Every 70s Movie: katharine ross

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Monday, January 1, 2018

1980 Week: The Final Countdown

Happy New Year, and welcome to the final 1980 Week of Every ’70s Movie. (Not to fear, we’re back to regular reviews of movies from the 1970s after this special 1980 Week runs its course.) Here's wishing everyone a healthy and prosperous 2018. Enjoy!

Basically a second-rate Twilight Zone episode stretched out to feature length, sci-fi thriller The Final Countdown unleashes a hell of a lot of firepower to sustain the viewer’s interest, especially considering how little energy was devoted to the storyline. Beyond a kicky premise, The Final Countdown has nothing to offer on a narrative or thematic level, and the movie’s approach to characterization is a joke. Having said all that, the picture has three solid attributes. First is the basic time-travel notion, second is a cast front-loaded with name-brand actors, and third is an eye-popping array of production values and special effects. The movie looks fantastic, and it contains so many stars working in roles suited to their skills that it seems as if it should eventually gel. It doesn’t. By the time that becomes clear, the movie’s over, so The Final Countdown is entertaining by default. It feels, looks, and sounds like a crackerjack popcorn picture despite a hollow center.

The flick begins in Pearl Harbor as the modern-day crew of the U.S. Navy supercarrier U.S.S. Nimitz prepares for a routine mission. Much to the consternation of skipper Captain Yelland (Kirk Douglas), the ship’s launch was delayed to await the arrival of civilian Warren Lasky (Martin Sheen), an efficiency expert working for the industrialist who designed technology onboard the Nimitz. Once at sea, Warren clashes with the ship’s top pilot, Commander Dick Owens (James Farantino), a part-time history buff working on a book about the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Nimitz encounters a bizarre electrical storm that blasts the ship with strange phenomena, and then the crew discovers they’ve been transported back in time to Dec. 6, 1941, the day before the Pearl Harbor attack. Proof of their circumstances arrives when the Nimitz crew rescues U.S. Senator Sam Chapman (Charles Durning) from his yacht after the boat gets strafed by Japanese Zeroes flying advance reconnaissance for the invasion fleet. What ensues is the usual what-if jazz stemming from the possibility of using modern weaponry to derail a historical tragedy.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers never take the premise anywhere, so The Final Countdown is all buildup with very title payoff. Adding to the peculiar quality of the movie is the fact that most of the screen time comprises money shots of the Nimitz, because the filmmakers were given almost complete access to the ship. Long stretches of The Final Countdown feel like excerpts from a training film, with vignettes of planes taking off and landing, sailors running drills, and heavy machinery being operated at breakneck speed. The movie is a nautical gearhead’s wet dream. Douglas, Durning, Farantino, Sheen, and nominal leading lady Katharine Ross are left with little to do except convey wonderment and spout exposition. On the plus side, cinematographer Victor J. Kemper has a blast shooting action footage, the dogfight between jets and Zeroes is memorable, and the FX shots of the strange laser/cloud tunnel appearing during the electrical storm are cool.

The Final Countdown: FUNKY

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Fools (1970)

“Is there anything left but winning and losing in the world?” That question, posed by a fading actor to his decades-younger lover, epitomizes everything that’s interesting and ridiculous about Fools, a romantic melodrama starring the unlikely duo of Jason Robards and Katharine Ross. At first blush, the question sounds like a deep existential inquiry. On closer inspection, it’s pretentious. Both impressions are true, and both fit the movie as a whole. One of myriad late ’60s/early ’70s movies about older men discovering new ways of thinking by engaging in sexual affairs with young women, Fools strives to make a Grand Statement about the follies of human existence, only to tumble into a quagmire of clichés, half-developed notions, and easy contrivances. Yet Fools is strangely watchable, largely because of Robards’ innate charisma and Ross’ mesmerizing beauty. A charitable reading would say the casting alone saves the movie, because Robards incarnates the idea of a romantic poet gone to seed, while Ross represents the promise of youth. That reading, however, overlooks the movie’s dubious specifics.

Set in San Francisco, Fools opens with Matthew South (Robards) hanging out in a park and behaving eccentrically. He somehow catches the attention of Anais Appleton (Ross), resulting in one of the least credible meet-cutes in movie history. The two embark on a long walkabout through San Francisco, with Matthew issuing fashionably anti-Establishment attitudes, as when he screams at passing cars: “This whole world is infested with machines!” Soon the couple find themselves in a quiet forest, where the following dialogue exchange ensues. Anais: “You’re still a child, Matthew.” Matthew: “Am I?” She replies with a meaningful look, and they kiss, sparking one of many airy montages set to twee folk music. The dialogue becomes even more absurd once the story introduces Anais’ husband, uptight lawyer David Appleton (Scott Hylands), who pays private investigators to follow her. At one point, David says to Anais, “You’re a woman.” She replies, “You’re a man—what does that mean?” Oy.

Another layer of affectation stems from Matthew’s work, because he’s a Karloff-style actor in cheesy horror films. Presumably the idea was to express that life is an illusion, man, so we make the world we want—or something like that. At its most disjointed, the movie spins into pointless farce, plus a dream sequence and an oh-so-’70s tragic finale. In many ways, Fools epitomizes the ridiculous extremes of with-it late ’60s/early ’70s filmmaking, so it’s possible to consume the picture as an unintentional comedy. After all, Fools overflows with cutesy events, bogus emotion, stilted dialogue, and unbelievable characters. Approached less cynically, the movie has virtues. It’s a handsome-looking picture that tries to engage in relevant ideas, and the acting is generally quite good. Ross, as usual, is more luminous than skilled, but she commands attention with her sincerity, and Robards, working his familiar A Thousand Clowns groove, was singularly adept at making wild-eyed dreamers seem appealing, as he does here.

Fools: FUNKY

Monday, March 30, 2015

Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)

Representing not only a feeble attempt at absurdist humor but also a disastrous moment in the careers of two Hollywood luminaries, Get to Know Your Rabbit is such a misfire that it spent two years on the shelf at Warner Bros. before the studio finally arranged a half-hearted release. The picture was Brian De Palma’s first studio assignment, and his involvement ended when he was fired during principal photography. Similarly, the movie was TV funnyman Tom Smothers’ first and last starring role in a major movie. Written by Jordan Crittenden, Get to Know Your Rabbit tries for outlandish satire about the dehumanizing aspects of corporate culture. Marketing executive Donald (Smothers) quits his job the day terrorists explode a bomb at his office—a random event that neither makes sense nor adds anything to the story. Seeking a more fulfilling lifestyle, Donald studies with the eccentric Delasandro (Orson Welles) and becomes a tap-dancing magician. Then Donald goes on tour, enlisting his former boss, an alcoholic named Paul (John Astin), to serve as his manager. While Donald performs in seedy nightclubs across America and romances a young woman identified only as Terrific-Looking Girl (Katharine Ross), Paul creates a corporate empire called TDM—as in Tap Dancing Musicians.

Yes, the supposedly high-larious central joke of the movie is that so many people hate their jobs, just like Donald did, that thousands of them happily quit the 9-to-5 world in order to become kitschy entertainers. The tone of the movie is as much of a mess as the story. Characters who should seem eccentric instead come across as insane, jokes fall flat in nearly every scene, and the hyperactive music score tries to pump life into unresponsive footage. As for the would-be wacky dialogue? Consider this exchange between Donald and a floozy named Susan (Samantha Jones). Donald: “I don’t know exactly how to ask you this, but how long have you been a cheap broad?” Susan: “Oh, it’s an off and on thing.” De Palma’s signature overhead shots, split-screen gimmicks, and topless scenes merely add to the overall confusion, and Smothers’ performance runs the short gamut from nasty to nonexistent. Meanwhile, costars Astin, Allen Garfield, and Ross play their roles well, though each seems to exist in a different movie than the rest of the cast. Some cinematic train wrecks are fascinating, but Get to Know Your Rabbit is not one of them.

Get to Know Your Rabbit: LAME

Friday, September 27, 2013

Voyage of the Damned (1976)

Based on a horrific real-life incident and featuring an enormous cast of international stars, Voyage of the Damned should be powerful, but because the filmmakers opted for a talky approach—and because so many actors were relegated to minor roles that no single character provides narrative focus—Voyage of the Damned is merely pedestrian. The opportunity to make something great was so broadly missed, in fact, that it’s possible some enterprising soul in the future will revisit the subject matter and generate a remake with the impact this original version should have had.

Set in 1939, the picture depicts one of the Third Reich’s most brazen propaganda schemes. The Nazis loaded hundreds of Jews, some of whom were extracted from concentration camps, onto a luxury liner headed from Europe to Cuba. The passengers were told they were being set free, but the Nazis’ plan was to publicize the inevitable refusal by the Cuban government to accept so many unwanted immigrants. Per the insidious designs of Third Reich official Joseph Goebbels, the plan was to “prove” that Jews are unwanted everywhere, thus justifying the Final Solution. And therein lies the fundamental narrative problem of this picture—every person on board the ship, save for the captain and a few Nazi functionaries—is essentially a pawn in a larger game that’s taking place in Berlin. Thus, none of the characters in the movie truly drives the action, although some brave souls among the passengers prepare political counter-attacks once the true nature of the journey becomes evident.

Intelligently but unremarkably written by David Butler and Steve Shagan, from a book by Max Morgan-Witts and Gordon Thomas, Voyage of the Damned was directed by versatile journeyman Stuart Rosenberg, who generally thrived with pulpier material; his long dialogue scenes end up feeling stilted and theatrical, especially because some actors ham it up to make the most of their abbreviated screen time. Surprisingly, performers Lee Grant, Katharine Ross, and Oskar Werner each received Golden Globe nominations (Grant got an Oscar nod, too), even though their roles in Voyage of the Damned are so ordinary—and the overall story so turgid—that nothing really lingers in the memory except the haunting real-life circumstance underlying the story. (The picture’s shortcomings are exacerbated by an anticlimactic ending, which apparently represents a somewhat rose-colored vision of what happened in real life.)

Nonetheless, the luminaries on display in Voyage of the Damned are impressive: The cast includes Faye Dunaway, Denholm Elliot, José Ferrer, Ben Gazzara, Helmut Griem, Julie Harris, Wendy Hiller, James Mason, Malcolm McDowell, Jonathan Pryce, Jack Warden, Orson Welles, and the great Max von Sydow, who plays the ship’s noble captain. (Watch for Billy Jack star Tom Laughlin in a minor role as an engineer.) Fitting the posh cast, Voyage of the Damned is somewhat like an elevated riff on the disaster-movie genre, but the lack of truly dramatic events means the film is less an all-star spectacular and more an all-star mood piece. Grim, to be sure, but not revelatory.

Voyage of the Damned: FUNKY

Saturday, September 7, 2013

The Stepford Wives (1975)

Novelist Ira Levin had a great knack for taking outrageous premises to their fullest extreme, so his books were adapted into the classic shocker Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and the campy but entertaining thriller The Boys From Brazil (1978). Released between those pictures was the Levin adaptation The Stepford Wives (1975), which explores a scheme by suburban men to transform their brides into compliant automatons. Featuring a zippy screenplay by William Goldman and several memorable scenes, The Stepford Wives should be a terrific little shocker, but it’s held back by an inert leading performance and lackluster direction. Nonetheless, the film’s slow-burn narrative is fun, and the conspiracy at the center of the picture is so creepy that problems of execution can’t fully diminish the project’s appeal.

Katharine Ross stars as Joanna Eberhart, a beautiful young wife living in New York City with her attorney husband, Walter (Peter Masterson), and their two young kids. Much to Joanna’s chagrin, Walter abruptly relocates the family to the squeaky-clean suburb of Stepford, where the wives are all beautiful women preoccupied with housework and the sexual needs of their husbands. Joanna goes stir-crazy fast, bonding with fellow newcomer Bobbie (Paula Prentiss) and searching for signs of intelligent life in the Stepford universe. Meanwhile, Walter joins the mysterious Stepford Men’s Association, so Joanna and Bobbie investigate whether the association is behind the strange behavior of the Stepford wives. The story moves along at a good clip, with creepy hints of the truth peeking out through the shiny surfaces of Stepford life, and Joanna’s descent into desperation is believable.

Some supporting characters, including sexy housewife Charmaine (Tina Louise), could have benefited from greater development, but the way the movie withholds details about enigmatic Stepford power-broker Dale Coba (Patrick O’Neal) adds intrigue. Still, the middle of the movie lags simply because the performances aren’t engaging. Ross, the delicate beauty of The Graduate (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), delivers competent work but never gets under the skin of her character, while Masterson is forgettable and Prentiss is overbearing (though, in her defense, that’s a key trait of her character). Since the leads are wash, the best performance in the picture is given by Nanette Newman, who plays the most weirdly submissive of the Stepford wives, Carol. Van Sant.

Compensating significantly for the bland acting is the grainy cinematography by Owen Roizman, whose images give the plastic surfaces of Stepford a dark edge, and the tense score by Michael Small. Ultimately, the blame for The Stepford Wives’ failure to achieve its full potential must fall on director Bryan Forbes, a versatile Englishman who made a number of tasteful but unexceptional pictures; he presents the story clearly but without any panache or urgency. FYI, three sequels to The Stepford Wives were made for television—Revenge of the Stepford Wives (1980), The Stepford Children (1987), and The Stepford Husbands (1996)—before the original picture was remade in 2004, with Nicole Kidman starring.

The Stepford Wives: FUNKY

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Mrs. Sundance (1974) & Wanted: The Sundance Woman (1976)

Since the Sundance Kid’s girlfriend, Etta Place, was the only major character left standing after the ending of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), it’s not surprising she became the focus of two attempts by 20th Century-Fox to capitalize on the film’s success. In 1974, Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery headlined Mrs. Sundance, the feature-length pilot for a potential series about Place’s adventures following the events of the 1969 movie. Mrs. Sundance begins with Place working as a small-town teacher under an assumed name. (There’s a price on her head because of her association with criminals.) Worried that relentless lawman Charles Siringo (L.Q. Jones) is close to finding her, Place hops a freight train and meets small-time crook Jack Maddox (Robert Foxworth), who recognizes her and claims to have known Sundance. Then, when Place hears a rumor that Sundance is still alive, she tracks down old accomplices for directions to the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang’s hideout. Unfortunately, it turns out Maddox has been pressured into working for Siringo, so Place doesn’t realize she’s heading into a trap.

Mrs. Sundance is actually rather dark, since the specter of death runs through the whole storyline, and the movie features a potent musical score by Pat Williams. Jones makes an effective villain, all crisp diction and merciless efficiency, while Foxworth exudes a squirrelly sort of appeal as a small man ashamed of his own cravenness. Montgomery ends up being the weak link, her breathy line readings and vapid expressions making slow scenes feel even slower. Still, Montgomery’s beauty and spunk command attention; had Mrs. Sundance gone to series, she might have grown into the role. Alas, when Mrs. Sundance failed to excite the public, Fox decided to reboot the concept by hiring Katharine Ross, who originated the Place character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, for a second TV movie.

Wanted: The Sundance Woman is less grounded than Mrs. Sundance, although the picture offers stronger production values. In Wanted, Place asks Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa (Hector Elizondo) for protection, in exchange for helping with his revolutionary endeavors. Siringo is still on Place’s trail, but this time he’s played by Steve Forrest in an unmemorable performance. Whereas Mrs. Sundance rightly portrays Place as a woman still in love with a man who has recently died, Wanted hints at romantic tension between Place and Villa, a plot development that feels forced and tacky. Worse, Elizondo is too lightweight a presence to seem credible as an iconic revolutionary. Ross is as beautiful as ever, though the cheap lighting of a TV movie cannot match the spellbinding glamour with which cinematographer Conrad Hall surrounded Ross in Butch Cassidy.

So, while both of these telefilms are mediocre, Mrs. Sundance is incrementally more satisfying. Ironically, had Ross agreed to star in the first picture, which has a better storyline, Etta Place might have become an interesting presence on ’70s episodic TV, instead of merely a footnote to the era’s small-screen fare.

Mrs. Sundance: FUNKY

Wanted: The Sundance Woman: FUNKY

Friday, April 27, 2012

The Legacy (1978)

Mindless and silly but entertaining in a guilty-pleasure sort of way, this good-looking horror flick features one of those inane plots about an otherwise ordinary person whose lineage designates her the inheritor of a fearsome supernatural power. Katharine Ross, lovely and lightweight as always, plays Margaret, an American summoned to England under the pretense of a lucrative commission for interior-design work. She brings along her sensitive-stud boyfriend, Pete (Sam Elliott), and soon after their arrival in the UK, the couple encounters trouble. Riding a rented motorcycle, they’re run off the road by the town car of Jason Mountolive (John Standing), a super-wealthy English gentleman. He invites them back to his sprawling estate, where it soon becomes clear Margaret was expected—she’s a distant relative of Mountolive, and he’s the person behind her mysterious job offer. In classic horror-movie fashion, Margaret ignores obvious warning signs and sticks around to see what happens.

What happens, of course, is a serious of bizarre deaths involving the various loathsome relatives Mountolive summons to his estate. Eventually, we realize that the Mountolives are witches, and Margaret is expected to take her place as the clan’s new Satan-worshipping matriarch. Unfortunately, one of the other potential heirs is trying to take out the competition, so Margaret and Pete must dodge a few nasty attempts on their lives. Based on a story by Jimmy Sangster, a veteran of the Hammer Films assembly line, The Legacy gets goofier with each passing scene, to the point that the ending plays more like accidental humor than intentional horror.

Still, some of the deaths are enjoyably gruesome, like the one in which flame leaps from a fireplace to cook a victim. Director Richard Marquand (Return of the Jedi) makes good use of regal locations, while the British supporting players (including Rocky Horror Picture Show narrator Charles Gray and rock singer Roger Daltrey, of the Who) are lively. And though neither gives a strong performance, Elliott and Ross display believable attraction: They got together offscreen after making this movie, and they’ve been a couple ever since.

The Legacy: FUNKY

Sunday, February 5, 2012

The Betsy (1978)

Stupid and trashy, but inadvertently amusing exactly because of those qualities, The Betsy was adapted from one of Harold Robbins’ shamelessly eroticized potboiler novels. Like Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann, Robbins made a mint writing sleazy books about rich people screwing each other over (and just plain screwing), so anyone expecting narrative credibility and/or thematic heft is looking in the wrong place. That said, The Betsy delivers the type of guilty-pleasure nonsense that later dominated nighttime soaps like Dallas and Dynasty, along with some R-rated ogling of celebrity skin. And the cast! Great actors slumming in this garbage include Jane Alexander, Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, and the legendary Laurence Olivier. They’re joined by young beauties Kathleen Beller, Lesley-Anne Down, and Katharine Ross, all whom disrobe to some degree; Beller’s memorable skinny-dip scene helped make this flick a regular attraction on cable TV in the ’80s.

The turgid story revolves around Loren Hardeman (Olivier), an auto-industry titan who rules a fractious extended family. Now semi-retired and confined to a wheelchair, Hardeman hires maverick racecar designer/driver Angelo Perino (Jones) to build a new car with terrific fuel efficiency, because Hardeman wants to leave as his legacy a “people’s car” like the Volkswagen Beetle. This plan ruffles the feathers of Hardeman’s grandson, Loren Hardeman III (Duvall), who wants to get the family’s corporation out of the money-losing car business. As these warring forces jockey for control over the company’s destiny, with Loren III’s college-aged daughter, Betsy (Beller), caught in the middle, old betrayals surface. It turns out Hardeman the First became lovers with the wife (Ross) of his son, Loren II, driving the younger man to suicide. This understandably left Loren III with a few granddaddy issues. There’s also a somewhat pointless romantic-triangle bit involving jet-setter Lady Bobby Ayres (Down), who competes with Betsy for Peroni’s affections. Suffice to say, the story is overheated in the extreme, with characters spewing florid lines like, “I love you, Loren, even if I have to be damned for it,” or, “I always knew it would be like this, from the first time I saw you.”

John Barry’s characteristically lush musical score adds a touch of class, Duvall somehow manages to deliver a credible dramatic performance, and Alexander is sharp in her small role. However, Beller, Down, Jones, and Ross coast through the movie, trying (in vain) not to embarrass themselves. As for Olivier, he’s outrageously bad. Hissing and/or screaming lines in an inept Midwestern accent, Olivier has no sense of proportion, playing every scene with such intensity that his work reaches the level of camp. Especially since Olivier was still capable of good work at this late stage of his life (see 1976’s Marathon Man), it’s depressing to watch him flounder.

The Betsy: LAME

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

The Swarm (1978)

Hollywood’s master of disaster, producer Irwin Allen, was well into the unintentional self-parody phase of his career by the late ’70s, less than a decade after he first started mining mass misfortune for mass entertainment. Instead of the towering infernos and upside-down cruise ships of yore, he restored to demonizing insects in The Swarm, an undercooked comin’-at-ya picture in which killer bees, mostly depicted as animated blotches roaming across the skyline, attack a small town in the Southwest before heading to Houston. Filled with all the usual tropes of Allen’s pictures, from large mobilizations of rescue forces to trite melodramas playing out against the backdrop of tragedy, The Swarm also features one of Allen’s trademark hodgepodge casts.

Michael Caine, starting his slide into ridiculous paycheck gigs, stars as a bug specialist who takes command of the government’s response to the bees, and he’s accompanied by Richard Widmark (as a general who wants to blow up everything in sight), Henry Fonda (as a wheelchair-bound immunologist), Richard Chamberlain (as a Southern-fried scientist/crankypants whose sole function seems to be scowling at Caine), and Katharine Ross (as a scientist/love interest who gets stung by more than Cupid’s arrow), plus Patty Duke Astin, Olivia de Havilland, Bradford Dillman, Jose Ferrer, Lee Grant, Ben Johnson, and Fred MacMurray.

Even though a few elements are respectable, like Jerry Goldsmith’s exciting score, The Swarm is, well, swarming with ludicrous highlights, because the movie’s so preposterously straight-faced it plays like a comedy. The plotting is, of course, extraordinarily stupid, with Caine regularly leaving his post as the government’s top man during a major crisis to run inconsequential errands with Ross so they can share cutesy patter while driving around the countryside. Better still, from the perspective of amusing awfulness, is the outrageously limp dialogue, which nails the audience with clunky exposition as mercilessly as the bees zap their victims. “Just because you’re the mayor of Marysville, that doesn’t make you an engineer,” Johnson barks to MacMurray, who replies, “Look, nobody asked you to leave Houston and come here to retire, you know.” Ouch.

In its most hysterically insipid moments (which are, sadly, outnumbered by long stretches of flat tedium), The Swarm approaches full-on camp, like the bee attack on a nuclear power plant or the colorful bit of Caine running through the small town, screaming, “The killer bees are coming! Everybody get inside!” (On a less amusing note, Widmark takes to referring to the Africanized bees as “Africans,” leading to icky lines like, “By tomorrow, there will be no more Africans in Houston!”) The movie’s best moment, though, is undoubtedly the scene in which Caine coaches a young bee-sting victim through a bout of hysterics by convincing the boy that the giant bee floating in front of his head—depicted, with goofy obviousness, by a giant superimposed bee—is a hallucination.

For good or ill, The Swarm is no hallucination, because this two-and-a-half-hour venom blast of a gloriously bad creature feature really exists. And, yes, you read that right: Though originally released at 116 minutes, there’s an extended version of The Swarm clocking in at 155 minutes. Rest assured the whole damn mess was endured for the sake of this review. Anti-venom, please!

The Swarm: FREAKY

Friday, November 5, 2010

They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)

In the years between his TV triumphs on Maverick in the ’50s and The Rockford Files in the ’70s, James Garner enjoyed an admirable career on the big screen, mostly in action flicks and light comedies. One of the pictures from this period, They Only Kill Their Masters, is of unique interest because it offers an early glimpse at the easygoing-detective vibe that made Garner so appealing as Jim Rockford. A slight (and slightly sleazy) whodunit with the offbeat gimmick of treating a Doberman Pinscher as a suspect, the picture takes place in a small coastal town in California, where charmingly grumpy Garner is the sheriff who keeps locals and tourists in line. When a woman is found in the ocean with her Doberman’s jaws clamped onto her body, Abel Marsh (Garner) believes the canine went crazy, but then a deeper mystery unfolds involving adultery, group sex, and, worst of all, out-of-towners. The salacious storyline helps the movie overcome its TV-grade production values, as does the presence of several big-screen regulars: Katharine Ross is alluring as a veterinarian who steers Garner away from rushing to judgment, Peter Lawford is pompous as an L.A. smoothie slumming in the small town, Harry Guardino scowls as a state cop eager to claim jurisdictional authority over Garner, and Hal Holbrook is wonderfully sympathetic as a character whose role in the mystery is, well, a mystery—at least until the surprising conclusion. FYI, the Abel Marsh character resurfaced in a pair of 1977 made-for TV movies, Deadly Game and The Girl in the Empty Grave; for those projects, Andy Griffith took over the role originated by Garner. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

They Only Kill Their Masters: FUNKY