On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970)

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Writer: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his musical
Stars: Barbra Streisand and Yves Montand

Index: The First Thirty.

Regular readers will know that I’m hardly a fan of most musicals and, for a while, this fell into the category of engaging story plagued by annoyingly bland songs. In fact, it opens that way, with gorgeous time lapse photography of flowers growing from seeds to being delivered to market, accompanied by the strong voice of Barbra Streisand singing a boring song.

By the time we get another boring song, the film has set up a serious amount of story and it’s rather fascinating. Yves Montand, playing Dr. Marc Chabot, teaches a psychology class about hypnosis by taking Preston back to his childhood but that’s paused as Daisy Gamble is accidentally hypnotised in the audience too.

She’s not a student; she came to him to help her quit smoking, for weird reasons that tease her as having ESP. She knows both what he’s looking for in his office and where to find it: in the dictionary under X. She knows when the phone’s about to ring, any phone. And she has feelings when people think about her so goes to see them in preparation.

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

Index: That's a Wrap!

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

Index: That's a Wrap!

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.