Glass Houses (1972)

          Offering a scandalous twist on the already-lurid genre of cross-generational love stories, Glass Houses imagines a scenario wherein a middle-aged patriarch’s infidelity arouses the sexual curiosity of his 19-year-old daughter. Although Glass Houses doesn’t follow this premise to its logical conclusion, the clear implication is that something highly inappropriate may soon happen. This naturally raises the question of why the filmmakers felt compelled to tell this story. Did they mean to suggest that a man who sleeps with a woman young enough to be his daughter may also be tempted to sleep with his actual daughter? And since the adulterer’s wife eventually takes a lover of her own, do the filmmakers mean to say that a man who starts down the road of violating sexual propriety should not be surprised when others in his household do the same? Glass Houses is too shallow to provide satisfying answers to these questions, but it’s not accurate to describe the picture as mere sensationalistic provocation. Some measure of thought went into the film, as did some measure of cinematic craftsmanship.

          Victor (Bernard Barrow) runs a board-game company with his business partner, Ted (Phillip Pine). Victor is married to Adele (Ann Summers), and their daughter is Kim (Deirdre Lenihan). Victor’s mistress is a beautiful young model named Jean (Jennifer O’Neill). Kim is hip to Victor’s dalliances, but she doesn’t know the specifics until one fateful weekend. At Jean’s behest, Victor accompanies her to the “Institute of Encounter Awareness,” which is just as hippy-dippy as it sounds. While there, Victor stumbles across his business partner, Ted, who brought his own much-younger lover to the Institute. She is Kim, Victor’s daughter. (Side note: A lengthy sex scene with Ted and Kim is both the movie’s most perceptive vignette and its most unpleasant.) Although neither Kim nor Jean freak out upon discovering the seedy connections between characters, squaresville Victor has trouble processing everything.

          Not much else happens in Glass Houses, excepting Adele’s unglamorous tryst with a lecherous author, so most of the drama hangs on shots of Barrow and/or Pine looking perplexed about modern attitudes toward sex. (Adultery? Fine! Progressive morality? Hey, just a minute!) Directed and co-written by prolific TV director Alexander Singer, Glass Houses reflects the hypocricy of its male characters, inasmuch as the camera often lingers on young female flesh. That being said, Singer and his collaborators seem legitimately concerned with examining societal changes, even if they fall short of providing fresh insights. The same is true of the picture’s artistic elements, because the tricky cross-cutting used in certain scenes feels awfully familiar given how prevalent that style was in social dramas of the late ’60s.   

Glass Houses: FUNKY

L’Innocente (1976)

          Italian director Luchino Visconti died just months before the premiere of his final film, the grim period melodrama L’Innocente. (Advertising materials in English-speaking territories bore the translated title The Innocent.) In some ways, the picture makes a fitting cinematic epitaph, since it touches on issues of class and morality that infuse Vischonti’s more celebrated films, but in other ways, it’s a comedown from the intellectually ambitious triumphs of The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Conversation Piece (1974). By comparison to those films, L’Innocente is a lurid soap opera without enough thematic weight to support its narrative extremes. The picture also suffers for inconsistent acting among the leading players, because American actress Jennifer O’Neill delivers merely serviceable work. (During post-production, O’Neill’s dialogue was dubbed into Italian by another performer.) Costar Laura Antonelli gives a more impressive performance, though her many nude scenes are distracting; as always, Antonelli’s erotic presence receives more attention than her respectable acting skills. Of the three principal players, only leading man Giancarlo Giannini truly elevates the material, investing his role as a borderline sociopath with real menace.

          Taking place in Italy circa the late 1900s, L’Innocente tells a simple story about lust, pride, and revenge. The marriage of rich Italians Guiliana (Antonelli) and Tullio (Giannini) has gone cold, not least because of Tullio’s open-secret affair with another wealthy aristocrat, Teresa (O’Neill). As tension grows because Teresa finds her position as the other woman more and more untenable, Giuliana begins an affair of her own with Filippo (Marc Porel). He treats Giuliana with respect, and their intimacy burns with a passion long missing from Guiliana’s marriage, hence the extensive bedroom scenes between Filippo and Guitliana. Despite having taken her for granted, Tullio becomes jealous of his wife’s newfound romance, and his jealousy informs the dark events of the movie’s second half.

          Based on a novel by Gabriele d’Annunzio, L’Innocente could easily have been presented as a taut morality tale running perhaps 90 minutes. As directed by Vischonti with his usual stately pacing, the movie loses intensity at regular intervals, even though the final half-hour, which is filled with horrific tragedy, commands attention. The question, of course, is whether the preceding hour and a half is enough to pull viewers along. For some, the answer will be yes, thanks to sumptuous costuming and production design, in addition to Giannini’s performance, the beauty of the leading ladies, and the general tawdriness of the storyline. For others, getting through the film’s slow stretches to reach the climax will require considerable willpower. And if there’s a profound theme buried inside L’Innocente, beyond trite assertions about how selfish men pay terrible costs for living empty lives, it’s not immediately apparent after one viewing.

L’Innocente: FUNKY

Whiffs (1975)

          The military-themed comedy Whiffs must have seemed promising at the conceptual stage, because the premise is outrageous—a schmuck GI spends years working as a test subject for the Army’s chemical-weapons program, gets discharged because the Army made him too sick to remain a viable test subject, can’t find steady work in the civilian world, and uses his knowledge of chemical weapons to mount a crime spree. A brilliant writer could have taken this material to wicked places, but the skill level of TV-trained scribe Malcolm Marmorstein falls well short of brilliance. His script introduces clever situations without exploiting their full potential, relies upon one-note characterizations, and simply isn’t funny enough. To be fair, Whiffs is infinitely more palatable than S*P*Y*S (1974), another project starring Elliot Gould to which Marmorstein made screenplay contributions. Yet the highest praise one can offer is that Whiffs is pleasant to watch except when it lapses into repetitive silliness, which happens often.

          The picture’s unlikely protagonist is Dudley Frapper (Gould), who enjoys getting bombarded with gases by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, led by straight-laced Colonel Lockyer (Eddie Albert). The implied joke that Dudley is an Army-sanctioned drug enthusiast is among the many pieces of low-hanging fruit that Marmorstein fails to harvest. After his discharge, Dudley fails at several entry-level jobs, succumbs to self-pity, and heads to a bar where he reconnects with Chops Mulligan (Harry Guardino), a career criminal who endured chemical experiments alongside Dudley in order to secure an early parole. Chops picks a fight with the bartender, and Dudley sedates Chops’ opponent with a tube of laughing gas. Chops steals the money in the bar’s cash register, then proposes committing more crimes while using gas to immobilize people.

          It takes the movie far too long to reach this point, and the subplot of Dudley’s romance with a pretty Army nurse played by Jennifer O’Neill doesn’t add much beyond eye candy—and a drab running joke about Dudley’s virility. Meanwhile, the subplot involving Godfrey Cambridge as an opportunistic crop-duster pilot is exceedingly goofy. Gould contributes half-hearted work, and Guardino makes a valiant effort despite being ill-suited for his comic role. The same can be said for director Ted Post, a reliable hand for action pictures and melodramas but not a comedic director by any stretch of the imagination.

Whiffs: FUNKY

The Psychic (1977)

An Italian film that merely happens to star an American actress, The Psychic hit U.S. screens in 1979, two years after it played in Italy under its original title, Sette note in nero (translation: Seven Notes in Black). Featuring a mystery/thriller story with elements of supernatural horror, the picture belongs to the loose genre of giallo films, so it’s a cousin to the creepy work of Dario Argento. Alas, the director of this picture, Lucio Fulci, never rose to the same level of international notoriety as Argento, and with good reason; while The Psychic has some gruesome moments, the overall experience is dull. After a zippy opening scene of a young girl psychically “seeing” her mother’s death while it happens in another country, the movie slips into a turgid storyline about American decorator Virginia Ducci (Jennifer O’Neill) getting embroiled with a murder. Virginia, of course, was the little girl in the prologue, and now her gift has resurfaced, because she “sees” a new killing. Reporting her vision to the authorities causes Virginia’s Italian husband to become a suspect, so she spends the rest of the movie following clues from her visions in order to find the truth. Without giving away the movie’s big secret, it’s sufficient to say that the final twist is a dark surprise of which Edgar Allen Poe would have been proud. Unfortunately, the road the movie travels in order to reach that destination is boring as hell, and even the ending is stretched out in such a way that excitement and suspense are neutralized. Like many of his peers in ’70s Italian cinema, Fulci relies on distracting gimmicks, such as sharp musical stings and sudden camera zooms, and he also spends far too much time lingering on O’Neill’s features, perhaps assuming that viewers will imbue her beautiful face with a world of meaning that O’Neill is unable to convey through her weak acting. Giallo fans may find much to enjoy here, thanks to long purely visual sequences and a cryptic storytelling style that vaguely recalls Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973). Casual viewers, however, are likely to lose interest way before Fulci’s film finds its mojo.

The Psychic: LAME

Caravans (1978)

          Based on a novel by James Michener, whose sprawling stories set in exotic periods of history were better served by TV miniseries, Caravans features interesting cultural observations, resplendent production values, a romantic musical score, and a solid international cast. Undercutting these strong elements, however, is muddy storytelling. Not only is the nature of the relationship between the characters played by stars Jennifer O’Neill and Anthony Quinn maddeningly vague—are they lovers or merely friends?—but the dynamics coloring interactions between the various sociopolitical factions in the movie are hard to track. The root of this problem, of course, is the choice to set Caravans in a fictional Middle East country, necessitating inoffensive vagueness, even though everything about the setting and the story suggests the region in and around Afghanistan. Furthermore, because the main story is very simple, casual viewers can easily tune out the social-studies material, which is a shame—for while Caravans is primarily a story about a proud man clinging to outdated traditions during a moment of global change, the movie also attempts to dramatize the intrusion of America into foreign conflicts, the power struggles between different Muslim tribes, the smuggling of Russian guns, and so on.

          Anyway, the main story goes something like this: Low-level American diplomat Mark Miller (Michael Sarrazin) is sent into the desert to find runaway American woman Ellen Jasper (O’Neill), who married a local military man (Behrouz Vossoughi) but then fled to join the caravan of a nomadic tribe led by Zuffiqar (Quinn). Predictably, the movie tracks Mark’s slow awakening to the beauty and savagery of an ancient culture. Just as predictably, the movie features a half-hearted attempt at romance between Mark and Ellen, a subplot that climaxes in a drab love montage set to the pretty “Caravan Song,” performed by Barbara Dickson.

          Had the filmmakers either gone full-bore in Michener’s epic storytelling style or winnowed the source material down to just the core narrative, Caravans might have been more effective. As is, the movie feels too melodramatic for a depiction of geopolitical strife, and too complicated for a sweeping romance. The indifference of certain performances exacerbates these problems, with the lovely O’Neill—as usual—forming the weak link in the principal cast. Meanwhile, Quinn delivers an amiable retread of his Lawrence of Arabia performance, and Sarrazin struggles to identify what purpose his character serves other than to guide audiences into the narrative and periodically express “Oh, the humanity” shock. Among the Middle Eastern actors in the cast, Vossoughi provides intensity as the main villain, and Khosrow Tabatabai adds edge as a male dancer who plays sexualized mind games with men and women alike, causing considerable havoc.

Caravans: FUNKY

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

          Creepy, provocative, and sexy, this psychological thriller asks what might happen if a rational modern man began to suspect that he was the reincarnation of someone else—and then complicates that central question by implying that the soul haunting the modern man’s body came back to settle some nasty unfinished business. Michael Sarrazin, perfectly cast because his wide eyes and slim build give him an ethereal quality no matter the circumstances, stars as Peter Proud, a West Coast college professor whose life seems perfect. He’s happy, respected, successful, and romantically involved with a beautiful fellow teacher, Nora (Cornelia Sharpe). Yet when Peter starts experiencing disturbing nightmares and phantom pains that doctors can’t explain, he seeks out help from a paranormal researcher, Samuel (Paul Hecht). Samuel suggests that Peter may be reliving memories from a past life.

          Determined to resolve the situation, Peter tracks down the Massachusetts city in which his nightmares/memories take place. Finding the city confirms to Peter that the reincarnation is real. Next, Peter connects with Marcia (Margot Kidder), the widow of Peter’s prior incarnation, and Ann (Jennifer O’Neil), Marcia’s daughter. Peter doesn’t explain to either of these women why he’s in Massachusetts, partially because he doubts they’ll believe him and partially because in the recurring nightmares/memories, Marcia murders Peter’s prior incarnation. Obsessively investigating the past-life mystery damages Peter’s present-day life, because Nora bails on Peter when the going gets weird. Later, things get even worse when Peter’s relationships with Ann and Marcia gain Freudian dimensions.

          As helmed by J. Lee Thompson, who mixes carnality and savagery in this film much as he did in the great Cape Fear (1962), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is efficient, erotic, and evocative—an offbeat mixture of sleazy thrills and thought-provoking concepts. Although the film loses points for its troika of mediocre female performances (Kidder, O’Neill, and Sharpe are each gorgeous but amateurish), Sarrazin’s intensity keeps the piece on track. Written by Max Ehrlich, who adapted his novel of the same name, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud fits into the mid-’70s trend of sensationalistic pseudoscience in popular culture. Furthermore, the writer gives decent lip service to the philosophical and theological implications of Peter’s experience, because—as the story’s paranormal researcher says at one point—the revelation that reincarnation is real could permanently alter the human experience by erasing fear of death. No dummy, Ehrlich delivers all of this heady material in the form of a story filled with sex and violence.

         And while the film’s brutality is fairly minor, the film’s sexuality is quite intense. Both lurid aspects of the picture converge in a climactic scene (no pun intended) featuring Marcia masturbating in a bathtub while recalling the brutal affections of her late husband. This startling vignette was almost certainly the most graphic depiction of female self-pleasure in a mainstream movie until the release of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). Yet the presence of such moments gets to the heart of why The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is so watchable. With strong elements ranging from the disturbing psychosexual connotations of the story to the unnerving score by the great Jerry Goldsmith (love those electronic accents!), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud engages the viewer on myriad levels simultaneously. It’s not high art, per se, but it’s definitely not low art, either.

The Reincarnation of Peter Proud: GROOVY

Rio Lobo (1970)

          The last movie directed by the revered and versatile Howard Hawks, Rio Lobo would seem—if based solely on the genre, star, and title—to be a quasi-successor to Hawks’ wonderful 1959 adventure film Rio Bravo. Yet even though Rio Lobo is a Western with John Wayne in the lead role, Rio Lobo is no Rio Bravo. Whereas the 1959 film bursts with excitement, humor, and vivid characterization, the 1970 film is a turgid slog through random plot elements piled indifferently onto a heap. Everything in Rio Lobo feels half-hearted, from the flat cinematography to the mindless music to the stiff acting. The picture starts out as a Civil War-era heist story, with Confederate soldiers stealing gold from a Union train, but then the narrative shifts into a postwar justice saga, with now-retired Union officer Cord McNally (Wayne) chasing after the traitors who sold information about the train to the Confederacy.

          And since that premise, apparently, was deemed insufficient by the filmmakers in terms of plotting, the picture gets mired in various subplots about wronged women seeking vengeance against bad men. Furthermore, to justify the title, there’s another subplot, about the liberation of a small town from oppression by crooked varmints. There’s enough story in Rio Lobo for several different movies, and as a result, everything gets short shrift. The characters feel either clichéd or underdeveloped (sometimes both), the action scenes are confusing (since there are too many players on the filed), and the whole thing is directionless (in every sense of the word, with all due respect to Mr. Hawks).

          As usual, appraising Wayne’s “performance” is a pointless endeavor, since the veteran star simply drawls and struts through a rote demonstration of his familiar persona. Luckily, reliable character actors lend flavor to minor parts, with Jack Elam and David Huddleston providing humor and gravitas, respectively—but their work isn’t enough to compensate for the overall mediocrity. Unfortunately, much of Rio Lobo’s cast comprises young actors whose work here explains why they never achieved stardom. Fresh-faced studs Christopher Mitchum and Jorge Rivero aim for likability but instead come across as vapid, while beautiful starlets Susana Dosamantes, Sherry Lansing, and Jennifer O’Neill embarrass themselves with amateurish line deliveries.

          In fact, it’s quite shocking to look at the sprawl of bad performances in this movie and realize that such a venerable filmmaker was calling the shots. Clearly, the muse was not with Hawks while he assembled this picture. The pervasive blandness of Rio Lobo also drags down the normally excellent composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose score only catches fire during the big shootout at the end.

Rio Lobo: FUNKY

A Force of One (1979)

Former karate champ Chuck Norris continued his ascendance to B-movie stardom with this lifeless martial-arts saga, which tries to compensate for its myriad shortcomings by showcasing long scenes of Norris in action. Karate aficionados may find this picture more satisfying than the actor’s previous flick, Good Guys Wear Black (1978), but, as always, catering to a niche audience is the easiest way to alienate everyone else. Accordingly, viewers hoping for things like believable acting, intriguing drama, and passable writing should direct their attention elsewhere. Model-turned-actress Jennifer O’Neill stars as Mandy Rust, the lone female on a San Diego police unit tasked with investigating narcotics activity in the city. When two cops from the unit are murdered via karate, Mandy persuades her boss (Clu Gulager) that everyone on the unit needs martial-arts training. Then she recruits title contender Matt Logan (Norris), who runs a local dojo, for the job. Predictably, Matt gets drawn into the investigation, suffers a horrific personal loss that makes him vengeful, and helps the police take down the drug kingpin who ordered the hits on the cops. There’s also a twist involving a corrupt detective, a quasi-romance between Mandy and Matt, and a touchy-feely subplot concerning Matt’s guardianship of a plucky teenager. It’s all very rote, with nary an original idea in evidence, and the storytelling is turgid in the extreme. Scenes plod along aimlessly, and the only thing flatter than the writing is the acting. Norris is awful, since he had not yet learned to emulate Clint Eastwood’s less-is-more approach, so his line deliveries sound awkward and his “emoting” is pathetic. O’Neill is almost as bad, a delicate beauty preening her way through the absurd role of a tough street cop. Gulager borders on camp with his twitchy take on the clichéd role of a put-upon top cop, and Ron O’Neal (of Superfly fame), who plays one of the officers on the drug unit, waffles between distracted indifference and silly swagger. In short, if you want to see an in-his-prime Norris deliver lightning-fast punches and walloping roundhouse kicks, A Force of One will satisfy for needs. Beyond that? Not so much.

A Force of One: LAME

The Carey Treatment (1972)

          Even though it’s executed with obvious craftsmanship and intelligence, The Carey Treatment suffers from a lack of novelty and substance, which isn’t helped by the jagged narrative rhythms that were presumably transposed from the Michael Crichton novel upon which the film is based. The best Crichton yarns have such fascinating underlying ideas that storytelling hiccups don’t matter, but The Carey Treatment is far from being one of Crichton’s best. James Coburn stars as Dr. Peter Carey, a swaggering pathologist newly arrived at a Boston hospital. Quickly shacking up with beautiful Dr. Georgia Hightower (Jennifer O’Neill), Carey springs into action when his old friend, Dr. David Tao (James Hong), is arrested for allegedly botching an illegal abortion that resulted in the death of a young woman with important society connections. The story gets confusing when Carey simultaneously investigates whether Tao actually performed the abortion and looks into the sordid lifestyle of Roger Hudson (Michael Blodgett), a pretty-boy masseur with a bad habit of knocking up young women. Adding other dimensions to the story are Carey’s fraught relationships with a diligent policeman (Pat Hingle), a senior physician (Dan O’Herlihy), and various other characters.

         Director Blake Edwards, skewing toward the thriller side of his style but still lacing the picture with the sort of urbane dialogue found in his many comedy films, handles individual scenes effectively but can’t quite get a handle on the overarching storyline. It doesn’t help that the movie constantly puts Carey into antihero mode, because logic suffers when Carey does things like trapping a college girl in his car and then taking her for a terrifying high-speed ride along a cliff in order to extract information. Even though Carey’s ostensibly doing everything in the service of justice, he’s such an arrogant prick that it’s hard to root for him. That said, the performances are generally quite entertaining, with Alex Drier standing out as an eccentric blueblood whom Carey interrogates. And, for what it’s worth, O’Neill is beguilingly pretty. The Carey Treatment is murky and ultimately forgettable, but it’s pleasant enough for a single casual viewing. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Carey Treatment: FUNKY

Summer of ’42 (1971) & Class of ’44 (1973)

          Featuring one of the most lyrical love scenes in all of ’70s cinema, Summer of ’42 is an offbeat romance involving a teenage boy and a grown woman. Compassionately directed by Robert Mulligan, the film takes a bittersweet look at characters moving through profound life changes, conveying a sense of how deeply two people can comfort each other in times of need despite coming from different worlds. Screenwriter Herman Raucher, who adapted his original story into a novelization after completing the script—the book version eventually became a best-seller, just like the movie eventually became a sleeper hit—has said that the tale is autobiographical.

          According to Raucher, he was a confused 15-year-old vacationing with his family on Nantucket Island during World War II, and he became friends with a beautiful woman named Dorothy and her husband, a U.S. soldier. After the soldier was summoned to active duty, young Raucher remained friendly with Dorothy. Then, one afternoon, young Raucher arrived at Dorothy’s house moments after she learned of her husband’s death in combat. Distraught and lonely, she took young Raucher to bed, and then departed the island the next day, leaving her adolescent lover only a note.

          In the film version of this story, young Raucher is “Hermie” (Gary Grimes), a curious and kind-hearted teen spending the summer with his pals Benjie (Oliver Conant) and Oscy (Jerry Houser). Dorothy is portrayed by the mesmerizingly beautiful model-turned-actress Jennifer O’Neill. The teen high jinks that comprise much of the movie’s first half are forgettable, but all of the scenes with O’Neill have a certain magic. Not only does Mulligan guide O’Neill to a higher performance level than she ever reached in another project, but Mulligan captures the wonderment Hermie feels at connecting with a sophisticated adult. The entire movie has a nostalgic feel, with cinematographer Robert Surtees capturing the stark beauty of East Coast shorelines and composer Michel Legrand contributing tender melodies. Yet the appeal of the picture stems almost entirely from that one key scene—handled with unusual elegance and restraint, Hermie’s encounter with Dorothy is beautiful and bewildering and sad. The sequence is poetry.

          Alas, the success of the movie compelled Raucher to write a thoroughly unnecessary sequel titled Class of ’44, which was produced and released two years after the original film. Neither director Mulligan nor costar O’Neill returned, though Grimes reprised his role as Hermie. (Conant and Houser return, as well, portraying Hermie’s pals, but they remain in supporting roles.) Set during Hermie’s college years—which are heavily fictionalized extrapolations of Raucher’s real-life experiences—the bland and meandering picture primarily concerns Hermie’s romance with Julie (Deborah Winters), a high-strung coed. Julie comes off as difficult and domineering, and Winters’ performance is strident, so it’s difficult to get excited about the prospect of these two forming a lasting bond.

          Worse, Hermie emerges as a deeply ordinary collegiate who neither changes significantly during the course of the story nor has a major impact on those around him. Yes, he suffers a few coming-of-age blows, such as the death of his father, but these events feel trite compared with the transcendent experience Hermie had in Summer of ’42. The likeable Grimes does what he can with bland material, however, leavening the story’s inherent navel-gazing quality with admirable toughness. In sum, while the execution of Class of ’44 is more or less acceptable—particularly in terms of period details and production values—the whole enterprise feels perfunctory.

Summer of ’42: GROOVY

Class of ’44: FUNKY

Steel (1979)

          While it’s mildly enjoyable as a manly-man action movie, Steel is actually more amusing when viewed for its unintentional subtext—endeavoring for macho swagger led the filmmakers weirdly close to the realm of gay erotica. The story begins when contractor “Big” Lew Cassidy (George Kennedy) heads to work on a new high-rise he’s building in Texas, explaining that the sight of a tall building “still gives me a hard-on.” When Lew dies in a workplace accident, his pretty daughter Cass (Jennifer O’Neill) pledges to finish the building, thus saving her family’s company from bankruptcy. To do so, she needs a “ramrod”—no, really, that’s the phallic job title of the movie’s real leading character, Mike Catton, played by the Six Million Dollar Man himself, Lee Majors.

          Mike is a construction foreman who quit working at high altitudes after suddenly developing a fear of heights. Now working as a trucker (picture Majors behind the wheel of a big rig in a cowboy hat and a wife-beater), Mike accepts the job on the condition that he can supervise work from a completed floor instead of climbing onto beams. As Cass’ second-in-command, “Pignose” Morgan (Art Carney), says to Mike: “You’re here because this building will give you a chance to get it up again.” Scout’s honor, that’s the line!

          The first half of the movie comprises Mike building his team of world-class steel workers, Dirty Dozen-style. These roughnecks include such walking clichés as a horny Italian named Valentino (Terry Kiser); a jive-talking African-American named Lionel (Roger E. Mosley); a stoic Indian named Cherokee (Robert Tessier); and a taunting bruiser named Dancer (Richard Lynch). Meanwhile, Lew’s estranged brother, Eddie (Harris Yulin), conspires to derail the project because he wants to seize control of Lew’s company. As the movie progresses, Mike tries to overcome his fear of heights while coaching his fellow dudes through long days of hard work and hard drinking.

          Steel is such a he-man enterprise that even though Majors engages in close physical contact and soft talk with most of his male costars, he can barely muster furtive glances for his nominal love interest, O’Neill. All of this is pleasantly diverting, in a Saturday-matinee kind of way—director Steve Carver’s cartoony style didn’t peak until his 1983 Chuck Norris/David Carradine epic Lone Wolf McQuade, but he moves things along—so it doesn’t really matter that the script is ridiculous, or that Majors is ineffectual as a leading man. Plus, to Carver’s credit, the plentiful scenes taking place on girders high above city streets are enough to give any viewer vertigo. And as for those lingering shots of sweaty men working hard, their biceps glistening in the hot Texas sun . . .

Steel: FUNKY

Such Good Friends (1971)

          Another of director Otto Preminger’s cringe-inducing attempts to explore themes related to the youth culture of the late ’60s and early ’70s, this awkward movie features a few cutting one-liners, but is so scattershot and tone-deaf that it’s nearly a disaster. Worse, this is very much a case of the director being a film’s biggest impediment, because had a filmmaker with more restraint and a deeper connection to then-current themes stood behind the lens, the very same script could have inspired a memorable movie.

          Adapted from a provocative novel by Lois Gould, the movie tells the story of Julie Messigner (Dyan Cannon), a New York City housewife who discovers that her husband (Laurence Luckinbill) is a philanderer—at the very same time her husband is stuck in a coma following complications from surgery. (Any resemblances to the 2011 movie The Descendants, which features a similar plot, are presumably coincidental.) As Julie discovers more and more about her husband’s wandering ways, she moves through stages of grief, first denying the evidence with which she’s confronted, and then acting out in anger by having affairs of her own. Mixed into the main storyline are semi-satirical flourishes about the medical industry, because one of Julie’s close friends is Timmy (James Coco), the leader of the incompetent medical team treating Julie’s husband. As if that’s not enough, Preminger also includes trippy bits in which Julie flashes back and/or hallucinates because she’s looking at the world in a new way. In one such scene, Julie dreams that a publishing executive played by Burgess Meredith is naked while he’s talking to her at a party, leading to the odd sight of Meredith doing a few bare-assed dance moves.

          Preminger’s atonal discursions clash with the poignant nature of the story, thereby undercutting strong qualities found in the movie’s script—the great Elaine May (credited under the pseudonym Esther Dale) and other writers contributed pithy dialogue exchanges that occasionally rise above the film’s overall mediocrity. Preminger’s sledgehammer filmmaking hurts performances, too. Cannon tries to infuse her character with a sense of awakening, but Preminger seems more preoccupied with ogling her body and pushing her toward jokey line deliveries. Costars Coco and Ken Howard, both of whom appeared in Preminger’s awful Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970), have funny moments playing unforgivably sexist characters, and model-turned-actress Jennifer O’Neill is lovely but vapid as a friend with a secret. As for poor Luckinbill, his role is so colorless that he’s a non-presence.

Such Good Friends: FUNKY

Lady Ice (1973)

Calling Lady Ice a routine heist movie is an insult to routine heist movies, because this lifeless flick has all of the trappings of the genre but none of the appeal. Donald Sutherland plays an insurance-company investigator who romances a rich young woman (Jennifer O’Neill) in order to prove she’s a fence for stolen jewels. Sutherland seems game for playing a suave secret agent, flirting his way through a charming performance as a cocksure operator who may or may not be out of his depth, but the vapid script generates neither excitement nor suspense, so Sutherland ends up treading water. However O’Neill, the wholesomely beautiful ex-model who made such a memorable impression in Summer of ’42 (1971), is amateurish. Though she’s enchanting when she smiles with her impossibly white teeth contrasting her deeply tanned skin, she’s boring when she speaks because of her inability to invest dialogue with emotion or reality. Had the film given her anything interesting to do, the shortcomings of her performance might not have been as obvious, but then again, there’s a reason why less than ten years after Summer of ’42, O’Neill had slid so far down the Hollywood ladder that she spent 1979 costarring with the likes of Lee Majors and Chuck Norris. The great Robert Duvall shows up in Lady Ice as well, though just barely, in a small and underwritten role as a cop trailing Sutherland’s character, and the film’s other appeal is extensive location photography showcasing the sights of Miami and Nassau. But thanks to paper-thin characters, a rudimentary storyline, and long stretches in which nothing much happens, Lady Ice isn’t worth examining for hidden virtues.

Lady Ice: LAME