The Mind Snatchers (1972)

          Prior to achieving stardom with The Deer Hunter (1978), Christopher Walken played his first leading film role in this peculiar sci-fi drama based upon Dennis Reardon’s play The Happiness Cage. (The film is sometimes exhibited under the same title as the play.) While The Mind Snatchers is a frustrating piece of work thanks to half-baked ideas and a meandering narrative, it’s fascinating to watch Walken’s acting because he does not employ the affectations that later defined his screen persona. Bereft of his stop-and-start vocal rhythm and sudden gestures, Walken delivers a powerfully unadorned performance—even though, ironically enough, he portrays a character whom others perceive as being mentally unbalanced.
          Set in West Germany, the picture introduces U.S. Army Private James H. Reese (Walken) as a volatile troublemaker. He gets into fights with fellow soldiers, partygoers, and even his long-suffering European girlfriend. After Reese is brought to the attention of Dr. Frederick (Joss Ackland), the psychiatrist behind a mysterious experiment backed by the Army, Reese is transported to a remote hospital with only two other patients—talkative Southerner Sergeant Buford Miles (Ronny Cox) and a young soldier named Tommy, whose head is bandaged and whose only communication is involuntary screaming. Turns out Dr. Frederick designed an experimental probe that he inserts directly into the brain. The probe connects to antenna protruding through the subject’s skull, and the antenna relates to a switch the subject has at his disposal. Whenever the subject feels angry or depressed, the subject can hit the switch and stimulate a pleasure response. The film’s drama, such as it is, stems from the fact that Dr. Frederick wants only voluntary subjects, so he plays mind games with Buford and Reese in the hopes they will volunteer.
          That’s where the movie veers off-course. Reese comes across as a one-note rebel, patterned too closely after the protagonist of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Kesey’s book was published in 1962, and Reardon’s play premiered in 1969.) Meanwhile, Buford is a compendium of writer-convenient extremes. The story also includes the dull cliché of a cold-hearted Army general who demands results no matter the human cost. (Old pro Ralph Meeker essays this role in a forgettable performance.) By the time The Mind Snatchers spirals into its highly predictable final act, logic problems have achieved crushing weight, and the repetitive cycles of the storyline have grown tiresome. That said, director Bernard Girard—a veteran of episodic television who made a handful of minor features—films scenes quite well, and Walken and Cox give the best imaginable renditions of poorly conceived characters.

The Mind Snatchers: FUNKY

Shoot the Sun Down (1978)

The obscure Western drama Shoot the Sun Down is a downbeat saga featuring the unlikely duo of Margot Kidder and Christopher Walken as desperate people seeking new lives in the sun-baked wilderness. Superficially, the movie delivers—Kidder is sexy, Walken is otherworldly, and the movie’s vibe is as dusty as it is depressing. Beyond surface textures, however, Shoot the Sun Down is a total dud. Neither the characters nor the story make sense, most of the running time comprises lifeless dialogue scenes, and whenever producer/director David Leeds strives for profundity, he gets stuck in the mud of false notes and overreaching metaphors. Set in the American southwest before the Civil War, the picture introduces viewers to The Woman (Kidder), an English beauty who travels with Captain (Bo Brundin), a Scandinavian seaman, and Scalphunter (Geoffrey Lewis), an outlaw. Visiting a small town one day, the group encounters Mr. Rainbow (Walken), a gunslinger. Turns out the Woman is Captain’s indentured servant. The Woman tries to bribe Mr. Rainbow with sex, asking him to kill Captain so she can be free. For some reason, the plot also involves an Indian named Sunbearer (A. Martinez), who stands out in the desert waiting to have ponderous conversations with Mr. Rainbow. Various things happen. Kidder bathes in a wading pool so she can parade around in wet undergarments. Walken gets tied to a rock in the hot sun so he can suffer in a visually interesting way. Through it all, only veteran character actor Lewis seems to have any idea what the hell he’s doing, snarling through bad-guy moments and cheerfully spewing cornpone aphorisms. Kidder is terrible, employing a weak accent and often simply lingering in the backgrounds of scenes because she’s got nothing to do, and Walken seems miscast with his postmodern acting style. Yet most of the blame must fall on Leeds, who also cowrote this incomprehensible mess. Luckily for everyone, this was his first and last movie.

Shoot the Sun Down: LAME

1980 Week: Heaven’s Gate

          Writer-director Michael Cimino’s magnum opus about greed, which has ironically become shorthand for the profligate excesses of auteur filmmaking, boasts enough commendable elements for a dozen movies. The story is a thoughtful riff on a fraught period in American history, the performances are sensitive and textured, the production values are awesome, and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s images are rapturous. Had Cimino been able to wrestle this material into shape, either at the time of the film’s original release or prior to one of its many reissues, he could have made a classic Hollywood epic. Famously, however, he did not. In its most widely acclaimed version, Heaven’s Gate runs three hours and 37 minutes, which is not inherently hubristic; Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is only one minute shorter. The problem is that Heaven’s Gate features at least an hour of repetitive material that, no matter how beautifully filmed, adds nothing to the dramatic experience. Hence, now and forever, Heaven’s Gate is known as the debacle that nearly bankrupted United Artists, the disaster that ballooned from an original budget of $11 million to a final cost of $44 million, and the death knell for the freedoms that maverick directors enjoyed in the ’70s. Ouch.

          The movie begins with a pointless 20-minute prologue that introduces protagonist Jim Averil (Kris Kristofferson) during his graduation from Harvard in 1870. The excess of the prologue, which features innumerable extras in elaborate costumes, is a bad omen. Once the movie cuts 20 years ahead, to 1890 Wyoming, things get moving (more or less). Averil has become a marshal tasked with overseeing a county populated by impoverished Eastern European immigrants. In the first volleys of a land war, cattlemen led by Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) hire gunmen to kill immigrants based on trumped-up charges. Eventually, a love triangle emerges between Averil, prostitute Ella (Isabelle Huppert), and gunman Nate Champion (Christopher Walken). Amid various subplots, the narrative builds toward a showdown between the haves and the have-nots, with our Principled Antihero caught in between.

          Alas, Cimino’s writing is nowhere near as strong as his direction. When he aims for subtlety, he achieves muddiness, and when he reaches for profundity, he achieves pretentiousness. Supporting characters feel underdeveloped, relationships grind through repetitive rhythms, and everything is grossly overproduced. Some of the film’s gigantic scenes are powerful, including the final showdown, but some are laughable—notably the 10-minute roller-skating scene. Cimino’s missteps are especially disappointing because he gathered such an interesting cast and, for the most part, gave the actors viable emotions to play. Kristofferson fares the worst, since his understated screen persona exacerbates the movie’s lazy pacing, but he connects periodically. Walken fares the best, his innate eccentricity helping him forge an individualized character. Yet costars Jeff Bridges and Brad Dourif are almost completely wasted.

          Even though it’s possible there’s a great movie buried inside Heaven’s Gate, it becomes more and more difficult to see potential as the minutes tick by and the problems accumulate. Nonetheless, there’s some comfort it knowing the situation could have been worse. The first version of Heaven’s Gate that Cimino showed to understandably flabbergasted United Artists executives was five hours long.

Heaven’s Gate: FUNKY

Next Stop, Greenwich Village (1976)

          During his heyday, writer-director Paul Mazursky was so good at constructing incisive scenes filled with humor, insight, and pathos that it was frustrating whenever he got mired in self-indulgence. For example, Mazursky’s Next Stop, Greenwich Village, a fictionalized account of his own transition from the provincial Jewish community in Brooklyn where he grew up to the bohemian wonderland of 1950s Greenwich Village, should be impossibly precious. After all, Mazursky includes characters based on his parents, dramatizes formative sexual experiences, and even re-creates the texture of early acting lessons. Executed without discipline and taste, Next Stop, Greenwich Village could have been nothing but a filmed diary entry. Yet Mazursky (mostly) applies the same rigorous techniques he employed when telling the stories of wholly fictional characters, so the movie is brisk, funny, lively, and surprising—except when it isn’t. And that’s where the issue of self-indulgence becomes relevant.

          After starting very strong, Next Stop, Greenwich Village gets stuck in a groove about halfway through its running time, because Mazursky includes such needless scenes as the lead character’s dream/nightmare of what it would be like to have his overbearing mother invade one of his acting classes. Furthermore, the exploration of crises that are experienced by the lead character’s downtown friends feels a bit forced. Were this the work of a lesser filmmaker, these problems would have been catastrophic. Yet since Next Stop, Greenwich Village represents Mazursky at his prime, they’re only minor flaws. The movie is so good, in the mean, that even sizable detours can’t subtract from the value of the journey.

          In terms of texture, Mazursky strikes a terrific balance between deglamorizing and romanticizing the New York City of his younger days. Scenes of cavorting through the streets with like-minded friends and of sharing a bed with a beautiful young girlfriend make the best moments of protagonist Larry Lipinksy’s life seem like pure postadolescent bliss, and rightfully so. Meanwhile, grim encounters with disappointment and heartbreak, to say nothing of incessant clashes with the aforementioned smothering mom, play out as epic suffering—which is often how young people perceive their own travails. In sum, Mazursky seems to get things exactly right whenever the movie clicks. He also, as always, benefits from extraordinary performances. An actor himself, Mazursky regularly drew the best possible work from his casts, creating a loose performance space in which players can easily blend their idiosyncracises with the rhythms of the text.

          Playing the Mazursky surrogate, leading man Lenny Baker is terrific, all gangly awekwardness mixed with youthful arrogance. Ellen Greene is sly and sexy as his quick-witted girlfriend, and Shelley Winters finds a perfect vessel for her uniquely voracious screen persona. Durable supporting players including Lou Jacobi, Mike Kellin, and Joe Spinell lend ample Noo Yawk flavor, while future stars Antonio Fargas, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Vincent Schiavelli, and Christopher Walken appear in secondary roles of various sizes. And if the movie ultimately lacks a satisfying resolution—since it’s really just a snapshot of a transitional moment—that’s inconsequential given how much sensitive entertainment the experience of watching the movie provides.

Next Stop, Greenwich Village: GROOVY

Roseland (1977)

          Given their predilection for stuffy period stories, it’s always surprising to see how well the Merchant-Ivory team handled contemporary narratives. Freed from obligations to replicate the décor and mannerisms of yesteryear, director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala could focus on the simple business of documenting human behavior in all of its sad and beautiful dimensions, creating charmingly melancholy movies like Roseland. Set in the titular Manhattan dancehall, a mecca in the ’70s for aging New Yorkers eager to recapture the elegance of their younger years, Roseland comprises three featurettes with separate casts; the movie gracefully segues from one story to the next simply by cutting across the sprawling Roseland facility.

           In the first story, “The Waltz,” aging widow May (Teresa Wright) fixates on an unglamorous dance partner, Stan (Lou Jacobi), because whenever they waltz together, she sees visions of her younger self and her late husband in mirrors. “The Waltz” is a sweet fable about the strange ways people find happiness, and it delivers a warm message about the transformative power of dancefloor intimacy.
          The longest story, “The Hustle,” focuses on professional dancer Russel (Christopher Walken), who juggles unusual relationships with three women. His mother figure is his dance mentor, Cleo (Helen Gallagher), who probably wants to become lovers but doesn’t push her luck because she senses her affections are not reciprocated. His benefactor is Pauline (Joan Copeland), who treats Russel like a pet and plies him with compliments and gifts. Russel enjoys this murky status quo until he becomes involved with Marilyn (Geraldine Chaplin), a control freak who demands Russel give up his nebulous status as a boy toy and assume adult responsibilities. Jhabvala deftly sketches the myriad ways an intruder upsets the social order created by complex relationships, and she’s meticulous in her depiction of Russel as an opportunist who belives no one’s getting hurt by his choices, even though everyone involved is actually wounding everyone else on a daily basis. “The Hustle” is a smart, understated piece of work.
          Roseland closes with “The Peabody,” which has a lovely story and a grating lead character. Aging, delusional dancer Rosa (Lilia Skala) perceives herself as a once-and-future star, so she’s obsessed with winning the weekly Peabody contest because it’s the closest she can get to notoriety. Unfortunately, her regular partner just died, so Rosa tries to mold her enthusiastic but untalented new partner, Arthur (David Thomas), into a competitor. Meanwhile, she ignores the fact that he adores her, since Rosa considers him beneath her station. This dynamic is Merchant-Ivory class observation at its best, a kind of textured social anthropology that reveals how people are limited by the walls they accept or create.
          From start to finish, Roseland is brisk, romantic, soft-spoken, and tragic, and it’s easily the best movie Merchant-Ivory made in the ’70s.

Roseland: RIGHT ON

The Anderson Tapes (1971)

          Enough goes right in The Anderson Tapes that it’s almost possible to overlook the huge problem at the movie’s center: The main storyline of an apartment-building heist is exciting, but the gimmick of observing certain events through illicit wiretaps and surveillance cameras is pointless. In other words, the “Anderson” part is pretty good, but the “Tapes” part, not so much. Based on a novel by Lawrence Sanders and written and directed, respectively, by future Dog Day Afternoon collaborators Frank Pierson and Sidney Lumet, The Anderson Tapes begins when thief Duke Anderson (Sean Connery) gets released from jail after a 10-year incarceration. He heads straight to the bed of his sexy girlfriend, Ingrid (Dyan Cannon), who lives in a posh apartment building as a wealthy man’s kept mistress. Duke decides Ingrid’s building is a treasure trove waiting to be robbed, so he contacts a well-heeled gangster (Alan King) for backing, and then puts together a motley crew to pull off the job. Anderson’s colorful accomplices include a swishy art expert (Martin Balsam) and a cocksure electronics whiz/safecracker (Christopher Walken).

          As in all of Lumet’s New York-based crime pictures, the pleasure of The Anderson Tapes comes from watching cops and hoodlums methodically plan their respective efforts, because Lumet has a peerless touch for grounding high-stakes action in believable character dynamics. In his universe, crooks and police officers wrestle with mundane problems like budget shortfalls, looming deadlines, and workplace tension. Thanks to these nuances, the robbery scenes and the police-standoff climax are terrific. However, nearly everything else about The Anderson Tapes is wobbly.

          Duke’s relationship with Ingrid is unbelievable, since her loyalty wavers in a manner that’s narratively convenient. Balsam’s characterization is borderline offensive. And the whole business with the surveillance tapes is a miscalculation: We see various parties recording Anderson’s activities, and we get the idea he’s stepped into a web of illegal wiretaps installed to catch bigger fish, but this angle never affects the story. Still, the performances are generally strong. Connery is macho and believably frustrated by his dubious cohorts; King is cheerfully vicious; Cannon is cynical and sultry; and Walken, in his first major screen role, brings his signature twitchy energy. Even Balsam, despite the insensitive characterization, is quite enjoyable. And watch out for future Saturday Night Live star Garrett Morris as a world-weary beat cop.

The Anderson Tapes: FUNKY

The Deer Hunter (1978)

          The winner of five Oscars and one of the best-remembered movies of the ’70s, The Deer Hunter has undeniable strengths. The acting is across-the-board great, with Christopher Walken earning an Academy Award for the film’s crucial supporting role; Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep were nominated for the male and female leading roles, respectively, and John Cazale and John Savage both contribute mesmerizing work. The film’s level of intensity, once the story kicks into gear, is so high that many find the film too painful to watch. On every technical plane, the movie is gorgeous to behold, with immaculate costuming and production design filling cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond’s Oscar-nominated imagery to create a rich visual experience. And, finally, since The Deer Hunter was one of the first big-budget movies to address the issue of post-traumatic stress disorder as a major issue for veterans returning from the Vietnam War, it has historical importance.

          Having said all that, The Deer Hunter hasn’t aged well, and in fact its flaws were apparent to some discerning viewers back when the movie was new. First off, director and co-writer Michael Cimino’s storytelling is wildly undisciplined. The first hour of the picture, which introduces a group of male friends living in a Pennsylvania steel town, drags on endlessly. Although Cimino’s scheme of immersing viewers in mundane details of his characters’ lives before moving the story to Vietnam is sensible, Cimino ends up delivering the same information over and over again, resulting in tedium. In particular, the interminable sequence depicting the wedding of wide-eyed Steven (Savage) to his pregnant sweetheart unfolds in what feels like real time. Amid this narrative muck, De Niro’s character, Michael, emerges as the de facto leader of the group, an autodidactic tough guy whom the others fear and respect in equal measure.

          A long sequence of the male friends bonding for one last deer hunt before deploying to Vietnam has great visual poetry, but it’s jarring that the sequence was obviously shot in the Pacific Northwest (specifically, Washington state) even though it supposedly takes place in Pennsylvania. The movie really goes off the rails, however, after an abrupt mid-movie shift to Vietnam. For the remainder of the movie, the vicious game of Russian roulette becomes the dramatic focus, first when American POWs are forced to play the game by their animalistic captors, and then when Nick (Walken) becomes a champion Roulette player working the postwar Vietnamese underground. Michael is a kind of battlefield superhero during the POW scenes, and the manner in which he rescues his buddies stretches believability. Yet the story becomes even more audacious when Michael returns to postwar Vietnam in order to rescue Nick, who has become so traumatized, almost to the point of catatonia, that he plays Russian roulette for money.

          It turns out there’s a good reason why none of this hangs together particularly well. Producer Michael Deeley reportedly hired Cimino to expand a non-Vietnam script about Russian roulette into the story that eventually became The Deer Hunter. Perhaps reflecting this hodgepodge approach, the Russian roulette material is so overwrought, and so demeaning to the Vietnamese national character, that it completely derives the film of dramatic restraint and historical accuracy. Whether historical accuracy was ever the goal is another question, but The Deer Hunter ends up being an uncomfortable hybrid of incompatible narrative elements, and also a needlessly repetitive movie that slogs through 183 minutes of boredom and brutality. There are incandescent moments, mostly due to the valiant work of a remarkable cast, but in sum, The Deer Hunter is pretentious, sloppy, unpleasant, and not just a little racist.

The Deer Hunter: FUNKY

Annie Hall (1977)

          Whether it’s viewed as the climax of Woody Allen’s early career as a self-deprecating comedian or the beginning of his later career as a serious filmmaker, Annie Hall is an extraordinary piece of work. Among many other things, Annie Hall is Allen’s first attempt at a Big Statement, simultaneously a deep exploration of one specific relationship and a microcosmic study of relationships in general. Furthermore, the picture contains two of the most vividly sketched characters in ’70s cinema, both of whom are fictionalized versions of the actors playing them: Annie Hall, the eccentric singer portrayed by Diane Keaton, and Alvy Singer, the neurotic comic portrayed by Allen.

          To the filmmaker’s great credit, neither character gets off easily, because both are depicted as fascinating people capable of infuriating behavior—and both are shown to be almost pathologically incapable of subverting their identities into the collective identity of a couple, despite being very much in love. (Allen had a lengthy real-life affair with Keaton, his costar in a string of beloved ’70s films.) Yet the bond between Alvy and Annie isn’t the film’s only romance; Annie Hall illustrates Allen’s devotion to the island of Manhattan by creating several hilarious fish-out-of-water scenes depicting Alvy gasping for air whenever he’s taken off the bedrock of New York City.

          The bits of Alvy disastrously trying to cook lobsters in a beach house and trying to drive in Los Angeles are tiny comic masterpieces, just as the interaction between Alvy and his sitcom-producer pal, Rob (Tony Roberts), articulates Allen’s contempt for the assembly-line approach to creating Hollywood pabulum. Some of the most vivid material in the picture involves Annie’s WASP family, particularly the unforgettably funny/creepy scenes of Annie’s brother, Duane (Christopher Walken), giving a speech about vehicular suicide—and then taking a terrified Alvy for a car ride.

          As the title suggests, however, the movie’s most memorable invention is Annie herself, a character so individualistic she inspired a fashion craze as women tried to mimic Keaton’s offbeat wardrobe of repurposed men’s clothing. Whether you find Annie appealing or irritating is a matter of taste, but it’s impossible not to appreciate moments like the scene in which Annie magically leaves her body during sex because she’s bored.

          Beyond Allen and Keaton, both of whom are at their very best, Annie Hall features a deep well of colorful actors in supporting roles, from featured performers Colleen Dewhurst, Shelley Duvall, Carol Kane, and Paul Simon (yes, the singer-songwriter) to bit player Sigourney Weaver, who makes her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it screen debut at the end of the picture. Yet perhaps the funniest mini-performance in the picture is given by author Marshall McLuhan, who appears in a quintessential Allen moment: As Alvy waits in line at a theater, listening to a windbag pontificate about McLuhan’s media theories, Alvy wishes he could set the guy straight, so he yanks the real McLuhan from behind a poster, upon which McLuhan says to the windbag, “You know nothing of my work.”

          It’s a given that Allen’s movies aren’t for everyone, but Annie Hall winningly sets his intellectualism, narcissism, and neuroticism into a palatable framework by dramatizing the perils of being opinionated about everything; in a very important way, Annie Hall is the Allen movie for people who don’t like Allen movies, since it depicts the inability of a character very much like Woody Allen to comfortably exist in everyday life.

Annie Hall: OUTTA SIGHT