Tuesday


Annual "Best Nude Scenes" Poll


Done.



Gone With The West

 (1972 or 3)

Little Moon and Jud McGraw

(1978 or 9)

If you believe IMDb, Gone With the West and Little Moon and Jud Mcgraw are the same 1975 movie, with the latter being simply a re-naming for the foreign and video releases.

Not so.

First of all, there are two good reasons why that date cannot be accurate:

  1. The characters in another movie, Messiah of Evil, attend a movie theater. As they watch the previews of coming attractions, they see the trailer for Gone With The West. Messiah of Evil was released in 1973, so Gone With The West had to have been filmed before that.
  2. The characters in the beginning and end of the film are seen driving a 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass. I'm pretty sure that the budget of Gone With The West did not include enough petty cash to develop a working time machine, so those scenes had to be filmed in 1978 or 1979.

OK, now I see if you were paying attention. Did you realize that I contradicted myself? On the one hand, this film was seen in another film which was released in 1973. On the other hand, some of the scenes included a 1978 automobile. How can that be? It's because Gone With The West and Little Moon and Jud McGraw are actually two different films cobbled from the same 1972 footage, although a little extra footage was shot in 1978 or 1979 for the version called Little Moon and Jud McGraw.

Here's what happened. Gone With The West was created in 1972, and it turned out to be utterly unwatchable. It's an Old West yarn which is very sparse in the dialogue department and is edited in such a way as to make it difficult, almost impossible, to follow. Some of the scenes were rushed through without sufficient explanation, while some fight scenes and the burning of a town just went on and on, long after they had exhausted their purpose. The burning scene alone lingers for 14 minutes of running time, almost all of it without dialogue. (They built a small Western town and burned every bit of it on camera, so I guess they wanted their money's worth.)

Gone With The West seems to be trying to be a genre spoof, but none of the jokes really work, so it's not even obvious that it is a spoof, except during the final scene, which consists of classically awful 1970s cheese. Stephanie Powers, who had been in character the entire movie as a Spanish-speaking Native American with only a word or two of English, breaks out of character and says to James Caan, speaking as Stephanie Powers rather than as Little Moon, "You've killed everyone else except the cameraman." Caan then draws his gun and shoots the cameraman, who falls to the ground with the hand-held camera still running, thus turning the image we see 90 degrees clockwise. Caan and Powers then walk off into the sunset. Sideways.

It wasn't just the jokes that failed. Nothing that they tried in this film really worked, and it turned out to be an unreleasable mess. It's now in the public domain, so you can watch it online or legally download it for free if you care to. (The Stephanie Powers nude scene occurs around 15:40.)

It was a terrible film, but a lot of things happened between 1972 and 1979 to make its jumbled footage valuable enough to try a re-edit. James Caan went from being a virtual nobody to being Sonny Corleone. Stephanie Powers got through the rough patch in her career and became a star again in the TV series "Hart to Hart." Some marketing geniuses figured, "Why not re-release the film in 1979 by fixing up the two main problems - short scenes which aren't clear, and long scenes which drag on." And so they shot a framing story about a modern reporter sent out into the desert by his editor to produce a story on ghost towns of the Ol' West. The reporter encounters a crusty old stock Western character who ramps up her authentic frontier gibberish to Gabby Hayes level as she relates a story about the old days. The story told by the ornery old sidewinder is the same story from Gone With The West, with 16 minutes of fat trimmed. Because the colorful old woman was telling the story to the city slicker, the editor was able to use her voice-over to explain the incomprehensible goings-on in some of the scenes. Voila! New movie: Little Moon and Judd McGraw, starring three pretty big stars: Caan, Powers, and Sammy Davis, Jr. The original version of the film ran 92 minutes. The re-release uses 76 minutes of that footage and adds another 6-7 minutes in the framing story.

The most entertaining part of both versions is probably Sammy Davis Jr's extraordinarily eccentric performance as a hipster gunslinger. He dresses entirely in modern leathers which are embellished with a little fringe to make the outfit look Western-y. His outfit is so garish and so anachronistic that he makes Cleavon Little's spiffy and contemporaneous "Sheriff Bart" (from Blazing Saddles) seem in comparison to be a Dickensian waif. Sammy does do some twirling and fast-draw tricks in real time, and he's actually brilliant. He's so graceful and quick that he probably could really have been a gunslinger. And while I'm in the mood to find some silver linings in this cloud, I'll note that Stephanie Powers speaks very good Spanish. Those are about the only good things to be said about these two "sister movies."






TV Round-Up

One more look at Emmy Rossum in this week's Shameless, this time in 1080p

Here's Aina Clotet in Germanes, a 2012 made-for-TV film broadcast Sunday night in Spain



  • * Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe).

  • * White asterisk: expanded format.

  • * Blue asterisk: not mine.

  • No asterisk: it probably sucks.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.









Don's Party

(1976)

Johnny's comments:

Don's Party is a 1976 slice of life comedy/drama that focuses on a time when there are key changes in the social structure. Set on the night of the 1969 Australian elections where the Labor Party is tipped to get back into office for the first time since 1949, Don (John Hargreaves) and his wife Kath (Jeanie Drynan) host a party to celebrate a Labor Party victory, inviting his friends who have varying views. Simon (Graeme Blundell) and Jody (Veronica Lang) are fairly conservative and seem out of place at the party. Mal (Ray Barrett) and Jenny (Pat Bishop) are long time friends of Don and Kath with similar views, but their marriage is a little unsteady. Mack's (Graham Kennedy) wife has dumped him and arrived by himself. Evan and Kerry (Candy Raymond) are a couple whose marriage is falling apart and it's going to be a long night for them. Finally, serial womaniser Cooley (Harold Hopkins) has picked up a promiscuous young girl Susan (Clare Binney) and together they are going to set this party alight. Over the night, both political and sexual tensions will hit boiling point, marriages and friendships frayed and things may never be the same again. If only the Labor Party would win the election. (Spoiler: They don't). It's hard to describe Don's Party without going on and on because there's some much happening. It's a pretty much perfect showcase of a certain time and I say that as someone who has an aversion to writer David Williamson's work (although I seem to have forgotten why). While it is based on a play and is pretty much set just at Don's house, it never feels stagey or restrictive. Director Bruce Beresford has done some great work here. There's so many iconic scenes and while the characters all have their purpose, Cooley is a standout, he's so freaking hilarious. His reaction to finding out the girl he just picked up, Susan, is just 19 is priceless. And he hits on every woman at the party, including Jenny, who he calls a fishwife. It's all gold and I have to say, one the best Australian films ever. I can't believe this is first time I've ever seen Don's Party.

And Clare Binney is pure hotness in her first ever film. She doesn't have much of acting resume, only appearing in four films and a TV movie. Tomorrow, I release a series from two other films she appeared in, Dimboola and Duet For Four. I've already capped Hostage, but she had nothing cappable in that film (I recommend it for Kerry Mack). Don's Party is well and truly her best nudity.

Claire Binney film clips (collages below)


Veronica Lang film clip (collage below)

Candy Raymond film clip (collage below)

 









CLIPS

Some clips from the non-theatrical 2009 release Deep in the Valley:

 Olivia Alexander and Heather Vandeven

Aubrie Lemon and Jessica Hall

Madison Bauer and Annie Huntley

PICS/ Collages

Daria Werbowy in a new magazine spread

AnnaLynne McCord's "accidental twitpic" of a breast

Poni Silver of the rock group The Ettes

Penelope Cruz and others in Jamon, Jamon