Slap Shot (1977)

Director: George Roy Hill
Writer: Nancy Dowd
Stars: Paul Newman, Strother Martin and Michael Ontkean

Index: 2025 Centennials.

I’ve seen a lot of Paul Newman movies, from early films like Somebody Up There Likes Me to late ones like Road to Perdition. Somehow I not only hadn’t seen Slap Shot but hadn’t realised it was a comedy.

I knew that it was an ice hockey movie from the seventies and that it was violent, famously so, but I was under the impression that it was a more realistic equivalent to Rollerball. Well, it isn’t. It’s violent, for sure, but I found it to be a drama, first and foremost, that often took time to be funny. I liked it more than I expected to.

The humour is almost cartoonish, so much so that it’s not very realistic, but the funniest thing of all is that almost everything that feels unrealistic actually happened in real life. This is no documentary, but it seems to be true to the spirit of what was happening in the minor hockey leagues during the early seventies and, in many instances, the detail as well.

The Terror (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writers: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill
Stars: Boris Karloff, Jack Nicholson and Sandra Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

The Terror is one of those movies that’s a lot more interesting than it is good. Then again, it really had no business being any level of good, given that it was shot on the sets of The Raven during the two days Roger Corman had before they would be torn down, the same two days he had the continued use of Boris Karloff.

He didn’t have a script, just a vague idea, so had Karloff and a few other actors do generic things like walking down hallways or through doors and, of course, talking to each other, as people do, so a writer could conjure up a story around it later. The idea was coherent enough, at least, to have Karloff spend a few hours in a tank of cold water for the finalé.

That writer was Leo Gordon, a co-writer of The Cry Baby Killer. Once his script was written, Corman brought in another director to shoot everything else, because he was union and he didn’t have the budget to shoot extra footage according to union rules.

More footage was needed but that director had taken another job, so a friend of his shot some scenes. Then a fourth director took care of some exterior shots, a fifth supposedly took care of the rest but a sixth shot the last day. A two day shoot therefore ended up taking nine months and the results are about as coherent as you can imagine, with creative input from all of those different people.

The Raven (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Richard Matheson, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe
Stars: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff

Index: The First Thirty.

I’ve always been in two minds about Roger Corman’s fifth Edgar Allan Poe adaptation and a fresh viewing doesn’t change that.

On one hand, it’s a flimsy movie indeed, the source material—Poe’s famous poem—adapted so loosely that it would be unrecognisable but for Vincent Price’s memorable voice reading a part of it at the very beginning. There are very few characters and, twists aside, they’re all of little substance. What’s more, unlike its four predecessors, it’s played primarily for laughs and with inconsistent effect.

On the other hand, it’s a ridiculous amount of fun. Price camps it up unashamedly. Peter Lorre steals every scene he can from him with ruthless intent. And Boris Karloff adds some weight to proceedings by playing it straight, a stellar decision regardless of how outrageous his character actually is. Hazel Court and Jack Nicholson are really just icing on the cake. We could focus only on the sorcery duel with 1963 special effects and this would be worthy.

As a result, the critic in my head continued to find fault, but the fan next to him ignored it all and revelled in its insanity. How it will play to you in 2025 will depend on which voice you want to listen to.

The Broken Land (1962)

Director: John Bushelman
Writer: Edward Lakso
Stars: Kent Taylor, Diana Darrin, Jody McCrea, Robert Sampson and Jack Nicholson

Index: The First Thirty.

Jack Nicholson checked off many genres in his early years. He started in teen exploitation pictures but they shifted from crime through melodrama to hot rod racing. Then it was dark comedy and historical drama—if we could call the 1920s historical in 1960. Here, he acted in a western before finding his way into horror.

The Broken Land apparently ran for seventy minutes but the only versions I can find are a mere sixty minutes long. Clearly something’s gone but I couldn’t tell you what it was. There are too many scenes of padding as it is, with a succession of characters riding here or there or somewhere when the editor could have just taken us there in a snap.

It’s the late 1870s and the frontiers are gone for the most part as law and civilisation take root. The deepest this movie gets, which isn’t particularly deep, is to ask us what law means. The telling speech there is given by a marshal of a tiny town that doesn’t seem large enough to warrant one, so he can explain his mind to his much younger fiancée.

He’s Marshal Jim Cogan, who’s played by the ever-reliable Kent Taylor, and he believes that the law is some sort of gospel truth delivered from on high. “You see, no man really knows right from wrong,” he says. “That’s why laws are invented. I’ve lived by them all my life. It’s the only way I can be sure of myself.”

Studs Lonigan (1960)

Director: Irving Lerner
Writer: Philip Yordan, based on the novels by James T. Farrell
Stars: Frank Gorshin, Venetia Stevenson, Carolyn Craig, Jack Nicholson, Robert Casper, Dick Foran, Katherine Squire and Christopher Knight

Index: The First Thirty.

Nowadays, the trend seems to be to adapt a single book into a trilogy. Hello, The Hobbit! In 1960, Studs Lonigan took the opposite approach by adapting three novels by James T. Farrell into a single hour and a half movie. Needless to say, it skips forward in time a lot and misses a heck of a lot out. Does it matter? Maybe not.

The point is that William Lonigan is a young man living in the Roman Catholic south side of Chicago in the twenties and he proves unable to escape any part of that, however much he tries to (or doesn’t). Farrell knew the time and place (this trilogy was published from 1932 to 1935) and suggests that the “spiritual poverty” carved into its every aspect was inescapable.

If it wasn’t immediately apparent that this was a naturalistic drama, very American in the setting but very European in the telling, Studs Lonigan is played by Christopher Knight, who landed an “introducing” credit. He’s certainly game enough and he gives it a fair shot, but he does reach Reefer Madness levels of histrionics, only made one more film and is best known today for a near marriage to philanthropist John D. Rockefeller’s granddaughter Neva.

The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Charles B. Griffith
Stars: Jonathan Haze, Jackie Joseph and Mel Welles

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh, it’s been a long while since I’ve seen this little gem, though I revisited A Bucket of Blood a lot more recently, a thematic predecessor on whose sets it was shot. It was the first of four films Jack Nicholson made with Roger Corman in the director’s chair; Corman had produced his debut, The Cry Baby Killer. He isn’t the lead, but he does have a highly memorable role.

For a throwaway B-movie feature made on a budget of under $30,000 and shot in only two days (because that’s how long those sets were going to be up), The Little Shop of Horrors has found some major legs. It built a cult audience quickly, continued to build it on television (it’s in the public domain) and eventually exploded in popularity after it was given the Broadway musical treatment which was filmed in 1986 by Frank Oz. It even became an animated show on Fox Kids, horror removed.

I much prefer the original, not only because it isn’t a musical but because it does so much with so little. Corman didn’t give much effort to making the sets look grand, so Mushnick’s Florists has a sign reading “Lots Plants Cheap” and almost everything we see takes place in it, almost like a play. However, the screenplay, by regular Corman writer Charles B. Griffith, is darkly witty, full of New York Jewish dialect, black humour and malapropisms, and the big cast of character actors nail the delivery. “It’s a finger of speech!”

The Big Gundown (1967)

Director: Sergio Sollima
Writers: Franco Solinas and Fernando Morandi, based on a story by Sergio Donati and Franco Solinas
Stars: Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian and Walter Barnes

I remember learning from Alex Cox that all the great spaghetti westerns are directed by a man named Sergio. There’s Leone, of course, but Corbucci and Sollima as well. This is one of the latter’s greatest films and it stands up well to my memory of it from two decades ago.

I’m watching it because 9th January would be Lee Van Cleef’s hundredth birthday and so chose the English dub rather than the original Italian language version. It’s an odd dub that shifts now and then back to Italian, with Van Cleef’s voice dubbed, but it mostly features his memorably deep voice.

He’s the hero of the film, Jonathan Corbett, but one of the best things about it is that he’s not a clear hero. He has honour and integrity and he’s cleaned up his part of the west, with the sheriff’s wall now free of wanted posters. His friends are keen for him to run for senator. However, he gets suckered into going after a Mexican who supposedly raped and murdered a twelve year old girl, without seeking proof first, becoming a rather flawed arm of justice. We may not be in on the real story yet, but we can see that it’s clearly a setup from the start.

The Wild Ride (1960)

Director: Harvey Berman
Writers: Marion Rothman and Ann Potter, based on a story by Burt Topper
Stars: Jack Nicholson, Georgianna Carter and Robert Bean

Index: The First Thirty.

Oh boy! Everything I expected from obscure teen exploitation films like The Cry Baby Killer and Too Soon for Love manifested here instead. I stand by both of those being better than we’re conditioned to expect. I can’t say that here.

This is a pretty dismal and rather unlikeable teen exploitation flick, only an hour long and that at least half an hour too much. Most of it boils down to a dick measuring contest for no particular title except that of far out stud in a small town juvenile delinquent clique.

Top stud when we begin is Jack Nicholson as Johnny Varron, who’s done precisely nothing at this point except force a motorcycle cop off the road. “Chicken!” he says, as the cop hits a tree, and then he goes about his day. We learn a little later that it’s Officer Neely who’s now fighting for his life in hospital.

Too Soon to Love (1960)

Director: Richard Rush
Writers: Laszlo Gorog and Richard Rush
Stars: Jennifer West and Richard Evans

Index: The First Thirty.

Jack Nicholson doesn’t have much of a part to play in Too Soon to Love, here and gone again in a few short scenes at a drive-in theatre. The rest of the cast are nobodies, as indeed he was at the time, though a couple of the supporting adult characters went on to parts of note.

The director is the other big name, though he was debuting here. Richard Rush went on to direct The Stunt Man, Freebie and the Bean and a couple of other Nicholson pictures, Psych-Out and Hell’s Angels on Wheels. He co-wrote it with László Görög, who had penned The Mole People and Earth vs. The Spider, hardly nuanced fare.

It would be easy to automatically write this off, but that would be unfair, because it turns out to be a surprisingly effective drama that persists in going further than I expected it to. I don’t know how many times I said “Damn!” during the second half but it had to be a lot.

The Cry Baby Killer (1958)

Director: Justus Addiss
Writer: Leo Gordon and Melvin Lavy
Stars: Harry Lauter, Jack Nicholson and Carolyn Mitchell

Index: The First Thirty.

Yes, Jack Nicholson, star of so many eighties and nineties movies, started out way back in the fifties, when he was shockingly young but still recognisable. His name surely eclipses all the others above today but he was very much a new kid in 1958 working on his first picture.

The biggest name other than Nicholson’s to our eyes today is that of the producer, Roger Corman, for whom Nicholson worked in many of his early films, not only as an actor but as whatever a film needed at any particular time. If you know Corman’s name, then it shouldn’t surprise you to find that this is an exploitation film, but it doesn’t do a bad job at mimicking the effects of Ace in the Hole on a tiny budget.

Other than the opening scene, which is set in a dark alley, the whole picture unfolds in or around Pete Gambelli’s café. There are a lot of characters, meaning that a lot of actors get to have moments in the spotlight. Nicholson gets surprisingly little to do, but he’s arguably the lead character, even with second billing after Harry Lauter, and his character is absolutely the driving force of the entire picture.