By Scott Ross
Babes in Toyland (1961) Walt Disney’s first live-action musical is a candy-coated bomb containing some pleasant old Victor Herbert tunes kitted out with new Mel Leven lyrics to replace some of the more dated, fustian originals by Glen MacDonald (the best of them is the comic tango “Castle in Spain,” an amusing turn for Ray Bolger, camping it up as the mustache-twirling villain), a few nice visual touches, Henry Calvin and Gene Sheldon performing homages to Laurel and Hardy, Annette Funicello as Mary Contrary, Tommy Sands doing a drag bit as a gypsy fortune-teller, Tommy Kirk as a hapless inventor and Ed Wynn as a surprisingly cranky and hypocritical Toymaker. The rest of it is over-fed, cloying operetta-fantasy that must have seemed, even in the year of my birth, at least 50 years out of date; I can’t imagine what today’s children would make of it. The best items are the funny little animated curlicues devised by Ward Kimball, who was also responsible for the marching wooden soldiers. (Co-author with Joe Rinaldi and Lowell S. Hawley of the screenplay, Kimball was the original producer until he ruffled Walt’s feathers and was replaced.) Jack Donohue directed, with numbing literal-mindedness. The wrong-headedness of the thing is exemplified by George Bruns and Jud Conlon speeding up the haunting ballad “Toyland” and turning it into a march.
The Celluloid Closet (1995) The partly-successful documentary based on Vito Russo’s groundbreaking book has much to recommend it but is missing its author’s essential voice, and his anger.
The Devil’s Brother, aka Fra Diavolo (1933) Whenever Laurel and Hardy are on the screen, this adaptation by Jeanie Macpherson of the 1830 Daniel Auber/Eugène Scribe opéra-comique is wonderful. Unfortunately there’s a plot, and songs, that have nothing to do with them. But coming as it did before strict enforcement of the Production Code began, The Devil’s Brother is sexually frank in a way movies ceased to be after January 1935: It’s perfectly obvious that the rich women who are his unwitting victims are having it off with Dennis King’s murderous jewel thief Fra Diavolo, or (as with Thelma Todd) are about to. The direction by Hal Roach and Charles Rogers is pleasant, as is the cinematography by Hap Depew and Art Lloyd, and the sequence in which Stan is supposed to be filling tankards with wine but gets nearly as much down his own throat as he does the vessels Ollie hands him, growing more and more inebriated, is a classic of its kind, as is his enactment of the game “Kneesey-Earsie-Nosey.” Todd is both luscious and amusing, and L & H’s perennial foil, James Finlayson, appears to good (if too brief) effect as her jealous husband. If you care about such things, Roach directed the musical sequences and Rogers the “book” scenes.
Capricorn One (1977) When I was 16, this crowd-pleasing paranoia thriller written and directed by Peter Hyams about a faked NASA Mars landing satisfied my post-Watergate cynicism about my government and my concomitant delight in seeing dogged investigative reporters (remember them?) portrayed on the screen. Hyams, a sort of poor-man’s Alan J. Pakula, keeps his story moving fast as three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Waterston and O. J. Simpson back when he was remembered more for his prowess on the football field than for If I Did It) are blackmailed into participating in a massive hoax, escape and are pursued across the desert by a pair of creepily anonymous high-tech black helicopters. Meanwhile, a wobbly reporter (Elliott Gould), tipped off by a NASA employee (Robert Walden) who then mysteriously disappears, latches onto the story and begins piecing it together.
Watching Capricorn One for the first time since it was released I was as pleasantly surprised by how much of it still works as I was annoyed by the things in it, such as Telly Savalas’ profane crop-duster, that seem a sop to then-fashionable audience expectations of low-comedy relief, and the Waterston character’s irritating joke-monologue as he climbs a mesa (why?) What’s most enjoyable about it are Jerry Goldsmith’s superb action score with its propulsive earworm of a main theme; Gould’s performance as the reporter; David Doyle as his cheerfully nasty editor; Hal Holbrook as the duplicitous NASA official heading the operation; and the rich supporting performances of Brenda Vaccaro, Karen Black, David Huddleston, Barbara Bosson and James Karen. Bill Butler provided the occasionally rapturous cinematography and James Mitchell the effective editing. The action set-pieces are generally well-directed by Hyams and there is a moment during the obligatory Hey-wait-my-brakes-are-gone! sequence with Gould where his car sails off a bascule bridge that is, if you have a phobia about these things, absolutely terrifying.
I am, of course, being slightly facetious when I imply there are no more serious investigative journalists in America. There are plenty. But none of them — not one — works for the corporate press (newspaper or magazine) nor for any of the broadcast radio, television or cable networks, staffed as they are almost exclusively by CIA assets or former security-state officials and employees. The names Lee Fang, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal, Whitney Webb, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Anya Parampil, Michael Tracey, Johnny Vedmore, Emma-Jo Morris, Michael Shellenberger and Kit Klarenberg are likely unknown to you, unless you make an effort to seek out their reporting or happen to catch a Congressional hearing in which they are as likely as not to be insulted, demeaned, slandered and even threatened by censorship-loving Democrats like that corrupt carpetbagger Stacey Plaskett or her colleague, the equally sleazy and anti-democratic Debbie Wasserman Schultz. But with our permanent government writing the stories it feeds to its lackeys in the corporate media and dictating to social websites what speech it will permit Americans to utter and which beliefs we are now allowed to hold, a free press, essential to a free people, is largely dead in the Land of the Free.
The Jerk (1979) I wish Steve Martin’s screen debut had been a better, funnier, movie. Taking off from Martin’s old “I was born a poor black child” stand-up routine the screenplay by him, Carl Gottlieb and Michael Elias posits his character as less a jerk than a congenital idiot, but I suppose The Moron wouldn’t have played as well on theater marquees. The picture, directed by the redoubtable Carl Reiner, is almost militantly unfunny; the laughs are so intermittent they could scarcely pad out a 30-minute television episode let alone a full-length movie. When something in the picture is amusing, it tends to elicit a smile rather than an actual laugh, as when Martin sings a dopey song in the bathtub or when he leaves Bernadette Peters near the end, a sequence largely ad-libbed by him. The only genuinely hilarious bits in The Jerk are M. Emmet Walsh’s turn as an incompetent sniper and the verbal payoff to Martin kicking Gottlieb in the testicles. (The screenwriter says even he didn’t know about the punch-line until he saw the rough-cut.) But it’s a measure of the movie’s failure that Bill Macy, Dick O’Neill, Maurice Evans, Jackie Mason and Reiner himself don’t have a funny line or bit between them.
Peters is charming as Martin’s love interest but it’s hard to believe her as a woman nearly as stupid as he is. The nicest scene in the picture, when they sing “You Belong to Me” together on the beach as he strums a ukulele, is undercut when, at its climax, she’s made to produce and play a trumpet in imitation of a Louis Armstrong riff. That should give you an idea of how incompetent and annoying The Jerk really is: Its makers couldn’t even trust a moment as sweet as that impromptu duet without trying to wring a dumb joke out of it.
The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 (1974) One of the most entertaining thrillers of its era; like Rio Bravo, it’s a movie I have over the decades seen repeatedly, and with undiminished pleasure. The picture follows the narrative of John Godey’s 1973 bestseller but Peter Stone’s sharp, often funny screenplay changes and improves on it. It’s also one of the best-cast movies of the 1970s, from Walter Matthau’s Transit Authority lieutenant faced with a highjacked subway train held for ransom and Robert Shaw as the chillingly methodical leader of the group of crooks to Doris Roberts as the Mayor’s deadpan wife and Tom Pedi as the hot-headed Transit manager Caz Dolowicz, a name that lives on in glory among us Pelham aficionados. It’s a quintessential New-York-in-the-’70s movie, and nearly everybody in it is pissed off at the world; the bad humor of its many characters adds to the picture’s flavor, and its wit. Its director, Joseph Sargent, handles the pace, the suspense and the look of the movie admirably, the editing by Gerald B. Greenberg and Robert Q. Lovett couldn’t be more apt, and Owen Roizman’s rich cinematography looks especially good in the recent 4K UHD transfer. David Shire’s brief, 12-tone-inspired score is terse and infectious — it’s one of the things about the picture you remember most, along with Matthau’s hangdog look and Martin Balsam’s head-cold.
Among the terrific actors in the supporting cast are Earl Hindman as a relatively mild-mannered highjacker; Héctor Elizondo as his polar opposite, a frighteningly mercurial, psychopathic killer; James Broderick as the train motorman; Dick O’Neill as a sour, belligerent Transit Authority controller; Lee Wallace, everyone favorite Ed Koch stand-in, as the Mayor (although Wallace’s presence predates Koch’s in Gracie Mansion by four years); Tony Roberts as the disgusted deputy mayor; Jerry Stiller as Matthau’s coeval; Kenneth McMillan as a Borough commander; and Julius Harris as the Deputy chief inspector, recipient of a priceless greeting by Matthau. The train’s passengers are well-delineated and believable except for Anna Berger as the mother of two obnoxious boys; she so overdoes every emotion you begin to long for the gunmen to summarily dispose of her. Berger is one of the very few aspects of the picture that let it down.
Planet of the Apes (1968) There are some fantasy notions so good they seem blazingly original and at the same time so creatively logical you almost can’t believe no one thought of them before their authors set them down. Pierre Boulle’s Monkey Planet was one of them, a tongue-in-cheek science-fiction novel that turned on the ultimate cosmic joke: A sphere in which apes evolved from human beings, who are in turn ruled by their evolutionary superiors. (The book is more satirical than the eventual movie: Its narrative is in the form of a missive left in space, an interstellar message-in-a-bottle picked up by a skeptical married couple who, at the end, are revealed as chimpanzees.) The movie, imaginatively directed by Franklin J. Schaffner from an intelligent screenplay credited to Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, was an enormous success for its producer Arthur P. Jacobs in 1968, eventually siring four sequels of varying quality, and several remakes in the modern era. All that from a little French speculative novel published 60 years ago.
Charlton Heston has one of his best roles as the cynical American astronaut Taylor, delighted to be leaving Earth and his fellow humans, whom he despises. The bitter joke at the core of the movie is that he more than gets his wish. He’s well-matched by his co-stars, especially Kim Hunter as the curious, compassionate scientist Zira, Roddy McDowall as her cautious fiancé Cornelius and James Whitmore as the President of the Assembly who makes Taylor defend himself in a rather too pointed spoof of the Scopes trial. (That “See-No-Evil, Hear-No-Evil, Speak-No-Evil” imagery should have been reconsidered by everyone concerned because it makes the movie momentarily something it otherwise never is: Silly.) Leon Shamroy’s fine-grained images are splendid, and the simian prosthetics created by John Chambers are still remarkable 55 years on. Jerry Goldsmith’s score is one of his most original and inventive, particularly in the big action set-pieces, such as Taylor’s capture and his later (momentary) escape.
Side-note: I can no longer contemplate Maurice Evans’s orangutan authoritarian Dr. Zaius without also thinking of the chorus in the hilarious Andrew Lloyd Webber parody Planet of the Apes musical featured in an early episode of “The Simpsons.” Even his name seems funny to me now.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) Arthur P. Jacobs’ first sequel to Planet of the Apes suffers from a sense of being rushed — not in its production but in the more perfunctory aspects of its story: The astronaut played by James Franciscus barely meets Cornelius and Zira before they give each other a few scraps of exposition and abruptly part. The chimpanzees are hardly in the movie; neither, at his own request, is Charlton Heston, although Maurice Evans returns as Dr. Zaius, as do Kim Hunter as Zira and Linda Harrison as Nova, her role even more thankless than in the original. Due to the poet-screenwriter Paul Dehn’s particularly weird sense of drama, Franciscus and Heston are confronted with intelligent human mutants who communicate, threaten and destroy telepathically, worship an unexploded cobalt bomb and wear humanoid masks over their ruined faces. (Dehn wrote the story with Mort Abrahams.) If the picture has any distinction, it’s in this aspect, and the art direction (by William Creber and Jack Martin Smith) and set decoration (by Walter M. Scott and Sven Wickman) of the underground remnants of New York. Ted Post’s direction is functional, but the visual effects are almost stunningly bad. The mutants are a clutch of splendid character actors including Victor Buono, Jeff Corey, Thomas Gomez, Don Pedro Colley, Natalie Trundy and Gregory Sierra, and James Gregory memorably portrays a militant gorilla general. The best thing about Leonard Rosenman’s futuristic score is the witty inversion he composed for the mutant bomb-worshippers of “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 
I have a McCall’s Magazine from the thirties in which Robert Sherwood, no less, reviews Fra Diavolo. I could not wait to dig in to it to see what he wrote about “The Boys.” At first glance, I saw nothing. Then I read it carefully and found one line I never forgot: “The film also includes a pair of low comedians who are indescribably unfunny.”
NO!!! Sorry. It was a review of THE ROGUE SONG. I had my first Gin and Tonic in years today… Saundra too, who is still snoring. We’re such shadows of our former selves,
123: the only thing the Metropolitan Transit Authority insisted upon was NO graffiti on the subway. The film makers thought everyone would find that laughable. I don’t think anyone, even Noo Yawkas, noticed it! (Another Gabriel Katzka production. He was the most successful film producer who never actually made a movie. He’d secure the rights to a book early on and keep his name attached to it. My hero!)
It’s Hell to get old, isn’t it? That Sherwood line, however, is hilarious. I should have mentioned the graffiti, or rather the lack of it. Did anyone in those days ever ride in a car that clean? On the “1-2-3” commentary someone says that beyond the filmmakers being allowed to film on a car from their museum, the M.T.A. refused to assist them or to let them copy their facilities. They were terrified some idiots would try to replicate the action of the movie.