American Pop (1981)

AMERICAN POP

AMERICAN POP (1981) Four stars
From 1972 to 1983, British Mandate of Palestine born and New York City and Washington D.C. raised Ralph Bakshi directed eight animated features: FRITZ THE CAT, HEAVY TRAFFIC, COONSKIN, WIZARDS, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, AMERICAN POP, HEY GOOD LOOKIN’, and FIRE AND ICE.

Bakshi definitely proved to be a game changer: Feature-length animation could be combative, satirical, adult entertainment and more than just good, clean, wholesome family entertainment as in the socially accepted definition for animated films. His films — especially his first three — paved the way for “The Simpsons,” “Beavis & Butt-Head,” “South Park,” “Family Guy,” “Adult Swim,” et cetera.

FRITZ THE CAT, loosely based on Robert Crumb’s comic strip, became a landmark motion picture, the first animated feature to earn the ‘X’ rating in the United States.

HEAVY TRAFFIC, COONSKIN, AMERICAN POP, and HEY GOOD LOOKIN’ are ‘R’ and WIZARDS, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and FIRE AND ICE are ‘PG,’ although that rating once packed a punch with the first two Indiana Jones, JAWS, POLTERGEIST, GREMLINS, and LONE WOLF McQUADE, arguably the most violent ‘PG’ ever made, being some of the most notorious ‘PG’ entries before ‘PG-13’ debuted in August 1984 with the release of RED DAWN.

I’ve watched seven of the eight Bakshi films listed above, liked nearly all of them, and FRITZ THE CAT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and AMERICAN POP have earned a spot on my personal top 10 lists for 1972, 1978, and 1981, respectively.

I just watched AMERICAN POP last night and I was once again impressed by the overall sweep of the enterprise — narratively and musically and, of course, its animation — just like I had been several years back watching it for the first time.

AMERICAN POP tells the story of four generations of Russian Jewish immigrants who all have some involvement with American popular music.

First, we meet Zalmie around the late 19th and early 20th century and follow him for a series of years. Zalmie, who started hanging around burlesque shows at an early age, wants to be a singer, but a wound to his throat during World War I kills his singing career. After the war, back home in New York City, he falls in love and marries a stripper named Bella, and Zalmie transfers his star-making ambition to his wife. She’s killed opening a letter bomb intended for him. See, Zalmie used money from mob boss Nicky Palumbo for his wedding to Bella and eventually, Zalmie testifies against Palumbo on TV, calling the mob boss “a rat.”

Zalmie and Bella have a son named Benny, who becomes a very talented jazz pianist. Benny fights in World War II and in one of the film’s best scenes, he finds an abandoned piano in a bombed-out building that leads to his demise. When we first see Benny in Nazi Germany, he’s playing the harmonica (not exactly his musical forte) and even he quips to two fellow troops who call out his lousy playing, “I know, but it’s hard to fit a piano in a foxhole.” At this abandoned piano, Benny first riffs on “As Time Goes By” (Dooley Wilson’s Sam had to play it — again — in CASABLANCA) and his playing quickly draws the attention of an awakened, armed Nazi soldier who approaches Benny from the rear. Benny changes tune to “Lili Marleen” (Marlene Dietrich made it especially famous) and the appreciative Nazi waits to shoot down Benny until he’s done playing “Lili Marleen.” The Nazi even says thanks in German before firing his shots.

Third generation Tony experiences the Beats and the Hippies as he migrates from East to West and back again — of course, we hear Allen Ginsberg’s “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” one of the best starts to any poem — and he gets poetic himself first over “The Blonde” from Kansas. “Yeah, I’m crazy,” Tony tells her. “I’m crazy in love with your blue eyes … and your corn-sulked hair. Your corn-sulked hair. I’ll never eat corn again without thinkin’ about you. Canned corn, candy corn, popcorn, Crackerjacks! You’re the prize in my box! And my box is this country. It’s all tinfoil on the outside. Corn and sweetness on the inside.”

Tony’s journey leads him next to California and he writes songs for a rock band on the edge of stardom. Tony and female lead singer Frankie Hart — a character archetype obviously inspired by Grace Slick and Janis Joplin — become heroin addicts. With the band set to play after Jimi Hendrix one night in Kansas, two important events happen to Tony: his lover Frankie overdoses backstage and he meets his son Pete, who came from the one night with the corn-sulked hair girl.

Tony moves back to New York City, joined by his son. Both Tony and Pete become drug dealers and Pete begins selling drugs to rock bands. Pete finally seizes the moment and gives the band members an ultimatum: They must listen to Pete’s music before they can have any more cocaine. Pete chooses to play Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” for the band and the management. Next thing we know, before we can get all the way through “Night Moves,” Pete’s on stage with the band playing “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Devil in a Blue Dress,” and “Crazy on You.” Late in the medley, we start to see images from earlier in the movie — Zalmie, Benny, and Tony — with Pete on stage.

Of course, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” plays over the end credits.

AMERICAN POP guides us through 80 years of popular music — everything from standards to Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” Janis Joplin’s “Summertime,” and Lou Reed’s “I’m Waiting for the Man,” in addition to the songs already mentioned. That list barely hints at the music heard throughout AMERICAN POP.

Stylistically, we not only have rotoscoping (a process where live actors are filmed and then animators draw over the live-action footage), but also water colors, computer graphics, live-action shots, and archival footage.

Bakshi swung for the fences making AMERICAN POP — an epic achieved in 96 minutes with any failures consumed by the successful elements.

If you still have, somehow at this point in time after many advances in the field, a belief that animated films occupy a limited range aesthetically, emotionally, and intellectually, then Ralph Bakshi’s AMERICAN POP just might free and expand your mind.

In other words, “Whether you dance to it, drive to it, sing with it or swing to it … if you can crank it up, plug it in, or switch it on … if it assaults your senses, rocks your body, or touches your soul, it’s AMERICAN POP.”

King Kong (1976)

KING KONG 1976

KING KONG (1976) Three-and-a-half stars
Of course this 1976 KING KONG cannot hold a candle to the 1933 version, one of the all-time screen classics.

If and when you and I can get past that fact, admittedly not an easy hurdle, the 1976 version stands out for being a great entertainment.

Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange are improvements over Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray, respectively, in the male and female leads and Charles Grodin’s not far below what Robert Armstrong did in a similar role.

Of course, you can immediately tell when this movie was made by all the contemporaneous dialogue (especially from Lange) and Grodin plays an executive with Petrox Corporation, a fictional American oil company referencing the “pet rock” phenomenon. This KONG is more bound to 1976 than the original is to 1933.

Beset with production issues of a wide variety, including a complicated legal battle between Paramount, Universal, RKO, and the Cooper estate before filming even started (at one point, both Paramount and Universal had KONG projects lined up), and a first-time leading lady, as well as practical effects that often look more dated than what Willis O’Brien accomplished in 1933, KONG 1976 still works on a basic level.

It is fun.

The stories around the film, though, are more interesting than the finished product and help explain why the hype for the film took on epic proportions before its December 17 premiere.

Italian producer Dino DeLaurentiis (1919-2010) had the Carl Denham quotes in real life: “No one cry when JAWS die,” he said in Time. “But when the monkey die, people gonna cry. Intellectuals gonna love Kong. Even film buffs who love the first Kong gonna love ours.”

Or how about this one about Barbra Streisand told by Roger Ebert: “It’s-a no good, have two monsters in one movie.”

Unfortunately, when Meryl Streep auditioned for the Jessica Lange part, Dino said to his son in Italian that she was “too ugly” for the role; Streep understood Italian and replied in Italian to Dino, “I’m sorry I’m not beautiful enough to be in KING KONG.” We are printing legends, and that only seems appropriate for KING KONG.

Dino talked more smack about JAWS with ORCA THE KILLER WHALE (1977).

Gotta love Dino, whose mouth bit off more than his productions could chew.

Rather than Universal’s competing KONG movie (not released until Peter Jackson’s remake in 2005), the public first received A*P*E, an American / South Korean co-production with its Grade Z special effects, an early appearance for future TV mother Joanna (“Growing Pains”) Kerns, and an infamous shot where the ape uses the middle finger to show his disgust with the helicopters shooting at him.

Either that or he’s just showing his disgust at being trapped in that damn gorilla suit in a shitty movie.

A*P*E would later be topped, in the KING KONG ripoff department, by the Shaw Brothers’ MIGHTY PEKING MAN, the best of the King Kong ripoffs.

There’s also KING KUNG FU from 1976, where a gorilla trained in martial arts wreaks havoc on Wichita, Kansas. Financial constraints forced the makers into not being able to finish their film until 1987.

A*P*E invaded movie screens in October 1976, beating DeLaurentiis’ KONG by a good two months. MIGHTY PEKING MAN came out April 10, 1977, and Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures re-released the film on April 23, 1999.

Carlo Rambaldi, Glen Robinson, and Frank Van der Veer won a Special Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the visual effects in KING KONG, believe it or not.

Legendary make-up artist Rick Baker played Kong, or he’s the man in the ape suit. The original plan had been for KONG ’76 to feature a 40-foot high mechanical ape, but that mechanical monster worked even less than Bruce the Shark in JAWS. JAWS director Steven Spielberg worked around the frequent mechanical failure to make an even better film than if the mechanical shark had been fully operational.

That’s not exactly the case with KONG ’76, partially because musical cues would not be a proper substitute for an ape like John Williams’ musical score proved to be for the shark or even Harry Manfredini’s score for the psycho killer in FRIDAY THE 13TH.

In other words, you have to see the ape.

“KING KONG offered the one chance to do a really perfect gorilla suit,” Baker said. “With the money and the time, it could have been outstanding. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. There were compromises and enforced deadlines.”

Let’s face it, KONG director John Guillermin, he’s no Spielberg.

At the same time, though, I give KONG ’76 and JAWS both three-and-a-half stars. Why?

A) Because life (and my brain) work in mysterious ways.

B) Because star ratings are basically arbitrary.

C) Because both films tap into the same primordial appeal and work as great entertainments for a couple hours each.

Any Which Way You Can (1980)

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN (1980) Three stars
If I believed in feeling any guilt whatsoever about feeling pleasure, I might call ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN a guilty pleasure.

It’s another one of those sublimely ridiculous movie packages that I can’t help but not to like. I mean, it could play on a double bill with ROAD HOUSE.

We all have “guilty pleasures,” and they form one of the most rewarding experiences that we can have at the movies.

If you describe ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN as a movie with a little bit of everything, that’s still selling it short. I mean, it’s not every day that you have Clint Eastwood in a comedic role, an orangutan named Clyde (played by Buddha and C.J., although there’s no screen credit) who steals every scene that he’s in, a concluding fight scene that can go head-to-head with the later ROCKY sequels and THEY LIVE, a buffoonish motorcycle gang, Ruth Gordon (1896-1985) in what can only be called the “Ruth Gordon” role, and a country song played seemingly every few seconds.

This is the only motion picture that starts with an Eastwood and Ray Charles duet on a little ditty over the opening credits named “Beers for You.”

Personally, I feel the movie could have used more Clyde scenes — more “Right Turn Clyde,” more flipping the bird, more smashing cars, et cetera — and fewer scenes between Eastwood and his real-life partner at the time Sondra Locke. Locke generally became the weak link in Eastwood’s films of the period, and both EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE and ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN dramatically prove that as Eastwood demonstrates better chemistry with the orangutan than Locke.

Back to Clyde and Buddha and C.J. Buddha and C.J. assumed the Clyde role for the sequel since Manis — who alone played the role in EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE — apparently had grown too much between films. Manis returned to his act in Las Vegas.

Reports have it Buddha alone played the role in ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN and C.J. came on in publicity because Buddha was caught stealing doughnuts on the set near the end of filming and he was brought back to his training facility and beaten for 20 minutes, according to the book “Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People” by Jane Goodall and Dale Peterson.

Buddha then died soon after of a cerebral hemorrhage.

C.J. went on to star in Bo Derek’s TARZAN THE APE MAN and a NBC sitcom named MR. SMITH.

Executive producer Ed Weinberger said of C.J. in the Washington Post, “It’s a Buddha-like presence. He has wisdom about him. You have to know the animal; I’m in love with him. I’d have him in my house any time.”

MR. SMITH lasted all of 13 episodes from Sept. 22 through Dec. 16 in 1983 and finished a dismal 95th in the Nielsens.

So much for a talking orangutan and who knows if Weinberger had C.J. over at his house after the show flopped big time.

I remember loving ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN as a young child. It was an affinity for Clyde. He’s what I remembered about the movie for many years before I revisited it decades later.

Not every movie I loved in childhood holds up revisited in adulthood. For example, CANNONBALL RUN, an entertainment I found to be an endurance contest several years back. (For the record, I recently watched SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, another childhood favorite, again and it held up. I enjoyed Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Jerry Reed, and Jackie Gleason.)

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN is not quite at the same high level as COMMANDO, LONE WOLF McQUADE, and ROAD HOUSE.

That’s because it’s a little flabby with a running time of 1 hour, 56 minutes. Granted, that concluding fight scene between Eastwood and William Smith eats up a good 10 percent of a nearly two-hour experience.

LONE WOLF McQUADE and ROAD HOUSE do have similar run times, but fewer bad scenes than ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN.

The great director Howard Hawks (1896-1977), born the same year as Ruth Gordon, said that a good movie is “three great scenes and no bad ones.” Not sure that he had movies like ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN in mind, which does have three great scenes but also some bad ones.

ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN, though, is one of those sequels better than the original.

Road House (1989)

ROAD HOUSE

ROAD HOUSE (1989) Three-and-a-half stars
This is the Patrick Swayze (1952-2009) movie that ate all his other movies. More like ripped all the other movies’ throats out. We are talking about ROAD HOUSE, after all.

You can weep to GHOST, you can boogie to DIRTY DANCING, and you can kill Commies to RED DAWN, that’s fine and dandy, whatever floats your boat and tickles your fancy, but ROAD HOUSE is the ultimate Swayze viewing experience, at least for this magnificent bastard.

It is Swayze in Testosterone Hyperdrive, or it should have been titled OVER THE TOP rather than Sylvester Stallone’s epic about child custody, arm wrestling, and truck driving.

“Dalton lives like a loner, fights like a professional. And loves like there’s no tomorrow.”

“The dancing’s over. Now it gets dirty.”

“Dalton’s the best bouncer in the business. His nights are filled with fast action, hot music and beautiful women. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.”

Three taglines for ROAD HOUSE that only hit at the surface of the epic sleaze within the film.

Swayze plays Dalton, who’s not only the world’s greatest bouncer, he’s got a degree in philosophy from NYU. At one point, Dalton shares his general bouncer philosophy to his bouncer troops at the Double Deuce, the world’s roughest bar and the pride of the fictional Jasper, Missouri. (Bet the film’s producers did not know there’s a real Jasper, Missouri.)

“All you have to do is follow three simple rules. 1) Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected. 2) Take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary. And 3) Be nice.”

I enjoy hearing these rules — every single time — just like in GREMLINS when inventor Rand Peltzer tells his son about his new pet Mogwai, “First of all, keep him out of the light, he hates bright light, especially sunlight, it’ll kill him. Second, don’t give him any water, not even to drink. But the most important rule, the rule you can never forget, no matter how much he cries, no matter how much he begs, never feed him after midnight.”

I enjoy hearing both the rules in GREMLINS and ROAD HOUSE because I know that rules are meant to be broken in the movies. The rules — and a whole lot more, namely bones and plate glass windows — are definitely broken in ROAD HOUSE.

ROAD HOUSE is the most quotable Swayze movie by far.

“Pain don’t hurt.”

“Prepare to die.”

“Nobody ever wins a fight.”

“A polar bear fell on me.”

“You’re too stupid to have a good time.”

“Calling me ‘sir’ is like putting an elevator in an outhouse, it don’t belong.”

“Elvis! Play something with balls!”

“I thought you’d be bigger.”

“I’ll get all the sleep I need when I’m dead.”

“I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.”

Three lines that you might want to pass on: “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.” “I heard you had balls big enough to come in a dump truck.” “Whaddaya say we get nipple to nipple?”

Sam Elliott strolls into Jasper as Wade Garrett, Dalton’s mentor and friend who rates second best bouncer in the world. Garrett’s salty language would not pass muster with Elliott’s ‘The Stranger’ in THE BIG LEBOWSKI — The Stranger asked The Dude at one point, “Do you have to use so many cuss words?” The Dude replied “What the fuck are you talking about?”

ROAD HOUSE is a Western cast in bar room terms all the way down the line, from the hero to the old mentor to the businessman with an offer for the hero to come in and calm down a rowdy scene to the super villain to the henchmen to the leading lady to the watering hole to a guy named Red. Kelly Lynch plays “Doc,” Dalton’s love interest, and ROAD HOUSE might have showed its only restraint in not choosing “Kitty” for the character’s name. Doc’s real name is the film’s big twist.

Guess we should have expected ROAD HOUSE from a director named Rowdy Herrington.

It was destined to be, especially since Herrington adopted the correct approach: “I saw it as a cartoon,” he said. “Broader than life. Brighter than life.”

Epic bar fights. Live music from a real band. A monster truck. Bouncer philosophy. Boobs. Obligatory Swayze butt shot. All that eminently quotable dialogue, although it would be hard saying any of it if we met arch henchman Jimmy’s fate. By the way, Jimmy’s wardrobe approved by Chuck Norris from INVASION U.S.A. and Ramon Revilla from THE KILLING OF SATAN.

In the film’s bravura climax, we encounter super villain Brad Wesley’s trophy room. True story: Recently visiting the Wonders of Wildlife National Museum in Springfield, Missouri, it called to mind Wesley’s trophy room.

Roger Ebert (1942-2013) found this late scene the key to unlocking the film’s guiding spirit: “His hunting trophies include not only the usual deer and elk and antelopes, but also orangutans, llamas and a matched set of tropical monkeys. This guy went hunting in the zoo.

“We are expected to believe that the sadist financed these hunting expeditions by shaking down the businessmen in a town that, on the visible evidence, contains a bar, a general store, a Ford dealership and two residences. ROAD HOUSE is the kind of movie that leaves reality so far behind that you have to accept it on its own terms.”

That’s right. It’s so ridiculous, so cartoonish, so over-the-top that it becomes highly enjoyable, just like COMMANDO and LONE WOLF McQUADE.

There’s a lot (not a whole lot, though) more that I have to say about ROAD HOUSE, but that can wait for another time down at the Double Deuce.

Don’t worry, it’s cooled down considerably since 1989.

Three favorite character actors in ROAD HOUSE: Sunshine Parker, John Doe (rock musician), and Terry Funk (professional wrestler).