By Joseph W. Smith III
Last week, your Webb movie critic covered “Fifty Years Ago in Film” — prepping for my upcoming talk on that topic at Brown Library: 5:30 p.m. on 7/31.
Trotting out the 10 biggest box-office hits from 1975, we briefly discussed the top two — Jaws and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — while also nodding to Robert Altman’s cult-fave Nashville.
Next week, we’ll take a deeper dive into Jaws (if you’ll pardon the pun); but for now, let’s cover some other ’75 hits … and misses.
Among the top 10, Return of the Pink Panther and Three Days of the Condor (Nos. 6 & 7) are particularly strong.
Starring the incomparable Peter Sellers, Return revived a struggling franchise.
After the success of the first PP and its follow-up, A Shot in the Dark (1963 and ’64), this franchise inexplicably handed the lead to Alan Arkin for 1968’s dismal Inspector Clouseau.
By ’75, PP had seen only two hits in 12 years and appeared to be circling the drain — till original director Blake Edwards returned to helm an uproarious reboot. Featuring fine support from Christopher Plummer, Return offers one side-splitting scene after another — some so funny that co-star Catherine Schell can be seen laughing helplessly in the background.
My father, a film critic at the time, attended Return’s pre-release gala in Los Angeles, where Edwards recounted how one sequence was filmed 23 times before the cast could keep a straight face. “For every week’s shooting,” he told reporters, “We had to allow three days for falling down laughing.”
Speaking of which: Three Days of the Condor is, by contrast, a deadly serious crackerjack thriller — with Robert Redford as a low-level CIA staffer who returns from lunch one day to find all his co-workers slain; and he knows he’s next.
Directed by Sidney Pollack (Tootsie, Out of Africa), Condor features a stellar supporting cast: Faye Dunaway, John Houseman, Cliff Robertson and a truly frightening Max Von Sydow. One of those insidious mid-70’s exercises in paranoia (think The Conversation), it really gets under your skin — and stays there.
Other films that year didn’t do as well but have since grown in stature: Arthur Penn’s moody Night Moves; Peter Weir’s haunting Picnic at Hanging Rock; and of course Monty Python and the Holy Grail — a reasonable candidate for the funniest movie ever made.
At the same time, 1975 saw a handful of films that should have scored — but didn’t.
Perhaps the year’s most spectacular flop was The Hindenburg. Arriving in an era wild about disaster films (Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno), it had a ready-made catastrophe, plus the usual larger-than-life cast: George C. Scott, Anne Bancroft, Gig Young, Burgess Meredith and Charles Durning — among many others.
What’s more, it was directed by Robert Wise, whose jaw-dropping resume includes The Sound of Music, West Side Story and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Yet it thrilled neither critics nor viewers, with the estimable Vincent Canby saying it was “pricelessly funny at the wrong moments.”
Similarly unsuccessful was Lucky Lady, which again had a solid cast (Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds) — along with veteran director Stanley Donen (Charade, Singin’ in the Rain). A romantic-dramedy about shipboard rum-runners working in Prohibition-era Mexico, it went way over budget, with the south-of-the-border shoot turning into something of a fiasco. (My father also did the press-junket for that one — which front-lined complaints from Minnelli and Reynolds; the latter said he would never again work with Donen again.)
The resulting release, said critic Roger Ebert, was “a big, expensive, good-looking flop of a movie.”
A more personal disappointment for this Webb writer was Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze.
Based on a series of corny but popular 1930s pulp-fiction stories — which later sold well as handsome paperbacks — the film starred Ron Ely as the titular crime-fighting inventor, genius, billionaire and muscle-man. Ely — solid as TV’s Tarzan in the late sixties — was here working with the revered George Pal, overseer of such fine adaptations as The Time Machine (1960) and War of the Worlds (1953).
A huge fan of the Savage books, I was distressed to find the film almost unwatchable: campy, outlandish and narratively tone-deaf. Apparently, most viewers reacted along the same lines, and the movie failed to kick off a possible franchise (there were, after all, 182 titles in the series).
It didn’t help that Doc Savage opened around the same time as Jaws. Like some of the latter’s onscreen victims, it sank without a trace.
More on that next week.
Meanwhile, registration for my free talk is currently open at jvbrown.edu.
