Vintage Viewings

I've been trying to catch up on some recent films lately that I have missed so this Vintage Viewings post will be a bit short. I've also been watching a lot of TV surprisingly with reruns of Lou Grant on American Life, a new season of Mary McCormack in In Plain Sight and the very funny Parks and Recreation providing the biggest pleasures. I have had time for some older works though and here are some thoughts on the more recent that I've had in my player:

1. Born Innocent: Fascinating 1974-television film starring a tremendous Linda Blair. Surprisingly rough in spots, the film will be extremely interesting to fans of The Exorcist as this was the first picture Linda shot after it. Keep an eye out for Janit Baldwin, seen here the same year she shot Gator Bait with Claudia Jennings!

2. The Rocker: Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott: I’ve been listening to a lot of Thin Lizzy lately, and in no way is that a bad thing. This engrossing 60 minute documentary on their legendary founder is filled with killer clips of live Lizzy, vintage interviews as well as insightful commentary from the surviving band members, peers, family and friends.

3. Murder Obsession: The final film from important Italian director Riccardo Freda is a fairly flawed affair at best. Featuring lovely Laura Gemser as well as Anita Strindberg and John Richardson, Murder Obsession is a confused late period Giallo that never really comes together. It has its moments and includes an interesting score from Franco Mannino, but it is nowhere near Freda’s better works.

4. Return of the Ewok: An odd little documentary shot during the making of the thrilling Return of the Jedi featuring Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher (in her Jedi bikini gear), Mark Hammill as well as some other familiar faces from the original Star Wars saga. Nowhere near as embarrassing as the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, I found this short little film sort of sweet and it would make a nice bonus feature to a future Jedi DVD release.

5. Smile Jenny You’re Dead: The best thing about this boring 1974 TV film starring David Janssen is getting to see a young Jodie Foster together with Barbara Leigh in a couple of scenes. Otherwise this Harry-O mystery is pretty limp stuff although anything with both Zalman King and Victor Argo on hand isn’t all a bad thing.

6. Super Fly TNT: I’ve wanted to see this sequel to one of my favorite films from the seventies for years, but unfortunately it is about as bad as its reputation suggests. Despite being scripted by none other than Alex Hailey, Super Fly TNT is just bad throughout. Ron O’Neal was an incredibly talented actor but his direction here is flat at best. A solid cast is wasted and this film film deserves to be just a footnote to Gordon Park Jr’s landmark work.

7. The Buddy System: A fairly dreadful 1984 film starring Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon and Nancy Allen from director Glenn Jordan. I admittedly just watched it for Allen, who is wasted in a supporting role.

The Great Video Store in the Sky (Blow Out)

***I recently have gained access to some folders containing scans of thousands of different old import VHS covers, posters and lobby cards. I thought it might be cool to build some new series' here to show off some favorites. Enjoy...***

Images From My All Time Favorite Films: Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981)

Screenshot 101: Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill

Nancy Allen is followed in an empty subway in these shots

from one of my favorite scenes of all time.

Travolta In The Seventies: From Barbarino to Blow-Out

Next week will see the long awaited release of the first season of WELCOME BACK KOTTER, a series fondly remembered by many people my age and the series that made John Travolta one of the biggest stars of the seventies.
Travolta had been doing television work since the early seventies and had a small part in the intriguing Robert Fuest film THE DEVIL'S RAIN before his role as the lovably dumb Vinnie Barbarino would catapult him into a major television star. Barbarino is one of the great characters of seventies sitcoms and Travolta's strutting and stuttering performance as the punk everybody loves landed him a role in Brian De Palma's CARRIE as well as a record deal.

Travolta's record deal would produce two albums of typically harmless seventies pop. LET HER IN actually hit the top ten and Travolta did some tv appearances promoting the song but thankfully it was his film career that would take off instead of his music.
Travolta's role as Billy Nolan, who connives with Nancy Allen's Chris to ruin Carrie White's shining moment, was small but brought an undeniable force to CARRIE and he's impossible to take your eyes off of. Whatever that mysterious thing is that makes a star a star, Travolta has it multiplied by ten.
Also released, along with CARRIE, in 1976 is the much loved television movie THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE. For all of the tv-movie trappings it falls into, THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE actually contains one of Travolta's finest performances. Here, for the first time, we can see all of the vulnerability and little boy frustration that Travolta can project so well. THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE is a sweet and well made little film that is majorly important in the evolution of John Travolta as an actor.

WELCOME BACK KOTTER might have made John Travolta a star but nobody, least of all Travolta himself, could have been prepared for the worldwide fame his next role would bring. It is often forgotten just how serious and rough the film SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER is. The film, and its astonishing Bee-Gees soundtrack, has saturated so completely into popular culture that actually sitting down and watching the film can prove a jolting experience. The original hard R version of the film, before it was cut down to a PG version that many people grew up with, is an angry, profane and tough film featuring a lead character that at times is despicable in his actions.
Tony Manero in any one else's hands would have just come across as a racist and overwhelmingly sexist punk but with John Travolta playing him the audience not only comes to understand but finally love him. Travolta is incredible in the role, bringing levels of humanity and hurt to Tony that few actors would have even thought to attempt. The tragic loss of Travolta's real life girlfriend, Diana Hyland, to cancer during the films shooting probably led Travolta into much darker places than he would have otherwise travelled in the role.

Travolta would receive a well deserved Oscar nomination for his role as Tony and the character and film would go onto to influence an entire generation of actors and filmmakers. One of my favorite tributes is Paul Thomas Anderson's shot of Dirk Diggler's bedroom in BOOGIE NIGHTS, a direct reference to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and just how much impact the film had in the seventies.
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER should have launched John Travolta's career as a serious actor but the one thread that runs throughout his career to this day is one of not taking risks. Travolta has always played it too safe, it is his biggest downfall. It is no coincidence that his best roles, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, BLOW-OUT, PULP FICTION, are all risk taking roles. A perfect example of Travolta's mistake of not pushing himself into darker terrains is his quitting AMERICAN GIGOLO in 1979. The role, which made Richard Gere a major star, would have changed the tragic direction that Travolta's career went to in the eighties.

So instead of following SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER with another hard hitting role Travolta delivered GREASE and MOMENT BY MOMENT. GREASE remains an incredibly alive and fun film, and one of the best musicals of the seventies. Most of the films strength comes from the blazing hot chemistry between Travolta and his costar, the lovely and talented OLivia Newton-John. GREASE would make Travolta even a bigger star and was one of the biggest hits of 1978.
MOMENT BY MOMENT was Travolta's first real slip up and an omen for some of the terrible decisions he would make in the next decade. Jane Wagner's painfully sappy and cringe inducing film stars Travolta along with Lily Tomlin. Take all the chemistry that Travolta had with Newton-John and put a negative sign in front of it and you've got him and Tomlin. MOMENT BY MOMENT was a huge bomb and it hurt Travolta's career. He wouldn't make another film for two years.
Travolta returned to the screen with URBAN COWBOY in 1980. It is a fun little film made better than it is because of a smouldering young Debra Winger and an undeniably great soundtrack. Travolta is good in it but he seems to be holding back. The film would make a lot of money but it seemed a long way from Tony Manero.
I often forget that BLOW-OUT is a film from the eighties. It seems so steeped as one of the greatest paranoid thrillers of the seventies that I often think of it, even more than RAGING BULL, as the decade's last scream of greatness before the ugly Reagan dominated eighties kicked into full gear.
Travolta's performance as sound man Jack in De Palma's film is his greatest and most complex role. Travolta goes for broke here and it is a haunting and mesmerizing turn that still resonates. Again working with the great Nancy Allen, Travolta delivers a turn that should have re-established him as a one of America's great actors and yet for some reason in the summer of 1981 very few people liked or even saw BLOW-OUT.
As many times as Pauline Kael's reviews would irritate and anger me, sometimes she would knock one out of the park and her writing on BLOW-OUT is dead on. She seemed to be the one critic who understood this was a major film and a great American masterpiece. It is one of her finest reviews and is well worth searching out. BLOW-OUT remains one of the most undervalued films of the eighties and contains the best work that John Travolta ever did.
The failure of BLOW-OUT sent Travolta's career into a major downward spiral and it would take him almost 15 years to recover. Starting with the regrettably bad SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER follow up STAYING ALIVE in 1983 Travolta's career would become a sad cartoon of bad films and poor choices. The period of 1983 to 1993 is one of the worst runs for a major actor and star in Hollywood history.
Quentin Tarantino was 18 when BLOW-OUT came out and I have always pictured him alone in a theater watching it and thinking, "that's the guy." Much has been written about Travolta as Vincent Vega in PULP FICTION and I don't have much to offer to the discussion. It is an incredible performance and it started a really incredible comeback for John even if he would inevitably start to play it safe again as soon as he wrapped Tarantino's film.
Ironically John Travolta is in yet another slump. His films are making money but looking at his resume from the past few years and his upcoming projects is truly depressing.
John Travolta is one of my favorite actors, even if it is mostly for work that he did in a very short period of time 30 years ago. I hope the guy pushes himself at least once more before everyone, including himself, forgets just how powerful he can be.

Missing Man In The Middle

There was something surreal about seeing Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola give Martin Scorsese his long overdue Oscar the other night. While I am not a huge Lucas or Spielberg fan there is no denying their monumental importance to film and seeing this group together again was pretty inspiring. I felt it was pretty obvious that Scorsese was going to win when those three walked out on the stage; so upon their introduction where Lucas joked that that he was the only one who hadn't won an oscar I found myself thinking about a photograph I had seen years before and about a guy who has never even been nominated for an Academy Award.
I have never been able to comprehend peoples disdain for Brian De Palma. De Palma's films along with Scorseses and Coppolas shaped my youth as no other American filmmaker did, and yet many people continue to have an overwhelming hatred for De Palma's body of work.
The complaints against De Palma have almost always been the same and have almost always been unsatisfactory to me. The biggest one is the misogynistic claim that has constantly been thrown at him. I have always had the hardest time swallowing this one as it is hard to think of another modern American director who has continually worked with such strong women in his films. De Palma's 'golden' age between Sisters and Scarface presented us with some of the most effective work by actresses in that incredible period. From Margot Kidder in Sisters through Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface De Palma had an amazing skill at photographing, directing and bringing out the best of his leading ladies. Sissy Spacek remains the most famous De Palma heroine in Carrie but one shouldn't overlook the work of Amy Irving and Nancy Allen in these films. I would hold Amy Irving's work in The Fury among the great performances of the seventies and Nancy Allen brought such an immeasurable presence to De Palma's cinema that it is impossible to imagine these films without her.
The other criticisms have always been the same: too violent, too stylized, too Hitchcockian....too much. I honestly think that many 'film' lovers are actually scared of cinema, and the possibilities of it. De Palma is one of the most cinematic of all directors, this man loves film and he loves what he can do with it. More than any of his peers De Palma has been able to create a body of work that is itself in love with cinema, but it is also a body of work that has an emotional resonance that many continue to deny. For all of the audacious camera work, split screens, slow motion, deep focus and long tracking shots many of my favorite De Palma moments are more intensely personal shots. Travolta in the last scene of Blow-Out, Pacino standing in the rain in Carlito's Way watching Penelope Ann Miller through the window, the look on Amy Irving's face right before the climax of The Fury. De Palma isn't afraid to be as human as he is stylish, and it is the emotional weight that his greatest films carry, along with his undeniably power as a technician, that allows these films to endure more and more year after year.
I plan on writing more in the future on De Palma, I can't imagine my life as a movie lover without his films. Also this man can still deliver, seeing Femme Fatale a few years back was one of the most invigorating, and emotional, experiences I have ever had in a theater.
Brian De Palma will probably never even get nominated for an Academy Award and I am sure it didn't cross anyone else's mind that he was missing from that group the other night. His critics have always tried to push him to the margins and yet his work continues to thrive. People keep discovering his films, gloating web-sites continue to appear and for people like me that have loved his work for so many years, we continue to find the answer as to why we love cinema in his greatest films.

The Great Ones Vol. 1 (Side B Track 4)

Long undervalued as one of the great beauties and most diverse actresses of the seventies, Margot Kidder and several of her films have continued to endure all these years later.
Many people who grew up in the seventies fell in love with Margot as Lois Lane in the Superman films. It is a part that she will always be connected to, I couldn't even see the newest Superman film because I already had my Clark Kent and Lois Lane.
Margot started her career in the late sixties in Gaily Gaily and has appeared in well over 100 films and tv shows since then. A dedicated worker who has survived more blows than most of us could even began to handle, Margot is working on several projects in the next year alone.
The earliest role that she had, that is among my favorites, is her part as the American student Zarel in the underrated 1970 Gene Wilder film Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx. Fortune is one of the sweetest films and characters from the early seventies and its tragi-comic feel has stuck with me for many years. Margot is breathtaking as the selfish young student who romances and ultimately abandons Quackser. I have read reports that Margot wasn't happy on this set which is a shame because I think this is such a wonderful little film and it features one of the great Wilder's finest performances.
Margot would continue with many film and tv roles before scoring the starring role in her friend Brian De Palma's classic Sisters from 1973. De Palma's triumphant film features perhaps Margot's best performance, as a schizophrenic Siamese twin. It is a tricky role that would have become strictly camp in a lesser actresses hands but Margot handles it beautifully and injects the part with much more humanity and realism than most genre films are accustomed to. Margot would start the ball rolling for De Palma and lead the way for the great work he would do later in the decade with everyone from Amy Irving to Nancy Allen.
Margot would score another horror hit a year later with the influential Black Christmas. Along with Mario Bava's Twitch Of The Death Nerve, Bob Clark's Black Christmas remains one of the most copied horror films ever made. A virtual blueprint for John Carpenter's Halloween, this Canadian shocker would give us one of Margot's most most entertaining roles. As the foul mouthed and sexy Barbie, Margot easily stole every scene she was in (not easy when you are working with everyone from Olivia Hussey to John Saxon) and she looks like she was having a ball doing it. This stylish thriller is now available in yet another dvd edition, this time featuring an interview with Margot recalling her time making it.
The hard to find Reincarnation of Peter Proud is one of many spooky seventies films that has slipped under the radar. I still have fond memories of seeing this film on tv years ago and have hoped for a DVD release but one has still yet to be announced.
More tv work would follow before Margot would land the role that would grant her immortality and would send her into the dreams of every teenager in the seventies. Many actresses have played Lois Lane but none ever inhabited that iconic character with as much charm and charisma as Margot. Perhaps it is a generational thing but for me she is the one and only Lois Lane.
The recent re-releases of the Superman films show clearly how important Margot was to their success and as her involvement became lessened the films suffered. Still the first two are grand entertainments and the chemistry she shared with the great Christopher Reeve affected an entire generation.
Margot would become a bona fide superstar in between the first two Superman films and her great appearances on Saturday Night Live and her Rolling Stone cover story added to her allure. While 1979's Amityville Horror isn't a great film by any means it remains one that many people, including myself, enjoy revisiting. Perhaps it is more nostalgia than anything else but the film and Margot in it retain a certain power.
The 1980's would find Margot in many good performances in mostly flawed films like Heartaches, Some Kind Of Hero and Trenchcoat. Her tv work also continued, including an interesting remake of Bus Stop.
Her peak was that period in the seventies when she was at the height of her beauty and at her most powerful as an actress. My heart has continually gone out to her through her troubles in the past couple of decades and I've been so proud to see her always emerge as a strong and dignified woman who seems incapable of giving up. She has become a great character actress and wonderful role model, we should all be so blessed to have just half her strength.