Movieline Online

There’s a point about 20 minutes into Smokey and the Bandit (1977) in which Burt Reynolds, having just successfully left another inept local cop in the dust, leans halfway out of his tricked-out TransAm convertible, looks up at the camera and cracks an ear-to-ear grin, his famous moustache curled up in smug celebration. That shot encapsulates all one ever needs to know about the appeal and success of the film, which in most other respects is one of the most simplistic, juvenile, sexist and just plain stupid movies ever made. It was also one of the highest grossing movies of 1977, right behind beloved classics like the original Star Wars , Close Encounters and Saturday Night Fever . So what was the appeal? In a word: Reynolds. Already a proven sex symbol (he appeared nearly nude on the 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan ) and a man’s man thanks to roles in Deliverance and The Longest Yard , he was that unique star that appealed equally to both sexes with a country-fried sense of humor...

For mass audiences, Sergio Leone’s legitimization of the spaghetti western begins and ends with his Clint Eastwood Dollars trilogy; more specifically their final collaboration, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly , where Clint’s signature squint and poncho became enshrined in American pop culture. And yet Italian filmmakers found just as much inspiration in the character of Taco (played by Eli Wallach), an egomaniacal outlaw who served as both the film’s comic relief and a self-styled “man of the people,” embodying all the ambitions of the huddled masses. A Bullet for the General doesn’t even register as a blip on the average western fan’s radar, and yet in many ways it’s a much more successful film than Leone’s bloated epic. The film is set during the Mexican revolution and stars Gian Maria Volonte as “El Chuncho” (the savage), a bandit who steals guns from the army and sells them back to the revolutionaries. During a well-choreographed train heist, he crosses paths with a soft-spoke...

European films have never really felt the obligation to provide audiences with a beginning, middle and end; the sort of cohesive narrative that American audiences, by and large, expect and demand. Working off the newfound freedom of the French New Wave, Jean Rollin’s The Rape of the Vampire started life as a quick commercial cash-in, but was expanded and evolved into an experimental art film with leftover gothic clichés. As part of the second wave of Rollin titles released by Kino-Lorber under the Redemption label, Rape isn’t really a must-watch for anyone except those who purchased the previous set which repeatedly referenced the film in the original liner notes. It is less a coherent work than a document of Rollin’s education as a filmmaker. The plot - involving a family of vampires, their queen and some unsuspecting visitors - is broken into two parts, neither coalescing into anything conventionally logical. But the director’s fascination with the science behind the super...

The golden age of Hollywood produced relatively few big-budget fantasy and science fiction pictures. With prohibitive costs for special effects and an audience of mostly children (or so the suits said), genre pictures were left in the low-budget gutter. But from time to time a studio like Fox was adventurous enough to put their full financial and creative weight behind a project like Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth . It certainly helped that Disney had scored a huge hit with another Verne adaptation ( 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ) a few years earlier. Fox even went so far as to carry-over the same leading man – the inimitable James Mason – in this story of a scientific expedition racing to become the first team to reach the Earth’s core. While Verne’s novel is a tough read today, obsessively bogged down as it is with scientific minutia, the film’s screenplay is an expert balance of adventure and wit. Among the subterranean dangers our heroes face are constant t...