The Trackers (1971)

          Apparently Sammy Davis Jr. spent some time looking for a project in which he could costar with John Wayne, leading to development of The Trackers. Somewhere along the way, the project lost Wayne, director Burt Kennedy, and the potential for a theatrical release, instead becoming an inexpensive telefilm directed by small-screen workhorse Earl Bellamy and costarring Ernest Borgnine. It’s probably for the best a glossier version of this project never materialized for two reasons: 1) Davis seems way out of his element playing a formidable lawman, and 2) the plot follows the familiar formula of Black and White characters who overcome racial animus when thrown together by circumstance. As a brisk TV movie with household-name actors, The Trackers makes for a pleasant 74 minutes of disposable entertainment—but stretching this content out to feature length would have brought its shortcomings into sharp focus.
          Sam Paxton (Borgnine) is an amiable rancher with a wife and two adult children until one day when raiders attack his property, kill his son, and kidnap his daughter. Initial efforts to find the evildoers prove fruitless, so Sam writes to a lawman friend who specializes in tracking. Unable to help because of an injury, the friend sends Ezekiel Smith (Davis), which aggravates Sam’s racism. (He fought for the South.) Nonetheless, once Ezekiel demonstrates his prowess, Sam agrees to ride with the Black lawman even as the trail leads closer and closer to the Mexican border. Since there have been roughly a zillion movies about men from different worlds forced to work together, you know how things go from there—Sam and Ezekiel vacillate between bonding and squabbling. In reflective moments, they share stories and find common cause. In combustible moments, they physically assault each other. A few beats are played for mild comic relief, but for the most part The Trackers aims for a serious tone.
          It’s tricky to buy Davis in his role, not just because he seems so modern but also because he’s so physically slight—in one particularly eye-rolling moment, Davis’s character holds his own in an extended brawl with Borgnine’s character even though Borgnine looks as if he could snap Davis’s spine like a twig. Related, Davis’s performance feels artificial and bland compared to the believable intensity Borgnine brings to nearly every scene. As always, Borgnine’s performance style is more about blunt force than nuance, but his animalistic approach suits the role and the storyline. He’s actually quite engaging here, so it’s moderately satisfying to watch his character describe an emotional arc, however predictable and trite.

The Trackers: FUNKY

Ravagers (1979)

          There’s no good reason for sci-fi thriller Ravagers to be as dull as it is. Even setting aside the lively cast—more on that in a minute—the picture features a serviceable postapocalyptic storyline, in which gangs of violent people called ravagers prey on settlements of vulnerable people to steal food and other supplies. The underlying premise holds that something poisoned the world’s water, making it nearly impossible to grow new food, so everyone still alive competes for resources. Though hardly new, shouldn’t these concepts be enough for a passable mixture of pulpy adventure and social commentary? Before you answer that question, let’s get back to the cast: Ravagers stars Richard Harris, and supporting him in much smaller roles are Ernest Borgnine, Art Carney, Seymour Cassel, Anthony James, and Woody Strode. That lineup explains why Ravagers isn’t a total waste of time, even though the actors are squandered as badly as the potential of the storyline.

          Set in the near future, Ravagers begins with Falk (Harris) bringing precious food back to his companion, Miriam (Alana Hamilton), who dreams of someday finding a place called Genesis, where food is rumored to grow. Alas, ravagers led by a vile leader (Anthony James) followed Falk to his hiding place, so they rape and murder Miriam, leaving Falk for dead. He survives and exacts some revenge, then flees into the countryside with the ravagers in pursuit. Falk meets assorted benevolent people until stumbling across an installation supervised by Rann (Borgnine), who clashes with Falk over strategies for holding the outside world at bay.

         Some of the film’s episodes are more interesting than others, but the pacing is glacial and the movie is nearly over before Rann appears. Yet the shape of the narrative isn’t the worst problem plaguing Ravagers. In nearly every scene, actors stand still with their faces blank, as if they’re waiting for director Richard Compton to give them something to do or say. The movie’s script is so enervated that character development is nonexistent, with people defined by their situations instead of their personalities. This sort of one-dimensional approach can work in fast-paced movies, but it’s deadly for slow-paced movies like Ravagers. Adding to the onscreen lethargy are vapid turns by Stewart and nominal leading lady Ann Turkel. Ravagers is more or less coherent, but as goes Harris’ performance—a wispy suggestion of what he might have done with a proper screenplay—so goes the whole disappointing picture.

Ravagers: FUNKY

Holiday Hookers (1976)

          Don’t let the ghastly title—or the equally terrible American-release poster—give you the wrong impression about this Italian sex comedy, which features American star Ernest Borgnine in a supporting role. The original title translates to Christmas Time in a Brothel, an improvement, and the alternate US moniker, best of all, is Love By Appointment. To muddy the waters even more, it’s a stretch to call this movie, by any name, a comedy. It’s more of a sad character study executed with a light touch—and, naturally, a fair amount of sex. After all, French beauty Corinne Cléry, who costars, rarely managed to stay dressed in her ’70s movies, and Holiday Hookers is no exception. Summarizing, Holiday Hookers isn’t the sleazy enterprise one might expect, and yet it’s also not entirely respectable. Confused? Welcome to the club.

          The picture revolves around Nira (Françoise Fabian), an aging madam who runs a high-class brothel out of her luxury apartment. After years of serving a selective and wealthy clientele, Nira plans to leave the business because her lover is about to be released from prison, and she hopes to begin a quiet new life with him. But bills must be paid in the meantime, so Nira manages a few girls and sets her eyes on a neighbor, beautiful young mother Senine (Cléry), as a possible new recruit. Then things get complicated. Longtime client Max (Borgnine) has a coronary while he’s with one of Nira’s girls and develops a fixation on the uninterested prostitute after he recovers. Another client gets hooked on Roxy (Norma Jordan), who works for kicks instead of pay—on the condition she never sees the same client twice. And then there’s the Senine problem. After wooing her neighbor into the sex trade, Nira grows frustrated when Senine becomes addicted to big money and sexual power.

          Directed by Armando Nannuzzi, an award-winning cinematographer who only helmed two films, Holiday Hookers reflects conflicting impulses. The lurid subject matter and plentiful nude scenes nearly quality Holiday Hookers as an exploitation flick, but few exploitation flicks are this careful and sensitive about characterization. We get to know the people in this movie fairly well, and we even grow to care about some of them. For example, Borgnine poignantly sketches a lonely businessman, and Fabian effectively illustrates the way Nira’s life is built on self-delusion. Plus there’s the downbeat ending, which lands thematically instead of merely delivering a shock. This is far from the deepest story ever told about the oldest profession, but the picture has just enough soul (and sauciness) to reward a casual viewing.

Holiday Hookers: FUNKY

The Boxer (1972)

          An Italian production starring two American dudes and a Frenchwoman, The Boxer—also known as Ripped-Off, among other titles—is a thoroughly disposable crime drama about that most familiar of topics, a pugilist who gets in trouble when gangsters ask him to throw a fight. The sorta-kinda interesting twist here is that the fighter isn’t aware he’s expected to lose on purpose. Instead, crooks pressure his manager, who stubbornly refuses to pass along the lose-or-else message. This decision costs the manager his life, and circumstances make the boxer the prime suspect in his manager’s murder. Can our hero clear his name and avenge his loyal friend? If you’ve ever seen a movie before, you know the drill. Featuring a compendium of stock moments and trite characterizations, this painfully formulaic picture exists somewhere between background noise and comfort food, with the usual lost-in-translation problems (choppy editing, questionable dubbing) adding to an overall sense of mediocrity. Nonetheless, the presence of Robert Blake in the leading role lends the project a certain level of interest.

          He plays Teddy “Cherokee” Wilson, a short but muscular boxer with a long criminal record. In the opening scene, he discovers that a manager has ripped him off, so he brawls with the gun-toting crook and secures his freedom. Broke and homeless, Teddy encounters an old friend, Mike (Orazio Orland0), who connects Teddy with a new manager, leading to the aforementioned fight-fixing intrigue. After the murder, Teddy pleads his innocence to Captain Perkins (Ernest Borgnine), the cop leading the investigation. He also struggles to win the loyalty of his dead manager’s daughter, who may or may not have seen the real killer. All of this is just as bland and perfunctory as it sounds. While Borgnine is in and out of the movie so fleetingly as to barely register, Blake is in nearly every scene. His combination of pugnacity and sensitivity is always somewhat interesting, but he’s as undisciplined here as usual, over-decorating some scenes with actorly tics and underplaying others. Still, at least he engages with the material in a serious way. Whether the material actually deserves engagement is another matter.

The Boxer: FUNKY

The Double McGuffin (1979)

          After scoring a major success with the independently produced canine caper Benji (1974), writer-director Joe Camp made two attempts at expanding his film career beyond Benji sequels and spinoffs. First came Hawmps! (1976), a silly lark about cavalrymen using camels instead of horses, and next came this youth-oriented Hitchcock homage. As any good student of the Master of Suspense knows, a “McGuffin” is a plot device that triggers action, such as the key in Notorious (1946) or the microfilm in North by Northwest (1959). Therefore the gimmick behind this movie, as Orson Welles explains during brief narration toward the beginning, is that the plot involves two separate McGuffins. Specifically, a mischievous boy discovers a suitcase filled with money near a sewer pipe, then brings his friends back to the area, where they discover the suitcase has been replaced with a dead body. Thereafter, the lads embark on a mystery-solving adventure that becomes a race against time once clues reveal a plan to murder someone at their school’s homecoming game. Echoing the classic Hitch tradition, the scenario grows more convoluted with each new development, so the kids discover international intrigue as well as hitmen and payoffs. Dogging the youthful investigators is a kindhearted local cop.

          On the plus side, The Double McGuffin is slickly produced, with peppy work by the young leading actors and proficient supporting turns by Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, and Elke Sommer. On the minus side, Camp’s writing is not as strong as his filmmaking. Too often, he slips into mawkishness and triviality, and several long scenes of interplay among the schoolchildren are boring. Worse, the film’s pacing is so unhurried and the narrative events are so inconsequential that the film nearly evaporates at regular intervals. One gets the sense of Camp being way too nice behind the camera, since much focus is given to the performance of newcomer Dion Pride, son of country singer Charley Pride. Papa Pride, of course, crooned the theme song for Benji, and Pride the Younger does the honors here. Doing a solid for a pal is lovely, but it doesn’t make for engrossing cinema. And let’s be honest: There’s only so high a juvenile Hitchcock riff can rise when the leading lady is Lisa Whelchel, later to achieve fame as “Blair” on The Facts of Life. One of the great screen sirens she is not.

The Double McGuffin: FUNKY

Rain for a Dusty Summer (1971)

A clumsy retelling of historical events that were previously dramatized by director John Ford in The Fugitive (1947), this low-budget melodrama begins with the crazed ruler of a Mexican state declaring war on the Catholic Church, then tracks the journey of the last priest to evade the strongman’s grasp. Despite telling an interesting story full of intense sociopolitical themes, Rain for a Dusty Summer—also known as Guns of the Revolution—doesn’t work. The first problem stems from misleading credits, since Ernest Borgnine has top billing for his role as the brutal dictator. Borgnine appears in the movie so fleetingly that it seems as if he shot all of his material in an afternoon. (Adding to the forgettable nature of his appearance, Borgnine’s weak attempt at a Spanish accent comprises little more than pronouncing the name of his character’s country as “Me-hee-co.”) The next big problem involves tone. Scenes depicting the priest’s adventures as he moves from one hiding place to another are gentle and lighthearted, complete with chipper music that would seem appropriate accompanying circus performances. The dissonance between serious subject matter and silly style destroys the film’s credibility. Accordingly, whenever the filmmakers try to get heavy, as during the downbeat final scene, it’s as if they're rebooting the movie while it's still underway. And while Humberto Almazán is okay in the leading role—affable in a Disney-flick sort of way—his lack of dimensionality derails any efforts to render narrative complexity. In fact, it’s easier to list the many things Rain for a Dusty Summer lacks—among them a compelling secondary villain and a viable sense of urgency—than to identify praiseworthy elements. That’s why it’s probably best to stick with the Ford version of this worthwhile material, or to wait for someone else to tackle the story in the future.

Rain for a Dusty Summer: LAME

Sunday in the Country (1974)

          A minor contribution to the early-’70s conversation about cinematic vigilantism that primarily revolved around Straw Dogs (1971) and Death Wish (1974), Sunday in the Country benefits from immersive location photography and a zesty leading performance by Ernest Borgnine. The filmmakers take a bit too much time setting their narrative trap, then end up spinning in circles toward the end while searching for the satisfying conclusion that they never find. Nonetheless, Sunday in the Country is very nearly a serious film questioning how far citizens are entitled to go while endeavoring to preserve public safety. Borgnine plays a farmer who learns that three escaped bank robbers have been sighted in his rural county, so he loads his shotgun just in case he needs to protect himself and his teenaged granddaughter. By the time the crooks inevitably reach his property, the farmer knows that they’ve killed two local residents, so he surprises the crooks by immediately shooting one of them down. Thereafter, he imprisons the other two and commences psychological torture, aggrieving his granddaughter’s more liberal notions of justice.

          Director John Trent does a fairly good job of creating mood and texture, contrasting the film’s ominous first act with peppy country songs, and it’s fun to watch Borgnine think on camera while his character contemplates where events might be headed; too often during the ’70s and subsequently, Borgnine was asked only to be crude and loud. Yet there’s only so much Borgnine and Trent can do with the overly schematic storyline. The criminals are one-dimensional, and there’s never any question of whether they’ll reach the farm. Therefore, after the film plays its one ace—the moment when Borgnine greets the criminals with a loaded gun—believable suspense gives way to silly contrivances, like a far-fetched sequence involving the criminals and the granddaughter. As for the picture’s third act, it starts strong but then spirals into nonsense. Also spiraling into nonsense is costar Michael J. Pollard’s annoying supporting performance as the most trigger-happy of the criminals—Pollard’s work is a compendium of pointlessly weird flourishes, right down to the pastel-colored briefs his character wears.

          FYI, this picture is sometimes marketed under the titles Blood for Blood and Vengeance Is Mine.

Sunday in the Country: FUNKY

All Quiet on the Western Front (1979)

          Considering that a 1930 black-and-white adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the first films to receive the Academy Award for Best Picture, it’s no surprise that Hollywood avoided revisiting the story for decades. Once cameras rolled on a fresh take, albeit for television, restrictions on what could be shown had relaxed sufficiently for the 1979 version of All Quiet on the Western Front to play rougher than its predecessor. Particularly when viewed in the “uncut” extended version that was released theatrically in Europe, the 1979 All Quiet on the Western Front is much bloodier than Lewis Milestone’s 1930 feature. It’s also much less poetic, though it nearly matches the earlier film in terms of scope.

          The story follows a group of German soldiers during World War I as they evolve from new recruits to battle-hardened veterans. At the center of the piece is Paul Baumer (played by Richard Thomas of The Waltons), a gentle artist who learns to kill out of necessity. The story tracks Paul’s relationships with many people, including fellow enlisted men as well as cruel training officer Himmelstoss (Ian Holm) and pragmatic NCO Katczinsky (Ernest Borgnine). The Himmelstoss character represents ambitious conformists whose participation in the military brings out inhumane qualities, and the Katczinsky character represents the challenges faced by those who wish to survive war with their souls intact. Per the forceful but schematic architecture of Remarque’s storyline, Paul finds himself pulled between these extremes—as well as other impulses—while he resists the circumstances that could otherwise compel him to become a callous killing machine.

          Though his work is earnest and rigorous, leading man Thomas is the weak link in this production, hitting voiceover lines too mechanically and playing scenes too obviously. By contrast, Borgnine, Holm, and Donald Pleasance—who plays a schoolteacher with dubious notions of nationalism—all come across as nuanced and subtle. Generally speaking, All Quiet on the Western Front commands and rewards attention. Cinematographer John Coquillon and director Delbert Mann create a rich widescreen look with much more texture than the average ’70s telefilm, composer Allyn Ferguson layers scenes with suitably ominous music, and the picture contains several startling images. Rats chewing on corpses. A dazed man begging mercy for wounded horses. Lines of soldiers dropping from gunfire as they climb out of trenches. It’s all quite potent, from the unexpected significance of what happens to a wounded soldier’s boots to the grim final images that succinctly express Remarque’s antiwar themes.

All Quiet on the Western Front: GROOVY

Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? (1970)

          Partly an antiwar film reflecting the counterculture perspective and partly a squaresville pro-military picture promulgating Greatest Generation attitudes, the misshapen comedy/drama Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? depicts an explosive conflict between the soldiers occupying a U.S. Army base and the citizens of the hick town neighboring the base. The movie features myriad subplots and several principal characters, so for about the first hour of the film’s running time, it’s hard to tell who or what the story is about. Once things come into focus—or at least as much so as they ever do, which is not a lot—the sum is less than the parts. Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? includes some amusing performances, as well as fine production values and fleeting passages of snappy dialogue, but the script is simultaneously overpopulated and underdeveloped. Interesting ideas fade into the ether, silly tropes rise to the fore, and it all congeals into a kind of cinematic sludge.

          The basic gist is that a career soldier named Officer Michael Nace (Brian Keith) gets tasked with handling community relations between the base and the town. That’s easier said than done, because troublemaking Army personnel including drunken womanizer Sergeant Shannon Gambroni (Tony Curtis) have made enemies of the town’s sadistic top cop, Sheriff Harve (Ernest Borgnine). As the film progresses, tensions between citizens and soldiers grow worse and worse, eventually inspiring Mace to lead an armed assault on the town. The town fights back not just with police but also with a private militia funded and overseen by megalomaniacal idiot Billy Joe Davis (Tom Ewell).

          This short synopsis excludes easily half of the film’s narrative threads, because characters played by Don Ameche, Bradford Dillman, Ivan Dixon, and Suzanne Pleshette—among others—also have significant amounts of screen time. Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? is such a mess that it’s not worth expressing frustration that certain elements almost work. Borgnine adds another scenery-chewing monster to his gallery of screen villains, and Keith is entertainingly grumpy, but their efforts are stymied by the general formlessness. As Borgnine says in his autobiography, “We had a lot of fun doing it and I got a paycheck, even though it turned out terrible.”

Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came?: FUNKY

The Ghost of Flight 401 (1978)

          Given their low budgets and quick turnaround times, TV movies have always been able to jump on both cultural trends and ripped-from-the-headlines stories more easily than theatrical features. That's one reason why numerous ’70s telefilms dramatize sensationalistic events with supernatural connotations. “Weird news” items lacking the factual foundation and/or social significance to merit feature treatment were ideal fodder for movies of the week. All of this should set the proper context for The Ghost of Flight 401, a slight but somewhat thoughtful riff on strange phenomena that followed the crash of a commercial airliner in Florida. In real life, people reported hearing, seeing, and even smelling the ghost of the doomed plane's copilot long after he died from injuries sustained in the crash.

          After the usual gravitas-laden opening narration warning viewers that what they're about to see maybe-kinda-sorta could have actually happened, the picture introduces veteran flyer Dom Cimoli (Ernest Borgnine), a likeable family man with a weakness for Bay Rum cologne. Despite a premonition from his wife that something bad is about to happen, Dom joins the cockpit crew of a plane that suffers landing-gear failure, loses altitude, and crashes in the Everglades. Among the few survivors is flight attendant Prissy Frasier (Kim Basinger). She and others who knew Dom sense his presence in the days and weeks after the crash, first by catching a whiff of Bay Rum and then by actually seeing his physical body for fleeing moments. Airline administrator Jordan Evanhower (Gary Lockwood), an avowed agnostic, dismisses the sightings as mass hysteria, so when Prissy swears she encountered the deceased Dom on a night flight, Jordan tells her she needs to see a shrink before returning to duty. Eventually, enough people report sightings that Jordan is forced to broaden his horizons, leading to a kicky final act.

          As directed by the capable Steven Hilliard Stern, The Ghost of Flight 401 doesn't break ground in terms of otherworldly thrills. Instead, the film effectively depicts the emotional states of otherwise rational people who encounter things beyond their understanding. Stern guides actors toward restrained, tense performances, and cinematographer Howard Schwartz bathes everything in evocative shadows that Stern maximizes with elegant camera moves. Calling The Ghost of Flight 401 a cut above the normal made-for-TV fare would be exaggerating, and it's worth noting that Borgnine's screen time is limited (although Basinger, in one of her earliest roles, is quite prominent). Nonetheless, the respectful way that the filmmakers explore such pseudoscientific concepts as pscyhometry makes The Ghost of Flight 401 more ruminative than exploitive.

The Ghost of Flight 401: FUNKY

Shoot (1976)

          If you’re willing to overlook a completely unbelievable premise, then this tense drama about guns and the men who love them makes for a somewhat exciting viewing experience. The acting is solid, the cinematography and production values are excellent, and the story features a number of peculiar twists, as well as explosive action scenes. However, if you’re the sort of viewer who prefers movies that stem from logical concepts and then proceed along the lines of credible human psychology, then Shoot is not for you. The moment this film reaches what screenwriters refer to as the “inciting incident,” all semblance of reality goes out the window.

          The movie begins with several buddies heading into the wilderness for a hunting trip. Leading the pack is Rex (Cliff Robertson), a tightly wound businessman who formerly served as an officer in the U.S. military. He’s first seen strapping on a pistol like it’s part of his everyday wardrobe, and then cleaning a rifle with stroking movements so gentle and passionate that the visual analogy to masturbation is impossible to miss. Once Rex and his pals reach a deep forest ravine, they encounter another group of hunters—and then, for no discernible reason, one of the hunters from the other group opens fire. Rex and his people retaliate, and Rex kills one of the “enemy soldiers.” The mysterious hunters then withdraw, leaving Rex and his friends alone with their confusion about what the hell just happened. Later scenes compound the bewildering nature of the firefight. Rex and his guys refuse to report the incident. Rex studies newspaper obituaries until he discovers the identity of the man he shot, and then he visits that man’s widow, who spews lots of xenophobic dialogue. Rex has an affair with a friend’s wife, since the filmmakers apparently need us to know that their protagonist is virile in bed as well as on the battlefield. Rex quarrels with his fellow hunters, especially Lou (Ernest Borgnine), about a proper response to the incident. Finally, Rex recruits a private army, complete with automatic weapons and heavy equipment, for a siege on the forest, where he’s sure the “enemy soldiers” await a rematch.

          None of this makes much sense, but Shoot is acted with considerable skill and it’s beautifully photographed by DP Zale Magder, from the artfully composed interior scenes to the pristine visions of snow-covered forests. There’s also an interesting theme buried in the movie, something about the consequences of escalation, although the potency of theme is diminished because of its symbiotic connection to a poorly supported narrative. Still, there’s something about this particular genre—movies derived from Deliverance (1972)—that speaks to issues of male identity and militarism in an endlessly interesting way.

Shoot: FUNKY

The Revengers (1972)

          A passable Western with a few meritorious elements, including a lively supporting performance by Ernest Borgnine and a zippy musical score by Pino Colvi that borrows textures from the work of Elmer Bernstein and Ennio Morricone, The Revengers represents a milquetoast response to the cinema of Sam Peckinpah. Whereas Peckinpah’s Westerns upended the genre by accentuating gritty realism and moral ambiguity, The Revengers has the feel and look of an old-school cowboy movie, even though the broad strokes of the story are quite grim. Had the filmmakers taken their endeavor to its logical conclusion by emulating Peckinpah’s gutsy style instead of simply copping a few of his narrative tropes, The Revengers could have been something special. As is, the movie provides about 90 minutes of so-so entertainment during the course of a bloated 106-minute running time.

          William Holden, giving a phoned-in but still authoritative performance, plays John Benedict, a former Union solider now living quietly on a Colorado ranch with his family. A band of rogue Indians led by a white man raids the ranch one day while John is away hunting, so he returns to find his family slaughtered and his livestock stolen. John ventures into he wilderness in order to find and kill the guilty parties, eventually tracking them across the border to a hideout in Mexico. Realizing he needs extra guns, John manipulates the warden of a Mexican prison into loaning the services of several convicts, among them Americans Job (Woody Strode), a runaway slave, and Hoop (Borgnine), a fast-talking varmint. Adventures and betrayals ensue.

          The Revengers moves along at a good clip, except for a dreary interlude during which John spends time with frontier woman Elizabeth (Susan Hayward), and even though there aren’t many full-out action scenes, the bits of John and his outlaw gang living on the trail have color. Borgnine easily steals the picture by playing a two-faced creep prone to vulgar aphorisms (“That one-eyed rooster got away cleaner than a fart in a high wind!”). And while Holden’s gritted-teeth intensity suits the material well, his boredom during much of the picture is evident. Worse, director Daniel Mann’s periodic attempts at comic relief are punctuated with cringe-inducing musical stings, a sure sign the filmmakers lacked confidence in their own work. Fans of south-of-the-border Westerns should find The Revengers sufficiently distracting, though anyone expecting a proper follow-up to the previous Borgnine/Holden oater will be disappointed—instead of The Wild Bunch (1969), this is more like The Mild Bunch.

The Revengers: FUNKY

The Adventurers (1970)

          Per the norm for pictures adapted from the trashy novels of Harold Robbins, The Adventurers is a big, glossy melodrama filled with betrayal, sex, and violence, set against a backdrop of international strife and unimaginable wealth. From a technical standpoint, the movie is impressive, thanks to glossy cinematography by Claude Renoir and swank music by Antonio Carlos Jobim. The Adventurers also features a truly eclectic cast, comprising accomplished veterans (Ernest Borgnine, Olivia de Havilland), colorful international stars (Alan Badel, Charles Aznavour, Rosanno Brazzi, Fernando Rey), and dazzling starlets (Candice Bergen, Jaclyn Smith, Leigh Taylor-Young). Yet the film’s laughable flaws are myriad. The story, reputedly inspired by the exploits of real-life jet-setter Porfirio Rubirosa, is an overheated mixture of bedroom antics and political machinations. The pictorial style, marked by silly metaphors during sex scenes, lacks anything resembling good taste. And the leading performance, by Yugoslavian stud Bekim Fehmiu, is atrocious.

          Nonetheless, it must be said that the film’s three hours breeze by fairly quickly, since director Lewis Gilbert and his collaborators ensure that the screen is almost constantly filled with vivid images of people fighting, scheming, and/or screwing, if not all at once.

          The picture begins in the fictional South American country of Courteguay during a rebellion. After soldiers rape and murder his relatives, Dax Xenos (played as a boy by Loris Loddi) meets Rojo (Badel), leader of the rebellion. Rojo helps Dax kill the soldiers who slaughtered his family, beginning a lifelong relationship. Eventually, Dax is taken from South America by his guardian, Fat Cat (Borgnine), and integrated into a group of wealthy young Europeans. By the time Dax reaches adulthood (whereupon Fehmiu takes over the role), Dax is a playboy with a chip on his shoulder. Over the course of myriad back-and-forth trips from Europe to South America, Dax seduces a series of rich women (including Bergen and de Havilland), thus gathering his own personal fortune. Meanwhile, Courteguay descends into chaos, so Dax returns home and leads a military coup against his onetime benefactor, Rojo.

          There’s enough plot in The Adventurers for three movies, the characterizations are beyond contrived, and the dramaturgy is as subtle as thunder. For instance, it’s never enough for a character in this movie to discover a dead body—the body must have a dagger impaled in the neck or a giant wound in the middle of the forehead. Similarly, the myriad overwrought sex scenes recall the work of skin-flick auteur Russ Meyer. During Dax’s first conquest, Gilbert intercuts lovemaking with close-ups of erotic statues (one of which has a giant erect phallus) and then literally zooms the camera in and out, matching the rhythm of Dax’s thrusts. When Dax beds Taylor-Young’s character, Gilbert uses a rifle and cymbal crashes to symbolize Dax’s potency. And Dax’s first encounter with Bergen’s character begins in a hothouse (get it?) and concludes with actual fireworks. This sort of stuff isn’t credible by a long shot, but neither is it boring.

          Unsurprisingly, The Adventurers was savaged upon its initial release, and today it’s best to regard the movie as big-budget camp. FYI, at least one actor had serious misgivings about making The Adventurers. In his autobiography, Borgnine calls the picture “my worst experience in nearly 20 years of filmmaking.”

The Adventurers: FUNKY

1980 Week: When Time Ran Out . . .

It’s hard to imagine a more fitting title for the final big-screen release from producer Irwin Allen, who became synonymous with the disaster-movie genre after making The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). By the time this enervated flick hit cinemas with a resounding thud, time had indeed run out for Allen’s formula of jamming as many movie stars as possible into melodramatic epics about mass destruction. The disaster this time is a volcano that threatens to consume an island in the Pacific, so the usual Allen contrivances seem especially silly. For instance, tanned B-movie stud James Franciscus plays the requisite cold-hearted businessman who tries to convince island residents that the volcano’s not going to erupt. Really? Then what’s with all the lava and smoke, to say nothing of the corpses left over from scientists conducting tests in the mouth of the volcano? Similarly, the endless scenes of people climbing hills and crossing ravines—running from lava as if the stuff possesses malicious intent—are ludicrous. And while much of the cast comprises such second-stringers as Edward Albert, Barbara Carrera, Alex Karras, and (of course) Allen regular Ernest Borgnine, Allen clearly wrote big checks to get a trio of major stars involved. William Holden plays a hotel owner more concerned with his love life than his professional obligations, Paul Newman plays a heroic oil-rig boss who spots trouble that others can’t recognize (naturally), and Jacqueline Bisset plays the woman caught between them. Never mind that late-career Holden looks so desiccated from alcoholism that he seems more like Bisset’s grandfather than her would-be lover. Anyway, it’s all incredibly boring and shallow and trite, with any potential for excitement neutralized by indifferent acting, leaden pacing, and questionable special effects. Not even Bisset’s spectacular cleavage or Newman’s irrepressible charm can sustain interest. Instead of being a disaster movie, When Time Ran Out is merely a disaster.

When Time Ran Out . . .: LAME

Willard (1971) & Ben (1972)

          Easily one of the strangest wide-release pictures of the early ’70s, Willard starts off as the character study of a deranged individual, and then it gradually morphs into a horror movie. Oh, and it’s also a love story of sorts between the lead character, a twentysomething misfit, and an extraordinary rat named Ben. The film’s sequel, Ben, pushes the formula even further by putting the titular vermin together with a new human, a horribly ill young boy who considers Ben a terrific pal even though the rat frequently leads thousands of rodents on murderous rampages. The inherent weirdness of these two films is encapsulated by the most noteworthy element of either picture, “Ben’s Song,” a gentle ballad that’s sung over the closing credits of Ben by Michael Jackson at the height of his early Jackson 5 fame. Like the song, both films approach bizarre subject matter with complete sincerity, which makes for singular viewing experiences.

          Based on novel by Stephen Gilbert titled Ratman’s Notebooks and written for the screen by Gilbert Ralston, Willard compounds the oddity of its premise with a fairy-tale narrative approach. Willard Stiles (Bruce Davison) works for overbearing businessman Al Martin (Ernest Borgnine), who played a role in the business failure and death of Willard’s father. Meanwhile, Willard lives with his aging but smothering mother, Henrietta (Elsa Lanchester), in a stately house. Forgetful, introverted, and nervous, Willard makes an easy target for Al’s bullying and Henrietta’s nagging. One afternoon, Willard meets a group of rats in his backyard, subsequently adopting them as playmates. Then, once he moves the rodents into his basement and starts teaching them tricks—even as the group expands through breeding to include thousands of critters—Willard realizes he can use the rats to exact revenge against his oppressors.

          The movie takes a long time to reach the point when Willard leads his skittering soldiers into combat, but Davison gives such a twitchy performance that it’s interesting to watch Willard spiral into madness. (Good luck shaking the image of Davison hanging out in the basement with a rodent on his shoulder and dozens of other rats literally crawling the walls around him.) As directed by studio-era helmer Daniel Mann, whose so-so filmography includes the Oscar-winning Elizabeth Taylor vehicle Butterfield 8 (1960), Willard evolves from campy to gruesome, so it’s impossible to take the film seriously. Nonetheless, the protagonist is quasi-sympathetic until he goes too far, so the character’s arc is similar to that of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960). Better still, the film’s final act is a tastefully photographed bloodbath sure to cause shudders among even the hardiest of viewers. That said, it’s a mystery why composer Alex North scored most of the movie with bouncy comic cues and triumphant marches—although the music certainly adds to the overall peculiarity.

          Ben, which was directed by action specialist Phil Karlson, is an almost completely different type of film from its predecessor. In fact, Ben is really two movies in one. The main relationship story, about Ben’s new friendship with fragile youth Danny (Lee Montgomery), is so gentle that it includes comedy and music scenes. Yet the main action story, about Ben’s nocturnal adventures immediately following the events of the first film, is bloody and violent. Ben’s four-legged army starts claiming victims within the first 10 minutes, and the movie is filled with shots of grown men screaming as their bodies are swallowed by hordes of rodents. Later, once officials track down the culprits for various deaths and incidents of property damage, all-out war ensues. (Key image: City workers advance through sewer tunnels wielding flamethrowers, killing rats by the score.) Yet somehow, these disparate elements hang together in a ridiculous sort of way. As he did with his next film, the redneck-vigilante classic Walking Tall (1973), Karlson keeps things moving so fast that viewers can’t stop to smell the insanity.

          The cast of Ben is strictly C-grade, with future TV mom Meredith Baxter playing Danny’s sister and journeyman players including Norman Alden, Joseph Campanella, Arthur O’Connell, and Kenneth Tobey filling out the various upporting roles. (Although Stephen Gilbert penned Ben as well as Willard, the writer’s character work is much more slack on the sequel.) Since Ben is basically a creature feature, however, the acting is much less important than the work of the animal wranglers and FX technicians who make the murderous monsters look convincing. FYI, Willard was remade in 2003, with eccentric actor Crispin Glover in the lead, though a revamp of Ben has yet to emerge. And in a particularly odd footnote, actress Sondra Locke, who costars in the original Willard, later made her directorial debut with a film titled—wait for it!—Ratboy (1986).

Willard: FUNKY

Ben: FUNKY

Bunny O’Hare (1971)

          The fine folks at Wikipedia report that Bette Davis sued the producers of this offbeat comedy because editing changes transformed what Davis had been promised would be grown-up satire into silly slapstick. And while it’s heartening to see that Davis was still her usual combative self even well into the twilight of her career, the question underlying this factoid is why Davis—or anyone, for that matter—could ever have envisioned Bunny O’Hare as grown-up fare, satirical or otherwise. A juvenile predicated on coincidence and contrivance, the film is marred by pervasively nonsensical plotting. The opening scene tells the tale. Bunny O’Hare (Davis) is a dippy widow who flies into a panic when workers show up to demolish her home after she’s defaulted on bank payments. She inexplicably asks a workman named Bill (Ernest Borgnine) to protect her house even though he’s just there to salvage plumbing items for resale. Then Bunny phones her adult children for help, but the kids are too self-involved to recognize that Mom’s in a jam. Next, after Bill fails to protect Bunny’s house (which wasn’t his responsibility in the first place), he succumbs to guilt and offers Bunny a ride. Huh? A series of unlikely situations ensues, during which Bunny discovers that Bill is actually a bank robber wanted by the police, so Bunny blackmails Bill into helping her rob the financial institution that she feels treated her shabbily.

          Bunny O’Hare is a deeply confused movie. For instance, the filmmakers can’t decide if Bunny is competent or helpless. Nor can they decide if the antagonist is a bank, the cops, or Bunny’s children. Yet the myriad story problems aren’t the worst aspects of this dreadful movie. The central visual gimmick involves Borgnine and Davis masquerading as hippies, so viewers are subjected to the surreal sight of bearish Borgnine and tiny Davis decked out in Day-Glo polyester while they hurtle down city streets on a motorcycle. Proving that Davis was at least correct to complain about the film’s editing, the flick is cut and scored with the frenetic, broad-as-a-barn storytelling style of a Jerry Lewis movie. Plus, many getaway scenes feature out-of-place banjo music, as if the picture aspires to be a cousin to Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Davis strives to retain her dignity and plays certain scenes well, but her crisp line deliveries clash badly with Borgnine’s boisterous energy. Costar Jack Cassidy, as the vain cop obsessed with catching the “hippie bandits,” delivers a tiresome caricature in lieu of a performance, while funnyman John Astin, playing one of Bunny’s kids, fares slightly better.

Bunny O’Hare: LAME