Elvis (1979, directed by John Carpenter)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Elvis, not to be confused with the later film starring Austin Butler, is a historically-interesting film for a number of reasons.

Made for television, it was the first of many biopics to be made about the King of Rock and Roll.  Seeing as how it went into production just a year after Elvis’s death and that its script was vetted and approved by Priscilla Presley herself, it’s not surprising that Elvis doesn’t really delve into the darker aspects of his life.  Elvis shoots a television, gets frustrated with his bad movies, and wonders who he can trust but we don’t see him get fat nor do we see him popping pills.  The movie ends with Elvis making his comeback in 1969, allowing a happy ending for the title character.

The film was directed by John Carpenter.  It was his first film to be released after the monster success of Halloween, though Carpenter actually started work on Elvis before Halloween was released.  Though the film’s television origins means there aren’t many examples of Carpenter’s signature style in Elvis, Carpenter does a good job recreating Elvis’s performances and, most importantly, he comes up with a film that holds your interest for three hours.

Finally, the role of Elvis is played by Kurt Russell, who was at the time still struggling to prove himself as being something more than just a Disney star.  Russell, who made his film debut kicking Elvis in the shins, throws himself into playing the role and captures the look, the swagger, and the voice of Elvis without ever descending into caricature.  His singing voice is dubbed for the performances but Russell is still convincing as the King.  It takes skill to wear that white jumpsuit without looking like you’re wearing a bad Halloween costume.  While this film showed that Russell was capable of more than just Disney films, it even more importantly launched his friendship with John Carpenter.  Escape From New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble In Little China all began with Elvis.

The movie doesn’t really tell us anything that we didn’t already know about Elvis but its entertaining and it has a big, colorful cast that include Pat Hingle as Tom Parker, Shelley Winters as Elvis’s mother, and Bing Russell (Kurt’s father) as Elvis’s father.  Priscilla is played by the beautiful Season Hubley, who married Kurt Russell shortly after filming.  (They divorced in 1983.)  Joe Mantegna, Ed Begley Jr., Ellen Travolta, and Dennis Christopher all appear in small roles and do their part to bring Elvis’s world to life.  Elvis is a fitting tribute to the King of Rock and Roll, one that gave Elvis a happy ending and started a great collaboration between a director and his star.

The Deadly Tower (1975, directed by Jerry Jameson)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Made for television, The Deadly Tower is a recreation of the terrible day in 1966 that a 25 year-old former Marine named Charles Whitman shot his wife and mother and then climbed to the top of the tower at the University of Texas in Austin and started to indiscriminately firing on the people below.  It was one of the first mass shootings of its kind.  What drove All-American boy Charles Whitman, who was eventually taken down by the police, to start his rampage is not known though the autopsy revealed that he did have a small brain tumor at the time of his death.

The Deadly Tower focuses mostly on the efforts of the policeman Ramiro Martinez (Richard Yinguez) and civilian Allan Crum (Ned Beatty) to get to the top of the tower and stop Whitman’s shooting rampage.  (Pernell Roberts, John Forsythe, and Clifton James all appear as other police officials, trying to deal with what was then an almost unheard of occurrence.)  Martinez risks his life to stop Whitman’s rampage while Allan worries that other shootings will follow.  One of the first examples of a true crime event being turned into a movie for television, The Deadly Tower a tense and effective docudrama.  Kurt Russell, who was then still known for being Disney’s top-paid star, plays Whitman.  Russell doesn’t have much dialogue in the film.  He’s blandly friendly while buying bullets and, when he’s sitting up in the tower with his rifle, he could just as easily pass for a teenager out hunting with his father during deer season.  Russell’s clean-cut appearance made him ideal for playing the role of someone who no one would have ever suspected could be capable of committing such a terrible crime.  It took courage to cast an actor then known for Disney films as one of America’s worst mass murderers and it also took courage for Russell to accept a role that was the total opposite of his family-friendly image.

The Deadly Tower used to show up on television frequently when I was a kid.  It’s still a scary movie, even if you know how it’s going to end.  Whitman may have been one of the first of his kind but sadly, he wouldn’t be the last.

I Watched The Strongest Man In The World (1975, Dir. by Vincent McEveety)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Dexter Riley (Kurt Russell) is back, again!  He still hasn’t graduated from Medfield College and Medfield is still on the verge of going broke.  Dean Higgins (Joe Flynn) discovers that the reason Medfield can never get out of the red is because the science class and students like Dexter are spending so much money on their experiments.  The Dean fires the science professor and threatens to expel Dexter!  But when Dexter’s latest experiment develops a type of milk that gives the drinker super strength, the Dean might have to change his mind.

A cereal company wants to buy the supermilk, which would get Medfield out of the hole.  But a rival cereal company just wants to steal the formula for the milk so they hire disgraced businessman and gangster A.J. Arno (Cesar Romero) to once again try to thwart the best laid plans of Medfield College.  Meanwhile, Dexter competes in a contest to prove that the supermilk has truly made him into the strongest man in the world.

The plot of the last Dexter Riley movie somehow manages to be even dumber than the first two and it was high time for Dexter to graduate and get on with his life but The Strongest Man In The World did make me laugh a few times.  Because this entry in the series involved super strength instead of invisibility or merging with a computer, it allowed for more physical comedy and it felt less dates than the other two movies.  The action is pretty much nonstop, as Dexter gets into one scrape after another and the cast is likable even if they all were getting a little old to still be playing college students.  Like the other Dexter Riley films, The Strongest Man In The World is too innocent and good-natured not to enjoy on some level.

I guess Dexter finally graduated after this movie.  Both he and Kurt Russell went on to better things.

Life’s A Beach: Superdad (dir by Vincent McEveety)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1973’s Superdad, Disney takes on the generation gap.

Charlie McCready (Bob Crane) just can’t understand what’s going on with his daughter, Wendy (Kathleen Cody).  She’s smart, pretty, and has the potential for a great future ahead of her but all she wants to do is hang out with her friends on the beach.  Eccentric Stanley Schlimmer (Bruno Kirby) drives everyone around in a souped-ambulance.  Ed Begley, Jr. (who plays a character who doesn’t even get a name) joins in whenever the group sings a folk song.  Wendy’s boyfriend, Bart (young and likable Kurt Russell), is a surfer and water skier.  Charlie is truly convinced that this extremely clean-cut group of teenagers is going to lead his daughter astray.  In fact, Wendy wants to marry Bart!  Charlie attempts to hang out with Wendy, Bart, and his friends on the beach and he can’t keep up.  He can’t water ski, he can’t play football, he can’t play volleyball.  All he can do is scream in this weird high-pitched voice.  The entire time is Bart is extremely nice to him and doesn’t even make fun of him for not being able to hit a volleyball over a net.  I mean, even I can do that!  But because Charlie’s not dealing well with becoming middle-aged, he decides that Bart is a threat.

(I’m going to assume that Charlie also teams up with a creepy friend and starts filming himself having threesomes with groupies, though we don’t actually see that happen in the film.  The subtext is there, though!)

Charlie decides that he has to get Wendy away from this group and the best way to do that would be to trick her into thinking she’s received a scholarship to …. Yes, this is just that stupid …. a scholarship to a prestigious university.  While Bart and his healthy, non-smoking, non-drinking friends are all going to City College and living at home with their parents, Wendy will be miles away at a college where she can do anything that she wants. Charlie thinks this is a great plan.  One gets the feeling that Charlie, for all of his overprotectiveness, hasn’t read a newspaper in 20 years.  Seriously, has he not been keeping up with what was happening on most college campuses in the late 60s and early 70s?

The main problem with this film is that Charlie is an incredible jerk.  It’s one thing to be overprotective.  Fathers are supposed to be overprotective of their daughters.  It’s one thing to worry about his daughter not having a good deal of ambition.  I can even understand him getting annoyed with Stanley because Stanley is kind of annoying.  (Watching this film, it’s hard to believe that Bruno Kirby was just one year away from playing the young Clemenza in The Godfather, Part II.)  But seriously, Charlie is freaking out over his daughter dating KURT RUSSELL!  In this film, Kurt Russell plays a character who is always polite, mild-mannered, sensible, and remarkably understanding of Charlie’s attempts to keep him from marrying Wendy.  There is one scene where Bart gets upset and he barely even raises his voice.  He’s incredibly likeable and, for all of this film’s flaws, it’s still easy to see why Kurt Russell became a star.

Of course, what really makes this film a cringe-fest is that it stars Bob Crane as a family man with a secretly manipulative side and, the whole time I was watching, I kept having flashbacks to Greg Kinnear in Auto-Focus.  Wendy, to make her dad really angry, gets engaged to an actual hippie named Klutch (Joby Baker) and there’s a scene in which Klutch and Charlie get into a fight in Klutch’s artist studio.  Every time Klutch swung anything near Charlie’s head, I definitely cringed a bit.  Red paints get spilled everywhere, though luckily it ends up on Klutch and not Charlie.  Still, watching the film, I couldn’t help but think that there are worse things that could happen to someone than having their daughter marry Kurt Russell.

I Watched Now You See Him, Now You Don’t (1972, Dir. by Robert Butler)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Dexter Riley (Kurt Russell) is back and just in time because Medfield College is on the verge of getting closed down again.

In The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, buying a computer was supposed to be the solution to all of Medfield’s financial problems.  I guess it didn’t work because Medfield is broke again and corrupt businessman A.J. Arnoe (Cesar Romero) is planning on canceling the school’s mortgage so that he can turn it into a casino.

There is some hope.  Dexter has accidentally created an invisibility spray.  Not only does it tun anything that it touches invisible but it also washes away with water so there’s no risk of disappearing forever.  Dexter and his friend Schuyler (Michael McGreevey) know that they can win the science fair with their invention but the science fair doesn’t want to allow small schools like Medfield to compete unless they really have something big to offer.  Dexter tells the Dean (Joe Flynn) that he has a sure winner but Dexter also refuses to reveal what it is because he doesn’t want word to leak before for the science fair.  The Dean decides to raise the money to pay off the mortgage by becoming a golfer, as one does.  Schulyer works as the Dean’s caddy while Dexter uses the invisibility spray to help the Dean cheat.  That’s a good message for a young audience, Disney!  But when Arno finds out about the spray, he wants to steal it so he can rob a bank.

This was even dumber than The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes but it was also hard to dislike it.  The comedy was too gentle, Kurt Russell and the rest of the cast were too likable, and the special effects were too amusingly cheap in that retro Disney way for it to matter that the movie didn’t make any sense.  When a bunch of college kids learn the secret of invisibility and use it to cheat at golf, you know you’re watching a Disney film.

Song of the Day: The Rocker (by Thin Lizzy)

Posted on by Arleigh

So, it looks like it’s St. Patrick’s Day here in Through the Shattered Lens. For my lone contribution to all things Irish I present “The Rocker” by Dublin, Ireland’s very own Thin Lizzy.

A song that was part of their 1973 album release Vagabonds of the Western World and it features the Dublin trio of Phil Lynott on bass guitar, Eric Bell on lead guitar and Brian Downey on drums. The song itself has the Thin Lizzy rock sound with Irish folk music influence.

I’ve chosen this song as my choice since it also qualifies as having one of the great rock guitar solos in history. Eric Bell’s guitar solo actually occurs throughout the length and breadth of the song. It’s sometimes hard to hear that there’s even a guitar solo but the whole song could be looked at as being a guitar solo from start to finish with Eric Bell being the lead and only guitar with Phil supporting on bass.

“The Rocker” by Thin Lizzy is not a song that many fans today would ever think is a major classic, but rock aficionados, especially of music of the late 60’s through the 70’s would not hesitate to have this song as one of the classics.

The Rocker

I am your main man if you’re looking for trouble
I take no lip, no one’s tougher than me
I’d kick your face, you’d soon be seeing double
Hey, little girl, keep your hands off of me

I’m a rocker
I’m a rocker
I’m a roller too, baby
I’m a rocker

Down at the juke joint, me and the boys are stompin’
Bippin’ and boppin’ and telling a dirty joke or two
In walked this chick and I knew she was up to something
And I kissed her right there, out of the blue

I said, “Hey baby, meet me, I’m a tough guy
Got my cycle outside, you wanna try?”
She just looked at me and rolled them big eyes
“Said, I’d do anything for you, for you’re a rocker”

I’m a rocker
I’m a roller too, honey
I’m a rocker

I love to rock and roll
I get my records at the Rock On stall
Sweet rock and roll
Teddy boy, he got them all

Rocker

I love to rock and roll
I get my records at the Rock On stall
Sweet rock and roll
Teddy boy, he’s got them all

I’m a rocker

Great Guitar Solos Series

Film Review: Fools’ Parade (dir by Andrew V. McLaglen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1971’s Fools’ Parade opens in 1935.

Three men are released from the West Virginia state penitentiary and given a train ticket out of town by the prison captain, Council (George Kennedy).  The men are a bank robber named Lee Cottrill (Strother Martin), a young man named Johnny Jesus (a young Kurt Russell), and a courtly older man named Mattie Appleyard (James Stewart).  Despite his polite tone of voice and his folksy manner, Appleyard is actually the most notorious of the three men being released.  Convicted of murdering two men, Appleyard has spent the past 40 years in prison.  Both Appleyard and Cottrill are looking to go straight.  Every day of his sentence, Appleyard worked and earned money.  Along with a glass eye, Appleyard leaves prison with a check for $25,000 dollars.  Appleyard plans to cash the money at the bank and then open a store with Cottrill.

Unfortunately, Appleyard has been released at the height of the Great Depression.  The streets are full men desperately looking for work.  People will do anything to feed their families or to make a little extra money.  Salesman Roy K. Sizemore (William Window) transports guns and dynamite.  Willis Hubbard (Robert Donner) works as a conductor on the train.  Aging prostitute Cleo (Ann Baxter) offers to sell the virginity of her adopted daughter, Chanty (Katherine Cannon).  Junior Killfong (Morgan Paull) sings on the radio and occasionally takes on deadlier work with his friend, Steve Mystic (Mike Kellin).  As for Captain Council, he’s decided that he’s going to make his money by ambushing the train carrying the three men that he has just released from prison.  After killing the men, Council will cash Appleyard’s check himself.

Of course, it doesn’t quite work out as simply as Council was hoping.  Willis Hubbard has a crisis of conscience and lets Appleyard, Cottrill, and Johnny know what Council is planning.  The three men narrowly make their escape but Council frames Appleyard for a murder that he didn’t commit.  Now wanted once again, the three men must not only get the money but also clear their names.  It won’t be easy because, as Hubbard explains, they may be free from the penitentiary but now, they’re trapped in “the prison of 1935.”

Fools’ Parade really took me by surprise.  I watched it because it featured two of my favorite actors, James Stewart and Kurt Russell.  And both Stewart and Russell give very good performances in the film.  Stewart was always at his best when he got a chance to hint at the melancholy behind his folksiness and the young Kurt Russell plays Johnny with a sincerity that makes you automatically root for him.  For that matter, the normally sinister Strother Martin is very likable as Lee Cottrill, a bank robber who is still struggling with the idea of going straight.  But, beyond the actors, Fools’ Parade is a genuinely sad portrait of desperate people trying to survive.  At one point, Sizemore and Cottrill watch as their train passes a camp of people who have been displaced by the Great Depression and it’s even implied that the villainous Council has some regret over what he’s become.  (There’s a small but poignant scene in which Council and Cleo acknowledge the passage of time and, for a minute, the viewer realizes these two people were, at one time, maybe as idealistic and optimistic as Johnny.)  It’s a well-acted film, one in which moments of humor are mixed with moments of true sadness.  I may have picked the film for Jimmy and Kurt but, in the end, the film’s story and performances drew me in.  The 63 year-old Stewart proved that he could still give a memorable performance and the 20 year-old Kurt Russell proved that he was a future star in the making.  If you haven’t seen it, this is definitely a film to check out.

I Watched The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969, Dir. by Robert Butler)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Medfield College has a problem.  No one takes the college seriously.  Maybe if the college could win the big college quiz show, people would finally stop laughing at Medfield but the students are not academically talented.  Professor Quigley (William Schallert) thinks that the college needs to finally buy a new-fangled device called a computer.  The Dean (Joe Flynn) says that there’s no way any college can afford something as expensive as that!  Luckily, businessman and gangster A.J. Arno (Cesar Romero) is willing to donate one of his computers.  It takes several students to move the computer into the lab because the computer is huge.

Medfield finally has a computer but are the students smart enough to win that quiz show?  Popular jock Dexter Riley (Kurt Russell) happens to be in the lab during a freak thunderstorm.  When both he and the computer get struck by lightning at the same time, it leads to Dexter becoming a human computer.  He suddenly knows everything.  He can speak any language and solve any equation.  He can answer any question/  Whenever anyone shines a light into Dexter’s ear, they see circuit boards.  No one really cares that none of this makes sense.  Medfield is going to win that quiz show for sure!  But first, Dexter is going to have to escape from Arno, who fears Dexter now knows all the details about his gambling ring.

Watching this Disney film was a real eye-opener for me.  Computers are such a part of my everyday life that it was strange seeing a college making such a big deal about getting one.  The computer that Medfield got looked more like the type of computer that NASA used to go to the moon than the ones that were in my high school computer lab.  I was worried that no one seemed to care that Dexter had a circuit board in his head.  Not even Dexter seemed to care.  It was also funny to me that all he had to do was get struck by lightning while standing near a computer and suddenly, he knew how to speak every language and solve every problem.  I use a computer everyday and I can still only speak English and Spanish.  I feel like I’m getting cheated.

The whole movie was absolutely ludicrous but I did enjoy watching this movie.  It was too sweet, innocent, and good-natured not to enjoy.  There was nothing realistic about the movie but it was nice to imagine a world where everyone gets along, the bad guys are all too buffoonish to really be dangerous, and a serious knock on the head leads to thing returning to normal instead of permanent brain damage.  Kurt Russell was only 18 when he made The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes but he could already carry a movie.

Shattered Politics: The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band (dir by Michael O’Herlihy)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1968, The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band is an old school Disney family film that almost feels like a rather mean-spirited parody of an old school Disney family film.  The songs are forgettable, the film has a cheap made-for-TV look to it, and the whole thing feels a bit too manufactured to  produce any sort of genuine emotion.

That said, it’s memorable for two reasons.  First off, it may be the only film ever made that centers on the presidential election of 1888.  In the Dakota territories, the citizens wait to see whether or not Democrat Grover Cleveland will be reelected or whether he’ll be defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison.  Those who support the Dakotas joining the Union as one state hope to see Cleveland returned to the White House.  Those who favor the creation of a North and South Dakota hope that Benjamin Harrison will win the election, allowing for four new Republican senators to be sent to Washington.

Confederate veteran Renssaeler “Grandpa” Brown (Walter Brennan) supports the Democrats and he’s got his family singing songs to promote the cause of Grover Cleveland.  Grandpa’s son, Calvin (Buddy Ebsen), is a Republican who still has no problem performing at the Democratic Convention because he, much like his children, is a born performer.  His oldest son, Sidney (Kurt Russell, who was 16 at the time of filming), is not old enough to vote but I imagine he’d probably vote for the Republican ticket because he’s Kurt Russell and it’s hard to imagine Kurt voting for a Democrat.  The other children want to keep both Grandpa and their father happy.  Meanwhile, daughter Alice (Lesley Ann Warren) has fallen in love with newspaper editor, Joe Carder (a very bland John Davidson).  Joe’s a Republican and supports Benjamin Harrison.  Grandpa’s not happy but really Grandpa should just mind his own darn business.  At least, that’s my take on it.  (Also, I gave up cursing for Lent.)

On the one hand, the Bowman sisters are pretty evenly split politically, with two voting for the Democrats and the other two tending to vote Republican so I could definitely relate to the idea of a family that didn’t always agree on politics  At the same time, this film’s premise means that there are a lot of songs about Benjamin and Grover Cleveland in this film and they’re about as memorable and exciting as you would expect a bunch of songs about two of America’s forgotten presidents to be.  If you learn anything about the election of 1888 from this film, you’ll learn that Cleveland’s full name was Stephen Grover Cleveland.  You might also note that, for all the talk about how the country have never been as divided as it is today, people were saying the exact same thing in 1888.

The other thing that makes this otherwise forgettable film stand-out is that it features the film debut of Goldie Hawn, who appears as a Republican dancer in the film’s climax.  This was not only Hawn’s debut but it was also the first film that she made with Kurt Russell.  That said, don’t panic.  Hawn was 22 to Kurt’s 16 when she made this film but the two of them didn’t become a couple until they met again in 1983, while filming Swing Shift.  I read an interview with Kurt where, when asked whether he noticed Goldie Hawn in her film debut, he said that he did but he didn’t even think of talking to her because, “I didn’t even have a car.”

Fortunately, everything worked out in the end.  Benjamin Harrison vanquished Grover Cleveland (though Grover returned in 1892, becoming the first of two president to serve non-consecutive terms) and, after their second film together, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn are together to this day.

 

 

Scenes That I Love: Kurt Russell In Used Cars

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Used Cars (1980, directed by Robert Zemeckis)

Today is not only St. Patrick’s Day!  It’s also Kurt Russell’s birthday!

Today’s scene that I love comes from one of my favorite Kurt Russell movies, the wonderful 1980 comedy, Used Cars!  In this scene, Kurt’s ambitious used car salesman promotes his senate candidacy and gets some important advice from his mentor (Jack Warden).  This scene features both Russell and Warden at their considerable best.  Needless to say, if you haven’t watched this film, you need to!

(Watch it with Fargo and have yourself a car salesman double feature!)