Where’s Poppa? (1970)

          With its barrage of surrealistic plot developments and tasteless jokes, Where’s Poppa? would be a weird movie under any circumstances—yet it’s doubly strange when viewed as part of its director’s overall career. Carl Reiner, one of the most likable comedians America has ever produced, is best known for gentle humor of the family-friendly variety, since his professional highlights include creating the beloved ’60s sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show and helming such inoffensive comedy features as Oh, God! (1977) and All of Me (1984). Excepting this bizarre movie, the most offensive thing Reiner ever made was probably the Steve Martin vehicle The Jerk (1979), which is incredibly tame by comparison with Where’s Poppa?

          Adapted by Robert Klane from his own novel, Where’s Poppa? depicts the travails of New York attorney Gordon Hocheiser (George Segal), who lives with his senile mother, Mrs. Hocheiser (Ruth Gordon), in a cramped apartment. Momma’s a dottering nut who keeps asking “Where’s Poppa?” because she can’t grasp the fact that her husband is dead, and she smothers Gordon with constant nagging and with inappropriately physical affection. Over the course of the movie, Gordon faces three predicaments: 1) He wants to dump Momma in a nursing home but can’t break a deathbed promise to his father that obligates him to care for his insufferable mother; 2) He wants to marry Louise (Trish Van Devere), the pretty nurse he just hired to care for Momma, but there’s no way the three of them can live together; and 3) Gordon’s high-strung brother, Sidney (Ron Leibman) keeps getting into trouble.

          The tone of Where’s Poppa? is all over the place, so it’s hard to know when the movie is going for absurdist humor, black comedy, nasty satire, or surrealistic farce. One scene might involve a gentle joke like Momma using cola in her cereal instead of milk, and the next scene might involve Sidney committing rape in Central Park while wearing a gorilla suit. Yes, you read that right—the “comedy” centerpiece of the movie is a rape scene, which is as gruesomely unfunny as it sounds. So, too, is the icky sequence in which Momma yanks down Gordon’s pants and chews on his ass while a shocked Louise watches. Underlying all of this is the distasteful central premise: The “hero” of the story wants to break a blood oath and dump his mentally ill mother so he can get laid.

          Segal does what he can, providing a few almost-amusing moments of exasperation, but his character is so ugly it’s hard to find anything Segal does funny. Similarly, Gordon drops the crazy-like-a-fox bit that distinguished most of her late-career roles and hits the same note of annoying senility again and again; her characterization is alternately boring and pathetic, neither of which is much fun to watch. Leibman’s performance is grotesque, and Van Devere seems lost amid the repulsive situations. Where’s Poppa? has a minor cult following, so clearly some people find the picture amusing, and it’s worth noting that a handful of familiar actors—Vincent Gardenia, Barnard Hughes, Garrett Morris, Rob Reiner, Paul Sorvino—make appearances. Yet it’s telling that after making this picture, Carl Reiner mostly left the realm of bad-taste humor behind, gravitating toward stories that reflect the sweetness one associates with his persona.

Where’s Poppa?: FREAKY

Soldier Blue (1970)

          Nineteen-seventy was a wild year for Hollywood movies about the Native American experience, even if most of the stories Hollywood generated were told through the prism of white people assimilating into Indian culture. The best of the 1970 batch is undoubtedly Little Big Man, with Dustin Hoffman, although A Man Called Horse, with Richard Harris, has noteworthy virtues, as well. And then there’s Soldier Blue, which is in odd hybrid of bleeding-heart liberalism, culture-clash comedy, gut-wrenching violence, and Vietnam allegory. The movie’s a mess, but it’s strangely compelling and undeniably memorable, if for no other reason than how well it captures the anguished spirit of the historical moment in which it was created. Based on a novel by Theodore V. Olsen (which was originally titled Arrow in the Sun), the movie is set in the American West during the Civil War and revolves around two white characters with opposing views on Indians. Thrown together by circumstance, they bicker until arriving at an understanding, only to stumble into a horrific slaughter by U.S. soldiers of an entire Cheyenne village.

          Although the film’s bloody climax is based on a real historical incident from the time of the Indian Wars—the infamous Sand Creek massacre—the filmmakers’ thematic and visual parallels to the 1968 My Lai atrocity in Vietnam are unmistakable. So, in a weird way, the Native Americans supposedly at the heart of Soldier Blue are doubly marginalized—not only are Caucasians the leading characters, Indians are used as an all-purpose metaphor representing oppressed indigenous people everywhere. Still, iffy politics are the least of Soldier Blue’s problems from a cinematic perspective, because the film wobbles between sitcom-style banter and ugly scenes of murder and rape. Nearly everything in the movie is highly watchable for some reason or another, but Soldier Blue feels like several films cobbled together into one sloppy whole.

          The picture begins when Cheyenne warriors attack a group of civilians and soldiers. Only Cresta (Candice Bergen) and Honus (Peter Strauss) survive. She’s a white woman who has been held captive by Indians for a long period of time and has unexpectedly developed sympathy for their plight, whereas he’s a straight-line military man with ignorantly racist attitudes. The duo travels through a remote wilderness, arguing their way to mutual attraction while surviving near-death experiences as well as encounters with weird frontier characters. (Reliably odd character actor Donald Pleasance plays one of these folks.) Eventually, Cresta and Honus reach a military fort, where Cresta becomes permanently disillusioned with white culture—the soldier to whom she’s engaged reveals his plans to annihilate the village where she was held.
          The heroes try to prevent mass bloodshed, to no avail, so director Ralph Nelson unleashes an incendiary barrage for the movie’s big finish—the raid on the Indian village is filled with graphic violence and intense rape scenes as nature-loving Indians fall victim to monstrous whites. All of this is exactly as heavy-handed as it sounds, even if the underlying message is historically valid. Viewed as a piece of dramatic art, Soldier Blue is a train wreck. But viewed as a window into the concerns of its time, Soldier Blue gains a measure of twisted relevance.

Solider Blue: FREAKY

The Last Movie (1971)

          One of the most notorious auteur misfires of the ’70s, this misbegotten mind-fuck was Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider (1969), the surprise blockbuster that not only transformed Hopper from a journeyman actor to an A-list director but also established him, for a brief time, as a leading voice of the counterculture. Alas, Hopper’s poor choices as an actor, co-writer, and director turned The Last Movie into a metaphor representing the way some people, Hopper included, fell victim to the excesses of the drug era. In trying to escape the constraints associated with conventional cinema, Hopper created a maddening hodgepodge of self-indulgent nonsense and uninteresting experimentation.

          Hopper stars as Kansas, the horse wrangler for a Hollywood film crew that’s shooting on location in Peru. After a fatal on-set accident, Kansas drops out of his Hollywood lifestyle to start over in South America, hooking up with a sexy local girl (Stella Garcia) and scheming with a fellow U.S. expat (Don Gordon) to get rich off a gold mine. Kansas also romances a beautiful upper-crust American (Julie Adams), with whom he engages in gentle sadomasochism, and he gets roped into a bizarre situation involving Peruvian villagers who are “shooting” their own movie using primitive mock-up cameras and microphones made from scrap metal and sticks. (One of The Last Movie’s myriad pretentious allusions is that the “fake” film crew is making more authentic art than the “real” film crew.)

          Simply listing the trippy flourishes in The Last Movie would take an entire website, so a few telling examples should suffice. Early in the picture, a Hollywood starlet (played by Hopper’s then-girlfriend, former Mamas and the Papas singer Michelle Phillips) conducts a ritual during which she pierces a Peruvian woman’s ear with a large pin while people stand around the scene wearing creepy masks and chanting. Later, Kansas leads a group of Americans to a whorehouse, where they watch a grimy girl-on-girl floor show; this inexplicably drives Kansas into such a rage that he ends up slapping around his long-suffering female companion. And we haven’t even gotten to the weird one-shot bits that are periodically inserted into the narrative. At one point, Kansas leans back while a woman shoots breast milk from her nipple to his face. Elsewhere, while getting his hair trimmed, Kansas shares the following random remark: “I never jerked off a horse before.” Good to know.

          The whole movie culminates with a befuddling barrage of images, including scenes of Kansas getting beaten by members of the “fake” film crew, as if the Hollywood runaway is some sort of martyr for art. It’s all very deliberately weird. During the final stretch, for instance, Hopper cuts to silly things like “scene missing” placeholders and outtakes of actors consulting their scripts. The idea, presumably, was to deconstruct Hollywood filmmaking so that a new art form could emerge from the ruins, but Hopper missed the mark in every way. That said, it’s worth noting that Hopper brought interesting friends along for the ride. Cinematographer László Kovács, who also shot Easy Rider, does what he can to infuse Hopper’s scattershot frames with artistry, and the cast includes ’70s cult-cinema stalwart Severn Darden (who does a musical number!) as well as maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, who plays a version of himself during the scenes depicting the making of the Hollywood movie.

The Last Movie: FREAKY

Message from Space (1978)

          If you’ve ever wondered what Star Wars (1977) would have been like if George Lucas had stimulated his imagination by consuming massive doses of hallucinogens, then you should definitely check out Message from Space. A Japanese production with some scenes performed in English by Hollywood actors, this effects-driven fantasy/sci-fi epic comprises 105 minutes of complete brain-blasting weirdness. Individual elements within the film are straight-up crazy, and Message from Space unfolds at a frenetic pace while juxtaposing incompatible images with stream-of-consciousness abandon.

          Things get surreal right from the start. Out in space, some bizarre planet inhabited by tree people (as in, leaves apparently growing out of their bodies) becomes imperiled by the evil designs of a wizard/king/robot/whatever, so the chief of the tree people sends glowing seeds into space to find saviors. A princess from the tree planet also joins the search, zooming through the stars in a tall ship complete with oars and sails. Eventually, the seeds (and the princess) gather a band of “heroes” including a recently discharged military officer (Vic Morrow), a gang of interstellar hot-rodders, and others. All of this is set to a hyperactive music score dominated by a motif that’s blatantly stolen from John Williams’ score for Star Wars.

          Director Kinji Fukasaku shoots nearly every scene with the kind of ADD camerawork you might normally expect to encounter in a skateboarding video, and the movie’s production design suffers from a major case of multiple personality disorder. Some costumes and sets seem germane to a hippy-dippy fairy tale, some seem yanked from a medieval drama, and others suggest a disco-era gay-culture fantasia—seriously, what’s with the dancers flitting around in spangly g-strings and rainbow-colored crystalline breastplates? Yet describing the picture’s look doesn’t begin to communicate the strangeness of Message from Space.

          Consider the scene of Meia (Peggy Lee Brennan), who’s some sort of groupie associated with the hot-rodders, floating around in open space—wearing no protective gear except a ventilator—so she can catch “fireflies” that turn to rocks when captured. Or consider the long sequence featuring a Disney-style wicked witch who poisons several of the “heroes” so she can force the princess to marry her son—a giant monster with a lizard head who perversely threatens the princess with a laser whip until bad-guy stormtroopers intervene. And we haven’t even gotten to the villain’s Lady Macbeth-style mommy—she’s a heavily made-up ghoul/witch/zombie thing who tools around in a wheelchair that looks like it’s built from human bones.

          Morrow, the only recognizable Hollywood actor in the picture, strolls through the whole crazy mess trying to cut a dashing figure as a gentleman soldier, but his straight-arrow routine belongs in a different movie. (It’s hard to take Morrow seriously when he shares scenes with a grade-Z C3P0 knockoff named “Beba-2,” who spews lines like, “No robot can forget your kindness to robotkind.”) It’s no wonder that Message from Space has built a minor cult following over the years, because watching the movie from an ironic perspective—or while stoned—probably makes for a better experience than trying to accept Message from Space at face value.

Message from Space: FREAKY

The Big Doll House (1971) & Women in Cages (1971) & The Big Bird Cage (1972)

          Overflowing with gratuitous nudity, sadistic violence, and various iterations of sexual abuse, this trio of babes-behind-bars pictures—which were filmed together in the Philippines and share many actors, but which do not comprise a continued narrative—is trashy in the worst way. The movies are also, surprisingly, quite boring. The first flick, The Big Doll House, sets the numbing tone. After sexy blonde Alcott (Roberta Collins) gets thrown into a primitive Filipino prison overseen by perverse warden Miss Dietrich (Christine Schmidtmer), Alcott runs into hassles with cellmates including tough-talking African-American Grear (Pam Grier). The movie features myriad ugly scenes of Alcott being fondled by a swarthy cook (played by B-movie staple Sid Haig), being tortured by the warden’s goons, and/or trudging through catfights with Grear. (The ladies’ climactic battle is fought in a puddle of mud, with the combatants wearing only panties and tank tops.) The slim narrative involves Alcott uniting her fellow inmates for an audacious escape, but the story is really just an excuse for generating scenes of women in demeaning situations. And while Collins, Grier, and their cronies are attractive, the movie is so crass that it’s hard to find much enjoyment in director Jack Hill’s tacky take on titillation. That said, blaxploitation fans may find The Big Doll House interesting simply because it features Grier’s first major role. Her acting is dodgy, but Grier is so committed that she even sings the theme song, an R&B thumper called “Long Time Woman.”

          The second picture in the cycle, Women in Cages, is a decidedly weird type of drive-in sludge. Scored with dirge-like music and featuring such a fragmented storyline that the movie feels more like a series of torture vignettes than a proper narrative, Women in Cages comprises 81 minutes of nearly unadulterated brutality. The gist of the piece is that a political prisoner (Jennifer Gan) gets tossed into jail and rallies her cellmates for an escape. The lovely Collins is back, in a florid supporting role as a heroin-addicted inmate tasked with murdering a fellow prisoner—her methods include loosing a snake into a cell, poisoning a sandwich, and tossing acid onto her intended victim. Grier switches to full-on villain mode, playing a psychotic matron who runs her own personal torture garden. Grier’s performance is bug-eyed and silly, but the actress participates in the movie’s best dialogue exchange: After one of Grier’s victims asks, “What hell did you crawl out of,” Grier replies, “Harlem!” Given the lack of a compelling storyline, it doesn’t really matter that leading lady Gan is inept; this one’s all about grooving on seedy textures.

          The best of these three movies, though it’s not saying much, is The Big Bird Cage, which benefits from an action-packed climax and lots of wink-wink jokes. This one stars icy beauty Anitra Ford as an American who sleeps with political figures for social advantage until a misunderstanding lands her in the slammer. Grier and Haig play revolutionaries who pursue the oddball idea of freeing inmates from prison and transforming them into fellow revolutionaries. Written and directed by The Big Doll House’s Jack Hill, who brought more pizzazz to this skeevy genre the second time around, The Big Bird Cage has several interesting gimmicks, such as the presence of a giant sugar mill in the prison yard; the mill is the “Big Bird Cage” of the title, because workers toil inside the towering structure. The picture also benefits from campy humor, usually involving Haig doing something outrageous. (At one point, he masquerades as a swishy homosexual.) Leading lady Ford has a beguilingly reserved quality—she’s the Faye Dunaway of grindhouse cinema—and Grier locks into a groove playing a gun-toting mama with a smart mouth. In fact, of the three pictures, The Big Bird Cage comes closest to delivering the full Pam Grier persona that blaxploitation fans know and love.

The Big Doll House: LAME

Women in Cages: FREAKY
The Big Bird Cage: FUNKY

Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song (1971)

          The lore of Melvin Van Peebles’ breakthrough picture is well known, especially since the maverick auteur’s son, Mario Van Peebles, made an entire movie about the creation of Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song. As it happens, Mario’s highly entertaining behind-the-scenes flick, Badasssss!(2003), is much more accessible than Melvin’s guerilla-style original, in part because Mario’s narrative juxtaposes the overwrought subject matter of Sweet Sweetback with amazing tales about the obstacles Melvin surmounted to get the picture completed.

          That said, Sweet Sweetback occupies a unique place in both film history and sociopolitical history. Perhaps more than any other movie made by an African-American director in the ’70s, Sweet Sweetback captures the rage of the Black Power era by presenting a grim parable about a dude who fights back after getting fucked over by The Man. Sweet Sweetback was famously embraced by members of the Black Panther Party during early screenings, and this groundswell of support helped transform a scrappy little underground project into a surprise hit—despite being made for just $150,000, the movie grossed more than $15 million.

          Melvin Van Peebles’ storyline is lurid and nasty. In a brief prologue, young Mario plays the title character as a teenaged orphan—Sweetback earns his nickname by demonstrating tremendous sexual powers while losing his virginity in an L.A. whorehouse. After the movie cuts to the present, Melvin takes over the title role. (In addition to starring, he wrote, produced, directed, and scored the movie.) Now grown into a regular performer at the whorehouse who impresses crowds with his size and stamina while screwing in public, Sweetback is stuck in a degrading life cycle. Naturally, things get worse. Through a convoluted series of events, Sweetback gets framed for a murder and handcuffed to a Black Panther named Mu-Mu (Hubert Scales). Eventually, Sweetback and Mu-Mu escape police custody, resulting in an extended chase. By the climax of the movie, Sweetback makes a solo run for the Mexican border, surviving through the support of black strangers and, at regular intervals, by trading sex for patronage from women.

          Viewed through the most forgiving lens, Sweet Sweetback is a revolutionary fable that both employs and subverts clichés about African-American male identity. It’s also, unmistakably, a call for open revolution—if not necessarily violent uprisings, then at the very least angry protests against the racially imbalanced status quo. Because the picture is so politically charged, appraising Sweet Sweetback’s merits as a cinematic experience is something of a pointless endeavor—rather than being pure entertainment, Sweet Sweetback is an incendiary statement.

          And, indeed, Melvin’s politics are more evolved than his filmmaking skills. Certain segments of Sweet Sweetback have great power thanks to the use of trippy montages accompanied by dense sound design, and some scenes pack a punch simply because they contain so much sex and violence. But while the director/star brings innate tough-guy charisma to his leading performance, the supporting cast mostly comprises nonactors, giving many scenes an amateurish quality. Further, the camerawork is dodgy, with lots of grainy shots and hard-to-read nighttime photography. Yet in the end, it’s the attitude of Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song that makes the movie so unique, and that loud-and-proud perspective is characterized by a provocative slogan on the movie’s poster: “Rated X by an All-White Jury.”

Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song: FREAKY

Flesh Gordon (1974)

          Although it’s not the out-and-out porn film its reputation might suggest, Flesh Gordon is a cheerfully filthy spoof of the old Flash Gordon movie serials—the picture tries to blend satire with titillation by bombarding viewers with crude jokes, nudity, and sex scenes. The movie is quite awful, of course, but it moves along at a breakneck speed and, in its best moments, approaches an anything-goes party vibe that suggests a low-rent version of the comedy style perfected a few years later by the makers of Airplane!(1980). Obviously, the big difference is that the makers of Airplane! had real actors and a real budget, to say nothing of the fact that the Airplane!team didn’t have to interrupt their movie periodically for lingering close-ups of genitalia.

          The plot of Flesh Gordonis adapted from the first Flash Gordonserial, released in 1938 and starring Buster Crabbe. (Another version of the very same plot was employed for the big-budget Flash Gordon movie released in 1980.) When Earth is bombarded by a sex ray from outer space, which drives victims to uncontrolled lust, dashing adventurer Flesh Gordon (Jason Williams), his new girlfriend Dale Ardor (Suzanne Fields), and kooky scientist Dr. Flexi Jerkoff (Joseph Hudgins) fly into space to find the source of the sex ray and save the Earth. Arriving on the planet Porno, the heroes battle minions of evil Emperor Wang the Perverted (William Dennis Hunt), along the way encountering monsters and other fantastic creatures. This being a sex comedy, those fantastic creatures include the flamboyantly gay prince (Lance Larsen) of a men-in-tights troupe and the Amazonian leader (Candy Samples) of a lesbian cult.

          Ninety-nine percent of the jokes in Flesh Gordon are painfully stupid, the performances are terrible, and the editing is so choppy that some scenes appear as if from nowhere. However, writer/co-director Michael Benveniste and his collaborators cleverly shield themselves from legitimate criticism by framing the movie as a campy goof—the worse the acting gets, the better. Yet some aspects of the picture run perilously close to real filmmaking. For instance, the flick includes several elaborate scenes of stop-motion animation fused with live-action, leading to Harryhausen-style scenes of real actors fighting stop-motion monsters. This stuff is executed fairly well, given the budget constraints.

          That said, the way Flesh Gordon devotes long stretches of screen time to pure adventure would seem sure to infuriate the heavy-breathing crowd more interested in Flesh than Gordon. But then again, that’s why Flesh Gordon is so peculiar—it’s a kiddie movie for pervs. Consider this amusingly infantile chant, delivered by bottomless cheerleaders (!) in Wang’s palace: “Emperor Wang is the one for me—without him, the planet Porno would be ever so forlorn-o.” Or consider the very strange finale, which involves a giant, cloven-hooved monster who chases after the heroes while speaking in smooth, lounge-lizard patter. (Craig T. Nelson, the only familiar actor involved with the project, voices the monster in one of his earliest film performances, though he’s not credited.)

          FYI, there are two versions of Flesh Gordon in circulation. The original 78-minute version carried an X-rating, even though it’s not hardcore, and the 90-minute version available on home video is unrated. In the 90-minute version, the only full-on porn action involves a few extras making out on the periphery of crowd shots. Oh, and one more thing: Howard Ziehm, who co-directed and co-produced Flesh Gordon, resuscitated the character by directing a 1989 sequel, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders, with an almost entirely new cast. Suffice to say the picture was not well received.

Flesh Gordon: FREAKY

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977)

          A dark meditation on the Sexual Revolution that caroms wildly between sensitive vignettes and overwrought climaxes, Looking for Mr. Goodbar divided audiences during its original release but has since attained cult-movie notoriety, especially because, as of this writing, it has yet to be released on DVD or Blu-Ray. (Falling into obscurity often boosts a once-popular film’s reputation.) Adapted from a best-selling novel by Judith Rossner and written and directed by uncompromising auteur Richard Brooks, the movie is a cautionary tale, but it’s not entirely clear what Brooks wants to caution viewers against. Sometimes, it seems as if he’s castigating his lead character, a young professional woman with a wild sex life, for the sin of seeking physical fulfillment. At other times, it seems as if the villain of the piece is the lead character’s recklessness. And thanks to a gruesome narrative turn during the story’s third act, an implication is communicated that homosexuality is a malignant societal force. Suffice to say, the sexual politics of the movie have not aged well.

        Yet certain elements of the picture probably seemed damned weird right from the get-go—consider the awkward device of grown-up star Diane Keaton playing her character during college scenes, or such surrealistic flourishes as the trippy visual effect that’s featured during the final shots of the movie. In fact, Brooks takes a gonzo storytelling approach from start to finish simply by pitching the intensity level of key scenes absurdly high. Were it not for the supple textures of Keaton’s performance, Looking for Mr. Goodbar would feel like a cartoon, albeit a nihilistic one.

          The story follows Teresa (Keaton), a good girl from a religious New York City-area family, as she matures professionally and sexually. Following an eye-opening dalliance with her college professor, Teresa takes a job as a teacher at a school for deaf children, so right from the beginning of this young woman’s journey, her intellectual and physical lives are intertwined. Teresa’s older sister, Katherine (Tuesday Weld), is a high-strung swinger who gets in too deep with a sexually adventurous man, but instead of being frightened by Katherine’s experiences, Teresa is titillated.
          Soon, Teresa enters the swinger world and gets involved with men including Tony (Richard Gere), a small-time crook who introduces Teresa to cocaine. (One memorably campy scene features Tony, jacked up on blow, doing push-ups in Teresa’s apartment while wearing nothing but a jockstrap.) Teresa also becomes involved with James (William Atherton), a social worker who represents a “safe” choice of romantic partner. However, she shuns his old-fashioned normalcy in favor of freakier delights. Eventually, Teresa’s sexual wanderlust lands her in bed with Gary (Tom Berenger), a sexually confused young man with a prison record, which instigates the movie’s infamous final scene.

          Looking for Mr. Goodbar is strange on many levels, but the most noteworthy cinematic disharmony is the rift between the story Brooks is telling and the one Keaton is telling. Brooks delivers every narrative assertion with an exclamation point, eschewing subtlety for hand-wringing histrionics. Meanwhile, Keaton does extraordinary work, imbuing her performance with naturalism and spontaneity. In essence, Brooks tries to make a Grand Statement while Keaton sketches a character study. This has the effect of making Keaton feel separate from the rest of the movie, especially when Gere over-acts his way through a ridiculous performance that Brooks should have restrained. And while supporting players including Atherton, Richard Kiley, and Priscilla Pointer all deliver competent work, the only actor who achieves the same level of nuance as Keaton is Weld, a perpetually underutilized daredevil of a performer who is capable of incandescence in the right context. (Her work in this movie earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.) Ultimately, Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a uniquely disjointed movie—part melodrama, part tragedy, and part oh-so-’70s bummer phantasmagoria.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar: FREAKY

Fools’ Parade (1971)

          A weird adventure story depicting the exploits of three ex-cons traveling through Depression-era West Virginia, Fools’ Parade features such a delicate combination of eccentric characterizations and literary contrivances that it would have taken a director of tremendous artistry to pull the pieces together into a coherent whole. Alas, Andrew V. McLaglen is not such a director. Because he presents the story with the same brisk, unvarnished style with which he made several entertaining action films, the peculiar nuances of Fools’ Parade end up feeling completely false. So while the movie is watchable thanks to the novelty of familiar actors playing offbeat scenes, Fools’ Parade isn’t satisfying—the execution is too straight for fans of idiosyncratic cinema, and the storyline is unlikely to thrill people who prefer conventional narratives.

          Jimmy Stewart stars as Mattie Appleyard, a recently paroled inmate who accrued $25,000 in back pay through 40 years of hard labor behind bars. Mattie has gathered a surrogate family of fellow ex-cons, including Lee Cottrill (Strother Martin), a nervous would-be storekeeper, and Johnny Jesus (Kurt Russell), a naïve youth. The trio’s goal of starting a business together hits a roadblock when they realize their former jailor, a psycho named “Doc” Council (George Kennedy), has conspired to prevent Mattie from safely cashing his $25,000 check. This circumstance precipitates a battle of wills between the ex-cons and their once and future oppressor, who chases after them with gun-toting henchmen. There’s also a subplot involving a blowsy madam (Anne Baxter) and a reluctant prostitute (Kathy Cannon), plus another subplot involving a corrupt banker (David Huddleston) who’s in cahoots with Council.

          Fools’ Parade was based on a book by Davis Grubb, who also wrote the source material for the 1955 cult classic The Night of the Hunter. This is arch material, but McLaglen plays the story straight, missing opportunities for irony, satire, and whimsy. Only the action scenes really work, at least in the conventional sense. Another issue is the clunky dialogue by screenwriter James Lee Barrett, much of which the normally excellent Huddleston is forced to deliver; Huddleston is little more than an exposition machine here.

          Despite these fatal flaws, Fools’ Parade is mildly arresting. Watching Stewart play a stately crook who does things like yank his glass eye from his skull in order to tell fortunes is bracing. Martin squirms through one of his signature performances as a Southern-fried oddball. And Russell plays every moment with the same gee-whiz sincerity he brought to myriad Disney flicks in the early ’70s. Yet Kennedy delivers the movie’s most extravagant performance. Wearing grime over his teeth and wire-rimmed glasses over his face, the bulky actor hunches over like a troglodyte and drags out utterances in the vocal style a tweaked country preacher. His acting is spectacularly bad. (Baxter almost matches him for over-the-top stagecraft, especially since she wears garish whore makeup.) It’s hard to imagine how or why Fools’ Paradegot made, since it must have been nearly as strange on paper as it is on screen. After all, the climax features a sight gag involving a lovable dog fetching a stick of lit dynamite. However, these bizarre flourishes make Fools’ Parade a curio—one can only marvel that the movie exists.

Fools’ Parade: FREAKY

The Day of the Locust (1975)

          In terms of artistic ambition and physical scale, The Day of the Locust is easily one of the most impressive studio movies of the ’70s. Working with first-class collaborators including cinematographer Conrad Hall, director John Schlesinger did a remarkable job of re-imagining ’30s Hollywood as a dark phantasmagoria comprising endless variations of debauchery, desire, despair, disappointment, and, finally, death. As a collection of subtexts and surfaces, The Day of the Locust is beyond reproach.

          Alas, something bigger and deeper must be present in order to hold disparate elements together, and even though Schlesinger’s film was adapted from a book many regard as one of the great literary achievements of the 20th century, The Day of the Locustlacks a unifying force. Schlesinger and his team strive so desperately to make a Big Statement that the movie sinks into pretentious grandiosity, and Schlesinger’s choice to present every character as a grotesque makes The Day of the Locust little more than an exquisitely rendered freak show.

          Novelist Nathanael West based his 1939 book The Day of the Locust on his own experiences as a writer in ’30s Hollywood, capturing the has-beens, never-weres, and wanna-bes living on the fringes of the film industry. West’s book is deeply metaphorical, with much of its power woven into the fabric of wordplay. So, while screenwriter Waldo Salt’s adaptation of The Day of the Locust is admirable for striving to capture subtle components of West’s book, the effort was doomed from the start—some of the images West conjures are so arch that when presented literally onscreen, they seem overwrought. Plus, the basic story suffers from unrelenting gloominess.

          While employed at a movie studio and hoping to rise through the art-direction ranks, Tod Hackett (William Atherton) moves into an apartment complex and becomes fascinated with his sexy neighbor, actress Faye Greener (Karen Black). Loud, opportunistic, and teasing, Faye accepts Tod’s affections while denying his love, even though Tod befriends Faye’s drunken father, a clown-turned-traveling salesman named Harry Greener (Burgess Meredith). Meanwhile, Faye meets and seduces painfully shy accountant Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), who foolishly believes he can domesticate Faye. The storyline also involves a hard-partying dwarf, a borderline-sociopathic child actor, a lecherous studio executive, and loathsome movie extras who stage illegal cockfights.

          The narrative pushes these characters together and pulls them apart in wavelike rhythms that work on the page but not on the screen. And in the end, ironic circumstances cause Hollywood to erupt in a hellish riot.

          Considering that Schlesinger’s film career up to this point mostly comprised such tiny character studies as Darling(1965) and Midnight Cowboy (1969), it’s peculiar that he felt compelled to mount a production of such gigantic scale, and it’s a shame that his excellent work in constructing individual moments gets overwhelmed by the movie’s bloated weirdness. In fact, nearly every scene has flashes of brilliance, but The Day of the Locust wobbles awkwardly between moments that don’t completely work because they’re too blunt and ones that don’t completely work because they’re too subtle. Predictably, actors feel the brunt of this uneven storytelling. Atherton gets the worst of it, simply because he lacks a leading man’s charisma, and Black’s characterization is so extreme she’s unpleasant to watch. Meredith’s heart-rending vulnerability gets obscured behind the silly overacting that Schlesinger clearly encourages, and Sutherland’s performance is so deliberately bizarre that it borders on camp, even though he displays fierce emotional commitment.

The Day of the Locust: FREAKY

3 Women (1977)

          Deliberately opaque and sluggishly paced, 3 Women represents maverick auteur Robert Altman’s filmmaking at its least accessible. With its clinical depiction of weird behavior and its cringe-inducing storyline about an odd young woman coveting the existence of a fellow misfit, 3 Women is a cinematic cousin to Ingmar Bergman’s personality-transfer psychodrama Persona (1966). The difference, of course, is that Personamakes sense. Written, produced, and directed by Altman, 3 Women a thriller with heavily surrealistic elements, so the actual narrative matters less than the sick stuff crawling beneath the surface. Further, Altman has said that the film came to him as a dream, and these roots are evident in the way Altman strings together bizarre signifiers—the movie’s random components include a speechless woman who paints epic murals on the base of a swimming pool, a middle-aged dude whose claim to fame is having been the stunt double for TV cowboy Hugh O’Brien, and a pair of bitchy twins.

          Set in a dusty town in rural California, the picture begins when spooky-eyed young waif Pinky (Sissy Spacek) shows up for her first day of work at an aquatic rehab center for seniors. (Cue grotesque shots of aging thighs descending into water.) Assigned to mentor Pinky is gangly chatterbox Millie (Shelley Duvall), who inexplicably believes herself irresistible to friends and suitors alike, even though she’s constantly mocked and rebuffed. Pinky gravitates to Millie, and the two become roommates. (Cue weird sequence of touring a semi-abandoned Old West theme park near Millie’s apartment building.) As the story drags on—and on and on—Pinky covertly studies her roommate and does little things to screw with Millie’s existence, until finally the women arrive at some strange new level of understanding.

          As for what exactly that new level of understanding comprises, your guess is as good as mine; even Altman has admitted he doesn’t know what the picture’s ending means.

          3 Women is filled with ominous textures, such as guttural music cues and, at one point, an extended, impressionistic montage of murder scenes and trippy artwork. There’s also a recurring motif of vignettes seen through a veil of water, as if the story’s events occur at some unknowable depth of consciousness. 3 Women is catnip for viewers who crave ferociously individualistic cinema, because there’s no mistaking this ethereal symphony for an ordinary movie. And, indeed, the picture has many respectable admirers: Roger Ebert is a fan, and after a long period in which the film was commercially unavailable, it was released on DVD by the Criterion Collection.

          That said, is the movie actually worth watching for mere mortals? Depends on what rocks your world. I found 3 Women pointless and tedious, little more than self-indulgent regurgitation of personal dream imagery. Yet I admit that I rarely enjoy movies lacking grounded narratives, and that I have mixed feelings about Altman’s tendency to pick the scabs of human strangeness. However, the strength of a movie like 3 Women is that it’s a different experience for every viewer—where I saw only ugliness, you may find beauty.

3 Women: FREAKY

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. (1970)

          Also known as Gas-s-s-s, this absurdist riff on the generation gap is a willdly imaginative movie that somehow fails to sustain interest even at its brief running time of 79 minutes. Written by George Armitage, who later channeled his weird narrative impulses into eccentric action pictures (notably the bizarre 1976 flick Vigilante Force), this picture was produced and directed by Roger Corman, as always an adventurous exploiter/explorer of youth culture. The story is a sci-fi lark that takes place after a chemical that was accidentally released into the atmosphere by the military/industrial complex has killed everyone in the world over the age of 25. The surviving kids rebuild a funhouse-mirror version of modern society, and the movie follows a gaggle of hip youths in their search for a place to settle.

          Along the way, Our Intrepid Heroes encounter gangs that have organized in strange ways, like the fascistic warmongers who behave and dress like a football team, or the automobile scavengers who “shoot” victims by aiming guns and shouting the names of cowboy-movie actors. (Best line in this scene: “Maybe I could’ve just winged him with a Dale Robertson or a Clint Eastwood.”) Among the movie’s myriad problems is the fact that it meanders through silly episodes and never defines its leading characters as individuals. There’s nothing human for viewers to grasp. Plus, many of the bits tip over the edge from irreverence into pointless surrealism. For instance, hippie characters engage in sex play by reciting “erotic” words to each other, and the apex of this practice is the invention of the word “arrowfeather.” One must admire Armitage’s imaginativeness, but there’s something to be said for using the rewriting process to focus flights of fancy into a coherent storyline with logic, momentum, and purpose. Gas! feels like something yanked straight from the head of a writer, without benefit of translation so others can play along.

          Still, the movie has a handful of genuinely tart lines. At one point, a motorcycle-riding Edgar Allen Poe (Bruce Karcher) shows up to warn the young heroes, “Now that you are sole heir to our world, you will have every opportunity to achieve wickedness.” In a more substantial context, this might have had more impact, but in Gas! laudatory elements get subsumed into the overall blur of trippy signifiers. (Corman reuses some of his favorite ’60s image-making gimmicks, including the projection of psychedelic film images onto undulating actors during a love scene.) Beyond its abundant strangeness, Gas! is noteworthy for the appearance of three future B-level stars—Talia Shire (billed as “Tally Coppola”), Ben Vereen, and Cindy Williams all play their first significant film roles here.

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.: FREAKY

Cockfighter (1974)

          The strangest thing about Cockfighter is simply that it exists. A meditative character piece about a Southern drifter who makes his life training chickens for death matches with other chickens—and who, for most of the movie, refuses to speak—Cockfighter is daring even by the standards of offbeat ’70s American cinema, if only by dint of the storyline’s inherent ugliness. Did anyone involved in the picture believe that broad audiences would be able to sympathize with a protagonist who leads animals to slaughter for sport and profit? But that’s the ’70s for you, a wild time when brash young filmmakers somehow got funding to put the inner lives of society’s freaks onto the screen. And, indeed, the inner life of Frank Mansfield (Warren Oates) is very much the subject of Cockfighter, which was adapted by Charles Willeford from his novel of the same name. Frank is a self-destructive iconoclast who takes such crazy pride in his skills that he bets all his assets on his feathered killers, then suffers in silence when things don’t go his way.

          At the beginning of the picture, Frank is partway through a long, grueling odyssey to regain his pride. We learn, via flashbacks and narration, that after Frank lost a crucial match some time ago, he swore himself to silence unless he won the Cockfighter of the Year medal. In the grungy universe of this movie, Frank and his colleagues work an underground circuit of formal and informal matches, all of which are governed by an unyielding code of honor. So, just as we see Frank earn the respect of his peers by taking losses gracefully, we see minor characters excoriated for defying accepted methods. In one gruesome scene, for instance, a redneck trainer named Junior (Steve Railsback) gets disqualified for agitating a bird by inserting his (Junior’s) fingers into the bird’s anus. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie—sort of.

          While the content of Cockfighteris frequently repulsive, the actual images are artful, except, of course, during the actual fighting scenes (many of which are filmed in horrific slow-motion). As directed by Monte Hellman, who earned a cult following in the ’70s for his heavily metaphorical character studies, Cockfighteris memorable but undisciplined. Some episodes in the story feel germane while others feel superfluous. Additionally, the portrayal of women in Frank’s life is confounding, since it’s hard to tell whether Frank’s a romantic or a son of a bitch. Further, the movie’s occasional leaps into redneck humor feel out of step with the overall lyrical vibe. Yet Oates is a fascinating presence, as always, his hangdog features perfectly suited for an outsider character with a savage streak, and the invaluable Harry Dean Stanton enlivens several scenes as Frank’s preening, scheming pal. Cockfighter is an odd beast for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that the movie is both simplistic and complex—on one level, it’s a superficial exploitation flick, and on another, it’s a ballad of loneliness. With a lot of foul-tempered fowl.

Cockfighter: FREAKY

A Boy and His Dog (1975)

          Based on a story by revered sci-fi scribe Harlan Ellison, this cult-fave saga takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland—Ellison’s narrative contrives an alternate reality in which John F. Kennedy survived the events of November 22, 1963, with major ripple effects on history. In 2024, survivors wander the desolated Earth, struggling for food and water. The protagonist (not really a hero) is dim-witted teenager Vic (Don Johnson), who roams the American Southwest accompanied only by Blood, his genius-level telepathic pooch. Blood “speaks” via voiceover performed by actor Tim McIntire. Blood and Vic travel together because the boy’s physical strength and the dog’s mental abilities make them a formidable unit. As the weird story progresses, Blood and Vic end up in a subterranean community called Topeka, where Vic gets involved with Quilla (Suzanne Benton), the daughter of underground overlord Lou (Jason Robards), a boisterous megalomaniac.

          Even by comparison with earlier sequences that feature killer mutants and talking dogs, the underground bits in A Boy and His Dog are insane. Most of the Topeka residents wear garish mime makeup, and the culture beneath the Earth’s surface is built around sexless procreation. (Men get strapped to machines that extract sperm—fun!) Describing the full plot of A Boy and His Dog is more work than it’s worth, partly because the story is so complicated and partly because the mysteries of this unique film should not be revealed. Suffice to say,  A Boy and His Dog is not for every taste. Some viewers will find it too confusing, some will find it too odd, and some will find it too pretentiously allegorical. Furthermore, the film’s extremes are exacerbated by narrative and technical shortcomings.

          L.Q. Jones, a veteran character actor known mostly for Westerns (including Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 classic The Wild Bunch), directed, co-wrote, and co-produced the movie—one of only three completed projects he helmed—and he’s shaky behind the camera. The movie has visual flair, since bizarre post-apocalyptic environments are inherently interesting, but do the various elements hang together comfortably? Not really. The movie toggles between bleak drama, high comedy, and wicked satire, never settling on a consistent tone, and the final scene (which won’t be spoiled here) kicks the film into truly demented terrain. Plus, since Johnson is not a powerhouse actor, it’s odd that the most dynamic performance in the film is given by McIntire, who never appears onscreen; his impassioned vocal work, portraying every dimension of Blood’s perversely complicated personality, nearly pulls the picture together.

A Boy and His Dog: FREAKY