The Mafu Cage (1978)

          Boundary-pushing ’70s movies went to some highly inappropriate places, from the animated fornication of Fritz the Cat (1972) to the comedic infanticide of Bad (1977) and beyond. In some instances, filmmakers were after shock value, and in others, satire was the intention. Then there are films on the order of The Mafu Cage. Although this batshit-crazy melodrama depicts characters and situations that have no connection to human reality, director Karen Arthur and her collaborators play the material completely straight. In other words, the only thing  weirder that the events portrayed onscreen in The Mafu Cage is the notion that intelligent people thought this story was worth telling.

          Adapted from a play by Eric Wesphal by screenwriter Don Chastain, the movie is primarily set in a sprawling Los Angeles mansion, several interior rooms of which have been filled with plants and tribal art so the rooms resemble a sprawling jungle. The reason? Deranged twentysomething Cissy (Carol Kane) previously lived in Africa with her father. After he died, Cissy moved in with her older sister, a professional astronomer named Ellen (Lee Grant). For reasons that defy understanding, Ellen indulges Cissy’s desire for a simulacrum of her African lifestyle, hence the offbeat décor. Additionally, family friend Zom (Will Geer) regularly acquires primates that Cissy keeps as pets in a large cage. She calls each primate “Mafu,” but she has a nasty habit of beating the animals to death while screaming the phrase “Dumb shit!” over and over again. The drama of the story, such as it is, stems from Ellen’s overdue realization that it’s time to stop acquiring primates. She pays dearly for cutting off her twisted sister’s supply.
          Adding to the peculiarity of the piece are several overt scenes describing the incestuous lesbian relationship between Cissy and Ellen. (Very little sexual activity is shown, but in one scene, Cissy talks about cupping Ellen’s breasts and making Ellen “gush.”) The Mafu Cage also features many extended sequences of Kane behaving like a lunatic. She dances around the house to the beat of recordings featuring tribal drums, mimicking the undulating movements of African rituals. She slathers herself in face paint while eavesdropping on her sister. And she screams. A lot.

          Kane’s performance is a compendium of over-the-top antics, rather than a genuine attempt at rendering the dimensions of a troubled human being. Depending on your personal tolerance, she’s either fascinatingly terrible or painfully atonal. Oddly, the fact that Grant comes across as rational decreases the movie’s efficacy, because it’s impossible to believe that her character would tolerate such volatile life circumstances. And when you throw in the actor best known as Grandpa Walton dancing around the house with Kane while he wears a primitive-looking ape costume—well, let’s just say that the strangeness of The Mafu Cage increases exponentially with each passing scene. So, too, does the ugliness of the movie, because watching the crazed Cissy murder an innocent primate is enough to make any animal-loving viewer feel genuine hostility toward the filmmakers.

The Mafu Cage: FREAKY

When a Stranger Calls (1979)

This movie scared the crap out of me before I even saw the thing. I should explain. When a Stranger Calls is based on an urban legend about a babysitter who keeps receiving calls asking her to “check the children,” only to discover the calls are emanating from the house where she’s working, and that the kids in her care have already been murdered. Around dusk one evening in the mid-’70s, when I was a preteen living in Michigan, I was walking through my suburban neighborhood with a gaggle of fellow youths. One of the older kids in the group told a version of the “check the children” story, adding (of course) that the story really happened, and that it happened nearby. Cue freaked-out little me. For many years afterward, the experience of hearing the urban legend (which I completely believed) and the subsequent release of When a Stranger Calls blurred. Thus, once I finally sat down to watch the flick as an adult, I was prepared for a terrifying ordeal. During the beginning of the picture, I almost got what I expected. The first 15 minutes or so, which dramatizes the whole “check the children” bit, is hella creepy. How could it not be, especially with such a nihilistic climax? Alas, the movie’s energy drains afterwards, because it becomes a drab stalker picture in which the killer (Tony Beckley) torments the babysitter (Carol Kane) once more. Even with the fabulous Charles Durning playing the cop who tries to protect Jill, When a Stranger Calls cannot overcome a lifeless script, and first-time director Fred Walton’s work is competent but painfully unimaginative. Poor Kane, a gifted actress who should have known better than to appear in a psycho thriller, is left floundering through one flat scene after another, unable to showcase her charming idiosyncrasies. All in all, a missed opportunity—and yet for some reason, Durning, Kane, and Walton reteamed for a made-for-TV sequel, When a Stranger Calls Back (1993), and the original picture was remade in 2006, with Camilla Belle in the Kane role.

When a Stranger Calls: LAME

Hester Street (1975)

          Although Hollywood films including The Fixer (1968) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971) explored the experience of European Jews, Joan Micklin Silver’s debut feature, the independently made Hester Street, was among the first mainstream pictures to explore the experience of Jewish immigrants in America. For that reason alone, the movie is noteworthy, and it was added to the National Film Registry in 2011. Yet instead of being the stuffy museum piece one might expect, Hester Street is a tonally varied movie featuring comedy, drama, romance, and sociopolitical commentary. It’s not the smoothest film, since Silver was still finding her way as a storyteller and since she was hemmed in by a tight budget, but it’s quite rewarding.

          Based on a novel from 1896 and set in that year, the movie re-creates the economically challenged milieu of European Jews who relocated to lower Manhattan and formed a tight community in and around Hester Street (which is now part of Chinatown). The film’s lead character is Yankel Bogovnik (Steven Keats), a Russian immigrant so thoroughly Americanized he calls himself Jake and conducts many of his conversations in English. Jake is a smooth-talking striver, even though he’s got a nowhere job in a sweatshop, and he has romantic designs on the beautiful and comparatively well-off Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh). The other figure in Jake’s world at the beginning of the story is Mr. Bernstein (Mel Howard), a kind-hearted boarder in Jake’s apartment who spends his time consumed in Talmudic study. Although Jake has accepted a significant sum of money from Mamie as a premarital dowry, he failed to tell her that he’s already got a wife and child back in the old country. So, when Jake’s wife Gitl (Carol Kane) and their son arrive on Ellis Island, Jake’s got some explaining to do.

          Once this fraught situation is established, Silver explores the complicated ways that Jake and the people in his life try to balance their obligations to traditional Jewish orthodoxy with their aspirations to U.S. modernism. Some of the best scenes feature Gitl emerging from her shell, because when she arrives in America, she’s a mousy foreigner afraid to speak her mind; later, after exposure to progressive ideas, she endeavors to escape a bad situation.

          The look of the movie is appropriate and interesting, since Silver shot the picture in hazy black-and-white images that recall turn-of-the-century photographs, and Silver’s tonal missteps are relatively minor. (The montage sequences that evoke silent-cinema comedy, for instance, are an acquired taste.) Keats is hard to take, committing to his character so wholeheartedly that he becomes repulsive, and it takes a bit too long for Kane’s character to find her strength. Still,  the last 40 minutes or so of the picture are delicately orchestrated, and Kane’s characterization gains subtle power. No surprise, then, that Kane received an Oscar nomination.

Hester Street: GROOVY

The Last Detail (1973)

          Jack Nicholson’s post-Easy Rider ascension to Hollywood’s A-list continued with The Last Detail, a crowd-pleasing road movie of sorts dominated by the raunchy Navy sailor whom Nicholson portrays with manic intensity. Written by Robert Towne from Darryl Ponicsan’s novel, and directed by the peerless humanist Hal Ashby, The Last Detail begins when enlisted men Buddusky (Nicholson) and Mulhall (Otis Young) get assigned to a demeaning task: They’re to escort a sailor named Meadows (Randy Quaid), who has been sentenced to eight years in jail for petty theft, across several states so he can commence his incarceration.

          Buddusky is a heavy-drinking troublemaker who peppers nearly every sentence with some variation of the word fuck, and Mulhall is a savvy African-American whose strategy for survival is flying below The Man’s radar. Buddusky convinces Mulhall to drag out their transport duty so they can pocket extra per-diem money, and once they meet Meadows, both men become sympathetic to the kid’s pathetic circumstances. A simple-minded stooge whose real crime was pissing off a superior officer, Meadows is so green that he’s never had booze, cigarettes, or sex. Buddusky decides to ensure Meadows experiences all three before hitting the brig, so the trio’s journey becomes a hell-raising odyssey.

          Some of the episodes are exactly what one might expect, like a brawl with a group of Marines, but others exude pure early-’70s quirkiness. The sailors meet a hippie chick who meditates with Far East chanting, so Meadows picks up the habit, and the sailors make a pit stop at Meadows’ home to discover the bleak reality he left behind when he joined the Navy. The Last Detail walks a fine line between comedy and drama, often pivoting instantaneously from raucous to somber and back again. While Ashby’s masterful control of tone anchors the storytelling, the picture rises to an even higher level on the strength of the performances.

          Quaid works the weird gentle-giant vibe that characterized many of his early roles, and it’s to his great credit that Meadows keeps surprising us right through to the final scene. As for Nicholson, his flamboyant turn in The Last Detail cemented his cinematic persona. And while he’s probably over the top in many respects, exaggerating his character’s volatility almost to the point of seeming insane, excess seems like an appropriate acting choice since Buddusky’s supposed to represent the male animal cut loose from decorum and propriety. (Young is fine, by the way, but his character is so underdeveloped that he’s regularly eclipsed by his costars.)

          The Last Detail isn’t perfect, given its weakness for clichés like the hooker with the heart of gold (Carol Kane plays this thankless role with a blend of cynicism and sweetness). Nonetheless, by the time the movie reaches its downbeat finale, Ashby and his collaborators have delivered a potent statement about the limitations that bureaucracies—and, really societies in general—place upon individuality.

The Last Detail: RIGHT ON

Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976)

          Despite a fantastic cast, the would-be farce Harry and Walter Go to New York falls flat because only a handful of the movie’s myriad one-liners, sight gags, and slapstick routines actually elicit laughter. A failed attempt to blend the Vaudevillian style of silent-era comedy with the elaborate con-man plotting of The Sting (1973), the ineptly written but lavishly produced picture follows a pair of nincompoop 19th-century crooks who fall into the orbit of a world-famous master criminal, then try to rob a bank before the criminal gets there first.
          James Caan and Elliot Gould play Harry and Walter, small-time robbers who get caught picking pockets during one of their low-rent song-and-dance routines. Meanwhile, gentleman thief Adam Worth (Michael Caine) gets tossed into the same jail as our heroes, but Adam’s so rich that he gets a private cell appointed with velvet curtains and silver table settings. Harry and Walter discover—and accidentally destroy—Adam’s prized blueprints for an ambitious bank job, then escape and get enmeshed with activist reporter Lissa Chestnut (Diane Keaton). Through convoluted circumstances, Harry, Walter, and Lissa end up trying to rob the bank the same night as Adam’s gang, leading to silliness like Harry and Walter stalling for time with an improvised musical number.

          As photographed in a nostalgic glow by Laszlo Kovacs, Harry and Walter looks great, and the leads are complemented by a gaggle of ace supporting players, including Val Avery, Ted Cassidy, Charles Durning, Jack Gilford, Carol Kane, Lesley Ann Warren, and Burt Young. Unfortunately, the material just isn’t there. The characters are underdeveloped, the comedic situations don’t percolate, the dialogue doesn’t sparkle, and the narrative conceit that the idiotic Harry and Walter keep stumbling into good fortune feels like a cheat. Still, it’s impossible not to find commendable elements with this much talent involved, and those high points range from the intentionally awful musical passages featuring Caan and Gould to Caine’s peerless delivery of sardonic dialogue. Providing one of the movie’s few real laughs, he dismisses the heroes by explaining that “They’re not oafs—they would require practice to become oafs.”

Harry and Walter Go to New York: FUNKY

Annie Hall (1977)

          Whether it’s viewed as the climax of Woody Allen’s early career as a self-deprecating comedian or the beginning of his later career as a serious filmmaker, Annie Hall is an extraordinary piece of work. Among many other things, Annie Hall is Allen’s first attempt at a Big Statement, simultaneously a deep exploration of one specific relationship and a microcosmic study of relationships in general. Furthermore, the picture contains two of the most vividly sketched characters in ’70s cinema, both of whom are fictionalized versions of the actors playing them: Annie Hall, the eccentric singer portrayed by Diane Keaton, and Alvy Singer, the neurotic comic portrayed by Allen.

          To the filmmaker’s great credit, neither character gets off easily, because both are depicted as fascinating people capable of infuriating behavior—and both are shown to be almost pathologically incapable of subverting their identities into the collective identity of a couple, despite being very much in love. (Allen had a lengthy real-life affair with Keaton, his costar in a string of beloved ’70s films.) Yet the bond between Alvy and Annie isn’t the film’s only romance; Annie Hall illustrates Allen’s devotion to the island of Manhattan by creating several hilarious fish-out-of-water scenes depicting Alvy gasping for air whenever he’s taken off the bedrock of New York City.

          The bits of Alvy disastrously trying to cook lobsters in a beach house and trying to drive in Los Angeles are tiny comic masterpieces, just as the interaction between Alvy and his sitcom-producer pal, Rob (Tony Roberts), articulates Allen’s contempt for the assembly-line approach to creating Hollywood pabulum. Some of the most vivid material in the picture involves Annie’s WASP family, particularly the unforgettably funny/creepy scenes of Annie’s brother, Duane (Christopher Walken), giving a speech about vehicular suicide—and then taking a terrified Alvy for a car ride.

          As the title suggests, however, the movie’s most memorable invention is Annie herself, a character so individualistic she inspired a fashion craze as women tried to mimic Keaton’s offbeat wardrobe of repurposed men’s clothing. Whether you find Annie appealing or irritating is a matter of taste, but it’s impossible not to appreciate moments like the scene in which Annie magically leaves her body during sex because she’s bored.

          Beyond Allen and Keaton, both of whom are at their very best, Annie Hall features a deep well of colorful actors in supporting roles, from featured performers Colleen Dewhurst, Shelley Duvall, Carol Kane, and Paul Simon (yes, the singer-songwriter) to bit player Sigourney Weaver, who makes her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it screen debut at the end of the picture. Yet perhaps the funniest mini-performance in the picture is given by author Marshall McLuhan, who appears in a quintessential Allen moment: As Alvy waits in line at a theater, listening to a windbag pontificate about McLuhan’s media theories, Alvy wishes he could set the guy straight, so he yanks the real McLuhan from behind a poster, upon which McLuhan says to the windbag, “You know nothing of my work.”

          It’s a given that Allen’s movies aren’t for everyone, but Annie Hall winningly sets his intellectualism, narcissism, and neuroticism into a palatable framework by dramatizing the perils of being opinionated about everything; in a very important way, Annie Hall is the Allen movie for people who don’t like Allen movies, since it depicts the inability of a character very much like Woody Allen to comfortably exist in everyday life.

Annie Hall: OUTTA SIGHT

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) & The World’s Greatest Lover (1977)

          The comedy world suffered a blow when Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder stopped collaborating in the mid-’70s, because Brooks never found a better leading man, and Wilder never found a better director. A good example of how badly these men needed each other is The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother. A farcical mystery written and directed by Wilder, the movie features several members of Brooks’ stock company (Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Wilder), and it looks great (thanks to cinematographer Gerry Fisher). Better still, the basic idea of famed sleuth Holmes using an idiot sibling as a decoy is clever and fun. (The movie’s title is meant ironically.) Unfortunately, the gags run the gamut from insultingly stupid to numbingly stupid: Feldman and Wilder dancing at a formal ball with their rear ends exposed; Feldman, Kahn, and Wilder doing a cringe-inducing dance number called “The Kangaroo Hop” (twice); Wilder and British comedy stalwart Roy Kinnear fighting with an oversized glove and an oversized shoe for weapons. It’s all so painful that when cameo player Albert Finney shows up to ask a rhetorical question—“Is this rotten, or wonderfully brave?”—the answer is clear. Only the consummate skill of the players makes Smarter Brother borderline tolerable.
          Wilder went the auteur route again for The World’s Greatest Lover, which is shockingly awful. A period piece about a talent search for a silent-movie heartthrob in the mode of Rudolph Valentino, Lover is filled with moronic slapstick (like an endless gag involving an overflowing bathtub), and Wilder’s performance is atrocious. He spends nearly every scene screaming and bulging his eyes, so he looks like he’s receiving electroshock therapy instead of acting. Playing his wife, Carol Kane tries to ground a few scenes with her offbeat sweetness, but she was obviously instructed to match Wilder’s manic energy to the best of her ability, so she ends up mugging and screaming as well. Supporting Wilder once again, DeLuise goes way over the top in his costarring turn as a psychotic studio executive, and his preposterous hairstyle is just about the only amusing thing in this unbearable movie. Great poster, though!

The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother: LAME

The World’s Greatest Lover: SQUARE