Togetherness (1970)

A dreary attempt at romantic farce that employs such hackneyed conceits as cartoonishly exaggerated class differences, wholly unconvincing fake personas, and a crass wager between would-be seducers, Togetherness teams C-listers George Hamilton and Peter Lawford with European beauties Giorgia Moll and Olga Schoberová. Yawn. Even the film’s Mediterranean locations fail to impress because the movie’s photography is so flat and unimaginative. In fact, nearly everything in Togetherness lands with a thud, so the picture represented a shaky transition to features for writer-director Arthur Marks, who previously helmed episodes of Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. (He followed this rotten movie with more low-budget flicks, including a handful of energetic blaxploitation movies, before returning to episodic television.) The interminable first half of Togetherness concerns horny jet-setter Jack DuPont (Hamilton) trying to bed voluptuous Yugoslavian athlete Nina (Schoberová) after they meet in Greece. Because Nina is a stalwart communist, Jack pretends to be a poor journalist instead of a rich playboy, but the courtship storyline makes Nina seem like a hopeless idiot because Jack’s ruse is so transparent. Eventually, Togetherness gets around to its real storyline when Jack and Nina take a boat trip with Jack’s friend, Solomon (Lawford), a European prince whose beautiful companion, Josee (Moll), pretends to tolerate Solomon’s infidelity. Solomon and Josee bet each other they can woo Nina and Jack, respectively. Hilarity does not ensue. To get a sense of how desperately Togetherness reaches for laughs, the most prominent supporting character is “Hipolitas Mollnar,” a boisterous Eastern European painter played by John Banner, best known as Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes. Even by the pathetic standards of this movie, Banner’s relentless mugging is excruciating. Sluggish, tacky, and unfunny, Togetherness is so inert that Marks would have been better served executing the piece as a sex comedy. Lively and sleazy would have been preferable to dull and smarmy.

Togetherness: LAME

Death Car on the Freeway (1979)

          Former stuntman Hal Needham scored two hits out of the gate as a director, because Needham’s buddy Burt Reynolds starred in Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Hooper (1978). Yet Needham’s first picture without Reynolds, the Wild West comedy The Villain (1979), was a dud. Perhaps that’s why Needham downgraded to TV movies before reteaming with Reynolds for the inevitable Smokey and the Bandit II (1980). The first of Needham’s telefilms, Death Car on the Freeway, is as laughably obvious as its title. Pitting an intrepid TV reporter against a psychopath who uses his vehicle to kill people while they’re driving, Death Car on the Freeway is enjoyably vapid made-for-TV dreck, with a parade of familiar actors enacting simplistic scenarios against a backdrop of automotive violence and explosive stunts. Always stronger at choreographing mayhem than guiding performances, Needham suffers for the casting of Charlie’s Angels beauty Shelley Hack in the leading role, because she offers only her usual robotic line readings. Similarly, the story is so formulaic and predictable that there’s never much suspense, except perhaps when Needham steps on the gas to simulate vehicular jeopardy. Still, with its lip service to women’s liberation and its stubborn insistence on showing a car wiping out every 15 minutes or so, Death Car on the Freeway never pretends to be anything but disposable entertainment.

          Hack plays Jan Claussen, a Los Angeles newscaster looking for a hot story. She connects two seemingly unrelated incidents and dubs a public menace “The Freeway Fiddler” because survivors recall hearing bluegrass music emanating from his van. (Yes, the film’s title is a misnomer, because the subject is actually a death van on the freeway.) Jan clashes with the usual opponents—an ex-husband (George Hamilton) who doesn’t believe in her potential, a stubborn cop (Peter Graves) who resents that she spotted a crime pattern before he did, and a kindly boss (Frank Gorshin) who can’t protect her from advertisers wary of the anti-automobile stance that Jan takes during editorials. And, yes, you read that right. Somewhere along the line, Jan morphs from a reporter to a public crusader, and she inexplicably determines that car ads linking speed with virility are the reason the Fiddler started attacking people. Better to ignore the plot twists while gawking at the cool chase scenes and the random guest stars. Others appearing in Death Car on the Freeway include Harriet Nelson, Barbara Rush, Dina Shore, Abe Vigoda, and Needham himself, who acts the small role of a defensive-driving instructor.

Death Car on the Freeway: FUNKY

Medusa (1973)

Good luck deciphering the plot of Medusa, a jumbled mystery/thriller shot in Greece with two American leading actors accompanied by a European supporting cast. Perpetually tanned pretty boy George Hamilton, who also produced this disaster, stars as Jeffrey, some sort of debauched jet-set type who flits around Europe looking for a good time. The picture opens with a scene of Jeffrey dying on a boat and then, in voiceover, promising the audience an explanation for his demise. The rest of the picture is an extended flashback, but clarity surrounding Jeffrey’s circumstances—or, for that matter, his characterization—never emerges. Instead, Medusa grinds through one seemingly unrelated vignette after another. In one scene, Jeffrey crashes a party while dressed in an Elvis-style white jumpsuit, then jumps onto a table and sings until he’s dragged away. In another scene, he reacts with horror upon discovering that his gangster acquaintance, the sadistic Angelo (Cameron Mitchell), has murdered someone. And yet in the scene following that one, Jeffrey himself commits murder, since it appears that he’s either a serial killer or the accomplice of a serial killer. (The last thing this dunderheaded flick needed to do was play perceptual games.) Worst of all, Jeffrey chews up long periods of screen time by spewing bargain-basement philosophy, suggesting that, on some level, Hamilton envisioned Medusa as a character study of a playboy in decline. Whatever the intentions, the culprits behind this absolute mess of a movie (including director Gordon Hessler and screenwriter Christopher Wicking) can’t lock into a coherent storyline or a consistent tone for more than a few minutes at a time. After all, the same movie containing the frivolous scene of Jeffrey crashing the party also features an extended sequence of Angelo torturing some poor guy to death by pumping his stomach full of water until the guy drowns.

Medusa: SQUARE

The Dead Don’t Die (1975)

It’s fitting that the worst thing about this zombie flick is a lifeless performance. Made for TV by horror specialist Curtis Harrington, directing a script by Psycho novelist Robert Bloch, The Dead Don’t Die gene-splices the film-noir genre with supernatural horror. Because both of these genres feature existentialism and shadowy photography, they should mesh well, and indeed The Dead Don’t Die has some fun jolts involving zombies emerging from darkness in locations that could’ve been used in a Humphrey Bogart movie, but the thing never quite comes together. The story is set in 1934, when sailor Don Drake (George Hamilton) returns from military service to attend the execution of his brother, Ralph (Jerry Douglas), who claims he’s innocent of the murder charge for which he was convicted. In the course of investigating Ralph’s life and alleged crimes, Don enters the orbit of Jim Moss (Ray Milland), the shady promoter of bop-till-you-drop dance marathons. Eventually, it becomes clear that Ralph was mixed up with criminals who learned voodoo in Haiti, and are using the undead as soldiers in a nefarious scheme. Obviously, this is all very cartoony, but there should have been plenty here to sustain 74 creepy minutes. Alas, The Dead Don’t Die is merely mediocre, partially because of shortcomings in Bloch’s teleplay—his dialogue is way too obvious, for instance—and mostly because of Hamilton’s acting. A pretty-boy performer whose best work generally involves self-parody, Hamilton can’t muster anywhere near the intensity required to sell such outlandish material. Still, veteran actors including Joan Blondell, Ralph Meeker, and Milland provide competent supporting performances, and some of the zombie scenes work. As such, it’s not difficult to imagine some enterprising producer revisiting this material, smoothing out the rough patches, and coming up with an interesting remake.

The Dead Don’t Die: FUNKY

Love at First Bite (1979)

          Casting perpetually tanned smoothie George Hamilton as a pasty-faced vampire was such a droll bit of comic inspiration—and Hamilton’s ensuing performance was so unexpectedly delightful—that it’s easy to savor fond memories of Love at First Bite if one encountered the movie during its original release and avoided it thereafter. Alas, revisiting the film dispels those fond memories quickly. Hamilton is indeed quite funny, and his costars pour on the charm to infuse their thin characterizations with vitality, but the film’s comedy is so broad (and, at times, so racist) that sensible viewers will cringe as often as they chuckle. On top of insipid one-liners like “I’m going out for a bite to drink,” the picture includes awful sequences with featured players Sherman Hemsley and Isabel Sanford (better known as TV’s The Jeffersons) lampooning African-American patois.

          Anyway, here’s the good news: Hamilton, Richard Benjamin, Arte Johnson, and Susan Saint James look like they’re having a blast delivering silly jokes, so their cheerfulness makes long stretches of the movie palatable. The plot involves Count Dracula (Hamilton) relocating to New York City with his psychotic henchman Renfield (Johnson). Once in Manhattan, Dracula courts neurotic model Cindy Sondheim (Saint James), who, of course, happens to be romantically entangled with shrink Dr. Jeffrey Rosenberg (Benjamin), a descendant of Dracula’s old nemesis Abraham Van Helsing. And so it goes from there: The vampire woos the model, the doctor becomes a monster hunter, and Renfield eats bugs.

          The tone of the picture is set perfectly during the opening Transylvania scenes, because when Hamilton makes his entrance in a spooky castle to the accompaniment of baying wolves, he coos a funny twist on an old Bela Lugosi line: “Children of the night—shut up!” The gimmick is that Dracula is tired of the same old routine, so he’s eager to try new things like dancing in a disco; sure enough, the romantic boogie that Hamilton and Saint James perform to Alicia Bridges’ slinky hit “I Love the Night Life” is a highlight.

          Had director Stan Dragoti and the film’s writers been able to maintain a consistent balance of clever jokes and romance, Love at First Bite could have become an offbeat gem. Instead, it’s a mixed bag of fun sequences and stupid discursions, with the clunker gags outnumbering the successful zingers. Still, there’s a reason this was among the few unqualified triumphs of Hamilton’s career—since the actor conveys ironic self-awareness from start to finish, he’s impossible to dislike even when the movie around him is very easy to dislike.

Love at First Bite: FUNKY

Sextette (1978)

          If there’s one scene that epitomizes the spellbinding strangeness of Sextette, a big-budget musical comedy that’s both tone-deaf and completely unfunny, it’s an extended romantic duet between the heroine and the younger man she just married. The leading lady is none other than Mae West, the notorious actress/writer who first achieved fame in the 1920s for scandalous stage shows. The bridegroom is played by Englishman Timothy Dalton, a decade before his brief run as 007. At the time, West was 84 and Dalton was 32, yet the scene features the actors sharing vocal chores (and they are chores, since neither can sing) on a lifeless, quasi-disco version of the Captain and Tennille hit “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

          Dalton’s a slim young man wearing an elegant tux, and West is an overweight senior hidden behind gallons of makeup, acres of Edith Head-designed sequined costuming, and a haze filter thick enough to trigger a smog alert. At the most ludicrous moment of this sequence, Dalton sings the laughably re-written lyric, “Young and beautiful, your looks will never be gone.” The camera then cuts to a close-up (shot from about 20 feet away) of West writhing seductively, her looks very much gone.

          And that’s pretty much the tone of this whole excruciating picture, which features an old-fashioned lark of a plot about legions of men lusting after West’s character, Marlo Manners. Marlo is a Hollywood movie star who just married her sixth husband, Great Britain’s Lord Barrington (Dalton). Their honeymoon is being celebrated by the public and documented by the media as a major event, but before the duo can (shudder) consummate their union, Marlo’s agent (Dom DeLuise) says the U.S. government wants Marlo to seduce a foreign leader (Tony Curtis) into cooperating with an international peace initiative. Meanwhile, Marlo’s fifth husband, gangster Vance Norton (George Hamilton), has resurfaced despite everyone believing him dead, and he’s intent on reclaiming Marlo’s hand.

          Also thrown into the mix are a fey fashion designer (played by The Who drummer Keith Moon), an imperious Russian film director (played by Beatles drummer Ringo Starr), real-life broadcasters Rona Barrett and Regis Philbin (as themselves), and cameo players Walter Pidgeon and George Raft. Oh, and shock-rocker Alice Cooper shows up at the end, without his trademark ghoul make-up, to (quite effectively) croon a number as a singing waiter.

          This whole mess is based upon the last play West wrote, also called Sextette, and because the play opened in 1961, questions of “why” are unavoidable. Why was a film adaptation deemed necessary almost 20 years after the play opened? Why was a West comeback deemed necessary, more than 30 years after her last starring role in a movie? And why the hell didn’t anyone realize how wrong all of this was? Answers to these puzzlers are lost to the ages, so we’re merely left with a cinematic curio. Sextette is filled with images that would be innocuous in other circumstances but are mind-warpingly bizarre given West’s advanced age: a roomful of bodybuilders flexing their muscles to curry West’s favor; a roomful of diplomats (including a stand-in for then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter) singing and dancing as West holds them in her thrall; West cooing sexual puns as she lounges in bed and drives men like Curtis, Dalton, and Hamilton to erotic distraction.

          West’s performance is abysmal, since she tries to mimic the sass of bygone days without acknowledging the passage of time; the poor woman looks close to toppling when she tries to shimmy in tight dresses. About the only good thing one can say about Sextette is that even though much of the dialogue recycles past favorites (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime,” and so on), West had not completely lost her flair for penning ribald one-liners, like this zinger: “I’m the girl who works for Paramount all day, and Fox all night.”

Sextette: FREAKY

Once Is Not Enough (1975)

          New cinematic freedoms in the ’60s and ’70s emboldened pandering producers to adapt trashy bestselling novels for the screen, resulting in a series of godawful epics based on pulpy books by the likes of Harold Robbins, Sidney Sheldon, and Jacqueline Susann. A typical example of the breed is the Susann adaptation Once Is Not Enough, an overwrought melodrama about a beautiful young woman tormented by a daddy complex.

          Deborah Raffin stars as January, the teenaged daughter of a macho movie producer named Mike Wayne (Kirk Douglas). When the story opens, January is completing her lengthy recovery from a bad motorcycle accident, so when she finally returns home from the hospital, she discovers that Mike’s career has hit the skids, and that he recently married the super-rich Deidre Granger (Alexis Smith) in order to provide for January.

          This discovery sends January into an emotional tailspin—and eventually into the arms of Tom Colt (David Janssen), an alcoholic novelist who becomes a sexual surrogate for dear old Daddy. The sleazy storyline also includes Deidre’s lothario cousin (George Hamilton); Diedre’s secret lesbian lover (Melina Mercouri); and January’s promiscuous best friend (Brenda Vaccaro). These self-involved and/or self-loathing characters fight, scheme, and screw in an endless cycle until enough of them are either dead or neutralized to arrive at an arbitrary conclusion.

          Once Is Not Enough lacks any tangible relation to the real world, just like it lacks any sense of higher purpose, so the movie’s supposed entertainment value involves reveling in sleaze. The storyline of he-man Douglas emasculating himself by marrying for money offers some amusement, but it’s difficult to enjoy the principal narrative about January, which careers between her pseudo-incestuous preoccupation with her father and her odious sexual involvement with Tom, who’s forty years her senior.

          The screenplay, by Casablanca co-writer Julius J. Epstein, has a few zippy dialogue exchanges, but relies too much on Susann’s patois of contrived world-weariness. Similarly, the performances are erratic: Raffin is terrible (flat line readings, unconvincing emotional shifts), Douglas is okay (hammy but intense), and Vaccaro is great (bitchy, fragile, funny). A handful of worthwhile elements, however, are insufficient to justify the picture’s deadly 121-minute running time, so a more appropriate title would be Once Is More Than Enough.

Once Is Not Enough: LAME

Evel Knievel (1971) & Viva Knievel! (1977)

          For most of the ’70s, real-life daredevil Evel Knievel was a ubiquitous figure in kiddie-oriented pop culture, thanks to death-defying TV appearances, a line of cool toys, and regular ads on the back covers of comic books. A classically American entrepreneur whose gift for hucksterism far exceeded the virtues of the product he sold, Knievel was a circus act writ large, making a small fortune off the public’s interest in whether he could survive doing things like flying a rocket across Snake Canyon. Cinematic tributes were inevitable, because Knievel did visually interesting things while wearing colorful costumes and issuing glib soundbites and outlandish boasts.
          Watched chronologically, the two features made about Knievel in the ’70s show the daredevil’s self-promotional hubris in ascension and decline.

          While not precisely an underappreciated gem, the 1971 release Evel Knievel is so cartoonishly enjoyable that it’s a shame the picture is only currently available via rotten public-domain prints. Co-written by John Milius, the right man for the job given his affection for larger-than-life macho heroes, the sprightly picture plays out like the origin story of a noble warrior whose motorcycle is his weapon for flouting the expectations of conventional society. George Hamilton, putting his superficial charms to great use by playing a character beloved for his superficial charms, portrays Knievel in a present-day wrap-around bit as Knievel prepares for a big stunt, and also in a series of jaunty flashbacks depicting the burgeoning stuntman’s discovery of his gifts. The Knievel in this movie is rebellious ’50s biker who never grew up, so by the time Hamilton dons Knievel’s signature red-white-and-blue jumpsuit for the climax, it’s as if we’ve watched a masked adventurer embrace his fate. Furthermore, Hamilton’s cheerful performance and Milius’ oversized dialogue create the pleasant illusion that Knievel’s odyssey is something inspirational instead of just the evolution of a crass gimmick. (Hamilton even dares to suggest that Knievel got nervous before jumps, giving the story a smidgen of humanity.) And if Evel Knievel is ultimately little more than the equivalent of a fluffy telefilm, it's exactly the right gee-whiz commercial for all that groovy swag Ideal Toys peddled throughout the ’70s.

          The bloom comes off the rose very quickly when one watches Viva Knievel!, however, and not just because the real-life Knievel is a dud playing himself. Paunchy, stilted, and a little bit nasty, Knievel seems less like an adventurer and more like an asshole, which by all reports is closer to the truth—though unquestionably brave and tough, Knievel was also a drinker and a hothead. The sense one gets of unseemly reality showing through a glossy façade is exacerbated by the ridiculous storyline of Viva Knievel!, which portrays the lead character as an international superhero. While traveling to Mexico for a stunt, Knievel defeats a gang of cocaine smugglers who are conspiring to kill him and use his 18-wheeler to transport drugs; inspires a group of orphans by secretly visiting them at night to deliver Evel Knievel action figures; and resolves the family tensions between his alcoholic mechanic and the mechanic’s estranged son. Model-turned-actress Lauren Hutton shows up as Knievel’s love interest, which means she spends a lot of time telling the hero how gosh-darn wonderful he is, and colorful figures including Red Buttons, Gene Kelly, Cameron Mitchell, and Leslie Nielsen round out the principal cast.

Evel Knievel: FUNKY

Viva Knievel! LAME

The Happy Hooker (1975) & The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington (1977)

          Dutch-born madam Xaviera Hollander became a minor celebrity in 1971, when she published a raunchy memoir titled The Happy Hooker at the apex of the sexual revolution, so a film adaptation was inevitable. And perhaps just as inevitably, the movie version of The Happy Hooker is a slapdash affair stitching together several silly episodes from Hollander’s adventures without any artistry or purpose. Indifferently directed by TV journeyman Nicholas Sgarro, the picture suffers from cheap production values, atrocious music, and a complete absence of sexiness—for a movie with the word happy in the title (not to mention the other word), it’s actually pretty miserable to watch.

          Screenwriter William Richert, who later wrote and directed the wonderfully weird Winter Kills (1979), contributes a few palatable dialogue exchanges, but his efforts can’t elevate the tacky source material or surmount the producers’ low intentions. Lynn Redgrave, a long way from her Oscar-nominated role as an overweight naif in Georgy Girl (1966), tries valiantly to invest her leading performance as Hollander with liberated-woman dignity, but even she can’t do get a rise out of the flaccid script.

          About the only novelty value of this dreary film is the presence of familiar character actors in small roles: Risky Business dad Nicholas Pryor plays Hollander’s first American boyfriend; ghoulish B-movie villain Richard Lynch plays a creepy cop; Smuckers pitchman Mason Adams and future Ghost costar Vincent Schiavelli play johns; and Newhart regular Tom Poston appears in the movie’s only amusing-ish scene, as a corporate exec who gets off watching a half-dressed Hollander deliver a ribald version of the daily stock report.

          Redgrave wisely steered clear of the movie’s two diminishing-returns sequels, the first of which, The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington, features actress/singer Joey Heatherton in the lead role. The story, such as it is, depicts Xaviera getting summoned before a Congressional committee as part of a morals inquiry and then getting recruited to serve as a Mata Hari for the CIA. Heatherton is a knockout, but her idea of sexiness is cooing and pouting, resulting in a flaccid Marilyn Monroe routine, and she’s surrounded by a truly random assortment of supporting players: Billy Barty, George Hamilton, Larry Storch, Ray Walston, and even Harold Sakata, the hulking Hawaiian who played “Odd Job” in Goldfinger.

          The movie is car-crash awful from start to finish, though it’s weirdly arresting to watch flamboyant comic Rip Taylor playing a fashion photographer who complains when he starts to see, horror of all horrors, a female model’s nether regions: “I don’t want to see any privates!” Well, not hers, anyway. Less amusing are embarrassing scenes like the vignette of Walston acting out a sex fantasy by dressing as Superman for a tryst with a bimbo prostitute. FYI, a final picture, The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood, with B-movie veteran Martine Beswick as Hollander, was released in 1980 and is therefore (thankfully) outside the purview of this survey.

The Happy Hooker: LAME

The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington: SQUARE

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973)

Although Burt Reynolds filmed hours upon hours of cowboy stories for film and television in the ’60s, he only starred in one Western during his peak period of the 1970s and early ’80s, and the picture pales in comparison to similar films of the same period starring Reynolds’ buddy Clint Eastwood. Part of the problem is an episodic storyline with too many villains, and part of the problem is the movie’s indecision about whether it’s an action picture with a romantic subplot or a romantic drama with action scenes. It also doesn’t help that the misogyny quotient is off the charts. Reynolds plays Jay, an outlaw reeling from the rape and murder of his Native American wife, Cat Dancing. When Jay’s accomplices Billy (Bo Hopkins) and Dawes (Jack Warden) kidnap a woman (Sarah Miles) they find wandering in the wilderness, Jay prevents the thugs from raping her, and takes her with him when he abandons the gang. The woman, Catherine, is running from her monstrous husband, Crocker (George Hamilton), so eventually Jay and Catherine are stalked by Dawes, Crocker, and even a bounty hunter (Lee J. Cobb), whom Crocker hires. It’s all very convoluted, and the idea that Catherine falls for Jay because he reveals his tragic past is trite. Making matters worse, Reynolds and Miles lack chemistry, so the only sparks are between Reynolds and Warden, whose climactic confrontation is memorably brutal. A priceless actor no matter how he was cast, Warden contributes one of his most odiously villainous performances in Cat Dancing, so he’s almost worth the price of admission. The location photography is handsome, especially scenes in a snowy forest toward the end of the picture, but the narrative’s stop-and-start-rhythm prevents Cat Dancing from building up a head of emotional steam. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing: FUNKY