The Titans

Don't deny the truth.  This literally incredible motion picture will fry your brain, save your soul and very possibly get you pregnant.  Would you dare deprive yourself over such minor inconveniences like being extremely silly and cheap? 

Constructively, perhaps it could be said that sci-fi is simply out of John Boorman's wheelhouse, and it remains intriguing to consider how it would have been handled by a director such as a Jodorowsky or a Ken Russell.




Ken Russell, meanwhile, was busy with the middle entry in his "composer trilogy", between Tchaikovsky (The Music Lovers) and Liszt (Lisztomania), with Mahler.  Like the title, this film is more straight-forward, with only one or two truly bonkers sequences.  Unfortunately, Georgina Hale, playing Mahler's wife, passed away back in January without receiving much notice.




Since this was ostensibly an art film, I won't include it among some of the other exploitation films of the year.  However, these days, the film is only seriously remembered for being exploitative, with its scenes of Nazi sadomasochism and Charlotte Rampling's nude dance in a concentration camp.  In other words, director Liliana Cavini managed to make the most Ken Russell film of the year, and ashamed Ken Russell would have to double down on his Nazi dildos for Lisztomania.
 

If we were to take a public poll, I have little doubt that this other Mel Brooks classic of 1974 would top the clearly superior sublime and enlightened comic genius of Young Frankenstein.  The fever of the masses would overrun this thread like so-many savage shitkickers crashing our finely flailed debutante dance.  Well, let them come.  Let them show their asses.  Let them whip it all out.  I'll be sitting here.  Making espresso.

And to repeat one of my well-worn cliches, for those who complain about how no one can make a film like this anymore, the point is that it is no longer culturally necessary for this film to be made.  Sorry, folks.  That cherry has popped.




There's probably not a lot of curiosity for why Mel Brooks was too busy to bother with an adaptation of this famous surrealist play, reuniting the stars of Brooks' Producers, Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, but the utter failure of the film certainly begs the question.  Director Tom O'Horgan is a well-known Broadway guy, but that alone doesn't suffice to explain the film's complete lack of visual ingenuity.  For example, Bob Fosse, another Broadway guy who filmed the play that Tom O'Horgan had just staged (Lenny), was intuitively capable of understanding the distinct advantages of film, utilizing techniques which are completely foreign to the live stage such as verite, montage, appreciating the rhythms of editing.  O'Horgan, bluntly, does none of that.  The generic sets (both of them?) are drab and underlit, like a grainy TV production, and O'Horgan doesn't seem interested in how cinema could facilitate the surrealism of the text.  Even as minimalism, it's underdeveloped.




Much like the Mel Brooks controversies above, I know for a fact that there is, at this very moment, ensuing scratching and pulling of hair over whether or not this motion picture, or whether another of the "trash trilogy", is indeed the superior specimen.  I'm not naive enough to even want to wade into that muck.  Suffice it to say that I think they're all fabulous in the eyes of John Waters' bed-ridden mother.




I'm not sure why the reception of this late-era Billy Wilder comedy, reuniting Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, seems to be so mixed.  It's old-fashioned, to be sure, and stagey like a sitcom, but Matthau and Lemmon are simply so good together, and the writing (with Wilder's long-time collaborator I.A.L. Diamond) is so whip-sharp that it's just pretty breezy fun.  And a great cast - Charles Durning, Carol Burnett, Harold Gould, Vincent Gardinia, Susan Sarandon.




When I saw this as a child, I thought it was like a big cinematic barbiturate.  I was almost scared by how bored I was, like it seemed very real the prospect that it would never end and I would be forever stuck inside of it, listening to all of that stale mirthless music.  It was so awful, it kept me away from reading the novella until I was an adult.  I've seen pieces of the film in years since, but I was always triggered by that lulling terror into turning it off pretty quickly.  On a more positive note, in what I hope will be taken as a compliment, this film also happens to be a lot more gay than anything John Waters has ever put out.
 

Rock wrote:

All the dumbasses who say Scorsese can't do women characters clearly have never seen Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

Or Age of Innocence.

And even if we parse out the so-called weakness of the characters themselves - or rather fleawed women unable to deal with the weakness of men in their lives - how can one not at least partially attribute to Scorsese the consistent quality of the female performances, from Sandra Bernhard, Cathy Moriarty, Lorraine Bracco, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Jessica Lange, Sharon Stone, Cate Blanchett, Vera Farminga, Lily Gladstone or any of the half dozen in After Hours?

Rock wrote:

Young Frankenstein is probably the better directed movie, but I prefer the sheer anarchy and willingness to go for the dumbest possible joke in Blazing Saddles.

But with all due respect, Marty Feldman is the dumbest possible joke.

Commonly known as John Carpenter's debut film, originally a student film expanded for theatrical release, it can just as easily and equally importantly be considered as the debut film of Dan O'Bannon, the star and co-writer of the film, as well as its editor and visual effects creator.  O'Bannon would go on to provide visual effects for the failed Jodorowsky Dune project, contribute some FX for Star Wars, script and contribute visual design for Alien and continue to create, script or contribute to some of the 80s more notable films from horror (Dead & Buried, Return of the Living Dead) to sci-fi (Heavy Metal, Blue Thinder, Lifeforce, Total Recall).  Obviously, John Carpenter would have a pretty successful run through this time as well.  (Note, there are two different cuts of Dark Star available, the original theatrical cut including edits forced by the distributor, and a "director's cut" - actually supervised by O'Bannon - which is closer to the original that Carpenter/O'Bannon had shopped around.  The edition to get is the "Hyperdrive" DVD with both cuts, plus a doc and extras.)




Not to needle John Carpenter too much on the fine point that this film happens to include a number of the stylistic innovations later utilized so successfuly on his Halloween - specifically the use of stalking POV perspective - Bob Clark's Black Christmas ranks just behind Texas Chain Saw Massacre as the most accomplished horror film of 1974 and as an essential proto-slasher.  Bob Clark would unfortunately eschew horror films for mostly terrible 80s comedies, with the rather stark exception of one Christmas Story.




This unique sci-fi/horror mix is the only feature film from visual designer Saul Bass, most famously known for the entracing opening credit sequences for Hitchcock (Vertigo, Psycho among the best).  Here we have a scientific outpost in Arizona studying why large groups of ants have started building elaborate structures, but soon beginning to discover the emergence of an alien consciousness.  This film is a lot more psychological, nay, psychedelic than your typical mutant insect horror films from the '50s.  Another well-deserved cult classic.




Larry Cohen is another schlock-meister who transcends the exploitation genre in which he thrived, based on his sheer, mad ingenuity and almost shameless histrionics.  The plot is rather conservative, with the deformed monster killer infant being the result of side effects from contraceptives (at a time when a lot of women who had used birth control were beginning to choose to start families), but none of that really sways the potential of having a deformed monster killer infant on the loose.  Also, it helped tremendously that this film was released just weeks before my own birth and I, for one, especially appreciate the extra anxiety it provoked.



(approximate depiction)
 

That was before Black Christmas.  I don't think he ever did one afterwards.

And yeah, Black Christmas and Phase IV are great. The former I usually rewatch around Christmas. The latter I rewatched recently because it was on the Criterion Channel. Shame Saul Bass didn't direct more, I think his visual sense translates pretty seamlessly to cinema. He also worked on the racing sequences in Grand Prix, IIRC.

Terence Malick was staying busy, in the honeymoon of the success of Badlands and a year before serious work on Days of Heaven, Malick was seeing his years as a screenwriter and script doctor start to pay off.  This film, aka The Gravy Train, is a bit obscure, and I believe the obscurity has as much to do with its cult status, is a modest low-budget affair about brothers who decide to take the more lucrative life of crime.  Although not technically a Depression-era film, it might as well be, and follows a similar formula of those kinds of crime films.  I didn't find it particularly funny myself, but it can be amusing.  Stacy Keach is fine, but you're not going to get the depths of his Doc or Fat City here.




Kind of like a reverse To Sir With Love (which eliminates a lot of the social significance), here we have Jon Voight teaching poor black children in swampy South Carolina the values of hygene and education.  Heart-warming for the entirely wrong audience, this well-intentioned but preachy effort aged like milk.




Charles B. Pierce is a filmmaker who is mostly known for some low-budget and slight campy films like Legend of Boggy Creek and The Norseman, but who also made a series of interesting independent Southern/Western dramas.  This film is what I consider to be a superior take on the rural working class crime film, and it probably helped that Pierce is a bonafide Southerner who largely worked outside of the system.  He is here graced with cinematography from Tak Fujimoto, fresh off of Malick's Badlands.




Another budding light of New Hollywood, Philip Kaufman, had some minor success with the previous Great Northfield Minnisota Raid, here features an adventure-drama set in the Arctic and has been noted for its use of actual Inuit langage and authentic portrayal of their culture.  The cast, with Warren Oates and Lou Gossett Jr, adds to why this relatively unknown film should be sought out.  Kaufman would later co-write Outlaw Josey Wales and Raiders of the Lost Ark and direct Invasion of the Body Snatchers ('78), The Right Stuff and Unbearable Lightness of Being.




Monte Hellman is not a Southerner, but he has a knack for its cultural rhythms and has the good sense to make sure to keep Kentucky faces like Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton on screen to keep it real.  Here's a particularly un-PC look at the lives of down-and-out chickens on the cockfighting circuit.  It's a lot better than that sounds with the addition of the great Nestor Almendros on camera.




This is another, like Cockfighter, Roger Corman production where the worst thing we could say about it is that we should have known what we were getting into.  Angie Dickenson playing a sexy bad-ass bitch, with deep bench support from Willaim Shatner, Tom Skerritt, Sally Kirkland and faithful Dick Miller.  What more do you want (expect)?




Here's a hot take: This is a total piece of shit.
 

The only one of this new batch I was even aware of was Cockfighter. Which I haven't even seen.

crumbsroom wrote:

The only one of this new batch I was even aware of was Cockfighter. Which I haven't even seen.

Conrack is probaby the best known.  It even got some award buzz at the time (kind of like the era's Help or something).

I would have guessed that you might know Big Bad Mama, which has some reputation in the later Corman canon.  And, um, elsewhere for the Dickenson/Shatner sex scene.

Rock wrote:

White Dawn used to play a lot on TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies. I think at a certain point they ran out of money and only had the rights to a handful of movies left, so those played ad nauseam in the final year before the program got dropped. I definitely noticed the decline in the programming over its last few years, but was sad to see it go in any case.

I think White Dawn is a bit better than the connotation of "last videotape in failed Canadian syndicate closet" would suggest, but my condolences nonetheless.