High Plains Drifter

 

From The Good, The Bad & The Ugly (1966) to Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) to Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood has made all kinds of westerns. High Plains Drifter (1973) is one of his more intriguing efforts in the genre – it takes the enigmatic Man with No Name gunslinger from Sergio Leone films such as A Fistful of Dollars (1964), fusing it with the gothic sensibilities of the Don Siegel film, The Beguiled (1971). It starts off as a typical lone gunfighter-for-hire story. In this film, Eastwood’s mysterious character is part avenging angel and part vengeance demon, determined to punish the people of a town for a crime that is gradually revealed.
 
The Stranger (as he is referred to in the credits) literally materializes out of the hazy, shimmering horizon like an apparition while Dee Barton’s eerie music plays on the soundtrack. After Eastwood’s credit and the film’s title appears, the score transitions into a more traditional western motif, reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western soundtracks.
 
High Plains Drifter starts in typical western fashion with a hired gun wandering into the town of Lago looking for work. After quickly and efficiently dispatching three mercenaries who challenge him, he’s offered a job by the town elders. Stacey Bridges (Geoffrey Lewis) and the Carlin brothers, Dan (Dan Vadis) and Cole (Anthony James), have just been released from prison. They tried to steal gold from the town and whipped Marshal Jim Duncan (Buddy Van Horn) to death. Now, they aim to return, take the gold, and exact revenge on the townsfolk.

The Stranger agrees and is given unlimited credit at all of the town’s stores and proceeds to exploit their goodwill, starting off by giving two American Indian children candy they were eyeing and a pile of blankets to their grandfather, right after the store owner berated them with racial slurs. He goes on to accumulate material items for free – new boots, a saddle, and cigars. He then uses his leverage to humiliate the town elders by making Mordecai (Billy Curtis), the town dwarf, the new sheriff and mayor, and has the hotel owner’s barn stripped of its wood to build picnic tables, much to their chagrin. They have to go along with it, lest they lose the only person standing between them and the vengeful outlaws headed their way.
 
The film’s big question: who is The Stranger and what is his motivation? Within minutes of being in Lago he has killed three men and raped a woman (Marianna Hill). Initially, it appears to be a nasty, misogynistic streak in the character but, as we learn more about the town and in its denizens, the more we understand what this mysterious gunslinger is doing. His motivation begins to shift into focus early on when he dreams of the Marshal being whipped to death while the whole town watched and did nothing. The haunting music from the start of the film comes on as we see Bridges and the Carlin brothers whip Duncan at night. He pleads for help while all the townsfolk stand and stare, the camera framing them in near-dark shots, some almost in silhouette, which creates an ominous mood. As the poor man is whipped to death he mutters, “Damn you all to hell,” which is exactly what The Stranger plans to do to the complicit townsfolk.
 
Interestingly, the second flashback to what happened to the Marshal that fateful night is predominantly from Mordecai’s perspective. He takes us back and this time, we see the townsfolk’s faces more clearly. Unlike The Stranger, he was there and saw what happened. Eastwood also cuts back and forth from shots of the outlaws’ evil faces, the residents, and the Marshal’s point-of-view. In doing so, he makes the man’s pain and suffering more personal and we see the townsfolk’s reaction to what is happening more clearly – some are indifferent, some afraid, and some malevolently approving. It is Mordecai, however, who seems the most upset and remorseful.

Who is the Marshal to The Stranger? It is never clear. The hotel owner’s wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom) even asks him: he is coy with the answer, refusing to confirm or deny his relationship with the dead man. Everything he does in the town, from making a mockery of its elders to getting carte blanche with all of their resources, is to punish the townsfolk, not just for their complacency but for their sins. As the film progresses, we also learn more about what motivates the town elders – why they are so distrustful of outsiders, why they are so eager to cover things up, and why they hired The Stranger to protect them from Bridges and the Carlin brothers. The scenes with them illustrate the corruption inherent in the authoritarian structure – something Eastwood has been distrustful of his entire career – as The Stranger’s abuse of power eats away at the relationship among the town elders until they begin to turn on each other.
 
Future members of Eastwood’s informal repertory company of actors, Geoffrey Lewis, Anthony James, and Dan Vadis are well cast as the grungy, amoral outlaws that kill three men in cold blood as soon as they are released from prison, stealing their horses and clothes. These consummate character actors have no problem playing dirty, unrepentant, evil criminals and, over the course of the film, we anticipate their inevitable confrontation with Eastwood’s gunfighter. The key to his films is to have someone who is a formidable threat to his character and Lewis, with his character’s ruthless drive to exact revenge, is completely believable in that role.
 
Clint Eastwood received a nine-page treatment from Ernest Tidyman, known mostly for writing the screenplays for urban crime films such as Shaft (1971) and The French Connection (1971). The primary inspiration for the screenplay was the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese in Queens, New York in 1964, in which 38 witnesses saw or heard the attack and failed to help her or call the police. The starting point for Eastwood was, “What would have happened if the sheriff in High Noon had been killed? What would have happened afterwards?” Once he agreed to do it, Tidyman took these two ideas and developed the treatment into a script that was subsequently revised by Eastwood’s go-to script doctor, Dean Riesner, who added, his trademark black humor: early in the film, one of Lago’s hired guns says to The Stranger, “Maybe you think you’re fast enough to keep up with us, huh?” to which he replies curtly, “A lot faster than you’ll ever live to be.” The biggest mystery of the film is The Stranger’s identity. Eastwood later admitted that the script identified him as the dead sheriff’s brother and that “I always played it like he was the brother. I thought about playing it a little bit like he was sort of an avenging angel, too.”

High Plains Drifter was put into production in late summer of 1972. The studio wanted Eastwood to shoot the film on its backlot but Eastwood decided to shoot on location. He originally considered Pyramid Lake, Nevada but his car ran out of gas before he got there. The American Indian tribal council were divided about a film crew shooting on their land. Someone in the production suggested Mono Lake in California, which Eastwood had visited in the past. Once he arrived, the filmmaker found a point overlooking the lake and decided that would be the site for the town. He went on to find all the other locations within a four-minute drive save for the opening shot, which was done outside of Reno. Production designer Henry Bumstead and his team built the town of Lago in 28-days. They assembled 14 houses, a church and a two-story hotel. These were complete buildings so that Eastwood could shoot interior scenes on location.
 
The Stranger has the townsfolk literally transform Lago into Hell by painting of all the buildings red – a striking image to be sure – which not only evokes hellish imagery but also symbolizes the blood on the hands of the townsfolk who were all culpable in the Marshal’s death. The climax of High Plains Drifter is where the film goes full-on horror as The Stranger leaves, letting the ill-prepared townsfolk “handle” Bridges and the Carlin brothers. Naturally, they put up little to no resistance as they are too scared to shoot and run away or as in the case of Drake (Mitchell Ryan), the mining executive, are shot and killed.
 
Later that night, Bridges and his crew terrorize the survivors, exposing their hypocrisy. It is at this point when The Stranger reappears, that, just like the Marshall, as Cole is mercilessly whipped to death with The Stranger framed with nightmarish flames of the town burning in the background. The two surviving outlaws walk through the town on fire – hell on earth indeed – only for Dan to be whipped around the neck and hung. Bridges still has not seen The Stranger until he hears the words, “Help me,” (sounding very much like the murdered Marshal) and turns to see him standing in front of a burning building for the final showdown. He easily guns down Bridges who asks The Stranger’s identity – and gets no response.

Late in the film, the motel keeper’s wife, Sarah (Verna Bloom) says, “They say the dead don’t rest without a marker of some kind.” High Plains Drifter ends on an emotional note as The Stranger observes Mordecai naming the Marshal’s previously unmarked grave before riding out of town, disappearing into the hazy horizon like a ghost with a reprise of the unnerving music from the opening credits. The dead Marshal can finally rest: those responsible for his demise have been punished. The film is a scathing indictment of how greed can corrupt those in positions of power. It is also a powerful critique of bystander apathy, as embodied by a town of cowards and petty, greedy tyrants that let a good man die. The Stranger embodies the dead man’s spirit and his search for vengeance.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Gentry, Ric. "Director Clint Eastwood: Attention to Detail and Involvement for the Audience.” Clint Eastwood: Interviews. University of Mississippi. 1999.
 
Hughes, Howard. Aim for the Heart. I.B. Tauris. 2009
 
McGilligan, Patrick. Clint: The Life and Legend. Harper Collins. 1999.
 
Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf. 1996.
 
Wilson, Michael Henry. “’Whether I Succeed or Fail, I Don’t Want to Owe it to Anyone but Myself’: From Play Misty for Me to Honkytonk Man.” Clint Eastwood: Interviews. University of Mississippi. 1999.

Satan's Triangle

People have been fascinated with the enigma that is the Bermuda Triangle for decades. It is a region marked by the Florida coast and the islands of Bermuda and the Bahamas, a “danger zone that seems to swallow ships and planes,” as a vintage episode of the In Search Of… television show from the 1970s aptly described it. It is an area of 60,000 square miles where many planes and ships have mysteriously vanished over the years. Science has tried to explain the phenomenon but compelling anecdotal information endures and continues interest in it.
 
It has been fertile ground for genre movies and T.V., from Airport ’77 (1977) to The Triangle (2005) mini-series. One of the more interesting and unsettling efforts is Satan’s Triangle, a 1975 made-for-T.V. movie starring Kim Novak and Doug McClure and produced by famed entertainer Danny Thomas’ production company. Originally nothing more than a movie-of-the-week, Satan’s Triangle has developed a small cult following over the years of people who have fond memories of seeing it in the ‘70s.
 
The United States Coast Guard receives a distress call from a schooner caught in a terrible storm at sea right in the center of the Bermuda Triangle. Lt. Haig (McClure) and Lt. Comdr. Pagnolini (Michael Conrad) investigate in a rescue helicopter. The two men briefly discuss the Bermuda Triangle with the former being a skeptic and the latter believing that the Devil plays a role. They come across the ship and find a man hanging upside down from the main mast and another man slumped on the forward hatch. The sails are shredded and it looks abandoned.

They try to radio the base but all they get is static. Haig decides to go down to the vessel and investigate. Once aboard, he confirms both men are dead and the one hanging ominously from the mast is priest (Alejandro Rey)! The suspenseful tone is quite effective here as the spooky atmospheric music by Johnny Pate and the wind whistling around the ship set a creepy vibe.
 
Initially, Haig doesn’t find anyone, which only ratchets up the tension including the incredible choppy sea that rocks the boat. When he ventures aft he finds another man, his body hanging in mid-air! He also finds a woman named Eva (Novak) in shock. Haig brings her on deck and they try to get back on the helicopter but the wire on the rescue basket snaps sending them tumbling into the sea. The chopper begins to inexplicably have technical difficulties forcing it to leave. Haig and Eva return to the boat. While waiting for help to return, she recounts the strange happenings on the boat that led to its current state. At this point Satan’s Triangle has sucked us in with this intriguing premise and engaging mystery. How did these men die and only Eva survive?
 
Even in the twilight of her career, Kim Novak casts an alluring presence and her sexy, husky voice warning Haig, “We’re going to die on this boat, you know,” doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world. After all, who wouldn’t want to be stuck out at sea alone with her? Novak does her best to convey the dread of the situation as Eva stares off into space with a haunted look whenever she recounts what happened to all on board before Haig and his partner showed up. In the flashback sequences she gets to have fun playing the bored, spoiled trophy wife who receives massages from one of the crew members while her older, rich husband Hal (Jim Davis) gets to live out his Ernest Hemingway fantasy by trying to land a huge marlin.

His macho fantasy is interrupted by the ominous sight of a priest floating alone at sea on the wing of plane wreckage. The shot of him adrift at sea is a haunting one as he doesn’t look quite right. There is an air of malevolence about him as opposed to say trauma from surviving a plane crash. As soon as he is brought on board all hell breaks loose starting with a violent storm that engulfs the schooner and frightens the crew so badly that they abandon ship, leaving Hal, Eva and the ship’s captain (Ed Lauter) and the first mate (Titos Vandis) with the priest.
 
Alejandro Rey is eerily effective as the priest whose stoicism and dead eyes are an unsettling combination. Ed Lauter plays another no-nonsense authority figure that he excelled at throughout his career, playing the ship’s captain who is at odds with the rich man obsessed with catching an elusive marlin. Doug McClure is just fine as the male lead who provides a skeptical counterpoint to Eva’s traumatized believer. Initially, he comes off as something of a ladies man and has no problem “comforting” her while they wait for help to arrive but the movie’s dramatic plot twist late on turns his world upside down.
 
Naturally, Eva’s account of what happened leans heavily into the supernatural with a crew member suddenly disappearing without a trace and Hal’s inexplicable corpse hanging suspended in air as she wrestles with her faith in God in the presence of the Devil at the heart of the Bermuda Triangle. Haig, the man of reason, goes through her story and explains the unnatural occurrences in such a way that he has us convinced, lulling us into a sense of complacency and setting us up for the movie’s crazy climax that delivers a deliciously chilling twist with only a look.

Satan’s Triangle is a vintage made-for-T.V. movie with cheap yet well-delivered jolts as it mixes a fascination with the supernatural and the jaded cynicism of the decade that lost its idealism in the 1960s. Ultimately, it delivers the requisite scares in surprisingly effective fashion and is anchored by an engaging performance from Novak who showed that she still had it after all those years, delivering a hell of a gut-punch of an ending.
 
You can watch Satan’s Triangle for free on Youtube.

Welcome Home, Soldier Boys

In the wake of the Vietnam War, many films were made that examined what happened to American soldiers returning home, from classy prestigious studio films such as The Deer Hunter (1978) to B-movie action fare such as Rolling Thunder (1977). Some explored how soldiers tried to re-acclimate to “normal” life back home while others depicted how their friends and family reacted to their return. A common theme among these films is how the veteran’s war experiences affected them, be it emotionally, psychologically or physically. These films were an attempt for America to come to grips with a highly publicized war that they lost.

Welcome Home, Soldier Boys (1972), directed by Richard Compton and written by Guerdon Trueblood, is a small B-movie that one can imagine playing in some small, rural town on the bottom half of a double bill. It hardly did any business and was barely reviewed, quietly drifting into cinematic obscurity but remains a fascinating oddity nonetheless.

Four soldiers freshly discharged from the United States Army try to re-assimilate into civilian life after a tour in Vietnam with designs to go to California where one of them claims to have inherited a chunk of family-owned land that they can make their own. They’re a tight-knit group as evident in the short-hand between them and the way they banter back and forth.

The four men try to buy a car and are taken advantage of by a salesman. They proceed to “check out” the vehicle and strip it down, knocking down the price from $6200 to $5500. This scene is crucial in that it not only establishes that these guys aren’t pushovers but are also savvy enough to deal with someone in a creative fashion when they feel that they’re being exploited.

The film is a road movie that takes a decidedly dark turn early on when the men pick-up a stranded woman (Jennifer Billingsley) whose car broke down on the side of the road. The proceed to take turns having sex with her but when she demands $500 to get a car and drive home instead of $100 bus fare, things turn ugly and she is thrown out of the car while it was going 65 mph. They don’t stop to see if she’s okay or dead and this scene is an early indicator of what these men are capable of and where the film is going.

Apart from Danny (Joe Don Baker), we are given very little backstory to these men. What we know about them is strictly from their actions in the present. Danny returns home to see his folks and realizes that his experiences in the war has changed him, his parents have stayed the same, assuming he’ll pick up where he left off before he went overseas. They don’t understand he and his friends want to make a go of it in California. A somber mood hangs over this entire sequence and the whole experience leaves Danny and his friends crestfallen, proving the old saying, you can’t go home again.

When their car breaks down somewhere in Texas, they are towed into town and are met with all kinds of flak from the locals. They are overcharged by a mechanic, mocked by Korean War vets for not finishing the job in ‘Nam, and thrown in jail for the night by the Sheriff (Billy “Green” Bush). These incidents only deepen their feelings of alienation and resentment towards civilians.

Low on gas and money, they finally roll into New Mexico and try to get gas in a small town but it is too early. They end up stealing what they need and for them this is the last straw. When they are meant with resistance from the locals, the four men unleash an orgy of violence that would make Sam Peckinpah proud. The ensuing bloodbath is shocking in its ruthless efficiency.

Welcome Home, Soldier Boys ends on a nihilistic note that pays homage to the ending of The Wild Bunch (1969) but while Peckinpah mythologized and had great affection for his characters, this film doesn’t sentimentalize its protagonists. It doesn’t make any excuses for the behavior of these men, presenting the things they do in matter-of-fact fashion. The filmmakers show these men for who they are and lets us judge them. Unlike Rolling Thunder or First Blood (1982), this film isn’t a rousing revenge tale as the protagonists strike back at those that misunderstand and try to keep them down. This is a massacre, plain and simple.

This deviates from the common coming home from war narrative that asks us to sympathize with the vets that return damaged in one way or another. Not so much with these characters who are unrepentant in who they are, escalating slights against them that doesn’t make them victims but aggressors in a way that is unsettling. Is the ending meant to evoke the infamous bloody 1968 Mỹ Lai massacre? Is it suggesting that these guys killed women and children in ‘Nam and are carrying on where they left off? Who is this film made for? It doesn’t quite get down ‘n’ dirty enough for the exploitation crowd and isn’t palatable for mainstream audiences, which may explain why it slipped through the cracks over the years.

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Dirty Little Billy

The 1970s was a great decade for revisionist takes on genre cinema with the likes of William Friedkin shaking up the cop movie with The French Connection (1971), George Lucas’ take on the coming-of-age movie with American Graffiti (1973), and Robert Altman’s idiosyncratic private detective movie with The Long Goodbye (1973). These films upended the conventions of their respective genres with anti-heroes, downbeat endings, and eschewed a black and white worldview for one that was morally murky.
 
The western was a particularly fertile genre for reinvention with Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970), Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and Sydney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson (1972) offering bold takes. Among these films is the lesser-known Dirty Little Billy (1972), a grungy, no frills take on legendary outlaw Billy the Kid with Michael J. Pollard playing the titular character. The film came and went quickly and became so difficult to find that it wasn’t even able to develop its own cult following despite counting notable people like Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie among its admirers.
 
The film establishes its grungy aesthetic right away with an establishing shot of a muddy puddle and an equally muddy foot stepping in it. Billy (Pollard) and his family arrive by train to a small frontier town and he promptly slips and falls in the mud – his introduction to this dead-end burg. His parents buy a house that can be charitably called a shithole – it’s covered in dust, no glass in the windows and livestock occupy one of the bedrooms. Train tracks were just laid down and the realtor claims that this means cattle will soon arrive and that will provide a source of income causing the town to grow. Judging by how dismal things look that seems highly unlikely. Billy’s family moved away from New York City for this?
 

Billy’s stepfather Henry (Willard Sage) sets him to work on the land but between his soft hands and lazy approach to work he’s kicked out of the house after a heated confrontation. Billy soon crosses paths with two fellow outcasts, Goldie (Richard Evans) and Berle (Lee Purcell), when he witnesses the former killing a man. An understandably wary Goldie threatens to kill Billy and they form an uneasy partnership which allows Billy to learn how to be a criminal. The rest of the film follows their misadventures as they try to get enough money to leave town.
 
Billy’s sullen attitude acts in sharp contrast to Michael J. Pollard’s cherub-like face. He’s a more low-key crook as opposed to Emilio Estevez’s cocky psychotic in the Young Gun movies. Pollard plays Billy as someone unusually calm during intense situations. He spends a lot of time watching others, learning from them what to do and not to do in a given situation. What better place to develop your chops as an outlaw than a saloon where he is shown how to cheat, gamble and steal – not from the best but rather from people who are just as desperate to get out of town.
 
Richard Evans plays Goldie as a nasty sadist who treats Berle like a piece of property, slapping her around when she refuses to work as a prostitute. He is a mentor of sorts to Billy, telling him how things are in the world. The film presents prostitution as a dehumanizing profession as we see her eating while servicing a client to take her mind off the demeaning act. Lee Purcell plays Berle as a scrappy survivor, the only one to outlast her seven siblings. She is excellent in the role, especially in a scene where Berle recounts the hardships she and her family endured. It is a touching scene that highlights her vulnerable side as she and Billy get closer.
 
Dirty Little Billy turns many conventions of the western genre on its head. Everybody is covered in dirt and wears raggedy clothing that looks like they’ve never been washed. Even the gunfights are clumsy, chaotic affairs that are over quickly. There is nothing cool about them. People are scared, they miss their shots or their guns misfire. The violence is brutal and ugly as evident in a nasty knife fight between Berle and the girlfriend of a rival gambler.
 

Billy’s education as an outlaw is paralleled with the growth of the town, which sees a boost in population thanks to a neighboring town closing. Dirty Little Billy is an origin story with modest scope and stakes with most of the action taking place in a saloon in a small town as Billy and his new friends spend most of their time drinking, gambling and scheming to no end. Billy is content to do nothing until fate forces his hand and make an important life decision. It isn’t until the climactic showdown with three fellow hardened outlaws that we finally see the beginnings of the famous outlaw he’ll become. This is refreshing take on the legendary historical figure and a no-frills western that deglamorizes the genre with unflinching conviction, anchored by a committed performance from Pollard.

American Graffiti

“The anthropologist side of me never went away and…the whole innocence of the ‘50s, the mating rituals of the ‘50s, the uniquely American mating ritual of meeting the opposite sex in cars was very fascinating to me…I saw the beginning of the ‘60s as a real transition in the culture in the way, because of the Vietnam War, and all the things we were going through and I wanted to make a movie about it.” – George Lucas

There is a fascinating push-pull friction going on in American Graffiti (1973) between George Lucas the anthropologist with the use of long lenses and takes observing his subjects and Lucas the autobiographer with his close-ups on the compelling dramatic moments of his characters going through events either he experienced or people he knew. The film is at times nostalgic for this bygone era and at other times chronicling it from a distance, which may explain why it has aged surprisingly well as a time capsule of that time period and of Lucas as an artist when he made it, before he would create a franchise empire that would overshadow everything else he has done.

The film follows four young men and the women in their lives on the last night of summer vacation in 1962. We are introduced to the first three in a long shot arriving in their respective vehicles at a local diner in Modesto, California. Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) is deciding whether or not to college on the east coast. Steve Bolander (Ron Howard) is also going off to school and can’t believe that his friend is having doubts, pointing out that this is finally their chance to escape their dead-end town and avoid ending up like John Milner (Paul Le Mat), the local drag racer that never grew up and has a reputation for having the fastest car. Terry “The Toad” Fields (Charles Martin Smith) is entrusted with Steve’s ’58 Chevy Impala while he’s away at school and spends the night trying to get laid.

Curt, Steve and his girlfriend Laurie Henderson (Cindy Williams) start the night off by going to the freshman hop at their high school to remember all of “the good times” as Curt puts it, which sets John off: “I ain’t going off to some goddamn fancy college. I’m staying here right here! Having fun, as usual.” This hints at the trouble he won’t say but we know. He feels left behind while they go off to college. He wants things to stay the same; later complaining that rock ‘n’ roll has gone downhill since Buddy Holly died.

The characters soon go their separate ways and Lucas the anthropologist cuts to a montage of cars cruising up and down the main street of the town. This was a nightly ritual that began back in the 1950s and continued on into 1960s and beyond – teenagers would go riding in their cars making fun of each other, getting into trouble and picking each other up. We see John in his element for this is where he feels most comfortable. He’s the king of the strip. All the while, Lucas has music playing with famed radio disc jockey Wolfman Jack’s colorful banter between songs. The music acts as a Greek chorus, complimenting and commenting on what we are seeing.

The guys’ lives are complicated by the women they are either involved with or encounter over the course of the night. With John, it’s when he agrees to pick-up Carol Morrison (Mackenzie Phillips), a young girl and not a beautiful woman as he was led to believe. Curt spots a mysterious striking blonde woman (Suzanna Sommers) in a car mouthing what he believes are the words, “I love you,” and spends the rest of the film trying to find her. Steve and Laurie start off by agreeing to see other people while they’re away at college but that quickly goes south when they get into a fight at the dance. This tension flares and simmers over the course of the night. Finally, Terry picks up a girl named Debbie (Candy Clark) off the street and they go through a series of misadventures.

The split personalities of Lucas the documentarian and the autobiographer are most apparent early on during the depiction of the freshman sock hop that Curt, Steve and Laurie attend, which is much more interesting than the melodrama that erupts between the latter couple. Lucas is a depicting a ritual from a bygone era that he actually experienced, which gives the sequence an air of authenticity. Once again, Lucas’ documentarian side comes to the foreground as he meticulously recreates this dance right down to the band Herby and the Heartbeats (Flash Cadillac and the Continental Kids) playing the music and the dance moves of the kids. Lucas the self-mythologizer takes over when we see Curt wandering the empty, darkened halls of the high school. He ends up talking to a teacher (Terry McGovern) chaperoning the dance and asking him about his college experience. He only lasted a semester before going home after deciding he wasn’t “the competitive type.” This only feeds into Curt’s doubts.

Of the four main characters Curt and John are the most interesting, even getting the film’s most poignant moments. Steve is your typical all-American class president type and Terry is a dweeb that just wants to get laid. Curt, in comparison, starts off with the dilemma of going to college or staying put, then becomes obsessed with a blonde woman in a car and this leads him to being shanghaied by local greaser gang The Pharaohs who force him to pull a series of pranks as a form of initiation. Richard Dreyfuss is charming and funny in the role, especially how he interacts with others, using humor to both deflect insults and keep himself out of trouble as we see with his misadventures with The Pharaohs.

Curt’s brief stint as a juvenile delinquent is both amusing and a bit harrowing as The Pharaohs put him in danger on two separate occasions but he is able to use his affable personality to get out of these sticky situations. Dreyfuss plays well off of Bo Hopkins’ genial yet menacing greaser. There’s always the implied threat of violence hanging over them but Curt manages to pull off the tasks he’s given and survive the night.

John starts off as a typical hot rodder interested only in cars and picking up women but the more time he spends with Carol his true character emerges. Initially, they have an antagonistic relationship, as he’s embarrassed to be seen with this young kid, afraid it will damage his reputation. She feels like no one likes her, not her older sister Judy who dumped her with John or this grease monkey who is trying to get rid of her. Mackenzie Phillips does an excellent job of showing that Carol is more than an annoying brat. She wants to hang out with the older kids and be taken seriously.

They take a walk through a junkyard and John points out a few cars and their histories, such as the people that died in them. He’s managed to avoid that fate so far and stay the fastest guy on the strip. It is a quiet, poignant moment between these two characters where they put their differences aside. Paul Le Mat is excellent in this scene as John lets his cool façade down for a few minutes and shows a vulnerable side to Carol. In their next scene together, he helps her terrorize a car of girls that threw a water balloon at her. It is an important bonding experience for them as it is no longer two of them sniping at each other but them working together against a common foe. Their night ends on a sweet note as he finally drops her off at her house and gives her a part from his car – a little memento of their night together. It means the world to her as she runs off into the house while he heads off into the night with a wry smile.

Curt’s payoff comes when, in a last ditch Hail Mary to get in touch with the mysterious blonde, he goes to the local radio station to get a dedication played in the hopes she’ll contact him. He meets the night D.J. who doesn’t claim to be the mythological Wolfman but promises to relay the dedication to the man. As Curt leaves the station he looks back and sees the D.J. adopt the Wolfman’s distinctive voice and smiles with the knowledge that few others have.

American Graffiti heads towards its exciting climactic showdown between John and Bob Falfa (played to cocky perfection by Harrison Ford), an unknown drag racer in a black ’55 Chevy One-Fifty Coupe who has been looking for him all night. It’s dawn when the two head out of town to race. John has been dreading this moment, as he knows Falfa’s car is faster than his, thanks to a brief encounter earlier that night, but the would-be challenger crashes his car. Terry gushes about John’s win and in a rare moment of candor among his friends, tells him that he would’ve lost. Terry won’t hear it and hypes him and his car. John goes along with it, snapping back into “character” as it were. After all, being the top hot rodder is all he has in life and he knows it. In that moment, he comes to terms with it.

One can’t stress the importance of music in this film enough. It is everywhere. The first thing we hear is a radio being tuned to a station with the characters listening to it or having it play in the background throughout the film with the legendary Wolfman Jack commenting occasionally between songs. Music is often used to establish a mood and take us back to the time period as evident early on when “Sixteen Candles” plays over a shot of cars parked at Mel’s Diner, or showing cars cruising up and down the main drag to “Runaway” by Del Shannon as Lucas the anthropologist observes these people in their natural habitat, chronicling their nightly rituals.

For all the nostalgia that this film evokes people often forget the darker elements that gradually appear towards the end as Laurie is almost killed in a car accident. Lucas delivers the most powerful, emotional gut punch at the end with an epilogue that bluntly states the death of one of the main characters and another MIA in Vietnam. In an incredible example of tonal whiplash, the Beach Boys’ cheery “All Summer Long” plays over the credits ending things on a bittersweet note.

With every passing year there are fewer people that can answer the American Graffiti poster’s tag line question, “Where were you in ’62?” Lucas takes us back to a more innocent time when John F. Kennedy was still President of the United States and before a series of political assassinations, coupled with the Vietnam War, divided the country. We have this knowledge and are aware that these characters are on the cusp of all of this happening but are currently blissfully unaware. The farther we get away from the year that the film is set and the less people still alive who can remember it, American Graffiti becomes less of a nostalgia piece and more of a snapshot of a certain time and place, capturing Lucas as a young man before his life became complicated with filmmaking and empire building.

Rollerball

“I thought that violence for the entertainment of the masses was an obscene idea. That’s what I saw coming and that’s why I made the film.” – Norman Jewison

For many years now, professional sports have been all about money. Superstar athletes earn huge salaries for their exploits while also enjoying lucrative endorsements. Meanwhile, wealthy businessmen and corporations make millions with ever-increasing ticket prices and merchandising. Hell, even the places where people gather to watch sporting events have become corporatized. Gone are the Maple Leaf Gardens and the Boston Garden, replaced or renamed Mattamy Athletic Centre at the Gardens and TD Garden respectively, which will last only as long as that corporate entity owns it to be renamed by the next corporate behemoth.

Director Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975) saw this coming. Set in the future, it features a world where the purity of a sport known as Rollerball (think roller derby meets hockey) is becoming increasingly tainted by the influence of corporations. He wisely starts things off by showing a match from beginning to end, which lets us see how it works – the rules and the dynamics of the game – and he thrusts us right in the middle of the mayhem, conveying the speed and brutality of the sport. Most importantly, it introduces us to the sport’s most popular player Jonathan E (James Caan), the captain of Houston’s team.

It’s a tough game with plenty of injuries. Much like with hockey, Houston has an enforcer named Moonpie (John Beck) whose job it is to protect top scorer Jonathan and provide the occasional cheap shot on an opposing player. Jewison sprinkles several little touches here and there that establishes the atmosphere, like how the corporate anthem is played before the game starts instead of a national anthem. There are no nations any more. There are no more wars. Corporations run everything.

The game plays on while the corporate overlords, as represented by Mr. Bartholomew (John Houseman), observe from on high and afterwards visits the team in the locker room, applauding them for the victory in his own benign yet smug way of a man that knows how much power he wields. Jonathan is a highly decorated player and as Bartholomew points they’ve run out of accolades to give him. As the team leaves the stadium we see how popular Jonathan is as a large group of fans chant his name, clamoring for his autograph.

The next day, he meets with Bartholomew who wants him to announce his retirement on a television special dedicated to his long and illustrious career. The executive offers him a cushy life with all kinds of perks but the athlete is still bitter over the past. An executive took his wife Ella (Maud Adams) away from him. Bartholomew doesn’t understand Jonathan’s reluctance to retire as he doesn’t know what it’s like to be on a team that has its own unique dynamic and way of playing. Everybody depends on each other and Jonathan doesn’t want to give that up. He has everything he could want but when the powers that be want to take that away from him he decides to push back. The rest of Rollerball plays out with his quest to find out why they want him to quit.

Jewison portrays corporate executives as pretty, shallow people that attend lavish parties and take high-end drugs. At one such gathering they take their escapades to the next level, mindlessly shooting and blowing up trees for fun. The idle rich are horribly drunk on destructive power. The image of a row of trees burning on a hill is a powerful one and makes us want to see Jonathan succeed even more.

The film also shows how the corporate machine tries to crush any kind of resistance to their edicts by changing the rules of the sport for the last two games to make it more dangerous. If Jonathan doesn’t quit, he’ll either die playing the game or his teammates will. The semi-final against Tokyo ups the stakes in violence not only among the athletes but in the stands as fans become increasingly hostile to the point where when their team loses they turn into an angry mob. Their rage spills out onto the track as they mix it up with the players. The game has gotten out of control with very few rules. The final championship game features no rules in a final desperate attempt to eliminate Jonathan.

Rollerball was part of a fantastic run of films for James Caan in the 1970s. Starting with The Godfather in 1972, he delivered strong performances in Cinderella Liberty (1973), The Gambler (1974) and Freebie and the Bean (1974). He does an excellent job conveying Jonathan’s gradual self-awareness that starts simply: why is he being forced out of the game he loves? In a world where no one is supposed to ask questions, this makes him a dangerous person. He is no longer following the corporate script.

Caan’s on-screen presence demonstrates why Jonathan is such a charismatic player. He is loyal to his teammates and is a dynamic athlete that can make those clutch plays that win games. He is not particularly intelligent but is self-aware of this fact and has an innate instinct for what’s wrong and goes with his gut as he begins to question things. The actor also shows Jonathan’s vulnerable side in a scene where he gives a heartfelt speech to comatose teammate Moonpie on the eve of what might be his final game. Up until now he’s always been there to watch his back and for the first time Jonathan is going to have to go it alone.

John Houseman is excellent as the benevolent executive that speaks in a wonderfully condescending, cultured voice while also capable of stern, icy glares directed at the increasingly disobedient Jonathan. At one point, he finally lays it out for the star athlete: “No player is greater than the game itself…It’s not a game a man is supposed to grow strong in, Jonathan…You can be made to quit. You can be forced.” Of course, this makes Jonathan even more determined and defiant.

John Beck plays Moonpie as a racist good ol’ boy with little self-awareness. He understands his role on the team – to protect Jonathan and mess up players on the other team – but little else. He’s the kind of player that exists in all kinds of professional sports and the actor nails stereotypical enforcer, especially in the scene where he gives his teammates a rousing pep talk while a strategy coach (Robert Ito) tries to prepare them for the upcoming game with Tokyo.

The final match doesn’t feature a traditional pre-game pep talk as we’ve seen before – just grim determination as Jonathan goes out first while the crowds chant his name. Not surprisingly, this is the most intense and violent one yet as he survives, scoring the only goal in defiance to the corporation. Battered but not beaten he has become what they feared – bigger than the game and bigger than the corporation.

William Harrison was a professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas and found himself obsessed with what he felt was the unsettling social and economic changes occurring in the world. He also witnessed a violent fight at a university basketball game. These things inspired him to write a short story called, “Roller Ball Murder,” which was published in the September 1973 issue of Esquire magazine.

Around the same time, filmmaker Norman Jewison had gone to a hockey game between the Boston Bruins and the Philadelphia Flyers, which turned into an ugly mess: “There was blood on the ice and 16,000 people were standing up and screaming.” This led to him contacting Harrison. Both men were living in London at the time and the writer’s agent told him that Jewison was going to offer him $50,000 for the short story. He decided to ask for more money and an opportunity to write the screenplay. Six weeks went by and Harrison assumed that he had blown the deal but received a call from Jewison’s assistant who told him that all his demands had been met and they were in pre-production. When the two men finally met at Pinewood Studios they immediately bonded and spent all summer in London working on the script together.

When it came to designing the track for rollerball, Jewison and his crew decided that it had to be circular because of the roller-skaters and the motorcycles. British production designer John Box built a scale model of the track. Working with the art director and the track architect, they took a little ball, put a spring behind it and shot it around the track so that they could figure out the moment of gravity pull. The next step was to find a place to recreate the model. They found the Olympic basketball stadium in Munich. The production spent a large amount of the film’s budget building the track, complete with a banked surface of 40 feet and a total circumference of 190 feet.

When it came to casting for the pivotal role of Jonathan E, Jewison knew of James Caan’s love of “physical confrontation” and offered him the role. The actor liked the script but “I was really persuaded to get involved by the jock in me.” For team extras, Jewison recruited California roller derby athletes, English roller hockey players, and, of course, stuntmen. Caan and his teammates were sent to a California arena for four months before shooting to learn how to play the game. He said they skated seven times a week until they were good enough.

The actors thought they were ready to go until they arrived in Munich and saw the banked track they would be filming on. They had practiced on a flat track in California and had to learn how to skate on this new one. They quickly adapted and Jewison let them play for real, soon regretting it when a stuntman got injured and ended up in the hospital. Once they put on their uniforms, something changed as one extra on the Tokyo team said, “We want to skate the game. When we start up, everybody forgets the filming and we’re competing for the ball.” The director was concerned for the players’ safety: “There is a gladiatorial aspect to rollerball that frightens me. I keep cautioning the boys about it. They are all athletes…and they love body contact, they love playing with the ball, they love the speed and agility, and there is an enormous amount of skill involved.” Caan insisted on doing his own stunts and separated a shoulder and damaged a rib. He was less enthused about the non-rollerball scenes or, as he called them, “all the walking and talking shit,” because he had to play “a guy whose emotions had basically been taken away from him.”

The extras got so into the game that on the final week of shooting they put on a game for the public. Even though the stadium only held approximately 5,000 people, 8,500 turned up and the police had to be called in to turn away those that couldn’t be let in. According to Caan, gameplay never lasted for more than 25 or 30 seconds: “It was just one fight after another.”

The irony of Bartholomew’s reasoning – that no one player is bigger than the game – is exactly what happened. Jonathan is an icon thanks to corporate machinations and his own natural talent. Most sports are designed to be all about teamwork. It is all the things outside of the game – the merchandising, pundits, corporate puff pieces, and so on that puts an emphasis on the individual player, elevating them to heroes in the eyes of their fans.

Rollerball is a classic man against the system film. It features a man who has it all but when he refuses to do what he’s told, is pressured in all kinds of ways, from changing the rules so that he’ll either quit or be killed, to reuniting him with Ella – a bittersweet experience as she admits to being told to try and convince him to quit. These tactics only strengthen his resolve, making him even more dangerous because all that ever mattered to him was the game. At the end of the film he transcends it to become something else.

SOURCES

Delaney, Sam. “When It Comes to the Crunch.” The Guardian. April 20, 1999.

Gammon, Clive. “Rollerball.” Sports Illustrated. April 21, 1975.

George Lucas vs. Star Wars

Now that I've had some time to reflect on Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) and the entire Disney trilogy, it has me thinking about Star Wars without George Lucas. The spark of inspiration came from this 2012 interview on StarWars.com with head of Lucasfilm Kathleen Kennedy and Lucas, which is very interesting, especially in regards to the following quotes:

At one point, Kennedy says, "The main thing is protecting these characters." Really? Then how does she explain killing them off over the course of the new movies? For me, I think that is the hardest thing to accept - characters that I love and cherish from the Original Trilogy being killed off and in ways that feel cheap. For example, I don’t mind the idea of killing off Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), but it is the way in which it was done that rankles me. It rang false and I expected a very heroic end for a character that deserved a proper demise. I was also fine with Luke Skywalker’s (Mark Hamill) death in Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2016), which was pretty badass but why did the filmmakers feel the need to kill him off? I’ve always felt that in the Lucas-controlled Star Wars movies, when a major character was killed off it meant something, it was significant – the notable exception being Boba Fett, which was silly and did a great disservice to such a cool character.

In the 2012 interview, Lucas sums up his vision of Star Wars brilliantly:

"There are people out there who don't play by the rules and if you're not careful you're going to lose all your freedoms. At the same time, those people that don't play by the rules because they are selfish and greedy, and turn themselves into evil people who don't care about other people."

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I don't think he's talking about Star Wars. He's talking about Hollywood and the studios. He's always been wary and suspicious of them going back to THX 1138 (1971) when the studio cut out five minutes of the film against his wishes. Perhaps that's why he sold off Lucasfilm. He was tired of all the bullshit and baggage that comes with dealing with them.

Check out the body language between Kennedy and Lucas in the 2012 interview and it is very telling indeed. One person can clearly state his vision for his cinematic world. The other basically parrots what has been said and some of what she says feels like lip service. Now, before you say it, I don't bear Kennedy any ill will and I don't buy into any of the conspiracy theories in regards to why Lucas sold off his company, but the more I think about Star Wars since he sold it off the more I find it less and less like what he originally envisioned it to be. Say what you will about the Prequel trilogy but at least it was the vision of one person as opposed to the Disney trilogy, which, at times, lacks focus – due in large part to the switch of directors on The Last Jedi and then back again on The Rise of Skywalker.

In some respects, I feel sorry for Lucas, especially in light of the excerpts from Robert Iger's book where he writes about how Kennedy, director J.J. Abrams, et al ignored Lucas' ideas for the new movies and went in a different direction. I understand the notion of striking out in a new direction but they didn't really do that did they? The Force Awakens is basically a rehash of Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) and Lucas wasn’t happy about that as Iger’s book states:

"Things didn't improve when Lucas saw the finished movie. Following a private screening, Iger recalls, Lucas "didn't hide his disappointment. 'There's nothing new,' he said. In each of the films in the original trilogy, it was important to him to present new worlds, new stories, new characters, and new technologies. In this one, he said, 'There weren't enough visual or technical leaps forward.' He wasn't wrong, but he also wasn't appreciating the pressure we were under to give ardent fans a film that felt quintessentially Star Wars.""

There it is in a nutshell the biggest problem with The Force Awakens and The Rise of Skywalker: the filmmakers were more concerned with giving fans what they wanted instead of staying true to Lucas’ artistic vision. I’m willing to give the former a pass as it managed to renew my love for Star Wars, getting rid of the bad taste left by the Prequels, and introducing us to some wonderful new characters. It doesn’t hold up as well to repeated viewings now that the initial glow has faded. Lucas has made it clear that he was never concerned with what the fans wanted. He had a definite story he wanted to tell and knew how he wanted to tell it whether the fans liked it or not. This may explain why Rian Johnson’s installment – The Last Jedi – is so reviled in some corners of Star Wars fandom as he adhered to Lucas’ notion of remaining true to your own artistic vision. He said in an interview:

“I think approaching any creative process with [the purpose of making fandoms happy] would be a mistake that would lead to probably the exact opposite result. Even my experience as a fan, you know, if I’m coming into something, even if it’s something that I think I want, if I see exactly what I think I want on the screen, it’s like, ‘Oh, okay.’ It might make me smile and make me feel neutral about the thing and I won’t really think about it afterwards, but that’s not really going to satisfy me.”

The Abrams-directed movies are attempting to give the fans what they want instead of staying true to an artistic vision, while Johnson's movie refused to pander to the fans and they crucified him for it. Interestingly, it is the only one of the new movies that Lucas has publicly said he liked. As a result, we get Abrams returning to the fold to "right the ship" as it were with The Rise of Skywalker. The more I think about them, the more I find that they are lacking. I love the new characters but was disappointed at how the Original Trilogy characters were treated. I don't mind killing off characters but have it mean something, which I felt wasn’t the case in some respects. Again, why do they need to be killed off in the first place? It can be a cheap, narrative ploy. Why couldn't some of them just ride off into the sunset? Admittedly, these sentiments come from having grown up with these characters and having genuine affection for them. I feel protective of them.

Love or hate the Prequels at least they did tread new ground in terms of technology and refused rehash what came before in terms of plot and story. Lucas took us to new worlds and introduced us to all sorts of new characters. The problems with these movies is that Lucas surrounded himself with Yes-men whereas on A New Hope and Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) he had people, like his wife Marcia and producer Gary Kurtz, keeping him in check, curbing his worst tendencies. It really started with Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) where Lucas freed himself of anybody who would say a critical word, allowing him to indulge himself. It would only get worse on the Prequel trilogy with the awkward racist stereotypes, ruining the mystique of The Force, and the clumsy direction of young, inexperienced actors.

This is why I find myself enjoying and revisiting the non-Disney trilogy movies/shows, like Rogue One (2016), Solo (2018) and The Mandalorian (2019), more as they are in keeping with the same spirit and tone as Lucas' original vision. Maybe, just maybe, I judged the Prequel movies a little too harshly (well, Episode I: The Phantom Menace is still horrible) and I feel like I need to revisit them in light of now finally seeing the last installment in the Disney trilogy. Maybe my opinion of them will change.

SOURCES

Parker, Ryan. “George Lucas Thinks The Last Jedi Was ‘Beautifully Made’.” The Hollywood Reporter. December 12, 2017.

Parker, Ryan. “Rian Johnson Calls Pandering to Star Wars Fans a ‘Mistake’.” The Hollywood Reporter. December 18, 2019.