Chesty Anderson U.S. Navy (1976)

This dimwitted sex comedy isn’t nearly as sleazy as its title suggests, even with two voluptuous veterans of Russ Meyer flicks, Shari Eubank and Uschi Digard, in the cast. Nonetheless, Chesty Anderson U.S. Navy is so boring and dumb and forgettable that its lack of exploitation-flick excess barely qualifies as a redeeming value. Buxom girl-next-door type Eubank plays Chesty, a WAVE (Woman Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) who recruits fellow WAVES to help investigate when her sister, who is also in the service, goes missing. What follows is an alternately comedic and gruesome adventure, comedic because of lighthearted banter, gruesome because of violence including the dispatching of persons in a gigantic garbage shredder. During the course of the adventure, many women’s breasts are displayed. (After all, titling a movie Chesty Anderson U.S. Navy forms a sort of contractual agreement between the filmmakers and prospective viewers.) In addition to myriad topless scenes, the picture features a catfight during which combatants wear lingerie, so one way or another, boobs are thrust at the camera in nearly every reel. Buried amid the mammary-fetish nonsense are a couple of half-decent comic performances, by Marcie Barkin and Scatman Crothers, as well as a completely deranged turn by ghoulish-looking character actor Timothy Carey. Playing a twisted mobster, he rants and raves in an unhinged manner whenever he’s onscreen, clucking like a chicken here and doing what’s perhaps best described as scatting there. Some might find this competently made but unrelentingly stupid movie worth the price of admission just to witness his weirdness. Others, wisely, will seek amusement elsewhere.

Chesty Anderson U.S. Navy: LAME

Mean Dog Blues (1978)

         Mean Dog Blues gets off to a decent start. After the AIP logo (always a promising sign), Fred Karlin’s smooth lounge-rock score accompanies credits that include these heartening words: “Scatman Crothers as Mudcat.” Shortly afterward, shaggy-haired protagonist Paul (Gregg Henry) abandons his useless car on the side of a desert road near a stand of Joshua trees by saying, “Goodbye, Old Paint,” then wanders off to his next adventure carrying only his guitar and a suitcase. By this point, viewers have learned that the cast includes George Kennedy, Kay Lenz, Tina Louise, and William Windom. As the saying goes, you had me at hello. Although it’s not exactly downhill from there, Mean Dog Blues never builds the desired head of steam. Nonetheless, it’s enjoyable in a disposable sort of a way. (Sadly, it's also homophobic, par for the course in B-movies of this vintage.)

          After dumping his car, Paul hitches a ride with Victor (Windom) and his wife, Donna (Louise). Things get tricky a few hours later, when Donna hits on Paul while Victor gets drunk at a roadside diner. Imprudently, Paul remains in their car afterward, so he’s a witness when Victor hits a 10-year-old kid. Politically connected and wealthy, Victor claims Paul was behind the wheel at the time of the accident, so Paul gets slapped with a one-to-five stretch at a prison work farm. Predictably, the commandant, Captain Omar Kinsman (Kennedy), is a sadistic redneck who cares more about the welfare of his favorite bloodthirsty Doberman, Rattler, than he does about the health of the convicts under his supervision. Paul decides the best way to survive his prison term is to take a dangerous job as a “dog nigger” (seriously, that’s the phrase used through the movie), so his work involves running through wilderness while guard dogs chase him for training exercises. Meanwhile, Paul’s wife, Linda (Lenz), agitates for his release.

          So much of the picture comprises scenes of Paul getting chased by the dogs that everything else gets pushed to the sidelines. Lenz, for instance, is barely in the movie except for a sequence during which a creepy guard bedevils her during a prison visit. The great Crothers has even less screen time. Of the film’s many underused supporting players, Louise probably comes off best because one doesn’t usually expect an adequate performance from the Artist Forever Known as Ginger. Kennedy is Kennedy, growling and stomping his way through scenes, while Henry, later a strong character actor, makes an ineffectual lead. 

Mean Dog Blues: FUNKY

Coonskin (1975)

          Featuring an outrageous barrage of images, themes, and words about race, the animation/live-action hybrid Coonskin is among the most incendiary products of the blaxploitation era. A casual viewer stumbling onto any part of the film would probably find the material shockingly racist, and the reaction would be compounded by the discovery that Coonskin was written and directed by a white man. Taken in context, however, Coonskin is a deeply complicated piece of work. Part satire and part tragedy, it’s a sexualized and violent phantasmagoria about the cancerous reach of racism. The question of whether filmmaker Ralph Bakshi justifies his extremes by placing his work into a sociopolitical framework is one that each individual viewer must explore, because the content of Coonskin is deliberately offensive. By presenting grotesque caricatures of African-Americans, gays, Italians, Jews, rednecks, women, and so on, Bakski tries to confront small-minded attitudes. Yet in so doing, he unavoidably perpetuates stereotypes. Some influencers in the African-American community have embraced the movie over the years, while many others have vilified the piece as the cinematic equivalent of a hate crime.

           Coonsin opens with a series of vignettes. First, two animated characters, both African-American dudes dressed like pimps, appear over a live-action background to deliver a volley of angry humor. (The first line of dialogue is “Fuck you!”) Next, actor/singer Scatman Crothers appears onscreen to perform a jive-talkin’ ditty about the troubles of being a “nigger man” while the opening credits appear. Finally, the story proper begins, with two black convicts, Pappy (Crothers) and Randy (Philip Michael Thomas), prepping for a prison break in a live-action sequence. While the inmates hide from guards, Pappy tells Randy a fable that Bakshi illustrates with animated sequences. The fable involves three black men—Brother Bear (voiced by Barry White), Brother Rabbit (voiced by Thomas), and Preacher Fox (Charles Gordone)—getting into hassles with the law down south. Soon, the group heads for Harlem, where Brother Rabbit kills a high-powered gangster and takes over the criminal’s operation. As Brother Rabbit rises to power, he and his friends get into hassles with corrupt cops, manipulative prostitutes, and vengeful mobsters, among others. Lots of animated bloodshed and sex ensues.

          Many scenes blend cartoons and live-action images within the same frame—Bakshi recruited ace Hollywood cinematographer William A. Fraker to shoot the live-action material, and Fraker provides an appropriately gritty look. Long stretches of Coonskin are surrealistic, with Bakshi embarking on flights of artistic fancy. A woman turns into a butterfly. A deceased fat man gets buried, but his body parts keep popping up through the dirt of the grave, as if the earth can’t contain his girth. A voluptuous streetwalker wearing an American-flag costume blows away a horny guy by using the cannon hidden in her crotch. Concurrently, the race-themed dialogue goes as far over the top as the animation does. “I’m tired of trying to segregate, integrate, and masturbate!” “I sees you, Lord, and you fuckin’ well better see me!” “Killin’ crackers, I guess that’s cool!” Even the religious material is inflammatory. A 300-pound preacher calling himself “Black Jesus” performs in front of his flock while nude, his junk flailing to and fro, and another preacher uses the gospel as a come-on to lure a man into a brothel. When Bakshi opens fire with his satirical machine gun, no one escapes unharmed.

          In many ways, Coonskin is deeply alive, with creativity and indignation and passion powering every frame. And yet the movie is also a mess, with herky-jerky storytelling, potshots at easy targets, and underdeveloped characters. It’s more of an experience than a proper movie. Is the experience worthwhile? For some viewers, the answer to that question will be a resounding yes, because Coonskin gives it to bigots with both barrels. However, the disjointed, grotesque, and juvenile aspects of the movie are big turnoffs for those who expect their sociopolitical discussions to unfold on a higher plane. By any regard, Coonskin is Bakshi’s boldest movie, which is saying a lot seeing as how he made the world’s first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat (1972).

Coonskin: FREAKY

Detroit 9000 (1973)

          During his Pulp Fiction afterglow, Quentin Tarantino created a short-lived Miramax subsidiary called Rolling Thunder, which distributed handful of indie movies and re-released faves from Tarantino’s days as a grindhouse habitué. One of the obscure ’70s movies that benefited from Tarantino’s largesse was Detroit 9000, a racially charged action thriller set in the urban wasteland of the Motor City. Yet while the picture has a lively cast and solid action scenes, it’s strictly a run-of-the-mill endeavor, so Tarantino’s imprimatur should not unreasonably raise expectations. Yes, Detroit 9000 is relatively unique in the way it blends elements of blaxploitation and mainstream action movies, and yes, the movie flips a cliché by portraying a black guy as the book-smart half of a buddy-cop duo—but novel elements can’t compensate for the lack of a memorable story. Detroit 9000 begins with crooks stealing millions from a fundraiser for a black gubernatorial candidate. The cops assigned to the case are street-smart white dude Det. Danny Bassett (Alex Rocco) and college-educated African-American Sgt. Jesse Williams (Hari Rhodes). Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t fully exploit the culture-clash potential of this dynamic, even though Rhodes and Rocco are both interesting performers.
          Rhodes, best known for his role on the TV adventure series Daktari (1966-1969), was a man of letters offscreen and, accordingly, brought eloquence and poise to his acting. Therefore, it’s a shame that Detroit 9000 give Rhodes one of his only leading roles, since he’s got nothing to do here but strive to retain his dignity while running through gutted urban locations and/or spewing bland dialogue. Rocco, a versatile character actor whose filmography includes everything from The Godfather (1972) to a string of sitcoms, provides a totally different flavor of authenticity, although he, too, is handicapped by an underwritten characterization. Among the supporting cast, Scatman Crothers does some energetic speechifying as a preacher; Vonetta McGee classes up a trite hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold role; and Herbert Jefferson Jr., later a regular on the original Battlestar Galactica series, shows up in full pimp regalia. The problem is that everyone involved in Detroit 9000, including second-rate blaxploitation director Arthur Marks, did better work elsewhere—so why this mediocre flick lingered in Tarantino’s memory is a mystery.

Detroit 9000: FUNKY

The AristoCats (1970)

          Walt Disney Productions’ first animated feature of the ’70s, The AristoCats is an old-fashioned charmer in the company’s classic tradition. Filled with amusing characterizations, bouncy songs, meticulous illustration, and unvarnished sweetness, this was the last animated feature authorized by Walt Disney himself, although he died before production began.
          Offering a feline twist on the studio’s canine classic 101 Dalmatians (1961), the picture takes place in 1910 Paris, where retired opera singer Madame Bonfamille lives with her cats and her seemingly loyal butler, Edgar. When Edgar discovers that “Madame” plans to leave her estate to her pets, he kidnaps the animals and dumps them in a remote field, starting the felines on a long journey home. Along the way, the cats bond with assorted critters who help the heroes foil Edgar’s scheme.

          As the title suggests, the main contrivance is that the cats inherited refinement from their owner. Thus, when feline matriarch Duchess (voiced by Eva Gabor) and her three kittens end up in adrift the world outside their stately home, they charm everyone they meet and discover the plebian pleasures enjoyed by vagabonds like Thomas O’Malley (voiced by Phil Harris), an alley cat who falls for Duchess.
          Although the vocal styles are a bit of a mishmash, with some performers speaking in European accents and others using American intonations, The AristoCats feels unified in the most important respects. The animals can only be heard speaking by other animals, and the choice of wildlife is germane to the story’s milieu.

          Moreover, the soundtrack entertainingly juxtaposes the faux-classical music of Madame’s world with the low-rent jump-and-jive of O’Malley’s environment. The movie’s centerpiece song, “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat,” is presented in an extended concert/party scene featuring O’Malley’s streetwise pal, Scat Cat (voiced by Scatman Crothers), and the sequence is an explosion of musical and visual energy with bright colors and dynamic graphics flashing in time with the music.

          Although that number was written by Floyd Huddleston and Al Riker, the best tunes in The AristoCats are those penned by songwriting siblings Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, of Mary Poppins fame. Their title song, performed over the opening credits by a droll Maurice Chevalier in the last recording of his life, and the Shermans’ character-defining song for Duchess and her kittens, “Scales and Arpeggios,” feature the brothers’ deft wordplay at its best.

          Gabor and Harris provide endearing vocal portrayals, as do the various character actors and children voicing the supporting roles, so even though the picture gets a bit carried away with peripheral comedy bits (like the frivolous scenes of Edgar battling a pair of pesky bloodhounds), The AristoCats is a winning exhibition of the beloved Disney style.

The AristoCats: GROOVY

Friday Foster (1975)

          First, the good news. In the last of her ’70s blaxploitation star vehicles, leading lady Pam Grier looks fantastic, and she displays an endearing quality during the film’s too-few comedic bits. She’s also supported by an eclectic cast: Godfrey Cambridge, Scatman Crothers, Julius Harris, Yaphet Kotto, Thalmus Rasulala, Carl Weathers, and the always-bizarre Eartha Kitt. There’s even room for erstwhile Love Boat bartender Ted Lange, who plays a pimp named “Fancy Dexter” in a spectacularly bad performance.

          Now, the bad news. Friday Foster is a silly adventure story adapted from a family-friendly newspaper comic strip, but with the requisite level of sex and violence to earn its blaxploitation bona fides—meaning it’s too rough for lightweight escapism, and too soft to be a real action picture. The characters are cardboard, the plot is clumsy, and the storytelling is so numbingly obvious that the whole thing feels like an episode of Wonder Woman (which is not a compliment).

          Friday (Grier) gets assigned to photograph a possible sighting of Blake Tarr (Rasulala), known as “the black Howard Hughes.” Instead of grabbing a paparazzi shot, however, she photographs an assassination attempt, drawing her into a conspiracy targeting leading members of the black community. If that sounds promising, prepare for disappointment, because Friday’s unauthorized investigation, with cranky PI Colt Hawkins (Kotto) at her side, comprises a clichéd string of close calls with incompetent would-be killers and convenient discoveries of clues that only make sense when one of the characters provides a recap of the plot thus far. It’s all very garish and labored, so it’s impossible to care what happens, even in the rare instances when the storyline is decipherable.

          What makes this so unfortunate is that Grier is actually stronger than usual here; she clearly relished the chance to try something a bit outside the grimy blaxploitation norm. It’s also fun to see Kotto playing a gruff charmer instead of one of his ususal menacing roles. Yet, no matter how likeable Grier and Kotto are in fleeting moments, they can’t make up for the flat filmmaking and tedious narrative.

Friday Foster: LAME

Black Belt Jones (1974)

Gene-splicing the blaxploitation and kung-fu genres was a smart move in terms of marketing, but Black Belt Jones is far less than the sum of its parts. There’s a significant kitsch factor thanks to scenes of black martial artists doing their thing with sky-high Afros atop their heads, but the flick is schlocky even by the low standards of the genres it bridges—the script is brainlessly derivative and the filmmaking is garishly mechanical. Real-life karate champ Jim Kelly, who achieved minor fame as a costar of Enter the Dragon (1973), stars as Black Belt Jones, a government operative/mercenary/whatever, since this is one of those B-movies in which dudes with prowess at kicking ass are constantly in demand from deep-pocketed employers. When Mafia bad guys decide to seize ownership of a property owned by Jones’ mentor, karate teacher Pop Byrd (Scatman Crothers), the Mafia sends African-American enforcer Pinky (Malik Carter) to intimidate Pop. Unfortunately, one of Pinky’s goons inadvertently kills Pop, sending Our Hero on an uninteresting vengeance mission that somehow involves breaking into a mob fortress and seizing photos the gangsters use for blackmail against political figures. Obviously, acting and story are not the big draws here, and Kelly is fine kicking and punching his way through fights, often in slow motion. Gloria Hendry is actually even more impressive as Sydney, a female martial artist who mows down villains alongside Jones. Additionally, the action stuff has a few glimmers of wit, like the funny moment when a victim gets thrown onto a trampoline, bounces upward, and lodges in the ceiling like a character in a Warner Bros. cartoon. So, if tongue-in-cheek martial arts mayhem gets your blood pumping, you might find fleeting amusement amid the tedium—but if not, chances are you’ll find Black Belt Jones thoroughly uninteresting. (FYI, the 1978 Jim Kelly movie The Tattoo Connection is not a sequel to this film, and in fact there is no sequel to Black Belt Jones, despite some video releases that misleadingly label The Tattoo Connection as Black Belt Jones 2.)

Black Belt Jones: LAME

The King of Marvin Gardens (1972)

          A film that sounds more interesting than it actually is, The King of Marvin Gardens features a convergence of several of the most important players in ’70s cinema. The cast includes Ellen Burstyn, Bruce Dern, and Jack Nicholson; New Hollywood mainstay Bob Rafelson co-wrote the story and directed; and acclaimed cinematographer László Kovács shot the picture. The narrative also seems like it should hit the sweet spot of early-’70s ennui, with Dern playing Jason Stabler, a small-time Atlantic City schemer who tries to rope his reluctant brother, David (Nicholson), into helping him put together some sort of casino/resort enterprise, much to the chagrin of Jason’s boss, mid-level gangster Luther (Scatman Crothers).
          But right from the beginning of the picture, pretentious opacity rules: The first scene features David performing a grimly nostalgic monologue for his late-night radio show about David and his brother watching their overbearing grandfather die, and the next scene reveals that the grandfather is very much alive. Presumably the idea was to establish a milieu exploring the gap between dreams and reality, but the film never comes into sharper focus than the opening sequence, so it’s a struggle to follow basic threads like what exactly Jason wants to accomplish and why he’s constantly accompanied by an unhinged middle-aged beauty named Sally (Burstyn) and her adult stepdaughter Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson). In lieu of clarity, the movie presents gifted actors generating unusual dynamics, but the performances are inhibited by the film’s murkiness.
          Nicholson is muted to a fault, communicating his character’s lost quality by seeming lost himself, and Burstyn is uncharacteristically screechy, as if she’s flailing for some legitimate character motivation the script can’t provide. Dern comes off best, effectively personifying a huckster of limited ability but unlimited ambition, and it’s a shame that his fine performance appears in such a disappointing film. Kovács’ impeccable photography provides an unvarnished travelogue through the ghost-town streets of early-’70s Atlantic City, and it’s impressive that the film doesn’t have any musical scoring; to Rafelson’s credit, the focus is entirely on acting. The King of Marvin Gardens is very much of its moment, so now that time has deprived the movie of its currency as a counterpoint to the staid cinema of the studio era, it’s simply a clinical exercise in affected New Hollywood style.

The King of Marvin Gardens: FUNKY

Chandler (1971)

So miscast that his unique screen persona is suffocated, roughly made and distinctly Southern everyman Warren Oates stars as a modern-day private dick in Chandler, a lesser entry in the seemingly endless series of ’70s thrillers paying homage to classic film noir. Directed and co-written by Paul Magwood, who for obvious reasons never made another movie, Chandler features many of the usual private-investigator tropes, but sluggish pacing and an incoherent storyline make it almost unwatchable. On the plus side, the movie looks good and features several colorful actors (Leslie Caron, Scatman Crothers, Gloria Grahame, Mitchell Ryan). Additionally, the leisurely camerawork provides lingering looks at such Los Angeles landmarks as Olvera Street and Union Station circa the early ’70s, but you know a movie is in trouble when the scenery is more interesting than the story. The inconsequential plot is the usual gobbledygook about a tough gumshoe falling for the dame he’s supposed to observe, and many of the film’s scenes are so casual—like Oates’ chatty introduction to Caron on a train bound for Monterey—that it feels like the filmmakers shot the actors hanging out on set instead of performing dramatic scenes. Even with this loose storytelling approach, Chandler manages to make the experience of watching Oates boring, which is quite an accomplishment given his eccentric dynamism, and suffice to say nothing sparks between him and Caron, who seems like she’s from a different universe. Apparently gallons of bad blood were spilled after filming ended: The movie was re-edited without the director’s participation, so huge chunks of story were excised; the first composer was fired and a new score was installed; and Caron sued to get her name over the title. It’s possible a good movie was buried inside the raw material, but the version that survives is confusing and dull, of interest only to noir nuts and Oates obsessives.

Chandler: LAME