If you’ve ever wondered how the sugary, surf-sprayed innocence of the Frankie and Annette era curdled into the nihilistic, neon-soaked cynicism of the 1970s, look no further than George Axelrod’s Lord Love a Duck. This isn’t just a movie. It’s a scorched-earth policy directed at the American Dream, wrapped in a high school blazer and smelling of desperation.

Alan Musgrave (Roddy McDowall) has spent an entire year fulfilling the dreams of Barbara Ann Greene (Tuesday Weld). Anything to keep her from becoming her mother (Lola Albright), an aging waitress whose life has long passed by. Whether that means Barbara Ann getting to join an exclusive sorority, dropping out of school or marrying Bob Bernard (Martin West), Alan makes it happen. Alan is a Svengali. He doesn’t want to date Barbara Ann; he wants to curate her. When she needs thirteen cashmere sweaters to fit in with the in crowd, he gets them. When her mother stands in the way of Barbara’s social ascent, Alan helps her out of this mortal coil. He frames her suicide as an accidental drowning because, in Alan’s world, a dead mother is a tragedy, but a suicide is just bad PR.

Then, Barbara decides she’s going to be a star and T. Harrison Belmont (Martin Gabel) wants her to star in his beach movies. Bob says no, so of course he’s out. Alan tries to kill him so many times that the boy ends up in a wheelchair, only for Alan to finally kill him and most of their graduating class with an excavator. Barbara Ann lives, stars in Bikini Widow and Alan is sent to prison.

But he did it all for love.

With roles for Ruth Gordon, Harvey Korman, singer Lynn Carey, Frankenstein’s Daughter monster Donald Murphy, Sybil‘s mother Martine Bartlett, 1965 Playboy Playmate of the Year Jo Collins, Dave Draper (the body builder who became movie host David the Gladiator on KHJ Channel 9 in Los Angeles and showed peplum films) and Donald Foster (often a neighbor on shows like Hazel), this was directed by George Axelrod. He directed only one other movie, The Secret Life of an American Wife, but is best known for writing The Seven Year Itch and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

McDowell was in his late 30s when he made this, yet he played a teenager. Weld was 22. And who can say what kind of movie they were in? It’s more darkness than farce, a movie where Alan does everything to make Barbara Ann happy and asks nothing in return. It’s like he enjoys being a source of anarchy and chaos, as long as she’s happy. 

I always wondered how we went from beach movies to early 70s New Hollywood. This may be the connection.

Lord Love a Duck is the bridge between the malt shop and the Manson family. It’s a movie where the protagonist is a high-functioning sociopath, and the heroine is a void of pure consumerist greed. McDowall is genuinely unsettling as he plays the role with a frantic, wide-eyed devotion that suggests that, unlike every other male in this movie, Alan doesn’t even want to touch Barbara Ann.

He just wants to watch her consume the world.

Directed by Robert Altman and based on Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel, with a script by Leigh Brackett (who co-wrote the screenplay for Chandler’s The Big Sleep), who said that United Artists demanded that “either you take Elliott Gould or you don’t make the film. Elliott Gould was not exactly my idea of Philip Marlowe, but anyway, there we were.” — The Long Goodbye was revised to move the story to the 70s.

As for Gould, he hadn’t worked in two years, ever since battling with Kim Darby and director Anthony Harvey on A Glimpse of Tiger. He had to take a psychological examination before United Artists would sign him to the lead role.

Marlowe (Gould) is asked by his friend Terry Lennox (baseball player and author of Ball Four, Jim Bouton) to take him to the border at Tijuana. When he gets home, the cops bring him in and question him about Lennox killing his wife, Sylvia. After three days in jail — and refusing to help the police — Marlowe learns that Lennox is said to have committed suicide. He refuses to believe that story.

Marlowe is hired by Eileen Wade (Nina van Pallandt, who dated Hughes diary forger Clifford Irving and sings “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) to find her missing husband Roger (Sterling Hayden, who was drunk and stoned for most of the movie; he’s still great), which takes the detective — who never stops smoking — into the health and fitness world of well-off Californians. And of course, the Wade and the Lennox couples knew one another, as Eileen confesses that Roger was sleeping with Sylvia, and might have killed her, right after Roger walks into the sea and drowns. Oh yeah — there’s also the matter of mob boss Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell), who has some money owed to him by Terry.

All paths lead back to Mexico, where Marlowe soon realizes that he’s been played for a fool. However, he plans on having the last laugh. Altman referred to his character as Rip Van Marlowe, seeing him as a man trapped in the 50s and “trying to invoke the morals of a previous era.”

The cast also includes David Arkin, Pancho Córdova, Amityville 2 and Mommie Dearest star Rutanya Alda, Jack Riley, David Carradine, Morris the Cat and a non-speaking role for an impossibly young Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Critics savaged this on initial release, with Jay Cocks from Time saying, “It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire.” Chris Champlin of the Los Angeles Times summed up what so many thought of Gould as Chandler’s hard-boiled detective hero by writing, “He is not Chandler’s Marlowe, or mine, and I can’t find him interesting, sympathetic or amusing, and I can’t be sure who will.”

As for the actor, he has said that, as long as he is physically able, he hopes to reprise the role. He has a screenplay entitled It’s Always Now based on the Chandler story “The Curtain.” The Chandler estate sold him the rights for $1.

With an always-moving camera and the pastel cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond, this movie still looks wonderful and has stood the test of its time, a time when it was not as well considered.

The movie opens with a high-stakes military heist that feels more like a war film than a mafia flick, as Vincenzo (Peter Lee Lawrence) and his crew ambush an army convoy to steal a crate of rifles. Vincenzo’s fatal mistake isn’t just stealing from Don Carmelo (Adolfo Celi); it’s his arrogance. He believes he can outmaneuver the seasoned Don by selling the hardware to a group of Arab insurgents.

The middle act shifts the tension to a claustrophobic hotel in North Africa. This change of scenery distinguishes the film from other Italian crime movies of the era that rarely left the streets of Rome or Milan. The Middle Eastern subplot adds a layer of political cynicism, suggesting that Vincenzo is out of his depth not just with the Mafia, but with international arms dealing.

But you know how these Italian crime movies end. Not always well, you know? Maybe he should have just stayed at that hotel with his girlfriend, Sabina (Erika Blanc), and forgotten about a life of crime.

Nardo Bonomi (sometimes credited as Leonardo Bonomi) is a ghost in film history. This is his only officially released directorial credit. While he brings a surprisingly energetic eye to the action, this is one mean-spirited film. Vincenzo isn’t a hero, but an amoral social climber who uses his girlfriend Sabina’s jewelry to fund his escape.

His other project, Sortilegio, remains one of the great holy grails of Italian cult cinema. The fact that it was co-directed by Corrado Farina (the visionary behind the psychedelic Baba Yaga) suggests Bonomi had a foot in the more avant-garde side of Italian filmmaking before disappearing from the industry entirely. This movie starred Erna Schürer as a woman given to waking nightmares. It was completed, assembled and dubbed, but never arrived for censorship approval and went unpublished. Four Flies Records released the soundtrack, saying, “One of the most mysterious movies that came out from the golden age of Italian cinema, its soundtrack was recorded in 1974. The movie had never been officially distributed and was probably never taken to the final stage of post-production. The film is lost, gone forever apparently.” 

Peter Lee Lawrence was often criticized by contemporary critics for being too pretty or wooden, but in The Long Arm of the Godfather, his youthful, clean-cut looks work perfectly. He plays Vincenzo as a man whose ambition far exceeds his intelligence. At the time of filming, Lawrence was already nearing the end of his prolific but short career. The headaches — he died in 1974 at the age of 30 — he suffered during his final years make his frantic, high-energy performance here feel somewhat haunting in retrospect. He was married to Cristina Galbó, who may be best known for playing Elizabeth in What Have You Done To Solange?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Nora Green (Ursula Andress) is a flight attendant who is asked to deliver a letter to a circus led by Silvera (Woody Strode) when she lands in Naples. This gets her in the middle of a gang war. She’s beaten up and thrown to what should be her doom, but she somehow survives. Working with a former circus acrobat, Manuel (Marc Porel), she puts multiple bad guys — there’s Silvera, as well as Don Calo (Aldo Giuffrè) and the mysterious Americano — against one another and looks gorgeous doing it. Luckily, they find another partner in Rosy (Isabella Biagini), who has been the lover of nearly all these gangsters.

Known in Italy as Colpo in canna, this is a fascinating departure for director Fernando Di Leo. While he is the undisputed master of the gritty, nihilistic Poliziotteschi genre — he made Caliber 9, The Italian Connection and Blood and Diamonds and wrote one of my favorite parodies of the genre, Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man — this film sees him blending his signature violence with a lighter, almost comic-book tone that leans heavily on the charisma of its lead.

While Di Leo’s “Milieu Trilogy” (Caliber 9, The Italian Connection, and The Boss) is defined by cold-blooded betrayal and urban decay, Loaded Guns feels more like a colorful caper. Di Leo pivots Nora into a femme fatale superwoman archetype. Unlike the doomed protagonists of his other films, Nora is proactive and resilient; she isn’t just a victim of the gang war. She becomes its architect, deliberately whispering in the ears of rival bosses to ensure they wipe each other out.

This ends with a fun brawl that involves the entire cast, including Andress, who did her own stunts. She’s beyond ravishing in this, reminding you that she was not just a Bond girl, but the first of them all. She plays Nora with a wink to the camera, balancing the high-fashion glamour of a flight attendant with the grit of a woman who can take a beating and come back swinging.

You can watch this on YouTube.

In the rigid, Catholic-guilt-soaked landscape of late 60s Italy, a widow wasn’t supposed to do much besides wear black, weep over a portrait of her departed husband, and perhaps consult a priest about her loneliness. But Mimi (the ethereal, wide-eyed Catherine Spaak) isn’t interested in the script society wrote for her. When her husband, Franco, kicks the bucket, he leaves behind more than just a grieving widow; he leaves a secret high-tech bachelor pad equipped with a little black book, instead of sharing his fantasies with her, that he kept a lair where he could cheat on her.

Instead of burning the apartment down in a fit of rage, Mimi decides to use it as a laboratory. If Franco spent his life grading women on a scale of imagination, experience, talent and cooperation, why shouldn’t she do the same to the men of Italy?

Now, in the place where her husband sinned while striving to keep her pure, everything changes.

Directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile, best known for his commedia all’italiana like Il merlo maschio,  When Women Had Tails and When Women Lost Their Tails, as well as the harrowing Hitch-Hike, this is about a woman going from an affection-negative marriage to finding love — or lust — everywhere.

Luckily, she finds the perfect partner in Dr. Carlo De Marchi (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a man who can match her kink for kink, but more importantly, wants to connect with her outside of the bedroom. Other conquests include Philippe Leroy as a tennis instructor who can’t get aroused when she’s the one who comes on to him; Italian Western tough guy Luigi Pistilli; Pistilli’s The Great Silence co-star Frank Wolff playing a dentist; Renzo Montagnani, who was Maluc in Campanile’s caveman nudie cuties and the man who would marry Black Emanuelle for real, Gabriele Tinti, playing a man who thinks Mimi is a prostitute. The biggest problem is that she instantly sleeps with her husband’s business partner, Sandro (Gigi Proietti), who claims her as his property and even refers to her as a whore, as mentioned above.

I love this movie because somehow, it came out in 1968 Italy and yet represented a step forward — not always, I get that there are still issues in this, but what do you expect from a male-made Italian sex comedy? — in the way Italian films, much less Italians, saw a woman owning her sexuality.

On Movie-Censorship.com, I found a line about this movie that I love: “Without drifting into the vulgar, she experiences various sexual styles until she discovers her favorite fetish in piggyback.” That’s why in Germany, this was called Huckepack (other amazing titles include The Aristotle Perversion; Sekso Manyak or Kadının İntikamı or Garip Duygular (Good Sex or The Woman’s Revenge or Strange Feelings in Turkish); Änka i trosor (Widow In Panties in Swedish); Una viuda desenfrenada (An Unbridled Widow in Russian, which is a nice play on the position and conceit of this film) or the best of all these titles, The Era of Female Dominence.

In its native Italy, this flick is La Matriarca. Think about that word. The Matriarch. It drips with the heavy, incense-laden weight of the Italian family unit. It suggests a woman taking the throne, perhaps with a rolling pin in one hand and a rosary in the other. But then, it hits the States. Audubon Films, owned by Radley Metzger, knew they had a movie with Spaak nude, a blonde Italian sex goddess with eyes that could melt a Cinecittà camera lens, so instead of making a statement, they went with The Libertine.

To the Italian audience, she’s a woman reclaiming her power within the structure of her life; to the US grindhouse and art-house crowd, she’s just another bad girl on a sexual odyssey. Italy gives us the status, and America gives us the sin. Actually, Italy gives us a lot of sin, but I digress.

Audubon Films also gave us way more nudity, mostly more of Fabienne Dali from Kill, Baby… Kill!

I don’t like that Dr. Carlo becomes such a jerk at the end of the movie, because I would much rather he came to Mimi on her terms and wasn’t so rude. There was no need to destroy the secret sex apartment, which is incredible and could only exist in Italian movies. That pad is a masterpiece of 60s Italian production design, a space where the rules of the outside world don’t apply.