Game of Death (1978)

Film: Game of Death (1978)

Stars: Bruce Lee, Gig Young, Dean Jagger, Colleen Camp, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Director: Robert Clouse

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 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 Bruce Lee: click here to learn more about Mr. Lee (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Actors dying during or after the production of a film is not uncommon, and it's actually relatively normal for directors/studios to use creative ways to meld together clips, body doubles, & whatever you can think of to piece together one last movie with a popular star.  Everyone from Carrie Fisher to Philip Seymour Hoffman to Heath Ledger to Paul Walker all had films released after they died that they had been filming at the time.  But no actor in the history of movies has ever continued to work as much in the years after his death in the same fashion as Bruce Lee, to the point where there became a name for it: "Bruceploitation."

The films that happened after his death in 1973 run the gamut, from re-editing two movies from old episodes of Lee's time on The Green Hornet to actors using Lee's name or film titles to conjure allusions to the late actor.  Films with names like Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave (likely the tackiest of the bunch) were relatively common in martial arts films of the 1970's.  Even Jackie Chan, who would eventually succeed Lee as the biggest name in martial arts films, would get an early start with New Fist of Fury, a spin on Lee's 1972 film that we profiled earlier this month.  Producers, having seen gargantuan paydays with The Way of the Dragon and Enter the Dragon, weren't willing to go quietly and admit that Lee had only really starred in four films, and their gravy train had passed away.  This greed was most encapsulated by today's film and its inexplicable sequel, perhaps the most horrifying movie I can remember seeing given its backstory.

(Spoilers Ahead) Game of Death follows a relatively standard (for a Lee picture) plot, with Billy Lo (Lee...occasionally) fighting against a racketeering syndicate who is threatening he and his fiancee (Camp) as they want a piece of his new movie star success.  Billy, after being shot in the face during a film production, decides this is a good time to go into hiding, and in hiding exacts revenge on those around him, in an attempt to get them back for essentially ruining his career (and eventually, because they kidnap Colleen Camp).

This is the plot of Game of Death...which you will not care about during the movie, as the plot of this movie is very obviously "Bruce Lee is dead."  This is because with the exception of about 12 minutes toward the end of the movie, Bruce Lee the living person is not in the film despite prominent top billing.  He is instead being portrayed by a series of stunt doubles & stand-ins, many of whom have their face onscreen, and are clearly, visibly, not Bruce Lee.  That is, of course, when they decide to even do that.  There's an actual scene (and I had to rewind, which if you know anything about streaming movies on Amazon Prime, is a feat) but there is literally a shot of this movie where they have taped a headshot of Lee onto a mirror, with it clear that a cardboard cutout is serving as the face of the stand-in to make him look more like Lee.

Most famously, Lee himself does appear in the film earlier on in the picture...but as a literal corpse.  That is because, in a shameless scene where we see Colleen Camp screaming & crying while attending the fake funeral of Billy Lo, we see cutaway footage of the actual funeral of Bruce Lee, at one point for a second or two seeing the open casket visage of the actually dead Lee on the screen.  Other than a scene stolen from The Way of the Dragon where he fights Chuck Norris imposed into the beginning of the picture, this is the first time you see the real-life Lee in the movie, making it all the more jarring.

Game of Death is, by my estimation, grave-robbing.  Despite having proper actors like Camp and Oscar-winners Dean Jagger & Gig Young (this being his final film before he murdered his new wife & killed himself, which in literally any other review would be the real-life headline), the only thing worth watching here is Lee.  The scenes, especially his fight with basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabber, where he battles in a skin-tight yellow jumpsuit, are splendid.  Lee is wry, agile, funny, & sexy-as-fuck.  I will own at this point that I have developed not just a heart-fluttering crush on Lee but also a talent one on him (I will 100% be completing his five film set at some point, as I am a true fan), and so on his behalf, the fact that this movie (and somehow a sequel that patches together even more past footage of Lee) exist is an abomination.

I will note, though, that it also opens up an uncomfortable door into the other legacy of Lee: his son, Brandon.  The younger Lee was also an actor (in fact both of Bruce Lee's children would become film performers), and in the 1980's he was doing some version of Bruceploitation, making films like Legacy of Rage which was released in Asia to try to capitalize on his father's still potent legacy.  Lee, though, didn't have much success, even after getting a chance in some American action films in the early 1990's.  But The Crow would end up being (in terms of box office) his big break.  The gothic superhero film was a smash hit in 1994, but similar to half of the films of his father, it was released after his death.  Eerily like his father's character in Game of Death, Brandon Lee would die from an accident involving a prop gun, in this case accidentally firing a live round that had been trapped in the barrel, shooting Lee in the abdomen, and killing him.  Unlike Game of Death, most of the younger Lee's performance was completed (he only had three days left on production, so most reviews don't note the clear real-life issues with this production coming through on the screen), and so after some jostling between Paramount & Miramax, the latter used a stand-in and CGI (which would later become more common) to complete Lee's performance.  Father and son would eventually be buried next to each other in Seattle.

Next month, and for the remainder of the year, we are going to start writing about the "true" modern action stars and not just the pioneers who forged the way, all six of whom would enter into action movie fame throughout the late 1970's, and especially in the 1980's & 90's, the heyday of the action movie genre.  Our first star, though, is going to be someone who, for much of the 1970's, felt like he was headed in a different direction than action, and it was only a chance twist of fate (and eventually billions of dollars) that would make him one of the Grand Tetons of the genre.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Film: Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Stars: David Emge, Kene Foree, Scott Reininger, Gaylen Ross

Director: George P. Romero

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

All October long, The Many Rantings of John is running a marathon dedicated to the Horror classics of the 1960's-90's that I'm seeing for the first time this month.  If you want to take a look at past titles from previous horror marathons (both this and other seasons) check out the links at the bottom of this article.

You'll notice, by-and-large, that we are not doing sequels this month.  This is both out of practicality (I have a lot of horror blindspots, particularly in the 1970's & 80's that I need to catch up on), and out of pragmatism (this is the fourth season of this series...a future season of sequels might be kind of fun so I'm saving that as an option).  However, we are going to make one exception, partially because I'm a bit obtuse and didn't realize when I was making this year's list that this movie was a sequel.  Zombie films are not my area of expertise, and and while you assume that films entitled Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead were connected in some fashion...that connection didn't occur to my brain, and I had shared this list with enough people that I didn't want to disappoint by not including this picture.  So we are doing our sole sequel today, though it's a sequel in pretty much just subject matter, as not only does this movie have none of the actors of Night of the Living Dead, it also is tonally quite different from that movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in the same universe as Night of the Living Dead, though based on the set design and the technology I assume that it had to be meant to be set in the 1970's rather than the original's 1960's motif.  The ghouls (aka zombies) have taken over, feasting on the flesh of the living.  We see a traffic reporter Stephen Andrews (Emge) and his pregnant girlfriend, TV producer Fran Parker (Ross) planning to steal the news station's helicopter & flee north.  Concurrently two police officers across town Peter Washington (Foree) and Roger DeMarco (Reininger) are trying to maintain the law in a world gone mad, and Roger suggests they team up with his friend Stephen to flee the city.  After some skirmishes with more zombies, the four of them flee, and eventually come to a shopping mall, which they are able to barricade completely from the hapless zombies.  This is an optimal shelter (it has food, ammunition, & medicine), but it becomes too attractive as a group of renegades come across them.  By the end of the movie, only Fran & Peter have survived not being bitten or killed by the zombies, and are flying off with the helicopter, low on fuel, into the unknown.

This film, like it's predecessor, has a long footprint.  It has inspired four official sequels, as well as a remake of the film directed by Zack Snyder, and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead is a clear parody of the movie.  It's easy to see why.  The film, like its predecessor, is not shy about social commentary, giving us the pitfalls of capitalism (it's underlined through exposition by Peter multiple times that the reason the zombies are coming to the mall is less about finding the four people living there and more about "this is what they did in life, and they can't stop coming back...even if they don't know why") and how addictive it is.  It also mocks the disposability of life, the way that we see the horde of renegade bikers coming in and basically terrorize the zombies, robbing them & using them for sport (until their inevitable comeuppance).  Plus, the visual effects, art direction, & makeup (Tom Savini, y'all) are all top drawer.  You will want to shop at this mall, capitalism be damned, by the end of this film.

But I was "ehh" on it for large swaths of the movie.  It's way too long, and becomes repetitive (you wouldn't guess from that description that it was well over 2 hours).  It also doesn't really understand what type of movie it's making.  The film frequently uses the zombies for genuine comic effect, making them look like hapless figures that should be easy to fend off, but then other scenes they are genuinely terrifying, and still in other scenes we get relationship fights between Fran & Stephen that feel like they'd be more at-home in a 1970's familial drama.  It doesn't work.  It's objectively a good movie, and there are parts worth recommending, but I'm going 3-stars as it largely wasn't for me in the way Night of the Living Dead was.

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

Halloween (1978)

Film: Halloween (1978)

Stars: Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nick Castle, PJ Soles, Nancy Kyes, Kyle Richards, Brian Andrews

Director: John Carpenter

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 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.

I will be honest here-the goal of this marathon is to watch movies that I've never seen before.  And with 14 of the titles, I can say with absolute confidence I haven't seen them before.  Halloween, on the other hand, I'm not sure.  I am not one of those people who have religiously been marking my Leonard Maltin guide since I was a kid (I should've, but I didn't), and my notes are incomplete-some indicating I have seen this at some point (my mom thought she showed it to me), but I have no memory of actually seeing it fully (likely just seeing a chunk of it on TBS in October).  Of course, we'd all be forgiven for not realizing we've seen John Carpenter's signature horror classic.  Made in 1978 for mere peanuts by an independent studio, Halloween would go on to spawn not just a franchise, but would become the most important horror film of its generation, and most of it is now as ingrained into our pop culture as Star Wars or Jaws.  Pretty much all of the movies we're going to profile for the remainder of this marathon are somewhere in its shadow, Halloween becoming the most important horror film since The Exorcist, perhaps even Psycho.  That Halloween would feature Jamie Lee Curtis in her breakout role, who of course is the daughter of Psycho star Janet Leigh, proves that Hollywood loves nothing more than a twist (and a little nepotism).

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place on two separate Halloweens, with Michael Myers (as an adult, played by Castle) stabbing his teenage older sister Judy to death after she has sex with her boyfriend.  15 years later, Myers has escaped from a mental institution, and seems intent on going back to his childhood home, potentially to cause more murder & chaos.  He is pursued to that house by Dr. Sam Loomis (Pleasance), who understands that Myers is more than just a bad guy-he's evil incarnate.  Mike Myers slowly starts to kill a trio of friends, one of which is Laurie Strode (Curtis), who is babysitting two kids named Tommy (Andrews) and Lindsey (Richards, and yes it's the Kyle Richards of Real Housewives fame).  Laurie outsmarts Myers, but in true horror movie fashion he clearly is going to make it to live another day, running away from Laurie & Dr. Loomis in the end of the movie, the film ending with his heavy breathing near all of the scenes of his crimes earlier in the evening.

Halloween is fascinating in part because of the tropes that it launched.  It was not, as we've already shown this month, the first "slasher" movie-Psycho, of course, had a serial killer of that nature, and movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas both contained elements of what would become signatures of the slasher genre.  But Halloween really brought it to another level, giving us one of the quintessential "final girls" with Laurie Strode, and introducing many of the "rules" of the genre (particularly its complicated attitudes toward sex & virginity & how killers will punish those who don't take these concepts seriously) that would dominate it for the next twenty years.  While it wasn't the first, it's impossible to imagine Jason, Freddy, Chucky, & Ghostface in the decades to come without Michael Myers.

The movie itself is really strong, and ages beautifully.  It is still genuinely terrifying, building its scares not just through graphic violence (that would've been impossible a decade previously), but through genuine tension.  The movie isn't afraid to stretch some of the tension-it's not just about killing some of the teenagers, but instead about faking out the audience-making us try to understand who will live or not.  It's brief (under 100 minutes long), and there's literally no fat on the movie.  The technical aspects are sharp, with solid cinematography, editing, & in particular an iconic score that sends chills down your spine.  Independent cinema still had something of a bad rap at this point in terms of "quality" being the exception to the rule, but look at scenes like the one where the nurse is attacked in the car, and the terrifying way we film the unknown before we understand what's going on-that happens a lot in the movie, and it helps make it feel like it's not working on a dime store budget.

And Curtis, well, is great.  I'm curious as we move into other classics of the genre where we end up in terms of "best acting," but it's clear that Curtis understands that she needs to bring more to Laurie than the script is asking.  I love the way that she genuinely enjoys babysitting (she's not a "good girl" because she's not pretty, but because it's just how she's wired), or the little touches of trying to understand why she's friends with girls so different from her.  She is forging a lot of what would eventually become cliches for a reason-her Laurie is a fighter, and someone who doesn't know her own strength.  Add in Donald Pleasance as an obviously scarred psychiatrist who knows more than he's let on (and perhaps feels some relief that the world understands the monstrosity that he's lived with for so many years), and you've got an A+ horror masterpiece.

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

OVP: Days of Heaven (1978)

Film: Days of Heaven (1978)

Stars: Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, Sam Shepard, Linda Manz

Director: Terrence Malick

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Sound, Cinematography*, Costume Design, Score)

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 fascinating aspects of Terrence Malick's filmography, especially for me looking backward right now (I have seen virtually all of his recent work but until this month had never seen his first three pictures) is that by the time The New World and especially The Tree of Life had come around, there was very little plot in the films in a traditional sense.  Many actors have complained about this (perhaps the most vocal being Christopher Plummer), but it's one of the things I love about his movies.  They're gorgeous, but they're also very much mood portraits, about trying to capture a feeling or a belief or a meaning beyond what you'd normally get with a film.  Days of Heaven, Malick's second feature film, was not well-received by audiences in 1978 when it came out (it was not particularly successful, despite some critical praise and getting four Oscar nominations), but by Malick's standards the plot of this one is pretty structured, and provides a meaningful story in addition to breathtaking photography.

(Spoilers Ahead) Taking place in the 1910's, Bill (Gere), his girlfriend Abby (Adams), and his kid sister Linda (Manz) are on the run after Bill accidentally kills the steel mill foreman at his job.  They ride across the country on trains (with Abby pretending to be Bill's sister to prevent the gossip of them being unmarried but clearly having sex), and come across a man that is simply known as the Farmer (Shepard) in the movie, who is a wealthy man who runs a gigantic estate.  Initially they are just day laborers on his farm, but Bill soon learns that the Farmer is dying, and will only have about a year to live.  Eyeing an easier life for he & his makeshift family, Bill hatches a plot-he'll remain Abby's brother and convince her to marry the Farmer.  Then, when the Farmer dies, Abby will inherit the entire estate.  This works for a while-the Farmer loves & marries Abby, but the plan begins to work too well-Abby begins to fall for the Farmer, and he doesn't seem to be getting any sicker.  When the Farmer finds out about Bill & Abby's plan, he flies into a rage (during a locust swarm), and sets fire to his wheat fields.  This leads to a standoff between Bill & the Farmer which results in Bill killing him with a screwdriver.  Bill runs away with Abby & Linda, but is quickly caught and killed, with Abby inheriting the farm, though her boundless spirit continues, with both she and Linda eventually running off in opposite directions, continuing their lives as drifters.

Though the film has more plot than your average Malick film, as I said, it does feel like it's operating on a different plane.  The fact that the Farmer doesn't have a name should tell you something about it being a bit dreamy, but it works really well.  We get to see a disarming treatise about love & betrayal, with each person in the love triangle distinct enough in their imperfections without ever feeling like they're caricatures or behaving badly to advance the plot.  I thought the acting was uniformly good, particularly Shepard as the Farmer.  The lovers don't care to define him, and I think that works really well as we begin to test his limits & what he's capable of as the film shifts toward him bitterly resenting these people taking advantage of him in his "final" days.

The movie won four Oscar nominations, all of them warranted.  Ennio Morricone famously disliked working with Malick, but you can't argue with the results.  A recurrent theme that feels like it's capturing the beauty of the American spirit before it is forever altered by World War I is felt throughout the movie.  The sound work, period costumes, & Jack Fisk's daring outdoor design are also worthy (though Fisk sadly wasn't nominated), but with Days of Heaven, you think first-and-foremost about the cinematography.  I say this knowing it's a recent film viewing, but I cannot help but indulge in some hyperbole...Days of Heaven might be the most beautiful film ever made.  Malick famously uses natural light, which feels awash on the house in the middle of a giant field, giving us just scene-after-scene of oil paintings (it doesn't hurt that he cast Richard Gere at his most ravishing, looking every bit the Raphael-inpsired young god).  The scene with the locusts, which had to be filmed backward to get a realistic effect (this was before CGI was widely-used), has to be seen to be believed.  In an era where you seemingly cannot win Best Cinematography without a Best Picture nomination, I'm glad Oscar realized what they had on their hands and gave Nestor Almendros his richly-deserved statue.

OVP: Autumn Sonata (1978)

Film: Autumn Sonata (1978)

Stars: Ingrid Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Lena Nyman, Halvar Bjork

Director: Ingmar Bergman

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Ingrid Bergman, Original Screenplay)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

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

Last week, we were discussing Ingrid Bergman and her infamous affair with Italian Roberto Rossellini, which resulted in one of the most successful (creatively) periods of her career, even if it also meant that she was essentially a pariah in Hollywood.  This didn't last though-scandal can destroy a career, but Ingrid Bergman wasn't an actress that could be brought down that easily.  In 1956, she made an unexpected comeback in Fox's smash hit Anastasia, which won her her second Oscar and made her employable in Hollywood again.  Bergman would then have a remarkable third act in her career, making a series of films that were consistently successful opposite major leading men like Cary Grant (Indiscreet), Robert Donat (The Inn at the Sixth Happiness), Rex Harrison (The Yellow Rolls-Royce), and Walter Matthau (Cactus Flower).  Bergman, always beautiful & sexual, but more in a timeless way than an "of her moment" beauty was able to buck much of the problems that other actresses of her generation had in staying relevant & continuing to gain roles.  She won a third (ill-advised, but that's a conversation for a different day) Oscar for 1974's Murder on the Orient Express, and then made today's film, which would be her last theatrically-released movie, and one in her native tongue.

(Spoilers Ahead) Autumn Sonata is something of a chamber play where Eva (Ullmann) has invited her famous, concert pianist mother Charlotte (Bergman) to stay with she & her husband Viktor (Bjork).  Initially, we get the sense that Eva is a bit mousy, intimidated by her mother's beauty & success, and her mother's forceful nature keeps Eva from being too forthright with her.  We also learn that she is keeping a secret from her mother, that her disabled sister Helena (Nyman) is staying with them, which upsets Charlotte who does not like to witness her other daughter's handicap & difficult life.  As the movie progresses, though, we see a switching of the power dynamic in their relationship.  Eva becomes more forceful, challenging her mother on the years of neglect she endured growing up, with Charlotte's singleminded approach to her career (and her laissez-faire attitude toward her marriage to Eva's father), as well as later hardships such as Charlotte's insistence that Eva get an abortion when she was 18, the death of Eva & Viktor's son who died years earlier (without any consoling from Charlotte), Eva's loveless marriage, and allegations that Charlotte's recently-deceased boyfriend had molested Helena.  The movie takes a look at these two women as broken, not able to find any sort of absolution within each other, even if the other one appears to be the root cause of much of their anguish.  The film ends on an ambiguous note, with Charlotte leaving for another concert, and Eva, potentially contemplating suicide but likely not going through with it, once again reaching out to her mother, understanding that their relationship might not be over yet.

Ingmar Bergman is my favorite film director, and this is one of his better-known films that I'd never seen.  A lot of the signatures are there, including some that others dismiss about the director's work (his preoccupation with anguish, family, & (in particular) death), as well as the the things that I love about his work.  Bergman is fascinated by closeups, and finding a way to frame the camera on an actor's face, waiting for nothing more than time to give away more secrets of their feelings.  With Bergman & Ullmann, he gets that.  There are scenes where he looks at Bergman, every inch the movie star, and waits as emotion or exasperation in Charlotte's eyes start to fall forward, a woman who has given so much pretense, so much performance, she doesn't entirely know how to play the next moment if she's just expected to be herself, not read what's on the page.  Bergman understands this about Charlotte, and both she and Ullmann give master class performances as a mother/daughter who are anguished by the past, but cannot move past it in order to find a future.  I'm going with a 4-star, mostly because I don't use halves on TMROJ (this would be a 4.5 on Letterboxd), principally because I thought the framing device with Viktor didn't work, but the acting is all extraordinary-it's a pity that this wasn't Bergman's late third-act Oscar and not Orient Express, and it is the best work she was ever nominated for.

Bergman was battling the breast cancer that would eventually kill her while she was filming Autumn Sonata.  Despite this, this wasn't her last film (though it was the final one to be released theatrically).  She would star in A Woman Called Golda in 1982, winning a posthumous Emmy before her death at 67.  She would also make a number of public appearances, including giving Alfred Hitchcock his AFI Life Achievement Award.  Bergman was an actress who starred in multiple Hitchcock movies, and nearly had a marriage destroy her Hollywood career, before returning triumphant.  Tomorrow, we'll kick off a new star and month with a different actress who became Hitchcock's muse, one who did escape his shadow, but only through a marriage that would end her Hollywood career.

OVP: The Swarm (1978)

Film: The Swarm (1978)
Stars: Michael Caine, Katharine Ross, Richard Widmark, Richard Chamberlain, Olivia de Havilland, Ben Johnson, Lee Grant, Jose Ferrer, Patty Duke, Slim Pickens, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda
Director: Irwin Allen
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Costume Design)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Typing up the call sheet for The Swarm, you're right initially to be perplexed by this film's reputation.  There are, in fact, seven Oscar winners in The Swarm, seven, making it one of the most decorated casts in the history of Hollywood (seriously-aside from stunt films like The Player or Around the World in 80 Days, you only really have the late-stage Marvel movies like Avengers: Endgame that can come close to a movie like The Swarm).  So seven winners, and that doesn't even count the nominated Katharine Ross & Richard Widmark and screen legend Fred MacMurray in his final role.  So, why exactly is it that The Swarm is considered by so many people to be one of the worst movies ever made?  And how exactly did it get nominated for an Oscar?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a group of killer African bees invading Texas.  That's the plot in one sentence, but if you want an expanded one, while the killer bees are invading Texas, initially focusing on one small town and then moving on to Houston, we have two men Dr. Bradford Crane (Caine), assisted by Dr. Walter Krim (Fonda), in a turf battle with a military commander General Slater (Widmark).  Dr. Helena Anderson (Ross) is also there, but naturally becomes nothing more than the romantic interest for Crane, and then we frequently cut to the town, which is focused on a senior citizen love triangle (between de Havilland, MacMurray, & Johnson), and Rita (Duke), who is having a baby.  Almost every one of these characters ends up dying, but in the end Crane (with his new girlfriend by his side) burns all of the bees in the Gulf of Mexico by using their mating call against them.

If you can't tell, this movie is kind of hilariously bad.  The plot is absurd, even in an era where murder hornets feel like they're about to add a true level of ridiculous onto 2020.  Forgetting for a second the sexist treatment of Ross' character, the loopholes and twists in the movie are bizarrely unsatisfying.  The movie has no sense of how a plot is supposed to work, and frequently introduces tension that would normally trigger to an audience "okay, this is something I should be emotionally invested in" without any sort of resolution.

Take, for example, the skepticism of Caine's character coming out of nowhere at the beginning of the picture.  Widmark is suspicious of him, and the ominous Jerry Goldsmith score agrees, but not only does he end being the good guy, we never have a moment where there is a bad guy-it just sort of skates into "we're all in this together" mode without any sort of friction between Caine & Widmark that doesn't last longer than three lines.  De Havilland's character is met with a love triangle, but unlike any other movie, all three characters die before she chooses or even tips her hat to which man she might marry.  And Patty Duke's pregnant mother just sort of shows up, has a baby, and then is never heard from again-what was the point of this character?!?

The movie won one Oscar nomination, and it's not, as you might expect, Visual Effects, but instead Costume Design.  I just don't get why.  The only costumes of any note in this movie are the hazmat suits that seem to be crossed with a beekeeper costume, but there's nothing special about this, and the action happens all in one day, to the point where most characters are wearing maybe 2-3 costumes at most (de Havilland probably has the most costume changes at I think three).  I don't have a problem with Oscar going subtle, but there is almost no precedent for a costuming choice this mundane getting an Oscar nomination, and there were certainly other options that would have been showier (California Suite, The Brink's Job, The Boys from Brazil, The Deer Hunter) and were in films that were Oscar-nominated already.  That The Swarm got in instead is kind of hilarious, but just another confusing aspect to this movie's tale.

OVP: The Wiz (1978)

Film: The Wiz (1978)
Stars: Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Ted Ross, Richard Pryor, Lena Horne
Director: Sidney Lumet
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Art Direction, Costume Design, Cinematography, Song Score)
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 Lena Horne-click here to learn more about Ms. Horne (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Lena Horne had a career, a truly steady, vibrant reliable career, for a longer stretch than virtually any other actor of Classical Hollywood.  Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland-they had all long since passed away while Horne was still doing her act.  But her film career pretty much died when she lost both Pinky and Show Boat, and thus refused to consider another contract with MGM.  She spent the next few decades doing television, theater, and nightclub acts near constantly.  During that time, Horne was blacklisted (for her association with Paul Robeson), and became a pioneering voice in the Civil Rights movement, working with voices as diverse as John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Medger Evers.  But in terms of her time in the cinema, Horne appeared in just two narrative features after the 1950's-first, the Don Siegel-directed Death of a Gunfighter, and then today's entry in our series, The Wiz, directed by her (then) son-in-law Sidney Lumet.

(Spoilers Ahead) I know this is odd, but I'd never actually seen The Wiz and was not at all prepared for what was about to happen in this movie.  For those unfamiliar, the movie is a re-imagining of the Wizard of Oz story with Dorothy (Ross) now a New York teacher in her mid-twenties who lives with her aunt and uncle and never has gone below 125th Street (which is basically the southern border of Harlem, if you aren't familiar), and seems scared to start her own life.  A snowstorm transports her to the land of Oz, where she meets a Scarecrow (Jackson), Tin Man (Russell), and Cowardly Lion (Ross) who are in wont of a brain, heart, and courage, respectively.  Together with Dorothy, trying to find a way home, they go to find "the Wiz" (Pryor) a wizard who is supposedly so powerful that he'll be able to give them all that they desire.

This all sounds pretty close to the idea of the Wizard of Oz, right?  It's in the execution that the film becomes something resembling an acid trip (in a way not even the 1939 classic could do on its strangest day).  The Wiz, originally a Broadway production, combines blaxploitation-era touches with just some bizarre production design to create a truly distinct visual.  You'll see the people of the Emerald City disco dancing as the Wiz changes the color of all of their clothes, and a frightening Mabel King bellowing out as the Wicked Witch of the West.

The film is impossible to watch without a clear understanding of the original film or book, because it strays so vehemently from logic in hopes of getting to the next outlandish motif (seriously-the Oscar-nominated set design here approaches something like 2000's How the Grinch Stole Christmas in its abundance & garishness) or musical number.  It'd have the makings of a proper camp classic (which in a lot of ways it is), except it's pretty dull.  With the exception of "Get on Down the Road" and "Home" there are no truly memorable musical numbers, and no one is doing heavy-lifting in terms of acting.  Ross is dreadfully dull (and miscast) even if she's on-fire vocally, and Pryor, whom one would assume would be able to steal the film in a late third act appearance, is dull (something he's never been accused of before).  Jackson brings a naivete that would work for Scarecrow, but considering the troubling knowledge we'd learn about his private life in the coming decades, it's hard to watch this without it feeling unnerving.  About the only Oscar nomination I'll get behind is the costume design, which is unique & occasionally fascinating (the whole disco scene requires a very specific color scheme to work so well), but the rest feel like a way for AMPAS to get behind a flop that had cost a fortune.

Horne is only in one scene of the movie, delivering a musical interlude of "Believe in Yourself" and proving that she, unlike the Wiz, is powerful enough to get Dorothy home.  Sixty-years-old (but still impossibly beautiful) at the time, it's both a reminder of the sort of roles she had played before (just being trotted out to do a musical number that is inconsequential to the plot), and what might have been in a different era.  Diana Ross, her costar, was able to have a more balanced stardom, getting to star in a mainstream hit like Mahogany and even getting an Oscar nomination for Lady Sings the Blues.  Horne would never act in another movie, though she'd reach arguably the peak of her professional career three years later with her one-woman show Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, winning a Tony & two Grammys for her work.  Though her time in the cinematic spotlight was brief, it was well-remembered.  Sixty years after she signed with MGM, one of the first people that Halle Berry thanked when she became the first black woman to win Best Actress at the Oscars was Lena.

National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)

Film: National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)
Stars: John Belushi, Tim Matheson, Peter Riegert, Tom Hulce, Stephen Furst, John Vernon, Verna Bloom, Donald Sutherland, Karen Allen
Director: John Landis
Oscar History: Hardly, though it still regularly shows up on "greatest films of all-time lists" anyway.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

One of the strange things about being a film fan is that you don't really watch movies chronologically.  I can see a movie like Stagecoach now, for example, and think it's a run-of-the-mill western, albeit one with an A-Grade cast, and not realize that it set the stage for hundreds of westerns that followed, and essentially turned John Wayne into one of the truly great movie stars.  The reality is that some films get borrowed from so ferociously that it's impossible to see them anew the first time you investigate them, which was the case for me when this past week I caught Animal House for the first time.

(Spoilers Ahead) For anyone over, say, 40, that is reading this blog, Animal House needs no introduction, and for anyone under the age of 40, you probably have seen Animal House over-and-over anyway, as it spawned dozens of movie stars in its wake (it's hard to imagine Adam Sandler, Jack Black, and Will Ferrell having the long careers they've had without John Landis' much-beloved film as a forerunner).  If you don't know the film's plot, essentially it's about the Deltas, a group of motley college frat guys who don't live up to the posh, WASP-y ideals that their rivals the Omegas aspire toward.  Two new pledges, Larry (Hulce) and Dorfman (Furst), join and suddenly find themselves becoming accepted for the first time in their lives (they play the nerd and the fat kid in terms of college movie tropes).  The movie's plot is a series of elaborate stunts and pranks, followed by debauchery of most kinds, all-the-while the Deltas are a foil for the Dean.  The film ends in a similar fashion to American Graffiti, a movie that it clearly is parodying in some respects, but instead of the surprisingly bleak way the title cards show how quickly youth fades in American Graffiti, here that profound moment is played for laughs, implying that Bluto (Belushi), the most outrageous of the characters, became a US Senator while Greg, the sycophantic president of the Omega House, ended up being a Nixon aide who was raped in prison.

This sort of humor (rape jokes and all), show that the film is extremely dated.  Even an Adam Sandler comedy couldn't get away with some of the film's most shocking elements (there's a scene where Hulce's Larry debates whether or not to commit date rape on a girl who passes out at a party).  These elements are jaw-dropping in the wrong sense, and proves the adage that comedies don't ever age as well as dramas, but there's still some scenes in the film that probably fall into the classic level, even if they've been parodied to death.  The movie itself has some terrific site gags, every-so-often breaking the fourth wall, and the central performances are good, particularly from Matheson and Belushi.  Matheson, whom I'd never seen in a comedic role prior to this (I'm really more used to him as the dour Vice President Hoynes on The West Wing) is surprisingly good as the cocky, handsome ladies' man who seduces everyone, including both of his rival's love interests.  While he's hardly a feminist (something none of the film could be accused of), you can see why he was cast and for the most part his role works as keeping him likable, when a lesser actor would have had to make him more sympathetic in order to maintain the audience on his side.

Belushi, though, stands apart as the best part of the movie.  Played as a combination of a secret genius and a warthog, his Bluto steals virtually every scene.  He gets top-billing, even though he's really more of a supporting player at the end of the day (very little of the plot ever centers around him), but honestly-you can see why legions of comedy fans were devoted to Belushi from this performance.  He has a raw, live-wire act that is impossible to turn away from and he is by-far the best part of the movie.  I don't know if the film deserves its place in the pantheon of great films (it's still a frat movie with very little to say and is very dated), but if it does it's almost certainly because of Belushi's performance.

Those are my thoughts on this much-celebrated picture-how about yours?  Overall, I enjoyed it more than I expected (I try not to be a genre snob, but college frat movie is not in my wheelhouse at all), but don't quite think it passes into the realm of classic, just popular.  But try to convince me otherwise below!

OVP: Bloodbrothers (1978)

Film: Bloodbrothers (1978)
Stars: Paul Sorvino, Tony Lo Bianco, Richard Gere, Lelia Goldoni, Yvonne Wilder, Marilu Henner
Director: Robert Mulligan
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Ugh.  I've actually got a whole mess of Oscar-winning and nominated films that I need to review (I'm kind of in a tug-of-war with my time this week with the DVR looking too plump to deny it time but also I have so many reviews I want to get out into the world-time is a precious resource in my universe at the moment).  But for some reason I'm going to start my return to film reviews after not too many in the last week with a look at one of the worst movies I've seen in a while, and that's saying something after the weekend of disappointments I've just endured.  Bloodbrothers, a little-remembered (I'd never heard of it, and it has some decently large names attached) film from the late 1970's got an inexplicable nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and so as a result I was forced to endure (in the good name of the Oscar Viewing Project) a chauvinistic, nasty piece of work about a poor Italian family in the Bronx and the quest for one of its members, Stony (Gere) to find a better life for himself.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film isn't, admittedly, in my wheelhouse to begin with, as I'm currently over the "young man finds himself" routine that the movies seem to rely so heavily upon, but this in particular is a film that grates on almost every level.  The film is utterly predictable, with Stony, an impossibly-gorgeous lug who lives under the shadow of his alcoholic, philandering father and uncle (played by Lo Bianco and Sorvino, respectively), getting a rare opportunity from a doctor who is treating his younger brother for anorexia to get out of the hardhat-union lifestyle that his family has preordained for him.  Stony begins working at a hospital helping children, and starts dating a girl that he previously called the Town Plug or something off-color (played by Marilu Henner in her breakout role before Taxi).  The film has Stony alternating back-and-forth between the hardhat life and pursuing his dream of working with children until, at the end of the film, his mother finds out his father is cheating, we as an audience are forced to endure her first being humiliated by a mentally-imbalanced man in the laundry room while he "relieves himself" in her presence, and then we have to watch her beaten, and then the screenplay has the audacity to have us try and feel sorry for not just her attacker, but pretty much everyone involved.

Stony gets away, but the script itself is so bad and sexist you half expect him to just stick around and get back together with Henner's Annette, even after repeatedly humiliating her.  The film suffers from not only a predictable plot, but one with very few likable characters.  Stony is meant to be a kind guy, but in many ways he's just like his father and uncle, and really the only nice thing about him is that he's a good older brother, we just forgive him more because he looks like Michelangelo's David.  The film might have something interesting to say about Henner, but her role is really just window dressing.  On the flip side, the movie frequently gives way to all of Lo Bianco's machismo, and we see him moan, sigh, and grunt so frequently you have the feeling the director had no opinion on the character and the way he's supposed to be shaped.  There's literally nothing redeeming about him, and the way he treats his family is appalling, but the script feels too complicit in trying to make him seem complicated when he's not-he's just a jackass.  However, Lo Bianco somehow doesn't give the worst performance in the film.  That prize goes to Lelia Goldoni, who does some of the worst acting I've ever seen in a major motion picture, certainly one that was nominated for an Academy Award.  Goldoni is awful as a mother who can't decide if she's psychotic or just deranged by anger at her situation in life, but she's a truly terrible human being and one that it's hard to feel for as Stony tries to forgive she and her father when he leaves their life behind.  Goldoni's performance makes Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest seem like a Charlotte Rampling-level act of subtlety.

The film's nomination is perplexing-was there just a dearth of contenders that year?  Walter Newman is a longtime favorite in Hollywood and wrote two other more memorable Oscar-blessed screenplays (Ace in the Hole and Cat Ballou), but unless the Academy thought this was actually a renamed version of his legendary Harrow Alley, this is pretty much unforgivable.  The script is predictable, maudlin, and has nothing but 2-dimensional characters.  I know this was a weak year for this category, looking at some of the also-rans, but surely Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?, Death on the Nile, Superman, or Stevie have to be considered a better option than this dreadful movie and more worthy of the title Oscar-nominated.  I shall now not think of it anymore, except perhaps at how it weirdly objectified Richard Gere the entire movie and yet no one commented on his beauty once.  Honestly, it even had time to randomly make a gay guy look bad, because why not?

Those are my thoughts on this aggressively terrible picture-how about yours?  Anyone want to jump to its defense?  What films should have gotten this nomination instead?  And what's your favorite Richard Gere picture?  Share your comments below!