Rider on the Rain (1970)

Film: Rider on the Rain (1970)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Marlene Jobert, Gabriele Tini, Annie Cordy, Corinne Marchand, Jill Ireland

Director: Rene Clament

Oscar History: No nominations, though it did get a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film.  France, however, in 1970 chose to submit Hoa-Binh, and wasn't nominated at all.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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 Charles Bronson: click here to learn more about Mr. Bronson (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Charles Bronson's career as a movie star was bizarrely-timed.  Similar to actors like, say, Morgan Freeman & Samuel L. Jackson, Bronson spent decades after coming to Hollywood working in a host of small & supporting roles before getting top-billed parts in his 50's.  Like most of these men (and honestly even more so), Bronson did this in notably good movies.  While early roles had him playing occasionally in B-Pictures (like the Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax or the celebrated Roger Corman biopic Machine Gun-Kelly), he appeared in a number of really popular & classic movies in the 1960's, including The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Sandpiper, & The Dirty Dozen, all of which had him in key supporting roles...but not getting the lead parts that were going to men like Richard Burton & Steve McQueen.  Bronson did, during this time frame, get a part you could arguably say he's the male lead in, Once Upon a Time in the West (he gets fourth-billing in the film, but of the three main men in the movie, he has the most screen-time), a film that was not a success when it was released to American audiences (it was filmed in Italy), but has since been considered by many to be a masterpiece.  I will go on record as saying it is my favorite movie of all-time (full stop), and Bronson is wonderful in it.

(Spoilers Ahead) But that changed in the early 1970's, as Bronson started to regularly to get lead roles, one of the first of which was Rider on the Rain.  Rider on the Rain is about a man named Henry Dobbs (Bronson), whom we don't realize until much later in the picture is not a true blackmailer or a cop, but instead a member of the military.  It's also true that much of Rider on the Rain is not really Bronson's movie-the main character in this (despite billing to the contrary) is Mellie (short for Melancolie, one of several cheeky monikers in this picture), played by French actress Marlene Jobert, who despite not being super well-known to American audiences now, was a regular lead presence in French films of the 1970's (and would go on to win an Honorary Cesar for her troubles in 2007).  Jobert & Bronson have a weird chemistry, one that feels at odds with his famed brevity as an actor (Bronson in virtually all of his roles speaks in short, clipped sentences...if you've never seen him, think something like Clint Eastwood but with slightly more inflection).

Rider on the Rain, though, would not be the prototype for a Charles Bronson picture, and that's a kind of a pity because while the film isn't very good, it is quite odd (and if you know me, you'll know I'll take "weird & not very good" over "boring but fine" any day of the week).  Jobert's Mellie kills a man who rapes her in the opening scene, and for much of the movie is trying to convince everyone around her (including herself) that she didn't do it.  It's a weird juxtaposition because in 1970 (and especially in 2026), the audience is rooting for her, and is fine giving her a pass for dealing out very direct vigilante justice.  She's also played strangely, with Jobert feeling at once a mature woman, one who is lusting after a shockingly jacked (the man's abs are incredible for being nearly 50 and not having modern workout techniques) Bronson, while also playing a "little girl" role in parts.  The film in many ways feels like a sort of New Wave take on Hitchcock, and some of the camerawork mirrors that (as does a twist at the end that I won't spoil even with the spoiler alert-you'll have to see the movie to find out).

The film also starred Jill Ireland in a supporting part.  Ireland is going to show up in one more movie we profile this month, but I'm going to take this moment to talk about her a little bit given that she was so crucial to Bronson's public persona.  Ireland & Bronson met in a rather nefarious way (she was married to David McCallum, Bronson's costar in The Great Escape, and according to legend Bronson told him that he was going to "marry his wife," which of course he would in 1968, and the two would star in 15 films together throughout the course of their career.  Ireland is important to understanding Bronson's public profile in part because she was in so many of his movies (and would even produce some), but also because he was famously shy.  Bronson rarely sat for interviews, so he didn't get the traditional cultivated celebrity-treatment that other stars would get as part of media coverage, but one thing the public knew about was his devotion to his wife.  You watch one of the rare interviews he did in the 1970's (with Dick Cavett) where he was joined by Ireland and you see the devotion, and by all accounts they had a very happy marriage.  We'll talk a little bit about this as we go along, but wanted to give Ireland her due alongside our month of Charles Bronson given she was such an important component in his filmography.

The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Film: The Dunwich Horror (1970)

Stars: Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley

Director: Daniel Haller

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

By the mid-to-late 1960's, Sandra Dee's teen idol days were coming to an end, and sadly, so was her career.  Like Annette Funicello before her, Dee couldn't make the transition into proper adult roles, and Universal dropped her around the same time her tabloid-friendly marriage to Bobby Darin fizzled.  She made a few pictures at the end of the 1960's, including the successful Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding! with George Hamilton, but by-and-large, Dee was done with the film industry.  Her one foray into a proper adult role came in 1970, in the independent film The Dunwich Horror, which put Gidget herself opposite Oscar winner Ed Begley in a picture about satanic, sex-crazed netherworld demons.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place over multiple time frames, first opening with a ritual sacrifice of a young woman, and then flashing forward to "today" (which is actually the late 60's), where Nancy (Dee) is guarding a copy of The Necronomicon (which, inexplicably, the original copy of it is just in some random university library behind nothing more than a glass case).  Despite the warnings of her professor Henry Armitage (Begley), Nancy is smitten with a creepy, glass-eyed guy named Wilbur (Stockwell).  Wilbur is obsessed with creatures from another world, "higher forms" as he calls them, and think the book will help him to learn more about them (he doesn't tell Nancy that he's preparing her as a sacrifice to bring them back).  As the film progresses, we learn that while Wilbur was born of his human mother, his twin in utero was a demon monster who is kept locked in their attic.  When he is let out, he goes on a murderous rampage, including attacking Wilbur just before he is about to murder Nancy to bring back the other creatures.  This seemingly ends the tale, though Nancy is pregnant with Wilbur's baby (which we find out in the film's final shot, where a camera zooms in on Dee's barely concealed vagina), so there's room for a sequel in a pre-Roe America.

The film is stupid, let's be perfectly clear about that.  The plot rarely makes sense, and Begley (in his penultimate film role-he would die just a few months after the film's release from a heart attack) doesn't help much.  Stockwell seems to understand that this is maybe supposed to be funny, as his zoned-out goth student act is hard not to giggle over (I also both get and am confused by people claiming he's a total stud in the film, as he's definitely cute but not in a Robert Redford sort of way).  But the film doesn't work, and honestly, Sandra Dee doesn't get much to do in the picture.  She's once again playing the virgin, albeit this time she actually gets laid (in a wanton, demonic sex ritual...which still sounds better than some guys I hooked up with in college), and doesn't get more to do than that.  Dee has stated this was one of the films she was most proud of, perhaps because it's one of the only films where the subject matter gets beyond her playing a pretty young woman, but...it's not a good movie.

More than any actress we'll profile this year, Dee felt crushed under the weight of both being and then losing the title of America's Sweetheart.  After Darin, she would never marry again, and would rarely work in movies in the years that followed.  She would eventually come to terms with the sexual abuse her stepfather had put her through (accusing her mother of knowing that it had happened), and bad health plagued her in the 1980's, when she would suffer from alcoholism and anorexia.  The effects of that alcoholism would eventually cost her her life (even though she would eventually quit), dying from kidney failure in 2005 at the age of just 62.  At that point, once one of the world's most famous women, Dee had basically had become a recluse for over twenty years.

Next month, we're going to talk about a woman who took the title of America's Sweetheart and made it her own not through movies, but largely through television, enjoying critical success with it.  We're going to talk about that television career, as well as the surprisingly diverse film career she managed to pull off as a side hustle throughout the month of September.

Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Film: Myra Breckinridge (1970)

Stars: Raquel Welch, Rex Reed, John Huston, Mae West, Farrah Fawcett, John Carradine

Director: Michael Sarne

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

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

I'm going to be honest here, it feels kind of mean to put this movie next in our month devoted to Raquel Welch.  We aren't going to be jumping super far after 100 Rifles here for Welch chronologically, and I'll be real that based on the cast list & the genre, I assumed that I'd have liked 100 Rifles more than I did, so we're going to have our third 1-star movie in a row for the actress today.  But it would be irresponsible to talk about Raquel Welch's career and not bring up the nadir of her stardom: Myra Breckinridge.  We'll get into this below, but initially one would've thought that Welch was making a good decision here.  The original novel (by Gore Vidal) on which this story is based was a big deal.  It was certainly controversial (many called it pornographic), but it was celebrated by some (Harold Bloom included the novel in The Western Canon), and for an actress like Welch, who was trying to be taken seriously by her peers, investing in a movie that might do that made sense.  Instead, it nearly wrecked her career (and in some ways caused irreparable damage), and pretty much every person involved with the movie has since opined it was an unmitigated disaster, destroying the lives of several involved & generally being considered one of the worst movies ever made.

(Spoilers Ahead) All right, this is a very strange movie, and one that is not sensitive to today's views on transgender issues, so I'm going to be matter-of-fact in describing the plot as accurately as they did at the time.  We open with Myron Breckinridge (Reed), undergoing an experimental surgery at the hand of a surgeon (Carradine, in a cameo).  He is then transformed into a beautiful woman, Myra (Welch) who goes to see Myron's Uncle Buck (Huston) under the guise that Myra is Myron's widow, rather than telling the truth.  Myra is entitled to a portion of Buck's school, and when Buck refuses to give over the school, Myra insists on teaching at the school while Buck comes up with the money.  While there, she meets two "all-American specimens," masculine, handsome Rusty (Herren) and feminine, blonde Mary Ann (Fawcett).  In her quest to "destroy the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood," (that's a direct quote from the movie) Myra sets out to seduce both of them, first Rusty (which she does by raping Rusty with a strap-on dildo), and then after Rusty breaks up with Mary Ann, she starts sleeping with the blonde.  Eventually Uncle Buck concludes Myra isn't who she says she is with him trying to get her to admit she's a con artist, and then she exposes herself (and her apparently still-present testicles) to Uncle Buck, showing that she is Myron.  After this, we see that Myron has just been dreaming all of this-the people were figments of his imagination (Mary Ann was his nurse, and on a nightstand seen by the audience but not Myron as the film concludes, is a picture of a magazine featuring a headline & cover story about "Raquel Welch").

That's the plot in essence, though there are other aspects to the film worth mentioning (specifically that Reed's Myron continues to appear to Myra, frequently lusting after both Mary Ann & especially Rusty from afar, as a figment-of-her-imagination, and a strange subplot involving Mae West's Letitia van Allen as a casting couch-agent who at one point beds an extremely young, pre-mustache Tom Selleck).  But this is enough for you to understand we're in uncharted territory plot-wise, right?  A few years after the fall of the studio system, Frank Capra has officially left the building.

Myra Breckinridge could have been a cult classic.  It has those trappings, just a few years away from the quintessential (and not entirely dissimilarly-themed) Rocky Horror Picture Show.  But Myra is terrible, and not even some of its campier elements can save it.  Myra as played by Welch is a cartoon, a cruel, vicious cartoon, insensitive, degrading, & violent.  She's a weird juxtaposition of celebrating Old Hollywood (in many ways mirroring film critic Red Reed himself in that regard) and wanting to totally defy gender norms.  Her sexuality at the end feels a bit confusing (it feels like her lust after Mary Ann is more real than her lust after Rusty, even though Myron generally feels like he's a gay man in our meetings with him in apparition).  And putting Myra aside, the movie is littered with terrible performances (including from actors like Huston, who are brilliant in other movies), and a plot that vacillates between dumb comedy & abject horror.  Particularly in its strange treatment of the character of Rusty (who is literally raped for laughs at one point in the film), it's just mind-bogglingly awful.

And that was the public reaction.  Myra Breckinridge was an abject disaster for all involved.  Mae West (who came out of a 27-year film retirement to do this movie) & Raquel Welch feuded repeatedly on the set, and the whole film went over budget quickly.  As word spread of what the movie was about (and that it was going to get an X-Rating, one of only two such films to be released by Fox with such a distinction), the use of old footage of movies in the picture was removed due to lawsuits from the original stars; Loretta Young & Shirley Temple (then a UN Ambassador, so even the White House go involved on her behalf) both successfully sued to have footage of themselves removed from the film (though other footage of Temple was still used during the opening of the film).  And the end product was savaged by critics, was a flop at the box office, and since then West, Vidal, Welch, & Fawcett have all publicly disavowed the film.  Sarne never directed another major studio film again, and eventually had to find work as a waiter at a pizzeria to make ends meet.

This also caused big issues with Welch's career.  Welch thought when she was signing up for this film she was taking her career in a different direction, a more serious one like we saw with Ann-Margret in Carnal Knowledge last month.  Instead, she became something of a joke, and never really got to do a film that was considered "important" in the 1970's.  Next week we're going to take a look at arguably the closest that Welch ever came to actual critical credibility, but it's worth remembering that unlike several of the women we profiled this year, Welch never actually was considered a serious actress (even in hindsight), and a lot of that damage lies squarely at the feet of Myra Breckinridge.

OVP: Tristana (1970)

Film: Tristana (1970)
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, Fernando Rey, Frano Nero, Lola Gaos
Director: Luis Bunuel
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Spain)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I am having a lot of health issues this week (not-Covid, for the record), and so other than work I have basically been a vegetable trying to calm said issues, which is why I haven't posted much.  My hope, though, is that by Sunday we'll still get out our four Foreign Film articles (and Saturdays with the Stars is all set to go already), and then next week (stomach-willing), I'll be back to our normal schedule.  Today our article is going to be about Tristana, one of the final films from cinematic icon Luis Bunuel, and a movie made at arguably the peak of Catherine Deneuve's initial stardom.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film feels at once conventional and very film-of-the-1970's.  We have Tristana (Deneuve), a beautiful young woman whose mother has just died.  She is taken on as a ward by Don Lope (Rey), who initially treats her as a father, but then adopts her as his lover, basically rationalizing to her and himself that if it weren't for him, she'd be on the streets, and therefore she owes him.  It's as gross as it sounds, but thankfully the filmmakers realize that it's gross.  Tristana eventually falls in love with Horacio (Nero), a handsome young painter, and is taken in as his lover, but when she gets sick and loses her leg to a tumor she agrees to wed Don Lope (who is now rich after inheriting a large sum from his sister), and in the final moments of the film, she kills him, essentially pretending to call for a doctor when he is obviously in need of medical care, and (presumably) inheriting his fortune.

The film is oddly juxtaposed between the beauty of a young Deneuve (radiant, always, but breathtakingly so so early in her career) with the grossness of the story.  The film's plot, with Don Lope essentially blackmailing Tristana into being his lover, is the kind you'd see in an old movie, but instead of having her eventually love him (which would have happened in an old movie, or, quite frankly Beauty and the Beast), she gets her revenge, and it's pretty cathartic for the audience.  The film has other visually gross elements (there's a scene where Rey's head, in a dream, is banging against a bell), but it doesn't need them-the heinousness of what is happening is already apparent.

Deneuve has a difficult role to play here.  While Rey and Nero have relatively standard characterizations (played well, but still), there's little growth in these characters, likely to show how much Tristana changes (or doesn't...both interpretations have merit) as we go.  There are scenes that don't make sense (like when she flashes a third side of the love square, a young man named Saturna, on a balcony) until the film's final moments, when you understand that Tristana, despite being robbed of her lover and her leg, is still in command, still aware of the effect she can have on men, not just sexually, but in taking what she wants from them, in this case revenge and inheritance.  There's the potential for this character to be an anti-feminist nightmare, but Deneuve doesn't play her that way-she's someone who understands power, and is willing to use her own to gain an advantage on those who betray her.  It's a fascinating, unkempt revenge tale.

OVP: Five Easy Pieces (1970)

Film: Five Easy Pieces (1970)
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Susan Anspach, Lois Smith, Ralph Waite
Director: Bob Rafelson
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Actor-Jack Nicholson, Supporting Actress-Karen Black, Original Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

It's always a little bit odd to see Jack in a film before Cuckoo's Nest, when he started his slow descent into the crazy, wild-eyed cartoon that we know-and-admire from The Shining or Batman.  Before that, while he always had that signature intensity and a carnality in his onscreen personas, he was still trying to prove himself as a genius for his generation, one of the truly great screen presences.  In many ways, this mirrors what happened to his Ironweed costar Meryl Streep, who also eventually became so famous and so identified with her offscreen persona that it became impossible for her to incarnate character acting roles.  Five Easy Pieces is one of the first films in Nicholson's legend as a great actor, coming a year after his big breakthrough in Easy Rider, and was his first nomination for Best Lead Actor at the Academy Awards, a category he'd compete in a total of eight times (to date).  The film has the feel of a 1970's classic, occasionally too lost and dated in the years since to land all of the punches it surely would have hit in 1970, but Nicholson is sensational as a little boy lost in the violent persona he's crafted in his adulthood.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers on Bobby Dupea (Nicholson), an oil rig worker with a brainy side, as he was once a child prodigy & classic pianist.  He spends his days cheating on his air-headed girlfriend Rayette (Black), who whines about the world while blasting Tammy Wynette records.  After finding out from his sister Partita (Smith) that their father has suffered two strokes and may soon die, Bobby returns back to the privileged place of his youth, where he begins to fall for his brother's fiance Catherine (Anspach).  Along the way, we start to learn about the world that Bobby abandoned, and the clear emotional scars a complicated relationship with his father have left him with, to the point where he doesn't seem capable of falling in love with a woman in the traditional sense.  The film ends brutally, with Catherine telling Bobby he's incapable of loving anyone, and then he proves her right by abandoning a pregnant Rayette at a truck stop while he heads as a hitchhiker up to Alaska, a callback to an earlier scene in the film where Toni Basil's Terry Grouse (yes, Toni Basil of "oh Mickey, you're so fine" fame) is discussing she and her friend's obsession with going to Alaska where it's "clean."

The film has a definite 1970's mold, with emotionally unavailable men trying to connect to a changing world.  Nicholson wasn't the only person who capitalized on this motif-Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, and Ryan O'Neal were all mining similar ground at this point to great success.  What sets Five Easy Pieces apart, then, is the ambiguity of the film, particularly its stronger second half.  There are scenes in the movie where you have to heavily understand what the script is giving you hints at.  Look at, say, the clear unrest in Lois Smith's work here-where she's so sexually repressed that she pursues a man she knows won't be good to her, an exact mirror of the relationship she has with every man in the film.  Or the sheer comic ridiculousness of Nicholson "fighting the man" in the form of Lorna Thayer's waitress in the movie's most famous sequence, the "chicken salad scene."  Or the very complicated, manipulative relationship that Rayette and Bobby have with each other, where you know they're destined to end up apart, but the way it happens lets them both find peace in a melancholy way.

The film struggles on occasion, and is hurt in the way that it looks at Bobby's philandering and abuse of Rayette as two-sided, when clearly it's more his fault that their relationship is poisoned.  Both actors received Oscar nominations for the film, and while it's easy to praise Nicholson's work here (the heartbreaking moment with his father, confessing things he's never said out loud to a man he was once terrified of but is now just a blank slate is jaw-dropping), I was mixed with Black's work.  She clearly embodies Rayette, but I feel like we keep going to the same well over-and-over, with the main moment at the end not being the moment we need it to be-she's expected to have not grown outwardly but grown inwardly, but to me she was still the same person at the beginning of the film.  It's easy to mix "good performance" with "I feel bad for her," and I think some of the praise for her work should fall into the latter camp even if people are claiming the former.  Black has some great moments ("I'm not a piece of crap") but her sole Oscar nomination left me mixed, even in a year of very eclectic nominees (I officially have seen all five of this year's nominated films, though I have little memory of Lee Grant in The Landlord).  The film is occasionally dated, but is one of the best of this style of "changing times" films I've seen, and one of Nicholson's most effective performances.  I'm not quite at 5-stars, but it deserves its perch as a "classic."

OVP: MASH (1970)

Film: MASH (1970)
Stars: Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kellerman, Robert Duvall, Roger Bowen
Director: Robert Altman
Oscar History: 5 nominations/1 win (Picture, Director, Supporting Actress-Sally Kellerman, Editing, Adapted Screenplay*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Seeing a classic for the first time is something that is a sight to behold, and quite frankly something I don't get to do very often anymore, particularly if I know in advance it's already a classic.  Most of the classics I've actually had a chance to catch by now in my movie-watching.  In fact, looking at the famed AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list, I only have four movies left to see (all of which we'll have reviewed here before the year is up).  So I went into MASH (or M*A*S*H, if you so choose) with a bit of nervous anticipation.  Would I love it?  Would my expectations be too high?  Would it be one of those movies that I gush on and on about or would it be a film that I simply relegate to the "it was okay" pile of the cinematic conversation?  Let's find out, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The thing I think that first threw me about the film, after tangential relationships with the hit show starring Alan Alda (I've seen a couple of episodes, but not enough to know anything other than Hawkeye, Radar, and Hot Lips' character names), was that the film felt grimier than I was expecting.  Perhaps forgetting that it was the 1970's and was filmed by Robert Altman, I was expecting something a bit glossier, a bit more in line with TV Land and not with an independent film channel.  The film gains from this, though.  Unlike other major war films of the era (The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now), we don't necessarily get a look at the realism of the war, but MASH is hardly supposed to be realistic-it's a farce of sorts, a comedy that isn't mocking previous films (like, say, Spy) but is simply going for straight laughs in its own Altman-esque world.

The film is by Altman and has to be called classic for at least a reason, so I am not going to sit here and tell you there aren't a few redeeming qualities to the movie.  The Altman-flow of the script, with actors talking over each other and in different directions is always jarring at first, and blissful when you see it working so well (Nashville is forever my favorite example of this, but none of his films have that much trouble achieving it).  The film is filled with characters, most of them memorable.  If a film is going to have a long shelf-list of actors, it's nice to know that they managed to create interesting side avenues with people like Robert Duvall's Frank Burns having tons of depth and interesting nuance.  The film rarely stops having a sterling script, even if some of the subplots border onto the offensive.

That's probably where my biggest issue with the movie lies.  It's finely written and directed, this is true, but the movie itself celebrates the jackassery of Hawkeye (Sutherland) and Trapper John (Gould) a little too much for my liking, particularly at the expense of the main female character Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Kellerman).  The film constantly wants to take Hot Lips down a peg for no real reason other than her gender, not only by giving her the nickname after a romantic dalliance with Duvall's Frank Burns is broadcast over the camp, but by consistently objectifying her, eventually watching her reduced to a faux shower stunt (where she is exposed naked for the entire camp to see) and to being a bouncy, idiotic cheerleader at a football game.  Honestly, the performance isn't helped by Kellerman, who plays Hot Lips as shrill and both uptight and randomly horny without any explanation for either, but she didn't get much to go by.  It's weird that this performance was cited for an Oscar nomination over anyone else in the film-perhaps it was the nudity (which was a pervy reason for the Academy, but not the first time they had done such a thing).

The sexism and the complete lack of empathy toward the main characters causes a disinterest as the film progresses, something that no amount of fine direction and writing is going to fix.  You need to care about the main characters, and I found nothing to like or really even hate in the main protagonists, so in the end it becomes something like a series of stunts, and the gravity of Hawkeye leaving loses all of its meaning in the final scene.

So while I see why this is regarded as a good film, a classic is a big stretch.  The film has aged miserably, and the writing/directing has been on display in far better pictures that Altman has made like Nashville and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  These were my thoughts at least-I suspect a number of you have seen this iconic movie-what were yours?

OVP: I Never Sang for My Father (1970)

Film: I Never Sang for My Father (1970)
Stars: Melvyn Douglas, Gene Hackman, Dorothy Stickney, Estelle Parsons
Director: Gilbert Cates
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Actor-Melvyn Douglas, Best Supporting Actor-Gene Hackman, Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Maybe it's the furniture.  There's something so distinctive about adult dramas of the 1970's-the mood is covered in grey, as if the screen has become exhausted from decades of technicolor, and is wallowing in self-pity.  It's something I've never truly loved, which is odd because there's few periods of film history that resonate more with me-perhaps it's because my favorite films of the era seem to breakout of this color scheme-Chinatown, The Godfather, Jaws-but it's always a tad bit jarring, as if you're visiting your great aunt's house and wondering why she simply won't redecorate.

(Spoilers throughout) This jarring juxtaposition, though, highlights what you have in common with the players onscreen, and there's a lot to see in yourself while watching I Never Sang for My Father, a film about when you realize that the balance of power within your relationship with your parents has started to lean toward your end, rather than visa versa, and what you lose in the process.  Gene Hackman stars as a dutiful son to a caring mother (Stickney) and a domineering and reductive father (Douglas), a once great man who has been compressed to anecdotes and rambling tales of his once great life.  When Stickney's character dies, you see that she's been the balancing act between the two, and Hackman must contend with the fact that he has little in common with his father, and that neither of them know that they love each other, or even if they do.

This is one of the great lost arts of the films of the 1970's that simply doesn't exist today.  There is an ending to the film (eventually Douglas and Hackman come to blows about their unrealistic expectations of each other, and go their separate ways, with Douglas dying offscreen), but there's no resolution.  Hackman or Douglas do not find absolution in airing their feelings toward another in a shouting match, but find more loss, more questions of why their lives didn't work out the way that they planned.  Only Alice (Estelle Parsons in a gut-punch of a performance), broken from years of exile from the family, has found closure in the family's many fractured relationships, by learning to hate her father and by proxy, hate the world.

Hackman and Douglas are both incredibly strong here, though I have to deduct a few points from Hackman for being ridiculously put in the Supporting Actor category when he's in every scene of the film.  Douglas, an actor that I adored in Hud, comes as close to taking out George C. Scott in the Best Actor race as one could without toppling him.  Both are men that know that their times have past-that they are relics that must make way for the new world, and for men who are more sensitive and whose ways they of which they neither understand nor approve.  Douglas's pleadings to his son to stay, to come and visit and go with him to the rotary club and not move to California, are less about seeing his son and more about seeing himself as a younger man, a man who was important and not fading into the background while the youth take control.  Everything revolves around his own youth, and his stories are not meant to bore or to entertain, but simply to remind both he and the listener that he was once a young man himself.  Douglas is just a force in the movie, and towers every scene as a man always in control.  His son, Hackman, allows him to tower again, not because he enjoys it, but in a vain hope to capture a childhood love that he knows he's supposed to have, but realizes in the dynamic title scene that will never come.  Robert Anderson's screenplay allows this uncomfortable bending, twisting their relationship until it snaps.  Their relationship will never be black and white like both hope, but like the movie, it is instead a collage of grey that neither can make clear.  It's in this grey that both actors excel best, and it is this grey that makes the film's tone so rich.  Or perhaps, it's just the furniture.