Alex & the Gypsy (1976)

          Eccentric, literary, and unpredictable, Alex & the Gypsy has all the makings of a minor classic from the New Hollywood era. The filmmaking is naturalistic but slick, the performances are vivid, and the romantic storyline crosses cultural boundaries by putting a caustic everyman together with a reckless young woman from the fringes of society. The dialogue sparks at regular intervals, and the love scenes are bracing without being explicit, because where else can one encounter Jack Lemmon acting peeved because Geneviève Bujold isn’t sufficiently responsive to his labors during oral sex? For that matter, where else can one encounter a young James Woods dressed like a modern-day Bob Cratchit because his employer enjoys irony? Alex & the Gypsy has attitude and style and wit for days. What it doesn’t have, unfortunately, is a credible story or even consistent characterizations. The picture tries a lot of admirable things but fails at many of them.

          Alex Main (Lemmon) is a low-rent bail bondsman in Los Angeles, and his only employee is accountant/gofer Crainpool (Woods). Alex learns that Maritza (Bujold) has been arrested for attempted murder. As we learn in flashbacks that are awkwardly interspersed throughout the movie, Alex and Maritza used to live together. He met her under ridiculous circumstances, fell under her exotic spell, and suffered a broken heart when she skipped out on him. Now he’s reluctant to provide bail services, even though he still carries a torch. Sap that he is, he bails her out. The story of the movie comprises Alex’s seriocomic attempts to keep Maritza captive until her hearing, plus his efforts to gather evidence that might clear her.

          As directed by John Korty, a skillful maker of documentaries and TV movies whose theatrical features are usually disappointments, Alex & the Gypsy has great moments. A typically colorful scene involves Maritza reading palms at a Greek picnic, or Alex lulling himself to sleep with blinking traffic lights be bought at a police auction because they remind him of fireflies. Lemmon is wonderfully cranky here, balancing a hot temper with vulnerability, and Woods makes a terrific foil. Bujold, like her character, is the wild card. Obviously miscast (she’s French-Canadian), the unique actress renders a tough sort of sensuality, striving valiantly to make sense of a poorly conceived role.

           Yet it’s the script that undermines the best efforts of everyone involved. Behavior and motivations make little sense, and the structural game of jumping between flashbacks and the present creates confusion without delivering compensatory benefits. Still, this is a strange little movie for a major star and a major studio to have made, so even if it’s not a proper New Hollywood artifact, it’s an example of the New Hollywood’s influence. Mainstream movies soon left this sort of adventurousness behind.

Alex & the Gypsy: FUNKY

The Visitors (1972)

          Lots of ink has been spilled analyzing the latter-day career of director Eliza Kazan, a onetime champion of the left-wing theatrical community and a key figure in the process of introducing Method acting to America. Around the same time he made cinematic masterpieces with Marlon Brando (A Streetcar Named Desire), James Dean (East of Eden), and Andy Griffith (A Face in the Crowd), Kazan turned on old friends by “naming names” before the U.S. government’s anti-communist witch hunters. Partially owing to the complex political dynamics of his career, Kazan was effectively finished as a director of major studio films just a few years later, circa the early ’60s. Nonetheless, he still had some creative gas left in the tank, as evidenced by the offbeat low-budget project The Visitors, Kazan’s penultimate feature.

          Stamped with his signatures of emotional intensity and truthful acting, the picture feels hipper and rougher and more contemporary than anything one might reasonably expect from a 63-year-old (Kazan’s age at the time of the movie’s release). A small, character-driven drama/thriller written by one of Kazan’s sons, Chris Kazan, The Visitors is a nihilistic story about psychologically scarred Vietnam veterans, and the whole film is set on a remote farm in the Northeast during wintertime.

          Unassuming vet Bill Schmidt (James Woods) lives with his girlfriend, Martha (Patricia Joyce), on a farmed owned by her father, Harry Wayne (Patrick McVey). Harry, who resides in a guesthouse adjoining the farm’s main residence, is an alcoholic he-man novelist, so underlying tension stems from his disapproval of Bill’s pacifistic timidity.  One day, two of Bill’s Army comrades show up unexpectedly. Mike Nickerson (Steve Railsback) feigns courtesy but obviously hides tremendous rage, while Tony Rodrigues (Chico Martinez) tags along and follows Mike’s orders without question. As the day-long visit progresses, the vets bond with Harry—who respects their blood lust and racist attitudes—while Bill prepares for inevitable violence. It turns out that during the war, Mike and Tony committed atrocities, and Bill was the soldier who testified against them. (Make what you will about the parallels between this backstory and Kazan’s personal history.)

          Shot in grainy 16-millimeter, The Visitors has the feel of a scrappy independent film even though Kazan’s handling of pacing and tone is masterful. The picture has the slow-burn structure of a horror film, and it’s stomach-churning to watch a metaphorical cloud of darkness form over the tiny farm. Moreover, the screenplay illuminates the line dividing the “sanctioned” violence germane to American life (the brutal football game several characters watch, Harry’s tales of killing enemies in World War II, etc.) from the “unsanctioned” violence of actual criminals. Does one beget the other?

          The Visitors has flaws, of course, notably a nasty sort of sexual politics. Further, the film is unremittingly grim, which will make it a tough experience for many viewers. But especially thanks to incendiary performances by Railsback (one of the screen’s great portrayers of psychosis), Woods (a live wire even in a restrained role such as this one), and McVey (who channels Sterling Hayden with a vengeance), The Visitors is gripping from start to finish.

The Visitors: GROOVY

Night Moves (1975)

          Complementing outright throwbacks such as Chinatown (1974), several ’70s thrillers updated classic film-noir style with modern characters, settings, and themes. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves is among the best of these current-day noirs, featuring a small-time detective who has seen too much misery to muster any real hope for the human species. Nonetheless, like all the best noir heroes, he strives to do something good as a way of compensating for all the bad in the world, and thus ironically dooms not only himself but also the very people he’s trying to protect. Penn, whose erratic feature career peaked with a run of counterculture-themed pictures spanning from Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to this film, was at his best orchestrating subtle interactions between complicated characters, and he does a terrific job in Night Moves of meshing bitter tonalities.

          A seething Gene Hackman stars as low-rent L.A. investigator Harry Moseby. An amiable idealist whose principles alienate him from the compromisers who surround him, Harry is married to Ellen (Susan Clark), who wants him to shutter his one-man agency and work for a big firm. Preferring to steer his own course, Harry focuses on his next case, which involves tracking down teen runaway Delly (Melanie Griffith), the daughter of a blowsy widow (Janet Ward) who, a lifetime ago, was a promiscuous Hollywood starlet. During downtime between investigative chores, Harry discovers that Ellen is cheating on him, so he’s only too happy to follow a lead on Delly’s whereabouts to Florida, a continent away from his troubled marriage. In the sweaty Florida Keys, Harry finds Delly living with her lecherous stepfather, Tom (John Crawford), and his sexy companion, Paula (Jennifer Warren). Also part of the mix is Quentin (James Woods), a squirrelly friend of Delly’s who works as a mechanic for film-industry stuntmen.

          Alan Sharp’s provocative script features murky plotting but crisp character work, so even when the story is hard to follow, moment-to-moment engagement between people is interesting. And since the film is driven by Harry’s zigzag journey from naïveté to despair and then to a misguided sort of optimism, each time he encounters some tricky new piece of information, his relationship with someone changes. Though Hackman was never one to play for cheap sympathy, it’s heartbreaking to watch Harry cast about for someone who deserves his trust, only to be disappointed again and again.

          Every performance in the movie exists in the shadow of Hackman’s great work, but all of the actors hit the right notes, with Griffith’s adolescent petulance resonating strongly. Composer Michael Small and cinematographer Bruce Surtees contribute tremendously to the film’s shadowy mood, and Penn achieves one of his finest cinematic moments with the picture’s desolate finale. Night Moves gets a bit pretentious at times, but when the movie is really flying, it becomes a potent meditation on the challenge of finding sold moral footing during a confusing period in the evolution of the American identity.

Night Moves: GROOVY

The Onion Field (1979)

          Former L.A. cop Joseph Wambaugh forged a new career writing fiction and nonfiction books inspired by his time in uniform, and the moment his debut novel was published in 1971, he started getting attention from Hollywood. Yet by the end of the decade, he was reportedly sick of the liberties filmmakers took in their adaptations of his work—so for The Onion Field, Wambaugh insisted on writing the script and working closely with the director. The result was a highly intelligent look at the unique emotional challenges of police life, shown through the prism of how one detective is scarred by his involvement in a killing.

          As directed by Harold Becker, whose best movies are filled with actual and metaphorical shadows, The Onion Field paints a bleak picture of modern law-enforcement: The policemen in this story are easy targets, while criminals armor themselves with the legal system. Based on a real case, the narrative takes place in the early ’60s, when newly minted Detective Karl Hettinger (John Savage) is assigned to work with slightly older partner Ian Campbell (Ted Danson). Hettinger is an oversensitive ex-Marine, and Campbell is a conflicted soul who plays bagpipes for relaxation and contemplates whether he should quit police work.

          Meanwhile, simple-minded thief Jimmy Smith (Franklyn Seales) has the bad luck to hook up with intense career criminal Greg Powell (James Woods) shortly after Smith’s release from prison. Powell’s a live wire who’s too smart for his own good, since his hodgepodge education leads him to misunderstand as many things as he comprehends. These duos from opposite sides of the law intersect when the criminals take the police officers captive. Soon, Campbell is dead in a roadside ditch near an onion field in the rural community of Bakersfield. Ettinger escapes captivity, though his real trauma has just begun. Haunted by guilt over what he might have done differently, Ettinger spirals into depression and petty crime, eventually losing his badge. He’s also forced to relive his worst moments again and again because after Powell and Smith are arrested, the hoodlums mount endless legal challenges.

          Wambaugh’s close attention to the psychological after-effects of crime ensures that every frame of The Onion Field is compelling, even though his handling of the story’s female characters is weak. Becker’s meticulous images accentuate Wambaugh’s dramaturgy, since Becker uses long lenses to isolate figures and, at other times, deep shadows to smother them.

          Woods’ performance dominates, not only because he’s got the showy role of a psychotic chatterbox, but also because Woods adds textures of deviousness, humor, intelligence, perversion, and self-loathing. (He received his first Golden Globe nomination for The Onion Field.) Savage is touchingly vulnerable, though he sometimes drifts into affected, Method-style twitchiness, and Seales displays wide-open emotion as a loser who stumbles into a situation he can’t handle. Danson is terrific in one of his earliest roles, putting across something memorably humane in just a handful of scenes.

The Onion Field: GROOVY

The Choirboys (1977)

          The weirdness of this comedy-drama adapted from a Joseph Wambaugh novel about debauched L.A. police officers is epitomized by one particular scene. Hot-tempered redneck cop Roscoe Rules (Tim McIntire) wakes up by a pond in L.A.’s MacArthur Park after passing out from heavy drinking (the characters call their drunken revels “choir practice”). Roscoe looks down and discovers that a duck is, well, enjoying Roscoe’s private parts with its beak. All around Roscoe, his fellow officers bust out laughing. Turns out that practical-joke-loving cop Francis Tanaguchi (Clyde Kusatsu) found Roscoe drunk, opened Roscoe’s zipper, and laid a trail of breadcrumbs from the pond to Roscoe, thereby luring the frisky foul. Unspooling across 119 deranged minutes, The Choirboys zigzags wildly between sub-Animal House humor like the duck scene and horrific moments like the opening sequence, in which Roscoe taunts a potential suicide by shouting, “Go ahead and jump, bitch!” until she does exactly that.
          The theme of this wildly overstuffed ensemble picture seems to be that anything goes if you’re wearing a badge, so one storyline involves a sensitive cop (Perry King) who gets his kicks through S&M, while another follows a Vietnam vet (Don Stroud) perpetually on the edge of a complete meltdown. And then there’s the nerdy beat cop (James Woods) enlisted to entrap hookers because he looks like an accountant, and the fat slob named “Spermwhale” (Charles Durning), whose grudge match with his overbearing superior officer gets serious when the lieutenant threatens Spermwhale’s pension. Most of the storylines include some sort of raunchiness, like the cringe-inducing scene of a slow-witted cop sliding under a glass table to “kiss” the nether regions of a female officer sitting on the table, and the picture also has more than its share of physical and psychological violence. At one point, a mischievous vice cop (Vic Tayback) taunts Roscoe with put-on homosexual advances, triggering a gay-panic freakout in which Roscoe mercilessly pummels the vice cop until other officers intervene.
          What makes all of this so odd is that venerable director Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) exerts absolutely zero control over the movie’s tone. Pathetically sad moments are played for laughs, idiotically silly scenes are played straight, and the film’s sympathies seem to lie with its most depraved characters. The indescribably inappropriate music by Frank DeVol only accentuates the strangeness; DeVol’s sunny tunes punctuate sequences the way rimshots accompany a nightclub comic’s routine, though often with no apparent connection to the actual content of the sequences. Eventually, a plot of sorts emerges from the chaos, but even that is so distasteful as to seem utterly perplexing: The “heroes” scheme to cover up the accidental killing of the most sympathetic character in the movie. The Choirboys is loaded with colorful events and interesting actors, but it’s a sure sign of trouble when the never-subtle Burt Young, playing a disgusting vice cop named “Scuzzi,” gives the most disciplined performance in the movie.

The Choirboys: FREAKY