There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, you get hit hard with the fact that you’re too old for this…
The Phynx (1970)
Distributed by: Warner Bros.-7 Arts
Directed by: Lee H. Katzin
Before riders had it easy and bulls raged, the old guard in Hollywood became aware that they were out of touch.
The numbers weren’t great, with weekly attendance at theaters down 40% between 1960 and 1970. The decline of the studio system described by Mark Harris’ Pictures at a Revolution was not as quick as the book suggested, but the fact that the heads of the lot refused to pay attention to what was going on off the set left them entirely unprepared when things hit a tipping point.
And much like it was with the dinosaurs whipped out by the Chicxulub impactor 65 million years before, there was a bright flash accompanied by grand futile gestures as the end came…
We open cold at night, at the base of thick stone walls over 40 feet high. In front of them pops up Corrigan (Lou Antonio) in dark camo, ready to go over the walls into what we’re told through signage is Albania. He makes one attempt to scale the walls, which fails, during which he utters, “Dirty lousy Commie.”
He tries again to smuggle himself in inside a casket, and gets caught and kept out. Then he tries the old “human cannonball cover” trick, which also fails, and leads into an animated credit sequence that was one of the last bits Bob McKimson did for Warners:
The reason he’s at IHoP is that that’s the cover for the HQ of his organization, the SSA (Super Secret Agency), where he meets with his handler, Bogey (Mike Kellin). He lets Corrigan know he’s unhappy with him, with, yes, a bad channeling of Humphrey Bogart that gets tiresome quickly.
Bogey gives a briefing to the different sections of the SSA and his boss, Number 1 (Bob Williams inside a large cardboard box on his head, voiced by Rich Little), where he explains and sets up the film: Albania is believed to have kidnapped some important people, such as George Jessel, Colonel Sanders, and Butterfly McQueen, among others, for reasons unknown. When the floor is opened for suggestions as to how to get someone in there to break them out, it’s proposed that they ask M.O.T.H.A.
The “Mechanical Oracle That Helps America” comes up with a plan: The SSA should form a pop musical group to get invited to Albania. When asked whom, M.O.T.H.A. gives them four names as to who should be in this band:
- Dennis Larden, a protestor for hire whose degree in Oriental philosophy gets a lot less jobs than whatever you graduated with;
- Ray Chippeway, a Native American who comes home from college to a disapproving father;
- “Michael” Miller, a hedonist who’s filling in for someone else for a fling with a woman who’s also subbing, making their encounter even more random than possible; and
- Lonnie Stevens, an actor who gets plenty of work in commercials.
And yes, the characters have the same name as the actors. Once again, we’re getting a “pre-fab four” put together on screen to try and turn them into a real group. Someone figured, hey, it worked for Don Kirshner, it should work again here, no? (If they knew what happened when Kirsher tried a second time to assemble such a group, we might have been spared this film, and yet…)
Our four bargain-basement Monkees wannabes are kidnapped and brought to a southwest Gitmo an abandoned army base, where they are put through training in the ways of spycraft and modern musicianship:
From there, the next part of the operation goes from cloak-and-dagger to artists-and-repertoire. The group goes into the studio with producer Philbaby (Larry Hankin), who helps them lay down their hit track, “What Is Your Sign?” after 748 takes. The record tries to go number one with a bullet, literally, after Corrigan and a squad of goons shoot up a record store and make the Phynx’s hit the only one for sale. This brilliant piece of marketing is followed up by holding Ed Sullivan at gunpoint to put the band on his show, with all the seats in the audience filled with spies in trench coats.
This extreme campaign, which also used more mundane marketing tricks that gave us such real-world acts as the Knack and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, gets the record up the charts. And soon after it hits number one, no less a talent than James Brown shows up to let them know that RIAA certified the record as gold:
The band is now famous enough that it can set its own very limited touring schedule, which is essential to their mission. They need to find three pieces of a map into Albania that’s been tattooed on the abdomens of three different women, then put pictures of the pieces together to make it in where they find those kidnapped important people-
Okay, yeah, we gotta stop this there and ask: What makes these people so important? All of them are big celebrities, sure, with major accomplishments on their CVs…
Which all seem to have peaked decades ago:
This ad, taken out by Warner Brothers in the trade magazines, showcasing and thanking who was on set for filming, explains one of the bigger problems with the film. They set up a group of four fresh faces to rescue the old guard of Hollywood, folks who the studios thought were important.
While it’s nice to know that Jack Warner thought the world of them, the world didn’t seem to care about any of these hostages. Why, you’d have to ask, did Warner Brothers try and do a film to get the youth audience, with stars held in much higher esteem by their demo’s parents or grandparents? Going this route undercut the entire purpose of the film, to be “with it” and draw a younger crowd into the theaters.
It didn’t help much that the old guard was being saved by four folk who, as seen in this interview with Bobby Wygant, were never going to be able to upstage their targets:
It didn’t get much better for these guys after the film wrapped. Chippeway and Miller disappeared after the film wrapped; Stevens would land a number of television appearances the 1970s, and Larden went back into music, trying in vain to replicate the success of his single hit with the band Every Mother’s Son.
Also missing in action after the film finished was screenwriter Stan Coryn. This was his sole script, which he only got the chance to write thanks to being an executive at Warner Bros. Records. The whole mess is overloaded with poor jokes, jejune situations, and a complete lack of logic; for example, why would a Communist country expel spies trying to enter, instead of capturing and holding them for leverage later on? It gets some mojo when the screenplay was taken on by the workman-like Lee Katzin, who did most of his directing for television, but it never got any help to make it sing on screen.
Speaking of singing, funnily enough, the score by Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller proved to be a major mistake. Having the songwriters of “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock” do the score at a time when songs such as “The Boxer” and “Honky Tonk Woman” were charting, was emblematic of the disconnect between the studio and the audience as this was made.
And boy, did they disconnect. The above announcement is the only evidence that the film got a screening in the United States, a world premiere in Indianapolis. Considering the lack of follow-up information about the event and the quality of the film itself, you can imagine how well THAT went.
The movie would get more foreign runs than domestic; even one weekend in any other country would be more than it had here, where the film never went wide. Warner Brothers would only show the movie some respect when Warner Archive made it available in 2012.
By which time, any of the original target audience for the film had aged out of the desirable demo, having gotten too old for the studio to care…
