Since today is Orson Welles’s birthday, I wanted to share at least one scene that I love from his films. The famous tracking shot from 1958’s Touch of Evil, which begins in America and ends in Mexico, truly shows Orson Welles at his visionary best.
It’s also Welles at his most clever. Knowing that he wouldn’t be given control over the editing of the footage he shot, Welles included as many long shots as possible to make it more difficult for an editor to chop up or alter his vision.
“It’s gonna take a lot of good people to make this place decent again.” — Hugh Holmes
Chiefs, the 1983 CBS miniseries adapted from Stuart Woods’ Edgar Award-winning novel, triumphs as a faithful yet inventive translation of a sprawling literary thriller into television’s constrained canvas. Unfolding across four decades in Delano, Georgia (1924-1963), it chronicles three generations of deeply flawed police chiefs pursuing a serial killer who targets young boys, their quest shadowed by the American South’s seismic shift from Jim Crow’s iron grip to the civil rights revolution.
Woods’ debut novel uses the murders as a piercing allegory for societal rot—Delano a claustrophobic organism where racism, class divides, and omertà-like codes nurture evil. The miniseries scores a major win by distilling this 400-page epic into six compelling hours, preserving the book’s generational rhythm and thematic spine while leveraging TV’s strengths in visual dread and ensemble intimacy. Yet, as a TV production, it inevitably stumbles under the medium’s inherent drawbacks: commercial interruptions, budgetary limits, network sanitization, and episodic structuring that blunt the novel’s novelistic nuance.
Performances drive Chiefs, with Keith Carradine and Brad Davis towering as the absolute standouts, breathing transcendent life into Woods’ most vivid creations and elevating the adaptation beyond its TV trappings. Carradine’s Foxy Funderburke, the killer—a vulpine everyman whose sly charm cloaks bottomless depravity—is nothing short of revelatory. Woods crafts him as Delano’s perfect predator, evading justice across decades because prejudice and small-town loyalty provide endless cover; the miniseries unleashes Carradine’s eerie genius, his lanky frame slinking through scenes with piercing eyes and smirks that chill deeper than any scream. Watch him whistle casually amid shadows or flash a fox-like grin during backyard chats—it’s understated psychopathy at its peak, a masterclass in menace that makes Foxy scarier than modern slashers, his longevity indicting the chiefs’ every failure. Carradine doesn’t just play the monster; he inhabits its everyday skin, sly pauses and folksy drawl turning every frame into taut wire. It’s career-best work, haunting long after credits, the performance that cements Chiefs as essential viewing.
Matching that blaze is Brad Davis as Sonny Butts, the post-WWII chief whose war-hero shine curdles into tyrannical fury—one of the most volcanic turns in ’80s TV. Woods luxuriates in Sonny’s hypocrisy: brutalizing Black neighborhoods, shaking down suspects, half-chasing the killer amid integration’s tremors, his “heart of darkness” blending trauma with bigotry. The adaptation amps kinetic brawls absent in prose, but Davis owns it all—brooding intensity erupting in guttural snarls, trauma-flashed eyes, coiled physicality that dominates every standoff. His Southern accent locks authentic, chortles flipping to wide-eyed betrayal in heart-stopping beats; Sonny becomes tragically magnetic, a damaged bully whose rage mirrors Delano’s resistance, derailing justice while stealing the show. Davis channels raw, Brando-esque power without caricature, making mid-century arcs electric—visceral theater that rivals Carradine’s creeps for MVP crown.
The supporting ensemble holds strong but orbits these twin suns. Wayne Rogers brings MASH-grit to Will Henry Lee, the 1920s everyman chief, his weary resolve fitting the book’s naive obsession amid lynch-mob shadows. Stephen Collins’ crisp poise suits Billy Lee, the ambitious son bridging eras with subtle unease. Billy Dee Williams layers charismatic fire into Tyler Watts, the trailblazing ’60s Black chief, urgent under threats. Charlton Heston’s gravelly narration as Hugh Holmes anchors the old guard. Solid work all, but Carradine and Davis are the revelation, their chemistry with the killer-chief dynamic supercharging Woods’ prose.
Thematically, Chiefs touts adaptive victory: murders scalpel Southern sins—killer’s span enabled by whitewash, chiefs’ flaws (naivety, rage, complacency) echoing Jim Crow’s throes. Woods’ restraint (dread over gore) translates via Jerry London’s direction: TV-budget grit evokes Roots-sweep—rally torches, unearthed graves—pruning romances tautens pace, foregrounds racism’s backbone.
Yet television’s pitfalls drag it earthward, exposing media frailties the novel evades. Network TV demands commercial breaks, fracturing tension—cliffhangers feel forced, mid-episode lulls kill momentum where Woods’ chapters flow seamless. Budget caps hobble scope: no sweeping location shoots, recycled sets make Delano static vs. book’s vivid evolution; period details (cars, garb) ring true but cheapen under fluorescent lighting. CBS sanitization softens edges—Woods’ grayer morals binarize (heroes nobler, Sonny’s bigotry punchier for prime time), racial arcs gain clunky exposition (“We can’t let ’em take our way of life!”) where prose implies slyly. Episodic format sags pacing: generational pivots drag with filler (subplots padded for hours), killer’s decades-long credulity strains more on screen, visuals exposing logistical gaps the page glosses. Accents waver under non-native casts, a TV-casting haste; direction, competent, lacks cinematic flair—static shots, TV-gloss lighting mute novel’s sweaty dread. Ensemble shines brightest via leads, but supporting roles flatten into types, ensemble dilution print sustains. Flaws compound: preachiness in ’60s beats (TV’s social-message itch), conveniences (plot devices for act breaks), and era-inaccurate tweaks (anachronistic attitudes) betray source fidelity.
In the end, Chiefs succeeds more than it fails as an adaptation—capturing Woods’ generational prisms and Southern reckonings with enough fidelity and flair to transcend its era’s TV limitations, delivering cathartic release amid rising dread, propelled by Carradine and Davis’ unforgettable peaks. Its triumphs in atmosphere, those two volcanic turns, and thematic resonance outweigh the medium’s drags: clunky pacing, sanitized nuance, and budgetary blandness. Remarkably, it presages the true-crime boom on television decades later, laying groundwork for anthology masterpieces like True Detective, The Killing, and Fargo. Like those, Chiefs blends procedural hunts with existential rot, flawed antiheroes navigating moral quagmires, and killers embodying societal fractures—here, racism as the true long-game predator, with Carradine’s Foxy as proto-Rust Cohle eerie. Where modern series revel in cinematic polish and nonlinear flair, Chiefs proves the blueprint: small-town secrets, generational hauntings, justice as bloody evolution.
Today’s scene that I love comes from 1956’s The Ten Commandments.
Cecil B. DeMille is often unfairly dismissed as a director, just as Charlton Heston is often underrated as an actor. To me, this is one of the most powerful scenes in DeMille’s filmography. The sound of the screams is haunting. However, one must remember that, as with all the plagues that afflicted Egypt, the Pharoah was given fair warning.
Today’s scene that I love comes from 1959’s Ben-Hur. The chariot race was one of the great action sequences of its era and its influence is still felt to this day. Rumor has it that Mario Bava was among the crew that helped to shoot the chariot race. Personally, I choose to believe that even if I can’t prove it!
About halfway through 1974’s Airport 1975, Sid Caesar has one of the greatest lines in film history.
“The stewardess is flying the plane?”
Hell yeah, she is! After a collision with another plane takes out the crew of a Broening 747, it’s up to head flight attendant Nancy (Karen Black) to keep the plane from crashing until another pilot can somehow be lowered into the cockpit of the stricken airliner. Nancy’s never flown an airplane before but she is dating Al Murdock (Charlton Heston), who may be scared of commitment but who is still described as being one of the greatest pilots who has ever lived. None other than Joe Patroni (George Kennedy) says that no one knows more about flying than Al Murdock.
George Kennedy is the only cast member to return from the original Airport. When we previously met Patroni, he was the cigar-chewing chief mechanic for Trans World Airlines. In Airport 1975, he’s suddenly an executive with Columbia Airlines. His wife (Susan Clark) and his son (Brian Morrison) are also on the plane. Joe Patroni and Al Murdock are determined to bring that plane safely to the ground in Salt Lake City and if that means dropping a pilot into the cockpit from a helicopter, that’s what they’ll do. It’s all a question of whether or not Nancy can keep that plane from crashing while they round up a helicopter and a pilot.
Airport 1975 is so famous for being the movie where the stewardess is flying the plane that it’s often overlooked that it’s also the film where Linda Blair plays a young girl in need of a kidney transplant. When Sister Ruth (Helen Reddy) sees that the girl has a guitar with her, Ruth sings a folk song that has everyone on the airplane smiling. (If I was on a plane and someone started playing folk music, I’d probably jump out. That may seem extreme but seriously, you don’t want to test me on how much I dislike the folk sound.) This scene was, of course, parodied in Airplane! In fact, it’s pretty much impossible to watch Airport 1975 without thinking about Airplane!
It’s also overlooked that Gloria Swanson is one of the many stars to appear in this film but Swanson is the only one playing herself. Gloria Swanson starts as Gloria Swanson and I assume that this 1974 film was set in 1975 in order to generate some suspense as to whether or not Swanson was going to survive the crash. Swanson talks about how, in 1919, Cecil B. DeMille flew her over California. She does not talk about Joseph Kennedy or Sunset Boulevard and that’s a shame. As I watched Airport 1975, I found myself thinking about how different the film would have been if Gloria Swanson had been the one who had to pilot the plane instead of Karen Black.
“Gloria Swanson is piloting the plane?”
As entertaining as that would have been, it would have meant missing out on Karen Black’s intense performance as Nancy. At times, Nancy seems to be so annoyed with the situation that one gets the feeling that she’s considering intentionally crashing the plane into one of Utah’s mountains. At other times, she seems to be at a strange sort of peace with whatever happens. There’s a scene where she attempts to clear some of the clutter in the cockpit and an instrument panel falls on her head and it’s such a powerful moment because I know the exact same thing would have happened to me in that situation. There’s another moment where I’m pretty sure she accidentally kills the first pilot who attempts to drop into the cockpit and again, it’s a mistake that anyone could have made. The film doesn’t call her out on it because the film understand that none of us are perfect, except for Charlton Heston.
Speaking of which, Karen Black’s emotional performance contrasts nicely with the performance of Charlton Heston. This is perhaps the most Hestonesque performance that Charlton Heston ever gave. Al Murdock is confident, he doesn’t suffer fools, and he’s condescending as Hell. Every time he calls Nancy “honey,” you’ll want to cringe. And yet, it’s hard not to appreciate someone who can be so confident while wearing a tight yellow turtleneck. Charlton Heston watches as the first pilot to attempt to enter the cockpit plunges to his death and immediately declares that it’s his turn to try. “Get me in that monkey suit!” he snaps and it’s such a Heston moment that you have to love it.
There’s a ton of people in this movie. Norman Fell, Jerry Stiller, and Conrad Janis play three rowdy drunks. Erik Estrada, Efrem Zimbalist, and Roy Thinnes are the unfortunate members of the flight crew. Dana Andrews has a heart attack while piloting a small private plane. Myrna Loy appears not as herself but as Mrs. Delvaney, who spends almost the entire flight drinking. Christopher Norris plays Bette, who says that she may look like a teenager but she prefers to be called “Ms. Teenager” and that she’s trained in Kung Fu. Beverly Garland played Dana Andrews’s wife. Larry Storch is an obnoxious reporter. Character actor Alan Fudge plays Danton, the Salt Lake City controller who keeps Nancy calm until Charlton Heston can start snapping at people.
The first time that I watched Airport 1975, I was pretty dismissive of it but, over the years, I’ve rewatched it a few times and I have to admit that I’ve fallen in love with this wonderfully ridiculous film. There’s just so many odd details, like American Graffiti showing up as the plane’s in-flirt entertainment and Sid Caesar saying that he’s only on the flight because he has a small role in the movie and he finally wanted to see it. (It seems like it would have been cheaper to just go to a drive-in but whatever.) And there’s Karen Black, giving the performance of a lifetime and letting us all know that, in 1975, the stewardess flies the airplane!
And she does a damn good job of it too!
Today would have been the 102nd birthday of actor Charlton Heston.
This scene that I love comes from one of the few horror films in which Heston appeared. An adaptation of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, 1971’s The Omega Man featured Charlton Heston as Robert Neville. By night, Neville protects his house against the mutant horde. By day, he tracks those sleeping mutants down and watches Woodstock over and over again.
“They don’t make them like that anymore.”
In 1973, director Richard Lester and producer Ilya Salkind decided to try to get two for the price of one.
Working with a script written by novelist George McDonald Fraser, Lester and Salkind had assembled a once-in-a-lifetime cast to star in an epic film adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Michael York was cast as d’Artagnan, the youthful swordman who goes from being a country bumpkin to becoming a King’s Musketeer. His fellow musketeers were played by Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, and Frank Finlay. Faye Dunaway and Christopher Lee were cast as the villains, Milady and Rochefort. Charlton Heston played the oily Cardinal Richelieu. Geraldine Chaplin played Queen Anne while Simon Ward played the Duke of Buckingham. Comedic relief was supplied by Roy Kinnear as d’Artagnan’s manservant and Raquel Welch as Constance, d’Artagnan’s klutzy love interest. The film was a expensive, lushly designed epic that mixed Lester’s love of physical comedy with the international intrigue and the adventure of Dumas’s source material.
The only problem is that the completed film was too long. At least, that’s what Salkind and Lester claimed when they announced that they would be splitting their epic into two films. The cast and the crew, who had only been paid for one film, were outraged and the subsequent lawsuits led to the SAG ruling that all future actors’ contracts would include what was known as the Salkind clause, which stipulates that a a single production cannot be split into two or more films without prior contractual agreement.
But what about the films themselves? Both The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are currently available on Tubi. I watched them over the weekend and, of the many films that have been made out of Dumas’s Musketeer stories, Richard Lester’s films are the best. Lester captures the swashbuckling spirit of the books while also turning them into two films that are easily identifiable as Lester’s work. There’s a lot physical humor to be found in Lester’s adaptation, especially during the first installment. d’Artagnan runs through the streets of Paris, convinced that he has been insulted by the haughty Rochefort. d’Artagnan manages to get challenged to three separate duels, all to take place on the same day. After his first swordfight as a member of the Musketeers, d’Artagnan tries to tell the men that he wounded about an ointment that will help them with their pain. Raquel Welch also shows a genuine flair for comedy as Constance, which makes her fate in the second film all the more tragic.
For all the controversy that it caused, splitting the story into two films was actually the right decision. If The Three Musketeers is an enjoyable adventure film, The Four Musketeers is far more serious. In The Four Musketeers, Oliver Reed’s melancholic Athos steps into the spotlight and his story of his previous marriage to the villainous Milady casts his character in an entirely new light. In The Four Musketeers, the combat is much more brutal and the humor considerably darker. Likable characters die. The Musketeers themselves commit an act of extrajudicial brutality that, while true to Dumas’s novel, would probably be altered if the film were made today. From being a naive bumpkin in The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers finds d’Artgnan transformed into a battle weary soldier.
The cast is fabulous. This is a case of the all-star label living up to the hype. Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, and Richard Chamberlain all seems as if they’ve been riding and fighting together for decades. Christopher Lee plays Rochefort as being an almost honorable villain while Faye Dunaway is a cunning and sexy Milady. What truly makes the film work, though, is the direction of Richard Lester. Lester stay true to the spirit of Dumas while also using the material to comment on the modern world, with the constant threat of war and civil uprising mirroring the era in which the films were made. Interestingly enough, Richard Lester first became interested in the material when Ilya Salkind reached out to the Beatles to try to convince them to play the Musketeers. While the Beatles were ultimately more interested in a never-produced adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, Richard Lester was happy to bring Dumas’s characters to life.
Both The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers are currently on Tubi, for anyone looking for a truly great adventure epic.
The late director Franklin J. Schaffner was born 105 years ago today.
Though Schaffner won an Oscar for directing Patton, my favorite Schaffner film will always be Planet of the Apes. In this scene, Charlton Heston discovers where he’s actually been for the entire movie.
Though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences claim that the Oscars honor the best of the year, we all know that there are always worthy films and performances that end up getting overlooked. Sometimes, it’s because the competition too fierce. Sometimes, it’s because the film itself was too controversial. Often, it’s just a case of a film’s quality not being fully recognized until years after its initial released. This series of reviews takes a look at the films and performances that should have been nominated but were, for whatever reason, overlooked. These are the Unnominated.
I come here to defend Charlton Heston.
1994’s Ed Wood is a great film that has one unfortunate line. Towards the end of the film, director Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) meets his hero, Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onoforio), in a bar. They talk about the difficulties of directing a film. Wood talks about the trouble that he’s having with Plan 9 From Outer Space. Welles says that he can understand what Wood is going through because the studio is forcing him to cast Charlton Heston as a Mexican in his next movie.
And look, I get it. It is true that Charlton Heston does play a Mexican prosecutor named Mike Vargas in Welles’s 1958 film, Touch of Evil. And it is true that Heston is not the most convincing Mexican to ever appear in a film. And I understand that there are people who enjoy taking cheap shots at Charlton Heston because he did have a tendency to come across as being a bit full of himself and he was a conservative in a industry dominated by Leftists. There are people who actually think Michael Moore doesn’t come across like a self-righteous prick when he confronts Heaton in Bowling for Columbine. I get the joke.
But it’s not true and it’s not fair. When Touch of Evil was first put into production by Universal, Welles was not hired to direct. He was hired to play Hank Quinlan, the formerly honest cop with a habit of planting evidence on those who he believed to be guilty. When Charlton Heston was offered the role of Vargas, he asked who had been hired to direct. When he was told that a director hadn’t been selected, Heston was the one who suggested Welles be given the job. When, as often happened with Welles’s film, the studio decided to take the film out of Welles’s hands, Heston argued for Welles’s vision while Welles was off trying to set up his long-dreamed of film of Don Quixote. Say what you will about Charlton Heston’s career, he fought for Orson Welles, just as he later fought for Sam Peckinpah during the making of Major Dundee. Heston may not have agreed with either Welles or Peckinpah politically but he fought for them when few people were willing to do so.
That Touch of Evil is a brilliant film is pretty much entirely due to Welles’s directorial vision. The story is pure pulp. While investigating the murder of an American businessman in Mexico, Vargas comes to believe that Quinlan is attempting to frame a young Mexican for the crime. While Vargas watches Quinlan, his wife Susie (Janet Leigh) is menaced by the crime lord Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff), who has his own issues with both Vargas and Quinlan. The plot may be the stuff of a B-programmer but, as directed by Welles, Touch of Evil plays out like a surreal nightmare, a journey into the heart of darkness that is full of eccentric characters, shadowy images, memorably askew camera angles, and lively dialogue. Welles and cinematographer Russell Metty create a world that feels alien despite being familiar. Just as he did with Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane, Welles shapes a film that shows us what’s happening in the shadows that most people try to ignore.
There’s really not a boring character to be found in Touch of Evil and the cast is full of old colleagues and friends of Welles. Marlene Dietrich shows up as Quinlan’s former lover. Mercedes McCambridge plays a leather-clad gang leader. Dennis Weaver is the creepy owner of a remote motel. (Two years before Psycho, Touch of Evil featured Janet Leigh being menaced in a motel. Mort Mills, who played Psycho’s frightening highway patrolman, plays a member of law enforcement here as well.) Zsa Zsa Gabor shows up for a few brief seconds and it makes a strange sort of sense. Why shouldn’t she be here? Everyone else is. Joseph Cotten plays a coroner. Ray Collins plays a local official. In the film’s skewered world, Charlton Heston as Mike Vargas works. His upright performance grounds this film and keeps it from getting buried in its own idiosyncrasies. Big personalites are everywhere and yet the film is stolen by Joseph Calleia, playing Quinlan’s quiet but observant partner. Calleia’s performance is the heart of the film.
Touch of Evil was not nominated for a single Oscar and that’s not surprising. It’s not really the type of film that was noticed by the Academy in the 50s. It was too pulpy and surreal and, with its story of a crooked cop framing someone who might very well be guilty anyway, it was probably too subversive for the Academy of the 1950s. It would take a while for Touch of Evil to be recognized for being the noir masterpiece that it is. In a perfect world, Welles would have been nominated for directing and for his larger-than-life performance as Quinlan. Joseph Calleia would have been nominated for Supporting Actor and perhaps both Janet Leigh and Marlene Dietrtich would have been mentioned for Supporting Actress. That didn’t happen but it would have been nice if it had.
Previous entries in The Unnominated:
Since today is Orson Welles’s birthday, I wanted to share at least one scene that I love from his films. The famous tracking shot from 1958’s Touch of Evil, which begins in America and ends in Mexico, truly shows Orson Welles at his visionary best.
It’s also Welles at his most clever. Knowing that he wouldn’t be given control over the editing of the footage he shot, Welles included as many long shots as possible to make it more difficult for an editor to chop up or alter his vision.
Through the Shattered Lens 