A Movie A Day #21: A Case of Libel (1983, directed by Eric Till)

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

a-case-for-libel In the 1950s, at the height of the McCarthy era, no one is more feared than Boyd Bendix (Daniel J. Travanti), an acerbic, right-wing gossip columnist. Anyone who crosses Bendix the wrong way runs the risk of being accused of everything from sexual deviancy to communism. Bendix’s latest victim is prominent journalist named Dennis Corcoran (Gordon Pinset). Unlike everyone else who has been bullied by Bendix, Corcoran refuses to quietly submit. Working with a gruff but brilliant attorney, Robert Sloane (Ed Asner), Corcoran takes Bendix to court.

A Case of Libel was made for Showtime and it is very much the type of movie that was made for teachers to show in classrooms full of aspiring Clarence Darrows. Adapted from a Broadway play, A Case of Libel is also based on the true story of a successful lawsuit that was brought against columnist Westbrook Pegler in 1955. A Case of Libel is basically a filmed play but is memorable for the performances of Ed Asner and especially Daniel J. Travanti.

A Case of Libel is a movie that I used to rent, on VHS, from my local video store when I was just starting to get interested in politics. Because it was a cheap production on a cheap tape, the picture always looked terrible but I still enjoyed it. Despite what the picture above claims, it’s never gotten an official DVD release and it probably never will be since there’s not a huge demand for old Ed Asner/Daniel J. Travanti courtroom dramas. If it ever does come out on DVD, I’ll buy it.

A Movie A Day #20: First Family (1980, directed by Buck Henry)

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

first-family Like any newly inaugurated President, Manfred Link (Bob Newhart) faces many new challenges. The biggest challenge, though, is keeping control of his family and his White House staff. His wife (Madeline Kahn) is an alcoholic. His 28 year-old daughter (Gilda Radner) is so desperate to finally lose her virginity that she is constantly trying to sneak out of the White House. General Dumpson (Rip Torn) wants to start a war. Press Secretary Bunthorne (Richard Benjamin), Ambassador Spender (Harvey Korman), and Presidential Assistant Feebleman (Fred Willard) struggle and often fail to convince everyone that all is well.

President Link needs to form an alliance with the African country of Upper Gorm, a country that speaks a language that only one man in America, Prof. Alexaner Grade (Austin Pendleton), can understand. The President of Upper Gorm (John Hancock) orders that the kidnapping of Link’s daughter. Holding her hostage, he demands that Link send him several white Americans so that the citizens of Upper Gorm can know what it is like to have a minority to oppress.

First Family not only featured a cast of comedy all-stars but it was also directed by one of the funniest men in history, Buck Henry. So, why isn’t First Family funnier? There are a few amusing scenes and Newhart can make a pause hilarious but, for the most part, First Family feels like an episode from one of Saturday Night Live‘s lesser seasons. Reportedly, Henry’s first cut of First Family tested badly and Warner Bros. demanded that certain scenes, including the ending, be reshot. Perhaps that explains why First Family feels more like a sitcom than a satire conceived by the man who wrote the script for The Graduate and whose off-center perspective made him one of the most popular hosts during Saturday Night Live‘s first five seasons. Famously, during one SNL hosting gig, Henry’s head was accidentally sliced open by John Belushi’s samurai sword. Without missing a beat, Henry finished up the sketch and performed the rest of the show with a band-aid prominently displayed on his forehead. Unfortunately, there’s little sign of that Buck Henry in First Family.

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A Movie A Day #19: Kill Me Again (1989, directed by John Dahl)

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

killmeagain Fay Forrest (Joanne Whalley) and her boyfriend, Vince Miller (Michael Madsen), make their living stealing from the mob. After their latest job results in the death of a made man, Fay decides that she needs to escape from the abusive Vince. She runs away to Las Vegas, where she looks up a small-time, financially strapped P.I., Jack Andrews (Val Kilmer). She hires Jack to help her fake her death, offering to pay him $5,000 upfront and $5,000 after she’s dead. Jack is reluctant to get involved but he also has a loan shark threatening to break every bone in his body. Jack helps Fay fake her death but then Fay leaves town without paying him the second $5,000. Even worse, both Vince and the mob quickly figure out that Fay is not actually dead and join Jack in trying to track her down.

Predictable but entertaining, Kill Me Again is an early example of the type of modern neo-noir that would become extremely popular in the 1990s. In his directorial debut, John Dahl shows some hints of the style that he later brought to films like Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. Val Kilmer was miscast and a few years too young for his role but Joanne Whalley (or Joanne Whalley-Kilmer as she was known when Kill Me Again was filmed) fully inhabitanted the stock role of the sultry femme fatale who can never quite be trusted. Michael Madsen goes all out as Vince, giving an early version of his performance in Reservoir Dogs.

A Movie A Day #18: Breaker! Breaker! (1977, directed by Don Hulette)

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

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Somewhere, in Southern California, there’s a small town called Texas City. Texas City is run by a corrupt judge (George Murdock) and a sadistic cop (Don Gentry). The residents of Texas City make their money by arresting truckers, forcing them to pay huge fines, and selling their rigs to the savage yard. But they made a mistake when they arrested a trucker named Billy Dawes (Michael Augensten). Billy has an older brother who is also a trucker. His name is J.D. and he’s Chuck Norris!

After appearing as an “honorable” villain in Bruce Lee’s The Way of the Dragon and providing martial arts training to the Hollywood elite, Chuck Norris made his starring debut in Breaker! Breaker! This is one of those weird only in the 70s hybrid movies. Mix in a little Deliverance, add a little Smokey and the Bandit, and then toss in Chuck Norris doing a roundhouse kick. Shake it up and you get Breaker! Breaker!

The main problem with Breaker! Breaker! is that it does not really know what to do with Chuck Norris. While he’s stil a step above someone like Steven Seagal, Chuck has never exactly been a great actor but, in Breaker! Breaker!, his inexperience in front of the camera is especially noticeable. Chuck is at his best when he’s fighting but he spends too much of Breaker! Breaker! sitting behind the wheel of either his truck or his super groovy 70s van (check out the eagle painted on the side) and doing CB radio patter. When he does fight, his opponents are all rednecks who, unlike Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon, don’t stand a chance against him.

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I did like the movie’s ending, in which an army of big rigs descend on Texas City. Don’t mess with truckers!

Two final notes: Breaker! Breaker! was edited by Steven Zaillian, who 16 years later, would win an Oscar for writing Schindler’s List. Also, keep an eye out for Eraserhead himself, Jack Nance, as one of J.D.’s friends.

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A Movie A Day #17: The Laughing Policeman (1973, directed by Stuart Rosenberg)

Posted on January 17, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

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San Francisco in the 1970s. Revolution is in the air. Hippies are on every street corner. A man named Gus Niles knows that he’s being tailed by an off-duty cop, Dave Evans. Gus boards a city bus, knowing that Evans will follow him. On the bus, an unseen gunman suddenly opens fire with an M3 submachine gun, not only killing both Evans and Gus but six other people as well. After the bus crashes, the gunman calmly departs. At first, it is assumed that the massacre was another random mass shooting, like Charles Whitman in Austin or Mark Essex in New Orleans. But one San Francisco detective is convinced that it wasn’t random at all.

The Laughing Policeman was one of the many police procedurals to be released after the box office success of Dirty Harry and The French Connection and, despite the name, it’s also one of the grimmest. While the complex mystery behind why Evans was following Gus and who killed everyone on the bus is intriguing, The Laughing Policeman‘s main focus is on the often frustrating nitty gritty of the investigation, complete with false leads, uncooperative witnesses, unanswerable questions, and detectives who frequently make stupid mistakes. The movie’s first fifteen minutes are devoted to the police processing the bus, with Stuart Rosenberg (best known for directing Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke) using overlapping dialogue to give the entire scene a documentary feel. As Detective Jake Martin, Walter Matthau is even more cynical and downbeat than usual while Bruce Dern provides good support as a younger, more volatile detective. The supporting cast is full of 70s character actors, like Lou Gossett, Anthony Zerbe, Gregory Sierra,and playing perhaps the sleaziest drug dealer ever seen in an American movie, Paul Koslo.

The Laughing Policeman was based on a Swedish novel that took place in Stockholm but, for the movie, Swedish Detective Martin Beck became world-weary Sgt. Jake Martin and Stockholm became San Francisco. Rosenberg directed the entire film on location, giving The Laughing Policeman the type of realistic feeling that would later be duplicated by TV shows like Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Law & Order. Though it may not be as well-known as either Dirty Harry or The French Connection, The Laughing Policeman is a dark and tough police procedural, an underrated classic of the genre.

Incidentally, The Laughing Policeman was one of the first films for which character actor Bruce Dern shared top billing. According to Dern’s autobiography, Matthau generously insisted that Dern be credited, with him, above the title.

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A Movie A Day #16: Boycott (2001, directed by Clark Johnson)

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

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Originally made for HBO, Boycott is one of the best and, unfortunately, least-known films made about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Boycott tells the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, starting with the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to sit in the back of the bus to the eventual integration of the Montgomery public transportation system. Clark Johnson directs Boycott in a semi-documentary, handheld style, which adds an immediacy to the oft-told story.

Boycott focuses on the role that 24 year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. (played by Jeffrey Wright) played as the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and how the boycott’s success turned King into a national figure. Jeffrey Wright does a great job playing the young King and it’s interesting to watch as the initially uncertain King finds both his voice and his strength as a leader. Boycott works as a good companion piece to Selma, not the least because Carmen Ejogo plays Coretta Scott King in both of them.

Also giving a noteworthy performances are Terrence Howard as King’s second-in-command, Ralph Abernathy and Erik Dellums in the role of Bayard Rustin, who was one of King’s closest confidants but, because he was gay, was often left outside of the movement’s inner circle. Before they worked together on Boycott, Dellums, the son of former U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums, co-starred with Clark Johnson on Homicide: Life on the Street.

Boycott is a tribute to not just Martin Luther King but also the entire civil rights movement.

A Movie A Day #15: Special Bulletin (1983, directed by Ed Zwick)

Posted on January 15, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

“We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for a special report…”

Led by veteran anchor John Woodley, the RBS news team is providing continuing coverage of a developing crisis in Charleston, South Carolina, where terrorists are holding several members of the coast guard, a local new reporter, and his cameraman hostage on a small tugboat. These are not typical terrorists, though. Two of them are nuclear scientists. One of them is a social worker. Another one is a nationally-renowned poet. The final terrorist is a former banker robber who was just recently released from prison. This unlikely group has only two demands: that the U.S. government hand over every single nuclear trigger device at the U.S. Naval Base and that RBS give them a live television feed so that they can explain their actions to the nation. If either of those demands are not met, a nuclear bomb will be detonated and will destroy Charleston.

This made-for-TV movie was shot on video tape, to specifically make it look like an actual news broadcast. Though much of the movie seems dated when compared to today’s slick, 24-hour media circus, Special Bulletin was convincing enough that, when it was originally broadcast in 1983, it caused a mini-panic among viewers who missed the opening disclaimer:

Because the movie deals with the threat of nuclear terrorism instead of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear war, it still feels relevant in a way that many of the atomic disaster films of the 1980s do not. Beyond making an anti-nuclear statement, Special Bulletin is also a critical look at how the news media sensationalizes every crisis, with the RBS news team going from smug complacency to outright horror as the situation continues to deteriorate. David Clennon and David Rasche are memorable as the two most outspoken of the terrorists and Ed Flanders is perfectly cast as a veteran news anchor struggling to maintain control in the middle of an uncontrollable situation. Special Bulletin won an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Special and can be currently be found on YouTube.

Keep an eye out for Michael Madsen, who shows up 57 minutes in and gets the movie’s best line: “That guy’s a total psycho ward.”

A Movie A Day #14: Eyewitness (1970, directed by John Hough)

Posted on January 14, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

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In Eyewitness (which is also known as Sudden Terror), eleven year-old Ziggy (Mark Lester) witnesses a policeman (Peter Vaughan) assassinating a visiting African dignitary but, because he has a history of “crying wolf,” he can’t get anyone to believe him. Not his older sister, Pippa (Susan George). Not his grandfather (Lionel Jeffries), the lighthouse keeper. Not the housekeeper, Madame Robiac (Betty Marsden). Not even Tom Jones (Tony Bonner), a tourist who fancies Pippa. When he sees two policemen driving up to his grandfather’s lighthouse, Ziggy panics and runs. Though John Hough’s direction, which is full of zoom shots and Dutch angles, is dated, Eyewitness holds up well as a tight thriller. Susan George was beautiful in 1970 and Peter Vaughan is a great villain.

If Sam Peckinpah had ever made a children’s movie, it would probably look a lot like Eyewitness. The movie starts out with Ziggy playing on the beach and pretending to be a soldier while imaginary gunshots and explosions are heard in the background. It ends with a strange joke about a man who looks like Hitler, followed by a cheery freeze frame. In between all that cheeriness, the assassin and his brother (Peter Bowles) chase Ziggy across Malta and kill anyone who gets in their way, from a friendly priest to a ten year-old girl being held by her father. I counted ten onscreen death, which is a lot considering that this British movie was released at a time when some were still arguing that Jon Pertwee-era Dr. Who was too scary for children. There’s even an exciting car chase that ends with one car overturned and the blood-covered survivors struggling to drag themselves out from underneath the wreckage. How many British children were traumatized by Eyewitness?

A Movie A Day #13: Ringmaster (1998, directed by Neil Abramson)

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

ringmaster-poster Jerry Springer has been many things over the course of his long life. Lawyer. Anti-war activist. Adviser to Bobby Kennedy. Congressional candidate. City councilman. Brothel aficionado. Mayor. Journalist. Commentator. Talk show host. Destroyer of culture. Scourge of humanity. Twice, he was a highly recruited candidate for the U.S. Senate but, both times, it was decided that there was no way a morally questionable television personality could actually win high political office in the United States.

(Yeah, about that…)

There is one thing that Jerry Springer has never been and that is a movie star. However, that’s not for lack of trying. At the height of his talk show’s popularity, Jerry Springer starred in Ringmaster. Though he played a character named Jerry Farrelly and his show was retitled The Jerry Show, there was never any doubt that Jerry Springer was meant to be playing himself.

Who is Jerry Springer, according to Ringmaster? He’s a sad and weary man who sleeps with his guests and worries that his raunchy show will be his only legacy. After one show, he tells his staff that he will never again be elected to political office. His staff laughs but Jerry didn’t sound like he was making a joke. Why does Jerry do it? Because he cares about America! When a man in his audience starts yelling that Jerry and his guests are all going to Hell, Jerry gets in his face and let him know that his show is providing a voice for the people who live in the real America.

In Ringmaster, the real America is made up of people like trailer park nymphomaniac Angel Zorzak (Jaime Pressly) and her mother, Connie (Molly Hagan). Angel and Connie appear on The Jerry Show after Angel sleeps with her stepfather (Michael Dudikoff, the American Ninja himself) and Connie gets revenge by sleeping with Angel’s boyfriend. Also on the show is Demond (Michael Jai White), who cheated on his girlfriend with her two best friends and, the night before the show, cheats with Angel too. Thanks to the show, Demond gets his comeuppance and Angel and Connie’s relationship is repaired. The movie ends with mother and daughter back in the trailer park, talking about how their new neighbor has big feet.

Pressly and Hagan are the best thing about Ringmaster. The worst thing is undoubtedly Jerry Springer. For someone who has made a career in both politics and television, Jerry Springer turns out to be a terrible actor. He sleepwalks through the movie with a please-kill-me look on his face, keeping his head down and muttering the majority of his lines.

According to Wikipedia, Ringmaster had a budget of $20,000,000 and grossed back less than half of that. Why would people pay money to watch what they could see on TV for free? Jerry Springer never became a senator or a movie star. He continues to host his talk show and probably will until the end of time.

A Movie A Day #12: Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator (2002, directed by Helen Stickler)

Posted on January 12, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

In the 1980s, Mark “Gator” Rogowski was a superstar. A professional skateboarder, Gator was one of the most popular vert skaters, competing and partying alongside Tony Hawk, Christian Hosoi, Steve Caballero, and Lance Mountain. Yet today, unlike his contemporaries, Gator is almost totally forgotten. In 1991, after having changed his name to Mark Anthony and declared himself to be a born again Christian, Gator raped and killed Jessica Bergstrom, a friend of his ex-girlfriend. Convicted of first degree murder, Gator was sentenced to life imprisonment. He is currently an inmate of the California State Prison System.

Through archival footage and interviews with both his fellow skaters and his ex-girlfriend, Stoked tells the story of Rogowski’s rise and fall. Even if you know nothing about the history of skating, the interviews are interesting and frequently insightful about the fickle nature of fame. Anyone who was not already a fan of Jason Jessee’s will be after seeing him interviewed in Stoked. Because California state law prohibits inmates from giving video interviews, Rogowski is interviewed over the phone and his disembodied voice provides a ghostly accompaniment for much of the film.

Stoked not only tells the story of how Gator ended up in jail but also of how vert skating became big business in the 1980s. At the height of his popularity, Gator was making $20,000 a month, just through board sales and the sponsorship of Vision Street Wear. When street skating became popular in the 90s and a new generation of skaters rejected Vision’s commercial approach, Gator found himself washed up before he even turned 25. By using Gator’s story as a way to examine an entire era, Stoked is to skateboarding what O.J.: Made in America is to football.