Television Review: CELEBRITY BOWLING: BORGNINE/HARVEY VS. MARTIN/IRELAND (1972, Don Bucola)

Stars: 3 of 5.
Running Time: 23 minutes.

Tag-line:  "The game in which Hollywood's biggest stars do what millions of Americans do every day... have a good time bowling."

Notable Cast or Crew:  Dick Martin (LAUGH-IN, NEWHEART) and John Ireland (SPARTACUS, RED RIVER) vs. Laurence Harvey (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE ALAMO) and Ernie Borgnine (ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, FROM HERE TO ETERNITY).  Hosted by Jed Allan (LASSIE, ICE STATION ZEBRA).

Best One-liner: "The concentration of Ernie Borgnine, right here... (trails off)"

I'd like to send Ernest Borgnine week out with a bang.  Er, nevermind: make that a whimper.

CELEBRITY BOWLING is a peculiar beast.  Created by Joe Siegman and hosted by Jed Allan, it ran for seven years (1971-1978).  Each episode featured four (washed-up) celebrity non-bowlers facing off at lanes constructed in the shadowy, spartan gloom of KTTV studios.

The visuals are quite striking.


This is the host, Jed Allan.  I know you don't care.

There's all sorts of ancillary rules about who bowls first and, later,  celebrities will routinely finish each other's frames according to the whims of Jed Allan.  All of this is being played, not for charity, but for the benefit of one or two random audience members who will receive prizes of varying quality based on the scores.  If they score a 150, an audience member gets a stereo; if over 180, they get a microwave; if more than 210, a car.  But don't worry––no one is bowling more than 210.  Hell, it's tough enough for these people to crack a hundred.  For the lower scores they receive more realistic prizes, like a piece of luggage or a pair of pants.

Not even joking.

The production value is incredibly low-rent; it's all stark bright lights and empty black backgrounds.  Large portions of the show proceed in silence and often the only noise is the constant putt-putt-putt of the improperly maintained bowling ball retrieval machine (Allan is frequently reminding the stars "Hey, watch it there––don't pinch your fingers!"). Occasionally this is interrupted by unenthusiastic applause while some television actor lobs gutter balls.

Today's episode features comedian Dick Martin and Western actor John Ireland versus Manchurian Candidate Laurence Harvey and Wild Bunchie Ernie Borgnine.  I really like that they refer to him as "Ernie" Borgnine throughout.  And I apologize in advance that I'll be giving the short shrift to John Ireland and Dick Martin; this is Ernest Borgnine week, after all.
 
John Ireland and Dick Martin are bad bowlers...

 
...but not as bad as Ernest Borgnine and Laurence Harvey.

I love Laurence Harvey––here, he's looking gawky (referred to by Allan as "the human pretzel") and showing off what a terrible bowler he is.




Most of the show is Laurence and Ernie slowly walking back from a terrible frame with legitimately pissed off expressions on their faces while Jed Allan mutters, "He was putting a little too much tug in there!" or "He couldn't really get behind that one, could he?"  Why didn't the producers let them get in a practice round or two first?  Were they really that afraid they'd have to give away a free pair of pants?

Grizzled and unkempt, Borgnine looks as though a week-long bender was interrupted by the producers of CELEBRITY BOWLING, who only gave him enough time to change out of his robe and slippies before they slapped him on your television screen. 

Borgnine does this little flourish when he bowls, lifting his arm to the heavens like he's conducting a symphony.





The Gutter Ball Symphony: Lane 1, Opus 1.

Ordinarily jovial, I cannot emphasize how crabby Borgnine is.  He rarely speaks, and when he does, it's muttering bitterly off-camera about––no joke––"One day you're a star, and the next, you're a bum..." or "'Golf' spelled backwards is 'flog'; how would you spell this backwards?"  His finest moment is when he bowls a spare. 

Not quite a strike, Ernie.

When John Ireland rolls a gutter ball, Ernie peevishly growls "Do exactly what he did!" to Dick Martin.  To this, Allan says, "You're all heart, Ernie."
 
The frames proceed pretty badly for our buddies Laurence and Ernie, and, at their lowest moment, when they're beyond the point of no return and cannot possibly win, Allan announces:  "Ladies and gentlemen, in case you forgot, the two gentlemen up at bat now are both Oscar winners.  How 'bout that?"  This is followed by half-hearted applause.

The best (worst?) part is that Laurence Harvey never won an Oscar, he was only nominated for ROOM AT THE TOP.  Nice fact-checking, guys!

But Laurence takes it in stride.

The final score is 116 to 93.

Borgnine painfully laughs and says the scores are so low, they should probably take the audience out to dinner.  The crowd claps at this, and he says, "I don't think we deserve all that applause for those awful scores."  He really means it.

Ultimately, the winning audience member (representing John and Dick) receives a Spiegel catalogue gift certificate (for a conspicuously unspecified amount––it could have been $1) and a "watch."  The audience member who represented Laurence and Ernie receives the consolation prize of a bowling ball and a bag to hold it in.  Hopefully it was one that was lying around the set already.

Before we cut to black, Laurence and Ernie contemplate the ignominy that is CELEBRITY BOWLING.

But they were gluttons for punishment:  Ernie came back to bowl twice more on the series, and Laurence once.

As bleak as it was, I enjoyed this.  Three stars. 

–Sean Gill

Film Review: CODE NAME: WILD GEESE (1984, Antonio Marghereti)

Stars: 2.5 of 5.

Running Time: 101 minutes.

Tag-line: "This is a corporation of businessmen.  Their business is war.  For them, the jungle and the city are the same."

Notable Cast or Crew: Lee Van Cleef (THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY; ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK), Klaus Kinski (AGUIRRE, THE WRATH OF GOD; DOCTOR ZHIVAGO), Ernest Borgnine (MARTY, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK), Mimsy Farmer (FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, MORE), Lewis Collins (KOMMANDO LEOPARD, CONFESSIONS OF A DRIVING INSTRUCTOR).  Directed by Antonio Marghereti (YOR THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE, CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE).

Best One-liner: "You find them, and make it slow. I want them to suffer. And then...take PICTURES!"

So you send your buddy down to Drug Mart with 50¢ to grab THE WILD GEESE on VHS with Richard Burton.  Instead, he comes back with this. We're far beyond the point where Margheriti and his Campari-swilling cronies are making any money off of that rental, but, the question is, what are they getting out of it? I would propose that (like every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings) maybe every time a piece of plagiaristic Italo-trash gets mistakenly rented, Fabio Testi gets another pair of tight jeans?

Regardless, this is pretty terrible. The quality is bootleg-level horrid, the action is boring, the characters bland, the editing stale.  It's the kind of flick that makes Michael Winner look like Orson Welles. It features a fairly awful Jan Nemec/Eloy score––kinda Christopher Cross meets De Angelis. Most everyone seems to have done their own dubbing, but Kinski must've thrown a tantrum in post, cause he's been dubbed by a stuffy English gent, which is just plain whacky.
 
Good day to you, sir

Then Mimsy Farmer shows up about 50 minutes in to ruin our lives.  But there's a lot of schweet things going on as well: Lee van Cleef with a Rambo-bandana as the badass prisoner sprung for the mission (in a role reversal from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK),

Science cannot explain my irrational dislike for Mimsy Farmer (shoulda been Grace Jones)

Ernest Borgnine doing his patented "Borgnine-grin,"


Truly Kinski's madness holds no power in the face of a Borgnine-grin


Kinski's machine gun versus Lee van Cleef's flamethrower-spewing helicopter,



Even the prospect of attacking Kinski with a flying flamethrower does not excite Lee van Cleef

the operation at hand is called "Operation: Cleaning," there's a generic villain named 'Khan' ("You find them, and make it slow. I want them to suffer. And then...take PICTURES!"), and the line "That's Americans for you! The only serious thing we've ever done is revolt against your king, since then, it's just been Hollywood, Hollywood..."

This movie's full of head-scratchers––like the weird nuzzle/forehead rub van Cleef does with Mimsy at the end.

Not sure where this came from.

And where does this guy keep getting ice cold Buds in the middle of the jungle?

I'm reminded of the finale of DELTA FORCE––beers for everybody!

Why do the silenced gunshots sound like a pinball ricochets? How does a car drive sideways along the wall of a tunnel?
 
 
 
 
 
This is truly one of the more majestic scenes in film history: Lewis Collins, while driving his car in a tunnel, swerves to avoid some construction and drives sideways down the tunnel wall (in miniature) for a good forty-five seconds as Ernest Borgnine tries to wrap his head around it, in vain.

Still, this is far from being the worst that Italy has to offer.  I cheerfully give it two and a half stars.

–Sean Gill

Only now does it occur to me... DEADLY BLESSING

Only now does it occur to me... that I would ever see Ernest Borgnine play a crazy-eyed, terrifying Amish preacher in a Wes Craven religious-slasher flick.

Er, scratch that, he's not Amish– he's a "Hittite."  Now nobody can be offended, apparently.  As Sharon Stone's character says, "The Hittites make the Amish look like swingers."  What, WHUTTT?!– did I just say "Sharon Stone?"

Yup, here she is, in one of her very first film roles, pictured below as a real, defanged spider crawls up her neck.



This would seem to nullify Menahem Golan's claim that she was discovered entirely by Cannon Films.

We also have the distinctive Michael Berryman (THE HILLS HAVE EYES, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, WEIRD SCIENCE)
 
as a red herring, a role he would later fulfill again in the similarly-themed religious slasher episode of the X-FILES, "Revelations."

Anyway, DEADLY BLESSING is definitely second or third-tier Craven, though it contains much memorable and spooky imagery (including freaky use of snakes and spiders)
 
 and feels in many ways like a trial run for A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, with its distinguishing Craven camera-angles:

and its surreal forays into the dreamscape
 
 
which tell me that, conscious or not, the germ of the idea that was Freddy Krueger began to really flesh itself out for the first time on set of DEADLY BLESSING.

Only now does it occur to me... JUBAL

Only now does it occur to me...  that my lifelong dream to see Charles Bronson throw a table at Ernest Borgnine would one day be realized!

Sheer visual poetry!  And from the freeze-framing, it looks like Bronson is in fact heaving that table across the room, while Borgnine has been replaced by a stunt double.

The movie's pretty good, too– a loose (very loose) retelling of OTHELLO (with Borgnine as Marty– I mean Othello, Rod Steiger as Iago, Valerie French as Desdemona, and Glenn Ford as Cassio),

JUBAL is a beautiful Eastmancolor Western that's tense, well-acted, and bursting with Douglas Sirk-ian melodrama.  It's not quite as good as my other Delmer Daves favorites (DARK PASSAGE and 3:10 TO YUMA), but it's well worth your time (even though Bronson's only in a supporting role).  It's also clear that Sergio Leone was a Delmer Daves fan, and it's funny how many of the film's tableaux are comprised entirely of actors who would go on to work with the Spaghetti Master:

Rod Steiger (DUCK, YOU SUCKER) and henchman Jack Elam (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.)

Charles Bronson (even wearing practically the same hat as in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) faces off with Steiger.