The Pied Piper (1972)

          It’s tricky to guess which audience the producers had in mind when they made this dreary, quasi-musical fantasy, which is set in medieval times. Seeing as how the Pied Piper myth involves a minstrel using his magical music to escort children from a corrupt village, it would seem as if The Pied Piper was made to attract young viewers. Then again, because the producers cast grizzled British character actors in many key roles and infused scenes with lengthy debates about political strategies, perhaps the film was meant for adults. Making the whole business even more perplexing is the presence of Scottish pop star Donovan in the title role. A real-life minstrel whose ethereal music and lyrics epitomize the hippy-dippy 1960s, Donovan would have been appealing to college kids and young adults circa 1972. Oh, and parts of the movie are disgusting, what with shots of plague-carrying rats crawling through houses and neighborhoods. The Pied Piper looks expensive, Donovan sings a few tunes, and the script is fairly intelligent—but the picture is too glum for viewers seeking escapism, and too lightweight for those craving something serious.
          It’s not a mess, per se, but it’s not really much of anything.

          Set in the German town of Hamlin during the year 1349, the movie opens with Piper (Donovan) joining a group of traveling players before entering the town. Inside Hamlin, the bürgermeister (Roy Kinnear) worries over his ailing daughter, so he demands assistance from “Melius the Jew” (Michael Hordern), the local alchemist. When that doesn’t work, the bürgermeister realizes that his daughter reacts to Piper’s music, so Piper is hired to play for the daughter. That’s why Piper is at the center of the action when the bürgermeister and other officials discuss solutions for a rat infestation. (Little problem: Officials risk heresy if they embrace Melius’ theory that rats carry plague, since Vatican doctrine defines the plague as God’s work.) Piper offers to solve the problem by using music to lead the rats from Hamlin, and the situation spirals from there.

          Considering that he plays the title character, Donovan isn’t in the movie very much, which is no big loss, given his stiff line deliveries. With the Piper character sidelined, the story focuses on Melius’ plight. This creates problems for the viewing experience: Whereas the Melius scenes are grounded, the Piper sequences are fanciful, and vignettes depicting a love story between the bürgermeister's daughter and Melius' assistant are sickly-sweet. None of this material hangs together very well, and by the time Piper’s legendary exodus gets intercut with a scene of a character burning at the stake, The Pied Piper has become as unpleasant as it is tonally inconsistent.

The Pied Piper: FUNKY

The Last Remake of Beau Geste (1977)

          Best known in the U.S. for his hilarious performance as Igor in Young Frankenstein (1974), odd-looking Englishman Marty Feldman was an accomplished comedy writer before he started acting, so it’s not surprising he used his mid-’70s visibility to launch a career as a feature filmmaker. Unfortunately, his directorial debut, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, is a dreary compendium of painfully obvious jokes with only a few flashes of real wit. As the title suggests, the picture riffs on a manly-man tale that was adapted for the screen several times previously, P.C. Wren’s 1924 novel about the French Foreign Legion, Beau Geste. The story concerns a pair of orphaned brothers, Beau and Digby, who are raised in an aristocratic French home. Once they reach adulthood, the brothers become suspects in the theft of a precious jewel, so noble Beau withdraws honorably to join the Foreign Legion. In Feldman’s version of the story, inept Digby gets thrown into prison while Beau is away, then escapes and joins Beau in Morocco for adventures that lead to the recovery of the jewel.

          Feldman assembled a great cast, with Michael York as Beau, Ann-Margret as the brothers’ conniving mother-in-law, and Peter Ustinov as the brothers’ psychotic Foreign Legion commander. (Feldman, of course, plays Digby.) Actors essaying cameos and minor roles include Henry Gibson, Trevor Howard, James Earl Jones, Roy Kinnear, Ed McMahon (!), Spike Milligan, Avery Schreiber, and Terry-Thomas. On the bright side, the picture has a few imaginative gags like an elaborate scene during which Feldman magically travels into footage from a 1939 version of the same story, resulting in a dialogue scene between Feldman and Gary Cooper. These kicky sequences demonstrate that Feldman had a deep knowledge of cinema devices and a vivid comic imagination.  More typical, however, is the bit depicting a commercial for a used-camel salesman whose slogan is “Let Harik hump you.” Ustinov is the only actor who really shines here, since he has a field day with physical gags like interchangeable peg legs. As for Feldman, sporadic funny moments cannot disguise how ill-suited he was for playing leading roles. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

The Last Remake of Beau Geste: FUNKY

Herbie Rides Again (1974) & Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977)

          It doesn’t speak well of American culture that the biggest domestic box-office hit of 1969 wasn’t Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or Midnight Cowboy or Romeo and Juliet. No, the top grosser was Disney’s The Love Bug, a ridiculous special-effects comedy about an anthropomorphized Volkswagen Beetle that plays matchmaker for two unsuspecting humans. Starring the amiable Dean Jones and the grating Buddy Hackett, The Love Bug makes almost every other live-action Disney flick seem sophisticated by comparison. Given this success, it’s odd the Love Bug back didn’t hit the road again until 1974, when Herbie Rides Again was released.

          The second time around, the hero is not Jones’ racecar-driver character, but instead Willoughby Whitfield (Ken Berry), the nebbishy nephew of cutthroat real-estate developer Alonzo Hawk (Keenan Wynn). Hawk wants to demolish an old firehouse occupied by widow Mrs. Steinmetz (Helen Hayes), so he sends Willoughby to sweet-talk the old lady. This puts Willoughby at odds with the widow’s spunky granddaughter, Nicole (Stefanie Powers), and the widow’s even spunkier VW, Herbie. (Mrs. Steinmetz is the mother of Hackett’s character from the original movie.) Herbie Rides Again is laborious and tiresome, with idiotic scenes like Herbie driving up the rails of the Golden Gate Bridge while an oblivious Mrs. Steinmetz sits behind the wheel, focused on her grocery list. The only memorable sequence is Hawk’s trippy nightmare vision of armies of Herbies attacking him, some flashing gaping “mouths” lined with sharp teeth, others dressed like Indians and tossing Tomahawks that scalp poor Alonzo. Berry, Hayes, and Powers are likeable, and Wynn is appropriately cartoonish, but the stupidity factor is almost unbearable.

          Things don’t get much better in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, for which Jones resumes leading-man duties. The filmmakers overlook the fact that Jones got married at the end of the first picture, since he’s inexplicably single, and they never explain why he’s got a new best friend/mechanic, Wheely Applegate (Don Knotts). Nonetheless, he heads to Europe for a racetrack comeback in the cute little VW with the “53” on the side. The plot thickens when jewel thieves hide a stolen diamond inside Herbie’s gas tank and when Herbie falls in love with a sexy Italian sportscar. Veteran British thesps Bernard Fox and Roy Kinnear try valiantly to make their slapstick scenes as the bumbling crooks work, but the lifeless script renders their efforts futile. Worse, the long scenes of Herbie courting the sportscar seem creepy after a while, since the vehicles do everything short of consummating their attraction. The moronic plot also calls far too much attention to the imponderables of just how self-aware Herbie really is; since the car drives itself for most of the movie, what purpose, exactly, does Jones’ character serve during the big race?

          Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo did well enough to justify a final sequel in the franchise’s original run, 1980’s Herbie Goes Bananas (without Jones), plus a short-lived TV series in 1982 (with Jones). The spirited VW returned yet again in 2005, when Lindsay Lohan starred in Herbie: Fully Loaded.

Herbie Rides Again: LAME

Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo: LAME

The Three Musketeers (1973) & The Four Musketeers (1974)

          Though previously known for the irreverence of, among other things, the invigorating movies he made with the Beatles, Richard Lester revealed great gifts as a director of adventure films with this epic adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ deathless novel The Three Musketeers, which producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind divided into two movies (more on that in a moment). Depicting how enthusiastic bumpkin D’Artagnan (Michael York) finds his place amid a group of elite 17th-century swordsmen, then inadvertently helps spoil a conspiracy within the French ruling class, Lester’s sprawling project mixes lowbrow comedy and grandiose swashbuckling to great effect. The silly stuff includes lots of bedroom farce and pratfalls, while the derring-do material features everything from amusingly preposterous stunts to genuinely unnerving swordfights.
          Getting into the weeds of the dense storyline would require more space than is reasonable to allot here, but the yarn goes something like this. After befriending three musketeers in service to France’s King Louis XIII (Jean-Pierre Cassel, dubbed by Richard Briers), D’Artagnan discovers that Cardinal Richelieu (Charlton Heston) is conspiring to gain power by revealing that Louis’ bride, Queen Anne (Geraldine Chaplin), is having a secret affair with the Duke of Buckingham (Simon Ward). Caught in the middle of the intrigue is royal dressmaker Constance (Raquel Welch), with whom D’Artagnan falls in love. Also featured are two of the cardinal’s devious agents, formidable swordsman Rochefort (Christopher Lee) and vicious assassin Milady de Winter (Faye Dunaway). This pulpy scenario begets a gleefully overstuffed cinematic experience.
          The project’s unusual tonal mix is exacerbated by sometimes jarring transitions between sequences—one gets the sense of filmmakers trying to put over an audacious contrivance by overwhelming viewers with a nonstop procession of spectacular moments. (Things get particularly dizzying in The Four Musketeers, which breezes past myriad glaring plot holes.) Still, Lester’s effervescent approach to staging, camerawork, and editing is almost as dazzling as the project’s sumptuous production design and costuming. Better still, both films overflow with entertaining performances.
          Playing the story’s romantic lead, York is appropriately overzealous and sincere. Conversely, top-billed Oliver Reed—as the leader of the musketeer band—imbues the narrative with a captivating blend of intensity and world-weariness. Few filmmakers captured Reed’s singular combination of poetry and savagery better than Lester does here. As for the project’s leading ladies, Welch gives an appealingly unaffected performance in a mostly comic role, Dunaway imbues a monstrous villain with icy elegance, and Geraldine Chaplin capably services a minor but important role as an adulterous royal. Heston gives a respectable faux-Shakespearean turn while Lee surprises by actually landing jokes in addition to providing the expected element of imposing menace. On the topic of comic relief, Roy Kinnear is delightfully silly as D’Artagnan’s long-suffering servant.
          While some viewers may justifiably resist Lester’s erratic dramaturgy, the herky-jerky alternation between schtick and melodrama keeps things lively. And even when the pace lags, the movies are treats for the eyes because of David Watkin’s wondrous cinematography. His lighting is so subtle that one is often hard-pressed to spot traces of artificial illumination; moreover, because Lester employs long lenses and loose framing, Watkin’s visual approach lends a naturalistic quality.
          Originally shot as one lengthy feature, the Musketeers saga was bifurcated by the Salkinds—providing an unpleasant surprise for the actors, who had been paid for just one movie. Considerable legal wrangling ensued. The Salkinds refined their strategy by shooting 1978’s Superman and 1980’s Superman II simultaneously with director Richard Donner, this time revealing to everyone beforehand that two movies were being made, but that didn’t work out perfectly, either; production of the second picture was halted partway through and then restarted, at a later date, with Lester replacing Donner. Lastly, although 1977 flop The 5th Musketeer is unrelated to the Salkind/Lester pictures, much of the original team regrouped for 1989’s flop threequel The Return of the Musketeers. The death during production of series comic foil Kinnear cast a pall over the piece and expedited Lester’s retirement from moviemaking.

The Three Musketeers: GROOVY

The Four Musketeers: GROOVY

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) & Scars of Dracula (1970) & Dracula AD 1972 (1972) & The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) & The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

          By the mid-’60s, a dreary formula was in place for Hammer Films’ long-running Dracula series: Each movie contrived a laborious new mechanism for resurrecting the titular bloodsucker (Christopher Lee), and each movie ended with Drac suffering an elaborate demise. As the series progressed, Lee’s characterization became more robotic, and the filler scenes depicting various supporting characters became more tedious. By the time the ’70s arrived, even Hammer’s lush Victorian-era costumes and locations felt stale. As a result, Taste the Blood of Dracula is a routine but well-photographed entry notable only for introducing Satan worship into the series, although comic actor Roy Kinnear enlivens a few early scenes. The movie takes forever to get started (an hour passes before Drac bites his first neck), and the formula of blood, cleavage, and Gothic atmosphere is overly familiar; furthermore, Dracula’s overreliance on henchmen makes him seem more like a Bond villain than a legendary monster.
          Scars of Dracula features more of the same, but instead of Satan worship, the story pays rudimentary homage to Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel with scenes of an unfortunate European fellow imprisoned in Drac’s castle. Reflecting how dry the creative well was at this point, the opening scene depicts a bat reviving Dracula by drooling blood onto the count’s bones. Really? Although Lee spends more time onscreen than usual in this entry, Scars of Dracula is one of Hammer’s shoddiest productions, complete with fake bats that wouldn’t pass muster in a student film.
          After a two-year hiatus, Hammer shook up the formula with Dracula AD 1972, which resurrects Dracula in present-day England, and the always-entertaining Peter Cushing returned to the series for the first time in 12 years, playing Lorimer Van Helsing, a descendant of the count’s old nemesis. The movie retains a bit of Gothic flavor by giving Dracula an abandoned old church as a lair, but most of the story takes place in the London youth scene, so lots of with-it kids party in tacky early-’70s fashions (leading lady Stephanie Beacham rocks a fierce mullet hairstyle). Campy dialogue, kitschy musical interludes, and slick camerawork make Dracula AD 1972 a guilty pleasure, and watch for raven-haired cult-favorite starlet Caroline Munro in an early role. It should also be noted that Beacham’s mesmerizing cleavage is such a focal point in Dracula AD 1972 that her breasts should’ve gotten special billing; this movie may represent the apex of Hammer leering, which is saying a lot.
          Hammer continued its new modern-day continuity with The Satanic Rites of Dracula, a Cushing-Lee romp enlivened by the presence of costar Freddie Jones, who plays a twitchy Satanist/scientist, and future Absolutely Fabulous star Joanna Lumley, taking over Beacham’s role as a Van Helsing descendant. The movie boasts an energetic score (proto-disco funk passages, lots of stabbing horns), plus slickly atmospheric wide-lens photography. There are even a couple of genuine jolts (rare in any Hammer flick), like a slo-mo attack on Lumley by several distaff vampires. The fact that the first hour of the movie plays out like an occult-themed conspiracy thriller sets the stage nicely for Lee’s dominance in the last twenty minutes; for once, Lee gets to do more than lunge at people and recoil from crosses, and he seems energized. Satanic Rites is easily the best thriller of this batch, even though it’s barely a Dracula movie in the classic sense.
          In 1974, Hammer’s Dracula series reached a bizarre conclusion with the kung fu epic The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, a joint effort from Hammer and chop-socky specialists the Shaw Brothers. In two brief scenes, John Forbes-Robertson unimpressively stands in for the absent Lee as Dracula, while a tired-looking Cushing reprises his Van Helsing shtick for the whole dreary flick. Boring nonsense about noble Chinese martial artists engaged in brawls and swordplay against decaying vampire ghouls in ornate gold masks, 7 Vampires is the series’ absolute nadir. Plus, who knew Dracula spoke fluent Chinese?

Taste the Blood of Dracula: LAME

Scars of Dracula: LAME

Dracula AD 1972: FUNKY

The Satanic Rites of Dracula: FUNKY

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires: SQUARE