1978 - THE WIZ, the legendary bad musical

Writing about this film is like swatting a fly with a jackhammer.  Whatever is said about it today was covered in negative reviews of the film when it was released and they were very negative reviews.  A lot of the criticism of the film was focused on Diana Ross who was able to use her status as a superstar performer to get the role of Dorothy Gail the protagonist of The Wizard of Oz. In the original story Dorothy was a 6 year old girl. The role was rewritten for Ross to play a young insecure woman in her 20's.  Diana Ross hadn't seen 6 years old in a while much less 26 years old.  She was 33 when she played this role and she looked it.  However in spite of the disastrous participation of Diana Ross there was plenty of blame to go around.

For a film that wanted to channel the Black American experience there sure were an awful lot of white people behind the scenes calling the shots.  The director was Sidney Lumet who was known for filming tough dramas about New York City in particular.  Lumet's last film had been Network and there wasn't a dance sequence in that one.  Lumet had never directed a musical before and it showed.  Almost every number is shot in boring wide angle shots apparently more to show off the sets than the performers.

More white people behind the scenes.  Joel Schumacher another white guy wrote the screenplay.  Schumacher's claim to fame was as the director who took over for Tim Burton in the Batman series and ran that into the ground.  The cinematographer Oswald Morris was British.  The editor Dede Allen had cut Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, again not a lot of singing in those films.   The costume designer Tony Walton was another Brit.  Quincy Jones was the music supervisor on the film and he apparently was not very impressed with the songs which probably didn't help matters.

 

The Wiz was a film with an all black cast and it's failure commercially and critically gave Hollywood executives an excuse not to finance any films which featured black performers and stories a fairly lame excuse considering all the under performing films featuring casts of white people that really suck. 

The film's running time is an unending 133 minutes.       

1978 - BEAUTY AND THE BEAST aka THE VIRGIN AND THE MONSTER

There have been many versions of Beauty and the Beast with Jean Cocteau's film and the Disney animated feature probably the best known adaptations of this story.  From Czechoslovakia comes this fascinating version.

The emphasis is on horror and is it ever on horror with the love story almost relegated to a next to nothing subplot.  The story is still basically the same with the daughter of a merchant substituting for her father after he violates the home of a mysterious creature living in a creepy rundown castle.   If you are looking for a Beauty and the Beast film with singing dishware you better skip over this one.  An atmosphere of decay and ruin runs through the film.  In fact the Beast is haunted by voices in his head telling him to kill Beauty a nice creepy touch.

 

The film opens with the slaughter of the Merchant's wagon train by some bandits and the killing of a woman by the Beast.  The story then moves to a not very merry medieval village where we get to watch animals being slaughtered for a wedding in a town that is one big muddy disgusting mess.  The cinematography compliments the setting with lots of gloomy and foggy night photography.

 

This version of Beauty and the Beast was directed by Juraj Herz who was associated with the "Czech New Wave." A horror film version of this old narrative war horse was an interesting approach to a frequently adapted story and definitely worth a look.

The film was written by Pavla Marková, the running time is a spooky 91 minutes.  

1978 - GATES OF HEAVEN, a documentary about the pet cemetery business

This documentary about the pet cemetery business was what really put Errol Morris on the map as an interesting filmmaker to watch.  Morris's documentaries usually focus on the oddball or eccentric or just plain weird in people.   

Gates of Heaven started as a documentary after Morris read a news story about a pet cemetery that was being relocated.  Sensing there was a film in this story he raised the money and then got interviews with the people involved.  Morris spoke with the owner of the failed pet cemetery and the owners of the pet cemetery that the deceased pets had been moved to.   The result were filmed interviews that for the most part just focused on the interviewee with the camera locked down.  It certainly gave the film an unusual look and pace. 

I had seen this film several years ago and watching these people being interviewed at the time I found it very easy to sneer and develop a real patronizing attitude about their lives.  Now watching it again I find that I am a lot more sympathetic. The love and grief that they feel for their deceased pets is actually very genuine and touching. After all who loves you more unconditionally than your pet. 

 

 Don't get me wrong there's still plenty of quirk and weirdness going on throughout the film.  In the end it's just people being people.  Gates of Heaven is a very entertaining documentary.

The film runs 83 minutes. 

1978 - FINGERS, well it's certainly unusual

For a while in the 70's and 80's,  James Toback was a hot screenwriter.  Toback wrote The Gambler which got a lot of favorable reviews from the critics. As is usually the case, Toback moved into direction with as they like to say "mixed results."  Fingers certainly fits that description.

The film is about a concert pianist hopeful who is getting ready for an audition at Carnegie Hall.   The pianist is played by Harvey Keitel in a very intense performance.  It's safe to say he out acts Robert DeNiro's Taxi Driver weirdo character Travis Bikel .  Anyway as a favor to his father who is some kind of gangster the Keitel character is also a debt collector when his father's customers don't pay their loans back and he's a very violent debt collector at that.

 

 

In addition to all of that stuff,  Keitel is pretty good at getting sex out of women.  He screws a very young Tanya Roberts in the women's restroom in a kind of repellent scene.  However his chief obsession is with an artist played by the actor Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia).  The Farrow character is also involved with a character played by Jim Brown named Dreems.   In this film women in general appear to be attracted to Jim Brown's character and Brown pays them back by bashing their heads together in a brutal scene.  Toback must have been channeling  Brown's real life issues with women,  Brown at the time had a very extensive history of domestic violence.  

It's hard to know what to make of this film.  Frankly there are so many strange and pointless story lines The whole thing just comes off as a confusing mess, or make that a violent and confusing mess.  Keitel really doesn't seem like the concert pianist type although there is no denying he really gives it his all portraying this very strange protagonist. 

 

I'm impressed James Toback was able to raise the money for this film because as a main stream film it certainly wasn't going to appeal to the public.  Toback himself is what people call an "interesting character."  He is a Harvard graduate, summa cum laude (highest honors) and as of December of 2022 he was charged with the sexual abuse of 38 women.

Fingers runs 89 minutes and as they say no one probably wished it a minute longer.

1978 - INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, Tarantino's World War II film

Well either you like Tarantino or you don't like Tarantino because it's all here in his World War II fantasy. The violence, lots of talk and a really crazy story.

Tarantino, one of the few directors who can actually channel cinema history into something original was clearly influenced by Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen, Italian director Enzo G. Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards and The White Hell of Pitz Palu by German directors Arnold Fanck and G.W. Pabst.  I'm sure I missed a bunch of film references, but Tarantino knows his movies.

 

Tarantino's casting is equally entertaining. Brad Pitt as Lt Aldo Raine sporting a southern accent, horror director Eli Roth, Mike Meyers as an allied general and coming out of retirement actor Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill.  Other equally important performances are Christoph Waltz as a very smart Nazi officer, Mélanie Laurent as a Jewish woman out for revenge, Michael Fassbender as a film critic turned British commando and Diane Kruger playing an actress turned double agent.  

 

The plot has Pitt and his commando unit creating havoc behind enemy lines which somehow dovetails into an encounter with Adolph Hitler and his high command.  With Tarantino the fun isn't the climax but how you get to the climax.

One of Tarantino's most entertaining films. the running time is 153 minutes and as usual Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay.

1978 - NEWSFRONT - Australian film about a newsreel company

 Newsfront is a tribute to the Australian newsreel organizations that provided news and human interest stories to movie goers before the main feature film began.  The film covers the period of 1948 - 1956 when television became more prevalent and basically put the newsreel cameramen out of business.  Newsfront touches on major events in Australian history, a flood, a rabbit plague, a long distance road race and a vote to ban the Communist Party in Australia.  While these moments were important in Australia hisory these events probably won't mean much to any viewer outside of Australia.

The film uses a lot of actual newsreel footage and it also employs that old Wizard of Oz trick of switching from black and white to color at times. The cast is obviously all local actors who for the most part I had never heard of with the exception of Bryan Brown, Bruce Spence and Wendy Hughes.  I recall Wendy Hughes from some American TV shows that she guest starred in.  Star Trek:  The Next Generation sticks out in particular, I believe she was Picard's love interest.

 

Newsfront was based on a short film from director Phillip Noyce.  Noyce eventually moved to Hollywood in the 1990's and made some undistinguished film thrillers such as Patriot Games, Silver and A Clear and Present Danger to name a few.  

 

The big problem with this film are the choices that Noyce made as a storyteller.  He appears to have decided to play down all of the drama of the various historical events and this has even extended to the cast who so underplay their parts that the viewer has no chance to get involved with their lives.   The characters are cyphers at the beginning of the film and they remain cyphers at the end of the film. It’s just poor drama. While Newsfront has interesting moments overall the film lacks any reason for  viewers to get involved in this story.

Written by Phillip Noyce and Bob Ellis, the running time is 110 minutes.

1978 - GOIN' COCONUTS, finally complete and uncut thanks to Youtube

 In a (2010 blog post) I lamented that the Donny and Marie film Goin' Coconuts only existed in an 80 minute version on YouTube.  However I recently discovered a complete copy on YouTube so I can finally finish viewing this musical comedy epic.  This film doesn't compare to the searching that has gone on for the uncut versions of Greed and The Magnificent Ambersons but in many ways it's an important cinematic find.  

The viewer should prepare themselves for comedy, action, music, romance and perhaps at times a tear or two, as we watch the adventures of very clean cut brother and sister entertainers Donnie and Marie Osmond in their exciting adventure in Hawaii.  Donny was a breakout performer from The Osmond Brothers act who teamed with his sister Marie for The Donny and Marie Show a very wholesome, healthy and lets face it insipid variety series that incredibly ran for three years on Friday nights. This was before the days of cable television when frankly there wasn't a whole lot to watch.

Goin' Coconuts was a critical and box office failure unsurprisingly.  The film is an excellent example of how not to make a film.  The camera angles, editing and staging of the various scenes show an amazing ineptness.  The director was Howard Morris a comedian and crony of Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks.  Morris had directed a lot of TV shows but for some reason he seemed to forget everything he learned when he came to make this movie.  Morris appears at the end in a small cameo.

 

Goin' Coconuts was produced by the Osmond family and had songs written by The Osmond Brothers, a real "auteur" family affair. Incredibly these two singing sensations passed on the opportunity to appear in Grease in order to make this film.   Marie Osmond might have had a very different career had she taken on the role of Sandy which Olivia Newton John appeared in.  Who can say, and who wants to say.

 

The cast of comedians that Morris put together shamelessly mugged throughout the film probably trying to make something funny out of a very unfunny script.  A further review of the cast turns up the actor Crystin Sinclaire in the role of Donny's potential love interest, Sinclaire had appeared in Caged Heat, Portrait of a Stripper, Eaten Alive and Hustler Squad.  A very strange casting choice to play with the very clean cut and very Caucasian Donny Osmond.  I wonder what happened to her?

 The film was written by William Mark Daniels and Raymond Harvey, the running time is 96 minutes.

1978 - STUNT ROCK, a tribute to a stuntman

Stunt Rock is for the most part barely a film.  It seems to have been made has a tribute to one of Australia's best and probably craziest stuntman, Grant Page.  What plot there is in this film has Page traveling to America to do stunts for some lame action TV series.  At the same time Page visits his cousin who is part of a heavy metal rock band called Sorcery. Sorcery's shows are full of elaborate magic stunts in some kind of good vs evil thing musical act.

Page hooks up with two women, one a reporter played by Margaret Trenchard-Smith, the director's wife and actor Monique van de Ven playing herself.  Monique van de Ven was associated with over the top Dutch director Paul Verhoeven in several films.  I frankly have no idea what these two women are doing in this film.

 

Stunt Rock is basically film clips of Grant Page performing stunts in various Australian films.  Page seems to have a thing about being set on fire as a number of stunts are of him running around while burning up.  This stuff is inter cut with musical numbers from Sorcery for no apparent reason.  Most of the stunts are shown in split screen.  The director Brian Trenchard-Smith has admitted that the stunts were filmed in 16 mm and would have looked very grainy blown up in to 35 mm.  For this film the decision was made to go with split screen.

Stunt Rock apparently has sort of a cult following but it seems more like someone's home movies edited together in an effort to pass it off as a feature film.

The film was written by Brian Trenchard-Smith and Paul-Michel Mielche Jr., although saying this film is "written" is really stretching it.  The running time is 86 minutes.

1978 - SHE FELL AMONG THIEVES, entertaining old school thriller

This entertaining throwback to a 1930's type of British thriller, i.e. the stuff Hitchcock and Carol Reed did, has a good cast to recommend it.  Malcolm McDowell is the intrepid hero Richard Chantos.  While vacationing in France the French Pyrenees he stumbles onto a plot to rob a heiress out of her considerable fortune.  With the help of the British foreign office he springs into action.

 

The heiress is played by one time Disney star Karen Dotrice who today is chiefly remembered as Jane Banks from Mary Poppins.  Dotrice is in full damsel in distress mode in this film.  The rest of the cast is made up of the usual British supporting players.  However the standout performance in this film is from Eileen Atkins one of those distinguished grand dame British performers who show up in films to class the show up.  Atkins plays a character called "Vanity Fair." She's a villainous schemer in the grand tradition of over the top evil doers. 

 

The film consists of  Richard Chantos matching wits with Vanity Fair in a series of amusing encounters.  In this type of story tone is everything, the actors play the whole thing fairly straight and the film clips along at a decent pace.  If you like your mystery/adventure stories with a heavy dash of British stiff upper lip stuff you should enjoy this film.

 

The film was written by  Tom Sharpe, the running time is 79 minutes.

1978 - WARRIORS 2, Sammo Hung's slam bang action/comedy film

Another mix of that odd humor and martial arts action that came out of Asia for a while.  The actor/director and writer Sammo Hung has made a deceptively simple action film.

Warriors 2 starts out with a lot of goofy Sammo humor.  Sammo is attempting to sell pork balls or something.  After a lot of lame comedy the film settles down into a sort of revenge flick with Sammo and his friend Cashier Hua attempting to bring to justice a corrupt mayor who has killed Hua's mother. The film contains a long and interesting training sequence where Kung Fu master Mr. Tsan an expert on  the Wing Chun art of fighting, trains Cashier Hua for the big fight climax that the film has been building to.

 

But the reality is nobody watching this film is tuning in for the plot.  Bring on the fighting.  The last 30 to 40 minutes of Warriors 2 is a lengthy fight scene which is quite exciting to watch and extremely impressive as a piece of action cinema.

 

Running time on this film is 90 skull pounding minutes.

1978 - THE GREEN ROOM, a Truffaut misfire.

 I'm not sure what went wrong with this Truffaut film. Francois Truffaut was usually a reliable director/writer but his instincts really deserted him on this film.  The Green Room, is about a man's obsession with death.  He constantly dwells on death and finally creates a memorial to people he knows who have passed on.  This is not exactly going to be a fun film like Day For Night.

In  fairness, this was clearly a very personal film for Truffaut.  He plays the lead and unfortunately he does not do a very good job as an actor.  I can't help thinking a better actor would have helped this film's theme about the effect the dead have on the living.  Playing opposite Truffaut is the actor Natalie Baye who is sort of his partner who has an equal obsession with the deceased.

Frankly the whole film just didn't work for me.  Truffaut always seemed to have a light touch when it came to making films.  But that certainly abandoned or he chose to abandon it in this film.

The running time is 94 minutes and probably nobody would want it to run a minute longer.  Truffaut wrote the screenplay.

1978 - THE DRIVER, excellent car chase film

Crapped on by about every major critic at the time of release and ignored by the audience.  This is one of writer/director Walter Hill's best films.

 

The action scenes are excellent, the car chases are real.  None of the characters have names.  Ryan O'Neal (who's pretty damn good) is "The Driver."  Bruce Dern is "The Detective."  Isabelle Adjani is "The Player."

 

The film is styled in it's presentation to put it mildly. Clearly a big influence on Nicholas Winding Refin's The Drive and Edgar Wright's Baby Driver.

 

The film runs a fast paced 91 minutes.

1978 - THE BETSY, is high class trash

The Betsy is trash but it's Harold Robbins trash.  The film has a very classy look to it.  John Barry did the music, Dorthy Jenkins was a noted costume designer.   It was filmed in Newport, Rhode Island.  The director Daniel Petrie had been involved with fairly high class projects in television and the film world.

But probably the most eye rolling thing about this film is the cast.  And what a cast.  Laurence Oliver, Robert Duvall, Joseph Wiseman, Tommy Lee Jones, Edward Herrmann, Jane Alexander, Katherine Ross among others.  Exactly how they were attracted to this project will forever remain a mystery.

The film's got it all, illicit love, incest, homosexuality, corporate intrigue and I've probably left a lot of stuff left out.  The cast is easy on the eyes and plays all this junk fairly straight.  But for the life of me I can't figure out what Laurence Oliver is doing in this thing having sex with Katherine Ross playing his step-daughter married to his homosexual son.  Well you get the idea about what kind of film this is.  The producers apparently worked very hard to get an "R" rated film.

William Bast and Walter Bernstein wrote the screenplay, the film runs a never dull 125 minutes.

1978 - HALLOWEEN, finally got around to watching this one

Another good looking Blu Ray.  I've put off watching this horror film for years since I am not really a horror film kind of guy.  Have to admit John Carpenter did a very good job with this film considering what he had to work with.

Carpenter essentially had to tease the audience for over an hour before he started in with the killings.  Much to my surprise there are only three dead teenagers in the original Halloween.  The acting of the cast is hit or miss.  I never thought I would watch a film where Donald Pleasence was the headliner. 
Jamie Lee Curtis is a pretty tough little cookie with a brain in her head.  The rest of the cast seems to have a rather limited range of emotions and as is expected in this genre the women are the ones who have to show some skin.

There is an unintentionally hilarious moment where Curtis discovers the bodies of her dead friends but overall the film is pretty good with the suspense and terror stuff.

91 minutes, written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill.

1978 - THE LAST WALTZ, the last time I watch this.

The third time on this film for me and it will be the last.  The Band, in their supposedly last appearance on stage performed  a concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco.  Robbie Robertson a guitarist with the band got Martin Scorsese involved in filming  this bash.  Scorsese brought along a team of professional cinematographers and filmed in 35 mm instead of the usual grainy 16mm these kind of shows were shot in.  The result was a film with some pretty sharp images that looked unlike anything that had been seen in a concert film before.

Half the fun this time was reading up on the behind the scenes shenanigans that went on during the concert.  Levon Helm apparently was extremely pissed at Robertson and felt the film was mostly a Robbie Robertson ego trip.  Helm felt that Scorsese was entirely focused on Robertson and one thing for sure is that Scorsese seems to have a major man crush on Robertson with all of the closeups of him inserted throughout the film. 

Well how's the film?  I have the same issues that I had with it the first time I saw it.  The Last Waltz is too damn long.  It's fun to see a lot of the guest stars such as Dr. John, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.  But really, Neil Diamond come on.  Also Scorsese's interviews with The Band are kind of stupid and incoherent with their talk of the number of skirts they chased and just some general incoherence that pervades all of their supposedly deep thoughts about music.  Apparently the drugs flowed freely during the making of this film.  

Still, the film is kind of a must see concert film.  The Last Waltz is well made and the musical numbers filmed in a studio are extremely well done.

117 minutes.

1978 - DAYS OF HEAVEN, Terrence Malick's beautiful film and it's at a reasonable length

Malick's film about a love triangle in the early 1900's is one of the best looking films ever photographed.  The film runs about and hour and a half and believe me a short Terrence Malick film are is a lot easier to take than a long Terrence Malick film.

 

Slight criticism, for all the care brought to the look of the film the actors have very contemporary haircuts and looks.  Don't know if this was intentional or just sloppy.

Still the film looks stunning particularly the scenes of the mansion standing alone on the prairie.

It's probably best to watch this in the most optimal conditions possible, a good TV with a large screen and a high quality copy of the film since I doubt it will be seen on a large screen anytime soon.

94 minutes, written by Terrence Malick.

1978 - MESSAGE FROM SPACE, Japanese Star Wars ripoff

Released a year after the very first Star Wars film, Message From Space rehashes a lot of the same situations and characters as that film while throwing in a few silly ideas of it's own.  The film is clearly no Star Wars and can't even hit the lunatic heights of Latitude Zero. 

The planet Jillucia has been attacked by the Gavanas Empire.  The Gavanas warriors all look like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.  The Emerald Princess of the planet Jillucia sends eight Liabe Seeds into space to find eight warriors to save what's left of her people.  The Liabe Seeds look like walnuts and glow when they find the chosen warriors.  The seeds end up with a Space General played by Vic Morrow of all people and a couple of hot shot fighter pilots clearly standing in for Luke and Han.  The seeds also happen to find a guy to provide comedy relief and a feisty gal named Meia.  Sonny Chiba star of the Streetfighter series also shows up as a space guy with a sword.  This is essentially the plot of The Magnificent Seven (Seven Samurai).  If you've seen Star Wars you know where this is going and it doesn't disappoint.

The space ships literally look like ships and the special effects are miniatures hanging from wires while they are whisked across miniature landscapes.  The weapons used are ray guns and swords and the film is dubbed and daffy as they like to say.

Overall, Message From Space is probably a waste of time although I wasted my time watching it.  Kinji Fukasaku the director should have really known better.

105 minutes, written by Hiro Matusda.