Daily Archives: February 15, 2024

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February 15, 2024

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KAMAD Throwback Thursdays 1975: The Fortune

Throwback Thursday #TBT

Throwback Thursday on the KAMAD site will be a regular occurrence in the next year. As a motivational project, to make sure I am working on something, even in a week where I don’t see a new film in a theater, I am going to post on movies from 1975. Along with 1984, this is one of my favorite years for movies and it is full of bittersweet memories as well. 1975 was my Senior Year in High School and my Freshman Year in College. The greatest film of the last 60 years came out in 1975, as well as dozens of great and not so great cinematic endeavors. Most of the films in this weekly series will have been seen in a theater in 1975, but there are several that I only caught up with later. I hope you all enjoy.

The Fortune

As usual, I tried locating a trailer to accompany my film selection, but this does not seem possible with “The Fortune”. I was unable to locate a trailer on YouTube, which is the most likely site that it would be available on. I looked at Google to search for the same thing and also got no results. Maybe this is the reason that this film was a Blind Spot for me, I never remembered seeing anything promoting it, except newspaper ads. The fact that the movie flopped on release probably accounts for it never being available for me to see in 1975. To catch up with it today, I purchased a copy from Umbrella, an Australian Media company, this actually had to clear customs before being delivered to me. Anyway, the above video is a clip from TCM when they showed the film a few years ago.

“The Fortune” stars Jack Nicolson (This is his fourth film in the Throwback Thursday Series) and Warren Beatty (Only his second). They were both big stars at the time and the movie was directed by Mike Nichols. With that pedigree, you would think this was a surefire smash. Unfortunately, like “Lucky Lady”, also in 75, casting cannot make up for all the elements of a movie. Somehow this light comedy farce, just lacks the delicate touch that it takes to pull off this kind of material, and part ofd the problem is the two stars.

Nicolson and Beatty are both laconic actors, who need some pushing to feel like active participants in a movie. Here they seem to be cruising rather than working, and the script and direction are not enough to compensate for a lack of wattage from the stars. There is a scroll at the start of the movie, to explain the complication that the story is trying to deal with. This immediately suggests trouble. When you have to have a history lesson before the story starts, it is never very promising. Basically, the two are small time scam artists, who are trying to get a hold of the wealth of an heiress by marrying her. Unfortunately, the man who wooed her is unable to complete a divorce, so if he takes her with him across the country, he could be violating the Mann Act.

During the 1920s, in the United States, the law known as the Mann Act was much feared. It prohibited transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes. Because of the Mann Act, a man who wanted to run off with a woman and was willing, or unable, to marry her, would sometimes go to unusual lengths.

So Beatty wants to marry Stockard Channing, but can’t, so he has her marry his pal Nicholson, as a way of getting around the law. Of course that presents some awkward moments in the story, and those are the only places where the film comes to life. The movie is less than an hour and a half long, but it seems to take forever to get to the real complications. A car ride, train trip and Airplane flight, all use up a lot of screen time, without really building the story or the characters. Once the trio arrives in Los Angeles, and settles into the same courtyard apartment that was used in “The Day of the Locust”, the comedy feels more connected to the goings on. There just isn’t that much of it.

Channing is in her first credited role here, and for the most part she is great, but there are a couple of scenes where bickering is featured and she was given the direction “louder”. It annoys rather than amuses. The final section of the film, is where the slapstick humor comes in, and the hapless con men, having decided to murder the woman they both claim to love, can’t quite pull off the act. There is a scene of a traffic jam on a bridge that showcases what the film could have been, if only that spirit was infused in the rest of the story.

Anyway, it’s not as big a misfire as “Lucky Lady”, it still isn’t something you need to add to your list of essential viewing.

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Lisa Frankenstein

I didn’t hate this movie but I didn’t love it the way I wished I had. Diablo Cody has written a couple of films that I do admire quite a bit, both “Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body” are regular visitors on our TV screen. So it was with some enthusiasm that I looked forward to this newest film penned by this talented screenwriter. I can’t say the fault for this film’s failures is entirely with the director, because the screenplay is a mess. Instead of being funny or cute or sexy, it’s just gross and it relies on obnoxious stereotypes to sell some of its jokes.

The premise is a cross between “Heathers” and “Warm Bodies”, two films with horror at their heart that also try to slip in some romance. Maybe “Heathers” can successfully pull that off because its black heart is clear from the very beginning. “Warm Bodies” just didn’t work when it was released a few years ago, and this film has the same problem, dead bodies are just not sexy or romantic. Dress them up in period clothing and try to style them as if they were poets of the era, they are still decaying, oozing, cold bodies that would not be attractive to anyone.

This film takes the idea of a wicked stepmother, and tries to update it into Dawn of the Dead. There’s not enough humor to make it work when the film’s tone changes dramatically after the first murder. At first the film seems to want to be a wacky romance between a girl who’s an outsider and a little odd, and the idea of a Lost Boy from the old days, you know, when men were cravats and vests. The idea that a short circuiting tanning bed will substitute for the elaborate Laboratory of Dr. Frankenstein, is funny at first, but the joke gets repeated several times and it never really makes sense in the story why this would work. I know this is supposed to be a fantasy, so I shouldn’t take most of these things seriously, and I don’t, but come on. There needs to be a little bit more of an explanation about why a body that’s been in the ground for almost 200 years suddenly rises from the grave because of the lightning strike. Lisa, the teen girl who is the protagonist in the story, is suffering from PTSD after the loss of her mother by an Ax Murderer, and the acquisition of a sister and mother when her father remarries. So okay, she’s not stable, but her reaction to the character that shows up in her bedroom makes no sense at all.

Speaking of teen comedies that this film borrows from, we also get a little bit of “Pretty in Pink”, where there is a romantic interest, but not the one that we should be rooting for given the setup. It just doesn’t make much sense that Lisa continues to want the editor of the school literary journal, after practically engaging in voodoo to get the corpse of Victor Frankenstein animated. Expecting the corpse to go along with this, without any jealousy also makes no sense. This is just a series of scenes that are supposed to be funny but don’t work. We get ax murders that aren’t funny, and characters who act as if there’s no consequence to their actions, when in fact anybody can see the consequences coming from a mile away.

Oh, and another team comedy that we can throw in, “She’s All That”, where the dowdy little girl turns into a teen Queen that all the boys at school want to be with. Not sure that this is the right way to go from a screenwriter who came up with the clever premise of “Jennifer’s Body”, and the terrific contrarian “Juno”. This movie feels like it was manufactured by somebody who is trying to make a successful Teen Movie by doing the same thing that Dr. Frankenstein did, sewing together the parts of dead films and hoping to revive them as something new. It’s been tried before and rarely is it successful.

Comedy in horror, it’s hard to pull off well. When it happens, like in the film “American Werewolf in London”, we are lucky that we can laugh and be scared at the same time. Lisa Frankenstein doesn’t pull this Balancing Act off, it’s not as disappointing as Five Nights at Freddy’s, but the number of laughs is almost as low, and despite the cute actors, and three or four clever lines, there’s just not much here to recommend.