John Hillerman Movies

In Lawman, Burt Lancaster is Jered Maddox, a dedicated marshal with an inflexible adherence to upholding the law at all costs. Riding into a nearby town to pick up a group of local carousers who, during a drunken spree, killed an old man, Maddox meets up with Vincent Bronson (Lee J. Cobb). Bronson is the local town boss, and Maddox discovers that the men he is looking for work for him. Unlike most western heavies, Maddox, although he is powerful and unscrupulous, abhors violence. But violence is something Maddox cultivates. A major confrontation between the reluctant Bronson and the intransigent Maddox builds -- particularly when Maddox enlists the help of weak-willed local sheriff Cotton Ryan (Robert Ryan). ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide

Produced by Hollywood iconoclast BBS Productions, film critic-turned-director Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film pays homage to Hollywood's classical age as it chronicles generational rites of passage in Anarene, a fictional one-horse Texas town. In 1951, high school seniors Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges) play football, go to the movies at the Royal Theater, hang out at the pool hall owned by local elder statesman Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson), and lust after rich tease Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd in her film debut). As the year passes, Sonny learns about the pitfalls and compromises of adulthood through an affair with his coach's wife Ruth (Cloris Leachman) and a thwarted elopement with Jacy after she dumps Duane. Following two tragic deaths, and with Duane gone to Korea and Jacy packed off to college in Dallas, Sonny is left behind in Anarene, wise enough to absorb the life lessons of Sam the Lion and Jacy's mother Lois (Ellen Burstyn). He is determined to honor Sam's legacy as the town's conscience, despite a telling sign of incipient communal disintegration: the closing of the Royal Theater after a final showing of Howard Hawks's Red River. Paying tribute to classical Hollywood directors like Hawks and John Ford, Bogdanovich used old-time cinematographer Robert Surtees and shot The Last Picture Show in crisp black-and-white, with a restrained style devoid of the kind of "new wave" techniques (jump cuts, zooms, and jittery hand-held camerawork) used by such contemporaries as Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, and Martin Scorsese. As in such Ford films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Bogdanovich relies on careful visual composition in deep focus to help communicate the regret over the passing of an era. Hailed as one of the best films by a young director since Citizen Kane (1941), The Last Picture Show premiered at the New York Film Festival and went on to become a hit. It was also nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay for Larry McMurtry's and Bogdanovich's adaptation of McMurtry's novel. John Ford stalwart Johnson won Supporting Actor and Leachman won Supporting Actress, beating out their cohorts Bridges and Burstyn. For an audience steeped in movie history and caught up in the chaotic 1971 present, The Last Picture Show presented a nostalgic look backward that was not so much an escape from the present as a coming to terms with what the present had lost. Its 1990 sequel Texasville, in which Bridges and Shepherd played later incarnations of their original characters, was not as successful. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

With Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) as his blueprint, Peter Bogdanovich resurrected and payed homage to 1930s screwball comedy in What's Up, Doc? (1972). When wacky co-ed Judy Maxwell (Barbra Streisand, in the Katharine Hepburn part) spies nebbishy musicologist Howard Bannister (Ryan O'Neal in bespectacled Cary Grant mode) in a San Francisco hotel lobby, she decides that Howard and his precious igneous rocks are right up her alley. Too bad Howard already has a fiancée, the propriety-fixated Eunice (Madeline Kahn in her film debut). Using all her arcane knowledge from brief stays at numerous colleges, Judy tries to charm her way to a $20,000 grant for Howard, and Howard himself, at a banquet with grantor Frederick Larrabee (Austin Pendleton). Things get even more complicated the next day when Judy's underwear-filled overnight bag gets mixed up with Howard's rock bag, which gets mixed up with Mrs. Van Hoskins' bag of jewels, which gets mixed up with Mr. Smith's bag of top secret government papers. All sides converge at Larrabee's mod townhouse and the chase begins. Retaining Hawks' machine-gun pace (as well as the sly pop culture referentiality of Billy Wilder), Bogdanovich and writers Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton updated the opposites-attract screwball convention for contemporary times. O'Neal gently parodied not only Grant but also his own Love Story (1970) preppy, while Kahn represents stiff-wigged 1950s manners as opposed to Streisand's long-haired, pants-wearing free spirit. The happy ending, in which Cole Porter-belting youth wins out over old manners, found favor with audiences, as What's Up, Doc? became one of the most popular films of 1972, and the second hit in a row for Bogdanovich after 1971's The Last Picture Show. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

Sky Terror is the reissue title for Skyjacked, a 1972 MGM all-star adventure based on a novel by David Harper. Charlton Heston mans the controls of a Los Angeles-bound commercial airliner which is hijacked to Russia by an unknown miscreant. Even when the skyjacker, revealed to be passenger James Brolin, is subsequently subdued, the crew must contend with a hidden time bomb. The film is graced with a who's who of MGM contractees past and present, including Yvette Mimieux, Walter Pidgeon and Mike Henry. A flashback sequence contains one of the first examples of an American film coming to grips with how rudely our Vietnam veterans were ignored upon returning home; alas, this compassion quickly degenerates into the odious "crazed Vietnam vet" cliche. Footnote: The first network showing of Skyjacked was boycotted by TV stations owned by the Storer Corporation, which had a hard and fast rule against screening any film concerning a hijacked plane. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The year is 1936. Orphaned Addie Loggins (Tatum O'Neal, in her film debut) is left in the care of unethical travelling Bible salesman Moses Pray (Ryan O'Neal, Tatum's dad), who may or may not be her father. En route to Addie's relatives, Moses learns that the 9-year-old is quite a handful: she smokes, cusses, and is almost as devious and manipulative as he is. They join forces as swindlers, working together so well that Addie is averse to breaking up the team -- which is one reason that she sabotages the romance between Moses and good-time gal Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn). Later, while attempting to square a $200 debt that Addie claims he owes her, Moses runs afoul of of a bootlegger (John Hillerman) and is nearly beaten to death by the criminal's twin-brother sheriff. Painfully pulling himself together, Moses gets Addie to her relatives, whereupon she adamantly refuses to leave his side. Photographed in black-and-white by Laszlo Kovacs, the film was made largely on location in Kansas and Missouri (an experience colorfully recalled by director Peter Bogdanovich in his 1972 book of essays Pieces of Time). 9-year-old Tatum O'Neal won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, beating out costar Kahn. Paper Moon later became a short-lived TV series, starring Ryan O'Neal lookalike Christopher Connelly and future Oscar winner Jodie Foster. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This French-produced thriller was shot entirely in English. Jean-Louis Tritignant stars as Lucien, a hit man who goes to Los Angeles to end the life of an important local mobster. The mobster's heirs, who hired Lucien, had already hired yet another hit man (Roy Scheider) to kill him. He speaks very little English, and the lifestyles and customs of Los Angelenos puzzle him completely. One of the films highlights is its use of many unusual decayed and shabby sites in the Los Angeles area, such as Venice Beach. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Previously filmed with Paul Muni in 1959, Gerald Green's novel The Last Angry Man was adapted for television by Green himself, who restored the original book's Depression-era setting in the process. Pat Hingle steps into the Muni role as crusty, temperamental Dr. Sam Abelman, who tends to the residents of a seedy Brooklyn tenement neighborhood. Refusing to treat his patients as victims of society, Sam practices his craft with a heady combination of common sense and tenderness. He is particularly interested in the welfare of a hostile teenager (Paul Jabara), whose violent temper may be attributable to a serious brain condition. Since this was the pilot for a proposed TV series, Dr. Abelman was not permitted to "die" in as spectacular a fashion as his counterpart in the 1959 film, but instead soldier on at fadeout time with the assistance of his daughters Sarah (Lynn Carlin) and Eunice (Tracy Bogart). This version of The Last Angry Man was broadcast by ABC on April 16, 1974. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Vulgar, crude, and occasionally scandalous in its racial humor, this hilarious bad-taste spoof of Westerns, co-written by Richard Pryor, features Cleavon Little as the first black sheriff of a stunned town scheduled for demolition by an encroaching railroad. Little and co-star Gene Wilder have great chemistry, and the delightful supporting cast includes Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens, and Madeline Kahn as a chanteuse modelled on Marlene Dietrich. As in Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), and High Anxiety (1977), director/writer Mel Brooks gives a burlesque spin to a classic Hollywood movie genre; in his own manic, Borscht Belt way, Brooks was a central player in revising classic genres in light of Seventies values and attitudes, an effort most often associated with such directors as Robert Altman and Peter Bogdanovich . Some of this film's sequences, notably a gaseous bean dinner around a campfire, have become comedy classics. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

During the Prohibition era, Walker (Burt Reynolds) and Kibby (Gene Hackman) run a liquor smuggling operation in Mexico; they team up with Claire (Liza Minnelli), a cabaret entertainer who has an "in" with several big-time nightclub owners. Complications ensue when both men fall in love with Claire, and she can't make up her mind between them. Escaping both the law and a murderous gang of rival crooks, the threesome set sail on a small boat called the "Lucky Lady." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

The Day of the Locust is anything but a cheerful, light look at Hollywood in the '30s. It recreates both the town as well as the filmmaking world around which much of the town revolved with devastating accuracy. The movie tells the twin tales of talentless wannabe actress Faye Greener (Karen Black) and Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland), a lovelorn accountant who couldn't care less about movies. Around this framework, a huge and intricate social network is tellingly revealed, until the film's gruesome and tragic ending. Not for those who prefer to hang onto their illusions about the glory days of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, based on the novel by Nathanael West, is a must-see for serious film buffs. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

The made-for-TV Invasion of Johnson County is based on a dark chapter in the history of Wyoming. As settlers pour in, a cartel of Wyoming cattle barons raise a private army to wipe the "interlopers" off the face of the Earth. Bostonian Bill Bixby teams with good ol' boy Bo Hopkins in warding off the villains. If the story for this TV movie strikes a familiar chord, it is because the same historical incident was used as the basis for Michael Cimino's 1980 megabomb Heaven's Gate. The principal differences: Heaven's Gate lasted three dreary hours, while Invasion of Johnson County zipped along at 100 rousing minutes; and while it didn't set fires in the ratings, at least Johnson County didn't destroy United Artists. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Audrey Rose is a "thinking man's" horror film, which in a way is unfortunate, since it tended to be ignored amidst the many spell-it-all-out scarefests of the late '70s. Marsha Mason and John Beck play Janice and Bill Templeton, a happily married couple, the parents of well-adjusted preteen Ivy (Susan Swift). Their family security is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious stranger, Elliot Hoover (Anthony Hopkins). At first mistaken for a potential child molester, Hoover explains that his obsessive interest in young Ivy is actually paternal. It is Hoover's contention that their daughter is the reincarnation of his own child, who died in a horrible accident. This information is dismissed out of hand-and then strange things begin happening. Directed by Robert Wise (who had previously helmed the psychological thriller The Haunting), Audrey Rose was adapted by co-producer Frank de Felitta from his own novel. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Perennial busybody Harriet Oleson (Katherine MacGregor) inaugurates a gossip column in the local Walnut Grove newspaper. With her usual sensitivity toward other people's feelings, she uses her column to malign a local farming family -- for no other reason than they are recent immigrants from Germany. Acting as the church's lay minister while Rev. Alden is away, Charles (Michael Landon) uses his sermon to teach Mrs. Oleson a lesson. Meanwhile, Charles' daughter Laura (Melissa Gilbert) and foster son, Albert (Matthew Laborteaux), decide to employ Harriet's journalistic methods to hoist her on her own petard. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide