1980 Week: The Long Riders

          Offering a sweeping view of the Jesse James story that includes the relationship between brothers Frank and Jesse James and their longtime comrades-in-arms, the Younger brothers, The Long Riders is exquisitely rendered on many levels, with crisp direction by Walter Hill, luminous photography by Ric Waite, and a plaintive score by Ry Cooder. The movie is best known for its cast, featuring four sets of real-life brothers. James and Stacy Keach play Jesse and Frank James; David, Keith, and Robert Carradine play the Youngers; Dennis and Randy Quaid play the Millers, two members of the James-Younger Gang; and Christopher and Nicholas Guest play the Fords, two unsavory wannabes whose association with the gang has tragic consequences. (At various stages in the project’s development, participation by Beau and Jeff Bridges and by Timothy Bottoms and his acting brothers was discussed.)
          Notwithstanding an unnecessarily long action scene featuring David Carradine—the cast’s biggest star at the time of filming—the stunt casting works beautifully, because the actors bring a natural rapport that suits the narrative. Oddly, however, the film rarely lingers on scenes of the gang members interacting as a group, with the obvious exception of elaborate robbery sequences. Rather, the picture mostly spotlights two-character scenes, such as long vignettes dramatizing the doomed romance between swaggering Cole Younger (David Carradine) and tough-as-nails prostitute Belle Starr (Pamela Reed). Wasn’t the point of casting so many famous brothers to create massive, Magnificent Seven-style scenes in which everyone onscreen is famous and interesting?
          In any event, The Long Riders is consistently entertaining, even though the storyline meanders in frustrating ways—lots of important things happen between scenes, and too much screen time gets chewed up by humdrum events. Directing his first Western, Hill shows a remarkable flair for the genre, using long lenses and judiciously selected slow motion to create a poetic sense of place. Whether he’s filming a weathered barn in the middle of a forest or a dusty street running through a grubby frontier town, Hill surrounds his performers with atmosphere. He also films action with his usual consummate skill, so every bullet means something and every horse fall has bone-crunching impact. (The climactic shootout in Northfield, Minnesota, is spectacular, albeit a bit overzealously edited.) Had the script been stronger, The Long Riders could have become a masterpiece instead of a solid attempt at mythmaking. Unfortunately, the screenplay is a hodgepodge setting brilliant flourishes within a shaky structure.
          James Keach, who has enjoyed a long career in front of and behind the camera without ever becoming a marquee name, developed the piece with an eye toward costarring with his more successful sibling, Stacy. (Both Keaches are credited as cowriters and coproducers.) Yet instead of following the obvious path by casting Stacy as Jesse, the brothers installed James in the leading role, presumably to create a star-making moment. This choice hurt the movie, because while Stacy’s charismatic intensity burns like a bright candle in the background, the less expressive James sets a too-reserved tone. David Carradine nearly steals the movie, since he gets most of the best lines and scenes, and some of the film’s excellent players (notably Keith Carradine and Dennis Quaid) are badly underused. Nonetheless, the many fine attributes of The Long Riders make watching the movie a rewarding experience.

The Long Riders: GROOVY

Our Winning Season (1978)

          Rehashing themes from American Graffiti (1973), but with a milquetoast approach to storytelling replacing the visionary qualities of George Lucas’ enduring hit, Our Winning Season juggles the bland stories of several 1960s high-school students facing adulthood. Competently directed by Joseph Ruben, who has usually fared better with pulpy genre stories, the picture suffers as much from a lack of distinctive performances as it does from a lack of distinctive characters. Of the principal cast, three actors later gained notoriety, and none of them is is the lead. Future WKRP in Cincinnati costar Jan Smithers plays a young woman wrestling with whether or not to surrender her virginity, future Riptide/Jake and the Fatman TV actor Joe Penny plays the on-again/off-again boyfriend of Smithers’ character, and future A-lister Dennis Quaid portrays one of several interchangeable young men driven to stupidity by raging hormones. The actual leading man of Our Winning Season is Scott Jacoby, who plays an angst-ridden student athlete, and despite putting in a sincere effort, he’s ultimately as forgettable as his role.

          In lieu of a proper overarching storyline, Our Winning Season presents a number of interconnected subplots. David (Jacoby) struggles to overcome the feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing that keep him from achieving greatness as a distance runner. Meanwhile, his sister, Cathy (Smithers), breaks up with her tiresome boyfriend, Dean (Penny), only to reconsider their situation when Dean impulsively joins the Army and explains that he’s headed for Vietnam. Providing would-be comic relief are the misadventures of a teen Casanova named Jerry (Randy Herman), who juggles relationships with two girls at once. (One of Jerry’s ladies is played by cult-fave starlet P.J. Soles, whose presence in the movie is fleeting.)

          In terms of tone, Our Winning Season is all over the place. At its most desperate, the movie provides “wild” scenes of kids getting into trouble, hence the ridiculous shot of a car crashing through the screen at a drive-in theater. At its best, the movie aims for intimate drama with a special focus on the challenges that horny young men face when they first realize they must treat women as more than just sexual objects. Quite often, the movie lands in some unsatisfying place between these extremes. For instance, several necking scenes linger so long that they almost feel like softcore—it’s as if the filmmakers tried a little bit of everything, then cobbled the final movie together from whichever footage seemed to generate visceral reactions. Therefore, even though Our Winning Season steers clear of many obvious traps, the movie is as unfocused as it is unmemorable.

Our Winning Season: FUNKY

The Seniors (1978)

          To understand why Risky Business (1983) is so remarkable, one need only imagine the same concept—a young man solves a financial crisis by opening a brothel—executed without good taste. Hence The Seniors, which came out five years before Risky Business. The narratives of the two films are sufficiently different that it’s not as if one emanated from the other, but close enough to allow for side-by-side comparison. Whereas Risky Business has complex characters, ingenious plotting, sophisticated gender politics, and wicked humor, The Seniors has ciphers, silliness, smut, and stupidity. The Seniors is not outright awful, since the story makes sense and some of the jokes are almost funny, but it’s cringe-worthy on myriad levels. Most egregiously, the film portrays women as subhuman sex objects to be manipulated, ogled, traded, and used at whim. That all of this exploitation is hidden behind the veil of calling female characters “liberated” makes the whole enterprise seem even more dubious.

          At the beginning of the movie, four male college seniors decide they don’t want to graduate because their situation is idyllic. Occupying a rented house, the dudes share a live-in nymphomaniac named Sylvia (Priscilla Barnes), who also serves as their chef and cleaning lady. Nerdy classmate Arnold (Rocky Flintermann), who is desperate to have sex with Sylvia, reveals one day that his employer—a reclusive, Nobel Prize-winning scientist—regularly receives more grant offers than he can accept. In exchange for diverting grant money to the four seniors, Arnold is given permission to sleep with Sylvia whenever he wants. The seniors then contrive a sex study, offering coeds $20 per hour to sleep with the seniors “for research purposes.” The study catches on, so the seniors rent a hotel and charge businessmen $50 per session for the privilege of sleeping with the coeds. And so it goes from there. Corporate entities buy a piece of the seniors’ lucrative project, the nonprofit organization behind the grant becomes suspicious, and Sylvia puts poor Arnold in traction because of endless sex.

          The movie’s jokes tend to be along the line of this slogan: “Schmucks graduate—smart guys copulate!” In other words, this is professional comedy of a sort, though none involved in the project has much reason for pride. Appraising the film’s acting and storytelling is pointless, since The Seniors basically a second-rate National Lampoon-type satirical concept stretched out to full-length, meaning that characterization is not a priority, but it’s worth nothing that Dennis Quaid—appearing in one of his first credited roles—plays one of the seniors.

The Seniors: FUNKY

September 30, 1955 (1977)

          A minor work by writer-director James Bridges—whose more impressive credits include The Paper Chase (1973) and The China Syndrome (1979)—September 30, 1955 revolves around a bold premise that sounds more interesting in conception than it is in execution. The titular date is when movie star James Dean died in a car wreck, so Bridges focuses on the reactions of several Dean fans in small-town Arkansas. The idea, so promising in the abstract, was to convey why Dean’s incarnation of angst-ridden teen rebellion spoke so deeply to a generation of postwar adolescents. Unfortunately, Bridges stretches this already-thin material way past its breaking point, and he features characters whose behavior is so extreme (and inexplicable) that he leaves recognizable reality far behind. Perhaps Bridges would have been better served tackling this topic with a short film.

          In any event, the central character of September 30, 1955 is Jimmy (Richard Thomas), a high-strung youth afraid of the life that awaits him after he graduates high school in a few weeks. Having fallen under Dean’s thrall after seeing East of Eden (1955) four times, Jimmy is more than eager to demonstrate that he, too, can be a rebel. Hearing about Dean’s death gives Jimmy license to release his id, so the picture depicts the misguided mischief Jimmy creates along with friends including Charlotte (Deborah Benson), Frank (Dennis Quaid), Hanley (Tom Hulce), and especially Billie Jean (Lisa Blount), who’s an even bigger Dean freak than Jimmy. The youths steal booze from a store, run away from cops, hold a séance, terrorize classmates at a lover’s-lane spot, and eventually trigger a near-tragic accident. While it’s easy to believe that Jimmy’s friends are bored kids looking for laughs, accepting Jimmy’s characterization is nearly impossible—whether he’s stripping down to undies and slathering himself in mud or claiming he’s receiving signals from Dean’s spirit, Jimmy comes across as a lunatic. He’s also a boring lunatic, especially in the film’s interminable climactic scene, which features Jimmy giving the dullest monologue imaginable in an utterly absurd circumstance.

          Thomas, who enjoyed a big ’70s TV career on The Waltons, wears out his welcome here, reaching for but not seizing the kind of intensity that seemed to come effortlessly for better Dean-esque actors (e.g., Martin Sheen, etc.). Thomas’ castmates fare better, but they can’t fully surmount the iffy material, and an atrocious score by Leonard Rosenman only makes things worse. Only the great cinematographer Gordon Willis contributes something unassailably special to September 30, 1955, with moody imagery dominated by shadows and silhouettes, although whether his dark style is actually “right” for this story is anybody’s guess.

September 30, 1955: FUNKY

Are You in the House Alone? (1978)

Based on the title and premise, it’s easy to get this TV movie confused with the theatrical feature When a Stranger Calls (1979), which employs the same gimmick of a babysitter terrorized by creepy phone calls, but the similarities mostly end there. When a Stranger Calls is a straight-up thriller about a deranged killer, while Are You in the House Alone? is a serious-minded drama about rape that simply happens to employ horror-movie elements. That said, Are You in the House Alone? is not exceptional—in fact, the movie is quite clumsy, even though the filmmakers treat touchy subject matter with respect. Wide-eyed starlet Kathleen Beller brings sweet vulnerability to the role of Gail, a suburban high-school student who dreams of becoming a photographer. Since her parents (played by Blythe Danner and Tony Bill) squabble regularly, Gail finds solace in her friends and in babysitting—until an unknown admirer starts pestering her with suggestive calls. Meanwhile, Gail becomes involved with sensitive classmate Steve (Scott Colomby), which enflames her stalker’s rage. Eventually, the stalker emerges from hiding and rapes Gail, which transforms the latter half of the movie into an oh-the-humanity treatise on the way the law protects criminals instead of victims. Suffice to say, the various elements of Are You in the House Alone? clash. Sometimes, the picture’s a lurid saga about a girl being menaced; at other times, it’s a gentle love story about Gail and Steve opening their hearts to each other. In a peculiar way, the most memorable aspect of this picture (the social-injustice material) is the least organic—Are You In the House Alone? is a message movie wrapped inside a genre picture. In trying to do too many things, alas, the filmmakers achieve only moderate success with each of those things. Still, Beller’s naturalistic appeal—which often exceeds her acting skill—provides a sympathetic viewpoint, and the picture benefits from the talents of Bill, Danner, and costar Dennis Quaid, who made his big-screen breakout a year later in Breaking Away (1979). Although his role is smallish, Quaid’s intensity demonstrates how ready he was for bigger things.

Are You In the House Alone?: FUNKY

Breaking Away (1979)

          An Oscar winner for Best Screenplay and a nominee for Best Picture, Breaking Away is one of the true gems of the late ’70s. While the film is inarguably a feel-good sports tale with a big race for a climax—which is to say that the story traffics in formulaic elements—Breaking Away explodes with so much in the way of memorable acting, characterization, and dialogue that the handicap of a preordained ending isn’t crippling. From start to finish, screenwriter Steve Tesich and director Peter Yates ground the story in specificity, separating Breaking Away from the pack of routine inspirational athletic pictures. Tesich, a Yugoslavian native whose family relocated to Indiana when he was a teenager, brings a unique outsider/insider viewpoint to this perspective on American culture; he captures the colorful textures of American idiom while evincing a sharp consciousness of class divisions. Further, the credible qualities of Tesich’s script enable the film’s four principal actors to sculpt distinct (and distinctly likable) personalities.

          Breaking Away’s protagonist is Dave (Dennis Christopher), a recent graduate from an Indiana high school who’s obsessed with a celebrated group of Italian bicyclists. Accordingly, even though Dave’s a corn-fed townie who spends his afternoons at a swimming hole with fellow high-school grads Cyril (Daniel Stern), Mike (Dennis Quaid), and Moocher (Jackie Earle Haley)—none of whom have clear plans for the future—Dave emulates Italian culture by singing along to opera and speaking Italian at every opportunity. This causes great consternation for Dave’s working-class dad, Ray (Paul Dooley); Ray’s befuddled rants about his kid’s abandonment of U.S. culture are endlessly entertaining. As the story progresses, Dave gets romantically involved—under false pretenses—with a pretty Indiana University coed, Katherine (Robyn Douglass), and he also decides to enter an annual bike race called the “Little 500.” Dave’s nervy encroachment into the rarified collegiate world exacerbates tensions between upper-crust students and blue-collar locals. (The college kids pejoratively refer to locals as “cutters” because limestone mining is a venerable local industry.)

          You can pretty much guess where things go from here, and, indeed, the story features lots of oppressor-vs.-underdog standoffs. Yet the joy of Breaking Away is the journey, not the destination. For instance, the ensemble scenes involving Dave’s friends feature crisp dialogue, naturalistic acting, and a warm sense of camaraderie. On a deeper level, the sense of anxiety these young men express speaks volumes about the fraught lives of people restricted by limited choices. Christopher, Haley, Quaid, and Stern function as a cohesive unit, even though Christopher has more scenes than anyone else, and their enchanting work is complemented by great supporting turns from Dooley and Barbara Barrie (who plays Ray’s wife). The actors playing IU snobs don’t fare quite as well, since their roles lack equal measures of complexity, but everyone is effective in his or her way. Director Yates, who often made thrillers such as Bullitt (1968) and The Deep (1977), captures Tesich’s humanistic storyline in an unvarnished style that suits the material, and his filmmaking soars during the climactic bike race.

Breaking Away: OUTTA SIGHT