The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie (1972)

          The presence of the word “strange” in this film’s title represents truth in advertising, because the picture’s sole peculiar element—and it’s a doozy—is Rosalie herself, the sort of inexplicably clever wild child who exists only the imaginations of storytellers. Set in the remote deserts of the American southwest, the picture begins with a lyrically filmed burial scene that raises a zillion questions. The individual performing the burial is Rosalie (Bonnie Bedelia), and though viewers have not yet learned her name, she seems feral with her filthy burlap-sack dress and her ramshackle surroundings. (Never mind her immaculately groomed eyebrows and perfectly shaved legs.) Cut to Virgil (Ken Howard), a traveling salesman on his way to Los Angeles. He encounters Rosalie on a remote stretch of road, so he offers her a ride. She says she’s travelled some distance to reach her new home, a ranch owned by her grandfather.

          Virgil delivers her to the ranch, only to discover the place abandoned. Then Rosalie slashes his tires, knocks him unconscious, and breaks his leg so he can’t escape. (One can’t help but wonder whether Stephen King saw this movie and derived inspiration for his novel Misery, subsequently filmed as the 1990 Kathy Bates/James Caan movie of the same name.)

          Once Virgil regains consciousness, Rosalie explains her wacky plan to keep Virgil on the ranch forever as her lover, even though he’s a grown man and she’s just a teenager. Virgil tries various means of escape, but his immobility and the seclusion of the ranch are insurmountable obstacles. Adding to Virgil’s problems is Fry (Anthony Zerbe), a slovenly biker with the intelligence of a turnip and a tendency toward homicidal rage. Fry is obsessed with stealing a small cache of gold owned by Rosalie’s grandfather—who, if you haven’t surmised by now, is the fellow Rosalie buried in the prologue. Per the B-movie formula, director Jack Starrett and his collaborators put these lurid elements into a pot and wait for things to boil.

          The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie has some enjoyably grungy scenes, though the film is far-fetched and overlong. That said, acting more or less puts the piece across. Bedelia makes a ridiculous role as credible as possible, Howard conveys the necessary shades of uptight exasperation, and Zerbe has a blast portraying a foaming-at-the-mouth psycho. If nothing else, the sight of Bedelia driving her mule through the desert as it pulls a four-poster bed containing the prostrate Howard is memorably odd.

The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie: FUNKY

Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978)

          Provocative themes related to counterculture idealism, illegal drugs, police corruption, and the Vietnam War intersect in Who’ll Stop the Rain, an exceptionally well-made drama/thriller that, somehow, never quite gels. The film is praiseworthy in many important ways, boasting evocative production values, sensitive performances, and suspenseful situations, so the picture’s shortcomings are outweighed by its plentiful virtues. Nonetheless, Who’ll Stop the Rain is frustrating, because judicious editing—or, better still, bolder reimagining during the process of translating the source material into a film script—could have accentuated the most important elements while also providing greater clarity and simplicity. Some background: Robert Stone, the author of the underlying novel and also the co-writer the script, ran with a cool crowd in the ’60s and ’70s, gaining insight into hipster icons ranging from Neil Cassady to Ken Kesey. Stone also amalgamated data about the role dope played in the lives of U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam. The writer blended these ideas, plus notions from his fertile imagination, into the novel Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975. Alas, Stone’s story got muddy on the way to the screen.

          The picture follows three interconnected characters. During a prologue set in Vietnam, burned-out journalist John Converse (Michael Moriarty) hatches a get-rich scheme: He buys a stash of heroin, and then recruits his friend, soldier Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), to smuggle the smack inside a military transport when Hicks returns to America. Right away, this set-up illuminates the textured character dynamics at work in Who’ll Stop the Rain; there’s a great moment when Hicks expresses surprise Converse is willing to use him so brazenly, thus revealing how deeply Converse’s idealism has been eroded by the ugliness of war. Hicks mules the package successfully, but unloading the drugs stateside proves troublesome. Converse’s wife, Marge (Tuesday Weld), has become a prescription-drug addict and therefore can’t arrange Hicks’ payoff as instructed. Worse, a corrupt DEA agent (Anthony Zerbe) pounces on the Converse home—while Hicks is there with the drugs—in order to steal the narcotics and wipe out anyone who gets in his way. Hicks escapes with Marge, but this sets in motion a long chase leading from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Converse returns to the U.S. and gets captured by the DEA agent, who tortures the would-be drug mogul and uses him for bait to lure Hicks (and Marge) from hiding. All of this culminates with a wild shootout at Hicks’ hippie hideaway in the Southern California desert.

          Listing all the ways this story doesn’t work cinematically would take a while—for instance, Converse departs the narrative for long stretches, and the quasi-romance between Hicks and Marge feels both contrived and needlessly downbeat. But none of these problems diminish the texture of Who’ll Stop the Rain. The movie’s acting is amazing, with Nolte at his animalistic best, Weld capturing a queasy sort of bewilderment, and Moriarty sweating his way through a vivid turn as a pathetic striver. Zerbe is memorably insidious, while the actors playing his low-rent henchmen—Richard Masur and Ray Sharkey—add surprising elements of humor and terror. Director Karel Reisz, always stronger with atmosphere and character than with story, generates tremendous realism even in the most outrageous scenes (e.g., the final shootout), and his filmmaking soars at periodic intervals. Ultimately, the power of Who’ll Stop the Rain stems from the cumulative mood of despair that the filmmakers generate—if nothing else, Who’ll Stop the Rain captures something profound about how it felt to sort through the mess of Vietnam while history was still unfolding.

Who’ll Stop the Rain: GROOVY

Papillon (1973)

          This minor classic, which tells the real-life story of a Frenchman who endured 10 years of harsh imprisonment in South America during the 1930s, arose from a turbulent development process. After screenplay drafts by writers on the order of William Goldman were rejected, the film went into preproduction with a script by the fine popcorn-movie scribe Lorenzo Semple Jr. By that point, Steve McQueen was committed to play the title character. Then Dustin Hoffman agreed to co-star in the picture, only there wasn’t a role for him to play. Enter Oscar winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was hired to weave Hoffman into the picture. Trumbo’s writing continued well into production—he was generating pages just a few days ahead of when they were being shot—so after Trumbo fell ill, someone had to finish the work, fast. Trumbo’s son, Christopher, did the job, writing the movie’s poignant final scenes. Thus, if the resulting movie has a bit of a patched-together feel, there’s a good reason—and it’s a testament to the skill of everyone involved that despite the convoluted gestation, Papillon works.

          The film was adapted from a memoir by French criminal Henri Charrière, whose claim to fame was escaping from Devil’s Island, the infamous prison in French Guyana. (Never mind that many people have questioned the veracity of Charrière’s recollections.) When the story begins, Charrière (Steve McQueen) is convicted for a murder he did not commit, and then sent across the ocean to a lifetime term on Devil’s Island. (Charrière is nicknamed “Papillon,” French for “butterfly,” and an image of the winged insect is tattooed across his chest.) While in transit to Devil’s Island, Charrière befriends a bespectacled crook named Louis Dega (Dustin Hoffman), who has money but isn’t physically formidable. Charrière, on the other hand, is a tough guy, so they strike a protection deal. Yet what begins as a pragmatic arrangement evolves into a full-blown bromance over the course of several years; among other incidents, Charrière protects Dega from assailants and Dega smuggles food to Charrière while Charrière endures inhumane solitary confinement.

          The movie combines intense scenes of prison suffering with thrilling escape attempts. Along the way, Charrière earns the respect of nearly everyone he meets by displaying superhuman determination. In one vivid but far-fetched vignette, the hero even curries favor with the charismatic leader (Anthony Zerbe) of a leper colony.

          Despite extraordinary production values and the sure hand of director Franklin J. Schaffner guiding the story, Papillion drags somewhat at a bloated length of two and a half hours. Ironically, however, the narrative’s most expendable element is also one of the movie’s strongest virtues: Hoffman’s character. Because the myriad scenes of Charrière’s imprisonment are painful to watch (at one point, he eats bugs for survival), producers were wise to add the leavening agent of a major friendship. Hoffman is oddly appealing, affecting a cerebral, sarcastic quality while peering out through Coke-bottle glasses. Better still, his tightly wound energy complements McQueen’s he-man stoicism, giving the picture contrast it would otherwise have lacked. (The last scene between the main characters also has an undeniable emotional tug.) Is Papillon overlong and repetitious? Sure. But is it beautifully made and sensitively acted, with a reassuring theme of man’s indomitable spirit? Yes. And that’s what matters, at least in terms of what this memorable movie offers and delivers.

Papillon: GROOVY

They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970) & The Organization (1971)

          Seeing as how the Oscar-nominated thriller In the Heat of the Night (1967) is best remembered today for its bold portrayal of race relations—when a racist white character slaps a black detective, the black detective shocks onlookers by slapping the racist back—it’s peculiar that both sequels to In the Heat of the Night are so tame by comparison. Although these follow-up films superficially delve into racial politics, they’re primarily action-packed police procedurals. In fact, it’s hard to think of another movie series in which latter titles bear so little stylistic and thematic resemblance to the original picture. Even the home base of the series’ hero changed from the first movie to the second: When audiences first encountered Detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), he operated out of Philadelphia, yet in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! and The Organization, he’s a member of the San Francisco Police Department.

          Moreover, while the original film is an intelligent drama with sophisticated camerawork and music, Tibbs is basically a blaxploitation picture, with its gritty urban setting and percolating score. The Organization tacks in yet another direction, presenting a straightforward cop story. If not for the continuity of Poitier appearing in all three movies, it would be hard to recognize any tether between them.

          Of the sequels, Tibbs is moderately better simply because it offers a sensationalistic stew of sleazy storylines. (Say that three times fast!) Tibbs is assigned to find out who killed a prostitute, but he’s conflicted because the prime suspect is his pal, Logan Thorpe (Martin Landau), an activist priest working for liberal causes that Tibbs supports. The effective supporting cast includes the always-entertaining Anthony Zerbe as a violent pimp, plus TV favorites Ed Asner (Lou Grant) and Garry Walberg (Quincy, M.E.). Moreover, the picture introduces the recurring characters of Tibbs’ wife (Barbara McNair) and children, who were absent from the first picture; while grounding the detective in everyday reality, the normalcy of these characters also drains some of Tibbs’ mythic qualities. It doesn’t help that the script, credited to Alan Trustman and James R. Webb, twists awkwardly toward an overheated finale. Tibbs isn’t bad, as disposable police thrillers go, but it’s hardly a worthy extension of In the Heat of the Night.

          The next picture, written by Webb and John Ball, the author of the original novel In the Heat of the Night and therefore the creator of the Tibbs character, goes lighter on the skeeviness while drifting into the bland mainstream of everyday cop pictures. The convoluted narrative of The Organization involves Tibbs investigating a company that’s fronting for a drug operation, and there’s a bit too much screen time devoted to Tibbs’ home life, accentuating the undercooked nature of the main storyline. Plus, the more filmmakers pulled Tibbs away from racially charged milieus, the more it became apparent that Tibbs wasn’t a particularly strong character. The novelty of his first appearance, and to a lesser degree his second, was defined by his clash with racist power structures. Stripped of this powerful opposing force, Tibbs is just another onscreen tough guy with a badge.

          As such, it’s not surprising the franchise went fallow after these two diverting but forgettable pictures; although Ball continued writing novels and short stories about Tibbs well into the ’80s, the character didn’t reappear onscreen until 1988, when In the Heat of the Night was adapted into a moderately successful TV series. Troubled actor Howard Rollins played Tibbs until Rollins was fired from the show in 1993, and the series continued for two more years without the character.

They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: FUNKY

The Organization: FUNKY

The Omega Man (1971)

          Apocalyptic storyline? Check. Macho hero with a big gun and an impregnable lair? Check. Pasty-faced undead cultists on a lethal rampage? Check and double-check. Yes, The Omega Man features an abundance of fantastical elements, so when these components are matched with a campy leading performance and a cheesy visual style that screams early 1970s, a good time is guaranteed for all.

          The Omega Man was adapted from Richard Matheson’s enduring 1954 novel I Am Legend, which depicts the travails of a survivor who believes he’s the last man on earth following a plague that turned everyone else into supernatural creatures. In Matheson’s ingenious story, Colonel Robert Neville builds a fortress around the lab in which he searches for a way to cure the worldwide affliction. Since the vampire-like monsters don’t come out until nighttime, Neville has the world to himself during daylight hours, and he uses these windows to gather supplies, survey enemy encampments, and troll for signs of normal life.

          Updating Matheson’s narrative for the ’70s, screenwriters John W. Corrington and Joyce H. Corrington, together with director Boris Sagal, crafted a pulpy thriller suited to star Charlton Heston’s oversized persona. Heston plays Neville as a bruised idealist appalled at what mankind has done to itself—the filmmakers deviated from Matheson’s novel by making biological warfare the culprit for humanity’s descent into barbarism—so watching The Omega Man is like watching Heston pick up where his tantrum during the finale of 1968’s Planet of the Apes ended.

          In Heston’s gritted-teeth portrayal, Neville isn’t just the Last Man on Earth, he’s the Last Man With Any Damned Sense In His Head. Strutting around with an air of messianic purpose suits Heston’s florid style, so when he’s blasting away at the hordes of monsters that attack his headquarters every night, it’s as if each bullet is a blow for God, America, and apple pie.

          Yet the whole business of Neville defending himself is only one thread of the movie, which also introduces a trés-’70s cult called “The Family,” comprising murderous albino mutants. Led by crazed Jonathan Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), the Family is devoted to killing Neville, even though they succumb to the usual B-movie folly of planning an elaborate death that leaves room for escape instead of simply whacking Neville when they have the opportunity.

          As the story progresses, Neville avoids the Family’s wrath with the aid of Lisa (Rosalind Cash) and Dutch (Paul Koslo), two unexpected fellow survivors. The attractive Lisa becomes Neville’s love interest, of course, which means it’s just a matter of time before the Family tries to nab her. This being ’70s sci-fi, you can see the bummer road this is heading down, and The Omega Man doesn’t disappoint in terms of third-act plot twists. Rest assured, however, that it takes more than a gang of albino mutants to stop Chuck Heston from getting what he wants.

The Omega Man: GROOVY

The Laughing Policeman (1973)

          Long on atmosphere but short on coherence, this ultra-American thriller was, oddly, based on a Swedish novel. Despite its foreign origins, The Laughing Policeman is one of the most persuasive police procedurals made for the big screen in the ’70s, putting across a palpable sense of realism as it depicts badge-wielding working stiffs trying to sort out the mess of a complex murder investigation. The story ultimately spirals into confusion—an argument could be made that the filmmakers tried to achieve verisimilitude, leaving the audience as confounded as the characters—but even if the destination isn’t particularly worthwhile, the journey is engrossing.

          Set in San Francisco, the picture begins with a horrific assault, when a mysterious assailant whips out a grease gun on a crowded city bus and annihilates all the passengers, including an off-duty cop. The dead policeman’s partner, taciturn detective Jake Martin (Walter Matthau), takes the lead on the investigation but shares very few of his discoveries with his replacement partner, hotshot Leo Larsen (Bruce Dern), or his irritable commanding officer, Lt. Steiner (Anthony Zerbe). Part of the reason Martin plays his cards so close to the vest is that he learns unsavory facts about his late partner, like the kinky aspects of the dead cop’s romance with a young woman (Cathy Lee Crosby), and part of the reason is because Martin senses a connection between the current crime and an unsolved case from the past.

          Director Stuart Rosenberg, a TV-trained helmer whose eclectic résumé includes the macho melodrama Cool Hand Luke (1967), shoots the hell out of scenes featuring Martin and his fellow cops pounding the San Fran pavement to shake underworld sources for clues. Rosenberg and cinematographer David M. Walsh use long lenses to surround characters with evocative details, and they drape nighttime sequences in a soft haze that suggests salty air drifting off the Bay. Every scene feels like it’s happening in a genuine place, and Rosenberg lets his actors perform in a loose style that feels improvisational; this method generates fantastic moments between motor-mouthed Dern and tight-lipped Matthau, like a vivid throwaway scene in which they rest after ascending an epic flight of stairs.

          Matthau is memorably belligerent and terse, while Dern, seizing the opportunity of his first above-the-title role in a studio picture, loads every line with energy and meaning. In addition to the colorful actors playing the cops (Louis Gossett Jr. rounds out the principal cast with an intense performance as a hot-headed detective), The Laughing Policeman showcases a cavalcade of eclectic bit players, essaying the various gamblers and informants and pimps who permeate the underworld the cops must troll for leads.

The Laughing Policeman: GROOVY

Rooster Cogburn (1975)

          More of a merger between two established cinematic brand names than an organic creative enterprise, Rooster Cogburn offers the unlikely screen duo of towering he-man John Wayne and delicate blueblood Katharine Hepburn. A sequel to True Grit (1969), the movie for which Wayne won his only Oscar, this lively Western adventure story reprises Wayne’s award-winning role of drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn and pairs the character with a Bible-thumping East Coast transplant named Eula Goodnight (Hepburn). Each role is catered to the persona of the respective screen legend, so Rooster Cogburn delivers exactly what longtime fans of the actors want, and nothing more: Wayne is cranky and heroic and macho, while Hepburn is articulate and defiant and indomitable. The movie is therefore hard to beat for sheer crowd-pleasing star power, but aesthetic dissonance abounds.

          For instance, the acting styles of the two stars are so wildly divergent that the performers seem to exist in parallel universes even when they occupy the same shot. Wayne poses and preens, pausing arbitrarily like he’s struggling to remember his lines, while Hepburn powers through reams of dialogue effortlessly; however, each accentuates the other’s peculiar appeal, since Wayne’s frontier authenticity compensates for his lack of acting ability in the same way that Hepburn’s numerous affectations are leavened by her supreme dramatic skills. With star personalities the main attraction, it doesn’t matter that Rooster Cogburn’s story is redundant and trite.

          Just like in True Grit, Cogburn embarks on a hunt for a pack of killers accompanied by the willful daughter of a murdered man. In this case, Eula is the adult child of a preacher who was gunned down by varmints led by Hawk (Richard Jordan), a thief who has stolen a wagonload of government nitro for use in a robbery. When Cogburn accepts the job of capturing Hawk, Eula insists on tagging along, so the bulk of the picture comprises cutesy scenes of Rooster and Eula bickering even as they develop grudging affection for each other. There are several exciting action sequences, particularly a raft ride down nasty white water, and attractive location photography in Oregon adds to the film’s appeal. Jordan delivers enjoyable villainy, doing the best he can with an underwritten role, and costar Anthony Zerbe lends a bit of nuance as a gun-for-hire with conflicted emotions. Directed with workmanlike efficiency by Stuart Millar, Rooster Cogburn is pure hokum, and it never pretends otherwise.

Rooster Cogburn: FUNKY

Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

          Highly regarded as one of the most faithful adaptations of a Raymond Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely is an oddity among the films that comprised the noir boom of the mid-’70s. Unlike, say, Chinatown (1974), which placed a contemporary cast in a period milieu to achieve a postmodern effect, Farewell, My Lovely stars an actor who appeared in several classics of the original late ’40s noir cycle: Robert Mitchum. And while Mitchum’s advanced age creates some storytelling hiccups, like the idea that his character is sexual catnip for a young beauty, his deep association with the genre and the hangdog quality that made him a good fit for vintage noir are used to great effect; Mitchum lumbers around Farewell, My Lovely like he’s the same poor bastard he played in Out of the Past (1947) after another 30 years of rough road.

          In addition to its well-cast leading man, the picture boasts a smooth script by David Zelag Goodman. The screenplay retains Chandler’s pithiest observations (via Mitchum’s world-weary voiceover) and lets the story spiral off into all the right murky tangents without losing narrative coherence. Describing a Chandler plot in the abstract does nothing to capture the story’s appeal, but the broad strokes are that a muscle-bound crook named Moose Malloy (Jack O’Halloran) hires private dick Philip Marlowe (Mitchum) to track down his long-lost girlfriend. This draws Marlowe into a web of hoodlums, politicians, and whores, so before long Marlowe’s been beaten, shot at, shot up, and generally put through the wringer. Along the way, he commences a torrid romance with a powerful judge’s fag-hag trophy wife, Helen Grayle (Charlotte Rampling). The movie gets seedier as it progresses, with Marlowe serving as the audience’s tour guide through the underworld.

          Director Dick Richards gets preoccupied with aping the visual style of classic noir flicks (lotsa neon and venetian blinds), so the more amateurish actors in the cast don’t get the attention they need, and Richards is pretty inept handling the sequence of Marlowe getting hopped up on dope. Nonetheless, the story is compelling—in Chandler’s universe, bad situations always get worse—and the supporting cast is colorful. John Ireland stands out as Marlowe’s policeman pal, the stalwart Detective Nulty, and Sylvia Miles received an Oscar nomination for her grotesque turn as a boozy ex-showgirl. Harry Dean Stanton, Joe Spinell, and Anthony Zerbe show up at regular intervals, and there’s even a brief appearance by a pre-Rocky Sylvester Stallone. Farewell, My Lovely is uneven, but its virtues are plentiful.

Farewell, My Lovely: GROOVY

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

          Screenwriter John Milius crafted this outlandish narrative from the real-life exploits of Old West eccentric Judge Roy Bean, integrating a series of impossibly colorful episodes featuring an albino gunslinger, a lascivious priest, a beer-drinking bear, a legendary stage actress, and frontiersman Grizzly Adams. As directed by the venerable John Huston, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean isn’t remotely believable, but rather so enthusiastically weird that it’s fascinating to realize the movie was released by a major studio.

          Paul Newman stars as Bean, a fanciful drifter who wanders into a bar in the wilds of Texas only to get bushwhacked by unsavory locals. After being nursed back to health by a sweet senorita (Victoria Principal), he returns to the bar and slaughters everyone inside, then establishes the bar as the headquarters of his Wild West fiefdom. Bean declares himself a judge (literally draping himself in the U.S. flag at one point), and makes it a hanging offence for those under his “jurisdiction” to do things like besmirch the good name of Lily Langtry, the actress whom Bean worships from afar. He also attracts a cadre of loyal followers, including pistol-packing “marshals” who enrich themselves by stealing loot from the myriad unlucky souls Bean executes.

          The story eventually becomes a battle of wills between Bean and an ambitious lawyer (Roddy McDowall) who wants to seize the judge’s holdings, but the film mostly comprises a string of strange vignettes. Stacy Keach plays the aforementioned albino gunslinger, strutting around in pasty makeup, an Edgar Winter fright wig, and a spangled cowboy outfit worthy of the Village People. Appearing onscreen as well as directing, Huston plays Adams as a grumpy wanderer who complains the law won’t allow him to die wherever he wants. And so it goes. Huston lets actors run amok with the absurd material, and they look like they’re having a blast; Newman in particular seems thrilled to play a grizzled old coot with a silver tongue and a colossally bad attitude.

          The cast is filled with interesting people, from assorted varmint types (Ned Beatty, Bill McKinney) to those playing random small roles (Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Zerbe). But the real star of this unique show is Milius’ outrageous dialogue, like this rant from Bean after he insults a group of fallen women: “I understand you have taken exception to my calling you whores. I'm sorry. I apologize. I ask you to note that I did not call you callous-ass strumpets, fornicatresses, or low-born gutter sluts. But I did say ‘whores.’ No escaping that. And for that slip of the tongue, I apologize.”

The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean: GROOVY

The Molly Maguires (1970)

          An old-fashioned morality tale somewhat in the vein of John Ford’s classic film The Informer (1935), The Molly Maguires offers a fictionalized take on a group of real-life Irish immigrants who worked in Pennsylvania’s coalmines during the late 19th century. When a group of fed-up miners led by Jack Kehoe (Sean Connery) lashes out at their oppressive employers through a covert campaign of bombings and murders, the police send an Irish-born detective, James McParlan (Richard Harris), to infiltrate and expose Kehoe’s group, causing McParlan to experience a crisis of conscience: The more he learns about the secret guerilla organization called “The Molly Maguires,” the more he sympathizes with them.

          As scripted by once-blacklisted Hollywood lefty Walter Bernstein and as directed by sensitive humanist Martin Ritt, The Molly Maguires takes an unusually nuanced view of radical politics. The picture lays out the reasons why the workers rebel—dangerous work conditions, a usurious pay structure in which the mining company withholds nearly all wages through outrageous “deductions”—yet the filmmakers don’t paint the Maguires as heroes. Instead, the Maguires are depicted as desperate men who resort to violence when pushed beyond reasonable limits.

          This distinction puts viewers squarely inside McParlan’s conflicted psyche, and the melancholy nature of Harris’ screen persona suits the story well. The actor is believable as a working-class bruiser and as a man who realizes he’s selling his soul for career advancement. The betrayal inherent to the story is accentuated by Connery’s tightly controlled performance, since the Kehoe character is acutely self-aware; especially toward the end of the picture, Connery does a strong job of demonstrating that Kehoe values his life less than the goal of making his oppressors understand his rage.

          Fittingly for a story about the Irish, there’s a darkly lyrical quality to The Molly Maguires; in particular, the tin whistles of Henry Mancini’s score and the lilting accents of the various players make the gloomy mines and rolling hills of Pennsylvania seem like lost colonies of the Emerald Isle. Several strong supporting players add muscle to the picture as well. Frank Finlay is odiously pragmatic as McParland’s superior officer, while Anthony Costello, Art Lund, and Anthony Zerbe are fierce as Kehoe’s accomplices. Female lead Samantha Eggar, making the most of an underwritten role, is quietly principled as the local girl who falls for McParland without knowing his true identity.

          Although too conventionally made and slow-moving to qualify as any sort of classic, The Molly Maguires is intelligent, sincere, and thought-provoking.

The Molly Maguires: GROOVY

The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970)

          The last movie directed by the great William Wyler, The Liberation of L.B. Jones is one of several nervy race-relations pictures made in the wake of In the Heat of the Night (1967). Like that Oscar-winning film, L.B. Jones is s a thriller exploring the dangers of a black man seeking justice in the South, only this time the protagonist is not a cop or even a lawyer, but rather an undertaker. In a small Tennessee community, L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne) is the most affluent black citizen, which generates grudging respect from well-to-do whites and seething resentment among poor whites. When Jones discovers that his years-younger wife, Emma (Lola Falana), is sleeping with a white cop, simple-minded redneck Willie Joe (Anthony Zerbe), Jones’ attempt to amicably dissolve his marriage unexpectedly triggers a fusillade of horrific violence.

          Based on a novel by Jesse Hill Ford, who co-wrote the script, the picture’s tricky plot weaves together nearly a dozen major characters, each of whom reflects a facet of racism or its impact. The formidable Lee J. Cobb plays Oman Hedgepath, the white lawyer Jones hires to handle the divorce; Hedgepath tries to resolve the matter outside of court by working angles with Willie Joe and the town’s do-nothing mayor (Dub Taylor), but he only makes matters worse. Lee Majors, of all people, plays Oman’s idealistic nephew, a clean-cut voice of reason whose words are drowned out by pervasive prejudice. And in the picture’s linchpin role, a very young Yaphet Kotto plays Sonny Boy, an angry young black man who has returned to his hometown after a long absence because he wants revenge against the racist white who beat him as a child. Barbara Hershey pops up in a tiny role as Majors’ wife, and dancer Fayard Nicholas, of the famed Nicholas Brothers, appears as well, in his only dramatic performance.

          Amazingly, The Liberation of L.B. Jones doesn’t feel overstuffed, although some actors are left gasping for screen time; the clockwork script allocates time wisely, sketching characters just well enough for viewers to understand why people choose their paths. Wyler orchestrates the various elements so that when things get ugly, horrible events explode like the stages of carefully coordinated fireworks display. Not everything that happens in the picture is credible, and the material portraying Emma as a capricious nymphomaniac is stereotypical, but The Liberation of L.B. Jones is filled with memorable nuances. It’s also filled with memorable acting, because the film’s cast offers a spectrum of performance styles. Browne is elegant and nuanced; Cobb is fiery and intense; Zerbe is wonderfully squirrely and perverse; and Kotto bounces between sweet and menacing, effectively portraying the wounded boy within the dangerous man. As for Falana, she’s so sexy that it’s easy to see why the men in her life are driven to distraction. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

The Liberation of L.B. Jones: GROOVY

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978)

          By the late ’70s, cartoonish hard-rock outfit Kiss was making a fortune selling tacky merchandise to kids like me, who found their mixture of horror-movie costumes, simplistic songs, and supernatural mythology irresistible. There were action figures, comic books, lunchboxes, posters, and, to the band’s great dismay, a spectacularly awful made-for-TV movie. Despite high ratings, a bruising critical reception prompted the band to suppress the movie for many years, making bootlegs sought-after collectibles. Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park finally got a legitimate DVD release in 2007, when entrepreneurial band bosses Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley decided that if anyone was going to make money laughing at Kiss’ disastrous dramatic debut, it should be Messers. Simmons and Stanley. In truth, when I first saw this thing on NBC a few days before Halloween 1978, I probably realized something was wrong—but didn’t care. As produced by cartoon mavens Hanna-Barbera, Kiss Meets the Phantom is a live-action onslaught of horror-movie tropes and juvenile jokes, making it feel like an extra-trippy episode of Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby-Doo franchise. What more could a ’70s kid want?
          When the story opens, the members of Kiss—portrayed in the movie as otherworldly superheroes—arrive to play a show at the Magic Mountain theme park near Los Angeles. They soon discover that a crazed scientist (Anthony Zerbe) is taking his skill for creating Disney-style animatronics too far, kidnapping teenagers and replacing them with robot lookalikes. How? Why? Don’t look for answers. Before long, the Kiss gang faces off with robot versions of themselves, exhibiting cheaply rendered superpowers like Simmons’ ability to breathe fire. A number of songs are performed onscreen, and many more appear on the soundtrack, so the constant barrage of clumsy visuals and hard-driving music (excepting the wimpy “Beth”) mesh with the nonsensical plotting to create a fever-dream vibe, because it’s hard to believe anything this weird ever got made, much less broadcast. A big part of the unintentional-humor appeal is that all four members of Kiss give terrible acting performances, so each scene feels more catastrophic than the last.
          FYI, the version of this movie that Kiss released in 2007 isn’t the as-broadcast original but rather a shorter cut released to European theaters under the moniker Attack of the Phantoms; I’m sure everyone reading this will weep at the thought of being deprived the unvarnished masterpiece I first saw in 1978.

Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park: FREAKY