Dipping into Rollercoaster

When Earthquake appeared in theaters in 1974 with the new sensation Sensurround (in which large speakers were installed that caused vibrations and enhanced audio, making the viewer feel that he was in the midst of the big shakedown), the creators looked for new opportunities to utilize the system, eventually presenting the 1976 WWII drama Midway with it. Next was 1977’s Rollercoaster, the Sensurround offering enhanced ride noises and vibrations. (The process would only be used once more, when the TV pilot for the original Battlestar Galactica was released to theaters as a feature film, before quietly fading away forever.)

Rollercoaster concerned a mad bomber who has an axe to grind with the owners of amusement parks in the U.S. (this fact is not actually spelled out in the movie, but, rather, is explored in the tie-in novel and in a scene that was cut from the final print in which the bomber discusses with his mother the way the big parks drove her and the bomber’s father into bankruptcy.) Playing the young man with a detonator is Timothy Bottoms.

After causing a violent and deadly accident on one of the coasters, he makes it known that he wants $1 million from the cartel of amusement park owners or he will continue to blow up their chief attractions. The clean-cut, demurely dressed guy couldn’t be any more docile or non-threatening looking, but that’s the point. Many 70s thrillers wanted to emphasize that killers could come in many shapes, sizes and types. For that matter, Alfred Hitchcock went that route in Psycho.

Speaking of Hitchcock, some of the posters for Rollercoaster contained the following blurb in large print: “ROLLERCOASTER is a suspense melodrama of the sort that Alfred Hitchcock does best.” Think about that. On their own posters, they are promoting the fact that the “suspense melodrama” they have crafted is one that someone other than themselves does best?? Ha! I’m guessing that this little gem caused people to go and watch something that was actually done well instead.

Anyway, taking an extreme interest in the extortion gambit is a ride inspector who had only recently checked out the coaster that derailed. Played by George Segal, he’s a divorced dad trying to quit smoking and who seems to catch hell from everyone from his superiors (one of whom is played by Henry Fonda, in a cameo appearance) on down. He draws attention to himself as the drama surrounding the incident swells and before long, Bottoms has decided to deal one on one with him, forcing him to deliver the money.

What follows is a cat and mouse game between Segal and Bottoms as Bottoms makes Segal go through a number of elaborate and seemingly pointless moves throughout a major theme park. He has to buy cotton candy (and I don’t even want to know what Segal’s moustache looked like after this chomp of the stuff!), ride rides that are dizzying and/or otherwise uncomfortable, purchase a goofy hat, have his weight guessed and just generally be run ragged all through the park as Bottoms watches amusedly through binoculars. He is then informed that he is actually carrying a bomb and isn’t allowed to let it go!
Complicating things for Segal is a belligerent FBI agent (Richard Widmark) who is used to calling the shots and is none too fond of having a civilian placed in the middle of the situation. He and Segal clash over the best way to handle things, though they also establish a begrudging respect for one another.

Segal’s current girlfriend Susan Strasberg has unwittingly chosen the same day, of all days, to bring his daughter Helen Hunt (!) to the amusement park, further complicating things and adding another layer of worry to Segal’s already crowded pile of them.
Rollercoaster is often placed into the disaster movie genre because of its sequence depicting the destruction of part of a coaster and the decimation that happens when the runaway car projects itself into a set of carnival booths. Unfortunately, that is practically the only sequence of its kind and, thus, the movie is action-heavy at the start and close to nonexistent as it proceeds. The film really has to be categorized more as a suspense drama, though opinions vary greatly on how much suspense there really is.

That crash, however, is pretty eye-opening. Yes, there are clearly mannequins riding in at least one of the coaster cars, but it’s still pretty neat to see it careening off its track and into the activity below. Allegedly, this sequence was initially far more graphic and visceral, but was pared down for a PG rating. If the script had allowed Bottoms just one more incident of destruction, it might have made the difference in the success of the picture. As it stands, the lack of pyrotechnics in the latter 7/8th of the movie gives the viewer a feeling of being let down. Universal tried to blame Star Wars, which came out around the same time, for the film’s poor performance, but they really needed to look at just how pedestrian a film they had on their hands!

What appeals to me about the movie is the kitschy, frozen-in-time aspect of the park in which most of the action takes place. Kings Dominion in Richmond, VA is very, very much like Kings Island in Mason, Ohio and I went there as a child. (So did The Brady Bunch, if you ever caught that episode.) The rides, characters, décor, the simplicity of it all, it is all gone forever. When I watch Rollercoaster, which isn’t that often because it’s a middling movie really, I find myself paying closer attention to the background action and the people rather than the stars! The sign for the singing mushrooms above notes that they have to rest every fifteen minutes or their throats will get "spore!"

As for the stars, Segal gives one of his quirky sort of portrayals with his patented brand of tormented haplessness. He’s a matter of taste. If you like him, it’s well worth watching this. If you don’t, it could become pretty tiresome rather quickly. I find that I don’t usually mind George Segal movies much, occasionally even like them, but always need a buffer of other ones in between them. In other words, there will be no George Segal Film Festivals in The Underworld! Note that he is wearing an Izod polo shirt with the requisite alligator on the chest. Within a couple of years, these would be the hottest shirt possible to own.

Timothy Bottoms (for whom, you ask? LOL) He is a peculiar presence to me. There was a time when he seemed like he was going to be a really major film actor. He had significant roles in several notable movies such as his debut in the disturbing Johnny Got His Gun and then The Last Picture Show and The Paper Chase. It never quite happened for him, though. He is unforgettable to me because, as a child (isn’t everything here about my childhood?! How annoying!) I watched him in the 1976 miniseries Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers. He played a thieving bank teller who was sent to prison and immediately raped by a sadistic fellow inmate. So I guess that answers the question at the beginning of this paragraph.
I never paid much attention to Richard Widmark until a while back when I realized how dependable he was as an actor and how undervalued he is as an antagonist. He was very adept at playing hard-assed authority figures who are still either sympathetic (usually thanks to a level of sarcasm) or multidimensional. I love his work in Coma, of course, and he is one of the few people in The Swarm to have some life in him. He made a huge impact in his first film Kiss of Death (in which he laughed as he sent a wheelchair-bound woman hurtling down a flight of stairs) and it gleaned him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. He worked steadily thereafter in many films, but remains strangely unappreciated.

At this stage in his career, Fonda was working in crap, crap, crap. Just look at some of the gems he did from ‘77 –’79: Tentacles, The Great Smokey Roadblock, The Swarm, City on Fire and Meteor. Even Dionne Warwick and her Psychic Friends Network could not have predicted that in 1981 he would finally win the coveted Academy Award for his role in On Golden Pond. Apart from a TV movie that same year with Myrna Loy, it was the final thing he did before his death. I always say go out in a winner and avoid “The ‘Trog’ Trap.”

This was really a nothing role for Strasberg, too. Perhaps the makers thought it might be too clichéd to have her or her young charge Helen Hunt be on the threatened rollercoaster, but in just having them present in the park, there’s nothing much at stake and they are merely uninvolved bystanders bordering on filler. (By the way, look at the ignorant lady in the tan hat next to Helen who has no clue where to focus her attention!) The year after this, Strasberg would appear in the camp howler The Manitou as a woman with an Indian shaman growing out of her neck!

This was Hunt’s first film role and it would be 1985 before she did another one, so busy was she in TV movies and series. Again, only a mind reader could know that she would also one day have an Oscar to call her own, though she was a significantly successful child actress. Like Strasberg, her role here is insubstantial.

Busy character actor Harry Guardino, who often played cops, has a role (and decent billing) in the film as a police detective. What’s interesting about him is that in some of the movie posters, his photo appears alongside everyone else’s, but in some (like the one at the top of this post), he was taken out!

There are several notable names among the rest of the cast, most of whom appear only briefly. Craig Wasson, who would later star in Body Double and Ghost Story, plays a hippie. The trashy looking chick next to him was used again by this director (and to no good effect - it was her last screen credit) when he made When Time Ran Out. She bagged way too much screen time in that one. Jean Rasey, who was in The Hindenberg and later played Pamela Sue Martin’s sidekick for one season on The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, has a bit as a girl in line to ride a coaster. There’s also a messenger played by the then-unknown Steve Guttenberg, making his film debut

Then we have Miss Monica Lewis. I’ve spoken of her here in The Underworld before because of her tendency to pop up in the film projects of her producer husband Jennings Lang. She had substantial roles in Earthquake, Airport ’77 and The Concorde: Airport ’79, but here she was relegated to one quick scene as a tourist who interacts briefly with Bottoms. Lang probably got cold cereal for breakfast for a month after that slight!

Pre-production plans called for The Bay City Rollers to perform in the film, but this never happened. Instead, a group called Sparks was used. Sparks had (and still has) a considerable career in the music industry, but they considered their appearance here to be one of their biggest regrets! It must be said that they don’t come off particularly well here. They are part of a show emceed by the famous L.A. disc jockey Charlie Tuna.

Also with regards to music, prolific composer Lalo Schifrin (the man behind the themes for The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible and Starsky and Hutch along with many film scores) created a waltz for the score called Magic Carousel that is pretty hard to shake off once you’ve heard it. Though his score for the film is repetitive, some of it does help build suspense where the director James Goldstone sort of failed to provide it.
I never got to experience Sensurround, its chief years being when I was 7 through 11 years of age and it being used on only four films. If anyone reading this went to see a movie with it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I understand that some theaters experienced cracked plaster and that, generally, the public didn’t care for the notion.

Why wait until St. Patrick's Day?

Most loyal readers of this blog do not know that I was born in Northern Ireland to a beautiful, but fiery, young lady who, while not born a redhead, later became one for many years. Her cinematic counterpart, in several ways, is the lovely, yet firm-minded, Miss Maureen O’Hara.

Born Maureen Fitzsimons in Dublin in 1920 to a successful businessman and an opera singer-turned-women’s clothier, she longed to grow up and become an operatic vocalist like her mother. Her father, endowed with stern Irish practicality, insisted that Maureen learn some sort of trade to fall back on in case her singing career didn’t pan out. (My mother and I had many similar battles when I had aspirations to sing and act and, though I later was able to do both, primarily as a hobby, she was right in wanting me to have a secure education and/or skill!)

While in training at The Abbey Theater and the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution (one hopes they had a nickname for that place!), she excelled and won any number of local awards. Still, she learned shorthand and typing and also succeeded tremendously with those skills.

While still in her teens, she won a couple of bit parts in English movies and was granted a screen test that most viewers dismissed as unsatisfactory. However, the great British actor Charles Laughton was shown the test and fell in love with Maureen’s haunting, soulful eyes. He was in the midst of preparing his upcoming film for Alfred Hitchcock, Jamaica Inn, and got her cast in the female leading role, putting her under contract to his own fledgling film company as well.

The world at that time was obsessed with an American of Irish descent, the fictional heroine Scarlett O’Hara of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The legendary search for Scarlett had taken place and the film version was underway. Laughton renamed Maureen Fitzsimons as Maureen O’Hara and made plans to take her to America with him for his next film.

That film was the classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame and O’Hara played the gypsy girl Esmeralda who is alternately saved by the title outcast and fearful of him. It was an auspicious start to her Hollywood career, but the outbreak of WWII interfered with her burgeoning progress. Laughton, unable to continue with the film company he’d started, sold her option to RKO Studios in Hollywood.

Here, she floundered briefly, stuck in low-budget projects and musicals in which her own great voice was never once put to use. When John Ford (another person with an Irish heritage) directed How Green Was My Valley, a film about a Welsh mining family, he used O’Hara in a featured role and the film was a stunning success. It might have signaled a strong change in the course of her career, but Ford left to take part in WWII filmmaking shortly after, not returning to Hollywood until 1945.

She was next seen in color in To the Shores of Tripoli, playing a nurse against John Payne’s marine, followed by Ten Gentlemen from West Point, in which she played a pretty socialite involved with Errol Flynn during the time that the training academy was first formed. Then she starred with Tyrone Power in the colorful pirate movie The Black Swan. In these early color films, her red hair was (purposefully?) darker than it would later be. In time, her striking coloring would be exploited with more emphasis.

She continued on, making films for such esteemed directors as William Wellman and Jean Renoir and working with costars such as Henry Fonda, John Garfield and her old pal Laughton. (Laughton, it should be noted, had only a platonic interest in O’Hara, being a homosexual married for convenience to Elsa Lanchester.)

O’Hara’s beauty was revealed in various period films, whether they be pirate movies like The Spanish Main (pictured here with Paul Henreid. Note her strong profile and ornate hairstyle) or westerns or even Arabian style escapades like Sinbad the Sailor starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Another costar, pictured with her here, is a trim, handsome Anthony Quinn. O’Hara and Quinn made five pictures together from the early 40s to the mid 50s, a fact that would come into play for her fans later on.

In 1947, O’Hara starred in what would become an immortal classic, one that is enjoyed by millions every year. She played the no-nonsense mother of precocious Natalie Wood in the Christmas-themed Miracle on 34th Street. Edmund Gwenn won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Kris Kringle. Reunited with her To the Shores of Tripoli costar John Payne as an attentive suitor, she and the whole cast worked in harmony to create a film that is held dear to multitudes of viewers.

The next couple of years were busy ones, but ones without any films of significant distinction, though she transported though many different genres including adventure, film noir, comedy and so on. Then John Ford decided to make his film, The Quiet Man, set (and filmed) in Ireland. He wanted to use his frequent collaborator John Wayne, along with Maureen, but the president of Republic Pictures insisted that the film’s script was weak and made Ford put it off, requesting that he first use Wayne and O’Hara in the final chapter of Ford’s cavalry trilogy Rio Grande. His plan was for Rio Grande’s success to pay for The Quiet Man, whose location filming might prove costly.

As it turned out, when The Quiet Man was released two years later (O’Hara having made three films in between Rio Grande and it), it was a major success, the number one money-earner for the studio. Wayne and O’Hara played tempestuous lovers who share a remarkable moment during a hellacious windstorm and their spirited chemistry together led to a lifelong friendship and five costarring films in all. TCM sometimes runs an interview with O’Hara about the filming of that scene and it is hilarious. Ford kept shooting take after take as her hair was whipping her in the face repeatedly, but not to his satisfaction. Finally, she lost her temper and asked him what a one-eyed, bald bastard like him knew about hair hitting the face! While The Quiet Man was in pre-production, she used her still-sharp secretarial skills to transcribe script notes for him as he dictated!

She next re-teamed with Errol Flynn for the swashbuckling Against All Flags, more than holding her own in the swordplay sequences. Always an athletic type as a young girl, her abilities in this area gave her quite an asset when it came to performing stunts and feats. Still, her best work and most important films seemed to be when she was working for Ford or costarring with a familiar actor. Her swashbuckling adventures did cost her the lead role in the film version of The King and I (in which she'd have been excellent), however, when Richard Rodgers exclaimed that he didn't want "a pirate queen" in his movie.

In 1955, she filmed The Long Gray Line, a Ford drama about an Irish immigrant (played by Tyrone Power) who spends 50 years at West Point, gaining in position from a dishwasher to an officer. It was in preproduction for this film that she claims to have walked in on the craggy, rough Ford in a romantic embrace with another man, a known actor (not Power, though he certainly had more than a few rumors about him as well.) This bombshell was nestled blithely within her 2004 autobiography.

That same year, she made the very tame, but nonetheless daring for its time, film Lady Godiva of Coventry and took a scantily clad ride in protest of her husband’s policies. The stagnant film didn’t begin to deliver on its provocative advertising scheme, nor had it any chance to do so in 1955.

As the decade drew to a close, she was working somewhat less, but still collaborated with Ford and Wayne (in The Wings of Eagles) and even starred with Sir Alec Guinness in the light spy film Our Man in Havana. One of her most significant achievements during this time was the suing of Confidential magazine. The mudslinging gossip rag held Hollywood by the throat in the early 50s with its threats of outing gay actors or otherwise unearthing hidden scandals. What the publishers couldn’t prove, they made up. She was accused in its March 1957 issue of having indulged in lewd behavior in the balcony of Graumann’s Chinese Theatre and, thanks to her passport, was able to prove that she hadn’t even been in the country at the time of the alleged story. Her suit (and sizeable settlement) was instrumental in leading to the eventual demise of the magazine, earning her applause from her peers.

Maureen took part in another enduring family classic when she paired up with Brian Keith in Disney's The Parent Trap. Playing the divorced parents of twins (both played by Hayley Mills), their still-festering love for one another was reignited by a conspiracy involving the girls. This film resonated for years afterward on TV and in re-release, leading to a few TV-movie sequels starring Mills and a 1998 remake.

Things got a little sticky, however, during the western The Deadly Companions, in which they quickly re-teamed. O’Hara’s brother Charles Fitzsimons was producing the film and had brought on novice director Sam Peckinpah at costar Brian Keith’s suggestion. (Peckinpah had recently produced and directed Keith’s short-lived TV series The Westerner.) However, Fitzsimons and Peckinpah did not get along (with Peckinpah claiming that the producer wouldn’t let him give his sister any direction, nor let him rewrite or edit) and from then on Peckinpah would demand control of his movies.

In the early 60s, O’Hara played wife to several of Hollywood’s older leading men. In Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation, her husband was James Stewart. Then she portrayed the wife of Henry Fonda in the film Spencer’s Mountain, based on the same novel that would later give rise to The Waltons TV series. She and Fonda played the parents of a staggering brood of children. Notable among them was James McArthur as Clayboy (who would be renamed in the series as “Johnboy”), Veronica Cartright of The Birds fame and Kym Karath who would appear a short time later as Gretl in The Sound of Music along with Veronica's sister Angela.

The film featured some elements (including alcoholism and infidelity) that were, initially at least, left out of the later TV show. However, the family’s struggle to make ends meet and permit their eldest son to go to college remained, along with other similarities. O’Hara, approaching 90 years of age as of this writing, has long outlived these famous male costars one and all.

McLintock!, a rowdy western comedy, saw O’Hara and her pal Wayne as feuding spouses and was loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Like that famous work, this film included the hero giving the heroine a much-deserved spanking as a crowd of onlookers react vigorously.

Around this time, Maureen began appearing with some frequency on TV variety shows and specials, allowing her the opportunity to sing as she had always wanted to do. She appeared in the 1960 Broadway musical Christine and even released two albums, one of which was comprised of Irish songs. In this cover shot for a program guide, she does something brave that I would never attempt. She poses next to a lit candelabra while wearing copious amounts of hairspray!

She worked with James Stewart again in 1966’s The Rare Breed about the acquisition of a Hereford bull. Having played Hayley Mills’ mom in The Parent Trap, here he played Juliet Mills’ mother. (She and Juliet had previously worked together in a TV adaptation of Mrs. Miniver in 1960, however.)

After 1971’s Big Jake, which paired her with John Wayne for the last time (in a brief role as, what else, his estranged wife!), Maureen retired from the big screen. She did do a 1973 TV movie opposite Henry Fonda called The Red Pony, but was, for the most part, entirely out of the public eye. Having lost her pilot husband in a 1968 plane crash, she kept busy with interest in his airline company and resided in the US Virgin Islands.

Twenty years after her last feature film, she was coaxed out of retirement by Chris Columbus for his John Candy comedy Only the Lonely. The role of an overbearing, politically incorrect mother was written with her in mind. Columbus gave the script to Maureen’s producer brother and he encouraged her to do the film. After reading the script, and meeting with Candy, she enthusiastically agreed. Her character spouted all sorts of insensitive and potentially explosive remarks and O’Hara gamely took part in several fantasy sequences in which Candy dreamed of doing her in.

On the set, Candy was appalled that someone of her stature was given a shoddy, tiny trailer and demanded a better one. When it didn’t happen, he gave her his luxurious trailer and slept on an old cot until the producers relented. Even at 71, she had to be deglammed in order to look appropriate for the part. There are parts of this film in which it may as well be my own mother onscreen.

Cast as her charming Greek neighbor was Anthony Quinn, her costar in five prior movies. While, to the movie going public in general, these were just two old bats, for fans of the stars, it marked a tender and entertaining reunion of two pros from the golden era of the cinema.

In the wake of this, O’Hara retreated to her various homes in Ireland, Arizona and The Virgin Islands, but occasionally emerged to film a TV movie. She did three of them between the years 1995 and 2000. Then, in 2004, she penned her book and embarked on a tour with that. Still quite lovely and stunning, even in her mid 80s, she charmed everyone with her glowing smile and still gorgeous eyes, always turned out in the style she no doubt inherited from her mother. She has several interview snippets on TCM that are played in between movies and she is invariably witty, beautiful and full of hilarious anecdotes.

While it is true that Maureen O’Hara never really carried a hit film solely on her own, she was an integral part of several bona fide cinema classics and by that I mean true classics, not just films that are referred to that way because they’re old. She also provided lustrous support for many of Hollywood’s greatest actors. Fonda, Wayne, Quinn, Stewart… all were the recipients of an Oscar and yet O’Hara was never once nominated. It makes me physically ill to dwell on some of the actresses who not only have been nominated but have also have been given a statuette when she has not and I continue to scratch my head as to why she has not been awarded an Honorary Oscar. I hope someone wakes up the Academy before it is too late, because it is truly deserved. In any case, she’s given me many hours of delight as I’ve watched her films over the years.