Videoage International November 2017

6 Book Review W hen speaking about U.S. movie classics from the 1970s, no conversation would be complete without mentions of Prime Cut, Cisco Pike, Ulzana’s Raid, Two- Lane Blacktop and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, right? Wrong, of course. Few people have ever even heard of these B-movies, much less would call them classics. But in a series of essays in Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You (Bloomsbury, 2017, 197 pages, U.S. $27), author Charles Taylor treats these forgettable trifles — which often came and went from movie theaters in less than a week — as masterworks that need to be revered and studied in order to truly understand America in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam “Me Decade,” when people’s understanding of what it meant to be an American was undergoing a radical change. The title of the book, writes Taylor, a member of the National Society of Film Critics, who’s taught journalism and literature at NYU and the Columbia School of Journalism, “refers to the release pattern used for horror movies, biker pictures, nudie teasers, women’s prison pictures, moonshiner sagas, phony documentaries like In Search of Noah’s Ark , Eurosleaze exploitation pictures like Mark of the Devil (‘Rated V for Violence’ in the U.S. and included a vomit bag with every ticket sold). These pictures were preceded a week or two in advance by saturation advertising campaigns that seemed to appear out of nowhere, deluging newspaper, radio, and TV with ads that breathlessly announced the film would be ‘opening Wednesday at a theater or drive-in near you!’ “The aim, as with a traveling carnival and sideshow, was to get asses in the seats and then get the hell out of Dodge. Unlike the prestige studio movies, which were given platform releases, opening on a few select big-city screens and gradually making their way to more theaters and other cities — a release schedule that could keep a popular film in release for close to a year— many of themovies written about here began their commercial life in the second-run neighborhood houses and drive-ins — the very places where the big releases ended their theatrical lives,” he writes. In short, these are the movies people tended to see either because nothing else was playing at the time or they planned to pay more attention to their dates than to the screen in front of them. Few folks went to see them on purpose. Taylor fully understands that. But he also feels that these films should endure because we, as modern movie audiences, truly need them. “For me, the staying power of these movies has to do with the way they stand in opposition to the current juvenile state of American movies,” he writes. “The infantilization of American movies that began in 1977 with the unprecedented success of Star Wars has become total. Mainstream moviemaking now caters almost exclusively to the tastes of the adolescent male fan. “As they currently stand, mainstream Hollywood releases consist almost exclusively of superhero blockbusters, sequels, remakes, and comedies aimed at the frat-boy sensibility… Movies have devolved back to spectacle and gimmicks, not so much movies anymore as packages put together by studio marketing departments in the hopes of spawning or sustaining a franchise and maybe selling a line of merchandise along the way,” he writes. He believes the movies he chose to write about here offer “the connection to the world, and to real-life emotions — not to mention the craft — that today’s blockbusters and remakes and churned-out franchises work so hard to avoid.” He explains that there was a self-awareness and a lack of self-consciousness in these films (as well as some rather disturbing violence) that would never fly in today’s over-produced, overwrought Hollywood. Each of the essays have somemerit, but all were not created equal. Some, like the first chapter, a deep-dive into Prime Cut , a 1972 film from director Michael Ritchie starring Lee Marvin as a mob enforcer sent to collect a debt from meatpacking boss Gene Hackman, are a little much. This one delves too deeply into the slaughterhouse aspect of the movie, making me (and my rather sensitive stomach) want to skip on over to the next essay as quickly as possible. “ Prime Cut gives us an America rapacious for flesh,” writes Taylor. “Cow flesh, girl flesh, it’s all the same.” And chapters on Hickey & Boggs , a 1972 private eye film starring Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, and Vanishing Point, a 1971 road picture starring Barry Newman, are as unremarkable as the movies they’re about. I barely remember what the essays touched on, let alone the plots of those films. But there are also essays on movies like Eyes of Laura Mars , a 1978 thriller starring Faye Dunaway as a fashion photographer who starts seeing real-time visions of her friends being murdered through the eyes of their killer. “At the moment each murder is occurring,” writes Taylor, “Laura sees the crimes through the killer’s eyes. In effect, she becomes blind, her field of vision replaced by the killer’s. This psychic kinship makes her a helpless witness to the grisly killings of her friends and associates. And since the audience can no more control the images that appear before us than Laura can, we’re on her side. It’s a great device, this psychic blindness always seeming to hit Laura at her most vulnerable moments, as she crosses a busy city street or when she’s behind the wheel of a car… This reaches a virtuosic climax when, at the end of the movie, the killer comes after Laura, and as she tries to get away, she can see only her own terrified retreating self.” This is the plot of a classic — or at least a cult classic. While I never heard of this movie before, I plan to seek it out now. Taylor goes on to explain that “the movie is saying that danger is an essential part of glamour and art… that art and sex and urban life should get our blood racing. For the rest, there’s [women’s clothing store] Talbots and the 5:50 [train] to New Canaan.” While Eyes really opened mine, the real pièce de résistance of Opening Wednesday is chapter “A Queen Without a Throne,” an in-depth look at blaxploitation flicks Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974)—both starring the great Pam Grier, who, thankfully, became an icon later in life thanks to A-list director Quentin Tarantino, a longtime admirer. The essay explores the ways that institutional racism led to the almost criminal neglect of talented black actresses like Grier. “By the time Pam Grier was making movies,” he writes, “something like this was already playing out with Cicely Tyson, who, after the one-two punch of Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman —performances that would have made a white actress immediately sought after — had only drab, mediocre film roles come her way. It would continue after Grier with the misuse—or nonuse — of actresses like Lonette McKee, Angela Bassett, Regina King. And it continues today with actresses as talented as Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, and Octavia Spencer turning to television because there are no leading roles for them in the movies.” Opening Wednesday is probably one of the few times that many of the films written about here get the respect the filmmakers who toiled over them felt that they deserved when they first came out. And unfortunately, for many of them, it will also probably be the last time. Because while Taylor’s book might give them one final time to shine, they’ll probably be forgotten again as fast as the original theatrical runs of these movies. And they won’t be opening up again on Wednesday at a theater or drive-in near you. They won’t be opening again at all. LHR Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive- In Near You : Forgotten Films of the ‘70s November 2017