Cisco Pike (1972)

          During the early ’70s, one of the most happening scenes in the music business revolved around the Troubadour club in West Hollywood, the watering hole of choice for folks like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt. Perhaps no single narrative movie captures the texture of this scene better than Cisco Pike, which tells the story of a rock star who turns to dealing grass when his career goes cold. Starring singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson in his first acting role, Cisco Pike exudes atmosphere and authenticity as the storyline winds through nightclubs, recording studios, and the streets of Los Angeles—at its best, the movie almost feels like a documentary capturing what it was like to be high on tunes (and weed) in the City of Angels during a transitional moment between the idealism of the late ’60s and the decadence of the late ’70s.

          The weird part, though, is that Cisco Pike isn’t really a story about the music business. It’s a crime thriller exploring what happens when the title character gets into a hassle with a whacked-out cop who’s playing both sides of the law. The basic story involves an LAPD psycho named Leo Holland (Gene Hackman) forcing rocker-turned-recidivist Cisco (Kristofferson) to sell a huge trove of pot that’s fallen into Holland’s hands. In shaking down his old music-industry contacts for cash, Cisco finds out which friends have integrity and thereby arrives at a new but unsettling understanding of his place in the world. Thanks to this offbeat storyline, viewers can consume Cisco Pike several different ways. For instance, it’s possible to groove on the picture as a nostalgia trip, and it’s also possible to enjoy the narrative’s mild suspense.

          What makes film so rich, besides the colorful details woven into writer-director Bill L. Norton’s script and the extensive location photography, is the lively cast. Beyond Kristofferson, who exudes such powerful natural charisma that he subsequently became a movie star, Cisco Pike benefits from Hackman giving an energetically weird performance as the dirty cop, as well as Harry Dean Stanton blending humor and pathos as the title character’s once-and-future singing partner. The picture also features ’70s stalwarts Allan Arbus, Karen Black, Roscoe Lee Browne, Antonio Fargas, Howard Hesseman, and Severn Darden. For some fans, however, the highlight is a cameo by real-life rocker Doug Sahm, who plays a campy riff on himself—rhapsodizing about the virtues of great ganja and spewing subliterate hipster jive about music, he epitomizes the far-out vibe of stoned ’70s rock.

          It’s easy to find flaws with Cisco Pike, because the movie’s energy is fairly low and because Norton’s filmmaking style is way more conventional than, say, Dennis Hopper’s mind-bending approach, which might have suited this milieu better. But considering how many interesting things Cisco Pike presents in its 95 minutes, complaining that it could have been a stronger picture seems petty.

Cisco Pike: GROOVY

Scarecrow (1973)

          Given its casting, pedigree, and subject matter, Scarecrowsounds like an automatic addition to the Mount Olympus of ’70s cinema. It’s a downbeat road movie about two vagabonds ineptly pursuing small dreams, the vagabonds are played by Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, the film was directed by adventurous humanist Jerry Schatzberg, and the cinematography is by the extraordinary Vilmos Zsigmond. Yet while the movie has a lovely intimacy, it doesn’t linger in the memory anywhere near as much as it should. That said, Scarecrow is near-essential viewing for fans of this period in American cinema simply because it exudes integrity and contains strong but obscure performances by two of the best actors America has ever produced. Although Hackman and Pacino each did better work in other films (because other films gave them better raw material from which to craft performances), it’s still a tremendous pleasure to watch these remarkable men amplify and complement each other’s talents.

          Hackman plays Max, a volatile ex-con traveling like a hobo from California to Pennsylvania, where he plans to open a car wash. (Whether Max actually has the financial or managerial wherewithal to realize his dream is one of the film’s many richly ambiguous elements.) Max becomes traveling companions with Lionel Delbuchi (Pacino), a former sailor who approaches life with boyish exuberance; barely more than a simpleton, Lionel believes there’s almost no problem a good joke can’t solve. One of the inherent shortcomings of George Michael White’s script is that the Max/Lionel friendship always feels a bit contrived; their bond is more narratively convenient than purely organic. Nonetheless, Hackman and Pacino lend as much credibility to the relationship as possible, even when the characters behave in predictable ways—Lionel rarely steps outside his man-child persona, and Max keeps getting into stupid brawls even though he seems, in other respects, like a mature human being with real self-awareness. The film also suffers from the inherently episodic nature of most road movies.

          Therefore, it’s almost all about the acting. Hackman is explosive and haunted and tender all at once, demonstrating his unique gift for incarnating emotionally conflicted men, and Pacino—though a bit over the top, thanks to a set of indulgent physical tics—creates many resonant moments. Supporting players Eileen Brennan, Richard Lynch, and Ann Wedgeworth lend strong atmosphere as well, though their characters border on being clichéd movie-hick grotesques. Former photographer Schatzberg and master cinematographer Zsigmond capture all of these lively performances in artful frames that showcase grungy locations and meticulous production design, so the physicality of the movie feels real even when the dramaturgy slips into artificiality.

Scarecrow: GROOVY

Night Moves (1975)

          Complementing outright throwbacks such as Chinatown (1974), several ’70s thrillers updated classic film-noir style with modern characters, settings, and themes. Arthur Penn’s Night Moves is among the best of these current-day noirs, featuring a small-time detective who has seen too much misery to muster any real hope for the human species. Nonetheless, like all the best noir heroes, he strives to do something good as a way of compensating for all the bad in the world, and thus ironically dooms not only himself but also the very people he’s trying to protect. Penn, whose erratic feature career peaked with a run of counterculture-themed pictures spanning from Bonnie and Clyde(1967) to this film, was at his best orchestrating subtle interactions between complicated characters, and he does a terrific job in Night Moves of meshing bitter tonalities.

          A seething Gene Hackman stars as low-rent L.A. investigator Harry Moseby. An amiable idealist whose principles alienate him from the compromisers who surround him, Harry is married to Ellen (Susan Clark), who wants him to shutter his one-man agency and work for a big firm. Preferring to steer his own course, Harry focuses on his next case, which involves tracking down teen runaway Delly (Melanie Griffith), the daughter of a blowsy widow (Janet Ward) who, a lifetime ago, was a promiscuous Hollywood starlet. During downtime between investigative chores, Harry discovers that Ellen is cheating on him, so he’s only too happy to follow a lead on Delly’s whereabouts to Florida, a continent away from his troubled marriage. In the sweaty Florida Keys, Harry finds Delly living with her lecherous stepfather, Tom (John Crawford), and his sexy companion, Paula (Jennifer Warren). Also part of the mix is Quentin (James Woods), a squirrelly friend of Delly’s who works as a mechanic for film-industry stuntmen.

          Alan Sharp’s provocative script features murky plotting but crisp character work, so even when the story is hard to follow, moment-to-moment engagement between people is interesting. And since the film is driven by Harry’s zigzag journey from naïveté to despair and then to a misguided sort of optimism, each time he encounters some tricky new piece of information, his relationship with someone changes. Though Hackman was never one to play for cheap sympathy, it’s heartbreaking to watch Harry cast about for someone who deserves his trust, only to be disappointed again and again.

          Every performance in the movie exists in the shadow of Hackman’s great work, but all of the actors hit the right notes, with Griffith’s adolescent petulance resonating strongly. Composer Michael Small and cinematographer Bruce Surtees contribute tremendously to the film’s shadowy mood, and Penn achieves one of his finest cinematic moments with the picture’s desolate finale. Night Moves gets a bit pretentious at times, but when the movie is really flying, it becomes a potent meditation on the challenge of finding sold moral footing during a confusing period in the evolution of the American identity.

Night Moves: GROOVY

I Never Sang for My Father (1970)

          An elegant, insightful character piece grounded by precise writing and masterful acting, I Never Sang for My Father is one of the best small dramas of the ’70s, and it contains a crucial early performance by Gene Hackman. Already recognized as an extraordinary actor (his memorable supporting turn in 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde earned an Oscar nomination), Hackman was on the verge of becoming a Hollywood leading man, and he commands the screen throughout I Never Sang for My Father with the confidence of a veteran star. Indeed, had established actor Melvyn Douglas not received top billing for this movie, it’s likely Hackman’s well-deserved Oscar nomination for I Never Sang for My Fatherwould have been in the leading-actor category, not the supporting-actor category.

          Such considerations aside, I Never Sang for My Father benefits from Douglas’ expert acting as much as it does from Hackman’s touching work. Hackman plays Gene Garrison, an author and teacher who has never been able to win the approval of his father, Tom (Douglas). A self-made man who rose from a miserable childhood to high achievement, Tom lords over every member of his family, exerting such merciless authority that Gene’s sister, Alice (Estelle Parsons), was excommunicated for the sin of marrying a Jew. Despite Tom’s hard edges, Gene struggles to find kindness in the man, especially after Gene’s mother dies and Tom becomes an aging widower with rapidly diminishing mental capacity. Meanwhile, Gene contemplates a move from the family’s East Coast home base to California, where Gene has a chance to start a new life with his girlfriend, Peggy (Elizabeth Hubbard). Thus, in the aftermath of his mother’s death, Gene becomes the de facto caretaker of his domineering dad, potentially at the cost of a chance for personal happiness.

          Exploring themes of duty, independence, love, and what it means to be a man, screenwriter Robert Anderson—adapting his successful play of the same name—digs deep into his characters, presenting everyone in the movie as a complex individual with warring impulses. For instance, Tom is nurturing and tender with his children until the instant he perceives disobedience, which instantly transforms him into a scornful monster. Similarly, Gene is soulful despite exhibiting faint echoes of his father’s macho stubbornness. That both Douglas and Hackman illustrate such subtle nuances is a testament to their thoughtful work. An even greater testament to their skill is that both actors assiduously avoid playing for cheap sentiment: Every painful moment in I Never Sang for My Father is earned. Producer-director Gilbert Cates, who worked on the Broadway presentation of Anderson’s play, serves the material well with unobtrusive camerawork, and his use of unvarnished locations adds greatly to the movie’s diligent realism. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

I Never Sang for My Father: RIGHT ON