Category: 1970s

I was pleasantly surprised with this made for TV movie about a woman’s experiences travelling with her family from Indiana to Kansas then on to Wyoming. William Shatner is her idiot husband who forces her family to leave their comfortable town life to move to the wilderness. He’s completely ill-prepared and leads them on one misadventure to another, angering various people along the way. Joanna Pettet plays the woman and the film is moved along by her diary narrations. It’s her strength that propels and even though they’re likely to die at the first winter (I’ve seen enough pioneering reality shows to have an idea of what a family of three needs to keep themselves fed and warm through the cold season), you still want to hold some hope for them. The film also features a very young Helen Hunt as the couple’s daughter who seems to have inherited her father’s idiocy. 

When El Jefe discovers his teenage daughter was knocked up by Alfredo Garcia, he places a million dollar bounty on Garcia’s head. Warren Oates, seeing it as an easy payday since he knows Alfredo is already dead, takes his girlfriend on a road trip to Garcia’s grave to retrieve the head. Unfortunately nothing is as easy as it sounds. An ugly, brutal film, Oates brings a grizzled, weariness to his role, especially as the body count mounts up and his desperation grows. There is a single-mindedness to completing the job even when it doesn’t seem to make any sense to continue doing so.    

Those are certainly no friends of Eddie Coyle. Robert Mitchum plays Eddie, a Boston-area family man and gunrunner who is facing serious jailtime for a New Hampshire hijacking. He tries to trade information with an ATF agent to reduce his sentence, but unbeknownst to him, there are others who are working similar angles. It’s a tragic story for Coyle and Mitchum plays him with a world-weary, grizzled desperation. The story is a bit twisty and it takes some attention to follow how all the pieces play together, but it’s fairly worth the commitment in the end. 

Robert Redford is the titular character, a war veteran who decides to take on the life of a mountain man. At first, he is completely inept and completely unprepared for this role, but before long with luck and grit, his life has become the stuff of legend. The film feels longer than it is, not because it drags, but because of the scope of time and adventure that it encompasses. Redford manages to dirty up his prettiness just enough to pull off the rugged character, but I preferred the interactions with the other people he met during his experiences.  

This is a pretty good rendition of the famous H.G. Wells story. Burt Lancaster plays the mad scientist who oversees an island where he experiments on animals trying to make them human-like; Michael York is the unfortunate man who finds himself stranded on said island. Both of them are well-cast in their roles and are well matched in their battle of wills, but what is particularly fascinating in the film is the believable depictions of the human-animal hybrids.