Blue (Bill Cosby) works as a skycap for an airport and also scrounges for junk he can sell. His wife Serena (Gloria Foster) is a maid and going to school to be a nurse. They’re both working so they can leave the projects and have a better life for their son Vandy (Dennis Hines), who resents the fact that he can’t have fun like his other friends and spend money. Well, when he gets sickle cell anemia, everyone realizes that time may mean as much as dollars.
Directed by Gilbert Cates — the producer of the Academy Awards fourteen times between 1990 and 2008 and was credited with recruiting Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman, Steve Martin, Chris Rock and Jon Stewart to serve as hosts — this was written by Cosby and Allan Sloane.
Cosby and Foster would reunite years later for Leonard Part 6. But that’s another story.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
Based on characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner, this was directed by Walter Grauman and written by Sam Roffe, who created Have Gun, Will Travel. The producers — Paisano Productions — had tried to launch a Doug Selby series for six years, while its series Perry Mason was popular. This is the only effort that came of all that hard work.
In the small town of Madison City, Doug Shelby (Jim Hutton) and Sheriff Brandon (Robert J. Wilke) have recently won the election pledging to keep the filth of neighboring Los Angeles out of their city. There’s also Chief Larkin (Ed Asner), who loves L.A. and a murder. That’s right — a body has been found in the pool at Jane Antrim’s (Jessica Walter) home. She that place with her disabled father-in-law Frank (Leslie Neilsen), a man who was put in a wheelchair by an accident. that also killed Jane’s husband Brian, who was also Frank’s son. For some reason, the insurance won’t pay up. And now that body isn’t drowned but has been shot twice, with two different bullets, in one entrance wound.
This is very Perry Mason, which makes sense, as Erle Stanley Gardner also created that character. Where his TV show was memorable, this movie, unfortunately, isn’t.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
Michael Apted directed Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorillas In the Mist and The World Is Not Enough but before all that, he made this movie that he called an “informed look at the British underworld.” That may be because he enlisted ex-gangster Bob Ramsey to act as a contact between the film unit and the local underworld. This kept harassment down and let them shoot in high crime areas.
Jim Naboth (Stacy Keach) has lost his job and his wife Jill (Carol White) and children thanks to his drinking problem. Now a private detective, he’s still drinking and she’s moved on to a new husband, Foreman (Edward Fox) and taking care of his daughter Christine (Alison Portes).
A gang of kidnappers — Keith (David Hemmings), Vic (Stephen Boyd), Barry (Roy Marsden), Des (Barry Stewart Harwood) and Taff (Alan Ford) — take Jill and Christine to force Foreman to help them with a crime. He’s an important businessman, so he hires Jim to get his wife and child back.
The story itself is simple but the real issues are whether Foreman was part of the crime, the past relationship between Jim and Christine, and how Jim and Keith knew each other when Jim was a cop. There’s a lot of humiliation of Jim — and Christine — which also seems like Foreman’s doing. This may be too British for American audiences — Warner Bros. said it was “too indigenous” — but I found it interesting.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
You probably know Jack Arnold better from directing movies like It Came from Outer Space, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tarantula and The Incredible Shrinking Man than spy thrillers. In this movie, a Swiss bank has its infamous secret bank accounts get compromised. They get David Christopher (David Janssen), a former U.S. Treasury official who now resides in Geneva to help.
He meets with the four people being blackmailed — one has already been killed — who include Denise Abbott (Senta Berger), Dwight McGowan (John Ireland), Robert Hayes (John Saxon) and Andre Kosta (Arthur Brauss). Who could be blackmailing them? Well, it could be any of the following people: bank vice-president, Franz Benninger (Anton Diffring), his mistress Rita Jensen (Elke Sommer) or two criminals, Korsak (Curt Lowens) and Sando (David Hess). Whoever the blackmailer is, they demand uncut diamonds as their payoff. Christopher has to head into the Andes, all alone, prepared to face off with whoever the blackmailer or blackmailers may be.
Hey it’s 89 minutes long and moves quick. It’s not the worst movie you’ve seen.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
This was Bob Shaye’s — and New Line Cinema’s — first full-length production after a decade as a pure distribution company. Director Mark Lester would tell The Pink Smoke, “They were distributing Truck Stop Women to college campuses and they already had a script, so I was hired to direct it. We hired Robert Forster because he had done Medium Cool. Don Stroud was supposed to star in it but he got into a motorcycle accident the night before shooting.”
The film starts with the death of one of Greg Wilson, one of its stuntmen, who was set up. His brother Glen (Forster) arrives on the set, along with B.J. Parswell (Fiona Lewis!), a reporter who wants to write about the danger of the stunt game. The minute Glen gets there he gets hit on by the producer’s wife (Candice Rialson, in one of her last roles; she’s also great in pretty much everything she ever did, like Chatterbox, Hollywood Boulevard and Moonshine County Express).
Glen joins the stunt team of the film, who all promise one another that if anyone gets hurt, they’ll always pull the plug for one another, predating Dr. Kevorkian by several years. Screw the law. We’re stuntmen!
One of the people who have to get the plug pulled on them is Chuck, played by Bruce Glover, always a welcome sight. He’s married to Joanna Cassidy, who is — again, you’re going to get this a lot with this cast — astounding in everything I’ve ever seen her in. In this one, more than aardvarking with Crispin’s dad in a waterbed in the back of a custom van, she’s punching the faces of an entire bar of rednecks.
The death keeps coming, as Paul (Ray Sharkey? This is like a B&S About Movies dream cast and it gets even better) gets trapped in a burning building. That means that our hero has to finish the film, figure out who the killer is and get some revenge.
Former pro wrestler Hard Boiled Haggerty shows up, as does Richard Lynch. And you know how I feel about Mr. Lynch and the fact that he can make any movie better just by walking on set. Suffice to say he does way more than saunter on here.
This is why we’re doing an entire week of Mark Lester’s films. He knows how to get a story told, gather the right people to help tell it and get out of the way. He’s never let me down yet.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
Based on Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel Rogue Male, this BBC TV movie was directed by Clive Donner, adapted by Frederic Raphael and in addition to Peter O’Toole, it also stars Alastair Sim in his last film role.
In early 1939, before the start of World War II, Sir Robert Hunter (O’Toole) takes aim at Adolf Hitler with a hunting rifle. He hesitates to shoot, which ends with him being attacked by an SS guard. He’s tortured and claims that this was just an intellectual exercise to see if he could kill the leader. He’s a well-known British citizen, so to cover up the torture, they throw him off a cliff.
He survives and escapes to England, where a Nazi sympathizer named Major Quive-Smith (John Standing) recaptures him and demands that he writes a false confession that the British government demanded that he was given orders to kill the German leader. But he’s not giving up without a fight.
In 2007, Peter O’Toole named the film as his favorite among those that he had made. One of the reasons he was in it was because his wife Sian Phillips loved the novel.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on YouTube.
Directed by Krishna Shah and written by Joseph A. Walker, this has an incredible soundtrack by the band War. It’s based on Walker’s 1972 play.
Johnny Williams (James Earl Jones) is a house painter and poet who has raised his family in Watts. His son Jeff (Glynn Turman) is home after failing out of the U.S. Air Force flight school and his wife wife Mattie (Cicely Tyson) is dying, but Johnny tries to remain positive. Yet when Jeff kills a rival gang member and a police officer gets killed, there’s a standoff with the cops that doesn’t end well for anyone.
The cast also includes Roger E. Mosley as Big Moe Hayes and Louis Gossett Jr. as Dr. Dudley Stanton.
This is shot in an all over the place style, somethimes in striking POV shots, other times in your face African masks dominating the entire shot. There seems to be so much crammed into this movie — Vietnam, alcoholism, racism, dealing with loss, Afrocentrism, the militarism of the Black Panthers — that it doesn’t have a solid focus, but these are the kinds of movies that had to be made and stories that had to be told.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
From a story by Robert Ayre and a play by Ketti Frings, this is the tale of John Gwilt (Jason Robards), a postman who decides that he wants to become a tree. He plants himself in his back yard and waits for it to happen while his wife Jane (Sandy Dennis) tries everything she knows to get him to be normal. At the same time, John finds a sympathetic figure in librarian Estelle Benbow (Jean Simmons).
Also known as The Letter of the Law and Big Stick, this is a movie about Buford Pusser, except instead of Joe Don Baker, Bo Sevenson, The Rock or Kevin Sorbo, it has Brian Dennehy in the lead. Keep in mind this came out five years after the first movie and a year after Walking Tall: Final Chapter.
Buford Hayse Pusser was the sheriff of McNairy County, Tennessee, from 1964 to 1970, and constable of Adamsville from 1970 to 1972. During his time on the force, he survived seven stabbings and eight shootings as the result of his war on moonshining, prostitution and gambling on the Mississippi and Tennessee state line.
Already a local hero, Pusser’s war on the State Line Mob went national when his wife Pauline was killed on August 12, 1967. There was an ambush intended for him, brought on by common-law husband of a woman who tried to kill Pusser and who he shot and killed in self defense,
Pusser died on August 21, 1974, of injuries sustained in a one-car automobile accident four miles west of Adamsville on the same day that he met with Bing Crosby Productions in Memphis to talk about playing himself in the sequel to Walking Tall. It was claimed he was drunk driving but no autopsy was ever conducted.
As his legend grew — even when he was alive — singer Eddie Bond wrote and recorded several songs honoring Pusser, beginning with “Buford Pusser” in 1968 and then released Eddie Bond Sings The Legend Of Buford Pusser five years later. Pusser even recorded on Stax subsidiary Respect and even today, bands like The Mountain Goats and The Drive-By Truckers sing about him. And in 1973, when the first movie was made, he became a hero to many.
There’s a good cast here, with Forrest Tucker as Carl Pusser (he also played the same role in Final Chapter: Walking Tall), Brian Kerwin as Til Johnson, Ken Howard as Danny Boy Mitchell and Sheree North as Carrie Todd. It was directed by Lou Antonio and written by Samuel A. Peeples. If you don’t know the story from the other movies, here it is again. I like Dennehy, but I’m partial to Joe Don Baker. Then again, this led to the seven episode TV series. I can remember seeing all the commercials for these movies and I thought it was kind of sad that people kept glorifying someone who was dead, but I was a kid and what did I know.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
Once Confederate soldiers and now mercenaries, Sgt. Will Hansen (Chuck Connors), Ike (Aron Kincaid), Hank (Henry Caps), Jeb (Smokey Robards), and Billy (Peter Ford) have just come from Texas to Colombia. In hours, they’re captured by General Martinez (Andres Marquis) and forced to join the rebels and report back what they discover from them.
Will also soon meets and falls for a gypsy girl named Mila (Anita Quinn) whose father is so angry about her dating a white man that he cuts off her ear. Will responds by shooting him because the holidays are gonna be weird after this. So because Will gets detained, Martinez finds him and hangs him. Yes, that’s right, the hero of the story dies before the end. The rest of the mercenaries — who never make any money from their soldier work — join the rebels, get revenge and get killed. Except Billy. Because of dumb luck, he fell off his horse and missed the deaths of his friends.
This was directed and written by Ferde Grofé Jr., who also made Hellraiders and Judgement Day. He finished shooting in 1969 and the movie wasn’t released until 1972, so it didn’t seem to work out all that well. At least Cesar Romero got some work.
Don’t have the box set? You can watch this on Tubi.
B&S About Movies 