Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1979)

          Presenting a weird fusion of modern explicitness and old-fashioned storytelling, the racially charged melodrama Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff is interesting not because of cinematic quality—in many ways, it’s an embarrassingly bad piece of work—but because of its peculiarity. Based on a novel by William Inge that came out in 1970, the movie would have seemed hip and provocative if released, in virtually the exact same form, the same year as the novel. What a difference a decade makes. Arriving at the end of the ’70s, the film seems stylistically ancient, the acting and camerawork as stiff as screenwriter Polly Platt’s on-the-nose dialogue, and the sexual stuff, while still fairly bold for a mainstream movie, lacks the power to truly shock. Viewed outside of its original historical context, the film fares even worse. Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff is too well-intentioned to qualify as a so-bad-it’s-good atrocity, and yet it’s also far too wrongheaded to work as legitimate entertainment.

          Set during 1956 in the small town of Freedom, Kansas—the name of the town accurately indicate the degree of the movie’s subtlety—Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff opens by exploring the life of 35-year-old schoolteacher Evelyn Wyckoff (Anne Heywood). A neurotic virgin, she’s so edgy about her lack of sexual experience that she has periodic breakdowns and suicidal thoughts. In moments of clarity, she’s a respected educator and a passionate advocate for progressive causes. After her physician, Dr. Neal (Robert Vaughn), suggests getting intimate with a man is the cure for what ails her, Evelyn tries, unsuccessfully, to hook up with a lecherous bus driver named Ed (Earl Holliman). Meanwhile, she explores her difficulties with a shrink, Dr. Steiner (Donald Pleasance). And then, almost completely out of nowhere, a young black janitor named Rafe Collins (John Lafayette) rapes Evelyn in her classroom. That’s when the story spins in bizarre directions. Instead of reporting Rafe to authorities, Evelyn becomes his lover, participating in steadily more humiliating trysts even as the risk of discovery increases.

          Listing everything that rings false about Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff would take quite a while, but, briefly, the title character’s psychological state defies understanding, the portrayal of the Rafe character is startlingly racist, and the integration of a Red Scare subplot doesn’t work. Yet Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff is weirdly compelling, at least for the cinematically adventurous. Even though Heywood’s performance is rigid and unbelievable, she’s watchably odd. Carolyn Jones, late of TV’s The Addams Family, gives a fine if too-brief turn as Evelyn’s best friend. And the film’s technical presentation is excellent in a museum-piece sort of way. Rarely have such lurid scenes been captured with such uptight professionalism.

Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff: FUNKY

1980 Week: Hangar 18

          Only the brave or the brazen dared to make UFO movies in the immediate aftermath of Steven Spielberg’s monumental Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which realized nearly all the potential of the genre in spectacular fashion. Undaunted, the happy hacks at Sunn Classic Pictures forged ahead with their own entry into the flying-saucer genre, Hangar 18, perhaps emboldened by their success in the paranormal realm with such “documentaries” as Beyond and Back (1978) and The Bermuda Triangle (1979). Anyway, Hangar 18, which shamelessly borrows plot elements from Peter Hyams’ larky sci-fi adventure Capricorn One (1978), begins in space, where the crew of a space-shuttle mission witnesses a UFO striking a satellite. Returning to earth, the astronauts (played by Gary Collins and James Hampton) seek an explanation for what happened but get a run-around from officials, even as their boss (Darren McGavin) receives the true story. Turns out the UFO crash-landed on earth and was recovered by the U.S. military, then hidden in a secret hangar in the Southwest. (Shades of Roswell, New Mexico.) McGavin’s character is tasked with examining the spaceship.

          Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a presidential aide (Robert Vaughn) conspires to keep the whole mess secret until the impending election because—how convenient!—the president recently scolded his opponent for suggesting that UFOs might be real. Making the story even sillier is an action/adventure subplot about the astronauts trying to find the secret hangar, and a very Star Trek-ish thread about McGavin and his team entering the spaceship, discovering quasi-humanoid bodies inside, and trying to decode the alien language they discover on the ship’s computers. Had any of this been put across persuasively, Hangar 18 could have built up a tremendous head of steam, but the filmmaking and storytelling exist on the level of a bad TV movie, with each scene feeling more outlandish than the preceding all the way to the anticlimactic ending. Yet even with its goofy storyline and C-lister cast (apologies to Messers. McGavin and Vaughn), Hangar 18 represents a sort of pinnacle moment for Sunn Classics, combining myriad layers of speculative-fiction bullshit—ancient astronauts, government conspiracies, and so on—into one cartoonish pseudoscience extravaganza. Call it a close encounter of the tepid kind.

Hangar 18: FUNKY

The Lucifer Complex (1978)

Film history is rife with stories about producers who had to cut corners because they ran out of money midway through filming, and we tend to remember the enterprising film professionals who responded to hardship with creativity. Understandably lost in the shuffle are embarrassments along the lines of The Lucifer Complex, which likely represents an unsuccessful attempt at stretching footage from an incomplete movie to feature length. Ostensibly, the picture is about a government agent (Robert Vaughn) investigating and trying to defeat a group of Florida-based neo-Nazis who want to build a Fourth Reich around a clone of Adolf Hitler. (Yes, the plot is shamelessly stolen from Ira Levin’s novel The Boys from Brazil, which was adapted into a big-budget feature released around the same time as The Lucifer Complex.) However, the far-fetched thriller featuring Vaughn is really just part of The Lucifer Complex. The movie actually begins on a tropical island, where a mystery man wanders into a cave filled with computers and then watches video recordings of human history until settling into his seat and watching the “historical record” of the storyline featuring Vaughn’s character. The drab business of the mystery man watching videos takes nearly 20 minutes of screen time, meaning that almost a third of the movie is over before the story begins. There’s no point searching for redeeming values in The Lucifer Complex, because the flick is so cheap, disjointed, nonsensical, and tiresome that the producers would have been better off selling their material as stock footage than actually assembling it into a feature. Except that option wouldn’t have been available to them, since most of those interminable first 20 minutes are already composed of stock footage. As for Vaughn, his obvious disinterest makes sense. Same goes for costars Aldo Ray and Keenan Wynn, each of whom sleepwalks through a minor supporting role.

The Lucifer Complex: SQUARE

1980 Week: Battle Beyond the Stars

          Roger Corman’s most successful attempt at riding the coattails of Star Wars (1977), this somewhat enjoyable space adventure represents an important juncture in several cinematic careers. It was the last of several projects that John Sayles wrote for Corman, because Sayles graduated to working for bigger producers in addition to writing and directing his own independent films. Perhaps more significantly, Battle Beyond the Stars was the first big FX job for James Cameron, who was just a handful of years away from directing his first proper feature, The Terminator (1984). Both men contributed strong elements to Battle Beyond the Stars, notably Sayles’ dry wit and Cameron’s visual ingenuity, but that shouldn’t give anyone the impression that Battle Beyond the Stars is a good movie. Quite to the contrary, it’s typical Corman junk, rushed and silly, but it has better production values than one might expect, and the combination of a familiar plot and a lively cast generate some interest.
          After all, the movie is a shameless sci-fi riff on The Magnificent Seven (1960), which in turn was a remake of the Japanese classic Seven Samurai (1954), so the underlying narrative is rock-solid even if the campy execution is not.

          Battle Beyond the Stars revolves around farmers who live on the planet Akir and are terrorized by an interstellar villain named Sador (John Saxon). The farmers send one of their own, naïve young Shad (Richard Thomas), into space so he can hire mercenaries. Eventually, Shad gathers a crew including Gelt (Robert Vaughn), an assassin hiding from outer-space authorities; Saint-Exmin (Sybil Danning), a Valkyrie seeking battlefield glory; Space Cowboy (George Peppard), an intergalactic trucker with a grudge against Sador; and others, including the predictable coterie of anthropomorphized robots. Hiring Magnificent Seven veteran Vaughn accentuates the connection to the earlier film, as does James Horner’s rousing score, which emulates the spirit of Elmer Bernstein’s famous Magnificent Seven music.

          As should be apparent by now, very little in Battle Beyond the Stars is even remotely original, and the movie’s recycled quality is as problematic as the episodic story structure. Making matters worse is the all-over-the-map acting. Peppard gives an amiable turn as the wisecracking antihero and Vaughn is suitably icy as the killer seeking redemption, but Danning is amateurish and Saxon operates on moustache-twirling autopilot. (In Danning’s defense, the voluptuous actress contributes some of the most spectacular cleavage ever seen outside of a Russ Meyer movie.) Even the effects are a mixed bag. While some design elements are interesting, Corman cuts far too many corners, so battle scenes that should be epic end up feeling anticlimactic. Plus, the movie falls victim to the usual sci-fi foible of too many goofy-sounding names and silly-looking aliens. Still, Battle Beyond the Stars has enough colorful elements to merit a casual viewing, especially for space-opera junkies.

Battle Beyond the Stars: FUNKY

Brass Target (1978)

          Crammed with big-name actors, colorful locations, and complex schemes, Brass Target should be a rousing thriller. Unfortunately, the team behind the picture tried to do too many things, and the starring role was unwisely given to John Cassavettes—who by this point in his career preferred directing low-budget films to acting in Hollywood flicks—so the combination of a confusing script and a phoned-in leading performance makes it difficult to appreciate the picture’s many admirable qualities. Set in 1945 Europe, just after the defeat of the Nazis, Brass Target begins with an exciting robbery: Mysterious criminals attack an Allied train and steal a fortune in Nazi gold. The theft divides Allied powers, because Russians blame Americans for the loss, so belligerent U.S. General George S. Patton (George Kennedy) vows to recover the gold and prove his country’s innocence. And then the movie veers off-course.

          Instead of focusing on Patton and the conspirators who want to impede his investigation, the picture shifts to an Army detective, Major Joe De Lucca (Cassavettes), who digs into the robbery while dealing with myriad personal melodramas. Among other things, he’s got a fractious friendship with Col. Mike McCauley (Patrick McGoohan), a schemer who trades in stolen war loot, and both men love Mara (Sophia Loren), a European who survived the war by sleeping her way to safety. The movie’s plot gets even more complicated when the conspirators—primarily Col. Donald Rogers (Robert Vaughn) and Col. Walter Gilchrist (Edward Herrmann)—hire an enigmatic European assassin (Max Von Sydow) to kill Patton lest the general discover their crime.

          Any one of these storylines would have been enough for a satisfying movie, so Brass Target ends up giving each of its component elements short shrift. More damningly, the best scenes, which depict the assassin’s meticulous planning of an attempt on Patton’s life, feel like repeats of similar scenes in the acclaimed thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973). Nonetheless, Von Sydow gives the picture’s best performance, especially since the other acting in the movie is highly erratic.

          Cassavettes preens and scowls like some sort of irritable peacock; Loren looks lost, which is understandable seeing as how her character is anemically underdeveloped; Kennedy plays Patton as a foul-mouthed bully, his acting inevitably suffering by comparison to George C. Scott’s Oscar-winning turn in Patton (1970); and McGoohan is terrible, his accent shifting inexplicably from one line to the next. Still, Brass Target has tremendous production values, and the milieu of the story—postwar Europe as a lawless frontier—is fascinating. Plus, the central gimmick of the narrative, a conspiracy-theory explanation for the real Patton’s death in 1945, is imaginative. One suspects, however, that the premise was explored to stronger effect in the Frederick Nolan novel from which this film was adapted. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Brass Target: FUNKY

Julius Caesar (1970)

          Although the idea of Charlton Heston playing classical roles always inspires trepidation, Heston is quite potent as Marc Anthony in this lusty adaptation of the Shakespeare classic. Instead, it’s the usually impeccable Jason Robards, playing treacherous senator Brutus, who underwhelms. Whereas one might expect Heston’s distinctly American persona to be an impediment in this milieu, his flamboyance fits the grandeur of Shakespearean English; conversely, Robards’ internalized moodiness is too quiet for director Stuart Burge’s muscular approach to the text. Screenwriter Robert Furnival hacked a few passages from the play, shortening the running time and making room for flourishes like an elaborate battlefield finale, but the core of the piece is intact. In 44 B.C., Roman emperor Julius Caesar (John Gielgud) cements his power through military victories, sparking fears among senators like Brutus, Casca (Robert Vaughn), and Cassius (Richard Johnson) that Caesar will seize absolute control. Brutus and his fellow conspirators murder Caesar, triggering a civil war between the conspirators and forces led by Caesar’s best friend, Marc Anthony.

          Burge gives the picture a standard sword-and-sandals look, with extras in flowing robes flitting across soundstages crammed with columns and staircases, so the piece doesn’t really take flight until Burge moves onto location for the climactic battle. That said, he builds an insistent pace and employs enough movement in his blocking to avoid filling the screen with long stretches of static talking heads. Plus, with its scenes of assassination and civil unrest, it’s not as if Julius Caesar lacks for inherent drama. Among the supporting cast, the standouts are Geilgud, bitchy and grandiose as a leader drunk on adulation; Johnson and Vaughn, calculating and cruel as men whose ambition trumps their loyalty; and Diana Rigg, sexy and sly as Brutus’ wife. Ultimately, however, the movie hinges on the interplay between Brutus and Marc Anthony. Robards seems uninterested throughout most of the picture, though his performance gains vigor after the assassination, but Heston is on fire from beginning to end. Clearly relishing the chance to play one of the great roles, Heston attacks monologues with the same animalistic energy he usually brings to the physical aspect of his performances, so he’s magnetic even though his performance choices are obvious and simplistic.

Julius Caesar: FUNKY

The Mind of Mr. Soames (1970)

          A compelling oddity, The Mind of Mr. Soames is a British drama with a sci-fi flourish starring Terence Stamp as John Soames, a 30-year-old man who fell into a coma while an infant. When clever American surgeon Dr. Michael Bergen (Robert Vaughn) contrives a way to stimulate Soames’ brain and free him from his lifetime of slumber, Soames enters the world as a 30-year-old baby with no idea how to eat, speak, or walk. Conflict soon arises between Bergen, a compassionate father of two who advocates a nurturing approach to Soames’ development, and Dr. Maitland (Nigel Davenport), a hard-liner who believes Soames should be rushed through disciplined education in order to become a functioning member of society. Since Maitland has legal custody over Soames, Bergen is forced to sit on the sidelines as Maitland’s iron-fisted approach turns Soames into the equivalent of a troubled child.

          Thus, when Bergen builds rapport by busting the man-boy out of his hospital room for a joyous play date outside, Maitland becomes infuriated that another doctor is producing better results. Fast-moving and focused, The Mind of Mr. Soames works as a slow-burning thriller, steadily building toward the inevitable moment when Soames escapes and tries to make his way in the world. The movie also works as a drama of ideals, exploring questions about what happens when civic responsibility and human compassion clash—Bergen and Maitland are both “right,” since each wants what he perceives as the best outcome for the patient, though the film unequivocally portrays Maitland as a villain whose actions are guided by repression.

          The film’s key performances are quite effective, with Vaughn suppressing his Man from U.N.C.L.E. flair to present an authoritative sort of clipped intellectualism, and Davenport playing uptight Englishness to the hilt. Stamp makes the most of a wild role, somehow retaining his dignity while making goo-goo-gaga sounds, parading around in onesies, and receiving baby food through spoon-feeding. The final stretch of the movie, in which Soames wanders the countryside frightened and hungry, is touching and terrifying at the same time, since the filmmakers create tension around the question of whether Soames will fall victim to the outside world or succumb to animal instincts and lash out in violence. All in all, The Mind of Mr. Soames is solid stuff. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

The Mind of Mr. Soames: GROOVY

Demon Seed (1977)

Taking the crazed-computer menace of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in a depraved new direction, this strange thriller is based on a Dean Koontz novel, but bears the unmistakable signature of its director, Donald Cammell, notorious for co-directing the perverse cult classic Performance (1970). Even within the confines of a big-budget Hollywood movie, Cammell lets his freak flag fly throughout Demon Seed, which features an anguished Julie Christie as a woman who gets imprisoned, tortured, and impregnated (!) by a sentient computer. The source of her misery is her scientist husband (Fritz Weaver), who creates a supercomputer called Proteus IV; the computer’s desire for physical life prompts Christie’s artificial-intelligence insemination. Much of the movie comprises two-character scenes with Christie and Proteus, which mostly manifests as lava-lamp patterns on computer screens, so Christie’s main costar is unseen actor Robert Vaughn, who provides Proteus’ voice without much vigor. Adding a hallucinatory feel are long electronic-animation montages by Frank Mazzola, and Proteus’ eventual physical manifestation as a weird cube/diamond thing that extends long tendrils of geometric shapes. These trippy sequences are like Yes album covers come to life. However the movie suffers from idiotic plotting and long dull stretches, plus the miscasting of two behind-the-scenes players: Jaws cinematographer Bill Butler and frequent Peckinpah composer Jerry Fielding both contribute great work that belongs in a different, less bizarre movie. As for Christie, she flails through scenes that would be impossible for anyone to play, and seems embarrassed by her surroundings. So although Demon Seed is pretty damn weird, grounding elements like Butler’s crisp cinematography, Christie’s emphatically expressed anguish, and Vaughn’s overly explanatory voiceovers tether the movie to earth when it clearly wants to drift into even weirder territory.

Demon Seed: FREAKY