A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece here on ensembles and how, often times, I like the ensemble better than the leads which led to a comment by the incomparable Emgee who said, and I quote, “[M*A*S*H] the movie comes to mind; Sutherland and Gould sorely get on my nerves, but the rest of the cast is terrific.” Well, I like Sutherland and Gould in the movie, actually, but there was something else I wanted to bring up but chose not to, until now. Specifically, the stupid reason I like the movie. I like M*A*S*H because of how it looks. It supposed to look grungy and dirty around the camp but, to me, it always looked like a really cool getaway camp in Southern California. A little muddy, sure, but kind of cozy. I really don’t care about any of the vignettes all that much but the look of it I love. And the football game is always described as the point where the movie goes off the rails (and, yes, I think I’ve even said that myself) but it looks so nice there, I just want to grab a brew and cheer on the teams. It reminds me of the high school stadiums I frequented in my teens. So there it is. That’s why I like M*A*S*H: It looks cozy and reminds me of my teen years. Don’t tell anyone. Which leads me to today’s schedule and some other movies that I absurdly connect to thanks to a nostalgia for the suburbia of my youth.
One of the movies on today is Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a movie I saw on its opening weekend and one that I have liked ever since. But, honestly, I don’t really care much about the story at all. I think it’s a great science fiction movie about an alien visitation and contact with humanity but, how do I put this? Well, I just really like that seventies suburban look and feel. Now, when I saw it the first time, I liked it for the story and the effects. I never really liked Richard Dreyfuss much in it and that hasn’t changed but I like the big Devil’s Mountain he builds in his living room. And I like Bob Balaban and Francois Truffaut. In fact, those things make up most of my love of the movie now, especially the suburbia. By the time they get to the big finale, I’ve already got what I came for. Spielberg excelled at recreating the suburbia of the late sixties through the early eighties and even though I can’t really stand E.T. anymore (I liked it very much once but each subsequent viewing put me off more and more), I still enjoy the look of suburbia from that period.
But it’s not just the big movies like that. I also enjoy the movies made on a lower budget with camera work closer to the hand held variety that makes a movie from the period almost feel like an elaborate home movie. One such movie is The Honkers, starring James Coburn, Lois Nettleton, and Slim Pickens. You can be forgiven for not knowing it. Filmed in Carlsbad and Artesia, New Mexico, in 1972, it follows the barely held together story of an over the hill rodeo star played by Coburn. It is brimming with filler, such as a nearly ten minute scene of Coburn walking around town during a parade. It’s that kind of movie; slightly lazy, doing whatever it can to make the film run time long enough to play as a feature in theaters. The houses are small ramblers and ranches and the town’s main street looks like a lot of South Carolina main streets I grew up walking around myself. I have never watched it for the story (though I can tell you that Coburn and Pickens are fantastic, as expected), only for the location feel. With The Honkers, that’s good enough.
Other movies that have an almost entirely home movie feel to it that I could never honestly recommend for their story or quality, but watch it for the location feel, include such low budget efforts as The Astro Zombies and She-Freak. The Astro Zombies opens with a drive down a Southern California community of nothing but mid-century homes leading to a confrontation in of the homes garages. Believe it or not, that simple, poorly filmed, barely competent opening can hold my attention through multiple viewings. As for She-Freak, well, it’s a wonder of a movie in my book. Poorly acted and written with no director in evidence, it is nonetheless a treasure trove of late sixties home movie action. As I wrote for the article on this very site (yes, there is an article on TCM’s website for She-Freak, why do you ask?), ” In fact, carnival footage takes up the first full five minutes of the film signaling immediately to the astute viewer the mark of an exploitation film: Filler footage to pad out the running time. And that’s why there’s something almost beautiful about watching a true exploitation film because they provide endless shots of real people in a real time, not how glamorized Hollywood saw things. When the viewer is introduced to the star of the film, Claire Brennen as Jade Cochran, the diner she works in has the look and feel of desolation because, well, it is desolate. Hollywood would have made it appealing, somehow (think “trashy chic”) and ruined it.”
She-Freak is loaded with cheap diners and cheap motel rooms. Scenes of people eating at picnic tables at the carnival and going to hotel bars afterwards. And all in a small town, no big metropolis, no big scenes of city night life. It’s all very suburban and intimate. In fact, without listing them all, this is in large part why I love the low budget movies of the sixties and seventies: because they had no big budget for grand sets and location shoots, they often ended up providing a much closer look to the reality I knew as a child. And now, of course, that means they can stir nostalgia in me far more than a bigger, better made movie.
The movies like M*A*S*H and Close Encounters are rare examples of this phenomenon because with the bigger budget movies, there’s a lot more to like than just the suburban feel. It’s the lower budget movies of the sixties and seventies that can really hold me entranced by their locales because there is nothing else – good acting, writing, direction – to distract me from it. And that makes these movies, as bad or poorly made as they may be, just as important to me as any other movie. They didn’t go down in history for the story or direction or any other reason they may have hoped for but they matter nonetheless because, if nothing else, they document the time and place of their making. And, sometimes, that’s all you need.