to make the contradiction to Harris/Dern's more fully-fledged romance feel sharper.  Harris is the best in show (though at this point, you have to question when is she not?), and John Williams taking up the baton from Bernard Herrmann (his only work with Hitchcock) works well as Williams has enough talent to make Family Plot's score standout.

Hitchcock would attempt to make one more picture, a spy film called The Short Night, that made it to pre-production but not much further (if you want to daydream, some of the stars considered for the film included Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Catherine Deneuve, and Liv Ullmann...I prefer the strange combination of Eastwood & Deneuve in terms of actors I think Hitchcock could've made magic with).  Both he and his wife Alma had a series of health problems, and while he made public appearances, they became less frequent.  Hitchcock was knighted in 1980, but was in so ill health he couldn't accept the designation from the Queen, and would die three months later.  We'll talk a little bit more about Hitchcock in a week when we do a recap of this season of Saturday with the Stars, but it's nice to know after Family Plot that he didn't end on a dour note, even if it wasn't also a triumphant one.  Next Saturday, we're going to conclude our month-long look at Barbara Harris when we see what happened beyond her brief period as a leading lady, and a movie where she'd star alongside an iconic blonde of an era beyond Hitchcock.

Freaky Friday (1976)

Film: Freaky Friday (1976)

Stars: Jodie Foster, Barbara Harris, John Astin, Sparky Marcus

Director: Gary Nelson

Oscar History: No nominations, though both Foster & Harris (and the Original Song "I'd Like to Be You for a Day") were nominated for Golden Globes, so it was relatively close to inclusion.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Barbara Harris-click here to learn more about Ms. Harris (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned last weekend, Barbara Harris had an unusual film career, and it's not entirely clear what caused it.  Harris seemed to take long breaks in her career, sometimes very long ones (we'll talk more about that in two weeks when we get to the conclusion of our month devoted to her), and at least a few of these were voluntary.  Her offbeat persona seemed a bit at a loss in the 1970's, though, in a way it might not have been a decade later when the 1980's were more welcoming to comedic talents & nontraditional beauties (the best comparison I can make to Harris might be Madeline Kahn, who like Harris also enjoyed a long stage career interspersed with memorable film roles) so it's possible she also struggled to find work that suited her.  This series focuses exclusively on movies I'd never seen before, and so we are going to skip what is generally considered to be Harris' best performance, as Albuquerque in Robert Altman's Nashville (one of my all-time favorite films, and a performance I would've definitely nominated Harris for in my personal awards), and move to the height of her movie stardom in 1976, where she won two Golden Globe nominations, including for today's sleeper Disney hit.

(Spoilers Ahead) Freaky Friday is one of the many body-swapping comedies that audiences in the 1970's & 80's became obsessed with, and is about Annabel (Foster), a 13-year-old girl who hates her braces, has a crush on the boy-next-door, and struggles in school (despite an aptitude for learning), who on Friday the 13th swaps bodies with her uptight, perfect housewife mother Ellen (Harris), who cannot make a connection with her daughter.  The two try to make their own lives work, at first assuming the other one has it easy, but eventually gaining an appreciation for the other, attempting to deal with a 30-person meal last minute for an adult Annabel and a young Ellen having to win a field hockey game (with less than happy results).  The two eventually switch back, firmly understanding each other & vowing to have a better relationship going forward.

Freaky Friday was one of a number of Disney films that Lindsay Lohan made her name off of during the successful period of her young career (Lohan also made The Parent Trap and Herbie Fully Loaded, the latter being her last commercial success to date).  Lohan's film was how I was familiar with the Freaky Friday franchise, as I saw this in high school & loved it-Jamie Lee Curtis is superb as the mother, and Lohan & Curtis play well off of each other.  The film also allows more interactions between the two post-swap, helping each other & making it feel like a truly earned relationship build, rather than just something they both do away from each other, which is what Freaky Friday does.  Harris & Foster only have one scene together post-swap, and never interact while they're "in each other's bodies."

This is the wrong choice, and Disney was wise to correct it because the original Freaky Friday is an unmitigated bore.  Even if it's your first body-swapping comedy, you still are going to see every joke coming a mile away, and it's ridiculous how clueless both women are about their counterparts' lives.  I know that in the 1970's the assumption was that parents were less-aware of what was going on in their children's lives, but come on-Ellen in her daughter's body at least has to realize how ludicrous she's going to sound if she doesn't at least tamp down her behavior, and Annabel somehow knows how to properly stuff a turkey, but doesn't know where her mother keeps her checkbook?  It's a stupid movie, and while the lead actresses do their best (Harris is fun, in particular), it doesn't save a slog of a film from collapsing on its premise at least twenty minutes in.

OVP: Obsession (1976)

Film: Obsession (1976)

Stars: Cliff Robertson, Genevieve Bujold, John Lithgow

Director: Brian de Palma

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Every year or so, the Oscars change the definition of what they consider to be "Academy-worthy" when it comes to "auteur"-style filmmakers.  People like David Fincher, David O. Russell, Kathryn Bigelow, & Wes Anderson graduated from being "critically-acclaimed but ignored" by AMPAS to being darlings, or even perennials with the awards circuit.  This is not a new feature, and it stretches back as far as the 1970's, when filmmakers like Steven Spielberg & Martin Scorsese made this transition.  One of the bigger names, though, that never really translated with Oscar is Brian de Palma.  While de Palma has had some success with Oscar (both Carrie and The Untouchables were nominated for high-profile acting trophies), de Palma himself has never been cited for an Oscar, making him arguably the most celebrated living American director to never be nominated for an Academy Award.  We're going to go with one of the few films he made that did tangentially flirt with Oscar, but of course, didn't get de Palma that glory.

(Spoilers Ahead) Obsession is not a perfectly linear story, but I'll try to suss out the plot for you here.  Essentially we have Michael Courtland (Robertson), who is a wealthy real estate developer, whose life is torn asunder when his wife (Bujold) & daughter are kidnapped, and in a botched ransom drop-off, are killed.  Years later, Michael is still mourning his spouse when he is visiting Florence, and he meets a woman there named Elizabeth (Bujold) who looks exactly like his dead wife.  Despite the misgivings of many, including his business partner Robert (Lithgow, in his first major film role), he marries Elizabeth...and then she is promptly kidnapped in a fashion similar to his dead wife.  It turns out that Elizabeth is in fact Michael's daughter (who is not dead), and it was Robert who staged the original kidnapping to try & gain control of Michael's company.  Michael then kills Robert, and nearly kills Elizabeth in a maddened state, but in the end they reunite happily rather than in a homicidal confrontation.

The film's incestuous plot was apparently slightly toned down (screenwriter Paul Schrader, not surprisingly, wanted to amp up this angle as it's by-far the film's most provocative element).  The bigger problem, though, isn't this jaw-dropping reveal in the third act, but that the film itself is such a mess.  This is a hallmark of de Palma's films-the need for excess in every fashion (particularly in terms of plot), but it's not my jam.  I thought the film didn't really make much sense, and the climax with Robertson killing Lithgow, and then the tearful hug was...cheap.  I thought it was a bit of a letdown given the gonzo directions the movie was going (if you're going to go for it, go all out).

The film received one Academy Award nomination, and a bit of a sad one.  Bernard Herrmann was hired for the film, and while this wasn't the only movie that de Palma would work with Herrmann on (he'd also write the score to Carrie), it does feel like a nod in the direction that Obsession was criticized for at the time-it's way too similar to Vertigo.  The movie seems to copy exact passages (like when Robertson is instructing Bujold how to walk), trying to recreate Hitchcock's film verbatim.  This reads as cheap homage to me, bordering on student film laziness it so closely relates to Hitchcock's original, and while the score is decent (Herrmann doesn't do bad work), it also feels like the kind of situation where he's underlining some of the worst parts of the movie through his music being so similar to Vertigo.

OVP: Logan's Run (1976)

Film: Logan's Run (1976)
Stars: Michael York, Richard Jordan, Jenny Agutter, Farrah Fawcett, Peter Ustinov
Director: Michael Anderson
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Cinematography and Art Direction)...the film also received a Special Award for Visual Effects (side note-so did King Kong that year, and Midway was also out in theaters, so why not have a competitive category?  It's not like they hadn't had a competitive Visual Effects category before at the Oscars or would do it again...the very next year, in fact)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Ross Geller once called it the sexiest movie ever.  That was probably my first introduction to Logan's Run.  However, once I learned a little bit about the plot, I decided to wait before I experienced all of the paleontologist-approved sexiness, and instead wanted to watch the film right before I turned...a certain number that is important in the film that I'm still a bit in denial about turning.  That date is now approaching, and so last night I curled up on the couch, watched the movie (though not, as Ross did, with my Denise Richards-looking cousin), and giggled throughout.

(Spoiilers Ahead) Ross's definition of sexiness is a bit questionable to me now, but I kind of see what he's going with-he is indeed correct that everyone is at least dressed sexily, I suppose.  It's the year 2274 and the entire world is in a domed city, where at the age of thirty people must undergo the process of Carousel and be renewed.  What we learn fairly quickly is that this process is bogus, and what actually happens is that everyone is killed at the age of thirty.

Logan 5 (York) is a Sandman, and celebrates this culture obliviously.  Sandmen track runners in the city (people who try and flee when they are nearing thirty) and terminate them.  Logan is given an assignment by the governing computer (oh how technology was feared in the 1970's) to find and destroy a place called Sanctuary, where successful runners have escaped and are now hiding.  To do this, the computer pushes Logan's tracking crystal (which is in his hand) to be red, meaning that he is now 30 instead of 26 like in reality.

This follows a series of events that you'd expect.  Logan flees the city to save his life, with a beautiful girl named Jessica 6 (Agutter) by his side, though being hotly pursued by his fellow sandman Francis 7 (Jordan).  Once outside the city, we find that this is the United States, and they go through the swampy remains of Washington DC, with the Capitol, Washington Monument, and Lincoln Memorial all covered in vines.  There they meet an old man (Ustinov) and realize there is no sanctuary.  Rather foolhardily, they return to the city and try and stop Carousel, and though no one believes them, the computer overrides when it learns that there is no Sanctuary and the city explodes, forcing everyone out and into the real world.

I just rushed through that last explanation on purpose, since the film itself does that.  The movie is indeed, well, sexy, in certain aspects-it's very modern, and it actually pegs some parts of our modern life quite well.  One of the more famous scenes is where Logan 5 is using a transmitter and shopping throughout the city for a sexual partner.  If there's a better predictor in 1970's/80's cinema of Chat Roulette, I don't know what it is (also, interestingly enough the first person to show is a guy, which implied gay sex to anyone paying attention-anyone think this a bit odd for a blockbuster from 1976?).  There's also a "Love Shop" sequence that involves what may be the earliest cinematic depiction of "third base" that I've seen insinuated onscreen.  Edgy stuff, for 1976.

But the film is too poorly-paced to be any good, and the acting too stiff and silly for anyone to take it seriously.  The film spends so much time with Jessica and Logan exploring DC, talking with the Old Man (Ustinov, whom you would assume is the best part of the ensemble, is far too full of tics and giggles to be anything other than a Walter Huston-style impression of a human being), that it completely ignores the ending.  Are Logan and Jessica so stupid as to think that that shouting from a balcony is a good plan?  The ending is completely rushed, and feels tacked on in a way that you think the director was forced to do so by the studio (I have found little evidence of this while searching the IMDB trivia page, but it's still my theory).  The movie just sort of finds an out-are we really to believe that the computer was never faced with something it didn't believe before?  It seems far-fetched.

The movie is a lot like that though-a lot of surface level pleasures but nothing really of substance, despite having the elements of something to say in there.  It clearly wants to be more important than it is, picking topics such as group think and ageism to focus on (I have long felt that while every prejudice is idiotic, ageism is literally the stupidest prejudice from a practical standpoint, if only because it's the only prejudice we are fully aware we will fall victim to if we live long enough...end side caveat), but every time it seems like the movie is about to say something interesting, it pivots and seems more intent on a special effect or a crazy side story about a robot obsessed with plankton (weirdest scene in the film...and I already mentioned the Love Shop).  The cinematography is only okay-it doesn't have the consistency of some other films of the era like Chinatown, though the art direction (also Oscar-nominated) should be rewarded for its scale (it seems huge) even if practically speaking it never actually seems believable that the city could hold that many people in such luxury.

I'll leave it there-have any of you seen Logan's Run?  Do you agree with Ross Geller's assessment?  What do you think of its Oscar nominations or future-predicting skills?  Share in the comments!