1980 Week: Foolin’ Around

          Your ability to enjoy Foolin’ Around depends entirely upon your willingness to accept a young Gary Busey as a romantic lead. Still in the afterglow of his Oscar nomination for The Buddy Holly Story (1978), he’s at the apex of his affability and talent here, so he delivers punchlines well enough and infuses dramatic scenes with real feeling. Yet he’s still Gary Busey, a massive galoot with possibly the world’s largest teeth and more than a little glint of madness in his eyes. Watching him romance delicately pretty Annette O’Toole, it’s difficult not to fear for her safety, especially when they’re making out in the back of a panel van. Still, it’s only fair to attempt watching this movie with 1980 eyes, before the more extreme aspects of Busey’s public persona took root. Directed with his usual indifferent professionalism by Richard T. Heffron, Foolin’ Around is a slick piece of work, benefiting from fine production values, glossy photography, and terrific supporting players.

          The action begins at a college in Minnesota, where Oklahoma boy Wes (Busey) shows up for his first year of studies. Seeking part-time work, he signs up for an science experiment overseen by fellow student Susan (O’Toole), and he falls for her almost instantly. She declines his advances because she’s engaged to golden-boy businessman Whitley (John Calvin), who works for the company founded by Susan’s grandfather, Daggett (Eddie Albert), and operated by her mother, Samantha (Cloris Leachman). Over the course of the story, Wes draws Susan into an affair that threatens her impending marriage. While Samantha tries to prevent Wes from seeing Susan, he finds an advocate in Daggett, who likes Wes’ heartland gumption.

          Not a single frame of Foolin’ Around will surprise anyone who’s ever seen a romantic comedy, but the movie goes down smoothly. Busey is likeably upbeat, O’Toole is wholesomely sexy, sunny tunes performed by Seals and Crofts enliven the soundtrack, the story moves along at a brisk pace, and colorful vignettes add novelty. A young William H. Macy plays a shifty used-book salesman, Albert and Leachman deliver nuanced work despite playing clichéd roles, and Tony Randall gives a weird performance as Samantha’s vulgarity-spewing butler. (Randall seems like he’s in a totally different movie.) Lest all this praise give the wrong impression, Foolin’ Around disappoints as often as not, thanks to insipid physical comedy on the order of crotch hits, a hang-glider ride, and a sequence spoofing Rocky (1976). About the highest praise possible is that it’s a palatable flick for viewers able to groove with the Busey of it all.

Foolin’ Around: FUNKY

1980 Week: Carny

          Picture, if you dare, the disturbing images that open Carny. Gary Busey, in all his glorious weirdness, sits in a dark room before a mirror, a single light illuminating his face from above, as he applies black, red, and white clown makeup, all the while bulging his eyes and baring his gigantic teeth to test the progress of his transformation. Insinuating music underscores the scene. And that’s how it is with Carny—strange and unpleasant things happen without much context. At varying points, Carny is funny, humane, insightful, sexy, and terrifying. Yet the film is also dull, pointless, and sloppy. Is it a horror movie about violent drifters who work in traveling carnivals? Is it a low-rent romantic triangle involving two grown men battling over the affections of a teenager? Is it a melodrama about outsider artists facing irrelevance thanks to shifting social mores? The answer to each of those questions is yes—but Carny is a disappointment nonetheless, because the film is made conventionally as to require a strong central storyline, which it lacks.

          One can’t help but wonder whether producer, cowriter, and leading man Robbie Robertson—a genuine rock star known for his tenure as the Band’s guitarist and principal songwriter—imagined collaborating on this film with his friend Martin Scorsese. Although Carny exists way outside Scorsese’s preferred urban-crime milieu, surely Scorsese would have known how to wrangle the film’s ideas and textures into a coherent script. Clearly, Robertson did not. At its core, Carny spins a dishearteningly simple yarn. When the Great American Carnival rolls into a small town, 18-year-old waitress Donna (Jodie Foster) becomes infatuated with Frankie (Busey), a “geek” who spends his nights inside a cage above a water tank, taunting rubes so they’ll pay to dunk him. Donna leaves home to, as the saying goes, run away with the circus. This causes friction with Frankie’s best friend, Patch (Robertson), the carnival’s fixer. (He breaks up fights and pays bribes to officials in towns the carnival visits.) The movie also has about a dozen subplots, some of which receive no more than a moment or two of screen time, and eventually the Donna business turns sordid when she becomes a dancer in the carny’s girlie show.

          There’s a lot of everything in Carny, as evidenced by the massive supporting cast: Elisha Cook Jr., Meg Foster, Kenneth MacMillan, Bill McKinney, Tim Thomerson, Fred Ward, Craig Wasson, and more. The film also bursts with special people portraying sideshow performers. All of these characters wander through engrossing vignettes, so the plot sometimes feels like an interruption. Not helping matters is Alex North’s truly awful musical score, which turns unhelpfully comedic during dark moments. You’d think Robertson would have at least gotten the music right in his capacity as producer, especially since his acting is naturalistic but forgettable. Busey is unhinged whenever he’s in geek mode, and he brings surprising tenderness to quiet scenes. Foster, meanwhile, delivers an atypically indifferent performance, but she’s quite beguiling  here—as in her other 1980 film, Foxes, Foster seemed determined to demonstrate after a three-year screen hiatus that she was no longer a juvenile.

Carny: FUNKY

Didn’t You Hear . . . (1970)

An obtuse oddity that would be long forgotten had two of its actors not later achieved stardom, Didn’t You Hear . . . began as a student film, then had a brief theatrical release in 1970. (Sources including IMDb list the movie’s vintage as 1983 because that’s when it received a wider release.) Although the picture has certain elements of conventional storytelling, it’s more of an impressionistic experience, like a series of dreams brought to life. In fact, the bulk of the movie comprises an imagined narrative during which the hero, assuming a secondary identity inside a dream, joins his friends in the takeover of an abandoned ship. Periodically, the movie stops dead for a trippy montage featuring double exposures and solarized images, often set to twee folk music, so the guiding aesthetic involves taking viewers beyond the realm of everyday perception. That sort of thing is all well and good conceptually, but drifting further and further from reality often leads inexperienced storytellers into outright nonsense, as is the case here. Director Skip Sherwood and his three screenwriting collaborators unquestionably form a distinctive mood during the movie’s strongest moments, landing somewhere between an acid trip and a nightmare, but the lack of a clear central concept and/or any discernible thematic purpose makes watching the picture frustrating. Broadly, Kevin (Dennis Christopher) is a college kid who feels lost or overwhelmed or something like that. Among his buddies is the rowdy James (Gary Busey). After some humiliating real-world adventures, such as being the target of a sorority-pledge prank, Kevin drifts into a dream state, upon which he and his pals become pirates steering the ship they name The Queen of Sheba. Driven by a weird electronic score, Didn’t You Hear . . . has a few moments the patient viewer can grasp, with Christopher channeling adolescent angst while Busey hoots and hollers about sex, but most of what happens is impenetrable.

Didn’t You Hear . . . : LAME

Hex (1973)

          On paper, this one sounds like a sure winner—a supernatural thriller set on the American prairie in the early 20th century, with motorcyclists and witches fighting against each other. Oh, and the cast includes Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Scott Glenn, Dan Haggerty, and stunning model/actress Cristina Raines. On film, however, Hex is a perplexing misfire, neither pedestrian enough to work as a run-of-the-mill genre piece nor weird enough to qualify as so-bad-it’s-good cult fare. The movie is amateurish and muddled and slow, with an offbeat premise and a few somewhat exciting scenes. At its worst, Hex becomes utterly silly (especially when cornpone music kicks into gear on the soundtrack) and that’s not exactly the vibe one looks for in a supernatural thriller.

          The picture opens at a remote farm occupied by beautiful sisters Acacia (Hilarie Thompson) and Oriole (Raines), who seem like Old West eccentrics. They drift into a nearby frontier town, where they see a traveling motorcycle gang led by Whizzer (Keith Carradine), who claims to be an ex-World War I flyer, interacting with the locals. After the sisters leave town, Whizzer and his pals get into a hassle with a redneck named Brother Billy (Haggerty), so the bikers flee the town and discover the farm, taking the sisters hostage at gunpoint. Soon Whizzer falls into a romantic triangle, because even though he’s involved with fellow biker China (Doria Cook), he finds Oriole irresistible. Meanwhile, Acacia takes a liking to soft-spoken mechanic Golly (Mike Combs). But when biker Giblets (Busey) tries to rape Acacia, Oriole uses magic that she learned from her Native American father to get revenge. The movie them spirals into the hippy-dippy-’70s equivalent of a slasher flick, with members of the biker gang esuffering gruesome deaths until the final showdown between Oriole and Whizzer.

          Very little of this stuff makes sense, either in terms of basic logic or recognizable human behavior, and choppy editing exacerbates the myriad script problems. (For instance, what’s with all the material featuring the very white Robert Walker Jr. as some sort of ethnic/spiritual martial artist?) The actors playing bikers give spirited performances, but Raines’ lifeless work drains the picture of vitality, and it’s odd whenever the movie drifts into comic terrain. (Someone insults a woman by yelling, “Up yer skeeter with a red-hot mosqueeter!”) On the plus side, Raines gets to wear a creepy bear costume during the climax, and that’s something one doesn’t get to see every day. FYI, Hex is sometimes marketed on video under the titles Charms and The Shrieking.

Hex: LAME

Lolly-Madonna XXX (1973)

          On the plus side, the dueling-rednecks picture Lolly-Madonna XXX features elegant cinematography, an impressive cast, a plaintive score, and a whopper of a final act filled with bloodshed and tragedy. For fans of melodramatic pulp, there’s a lot to savor in this fictional story that vaguely evokes the Hatfield-McCoy mythos. Nonetheless, the film’s weaknesses are plentiful. The basic premise is awkward and contrived, the middle of the movie is dull and uneventful, and many of the character relationships stretch credibility to the breaking point. One can feel the filmmakers trying to push all the pieces in place for a spectacular finale, but the elements never cohere dramatically or logically. Considering that the movie was co-written by future mystery-fiction queen Sue Grafton, who adapted Lolly-Madonna XXX from her own novel of the same name, it’s fair to say that Grafton was still learning how to construct plots.

          Here’s the iffy set-up. In backwoods Tennessee, two families have been fighting for years because one bought a piece of a land that previously belonged to the other. The Feathers are led by stoic patriarch Laban (Rod Steiger), while the Gutshalls answer to the highly principled Pap (Robert Ryan). One day, the Gutshall boys leave a postcard in the Feather mailbox, indicating that a young woman named Lolly Madonna is scheduled to arrive in the region, with plans to marry one of the Gutshall boys. The Feathers head to the bus station and kidnap a young woman named Roonie Gill (Season Hubley), whom they mistakenly believe is Lolly Madonna. In reality, there is no such woman, and the postcard was a ruse to get the Feathers away from their moonshine operation so the Gutshalls could vandalize the still. Despite Roonie’s vehement objections, the Feathers refuse to believe she’s not the intended bride of a Gutshall, so they try to leverage her as a hostage. Somehow, even though Roonie has no actual relationship with the Gutshalls, this scheme exacerbates the rivalry, triggering arson, rape, theft, and eventually murder. Does any of this hogwash make sense? No.

          But consider the vivacious actors populating the cast. Jeff Bridges. Gary Busey. Ed Lauter. Randy Quaid. Scott Wilson. Not too shabby. Moreover, director Richard C. Sarafian does his usual frustrating job, rendering richly textured images and staging individual scenes well even as he fails to convey a persuasive overarching story. At least the movie’s final half-hour is memorably grim, and it’s hard to shake the weird vignettes with Lauter—not only does the tough-guy actor pretend to give a rockabilly concert performance while standing alone in a hog pen, but he also plays a rape scene while wearing lingerie and makeup. You don’t see that sort of thing every day. Oh, and for what it’s worth, Bridges is terrific, as usual, giving a better performance than the movie probably deserves, even as Ryan underplays and Steiger thunders for the entertainment of those in the cheap seats.

Lolly-Madonna XXX: FUNKY

Angels Hard as They Come (1971)

          Long before he made humanistic dramas and thrillers for major studios, Jonathan Demme paid his dues by generating exploitation films for Roger Corman’s B-movie factory. Demme’s tenure at New World Pictures began with this biker flick, which has some admirable moments but doesn’t make a lasting impression. Scott Glenn, at his most stoic and sullen, stars as Long John, leader of a small gang of drug-dealing cyclists. After escaping cops during an interrupted transaction, Long John and his pals encounter members of another biker gang at a gas station. The second gang has taken up residence in an Old West ghost town, where they’re partying with a group of hippies, so Long John and his buddies are invited to join the fun. Soon after the various factions converge, Long John gets into a heavy rap session with hippie chick Astrid (Gilda Texter). She pushes him to explain why bikers are so violent, and he replies that anyone who flouts society’s rules invites conflict. “Yeah, I dig your problem,” Astrid says, “but I don’t think your solution is right.” “Shit,” Long John says, “What works is what’s right.” In fleeting moments like this one, Angels Hard as They Come almost becomes a thoughtful referendum on the counterculture.

          Alas, Demme (who cowrote and produced the picture) and Joe Viola (who cowrote and directed) can’t linger too long on philosophy. This being a biker flick, the main items on the menu are debauchery and violence. Accordingly, Demme and Viola contrive an iffy plot revolving around the rape and murder of a hippie chick. Eventually, Long John is accused of the killing and subjected to kangaroo-court justice at the hands of General (Charles Dierkop), the demented leader of the opposing biker gang. None of this quite works, since it’s never clear why the bikers are so upset a stranger was killed, or what the General hopes to achieve by incriminating Long John. Plus, the story simply runs out of gas at some point, looping through repetitive scenes of boozing and brawling. That said, Angels Hard as They Come delivers most of the favorite tropes associated with its genre—crazies referring to each other by colorful nicknames (“Axe,” “Juicer,” “Lucifer,” etc.), nasty fight scenes involving broken bottles and other found-object weapons, zonked-out chicks dancing topless on bars, and so on. A young Gary Busey is the mix, too, though he’s rather improbably cast as a pacifist hippie instead of a scary biker.

Angels Hard as They Come: FUNKY

A Star Is Born (1976)

          First, the good news: This Kris Kristofferson-Barbra Streisand version of the oft-remade showbiz tale about a rising star’s doomed involvement with a veteran celebrity is not as bad as its reputation would suggest. Considering the vicious criticism the picture has received over the years, one might expect an outright disaster. Instead, A Star Is Born contains some credible dramatic elements, and the production values are terrific. As for the acting, it’s quite good—after a fashion. The main problem, which infects every aspect of the picture, is that viewers are asked to believe Barbra Streisand could have become a rock star in the mid-’70s. Considering that Streisand was a show-tune belter who incidentally dabbled in pop music, her casting creates fundamental believability problems. After all, the biggest song the movie generated was “Evergreen,” a ballad so gentle it could have been recorded by the Carpenters. A further complication is Streisand’s legendary vanity—the degree to which the movie contorts itself in order to showcase her looks is absurd. For instance, the number of Streisand’s costume changes seems even more comically excessive than it might have otherwise given the presence of a unique screen credit during the closing crawl: “Miss Streisand’s Clothes From Her Closet.” Oy.

          Anyway, Streisand plays Esther Hoffman, a singer-songwriter stuck working in small clubs until she meets John Norman Howard (Kristofferson), a darkly handsome rock star. (Never mind that Kristofferson found most of his real-life musical success on the country charts.) Howard mentors Hoffman until she becomes a bigger star than he ever was, at which point Howard determines that he must disappear—in every way possible—so as not to impede his apprentice’s ascent. Woven into this melodrama, naturally, is a love story between the musicians.

          Director Frank Pierson, who by this point in his career was a top screenwriter with such movies as Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) to his credit, made a major professional leap with this project; before directing A Star Is Born, he’d mostly helmed TV episodes and low-budget features. Considering that poor Pierson must have gotten diva demands in stereo—beyond Streisand’s micromanagement, Pierson had to deal with hairdresser-turned-producer Jon Peters, who happened to be sleeping with Streisand at the time the movie was made—the fact that A Star Is Born moves along fairly well is a testament to Pierson’s innate storytelling abilities. Yes, the flick is overwrought and sudsy, but in some sequences—particularly Kristofferson’s final moments—Pierson renders solid drama about life under the media microscope. The picture also benefits from vibrant supporting turns by performers including Gary Busey and actor/director Paul Mazursky. Does A Star Is Born need to be 140 minutes? Not hardly. But is the picture worthwhile? Yes, especially for Pierson’s close attention to emotional detail and for Kristofferson’s charismatic performance. Plus, it must be said, Babs looks (and sounds) great.

A Star Is Born: FUNKY

The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972)

Continuity among sequels to The Magnificent Seven (1060) is a dodgy matter, which is probably to be expected seeing as how The Magnificent Seven was an Americanized spin on the Japanese action classic The Seven Samurai (1954)—it’s silly to complain about the lack of artistic integrity when discussing sequels to a remake. Therefore, suffice to say that by the time this fourth entry arrived, changes had been made. None of the original film’s actors is present, and the lead role of honorable gunfighter Chris Adams is occupied by Lee Van Cleef, the third actor in the series to play Adams. (Yul Brynner originated the part.) The storyline for The Magnificent Seven Ride! is, predictably, a retread of the series formula—Adams reluctantly agrees to help the citizens of a border town repel a violent invasion. To achieve this goal, Adams gathers a group of gunmen, and he enlists the citizens of the town, nearly all of whom are women, as helpers. Considering that it’s telling such a trite story, The Magnificent Seven Ride! takes quite a while to get going; the movie is nearly halfway over before preparations for the big battle get underway. Furthermore, the picture has an exceedingly ordinary visual style, looking more like an episode of a TV Western than a proper feature. Yet The Magnificent Seven Ride! is basically watchable, at least for undemanding viewers. Van Cleef’s cruel persona is compelling even in this drab context, and the reliable character actors surrounding him contribute solid work—the cast includes such familiar faces as Luke Askew, Ed Lauter, James B. Sikking, and Ralph Waite. (A young Gary Busey appears in a small role, too.) The women in the movie don’t fare as well, with Mariette Hartley disappearing quickly and Stefanie Powers pouting through her bland turn in the underdeveloped love-interest role. All in all, though, the movie is a fair trade: It promises little and delivers exactly that.

The Magnificent Seven Ride!: FUNKY

The Buddy Holly Story (1978)

          Decades before he became known as a reality-TV madman, Gary Busey was a promising young talent with irrepressible energy, thriving in a broad variety of projects and even scoring an Oscar nomination for his best performance, playing an ill-fated ’50s rock star in The Buddy Holly Story. Directed by first-timer Steve Rash, The Buddy Holly Story is a thoroughly ordinary piece of work that depicts key events during Holly’s ascent from obscurity as a Texas roller-rink performer to international fame as a chart-topping tunesmith. This is awfully clean-cut stuff by rock-movie standards, since Holly’s biggest professional obstacles were ambition and perfectionism, rather than the standard rock-god foibles of substance abuse and womanizing, so the level of drama in the picture never rises particularly high. Still, The Buddy Holly Story is rewarding, largely because of Busey’s impassioned performance.

          Stripping his gigantic frame down to slimmer proportions, burying his blonde locks in brown dye, and hiding his eyes behind Holly’s signature Coke-bottle eyeglasses, Busey slips into his character’s skin while still retaining the vivaciousness that makes Busey so interesting. Whether the actor actually captures the real Holly is a question better left to experts, but there’s no question that Busey’s work in this picture is consistently dynamic and naturalistic. Better still, Busey absolutely kills during the musical scenes, since he not only did all of his own singing but also performed the movie’s myriad tunes live during filming—there’s a good reason why most of The Buddy Holly Story’s 113 minutes comprise full performances of classics like “It’s So Easy,” “Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” and “True Love Ways.” Whenever Busey is on stage, with hard-working supporting players Charles Martin Smith and Don Stroud playing, respectively, Holly’s bass player and drummer, the movie sizzles.

          And if some of the surrounding narrative bits fall flat by comparison—for instance, Maria Richwine’s performance as Holly’s wife is amiable but forgettable—the problem is surmountable, since a theme of The Buddy Holly Story is that Holly was a workaholic who felt most alive while creating music. Plus, the movie can’t really do much with the circumstances of Holly’s sudden death in a plane crash at the height of his fame, since it’s hard to make capricious fate seem organic. Nonetheless, Rash’s loving evocation of the ’50s is appealing—all tidy surfaces and simmering youth-culture tension—and the best parts of the movie work just fine. As the kids on American Bandstand used to say, it’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it.

The Buddy Holly Story: GROOVY

The Last American Hero (1973)

          Based on a nonfiction story by Tom Wolfe, which was in turn based on the career of real-life NASCAR driver Junior Johnson, The Last American Hero is a solid character piece elevated by the documentary-style realism of its racing sequences and by uniformly good acting. The screenplay, by William Roberts, is a bit on the thin side, relying on broad characterizations and a hackneyed structure, but the aforementioned strengths help smooth over shortcomings in the writing.

          Jeff Bridges stars as Junior Jackson, the movie’s fictionalized version of Johnson. He’s a willful young man living in the Deep South, working in the family business of running moonshine. Junior’s skill behind the wheel comes in handy for evading cops, but because local police know all about the Jackson’s operation, Junior’s father, Elroy (Art Lund), is in and out of jail on a regular basis. When the legal bill related to one of Elroy’s arrests exceeds what the family can afford, Junior steps up deliveries but also joins demolition-derby races organized by an unscrupulous promoter (Ned Beatty).

          Soon, Junior graduates to the big time of the NASCAR circuit, where he competes with a super-confident champion (William Smith) and courts a racetrack groupie (Valerie Perrine). The story gains dimension once Junior starts running with a big-city crowd, because his aspirations to independence and integrity wither upon exposure to pressures like the need for sponsorship. In particular, Junior gets into an ongoing hassle with Burton Colt (Ed Lauter), a hard-driving entrepreneur who sets usurious terms and expects humiliating deference. All of this interesting material serves the concept encapsulated by the Jim Croce-sung theme song, “I Got a Name,” because the thrust of the story is Junior’s search for identity.

          Bridges is great, as always, winningly essaying Junior’s transition from naïveté to worldliness, and the supporting actors fit their roles perfectly. Lund and Geraldine Fitzgerald provide earthy gravitas as Junior’s parents, while a young Gary Busey adds an impetuous counterpoint as Junior’s brother. Perrine, all blowsy exuberance, captures the damaging caprice of a woman caught in fame’s tail winds, and Smith is understated as a man who realizes his moment in the spotlight is slipping away. Lauter rounds out the principal cast with his petty villainy, providing a formidable obstacle for the hero to overcome.

          Much of the credit for this ensemble’s work must go to director Lamont Johnson, whose handling of the movie’s visuals is as strong as his guidance of the actors. Though usually an unassertive journeyman, Johnson surpasses expectations by elevating Roberts’ humdrum script into something memorably humane.

The Last American Hero: GROOVY

The Gumball Rally (1976)

          In 1975, a Time magazine cover story introduced the world to the “Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash,” better known as the Cannonball Run, an illegal road race in which competitors sped across the U.S. to determine who could travel from New York to Los Angeles the fastest. Created by a pair of car enthusiasts rebelling against speed limits, the Cannonball Run inspired two low-budget movies released in 1976. First up was the Roger Corman production Cannonball, a black comedy with the accent on violence, and then came this lighthearted take on the subject.

          The Gumball Rally stars Michael Sarrazin as Michael Bannon, the idle-rich originator of a Cannonball-style road race involving a handful of free-spirited competitors. Although the movie has some perfunctory plot devices, like Bannon’s friendly rivalry with fellow racer Steve Smith (Tim McIntire) and the efforts of inept cop Lt. Roscoe (Norman Burton) to interrupt the race, the focus is on wild automotive antics: The drivers pull high-speed shenanigans like transferring passengers from one moving car to another, and they make sport of outsmarting cops across the country.

          There’s not much in the way of characterization, so, for instance, Alice (Susan Flannery) and Jane (Joanne Nail) are one-note hotties using their looks to wriggle free of police entanglements while demolishing speed limits in their Porsche. Despite its superficiality, The Gumball Rally is an amiable celebration of individualism and irreverence, since the racers aren’t out to hurt anybody; they’re simply competing for fun, glory, and a gold-plated gumball machine.

          As directed by Charles Bail, whose career primarily comprises episodes of shows like CHiPs and Knight Rider, The Gumball Rally benefits greatly from enthusiastic performers. Sarrazin, an promising ’60s/’70s leading man whose career was starting to wobble at this point, is charming and funny, while McIntire offers his customary force-of-nature bluster; they make such a great duo it would have been fun to see them in other movies together. Gary Busey plays another in his long line of crazy-redneck characters, hootin’ and hollerin’ to enjoyable effect, and a young Raul Julia steals the movie with his flamboyant turn as an Italian speedster with a weakness for the ladies.

          The Gumball Rally is fluff, but it goes down a lot smoother than the officially sanctioned movie about the Cannonball race, 1981’s star-studded The Cannonball Run. Whereas the latter film is bloated, crude, and sexist, The Gumball Rally is 105 minutes of pleasant silliness.

The Gumball Rally: GROOVY

Straight Time (1978)

          After the flurry of activity that followed his star-making performance in The Graduate (1967), Dustin Hoffman became incredibly selective in the ’70s and ’80s, sometimes letting years pass between projects. Not coincidentally, his commitment to the parts he actually took was incredible, manifesting as deep involvement with story development and meticulous research into the lifestyles of his characters. The excellent drama Straight Time is rooted in this uncompromising craftsmanship: Hoffman’s character appears in virtually every scene, so his performance shapes the film.

          Hoffman stars as Max Dembo, a small-time crook recently released from six years in prison. After a few halting attempts at living within the law, Max drifts back to criminality in part because his hard-driving parole officer, Earl Frank (M. Emmett Walsh), finds drug residue left in Max’s dingy apartment by Max’s useless friend, fellow ex-con Willy Darin (Gary Busey). Feeling like he’s damned to incarceration whether he commits crimes or not, Max starts executing risky robberies despite the promise of his new romance with Jenny Mercer (Theresa Russell), a sweet young woman he met at an employment agency.

          The intense drama of Straight Time stems from an exploration of whether Max ever really has the opportunity to go straight. In a way, the picture is an indictment of the social structures that ensure a lifetime of punishment for any significant infraction. Based on a novel by real-life criminal Edward Bunker and directed by Ulu Grosbard, all of whose films are distinguished by extraordinary acting, Straight Time has authenticity to burn. It’s uncomfortable watching Max gauge the reactions of people who discover the truth about his past, and excruciating to see him tossed back in the slammer on the mere suspicion of a parole violation.

          The genius of Hoffman’s performance is that he plays Max as an addict: Whenever Max gets his teeth into a promising score, he loses the ability to perceive anything except the loot in front of him, so he frequently overstays his welcome at crime sites, endangering himself and his accomplices. Therefore, the movie provides a resonant portrait of a career criminal, someone who, accurately or not, believes no other options exist.

          The performers supporting Hoffman are terrific, with Busey and a young Kathy Bates playing an impoverished couple trying to steer clear of trouble despite the Busey character’s many weaknesses. Harry Dean Stanton essays a frightening professional crook whose ruthless discipline makes him a public menace. Russell is credible and sensitive in one of her first roles, and Walsh does wonders with the movie’s thinnest characterization. Although a slew of writers worked on the script (including A-listers Michael Mann and Alvin Sargent), it’s to Grosbard’s and Hoffman’s credit that the film comes together as smoothly as it does: Straight Time is essentially a character study, but the movie also works, at least in moments, as a gripping thriller. More importantly, it resonates.

Straight Time: RIGHT ON

Big Wednesday (1978)

          Although John Milius is closely associated with cinematic ultraviolence, as a screenwriter (Apocalypse Now) and as a director (Conan the Barbarian), one of his most assured endeavors in both capacities is the lyrical surfing drama Big Wednesday, which he cowrote with lifelong surfer Dennis Aaberg. Wonderfully pretentious from beginning to end, the picture uses the interwoven adventures of three surf-crazy friends as a metaphor for self-realization, with human drama unfurling across years defined by seismic social change. Big Wednesday is a grandiose symphony of destiny, masculinity, and transcendance, with poetic speechifying and taut musculature the dominant instruments. In other words, it’s pure Milius, only without the beheadings.

          Set primarily in Malibu, the picture begins in 1962, when three macho pals live carefree lives of chasing girls and riding curls. They are levelheaded Jack (William Katt), unhinged Leroy (Gary Busey), and reckless Matt (Jan-Michael Vincent). Surfing is the center of their lives, and Milius uses the endless blue of the Pacific to express how these young men see their lives stretching to infinity. Yet Milius also employs the danger of testing oneself against the ocean’s power to underscore life’s ephemeral quality—Jack strives to use time well, Leroy defines himself by cheating death, and Matt courts his own demise, as if the sureness of mortality robs existence of its sweetness. Despite the heaviosity running through the picture, moments of levity emerge, sometimes in the form of hormone-driven tomfoolery and sometimes in the form of speeches that are quintessentially Milius. “I like fights,” says Leroy, nicknamed “The Masochist” by his pals. “I’ve dove through windows, I’ve eaten light bulbs, I like sharks, any kind of blood. If you gave me a gun, I’d shoot you in the face just to see what it looked like when the bullet hit.” That’s Milius, ever the voice of maniacs with twinkles in their eyes. (As a side note, Leroy mostly disappears from the movie soon after this speech—it’s as if Milius had nothing left to say about the character.)

          Early scenes of brawling and carousing work better than a long stretch during which the boys use creative lies to dodge the draft, but the movie eventually finds its groove—perhaps too much so—during an epic climax confronting the friends with the biggest waves of their lives, to the accompaniment of histrionic scoring by Basil Poledouris. From start to finish, the picture benefits from the great Bruce Surtees’s ominous photography (with significant assistance from the second unit), and the film’s principal actors contribute impassioned work despite the limitations of their skillsets. It’s poignant to see Busey and Vincent in their gleaming youth, given the damage ensuing years inflicted on both actors, and Katt complements them with the earnest Redford Lite vibe that, one year later, got him cast as a younger version of Redford’s signature character in Butch and Sundance: The Early Days.

          Ultimately, Milius’s choice to frame the movie as a Big Statement ensures the ocean is the most clearly defined individual in the film, but at least the ocean gives a hell of a performance—some of the surfing footage (captured in California and Hawaii) has terrifying power.

Big Wednesday: GROOVY