The California Kid (1974)

          Never mind that the “kid” of the title is played by a 34-year-old Martin Sheen, because if that kind of logical disconnect ruins your viewing experiences, then you probably don’t have much of an appetite for dopey TV movies from the ’70s, and The California Kid will strike you as a non-starter. Flip side, if you’re willing to lower your standards in order to enjoy 74 minutes of formulaic escapism, then prepare yourself for an enjoyable fast-food snack brimming with empty calories. Hot-rod driver Michael McCord (Sheen) blows into the small town of Clarksberg, where Sheriff Roy Childress (Vic Morrow) is so mad for speed-limit enforcement that he occasionally pushes reckless drivers’ cars over a cliff in treacherous canyon terrain. One of Sheriff Roy’s victims was Michael’s kid brother, so Michael has come to Clarksberg in search of truth and, if necessary, frontier justice. That’s the entire plot, notwithstanding an anemic love story pairing Michael with seen-it-all waitress Maggie (played by lissome singer-turned-actress Michelle Phillips).

          Written and directed, respectively, by longtime TV professionals Richard Compton and Richard T. Heffron, The California Kid is competent but graceless, and the movie’s lack of character development is laughable, especially when the filmmakers try for angsty gravitas in the final act. Had the project not landed so many interesting actors (Stuart Margolin and Nick Nolte show up in supporting roles), it’s safe to assume that The California Kid would have been unbearably vapid. As is, the thing moves along at a more sluggish pace than you might imagine, given the high-octane subject matter, but Sheen is consistently watchable. He’s particularly compelling in moments when he glares at Morrow, the heat of his character’s rage smoldering from beneath a menacingly scrunched brow. And just when it seems that Morrow has phoned in a one-dimensional portrayal, the revelation of his character’s backstory—combined with a single scene in a dusty backyard—adds something like nuance. So even though one can’t help but wish this thing grew up to become the Roger Corman-esque thrill ride it so clearly wants to, The California Kid has its simplistic charms.

The California Kid: FUNKY

Funeral for an Assassin (1974)

          Made in South Africa and released there in 1974, the no-nonsense thriller Funeral for an Assassin, which stars U.S. actor Vic Morrow, hit American screens in 1977. (The picture was an American/South African coproduction.) Largely ignoring the racial issues that defined apartheid-era South Africa, the movie delivers a serviceable plot about a criminal who escapes jail and kills a judge as a means of triggering a state funeral, where he intends to detonate an explosive and thereby kill as many high-ranking members of the South African government as possible. Tracking the criminal’s moves and rushing to prevent bloodshed is that beloved standby of crime films, the Lone Wolf police detective. Yes, excepting its country of origin, Funeral for an Assassin is as contrived and generic and predictable as the average episode of Kojak. The picture is not without its brainless appeal, some of which stems from Morrow’s grumpy performance as the criminal, but nothing in this passable-at-best flick will genuinely surprise or thrill viewers familiar with genre-movie tropes. That said, those seeking 92 minutes of undemanding intrigue will find what they want here.

         Morrow plays Michael Cardiff, an assassin who flees jail with the single-minded goal of obtaining revenge against the South African government. Peter Van Dissel plays Captain Evered Roos, an iconoclastic cop perceived by his superiors as being prone to conspiracy theories and reckless behavior. Accordingly, when Evered discovers clues suggesting that Michael is up to no good—even though Michael persuasively faked his own death—authorities are disinclined to believe Evered. Meanwhile, Michael moves through society with an absurd disguise, slathering his face, neck, and hands with blackface makeup. To the filmmakers’ minor credit, this masquerade eventually backfires on Michael, though every scene in which Michael passes for black strains credulity. Had the filmmakers made the next logical leap of giving Michael’s evil scheme racial overtones, or imbued Evered with an interesting attitude toward apartheid, Funeral for an Assassin could have become a thriller with a purpose. As is, it’s disposable pulp with the tiniest dash of local flavor thanks to extensive location photography. FYI, this picture should not be confused with Target of an Assassin, a 1977 South African film starring Anthony Quinn that was not released in the U.S. until the 1980s.

Funeral for an Assassin: FUNKY

The Night That Panicked America (1975)

          Clever, exciting, and suspenseful, The Night That Panicked America tells a quasi-fictionalized version of the events surrounding Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ sci-fi novel The War of the Worlds. Broadcast when radio was America’s primary form of home entertainment, Welles’ show was so immersive and persuasive that thousands upon thousands of listeners believed invaders from Mars had actually landed on Earth and commenced a hellacious assault. This highly enjoyable made-for-TV movie was adapted from the play Invasion from Mars, which was written by Howard Koch, the author of the script for the Welles broadcast. Yet arguably the most important contributor to this project was the gifted novelist and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer, credited with writing the screen story and cowriting (with Anthony Wilson) the teleplay. A literate fantasist adept at injecting new life into familiar characters (Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, the crew of the starship Enterprise), Meyer was ideally suited for transforming a historical event into old-fashioned pulp fiction.

          The movie cuts deftly between the scene at a CBS radio studio in New York City and various places around the country where people listen to the broadcast. In the studio scenes, Paul Shenar plays Welles like a demonically possessed orchestra conductor, determined to see his complex vision realized no matter the obstacles. One of the best creative choices made by the team behind The Night That Panicked America was eschewing psychoanalysis of Welles—simply presenting his determination implies plenty. The studio scenes are realistic and vivid, celebrating the gifts of voice actors and the resourcefulness of technicians. (The sound-effect subplot involving a bathroom is quite droll.)

          As for the pandemonium scenes, they’re more pedestrian but still quite effective. Borrowing a page from the disaster-movie playbook, the filmmakers present people who are either caught up in personal troubles or stupidly oblivious, with their reactions to impending doom revealing their personalities. The most compelling thread involves Hank Muldoon (Vic Morrow), a beleaguered family man contemplating leaving his wife, Ann (Eileen Brennan), and their children. When the Welles broadcast convinces the Muldoons the end is near, Hank takes extreme measures leading to a harrowing climax. (One can’t help but wonder whether Frank Darabont saw this telefilm, as the conclusion of the Muldoon supblot anticipates a key scene in Darabont’s 2007 Stephen King adaptation The Mist.)

          Directed by the reliable Joseph Sargent and featuring solid supporting actors—Tom Bosley, Michael Constantine, Cliff De Young, Will Geer, John Ritter—The Night That Panicked America may include a high quotient of artistic license, but isn’t using every possible means to put on a good show very much in the spirit of the Welles broadcast?

The Night That Panicked America: GROOVY

Message from Space (1978)

          If you’ve ever wondered what Star Wars (1977) would have been like if George Lucas had stimulated his imagination by consuming massive doses of hallucinogens, then you should definitely check out Message from Space. A Japanese production with some scenes performed in English by Hollywood actors, this effects-driven fantasy/sci-fi epic comprises 105 minutes of complete brain-blasting weirdness. Individual elements within the film are straight-up crazy, and Message from Space unfolds at a frenetic pace while juxtaposing incompatible images with stream-of-consciousness abandon.

          Things get surreal right from the start. Out in space, some bizarre planet inhabited by tree people (as in, leaves apparently growing out of their bodies) becomes imperiled by the evil designs of a wizard/king/robot/whatever, so the chief of the tree people sends glowing seeds into space to find saviors. A princess from the tree planet also joins the search, zooming through the stars in a tall ship complete with oars and sails. Eventually, the seeds (and the princess) gather a band of “heroes” including a recently discharged military officer (Vic Morrow), a gang of interstellar hot-rodders, and others. All of this is set to a hyperactive music score dominated by a motif that’s blatantly stolen from John Williams’ score for Star Wars.

          Director Kinji Fukasaku shoots nearly every scene with the kind of ADD camerawork you might normally expect to encounter in a skateboarding video, and the movie’s production design suffers from a major case of multiple personality disorder. Some costumes and sets seem germane to a hippy-dippy fairy tale, some seem yanked from a medieval drama, and others suggest a disco-era gay-culture fantasia—seriously, what’s with the dancers flitting around in spangly g-strings and rainbow-colored crystalline breastplates? Yet describing the picture’s look doesn’t begin to communicate the strangeness of Message from Space.

          Consider the scene of Meia (Peggy Lee Brennan), who’s some sort of groupie associated with the hot-rodders, floating around in open space—wearing no protective gear except a ventilator—so she can catch “fireflies” that turn to rocks when captured. Or consider the long sequence featuring a Disney-style wicked witch who poisons several of the “heroes” so she can force the princess to marry her son—a giant monster with a lizard head who perversely threatens the princess with a laser whip until bad-guy stormtroopers intervene. And we haven’t even gotten to the villain’s Lady Macbeth-style mommy—she’s a heavily made-up ghoul/witch/zombie thing who tools around in a wheelchair that looks like it’s built from human bones.

          Morrow, the only recognizable Hollywood actor in the picture, strolls through the whole crazy mess trying to cut a dashing figure as a gentleman soldier, but his straight-arrow routine belongs in a different movie. (It’s hard to take Morrow seriously when he shares scenes with a grade-Z C3P0 knockoff named “Beba-2,” who spews lines like, “No robot can forget your kindness to robotkind.”) It’s no wonder that Message from Space has built a minor cult following over the years, because watching the movie from an ironic perspective—or while stoned—probably makes for a better experience than trying to accept Message from Space at face value.

Message from Space: FREAKY

The Evictors (1979)

Low-budget filmmaker Charles B. Pierce was relentless about trying to recapture the success of his first movie, The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a backwoods monster movie that was shamelessly sold as a true story, even though it wasn’t. For instance, Pierce’s last flick of the ’70s, The Evictors, wasn’t a true story either, despite hype to the contrary. Set in Louisiana circa 1942 (with extensive flashbacks to the same area in 1928), The Evictors employs the scary premise of displaced psychos tormenting the current residents of the psychos’ former home. Unfortunately, the movie is far less interesting than the concept. To the dismay of viewers suckered by the spooky poster and trailer, The Evictors comprises an hour of boring preamble and about 30 minutes of underwhelming climax. Like Pierce’s other Southern-fried shockers, the picture has atmospheric widescreen cinematography and decent production design, but there isn’t enough narrative to sustain a feature. The picture begins with a sepia-toned flashback of cops trying to evict rednecks from an attractive rural home in 1928. Bloodshed ensues. Cut to 1942, when newlyweds Ben Watkins (Michael Parks) and Ruth Watkins (Jessica Harper) decide to buy the house from overly solicitous realtor Jake Rudd (Vic Morrow). For the next hour, Ruth grows worried based on cryptic written threats and the resulting vague suspicions. (The acting in The Evictors is exactly as lifeless as the material deserves, though cult-fave starlet Harper is a uniquely vulnerable presence in any context.) To get a sense of how ineptly Pierce tries to build tension, consider the bit where Ruth walks into her property’s barn, looks directly at a group of chickens, then yelps when one of the chickens hops off the ground. Pierce tries to jack up moments like these with spooky music, but the sum effect is still ridiculous. Occasionally, the movie livens up with a grisly flashback—as when someone gets murdered with a horseshoe attached to the end of a stick—and, of course, when “the evictors” finally show up at the end of the movie, a few minutes of chasing and running and screaming occur. This is followed by a head-scratcher of a “twist” ending.

The Evictors: LAME

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

          While not actually a good movie in terms of artistic achievement and/or narrative ambition, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is in some perverse ways the epitome of its genre. Throughout the ’70s, filmmakers made innumerable ennui-drenched flicks about young people hitting the road for crime sprees that represented a sort of anti-Establishment activism. In the best such pictures, the wandering youths articulated their angst so well that their actions felt meaningful; in the worst such pictures, the basic premise was simply an excuse for exploitative thrills. Since Dirty Mary Crazy Larry exists somewhere between these extremes, it’s emblematic of the whole early-’70s road-movie headspace. The picture also has just enough cleverness, reflected in flavorful dialogue and oblique camera angles, to validate the existence of genuine thematic material, even in the context of a trashy lovers-on-the-run picture.

          Peter Fonda stars as Larry, an iconoclastic driver pulling crimes to earn money for a new racecar. Riding shotgun during Larry’s adventure is Deke (Adam Roarke), an accomplice/mechanic. During the movie’s exciting opening sequence, Deke breaks into the home of a grocery-store manager (Roddy McDowall) and holds the man’s family hostage while Larry waltzes into the store to collect the contents of the store’s safe. Unfortunately, Larry’s most recent one-night stand, Mary (Susan George), tracks Larry down during his getaway—she steals his keys and threatens to tell the cops what he’s doing unless she lets him tag along. Thus, Deke, Larry, and Mary form an unlikely trio zooming across the Southwest with police in hot pursuit. Working from a novel by Richard Unekis, director John Hough and his assorted screenwriters do a fine job of balancing talky interludes with high-speed chase scenes, creating an ominous sense of inevitability about the drama’s impending resolution.

          Still, the characterizations are thin—although the crooks’ main pursuer, Sheriff Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow), is an enjoyably eccentric small-town lawman—and the performances are erratic. Roarke anchors the getaway scenes with a quiet intensity that complements Fonda’s enjoyably cavalier persona. Englishwoman George, however, is a screeching nuisance, presumably impeded by the task of mimicking redneck patois. She’s so annoying, in fact, that it’s easy to laugh when Fonda berates her with this bizarre ultimatum: “So help me, if you try another stunt like that, I’m gonna braid your tits!” Dirty Mary Crazy Larry zooms along as fast as the cars featured onscreen, delivering several nerve-jangling crash scenes and generally setting an interesting trap for the reckless protagonists. Yet the movie’s ending changes everything, and the finale is so quintessentially ’70s that it’s reason enough to check out this hard-charging romp.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: GROOVY

The Take (1974)

Although it might seem on first glance to be a blaxploitation picture, The Take is instead a straight-ahead crime thriller that just happens to star a black man, the inimitable Billy Dee Williams. He plays an unabashedly crooked cop who accepts payoffs from criminals even as he endeavors to bring them down. There’s a germ of an interesting idea here, because exploring the life of a maverick detective who rips off the crooks he’s busting could unveil provocative insights. Rather than going down that interesting road, however, the filmmakers behind The Take merely generate an exciting potboiler as our antihero, Lt. Sneed (Williams), pulls a fast one on a New Mexico-based kingpin named Manso (Vic Morrow). The story begins when Sneed gets summoned from his home base in San Francisco to sun-baked New Mexico by exasperated police chief Barrigan (Eddie Albert). Although Barrigan needs a big-city cop to tackle Manso, he’s aware of Sneed’s unorthodox methods and suspicious that Sneed is corrupt; Sneed’s tension with his new superior officer helps the big-city cop get into Manso’s good graces. In theory, all of this should be devious and thrilling, but in a strange way, Williams’ famous suaveness undercuts the picture: He’s so cool under pressure that we never worry very much for his welfare. In fact, Wiliams ends up being less interesting to watch than either Albert or Morrow, both of whom elevate underwritten roles. Morrow shows great flair playing a hot-tempered mobster who, at one point, gingerly nudges a rattlesnake off his property even as his thugs pummel someone who betrayed him. It’s also a kick to see onetime Beach Blanket Bingo dreamboat Frankie Avalon playing a small-time hood in a minor role, since it’s hard to imagine another circumstance in which he and Williams would share screen time. And in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it department, voluptuous ’70s starlet Kathy Baumann shows up for a wordless supporting role as Avalon’s squeeze, turning a bath towel into the movie’s sexiest costume. The Take is little more than a compendium of chase scenes and macho stand-offs, but it’s enjoyable in a mindless, pulpy sort of way. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

The Take: FUNKY

A Man Called Sledge (1970)

          A Man Called Sledge stitches together a dozen clichés of the spaghetti-Western genre and drains them of virtually all interest, so only the presence of charismatic leading man James Garner provides fleeting (but woefully insufficient) passages of watchability. Garner plays a gunslinger who stumbles across information about a military convoy that regularly transports gold across the desert and stores the loot overnight in a prison, so he conspires to get himself locked in the big house because he’s cooked up a scheme for ripping off the gold from inside the prison. A Man Called Sledge is so generic that its version of the clichéd Western character of a crazy old man is literally named “Old Man.” (If you care, John Marley from The Godfather plays the role.) The movie also has tired Euro-Western tropes like a histrionic music score and silly religious imagery, in this instance the crucifix Garner uses for a splint when his arm gets shot, meaning Jesus literally guides his gun hand. Whatever. Claude Akins and Dennis Weaver pop up in the supporting cast, as do lots of sweaty Italians, but they mostly just glower and gripe, so their presence doesn’t add much.

          Helmed and co-written by tough-guy actor Vic Morrow, A Man Called Sledge is nearly palatable during meat-and-potatoes action scenes, and then thoroughly uninteresting during dialogue passages. The biggest problem is that the characters are undefined, making it impossible to invest in the story. For instance, Sledge himself (Garner, of course) gets several different introductory scenes, none of which illuminates anything unique, so by about 15 minutes into the movie, it’s still unclear whether he’s a loner, part of a duo, or the leader of a gang. Adding insult to injury, the movie is capped by an atrocious theme song called “Other Men’s Gold,” featuring insipid lyrics sung in an amateurish warble—thereby unintentionally encapsulating the bargain-basement flavor of the whole enterprise. Oh, and for a capper, A Man Called Sledge mistakes viciousness for hard-edged storytelling, so the movie feels mean-spirited from beginning to end.

A Man Called Sledge: LAME

The Glass House (1972)

          For an early-’70s social-issue telefilm, The Glass House has an impressive pedigree: Truman Capote co-wrote the story, and ace scribe Tracy Keenan Wynn (The Longest Yard) wrote the teleplay. Alan Alda stars as Jonathan Paige, a college professor convicted of manslaughter for inadvertently killing the man who injured Paige’s wife in a car accident. He’s sent to prison on the same day that an idealistic guard, Brian Courtland (Clu Gulager), starts work at the institution, and as these unsuspecting men fall into the web of corruption and violence spun by prison overlord Hugo Slocum (Vic Morrow), a brutal killer incarcerated for life, the heroes come to realize the hopelessness of escaping, much less changing, the merciless status quo inside the big house.

          Paige’s descent is tied to the abuse visited upon a sweet-faced young man (Kristoffer Tabori) whom Paige fails to protect, and Courtland’s disillusionment stems from his realization that the aged warden (Dean Jagger) is content to let inmates kill each other. Unobtrusively directed by journeyman helmer Tom Gries, the picture moves at a strong pace from the bleak opening sequence to the horrific finale, making a simple statement about the seeming impossibility of retaining humanity inside a maximum-security lockup.

          Abetted tremendously by Alda’s characteristically sensitive performance, the script does a strong job of depicting Paige as a man who can’t win: Keeping to himself doesn’t steer the professor clear of danger, and neither does taking a principled stand. What’s more, the script expertly weaves together various strong personalities, with Morrow commanding the screen as a predatory monster, and Tabori giving a poignant turn as innocent doomed by circumstance. Billy Dee Williams shows up in an important featured role, and the film slyly employs his super-cool swagger to present a complex character who’s part peacenik, part revolutionary, and part straight-up badass. Depressing but focused and purposeful, The Glass House is solid stuff.

The Glass House: GROOVY