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and the statues coming to life very much reminds me of Jason & the Argonauts (1963) and the infamous Talos.
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I do believe that Tom Hanks was given the honor of giving an Oscar to Ray Harryhausen some years ago(when Hanks was pretty much peaking as a star.) Hanks introduced Harryhausen by saying "Some say that Citizen Kane is the greatest film ever made. Some say Casablanca. But all of us of a certain age know that's not the case. If you were a kid in the 60's, the greatest film ever made was 'Jason and the Argonauts."
Harryhausen of course created his own stop-motion monster special effects genre (with a historical assist from Willis O'Brien and King Kong) with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Mysterious Island, and Jason and the Argonauts in the 50s/60s cusp, and then a later batch of stop motion monster movies in the 70's and 1981(his last one, Clash of the Titans.).
To me, the greatest of all Harryhausen stop-motion monsters WAS Talos. He wasn't the amazing technical acheivement of the sword fighting skeletons and the multi-headed hydra in the same movie(imagine the TIME necessary to make those things move), but he WAS flat-out terrifying -- the stuff of my nightmares as a kid.
The way his head turned to look down on the hapless duo(Hercules and some little guy) who stole from his platform. The METALLIC CREAK of his rusted bronze head turning and his eyes locking on the two below. Talos was 'terminator terrifying" in his single-minded, silent determination to kill Hercules, the little guy, Jason ...and all the argonauts, chasing them around his private island with the slow-minded gate of a giant Michael Myers. A GREAT memory of excitement at the movies.
So if Coppola IS referencing Talos...he is referencing one of the greatest of movie memories.
This issue of a nameless, near faceless villain about whom we know NOTHING is shared by BOTH Rollercoaster AND Two-Minute Warning. In "Rollercoaster," at least, this psycho is played by a name actor(Timothy Bottoms) and given some blood-pressure exploding characteristics: total deadpan, nice voice...constant wililngess to kill men, women and chlldren AND to torment George Segal over phones and walkie talkies. (Casting alert: teenage Helen Hunt as his daughter.)
But at the end of the day, neither Two-Minute Warning nor Rollercoaster invested either in serious motivation for their villains(even if a psychotic one) nor real "gravitas" for the story.
Black Sunday did ALL of that. Robert Evans, Paramount and John Frankenheimer oversaw a production with top cinematography(Two-Minute Warning and Rollercoaster were more "flat") a big budget, and some real depth to the villainy of the villains: Paletinian terrorists who wanted to bring the fat and happy USA into their nightmare war; a Vienam POW with a burning desire to wreak vengeance on the fat and happy USA.
Robert Evans said that part of the problem was that he "tried to show both sides" in Black Sunday, even though the Palestinians want to kill everybody in the Super Bowl(their female leader makes a tape expressing their grievances.)
Well, maybe that hurt Black Sunday but in the end, it left us with a solid, well-written, extremely well acted(by Dern and Shaw in particular) thriller with "something to say."
Neither Two-Minute Warning nor Rollercoaster had any interest in that.
"Rollercoaster" is about a pleasant looking, too calm, rather soulless young man(Timothy Bottoms) who kills a bunch of people on a roller coaster(via remote bomb) in the opening scene and threatens to do it again unless paid ransom. George Segal is the state safety inspector!(An OSHA hero!) who gets trapped as the young psycho's chosen "bag man" and must engage him in a duel of wits. Lots of roller coaster rides ensue -- will another bomb go off and will more people die?(They died pretty bloody in the opening sequence, even if some of them falling out of the car were literal dummies.)
"Rollercoaster" was uniquely disappointing because it came from the mystery writing team of Richard Levinson and Richard Link...creators and showrunners of "Columbo." Here with their first(I think) shot at a big screen thriller(screenplay directed by James Goldstone), the writers pretty much gave us a "TV movie on the big screen," very light on the character development(Old hands Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda where there to prop the movie up and undercut Segal's youth) and (SPOILER) filled with nothing but NON-FATAL rollercoaster rides after the first lethal one.
Worse: when it came time for the climax, there was no big Hitchcock-like chase around the roller coaster or fight on one of the cars(ala Strangers on a Train and its berserk carousel.)
Worse: The confrontation between hero George Segal and villain Timothy Bottoms( a truly evil fellow, soft spoken with no soul and a penchant for cruelty) was "edited funny" so you could'nt see what happened(I think in the first cut, Segal simply shot Bottoms, but they didn't want that to be the case in the final.)
Worse: After Bottoms is run over by a roller coaster(fitting but anti-climactic), somebody walks up to Segal and says: "We have ID and background on him now. Here's the story--"
And Segal cuts him off: "Who cares?" and walks away.
CONT
One last thing about Two Minute Warning. The tagline on the posters was pretty cool:
"91,000 People. 33 Exit Gates. One sniper..."
Yeah...that set up the climax, alright. Cool.
However, some friends and myself used to make fun of that tagline. Thus:
"91,000 People. 33 Exit Gates. One tuba..."
Etc
Meanwhile, in 1977, about a month AFTER the release of Paramount's Black Sunday, Universal tossed out another rather "too cheap for the concept" thriller-cum-disaster movie called "Rollercoaster." Guess what THAT was about?
Though "Rollercoaster" had a thriller plot, it was also designed -- rather like the Cinerama movies back in the day-- to give the audience a 'you are there" experience -- not only "riding" a roller coaster(and getting dizzy looking straight ahead and down" but HEARING a rollercoaster -- as the flash-in-the-pan "Sensurround" theater effect made every ride sound like an earthquake -- which made sense because Sensurround debuted with Earthquake(1974) then moved on to the battle explosions of Midway(1976...another Chuck Heston hit) and then just about bowed out with "Rollercoaster."
A "newer" male star than Chuck Heston was secured to anchor "Rollercoaster": George Segal, who after a 60's career as an "up and comer" in King Rat and Virginia Woolf, FINALLY became a handsome, funny , exasperated leading man in the 70s: Where's Poppa, The Hot Rock(with Redford), A Touch of Class, Blume in Love, California Split and then...a rather slow and then sudden decline. "Rollercoaster" was part of that decline.
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1. Dirty Harry
2. Charley Varrick
3 The Shootist
They also knew it would be a very difficult shoot so they gave him the whole summer to figure it out. I think Universal took a good look at the success of French Connection, Godfathers, and The Exorcist and thought Jaws/Spielberg was a gamble worth taking.
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All likely so. This was also the era of "the blockbuster movie being made from the bestselling novel." The Godfather and The Exorcist were from huge best selling books, Jaws was a huge bestselling book, so Universal knew they had a movie that a LOT of people wanted to see.
I do recall that the paperback (with a cover very similar to the movie poster -- exactly the same?) was a popular beach read the summer BEFORE the summer that Jaws came out. The summer of 1974 created hype for the movie a year away -- articles in People magazine that summer, for instance.
And indeed Sid Sheinberg had faith in Spielberg. Yep, he'd cast Mrs. Spielberg as Mrs. Brody but she WAS right for the part and ALL of the Universal brass knew Spielberg "had something." The TV movie Duel had proved it , as had his first feature, the technically adroit if downbeat and depressing The Sugarland Express(but then almost ALL major 1974 films were downbeat and depressing, less Mel Brooks and some other stuff.)
And: In some ways, the ongoing saga of the making of the movie became publicity FOR the movie. Famously, the shark wasn't in the finished movie a lot. The land scenes weren't THAT hard to film. It was the shark AND the filming on the ocean(not very far from shore at all) that kept up delays.
He's bald, pudgy, can not do the simplest of stretching exercises, throws like a girl, and speaks in such an esoteric manner (often in Latin) as to be wholly unrelatable to the common 1970-71 man or woman.
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Don't forget the wild wall eye...
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It was just a bridge too far that women (like Miss Crane) would want to be near him.
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I must admit when the third act reveal came that he SMELLED bad -- like FISH -- and that he smelled WORSE as the day went on -- it did seem a bridge too far for me, too. Miss Crane -- any woman -- who could see past Hunham's eccentricities (and perhaps be in awe of his book knowledge and command of Latin) could like NOT move on to physical love with a man who smelled like bad fish.
But I also rather think that this reveal rather more fully explained Hunham's anger, tyranny and separation from life(I can't remember the line exactly, but the one about how people did much want to be around him, and he didn't want to be around THEM. This explains both.)
On hearing this plot information I started the mentai work: Medication? Cologne?(or would that make the smell worse?)
We know of many love stories where the woman sacrifices for the man(or vice versa.) If a woman was truly in love with Humham and wished to make love with him -- well, put some sort of menthol cream under the nostrils(as Jodie Foster does near a corpse in Silence of the Lamb), wear nose plugs(like swimmers do) ...and go to town.
James Michener wrote a book called "The Drifters" published in 1971. I read it a few years ago, I found it fascinating, young hippies partying in Iberia and Africa, "turn-on-tune-in-drop-out."
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I seem to remember that book title. Michener was riding high when his book became a best seller and a Number One box office hit in 1966.
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One of the characters was avoiding the Vietnam draft,
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..so there it was as a theme WHEN it was happening(in 1971, when The Holdovers ends)
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he was talking about going "Big Casino" which IIRC was never explicitly described, but it seemed to me to be like Jamie Farr's character "Klinger" in M*A*S*H - with more sodomy...
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TWO: "...still going to live a better life that 90% of the masses." This reminds me of Payne's 2011 movie "The Descendants," where Hawaiian George Clooney COMES from wealth(his family owns Hawaiian land), EARNS wealth(as a lawyer)...yet tells us in his narratiion to feel sorry for him in general(a family land sale battle is bad enough) and then..the movie pops(right up front) a REAL agonizing tragedy: his wife is in a coma and going to die soon, he is left to parent two young daughters...and he finds out that his dying wife was cheating on him. STILL, the wealth of the character and his family seem to distance them from us. (And surely a rich man who looks like George Clooney will have Wife Number Two to raise those daughters, soon.)
However, the film AFTER The Descendants -- Nebraska -- is about a pretty hardscrabble family --the parents are retired, one grown son works in a stereo store -- only the other son has found success as TV newscaster.
I just don't buy that this elite prep school with Senators' sons, kid gets kicked out, he's off to Vietnam. I think he mentions in the beginning that he's expected to go to Cornell or some other Ivy League University. Maybe he doesn't get into an Ivy League and he has to go to someplace like UMass... that might be devastating to HIM, but he's still going to live a better life than 90% of the unwashed masses...
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Two thoughts on the above well-placed questions.
ONE: On my second viewing of the film, I noticed that Angus got a short, brief, almost throway line, and he faded off at the end something like:
"If I flunk out of this school I'll have to go to (military school) and that means I'll have to go...(shakes his head, fades out) so he SEEMED to be saying the military school would be a "direct feed" to military service..with no escape to another college? I'll admit that's a lot of weight to put on one line.
But the movie DOES rather constantly contrast these rich white kids with the black son of the cook and his death in Vietnam. (I will note that Alexander Payne spent his career til now detailing white lives -- but here is his first movie with a significant black character and plot impact. Seemed a little "forced by the Academy rules" to me. Still, it worked: the actress WON the Oscar.)
CONT
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