Hi, everyone! Tonight, on twitter, I will be hosting one of my favorite films for #MondayMania! Join us for Sleepwalking in Suburbia!
You can find the movie on Tubi and then you can join us on twitter at 9 pm central time! (That’s 10 pm for you folks on the East Coast.) See you then!
In 1944’s Voodoo Man, Michael Ames stars as Ralph, a screenwriter who has been asked to write a treatment based on the real case of several “girl motorists” who have disappeared in the surrounding area. Ralph turns down the assignment because he’s busy planning his wedding to Betty (Wanda McKay). However, when Betty’s maid of honor, Stella (Louise Currie), vanishes, Ralph and Betty set out to investigate. As Ralph puts it, he’s become a part of the story that he earlier rejected.
What has happened to Stella and all of the other women? They’ve been abducted by Toby (John Carradine) and Grego (Pat McKee), two lunkheads who work for Dr. Marlowe (Bela Lugosi). Dr. Marlowe lives in an isolated mansion where he is cared for by his loyal housekeeper (Mici Goty). Twenty-two years ago, Dr. Marlowe’s wife, Evelyn (Ellen Hall), died but Marlowe has been able to keep her body in a sort of suspended animation ever since. Marlowe is kidnapping women because, through the use of voodoo and mad science, he hopes to take their “will to live” and transfers it into Evelyn. Helping Marlowe out is a voodoo priest named Nicholas (George Zucco).
Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco! Obviously, the main appeal of Voodoo Man is that it brings together three great names in horror. Even if the story doesn’t really make much sense (and it doesn’t), the film gets a lot of mileage out of the combination of Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco. While Lugosi does seem to be a bit bored with his role, Carradine and Zucco really throw themselves into their characters. John Carradine, in particular, seems to be having the time of his life as he shuffles around the mansion and replies, “Yes, master,” to every command from Dr. Marlowe. It’s the type of entertaining performance that could only be delivered by a trained Shakespearean slumming in a low-budget, B-grade horror film. As for Zucco, he plays Nicholas with a certain amount of ruthless erudition. Zucco is playing the Boris Karloff role here and he definitely seems to understand what that means.
As for the film itself, it has its moments. Legend has it that director William Beaudine’s nickname was “One Shot” because he was usually only willing to do one take of each scene. As a result, he filmed quickly and he didn’t spend a lot of money and that was probably a good thing for a production like Voodoo Man. It also meant that if someone flubbed a line or bumped into a piece of furniture, that take would still be the one that showed up in the film. My favorite moment of Voodoo Man was when the local sheriff (Henry Hall) referred to Dr. Marlowe as being “Dr. Martin,” and Bela Lugosi, who appeared to be struggling not to laugh, quickly said, “It’s Marlowe.” The sheriff corrected himself. That’s the type of fun you don’t get in movies made by people who do more than one take.
Voodoo Man has a quick 61-minute running time. To enjoy it, it probably helps to already be a fan of low-budget, B-horror films from the 40s. Lugosi, Carradine, and Zucco are combination that deserves to be seen.
As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.
Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1973’s Satan’s School For Girls! I picked it so you know it’ll be good.
It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, find the movie on YouTube, hit play at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! The watch party community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.
See you soon!
This is a film that I share every year for Horrorthon and can you blame me? Check out this pitch: Leonard Nimoy is a race car driver who can see into the future and who uses his powers to solve crimes!
Seriously, if that’s not enough to get you to watch the 1973 made-for-TV movie Baffled!, then I don’t know what is. In the film, Nimoy takes a break from racing so that he and a parapsychologist (played by Susan Hampshire) can solve the mystery of the visions that Nimoy is having of a woman in a mansion. This movie was meant to serve as a pilot and I guess if the series had been picked up, Nimoy would have had weekly visions. Of course, the movie didn’t lead to a series but Baffled! is still fun in a 70s television sort of way. Thanks to use of what I like to call “slo mo of doom,” a few of Nimoy’s visions are creepy and the whole thing ends with the promise of future adventures that were sadly never to be. And it’s a shame because I’ve always wondered what was going on with that couple at the airport!
Enjoy Baffled! Can you solve the mystery before Leonard?
There was one film I saw when I was very young that absolutely terrified me, and even now, decades later, it still has the power to unsettle me and rob me of sleep. That film is Horror Express, a 1972 Spanish-British horror/science fiction hybrid directed by Eugenio Martín. It brought together two titans of gothic horror cinema, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing—icons of the Hammer Films era—while also featuring Telly Savalas in a sadistic, scene-stealing turn as a volatile Cossack captain.
When Horror Express was released, the horror genre was at a fascinating crossroads. The gothic traditions popularized by Hammer Studios throughout the 1960s were beginning to fade, overtaken by the grittier, bloodier styles of filmmakers like Herschell Gordon Lewis and George A. Romero. By 1968, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead had already shifted the genre toward a darker, more nihilistic tone, paving the way for the grislier excesses that would dominate the 1970s. Martín’s film stood out precisely because it clung to the elegance and atmosphere of Hammer’s gothic aesthetic while incorporating moments of shocking violence and morbid detail. It occupied an unusual in-between space: refined in look and tone yet unnerving in its thematic brutality. Its blend of period atmosphere, science fiction paranoia, and restrained gore made it a fascinating transitional work in horror history.
The premise is simple but chilling. Aboard the Trans-Siberian Express, a British anthropologist (Christopher Lee’s Professor Saxton) transports a recently unearthed specimen—an ape-like, fossilized creature. His colleague, Peter Cushing’s Dr. Wells, becomes reluctantly entangled in the unfolding mystery. Predictably, the specimen is not what it seems; it revives and begins unleashing a series of violent attacks on the passengers. Soon it is revealed to harbor a far more terrifying, alien intelligence capable of killing and inhabiting its victims. This leads to one of the film’s most haunting sequences: the white-eyed, zombie-like corpses, drained of memories and humanity, shambling through the train corridors under the entity’s control. At eight years old, these images struck me as some of the most horrifying I had ever seen, and even today their uncanny blend of gothic atmosphere and science fiction body horror still lingers.
Viewed in retrospect, Horror Express bears a striking resemblance to John W. Campbell’s novella Who Goes There?—the basis for Howard Hawks’ The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing in 1982. Like those stories, it is steeped in paranoia, playing with the idea of an alien intelligence that can absorb knowledge and animate the dead. While it never attains the precision of Carpenter’s later masterpiece, it foreshadows that same blend of claustrophobia, distrust, and escalating dread.
What makes Horror Express unforgettable is its restraint. Rather than leaning on gore, it generates fear through suggestion, atmosphere, and disturbing imagery. The snowy isolation of the Trans-Siberian route reinforces the cold sterility of its alien invader, while the confined train cars become a claustrophobic prison of escalating terror. Over time, the film has slipped into the public domain, making it widely available on streaming platforms and budget DVDs. Though often overlooked in surveys of 1970s horror, it deserves recognition as one of the last great gothic horror films before the torch passed to Craven, Carpenter, and Hooper.
For me, Horror Express remains not just a childhood scare but a cinematic touchstone: a rare piece of science fiction horror bridging two eras, one that manages to terrify without relying on excess gore. It disturbed me at age eight, and even now, watching the blank-eyed corpses lurch through the dim train cars still triggers that same visceral shiver.
This is an example of a perfect short film! Sometimes life is just awful and you find that Hell has sub-basements. I am currently in the next to last sub-basement; yes, it really is that bad. At times like that, Richard Morgan, the author of Altered Carbon wrote “You take what’s offered….sometimes you just need to get to the next screen.” Working with Jigsaw was one of those moments for me. It was funny enough to make my brain take a brief break and allow me to laugh. Trust me, if a film is funny enough to make me laugh at this time in my life, you might literally pee your pants or poo or pee/poo them. What I am trying say is that you should wear your peeing yourself pants while watching this and then shower- Don’t be gross!
The plot is right in the title and you get what you were promised. You know you have something special when the writer and director know that 3 minutes and 43 seconds is actually longer that you think. Why is that important? It is critical to have the time awareness because it frees the short film director to use silence to set up a reaction. In this film, the silences set up the punchlines, but it a straight horror short it allows for suspense, payoff, and even to have a moment to care about the characters. Most of the shorts I watch are either pitches in disguise or worse they don’t use their time wisely to make you care that the characters are in peril.
Working with Jigsaw pulls together the concept of a malevolent force being awful at work. Jigsaw is constantly interfering with people’s work to make them play his non-lethal but horribly annoying games. The HR scene at the end is film gold!
I really can’t say enough nice things about this short. Both writers got jobs working for Jimmy Kimmel after this short, which fills with rare joy! I hope they continue to make short films and feature length comedies- they are truly gifted artists!
With apologies to Brad Crain, I’ve never been a basketball fan.
I’m not really a team sports fan in general but basketball truly gets on my nerves. My main issue, of course, is that all the squeaky shoes make it difficult for me to watch a game. The constant squeaking is headache-inducing. My other problem with basketball is that people who like basketball tend to really, really, really like it, to the extent that they can’t handle the fact that some of us don’t really care. Finally, I get tired of being expected to pay attention to whatever it is the coaches say after the game. How many times have I come online to see breathless stories about a basketball coach giving his thoughts on current events? Like seriously, who cares? Why would I care what a coach thinks about tariffs? Why are we even asking basketball coaches for their opinions? Aren’t basketball coaches just supposed to yell at people until they get kicked out of the game? I’ve seen Hoosiers, which I will acknowledge is a very good movie despite my feelings about the game. Gene Hackman was constantly getting kicked off the court and everyone loved him for it. Temper tantrums, that’s what we need from basketball coaches. We don’t need to know your thoughts on the cost of bread.
What’s the point of all this? Before I talk about 2022’s Nothing Is Impossible, I thought you deserved to know my own bias against the game. Nothing is Impossible is a movie that loves basketball.
Nothing is impossible? Try telling that to former basketball-star-turned-high-school-janitor Scott Beck (David A.R. White). Scott, we’re told, could have been a star in the NBA but it didn’t pan out. Instead, Scott works as a janitor and volunteers as an assistant high school coach. While NBA players and their coaches are answering questions about who they voted for in the last election, Scott is looking after his alcoholic father and regretting the fact that he left Ryan Aikins (Nadja Bjorlin) at the altar.
Ryan is now the owner of a basketball team and, when the team announces that it will be holding live tryouts for anyone who wants to try to make the team, Scott finds himself tempted to try to achieve his dream of playing in the NBA. Can Scott do it? Can he still compete at a competitive level? Actually, could he ever compete at a competitive level? Listen, I know this is a PureFlix film and David A.R. White can probably appear in any one of their films that he wants to because he’s one of the founders of the company but White is never particularly convincing as someone who could make a professional basketball team. He’s not particularly tall. He doesn’t come across as being particularly athletic. He’s middle-aged. Nothing is impossible the title tells us but the idea of an unathletic, middle-aged, 5’10 white guy dunking on a bunch of NBA superstars truly tests that claim.
The important thing, of course, is that Scott and Ryan discover that they’re still in love and White and Bjorlin manage to generate enough romantic chemistry to make a believable couple. The other important thing is that Steven Bauer shows up as a heartless executive. It’s always nice to see Bauer destroying dreams. Otherwise, the film did not change my opinion about basketball.
Seriously, those shoes are just too damn squeaky….
“You’re a monster!” a terrified woman shouts at the hulking, murderous figure who haunts the local abandoned cannery.
“I yam what I yam,” the Sailor Man (Jason Robert Stephens) replies before presumably killing her in some grotesque way.
The Sailor Man haunts the cannery. Some believe him to be a ghost be actually, he’s just a former sailor who has been mutated after eating too much contaminated spinach. Now, he is freakishly strong and can literally rip people into pieces with his hands. Running into the Sailor Man means that you will soon be seeing disconnected limbs, compound fractures, and split open heads. The Sailor Man’s motives aren’t always easy to figure out but, if you smell the burning of his pipe, you should probably run. With those gigantic arms and his permanent sour expression, the Sailor Man can pretty much do whatever he feels like doing. Shooting him or stabbing him won’t stop him. He’s hooked on the spinach.
Popeye The Slayer Man is one of three Popeye-themed slasher movies to be released in the wake of Popeye moving into the public domain. In this one, Dexter (Sean Michael Conway), a film student, decides that he wants to make a documentary about the Sailor Man legend so he and his friends break into the cannery. Almost everyone is killed in a bloody way and it’s hard not to notice that no one seems to be that upset about it. Dexter comes across the dead body of someone who was previously described as being his best friend since the Second Grade and he barely seems to care. Instead, he just lifts up his camera and films. I’m tempted to think that this was meant to be a satire on the callousness of aspiring documentarians but I might be giving the film too much credit. Who knows?
Obviously, you can’t take a film like this too seriously. In almost every room in the cannery, there’s at least a handful of empty spinach tins. To be honest, I actually think the film didn’t go far enough. Sure, Popeye’s killing people and there’s a character named Olivia (Elena Juliano) but where’s Bluto? Popeye is presented as a largely silent killer which, again, seems like a missed opportunity. Popeye is also presented as being rather random in his kills. He allows one person to survive for reasons that are incredibly unclear, beyond the fact that I guess the filmmakers felt that the character in question was too sympathetic to suffer the same bloody death as nearly everyone else in the film.
Other than the killer being Popeye, this is pretty much a standard low-budget slasher. I will admit that I kind of appreciated that is was pretty straight-forward about its intentions. Unlike a lot of recent slasher films, it never came across as if it was apologizing for being what it was and there’s definitely something to be said for that. The film embraces the philosophy of “I yam what I yam.” The Sailor Man would be proud.
In 1988’s The Undertaker, a small college town is rocked by a serious of viscous, sexually-charged murders. While the professors and the students deal with their own dramas on campus, the bodies are piling up at the local funeral home. Who could the murderer be?
Well, Joe Spinell’s in the film. That really should be the only clue you need.
Spinell plays Roscoe, the town undertaker who has issues with his mother, cries at random, talks to dead bodies, watches movies featuring sacrifices, and occasionally performs what appears to be some sort of a ritual with his victims. This film was Spinell’s final film and he gives a performance that alternates between being perfunctory and being fully committed. On the one hand, there are plenty of scenes where Spinell appears to be making up his lines as he goes along, In the scenes in which he appears in his office, it’s appears that Spinell is literally reading his lines off of the papers on top of his desk. Then there are other scenes where Spinell suddenly seems to wake up and he flashes the unhinged intensity that made him such a fascinating character actor. In the 70s and 80s, there were many actors who frequently played dangerous people. Spinell was the only one who really came across like he might have actually killed someone on the way to the set. Spinell was in poor health for most of his life and he also struggled with drug addiction. In The Undertaker, he doesn’t always look particularly healthy. Even by Joe Spinell standards, he sweats a lot. And yet, in those scenes were actually commits himself to the character, we see the genius that made him so unforgettable.
As for the film itself, it’s basically Maniac but without the New York grit that made that film memorable. Instead, it takes place in a small town and Spinell, with his rough accent and his button man mustache, seems so out-of-place that the film at times starts to feel like an accidental satire. Roscoe is obviously guilty from the first moment that we see him and yet no one else can seem to figure that out. Only his nephew suspect Roscoe but that problem is quickly taken care of. Whenever anyone dies, their body is brought to Rosco’s funeral home. Roscoe puts on his black suit, plasters down his hair, and tries to look somber. Roscoe spends a good deal of the film talking to himself. When a victim runs away from Roscoe, Spinell looks at a nearby dead body and shrugs as if saying, “What can you do, huh?”
If you’re into gore, this film has a lot of it and, for the most part, it’s pretty effective. In the 80s, even the cheapest of productions still found money to splurge on blood and flayed skin effects. If you’re looking for suspense or a coherent story, this film doesn’t really have that to offer. It does, however, offer up Joe Spinell in his final performance, sometimes bored and yet sometimes brilliant.
1979’s Apocalypse Now reimagines the Vietnam War as pop art.
Jim Morrison sings The End in the background as slow-motion helicopters pass in front of a lush jungle. The jungle erupts into flame while in a dingy hotel room, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) gets drunks, practices his karate moves, and smashes a mirror before collapsing to the floor in tears. The next morning, the hung-over and bandaged Willard ends up at a U.S. military base where he has a nice lunch with Lt. General Corman (G.D. Spradlin) and Col. Lucas (Harrison Ford) and a nearly silent man wearing an undone tie. Willard is asked if it’s true that he assassinated an enemy colonel. Willard replies that he did not and that the operation was classified, proving that he can both lie and follow military protocol. Willard is told that a Col. Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gone rogue and his mission is to go into Cambodia and terminate his command with “extreme” prejudice. It’s a famous scene that features G.D. Spradlin delivering a brilliant monologue about good and evil and yet it’s often missed that Willard is getting his orders from Roger Corman and George Lucas.
(Roger Corman was the mentor of director Francis Ford Coppola while the pre-Star Wars George Lucas was Coppola’s business partner. Indeed, Apocalypse Now was originally somewhat improbably planned to be a George Lucas film.)
Up the river, Willard heads on a patrol boat that is populated with characters who could have come out of an old World War II service drama. Chief (Albert Hall) is tough and no-nonsense. Lance (Sam Bottoms) is the goofy comic relief who likes to surf. Clean (Laurence Fishburne) is the kid who is obviously doomed from the minute we first see him. Chef (Fredric Forrest) is the overage, tightly-wound soldier who just wants to find mangoes in the jungle and who worries that, if he dies in a bad place, his soul won’t be able to find Heaven. The Rolling Stones are heard on the boat’s radio. Soldiers on the other patrol boats moon the boat and toss incendiary devices on the roof. It’s like a frat prank war in the middle of a war.
Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is a badass calvary officer whose helicopter raids are legendary amongst the enemy and a dedicated surfer who tries to turn every night into the equivalent of an AIP Beach Party film. He’s a brilliant warrior who speaks with Malibu accent (“Charlie don’t surf!”) and who doesn’t flinch when a bomb goes off near him. “I love the smell a napalm in the morning,” he says and, for a few moments, you really wish the film would just abandon Willard so we could spend more time with Kilgore. “Some day this war is going to end,” he says with a reassuring nod, showing a non-neurotic attitude that is the opposite of Kurtz’s. Willard says that he could tell Kilgore was going to get through the war without even a scratch and it’s true. Kilgore doesn’t try to rationalize or understand things. He just accepts the reality and adjusts. He’s a true surfer.
The film grows progressively more surreal the closer the boat heads up the river and gets closer to Cambodia. A USO show turns violent as soldiers go crazy at the sight of the Playboy Bunnies, dressed in denim outfits and cowboy hats and twirling cap guns like the love interest in a John Wayne western. A visit to a bridge that is built every day and blown up every night is a neon-lit, beautiful nightmare. Who’s the commanding officer? No one knows and no one cares.
The closer Willard gets to Kurtz, the stranger the world gets. Fog covers the jungles. A tiger leaps out of nowhere. Dennis Hopper shows up as a photojournalist who rambles as if Billy from Easy Rider headed over to Vietnam instead of going to Mardi Gras. Scott Glenn stands silently in front of a temple, surrounded by dead bodies that feel as if they could have been brought over from an Italian cannibal film. Kurtz, when he shows up, is an overweight, bald behemoth who talks in riddles and who hardly seem to be the fearsome warrior that he’s been described as being. “The horror, the horror,” he says at one point in one of the few moments that links Apocalypse Now to its inspiration, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Directed by near-communist Francis Ford Coppola and written by the unapologetically right-wing John Milius, Apocalypse Now is actually less about the reality of Vietnam and more about how the images of the war shaped pop culture the world over. It’s a reminder that Vietnam was known for being the first television war and that counterculture was not just made up of dropouts but also of writers, actors, and directors. Kurtz may say that Willard’s been sent by grocery store clerks but actually, he’s been sent by the B-movie producers who first employed and mentored the directors and the actors who would eventually become the mainstays of the New Hollywood. The film subverts many classic war film cliches but, at the same time, it stays true to others. Clean dying while listening to a tape recording of his mother telling him not to get shot and to come home safe is the type of manipulative, heart-tugging moment that could have appeared in any number of World War II-era films. And while Coppola has always said the film was meant to be anti-war, Col. Kilgore remains the most compelling character. Most viewers would probably happily ride along with Kilgore while he flies over Vietnam and plays Wagner. The striking images of Vietnam — the jungle, the explosions, the helicopters flying through the air — stay in the mind far more than the piles of dead bodies that appear in the background.
It’s a big, messy, and ultimately overwhelming film and, while watching it, it’s hard not to get the feeling that Coppola wasn’t totally sure what he was really trying to say. It’s a glorious mess, full of stunning visuals, haunting music, and perhaps the best performance of Robert Duvall’s legendary career. The film is too touched with genius to not be watchable but how one reacts overall to the film will probably depend on which version you see.
The original version, which was released in 1979 and was nominated for Best Picture, is relentless with its emphasis on getting up the river and finding Kurtz. Willard obsesses on Kurtz and really doesn’t have much to do with the other people on the boat. It gives the story some much-needed narrative momentum but it also makes Kurtz into such a legendary badass that it’s hard not to be disappointed when Willard actually meets him. You’re left to wonder how, if Kurtz has been living in the jungle and fighting a brutal and never-ending guerilla war against the communists, he’s managed to gain so much weight. Brando, who reportedly showed up on set unprepared and spent days improvising dialogue, gives a bizarre performance and it’s hard to view the Kurtz we meet as being the Kurtz we’ve heard about. As strong as the film is, it’s hard not to be let down by who Kurtz ultimately turns out to be.
In 2001 and 2019, Coppola released two more versions of the film, Redux and The Final Cut. These versions re-inserted a good deal of footage that was edited out of the original cut. Most of that footage deals with Willard dealing with the crew on the boat and it’s easy to see why it was cut. The scenes of Willard bonding with the crew feel out of character for both Willard and the rest of the crew. A scene where Willard arranges for Clean, Lance, and Chef to spend time with the Playboy bunnies seems to go on forever and features some truly unfortunate acting. Worst of all, Redux totally ruins Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” monologue by having Willard suddenly steal his surf board. Again, it’s out of character for Willard and it actually feels a bit disrespectful to Duvall’s performance to suddenly turn Kilgore into a buffoon.
But then there are moments that do work. I actually like the lengthy French Plantation scene. By the time Willard, Lance, and Chef stumble into the plantation, the journey upriver has gotten so surreal that it makes a strange sort of sense that they would run into a large French family arguing politics while a clown tries to keep everyone distracted. The new versions of the film are undeniably disjointed but they also shift the focus off of finding Kurtz and place it more on Willard discovering how weird things are getting in Vietnam. As such, it’s less of a disappointment when Kurtz actually shows up. Much as with the French Plantation scene, the journey has become so weird that Kurtz being overweight and pretentious feels somehow appropriate.
What all the versions of the film have in common is that they’re all essentially a neon-lit dream of pop cultural horror. Is Apocalypse Now a horror film? Critic Kim Newman argued that it owed a lot to the genre. Certainly, that’s the case when Willard reaches the temple and finds himself surrounded by corpses and and detached heads. Even before that, though, there are elements of horror. The enemy is always unseen in the jungle and, when they attack, they do so quickly and without mercy. In a scene that could almost have come from a Herzog film, the boat is attacked with toy arrows until suddenly, out of nowhere, someone throws a very real spear. Until he’s revealed, Kurtz is a ghostly figure and Willard is the witch hunter, sent to root him out of his lair and set his followers on fire. If the post-60s American horror genre was shaped by the images coming out of Vietnam then Apocalypse Now definitely deserves to be considered, at the very least, horror-adjacent.
Apocalypse Now was controversial when it was released. (It’s troubled production had been the talk of Hollywood for years before Coppola finally finished his film.) It was nominated for Best Picture but lost to the far more conventional Kramer vs Kramer. Robert Duvall was the film’s sole acting nominee but he lost the award to Melvyn Douglas’s turn in Being There. Douglas was very good in Being There and I imagine giving him the Oscar was also seen as a way of honoring his entire career. That said, Duvall’s performance was amazing. In his relatively brief screen time, Duvall somehow managed to take over and ground one of the most unruly films ever made. The Oscar definitely should have gone to him.
As for the film itself, all three versions, flaws and all, are classics. It’s a film that proves that genius can be found in even the messiest of productions.
Through the Shattered Lens 