A sad spectacle representing the near-end of a once-glorious career, Convoy was not director Sam Peckinpah’s final film, but it might as well have been. (He only made one more picture, the lifeless ’80s espionage flick The Osterman Weekend.) Virtually a lampoon of every theme and visual device Peckinpah used in his previous films, Convoy is as vapid as the director’s other pictures are meaningful, so watching the movie is like seeing a faded singer struggle through greatest hits he can no longer perform with the proper energy. Exacerbating its lack of artistic worth, Convoy was the production that finally destroyed Peckinpah’s fragile reputation in Hollywood, since substance abuse often left him so debilitated that his friend James Coburn had to step in and direct several scenes. Even with the extra help, Convoy came in over-budget and over-schedule, guaranteeing no reputable producer would hire Peckinpah for years. Providing the final insult, Convoy became Peckinpah’s biggest box-office success. Yes, despite making provocative classics like The Wild Bunch (1969) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), Peckinpah wasn’t fully embraced by American moviegoers until he helmed a trucker flick that was adapted from a novelty song. The song, of course, was C.W. McCall’s “Convoy,” the 1975 hit in which McCall narrated the tale of a rebel trucker’s adventure while cheesy music composed by future Mannheim Steamroller leader Chip Davis grooved underneath. Screenwriter B.W.L. Norton translated the song quite literally, presenting the idiotic story of badass trucker Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald (Kris Kristofferson) forming a giant convoy of 18-wheelers to battle corrupt Sheriff “Dirty Lyle” Wallace (Ernest Borgnine). Yet Norton should probably be held blameless for the incoherent weirdness of the final film, since Peckinpah rewrote the script before and during production, even taking the extreme of letting his cast contribute material whether or not the material actually fit the overall storyline. Worse, Peckinpah dug into the tropes of his earlier movies, layering in endless scenes of property destruction, slow-motion violence, and sweaty men stirring up trouble. Whenever Convoy enters a sloppy montage of barroom brawling or cars crashing through buildings, the movie becomes a parody of Peckinpah’s wild-man style. Had the filmmaker demonstrated any discipline or restraint, Convoy could easily have become a fun B-movie about outlaws fighting the man. Certainly, the casting of the lead roles pointed the way toward something unpretentiously enjoyable. Singer-turned-actor Kristofferson, at the height of his beardy handsomeness, exudes rock-star cool, so he cuts a great figure steering an 18-wheeler while wearing aviator shades and a wife-beater. Borgnine, his gap-toothed swarthiness in full bloom, personifies redneck villainy. Yet Peckinpah puts so much crap between these characters—driving montages, explosions, pointless scenes featuring Kristofferson’s love interest, played by Ali MacGraw with her usual ineptitude—that the basic story gets bludgeoned to death. Convoy ends up feeling like a fever dream instead of a narrative, so it’s fascinating for all the wrong reasons.View the original article here
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While some viewers may enjoy watching leading lady Sondra Currie kick ass and strut around in revealing outfits, those without an affinity for the actress will find little to enjoy in Policewomen, a grade-Z thriller about cops who go undercover in a smuggling ring. The action is dull and fake, the one-liners are painfully stupid, and the story is beyond trite. Oh, and just to make everything worse, the acting is terrible, with Currie’s lifeless performance setting the pace for her equally inept costars. Plus, because people who seek out movies like Policewomen usually settle for trashy elements in lieu of worthwhile ones, it deserves mentioning that at least one widely available print of Policewomen is bereft of nudity and even swearing (the audio drops out whenever someone curses). Yet it’s hard to imagine that the inclusion of rough stuff could make much difference. Anyway, for anyone who cares (and believe me, that list shouldn’t include you), the story begins with Lacy (Currie) trying to prevent a jailbreak at a women’s prison. Despite her karate jobs and right crosses, several badass mamas escape and join the criminal gang of Maude (Elizabeth Stuart), an aging crone portrayed in the “dragon lady” style of the era. (You know a movie’s in trouble when you wish Shelley Winters would show up to add some vigor.) Having impressed supervisors with her valor during the jailbreak, Lacy meets with top cops including Tony (Frank Mitchell), who put her through a series of tests to confirm she’s got the right stuff. (Sample dialogue from Mitchell: “Now, you’re a very pretty girl, and you obviously have a way with escaping female prisoners, but . . .”) The highlight of the movie, speaking only in very relative terms, is Lacy’s sparring session with a karate instructor played by the always-enjoyable B-movie madman William Smith. Lacy flips Smith’s character on his ass several times, and Smith plays the scene for high comedy. So, even though the scene is stupid and unfunny, at least the scene wants to be something, which is more than can be said for the rest of the movie.
Despite some egregious miscasting and a terrible title, Hornet’s Nest is a solid World War II action thriller with an offbeat angle—the guerilla group at the center of the movie is composed entirely of teenagers and children. Set in Italy, the story begins with a horrific scene during which Nazis under the command of the ruthless Captain Von Hecht (Sergio Fantoni) slaughter the women and seniors in a small village because the area’s young men, who are hidden in nearby woods, are insurrectionist partisans. Led by the hot-tempered Aldo (Mark Colleano), the surviving youths swear to exact revenge. Then, when a U.S. parachute drop goes awry, resulting in the deaths of nearly all the paratroopers, Aldo’s gang recovers one American commando, Captain Turner (Rock Hudson), and drags him back to their remote lair. Since Turner is unconscious and requires medical attention, the youths kidnap a Nazi physician, Bianca (Sylva Koscina), and force her at gunpoint to care for Turner. Once the American recovers, he reluctantly agrees to help Aldo’s group attack the Nazis occupying their village before pursuing his own mission of blowing up a strategically important dam. As does the 1972 John Wayne picture The Cowboys, this Italian-U.S. coproduction explores the fraught dynamic between a veteran killer and young men pulled into bloodshed by circumstance. The storyline is clean and linear, steadily moving toward a climax in which both Aldo and Turner must face the consequences of their violence, and the filmmakers show Bianca suffering badly for the poor luck of ending up near animalistic males. In fact, Hornet’s Nest is such a tough picture that it represents one of Hudson’s boldest departures from harmless-heartthrob territory. The picture is also made quite well, with nimble camerawork and vivid lighting complemented by a plaintive Ennio Morricone score. One big problem, however, is the use of Italian actors in nearly every role—the Germans in the movie sound like they’re straight outta Sicily. Furthermore, Colleano’s performance borders on camp because he’s so overly emphatic, and Koscina is competent but unmemorable. Still, this is a nasty little picture filled with dead children, rape, and throat-slashings, so it can’t be accused of pulling its narrative punches as it seeks to depict the horrors of war. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com) 
After making a strong directorial debut with 1971’s Play Misty for Me, Clint Eastwood decided to put his stamp on the genre that originally made him famous as an actor: the Western. Yet instead of simply churning out a moralistic shoot-’em-up in the John Wayne mold, Eastwood made High Plains Drifter, a creepy revenge tale so heavily allegorical it might actually be a ghost story. Considering this was only his second directing job, Eastwood’s artistic ambition is impressive. Yet while the movie is brisk, nasty, and stylish, it has major narrative weaknesses. One big problem is that the protagonist is a cipher—we never learn the character’s background, name, or true motivation—and another is the way the movie fails to clarify whether onscreen events are happening in “reality” or taking place in a supernatural netherworld. Eastwood gets points for attacking heavy themes, but his inability to bring everything together is disappointing. The story begins when a character referred to as the Stranger (Eastwood) rides into the lakeside frontier town of Lago. He gets into a hassle with a group of thugs, and then kills all of them with his frightening gunplay. Impressed, the townspeople ask the Stranger to plan an ambush: Three murderers who have just been released from prison are pledged to ravage Lago, so the townspeople are terrified. Courtesy of (confusing) exposition and flashbacks, we learn that some time ago, the murderers slaughtered Lago’s do-gooder sheriff while the townspeople watched—and that the tragedy stemmed from a conspiracy related to the mine from which the town derives its livelihood. Furthermore, Eastwood’s character may or may not actually be the sheriff’s reincarnation and/or spirit—never mind the fact that no one recognizes him. Anyway, the Stranger is given carte-blanche throughout Lago, so he installs a local dwarf (Billy Curtis) as the new mayor/sheriff, seizes a local tramp (Marianna Hill) as his personal concubine, and makes the townspeople paint all of Lago’s buildings red so the town looks like a vision of hell. This sets the stage for a showdown with the murderers, although the townspeople start to wonder if their “savior” is worse than the killers he’s been hired to fight. The gist of the piece is painfully obvious right from the beginning—the people of Lago are being punished for their sins—but the script, by Ernest Tidyman, muddies the narrative waters. The Stranger is a bloodthirsty, crude, sarcastic outlaw capable of violent sexual assaults, so it’s not as if he’s the personification of justice. Therefore, the movie has virtually no morality on display, making it difficult to care what happens to any of the film’s characters. And since the movie doesn’t compensate for this deficit by providing a tidy parable, what’s the point? Still, High Plains Drifter looks great, especially during the moody nighttime scenes, and Eastwood surrounds himself with interesting faces. Curtis stands out as the town’s perverse voice of conscience, and Eastwood favorite Geoffrey Lewis is effectively odious as the leader of the murderers.
While the prospect of a tough World War II thriller starring velvet-voiced Broadway and TV star Robert Goulet might not be enticing in the abstract, Underground is actually quite palatable. Featuring a clear story, a handful of decent surprises, and a steady stream of effective suspense scenes, the picture gives Goulet all the ammunition he needs to deliver a respectable performance, and while it’s true he does a bit of preening here and there, he makes an okay (if somewhat wooden) action hero. When the story begins, mysterious American commando Lt. Dawson (Goulet) breaks into an airbase and slips onto a plane that’s departing for a secret mission. He then subdues the man who’s supposed to jump from the plane into enemy territory and makes the jump himself, joining up with a group of French resistance fighters led by the chrome-domed Boule (Lawrence Dobkin). It seems the American whose place Dawson took was slated to attack a convoy delivering Nazi Gen. Stryker (Carl Deuring) through France. Further, not only does Dawson have history with Stryker, but Dawson’s task is to kidnap rather than kill the German officer. While executing his mission, Dawson engages in a battle of wills with Boule, who doubts the American’s credibility from the moment they meet, and has a steamy tryst with Yvonne (Danièle Gaubert), a member of Boule’s team. Although the basic story of Underground is uncomplicated, a few unexpected dimensions give the film texture. For instance, Stryker is in disgrace following a major strategic error, so he’s on a de facto suicide watch by his fellow members of the Third Reich; similarly, Dawson’s haunted by nightmares stemming from a past episode of imprisonment and torture. Since Goulet is the definition of a whitebread entertainer, it’s a kick to see him playing rough, though another actor could have done more with the role. (Dobkin and Gaubert are well-cast and efficient.) Still, TV-trained hack director Arhtur H. Nadel presents the story without adornment, giving the movie a grungy edge even though the production values are slick, and reliable composer Stanley Myers puts some blood in the flick’s veins. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com) 
Director Brian De Palma borrowed heavily from Alfred Hitchcock’s filmmaking style for Sisters (1973), a perverse story about murderous twins that featured a score by Hitchcock’s best composer, Bernard Hermann. So it was no surprise that a few years later, after the box-office failure of De Palma’s audacious musical fantasy Phantom of the Paradise, the director returned to the crowd-pleasing milieu of Hitchcockian suspense. In fact, De Palma took homage even further with Obsession, which borrows key themes from the Hitchcock masterpiece Vertigo (1958). So, by the time De Palma layered in old-school glamour photography (by the great Vilmos Zsigmond) and another moody score by Hermann, Obsession became a virtual copy of Hitchcock’s style, updated for the ’70s with a heightened level of sexual transgression and technical sophistication. Thus, while Obsession is an arresting movie, any appraisal must be somewhat muted given its overtly derivative nature—it’s merely a fine achievement in emulation. Written by the formidable Paul Schrader (from an original story he and De Palma concocted together), Obsession tells the tragic tale of New Orleans businessman Michael Courtland (Cliff Roberts0n). During a harrowing prologue set in 1958, Courtland’s wife and daughter are kidnapped and held for ransom. Bending to advice from police, Courtland delivers blank paper instead of the cash the kidnappers requested, so the kidnappers flee with Courtland’s loved ones. A police chase ensues, at the end of which the hostages and the kidnappers are killed. The story then cuts to the present day, when Courtland has rebuilt his life but never forgotten the traumas of the past—quite to the contrary, as the movie’s title suggests, Courtland is preoccupied with his dead wife and child. So when he encounters a young woman named Sandra (Geneviève Bujold) who is a living replica of his dead wife, Courtland seizes a chance at reclaiming happiness—he woos Sandra and tries to mold her in the image of the wife he lost. Alas, history repeats when Sandra is kidnapped under circumstances recalling the earlier crime. How Courtland responds to this crisis, and what he discovers while doing so, takes the story down a path only De Palma and Schrader would be nervy enough to explore. As in most twisty thrillers, the plotting of Obsession isn’t necessarily the strong suit—the storyline is predicated on people making foolish decisions, after all—so what makes the picture effective is its insidious mood. Zsigmond imbues images with haze and shadows that embody the story’s psychological implications, and nobody uses music to create a menacing environment better than Hermann. De Palma contributes elements including elegantly probing camera moves and an appropriately suffocating degree of nonstop intensity. (De Palma also showcases supporting player John Lithgow, in one of his first major film roles.) Bujold and Robertson wisely underplay early scenes depicting their characters’ modern-day courtship, since each character hides dark secrets, and later, they both do well portraying people subject to the cruel vicissitudes of fate. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)
A laughably silly horror movie, The Incredible Melting Man delivers exactly what the title promises—a grotesque character melts throughout the movie. Yes, this one’s about a monster who becomes less formidable with each passing scene. Or at least that’s the logical implication. To make the movie work, the filmmakers fudge the premise by giving the monster superhuman endurance, so he never loses any of his strength until the very last scene. Most beings run out of gas if they burn through too many calories, but somehow the "melting man" retains his vigor even as his body is disappearing. As such, the underlying notion of The Incredible Melting Man is so astoundingly stupid it’s impossible to take a single frame of the picture seriously. But then again, even though the movie is basically competent in its execution, every other aspect of the storyline is just as astoundingly stupid. The picture begins with U.S. astronauts in outer space, where they’re bombarded with radiation from a solar flare. Returning to earth, all of the astronauts die except Steve West (Alex Rebar), who wakes up in a hospital and discovers that he’s become the sludgy shuffler of the title. Cue murderous rampage. The movie is dominated by the work of make-up master Rick Baker, who later won multiple Oscars (beginning with his prize for 1982’s An American Werewolf in London); in addition to creating the grotesque applications for the title character, whose organs and skin drip and ooze in loving close-ups, Baker made props including a realistic-looking disembodied head. Yet it’s a measure of the picture’s schlocky nature that the head is featured in not one but two slow-motion angles as it drifts down a lazy river—the money shot involves the head tumbling over a waterfall and then cracking open when it hits a rock at the base of the water, a geyser of crimson shooting forth. Perhaps offering a nod to The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), writer-director William Sachs follows his narrative all the way to a depressing ending, so the movie has a certain kind of bummer integrity, but, still, it’s hard to heap too much praise on a dull gorefest about a glop of goo. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com) The Incredible Melting Man: LAME