The Rebel Rousers (1970)

Director: Martin B. Cohen
Writers: Abe Polsky, Michael Kars and Martin B. Cohen
Stars: Cameron Mitchell, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh dear, oh dear. Going strictly by the dates of release, Jack Nicholson ended the sixties on his highest note thus far, with Easy Rider being his first bona fide classic and bringing his first Oscar nomination, but he started the seventies on his lowest note thus far, with this debacle.

I’ve seen it before and reviewed it too, and it remains just as bad as it’s always been, but it’s a little more interesting when seen in context of Nicholson’s career.

The first important thing to know is that it wasn’t shot in 1970 in the wake of Easy Rider. It was shot in 1967 at the peak of outlaw biker movies but only released in 1970 in the wake of Easy Rider. It has more in common with Hells Angels on Wheels that was actually released in 1967, hardly a great outlaw biker movie either but a heck of a lot better than this with a far better part for Nicholson.

Lady of the Night (1925)

Director: Monta Bell
Writer: Adela Rogers St. Johns and Alice D. G. Miller
Stars: Norma Shearer, Malcolm Mac Gregor and George K. Arthur

I wasn’t expecting to like Lady of the Night as much as I did, especially as I had seen it before and didn’t rate it highly back in 2006. I’ve also never been a huge fan of Norma Shearer, who was the biggest female star at MGM back then, only partly because she was married to Irving Thalberg, their head of production.

However, she’s highly impressive here in a double role, as the eighteen year old versions of the two babies we meet at the beginning of the film. One is born poor, her father already in handcuffs as her mother names her Molly; Judge Banning soon sentences him to twenty years. The other is born rich, to the very same judge, her name being Florence.

Shearer delineates these two characters in a number of ways and, while I’m still puzzled as to why nobody who meets both ever chooses to comment that they look stunningly alike, I never confused them once, even though they are actively compared often, including in their very first scenes.

Easy Rider (1969)

Director: Dennis Hopper
Writers: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern
Stars: Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

Well, here’s the gamechanger, the film that made Jack Nicholson a star, even though he’s not in it for as long as I remembered and then not until almost halfway. His role here landed him an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor, a real wake-up call to someone who had been writing and producing films to diversify after a decade of bit parts and B-movies.

It’s been fascinating to watch him grow as an actor, from the weak lead of The Cry Baby Killer and The Wild Ride to entertaining support in The Broken Land and Flight to Fury to the best thing about the movie in Back Door to Hell and Hells Angels on Wheels.

It’s also been fascinating to see so much of those earlier movies combining here. It’s like he was waiting for the counterculture to show up to see what he could do. This film too feels like the natural child of acid westerns like The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, outlaw biker movies like Hells Angels on Wheels and drug movies like Psych-Out and Head.

The Monster (1925)

Director: Roland West
Writer: Willard Mack and Albert G. Kenyon, based on the play by Crane Wilbur
Stars: Lon Chaney and Johnny Arthur

Here’s an interesting movie, but not for the reasons we expect. I’m up for anything that’s got Lon Chaney in the cast, but he doesn’t do much in this film and he overdoes what little he does. His other two extant 1925 movies are notable for him rather than other people; this one isn’t worth watching for Chaney alone.

However, it’s absolutely worth watching for fans of director Roland West, made before The Bat and The Bat Whispers and outdoing both of them on the old dark house front. In fact, this outdoes The Old Dark House, which wouldn’t be made for another seven years anyway. Once it gets moving, every scene seems to feature at least one and often two or three different old dark house tropes arriving so quickly that we can’t close our eyes in case we miss some.

It does take a little while to get moving and much of that is because, while Chaney was the big name, it’s really a Johnny Arthur vehicle, a comedy horror with him getting scared at any opportunity that arises but somehow making it through to be the hero anyway. In that way, it’s as much a precursor to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein as The Old Dark House.

Cross of Iron (1977)

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Writers: Julius Epstein, Walter Kelley and James Hamilton, based on the book by Willi Heinrich
Stars: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason, David Warner and Senta Berger

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Cross of Iron is a polarising movie and it’s not hard to see why both sides think the way they do. The people who dislike it see the weak plot and overwhelming amount of explosions. That seems fair. On the other hand, the people who like it tend to love it because it isn’t about plot but immersion and overwhelming is the point.

Initially, it’s a little jarring, because of, well, everything. Sure, we’re in World War II, which isn’t unusual, but it seems so otherwise.

For a start, we’re on the German side, which I should emphasise is not necessarily the Nazi side. There’s only one Nazi in this film and he meets an appropriately awful end: the Russian soldier he raped in a barn bit off his penis and Sgt. Steiner walks in the rest of her platoon to do with him what they will.

Images (1972)

Director: Robert Altman
Writers: Robert Altman and Susannah York
Stars: Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Marcel Bozzuffi, Hugh Millais and Cathryn Harrison

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’m very happy that I chose to review Images to remember director Robert Altman on what would have been his hundredth birthday, but it’s a challenging movie to watch or review.

Of course, he was never an easy director to nail down. He hopped genres for fun—this is arguably a horror movie—and involved actors heavily in the writing process by having them develop their characters from his initial ideas. Susannah York has a writing credit here as she actually wrote the book that her character is writing in it, In Search of Unicorns.

If there’s such a creature as a typical Altman film, then this isn’t it. It doesn’t feature a huge ensemble cast. It doesn’t appear to contain an ounce of satire. Only one member of the cast is someone he worked with often. However, it’s a highly personal feature that’s as close to pure cinema as an American horror movie has got.

Head (1968)

Director: Bob Rafelson
Writer: Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson
Stars: Peter Tork, David Jones, Micky Dolenz and Michael Nesmith

Index: The First Thirty.

Going into this movie, I noted that it’s been a couple of decades since I last saw Head and I don’t remember much about it, just that it was a Monkees film with Frank Zappa and a mule.

Then I realised that I’d written a review of it in 2007, in which I mentioned that “It’s been a couple of decades since I saw Head and I don't remember much about it, except that beyond the Monkees, there was Frank Zappa and a mule and not a lot of sense.”

So, nothing’s changed. Including that it was a bull not a mule. I clarified that at the end of my previous review and it’s even on the poster if you look closely enough, but I forgot again anyway. The one thing I remember about this film isn’t in this film, which may actually be oddly appropriate. To borrow actual dialogue, I “can’t distinguish between what’s real and what’s vividly imagined experience”?

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

Director: Michael Cimino
Writer: Michael Cimino
Stars: Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges, George KEnnedy and Geoffrey Lewis

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I could have sworn that I’d seen Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, along with every other film that Clint Eastwood made during the seventies, but I was wrong because this was new to me.

It’s an odd film in a number of ways. For one thing, it’s a very likeable film even though I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t be. If any character in it charmed us in real life, we’d be worse off for the experience. For another, it’s violent crime action in the seventies style but told as an easy and free sixties road movie. In fact, it’s not too hard to see it as a modern take on the end of the Old West from debuting Michael Cimino.

It starts out with Thunderbolt and Lightfoot meeting for the first time, even if the former isn’t introduced for quite a while. Lightfoot is Jeff Bridges, who walks into Dependable Pete’s Used Cars in leather trousers and steals a car. Five minutes on, he swerves into a wheatfield to avoid a preacher, knocking down the man shooting at him. Eastwood is the priest.

That Certain Summer (1972)

Director: Lamont Johnson
Writers: Richard Levinson and William Link
Stars: Hal Holbrook, Martin Sheen, Joe Don Baker, Marlyn Mason, Scott Jacoby and Hope Lange

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Hal Holbrook turned the lead role in this TV movie down when it was offered to him, as he felt that nothing much happened in it. He isn’t wrong, at least from one perspective, but it’s a groundbreaking gamechanger from another.

He’s Doug Salter, who’s divorced with a son, lives in San Francisco and runs a contracting business. That son, Nick, who’s fourteen years old, lives down the coast in Los Angeles with his mother Janet, but is about to fly out to spend a summer with his dad, who he misses.

They drive around and see the sights, talk to each other in classic movie voices and host a party for friends and neighbours to celebrate Nick being there. Nick gets to see dad at work and he meets one of dad’s friends, Gary, who’s a sound engineer.

Late in the film, Nick takes off and spends a day riding the trams; he isn’t running away so much as he’s going walkabout to think about things, but it worries his parents, of course. He does come back, I should add, and flies home with his mum at the end of the movie.

The Swan (1925)

Director: Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy
Writer: Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy, based on the play by Ferenc Molnár
Stars: Adolphe Menjou, Ricardo Cortez and Frances Howard

If The Rag Man was an emotional but highly predictable film for the whole family, then The Swan is all of those things but for women. This is a textbook weepie, the sort of stereotypical picture that men hated and women wept over.

It’s based on a Hungarian play, A hattyú, or The Swan, by Ferenc Molnár, a comedy whose comedy seems to have been lost in translation. On the other hand, it had tragic undercurrents which are emphasised in this version. Some of the scenes almost seem brutal in their tragedy and it’s hard to imagine comedy ever having been associated. And I say that as a devotee of the blackest English humour. I see Kind Hearts and Coronets as an absolute masterpiece. I have no issue with comedy and tragedy co-existing.

The story also seems to be so threadbare as to be archetypal. Was it successful because it’s the originator of a trope? I don’t know. Given that I liked the 1956 remake for its dialogue, a notion helped by actors of the calibre of Grace Kelly, Estelle Winwood and Agnes Moorehead, not to forget Alec Guinness, there to deliver it, I wonder if this struggles because it inherently doesn’t have much dialogue, as a silent movie.

The Rag Man (1925)

Director: Edward F. Cline
Writers: Willard Mack and Robert E. Hopkins
Star: Jackie Coogan

The first entirely MGM outing for child star Jackie Coogan arrived four years after his huge appearance in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid and it borrows from it considerably.

For a start, he’s an orphan again, though he has a place in an orphanage this time out. The catch is that the orphanage is on fire when the film begins and so, rather cleverly, is the title card that tells us that.

He does climb out, using bedsheeets that are tied together but they’re also on fire and they drop him on the ground and wrap around him, so the firemen putting out the flames inadvertently bounce him out to the street, where a cop chases him away because he’s only dressed in a nightshirt.

And so he’s on the loose in New York City, a couple of years younger than Macaulay Culkin was when he made Home Alone II and without a packed wallet that will get him into the Plaza Hotel. Instead he sleeps his first night in the back of a rag man’s horsedrawn cart, in which he also finds a sweater, a pair of trousers and a familiar looking hat. He has to cut the trousers down to size by placing them on tram tracks, but that’s only the first of his bright ideas that works a treat.

Psych-Out (1968)

Director: Richard Rush
Writers: E. Hunter Willett and Betty Ulius, based on a story by E. Hunter Willett
Stars: Susan Strasberg, Dean Stockwell, Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern

Index: The First Thirty.

Back in 1968, when Psych-Out was released, the names AIP felt would draw the public into buying tickets were Susan Strasberg and Dean Stockwell. The former is the lead, doing a good job at playing deaf. The latter, however, isn’t particularly prominent, though he does a very good job and exits the film in notable style.

Looking back from 2025, it’s different names that would draw us in. Strasberg’s male lead is really Jack Nicholson, the most famous actor in the film now. The MacGuffin of the piece is Bruce Dern, who’s also still going strong.

More hardcore cinema junkies might focus on Richard Rush or László Kovács, the director and cinematographer respectively, as well as Henry Jaglom, not yet a notable experimental director, but memorable for a scene in which his character freaks out and tries to cut off his own hand believing it to be that of a zombie.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Howard Browne
Stars: Jason Robards, George Segal, Ralph Meeker and Jean Hale

Index: The First Thirty.

I’m not going to be able to review this Roger Corman picture from my usual perspective of the part Jack Nicholson plays in it, because he has very little to do at all.

Let’s just say that it’s a docudrama about the real massacre of the title, in which men hired by Al Capone gunned down seven members of his rival Bugs Moran’s North Side Gang on the famous day in 1929 and Nicholson plays one of that crew, a gangster named Gino. He’s not one of the killers, but he’s there as it happens, waiting outside the S. M. C. Cartage Company as their getaway driver.

We first see him after Heitler buys the car, because he backs it into a garage and unloads it. He also delivers a line as the killers prepare, pointing out in a rather rough voice that one of them coats his bullets with garlic because, if a victim survives, he’ll get blood poisoning.

Hells Angels on Wheels (1967)

Director: Richard Rush
Writer: R. Wright Campbell
Stars: Adam Roarke, Jack Nicholson and Sabrina Scharf

Index: The First Thirty.

Early on, before Easy Rider utterly changed his career trajectory, Jack Nicholson served as a reliable regular in the stock companies of a select few directors. Out of his first seventeen features, eleven were directed by either Monte Hellman, Roger Corman or Richard Rush.

This was his second for the latter, after the wildly different Too Soon to Love, but it bears a lot of similarities to the third, Psych-Out, which would follow in 1968. Both focus on particular American subcultures whose participants have opted out of regular society. Both look at how leaving norms behind is freeing but have big drawbacks. Both end in tragedy.

Here, the subculture is bikers, especially the Hells Angels of the title, who provided extras from four different chapters. Also credited are the Nomads of Sacramento but it’s the Angels who stamped an official approval on the film through Sonny Barger, their “leader”—quoted from the poster as he often denied that he was the president his credit calls him—having an unspeaking role early in the film.

Missing (1982)

Director: Costa-Gavras
Writers: Costa-Gavras and Donald E. Stewart, based on the book The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser
Stars: Jack Lemmon, Sissy Spacek, Melanie Mayron and John Shea

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Jack Lemmon was nominated for an Oscar on eight films. The first was for Mister Roberts in 1955, for which he won as Best Supporting Actor, and I coincidentally watched that this week as prep for its sequel in Jack Nicholson’s First Thirty. Now I’m watching Missing for his centennial, as it was the last of the eight nods, this time as Best Actor. He lost to Ben Kingsley for the year’s biggest picture, Gandhi.

It’s also a rather timely film, given the news of late, as it’s the true story of a coup, in Chile in 1973, when the U.S. aided the removal of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, in favour of a brutal military regime run by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

More specifically, given that most of those names, like Allende, Pinochet and even Chile, are carefully never mentioned in the film, it’s a look at the effect of such a coup on a family. The missing man is Charlie Horman, a writer from New York state, and much of the movie is dedicated to the search for him by his wife Beth and his father Ed, the latter of whom has flown out specially after not getting answers he likes from the powers that be back home.

The Lost World (1925)

Director: Harry O. Hoyt
Writer: Marion Fairfax, based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle
Stars: Bessie Love, Lewis Stone, Wallace Beery and Lloyd Hughes

Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this one! I have seen it before, probably more than once, but not for a couple of decades and I’m unsure as to the completeness of those versions. Now, I’m watching as complete a version as exists, a 92 minute composite of eight prints.

It’s the Arthur Conan Doyle story, of course, a pivotal 1912 novel that didn’t invent a genre but did give it a name. It stands up very well as a smooth read free of the excesses of Victorian literature and as an archetypal adventure.

Of course, Hollywood ached to adapt it but a crucial detail needed to be squared away. How were they going to depict the dinosaurs? Well, enter Willis O’Brien, who had been animating them in stop motion since The Dinosaur and the Missing Link in 1915 and the far more advanced The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in 1918. He’s best known today as the animator of King Kong but his work here was just as pioneering.

Ride in the Whirlwind (1965)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Jack Nicholson
Stars: Cameron Mitchell, Millie Perkins and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

The second of Jack Nicholson’s westerns for Monte Hellman, shot back to back in the Utah desert with the first, The Shooting, isn’t quite as stripped down but it’s almost as nihilistic and it’s an excellent companion piece.

Like with The Shooting, the poster is notably misleading as this predates Easy Rider and Jack is not the star of the film. This time out, that’s Cameron Mitchell, as Vern, the leader of three cowboys heading for Waco, with the other two being Wes and Otis, played by Nicholson and Tom Filer respectively.

The Crazy Ray (1925)

Director: René Clair
Writer: René Clair
Stars: Henri Rollan, Albert Préjean, Madeleine Rodrigue, Louis Pré Fils, Antoine Stacquet, Marcel Vallée, Charles Martinelli and Myla Seller

Less than a week after Josef von Sternberg’s debut with The Salvation Hunters, another film legend of the future, René Clair, debuted with this short and unusual science fiction feature, although I believe his second picture, Entr’acte, was released first, in 1924.

It’s usually titled The Crazy Ray in English, a much edited version released as At 3:25, but its original French title translates to Paris Asleep, which carries a lot more depth. As French film tends to do, it asks many questions, but it isn’t particularly interested in answering any. It’s a happy and very cinematic curiosity.

Initially it’s a curiosity because of its dream of a location. Albert wakes up one morning to look out over Paris from a singular point: he’s at the very top of the Eiffel Tower, where he’s presumably working as a night watchman. The views of 1924 Paris from this height are magic andshots of the tower are even better still. The one of him walking down the spiral staircase at its heart while the camera slowly descends alongside him is a thing of beauty indeed.

The Shooting (1966)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writer: Adrien Joyce
Stars: Will Hutchins, Millie Perkins, Jack Nicholson and Warren Oates

Index: The First Thirty.

Before this project, I hadn’t seen any of the four movies Jack Nicholson made for and often with Monte Hellman, given that he wasn’t just an actor; he wrote Flight to Fury and Ride in the Whirlwind and he co-produced Back Door to Hell and The Shooting. After seeing the first couple, shot back to back in the Philippines, I can’t say I had much hope for the second couple, shot back to back in the Utah desert.

How wrong I was! These two westerns turn out not only to be good movies but important ones too. They’re arguably the very first acid westerns, which weren’t necessarily all about drugs but about flipping a genre on its head. It has been said that westerns are a path towards freedom and justice, while acid westerns are a path towards death.

It was first used as a term by Pauline Kael in a review of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo in 1971, but Jonathan Rosenbaum later applied it to these earlier films. I’ve long appreciated the alternative list he put together to counter the AFI’s annoyingly safe 100 Years... 100 Movies list, including films that dared to be different and sparked change in film. The Shooting is on that list, because that’s precisely what it did.

A Raisin in the Sun (1961)

Director: Daniel Petrie
Writer: Lorraine Hansberry, from her play
Stars: Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee

Index: 2025 Centennials.

It’s Black History Month, whether Trump’s administration is willing to acknowledge it or not. It therefore seems appropriate to review this film now, even though I’m actually doing so for a white actor, in fact the one and only white actor in the entire movie. He’s literally the token white guy.

He’s John Fiedler, who would have been one hundred years old today. While he only has a supporting role, it’s a notable one. The entire closing monologue, a tearjerking showcase of a monologue, is delivered to him and he walks out utterly silenced. Well, for now, at least.

A Raisin in the Sun is a powerful film indeed and part of its success is that it was based on a powerful play, the first Broadway production by a black woman, Lorraine Hansberry, as well as the first by a black director, Lloyd Richards. It didn’t win a Tony from its four nominations but it was the New York Drama Critics’ Circle’s best play of 1959. It ran for 530 performances.

Crucially, almost the entire cast transferred over to this feature version, as did the writer, so they were all well and truly invested in the roles they played and the relationships their characters had with each other.

Back Door to Hell (1964)

Director: Monte Hellman
Writers: Richard A. Guttman and John Hackett, based on a story by Richard A. Guttman
Stars: Jimmie Rodgers, Jack Nicholson, John Hackett, Annabelle Huggins and Conrad Maga

Index: The First Thirty.

This is the second of four pictures in a row that Nicholson made with Monte Hellman and there’s some powerful irony in play this time.

Flight to Fury was his tenth picture and none of the ones before it had established him as an actor, so he began to diversify his roles off the screen. He wrote that one, he co-produced this one and he did both for Ride in the Whirlwind, two films on. He got the opportunity because producer Robert Lippert had been impressed by his writing for Thunder Island a year earlier.

After all, if he wasn’t going to make it as an actor, then maybe he’d make it as a writer or a producer. Those jobs paid well. Given all that, it’s acutely ironic that this be his first film in which he is without a doubt the best actor.

The Salvation Hunters (1925)

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Writer: Josef von Sternberg
Stars: George K. Arthur, Georgia Hale and Bruce Guerin

After precisely no notable new feature films in January 1925, February started off with one from a complete unknown of a director, Josef von Sternberg.

He was Austro-Hungarian, born in Vienna in 1894 and he would become a major filmmaker, often credited for inventing the gangster film, with 1927’s Underworld, and lauded for a string of important films starring Marlene Dietrich, not least The Blue Angel, Morocco and Shanghai Express, the latter two landing him Oscar nods. Talking of Oscar, he’d also direct Emil Jannings in what would become the very first Academy Award-winning performance for Best Actor, in 1928’s The Last Command.

Needless to say, this picture isn’t up to those standards, but it’s an interesting one, notably artistic and feeling much more European than American, though it was made in Hollywood.

It’s a depressing picture but it’s meant to be. The Great Depression didn’t happen until 1929 but times were tough in the twenties and this film makes them seem even tougher. Tellingly, everything is kept vague, none of the locations or characters given names, and stripping their identities helps us to realise not only that they could be anyone anywhere but also that they simply don’t matter to the world at large.