Robert Carradine Movies

In one of John Wayne's more interesting late Westerns, "The Duke" plays Will Anderson, a crusty veteran cattleman preparing a 400-mile drive to get a herd of steers to market. Shortly before the trip is scheduled to begin, Will's crew quits when they get word of a nearby gold strike. With little time and few alternatives, Will recruits eleven boys, ages nine through 13, and teaches them the basics of herding cattle and riding the range. Bruce Dern plays a memorably foul villain and cattle rustler named Long Hair, while Roscoe Lee Browne portrays Jebediah, the cattle drive cook, and Colleen Dewhurst is Kate, a madam. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

"You don't make up for your sins in church; you do it in the streets; you do it at home. The rest is bulls--t, and you know it." Returning to the autobiographical milieu of his 1968 debut Who's That Knocking at My Door? for his third feature, Martin Scorsese examined the daily struggles of a wannabe hood to keep his morals straight on the streets of Little Italy. Driven equally by his wish to become a respectable gangster like his uncle (Cesare Danova) and his desire to live his life like St. Francis, Charlie (Harvey Keitel) takes on his energetically unhinged friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) as his own personal penance, intervening to get Johnny Boy to pay off a debt to the local loan shark Michael (Richard Romanus). Despite his promises to his epileptic girlfriend Teresa (Amy Robinson) that they will move out of Little Italy once he strengthens his position in his uncle's world, Charlie's involvement with Johnny Boy further ensnares him in the neighborhood. When Johnny Boy decides to mouth off to Michael rather than pay him, Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Teresa try to flee Michael's murderous anger (and an assassin played by Scorsese), forcing Charlie to realize that the rules of the streets do not mesh with absolution. Whereas fellow "film school generation" director Francis Ford Coppola transformed the Hollywood gangster movie into metaphorical epics about the Mafia and capitalism in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Scorsese revised the genre in the opposite direction, focusing on the gritty minutiae of daily life and drawing from personal memory. Combining documentary-style realism (even though most of the film was shot in L.A.); kinetic editing and camera movement; and expressionistic lighting, angles, and film speed, Scorsese presents an intimate picture of the trivial incidents and latent violence of Charlie's and Johnny Boy's world, naturalistically unfolding their experiences rather than simply explaining what motivates them. They lead a claustrophobic, petty existence that Scorsese and screenwriter Mardik Martin witnessed growing up in Little Italy, complete with a soundtrack of hit songs like "Be My Baby" and "Jumping Jack Flash" that had poured out of neighborhood radios. Mean Streets opened at the New York Film Festival to excellent notices and played strongly in New York but failed to duplicate that level of business elsewhere. Even so, Mean Streets established Scorsese and De Niro as formidable young talents and marked the beginning of a long-running and fertile collaboration that continued in such films as Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), and Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese's exceptional grasp of the texture of day-to-day life, the rhythm and cadences of street talk, and cinema's visual and aural possibilities makes Mean Streets one of the pivotal films of the 1970s, as well as of Scorsese's career, and an influence on such future filmmakers as Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino, among many others. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Aloha, Bobby & Rose was conceived and promoted as a contemporary Bonnie and Clyde. Paul LeMat plays Bobby, an auto mechanic, while Diane Hull is Rose, a car-wash jockey; the two fall in love and dream of heading off to Hawaii, hence the title. Responsible for an accidental homicide, Bobby and Rose are then forced to take it on the lam. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Paul Bartel rips off his own Death Race 2000 in this mindless car-crash saga, containing more twisted metal than a bombed-out steel mill. The nominal storyline concerns an illegal auto race from Los Angeles to New York that promises the winner 100,000 dollars. David Carradine is Coy "Cannonball" Buckman, the race leader who drags his girlfriend, Linda (Veronica Hamel), along for the ride. Cade Redman (Bill McKinney) tools around in a loud red Trans Am, while Cannonball's nemesis barrels along in a big, black Plymouth, trying to outsmart Cannonball at every turn and exit ramp. The pile-ups keep building, and the cameos (Roger Corman, Martin Scorsese, Sylvester Stallone, Joe Dante, Paul Bartel) keep coming, but Cannonball must make it to New York to collect his winnings. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Dutch cult director Rene Daalder's fascinating debut was this unfairly neglected and richly idea-laden political allegory set in an American high school. Derrel Maury stars as David, a new student at Central High School who is shocked at the degree of control wielded by several preppie thugs who run the school with an iron fist. Though accepted into this circle given his connections to one of its members, Mark (Andrew Stevens), David loses favor with Mark's friends when he also begins spending time with the school's social outcasts. The worst is still to come, however, when David threatens the pecking order by foiling the thugs' attempted gang rape of a female student and has his leg crushed for his efforts. Eventually, the crippled David politicizes the underclass to fight their oppressors, and all three are killed by falling (from political power, the analogy clearly suggests). Daalder then takes the film in a different direction, with the newly liberated student body becoming an oppressive force themselves, and David enraged to the point of mass murder, deciding to wipe out the entire school. Stirred to action, it is up to the formerly apolitical Mark and Teresa to stop him. Daalder shrinks the entire political spectrum into the crucible of what seems on the surface to be a standard exploitation film. There are representatives of the extreme left, extreme right, disaffected center, intellectual bourgeoisie, and so forth, and all are nicely sketched without sacrificing the film's visceral appeal. Beyond the portraits, however, Daalder also skillfully shows the transitions which occur in many political movements, notably those which start as populist and develop into oppressively hierarchical castes. Perhaps disheartened by the failure of Massacre at Central High at the box office, Daalder did not direct again for nearly two decades, but returned with two more conceptually challenging (if equally unsuccessful) genre films, Hysteria and Habitat, in the mid-'90s. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi

Hoping to break out of the boring lives they knew in L.A., a group of young people make the journey to Alaska to work on the oil pipeline that is being built. However, they soon start getting into trouble. Life on the oil pipelines is difficult, violent, and expensive, and soon these city kids turn to robbery to make ends meet and to keep the thrills coming. The movie is most notable in that it stars a large number of famous actors' children: Desi Arnaz, Jr. (son of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz), Robert Carradine (one of John Carradine's many actor sons), Melanie Griffith (daughter of Tippi Hedren) and others. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Hal Ashby's 1978 melodrama examines the impact of the Vietnam War on the "war at home" among the men who fought it and the women in their lives. Left alone in Los Angeles when her gung-ho Marine husband Bob (Bruce Dern) heads to Vietnam in 1968, proper wife Sally Hyde (Jane Fonda) decides to volunteer at the V.A. hospital where her new friend Vi (Penelope Milford) works. There she meets Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a former high-school classmate and Marine who has returned from 'Nam a bitter paraplegic. As their relationship grows, Sally sees the effect of the war on the soldiers after they come back, inspiring her to rethink her priorities; Luke's spirits begin to lift, and a hospital tragedy helps focus his anger toward meaningful protest. After a Hong Kong visit with her increasingly withdrawn husband, Sally finds a love and companionship with Luke that she had never known with her husband. Once Bob comes home with his own injury, however, the three must find a way to deal with a changing world and with a system that betrayed the men fighting for it. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Sue Anderson heads the cast of the made-for-TV The Survival of Dana. Dana Lee (Anderson) is a basically decent high school girl who suffers severe culture shock when her family moves to another town. A victim of oppressive peer pressure, Dana begins hanging around the "wrong crowd." Despite the affluence of their parents, these aimless kids get their kicks out of petty crime-and before long, there's nothing petty about their activities. Marion Ross, Robert Carradine Talia Balsam and Frederic Forrest costar in The Survival of Dana, which debuted May 29, 1979. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Samuel Fuller's valedictory war picture, The Big Red One follows the First Infantry Division from Africa to Europe during the years 1942 through 1945. Lee Marvin portrays the division sergeant; he's tough and experienced, to be sure, but he takes on his job with cool professionalism rather than Hollywood bravado. Based on Fuller's own experiences, the film is a loosely constructed series of anecdotes. Among them are an insane asylum under bombardment while the inmates applaud and a climactic vignette in which a very young concentration camp internee dies while a friendly soldier plays piggy-back with the boy. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this exciting Gold Rush adventure, the trials, tribulations and joys experienced by sourdoughs in the Canadian Yukon are chronicled. The tale is taken from a Jack London story. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Students at a college with obviously low graduation requirements spend their time and energy playing a game that involves mock assassinations with rubber-tipped darts fired from plastic guns. If you are shot, you are assassinated and out of the game and whoever remains alone at the end wins. When Gersh (Bruce Abbott), the odds-on favorite is about to do one of his opponents in, the hapless victim drops his dart gun, it misfires, and bonks a dart at Gersh - who is pushed over the edge, pulls out a real gun and kills his unfortunate opponent. Gersh drags the body to his room and stuffs it in his closet. Having killed once, the blood-thirsty student goes on a rampage, killing as many of these players as he can and stuffing them all in his closet. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi