Paco (1976)

Sloppily constructed family film Paco ostensibly tells the story of a little Colombian boy (Panchito Gómez) who travels from the country to the crowded streets of Bogotá in search of his wayward uncle. Yet the most interesting material is a subplot revealing the uncle’s vocation—he’s a Fagin-like mastermind controlling a network of street urchins who steal to pay off loans that he offers at usurious interest rates. As played by the elegant José Ferrer, this character is infinitely livelier than a generically heartbroken little boy on walkabout. Yet relegating the most colorful person onscreen to secondary status isn’t the only storytelling error made by the creators of Paco. In the film’s most peculiar sequence, Pernell Roberts shows up to play a flamboyant gangster. How flamboyant? Roberts’ big scene literally takes place on a theater stage, with the actor flitting about in a cape while issuing dialogue like thunder and decorating lines with dramatic hand gestures. It’s a mystery how Roberts’ showboating relates to the rest of the picture, because by that point the wheels have gone completely off the bus. After all, we haven’t even mentioned the silly stuff at the beginning of the picture involving a priest (Allen Garfield) whose signature move is belching and then turning his eyes skyward so he can apologize to God. There’s also a heist sequence with intense music befitting a Mission: Impossible episode. And the donkey featured prominently on the film’s poster? Gone by about 15 minutes into the movie. Rarely have so many disparate parts added up to so little.

Paco: LAME

Skateboard (1978)

Cheap-looking, derivative, and superficial, Skateboard borrows myriad elements from The Bad News Bears (1976), but fails to mimic that picture’s nuanced characterizations. Instead, Skateboard tells a drab seriocomic story about a shady talent representative exploiting talented teenagers. And because cowriter/director George Gage uses lengthy scenes of kids performing skateboard tricks to pad the movie’s running time, he’s in the exploitation business, too—he seems to believe that fans of skateboarding should be satisfied with any old movie containing ramp rides and walking-the-dog routines. The cast mostly comprises unskilled juvenile actors, abrasive character actor Allen Garfield plays the leading role. He’s a poor substitute for Bad News Bears star Walter Matthau. Whereas Matthau leavened his cantankerous characterization with glimmers of empathy, Garfield spends so much time hurling invective at his costars that he’s unpleasant to watch. And at the risk of body-shaming, he looks like a predator when he’s surrounded by gleaming California kids, seeing as how he’s a pasty blob of a man with a horrific combover. The gist of the piece is that low-rent agent Manny Bloom (Garfield) owes money to a crook, so when he spots kids skateboarding in his neighborhood, he abruptly forms a team called the Los Angeles Wheels. Predictable complications ensue. Star athlete Jason (Richard Van der Wyk) rebels, an injury sidelines another player, and Manny has trouble keeping the kids under control while traveling. Eventually, he hires an attractive nurse, Millicent (Kathleen Lloyd), resulting in a dubious romantic subplot. Underscoring the tedium is lots of shrill pop/rock music, with several songs shrieked by future Jefferson Starship vocalist Mickey Thomas.

Skateboard: LAME

Believe in Me (1971)

          Released a few months after Jerry Schatzberg’s harrowing The Panic in Needle Park, this slickly produced drug drama tells roughly the same story, even though the films couldn’t be more different in terms of execution. Whereas The Panic in Needle Park is loose and nihilistic, Believe in Me is linear and tame. Despite its arty excesses, The Panic in Needle Park is something akin to a straight shot of ugly reality. Conversely, Believe in Me is a diluted dose, with the mandates of palatable Hollywood artifice compelling everyone involved to pull their punches. Believe in Me isn’t a rotten movie, per se, and neither does it slip into self-parody, which often happens when mainstream filmmakers try to explore street culture. Nonetheless, it’s way too safe and tidy to have the desired impact, and only one of the film’s two leading actors approaches the necessary level of commitment.

          Lanky and wide-eyed Michael Sarrazin stars as Remy, a young doctor who feels the world too deeply, so he pops a pill every time he’s touched by the plight of a patient, whether a diminished senior or a sick child. Setting aside the major plot point that Remy made an incredibly poor career choice, the movie continues when Remy meets Pamela (Jacqueline Bisset), the sister of a fellow physician. She’s working as an assistant editor on children’s books, but she’s a bit lost in life, so she’s susceptible to Remy’s charms. They move in together, and she soon learns that his drug use is spiraling out of control. She catches him snorting speed, and she lets him spin the fantasy that it’s okay for him to self-medicate because his medical degree allows him to safely manage his intake. Rather inexplicably, Pamela remains with Remy even after he escalates to shooting speed intravenously, and she ignores red flags like the periodic appearances of slimy dealer Stutter (Allen Garfield), who all but directly says he’d like to turn Pamela out as a prostitute. Inevitably, Rmy pulls Pamela into his world of addiction, and that’s when the movie loses its way.

          Not only is Pamela’s embrace of hard drugs dubious from a narrative perspective, but at this stage in her development, Bisset lacked the range to credibly dramatize the leap from buttoned-up city girl to strung-out junkie. Toward the end of the picture, she looks like she’s playing dress-up with her raccoon eyes and stringy hair. For his part, Sarrazin in his prime was so gaunt that he looked somewhat like a junkie anyway, and he was also a deeper actor than Bisset was during her ingénue years. His work here isn’t good enough to fully overcome the picture’s flaws, but he easily eclipses his costar. Adding to the general fakeness of Believe in Me is the gooey score by Fred Karlin, which is punctuated by a tender theme song that Lou Rawls sings, and the sometimes distractingly elegant imagery created by cinematographers Richard C. Brooks and Richard C. Kratina. In other words, good luck believing in Believe in Me.

Believe in Me: FUNKY

 

Top of the Heap (1972)

Top of the Heap represented a big professional leap for actor Christopher St. John, seeing as how he had only four screen credits to his name previously, including a supporting role in Shaft (1971). St. John wrote, produced, directed, and stars in Top of the Heap, but he botches all four of his jobs over the course of the glossy but misguided crime drama. George Lattimore (St. John) is an African-American beat cop in Washington, D.C., who resents that racist superiors prevent him from moving up in the ranks. Meanwhile, civilians and crooks alike regard George as an Uncle Tom, and George’s marriage to Viola (Florence St. Peter) has turned bitter. Had St. John kept things simple with a racially changed character study, he could have made something meaningful. Unfortunately, he overreached. St. John unwisely gave his protagonist a long-suffering mistress, identified only as “Black Chick” (Paula Kelly), and it’s hard to root for a philanderer who abuses both the women in his life. Worse, St. John interspersed the movie with bizarre dream sequences, mostly showcasing two recurring tropes—in one, George imagines that he’s an astronaut, and in the other, George imagines that he’s a naked savage running through a jungle. (The jungle scenes climax with an eroticized vignette of George and a woman slathering each other with pieces of watermelon, after which George inexplicably yells, “Jambalaya!”) The hallucinations give Top of the Heap an incoherent quality, but even the dramatic scenes are confusing, as when George, in uniform, scares a vituperative cab driver (cameo player Allen Garfield) nearly to death. By the time the movie’s pointless bummer ending rolls around, it seems like unreasoning rage, rather than righteous indignation about racism, is the protagonist’s real problem. Not exactly, one presumes, the point the filmmaker wanted to make.

Top of the Heap: LAME

Virginia Hill (1974)

          Here’s an odd cinematic footnote: Seventeen years before he played a supporting role in Bugsy (1991), the whip-smart drama about real-life gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Harvey Keitel starred as Siegel himself in a 1974 TV movie called Virginia Hill. In real life, Hill was Siegel’s girlfriend for several years. As the title suggests, Virginia Hill tells the Siegel story from his companion’s perspective, exploring how a small-town girl ended up with the violent criminal who invented Las Vegas but then doomed himself by spending too much of the Mob’s money. Cowritten and directed by costume designer-turned-filmmaker Joel Schumacher, Virginia Hill crams too much material into its scant 74-minute running time, and Dyan Cannon disappoints in the title role. Among other problems, Cannon seems so self-assured from her earliest scenes that it’s hard to accept the way Siegel dazzles Virginia. Keitel isn’t much help, since he’s robotic except during one scene in which an enraged Siegel physically assaults his lover. (Violent rage, always a Keitel specialty.)

          After the introduction of a Congressional hearing that provides the movie’s wraparound structure, Virginia Hill gets underway with flashbacks depicting Virginia’s adolescence, when her acceptance of favors from male suitors made her a social pariah. Fleeing to the big city alongside childhood friend Leroy (Robby Benson), for whom Virginia assumes responsibility, Virginia becomes involved with gangsters Leo Ritchie (Allen Garfield) and Nick Rubanos (John Vernon). After earning the criminals’ trust, Virginia is tasked with spying on Siegel. Eventually, Siegel and Virginia develop real feelings for each other, so she’s with him when he envisions Vegas—and when he seals his fate. In terms of plot and themes, this stuff should be dynamite (as it was in Bugsy), but Virginia Hill is unrelentingly pedestrian. Cannon plays the role too abrasively for viewers to develop empathy, and there’s zero chemistry between her and Keitel. As for Schumacher, he was still a ways from the stylish pulp of The Lost Boys (1987) and the crowd-pleasing histrionics of his blockbuster John Grisham adaptations. 

Virginia Hill: FUNKY

Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)

          Representing not only a feeble attempt at absurdist humor but also a disastrous moment in the careers of two Hollywood luminaries, Get to Know Your Rabbit is such a misfire that it spent two years on the shelf at Warner Bros. before the studio finally arranged a half-hearted release. The picture was Brian De Palma’s first studio assignment, and his involvement ended when he was fired during principal photography. Similarly, the movie was TV funnyman Tom Smothers’ first and last starring role in a major movie. Written by Jordan Crittenden, Get to Know Your Rabbit tries for outlandish satire about the dehumanizing aspects of corporate culture. Marketing executive Donald (Smothers) quits his job the day terrorists explode a bomb at his office—a random event that neither makes sense nor adds anything to the story. Seeking a more fulfilling lifestyle, Donald studies with the eccentric Delasandro (Orson Welles) and becomes a tap-dancing magician. Then Donald goes on tour, enlisting his former boss, an alcoholic named Paul (John Astin), to serve as his manager. While Donald performs in seedy nightclubs across America and romances a young woman identified only as Terrific-Looking Girl (Katharine Ross), Paul creates a corporate empire called TDM—as in Tap Dancing Musicians.

          Yes, the supposedly high-larious central joke of the movie is that so many people hate their jobs, just like Donald did, that thousands of them happily quit the 9-to-5 world in order to become kitschy entertainers. The tone of the movie is as much of a mess as the story. Characters who should seem eccentric instead come across as insane, jokes fall flat in nearly every scene, and the hyperactive music score tries to pump life into unresponsive footage. As for the would-be wacky dialogue? Consider this exchange between Donald and a floozy named Susan (Samantha Jones). Donald: “I don’t know exactly how to ask you this, but how long have you been a cheap broad?” Susan: “Oh, it’s an off and on thing.” De Palma’s signature overhead shots, split-screen gimmicks, and topless scenes merely add to the overall confusion, and Smothers’ performance runs the short gamut from nasty to nonexistent. Meanwhile, costars Astin, Allen Garfield, and Ross play their roles well, though each seems to exist in a different movie than the rest of the cast. Some cinematic train wrecks are fascinating, but Get to Know Your Rabbit is not one of them.

Get to Know Your Rabbit: LAME

Hi, Mom! (1970)

          With the exception of Phantom of the Paradise (1974), a cult-fave rock musical that some people find quite droll, director Brian De Palma has delivered only middling results when making comedies. In fact, some of his worst flops, including The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), were supposed to make people laugh. So it’s mildly interesting that several of De Palma’s earliest features are comedies, since he didn’t find his sweet spot of sexualized horror until Sisters (1973). Anyway, De Palma’s fourth feature—also his first of the ’70s—is the eclectic Hi, Mom!, which uses a loose storyline about an ambitious young filmmaker to frame sketches about art, class, race, and sex. The picture is a sequel to De Palma’s earlier film Greetings (1968), and Robert De Niro stars in both pictures as edgy New Yorker Jon Rubin.

          When we meet the character in Hi, Mom!, Jon is a struggling filmmaker who uses a telescope to peer into neighbors’ windows, then persuades a skin-flick producer, Joe Banner (Allen Garfield), to fund a porno movie shot in the peeping-tom style. Later, Jon spots a cute woman named Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt), who lives in the building across the street, and seduces her by pretending to be an insurance salesman. (Classy ulterior motive: Filming their sexual encounters without her permission for use in porn.) Also thrown into the mix is a group of black-power activists, because Jon makes grungy black-and-white verité-style short films in which the activists confront white New Yorkers with performance art challenging widespread attitudes toward African-Americans.

          Stylistically, Hi, Mom! is a mess. Some scenes are played for broad humor, some are politically provocative, some are sleazy, and some are nearly frightening because of their intensity. One gets the sense that De Palma, who cowrote the picture with Charles Hirsch, either made the story up as he went along, or that the filmmakers created a laundry list of hip topics without giving much consideration to how things might (or might not) cohere. Bits of the movie are interesting (although not particularly funny), especially the man-0n-the-street vignettes that De Palma seems to have captured with hidden cameras. Yet the lack of an organizing aesthetic makes the overall experience rather boring. It doesn’t help that rock musician Eric Kaz contributed an inanely upbeat score complete with a clumsy theme song, or that De Niro is woefully out of his element. The actor didn’t find his sense of humor till much later in life, and he only really catches fire during a scene in which Jon auditions to play an abusive policeman.

Hi, Mom!: FUNKY

The Conversation (1974)

          To fully grasp the hot streak filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola was on in the ’70s, it’s necessary to look beyond the titanic accomplishments of The Godfather (1972), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979). Released the same year as The Godfather: Part II—and, amazingly, also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar that year, giving Coppola two slots in the category—was The Conversation, which arguably represents the purest artistic statement of Coppola’s early career. Whereas Coppola’s other ’70s films are adaptations, The Conversation is an original. Moreover, the picture is so intimate that it demonstrates the filmmaker’s preternatural ability to use image and sound as a means of communicating nearly microscopic details about a protagonist’s inner life. Yet beyond simply being an auteurist showpiece, The Conversation tells a resonant story about themes ranging from paranoia to personal responsibility, and it contains one of the finest leading performances of the decade, by the incomparable Gene Hackman. In sum, The Conversation is a pinnacle achievement whether viewed as personal art, social critique, or even just craftsmanship.

          Set in Coppola’s beloved San Francisco, the movie concerns Harry Caul (Hackman), a surveillance contractor revered by fellow professionals for his skill at secretly recording conversations in tricky situations. The opening scene depicts Harry’s team using a trio of strategically placed microphones to eavesdrop on an exchange between young lovers Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest), who speak while walking in circles through a crowded urban square. Harry merges the recordings until he’s extracted a pristine master tape, and then attempts to make delivery to his client, a director at the CIA. Yet when Harry is denied access to the director, he suspects trouble, so he withholds the master tape. It turns out that in the past, one of Harry’s tapes was used to justify an assassination, so Harry fears history might repeat itself. The problem, however, is that Harry is so reclusive that he has no close friends from whom to seek guidance or support. Therefore, the incredible drama of the movie stems from Harry’s quandary over whether to maintain his personal code of noninvolvement or violate his self-preserving principles in order to serve the greater good.

          Every character surrounding Harry is used by Coppola to illuminate a different facet of the protagonist. Amiable coworker Stan (John Cazale) reveals Harry’s inability to trust; gentle prostitute Meredith (Elizabeth McRae) reveals Harry’s inability to share emotionally; undemanding kept woman Amy (Teri Garr) reveals Harry’s inability to commit; and so on. Meanwhile, edgy supporting characters including ice-blooded functionary Martin (Harrison Ford) and vulgar surveillance-industry competitor Bernie (Allen Garfield) represent the types of avarice and duplicity that first drove Harry to become a recluse. On nearly every textual and subtextual level, The Conversation is a master class in character development.

          It’s also a wonder in terms of technical execution. Coppola and expert cinematographers Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler carve delicate images from light, movement, and shadow, articulating the significance of how different people occupy different spaces. Unsung hero Walter Murch, performing the role of sound designer before that job title existed, works magic with distortion and fragmentation to evoke Harry’s insular life experience, while composer David Shire’s whirling piano figures address the painful tension pervading the story. The performances are uniformly good, from Garr’s slightly pathetic likeability to Garfield’s crass aggression, but, obviously, the brittle textures of Hackman’s work hold The Conversation together. Disappearing behind dumpy clothes, horn-rimmed glasses, and a receding hairline, Hackman sketches Harry Caul with incredible restraint, so the flashes of emotion that the actor makes visible speak volumes. The Conversation isn’t perfect, thanks to occasional directorial flourishes that slip into pretention and thanks to a slightly overlong running time. Nonetheless, in every important way, The Conversation defines what made New Hollywood cinema bracing, innovative, and meaningful.

The Conversation: OUTTA SIGHT

Gable and Lombard (1976)

          Gable and Lombard, a romantic drama about the illicit love affair and subsequent marriage of real-life Golden Age movie stars Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, is so preposterously fictionalized that it’s a pointless endeavor. Among many other howlers, the movie features a climactic scene in which Lombard (Jill Clayburgh) testifies on behalf of Gable (James Brolin) at a court hearing related to his divorce from the woman to whom he was married when he began keeping company with Lombard. Not only did this testimony never happen, but the filmmakers portray Lombard as such a crude loudmouth that when asked to describe her relationship with Gable, she proclaims, “Me and that big ape over there have been hitting the sack every night, and I’ve got a sore back to prove it!” Yet Gable and Lombard lacks the courage of its convictions—instead of going wholeheartedly down the road of tabloid tawdriness, the movie is meant to be some sort of loving tribute to once-in-a-lifetime passion. Unfortunately, Barry Sandler’s inept screenplay and Sidney J. Furie’s unsophisticated direction makes the leading characters look like sex-crazed buffoons instead of incandescent lovers.

          This tone-deaf portrayal is exacerbated by performances that are, to say the least, uneven. While Clayburgh is grandiose and shrill, it’s possible to discern some of the emotional realities she’s attempting to communicate. However, Brolin is laughable, growling and smirking through a paper-thin impersonation of Gable’s most obvious onscreen tics. When these dissonant performances merge during interminable dialogue scenes—Gable and Lombard runs a deadly 131 minutes—the result is loud, superficial nonsense. It’s also impossible to know whom this movie was meant to please: The picture’s narrative is far too bogus to please diehard Gable-Lombard fans, and far too cliché-ridden to work as a standalone romance. Yes, the movie is handsomely produced, but so what? Even the supposed appeal of re-creating Old Hollywood is wasted, since the only other major character drawn from history is studio chief L.B. Mayer (played unpersuasively by Allen Garfield). As the real Lombard’s onetime secretary told syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner at the time of the Gable and Lombard’s release: “I couldn’t associate a single scene with anything that I’d lived through. Nothing in it is right, not even the clothes.”

Gable and Lombard: LAME

Fyre (1979)

An indie production that doesn’t seem to know what it’s trying to accomplish, Fyre is a little-girl-lost story following a 17-year-old down the dehumanizing path of abuse, drugs, and prostitution following a family tragedy. The picture isn’t sensitive enough to score as a probing drama, and it’s not sufficiently sleazy to qualify as exploitation, so about all that can be said for Fyre is that it’s briskly paced, coherent, and competently made. Is that enough to make it worth watching? Not unless you feel the need to see every movie in this sordid genre, or unless you’re taken with curvy leading lady Lynn Theel, who appeared in a handful of movies and TV shows during the late ’70s and early ’80s without gaining much career momentum. Watching her play the wayward lass whose nickname provides this film’s title, it’s not hard to see why Theel failed to achieve stardom. She gets the job done, and her effort to summon emotion in dramatic scenes appears to be genuine, but nothing sets her apart from other performers. And, unfortunately, she’s pretty much the whole show. Director and co-writer Richard Grand builds the entire movie around Theel’s character, tracking Fyre’s woes as she experiences rape, the loss of family members, a descent into the sex trade, a fraught love relationship with a small-time criminal, and even, just for extra titillation, a near-miss encounter with lesbianism. Then, once the movie reaches its climax of Fyre realizing self-definition is her only path to happiness, Fyre ends up feeling like an after-school special with a bit of R-rated raunch thrown in for no special reason. Offering some distraction from the blandness is a recurring character named Preacher, played by the rotund actor Allen Garfield; a fast-talking crook who drifts in and out of Fyre’s life, he’s the closest thing the movie has to novelty.

Fyre: LAME

Cry Uncle (1971)

Truly vile, this low-budget attempt at spoofing the private-eye genre features excitable character actor Allen Garfield in one of his few leading roles, but the picture’s real claim to notoriety is that it’s an early effort by director John G. Avildsen, who later rose to fame with the Rocky and Karate Kid franchises. Whereas those series comprise feel-good family entertainment, Cry Uncle is a gutter-level sex flick; in fact, thanks to copious amounts of nudity, a few unpleasantly realistic sex scenes, and a generally depraved atmosphere, Cry Uncle carried an X-rating in its original release. The story is the usual film-noir gobbledygook about a private detective getting embroiled in a morally complex blackmail case, and (of course) the detective becomes sexually involved with someone related to the case. On the plus side are a few amusing throwaway moments, like the scene with a chain-smoking cop (Paul Sorvino in an early role) who can’t stop coughing. Additionally, some viewers might find Garfield’s performance amusing, since he takes his exacerbated-everyman persona to a greater extreme here than in most other films. However, it’s difficult to see beyond the movie’s grimy sexual content, since lowbrow smut infuses nearly every frame (in the few scenes when characters aren’t actually screwing, they’re talking about screwing). Given that most of the carnal scenes involve Garfield, whose physique is not exactly that of an Adonis, it’s evident that Avildsen was after something other than titillation—there’s nothing remotely sexy about watching hairy, overweight, sweaty Garfield mount one woman after another. Presumably, Avildsen was trying to mock the film-noir trope of private dicks being sexual catnip for all the women they meet. Whatever the intent, humor is nowhere to be found in scenes like the jaw-dropping moment when Garfield’s sex-crazed character rapes a corpse. The irony is that if Cry Uncle didn’t have so much sleaze, it might have been a watchable spoof. As is, however, the plot-driven scenes are probably boring for viewers who prefer the raunchy bits, and the sex scenes are so unpleasant they sour the experience of following the story.

Cry Uncle: SQUARE

Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976)

          With a more coherent script work and a better actress playing the female lead, this insouciant comedy about misfits working for low-rent ambulance companies might have been a solid entry in the M*A*S*H-inspired subgenre of outrageous medical comedies. As is, the picture’s redeeming qualities get drowned out by muddy storytelling and tonal inconsistencies.
          Bill Cosby stars as Mother, a driver at the wildly unethical F+B Ambulance Company. Boozing it up behind the wheel and packing a .357 Magnum for sticky situations, Mother regularly intercepts calls for other ambulance companies so F+B can collect the fares. Raquel Welch costars as Jennifer, better known as “Jugs” (for obvious reasons); she’s the F+B receptionist who longs for gender equality in the workplace. Eventually, Harvey Keitel shows up as Speed, a police detective who needs to make extra cash while on suspension for alleged corruption. These three characters, along with other oddballs like Murdoch (Larry Hagman), a scumbag prone to stunts like trying to rape unconscious female patients, form a tapestry of human weirdness that’s occasionally very funny.

          Screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz, known for his lighthearted contributions to Roger Moore’s early 007 movies and the first two Superman pictures, contrives lively banter, although the fact that Cosby delivers most of the best lines suggests the actor did some on-set embellishing. When the movie is really cooking, which doesn’t happen very often, Mother, Jugs & Speed cleverly riffs on the idea of trying to remain sane in a world gone mad. Unfortunately, the movie gets derailed as frequently as it stays on track.

          One big problem is the characterization of Jennifer. After she transitions from her secretary role to working in the field, the movie’s focus shifts to the angst she suffers upon encountering the Big Bad World. Jennifer also falls into a sudden (and not particularly credible) relationship with Speed, despite rebuffing the advances of every other dude she meets. Exacerbating matters is the fact that when Mother, Jugs & Speed goes dark, it goes very dark, to the tune of major characters getting shot and killed. Even with reliable director Peter Yates calling the shots, this picture simply isn’t solid enough to sustain whiplash changes in tone.

          Still, there’s plenty for casual viewers to enjoy in the brisk 95-minute film, from Cosby’s impeccable timing to Allen Garfield’s sweaty performance as F+B’s cheapskate proprietor. Fellow supporting players Hagman, Bruce Davison, and L.Q. Jones deliver vivid work, and Keitel is appealing in one of his few real romantic leads. As for Welch, she thrives during light-comedy bits but is startlingly awful during dramatic scenes.

Mother, Jugs & Speed: FUNKY

The Brink’s Job (1978)

Since director William Friedkin is mostly known for making intense pictures like The Exorcist (1973), it should come as no surprise to report that his occasional ventures into comedy aren’t among his most impressive achievements. So, even though The Brink’s Job has many of his trademarks (naturalistic acting, realistic locations) it fails in a rather significant regard: It’s not the least bit funny. Telling the real-life story of a group of brazen thieves who broke into a Brink’s building in late ’40s Boston and boosted almost $3 million, the picture is supposed to be a farce about a gang of nincompoops who slipped through cracks in the Brink’s security system, then became folk heroes once FBI director J. Edgar Hoover made catching them a top priority. Instead, it’s a good-looking but flat recitation of events involving people who aren’t admirable or interesting. The ensemble Friedkin assembled couldn’t be more appropriate for this sort of thing, with Peter Falk leading a gang that includes Peter Boyle, Allen Garfield (billed as Allen Goorwitz), Warren Oates, and Paul Sorvino, but they all play dull stereotypes: Falk is a cantankerous mastermind, Boyle is a hot-headed career criminal, Garfield is a simpering idiot, Oates is a shell-shocked war veteran eager to kill people, and Sorvino is a seen-it-all dandy who prefers jobs that don’t require him to get his hands dirty. The performances are fine, but they’re not specific enough to elevate the ho-hum screenplay by Walon Green; although some of Green’s dialogue has street-level authenticity, his narrative is plodding. Plenty of crime films have surmounted turgid narratives, however, so The Brink’s Job might have fared better if audiences hadn’t been told to expect laughs that the movie never delivers. (Available as part of the Universal Vault Series on Amazon.com)

The Brink’s Job: FUNKY

Busting (1974)

          One of the first examples of what later became known as the “buddy cop” subgenre, Busting exemplifies the subgenre’s virtues and weaknesses. When buddy-cop flicks ruled the box office in the ’80s, for instance, movies like Walter Hill’s 48 Hrs. (1982) alternated wildly between broad humor and brutal violence. That same tendency is on display throughout Busting, which features a pair of scruffy vice cops determined to take down an arrogant crime lord who lubricates his operation with payoffs to powerful city officials. In some scenes, Busting feels like an out-and-out comedy, with leading players Robert Blake and Elliot Gould trading amusingly cynical quips. Yet in other scenes, Busting is a full-on action thriller, featuring intense shootouts and scary car chases. The piece doesn’t hang together perfectly, and the story meanders a bit in the middle, but Busting is nonetheless fascinating as a rough draft for a type of movie that soon became ubiquitous.

          Like Richard Rush’s outrageous Freebie and the Bean, which was released almost a year after Busting, writer-director Peter Hyams’ Busting presents cops who disrespect authority as much as the crooks they pursue. Detectives Farrel (Blake) and Keneely (Gould) are veteran LAPD officers tired of pinching perverts and prostitutes only to see the worst offenders set free because underworld boss Carl Rizzo (Allen Garfield) has so much pull downtown. So even though the cops know Rizzo is protected on every level, they go after him anyway, harassing his nightclubs, stalking him while he drives around town, and waiting for the day they catch him making a connection with his drug supplier.

          Throughout the first hour of the movie, this is all quite entertaining, because Gould’s world-weary routine is delightful. “We could be good bad guys,” he opines at one point. “Pays better. Better hours. More cooperation from the police.” Blake, later famous as TV’s Baretta (and as an alleged felon in private life), ratchets down his signature intensity, and he’s surprisingly effective as a straight man. Garfield is suitably slimy, especially in a long scene when the cops get in Rizzo’s face during a boxing match.

          The movie goes dark around the one-hour mark, losing a bit of its liveliness as it speeds toward an unsatisfying conclusion—yet even when it’s tonally awkward, Busting is impressive to watch. Hyams, a former photographer who closely supervises the look of his films, gives Busting a grimy feel with lots of wide shots filled with atmospheric detail; the only recurring visual hiccup is a device of extremely wide dolly shots for which the camera is positioned so far ahead of the actors that the camera rounds corners before the talent, leaving empty frames onscreen for long beats. Given how flatly many ’70s crime films were shot, however, noting that Busting has overly ambitious imagery is a compliment instead of a criticism. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Busting: FUNKY