The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (9 page)

Years before he would find fame as Number Six on TV's
The Prisoner
, Patrick McGoohan was Dr. Syn, a hero dressed like a scarecrow in an eponymously named movie. Originally made as a four-part mini-series for
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color
in 1962,
Dr. Syn: Alias the Scarecrow
was repackaged and released theatrically two years later.

Based on a Russell Thorndike novel first published in 1915, the story has been committed to film three times, first in a 1937 black-and-white film starring George Arliss, and twice in the early '60s by Disney and the British Hammer Films. Despite having been voted Best TV Actor of the Year by the British public in 1959, the American-born, U.K.-raised McGoohan was an unknown in America when he was signed to a three-picture deal by Disney in 1961. He had already turned down the role of James Bond (which eventually went to Sean Connery), but Disney recognized that he had the smoldering good looks and charisma to carry an action-adventure film, and molded
Dr. Syn
as a star vehicle for him.

The movie is set in 1736, and McGoohan plays Dr. Christopher Syn, a real-life English pastor who led a double life — upright citizen by day, and rogue smuggler by night. Disguised as “The Scarecrow,” Syn leads a rebellion across the English countryside against the oppressive taxes of King George iii. When the cruel General Pugh (Geoffrey Keen) is dispatched to the area to quell the insurgents, Syn and his underground army step up their efforts, looting the King's coffers and doing their best to avoid the ferocious press gangs that roam Romney Marsh, looking to force young men into the service of the Royal Navy. To make an already complicated situation even more complex, an escaped American revolutionary prisoner and an awol sailor (and son of a leading town official) both seek the help of Dr. Syn. Swashbuckling scenes abound as the legendary Scarecrow does battle against the forces of tyranny.

McGoohan ably handles the dual role of the pastor and the rebellious Scarecrow, imbuing each character with a distinctive personality. His Scarecrow isn't just the pastor with a mask, but a completely separate and well-rounded character that doesn't simply rely on a costume à la Batman or Superman to define his personality. Also look for Geoffrey Keen as the evil General Pugh. Fifteen years after shooting
Dr. Syn
he undertook his best-known role, that of M's deputy, Sir Frederick Gray, in six James Bond movies from 1977's
The Spy Who Loved Me
to 1987's
The Living Daylights
.

McGoohan's strong lead performance coupled with great historical action-adventure makes
Dr. Syn
a great romp for the family, but may be too intense for younger children.

A close-up look at the birth of skateboard culture in Southern California,
Dogtown and Z-Boys
has attitude to burn, just like the sport it documents. Directed by Stacy Peralta, one of the legends of the sport, it captures the punk-rock spirit of skateboarding and perfectly places it into the context of its time — the 1970s — and location — Dogtown, a marginal area of California including parts of Venice, Ocean Park, and South Santa Monica, described by the boys as “the last great seaside slum,” and “where the debris meets the sea.”

Even if you are not a fan you'll be fascinated by the story about street-wise teens who traded in their surfboards for homemade skateboards. Based at the Zephyr Surf Shop, the Z-Boys (and one Z-Girl) altered the course of modern skateboarding, redefining the sport by inventing gravity-defying stunts honed to perfection in dried-out swimming pools during the California droughts of the 1970s. Told using a combination of narration, stills, great vintage 1970s skateboarding footage, classic rock (Aerosmith, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, and David Bowie, among others), and new interviews with all the key players, the film details a small, interesting slice of Southern Californian life.

Sean Penn provides the narration, adding a flair all of his own. The opposite of stodgy, Penn speaks
to
the audience, not
at
them, sounding like someone sitting at a bar telling the tale. At one point, in mid-sentence, he coughs, pauses for a moment, and then continues. It's this kind of approach that gives this movie its edge.

“I'm very interested in doing eccentric individual low-budget films,” said director Paul Bartel early in his career. And so he did. After making several cutie nudies in the late '60s, he hit his stride in 1975 with
Death Race 2000
, a campy sci-fi exploitation flick starring a then-unknown Sylvester Stallone. A series of drive-in movies followed, but it was a small no-budget film that made him a cult star. He wrote, directed, and starred in
Eating Raoul
, a dark look at suburban life.

Bartel conceived the idea for
Eating Raoul
while serving on the jury at the 1979 Berlin Film Festival. Working independently, he cobbled together a modest budget from friends, family, and credit cards, and shot the film bit by bit in Los Angeles when he could afford it. “I wanted to make a film about two greedy uptight people who are not so unlike you and me and Nancy and Ronnie [Reagan],” he said, “and to keep it funny and yet communicate something about the perversity of these values.”

In the film, the aptly named Paul and Mary (Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov) Bland dream of owning a house and restaurant in the country, but can't come up with the $20,000 down payment. Paul has just lost his job as a wine merchant for refusing to sell crappy wine to a customer. Money is tight, and the couple are desperately looking for a solution to their problem. Late one night a swinger from a party next door enters the Bland apartment and attacks Mary. Wielding a frying pan, Paul kills the intruder. When they discover $600 on the man, the couple forms a deadly plan.

Paul and Mary take out an ad in the personals section of the local newspaper to entice sex-seekers to their home. Mary, posing as a prostitute, indulges their erotic demands before Paul kills them and takes their money. To dispose of the bodies they sell the corpses for dog food. Their plan is double pronged: because of their disgust for the “johns” and their sexual perversions, the couple feels that they are cleaning up society, while at the same time the money they make finances their dream home. According to Paul their clients are “horrible, sex-crazed perverts that nobody will miss anyway.”

All is going well until a locksmith named Raoul (Robert Beltran) uncovers their scheme and demands a cut of the action. Raoul transports the bodies, but is ultimately expendable . . . and edible.

To write off
Eating Raoul
as a cannibal movie is not accurate. There are elements of cannibalism in the script, but they are a means to an end. Bartel needed something taboo to show the lengths that “normal” people can go to to achieve their slice of the American dream. The unsavory situations in the film are used to amplify the farcical elements of the story, and maybe tickle your funny bone by shocking you a little.
Eating Raoul
is Bartel's finest achievement as a director and writer, and represents the point at which underground and mainstream cinema meet.

Bartel and Mary Woronov (see
Chelsea Girls
), who were previously paired in 1979's
Rock and Roll High School
, play the Blands with deadpan perfection. Their expressionless delivery illustrates their stupefying suburban existence and adds to the humor of the situation as the body count rises and things seem to spin out of control. Woronov went on to star in many more films (and write several books) but
Eating Raoul
remains her best performance on screen. Paul Bartel went on to direct several lackluster films, including
Lust in the Dust
(starring Divine) and
The Class Struggle in Beverly Hills
, and act in some good ones, like
The Usual Suspects
,
Basquiat
, and Ethan Hawke's
Hamlet
, before passing away of liver cancer in May 2000.

In 1982 the gallows humor of
Eating Raoul
pushed the frontiers of bad taste, but despite itself is a very likeable black comedy.

Most filmmakers would do anything to stay off the bottom of the bill at the drive-in. Arch Hall Sr., the maverick mini-movie-mogul and president of Fairway-International Productions, was not like most filmmakers. He spent a few glorious years pumping out B-movies best seen just after dusk through the windshield of your dad's car.

By the early 1960s Arch Hall Sr. (real name: William Watters) was an established B-movie wheeler-dealer, distributing schlocky low-budget films and documentaries. In 1961 he attained notoriety as the subject of
The Last Time I Saw Archie
, a comedy directed by Jack Webb and co-starring Robert Mitchum as Archie.

Like many doting parents, Senior was convinced that his son, Arch Hall Jr., could be a movie star. That Junior was supremely untalented was of little consequence. Hall Sr. gave his son a guitar and a shiny suit and paraded him through a series of rock-and-roll exploitation flicks. “He always used to say, ‘Gee, Pop, I can't sing,'” said Hall Sr. “But I told him that a lot of people had done well who didn't know how to sing.”

Their first outing, 1962's
Wild Guitar
, featured Junior singing his own songs . . . badly. The film was directed by Ray Dennis (a.k.a. Cash Flagg), who would later direct and star in the most clumsily-titled drive-in classic ever,
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
. Not surprisingly,
Wild Guitar
lost money; even red ink wasn't enough to keep Hall Sr. from trying to turn Junior into the next Ricky Nelson.

The elder Hall conceived
Eegah!
after meeting the 7'2'' Richard Kiel, who was a bouncer in a cowboy bar. Hall Sr. sensed that Kiel's unusual looks and 300-pound size could make a commanding if not unusual film presence, and began working on a script that would co-star Arch Jr. and Kiel. Kiel had appeared on television, usually as an extra, and was willing to give the lead role a try as long as Hall supplied a place for him to stay.

Hall Sr.'s script added his own special twist to the
Beauty and the Beast
fable, set to the rock-and-roll beat of Arch Jr.'s compositions. Keil was cast as a caveman who has survived from pre-historic times by drinking sulfur-infused water in a secret desert cave. He is discovered by Roxy Miller (played by Marilyn Manning, who in real life was a receptionist for a chiropractor who had rented an office from Hall), when she almost runs him over on a desolate desert road. Unhurt, she rushes home to tell her father of her discovery. Robert Miller (Arch Hall Sr.) is a distinguished author of adventure books who dons his pith helmet and investigates his daughter's outrageous story. He disappears. Roxy and her boyfriend Tommy (Arch Hall Jr.) set off in a dune buggy to rescue doddering old Dad. They have no luck and decide to bed down for the night (in separate sleeping bags, of course). During the night the caveman looms over Roxy, but is scared off when Tommy rolls over and inadvertently switches on his transistor radio. The next day, while Tommy explores the area with a shotgun, the mysterious cave-dweller grabs Roxy. They return to the cave to find her father safe and in good spirits. The perfect prehistoric gentleman treats his company well and offers Roxy a meaty bone, grunting affectionately while rubbing his nose against her arm. Sparks fly between the two, and it is apparent that Roxy is falling for her superannuated captor. She dubs the ancient Lothario Eegah because he keeps saying that word over and over.

Tommy discovers the underground love nest and picks a fight with Eegah. Amazingly the slight city slicker opens up a 40-ounce can of whoopass on the giant, Davey and Goliath style, before beating a hasty retreat with Roxy and Mr. Miller in tow. The rest of the film sees Eegah out of his element, pursuing Roxy through the travails of the modern world.

To say
Eegah! The Name Written in Blood
was cheaply produced is like having a 500-pound hippo in your bedroom: it's so apparent you don't even have to mention it. Hall Sr. was desperate to make back the money he lost on
Wild Guitar
, so he cut corners everywhere he could on this film. With no money in the budget for a director, he helmed the film himself (under the pseudonym Nicholas Merriwether), even though he had never been behind a camera. He also cooked for the crew and cast himself in one of the major roles. Everyone, including his son, basically toiled for no money. “He worked for peanuts,” said Senior. “He was only 16.”

Even with doubling up on duties and underpaying his actors, Hall still had to raise $15,000, the kind of money that was scarce after the failure of his previous effort. “I had to sell my own car, borrow money, make exchanges, offer pay-you-laters to finance the thing,” he said. “When I think of all the special deals — it was just Mickey Mouse all the way through.”

You get what you pay for. Shot on location in Palm Desert, California, with additional scenes shot on Harpo Marx's property, most days the temperature reached an astronomical 115°F. Crewmembers were dropping from sunstroke, and some just went crazy from the heat. An inexperienced soundman repeatedly switched the recorder to Playback rather than Record during production of some scenes, failing to record sound; the problem wasn't discovered until after shooting had wrapped. During post-production they tried to dub the missing dialogue, but because the actors had ad-libbed so much no one could remember what the lines were supposed to be. They fixed the problem, and while bad dubbing is better than no dubbing, when you hear the dialogue, you have to wonder why they bothered. Another rookie crew member on the desert shoot loaded as much sand into the camera as he did film, ruining many takes and wasting hours of production time.

The editing, or what passes for editing, is of home-movie caliber. Scenes end suddenly, there are inappropriate close-ups . . . it's just a mess. Probably the best example of the haphazard post-production comes in a scene as Mr. Miller walks toward the cave, when suddenly a crewmember's voice shouts, “Watch out for snakes!”

Now, there is Grade B acting, and then there is Arch Hall Jr. The way Arch Sr. flaunts his son in front of a camera in this way is almost cruel, and in some countries could probably be considered child abuse (or at least audience abuse). It is a testament to a father's love that Arch Sr. was so blind to his son's shortcomings that he would continue to parade him around in these pictures. Hall Jr. is a wooden actor, and the songs . . . oh, my, the songs. He warbles three tunes in
Eegah!
, including one love ballad recycled from
Wild Guitar
. “Vitamins are good they say,” he sings in “Valerie,” “And so's a calorie, but I feel like a tiger on one kiss from Valerie.” A sunny sentiment to be sure; too bad his girlfriend's name is Roxy. The father-and-son team went on to make several more films together, including
The Nasty Rabbit
, about Russian spies who wreak terror on the United States with a diseased rabbit. Arch Jr. found his true calling when he retired from motion pictures and became a commercial pilot.

To recap,
Eegah!
features terrible acting, bad sound, a lame story, and atrocious editing. Why do I love this movie? Because it dares to be bad. In a business where everyone craves respectability and prestige Hall Sr. was a self-made man who didn't care what anyone thought of his films. He didn't concern himself with reviews, only the bottom line. He figured out what audiences wanted to see — in this case rock and roll, dune buggies, and an unusual creature — and shamelessly gave it to them. He's the kind of independent character that could only come out of Hollywood. Did he make good films? No, but he sure knew how to entertain.

“I used to get teased about
Eegah!
quite a lot,” he said. “It was always sort of a subject of laughter that the darned thing did so well.” Hall laughed all the way to the bank; by the time of his death in 1978 the film had grossed over one million dollars.