The Runner Stumbles (1979)

          The final film directed by self-appointed cinematic moralist Stanley Kramer, this peculiar drama presents a sensationalistic story in a manner that ranges from absurdly lighthearted to absurdly overwrought. To be fair, most scenes occupy a palatable middle ground of rationality and restraint. Nonetheless, the extremes define this piece, as does the suffocating artificiality that permeates every scene, whether the scene in question is bad, good, or indifferent. To get a sense of why this picture is simultaneously respectable and ridiculous, The Runner Stumbles stars jovial song-and-dance man Dick Van Dyke as a middle-aged priest suspected of not only sleeping with a pretty young nun, but also of murdering her—not exactly “Chim Chim Cher-ee” territory. And when Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz (1939), shows up to represent the full weight of religious authority, The Runner Stumbles approaches self-parody.

          Set in a remote part of Michigan circa 1911, and based loosely upon a true story, the picture begins with Father Rivard (Van Dyke) fetching his parish’s latest addition, fresh-faced Sister Rita (Kathleen Quinlan), from a transit station. They strike sparks immediately, because she’s challenging and curious while he’s a bundle of conflicts—on one hand, he’s a stickler for rules and tradition since he’s tired of fighting the church establishment, and on the other hand, he’s a passionate freethinker who once imagined a more important destiny for himself. Rita’s attitude represents a bracing change from the two sickly older nuns she was hired to assist, and Rita soon raises eyebrows by teaching secular songs to local children. Later, when the older nuns contract tuberculosis, Rivard suggest that Rita move into his residence, thereby separating her from contagions. This scandalizes everyone involved, from Rivard’s devout housekeeper, Mrs. Shandig (Maureen Stapleton), to the monsignor with authority over Rivard’s parish, Nicholson (Bolger). The fraught scenario climaxes in a noisy final act comprising a fire, illicit sex, and a trial shot through with venomous accusations. Framing the main storyline is a recurring courtroom sequence featuring Rivard—incarcerated on suspicion of murder after Rita’s body is discovered—receiving counsel from his inexperienced young lawyer, Toby Felker (Beau Bridges).

          Excepting Bridges’ loose and naturalistic work, everything about The Runner Stumbles is old-fashioned and sterile. Quinlan plays her role like Shirley Temple with mood swings, utterly failing to make Rita’s dangerous instability seem credible. Van Dyke is equally stiff in many scenes, though he paints colors of bitterness and rage with surprising skill. Unfortunately, Van Dyke is so broad and theatrical during the film’s crucial trial scene that he undercuts his few good moments elsewhere. That’s why the abrupt and unsatisfying ending doesn’t really matter: It’s just one more false note in an atonal symphony.

The Runner Stumbles: FUNKY

Oklahoma Crude (1973)

          John Huston and Elia Kazan, among many others, have been credited with the quote that “90% of directing is casting.” To understand what this remark means, check out Oklahoma Crude, a handsomely produced but frustrating period drama about a belligerent woman operating a wildcat oil well in the early 20th century. The picture has four main characters, but only one is cast perfectly. The protagonist, Lena Doyle, is a tough-as-nails loner who works with her hands and dislikes people so much that she expresses a wish to be a third gender, complete with a matched set of sex organs, so she can tend to her own carnal needs. Improbably, she’s played by Faye Dunaway, a cosmopolitan beauty who seems more suited to a Paris fashion runway than a rugged work site. Further, because Lena rarely speaks during the first half of the picture, the role requires a performer with expressive physicality. Dunaway’s greatest gifts are her face and voice, so she’s wrong for the part on every level, even though it’s easy to understand why she relished a chance to try something different.

          The next important character is Noble Mason, a scrappy rogue whom Lena reluctantly hires as a laborer/mercenary once representatives from an oil company try to seize her well by force. Since the Lena/Noble relationship has a Taming of the Shrew quality, the obvious casting would be a handsome rascal along the lines of Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. Instead, Noble is played by George C. Scott, unquestionably one of the finest actors in screen history but not, by any stretch, a romantic lead. Rounding out the troika of casting errors is the presence of dainty English actor John Mills as Cleon Doyle, Lena’s estranged father. Seeing as how he plays the role with an American accent, why didn’t producer-director Stanley Kramer simply cast an American? Well, at least Kramer got the villain right, because Jack Palance is terrific as Hellman, the sadistic enforcer whom the oil company sends to menace Lena.

          The intriguing plot of Marc Norman’s script revolves around Lena’s ownership of a nascent well, which gains Lena unwanted attention once clues indicate the well might produce oil. Hellman makes a cash offer that Lena refuses, so Hellman simply steals the well, in the process ordering his people to beat Lena and her employees nearly to death. Then, with the assistance of ex-soldier Noble, Lena reclaims the well, sparking a lengthy standoff that culminates in a bittersweet combination of tragedy and victory.

          Oklahoma Crude gets off to a rocky start, because the first 20 minutes—in which the Lena/Noble relationship is established—simply don’t work, largely because of the aforementioned miscasting. Things pick up once Palance arrives, and the last hour of the picture is fairly exciting. Legendary cinematographer Robert Surtees contributes his usual vigorous work, and composer Henry Mancini’s music keeps things bouncy. (Occasionally too much so.) As with most of Kramer’s pictures, the tone rings false at regular intervals, since the filmmaker can’t decide whether he’s making a dramedy or a serious picture. The novelty of the story and the strength of the primal good-vs.-evil conflict ultimately sustain interest, but it’s a bumpy ride—especially when the syrupy, Anne Murray-performed theme song, “Send a Little Love My Way,” gets played on the soundtrack for the zillionth time.

Oklahoma Crude: FUNKY

Bless the Beasts & Children (1971)

          Adapted from a 1970 novel by Glendon Swarthout, Bless the Beasts & Children is a weird meditation on adolescent angst, the ostracism of oddballs, and the ugliness of killing animals for pleasure. Despite all of these conflicting elements, Bless the Beasts and Children is highly watchable, though perhaps not for any of the reasons producer-director Stanley Kramer intended. The histrionic performances by the child actors comprising the film’s main cast give the picture a so-bad-it’s-good kitsch factor, the overwrought nature of the plot offers the lurid appeal of sensationalism, and the unearned intensity of Kramer’s storytelling commands attention in a traffic-accident sort of way. Bless the Beasts & Children isn’t a disaster, but it’s an oddly beguiling mess.

          The picture begins at a summer camp in Arizona, where counselors train boys in the ways of the Western frontier. The Bedwetters, occupants of the camp’s lowest-ranked cabin, are traumatized because of a recent field trip to a buffalo ranch. During the field trip, the boys witnessed the shooting-gallery slaughter of excess livestock. Led by high-strung John Cotton (Barry Robins), the Bedwetters flee camp one night, intent on freeing the next group of buffalo marked for death. As the movie follows the kids’ odyssey across the Southwest, Kramer cuts to flashbacks of key episodes from each child’s past, and it all leads up to a ridiculous climax filled with Kramer’s usual sledgehammer moralizing.

          The concept of unruly kids sharing an adventure is appealing, so scenes of the Bedwetters traveling through the desert on stolen horses, or zipping down the open road in a stolen car, are lively. Unfortunately, the characterizations are way too arch (for instance, the effeminate Bedwetter complements his uniform with bleach-blonde hair, a headband, and a shag vest) and the villains are preposterously two-dimensional (every adult is a mouth-breathing ogre). On the bright side, the cinematography by Michael Hugo is bright and muscular, while the music is, to say the least, assertive.

          Composers Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr. smother the movie with maudlin strings, and one of their principal motifs was later repurposed for Olympics broadcasts as the famous “Nadia’s Theme,” and then again repurposed as the title music for the long-running soap The Young and the Restless. (Years later, the music became the sample underlying Mary J. Blige’s signature song, “No More Drama”). The musical bludgeoning continues in the movie’s main-title song, performed by the Carpenters. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

Bless the Beasts & Children: FUNKY

The Domino Principle (1977)

          By the late ’70s, the cinematic marketplace was clogged with so many like-minded conspiracy thrillers that filmmakers had to struggle to contrive credible new conspiracies—and in some cases they didn’t even bother with credibility at all. The latter circumstance is true of The Domino Principle, which was inexplicably directed by venerable Hollywood filmmaker Stanley Kramer, a man best known for hand-wringing dramas about Big Issues like injustice and racism. This profoundly stupid movie follows Vietnam vet Roy Tucker (Gene Hackman), a prison inmate offered clemency by mysterious but high-powered conspirators in exchange for committing an assassination.

          Right away, the film raises bizarre questions it never answers. Why bother recruiting a convict instead of simply hiring a criminal who’s walking free? Why go through all the trouble of bribing and manipulating prison personnel to engineer Tucker’s “escape”? Why go through an extended negotiation with Tucker about his desired terms, when the simpler thing to do is simply threaten his beloved wife (Candice Bergen) in order to pressure Tucker? Why send Tucker to an expensive hideaway in Mexico after the assassination is over, instead of just cutting him loose or gunning him down? And why does the supposedly savvy Tucker think all this will end well?

          Instead of raising intriguing questions about why the bad guys are scheming, the film stacks idiotic plot contrivances upon each other until the viewer’s brain is numbed. It’s even unclear what sort of reaction The Domino Principle is supposed to generate. Tucker is a callous son of a bitch, so it’s not as if we’re supposed to care that he’s in trouble. The stakes of the assassination are never made clear, so it’s not as if we’re supposed to worry about the world order getting overthrown. Worst of all, the movie is so confusing, talky, and tedious that it’s not as if viewers can simply cast logic aside and groove on the thrills.

         Hackman seems peevish throughout the entire movie, as if he’s upbraiding himself for agreeing to yet another pointless paycheck gig; Bergen is upstaged by the horrific perm she wears throughout the picture; and villains Richard Widmark and Eli Wallach sneer happily even though they probably can’t make any damn sense of the inane dialogue they’re spouting. (Plus, the less said about the pointless supporting character portrayed by an out-of-place Mickey Rooney, the better.) By the time the movie sputters to an overheated conclusion that’s as nonsensical as it is merciless, The Domino Principle has bludgeoned viewers so badly that only one mystery remains: Were the conspirators behind this cinematic atrocity ever brought to justice?

The Domino Principle: LAME

R.P.M. (1970)

          Though admirable for his commitment to exploring progressive causes onscreen, producer-director Stanley Kramer was also a total square whose movies were so conventional they felt ancient even when they were new. That’s certainly the case with R.P.M. (the poster of which provides the handy translation Revolutions Per Minute), which explores the student unrest that was pervasive on college campus circa the late ’60s. However, instead of building his movie around a student leader whose experiences might illuminate issues related to the counterculture, Kramer focuses on a fiftysomething professor who’s so “hip” to the youth scene that his live-in girlfriend is a 25-year-old grad student (Ann-Margret). Yes, in Kramer’s archaic viewpoint, being a dirty old man is a revolutionary act.

          Further identifying this weird movie as an establishment statement about anti-establishment themes, studio-era leading man Anthony Quinn stars as Professor Paco Perez, a social-sciences specialist recruited by his school’s board of trustees to serve as an interim president after students storm the administration building and force the resignation of the previous president. With his hep-cat clothes and “rebellious” motorcycle, Paco swings to the same lefty tune as student leaders Rossiter (Gary Lockwood) and Dempsey (Paul Winfield), but once Paco starts engaging in rap sessions with the protestors, he discovers the gulf between his grown-up pragmatism and the kids’ all-or-nothing extremism. This renders the whole film somewhat pointless, because the focus on the uninteresting topic of Paco’s midlife crisis pushes the whole subject of student unrest into the background.

          That said, R.P.M. is strangely watchable. Kramer’s filmmaking is energetic, even though he opts for borderline embarrassing vignettes like a dream sequence in which school administrators are seen as clowns. There’s also considerable pleasure to be found in watching Kramer struggle with the movie’s climax, because his shots of the inevitable student riot are laughably overwrought. Furthermore, the dialogue is like a greatest-hits collection of ’60s slang; R.P.M. was penned by future Love Story author Erich Segal, who knew a thing or two about tapping into the zeitgeist. Leading man Quinn is comparatively restrained, embracing the talky role of an intellectual as a switch from his usual casting as animalistic macho men. Lockwood, best known for his costarring role in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is quietly charismatic; Winfield is characteristically intense; and Ann-Margret’s sex appeal is as formidable as always.

          Ultimately, R.P.M. is fascinating not only for its clumsy onscreen examination of the generation gap, but because its very style demonstrates the breadth of that gap—in every scene, it’s painfully obvious that Kramer and the kids he’s depicting come from totally different worlds. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics Request via WarnerArchive)

R.P.M. : FUNKY