The Valley of Gwangi (1969) — Cowboys and Allosaurs

I caught Cowboys & Aliens this past weekend. Evidently my expectations were properly modulated, as I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. It's a popcorn flick. It's got cowboys, it's got aliens, it's got 'splodey bits. No surprises there. Anything more is gravy, which for Elizabeth means Daniel Craig, who trades his steely-eyed 007 for steely-eyed Clint Eastwood quite agreeably. (And Harrison Ford looks far more at home and unembarrassed here than he did in his previous face-to-face with ETs. What was that film again? My memory has purged it....)

C&A had been on my list of movies to catch later at home casually on the couch via iTunes or Netflix streaming, but Elizabeth arranged a gathering of the tribe to meet at a local cinema and then enjoy each other's company afterward, and I have to say that I'm glad she did. It's not a bad way to see a movie like Cowboys & Aliens.

What surprised me about it was its evident affection for the Hollywood westerns of previous generations. The plot could not be more predictable and by-the-book (the slimy alien monsters could be any old rustlers and bandits and claim jumpers determined to stamp out runaway decency in the west) and no trope is left unturned. Okay, at the end, as our hero rides off into the sunset, the kid doesn't run after him shouting "Shane! Come back!", but it's there in spirit. Subtlety is utterly beside the point.

All the same, Cowboys & Aliens successfully walks the dusty line between winking self-mockery and respectful homage to the traditions of John Ford oaters and B westerns of yore. It's not the Coens' True Grit, with that film's arresting air of authenticity to its time and place. Rather, it begins and ends as a comfortable old shoe, and it reminded me of being a thrill-hungry 10-year-old catching another genre-mashing romp on Saturday afternoon TV: the Ray Harryhausen Wild West dinosaur spectacle, The Valley of Gwangi.

"Cowboys and dinosaurs" — seriously, that must be one of the all-time great Hollywood "high concept" pitches. The Valley of Gwangi does treat us to plenty of both. It has at least one sequence that belongs on any enthusiast's list of Best Dinosaur Scenes Ever.

However, this 1969 opus from co-producer and stop-motion master Harryhausen suffers from a familiar problem: as in his other Giant Creature features, from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms to Mysterious Island, the special-effects work is better than the rest of the movie. And yet, when you're a certain age, that's plenty enough, thank you, because what better reason is there to be watching at all?

The concept sounds great on paper: Members of a struggling Wild West show traveling through Mexico find Forbidden Valley, a lost world containing pterodactyls, triceratops, and other holdovers from the era of dinosaurs. There they capture Gwangi — an allosaurus and thus the biggest apex predator south of the border — in hopes of making it their show's star attraction. The movie sticks to the by-now threadbare King Kong formula by making sure that the towering monster breaks its bonds and goes on a public rampage.

On the plus side, The Valley of Gwangi gives us some of the most memorable of Harryhausen  extravaganzas. The scene with four cowboys lassoing Gwangi is justifiably famous, and the beast's hemmed-in confrontation in the town square and inside the church is first-rate even by modern standards. Its battle with a circus elephant is one of numerous similarities to Harryhausen's 20 Million Miles to Earth. And it's all set to Jerome Moross's rousing score, which refurbished parts of his work for 1958's The Big Country.

The DVD adds a bonus extra, Return to the Valley. Shot in 2003, it features Harryhausen, still hale and hearty at 83, talking about the movie's conception and development. Joining him are several starstruck young SFX professionals from Industrial Light and Magic. Appropriately reverent, they discuss the inspiration that Harryhausen and Gwangi provided to their work on Jurassic Park 24 years later, and they remain awestruck as they examine how to show life-size cowboys convincingly roping a tabletop model allosaurus, a sequence that took Harryhausen five months to complete. (Return to the Valley is embedded at the bottom of this page.)

Harryhausen's dinosaur designs were based on the art of Charles R. Knight, a nostalgic data point for viewers whose childhood imaginings predate Jurassic Park. Another Harryhausen treat here is the toy-like Eohippus, a long-extinct horse the size of a house cat.

But to get to the dinos we must first suffer through a story that plods along and that's peopled by characters with all the spark and personality of sagebrush. Half the movie passes before Gwangi leaps into frame for his startling entrance. (Jurassic Park paid tribute to that moment with the T-Rex's entrance.) James Franciscus cuts a bland hero, and Gila Golan (Our Man Flint, Miss Israel 1961, indelicately overdubbed) as the cowgirl T.J. is the stiffest of love interests. Even Richard Carlson, who fought The Creature From the Black Lagoon, barely registers.

It says something about the production and about Harryhausen's artistry — his meticulous sense of detail, realism, and imbued personality — that Gwangi, a snarling dinosaur created from a two-foot model, is the most realistically alive character on the screen.

This production had been a pet project of the late Willis O'Brien, who had wanted to do it in 1942. By the time Harryhausen dusted off his mentor's notes, The Valley of Gwangi was a relic of an antiquated era. Even though it was aimed chiefly at kids (who must have sighed like bored accordions through all the mushy stuff), the movie bombed. Of course, it didn't help that Warner Bros. just tossed it like a used napkin into the theatrical marketplace, inexplicably double-billing it with a mod British-French bit of psychedelia, Marianne Faithfull's Girl on a Motorcycle, thereby missing Gwangi's target audience entirely.

Nonetheless, by '69 monster movies were old hat anyway, and the year of Midnight Cowboy, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Easy Rider was too late in the day for an old-fashioned pulp yarn where cowboys are named Rowdy, Champ, and Tuck. Let's hope that there's an alternate universe where Harryhausen teamed up with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin to make this the Wild Wild West movie that should have been.

Despite its shortcomings and because of that always-entertaining Harryhausen spectacle, decades of Saturday afternoon TV airings have secured The Valley of Gwangi in the hearts and memories of erstwhile ten-year-old boys everywhere. So I can't help but wonder if someone behind Cowboys & Aliens — Jon Favreau, Speilberg, Ron Howard? — experienced a happy flashback to The Valley of Gwangi when the C&A pitch landed in their laps.

Return to the Valley: A "making of" documantary

Music: The Beatles
Near at hand: Parts of a would-be play script stalled in the middle

The Magic Christian (1969) — If you want it, here it is, come and get it

This third film in my alone-on-the-couch-with-the-flu Peter Sellers retrospective — after Blake Edwards' The Party and I Love You, Alice B. Toklas — was based on the short book by hipster novelist Terry Southern. According to Southern, a copy of his 1959 comic novel found its way to Peter Sellers via their mutual friend Jonathan Miller.

"Peter liked it to the improbable degree that he went straight to the publisher and bought a hundred copies to give to his friends. One such friend, as luck would have it, was Stanley Kubrick."

Thus Southern pinged Kubrick's radar, and that led to Kubrick hiring Southern to co-write the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove once Kubrick decided to make his nuclear Armageddon movie a comedy.

In the movie-making Circle of Life, that's not a bad little outcome for a writer's first solo novel.

Sellers, meanwhile, imagined a film version of The Magic Christian as a pet project, with himself taking the lead role. In 1968 Southern wrote draft after draft of the screenplay, aided (or hindered) by Sellers, director Joseph McGrath, and a pair of TV comedy writers named Graham Chapman and John Cleese.

The ultimate result, 1969's The Magic Christian, is at best a baggy, vapid interpretation of the source novel. Ringo Starr's character was invented for the film and for Starr specifically. While seeing Starr cohabit a film with Sellers, Racquel Welch, Yul Brynner, Roman Polanski, etc. is of keen interest to us lifelong Beatles fanatics, The Magic Christian is diverting more as anthropology than as entertainment. Indeed, it may engender a trippy period appeal you might otherwise reserve for a lava lamp. Unfortunately, both as a movie and as a satire of society's corruptibility and greed, it's likewise formless and gloopy.



This gaudy bauble from the paisley era just drips with low-gloss British Mod Pop style and a would-be Richard Lester vibe, but with no clue about how to put its abundant British talent, chiefly Peter Sellers, to any worthy purpose beyond playing at adolescent cynicism.

It aims, with unearned smugness, to skewer the moneyed classes through the English Theatre of the Absurd that fostered Monty Python among others. Because pre-Python Cleese and Chapman were among the too many cooks behind this screenplay, some of its better moments bear that distinctive Python stamp.

Sellers plays millionaire prankster Sir Guy Grand, who in the movie's first moment of unexplained whimsy adopts as his son a scruffy youth sleeping in Hyde Park (Starr, mere months from becoming an ex-Beatle and seemingly anesthetized). Together they work their way up the social ladder staging elaborate scenarios — at Sotheby's, in a fine restaurant, at an Oxford-Cambridge boating race, bringing an anti-aircraft gun to a pheasant hunt, and so on — to freak out the toffs, expose the shallow bigotry and avarice of the Establishment, and generally prove that "everyone has their price."

The final 20 minutes boil over aboard the luxury cruise ship "Magic Christian," where the cream of elite society is curdled by a mishmash of psychedelic goings-on that include a vampire, willy-nilly dwarfs, and a rampaging gorilla suit.

Just to be clear here: It's not as though I'm constitutionally opposed to the movie's "message." I acknowledge that human beings can willingly become self-degrading Pavlovian animals when fat wads of cash are wafted under our noses. And if you know me personally you already know that "black humor" and I have a long and happy relationship.

It's just that I'm repulsed at the cellular level by any vehicle — a movie, a political manifesto, a raised-fist poetry slam declamation, a bathroom graffiti pronouncement, the typical Tea Party utterance — that mistakes pompous, unnuanced, mean-spirited and blinkered treatment of its thesis for thought-provoking insight. Especially when I'm supposed to be laughing along with the humor of its delivery mechanism.

In The Magic Christian, this self-satisfied faux-profundity reaches face-palm levels in its final moments, when, to make sure we Get The Message, Sir Guy tosses wads of bank notes into a swimming pool vat brimming with offal, shit, and piss, into which the dapper swells mingle with the hoi polloi to wade in and submerge to line their pockets. 

On the other hand...

Because its sketch-comedy indictments of Society's Empty Values don't get much less sophomoric than that, The Magic Christian is never as clever or enlightened as it thinks we think it is. Never mind that, after more than 40 years, any satire here that might once possibly have been biting now just gums.

One of the movie's problems is that there are no characters here, only actors used as furniture moved about from one underdeveloped vignette to the next. Its rudderless, rambling course — leading to its over-the-top, throw-anything-at-the screen climax — makes this an English cousin of 1967's overstuffed Casino Royale, with whom it shares director Joseph McGrath; although Casino at least had the good nature to be occasionally stupid-silly-fun instead of just callow and bitchy.

Oh, Christopher....

Not such a fantastic voyage.

As The Magic Christian meanders drunkenly from scene to scene, out come the "name that celebrity" cameos that contribute to its minor cult-kitsch popularity. There's Laurence Harvey as a strip-tease Hamlet, Raquel Welch in a brass brassiere as the "Priestess of the Whip" among a galley of topless slave girls, barfly Roman Polanski chatted up by singing transvestite Yul Brynner, and Christopher Lee in full Dracula regalia as the Ship's Vampire. Continue this drinking game by spotting Cleese and Chapman, Richard Attenborough, Spike Milligan, Dennis Price (Kind Hearts and Coronets), and Wilfrid Hyde-White.


Mind-scrub of the week: Yul Brynner in drag hits up Roman Polanski at the bar.

The music — namely Badfinger's "Come and Get It" (penned by Paul McCartney) and Thunderclap Newman's "Something in the Air" — adds to the nostalgia fest.

Geoffrey Unsworth supervised the photography, though it's safe to say that he's better remembered for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cabaret, and Superman.

The Magic Christian has fleeting moments of fun, is a should-see for those of us who dig on Sellers and vintage Britcom, and heaven knows it's a sampler tray of its time. Too bad it's all such a dismal mess, a joyless exercise that sets out to deliver a Statement that's puerile and obvious and ultimately doesn't amount to much. One may ask if Sellers, Southern, and other well-heeled individuals behind The Magic Christian made it as a quick, easy means to sucker in the "rebel" youth market it's so clearly aimed at. But that would be cynical, wouldn't it?

Music: Ute Lemper, "All That Jazz"
Near at hand: Wild Child by T.C. Boyle