Scavenger Hunt (1979)

          Producers have spent years trying to mimic It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), the all-star comedy epic about an international treasure hunt. Lesser attempts, such as Scavenger Hunt, succumb to predictable problems including bloated running times and underwritten characters. Trying to adequately service roles for a dozen or more principal actors seems to vex even the most well-meaning filmmakers. Additionally, trying to maintain the desired level of hellzapoppin excitement for an entire feature film usually drives the people behind pictures like Scavenger Hunt to rely on chases, screaming, and slapstick—all of which get tiresome. Inevitably, the initial sugar rush leads to a crash. Although Scavenger Hunt is largely a disappointment, especially considering the incredible array of gifted comic actors appearing in the film, it has some meritorious elements. Cowriter/producer Steven Vail and his team (mostly) avoid taking cheap shots at ethnic stereotypes, and they play a clean game by opting for family-friendly jokes instead of lurid ones. It’s not difficult to see the frothy confection the filmmakers had in mind.

          The premise, naturally, is simple. When multimillionaire board-game titan Milton Parker (Vincent Price) dies, his would-be heirs are forced to compete in a scavenger hunt that will determine who inherits the Parker fortune. On one team is Parker’s greedy sister (Cloris Leachman), along with her idiot son (Richard Masur) and her slimy lawyer (Richard Benjamin). Another team includes Parker’s son-in-law (Tony Randall) and the son-in-law’s kids. Next up is a duo comprising two of Parker’s nephews (played by Willie Aames and Dirk Benedict). Still another team features Parker’s household help—the butler (Roddy McDowall), the chauffeur (Cleavon Little), the chef (James Coco), and the maid (Stephanie Faracy). The wild-card contender is a dimwitted taxi driver (Richard Mulligan), whom Parker included because the cab driver accidentally killed Parker’s business partner, making Parker rich.

          You can figure out where this goes—as the teams pursue items on their lists, the evil people bicker and steal while the virtuous people help each other. Some scenes that presumably were meant to be comic highlights fall flat, including a lengthy bit of McDowall supervising his team’s theft of a toilet from a hotel bathroom. Cameos from random actors (Ruth Gordon, Meat Loaf, Arnold Schwarzenegger) add little, and the gags are uninspired. Nonetheless, director Michael Schultz keeps everyone upbeat and moving fast, so several sequences generate mild amusement, especially the anything-goes finale. Additionally, while none of the performances truly stand out (excepting perhaps Benjamin’s vigorous turn as a long-suffering schmuck), the vibe is consistently and pleasantly silly.

Scavenger Hunt: FUNKY

Which Way Is Up? (1977)

          The same year their far superior collaboration Greased Lightning was released, funnyman Richard Pryor and director Michael Schultz unveiled this peculiar project, a quasi-blaxploitation comedy that was adapted from an Italian art movie. While the source material, Lina Wertmüller’s 1972 film The Seduction of Mimi, blended left-leaning sociopolitical commentary into its satire, Which Way Is Up? features a middling combination of crude sex humor and shallow take-this-job-and-shove-it posturing. One element of the original movie, a poignant exploration of the challenges faced by a blue-collar man who’s trying to navigate a white-collar world, survives the translation more or less intact, but this worthy theme is surrounded by so much stupidity it loses much of its intended impact. And though a great deal of blame must fall on the shoddy screenplay, which is designed to showcase farcical setpieces that never achieve comedic liftoff, Pryor is a major culprit for the picture’s mediocrity, since he plays three roles and therefore dominates the movie from beginning to end.

          Pryor is best as the protagonist, Leroy Jones, a poor everyman swept up in absurd circumstances. Specifically, he’s a farm worker who inadvertently becomes a poster boy for unionizing efforts and gets exiled from his small town. Relocating to L.A. and subsequently mistaken for a labor-movement hero, Leroy starts a new life with beautiful activist Vanetta (Lonette McKee), even though he’s got a family back home. Eventually, Leroy returns to his small town for a middle-management job and tries to maintain two homes—keeping Vanetta and the child she had with Leroy secret from Leroy’s wife, Annie Mae (Margaret Avery). This balancing act works until Leroy discovers that a local preacher, Reverend Lenox Thomas (Pryor), is sleeping with Annie Mae. Despite himself being an adulterer, Leroy becomes enraged and upsets the fragile life he’s built for himself. Undercutting the promising aspects of this storyline, Schultz spends way too much time on insipid sequences like Annie Mae’s attempts to get Leroy sexually excited. (She tries everything from S&M gear to vibrators.) Similarly, Pryor’s foul-mouthed rants lose their shock value quickly, especially when he’s dressed up in old-age makeup to play Leroy’s salty father. Having said all that, Which Way Is Up? has a few small insights into the black experience, the lives of the working class, and the vicissitudes of the labor movement. Yet as a whole, the picture is as unsatisfying as its “comically” downbeat ending.

Which Way Is Up?: FUNKY

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

          One of the Bee Gees’ catchy disco ballads, released a year before they conquered the world’s dancefloors with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, was titled “Love So Right.” The song’s anguished chorus laments, “Maybe you can tell me how a love so right can turn out to be so wrong.” It seems apropos to paraphrase the sentiment when considering Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which costars the Bee Gees and ’70s rock god Peter Frampton: Can anyone tell why an idea so right turned into a movie so very, very wrong? It’s not as if there wasn’t ample precedent for translating the music of the Beatles into amiable motion pictures.

          During their ’60s heyday, the Fab Four appeared in several lively flicks powered by tunes from the Lennon-McCartney songbook. And if the Beatles were no longer a band by the time this project took shape, who’s to say a fresh batch of mop-topped kids couldn’t have carried the cinematic torch? Unfortunately, producer Robert Stigwood transformed the Beatles’ LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band into one of the most deranged flops in cinema history: Every frame of Sgt. Pepper’s is so mind-bogglingly inappropriate that the film is mesmerizing for the wrong reasons.

          Here’s the backstory. In 1974, Stigwood produced a London stage show called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the Road, which combined the Beatles’ music with a loose narrative. Three years later, Stigwood produced the movie and soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever, which made the Bee Gees into superstars. Combining two of his assets, Stigwood hired the Bee Gees to act in a film adapted from the stage show. He also recruited white-hot English guitarist/singer Frampton to round out the principal cast. (The fact that none of the leads had significant acting experience apparently didn’t matter.) Pressing forward, Stigwood hired first-time screenwriter Henry Edwards to pen the screenplay, then enlisted Michael Schultz, best known for helming a series of African-American-themed comedies, to direct. (Again, the fact that neither Edwards nor Schultz had demonstrated affinity for musical storytelling was disregarded.)

          Stigwood’s hubris was compounded by the choice to make Sgt. Pepper’s on a grand scale, employing gaudy special effects, opulent production design, and random guest appearances. A mishmash of clichés culled from the worlds of fantasy fiction and showbiz melodrama, Sgt. Pepper’s plays out like a fever-dream fusion of A Star Is Born and The Wizard of Oz. From the very first scene, the bad-movie die is cast. A title card announces that we’re in “August 1918, the tiny village of Fleu de Coup.” Against a World War I backdrop, we meet the original Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an American marching band so likeable they convince soldiers to stop fighting. Returning to their U.S. hometown, Heartland, the band continues entertaining people through to the World War II era, and the citizens of Heartland decide to erect a golden weathervane in Sgt. Pepper’s honor.

          The now-aged musician strikes up the band for one final performance at the weathervane unveiling, then drops dead after a few notes. A generation later, circa the ’70s, four new musicians take up the Sgt. Pepper mantle: Billy Shears (Frampton) and the Henderson brothers (the Bee Gees). Barely 10 minutes into the movie, Sgt. Pepper’s is already buried in convoluted hogwash. Yet somehow, it gets worse.

          While an evil record executive (Donald Pleasence) seduces the young musicians with drugs, money, and women, the bizarre villain Mean Mr. Mustard (Frankie Howard) conspires to steal the original Sgt. Pepper instruments from a Heartland museum. Later, the musicians encounter a madman (Alice Cooper) who brainwashes America’s youth, and a plastic surgeon (Steve Martin) who gives rich old people new bodies. There’s also a love story between Billy and his hometown sweetheart, Strawberry Fields (Sandy Farina), and battle between the heroes and a villainous rock group (portrayed by Aerosmith).

          The whole thing climaxes with the weathervane coming to life as a super-powered messiah (played by real-life Beatles sideman Billy Preston) in a bizarre scene that completely reverses every significant dramatic event that happened previously. In a word, Sgt. Pepper’s is insane. Consider the dream sequence in which costar George Burns, then 80-ish, straps on an electric guitar to croak “Fixing a Hole.” And we haven’t even discussed the dancing robots. The Bee Gees and Frampton feel like guest stars in their own movie, since none of the quartet delivers a single line of dialogue, and even their musical performances are wildly erratic (although Frampton sings “Golden Slumbers” nicely). Therefore, the only people who don’t completely embarrass themselves are Martin, who gets to be funny on purpose, and Preston, whose natural funk somehow elevates him above the ludicrous surroundings.

Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band: FREAKY

Cooley High (1975)

          An African-American alternative to American Graffiti (1973), this charming nostalgia piece depicts the highs and lows of teen life in the black housing projects of Chicago’s North Side during the mid-’60s. Writer Eric Monte based the script on his experiences as a student at the real Cooley High, an inner-city vocational school, and together with director Michael Schultz, Monte does a wonderful job of capturing the exuberance and vitality of a particular historical moment. Boasting a soundtrack filled with great Motown tunes, Cooley High doesn’t dwell on the challenged economic circumstances of its characters, but at the same time the picture doesn’t shy away from the dangers of ghetto life.

          Underachieving pseudo-intellectual Leroy “Preach” Jackson (Glynn Turman) and swaggering basketball prodigy Richard “Cochise” Morris (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs) know that unless they get bold or lucky, if not both, they could end up working in dead-end jobs like so many of the adults in their neighborhood, and they’re also painfully aware of the prevalence of street-level crime among their peers. Yet they’re still testosterone-crazed adolescents, so they think they’ve got the world figured out, they’re big on breaking rules, and they feel invincible. By focusing on universal coming-of-age rituals like joyriding in cars, skipping school, and trying to make time with pretty girls, Monte creates characters to which anyone can relate, even as he integrates the countless ultra-specific details that make Cooley High a unique study of a vibrant subculture as it existed for a fleeting moment in time.

          Turman is incredibly appealing, communicating that special mixture of arrogance and insecurity that distinguishes young men trying to carve out their own identities, and he’s also very funny, especially when his character tries to manage a complicated love life. Preach has a thing going on with Sandra (Christine Jones), a classmate who won’t let him get very far, but then he falls wildly in love with Brenda (Cynthia Davis), a gorgeous girl who rebuffs his advances until she discovers his interest in poetry. Cochise, on the other hand, is the guy every teenage boy wants for a best friend—a popular jock who’s always ready for an adventure, a fight, or a prank. Hilton-Jacobs, who later achieved fame as a regular on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, offers a tart counterpoint to Turman’s sweetness.

          Cooley High is filled with memorable scenes and characters, like the zaftig greasy-spoon proprietor who chases troublesome kids out of her place by brandishing a cleaver, and the story advances from high jinks to melodrama in a graceful fashion. So in addition to being one of the most important black films of the ’70s—an authentic, sensitive change of pace from the demeaning sleaze of blaxploitation—it’s one of the best pictures about teen life to emerge from any era.

Cooley High: RIGHT ON

Greased Lightning (1977)

Easily mistaken for one of the myriad demolition-derby comedies that flooded theaters in the ’70s, Greased Lightning is actually a charming biopic about real-life stock-car racer Wendell Scott, a former bootlegger who rose through his sport in the ’50s and ’60s to become America’s first black stock-car champion. Made with an easygoing vibe and a strong pace by cult-fave director Michael Schultz, the picture stars Richard Pryor in one of his most amiable leading performances. While not completely suppressing his comic gifts, Pryor mostly plays it straight, combining the inherent exuberance of a thrill-seeker with the latent anger of a black Southerner busting through racial barriers prior to the Civil Rights era. The story begins just after World War II, when Wendell (Pryor) returns from the war to his tiny town of Danville, Virginia. He marries local girl Mary (Pam Grier), buys a taxicab, and starts a dodgy business driving the community’s mostly impoverished black residents to and from errands. Eager to make more money, Wendell joins his childhood buddy Peewee (Cleavon Little) running moonshine, soon becoming the scourge of local police with his prowess behind the wheel. When Wendell finally gets caught, he’s given a choice: rot in jail, or compete in a dangerous stock-car race where he’ll be a target as the only black competitor. Wendell chooses the race, thus beginning his storied racing career. Given Wendell’s colorful backstory, the movie loses a little of its novelty value once his racing career begins, but the picture is helped along by a solid cast. Grier is lovely and warm in one of her few non-sensationalized roles of the era; Little adds the same sharp timing he contributed to Blazing Saddles (1974); and Beau Bridges is amiable and loose as a good ol’ boy who unexpectedly joints Wendell’s pit crew. A major sequence about two-thirds of the way through the picture suffers because it’s mostly assembled from stock footage, and in general the movie streamlines Scott’s narrative to a fault, so everything plays out in the most sanitized and simplistic fashion possible. Nonetheless, the picture’s fundamentally interesting story and its thoroughly watchable cast make Greased Lightning a fun romp.

Greased Lightning: FUNKY