Permission to Kill (1975)

          “You’re a very clever man,” the revolutionary says to the spy. “What a waste you’re an evil one.” That sharp dialogue indicates the provocative themes pulsing through Permission to Kill, a European/US coproduction released in America with the graceless title The Executioner. Elegant, meditative, and restrained, this picture won’t be for everyone’s taste, since it’s not purely the action/suspense piece one might expect. Yet neither is it purely cerebral in the vein of, say, some Graham Greene adaptation. Permission to Kill occupies an interesting middle ground, spicing its intricate plotting and thoughtful characterization with a dash of luridness. Defining the film’s icy tone are Dirk Bogarde’s soft-spoken performance in the leading role of a ruthless manipulator, and cinematographer Freddie Young’s classically beautiful compositions. Whereas many espionage thrillers of the ’70s opted for grittiness, Permission to Kill luxuriates in European elegance.

          Although the central premise is simple, the pathway the storytellers take toward presenting the premise is slightly obtuse, presumably by design—in the spy world, nothing is ever simple. Alan Curtis (Bogarde) works for a mysterious agency that wishes to prevent leftist Alexander Diakim (Bekim Fehmiu) from returning to his home country, where it is assumed he will foment a communist revolt against the totalitarian powers-that-be. Thus Alan recruits four civilians and one professional. Each of the four civilians has some connection to Alexander, either financial or personal, so Alan blackmails them into pressuring Alexander, who is presently exiled in Austria. The professional is a beautiful French assassin, Melissa (Nicole Calfan), hired as an insurance policy should the others fail to impede Alexander’s disruptive homecoming. Much of the film explores Alan’s fraught encounters with the people he’s using, all of whom regard him as a soulless monster. For instance, Katina (Ava Gardner), Alexander’s former lover, is appalled when Alan reveals his willingness to involve the child she had with Alexander, long since given up for adoption. Eventually, Alan’s cruelty inspires two of the pawns, British government functionary Charles (Timothy Dalton) and American journalist Scott (Frederic Forrest), to engineer a counter-conspiracy against their tormentor.

          While Permission to Kill has a ticking-clock aspect, it’s as much a character piece as a potboiler. Even Vanessa, about whom little is revealed beyond her lovely figure, comes across as complicated and dimensional. Writer Robin Estridge, who adapted the script from his own novel, revels in the duplicity and gamesmanship of spycraft, so when Alan coolly says, “The truth is what I make it,” the remark doesn’t seem like empty posturing. None of this is to suggest that Permission to Kill is flawless, since the performances are uneven (Forrest delivers clumsy work and Gardner’s breathy melodrama feels old-fashioned), and since some viewers may rightly grow impatient between bursts of action. For those who lock into its downbeat groove, however, Permission to Kill is smart and vicious, a palliative for the cartoonish superficiality of Bond flicks and their escapist ilk.

Permission to Kill: GROOVY

When the Legends Die (1972)

          Arguably the best film to emerge from the mini-boom of rodeo movies in the early ’70s, this small-scale drama hits a number of interesting notes at once. In addition to servicing the public’s fleeting appetite for stories about men who prove their bravery by riding fierce animals, the picture also speaks to very ’70s themes related to the Native American experience and the travails of small men trapped by self-destructive life choices. Adapted from a novel by Hal Borland, When the Legends Die tracks the sad adventures of Tom Black Bull (Frederic Forrest), an 18-year-old Yute Indian who lives among whites but lacks a strong sense of social belonging. This emotional state makes Tom susceptible to the machinations of Red (Richard Widmark), a drunken rancher who sees a financial opportunity in Tom’s skill with animals.

          After snookering Tom with a line about fame and fortune, Red convinces the young man to become a rodeo rider, and then pushes even harder after Tom survives a harrowing ride that results in the death of a horse. Announcers start calling him “Killer” Tom Black, exploiting demeaning stereotypes and harming Tom’s already wobbly self-image. Dazed by money, notoriety, and women, the impressionable Tom plays into his role, intentionally pushing more horses to their deaths until his conscience starts to nag at him. This, naturally, creates a rift between Tom and his unscrupulous mentor, and the film comes into its own by depicting the ways in which Tom and Red are changed by the distance that grows between them.

          Even though When the Legends Die traffics in clichés to some extent—always a risk when trying to lend fresh nuances to archetypal stories—the restraint of the filmmaking and the sensitivity of the acting make the piece believably mournful. Screenwriter Robert Dozier employs admirable economy, and director Stuart Miller stays out of the material’s way, presenting action and performance in an unvarnished fashion. Widmark, whose latter-day work tended toward woodenness, does some of his finest acting here, dramatizing the pathetic lifestyle of a loser who hitches a ride on a winner. Furthermore, Widmark’s natural stoicism suits the character, defining the macho precipice from which Red will inevitably fall. Forrest, whose erratic career has included everything from enthusiastic overacting to somnambulistic underacting, hits a great pocket, as well. The naturally melancholy set of Forrest’s features, accentuated with lighting and makeup to make him appear more Native American, gives a strong sense of vulnerability—seeing Red toy with Tom’s emotions is like watching someone kick a puppy.

          Ultimately, the most distinctive aspect of When the Legends Die may be the one that separates it from other rodeo flicks. Except for a few fleeting passages during which viewers are meant to share in Tom’s triumphs, the film generally makes rodeo life look cruel, exploitive, and seedy. Whereas films including Sam Peckinpah’s lovely Junior Bonner (also released in 1972) treat bronc-busting as a metaphor representing the realization of male identity, When the Legends Die depicts the sport as a form of modern-day gladiatorial carnage. The obvious parallels to white America’s historical mistreatment of the frontier, and of the living things found there, are resonant but never overstated.

When the Legends Die: GROOVY

The Conversation (1974)

          To fully grasp the hot streak filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola was on in the ’70s, it’s necessary to look beyond the titanic accomplishments of The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). Released the same year as The Godfather: Part II—and, amazingly, also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar that year, giving Coppola two slots in the category—was The Conversation, which arguably represents the purest artistic statement of Coppola’s early career. Whereas Coppola’s other ’70s films are adaptations, The Conversation is an original. Moreover, the picture is so intimate that it demonstrates the filmmaker’s preternatural ability to use image and sound as a means of communicating nearly microscopic details about a protagonist’s inner life. Yet beyond simply being an auteurist showpiece, The Conversation tells a resonant story about themes ranging from paranoia to personal responsibility, and it contains one of the finest leading performances of the decade, by the incomparable Gene Hackman. In sum, The Conversation is a pinnacle achievement whether viewed as personal art, social critique, or even just craftsmanship.

          Set in Coppola’s beloved San Francisco, the movie concerns Harry Caul (Hackman), a surveillance contractor revered by fellow professionals for his skill at secretly recording conversations in tricky situations. The opening scene depicts Harry’s team using a trio of strategically placed microphones to eavesdrop on an exchange between young lovers Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest), who speak while walking in circles through a crowded urban square. Harry merges the recordings until he’s extracted a pristine master tape, and then attempts to make delivery to his client, a director at the CIA. Yet when Harry is denied access to the director, he suspects trouble, so he withholds the master tape. It turns out that in the past, one of Harry’s tapes was used to justify an assassination, so Harry fears history might repeat itself. The problem, however, is that Harry is so reclusive that he has no close friends from whom to seek guidance or support. Therefore, the incredible drama of the movie stems from Harry’s quandary over whether to maintain his personal code of noninvolvement or violate his self-preserving principles in order to serve the greater good.

          Every character surrounding Harry is used by Coppola to illuminate a different facet of the protagonist. Amiable coworker Stan (John Cazale) reveals Harry’s inability to trust; gentle prostitute Meredith (Elizabeth McRae) reveals Harry’s inability to share emotionally; undemanding kept woman Amy (Teri Garr) reveals Harry’s inability to commit; and so on. Meanwhile, edgy supporting characters including ice-blooded functionary Martin (Harrison Ford) and vulgar surveillance-industry competitor Bernie (Allen Garfield) represent the types of avarice and duplicity that first drove Harry to become a recluse. On nearly every textual and subtextual level, The Conversation is a master class in character development.

          It’s also a wonder in terms of technical execution. Coppola and expert cinematographers Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler carve delicate images from light, movement, and shadow, articulating the significance of how different people occupy different spaces. Unsung hero Walter Murch, performing the role of sound designer before that job title existed, works magic with distortion and fragmentation to evoke Harry’s insular life experience, while composer David Shire’s whirling piano figures address the painful tension pervading the story. The performances are uniformly good, from Garr’s slightly pathetic likeability to Garfield’s crass aggression, but, obviously, the brittle textures of Hackman’s work hold The Conversation together. Disappearing behind dumpy clothes, horn-rimmed glasses, and a receding hairline, Hackman sketches Harry Caul with incredible restraint, so the flashes of emotion that the actor makes visible speak volumes. The Conversation isn’t perfect, thanks to occasional directorial flourishes that slip into pretention and thanks to a slightly overlong running time. Nonetheless, in every important way, The Conversation defines what made New Hollywood cinema bracing, innovative, and meaningful.

The Conversation: OUTTA SIGHT

The Gravy Train (1974)

Though it possesses many of the qualities shared by the best oddball ’70s movies—brazen tonal shifts, eccentric flourishes, offbeat characterizations—The Gravy Train runs off the tracks very quickly. Among other problems, the film is primarily a comedy but it isn’t funny, and the picture’s main attraction is the buddy-movie dynamic of two characters who aren’t colorful enough to sustain interest, separately or together. So, while it’s very easy to parse the film’s underwhelming content and discern how the material could have been developed into something more worthwhile, the finished picture lacks emotional punch, narrative momentum, and wit; the only real virtues on display are competent technical execution and vigorous acting, but these aren’t enough to justify the chore of watching The Gravy Train. Alternatively titled The Dion Brothers, the movie is about—you guessed it—the Dion brothers, two schemers from West Virginia mining country. Calvin (Stacy Keach) is a flashy chatterbox who has gotten involved with big-city criminals, while Rut (Frederic Forrest) is a slow-witted bumpkin back in the old hometown. When Calvin joins a crew planning a big heist, he talks his employers into letting him bring Rut aboard—but after the heist goes south and the brothers realize they’ve been double-crossed, they seek out the gangster (Barry Primus) who betrayed them. Along the way, the brothers pick up a screechy floozy (Margot Kidder), who accompanies them through various adventures. Co-written by Terrence Malick (under a pseudonym), The Gravy Train is dull and plodding, from its underwhelming opening—Calvin stages one of the lamest take-this-job-and-shove-it tantrums in movie history—to its stupidly downbeat ending. Despite valiant efforts at creating enjoyable characterizations, Forrest, Keach, and Kidder are undercut at every turn by lackluster writing, and it says a lot that the most amusing moment in the picture involves Keach using a live lobster as a weapon.

The Gravy Train: LAME

The Rose (1979)

          Beautiful in moments, harrowing in others, and soulful despite a derivative origin and a preponderance of clichés, The Rose is best remembered as the vehicle that drove singer/actress Bette Midler to international superstardom. In addition to providing Midler with her biggest hit song to date (the film’s poetic title track), The Rose earned the entertainer her first Oscar nomination. Combined with several other Oscar nods and a sold box-0ffice performance, this amount of success represented an unlikely turn of events for a project that seemed destined to fail. Originally developed as a biopic of the late, great rock singer Janis Joplin, the project was fictionalized when negotiations for the use of Joplin’s likeness and music came to naught; furthermore, the producers failed to hire eccentric British director Ken Russell, who had scored a major hit with the rock musical Tommy (1975) and therefore seemed the safe bet for this sort of material.

          Yet these setbacks turned out to be fortuitous, since moving away from Joplin’s life story allowed the screenwriters to create a self-contained mythos for their protagonist, and losing Russell led the producers to Mark Rydell, whose sensitive direction grounds the movie in a way Russell never would have attempted. None of this is to say The Rose is a great movie—quite the contrary, it’s rather average in terms of narrative content, since the storyline essentially throws various rock & roll signifiers into a Cuisinart. However, the picture has coherence thanks to Midler’s impassioned performance, Rydell’s unwavering focus on the tragedy of a performer’s downward spiral, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s elegant cinematography. So, even though The Rose is a simultaneously tarted-up and watered-down version of Joplin’s journey, it’s emotionally arresting.

          The actual plot is simple—as raunchy blues/rock singer Mary Rose Foster becomes famous, the pressure to deliver consistent success drives her toward drinking, drugs, and philandering. By the time she’s a superstar known simply as “The Rose,” her fragile self-image has crumbled, so she rushes toward self-destructive oblivion. The ineffectual men sharing her life include Houston Dyer (Frederick Forrest), a sweet boyfriend whose affections aren’t enough to pull Mary Rose back from the brink, and Rudge Campbell (Alan Bates), a domineering manager whose ambition and greed outstrip his concern for Mary Rose’s welfare.
          The Rose takes its seediness seriously, so Midler is often presented as unattractively as possible, both in terms of her slovenly physical appearance and her screeching tirades during binges. Midler makes these unseemly aspects watchable with the commitment of her acting, though just barely so—were it not for Midler’s innate likability, which shines through even at the worst of times, Mary Rose would be a completely unsympathetic character. After all, one can’t help but ask why Mary Rose doesn’t simply quit when things get awful. Alas, The Rose doesn’t go that deep, so we’re left with a finely textured surface—which is probably enough, at least for a single viewing.
          As for the music, it’s a mixed bag, even though Midler’s vocal performances are astounding from start to finish. The best hard rockers are covers of “real” songs (“Fire Down Below,” “Stay With Me,” “When a Man Loves a Woman”), but the ersatz numbers composed for the movie work fine. And if the title song is a bit too gentle for a Joplin-esque singer’s set list, that’s easy to overlook since Midler’s rendition has so much feeling.

The Rose: GROOVY

The Don Is Dead (1973)

Even as Italian-American auteurs Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese reimagined the gangster genre in the early ’70s, other filmmakers cranked out perfectly serviceable mob thrillers of a more conventional nature. The Don Is Dead is a good example, since it’s a brisk potboiler that lacks much in the way of artistic ambition but still gets the down-and-dirty job done with a florid mixture of intrigue, sex, and violence. Anthony Quinn, overripe as always but effectively cast, stars as Don Angelo, leader of a powerful gang. When his mistress (Angel Tompkins) is murdered, Don Angelo orders his soldiers to go on a killing spree, sparking a war among various factions angling for power. Eventually, as the title suggests, Don Angelo gets caught in the crossfire, and the most effective stretch of the picture depicts the crime lord scheming from a secret hiding place while his enemies think he’s been taken out of commission. Based on a novel by Marvin H. Albert and directed by versatile workhorse Richard Fleischer, The Don Is Dead offers acres and acres of tasty ’70s texture. The clothes are all big lapels and synthetic fabrics, the locations are gritty, and the action is nasty. Fredrick Forrest stands out among the cast as an enforcer-for-hire who works alongside his brother; his energetic performance captures the melodramatic spirit of the piece. Robert Forster, working a nice blend of seething and suave, is good as well, playing an ambitious junior mobster trying to climb the organized-crime ladder no matter who gets hurt along the way. There’s even some crossover with The Godfather, which hit theaters about a year and a half before The Don Is Dead, because character actors including Al Lettieri and Abe Vigoda appear in both films. The Don Is Dead doesn’t break any new ground, but it works.

The Don Is Dead: FUNKY

It’s Alive (1974) & It Lives Again (1978)

          Arguably the most enduring creation of B-movie auteur Larry Cohen’s colorful career, the It’s Alive franchise depicts the bloody rampages of killer mutant babies born with claws, teeth, and bad attitudes. Surprisingly, the first picture is as much of a melancholy tragedy as it is an out-and-out horror show. Frank Davis (John P. Ryan) is a successful Los Angeles PR man expecting a second child with his easygoing wife, Lenore (Sharon Farrell). Yet as he stands outside the delivery room waiting for news, Frank hears screams and then sees a doctor stagger out, bloodied and dying. Frank runs into the operating room and discovers an abattoir, because his “child” came out of the womb and killed the whole surgical staff before escaping. This outrageous scene sets the tone for the whole picture, and indeed the whole franchise, by turning a universal experience into a nightmare. The scene also initiates a disquieting odyssey during which Frank becomes a social pariah, Lenore loses her mind, and the escaped “infant” racks up a horrific body count.

          Cohen’s filmmaking style is unpretentious to a fault, with many sequences marred by dodgy cinematography, but he’s aided immeasurably by the participation of legendary composer Bernard Hermann (Psycho). Hermann layers the film with one darkly insinuating theme after another, creating uncomfortable levels of menace and suspense that accentuate Cohen’s scheme of juxtaposing normalcy and the supernatural. This effect is aided by Ryan’s tightly wound performance; the actor does a great job of conveying angst beneath a veneer of stoicism. So while Rick Baker’s creature FX are a bit on the goofy side, and while some viewers may quibble about the lack of any scientific explanation for the killer-baby phenomena, It’s Alive has an undeniable mood all its own.

          Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the first sequel, It Lives Again. Once again written and directed by Cohen, the picture meanders through a contrived storyline that lacks the insistent momentum of the first picture. Ryan returns as Frank Davis, only this time he’s part of an underground group helping couples pregnant with killer mutant babies like the one Davis’ wife delivered. In trying to aid one particular young couple (Frederic Forrest and Kathleen Lloyd), Davis runs afoul of a government operative (John Marley) assigned to annihilate the killer mutant babies as they’re born. Intrigue and mayhem ensue, but the excitement level is never particularly high, and by the time two killer mutant babies escape for a rampage, the picture has settled into a dreary rut of people waiting around for haphazardly staged attacks.

          Cohen resurrected his infantile monsters one more time for the 1987 threequel It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive, and the original picture was remade in 2008.

It’s Alive: FUNKY

It Lives Again: LAME