Category: 1977

Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes (1977) #234

L234

I’m going with DC’s current conventional wisdom on where to start reading Paul Levitz Legion of Super-Heroes (based on their latest collection of those issues), and I’m not surprised to see the first issue in that run written by Gerry Conway. Back to the seventies, where creator runs were short and had to be nimble.

This issue only has one call back to previous events. Otherwise, it seems to be starting its plots.

The A-plot has Superboy and some other Legionnaires flying out in space to capture a space dragon. Conway and artists Ric Estrada and Jack Abel juxtapose the space dragon hunt with a bounty hunter—called Bounty, natch—hunting down some harmless old fugitive. The exposition promises the two subplots will make sense, but first, we need to check in on planet Earth, where Legion leader Wildfire is just too hot under the collar for decorum with the politicians.

The A-plot brings Bounty in pretty quickly—or at least there’s nothing else Bounty does after his introduction before he’s incorporated—but the strong B-plot of the issue is the Legion lacking confidence in Wildfire. And Wildfire lacking confidence in himself. It’s never overly dramatic, the arguments are constrained, and it’s just steady character development. It’s a neat device. Conway’s exposition is occasionally tiresome, often ableist, but the plotting and some of the dialogue are solid efforts.

When Bounty is fighting the monster—a Composite Legionnaire (they get zapped together and, since they’re giant now, have to wreak havoc on future Metropolis)—he’s got endless thought balloons; they’re universally bad. The character feels unnecessary for the story.

Besides the internal organization turmoil stuff, it’s basically just a giant monster movie. They need to stop the monster before it destroys too much stuff. There are also some space dragon origin flashbacks to pad out the story’s first half. Conway’s pacing, despite the verbiage in his exposition, is strong.

Estrada and Abel’s art is decent. Some of the giant monster pages are quite good, giving off fifties sci-fi movie poster vibes.

It’s perfectly fine superhero sci-fi team stuff.

Griffu (1978)

Streets Of Paris, Streets Of Murder: The Complete Graphic Noir Of Machette & Tardi Vol. 1

Griffu has all the trappings of hard-boiled detective fiction–a reluctant “hero,” in this case the titular Griffu, whose not a private investigator but a “legal advisor” (read, apparently, debt collector), a femme fatale (or three), and an intricate plot line involving corruption and class—only set in seventies Paris. And, of course, there’s the omnipresent narration.

The first panel’s exposition box sets the scene for the story, though without any fanfare—writer Jean-Patrick Manchette seems to fully understand what it means to be narrating in the past tense and gets the important stuff out of the way first, but without signaling the importance. Manchette and Tardi originally serialized Griffu, which means if you happened to miss the first installment, you’d entirely miss out on the long-term layering the creators had been doing.

The majority of Griffu’s narration is terse and pragmatic, with just enough personality for Tardi to find a good expression to accompany it with. Eventually Griffu will get talky—including the requisite “detective explains all” scene in the finish—but Manchette and Tardi are working hard at establishing Griffu, the character, as not too bright.

If he were bright, he might’ve listened to the nagging suspicion in his head and not gotten taken for a ride by the first cute girl customer he’d had in a while. She gets him to break into a real estate developer’s office to get some files, then abandons him there once she’s got them. After a quick recap of how Griffu found himself in the situation, goons show up to confront him on the breaking and entering. They give him a beating before he can escape.

They’re going to catch up with him later and hire him to find the girl—but only with the files. By that time, Griffu will have already met up with the girl’s roommate, fetching coed Evangeline, whose already had a run in with the same set of goons.

The story will take Griffu around Paris, from ritzy parties to immigrant hostels, from the offices of Charlie Hebdo to the strip clubs; Griffu’s always a bull in a china shop, bumping as many heads and noses as possible. When the comic finally does get to the shootouts, it’s incredible Tardi’s able to get so much mileage out of the violence’s intensity given Griffu’s usually bleeding from one nostril or the other. Tardi and Manchette spend most of the story establishing the hard, violent world only to then explore how much harder and how much more violent it can get.

Great art from Tardi, which gets slightly overshadowed when Manchette actually makes sure to plug all the plot holes he’d left leaking throughout. The finish is simultaneously exciting, harrowing, and depressing. Tardi will occasionally have these haunting punctuation panels, searing the image into both Griffu and the reader’s minds—Manchette even draws attention to one in the narration, with Griffu standing and staring—and the finish brings that quality to the lightning paced action sequence.

Griffu’s awesome. It’s Tardi; of course it’s awesome. But it’s also really nice Manchette wasn’t lazy with the loose threads.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1975-77)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

I was waiting for Bronze Age to get to the Batman Family reprints, assuming since DC moved Batgirl from backups to an anthology—and even a feature or two—the stories must be better. Surely Elliot S. Maggin and Bob Rozakis had to be better at writing her comics than Frank Robbins. Silly me.

Most of the Batman Family stories have Batgirl teaming up with Robin. There’s one where she teams up with the Golden Age Batwoman, which features some of the worst Rozakis exposition. At least until his last story, which is the last story in the collection, where Rozakis calls the readers dummies for not understanding how his very bad plot line works. Usually he’s just being oddly sexist to Batgirl (and alter ego Barbara Gordon) in a way Maggin never hits. Maggin’s got his issues—Batgirl kisses Robin to show him he can’t tell her she’s a girl and can’t do crimefighting—not to mention his very weird take on Robin:

If Spider-Man’s superpower came from being bitten by a radioactive spider, Robin’s special power is having the agile body of a boy and the intellect of man. He’s a man-boy or a boy-man. Definitely makes Robin seem like a better superhero name.

When the Dynamite Duo—Batgirl and Robin—first team up, they still don’t know each others secret identities. They quickly figure it out—off panel because Maggin’s not into any character development whatsoever—but that discovery even further stalls their character development. There’s maybe some implications—like Dick’s girlfriends being jealous of his friendship with Babs—but he tells Batman at one point he’s not interested in older women. Bruce Wayne doesn’t agree (oddly, Barbara never figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman despite Grayson being his ward); meanwhile, Barbara thinks Dick’s too young for her and when you subtract seven from her twenty-five (I’m fairly sure they’ve de-aged her and also taken away at least one advanced degree) he’s just outside jailbait. Guess she’s not impressed with the boy body, especially since Robin’s usually just using the man intellect to tell Batgirl she’s too much a girl to be a good superhero.

All of the stories are silly or bad. The first one has the Devil bringing Benedict Arnold back to life to take over the United States, which is actually a low point until Maggin brings in the Huntress and the Sportsmaster (doesn’t matter, don’t ask) who trick Robin and Batgirl into doing an elaborate heist in South America. But then Rozakis comes on and, while the stories are less patently absurd, they’re also intentionally confusing so Rozakis can turn around and be condescending to the reader on the last page or whatever.

Also disappointing is the art. Unless you want to see when Mike Grell didn’t know people had knees or Pablo Marcos drew everyone at 6’6”. Not even the José Luis García-López entry pays off. Curt Swan’s entries are also rather disappointing. Irv Novick’s is maybe the best. It’s a very low bar.

There are some decent DC extreme long shot action panels, which usually involve Batgirl doing a flip out of danger. Those panels at least show some good composition work.

The Batman Family reprints are a tepid finish to the already tepid collection. Every story, you see the artists credits and assume it’ll at least look good and then it never even looks good.

I’m a few years too young for the late seventies Batman Family but am now really glad I never bought a bunch of back issues of it because, if Maggin and Rozakis’s writing is any indication, they’re probably pretty stinky overall.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 sure doesn’t motivate to read Vol. 2.

Fun with Dick and Jane (1977, Ted Kotcheff)

Every once in a while, Jane Fonda will say a line just right and Fun with Dick and Jane will be, well, fun for a moment. Not a long moment. Sometimes it approaches funny, sometimes it’s just fun. But it’s something. Because fun and funny are in short supply in Dick and Jane. Somehow the ability to do a ninety-five minute situation comedy escapes the collected creatives of Dick and Jane, mostly spectacularly the three writers—David Giler, Jerry Belson, Mordecai Richler, who want you to like lead George Segal for his racist, bigoted tendencies and to abhor the displays of humaneness around him—director Kotcheff, who can’t direct the simplest scene without screwing it up, editor Danford B. Greene, who manages not to have a single competent cut in the entire film.

I left cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp and composer Ernest Gold off that initial list because they’re not glaringly inept like the writers, the director, and the editor. But the film would obviously be better if they’d replaced Gold with the generic Black funk they have during the minorities get together and slack-off while working third shift scene because it’s the seventies and it’s funny but not racist funny but, you know, if you want to read it that way, Dick and Jane will sell you your ticket too.

And Koenekamp’s not good but what’s he going to do, somehow miracle Kotcheff into being able to compose a shot. I mean, maybe it is Koenekamp’s fault, maybe he did tell Kotcheff the film was using a very special Panavision Panaflex where you couldn’t place it anywhere slightly interesting. Or maybe Kotcheff’s direction is just terrible.

Latter seems most likely.

But then it’s not like the acting is anything good either. Fonda’s far better than George Segal, whose comedic performance somehow gets lost because of how Kotcheff doesn’t shoot him and then however Greene ruins the edit. The script’s jokes are fairly simple; setup and punchline. Only Greene somehow fumbles every single punchline. Yes, he’s cutting between one terrible Kotcheff shot to another, but… I don’t know, cut more of the bad shots and make it move faster.

Because for ninety-five minutes… Dick and Jane is a sludge of a picture. The first act, which has Segal getting laid off and trying to navigate unemployment as an upwardly mobile White man—he momentarily teams up with Hank Garcia, who was also fired from Segal’s company; Garcia was the custodian, Segal a veep—is painfully unfunny, with Segal trying to be as elitist, racist, and bigoted as he can get away with because… privilege is good? I’m sure Dick and Jane thinks it’s making a statement about corporate America or something but it’s really just about entitled White people being terrible.

What else.

Oh, Ed McMahon. If you’ve never gotten to see Ed McMahon try to act, it’s a rare—what’s a good antonym of delight—it’s a rare agony. In some ways it’s like Kotcheff has directed the whole movie around McMahon, trying to force the movie to encompass his inept acting, which just drags everything else down with it.

Or, maybe, Kotcheff just does a really bad job directing and there’s no one around to save the day in post.

It’s not like there are any better subplots to rely on, as everything—including Sean Frye as Fonda and Segal’s kid—disappears. Though maybe it was a deal with the MPAA: the kid had to go once Fonda and Segal start robbing places for laughs.

I guess Fonda’s got some great outfits, courtesy Donfeld (did she get to keep them, I wonder) but James Hulsey’s production design is hideous. The movie’s an eyesore.

Fun with Dick and Jane is anything but.

Archie Gets a Job! (1977)

Archie Gets a Job 1977 copy

Are Christian comics better or worse since Archie Gets a Job! (from 1977)? The comic promotes a combination of functional illiteracy and profound ignorance, not to mention encouraging teasing of people’s appearances, particularly fat-shaming. Just like Jesus, no doubt.

The comic’s all about Archie and Jughead getting summer jobs at school teacher Mr. Weatherbee’s beach-front Christian book store. It’s not very Christian-y for the first half or so. It’s not, you know, any good—and the fat-shaming starts almost immediately, along with some ageism—but it’s not shockingly insipid Christian-y either. Not until Big Ethel shows up to be shamed for her appearance, only to get a Christian dating book (which is an ad for creator Al Hartley’s son’s real book; Hartley includes an illustration of his son to show off how handsome he is—at least Jughead thinks so, anyway). Pretty soon Veronica shows up at the store to get the same book because all the boys on the beach are enraptured by Ethel reading it to them. Silly Veronica thought her body would get her Christian boys. Not so. They want someone to read them Hartley’s kid’s book.

I do have to admit it might be fun to read the book but not aloud to a beach full of studs. From that point, Hartley lays on the Christian thick. Why get a book on sociology, ecology, or solar energy when you can just read the Bible and not learn anything real at all? And Archie and Jughead are much better fellows for selling Bibles—the Bible “tells you how to be a winner”—than pushing drugs or porno on the beach like other people. Sadly we don’t get to meet those people.

They’d probably be scummier but more amusing.

The last bit of the comic is all about how even teenagers need to tithe, which seems very anti-Capitalist.

There’s actually a couple technically good panels as far as how Hartley plots the action, but the comic’s a disappointment. The cover has Jughead crucified on a giant kite, which has no pay-off in the comic itself.

It might be amusing to read Gets a Job with the seven deadly sins in mind but… probably not. Again, there’s a good reason no one took Archie comics seriously until 2010 or whatever. This thing is dreadful.

Peanuts (1965) s01e16 – It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown

It’s Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown is a little weird. Not only because the opening establishing shot has adults (albeit in extreme long shot) but also because Snoopy’s helicoptering around on his ears and Woodstock is his cameraperson. And it’s about the homecoming game, where Charlie Brown is the star kicker. And Snoopy’s both ref and mascot and the kids in the stands put on dances in his honor. First Kiss is painfully trying to be hip but it’s also kind of ambitious. It’s going where no “Peanuts” special has gone before.

All of the jokes fall a little flat. The Snoopy stuff is too overdone. The football game gets a lot of attention, but every time Charlie Brown (Arrin Skelley) goes to kick, Lucy (Michelle Muller)–who is on his team–pulls the ball. And everyone blames Charlie Brown for it because, well, apparently no one ever sees Lucy pull the ball. First Kiss has Peppermint Patty (Laura Planting) getting mad at Charlie Brown. It’s kind of intense.

But the First Kiss stuff is about how Charlie Brown is going to escort the Little Red-Haired Girl at the Homecoming dance. She’s the queen and he’s up. Somehow he’s forgotten he agreed to this activity, which is actually kind of fine given the final punchline in First Kiss but only if writer Charles M. Schulz is trying to imply Charlie Brown has blackouts.

He’s not. Unfortunately. Schulz is just really lazy with the script. He goes big with First Kiss–there are a lot of constant elements to contend with. The football game has the other team, it has the kids cheering, it has the cheerleaders, it has Snoopy, it has Linus sitting around giving Charlie Brown bad advice. The dance is different–and where director Roman gets a tad more enthusiastic.

Roman’s direction is good throughout. More than enough to make up for the animation inconsistencies. Though the repeated frames on the Little Red-Haired Girl get annoying fast. Roger Donley and Chuck McCann edit the actual football game in the football game quite well. The rest is fine. Except on the Little Red-Haired Girl. All the shots of her go on way too long. It’s yet another weird thing about the special.

Not to mention Ed Bogas and Judy Munsen’s funk-lite score. It’s… a lot.

First Kiss is never particularly strong, so it’s never disappointing. It even impresses a bit with Charlie Brown at the dance. It’s just too late. The whole script feels distracted and detached.

Good performance from Muller. Mixed performance from Skelley.

It ought to be better. But it’s not terrible, it’s just kind of blah.

The Return of the Incredible Hulk (1977, Alan J. Levi)

The Return of the Incredible Hulk is the second pilot movie for the subsequent “Incredible Hulk” TV series. It aired three weeks after the first pilot, which featured the origin of the Hulk–scientist Bruce Bixby turns himself into green-skinned musclebound grotesque Lou Ferrigno thanks to gamma rays–and his pursuer, annoying, uninformed tabloid reporter Jack Colvin. Luckily Colvin doesn’t come into Return until over a half hour in so there’s limited Colvin, which is just fine. Return has enough acting… issues without Colvin mucking up too many scenes.

It’s not all Colvin’s fault; the details of his scenes are idiotic television shorthand. But it’s not like he makes the scenes work, which an actor could with some enthusiasm. The cast of Return of the Incredible Hulk is usually at least enthusiastic–all the guest stars act like they’re auditioning for a regular CBS show, which they are–but not Colvin. He’s just an unenthusiastic jackass, which isn’t a good kind of jackass.

And Colvin isn’t the one who drags Return down. The Return of the Incredible Hulk is a perfectly adequate, lower mediocre, late seventies television pilot. The one impressive shot in it doesn’t even involve the Hulk and it’s only technically impressive. Director Levi does show some interest occasionally, but he also shoots some really mediocre scenes. He’s got no interest in the soap opera aspects of the story, which is sort of a Gothic about a troubled young woman (Laurie Prange), who lost her father and her ability to walk, now getting sicker and sicker, in the care of stepmother Dorothy Tristan and special doctor William Daniels. Although an heiress, her true love is Gerald McRaney. He disappears after the first third, which is too bad. He’s rather enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Prange ends up getting the spotlight, befriending both Bixby and Ferrigno–separately. She calms Ferrigno’s beast and Bixby is trying to save her from those conspiring against her. Though there’s not much mystery in who’s conspiring against her. Kenneth Johnson’s teleplay is nothing if not efficient. The moment after Bixby reveals he knows Daniels’s doing something slimy, Daniels’s conspirator confronts Daniels about it. So all of a sudden Return’s got specific villains who have specific henchmen for Ferrigno to fight.

All the action takes place on Prange’s orange orchard in Northern California. At the opening, before it’s been made clear what a low bar Return is going for, it almost seems like there’s going to be a Bill Bixby as Tom Joad thing. There isn’t.

There is a Lou Ferrigno is Boris Karloff with the old man, which would be a lot more amusing if the old man didn’t stick around the rest of the movie. John McLiam plays the old man, a loner who has cut himself off from the world because of tragedy. He’s a veteran. He’s also a drunken Northern California hillbilly living in a surprisingly well-lighted shack. Oh, and his introduction is taunting the chicken he’s cooking about how he’s going to eat it.

And McLiam plays it all straight, which is just the wrong way to play it.

Everyone in Return, with the exception of Colvin and McLiam, tries. Daniels has some good nerdy creep moments. Tristan has some good moments. Some bad ones too, but at least there’s some energy to her performance. Though muted… as it appears in Charles W. Short’s thoroughly competent and boring lighting.

Prange tries. And she is frequently bad. But when the script’s at its best and the melodrama is toned down, Prange has a really good moment or two. There’s a sweetness between she and Ferrigno and it’s entirely from the actors. Johnson makes the time in the movie for it, but–as producer–he doesn’t make Levi enable it. Instead they rely on Joseph Harnell to do a terrible theme for Prange, separate from the “Incredible Hulk” theme, which gets a disco-ish remix early on in Return. And they use that theme for Prange ad nauseam. It ruins scenes, it ruins momentum.

Because Return finally gets some momentum in the second half, when Bixby, Prange, and McLiam are on the run. Through the Northern California orange country swamp, chased by men with dogs and a guy in a helicopter. And there are snakes.

And bears. And Ferrigno fights a bear. It’s not a bad fight. Like, for a TV pilot movie? With the “Hulk”’s demographic target audience? It’s a decent bear fight. Much cooler than the rest of the Ferrigno action. There’s too much slow motion, not enough choreography. When there’s choreography–even a little bit–it works better. There’s also the breaking stuff factor. Ferrigno breaks things (it’s the reason Bixby can’t stay in one place too long, Ferrigno might break something–not kill someone, break something). They’re big things, sure, but the set pieces are often tedious in Return. And sometimes Levi will all of a sudden decent to get serious during a fight scene and totally change the tempo.

But the bear fight is cool.

The snake not so much.

There’s also a quicksand sequence, because it’s a TV pilot movie from the late seventies. The quicksand is a disappointment.

I forgot McRaney (just the like the movie; though maybe he was busy shooting other things). He’s not good, but he’s likable. You can tell he’s got the TV star thing down. And when he’s in the movie, there’s at least a chance for it to go someplace surprising, story-wise.

It’s when he disappears Return becomes a race to the half hour chase scene.

And the half hour chase scene makes up for the rest. Enough for a late seventies TV pilot movie. The whole thing is an audition tape for Bill Bixby and the various things he’ll be able to do on the subsequent series. There’s just enough with Ferrigno to show off the action possibilities. Prange has just the right amount of tragedies to show off the sentimental possibilities. Bixby’s likability, especially opposite Prange, makes up for a lot throughout. Johnson does a fine job advertising a series.

While still adequately plotting out the ninety minutes. Return is well-produced, it’s just unimaginatively executed and rather underacted.

The Goodbye Girl (1977, Herbert Ross)

The Goodbye Girl is excessively genial. Usually at the expense of lead Marsha Mason. It’s her movie too. Not hers to lose, because it’s so much her movie–she’s The Goodbye Girl–instead hers to be taken away. And take it away writer Neil Simon does. The film starts being about single mom Mason getting dumped by her live-in boyfriend. He’s a New York actor, she was a Broadway dancer. He goes to Italy, dumping her and the kid (Quinn Cummings) instead of taking them to L.A. as promised.

Of course, the ex-boyfriend is never in the movie. He’s got his pictures up all over the apartment, but he’s never in the movie. It’s the best thing Simon and director Ross end up doing in the film. The establishing of this awful ex-boyfriend just through exposition and visual suggestion.

The ex sublets the apartment out from under Mason and Cummings. Enter Richard Dreyfuss, Chicago actor come to New York, subletter.

The apartment is central to the film. Simon’s script has play trappings while still paced like a movie; Ross never goes stagy. The direction’s not great, but it has a lot of depth. The apartment becomes gradually familiar in the first half of the film. It becomes comfortable. Even though Mason and ten-year old Cummings are living with part-time nudist, wheat germ enthusiast Dreyfuss. Though all of Dreyfuss’s first act eccentricities disappear right after being established.

Goodbye Girl has some behind-the-scenes drama and some of it might explain Simon’s disjointed script. But the lack of consistency just comes off as lazy. It makes a lot of Simon’s set pieces come off contrived. Especially once they become at the expense of Mason. First couple times, it’s not at the expense of screentime for her, it’s at the expense of her performance. See, once Dreyfuss warms to Mason–which seems impossible after their first few scenes together–and takes a liking to Cummings (who’s likable in the thinnest part in Simon’s atomic-thin cast of characters), he sort of starts stalking her. Like he goes to her job to mess with her.

Then Mason stops doing anything but decorating; once she and Dreyfuss do hook up, she stops caring about anything except redecorating.

The movie has some problems with plotting. Ross doesn’t do summary well so it’s never clear how long they’re living together before the third act. It just makes for a disjointed picture–Dreyfuss and Mason go from bickering funny to romantically funny in about five minutes. And it’s Dreyfuss becoming a completely different character.

That character is far from an organic development. The movie doesn’t even really acknowledge that his character is developing. While he should be warming up to Mason and Cummings, Dreyfuss is busy in the play from hell subplot with Paul Benedict as a misguided but insistent director.

So, while Dreyfuss is doing all that stuff, Mason gets to keep her movie. Then she loses it.

By the finale, all Goodbye Girl has got keeping it going is the charm of its three stars. Because everyone else in Goodbye Girl is disposable. It’s just Dreyfuss, Mason, and Cummings. If their parts were stronger, it’d be enough. If their parts were at least consistent, it might be enough.

The film’s dramatically inert. But pleasant–even when it’s being creepy–and amiably acted. David M. Walsh’s photography doesn’t help with the excess geniality. His lighting is too soft. Dave Grusin’s score is a little light too. Everything in Goodbye Girl is too thin, too soft, or too light. They have to be to match Simon’s unsubstantial script.

2/4★★

CREDITS

Directed by Herbert Ross; written by Neil Simon; director of photography, David M. Walsh; edited by John F. Burnett; music by Dave Grusin; production designer, Albert Brenner; produced by Ray Stark; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Marsha Mason (Paula McFadden), Quinn Cummings (Lucy McFadden), Richard Dreyfuss (Elliot Garfield), Paul Benedict (Mark), Barbara Rhoades (Donna), and Theresa Merritt (Mrs. Crosby).

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The Incredible Hulk (1977, Kenneth Johnson)

The Incredible Hulk opens with a montage of lead Bill Bixby’s martial bliss. It goes on for quite a while, just Bixby and (an uncredited) Lara Parker being a happy married couple. Then tragedy strikes. Like most tragedies in The Incredible Hulk, it involves a car tire blowing out. There are three such instances in the movie. The first two are fine. The third one’s contrived, but effective. Director and writer and producer Johnson doesn’t let anyone acknowledge how unlikely the third instance seems; Hulk takes itself way too seriously for that sort of thing.

And Hulk taking itself seriously works. Sure, Hulk Lou Ferrigno has a terrible wig but who knows what would happen to hair after a person metamorphoses into a… well, an incredible hulk. But the rest of the seriousness? It works.

Even the manipulative opening montage.

It’s almost a year after the tragedy. Bixby has thrown himself into his work; he and research partner Susan Sullivan are trying to figure what gives people superhuman strength in cases of crisis. It’s not clear whether they’ve been working on the project since before the tragedy, as it ties directly into Bixby and Parker’s experiences.

The first act of Hulk is this phenomenally plotted science and research story. Sullivan does great selling all the scientific stuff (for a while at least, Hulk sounds pretty scientificy–the science variation of truthy). Sullivan does a great job with everything. Bixby might get top-billing, but Sullivan makes the movie. She and Bixby have this gentle relationship; when Johnson adds their backstory in exposition towards the end of the second act, it all works because Sullivan has been so good.

As the movie begins, Bixby’s not doing well at work. He walks out on an interview with mom Susan Batson who found super-strength to save son Eric Deon. Sullivan, playing the responsible one, has to get Bixby focused. Turns out she gets him too focused and he starts experimenting on himself. Resulting in the third blowout and the first appearance of Ferrigno.

Ferrigno’s “first day” out as the Hulk is Johnson doing something of a Frankenstein homage. The electronically amplified Hulk growls don’t work–and the wig is terrible–but Ferringo works hard in his scenes. He gets to over-emote since he’s a seven foot tall musclebound green grotesque, but the over-emoting is what the part needs. Johnson knows it too. He gives Ferringo more emotional scenes than Bixby by the end of it. Bixby’s sad, but Ferrigno’s tragic. Sullivan’s great with both of them.

Did I already mention she makes the Hulk? Not literally, of course, because she’s a responsible scientist, unlike Bixby.

Unfortunately, once Ferrigno shows up, the movie takes a turn. It’s been expansive until that point–introducing new characters, having Bixby and Sullivan’s research go somewhere–but once it’s about figuring out the Hulk, the movie starts folding in on itself. It’s just Bixby and Sullivan trying to figure things out. And dodge tabloid reporter Jack Colvin, who is very dedicated to his job, but very bad at it. Colvin’s performance also isn’t up to Sullivan or Bixby’s level, which certainly doesn’t help the already narratively troubled third act.

The movie’s technically accomplished, with Johnson getting a lot of good work out of his TV movie crew. Howard Schwartz’s photography is excellent for the daytime stuff and interior night stuff, okay for the exterior night stuff. Johnson’s direction is rather good. Surprisingly good in spots. The editing is fantastic–Alan C. Marks and Jack W. Schoengarth cut the heck out of the first act setup. Okay, they can’t make the remembered dialogue playing as voiceover work but who can? And the script needs the voiceovers for introspective purposes. Johnson likes introspective; he gets the tragedy out of it.

He’s good at the introspective stuff too. Bixby’s great at being sad. Sullivan’s great at everything, which I think I mentioned. She really holds the movie together. Anyway, Johnson’s not great at some of the action stuff. He’s fine with scaling up to big set pieces, but he’s not so great at little stuff. Like his Frankenstein homage. It’s well-directed, but the actors? Johnson doesn’t pay any attention to their performances, just how they’re moving through the action sequence. Their performances need a lot of attention, especially given the action sequence. Johnson doesn’t direct much from character point of view (if ever). Sometimes that point of view would help things.

I can’t forget–Batson’s great. She’s only in it for a bit but it suggests Johnson’s going to keep bringing in excellent performances in small parts. Doesn’t work out that way, though. Instead we get Colvin’s performance rolling gradually downhill from mediocre.

Joseph Harnell’s music has one good theme and then the rest of it is hot and cold. He runs out of ideas for the action scenes pretty quick. And the dramatic stuff only really works when he’s playing with that one good theme.

The Incredible Hulk could be better–another half hour to play with might have given Johnson some ideas for subplots–but it’s still pretty good.

Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)

For most of its runtime, Suspiria builds. It increases suspense, it increases terror, it increases discomfort. Director Argento and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli shoot these long shots with slightly fish-eyed backgrounds. Combined with Giuseppe Bassan’s jawdroppingly awesome production design, the film gives the impression of having no depth. No perspective. The actors move in front of these flat backgrounds, which they may or may not interact with. It’s beyond creepy; it controls the narrative distance but also the narrative possibility. How can lead Jessica Harper interact in three dimension space if the shot is her in the foreground, but the background is flat.

Then she does and the discomfort increases. Not in the narrative, not through the off-putting Goblin (and Argento) score, but because she’s moving into a space where she shouldn’t be able to move. It takes time, each time, to readjust. Just a couple seconds, which is more than enough time for Argento to move on to the next discomfort acceleration.

He also plays with depth a little in the first half of the film. Foreground is sometimes less important than background, even though foreground takes up most of the frame. Then there are all the colors. Harper moves through a world of color, most often red (though blue eventually becomes big); red is, of course, the color of blood. It’s also the color of danger in Suspiria, something Harper doesn’t recognize, but the viewer does. It’s all about unsettling the viewer and Argento succeeds at it, scene by scene, frame by frame, for more than half of the film.

Then he gets impatient. He also relies way too much on Stefania Casini, who plays Harper’s friend. Casini is an inexplicable busybody, something Harper can’t quite acknowledge because it turns out she’s being doped into tranquility. They’re both students at an elite German dance school. Harper has just arrived. The film opens with her getting to school and seeing another student run away, out into a torrential thunderstorm.

That student (Eva Axén) ends up brutally murdered, something the viewer sees (along with a lot of Argento and Tovoli’s perspective flattening and a lot of blood), but Harper doesn’t. She’s just slightly bewildered by Axén’s behavior. Slightly. She’s got the intense dance school to deal with. There’s strict instructor Alida Valli (in an awesome performance) and abrupt headmistress Joan Bennett (in a decent, but certainly not awesome, smaller part), not to mention possible love interest Miguel Bosé. The non-teaching staff of the school is all peculiar Eastern Europeans (Harper’s a New Yorker) and Harper’s classmates range from snippy to downright vicious mean girls. Casini is the only nice one. But she too has her secrets.

Instead of returning to a calm after Axén’s murder, weird occurrences keep getting weirder and more deadly around the school. It’s one of the problems with Argento and Daria Nicolodi’s script. It makes no sense how the place could function without incident. Especially if Bennett is going to keep letting in busybodies like Casini and Axén.

More problematic is how Argento’s style changes as the film moves along. His composition is always strong, Tovoli’s photography is always good, Franco Fraticelli’s editing is always good, but once the film starts into exposition, Argento stops relying on the visuals. Harper’s story–getting to this weird school, being a fish out of water, getting sick–doesn’t have anything particularly ominous about it. Argento’s direction–and the narrative distance, which reveals quite a bit to the viewer (though not everything–like why does the creepy little German kid force an altercation with blind staff pianist Flavio Bucci’s guide dog)–they make Suspiria creepy. The music makes Suspiria unsettling. Not Harper’s story. She’s just naive.

When the film does shift its focus, just for a while, to Casini, things start going off track. Repeated, inexplicable stupidity mars an otherwise solid chase sequence. The pace changes. The script’s calls for suspension of disbelief get bigger; Argento has no time for gradual. Contrived becomes good enough.

He still lets Harper have a good performance, he and Nicolodi just don’t care about giving her a good character arc. The third act is a breathless race to the finish line, with Suspiria stopping instead of ending. It goes out on a shrug, Goblin and Argento’s score no longer one of the film’s greatest assets but its primary encumbrance. The film never recovers from making Casini the lead, even for five or ten minutes. Suspiria’s all dubbed–Harper, Bennett, Valli doing their lines for the English version–and it’s unclear if Casini’s performance is the fault of her or her voice actor. Even if she were better, her material’s all crap. After forty minutes of precise filmmaking and writing, Argento lets it go to pot.

The film does recover somewhat and, with a stronger finale, it would’ve been fine. But the finale’s not strong–and gets weaker as it progresses–leaving Suspiria a phenomenal exercise in filmmaking. And a disappointing contrivance as a film.

2.5/4★★½

CREDITS

Directed by Dario Argento; screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi, based on a book by Thomas De Quincey; director of photography, Luciano Tovoli; edited by Franco Fraticelli; music by Goblin and Dario Argento; production designer, Giuseppe Bassan; produced by Claudio Argento; released by Produzioni Atlas Consorziate.

Starring Jessica Harper (Suzy Bannion), Stefania Casini (Sara), Alida Valli (Miss Tanner), Miguel Bosé (Mark), Flavio Bucci (Daniel), Udo Kier (Dr. Frank Mandel), Eva Axén (Pat Hingle), Jacopo Mariani (Albert), and Joan Bennett (Madame Blanc).

THIS POST IS PART OF THE HORRORATHON HOSTED BY MADDY OF MADDYLOVESHERCLASSICFILMS.

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