The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970)

Another one of those hideous big-studio attempts at depicting the youth culture of the ’60s, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart follows the adventures of a Beverly Hills brat living in a New York City hovel while studying at Columbia and making underground movies on the side. At first, Stanley’s problem is that he feels undersexed, compelling him to masturbate regularly, and later, his problem is that he feels oversexed, since he transitions from a monogamous relationship with the girl of his dreams to a threesome arrangement with two drugged-out hippie chicks. As if that’s not enough, he also gets an insecure girl drunk, talks her into pleasuring herself while he films her, and sleeps with her while she’s inebriated. Nice guy. Based on a novel by Robert Westbrook, who also wrote the script, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart starts out gently, portraying Stanley (Don Johnson) as a shy kid who experiences Walter Mitty-style fantasies of being bold and seductive. Once things start going Stanley’s way, he becomes an absolute jerk. In one scene, he tunes out a monologue by his girlfriend, Cathy (Dianne Hull), by imagining that her voice is the sound of a tape recording being fast-forwarded and rewound at high speeds. He lays a heavy I-love-you rap on Cathy to get into her pants, then two-times her the minute another woman shows sexual interest. Even with all the carnal content, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart is quite boring. Johnson’s dippy and unlikeable performance is one reason; with his mouth open in most scenes, he seems lobotomized rather than overwhelmed. The repetitious use of an awful song called “Sweet Gingerbread Man” makes things worse, and the way the story spirals toward a bad-trip freakout is painfully predictable. Excepting perhaps some interesting glimpses at Manhattan back in the day, The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart is nothing but a vapid cavalcade of debauchery disguised as a with-it melodrama.

The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart: LAME

Zachariah (1971)

          The music-driven western Zachariah could have become a touchstone for the stoner crowd, since the picture borrows the framework of Hermann Hesse’s trippy novel Siddhartha, features electrified rock bands anachronistically performing in cowboy towns, and uses the hero’s encounters with sex and violence to illustrate his spiritual growth. Alas, while the concept of Zachariah sounds far-out, the execution is disappointingly mundane. Excepting scenes with contemporary music and/or outlandish production design, the film unspools as a straightforward Hollywood western, complete with slick photography, a straight-ahead storyline, and tense gunfight sequences. As such, Zachariah can’t really decide which audience it’s trying to serve—the movie is too square for hippies, and too offbeat for straights.
          Furthermore, while the relationship between the movies may be coincidental, Zachariah comes across like a hopelessly watered-down American riff on Alejandro Jodorowsky’s demented gunfighter epic El Topo, which hit theaters a year before Zachariah.

          Cowritten by Joe Massot and the four members of comedy troupe the Firesign Theatre (who failed to imbue Zacharaiah with much in the way of humor), Zachariah concerns the title character (John Rubenstein), a country boy in the Old West who dreams of becoming a gunfighter. He buys a pistol through mail order, practices with the weapon, and then embarks on a journey along with his best friend, young blacksmith Matthew (Don Johnson). The lads join a small-time gang (portrayed by Woodstock rockers Country Joe and the Fish), but Zachariah longs to earn fame by defeating celebrated gunslinger Job (Elvin Jones). Eventually, Zachariah’s ambitions derail his friendship with Matthew and send Zachariah into the bed of prostitute Belle (Patricia Quinn).

          Director George Englund weaves music into the entire movie, sometimes stopping the story dead for an onscreen performance (hello there, Joe Walsh and the James Gang!), and sometimes utilizing propulsive tunes as an underscore. It’s all very pleasant to experience, inasmuch as counterculture-era sounds and the outlaw mythos mesh well, but nothing extraordinary takes shape. After all, even though the performances are adequate, the look is colorful, and some the tunes swing, how hip can a movie really be when it includes a supporting performance by future Eight Is Enough dad Dick Van Patten as a carnival barker?

Zachariah: FUNKY

The Harrad Experiment (1973)

          Adapted from a best-selling novel by Robert Rimmer, a lifelong skeptic of monogamy, The Harrad Experiment strikes an odd balance between tackiness and thoughtfulness. Set at a fictional college where two professors use students as a control group while testing their theories about free love, the movie has a salacious premise—students are asked to ditch their hang-ups and have sex with strangers—yet the onscreen content is gentle to a fault, because the worst repercussion of the experiment is hurt feelings. Nonetheless, The Harrad Experiment gained forbidden-fruit allure during its original release; after all, there’s a kinky thrill to be had imagining a college where sex ed is taken so literally. Also contributing to The Harrad Experiment’s minor cult-fave status is the presence of leading man Don Johnson, later to achieve fame in the ’80s TV series Miami Vice. Make what you will of the fact that he shares a quasi-erotic scene with screen veteran Tippi Hedren, who in real life is the mother of actress Melanie Griffith, Johnson’s on-again/off-again paramour for many years.

          Much of The Harrad Experiment comprises rap sessions between the students and their teachers, married couple Philip Tenhausen (James Whitmore) and Margaret Tenhausen (Hedren). The Tenhausens organize their students into couples and then encourage the kids to get it on, so a lot is made of the insecurity and shyness of Sheila (Laurie Walters), the meek coed paired with sexually confident Stanley (Johnson). Similarly, mousy Harry (Bruno Kirby) gets matched with gorgeous Beth (Victoria Thompson), so trouble arises when Beth dallies with Stanley.
          It’s all very unintentionally amusing, simply because the performers play everything so straight—even when delivering now-dated platitudes about human connection that are really just veiled pick-up lines. (One memorable bit of hippy-dippy interaction involves the students’ yoga instructor teaching them to do “zooms”—as the kids sit in a circle and say the word “zoom” one after another, literally creating a mellow buzz among the group.) The irony of The Harrad Experiment, of course, is that the movie is as conventional in its execution (and its morality) as the uptight society that Rimmer’s novel was presumably designed to challenge. As such, it’s a spicy message picture without the spice or the message. A quasi-sequel, originally titled Harrad Summer and later rechristened Love All Summer, followed in 1974. More on that one at a later date.

The Harrad Experiment: FUNKY

Macon County Line (1974) & Return to Macon County (1975)

          Max Baer Jr. enjoyed a minor acting career until landing the role of Jethro on the hit 1962-1971 sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. Alas, typecasting rendered Baer virtually unemployable once the show ended. Undaunted, he moved behind the camera to produce low-budget movies, the second of which was Macon County Line. The lurid potboiler earned huge profits on the drive-in circuit and opened the door for Baer to become a director of Southern-fried pictures including the respectable-ish Ode to Billy Joe (1978). The reason it’s worth dwelling on behind-the-scenes data is that Macon County Line is an underwhelming cinematic experience—therefore, the fact that it had an impact lends the picture a small measure of significance.

          In any event, the film—cowritten by Baer and Richard Compton (who also directed)—is a straightforward bummer narrative about mistaken identity. In 1954 Louisiana, two young brothers, Chris and Wayne Dixon (played by real-life siblings Alan and Jesse Vint), travel the countryside, getting laid and getting into trouble before commencing military service. Meanwhile, a pair of psychotic drifters roams the same terrain. Caught in the middle is small-town cop Reed Morgan (Baer). The drifters kill Reed’s wife, but Reed mistakenly believes the Dixon brothers are responsible. Tragedy ensues. The first hour of Macon County Line is disjointed and dull, lurching from playful scenes of Chris courting cute hitchhiker Jenny (Cheryl Waters) to grim scenes of the drifters committing crimes. There’s also a peculiar subplot in which Reed educates his young son (Leif Garrett) about the finer points of being a proper Southern racist. The whole thing leads up to a pointless twist ending that Baer and Compton stage like a vignette from a horror movie. Presumably, the combination of a gotcha climax and pandering redneck stereotypes made an impression on audiences, hence the box-office haul, but it’s hard to categorize Macon County Line as anything but a pop-culture aberration.

         Nonetheless, the picture inspired a quasi-sequel, Return to Macon County, which features an all-new cast and all-new characters, although the storyline is basically just a retread of the previous movie. (Compton returned as director, and he wrote the second movie solo, but Baer was not involved with the follow-up.) This time, the horndog young heroes are Bo and Harley, played by a pre-fame Nick Nolte and Don Johnson. The story takes place in 1958, and it revolves around Bo and Harley traveling the country to enter drag races. As in the previous picture, the boys hook up with a pretty girl (Robin Mattson) and invoke the ire of a crazed cop (Robert Viharo). Despite the charisma of the male leads, Return to Macon County is drab and sluggish. The story takes forever to get moving, and relies even more heavily on contrived circumstances than its predecessor. It doesn’t help that Nolte outclasses every other actor in the movie—with his bearish build and rascally intensity, he’s a potent image of youthful rebellion even when’s playing trite scenes and spewing vapid dialogue. It’s no surprise, then, that Nolte rose to major stardom with his very next project, the epic miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man (1976). Just like it’s no surprise there wasn’t a third entry in the Macon County franchise.

Macon County Line: FUNKY
Return to Macon County: LAME

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