The Gamblers (1970)

          The public’s zeal for smooth-criminal movies was on the wane by the time The Gamblers passed through cinemas in early 1970. Yet diminishing enthusiasm for a genre is hardly the only reason the movie failed to make an impression. Although respectably made from a technical point of view, the cast is underwhelming and the script is underdeveloped. Don Gordon, a fine character actor who presumably got this gig after being featured prominently in Bullitt (1968), plays a card shark who learns that con men are planning to fleece a European investor during a river cruise through the area then known as Yugoslavia. Setting aside the usual crime-movie challenge of getting audiences to care about craven people who prey on innocents, The Gamblers suffers because its central scheme is simultaneously too opaque (how did the card shark learn about the con men?) and too obvious (the ending requires viewers to accept that our intrepid protagonist can’t detect duplicity and that the real villains are masterminds).

          Rooney (Gordon), accompanied by goofy henchman Goldy (Stuart Margolin), works his way into the orbit of Broadfoot (Kenneth Griffith) and Cozzier (Pierre Olaf), who have their own goofy henchman, Koboyashi (Richard Ng). Upon discovering that Rooney is a slick card player, Broadfoot and Cozzier enlist him to help rip off Del Isolla (Massimo Serato), who is in possession of a bank note for $250,000. During the cruise, Rooney also meets attractive blonde Candance (Suzy Kendall), so he uses her as a lure to get Del’s attention. None of this is particularly interesting to watch, but the filmmakers try at various times to emulate the styles of similar movies. Add in some jaunty theme music, a few scenes of Kendall in barely-there swimsuits, plus weak attempts at comedic banter, and the result is a simulacrum of light entertainment. 
          Even devoted fans of the smooth-criminal genre will have difficulty getting excited about The Gamblers. It’s not a chase picture or a heist movie, so the adrenaline level is low. Meaning no disrespect to the former Yugoslavia, the locations don’t have the flair of England, France, or the Mediterranean, the customary settings for ’60s flicks of this ilk. And the star power just isn’t there. Kendall provides the requisite sun-kissed loveliness, but Gordon has such a menacing quality that he can’t muster the charm required to put something like this over. Margolin is both miscast and saddled with demeaning moments including a ridiculous dance scene, and—no surprise, given the cultural climate of the time—Ng’s characterization is problematic. 

The Gamblers: FUNKY

Z.P.G. (1972)

          Very much a product of the same anxious zeitgeist that generated Silent Running (1972) and Soylent Green (1973), as well as other cautionary tales with environmental themes, this downbeat and sl0w-moving sci-fi saga concerns a dystopian future in which man has so completely overrun the earth that the planet’s governments establish a 30-year ban on childbirth. Concurrently, pollution has become so horrific that entire cities are shrouded 24/7 with suffocating smog, and it’s become impossible to grow organic materials, so neither animals nor plants exist. The story’s protagonists, Carol McNeil (Geraldine Chaplin) and her husband Russ (Oliver Reed), work in a museum, where they perform re-creations of domestic scenes from the 20th century inside living dioramas. While some couples in this ugly future society have purchased the only legal substitutes for children—lifelike robot babies—the McNeils want more, even though the penalty for childbirth is death. At Carol’s desperate urging, Russ agrees to start a family. Once Carol becomes pregnant, Russ fabricates a marital separation as a cover story before hiding Carol in an underground bunker until she delivers her baby.

          The plot twists that follow, depicting the McNeils’ efforts to hide their secret from curious neighbors and prying government operatives, are fairly clever even though a lot of what happens in Z.P.G. (abbreviated from the government policy of Zero Population Growth) is logically dubious. Made in the UK and written by Frank De Felitta and Max Ehrlich (who also wrote the strange 1974 George C. Scott drama The Savage Is Loose), Z.P.G. features imaginative gadgets (such as the clear masks that citizens must wear while walking around smog-choked streets) and unnerving manifestations of totalitarianism (notably a high-tech torture chamber that feels like a precursor for a similar chamber in the 1976 sci-fi classic Logan’s Run). Unfortunately, neither the dramaturgy nor the performances rise to the level of the concepts. Chaplin’s acting is fidgety but icy, and Reed plays so many of his scenes with a stone face that he barely seems present, much less emotionally involved. Combined with long stretches of repetitive scenes, the inert acting makes the first hour of Z.P.G. very slow going. And while things pick up somewhat in the second half, when characters played by Diane Cliento and Don Gordon emerge as unlikely villains, the movie runs off the rails again during the ludicrous climax.

Z.P.G.: FUNKY

The Education of Sonny Carson (1974)

          Based on a popular nonfiction book by real-life criminal-turned-activist Robert “Sonny” Carson, this deeply flawed drama tries to frame the crisis of African-American gang violence within a larger context of racial marginalization. Had the picture been executed with more responsibility and sophistication, it could easily have become one of the seminal black films of the ’70s. Instead, the movie reaches far beyond its grasp, because despite lots of grandiose talk about how the title character is the innocent victim of a cruel system, the storytellers tend to put the cart before the horse—in other words, they offer sociopolitical explanations for Sonny’s criminal acts after he’s committed them, which creates the effect of convenient justification instead of legitimate proof. What the film has to say may in fact be correct and important, but the argument is made poorly.

          At the beginning of his journey, Sonny (played as a child by Thomas Hicks) is a tough street kid in a Brooklyn neighborhood filled with gang violence. After serving a stretch in juvenile detention for petty theft, Sonny (played as an adult by Rony Clayton), joins street gang the Lords and becomes friends with fellow member Lil Boy (Jerry Bell). When Lil Boy is killed during a huge brawl with a rival gang, Sonny steals money to pay for flowers at Lil Boy’s funeral. This puts Sonny in the crosshairs of vicious cop Pilgilani (Don Gordon), who beats Sonny before shipping the young man off to prison. (Yes, the movie is so blunt that the main cop has a name including the word “pig.”)

          While the preceding events might seem as if they should comprise merely the first 20 minutes of screen time, setting up Sonny’s odyssey through punishment and redemption, it takes more than an hour for Sonny to land in prison. This first hour of the movie is padded and slow, while the rest is rushed and superficial. Director Michael Campus lingers endlessly on marginal scenes, like an endless shot of Sonny and his girlfriend riding a ferry past Liberty Island or a ridiculous scene of a preacher (Ram John Holder) eulogizing Lil Boy. (There’s a hell of a lot of weeping in The Education of Sonny Carson.)

          Even though the storytelling is clumsy, the notion that audiences are supposed to sympathize with the going-nowhere lives of inner-city youths comes across. Yet the actual dialogue in the picture doesn’t convey the message effectively. For instance, when Sonny asks a parole board who gave the board “the authority to impose your will on me,” he’s expressing the right sentiment to the wrong people. And so it goes throughout this frustrating movie, which is so weakly constructed that a key plot point of heroin addiction plaguing black neighborhoods isn’t even introduced until the last 10 minutes. There’s an impassioned and soulful drama buried inside The Education of Sonny Carson, but sifting through the dissonant and superfluous material takes work.

The Education of Sonny Carson: FUNKY

Slaughter (1972) & Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off (1973)

          For various reasons, it’s not entirely accurate to call the 1972 Jim Brown movie Slaughter a blaxploitation flick. After all, ex-football player Brown was already a movie star before the blaxploitation genre emerged; he’s nearly the only actor of color in the movie; the story takes place outside the urban milieu normally associated with the genre; and certain tropes in Slaughter, such as the lead character’s sexual appeal to white women, had been present in Brown’s cinematic output since the late ’60s. That said, even if Slaughter wasn’t conceived as a blaxploitation movie, it was completed and marketed as one—the funky Billy Preston theme song and the “stickin’ it to the man” vibe of promotional materials reflect the influence of films including Shaft (1971). Anyway, if all this quibbling about categories seems tangential to the movie itself, that’s because Slaughter is so vapid that there’s not much to discuss in the way of actual content.

          Brown stars as Slaughter, an ex-Green Beret whose parents are murdered by mobsters. After killing two functionaries in reprisal, Slaughter is offered amnesty by the Feds so long as he travels to South America and takes out higher-level mobsters. That puts Slaughter into the orbit of crooks including Hoffo (Rip Torn), whose girl, Ann (Stella Stevens), is assigned to seduce Slaughter. (Torn lends a fair measure of weirdness, and Stevens mostly parades around in various states of undress.) A romantic triangle emerges, and everything leads, inevitably to a big showdown. Director Jack Starrett fills Slaughter with car chases, fistfights, shoot-outs, and nudity—Stevens’ topless appearance is probably the most memorable scene in the movie—but it’s all quite crude and routine. Brown holds the thing together, more or less, with his casual cool, and it’s a kick to hear Slaughter describe himself as “the baddest cat that ever walked the earth.” Thankfully, costar Don Gordon livens things up by providing comic relief as Slaughter’s unlikely sidekick; as is true for every other actor in the picture, however, he’s forced to make the best of clichéd dramatic situations.

          When the Slaughter character returned to movie screens a year later, in Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off, a new creative team was in place, led by director Gordon Douglas, and their mandate was clearly to make a full-on blaxploitation joint. Unlike its predecessor, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off is filled with hookers, pimps, slang, terrible clothes, and white women who can’t get enough of Slaughter—played, once more, by Brown. Deepening its blaxploitation bona fides, the sequel even boasts a high-octane funk score by the Godfather of Soul himself, James Brown. The story is diffuse, because even though the plot kicks off with another murder/revenge scenario, the narrative gets mired in convoluted underworld machinations. Furthermore, there’s zero urgency in the story until the very end, so Slaughter spends lots of time driving around, enjoying meals, and getting laid. Plus, in lieu of the previous film’s Rip Torn, the sequel’s main villain is played by Ed McMahon, better known as Johnny Carson’s second banana. McMahon does competent work, but he hardly makes a formidable opponent for “the baddest cat that ever walked the earth” (a line reprised in the sequel). Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off also loses points for a narrative predicated on wildly incompetent assassins, seeing as how the lead character survives a crazy number of attempts on his life. Neither of the Slaughter films is genuinely awful, but neither of them is anything special, either.

Slaughter: FUNKY

Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off: FUNKY

The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

Cannon for Cordoba (1970)

          Even though it suffers from a muddy screenplay, the sweaty Western Cannon for Cordoba boasts a brisk pace and impressive production values. Another entry in the seemingly endless cycle of action pictures set during the Mexican revolution, the picture begins when ruthless Mexican general Cordoba (Raf Vallone) assaults a U.S. Army train and steals six cannons from troops led by U.S. General John J. Pershing (John Russell). Determined to reclaim the weapons, Pershing enlists maverick officer Captain Rod Douglas (George Peppard) to lead an undercover assault on Cordoba’s fortress. In the course of doing his job, Douglas gets into a romantic hassle with a sexy Mexican double agent (Giovanna Ralli) and alienates his hot-tempered second-in-command (Don Gordon).

          Despite telling a simple story, Cannon for Cordoba feels needlessly complicated, because Stephen Kandel’s script fails to sufficiently differentiate characters and explain motivations; furthermore, the scene that really gets the story moving, in which Douglas receives his orders from Pershing, doesn’t happen until the half-hour mark. That said, Cannon for Cordoba delivers the goods in nearly every other way. The action scenes are tense and violent, with an exciting mixture of close-quarters combat and big-canvas warfare (people get beaten, blown up, shot, stabbed, thrown off high ledges, and so on).

          The movie also looks and sounds fantastic. Cinematographer Antonio Macasoli emulates the look that famed DP Conrad Hall brought to a better picture with similar themes, The Professionals (1966), so the imagery in Cannon for Cordoba is sharp, textured, and vibrant. The music score thunders along nicely, since the producers hired Elmer Bernstein to give this movie the same gallop Bernstein provided for the Magnificent Seven pictures.

          Alas, Cannon for Cordoba cannot boast star power equal to that found in any of the movies it emulates. None of the supporting actors makes much an impression, and Peppard is merely okay, though he seethes with a suitable mixture of contempt and malice. Yet his chilly characterization doesn’t inspire a rooting interest, and there’s not enough humor to leaven his solemnity, which makes Cannon for Cordoba grim when glib might have been the better tonal choice. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Cannon for Cordoba: FUNKY

The Mack (1973)

          Few blaxploitation pictures have cast a longer shadow over African-American pop culture than The Mack, a violent thriller about the sex trade that’s imbued with a bracing amount of documentary realism. Set in the ghettos of Oakland, California, the picture follows the adventures of Goldie (Max Julien), a small-time crook who returns home to Oakland after a stretch in prison. Surveying his options for making a buck, he decides to become a pimp (or “mack,” in the movie’s authentic parlance), and his success in the flesh-peddling line makes him a target for competitors, corrupt cops, and mobsters.

          On paper, the picture sounds like a hundred other blaxploitation flicks, and, indeed, The Mack features the customary polyester clothing, R&B tunes, and street jargon. Beyond the rote action-movie plotting, however, is a sincere exploration of sociopolitical forces driving life in the roughest pockets of Oakland’s black community. The filmmakers enlisted several real pimps as technical advisors, which gives credibility to scenes of internecine power struggles.

          Adding another interesting dimension are pointed interactions between Goldie and his brother, black-power activist Olinga (Roger E. Mosley). “Bein’ rich and black means something,” Goldie says to Olinga at one point. “Bein’ poor and black don’t mean nothing.” The idea of success as a revolutionary act is provocative, and Olinga counters this argument with hard-hitting remarks about how the cycle of blacks exploiting blacks benefits the white power structure.

          This is heady stuff for a B-movie that also makes room for vicious scenes like the moment when Goldie locks a competitor in a car trunk along with a bagful of rats, but The Mack is consistently surprising. In addition to the race-relations material, the movie tries to explain the phenomenon of pimps controlling the minds of their “bitches” (get used to hearing that word, a lot, if you watch The Mack). In one vivid scene, Goldie gathers his streetwalkers in a planetarium and delivers a Jim Jones-style sermon about the rewards he’ll shower them with in exchange for unquestioning loyalty.

          The Mack isn’t made particularly well (most of the shots are grainy and underexposed), and Julien is a peculiar leading man, his onscreen persona so leisurely it’s hard to buy him as a lethal street warrior. Additionally, comedian Richard Pryor is underused in a supporting role as Goldie’s sidekick, though his sporadic torrents of vulgarity amp up the intensity level.

          Nonetheless, the resonant elements of the picture stack up. Willie Hutch contributes atmospheric music (including the suave ballad “I Choose You”); veteran character actor Don Gordon weaves all sorts of eccentric details into his performance as a bad cop who torments Goldie; and Mosley, later of Magnum P.I. fame, is believably anguished. More importantly, for fans of the blaxploitation genre, The Mack is filled with choice dialogue, like Goldie’s classic challenge to an enemy: “We can handle this like you got some class, or we can get into some gangsta shit.”

The Mack: GROOVY