Black Narcissus, Thieves Like Us, The Bad News Bears (1976)

Black Narcissus, by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1947

Who likes erotic nun movies? Ew, not that kind of erotic nun movie! The kind that's fit for public screening. No nudity or sex, just tension that you can cut with a knife. Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus is about as good as an erotic nun movie can get. Deborah Kerr stars as Sister Clodagh, assigned to lead a group of nuns in the Himalayas, sent there to educate, care for, and convert the locals. Clodagh soon must try to keep it together when she meets and is attracted to Dean, a local Englishman who helps them out, and the exotic, sensual environment begins getting the best of her and her fellow nuns.

The duo of Powell and Pressburger are a team I am only just now discovering. I had seen a couple of Powell's solo films already (Thief of Bagdad and Peeping Tom), but Black Narcissus is the first product of this famous collaboration that I have watched. Wow, it's quite a film. The lush color cinematography is beautiful. I loved the movie's slow shift in tone into a psychological thriller as the temptation gets to be too much for one of Clodagh's nuns, Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron). Most movies about nuns have only one hot nun. Black Narcissus has two, so you know there's going to be trouble.

All joking aside, Black Narcissus is an incredible film. It actually reminds me a little bit of Picnic at Hanging Rock, with that unsettling feeling that your very surroundings are overpowering you. I wonder if Peter Weir was thinking of this movie at all when he made Hanging Rock. I can't wait to see more of Powell and Pressburger's work, especially if it is anywhere near as rich and powerful as this.

Thieves Like Us, by Robert Altman, 1974

Nobody made them like Altman did in the 1970's, did they? Thieves Like Us is about a trio of Mississippi bank robbers in the 1930's. Kieth Carradine stars as Bowie, the youngest of the three, and the movie focuses on Bowie's doomed romance with Keechie (Shelley Duvall), the girl he holes up with.

Thieves Like us is filled with all the stylistic flourishes you would expect from Altman. The overlapping, naturalistic dialogue, the searching cameras, the little visual and aural puns and hints sprinkled into the background. I must say, though, I didn't think this was Altman's best work of the era. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but I didn't think it was quite as subversive as McCabe & Mrs. Miller or as nutso as The Long Goodbye. Still, it's a 70's Robert Altman film, and that makes it automatically worth watching, especially if you're already an Altman fan.

The Bad News Bears, by Michael Ritchie, 1976

This is one of those movies I fudged my rules a little bit with. I usually only review movies I'd never seen before, but I make an occasional exception for movies I haven't seen since I was a kid and don't remember very well. I do remember liking it when I was young, though.

The Bad News Bears holds up wonderfully. The story of Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), a washed up drunk pool cleaner who used to play for the minor leagues, who agrees to coach the most ragtag team of Little Leaguers ever. After placing a couple ringers on the team, including his estranged daughter (Tatum O'Neal, fresh off of her Paper Moon win) they begin to turn around, and Buttermaker gets caught up in the thrill of winning, before realizing that winning isn't the only thing that matters.

I love how in the 70's, even kids movies were edgy. This movie has kids smoking, drinking, swearing, saying racial slurs, etc., and it has Matthau drinking and driving and generally mistreating a bunch of kids. Yet, it's still hilarious, full of heart, and has a good positive message at the end. I also liked the simplicity and straightforwardness of the story. It's incredibly hard to tell a story this clearly and without any added distractions. Just now looking it up, I see that the screenplay is by Bill Lancaster, writer of John Carpenter's similarly uncluttered (and most excellent) The Thing.

The Bad News Bears stands the test of time, and resonates as well. I couldn't help but have flashbacks to how horrible I was at team sports as a kid, how much I wanted to be included, and how it ultimately led to me not caring about sports at all. I think I turned out somewhat OK in the end, but it would have been nice to have caught the fly ball like that Lupus kid did just once.

The Long Goodbye

Wow, before we start this review, just take a look at that poster. Click on it and make it big. Look at that! If you don't recognize the style, that's by legendary Mad Magazine artist Jack Davis. The reason I'm pointing this out is that only a kooky Robert Altman movie from the 1970's could get sold with a poster like that. And it's appropriate that Altman himself narrates it, since his movies liked to poke fun at their own conventions, much in the way a Mad parody would do. I would totally hang that poster on my wall (hint, hint, gifters!).

The Long Goodbye is Altman's take on the Film Noir genre, adapting the famous Raymond Chandler novel featuring Elliott Gould as his detective, Philip Marlowe. The movie kicks off with Marlowe's buddy Jim coming to his run-down apartment, asking for him to take him across the border. He, of course, needs to cool down for a while. Upon returning, Marlowe finds out that Jim's wife has been killed and the cops think Jim did it. Believing his friend innocent, Marlowe attempts to crack the case, digging his way through L.A.'s seedy underbelly in the way that all great Film Noirs do.

But Altman would never settle to just make a Film Noir. He could never just make a genre movie. He had to find ways to explore and deconstruct the genre, twist it around and flip it on its head. In the case of The Long Goodbye, he takes a rumpled, unkempt 1950's detective, and transports him into the present in order to explore the shallow, health-obsessed Los Angeles of the early 70's. Marlowe radiates unhealthiness, with his chain-smoking and squalorous, filthy apartment. His neighbors are healthy, young, new-age, yoga obsessed girls. His investigations even lead him to a corrupt rehab clinic.

Elliott Gould creates something truly unique and utterly bizarre with his characterization of Marlowe. Altman was well known for giving a ton of leeway to his actors, and I think in this case he just let Gould do whatever the hell he wanted, and in doing so hit upon something kind of magical. Marlowe mutters to himself constantly (and hilariously), possibly Altman's twist on the voice-over narration of detective movies of old. He also wisecracks endlessly, presses his face up against windows, and talks to his cat as though they were equals.

The other cast member of note is Sterling Hayden, possibly best known for being the lead in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing. As a drunk, unstable old writer, he is the only other anachronistic character in the modern world Marlowe inhabits. I don't think he even had a script, Altman probably just said, "just go, be drunk."

I think this is the 10th or 11th Altman film I've seen so far, most of them being the important ones, and The Long Goodbye is quite possibly my favorite. It's extremely funny and weird as a comedy, but still works on the level of a good old fashioned detective story. I wish the types of movies that warranted Mad Magazine posters could still get made, but alas, there was a time and a place in cinematic history for that, and that was the 70's.

Brewster McCloud

Brewster McCloud is a weird movie by people who were on drugs. I thought about it hard, and that is absolutely the easiest way to describe it.

Of course, it was made in 1970, when lots of people were making lots of great movies on drugs.

So, I'm not sure if a lot of people even know about this movie. This is the movie that Robert Altman made between M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. For some reason, it's never had a proper DVD release. I found a VHS at a thrift store a couple years ago and quickly snatched it up. But, being a VHS tape, I just as quickly set it aside, and left it to collect dust. Last weekend, I finally popped it into the old VCR and gave it a shot.

It's a pretty good movie, although I admit I'm not 100% sure I get all of it. It's definitely an original movie. It has all of Altman's trademark moves; the large cast, the overlapping dialogue, the punny signs in the background, the caustic outlook.

So, what is it about? Birds, mostly. It's about how we are like birds, how we are not like birds, and where we fail to be like birds. The title character, played by Harold and Maude's Bud Cort, is a young man secretly living in the Astrodome, constructing his own set of mechanical wings. Sally Kellerman is a mysterious woman who may or may not actually be a bird (?) who has lost her wings. There is a detective on the trail of a serial killer, whose victims are found strangled to death and covered in bird shit.

The whole film is narrated by a professor (Rene Auberjonois), whose lessons on bird behavior are intercut with human behavior that resembles the bird he is describing. He also slowly transforms into a bird-man throughout the movie. Yeah, it's that kind of movie.

Also of note is, this is Shelley Duvall's first film, as an Astrodome tour guide that Brewster falls in love with. She's very birdlike in appearance. With her long neck and the way they give her like 4 big lashes around each of her big round eyes, she reminds me of the ostrich ballerinas in Fantasia. Not a slam, mind you, just an observation.

The ending is pretty awesome. Altman builds and builds his story to a triumphant crescendo, only to burst it like a balloon, and then thumbs his nose at us, the audience. In so doing, I think he's making a statement about where we're heading as a people. Maybe man was never meant to fly, you know?

Sorry this review is kind of scattered. Brewster McCloud was kind of scattered too, so it's appropriate. I do love Robert Altman when he's on, and this is a pretty wild movie, even for him. I'll give it a solid B.

If you are interested in seeing it, the only way it is available on DVD is on the Warner Brothers Archive website, where DVDs are made-to-order of catalogue titles that they didn't sense enough demand for. There's some other good stuff in there, too. I'm sure it has popped up on Amazon by now too. It's not on Netflix, unfortunately.

Popeye

Every once in a great while, something truly odd sneaks it's way through the Hollywood system. Something with very limited box office potential winds up getting tens millions of dollars poured into it. An uncommercial director is given a ridiculous amount freedom to construct a grand vision. These rare movies are usually financial disappointments, and often creative disappointments as well, but they're usually at least interesting to watch. In fact, I often like an interesting failure more than a well-made but typical Hollywood product, and as a result, I am much more forgiving of Speed Racer and Ang Lee's Hulk movie than either film probably deserves.

Something that always interests me is when a filmmaker known for making grown-up movies makes a kids film. George Miller knocked it out of the park 15 years ago with Babe (whose sequel, Pig in the City, is one of the strangest huge-budget movies ever, by the way). So did Wes Anderson with Fantastic Mr. Fox. Martin Scorsese has one coming out at the end of the year, and I totally can't wait to see it. Popeye was Robert Altman's entry.

Robert Altman's Popeye is perhaps one of the better cinematic oddities out there. It's not a perfect film (these movies rarely are), but it's certainly not a failure. It's just really weird. It's hard to believe that producer Robert Evans managed to get funding for this insane movie. But am I glad that he did? You betcha.

Altman made a live action cartoon, with it's own self contained laws of physics. With the town of Sweet Haven, he created a complete miniature world that feels lived in and alive. The extras appear to be entirely made up of tumblers and acrobats so they can bounce around and do all sorts of physical comedy.

The songs are pretty awesome. They're written by Harry Nillson and arranged by Van Dyke Parks. You can totally hear the Van Dyke Parks in there. Lots of Pet Sounds-style orchestration. The actors don't have to worry about nailing any high notes, because the songs are sung in the character's voices.

Robin Williams, Shelley Duvall and the rest of the cast are all pretty perfect. That's no surprise. We all know that Altman was great at casting. But the great casting leads to one of the movie's greatest failings: Popeye is mumbly and incoherent and Olive Oyl is shrill and obnoxious. But you know what? They're kind of supposed to be. That's how they always were in the cartoons too. Much of the dialogue had to be overdubbed, presumably because nobody could understand a word Robin Williams was saying.

The other thing that doesn't quite work is the finale. Altman did what he could, but that damn octopus puppet clearly would not cooperate. It looks like a piece of junk. The arms barely move, and when the actors aren't holding them in their hands and shaking them around, they just float motionless in the water. It's kind of anticlimactic when the monster you're supposed to battle just kind of droops there. Still, the movie ends with a battle with a giant octopus, something I can't say about most event movies (well, maybe Pirates 2).

Popeye was a production out of control, went insanely overbudget, and was shot far, far away from studio executives. As a result, we got a truly bizarre family movie, strange even by Robert Altman standards. It's known as one of the biggest disasters in cinema history, and it damaged Altman's directing career for the entirety of the 80's. It is also known as an enduring cult classic. It's not a movie for everyone, but the right people (people like me) are going to dig it. And dig it I did.

Popeye: B+