Retro Television Reviews: In Search of America (by Paul Bogart)

Posted on June 11, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay. Today’s film is 1971’s In Search of America! It can be viewed on YouTube!

College student Mike Olson (young Jeff Bridges) returns home and informs his mother (Vera Miles) and his father (Carl Betz) and his annoyingly quirky grandmother (Ruth McDevitt) that he’s dropped out of college. He apologizes for wasting all the money that they spent on tuition but hey, maybe he can make it up to them by taking them on a journey as he drives across America in an old bus.

Uhmmm….

Now, let me just repeat this so that there is no confusion. This absolutely schmuck took his parents’ money, wasted it, dropped out of college, and now he expects everyone to travel with him across America because he’s decided that he’s a part of the counterculture.

And, instead of telling him to go to Hell and get a job, his family agrees.

Oh sure, Mom is a little bit hesitant about Mike’s idea. But Dad is really enthusiastic. He understands the kids and he wants a chance to relive his own youth, before he got tied down with things like paying bills and being a responsible human being. And, of course, if the Hippies were famous for anything, it was their love of upper class, middle-aged people. Just ask the LaBiancas.

And, of course, grandma is totally excited about it because she’s an old person in a made-for-TV movie.

So, they all board the bus and Mike takes them to a music festival so that they can meet some of his friends. For instance, there’s Nick (Sal Mineo), a drop-out who says that he’s more burned out than turned on. There’s Annie (Tyne Daly), who is going to need someone to help deliver her baby. There’s Bodhi (Glynn Turman), who is some sort of doctor. He and grandma bond of their shared quirkiness. And then there’s Kathy (Renne Jarrett), who is at the music festival despite the fact that she’s really sick and on the verge of dying. When Kathy’s parents (Howard Duff and Kim Hunter) show up looking for her, Mike has to decide whether to save her life or respect her wish to do her own thing.

This was obviously meant to be a pilot for a show where the family would travel around the country and I guess get involved in different adventures each week. The main problem is that, while Jeff Bridges seems to be a bit of a hippie in real life, he’s not particularly convincing in this film. He’s way too clean-cut and his family’s decision to follow him across the country never makes the least bit of sense. As for the hippies themselves, they come across as being so shallow that I found myself wanting to donate money to the Nixon campaign.

The Party’s Over: Dean Martin in MR. RICCO (MGM 1975)

Posted on February 2, 2017 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

It’s an older, more world-weary Dean Martin we see in MR. RICCO, a fairly gritty but ultimately unfulfilling 70’s flick that would’ve made a decent pilot for a TV series (maybe in the NBC MYSTERY MOVIE rotation with Columbo and McCloud), but as a feature was best suited for the bottom half of a double bill. This was Dino’s last starring role, though he did appear in two more movies (THE CANNONBALL RUN and it’s sequel), and this attempt to change his image from footloose swinger to a more *gasp!* sober Martin doesn’t really cut it.

Dean’s a defense lawyer, a “lily white liberal” who gets black militant Frankie Steele (Thalmus Rasulala ) off a murder rap. When two cops are blown away in an ambush, the witness provides a description of Steele, causing friction between Ricco and the police, especially his friend Detective Captain Cronyn (Eugene Roche, an underrated character actor who’s really good here). The…

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Back to School #8: Halls of Anger (dir by Paul Bogart)

Posted on August 24, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Everybody loves Jeff Bridges.

Last month, the Democratic senator from Montana, John Walsh, announced that he wouldn’t be running for reelection because, much like Lianne Spiderbaby, he had been caught plagiarizing. (Incidentally, I was one of the many bloggers caught up in Lianne’s web of thievery. If you have ever read Lianne’s review of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, you were essentially reading my review of Black Sabbath.) Unfortunately, for the Montana Democratic Party, Walsh had already won the Democratic primary. So, the Montana Democrats held an emergency meeting to select a new nominee.

Governors, ranchers, former congressmen — nearly every prominent Democrat in Montana announced that he didn’t want the nomination. It looked like all hope was lost but then a petition appeared online, asking the Democrats to nominate Jeff Bridges for the U.S. Senate! This petition made national headlines and, in just a few hours, it had received thousands of signatures. For a few brief days, everyone was truly excited about the prospect of U.S. Sen. Jeff Bridges. I even signed the petition myself, despite the fact that 1) I don’t live in Montana and 2) I’m not even a Democrat!

(I’m a member of the Personal Choice Party. PCP in 2016!)

Ultimately, he announced that he had no interesting running and wasn’t even sure if he was registered to vote but, until that happened, why were so many of us excited about Jeff Bridges running for the Senate?

Because, in this time of division and conflict, everybody loves Jeff Bridges!

He’s just an incredibly likable actor. Even when he’s playing a villain, like in Iron Man, he still comes across like someone you would want to live next door to. He’s everyone’s perfect hippie uncle, the guy that even people who don’t smoke weed want to get stoned with. If you ever watch any of his early films — and Bridges has been making movies for nearly 50 years now — you’ll discover that this unique and likable charm is something that Jeff Bridges has always possessed.

It’s certainly present in 1970’s Halls of Anger. This was Jeff Bridges’s film debut, made at a time when he could still pass for a high school student. He was 20 when he made this film and I have to say that for those of us who best know him as the Dude, Rooster Cogburn, and whoever he was playing in Crazy Heart, it’s always interesting to see just how handsome Jeff Bridges was when he was young.

Jeff Bridges, hiding his face in Halls of Anger

In Halls of Anger, he plays Doug, one of 60 white kids who have been transferred to a majority black inner city high school in an attempt to integrate it. Of all the new white students, Doug is probably the most confident and the most open-minded. He’s also the most friendly. His attempt to join the high school basketball team upsets the other students but — even after getting beaten up — Doug sticks with it. You knew that he would because, after all, he’s played by Jeff Bridges.

Of course, Doug’s story is just one of the many stories told in Halls of Anger. Another one of the transfers — a weak-willed and balding racist named Leaky (played by future director Rob Reiner!) — tries to provoke a fight with a black student, hoping that he’ll be sent back to his old school for his own protection. White Sherry (Patricia Stich) dates a black classmate and is savagely assaulted as a result. Newly assigned vice principal Quincy Davis (Calvin Lockhart) tries to both keep the peace and teach a group of functionally illiterate students how to read. Militant J.T. Walsh (James Edwards) wanders the hallways and speaks of revolution…

Rob Reiner in Halls of Anger

Actually, I’m probably making Halls of Anger sound a lot more interesting than it actually is. For the most part, it’s pretty much your standard 1970 social problem film, in that it’s full of good intentions but those good intentions don’t always add up to compelling drama. Paul Bogart’s direction is often flat (the scene where Davis teaches his students how to read seems to drag on for hours) and the characters don’t so much talk to each other as they make narratively convenient speeches.

That said, Halls of Anger is worth watching just to see Calvin Lockhart’s authoritative performance, Rob Reiner’s hilariously bad performance, and Jeff Bridges’s charismatic debut performance. He may never be a member of the U.S. Senate but everybody will always love Jeff Bridges.

You can watch Halls of Anger below!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7btGxM2rSCY