Out Of Sight 1966 Rapidshare Movies
The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies. Up from Liberalism (1959); also quoted in The American Dissent: A Decade of Modern Conservatism (1966) by Jeffrey Peter Hart, p.
Seeing as how Roger Corman’s oeuvre includes countless knockoffs of big-budget films, it seems only fair that producers operating beneath Corman’s low-budget level occasionally stole his shtick. Hence Tender Loving Care, a shameless imitation of Corman’s various sexy-nurse flicks. Like those movies, Tender Loving Care follows the private and professional adventures of three young women who room together while working at the same hospital. Whereas Corman’s sexy-nurse movies had glimmers of style as well as pretentions to social relevance, Tender Loving Care is written, photographed, and acted in a rudimentary fashion, telling a melodramatic story that climaxes with a ridiculous explosion of violence. Naturally, each of the three ladies has a showcase sex scene, and of course there’s a rape sequence.
That said, does Tender Loving Care have any redeeming qualities? Depends how you define that notion. The liveliest scenes involve minor cult-fave actor George “Buck” Flower, appearing here clean-shaven instead of with his usual frontier-coot drag. He plays a demented orderly whose sexual violation of a nurse involves lots of creepy ad-libs about which nipple she wants him to pinch next. Just as Dick Miller added a welcome blast of energy to many of Corman’s productions, Flower enlivens brief stretches of Tender Loving Care with compelling weirdness. The movie also has ’70s texture to burn, including a long sequence of a hot R&B band playing in a pimped-out nightclub. Speaking of ’70s texture, this review should not omit the dirt-bike rider who brings a girl back to his swingin’ bachelor pad so she can writhe on his waterbed while he sucks her toes.
Soon after collaborating on the intimate Civil War drama No Drums, No Bugles (1972), actor Martin Sheen and writer-director Clyde Ware reteamed for this offbeat modern-day piece, which is primarily a drama but also has elements of whimsical comedy. In addition to sharing some of the same storytelling problems that plagued the previous Sheen/Ware collaboration, When the Line Goes Through suffers from bizarre narrative elements, a hideous musical score, and tonal dissonance.
It’s far less satisfying as a viewing experience than No Drums, No Bugles—and the preceding film was not fantastic. Nonetheless, certain qualities slightly redeem When the Line Goes Through. First, West Virginia native Ware brings authenticity to his explorations of Southern identity, so the honesty of his writing ameliorates his lack of skill. Second, a recurring device of ironic cutaways, wherein visuals reveal the truth behind a character’s verbal lies, adds dimension. Third, Sheen is always a pleasure to watch, no matter the circumstances.
The movie opens by establishing Bluff Jackson (Sheen) as a drifter making his way from the Southwest to the backwoods of West Virginia, where he stumbles onto a remote house occupied by three people. Twentysomething sisters Mayme (Davey Davison) and Rayme (Beverly Washburn) care for their aging great-grandfather (Jim Boles), whom they claim is a 130-year-old Civil War veteran who fought on both sides of that conflict. Bluff spends several days at the house, romancing both sisters while spinning tale tales about his past to impress the sheltered women, who have never explored the world beyond their property. (Never mind the question of where they get groceries.). Although Ware never seems quite sure what he’s after—beyond the basic notion of putting a worldly swindler together with impressionable rubes—watching the filmmaker struggle to find a storyline is not completely uninteresting.
He comes up with a few effective devices, such as having the sisters wear identical dresses so Bluff has difficulty telling them apart, and the sexual heat between Bluff and the sisters adds tension. It helps that the movie is very short, running about 77 minutes. That said, When the Line Goes Through is not for everyone—in fact, most viewers are likely to find the movie confusing and dull and frustrating. (Again: that awful, awful music.) Yet if nothing else, When the Line Goes Through is that rare beast, a truly handmade cinematic relic, almost outsider art. Viewed unfavorably, it’s a botched attempt at something profound.
Viewed generously, it’s a strange little exercise in personal expression. Notorious for her carnal abandon in onetime husband Russ Meyer ’s movies and for cavorting naked at Cannes, Z-lister Edy Williams earned what appears to have been her first and last starring role outside adult films with this sloppy comedy/drama/thriller hybrid. Her mesmerizingly bad performance is the only reason to watch the movie, and it’s especially fun to watch her share the screen with B-movie icon William Smith.
In other contexts, Smith’s acting often seems limited, but when performing alongside Williams, he seems like a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Anyway, Williams plays Dr. Carol Evans, a physician who recently conspired with her lover, Gus (Smith), to kill her rich husband for a $500,000 inheritance. When Gus begins blackmailing her, Dr. Evans seduces a young motorcycle-accident patient named Brian (Randy Boone), hoping he’ll help her kill Gus. Written and directed by bottom-feeding sexploitation guy Hikmet Avedis, Dr.
Minx seems unsure which path to follow. Sometimes it’s a bargain-basement riff on Double Indemnity (1944), sometimes it’s a sex comedy, and sometimes it tries to play scenes straight—despite Williams delivering most of her dialogue in a Marilyn Monroe coo while her low-cut dresses fight a losing battle to contain her breasts. Especially weird is a subplot about Brian’s buddy, David (Harvey Jason), becoming an amateur sleuth.
The subplot culminates with David imitating Peter Falk’s Columbo character in one scene, rumpled raincoat and all. Excepting those who find visions of a disrobed Williams captivating, only viewers who savor inept cinema will truly enjoy Dr.
Perhaps no factoid gives a better sense of how strange American cinema got in the ’70s than this—the decade produced at least three movies about cockfighting, the illegal sport in which chickens kill each other while gamblers cheer the pointless bloodshed. First came Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter (1974), a periodically mesmerizing character piece starring the great Warren Oates. Then came Fowl Play a/k/a Supercock (1975), a low-rent comedy with Ross Hagen. And closing out the cycle was Rooster, later given the sensationally extended title Rooster: Spurs of Death! Deliberately or otherwise, this third film combines elements of its predecessors, making for a strange viewing experience. Rooster wobbles between earnest drama and lighthearted comedy, so it’s a sort of deranged rural epic even though it’s only 91 minutes long.
The only reasonable reaction one can muster after the movie runs its course is confusion. When respected sportsman Kink (Jeff Corey) announces a match with a big purse, perennially unlucky trainer Stoke (Gene Bicknell) conjures a scheme—he’ll enter his impressionable son, Wyatt (Vincent Van Patten), as a contestant, hoping that people will bet big against the young man, unaware that he’s secretly trained for years to achieve cockfighting glory. In one subplot, Stoke’s long-suffering wife (Ruda Lee) rekindles her courtship with a wealthy gambler (Ty Hardin) who wants to marry her. In another subplot, a slutty Southern belle (Amy Johnston) teases men including a volatile little person named Chicken (Tommy Madden). And in yet another subplot, Wyatt reconnects with a high-school buddy (Kristine DeBell) who’s now working in a brothel. You begin to see where the whole “epic” notion enters the conversation, because it’s worth reiterating that Rooster runs just 91 minutes—with this many characters and storylines, everything is handled superficially, and transitions between different narrative threads are sketchy.
As a case in point, the scenes between the wife and the gambler are fairly intelligent, but vignettes of Stoke tooling down country roads with Wyatt and their mute African-American pal Billy (Charles Fort) seem extracted from a Burt Reynolds picture. The road scenes even have their own theme song, featuring the lyrics, “Here we come from far away, bringing with us the death on wings!”.
Yet it’s impossible to dismiss Rooster as pure drive-in trash. Firstly, there’s the aforementioned kaleidoscopic quality, all jarring rhythms and wrong notes. Secondly, some scenes have a demented sort of artistry. In particular, the vignettes with Corey—a fine character actor—radiate weird heartland poetry, as when Corey’s character holds a barnful of cockfighters rapt with quasi-Biblical speechifying.
Similarly, scenes in which characters praise the nobility of cockfighting are inherently perverse. And just as Hellman did in Cockfighter, director Brice Mack employs slow-motion during cockfights, complementing balletic shots of battling birds with discordant music to create an eerie effect. While it’s probable that the microbudgeted political-action movie Ice received only a tiny theatrical release back in the day, it nonetheless qualifies as a minor historical artifact. Ice represents a very specific sort of political cinema—call it “notes from the underground.” Just as the film was plainly designed to energize receptive audiences with precious little hope of converting skeptics, the movie holds minor appeal when appraised with modern sensibilities. Those on the far left will be more sympathetic to the attitudes and grungy style of the picture, while those in the center and on the right are more likely to find watching Ice pointless.
After all, the 130-minute drama is a black-and-white experimental piece that occasionally features text passages and culminates with a crude sequence using children’s toys and miniature sets to express overt statements about power structures in society. Reduced to its simplest level, the plot is about a consortium of revolutionary groups trying to align their agendas for combined action against the Establishment during the time of the Vietnam War. Much of the film comprises long debates among young people with clashing ideas regarding how best to trigger social change, so there’s an interesting trope about freedom-of-speech warriors airing grievances so openly they can’t agree on anything. A little of this material, however, goes a long way—and there’s a lot of this material. Also featured are brief vignettes of violence inflicted upon activists. Some of these scenes are vicious, as when thugs perform some sort of genital mutilation on a male activist; although that moment isn’t explicit, it unfolds, painfully, in real time. And then there are bits that tick the requisite ’70s-freakshow box, like the sequence of experimental-theater players crawling around a stage while wearing pig masks.
It’s not fair to say that Ice is impenetrable, since writer-director Robert Kramer’s political stance is obvious from start to finish. But there’s pronounced dissonance between accessible scenes of humans interacting and clumsy stretches featuring representative imagery. Particularly dubious is the aforementioned final scene, during which a toy-sized nuclear missile humps a robot toy bearing the label “Ruling Class.”. During the late ’60s and early ’70s, naturalist Gordon Eastman served as actor, cinematographer, director, and/or producer while making several pictures about life in Wyoming and the Yukon. Some were marketed as documentaries and some were sold as fiction films, but if The Savage Wild is any indication, Eastman favored a hybrid style in which he fabricated scenes he wasn’t able to capture organically. Clearly, Eastman possessed some skill and tenacity, because The Savage Wild contains competently shot vignettes of animals frolicking in wilderness. Just as clearly, however, he lacked a distinctive point of view.
In its dullest moments, The Savage Wild plays like an anemic imitation of countless similar pictures from Disney. And in its most exciting moments, of which there are precious few, The Savage Wild comes across like a shameless knockoff of Farley Mowat’s 1963 book Never Cry Wolf. (The real screen adaptation of Never Cry Wolf, released in 1983 by Disney, is one of the greatest outdoor films of all time.). Dragging along for 103 harmless but tiresome minutes, The Savage Wild mostly records Eastman’s attempts to raise wolf pups in captivity for vaguely scientific reasons. Over the course of the movie, he captures, nurtures, and releases two sets of wolves, occasioning lots of aww-inducing scenes of cute puppies growling and playing.
Clumsily grafted onto the picture are badly acted dramatic scenes in which Eastman clashes with a professional wolf hunter, though the implied threat the hunter poses to the pups never materializes. Much of the film features post-production sound layered onto silent footage, so if you find Eastman’s narration dull, your patience will be tested. However, if the occasional glimpse of caribou coupling sounds interesting, The Savage Wild is for you. FYI, the other movies comprising Eastman’s quasi-fictional oeuvre are Never Look Back (1973) and Free as the Wind (1974), while his pure documentaries are High, Wild and Free (1968) and Trail of the Wild (1974). Set in Mexico, the picture follows the travels of a painter named Mary (Ferrare), who has a nasty habit of murdering the men and women she meets. Specifically, she seduces them, weakens them with spiked drinks, then removes a hairpin and punctures their throats so she can drink their blood. Candy Crush Cydia Repo For Vshare. Yet Mary feels conflicted about what she does, and she’s haunted by visions/memories of the mystery man (John Carradine) who triggered her murderous impulses.
Keyshot 3 Crack Free Download. The particulars of the plot are neither clear nor significant, but the gist is that Mary falls for Ben (David Young) and tries to end her lethal cycle so she can be with him. Meanwhile, the mystery man chases Mary across Mexico, setting the stage for a final confrontation. In its best moments, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary has something approaching an art-movie vibe.
For instance, a long lesbian seduction scene features mirrors, striking costumes, and deliberate pacing. In its worst moments, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary feels like drive-in schlock. One crude sequence features Mary writhing atop a lover/victim while the camera pointlessly cuts back and forth between Mary’s face and objects d’art around the room.
Carradine’s appearance is especially problematic. In most scenes, his character is obviously portrayed by a stunt double. Moreover, the costuming of Carradine’s character recalls that of the old pulp character the Shadow, right down to the high collars and wide-brimmed hat. In sum, those who avoid this movie aren’t missing much—but those who give it a chance will discover an offbeat experience. There’s a real movie hidden beneath sexploitation sludge in The Psycho Lover, and some psychotronic-cinema fans make the case that The Psycho Lover is respectable compared to similar fare. But is improving just slightly over garbage really all that much of an accomplishment? Between interminably long rape, murder, and/or softcore-sex scenes, The Psycho Lover tells the story of psychiatrist Dr.
Kenneth Alden (Lawrence Montaigne) and his deranged patient, Marco Everson (Frank Cuva). Throughout the first half of the picture, Marco kills various women and then, under hypnosis, tells Kenneth about the crimes.
Even with pressure from cops, who identify Marco as a suspect, Kenneth seems disinclined to either tell authorities what he knows or use his influence to end the crime spree. Instead, Kenneth spends lots of time cavorting with his hottie girlfriend, Stacy (Elizabeth Plumb), even though he has a depressed wife, Valerie (Jo Anne Meredith), back home. One day, when Stacy somewhat randomly describes the plot of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Kenneth, he gets the notion of compelling Marco to murder Valerie. The movie’s halfway over by the time happens, so you get an idea of writer-director Robert Vincent O’Neill’s lackadaisical approach to pacing. That said, The Psycho Lover is not an incompetently made picture. The photography is decent, some of the acting is passable, and a few lines of dialogue are tasty. (Examining a crime scene, a cop says the following about a murderer: “I can smell him in this room, and the hairs on my ass stand on end every time I catch his scent.”) These attributes are insufficient to make watching the picture worth the trouble.
Things get weird fast in The Sporting Club, a wildly undisciplined adaptation of a novel by Thomas McGuane, who later became a screenwriter of offbeat films with Western themes. Here, the theme is actually Midwestern, though The Sporting Club certainly has enough eccentrics and iconoclasts to resonate with other films bearing McGuane’s name. The basic story is relatively simple. Rich white people gather at the Centennial Club, a hunting lodge in the Great Lakes region, for a drunken revel celebrating the club’s hundredth birthday. One of the club’s youngest members, an unhinged trust-fund brat named Vernur Stanton (Robert Fields), has a scheme to destroy the club from within while making a grand statement about class divisions in American society. Vernur fires the club’s longtime groundskeeper and hires a volatile blue-collar thug as a replacement, injecting a dope-smoking X-factor into the uptight culture of the Centennial Club. Yet the plot is only the slender thread holding the movie together.
More intriguing and more prominent are myriad subplots, as well as bizarre satirical scenes featuring the aging members of the Centennial Club devolving into savagery. Here’s a relatively innocuous example.
Early in the picture, Vernur and his best friend, James Quinn (Nicolas Coster), wander from the Centennial Club to a nearby dam, where the (unidentified) president of the United States makes a public appearance. Vernur and James sneak onto a tour bus left empty by Shriners watching the president, then trash the bus and commandeer it for a presidential drive-by during which Vernur moons the commander-in-chief. The scene raises but does not answer many questions related to character motivation and logistics. And so it goes throughout The Sporting Club. Outrageous things happen, but it’s anybody’s guess what makes the people in this movie tick or even, sometimes, how one event relates to the next.
Very often, it seems is if connective tissue is missing. In some scenes, James makes passes at Vernur’s girlfriend, and in other scenes, he’s involved with the local hottie sent to clean his lodge. And we haven’t even gotten to Vernur’s fetish for vintage dueling pistols, the time capsule containing century-old pornography, or the climactic scene involving a machine gun and an orgy. As directed by journeyman Larry Peerce and written by versatile wit Lorenzo Semple Jr., The Sporting Club has several deeply interesting scenes and a few vivid performances.
Coster, familiar to ’70s fans as a character actor, does subtle work in the film’s quiet scenes, even though the nature of his overall role is elusive. Conversely, the great Jack Warden is compelling to watch as the replacement groundskeeper, even though he’s spectacularly miscast—more appropriate casting would have been Kris Kristofferson, who plays a similar role in the equally bizarre Vigilante Force (1976). The lively ensemble also includes Richard Dysart, Jo Ann Harris, James Noble, and Ralph Waite. At some point during this mindless gorefest, a local cop knocks on the door of the castle-like mansion where a mad scientist performs unholy surgery. The scientist answers the door politely, so the cop makes an inquiry: “You’re not doing anything illegal, are you?” “No,” the scientist says, “I’m a doctor.” Inexplicably satisfied with that answer, the cop says, “Well, I hope I didn’t bother you.” Huh? As goes that idiotic scene, so goes the rest of this unwatchable movie, which is sometimes known as Doctor Gore.
Written and directed by J.D. Patterson Jr., who also plays the leading role, the picture concerns a medical man determined to replace his deceased wife with a simulacrum.
Aided by his hunchbacked assistant (yes, really), the doctor seduces and murders young women, then cuts up their bodies with the intention of building a new bride for himself. Variations on the same ridiculous presence are nearly as old as Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein (1818), in which the monster demands a mate, so Patterson doesn’t get any points for originality. Nor does he deserve praise for anything else—from acting to directing to writing, everything he does here is inept. For instance, what’s with periodically cutting to portly country singer Bill Hicks, who repeatedly croons the song “A Heart Dies Every Minute”? And what’s with those dull montages of Patterson, as the doctor, making out with curvy young women? Excepting some quasi-realistic gore, this flick runs the gamut from incompetent to indulgent. Luckily, Patterson only made one more movie, The Electric Chair (1976).
The sketchy narrative begins with two couples driving into the Everglades for a vacation. Mike (Jerry Albert) recently inherited a remote cabin, and he’s brought his reluctant wife, Kim (Toni Crabtree), and their friends Daniel (Ken Miller) and Jeri (Celea Ann Cole) along for the ride. Upon arriving in swamp country, Mike clashes with a grubby gas-station proprietor (Herb Goldstein), who gives the standard get-outta-here-if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you rap. Naturally, because he’s a character in a dumb horror movie, Mike ignores the advice. Things get weird immediately thereafter, because three gun-toting slobs, who look less like Deliverance rejects and more like members of a redneck militia, show up at the gas station to wave guns at the newcomers. Again, Mike proceeds despite the clear danger to himself and his friends, which means that logic is not a factor in what follows.
After Mike’s group settles into the cabin, they’re frightened by mysterious creatures that are referred to by locals as “blood stalkers,” whatever that means. The siege grows more intense each passing night, with hairy Bigfoot-like monsters eventually putting their hands on members of Mike’s group.
Eventually, the movie develops a queasy sort of tension because things get ultraviolent, complete with over-the-top gore. None of it makes much sense, but it’s hard to look away from bizarre scenes featuring slow-mo chases and cuts to gospel singers. (Don’t ask.) And while the onscreen Bigfoot stuff is a bit of a tease, the offscreen connection to Sasquatch lore is real.
Morgan, who wrote and directed Blood Stalkers in addition to playing one of the menacing rednecks, appeared in several ’70s documentaries as a self-proclaimed Bigfoot hunter. He cut a memorably ridiculous figure in those projects, so it’s unsurprising that Blood Stalkers, his sole directorial effort, is simultaneously earnest and stupid. For better or worse (mostly worse), Morgan approached his contributions to ’70s pop culture with fierce commitment.
In the ’70s, Armenian-American filmmaker Sarky Maroudian made three melodramas starring singer/actor Manuel Manankichian—and while the following remarks pertain to Tears of Happiness, which appears to be the first and most widely seen of their collaborations, one imagines that Promise of Love (1974) and Sons of Sassoun (1975), neither of which were available for review, are roughly equivalent. Tears of Happiness, which is mostly in Armenian but has a few scenes in English, is a somewhat primitive piece of work, competent but marred by iffy performances and a weak storyline. Yet bitching about anemic plotting probably misses the point, because it’s not as if anyone ever bought tickets for an Elvis picture expecting profound insights into the human condition. Like myriad other musicals designed to showcase singers, Tears of Happiness is a one-dimensional showbiz saga that follows a predictable path to a crowd-pleasing payoff, with many tuneful detours along the way. An unkind review would note that Tears of Happiness often lapses into self-parody. Director Maroudian’s idea of a deep scene is to have someone cry or mope near water—a fountain, an ocean, a river—in vignettes that usually comprise only two shots, one of the actor and one of the water.
This device feels particularly enervated during musical passages that drag on for several minutes. The acting is as crude and obvious as the filmmaking, so the big reunion scene (not-really-a-spoiler alert!) consists of Raffi wandering through woods and shouting Silva’s name until they somehow find each other in the wilderness. Still, Maroudian and his collaborators showed enterprise by creating specialty content for an underserved demographic, and some fans undoubtedly savor this document of Manankichian in his prime.
It’s tempting to wonder what sort of box-office expectations the producers of this filmed stage production had, because Sammy Stops the World radiates sensibilities associated with the mid-’60s rather than sensibilities associated with the late ’70s. Did anyone really think the public was hungry for a dated musical starring an old-fashioned entertainer? In any event, Sammy Stops the World failed to restore Sammy Davis Jr. To the big-screen popularity he enjoyed in the ’60s, and has since fallen into obscurity. Seen today, it’s perhaps best appreciated as a record of Davis’ incredible stamina, though casual fans might prefer tracking down concert footage of Davis’ familiar hits.
Instead of “Candy Man” and “I Gotta Be Me,” Sammy Stops the World comprises unmemorable songs by UK tunesmiths Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, of Doctor Dolittle and Willy Wonka fame. That’s because Sammy Stops the World records a performance of Davis in the 1966 Bricusse/Newley show Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. The most famous tune to emerge from the musical is “What Kind of Fool,” not to be confused with the Barry Gibb song of the same name popularized by Barbra Streisand. Performing against a circus-themed backdrop and accompanied by a small cast of singers and dancers, Davis plays Littlechap, an everyman whose life journey forms a ham-fisted satire about modern existence.
He gets married, takes a soul-sucking job to pay the bills, and sells out his principles for professional and social advancement, eventually becoming so adept at telling people what they want to hear that he becomes President of the United States. Periodically, Littlechap addresses the audience by exclaiming “Stop the world!” and uttering introspective asides. Eventually, the story resolves into a moral lesson because Littlechap rediscovers his integrity at a crucial moment. The fashionable anti-Establishment lingo of the original play was reconfigured slightly for Davis, hence some awkward references to race relations.
(The performance in this film, recorded in Long Beach, California, was part of a national tour.) As a movie experience, Sammy Stops the World is underwhelming at best, exhausting at worst. Davis works his ass off, but he also mugs shamelessly and milks emotional moments—which is to say that he offers his usual shtick.
And while his leather-lunged belting is physically impressive, it’s not particularly artful. Worse, the show doesn’t properly showcase his remarkable dancing. Incidentally, mention should be made of costar Marian Mercer, who plays multiple roles, since she performs the show’s cutesy dialogue and lyrics with welcome edginess. Here’s the most striking scene in this atrocious horror flick—for several anguished moments, a young man contemplates suicide while holding a straight razor over his wrist, then abruptly says, “Oh, Jesus, I’m late for work,” sets the razor down, and zooms off to start his day. Need it even be mentioned that he’s alone in his apartment, so it’s unclear to whom he directed that line? Finding a morbidly funny non sequitur is about the only enjoyment one can derive from watching Meatcleaver Massacre, a supernatural-themed revenge saga that not only lacks any scenes featuring meatcleavers, but also lacks any scenes featuring demons, even though characters talk endlessly about them.
The plot is simple enough: After several college students beat up a professor who teaches classes in the occult, the professor summons a demon to menace his attackers. Alas, the plot accounts for only a portion of what appears onscreen. In some scenes, characters run around as if they’re being pursued, and in other scenes, characters experience psychological freakouts that are presented like acid trips. None of what happens is interesting, very little of it makes sense, and none of it is scary. Basically incoherent beyond the opening scenes that set up the relationship between the professor and his tormenters, Meatcleaver Massacre offers just one familiar actor, horror-cinema icon Christopher Lee. But don’t get your hopes up—he appears only briefly at the beginning and end, sitting in an office while reciting eerie mumbo-jumbo factoids. Apparently Lee shot the footage for a separate movie, and the producer of that never-completed flick sold Lee’s clips to the folks behind Meatcleaver Massacre, prompting Lee to explore litigation.
If only he’d successfully injoined the film from being shown anywhere. Every Little Crook and Nanny is a deeply mediocre crime comedy based on a novel by Evan Hunter and featuring a random assortment of familiar actors.
The stars are studio-era hunk Victor Mature, taking a break from retirement to play a caricatured mobster; versatile British actress Lynn Redgrave, still desperately trying to pick a lane in Hollywood; and sad-eyed Paul Sand, one of the most distinctively neurotic screen personalities of the early ’70s. Abetting the main actors are a slew of minor players from film and TV of the era: John Astin, Severn Darden, Dom DeLuise, Pat Harrington Jr., Pat Morita, Austin Pendleton, Isabel Sanford, Vic Tayback, and more.
The story moves briskly, the jokes are (mostly) inoffensive, and watching these actors is like noshing on comfort food. In other words, even though Every Little Crook and Nanny is substandard, watching the picture is a tolerable experience. At the top of the story, goons working for mobster Carmine Ganucci (Mature) forcibly evict etiquette teacher Miss Poole (Redgrave) from her longtime storefront, so she vows revenge. Poole talks her way into a job as a nanny for Carmine’s young son just before Carmine departs for a trip to Europe. Then Poole conspires with her dimwitted accomplice, Luther (Pendleton), to kidnap the boy and squeeze Carmine for ransom.
Coproducer, cowrtier, and director Cy Howard, a longtime comedy pro, keeps things humming with abundant physical comedy, plentiful punch lines, and short scenes. Hilarity is elusive, but the movie aims to please—and with so many gifted comic actors in the cast, some moments, particularly those with Pendleton and Sand, nearly connect.
It will come as no surprise to say the movie fails to create emotional engagement, though Howard scores a few glancing blows with his portrayal of Carmine’s son as a lonely boy desperate to form real human relationships. As for the leads, Mature and Redgrave are smooth in different ways—he struts through scenes with a pleasant I-don’t-give-a-shit swagger, and she churns through complicated dialogue with grace. It doesn’t really matter that neither of their characters is remotely believable, since Every Little Crook and Nanny is basically a live-action cartoon. Is the picture frenetic and overstuffed, representing a desperate attempt to substitute constant noise for substance?
And is there any compelling reason for movie fans to seek out this forgotten studio release? Certainly not. But if Every Little Crook or Nanny somehow crosses your path, it will offers 92 minutes of pointless silliness.
Beyond his success as a country singer, Marty Robbins occasionally acted, for instance starring in the short-lived Western series The Drifter (1965–1966). This movie, which contains Robbins’ last leading performance, is a quasi-continuation of that series, because Robbins stars as a former sheriff who goes by the nickname “Drifter.” Envision an anemic rehash of the plot from Shane (1953), and you know roughly what to expect here.
Kind but tough Matthew (Robbins) leaves law enforcement for life on the roam, then happens upon a family in trouble. Elderly Tom Duncan (Chill Wills) isn’t up to the task of protecting his grandchildren, pretty twentysomething Virginia (Dovie Beams) and impressionable grade-schooler Danny (Steven Tackett), from generic frontier varmints. Seeing injustice sparks Matthew to action—sort of. Among the most casually paced Western movies ever made, Guns of a Stranger meanders from one inconsequential event to the next, so viewers never get a sense of impending danger. In fact, the movie frequently stops dead so Matthew can warble a tune or impart a life lesson to the worshipful Danny.
Storytelling this vapid went out with Gene Autry, and matters are made worse by the excruciatingly bad supporting performances; although Robbins is competent, Wills is well past his prime and Beams is stunningly awful. Guns of a Stranger is so enervated that it verges on accidental comedy at times, as when Matthew participates in a lengthy but pointless bare-knuckle brawl or when he sings a lullaby to a group of cows.