July 1981 continues with Disney animation, drunk millionaires, and another uncomfortable Brooke Shields movie
Also, will Robert Clouse ever stop ripping off ENTER THE DRAGON?
We’re digging into two different weekends in this week’s edition. I like to try to break it up a little more, but in this case, neither one of these was enough on its own. There were more releases on the first weekend, but very little of note. Then the next weekend featured three big titles and nothing else. Taken together, this is a very weird midpoint for the summer.
No time to waste. Let’s jump right in with a truly terrible movie…
JULY 10
Force: Five
Joe Lewis, Bong Soo Han, Sonny Barnes, Richard Norton, Benny Urquidez, Ron Hayden, Bob Schott, Pam Huntington, Michael Prince, Peter MacLean, Amanda Wyss, Tom Villard, Matthew Tobin, Mel Novak, Dennis Mancini, Patricia Alice Albrecht, Edith Fields, Kathryn Greer, Glenn Morrissey, Bill M. Ryusaki, Delores Cantu, Phil Rubenstein, Addison Randall, Loren Janes, Michael Phenicie, Kelly Greer, Susan Santelli, Rubin Moreno, Nora Denney, John G. Becher, John Vincent Schumann, Phil Chong, Jason Randal, Pat Johnson, Stephen L. Meek, Don Charles McGovern
cinematography by Gil Hubbs
music by William Goldstein
screenplay by Robert Clouse
based on a screenplay by Emil Farkas and George Goldsmith
produced by Fred Weintraub
directed by Robert Clouse
Rated R
1 hr 36 mins
A team of fighters is hired to infiltrate an island owned by a cult to break out the heirs of young wealthy families who have fallen under the cult’s control.
Robert Clouse’s Enter the Dragon is one of the most influential and widely-imitated martial arts films of all time, and deservedly so. It is a remarkable showcase for Bruce Lee’s undeniable magnetism, and it’s one of those movies that feels so perfectly realized that it almost feels inevitable. Maybe the most enjoyable of the films made in the immediate aftermath of Enter the Dragon’s wild success was the parody anthology film Kentucky Fried Movie, a collaboration between Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker and John Landis. There are a number of short sketches in the film, but a good chunk of the running time is given over to a single parody, A Fistful of Yen, which is a savage takeoff on the Bruce Lee hit. In the film, Evan C. Kim plays a cartoon character version of Lee, and he’s sent to stop the evil Chinese mastermind Dr. Klahn, played by Bong Soo Han. Both men are riotously funny in the film, and I love just how completely Landis roasts Clouse, one filmmaker to another. Time magazine ended up naming A Fistful of Yen to its top ten films of the year list, and Kentucky Fried Movie as a whole managed to launch the careers of both Landis and the Z-A-Z team.
It is hard for me to get my head around the idea, then, that Robert Clouse decided to hire Han Bong-soo to play an evil Chinese cult leader in a movie that is essentially a crappy ripoff of Hot Potato, which was itself a crappy ripoff of Enter the Dragon. You’ve got the guy who starred in the parody starring in a ripoff of a ripoff and it’s directed by the guy who made the original? Madness. Pure madness.
It would be fine if Force Five was even slightly good. That is not the case. Like all of Clouse’s post-Dragon movies, it feels like he is mystified by his one hit, like he has no idea how he did it, and every effort he makes to try to reproduce that hit only takes him further and further from the target. The film stars Joe Lewis, a real-life karate champion who actually trained with Bruce Lee for a time, as well as Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, Richard Norton, and Sonny Barnes. All of these guys are trained fighters and stuntmen, and all of them feel like they’re handcuffed in this one, barely able to show why they were hired in the first place. I think that’s all Clouse’s fault. Fred Weintraub, his producer, made an entire career out of this kind of low-rent crap, and even considering the standards set by his movies The Ultimate Warrior, Jaguar Lives!, and Battle Creek Brawl, this is terrible.
A team is put together to stop the evil Reverend Rhee, clearly modeled on the Reverend Sun Yung Moon, because he’s made a habit of recruiting the children of the wealthy and talking them into giving all of their money to his cult. It feels like the only time the film even remotely clicks is in the final big action sequence, but even that is just barely better than the rest of the film. There are some inventive deaths, but if that’s the only compliment I have at all, that’s not saying much. Even the most forgiving martial arts fans are going to find their patience tested by this one.
The Fox and the Hound
Mickey Rooney, Kurt Russell, Pearl Bailey, Jack Albertson, Sandy Duncan, Jeanette Nolan, Pat Buttram, John Fielder, John McIntire, Richard Bakalyan, Paul Winchell, Keith Coogan, Corey Feldman, Mel Blanc
music by Buddy Baker
story by Larry Clemmons & Ted Berman & David Michener & Peter Young & Burny Mattinson & Steve Hulett & Earl Kress & Vance Gerry
based on the book by Daniel P. Mannix
produced by Wolfgang Reitherman and Art Stevens
directed by Ted Berman, Richard Rich, Art Stevens and David Hand
Rated G
1 hr 23 mins
A red fox and a hunting dog meet and become friends when they are very young, then find themselves at odds when they become adults.
Walt Disney purchased the film rights to the 1967 novel The Fox and the Hound by Daniel P. Mannix pretty much as soon as they were published, and there was some low-key development happening on the film pretty much continuously from that point forward. This was a rough era for the animation division, though. That was the year The Jungle Book came out, and the next decade saw the release of The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh, and The Rescuers, as well as the live-action/animation hybrids Bedknobs & Broomsticks and Pete’s Dragon. I have a marked nostalgic fondness for most of those films, probably since that’s the exact stretch of time when I fell in love with movies and Disney’s work, but internally, the studio was facing the retirement of the Nine Old Men, the legendary animators who were responsible for defining the studio’s artistic voice, as well as the loss of Walt himself. There were new younger animators on the rise who were desperate to prove that they could help push the studio in new artistic directions, but the studio was reluctant to give them room to experiment. One of those “younger” animators was Don Bluth, who started work for the studio in 1955 as an assistant on Sleeping Beauty. By the time he became the directing animator on The Rescuers, he was one of the most valuable people at the studio by some accounts.
When The Rescuers turned out to be a solid hit for the company, they started pushing to make The Fox and the Hound their next film. From the very beginning, there seemed to be two camps working on the film. One camp, embodied by Burny Mattinson, was loyal to the studio and its system for producing movies. The other camp, led by Bluth, felt like the entire system was flawed and there had to be a better way to make animated movies. Things came to a head in September of 1979 when, on his birthday, Bluth led a walkout and managed to eventually take 14 animators with him to start a brand-new studio.
This could have been disastrous, but there was a third group of people working at the studio who turned out to be the film’s saviors, young recent graduates from the CalArts program. People like Brad Bird, Tim Burton, Ron Musker, Henry Selick, Dan Haskett and Bill Kroyer were put off by what they saw as a cult of personality around Bluth and they disagreed with some of his fundamental ideas about storytelling. When Bluth and his disciples left, Ron Miller held a meeting with everyone still working for Disney Animation to try to rally them to prove Bluth wrong. The press went crazy for the story, and in many of the interviews he gave at the time, Bluth openly shit-talked the last movie he’d worked on, saying the studio had cut the heart out of Mannix’s book. “It’s become a cute story instead of a meaningful one,” he said.
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