Togetherness (1970)

A dreary attempt at romantic farce that employs such hackneyed conceits as cartoonishly exaggerated class differences, wholly unconvincing fake personas, and a crass wager between would-be seducers, Togetherness teams C-listers George Hamilton and Peter Lawford with European beauties Giorgia Moll and Olga Schoberová. Yawn. Even the film’s Mediterranean locations fail to impress because the movie’s photography is so flat and unimaginative. In fact, nearly everything in Togetherness lands with a thud, so the picture represented a shaky transition to features for writer-director Arthur Marks, who previously helmed episodes of Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. (He followed this rotten movie with more low-budget flicks, including a handful of energetic blaxploitation movies, before returning to episodic television.) The interminable first half of Togetherness concerns horny jet-setter Jack DuPont (Hamilton) trying to bed voluptuous Yugoslavian athlete Nina (Schoberová) after they meet in Greece. Because Nina is a stalwart communist, Jack pretends to be a poor journalist instead of a rich playboy, but the courtship storyline makes Nina seem like a hopeless idiot because Jack’s ruse is so transparent. Eventually, Togetherness gets around to its real storyline when Jack and Nina take a boat trip with Jack’s friend, Solomon (Lawford), a European prince whose beautiful companion, Josee (Moll), pretends to tolerate Solomon’s infidelity. Solomon and Josee bet each other they can woo Nina and Jack, respectively. Hilarity does not ensue. To get a sense of how desperately Togetherness reaches for laughs, the most prominent supporting character is “Hipolitas Mollnar,” a boisterous Eastern European painter played by John Banner, best known as Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes. Even by the pathetic standards of this movie, Banner’s relentless mugging is excruciating. Sluggish, tacky, and unfunny, Togetherness is so inert that Marks would have been better served executing the piece as a sex comedy. Lively and sleazy would have been preferable to dull and smarmy.

Togetherness: LAME

Class of ’74 (1972)

          Shapeless exploitation flick Class of ’74 comprises dippy dialogue, pathetic storytelling, and uneven acting, as well as the usual barrage of nudie shots and softcore humping. So why suggest, by use of the “Funky” rating, that Class of ’74 has redeeming values? Because, thanks to lots of “hip” conversations about sexual attitudes, the picture has minor value as a time capsule. Make no mistake, the film’s gender politics wilt upon close inspection, since the takeaway is that hot young coeds should use their bodies to land older men with money. Yet in the course of expressing retrograde ideas, Class of ’74 articulates aspects of social exploration that were intrinsic to the experience of being young in the early ’70s. An uptight girl tries a threesome. Ladies ask why America is so hung up on old ideas about age gaps and racial differences. And in one surprising sequence, several young people unload about their sexual histories, leading to the vignette of a gay man recalling the time he was molested by his high-school gym coach. If only because of that one scene, Class of ’74 differs from other skin flicks. Codirectors Mark Bing and Arthur Marks might not actually surpass the boundaries of softcore, but they jam into this dubious subgenre elements that can almost be described as thoughtful.

          Here’s the salacious storyline, a simple description of which should be sufficient for dispelling any impression that these remarks constitute praise. When her gal pals realize that leggy Gabriella (Barbara Mills) is sexually inexperienced, they conspire to hook her up with sex partners and sugar daddies. The process triggers a series of flashbacks, montages, and rap sessions delineating the sexual identities and proclivities of various characters. Among Gabriella’s gaggle of girlfriends, swaggering African-American babe Carla (Marki Bey) espouses a cynical get-it-while-you-can attitude; even-more-cynical redheaded beauty Maggie (Sondra Currie) describes how she uses men while trying to sleep her way to stardom; and most-cynical-of-all blonde hottie Heather (Pat Woodell) explains to Gabriella the virtues of screwing older, and often married, men with money. Every so often, Class of ’74 has a fleeting moment of insightfulness, but then it swerves back into the safe lane of drab sleaziness. In sum, Class of ’74 represents an interesting opportunity to learn what two male filmmakers thought (or hoped) young women were saying about sex back in the day.

Class of ’74: FUNKY

Bonnie’s Kids (1973)

          An all-too-common storytelling technique among ’70s filmmakers catering to the drive-in market involved taking elements that worked in other low-budget movies and jamming them together for maximum pulpy impact, even if narrative dissonance resulted. As a case in point, the action thriller Bonnie’s Kids includes ingénues, lesbians, mobsters, horny rednecks, sleazy photographers, a heist story right out of an old film noir, and lurid scenes that could be generously described as attempts at sex comedy. Based on sheer percentages of screen time, Bonnie’s Kids is a crime movie by default, but there’s a lot of cinematic wandering amid the film’s 105 undisciplined minutes. And yet as awful and sloppy as the preceding description makes Bonnie’s Kids sound, it’s not a completely terrible movie. The performances by leading lady Tiffany Bolling and supporting actor Alex Rocco are tasty, the plotting is relatively intricate, some scenes contain a modicum of wit, and there’s more than enough sex and violence to keep the viewer’s reptile brain engaged.

          The story starts in the deep south, where sexy sisters Ellie Mae (Tiffany Bolling) and Myra (Robin Mattson) live with their drunken lout of a stepfather because their mother, Bonnie, died two years previous. After the stepfather tries to molest Myra, older sister Ellie Mae unloads a shotgun into his chest, and the sisters flee to L.A., where Bonnie’s brother is a businessman. Before long, Myra gets romantically involved with a predatory lesbian, while Ellie Mae gets roped into transporting a package across state lines for gangsters, which brings her into the orbit of fellow courier Larry (Steve Sandor). Once Ellie Mae seduces Larry, she persuades him to open the mysterious package they’re carrying. It’s full of cash, so Ellie Mae talks Larry into running away with her—and the money. Predictably, the Mafia doesn’t the theft lightly, so gunmen Digger (Timothy Brown) and Eddy (Rocco) are sent to recover the loot.

          The first half of Bonnie’s Kids is scattershot, but the second half works fairly well as a lovers-on-the-run melodrama. There’s even some real tension toward the end, despite Ellie Mae’s annoying tendency to shout, “What are we going to do?” every five seconds. Writer-director Arhtur Marks, who cut his teeth directing episodes of Perry Mason and later made several lively blaxploitation flicks, keeps the pace brisk and seizes every opportunity to showcase the curvaceous figures of starlets. One can do a lot better in the world of tacky ’70s exploitation pictures than Bonnie’s Kids, but one can also do a lot worse, because hints of real filmmaking periodically emerge from the boobs-and-bullets muck.

Bonnie’s Kids: FUNKY

Bucktown (1975)

          One of my favorite ’70s drive-in flicks is the violent oddity Vigilante Force (1976), starring Jan-Michael Vincent as a redneck who recruits his Vietnam-vet brother, played by Kris Kristofferson, to clean up a town that’s become infested by unruly newcomers. Alas, the cure is worse than the disease, because Kristofferson’s character and his hired guns seize control of the town, forcing a showdown with Vincent’s character. Anyway, go figure there’s a blaxploitation movie with virtually the same plot. Released more than a year before Vigilante Force, the far less satisfying Bucktown stars Fred Williamson as a tough guy named Duke Johnson. When the story begins, Duke returns to his Southern hometown, which is nicknamed “Bucktown” by racist white authorities because of the municipality’s large concentration of black citizens, in order to attend his brother’s funeral. Duke quickly learns that his brother, who owned a nightclub catering to black customers, was murdered, and that cops under the supervision of Chief Patterson (Art Lund) mercilessly squeeze African-American business owners for protection money. Determined to set things right, Duke reopens his brother’s club and summons his badass buddy Roy (Thalmus Rasulala) from Chicago with a request to “bring muscle.” Together, Duke, Roy, and Roy’s hired guns topple Chief Patterson’s operation, but then Roy decides to establish himself as the new underworld king of Bucktown.

          Naturally, even though Duke spendt the first half of the movie proclaiming his intention to leave Bucktown after defeating Chief Patterson, Duke decides to stay and fight Roy. Part of Duke’s motivation, of course, is a burgeoning romance with local beauty Aretha, played by the va-va-voom Queen of Blaxploitation herself, Pam Grier.

          As written by Bob Ellison and directed by the perpetually disappointing Arthur Marks, Bucktown is a compendium of missed opportunities. The characterizations are paper-thin, the possibilities of defining a community by illustrating the vibe at Duke’s nightclub are never exploited, and the logic problems created by open warfare in the streets of an American city are ignored. As a result, the vibrant actors populating the cast are left to flounder while trying to energize lifeless material. Williamson’s at his best, focusing on righteous indignation and suppressing his tendency toward megalomaniacal strutting, but every single thing he does is a cliché. Rasulala fares slightly better, since his character gets to arc from noble to nefarious, but it says a lot that the climax of his performance involves taking a brutal kick to the groin. Grier is almost completely wasted, since she’s relegated to showing off her astonishing body and watching the main action from the sidelines. Making a story this colorful boring required considerable effort, but Marks and his team somehow managed that dubious accomplishment.

Bucktown: FUNKY

The Monkey Hu$tle (1976)

There’s an interesting and offbeat blaxploitation movie buried somewhere inside The Monkey Hu$tle, but the film’s meritorious elements are suffocated by an incoherent script and half-assed postproduction. For fans of actor Yaphet Kotto, the movie is worth a look because he gives a charming performance as a flim-flam man with funky jargon and a natty wardrobe; Kotto even seems like a credible romantic lead in his too-brief scenes with underused costar Rosalnd Cash. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t primarily about Kotto’s character—instead, The Monkey Hu$tle has about five different characters jockeying for pole position, just like the movie has about five different storylines competing for attention. As a result, the picture is a discombobulated mess, a problem made worse by lazy scoring that features the same enervated funk jams over and over again. Set in Chicago, the movie begins with Daddy Foxx (Kotto), a con man who enlists local youths as accomplices/apprentices. Daddy Foxx’s newest aide is Baby ’D (Kirk Calloway), much to the chagrin of the boy’s older brother, Win (Randy Brooks), a musician who’s had troubles with the law. Each of these three characters has a romantic partner, and the movie also presents Goldie (Rudy Rae Moore), a hustler who’s alternately Daddy Foxx’s friend and rival, plus other subplots including the threat to a black neighborhood posed by impending construction of a freeway. Amid all of this, the single thread that receives the most screen time, inexplicably, relates to Win securing a set of drums. Although The Monkey Hu$tle is so shapeless that it feels like the movie’s still just getting started by the time it’s over, some of the acting is fairly good and the production values are excellent; as a travelogue depicting inner-city Chicago circa the mid-’70s, the movie has value. However, the realism of the settings is undercut whenever the ridiculous Moore comes onscreen, with his atrocious acting and his costumes that seem like leftovers from a Commodores show. Had producer/director Arthur Marks built a solid film around Kotto’s endearing characterization, he might have had something. Instead, The Monkey Hu$tle merely contains glimmers of a legitimate movie.

The Monkey HuStle: LAME

Detroit 9000 (1973)

          During his Pulp Fiction afterglow, Quentin Tarantino created a short-lived Miramax subsidiary called Rolling Thunder, which distributed handful of indie movies and re-released faves from Tarantino’s days as a grindhouse habitué. One of the obscure ’70s movies that benefited from Tarantino’s largesse was Detroit 9000, a racially charged action thriller set in the urban wasteland of the Motor City. Yet while the picture has a lively cast and solid action scenes, it’s strictly a run-of-the-mill endeavor, so Tarantino’s imprimatur should not unreasonably raise expectations. Yes, Detroit 9000 is relatively unique in the way it blends elements of blaxploitation and mainstream action movies, and yes, the movie flips a cliché by portraying a black guy as the book-smart half of a buddy-cop duo—but novel elements can’t compensate for the lack of a memorable story. Detroit 9000 begins with crooks stealing millions from a fundraiser for a black gubernatorial candidate. The cops assigned to the case are street-smart white dude Det. Danny Bassett (Alex Rocco) and college-educated African-American Sgt. Jesse Williams (Hari Rhodes). Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t fully exploit the culture-clash potential of this dynamic, even though Rhodes and Rocco are both interesting performers.
          Rhodes, best known for his role on the TV adventure series Daktari (1966-1969), was a man of letters offscreen and, accordingly, brought eloquence and poise to his acting. Therefore, it’s a shame that Detroit 9000 give Rhodes one of his only leading roles, since he’s got nothing to do here but strive to retain his dignity while running through gutted urban locations and/or spewing bland dialogue. Rocco, a versatile character actor whose filmography includes everything from The Godfather (1972) to a string of sitcoms, provides a totally different flavor of authenticity, although he, too, is handicapped by an underwritten characterization. Among the supporting cast, Scatman Crothers does some energetic speechifying as a preacher; Vonetta McGee classes up a trite hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold role; and Herbert Jefferson Jr., later a regular on the original Battlestar Galactica series, shows up in full pimp regalia. The problem is that everyone involved in Detroit 9000, including second-rate blaxploitation director Arthur Marks, did better work elsewhere—so why this mediocre flick lingered in Tarantino’s memory is a mystery.

Detroit 9000: FUNKY