Carquake!

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

A Robert Carradine quadruple feature.

THE COWBOYS (1972)

Robert Carradine didn’t intend to follow his father, John, and his brothers David and Keith into the acting world. He wanted to be a race car driver. But then came The Cowboys, a Western starring the legendary John Wayne as a rancher who needs drovers for a 400-mile cattle drive – and circumstances force him to recruit a group of local schoolboys for the job. David had been offered the villain role, but turned it down (probably for the best; taking the role got Bruce Dern typecast as psychos for years). He then told his little brother Bobby that he should audition for a schoolboy role because he had “everything to gain, and nothing to lose.” Robert auditioned and landed the role of Slim Honeycutt.

Wayne knew it was a risk to share the screen with a bunch of youngsters, but ended up feeling that working on The Cowboys was the best experience of his life... even if he had to chew out the inexperienced but opinionated Robert Carradine and reduce him to tears one day. 

Directed by Mark Rydell from a script by Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., and William Dale Jennings that was based on Jennings’ 1971 novel, The Cowboys is a great Western that mixes an Old West cattle drive epic with amusing coming-of-age moments, some intense sequences, and emotional scenes that will tug on your heartstrings. Roscoe Lee Browne also turns in a great performance as Jebediah Nightlinger, the cook that accompanies Wayne and the kids on the drive.

The Cowboys was such a hit that it spawned a TV series follow-up in 1974, with Robert Carradine and A Martinez reprising their roles. But ABC bungled the development of the show and it only lasted for 12 episodes. These days, it’s disappointingly difficult to find. I would gladly watch all of the episodes and spend more time in the world of this film.

CANNONBALL! (1976)

In the 1970s, the Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash, better known as the Cannonball Run (named in honor of late racer Erwin “Cannon Ball” Baker), was run five times, starting in New York City and Darien, Connecticut, and ending at the Portofino Inn in the Los Angeles suburb of Redondo Beach, California. Conceived as both a celebration of the United States Interstate Highway System and a protest against strict traffic laws that were being enacted at the time (Nixon’s National Maximum Speed Law said passenger vehicles were to go no faster that 55 miles per hour), this race inspired multiple films – the first of the bunch being director Paul Bartel’s Cannonball!

Made in response to the success of Bartel’s Death Race 2000, this one reunites Bartel with Death Race 2000 star David Carradine, who takes on the title role of racer Coy "Cannonball" Buckman. Despite having a dark history with motor vehicles (he was driving drunk in an accident that killed a girl), Buckman is looking to get his racing career back on track, so he signs on for the illegal Trans-America Grand Prix, which starts at the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles and ends in New York City. Buckman is joined on this race by his pal Zippo (Archie Hahn) and his parole officer / girlfriend Linda (Veronica Hamel).

Also competing in this race are Buckman’s nemesis Cade Redman (Bill McKinney), whose expenses are being paid by country singer Perman Waters (Gerrit Graham); teens Jim (Carradine’s brother Robert Carradine) and Maryann (Belinda Balaski), German driver Wolfe Messer (James Keach), a trio of waitresses in a van (Mary Woronov, Diane Lee Hart, and Glynn Rubin), corrupt cop and adulterer Terry McMillan (Carl Gottlieb), and Beutell Morris (Stanley Bennett Clay), who is driving a car he’s supposed to deliver to New York for an elderly couple... and the car gets steadily destroyed on its way across the country.

Bartel was attempting to make Cannonball! harder and more realistic than Death Race 2000, while also imbuing the film with his unique sense of humor. There are plenty of comedic moments, a lot of vehicular smash-ups, an unnecessary subplot where Buckman’s brother (played by Dick Miller) tries to sabotage the race, and cameo appearances by Death Race 2000 producer Roger Corman, Sylvester Stallone (who was in Bartel’s previous movie with David Carradine), and directors Joe Dante, Jonathan Kaplan, Allan Arkush, and Martin Scorsese.

The movie didn’t really work for me very well, but it does have a great cast, some fun moments, and some cool stunts. It’s got an entertaining ‘70s vibe to it, and puts an incredible collection of cars on display, including a pair of identical 1970 Trans Ams, a 1969 Mustang, a 1969 Lincoln Continental, a 1973 De Tomaso Pantera L, and more.

THE BIG RED ONE (1980)

Born in 1912, Samuel Fuller started out working as a crime reporter when he was still a teenager, then got into writing pulp novels and screenplays, earning his first credit on a movie in 1936. When World War II broke out, he enlisted in the United States Army, where he was assigned as an infantryman to the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. That meant he saw a whole lot of fighting in a variety of locations: Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He was present at the liberation of a German concentration camp in Falkenau. He reached the rank of corporal and was awarded the Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, and Combat Infantryman Badge. All that, and there was only a two-year gap in his film writing credits during the years the U.S. was in the war (although a four-year gap followed).

By the late ‘50s, Fuller was already planning to direct a film based on his personal experiences in World War II... but getting it into production turned out to be a twenty-year ordeal, due to studio issues. When The Big Red One (which is the nickname for the 1st Infantry Division) finally started filming, Fuller chose Robert Carradine to play the character based on himself, young writer Private Zab, and deliver the film’s narration.

Lee Marvin stars as Possum, who was a Private when he served in World War I. By November of 1942, he’s a Sergeant, leading a squad of infantrymen into battle. This squad includes Carradine’s Zab, plus characters played by Mark Hamill, Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward. The theatrical cut of the film has a running time of 113 minutes and follows the 1st Infantry Division through a series of battles in the places Fuller himself fought, ending at the Falkenau concentration camp. It’s an action-packed movie, written with the tone of an old man who had seen some hellish things in his life and could no longer be fazed by much of anything. 

The Big Red One wasn’t exactly what Fuller wanted it to be. His rough cut was four hours, he got it down to two hours, then the distributor made him cut it down to 113 minutes. Still, it’s one of the best war movies ever made – and if you want to see more of Fuller’s cinematic take on his own experience, there’s a “reconstruction cut” that adds nearly 50 minutes to the running time.

TAG: THE ASSASSINATION GAME (1982)

Four years after playing Michael Myers in the original Halloween and one year after he co-wrote the sci-fi action classic Escape from New York (both of those projects being collaborations with John Carpenter), Nick Castle made his feature directorial debut with the “action comedy” TAG: The Assassination Game – although I would say that “college campus thriller” would be a better description for the film than the “action comedy” label it has been given online.

The Assassination Game is being played by students on this particular college campus, and it’s just like it sounds. The idea is that each participant is pretending to be an assassin. They’re given the names of other participants and sent out to “assassinate” them with suction cup dart guns. The reigning champion is Loren Gersh (future Re-Animator star Bruce Abbott) – and when he’s taken out of the game in a ridiculous way, he has a complete mental breakdown and decides to hunt down his opponents with a real gun.

While Gersh is knocking students off with real bullets, his biggest competitor, Susan Swayze (Linda Hamilton) is racking up the “kills” with her dart gun, putting them on a collision course for climactic action. While heading for the championship, Swayze is also falling for fellow student Alex Marsh (Robert Carradine), who works for the school paper and has introduced himself to her under the guise of covering this Assassination Game the campus has gotten swept up in.

Naming two major characters who get referred to by their last names such similar names as Gersh and March was an odd choice in the writing process, but who am I to question Nick Castle?

As evident in the genre confusion, TAG has a little bit of everything in it. There is action and comedy, there are thrills, and there’s even a bit of romance between Susan and Marsh. Castle tends to present their interactions in film noir style, complete with a recreation of the "you know how to whistle" scene from the 1944 film noir To Have and Have Not, with Hamilton and Carradine in place of Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart.

This movie is a good time, and an ‘80s college campus thriller is something I should have seen a lot sooner than 44 years after it was released.