Red Sky at Morning (1971)

          An earnest coming-of-age story that wears its literary origins proudly, Red Sky at Morning offers an interesting mixture of artifice and authenticity. Produced by Hollywood veteran Hal Wallis, the picture has a gentle and old-fashioned style, even though explorations of race and sex reflect somewhat contemporary attitudes. In other words, the picture surrounds modern thought with a thick shell of Capra-esque hokum. Yet the script, adapted by Margeurite Roberts from Richard Bradford’s novel, is methodical and sensitive in its portrayal of a young man forced by circumstances to embrace a larger world than the one he’s known. That the film contains Richard Thomas’ first leading performance is significant, because for all his limitations as a young actor, Thomas demonstrated a tremendous gift for expressing the confusion of adolescence.

          The picture begins in Alabama, where Frank Arnold (Richard Crenna) prepares for Naval service in World War II. A middle-aged businessman, he enlisted because of patriotism. Before shipping out, Frank escorts his fragile Southern-belle wife, Ann (Claire Bloom), and their teenaged son, Joshua (Thomas), to the family’s second residence in New Mexico, planning for them to live quietly in the Southwest until his return from the war. After Frank leaves, Joshua goes through the predictable difficulties of forming social connections at a new school. He bonds with a misfit intellectual named Marcia (Catherine Davidson) and an extroverted Greek nicknamed “Steenie” (Desi Arnaz Jr.). The trio’s extracurricular adventures include a gross-out test of nerves involving a dead cow. Concurrently, Joshua gets into a hassle with local thugs and watches with alarm as his mother’s sleazy cousin, Jimbob (John Colicos), arrives with designs on taking the absent Frank’s place.

           The plot is dense and rich, sometimes to a fault, but the end result is that Red Sky at Morning takes viewers on a tonally varied journey. Although some supporting characters get such short shrift that removing them entirely would have been advisable, even the peripheral people in Red Sky at Morning generate interesting moments. Ultimately, the story is about Joshua’s growth. His experiences constitute a greatest-hits collection of adolescent milestones, from confronting a parent to losing his virginity, so Thomas gets to play an incredible spectrum of emotions. He mostly serves the material well, as do Bloom, Burns, and Crenna. Arnaz, despite earning a Golden Globe nomination for his work, is forgettable, easily overshadowed by a miscast Harry Guardino and an even-more-miscast Nehemiah Persoff. (Born in Jerusalem, he plays a Latino.) Also strong is Gregory Sierra’s lived-in performance as a local cop.

          Red Sky at Morning gets lost in the wilds of its own storyline at regular intervals, so it’s an unruly piece of work. Nonetheless, the same intricate layers of backstory and characterization that contribute to murkiness give Red Sky at Morning its appealing immersiveness. The film has a strong sense of time and place, and the centrality of Thomas’ character provides a clear point of view.

Red Sky at Morning: GROOVY

The Deserter (1971)

          Part spaghetti Western and part Dirty Dozen ripoff, this Italy/US/Yugoslavia coproduction has a serviceable premise, then loses its way thanks to a forgettable leading performance and an overly mechanical plot. Along the way, several colorful actors are subsumed by the overall mediocrity of the piece, delivering half-hearted interpretations of underdeveloped roles. Even the action highlights are ho-hum. Those who want nothing more from adventure pictures than a steady flow of death-defying bravery and tight-lipped macho posturing will be able to consume the picture like a serving of empty calories, but those who expect anything more will get bored fairly quickly. In the Wild West, U.S. Cavalry soldier Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) completes a fortnight-long patrol and discovers that while he was away, Apaches raided the outpost where he lives and killed his wife. Kaleb blames the death on his superior officer, Colonel Brown (Richard Crenna), so Kaleb tries to quit the service and devote his life to killing Apaches. When Brown refuses Kaleb’s resignation, Kaleb shoots the colonel and becomes a fugitive from military justice. Two years later, blustery General Miles (John Huston) arrives on the scene, demanding that Brown illegally cross the Mexican border to slaughter a band of Apache raiders. What’s more, Miles demands that Brown’s men bring Kaleb in from the wilderness, because during the intervening period, Kaleb has made good on his vengeance pledge by slaughtering Apaches heedlessly, thereby becoming the ideal man to lead the mission into Mexico.

          Once all the narrative pieces are in place, Kaleb finds himself supervising a band of soldiers, including Kaleb, who would just as soon kill the notorious deserter as kill Apaches. Among those playing soldiers are Ian Bannen, Chuck Connors, Ricardo Montalban, Slim Pickens, and Woody Strode. (Naturally, Crenna’s character is along for the ride, too.) With this much talent at their disposal, producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Burt Kennedy should have been able to come up with something much more interesting than The Deserter, which is sometimes known as The Devil’s Backbone. Alas, the script is unrelentingly clichéd, predictable, and superficial, and the filmmakers miscalculated, badly, by casting Yugoslavian stud Fehmiu in the leading role. Just one year previous, Paramount tried to make Fehmiu into an international star by toplining him in the epic melodrama The Adventurers (1970), so this picture presumably represented the completion of a two-picture deal. A European equivalent to, say, James Franciscus, Fehmiu is suitably brooding and athletic, but he’s got the depth and range of a statue. With his performance creating a vacuum at the center of The Deserter, the movie is doomed to disappoint from its very first frames.

The Deserter: FUNKY

Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell (1978)

          Incredibly, the year 1978 birthed not one but two movies about dogs serving supernatural villains, the theatrical feature Dracula’s Dog (also known s Zoltan, The Hound of Dracula) and the made-for-TV thriller Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell. In the telefilm, familiar actors trudge their way through a ridiculous plot, the titular canine accrues an impressive body count, and the whole thing culminates in a low-rent FX sequence that feels like an excerpt from a fever dream. In a too-brief prologue, a Satanist (Martine Beswick) and her accomplices purchase a female German Shepherd from a breeder, then hold a ritual in which Satan is summoned from Hell in the form of a dog to breed with the unfortunate Shepherd. Then the movie introduces businessman Mike Barry (Richard Crenna) and his family—wife Betty (Yvette Mimieux), daughter Bonnie (Kim Richards), and son Charlie (Ike Eisenmann)—in their quiet suburban neighborhood. The family dog is killed in a mysterious hit-and-run accident, and soon afterward one of the Satanists (R.G. Armstrong) turns up in the guise of a traveling fruit vendor who just happens to have adorable German Shepherd puppies available for free adoption. Mike’s kids fall in love with one of the pups, so the dog is given the name “Lucky” and welcomed into the Barry home.

          Weird things start happening immediately, and then people start dying in horrific ways after crossing paths with Lucky. Naturally, Mike is the only person to make the connection, because his loved ones fall under Lucky’s unholy spell. Cue the usual drill of Mike saying to people, “I know this sounds crazy, but . . .” The storyline eventually reaches cartoonish levels of absurdity, as demonstrated by the scene in which Mike tries with no success to kill Lucky with a gun, and the bizarre passage during which Mike travels to Mexico (!) to find an ancient wise man (!!) who tattoos a magical pattern on Mike’s hand (!!!). And we haven’t even gotten to the FX stuff yet. As directed by horror veteran Curtis Harrington, Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell isn’t quite as zippy as it sounds, but the sheer silliness of the endeavor guarantees a high kitsch factor. Crenna looks uncomfortable in every scene, like he’s got a charley horse he can’t shake, and it’s a kick to see Eisenmann and Richards—the kids from Disney’s Witch Mountain movies—acting together in a lesser-known project.

Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell: FUNKY

Doctors’ Wives (1971)

          Pure trash that’s bearable only because of the lurid storyline and the presence of many skilled actors, Doctors’ Wives is a melodrama about the problems of wealthy surgeons and their long-suffering spouses. Somewhat improbably, the movie revolves around a murderer’s elaborate scheme to escape police custody and flee to Europe. And if that makes you think that perhaps a thoughtful examination of the medical community is not the real goal of this movie, then congratulations, you’ve cracked the code. Even with two lengthy surgery scenes that integrate bloody documentary footage, this movie’s about the healing arts in the same way that the 1980s TV show Dynasty was about big business. The nominal milieu is nothing but an excuse for depicting people with too little compassion and too much money.

          The main characters are Dr. Brennan (Richard Crenna) and his estranged wife, Amy (Janice Rule); Dr. Gray (Carroll O’Connor) and his self-loathing wife, Maggie (Cara Williams); Dr. Randolph (Gene Hackman) and his embittered wife, Delia (Rachel Roberts); and Dr. Dellman (John Colicos). In the opening scene, Dr. Dellman’s horny wife, Lorrie (Dyan Cannon), announces her plan to sleep with all of the doctors in order to report back to the women on each man’s sexual failing. When Dr. Dellman catches Lorrie in bed with a surgeon, he shoots her dead, wounding the surgeon in the process. Dr. Dellman confesses and surrenders to the police, but then he contrives a plan. He uses dirty secrets to blackmail his fellow doctors for getaway money, and when he’s asked to perform emergency surgery on a boy who requires Dr. Dellman’s specialized services, Dr. Dellman makes arrangements to slip out of the hospital, avoiding the cops who are watching him. Also thrown into the mix is a tawdry subplot about Dr. Brennan’s extramarital affair with an African-American nurse, Helen (Diana Sands), as well as a separate subplot about a doctor’s wife stealing his meds in order to feed her appetite for morphine.

          Suffering from one-dimensional characterizations and trite dialogue, Doctors’ Wives is so generic that even the best actors in the cast operate, no pun intended, while handicapped by the material. O’Connor and Sands wring some pathos out of key scenes, but otherwise everyone is stuck delivering obvious lines amid predictable scenarios. At least the flmmakers keep things moving along quickly, so viewers never have to linger on any particular scene very long. It says a lot that Cannon, the liveliest actor in the cast seeing as how Hackman is hamstrung by the limitations of a small secondary role, disappears from the movie after the first 10 minutes. When a movie that’s largely about sex loses its principal sexpot early, that’s a sure sign of trouble.

Doctors’ Wives: FUNKY

The Evil (1978)

          Schlocky but entertaining, The Evil takes the haunted-house genre to its logical extreme, resulting in a climax that’s embarrassingly obvious and stupid. Before it totally goes off the rails, however, the movie offers a number of gruesome deaths and touches on nearly every cliché associated with the haunted-house genre—apparitions, inexplicable noises, objects moved about by unseen forces, people possessed by dastardly spirits, and so on. None of what happens is particularly scary, so The Evil plays out like one of those old ’50s horror comics—it’s all about the fun of playing with concepts that might actually be scary if they were executed with greater care and sophistication. Because, rest assured, care and sophistication are not among the elements that cowriter-director Gus Trikonis brings to the party. Trikonis and his collaborators generate a few decent effects, particularly during scenes of people getting thrown around by supernatural powers, but The Evil is bargain-basement pulp through and through.

          Richard Crenna, all beardy and serious, plays Dr. C.J. Arnold, a shrink who rents an old mansion for a summer of psychiatric research. Several colleagues gravitate to the mansion in order to help with the project. While the scientists prep the house in anticipation of receiving patients, C.J.’s wife, Dr. Caroline Arnold (Joanna Pettet), sees ghostly visions and strange phenomena, including a fireplace roaring to life without being ignited. Concurrently, director Trikonis shows the house flexing its maniacal muscle, because the live-in caretaker gets burned alive when a magical jet of flame bursts from a furnace. Demonstrating why it is unwise to parse the logic of The Evil, C.J. doesn’t perform the de rigueur act of foolishly unleashing the malevolent entity that resides in the house until about 30 minutes into the story, when he removes a crucifix that’s holding a secret compartment in the basement closed. (Because, of course, that’s what any sensible person would do upon encountering a secret compartment locked with a crucifix.)

          The problem, from a story perspective, is that the house has already racked up a body count before C.J. uncorks the hidey-hole, so the story that subsequently unfolds—in which the heroes must reseal the compartment in order to save themselves—doesn’t reconcile with onscreen events. Nonetheless, one doesn’t watch a flick like The Evil for masterful storytelling, and Triknois provides enough mayhem to keep casual viewers engaged. A couple of folks get electrocuted, a dude gets swallowed by the earth, and an unfortunate lady gets most of her clothes ripped off by demonic winds. You get the idea. The acting in The Evil is nothing special, although everyone delivers basically competent work, and it’s a hoot to see corpulent bon vivant Victor Buono show up for a ridiculous cameo at the end.

The Evil: FUNKY

Un Flic (1972)

          The final film of French director Jean-Pierre Melville, a specialist in postmodern hard-boiled cinema, Un Flic has enough style for a dozen movies, even though the plot leaves something to be desired. Starring suave Alain Delon as a Parisian police superintendent, the picture is a methodical, sleek examination of the title character’s investigation of an armed robbery that turns out to have larger implications. The picture soars when presenting a twilight world filled with amoral people and wicked schemes; Melville treats actors and objects as colors in his deliberately minimal palette. Yet the picture falls short in characterization, since Melville is obviously more interested in mood than in psychology. Still, with Paris as the primary backdrop and the beautiful faces of Delon and leading lady Catherine Denueve at his disposal, it’s hard to blame the director for getting preoccupied with surfaces.

          The movie begins with a brief introduction to Edouard (Delon), an unflappable detective who spends his evening prowling the Parisian underworld to resolve cases that flummox other policemen. Then the movie shifts to a bank robbery overseen by Simon (Richard Crenna). The robbery ends with one bystander murdered and one accomplice wounded. While the injured crook is hospitalized, Edouard cleverly connects the man to the crime; then the policeman works informants and discovers that the robbery was merely the prelude to an elaborate train heist. Concurrently, Edouard spends time with his glamorous mistress, Cathy (Deneuve), who is also Simon’s lover—although Edouard initially has no idea that Simon is involved with criminal enterprises.

          While the procedural aspects of the story come together well, culminating in an deliciously ambiguous finale, the romantic-triangle thread fizzles after too many excessively cryptic scenes. Plus, the nature of the principal Gallic performances creates an inherent storytelling obstacle—Delon and Deneuve transfix with their looks, but neither actor communicates much emotional heat. Meanwhile, the valiant Crenna’s work is hampered by dubbed dialogue, for although the Hollywood star spoke his French lines on set, a performer with better diction was hired to loop the role during post-production.

          These shortcomings aside, Un Flic has an utterly unique look that communicates Melville’s themes beautifully. In addition to employing such playfully artificial tools as miniatures for train scenes and process shots for driving scenes, Melville presents the whole film in a cool shade of blue—it seems likely he shot daylight film without adjusting for artificial light, and vice versa, so even the whites in Melville’s images (with a few exceptions) feel slightly azure. This offbeat visual device makes Un Flic seem as if it exists within a universe all its own. Better still, the most effective sequences do more than merely cast a spell with visuals. The centerpiece of the picture, for instance, is a real-time staging of the audacious train heist, an impressive 20-minute sequence almost entirely bereft of dialogue. Similarly, the opening robbery sequence and Edouard’s final scramble to capture fleeing criminals are studies in economy.

Un Flic: GROOVY

Footsteps (1972)

          Nominated for a Golden Globe as the best TV movie of its year, Footsteps is a hard-driving character drama set in the competitive world of college football. Yet instead of focusing on the tribulations of athletes, as is the norm for the genre, Footsteps explores the psychology of a ruthless coach whose belligerence, drinking, and shady ethics have made him a pariah among top schools. Richard Crenna, putting his customary intensity to great use, stars as Paddy O’Connor, a cocky ex-player with a good record of guiding teams toward victory, but a bad record of holding onto jobs.
          When the movie begins, he arrives in a small Southwestern town to start work as a defensive coordinator at a regional college. Since the school’s head coach, Jonas Kane (Clu Gulager), once played for O’Connor, O’Connor bristles at taking orders from a former subordinate. O’Connor also angles for Kane’s job, sleeps with Kane’s secretary to get inside information, cozies up to a deep-pocketed sponsor (Forrest Tucker) in order to have a star player moved to defense, and makes passes at Kane’s girlfriend, beautiful drama teacher Sarah Allison (Joanna Pettet). For a while, O’Connor gets away with his behavior by delivering a winning season, but things come to a head when moral crises reveal how conscience sometimes inhibits ambition.

          Although it suffers from brevity, running the standard 74 minutes for a ’70s TV movie, Footsteps is quite solid. Featuring a script co-written by future Oscar winner Alvin Sargent, the movie has several compelling confrontations. Moreover, the O’Connor character is such a force of nature that it’s fascinating to parse how much of his act is bluster and how much is justifiable confidence. Though generally not the deepest actor, Crenna slips into this role comfortably and delivers a virile performance. The supporting cast is fine as well, with Bill Overton doing strong work as O’Connor’s star player. (Ned Beatty is wasted in a tiny role.) Veteran TV director Paul Wendkos accentuates the story’s inherent tension with tight compositions placing actors in close proximity, and the filmmakers employ trippy effects like solarization and split-screens to enliven big-game montages that were obviously cobbled together from stock footage.

Footsteps: GROOVY

Breakheart Pass (1975)

          Though he spent most of the ’70s starring in ultraviolent thrillers, Charles Bronson also displayed a lighter touch in occasional escapist adventures. One of the most diverting of these efforts is Breakheart Pass, adapted by bestselling novelist Alistair MacLean from his own book. Breakheart Pass is a Western thriller gene-spliced with bits and bobs from the espionage and murder-mystery genres, set primarily on a passenger train barreling through the wintry wilds of the Midwest. Governor Fairchild (Richard Crenna) is on board the train to oversee the delivery of medical supplies to a fort that’s suffering an outbreak of diphtheria. During a routine stop in a frontier town, U.S. Marshal Pearce (Ben Johnson) talks his way into passage on the train, bringing along his prisoner, medical lecturer-turned-suspected murderer Deakin (Bronson). Once the train gets moving again, several passengers are mysteriously killed, so Deakin sniffs around and discovers that the diphtheria outbreak is a ruse invented to cover a heinous conspiracy to which the governor is party. So, in the classic mode, Deakin has to figure out whom he can trust as he smokes out the bad guys, all while racing the clock before the train arrives at a rendezvous with destiny.

          Breakheart Pass is enjoyably overstuffed with manly-man excitement: The picture has bloodthirsty criminals, fistfights atop moving trains, marauding Indians, revelations of secret identities, shootouts in the snowy wilderness, unexpected double-crosses, and even a spectacular crash. As with most of MacLean’s stories, credibility takes a backseat to generating pulpy narrative, so trying to unravel the story afterward raises all sorts of questions about logic and motivation. Still, Breakheart Pass is thoroughly enjoyable in a cartoonish sort of way. Veteran TV director Tom Gries keeps scenes brisk and taut, and he benefits from a cast filled with top-notch character players, including Charles Durning, David Huddleston, Ed Lauter, Bill McKinney, and others. As for the leading players, Bronson presents a likeable version of macho nonchalance, while Crenna essays his oily character smoothly. Predictably, the female lead is Bronson’s real-life wife, Jill Ireland, who costarred in a dozen of her husband’s ’70s pictures.

Breakheart Pass: GROOVY

Catlow (1971)

Who knew the world needed a grisly Louis L’Amour adaptation featuring a nude scene by Mr. Spock? What’s that you say? The world didn’t need a movie like that? Well, too bad, because for better or worse (mostly worse), Catlow exists. Yul Brynner plays the title character, an outlaw who gets wind of when and where a group of soldiers are transporting a shipment of gold. Catlow’s decision to make a play for the loot puts an understandable strain on his friendship with a U.S. Marshal (Richard Crenna), so chrome-domed Catlow finds himself in the crosshairs of the law, the soldiers, and even a hired killer (Nimoy). Seeing the once-and-future science officer of the starship Enterprise in an offbeat context is about the only novelty value that Catlow offers, because the picture is a shoddily produced and thoroughly mean-spirited Western made at a time when such films were churned out by the dozen, especially in Europe. Brynner does his usual stoic bit and Crenna delivers his standard clenched-teeth performance, so only Nimoy gets to do something outside his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seize the opportunity. For all of about five minutes, it’s a kick to see him Nimoy a full beard and grimly mowing down everyone in his path, but he doesn’t have a character to play, and his performance is restrained to the point of catatonia. (I blame the circumstances, because he was great in the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) The only moment Nimoy gets lively is the aforementioned bare-ass bit, a nasty brawl that begins when his character is taking a bath, but Catlow is so poorly made that in half the shots of this scene, Nimoy’s wearing an anachronistic black Speedo, while in the other half sloppy editing leaves Nimoy adrift in compromising angles. When a scene filled with technical errors is the only one that makes an impression, that’s generally not considered a good sign.

Catlow: LAME