1980 Week: Little Miss Marker

          Envision The Sting (1973) without the zing, and you get an idea of what to expect from Little Miss Marker, a crime-themed comedy set in the Depression. Based on a vintage Damon Runyon story and written and directed by Hollywood vet Walter Bernstein, the movie wants desperately to recapture the effervescence of classic screwball comedies. It doesn’t. But thanks to star power and slick production values, the movie is watchable, provided your tolerance for schmaltz is high. Little Miss Marker is one of myriad movies featuring the perpetually crusty Walter Matthau as a cynical loner softened by the experience of becoming the surrogate parent to a sweet child. Adding to the movie’s sugar level is the presence of leading lady Julie Andrews. While her screen coupling with Matthau stretches credibility, her innate dignity elevates the whole production. Matthau plays “Sorrowful” Jones, a pitiless bookie forever at odds with local gangster Blackie (Tony Curtis), whom Jones has known since childhood. One day, a client who doesn’t have the cash to pay off a bet leaves his six-year-old daughter, “The Kid” (Sara Stimson), as collateral. When the girl’s father fails to return on schedule, Jones takes the Kid home as a means of protecting his investment.

          Limp comedy stems from the farcical situation of Jones trying to play homemaker. Later, once Jones learns that the Kid’s father has died, he resists turning her over to authorities, ostensibly because doing so would require Jones to explain his criminal enterprise. In reality, of course, he’s fallen for the kid and wants to protect her from the big, bad world. Complicating matters is Blackie’s scheme to open a new gambling joint, with money borrowed from Jones, and to fix a horse race involving a thoroughbred owned by society dame Amanda (Andrews). Figuring out where all this stuff is headed doesn’t require much imagination. When Runyon wrote the original story in 1932, the narrative might have seemed fresh and fun. Nearly 50 years later, the cocktail lost its fizz. Had Bernstein presented Little Miss Marker with a frenetic pace and different casting (namely, someone with more sass than Andrews), he might have put the thing over. Instead, he made something passable bordering on tedious. Stll, one can do worse than watching so many talented actors—the cast also includes Brian Dennehy, Lee Grant, Kenneth McMillan, and Bob Newhart—strut their stuff.

Little Miss Marker: FUNKY

Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? (1970)

          Partly an antiwar film reflecting the counterculture perspective and partly a squaresville pro-military picture promulgating Greatest Generation attitudes, the misshapen comedy/drama Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? depicts an explosive conflict between the soldiers occupying a U.S. Army base and the citizens of the hick town neighboring the base. The movie features myriad subplots and several principal characters, so for about the first hour of the film’s running time, it’s hard to tell who or what the story is about. Once things come into focus—or at least as much so as they ever do, which is not a lot—the sum is less than the parts. Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? includes some amusing performances, as well as fine production values and fleeting passages of snappy dialogue, but the script is simultaneously overpopulated and underdeveloped. Interesting ideas fade into the ether, silly tropes rise to the fore, and it all congeals into a kind of cinematic sludge.

          The basic gist is that a career soldier named Officer Michael Nace (Brian Keith) gets tasked with handling community relations between the base and the town. That’s easier said than done, because troublemaking Army personnel including drunken womanizer Sergeant Shannon Gambroni (Tony Curtis) have made enemies of the town’s sadistic top cop, Sheriff Harve (Ernest Borgnine). As the film progresses, tensions between citizens and soldiers grow worse and worse, eventually inspiring Mace to lead an armed assault on the town. The town fights back not just with police but also with a private militia funded and overseen by megalomaniacal idiot Billy Joe Davis (Tom Ewell).

          This short synopsis excludes easily half of the film’s narrative threads, because characters played by Don Ameche, Bradford Dillman, Ivan Dixon, and Suzanne Pleshette—among others—also have significant amounts of screen time. Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? is such a mess that it’s not worth expressing frustration that certain elements almost work. Borgnine adds another scenery-chewing monster to his gallery of screen villains, and Keith is entertainingly grumpy, but their efforts are stymied by the general formlessness. As Borgnine says in his autobiography, “We had a lot of fun doing it and I got a paycheck, even though it turned out terrible.”

Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came?: FUNKY

Lepke (1975)

          Pulpy but shallow, the gangster biopic Lepke lacks a distinctive point of view. A compendium of episodes tracking the career of Jewish mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter—played with generic intensity by Tony Curtis—the picture was produced and directed by Menaham Golan, who later found his groove as a producer of glossy action pictures. While Lepke is probably the slickest movie that Golan ever directed, it feels artificial from beginning to end, and it has nothing to say about its subject matter. Thanks to solid production values, a steady stream of violent episodes, and the surprising presence of iconic funnyman Milton Berle in a dramatic supporting role, Lepke is never less than watchable. However, it makes very little impact while unspooling and disappears from the viewer’s memory immediately afterward. Opening in 1923 and covering events through 1944, when Lepke was executed for his crimes, the picture depicts Lepke as a tough street kid who channels his anger at the world into violence, and then discovers that ruthlessness leads to career advancement in the underworld. Lepke eventually teams with—and breaks from—fellow gangster “Lucky” Luciano (Vic Tayback) before helping to form the infamous organization known as Murder Incorporated. In addition to depicting Lepke’s criminal activities, the picture explores his relationship with Bernice Meyer (Anjanette Comer), the daughter of Orthodox businessman Mr. Meyer (Berle). Another component of the story is Lepke’s friendship with lawyer Robert Kane (Michael Callan), who eventually joins the Justice Department.

          A few of the picture’s episodes are mildly interesting. In one scene, Lepke dispatches a subordinate to the Far East in order to collect heroin. In another scene, Lepke has a tryst that Golan and cinematographer Andrew Davis (who later became the director of such outstanding action pictures as 1993’s The Fugitive) stage sexily, with light streaming through windows. And the bit with Berle negotiating for his daughter’s hand in marriage is somewhat droll, thanks to the way Berle channels his legendary comic timing into a crisp sort of dramatic tension. Yet most of Lepke is painfully unimaginative. During a climactic action sequence, for instance, a shootout in a movie theater is intercut with black-and-white gangster action on the movie screen. And thanks to distractingly clean costumes and sanitized sets, much of the gangster material recalls the old Star Trek episode in which the crew of the Enterprise beams down to a planet where society is modeled after Earth’s Depression-era gangster culture. (Adding to the unhelpful visual association, Lepke costar Tayback appeared in that particular Trek episode.) While Curtis scores a few points during his character’s darkest interludes, summoning the edge that he brought to his fine work in The Boston Strangler (1968), his performance is middling overall—just like the movie surrounding him.

Lepke: FUNKY

The Bad News Bears (1976) & The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977) & The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)

          Foul-mouthed and politically incorrect, The Bad News Bears presents a startlingly funny vision of childhood. In fact, it would be nearly impossible to include some of the movie’s edgier jokes in a contemporary film, and that’s a shame—screenwriter Bill Lancaster and director Michael Ritchie lend believable spark to their story by showing characters trading cruel epithets about disability and race. This warts-and-all approach elevates The Bad News Bears from being just another underdog tale in the classic sports-movie tradition; the movie is also a wicked look at growing up the hard way.

          The main adult character is Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), a former minor-league player now gone to seed—he’s a rumpled drunk who works as a pool cleaner in Southern California. Buttermaker gets recruited to coach a newly formed Little League team, the Bears, which comprises rejects from other squads: bad seeds, minorities, nerds, runts, slobs. A paragon of insensitivity, Buttermaker is the worst possible person to corral this gang, since he’s as appalled by these losers as everyone else. To give the team a remote chance of success, Buttermaker enlists a pair of ringers.

          First up is 12-year-old pitcher Amanda Whurlizer (Tatum O’Neal), whose mother used to date Buttermaker. She’s a wise-beyond-her-years handful, demanding endless financial perks in exchange for participating. Next, Buttermaker woos Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley), a local dropout who zooms around town on a Harley and makes a sketchy living with small-time scams. Watching the younger kids get schooled by the self-serving Amanda and Kelly is hilarious, especially since Buttermaker observes the whole pathetic spectacle with a mix of cynical detachment and whatever-works ruthlessness.

          The contrivance, of course, is that Buttermaker falls in love with the team because of how hard the kids try to please him, but Matthau’s unsentimental performance sells the illusion nicely. Better still, Ritchie does an amazing job with the ballpark scenes, using the strains of Bizet’s “Carmen” as a leitmotif for the Bears’ outfield ineptitude; these scenes are sly ballets of expertly staged physical comedy. Ritchie also pays careful attention to vignettes taking place off the field, ensuring that even minor characters are sketched beautifully.

          It helps a great deal that O’Neal was in the midst of her hot streak of precocious performances, and that Haley, in his breakout role, presented a memorable mixture of bravado and insecurity. Even the movie’s main villain, the super-competitive coach (Vic Morrow) of an opposing team, comes across as a fully realized individual, since the dynamic he shares with his long-suffering son speaks to the movie’s theme of what happens when winning eclipses other priorities.

          Predictably, the departure of key players behind and in front of the camera led to diminishing returns for the movie’s first sequel, The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Written by Paul Brickman (who later wrote and directed Risky Business), Breaking Training is enervated and overly sweet but basically palatable. The story focuses on Kelly (still played by Haley) and his estranged dad, Mike (William Devane), who takes over as the Bears’ coach. Mike tries to rally the team for a big exhibition game at the Houston Astrodome, and a combination of formulaic plot elements and unwelcome sentimentality makes Breaking Training feel second-rate. Wasn’t eschewing the cheap emotionalism of traditional sports movies the point of the original film? Still, the interplay between the misfit kids, most of whom are played by the same actors, remains enjoyable, so group scenes are fun to watch.

          In fact, Breaking Training is a near-masterpiece compared to the final theatrical film of the original series, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan. Although original screenwriter Bill Lancaster returned for this entry, the gimmick of the Bears getting exploited by a slick promoter (Tony Curtis) feels forced, as does the uninteresting romantic subplot involving Kelly (once more played by Haley) and a pretty Japanese teenager. Even the game-time jokes start to feel tired by this point, so Japan is to be avoided by those who wish to leave their memories of the first picture untouched. The franchise soldiered on when CBS broadcast one season of a Bad News Bears TV series in 1979–1980, with Jack Warden playing Matthau’s old role of Morris Buttermaker. Then, in 2005, the Bears returned for director Richard Linklater’s pointless remake of the original film, with Billy Bob Thornton becoming the third actor to play Buttermaker.

The Bad News Bears: RIGHT ON

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training: FUNKY

The Bad News Bears Go to Japan: LAME

Sextette (1978)

          If there’s one scene that epitomizes the spellbinding strangeness of Sextette, a big-budget musical comedy that’s both tone-deaf and completely unfunny, it’s an extended romantic duet between the heroine and the younger man she just married. The leading lady is none other than Mae West, the notorious actress/writer who first achieved fame in the 1920s for scandalous stage shows. The bridegroom is played by Englishman Timothy Dalton, a decade before his brief run as 007. At the time, West was 84 and Dalton was 32, yet the scene features the actors sharing vocal chores (and they are chores, since neither can sing) on a lifeless, quasi-disco version of the Captain and Tennille hit “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

          Dalton’s a slim young man wearing an elegant tux, and West is an overweight senior hidden behind gallons of makeup, acres of Edith Head-designed sequined costuming, and a haze filter thick enough to trigger a smog alert. At the most ludicrous moment of this sequence, Dalton sings the laughably re-written lyric, “Young and beautiful, your looks will never be gone.” The camera then cuts to a close-up (shot from about 20 feet away) of West writhing seductively, her looks very much gone.

          And that’s pretty much the tone of this whole excruciating picture, which features an old-fashioned lark of a plot about legions of men lusting after West’s character, Marlo Manners. Marlo is a Hollywood movie star who just married her sixth husband, Great Britain’s Lord Barrington (Dalton). Their honeymoon is being celebrated by the public and documented by the media as a major event, but before the duo can (shudder) consummate their union, Marlo’s agent (Dom DeLuise) says the U.S. government wants Marlo to seduce a foreign leader (Tony Curtis) into cooperating with an international peace initiative. Meanwhile, Marlo’s fifth husband, gangster Vance Norton (George Hamilton), has resurfaced despite everyone believing him dead, and he’s intent on reclaiming Marlo’s hand.

          Also thrown into the mix are a fey fashion designer (played by The Who drummer Keith Moon), an imperious Russian film director (played by Beatles drummer Ringo Starr), real-life broadcasters Rona Barrett and Regis Philbin (as themselves), and cameo players Walter Pidgeon and George Raft. Oh, and shock-rocker Alice Cooper shows up at the end, without his trademark ghoul make-up, to (quite effectively) croon a number as a singing waiter.

          This whole mess is based upon the last play West wrote, also called Sextette, and because the play opened in 1961, questions of “why” are unavoidable. Why was a film adaptation deemed necessary almost 20 years after the play opened? Why was a West comeback deemed necessary, more than 30 years after her last starring role in a movie? And why the hell didn’t anyone realize how wrong all of this was? Answers to these puzzlers are lost to the ages, so we’re merely left with a cinematic curio. Sextette is filled with images that would be innocuous in other circumstances but are mind-warpingly bizarre given West’s advanced age: a roomful of bodybuilders flexing their muscles to curry West’s favor; a roomful of diplomats (including a stand-in for then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter) singing and dancing as West holds them in her thrall; West cooing sexual puns as she lounges in bed and drives men like Curtis, Dalton, and Hamilton to erotic distraction.

          West’s performance is abysmal, since she tries to mimic the sass of bygone days without acknowledging the passage of time; the poor woman looks close to toppling when she tries to shimmy in tight dresses. About the only good thing one can say about Sextette is that even though much of the dialogue recycles past favorites (“Why don’t you come up and see me sometime,” and so on), West had not completely lost her flair for penning ribald one-liners, like this zinger: “I’m the girl who works for Paramount all day, and Fox all night.”

Sextette: FREAKY

The Manitou (1978)

          The supernatural horror flick The Manitou is about as gonzo as mainstream cinema gets. Featuring a demented concept taken to ridiculous extremes, this mesmerizing misfire combines demonic possession, Native American mythology, parallel dimensions, reproductive horror, sentient machinery, and probably a dozen other tropes of genre cinema, all wrapped up in a tasty package decorated with stilted acting, inane dialogue, and histrionic storytelling. There might be an interesting notion or two buried amid the melodramatic muck, but the beauty of something as strange as The Manitou is that redeeming values are beside the point; the movie’s spectacular awfulness offers a special kind of entertainment value.

          When the movie begins, Karen (Susan Strasberg) seeks medical help for a strange tumor growing out of her upper back. Physicians are astounded to discover that the tumor is actually a fetus. This revelation understandably concerns Karen’s on-again/off-again boyfriend, fake psychic Harry (Tony Curtis), who investigates Karen’s condition when medical science fails to provide an explanation. Eventually, Harry and a real psychic (Stella Stevens) dig up loopy scientist Dr. Snow (Burgess Meredith), who opines that the growth is a “manitou,” the reborn spirit of a Native American shaman.

          Told that one needs a shaman to fight a shaman, Harry treks to the Southwest and recruits John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara) to serve as a kind of exorcist. John Singing Rock says he can’t battle the Manitou until the creature leaves Susan’s body, and the manitou’s birth scene is one of the most insane moments in all of ’70s cinema: A miniature muscleman crawls out of a giant sack attached to Strasberg’s spine and then plops onto the floor of a hospital room, panting like a placenta-drenched pervert. Soon, this child-sized monstrosity is lurking inside a force field created by John Singing Rock, plotting some sort of supernatural takeover (and breathing heavily some more). “To quote a hackneyed line,” John Singing Rock says at one point, “This is powerful medicine.” You said it, friend!

          As directed and co-written by genre-cinema stalwart William Girdler (Grizzly), The Manitou is arresting simply because of how far it goes down the bad-cinema rabbit hole. Plus, to be charitable, some of the film’s images are genuinely unsettling: There’s a great bit during a séance, for instance, when a human head rises up through a tabletop as if the tabletop were an oil slick rather than solid wood.

          The acting is, of course, terrible, because no one can be expected to do much with this material, but Curtis has a few entertainingly bitchy line readings even as he trudges through various declarations of the obvious. Syrian-born Ansara, who had a long career as a voice actor in addition to his onscreen work, makes the fatal mistake of playing his role straight, so his wooden performance offers an amusing counterpoint to Curtis’ desperate hamminess. The movie’s high point, relatively speaking, is the trippy finale, which features (and I’m not kidding) a naked Strasberg shooting laser beams of channeled machine energy at the muscled little person as they float in a star field, battling for the final fate of the universe. Powerful medicine, indeed.

The Manitou: FREAKY

You Can’t Win ’Em All (1970)

Boasting upbeat leading performances and impressive production values, this action flick set in turbulent post-World War I Turkey has everything going for it except a coherent story. Charles Bronson and Tony Curtis star as a mercenary and a mystery man, respectively, and their personas mesh fairly well; Bronson plays up his lighter side and Curtis goes tougher than usual, so they meet somewhere in the middle. If only their entertaining buddy-movie dynamic was supported by a better script. The narrative is murky at best, with underdeveloped characters pursuing the myriad new goals and motivations that are introduced in almost every scene, so from moment to moment it’s impossible to tell if the heroes are after justice, money, revolution, women, or just escape. After a broadly comedic opening involving a boat heist and a bar brawl, the movie drags on through one ineffectively expositional scene after another, laying pipe for a story that never congeals. Worse, all the cumbersome plotting limits the screen time shared by Bronson and Curtis, so they don’t get as many extended scenes together as they should. For a good stretch of the movie, charismatic Turkish actor Fikret Hakan gets to do more interesting stuff than either of the leads, because his role as an opportunistic military officer is so much more clearly defined. The movie gets a little more watchable in the last half-hour, when the big combat scenes and a series of double-crosses kick in, but even with grandiose visuals like two airplanes dive-bombing an army encampment, everything feels inconsequential because the story gives viewers nothing solid to grasp. In fact, the movie is such a muddle that one wonders if the title was the producers’ way of apologizing.

You Can’ t Win ’Em All: LAME