Reeling Backward: "The Andromeda Strain" (1971)

"The Andromeda Strain" was a procedural show before they had a name for such a thing.

I'm guessing in 1971 it seemed like a fairly tense, purposeful sci-fi drama at a time when such things were still fairly novel. Science fiction had been generally regarded as the plaything of young people -- at least since the early silent film era of "Metropolis" and the like.

Then after Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 1968, audiences were again willing to watch serious stories involving lasers, space aliens and the like. (Along with a few acid-droppers.)

Michael Crichton's novel was a huge hit for the doctor-turned-best-selling-author, launching a long run of film adaptations. The story involves an American satellite that has crash-landed in the desert, killing nearly everyone in the tiny town of Piedmont, Ariz. A crack team of scientists discovers that an alien lifeform fell to Earth with it, threatening all human life on the planet.

In a lot of ways, it's the godfather of the "outbreak" disaster movie subgenre -- "28 Days Later," "Contagion," etc.

"Andromeda" was directed by the great Robert Wise from an adaptation by pet screenwriter Nelson Gidding. Wise began as a film editor in the 1930s and directed films spanning seven decades and virtually every genre.

For a "race against the clock" type of movie, it's a rather listless, obstinately paced one. Popular films just had a generally different pace back then, with long establishing shots, pregnant pauses and an observational camera perspective.

By today's standards it's incredibly slow and mired in minutia. There's a sequence that's about 15 minutes long that just involves the scientists making their way down through five levels of a secret underground station, going through various rounds of decontamination and body scanning.

It's completely dead weight, and a modern editor would lop off the entire thing if they were halfway competent.

"Andromeda" is very much dominated by its special effects to an almost fetishistic degree. It was one of the first films to use computerized visual effects, so an astonishing portion of the 130 minutes of screen time involves staring at screens, or watching characters stare at screens. Douglas Trumbull also did the effects for "2001."

Of course it all looks terribly outdated almost a half-century later, with blocky graphics and green-lettered screen readouts. My issue is not so much with the aesthetics of the effects as how much the movies relies on them to propel the story.

Interestingly, "Andromeda" is not set in the future but the present, with contemporary military hardware, clothing, hardware, etc. It's an idealized portrait of a modernistic present, but the present nonetheless. I would very much place it in the "hard" science fiction category, with its emphasis on technology and harsh realities.

Another notable thing about the film is the cast is so, well, normal-looking. It's pretty much all middle-aged actors very much not in the Harrison Ford/Julia Roberts mold. There are ample bellies, receding hairlines and neck wattle galore.

James Olson plays Mark Hall, the brash young surgeon who provides the youthful energy on the team, and even he was in his 40s when the film came out. Arthur Hill is more or less the central characters as Dr. Jeremy Stone, architect of the Wildfire facility designed to deal with extraterrestrial encounters. David Wayne is Charles Dutton, the elder member of the scientist team.

By far the most interesting character is Dr. Ruth Leavitt, payed by Kate Reid. She's the cantankerous, independent-minded researcher who was more or less forcibly drafted to Wildfire when some soldiers with guns showed up at her laboratory. She's also later revealed to have been hiding an epileptic condition, which ends up endangering the mission.

Leavitt was a male character in the novel but Gidding suggested changing it to a woman. Wise was initially hesitant, but in the end was happy with the switcheroo.

The main conflict in the story is between Leavitt and Hall, as their personalities and specialties do not mesh. Even though Leavitt is portrayed as much older, Reid and Olson were actually the exact same age.

It's the "Hollywood Age Differential," in which male and female characters of different generations are played by actors who are contemporaries.

There are two survivors of the Piedmont disaster: Jackson (George Mitchell), a 69-year-old kook who drinks Sterno (a liquid fuel used for campires) to combat his ulcers, and a 6-month-old baby who never stops crying. It turns out these peculiarities rendered them (mostly) immune to the effect of the alien virus.

The extraterrestrials, given the titular code name, are non-sentient green crystalline structures that are constantly growing and mutating, given the right environment... such as the human body. The result is that the blood in the body turns to a powder, which makes for a couple of gruesome autopsy scenes.

Paula Kelly plays Anson, the nurse who assists Hall in the Wildfire infirmary. She's smart and sassy, though not above accepting a little light groping from Mitchell. Both her and Hall have to work in large, clumsy environmental suits.

Another notable aspect of the film is the "odd man hypothesis." Although it's pretty much fictional bunk, the idea is that unmarried men are most likely to carry out dispassionate orders with large-scale effects -- like launching nuclear missiles, for example.

As someone who didn't get married until rather late in life, I'm amused at the notion that bachelors are just assumed to be weird. Tell it to my uncle, who didn't start a family until he was 60. Thus Hall is selected to carry the self-destruct key for the Wildfire station should the contagion break its barriers and threaten the world above. Though in this case the scenario is reversed: a 5-minute countdown is automatically initiated for a small nuclear bomb hidden in the lowest level, and it's Hall's job to turn it off.

This leads to pretty much the only genuine excitement in the film, where he has to clamber through the innards of the facility while dodging lasers and the like. He takes a couple of good shots to the hand and cheek.

I'd been looking forward to catching up with "The Andromeda Strain" for some time, and am sorry to say I was sorely disappointed. Some films stand the test of time, while others give birth to later, superior copycats.

Reeling Backward: "The Champ" (1979)

"The Champ" did not get very good reviews when it came out in 1979, with the general consensus being that it was a brazen, manipulative tearjerker. That's true, but it also happens to be a very effective manipulative tearjerker. To wit: I welled up several times watching it.

That's mostly what people remember about the movie these days: that it's very sad. In fact, a few years ago the Smithsonian Magazine ran an article dubbing it "The Saddest Movie in the World," based on some research by some at the University of California, Berkeley. They tested clips from hundreds of movies, and determined that the final scene of "The Champ," where young Ricky Schroder bawls his eyes out weeping for his dead boxer father, elicited the strongest emotional response from people.

What's lost in all this is the absolutely amazing, unforgettable and emotionally vibrant performance of Schroder, who was only 8 years old when they shot the film. It truly is one of the most affecting things I've ever seen on film.

I've often said that identifying good child acting is like that Supreme Court justice's quip about pornography -- you know it when you see it. I definitely see it with Schroder, who was acting in his very first feature film after several years apprenticing in television commercials.

What's so arresting about the towheaded youngster is how utterly unfiltered his performance is. Whether he's crying, or experiencing a fleeting moment of happiness, or just glumly soldiering on as the son of a never-do-well washed-up former boxing champion, Schroder is completely in the moment. There's no barrier between his emotions and the audience. It's so raw, it's difficult to watch at times.

I'm officially bumping Haley Joel Osment in "The Sixth Sense" as the crownbearer for Best Child Acting Ever in favor of Schroder. (Elizabeth Taylor in "National Velvet" probably comes in third.)

Schroder won a Golden Globe for his performance, but wasn't even nominated for an Academy Award, which I find just appalling. Great acting by very young performers often gets overlooked when it's Oscar time. But another kid, Justin Henry, got nominated the same year for his turn in "Kramer vs. Kramer." Henry's solid in that movie, but he can't hold a candle to the mega-wattage of talent radiating off of Schroder in "The Champ."

The other thing that struck me about "The Champ" is how little boxing there is in it. To me, it's not really a sports movie. Director Franco Zeffirelli, known for high-toned material like "Romeo & Juliet," and screenwriter Walter Newman keep the focus on the human story rather than the fisticuffs.

Billy Flynn, the 37-year-old fighter and single dad played by Jon Voight, doesn't even begin training for his comeback until the 90-minute mark of this two-hour film, with the actual bout taking up perhaps 12 minutes of screen time. The aftermath, with young T.J. watching his father die, then pulling at his corpse hollering "Wake up, Champ!" and "I want the Champ!" goes on nearly as long.

And, as those Berkeley scientists concluded, it's heartrending stuff. I think what makes it so powerful is that other men are in the room, trying to hold it together for the sake of this little boy who just lost not just his father but his heroic idol, and several of them break down themselves in the face of T.J.'s eruption.

It's never quite clear exactly why Billy climbs back in the ring, other than saying "I gotta do something for my boy." They are flat broke, but that's not a new experience for them. They live on the backstretch of the Hialeah, Fla., horse racing track, where Billy works as a horse walker.

(I noticed that many summaries for the movie erroneously refer to him as a "horse trainer," which is something else entirely. A trainer is a prestigious job, someone who often oversees an entire stable of racehorses and all the employees who work there. They pick the horses, train them, decide how and when they'll race, and oversee breeding. Successful ones are famous, get interviewed on television and become quite wealthy. A horse walker merely warms up or cools down the animals before and after races, and is even lower on the thoroughbred racing rung than the African-American stable boys. They're nobodies.)

Billy is good-hearted, but selfish and weak. He constantly goes out and gets drunk, gambling away whatever money they've earned. When he says he wants to do something for his boy, I think Billy really means that he wants to do something for himself. He wants to recapture his old life from seven years ago, before his wife left him and when he was the champion of the world. He was good enough to hold the title for another five years, so we're told, but he admits he just didn't want it anymore.

Now that he finds his life a shambles, Billy wants to be the idealized -- and idolized -- version of the father figure T.J. sees in him.

T.J., for his part, already thinks he's the greatest dad in the world, refusing to call him anything other than "Champ."

This movie is, of course, a remake of a 1931 film starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper. Beery and writer Frances Marion both won Oscars for that movie, unseen by me. I think a lot of older critics are bedazzled of that movie, which likely adds to their inability to connect with the remake.

If the 1979 version has a weakness, I think it's the portrayal of T.J.'s mother Annie, played by Faye Dunaway. She walked out on them, and Billy has told T.J. that his mother died in a car crash. She married a rich gerontologist (Arthur Hill), and they spend their days cruising around on a magnificent yacht and giving fashion shows.

Billy is extraordinarily angry at Annie for leaving them, and at first refuses her requests to spend time with T.J. (without telling him who she is). Over time, though, his brittle exterior softens, and he even ends up offering to let her come back to him. She refuses him, again, which seems to be what pushes Billy to put on the gloves again.

Dunaway's just fine in this; my main problem is that I never really bought her and Billy as a couple in the first place. Dunaway's refined, aristocratic manners contrast so sharply with Billy's loutish ways and Brooklyn accent, it's difficult to grasp the concept of what would've drawn her to him in the first place. An ambitious, smart woman with a craving for the finer things, she possibly would've had an opposite-attract type of feelings for him.

Narratively it probably wouldn't work, but maybe a scene or two of them before T.J. was born would have made their screen pairing more palatable.

Mary Joe Catlett also has a too-small role as Josie, a friend who helps out Billy and T.J., and seems to have an attraction toward the aging fighter. She's the sort of solid, loyal woman who would make a perfect complement to their harried little family, but because she has plain looks Billy takes her for granted as simply someone to lean upon.

I should mention that several iconic screen actors appear in brief supporting roles: Elisha Cook, Jr. as Billy's bucket man, Strother Martin as an amiable member of the crew at the racetrack, Joan Blondell as a rich horse owner, and Jack Warden as Billy's old boxing trainer, who takes his corner in the ring despite some reservations.

Sometimes it seems like Jack Warden appeared in every single movie made in the 1970s ... not that that's a bad thing.

"The Champ" may be a weepie, but it's a damn fine one. I really can't overpraise how good Rick Schroder is. I will carry the experience of watching him with me always.

3.5 stars out of four