Every 70s Movie: jennifer salt

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Thursday, September 4, 2014

Hi, Mom! (1970)

With the exception of Phantom of the Paradise (1974), a cult-fave rock musical that some people find quite droll, director Brian De Palma has delivered only middling results when making comedies. In fact, some of his worst flops, including The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), were supposed to make people laugh. So it’s mildly interesting that several of De Palma’s earliest features are comedies, since he didn’t find his sweet spot of sexualized horror until Sisters (1973). Anyway, De Palma’s fourth feature—also his first of the ’70s—is the eclectic Hi, Mom!, which uses a loose storyline about an ambitious young filmmaker to frame sketches about art, class, race, and sex. The picture is a sequel to De Palma’s earlier film Greetings (1968), and Robert De Niro stars in both pictures as edgy New Yorker Jon Rubin.

When we meet the character in Hi, Mom!, Jon is a struggling filmmaker who uses a telescope to peer into neighbors’ windows, then persuades a skin-flick producer, Joe Banner (Allen Garfield), to fund a porno movie shot in the peeping-tom style. Later, Jon spots a cute woman named Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt), who lives in the building across the street, and seduces her by pretending to be an insurance salesman. (Classy ulterior motive: Filming their sexual encounters without her permission for use in porn.) Also thrown into the mix is a group of black-power activists, because Jon makes grungy black-and-white verité-style short films in which the activists confront white New Yorkers with performance art challenging widespread attitudes toward African-Americans.

Stylistically, Hi, Mom! is a mess. Some scenes are played for broad humor, some are politically provocative, some are sleazy, and some are nearly frightening because of their intensity. One gets the sense that De Palma, who cowrote the picture with Charles Hirsch, either made the story up as he went along, or that the filmmakers created a laundry list of hip topics without giving much consideration to how things might (or might not) cohere. Bits of the movie are interesting (although not particularly funny), especially the man-0n-the-street vignettes that De Palma seems to have captured with hidden cameras. Yet the lack of an organizing aesthetic makes the overall experience rather boring. It doesn’t help that rock musician Eric Kaz contributed an inanely upbeat score complete with a clumsy theme song, or that De Niro is woefully out of his element. The actor didn’t find his sense of humor till much later in life, and he only really catches fire during a scene in which Jon auditions to play an abusive policeman.

Hi, Mom!: FUNKY

Thursday, January 3, 2013

The Revolutionary (1970)

On the plus side, this counterculture-themed drama has a strong sense of time and place. Even though it was shot in England, the movie somehow evokes a vivid sense of America in the student-revolt era, from pristine campuses to trash-strewn ghettos. Furthermore, director Paul Williams and cinematographer Brian Probyn artfully situate characters within painterly shots to provide context for how people relate to different environments. And the overarching narrative is interesting because it tracks how a troubled student shifts from posturing campus demonstrator to radicalized anarchist. Unfortunately, the weakest element of The Revolutionary is the most fundamental one—Hans Koningsberger’s script, which he adapted from his own novel of the same name.

For instance, the lead character is known only as “A,” even though we see nearly every aspect of his life—his classwork, his home, his lover, his parents—so it’s clear right from the start that Koningsberger can’t decide whether to operate on a metaphorical or realistic plane. Worse, the storyline is logy and meandering, with excessive screen time devoted to uninteresting relationships. Much of the movie comprises A’s romance with Helen (Jennifer Salt), a rich girl whose lifestyle is pure Establishment, so it seems as if the focus is A choosing between creature comforts and political integrity. But then, nearly three-quarters of the way through the movie, A joins forces with Leonard II (Seymour Cassel), a radical whose activism involves outright lawlessness. So if the story is about how far A will go to serve his principles, then why bother with the Helen scenes or, for that matter, the unsatisfying bits with Despard (Robert Duvall), a mid-level organizer who debates politics with A but never has much impact on the overall narrative?

To be fair, the goal of The Revolutionary may simply have been to raise questions. However, the sponginess of the story is compounded by the middling nature of Voight’s performance. Yes, it’s tough to dramatize a character who’s racked by indecision, but spending 100 minutes watching someone almost do this and almost do that challenges viewers’ patience. Still, the film gets points for tackling worthwhile subject matter, and the technical execution is terrific. (Composer Michael Small deserves special mention for imbuing many scenes with tension.) Yet just like director Williams’ next film, the drug drama Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972), The Revolutionary strives for profundity it never quite achieves. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

The Revolutionary: FUNKY

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Brewster McCloud (1970)

Arguably Robert Altman’s strangest movie—a high standard, given his eccentric career—Brewster McCloud hit theaters shortly after the idiosyncratic filmmaker scored a major hit with M*A*S*H, but this picture was far too bizarre to enjoy the broad acceptance of its predecessor. In fact, Brewster McCloud shuns narrative conventions so capriciously that it seems likely Altman took taken perverse pleasure in confounding viewers. Consider the willfully weird storyline: Nerdy young man Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort) lives illegally in a workroom beneath the Houston Astrodome, and he passes his days studying avian physiology while building a pair of mechanical wings so he can eventually fly away to some unknown location.

Three women in his life accentuate the peculiarity of Brewster’s existence. Hope (Jennifer Salt) is a groupie who visits Brewster’s lair and climaxes while watching him exercise; Suzanne (Shelley Duvall, in her first movie) is a spaced-out Astrodome tour guide who becomes Brewster’s accomplice and lover; and Louise (Sally Kellerman), who might or might not be a real person, is Brewster’s guardian angel, subverting everyone who tries to impede Brewster’s progress.

This being an Altman film, the story also involves about a dozen other significant characters. For instance, there’s Abraham Wright (Stacy Keach), a wheelchair-bound geezer who makes his money charging merciless rents to seniors at rest homes, and Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), a supercop investigating a series of murders that may or may not have been committed by Brewster and/or Louise. (Each of the victims is marked by bird defecation on the face.) Among the film’s other threads is a recurring vignette featuring The Lecturer (Rene Auberjonois), a weird professor/scientist who speaks directly to the audience about bird behavior while slowly transforming into a bird.

Although it’s more of a comedy than anything else, Brewster McCloud incorporates tropes from coming-of-age dramas, police thrillers, and romantic tragedies, and the whole thing is presented in Altman’s signature style of seemingly dissociated vignettes fused by ironic cross-cutting and overlapping soundtrack elements. This is auteur filmmaking at its most extreme, with a director treating his style like a narrative component—and yet at the same time, Brewster McCloud is so irreverently lowbrow that Kellerman’s character drives a car with the vanity license plate “BRD SHT.” Similarly, Salt’s character expresses an orgasm by repeatedly pumping a mustard dispenser so condiments squirt onto a table.

Appraising Brewster McCloud via normal criteria is pointless, since Doran William Cannon’s script is designed for maximum strangeness, and since none of the actors was tasked with crafting a realistic individual. A lot of what happens onscreen is arresting, and the movie is cut briskly enough that it moves along, but one’s tolerance for this experiment is entirely contingent on one’s appetite for mean-spirited whimsy. That said, Brewster McCloud is completely unique, even for an era of rampant cinematic innovation, and novelty is, to some degree, its own virtue. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Brewster McCloud: FREAKY

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Gargoyles (1972)

Made-for-TV horror movies got awfully strange in the early ’70s, sometimes diving deeper down the supernatural-cinema rabbit hole than their big-screen counterparts. Gargoyles is a prime example. Depicting exactly what its title suggests, the picture features an anthropologist running afoul of a tribe of real-life gargoyles, flying human/lizard hybrids who look as if they just emerged from the stonework of old buildings. Yet while the concept promises scares and spectacle, the makers of Gargoyles employ a moronic storyline that not only gets mired in trite monster-movie gimmicks but also contradicts itself. For most of the picture, it seems the gargoyles are misunderstood monsters trying to steer clear of human interference, but then the lead critter (Bernie Casey) announces a master plan to hatch thousands of baby monsters and take over the world. This indecision about how to present the titular creatures is unfortunately but one of Gargoyles’ problems.

Things get off to a bland start when macho scientist/author Dr. Mercer Boley (Cornel Wilde) recruits his grown daughter, Diana (Jennifer Salt), for an expedition through the American southwest. They travel to a novelty shop whose proprietor claims to have a gargoyle skeleton, and then the novelty shop is violently attacked by unseen creatures. After the requisite scenes of our heroes reporting the incident to disbelieving authorities, who blame the attack on a trio of dirt bikers led by James (Scott Glenn), Mercer and Diana get assaulted once more. This time, however, they see their assailants—who are played by stunt men running around in head-to-toe lizard suits complete with horns, devilish faces, and giant wings. And so it goes from there. As the first onscreen monsters created by legendary special-effects guy Stan Winston, the gargoyles have some geek-cinema historical importance, but they’re also thoroughly ridiculous, especially when Casey starts delivering dialogue from behind his goofy monster mask. It must have been trippy to stumble across this thing in 1972, but time has diminished whatever charm Gargoyles might once have possessed.

Gargoyles: LAME

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Sisters (1973)

After cutting his teeth with a series of irreverent comedies that received marginal releases, director Brian De Palma found his calling as a fearmaker—and his first significant box-office success—by merging his lurid fixations with a cinematic style borrowed from Hollywood’s master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. An unnerving thriller about a reporter who believes she’s discovered that her docile neighbor has a homicidal twin sister, Sisters owes a huge debt to Hitch (right down to the use of composer Bernard Hermann), but it’s also an impressive demonstration of De Palma’s storytelling gifts. As the author of the film’s original story and the co-writer of its script, De Palma has his fingerprints all over this movie, and Sisters sets the template for his many subsequent sexually charged suspense flicks.

The story is simple: Staten Island-based investigative reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt) happens to look across the street during a frenzied murder in the apartment of French-Canadian model Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder). Collier calls the police, but after a skeptical cop (Dolph Sweet) fails to discover any evidence, Collier enlists a private detective (Charles Durning) to continue the investigation. The deeper Collier goes down the rabbit hole of her neighbor’s strange world, however, the more danger Collier invites. As in all of De Palma’s suspense flicks, the story is less important than mood and theme. With Hermann’s effectively bombastic score creating uncomfortable degrees of tension, De Palma sketches a world of biological abnormalities, dysfunctional sexuality, and rampant conspiracies; he also carefully sets the stage so Collier exists in a milieu of logic and rationality until circumstances quite literally land her in an insane asylum.

Produced for drive-in suppliers American International, Sisters is brisk and sensationalistic, with plenty of gore and a smattering of nudity, yet it’s also finely crafted inasmuch as De Palma designs each frame with an architect’s precision. Despite dodgy cinematography and set decoration (De Palma later benefited from larger budgets and longer shooting schedules), editor Paul Hirsch’s wonderfully methodical pacing makes the most of the footage. So even though De Palma’s later suspense pictures are more visually impressive, few of them can match the no-nonsense economy of Sisters.

Sisters: GROOVY