The Last Dinosaur (1977)

          While the folks at Rankin/Bass Productions are justifiably revered for having made several beloved holiday-themed TV specials—Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), and so on—Rankin/Bass also collaborated periodically with Japanese companies to make monster movies. The results of these creative unions were not pretty. In addition to the abysmal King Kong Escapes (1967) and the bizarre The Bermuda Depths (1978), Rankin/Bass helped create The Last Dinosaur, a boring creature feature in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein. Veteran big-screen tough guy Richard Boone, giving a performance so half-assed he seems like he never rehearsed a single line, stars as super-rich oilman and big-game hunter Maston Thrust. No, seriously. Maston Thrust. Whose last name is emblazoned on jets and underground boring vehicles that look like missiles. Yes, the man’s empire features countless giant phallic objects labeled Thrust.

          Anyway, Maston announces a spectacular new expedition because one of his oil-drilling teams accidentally discovered a hidden valley inhabited by a surviving T-Rex. After disingenuously pledging to study the creature rather than kill it, Thrust and his companions—including an intrepid photojournalist (Joan Van Ark), a mute African scout (Luther Rackley), and a square-jawed scientist (Steven Keats)—head to the dinosaur’s lair. Upon arrival, they discover many prehistoric beasties, as well as a tribe of primitive humans. The less said about the film’s dramatic scenes, the better, since the only thing worse than the acting is the patronizingly stupid writing. (“Maston, please, you’ve done all anyone could, and you’ve been magnificent,” Van Ark says breathlessly at one point. “But let the dinosaur go—it’s the last one!”) The monster scenes are no improvement. Actors in rubber suits flounce around elaborate scale-model sets of caves and jungles, with the leading players badly matted into the foreground.

          The Last Dinosaur is deeply dull, especially when Maury Lewis’ grating score pastiches together blues, jazz, and orchestral flavors into sonic sludge. Plus, God help us, there’s a theme song, performed by noted jazz crooner Nancy Wilson. Although released to cinemas in Japan, The Last Dinosaur originally reached American audiences as an ABC movie of the week in 1977. Whether the folks at Rankin/Bass previously envisioned a U.S. theatrical release is a mystery.

The Last Dinosaur: 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 Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972)

          Despite having been in movies since the heyday of the studio era, Robert Mitchum delivered several of his most interesting performances in the ’70s, probably because his don’t-give-a-damn acting style meshed comfortably with the naturalistic filmmaking methods that were in vogue at the time. One of the best examples of this synthesis between the right actor and the right moment is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, a soft-spoken crime picture about a sad-sack Boston hoodlum faced with the awful choice of going to prison for an interminable sentence or snitching on his lowlife friends.

          Utilizing the actor’s hangdog face and world-weary carriage to great effect, director Peter Yates employs Mitchum as the visual foundation for a rich portrait of going-nowhere criminality. Character actors Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, and Alex Rocco surround Mitchum with vivid performances laced with ambition, avarice, paranoia, and sociopathic violence; Boyle is particularly good as an operator working several self-serving angles at once. So even though the storyline meanders through beats that are familiar to fans of the crime genre, deeply textured acting gives the piece dimension and humanity.

          In one of the best scenes, Mitchum meets with a cocky gun dealer (Keats) in a coffee shop to discuss an illicit arms deal. Bruised by a lifetime of bad experiences, Mitchum brandishes his deformed mitt and explains that making a deal with the wrong guy in the past led to getting his hand broken, thus explaining his reluctance to accept Keats’ overconfidence at face value. Yates shoots the scene simply, with long lenses angled over the actors’ shoulders, creating a level of docudrama realism that’s emulated throughout the picture. As a testament to Yates’ focus on meticulous dramaturgy, the film’s quiet conversation scenes often have as much punch as its highly charged bank-robbery sequences. The action stuff works just fine, however, like the bits in which hoodlums use their favorite trick—holding a bank manager’s family hostage so he doesn’t get heroic ideas during a robbery.

          The Friends of Eddie Coyle has a subtle power that isn’t immediately evident on first viewing, since the plot isn’t clever and the payoff is more logically inevitable than inexorably tragic, but it’s hard to think of another crime film from the same period with as much artfully rendered nuance.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle: GROOVY