1975 - ONE OF OUR DINOSAURS IS MISSING, a not unfunny Disney comedy

I actually laughed at a lot of the comedic scenes in this late period Disney comedy.  The Disney company kept chugging along with live action comedies after the death of Walt Disney.  For every Treasure Island or Pollyanna audiences had to endure films like The Boatnicks, Snowball Express or The Cat from Outer Space.

One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing kind of falls in the middle.  It's silly and stupid at times but it does have some undeniably humorous stuff.  The so called plot of this film has a group of Chinese spies chasing a British spy who has a microfilm of a secret formula called "Lotus X" which the Chinese agents want back.  Little do these martial arts wielding Asians realize is that they have to deal with some English nannies out to stop them.

Well the cast is shall we say interesting and not exactly P.C.  Peter Ustinov is the leader of the Chinese and sports an absurd accent and dresses like a poor man's Fu Manchu.  Helen Hayes usually referred to as "The First Lady of the American Theater," plays the leader of the British nannies out to stop him. Hayes, wrapped up her long career performing in mediocre Disney comedies and crappy TV shows probably to pad her retirement account.  In fact a lot of British character actors show up in this film.

 

Bill Walsh was the producer and the writer of this film, Walsh was a mainstay at the Disney Studios for many years and was responsible for the better Disney family films like The Love Bug, Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks to name a few.  The director was Robert Stevenson who had been working since the 1930's and moved over to the Disney organization in 1957 and really seemed to jell with their kind of film.  Stevenson made a lot of popular and commercially successful films for Disney.

 

I have to mention a couple of amusing scenes in this film.  The chase through London with the dinosaur skeleton is darn funny and the final battle between the nannies and the Chinese martial artists is funny slapstick.  Overall One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing is a good comedy in an ocean of really bad Disney comedies.

The running time is 100 minutes. 

1975 - RANCHO DELUXE, western comedy about cattle rustling

This modern day (at least as modern for 1975) comedy is about a couple of cattle rustlers in rural Montana.  They have mostly been rustling from a rich cattle rancher named John Brown, one cow at a time.  The film involves Brown's attempts to catch the rustlers.

Rancho Deluxe is a comedy or to put it another way a very laid back comedy at times almost to laid back.  The film has been well cast with Jeff Bridges as a slacker cowboy, Sam Waterston as his Native American companion the typical white guy actor playing a role he shouldn't.  New York actor Clifton James is the Montana rancher John Brown and Elizabeth Ashley is his wife.  The actor who seems more like a western character than most of the cast in this film is Slim Pickens as a livestock detective.  Pickens is his usual amusing self.

 

There is funny stuff in this film but the humor is very low key.  The film has nice photography from William Fraker who was a top Hollywood cinematographer who excelled at filming in western settings.  The director Frank Perry was not a guy known for his comedic touch.  He had filmed David and Lisa, Doc, and The Swimmer.  Perry was also a director with a couple of camp classics in his filmography, Mommie Dearest and the insane Catholic priest drama, Monsignor two films that are certainly a lot funnier than Rancho Deluxe. 

 

Rancho Deluxe was written by the very quirky screenwriter Thomas McGuane the author of that weird Marlon Brando/Jack Nickelson film The Missouri Breaks. In the end for all of it's strangeness this film just doesn't quite hang together.

The running time is 93 minutes.

1975 - THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG, another questionable Disney family film

 Hovering around in that rock bottom pile of Disney family films which include, The Boatniks, Snowball Express, No Deposit, No Return and The Cat From Outer Space, sits The Apple Dumpling Gang.

This is really bottom of the barrel stuff for the Disney studios probably made just to keep people working at the studio.  The director is Norman Tokar who I can safely say is not much of a stylist, he films everything very conventionally to put it mildly.

The plot what there is of it has something to do with 3 cute orphans who end up living with a gambler who slowly learns to become their parent.  Bill Bixby plays the gambler and he had done enough comedy to know how to milk a laugh or two.  Susan Clark is his "tom boy" love interest and you just know they will get together in the end.  Throw in Tim Conway and Don Knotts who play a couple of inept robbers who call themselves The Apple Dumpling Gang and away we go with lots of silly slapstick, a lame chase or two filmed against a process screen and a film which was for the most part clearly filmed on Disney's back lot.

 

Well the best you can say for the film is it gave a lot of work to a number of character actors such as Slim Pickens, John McGiver, Harry Morgan, and David Wayne a chance to grab a paycheck so they could at least make their mortgage payments.

 

This is the kind of crap that was heavily marketed by Disney as a film you could bring the whole family to.  The problem was that nobody put in the work to actually make this a fun or entertaining film.  As it is the damn thing made money and actually prompted a sequel which I suppose I'll have to eventually sit through to be a completest.

Written by Don Tait, the running time is 100 minutes.

1975 - PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, an enigma wrapped up in a puzzle

Australian director Peter Weir's, film based on a well regarded novel.  Picnic at Hanging Rock is a mysterious film that creates a special mood as the director really saturates the film in a creepy atmosphere amongst the beauty of the rural setting.

At a boarding school for young women in Victoria, Australia three of the girls and one of their teachers mysteriously disappear while on a picnic at a former volcano now something of a scenic location known as Hanging Rock.  The film involves the search for the girls and the attempts by the authorities to unravel what happened at Hanging Rock.

The film seems to focus around one of the girls the mysterious Miranda.  Miranda's roommate Sara has some kind of repressed love for Miranda and the film calls back to Miranda in repeated flashbacks.

 

As the search for the missing girls goes on things at the boarding school begin to disintegrate as the anxiety among the students and faculty increases regarding the situation.  Really to say anything more about the plot would spoil a very good and interesting film. Weir's skill really makes this film absorbing.

 

While he was working, Peter Weir was one of Australia's best directors. His body of work reflects an interesting group of films, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Fearless and The Truman Show to name a few. 

The film was written by Cliff Green, the running time is 115 minutes.

1975 - DOC SAVAGE: THE MAN OF BRONZE, Producer George Pal's final film

Sadly the final feature film from George Pal is not one of his best.  Pal along with the director Michael Anderson decided to make a rather campy film of a 1930's pulp fiction hero.  Doc Savage was a character who went around righting wrongs with his team he called "The Fabulous Five."

Pal who was apparently hunting around for another film project settled on an original Doc Savage story instead of adopting one of the 67 stories that were already in paperback.  Producer Pal hired Michael Anderson a British director who had a rather proficient career directing such films as Around The World In 80 Days, Logan's Run and The Dam Busters.  Towards the end of his career Anderson ended up working in television.

 Supposedly a management change at the studio doomed the film and it languished at Warner Brothers, nobody knew how to market it.  A box office failure.  The bigger problem with the film was the campy tone that was just completely out of touch with the 1970's film audience.  The film was probably about 20 years to early.  Eventually films like Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark were able to mix camp with thrills

 

Doc Savage isn't the total disaster I've been led to believe it was.  The film does have a kind of cheap studio look to it, but the actor Ron Ely does make a fairly impressive Doc Savage. The film is entertaining in it's own modest way and as I have said before, "I've seen a lot worse."

 

The running time is 112 minutes, George Pal and Joe Morhaim wrote the screenplay.

1975 - ROYAL FLASH, Richard Lester returns to the swashbuckler

Panned by the critics upon the release and ignored by the audience, Royal Flash does have a lot of the old Richard Lester touch at times.  The screenplay was by the writer of the Flashman books, George MacDonald Fraser.  Fraser's clever idea was to create a character who was for the most part a coward and a complete "cad" as they liked to say in Merry Old England and stick him in world changing situations like the American Civil War or in this case the political maneuvering of Otto Von Bismark.

Lester appeared to be aware that audiences would think he was making another version of The Three Musketeers, so he worked hard to find a new spin of the swashbuckler genre.  The cast was certainly interesting, Malcolm McDowell mister intense in films like If and A Clockwork Orange is the cowardly Harry Flashman, Florinda Balkin is the famous and real life prostitute Lola Montes and Oliver Reed is Otto Von Bismark.

 

There are lots of great British character actors throughout the film, Michael Hordern, Lionel Jeffries, Britt Eckland and Alister Sim to name a few.  Jeffries is particularly amusing.

The plot of the film borrows liberally from The Prisoner of Zenda to which Lester adds a lot of his famous visual gags. The film is funny if maybe a little slow at times but it is entertaining.

Running time 102 minutes.

1975 - NIGHT MOVES - the end of the private eye genre

 Critics usually cite The Long Goodbye as the end of the private detective film, but I would argue Arthur Penn's Night Moves is really the end of this genre.

Gene Hackman is Harry Moseby an independent investigator who is searching for a missing teenager played by Melanie Griffith who is basically a piece of jail bait in some of the film's most uncomfortable scenes.  Moseby is a smart guy but he gets involved in a case where he is in way over his head.  The film also spends a lot of time on Moseby's troubled marriage.

 

Arthur Penn was a theatrical director who made some interesting films chiefly Bonnie and Clyde.  He never had the big commercial success after that film but his resume has some very quirky stuff on it. This film is certainly one of them. 

 Alan Sharp wrote the screenplay and the film runs 99 minutes. 

1975 - THE HINDENBURG - on bluray format.

The director Robert Wise attempts to class up the 1970's disaster movie cycle with this meticulous film on the airship Hindenburg disaster.  If good direction, special effects and production design could make a good film this would have been a very fine film.  However the script leaves quite a lot to be desired and this ultimately lets the film down. 

As always with films like this where the primary characters are all supposed to be German the choice was made to let the American actors speak without accents.  This has always been an issue where a film is set in a foreign country and the cast is primarily made up of actors not native to that country. It frequently affects the film's verisimilitude.

The special effects are old school with model work and matte paintings extremely well done.  At times it seems like they actually built an airship and flew the damn thing to New York.  The photography and production design are well executed.  Robert Wise was always a director who put a lot of care into his films.

The film is somewhat of a disappointment but nowhere near the failure that the critics labeled it when it was released.

 The film runs 125 minutes, written by Nelson Gidding based on a story by Levinson and Link.

1975 - THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, on Blu Ray

John Huston was one of the few old style Hollywood directors who produced interesting and at times very good films late in his career.  The Man Who Would Be King was one of John Huston's dream projects.  The film reminded many critics of his 40's film The Treasure of Sierra Madre with it's story of greed and adventure.  It also has many similarities to Huston's famous Hepburn/Bogart film The African Queen.

 To play a couple of former soldiers who are essentially crooks.  Huston cast Sean Connery and Michael Caine a couple of larger than life screen personalities.  Christopher Plummer was hired to play the actual author of the original story Rudyard Kipling.  

This story has a very old fashioned feel to it.  It could have easily been made in the late 40's or early 50's.  There is a larger than life quality to the film which benefits a pretty tall tale even for Kipling who was also the author of The Jungle Book and Gunga Din.  Huston's story telling skill kept this film moving along.

John Huston certainly had his bad or indifferent films such as Annie but The Man Who Would Be King is certainly mainstream Hollywood film making at its best although it would probably be considered a slow moving film for today's audience.

123 minutes, written by John Huston and Gladys Hill.

1975 - BRANNIGAN, John Wayne cop movie set in London.

John Wayne sleepwalks through this cop film set in England and lets face it this isn't one of his best films but compared to some of the junk out there this is entertaining and has a fun supporting cast of British actors.

Brannigan is one of those "I know where the plot is going" films.  Duke is in London to bring back bad guy John Vernon to Chicago.  He clashes with Scotland Yard superintendent Richard Attenborough and has former late 60's British babe Judy Geeson who still looks pretty good, as his side kick.  By the time Wayne hit his mid 40's he was no longer comfortable playing love scenes especially with younger actresses.  In Brannigan there is a very mild and chaste flirtation that suits the actor who was in his late 60's when this was filmed.

The film was directed by Douglas Hickox who apparently got along very well with Wayne who had a tendency to direct himself as he got older.  Hickox keeps the action moving along with scenes like a car chase that ends up at the Tower Bridge and a completely anachronistic bar fight at an English Pub.

Brannigan runs longer than it probably should but is an entertaining if minor film in John Wayne's career.

111 minutes.

1975 - THE DEADLY TOWER, a TV movie based on the Charles Whitman shooting spree

This is one of those TV movies that were popular during the 1970's.  These movies would take real life events and dramatize or fictionalize them for the viewing public.  Some of them were OK occasionally they were actually good most of them were terrible.  The Deadly Tower is probably one of the better ones.  This is a dramatization of the Charles Whitman shooting from the Austin University tower in 1966 given the usual fact mixed with fiction treatment as if the actual events weren't dramatic enough.

Kurt Russell who at the time was transitioning from Disney kid actor into more "adult" roles played Whitman.  Back in the good old days of Hollywood, if you wanted to show you weren't typecast as a Disney actor you had to make a 180 degree turn and play either a crazed killer or a sexed up bimbo.  Obviously Russell decided on the killer route.  For a 1970's movie the 2nd lead is a Hispanic actor named Richard Yniguez who was one of the the cops that climbed up into the tower and finally stopped Whitman.  The rest of the cast is a couple of TV perennials, John Forsythe, & Pernell Roberts.  New York actor Clifton James again plays a redneck law enforcement officer and this appears to be an early role for Ned Beatty.

Just the actual situation itself is dramatic enough and this is probably the best part of the film.  Where things run a little off course is in the hokey dramatic events that the story veers down.  The Hispanic cop is passed over for promotion at the police department.  His wife wants him to quit his job and take something less dangerous etc.  This was the kind of stuff they would cram into these films.

This is probably one of the few films to take an anti-gun position.  At one point Forsythe yells at the gun store owner who sold all the guns and ammo to Russell without questioning what he was going to do with it.  Try getting that in a film today.  If there is one thing I am sure of, everyone in Texas probably owns a gun. 

100 minutes

1975 - ADVENTURES OF THE WILDERNESS FAMILY, of historical interest.

The Adventures of the Wilderness, is a family entertainment.  The film is wholesome almost to a fault.  This bunch has to be some of the whitest white people on the planet.  Yet the message of the film somewhat muddles up all of this wholesomeness.  The family has left Denver because of the smog and industrialization that has made the daughter sick.  Apparently moving out of Denver to the suburbs wasn't an option.  This family has chosen to move way the hell out to the middle of nowhere.  This "granola live off the land" existence is somewhat at odds with the message of the film which appears to be the American way of life sucks so lets go into the woods and grow stuff like a bunch of hippies.

What plot there is pretty much involves building a log cabin for everyone to live in, talk about togetherness.  The log cabin building is frequently interrupted by someone, usually one of the kids being chased by a wild animal with Dad coming to the rescue.  And that's it.  There's no soul searching about the children being isolated from human contact, no introspection about what it means to co exist with nature,  just a lot of scenes of kids getting chased by bears, or wolves or cougars.

The director is Stewart Raffill who made a lot of these kinds of films.  Besides The Wilderness Family, his film making cannon includes Across The Great Divide, The Sea Gypsies and that E.T. rip off Mac and Me. 

These films were usually advertised on television with the ads running so often that it basically hynotized the viewer into dragging himself or herself and family to see these films.  Considering the relatively low budget these films were made on (there's lots of shots of the boom mike dropping into view), these film made some decent money.

100 minutes.

1975 - OVERLORD, D-Day from the infantry soldier's point of view.

The director Stuart Cooper decided to tell a story about a World War II recruit training for the Normandy invasion.  He ended up mixing actual war footage and carefully filmed black and white recreations.  It's an impressive accomplishment I just wish I would have liked the film a little better.

Cooper should get a lot of credit for sorting through a bunch of World War II footage and picking out film clips that weren't beat up and scratched to hell.  The cinematographer John Alcott used old cameras and camera lens to match the lighting of the actual war footage and except for a couple of scenes it all looks very seamless.

The problem I have with this film is the central story that revolves around the young recruit and his premonition of death that he has throughout the film.  The actor playing the recruit drains all the emotion out of the character which makes it extremely difficult to work up any sympathy for him.  I can appreciate that Cooper didn't want to load the film up with a lot of overblown drama but I don't think it would have hurt to have a little emotion in the film especially from the central character.

Overlord is an impressive technical achievement but it doesn't have much heart to it.

85 minutes.

1975 - JAWS on the big screen

Two thumbs up, four stars, ten stars you name it Jaws really holds up for a 30 plus year old film.

Saw this film at a midnight showing in a neighborhood revival house it was in a very good digital copy that hadn't sucked all the grain out of the film.   Jaws looked a lot like I remembered it and I saw it a few times when it came out that summer.

Spielberg was a young guy when he filmed Jaws, he clearly worked his ass off.  Everyone knows that the mechanical shark gave him nothing but trouble and most of the film was shot on the ocean which escalated the cost and pushed the film from a five week shoot to a five month ordeal.   Spielberg was lucky that he had a couple of producers who had faith in the film and stuck by him getting him the best Hollywood talent available.  A lot of the production people on the film deserve credit for the success of Jaws.

Peter Benchley's book had the gem of a good idea which was basically a giant shark that seemed to be almost supernatural eating its way through a bunch of vacationers.  However as a work of literature the book was actually kind of crummy.  Benchley wrote the first draft of the screenplay but Carl Gottlieb, Spielberg the actors and lots of uncredited writers apparently added the humor and fleshed out the characters.  This is the prototypical summer entertainment that focused on characterization along with the exciting action scenes. 

124 minutes.

1975 - HUSTLE, sleeze from Robert Aldich

Another old school Hollywood director struggles for relevance in 1970's Hollywood.  Robert Aldrich coming off his success of The Longest Yard with Burt Reynolds teamed up with Reynolds again for this "sleazy slice" of Los Angeles life.

Aldrich was always a director with a blunt hit you over the head technique but this story set a new low for him.  Cynical cop Burt Reynolds is shacked up with high class hooker Catherine Denevue.  Reynolds investigates the drowning of a girl who was involved in the sex trade business in L.A.  Meanwhile the dead girl's father wants revenge as the cliches pile up higher and higher.  Hustle is either a criticism of the lack or morality in a corrupt American culture or a big time Aldrich wallow in slime.

Aldrich cast some of his old actor buddies like Ernest Borgnine and Eddie Albert and he had his usual cinematographer Joseph Biroc with him but it's not much help.   Borgnine and Albert seem like they should be in another film preferably something set in the 1950's and for a film showing the grimy aspects of Los Angles, Biroc made the whole thing way too pretty.

The crappy screenplay was by a hack writer with pretensions named Steven Shagan who let everyone down for this film.  

120 minutes.

1975 - WHITE LINE FEVER, truck driver trash classic

Jan Michael Vincent is Carrol Jo Hummer a Vietnam vet trying to make it as an independent trucker in southern Arizona.  He runs afoul of some crooked freight handlers and decides to take matters into his own hands.

White Line Fever is B movie stuff expertly directed by Jonathan Kaplan who also co-wrote the screenplay.  The film has a real feel for this trailer park white trash without being condescending towards them. 

Besides Jan Michael in his signature role driving his truck the "Blue Mule." 1974 Ford WT9000 cabover rig with a Cummins turbo diesel engine.   The film has an outstanding cast of character actors.  Slim Pickens as Duane Haller, L.Q Jones as the villainous Buck, Sam Laws as Pops and Don Porter as Cutler, head of the Glass House the evil transportation company trying to muscle out the independent truckers.

Half the fun of watching this film are the great stunts and fights that run throughout the film.  Kaplan even works in a John Ford shot with a sequence of the Blue Mule driving through Monument Valley.

90 minutes

1975 - THE MAGIC FLUTE, Ingmar Bergman's flm of Mozart's opera.

Ingmar Bergman films The Magic Flute on a sound stage in a TV studio.

Expecting the worst, an opera filmed in a claustrophobic studio emphasizing the theatricality of the production and translated into Swedish from the original German.  Ingmar Bergman, the master of existential despair should have had a major musical disaster on his hands.

However, Bergman was also a very smart director who took this property and with a high level of skill filmed a very lively version of Mozart's opera.  There are so many clever and witty touches through out the film that one tends to forget that Bergman was also a director of very sophisticated comedies during his career.  He was also a noted director of actors and in this version of The Magic Flute, he gets very naturalistic performances out of larger than life opera performers.

In the end the real auteur of The Magic Flute is W.A Mozart. Even if this film had been an absolute disaster, it would have been impossible to screw up the wonderful music in this opera.

This is one of Bergman's finest films.

135 minutes.

1975 - NASHVILLE, not to use the term lightly, a masterpiece.

I saw Robert Altman's Nashville when it first came out in 1975 and at the time I felt it was not a middle America I even recognized, I did not care for the film.  Watching this film again over 30 years later, I now realize that Altman has captured a portrait of middle America that is spot on.

From the campaign of "The Replacement Party" candidate for president Hall Phillip Walker spouting inflammatory political rhetoric to it's portrait of clueless empty headed fame seeking individuals crooning their mediocre country songs, Nashville presents a portrait of middle class white people that is uncomfortable to watch.

Altman managed a cast of 24 actors and there isn't a misstep in characterization or performance from any of them.  They are perfectly integrated into the story.  My only complaint is that perhaps there are maybe a couple of extra performances of country songs than are really necessary to the story.
This is probably the best of Altman's ensemble pieces and it seems more than just a satire of the United States, but an actual documentary record of it.  A film classic.

160 minutes, written by Joan Tewkesbury although clearly a lot of it was improvised.

1975 - THE KILLER ELITE, semi incoherent spy thriller from Sam Peckinpah

Spy vs spy double cross junk with James Caan and Robert Duvall as secret agent buddies who are now on opposite sides in the world of cut throat espionage. 

The Killer Elite was directed by Sam Peckinpah who doesn't appear to have had much interest in telling a coherent story.  The performances are very lazy, in fact the whole film seems pretty lazy.  By this time in the 1970's this "dirty side of the spy business" had run it's course as a plot line, the lack of originally about The Killer Elite is it's most notable feature.

The film has some of  Sam Peckinpah's flourish with an action scene and as usual nobody has ever really figured out how to film and edit fight scenes in slow motion the way he can.  In The Killer Elite, Peckinpah adapts his action technique to the martial arts genre, the results are interesting but not as outstanding as they are in some of his other films.

The Killer Elite is probably more notable for the beginning of Peckinpah's decline as a film maker which ended with his final film The Osterman Weekend.

122 minutes, written by Stirling Silliphant.

1975 - RACE WITH THE DEVIL, entertaining B movie with Satanists and Warren Oates

Finally the truth that good liberals have known all along, southwest Texas is crawling with devil worshiping satanists who aren't above sacrificing a virgin now and then.

Into this mix comes two couples on their vacation in their very cool  new Winnebago which has all the modern conveniences among them a color TV and a microwave.  The film also has a couple of seriously iconic actors, Peter Fonda and Warren Oates.

The director is B movie pro Jack Starrett who makes sure there is lots of action and that at some point in the film, the female leads will show up in tiny swimsuits.

This film is essentially a car chase movie with the red neck devil worshippers in pursuit of the Winnebago after Oates and Fonda accidentally witness one of their satanical rituals.  The stunt work with the cars and Winnebago is very impressive and this is a car chase using a Winnebago of all things.

But really this film is about watching a couple of cool guy actors like Oates and Fonda deliver the goods in an entertaining B movie.

88 minutes