Every 70s Movie: richard roundtree

Showing posts with label richard roundtree. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Embassy (1972)

Watching the political thriller Embassy is frustrating not just because the picture is mediocre, but also because it wouldn’t have taken much to elevate the piece above mediocrity. The source material for this British production, a novel by Stephen Coulter, provides a solid premise—the arrival of a Russian defector at the U.S. embassy in Beirut sparks an international incident. As scripted by William Fairchild and directed by Gordon Hessler, Embassy is blandly photographed, drably paced, and filled with performances as uninspired as the corresponding characterizations are unimaginative. Yet it’s easy to imagine a crackerjack version of the same basic storyline with, say, Sidney Lumet at the helm, abetted by an edgier screenwriter. Even without that level of behind-the-scenes firepower, Embassy has a few credible moments, mostly thanks to leading man Richard Roundtree (appearing in one of his first projects after becoming a star with 1971’s Shaft) and supporting player Max von Sydow, who portrays the defector. Roundtree’s appealing swagger smooths over some of the movie’s rough spots, and von Sydow gives a genuinely multidimensional performance.

Alas, too much time gets wasted on nonsense. Roundtree plays a mid-level diplomat who shares responsibility for the safety of von Sydow’s character, but the movie also gives Roundtree a drab romantic subplot that adds nothing. Similarly, perfunctory acting by Ray Milland (as the pragmatic ambassador), Broderick Crawford (as a security officer at the embassy), and Chuck Connors (as a KGB enforcer) diminishes the experience. Especially when combined with Hessler’s lifeless shooting style, watching actors who are past their best days give paycheck performances makes Embassy feel like a disposable TV movie, notwithstanding impressive production values acquired while shooting on location in the Middle East. As to the question of whether Embassy has anything meaningful to say, the answer is sorta-yes and sorta-no. The movie isn’t a completely vacuous potboiler, but most of its cynical assertions about the morality of political expediency are trite. Embassy only really sparks when von Sydow’s character talks about his reasons for defecting, and when the same character snaps after too many days in captivity.

Embassy: FUNKY

Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Charley One-Eye (1973)

Presumably conceived as a provocative statement about race, this peculiar Western depicts the adventures of a black soldier who’s gone AWOL from the Union Army and the mysterious Indian whom the soldier encounters in the desert. Initially, the soldier makes a hostage of the Indian by threatening him at knifepoint, forcing the Indian into servitude and mercilessly taunting the man. After bonding over their mutual hatred of white people, the soldier and the Indian decide to commit robberies together. All the while, a bounty hunter chases the soldier, so the specter of death is omnipresent. In its broad strokes, this storyline should be serviceable despite its contrived nature. But Charley One-Eye is riddled with peculiarities, like the fact that none of the characters has a name. (The soldier is billed as “The Black Man,” the Indian is billed as “The Indian,” etc.)
Actually, a slight correction to the preceding remark is necessary, because the film does indeed feature a character named Charley One-Eye. He’s a chicken. And, quite frankly, he’s the most sympathetic character in the whole movie.

The first hour of Charley One-Eye is a slog, because the soldier (Richard Roundtree) is a sadistic prick given to fits of idiotic laughter, and the Indian (Roy Thinnes) is part pathetic cripple and part wise mystic. Neither character is believable or fun to watch, so the myriad scenes of them shuffling through the desert while being cruel to each other are boring. Eventually, the bounty hunter (Nigel Davenport) arrives, leading to scenes of torture and other violence.

None of this resonates much beyond visceral impact, though flash cuts to the past indicate that the soldier slept with a white officer’s wife and subsequently killed the officer. The picture fails to provide corresponding illumination for the Indian, except to illustrate that he’s kind to fowl, particularly the aforementioned Charley One-Eye. The story climaxes with a failed attempt at poetic irony, exemplifying that the divide between the content and intentions of Charley One-Eye is so wide as to render the film almost impenetrable. As a result, the film is little more than pretentious pulp, despite Roundtree’s spirited efforts to enliven a poorly conceived role. Chicago native Thinnes, absurdly miscast as a Native American, mostly stares out from beneath long hair and a wide-brimmed hat while hissing his curt lines in a raspy whisper.

Charley One-Eye: FUNKY

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Diamonds (1975)

A dreary heist thriller noteworthy for its eclectic cast and for having been coproduced by American and Israeli companies, Diamonds comprises 108 very long minutes of anonymous people doing inconsequential things. Even with four big-name actors playing the leading roles, the picture is a chore to watch and offers no special rewards at the end of the journey. Only those deeply interested in the careers of the stars and/or those determined to see every heist movie ever made need bother. It’s not hard to determine where the blame for this picture’s lifelessness should fall, since producer/director Menahem Golan spent most of his career making schlocky movies for the international market; although he occasionally produced (or executive produced) a quality picture, nearly everything that Golan directed was substandard. Diamonds, therefore, is par for the course. The great Robert Shaw, clearly participating only for the paycheck, stars in dual roles, and Golan’s reliance on the old gimmick of one actor playing twins is not a good omen. Shaw’s main role is that of Charles Hodgson, a British millionaire with the resources and time to indulge in dangerous hobbies. For instance, in one early scene Charles stages a private martial-arts exhibition, fighting against his mustachioed brother, Earl Hodgson. The siblings often take their competitiveness to ridiculous extremes, hence the movie’s silly storyline.

Charles recruits career criminal Archie (Richard Roundtree)—as well as Archie’s sexy girlfriend, Sally (Barbara Hershey)—to help him rob millions of dollars worth of diamonds from a vault in Tel Aviv. Once Archie, Charles, and Sally reach the Middle East, they separate in order to prepare different components of their robbery scheme. This middle section of the picture, which comprises a good hour of running time, is deadly boring. About the only interesting sequences involve Charles trying to avoid an obnoxious American tourist, Zelda (Shelley Winters). Myriad scenes occur without any of the top-billed actors present, because interchangeable Israeli actors play cops and guards and thugs in dull vignettes. Worse, Hershey virtually disappears from the movie for a solid 40 minutes. Toward the end, Golan rallies for a proper break-in/escape sequence, which allows Roundtree and Shaw to share a few intense scenes filled with the kind of clear dramatic conflict that’s missing from the rest of the picture. Ultimately, however, the picture is a slow crawl toward a predictable ending. For viewers who enjoy napping during movies, Diamonds is passable. For everyone else, only disappointment and tedium await.

Diamonds: FUNKY

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Firehouse (1973)

Interesting only because of its cast, this brisk TV movie about racial tensions in a Los Angeles firefighting company was intended as the pilot for a series, but most of the name-brand actors disappeared between the initial telefilm and the first weekly episode, which didn’t air until a year after the pilot movie’s debut. Richard Roundtree, still riding high on the success of Shaft (1971) and its sequels, stars as Shelly Forsythe, an African-American firefighter who is tired of facing racism at work, to say nothing of accusations from civilians of being an Uncle Tom. Before Shelly enters the picture, however, viewers are introduced to an all-white company whose senior officer, Spike Ryerson (Vince Edwards), blames the recent death of his best friend on an at-large black arsonist. Thus, when Shelly is assigned to take the dead fireman’s place, Spike and his cronies haze the new arrival terribly. Worse, when one of the firemen witnesses Shelly allowing a black suspect to leave the scene of a crime, Spike presumes that Shelly is unwilling to help capture black crooks. Meanwhile, Shelly navigates the difficulties of his marriage to Michelle (Sheila Frazier), who wants him to succeed so they can improve their standard of living.

All of this is standard stuff. Furthermore, many scenes in Firehouse look chintzy because the producers interspersed grainy newsreel footage instead of staging full-scale fire scenes. Yet despite the shallow writing and tacky production values, Firehouse is basically watchable thanks to the acting. Roundtree is excellent, proving once again that Hollywood missed a great opportunity by failing to place him in better projects; his mixture of charm and righteous indignation works well. Frazier is good, too, blending sexiness and strength. And while Edwards merely performs his role adequately, familiar actors in smaller parts add texture. Val Avery gives a salty turn as the company’s short-tempered cook, Andrew Duggan is authoritative as the company’s progressive-minded captain, Richard Jaeckel does solid work as one of Spike’s cohorts, and Michael Lerner appears fleetingly as a liberal civilian working with the fire company. (Paul Le Mat lingers on the fringes of the movie, as well.) Of these performers, only Jaeckel stayed on for the Firehouse series, which ran for a few months in 1974.

Firehouse: FUNKY

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Earthquake (1974)

Pure junk that nonetheless provides abundant guilty pleasure, Earthquake was a pinnacle of sorts for the disaster-movie genre. Executive producer Jennings Lang was recruited by Universal Pictures to copy the formula that Poseidon Adventure mastermind Irwin Allen had perfected at rival studio 20th-Century Fox, so Lang commissioned a thrill-a-minute script (co-written by Mario Puzo) and hired a large ensemble of mid-level actors. The resulting movie, as produced and directed by fading studio-era helmer Mark Robson, is a cheesefest replete with bad acting, horrible clothes, and ridiculous storylines. However, since those are exactly the kitschy qualities that fans of the disaster genre dig, Earthquake became a major hit, earning nearly $80 million despite costing only $7 million. Therefore, Earthquake represents the disaster genre in full bloom.

While there’s not much point in discussing the actual plot—there’s a giant earthquake in L.A., in case you haven’t guessed—listing a few of the characters should give the flavor of the piece. Leading man Charlton Heston plays Stewart Graff, a businessman whose rich father-in-law, Sam Royce (Lorne Greene), offers him a company presidency in exchange for staying married to shrewish Remy Royce-Graff (Ava Gardner); meanwhile, Stewart is screwing around with a younger woman, Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold). Bullish police offer Lou Slade (George Kennedy, of course) spends most of the movie watching out for Rosa (Victoria Principal), a busty young woman who wears her hair in some sort of Latina Afro, because she’s mixed up with a motorcycle-riding daredevil (Richard Roundtree) and a psychotic stalker (Marjoe Gortner). Oh, and Walter Matthau plays a bizarre cameo as a drunk dressed in head-to-toe polyester, complete with a flaming-red pimp hat.

Virtually every melodramatic cliché from ’70s cinema is represented somewhere in Earthquake, which treats seismic activity as a cosmic metaphor for the uncertainty of life. And by “metaphor,” I really mean “narrative contrivance,” because the script for Earthquake exists far below the level of literary aspiration; this movie’s idea of storytelling is stirring up trite conflict before adding tremors that kill people in exciting ways. However, some of the big-budget effects scenes are enjoyable in a tacky sort of way, and the histrionic nature of Heston’s and Kennedy’s acting keeps their scenes jacked up to an appropriately goofy level of intensity. Plus, during its most outrageous scenes—picture Roundtree performing Evel Knievel-style motorcycle stunts as Principal cheers him while wearing an undersized T-shirt that displays his logo across her ample bosom—Earthquake embraces its low nature by providing shameless distraction.

Earthquake: FUNKY

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Man Friday (1975)

A strange re-imagination of Daniel Defoe’s classic adventure novel Robinson Crusoe, told from the perspective of the lead character’s companion/manservant Friday, Man Friday is filled with provocative ideas about the gulf between a “civilized” 17th-century Englishman and a “savage” from the tropics. The intention was clearly to examine a classic race-relations story through the prism of post-Civil Rights era enlightenment—and, indeed, much of the picture’s content fulfills this goal, illustrating Friday’s initial amusement and subsequent disgust with Crusoe’s imperialistic attitudes. In the movie’s best moments, Friday drives Crusoe to distraction with common-sense challenges to concepts like money, sports, and religion.

Unfortunately, everything surrounding these insightful moments is awkward and borderline cringe-worthy. The acting by the two leads is erratic at best, with Peter O’Toole shouting most of his performance as Crusoe and Shaft’s Richard Roundtree vacillating between carefree ebullience and don’t-mess-with-me swagger. The picture gets bogged down in tiresome comedy bits, like a sequence of the men trying out various artificial wings during an attempt to escape the remote island on which they are marooned.

Worse, the story’s framing device, which is clever in conception but distracting in execution, destroys the narrative rhythm: At the beginning of the movie, Friday is back on his own island after his adventures with Crusoe, relating his tale through jokes and songs around a crowded campfire as the members of his tribe listen. It’s hard to get over the jarring image of Roundtree, wearing just a loincloth, singing English-language verse over a queasy reggae beat while he explains that the man he called “Master” was a crazy person espousing alien beliefs. If the guiding aesthetic of this film was revisionist authenticity, wouldn’t shooting these scenes in Friday’s native tongue and subtitling the dialogue have been a stronger choice?

Considering the dodgy lead performances and the story’s stop-and-start pacing, however, the stylistic choice of how to present language is really just the least of the movie’s problems. Case in point: The confusing and unsatisfying ending (which radically breaks from Defoe’s story) is a major tonal misstep. Man Friday is not without interest, especially since so few people know the movie exists, but it’s ultimately more of an offbeat curiosity than a lost classic.

Man Friday: FUNKY

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Escape to Athena (1979)

Escape to Athena should be a tasty wedge of cheese, based solely on the eclectic cast and the fact that helmer George P. Cosmatos (The Cassandra Crossing) knows how to make entertaining trash. Set during World War II, the movie features Sonny Bono, Claudia Cardinale, Elliot Gould, David Niven, Stefanie Powers, Roger Moore, Richard Roundtree, and Telly Savalas as guards and inmates at a German prison camp on a Mediterranean island. The muddy screenplay, based on a story co-written by Cosmatos, tries to weave together a plan to derail an impending Nazi onslaught, a quest to liberate oppressed locals, and a scheme to steal ancient relics—while still leaving room for comedy and romance—but in trying to play every possible crowd-pleasing note, Cosmatos creates an absolute mess. Not only are the ample charms of the cast wasted, but sumptuous location photography by British DP Gilbert Taylor, of Star Wars fame, is squandered on inconsequential and occasionally nonsensical scenes. Miscasting and tonal inconsistency are the biggest problems. Moore, clearly eager to try something different between 007 movies, plays a stately Austrian commandant who resents his Nazi superiors, but he gives an atrocious performance: His accent is pathetic, and he tries to come across as likeable and menacing at the same time, so his work is indecisive and sloppy. Bono is such an intrinsically ’70s figure, sporting the same shaggy shoulder-length hair and drooping walrus moustache he wore in his countless TV appearances with Cher, that he’s a walking anachronism. And the scenes featuring Elliot Gould as a fast-talking American showman, complete with straw boater hat and vaudeville hucksterism, are decidedly unfunny. Making matters worse, some of the top-billed players, notably Cardinale, Niven, and Roundtree, get lost entirely because their roles are underwritten and lack distinct impact. It’s true that a few of the action scenes are passable, and Powers is appealing-ish as a showgirl using her wiles to make the best of a bad situation, but neither of these elements feels compatible with the other. Despite its obvious eagerness to please, Escape to Athena is so undisciplined that watching the cavalcade of lame humor, random stars, and sporadic action eventually becomes numbing.

Escape to Athena: LAME

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Shaft (1971) & Shaft’s Big Score (1972) & Shaft In Africa (1973)

   Richard Roundtree’s lead performance is a triumph of super-cool swagger, director Gordon Parks shoots the streets of New York City with a keen eye for grungy detail, and Isaac Hayes’ Oscar-winning music is nuclear-powered funk/soul, but Shaft thrives on style over substance, because despite these considerable surface pleasures, the quasi-legendary flick is a dramatic washout. Still, it was zesty enough to trigger a slew of sequels and to inspire the blaxploitation craze, so it must be ranked as of the most significant B-movies of the ’70s even though it’s not exceptional cinema. The storyline is standard stuff about tough-talking private dick John Shaft (Roundtree) getting hired to rescue a gangster’s kidnapped daughter, so what makes the picture significant is the characterization of a cocksure black superhero operating outside the law and doing whatever he damn well pleases; in the defining moment, Shaft exits a conference with a pushy white cop by announcing that he’s off “to get laid.”
   Roundtree cuts a great figure with his immaculate facial hair, black turtleneck, and black leather suit, so when he shoots his way through an action scene—or even just strolls through the city to the accompaniment of Hayes’ pulsating music—he’s such an appealing vision of African-American empowerment that he gives the movie more vitality than it probably deserves. Excepting the tasty ’70s lingo and atmospheric Harlem settings, Ernest Tidyman’s script is quite old-fashioned, the sort of convoluted crime story Hollywood has cranked out since time immemorial, so the granddaddy of blaxploitation films doesn’t really have all that much kitschy flava: It’s merely a conventional thriller that happens to feature an memorable lead character and a predominantly black cast.
   The ordinariness is even more evident in the first sequel, Shaft’s Big Score, which finds our hero stuck in the middle of a war for control over a lucrative numbers racket. Shaft gets laid, kills a few people, and lays on the ’tude, but the narrative is so utilitarian that it’s more like a run-of-the-mill TV episode than a theatrical sequel. About the only novelty is that director Parks took over as composer for Shaft’s Big Score, copying Hayes’ style down to the theme song “Blowin’ Your Mind,” which is a shameless rip of the original film’s unforgettable “Theme from Shaft.” Shaft’s Big Score is solid meat-and-potatoes ’70s action, but nothing more.
   The franchise’s last ’70s theatrical entry, before Roundtree took the Shaft character to the small screen for a brief run of telefilms, is the energetic Shaft in Africa. Boasting the most interesting (and logic-defying) storyline of the series, Shaft in Africa gets the main character out of his Harlem comfort zone for a 007-style international adventure in which he busts up a modern-day slavery ring—and with all due respect to the venerable Parks, Shaft in Africa helmer John Guillermin has a more polished approach to action and storytelling, using slick widescreen photography to give the modestly budgeted threequel more lush imagery than its predecessors. Shaft in Africa is also considerably more violent than the other two pictures, including some brutal hand-to-hand combat, so it’s the most intense entry, and Frank Finlay (The Three Musketeers) is an effectively perverse villain.
   Roundtree’s charismatic portrayal is consistently watchable throughout all three movies, so checking out at least one of the Shaft pictures is a necessity for any ’70s completist, but many of the outrageous blaxploitation flicks that followed in Shaft’s wake improved on the prototype.

Shaft: FUNKY

Shaft’s Big Score: FUNKY

Shaft in Africa: FUNKY