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.

1972 - MOON OF THE WOLF, A werewolf is loose in Louisiana, David Janssen is on the case.

One of those "Tuesday Movie of the Week" B-movies that ABC used to grind out during the 1970's.  Moon of the Wolf is fairly cheesy but worth a couple of chuckles. 

The film has an outstanding cast of TV actors,  Barbara Rush, Royal Dano, John Beradino, Geoffrey Lewis, Bradford Dillman and David "the Man " Janssen.  Bradford Dillman was married to one of the top fashion models of the 1950's the gorgeous Suzy Parker.

What can be said about a TV legend like David Janssen, the man with the gravely voice.  A guy with enough screen presence to keep this junk extremely watchable.  The film is set in a Louisiana Bayou town and most of the cast actually attempts southern accents.  Not Janssen, he's supposed to be a southern sheriff who grew up in the Bayou, but he spits his lines out in his Midwestern accent with an "I don't give a damn about this stupid movie" manner.  Janssen is clearly in it for a quick paycheck.

Moon of the Wolf is a very dumb film.  Some old coot realizes that a werewolf is running around killing people, he keeps saying "Loup-Garou".  Nobody seems to know what that means, but anyone who has seen the classic Jonny Quest episode Werewolf of the Timberland, knows that this is a french word for werewolf.

 The film is short and knows what it is, just another B movie made for television.

75 minuteS, written by Les Whitten and Alvin Sapinsley.