1980 Week: Heart Beat

          Given the endless fascination that people have for 1950s beatnik culture and especially for the work of Beat author Jack Kerouac, it’s surprising that no one’s attempted a proper biopic about the man. In fact, cursory research suggests this middling melodrama includes the first fictionalized onscreen depiction of Kerouac, who is played by the underrated actor John Heard as an earnest young man striving for meaning and recognition while also trying to reconcile the gap that exists between those two things. Yet Heart Beat isn’t primarily about Kerouac, who is merely one prong in a romantic triangle. The other people involved are Kerouac’s notorious pal Neal Cassady, an inspiration for one of the major characters in Kerouac’s classic 1957 book On the Road, and Cassaday’s wife, Carolyn, who wrote the memoir from which Heart Beat was adapted. The way that Kerouac gets lost in the shuffle is indicative of the narrative problems that plague Heart Beat. Although clearly made with care and conviction, the movie is indecisive and unfocused, trying to tell several stories at the same time and therefore serving none of those stories well.

          In the broadest strokes, Heart Beat explores the friendship between Jack (Heard), a straight-laced guy fascinated with the way Beats ignore the restrictions of Establishment culture, and Neal (Nick Nolte), a wild man who lives the Beatnik lifestyle to an extreme. Caught in the middle is Carolyn (Sissy Spacek), a society girl who impulsively joins Jack and Nick for an adventure into the unknown. Although Jack falls hard for Carolyn, he waits too long to make a move, and Neal swoops Carolyn into a torrid romance that later resolves into a conventional marriage. Before that happens, Carolyn is present for the creation of On the Road, which occasions a parting of the ways between Jack, who longs for mainstream success, and Neal, who resents having his life transformed into prose. Other friends drift in and out of the main characters’ vagabond existence, including Ira (Ray Sharkey), a loudmouth poet based upon the real-life Beat icon Alan Ginsburg. (Ira’s principal shtick involves screaming “cocksucker” in public places, which has the effect of reducing Ginsberg to a vulgar caricature.)

          During the first half of Heart Beat, in which writer-director John Byrum tracks the emergence of the romantic triangle, the movie is dull and meandering. During the second half, things get spicier, because Jack experiences success around the same time that Carolyn, Jack, and Neal attempt living as a threesome, with Carolyn moving between the beds of the two men she loves. Perhaps because of limitations in the source material (meaning Carolyn Cassidy’s book) and perhaps because of a failure of imagination on Byrum’s part, Heart Beat fails to genuinely illuminate its characters, thereby falling into the trap of simply re-creating interesting moments as museum dioramas. At its worst, the movie is a lifeless frame showcasing Jack Fisk’s immaculate production design, and sometimes the shadows cast by venetian blinds are the most compelling things onscreen. At its best, the movie gives Nolte room to portray Cassady as a merry prankster high on exploration and spontaneity.

Heart Beat: FUNKY

North Dallas Forty (1979)

          Although its portrayal of professional American football as a drug-addled, morally dubious free-for-all was undoubtedly jacked up for dramatic effect, North Dallas Forty feels credible from start to finish, and it works equally well as a joke machine and a serious story. Based on a tell-all book by former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Peter Gent, the picture depicts the odyssey of Phil Elliott (Nick Nolte), a wide receiver for the fictional team the North Dallas Bulls. Aging out of his prime and suffering the repercussions of numerous injuries, Phil’s a smart-ass who makes occasional game-winning catches and relies heavily on his close friendship with good-ol’-boy quarterback Seth Maxwell (Mac Davis). Yet Phil clashes with the Bulls’ autocratic coach, B.A. Strothers (G.D. Spradlin), who expects complete loyalty and rigorous research from his players. As Phil’s position on the team becomes more and more tenuous—he spends a lot of time on the bench—Phil starts to envision a day when football is no longer the most important thing in his life. Helping to motivate this transition are a romance with sexy bluebood Charlotte Caulder (Dayle Haddon) and the realization that Bulls owner Conrad Hunter (Steve Forrest) is willing to risk players’ health for a winning season.

          Screen time in North Dallas Fortty is divided fairly evenly between sports rituals (games, locker-room conferences, practices) and the other parts of Phil’s life. These worlds bleed into each other, so a sense is conveyed that pro players are modern gladiators who rely on dope to get through physically demanding games and then party hard to release tension. Woven into the picture is a melancholy thread of bold men watching their good years slip into the rearview mirror. Furthermore, players lament how middle managers like Emmett Hunter (Dabney Coleman) have replaced old-fashioned values of dignity and sportsmanship with profit-driven agendas. One suspects that the author of the source material stretched things a bit by portraying his onscreen surrogate as the Last Good Man in Football, but the characterization provides an effective viewpoint for observing the strangeness of professional sports.

          Director Ted Kotcheff, always a competent craftsman no matter the genre, excels on and off the field in North Dallas Forty, using atmosphere and pacing to illustrate how frat-boy chaos and merciless competition fuse into the unsustainable lifestyles of top players; Kotcheff also creates harmonious ensemble acting, no easy task. Nolte is at his very best here, prickly and sympathetic all at once, and singer-turned-actor Davis complements him with an amiably pathetic sort of me-first pragmatism. As the villains of the piece, Coleman, Forrest, Spradlin, and the great Charles Durning form a brick wall of corporate resistance, each representing a different color of uptight intolerance. Bo Svenson and real-life NFL player John Matuszak are very funny as a pair of Neanderthal linebackers, and if comely model-turned-actress Haddon gets lost amid the movie’s male energy given her flat acting, her deficiencies are not enough to detract from the picture’s overall effectiveness.

North Dallas Forty: RIGHT ON

Who’ll Stop the Rain (1978)

          Provocative themes related to counterculture idealism, illegal drugs, police corruption, and the Vietnam War intersect in Who’ll Stop the Rain, an exceptionally well-made drama/thriller that, somehow, never quite gels. The film is praiseworthy in many important ways, boasting evocative production values, sensitive performances, and suspenseful situations, so the picture’s shortcomings are outweighed by its plentiful virtues. Nonetheless, Who’ll Stop the Rain is frustrating, because judicious editing—or, better still, bolder reimagining during the process of translating the source material into a film script—could have accentuated the most important elements while also providing greater clarity and simplicity. Some background: Robert Stone, the author of the underlying novel and also the co-writer the script, ran with a cool crowd in the ’60s and ’70s, gaining insight into hipster icons ranging from Neil Cassady to Ken Kesey. Stone also amalgamated data about the role dope played in the lives of U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam. The writer blended these ideas, plus notions from his fertile imagination, into the novel Dog Soldiers, which won the National Book Award in 1975. Alas, Stone’s story got muddy on the way to the screen.

          The picture follows three interconnected characters. During a prologue set in Vietnam, burned-out journalist John Converse (Michael Moriarty) hatches a get-rich scheme: He buys a stash of heroin, and then recruits his friend, soldier Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), to smuggle the smack inside a military transport when Hicks returns to America. Right away, this set-up illuminates the textured character dynamics at work in Who’ll Stop the Rain; there’s a great moment when Hicks expresses surprise Converse is willing to use him so brazenly, thus revealing how deeply Converse’s idealism has been eroded by the ugliness of war. Hicks mules the package successfully, but unloading the drugs stateside proves troublesome. Converse’s wife, Marge (Tuesday Weld), has become a prescription-drug addict and therefore can’t arrange Hicks’ payoff as instructed. Worse, a corrupt DEA agent (Anthony Zerbe) pounces on the Converse home—while Hicks is there with the drugs—in order to steal the narcotics and wipe out anyone who gets in his way. Hicks escapes with Marge, but this sets in motion a long chase leading from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Converse returns to the U.S. and gets captured by the DEA agent, who tortures the would-be drug mogul and uses him for bait to lure Hicks (and Marge) from hiding. All of this culminates with a wild shootout at Hicks’ hippie hideaway in the Southern California desert.

          Listing all the ways this story doesn’t work cinematically would take a while—for instance, Converse departs the narrative for long stretches, and the quasi-romance between Hicks and Marge feels both contrived and needlessly downbeat. But none of these problems diminish the texture of Who’ll Stop the Rain. The movie’s acting is amazing, with Nolte at his animalistic best, Weld capturing a queasy sort of bewilderment, and Moriarty sweating his way through a vivid turn as a pathetic striver. Zerbe is memorably insidious, while the actors playing his low-rent henchmen—Richard Masur and Ray Sharkey—add surprising elements of humor and terror. Director Karel Reisz, always stronger with atmosphere and character than with story, generates tremendous realism even in the most outrageous scenes (e.g., the final shootout), and his filmmaking soars at periodic intervals. Ultimately, the power of Who’ll Stop the Rain stems from the cumulative mood of despair that the filmmakers generate—if nothing else, Who’ll Stop the Rain captures something profound about how it felt to sort through the mess of Vietnam while history was still unfolding.

Who’ll Stop the Rain: GROOVY

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

Winter Kill (1974)

          After actor/producer Andy Griffith left the series that bore his name, the 1960-1968 family favorite The Andy Griffith Show, he spent nearly two decades casting about for another project that curried equal favor with the public. Some of the failed pilots and short-lived series he made during these wilderness years, which extended until the 1986 launch of his geriatric-lawyer show Matlock, are interesting because they’re edgier than the kind of material one normally associates with Griffith. For instance, the 1974 telefilm Winter Kill, the first of three TV movies designed to launch a new series featuring Griffith as a small-town sheriff facing grislier problems than The Andy Griffith Show’s unflappable Andy Taylor ever encountered, is a suspense story about a serial killer. It’s startling to see good-ol’-boy Griffith tracking down a psycho who slips on a ski mask and prowls around a snow-covered resort town by night, blowing away victims with a shotgun and spray-painting the number of each murder near the crime scene. Mayberry, this ain’t.

          Even aside from the novelty of seeing Griffith in a new context, Winter Kill is fairly effective, and with good reason: Screenwriter John Michael Hayes, whose career was winding down at this point, counted three Alfred Hitchcock classics, including the seminal Rear Window (1954), among his past credits, so he clearly learned a few things about generating tension from the Master of Suspense. Winter Kill unfurls in a straightforward fashion, with Sheriff Sam McNeill (Griffith) uncovering his neighbors’ tawdry secrets while he looks for connections between murder victims. This prompts flashbacks showcasing the sordid sex lives of various townies, and we also discover the pressures McNeil faces when he starts treating his constituents as suspects.

          Although the specifics of the story are a bit on the generic side and the supporting cast is largely populated with workaday actors (exception: a young Nick Nolte shows up as a cocky ski instructor), Winter Kill manages to sustain interest from start to finish because Hayes and director Jud Taylor stay focused on the race to catch the killer. Furthermore, the murder scenes are memorable for their docudrama simplicity: Watching the masked killer methodically load his weapon and then trudge through snow toward his next victim preys upon the universal fear of something awful creeping out of the night. And who better to protect us than our beloved Sheriff Andy? If nothing else, Winter Kill is a reminder of Griffith’s versatility, something worth remembering on the sad event of his passing today at the age of 86. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Winter Kill: GROOVY

The Deep (1977)

          Few ’70s blockbusters had the far-reaching impact of Jaws (1975), which spawned not only countless substandard imitators but also a boom period for nearly everyone involved in the original picture. Both phenomena manifested in The Deep, a glossy thriller about oceanic peril based on a novel by the author of Jaws, Peter Benchley. With the additional exception of actor Robert Shaw’s participation, however, the similarities pretty much end there. Whereas Jaws is a robust adventure film with underwater horror, The Deep is a comparatively limp crime picture with underwater boredom. The movie has many noteworthy elements, all of which cheerfully pander to the public’s appetite for lurid sensation, but it’s also a 123-minute slog filled with meandering scenes that go on seemingly forever.

          The story begins when two young Americans who are vacationing in Bermuda discover a shipwreck during a scuba dive in the waters off the island. An artifact they recover catches the attention of a crusty deep-sea salvage expert (Robert Shaw) and a vicious drug dealer (Louis Gossett Jr.), because it turns out the shipwreck is filled with vials containing enough morphine to produce a huge amount of heroin. Accordingly, most of the picture comprises repeated dives to gather booty from the wreck, plus on-shore confrontations like the bit in which the Americans drive scooters while being chased by a truckload of bad guys. The thrills in The Deep are shameless, right down to the tepid running gag about a gigantic killer eel who lurks somewhere inside the shipwreck, and in fact the movie’s best-known element is its tackiest: Voluptuous costar Jacqueline Bisset’s long dive at the beginning of the movie certified her sex-symbol status because she spends the whole sequence in a nearly transparent white T-shirt.

         For good or ill, that sequence is indicative of The Deep’s ample lowbrow appeal. In the same vein, leading man Nick Nolte was at the apex of his handsomeness and youthful intensity, so he’s enjoyable even when he’s chewing the scenery. Shaw, basically delivering a toned-down version of his Jaws performance, is thoroughly entertaining even though he’s saddled with trite material. Gossett is effective as a crook hiding a killer’s heart behind a winning smile, and Eli Wallach adds campy flavor as the old sea dog who helps the heroes on their dives. The Deep falls apart toward the end, resorting to all sorts of tacky fake-outs to ensure a highly improbable happy ending, and fans expecting sea-critter action on the order of Jaws will be disappointed. Still, with its whatever-works mishmash of brazen titillation and luxurious underwater photography, The Deep is enjoyably shallow.

The Deep: FUNKY