The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972)

          Appraised solely for its political bona fides, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine is impeccable, conveying activist priest Father Daniel Berrigan’s poetic record of his involvement with the illegal destruction of Vietnam-era draft records. Every frame of the picture exudes righteous indignation, and the movie was released at a moment when every voice raised against an unjust war mattered. Seen today, it’s a bit of a slog even though it contains fine work by several terrific actors, especially the great Ed Flanders, who stars as Berrigan. The problem with The Trial of the Catonsville Nine today is that it unfolds as a scattershot expression of rage against the machine—specifically, the American military-industrial complex. Amid glorious speeches are heavy-handed inserts depicting battlefield atrocities and campus protests. It’s all meaningful, but it’s also monotonous and repetitive.

          In 1968, Berrigan and eight other activists snatched hundreds of draft records from an office in Maryland, dragged them to a parking lot, and immolated the records using homemade napalm. The activists remained in place awaiting arrest, hoping their ensuing trial would help draw attention to the antiwar movement. The trial resulted in convictions for all involved, though Berrigan fled, remaining a fugitive until 1970, at which point he was incarcerated for two years. The film opens with a brief dramatization of the crime, then shifts to a stylized courtroom set. Although Berrrigan’s original play was written in verse, the movie employs an alternate script by Saul Levitt, which transposes Berrigan’s text into dramatic scenes. In its best moments, the film has the tension of a proper courtroom drama, alternating heated ethical debates with brazen procedural maneuvers. In its driest moments, the movie becomes a hectoring leftist sermon that portrays the U.S. government as a corrupt empire.

          What redeems the viewing experience, beyond the beauty and passion of Berrigan’s language, is the acting. Flanders conveyed compassion and vulnerability with special grace, so he’s perfect in the leading role. Richard Jordan and Donald Moffat, also deeply humanistic actors, excel as two of Berrigan’s co-conspirators, and William Schallert displays unexpected colors as the trial’s sympathetic judge—what a pleasure to see him in a part this dimensional. It’s also worth noting the behind-the-camera participation of two important figures. Actor Gregory Peck, who does not appear in the film, financed and produced The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, while cinematographer Haskell Wexler, always eager to help an underdog cause, shot the picture.

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine: FUNKY

Les Miserables (1978)

          There are so many adaptation of Victor Hugo’s deathless 1862 novel that it’s impossible to call any one version definitive; from the celebrated stage musical to the various film adaptations to the novel itself, there’s a Les Miserables for any taste. In fact, there’s even a Les Miserables for those who prefer their cinema ’70s-style, thanks to this sturdy made-for-television production starring the underrated Richard Jordan as long-suffering hero Jean Valjean and veteran screen villain Anthony Perkins as dogged Inspector Javert. Efficiently directed by Glenn Jordon and intelligently scripted by John Gay, this version of Les Miserables delivers the familiar characters, moments, and situations with an acceptable replica of human emotion. Jordan achieves more than Perkins (who is mostly relegated to sneering), but the combination of a melancholy musical score, solid production values, and the vibrancy of Hugo’s incredible narrative makes this trek through familiar terrain worthwhile.

          Presenting a somewhat faithful adaptation while adding a few bits, deleting many more, and generally streamlining the storyline of the novel, the picture begins in France circa 1796. Poor Frenchman Jean steals a loaf of bread from a store window in order to feed his starving family, but he’s captured and sentenced to five years in prison. As more and more years are added to his sentence, Jean attempts to escape several times until finally breaking free once he’s reached middle age. Prison commandant Javert, well aware of Jean’s resilience, considers it a personal failure when Jean escapes. Upon gaining his freedom, Jean reverts to thievery for survival—until an encounter with a saintly clergyman gifts Jean with both wealth and the determination to live righteously. Jean becomes a successful businessman under an assumed name. Then, once fate brings him back into Javert’s orbit, Jean realizes that his liberty is tenuous. The situation is further complicated by the onset of the June Rebellion and by Jean’s selfless choice to become the guardian of an orphaned girl.

          Even though the filmmakers excised plenty of material, the telefilm of Les Miserables contains a lot of story, so the filmmakers wisely focus on the most dramatic scenes. Jean saving a fellow prisoner from certain death. Jean’s epiphany with the clergyman. Jean’s tense standoffs with Javert, during which they debate the value of the individual versus the need for social order. Jordan does some lovely work, showcasing his charismatic blend of masculinity and vulnerability, though he’s burdened with overly ornate dialogue and, in later scenes, questionable old-age makeup. Perkins, meanwhile, play-acts the role of Javert instead of inhabiting the character’s hatefulness; that said, Perkins is such a pro that his sour expressions add weight whether or not they’re backed by real intentionality.

          It’s easy to complain about episodes that get glossed over, and this probably shouldn’t be anyone’s first exposure to the story because certain things end up feeling too pat and predictable. However, there’s enough human feeling pumping through the piece—both from the DNA of Hugo’s novel and the earnestness of Jordan’s take on the leading role—that this Les Miserables comes across like meaningful entertainment instead of just another musty literary adaptation.

Les Miserables: GROOVY

1980 Week: Raise the Titanic

An idea in search of a plot—to say nothing of meaningful characters—the lavishly produced adventure film Raise the Titanic offers virtually nothing of interest beyond the spectacular sequence promised by the title. At one point during the film, enterprising scientists do indeed use explosives and giant balloons to draw the wreck of the H.M.S. Titanic to the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, an impressive visual brought to life by scale models, special effects, and a substitute vessel covered in decades of rust. (No real Titanic parts were harmed in the making of the picture.) Beyond these approximately 10 minutes of screen time, however, Raise the Titanic is a snooze. Based upon a novel by Clive Cussler, who disavowed the film because producer Sir Lew Grade employed a flotilla of screenwriters in the course of dramatically altering the storyline, Raise the Titanic revolves around the daft notion that a cache of secret weapons-grade minerals were stored aboard the famous “unsinkable” ship during its doomed maiden voyage. As viewers discover during endless dialogue scenes, myriad parties wish to recover the minerals because doing so would, in theory, change the balance of power in the Cold War. Giving the story a threadbare excuse for credibility, these various parties determine that the minerals cannot be salvaged from the ship because it rests too deep beneath the waves for divers or remote-controlled submersibles to enter. Had the filmmakers found a way to make the actual salvage mission the focus of the story, Raise the Titanic might have provided a few thrills. Instead, the film provides lots of dull intrigue on dry land and inside sea vessels before and after the titular event. Characters, complications, and motivations are forgettable and interchangeable. Grade must have written generous checks, however, because strong actors muddle their way through lifeless scenes: The cast includes Anne Archer, Alec Guinness, Richard Jordan, Jason Robards, David Selby, and M. Emmet Walsh. All play second fiddle to special effects, and not even John Barry’s glorious musical score is enough to lodge Raise the Titanic in the viewer’s imagination.

Raise the Titanic: LAME

A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square (1979)

          Inexplicably taking its name from a 1939 romantic ballad that was recorded enough times over the years to become a crusty standard, the weak heist comedy A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square stars the American actor Richard Jordan as an amiable criminal operating on foreign soil. When the UK-made picture begins, Pinky (Jordan) earns parole from a British prison by way of good behavior, promising his jailors that he plans to make an honest living as an electrical engineer. Stretching credibility way past the breaking point, Pinky soon lands a job at a major bank—because, apparently, British financial institutions don’t perform background checks on prospective employees. Anyway, Pinky plays things straight until he inadvertently reconnects with local crime lord Ivan (David Niven), who coerces Pinky into helping Ivan and his crooked gang rob the bank. Various twists and turns ensue, most of which are predictable.

          Although neither writer Guy Elmes nor director Ralph Thomas add much to the vocabulary of heist movies—quite to the contrary, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square is thoroughly forgettable and generic—the filmmakers benefit from a pair of nimble leading players. Jordan, the handsome stage-trained actor who generally fared better with heavy dramatic material, is left adrift throughout much of the movie, because the filmmakers seem unsure about whether to present Jordan’s character as cocksure or sincere. Nonetheless, Jordan lands a few key moments with emotional authenticity, especially during scenes depicting his character under duress. Costar Niven, meanwhile, effortlessly steals the movie with his carefree-urbanite routine, even though the plot requires viewers to accept Niven as having the potential to become a cold-blooded killer. Still, whenever Jordan as the crude and swaggering American is juxtaposed with Niven as the masterful and suave Englishman, it’s possible to see the culture-clash patter the filmmakers presumably envisioned.

          Supporting players Richard Johnson and Oliver Tobias add welcome flavors to the mix as, respectively, a dogged police inspector and Pinky’s best friend. Lost in the shuffle, however, are actresses Gloria Grahame and Elke Sommer. Grahame’s role as the mother of Tobias’ character is inconsequential, and Sommer merely provides eye candy by wearing a succession of slinky outfits and appearing in a laughably gratuitous nude scene. Another problem with the choppily edited movie is the terrible music score by the normally reliable Stanley Myers; the main theme sounds like the house band from Hee-Haw trying to play the theme from The Benny Hill Show.

A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square: FUNKY

Interiors (1978)

          After writing and directing an extraordinary run of comedy films, from 1969’s Take the Money and Run to 1977’s Annie Hall, Woody Allen needed a change, so he dove headlong into drama with Interiors, a grim chamber piece that recalls the work of Allen’s cinematic hero, Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman. Like Bergman’s myriad stories about the mysteries of the human soul, Interiors presents sophisticated but troubled individuals who possess the uncanny ability to articulate even the most miniscule nuances of emotion. Yet while Bergman’s singular movies exist on some elevated metaphorical plane that justifies the contrivance of hyper-verbal characters, Allen’s endeavor represents a queasy hybrid of realism and symbolism. That said, it’s helpful to view Interiors as a transitional moment, because while making his very next movie, 1979’s Manhattan, Allen found a more comfortable idiom by merging comedy with drama. Therefore, it’s as if Allen needed to flush jokes out of his system before he could evolve into a mature artist.
          This long preamble is a kind way of saying that Interiors would seem laughably dour and pretentious had it been made by anyone but a legitimate filmmaker in the midst of an important metamorphosis. In fact, notwithstanding rapturous cinematography by Gordon Willis and strong performances by an eclectic cast, Interiors sometimes approaches self-parody.
          Set primarily at a beach house in the Hamptons, the story borrows from the Eugene O’Neill template of a family plagued by epic dysfunction. Eve (Geraldine Page), an interior designer in late middle age, has been in crisis ever since her husband, Arthur (E.G. Marshall), left her. Over the course of several months, Eve attempts suicide, Arthur remarries, and their daughters wrestle with various neuroses. Nearly every scene in the picture features a depressing visual metaphor, whether it’s an off-white wall decorated by Eve as an expression of her barren emotional life, or an ominous shadow indicative of the ennui suffocating the characters.

          While undeniably artistic, intelligent, and ruminative, Allen’s unrelenting screenplay feels contrived, especially when characters unleash reams of overwritten dialogue. For instance, put-upon daughter Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) delivers a speech that summarizes the movie’s themes far too perfectly: “All the beautifully furnished rooms, carefully designed interiors—everything’s so controlled. There wasn’t any room for any real feelings.” And the scripting gets worse. Later in the same scene, Joey says, “There’s been perverseness and willfulness of attitude to many of the things you’ve done.” Allen has often evinced a proclivity for lines that are so “written” they sound unnatural emanating from actors, but his dramaturgical instinct has rarely failed him as completely as it does throughout Interiors.

          That said, the film is hardly without virtues. Aesthetically, Interiors is a triumph, with the combination of long takes and purposeful silence (there is no score) creating just the right kind of claustrophobia. Furthermore, the acting is impassioned, with performers struggling to make Allen’s stilted worlds sound organic—and occasionally succeeding. Page and costar Maureen Stapleton (who plays Arthur’s second wife) both received Oscar nominations, while Hurt, Marshall, Richard Jordan, and Diane Keaton all do strong work. Each character in the film, however, is essentially an elevated version of a cliché: the alcoholic novelist, the happy idiot, the soulful depressive, the vapid actress, and so on. Accordingly, Interiors remains most interesting as an artistic steppingstone, because it’s far too artificial, chilly, and pretentious to fully succeed as a movie.

Interiors: FUNKY

Lawman (1971)

          Provocative and savage, Lawman offers an unflinching take on the iconography of the Western vigilante, positing that a killer with a badge can be as destructive to society as the criminals he’s charged with bringing to justice. Arriving around the same time as a slew of movies about modern-day vigilantism, Lawman didn’t capture the public imagination like Dirty Harry or Straw Dogs, both of which were released the same year—or even Death Wish (1974), which was made by Lawman’s director, Michael Winner—but Lawman is an interesting companion to those enduring pictures.

          An ethical rumination set in such a minor key that many viewers will find the storyline unpalatably depressing, Lawman bravely defines its hero as the worst monster in his bloody environment. If violence begets violence, the movie seems to argue, then rampant violence can easily conjure that most grisly of oxymorons, “justifiable homicide.” And yet the most interesting aspect of Lawman is that the murders committed by the story’s antihero are only nominally sanctioned by society; supporting characters spend the entire narrative trying, in vain, to persuade the titular peacekeeper from using lethal force.

          Burt Lancaster, who was always game for playing brutal sons of bitches, puts his florid acting style to good use essaying Jered Maddox, a U.S. Marshal without an iota of mercy. When the story begins, several cowboys from a ranch situated outside of a tiny town called Sabbath—make what you will of the symbolism—accidentally kill a bystander during a drunken binge. Maddox hears of the crime and kills one of the cowboys, then rides into Sabbath and proclaims his intention to eradicate all of the men responsible. This puts him in conflict not only with overbearing rancher Vincent Bronson (Lee J. Cobb), who employs the cowboys, but also with Sabbath’s comparatively weak-willed sheriff, Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan). As the movie progresses, Maddox resists entreaties to his conscience and to his bank account, even endangering his renewed love affair with an old flame (Sheree J. North), all because of his single-minded devotion to eye-for-an-eye absolutism.

          The story stirs up thorny questions about whether a society that kills killers is worth preserving; about how deeply the meting out of deadly justice corrupts the executioner; and about what role compassion plays in the whole mix. Gerry Wilson’s script is probably a bit too literary for its own good, and the pervasive darkness of the story will be a turnoff for those who like their morality plays leavened with escapism. But especially thanks to the presence of a great supporting cast—including Robert Duvall, Richard Jordan, and Ralph Waite—this one goes down smoothly for those with a taste for bitter parables. Best of all, the final scene, in which Cobb’s thunderous performance reaches an ironically pathetic crescendo, resonates on myriad levels.

Lawman: GROOVY

The Yakuza (1974)

          Director Sydney Pollack took a lot of critical flack for shoehorning love stories into movies that couldn’t organically contain them, as if he wanted to sprinkle the fairy dust of his breakthrough hit The Way We Were (1973) onto every subsequent project. It’s a fair complaint, especially when one considers a Pollack film such as The Yakuza, which suffers from narrative bloat—the film’s romantic subplots are handled with intelligence and taste, but they’re borderline superfluous. That said, it seems ungallant to gripe about a director who endeavored to invest all of his pictures with as much grown-up human feeling as possible. So perhaps it’s best to regard The Yakuza as an embarrassment of riches: Nearly everything in the movie is interesting, even though Pollack regularly forgets what sort of film he’s trying to make.

          At its best, the picture is a tough gangster story with an exotic setting; at its worst, The Yakuza is a sensitive drama about a man in late life reconnecting with a lost love. So while action funs may find the touchy-feely stuff dull, and while viewers more interested in the heartfelt material may be turned off by the bloody bits, watching the disparate elements fight for dominance is fascinating.

          Based on an original script by Leonard Schrader, who lived in Japan for some time, and his celebrated brother, Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader, The Yakuza went through the usual Pollack-supervised rewrite routine, getting a credited overhaul from A-lister Robert Towne (as well as, presumably, uncredited tinkering by others). The convoluted story revolves around Harry Kilmer (Robert Mitchum), an aging WWII vet asked to perform a favor for his old friend, George Tanner (Brian Keith). George has gotten into trouble with the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia), so he needs Harry, who knows Japanese culture, to smooth out relations. Harry travels to Japan with George’s hotheaded young associate, Dusty (Richard Jordan), and coordinates with a former Yakuza member, Ken Tanaka (Ken Takakura). Harry’s crew stumbles into a complicated war between American and Japanese criminals, and also between various Yakuza factions. Meanwhile, Harry reconnects with Eiko (Keiko Kishi), the Japanese woman he loved while he was stationed in Japan during WWII. Both obviously want to pick up where they left off, but their relationship is complicated by ancient traditions and surprising family ties.

          Describing the plot doesn’t do The Yakuza any favors, since the story doesn’t “work” in a conventional sense; the narrative is far too muddled and tonally inconsistent. Nonetheless, The Yakuza offers rewards for patient viewers. The performances are uniformly poignant, with Mitchum’s world-weariness setting the downbeat tone. Jordan and Keith complement him with macho brashness; Kishi and Takakura are quietly soulful; and Herb Edelman, playing an old friend of Harry’s, offers a sweet quality of peacenik anguish. James Shigeta is terrific, too, in a handful of scenes as Ken’s tightly wound brother. Melding his signature classicism with uniquely Japanese textures, such as highly formalized framing, Pollack and cinematographer Kôzô Okazaki fill the screen with artistry and color. Plus, the movie introduced America viewers to a bloody Yakuza ritual that will linger with you long after the movie ends—ouch!

The Yakuza: GROOVY

Old Boyfriends (1979)

Old Boyfriends is a painfully dull movie made by a number of people who should have known better. Screenwriting brothers Leonard Schrader and Paul Schrader, who are best known separately and apart for making dark dramas with complicated male protagonists, ventured way outside their comfort zones to create this unconvincing story about a troubled young woman working through an identity crisis by tracking down her exes. Talia Shire, who was at this point in her career embarking on a series of shockingly unsuccessful star vehicles in between appearing in Rocky sequels, delivers what can only be described as a non-performance. Bland to the extreme of barely registering on camera, she alternates between moping, whining, and fading into the woodwork while other actors do all the heavy lifting. Also, there’s a reason first-time director Joan Tewksbury, best known as the screenwriter of Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), gravitated to television after this movie tanked; her inability to generate and sustain interest is stunning. Even the movie’s score is misguided, because composer David Shire contributes music so gloomy and overwrought you’d think he was generating accompaniment for a Holocaust saga. What little notoriety Old Boyfriends has probably stems from John Belushi’s appearance in a supporting role. (Shire’s character visits two exes, played by Richard Jordan and Belushi, before visiting the younger brother, played by Keith Carradine, of a third ex.) Belushi incarnates a dramatic riff on his Animal House character of an obnoxious man-child, and the meanness he channels into his performance almost brings the movie to life for a while. He also sings “Jailhouse Rock,” just a year before he performed the same song in The Blues Brothers. Alas, Shire’s vapidity and the script’s contrived rhythms prevent even the Belushi scenes from soaring. In fact, nearly the only segment of movie that really works is a fun but peripheral bit with Buck Henry as a laconic private eye.

Old Boyfriends: LAME

Beyond and Back (1978)

          The dubious-documentary folks at Sunn Classic Pictures strike again with this sensationalistic study of near-death experiences, which is filled with so many bogus assertions, staged reenactments, and unsupported claims that its relationship to fact is laughably remote. That said, Beyond and Back is entertaining-ish, even though it goes on far too long, and during its best moments, the movie casts a creepy spell. Beardy, bearish host Brad Crandall—a hirsute professor type with a deep, melodic voice—introduces the movie from a mist-filled graveyard, and then retires to a library from which he remarks upon various episodes. Most of the vignettes are reenactments of incidents involving everyday people who “crossed over” while they were clinically dead for brief periods.

          The depiction of this phenomenon is similar in every episode. After the person dies, the camera rises above the person to represent the perspective of an out-of-body spirit, and then bright light shoots toward the camera. Next, the camera hurtles along a tunnel, or shifts to some idyllic setting, and in many instances the subject encounters a vision of Jesus before being told their time on Earth is not yet done. In between these reenactments, Crandall shares the usual Sunn Classics brand of “facts and figures”—serious-sounding pseudoscience that’s really a lurid mix of hearsay and hogwash. In Crandall’s finest deadpan moment, he sums up a series of vignettes illustrating the last words of dying people thusly: “All these people died after having their visions, and so can tell us little.”

          Beyond and Back is more focused than the usual Sunn Classic product, since projects like The Mysterious Monsters (1976) cover multiple believe-it-or-not mysteries at once, but Beyond and Back suffers for this singularity of purpose, because the picture is padded and repetitive. Nonetheless, Beyond and Back has several engaging moments of cheesy melodrama, notably a long sequence about a WWII private’s near-death experience. The voice of the actor playing the private was unmistakably replaced with that of Hollywood leading man Richard Jordan (although Jordan is not credited), and Jordan’s emotional line readings give Beyond and Back a few moments of dramatic credibility. FYI, this movie is not to be confused with the following year’s release Beyond Death’s Door, also from Sunn Classic Pictures.

Beyond and Back: FUNKY

Rooster Cogburn (1975)

          More of a merger between two established cinematic brand names than an organic creative enterprise, Rooster Cogburn offers the unlikely screen duo of towering he-man John Wayne and delicate blueblood Katharine Hepburn. A sequel to True Grit (1969), the movie for which Wayne won his only Oscar, this lively Western adventure story reprises Wayne’s award-winning role of drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn and pairs the character with a Bible-thumping East Coast transplant named Eula Goodnight (Hepburn). Each role is catered to the persona of the respective screen legend, so Rooster Cogburn delivers exactly what longtime fans of the actors want, and nothing more: Wayne is cranky and heroic and macho, while Hepburn is articulate and defiant and indomitable. The movie is therefore hard to beat for sheer crowd-pleasing star power, but aesthetic dissonance abounds.

          For instance, the acting styles of the two stars are so wildly divergent that the performers seem to exist in parallel universes even when they occupy the same shot. Wayne poses and preens, pausing arbitrarily like he’s struggling to remember his lines, while Hepburn powers through reams of dialogue effortlessly; however, each accentuates the other’s peculiar appeal, since Wayne’s frontier authenticity compensates for his lack of acting ability in the same way that Hepburn’s numerous affectations are leavened by her supreme dramatic skills. With star personalities the main attraction, it doesn’t matter that Rooster Cogburn’s story is redundant and trite.

          Just like in True Grit, Cogburn embarks on a hunt for a pack of killers accompanied by the willful daughter of a murdered man. In this case, Eula is the adult child of a preacher who was gunned down by varmints led by Hawk (Richard Jordan), a thief who has stolen a wagonload of government nitro for use in a robbery. When Cogburn accepts the job of capturing Hawk, Eula insists on tagging along, so the bulk of the picture comprises cutesy scenes of Rooster and Eula bickering even as they develop grudging affection for each other. There are several exciting action sequences, particularly a raft ride down nasty white water, and attractive location photography in Oregon adds to the film’s appeal. Jordan delivers enjoyable villainy, doing the best he can with an underwritten role, and costar Anthony Zerbe lends a bit of nuance as a gun-for-hire with conflicted emotions. Directed with workmanlike efficiency by Stuart Millar, Rooster Cogburn is pure hokum, and it never pretends otherwise.

Rooster Cogburn: FUNKY

Chato’s Land (1972)

          British filmmaker Michael Winner made a slew of gruesome movies in the ’70s and ’80s, often starring Charles Bronson as tight-lipped avengers who let their bloody actions speak for them. At their best, the duo created provocative work like Death Wish (1974). At their worst, they made ugly trash like Chato’s Land, which can best be described as a two-hour murder symphony. It’s hard to tell which element of the picture is most confusing and distasteful: The casting of Lithuanian-descended Bronson as a half-breed Apache, or the weird plot that presents Bronson’s character, Chato, as a vigilante seeking revenge even though he’s the perpetrator of a crime instead of the victim.

          At the beginning of the story, Chato struts into a white town, lets a racist marshal talk him into an argument, and kills the lawman instead of walking away. After Chato heads for the Indian country outside town, he’s pursued by ex-Confederate solider Capt. Whitmore (Jack Palance) and a posse of bloodthirsty townies. Once the pursuers slip into “Chato’s land,” the half-breed uses clever guerilla tactics to demoralize the posse. Then, when the pursuers rape and murder Chato’s relatives, he declares war. The problem is one of motivation: The attack that justifies Chato’s vigilantism doesn’t happen until after he’s already started picking off his enemies. Since Chato’s Land is merely a quick-and-dirty action picture, it’s unlikely the filmmakers were trying to make a nuanced statement about violence begetting violence—therefore, the storytelling just seems sloppy. It doesn’t help that most of the posse members are depicted as cartoonish rednecks, notably vile Elias (Ralph Waite) and his sex-crazed little brother, Earl (Richard Jordan). There’s some lip service given to the subject of morality, with characters including grizzled frontiersman Joshua (James Whitmore) questioning the virtue of violence, but the talk rings hollow as Winner stages one elaborate kill scene after another.

          Beyond its dubious content, Chato’s Land also suffers from erratic acting: Whereas Jordan, Waite, and Whitmore chew up the scenery, Palance wanders around in a daze, whispering elegiac monologues that don’t make much sense, and Bronson just glares a lot. Furthermore, since Bronson spends most of the movie flitting about in a loincloth, his taut musculature ends up giving a more expressive performance than his famously squinty face.

Chato’s Land: LAME

Logan’s Run (1976)

          For many fantasy fans of a certain Gen-X vintage, Logan’s Run is the most beloved sci-fi film of the ’70s—with the notable exception of a certain George Lucas-directed blockbuster. Featuring a terrific premise, exciting action sequences, memorable production design, and a musical score filled with far-out electronic sounds, Logan’s Run has an intoxicating vibe. So even though the cheese factor is high, thanks to questionable special-effects miniatures and a generally dated aesthetic, the picture still works as stylish escapism.

          Based on a novel by George Clayton Johnson and William F. Nolan, the story introduces a 23rd-century society comprising a series of interconnected domes that contain climate-controlled luxury environments. By day, the society’s gorgeous young citizens perform easy jobs aided by pervasive technology. By night, they engage in culturally acceptable hedonism, trading sexual favors without emotional hang-ups. The only catch is that when each citizen reaches the age of 30, he or she must enter a violent arena called the Carousel, in which strivers who fail to reach the prize of “renewal” die on the spot.

          The citizens are so narcotized by their easy lives that no one questions their built-in expiration dates except “runners,” rebels who flee the domes to join a secret underground. Logan-5 (Michael York) is a “sandman,” a gun-toting cop employed by the city’s computerized overlords to hunt and kill runners as a means of maintaining order. When Logan discovers a clue about the runners’ hidden citadel, Sanctuary, his lifespan is abruptly abbreviated so he can go undercover as a runner—a harsh move that eventually turns Logan against his former superiors.

          Logan’s Run is filled with imaginative details, like the high-tech “New You” plastic-surgery salon that predicts laser-guided medical procedures (and features a sexy Farrah Fawcett-Majors as a receptionist). York and leading lady Jenny Agutter, who plays Logan’s fellow runner, make an attractive couple, their posh English accents lending the film a certain elegance, and Richard Jordan is frighteningly impassioned as Logan’s friend-turned-pursuer. Yet it’s the visuals that impress the most, because the filmmakers ingeniously converted a modernist shopping mall into the interior of the domed city, then created similarly vivid environments for the Carousel, the den of a group of animalistic street urchins called “cubs,” and even the ice-covered cavern of an overbearing robot called Box.

          Like a great old Jules Verne yarn, Logan’s Run is a fast-moving adventure that introduces one wild situation after another, and the whole story is anchored by Logan’s relatable journey from conformist to anarchist. Logan’s Run may be silly and stilted, but it’s also a great ride with a handful of resonant ideas thrown in for good measure. FYI, small-screen hunk Gregory Harrison slipped on the sandman spandex for a short-lived series adaptation, also called Logan's Run, which ran on CBS for most of the 1977-1978 season.

Logan’s Run: GROOVY

Valdez Is Coming (1971)

          The presence of iconic leading man Burt Lancaster is the only thing that separates this revenge-themed Western from dozens of similar movies, and even though Lancaster is miscast as a Mexican-American lawman, the actor’s signature intensity adds gravitas to the thin storyline. Based on one of Elmore Leonard’s many pulpy Western tales, Valdez Is Coming depicts a bloody campaign by a Mexican sheriff named Valdez (Lancaster) to get justice from a wealthy rancher, Tanner (Jon Cypher), who killed a man for trumped-up reasons and left the victim’s widow penniless. Tanner is romantically involved with Gay (Susan Clark), the widow of another murdered man, so Valdez kidnaps Gay in order to gain leverage over his enemy.

          Not only is this set-up unnecessarily convoluted, it’s also ineffective: The movie is supposed to be fueled by Valdez’ obsessive desire for justice, but the lawman’s connection to the injured parties is so tangential that it doesn’t make sense for him to antagonize the powerful and ruthless Tanner. The story gains credibility when Tanner instructs his underlings to abuse Valdez and the lawman’s friends, thereby deepening the hero’s motivation, but because the picture proceeds from a weak premise, everything that follows feels contrived.

          That said, Valdez Is Coming has enough blood, sweat, and tears to satiate the appetites of undemanding fans of ’70s Westerns. So even though the story isn’t especially interesting or persuasive, there are lots of close-ups of sneering villains, wide shots of perspiring men trudging through brutal deserts, and briskly edited scenes of Lancaster picking off Tanner’s men at a great distance with his reliable Sharps Carbine. The actors supporting Lancaster generally contribute undistinguished work, but Richard Jordan makes the most of his multidimensional role as a would-be gunslinger who waffles between overbearing arrogance and pathetic weakness.

Valdez Is Coming: FUNKY

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972)

          Despite having been in movies since the heyday of the studio era, Robert Mitchum delivered several of his most interesting performances in the ’70s, probably because his don’t-give-a-damn acting style meshed comfortably with the naturalistic filmmaking methods that were in vogue at the time. One of the best examples of this synthesis between the right actor and the right moment is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a soft-spoken crime picture about a sad-sack Boston hoodlum faced with the awful choice of going to prison for an interminable sentence or snitching on his lowlife friends.

          Utilizing the actor’s hangdog face and world-weary carriage to great effect, director Peter Yates employs Mitchum as the visual foundation for a rich portrait of going-nowhere criminality. Character actors Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, and Alex Rocco surround Mitchum with vivid performances laced with ambition, avarice, paranoia, and sociopathic violence; Boyle is particularly good as an operator working several self-serving angles at once. So even though the storyline meanders through beats that are familiar to fans of the crime genre, deeply textured acting gives the piece dimension and humanity.

          In one of the best scenes, Mitchum meets with a cocky gun dealer (Keats) in a coffee shop to discuss an illicit arms deal. Bruised by a lifetime of bad experiences, Mitchum brandishes his deformed mitt and explains that making a deal with the wrong guy in the past led to getting his hand broken, thus explaining his reluctance to accept Keats’ overconfidence at face value. Yates shoots the scene simply, with long lenses angled over the actors’ shoulders, creating a level of docudrama realism that’s emulated throughout the picture. As a testament to Yates’ focus on meticulous dramaturgy, the film’s quiet conversation scenes often have as much punch as its highly charged bank-robbery sequences. The action stuff works just fine, however, like the bits in which hoodlums use their favorite trick—holding a bank manager’s family hostage so he doesn’t get heroic ideas during a robbery.

          The Friends of Eddie Coyle has a subtle power that isn’t immediately evident on first viewing, since the plot isn’t clever and the payoff is more logically inevitable than inexorably tragic, but it’s hard to think of another crime film from the same period with as much artfully rendered nuance.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle: GROOVY