Reeling Backward: "The Final Countdown (1980)

When pornographic films first went mainstream in the 1970s, the smut studios discovered it was actually very hard to fill up a feature-length movie run time with just depictions of sex. No matter how repetitive the various thrustings and couplings became, there just wasn't sufficient racy footage to get up to a respectable 80- or 85-minute length.

So they started to cheat by showing a bunch of "filler" -- stuff that a normal narrative film skips over. Things like cars pulling up to a house, the door opening, people walking inside, unnecessary conversations, etc. It made them seem more like, as famously described in "Boogie Nights," a "real movie."

Why do I bring up porno flicks in relation to 1980's sci-fi/action film, "The Final Countdown"? Because even though there's no sex -- indeed, there's only one female in an entire movie crammed with Navy dudes, and she doesn't do more than trade moony looks with an officer -- this low-budget spectacle is positively filled with filler.

Peter Douglas, son of Kirk, had a script but not much of a budget, so he turned to the U.S. Navy for help. They saw the project as a clever recruiting tool, and provided the complete use of the aircraft U.S.S. Nimitz, its aircraft and much of its crew for several weeks of shooting.

A few name actors carry the story -- besides Kirk Douglas there's Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, Charles Durning and James Farentino -- but an astonishingly large portion of the 103-minute runtime is made up of Navy personnel running hither and fro, loading weapons and moving ordnance, planes taking off and landing, and so forth.

The film, a modest hit at the time, has developed a cult status among military aficionados for its realistic depiction of operations aboard a modern aircraft carrier. Of course it's accurate -- director Don Taylor largely just filmed what was happening aboard the ship, and worked in a preposterous sci-fi plot in between the everyday doings.

And that story is a doozy: the Nimitz encounters a random time wormhole that takes it back to Dec. 6, 1941 -- the day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Douglas, as the captain, must decide whether to intervene and prevent the massacre, or let history take its course. In the end he's a by-the-book man, and decides it's his duty to defend his country no matter when and where.

The entire movie is a big tease. No battle actually ever takes place between modern American jets and vintage Japanese Zeroes, as the never-explained wormhole opens up again just in time to suck the Nimitz and its planes back to 1980.

Returning to the porno reference, "The Final Countdown" is all foreplay and no main event, making its head-scratching title even scratchier.

There is one sorta-encounter between a pair of F-14 Tomcats and some Zero replicas (left over from "Tora! Tora! Tora!" supposedly). It's the one moderately entertaining segment of the movie, though we never really get the sense of a tense aerial dogfight. Even more ridiculously, one of the Japanese pilots (Soon-Tek Oh) somehow survives his crash, is taken prisoner and gets loose, managing to kill four or five Navymen.

Sheen plays Lasky, a Defense Department civilian observer placed aboard the Nimitz for reasons that are mysterious even to him. Farentino is the wing commander who just happens to be a Pearl Harbor history buff. Charles Durning plays a (fictitious) U.S. senator who was killed by Japanese fighters as part of the historical event, but who gets inadvertently saved by the time travelers. Ross is his smart and winsome right-hand woman, who falls for the Farentino character.

The film ends with one of those out-of-left-field twists that is supposed to make the audience drop their jaws, but which only raises more puzzling time-loop questions that aren't really all that interesting, anyway.

Even as downmarket entertainment, "The Final Countdown" feels cheap and lazy. The actors appear to be going through the motions -- Kirk Douglas does a winking turn that suggests he had a good laugh at how goofy the movie was during production. If you took out all the endless loops of Navy-action, the film would get chopped down from 103 minutes to about 20. I think I would've found that version more watchable.

Reeling Backward: "The Naked City" (1948)

"The Naked City" isn't a particularly well-made movie, other than the cinematography and editing, both of which won Academy Awards. The acting is hammy, even amateurish at times, and the pacing is so uneven there are occasions you could wander out of the room, prepare and eat a nice snack, and come back without having missed anything critical.

But as an early example of what would come to be known as film noir, this 1948 crime drama did things that were way ahead of its time. Its gritty take on the squalor and urban decay of post-war New York City was remarkably pessimistic for that era..

And the hard-bitten cynicism of the narrator -- actually producer Mark Hellinger, who died after recording his lines -- bleeds through the audio like a pickax against metal. My favorite line is near the end when, the mystery of a beautiful model's murder having been solved, he comments upon the media spotlight thrown on the case by the newspapers: "Her name, her face, her history, were worth five cents a day for six days."

The plot, while frequently pedantic, essentially created the model of the police procedural that would become a staple of movies and television for decades to come. It shows a case being worked step-by-step from the inside out, rather than the usual "flash of genius" stuff audiences were used to.

One thing I really liked was director Jules Dassin's decision to cast genuine-looking people in most of the key roles, and to use real New York locations as his backdrop -- most notably in the culminating chase as the murderer climbs to (and falls from) the top of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Aside from Don Taylor as clean-cut young detective Jimmy Halloran and socialite/witness Ruth Morrison (Dorothy Hart), none of the other actors have classic Hollywood looks. Even Howard Duff as key suspect Frank Niles, a conniving playboy on the make, has the droopy look of a heel about him.

The other supporting parts are a litany of bulbous noses, balding pates, paunchy midsections and seamed faces. The film goes out of its way to be as egalitarian as possible in reflecting the entire untidy spectrum of the Big Apple, as summed up in the closing line: "There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them."

At the beating heart and soul of the picture is Barry Fitzgerald as Lieutenant Dan Muldoon, a crusty old Irish-American homicide detective who knows all the tricks in the book. Barely over five feet and wizened, Fitzgerald nevertheless seems to command every room he's in, pulling quietly on his pipe and staring down whoever he's talking to like the Lord of All Hobbits.

(Fitzgerald holds a special place in film history as the only actor ever to be nominated for an Academy Award twice for the same performance. He won the Supporting Actor award for "Going My Way" but lost out in the Lead Actor category. Subsequently the Oscar rules were changed to prevent this from reoccurring.)

The story begins with the murder of Jean Dexter, who we eventually learn to be a small-town girl who went to the big city and ended up chasing the bright lights straight toward her murder. Interestingly, I couldn't find any credit for who played her, even though we see a blonde woman being chloroformed at the beginning and her body again at the morgue.

After much circuitous investigating -- delayed mostly by Niles, who seemingly cannot speak without telling a lie -- the trail finally leads to the doorstep of Willie Garza (Ted de Corsia), a former wrestler who loves to play the harmonica. Curiously, we never actually see or hear him blowing on one.

The final sequence is the film's highpoint, as Garza flees from the cops through the streets of Manhattan. What was really crazy about this sequence is that the narrator, who often addressed the characters the camera was following as if they could hear him, actually starts giving the villain advice on how to get away! He tells him to be calm, not to overreact or run, etc.

Of course, if he actually heard that voice in his head, he didn't follow the sage counsel offered. Otherwise "The Naked City" might have had a very different ending. This is one of the those flicks that managed to stake out a notable place in film history without actually being particularly good.