In short: Trapped (1973)

aka Doberman Patrol

Chuck Brenner (James Brolin) is in a bit of a complicated divorce situation right now. His ex-wife Elaine (Susan Clark) is just about to move to Mexico with her new husband David (Earl Holliman) and her and Chuck’s daughter (Tammy Harrington), and relations are understandably strained. On the day of their departure Chuck, trying to shorten the wait for some change for a doll he was buying for his kid just before the store closed (it’s – needlessly -complicated) by having a smoke in one of the few places in the department store where smoking is actually okay, the rest rooms(!), is mugged and struck unconscious by two criminals of dubious talent.

When he wakes up, he is trapped in the department store and soon finds himself confronted with a very special security measure. Apparently, the powers that be are in favour of just letting half a dozen kill crazy attack dogs roam the store over night without any human supervision, so Chuck has to use all his wits and physical strength to survive.

Outside, Elaine and especially David start worrying about him, doing some slow detective work to find him.

Frank De Felitta’s (of The Entity fame) ABC movie of the week is a fine example of the form, conquering the relatively minimalist production values of this sort of thing via clever suspense filmmaking, as is typical of the better of these films.

De Felitta (who also wrote) makes great use of Brolin’s often underused abilities as a physical actor (see also Night of the Juggler) in the locked-in suspense sequences, while increasingly constraining the character physically and emotionally. For this is a film very interested in portraying the mental toll the physical strain, the horror of the situation and his wounds will take on its main character. It uses simple yet highly effective methods (there is Vaseline on the camera involved, it seems) to convey Chuck’s increasing desperation and physical and mental exhaustion. The dog actors are also good enough to present a credible threat, particularly when the direction uses every possibility to make put them above our protagonists or in other positions where they seem to physically dwarf Brolin.

The film’s other plot thread with the search for Chuck is less obviously engaging. It is slower, with quite a few TV clichés and very 70s character psychology (my working theory at this point is that all 70s scriptwriters read the same two self help books and confused that with a knowledge of psychology). Yet it is also a necessary part of the film, keeping the inevitable slow moments away from Chuck’s dog adventures, and clearly added with the understanding that you can’t escalate the man versus dog centre of the film endlessly without it becoming slightly silly.

This approach does work out well for Trapped in the end, leaving it as yet another fine example of what talented filmmakers were able to create inside of the constraints of the TV movie form.

Skin Game (1971)

A few years before the US Civil War (going by the appearance of John Brown, I’d go with 1858), conmen Jason (Louis Gossett Jr.) – a free black man from New Jersey - and Quincy (James Garner) are touring the slave states in the South. Quincy plays the slave owner hitting on hard times who has to sell off his valuable and deeply harmless slave – Jason - quickly and cheaply. Once the deal is done and Jason locked away somewhere for the night, Quincy returns and frees his friend to repeat the same deal again in the next town.

The con is coming to an end though – the duo has played the trick in most every small town in the South by now, and there’s too much risk involved in bigger towns. Additionally, Jason is really growing tired of the whole affair, what with his slowly awakening political consciousness and the little fact that he’s taking the much higher risk of the two partners here. Quincy does convince Jason to do their thing one last time (and after that another last time), though, and as it goes with one last times, things go so wrong, they’ll not only find all their money stolen by con-woman and thief Ginger (Susan Clark) but their next attempt to get some pocket money lands Quincy in jail. Even worse, Jason finds himself an actual slave in the hands of the – appropriately – vile slave hunter Plunkett (Edward Asner). At least there’s honour among thieves, and Ginger might just come back and help Quincy out; and say what you will about Quincy, but he’s certainly not someone who lets what we can only assume to be his only actual friend end his life as a slave. Jason for his part clearly won’t just lie down and take it either.

The thing that’s most interesting about (as far as I know) otherwise undistinguished director Paul Bogart’s Skin Game is how well it manages to make a comedy about something that’s up there with murder and rape as one of the least funny things I can imagine, slavery. It does this without either pulling its punches when it comes to its depiction of slavery (this depiction is of course far less brutal than reality but that’s pretty much a given with anything you put on screen), or falling into the trap of pretending that slavery is funny.

A large part of the film’s humour is based on the joy we derive from seeing rich, powerful, and morally disgusting people put in their place by charming rogues, as evidenced by basically all caper movies ever made, or everyone’s favourite running gag in the Zatoichi films when our blind masseur does the trick that will only hurt the kind of people who’d cheat on a blind man gambling. There’s nothing nicer than seeing bad people get their comeuppance, and there are few people as deserving of said comeuppance than the slave owners. The film is too thoughtful to pretend its protagonists are some sort of Western (Southern?) Robin Hoods, though; they’re really doing what they do for their own gain, and while they are not out to hurt harmless people (much) they aren’t actually helping anyone either. Jason, as the one much more directly hit by the implications of what’s going on around them, does slowly come around to something more altruistic, but he only really takes care of somebody other than himself, and realizes that this skin game isn’t a game for the slaves around them, after he’s become a slave himself and is quite literally feeling the whip.

As you know, Jim, playing the sort of conman playing the games our characters here do was what James Garner spent much of his career on, and his performance is as perfect as they get. There’s the slightly smarmy charm, the curious core of what could be authentic friendliness, the willingness to fuck everyone over, but only up to a point, and the often misguided cleverness that may lead him into a good plan as much as into the kind of trouble you can get into when you’re congratulating yourself for your own cleverness too much – all played up to just the right amount, until you can’t help but like Quincy despite everything. Which, pretty much, is how Jason feels about him too.

Speaking of Jason, turns out that Louis Gossett Jr. is able to play the conman to the same level and style as Garner can, but with some really effective hints of fear, and a bit more sense than Quincy shows with all his cleverness. Gossett also handles the moments when Jason realizes a bit more about how the world around him works for the people who actually have to live in it wonderfully, developing a sense of responsibility his friend will never have, and sticking with it, without things getting preachy. And in the end, while Jason can’t change the world, he decides to save some people and take care of them. Which probably is the best you can do when you don’t want to be maimed by the wheel of history, the film suggests.

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Valdez Is Coming (1971)

A decade or two after the remaining apaches have been driven into the reservations, Mexican Valdez (Burt Lancaster) works as a part-time shotgun rider, part-time constable, part-time speaker for the Mexican community in a frontier town in the US South-West. His hard work of taking his hat off to people who’d never deign to take theirs off to him, not looking white people in the eye and peacefully ignoring most slights has only paid off for him as much as the town’s white bourgeois can pride themselves in treating him paternistically decent (which of course is no actual human decency at all).

Valdez realizes that even this decency doesn’t go very far when the false accusation of rich gun runner Tanner (Jon Cypher) and the stupid craziness of young, racist would-be gunman Davis (Richard Jordan) cause him to, mostly accidentally, kill the innocent black man Tanner accused of murdering an old friend of his – the husband of his now girlfriend Gay (Susan Clark) – years ago. Because the man left an Apache wife (Juanita Penaloza), Valdez tries to raise two-hundred dollars for her as at least some sign of contrition for the whole shabby affair by the people involved in it. However, the good white people of the town won’t give him more than pennies until he manages to collect a hundred dollars from Tanner.

Tanner, not surprisingly, doesn’t care one single bit about his own guilt, and lets his men, or rather the men of his main henchman El Segundo (Barton Heyman), rough Valdez up. Valdez does get the message yet decides to ignore it, going to Tanner a second time to ask for the money. This time around Tanner lets his men tie Valdez to a cross he’ll have to drag through the wilderness behind him; it’s clearly expected he will die this way.

Yet survive Valdez does, unpacking his old gear from his time as a scout and sharpshooter for the US cavalry, and now starting to ask for the money rather more violently. In the end, a lot of people will die for a hundred dollars, or rather the thing these dollars stand for, some people will show their true colours, and just perhaps, one man of power and money will learn that his power and money will only bring him that far.

It’s a rather confusing fact that a film as staunchly and clearly anti-racist as Edwin Sherin’s Valdez is Coming (based on a novel by Elmore Leonard) sees more than one actor donning brown-face. On the other hand, Burt Lancaster’s performance here is fine, often subtle stuff, so I wouldn’t call him miscast otherwise.

Lancaster does a lot of acting by body language and posture, an absolute necessity with a character like Valdez who doesn’t explain himself verbally; possibly because he doesn’t have many people to explain himself to except for his friend Diego (Frank Silvera), and Diego seems to know all that’s important about and for Valdez without needing to hear it. Lancaster’s posture shows how years of assumed humility (or really, as the Mexican version of an Uncle Tom) have bent his shoulders down, possibly even more so because his eyes always tell the audience he doesn’t have any illusions about his actual position in the eyes of the white bourgeoisie he’s never allowed to look straight in the eye; and it’s quite the moment – subtly underplayed by Lancaster as well as by the director – when he finally does look up. Also never explicitly emphasised by direction or actor, yet clear, is how Valdez’s posture changes the longer he gets back to making use of his old skill set.

However, the film isn’t quite so much singing a song of the glories of vigilantism here as you might expect. Even though Valdez comes to life donning his old uniform and weapons and doing what he does best, he and the film he’s in know that it’s not necessarily a good thing to be best at, something that changes men for the worse, particularly men like Valdez who have come to understand the consequences of their actions (in one of the film’s sparse moments of explicitness close to the film’s end Valdez explains that he has experience “hunting Apache” from a time when “he didn’t know better”). There’s little joy in the violence here, only a calm businesslike attempt to somehow make up for things you can’t make up for, as well as a sad knowledge you actually can’t yet still have to try.

Most of this is carried by the posture of Lancaster’s shoulders, the look in his eyes, and Sherin’s compositions of Spain’s (as so often standing in for the US) landscapes that often dwarf the people moving through them.

Surprisingly, the film does end on a rather hopeful note, the idea that, perhaps, the inevitable can be evaded somehow, and things can turn around for the hopeless cause; though it also leaves the possibility open that perhaps, it might not.

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