Fools’ Parade (1971)

          A weird adventure story depicting the exploits of three ex-cons traveling through Depression-era West Virginia, Fools’ Parade features such a delicate combination of eccentric characterizations and literary contrivances that it would have taken a director of tremendous artistry to pull the pieces together into a coherent whole. Alas, Andrew V. McLaglen is not such a director. Because he presents the story with the same brisk, unvarnished style with which he made several entertaining action films, the peculiar nuances of Fools’ Parade end up feeling completely false. So while the movie is watchable thanks to the novelty of familiar actors playing offbeat scenes, Fools’ Parade isn’t satisfying—the execution is too straight for fans of idiosyncratic cinema, and the storyline is unlikely to thrill people who prefer conventional narratives.

          Jimmy Stewart stars as Mattie Appleyard, a recently paroled inmate who accrued $25,000 in back pay through 40 years of hard labor behind bars. Mattie has gathered a surrogate family of fellow ex-cons, including Lee Cottrill (Strother Martin), a nervous would-be storekeeper, and Johnny Jesus (Kurt Russell), a naïve youth. The trio’s goal of starting a business together hits a roadblock when they realize their former jailor, a psycho named “Doc” Council (George Kennedy), has conspired to prevent Mattie from safely cashing his $25,000 check. This circumstance precipitates a battle of wills between the ex-cons and their once and future oppressor, who chases after them with gun-toting henchmen. There’s also a subplot involving a blowsy madam (Anne Baxter) and a reluctant prostitute (Kathy Cannon), plus another subplot involving a corrupt banker (David Huddleston) who’s in cahoots with Council.

          Fools’ Parade was based on a book by Davis Grubb, who also wrote the source material for the 1955 cult classic The Night of the Hunter. This is arch material, but McLaglen plays the story straight, missing opportunities for irony, satire, and whimsy. Only the action scenes really work, at least in the conventional sense. Another issue is the clunky dialogue by screenwriter James Lee Barrett, much of which the normally excellent Huddleston is forced to deliver; Huddleston is little more than an exposition machine here.

          Despite these fatal flaws, Fools’ Parade is mildly arresting. Watching Stewart play a stately crook who does things like yank his glass eye from his skull in order to tell fortunes is bracing. Martin squirms through one of his signature performances as a Southern-fried oddball. And Russell plays every moment with the same gee-whiz sincerity he brought to myriad Disney flicks in the early ’70s. Yet Kennedy delivers the movie’s most extravagant performance. Wearing grime over his teeth and wire-rimmed glasses over his face, the bulky actor hunches over like a troglodyte and drags out utterances in the vocal style a tweaked country preacher. His acting is spectacularly bad. (Baxter almost matches him for over-the-top stagecraft, especially since she wears garish whore makeup.) It’s hard to imagine how or why Fools’ Parade got made, since it must have been nearly as strange on paper as it is on screen. After all, the climax features a sight gag involving a lovable dog fetching a stick of lit dynamite. However, these bizarre flourishes make Fools’ Parade a curio—one can only marvel that the movie exists.

Fools’ Parade: FREAKY

Slap Shot (1977)

          It’s all about the Hanson Brothers. There’s a lot to like in George Roy Hill’s foul-mouthed, irreverent, and playfully violent hockey saga, but nothing in the movie clicks quite as well as the sight of Jack, Jeff, and Steve Hanson—three longhaired brothers wearing Coke-bottle eyeglasses that probably have higher IQ’s than the siblings—working their mojo on the rink. Savages who win by attrition, the Hansons zoom up and down the ice, high-sticking and punching and slashing their competitors until they’ve left a trail of injured opponents in their wake. These bad-boy antics are at the heart of this movie’s rebellious appeal, because even though Slap Shot has an amiable leading character and a tidy storyline, it is above all a lowbrow jamboree of brawling, cussing, and drinking.

          Set in a fictional Rust Belt town, the story follows the Charlestown Chiefs, a pitiful minor-league hockey team in the midst of an epic losing streak. Player-coach Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) tries to rouse his teammates for some good “old-time hockey”—straight playing without fights—but he knows crowds only get excited for bloodbaths. Meanwhile, team manager Joe McGrath (Strother Martin) is sending signals that the Chiefs organization might be on the verge of folding.

          Over the course of the movie, Reggie—who is desperate to elongate his career, even though he knows it’s long past time for him to stop playing and concentrate on coaching—pulls several underhanded maneuvers. He unleashes the Hansons, whose violence raises the level of game-time brutality while also stimulating attendance; he tricks a local reporter (M. Emmet Walsh) into printing a rumor that the Chiefs might have a new buyer; and he tries to seduce the depressed wife (Lindsay Crouse) of a peacenik player (Michael Ontkean) in order to prod his teammate toward violence. Reggie is a rascal in the classic Newman mold, willing to fracture a few laws in the service of a more-or-less noble goal.

          Written by first-time screenwriter Nancy Dowd, whose brother Ned played minor-league hockey, Slap Shot is cheerfully crude, taking cheap shots at bad parents, French-Canadians, gays, lesbians, and other random targets; most of the jokes are funny, but even the ones that aren’t help maintain a genial vibe of frat-house chaos. The picture also drops more F-bombs (and other colorful expletives) than nearly any other ’70s movie. It’s therefore quite a change of pace for the normally genteel George Roy Hill, whose other memorable collaborations with Newman are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). One gets the impression both men had a blast making Slap Shot, since Hill captures the hockey scenes with clever moving-camera shots and Newman elevates the piece with his contagious smiles and entertaining surliness.

          While not a critical hit and only a moderate box-office success during its original release, Slap Shot has since attained enviable cult status, even spawning a minor franchise of inferior straight-to-video sequels: Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice was released in 2002, and Slap Shot 3: The Junior League followed in 2008. Furthermore, a remake of the original film is rumored to be in the works. Until then, fans can content themselves with Hanson Brothers action figures, which hit stores in 2000.

Slap Shot: GROOVY

Hard Times (1975)

          A lean action drama about an enigmatic tough guy who drifts into the lives of several low-rent characters and has a profound impact, Hard Times borrows a lot, stylistically and thematically, from the cinematic iconography that director John Ford and actor John Wayne developed together. Making his directorial debut, Walter Hill emulates Ford’s elegant but unfussy visual style; similarly, leading man Charles Bronson deomonstrates tight-lipped adherence to a manly code of honor. So, even though there’s a lot of macho hokum on display here—we’re never particularly worried that the hero will lose any of the bare-knuckle boxing matches he enters—Hill effectively taps into the primal themes that made the Ford-Wayne pictures of the past so enjoyable.

          Bronson stars as Chaney, a drifter who wanders into Depression-era Louisiana and encounters Speed (James Coburn), a fast-talking fight promoter. Speed belongs to a network of men who stage illicit bare-knuckle boxing brawls, and Chaney offers his services as a new fighter—quickly proving his mettle by dropping his first opponent with one punch. Although Chaney is a good 20 years older than most men working the ring, he’s in spectacular physical condition and he sparks tremendous curiosity by withholding details about his background. Speed reluctantly agrees to Chaney’s terms (management without a long-term commitment), and Chaney soon lands on the radar of Chick Gandi (Michael McGuire), a successful entrepreneur who lords over the New Orleans fight circuit. Exacerbated by Speed’s bad habit of accruing gambling debts, Chaney’s rise sets the stage for an inevitable showdown between Chaney and Gandi’s chosen fighter.

          Rewriting an original script by Bryan Gindoff and Bruce Henstell, Hill employs incredibly terse dialogue (in one of Bronson’s best scenes, he only says one word: “dumb”), and the director keeps motivations obvious and pragmatic—a Spartan approach that suits the Depression milieu. Bronson benefits tremendously from Hill’s restraint, since the actor is more impressive simply occupying the camera frame than spewing reams of dialogue.  Hill wisely contrasts Bronson with a pair of actors who speak beautifully: Coburn is charming and pathetic as a self-destructive schemer, and Strother Martin is wonderfully eccentric as a drug-addicted doctor enlisted to support Chaney during fights. Bronson’s real-life wife, Jill Ireland, appears somewhat inconsequentially as Chaney’s no-nonsense love interest, though Hard Times is a such a guy movie that all the female players are sidelined. Ultimately, Hard Times is somewhat predictable and shallow—but it’s executed so well those shortcomings don’t matter much.

Hard Times: GROOVY

The Champ (1979)

          A shameless tearjerker that some fans of a certain age still hold close to their hearts, The Champ is a remake of the 1931 picture of the same name, and the focus of both versions is the cheap sentiment of a child crying. Directed with gimme-the-paycheck proficiency by Italian artiste Franco Zeffirelli, the 1979 version is lavish inasmuch as Zeffirelli lets scenes run longer than might seem necessary, presumably because he’s trying to build up a head of emotional steam for the bummer ending. For believers who get lost in the story, the overkill approach is probably quite effective, but for the rest of us, it’s just overkill.

          The tale begins on a Florida racetrack, where former boxer Billy Flynn (Jon Voight) works as a horse trainer and raises his angelic little boy, T.J. (Ricky Schroder). Billy’s an irresponsible drunk and gambler, ashamed that he’s not a role model for his son, and he talks a good line about returning to the ring someday so he can earn his nickname: Champ. Through convoluted circumstances, Billy and T.J. cross paths with Annie (Faye Dunaway), a fashion maven who just happens to be T.J.’s mom; she split when the boy was an infant. Annie, now remarried and wealthy, is enchanted by the boy and wants to become part of his life, but Billy won’t forgive her for her past infractions.

          However, when Billy gets thrown in jail after a drunken brawl, he realizes T.J. needs a better home, so Billy pretends to send the kid away to live with Annie. (Cue weeping from Schroder.) After getting out of jail, Billy decides to get himself together and return to the ring. T.J. runs away from Annie to be with Billy during his training. (More weeping upon their reunion.) Finally, the day of the big fight comes, and—well, there’s no need to spoil the finale. (Except to say that there’s more weeping.)

          Voight is pretty good here, trying to infuse Method credibility into a preposterous role, and he realizes his main purpose is triggering Shroder’s waterworks; nonetheless, Voight has strong moments depicting a simple man’s reluctant emotional declarations. Ice queen Dunaway is interesting casting, since we’re supposed to see Annie coming to life before our eyes, but her performance is far too reserved for this sort of thing. Several top-shelf character players (Elisha Cook Jr., Arthur Hill, Strother Martin, Allan Miller, Jack Warden) are underused in supporting roles. Schroder, who has subsequently enjoyed a long career on TV playing juvenile and grown-up roles, is like a Norman Rockwell dream of a perfect child in The Champ, clever and sensitive and smart, all bright eyes and rosy cheeks and tousled hair. He cries a lot and seems properly upset at the right moments. So, if watching youthful anguish is your thing, then The Champ is for you.

The Champ: FUNKY

The Brotherhood of Satan (1971)

The overripe genre of Satan-worship flicks and the florid persona of character actor Strother Martin should be a winning combination, but, alas, the tiresome evidence presented in The Brotherhood of Satan suggests otherwise. Martin, who perfected a certain type of oily Southern villainy in pictures like Cool Hand Luke (1967), only played leading roles in two pictures, both of which were misbegotten horror projects. In the snake-themed Sssssss (1973), Martin effectively broadened his range by playing a tweaked scientist, but here, he’s heinously miscast as the sort of aristocratic evildoer generally played by darkly European types like Christopher Lee. In the story, Don Duncan (Martin) is a modern-day warlock leading a coven of elderly devil-worshippers who want to slip their souls into the bodies of the children they’ve been kidnapping; after a local sheriff (L.Q. Jones) uncovers the creepy plot, he confronts the bad guys in an overwrought finale. Hampered by a disjointed script and a very low budget, The Brotherhood of Satan meanders through one dull and/or nonsensical scene after another, never building any real momentum. Despite the colorful premise, the picture isn’t exciting or scary, nor is it enough of a cinematic trainwreck to induce much unintentional laughter. It’s just boring, even during the climax of Martin spewing a ridiculous speech filled with “thees” and “thous” while dressed in a campy high-priest costume. Martin’s commitment to the role can’t be denied, however; for no discernible reason, the denouement includes a fleeting shot of Martin proudly opening his robe to reveal that he’s, well, disrobed.

The Brotherhood of Satan: SQUARE

The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday (1976)

An idiotic farce set in the Old West, this embarrassing misfire stars two of cinema’s great offscreen drunkards, Lee Marvin and Oliver Reed. Yet while Marvin’s role as a frontier schemer is in the vicinity of his Oscar-winning Cat Ballou wheelhouse, Englishman Reed is embarrassingly miscast as an inebriated Indian, mugging his way through a cringe-inducing performance complete with grotesque body makeup. The overstuffed storyline involves con men Sam (Marvin), Joe (Reed), and Billy (Strother Martin) trying to strong-arm money out of their former partner in crime, Jack (Robert Culp), who hid his criminal past to begin a career in politics, but of course Sam, Joe, and Billy are too stupid to properly manipulate their slick confrere. Hardy-har. For no particular reason, Joe kidnaps a bevy of whores from the titular cathouse, including one he names Thursday (Kay Lenz), and for no particular reason, she falls for the decades-older Sam. The lecherous nonsense eventually leads to a protracted chase scene, with the heroes driving a jalopy across the desert while—oh, who cares? This is one of those “madcap” comedies in the vein of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), with incessant slapstick noise thrown at the audience instead of actual jokes; virtually everyone gets punched in the face at least once, even Elizabeth Ashley, who plays Culp’s wife. So rather than being amusing, The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday provides the painful experience of watching actors who deserve better marking time in drivel. One hopes Marvin and Reed at least had fun imbibing their paychecks. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday: LAME

Pocket Money (1973)

          So leisurely it frequently abandons momentum in favor of easygoing vignettes, this pseudo-Western starring Paul Newman and the incomparable Lee Marvin is notable as the last screenwriting credit Terrence Malick notched before launching his celebrated directing career. Although Malick is not the sole writer on the picture, Pocket Money strongly reflects his observational approach, most notably in the piquant dialogue of everyday American losers. So, for instance, when Newman boasts that “If anybody cheats me, I'm gonna hit him with a Stillson wrench and shove him in a coal hopper,” the line is not only resonant Americana but also an echo of similar wordplay in a previous Malick-scripted picture, Deadhead Miles (1972). As directed by unobtrusive journeyman Stuart Rosenberg, Pocket Money puts the delicate textures of Malick’s writerly voice front and center, albeit to the dismay of viewers who value a strong narrative over local color—even calling this movie “slight” would promise more substance than it actually delivers, although that’s not meant as a derogatory remark.

          Newman and Marvin play contemporary cowboys whose guilelessness makes them easy prey for a sleazy rancher (Strother Martin, naturally), and the picture tracks the misadventures of the cowboys as they try to earn, cajole, and finally coerce money from their resourceful tormentor. The plot is insignificant, however, because what makes this sleepy piece interesting for patient viewers is the way the leads savor the homespun dialogue. Newman pours on the charm he perfected in his many Southern-fried hits of the ’60s, and Marvin displays the same gift for cornpone comedy that won him an Oscar for Cat Ballou (1965). Martin, though operating well within his self-described “prairie scum” comfort zone, complements the stars nicely as the villain, and M*A*S*H guy Wayne Rogers contributes an unexpectedly randy turn. So while Pocket Money generates very little excitement in the sense of traditional narrative, it offers lots of personality.

Pocket Money: FUNKY

Sssssss (1973)

The storied producing team of David Brown and Richard Zanuck (Jaws) got off to an inauspicious start with their first release, the underwhelming mad-scientist flick Sssssss. The storyline, which takes quite a while to get moving, depicts the efforts of Dr. Carl Stoner (Strother Martin) to perfect a serum that turns people into snakes, because he considers snakes a superior life form to human beings. Stoner recruits an eager lab assistant, David (Dirk Benedict), and administers a series of mysterious injections under the ruse of “inoculating” David against bites from venomous serpents. Meanwhile, Stoner’s daughter, Kristina (Heather Menzies), falls for David and spurns the advances of mean-spirited jock Steve (Reb Brown); her involvement with David gets complicated when he starts growing scales, and let’s just say that Steve and snakes don’t get along. The cheaply made Sssssss isn’t out-and-out awful, because the storyline makes sense and there are commendable elements, including some intense music from composer Patrick Williams. However, the deadly serious storytelling keeps raising expectations that the movie is about to go someplace really creepy, but instead viewers get drab dialogue scenes and vignettes of Benedict smothered in ridiculous half-man/half-snake prosthetics. The producers wisely included lots of footage of real cobras and pythons and such, guaranteeing a reaction from the vast swath of the viewing public afflicted with some measure of ophidiophobia. Yet aside from seeing future Battlestar Galactica star Benedict before his roguish charm was fully cultivated, the main novelty is watching Martin play outside his wheelhouse. A world-class character actor usually cast as unsophisticated Southern creeps, Martin gets to play an academic in Sssssss, so it’s fun to see him depict admirable and even amiable qualities before he goes bonkers and starts siccing black mambas on people who get in his way. If you give this one a look, make sure to slog through to the ending, which includes one of the most poorly executed special-effects sequences you’ll ever see in a theatrical feature, plus one of the oddest downbeat endings in the annals of ’70s cinema.

Sssssss: LAME

Hannie Caulder (1971)

          After achieving stardom in roles that accentuated her figure—she did a lot of bikini scenes—Raquel Welch began striving for credibility with parts that required acting as well as posing. To that end, Welch and her husband at the time, Patrick Curtis, used their production company to develop vehicles for the actress, though Curtwel Productions only issued three Welch projects: the 1970 television special Raquel, the lurid melodrama Sin (aka The Beloved and Restless), and Hannie Caulder. A nasty little Western shot in Spain as a collaboration with Tigon British Film Productions, Hannie Caulder puts a feminine spin on the familiar archetype of the frontier vigilante. While the movie has an inherently sleazy aspect, a raft of interesting supporting actors and solid production values compensate somewhat for the weak script and (despite her best efforts) Welch’s lackluster performance.
          After a trio of slovenly brothers (played by the character-actor dream team of Ernest Borgnine, Jack Elam, and Strother Martin) botch a bank robbery and escape into a desert, they stumble onto a small ranch owned by the title character and her husband. The brothers kill the husband, gang-rape Hannie, and leave her for dead. (This setup aligns Hannie Caulder with other 1971 revenge pictures featuring sexual-assault themes, from Billy Jack to Straw Dogs.) In one of the movie’s many overly convenient plot contrivances, conscientious bounty hunter Thomas Price (Robert Culp) happens upon the ranch soon after the siege, then agrees to teach Hannie about guns so she can track down and murder her assailants. Predictably, they fall in love while she trains, and just as predictably, circumstances ensure that Hannie must confront the brothers without Thomas by her side. Excepting an interlude during which Hannie and Thomas hang out with a philosophical gunsmith played by Christopher Lee, of all people, that’s more or less the extent of the story.
          Thanks to the considerable skills of director/co-writer Burt Kennedy, the picture moves along at a good clip, frequently exploding with bursts of brutality, and Hannie Caulder looks terrific. Yet the story is trite and even periodically nonsensical; virtually no explanation is provided for a shootout at the gunsmith’s home or for the presence of a mysterious gunfighter played, silently, by Stephen Boyd. This narrative opacity makes the movie seem more and more haphazard as it speeds toward an insipid climax. Yet the picture’s biggest shortcoming is also its biggest attraction, and that’s Welch—unable to believably simulate emotions, she’s never more than a beautiful physical presence. That said, Borgnine, Elam, and Martin are enjoyably repulsive as they bicker and whine their way across the frontier, and Culp is terrific as the bounty hunter. Calm, prickly, and wise, his characterization commands the screen, so Hannie Caulder rises when he’s present and wanes when he’s not.

Hannie Caulder: FUNKY