BONUS BLOG -- 1972: THE THING WITH TWO HEADS

What’s it about?

Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.

As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.




Is it any good?

This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.

I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).




THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.

But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.




A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)

There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.



And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:

BONUS BLOG -- 1968: WILD IN THE STREETS

What’s it about?

California senatorial candidate Hal Holbrook hatches a plan to pad his support in the electorate by getting the voting age lowered from 21 to 18. In order to get the measure passed before the election, he enlists the help of a major pop star named Max Frost -- a young runaway who commands Beatle-like adoration from millions of American teenagers. But the plan gets out of hand when Max Frost uses the occasion to start a grass roots movement to drop the voting age down to 14 instead.

With mobilized teenagers threatening violence across the country, a compromise is struck to give the vote to fifteen year-olds. But the compromise only further encourages the newly enfranchised youth of America, as they now also demand the right to run for political office -- not excluding the presidency. To pass the amendment, they spike the Washington water supply with gallons of LSD and cajole a two-thirds majority out of a turned-on, mind-blown, psyched-out Congress. The next order of business, of course, is to install Max Frost as president -- and soon he is shipping everyone over 35 to be neutralized at LSD therapy camps.



Is it any good?

I watched this flick on YouTube, so the bad news I don’t have any screen captures. But the good news is that you can watch it too if you want to! And although this is not exactly the greatest movie in the world, it is pretty interesting as a cultural artifact of the 1960s.

Old as I am, I wasn’t around for the sixties, so I have no idea how accurate WILD IN THE STREETS is about the culture and counterculture of the times. My guess is that it’s not very accurate at all since it paints with pretty broad strokes. (Max Frost’s mother -- a stand-in for the older generation as a whole -- is played with very little subtlety by Shelley Winters, if that tells you anything.) But parts of it ring true. For one thing, it’s hard to deny that the laws at the time which allowed 18 year-olds to be drafted to fight in Vietnam but not to vote were certainly unfair. And it’s this unfairness coupled with the rapidly expanding population of young people (who purportedly outnumbered adults at the time) that gives the movie the grain of reality under its layers of escalating silliness.

The cast is also pretty impressive for a relatively low budget picture. Besides Hal Holbrook and Shelley Winters, it features Ed Begley, a young Richard Pryor, a young Larry Bishop, and a handful of media types like Dick Clark in cameos. It was eventually nominated for an Academy Award for film editing -- presumably thanks to a few flashy split-screen montages with bright color washes and that kind of thing. (They really are pretty neat.) And the soundtrack produced a bona fide hit record called “The Shape of Things to Come”, though I’m not sure if the song was written for the movie specifically or if they just recorded a cover of it. The movie, by the way, is not exactly a musical, but there are several full songs since the main character is supposed to be a rock star. In any event, there’s a lot of neat stuff going on in the movie, even apart from the characters and story.



About that story -- it’s not terribly believable. It is a little terrifying to imagine what would have happened if the Beatles had started inciting young people to demonstrate en masse for some cause, but regardless of the numbers involved I cannot imagine any politician actually agreeing to lower the voting age to 15. The bit where the kids use LSD-spiked water to get amendments passed so they can run for office is even more off-the-wall. But the movie obviously needs to get to that point somehow, or else it wouldn’t have a reason for existence. So, implausible as it all is, it’s for a good cause.

Most of the movie could be taken as straight-up wish fulfillment for disillusioned young people. The kids steamroll the adults at every turn simply thanks to their superior numbers and grooviness. But one disappointing thing is that the teenagers don’t seem to have any objective except a pure power grab. Other than not wanting old people to run the show anymore, they don’t really have any clear platform -- yet dumping the old regime seems to be by itself a good enough reason for all the young people in the country to vote as a massive single-minded bloc. As president, Max Frost is most concerned with neutralizing the old people -- that is, anyone over 30 -- so that they’ll never gain power again. The main gear in this machine is to ship anybody over 35 off to a camp where they are forced to drink LSD-laced water so they do nothing all day except wander around in blue robes. Besides this, the only other goal of the government seems to be to establish a hedonist paradise for young people and to get rid of anything that is ungroovy (like a foreign policy).



That’s one half of the story anyway -- the half you might see if you were a young person sufficiently disgusted with the reigning establishment. The other half is a kind of indictment of the hypocrisy of old folks who worship some aspects of youth (like beauty and vitality) but who simultaneously don’t take young people themselves seriously. WILD IN THE STREETS is not really a cautionary tale since the events it depicts are so extreme and unlikely. But it does have a sort of cautionary message about attitudes towards youth. At its not-so-hidden center, the movie advocates a very traditional kind of society -- one where experienced adults are in charge and where young people pass through a kind of regulated wild period on the way to maturity. Permissive adults and adults who inappropriately seek to prolong their youth are the real bad guys here since they are the adults who allow the situation to get out of hand.

But, to be honest, it takes some digging to get down to that message. Rather than clearly impart any single message, WILD IN THE STREETS seems as though it would much rather have its cake (indulge in rabble-rousing youthful rebellion) and eat it too (condemn the people who allow such things to happen). Ultimately I’d say this one is more “interesting” than “good”, but it’s far from a bad movie. If it has any flaws, it’s probably that it cares too much about the mechanics of how this might actually happen and not enough about its characters.

BONUS BLOG -- 1962: PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!

What’s it about?

Ray Milland packs his wife and two teenaged children into the family camper and sets off early in the morning for a fishing trip. A few hours into the mountains around Los Angeles, the family suddenly sees a bright flash behind them. When they stop to look, an enormous mushroom cloud is spreading over the city. The family at first turns back towards Los Angeles, but soon Milland begins to have his doubts about this course of action. As more and more panicked people pour out of the city towards the mountains, they first seek out a grocery store and hardware store in a small town for supplies, and then head off into the wilderness.

All does not go smoothly, however. A misunderstanding in the hardware store ends with Milland pulling a gun on the proprietor and making off with a stash of goods without paying for them. Later, another confrontation on the highway escalates until son Frankie Avalon wounds a man with a shotgun blast. Even after arriving at the secluded fishing camp, the family finds they’ve been followed by both the hardware store owner and the hoods they shot at on the road. With no law for miles, the family finds itself harassed with no choice but to fight back with deadly force. But when one of them is wounded as well, they must risk leaving the relative solitude of the wilderness and venture back to the cities again for medical treatment.




Is it any good?

I don’t know an awful lot about Ray Milland, but he was a well respected actor in the 1940s (even winning an Academy Award for THE LOST WEEKEND) who ended up acting in a lot of low budget sci-fi and horror movies in the 1960s and 1970s. Milland once reportedly said that he didn’t particularly enjoy acting, and he considered it simply a way to pay the bills. In light of that, it’s tempting to look at his transition from romantic leading man to B-movie icon as the career move of a cynical or apathetic actor. But in addition to starring in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!, Milland also directed the picture. And he once said that the movie he was most proud of besides THE LOST WEEKEND was the Roger Corman cheap and quick sci-fi thriller X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963). So regardless of what motives were primarily behind the switch to genre pictures, he clearly had some interest in sci-fi above and beyond collecting a paycheck.

It’s hard to tell exactly where PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! wants the sympathies of the audience to be. As law and order break down around him, Ray Milland’s character pretty quickly crosses the line from law-abiding citizen to single-minded desperado doing whatever he must to protect his family. He holds up a hardware store, causes a multi-car pile-up on the highway, almost runs down a group of men trying to defend their town, and ultimately ends up blowing away two unarmed no-goodniks with a shotgun. Less egregiously, he also refuses to trust anybody outside of his family -- going so far as to turn away an abused girl looking for help before his son points out how heartless he’s being. Presumably we’re meant to think that Milland is doing what he has to do to protect his family, but that his single-minded objective obscures his judgment from time to time.




PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! doesn’t have much interest in the nuclear war other than as a vehicle for creating the lawless situation that Milland and his family must survive. There is no attendant Soviet invasion and no secondary effects from the nuclear blast beyond the destruction of Los Angeles and several other cities -- no fallout, no radiation sickness, no hint that this is anything except a temporary disruption of normalcy. The movie is surprisingly bleak in places, and it’s pretty surprising to see the “good guys” so willing to level shotguns at everybody they meet. Even the idea that Ray Milland would put a gun in Frankie Avalon’s hands and tell him to blow a guy away if he makes a wrong move is kind of crazy.

On the other hand, the dialogue and story are not that deep. The mother particularly gets the bad end of the script -- she spends much of the beginning of the movie as a kind of ineffectual conscience before her big conversion when she gets a few rounds off at the hoodlums trying to rape her daughter. Speaking of hoodlums, kids get a bum rap in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! too. Even Frankie Avalon is depicted as far too trigger happy -- he enjoys toting around a gun too much and Ray Milland seems to think he is teetering on the verge of running wild like the hoodlums who terrorize them. Add to this the fact that the attempted rape is disturbingly scored with hep jazz music, and it starts to seem like part of this movie’s agenda is a “get off my lawn” message from a cranky old man.