OVP: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Film: The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston

Director: Norman Jewison

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Original Song-"The Windmills of Your Mind," Score)

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 Steve McQueen: click here to learn more about Mr. McQueen (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Coming off of the success of The Cincinnati Kid, for the rest of the 1960's, you'd be hard-pressed to find a film actor who was more consistently bankable and electric than Steve McQueen.  In 1966, he won his first (and only) Academy Award nomination for The Sand Pebbles, a commercial triumph which got 8 nominations in total (McQueen would lose to Paul Scofield for A Man for All Seasons).  But it was in 1968 that he arguably hit his peak.  The most famous film of his career came out that year, the action flick Bullitt, which would be considered by many to be the greatest action film ever made (I liked it, but am not going to be quite that superfluous).  But I'd already seen that film, and with the Saturdays with the Stars, we stick entirely with movies I haven't seen of these actors, so we're going to focus on the other Oscar-winning film that McQueen made in 1968, a movie that was more polarizing with critics but nonetheless continued his trend of printing money: The Thomas Crown Affair.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is odd, and I'm going to start that right out because the plot is a bit thin.  It essentially follows Thomas Crown (McQueen), a bored millionaire who recruits a bunch of men (who know neither him nor their conspirators) to rob a bank, which they do successfully (and somewhat amusingly) in the film's opening moments.  It then shifts gears, with us meeting Vicki Anderson (Dunaway), a breathtaking blonde who is also clever, and who quickly figures out that Crown surely robbed the bank.  But there's a problem-there's no evidence other than common sense (and intuition), and both Crown & Vicki are mad horny for each other.  So Vicki is torn into a game of cat-and-mouse, with her seemingly closing in on him...all the while not realizing that she's getting played.  The film ends with Crown attempting another robbery, one that works perfectly and that he's confessed to Vicki already, implying to her that she loves him too much to stop him.  When she does, by showing up in the cemetery, she realizes that he did not, in fact, trust her, giving her the money from the second bank robbery for sport (along with his spectacular navy blue Rolls Royce), while he jets off to anonymity with the money from the first robbery.

Like I said, the plot doesn't resonate in a big way.  As I explained it above, it's quite straightforward, but doesn't read that way when you're watching the movie.  This is in part because it's severely underwritten-we don't get a lot of sense of who these characters are out of context with each other.  McQueen's Crown is essentially a thrill-seeker, a playboy, but we don't get much more.  Meanwhile, the only thing we learn about Dunaway's Vicki is that she doesn't play by the rules, which of course means that to all of the men around her, she's portrayed as a bitch (even though most of her best traits are lauded in Crown).  It's frustrating, and it feels stretched, like we're trying to make an excuse for this movie to exist.

But you see a 4-star review for a reason, and that's because it looks incredible.  The cars, the beaches, the costumes, the grand camerawork, it's all sublime.  There is a scene where Dunaway & McQueen, both just impossibly sexy, play the randiest game of chess you can ever imagine, us darting from his icy blue eyes to her pillow lips, each of them thumbing the pieces as if they're taking off each other's clothes.  Combined with a grand score, and the classic "Windmills of Your Mind" (one of the best movie songs of all time), it all adds up to film being a visual medium: who cares if none of it makes all that much sense when you are just looking for a cigarette to light afterward.

What's So Bad About Feeling Good?

Film: What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968)

Stars: George Peppard, Mary Tyler Moore, Dom DeLuise, John McMartin, Thelma Ritter

Director: George Seaton

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 Mary Tyler Moore: click here to learn more about Ms. Moore (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Mary Tyler Moore, as we pointed out when we kicked off this month, is very much a TV star first and a film star second.  Though other actresses we've talked about this year (such as Doris Day and Annette Funicello) had success in TV, Moore is the only actress we're going to discuss that the public almost exclusively associates with television.  That's because small screen success came pretty early.  She made her cinematic debut in Operation Mad Ball as a non-speaking nurse opposite Jack Lemmon, but it wasn't until 1961 that the public seemed to care who she was when she got the lead in The Dick van Dyke Show as the titular van Dyke's onscreen wife Laura Petrie.  Moore was a sensation, as was the show.  A now beloved series (if you've never seen it, you're in for a treat), it was a Top 10 hit for three seasons, and won 15 Emmys, including one for Moore as Best Actress.  The show went out on-top (van Dyke was begged by CBS to continue, but he wanted to end with the audience wanting more...something modern actors should have the class to consider), and Moore briefly turned to movies under a contract with Universal Pictures.  One of the first films she made was What's So Bad About Feeling Good?, our film today.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a pandemic sweeping across New York, where a toucan has come into the harbor and infects people with a disease that makes them unabashedly happy and euphoric.  It initially lands in the loft of a group of beatniks, including Pete (Peppard) and Liz (Moore).  Pete is infected, and suddenly he goes from being a glum, downtrodden pessimist to a joyous optimist.  The rest of their commune follow the same pattern, except for Liz, who is immune to the bird...but with so much positivity around her, she feels happy and in love with the new Pete.  The government (including John McMartin as a besotted Mayor and Dom DeLuise as a bumbling scientist) eventually stops the plague, given the worry that it'll hurt productivity and capitalism (one person in the Mayor's office suggests tearing down Wall Street to build a park, to the Mayor's horror).  Pete goes back to normal, but Liz can't-this change was real for her, and she leaves...but not before Pete decides to change too, and they rush and steal the toucan from the zoo, potentially to bring back the infection somewhere else and go live in bliss.

If you're reading that description and thinking "this feels prescient," you're not alone.  An episode of This American Life in 2020 talked about the film's bizarre similarities to the Covid-19 crisis, including how mask-wearing was encouraged in this film.  Of course, this is a lighthearted, silly comedy (and the disease isn't fatal).  It's also not a particularly good movie, unfortunately.  The film needs considerably more humor.  My thought has always been about comedy that, more than any other genre, it dates horribly, particularly when it's doing cultural commentary, which this does (the paranoia of the 1960's, the grooviness & pointlessness of hippie culture).  Dom DeLuise, in particular, feels like he's missing a pretty big opportunity by coming into the film late and not getting much in terms of visual comedy except at one point wearing a space helmet to protect himself from the virus.

Moore also isn't great here.  One of the things I'm curious about with Moore is that, for an actress who was very, very famous on television (and also quite gifted), her film career really only boils down to one movie (Ordinary People) in terms of critics' & audiences' memories.  I thought there might be a hidden gem here, but I was wrong.  The chemistry between she and Peppard is too strained, with Peppard's bland handsomeness not a good pairing with her cheerful spunk.  The ending should be more fulfilling, but we've had too little growth, especially from Peppard, to really land the plane on that front, and so you just are like "that was cute" rather than getting all of the feels.  A missed opportunity, but almost worth watching just from the curiosity perspective (in relation to the Covid pandemic).

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

Film: The Devil Rides Out (1968)

Stars: Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene, Sarah Lawson, Patrick Mower

Director: Terence Fisher

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

Last year we had a clear entry point into the new era of horror that happened after the Hays Code-Night of the Living Dead, a violent new chapter in horror, one that was a massive hit with audiences on a shoestring budget.  Night of the Living Dead is by all accounts the best entry-point into the genre during this time period, and as a result I wasn't entirely sure how to equal it this year.  So I decided to go into a different direction, looking at Hammer films, which was a groundbreaking British film production company (that still makes films today, though nowhere near the same cultural relevance as it did in the 1960's).  Hammer was most noted for having cheesy effects, focusing in a big part on sex & violence.  Despite having seen a couple of Hammer films productions during this time (including maybe its most known production today, One Million Years BC), I believe this is my first foray into the horror genre for the production company, and we're going to be doing so with one of the most iconic horror actors of this era, Christopher Lee.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, based on a series of novels by Dennis Wheatley, takes place in the 1920's in posh English society.  Nicolas, the Duc de Richleau (Lee) is looking after the son of a late friend Simon Aron (Mower), and along with his pal Rex van Ryn (Greene), he discovers that Simon has become involved in the occult.  He saves him from a meeting where he would've sacrificed his soul to the devil (also saving a girl named Tanithe, played by Arrighi), but both Simon & Tanithe, despite not being baptized into Satanism, are still under the spell of Mocata (Gray), who is intent on getting them both back into the fold.  The movie then spends about 60 minutes just sort of playing a game of cat-and-mouse, with us learning that Richleau knows WAY more about the occult than your average human being (which is super convenient for the plot), and that Mocata probably should've just given up trying to get these two back (it's the 60's-go to Spahn Ranch & you'll find a lot more worthy participants if you're desperate for devil-worshiping).

The glibness here is intentional.  The Devil Rides Out is considered to be one of the better Hammer horror films, but it lacks some of the sex and violence that are the hallmarks of the production company, and it probably needed them.  The movie's plot, which is deeply Christian in a way that isn't off-putting, but is definitely limiting to its final goal of terror (it makes it pretty clear which side is going to win), is very dry.  There's not a lot to the story, and we don't get enough character growth or titillation or chills as we're going to really make it feel like we're watching a proper horror film-it's not bad, exactly (the effects are cheesy fun (love the giant spider) and man do they use every cent of that budget by renting out random drawing rooms, but it's dull.

The acting is also abjectly awful.  With the exception of Christopher Lee, the rest of the men in the cast are interchangeable to the point of the confusion, and the women aren't much better.  Lee is such a strong actor, but he's famously good at playing villains, so much so that I kept expecting a twist that Richleau was in on the game all along, and was trying to trick all involved that they had accidentally sold their souls to the devil.  That would've made a better movie, but instead he's a deeply solemn hero in search of a less cardboard movie.

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 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

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Film: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Stars: Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Russell Streiner

Director: George Romero

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.

When it comes to modern horror, or at least when horror transitioned from the Universal Monsters into a more violent era, perhaps no movie stands out as a clear defining line more than Night of the Living Dead, which is where we're going to start our month devoted to horror films from the late 1960's to the turn of the century.  There's a few hallmarks here that will become mainstays throughout the month.  First, it's violent.  Without the presence of the Hays Code, horror films could now show what they used to just imply, and you see that with Night of the Living Dead.  Second, though, was how critically important independent cinema would be to horror, and continues to be today.  While horror has always been profitable (it's generally cheap and relies on less name brand stars as the violence & monsters are what gets audiences in their seats), you'll see throughout this month that it alternates quite a bit between major studio fare (including a couple of films that would have marquee names & get Oscar nominations) and independent ventures like today's movie, in many ways mirroring the 1930's when horror could creep out from behind both major studios and Poverty Row.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie opens with a brother and sister, Johnny (Streiner) and Barbra (O'Dea) in a graveyard mourning their late father.  While there, Johnny is trying to spook his sister, implying that a strange man on the other side of the graveyard is out to get her.  It turns out he's right, as this man is a ghoul (I don't believe the phrase "zombie" is ever uttered in the movie, though this is generally regarded as the first modern zombie movie) and in fact kills Johnny so that he can feast on his flesh.  Barbra escapes, and joins a man named Ben (Jones) who is one of the few people in the picture who clearly has his act together.  Along with a house of random figures from young, hippie-like figures to an uptight suburban couple & their daughter, they try to fend off the zombies, as well as their own internal prejudices with the most resourceful figure in the movie, Ben, being an African-American man in a house full of white people.

This racial dynamic is central to the film, and particularly important for the movie's ending.  The film ends with Ben being the only surviving figure in the house-everyone else has been eaten by or turned into a zombie.  We see in the cold light of day a group of law enforcement officers shooting the ghouls across a field & then burning the bodies, knowing now the only way to kill a ghoul is by shooting them through the head.  Ben, though, is clearly not a zombie (he's holding a gun as well), but is shot anyway as if he's a ghoul, then burned on the fire with the rest of the bodies.  Though the filmmakers claim they didn't have a commentary on race, it's hard to imagine that in an era of Medgar Evers & Martin Luther King, Jr. being killed by white men who were angry about the way the Civil Rights movement was changing society, it's not hard to see a movie where white law officers kill an innocent black man as being a commentary about the social politics of the era (social politics that sadly have not changed enough today).

The movie's social commentary works, but honestly pretty much everything works about Night of the Living Dead-it's a good movie, full stop.  Its gore is clearly where it got its calling card (you see, in disgusting detail that even in independent cinema would've been unthinkable a decade earlier, ghouls feasting on body parts of humans), but the terror is real throughout.  The way that the film operates as kind of a Twilight Zone-type message, where the dangers are just as much within the house as outside (if they all just listened to Ben, pretty much every person would've survived...it was the rest of the house's lack of trust in him that causes their demise), it's so good.  I see why this was a hit (generally considered to be one of the most profitable movies ever made), and I'm excited to see what it wrought in the coming weeks.

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

OVP: Star! (1968)

Film: Star! (1968)

Stars: Julie Andrews, Richard Crenna, Michael Craig, Daniel Massey, Robert Reed

Director: Robert Wise

Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Daniel Massey, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Scoring, Sound, Original Song-"Star!")

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 Julie Andrews-click here to learn more about Ms. Andrews (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are hitting the halfway point in our month devoted to Julie Andrews by discussing what is seen as one of the nadirs of her career (the actual nadir would happen decades later when doctors would destroy her flawless singing voice in a botched surgery).  In 1968, after a string of enviable hits including Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Hawaii, and Thoroughly Modern Millie, it felt like Andrews could do no wrong, but in Hollywood even the brightest of stars can fall, and that happened that year with, well, Star!.  The film was wildly expensive, the kind of musical that had stopped consistently being profitable as early as 1954, but Andrews had managed to keep in the black.  This wasn't the case after 1967, both Star! and Andrews' next picture Darling Lili would be two of the biggest bombs in Hollywood in their era, and just a few years after she saved Fox with The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews was putting it back on the brink.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, nearly three hours long, is weirdly thin on plot, so this is going to be a short paragraph.  Essentially, we have Andrews as famed vaudeville singer Gertrude Lawrence, who with her friend Noel Coward (Massey) became massive stage successes.  We see a traditional story where Gertrude starts out poor, but her immense talent & pluck get her noticed, and she moves on to bigger-and-better things.  Along-the-way, though, she develops a taste for extravagance, and despite making boatloads of money throughout her career, she's consistently broke.  The movie regularly cuts from Lawrence's spiraling romantic & financial life (she has multiple suitors before ending on Richard Crenna's Richard Aldrich), and weirdly the film finishes before both Lawrence's greatest triumph (playing Anna in the original run of The King & I) and tragic death at the age of 54 from liver cancer.

Watching Star!, I was struck at once by the fact that its reputation as a gargantuan bomb is unwarranted, but also that it totally makes sense that the movie was not a success.  After Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, Star! is merely okay.  There's pleasantness here (the musical numbers are nice, the costumes are grand, Andrews sounds good), but the plot itself is ridiculously underwritten.  There's no sense of who Lawrence is, and her troubles feel watered down to keep the film feel-good.  Also, her romantic life, which I suspect in real life was a bit messier (i.e. romantic relationships overlapping frequently with other men) is too convoluted with interchangeable beaus for me to be able to keep track of who was supposed to be winning her heart.  These are not insurmountable problems, but they are the kind that I get why audiences didn't show up.

The film won seven Oscar nominations, though Andrews herself was not one of them.  Daniel Massey got his only nomination (making him part of one of the very few father-son nomination teams with the acting Oscars, as his father Raymond was cited for 1940's Abe Lincoln in Illinois), and I actually was fine with this even if it's not a "great" performance.  Massey steals most of the movie, and is charming as Noel Coward, and does enough to underline why Noel is not one of Gertrude's lovers (he prefers the company of men) while not offending the censors of the day.  

The rest of the nominations follow a similar boat-not egregious, but hardly warranted.  The song "Star!" plays over the opening credits but is weirdly not one of the numbers we see performed (though its musical bridge comes up later in the picture), and it's good-but-not-great (it's the kind of song that sounds good but I dare you to hum it a few hours later).  The sound is good, though like the scoring it's more a case of it not being memorable-there are no real numbers in this other than perhaps the tried-and-true "Someone to Watch Over Me" that Andrews totally nails, and when you have peak Julie Andrews, you should be trying harder.  The cinematography is also nondescript-the concept of doing all of these staged sequences feels a bit of a cheat in this era, like they're just moving from sound stage to sound stage rather than feeling properly interactive with a larger audience (it never feels "real").  The best nominations were for Art Direction (all of the sets have their own flare, and I loved some of the crazy mansions these people occupy) and Costume Design (Lawrence, a famed clothes horse, comes across well in her opulent & growing attire in ways that Andrews is never achieve with her acting).  All-in-all, this is fine but forgettable, and though I wanted to save it, its most interesting calling card is that it was such an infamous flop.  Next week, though, Andrews will be starting a comeback in a surprise hit that would mark a second chapter in her film career.

OVP: The Firemen's Ball (1967)

Film: The Firemen's Ball (1967)

Stars: Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, Jan Stockl

Director: Milos Forman

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Czechoslovakia...worth noting that while this was released in 1967, it was nominated at the 1968 Oscars, hence the tag below but the year above)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Looking at movies from a distance is sometimes hard.  One of the stranger things about the cinema, particularly world cinema, is that you have to consider what is revolutionary in one part of the planet is not so in others, and as a result you have to remember that curve when you're considering the movie.  The Firemen's Ball is chief amongst these.  In 1967, Milos Forman was an emerging name in European cinema, and was the country's most important director in its "New Wave" having been nominated for an Oscar two years earlier for Loves of a Blonde.  However, this film nearly destroyed his career (and almost landed him in jail), and without some research for a modern audience, it's hard to understand why.  I'll get to that below, and as to why this is a movie I struggle to be able to properly review.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over one day, and with the exception of Stockl's fire chief, the characters are pretty much meant to be interchangeable.  Essentially Stockl's fire chief is retiring from the volunteer fire brigade, and is also dying of cancer (and potentially has not been told that he is dying).  The men attempt to put on a raffle & a beauty pageant during the giant shindig for his going-away, but both go awry, with the raffle items being stolen from the table by patrons walking by, and the beauty pageant a bust as none of the girls look like the women in their "Miss America" style photo, nor are they all that interested in winning the prize (save for one woman who comfortably exposes herself to a group of horny older men).  When a fire breaks out, we find that the firetruck is stuck in the snow, and the entire community watch a local man's home burn down.  Instead of giving him money, though, they give him raffle tickets to items that the citizens have stolen, leaving him destitute.  The firemen essentially wash their hands of the situation, as none of them is personally aggrieved, and pretend like the fiasco of an evening never happened.

The Firemen's Ball is meant as a comedy, or at least a dark comedy, and it plays that way, bordering into the sex comedy realm of the late 1970's/early 1980's.  Sex comedies always age poorly (even the good ones), and this one is gross like most of them are of this era.  The women are exploited by perverted old men, some of whom are literally their fathers, and the slapstick set-pieces lose their appeal pretty much after the man hanging from the rafters sets a banner on fire in the first five minutes.  As a result, I didn't like the movie, and in a normal scenario I'd say that I was bordering on actively disliking it.  The comedy aged badly, and the ending with the poor old man is confusing as it feels like it's being played for laughs even though he's essentially homeless with no active hope.

But I need to give the film its respect, as it was controversial at the time and nearly ended Forman's promising career.  While it wasn't initially banned in Czechoslovakia (it played in theaters & television), it was eventually as it was seen as an indictment of the Communist system, and the follies that result from entrusting a group of men with the simplest of tasks.  Forman nearly landed in jail when his producing partner Carlo Ponti pulled out his funding (thus meaning there wasn't enough money to back the film), and was only saved from such a sentence when filmmakers Francois Truffaut & Claude Berri bought the international rights to the film, which won acclaim abroad.  Forman would never make another film in Czech, and would not much later be making two Best Picture winners (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus), but while this film was revolutionary at the time, it reads today as no more than a mere curiosity.

Targets (1968)

Film: Targets (1968)
Stars: Tim O'Kelly, Boris Karloff, Arthur Peterson, Monte Landis, Nancy Hsueh, Peter Bogdonavich
Director: Peter Bogdonavich
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

When you read this I'll be coming back from a sojourn to visit my parents (we've all been socially distancing to do this trip, don't worry), and on that trip, I'll be listening to new episodes of my all-time favorite podcast, You Must Remember This.  This season, Karina Longworth is taking an in-depth look at the career of Polly Platt, an Oscar-nominated art director who was most famous for decades as a creative contributor (and frequent producer) of some of the most ingenious projects to come out of Hollywood, ranging from The Last Picture Show to Broadcast News to The Other Side of the Wind.  Platt's first significant film was the 1968 Roger Corman movie Targets, which was also the directorial debut of her then-husband Peter Bogdonavich.  The next episode I have in the series apparently goes quite in-depth into this movie, and since I'd always wanted to see it (and a recording of it was sitting on my DVR thanks to the eternal gift-giver TCM), this felt like the perfect time to take the opportunity.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie tells two seemingly unconnected tales that end up coming together in a petrifying final sequence.  The first story is one that Bogdonavich would intersperse into a lot of his movies and certainly into his decades of colorful anecdotes about Hollywood: the story of a Classic Hollywood actor.  In this case it's Byron Orlok (Karloff), an aging horror film actor who wants out of the business after finishing his last movie The Terror (which was, in fact, a real-life horror movie that starred Karloff and a pre-fame Jack Nicholson, so your eyes are not deceiving you when you see Jack Nicholson randomly show up in Targets, and according to legend around this movie, Nicholson sought after the other lead in this movie but wasn't given it).  Orlok has a curmudgeonly respect for his assistant Jenny (Hsueh) and a young screenwriter-director named Sammy (Bogdonavich), who has written an actually strong film that might give Orlok a new chapter in his career (meta, right?).

The other aspect of the story is around Bobby Thompson (O'Kelly), an all-American guy (handsome, young, veteran) who seems to have the world-on-the-sleeve, but whose only passion appears to be firearms.  Throughout the movie we see Bobby pretend to kill people, frequently stockpiling more and more weapons while his wife and his parents take little notice.  He eventually goes on a shooting spree, first killing his wife & mother, then shooting people randomly from a tower overlooking a freeway, and then finally shooting people at a drive-in...a drive-in showing The Terror where Byron Orlok is set to make his final appearance before retreating into retirement.

The movie up until the shooting scene at the drive-in is interesting if not always compelling.  The drive-in sequence in many ways anticipates another classic New Hollywood movie, one that I really want to name-check but it's such a surprise what happens at the end of the picture that I don't feel I should...suffice it to say, this movie was influential.  But before that scene, the O'Kelly scenes are oddly bereft of emotion.  This is a choice that I think works in hindsight, but I can't imagine how Bogdonavich had the foresight to think of making such a prototypical, 21st Century villain.  At the time, the character was based in large part on Charles Whitman, who killed 17 people in 1966, many of them at random from a tower at the University of Texas (Whitman also killed his wife and mother before his shooting rampage), and if you look at photos of Whitman and O'Kelly, they do share a similarity.  What makes Targets prescient, though, is that Whitman/Bobby Thompson fit the mold of what we think of as a 21st Century villain-straight, white, male loner obsessed with collecting weaponry & risking other people's safety.

This is what makes the final sequence at the drive-in so electric.  We know at this point that Bobby Thompson is a monster, solely intent on increasing his body count before capture or death.  We watch in horror as an audience of cars slowly realize that the danger is not the villain on the big-screen (Karloff's Orlok in The Terror), but instead a more real, actual danger.  People open their cars or speed away, trying to escape, but in the process turn on the lights, making them easier targets.  It's petrifying-one of the scariest things I've ever seen a movie.  All-the-while, there is Byron Orlok, as we come-to-understand his retirement is more about shutting out the world as he is afraid of death, not realizing that he's being confronted with it in very tangible, absolute terms.  When Orlok ultimately is the person who stops Thompson, he states "is that what I was afraid of?" as if realizing that death can come in many forms.  The film itself isn't strong enough to warrant 5-stars (the earlier sequences are too prosaic), but this is a fascinating film and a strong debut from Bogdonavich, who was about to make a trio of celebrated movies (The Last Picture Show, What's Up Doc?, and Paper Moon), and features a mesmerizing piece-of-work from Karloff, giving his final onscreen performance.

if... (1968)

Film: if... (1968)

Stars: Malcolm McDowell, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, Robert Swann, Peter Jeffrey

Director: Lindsay Anderson

Oscar History: No nominations, but it did win the Palme d'Or

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Sometimes Palme d'Or winners take on their own life, becoming instant classics that are talked about in gushing circles for decades to come.  Other times, they feel inconsequential, largely forgotten or the sort of movie when you're listing the winners that not only have you not seen, you've also not heard of it.  if... our movie review for today, is somewhere in-between.  This is not MASH or Pulp Fiction, an English-language movie that changed the cultural landscape to the point we still discuss it, but it was a hugely influential picture, one of the major films of the 1960's counterculture, in many ways as important at the time as landmark films like Blowup.  The film put Malcolm McDowell on the map, and indeed got him the role of Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange that would make him a legend.  But what is  if..., a movie that I had seen on lists but had no clue what it was actually about until I recently scurried to watch it before it disappeared off of the Criterion Channel?  Let's find out.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place at a school in the 1960's, one where the students live at the school rather than return home at the end of the day (I believe in Britain this is referred to as a "public school," which has a completely different meaning in the United States, hence why I'm providing a definition).  Mick (McDowell), Wallace (Warwick), and Johnny (Wood) are three men who are in their penultimate year at the school, and are thus one rung below the authority prefects, headed by Rowntree (Swann), who has an obsession with his role in authority, and is indeed given an enormous amount of leeway from the staff, who appear powerless compared to the prefects.  After Rowntree decides to teach the three younger students a lesson, they rebel against him at the Founders' Day celebration, and Mick, Wallace, Johnny, and Mick's girlfriend (simply known in the film as "The Girl," played by Noonan) begin to shoot people fleeing the celebration after they set off a smoke bomb in the school hall.

The film is shocking, as are frequently a lot of the best-made counterculture films.  The sex and violence, completely unthinkable just a few years prior to if... being released, is groundbreaking and bold.  This film, considering its ending, certainly could not be made or shown widely today, particularly considering the epidemic of gun violence in the United States.  The film's sexual politics are also ones we wouldn't see today.  There's a scene where Mick kisses "the Girl" without her permission, and then in a fantasy sequence they wrestle, and the prefects force the junior students to essentially be their slaves, and frequently make sexual innuendos about them.  Combined with a general sense of rebellion against authority, if... is a movie that intends to announce itself, and it's not hard to see why Cannes took notice.

That's because if... is a masterpiece.  If you can move past some of the realism, particularly in regard to gun violence, what's here is a fresh film and one that clearly influenced a number of filmmaker's in the years that followed (particularly Stanley Kubrick).  It's anchored by a wonderful star turn from McDowell, menacing and involved with this character in a way that few other actors would be able to be, but truly it's Anderson in the director's chair who takes this film to another level.  The sporadic use of black-and-white, the great use of close, medium, and long shots, the way that it puts social commentary squarely in its center but also can feel universally about the rebellion of youth some fifty years after the fact...that's difficult to achieve in a movie.  if... isn't well-remembered today, but it should be-this is innovative, provocative cinema.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

Film: Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Stars: Claudia Cardinale, Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Gabriele Ferzetti
Director: Sergio Leone
Oscar History: In one of the worst decisions in the history of the Academy, the film received no Oscar nominations, making it arguably the best film ever made to never receive an Oscar nomination.
(Not So) Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

I recently bought a house, and as a project for that house I'm working on the creation of my own little movie room in the basement.  While it's not quite finished yet (I feel like I shall have a similar attitude toward my blog & novels about my house in that I'll never be entirely satisfied with it, always tinkering), it's the closest any room in the house is to being exactly what I was dreaming of it being, and as a result I've been inaugurating a number of my favorite films in the room.  This weekend, I gave the room arguably its biggest classic title yet with Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, my favorite western of all-time and a film that, quite frankly, I can't recall the last time I'd seen it and was a little worried that it had become too storied in my memory to actually live up to the hype.  A nearly three-hour epic western that regularly ranks in my favorite films list as one of the greatest of all-time (it's currently positioned at #11, and is well-poised to crack the Top 10 the next I update the list), I don't think I'd even seen my Blu-Ray copy of the film yet, and may not have seen it for at least four years.  Thankfully, my memory didn't evade me-Once Upon a Time in the West was better than I remembered and even more glorious on the bigger screen (that is featured in my movie room), particularly with the Blu-Ray.  A true epic in every sense of the word, and a landmark picture that, despite its growing fame, doesn't feel as essential to any movie-lover's "must see" list as it should.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is hard to summarize into one simple paragraph as we so often do in my reviews, but here goes.  The movie takes place in a land where modernity and the wild west meet-a train magnate named Morton (Ferzetti) is making his way to the Pacific Ocean before he dies of a debilitating illness (it feels like muscular dystrophy, but the illness is never identified in the picture).  In order to get there in time, he hires a ruthless band of thugs, led by one of the nastiest villains in film history, Frank (Henry Fonda, of all people, playing a truly cruel baddie that totally upends his longtime nice guy persona), to kill an Irishman and his family on the eve of his wedding to a New Orleans prostitute named Jill (Cardinale).  Unknown to Frank, Jill is not in fact his fiancé but his wife, having gotten married in New Orleans and is therefore the legal owner of his desert ranch, which it's later revealed is a shrewd investment since the railroad must run through it to get there, and her husband McBain (Frank Wolff) planned on building a train station and making a fortune.  While trying to figure out what to do with Jill & the ticking clock of the railroad, we are dealing with two mysterious men in the story.  One is Cheyenne (Robards), a bandit whom Frank impersonates while killing McBain in order to frame him for the murders, and Cheyenne is none-too-happy about this, vowing revenge on Frank and his men.  The second is a man that only goes by Harmonica (Bronson), his real name never being revealed, who is known for playing his eponymous instrument and always keeping a cool head and his strategy to himself.  The movie ends with a showdown between Frank and Harmonica where it's revealed (wasn't kidding about that spoiler alert) that Frank killed Harmonica's brother many years earlier, not by shooting him but by hanging his brother from a noose and then having Harmonica serve as a living gallows, knowing that he can't stand forever but having him fight to keep his brother alive.  It's a nasty reveal in the showdown, when you finally realize why Harmonica has to win, and why he's hated Frank with such a blaze.

The film, as I mentioned above, is the greatest western of all time, a much-maligned genre for those who simply think of Peter Griffin saying "pilgrim" when they think of the classics of this era, rather than realizing the rich history of the many westerns that challenged the John Wayne tropes (even Wayne's own The Searchers would do just that).  The movie's genius lies in the way that it starts a ticking bomb in its first, meandering opening scenes, where Harmonica kills three nameless robbers (played by veteran character actors Woody Strode, Jack Elam and Al Mulock).  From then on, both Harmonica and Frank are marching to their inevitable end, and the film in some respects feels like one long ending.  This wouldn't work in virtually any other film, but it's the ending of a story that began long ago, of the men who created the west, but were too rough and too violent to make a proper civilization in this short-lived period of American history.  Frank, Harmonica, and Cheyenne are relics, and they know it as the film progresses, each realizing their way-of-life is not just threatened, but gasping for air, and it will be Jill, thoughtful, planful, and modern, who will bring the new world to the West.  This is a tall order for a film to carry, and almost any other director would have fallen under the weight of such a task as creating a gargantuan epic about the decline of the American West, but Leone was clearly the kind of director who took such tasks to heart.  The last thirty minutes makes for one of the best endings to any movie, period.  Think of the risk of having Harmonica's true reason for killing Frank come just seconds before Frank's death, an ending where we don't entirely know if Frank understands why he's being punished by this mysterious man.  Or the gravitas that Bronson brings to his still-faced goodbye to Jill, his "someday" not being literal but in fact that men of his nature will eventually come to save the world from evil if they are ever needed...that should read as so hokey, but it really never does.  It's hard to grasp how many jumps the film makes with its viewer that could fall flat, but Leone's confidence that he's making just a near-perfect film won't be deterred, and it pays off.

The film received no Oscar nominations, which is an unforgivable sin.  I'd argue it's not just the best movie of the year, but arguably of the decade, and it was probably ignored because Leone's film performed poorly at the box office (the western being on its last legs of Hollywood glory at the time as well), but has been rescued in decades since by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, who both consider it a landmark.  The film surely deserved nominations for Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, and the top prizes, but perhaps most egregious would be Supporting Actor and Score.  The performances are uniformly good, with Claudia Cardinale tasked with a tough part, playing the introverted hooker-with-a-heart-of-steel, and Jason Robards a brute who is also kind underneath.  But it's Bronson and Fonda who deserved the most credit.  Bronson's lone wolf is mesmerizing, the sort of performance you don't know an actor has in him until you give him the script.  Known for his tough guys and the Death Wish pictures, Bronson gives a soulful, deeply-felt performance as Harmonica, and it's hard to look at this and still see the caricature he's known as in popular culture.  Fonda is his equal as nasty, vicious Frank.  Villains are Oscar's raison d'être for Supporting Actor, so I don't know why the Academy ignored Fonda here since he was woefully without an Oscar (he'd win one 13 years later for the fine but not remotely as good On Golden Pond). Both men deserved nominations more than any performance I've seen from that category in 1968, and the same surely goes for Ennio Morricone with the most luscious score in film history.  Seriously-this is the best work from one of cinema's finest composers, lilting and iconic, frequently associating specific music with each of the four leads and it's instantly recognizable.  Morricone's work, not to get too hyperbolic, is my favorite cinematic score of all-time, and as a result it's a crime that it wasn't victorious, much less nominated.  Still, though, Oscars are one thing, but a critical reputation that grows almost every year since it's release is another.  Once Upon a Time in the West may not have gotten the attention it deserved when it came out, but a movie this good will always be found, and thankfully critics and film-lovers have done just that.