EDITOR’S NOTE: Santee was on the CBS Late Movie on October 16, 1975 and January 5, 1977.

Here’s some trivia you can use on your friends. Santee was one of the first motion pictures to be shot electronically on videotape, a groundbreaking technique at the time. This was achieved using Norelco PCP-70 portable NTSC cameras and portable Ampex VR-3000 2″ VTRs, marking a significant shift in film production technology.

Director Gary Nelson mainly worked in TV before this, but he has some interesting films to his credit, like the original Freaky Friday, The Black Hole and the Mike Hammer TV movies.

Jody’s long-awaited reunion with his father takes a dramatic turn when he discovers that his father is an outlaw on the run from a relentless bounty hunter named Santee (Glenn Ford). The story takes an unexpected twist when the two adversaries, Jody and Santee, find themselves forming an unlikely bond, realizing that they share a deeper connection than they could have ever imagined.

Santee boasts a diverse and intriguing cast, including Dana Wynter (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Jay Silverheels (Tonto himself, who for some reason has been showing up in nearly every movie I’ve watched lately), Robert Donner (who also is in Nelson’s Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold), Dark Brothers repertory actor Jack Baker, X Brands (the oddly named actor who may have been of German descent and from Kansas City, but always played Native Americans), Chuck Courtney (who played Daniel Reid Jr. on The Lone Ranger, the character who would grow up to be the father of The Green Hornet) and Lindsay Crosby (Bigfoot).

Edward Platt, the Chief on Get Smart, produced this film and played a crucial role in financing it. Platt raised the money to buy the video cameras, a significant contribution to the film’s production. One can only assume that his involvement also led to Nelson’s directorial role in the TV movie Get Smart, Again.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Clones was on the CBS Late Movie on November 7, 1975, and April 18, 1977.

Dr. Gerald Appleby (Michael Greene) finds himself in a perplexing situation. He believes he’s been cloned. His conviction stems from a near-fatal escape from his lab’s explosion and the unsettling reports of his sightings in places he’s never been. This sets the stage for a gripping narrative as he goes on the run, pursued not only by the deranged scientist Carl Swafford (Stanley Adams, Cyrano Jones from the original Star Trek) but also by the ruthless thugs Sawyer (Otis Young, Blood Beach) and Nemo (Gregory Sierra, a stark contrast to his usual role as the virtuous Det. Sgt. Chano Amenguale on Barney Miller).

Directed by Paul Hunt (he also directed Twisted Nightmare and produced Demon Wind) and Lamar Card (who directed Supervan and Jukebox AKA Disco Fever, as well as the producer of Nashville Girl, Savage Harvest and Project: Metalbeast), who co-wrote the film with Steve Fisher, who started writing movies back in 1938 with Nurse from Brooklyn. He also wrote the novel and screenplay for I Wake Up Screaming, Hell’s Half Acre, Johnny Angel and episodes of Peter Gunn, McMillan & Wife, Cannon and Fantasy Island.

Most people will watch this movie and see a slow-moving film that goes nowhere, filled with fish-eye lens-addled drug scenes and an overwhelming sense of conspiracy doom. As for me, I read that sentence and only see the positives. Young and Sierra are having a blast; the ending is as cynical as it gets, and a lot of the ending takes place inside an amusement park that runs itself. It’s a movie that came out on VHS, has had no major DVD release and has never come out on Blu-ray.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Night of the Lepus was on the CBS Late Movie on September 13, 1974; October 17, 1975 and June 13 and August 24, 1976.

Based upon Russell Braddon’s 1964 science fiction novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit, this movie pits mankind against mutant rabbits and, well, if you can get past that idea, you’re probably going to love this movie.

Director William F. Claxton and producer A. C. Lyles came from Westerns, which explains the cast of this movie, which includes Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun and DeForest Kelley being in the cast as well as the shooting location, the Old Tucson Studios. It does not explain the effects, which are a combination of regular-size rabbits on miniature sets and people dressed in rabbit costumes.

Janet Leigh, who is also in this, told Starlog, “No one put a gun to my head and said I had to do it. What no one realized was that, no matter what you do, a bunny rabbit is a bunny rabbit. A rat, that can be menacing — so can a frog. Spiders or scorpions or alligators, they could all work in that situation, and they have. But a bunny rabbit?! How can you make a bunny rabbit menacing?”

Rancher Cole Hillman (Calhoun) seeks the help of college president Elgin Clark (Kelley) when thousands of rabbits invade his farm after their natural predators, coyotes, are killed off. Roy and Gerry Bennett (Whitman and Leigh) are brought in and they work on using hormones to disrupt the rabbits’ reproduction cycles but their daughter falls in love with the bunny and switches it out; the mutant bunny runs away and pretty much declares war on humanity.

The towns of Galanos and Ajo are eaten by the giant rabbits before the strange team of a drive-in audience and the National Guard trap the gigantic hares in an electrified field that kills all of them. And good news, because regular rabbits — and the coyotes — are back at the end of the movie.

They tried to hide the rabbits on the poster — even changing the title from Rabbits — and then changed their mind at the last minute and gave away rabbit’s feet with the film’s logo on it.

Check out this ad for the CBS Late Movie show from Bill Van Ryn of Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum!

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Mephisto Waltz was on the CBS Late Movie on July 29, 1977.

Paul Wendkos may have directed most of the Gidget movies, but he has quite the horror pedigree. There’s the TV movie Good Against Evil, Haunts of the Very Rich, the 1985 remake of The Bad Seed and the legendary 1975 TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden.

Because this is a Quinn Martin Production and CBS aired it extensively on TV, many people believe that it was a made-for-TV movie. However, it was actually released in theaters—the only movie that Twentieth Century Fox released for the entire calendar year of 1970, due to several of 1969’s movies failing at the box office.

Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda) once wanted to be a pianist but is now a music journalist. He gets to interview the world’s greatest piano player, Duncan Ely (Curd Jurgens, The Vault of Horror). It doesn’t start well, but then Ely discovers that Myles has hands perfect for the piano.

At that point, Duncan and his daughter Roxanne (Barbara Perkins) become friends with Myles and his wife Paula (Jacqueline Bisset), who doesn’t trust either of them. She was right to suspect them, as they’re Satanists who have transferred Duncan’s mind to Myles’ body. However, as Myles becomes a major star, she starts to like the man she’s married to more and more. She becomes seduced by the power, even if Duncan comes to her in dreams and tells her that their daughter must die.

After that dream, the daughter dies, which pushes Paula to investigate the Ely family. She then finds herself falling into the arms of Roxanne’s ex-husband, Bill (Bradford Dillman).

This is the 1970s, so of course, incest figures in. It turns out that Duncan and Roxanne have bartered with Satan to enable them to pursue their incestuous relationship by placing Duncan’s consciousness into Myles’ body. When Bill is killed with the same blue forehead murder style as Paula’s daughter, she starts to worry for her life. But simultaneously, she decides that no matter who is in her husband’s body, that’s the man she wants to be with.

So she does what any of us would do. She turns to Satan and kills herself, moving her mind into Paula’s body. Then, she returns to her husband, Paula’s father, in her husband’s body. Whatever issues there were with the marriage have been solved, thanks to the left-hand path and outright murder.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Losers was on the CBS Late Movie on October 3, 1975 and October 8, 1976.

Also known as Nam Angels, this Jack Starrett-directed film (he also made Run, Angel, Run!, Race with the Devil and Hollywood Man, among others) has a great high concept: a biker gang called The Devil’s Advocates is sent to Cambodia to rescue an American diplomat because they are the only ones who can get the job done.

They’re led by a Vietnam vet — and the brother of the Army Major who has recruited them — Link Thomas, played by the always dependable William Smith. They’re under the orders of Captain Johnson (Bernie Hamilton, who was Captain Harold Dobey on Starsky and Hutch) and include fellow vets Duke (Adam Roarke from Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and Frogs) and Dirty Denny, as well as Limpy (Paul Koslo, Vanishing Point) and Speed (Eugene Cornelius, who was Space in Run, Angel, Run!).

They head to Vietnam,  but come on, we all know it’s the Philippines because the mechanic who works on their bikes, Diem-Nuc, is played by Vic Diaz. It doesn’t matter because by the time you start trying to figure out locations*, our heroes are doing wheelies and blowing things up with rocket launchers and machine guns while they do wheelies.

This movie does have some basis in reality. Sonny Barger, the Maximum Leader of the Hells Angels, sent LBJ a telegram offering the skills of his club in the Vietnam War. That inspired Alan Caillou, who originally wrote that The Losers would live. Starrett and Smith rewrote the script to the ending we know now.

If you watch Pulp Fiction, you can see a scene from this movie being watched by Butch’s girlfriend the day after his fight. When he asks what she is watching, she says, “A motorcycle movie, I’m not sure the name.”

*They’re reused from Too Late the Hero.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Story of G.I. Joe was on the CBS Late Movie on October 13, 1972 and May 18, 1973.

Ernie Pyle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and war correspondent, is revered for his stories about the ordinary American men who fought in World War II. His work was so impactful that President Harry Truman acknowledged, “No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told. He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen.”

As for this movie, when they were picking someone to play Pyle, he told the filmmakers, “For God’s sake, don’t let them make me look like a fool.”

Producer Lester Cowan picked Burgess Meredith, a captain in the Army at the time and could not be released from active duty. Presidential advisor Harry Hopkins overruled that order, overruled that order, and General George C. Marshall approved Meredith’s honorable discharge.

He spent time with Pyle in New Mexico as the writer recovered from surviving an accident bombing at the start of Operation Cobra in Normandy. They believed that Meredith was the best actor for the role besides Leslie Howard, who had recently died in a plane crash.

Director William A. Wellman, a decorated combat pilot during World War I who served in the Lafayette Flying Corps of the French Air Force and earned a Croix de Guerre with two palms for valorous action, asked the Army for 150 soldiers and demanded that they speak their own dialogue, live with the actors and train with them.

The 18th Infantry, U.S. Army, a unit that had never seen combat, is sent to the front lines. Lt. Bill Walker (Robert Mitchum) allows Pyle, who is inexperienced in combat, to accompany him. Despite a brutal defeat at the Battle of Kasserine Pass, they become efficient killing machines. The movie doesn’t shy away from the horrors of war, depicting a battle near Monte Cassino that forces the men into caves, eating from cold ration cans for Christmas and slowly losing their sanity. As a man Pyle watched get married dies in combat and another suffers a breakdown, the writer learns that he has won the Pulitzer, which seems like no comfort. After reuniting with the unit after the battle, he sees a long line of mules carrying the dead, the last one holding his friend Walker, which causes the men to weep openly.

Pyle’s poignant words, “For those beneath the wooden crosses, there is nothing we can do, except perhaps to pause and murmur, ‘Thanks pal, thanks.'”, encapsulate the profound loss and the enduring gratitude felt by those who survived the war.

Pyle was pretty honest about the movie, saying, “They are still calling it The Story of G.I. Joe. I never did like the title, but nobody could think of a better one, and I was too lazy to try.” Sadly, he was killed in action on Ie Shima during the invasion of Okinawa two months before the premiere of the movie about his life.

Sources

Cotillion : Ernie Pyle – War Correspondent. http://cotillion.mu.nu/archives/223272.php

William A. Wellman — Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2. https://wiki2.org/en/William_Wellman

Story of G.I. Joe | International Military Forum – IMF. https://www.military-quotes.com/forum/story-g-joe-t515.html?s=71be3e6c2acdb3eb06984571079155df

In the Movies: Wartime Columns: Ernie Pyle: Indiana University. https://erniepyle.iu.edu/wartime-columns/in-the-movies.html