OVP: The Conversation (1974)

Film: The Conversation (1974)

Stars: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound)

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

Harrison Ford's public persona has long been of a man who didn't really want to be a movie star.  A lot of this, I have long-suspected, is at least partially untrue (otherwise why do it, especially when he became bonkers rich & didn't really need to do it anymore...after all, his wife is also a talented actor who now rarely works).  But it is interesting that Ford's fame came relatively late.  The role that made him a movie star was Star Wars, which was released just days before his 35th birthday. For comparison's sake with some of his 1970's peers, Al Pacino at that age had several Oscar nominations and the Godfather franchise, Dustin Hoffman had been Ben Braddock & Ratso Rizzo, and Jack Nicholson & Peter Fonda had both boarded a motorcycle into legend.  Ford spent much of the 1970's balancing his time between small roles in movies and making furniture for people like Joan Didion, Valerie Harper, & George Lucas.  Ford's movie career, though, is really interesting because he appeared in a lot of interesting movies, among them Michelangelo Antonioni's controversial Zabriskie Point, and three Best Picture nominees: American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, and today's film The Conversation.  For all of the talk about Ford at one point before Han Solo nearly quitting the industry to work as a high-profile carpenter, the more intriguing idea might be what he did in this film: taking on the role of distinctive, very handsome character actor in important auteur-driven features.

(Spoilers Ahead) The Conversation is a movie best headed into with you knowing as little as is humanly possible, so while I provide a spoiler alert on all of my reviews because I generally want to know as little as possible about all movies I'm going to, this one in particular it helps to go in blind so I'll reiterate that now.  The movie follows Harry Caul (Hackman), a man who runs a service that essentially follows people and records them for money (it is not lost on me that The Conversation, which competed with Chinatown for Best Picture in 1974, bears a striking resemblance to the Roman Polanski film as both are about private investigators who uncover more than they expected from a routine case).  Unlike Jake Gittes, Harry Caul does not advertise and is not well-known for his work.  He is, instead, anonymous to the point of unhealthy, keeping everything about him at a distance to the point his girlfriend (Garr) doesn't ever visit his apartment and he doesn't even have his own phone.  This is driven by wanting to avoid retribution, but also the very real threat of violence in his career.  Similar to Chinatown (again) there are allusions to a previous case throughout the film that the audience only understands to be too horrific to mention, and that haunt both detectives to the point they are constantly in fear of repeating it.

The Conversation is considered a landmark film, but because Francis Ford Coppola had it come out the same year The Godfather, Part II (one of the greatest movies ever made), it always feels like it doesn't get its due, and so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect headed into this-would it be a really handsome movie, one that stands up but can't compare with a picture as perfect as Godfather II, or would it be just as exceptional.  Again, similar to Chinatown, it's not clear until the last moments what's happening, and it's also not clear where The Conversation will land in that comparison.  But as the movie concludes, you realize it's also a true masterpiece.  We understand as the film ends that Harry has no idea what he's walked into, and what he's helped cause.  He assumes that the conversation between Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams at the beginning of the movie is of a couple that might be having an affair, and becomes concerned when he uncovers (while listening to the clips that he initially won't hand over to a man known as "the Director's" assistant without first meeting the Director himself) that a part of the clips that he couldn't initially hear says "he'd kill us if he got the chance."  When he meets the Director (played by an uncredited Robert Duvall) he becomes worried for the young couple's safety as it's clear Cindy Williams is the Director's wife.  But as we learn in the waning moments of the film, he's missed something on the tapes-the emphasis in Forrest's reading of the word "us."

Because as the film ends, it's a case where Frederic Forrest has murdered Robert Duvall's husband with help from his lover, leaving all of the money (and secret organization he has) to Cindy Williams, and leaving them the opportunity to end up together.  The movie's sound work is legendary (and Oscar-nominated) for a reason, as not only is the entire setup with Hackman's Harry filled with us getting whirs & blurs from the recording equipment, but also the film tells in flashback narrative things the audience will have missed.  The film clearly inspired everything from The Usual Suspects to Severance (which borrows heavily from The Conversation's score), and you see why-this is a movie that shows paranoia is justified...and cannot be resolved.  We end the movie with Harry knowing he is being watched, knowing that he can't escape or be safely private...and having to give in to that to not go mad.

Harrison Ford's role is a key component & a crucial part of this story, even if he's only in about three scenes.  He plays the Director's assistant, and plays him with a level of bureaucratic cool that you kind of just assume he's a jackass (also according to most reports, Ford played him as gay which kind of comes across in the way he's super bitchy in a way you don't find a male character in the 1970's, even if there's no hint of this other than him wearing a stylish green suit in one scene that Ford bought with his own money), one who has gotten to this position through being absurdly handsome and honestly it's the sort of character you assume you don't need to pay attention to as the movie progresses.  Because I am writing this about Ford, though, I was paying attention, and it gives you a whole other angle here.  Ford's Martin Stett is the only figure in the film who 100% knows everything that's going on we learn as the film goes by-he works for the Director, but he's also clearly aware of the affair, and given that he's still working for Frederic Forrest & Cindy Williams in the end, it's possible he orchestrated all of this in connection with them.  The paranoia seeps into the actual film...was this all a setup to use Harry, kill the Director, and give the young couple everything they wanted?  Only Ford's Stett, who calls Hackman in the end to tell him he's being watched, knows for certain, and makes him the true antagonist of the picture.  Ford is good in this, and as we'll talk about next week, that layered acting ability didn't totally diminish when his visage started to adorn the postered walls of teenage boys, but as I said above-it's hard not to think of Ford in the same way we think of someone like Robert Duvall or John Cazale, someone who added extra layers to already great movies, as a supporting character actor, while watching The Conversation.

OVP: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Film: The Towering Inferno (1974)

Stars: Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Susan Blakely, Richard Chamberlain, Jennifer Jones, OJ Simpson, Robert Vaughn, Robert Wagner, Susan Flannery, Jack Collins

Director: John Guillermin

Oscar History: 7 nominations/3 wins (Best Picture, Supporting Actor-Fred Astaire, Art Direction, Cinematography*, Film Editing*, Score, Song, Sound)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 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.

Steve McQueen's career hit its financial peak in 1974, when he starred with Paul Newman in today's film The Towering Inferno.  At this point, Newman & McQueen were two of the biggest names in movies, and there were quite a few arguments over who would get top billing in the picture (ultimately it was a draw, with McQueen's name first but Newman's name higher), but after this both would suffer career lulls.  Newman would rebound eventually in the 1980's with films like The Verdict and The Color of Money, the latter winning him his only competitive Oscar, but McQueen would never regain this position.  He'd make an ill-fated Ibsen film in 1978 (one that would basically disappear from public consciousness), and then a pair of pictures in 1980 (Tom Horn and The Hunter), both decent-sized hits that might have hallmarked a comeback, but that wasn't to be.  Just over three months after the release of The Hunter, Steve McQueen would be dead.

(Spoilers Ahead) But before we get into that, let's get into the height of his career, at least commercially.  The Towering Inferno was a landmark movie in terms of its box office in 1974.  In the previous years, films like Airport and The Poseidon Adventure had found a formula for success-put a bunch of famous stars, including at least a few studio system legends that can scoop up a supporting acting Oscar nomination, and place them in an insane disaster situation, one that will have at least a few of them die, but the audience can look on in horror as we wonder who from this insanely-stacked call sheet might be safe.  This film is no less than these, and arguably has the starriest cast  of the bunch, but is much more in the vein of Airport (which I did not enjoy) than The Poseidon Adventure (which I did enjoy, in large part due to Shelley Winters' solid work).  The film has the tallest building in the world on fire, and all of our characters, including architect Newman and firefighter McQueen, fighting to stay alive as more-and-more paths to the ground floor are forfeited.  Along the way, some live (including, surprisingly, conman Fred Astaire), and some die, most shockingly Jennifer Jones, who in a morbid twist would be flung from the top of a giant building in the movie two years before her daughter would commit suicide in exactly the same way.

If only the movie was any good.  Technically, this is impressive-the set design, effects, and especially the stunt work are out-of-this-world, but the film spends no time trying to develop the characters, giving us two-dimensional feats from genuinely talented actors.  It's not like someone like Faye Dunaway or Paul Newman can't add a bit of three-dimensionality to their work, but there's no call for it.  Our star of the month, Steve McQueen, feels almost ancillary to the plot of the picture even as he's supposed to be the hero.  Fred Astaire would receive his only competitive acting Oscar nomination for this movie, and man is it unnecessary-he barely has anything to do, other than shout for a dead Jennifer Jones toward the end of the picture.  It feels weird to live in a world where Fred Astaire (whom I love) never got a competitive acting nomination, but, like...over John Cazale in The Godfather, Part II or John Huston in Chinatown...let's not be ridiculous here.

As I said above, Steve McQueen would disappear from movies after this, having a bit of a nomad period where he just went out into the country in a motor home, in the process turning down parts in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Apocalypse Now that might've dramatically changed his legacy.  But his health by the late 1970's was in terrible shape, and he developed mesothelioma (likely due to asbestos exposure from his time in the Marines).  The National Enquirer, at that point most famous for its ongoing coverage of the death of Elvis Presley rather than the right-wing attack ads that it would become known for to modern supermarket shoppers, broke the story that McQueen was dying shortly before his death (he'd been trying to keep it a secret), and McQueen attempted a number of experimental procedures, including a surgery to remove a tumor from his liver in Mexico, a procedure he couldn't have performed in the United States because no doctor would do it (since it would kill him).  12 hours into the surgery, the American doctors were proven correct, and Steve McQueen died at the age of only 50 from a heart attack.

Next month, we're going to talk about a man who was good friends with McQueen, even if they also had something of a professional rivalry during McQueen's early stardom.  Like McQueen, he also would die young, but unlike McQueen, that death would cement his legacy in a way that would in many ways outlast any films he made in life...and would become the source of near constant conspiracy theory in the decades to come, in ways that would haunt his family for generations.

Death Wish (1974)

Film: Death Wish (1974)

Stars: Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, William Redfield, Hope Lange

Director: Michael Winner

Oscar History: No nominations

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 and star persona would've certainly been different were it not for today's movie.  At the age of 52, most character actors are transitioning out of the limelight or more stunt-heavy spots, and instead becoming the sage for a younger, more famous actor (or playing the father to a younger, more famous actress).  It's rare, though, that you are going to become a true movie star in your 50's, but that's what Bronson did.  At this point, it's worth noting (as we've seen the past few weeks) that Charles Bronson was a relatively decent & successful box office draw, specifically in Europe, but he wasn't as big of a deal in the United States.  Death Wish would change that, though.  The movie, in 1974, would become a cultural phenomenon, making an extraordinary amount of money, and staying in the box office for weeks on-end.  To give you a perspective of how long the legs were for this movie, it became the #1 movie in America on its twentieth week at the box office, and would end the year as the #9 movie of 1974, putting Bronson in the same leading man category as people like Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, & Charlton Heston.

(Spoilers Ahead) The politics and cultural resonance of Death Wish, though, is controversial, and that involves getting into the plot.  The film is about Paul Kersey (Bronson), who is very in love with his beautiful wife Joanna (Lange), with whom he has one adult daughter.  One day, a group of hooligans (including a very young Jeff Goldblum) break into the Kersey's home, murdering Joanna and raping his daughter.  Paul, a relatively mild-mannered architect, cannot handle that the two women he loves will not receive justice, and so he decides to take the law into his own hands.  He goes out, trains himself with a gun, and then starts to purposefully get mugged in the streets of New York by petty criminals who threaten his life.  He then turns around, and starts to murder them, all technically in self-defense, but clearly with the intention of killing them each time he goes out.  During this time, the city of New York starts to celebrate him, even as Inspector Frank Ochoa (Gardenia) tries to capture Paul, which he does (with the help of a very young Christopher Guest), but has to set him free because Paul, as the "vigilante" has become a folk hero.

The politics of Death Wish are not subtle, and it's worth noting a history lesson here.  The New York of the 1970's was dramatically different than it is today, and that's also true of America at large.  Violent crime rates spiked notably in the 1970's, and that increase would hold until the early 1990's when they would drop precipitously (despite what you may see on Fox News, America is considerably safer now than in the latter-half of the 20th Century).  This would, oddly enough, coincide with when Bronson would be a proper leading man, and might explain the divergence in opinion on Death Wish.  The movie sparked hot debate at the time-virtually every film critic of the era, from Roger Ebert to Vincent Canby to Charles Champlin to Gene Siskel all made a point of arguing that it was kind of reprehensible, essentially arguing that violence is the only way to stop other violence, and that it's not important to understand what is causing this rise in crime-just that we destroy it, even if it means trampling on people's civil liberties & right-to-justice in the process.  Even the author of the novel that inspired the movie, Brian Garfield, would try to distance himself from the picture.

Watching the film, it's hard not to agree with these critics.  Bronson's character is not super complicated, and while he plays him as a bit of a fish-out-of-water, he doesn't have the same everyman appeal that, say, Bruce Willis would have a few years later in Die Hard in a similar motif.  The film's then-aggressive violence is rather tame by modern standards (save for the brutal break-in scene), and Winner's confidence with editing & cinematography (and Bronson's undeniable presence) make it very watchable-it's easy to see why this was a hit, but it's completely fair to say that the film glorifies the violence it indulges in, and offers little in the way of political commentary other than endorsing the behavior of Bronson's Paul.  Hell, even by the end the police officer is supporting this sort of brutality.  On its technical merits, it's a 3-star movie (it's too good for me to go lower), but it also borders into dangerous in its messaging.  It's so sleek and so well-paced that it's clearly condoning this type of violence, and so I think the film's complicated legacy is justified (and it's hard to celebrate it's glorification & countless sequels).  And as we'll talk about next week in our final Saturday with Charles Bronson, it would change the trajectory of the actor's career, definitely for the more lucrative, but also making him a far less daring performer compared to the man who once starred in genuine classics like The Great Escape and Once Upon a Time in the West.

OVP: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Film: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Stars: Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper, George Memmoli, Gerrit Graham

Director: Brian de Palma

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Original Song Score)

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-00'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're going to start our month of horror in the mid-1970's, and with a filmmaker not necessarily known for horror so much as for making thrillers: Brian de Palma.  De Palma, of all of the hero-worshipped 1970's auteurs, is not a director that I love.  I get why he's special-there's clearly something happening in his movies that is interesting, and he's definitely got a distinctive style...but it's not for me.  I honestly didn't know when I picked Phantom of the Paradise for our premiere film that this was directed by de Palma.  Why I picked it was because, keeping with our theme, it's Oscar-nominated (though not true for all of them, there will be a number of Oscar-cited films this month as a parting blog nod to the Oscar Viewing Project).  The film, along with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, may stand apart as the only two rock horror musicals in film history, a combination that could only happen in the mid-1970's.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a send-up of both The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Gray set in a nightclub.  Winslow Leach (Finley) is a talented songwriter, but his works are stolen by Swan (Williams), the diabolical owner of the nightclub called the Paradise who spends most of his time bedding the women who audition for him.  Winslow is framed for drug possession, and is sent to jail where he has his teeth removed, and upon escaping disfigures himself further when he gets stuck in a record press.  Now deformed, he wears a mask (like the Phantom of the Opera), and begins to haunt the Paradise, trying to get revenge for his stolen music.  He eventually strikes a deal with Swan, that will allow the girl he met & wanted to sing his songs, Phoenix (Harper) to be the headliner, but he also realizes he has a devil's pact with Swan.  Swan has sold his soul to the devil so he can remain youthful forever, and Winslow can't die until Swan does, so they're trapped forever...until of course Swan is exposed as the monster he is (aka the Dorian Gray angle), and they both perish on the stage of the Paradise.

Here's the deal-even for a horror movie in the 1970's, this movie makes no sense.  It's preposterous, it frequently changes its plot with expositional dialogue each scene, and every scene feels like it's sort of telegraphing what comes next.  De Palma is not a subtle director, and this is not a subtle script.  It also isn't a particularly well-acted one.  Paul Williams is a fascinating choice for the bad guy, and is the best part of the movie, but it's more curious than actually good when you think about his performance itself.

But for what it is, it's not bad.  It's certainly a movie you won't stop watching, and it's brief & moves along given how thick with plot it is.  The film's song score was Oscar-nominated in part because this was a weak year for the category, but it's not an embarrassing moment for the Academy.  The best song is "Old Souls" sung by Harper, whose voice sounds shockingly like adult contemporary crooner Anne Murray (seriously, listen to it and tell me I'm wrong).  This becomes something of a theme for the film, and had every song handled with this kind of care, this would be a rocking soundtrack to a weird movie.  As it is it's just a fine soundtrack to a weird 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 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 Hills Have Eyes, The Omen, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, When a Stranger Calls, The Wicker Man

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

1990's-Present: Arachnophobia, The Blair Witch Project, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Candyman, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Paranormal Activity, Scary Movie, Scream

OVP: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

Film: Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)

Stars: Ellen Burstyn, Alfred Lutter, Kris Kristofferson, Harvey Keitel, Diane Ladd, Valerie Curtin, Jodie Foster

Director: Martin Scorsese

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Actress-Ellen Burstyn*, Supporting Actress-Diane Ladd, Original Screenplay)

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 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.

Last week we talked a little bit about Kris Kristofferson's very successful early career in music, but during the 1970's you'd be forgiven for thinking of him as a movie star in the same breath as thinking of him as a country music titan.  Kristofferson's career in movies is unusual because two of his biggest films of that era are movies that, while he got top-billing, he was totally overshadowed in terms of press coverage (and eventual recognition) in favor of his female costars.  That's certainly the case for today's movie, which is a pretty major crossover into the Oscar Viewing Project, as I watch my final (to date) Ellen Burstyn Oscar-nominated performance, and the only movie Burstyn ever won an Academy Award for.  The movie also happens to be the first studio movie that Martin Scorsese (who, like Burstyn, is still working) ever made, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is something of a road trip film, at least in the first half, with Alice (Burstyn) a former singer who has recently been widowed by her neglectful husband, taking her son Tommy (Lutter) across the country.  She wants to go to Monterey, her childhood home, where she dreams of picking up her singing career again, but along the way things get messy for her.  First, she meets a younger man named Ben (Keitel), who seems charming, but is actually an abusive married man whom she ends up fleeing town with after he threatens Alice.  At that point, in Tuscon, she gives up (temporarily) on her dream of becoming a singer for the more realistic life of a waitress in Mel's Diner, a local, fast-paced watering hole, where she befriends the outspoken Flo (Ladd), and starts romancing a regular named David (Kristofferson).  But her relationship with David is complicated by her increasingly unruly son, and eventually things come to a head when David physically disciplines Tommy.  The movie ends with them moving past this, and forming an unlikely family, with Alice giving up on her dream of being a singer, but finding a different kind of happiness with David instead.

I'll be totally honest-the ending of the movie doesn't work.  The movie's naturalism is its key asset, and that assists in a lot of the performances, but not in the ending.  The only logical reasons that David & Alice end up together are that it makes a cleaner ending than her pursuing a dream the audience knows won't happen, and that Kris Kristofferson circa 1974 is so hot you kind of look past the obvious, toxic masculinity flaws.  But it's not earned.  It's also hard to totally look at this from a modern lens without realizing that there is something seriously wrong with Tommy, who is a truly spoiled brat, and one who exhibits a lot of the same cruel tendencies that his father also exhibited at the beginning of the picture, which is going to be a problem for Alice in the years that follow (writing children in the 1970's was a nightmare unless you cast Tatum O'Neal or Jodie Foster, the latter of whom has a small role in this).

But the acting is good.  Burstyn brings a naturalism to her Alice, a modern woman who doesn't understand that it's not her gender, but her age, that will hold her back with the dreams she gave up to start a family.  There's an interesting commentary there about how the women's liberation movement came too late for a lot of women who now had the opening to make their dreams come true, but not the time.  Coupled with Ladd, who is superb in a side role as Alice's rival-turned-friend where she continually steals scenes, it's a great pairing and proof that Scorsese is capable of getting strong performances from women when he tries.  Kristofferson doesn't have a lot to do here but look pretty and then bounce off of Burstyn's monologues (this is very much an actress showcase film), but he does that well.

Black Christmas (1974)

Film: Black Christmas (1974)

Stars: Olivia Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon, Marian Waldman, Andrea Martin

Director: Bob Clark

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.

Halloween is generally considered to be the pioneer of slasher films, and it definitely did change (I would go so far as to say perfect) the genre, but it wasn't the first slasher film.  In fact, slasher films had been gaining popularity for a while headed into 1978 when the John Carpenter film would change the game.  Perhaps the most famous example of this came out in time for the winter holidays in 1974.  Black Christmas was a modest hit at the time (it struggled being up against The Godfather, Part II and The Man with a Golden Gun at the box office), but it would gain in reputation in the decades that followed, especially after the advent of the VHS (for those of you too young to remember this, horror films were a staple in video rental places-there would be rows of shelves solely devoted to them).  It was also, on a personal level, a movie I heard a lot about growing up because it was the one scary movie that completely scared my mom, who saw it at a retro screening when she was in college (as you'll see from the plot, a bit too close-to-home for a girl walking to her dorm room at night).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place at a sorority house, where a group of girls are partying while an unseen man climbs into their house into the attic.  They soon get a crank phone call from someone, saying provocative and deeply sexual things to them.  They laugh it off, but then one of the girls, Clare, gets murdered by him suffocating her with a plastic dressing bag.  The film progresses over the course of roughly 24-hours, with them initially finding out Clare is missing (though in a plothole I'm just not buying, she's literally in the attic, her corpse rotting in her chair, the whole movie).  The killer never really leaves the house, staying there killing the girls and their sorority mistress one-by-one.  Meanwhile, we get a sub-story about Jess (Hussey...who is quite good in a role she doesn't need to be) who is pregnant, and is going to have an abortion despite protestations from her boyfriend Peter (Dullea), who becomes increasingly obsessive and angry at her for not wanting to have the baby.  The film ends with her, being chased by the killer, confronting Peter, whom the audience at this point is positive isn't the murderer, but she isn't, and so she kills him.  In a terrific twist, the police see her, stunned, and also think she's killed the murderer, Peter, and leave her behind, sleeping in the house...but then the phone starts to ring, with the audience understanding that the killer is still there, and likely about to kill Jess as the credits start to roll.

The movie is weirdly well-constructed, especially for a relatively low-budget slasher film from Warner Brothers.  The editing is remarkable.  It looks as if the actor playing the killer has actually taped the camera to his head, giving us a point-of-view shot of the house (similar to Michael Myers...it's impossible to believe that John Carpenter hadn't seen Black Christmas given the similarities).  The technical proficiency is really helpful to the movie, and adds to the scares.  One of the most frightening shots in the film is the recurring one of Clare, dead & plastic, rocking in her chair upstairs, the only creature who knows she's there is the cat.  It's terrifying because she literally died, they found the "killer"...and still no one has managed to look just a few feet away from where they are to notice that her body is there.

That's kind of the brilliance of Black Christmas, though, a movie I thoroughly enjoyed.  The police are so incompetent I initially thought it was a plot crutch, but the movie is centered entirely about how the voices of women are silenced.  Jess, along with her roommates Barb (Kidder) and Phyl (Martin, and yes it's that Andrea Martin) are constantly trying to get the men in their lives to listen to them, to take them seriously as women & as adults.  In the end, they literally have a man take away their voices, and that happens because the other men in their lives didn't take them seriously.  In an era of Roe vs. Wade and the ERA, this film reads like one of the earliest truly feminist horror films we've watched for this series.

Past Horror Month Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

1970's: The Amityville Horror, Carrie, Dawn of the Dead, 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

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Film: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Stars: Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Edwin Neal, Gunnar Hansen

Director: Tobe Hooper

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 talked a few days ago about how Night of the Living Dead is in a lot of ways one of the founding fathers of modern horror.  Not only did it create the zombie (arguably the most important "new" monster creature of the past sixty years for pop culture since vampires & werewolves have been around for centuries), but it also set the prototype for things like violence, sex, & politics making its way into a horror movie.  But in terms of much of what we thought of as horror throughout the period we're covering this month (up until the late 1990's), you'd be hard-pressed to find a film that had a bigger affect on the horror film industry that Texas Chain Saw Massacre, a movie featuring no big-name stars, made for almost no money, but was able to translate into becoming one of the most successful films ever made, grossing over $30 million at the box office in 1974 (about $150 million today) while being made for less than $200k.  In many ways it would become the prototype for the "slasher" film and spawned a franchise in the same way many future pictures of this nature would do in the coming decades.

(Spoilers Ahead) Texas Chain Saw Massacre is definitely a film with some occasional twists, but honestly, the spoiler alert feels a bit indulgent given a modern horror fan will know pretty much everything that is about to happen in this picture.  A group of young, free-loving hippies pickup a hitchhiker (Neal), in the middle of nowhere, and quickly regret it when he starts to mangle his thumb with a knife, and then attacks one of them.  They throw him on the side of the road, but when they stop at the next gas station, they find it is out of gas, and instead of (smartly) going to the next place to try & find gas, they instead go to an abandoned house & wander around...until one goes to the neighbors and they are, well, torn asunder.  We get slowly more-and-more deaths, each deeply disturbing (at one point a girl is hung up by a meathook like in a butcher shop, and then is frozen alive), as we learn that this figure that we know as Leatherface (Hansen) as well as the gas station proprietor & the hitchhiker are all related, and are a group of serial killer cannibals.  Only one of the five, Sally (Burns) survives in the end, escaping onto a passing truck, though inevitably emotionally scarred beyond recognition.

One of my great fears in doing this project this month was that I would struggle mightily in terms of enjoying the films themselves.  I don't love watching a lot of violence onscreen, particularly if it isn't pertinent to the story (or used for some movie-serving device), and honestly my great fear was that many of these films would veer into torture porn, like that used in the Saw movies, which would not be something I'd enjoy at all.  With just two movies left to see (these are published chronologically but I didn't watch them in that order), I lucked out-virtually none of these films are ones where the violence felt gratuitous or like it wasn't aiding the story in some capacity...

...except The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  I loathed the movie, I'm not going to lie.  I understand that it is formative, and I respect that.  The concepts of a serial killer monster (Leatherface) surely influenced figures like Freddy Krueger, Jason, & Michael Myers, and of course Sally would fulfill the new trope of a quintessential "final girl" in this movie, but it was so gross.  The movie doesn't so much scare us with bumps or frights or "what will happen next's" but instead it's all about showing us mutilated bodies that have no personality or character behind them.  Even Sally, whom we're with for almost the entire movie, you know nothing about; you want her to survive because of human instinct, but not because you know her or care about her as a person.  That this would spawn genuinely great movies is proof that there are no bad ideas...but there are definitely bad movies.

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

Badlands (1973)

Film: Badlands (1973)

Stars: Martin Sheen, Sissy Spacek, Warren Oates

Director: Terrence Malick

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

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

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

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

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

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

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

Mame (1974)

Film: Mame (1974)

Stars: Lucille Ball, Beatrice Arthur, Robert Preston, Bruce Davison, Jane Connell

Director: Gene Saks

Oscar History: Both Ball & Arthur were cited for Golden Globes, but neither of them translated to Oscar.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Lucille Ball click here to learn more about Ms. Ball (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week, we talked about Lucille Ball's tumultuous marriage to actor Desi Arnaz, which overlapped with the most successful period of her career, where she & Arnaz redefined television as the Ricardos on I Love Lucy, still considered one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.  I Love Lucy went off the air in 1957, and while the two appeared in the successful Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour specials, their onscreen & offscreen relationships dissolved in 1960.  Ball, though, stayed on television for the next 15 years, first in The Lucy Show and then with her children with Here's Lucy.  Not as well-remembered today (particularly Here's Lucy, which thanks to competition from I Love Lucy and The Lucy Show, struggled to gain a foothold in an already crowded "Lucy Reruns" syndication market), both series were massive hits in their days, and from 1951-1972, Lucille Ball had a Top 10 hit every single season (even when it went off the air, Here's Lucy was still in the Top 30).  During this time, Ball tried her hand at other industries, including theater & film, marking one of her bigger successes opposite her The Big Street costar Henry Fonda in the rom-com hit Yours, Mine, and Ours, which finally put Ball in the same stratosphere in cinemas that she had had for years in television.  But all careers have lows with their highs, and today we will talk about perhaps the lowest moment of Lucille Ball's career until that point, and one of the most infamous flops of the 1970's: Mame.

(Spoilers Ahead) For those unfamiliar with either the original Auntie Mame film with Rosalind Russell (which I had seen) or the smash Broadway musical which has been revived many times (which somehow I haven't seen), Mame is the story of Mame Dennis (Ball), an eccentric (and wealthy) spinster who is made the legal guardian of her nephew Patrick (Davison as an adult) after her brother's death.  Mame raises Patrick unconventionally, inviting him to the "school of life" rather than a more traditional, conservative upbringing given his status.  She also goes broke early in the film, but finds a loophole around that when she marries Beauregard Burnside (Preston), a wealthy Southern gentleman.  The back half of the film shows, after Beauregard dies in an avalanche, the once-again wealthy Mame trying to save Patrick from the doldrums of life by sabotaging his relationship with a snobby society girl who is only interested in money.  As this is a feel-good movie, Patrick eventually sees the light & marries Mame's Irish maid, with their kid now spending time with Auntie Mame, completing the cycle from Patrick's childhood.

It's important to understand a few things about Hollywood in 1974 when considering this picture.  For starters, musicals like Mame weren't really something that Hollywood was making anymore.  While there were films that had been made that had mirrored the level of success of previous generation's of musical, they weren't usually comedies (think Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret, both pretty dramatic pictures), and so Mame already felt dated.  Warner Brothers also was sinking a fortune into the film, and as a result they wanted a known commodity.  Though they picked several key players from the Broadway production for the big-screen adaptation (including Bea Arthur & Jane Connell), for the lead role they felt that Angela Lansbury, who had been a Tony-winning sensation in the part, wasn't a big enough name to lead the film, and instead chose television's biggest icon instead.  There's a famous (potentially apocryphal) legend that Ball went to see Lansbury in the role, with Lansbury initially flattered before she noticed Ball watching the play while taking notes in the balcony...and that was when Lansbury realized she was never going to get to play the role for Warner.

Ball, though, was all wrong for the part of Mame.  In her early 60's at the time (a decade older than Lansbury), she couldn't sing (at all), and vanity seemed to get the best of her as she was frequently shot in soft focus to make her look younger (there are moments in the film that looks like the lens of the camera was covered in vaseline).  As a result, she was basically unwatchable & off-key in the musical numbers.  Even a part like Mame, which doesn't require a huge range (she's not Sally Bowles or Mama Rose), was too much for her, and it shows onscreen.  Ball isn't as bad in the scenes where's she's talking (she's still Lucille Ball-there's charisma to spare), and lord knows there are other problems with this movie (the sound mixing is excruciatingly bad), but the critics were right-Warner had made a foolish calculation in trading Lansbury for Ball, and what had looked like a potential Oscar player quickly became an industry punchline.  Ball would never work in movies again.

This was sadly not the last noted failure of Ball's career.  A decade later, despite having more money than she needed & her legacy firmly cemented thanks to her previous series playing in perpetuity in reruns, Ball wanted to take one last stab at television, which she did in 1986's Life with Lucy.  The show, though, didn't work-the jokes weren't funny and Ball's brand of humor felt dated in an era where Miami Vice and Moonlighting were hits (ironically, one of the biggest shows of that season was Murder, She Wrote, starring Angela Lansbury in the role that would make her a global TV superstar).  It didn't last the season, and Ball would die three years later, with the unfortunate knowledge that her last two major projects had been high-profile flops.  Luckily for Ball, though, her legacy is secure.  Decades later, we're still in love with Lucy, an actress synonymous with television in the way Marilyn Monroe is with movies or the Beatles are with pop music.  Next month, we're going to take a look at a different star (and good friend) of Lucille Ball's whose brief career in film never took off, but that led him to become of the biggest names in radio & the early days of television.

The Three Musketeers (1974)

Film: The Three Musketeers (1974)

Stars: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch

Director: Richard Lester

Oscar History: No nominations, though Welch won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical, so it's possible she was close?

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 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.

As I said last week, Raquel Welch's career after Myra Breckinridge never really recovered-she was never able to properly transition away from sex comedies, or roles that traded on her beauty (and curvy figure) in a comic or exploitive way.  That being said, Welch was a star in major studio films throughout the 1970's, and what is generally considered to be one of her best roles (and best films) of that era was The Three Musketeers, a retelling of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel, though told with more comedic elements than you'd generally expect from this story.  The film is an ensemble & star-studded, and while Welch is one of the lead characters, she's not one of the most important, a testament to Welch's inability to land solo roles in films that might have elevated her beyond her plastic screen persona.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie actually sticks pretty closely to the novel, though it only tells half of the story (the movie was followed by The Four Musketeers, and then many years later The Return of the Musketeers, a film that resulted in the tragic death of one of its stars, though that's a story for a different day).  We have young, naive d'Artagnan (York), starting from his humble beginnings in hopes of someday becoming one of the king's musketeers.  After inadvertently challenging all of the three musketeers (Reed, Finlay & Chamberlain) to duels, they start out on adventure to try to stop Cardinal Richelieu (Heston), who is undermining the Queen (Chaplin), who is having an affair with the Duke of Buckingham (Ward).  Despite the Cardinal and his accomplice Milady de Winter's (Dunaway) intentions, the Musketeers (including d'Artagnan) & the Queen's dressmaker (Welch) are able to help the Queen save face, and hide her affair from the King...though we get over the closing credits an indication that there will be more mad adventures with those involved.

The film is more fun than it should be.  The script is meandering, the characters are all two-dimensional, but Richard Lester (who made several films with the Beatles, who at one point were intended to star in this film), knows how to craft comedy, and the action sequences are played for maximum effect.  No one in the film is giving a great performance, but everyone is game.  We see several actors (Welch, Dunaway, & Heston specifically) totally trade on their real-world personas for maximum comedic effect, and the central story around the Queen trying to hide her affair works.  This was a hit for a reason-it's mindless, but pleasant fun.

The movie has a weird place in Hollywood history that I'd be remiss not to mention.  If you watch the movie in its original cut (as I did) you'll notice a preview to the sequel over the end credits.  This was something that films occasionally did at the time (we saw that during our month devoted to Nancy Kwan with The Wrecking Crew advertising a sequel that never came out).  However, this was unusual because the actors involved didn't know they'd made a sequel; the two movies were intended to be one four-hour epic, and the stars of the film only found out that they'd made two movies for Fox when they attended the premiere.  This was technically legal at the time-there were no guarantees that a studio couldn't do something like this, but the stars (who were only paid for one movie) were enraged, and eventually there was a union clause set out by SAG that actors had to be informed how many movies they were being asked to film prior to the release of a film.

Welch won a Golden Globe for this film, and is fun in it.  This is not stretching for her-we see men fall over themselves, including Michael York, trying to bed her in the movie, but at least she feels like she's in on the joke here.  The movie would not, however, win her an Oscar nomination like we saw for Ann-Margret.  The competition was fierce in 1974 (a legendarily good lineup by AMPAS), and had one of those women left, my gut says that Liv Ullmann in Abdication would've bested Welch for this slot (Ullman was deemed ineligible for her seismic performance in Scenes from a Marriage, and considering the hubbub Oscar might've wanted to go with her for literally any performance as a way to acknowledge her work).  

This was the only time in Welch's career she came close to a nomination.  She would continue making bad (but sometimes successful) sex comedies or action-adventures for the remainder of the decade, until the troubled production of Cannery Row cost her her career.  Welch was accused of diva-like behavior on the set, causing the studio to dump her as its lead, and instead cast (the younger) Debra Winger.  Welch sued, and would win over $10 million in the lawsuit for breach-of-contract, but this essentially ended her career.  No one sues the powers-that-be in Hollywood & gets away with it, and while Welch would do television & theater throughout the decade, she'd make no feature films between 1977 and 1994, and even after that her work was simply in cameo roles.  She'd make tons of money on beauty & health products (at 80-years-of-age, Welch still is fashionable & looks decades younger), but her time as a movie star was over.

And with that, the traditional film sex symbol also seemed to fade.  Welch was the last real star of that mold-the kind of buxom, sex goddess role-that had a sustainable career in film.  Some blips on the screen like Bo Derek or Megan Fox popped up, but they disappeared just as quickly.  Television became a much more lucrative spot for these types of stars (think of Farrah Fawcett or eventually the quintessential TV sex bomb, Pamela Anderson), as did modeling, pop music, & reality television.  The only star that comes close to the heyday of sex symbols in the modern era is Jennifer Lopez, who really treads the line between music & movies in a way none of her predecessors would've had to.  We will start a new theme, and a new year of Stars next Saturday, but before then we'll take a look back at what we've seen this season tomorrow as we close out our year devoted to Classic Hollywood sex symbols.

OVP: The Little Prince (1974)

Film: The Little Prince (1974)

Stars: Steven Warner, Richard Kiley, Bob Fosse, Gene Wilder, Donna McKechnie

Director: Stanley Donen

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Scoring, Best Original Song-"Little Prince")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

We continue on with our week devoted to music & the Oscars with a story I somehow didn't know.  I'd heard of the famous children's story The Little Prince by Count Antoine de Saint-Exupery, as it's obviously well-known and has been remade many times, but I'd never seen it done & didn't know the plot (which was much more modern than I expected upon actually viewing the film).  This production, possibly the most famous version of the story committed to screen, was in an era where screen musicals were basically dead, or at least this style of them had completely gone out-of-fashion, other than in children's movies like Bedknobs and Broomsticks or Tom Sawyer.  I generally like mid-1970's musicals because they're so earnest (and not trying to be edgy at all), so I was curious what this one would be like-would it join other splendid children's classics or be horribly dated?

(Spoilers Ahead) The story, for those unfamiliar is of a Pilot (Kiley) who must make a landing in the middle of the Sahara Desert.  There he meets a young boy, the Little Prince (Warner), who has fallen from a nearby asteroid.  The Little Prince does not understand adults, and how they have such peculiar & jaded ways of looking at the world, but when he lands on Earth he learns several life lessons from a Fox (Wilder) and a Snake (Fosse), life lessons that he teaches the Pilot while he fixes his plane.  The Pilot tries to keep the Little Prince alive as his stories end & the plane is fixed, but to no avail-the Little Prince dies, and the Pilot eventually comes to realize that the Little Prince never existed, and if he has, he has returned to the stars.  The Pilot moves on from the experience, forever changed by the young apparition.

The story is quite silly initially, and a bit confusing.  We are meant to understand that the Pilot doesn't relate well to other adults, and had many of his childhood dreams crushed (he strived to be an artist, but was mocked for his work so he gave it up), and the film easily could've been horribly dated, as cinematic children of the 1970's always sound either like Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time or Dennis the Menace (and right off the bat the Little Prince is more in the former camp).

But then after a while something happens-The Little Prince ends up being kind of magical.  The two leads have a fascinating rapport, with the Little Prince sharing life lessons from the Snake & Fox that the Pilot had never put together, about responsibility & how people become special & unique when we decide to love them.  As a result, while the film is made on a shoestring budget & is occasionally a tad ridiculous, it's also strangely beautiful, and you'll cry when it's over.

This is apparent based on the movie's two Oscar nominations.  The score is filled with fun songs, but none better than the title tune.  I have a serious soft spot for Richard Kiley (that baritone-my god), and so him singing this beautiful, haunting ode to his dying friend (a goodbye, but also a debt of gratitude for giving him a fresh appreciation for his life) is chilling.  I loved the song, and I really enjoyed the movie.  I don't know if this is the kind of film that I'd recommend to everyone else (this might be a "right mood, right time" situation that occasionally happens), but The Little Prince is a tale I won't soon be forgetting.

Swept Away (1974)

Film: Swept Away...by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (1974)
Stars: Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato
Director: Lina Wertmuller
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Later this month, Lina Wertmuller will become only the second female director to win an Honorary Academy Award (the first was Agnes Varda in 2017).  Wertmuller already had a distinctive chapter in Oscar history when she became the first female director ever cited for Best Director for 1976's Seven Beauties.  In honor of her accolade this month, I thought it appropriate we mark the occasion somehow, but while I have not seen Seven Beauties (obviously for the Oscar Viewing Project we'll get there eventually), I have always been more intrigued by a different, more controversial installment in Wertmuller's filmography: Swept Away (the full title is longer, as I listed above, but for the sake of my typing fingers, we'll refer to it as Swept Away throughout this article).  Made in 1974, the movie garnered heated discussion when it was released in the mid-70's, being lauded by critics such as Roger Ebert & Vincent Canby, while other people like noted feminist Ellen Willis disparaged the film as anti-woman and sexist.  Considering the hullaballoo around such a film (and the fact that it was remade with disastrous consequences by Guy Ritchie and Madonna some thirty years after), I figured what better way to investigate the career of Lina Wertmuller than to go to a movie that attracted such attention?

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is the sort of movie that reads as pretty simple when you just examine the plot, so we'll start here to ground you in the film, but move on from the plot pretty quickly.  Essentially we have Raffaella (Melato), a trophy wife on a cruise in the Mediterranean where she frequently disparages the staff, particularly Gennarino (Giannini), a waiter with anger issues.  One day, while she's trying to meet her husband on an island, they become shipwrecked, and find themselves on a deserted island.  Here the tables are turned, with Gennarino forcing Raffaella to worship at his feet so that he'll provide food for her.  They fall in love, and Raffaella wants to continue to stay on the island with him forever, but Gennarino wants her to prove that she loves him by going back to civilization, having her choose him and his command rather than doing so because of chance (the shipwreck).  Once ashore, though, they revert back to their lives, having been changed by the experience but her not able to give up a life of privilege, and him defeated, going back to his loveless marriage.

The film's controversy is warranted.  Raffaella is not meant to be a character you like-in fact, the way that she spouts offensive political thoughts in the first half of the film and treats everyone like garbage, you definitely want her to get some sort of comeuppance in the back half of the film.  Wertmuller, though, plays with you clearly hating Raffaella by having her utterly humiliated to the point where it's difficult to watch in the film's center, when Gennarino treats her like garbage until she finally is subservient to him.  There are scenes in Swept Away that would be impossible to show today, considering the way that Raffaella is treated, and while the film doesn't quite go into the lens of rape-fantasy film, it toes that line close enough that I get what writers like Willis were objecting to when they wrote about the film in the 70's.

That being said-Swept Away is almost unreal in how confident and put-together it is.  There's a reason that Wertmuller was able to break down so many glass ceilings in her career-she's just that good.  The film's framing is perfect, the way that it doesn't shy away from conversations about sex, gender, and money, even if it makes the audience uncomfortable.  Those final moments, where you understand that Gennarino, who has been built up through Raffaella in the audience's mind as a "big man" in fact proves that he's a vain, lost soul who gave up his god complex because he couldn't understand his own limitations...it's provocative and shocking, but it's also like nothing I've ever seen from a film before.  The movie is, in fact, both problematic and a masterpiece, brilliantly pulled together & edited & acted while also giving the audience more questions than answers at the end.  Raffaella leaves clearly changed, but we don't understand if she pines for her time with Gennarino, or feels epic relief for it being over, getting to return to her regular life.  Gennarino leaves a paltry man, defeated in his gambit, knowing what it is like to live his twisted, warped fantasy and now left to have it as a memory, likely eventually realizing it was just a mirage.  It's, to use a more modern parlance, "messed up," but it's also challenging and smart, the sort of film you can think about for weeks afterwards.  As a result, I side with both Willis and Ebert here-Wertmuller made a film whose politics are frequently gross, but are so chilling & thought-provoking it's impossible to dismiss.