During the deadening nineteen fifties, when oafs were oafs, presidents were non-existant war heroes and teenagers throughout the' land measured their status in terms of the height of their Cuban heels and the amount of grease in their hair, far-sighted Ray Harryhausen was doin’ us all dirt. While Eisenhower innocently played his wellpublicized golf games, young Ray was insidiously setting loose an honest-togod dinosaur in Coney Island. When Tony Bennett was only THINKING of leaving his heart in San Francisco, Harryhausen was already sending in a two hundred foot octopus into town to tear down the Golden Gate Bridge. When the U.S. government hedged on the flying saucer question, balding Ray had a fleet of bona fide saucers crashland in Washington D.C.

Harryhausen lives in a land of fantasy and, through a vast amount of talent and skill, the inspired Mr. H. has chosen to share his world of supernatural craziness with all of us regular mortals through a series of mind boggling films: Jason and The Argonauts, MysteriouJ Island or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. California-born Ray got his first taste of screen fantasy whilst viewing Willis O’Brien’s mammoth masterpiece, King Kong. Legend has it that Ray has seen the film over one hundred times... and who can argue legend? What King Kong did to Ray, either on the first or fiftieth sittings was get him interested in a monster-making film process called stop motion animation, a movie technique wherein inanimate objects are brought to life via painstakingly slow, frame-byframe exposures in-between miniscule

movements of the scene being filmed. Forsaking the traditional animated world inhabited by wise-ass Bugs Bunnies and neurotic Elmer Fudds, Harryhausen chose to go into the surreal realm of film populated by giant apes, flying saucers and dimpled dinosaurs.

By the time Ray had served his internship (studying under master craftsman Willis O’Brien during the shooting of Mighty Joe Young), he was ready to take on the world... which is exactly what he did in his first feature length film. It was in 1953. The fifties were off to a shakey start. Government witch hunts were blossoming. The Cold War loomed in the headlines. TV threatened the movie industry and acne roamed the high school corridors. Surrounded by such turmoil, Harryhausen did the only thing a clear-thinking American filmmaker could do... he let a dinosaur loose in New York rush hour traffic, called it The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and left his audiences stunned. Adults were stupefied. Kids were engrossed. Box offices were smiling. The Beast wasn’t the usual lumbering lizard laughingly called “dinosaur” by a Victor Mature look-alike while oatmeal lava bubbled in the background. It was a. .. REAL dinosaur! And it knocked apart Coney Island to prove that point.

With the success of The Beast (now on TV in-between computer programming commericals), Ray, striking while the iron (or monster) was hot, dished up It Came From Beneath the Sea: the saga of a humungus five tentacled octopus mutation which destroyed half of San Francisco while, in real life, San Francisco city fathers (who saw the flick as anything but a tourist attraction) howled in dismay. The octopus was so effective in the destruction scenes that no one really noticed that it was three tentacles short of your run-of-the-mill squid. It seemed that, at $10,000 per tentacle, the film’s producer had a last minute change of heart about the importance of “realism.”

Five hands or eight, the IT was a smash and, before San Francisco had a chance to rebuild, Ray was inflicting destruction upon Rome in Twenty Million Miles to Earth and the world in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers. Miles told the tale of the ever-popular and evergrowing creature from Venus, the Ymir. The story was based in Rome because Ray figured that he’d love a vacation in Italy and would love it even more if the studio paid for it. Ray got his vacation, the studio got their film, and the Ymir got a bazooka shell in the spleen as he cavorted atop the famed CollOseum. Everyone, with the possible exception of the Ymir, went away happy.

Since the Ymir’s demise. Harry hausen has concentrated on technicolor terrors in Such films as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Three Worlds of Gulliver, Mysterious Island, Jason And the Argonauts, The First Men in The Moon, One Million Years B.C. and The Valley of the Gwangi. And, since Ray originally emerged in the languid, sleezy fifties, it is only right that he should surface with his most colorful project to date in the less than languid and more than sleezy seventies. 1974 beware The Golden Voyage of Sinbad! The Golden Voyage, soon to be released, carries on with the swashbuckling Sinbad the sailor character in a highly inventive style of fast flying fantasy closely akin to Doug Fairbanks’ Theif of Bagdad, Walt Disney’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, Willis O’Brien’s King Kong and Richard Nixon’s State of the Union TURN TO PAGE 76 Because Serpico is the touching story of an idealistic cop done in by the cynical realities of an urban nightmare where everybody from Lindsay on down is on the take, and it’s plain boring. Maybe it’s boring because, like Mean Streets and other fine recent slices of naturalism, it’s too goddam realistic. Meaning who cares? A1 Pacino is a swell fellow and I suppose he’s gonna be a big star, filling the Dustin Hoffman gap, but he really failed to involve me with this semi-dashing hippie undercover man who bucks departmental corruption like a damn fool and gets a bullet through the gullet for his troubles. Any movie this long and paced this slow deserves a little more action, and the fact that this is probably the first cop flick in two years without a major protracted glassand-chrome shattering car chase is not necessarily in its favor. Us barbarians go to the movies for cruel fantasy as much as anything else, and I could not help sitting there wondering why in hell Serpico was holding out against all bribes and cajolings with insufferable righteousness. You can bet I woulda took the bucks, buddy! is the standard response, along with “God, is it ever gonna end?” There are a couple of funny moments having to do with dope and the kind of cop jokes which are the next national rage and even better and more relatable than the old army jokes. But for badger heroes I’ll take a cold steel prickerino like Dirty Harry any day. His women were better looking, too. And if you want the best of both myths (Serpico’s idealism vs. Harry’s gouge), go see Walking Tall. Address. In his second Harryhausenconcoted caper, Sinbad (John Phillip) Law) is asked to fight off a horde of little green men, plug away at a oneeyed ceritaur, fight a six armed statue brought to life by an evil magician (Tom Baker), battle a wooden sea siren animated by demonic arts, dodge a giant winged griffen and try to capture a deadly artificial creature called the Hommonculus. Keeping in mind that there is not one visible Republican in the entire production, the amount of scariness conjured up is amazing. Sinbad wins in the end, but not before a lot of Marvel comic book action, minddeadening plot twists and bouncy mammary glands flash by. (This month’s glands belong to pretty Caroline Munro, a comely lass who, if she is lucky, will catch up with The Beast From 20,00 Fathoms and pay strict attention to the computer commercials.) It’s all great escapist fare, corny as hell and a lot easier to take than the pretentious tripe currently being dished out as cinematic “art.” (From The Exorcist down. . . or up, if you prefer.)

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SERPICO Directed by Sidney Lumet (Paramount)

Cops, cops, nothing but cops all over , the place. Go to eat, cops all over the table. Go to watch TV, cops all down the front of the 4 picture tube. Xmas present what does my nephew gimme but The Super Cops, this book about two Jew cops called Batman and Robin who clean up half of New York while smoking dope and making friends with the spades and junkies. I been so inundated with cops in the last year, I’m getting to where I like the damn things. In fact, I wish I was one.

You probably do, too. If you don’t just go to the movies, which are totally overrun with cops by this point, and you!ll find out that all that pig stuff is corny as panhandling in the park. Just get down with movies like Magnum Force, Dirty Harry, The Seven Ups, The Stone Killer, Cops & Robbers, etc. ad infinitum, and you’ll discover that the new cop is, far more than burnt-out homosexual valium junkies even, the

definitive 70s hero. They get all kinds of ass, they get to shove people around and smash the shit outa half the cars in any 35 square block radius, they run fast and loose through the urban jungles bringing justice down as they plunder.

Of course it’s all a disreputable fantasy even worse than previous cinematic yicaries of cocaine dealers, pimps, etc., and perhaps it is this tang of the forbidden thrill — jeez, what could be more outre than cophood — that makes these movies so utterly addictive, since almost all of them are exactly the same. Here at last is one that isn’t, and all it does is prove why they were better off being identically brutal and unreal.

Lester Bangs

THE LAST DETAIL Directed by Hal Ashby (Columbia)

Jack Nicholson gets drunk and swears all the time. He makes no excuses. Otis Young gets drunk and swears all the time. Neither does he. Randy Quaid has never gotten drunk, doesn’t swear, and although his mother is alcoholic, it appears that he doesn’t know how. In The Last Detail he learns. And we learn that Buddusky and Mulhall, two Navy lifers, don’t think he’ll make it through eight years of prison unless they jade him up a little.

So in the course of escorting Quaid (Meadows) to a cell 500 miles from base in Norfolk, Virginia, they take a tapdancing break in some big eastern cities, offering him beer, brawls, and brothels. But it’s the gift of comradeship that instructs. After they’ve drunked him

through the first night, he’s a fast learner. Since Mulhall (Young) and Buddusky (Nicholson) agree at the outset that it would be worse for Meadows to live with his innocence than have to reminisce this 5-day party for the next eight years, they stick to their plan, despite the risk to their own security resulting from their elaborations of this detail.They don’t get caught, but there probably wasn’t too much danger of that in the first place. There probably isn’t 'much chance either that Meadows’ brief initiation will do much to change his basically shy and acquiescent behavior. In this male saga travelogue, there is no grand finale: an epic without a punchline.

The Last Detail is bleak like its sets — a city picnic grounds, a tan hotel room with a had TV. It’s not bleak like, say, The Last Picture Show, where every scene and every face was stamped with severity and the whole number was popped into a black-and-white movie can. This movie’s shot in color, and the characters add their own. Buddusky is a mercurial, hysterical character, making you laugh one minute at his come-on to a girl at a pot-and-meditation party: looking at himself, he says “I always liked sailor pants because of the way they make my dick look, huh?” and the next at his pathetic attempt to take seriously a request from Meadows for a lesson in semiforing. Mulhall is cold enough to be cautious but funny enough to put you in stitches when he has to manuever in a hotel room, early morning all-night drunk, from a longitundinal position to a latitudinal one. And Meadows shuffles numbly beside them at first, waxes grateful, eventually even attempts escape.

There’s not much point in glorifying a movie that simply succeeds at making real life look that way. This is Jack Nicholson’s best performance since Five Easy Pieces, when he first proved that the movement of a bit of tension from the nerve in his neck to the grin on his face was sheer fascination on the screen. That’s the kind of reality I can only see in the movies.

Georgia Christgau

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And now that deadpan Ray has assaulted 1974 with his lavish, oldfashioned warped adventure concepts. .. what next? Will Idaho be invaded by giant potatoes? Will Hamlet reach the screen performed by Englishspeaking brontosauruses? How about the creation of a Planet of The Plumbs? No one can say for sure what Ray will come up with in the future but longtime pal and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Forrest J. Ackerman, thinks that it may be a really off-the-wall version of Frankenstein. While all of the aforementioned theories are good guesses, they don’t match the rumors that I’ve been hearing. ... it seems that there’s going to be this vacancy in Washington soon and they need someone big for the job... REALLLLLbig!!!