GUMSHOE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Stephen Frears Debut Hardboiled Brit Kitchen Sink

Finney great as hardboiled schlub

Gumshoe (1971)
dir. Stephen Frears
Starring: Albert Finney, Frank Finlay, Billie Whitelaw, Janice Rule

Review By Greg Klymkiw

One of the most infuriating things is when a picture throws in everything, including the kitchen sink, and resembles a ratty patchwork quilt designed to comfort the posteriors of smelly hippies sitting on a cold, rain-soaked, mosquito-breeding patch of earth during some loathsome folk festival. On the other hand, there are patchwork quilts like Stephen Frears’s first feature Gumshoe which, like the work of a serious folk artist, is designed specifically for aesthetic scrutiny.

Frears’s long-form debut wanders between loving parodistic homage and straightforward detective drama – a picture that succeeds winningly in spite (or perhaps even because) of its desire to both comment on the form of detective fiction whilst being the thing itself. In this sense, Gumshoe comes close to satire, but because it doesn’t have a mean bone in its celluloid body (save for some of the roughing-up the genre demands) and never quite comes close to roasting the folly of humanity over an open fire in the Swift-like fashion we’ve become accustomed to, it doesn’t really earn the right to be called satire either. It earns the right, however, to be called a kick-ass picture that stays with you long after it’s unspooled.

Spinning the tale of clinically depressed schlub Eddie Ginley (Albert Finney) and his obsession to parlay a photographic memory of hardboiled detective movies into his own reality, Gumshoe uses every cliché in the Warner-Brothers-RKO book. Of course, so does Eddie, and he’s the one driving the narrative – a narrative where dream gives way to reality.

When we first meet Eddie, he’s undergoing therapy and working in a seedy working class Liverpool nightclub as an emcee, bingo caller and standup comedian. Longing to be part of the world of rumpled Humphrey Bogarts where he can merrily be dispensing wisecracks, justice and indulging in kisses and repartee with a bevy of femme fatales (and potential victims of the evils of higher powers), he’s a man in search of something, anything that can help him escape what a miserable drudge his life has become. Turning 31 years of age, Eddie treats himself to a want ad in the newspaper announcing his services as a gumshoe – a private eye for whom no job is too big, too small or too dangerous. Quicker than he can spit out a hard-boiled quip, he’s offered a seemingly routine job on a case that eventually extends well beyond its simple surface intrigue.

The convoluted mystery that follows is, like most mysteries, secondary to the world and style of the genre itself. What really sets Gumshoeapart is that Eddie’s just a regular Joe and most importantly, his stylized patter and adventures are set against a kitchen sink British backdrop that would definitely be more at home in the "Angry Young Man" genre of the early 60s where the likes of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Tom Courtenay and Laurence Harvey railed against the injustices of working class life, but seldom found a way to crawl completely out of the muck. Eddie’s character is certainly not unlike those abovementioned anti-heroes. His ex-wife Ellen (Billie Whitelaw), a woman he will always love, left him for his own brother William (Frank Finlay), a shipping magnate who offered the sort of stability Eddie could never provide and, even to the end, has no intention of ever providing.

And, of course, in any great crime drama, betrayal always cuts deeper than anyone involved in the proceedings could ever imagine and in Gumshoe, betrayal is laid on thickly indeed, pistol-whipping Eddie constantly in the face.

This is an incredibly strange, beautiful and compelling picture. I’ve avoided detailing too much of the mystery, not so much for the continual surprises it offers, but because there is a political backdrop that, while dated, seems to have as much, if not more resonance in our contemporary world of strife and the gradual discovery of this makes for extremely engaging viewing. Also, Eddie’s family situation is one that figures very prominently in the proceedings and this is an especially poignant touch.

Save for a clunker of a performance from Janice Rule (though she looks great) as a femme fatale, the movie explodes with great acting. Finney fits his role like a glove and frankly, it might be one of his best performances in a very stellar career. As his brother Willie, Frank Finlay is the icy epitome of familial meanness.

Neville Smith’s screenplay bristles with crisp hardboiled narration and dialogue and the characters are full of delightful eccentricities and subtexts that always add to the forward movement of the convoluted, but always compelling narrative. The cinematography by Chris Menges (The Killing Fields, The Mission) dazzles with its stunning virtuosity. Blending film noir stylings with garish kitchen sink realism, this is perhaps one of the picture’s greatest achievements. The lighting and compositions are in perfect tandem with the strangeness of the screenplay and the two worlds that are often separate, but occasionally blend together, is always a visual wonder to behold. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s weird-ass score that veers from parody to homage to out and out straight up romantic old-Hollywood stylings is occasionally jarring in the wrong ways, but more often than not, hits the notes it needs to.

And last, but certainly not least, threading this altogether is Frears’ bold, yet controlled direction. He clearly loves these characters and this world. And frankly, so do we.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three and a half stars

Gumshoe is currently available on the Columbia Pictures Home Entertainment DVD label as part of their “Martini Movies” brand, which seems like a convenient way to lump a grab bag of catalogue titles under one banner. Alas, the banner makes no sense whatsoever with respect to the vast majority of films contained under it.

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GETTING STRAIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Important 70s examination of academia, civil unrest from Richard Rush, director of The Stunt Man, featuring a truly GREAT performance by Elliot Gould. This movie demands a proper Criterion or Kino Lorber edition featuring my dream commentary w/ Gould & Rush moderated by critic Kim Morgan!

Every kid growing up in the 70s wanted to be Elliot Gould because he was (and still is) so FUCKING COOL!

ELLIOT GOULD
with preppie/druggie
HARRISON FORD

Getting Straight (1970)
dir. Richard Rush
Starring: Elliot Gould, Candice Bergen, Harrison Ford, Brenda Sykes

Review By Greg Klymkiw

During the general 60s/70s American mayhem of the civil rights movement, Vietnam, protests, the draft and the JFK/RFK/King assassinations, one event still stands apart from the rest.

The Kent State University Massacre in Ohio of 1970 continues to send shudders through us all - that horrific moment when American National Guardsmen fired off live rounds of ammunition into throngs of innocent student protesters. As horrific as anything imaginable, this was a case where a government turned its fascist guns against its own people - its hope for the future, its youth.

Dissent would NOT be tolerated and Big Daddy Establishment was steadfastly unable to spare the rod against its seemingly spoiled, stubbornly non-compliant progeny.

During this period, the unrest was mirrored and examined in the popular culture – especially the movies, where filmmakers like Robert Altman, Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah and many others sought to expose the violence and hypocrisy of American life. Many of these films were not only boxoffice hits in their day, but continue to be revered and recognized to this day. And then, there’s all the rest.

While there are several worthy forgotten pictures from this era, one in particular stands out – Richard Rush’s fascinating and entertaining Getting Straight, a counter culture drama based on Ken Kolb’s novel (with Robert Kaufman's screenplay adaptation) about post-secondary academic hypocrisy. Rush is a great, but hardly prolific filmmaker. His biggest claim to fame is The Stunt Man, a wonky, obsessive and utterly anarchic look at the blurry lines between fantasy and reality in the movie business starring a completely and deliciously over-the-top Peter O’Toole whose thespian excess in the picture is rivaled only by Rush’s controlled manic directorial style.

Looking at Getting Straight 45 years years since its release (during the very year of the aforementioned Kent State Massacre) and in the context of The Stunt Man, one is immediately taken with Rush’s fascination with the blurring of borders. In Getting Straight, the divides are simply and clearly between old and new.

Harry Bailey (Elliot Gould) is the mustachioed, side-burned and amiably rumpled protagonist of Getting Straight – a Vietnam veteran returned from the war and in the last year of his English Literature Masters degree and a sessional lecturer. Harry is a man without (so to speak) a country. He wants to teach – desperately, but is, alas, faced with the dilemma of being too world wise to be a true part of the youth movement he so desperately craves to reach and too hip to embrace the staid complacency of the established order of academia.

He wanders through the picture, not so much torn between both worlds, but observing them and wondering how he can be a part of both. This noble effort, on the part of the character makes for fascinating viewing as we take on his perspective, but it’s also probably the main reason why Getting Straight has disappeared into the ether.

Rush bravely chooses to maintain the perspective of a man divided to lead us through the narrative – a worthwhile goal and certainly not flawed, but over the decades, audiences have become so bludgeoned into needing a character with firm coattails to grab onto in order to - ugh! - root for him/her, that part of the picture's relative obscurity has probably been affected by this the most. Like Gould’s Harry Bailey, we, the audience, wander through a world where students protest the outmoded academic ideals of the institution and Gould himself tries to utilize new methods to reach his students, but he also craves to play the game of an establishment he wants to change. This, of course, is what makes the film so fascinating.

Two Harry Baileys.
Both went to war.
One Harry won
the Congressional
Medal of Honor,
The Other Harry
got screwed
by The Man.

Harry Bailey’s namesake is, of course, a character from Frank Capra’s stunning post-WWII classic It’s A Wonderful Life. The difference between the two characters is especially intriguing since Capra’s Harry is anything but indecisive. As Harry Bailey's big brother George (in the form of James Stewart) declares, “Harry Bailey went to war, he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, he saved the lives of every man” under his command. And when Capra’s Harry returns from the war, he knows EXACTLY what he wants.

Rush’s Harry is probably closer to Capra’s big brother figure, George. He wants to join the establishment in order to change it. In Capra’s post-war fantasy, George Bailey gets to do exactly that, but in Rush’s world, with roles clearly reversed, Harry learns that straddling the fencepost can never yield true change – it instead equals stasis.

Getting Straight falls a bit short of greatness, but in many ways, it's one of the few pictures that comes closest to capturing the complexity of the period in which it’s set. In this sense, it has NOT dated. It is genuinely a project of its time – perfectly reflective of the complexities of the blurred lines on both sides of the old and new world orders. The two main things that work against the picture’s bid for the kind of immortality it probably craved are as follows: the aforementioned passivity of Gould’s character – it’s right for the movie and right for the world of the movie, but at the same time, fights against what mainstream movie drama is MOSTLY made of – a clear goal, clear stakes and a satisfyingly wrought conclusion.

Rush does not achieve this, though in all fairness, it’s clearly not his intent to do so. The second roadblock facing the picture's grab for greatness, and it is (and must have been) insurmountable, is the utterly dreadful performance of its leading lady Candice Bergen as the Ice Goddess grad student who is in love with Harry. Bergen is horrendous. Her lines are delivered with the kind of soullessness, which goes well beyond that of the character’s cold shiksa-like station. Bergen’s deliveries are flat and so is her face. Though this movie was made well before the Botox revolution, Bergen wanders through the picture like a poster-child for the toxic protein of choice to render the flesh immovable and wrinkle-free.

That said, there’s just so goddamn much to admire in the film. Elliot Gould works boundlessly with his character's passivity, indecision, confusion, complexity and manages to always maintain a fun, funny, sexy and amiable screen presence. When Harry Bailey is called upon to be active, especially during a brilliant thesis-defense sequence, one can see precisely how and why Gould was such a big star during this period and why he hit such a responsive chord with audiences. He's a laconic wiseacre who saves his best explosions of force for when he needs them. HE IS SO FUCKING COOL you just WANT to BE Elliot Gould. (At least I did as a kid and probably still do.)

The film's supporting cast is marvelous, especially a very young Harrison Ford as a wide-eyed preppie-druggie. It's also great seeing sexy Brenda (Mandingo) Sykes and counter-culture star of Zachariah, John Rubinstein.

Rush’s direction is suitably obsessive and detailed. There is a protest scene that is as breathtaking and chilling as anything you’re likely to see and the numerous party scenes are all infused with the kind of immediacy that allows you to observe AND participate.

At the end of the day, Getting Straight accomplishes much of what it set out to achieve and is, finally, an evocative window into a time and place that seems so distant, and at the same time, so current.

Look around. Innocent people are being killed indiscriminately by The Man everyday.

In that sense, things never really change that much, do they?

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Getting Straight is available on Sony Pictures’ inexplicably titled and oddly programmed DVD label “Martini Movies”. This movie is begging for a proper Blu-Ray release, transfer and special edition via Criterion or Kino Lorber. I also dream of a commentary track featuring Gould and Rush and, most importantly, moderated by Kim Morgan (whose piece on California Split for the L.A. Review of Books is a poster-child for WHY SHE'D BE PERFECT).

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LOVE AND PAIN AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING - Maggie Smith, Alan Pakula and Alvin Sargent a Holy Trinity!

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973) ***1/2
Dir. Alan J. Pakula
Starring: Maggie Smith, Timothy Bottoms

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is a terrific title and, because of its length, a challenge for most marquee displays, video box covers and TV listings. It’s also, save for those who saw the picture in 1973 and loved it, a relatively forgotten picture from one of the best American directors of the 70s. During the last 17 years of his life, however, one might have concluded, based on his delivering overwrought Holocaust-themed Oscar-bait like Sophie's Choice amidst a whack of John Grisham adaptations and the like, that Alan J. Pakula was little more than a hack.

In fact, the most interesting thing about Pakula during this period was how his life ended, a freak auto accident in which a steel pipe sailed through his vehicle's dashboard window, lodging itself deep into the filmmaker's skull.

However, if one could erase the abovementioned years of 1980 to 1997 and focus solely on his output during the 60s and 70s, one would be faced with the work of a good, if not great filmmaker. In the early 60s, Pakula established himself as one of the best creative producers in Hollywood. Allied as a producer with director Robert Mulligan, the pair generated seven fine feature films during the 60s. Of these seven pictures, two were bonafide masterpieces – the powerful film adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and the brilliantly acted (Anthony Perkins and Karl Malden) biopic of baseball player Jimmy Piersall and his domineering father, Fear Strikes Out. This was surely one of the great producer-director relationships in American cinema. Pakula and Mulligan tackled a wide variety of important social issues with taste, intelligence and most, importantly, a fabulous sense of showmanship. The pictures they made together were as supremely entertaining as they were thought provoking.

Pakula’s talent as a filmmaker became even more apparent when the team split up. Mulligan’s work got worse - a pale shade of his past successes, while Pakula went on to direct some of the most important films of the 70s. Ironically, it’s Pakula’s last years as a director that resemble the mediocrity of Mulligan’s career WITHOUT Pakula as a producer. But from his directorial debut in 1969 with the quirky Liza Minnelli vehicle The Sterile Cuckoo and through to the elegiac post-war western Comes a Horseman and the tremendous romantic comedy Starting Over, Pakula delivered the goods - and then some.

Pakula is, perhaps, always going to be best known for his unofficial trilogy of 70s paranoia-infused thrillers Klute, The Parallax View and All the President’s Men – and rightly so, since all three pictures clearly display a strong voice, an impeccable command of film craft and solid delivery of some of the most intelligent thrills committed to film.

Nestled between the paranoid world of a call girl being stalked and a corporation devoted to political assassination is Pakula’s imperfect, but still lovely and mostly forgotten bittersweet romantic comedy Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing. Working from a terrific script by Alvin (Paper Moon, Ordinary People, Spiderman 2) Sargent, the picture tells the tale of a May-December romance between two lonely, seemingly mismatched people. Lila Fisher (Maggie Smith) is a forty-something spinster dying of an incurable disease who takes a trip to Spain to experience the beauty and adventure that has eluded her. Walter Elbertson (Timothy Bottoms) is a twenty-something slacker packed off by his over-achieving father to the same sunny Spanish climes for a bike tour. When Walter abandons the rigorous journey for the relative comfort of a bus tour, he finds himself sitting next to Lila in the only empty seat. At first, the unlikely pair keep their distance, but after a couple of meet-cute-ish moments – one involving Walter’s underwear, the other involving a locked outhouse door – the loners are drawn to each other: first as friends and eventually as lovers.

Sargent’s scenario is a largely familiar romance, but he peppers his tale with a series of genuinely funny set pieces and some terrific dialogue for the two attractive stars. Most importantly, he creates two lovely, diverse characters for two equally diverse actors.

Timothy Bottoms, no stranger to the May-December romance by virtue of his turn as Sonny Crawford in Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 classic The Last Picture Show where the sensitively studly Bottoms beds down the sex-and-love-starved housewife played by Cloris Leachman. Made the same year as Love and Pain…, the Bogdanovich picture went through the roof while Pakula's effort saw its release delayed until 1973. Bottoms is great in both. In Love and Pain…, he's initially and alternately aloof and whiny, but his performance is truly a marvel as he slowly becomes charming and likeable as his relationship with Lila deepens.

Maggie Smith is especially wonderful in her role. Often portrayed as pinched and matronly in films like The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the seriously neglected The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, she is full of life, vim, vigour and romance in Love and Pain… and happily, Pakula lavishes the kind of pictorial attention to her that was so rare for Smith. She is a downright sexy in this movie – a mature, but enticing middle-aged babe. With her gorgeous red hair, long legs, delectably prim manner and beautiful smile flashing a nice set of pearly whites, Smith is – without question a MILF-extraordinaire! Most amazingly, the script allows her to engage in some really funny physical humour. Smith is not above taking more than one pratfall and a scene wherein she has an entire roll of toilet paper wrapped around her legs and unfurling an ever longer trail of bum-wipe as she scrambles towards her tour bus is the stuff of comic genius.

With a lush, romantic score from Michael Small, stunning location photography from Geoffrey (A Night To Remember, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tess) Unsworth and a fine director at the peak of his powers, Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing is a truly sparkling and moving romance.

“Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing” is available on Sony’s “Martini Movies” DVD brand. How and what a “Martini Movie” is supposed to be is still beyond me. How this bittersweet romantic comedy can be considered a “Martini Movie” is especially beyond me.

THE BUTTERCUP CHAIN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Gorgeous Douglas Slocombe Cinematography (Almost) Saves This Moronic, Dull, Soft-core 70s Euro Sleaze Replete With Incest and Swingin' Swingers

The Buttercup Chain (1970) *1/2
Dir. Robert Ellis Miller
Starring: Hywel Bennett, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jane Asher, Sven-Bertil Taube

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This dull, idiotic, pretentious bit of soft-core is not especially sexy and lacks even the tiniest shred of entertainment value, in spite of its more ludicrous elements of prurient excess. It is, however, one of the most sumptuously photographed bad movies I have ever seen.

Shot by the brilliant Douglas Slocombe, one is treated to impeccable compositions, delicate interior lighting and sun-drenched location photography of the highest order. And of course, whenever the supple flesh of the attractive leads is bared, Slocombe captures the puff pastry of the ladies and the buff brawn of the gentlemen with the eye of a pornographer extraordinaire.

Not that this should come as a surprise. Slocombe, a multi-award-winning-and-nominated cinematographer had, by the time he worked on this film, been making dazzling images for twenty-five years. His early career in Britain included lensing some of the great Ealing Pictures including the classic chiller Dead of Night, the black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alexander Mackendrick’s wry satire The Man in the White Suit, the quiet, delicate and almost elegiac The Smallest Show On Earth and the all-out hilarity of The Titfield Thunderbolt.

Throughout the 60s, Slocombe created indelible images on a variety of classic films from all genres. He gave us the lurid glory of the sickening, terrifying Circus of Horrors, the hip, groovily-dappled colours and endless heart-stopping shots of Raquel Welch in Fathom, the glory of the intimate historical epic The Lion in Winter, Roman Polanski’s gorgeously, insanely, expressionistic The Fearless Vampire Killers, Peter Collinson’s Euro-trashy heist thriller The Italian Job and among many others, the subtly darkening black and white palette of Harold Pinter-Joseph Losey’s The Servant. In the same year The Buttercup Chain was made and released, Slocombe also shot Ken Russell’s phantasmagorical biopic of Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers a cinematographer-director match made in heaven.

Of course, any of the above-named titles, should probably not even be mentioned on the same page as The Buttercup Chain, but alas, Slocombe was also enough of a pragmatic artist that he also took jobs that were just that – jobs. Not that money was the only aim in shooting this, but I suspect he was attracted to the stunning and wide variety of gorgeous European locations and the prospect of photographing a bevy of babes and hunks against said backdrops.

And just what, pray tell, is a “Buttercup Chain”?

Well, aside from being one of the least entertaining bad movies ever made, it appears to have something to do with the two lead characters and their childhood obsession with buttercups and how this, by extension, transmogrifies into a summer of carnal delight with everyone but each other in order to avoid the hint of incest that lingers over their desire for each other.

“Say, what?” you say!!!

France (the broodingly beautiful and ever-so-slightly mincing Hywel Bennett) and Margaret (jaw-droppingly ravishing model Jane Asher) are cousins. Their respective mothers are twin sisters. From childhood, they are deeply in love – the cousins, that is: not the twin sisters. As adults, they give each other lots of hugs and pecks, but never consummate their fleshly desires for each other. Instead, France desires to “pimp” (the word – I kid you not! – that he actually uses) Margaret out to as many lovers as possible so he can experience, from afar, the joy she will receive from every other man, but himself. For her part, Margaret also wants France to get some lovin’, so she encourages him to bed down the luscious Manny (that scrumptious morsel of big-screen 70s desire Leigh Taylor-Young). France chooses the swarthy Swede Fred (stiff-jawed and bulgingly endowed salami-meister Sven Bertil-Taube) to lay pipe within his beloved.

We, the audience, get to sit back, take our shoes off, apply the palm lubricant of choice and voyeuristically participate in this oh-so-sexy romp through the most exquisite European vacation spots imaginable as our two attractive couples… couple.

Alas, I feel I have made this cinematic equivalent to dog-shit-splattered-sidewalks sound far too watchable, if not downright compelling. It’s not. The dialogue is moronic, the performances wooden and Robert Ellis Miller’s direction is utterly pallid.

Miller’s poor work is not surprising. Essentially a camera-jockey (television director), he lucked out with one big screen picture, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – thanks mainly to a fine cast and lovely source material. Here, he has a quartet of incompetent actors and high-mindedly boneheaded source material.

There is, however, Slocombe’s gorgeous cinematography, but as mentioned above, a myriad of good and sometimes great movies already existed prior to this film and benefited from his magnificent eye. In fact, AFTER shooting The Buttercup Chain, Slocombe continued to dazzle as the Director of Photography on such diverse and solid work as the two terrific Norman Jewison pictures (Jesus Christ Superstar and Rollerball), the flawed, but compelling Jack Clayton version of The Great Gatsby and especially, the first three instalments of Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones pictures.

This deservedly obscure picture has recently and shockingly been bestowed with a DVD release on Sony’s weird “Martini Movies” label. Like many pictures in this series, one wonders why The Buttercup Chain is considered a “Martini Movie”. One thing I can assure, however, is a few dry, stiff, shaken-not-stirred carafes of the old olive-garnished belt-back will numb you rather pleasantly – should you choose, that is, to divest yourself of 95 precious minutes of your life.

VIBES - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Sickeningly Unfunny Comedy w/sickening leading lady

Vibes (1988) *
dir. Ken Kwapis
Starring: Cyndi Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, Peter Falk, Julian Sands, Michael Lerner

Review By Greg Klymkiw

At some point in the development of this property, there might have actually been something resembling a good movie waiting to get made, but this dull, clumsy romantic comedy without laughs and dollops of Indiana Jones and Romancing The Stone is one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had to endure in my many long years of slavish devotion to ingesting as many movies as humanly possible.

The movie that should have been good involves two psychics – one male and one female, with very different and ultra complimentary extra sensory skills who meet cute in a parapsychology lab and find themselves thrust together on a dangerous journey/mission and in the process, solve a mystery, nail the bad guys and fall in love. On the surface, this is, indeed, what happens, but alas the journey as rendered by director Ken Kwapis and the overrated screenwriting team of Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (Night Shift), requires the audience to nail its collective feet to the floor in order to actually sit through the picture in order to live to tell about it. The aforementioned simple storyline is a solid enough narrative coat hanger, but one needs a bit more than that to make a good movie.

First of all, one needs some cool shit to actually adorn the coat hanger with and the famed screenwriting duo do little more than dress it with the most dire, hackneyed events as the couple journey to a Latin American hell hole in order to help a crusty old rascal locate his missing son and find instead that they’re being used for more nefarious purposes.

An even greater sin is that the characters do little but exist beyond the status of cardboard cutouts. The male psychic has the ability to touch inanimate objects and both feel and see the people and events that have also touched the same objects. Not a bad idea, but the writers do little beyond using it as a mere and rather clunky device to move the story ever so conveniently forward. The female psychic is saddled with something far less interesting – she is endowed with a living voice in her head that imparts sage advice for her to impart, in turn, to others. This particular ability kind of renders the character as relatively passive and even the relationship between her and the voice in her head is not explored/exploited beyond being the most rudimentary of storytelling devices.

The less said about Kwapis’ lame, unexciting direction the better. He does little more than cover the action in the most basic manner. It’s vaguely conceivable that a director with some visual style might have rendered this tedious script with enough life to keep it at least watchable, but Kwapis, being a TV hack, is unable to do even this. Not that it’s surprising. One need only turn to the sort of feature work Kwapis did long after this film was made (The Beautician and the Beast, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and He’s Just Not That Into You) and realize that he’s only as good as the material he gets and even then, like a Garry Marshall and others of that loathsome lack-of-style ilk, he can’t turn excrement to gold and he most certainly has it in him to turn gold into excrement. Worst of all, he basically makes mediocre television for the big screen and there’s nothing more annoying than that.

Finally, there is the matter of casting. Jeff Goldblum as the male psychic is ALWAYS worth watching. His handsome, yet geeky facial features, his lanky physique and those magnificent bright eyes come close to carrying him unscathed through the mess that is Vibes. Alas, Goldblum must share screen time with one of the most loathsome leading ladies ever to find her way onto a movie set.

Pop star Cyndi Lauper, five years after she recorded the hit girlie anthem "Girls Just Wanna’ Have Fun”, was shoehorned into this film and she attacks her role with all the grace of a hippopotamus. In what possible world did anyone think that she was going to be even remotely palatable on a big screen? Needless to say, when a romantic comedy displays absolutely no chemistry between the leads, not even an eminently watchable figure like Jeff Goldblum can remain untarnished.

Finally, while it’s always fun to watch Peter Falk at his trademark crusty and crotchety best, he’s not in his finest form here and he really does seem to be sleepwalking through this picture, dreaming no doubt about his pay cheque.

Vibes is a perfectly abhorrent affair. I dare you to watch it without clutching, for dear life, to an airsickness bag.

Vibes is currently available on the Sony Pictures Home Entertainment DVD label as part of their “Martini Movies” brand, which seems like a convenient way to lump a grab bag of catalogue titles under one banner. Alas, the banner makes no sense whatsoever with respect to the vast majority of films contained under it.

THE NEW CENTURIONS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Richard Fleischer's screen adaptation of former LAPD cop Joseph Wambaugh's first bestselling novel delivers a dramatic, but realistic front-lines approach to a world that most of us couldn’t even begin to imagine.

The New Centurions (1972) dir. Richard Fleischer
Starring: George C. Scott, Stacy Keach, Jane Alexander, Clifton James, Scott Wilson, Erik Estrada, Rosalind Cash, Isabel Sanford, James Sikking and William Atherton

***

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It’s always a pleasure to extol the considerable virtues of Richard Fleischer, one of the most overlooked and underrated American directors, even when the picture in question is not one of his best works. The New Centurions is a movie that, at least for me, plops squarely into the category of work I loved as a kid that hasn't held up as well as I’d hoped. That said, it has much to recommend it – most notably, a great George C. Scott performance and a generally fine first two-thirds. If there are major problems with the film, they probably lie with Stirling Silliphant’s erratic screenplay adaptation of Joseph Wambaugh’s groundbreaking, best-selling novel.

Wambaugh is, of course, the former LAPD cop-turned-novelist whose books captured the day-to-day grind of police life sans shoot-em-up glorification – a dramatic, but realistic front-lines approach to a world that most of us couldn’t even begin to imagine. Fleischer’s movie version, from a directorial standpoint, often does an excellent job in this respect. Taking us from the graduation of rookie cop Roy Fehler (Stacy Keach) and his on-the-job training under the tutelage of grand, old man of the force; the wizened, cynical Andy Kilvinski (George C. Scott), a good part of this journey offers considerable entertainment value. With the dark grainy lighting and camerawork of Ralph Woolsey, Fleischer gets us through the nightly grind of patrol cops in an almost documentary-like flavour.

For the most part, this is no standard-issue genre fare as we follow the cops on a series of almost mundane adventures – domestic disputes, child abuse cases, petty theft, grifting and in one of the movie’s more amusing segments, the rounding up of streetwalkers, shoving them into the back of a paddy wagon and getting them boozed up so they can’t ply their trade. The film also focuses on the cops’ bouts with alcoholism and marital strife. All of this is peppered with George C. Scott's Kilvinski who regales his rookie charge with all manner of crusty wisdom and gallows humour.

For 1972, this was certainly groundbreaking material.

My first helping of the picture was at the tender age of 12 and I saw it with my ex-cop Dad. As a movie, it was definitely unlike the usual father-and-son fare in the de-glamorization of the cops’ lives and I also recall my own father responding very positively to the movie in that it had “less bullshit” than other cop pictures. Seen now, though, it’s a movie that scores points for being the first of its kind in the mainstream, but alas, loses considerable steam as Silliphant’s script maintains the episodic structure of Wambaugh’s book without finding a compelling enough backbone to hang it on cinematically. The script also adds, all on its lonesome, clunky and clichéd verbiage in strange contrast to the dialogue that crackles as well as plot elements that feel too stock.

This seems especially odd since Silliphant did such a fine job adapting the classic cop novel on which Norman Jewison’s In The Heat of the Night is based. With that film, Silliphant was able to deftly sift the best and most cinematic elements in the original source material by John Ball, while adding the proper connective tissue to make the picture a cohesive whole. The New Centurions by comparison is messy, lurching from one episode to another and never quite capturing the sense of time passing in a smooth manner.

There are other problems with the picture. When the character of Kilvinski tragically departs from the story, the rest of the movie can’t quite rise to Scott’s level of performance and his presence, or lack thereof in the latter third. Scott's rendering of this character is so powerful it almost seems like movie’s only raison d'être.

Alas, the marital difficulties portrayed border on soap opera. It's bad melodrama, pure and simple. It doesn’t help that actress Jane Alexander portrays Stacy Keach’s wife with such ramrod-like seriousness that she comes off like a harridan on lithium. Equally unexceptional is a subplot involving the gorgeous Rosalind Cash as Keach's fresh love interest. In theory, both of these SEEM necessary, but feel shoehorned in to the proceedings rather than flowing naturally from them.

Even more bothersome is the rather interesting cast of supporting characters who are introduced, then dropped, with no visible effort to fully integrate them into the whole. Part or this is definitely a script issue, but in fairness to Siliphant, this and some of the other structural failings could well be coming from studio-imposed cuts to bring the movie closer to traditional cops n' robbers fare. (There is even a well directed, but completely out of place car stunt that feels like it belongs to another movie.)

All this said, though, Fleischer keeps the action moving with his typical efficiency and he works overtime to deliver a sense of the streets and the day-to-day aspects of police work. Some of the banter of the cops themselves (both on patrol and in the station house is gorgeously rendered. There are individual scenes and sequences that soar in spite of the screenplay's flawed structure. Some are simply unforgettable.

Scott’s rendition of “Kilvinski’s Law”, the character’s off-the-book sage advice, is a marvel to behold. Nobody but Scott could do full justice to nuggets like: "Treat everybody the same - white, black, brown. Be civil to everybody, courteous to no one. We're supposed to use equal force. If a dude uses his fists, you use your stick. If he uses a knife, you use your gun - cancel his ticket right then and there. If everything else fails, hit him with a brick."

Other fine moments include a terrifying scene where the cops rescue a baby from being burned and beaten by its neglectful mother, an especially hilarious sequence involving the entrapment of a seven-foot lumberjack “fruit” seeking manly amore in a local park and George C. Scott’s final monologue which is not only heartbreakingly performed, but one of the few moments that achieves what the whole movie aspires to.

Besides, where else is one going to see Mrs. Jefferson herself (Isabel Sanford) playing a foul-mouthed, fat-assed, soul-infused street whore? That gal definitely was “a movin’ on up”.

Oh, and have I mentioned the movie has one major-league groovy Quincy Jones score?

“The New Centurions” is available on DVD from Sony Pictures in their Martini Movies series.