John Hillerman Movies
Natty, mellifluous character actor John Hillerman may have spoken on screen with a pure Mayfair accent, but he hailed from Denison, Texas. Hillerman first gained notice for his fleeting appearances in the films of Peter Bogdanovich: The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up Doc (1973), At Long Last Love (1975). He was also a semi-regular for director Mel Brooks, prominently cast in Blazing Saddles (1975) and History of the World, Part I (1981). A veteran of dozens of television series, John Hillerman was cast as the insufferable criminologist Simon Brimmer on Ellery Queen (1975), the star's director (and ex-husband) in The Betty White Show (1975), and most memorably as the ultra-correct Jonathan Quayle Higgins II, major domo to never-seen mystery writer Robin Masters, on Magnum PI (1980-88). ~ 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
- Starring:
- Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, (more)
- 1974
Kojak (Telly Savalas) makes it his personal mission to help little David Hecht (Lee H. Montgomery) find his missing father Simon (Joshua Bryant). What the viewer knows (but Kojak doesn't, at least not at first) is that Simon is being held by a group intending to use him as a decoy to locate a thief who has absconded to Brazil with $25 million--and then kill Simon when his usefulness is at an end. A pre-Magnum P.I. John Hillerman is prominently featured in this final episode of Kojak's first season. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- 1973
- PG
Bud Yorkin directed this middling comedy, written by Walter Hill from a novel by Terrence Lore Smith. Ryan O'Neal plays a computer expert named Webster, who alleviates on-the-job doldrums by moonlighting as a successful jewel thief. Webster invites himself to upscale soirees, where he cases out the location and proceeds with his heists. During his adventures, he meets up with Laura (Jacqueline Bisset), a high society woman who teams up with Webster to assist on his heists. Gradually the two fall in love. However, it's not all easy going, since an insurance detective (Warren Oates) suspects that Webster is the jewel thief but he has no proof ... yet. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ryan O'Neal, Jacqueline Bisset, (more)
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
- Starring:
- Ryan O'Neal, Tatum O'Neal, (more)
"Who are you?" the dwarf Mordecai (Billy Curtis) asks Clint Eastwood's Stranger at the end of Eastwood's 1973 western High Plains Drifter. "You know," he replies, before vanishing into the desert heat waves near California's Mono Lake. Adapting the amorally enigmatic and violent Man With No Name persona from his films with Sergio Leone, Eastwood's second film as director begins as his drifter emerges from that heat haze and rides into the odd lakefront settlement of Lago. Lago's residents are not particularly friendly, but once the Stranger shows his skills as a gunfighter, they beg him to defend them against a group of outlaws (led by Eastwood regular Geoffrey Lewis) who have a score to settle with the town. He agrees to train them in self-defense, but Mordecai and innkeeper's wife Sarah Belding (Verna Bloom) soon suspect that the Stranger has another, more personal agenda. By the time the Stranger makes the corrupt community paint their town red and re-name it "Hell," it is clear that he is not just another gunslinger. With its fragmented flashbacks and bizarre, austere locations, High Plains Drifter's stylistic eccentricity lends an air of unsettling eeriness to its revenge story, adding an uncanny slant to Eastwood's antiheroic westerner. Seminal western hero John Wayne was so offended by Eastwood's harshly revisionist view of a frontier town that he wrote to Eastwood, objecting that this was not what the spirit of the West was all about. Eastwood's audience, however, was not so put off, and an exhibitors' poll named Eastwood a top box-office draw for 1973. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, (more)
- 1973
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
- Starring:
- Jean-Louis Trintignant, Ann-Margret, (more)
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
- Starring:
- Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, (more)
- 1972
- R
Blake Edwards directed this murder mystery set against the backdrop of a busy metropolitan hospital. Dr. Peter Carey (James Coburn) is a pathologist who has signed on to work with Dr. J.D. Randall (Dan O'Herlihy) at a prominent hospital in Boston. When Randall's daughter Karen (Melissa Torme-March) dies after a botched abortion, another member of the hospital staff, David Tao (James Hong), is charged with her murder. Carey is convinced that Tao is innocent and sets out to prove his point. He also finds time for romance with beautiful Bostonian Georgia Hightower (Jennifer O'Neill). The Carey Treatment features Pat Hingle as police detective Peterson; Michael Crichton contributed to the screenplay. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- James Coburn, Jennifer O'Neill, (more)
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
- Starring:
- Charlton Heston, Yvette Mimieux, (more)
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
- Starring:
- Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, (more)
- 1971
In this comedy-drama, President Lincoln temporarily abandons his inaugural tour to visit a little girl who wrote him a letter asking him to grow a beard. ~ Sandra Brennan, 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
- Starring:
- Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, (more)
- 1971
Although the actors and character names aren't the same, Sweet Rachel was the pilot film for the TV series Sixth Sense. Alex Dreier plays a paranormal researcher whose patient, Stefanie Powers, suffers from disturbing ESP flashes. The source of these ghoulish images is a psychic murderer, who uses mind control to kill his female victims. Sutton Roley has directed tight, fascinating TV-movie horrors in the past; this isn't one of them. When Sweet, Sweet, Rachel became Sixth Sense, Alex Dreier was replaced by the younger, handsomer Gary Collins (A TV announcer-turned-actor replaced by an actor-turned-announcer. The mind boggles). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
