Love and the Midnight Auto Supply (1977)

          Entertaining in a brainless sort of way, Love and the Midnight Auto Supply is partially the story of a redneck Robin Hood who contrives a scheme for funneling profits from his various criminal enterprises to a group of oppressed farm workers. Yet it’s also a sex comedy about the main character’s relationship with a madam, a love triangle involving a rich kid torn between a good girl and a hooker, and a political story tracking the adventures of a activist. These parts hang together about as well as the disparate elements of the soundtrack, which toggles between discofied riffs on “The William Tell Overture” and swamp-boogie grooves, some of which were generated by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Tom Fogerty. The picture bombards viewers with just enough car chases, intrigue, rebellious rhetoric, and sex to keep things interesting, but it’s fair to say writer-director James Polakof hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of movie he was making. Is Love and Midnight Auto Supply a drive-in flick for the southern audience, a with-it counterculture story for the college crowd, or straight shot of exploitation nonsense? The answer to all of these questions is yes, because, with apologies to Donny and Marie, Love and the Midnight Auto Supply is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.

          Michael Parks, enjoyably rural and bitchy with his cowboy hat, leather jacket, and snide remarks, stars as Duke, proprietor of Midnight Auto. He and his boys sneak into parking lots, strip cars belonging to rich folks, and re-sell the stolen parts. Midnight Auto adjoins a brothel operated by Duke’s girlfriend, Annie (Linda Cristal). Through convoluted circumstances, Duke gets involved with Peter (George McCallister), son of a local bigwig, and Peter’s revolutionary pal, Justin (Scott Jacoby). Together, these unlikely allies develop the aforementioned Robin Hood scheme. Explaining the details is pointless, since Polakof doesn’t worry much about consistent behavior or narrative logic, opting instead to rush from one colorful scene to the next. The picture is best when Parks occupies center stage, dispensing a darker hue of the good-ole-boy charm one normally associates with Burt Reynolds. Whether he’s barking at his sidekick (“C’mere, Stupid!”) or romancing Annie in a bathtub, Parks epitomizes southern-fried swagger. Those around him mostly flounder in search of roles to play, though everybody gets to do something cartoonish or nefarious or sexy. Long on vibe and short on everything else, Love and the Midnight Auto is a mildly enjoyable mess.

Love and the Midnight Auto Supply: FUNKY

Ebony, Ivory & Jade (1976)

Thanks to dynamic artwork and a kitschy title, the American release poster for this exploitation flick from Filipino-cinema hack Cirio H. Santiago promises a no-nonsense thriller about multiethnic hotties kicking ass. No such luck. Originally titled She Devils in Chains—and also known as American Beauty Hostages, Foxfire, and Foxforce—this clunker tells a turgid story about Hong Kong hoodlums kidnapping a group of female American athletes. Despite a few vignettes of high-kicking karate action, most of the scenes depict the athletes’ time in captivity, as well as the activities of friends and relatives determined to effect their release. At first, the movie seems purposeful because the villains claim they want money to finance a political agenda. Before long, however, the narrative degrades into the usual human-slavery muck that permeates so many ’70s women-in-prison pictures. Although the title Ebony, Ivory & Jade suggests a close-quarters drama about three women from different backgrounds bonding over the course of a shared ordeal, the actual movie concerns four athletes, none of whom emerges as a vivid character. The two black athletes are interchangeable, with each delivering impassioned dialogue about racial oppression, and the nominal leading character, Ginger Douglas (Colleen Camp), is a one-note spoiled rich girl. Set to punishingly repetitive music, the PG-rated Ebony, Ivory & Jade is a whole lot of nothing, because Santiago neither delivers the goods in terms of sexy exploitation elements nor provides the sort of compelling storyline that could have rendered such elements superfluous.

Ebony, Ivory & Jade: LAME

Death Game (1977)

Allegedly based upon real events, this low-rent thriller is part of a cinematic continuum, spanning Play Misty for Me (1971) to Fatal Attraction (1987) and beyond, about the consequences of extramarital affairs with psychotic women. In Death Game, Bay Area businessman George (Seymour Cassel) is home alone one night while his wife and children are away, and answers the doorbell to find two attractive hippie chicks, Agatha (Sondra Locke) and Donna (Colleen Camp), looking helpless and lost. They claim they mistook George’s house for one with a similar address where a party is happening, so he lets the girls inside to use his phone. After some small talk that’s laden with sexual tension, the ladies strip naked and invite George into a threesome. He pays dearly for his dalliance, because the next morning, the girls commence destroying his property and threatening to charge with him rape. Agatha and Donna eventually bludgeon George and bind him. Later still, the odyssey descends into madness and murder. Death Game (sometimes known as The Seducers) could have been a salacious little thriller, but postproduction tinkering diminished whatever virtues director Peter S. Trayor’s raw footage possessed. The film is padded with irritating musical passages, including a headache-inducing opening-credits sequence set to a cloying song about daddy issues, and the nadir of the picture is a long interlude during which music plays over a shot of an overturned ketchup bottle. Seriously. Furthermore, all of Cassel’s dialogue was dubbed by another actor, which exacerbates the flick’s disjointed quality. Worse, the many long scenes of Agatha and Donna rampaging through George’s house are repetitive and shrill. The girls cry, dance, freak out, scream, and smash things, giving the impression that Camp and Locke were encouraged to improvise without much guidance. There’s a certain innate suspense to the premise, and the threesome scene is hot in a sleazy sort of way. Nonetheless, Death Game is choppy, meandering, and unpleasant, wrapping up with a pointless final scene that seems like a parody of ’70s-cinema bummer endings.

Death Game: LAME

Game of Death (1978)

          As is true for James Dean, the legend of martial-arts superstar Bruce Lee revolves around a surprisingly small body of work. In fact, Lee starred in only one English-language feature, Enter the Dragon (1973), the release of which he did not live to see. Left unfinished in the wake of Lee’s death were various projects including Game of Death, an allegorical action film whose production was suspended when Lee got the chance to make Enter the Dragon. Several years after Lee’s death, however, Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse was hired to build a film around the extant Game of Death footage. Game of Death is as exploitive, ghoulish, and tacky as most attempts to collateralize the public’s affection for a dead actor—here’s looking at you, The Trail of the Pink Panther (1982)—but Game of Death still has significance for Lee fans. For a good 10 minutes during the climax, when the real Lee is visible kicking and punching his way through a trio of fight scenarios, Game of Death becomes a “lost” film rediscovered. Unfortunately, everything else about Game of Death is highly problematic.

          After sneakily opening the movie by repurposing a famous screen fight between Lee and Chuck Norris (from 1973’s Return of the Dragon), Clouse employs stand-ins, occasionally punctuated by shots of the real Lee from Enter the Dragon outtakes, to simulate the star’s appearance. This technique doesn’t work, especially when chintzy optical effects are utilized to, say, superimpose a towel around Lee’s shoulders. By the end of the movie, Clouse blatantly cuts back and forth between vintage Lee footage and new shots of stand-ins, with the stand-ins’ faces plainly visible. It’s all quite insulting and ridiculous—adjectives that could just as easily be applied to the plot, about a movie star (Lee) who fakes his death so he can seek revenge against a mobster. In extensive English-language scenes, indifferent American actors Dean Jagger, Hugh O’Brian, and Gig Young deliver boring exposition while earnest American starlet Colleen Camp tries to fabricate a relationship with a phantom costar. The middle of the movie, in which the Americans and the stand-ins carry the plot almost completely, is borderline interminable. On the plus side, the folks behind Game of Death spent lavishly on post-production, commissioning a 007-style opening-credits sequence and hiring top-shelf composer John Barry (deepening the 007 association) to give the picture a fuller musical voice than it actually deserves.

          The best material in Game of Death doesn’t arrive until the finale, when Lee slips on a yellow tracksuit (later referenced in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies) to square off against opponents including a giant temple guard played by basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabar. The sight of comparatively tiny Lee battling the towering Jabar is hard to shake, as is, of course, the sheer charisma and elegance that Lee exudes whenever he’s onscreen. Lee is so commanding, in fact, that one wishes his Hollywood swan song was more fitting than this hack job. The makers of Game of Death trample so clumsily over Lee’s dignity that they even include a shot of the real Lee’s corpse, which was displayed publicly during a wake in Hong Kong.

Game of Death: LAME

Smile (1975)

          Several unique talents operating at the top of their respective games converged for Smile, a wicked satire of American values viewed through the prism of a second-rate beauty contest. Skewering ambition, competition, consumerism, hypocrisy, vanity, and other unbecoming qualities, the movie achieves a fine balance of humor and pathos while juxtaposing absurd situations with believable characterizations. The project’s key players include screenwriter Jerry Belson (a TV veteran doing some of his best-ever work), director Michael Ritichie (in the middle of a hot streak that included 1972’s The Candidate and 1976’s The Bad News Bears), and actor Bruce Dern. Though normally cast as psychos, Dern plays a normal character here, channeling his natural intensity into the fierce characterization of a small man grasping for social position. His terrific performance sets the pace for an eclectic cast including such veteran character actors as Geoffrey Lewis and Nicholas Pryor, plus newcomers Colleen Camp, Melanie Griffith, and Annette O’Toole. (TV beauty Barbara Feldon, of Get Smart fame, contributes a rich supporting performance as a contestant-turned-coordinator.)

          Ritchie films the story somewhat in the style of a Robert Altman movie, with lots of intermingled storylines revolving around the central event of the American Miss Pageant, so the movie winds through backstage politics, onstage disasters (some of the “talents” the contestants display are anything but), and the funny/sad melodramas of characters’ private lives. At the center of the story is Big Bob (Dern), a used-car salesman with way too much of his identity invested in the role of head judge. He spends the entire movie trying to hold the pieces of his life together even as the various illusions upon which his existence is predicated fall apart; his dissipation is an arch but effective metaphor representing the way some people blindly pursue the American Dream. O’Toole, appearing in her first major film role, personifies the other end of the spectrum—a cynical operator who’s learned the ways of the world at a young age, thanks to years of having men ogle her curves. (O’Toole’s character offers less experienced contestants such advice as using Vaseline to lubricate the mouth during hours of endless smiling.)

          Although Smile isn’t purely a comedy, since many passages of the picture are so pathetic that they’re more sad than funny, the picture works equally well as a romp and as a rumination. The spectacle of coaxing teenagers onto a stage so they can pretend viewers are interested in their ideals and skills—when, really, the name of the game is peddling flesh—is a fine proxy for the filmmakers’ observations about the avarice hidden behind American can-do attitudes. No surprise, then, that Belson’s script was nominated for a WGA Award, or that Smile was revisited for a new medium in 1986, when a musical based upon the film debuted on Broadway.

Smile: GROOVY