The Seven Minutes (Russ Meyer, 1971)

Courtroom drama about an obscenity trial over a novel called The Seven Minutes. 

Russ Meyer thought courtroom dramas were dull so he livened it up but editing it down to short takes and making it fast-moving. It was still long at an hour and fifty-five minutes. It became a bit of a mystery as the defense attorney tries to find the true author of the novel.

I saw it on TV when I was in high school. We had cable but didn't have any pay channels. It may have been on the Canadian channel. I didn't know anything about it or Russ Meyer. I somehow noticed the editing. I remember being impressed by it, but the arguments against censorship seemed pretty standard.

Tom Selleck and John Carradine were the only actors I recognized. 

A prosecutor up for re-election sets out to prosecute a bookstore for selling a high brow sex novel. The defense is at a terrible disadvantage during the trial. I don't know how realistic this is. I read Howl of the Censor which was mostly a transcript of the obscenity trial of City Lights Books over the publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems. The judge had to tell courtroom observers not to laugh at prosecution witnesses and the prosecution struggled to make any points. The work had to be judged as a whole so he couldn't single out the dirty parts, he could raise doubts about the literary merit of the poem as a whole but couldn't raise doubts by pointing out the unintelligible parts, and that trial was in 1957.

The prosecutor and the defense attorney confront each other in the parking garage once the trial is over. The defense lawyer with his Volkswagen bug and the prosecutor in his big giant Chrysler Imperial. They each swear that they'll continue the fight for or against censorship. At least they were sincere.

The movie failed at the box office. Apparently, audiences expected something different from Russ Meyer. He went back to independent film after this.

Based on the novel by Irving Wallace.

It appears to be available only on Moveland.Tv.

The Magic Christian (1969) Peter Sellers, Ringo Starr

Just awful. Supposed to be a satire about greed, I guess. Billionaire Peter Sellers adopts homeless Ringo Starr and, something. A series of random gags. They bribe people and make them do "funny" things or get reactions from them. They buy a painting at auction for thirty thousand pounds then cut out the nose with a pair of scissors. At the auction, people bid in what were supposed to be funny ways.

Let's see. They hunt quail using anti-aircraft guns. They open a small grocery store, have a grand opening sale, everything so cheap that shoppers quickly clear the place out and the place shuts down. Peter Sellers buys a hotdog from a vendor out the window of a passenger train. He pays with a five pound note. The vendor says he can't make change for it and runs alongside the train as it moves out trying to get a smaller bill. I don't know what the point of that was since the guy was the opposite of greedy.

Laurence Harvey appears on stage as Hamlet and starts doing a strip tease in the middle of his soliloquy. 

Includes documentary footage of a Vietnamese man being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese officer. I'm sure they thought that would get a big laugh, although, in fairness, Woody Allen used the same image in Stardust Memories.

On an ocean liner called The Magic Christian, passengers watch a movie about a transracial head transplant. Yul Brenner appears as a female impersonator, Christopher Lee as a waiter who turns out to be a vampire. A man in a gorilla suit attacks the captain.

Not one funny thing. But I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and was shocked that a few critics liked it.

I remember seeing short bits of this thing on TV in the '70's. I was a kid. My older brother laughed mirthlessly at it. Maybe it was because he liked Ringo, or maybe he was trying to show he understood the joke even if it wasn't funny. I thought I was too unsophisticated to see the humor.

With John Cleese and Graham Chapman. Roman Polanski's in the credits but I didn't spot him. I probably stopped paying much attention by then. 

Free on Zoneify, Classico, Momentu and Movieland.Tv. You have to pay to see it on Amazon Prime or Apple TV.

Try and Get Me aka The Sound of Fury (Cy Endfield,1950)

Inspired by actual events. There was a kidnapping and murder in California in 1933 which ended with a lynch mob murdering the accused killers. The victim in the kidnapping was a friend of former child star Jackie Coogan who participated in the lynching. 

Out of work and down on his luck with a child and a pregnant wife, normally law-abiding husband (Frank Lovejoy) becomes Lloyd Bridges' getaway driver on a series of robberies.

Lloyd Bridges jumps into a really nice convertible with a wealthy youth. He abducts him, murders him while Lovejoy pleads for the rich guy's life. They demand a ransom from the victim's father.

Reportedly, Martin Scorsese owned the only known 35mm print left of this movie. He allowed it to be used to restore the film.

You feel for the poor guy desperate for income, then distraught about being involved in a murder. A local newspaper columnist (Richard Carlson) innocently whips the community into a murderous rage. A lot of guilt-stricken people in this thing.

I watched it the day after Trump pardoned members of the mob who attacked the capitol intent on lynching Mike Pence. 

Directed by Cy Endfield a year before he headed for England to escape the blacklist. He went on to direct Zulu among other things. 

You know who should have gotten a supporting role? Jackie Coogan.

Free on Movieland.Tv, Local Now and Crime and Mystery. Available for $3.99 on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

Sudden Terror aka Eyewitness (UK 1970) Mark Lester, Susan George

Filmed in Malta but I'm not sure if it was set there. A boy-who-cried-wolf story. Mark Lester as Ziggy. He has an over-active imagination. His sister (Susan George) and his grandfather (Lionel Jeffries) don't believe him when he sees a couple of cops assassinate a visiting head of state. The killers see him, too, and are trying to find him so they can murder him.

The kid's grandfather is one of those retired British Army officers who dresses for dinner in his ridiculous dress uniform. Do guys like that exist? Still, I liked it when he karate kicks a cop down the stairs and shoots him with his own gun. I don't know why I like seeing the elderly kill people. 

So many innocent by-standers die in this thing, including one child, it would have been less of a loss to humanity if they had just killed Ziggy. But Mark Lester was a surprisingly big star back then. 

Free on Moveland.Tv. Doesn't seem to be available anywhere else.

I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! (1968)

Peter Sellers plays square attorney Harold Fine. We see him driving around a parking garage in his huge Lincoln Continental. It had to have been murder trying to park that thing, but I don't think that was the point. 

I don't know if this is common knowledge anymore, but Alice B. Toklas was Gertrude Stein's girlfriend for years. In 1954, she published the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, as much memoir as recipe book. It included a recipe for hashish fudge. In the movie, a hippie girl makes cannabis brownies which Sellers unwittingly serves his fiancee (Joyce Van Patten) and his parents when they drop in on him.

At their wedding, Harold panics and leaves Joyce Van Patten at the altar. He becomes a hippie but wisely keeps his Lincoln. He has ridiculous-looking long hair like in What's New, Pussycat.

In one scene, Sellers laughs uncontrollably when a conservative-looking man comes into a hippie clothing store and buys a dress for himself, but that was while Sellers' character was still a square. Although, once he becomes a hippie, he tells his new girlfriend not to hitchhike, or to only take rides from women, and, he adds, "make sure she's not a dyke".  An odd line in a movie where they keep playing the theme song with the line, "I love you Alice B. Toklas/and so did Gertrude Stein."

Free on Movieland.Tv or a channel called "Classico". $2.99 on other channels.

They Might Be Giants (1971) George C. Scott, Joanne Woodward

They used to show this on TV when I was a kid. I never understood it. George C. Scott as a judge whose wife died a year earlier. Since then, he believed he was Sherlock Holmes. He has no memory of anything that happened more than a year ago. There's no sense that his wife's death was especially tragic or that he was distraught over it, but that may just be because he has no memory of it.

Other characters include a mental patient who won't speak because he wants to be Rudoph Valentino in a silent movie. Jack Gilford imagines himself as The Scarlet Pimpernel. I guess the idea was that debilitating mental illness was a harmless escape from reality.

Nothing in it was funny.

Joanne Woodward as psychiatrist Dr. Watson. 

With Rue McClanahan just a year before Maude. Al Lewis five years after The Munsters. 

Part of the problem might have been that Sherlock Holmes was a detective. He sets nothing in motion. All he does is follow clues left by other people and there's nothing for him to investigate, although his brother is trying to get rid of him in order to take control of his fortune, but the judge is oblivious to it.

Joanne Woodward committed a number of what must have been ethical violations, like when she invites George C. Scott over for dinner.

Free on Movieland.Tv. 

A better movie along vaguely similar lines might be Gumshoe with Albert Finney as a neurotic who likes acting like a hardboiled detective. He also has a conflict with his brother. And it turns out there was an actual crime to be solved.  Free on a channel called Momentu, for $3.99 elsewhere.

Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023)

Realistically, how distressed should you be if you can't find your mother during a family gathering? She hadn't been gone long. No reason to think anything happened. It might not seem ominous if it weren't in a movie.

In Texas, a wealthy extended family gathers for a Christmas portrait. We see them milling around with Santa hats. They get word that a young relative has died unexpectedly, then their elderly mother can't be found. Only one of her daughters is concerned. She has a flight to catch with her Polish boyfriend and wants to get the photo taken but no one else is worried.

You probably don't see that many arthouse films set in Texas. 

Free on Tubi. 

Spielberg's Minority Report (2002)

A couple of critics pointed out the hypocrisy of this film. We see how intrusive advertising has become in the future in a movie that was full of product placements. The villain used the death of Tom Cruise's son to manipulate him in a movie that uses that death to manipulate the audience. 

I thought it was a little weird that the movie opens with Tom Cruise stopping a man from murdering his wife when he catches her in bed with another man. In The Fabelmans, it was Spielberg's mother's adultery that caused his parents' divorce. Was Spielberg saying something about his parents? Probably not, although Spielberg has never shut up about their divorce and has now made a whole movie about it.  

With the help of three psychics kept floating in a pool of water, police prevent future murders but then take the would-be murderers away and freeze them. Their children can't even visit them in prison. Isn't that as disruptive to society as the murders they prevent? Instead of raiding the house and dragging the husband away, couldn't they have raided the place a few minutes earlier and told the wife to cheese it because her husband was coming? Maybe they could have gotten the couple into counseling or told the husband what his wife was up to and gotten him a lawyer or told his wife her husband might kill her and gotten her into divorce court.

I read the Secret Service/FBI report on school shootings. They emphasized that the goal was to prevent shootings, not make arrests. They even listed kids who had been stopped in the planning stages of mass shootings who went on to live happy, productive lives.

With some drawn out chase scenes with special effects/stunts. I haven't seen any superhero movies but I imagine that's what they're like. In one chase, Tom Cruise knocks some workers off a scaffolding, presumably to their deaths. Maybe this thing would have interested me if I believed in psychics.