The Travelling Executioner (1970) We are by far not the only blogger-critic-movie-buff who fondly remembers the 1970's as a breakthrough era for films.....
It's the decade when the most daring, iconoclastic, off-the-beaten track film creativity found its full flowering......
You could start to see it coming in the mid-1960's, when new directors with startling visions began to take on stories and subject matter unheard of in the Hollywood studio system factories of 40's and 50's.
And these new bursts of fresh groundbreaking cinema came simultaneously with the collapse of the old moguls' studios and the rise of the Baby Boomer "Film Brat" talents like Coppola, Bogdonovich, Spielberg, DePalma and Scorcese.....
Some of the most exciting times for filmmaking were just getting started......and sadly, when we look back on some of the crazily quirky, downright oddball movies made in this era, we can't ever picture them ever getting made today.....or ever finding the light of a projector bulb anywhere.
Not when the vital arteries of today's film industry are clogged with the toxic landfill of superhero and franchise movies.
If we're going to kick off posts on the 1970's we figured we might as well start off with one of the most long forgotten, hard-to-find films that exemplified 70's cinema....
Though its director Jack Smight was a seasoned veteran helmsman of 50's TV and 60' films, the script for "The Travelling Executioner" came from Garrie Bateson, a young screenwriting student who was all of 22 when the film premiered in 1970.
And what a script this kid delivered......and the rapidly crumbling MGM studio, who at this point would try anything as long as didn't cost much, gave it a greenlight.
Set in the rural backwashes of the 1918 deep South, the film's centerpiece is Jonas Candide, played by Stacy Keach as if he'd found the plum role of lifetime. A loquacious huckster with the gift of gab, Jonas travels from prison to prison with "Old Reliable", his portable electric chair. At $100 a head, Jonas fires up Old Reliable and depopulates Death Row inmates with cheerful confidence.
Lucky for the condemned men, Jonas also employs his silver tongue to soothe his terrified 'clients' with a wondrous monologue about the 'fields of Ambrosia' awaiting them on the other side of death, a heavenly land of ripe fruit trees and young naked women. (Keach's delivery of this speech at the start of the film is worth the price of admission alone and young actors everywhere would do well to study both the dialogue and Keach's masterful rendition of it.)
But than blinding infatuation hits Jonas hard when he goes head over heals for the very next murderer due to sizzle in his hot seat, the beautiful alluring German immigrant Gundred Herzallerlieb (a stunning Marianna Hill). And thus begins the undoing of Jonas Candide, as he undertakes a series of desperate measures, both comedic and bizarre, to save Gundred from her...uh...high wattage appointment.......leading to a startlingly spectacular conclusion.
There's so much to savor here, starting with the rambunctious, bouncy Jerry Goldsmith score and a who's who of the era's best character actors - Graham Jarvis,, M. Emmet Walsh, Ford Rainy, Logan Ramsay, Val Avery, Stefan Gierasch, Charles Tyner, William Mims and James Sloyan.
Not quite an earth-shaking cinematic experience but the then that's the beauty of 1970's films.....they didn't have to be. Audiences then didn't require bloated 200 million dollar budgeted CGI-stuffed franchise films to feel entertained.
All we needed then were simply great stories and great characters brought to life by gifted directors and actors. And we didn't care if the films only cost a million or less to produce. As long as we had a good time.
And that, boys and girls, explains why we still hold the 70's as kind of a golden age for the kind of movies you'd never see today.....and may not ever see the likes of again.
That's why we say track down "The Travelling Executioner" wherever you can find it. We found it a literally electrifying 4 star(****) gem.....and not a bad place to start for the 70's Age Of Quirk.
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