This Alan Smithee-directed film really belongs to Dennis Hopper, who had a rough time for a variety of reasons. There were issues between Jodie Foster and Hopper from the first day of shooting, as Foster yelled “cut” which angered the directing side of Hopper.

She may have been upset by the shower scene, which is pretty gratuitous and she assumed would be edited. It isn’t. Neither is the long scene where she’s wearing lingerie that is more Frederick’s than Victoria’s.

A few years later, Foster generalized a bad experience she had on a movie by saying, “I worked with an actor-director who was a major pain. It was very difficult for me. Very difficult.”

This was that movie.

A crime thriller in which Foster plays an artist named Anne Benton who makes art signs — which were made for the movie by Jenny Holzer and say things like “Murder has its sexual side” — and falls asleep at the wheel and a hitman named Milo (Hopper) kidnaps her instead of killing her and she goes all Patty Hearst.

Was this movie made for me?

Well, it is a mess.

Vestron, who was makin actual movies in theaters before going out of business, took over the edit. And Hopper got angry: “They had taken an hour out of my movie, and they’d taken a half-hour of stuff I’d taken out of the movie and put it in. Then they took all my music out and threw it away. They put in great violin love themes beside Jodie and me — this is a hit man and an artist, and it’s certainly not a violin romance. This is not a film by Dennis Hopper. This is not directed by Dennis Hopper. This is directed by some idiots at Vestron.”

I mean, I love it. How can you not love a movie where Dennis Hopper and Jodie Foster make out on a bed of pink Hostess Sno Balls?

In the article “Abuse of Power,” writer Chris Randle spoke with this film’s original screenwriter, Ann Louise Bardach, who said, “He (Hopper) directed me to make a really tight, taut thriller and in the end what he shot was a…vaudevillian caper. Working with Dennis was completely insane.”

However, she did concede a point: “He had a beautiful eye. Dennis was not a narrative artist, he was a visual artist.”

So when a writer’s strike happenen, Alex Cox — yes, the man who made Repo Man — came on set to write when needed and play the ghost of D. H. Lawrence.

Did I mention this is a movie made for weird people like me?

Anyways…

Back to Anne happening to watch a mafia hit supervised by Leo Carelli (Joe Pesci, who asked for his name to be removed from this movie), who spots her. So even through our heroine gets to the police first, Greek (Tony Sirico) and Pinella (John Turturro) are able to track her down and kill her boyfriend (Charlie Sheen) just as he eats an entire frozen pizza directly out of the box.

FBI agent Pauling (Fred Ward) has been after these mobsters forever and wants to palce Anne in Witness Protection Program, but when she sees Carelli’s lawyer John Luponi (Dean Stockwell) at the police station, she goes on the run. To make sure she stays quiet, mob boss Lino Avoca (Vincent Price, who introduced Hopper to art when he was blackballed from Hollywood in the late 50s to eary 60s; this is one of his last roles) hires Milo to kill Anne.

All it takes are some dirty Polaroids of her — yes, that was Charlie Sheen — to have him fall in love.

Anne runs to Seattle and becomes a copywriter, which allows Milo to find her when a line from one of her art installations shows up in a lipstick ad: “Protect me…from what I want.” He tracks her down and promises to protect her if she does everything he asks. After all, by saving her, he’s doomed himself.

The cast of this is more than enough reason to watch. How about Dean Stockwell, Julie Adams (who was also in Hopper’s The Last Movie), Tony “Paulie Walnuts” Sirico, Helena Kallianiotes from Kansas City Bomber, Sy Richardson (who wrote Posse), Catherine Keener, Toni Basil and Bob Dylan wearing shin guards as he makes an art installation.

Hopper’s version is called Backtrack and has a longer ending but is in no way easier to understand.

This movie does, however, have a scene where Hopper plays saxophone and gets so upset that he repeatedly throws it at a plexiglass window and that’s what I want out movies. It also has Foster saving a lamb a year before she’d tell that story in a movie that she doesn’t want to forget about.

Hopper also brings a burrito to a gun fight.

Like I said, this movie is for me.

You can watch Hopper’s version on Tubi.

Sherman Hemsley from The Jeffersons is Buford Washington. Luis Ávalos from The Electric Company is Benny Alvarez. And they’re Greendale County, GA — yes, a black man and a Latino in the South! — police officers sent to serve an eviction notice to a plantation when the ghosts of the former slavemaster that owned the house, Andrew Lee (Monogram Pictures star Myron Healey), and one of his slaves named Jethro (also Hemsley), defend the home from beyond. Yes, a black man and his owner working together!

There’s also a torture room that neither Lee nor Jethro know about. That’s because it was the super racist grandfather vampire who did it all and his granddaughters — Linda (Deborah Benson) and Lisa (Diana Brookes) — need help.  Cue the scary music, bring in Madame St. Esprit (Jennifer Rhodes) and the ill-fated seance. Meanwhile, zombies pop up and Buford has to win the house from the bank in a boxing match against Joe Fraizer.  Smoking Joe isn’t the only combat sports veteran in this, as former pro wrestler Pepper Gomez is in the cast.

Then, the ghosts kill Benny and Buford, keeping the house — and the girls — all for themselves. If this seems like a narrative shift in a slapstick comedy, then you’re correct.

Screenwriter Oscar Brodney hadn’t written a movie in 16 years before this, but he did write Harvey, which does not translate into making this movie a success. The Alan Smithee credited for this film is really Lee Madden, who made Hell’s Angels ’69, The Manhandlers, Angel Unchained, The Night God Screamed and Night Creature. He hadn’t made a movie in eight years, but that could be because he was busy making commercials for car lots.

This was filmed in 1985 but not released until 1987 due to extensive re-shooting and re-editing, resulting in Madden demanding that his name be removed from the credits. It was produced by Hemsley and he lost most of the money he’d made in his career on this.

Oddly enough, Hemsley was super into prog rock and allegedly worked with Yes’s Jon Anderson on a funk-rock opera by the name of Festival Of Dreams about the “spiritual qualities of the number 7.” Daevid Allen from Soft Machine and GONG claimed that Hemsley had an LSD lab in his basement and had a room named the “Flying Teapot room,” named for the GONG song, with “…darkened windows and “Flying Teapot” is playing on a tape loop over and over again. There were also three really dumb-looking, very voluptuous Southern gals stoned and wobbling around naked. They were obviously there for the guys to play around with.

They used to call PCP Sherman Hemsley because it made people rude, just like his character. I believe that maybe he was making it!

Here’s the man dancing to Nektar’s “Show Me the Way.”

Let’s therefore forget this movie and enjoy the magical world we live in, where Yes and George Jefferson make music together.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Death of a Gunfighter was originally directed by Robert Totten, who directed the original The Quick and the Dead, as well as plenty of TV like Gunsmoke and Mystery In Dracula’s Castle. Despite a year of work, he couldn’t get along with star Richard Widmark and lost that battle, getting replaced by Don Siegel (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry and John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist).

Siegel had been the original choice to direct, but was overworked, according to the Chicago Tribune. However, in Siegel’s memoirs, he wrote that Widmark pushed from day one to get Totten kicked off the film and replaced by the unwilling Siegel. Finally, three and a half weeks into making the movie, Widmark got Universal boss Lew Wasserman to personally get involved.

When Siegel looked at Totten’s footage, he thought it was great and even made sure his own footage matched. In fact, he didn’t reshoot a single scene, only finishing off the film’s opening and closing sequences, as well as some pick-up shots. In the end, he didn’t think he had done enough work to take directing credit.

However, Totten wanted nothing to do with the film. Siegel didn’t want his name on the film, which upset Widmark even more. Finally, an agreement was made with the Directors Guild of America for the pseudonym Alan Smithee to be used.

In fact, this was the first Alan Smithee-directed film.

Here’s where it gets weird: critics loved the film and the new director. The New York Times claimed that it had sharp direction and that Smithee “has an adroit facility for scanning faces and extracting sharp background detail.” Roger Ebert said that it was “an extraordinary western by director Allen Smithee, a name I’m not familiar with, allows his story to unfold naturally.” I wonder if Ebert was aware what was going on and was having fun with his review. I’d like to think so.

Based on Death of a Gunfighter by Lewis B. Patten, this movie feels like Hollywood realizing that some of the better Westerns were coming from other countries, mostly Italy, at this point. Marshall Frank Patch (Widmark) is an Old West-style lawman in Cottonwood Springs, Texas, a town determined to be modern and, as such, conveniently forget its numerous sins and just whitewash the past.

“What would happen,” the mayor says, “if an Eastern businessman came to town and saw old Patch there, wearing that shirt he probably hasn’t washed in a week?”

Patch shoots a drunk in self-defense, which the town leaders use as a way to get him out. Knowing that the town is about to murder him with their own gunfighters — he knows too much — the old lawman settles his affairs, including marrying brothel owner Claire Quintana (Lena Horne), an interracial relationship that is a fact of life, something bold for 1969.

This is a film rich with character actors that I love — Carroll O’Connor, Royal Dano, John Saxon — and a town unlike many other Westerns, one made up of all races, a place where a lone car causes worry, where the trains must get ever closer, where the past — and Patch — must die to move progress ever forward, no matter what.