18 Days of Paranoia #6: Scandal Sheet (dir by David Lowell Rich)

Posted on March 19, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“So be it,” journalist Helen Grant dramatically announces as she lifts up her camera and starts snapping pictures of a body in a casket, “I’m …. a ….. WHORE!”

That is just one of the many wonderfully, over-the-top moments that can be found in the 1985 film, Scandal Sheet. Directed by David Lowell Rich, Scandal Sheet stars Burt Lancaster as Harold Fallen. If this movie were being made today, Fallen would be in charge of a TMZ-style website. Since this movie was made in the 80s, Fallen is the publisher and editor of a sleazy tabloid magazine. He specializes in stories about aliens and ghosts. When someone brings him in a story about the ghost of Grace Kelly haunting the beaches of Malibu, he announces, “Front page!” When someone else tells him about a woman who wants to marry a man from outer space but who can’t find anyone to perform the ceremony, Fallen arranges to get the woman a lawyer.

When Fallen isn’t tracking down ghosts and arranging for interplanetary marriages, he’s trying to destroy celebrities. When the film begins, he’s obsessed with taking down Ben Rowan (Robert Urich). We’re told that Ben Rowan is one of the world’s top movie star. (It’s important that we’re told this because there’s nothing about Urich’s bland performance that would lead us to suspect that to be the case.) Ben’s career is in trouble because he’s got a drinking problem. He just got out of rehab but no insurance company is willing to insure him. His wife, Meg North (Lauren Hutton), is demanding that Ben be cast in her latest movie. Everyone in Hollywood is like, “No way.”

It has the potential to be a big story and Fallen wants to be the first to break it. But to do so, he’s going to need an inside source. That’s where Helen Grant (Pamela Reed) comes in. Helen was Meg’s college roommate and she’s still friends with both her and Ben. Fallen decides to hire Helen to work for his magazine. The only problem is that Helen is a serious journalist. She writes stories about homeless children. She has no desire to work for a tabloid.

“I’ll pay you more than you’re making right now,” Fallen tells her.

Helen’s not interested.

“I’ll pay you $80,000 a year.”

Helen’s interested.

Against her better judgment, Helen accepts Fallen’s offer. At first, things seem okay. She’s a bit annoyed with having to work with a sleazy photographer named Simon (Peter Jurasik, giving a wonderfully reptilian performance) but she’s got a nice house and her son is going to a good school and she gets to use the company credit card and she even gets a housekeeper out of the deal!

Then Fallen tells her that her next assignment is to write about Meg and Ben. Helen refuses but she soon discovers that Howard Fallen is not an easy person to refuse. Not when he’s got people watching your every move, along with paying your housekeeper to spy on you. When her former boss (Max Wright) angrily tells her that no reputable magazine will ever work with her again, Helen is left with only two options: Become a whore or starve.

Scandal Sheet is a lot of fun. Just the fact that the main bad guy is named Howard Fallen should tell you almost everything you need to know about this movie. He’s Fallen — as in a fallen angel. At the end of the movie, he even wears all black with a white tie, which we all know is the typical modern-day costume of demons pretending to be human. (At one point, Fallen even says that he’s going to make someone an offer that they can’t refuse, giving us all a chance to see what The Godfather would have been like if Burt Lancaster had played Don Vito.) Lancaster gives a charismatic performance and he’s so effortlessly manipulative that it’s hard not to enjoy watching him, even if he is destroying innocent people. The rest of the cast is okay. As I said earlier, Robert Urich was a bit too bland to be a convincing film star but Pamela Reed does a good job of capturing Helen’s struggle to decide whether to side with good or evil and Lauren Hutton tears into the scenery with just the type of ferocity that a film like this requires. Late in the film, when she spits in Helen’s face, it’s the most dramatic spitting that you’ll probably ever see.

Scandal Sheet is an enjoyably over-the-top, anti-press melodrama. Watch it with someone who you would be willing to sell out for $80,000 a year.

Other Entries In The 18 Days Of Paranoia:

Horror on The Lens: Invitation to Hell (dir by Wes Craven)

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Much like yesterday’s offering of Summer of Fear, today’s horror on the lens is a made-for-tv movie directed by Wes Craven.

First televised in 1984, Invitation to Hell is a wonderfully over-the-top depiction of what happens when an engineer (Robert Urich) sells out and goes to work for a big evil corporation. Long story short, Satan (in the form of Susan Lucci) takes over his family. Admittedly, this film does start slowly but, in the end, it’s a lot of fun.

Horror On The Lens: Killdozer (dir by Jerry London)

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

A bunch of manly men are building an airstrip on an island off the coast of Africa. Two of them come across an oddly glowing meteorite and they make the mistake of trying to move it with a bulldozer. Needless to say, the bulldozer gets possessed by an alien presence and soon, the men are all being pursued by the … Killdozer!

My boyfriend and I recently sat down and watched this 1974 made-for-TV movie. Jeff enjoyed it while I thought Killdozer was perhaps one of the silliest films I have ever seen in my life. That’s not surprising, however. Killdozer is a guy film all the way, celebrating both the destructive power of machinery and the ability of men to tame that power.

Killdozer may not be a great film but it’s a film that feels rather appropriate for October.

Film Review: Magnum Force (dir by Ted Post)

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, we continue our look at the Dirty Harry film franchise by taking a look at the second film in the series, 1973’s Magnum Force.

Despite the fact that Dirty Harry famously ended with Harry Callahan throwing away his badge in disgust, Magnum Force reveals that Callahan (played again by Clint Eastwood) is still a member of the San Francisco Police Department. He’s got a new partner (Felton Perry, a likable actor in a thankless role) but he’s still butting heads with his superiors at the department. He’s also still got a way with the one-liners. When Lt. Briggs (Hal Holbrook) brags that he never once had to draw his gun while he was in uniform, Callahan replies, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

While Callahan is busying himself with doing things like gunning down robbers and preventing an attempt to hijack a plane, a group of motorcycle cops are gunning down the town’s criminals. They begin by killing a mobster who has just beaten a murder charge on a technicality but soon, they’re gunning down anyone who has ever so much as been suspected of committing a crime. Alone among the detectives investigating the murders, Callahan believes that the killers are cops and, even worse, he suspects that his old friend Charlie McCoy (played by Mitchell Ryan) might be a member of the group…

Though it suffers when compared to Dirty Harry, Magnum Force is still an exciting and effective action film that is clearly a product of the same period of time that gave us such classics of paranoid cinema as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. Whereas Dirty Harry took an almost documentary approach to capturing life and death in San Francisco, Magnum Force is a film that is full of dark shadows and expressionistic angles.

In Dirty Harry, the Scorpio Killer was both an obvious outsider and an obvious force of destruction. The film’s dramatic tension came from the fact that he was so clearly guilty and yet nothing could be done to stop him. The villains in Magnum Force are the exact opposite of Scorpio. As chillingly played by David Soul, Robert Urich, Tim Matheson, and Kip Niven, the killer cops are distinguished not by their otherness but by their total lack of individuality.

In the film’s best scene, they confront Harry in a parking garage and basically tell him that he’s either with them or against him. Sitting on their motorcycles, wearing their leather jackets, and with their grim faces hidden behind their aviator sunglasses, these cops are the ultimate representation of faceless fascism. After listening to their excuses, Harry asks if they consider themselves to be heroes.

“All of our heroes are dead,” one of them replies, delivering the film’s best line.

Obviously, Magnum Force was made to be an answer to those critics who claimed that Dirty Harry was a fascist film and it is a bit jarring, at first, to see Harry “defending” the system. (“I hate the goddamn system but until something better comes along…”) When Harry tells the killer cops, “I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me,” it’s not hard to see that this is the same message that Eastwood meant to give his critics.

However, what makes the killer cops in Magnum Force such interesting villains is that they are, ultimately, tools of the system that they’re attempting to destroy. By killing off criminals as opposed to arresting them and putting them on trial, the killer cops are minimizing the risk of the flaws inherent in the system being exposed. Hence, by defending the system, Harry is helping to expose and destroy it.

When I told Jeff that I was planning on watching and reviewing all of the Dirty Harry films, he suggested that I watch them in reverse-order. His logic was that, since the films tended to get worse as the series progressed, watching them backwards would allow me to end my project on a happy note as opposed to a note of bitter disappointment. I took his advice and I’m glad I did. While I disagree with him about whether or not The Dead Pool is a better film than Sudden Impact, I do have to agree that the first two Dirty Harry films are dramatically better (and quite different in tone) from the ones that subsequently followed.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the third film in the series, 1976’s The Enforcer.