1980 Week: Night of the Juggler

          The harshness of life in ’70s New York City inspired countless film and TV projects—after all, what better setting for pulp-fiction stories than a gritty metropolis filled with corrupt cops, frustrated citizens, petty criminals, and violent street gangs? Consider Night of the Juggler, an otherwise forgettable thriller starring James Brolin and Cliff Gorman. Out of context, it’s a silly action/suspense flick about a lunatic who accidentally kidnaps an ex-cop’s daughter in a failed extortion scheme. In context, the picture speaks to the same paranoia that gave rise to Death Wish (1974), The Warriors (1979), and so many other projects. Brolin stars as Sean Boyd, a divorced Californian now working as a truck driver to help support his daughter, Kathy (Abby Bluestone), who lives with her mother. One day, unhinged Gus Soltic (Gorman) snatches Kathy from a park, mistaking her for the daughter of a corporate tycoon. Sean witnesses the crime and nearly rescues his daughter, but Gus gets away and plunges Sean into an ordeal. Sean also clashes with authorities including Sgt. Otis Barnes (Dan Hedaya).

          As directed by the prolific and versatile Robert Butler, who spent most of his career in TV, Night of the Juggler moves along at a terrific pace, with Brolin’s character almost constantly in motion, whether he’s battling an opponent, hassling someone with information, or fleeing those who seek to impede his search. The movie ventures into many of New York’s dodgiest areas, from the sex palaces of pre-Giuliani Times Square to the ravaged war zone of the Bronx, so Night of the Juggler has atmosphere to spare. (As for the iffy title, Gorman’s character delivers this dialogue: “I’m gonna juggle the books my way and it’s gonna balance out for me!”). This is almost laughably shallow material, and more than a few ugly stereotypes find their way into the mix, as when Sean calls a Latino gang “a mean bunch of chili peppers.” Still, Night of the Juggler offers minor pleasures. Brolin gives one of his stronger performances, Gorman infuses his creepy character with a pathetic quality, and some of the supporting turns are juicy—beyond the always-entertaining Hedaya, watch for Godfather guy Richard Castellano as a cop and Mandy Patinkin as a Puerto Rican (!) cab driver.

Night of the Juggler: FUNKY

Trapped (1973)

          Generic but mildly enjoyable, this made-for-TV thriller explores the threadbare premise of a man getting stuck inside a department store and battling vicious Dobermans that a security company unleashes inside the store overnight. A few scenes comprise vapid melodrama about the man’s relationship with his young daughter and his embittered ex-wife, but most of the screen time features star James Brolin either running from dogs, using makeshift weapons to push the animals away, or extricating himself from close encounters. Here’s the setup, such as it is. Chuck (Brolin) meets his ex, Elaine (Susan Clark), and their preteen daughter, Carrie (Tammy Harrington), in a department store so Chuck can purchase Carrie a going-away gift, because Elaine and her new husband, David Moore (Earl Holliman), are about to move overseas. They’re taking Carrie with them, much to Chuck’s chagrin. Old resentments spark an argument, with Carrie caught in the middle, and the fight ends with a promise to reconvene at the airport for a more civil goodbye. Chuck lingers at the store to await the delivery of an out-of-stock toy, but he gets mugged in the men’s room, so he’s unconscious at closing time. While he’s out, dogs are set loose.

          Thereafter, the movie cuts between canine-suspense sequences and vignettes of Carrie moping about her missing dad. Nice guy David insists on tracking Chuck down, lest Carrie blame him for her father’s absence. Decent movies have arisen from material this simplistic, but Trapped (sometimes known as Doberman Patrol) still manages to underwhelm. The script is hackneyed and the acting is serviceable. Brolin, for instance, evidences his usual shortcomings. In conversational scenes, he’s enjoyably charming and macho, but whenever he tries for a big emotional display, his facial expressions turn cartoonish. Holliman is characteristically vapid, while Clark’s likable grit isn’t enough to significantly move the quality-control needle. As for the dog action, it’s okay. Seeing big animals perform simple stunts lacks novelty, and the money-shot scenes—Brolin fending Dobermans off with a handmade torch, a nasty-looking dog climbing along a thin railing to chase Brolin, and so on—pale in comparison to similar moments in bigger-budgeted productions.

Trapped: FUNKY

The Car (1977)

          As directed by journeyman Elliot Silverstein, whose eclectic résumé includes the memorable films Cat Ballou (1965) and A Man Called Horse (1970), this Southwestern-set shocker boasts such impressive visuals as panoramic vistas and razor-sharp detail shots. Clearly, Silverstein studied the way Steven Spielberg shot Duel (1972), and copied many of Spielberg’s flourishes. The Car also cops gimmicks from another Spielberg picture, Jaws (1975), notably combining point-of-view shots and theme music to jack up scenes of the villain attacking victims. Unfortunately, the villain of this piece is—as the title suggests—a car. Not a driver who uses a car as a weapon, mind you, but a customized, driverless Lincoln Continental. Yes, The Car is about a demonically possessed automobile. Novelist Stephen King took the same notion a step further with his 1983 book Christine, which gave the titular vehicle both a personality and supernatural powers, but in The Car, the killer is merely that—a car. Sure, it does a few fancy tricks like leaping into the air and repelling bullets, but the Lincoln has zero impact as a malevolent screen presence.
          The plot follows the Jaws formula of a small town victimized by an unstoppable killer. James Brolin stars as likeable sheriff working in the Utah community where the car is murdering people, so he teams up with fellow cops to battle the four-wheeled monstrosity. Eventually, local Indians persuade Brolin’s character that the car is possessed by an evil demon, so the film climaxes with Brolin and his troops attempting to bury the car in a remote canyon. The Car would have been more enjoyable had it been trimmed down to something like 80 minutes, but at its full 96-minute length, the movie feels needlessly padded with pointless and/or repetitive scenes. Nonetheless, there are some campy highlights.
          For instance, the filmmakers try to mimic the classic Jaws scene of a shark eating its way through an ocean filled with Fourth of July swimmers. Thus, The Car features a ludicrous scene of the villainous vehicle chasing a high-school marching band from a football field to a cemetery. Later, the car soars through an entire house just to wipe out one victim. And the final scene is an unintentionally funny attempt at supernatural-cinema grandiosity. As for the acting, while Brolin is as weak as usual—moderately charming in quiet scenes, startlingly terrible in intense ones—he’s abetted by an okay supporting cast. Veteran character actor R.G. Armstrong steals the movie as a disgusting redneck who witnesses several of the car’s murders, Ronny Cox adds humanity as a deputy with an alcohol problem, and Kathleen Lloyd is appealing as the hero’s stalwart girlfriend. FYI, real-life siblings and future Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast members Kim Richards and Kyle Richards play the young daughters of Brolin’s character.

The Car: FUNKY

Gable and Lombard (1976)

          Gable and Lombard, a romantic drama about the illicit love affair and subsequent marriage of real-life Golden Age movie stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, is so preposterously fictionalized that it’s a pointless endeavor. Among many other howlers, the movie features a climactic scene in which Lombard (Jill Clayburgh) testifies on behalf of Gable (James Brolin) at a court hearing related to his divorce from the woman to whom he was married when he began keeping company with Lombard. Not only did this testimony never happen, but the filmmakers portray Lombard as such a crude loudmouth that when asked to describe her relationship with Gable, she proclaims, “Me and that big ape over there have been hitting the sack every night, and I’ve got a sore back to prove it!” Yet Gable and Lombard lacks the courage of its convictions—instead of going wholeheartedly down the road of tabloid tawdriness, the movie is meant to be some sort of loving tribute to once-in-a-lifetime passion. Unfortunately, Barry Sandler’s inept screenplay and Sidney J. Furie’s unsophisticated direction makes the leading characters look like sex-crazed buffoons instead of incandescent lovers.

          This tone-deaf portrayal is exacerbated by performances that are, to say the least, uneven. While Clayburgh is grandiose and shrill, it’s possible to discern some of the emotional realities she’s attempting to communicate. However, Brolin is laughable, growling and smirking through a paper-thin impersonation of Gable’s most obvious onscreen tics. When these dissonant performances merge during interminable dialogue scenes—Gable and Lombard runs a deadly 131 minutes—the result is loud, superficial nonsense. It’s also impossible to know whom this movie was meant to please: The picture’s narrative is far too bogus to please diehard Gable-Lombard fans, and far too cliché-ridden to work as a standalone romance. Yes, the movie is handsomely produced, but so what? Even the supposed appeal of re-creating Old Hollywood is wasted, since the only other major character drawn from history is studio chief L.B. Mayer (played unpersuasively by Allen Garfield). As the real Lombard’s onetime secretary told syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner at the time of the Gable and Lombard’s release: “I couldn’t associate a single scene with anything that I’d lived through. Nothing in it is right, not even the clothes.”

Gable and Lombard: LAME

The Amityville Horror (1979)

          In 1975, the Lutz family moved into a beautiful home in the Amityville neighborhood of Long Island, but the house came with a dark history: A mass murder took place there a year before the Lutzes’ arrival. According to the best-selling book that Jay Anson wrote about this notorious real-life incident, the Lutzes heard, saw, and smelled a variety of unexplained phenomena, leading them to believe their house was possessed. Anson took a lot of heat for presenting the Lutzes’ account as pure fact, and director Stuart Rosenberg’s sensationalistic movie adaptation pushes things even further. The Amityville Horror has some scary moments, but the scenario is so overwrought—it’s as if the Lutzes took a sublet from Satan—that the picture regularly creeps into unintentional comedy.

          The main problem is that George Lutz (James Brolin) and his wife, Kathy (Margot Kidder), seem like the dumbest people ever to cross a movie screen. As soon as they move into their home, they start experiencing weird apparitions and sensations, but instead of gathering their three young children and running for safety, they summon a priest (Rod Steiger) to bless the house. The priest endures a horrific scene while the house traps him in a stifling upstairs room that fills with flies. Yet when the priest tells the Lutzes to vacate the house, they ignore the advice. Just a thought: If the demonic voice in your home says, “Get out,” it’s probably a good idea to comply. But, of course, if the big-screen versions of the Lutzes demonstrated any common sense, the movie would be over very quickly.

          Sandor Stern’s silly screenplay tries to weasel around this unworkable plot contrivance by suggesting that George has lost his will to the evil force occupying the house, and Brolin delivers the concept through a performance of embarrassing excess. In his signature moment, a bug-eyed Brolin howls, “Oh, mother of God, I’m coming apart!” Truth be told, Brolin actually outdoes costar Steiger in the bad-acting department, and that’s saying a lot. (As for Kidder, who should have been building on her sassy performance in the 1978 blockbuster Superman, she’s wasted in a vapid victim role.)

          Exacerbating its other flaws, The Amityville Horror is fairly dull through most of its running time, even though the production values are pretty good (the ooze dripping from the walls is enjoyably icky) and the wacky highlights are memorable. Nonetheless, lackluster storytelling didn’t stop the picture from becoming a major hit. The Amityville Horror earned nearly $90 million at the box office, and it kicked off a cycle of sequels and remakes that has continued well into the 21st century. Apparently, audiences are as reluctant to vacate the house at 112 Ocean Avenue as the Lutzes were.

The Amityville Horror: FUNKY

Westworld (1973) & Futureworld (1976)

           Best-selling author Michael Crichton made his feature-film directorial debut in 1973 with Westworld, based on his original script about a high-tech amusement park for adults. It’s a crudely made film, both in terms of narrative structure and production values, but the idea is so fascinating and the visuals are so rich that it’s one of the most memorable sci-fi pictures of the decade, especially since it contains a relentless villain who undoubtedly provided some inspiration for the Terminator character that Arnold Schwarzenegger first played a decade later. The story takes place at Delos, a super-expensive resort divided into three elaborate environments: Medieval World, Roman World, and Westworld. A grown-up spin on Walt Disney World, these realms are populated by lifelike robots that engage in realistic combat with guests, allowing visitors to feel as if they’re emerging victorious from gladiatorial contests, jousts, and shootouts.

            The movie follows two city-slicker businessmen, played by James Brolin and Richard Benjamin, who travel to Westworld for an exotic getaway. However, as tends to happen in cautionary tales, something goes wrong, so the robots start turning on the guests. The biggest menace is Gunslinger (Yul Brynner), a robot dressed as a black-garbed Old West outlaw, and as in the Terminator movies, part of the thrill of watching Gunslinger’s rampage is seeing his faux flesh ripped away to reveal glimpses of the technology underneath. Characterization and plotting are thin, and Benjamin struggles to infuse his role with a semblance of individuality, but the movie zooms along during 88 brisk minutes, providing just enough escapist jolts to make Westworld a fun ride.
          The movie did well enough to justify a sequel, made without Crichton’s participation. Futureworld lacks the no-nonsense gusto of its predecessor, tackling a somewhat more complex story as it sprawls over 108 leisurely minutes. Although the acting in Futureworld is much better than that in Westworld, the convoluted conspiracy-themed plot drags. Blythe Danner and Peter Fonda play reporters who travel to a new Delos attraction, Futureworld, in order to investigate why a journalist was killed when trying to expose something about the Delos organization. The movie drifts through several sorta-exciting scenes, including an unimpressive bit set in a room simulating the weightlessness of space, before becoming a straight-ahead thriller as Danner and Fonda strive to escape Futureworld with their lives. (In the movie’s weakest moment, Brynner reprises his Gunslinger role for a pointless dream sequence.) Futureworld ends on a strong note, with Fonda brandishing his signature antiestablishment attitude, and Danner is credible and lovely throughout, offering a strong counterpoint for Fonda’s easygoing persona.

          However, neither Westworld nor Futureworld truly lives up to the potential of Crichton’s underlying premise, so it’s no wonder plans for a remake of Westworld have been underway for years. (Futureworld is available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Westworld: FUNKY

Futureworld: FUNKY

Skyjacked (1972)

          Perhaps it’s a sign that I’ve spent too many years exploring the dark recesses of ’70s cinema, but the only way I can classify Skyjacked is to label it the second-best ’70s movie about Charlton Heston rescuing an out-of-control airplane. For while Skyjacked has a few entertainingly campy scenes, the picture can’t hold a kitschy candle to the wonderfully awful Airport 1975. The fact that I can draw such distinctions should indicate how high my tolerance is for so-bad-it’s-good ’70s trash, and it should also tell you to avoid Skyjacked at all costs if your tolerance is lower than mine.

          As the title suggests, this flick is a numbingly simplistic thriller about a nutty Vietnam vet hijacking a passenger plane in a storyline that brainlessly follows the standard disaster-movie playbook. Square-jawed Heston stars as manly-man pilot Captain Henry “Hank” O’Hara, who has to protect his passengers from the heavily armed shenanigans of tweaked ex-soldier Jerome Weber (James Brolin). The hijacker’s motivation has something to do with wanting to defect to Russia, but it’s not as if one expects this movie to go deep into characterization. A typically random assortment of actors gets caught in the crossfire, including Claude Akins, Susan Dey, Roosevelt “Rosey” Grier, Mariette Hartley, Yvette Mimieux, Walter Pidgeon, and Leslie Uggams, none of whom should consider this a high point in their screen careers.

          Despite the presence of capable pulp director John Guillermin behind the camera, Skyjacked is so generic that it’s almost undistinguishable from several other made-for-TV and theatrical features about the same subject matter—in fact, it’s especially easy to get Skyjacked mixed up with the carbon-copy telefilm Mayday at 40,000 Feet (1976), featuring David Janssen’s clenched teeth in place of Heston’s rigidly hinged pearly whites. The problem is that instead of going overboard with ludicrous characters and situations, Skyjacked is quite dull for most of its running time. The movie doesn’t come alive until the silly climax, when Brolin and Heston physically fight for control of the plane; Brolin is so screamingly awful, and Heston so outrageously overwrought, that the movie briefly enters bad-movie bliss. But even with that fleeting moment of amusement, Skyjacked is merely a footnote to a subgenre that never produced much in the way of meritorious cinema.

Skyjacked: LAME

Capricorn One (1978)

Peter Hyams’ loopy conspiracy thriller has the American government faking a Mars landing to score political points, a storyline so ’70s it almost hurts. The outrageous concept is rich with visual and narrative potential, only some of which writer-director Hyams mines in his entertaining but inconsistent narrative. The main problem with the movie is also its main contrivance: After participating in the hoax, three astronauts learn that the government expects them to crash during their spaceship’s staged return to terra firma, because they’ve got to disappear for real in order to sell the illusion. Quick question No. 1: If the astronauts can’t be trusted, then how can the dozens of technicians involved in mounting the conspiracy be trusted? Quick question No. 2: How does a crash landing give the government the PR win they’re seeking by staging a fake Mars landing in the first place? Don’t look for answers, because logic takes a backseat to pulpy fun as plot twists slam into place so quickly they cause cinematic whiplash. The bits depicting the actual fabrication of the Mars landing are colorful, but oddly enough a long sequence of leading man James Brolin trapped in the deserts of the American Southwest is more vivid. Hal Holbrook shines as the main conspirator, delivering an epic monologue toward the beginning of the picture that lays out the particulars of the plot; with his mesmerizing scowl and lilting voice, Holbrook’s one of the few actors who can make that many minutes of unbroken speech compelling. Elliot Gould plays a combination Woodward and Bernstein as the intrepid reporter who tracks the case, doing his amiable bumbling-schnook routine, and the endangered astronauts at the heart of the story are portrayed by a truly eclectic trio: Brolin, O.J. Simpson, and Sam Waterston. They’re so mismatched that they represent of sliding scale of American acting, from Simpson’s cheerful incompetence to Brolin’s vapid professionalism to Waterston’s earnest skillfulness. Ace character players James B. Sikking and Robert Walden are in the mix too, as is Telly Savalas in a gonzo cameo that adds gleeful absurdity to the climax.

Capricorn One: GROOVY