The Sporting Club (1971) If this titles sounds familiar to BQ visitors, that's because we reviewed the Thomas McGuane book it's based on earlier this year......(see our 7/13/20 post.)
We'd finished that review with a plea to anyone who could help us track down the elusive, barely seen 1971 film version........which we've been chasing after for 49 years.
Yesterday left us stunned when we discovered someone had uploaded an impossible-to-find VHS copy on to YouTube.......which we watched immediately before anyone takes it down.......
We'd categorize this film along side the group of 'Fractured America' movies that arrived in the early 70's as a response to the corrosive, tumultuous and divisive catastrophes of 1968.....(.the year which previously held the record as the worst year in American history until 2020 far eclipsed it in misery, dysfunction and death
Vietnam, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, urban riots, the Chicago police rampage at the Democratic convention and the ascendance of Richard Nixon combined to paint a horrifying portrait of America......a country in which the rich, the powerful, the corrupt and the bigoted solidified their conquest and domination over the young generation of baby boomers (as well as all disenfranchised minorities.....)
"The Sporting Club" fits perfectly among the films that arrived to bitterly decry and lampoon this grotesque state of affairs in the country.........especially in its withering takedown of a huge group of entitled, wealthy members of an exclusive hunting and fishing club, enjoying their privileged revels in the vast acreage of backwoods Michigan
The youngest of this group, Verner Stanton (Robert Fields) self-disgusted to be a part of them, has evolved into a cynical, dissolute nihilist and he's reached the brink of madness in his determination to destroy the Sporting Club and its members.
Stanton's pretty fiance (Margaret Blye) and his lifelong best friend James Quinn (Nicholas Coster)can only stand back and watch with disbelief at the erupting chaos Vernor brings down the club.
His agent of destruction is the lowlife, violence prone goon Earl Olive (a superb Jack Warden), who Stanton arranges to become the new manager of the club. After Stanton deliberately enrages Olive by humiliating him in a mock pistol duel, Olive responds by literally waging explosive war on the club........with plenty of dynamite.
The hapless club members and their wives, all depicted as pompous buffoons, try to organize themselves into a battle-worthy army, but they're overwhelmingly outmatched by the wily thug Olive, who's like a Viet Cong terrorist confounding the more powerful U.S. army.
And in the film's (and book's) final outrageous joke, the club's unearthing of their ancestors' buried time capsule, sends them into a sexual frenzy when they realize the club's original founders were just as immoral and depraved as they are.
We wish we could report that all these raucous events are handled with a deft, slyly subtle touch......(something akin to Robert Altman's "M.A.S.H." or mabe even early Brian DePalma)
Sorry, but no. Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. and director Larry Peerce are hardly subtle satirists here. Their blunt, sledgehammer approach does the story no favors.
Devoid of Thomas McGuane's densely constructed prose, Semple's script plays out like a skimpy, underwritten synopsis of the book. And Peerce's direction is mostly blunt, and crudely direct, like a made-for-TV horror film that's missing the horror.......(unless you count the scene where Olive captures one of the club members to tar and feather him.)
(It's typical of these filmmakers that McGuane's far more realistic, melancholic ending is tossed out and replaced with a burst of bloody violence that these guys thought would end the film on an ironic exclamation point.)
The only time the film comes close to replicating the book's quirky anarchic spirit is the moment when the imperious club members first encounter the earthy, course and vaguely threatening Earl Olive. Jack Warden's brilliant as he spins mad fishing tales while the uppercrusters view him with a mixture of amusement , fascination and unspoken contempt.
Nevertheless, we're still very appreciative that the film's finally seen the light of day again.......though now that at long last we've seen it, we'd recommend it to for hardcore movie buffs, especially those of you who, like us, treasure these one-of-a-kind oddities from the 60's and 70's.
If you're willing to take a chance on it, you'll discover a 2 & 1/2 star (**1/2) depiction of America's Nixonian malaise and the lingering damage wreaked by the convulsions of 1968.
We can only imagine the similar films we'll get after the merciful demise the Trumpian reign of destructive pandemonium.
The film only manages to replicate the book's overly literate
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