Smile, Jenny, You're Dead (1974)

 

          Offering a thoughtful spin on the TV-detective genre, Smile, Jenny, You’re Dead is a reboot of sorts, serving as the second pilot attempt for a series starring small-screen veteran David Janssen as sensitive private eye Harry Orwell. (A few months after this telefilm was broadcast, hourlong series Harry O began its two-year run.) What distinguishes Smile, Jenny, You’re Dead from other TV mystery fare of the same era is a focus on emotions and psychology, rather than action and plot twists. The effort to render a serious crime drama for grown-up viewers is bolstered by imaginative cinematography and moody scoring. Alas, the acting is not universally outstanding, and the suspense quotient is low, an unavoidable repercussion of avoiding the standard whodunnit route. Nonetheless, the movie is in many ways refreshingly humane.

          Harry (Janssen) is a cop on disability following an on-the-job shooting, so he picks up extra cash working as a private investigator. Living alone on a Southern California beach, he’s forever toiling on a boat that seems years away from seaworthiness, and his most perverse characteristic—by Los Angeles standards, anyway—is that he doesn’t drive. Another quirk? No gun. When a friend’s adult daughter gets harassed by a stalker, Harry takes the job of protecting her. She’s Jenny (Andrea Marcovicci), a model trying to divorce an overbearing man while taking comfort in the arms of a much older lover; Harry also finds himself attracted to her. Things get dangerous once Jenny’s stalker decides the men in Jenny’s life are better off dead.

          Writer Howard Rodman provides nuanced characterizations and slick dialogue, while director Jerry Thorpe periodically uses offbeat camera positions to give the movie an idiosyncratic quality. Accordingly, there are compensations in place of the thrills one might normally expect to encounter in such a piece. Janssen excels in the lead role, channeling his signature grumpiness into something complicated, so he’s at once appealing and harsh. Marcovicci does not leave a lasting impression, but Clu Gulager and Tim McIntire lend twitchy specificity to supporting roles, and Jodie Foster contributes her impressive poise to a small role as a youth separated from her mother. As for Jenny’s twisted tormentor, he’s portrayed by future softcore producer Zalman King, and his onscreen behavior is weirdly fascinating because he manages to simultaneously overact and underact.

Smile, Jenny, You’re Dead: FUNKY

1980 Week: Carny

          Picture, if you dare, the disturbing images that open Carny. Gary Busey, in all his glorious weirdness, sits in a dark room before a mirror, a single light illuminating his face from above, as he applies black, red, and white clown makeup, all the while bulging his eyes and baring his gigantic teeth to test the progress of his transformation. Insinuating music underscores the scene. And that’s how it is with Carny—strange and unpleasant things happen without much context. At varying points, Carny is funny, humane, insightful, sexy, and terrifying. Yet the film is also dull, pointless, and sloppy. Is it a horror movie about violent drifters who work in traveling carnivals? Is it a low-rent romantic triangle involving two grown men battling over the affections of a teenager? Is it a melodrama about outsider artists facing irrelevance thanks to shifting social mores? The answer to each of those questions is yes—but Carny is a disappointment nonetheless, because the film is made conventionally as to require a strong central storyline, which it lacks.

          One can’t help but wonder whether producer, cowriter, and leading man Robbie Robertson—a genuine rock star known for his tenure as the Band’s guitarist and principal songwriter—imagined collaborating on this film with his friend Martin Scorsese. Although Carny exists way outside Scorsese’s preferred urban-crime milieu, surely Scorsese would have known how to wrangle the film’s ideas and textures into a coherent script. Clearly, Robertson did not. At its core, Carny spins a dishearteningly simple yarn. When the Great American Carnival rolls into a small town, 18-year-old waitress Donna (Jodie Foster) becomes infatuated with Frankie (Busey), a “geek” who spends his nights inside a cage above a water tank, taunting rubes so they’ll pay to dunk him. Donna leaves home to, as the saying goes, run away with the circus. This causes friction with Frankie’s best friend, Patch (Robertson), the carnival’s fixer. (He breaks up fights and pays bribes to officials in towns the carnival visits.) The movie also has about a dozen subplots, some of which receive no more than a moment or two of screen time, and eventually the Donna business turns sordid when she becomes a dancer in the carny’s girlie show.

          There’s a lot of everything in Carny, as evidenced by the massive supporting cast: Elisha Cook Jr., Meg Foster, Kenneth MacMillan, Bill McKinney, Tim Thomerson, Fred Ward, Craig Wasson, and more. The film also bursts with special people portraying sideshow performers. All of these characters wander through engrossing vignettes, so the plot sometimes feels like an interruption. Not helping matters is Alex North’s truly awful musical score, which turns unhelpfully comedic during dark moments. You’d think Robertson would have at least gotten the music right in his capacity as producer, especially since his acting is naturalistic but forgettable. Busey is unhinged whenever he’s in geek mode, and he brings surprising tenderness to quiet scenes. Foster, meanwhile, delivers an atypically indifferent performance, but she’s quite beguiling  here—as in her other 1980 film, Foxes, Foster seemed determined to demonstrate after a three-year screen hiatus that she was no longer a juvenile.

Carny: FUNKY

1980 Week: Foxes

          Disco-era angst over teenage girls growing up too fast was fodder for myriad made-for-TV melodramas and a handful of features, but few such projects have aged well, particularly since most of them used the subject matter as an excuse for creating lurid images of nymphets dressed like streetwalkers. Consider the peculiar case of Foxes, which stars precocious Jodie Foster as the ringleader for a quartet of high-school girls who spend their free time experimenting with drugs and sex, largely because their libertine parents set poor examples. As directed by English stylist Adrian Lyne, who was part of a cadre of slick UK directors invading Hollywood around the turn of the decade (alongside Alan Parker and Ridley Scott), Foxes has the artistic veneer of a serious picture and the narrative soul of an exploitation flick. Yet the actual content of the film occupies a queasy middle ground between those extremes. Bereft of nudity and including virtually no onscreen sexuality, Foxes is like its characters—the movie talks a good game without going all the way.

          Had screenwriter Gerald Ayres compensated for this lack of salacious material by featuring meaningful dialogue and thoughtful characterizations, the movie could easily have become the best of its bottom-dwelling breed. Instead, Foxes is the definition of style over substance. Upon close inspection, the actual storyline is so slight it barely exists. Basically, each of the four girls has a unique set of misadventures, and the quartet periodically merges for scenes of driving and eating and partying. Jeanie (Foster) clashes with her single mother, Mary (Sally Kellerman), who does a lousy job of balancing family, school, and work. Nerdy Madge (Marilyn Kagan) attempts to set up housekeeping with an older man named Jay (Randy Quaid). Hottie Dierdre (Kandice Smith) plays adolescent romantic games, breaking hearts along the way. And doomed Annie (played by real-life rocker Cherie Currie of the Runaways) functions as a one-woman cautionary tale by messing with bad boys and hard drugs.

          Lyne masks the trashiness of the film with the signature look of the Lyne/Parker/Scott school, diffused side-light that makes everything look as if it was shot through the bottom of a used milk bottle. The naturalistic acting of the cast helps, with Currie making a minor impression as a teen trainwreck, and Foster delivers much better work than the picture deserves, even though she frequently shares scenes with the silly Scott Baio, previously her costar in the absurd Parker-directed musical Bugsy Malone (1976). Oh, and one final note—by the time Foxes ends, you’ll need a long reprieve from hearing Donna Summer’s wonderful ballad “On the Radio,” because Giorgio Moroder, who cowrote that song and provided the score for Foxes, features the tune itself and/or the underlying melody about eight zillion times.

Foxes: FUNKY

Candleshoe (1977)

          “I ain’t depressed,” tough street kid Casey explains. “I’m delinquent. There’s a difference, you know?” Had all of Candleshoe, the live-action Disney flick that tells Casey’s story, risen to the droll level of this dialogue, the movie would have been much more entertaining. Alas, the passable film coasts on the strength of glossy production values and skillful performances as the filmmakers substitute unnecessarily intricate plotting for actual storytelling. Based on a novel by Michael Innes, Candleshoe is one of those Disney pictures that twists itself into narrative knots while trying to generate an offbeat spin on a familiar formula. At its core, the movie presents the standard Disney gimmick of a wild kid becoming tame thanks to the acceptance of a loving family. Yet Candleshoe also includes con-artist schemes, an elaborate heist, a kidnapping angle, sweet kids attending to a dotty aunt, transatlantic travel, and a vivacious butler who masqueredes as different people in order to convince his employer that her estate is still solvent. Candleshoe only rarely breaks from the exhausting work of providing exposition long enough to offer such simple pleasures as slapstick and verbal comedy. So, while the movie isn’t bad—since it’s harmless and moderately intelligent—it’s leaden and slow when it should be light and speedy.

          Anyway, Jodie Foster, at her precocious best, plays Casey, an American street kid living in a dingy foster home. One evening, she’s “purchased” by English crook Bundage (Leo McKern). Turns out Casey vaguely resembles the long-lost niece of a wealthy Brit, Lady St. Edmund (Helen Hayes). Bundage hopes to insert Casey into Lady St. Edmund’s estate, Candleshoe, so Casey can find a buried treasure. Casey agrees to pretend she’s the long-lost niece in exchange for a cut of the take. Yet once Casey arrives at Candleshoe, she falls in love with the family—Lady St. Edmund; her resourceful butler, Priory (David Niven); and several children. Meanwhile, Casey discovers that Candleshoe is bankrupt, so she joins in with family schemes to keep the place afloat without revealing the financial trouble to Lady St. Edmund. Inevitably, some moments in Candleshoe are charming,simply because the actors are so good. Hayes provides warmth, Foster provides spunk,McKern provides menace, and Niven provides wit. Yet Candleshoe trudges when it should soar, never taking flight until the moderately entertaining slapstick-fight finale.

Candleshoe: FUNKY

Napoleon and Samantha (1972)

          For every family film made by Walt Disney Productions that hit the bull’s-eye in terms of marrying subject and theme, there seem to be half-a-dozen oddities whose plotting is explicable only if one imagines Disney people pulling random narrative elements from a hat. For instance, Napoleon and Samantha is about preteen runaways who embark on an adventure with a former circus lion until the children are endangered by a psychopath and rescued by a graduate student. Oh, and a huge portion of the film comprises a soulful exploration of mortality, with depressing speeches about death and a lengthy funeral scene. Yet the strangest thing about Napoleon and Samantha is that it’s watchable despite the loopy storyline. Veteran Disney director Vincent McEveety moves things along quickly, as always, and the cast benefits from the presence of seasoned performer Will Geer, as well as that of newcomers Michael Douglas, who was in his early 20s when he shot the picture, and Jodie Foster, who wasn’t yet 10. Alas, none of these people is the lead, with that function instead performed by ’70s kid-flick star Johnny Whitaker. He’s no worse than any other Hollywood kid trained in faking emotions, but his work exists on a plane far below that occupied by his more notable costars.

          The peculiar movie begins by establishing the lifestyle of rural urchin Napoleon (Whitaker), who lives with his kind-hearted grandfather (Geer). Napoleon’s best friend is Samantha (Foster), who resides nearby with her stern guardian, Gertrude (Ellen Corby). One day, Napoleon and Grandpa encounter an old circus clown who is traveling with Major, a tame lion. Inexplicably, Grandpa accepts the clown’s request to become Major’s caregiver. After a few cutesy scenes of life on the farm with a lion, Grandpa dies, so Napoleon goes to a job office and hires graduate student Danny (Douglas) as a gravedigger. Seriously, this is the plot! Lying to Danny by saying that a relative will soon collect Napoleon, the boy instead embarks on a trip with Major—and Samantha, who tags along for reasons that are never particularly clear. Then, once the trio survives near-misses with nasty animals and steep cliffs, they track down Danny—who promptly leaves them in the care of a stranger. Naturally, Danny discovers the stranger is an escaped psychopath (as one will), and runs to the kids’ rescue. For viewers willing to ignore logic, Napoleon and Samantha has a few admirable elements. Douglas, Foster, and Geer elevate their roles as much as possible, given the material, and Major—an animal performer featured in myriad films and TV shows—has an impressive bag of tricks. Plus, truth be told, the scenes about death have a certain lyricism, even if they feel like they belong in a different movie.

Napoleon and Samantha: FUNKY

Bugsy Malone (1976)

          Inexplicably beloved, especially by European fans, this bizarre family film is a musical homage to ’30s gangster movies that stars a cast of children whose singing voices are dubbed by adults. Befitting the juvenile cast, certain elements of criminal culture are softened, so instead of shooting each other with bullets, the crooks blast each other with “splurge guns,” which shoot gobs of whipped cream. Similarly, drivers propel cars by pushing bicycle pedals. Yet instead of completely reimagining the universe of old James Cagney flicks in order to suit kids, writer-director Alan Parker simply slots juveniles into adult clothes and situations. So, for instance, star Scott Baio wears pinstriped suits, and costar Jodie Foster, playing a bad girl, walks around with feather boas and whorish makeup.

          The weirdest aspect of the movie, however, is how straight Parker plays the material. Even though he includes campy dialogue and goofy slapstick, Parker employs such a painterly visual quality that if adults occupied the evocative frames instead of children, Bugsy Malone would seem positively dour. The same is true of the picture’s musical aspect. One of the best songs, “Tomorrow,” is the lament of an African-American janitor upset that a nightclub owner won’t allow the janitor to audition for a dancing job. This is kid stuff? Why any of this seemed like a good idea is a mystery, and why Parker considered himself suited to preteen entertainment is equally incomprehensible. Lest we forget, the man’s next movie was the brutal prison drama Midnight Express (1978), wherein Parker proved more adept with rape scenes than with “splurge guns.”

          Nonetheless, given Bugsy Malone’s cult-favorite status and the impressive credentials the movie accrued during its original release—including a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture (Musical/Comedy)—it’s clear that many viewers have discovered virtues in Parker’s oddball endeavor. Presumably, much of the affection fans feel toward Bugsy Malone stems from the unique gifts of tunesmith Paul Williams. Williams’ Bugsy Malone numbers range from perfunctory musical-theater songs to standouts including “Tomorrow” and the ballad “Ordinary Fool.” Hearing these songs delivered by adult singers reveals that Williams was operating at a more sophisticated level than the movie itself. Other points of interest include the presence of Baio, who transitioned from this movie to a lengthy run as streetwise kid Chachi Arcola in the TV series Happy Days, and that of the incomparable Foster, whose other 1976 releases included Freaky Friday and Taxi Driver.

Bugsy Malone: FUNKY

Echoes of a Summer (1976)

          Were it not for the presence in the cast of two extraordinary actors, the pretentious tearjerker Echoes of a Summer would be of less than negligible interest. Adapted by Robert L. Joseph from his play The Isle of Children, this talkfest is filled with fanciful wordplay, whimsical contrivances, and preteens who speak with absurd eloquence. Joseph contrives a universe in which people articulate their feelings “poetically,” so the characters in Echoes of a Summer are as likely to express themselves through esoteric historical references as they are through meticulously crafted metaphors. And while Joseph occasionally hits the bull’s-eye with a line that conveys some simple emotional truth, getting there requires slogging through lots of florid nonsense. As a result, watching Echoes of a Summer quickly grows tiresome—unless one surrenders to the very different pleasures offered by the work of the two stars, Jodie Foster and Richard Harris.

          Foster plays a 12-year-old girl facing imminent death because of heart problems, and Harris plays her anguished father, a professional writer who buys a lake house so his daughter’s last summer on earth is peaceful. Foster, who was already a veteran child actor by the time she made this film, delivers confident and sensitive work that embellishes her status as one of the most impressive youth performers ever to work in Hollywood. Even though her character is preternaturally sophisticated, Foster makes the role feel as organic as possible by tapping into her own natural intelligence—and if her acting never tugs at the heartstrings, per se, that’s a compliment to the good taste she exhibits, since Foster never takes cheap emotional shots for schmaltzy effect. Harris, meanwhile, provides the opposite of realism, opting instead for grandiose romanticism. Brooding around the film’s lovely Nova Scotia locations while reciting poetry, singing, and spinning imaginative stories for the amusement of Foster’s character, Harris incarnates a Superdad who devotes his life to filling each of his little girl’s final moments with laughter and wonderment. Whether this characterization comes across as endearing or overbearing is entirely a matter of taste, but none would dispute the assertion that Harris attacks his role with gusto.

          Given the film’s focus on an intense father-daughter connection, it falls to poor costar Lois Nettleton, playing the mother of the story’s central family, to function as the de facto villain, a woman mired in denial and depression. The process of bringing Nettleton’s character around to grace (a word sprinkled liberally through the movie’s dialogue) is highly contrived, culminating in a silly final scene of a play-within-a-play presented for the benefit of the dying girl. Despite its sincere intentions, alas, Echoes of a Summer is ultimately as affected and trite as the awful theme song that plays over the opening and closing credits, written and sung (if that’s the right word) by Harris.

Echoes of a Summer: FUNKY

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

          An unusual thriller that’s constantly on the edge of becoming a full-on horror movie, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane plays a clever game of making the audience wonder whether the title character is a victim or a villain. Jodie Foster, who wasn’t even 15 when she made the picture, gives a characteristically precocious performance as Rynn Jacobs, a teenager occupying a remote house in a coastal Maine town. Most of the picture comprises attempts by local residents to determine the whereabouts of Rynn’s father, whom she alternately claims is away on business or home but unavailable to receive callers. Some of the people poking around Rynn’s house have good intentions, including fellow teenager Mario (Scott Jacoby), and some have nefarious designs, such as pedophile Frank (Martin Sheen).

          Written by Laird Koenig (from his novel of the same name) and directed by Nicolas Gessner, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane does a lot with a little, concentrating most of the action in one location (Rynn’s house) and creating a great deal of Edgar Allen Poe-styled tension from the creepy premise of a young girl living alone with mysteries and shadows. The presence of Sheen’s character ups the anxiety level considerably, and Sheen creepily delivers many lines in a seductive whisper—watching such a good actor incarnate a predator is genuinely disturbing. Furthermore, the fact that young Foster is so formidable only makes the overall situation more believable. Some elements of The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane are formulaic, such as the nosy neighbor who pays a price for searching inside the basement of Rynn’s house, but Koenig’s use of stock components helps answer logic questions before they become problematic; for instance, the presence of a diligent local cop (Mort Shuman) explains how Rynn’s resourcefulness has kept authorities from digging too deeply into her circumstances.

          The final revelation of how Rynn found herself alone is a stretch, and the payoff to Mario’s character arc is even more outlandish, but The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane ultimately pays off well with a climactic confrontation that’s satisfying and unnerving at the same time. Since the picture was made as a low-budget French-Canadian production, it’s easy to see how a bit more Hollywood polish could have smoothed off the rough edges, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone surpassing either Foster or Sheen in their roles. So, while The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane might not meet the criteria for anyone’s list of the best ’70s shockers, it’s at the very least an atmospheric diversion with memorably grim nuances.

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane: GROOVY

Freaky Friday (1976)

          Among Walt Disney Productions’ most memorable live-action offerings of the ’70s, thanks to a novel concept and the presence of Jodie Foster in the leading role, Freaky Friday had a different genesis than the studio’s usual fare. Rather than being generated by in-house creatives, the movie was based on a novel by Mary Rodgers (the daughter of legendary composer Richard Rodgers), who also wrote the script. So, even though Freaky Friday follows the basic Disney paradigm of delivering a wholesome message through effects-driven comedy, it’s got a personal point of view.

          That’s not to say, unfortunately, that the movie is particularly good, since the characters are trite and the comedy never really connects. Freaky Friday zips along nicely enough, and the performances are sufficiently enthusiastic, but the movie’s entertainment value falls somewhere between forgettable and tiresome. The simple story begins when tomboyish, underachieving 13-year-old Annabel (Foster) and her uptight housewife mom, Ellen (Barbara Harris) simultaneously wish they could trade places with each other. By some unexplained magic, the women’s souls transpose, so Annabel’s mind ends up inside her mother’s body, and vice versa.

          At first, each is thrilled because of assumptions that the other lives a carefree existence, but then, as they will, high jinks ensue. Living inside an adult body but unaware how to deal with adult responsibilities, Annabel screws up chores like cooking and laundry. Meanwhile, Ellen can’t figure out how to make her teenaged body perform Annabel’s routine of schoolyard field hockey and extracurricular water-skiing. Ellen’s husband (John Astin) gets caught in the middle of the chaos, even as he’s trying to organize the splashy launch for a new real-estate development. It’s all quite harmless, with Annabel realizing what her mom juggles every day while Ellen learns that a lack of encouragement is keeping Annabel from fulfilling her potential.

          However, the mild charms of the leading performances—Foster displays her famously precocious gravitas, while Harris works a groove of likeable silliness—get drowned out by elaborate sight gags, particularly during the laborious chase scene that climaxes the movie. Nonetheless, Freaky Friday was a decent-sized hit that earned three Golden Globe nominations. It also got the remake treatment a generation later. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan as mother and daughter, the 2003 version is infinitely superior to the original, opting for sweetly character-driven comedy instead of noisy slapstick.

Freaky Friday: FUNKY

One Little Indian (1973)

          In a strange little career blip between his big-screen heyday in the late ’60s and his return to television with The Rockford Files, beloved leading man James Garner headlined a pair of inconsequential Disney movies. One Little Indian is darker and deeper than the company’s usual fare, telling the story of how a condemned man becomes the surrogate father for an orphaned child, and the feather-light The Castaway Cowboy is an offbeat romance. Were it not for the presence of colorful animal scenes in both flicks, it would be difficult to realize these titles came from the Mouse House.
          Written and directed, respectively, by old hands Harry Spalding and Bernard McEveety, One Little Indian is surprisingly respectable given the slightness of its storyline. Garner plays Keyes, a post-Civil War cavalryman sentenced to hang for treason. As we discover late in the story, Keyes tried to prevent fellow soldiers from conducting a Sand Creek-type massacre on an Indian village. Meanwhile, Mark (Clay O’Brien) is a white youth who has been raised by Indians. When a cavalry unit rounds up Mark’s tribe for relocation to a reservation, Mark tries repeatedly to escape. Through the magic of Disney coincidence, Keyes and Mark discover each other and become traveling companions.

          Adding novelty to their journey is the fact that their steeds are camels rather than horses; the animals are leftovers from an Army experiment in using dromedaries for desert transportation. Over the course of their journey together, man and boy bond with a frontier widow (Vera Miles) and her young daughter (Jodie Foster). They also engage in high jinks and shoot-outs as they evade capture. Excepting some silliness with the camels, One Little Indian is basically a straight drama, and rather a somber one, so Garner is able to sink his teeth into a few solid dramatic scenes. (He and Miles, who reteamed in The Castaway Cowboy, make an attractive screen couple.) O’Brien is a passable child actor, neither greatly adding to nor detracting from scenes, and reliable supporting players like Pat Hingle, Andrew Prine, and Morgan Woodward fill out the rest of the story. One Little Indian won’t linger very long in your memory, but it’s pleasant viewing.

One Little Indian: FUNKY

Taxi Driver (1976)

          “Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” That snippet of voiceover, an excerpt from the apocalyptic interior monologue of New York City cabbie Travis Bickle, gets to the heart of what makes Taxi Driver so intense: Instead of simply throwing a monster onscreen for lurid spectacle, the psychologically provocative drama takes us deep inside a man who does monstrous things for reasons he considers unassailably virtuous. As brilliantly realized by director Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader’s astonishing script introduces viewers to Vietnam vet Travis (Robert De Niro), an insomniac loner cruising the nighttime streets of the city within the self-imposed prison of a metal coffin on four wheels. His unique vantage point exposes him to the worst the city has to offer, the junkies and pimps and psychos, so his PTSD and whatever else is cooking inside his troubled brain compel him toward a “righteous” mission with a body count. Disturbing but mesmerizing, Travis’ journey is a profound exploration of the ennui chewing at the outer edges of America’s collective unconscious.
          The story elements are simple but audacious. Travis becomes preoccupied with two women, a polished campaign worker named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and an underage prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster). So disassociated that he can’t remember how to relate to people normally, Travis takes Betsy on an excruciatingly awful date to a low-rent porno movie, and presents himself as Iris’ savior even though she doesn’t believe she needs to be saved. Zeroing in on men he perceives as enemies, Travis targets Betsy’s politician boss and Iris’ pimp, leading our “hero” to arm himself for battle with an arsenal of illegal handguns. By the time Travis sits alone in his apartment, practicing his quick-draw with a cannon-sized pistol and a shoulder holster while delivering his infamous “You talkin’ to me?” soliloquy, viewers know they’ve been drawn into a nightmare.
          Scorsese’s camerawork and dramaturgy are extraordinary, infusing scenes with lived-in reality while never departing from the dreamlike stylization that makes Taxi Driver feel like a horrific fable; with the heavy shadows of Michael Chapman’s photography and the pulsing waves of Bernard Hermann’s insidious score, Scorsese achieves something like cinematic alchemy. In front of the camera, De Niro gives a selfless performance that channels Schrader’s vision of a lost soul who can’t differentiate idealism from insanity, becoming a figure of almost otherworldly menace. As the opposite ends of Travis’ imagined romantic spectrum, Foster nails the ephemeral idea of a jaded innocent, while Shepherd’s chilly inaccessibility is perfectly fitting. Comedian Albert Brooks provides helpful levity as Betsy’s coworker, Peter Boyle adds worldliness as one of Travis’ fellow cabbies, Harvey Keitel lends seedy color as Iris’ pimp, and Scorsese appears in a startling cameo that illustrates how deeply he saw into the meaning of this allegorical phantasmagoria.
          A breakthrough for everyone involved, Taxi Driver plays out like the anguished cry of a society in need of deliverance, filtered through the twisted worldview of someone damaged and discarded by that very society.

Taxi Driver: OUTTA SIGHT

Kansas City Bomber (1972)

On paper, this one sounds pretty fabulous as far as ’70s kitsch goes. Sex symbol Raquel Welch plays a single mom who tries to conquer the rough-and-tumble world of roller derby when other professional avenues prove unavailable. Kevin McCarthy, the star of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, plays the oily team owner who courts Welch and persuades her to join his roller-derby empire, spotting a potential marquee attraction. Norman Alden, the journeyman actor known for craptastic ’70s TV like Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, plays a gentle-giant skater prone to inflicting serious bodily harm when he’s not looking out for Welch’s welfare. The cast also includes Jodie Foster in an early role. But the sum of Kansas City Bomber is far less than its parts, even with some of those parts belonging to Welch. The reason is simple: The movie’s no fun. It’s actually a rather grim affair, as if the filmmakers thought the world would take a roller-derby movie starring Raquel Welch seriously. As for the star, she’s not really awful in this movie so much as just plain boring, which is disappointing because she seems sincere about demonstrating chops that she simply doesn’t have. Alden tries just as hard, but his performance as a mentally challenged individual borders on the cringe-worthy. So within this dramatic vacuum, McCarthy probably comes off best, because he at least plays the one note of his vile character effectively. The plot, standard leering stuff about predatory men who want Welch and bitchy roller-derby queens who want to put her down, would be tolerable if the action on the rink was exciting. No such luck. The sports scenes are sloppy and repetitive, without any of the crazy hair-pulling fun one might expect. Kansas City Bomber should be a permanent resident of the cinematic penalty box.

Kansas City Bomber: LAME

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Given that he built his reputation on testosterone-driven drama, it’s interesting to note that two of Martin Scorsese’s most important early pictures were about women. His first feature was a grimy black-and-white indie starring Harvey Keitel, and it took him five years to get a legit directing gig, helming the female-oriented Boxcar Bertha (1972) for Roger Corman. He returned to his NYC comfort zone for Mean Streets (1973), which in a roundabout way became the audition piece that convinced Ellen Burstyn to select him as the director of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, the actress’ first major project after earning an Oscar nomination for The Exorcist (1973). Burstyn has repeatedly told the story of how she hired the hungry young filmmaker: She asked him what he knew about women, and he said, “Nothing, but I’d like to learn.” And learn he did, because even though the resulting picture is driven by Burstyn’s powerhouse performance as a single mom making do as a waitress until her singing career takes flight, the movie is infused with Scorsese’s freewheeling camerawork and quasi-improvisational dramatic interplay. The opening bit, a smart-ass homage to The Wizard of Oz (1939), cleverly tells the viewer that this won’t be an ordinary “women’s picture,” and the tough-talking, unsentimental dramedy that follows easily fulfills that promise. The film boasts one vivid scene after another, from the funny/sharp exchanges between Alice (Burstyn) and her precocious son (Alfred Lutter) to the harrowing scenes of Alice’s volatile relationship with a younger man (Keitel). Supporting Burstyn is a terrific (and terrifically diverse) cast including Jodie Foster, Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd, and Vic Tayback, who debuts the “Mel” character he reprised on the hit sitcom Alice (1976-1985), which was based on this film. Burstyn won a well-deserved Oscar for her performance, and the film’s success paved the way for Taxi Driver (1976) because Scorsese had finally demonstrated the ability to direct a solid box-office performer.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: RIGHT ON