fs3

In our home theatre, we often run a "Complete" festival showcasing all the work of a director or star. When it came around to Greydon Clark, I checked the IMDb listing to make sure I had all of them and found this at the beginning of the directorial list. Comparing to an older list, this was a new addition and with the lack of info provided, I figured finding it was a lost cause and possibly a lost film.

To my surprise, a bit of searching provided it and as the festival began, we played it. I hadn't seen The Bad Bunch in years (IMDb title Tom, aka N Lover), but I was immediately struck by similarities. After a few minutes, I realized that this debut effort was roughly half of The Bad Bunch!

Clark, in the spirit of exploitation master Al Adamson (with whom he'd worked in the years preceding this effort), took this drama about a returning Vietnam veteran's relationships with the titular trio, and used much of the footage for the far more widely known/seen/released later film while creating a whole new plot.

Spurred by the brief Vietnam flashback scene in MF&L, TBB took off in a whole different direction with an increasingly bitter and downbeat look at the effort of the main character, played by Clark, to befriend his fallen comrade's family amid racial tensions. Much has been written about TBB for better or worse but it clearly was geared to tap into the Black cinema market that was drawing crowds regularly. Just as Adamson would retool his projects or simply change the ad campaigns to cater to popular trends, this early Clark effort became something wholly different.

MF&L is more in the spirit and tone of several other low budget counterculture projects of the day. It's rough around the edges and sometimes right through the middle, but it's interesting to compare the two projects and see how the relatively placid earlier film became the later one.

Like quite a few other of the 70's crime dramas that were not classics, but still of more grit and consequence than many of those churned out in the last two decades, this interestingly plotted mob film is a frustrating mix of a really good scene or two followed by a painfully predictable and badly presented one. Anthony Quinn is top billed but largely wasted as the boss whose romantic liaison triggers a war of wills and weapons with some headstrong younger members (led by Robert Forster, Frederic Forrest and Al Lettieri.) Some good action scenes follow, but, like the rest of the film, some of them are quite impressive while others fall flat. A mixed bag, not often seen but worth watching, with limited expectations.

In other of Paul Newman's movie years, this one might have fared better, but alongside the Southern masterpieces Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Long Hot Summer, and the flawed but interesting Billy The Kid take The Left-Handed Gun, this sometimes amusing fluff just can't hold up. Good to see him paired with Woodward and taking a stab at screen comedy for the first time, but he never truly excelled at it until later in his career. Still, some nice bits and decent work survive. It's just impossible to see and compare these days, rarely if ever broadcast and unreleased to video to this day.