Hurry Up or I’ll Be 30 (1973)

          An adequate character study that owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Paddy Chayefsky-penned classic Marty (1955), this quiet little picture follows a sad-sack New Yorker who tries to expand his universe beyond childhood friends and the family business. Cowriter, producer, and director Joseph Jacoby has a good touch with actors, getting naturalistic work from his entire cast, and Jacoby captures the way that working-class folks from the outer boroughs sometimes develop romantic illusions about Manhattan and its denizens. Also working in the movie’s factor is Jacoby’s take on sophisticated urbanites taking Brooklyn natives for rubes. In some ways, Hurry Up or I’ll Be 30 is a conventional coming-of-age flick, even though arrested development means the protagonist doesn’t face his developmental crisis until well after the conclusion of adolescence. In other ways, the picture is a simple exploration of how divisions of class, education, and ethnicity lead to prejudice. The film is very much a minor work, and it suffers for weak elements including a dopey musical score, but there’s something humane and real about what Jacoby has to say.

          George Trapani (John Lefkowitz) works for his father’s small printing company, but he’s bored with rituals like cruising with his friends while trying to score with local girls. One day, George meets a theatrical producer named Mark Lossier (Frank Quinn), who invites George to an audition because he thinks he can squeeze George for an investment. During the degrading audition, Mark compels desperate women to perform a scene topless in front of salivating would-be investors. Willowy actress Jackie (Linda De Coff) impresses George by politely refusing to strip, so when he encounters her later, he asks her out. They date for a while, but then George realizes she’s slumming with him, leading George to question whether he’ll ever truly escape the confining identity he inherited at birth.

         While nothing in Hurry Up or I’ll Be 30 is surprising, Jacoby seems more concerned with generating empathy for George, as well as for characters including Jackie and Mark. George discovers that even though their worlds are larger than his, they have their own problems. As portrayed by Lefkowitz with a bowl cut and a hangdog face, George is a moderately appealing protagonist. He’s admirable when he tries, and he’s pathetic when he tries too hard. Still, the movie never feels judgmental, especially because Jacoby shows George being repeatedly humiliated by his father. The mostly unknown actors comprising the supporting cast lend additional layers of credibility, and a young Danny DeVito fits right into the mix as one of George’s pals.

Hurry Up or I’ll Be 30: FUNKY

Swap Meet (1979)

One of those wretched late-’70s sex comedies that employs a colorful gathering place as the setting for a superficial ensemble story, Swap Meet bludgeons viewers with 85 minutes of nonstop stupidity. Some of the jokes are moderately better than the picture’s mindless default mode, some of the performers have more polished comedy skills than others, and the movie benefits from brisk pacing. That said, dumb gags are dumb gags, no matter how rapidly they follow each other, and the movie reeks of desperation and sleaziness. Among the various narrative threads is the adventure of Ziggy (Danny Goldman), a wimpy little dude who functions as the announcer/greeter at a weekly swap meet situated inside a Southern California drive-in theater. Ziggy longs for a better job, and he also pines for comely blonde Annie (Cheryl Rixon), a hooker who operates out of the drive-in’s lavatory and services customers in their cars. Also featured are a group of young adults, including Doug (Jon Gries), who wishes to impress a girl by defeating a bully in a car race (or something like that). Swap Meet is simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped, so it’s hard to know which storylines the filmmakers consider important. As a result, the movie unspools as a series of montages and vignettes. In the montages, people use enterprising means to procure goods they can sell; the colorful opening bit features thugs stealing pieces of the Hollywood sign during one of its periods of decay. In the vignettes, actors portray broad stereotypes while enacting insipid scenarios—we’re talking bathroom farce, rudely interrupted oral sex, skateboarding accidents, a running gag about a foul-mouthed psychic, and a quick scene featuring Danny DeVito as an auto mechanic. There’s also a disco theme song. In a word, tiresome.

Swap Meet: LAME

Scalawag (1973)

Choppy, episodic, and saccharine, the family-friendly adventure Scalawag represented an ignominious directorial debut for actor Kirk Douglas. The movie features such maudlin devices as crying children, cutesy musical numbers, sentimental monologues, a talking parrot (voiced by Mel Blanc!), and a weak subplot about a bad man finding redemption by serving as surrogate father to a child. Yet even these offenses would be tolerable if Scalawag was a rip-roaring action picture. It is not. Filmed on an insufficient budget in a singularly unattractive mountain region of Serbia, the movie looks cheap and ugly, a problem exacerbated by Douglas’ dodgy camerawork. Some scenes don’t cut properly, others have such profound screen-direction problems that it’s difficult to parse spatial relationships, and some scenes just look drab. The tone of the piece is just as chaotic. Set around the middle of the 19th century, Scalawag takes place in the deserts of California. Peg (Douglas), a one-legged pirate, leads a rough gang including twins Brimstone and Mudhook (both played by Neville Brand), Fly Speck (Danny DeVito), and Velvet (Don Stroud). Through convoluted circumstances, the pirates join forces with Latin stud Don Aragon (George Eastman), as well as the beautiful Lucy-Ann (Lesley-Anne Down) and her preteen brother, Jamie (Mark Lester). Together, the characters search for gold. Each character is either anonymous or trite, the plotting is amateurish, and the double-crosses and lies that are supposed to generate dramatic conflict instead produce confusion. Douglas is a terrible ham throughout, Stroud is wasted in a nothing role, DeVito plays a cartoonish imbecile, Down is ornamental, and Lester comes across like a lab-generated child-star robot. Plus, why bother to make a pirate picture if nearly all the action takes place on dry land? Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of dumb.

Scalawag: LAME

The Money (1976)

Before he became a revered curator of America’s cinematic memory, creating documentaries and montages such as his beloved sort Precious Images (1986), Chuck Workman made a few images that weren’t so precious. For instance, he wrote and directed this disjointed and frustrating drama/thriller about desperate people, which is often distributed under the title Atlantic City Jackpot. By any title, this picture is a mess, although the basic idea is sound. Roland (Graham Beckel) is a loser who flits around the edges of Atlantic City, piecing together a living with gambling, petty crimes, and scams. Meanwhile, Richard (Laurence Luckinbill) is a successful businessman whose ambition has caused trouble; smothered in debt, Richard floats by on advances from one sketchy deal to the next. Eventually, these characters intersect because Roland’s spaced-out girlfriend, Lucy (Regina Baff), babysits in Richard’s house. One evening while Lucy isn’t paying attention, Roland slips into Richard’s house and kidnaps Richard’s two children. Had the movie started this way and then become an examination of the extremes these two men are willing to chart in the name of self-preservation, The Money could have been interesting. Instead, the kidnapping doesn’t happen until very late in the story, so most of the screen time is consumed by nonsense. In one scene, Roland kneels on the sand beneath the famous Atlantic City boardwalk and watches a bunch of crabs scurry around while an unseen PA blasts carny hollers about a sideshow attraction called “The Ape Lady.” This goes on forever. Edited with an itchy trigger finger by the usually reliable Paul Hirsch, The Money jumps back and forth between flat scenes, trying and failing to create energy through juxtaposition. Yet while the acting and cinematography are passable, the storytelling is pathetic. And don’t be fooled by video packaging emphasizing the participation of Danny DeVito, because the diminutive actor has only one inconsequential scene as a bartender.

The Money: LAME

Goin’ South (1979)

          Having been exposed to the image countless times during my years as a video-store drone, since it was replicated on the movie’s VHS sleeve, the poster shot for Goin’ South has always irked me. At first glance, it’s a striking shot of star Jack Nicholson smiling wickedly while his face is framed by a noose. Upon close inspection, however, it’s clear that Nicholson is holding the noose in place to achieve the effect. The intended illusion is thus made and dispelled simultaneously. And so it goes for the movie itself, because throughout Goin’ South, Nicholson’s techniques as actor and director are so apparent that the movie feels laborious when it should feel effortless. After all, Goin’ South is supposed to be a comedy—and a romantic comedy, no less.

          Set in Texas during the Wild West era, the picture stars Nicholson as Henry Moon, an excitable but not particularly bright outlaw. Captured by lawmen including Sheriff Kyle (Richard Bradford) and Deputy Towfield (Christopher Lloyd), Moon is strung up for hanging. However, thanks to an arcane law allowing unmarried women to save condemned men by agreeing to marry them, young landowner Julie Tate (Mary Steenbugen) becomes Moon’s bride. Having inherited a ranch from her father, she needs a man and likes the idea of being able to use Moon for a slave since he owes her his life.

          Even though it’s rather convoluted, this premise could easily have generated an opposites-attract farce. Unfortunately, nearly every element in Goin’ South misses the mark. The screenplay meanders through dull and repetitive scenes. Supporting characters lack dimension. Plot twists emerge arbitrarily as opposed to organically. Nicholson’s direction is fuzzy, so scenes lack internal rhythm and the tone of the piece wobbles between broad comedy and subtle satire. Worst of all, the performances are terribly out of sync with each other. Steenburgen, appearing in her first movie, mostly communicates gentle nuances, while Nicholson goes way, way over the top.

          In fact, it’s probably fair to describe the actor’s work in Goin’ South as some of the worst acting in his career. Whether he’s frowning with an open mouth to imply stupidity or widening his eyes to indicate lunacy, Nicholson is silly and tiresome in nearly every scene; virtually the only clever touch he employs is speaking at various intervals with a phlegmatic knot in his voice, suggesting a character for whom language does not come easily. And to say the leads lack chemistry is a huge understatement. It’s also irritating to see two potent comic actors—John Belushi (another actor making his big-screen debut in Goin’ South) and Danny DeVito—relegated to insignificant supporting roles. Really the only member of the Goin’ South gang whose work is consistently praiseworthy is cinematographer Nestor Almendros, who paints most scenes with an appealing golden glow.

Goin’ South: FUNKY

The Van (1977)

It’s no mystery why most teen sex comedies are awful, since the producers of such films prioritize raunchy humor and sleazy scenarios over more high-minded storytelling considerations. Nonetheless, generating a few cheap laughs (and a few cheap thrills) from a simple premise shouldn’t be the most difficult task in the world. Therefore, upon encountering a dud like The Van, one can only marvel at how completely the filmmakers in question failed to vault such a low hurdle. Built around the most rudimentary of ideas—a high school graduate buys a tricked-out van to use as a bachelor pad on wheels—the movie churns through one unfunny scene after another, the inherent nothingness of each sequence exacerbated by choppy editing. Naturally, the acting is terrible, with the lone exception of future star Danny DeVito, who appears in a smallish supporting role. The picture begins when Bobby (forgettable redhead Stuart Goetz) graduates from high school and cashes in the money he’s made working at a car wash to buy a rig that he christens “Straight Arrow.” (Those words, accompanied by a phallic graphic, appear on the side of Bobby’s van.) Although Bobby is in love with classmate Tina (Deborah White), he spends the summer wooing various women into his van for sex. The comedic “highlight” of his carnal campaign involves sleeping with a heavyset girl whose weight breaks the waterbed Bobby installed in the back of the vehicle. The narrative is disjointed, with subplots introduced and discarded arbitrarily, and whenever the filmmakers run out of ideas (which is often), they cut to a montage and play the tacky soft-rock song “Chevy Van”—notwithstanding the fact that the Straight Arrow is a Dodge. The Van is so enervated that at one point, Bobby and Tina spend an entire lengthy montage attending a beachside van show, looking at other people’s tricked-out rigs with admiration. And as if failing to deliver in every other way wasn’t bad enough, The Van strikes out in the smut department, since there’s virtually no nudity in the film. So, unless ogling vehicles that are adorned with airbrushed murals raises your temperature, leave this wreck on the side of the highway where it belongs.

The Van: LAME

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

          Despite being one of the seminal dramas of the 1970s and an almost universally praised Oscar winner for Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has its detractors, not least of whom was the late Ken Kesey, who wrote the book upon which the film is based. Kesey, a counterculture legend who extrapolated the narrative from his experiences as a participant in LSD experiments at a military hospital, said he never saw the picture because the filmmakers informed him they were taking liberties with his story. Notwithstanding Kesey’s misgivings, Cuckoo’s Nest is an extraordinary piece of work that might not necessarily capture Kesey’s unique voice, but substitutes something of equal interest and power. Jack Nicholson plays R.P. McMurphy, a prison inmate who feigns insanity to dodge a work detail, then gets sent to a mental asylum for his trouble. Once there, he becomes the charismatic leader for a group of lost souls, uniting them against their common enemy: tyrannical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher).
           Under the audacious and sensitive direction of Milos Forman, a Czech native who lost his parents in the Holocaust and fled Czechoslovakia during a violent communist takeover, Cuckoo’s Nest plays out as a profound metaphor about the hardship and necessity of fighting fascist regimes; McMurphy personifies the rebellious soul of the free populace while Ratched represents the heartless machine of the oppressive overmind. The mid-’70s were just the right moment for this intense counterculture statement, and what makes Cuckoo’s Nest so extraordinary is that it meshes its idealistic themes with raucous entertainment. Whenever McMurphy leads his fellow patients in mischief, he’s like a high-art version of the sort of anarchistic rabble-rousers Bill Murray played in his comedy heyday. This irresistible charm (both McMurphy’s and Nicholson’s) makes the downbeat path the story follows totally absorbing, just like the work of the splendid cast makes ensemble scenes intimate and vivid.
          Fletcher and Nicholson won well-deserved Oscars, and they’re matched by artists working in top form: Actors Brad Dourif and Will Sampson are heartbreaking as two key patients; composer Jack Nitzsche’s score is subtle and surprising; and the loose, documentary-style images by cinematographers Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler are indelible. Incidentally, Cuckoo’s Nest netted Michael Douglas his first Oscar, because he produced the film, and watch out for future Taxi costars Danny DeVito and Christopher Lloyd as two members of McMurphy’s merry band.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: OUTTA SIGHT