Tag Archives: Richard Roundtree

Scenes I Love: The Opening of Shaft

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today would have been the birthday of Richard Roundtree so, of course, today’s scene that I love could only be the classic opening of 1971’s Shaft.

By doing something as simple as walking down a street in New York, Roundtree showed us exactly who Shaft was and why Shaft did what he did.  This is one of those scenes that’s been parodied so many times that it’s actually surprising to rewatch and see how just defiant and sexy Richard Roundtree’s confident strut actually was.

On another note, I enjoy seeing all of the names of the movies that were playing on 42nd Street when this scene was filmed.

Film Review: City Heat (dir by Richard Benjamin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1984’s City Heat, Clint Eastwood plays Lt. Speer, a tough and taciturn policeman who carries a big gun, throws a mean punch, and only speaks when he absolutely has to.

Burt Reynolds plays Mike Murphy, a private investigator who has a mustache, a wealthy girlfriend (Madeleine Kahn), and a habit of turning everything into a joke.

Together, they solve crimes!

I’m not being sarcastic here.  The two of them actually do team up to solve a crime, despite having a not quite friendly relationship.  (Speer has never forgiven Murphy for quitting the force and Murphy has never forgiven Speer for being better at everything than Murphy is.)  That said, I would be hard-pressed to give you the exact details of the crime.  City Heat has a plot that can be difficult to follow, not because it’s complicated but because the film itself is so poorly paced and edited that the viewer’s mind tends to wander.  The main impression that I came away with is that Speer and Murphy like to beat people up.  In theory, there’s nothing wrong with that.  Eastwood is legendary tough guy.  Most people who watch an Eastwood film do so because they’re looking forward to him putting the bad guys in their place, whether it’s with a gun, his fists, or a devastating one-liner.  Reynolds also played a lot of tough characters, though they tended to be more verbose than Eastwood’s.

That said, the violence in City Heat really does get repetitive.  There’s only so many times you can watch Clint punching Burt while various extras get gunned down in the background before it starts to feel a little bit boring.  The fact that the film tries to sell itself as a comedy while gleefully mowing down the majority of the supporting cast doesn’t help.  Eastwood snarls like a pro and Reynolds flashes his devil-may-care smile but, meanwhile, Richard Roundtree is getting tossed out a window, Irene Cara is getting hit by a car, and both Kahn and Jane Alexander are being taken hostage.  Tonally, the film is all over the place.  Director Richard Benjamin was a last-minute replacement for Blake Edwards and he directs without any sort of clear vision of just what exactly this film is supposed to be.

On the plus side, City Heat takes place in Kansas City in 1933 and the production design and the majority of the costumes are gorgeous.  (Unfortunately, the film itself is often so underlit that you may have to strain your eyes to really appreciate it.)  And the film also features two fine character actors, Rip Torn and Tony Lo Bianco, are the main villains.  For that matter, Robert Davi shows up as a low-level gangster and he brings an actual sense of menace to his character.  There are some good things about City Heat but overall, the film is just too messy and the script is a bit too glib for its own good.

Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood had apparently been friends since the early days of their careers.  This was the only film that they made together.  Interestingly enough, Reynolds gets the majority of the screentime.  Eastwood may be top-billed but his role really is a supporting one.  Unfortunately, Reynolds seems to be kind of bored with the whole thing.  As for Clint, he snarls with the best of them but the film really doesn’t give him much to do.

A disappointing film, City Heat.  Watching a film like this, it’s easy to see why Eastwood ended up directing himself in the majority of his films.

Film Review: Inchon (dir by Terence Young)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Inchon is an infamous film.

First released in 1982, this epic recreation of one key battles of the Korean War was an expensive film with a cast of well-known actors.  Jacqueline Bisset plays a wealthy army wife who tries to protect five South Korean children who have found themselves in the middle of the battle.  Ben Gazzara plays her husband, a major who is having an affair with the daughter of Toshiro Mifune.  David Janssen and real-life film critic Rex Reed wander through the film as journalist.  (Janssen growls like a man dealing with a serious hangover while Reed struggles to not look straight at the camera.)  Richard Roundtree plays a tough sergeant.  The great Italian actor Gabriele Ferzetti plays a Turkish officer.  And, finally, the role of legendary American general Douglas MacArthur — of “I will return” fame — is played by the very British Sir Laurence Olivier.  Olivier was apparently told that, in real life, MacArthur often sounded like the comedic actor W.C. Fields and Olivier often seems to be imitating Fields’s pinched style of speaking.  Olivier also wears almost as much makeup here as he did in his production of Othello.  MacArthur is portrayed as being almost a mystic warrior, a man who relies as much on his faith as his strategic genius to repel the communists.  (In victory, he recites The Lord’s Prayer.)  The film was directed by Terence Young, who previously brought James Bond to cinematic life.

Inchon is notorious for being a flop with both critics and audiences.  The film had a budget of $46,000,000 and reportedly made $5,000,000 at the box office before it was withdrawn.  The entirety of the budget was put up by the Unification Church, which is an organization that many people consider to be a cult.  (I like neither communists nor cultists so this film left me with no one to root for.)  The film proved to be such a flop at the box office that it has never been released on home video.  It did, however, air on television a few times and, in recent years, the television cut has been posted to YouTube.  That’s how I saw Inchon.

I watched Inchon because I’ve frequently seen it referred to as being one of the worst films ever made.  Watching the film, I have to say that I think the “worst film” label is a bit extreme.  For the most part, it’s just an extremely uneven and often rather boring film, one that mixed scenes of surprisingly brutal combat with dialogue-heavy scenes that just seem to drag on forever.  It’s a film that belongs as much in the disaster genre as the war genre as the film is full of rather shallowly-written characters who all have their own individual dramas to deal with.  Will Jacqueline Bisset save the children?  Who will sacrifice their lives to defeat the communists? Will Ben Gazzara, who often seems to be the sole member of the cast who is at least tying to give a credible performance, choose his wife or his mistress?  The film ultimately feels like a compressed miniseries.  Everyone has a story but hardly anyone makes an impression.

That said, Laurence Olivier’s performance as Douglas MacArthur …. agck!  Seriously, it’s hard to know where to even begin when it comes to talking about just how miscast Olivier is as the quintessential all-American general.  It’s been said that it takes a truly great actor to give a truly bad performance and Olivier certainly proves that to be true in this film.  Obviously frail and trying to sound like W.C. Fields, Olivier’s MacArthur is a general who would inspire zero confidence.  The film doesn’t help by portraying MacArthur as being an almost holy figure, one who is often framed to look like almost an angel descending from Heaven to lead the battle against America’s enemies.  The film is full of scenes of people discussing MacArthur’s genius just to be followed by a scene of Olivier looking old, tired, and rather grumpy.  There were a few times when I thought I could see Olivier’s hair dye running down the side of his face.  It may have been my imagination or just the graininess of the upload on YouTube but, given the quality of the film, I can’t really dismiss the possibility that it happened and no one felt like doing a second take.

As I said, Inchon can be found on YouTube.  It’s not the worst film ever made but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

Party Line (1988, directed by William Webb)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

“Hot singles are waiting to speak to you!”

Remember those party line commercials that used to air late at night in the 90s?  For just a few dollars a minute, you could call and talk to someone claiming to be a hot woman in your area of town.  (The commercials always featured women because everyone understood that only men would be dumb enough to call the number.)  Even when I was a teenager, I knew that there was no way that a young, hot woman was sitting at home alone and waiting for a stranger to call her.  But obviously, some people thought they were true because those party lines commercials aired for a long time and really only went away once everything moved online.

In Party Line, Greta Blackburn and Leif Garrett plays homicidal siblings who have money to burn so they spend all of their time on the party line, enticing men to sneak away from their wives and come to their mansion so that they can be murdered.  Detectives Richard Hatch and Shawn Weatherly are assigned to find out why so many married men are turning up dead.  The chief of police is played by Richard Roundtree, who is so smooth that his main purpose in the movie is to remind us that not everyone has to use a party line to pick up women.  It’s a standard 80s thriller that has some moments of unexpected humor, largely due to the contrast between the beautiful and rich killers and the people that they target.  Richard Hatch is wooden in the role of the detective but Shawn Weatherly is attractive and likable as his partner,  Greta Blackburn makes for an excellent femme fatale while Leif Garrett is twitchy but convincing as a killer who likes to wear a bridal gown.

Party Line was made when the idea of adult phone lines was still a new one.  Apparently, when those lines first started to advertise, the part about it costing money wasn’t actually mentioned and could only be discovered by reading the small print at the bottom of a television screen.  Since the small print was not only very small but also usually accompanied by a picture of a blonde in lingerie, no one ever bothered to read it.  I was not one of them but I do know more than a few 90s kids who came home from school to discover a parent waiting to talk to them about the phone bill.  The world was a different place back then.  Today, everyone should know that most hot singles have something better to do than to talk to you and if they don’t, they’re probably killers like people in Party Line.  It’s not worth a dollar for each additional minute.

 

Retro Television Reviews: The Love Boat 3.18 and 3.19 “Kinfolk/Sis & the Slicker/Moonlight & Moonshine/Too Close for Comfort/The Affair: Part 2”

Posted on 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 Wednesdays, I will be reviewing the original Love Boat, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1986!  The series can be streamed on Paramount Plus!

This week, it’s a family affair on The Love Boat!

Episodes 3.18 & 3.19 “Kinfolk/Sis & the Slicker/Moonlight & Moonshine/Too Close for Comfort/The Affair: Part 2”

(Dir by Roger Duchowny, originally aired on January 19th, 1980)

Well, heck, it’s another double-sized, two-hour episode of The Love Boat.

This is actually the third two-hour episode of the third season, following the season premiere and the episode with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders.  I have to admit that I don’t really look forward to these two hour episodes because they’re usually a bit uneven.  The Love Boat was the perfect hour show, one that featured stories that were specifically designed to be neatly wrapped up in 40 minutes.  The two-hour episodes always seem to lose their narrative momentum after that first hour and that’s certainly the case here.

At the center of the episode is Danny Fields (Donny Osmond), a singer who has been booked to perform on the cruise.  Julie is convinced that Danny is going to be a big star and she’s even convinced a talent scout named Steve Sorrell (Rich Little) to board the ship so that he can see Danny perform.  However, Steve is more interested in Kitty Scofield (Loni Anderson), an innocent West Virginia girl who is eager to see the rest of the world but who is also engaged to marry the unambitious Elmer Fargas (Randall Carver).  Kitty is also Danny’s sister and, in fact, Danny’s entire family (played by Richard Paul, Marion Ross, and Slim Pickens) are on the cruise.  Danny is worried that his hillbilly family will stand in the way of his rock ‘n’ roll career and he goes out of his way to avoid them.  While the rest of the Scofields are willing to accept that Danny doesn’t want to associate with them, Grandpa Luke Scofield (Slim Pickens) lets Danny know that he’s not to happy with Danny and his rock ‘n’ roll ways.  Of course, Luke himself is being courted by Brenda Watts (Eve Arden), a writer who wants to write about the Scofield family and who gets close to them by pretending to be from West Virginia herself.

Fortunately, Danny comes to realize the error of his ways, especially after he sees how Steve has been manipulating his sister.  At his next performance, Danny introduces his family and sings Country Roads especially for them.  Meanwhile, Kitty realizes that she needs to be independent for a while so she dumps both Steve and Elmer, though it’s suggested that she’ll eventually give Elmer a second chance.  Brenda comes clean to Luke about not being a hillbilly and Luke eventually forgives her because he’s in love with her and Brenda’s in love with him.  Even old Steve turns out to be not such a bad guy, though he does tell Danny that his record label just isn’t looking for any new country acts.  Hmmm …. maybe Danny should have stuck with the rock ‘n’ roll.  Oh well!

Got all that?  I hope so because I’m not typing all that out again.

Meanwhile, Frank (Robert Guillaume) and Maura Bellocque (Denise Nicholas) are taking the cruise with their best friends, Dave (Richard Roundtree) and Cynthia Wilbur (Pam Grier).  Frank and Cynthia are having an affair and they aren’t particularly discreet about it.  I was expecting Maura to decide that maybe she and Dave should have an affair of their own but instead, she just spent the entire cruise glaring at Frank.  This was actually a surprisingly dramatic story, one that did not end with the expected positive outcome.  (Is this the first cruise of the Love Boat to end in divorce?)  This is a story that demands at least one big, explosive moment but instead, it was all surprisingly low-key.

Finally, the sprinkler system malfunctioned while the boat was in dock and the cabins of Doc, Gopher, and Isaac were flooded.  So, they move in with the Captain!  The Captain is not amused by Doc’s snoring, Gopher’s New Age chanting, or Isaac’s disco dancing.  And when Doc, Gopher, and Isaac all try to bring different women back to the cabin with them, no one is amused by that.  I’m not really sure I understand why they all had move in together.  Why couldn’t Doc just sleep in his doctor’s office and maybe Isaac and Gopher could have shared an empty passenger’s cabin during the cruise?  (Julie did mention that there were some “small” cabins available.)  Anyway, the important thing is that they all manage to survive the cruise without killing each other.

This was an uneven episode.  The Captain annoyed with everyone as funny because Gavin MacLeod was always amusing whenever he acted annoyed.  The storyline with the cheating couple was well-acted, if dramatically a bit unsatisfying.  But then you get to all the stuff about Danny and his country family.  I know that The Love Boat is not meant to be a realistic or particularly nuanced show but still, Danny’s family was portrayed as being such a bunch of hicks that I was half-expecting them to ask the Captain whether he ever worried about the boat sailing over the edge of the world.  Loni Anderson and Slim Pickens gave likable performances but Donny Osmond was incredibly bland as Danny and the scenes where he “performed” featured some truly abysmal lip-synching.  It was also a bit difficult to buy Rich Little as a swinger.  He came across like he just couldn’t wait to get back home and hang out at the Elks Lodge.

This episode probably would have been fun if it had played out over a compact 60 minutes but, at two hours, things were just stretched a bit too thin.

Maniac Cop (1988, directed by William Lustig)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In New York City, murders are being committed by a hulking man dressed in a policeman’s uniform.  The NYPD brass (led by William Smith and Richard Roundtree) want to cover up the fact that the murders are being committed by an apparent maniac cop but Lt. Frank McRae (Tom Atkins) leaks the news to the press.  With the citizens taking up arms against cops, the brass is eager to frame adulterous cop Jack Forrest (Bruce Campbell) for not only murdering his wife but also committing all of the murders.  Lt. McRae believes that Jack is innocent.

Why is the brass so eager to frame Jack?  Maybe it’s because they know that the Maniac Cop is actually Matt Cordell (Robert Z’Dar), a formerly good cop who was sent to Sing Sing on  trumped up brutality charges.  Cordell was killed in prison but he has now come back to life and is seeking revenge on the police force that he feels betrayed him.

Written by Larry Cohen and directed by William Lustig, Maniac Cop is the first of three Maniac Cop films.  While the other two Maniac Cop movies largely work and hold up well, the first Maniac Cop is undoubtedly the worst of the trilogy, with most of the kills occurring offscreen and the action moving very slowly.  The film is full of genre vets and Tom Atkins gives another one of this good tough guy performances.  Bruce Campbell disappointingly plays his role straight and Robert Z’Dar, as intimidating as he is, is actually underused in this film.

As with most films written by Cohen, Maniac Cop has an interesting political subtext.  It focuses on cop brutality and corruption with Cordell becoming a symbol of most people’s mixed feelings about the police.  But the Maniac Cop trilogy wouldn’t really come to life until the second film.  The first spends a lot of time setting Cordell up as a relentless avenger but there’s not much of pay-off.

Scenes I Love: The Opening of Shaft

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today is the birthday of Richard Roundtree so, of course, today’s scene that I love could only be the classic opening of 1971’s Shaft.

By doing something as simple as walking down a street in New York, Roundtree shows us exactly who Shaft is and why Shaft does what he does.  This is one of those scenes that’s been parodied so many times that it’s actually surprising to rewatch and see how just defiant and sexy Richard Roundtree’s confident strut actually was.

On another note, I enjoy seeing all of the names of the movies that were playing on 42nd Street when this scene was filmed.

6 Classic Trailers For Loyalty & Law Day!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Since today is both Loyalty and Law Day here in the United States, it’s time for a special edition of Lisa Marie’s Grindhouse Trailers!

  1. The Super Cops (1974)

So, you think you can just ignore the law, huh?  Well, the Super Cops have got something to say about that!  This film was based on the “true” adventures of two widely decorated NYPD cops.  The cops were so good at their job that they were even nicknamed Batman and Robin.  Of course, long after this movie came out, it was discovered that they were both corrupt and were suspected of having committed more crimes than they stopped.  Amazingly, this film was directed by the same man who did Shaft.  The Super Cops are kind of annoying, to be honest.

2. Super Fuzz (1980)

Far more likable than The Super Cops was Super Fuzz.  Terence Hill plays a Florida cop who gets super powers!  Ernest Borgnine is his hapless partner.  The film was directed by Sergio Corbucci, of Django fame.

3. Miami Supercops (1985)

In 1985, Terence Hill returned as a Florida cop in Miami Supercops.  This time, his old partner Bud Spencer accompanied him.

4. Miami Cops (1989)

Apparently, Miami needed a lot of cops because Richard Roundtree decided to join the force in 1989.  Unfortunately, I could only find a copy of this trailer in German but I think you’ll still get the idea.

5. The Soldier (1982)

In order to celebrate loyalty, here’s the trailer for 1982’s The Soldier!  They’re our government’s most guarded secret …. or, at least, they were.  Then someone made a movie about them.

And finally, what better way to celebrate both Loyalty and Law Day than with a film that pays tribute to the Molokai Cops?  From Andy Sidaris, it’s….

6. Hard Ticket To Hawaii (1987)

Happy May Day!

Monday Live Tweet Alert: Join Us For Flight 93 and Seven!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter.  I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of #MondayActionMovie!  Every week, we get together.  We watch a movie.  We tweet our way through it.

Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 2006’s Flight 93!  Selected and hosted by @Titus88Titus, Flight 93 is a docudrama about one of the planes that was hijacked on September 11th, 2001 and the heroic passengers who bravely fought back.  The movie starts at 8 pm et and it is available on YouTube.

Following #MondayActionMovie, Brad and Sierra will be hosting the #MondayMuggers live tweet.  We will be watching 1995’s Seven, the trend-setting and still disturbing horror film that established David Fincher as a director and which starred Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Richard Roundtree.  (Yes, Shaft is in the movie.)  The film is available on Netflix.  It starts at 10 pm et.

It should make for a night of intense viewing and I invite all of you to join in.  If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto twitter, start Flight 93 at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag!  Then, at 10 pm et, start Seven and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag!  The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.  And reviews of these films will probably end up on this site at some point over the next few weeks.