The Sugarland Express (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1974) August 20, 2006
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1970s, Drama, Film reviews, Crime , add a comment
Dir. Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins; starring Goldie Hawn, William Atherton, Michael Sacks
Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical film (although ‘Duel’ was released theatrically in Europe) marks the director’s return to the open road. It isn’t surprising Spielberg got the job to direct this cross-country chase movie, since he had so beautifully brought the ‘road’ tot life in ‘Duel’. Yet, this true story of Lou Jean and her lover Clovis, who take a cop hostage in order to get back their baby, doesn’t have the technical ingenuity that made ‘Duel’ so much fun, or the comic undercurrent that made ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ and ‘Cannonball Run II’ such crowd-pleasers. It’s largely down to a muddled script that can’t strike a balance between melodrama and comedy, or social comment and familial loyalty. Certainly, the young Spielberg struggles to get to grips with his characters, and by the film’s end, you are left with the sense that you never got to know the people who’ve you’ve just invested all that time in.
In all, it’s one of the director’s lesser known films and for good reason. His trademarks aren’t evident, and while, if you delve into the story’s ideals, you’ll find the subjects Spielberg would investigate later in his career, this was a project used as a means to another end. After all, a year later he would make ‘Jaws’ with Sugarland’s producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown.
‘The Sugarland Express’ isn’t a bad film, it’s just a very average one, certainly for a director of Spielberg’s quality (and considering within three years he’d made two of his masterpieces – ‘Jaws’ and ‘Close Encounters’). The film is noteworthy for an excellent performance from Goldie Hawn.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1977) August 15, 2006
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 1970s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Sci-fi/Fantasy , add a commentDir. Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Steven Spielberg; starring Richard Dreyfuss, Francois Truffaut, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon
If this isn’t Spielberg’s best film, then it most certainly is his second greatest achievement behind Jaws. It could be looked at as a level of cinematic accomplishment that Spielberg could never re-imagine, an easy comparable for his critics to endlessly debate with their most hated of his movies like Schindler’s List.
If what tainted his film about the holocaust was his Manichean view of the world, at least in part, then this certainly doesn’t hinder CE3K. For me, it’s an example of a kid’s movie made entirely for adults. It recreates that sense of wonder, that fearful, guarded interest into the unknown, that only really works if one still believes that the unknown (the bogeyman, the werewolf, extraterrestrials, Father Christmas) still exists. Spielberg places the audience within the world of the few remaining dreamers – those that still cling to the idea: we’re not alone.
You can see that Spielberg is embodied in Richard Dreyfuss’ character, much like he was Elliot in E.T. There is the disenchantment with the American Dream – a feeling that his children just want to rebel and his wife is only interested in a tidy kitchen – a sort of apprehensive precursor to eighties yuppies and materialism. It’s as if the ‘important’ things in life don’t matter (much like the thought-process of a child), the only thing that needs worrying about is the monster that hides under your bed. The dreamers dare question that not everything is set in stone and their reality has not been made for them.
Driver, The (Walter Hill, 1978) August 8, 2006
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : 1970s, Drama, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Thriller/Suspense, Crime , add a commentDir. Walter Hill; screenplay by Walter Hill; starring Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabella Adjani
Walter Hill’s 1978 film-noir is fascinating in its depiction of Bruce Dern’s desperate attempts to catch the illusive ‘Driver’. The great thing about this film is how the criminal becomes the anti-hero. Hill plays with western, film-noir and action movie genre conventions to great effect, but it’s his two main characters that draw the viewer’s attention. Ryan O’Neal as The Driver is ‘all cool’, while Dern is tired, pissed off and at the end of his tether. There’s some excellent car chases while Dern and O’Neal carry the film with strong performances. I particularly liked how the crook is less corrupt than the cop – it made for an interesting dynamic between the two characters.
Snowbeast (Herb Wallerstein, 1977) August 7, 2006
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, 1970s, Film reviews, Sci-fi/Fantasy , add a commentDir. Herb Wallerstein; screenplay by Joseph Stefano; starring Bo Svenson
Oh the joys of the watching films when you’re a child. You have these vague scenes in your head that you remember being so scary or so dazzling or so funny. Two things I remembered from a film I’d seen years and years ago when I mustn’t have been any older than six or seven, were a scene involving an abominable snowman smashing a window and attacking a big group of people in an auditorium, and Roy Scheider starring in the lead role. When I got the opportunity to watch Snowbeast I realised this was the film I’d wanted to see for so long. But I wished I hadn’t.
This made-for-television film really isn’t scary and the scene that I had imprinted on my mind from childhood ended up resembling what looked like a naked Father Christmas trying to steal presents from the children. You know, I never thought that hairy beard of his was an indication of what was beneath the red suit and black boots, but on this evidence, it most definitely is.
As I watched it and realised Roy Scheider wasn’t in the film, I wondered what had given me that impression in the first place. However, after the hour mark I knew. The film is pretty much just another Jaws rip-off with the Yeti taking over from the shark. Yes it has some enjoyable moments but the acting and script are woeful, and the director’s ploy of using red coloured transitions is both off-putting and rather useless.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand (Robert Zemeckis, 1978) August 5, 2006
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1970s, Desert Island Films, Drama, Film reviews , add a comment
It’s 1964 and the Beatles are about to play the Ed Sullivan show. Fans are flocking to their hotel to get a glimpse of their idols and six friends from New Jersey are about to do the same, but they have much grander plans. Rosie (Wendie Jo Sperber) is a Beatles fanatic who is desperate to get into their hotel just to get close to Paul McCartney, while aspiring journalist Grace (Theresa Saldana) wants to do the same thing knowing if she can get a picture of them, up close and personal, she’s got a shot at the big time. Pam (Nancy Allen) gets dragged along too but after she splits up from Rosie and Grace, she hides in a food cart and finds herself in the Beatles room with free reign to Paul’s bass guitar and John’s…comb. Tony (Bobby Di Cicco), a Beatles hater, and Janis (Susan Kendall Newman), a protester, come along just to cause trouble, while Larry (Marc McClure) is there only because he’s in love with Grace, but the whole gang soon finds themselves having one mishap after another, as the clock quickly ticks down to the Beatles first ever U.S television performance.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand is the debut film of director Robert Zemeckis and the first feature that Bob Gale and Zemeckis worked on together (although they did write Spielberg’s 1941 around the same time, but that film was not be released until 1979). It’s a movie that shows off many of the traits and inspirations that would make their most notable collaboration Back To The Future so great, and it’s a debut that is certainly better than its poor box-office would have you presume. Sharing a similarity with George Lucas’ American Graffiti, it tells the story of some friends who come of age and have a great time doing it, but Zemeckis gleefully pays homage to the Three Stooges and the Marx brothers, styling his film in a much lighter tone than Lucas, concentrating on the brighter side of their misadventures. It’s a terrifically funny film, and once again the two Bob’s prove they are masters of the screenplay, creating some wonderfully well-rounded characters that sucker you in with their adolescent innocence and manic desperation to achieve their goals.
Certainly Zemeckis relies on his characters, and to a certain extent caricatures, to carry the film as the plot is fairly arbitrary, and it’s Richard ‘Ringo’ Klaus (Eddie Deezen) who stands out. This Beatles obsessive is played with such kinetic energy by Deezen, he’s thoroughly captivating to watch, encapsulating manic Marxism’s with a brilliantly strange fascination with all things Beatle – we meet him as he tears up the hotel carpet which the Beatles have just walked on. Later he shows Rosie a section of grass he claims the Beatles have stood on, saying, ‘This is actually a clump of grass that Paul stepped on. I’m not exactly sure which blade he stepped on, but it’s all in there. That’s why I got such a big clump.’ Deezen is a revelation but it’s a shame he doesn’t get more screen time as he steals every scene he’s in. Nevertheless, Nancy Allen is dependable in her role and she’s in one of the film’s best scenes when she hides under the bed and the Beatles come into the room. All we see is their distinctive shoes and half their legs pottering around, with voice actors imitating Paul, John, Ringo, and George perfectly, yet the scene works wonderfully as her idols are mere inches away yet she’s too afraid to alert them to her presence. Wendy Jo Sperber is also great to watch, as she’s a sort of toned-down, female version of Deezen’s Richard, and Zemeckis has the pair getting up to all kinds of trouble, from problems in a lift shaft, to trying to escape from the security staff, their madcap obsessive enthusiasm is simply a joy to see.
I Wanna Hold Your Hand is a very enjoyable film, and while it isn’t as refined as Zemeckis’ later films (it starts off quite slowly, and never really gets going until a quarter of the way through), it has a sense of youthful energy that makes it exceedingly endearing. It’s packed with some delightful vignettes (a rebellious kid is disgruntled at his father for making him cut his Beatles style hair so enlists the help of Janis to steal Ed Sullivan tickets off him; Grace overhears a businessman ordering a prostitute over the phone so takes her place to blackmail him into giving her enough money to get into the TV show; and Pam ends up being as idolised as the band themselves when the fans hear she was in their room), and of course the soundtrack is fantastic, packed with Beatles songs from their pre-1965 catalogue. There’s plenty to like, Zemeckis capturing the Beatlemania hysteria that hit the United States in 1964 with a genuine authenticity that superbly captures the time period, and beautifully renders the social implications of the public’s fascination with the popular-culture that surrounded them. It’s funny and it’s sincere, but above all it’s a great little time capsule for a place and period of unusual optimism.