Frogs (1972)

Film: Frogs (1972)

Stars: Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke, Lynn Borden

Director: George McCowan

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

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

Sam Elliott's early career is not typical of some of the western stars we saw this year.  He was too young to have grown up in the studio system, and unlike Robert Redford, while Elliott was handsome, he didn't have the visage that got him an audition in every studio office he walked into.  Instead, Elliott started his career in bit roles, first in television, and then getting a small part opposite Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  He would go on to get more television work before he received a chance at being a leading man (we'll talk about that next week), working in TV series such as The Mod Squad, Mission Impossible, and Gunsmoke (it is a testament to that show's endurance that we're still discussing its impact on western actors firmly in the 1970's).  He also did some work in independent cinema, one of those films being the bizarre horror film Frogs, which is going to be our picture today as it was his first part as a headliner in a movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) To say Frogs has a plot would be, well, charitable, but we'll give it a shot.  Wildlife photographer Pickett Smith (Elliott) photographs an island plantation in what appears to be Louisiana, and sees pollution flowing into the swamp nearby, disrupting the local wildlife.  He eventually meets the Crockett family, headed by Jason Crockett (Milland), a wealthy old man who has been dumping pesticides into the swamp, despite the impact on the environment.  Smith realizes the phone lines have been cut & are down, and they soon understand why-the environment is attacking them.  Throughout the remainder of the film, Smith and the Crocketts (including brother-and-sister Clint & Karen, played by Roarke & Van Ark, respectively) have to fight off the animals, and in a lot of cases meet grizzly deaths at the hands of snakes, alligators, and spiders.  Only Karen, Pickett, & two young children survive (fleeing in a car with a mother-and-son, the son clutching a frog as a pet, and the mother seemingly oblivious to a potential apocalypse happening around them).  Meanwhile, Jason stays behind, and collapses in a house that is now surrounded by frogs.

To say Frogs is silly is putting it mildly.  Despite the movie having alligators, snakes, & spiders (traditional and potentially dangerous animals) as the actual attackers in the film, the frogs are the omnipresent threat, just sitting their silently judging & chirping, somehow as much of a menace as a cottonmouth in the water.  But that's Frogs.  At one point a woman is killed by an alligator snapping turtle, moving so slowly that you spend the entire time it's happening thinking maybe your eyesight is bad and it's an actual alligator going after her, stuck in the mud...something that might, you know, be a threat.  But nope, it's just a turtle...and somehow it kills her.

The cast list is kind of insane.  Ray Milland in 1972 was not the star he'd been in the 1940's, but he was still an Oscar winner, and was doing a host of really Grade-Z horror films, including a blaxploitation movie, at the time.  Joan van Ark, on the other hand, had just been the toast of Broadway and gotten a Tony nomination.  This was clearly a "see what happens" moment in her career (she also made a failed television pilot with Bette Davis), before she'd become a household name in Knots Landing a decade later.  As for Sam Elliott?  He's kind of too stoic for me in this role, too uptight to be much fun as our leading man.  The most noteworthy thing here, and I'm sorry if this is improper, but it's that his pants are insanely tight, to the point where you can see his, ahem...how do I put this delicately...to use western parlance, you can see he's happy to see you & he's not sporting a Colt 45.  I don't know if it was intentional that Elliott's penis would play such a prominent supporting role in this film or if they just decided to go for it in the costuming department, but it's clearly visible in multiple scenes.  I'm not complaining by any means, but I just wanted to point it out for posterity.