The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

          Easily one of the most famous unfinished movies in world-cinema history, Orson Welles’ elusive The Other Side of the Wind—filming for which spanned 1970 to 1976—finally entered public view, more or less, when producer Frank Marshall supervised assembly and post-production of Welles’ decades-old footage, leading to a 2018 debut at the Venice International Film Festival. (Marshall was also part of the original Wind crew.) While not exactly a proper completion of the project, since Welles died in 1985 without finishing so much as a rough cut, the Marshall-supervised approximation of Wind is now available for examination by any cinematic explorer with a Netflix password.

          Though it seems rather crass to discuss this unique artifact in such mundane terms, the question of whether Wind is worth watching depends entirely on who is asking. Those eager to discover some lost addition to Welles’ mainstream canon should pass without a moment’s hesistation. Those willing to burrow into the madness of a guess at the final form of an experimental film made in an improvisational manner by an artist prone to abandoning projects for reasons that confounded his collaborators should have a better idea of what to expect.

          First, the plot, such as it is. John Huston plays J.J. Hannaford, an aging director in the tough-guy mode eager to make a hip new picture full of intense sexual content and youthful angst. One evening, Hannaford assembles his social circle, plus lots of groupies and sycophants, for a work-in-progress screening. Welles shoots the Hannaford scenes with myriad angles, as if everyone at the party has a camera, and he occasionally cuts to more polished footage comprising Hannaford’s picture, the plot of which falls somewhere between cryptic and nonexistent. Sloshing through this soup of intriguing, lofty, and/or pretentious concepts are performances by Peter Bogdanovich, whose character has a twisted apprentice/mentor relationship with Hannfaord (shades of Bogdanovich’s real-life bond with Welles); Susan Strasberg, as a Pauline Kael-esque critic; Norman Foster, as a has-been actor reduced to serving as Hannfaord’s errand boy; and Oja Kodar, Welles’ real-life mistress, as the actress who stars in Hannford’s movie.

          As should be apparent by now, this is a whole lot to process, especially since Welles largely eschews conventional plotting mechanisms, forcing viewers to piece the “plot” together. It’s relatively easy to follow the broad strokes, but tracking subplots and the interrelationships of supporting characters is quite challenging. The Other Side of the Wind is so overstuffed that it’s hard for the viewer to separate what the film is trying to be from what the film actually is—the piece demands but only occasionally rewards close scrutiny.

          Every so often, a random character will drop a great line, as when someone explains to Hannaford that several acolytes fled: “Five of our best biographers just went over to Preminger!” Just as intermittently, the film locks into a spellbinding stretch—best of all, perhaps, is a long erotic sequence from the film within a film, permeated with so many psychedelic visual effects that it’s both a full-on freakout and a study in meticulous technique. The relationship between the Huston and Bogdanovich characters is poignant and weird, rendered effectively by both actor/directors. (One almost wishes Welles nixed his overbearing visual gimmickry during the characters’ sad falling-out scene.)

          Situated dead center in this whole bizarre enterprise is Kodar, who never delivers a line of dialogue and frequently performs without the encumberance of garments. Not only is there something unseemly about Welles crafting arty nude shots of his decades-younger girlfriend, but Kodar is not an especially compelling presence. Her centrality thus provides an apt metaphor representing the way in which Welles misdirected his attentions. His innate talents are evident throughout The Other Side of the Wind, but artistic discipline is wholly absent. In one scene, studio boss Max (Geoffrey Land) views some of Hannaford’s footage, then asks Billy—the errand boy played by Foster—what happens next. Billy’s sheepish reply? “I’m not really sure, Max.” And so it goes throughout this only fleetingly exhilarating glimpse into Welles’ voluptuous creativity.

          FYI, Netflix commissioned a feature-length documentary, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead, about the making of Welles’ movie. Although it leaves many key mysteries unsolved, the imaginatively assembled doc is essential viewing after experiencing The Other Side of the Wind.

The Other Side of the Wind: FUNKY

The Bridge in the Jungle (1971)

Here’s one of cinema’s stranger footnotes. More than 20 years after directing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), John Huston participated in another adaptation of a novel by B. Traven. Yet this time Huston’s involvement was limited to acting, and that’s where the connections between the two films end, despite claims in online and print sources that The Bridge in the Jungle is a sequel to Sierra Madre. It is not. The Bridge in the Jungle tells two stories that intersect awkwardly. First the picture follows Gales (Charles Robinson), an alcoholic hunter who ventures into more and more dangerous areas to claim valuable crocodile hides. He encounters Sleigh (Huston), an American expat who settled in a small Mexican village, and it emerges that Gales is on a revenge mission. Just when this storyline starts cooking, The Bridge in the Jungle lurches into a separate plot about a young Mexican mother fretting over the disappearance and possible drowning of her son. Huh? Writer, producer, and director Pancho Kohner captures lots of local color, but he’s inhibited by the meandering narrative and by an overreliance on amateurish actors. The latter problem is exacerbated by the presence of old pros Huston and Katy Jurado. Worse, the entertainment value of watching Huston growl crotchety dialogue (“You crocodile hunters are a seedy, ignorant bunch”) wears off once it becomes clear his character is tangential at best. As a result of its myriad storytelling problems, the movie carries an unpleasant aroma of pointlessness, even though the technical execution is fine.

The Bridge in the Jungle: LAME

1980 Week: Phobia

Often cited as the worst movie John Huston ever made, Phobia isn’t one of those failed pictures that viewers can enjoy ironically, marveling at logic bumps and technical errors. Instead, it’s excruciatingly boring. The concept for this would-be shocker is simple. When his patients start dying in horrible ways that are related to their phobias, police identify Dr. Peter Ross (Paul Michael Glaser) as a suspect, then discover he’s involved with a daring experiment in immersion therapy. Using images and sounds projected on theater-style equipment, as well as props and real-life situations, Dr. Ross forces patients to face their fears. As in, he makes a woman who’s afraid of being molested watch gang-rape scenes, he makes a dude who’s fearful of snakes handle a giant snake, and so on. Phobia is so lazy and stupid in its conception that it’s as if the filmmakers either forgot or simply neglected to create any mystery or suspense, because the truth of what’s happening is evident from the very first scenes. Every creative decision compounds the problem. Huston’s camerawork, often a hallmark of his skillful approach, fails the project completely, because he clearly elected to shoot the minimum amount of coverage for every scene, the better to wrap production days early and move on to more interesting activities. The picture cuts together, but there’s no life in the editing, suggesting there weren’t any options for generating vitality. And speaking of vitality, that’s exactly what Glaser, best known as the costar of TV’s Starsky & Hutch, lacks here. He’s so lethargic it seems like Huston never bothered to tell Glaser when the camera started running.

Phobia: LAME

The Deserter (1971)

          Part spaghetti Western and part Dirty Dozen ripoff, this Italy/US/Yugoslavia coproduction has a serviceable premise, then loses its way thanks to a forgettable leading performance and an overly mechanical plot. Along the way, several colorful actors are subsumed by the overall mediocrity of the piece, delivering half-hearted interpretations of underdeveloped roles. Even the action highlights are ho-hum. Those who want nothing more from adventure pictures than a steady flow of death-defying bravery and tight-lipped macho posturing will be able to consume the picture like a serving of empty calories, but those who expect anything more will get bored fairly quickly. In the Wild West, U.S. Cavalry soldier Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) completes a fortnight-long patrol and discovers that while he was away, Apaches raided the outpost where he lives and killed his wife. Kaleb blames the death on his superior officer, Colonel Brown (Richard Crenna), so Kaleb tries to quit the service and devote his life to killing Apaches. When Brown refuses Kaleb’s resignation, Kaleb shoots the colonel and becomes a fugitive from military justice. Two years later, blustery General Miles (John Huston) arrives on the scene, demanding that Brown illegally cross the Mexican border to slaughter a band of Apache raiders. What’s more, Miles demands that Brown’s men bring Kaleb in from the wilderness, because during the intervening period, Kaleb has made good on his vengeance pledge by slaughtering Apaches heedlessly, thereby becoming the ideal man to lead the mission into Mexico.

          Once all the narrative pieces are in place, Kaleb finds himself supervising a band of soldiers, including Kaleb, who would just as soon kill the notorious deserter as kill Apaches. Among those playing soldiers are Ian Bannen, Chuck Connors, Ricardo Montalban, Slim Pickens, and Woody Strode. (Naturally, Crenna’s character is along for the ride, too.) With this much talent at their disposal, producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Burt Kennedy should have been able to come up with something much more interesting than The Deserter, which is sometimes known as The Devil’s Backbone. Alas, the script is unrelentingly clichéd, predictable, and superficial, and the filmmakers miscalculated, badly, by casting Yugoslavian stud Fehmiu in the leading role. Just one year previous, Paramount tried to make Fehmiu into an international star by toplining him in the epic melodrama The Adventurers (1970), so this picture presumably represented the completion of a two-picture deal. A European equivalent to, say, James Franciscus, Fehmiu is suitably brooding and athletic, but he’s got the depth and range of a statue. With his performance creating a vacuum at the center of The Deserter, the movie is doomed to disappoint from its very first frames.

The Deserter: FUNKY

Jaguar Lives! (1979)

A dunderheaded take on James Bond-style international espionage with a heavy element of martial arts, Jaguar Lives! is roughly the equivalent of a second-rate television pilot, thanks to adequate production values, a blandly handsome leading actor, several faded stars playing vapid cameo roles, and a nonstop barrage of noisy action. The story is as stupid as it is trite, so not one frame of the picture is likely to lodge in the viewer’s memory. Jaguar Lives! is not even fun to watch ironically, excerpt perhaps for the snarky thrill of noting how many of the film’s macho moments come across as accidental homoerotica. In fact, viewers who enjoy watching leading man Joe Lewis perform martial-arts rituals while his naked, sculpted torso gleams in the sun may be the only ones who can derive uncomplicated pleasure from Jaguar Lives! The movie begins with secret agent Jonathan Cross, code-named “Jaguar” (Lewis), conducting a mission with his buddy, Bret Barrett, code-named “Cougar” (Anthony De Longis). The mission ends in tragedy, sending Jaguar into seclusion. He licks his spiritual wounds by doing martial arts in the desert under the watchful eye of his sensei (Woody Strode), whom the filmmakers helpfully adorn with the character name “Sensei.” Then intelligence operative Anna Thompson (played by onetime Bond girl Barbara Bach) arrives with a new mission, and—oh, forget it. International locations are visited, stuff explodes, and villains get their asses kicked. Beyond Bach and Strode, others collecting paychecks for playing pointless roles include Capucine, John Huston, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasance, and Dr. No himself, Joseph Wiseman. Lewis, who enjoyed a hugely successful career in competitive karate and kickboxing, is impressively athletic, and that may be the only reason to associate any form of the adjective “impressive” with Jaguar Lives!

Jaguar Lives!: LAME

The Hobbit (1977)

          Produced around the same time as animator Ralph Bakshi’s doomed theatrical adaptation The Lord of the Rings (1978), this made-for-TV cartoon presents a truncated version of author J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit, a prequel to his Rings book trilogy. Wrought by Rankin/Bass Productions, best known for their stop-motion Christmas specials of the 1960s and beyond (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, etc.), this take on The Hobbit has a beguiling visual aesthetic but suffers from problems of storytelling and style. In terms of storytelling, the filmmakers condense and/or omit so many events that the narrative becomes choppy, and in terms of style, the filmmakers use songs so prominently that The Hobbit is an outright musical. While it’s true that Tolkein’s book features songs as a recurring device, the melodies exist only in the reader’s mind, and the lyrical passages are balanced with other elements. In the Rankin/Bass Hobbit, musicality dominates to the point of distraction. Given all of these problems, The Hobbit feels frivolous, rushed, and unfocused, which is a shame.

          For those unfamiliar with the source material, The Hobbit begins when the wizard Gandalf informs diminutive and friendly hobbit Bilbo Baggins that he’s to accompany a group of dwarves on a treasure hunt through dangerous terrain, with the ultimate destination being the lair of Smaug, a horrible dragon hoarding gold that was stolen generations ago from dwarf royalty. The Rankin/Bass script, penned by Romeo Muller, treats nearly every part of Bilbo’s adventure as a fleeting vignette, lingering at great length only on two colorful episodes—Bilbo’s creepy encounter with the cave-dwelling creature Gollum, and Bilbo’s riddle-filled conversation with the dragon Smaug. To be fair, these are exciting and offbeat scenes, both worthy of close attention, and the ornate illustrations permeating this production nearly compensate for the hiccups in dramaturgy.

          The film’s dwarves, elves, goblins, spiders, and such are drawn beautifully, with expressive lines and meticulous details; even though the animation is a bit rudimentary, characterization and texture come across well. The voice cast is mostly adequate, with Orson Bean giving Bilbo warmth, John Huston lending grandeur to Ganadalf, and New York eccentric Brother Theodore providing the requisite perversity for Gollum. (Richard Boone’s flat American tones seem wrong for Smaug, though these things are of course highly subjective.) Given the strengths of this production, one wishes Rankin/Bass had felt compelled to try for a theatrical release, thereby emboldening them to add a half-hour of screen time and let the story breathe. (Though the songs would have been just as irksome.) But then again, thanks to Peter Jackson’s critically drubbed Hobbit trilogy of the 2010s, we’ve seen that too much Hobbit is not necessarily an improvement over too little Hobbit.

The Hobbit: FUNKY

Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976)

          While it pales in comparison to the same year’s big-screen Sherlock Holmes adventure The Seven Per-Cent Solution, this entertaining telefilm boasts a colorful cast, a fine script, and more-than-adequate production values. The picture also represents Roger Moore’s first and only attempt at playing Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic detective, and he’s a good fit. Not only does Moore’s velvety voice make long scenes of Sherlock explaining things an auditory pleasure, but the snobbishness inherent to Moore’s screen persona meshes nicely with the aloof quality of the Holmes character. There have been so many wonderful interpretations of this particular investigator that offering superlatives is imprudent, so it will suffice to say that Holmes and Moore do each other justice.

          Written as a screen original by veteran TV scribe Alvin Sapinsley, directed by the reliable Boris Segal, and set to jaunty music by Richard Rodney Bennett, Sherlock Holmes in New York opens in London, with Holmes spoiling the latest scheme of his nemesis, Professor Moriarty (John Huston), who vows revenge before escaping. Soon afterward, Holmes receives word that his on-again/off-again lover, actress Irene Adler (Charlotte Rampling), is in peril. Thus Holmes and his trusty biographer/sidekick, Dr. Watson (Patrick Macnee), travel to New York, where Irene is performing. Holmes learns that Irene’s son—whose father may or may not be Holmes himself—has been kidnapped, and that Moriarty is responsible. The catch? Moriarty has stolen all the gold from an international exchange, and Holmes is warned that if he helps police recover the stolen loot, Adler’s son will suffer the consequences. Dum-dum-dum!

          Sapinsley’s script hits nearly all the required notes well. The dialogue is elevated, the criminal scheme is outrageous, and the interplay between Adler and Holmes is deep, encoded, and sexy. (Rampling looks especially beautiful here, with her signature iciness suiting the role of a woman capable of intriguing the brilliant Holmes.) Despite wearing a goofy perm and sideburns, Moore cruises through his performance with great flair, and Macnee employs a gruff vocal style instead of his usual sing-song tones, which makes his Watson a fine complement to Moore’s suave Holmes. If there’s a weak link in the cast, which also includes the great David Huddleston as an NYPD detective, it’s Huston, who delivers an over-the-top interpretation of Moriarty; that said, Huston appears in just a few scenes, and he raises the energy level whenever he appears.

Sherlock Holmes in New York: GROOVY

The Last Run (1971)

          The intrigue that unfolded behind the scenes of this turgid thriller is more interesting than anything that actually happens onscreen. Not only was an iconic director replaced with a filmmaker of considerably less distinction, but the leading man left his wife for another woman—and both ladies are featured in the cast. Had any of this tension seeped into the movie’s scenes, The Last Run could have been edgy and exciting. Instead, it’s a slow movie about a man who spends his life driving fast. Make what you will of the irony. In any event, George C. Scott plays Harry Garmes, an American wheelman who spent most of his career driving cars for mobsters in Chicago. Because of some unnamed existential crisis, which was exacerbated by the death of his young son the infidelity of his now ex-wife, Harry lives in Portugal, drinking and smoking his way through days full of nothing. When he gets hired to drive an escaped convict and the convict’s girlfriend across Europe, Harry embraces the opportunity to see if he still has what it takes. Predictably, this simple scenario gets complicated, thanks to double-crosses, secret agendas, and Harry’s burgeoning romantic interest in the convict’s girlfriend.

          There’s a certain poetry to some of the dialogue in Alan Sharp’s script, and it’s fun to imagine what The Last Run might might have become if John Huston, the project’s original director, had remained involved. Alas, he bailed partway through production, apparently because of friction with the notoriously difficult Scott, and his successor was Richard Fleischer, whose filmmographry includes several enjoyable films but also a number of genuine embarrassments. The Last Run falls somewhere between those extremes; while it’s a disappointment that often gets stuck in the mud of pointless and/or repetitious scenes, it’s never overtly bad. Rather, it’s drab and lifeless and uninspired. Although Huston was at a weird stage in his career, he was an old pro at telling stories about self-destructive men, so it’s tempting to believe he would have elevated the material more than Fleischer did. After all, the story is a quintessential ’70s downer, and Huston rebounded from a creative slump with the grim Fat City a year later.

          That said, the characterizations in The Last Run are so thin, and the narrative events so trite, that perhaps the picture was destined for mediocrity. Scott strikes a spark every so often with his signature blend of anger and ennui, but costars Tony Musante and Trish Van Devere barely register while playing pure clichés—the hotheaded crook and the opportunistic moll. Behind-the-scenes talents do what they can, with composer Jerry Goldsmith’s jaunty score complementing cinematographer Sven Nykvist’s moody imagery. As for that other aspect of behind-the-scenes drama, Scott began production married to actress Colleen Dewhurst, who appears in one scene as a prostitute, and by the end of production, Scott was with Van Devere, whom he subsequently married.

The Last Run: FUNKY

The MacKintosh Man (1973)

          Despite being shallow, turgid, and unoriginal, The MacKintosh Man more or less slides by on star power, both in front of and behind the camera. Sleekly made by veteran director John Huston, who enlisted frequent collaborator Oswald Morris as his cinematographer, the picture tells an inconsequential story about conspiracies, crime schemes, personal betrayals, and other such things. Taken as a pure narrative, the piece falls somewhere on the spectrum between forgettable and irritating simply because so much of what happens onscreen is confusing. Taken as a cinematic experience, however, The MacKintosh Man is considerably more palatable. Walter Hill’s screenplay is so terse that the graceful images generated by Huston and Morris cut together at a brisk pace, giving The MacKintosh Man an almost musical flow. Composer Maurice Jarre’s jaunty main theme accentuates the cotton-candy texture of the movie, even though the subject matter is quite dark, and Paul Newman plays the leading role with his customary effortless charm. All in all, The MacKintosh Man feels, looks, and sounds like a solid movie, and sometimes the illusion of substance is enough to warrant a casual viewing.

          Attempting to describe the labyrinthine plot of the film is pointless, so the broad strokes will have to suffice. Rearden (Newman) is a British spy enlisted to penetrate a ring of thieves who smuggle diamonds through the mail. While posing as a criminal, Rearden is captured, convicted, and imprisoned, whereupon he discovers a second scheme. In exchange for a cut of the loot he “stole,” Rearden is offered a chance to bust out of prison. Accepting the terms, Rearden participates in an elaborate escape that involves cranes and smoke grenades and a phony ambulance, then meets a group of conspirators who extort money from criminals—all of which ties back to the original ring of diamond thieves. There’s also lots of murky business involving one Mrs. Smith (Dominique Sanda), a beautiful European working for British Intelligence, as well as the predictable levels of intrigue relating to high-ranking government officials, namely Member of Parliament Sir George Wheeler (James Mason) and spy boss MacKintosh (Harry Andrews).

          Following all of the story’s moving parts is dull and unrewarding labor, so it’s better to just go with the flow, savoring Hill’s pithy dialogue, Huston’s confident presentation, and Newman’s cheerfully cynical characterization. Furthermore, the supporting cast is so strong that the movie works well on a scene-to-scene basis even if the sum effect is underwhelming. That said, the story achieves something close to clarity and dramatic power once it gets past the halfway point, eventually resolving into an enjoyably suspenseful final scene.

The MacKintosh Man: FUNKY

The Visitor (1979)

          There are so many mind-meltingly weird elements in the sci-fi/horror epic The Visitor that it’s difficult to do the film justice with a brief description. Put simply, the movie is a vague rip-off of The Omen, concerning the efforts of a heroic character to prevent a malevolent child from unleashing something terrible. Accordingly, The Visitor has the requisite scenes of a wholesome-looking young girl using her supernatural powers—or simply her bare hands—to inflict violence. And while the true strangeness of The Visitor stems from the chaotic storytelling, maniacal style, and WTF plot complications, even the central premise gets tarted up in a way that ensures audience bewilderment.

          Because, you see, it’s not just that little Katy Collins (Paige Conner) is some sort of devil child who must be killed in order to protect the universe. No, the problem is that Katy’s innocent mother, pretty Atlanta divorcée Barbara Collins (Joanne Nail), has a womb that breeds superkids, so conspirators led by mysterious surgeon Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer) have positioned Barbara’s boyfriend, Raymond (Lance Henriksen), to push Barbara into marriage and a second pregnancy so she can breed a son, because together with Katy, the son will comprise the demonic equivalent of the Wonder Twins. Got all that? Good, since there’s more!

          Stalking Barbara and Katy is grandfatherly space alien Jerzy Colsowicz (John Huston), who leads a band of bald alien musclemen who spend most of their time doing the equivalent of interpretive dance while standing behind scrims atop an Atlanta rooftop. Interstellar performance-art alert! Jerzy chases Barbara and Katy around downtown Atlanta, even though Katy tries to use her telekinetic abilities to kill him, and Jerzy spends one evening in the Collins home by announcing he’s the babysitter sent by an employment agency because the regular girl is sick. After all, don’t most of us welcome 70-year-old men into our homes to watch over our prepubescent daughters while we’re away? Oh, and we still haven’t mentioned the never-seen aunt who gives Katy a loaded pistol for her birthday, or that Katy accidentally shoots and paralyzes her mother. And then there’s crazed nanny Jane (Shelley Winters), who slaps Katy around because she knows that Katy is evil. Is it even worth noting that the plot also includes an intrepid police detective (Glenn Ford) and a silent longhair who may or may not be Jesus (Franco Nero)?

          The Visitor is gonzo right from the opening scene, a trippy special-effects vignette showing Huston in some otherworldly environment with oddly colored liquid skies. Among the film’s myriad bizarre episodes are the following: Katy uses her telekinesis to sway an NBA game by causing a basketball to explode; Jerzy has some sort of orgasmic interaction with a radioactive space cloud full of birds; a scene of spinal surgery gets intercut with a gymnastics routine; and famed movie director Sam Peckinpah shows up for one scene, in silhouette, to play a medical doctor. Accentuating all of this bizarre content is disjointed editing that makes everything seem hallucinatory, and lots of operatic disco music. You’ve been warned.

The Visitor: FREAKY

Fat City (1972)

          No genre epitomizes the anything-goes spirit of the best American ’70s movies more than the downbeat character study, because during the ’70s, actors resembling real people were given opportunities to play characters resembling real people. Nothing could be further from traditional Hollywood glamour, for instance, than Fat City, the exceptional drama that revived director John Huston’s career. An ensemble piece set in the agricultural fields and skid-row neighborhoods in and around Stockton, California, Fat City is filled with dreamers, drunks, and losers. It’s a hymn to the hopeless. Whereas Huston had in the immediately preceding years lost his way by making bloated and/or misguided projects including The Bible: In the Beginning (1966) and Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), the director used Fat City to return to his core strength of poetic narratives about people living on the fringes of society.

          Although he didn’t write the piece (Leonard Gardner adapted the script from his own novel), Fat City concerns themes that were deeply familiar to Huston, including alienation, boxing, drinking, and failure. So even if one doesn’t get the sense of the director seeing himself in the film’s characters, one intuits that he’s known the type of people whose sad exploits he puts onscreen. Working with a skillful crew including master cinematographer Conrad Hall, Huston generates utterly believable atmosphere, with every dirty location and every tattered piece of costuming accentuating the theme of people whose lives comprise hard-won dignity against a backdrop of desperation.

          Stacy Keach stars as Billy Tully, a washed-up boxer who decides to get himself together by going to a gym, where he meets promising young fighter Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges). Emboldened by the idea of mentoring a beginner while restarting his own career, Billy initiates a pathetic quasi-romance with a drunk named Oma (Susan Tyrrell). As the story progresses, Billy waffles between his real life, which involves arduous work picking fruit for meager pay, and his imagined life, which involves optimistic notions about a future with a surrogate family including Ernie and Oma. Fat City is primarily concerned with the ways in which people who have nothing latch onto possibilities. Similarly to how Billy entertains foolish notions of being a better fighter in middle age than he ever was as a youth, Ernie buys into Billy’s encouragement, and Oma pretends that what she has with Billy is genuine—even though she’s already involved with another man. Yet Gardner’s story doesn’t oversimplify these desolate characters by focusing myopically on their inability to improve their situations; quite to the contrary, Gardner illustrates every self-destructive tendency of these characters, such as Billy’s habit of blaming his circumstances on bad management. Every person in Fat City seems achingly real.

          Huston cast the picture beautifully, getting letter-perfect work out of nearly everyone in the film. Keach’s unique combination of a bruiser’s physicality and a romantic’s soul transforms the actor into Billy; within his first few scenes, Keach erases any audience knowledge of his aptitude for classical dialogue, creating the complete illusion of a broken-down slob living on the streets of Stockton. Tyrrell gives an equally powerful performance (for which she earned an Oscar nomination), her raspy voice and wild eyes conveying a woman lost to alcohol but not robbed of her humanity, while Bridges and costar Candy Clark provide youthful counterpoints to the main characters. (It’s not hard to imagine the people played by Bridges and Clark becoming like Billy and Oma later in life.) As for Huston, his artistic rejuvenation continued—although he made a few turkeys in the years after Fat City, he also made some of his most interesting pictures, including the challenging chamber pieces Wise Blood (1979), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), all of which are thematic cousins to Fat City.

Fat City: RIGHT ON

Wise Blood (1979)

          By the end of the ’70s, veteran director John Huston had amply demonstrated his ability to change with the times, making a series of hip oddities that stood in sharp contrast to the stuffy museum pieces created by many of his chronological peers during the ‘70s. Of these offbeat pictures, Wise Blood is perhaps the strangest, not only because the underlying material is peculiar but also because Huston presents the story as if it is high comedy—even though the narrative of Wise Blood is a grim compendium of episodes featuring characters gripped by criminal, delusional, self-destructive, and sociopathic impulses. It’s clear that the intent of the picture was to offer broad satire about certain cultural extremes prevalent in America’s Deep South, but it’s difficult to laugh when characters deeply in need of psychiatric intervention court oblivion.

          Based on Flannery O’Connor’s 1962 novel of the same name, the picture follows the exploits of Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), a Georgia native who returns home from military service in Vietnam to find that his old life has disappeared—his family skipped town, leaving their home an empty wreck. Unexpectedly adrift, Hazel relocates to the city of Macon and builds relationships with a group of eccentrics living on the fringes of society. Hazel’s new acquaintances include Enoch (Dan Shor), an exuberant young simpleton; Asa (Harry Dean Stanton), a fire-and-brimstone street preacher; and Sabbath (Amy Wright), Asa’s twitchy daughter. Eventually, Hazel decides to start his own religion, which isn’t actually a religion, so he ends up preaching against Jesus on the same street corners where Asa sings the gospels. Meanwhile, an edgy romance between Hazel and Sabbath takes shape, and Enoch follows Hazel around like a puppy. It all gets very bizarre—one of the subplots involves stealing a shrunken corpse from a museum—and the great Ned Beatty joins the story midway through as an opportunistic guitarist/preacher/swindler.

          Although Huston films the story with his customary elegance, blending evocative production design and subtle camerawork to create a vivid sense of place, the arch nature of the characterizations makes it difficult to buy into Wise Blood’s illusions. Dourif seems like a foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic in nearly every scene, rendering audience empathy nearly impossible; his performance is unquestionably committed and intense, but it’s a drag to watch. Meanwhile, Shor and Wright incarnate ignorance with painful believably. Only Beatty and Stanton strike a palatable balance between the lightheartedness of Huston’s storytelling and the ugliness of O’Connor’s story. Wise Blood would have been a unique film no matter who sat behind the camera, so it’s doubly impressive that a veteran of Huston’s caliber tackled such challenging material. Alas, novelty alone isn’t enough to make for a rewarding viewing experience.

Wise Blood: FUNKY

Hollywood on Trial (1976)

          Arguably the best examination of the Hollywood blacklist yet captured on film, this solidly made documentary features interviews with many key figures who survived that awful episode. Clearly explaining why the changing attitudes of a post-WWWII America, film-industry labor disputes, and opportunistic lawmakers collided in the purging of communists and other left-wingers from the film industry, Hollywood on Trial gives heroes a venue for recalling their shining moments and lets villains cement their ignoble legacies. Tremendous archive footage takes viewers back to the tense days of Congressional hearings in which movie stars and studio executives stupidly claimed that commies were trying to take over the picture business; this same footage shows the famed Hollywood Ten, the first professionals banned from employment for political reasons, derailing their own defense by condescending to their persecutors. And then, in contemporary interviews, most of the Ten reveal the wisdom gained through the passage of time, while still issuing righteous fire.

          Given his oversized personality, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo provides some of the more memorable moments, his pithy parade of polysyllables amply displaying why under-educated executives perceived him as uppity back in the day. It’s riveting to watch the great man in twilight, knowing that he and his colleagues went to jail on matters of principle before finally undermining the blacklist in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Yet the most poignant footage is probably that of director Edward Dmytryk, the lone member of the Hollywood Ten to recant his original testimony and “name names” as a prerequisite for returning to work. Watching his face as Dmytryk tries to defend his indefensible actions is simultaneously edifying and excruciating; one sees glimmers of ambivalence, indignation, regret, and shame.

          It’s also infuriating to see archive footage of right-wingers like Walt Disney, Joseph McCarthy, and Richard Nixon, since it’s impossible to discern which of them believed he was addressing a genuine social threat and which knew he was simply union-busting. The venerable actor/director John Huston provides narration for the piece, which has the simplistic visuals of a ’70s TV special but more than enough historical significance to generate consistent interest.

Hollywood on Trial: GROOVY

Myra Breckenridge (1970)

          The notorious flop Myra Breckenridge tries so hard to be outrageous that, after a while, it’s just boring to watch even though the storyline is a sensationalistic farce about a scheming transsexual. Based on a satirical novel by Gore Vidal, the picture follows Myron Breckenridge (Rex Reed) as he undergoes sex-change surgery to become Myra Breckenridge (Raquel Welch) in order to get revenge on his skeevy uncle, Buck Loner (John Huston), who swindled Myron’s inheritance.
          Throughout the picture, Welch interacts with other performers while Reed lurks on the sidelines, visible only to Welch as his/her character’s inner voice. (This device allows Reed to issue caustic commentary and to guide Welch through her underhanded machinations.) As if more weirdness was necessary, director Michael Sarne regularly cuts from the action to snippets from old Twentieth Century-Fox movies (think Laurel & Hardy, Shirley Temple, and so on), providing “ironic” counterpoints to the main story.

          Putting the whole thing way over the top is the casting of onetime sex symbol Mae West as a talent agent who gets embroiled in the story; ancient and overweight but glamorized as if her former sex appeal is still intact, West floats through the movie in outlandish costumes, dropping rude one-liners and singing a pair of horrible show tunes. Huston’s contribution to the strangeness is performing in cartoonish cowboy costumes (his ten-gallon hat features a brim that must be four feet across) and barking every line in a lascivious growl. Reed, the flamboyant film critic whose claim to fame in the ’60s and ’70s was jaded bitchiness, contributes absolutely nothing except jaded bitchiness. As for Welch, the allure of her spectacular beauty wears thin once she starts acting, since she delivers dialogue with a vapid breathiness that makes her sound like a posturing twit.

          Still, Myra Breckenridge is among the most brazen X-rated movies from the brief moment when studios actually made X-rated movies. The raunchiest scene is undoubtedly Myra’s sexual conquest of a young stud (Roger Herren), because she ties him to a table, straps on a dildo, and anally rapes him while hooting and hollering like she’s riding in a rodeo. (The scene is shot discreetly, but the content is nonetheless startling.) In another transgressive moment, Myron (who is actually Myra imagining that he/she is still Myron) pleasures himself while imagining a pretty girl (Farrah Fawcett) tempting him with ice cream and baked goods.

          Myra Breckenridge had a dour effect on the professional lives of nearly everyone involved, destroying Carne’s Hollywood career, dissuading Reed from acting again until his cameo in Superman (1978), and dashing Welch’s hopes of being taken seriously as an actress. Some many find this movie’s mannered excesses amusing in a campy sort of way, and Myra Breckenridge is a must-see for anyone cataloging the worst cinematic train wrecks of the ’70s, but the picture doesn’t come close to being the scandalous farce its makers obviously envisioned.

Myra Breckenridge: FREAKY

Winter Kills (1979)

          By the end of the ’70s, conspiracy thrillers had started to evolve from provocative political thrillers to wild escapist romps, because as fictional conspiracies grew more outlandish, the derring-do required to survive them grew to equally unbelievable proportions. For instance, consider the credibility gap separating the best-known adaptation of a Richard Condon conspiracy novel, 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, and the least-known adaptation of a Richard Condon conspiracy novel, 1979’s Winter Kills. Whereas the former is a chilling story about political assassination made just before the real-life death of John F. Kennedy, the latter is a whimsical oddity made at the end of a decade during which the public overdosed on real-life political corruption. In fact, Winter Kills somehow manages to be both a conspiracy movie and a spoof of conspiracy movies, delivering a narrative so preposterous that it provides sardonic commentary on the whole premise of searching for wheels within wheels while scrutinizing the body politic.

          An obvious riff on the Kennedy clan’s woes, the picture follows directionless young blueblood Nick Kegan (Jeff Bridges), the younger brother of assassinated U.S. President Timothy Kegan. Nearly 20 years after the killing, Nick meets a dying man who claims to have pulled the trigger, which starts Nick down an investigative road that reveals how deep the roots of political murders reach. As written for the screen and directed by the clever William Richert, the picture follows Nick into a quagmire involving a crazy millionaire with a private army (Sterling Hayden), a tweaked behind-the-scenes power-monger who operates out of a computerized secret lair (Anthony Perkins), and other strange characters who are all vaguely connected to Nick’s super-rich father, Pa Kegan (John Huston), a modernized doppleganger for legendary patriarch Joseph Kennedy. Nick also gets involved with a mysterious woman (Belinda Bauer) who may or may not be a femme fatale, and he spends plenty of time getting assaulted, shot at, and threatened by various bad guys.

          Richert’s script is brilliant in flashes but muddy overall, providing a number of memorable scenes even though the main narrative is unnecessarily convoluted. Still, the whole thing goes down quite easily thanks to splendid widescreen cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, and thanks to a number of thoroughly entertaining performances. Bridges is exasperated and intense, desperately trying to prove his manhood while he’s digging for the truth, and Bauer is powerfully seductive (that nude scene!) in her first movie role. Huston, by this point in his career a seasoned pro at playing oversized villains, barks and growls in that special style of avuncular menace he did so well. The supporting players are just as good. Hayden is funny as a militaristic kook, recalling his role in Dr. Strangelove, while Perkins is slyly robotic, coolly delivering dialogue even as he withstands physical assault. As an added bonus, watch closely for Elizabeth Taylor, whose droll cameo is one of the movie’s sardonic highlights.

Winter Kills: GROOVY

Breakout (1975)

If you set your brain on standby mode to groove on cheap thrills and star power, the Charles Bronson action picture Breakout is enjoyably pulpy. In the convoluted story, unlucky American Jay (Robert Duvall) gets framed and thrown into a nasty Mexican jail, thanks to the machinations of his evil father, Harris Wagner (John Huston); it seems Jay is in a position to expose some of Harris’ nefarious activities. Unaware of Papa’s real agenda, Jay’s dutiful wife, Ann (Jill Ireland), conspires to get Jay released. When legal procedures prove fruitless, she attempts bribing guards and tries smuggling in tools for an escape attempt, but nothing works. Eventually, Ann is introduced to Nick Colton (Bronson), a small-time pilot willing to break the law for a buck. After a few false starts, Nick contrives an audacious plan to fly a helicopter into the jail. Drama, such as it is, stems from Ann’s difficulty balancing her devotion to Jay and her attraction to Nick, plus the challenges Nick encounters while recruiting accomplices for a possible suicide mission. All of this is palatable in a Saturday-matinee kind of a way, which means that Breakout is never boring even though it’s never believable. The movie suffers tonal hiccups whenever it tries to get serious, as in the subplot of Jay’s mental state deteriorating after extended incarceration, and there’s not much in the way of character development. Still, Bronson makes a charming lowlife, all bravado and sarcasm, while supporting players Sheree North and Randy Quaid offer flair as Nick’s long-suffering redneck pals. Ireland, Bronson’s frequent onscreen costar and real-life wife, is a bit spunkier than usual, and Duvall adds a measure of gravitas by playing his prison scenes with great intensity. (Huston is wasted in a tiny role.) So, while Breakout is contrived and silly in the extreme, a few thrilling sequences (and one shockingly gory death scene) ensure that fans of manly-man action will find plenty to enjoy.

Breakout: FUNKY

The Man Who Would Be King (1975)

          After spending much of the ’60s in the creative wilderness, director John Huston rebounded in the early ’70s with the acclaimed character drama Fat City and the eccentric Western The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, both released in 1972. Still, it seemed unlikely he would ever make another classic equal to his studio-era masterpieces The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The African Queen (1951), both of which starred Humphrey Bogart. It also seemed unlikely he would ever find the right actors for his adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s story The Man Who Would Be King, since Huston originally meant to make the picture with Bogart and Clark Gable. Yet Huston gracefully achieved both goals: Engrossing, spectacular, and thoughtful, his film of The Man Who Would Be King is among the all-time great adventure movies, perfectly meshing a once-in-a-lifetime onscreen duo with a timeless parable about man’s lust for gold.

          Michael Caine and Sean Connery play English soldiers in late 19th-century India, when the country was still part of the British Empire. Determined to improve their lot and emboldened by their belief in the superiority of white Christians over dark-skinned pagans, Peachy (Caine) and Danny (Connery) quit the army and venture to the remote terrain of Kafiristan, which is rumored to harbor untold treasures. Employing their army training, the lads help bolster the defenses of a remote village against violent marauders, and then a chance occurrence elevates their stature.

          During an attack, Danny is hit by an arrow but doesn’t flinch, convincing the locals he must be a god. (In fact, the arrow struck his leather bandolier.) Soon, Danny is summoned to a nearby holy city, with Peachy in tow, and another chance occurrence secures their illusion of divinity: The locals mistake Danny’s Freemason crest for a symbol of Alexander the Great, thus mistaking him for a reincarnation of the fabled conqueror. A palace filled with gold is handed to the soldiers, but when Peachy suggests they grab as much loot as they can carry and leave before their ruse is discovered, a power-mad Danny insists on staying.

          The stage thus set, Huston elegantly stages the duo’s inevitable fall from grace. The film’s climax is beautifully realized thanks to committed acting, crisp storytelling, and dazzling stunt work. Huston and co-screenwriter Gladys Hill capture the dangers and delights of Kipling’s style throughout the picture, so scenes in crowded India are chaotic and fast, while scenes in sprawling mountaintop temples are meditative and resplendent. Furthermore, veteran cameraman Oswald Morris’ lush photography makes locations like a vertiginous mountaintop staircase and a terrifying rope bridge seem like legends come to life. Huston employs a quasi-documentary feel for the most exotic scenes, creating a sense that Caine and Connery wandered into a never-before-seen wonderland; this intoxicating atmosphere is accentuated by the presence of Caine’s real-life wife, Guyana-born beauty Shakira Caine, in her only significant acting role. (Christopher Plummer appears in enjoyable framing sequences as Kipling.)

          As for Caine and Connery, they live up to the grandiose production surrounding them. Trading working-class banter like blokes sharing a pint, the actors convey the quality of deep friendship, so watching avarice cleave their relationship feels like observing great tragedy. That the actors never reunited onscreen defines The Man Who Would Be King as a singular document of their cinematic camaraderie.

The Man Who Would Be King: OUTTA SIGHT

Man in the Wilderness (1971)

          The opening sequence of this strange Western is striking and memorable: A large expedition of fur trappers treks through the rugged American frontier, dragging a giant ship on wheels, the sea vessel’s towering mast dominating the skyline like a crucifix. Things only get weirder from there, and luckily for adventurous viewers, robust actors Richard Harris and John Huston deliver over-the-top performances that suit the bizarre material. Huston plays the expedition’s villainous leader, Captain Filmore Henry, an obsessed adventurer with a tentative grasp on reality and an almost utter lack of morality. With his black wardrobe, lanky frame, and phlegmatic voice, Huston personifies Captain Henry as a vision of sickly death. Harris is Zachary Bass, one of the captain’s trackers. Venturing away from the group at one point, Bass gets mauled by a bear, so Captain Henry orders him left for dead.

          Man in the Wilderness gets trippy after this turn of events, because vast wordless swaths of the movie depict Bass crawling through the woods as he tries to rebuild his strength, drifting in and out of delirious flashbacks all the while. This material exists somewhere on the border between fascinating and interminable, because Harris’ solo scenes are so repetitive and uneventful that at a certain point viewers become as disoriented as the character. Adding to the offbeat nature of the film are interludes of the expedition as it moves on from the site of Bass’ presumed demise; the superstitious trappers get the idea that Bass’ spirit is haunting them, so they guard the wheeled boat in shifts, waiting for some awful apparition to strike at them from the darkness of the forest. Huston goes to town in these sequences, depicting Captain Henry’s decline into guilt-ridden paranoia with gusto. By the time these two extreme characters reunite for their inevitable confrontation, Bass’ desire for revenge has, to a certain degree, become the audience’s desire as well.

          Harris spent much of the ’70s making violent Westerns about characters enduring horrible abuse, and Man in the Wilderness is the most surreal flick of the batch, which is saying something. The actor’s gift for portraying intense physicality makes the picture watchable in a masochistic sort of way, because his evocation of pain and suffering is excruciatingly vivid. With a characteristic lack of restraint, Harris plays to the cheap seats in every scene, even when he’s facedown in sludge, and that, too, adds to the effect: Harris seems like such a powerful force that it’s believable his character could survive an extraordinary ordeal. Therefore, despite the monotony and weirdness, the movie can’t be dismissed because of the fiery performances and because of the lushly textured widescreen images created by British cinematographer Gerry Fisher.

Man in the Wilderness: FREAKY