Every 70s Movie: adam roarke

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Thursday, March 22, 2018

How Come Nobody’s on Our Side? (1975)

If you’re willing to overlook a huge problem—the absence of a real story—then you might be able to groove on the silly pleasures of How Come Nobody’s On Our Side? A wannabe farcical comedy about two bikers who try to score bread by running drugs across the Mexican border, the picture stars two veterans of ’60s/’70s biker flicks, Larry Bishop and Adam Roarke. Here, they work in the mode of classic comedy duos: Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis, etc. Although Bishop and Roarke put forth mighty efforts, the jokes aren’t strong enough to sustain interest, and their characters aren’t sufficiently differentiated to create strong friction. Worse, the plot lacks forward momentum until the climax, which resorts to that dullest of clichés, a madcap chase scene. It’s fitting that the movie features a scene of our heroes escaping trouble in a hot-air balloon, because from start to finish, this whole thing runs on fumes.

After Brandy (Bishop) and Person (Roarke) quit a job playing bikers in a low-budget movie, they hit the road looking for new opportunities. Enter Brigitte (Alexandra Hay), Person’s freethinking sister. For some reason she has a groovy house on the beach in Los Angeles, so the bikers hang out there for a while. Eventually someone has the bright idea to run dope, triggering complicated schemes—Brigitte seduces a cop to get the use of his uniform so Brandy, posing as a policeman, can squeeze information from a border guard, and so on. Some of the schemes are mildly amusing, and the film’s banter is periodically entertaining, but the lack of narrative focus grows more and more frustrating as the picture drags on. Plus, some bits just don’t work, like the vignette of the bikers buying drugs from a couple played by Penny Marshall and Rob Reiner.

Apparently filmed in 1972 but shelved until 1975, How Come Nobody’s on Our Side? is a missed opportunity, because Bishop and Roarke render such an appealingly cranky buddy-picture vibe that better material might have resulted in success. But in addition to constructing a flabby plot, writer Leigh Chapman shows a weakness for sitcom-style jokes. The aforementioned balloon scene involves the bikers begging a little person for a ride before resorting to physical threats. At that point, the little person exclaims: “Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Look at all the time you wasted trying to reason with me!” As with so much of How Come Nobody’s on Our Side?, it’s enough to make you almost laugh.

How Come Nobody’s On Our Side?: FUNKY

Thursday, December 11, 2014

The Losers (1970)

Also known as Nam’s Angels, this bizarre biker flick imagines what might happen if an American motorcycle gang was hired by the U.S. government to conduct a covert operation in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. Apparently inspired by a real-life suggestion presented to President Lyndon Johnson by the Hell’s Angels, the movie features a paper-thin story, tedious storytelling, and underwhelming action scenes. Director Jack Starrett and his collaborators also fail to justify the movie’s outlandish premise, since the bikers in the picture don’t do anything that couldn’t have been done more effectively by trained soldiers. In fact, the members of the “Devil’s Advocates” (the name of the onscreen gang) approach their mission incompetently. Tasked with rescuing some VIP who’s trapped behind enemy lines, the Devil’s Advocates spend inordinate amounts of time brawling, drinking, fixing their bikes, and screwing prostitutes. It’s difficult to generate enthusiasm for a men-on-a-mission movie that lacks urgency, and, indeed, The Losers is so leisurely that the whole picture stops dead for several minutes while Starrett’s camera ogles a topless dancer. Yawn. Biker-cinema icon William Smith brings his usual macho swagger to the party, though his animalistic appeal isn’t nearly enough to make The Losers interesting—even when he periodically spews a nugget of tasty dialogue (“You hired scooter trash for this job, that’s what you got”). Instead of using Smith or fellow B-movie vet Adam Roarke properly, Starrett burns film chronicling the unfunny antics of Houston Savage, who plays the violent slob of a biker named “Dirty Denny.” Apparently, the spectacle of Dirty Denny beating up his friends, indulging himself with whores, and staggering as people crack beer bottles over his head was envisioned as entertainment. It’s not.

The Losers: LAME

Monday, September 1, 2014

This Is a Hijack (1973)

Executed with as little originality and subtlety as its hilariously bland title might suggest, This Is a Hijack is best described as “undemanding.” Produced on a low budget and shot without any attempt at visual flair, the picture cycles through generic scenes as it moves steadily toward a predictable climax. Every so often, a glimmer of individuality shines through the workmanlike storytelling—for instance, one of the hijackers makes his prisoners shout animal noises like a farmland chorus—but director Barry Pollack and his collaborators mostly demonstrate an impressive skill for determining the minimum effort required for manufacturing filmic elements, from composition to performance to editing. This Is a Hijack isn’t even lurid enough to qualify as proper drive-in fare, so it’s basically the equivalent of a forgettable TV movie, except with a couple of feature-film actors and slightly more elaborate production values.

Set in L.A., the movie begins when Mike (Adam Roarke), an inveterate gambler, is hustled out of bed by lackeys in the employ of a gangster to whom Mike owes a considerable sum of cash. Told he must pay his debts immediately, or else, Mike contrives a scheme to hijack the private jet owned by his boss, Simon (Jay Robinson), a rich entertainer who treats everyone around him like garbage. Assigned to watch over Mike is Dominic (Neville Brand), a psychotic thug who works for the gangster. Once the hijackers have taken control of the aircraft, Mike discovers that Dominic would be perfectly happy killing everyone aboard just for the thrill—he’s the one who makes people yell animal sounds—so Mike must tap his shallow reserve of bravery in order to prevent a catastrophe. Meanwhile, in a subplot so anemic it barely merits inclusion in the film, a small-town sheriff (Dub Taylor) coordinates with the FBI on a plan to seize control of the plane when it lands.

Brand, Roarke, and Taylor provide most of the watchable moments. Brand does his patented happy-maniac bit, Roarke broods with the same charismatic intensity he brought to ’60s B-movies, and Taylor provides his signature crazy-old-coot shtick. (The climax of the movie involves Taylor running around an airport while wearing nothing but boots, a cowboy hat, and boxer shorts.) This Is a Hijack runs out of gas toward the end, with characters overcoming problems after exerting only a modicum of effort, and it’s not as if there’s any visual spectacle on display. For the most part, however, the picture delivers exactly what it promises—which isn’t much.

This Is a Hijack: FUNKY

Sunday, November 24, 2013

A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970)

Representing yet another entry into the seemingly endless cycle of post-Bonnie and Clyde crime flicks set during the Depression, A Bullet for Pretty Boy stars former teen idol Fabian—billed with his full name, Fabian Forte—as farmboy-turned-outlaw Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd. And while the movie contains nothing even remotely approaching artistry or originality, the picture is basically watchable thanks to the inherent appeal of the genre and the likeability of the leading actor. Fitting the usual formula for this sort of thing, A Bullet for Pretty Boy begins prior to the title character’s life of crime. On the day of his marriage to wholesome Ruby (Astrid Warner), Charles gets into a hassle with Ruby’s ex-boyfriend. Later, the guy aims a gun at Charles and accidentally kills Charles’ father, so Charles gets revenge by killing his father’s murderer. A six-year prison sentence is his reward. Partway through his incarceration, Charles breaks out of jail and becomes a fugitive, hooking up with a kindhearted madam and her gangster brothers, who give Charles the nickname “Pretty Boy.” While hiding out in the madam’s brothel, Charles gets involved with a hooker named Betty (Jocelyn Lane). Eventually, Betty becomes Charles’ moll while he embarks on a bank-robbing career. Finally, the story transforms into a love triangle when Charles tries to return home. Danger and tragedy ensue, because cops are waiting for Charles at every turn.

While it’s admirable that the folks at American International Pictures attempted to examine the psychological and sociological backgrounds for famous gangsters in pictures such as A Bullet for Pretty Boy, the predictability and superficiality of the storytelling in these movies often undercut the good intentions. For example, even though A Bullet for Pretty Boy is only 89 minutes, the film is padded with music-driven montage sequences that use the same bland pop/rock songs over and over again. In other words, maybe 30 minutes of the movie are devoted to character development, and the rest of the running time comprises repetitive filler. That said, AIP knew how to stretch a dollar, so period props and rural locations are used effectively to create a sense of place, and even the least imaginative bank-robbery scene has some built-in excitement. It’s also (mildly) interesting to note that A Bullet for Pretty Boy is rated PG, which means the movie doesn’t rely on the usual exploitation-cinema tropes of gore and nudity. Instead, the film is primarily focused on the protagonist’s struggle to make the best of the circumstances in which he finds himself. Fabian does acceptable work, scowling to suggest anguish, while leading ladies Lane and Warner provide lovely decoration even if their acting underwhelms. B-movie stalwart Adam Roarke, alas, is wasted in a minor part as a country preacher who leaves the religious life behind to join Charles’ crime spree.

A Bullet for Pretty Boy: FUNKY

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry (1974)

While not actually a good movie in terms of artistic achievement and/or narrative ambition, Dirty Mary Crazy Larry is in some perverse ways the epitome of its genre. Throughout the ’70s, filmmakers made innumerable ennui-drenched flicks about young people hitting the road for crime sprees that represented a sort of anti-Establishment activism. In the best such pictures, the wandering youths articulated their angst so well that their actions felt meaningful; in the worst such pictures, the basic premise was simply an excuse for exploitative thrills. Since Dirty Mary Crazy Larry exists somewhere between these extremes, it’s emblematic of the whole early-’70s road-movie headspace. The picture also has just enough cleverness, reflected in flavorful dialogue and oblique camera angles, to validate the existence of genuine thematic material, even in the context of a trashy lovers-on-the-run picture.

Peter Fonda stars as Larry, an iconoclastic driver pulling crimes to earn money for a new racecar. Riding shotgun during Larry’s adventure is Deke (Adam Roarke), an accomplice/mechanic. During the movie’s exciting opening sequence, Deke breaks into the home of a grocery-store manager (Roddy McDowall) and holds the man’s family hostage while Larry waltzes into the store to collect the contents of the store’s safe. Unfortunately, Larry’s most recent one-night stand, Mary (Susan George), tracks Larry down during his getaway—she steals his keys and threatens to tell the cops what he’s doing unless she lets him tag along. Thus, Deke, Larry, and Mary form an unlikely trio zooming across the Southwest with police in hot pursuit. Working from a novel by Richard Unekis, director John Hough and his assorted screenwriters do a fine job of balancing talky interludes with high-speed chase scenes, creating an ominous sense of inevitability about the drama’s impending resolution.

Still, the characterizations are thin—although the crooks’ main pursuer, Sheriff Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow), is an enjoyably eccentric small-town lawman—and the performances are erratic. Roarke anchors the getaway scenes with a quiet intensity that complements Fonda’s enjoyably cavalier persona. Englishwoman George, however, is a screeching nuisance, presumably impeded by the task of mimicking redneck patois. She’s so annoying, in fact, that it’s easy to laugh when Fonda berates her with this bizarre ultimatum: “So help me, if you try another stunt like that, I’m gonna braid your tits!” Dirty Mary Crazy Larry zooms along as fast as the cars featured onscreen, delivering several nerve-jangling crash scenes and generally setting an interesting trap for the reckless protagonists. Yet the movie’s ending changes everything, and the finale is so quintessentially ’70s that it’s reason enough to check out this hard-charging romp.

Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: GROOVY

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Frogs (1972)

It’s not as if one starts watching an early-’70s horror movie titled Frogs with expectations of greatness, but it’s reasonable to assume the picture will deliver a few rudimentary thrills over the course of a brisk narrative. Alas, something far less insidious is in store for the unlucky viewers who dive into this amphibian atrocity. Noteworthy only for its extensive use of real animal footage, Frogs is among the dullest movies of its type, dragging through long, uneventful sequences in between nasty shots of swamp critters eating people. Despite the film’s title, frogs are not the only killers on display here; in fact, frogs are presented like evil masterminds goading their fellow beasties toward mayhem. Because, really, when one tries to list the fiercest predators in the natural world, aren’t frogs the first things that come to mind? The story begins with nature-magazine photographer Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott) riding his canoe around a private island in Florida while he takes pictures of animals and pollution. Soon, he’s invited to join the island’s residents, the Crockett family, for their annual Fourth of July celebration. The patriarch of the clan, Jason Crockett (Ray Milland), is domineering but wheelchair-bound, a rich prick who gets off on controlling the lives of his children and their spouses. (Quasi-notable actors playing his relatives include Adam Roarke and Joan Van Ark.) The Crocketts are preoccupied with a frog infestation on their island, so Pickett offers his counsel as an ecology expert, initially guessing that extreme weather changed breeding patterns. Yet after various island residents turn up dead, Pickett suggests nature is striking back after years of pollution. Nonetheless, Jason denies the obvious until it’s too late—but, hey, you knew that would happen, right? Hack director George McCowan devotes most of his energy to staging gruesome death scenes involving alligators, snakes, spiders, turtles, and other creepy-crawlies. If the movie zipped along a little faster, Frogs might qualify as effective kitsch, but even though the picture just squeaks over the 90-minute mark, it’s padded to the point of extreme tedium. Therefore, unless scales and tails get your motor running, it’s best to stay out of the swamp.

Frogs: LAME

Friday, August 5, 2011

The Four Deuces (1976)

An awful gangster-themed comedy/thriller featuring Jack Palance at his all-over-the-map worst, The Four Deuces has a few interesting flourishes that are worth noting, if not necessarily worth watching. The movie uses comic-book text panels during transitions between sequences, plus actual comic-book drawings that morph into live-action photography, so the idea is apparently to present a ’30s-era newspaper strip come to life—if, in fact, “life” is the right word for a movie so utterly lacking in vitality. The story is standard stuff about a mob boss whose main squeeze two-times him while he’s trying to win a bloody conflict with a rival hoodlum, and the generic quality of the picture is accentuated by costumes and props that all look they’re fresh off the rack; one gets the impression that dodgy producers rented everything instead of buying or manufacturing. As for the alleged comedy elements of the movie, not a single funny thing happens, unless enduring sped-up Kesystone Kops-style chases or watching the ghoulish Palance laugh hysterically while he kills people hits your sweet spot. Seeing Palance bounce between cringe-worthy over-acting and limp under-acting is nothing new; nor is watching leading lady Carol Lynley, of The Poseidon Adventure fame, demonstrate an utter lack of dynamism. Thus, the only disappointment is watching Adam Roarke spin his wheels in yet another pointless role: A handsome, intense player from ’60s exploitation flicks who never found his breakthrough role, he’s a cipher as the hotshot reporter who tags along with Palance’s gang and hops into the sack with Palance’s moll (Lynley). Especially since the movie’s only novel element, the comic-book stylization, was used more effectively in other pictures, like the exceedingly weird 99 and 44/100% Dead (1974), it’s safe to say The Four Deuces is not a winning hand.

The Four Deuces: LAME

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Play It As It Lays (1972)

A pretentious mood piece about a movie star experiencing and recovering from a mental breakdown, this adaptation of Joan Didion’s acclaimed novel is like a high-art version of a Jacqueline Susann novel: The only difference between Susann’s trashy showbiz stories and Didion’s take on sleazy Hollywood is that Didion examines the milieu from a sophisticated psychological perspective.
Tuesday Weld, one of the fiercest actresses to ever grace the screen, tries valiantly to sculpt a complete character from the discombobulated narrative shards of an unnecessarily arty script by Didion and her husband, novelist John Gregory Dunne, but Weld is held back by the ponderous direction of art-house mainstay Frank Perry (The Swimmer). Similarly, a poignant performance by costar Anthony Perkins is squandered because the film is so preoccupied with European-style abstract editing and overt symbolism that it forgets to simply tell a story.

Buried amid the auteur-ish muck is a standard-issue Hollywood tragedy about fragile actress Maria (Weld) suffering through a marriage to overbearing film director Carter (Adam Roarke). Maria’s traumas include an abortion; the mental problems of her young daughter, who is institutionalized; and her intense friendship with bisexual producer BZ (Perkins), a doomed drug addict.
Didion’s book is highly regarded for capturing a moment when promiscuity, psychoanalysis, recreational drugs, and tremendous wealth allowed a generation of Hollywood professionals to indulge themselves to the brink of insanity, but even with Didion and her spouse penning the script, the film version lacks effective cinematic equivalents for Didion’s literary tropes. Therefore, scenes gasp for air while they’re being suffocated with “significance” that viewers can sense but not really understand; it’s easy to envision the sort of Bergman-esque angst that Perry was trying to capture, but he doesn’t have sufficient control over the material to hit that elusive target.

Amid this slog of a movie, Weld comes off the best, since she has so many opportunities to reveal Maria’s inner demons, and Perkins runs a close second, personifying world-weary soulfulness. Roarke, a cult-fave actor known for offbeat flicks like Psych-Out (1968), gives a credible performance as a domineering artiste, but the script lets him down even worse than it does Weld and Perkins. Play It As It Lays is admirable for what it tries to accomplish, and deeply disappointing for how badly it fumbles the attempt.

Play It As It Lays: FUNKY