Tag: Sondra Locke

Rats! Rats! Rats! You’ve Got a Friend in Willard and Ben

RATS! RATS! RATS! YOU’VE GOT A FRIEND IN WILLARD AND BEN
It makes sense that a sequel to the 1971 hit Willard appeared within the next year.

It makes sense that this sequel focused on the rat Ben and would be called Ben, given the previous film’s rather downbeat ending.

It also makes sense that Phil Karlson directed Ben, since Karlson directed such gritty films as Kansas City Confidential, 99 River Street, and The Phenix City Story, all involving characters who might be considered dirty rats.

Karlson never directed any character badder and meaner than Ben, though. Not any of the tough guys played by John Payne, Preston Foster, Neville Brand, Lee Van Cleef, and Jack Elam in Kansas City Confidential. Ben don’t need no stinking mask, for one. Ben also has an infinitely larger gang anyway and they’re real hungry as demonstrated throughout Ben. Nor Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser from Walking Tall, which Karlson made right after Ben. Joe Don Baker must have come as quite a relief after Ben, who quickly became a has been after his two film roles and multiple songs about him. Ben must have wanted even more dough to return for a third film. That dirty rat!

Ben also won a PATSY Award for his performance in Ben, which undoubtedly contributed to his ego problem.

Anyway, I didn’t much care for Ben, because it quickly established a dread pattern after the obligatory flashback to the events that ended Willard. Here’s that pattern: Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number. Rat attack. Cutesy poo musical number.

Sounds like a real winner, right? Yeah, if you like a bunch of bad ideas bouncing off each other for 90 minutes.

You can also throw in some police chatter, a journalist character who’s seemingly working on just this one story (though it’s hard to blame him, I mean it’s not everyday that millions of street rats terrorize a city), and a little boy named Danny and his sister (played by Meredith Baxter before her marriage and hyphenated name, before her TV mother fame, before her Lifetime movie career, before her coming out) and his mother who all seem like refugees from a Disney live-action project.

Oh yeah, like Willard before him, the little boy possesses the ability to communicate with rats, especially Ben. Oh yeah, once again, the lonely little boy has a heart condition.

Danny proves responsible for the musical numbers scattered throughout Ben and he even gives Ben a puppet show. Wow, just wow.

A 13-year-old Michael Jackson sings “Ben’s Song” over the end credits and “Ben” competed against songs from The Poseidon Adventure, The Little Ark, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, and The Stepmother for Best Original Song at the 1973 Academy Awards. “Ben” lost to “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure, believe it or not, and having heard both songs, I don’t believe it since “The Morning After” defines godawful. Unfortunately so does most of the movie Ben.

I’ll give Karlson and animal trainer Moe Di Sesso their due for amplifying the rat count to 4,000 for Ben. Eight times the rats as Willard, but that’s the only area in which Ben triumphs over its older brother. Granted, one human year translates to approximately 30 in rat years, so maybe that’s why Ben’s motion picture career stopped after two films in two years.

Rating: One star.

— What else can I say other than I liked Willard and I would not be surprised if I found out that it played as one-half of a double bill with fellow 1971 cult film Harold and Maude.

Both are weird little items with a delightfully morbid sense of humor and I only say delightfully because I like both films, and they have offbeat lead characters who push the patience of every adult.

Bruce Davison stars as Willard Stiles, who must contend with a harridan mother (Elsa Lanchester) and a bully for a boss (Ernest Borgnine). Willard develops a close relationship with Ben and Socrates, who unfortunately for Willard are rats. See, Willard finds out that he can communicate directly with rats and that he enjoys their company more than his fellow human beings, especially his overbearing mother and all her overbearing friends and his asshole boss. His mother wants Willard to get rid of them damn rats and his boss, well, he develops genuine distaste for Rattus norvegicus after Willard’s rats crash his party one night.

Willard also begins a tentative, very tentative relationship with his lovely temporary co-worker Joan (Sondra Locke). In the end, Willard should have pursued Joan more than Socrates and Ben. No doubt that our lad Willard would have lived a whole lot longer.

As interesting as it was to watch Davison and Locke early in their careers and Lanchester (The Bride from The Bride of Frankenstein) late in her career, Borgnine proved to be the key component in the success of Willard. For a picture like Willard to work any whatsoever, we need a character that we love to hate and Borgnine’s Al Martin suitably fills that need. For us to fully anticipate and then relish his inevitable death, Borgnine needed to work us into a frenzy every time he’s onscreen. Borgnine does that and then some, especially when he seizes upon Socrates and kills him with delight. We know then, more than ever before, that Martin will meet a spectacular demise.

Borgnine won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1956 for his extremely likable performance as the title character in Marty, directed by Delbert Mann. Sixteen years later, in a picture directed by Daniel Mann, Borghine mined the opposite end of the character spectrum for Martin.

For sure, Borghine might be the first, last, and thus far only Academy Award-winning actor to be annihilated by rats.

That alone is worth the price of admission.

Rating: Three stars.

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.