1980 Week: The Man With Bogart’s Face

          Nostalgia for the golden era of film noir infused a number of movies in the ’70s and ’80s, from Roman Polanski’s provocative Chinatown (1974) to Carl Reiner’s silly Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) and beyond. Yet perhaps the strangest tip of the cinematic fedora was The Man With Bogart’s Face, a lighthearted mystery flick starring Humphrey Bogart lookalike Robert Saachi. Ostensibly a comedy, the picture has an innately surreal quality not only because of Saachi’s eerie resemblance but also because of the bizarre way that writer/producer Andrew J. Fenaday addresses the resemblance within the storyline. The flick begins with Sam Marlowe (Saachi) in a doctor’s office, having bandages removed from his head. The idea is that Sam, or whatever his real name might be, is so nuts for Bogie that he had his features surgically altered. Sam also starts a private-eye business, drives around in a car from the 1940s, and wears a trenchcoat reminiscent of Bogart’s costume from the final scene of Casablanca (1942). People often ask what’s wrong with his face whenever Sam mimics Bogart’s signature tic of flexing his lips. And so on. But because Fenaday never provides any backstory for the leading character, The Man With Bogart’s Face dodges the big question of whether the title character is a raving lunatic.

          Vexing mysteries about the leading character aren’t the only issues plaguing this film, which is overlong but otherwise pleasant to watch thanks to an eventful storyline and the presence of familiar supporting actors. The biggest problem is the limp nature of the picture’s comedy. Sight gags and verbal jokes fall flat on a regular basis. That said, it’s possible to consume The Man With Bogart’s Face as a goofy mystery and overlook the weak attempts at hilarity. As one might expect from a genre homage, the plot is formulaic—several clients hire Sam for cases that turn out to be interconnected, and everyone’s after a priceless treasure. Sam’s pithy voiceover connects scenes of betrayal, seduction, suspense, and violence, all of which are played for lukewarm laughs. Providing the movie’s eye-candy quotient are Sybil Danning, Olivia Hussey, Michelle Phillips, and Misty Rowe. Lending various shades of villainy are Victor Buono, Herbert Lom, Franco Nero, George Raft, and Jay Robinson. As for Saachi, his mimicry is smooth enough to complete the weird illusion created by his dopplegänger appearance.

The Man With Bogart’s Face: FUNKY

Redneck (1973)

          Some Eurotrash thrillers of a certain vintage have power almost despite themselves, simply because the connotations of the stories are so disturbing. Such is the case with Redneck, a coproduction of British and Italian companies starring an American, a Brit, and an Italian. On the surface, Redneck is a straightforward crime picture about a child becoming a captive when crooks steal his mother’s car during a getaway. Yet the story eventually grows to include creepy implications about the boy modeling after his captors. Director Silvio Narizzano and his collaborators deserve some kind of credit—or blame—for heading down such a dark path. However, because Redneck is all over the place tonally, and because top-billed star Telly Savalas gives a ridiculous performance, it’s hard to describe Narizzzano’s storytelling as disciplined. More like exactly the opposite. Nonetheless, there’s some interestingly weird stuff in here, alongside stuff that’s weird for no real purpose. As such, it’s likely the only folks who will consider Redneck essential viewing are those who relish off-the-rails filmmaking and unhinged acting.
          The picture opens with a fairly exciting scene during which Memphis (Savalas) and Mosquito (Franco Nero) rob a store. Memphis kills a man during the crime, which shocks Mosquito, who didn’t sign up for homicide. A wild getaway ensues, with the crooks stealing various cars and causing wrecks throughout narrow European streets. Eventually, the crooks realize they have a stowaway, 13-year-old Lennox (Mark Lester). Thereafter, the plot makes very little sense, because it’s not clear whether the crooks want to hold the kid for ransom or simply fear what incriminating information he might provide if released. It’s not as if Memphis has any compunctions against killing innocent bystanders, since he offs another kid (and a dog) over the course of his journey. Mosquito tries to keep Lennox safe even as Memphis becomes more and more deranged, and Lennox vacillates between idolizing the humane Mosquito and worshiping the maniacal Memphis.
          Like so many hopelessly contrived genre pictures, Rednecks throws characters together believably, then loses credibility by failing to explain why they stay together; clearly, the filmmakers reached for some sort of male-bonding intensity that remained forever beyond their grasp. In one sequence, for instance, Mosquito stands naked next to Lennox while shaving, prompting Lennox, a few moments later, to examine his genitals in comparison to his grown-up buddy’s. Anyway, Savalas’ performance is quite a spectacle, and not in a good way. He cries, giggles, rhymes, screams, and sings, sometimes decorating his lines with an annoying approximation of African-American street jive. The operative word is “self-indulgent.” Adventurous viewers may find Redneck’s extremes amusing. Others will find them tiresome and unpleasant, though Redneck is rarely boring.

Redneck: FUNKY

Street Law (1974)

          An Italian-made vigilante picture informed by the same zeitgeist that produced Death Wish—which hit U.S. screens only weeks before Street Law debuted in Europe—this nasty little movie has gained a minor cult following. It’s an exciting thriller with tremendous forward momentum, and leading man Franco Nero gives a relentless performance that approaches self-parody, especially because the film’s dialogue was shot in phonetic English and then dubbed during post-production. Other significant flaws include the perfunctory and sexist portrayal of the protagonist’s wife, a greasy musical score shot through with disco colorations, and a fetishistic portrayal of violence. Nonetheless, energy is energy, and Street Law has plenty of that. Accordingly, even though Street Law is so simplistic from a narrative and political perspective that it makes Death Wish seem subtle by comparison, the picture has a crude sort of visceral power that cannot be denied.

          When the movie opens, straight-laced engineer Carlo (Nero) visits a bank for a simple business transaction. Three armed robbers enter the bank, beating anyone who stands in their way, including Carlo. While making their getaway, the criminals abduct Carlo as a hostage, beating him even more along the way and forcing him to endure a terrifying car chase. Eventually, Carlo gets away, only to discover that the police have little hope of catching the crooks and that Carlo’s wife, Barbara (Barbara Bach), expects Carlo to move on with his life. Ashamed and humiliated at the way the criminals treated him, Carlo vows to find and kill his attackers. Yet instead of taking the Death Wish route of annihilating random thugs like they’re symptoms of a disease, Carlo gets methodical. He uses deception and surveillance to infiltrate the underworld, eventually identifying the bank robbers. Later, in a plot twist that strains credibility, Carlo bonds with a crook named Tommy (Giancarlo Prete), who provides Carlo’s ultimate entrée into the world of the bank robbers.

          Street Law is almost a mood piece in the way it strings together larger sequences, some of which are aimless driving montages, and some of which are symphonies of suffering. Carlo gets his ass kicked repeatedly, somehow emerging more resolute each time. The movie offers very little in terms of characterization (Bach, for instance, is barely in the movie), and the whole narrative stems from the iffy notion that a man who won’t fight back isn’t a man. Still, some of Carlo’s resourceful moves are quite clever, and director Enzo Z. Castellari knows how to generate brutal excitement, so nearly every scene in Street Law feels as if it concludes with an exclamation point.

Street Law: FUNKY

Tristana (1970)

          An offbeat character study with elements of radical politics and romantic tragedy, the Spanish film Tristana was adapted from a novel by Bentio Péres Galdós’ novel by the acclaimed avant-garde director Luis Buñuel. French actress Catherine Deneuve, whose dialogue was dubbed into Spanish, stars as Tristana, a beautiful young woman with limited life experience who finds herself thrust into a new world after becoming an orphan. Taken in as a ward by much-older aristocrat Don Lope Garrido—who rebels against society by refusing to work, instead living off old money and the sale of heirlooms—Tristana is confused when Don Lope begins expressing romantic interest, but she accepts his advances out of a sense of obligation.
           Don Lope (played by Fernando Rey) does not insist on marriage because of his nonconformist ways, so when Tristana meets handsome artist Horacio (Franco Nero), a bizarre triangle emerges. Despite all his bold talk about personal freedom, Don Lope tries to enforce his economic, psychological, and sociopolitical claims on Tristana, which has the effect of pushing her further away. Then fate intervenes in cruel ways, creating unexpected complications that take the story from the pedestrian realm of domestic melodrama into the rarified terrain of literary irony.

          While Tristana forefronts issues of class, idealism, and political theory just as strongly as Buñuel’s other films, the movie can be consumed either as a sharp parable or as a simple human narrative. For example, Don Lope’s myriad proclamations about the role of the individual in society (e.g., “We’re happy because neither you nor I have lost our sense of freedom”) speak to Buñuel’s pet theme of preserving identity amid totalitarianism. Yet the proclamations also illustrate the self-serving worldview of a cad who wishes to justify his lascivious behavior. As a case in point, consider Don Lope’s perspective on work: “Down with work that you have to do to survive! That work isn’t honorable. All it does is fatten the exploiting swine. However, what you do for pleasure ennobles man. If only we could all work like that.”

          The catch, of course, is that Don Lope embraces his anarchistic principles when they help coax beautiful young Tristana into bed, and then sings a different tune when she meets an age-appropriate suitor. The X factor in the storyline is Tristana herself, whom Buñuel depicts as an innocent turned cynical and opportunistic by extended exposure to the avarice of man. (One can’t blame her for changing after hearing Don Lope spend years saying things like, “I’m your father and your husband—one or the other, as it suits me.”)

          Although Deneuve captivates with her magnetic screen presence and overwhelming beauty, it’s actually frequent Buñuel collaborator Rey who carries Tristana. He portrays Don Lope as a pathetic failure who hides behind a meticulous appearance and thunderous oratory. Once age and loneliness remove Don Lope’s armor, Rey shows the character’s sad vulnerability without mitigating Don Lope’s insidious qualities. (Costar Franco, an Italian whose dialogue was dubbed into Spanish, mostly gets lost in the shuffle.) Tristana moves along briskly and features several compellingly strange motifs, so while it lacks the edgy wit of, say, Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), it’s very much of a piece with the director’s myriad condemnations of the ruling class. Plus, on some levels, the movie is a good old-fashioned yarn about a woman trying to seize limited opportunities during an oppressive time—while appropriate for the feminism era, it’s also the type of story in which someone like Joan Fontaine might have appeared during the ’40s heyday of Hollywood “women’s films.”

Tristana: GROOVY

Hitch-Hike (1977)

          The beautiful French actress Corinne Cléry endured an unusual amount of onscreen punishment in her early roles. Throughout the softcore epic The Story of O (1975), she’s beaten, psychologically tormented, and used as a sexual plaything. And throughout the lurid Italian road movie Hitch-Hike, she suffers much of the same treatment. Although the latter picture has strong cinematic merits, including a deep wellspring of plot twists and a wickedly fast pace, it’s difficult not to view Hitch-Hike through the prism of Cléry’s characterization. Hitch-Hike is a twisted sort of male fantasy, so the presence of a comely woman who gets off on being abused feeds into the picture’s overall themes of masculine energy run amok. Partisans of the picture, including the actors, perceive Hitch-Hike as a serious examination of troubling concepts, and that interpretation has some validity. Yet at the same time, the movie is shamelessly exploitive and sensationalistic. Unlike other ’70s movies that mixed notions of gender and violence in provocative ways, however, Hitch-Hike doesn’t shield itself against criticism through the use of believable characters and immaculate plotting. After all, Cléry’s character ignores several opportunities to escape captivity, and the main villain ludicrously survives many near-death encounters. In other words, Hitch-Hike is a thrill ride first, and a movie of ideas second. The difference matters.

          Shot in Italy but designed to look like it was photographed in the California/Nevada desert, Hitch-Hike begins by introducing Walter Mancini (Franco Nero) and his wife, Eve (Cléry), two vacationing Europeans. Walter, a journalist of dubious credibility, is a self-loathing drunk who physically, sexually, and verbally abuses Eve. Theirs is a marriage of convenience, since Eve’s father is Watler’s boss, but they’re bonded by a vivacious sex life. One afternoon, the couple picks up a hitchhiker, Adam Konitz (David Hess), who turns out to be an escaped bank robber. Before long, Adam makes sport of tying up Walter and then raping Eve in front of her helpless husband—even though, per the deviant spirit of the movie, Eve enjoys being raped as much as she enjoys her usual rough sex with Walter. Violent plot twists pile atop each other as the movie speeds toward a nihilistic climax.

          Cowritten and directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile, from a novel by Peter Kane, Hitch-Hike has energy to burn. The cinematography by Franco Di Giacomo and Giuseppe Ruzzolini is vibrant, the editing by Antonio Siciliano is almost savagely fast at times, and the music by Italian-cinema mainstay Ennio Morricone is suitably bizarre. (Even the dubbing, de rigeur for Italian movies of the period, is better than usual, so lip movements and voices match fairly well.) Htich-Hike is executed with above-average skill on every level except perhaps the most important ones. The story prioritizes excitement over logic and taste, Cléry and Nero give enthusiastic but unpersusive performances, and Campanile plays a tricky game of simultaneously celebrating and satirizing the male animal; after all, Campanile’s camera spends as much time lingering on the contours of Cléry’s nude body as do the eyes of the predators who bedevil her character. There’s a conversation piece buried in this gruesome movie, but the conversation it invites is not a pleasant one.

Hitch-Hike: FUNKY

The Visitor (1979)

          There are so many mind-meltingly weird elements in the sci-fi/horror epic The Visitor that it’s difficult to do the film justice with a brief description. Put simply, the movie is a vague rip-off of The Omen, concerning the efforts of a heroic character to prevent a malevolent child from unleashing something terrible. Accordingly, The Visitor has the requisite scenes of a wholesome-looking young girl using her supernatural powers—or simply her bare hands—to inflict violence. And while the true strangeness of The Visitor stems from the chaotic storytelling, maniacal style, and WTF plot complications, even the central premise gets tarted up in a way that ensures audience bewilderment.

          Because, you see, it’s not just that little Katy Collins (Paige Conner) is some sort of devil child who must be killed in order to protect the universe. No, the problem is that Katy’s innocent mother, pretty Atlanta divorcée Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail), has a womb that breeds superkids, so conspirators led by mysterious surgeon Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer) have positioned Barbara’s boyfriend, Raymond (Lance Henriksen), to push Barbara into marriage and a second pregnancy so she can breed a son, because together with Katy, the son will comprise the demonic equivalent of the Wonder Twins. Got all that? Good, since there’s more!

          Stalking Barbara and Katy is grandfatherly space alien Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston), who leads a band of bald alien musclemen who spend most of their time doing the equivalent of interpretive dance while standing behind scrims atop an Atlanta rooftop. Interstellar performance-art alert! Jerzy chases Barbara and Katy around downtown Atlanta, even though Katy tries to use her telekinetic abilities to kill him, and Jerzy spends one evening in the Collins home by announcing he’s the babysitter sent by an employment agency because the regular girl is sick. After all, don’t most of us welcome 70-year-old men into our homes to watch over our prepubescent daughters while we’re away? Oh, and we still haven’t mentioned the never-seen aunt who gives Katy a loaded pistol for her birthday, or that Katy accidentally shoots and paralyzes her mother. And then there’s crazed nanny Jane (Shelley Winters), who slaps Katy around because she knows that Katy is evil. Is it even worth noting that the plot also includes an intrepid police detective (Glenn Ford) and a silent longhair who may or may not be Jesus (Franco Nero)?

          The Visitor is gonzo right from the opening scene, a trippy special-effects vignette showing Huston in some otherworldly environment with oddly colored liquid skies. Among the film’s myriad bizarre episodes are the following: Katy uses her telekinesis to sway an NBA game by causing a basketball to explode; Jerzy has some sort of orgasmic interaction with a radioactive space cloud full of birds; a scene of spinal surgery gets intercut with a gymnastics routine; and famed movie director Sam Peckinpah shows up for one scene, in silhouette, to play a medical doctor. Accentuating all of this bizarre content is disjointed editing that makes everything seem hallucinatory, and lots of operatic disco music. You’ve been warned.

The Visitor: FREAKY

21 Hours at Munich (1976)

          A notorious terrorist action at the 1972 Olympics is re-recreated in this serviceable TV movie, which conveys a handful of important geopolitical nuances. Hampered by miscast leading actors and underwhelming dramaturgy, the picture is, predictably, most arresting during its opening and closing moments—the bloody siege on the Israeli compound in the Olympic village and, later, the tragic standoff between authorities and terrorists at a German airport. In between these vivid docudrama sequences, 21 Hours at Munich presents myriad scenes of political wrangling and tense negotiations. Had the acting and writing been more impassioned, the picture could have become a crucial dramatization of an intense moment in world relations; as is, the movie tastefully avoids pure sensationalism but gets stuck in flat recitations of well-known events.

          As directed by efficient TV helmer William A. Graham, from a script co-written by venerable Hollywood lefty Howard Fast, 21 Hours at Munich begins with a newsreel montage setting the uplifting mood of the Olympiad. Then the story proper begins with Palestinian terrorists led by Issa (Franco Nero) taking nearly a dozen Israeli athletes hostage. The filmmakers wisely eschew full-on melodrama during this sequence, focusing on the relentlessness of the attackers and the stalwart resistance of the Israelis. Next, viewers are introduced to Munich Chief of Police Manfred Schreiber (William Holden), and the haggling between various factions begins. There’s some deeply interesting content buried in the morass of the film’s middle section, including ugly buck-passing by political operators who don’t want to end up with Jewish blood on their hands if the situation deteriorates. Yet Issa and Schreiber remain the central figures—and, unfortunately, neither role is performed especially well.

          Italian-born Nero’s only qualifications for playing an Arab extremist seem to be abundant body hair and wide-eyed intensity; he’s creepy but a bit cartoonish. Holden’s casting as a German cop represents an even bigger stretch. Although Holden commands the screen effortlessly with his innate charisma and precise timing, the veteran star’s presence represents an obvious (and pandering) attempt to make this story palatable to U.S. viewers. (The supporting cast is not impressive, with Shirley Knight delivering a particularly lifeless performance as a fraulein who gets caught up in the drama.) Still, 21 Hours at Munich gets points for trying to show events the way they happened—or, in cases where imagination was required, the way they might have happened, Plus, the fact that the picture was shot on many of the locations where the events actually took place lends a certain gravitas.

21 Hours at Munich: FUNKY

Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears (1973)

A terrible spaghetti Western that wastes a potentially interesting premise, Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears takes place in the Republic of Texas following the region’s breakaway from Mexico but prior to its annexation by America. The republic’s president, Sam Houston, sends one of his spies to squash a burgeoning rebellion, so the story is rife with possibilities for intrigue and sociopolitical commentary. Unfortunately, the filmmakers behind Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears opt for the usual Euro-Western bilge of offbeat buddy comedy and overwrought melodrama. The “heroes” at the center of the story are the spy, Erastus “Deaf” Smith (Anthony Quinn), and his slow-witted sidekick, Johnny Ears (Franco Nero). Quinn’s character is a deaf-mute, which raises all sorts of questions about how he functions in the world of espionage, and Johnny is such a hot-tempered dolt that it’s inconceivable he provides anything more useful to Deaf than companionship and occasional translation. Inordinate amounts of screen time get wasted on silly scenes featuring these two characters bickering with each other and/or getting into trouble, so they seem like the most easily distracted spies in cinema history. Exacerbating these storytelling flaws is the lack of a compelling villain, since the rebel leader the spies are sent to derail is a colorless nobody who has no personal connection to either main character. In fact, the only character beyond the titular duo given anything resembling a personality is a saloon whore named Susie (Pamela Tiffin), who screeches her way through an unconvincing romance with Johnny. As for the leads, Nero comes across like a childish nincompoop, and Quinn seems so concerned with looking sensitive—he’s introduced smelling a flower with an expression of poetic reverie on his face—that his entire performance feels like a desperate request for approval. Request denied.

Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears: LAME

Force 10 from Navarone (1978)

          An unnecessary but harmless sequel to a classic action movie, Force 10 from Navarone slots replacement actors into the leading roles from The Guns of Navarone (1961); it also substitutes the simplistic men-on-a-mission vibe of the earlier film with a convoluted storyline comprising rampant double-crosses. As a result, Force 10 lacks the clarity and star power of its predecessor. At the end of The Guns of Navarone, World War II British commandoes Mallory (Gregory Peck) and Miller (David Niven) head home for England after blowing up an enemy installation in Nazi-occupied Greece. Force 10 picks up a short while later, when Mallory (Robert Shaw) and Miller (Edward Fox) are recruited to kill a dangerous double agent embedded with rebel forces in Yugoslavia.

          For reasons that are never particularly clear, the duo gets attached to “Force 10,” an American commando unit headed to Yugoslavia for a mysterious mission, and this understandably irritates Force 10’s no-nonsense leader, Barnsby (Harrison Ford). Thereafter, the movie’s narrative gets really contrived. First, an American soldier under military arrest, Weaver (Carl Weathers), escapes captivity and sneaks onto Force 10’s plane. Then, upon arrival in Yugoslavia, Mallory and Miller must track the shifting allegiances of a monstrous Yugoslavian (Richard Kiel), a beautiful rebel fighter (Barbara Bach), and the man who may or may not be their assassination target (Franco Nero). Oh, and there’s also the whole business of Force 10’s mission, which involves blowing up a bridge.

          Force 10 from Navarone is so over-plotted that character development is a casualty, but the movie zips along nicely thanks to attractive location photography and crisp direction by Bond-movie veteran Guy Hamilton. The picture has some enjoyable macho highlights, like Weathers’ duel with Kiel—how totally ’70s to see a knife fight between Apollo Creed and “Jaws” from the 007 movies! Additionally, Bach provides the requisite sex appeal, Nero smolders as we try to determine whether he’s a hero or a villain, and Fox scores a few laughs as a pip-pip Brit with a perpetual even keel. The climax has some groovy miniature effects, too.

          However, the movie hinges on the leading performances, and they’re a mixed bag. Shaw, apparently enjoying his post-Jaws run of action-hero roles, is atypically lighthearted, but Ford is lifeless. Shooting his first big action movie after Star Wars, he seems determined to present a characterization with more gravitas than his Han Solo performance, but this movie is far too slight to support understated acting. Nonetheless, Ford’s participation is probably why Force 10 from Navarone has been a cable-TV staple since the early ’80s, and it’s interesting to see the actor finding his way before Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) secured his status as a cinematic icon.

Force 10 from Navarone: FUNKY