The Rebel Rousers (1970)

Filmed in 1967 but shelved until 1970, The Rebel Rousers is a bland biker flick distinguished only by the presence of several actors who became famous after the picture was shot: Bruce Dern, Diane Ladd, Jack Nicholson, Harry Dean Stanton. Nicholson is barely in the picture, Stanton has a couple of amusing throwaway bits, and Ladd mostly shrieks or whimpers while playing a pregnant woman terrorized by bikers. Of the bunch, only Dern gets a part with dimension and size, though there’s not much he can do with the brainless material. He plays the chief of a scooter gang whose jackets bear Confederate flags (though none of the bikers sounds Southern). Yet his character’s behavior is befuddling, and one gets the sense of a rushed production inhibiting Dern’s ability to contribute his signature idiosyncratic flourishes—virtually every shot feels like a first rehearsal, or even a loose run-through, rather than a recording of fully developed performance. The threadbare plot revolves around portly architect Paul (Cameron Mitchell), who rolls into a dusty town and, by coincidence, encounters high-school buddy J.J. (Dern). Paul traveled to the town in search of his runaway girlfriend, Karen (Ladd), who fled during a rough patch in their relationship. Eventually, Paul’s car breaks down near a beach, at which point J.J.’s biker buddies menace Paul and Karen. J.J. tries to intervene, leading to power struggles within the gang. All of this is exceptionally boring to watch, especially when the plot degrades into a repetitive pattern of motorcycle races up and down the shoreline. There’s also a huge charisma gap separating Dern’s earnest performance and Mitchell’s drab work.

The Rebel Rousers: LAME

The Twist (1976)

Recalling the production of this obscure European sex comedy in his memoirs, Bruce Dern admits “I didn’t really get what the movie was getting at until about two-thirds of the way through.” In fact, most of the chapter Dern devotes to The Twist concerns meals, Parisian weather, director Claude Chabrol’s preoccupation with complicated camera movements, and a weird episode with Ann-Margret and her husband at a nightclub. Watching The Twist, you’ll quickly understand why the circumstances of the picture are more interesting than the picture itself. A dull would-be farce about rotten people cheating on each other, the movie concerns an American writer (Dern), his French wife (played by Chabrol’s real-life spouse, Stéphane Audran), and their various extramarital entanglements. Ann-Margret plays the writer’s mistress. The wife fantasizes about killing the mistress, and the husband has a fever dream about all the women in his life—including his hot stepdaughter—molesting him before the wife shows up to cut off his manhood with a pair of scissors. (Not exactly Mr. Subtlety, Chabrol juices this sequence with a closeup of a fake penis becoming engorged, lest the audience somehow misread the wife’s intentions when she shows up with the scissors.) The Twist is not wholly negligible, because Dern plays his role with intensity (perhaps too much so); the production values are slick; and there’s a lot of fodder for the male gaze, with Sybil Danning as a flirty secretary and Sydne Rome as the stepdaughter. Additionally, scenes depicting the marital dynamic between the main characters exude believable hostility, with the husband coming across as a self-involved prick while the wife comes across as a shrew desperate to be tamed. (Wait, you’re surprised that a sex farce from a French director born in 1930 has gender politics from the Stone Age?) Nonetheless, beyond those eager to see everything Chabrol or Dern ever made, it’s hard to imagine many viewers finding the stamina to endure all 107 minutes of The Twist.

The Twist: LAME

1980 Week: Middle Age Crazy

          During one of the many dream sequences that permeate Middle Age Crazy, successful but unhappy builder Bobby Lee Burnett (Bruce Dern) imagines that he’s on trial for the way he lives his life. “I find you guilty,” the dream judge declares, “of preventing your family from exercising their God-given right to tell you a bunch of shit you don’t want to hear.” That vignette illustrates everything that’s wrong—and right—about Middle Age Crazy. At a baseline level, the movie says something truthful about the way men of a certain era felt trapped after achieving the American dream. It’s the old “things you own end up owning you” conundrum. And yet the scene also illustrates that in order to solve his problems, all Bobby Lee needs to do is get the fuck over himself.

          Although technically released during the first year after the Me Decade concluded, Middle Age Crazy is infused with the absurd narcissism of the entitled suburban white male circa the late ’70s. Barraged by sociocultural messaging about self-actualization, Bobby Lee represents faceless millions who couldn’t tell the difference between having it all and having enough—which is why it’s tough to care about Bobby Lee’s journey. He’s so self-centered that he can’t appreciate what he has. Making matters worse, the film’s narrative problems are compounded by execution issues. Director John Trent has a clumsy touch for dramaturgy and pacing, so he presents the content of Carl Kleinschmitt’s bland script without any special spin. For most of its running time, the picture just sits there like a run-of-the-mill TV movie. While Middle Age Crazy would be disappointing under any circumstances, it’s especially irritating because the picture was one of two projects that helped derail the career momentum Dern gained with his Oscar nomination for Coming Home (1978).

          Dern earned his first shot at top billing in the early ’70s, headlining a number of interesting but unsuccessful projects, as well as a few outright turkeys, Coming Home gave Dern another chance. Middle Age Crazy and the perverse psychodrama Tattoo (1981) tanked, so Dern was thereafter relegated to supporting roles in expensive pictures and starring roles in low-budget indies. That said, Middle Age Crazy demonstrates why Dern was never destined for sustained leading-man status. Even when playing innocuous scenes, he’s got a strange twinkle in his eyes—and whenever his character gets angry, he’s frighteningly intense. Dern’s gifts include his bone-deep commitment and his myriad idiosyncrasies, so it’s a waste to put him in something as mundane as Middle Age Crazy, which was based upon, of all things, a song by Jerry lee Lewis.

          It doesn’t help that the actors surrounding Dern aren’t in his league. Ann-Margret makes a valiant stab at the thankless role of Bobby Lee’s crass wife, and the rest of the actors in this Canada/US coproduction are competent but forgettable. As for the story—yawn. Bobby Lee buys a fast car, sleeps with a younger woman (a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, no less), and tells an obnoxious client to take a hike. All of this plays out like an anemic version of Blake Edwards’ sexy hit 10 (1979), though the vibe is actually more grim character study than robust sex comedy.

Middle Age Crazy: FUNKY

Bloody Mama (1970)

          Among the better films in the seemingly endless cycle of Depression-era crime flicks that Roger Corman produced while capitalizing on the success of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), this ramshackle drama is a grim piece of work with occasional flashes of real insight and sensitivity. As a whole, the movie is quite rickety, thanks to erratic storytelling and the unsuccessful use of montages that blend newsreel footage with voiceover to place the activities of the main characters into a historical context. Yet for periodic stretches of screen time, the picture feels substantial.
          Directed as well as produced by Corman, Bloody Mama purports to tell the story of real-life 1930s criminal “Ma” Kate Barker, who led a gang comprising her adult sons and various hangers-on during a violent string of armed robberies. Right from the beginning of the film, Corman tries to present a psychological reading of the title character—viewers meet Kate as a young girl, when her brothers hold her down on the ground while her father rapes her. Once the picture introduces Shelley Winters as the middle-aged Kate, mother to four redneck kids, the idea is that viewers should understand what made Kate so tough. As with similar imagery appearing throughout the film (e.g., Kate holding one of her sons in his arms while he cries himself to sleep after murdering a young woman), the psychological stuff only goes so far. Beyond the dissonance of juxtaposing high-minded material with such tacky signifiers as gory murders and gratuitous nudity, the movie simply isn’t deep or literate enough. The script, credited to Don Peters and Robert Thorn, rushes through episodes covering several years, which has the effect of reducing characterizations to snapshots, and the slavish devotion to generating commercial elements means the narrative periodically stops dead while something lurid happens.

          Nonetheless, some of the characters and performances resonate. Don Stroud is menacing as the psychotic Herman Barker, while a young Robert De Niro gives an alternately frightening and goofy turn as the drug-addled Lloyd Barker. Playing the other two brothers, Clint Kimbrough and Robert Walden don’t have much to do, and in fact they’re overshadowed by the sterling work of costar Bruce Dern, who plays latter-day gang member Kevin Dirkman with his signature idiosyncratic edge. Pat Hingle’s vulnerable performance as a kidnapping victim and Diane Varsi’s bitter portrayal of a cynical prostitute-turned-moll make distinct impressions, as well. Alas, leading lady Winters is the movie’s weak link, since her cartoonish and shrill performance exists in an unpleasant dimension all its own. Oddly enough, Winters played a comical (and pseudonymous) version of the same role a few years earlier, portraying “Ma Parker” in two 1966 episodes of the camp-classic TV series Batman. Her work suited that milieu more closely.

Bloody Mama: FUNKY

Smile (1975)

          Several unique talents operating at the top of their respective games converged for Smile, a wicked satire of American values viewed through the prism of a second-rate beauty contest. Skewering ambition, competition, consumerism, hypocrisy, vanity, and other unbecoming qualities, the movie achieves a fine balance of humor and pathos while juxtaposing absurd situations with believable characterizations. The project’s key players include screenwriter Jerry Belson (a TV veteran doing some of his best-ever work), director Michael Ritichie (in the middle of a hot streak that included 1972’s The Candidate and 1976’s The Bad News Bears), and actor Bruce Dern. Though normally cast as psychos, Dern plays a normal character here, channeling his natural intensity into the fierce characterization of a small man grasping for social position. His terrific performance sets the pace for an eclectic cast including such veteran character actors as Geoffrey Lewis and Nicholas Pryor, plus newcomers Colleen Camp, Melanie Griffith, and Annette O’Toole. (TV beauty Barbara Feldon, of Get Smart fame, contributes a rich supporting performance as a contestant-turned-coordinator.)

          Ritchie films the story somewhat in the style of a Robert Altman movie, with lots of intermingled storylines revolving around the central event of the American Miss Pageant, so the movie winds through backstage politics, onstage disasters (some of the “talents” the contestants display are anything but), and the funny/sad melodramas of characters’ private lives. At the center of the story is Big Bob (Dern), a used-car salesman with way too much of his identity invested in the role of head judge. He spends the entire movie trying to hold the pieces of his life together even as the various illusions upon which his existence is predicated fall apart; his dissipation is an arch but effective metaphor representing the way some people blindly pursue the American Dream. O’Toole, appearing in her first major film role, personifies the other end of the spectrum—a cynical operator who’s learned the ways of the world at a young age, thanks to years of having men ogle her curves. (O’Toole’s character offers less experienced contestants such advice as using Vaseline to lubricate the mouth during hours of endless smiling.)

          Although Smile isn’t purely a comedy, since many passages of the picture are so pathetic that they’re more sad than funny, the picture works equally well as a romp and as a rumination. The spectacle of coaxing teenagers onto a stage so they can pretend viewers are interested in their ideals and skills—when, really, the name of the game is peddling flesh—is a fine proxy for the filmmakers’ observations about the avarice hidden behind American can-do attitudes. No surprise, then, that Belson’s script was nominated for a WGA Award, or that Smile was revisited for a new medium in 1986, when a musical based upon the film debuted on Broadway.

Smile: GROOVY

The Cowboys (1972)

          Although John Wayne’s actual cinematic swan song was The Shootist (1976), which depicts an aging gunfighter’s quest for death with dignity, the Duke’s earlier film The Cowboys is in many ways a richer closing statement about the themes Wayne spent decades exploring in Western movies. Instead of merely pondering the question of whether a man who lives by the gun must die by the gun—the poignant central theme of The Shootist—The Cowboys explores all the qualities, bad and good, that defined the Duke’s screen persona. His character, Wil Andersen, combines frontier values, heroic self-sacrifice, macho stoicism, and, of course, that most American of qualities: rugged individualism. The fact that Andersen’s journey inadvertently inspires a group of boys to become young men molded in Andersen’s honorable image perfectly echoes the manner in which Wayne’s characters inspired generations of moviegoers. So, whether you love or hate Wayne’s on- and off-screen politics, it’s easy to appreciate the elegance of this picture’s symbiosis between star and story.

          Based on a novel by William Dale Jennings and adapted for the screen by Jennings and the husband-and-wife duo Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., The Cowboys tells a simple story about noble characters clashing with craven ones. In the beginning of the movie, rancher Andersen preps for a cattle drive until his crew abruptly quits to join the Gold Rush. In short order, Andersen finds himself interviewing an unlikely set of replacements—several schoolboys, some teens and some even younger. When the kids display unexpected determination, he agrees to hire them. However, word of available work also attracts a gaggle of varmints led by Asa Watts (Bruce Dern), whom Andersen quickly identifies as a dangerous type. Andersen refuses to hire Asa’s gang, and then sets off on the drive with the kids as his crew. A series of frontier adventures ensues, during which Andersen gruffly mentors the boys on what it takes to succeed in the cattle biz. Meanwhile, Asa’s nefarious gang trails the cowboys, eventually leading to an infamous showdown between Dern and Wayne—the climax of the duel won’t be spoiled here, but suffice to say one single moment helped cement Dern’s typecasting as a crazed villain.

          Although the storyline of The Cowboys is so schematic as to seem a bit like a fable, the piece works—mightily—because of immaculate craftsmanship and vivacious performances. Director Mark Rydell, himself a thespian, does a gorgeous job of blending different types of acting, so everything from Wayne’s stylization to Dern’s improvisation feels unified; Rydell also draws fine work from young performers including Robert Carradine, who made his screen debut in The Cowboys. (Grown-ups in the fine supporting cast include Roscoe Lee Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, and Slim Pickens.) Cinematographer Robert Surtees captures the rugged beauty of untarnished landscapes, while composer John Williams’ music strikes just the right balance of excitement and wistfulness. And if the movie’s a bit bloated at 131 minutes, so what? Thanks to its careful treatment of resonant themes, The Cowboys is arguably Wayne’s best film of the ’70s.

The Cowboys: RIGHT ON

Black Sunday (1977)

          Full disclosure: Even though I recognize its many flaws, I love this movie for its ambition, intelligence, and toughness—and especially for costar Bruce Dern’s searing performance. Black Sunday is bleak, long, and outlandish, but whenever I watch the picture, I perceive those qualities as strengths rather than weaknesses.

          Based on an early novel by Thomas Harris, who later created Hannibal Lecter and wrote the various books about the cannibalistic shrink’s exploits, Black Sunday is an old-school terrorism thriller. When a Palestinian extremist named Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller) surfaces on the radar of merciless Mossad agent David Kabakov (Robert Shaw), David methodically tracks her down to the U.S. and joins forces with an FBI agent, Sam Corley (Fritz Weaver), to identify her plan and stop her. It turns out Dahlia has recruited a PTSD-stricken Vietnam vet, American pilot Michael Lander (Dern), to fly the Goodyear Blimp into a Miami stadium during the Super Bowl, where Dahlia will activate explosives inside the blimp and send thousands of steel darts flying into the crowd.

          John Frankenheimer, a seasoned pro at tightly coiled action stories, directs the film in an expansive style, taking equal care with intimate scenes of Dahlia manipulating Michael’s fragile psyche and big-canvas action sequences. What makes Black Sunday unique, however, is its sensitive exploration of Michael’s mental state—despite being neither the film’s hero nor its villain, Michael is by far the picture’s most developed character, and this peculiar storytelling choice delivers fascinating results. As the story progresses, we learn that David (the Mossad agent) is a cold-blooded hunter for whom the ends justify the means. Dahlia, meanwhile, is a kind of psychic counterpoint to David, and the biggest distinction between them is Dahlia’s willingness to kill bystanders for dramatic effect. Therefore, the conflict between these characters is a draw, morally speaking.

          Caught between them, literally and metaphorically, is Michael, a haunted man who endured torture as a prisoner of war, only to return home to an ungrateful society. Even when Michael is carefully preparing explosives, he acts more like an artist than a potential mass murderer; we feel his suffocating angst and wish for him to escape Dahlia’s destructive influence. Dern soars in this movie, adding dimension upon dimension to a role that’s perfectly suited to his offbeat gifts.

          Keller is good, too, presenting a creepy sort of sociopathic sensuality, and Shaw, though regularly upstaged by Dern and Keller, has many vivid moments. His is not, however, a true leading man’s performance—his characterization is far too cruel for that. Adding greatly to the movie’s appeal is a robust score by John Williams, which jacks up the tension, and muscular cinematography by John A. Alonzo. Black Sunday goes overboard during the finale, during which the laws of physics take a beating and during which iffy special effects dull the film’s impact, but even with its goofy denouement, Black Sunday is a popcorn flick executed with a rare level of craftsmanship behind and in front of the camera.

Black Sunday: RIGHT ON

Thumb Tripping (1972)

An awful picture that only comes alive when it succumbs to lurid extremes, Thumb Tripping is a road movie in which neither the travelers nor the journey is interesting. Michael Burns plays Gary, a sweet-natured college kid who drops out of mainstream society for a summer of hitchhiking in Northern California and thereabouts. He soon hooks up with Shay (Meg Foster), a spaced-out hippie chick, but for the first 20-ish minutes of the movie, nothing happens. Gary and Shay mill around small towns including Carmel, occasionally getting hassled by the man, and they camp in a seaside cave with other hippies. (There’s literally a five-minute scene in the cave during which the four characters discuss the virtues of soup as a dietary staple.) Then the movie shifts to a series of episodes revolving around the weird people who give Gary and Shay rides. The best sequence features Bruce Dern as Smitty, a quasi-psychopath who threatens the kids with a knife; although Dern is typecast as a violent nutter, he’s so vital he almost makes the movie seem purposeful. Almost. Michael Conrad, later of Hill Street Blues fame, plays a horny trucker eager to get into Shay’s pants, and the final major characters are Jack (Burke Byrnes) and Lynn (Marianna Hill), hard-partying drunks who lead the heroes through high junks such as bar-hopping and skinny-dipping. Thumb Tripping is beyond pointless, not only because the story never goes anywhere, but also because the lead characters are twits. Gary’s an inactive cipher who simply watches things happen, except when he’s demonstrating squaresville hang-ups, and Shay is such a reckless wastoid that it’s bizarre we never see her drop acid. As for the acting, Burns is fine in a nothing role, Foster’s icy-blue eyes are as striking as ever, Conrad is effectively sleazy, and Byrnes and Hill are awful—hyper and screechy from their first frames to their last. Worst of all, the movie lacks a point of view: It’s neither a celebration of the counterculture lifestyle nor a condemnation, and since Gary’s just a visitor in this world, it’s not a docudrama, either.

Thumb Tripping: LAME

Posse (1975)

Even though he’d been producing many of his own movies since the late ’50s, the venerable star Kirk Douglas didn’t try directing until the early ’70s, and it’s surprising how little skill he brought to the task. Both movies that Douglas directed—this one and the pirate flick Scalawag (1973)—suffer from middling storylines and tonal chaos. Posse is the better of the two, but it’s a messy endeavor in which Douglas’ admirable ambition far exceeds his directorial abilities. A failed attempt at a postmodern Western in the Sam Peckinpah mode, Posse revolves around U.S. Marshal Howard Nightingale (Douglas), who tries to curry political favor with frontier types by tracking down ruthless bank robber Jack Strawhorn (Bruce Dern). Nightingale organizes the mob of the film’s title, only to get captured by his quarry. Then, in what was undoubtedly meant to be an ironic twist, Nightingale’s posse must turn criminal in order to raise money with which to pay Strawhorn for Nightingale’s release. It all ends with lots of preaching and violence, so viewers are supposed to walk away from the movie contemplating issues of justice and mob rule and so forth. Had the movie been written with more clarity—and, quite frankly, had Douglas’ lead performance been more subtle—Posse might have become the hard-hitting statement Douglas surely envisioned. But while previous Douglas productions about the murky intersections between morality and violence had shattering power (consider his remarkable Stanley Kubrick collaboration from 1957, Paths of Glory), Posse is simultaneously overwrought and underdeveloped. The biggest moments are delivered with bludgeoning obviousness, an issue exacerbated by Douglas’ over-the-top acting, and the heaviest thematic elements are subverted by mixed narrative messages. In the end, the film says so many things, so loudly, that it’s a muddle. Still, the intentions are good, the production values are fine, and supporting player Dern’s performance crackles with his unique energy—few people play villains with anywhere near the level of humanity and nuance that Dern brings to the task.

Posse: FUNKY

Silent Running (1972)

          Special-effects mastermind Douglas Trumbull has only directed two features in his long career, and they’re both fascinating. His first picture, Silent Running, is one of the most deeply felt statements within the small but noteworthy genre of ecology-themed sci-fi dramas, and his sophomore effort, Brainstorm (1983), is a problematic but provocative examination of what might happen if technology allowed us to experience other people’s thoughts. Obviously, the fact that both films are rooted in man’s complicated relationship with machines means that Trumbull didn’t stray far from his strong suit of special effects and technological themes—but there’s a lot to be said for any artist operating within the idiom he or she finds most comfortable.

          Silent Running takes place entirely in space, specifically aboard the scientific vessel Valley Forge. The setting is a future date when plant life has disappeared from the surface of the Earth, so the Valley Forge tugs geodesic domes in which the planet’s last forests are lovingly maintained by botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern). Lowell has a tough time getting along with the other humans aboard the Valley Forge, partially because of his antisocial nature and partially because they don’t share his passion for preserving plant life. Instead, his main companions are three robots, whom he dubs Huey, Duey, and Louie (borrowing the names of Disney cartoon character Donald Duck’s nephews). When the Valley Forge receives orders to destroy the geodesic domes (including their precious cargo) and then return to Earth—a decision’s been made that greenery isn’t worth sustaining anymore—Lowell takes extreme measures to protect as many of the plants as he can.

          Some viewers might find this storyline bizarre, either because they can’t imagine anyone prioritizing plants over people or because the film’s conservation message is too overt, but the perfect casting of Dern in the lead role both accentuates and justifies the strange premise. On the most obvious level, Dern built his career playing unstable characters, so it’s not hard to accept his drift into idiosyncratic behavior. And yet on a deeper level, Dern’s intensity underscores Freeman Lowell’s self-perception as a reluctant savior—he sees the prevention of plant extinction as a higher calling. This aspect of the film pays off wonderfully in the finale, which has a strong emotional hit that’s grounded in the offbeat colorations of Dern’s exceptional performance. And though the most memorable quality of Silent Running is the humane nature of Dern’s acting—ironic, given Trumbull’s background and directorial inexperience—the special effects don’t disappoint. Using some of the same technology he brought to bear on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Trumbull creates outer-space environments with genuine dimension, all the while ensuring that visual gimmicks never overwhelm the offbeat story.

Silent Running: RIGHT ON

Coming Home (1978)

          Inarguably the best movie made during the ’70s about the unique difficulties facing American veterans returning from Vietman, Coming Home is at once moving, political, provocative, and tender—and it’s also the apex of actress Jane Fonda’s anti-Vietnam War activism, even though it was released three years after the fall of Saigon. While “Hanoi Jane” alienated as many people as she inspired while the war was raging, she used Coming Home—which she developed—to focus her rage at needless conflict through the prism of war’s impact on individuals. Rather than being polemic, even though some detractors saw the film that way, Coming Home is poetic.

          When the movie opens in early 1968, Sally Hyde (Fonda) is happily married to a Marine officer named Bob Hyde (Bruce Dern), and both unquestionably accept the rightness of U.S. involvement in Indochina. Once Bob leaves for his tour of duty, Sally begins to hear different opinions about the war, notably from her feminist friend Vi (Penelope Milford); Sally also begins to question the subservient role she plays in her marriage. Eventually, Sally volunteers at a VA hospital, where she meets returning soldiers including embittered but passionate Luke Martin (Jon Voight), who is paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. As part of her larger spiritual awakening, Sally recognizes Luke’s humanity, and they become lovers in a crucial scene that director Hal Ashby executes with a memorable combination of eroticism and poignancy. The fragile world that Luke and Sally build together is upset, however, when Bob returns from Vietnam, having been changed in disturbing ways that echo the film’s theme of how war affects different people differently.

          Placing Sally’s character at the center of the story was a genius move on many levels. First and most obviously, the role gives Fonda a way to express her deep feelings about the war; she dramatizes the ravages of conflict by meticulously charting Sally’s shifting attitudes. Second, making the central character a witness to the horrors of Vietnam—rather than an active participant—allows the audience to see soldiers as real-world people instead of battleground heroes. What does it mean when a draftee is rewarded for his service by wounds that will last the rest of his life? What does it mean when a career soldier encounters horrors during combat for which he wasn’t prepared? How can those left behind in the homeland ever hope to understand the experiences of soldiers?

          Coming Home is a deeply compassionate film, with Ashby and cinematographer Haskell Wexler capturing a spectrum of complex emotions in soft, painterly images; the movie is a tapestry of souls making connections and, alternately, slamming against insurmountable barriers. Coming Home is also a showcase for spectacular acting. Fonda and Voight both won Oscars, Fonda for her precise demarcations of stages in one woman’s life and Voight for his deeply touching openness. (His show-stopping speech to a group of young people near the end of the picture, while a bit of a narrative digression given its length, is among the finest moments Voight’s ever had onscreen.) Dern, unluckily overshadowed by his costars because he’s playing yet another in his long line of screen psychos, gives a performance every bit as powerful as Fonda’s and Voight’s—portraying a man who’s betrayed by the ideals to which he’s dedicated his life, Dern is frightening and yet also completely sympathetic.

Coming Home: RIGHT ON

The Great Gatsby (1974)

          While this much-maligned adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic Jazz Age novel is highly problematic, it’s not the disaster its reputation might suggest. And while the movie’s biggest shortcomings are indecisive direction and poorly conceived leading roles, it must be acknowledged that the source material’s inherent ambiguity prevents easy translation to the cinematic medium.

          The basics of the movie’s storyline are intact from the novel. In 1920s Long Island, carefree young socialite Daisy Buchanan (Mia Farrow) endures a financially comfortable but loveless marriage to the abusive and adulterous Tom Buchanan (Bruce Dern). One summer, Daisy’s life is brightened by the arrival on Long Island of a favorite cousin, comparatively penniless Nick Carraway (Sam Waterston). Nick resides in a small cottage next to the palatial estate of Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford), a mystery man who throws lavish parties that he doesn’t attend.

          Jay befriends Nick as a means of arranging a meeting with Daisy, whom we learn was in love with Jay prior to her marriage. The Daisy/Jay romance was originally thwarted by Jay’s poverty, so in the intervening period he acquired great wealth through dubious means. A dreamer mired in the past, Jay hopes to steal Daisy away from her unworthy husband and reclaim the idylls of yesteryear. Fitzgerald’s novel is a meditation on the blithe manner in which the rich trifle with the lives of the poor, and the book explores such rich themes as ambition, jealousy, self-delusion, and self-destruction.

          The screenplay, credited to Francis Ford Coppola but reportedly tweaked by director Jack Clayton and producer David Merrick, simplifies Fitzgerald’s story in hurtful ways, accentuating some of the novel’s least interesting aspects—the seductive glamour of Roaring ’20s clothing, the silly revelry of Prohibition-era parties, the trashy extremes of a subplot involving Tom’s déclassé mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Karen Black). Clearly, when the adaptation of a book famed for its internal qualities gets mired in surfaces, there’s a major disconnect on some level.

          Furthermore, it’s no coincidence that Clayton didn’t direct another Hollywood movie for nearly a decade after The Great Gatsby: His storytelling is so awkward that he sometimes contrives complex tracking shots that land in the wrong place, with a key character obscured while delivering dialogue, and Clayton gets completely lost during party scenes, lingering on unimportant details like the flailing hem of a flapper’s skirt while she’s doing the Charleston.

          The lead performances are similarly unfocused. Farrow is far too stilted to evoke Daisy’s signature quality of intoxicating carelessness, and Farrow’s clumsy reactions during the most dramatic scenes recall the over-the-top mugging of silent films. Redford fares better, nailing several important nuances, though he seems like he’s in a different movie from everyone else—he’s striving for quiet depth while other actors settle for loud melodrama. Waterston finds a comfortable middle ground between the extremes of Farrow’s and Redford’s performances, and the scenes between him and Redford are the movie’s best.

          Dern is very good, too, though he’s boxed in by a one-note characterization, and supporting player Scott Wilson is quietly moving in a key role. As for Black, there’s a reason a punk band bears the ironic name The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black—the operatic style she displays here is an acquired taste.

          The commercial and critical failure of this movie was enough to scare Hollywood away from Fitzgerald’s book for decades, as had happened previously with a reckless 1949 adaptation starring Alan Ladd; notwithstanding a bland TV version broadcast in 2000, Hollywood avoided The Great Gatsby until 2012, when flamboyant director Baz Luhrmann mounted a lavish new version (in 3D!) starring Leonardo Di Caprio as Gatsby.

The Great Gatsby: FUNKY

The Driver (1978)

          Fast, stylish, and taut, The Driver is an audacious experiment in cinematic minimalism. Eschewing conventional elements like backstory, character names, and emotional life, writer-director Walter Hill presents an action movie comprised merely of situations and forward momentum; the fact that a certain kind of ambiguous character study emerges from this Spartan storytelling speaks not only to Hill’s craftsmanship but also to the depth of his commitment to themes of individuality and male identity.

          The Driver (Ryan O’Neal) is a Los Angeles wheelman who freelances for crooks, providing his expensive services during high-speed getaways. The Driver’s reputation has spread beyond the criminal community to the world of law enforcement, so the Detective (Bruce Dern) devotes himself to catching the Driver. Caught between them is the Player (Isabelle Adjani), a casino gambler who witnessed the Driver performing a crime but refuses to ID him for the Detective’s benefit. When these characters converge, the Detective forces a situation that puts the Driver in league with reckless thieves willing to betray anyone and everyone for the right price.

          Taking place mostly at night, and set in evocative locations like a cavernous warehouse and L.A.’s iconic Union Station, The Driver is a sleek underworld poem. Nobody trusts anybody, and yet people must rely on each other to get their jobs done, so disconnected souls rise and fall based on their luck in picking the right partners. For viewers who buy into Hill’s singular approach, The Driver is a metaphorically rich meditation on the bleak moral relativism shared by killers. Yet others might find The Driver pretentious and vacuous, merely a symphony of attractive actors, cool shots, and exciting sequences.

          For me, the beauty of the picture is that it justifies both reactions—it’s a deep statement if you’re inclined to explore its enigmatic textures, and it’s empty fun if all you want to do is enjoy its visceral pleasures.

          Cast for their surface qualities rather than their acting chops, O’Neal manifests a cynical swagger that works well in this context, while Adjani’s dark beauty suits Hill’s nocturnal aesthetic. Dern manages to slip in a bit of characterization despite the script’s restraint, so he steals the movie by dint of presenting a recognizable personality. However, the acting in The Driver is really just part of Hill’s overall palette, because this is the action movie as art piece—whenever Hill commences a chase scene or a tense standoff, he reveals his innate mastery of primal signifiers and visual economy. In his hands, a car zooming across a nighttime highway is a brushstroke across a canvas, and a fragment of dialogue is a world of implied psychology.

The Driver: GROOVY

Family Plot (1976)

          Impeded by a muddy narrative that lacks a clearly defined main character, the Alfred Hitchcock comedy-thriller Family Plot has earned a dubious reputation over the years. In fact, it’s generally accepted that the picture represented a steep decline in Hitchcock’s artistry, which is unfortunate because it ended up being his final feature. Working once again with his North by Northwest screenwriter Ernest Lehman, Hitchcock obviously saw the potential for an entertaining mix of fright and fun in the Victor Canning novel from which Family Plot was adapted. The title stems from a comparatively minor story point, in which a principal character discovers that a grave is empty, meaning the person supposedly buried there must still be alive. That kind of morbid detail infused many a Hitchcock plot, and, indeed, some elements of Family Plot suit the Master of Suspense’s signature style. However, the movie never comes together in a satisfying way.

          The main threads of the story involve a con-artist couple and a kidnapping couple. The con artists are fake psychic Blanche (Barbara Harris) and her private-investigator boyfriend, George (Bruce Dern). They’ve stumbled onto a chance for an easy paycheck, provided they can find the long-lost nephew of a rich, elderly woman. As for the kidnappers, they are Fran (Karen Black) and Arthur (William Devane). These two are in the midst of committing a string of abductions, collecting gigantic diamonds as ransom payments. (Arthur runs a jewelry store, so he knows how to fence the rocks.) Although the manner in which these narratives intertwine is pure Hitchcock orchestration, the mechanics of the story are murky and unbelievable.

           Far too many scenes rely upon coincidences, last-minute rescues, and stupidity on the part of the characters. Moreover, the first hour of the movie drags because it takes Hitchcock an eternity to reveal where the story is headed. That’s not to say the film completely lacks charm. Although Black and Devane do rather ordinary work, Dern’s disquieting intensity complements Harris’ campy performance as a “seer” who speaks in tongues for dramatic effect. Had their strange characters occupied the center of the movie, Family Plot might have coalesced into a quirky black comedy. Alas, Hitchcock spends nearly as much time detailing the kidnappers’ elaborate methodology, suggesting the director couldn’t decide whether to concentrate on jokes or jolts.

Family Plot: FUNKY

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

Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood (1976)

The real-life inspiration for this tiresome comedy is an interesting footnote in Hollywood history: Early in his career, legendary studio mogul Darryl F. Zanuck guided the career of silent-movie star Rin Tin Tin, who happened to be a particularly noble-looking German Shepherd. While the absurdity of transforming a canine into a matinee idol would seem to present possibilities for sly spoofery, Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood instead opts for broad buffoonery. Set in the anything-goes world of 1920s Hollywood, the flick smothers its slight storyline with clunky plotting, inane slapstick, overwrought production values, and pointless cameos by faded stars of stage and screen. A badly miscast Bruce Dern stars as the Zanuck-inspired lead character, a Hollywood tour guide who dreams of moguldum and seizes his opportunity when a desperate studio owner (Art Carney) mistakes Dern’s character for the trainer of a photogenic dog. The animal actually belongs to a would-be starlet (Madeline Kahn), so Dern’s character and the starlet decide to hitch a ride to stardom on Won Ton Ton’s tail. Predictably, things go awry, so much of the movie concerns Won Ton Ton’s wilderness years after he’s separated from his owners, plus their attempts to replace him and, eventually, get him back; this plot twist changes the movie from silly to sappy, and Won Ton Ton is no better at eliciting tears than it is at eliciting laughter. Although Carney and Kahn are comedy pros accustomed to playing broad material, Dern is an edgy, naturalistic actor completely out of his element. Even more out of his element is the film’s director, Michael Winner, best known for brutal action pictures like Death Wish (1974); to say that the film’s painful aspirations to effervescence feel forced is an understatement. Some viewers may enjoy Won Ton Ton’s parade of Old Hollywood cameo players (everyone from Ethel Merman to the Ritz Brothers to Stepin Fetchit to Henny Youngman), but for anyone but obsessive devotees of movies about movies, Won Ton Ton is, well, a dog.

Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood: LAME

Drive, He Said (1971)

          A few years ago, I attended an anniversary screening of Chinatown (1974) at which screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, and star Jack Nicholson shared memories of making the classic detective story. Not having heard Nicholson speak extemporaneously before, I was surprised by how erudite he was but also by how obtuse he was. Though clearly steeped in esoteric artistic theories, he wasn’t particularly good at getting his ideas across. Perhaps that’s why he’s thrived as an actor, using other people’s writing as a prism for focusing his intellect. And perhaps that’s why he hasn’t thrived as a director, despite having helmed three features thus far. Each of Nicholson’s directorial efforts contains interesting ideas, but all are aesthetic and narrative jumbles.

          This is especially true of Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said, which is a bizarre drama involving college basketball, insanity, sexual obsession, student rebellion, and several other subjects. The movie is clearly about something, but Nicholson’s storytelling is so unfocused that it’s difficult to identify the underlying themes.

          William Tepper stars as Hector, a college-hoops star wracked with some sort of indecipherable angst. (In a laughably obvious moment, he opines, “I feel so disconnected.”) He’s involved in a sexual relationship with Olive (Karen Black), the undeserving victim of his frequent mood swings; Olive’s other lover is an older man played by Towne in one of his only acting roles. Making matters even more fraught, Hector’s best friend is Gabriel (Michael Margotta), a student revolutionary feigning insanity to dodge the Vietnam draft—and losing his marbles in reality.

          The script was based on a novel by Jeremy Larner (The Candidate) and credited to Larner and Nicholson, though Towne and Terrence Malick reportedly made uncredited contributions. Similarly, the movie has four (!) credited editors. So, whether the unfathomable nature of the story is the result of too many cooks in the kitchen or simply of Nicholson’s reach exceeding his grasp, the sum effect is the same: Drive, He Said feels like several movies stitched together, forming a haphazard mosaic.

          In fact, much of Drive, He Said comprises people making random declarations, like this narcissistic gem spoken by Towne: “I don’t think I want to talk about this as much as I thought I did.” Every so often, something affecting happens, like Black and Tepper forming an emotional connection in bed, and every so often, something coherent happens—but it’s a measure of this movie’s peculiarity that the most rational scenes involve Bruce Dern, who plays Hector’s coach. When one of the most deliciously unhinged actors of the ’70s gets relegated to straight-man status, something’s gone terribly wrong.

          The last half-hour of the movie gets awfully mean-spirited and weird, when Gabriel starts to completely lose his shit. First, he freaks out in an Army induction center, and then he tries to rape Olive. Eventually, a nude Gabriel breaks into a college science lab and releases assorted insects, reptiles, and vermin, “liberating” fellow prisoners of the Man’s oppressive system. With its abundance of such oddly provocative moments, Drive, He Said is a heavy trip, but it’s hard to say whether the trip actually goes anywhere.

Drive, He Said: FREAKY

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

          A film that sounds more interesting than it actually is, The King of Marvin Gardens features a convergence of several of the most important players in ’70s cinema. The cast includes Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, and Jack Nicholson; New Hollywood mainstay Bob Rafelson co-wrote the story and directed; and acclaimed cinematographer László Kovács shot the picture. The narrative also seems like it should hit the sweet spot of early-’70s ennui, with Dern playing Jason Stabler, a small-time Atlantic City schemer who tries to rope his reluctant brother, David (Nicholson), into helping him put together some sort of casino/resort enterprise, much to the chagrin of Jason’s boss, mid-level gangster Luther (Scatman Crothers).
          But right from the beginning of the picture, pretentious opacity rules: The first scene features David performing a grimly nostalgic monologue for his late-night radio show about David and his brother watching their overbearing grandfather die, and the next scene reveals that the grandfather is very much alive. Presumably the idea was to establish a milieu exploring the gap between dreams and reality, but the film never comes into sharper focus than the opening sequence, so it’s a struggle to follow basic threads like what exactly Jason wants to accomplish and why he’s constantly accompanied by an unhinged middle-aged beauty named Sally (Burstyn) and her adult stepdaughter Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson). In lieu of clarity, the movie presents gifted actors generating unusual dynamics, but the performances are inhibited by the film’s murkiness.
          Nicholson is muted to a fault, communicating his character’s lost quality by seeming lost himself, and Burstyn is uncharacteristically screechy, as if she’s flailing for some legitimate character motivation the script can’t provide. Dern comes off best, effectively personifying a huckster of limited ability but unlimited ambition, and it’s a shame that his fine performance appears in such a disappointing film. Kovács’ impeccable photography provides an unvarnished travelogue through the ghost-town streets of early-’70s Atlantic City, and it’s impressive that the film doesn’t have any musical scoring; to Rafelson’s credit, the focus is entirely on acting. The King of Marvin Gardens is very much of its moment, so now that time has deprived the movie of its currency as a counterpoint to the staid cinema of the studio era, it’s simply a clinical exercise in affected New Hollywood style.

The King of Marvin Gardens: FUNKY

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971)

In actor Bruce Dern’s chatty autobiography Things I’ve Said, but Probably Shouldn’t Have, one of the chapters is titled “Star of the Second-Best Two-Headed Transplant Movie of 1971.” The man knows what he’s talking about. Whereas The Thing With Two Heads (which was actually released in 1972) is campy fun that tries to wring jokes from its absurd plot, Two-Headed Transplant plays the premise straight, with deadly results. Dern plays a riff on Dr. Frankenstein, but instead of obsessively performing an obscene experiment, he’s forced into the act by circumstances that make his character more or less sympathetic; this mealy-mouthed approach to dramaturgy underscores that the picture can’t decide what it’s trying to accomplish. Inappropriately plaintive (and poorly edited) music punctuates leisurely episodes leading to the fusion of a hulking simpleton with the head of a psychotic murderer. Why anyone might consider either patient a prime candidate for the operation is never properly explained in the godawful script, and by the time the bicranial creature starts its rampage two-thirds of the way through the movie’s dreary running time, it’s hard to care what happens next. Dern is on autopilot in this one, blandly reciting pointless dialogue and periodically trying to insert pathos into atrociously written and directed scenes. Famed DJ Casey Kasem appears as Dern’s bestie, which ups the kitsch factor but not the entertainment value, and the violent finale is so crudely shot that it’s hard to feel much of anything except shame for everyone involved.

The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant: LAME