Mitchell (1975)

One of the least interesting entries in the ’70s cycle of action movies about cops behaving as lawlessly as the criminals they pursue, Mitchell features a disjointed storyline, lackluster action scenes, and perfunctory acting. The movie is more or less coherent, but it’s also boring, clichéd, and stupid. Hulking B-movie star Joe Don Baker plays the title character, a dim-bulb detective who gets mixed up with sophisticated crooks, so the bulk of the story involves Baker’s character trying to outwit people whose intellects greatly surpass his own. This sort of premise worked well in a zillion other movies; for instance, Baker offered an entertaining, Southern-fried spin on similar material in Walking Tall (1973). Yet everything about Mitchell feels half-assed. Baker isn’t the right casting for a tough city cop, since he’s unmistakably a good ol’ boy from Texas, and he plays nearly every scene like light comedy, even though death and destruction follow in his wake. As directed by the normally reliable Andrew V. McLaglen, Mitchell wobbles between escapism and seriousness, so it seems likely that many of the film’s tonal problems emerged during postproduction. After all, there’s no excuse for the inclusion of cornpone country singer Hoyt Axton’s lackadaisical theme song during a lengthy love scene between Baker and leading lady Linda Evans—for several excruciating minutes, Mitchell becomes the equivalent of the worst type of Burt Reynolds romp. Future Dallas star Evans is as forgettable as always, while the actors playing the villains—the great Martin Balsam and the emphatic John Saxon—are wasted in one-dimensional roles. (Saxon’s big scene is a silly chase involving dune buggies.) Virtually nothing in Mitchell works, and the climax is beyond ludicrous. Baker’s character commandeers a helicopter to chase after bad guys who are in a boat, transfers from the helicopter to the boat, and takes out a henchman with a metal hook. All the while, the main villain simply stands at the boat’s controls, waiting to get shot instead of taking defensive action. But then again, seeing as how he’s stuck in an awful movie, can you blame him?

Mitchell: LAME

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)

          A clever and funny hostage picture with an offbeat setting and an even more offbeat protagonist, the 1974 version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is vastly superior to the 2009 remake starring John Travolta and Denzel Washington. Whereas the latter picture is frenetic and slick, Joseph Sargent’s ’70s version mixes expertly orchestrated suspense with amusingly grumpy Noo Yawk character flourishes. In fact, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three achieves that most difficult of balancing acts by intermingling danger and humor so that scenes are often jittery and droll at the same time. The title relates to the hijacking of an NYC subway train by a group of middle-aged terrorists whom we get to know by code names: Ice-blooded mastermind “Mr. Blue” (Robert Shaw), trigger-happy gunman “Mr. Grey” (Hector Elizondo), avuncular driver “Mr. Green” (Martin Balsam), and accomplice “Mr. Brown” (Earl Hindman). These four take over a train and communicate their demand for $1 million via radio to the New York Transit Authority, threatening to kill hostages on a regular basis if the city fails to meet a ransom deadline. This puts the crooks at odds with Lt. Zachary Garber (Walter Matthau), a sarcastic, seen-it-all cop with the Transit Authority’s police force.

          Many of the beats in this story, which was adapted from a novel by John Godey, are standard stuff for hostage pictures: The political machinations of the mayor as he contemplates paying the ransom; the revelation that one of the hostages is an undercover cop; the tricky games Garber plays to buy time; and so on. It’s the execution, however, that makes all the difference. The great playwright/screenwriter Peter Stone delivers Godey’s pulpy narrative with what can only be described as effervescence. While Stone ensures that violent scenes have genuine tension, he threads the script with dry one-liners and pithy dialogue exchanges. In particular, Stone does wonders with the radio conversations between Garber and “Mr. Blue”—the adversaries pick at each other like bickering spouses, a vibe underlined by the contrast between Matthau’s put-upon petulance and Shaw’s tightly contained rage. (Another of the film’s many effective running jokes involves Garber giving a tour of the Transit Authority’s facilities to visiting Japanese dignitaries on the day the hijacking happens; wait for the terrific punchline after watching Garber make a series of offensive remarks to his seemingly oblivious guests.)

          Sargent keeps his camerawork nimble, exploiting the atmosphere of gritty locations, and he benefits from the hard-edged imagery of master New York cinematographer Owen Roizman (The French Connection). Adding to the entertaining verisimilitude is a cavalcade of salty New York character actors: In addition to Balsam, Elizondo, and Matthau, the picture features Kenneth McMillan, Dick O’Neill, Doris Roberts, and Tony Roberts. Balsam and Elizondo are memorable as, respectively, a schmuck who gets involved in something he can’t handle and a psycho who gets off on carrying a gun. Best of all, of course, is the movie’s exciting final act, which features a series of unexpected climaxes stacked upon each other—the conclusion of The Taking of Pelham One Two Threemanages to pay off every subplot meticulously and satisfyingly.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three: GROOVY

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

          Representing a great opportunity for historical spectacle that was sacrificed on the altar of its own leviathan scope, Tora! Tora! Tora!was conceived by Twentieth Century-Fox chief Daryl F. Zanuck as a companion piece to his epic war movie The Longest Day (1962). Whereas the earlier film was a star-studded reenactment of the D-Day invasion, focusing primarily on the heroism of a successful Allied assault, Tora! Tora! Tora! paints across a bigger canvas. The picture follows both American and Japanese forces before, during, and after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. Zanuck’s intentions were basically honorable, since he put together a coproduction with a Japanese team that was responsible for portraying their country’s soldiers in a humane light; Zanuck even hired the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa to develop and direct the Japanese half of the picture, although Kurosawa was replaced once production got underway. Journeyman Richard Fleischer, an efficient traffic cop not known for his artistry, handled the English-language scenes.

          Yet Zanuck’s overreaching vision of an opulent super-production almost inevitably generated a bloated movie in which hardware overwhelms humanity. The leaden screenplay, credited to Larry Forrester and Kurosawa allies Ryuzo Kikushima and Hideo Oguni—and based on two different books—is a dull recitation of names and dates without any memorable characterizations. In the American scenes alone, venerable actors including Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, E.G. Marshall, Jason Robards, and James Whitmore get lost amid the generic hordes of men in military uniforms wandering through command centers and battleship bridges. In the admirable effort to explain how and why the Japanese military caught American forces unaware, the movie provides dry description when it should provide intense drama—paradoxically, trying to do too much led the filmmakers to do too little.

          Nonetheless, the movie gets exciting whenever it departs from its inept attempts at personal interplay and focuses on battlefield spectacle. Employing a huge assortment of boats and planes (plus a whole lot of pyro, of course), Fleischer stages lavish scenes of wartime destruction, all of which are jacked up by composer Jerry Goldsmith’s invigorating music. Thus, it’s no surprise that the lasting legacy of Tora! Tora! Tora! is as a stockpile of endlessly reused footage—according to Wikipedia, clips and outtakes from this film appear in Midway (1976), The Final Countdown (1980), several TV episodes and miniseries, and even Pearl Harbor (2001). So, if you’re a military-history buff, you’ll probably find a lot to enjoy in Tora! Tora! Tora!–otherwise, you might have a hard time trudging through the movie’s 144 impressive but inert minutes.

Tora! Tora! Tora!: FUNKY

The Man (1972)

          A true ’70s obscurity that’s well worth tracking down, The Manis a whip-smart imaginary tale about the first black U.S. president. Built around a taut screenplay by Rod Serling and a commanding performance by James Earl Jones, the picture now seems quite prescient—believe it or not, the title character’s campaign slogan is “Change.” Based on a novel by Irving Wallace, the story presents a convoluted chain of events leading to the installation of Sen. Douglass Dilman as president. After the previous commander in chief and the Speaker of the House are killed in an accident, the sitting vice president exits the line of succession because he’s terminally ill. Thus, the presidency falls to the Senate’s pro tem president, Dilman. This doesn’t sit well with white power brokers including Secretary of State Eaton (William Windom), who has designs on the Oval Office, and Senator Watson (Burgess Meredith), an unapologetic racist from an unnamed Southern state. As a result, Dilman is a political target from the moment he takes power.

          Even potential supporters have issues with Dilman, simply because his ascension carries the weight of history. In one of the film’s best quiet moments, Dilman shares an exchange with his activist daughter, Wanda (Janet MacLachlan), the night he inherits the presidency. “They were expecting a black messiah,” Dilman says about African-Americans. Her reply? “What they’ve got is a black president—that’s more than they’ve ever gotten.” Then Dilman delivers the kicker, which resonates strongly in the Obama era: “I can’t be what everyone wants me to be.” The Man poignantly anticipates the gulf between dreams and reality that has been the source of so much anti-Obama criticism and disappointment.

          Yet The Man cleverly sidesteps the question of what a black president might do with a mandate, instead portraying Dilman as a dedicated public servant who inherits a racially charged mess. At the moment he takes the oath of office, a young African-American college student is under suspicion following an attempt on the South African defense minister’s life, and a minority-rights bill is working its way through Congress. Worse, domestic adversaries including Watson, Eaton, and Eaton’s Lady Macbeth-esque wife, Kay (Barbara Rush), forge political wedges with which to dislodge Dilman’s political standing, lest the accidental president decide he wants a full term.

          The Man is preachy and talky—Serling shares with Aaron Sorkin the debate-club approach to dramatic structure—but the plot churns with enough Beltway skullduggery to ground the speechifying in suspense. Director Joseph Sargent, a reliable TV-trained helmer, serves the material well by staying out of the way, and the acting is uniformly vivid. Meredith and Rush are believably loathsome as D.C. barracudas, Georg Sanford Brown lends fire as the impassioned college student, and the great Martin Balsam provides gravitas and warmth as the president’s chief of staff. The whole movie rests on Jones’ shoulders, however, and he meets the challenge with grace. Portraying an intellectual who has channeled his indignation into diplomatic rhetoric, Jones employs his formidable powers to convey charisma, strength, and wisdom—the very qualities that, decades later, distinguish the individual who changed history in the real world the way the Dilman character changed history in the reel world.

The Man: RIGHT ON

Catch-22 (1970)

          Director Mike Nichols once described the “green awning effect” of becoming a successful auteur. By notching two huge successes in the late ’60s, Nichols convinced Hollywood he knew how to connect with audiences. To test his newfound power, Nichols pitched a movie about a green awning outside a building—the movie would simply show the awning so viewers could watch different people pass underneath. According to Nichols, some executives actually expressed interest in this awful idea because they were so hungry to be in the Mike Nichols business.

          The “green awning effect” helps explain why Paramount Pictures gave Nichols a then-massive $17 million budget to adapt Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22. A dreamlike satire of military bureaucracy and the inherent madness of war, the book features a disjointed timeline and a large cast of characters, so Catch-22 is the quintessential “unfilmable” novel. Nonetheless, Nichols and his Graduate screenwriter Buck Henry took a crack at the material, imposing a linear narrative by focusing on the many attempts of Captain Yossarian (Alan Arkin) to escape his duty as a World War II bomber pilot stationed on an island in the Mediterranean.

          Specifically, the movie’s storyline explores Yossarian’s frustration with the length of his military tour and the “catch-22” rule that prohibits him from quitting. A “catch-22” is a guideline whose pretzel logic makes resolution impossible, so Yossarian can’t claim that bombing runs are driving him mad, because the Army declares that anyone capable of recognizing his own insanity must be sane and therefore suitable for combat.

          Unfortunately, the movie itself gets caught in a catch-22: Since the lack of a conventional structure is what makes Heller’s novel work, any attempt to align the book’s events into a straight-ahead progression inherently reduces the novel’s power. Worse, the movie of Catch-22 is a discombobulated mess from a tonal perspective, careering recklessly between absurdist jokes and somber tragedy. Yet Nichols’ massive ambition is not resigned to storytelling, because he also strives to outdo Orson Welles in terms of outlandishly complex tracking shots. Some of Nichols’ images are startling, like unbroken takes in which actors are synchronized with explosions and plane movements, but they make Nichols seem like a cocky show-off. For a director whose incisive focus on character is considered a key virtue, succumbing to auteur hubris is especially embarrassing.

          It doesn’t help that the “comedy” Henry and Nichols put onscreen is more strange than funny; in a typical scene, a military functionary laments that a particular soldier has been killed because it says so on a clipboard, even though the soldier is standing right next to him and repeatedly announcing that he’s alive. Given that Catch-22 came out the same year as the incendiary military satire M*A*S*H, this sort of Brechtian contrivance feels outdated.

          Despite such massive problems, Catch-22 is never boring. The widescreen cinematography by David Watkin is beautiful, with abstract images like a horrific death scene immediately burning themselves into viewers’ brains. (Believe me, if you see the movie, you’ll know which scene.) Furthermore, the cast is impressive, even though actors drift in and out of the movie so randomly that they can’t deliver full-blooded performances.

          Among the most prominent actors, Martin Balsam plays a hard-driving commander, Bob Newhart plays a nervous subordinate, Anthony Perkins plays a compassionate chaplain, and Jon Voight plays a wheeling-and-dealing first lieutenant. Others in the sprawling ensemble include Richard Benjamin, Norman Fell, Art Garfunkel, Jack Gilford, Charles Grodin, Paula Prentiss, and Martin Sheen. Screenwriter Henry pulls double-duty by playing a supporting role, and the director in whose shadow Nichols walks, Orson Welles, shows up for a few scenes as a blustery general.

          Catch-22 is a fascinating case study in what happens when a director is given carte blanche, but despite consistently glorious production values and momentary flashes of brilliance, the movie can best be described as a beautiful disaster.

Catch-22: FREAKY