The Dove (1974)

          Based on the real-life adventures of an American sailor named Robin Lee Graham, who began a five-year solo trip around the world while he was still a teenager, The Dove could conceivably have become a probing existential drama. Instead, the movie’s screen time is divided unequally between sailing scenes, which are interesting, and romantic interludes, which are not. The real Graham met and married a fellow American, Patti Ratteree, while he was traveling, so the filmmakers mostly treat Robin’s journey as an obstacle to his relationship with Patti. It’s only near the end of the picture that the filmmakers start using weather as a metaphor to investigate the deeper reasons why Robin felt compelled to prove himself. In particular, sequences of Robin enduring a horrific storm and suffering through a month of windless days feel like precursors of the excellent Robert Redford film All Is Lost (2013), which is unlikely to be surpassed anytime soon as the most harrowing film ever made about a solo ocean voyage.

          The Dove, which is named after the small sailboat that Robin steered around the world, begins in L.A. with Robin (Joseph Bottoms) leaving port for his long voyage. So little backstory is provided that the leading character feels like a cipher at first, which means the early passages of The Dove provide little more than aquatic spectacle. The storytelling gets clearer—and far less distinctive—once Robin reaches his first major port of call, where he meets Patti (Deborah Raffin). Around the same time, Robin begins his love/hate relationship with a series of correspondents from World Travel magazine, which has an exclusive on his story. (In real life, Robin worked with National Geographic.) By about 20 minutes into its running time, The Dove settles into a repetitive pattern: sailing scene, dry-land scene with Patti and/or journalists, teary goodbye scene, then back to the beginning of the cycle for another loop.

          Although director Charles Jarrott and his crew do an adequate job of shooting nautical vignettes—the storm sequence is genuinely harrowing—the movie tends to lose energy whenever Robin docks his boat. Leading man Bottoms (one of actor Timothy Bottoms’ three younger brothers) performs with more sincerity than skill, so he’s rarely able to enliven stiffly written scenes, of which The Dove has many. Raffin fares much worse, since she was prone to wooden performances anyway; some of her line deliveries in The Dove are embarrassingly amateurish. Even composer John Barry falls victim to the movie’s mediocrity, delivering one of his least interesting scores and contributing the melody for a fruity theme song, “Sail the Summer Wind,” which appears twice during the movie. FYI, The Dove is one of only three features that iconic actor Gregory Peck produced; the others are The Big Country (1958) and The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972).

The Dove: FUNKY

Crime and Passion (1976)

          Ivan Passer, a Czech writer/director of considerable skill who emerged in tandem with Milos Forman, has worked steadily in Hollywood but never joined Forman on the A-list. Projects such as Crime and Passion explain way. A discombobulated mess for which Passer deserves much of the blame—in addition to directing, he was one of seven (!) writers—this would-be caper flick lurches tonally from carefree to creepy and back again, often within the space of a single scene. The script combines countless incompatible elements, and the awful leading performances are delivered by two actors who simply don’t exist in the same universe—Omar Sharif acts with his usual swarthy intensity, while Karen Black pitches her portrayal to the level of operatic campiness for which she is (in)famous. Poor Joseph Bottoms forms the third side of a romantic triangle, but his laconic energy is smothered by the work of the other stars.

          The nonsensical story goes something like this. Andre Ferren (Sharif) is a European investment counselor who plays games with his clients’ money. His associate/mistress, Susan Winters (Black), agrees to manipulate a rich aristocrat into marriage, with the intention of divorcing him for a huge financial settlement that Susan will share with Andre. Things get complicated when Susan meets a handsome American (Bottoms) and when Susan becomes convinced that the aristocrat’s castle is haunted. There’s also a subplot about the aristocrat electronically spying on Susan, so the aristocrat may or may not be hip to the fact that she and Andre are running a con. Yet the story isn’t the only bizarre element of Crime and Passion so bizarre—the film is decorated with deeply strange flourishes.

          Andre gets aroused whenever he experiences professional setbacks, so Susan’s pillow talk consists of stock losses and so forth; during scenes featuring this behavior, Sharif seems frightening rather than eccentric, as if he’s about to rape Black. The unpleasant vibe is exacerbated by the film’s heavy-handed score, comprising moody electric-piano music and sudden, horror-movie-style stings. Toward the end of the movie, Bottoms sits in the castle dining room, receiving (offscreen) oral sex from Black until he hallucinates—or does he?—that a knight in full battle armor has entered the room. This bit is topped by the finale, during which Black and Sharif hump outside the castle while Black shoots a dead body out of a cannon into the valley below the castle. How any of this actually got filmed is a mystery. For instance, did anyone think the vignette of Sharif taking a bath and singing “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain” was a good idea?

Crime and Passion: LAME

High Rolling in a Hot Corvette (1977)

Boring and pointless but borderline tolerable because the location is novel and the storyline is coherent, High Rolling in a Hot Corvette is one of those innumerable “light-hearted” adventure romps about mischievous dudes roaming across the countryside, getting into trouble and getting into women’s pants. One presumes the intended appeal was wish-fulfillment for male viewers and bad-boy eroticism for female viewers, but as often happens in this particular genre, the filmmakers failed to make the leading characters charming enough to justify watching 90 minutes of their obnoxious antics. Joseph Bottoms, younger brother of ’70s mainstay Timothy Bottoms, stars as Texas, an overbearing American tramping around Australia with his Ozzie pal Albee (Grigor Taylor). They start out working at a carnival, but Texas gets fired after closing his attraction in the middle of the day for a quickie with a patron. Then the duo hitchhikes across the continent. One of their rides, Arnold (John Clayton), makes a pass at Albee, who knocks the guy flat. The lads then discover that Arnold’s car—the hot Corvette of the title—is loaded with money and pot, because Arnold’s a dealer. The boys steal the car and embark upon a freewheeling holiday, hooking up with women including a drifter (played by the great Judy Davis, mostly ineffectual in her first movie role) and a pair of cabaret singers. Eventually, the lads decide to become full-on crooks, so the climax involves the boys hijacking a tour bus while Arnold and his gunsels close in for the kill. The stakes are never very high in High Rolling, because we don’t care what happens to the idiotic heroes, and the picture’s tone is so lightweight it’s hard to believe major bloodshed looms ahead. Still, there are worse movies in this genre, and the Australian setting is offbeat. Plus, the flick contains one sequence of completely random weirdness: Dressed in flowing white gowns, the cabaret singers cover Donna Summer’s raunchy disco tune “Love to Love You Baby” as a performance piece of posh lesbian erotica. A land down under, indeed!

High Rolling in a Hot Corvette: LAME

The Black Hole (1979)

          By the late ’70s, a decade after Walt Disney’s death, the movie company bearing his name had lost the marketplace dominance it enjoyed during Walt’s heyday. Although the animation division remained adrift until 1989, Disney’s live-action unit began a brief but daring creative renaissance in 1979. That’s when the studio jumped onto the Star Wars bandwagon with The Black Hole, a dark sci-fi adventure story boasting opulent special effects and a memorably brooding music score by the great John Barry. The story involves a wonderfully absurd contrivance: In the year 2130, a deep-space exploration ship encounters a black hole and discovers that a long-lost spaceship, the Cygnus, is somehow locked in a permanent orbit over the mouth of the black hole. Our intrepid heroes enter the Cygnus and discover that megalomaniacal scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) controls the ship with an army of robots. When Reinhardt tries to shanghai the heroes into participating in a mad scheme, they rebel and trigger a chain of events that sends all of the movie’s main characters plunging into the black hole.

          The story is goofy and turgid, and the clumsiest fingerprint of the Disney brand is the presence of cutesy robots including the wide-eyed V.I.N.CENT (voiced by Roddy McDowall). Furthermore, the acting and dialogue are laughably wooden, with unfortunate leading players Joseph Bottoms, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Forster, Yvette Mimieux, and Anthony Perkins effortlessly upstaged by Schell, who works a florid Bond-villain groove. (Flattening the overwrought performance styles of both Borgnine and Perkins is a dubious sort of accomplishment.) As a piece of dramatic art, The Black Hole is, well, a black hole. As a compendium of vivid sensations, however, the picture is memorable. Barry’s music is grandiose and malevolent, expressing the vastness of space in such a powerful way that many scenes are genuinely unnerving. Some of the old-school optical effects are breathtaking, with exquisitely detailed spaceship models faring better than inconsistent greenscreen work.
          The Black Hole also boasts one of the weirdest climaxes in mainstream sci-fi cinema—a grim, phantasmagorical sequence illustrating the trippy horrors hidden inside the titular phenomenon. To say there’s disharmony between cutesy robots and a 2001-style head trip is an understatement, but if you’re an imaginative viewer willing to pick and choose which parts of this movie to enjoy, you’ll discover many superficial pleasures, as well as a few surreal ones.

The Black Hole: FUNKY