Every 70s Movie: lee j. cobb

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Saturday, August 8, 2015

That Lucky Touch (1975)

Suave British actor Roger Moore never properly capitalized on his visibility while playing James bond from 1973 to 1985, appearing in fun movies that failed to find wide audiences (such as the 1979 action romp North Sea Hijack, released in the US in 1980 as ffolkes), and, more often than not, headlining misfires along the lines of That Lucky Touch. A British/German coproduction plainly designed to capture the effervescence of Cary Grant’s romantic comedies, That Lucky Touch suffers from a woefully underdeveloped story, and neither the action components nor the humorous elements connect. Thanks to the presence of several big-name actors and the use of picturesque European locations, the movie is pleasant enough to watch on a scene-by-scene basis. Alas, it all crumbles the minute one tries to connect the narrative dots. Viewed with forgiving eyes, however, the picture has one strong virtue, which is the chemistry that Moore shares with costar Susannah York. (This was the duo’s second and final picture together, following the solid 1974 thriller Gold.) Although Moore and York aren’t exactly Grant and Hepburn—not even close—they banter well and have similar upper-crust screen personas.

Moore plays Michael Scott, an international arms dealer who may or may not operate inside the law. (Even though Michael takes clandestine nighttime meetings like a criminal, he’s portrayed as having above-board UN connections.) York plays Michael’s next-door neighbor, Julia Richardson, a reporter for The Washington Post. Both characters are friendly with US Lt. Gen. Henry Steedman (Lee J. Cobb), a blustery career officer married to the overbearing Diana (Shelley Winters). Michael wants Henry to buy a large shipment of guns, and Julia’s snooping imperils the deal, so, naturally, Michael and Julia share a meet-cute that leads to love. The plot also involves a UN war-games exercise that puts Julia into the orbit of an amorous Italian named Gen. Peruzzi (Raf Vallone). The final player on the board is Michael’s on-again/off-again girlfriend, sexy Sophie (Sydne Rome). Allegedly based upon an idea by the legendary playwright Moss Hart, That Lucky Touch makes very little sense. At its worst, the movie devolves into bewildering chaos, especially during a duck hunt that’s intercut with both the war-games exercise and Michael’s desperate attempt to stop Julia from doing—something or another. All very murky.

Mildly tasty but also flat and unsatisfying, That Lucky Touch is like champagne without the fizz.

That Lucky Touch: FUNKY

Friday, April 4, 2014

Macho Callahan (1970)

This grim and misguided Western stars the perpetually cranky David Janssen as Macho Callahan, a reluctant Civil War soldier who escapes from a horrific Confederate prison, then seeks revenge on the man who tricked Macho into joining the Army. (Don’t ask why a character who wants to avoid the conflict of war would seek the conflict of a vengeance mission.) This peculiar story gets even more contrived when Macho pointlessly shoots a Confederate officer during a minor dispute, provoking the officer’s widow to put a price on Macho’s head. Later, Macho abducts, beats, and rapes the widow—which inexplicably leads her to fall in love with Macho. Rest assured, none of this makes any more sense while it unfolds onscreen than it does in synopsis form. From the standpoint of character logic, Macho Callahan is incomprehensible, and from the standpoint of gender politics, it’s reprehensible. As a result of these problems, the protagonist is revealed as a sadistic thug undeserving of viewers’ attention. Janssen, best known for his work on the tense ’60s series The Fugitive, spends so much time scowling that he seems constipated instead of anguished. Leading lady Jean Seberg can’t seem to decide whether she’s incarnating a tough military bride or a weak-willed victim. And the question of whether these two stars spark any chemistry is moot, since the dynamic between their characters is grotesque and unbelievable. Meanwhile, the actors who deliver vivid supporting performances—David Carradine (as the officer whom Macho shoots), Matt Clark (as a sadistic prison guard), and Lee J. Cobb (as Macho’s arch enemy)—all disappear too quickly from the story. So, aside from some intense action scenes (particularly the disgusting opening sequence in the Confederate prison, which cinematographer Gerry Fisher shoots evocatively), there’s little of note in Macho Callahan, unless an overabundance of brutality qualifies as noteworthy.

Macho Callahan: LAME

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Lawman (1971)

Provocative and savage, Lawman offers an unflinching take on the iconography of the Western vigilante, positing that a killer with a badge can be as destructive to society as the criminals he’s charged with bringing to justice. Arriving around the same time as a slew of movies about modern-day vigilantism, Lawman didn’t capture the public imagination like Dirty Harry or Straw Dogs, both of which were released the same year—or even Death Wish (1974), which was made by Lawman’s director, Michael Winner—but Lawman is an interesting companion to those enduring pictures.

An ethical rumination set in such a minor key that many viewers will find the storyline unpalatably depressing, Lawman bravely defines its hero as the worst monster in his bloody environment. If violence begets violence, the movie seems to argue, then rampant violence can easily conjure that most grisly of oxymorons, “justifiable homicide.” And yet the most interesting aspect of Lawman is that the murders committed by the story’s antihero are only nominally sanctioned by society; supporting characters spend the entire narrative trying, in vain, to persuade the titular peacekeeper from using lethal force.

Burt Lancaster, who was always game for playing brutal sons of bitches, puts his florid acting style to good use essaying Jered Maddox, a U.S. Marshal without an iota of mercy. When the story begins, several cowboys from a ranch situated outside of a tiny town called Sabbath—make what you will of the symbolism—accidentally kill a bystander during a drunken binge. Maddox hears of the crime and kills one of the cowboys, then rides into Sabbath and proclaims his intention to eradicate all of the men responsible. This puts him in conflict not only with overbearing rancher Vincent Bronson (Lee J. Cobb), who employs the cowboys, but also with Sabbath’s comparatively weak-willed sheriff, Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan). As the movie progresses, Maddox resists entreaties to his conscience and to his bank account, even endangering his renewed love affair with an old flame (Sheree J. North), all because of his single-minded devotion to eye-for-an-eye absolutism.

The story stirs up thorny questions about whether a society that kills killers is worth preserving; about how deeply the meting out of deadly justice corrupts the executioner; and about what role compassion plays in the whole mix. Gerry Wilson’s script is probably a bit too literary for its own good, and the pervasive darkness of the story will be a turnoff for those who like their morality plays leavened with escapism. But especially thanks to the presence of a great supporting cast—including Robert Duvall, Richard Jordan, and Ralph Waite—this one goes down smoothly for those with a taste for bitter parables. Best of all, the final scene, in which Cobb’s thunderous performance reaches an ironically pathetic crescendo, resonates on myriad levels.

Lawman: GROOVY

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970)

The last movie directed by the great William Wyler, The Liberation of L.B. Jones is one of several nervy race-relations pictures made in the wake of In the Heat of the Night (1967). Like that Oscar-winning film, L.B. Jones is s a thriller exploring the dangers of a black man seeking justice in the South, only this time the protagonist is not a cop or even a lawyer, but rather an undertaker. In a small Tennessee community, L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne) is the most affluent black citizen, which generates grudging respect from well-to-do whites and seething resentment among poor whites. When Jones discovers that his years-younger wife, Emma (Lola Falana), is sleeping with a white cop, simple-minded redneck Willie Joe (Anthony Zerbe), Jones’ attempt to amicably dissolve his marriage unexpectedly triggers a fusillade of horrific violence.

Based on a novel by Jesse Hill Ford, who co-wrote the script, the picture’s tricky plot weaves together nearly a dozen major characters, each of whom reflects a facet of racism or its impact. The formidable Lee J. Cobb plays Oman Hedgepath, the white lawyer Jones hires to handle the divorce; Hedgepath tries to resolve the matter outside of court by working angles with Willie Joe and the town’s do-nothing mayor (Dub Taylor), but he only makes matters worse. Lee Majors, of all people, plays Oman’s idealistic nephew, a clean-cut voice of reason whose words are drowned out by pervasive prejudice. And in the picture’s linchpin role, a very young Yaphet Kotto plays Sonny Boy, an angry young black man who has returned to his hometown after a long absence because he wants revenge against the racist white who beat him as a child. Barbara Hershey pops up in a tiny role as Majors’ wife, and dancer Fayard Nicholas, of the famed Nicholas Brothers, appears as well, in his only dramatic performance.

Amazingly, The Liberation of L.B. Jones doesn’t feel overstuffed, although some actors are left gasping for screen time; the clockwork script allocates time wisely, sketching characters just well enough for viewers to understand why people choose their paths. Wyler orchestrates the various elements so that when things get ugly, horrible events explode like the stages of carefully coordinated fireworks display. Not everything that happens in the picture is credible, and the material portraying Emma as a capricious nymphomaniac is stereotypical, but The Liberation of L.B. Jones is filled with memorable nuances. It’s also filled with memorable acting, because the film’s cast offers a spectrum of performance styles. Browne is elegant and nuanced; Cobb is fiery and intense; Zerbe is wonderfully squirrely and perverse; and Kotto bounces between sweet and menacing, effectively portraying the wounded boy within the dangerous man. As for Falana, she’s so sexy that it’s easy to see why the men in her life are driven to distraction. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

The Liberation of L.B. Jones: GROOVY

Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973)

Although Burt Reynolds filmed hours upon hours of cowboy stories for film and television in the ’60s, he only starred in one Western during his peak period of the 1970s and early ’80s, and the picture pales in comparison to similar films of the same period starring Reynolds’ buddy Clint Eastwood. Part of the problem is an episodic storyline with too many villains, and part of the problem is the movie’s indecision about whether it’s an action picture with a romantic subplot or a romantic drama with action scenes. It also doesn’t help that the misogyny quotient is off the charts. Reynolds plays Jay, an outlaw reeling from the rape and murder of his Native American wife, Cat Dancing. When Jay’s accomplices Billy (Bo Hopkins) and Dawes (Jack Warden) kidnap a woman (Sarah Miles) they find wandering in the wilderness, Jay prevents the thugs from raping her, and takes her with him when he abandons the gang. The woman, Catherine, is running from her monstrous husband, Crocker (George Hamilton), so eventually Jay and Catherine are stalked by Dawes, Crocker, and even a bounty hunter (Lee J. Cobb), whom Crocker hires. It’s all very convoluted, and the idea that Catherine falls for Jay because he reveals his tragic past is trite. Making matters worse, Reynolds and Miles lack chemistry, so the only sparks are between Reynolds and Warden, whose climactic confrontation is memorably brutal. A priceless actor no matter how he was cast, Warden contributes one of his most odiously villainous performances in Cat Dancing, so he’s almost worth the price of admission. The location photography is handsome, especially scenes in a snowy forest toward the end of the picture, but the narrative’s stop-and-start-rhythm prevents Cat Dancing from building up a head of emotional steam. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing: FUNKY

Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Exorcist (1973) & Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

   Since its spectacularly successful release on December 26, 1973, the public has been divided on The Exorcist, with one audience contingent praising the picture as a powerful drama about faith and another excoriating the movie as sensationalist trash. The beauty of The Exorcist is that both interpretations are justified. While the heart of writer William Peter Blatty’s novel and screenplay is a probing exploration of the notion that definitive evidence of the devil implicitly proves the existence of God, the amped-up grotesquerie of director William Friedkin’s movie is as pandering as the content of any exploitation movie. In fact it’s the very tension between the dark and light impulses of the film that makes it so fascinating and so true to its deepest themes: Like the characters in the story, the film has to battle through the pea soup and spinning heads of manifested evil to reach a hopeful conclusion.
The movie unfolds simply, with distraught mom Chris MacNeill (Ellen Burstyn) seeking first medical and then religious help when her young daughter, Regan (Linda Blair), devolves into a condition that might be demonic possession. The little girl urinates in front of company, flails violently, and spews guttural obscenities, all while her body disintegrates into a horrific mess of pallid skin, scars, and sores. Helping Chris combat the deterioration are an anguished young priest, Karras (Jason Miller), and a world-weary exorcist, Merrin (Max Von Sydow). Providing a sort of comic relief is the caustic police detective (Lee J. Cobb) investigating a murder for which the possessed child might have been responsible.
   Friedkin’s aggressive verité style imbues the provocative story with as much realism as possible, given the focus on special effects and supernatural occurrences, and he’s aided by powerful performances and a technical crew committed to creating vivid atmosphere. Burstyn is spectacular as a mother in an unimaginable situation, making every scene she’s in emotionally credible, and Miller, a genuinely tortured sort offscreen, fills his performance with such intense emotional pain that some of his anguished moments are as hard to watch as the film’s goriest scenes. The movie is filled with classic moments, from the subtle (Burstyn walking down a Washington, D.C., street while Mike Oldfield’s eerie instrumental “Tubular Bells” plays on the soundtrack) to the vulgar (Regan’s obscene use of a crucifix). So while it’s impossible to say for certain whether the movie is inherently exploitive or inherently provocative, it’s also impossible to deny the film’s otherworldly power.
  The same cannot be said for the picture’s first sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic, an insipid mixture of old ideas that worked better the first time and new ideas that should have been nixed at the development stage. Unwisely working a trippy sci-fi/fantasy groove, director John Boorman leads an impressive but slightly embarrassed and narcotized cast through one profoundly silly scene after another. (Newcomers Richard Burton, Louise Fletcher, and James Earl Jones join returning stars Blair—newly curvy but still chipmunk-cheeked—and Von Sydow.) The initial story hook is intriguing, with the Vatican dispatching a priest to investigate whether Merrin was a godly man or a heretic, given his record of spectacular exorcisms, but things spin quickly spin out of control. Not only does the sequel plot indicate that Regan is still possessed, rendering the previous film moot, but Boorman weaves in a bizarre subplot about a primitive African village and its locust-centric religious beliefs.
Boorman and master cinematographer William A. Fraker shoot nearly everything on soundstages, including scenes in African wheat fields, so the whole movie feels bogus and odd. Seriously, what’s the deal with that high-tech hospital featuring so many transparent walls it resembles a county-fair funhouse? At one point, Jones wears an elaborate bug-shaped helmet, complete with giant eyes. In another scene, 17-year-old Blair lures 51-year-old Burton into bed. And the dialogue! Consider the scene where Regan meets Sandra, a little girl played by future Diff’rent Strokes star Dana Plato. “I’m autistic,” Sandra says. “I can’t talk. What’s the matter with you?” (Never mind that she can talk, or that the filmmakers don’t understand how autism works.) “I was possessed by a demon,” Regan replies. “It’s okay. He’s gone.” Despite being a complete dud as a horror show, Exorcist II: The Heretic is so exuberantly goofy that it’s a sumptuous feast for those who consume movies ironically; bad cinema doesn’t get much better.
Franchise creator Blatty wisely pretended Boorman’s film didn’t exist when he wrote and directed 1990’s The Exorcist III, the first worthy successor to the original film. As fans of this series know, there’s a lot more to the story of subsequent Exorcist flicks, but that’s a topic for another day.

The Exorcist: RIGHT ON
Exorcist II: The Heretic: FREAKY