Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972)

          Every Little Crook and Nanny is a deeply mediocre crime comedy based on a novel by Evan Hunter and featuring a random assortment of familiar actors. The stars are studio-era hunk Victor Mature, taking a break from retirement to play a caricatured mobster; versatile British actress Lynn Redgrave, still desperately trying to pick a lane in Hollywood; and sad-eyed Paul Sand, one of the most distinctively neurotic screen personalities of the early ’70s. Abetting the main actors are a slew of minor players from film and TV of the era: John Astin, Severn Darden, Dom DeLuise, Pat Harrington Jr., Pat Morita, Austin Pendleton, Isabel Sanford, Vic Tayback, and more. The story moves briskly, the jokes are (mostly) inoffensive, and watching these actors is like noshing on comfort food. In other words, even though Every Little Crook and Nanny is substandard, watching the picture is a tolerable experience.

          At the top of the story, goons working for mobster Carmine Ganucci (Mature) forcibly evict etiquette teacher Miss Poole (Redgrave) from her longtime storefront, so she vows revenge. Poole talks her way into a job as a nanny for Carmine’s young son just before Carmine departs for a trip to Europe. Then Poole conspires with her dimwitted accomplice, Luther (Pendleton), to kidnap the boy and squeeze Carmine for ransom. Coproducer, cowrtier, and director Cy Howard, a longtime comedy pro, keeps things humming with abundant physical comedy, plentiful punch lines, and short scenes. Hilarity is elusive, but the movie aims to please—and with so many gifted comic actors in the cast, some moments, particularly those with Pendleton and Sand, nearly connect. It will come as no surprise to say the movie fails to create emotional engagement, though Howard scores a few glancing blows with his portrayal of Carmine’s son as a lonely boy desperate to form real human relationships.

         As for the leads, Mature and Redgrave are smooth in different ways—he struts through scenes with a pleasant I-don’t-give-a-shit swagger, and she churns through complicated dialogue with grace. It doesn’t really matter that neither of their characters is remotely believable, since Every Little Crook and Nanny is basically a live-action cartoon. Is the picture frenetic and overstuffed, representing a desperate attempt to substitute constant noise for substance? Of course. And is there any compelling reason for movie fans to seek out this forgotten studio release? Certainly not. But if Every Little Crook or Nanny somehow crosses your path, it will offers 92 minutes of pointless silliness.

Every Little Crook and Nanny: FUNKY

Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970)

          If nothing else, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots has an impressive pedigree: Based on Tennessee Williams’ play The Seven Descents of Myrtle, the picture was written by Gore Vidal and directed by Sidney Lumet. (The on-camera talent is not quite as luminous, since James Coburn shares the screen with Robert Hooks and a hopelessly miscast Lynn Redgrave.) Pretentions, seedy, and talky, the film seems more like an over-the-top recitation of tropes from previous Williams plays than a serious drama. The metaphors are obvious (the characters occupy a decaying mansion while awaiting a flood), the sexual material is lurid (incest, impotence, miscegenation, prostitution), and the rhapsodic speeches about the good old days of the antebellum South feel trite. While everyone involved works at a high level of skill, the only moment that feels fresh is the scene spoofing TV game shows, which is somewhat peripheral to the overall storyline. In sum, Last of the Mobile Hotshots is a straight shot of Williams’ boozy and hateful debauchery, with a pinch of Vidal’s signature bitchiness for extra spice.

          After sloppy drunk Jeb Thornton (Coburn) gets ejected from a bar in New Orleans, he staggers to a nearby TV studio, where folks are lined up to get inside. Jeb watches a taping of a redneck game show, and when the host asks for volunteers to marry onstage, total stranger Myrtle Kane (Redgrave) grabs Jeb and drags him before the cameras as her betrothed. Soon enough, the two are newlyweds, trekking back to Jeb’s family estate with the carload of appliances they won on the TV show. Upon arriving at the estate—a wreck of a place covered in filth from the last devastating flood—Myrtle meets Jeb’s half-brother, an African-American laborer nicknamed Chicken (Hooks). Turns out Jeb married Myrtle in order to produce an heir, thereby absconding with Chicken’s inheritance—but Jeb didn’t account for his own dire health issues.

          None of this is remotely believable, no matter how many scenes feature monologues about wild dreams of glory and wealth. Adding to the artificiality of the piece are dreamlike flashbacks and a recurring trope in which Lumet changes the lighting to blood-red while Jeb lurks in a wheelchair and contemplates his situation.

          Yet Last of the Mobile Hot Shots is periodically interesting. Coburn fares best here, since he has a full arsenal of actor’s gimmicks at his disposal—in addition to an accent, he gets to play several maladies at once while giving monologues about betrayal and pride. He’s quite arresting, even if his character is nothing more than a flight of fancy. Hooks is fairly strong as well, playing a character who’s equal parts opportunist and sadist. Redgrave is the weak link, because she murders dialogue by speaking in high-pitched, high-speed volleys, and her character seems insane instead of eccentric. Worst of all, the picture appears to be a misguided attempt at dark comedy, especially during the ridiculous finale. Oh, and for no discernible reason except perhaps for the general tawdriness of the themes, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots carried an X-rating during its original release.

Last of the Mobile Hot Shots: FUNKY

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 Big Bus (1976)

It’s not hard to see why The Big Bus seemed like a good idea at the time. Mel Brooks had just turned spoofs into big business, with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974), and the disaster movie was all the rage, making it an ideal satirical target. But even with good timing, a decent budget, and a cast filled with rock-solid comedy pros, this minor effort from the usually impressive producing team of Julia and Michael Phillips is thoroughly forgettable. From a film-history perspective, however, it’s interesting to examine The Big Bus as the first attempt to do what Airplane! did so much better few years later. The missing secret ingredient seems to be lunatic non sequiturs, because every joke in The Big Bus is hindered a laborious setup. The picture’s intentionally stupid plot concerns the maiden voyage of a giant nuclear-powered bus, which is fraught with problems like a crazed passenger who wants to kill the driver because she thinks he ate her father (and 109 other folks) after a bus crash in the boonies years ago. The caliber of the humor is summed up by a sequence in which the driver accelerates the bus to test whether it overcomes wind resistance, finally exclaiming, “We’ve done it! We’re breaking wind at 90 miles an hour!” The movie is borderline watchable because it’s handsomely produced, blasts from start to finish in 88 minutes, and includes lots of fun people: Rene Auberjonois, Ned Beatty, Joe Bologna, Stockard Channing, Bob Dishy, José Ferrer, Harold Gould, Larry Hagman, Sally Kellerman, Richard Mulligan, Lynn Redgrave, Stuart Margolin. There’s even room for Ruth Gordon of Harold and Maude fame, doing the sort of vulgar-old-lady shtick Betty White does today.

The Big Bus: FUNKY