1980 Week: Die Laughing

          An ambitious but failed attempt at creating a Hitchcock-style caper flick for the teen demo, this overstuffed and underdeveloped comedy was a major misfire for leading man Robby Benson, who also coproduced the picture, in addition to writing and performing several songs for the project. Beloved by a generation of female fans for his blue eyes, glorious hair, and sensitivity, Benson was arguably the best actor of the whole ’70s teen-idol set, but he had a tricky time transitioning to grown-up roles. His turn as a young adult in Die Laughing was a half-hearted attempt at making the leap, because even though Benson’s character gets involved with life-or-death issues, he spends most of his screen time acting like an adolescent goofball.
          Set in San Francisco, the convoluted story begins with a shootout in a college laboratory. The scientist who escapes from the shootout ends up in a taxicab driven by Pinsky (Benson), a wannabe singer-songwriter. Thugs catch up with Pinsky’s cab and kill the scientist, but Pinsky escapes with a mysterious box the scientist had in his possession. Borrowing a page from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Pinsky flees the scene because circumstances give bystanders the false impression that Pinsky committed murder. This set-up begins a farcical chase story. Even as Pinsky evades killers and tries to learn why the scientist was killed (in order to clear his own name), Pinsky juggles changes in his romantic life and a series of high-stakes auditions with his band.

          Had Benson and his collaborators gotten a firm grasp on this material, Die Laughing could have been memorably intriguing and silly, very much in the vein of the Chevy Chase-Golden Hawn hit Foul Play (1978). Alas, Die Laughing director Jeff Wener doesn’t have anything close to the sure hand of Foul Play director Colin Higgins, so Die Laughing spirals out of control almost immediately. Beyond basic questions of logic and motivation, huge chunks of storytelling seem to be missing, and the movie’s kitchen-sink approach to physical and situational comedy comes across as desperate. Among other things, the picture includes a deranged taxi dispatcher who runs his company like a military operation, a shadowy figure who watches events from behind mirrored sunglasses, a trained monkey who somehow memorized the formula for a plutonium bomb, and an epic circus sequence that features Benson falling face first into huge piles of elephant excrement. Weirdest of all is the film’s bad guy, Meuller (Bud Cort). He’s a scrawny nerd with the grandiosity of a Bond villain, a raft of eccentricities, and a penchant for such strangely nonthreatening behaviors as squirting his adversaries with a water pistol.

          Despite the picture’s slick look and vigorous musical score, the story is so discombobulated that it’s hard to follow. Given that Benson and co-screenwriter Jerry Segal’s previous collaboration was the charming romance One on One (1977), it’s shocking that they missed the mark so widely. Similarly, it boggles the mind that costars Peter Coyote, Charles Durning, and Elsa Lanchester are wasted in small roles. Die Laughing is not without its virtues, such as Benson’s energetic performance of the hooky soft-rock tune “All I Want is Love” and the bizarre climax of Cort’s performance, but it’s a mess.

Die Laughing: FUNKY

Harold and Maude (1971)

          Today, Harold and Maude is so widely regarded as one of the quintessential New Hollywood films that it’s surprising to learn the movie didn’t have an easy path to immortality—especially since the early life of the project seemed charmed. Writer and co-producer Colin Higgins developed the project during his graduate studies at UCLA’s film school and won a major prize for the script. Then, while working as a pool cleaner in L.A. to stay solvent, Higgins met the film’s other producer, Mildred Lewis. The pair tried to set up the project with Higgins directing, but Paramount nixed that plan and hired editor-turned-filmmaker Hal Ashby. Good move. In addition to hitting just the right mix of satire and sweetness, Ashby shot the picture on such a modest budget that the story reached theaters with its darkness and humanism intact.

          Yet Harold and Maude did not catch on during its original release; rather, it took years of home-video exhibition, theatrical reissues, and TV broadcasts for the movie to find its well-deserved status as a minor classic. That said, it’s not difficult to see why the film alienates as many people as it enchants. The premise is perverse, the humor is morbid, and the May-December romance at the heart of the story skirts the limits of good taste. After all, the actors playing the lovers in the movie’s title—Bud Cort (Harold) and Ruth Gordon (Maude)—were in their 20s and 70s, respectively, at the time of filming.

          Higgins’ bold script begins by introducing Harold Chasen, a rich kid so bored with the trappings of everyday life that he spends most of his energy staging outrageous suicide scenes for the kinky thrill of shocking his mother, Mrs. Chasen (Vivian Pickles). Since Harold never actually kills himself, however, it’s unclear whether his activities represent a genuine cry for help or just bizarre frivolity. Undaunted, Mrs. Chasen tries to match Harold with various potential brides, but Harold’s eerie theatrics spook all of them. Meanwhile, Harold amuses himself by visiting funerals, which brings him into contact with Maude Chardin, who also digs watching final farewells to the deceased. Maude is as free and open as Harold is repressed and quiet, so as they spend time together, Maude teaches Harold surprising lessons about making the most of every day; she’s also the only person who encourages Harold to embrace his oddness.

          The evolution of this relationship involves a series of touching revelations and surprises that won’t be spoiled here, but suffice to say that Harold and Maude has boundless integrity—the film is never less than true to its offbeat self, which is, of course, why the picture has become a source of inspiration for generations of independent-minded filmmakers. Each of the major elements in the movie approaches a kind of poetry, from Cort’s hangdog quirkiness to Gordon’s ebullient outrageousness, while Ashby consistently handles the material with sensitivity and style.

          The storytelling is a bit on the schematic side, and some of Harold’s suicide scenes are absurdly grandiose, but the soul of this movie is so utterly unique that asking it to meet normal expectations is foolhardy. Especially with the jubilant soundtrack of Cat Stevens songs giving the piece a gentle heartbeat, Harold and Maude easily ranks among the most unconventional love stories ever filmed. It is also, not unimportantly, a perfect snapshot of the historical moment when mainstream Hollywood studios let young filmmakers run wild so long as they kept costs low. Harold and Maude isn’t perfect, but learning to accept the imperfections of life—no matter how horrific they might be—is a key component of the picture’s inspirational theme.

Harold and Maude: RIGHT ON

Brewster McCloud (1970)

          Arguably Robert Altman’s strangest movie—a high standard, given his eccentric career—Brewster McCloud hit theaters shortly after the idiosyncratic filmmaker scored a major hit with M*A*S*H, but this picture was far too bizarre to enjoy the broad acceptance of its predecessor. In fact, Brewster McCloud shuns narrative conventions so capriciously that it seems likely Altman took taken perverse pleasure in confounding viewers. Consider the willfully weird storyline: Nerdy young man Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort) lives illegally in a workroom beneath the Houston Astrodome, and he passes his days studying avian physiology while building a pair of mechanical wings so he can eventually fly away to some unknown location.

          Three women in his life accentuate the peculiarity of Brewster’s existence. Hope (Jennifer Salt) is a groupie who visits Brewster’s lair and climaxes while watching him exercise; Suzanne (Shelley Duvall, in her first movie) is a spaced-out Astrodome tour guide who becomes Brewster’s accomplice and lover; and Louise (Sally Kellerman), who might or might not be a real person, is Brewster’s guardian angel, subverting everyone who tries to impede Brewster’s progress.

          This being an Altman film, the story also involves about a dozen other significant characters. For instance, there’s Abraham Wright (Stacy Keach), a wheelchair-bound geezer who makes his money charging merciless rents to seniors at rest homes, and Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), a supercop investigating a series of murders that may or may not have been committed by Brewster and/or Louise. (Each of the victims is marked by bird defecation on the face.) Among the film’s other threads is a recurring vignette featuring The Lecturer (Rene Auberjonois), a weird professor/scientist who speaks directly to the audience about bird behavior while slowly transforming into a bird.

          Although it’s more of a comedy than anything else, Brewster McCloud incorporates tropes from coming-of-age dramas, police thrillers, and romantic tragedies, and the whole thing is presented in Altman’s signature style of seemingly dissociated vignettes fused by ironic cross-cutting and overlapping soundtrack elements. This is auteur filmmaking at its most extreme, with a director treating his style like a narrative component—and yet at the same time, Brewster McCloud is so irreverently lowbrow that Kellerman’s character drives a car with the vanity license plate “BRD SHT.” Similarly, Salt’s character expresses an orgasm by repeatedly pumping a mustard dispenser so condiments squirt onto a table.

          Appraising Brewster McCloud via normal criteria is pointless, since Doran William Cannon’s script is designed for maximum strangeness, and since none of the actors was tasked with crafting a realistic individual. A lot of what happens onscreen is arresting, and the movie is cut briskly enough that it moves along, but one’s tolerance for this experiment is entirely contingent on one’s appetite for mean-spirited whimsy. That said, Brewster McCloud is completely unique, even for an era of rampant cinematic innovation, and novelty is, to some degree, its own virtue. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Brewster McCloud: FREAKY

The Traveling Executioner (1970)

          The New Hollywood era was probably the only time The Traveling Executioner could have been made by a major studio, because the film is so dark and weird that at any other point in history, studios would have shunned the project like it was infected with a contagious disease. The movie is about exactly what the title suggests, an entrepreneur who owns an electric chair and shuttles between various Southern jails sending condemned killers to their final destinations. Imaginatively written by one Garrie Bateson (whose only other credits are a pair of early-’70s TV episodes), the picture doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its outlandish premise, but if only for its spectacular opening and closing scenes, it’s worth a look for adventurous viewers.

          Stacy Keach plays the wonderfully named Jonas Candide, a executioner working the Southern U.S. jail circuit in 1918. He’s perfected a colorful routine: As he straps terrified convicts into his chair, which he calls “Reliable” and treats as tenderly as a woman, he gives a spellbinding speech about how one of the men he killed contacted him through a medium and described “the fields of ambrosia” to which he was delivered after death. One warden chides Jonas for making the afterlife sound so appealing that guards are ready to line up for execution after hearing Jonas’ spiel.

          Our hero’s lifestyle gets derailed when he meets Gundred Herzallerliebst (Marianna Hill), the first woman scheduled for a rendezvous with Reliable. Gundred is persistent and slick, working the court system to obtain a series of stays on her execution, and she’s also a beauty willing to use her formidable wiles. Once Gundred gets Jonas in her sights, he’s a goner. She seduces him into feigning maintenance problems with Reliable, and then convinces him to bust her out of prison.

          The movie goes off-track at this point, getting lost in subplots about Jonas raising money for an elaborate breakout scheme, and the movie also loses its tonal focus; composer Jerry Goldsmith scores scenes in the middle of the picture like high comedy, as if the sequence of Jonas establishing a temporary brothel inside a prison is the height of hilarity. This discursion into ineffective black comedy is a shame, because the really interesting potential of the movie resides in elements like Jonas’ training of an apprentice (Bud Cort) and Jonas’ complex friendship with an amiable warden (M. Emmet Walsh). More damningly, the movie lets Jonas’ dynamic with Gundred slip into the cliché of black widow snaring a man with sex, when something more emotional would have had greater impact.

          Still, Keach is on fire throughout the movie, showing off his physical grace and his silky vocal delivery; the scene of him trying to sweet-talk a bank manager into providing a loan by pandering to the man’s patriotism is terrific. Even better, the dark turn the movie takes in its last act is simultaneously poetic and tragic, so by the end of the picture, Jonas’ peculiar identity as an evangelist for the afterlife has returned to the fore. This strange little picture also looks great, with journeyman director Jack Smight and veteran cinematographer Philip Lathrop assembling a series of stark widescreen frames that alternate between the shadowy spaces of prisons and dusty panoramas that make the picture feel like a deranged Western. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Traveling Executioner: FREAKY

M*A*S*H (1970)

          A brilliant antiwar comedy that turned Robert Altman into an A-list director, cemented the stardom of Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland, inspired one of the most beloved series in TV history, and pissed off supporters of America’s involvement in Vietnam without once uttering the word “Vietnam,” M*A*S*H encapsulates almost everything that made the counterculture movies of the ’70s wonderful. Brash, inappropriate, and vulgar, the picture tackles a controversial topic from an unexpected angle, resulting in outrageous comedy setpieces, seamless acting work by a terrific ensemble, and touching moments of unexpected humanity. Plus, even though some of Altman’s excesses are plainly visible, like his tendency toward misogynistic portrayals of attractive women, M*A*S*H is his most accessible movie, displaying all of his clever storytelling techniques without getting sidetracked by his esoteric narrative interests.
          The story, of course, depicts the wild adventures at a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, focusing on three gifted peacenik doctors drafted into military service: “Duke” Forrest (Tom Skerritt), “Trapper” John McIntyre (Gould), and “Hawkeye” Pierce (Sutherland). To numb themselves against the insanity of war—and the inanity of military bureaucracy—they spend their downtime bedding nurses, downing copious amounts of homemade booze, and violating every imaginable code of conduct. Their primary nemesis is another surgeon, the impossibly straight-laced Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), who preaches a nice god-mother-and-country line even though he’s a having an illicit affair with nurse Margaret “Hot Lips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman). Skerritt's funny and loose, though he gets eclipsed as Gould and Sutherland congeal into a perfect comedy team over the course of their first (and best) film together. Playing broader types, Duvall and Kellerman strike satirical sparks lampooning conservative hypocrisy.
          The supporting cast is deep and democratic, with Rene Auberjonois, Roger Bowen, Bud Cort, Jo Ann Pflug, John Schuck, Fred Wiliamson, and others all getting memorably outrageous things to do, plus the movie includes Gary Burgoff’s first appearance as his indelible character “Radar” O’Reilly, the ESP-equipped company clerk he played during most of the M*A*S*H series’ historic 11-year run.
          Working from Ring Lardner Jr.’s Oscar-nominated script, which in turn was based on a novel by Richard Hooker, Altman presents a string of irreverent scenes, like the football game in which doctors use syringes to dope the opposition, Hawkeye and Trapper’s debauched field trip to Japan, and the famous “Suicide is Painless” sequence that spotlights the franchise’s moody theme song (with lyrics!) while giving a shout-out to the Last Supper. From start to finish, the film achieves a delicate balance by satirizing everything inhuman about the military while at the same time celebrating the sacrifices of honorable men and women, so it’s a deeply felt statement that made waves when the movie was released in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bloody, funny, raunchy, serious, silly, and smart, M*A*S*H set a standard for tonally unpredictable satire that few films have matched since.

M*A*S*H: OUTTA SIGHT