Navy lifers Signalman First Class Billy “Badass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Gunner’s Mate First Class Richard “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) have been given orders they’re not happy with: escorting Seaman Larry Meadows (Randy Quaid) to Portsmouth Naval Prison so he can serve eight years in the brig for stealing $40 from a charity fund.

They have a week to get him from Virginia to Maine and if they fail, they will be kicked out of the Navy, losing all of their benefits, pay and pension.

A funny thing happens. They end up liking the kid and decide to show him a good time before giving him over to serve his sentence. What follows are several episodes in their journey, like Meadows trying to see his mother one last time, ice skating, a bar brawl, an encounter with Buddhists at a party, paying (twice) for Meadows first sexual experience and finally taking him in.

With a cast that includes Nancy Allen, Gilda Radner, Luana Anders, Clifton James (Cool Hand Luke and Sheriff J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun), Carol Kane and Michael Moriarty, I’m left wondering, did I cast this movie?

When Robert Towne wrote the script, he ended up facing a Hollywood that didn’t understand all of the profanity. Then again, there were 342 f words in the first five minutes. Once Jack Nicholson became a star, it became easier to get made, and the actor brought director Hal Ashby on board. The production stalled for a year and a half while the star made The King of Marvin Gardens, with Columbia Pictures’ Peter Guber wanting the team to move on and make it with Burt Reynolds, Jim Brown and David Cassidy. Luckily, everyone — including producer Gerry Ayres — stuck together, even when Ashby had a marijuana bust in Canada. Sadly, the script had been written for Nicholson and Rupert Crosse, who died from cancer before the movie could be made.

Still, Columbia was unhappy with how long the movie took to edit and how much profanity remained in the final cut. They wanted 26 lines to be cut and at the end, there were 65 uses of the f word, breaking records for swearing. Ashby talked Columbia into previewing the movie for a real audience to see how they would react and they loved it. And then when Nicholson won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, they finally did a limited release of the film.

The actor said, “I like the idea of winning at Cannes with The Last Detail, but not getting our own Academy Award hurt real bad. I did it in that movie, that was my best role.”

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John and Gumshoe. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

The Atlantis Bookshop is an esoteric bookshop that’s been the center of London’s occult scene since it opened in 1921. It’s where the “Father of Wicca” Gerald Gardner attended meetings of The Order of the Hidden Masters and the shop even published his first book. It continues to be a nexus point for magic users and is featured prominently in Gumshoe, a movie that has some magic of its own as Eddie Ginley (Albert Finney) dreams of escaping his bingo hall reality and becoming a detective like in the books he reads. When he places an ad for his detective services as a birthday joke, he discovers himself in the middle of an actual case that may involve his family.

Featuring the first music score for a film by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Gumshoe‘s drug scenes kept it from being released on video until 2009. It was the debut film of director Stephen Frears (The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity) and was written by Neville Smith, who also plays Arthur in this movie.

There was a big revival of hard boiled detective films and film noir at the start of the 70s and this film does a great job of showing how one man can become lost in the dream of what it would be like to live in their world.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

If racist white audiences were upset when Sidney Poitier retaliated and slapped back the plantation owner in In the Heat of the Night, they had to have had a meltdown when this time, a cop challenges him and he proceeds to complete emasculate the man without breaking a sweat.

Seriously, I was not prepared for this movie, a film in which Poitier plays a man of mystery who just may be the literal angel of death returning every time a family member dies in his small southern hometown when he isn’t showing up for moments of death and destruction all over the world.

This movie wasn’t well-considered when it came out and you know, I completely believe those critics were fools. Author Scott Woods wrote an essay, “Brother John: Reclaiming the Blackest Movie Ever,” in which he said, “In 1971 black people were fresh off several assassinations of people who stood firm in their interests and were starting to resign themselves to the reality that desegregation without enforceability was still segregation. Brother John did not beat what audiences it was able to muster over the head with its wisdom, but it was too much for people to transpose themselves into. Poitier perhaps did his job too well. Poitier wanted to do Brother John but America needed him to do Brother John . And then no one went to see it. Brother John has it all, and does all things well: civil rights, racism, classism, toxic masculinity, black love, house parties, homecooked funeral rites. You haven’t celebrated Black History Month properly until you’ve seen this film. Brother John is a perfect black film, both for its time and now, generating even more resonance as we walk every day in a world aflame with hate and neglect.”

It was written by Ernest Kinoy, who was a POW in World War II in the slave labor camp at Berga before making it back to America and becoming a writer for the radio shows Dimension X and X Minus One, eventually making his way to movies and TV, with Roots and the TV series The Defenders being his best-known scripts. Brother John was directed by James Goldstone, who was the director for episodes of Star Trek and The Outer Limits before working on movies like They Only Kill Their Masters, Rollercoaster and Jigsaw.

This movie is worth the entire price of this set.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Between The Mechanic, this movie and Death Wish, Michael Winner and Charles Bronson were firing on all cylinders in the early 70s*. Based on A Complete State of Death by John Gardner — a book with a message that was, of course, made into a Michael Winner movie — there are so many car crashes at the end of the film that Hertz Rental came back in a huff to reclaim their cars, met by an angry Winner who yelled, “You should be glad we’re crashing your fucking awful cars. You’ll be able to write them off completely and get nice new ones.”

I love the reviews for this movie, that mostly say things like, “I don’t want to admit that I like a Michael Winner movie.”

Back in 1931, an event called The Night of Sicilian Vespers saw the murder of several mob leaders and Al Vescari (Martin Balsam) hasn’t forgotten. He sets up a plan to get revenge forty years or more later by killing off every Italian and Jewish leader across the country by using “stone killers,” or non-mob-affiliated hitmen. His plan? Hire Vietnam vets to do the work.

Detective Lou Torrey (Bronson) is a New York cop who figures out that a killing is an inside job after taking a witness to Los Angeles and having him killed nearly on arrival. He starts to look deeper and begins to discover exactly what’s going on, but is it too late to stop the plan?

Released in the wake of Dirty Harry, this was sold with the tagline “Take away his badge and he’d top the Ten Most Wanted list!” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I worry about the militarization of our police force and the issues of police brutality, but when it comes to movies, I’m all about cops breaking the rules and getting the job done. That said, Bronson’s character is incredibly open about the “white walls” of society and rebuking racism on the force.

This has a great supporting cast, including David Sheiner (Oscar’s accountant and poker buddy in The Odd Couple), Norman Fell (as the leader of the police force; he’d reunite with one of the younger cops in this, John Ritter, on Three’s Company), Ralph Waite (who was John Walton Sr. on The Waltons and ran against Sonny Bono once and his wife twice for a seat in the California senate), Paul Koslo (who told Shock Cinema “My first day on the set, I sat in his (Bronson’s) chair. The first joke I ever told him was “Hey, Charlie, did you hear the one about the Polish actor?” He said, “No, what?” I said, “Charles Buchinsky!” “Do you think that’s funny?!” Being Polish myself, I thought it was hilarious, but it went over like a lead balloon with Charlie. He’s really Polish, that guy!”), Stuart Margolin (The Rockford Files) and Jack Colvin (who would go on to be one of my most hated characters ever, Jack MgGee, the man who ruined Dr. David Bruce Banner’s life on The Incredible Hulk).

If you’re someone that’s only seen movies from this century and need a warning on your movies, here’s one: this is a Michael Winner movie. Go in with that knowledge.

*Before this, they’d make Chato’s Land and also made Death Wish 2 and Death Wish 3 together.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Uraz (Omar Sharif) is the son of Tursen (Jack Palance), a stable master and retired buzkashi player, a sport in which horse-mounted players attempt to place a goat or calf carcass in a goal. He has lost his honor when he breaks his leg in a game that his father has bet all of the family’s money on, which means he has to learn how to ride and play again, despite most of his leg.

Based on Joseph Kessel’s Les cavaliers, this was scripted by Dalton Trumbo and directed by John Frankenheimer, who loved the movie even if it wasn’t a financial success.

There’s a lot of animal violence in this, so be warned. I mean, it’s a game played with a dead animal, after all. The same game is played in Rambo III, in case you wondered. Like that movie, the Afghanistan of this film is long gone.

It’s a big Hollywood film about a sport and a place that I can imagine very few people were interested in, which makes me interested in it.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

A few days out of jail and John “Duke” Anderson (Sean Connery) is back with his lover Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) and already planning his next job: robbing every single apartment in her building with the help of a furniture van.

To do the job right, he needs the right crew. So he gathers a team that includes antiques dealer Haskins (Martin Balsam), the safecracker known as The Kid (an incredibly young Christopher Walken) and Pop (Stan Gottlieb), an old-timer who is finally out of jail. However, Angelo (Alan King), the mob boss who funds this operation, forces him to bring along — and kill — “Socks” Parelli (Val Avery) as part of the job, making things even more complicated.

This movie has a great cast, with Conrad Bain, Garrett Morris, Ralph Meeker*, Scott Jacoby and Margaret Hamilton in her last role. It’s beyond prophetic in how overly watched we would be, as every step of the crew is watched, listened to and recorded by a number of government agencies, as well as a team of amateur radio operators. It was released one year to the day before Watergate, which announced just how watched we all are.

Based on the book by Lawrence Sanders, the screenplay was written by Frank Pierso (Cool Hand Luke, Dog Day Afternoon) and diected by Sidney Lumet (Network, Serpico). It brought back Connery’s career and stopped his typecasting as James Bond.

*Meeker plays Edward X. Delaney, a continuing character of Sanders, who would be played by Frank Sinatra in The First Deadly Sin.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Henrietta and Pete Robbins (Barbra Streisand and Michael Sarrazin) are a struggling couple who have to deal with the insults of their sister-in-law Helen, who tells them that an early marriage took away Pete’s chance at success. Yet when Pete gets an insider trading tip — this type of thing was somehow perfectly legal in 1974 — she borrows three grand from a Mafia loan shark and finds herself unable to quickly pay them back, which means that she’s sold to Mrs. Cherry and rented out as a call girl, but she fails again and again to satisfy any of her clients and starts adding up even more debt.

It was written by Stanley Shapiro (How to Save a Marriage and Ruin Your Life, Pillow Talk) and Maurice Richli (The Pink Panther) and directed by Peter Yates, whose career has movies like Breaking Away and Mother, Jugs and Speed as well as Bullitt, The Deep, The Dresser and Krull.

It’s a light farce and while Streisand didn’t like the movie, it was a success.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, The Owl and Pussycat, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Written by Buck Henry, based on a stage play by Bill Manhoff and directed by Herbert Ross, The Owl and the Pussycat was a huge romantic comedy hit. It stars Barbara Streisand (who did a nude scene for the film that was cut at her request and then published by High Society; Babs sued) as a prostitute who also has acted in two TV commercials named Doris who finds herself living with Felix, her writer neighbor (George Segal) when she’s evicted. Then, they both get evicted when he tries to cure her hiccups.

They end up moving in with Barney (Robert Klein), a friend of Felix, but their arguing — followed by lovemaking — leads to Barney and his girlfriend (Marilyn Chambers, credited as Evelyn Lang, two years before she went Behind the Green Door) leaving. Hijinks, as they say, ensue, like the fact that the two can’t stop falling in love — and driving each other crazy — and that well, Felix may already have a fiancee. Will these two ever just get along?

Mad Magazine #145 had a great parody of this movie, The Fowl and the Prissycats, written by Stan Hart with pencils and inks by Angelo Torres.

Hey! Roz Kelly is in this and so is an uncredited Tom Atkins!

Interestingly enough, Sidney Poitier was supposed to play opposite Streisand, yet it was decided that audiences weren’t ready for an interracial romance. Which is even weirder, because this started on Broadway with Alan Alda and Diana Sands as the principals.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, Fun With Dick and Jane, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.

Dick and Jane Harper (George Segal and Jane Fonda) were living the American dream, but when Dick’s aerospace job got liquidated due to the fuzzy accounting of his boss Charlie Blanchard (Ed McMahon, and if you think I’m not doing a week of movies that Ed was in, you don’t know me) and have to suddenly figure out how to save everything they have, even if Jane’s parents believe that poverty is going to be the best lesson they can ever receive.

The best answer to their problems? A life of crime. While Dick and Jane try to keep the people they’re stealing from to be those even more on the wrong side of the law than them, they still worry that they’re getting too used to being criminals. Can they give it up? Or is the lure of easy money just too much?

This movie was based on a story by Gerard Gaiser, which was scripted by David Giler (who wrote Myra Breckinridge and The Parallax View, as well as serving as the producer and rewriter of Alien as part of his partnership with Walter Hill), Jerry Belson (who popularized the line, “When you assume…” in a script he wrote for The Odd Couple) and Mordecai Richler. It’s directed by Ted Kotcheff, whose career is all over every genre, from the scares of Wake In Fright to the sports film North Dallas Forty, the original Rambo movie First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s.

That said — this has a homophobic scene followed by George Segal in blackface, so…1977 everybody. A year I was alive in, can remember and yes, it’s even more racist today, so we’ve made progress. Not enough progress, but some.

Through the Decades: 1970s Collection is new from Mill Creek. It also has A Walk In the Spring Rain, Dollars, The Owl and Pussycat, For Pete’s Sake, The Anderson Tapes, The Horsemen, The Stone Killer, Brother John, Gumshoe and The Last Detail. You can learn more on their site and order it from Deep Discount.