Cancel My Reservation (1972)

Funnyman Bob Hope played his last big-screen leading role in this limp, old-fashioned farce about a cowardly smartass who stumbles onto intrigue while vacationing near Native American land in Arizona. Written and photographed in roughly the same style that had been employed for Hope’s comedies since the World War II era, Cancel My Reservation uses a contrived and silly plot as a delivery device for rapid-fire jokes, and the wheezy gags take unkind jabs at everything from indigenous peoples to women’s rights. The ages of the leading actors are distracting, as well. Despite being nearly 70 years old when he made this picture, Hope is put across as the virile center of a love triangle, with the character’s wife (played by 48-year-old Eva Marie Saint) and a sexy squaw (played by 25-year-old Anne Archer, decidedly not of Native American heritage) competing for his affections. Hope’s ability to land zingers remained sharp his entire life, so forgiving viewers might be able to chuckle a few times during Cancel My Reservation. Most folks, however, will find the piece irritatingly artificial and moderately distasteful. Here’s the setup. After fighting with his wife/cohost Sheila (Saint) one too many times, Dan (Hope) takes a trip to his ranch out west, only to find a dead body in his house. The body disappears, but not before Dan gets into a hassle with the local constabulary. Later, he finds a live body in his house—naked and willing “Crazy” (Archer). This doesn’t sit well with Sheila, who arrives unexpectedly and discovers Dan with “Crazy.” Together, these three solve a mystery involving land grabs and police corruption. In a typically dumb scene, Dan and Sheila seek advice from Indian mystic “Old Bear” (Chief Dan George), who looks at his visitors and says the following via subtitles: “This chick is out of sight—and I wish he was!”  Familiar players Ralph Bellamy, Keenan Wynn, Henry Darrow, and Forrest Tucker round out the supporting cast, while Johnny Carson, Bing Crosby, John Wayne, and Flip Wilson all cameo in a dream sequence. 

Cancel My Reservation: LAME

The Bears and I (1974)

          One of the better live-action dramas made by Walt Disney Productions in the ’70s, The Bears and I presents the familiar trope of a man who leaves civilization to find solace in nature, then builds emotional bonds with wild animals until he must resolve the inherent problem of living in two worlds at once. Although The Bears and I is a simplistic  homily compared to the best Disney movie of this type— the extraordinary Never Cry Wolf (1983)—it is nonetheless a humanistic film with a credible approach to ecology and race. The movie has some of the usual kid-cinema extremes, notably an excess of cute-animal antics, and leading man Patrick Wayne is hopelessly bland. However, young viewers could do much worse than exposure to a story about treating animals, land, and people with respect.
          The film’s source material is a nonfiction book by Robert Franklin Leslie, who ventured into the woods of British Columbia during the 1930s to work as a trapper, inadvertently becoming the guardian of three cubs after their mother died. In the modernized Disney version, Bob (Wayne) is a Vietnam vet who travels into the wilderness near the Canadian Rockies to find Chief Peter A-Tas-Ka-Nay (Chief Dan George). Bob served with Peter’s son, who died in combat, so Bob returns the son’s personal effects and seeks permission to camp near the small Indian settlement that Peter oversees. Hostile toward all whites, Peter and his tribesmen accept Bob’s money but not his companionship, and the friction increases once Bob adopts the cubs. Peter says his people are a “bear tribe,” so they view the domestication of the bears as sacreligious. Nonetheless, Bob teaches the bears basic survival skills, such as foraging for insects and hiding in trees when stalked by predators. This being a Disney picture, several subplots impact the action, notably the impending transformation of the Indian settlement into the hub of a national park and the one-dimensional villainy of Sam Eagle Speaker (Valentin de Vargas), a drunken troublemaker.

          Presented with dense narration during animal scenes, The Bears and I goes down smoothly. Shot at gorgeous outdoor locations, the picture comes complete with a John Denver theme song {“Sweet Surrender”), so it meshes well with the back-t0-nature ethos of the early ’70s. Is it cutesy and manipulative? Of course. But there’s a bittersweet emotional peak buried inside the movie’s tidy third act, ensuring that the picture ultimately endorses a realistic view of how people and wild animals can safely interact.

The Bears and I: GROOVY

Shadow of the Hawk (1976)

         Something of a cousin to The Manitou (1976) and Prophecy (1979), this loopy flick puts a Native American spin on the horror genre, spicing its thrills with hokey material about ancient curses and sacred destinies. Shadow of the Hawk isn’t scary so much as it’s colorful, thanks to elaborate scenes of the hero fighting a grizzly bear, leading a group of people across a rope bridge over a massive canyon, and so forth. Yet the movie’s intensity level lags dangerously low at times because of phoned-in performances and underdeveloped characters and concepts. Nonetheless, Shadow of the Hawk is watchable in a Saturday-matinee sort of way, because every so often something enjoyably weird happens. In one scene, the dignified Native American actor Chief Dan George yanks the coral snake that just bit him off his face, throws the reptile to the ground, and uses Indian magic to engulf the snake in flames. Later, George applies war paint to the movie’s star, Jan-Michael Vincent, so Vincent can have a mano-a-mano duel with a fellow wearing a bird costume comprising a giant beak mask and feather “wings” extending below his arms. Oh, and rest assured that George utters lots of quasi-spiritual dialogue (“Give her strength—let it flow into her body like the wind in the trees”). Shadow of the Hawk is ridiculous, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

          When the story begins, Old Man Hawk (George) travels from the reservation to the big city so he can seek help from his grandson, Mike (Vincent), who has left Native American culture behind. Through contrived circumstances, Mike agrees to help and brings along Maureen (Marilyn Hassett), a pretty reporter whom he’s just met.  Old Man Hawk persuades Mike and Maureen that he’s engaged in a battle with the spirit of an ancient witch, and that matters of some consequence hinge on the outcome of the battle. The trio ventures into the woods to find and confront the ancient spirit, leading to deadly episodes whenever the witch uses its powers to turn the natural world against the heroes.

          Directed with indifference by TV hack George McCowan, who made a handful of B-movies including the absurd creature feature Frogs (1972), Shadow of the Hawk has some nice scenery, and it’s novel that many of the big fright scenes happen in broad daylight. (Unfortunately, this visual choice reveals that the “grizzly” fighting Vincent is a dude in a questionable bear costume.) The superficiality of the story is helpful in that it’s possible to watch the movie without utilizing any actual brain function, and hurtful in that it’s not possible to care what happens. George manages to avoid looking embarrassed, no small accomplishment, while Vincent seems completely vacant and Hassett merely whimpers her way through silly damsel-in-distress scenarios. Anyway, here’s an odd piece of Jan-Michael Vincent trivia that’s related to this movie: The pilot episode of the cheesetastic ’80s action show Airwolf, in which Vincent plays an adventurer named Stringfellow Hawke, is titled “Shadow of the Hawke.” I’d like to believe that someone on the Airwolf team had a mischievous sense of humor.

Shadow of the Hawk: FUNKY

The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)

          With the possible exception of Dirty Harry (1971), the offbeat Western The Outlaw Josey Wales is Clint Eastwood’s best movie of the ’70s, and also one of the most textured films in his long career. Blending a sensitive approach to character with Eastwood’s signature meditations on violence—a unique combination that resulted from Eastwood’s fractious collaboration with co-screenwriter Philip Kaufman—the picture delivers the intense action fans expect from Eastwood Westerns, but also so much more. Based on a novel by Forrest Carter, the picture was written by Kaufman and Sonia Chernus, with Kaufman originally slated to direct. Alas, Eastwood, who was the film’s de facto executive producer (though not credited as such), got into a disagreement with Kaufman partway through filming and fired Kaufman, stepping into the director’s chair himself.

          Eastwood had already helmed four features, so he was well on his way to developing a recognizable style—deep shadows, long takes, quick-cut bursts of bloody violence. Yet while it’s possible to watch the film and make educated guesses about which bits remain from Kaufman’s tenure behind the camera, the blending of two sensibilities goes much deeper than that, since Kaufman wrote a script he intended to direct and Eastwood followed that script. In any event, fused authorship gives The Outlaw Josey Wales more tonal variety than one finds in Eastwood’s other ’70s Westerns, especially because so much screen time is devoted to presenting idiosyncratic supporting characters.

         The story begins when pro-union bandits led by the craven Terrill (Bill McKinney) murder the family of Missouri farmer Josey Wales (Eastwood) during the Civil War. Joining the Confederate cause to seek revenge, Wales annihilates several enemies but witnesses the treachery of Terrill’s commander, Captain Fletcher (John Vernon). Soon Wales becomes a fugitive, with Fletcher and Terrill his relentless pursuers. Wales embarks on a long journey through the South, inadvertently gathering a surrogate family of frontier stragglers while preparing for his inevitable confrontation with Terrill, and possibly a second showdown with Fletcher.

          As in many Eastwood pictures—notably Unforgiven (1991), which can be seen as a successor to Josey Wales—this picture investigates the question of whether a man can preserve his soul after succumbing to bloodlust. Wales is a decent, hard-working man when we meet him, but tragedy turns him into a ruthless killer. Then, once he’s out on the frontier, protecting and being protected by his oddball friends, he becomes something more than a vigilante; he’s a strange sort of gun-toting patriarch, struggling to claim high ground while mired in moral quicksand.

          Simply by dint of the nuanced script, Eastwood’s acting has a broader range of colors here than usual, and the way his performance is decorated with weird details—like spitting tobacco onto nearly every living thing that crosses his path—makes Wales as indelible an Eastwood characterization as Dirty Harry or the Man With No Name. McKinney and Vernon provide different colors of villainy, with the former essaying a violent zealot and the latter portraying a world-weary pragmatist capable of shocking ruthlessness. Reliable character actors including Matt Clark, Woodrow Parfrey, and John Quade populate the movie’s sweaty periphery. Yet it’s the actors playing members of Wales’ surrogate family who often command the most attention. Sondra Locke, appearing in the first of many films she did with Eastwood, lends fragile beauty that contrasts the ugliness of Wales’ world, while Chief Dan George is dry, funny, and wise as Lone Watie, an aging Cherokee Indian who joins Wales’ entourage.

          Holding the movie’s potentially disparate elements together is slick technical presentation, courtesy of cinematographer Bruce Surtees and composer Jerry Fielding (both frequent Eastwood collaborators) and others. From its unique spin on gunslinger mythology to its colorful use of vivid Western archetypes, The Outlaw Josey Wales feels consistently interesting, literary, and personal.

The Outlaw Josey Wales: RIGHT ON

Americathon (1979)

          The basic premise of this hyperkinetic comedy is a winner, but the execution is so deprived of inspiration that Americathon ends up feeling like a Saturday Night Live sketch overstaying its welcome. Set in 1998, which was 20 years into the future when the movie was made, Americathon imagines what happens when the U.S. finally runs out of money and risks defaulting on debts. (Sound familiar, circa 2011?) The government hires a PR man (Peter Riegert), who suggests a month-long telethon in which Americans will be invited to help the government pay off a $400 billion loan. That’s a great start, but the filmmakers behind Americathon bludgeon this rich concept with one lame joke after another, filling the movie with so many misdirected satirical potshots that the movie becomes unrelentingly stupid.

          The country’s main creditor is a rich Native American (Chief Dan George), who makes his money selling running shoes and track suits; the President (John Ritter) is a narcissistic horndog preaching ’70s-style philosophy while operating out of the “Western White House,” a sublet condo in Southern California; and the country’s main enemy is a new nation called the United Hebrab Republic, formed when Arabs and Israelis solved their differences to become a greedy world power. But wait, there’s more! The telethon host is a drugged-out sitcom star named Monty Rushmore (Harvey Korman); the President gets infatuated with a screeching Vietnamese singer (Zane Busby), who performs something called “puke rock”; and the President’s insidious chief of staff (Fred Willard) wants to sabotage the telethon (by overstuffing the talent list with ventriloquists) in order to sell the country to the Hebrabs. There’s also room for rocker Meat Loaf as a stuntman, baseball manager Tommy Lasorda as a sports commentator, Jay Leno as a shlub who enters a boxing match with his aging mother, and random moments like a performance by Elvis Costello.

         Directed by Neil Israel, who later co-created the Police Academy franchise, this picture opts for a shallow mile-a-minute style that only works when the jokes are so funny that viewers can’t catch their breath in between laughs—and the jokes in Americathon simply aren’t funny. One can’t help but feel for the actors, since they’re clearly trying to elevate this dreck into something worthwhile, but even the indefatigable Korman is left gasping for air by the dopey script. In fact, virtually the only unassailable element of the movie is George Carlin’s sardonic narration (he voices a track ostensibly spoken by Reigert’s character); though the jokes in the narration aren’t any better than those onscreen, Carlin’s delivery is so perfect that his work hints at the satirical free-for-all Americathon could have been. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Americathon: LAME

Little Big Man (1970)

          The kind of cinematic oddity that could only have been made on this lavish a scale during the New Hollywood era, Arthur Penn’s revisionist Western Little Big Man is as entertaining as it is completely bizarre. Based on a novel by Thomas Berger, the film tells the story of 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman), who claims to be the only white survivor of the Little Big Horn massacre that claimed the life of notorious Indian fighter Gen. George Custer. As the ancient Crabb relates his story to a doubting interviewer (William Hickey), the picture flashes back to Crabb’s childhood and then presents wild episodes from his life leading up to the slaughter at Little Big Horn. Along the way, Crabb spends time personifying virtually every archetype of the Old West, from gunfighter to snake-oil salesman to town drunk. Most of Crabb’s recollections detail his upbringing by Cheyenne Indians—after his parents were killed during a Pawnee raid, young Crabb was adopted by a Cheyenne elder named Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George).

          Crabb’s story is outrageous, and part of the charm of Little Big Man is that it doesn’t matter whether you buy into the myth or even the possibility of the myth—the point is reconsidering Old West iconography from the fresh perspective of the Plains Indians, rather than the usual viewpoint of the “civilized” whites who systematically eradicated those Indians.

          Hoffman’s casting is pure genius, not only because he gives such a funny and humane performance, but also because the sight of him slathered in war paint is so incongruous; the juxtaposition that Hoffman creates in every single frame underscores the film’s mischievous intentions. And even if Jack is ultimately somewhat of a cipher—the blank screen onto which the film’s political agenda is projected—other major characters are presented so clearly and cleverly that a full emotional experience emerges.

          Several Native American actors lend authenticity to featured roles, with Robert Little Star adding absurd humor as a flamingly gay Indian, and Ruben Moreno lending intensity as Crabb’s main rival in the Cheyenne community. Chief Dan George’s deadpan line deliveries are perfect for the vivid character of Old Lodge Skins, a man utterly at peace with his understanding of the universe (“I’ve never been invisible before!”); George was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Faye Dunaway, at her most beautiful, gives a nuanced performance by playing a woman in her prime and, later in the story, gone to seed; she appears as the wife of a religious nut who takes in an adolescent Crabb after he’s separated from the Cheyenne. Jeff Corey is sly as a twitchy but endearing Wild Bill Hickock, and Martin Balsam lends campy amusement as Mr. Merriweather, Crabb’s unlucky mentor in the snake-oil business.

          Best of all is Richard Mulligan as Custer—he plays the general as a megalomaniacal loon given to pronouncements like, “Are you suggesting the reversal of a Custer decision?” Since Mulligan has to, in essence, personify the theme of white hubris, it’s impressive that he delivers such an individualistic performance while playing a symbol. (At the time of the picture’s release, Little Big Man was seen as a veiled indictment of America’s involvement in Vietnam; the film’s thematic content is a bit more malleable when viewed with modern eyes.) Plus, even though Crabb is an intentionally chameleonic character, Hoffman is terrific in a wild range of settings. He’s sweet as a young man trying to find his way in a new world, ridiculous as a duded-up gunfighter called “The Soda Pop Kid,” and finally resolute once tragedy drives him to ensure that Custer meets an unhappy end.

         Little Big Man moves at an impressive pace throughout its 139 minutes, and it pulls off that special New Hollywood trick of blending wild tonal extremes into a weirdly coherent whole. Alternately harrowing and hilarious, it’s as unique as its protagonist.

Little Big Man: RIGHT ON

Dan Candy’s Law (1974)

Given my affection for Canadian Westerns, Donald Sutherland, and obscure ’70s dramas with Native American themes, it pains me to report that the only film featuring all three things is almost completely uninteresting. Originally titled Alien Thunder and wisely renamed for American release, Dan Candy’s Law follows easygoing Mountie Dan Candy (Sutherland) as he tracks a fugitive Cree Indian called Almighty Voice (Gordon Tootoosis) across the vast, wintry landscapes of the Saskatchewan province circa the late 1800s. Almighty Voice’s original crime was slaughtering a government-owned cow to feed his family, but then he killed Candy’s partner (Kevin McCarthy) during an attempted arrest, and fled in fear with his pregnant wife. Director-cinematographer Claude Fournier shoots the Canadian wilderness well, capturing the harsh majesty of untamed open spaces, and he’s aided greatly by Georges Delerue’s plaintive score. But the film’s script is useless, an endless string of perfunctory scenes in which Candy treks across Canada while he talks about doing things that are more interesting than anything he actually does. We also see vignettes of Almighty Voice and his extended family living off the land while avoiding capture, but the movie never properly develops the theme of Native people trying to reclaim some measure of their lost sovereignty. Toward the end of the picture, Sutherland briefly tries to do some sort of unhinged-avenger thing, but his attempt is undercut by hapless direction; the broad tonal shifts in Sutherland’s performance from anger to exuberance seem forced instead of natural, because it’s never clear whether Candy is driven by decency or vengeance. Tootoosis and Chief Dan George lead an ensemble of Native supporting players, and though all of them add authenticity, none gets to do anything viewers haven’t seen in a zillion similar films. The pace of Dan Candy’s Law picks up briefly during the requisite bleak finale, but since the film hasn’t built up an emotional head of steam, the denouement feels arbitrary instead of powerful.

Dan Candy’s Law: LAME