Prophecy (1979) – DVD

March 4, 2002Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: John Frankenheimer, DVD, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

½*/**** Image B Sound C-
starring Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart
screenplay by David Seltzer
directed by John Frankenheimer

by Walter Chaw There is a moment in the middle of John Frankenheimer’s relentlessly campy (and prophecy-free) Prophecy when noble savage John Hawks (essayed by Irish-Italian Armand Assante), eluding the fuzz, runs through a forest clearing, into a cabin, and out a closed window. Why Hawks didn’t just take off into the woods is a mystery almost as great as what happened to Frankenheimer after the 1960s. I also liked a scene that finds professional weepy milquetoast Talia Shire with a mutant bear cub chewing on her throat.

Suspiria (1977) – DVD

January 19, 2002Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Dario Argento, DVD, Esoterica, Horror, Italy

****/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras D+
starring Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Flavio Bucci, Miguel Bosé
screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Dario Argento

Mustownby Walter Chaw At their best, Dario Argento’s films are lurid splashes of Hitchcockian reinvention that bristle with audacity and a pornographer’s sensibility. He deconstructs the male gaze in the mutilation of beautiful women, taking a moment (as he does in Tenebre, Opera, and Suspiria) to make guerrilla art of their extravagant suffering. Argento’s films are generally split between two sub-genres of the slasher flick, each defined to a large extent by his contributions. The first is the giallo, films indicated by their impossibly convoluted mystery plots and elaborate set-piece murders; the second, of which Suspiria is one, is the “supernatural,” distinguished by their surreality and lack of a traditional narrative. Known as “The Italian Hitchcock,” Argento, as I’ve said before, is more accurately “The Italian DePalma,” in that Argento’s imitating reads as homage. And though he occasionally selects sources to ape badly (i.e. attempting to adapt Jeunet and Caro to “Phantom of the Opera”), when he finds the perfect source material to serve as foundation for his redux perversions (Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and Rebecca for Suspiria), the end result can be as original as it is discomfiting.

The Hobbit (1978) + The Return of the King (1980) – DVDs

October 29, 2001Posted in1970s, 1980s, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Fantasy, Musical, Television

THE HOBBIT
**/**** Image B- Sound C
screenplay by Romeo Muller,
based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Jules Bass & Arthur Rankin Jr.

THE RETURN OF THE KING
**½/**** Image B- Sound C
screenplay by Romeo Muller,
based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
directed by Jules Bass & Arthur Rankin Jr.

by Walter Chaw There are a couple of ways to tackle screen adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit. One is to do as Ralph Bakshi did with his 1978 animation The Lord of the Rings and present a sexualized and disturbing vision of Middle Earth; the other is to make a film for children that omits the more troubling elements of Tolkien (the racism, homoeroticism, religiosity), as with Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr.’s two feature-length television specials: The Hobbit (1978) and The Return of the King (1979).

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

September 14, 2001Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Satire, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Monty Python
screenplay by Graham Chapman & John Cleese & Terry Gilliam & Eric Idle & Terry Jones & Michael Palin
directed by Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

by Walter Chaw Comprising Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Graham Chapman, the comedy troupe Monty Python had as their stock in trade the dialogue-dense, mildly absurdist short-form sketch. To that extent, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a series of comedic skits and improvisations bound loosely–very loosely–by the contention that this merry sextet of Britons is attempting to tell the Arthur myth without the aid of budget, plot, or accuracy. All of them are classically educated, and the film seems to be a giant flip of the nose at the pretension of the British literary tradition. In the act of being such, it nearly becomes the best telling of the Grail legend available. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a satire that instructs with its informed irreverence, a piece that knows the rules before it breaks them and has shown itself over the course of 26 years to be almost as immediate and hilarious as it was upon initial release.

Apocalypse Now Redux (1979/2001)

August 16, 2001Posted in****/****, 1970s, 2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Francis Ford Coppola, Drama, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, Theatrical, War

Apocalypse Now
****/****
starring Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Martin Sheen, Frederic Forrest
screenplay by John Milius and Francis Coppola, narration by Michael Herr
directed by Francis Coppola

by Walter Chaw Taking his cue from Orson Welles’s aborted screen translation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now sought to transplant Marlow’s journey down the Congo in pursuit of mad ivory trader Kurtz to Vietnam during the war. America’s involvement in Southeast Asia is, of course, a good fit with what Conrad calls “one of the dark places of the world,” and Apocalypse Now, easily one of the most literary big-budget blockbusters of the modern era, is utterly faithful to the intellectual and visceral impact of Conrad’s vision. Apocalypse Now is so overheated and pretentious, in fact, that the best way to explain its thematic core might be through an examination of the ways it uses three T.S. Eliot poems (The Wasteland, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men) and nods obliquely towards a fourth (The Dry Salvages, which refers to the animalism of rivers as the “brown god”).

The Wicker Man (1973) [Limited Edition] – DVD

August 7, 2001Posted in1970s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Horror, Mystery, UK

Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man
***½/**** Image B+ (Theatrical)/C (Extended) Sound C Extras A
starring Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland
screenplay by Anthony Shaffer
directed by Robin Hardy

by Walter Chaw Early in The Wicker Man, poor Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police shows the picture of a missing lass to a gaggle of locals on remote Summerisle Island. As he turns away, having received no information of value, the camera crops his head off. Later, during a pagan May Day festival, Sergeant Howie nearly gets his head cut off again, this time by six swords forming an interlaced sun symbol. The loss of the head represents castration (Sergeant Howie is shown to be impotent from the start), one of literally dozens of symbols both overt and subtle employed in this unique and brilliant genre film.

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) [Special Edition] – DVD

June 19, 2001Posted in1970s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, DVD, Japan, War

***½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, E.G. Marshall, Tatsuya Mihashi
screenplay by Larry Forrester, Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni
directed by Richard Fleischer and Kinji Fukasuka & Toshio Masuda

by Walter Chaw A joint project between a Japanese film crew and veteran American director Richard Fleischer (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Tora! Tora! Tora! had Akira Kurosawa assigned as the lead Japanese director, poised to make his American debut with a mammoth script weighing in at well over four-hundred pages–and that just for the Japanese side of the story. Accustomed to complete autonomy in his projects, Kurosawa bowed out after several weeks following a series of run-ins with Fox executives over not only the unwieldiness of his vision, but also disagreements concerning the shade of white used in the interiors of the Japanese carrier ward rooms! Unfortunately, Kurosawa’s initial involvement with the picture resulted in his regular cohort Toshiro Mifune turning down the role of Admiral Yamamoto (a role he would play in Jack Smight’s 1976 Midway and in 1968’s Yamamoto biopic Rengo kantai shirei chôkan: Yamamoto Isoroku), as the two titans of Japanese cinema had lingering bad feelings over their last collaboration, the underseen Akahige.

Jaws 2 (1978) [Widescreen] – DVD

May 21, 2001Posted in1970s, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Horror, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound B Extras A-
starring Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Joseph Mascolo
screenplay by Carl Gottlieb and Howard Sackler
directed by Jeannot Szwarc

by Bill Chambers Some key players besides Roy Scheider stuck around for this second helping of Jaws, which accounts for the tonal continuity and touch of class that are absent in the subsequent sequels. Producers David Brown and Richard D. Zanuck prostituted their box-office sensation because, according to Brown in Jaws 2's DVD documentary, "We decided if we didn't make it somebody else would make it. We felt very protective about it." Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb again returned to do the production draft. Production designer Joe Alves exhumed, and expanded the scope of, Amity Island. John Williams adapted his indelible Jaws score for a more youth-oriented adventure. And on screen, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, and Bruce reprised their roles as Mrs. Chief Brody, the unconscionable mayor (who, in the movie's darkest joke, is still in power), and the mechanical shark, respectively.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) [The Collector’s Edition] – DVD

May 2, 2001Posted in****/****, 1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Spielberg

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A
starring Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, Francois Truffaut
written and directed by Steven Spielberg

Mustownby Bill Chambers If his Jaws was about the Fourth of July, then Steven Spielberg followed it up with something like the holiday itself. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a soft-touched yet uncompromising hypothesis of benevolent flying saucers, seems structurally patterned after that day: domestic chaos, then military parades, then fireworks. It’s a film now in its third incarnation; Columbia TriStar’s DVD version, like their recent-vintage LaserDisc that preceded it, contains a Spielberg-sanctioned melding of the 1977 and 1980 theatrical releases, the latter the controversial “Special Edition” that effectively ransacked the imagination of fans. The latest rendition, which appears to have adopted the label “The Collector’s Edition,” is nothing short of masterful.

The Omen (1976) [Special Edition] – DVD

September 4, 2000Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, DVD, Horror, Mystery, UK

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner, Billie Whitelaw
screenplay by David Seltzer
directed by Richard Donner

by Bill Chambers I kind of enjoyed having nightmares as a child because they produced the most intense sensations then within my ken; the threat of death, as was so often the crux of these bad dreams, made me feel gloriously alive. Thus, when The Omen came into my life at the tender age of nine, it became an instant favourite, for it closely approximated the terrifying experiences I'd had with my eyes wide shut. In other words: it scared the pants off me.

Blue Collar (1978) – DVD

June 8, 2000Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Crime, Directors: Paul Schrader, Drama, DVD

***/**** Image B- Sound C+ Commentary B+
starring Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Cliff DeYoung
screenplay by Paul Schrader & Leonard Schrader
directed by Paul Schrader

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover Blue Collar gave me pause. On the one hand, it’s a no-excuses lambasting of management control and union corruption, railing against those who conspire to keep labour powerless and pliable. On the other, it offers no avenue for redress, throwing its protagonists’ lives out the window in an attempt to be modishly downbeat. The film is constantly at odds with itself, riling us into an angry mob while limiting the outlets for that anger, assuming that no political solution is possible and thus chopping everyone off at the knees. The result is a compulsively watchable film that never figures out what it’s trying to say, contained as it is within a boundary that keeps it from investigating the true nature of the problem.

Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) – DVD

June 7, 2000Posted in1970s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Travis Mackenzie Hoover, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Esoterica, Romance

**/**** Image A- Sound B
starring Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Val Avery, Timothy Carey
written and directed by John Cassavetes

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The experience of seeing Minnie and Moskowitz is like asking for a glass of milk and receiving a tequila shooter. Both might do good things for you in separate circumstances, but they are far from interchangeable. Similarly, the simple pleasures of a boy-meets-girl movie and the method bombast of John Cassavetes have their times and places, but they run on entirely different schedules. When the two actually collide, as they do in Minnie and Moskowitz, the cataclysm is so great it cancels out anything good that might have come from either one staying on their own turf: the wispy romance plot is mangled beyond all recognition and the soulful Cassavetes style is left pounding on the walls, resulting in a singularly unpleasant parade of standard cliché and acting overkill that leaves neither side standing by the end.