The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973) - Brief Review

The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing is not so much a bad movie - it's more pointless than anything else.

The Last American Hero (1973) - Brief Review

The Last American Hero is a 1973 film starring Jeff Bridges and is a fictionalized version of NASCAR legend Junior Johnson's entry into stock car racing. Best when it sticks to character drama and Jeff Bridges' classic Bridges-esque performance, the film only sags, ironically, when the racing begins.

The Mack (1973) - Review

The Mack enjoys its hallowed place in the exploitation cinema pantheon because it is so openly transgressive and so celebrates its male anti-hero and the misogynistic ethic that informs him. As a document of how pimps view themselves, it perhaps has some anthropological value. And the film certainly values pimps and serves as the prototypical example of the "it's hard out here for a pimp" genre that openly stomps on the worth of women and asks us to sympathize with someone because at least he's trying to get rich (even if doing so by turning women, through mental and physical brutality, into his chattel property).

The poor guy just wants to get rich via the exploitation of others and here are all these people - corrupt cops, tricks that don't know their place, white gangsters, his brother trying to rid the streets of drugs and prostitution, and other pimps with less game - that keep standing in his way. Why can't people understand he's just trying to make his own way in this world?

Capsule Film Reviews - 3/14/14

A few thoughts on some movies recently watched or re-watched:

Each Dawn I Die (1939) - This Jimmy Cagney vehicle is intended as an exposé of prison conditions, and is particularly damning toward solitary confinement. Which, sadly, makes the subject matter as relevant as ever 75 years later. Unfortunately, adherence to the Code means that the prison conditions are far too antiseptic and the messaging is too muddled for it to be effective as a message movie. Yet Cagney is Cagney, and his charisma and intensity are enough to sustain the picture and make it worth a viewing, if perhaps not move it to the top of Cagney's oeuvre. Screened via Warner Archive Instant.