High Velocity (1976)

          If you’re willing to overlook a pointless story and sludgy pacing, you might be able to enjoy some of the surface pleasures in High Velocity, an action thriller shot in the Philippines. Leading man Ben Gazzara and costar Paul Winfield strike up decent male-bonding chemistry during their scenes together as mercenaries on a dangerous mission, and Kennan Wynn conjures a passable degree of intensity playing the obnoxious American businessman whom the missionaries strive to rescue from a jungle hideout. Also contributing more than the movie deserves is composer Jerry Goldsmith, whose incredibly prolific output (he scored five other pictures the same year, including Logan’s Run and The Omen) rarely diminished the quality of his work. Among the major players who fail to impress, Britt Ekland adds nothing to a small role as the wife of Wynn’s character, and director Remi Kramer—well, this was his first and last feature film, so that tells you what you need to know about the caliber of the storytelling. Nonetheless, High Velocity contains an adequate number of action scenes, so every so often the movie rises from its stupor to deliver a fleeting thrill.

          Set in some unnamed corner of the Far East, the picture begins by introducing Andersen (Wynn), a blustery executive who treats his local help terribly and isn’t much kinder to his beautiful trophy wife (Ekland). Militia types kidnap Andersen, so the wife hires Vietnam veteran Baumgartner (Gazzara) to plan a rescue operation. He, in turn, solicits the assistance of former comrade-in-arms Watson (Winfield). Various double-crosses ensue, as does a long trek into remote terrain. Sadly, much of the picture comprises dull scenes of the mercenaries staking out the guerilla’s camp. More lively are bits featuring Andersen in captivity, because his kidnappers force the Ugly American to confront the effects of his company’s imperialism. Excepting the friendship between the two mercenaries, nothing in this picture pings emotionally, and the narrative valleys outnumber the peaks. There’s also the little matter of how the plot doesn’t end up making all that much sense once everything is resolved. Yet somehow the combination of skilled actors in three leading roles and a steady stream of zesty cues from Goldsmith keeps High Velocity borderline watchable.

High Velocity: FUNKY

The Great Train Robbery (1979)

          Easily the best movie that novelist/filmmaker Michael Crichton ever directed—thanks to a larky story, rich cinematography, and two vivid performances—The Great Train Robbery is an old-fashioned escapist adventure. Set in late-19th-century England, the movie concerns gentleman crook Edward (Sean Connery), who travels in high-society circles while cruising for possible schemes. One day, Edward learns the particulars about a regular gold shipment transported by the British government to cover military expenses. Excited at the prospect of being the first person to ever rob a moving train, Edward enlists cronies including femme fatale Miriam (Lesley-Anne Down) and pickpocket John (Donald Sutherland). Over the course of several months, Edward’s team tracks down and copies the four keys needed to open the locked train safe in which the gold is stored during transit. Concurrently, Edward contrives an outlandish method for getting onto the train undetected. When unexpected complications arise, Edward’s gang responds with imagination and verve.

          Crichton, who adapted the screenplay from his own novel of the same name, based the story on a real event. As a result, the narrative has the flavor of authenticity even though the tone is strictly lighthearted. Better still, Crichton stays laser-focused on the fun of depicting a seemingly impossible heist, rather than getting bogged down in contrived plotting and/or iffy characterization (two conundrums that permeate Crichton’s wholly original stories). That’s not to say The Great Train Robbery is flawless; quite to the contrary, the movie drags in the middle and contains several passages of stilted dialogue, such as Crichton’s weak attempts at double entendre-laden romantic patter. Nonetheless, the virtues of The Great Train Robbery outweigh the shortcomings. First and foremost, the movie looks gorgeous. Employing his signature deep-focus compositions and haze filters, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth creates a look that seems as if it’s illuminated by the gas lamps of the story’s historical period. Fantastic costuming and production design complete the intoxicating illusion of Unsworth’s imagery.

          Leading man Connery, ever comfortable in the role of the handsome rascal, sells the effervescent aspects of his characterization with a grace reminiscent of Cary Grant, and he underlines the physicality of the character with impressive stunt work on moving trains. Sutherland provides a terrific foil, opting for eccentric whining as a contrast to Connery’s unflappable poise; with his mutton-chop sideburns and scowling expressions, Sutherland approaches but safely avoids camp. Leading lady Down is more beguiling than interesting—while her work in The Great Train Robbery is competent, all she’s really asked to do is look seductive. It’s true that The Great Train Robbery is a bit windy at 110 minutes, although the painstaking approach pays off with such long scenes as the nighttime break-in at a train-depot office. However, with expert composer Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing music pushing things along, The Great Train Robbery snaps back into shape for a bravura finish.

The Great Train Robbery: 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

The Boys from Brazil (1978)

          Novelist Ira Levin came up with some of the kickiest thriller plots of his era, providing the source material for the films Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and The Stepford Wives (1972), as well as for this picture. Levin’s book The Boys from Brazil blended the sci-fi concept of human cloning with themes related to the World War II Holocaust into an entertainingly paranoid fantasy, and an impressive roster of actors and behind-the-camera talents translated the book into one of the great cinematic guilty pleasures of the late ’70s. The movie version of The Boys from Brazil is almost impossible to take seriously, especially because the leading performances are so over the top as to border on camp, but the picture unspools at a ferocious speed while stacking thrills atop thrills. It’s pure escapism. That is, so long as one sets aside the question of whether it was in good taste to predicate a popcorn movie on the murders of six million Jews. (Although, to be fair, The Boys from Brazil can be viewed as a revenge fantasy against one of the Third Reich’s worst real-life monsters.)

          Anyway, the story begins in Paraguay, where a resourceful young American Jew, Barry Kohler (Steve Guttenberg), tracks down several Nazi war criminals living in exile and stumbles across a conference during which infamous Nazi surgeon Joseph Mengele (Gregory Peck) outlines a plan to murder nearly 100 seemingly innocuous 65-year-old men living throughout the world. Barry transmits his initial findings to Ezra Lieberman (Laurence Olivier), an aging Nazi hunter based in Austria, who is initially skeptical. Meanwhile, Mengele discovers Barry’s spying and has the young man killed, initiating a cat-and-mouse game—can Mengele execute his evil scheme before Lieberman brings the notorious “Angel of Death” to justice? The Boys from Brazil is an old-fashioned potboiler with a modern-age twist, because it turns out Mengele’s scheme—stop if you don’t already know the details—involves “activating” dozens of clones made from Adolf Hitler’s DNA.

          As directed by Franklin J. Schaffner with his customary elegance, The Boys from Brazil is simultaneously goofier and smarter than the average thriller. The premise is outlandish and Levin’s plotting is mechanical, but individual scenes are sharp and the escalation of tension from start to finish is terrific. Regular Schaffner collaborator Jerry Goldmsith deserves ample credit for jacking up the excitement level with his vivacious music, and cinematographer Henri Decaé lends epic scope with evocative location photography from around the globe. Yet on many levels this one’s about the acting, because the star power in the leading roles is formidable.

          It’s a hoot to see Olivier play the inverse of his character in Marathon Man (1976), which featured the actor as an insane Nazi. Olivier’s acting is way too broad in The Boys from Brazil, from the thick accent to the comical eye rolls, but he’s inarguably fun to watch. Similarly, it’s wild to see beloved leading man Peck play an out-and-out monster. Peck succumbs to the same excesses as his co-star, employing an overdone accent and exaggerated facial expressions, but he too is highly entertaining. Supporting actors lend zest, from the exuberant Guttenberg to cameo players including Denholm Elliot, Bruno Ganz, Uta Hagen, and Rosemary Harris. Plus, the always-watchable James Mason has a tasty featured role as Mengele’s pissy colleague.

The Boys from Brazil: GROOVY

The Terrorists (1974)

While it’s fun to see a thriller in which Sean Connery uses his brains to outwit bad guys, rather than his fists or 007 gadgets, The Terrorists isn’t clever enough to justify the genteel approach. Despite naturalistic location photography by the great Sven Nykvist and a muscular score by the reliable Jerry Goldsmith, the storyline is too ordinary, and the storytelling is too clunky. For no particular reason, the narrative takes place in a fictional country called Scandinavia, even though nearly all of the actors use their own British accents. After a group of terrorists take the British ambassador to Scandinavia hostage, the country’s top cop, Nils Tahlvik (Connery), is tasked with defusing the situation. Then, when a second group of terrorists—led by British gunman Ray Petrie (Ian McShane)—hijacks a passenger jet just as the plane is landing in a Scandinavian airport, things get complicated. Petrie’s group plans to use the plane as a getaway vehicle for the group holding the ambassador hostage, threatening to blow up the plane (and its passengers) if they’re not allowed to do so. For much of the picture, Connery paces around the exterior of the British embassy and the halls of the airport, trying to figure out attack routes and exit strategies; he also fends off political pressure from British authorities and local heavyweights, since the two countries involved have vastly different agendas. Some of this stuff is interesting, in a procedural sort of way, and McShane invests his underwritten role with a bit of suave menace. Additionally, the movie’s pulse rises during the second half of the picture, as the story winds toward a far-fetched twist ending, and the lack of gunplay throughout much of the film forces theater-trained Finnish director Caspar Wrede—here directing the last of his five feature films—to conjure tension from circumstance instead of pyrotechnics. (Like Connery, he does what he can with limited resources.) Still, one need merely look at the following year’s Dog Day Afternoon to see how many terrific opportunities for hostage-situation suspense the makers of The Terrorists missed.

The Terrorists: FUNKY

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

          Despite falling well short of greatness, The Mephisto Waltz is an above-average supernatural-horror flick with evocative atmosphere, strong acting, and a unique hook—it’s built around the world of classical music. It should also be noted that the movie stars Jacqueline Bisset at her most ravishingly beautiful, so the eye-candy quotient is considerable. At the beginning of the movie, we meet angsty Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda), a mediocre pianist relegated to interviewing better players in his role as a music journalist. Accompanied by his wife, Paula (Bisset), Myles travels to a sprawling estate for an audience with Duncan Ely (Curt Jurgens), a legendary virtuoso. Although Paula gets a bad vibe off Duncan and his twentysomething daughter, Roxanne (Barbara Parkins), Myles quickly falls under Duncan’s spell—because Duncan claims he can train Myles to become a world-class pianist. It turns out the Elys are Satan worshippers, and Duncan has designs on U-Hauling his soul into Myles’ healthy young body, since Duncan is terminally ill but determined to preserve his genius.

          It’s not giving anything away to say that Duncan succeeds, because the real thrills begin when Paula starts to realize her husband isn’t her husband anymore. Produced by prolific TV guy Quinn Martin (whose output included The Fugitive and The Streets of San Francisco), the picture is capably directed by Paul Wendkos from a script by Ben Maddow (which was adapted from Fred Mustard Stewart’s novel). The execution is stylish even when the story gets convoluted and silly, and the film benefits tremendously from spooky music by composer Jerry Goldsmith. Additionally, the locations are consistently credible, especially the shadowy expanses of the Ely mansion. Yet it’s the acting that really propels the piece. Alda is poignantly narcissistic as Myles, and then appropriately aloof once Duncan’s spirit inhabits Myles’ body, while Jurgens makes a strong impression as a domineering diva during his few scenes. Parkins, whose dark beauty complements Bisset’s natural look, has fun playing a scheming witch, and Bisset lends a certain measure of emotional credibility to her various scenes of anguish and panic. Best of all, the movie twists and turns toward a perverse ending that almost justifies the movie’s overlong, 115-minute running time.

The Mephisto Waltz: GROOVY

S*P*Y*S (1974)

          Funnyman Elliot Gould was so prolific during the ’70s that his screen career ran along several parallel tracks—highbrow projects with Robert Altman, cameos in all-star movies, and so on. Yet perhaps the most interesting angle of his ’70s output was his pairing with various costars in buddy pictures—during the ’70s, it seemed Gould was Hollywood’s sparring partner of choice. Gould did one picture each with Robert Blake, James Caan, and George Segal, but he only went down the buddy-movie road twice with one actor: Donald Sutherland. Sardonic New Yorker Gould and reserved Canadian Sutherland first teamed, of course, in Altman’s 1970 antiwar classic M*A*S*H, playing irreverent surgeons. Their reunion, unfortunately, is as forgettable as M*A*S*H was memorable. S*P*Y*S—which was given an asterix-laden title solely for the purpose of luring M*A*S*H fans into theaters—is a dull, inept, noisy espionage caper that wastes the talents of everyone involved. Gould and Sutherland play bumbling American secret agents stationed in Europe who realize they’ve been targeted for assassination. Disillusioned, the men join forces to exploit their international contacts for a get-rich scheme involving the sale of important government secrets. This precipitates an uninteresting parade of chase scenes, double-crosses, and sight gags.

          Directed by capable journeyman Irvin Kershner, whose movies always looked good even when they were dragged into mediocrity by lame source material, S*P*Y*S features handsome European locations, and most of the screen time is devoted to Gould and Sutherland exchanging banter. However, nothing clicks. The stars lack defined roles, so they’re forced to vamp through desperate physical and verbal shtick, and the plot is so convoluted and inconsequential it’s impossible to care what happens. (At its worst, the movie features Gould drugging Sutherland into a seizure so they can get out of paying for an expensive meal.) S*P*Y*S also features that true rarity—an atrocious musical score by the normally great Jerry Goldsmith. Dominated by an annoying synthesizer melody that sounds like it’s being played on a mechanized kazoo, the music feels like everything else in S*P*Y*S—a futile attempt to persuade viewers they’re seeing a comedy.

S*P*Y*S: LAME

Patton (1970)

          Despite being bold, provocative, and smart, Patton should not have curried favor during its original release, since the movie arrived at the height of America’s misguided war in Vietnam. Surely, there couldn’t have been a worse time to release a feature-length tribute to one of World War II’s most famous American generals. Yet Patton is much more complicated than any hagiography, and the movie’s greatest strengths are undeniable. The script is insightful and witty, the direction and production values are impressive, and leading man George C. Scott’s performance ranks among the highest achievements in screen acting. The movie is imperfect, of course, suffering such flaws as an excessively long running time, but the audacity with which the filmmakers engage themes of hubris, militarism, and patriotism are still startling 40 years after the movie was made.

          Notwithstanding a riveting prologue (more on that in a minute), the movie begins in North Africa, when General George S. Patton Jr. (Scott) is first recruited to battle Germany’s “Desert Fox,” tank-division commander Erwin Rommel (Karl Michael Volger). As the movie progresses, Patton is moved from Africa to the European theater, his battlefield victories overshadowed by his outrageous behavior. Gaudy and vainglorious, Patton openly cites his belief in reincarnation, describing himself as the latest form of a soldier who has existed during the great wars of previous centuries; although Patton bolsters his claims with brilliant strategizing, his otherworldly pomposity spooks subordinates and unsettles superiors.

          Worse, Patton behaves abominably when confronted with GIs he regards as cowards or shirkers. In one of the picture’s unforgettable moments, Patton loses his cool upon meeting an enlisted man hospitalized for shell-shock, a condition whose existence Patton denies—Patton violently slaps the GI and seems ready to shoot the young man until Patton is subdued by aides. Thanks to such transgressions, Patton never consistently occupies the forefront of the Allied command, so the movie tracks his humiliating slide from active duty to elder-statesmen status.

          Although Patton has a large cast of characters and a sprawling number of locations, it’s not precisely a war epic—rather, it’s an intimate character study that plays across a massive stage during wartime. So, while costar Karl Malden is a steady presence as Patton’s staunchest Army ally, General Omar Bradley, other actors in the movie serve as mirrors reflecting facets of Scott’s performance. Scott justifies this approach with a thunderous star turn. His Patton is funny, inspiring, intimidating, maddening, pathetic, strange, and a dozen other things, whether he’s melodically quoting ancient poetry or impotently shooting a pistol at a fighter plane during a strafing run.

          Director Franklin J. Schaffner does a remarkable job of keeping the story forceful and clear, often through the use of elegantly gliding camerawork; screenwriters Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North provide brilliant dialogue and evocative vignettes; and composer Jerry Goldsmith’s clever score uses echoed horn figures to accentuate the idea of Patton as a figure from myth let loose on the modern world.

          Yet the film’s most indelible moment is also its simplest, the mesmerizing two-minute monologue that starts the movie with shocking directness. Stepping in front of a gigantic American flag, an ornately uniformed Patton barks out a hard-driving, vulgar speech about American can-do spirit, featuring a line that epitomizes the character’s philosophy: “No bastard every won a war by dying for his country—he won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” FYI, Scott returned to his Oscar-winning role years later for an underwhelming TV miniseries, The Last Days of Patton (1986), though few consider that project a true sequel to the 1970 movie.

Patton: RIGHT ON

Wild Rovers (1971)

          Even though he enjoyed a long and lucrative career directing light comedies, it’s a shame Blake Edwards made only one proper Western, because Wild Rovers reveals the writer-director’s unexpectedly lyrical approach to the cowboy genre. Starring the unlikely but compatible duo of William Holden and Ryan O’Neal, the gorgeous-looking movie tracks the adventures of a pair of cowpokes whose foolhardy decision to rob a bank triggers a series of deadly events.

          Presented as an old-school epic, complete with a musical overture and an intermission, the film moseys along at a deliberate pace, but it’s never boring; the locations and photography are intoxicating, the action is exciting, and the performances keep everything lively. Moreover, Edwards’ inventive screenplay presents a rich mixture of familiar Western tropes and witty flourishes; the best original elements include novel characterizations and sharp dialogue.

          Holden plays Ross Bodine, a veteran cowboy who’s ready to settle down even though he doesn’t have a financial stake, and O’Neal plays Frank Post, a young man still naïve enough to believe he can shape his own destiny. When Ross casually mentions one day that the only cowboys with money are those who rob banks, Frank gets his teeth into the notion and eventually talks Ross into performing a heist. The movie takes its time getting to this point, creating a persuasive sense of camaraderie between the protagonists before things get sticky, and the robbery sequence is offbeat.

          Instead of busting into a bank at daytime, the men casually intimidate the bank owner at his home during evening hours, holding his wife and daughter at gunpoint while forcing him to head to the bank and unload the vault. Charged with overseeing the hostages, Frank bonds with a puppy and protects the banker’s family from a mountain lion rather than doing anything menacing. Narrative choices like these make Ross and Frank compelling characters—we see how easily they buy into the romantic fantasy of a victimless crime, and feel their anguish when they realize how badly they miscalculated.

          Holden adds an unusual color to his standard world-weary persona, accentuating amiability over cynicism, and O’Neal gives a performance that’s as naturalistic as anything he’s ever done. Eschewing the usual rouge’s gallery of overly familiar onscreen varmints, Edwards surrounds his leads with carefully chosen supporting players—including Joe Don Baker, Moses Gunn, Karl Malden, James Olson, and Tom Skerritt—all of whom make valuable contributions. Framing the actors’ work are spectacular widescreen images created by veteran cinematographer Philip Lathrop, a regular Edwards collaborator; his crisp photography of a sequence in which Ross breaks a wild bronco in a snowy field is particularly outstanding, making the sequence a joyous celebration of the cowboy lifestyle. Even the film’s music is noteworthy, with the great Jerry Goldsmith subtly expressing everything from jubilance to heartbreak.

          The unhurried pace of Wild Rovers ensures the picture isn’t for everyone, but the film’s unexpected emotional complexities reward patient viewers with a tough, elegant statement about masculine identity. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Wild Rovers: RIGHT ON

The Swarm (1978)

          Hollywood’s master of disaster, producer Irwin Allen, was well into the unintentional self-parody phase of his career by the late ’70s, less than a decade after he first started mining mass misfortune for mass entertainment. Instead of the towering infernos and upside-down cruise ships of yore, he restored to demonizing insects in The Swarm, an undercooked comin’-at-ya picture in which killer bees, mostly depicted as animated blotches roaming across the skyline, attack a small town in the Southwest before heading to Houston. Filled with all the usual tropes of Allen’s pictures, from large mobilizations of rescue forces to trite melodramas playing out against the backdrop of tragedy, The Swarm also features one of Allen’s trademark hodgepodge casts.

          Michael Caine, starting his slide into ridiculous paycheck gigs, stars as a bug specialist who takes command of the government’s response to the bees, and he’s accompanied by Richard Widmark (as a general who wants to blow up everything in sight), Henry Fonda (as a wheelchair-bound immunologist), Richard Chamberlain (as a Southern-fried scientist/crankypants whose sole function seems to be scowling at Caine), and Katharine Ross (as a scientist/love interest who gets stung by more than Cupid’s arrow), plus Patty Duke Astin, Olivia de Havilland, Bradford Dillman, Jose Ferrer, Lee Grant, Ben Johnson, and Fred MacMurray.

          Even though a few elements are respectable, like Jerry Goldsmith’s exciting score, The Swarm is, well, swarming with ludicrous highlights, because the movie’s so preposterously straight-faced it plays like a comedy. The plotting is, of course, extraordinarily stupid, with Caine regularly leaving his post as the government’s top man during a major crisis to run inconsequential errands with Ross so they can share cutesy patter while driving around the countryside. Better still, from the perspective of amusing awfulness, is the outrageously limp dialogue, which nails the audience with clunky exposition as mercilessly as the bees zap their victims. “Just because you’re the mayor of Marysville, that doesn’t make you an engineer,” Johnson barks to MacMurray, who replies, “Look, nobody asked you to leave Houston and come here to retire, you know.” Ouch.

           In its most hysterically insipid moments (which are, sadly, outnumbered by long stretches of flat tedium), The Swarm approaches full-on camp, like the bee attack on a nuclear power plant or the colorful bit of Caine running through the small town, screaming, “The killer bees are coming! Everybody get inside!” (On a less amusing note, Widmark takes to referring to the Africanized bees as “Africans,” leading to icky lines like, “By tomorrow, there will be no more Africans in Houston!”) The movie’s best moment, though, is undoubtedly the scene in which Caine coaches a young bee-sting victim through a bout of hysterics by convincing the boy that the giant bee floating in front of his head—depicted, with goofy obviousness, by a giant superimposed bee—is a hallucination.

          For good or ill, The Swarm is no hallucination, because this two-and-a-half-hour venom blast of a gloriously bad creature feature really exists. And, yes, you read that right: Though originally released at 116 minutes, there’s an extended version of The Swarm clocking in at 155 minutes. Rest assured the whole damn mess was endured for the sake of this review. Anti-venom, please!

The Swarm: FREAKY

The Omen (1976) & Damien—Omen II (1978)

          A massive box-office hit feeding the public’s post-Exorcist appetite for supernatural horror but opting for cartoonish violence over gut-wrenching realism, The Omen is fabulously entertaining nonsense. The film’s premise remains tantalizing even after years of underwhelming sequels and retreads, Jerry Goldsmith’s powerful score set the template for myriad lesser imitations, and some of the creatively staged deaths in the picture have entered the horror-cinema pantheon. So even though The Omen has undoubtedly lost much of its power to shock, the film’s shameless entertainment value survives. Like the previous year’s Jaws, the first Omen movie is a textbook example of pulp disguised as prestige thanks to glossy stars and impressive production values. (Among other parallels, Goldsmith acknowledged that the iconic score John Williams created for Jaws was an influence on his work for The Omen.) Yet while critical admiration for Jaws has only grown over the years, time has put The Omen in its proper place as a guilty pleasure.
          Here’s the backstory. Producer Harvey Bernhard saw dollar signs when a clergyman acquaintance pondered what might happen if the antichrist emerged in modern times, so Bernhard commissioned a script by David Seltzer and hired promising director Richard Donner (the success of this picture earned Donner a choice gig helming 1978’s Superman: The Movie). The story that Bernhard and his collaborators contrived involves American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), who adopts a mysterious infant after his own son is stillborn. The ambassador unwisely hides the truth from everyone, including his wife, Kathy (Lee Remick), but once young Damien (Harvey Stephens) reaches his seventh year, things get messy. People around the child die gruesomely, raising Thorn’s suspicions, and then a crazed priest tries to convince the ambassador his “son” is an inhuman beast sired by a jackal.
          The beauty of the premise, in terms of generating spooky excitement, is the implication that Satan has both an endless supply of minions and nearly limitless power. Furthermore, the biggest challenge to embedding the antichrist in society is the possibility that someone might take Damien out before he’s old enough to defend himself. That last bit creates a potent moral dilemma for Peck’s character.
          Even though the plot crumbles under scrutiny, the movie’s operatic death scenes are enjoyably preposterous (“It’s all for you, Damien!”), and the made-up mythology (e.g., “the seven daggers of Meddigo”) casts an engrossing spell. Peck anchors the picture with anguished determination, while Leo McKern is memorably intense as the dude who says Damien’s gotta die, David Warner adds an enjoyable presence as a conspiracy-minded photographer, and Billie Whitelaw is all kinds of creepy as Damien’s nanny. With respect to Donner, who manages pace and tone expertly, and DP Gilbert Taylor, who provides a master class in the use of filters, the movie’s VIP is Goldsmith. His Oscar-winning score uses eerie chants such as “Ave Satani!” (Latin for “Hail Satan!”) to infuse the picture with palpable menace. His music is the film’s dark heart.
          One could argue that the picture’s first sequel, Damien—Omen II, actually makes more narrative sense than its predecessor, inasmuch as teenaged Damien’s circumstances seem better suited to future global conquest; Damien (played in the follow-up by Jonathan Scott-Taylor) accepts his destiny while being raised by his uncle (William Holden), a corporate giant whose empire the antichrist stands to inherit. Alas, Damien is less exciting than the previous picture. It’s not as if Bernhard and co. suddenly decided to take the franchise seriously, but director Don Taylor lacks Donner’s crowd-pleasing flair and Holden, though always watchable, is very much in paycheck mode, whereas Peck committed to the silliness of The Omen. Having said that, the perfectly cast Scott-Taylor is quite disturbing as he grows more and more comfortable in his unholy skin, and the death scene involving an icy lake is genuinely frightening; the scene might even surpass the gruesome kills that made the first Omen notorious. One great scene, alas, does not make a great picture. Neither does behind-the-scenes turmoil. British director Mike Hodges was discharged partway through production and replaced with American journeyman Taylor.
          The original Omen series concluded with The Final Conflict (1981), a grisly installment featuring Sam Neill as grown-up Damien trying to prevent the Second Coming, although a quasi-related telefilm called Omen IV: The Awakening followed ten years later. The original film was pointlessly remade in 2006, and a dreary prequel, The First Omen, appeared in 2024.

The Omen: GROOVY
Damien—Omen II: FUNKY

Chinatown (1974)

          Screenwriter Robert Towne has famously described his masterpiece Chinatown as a story about “the failure of good intentions,” and that cryptic quip says a lot about the film’s enduring power. Superficially a straightforward film noir about an adultery investigation that unravels a far-reaching conspiracy and also ghastly personal secrets, the picture is fundamentally a profound statement about the impossibility of finding definitive moral high ground. And though this provocative thematic material is unquestionably Towne’s creation, the product of a native Los Angeleno’s preoccupation with his hometown’s sordid past, director Roman Polanski delivers the narrative in his uniquely cynical voice, embellishing the tale with uncredited screenwriting contributions, ingenious camerawork, and even a tart supporting performance. It’s a perfect blending of two cinematic alchemists. The central character is L.A. private eye J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), an ex-cop who now earns an undignified living peering through peepholes so he can catch wayward husbands and wives in flagrante delicto.
          Through convoluted circumstances that only become clear as the masterfully organized film unspools, Gittes comes into the employ of Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), the beautiful but chilly wife of a high-ranking official in the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Partially through investigative skill, partially by dumb luck, and partially via sheer persistence, Gittes uncovers a scheme by Mulwray’s powerful father, Noah Cross (John Huston), to make money off the city’s insatiable thirst for water, and Gittes also uncovers shocking truths about the private lives of the Mulwray clan.
          The film’s haunting title refers to the idea that white cops keep a safe distance from internal conflicts in L.A.’s Chinatown district because they’re so ignorant of Chinese culture that they often stir up more trouble than they repair, simply by intruding where they don’t belong. This sad theme of irreparably twisted circumstances runs through every scene of Polanski’s deeply melancholy film. Whereas many lesser ’70s homages to classic film noir simply ape the saxophones-and-venetian-blinds surface of that venerable genre, Chinatown matches the surface plus the fatalistic foundation of noir; Chinatown then goes further still by using the trappings of noir to make an elegantly hopeless comment about the disconnectedness running through American society in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
          Towne won an Oscar for his work, and others on the team earned nominations for their equally excellent contributions: Dunaway and Nicholson got nods for their tragic portrayals, John A. Alonzo’s moody cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith’s elegiac score were recognized, and Polanski got a nom for his direction. Glaringly absent was recognition for Huston’s brief but unforgettable performance as heartless titan Cross. The way he intentionally mutilates the pronunciation of Gittes’ name, in that inimitably moist Huston growl, is one of the most vivid character details in any ’70s movie. Meditative and subtle, Chinatown is like the mystery it depicts: an enigma that becomes more fascinating and frightening each time it’s reexamined.

Chinatown: OUTTA SIGHT

Alien (1979)

          Writer Dan O’Bannon was a film-school pal of John Carpenter’s, but his career foundered after the duo expanded Carpenter’s thesis film into the commercial feature Dark Star (1974). While Carpenter was making the low-budget shockers that launched his career, O’Bannon was mired in stillborn projects like an unproduced version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, and at he ended up living on his friend Ron Shusett’s couch. Luckily, Shusett was an aspiring writer-producer intrigued by O’Bannon’s idea for a claustrophobic sci-fi/horror flick about an outer-space critter that preys upon a spaceship’s crew. (The concept borrows liberally from myriad sources, with the 1958 B-movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space often cited as a direct influence.) O’Bannon and Shusett fleshed out the story, which at one point was titled Star Beast, then sold the package to producers Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hil, whose new company Brandywine Productions had access to Twentieth Century-Fox. Giler and Hill, both screenwriters, did more narrative tinkering, but Fox didn’t get excited until the studio’s Star Wars (1977) exploded at the box office. Alien was the next outer-space picture on deck at Fox, so the project finally got momentum—and as more people joined the party, the level of artistic ambition continued rising.
          Ridley Scott, then a veteran of countless TV commercials but only one little-seen feature, was hired because of his keen visual sense. Just as importantly, Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who worked on the same stillborn version of Dune as O’Bannon, was recruited for creature and set designs; his creepy “biomechanics” style infused the resulting film’s alien scenes with perverse grandeur. Representing a rare case of the development process doing what it’s supposed to do, Alien kept evolving, rather like the creature in the story, until finally, on May 25, 1979, audiences got their first look at a perfect marriage of exploitation-flick elements and art-film craftsmanship. Scott fills every frame of the picture with meticulous details, building excruciating tension by keeping the titular beastie almost completely offscreen until the film’s finale. He also created one of scare cinema’s greatest jolts with the unforgettable “chest-burster” scene.
          So despite underdeveloped characters and an occasionally murky storyline, nearly everything in Alien works on some level, from the sleek title sequence by R/Greenberg Associates to the terrifying climax featuring Sigourney Weaver wearing the smallest panties in the known universe. The production design’s mix of utility and grime is utterly credible; the score by Jerry Goldsmith is eerily majestic; and the interplay between actors Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and Weaver nails under-pressure group dynamics. The movie that O’Bannon and Shusett once pitched as “Jaws in space” sits comfortably alongside Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster as one of the most cinematically important horror shows ever made.

Alien: OUTTA SIGHT