Maxie (1973)

Whatever happened behind the scenes of this oddity must be more interesting than what happens onscreen. Writer-director Paulmichel Mielche, who never made another fiction film, attracted some of the folks from Francis Ford Coppola’s filmmaking collective to work on his crew, and three respectable actors—Talia Shire, Vic Tayback, and Robert Walden—appear in the picture. Perhaps Mielche talked a good game about the picture he intended to make. Or perhaps some in the American Zoetrope crowd dug the idea of playing with exploitation-film elements. Whatever the case, Maxie—later sensationally but not inaccurately renamed The Butchers—is interminable. The story revolves around Maxie (K.T. Baumann), a young girl who cannot speak but helps make money for her small family by delivering newspapers. One day, she spots neighborhood butcher Smedke (Tayback) and his simple assistant, Finn (Walden), taking delivery of human corpses. Finn and Smedke spend the rest of the movie debating whether they should be worried about what Maxie saw. In a subplot, Shire plays a social worker eager to get Maxie into a speech-therapy program. Riddled with confusing transitions and pointless scenes, Maxie trudges along so slowly that it’s incorrect to describe the film as badly paced—it has no pace whatsoever. Shire and Walden play a few moments sincerely, and Tayback incarnates a stereotype loudly. But by the zillionth time Mielche cuts to weird shots of chickens and meat grinders, you’ll be more than ready for Maxie to end—that is, if you haven’t taken the wiser course of avoiding the movie entirely.

Maxie: SQUARE

1980 Week: Windows

Although Gordon Willis’ directorial debut deserved each one of its five Razzie Award nominations, the movie is noteworthy exactly because of the ways in which it is terrible. After dominating the ’70s with his astonishing work as a cinematographer (All the President’s Men, Annie Hall, The Godfather, etc.), Willis finally stepped into the director’s chair for this offbeat thriller about shy NYC stutterer Emily (Talia Shire) being menaced by her unstable neighbor, Andrea (Elizabeth Ashley). Predictably, the movie looks amazing, with so many beauty shots of the Brooklyn Bridge and the New York skyline that the film could have been sliced up to make tourism commercials. Living up to his “Prince of Darkness” nickname, Willis accentuates the failing light of late afternoons and the smothering shadows of urban nights. In some scenes, it’s as if Willis challenged himself to see how little illumination he could use and still record an exposure on film; the climax, for instance, features a pair of faintly backlit silhouettes juxtaposed with the dim view seen though a background window. Unfortunately, it seems Willis had no energy left for directing actors after composing his artful images—the performances in Windows are so flat that it seems like sleeping gas was pumped into the soundstage during production. Shire, never the most dynamic performer, tries for a Mia Farrow-esque brand of fragile anguish, but her character is so dull and inactive that the actress’ efforts are for naught. Ashley is terrible, using bugged-out eyes and heavy breathing to convey instability, while leading man Joe Cortese (playing a detective who romances Emily) is positively zombified. Yet it’s the script, by Barry Siegel, that really sinks Windows. The storyline comprises a painfully slow succession of scenes in which interesting things almost happen, and then even more scenes in which people stand around waiting for things to happen. So even though Willis’ photography is as regal as ever, his movie is a detour to Dullsville. Happily, Willis returned to his original vocation for many years of great work after Windows.

Windows: LAME

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It. (1970)

          Also known as Gas-s-s-s, this absurdist riff on the generation gap is a willdly imaginative movie that somehow fails to sustain interest even at its brief running time of 79 minutes. Written by George Armitage, who later channeled his weird narrative impulses into eccentric action pictures (notably the bizarre 1976 flick Vigilante Force), this picture was produced and directed by Roger Corman, as always an adventurous exploiter/explorer of youth culture. The story is a sci-fi lark that takes place after a chemical that was accidentally released into the atmosphere by the military/industrial complex has killed everyone in the world over the age of 25. The surviving kids rebuild a funhouse-mirror version of modern society, and the movie follows a gaggle of hip youths in their search for a place to settle.

          Along the way, Our Intrepid Heroes encounter gangs that have organized in strange ways, like the fascistic warmongers who behave and dress like a football team, or the automobile scavengers who “shoot” victims by aiming guns and shouting the names of cowboy-movie actors. (Best line in this scene: “Maybe I could’ve just winged him with a Dale Robertson or a Clint Eastwood.”) Among the movie’s myriad problems is the fact that it meanders through silly episodes and never defines its leading characters as individuals. There’s nothing human for viewers to grasp. Plus, many of the bits tip over the edge from irreverence into pointless surrealism. For instance, hippie characters engage in sex play by reciting “erotic” words to each other, and the apex of this practice is the invention of the word “arrowfeather.” One must admire Armitage’s imaginativeness, but there’s something to be said for using the rewriting process to focus flights of fancy into a coherent storyline with logic, momentum, and purpose. Gas! feels like something yanked straight from the head of a writer, without benefit of translation so others can play along.

          Still, the movie has a handful of genuinely tart lines. At one point, a motorcycle-riding Edgar Allen Poe (Bruce Karcher) shows up to warn the young heroes, “Now that you are sole heir to our world, you will have every opportunity to achieve wickedness.” In a more substantial context, this might have had more impact, but in Gas! laudatory elements get subsumed into the overall blur of trippy signifiers. (Corman reuses some of his favorite ’60s image-making gimmicks, including the projection of psychedelic film images onto undulating actors during a love scene.) Beyond its abundant strangeness, Gas! is noteworthy for the appearance of three future B-level stars—Talia Shire (billed as “Tally Coppola”), Ben Vereen, and Cindy Williams all play their first significant film roles here.

Gas! Or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.: FREAKY

Old Boyfriends (1979)

Old Boyfriends is a painfully dull movie made by a number of people who should have known better. Screenwriting brothers Leonard Schrader and Paul Schrader, who are best known separately and apart for making dark dramas with complicated male protagonists, ventured way outside their comfort zones to create this unconvincing story about a troubled young woman working through an identity crisis by tracking down her exes. Talia Shire, who was at this point in her career embarking on a series of shockingly unsuccessful star vehicles in between appearing in Rocky sequels, delivers what can only be described as a non-performance. Bland to the extreme of barely registering on camera, she alternates between moping, whining, and fading into the woodwork while other actors do all the heavy lifting. Also, there’s a reason first-time director Joan Tewksbury, best known as the screenwriter of Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), gravitated to television after this movie tanked; her inability to generate and sustain interest is stunning. Even the movie’s score is misguided, because composer David Shire contributes music so gloomy and overwrought you’d think he was generating accompaniment for a Holocaust saga. What little notoriety Old Boyfriends has probably stems from John Belushi’s appearance in a supporting role. (Shire’s character visits two exes, played by Richard Jordan and Belushi, before visiting the younger brother, played by Keith Carradine, of a third ex.) Belushi incarnates a dramatic riff on his Animal House character of an obnoxious man-child, and the meanness he channels into his performance almost brings the movie to life for a while. He also sings “Jailhouse Rock,” just a year before he performed the same song in The Blues Brothers. Alas, Shire’s vapidity and the script’s contrived rhythms prevent even the Belushi scenes from soaring. In fact, nearly the only segment of movie that really works is a fun but peripheral bit with Buck Henry as a laconic private eye.

Old Boyfriends: LAME

Prophecy (1979)

Creature-feature stinker Prophecy is hilarious because no one involved seems to realize they’re making an awful movie. Set in northern Maine, the story concerns a clash between pollution-generating white folks and tree-hugging Native Americans, with a big-city physician (Robert Foxworth) and his knocked-up missus (Talia Shire) caught in between. So far, so good. But then the Natives start talking about a legendary nature spirit that’s angry with the way the local woods are being defiled, and the titular prophecy comes true when a pollution-spewed monster arrives to take out the reckless palefaces and anybody else who gets in the way of its goo-covered talons. Aside from a generally histrionic tone, the first clue the movie has gone off the rails is the appearance of Irish-Italian actor Armand Assante as a Native American; not only is he preposterously miscast, he overacts like someone put crank in his morning coffee each day. Foxworth is beardy and serious, offering a typical sane-in-a-world-gone-mad routine, while Shire tries to retain her dignity playing an underdeveloped character who’s mostly around to get endangered. Only the terrific Richard Dysart, playing an employee of the polluting mill, hits the right campy tone. John Frankenheimer, the venerable Manchurian Candidate director who spent much of the ’70s and ’80s making trash beneath his station, ensures unintentional humor by playing everything in Prophecy straight, like the scene of a giant mutated salmon leaping from the depths of a lake to chomp on a duck, or the absurd climax in which a mutated bear-thing tromps around while covered in glistening muck. Steadily building from silliness to outright stupidity, Prophecy is a must-see for fans of genre-movie train wrecks.

Prophecy: FUNKY

Rocky (1976) & Rocky II (1979)

          In many respects, cinema history has not been kind to Rocky, the feel-good hit that turned Sylvester Stallone into a superstar and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter. The film’s detractors dismiss Rocky as pandering hokum, and Stallone has been dogged for years by rumors that he didn’t really write the script. Further resentment is fueled by the fact that Rocky won the Best Picture Oscar for 1976, defeating such acclaimed competitors as Network and Taxi Driver. And of course the film’s biggest impediments are the many gratuitous sequels that cheapen the Rocky brand. Yet when the muck is pushed aside, one quickly rediscovers a gem of a movie, which isn’t so much pandering as old-fashioned. The story follows low-rent boxer Rocky Balboa (Stallone), who supports his going-nowhere pugilistic career by working as a muscleman for a Philadelphia gangster, even though Rocky’s too inherently decent to inflict much damage on his employer’s enemies. A simple soul with zero self-esteem, Rocky’s in love with a meek pet-shop clerk, Adrian (Talia Shire), whose brother is foul-tempered drunk Paulie (Burt Young). The other key figure in Rocky’s life is a crusty manager, Mickey (Burgess Meredith), who doesn’t think Rocky will ever amount to anything. But when the reigning heavyweight champ, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), agrees to a publicity-stunt fight in which he’ll give a “nobody” a shot at the title, Rocky’s life changes overnight.
         Yet Rocky isn’t so much about boxing as it is about a small man learning his value in the world, so the filmmakers employ time-tested storytelling gimmicks to put viewers squarely in the underdog hero’s corner. The narrative’s pervasive optimism is leavened by a gritty visual style, courtesy of director John G. Avildsen, who uses working-class neighborhoods and other evocative locations to create a tangible sense of place, so in its best moments Rocky has a level of docudrama realism that sells the contrived storyline. Avildsen also created the definitive sports-training montage, often imitated but never matched—Rocky at the top of the steps! Stallone’s ambition infuses his performance, from the intensity of the boxing scenes to the sweetness of the romantic interludes, and the whole cast meshes perfectly, like the players in a well-oiled stage play. Bill Conti’s thrilling music, especially the horn-driven main theme and the exciting song “Gonna Fly Now,” kicks everything up to epic level, and Rocky boasts one of the all-time great movie endings.
          Three years after the first film became a blockbuster, Stallone starred in, wrote, and directed the first of many unnecessary sequels. Rocky II is the most irritating installment in the series, because shameless crowd-pleaser Stallone undercuts the impact of the original movie with a trite denouement that essentially erases the climax of the previous film. Rocky II features all of the principal players from the first movie, and it’s made with adequate skill, but it’s a hollow echo at best. What’s more, the next two sequels, both released in the ’80s, dispatched with credibility in favor of super-sized entertainment, so Rocky II represents the juncture at which the series enters guilty-pleasure territory.

Rocky: OUTTA SIGHT

Rocky II: FUNKY