The Love God? Pt. 1

As is my wont, I’ll start by intending to belt out a short little post and the next thing I know I’m plunging down one online rabbit hole after another.

As Lloyd Bridges famously observed, “If you want treasure, you’ve got to dive for it.”

Preamble

Cheap bastard that I am, I never order from a certain movie catalog unless they offer enough films I want to tip my purchase over $50 and get me free shipping.

I only order from them three or four times a year, but I’ve bought for them to make damn sure I get a catalog promptly at the beginning of each month.

Last month I ordered three sale items:  The first five Marx Brothers movies, ten of the best W.C. Fields movies (missing only If I Had A Million and David Copperfield to make it a perfect collection), and the five comedies Don Knotts made for Universal in the late ‘60s / early ’70s.

I’m not a big Don Knotts fan.  Oh, I don’t dislike him, but other than The Incredible Mr. Limpet and one of the DVDs in the set, he never appealed to me in a starring role.

However, I saw one of his movies in 1969 that struck me as hilarious.  I didn’t see it again until it appeared on TV sometime in the early 1970s and it was clear somebody with a dull hatchet had chopped up what I remembered as a very funny movie to make it TV acceptable.

It’s been over fifty years since I last watched even the truncated cut of the movie.

So when I saw on sale at bargain basement prices, I figured it was worth $10.57 to see if I remembered it correctly.

The Beginning

My first job in show biz was lot attendant at a drive-in movie theater in East Tennessee from 1968 to 1971.  I saw a lot of movies there (From Nashville With Music at least 37 times).

It was a weird time for movies in general and American movies in particular.  It seemed as if everybody suddenly forgot how to make a movie.  Edgy experimental films found cultural traction but lacked the storytelling chops needed to make them genuine classics, movies that could tell coherent stories usually told them to audiences long aged out of relevance.

As filmmakers gradually found their way back to solid storytelling, the older studios struggled to find their way right mix of contemporary appeal and solid production values to hit that sweet spot of young people (i.e., hippie / hippie-adjacent) to guarantee box office success.

Universal was one such studio.

Most of Universal’s output in the 1960s seemed the same as their 1950s output and that with their 1940s and 1930s releases:  Standard comedy / melodrama / thriller / horror / western fare with an occasional big budget prestige picture thrown in.

In short, good solid dependable midrange fare.

There were changes with the times, of course.  WWII influenced all genres heavily with war movies remaining popular until the late 1960s / early 1970s for reasons that will become obvious.  “Thriller” is a loose enough term to include mystery / crime / spy movies, the exact mix fluctuating with whatever was popular at the time.  Horror expanded to include science fiction in the 1950s, almost always involving a monster of some sort.

But by the early 1960s it was clear America’s cultural gestalt was going through some changes.  In 1963 Universal released The Ugly American, a what-are-we-doing-in-Vietnam movie long before Vietnam heated up, to almost universal (no pun intended) pans, harsh criticism from conservatives, and piss poor box office.

Universal got the message and steered clear of culturally sensitive topics.

Just because you don’t want to mess with culturally sensitive topics doesn’t mean the cultural doesn’t want to mess with you.

1963 was the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s proved pretty glum affairs that year.

However, in early February 1964 The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, and when then did millions of young Americans realized they could feel joy again.

Beatlemania ignited quickly, and right on its heels the British Invasion of every duet or foursome of English lads who could twang a guitar and carry a tune flooding U.S. airways with music.

Americans responded in kind, of course, and by 1964 youth culture was well established in the U.S. and by 1965 the burgeoning hippie movement permeated America’s collective public consciousness.  While not a dominant cultural thread…yet, it certainly got mainstream attention.  In 1965 there were very few people unaware of hippies in the U.S. (and most of those were probably Amish).
Certainly no one in Hollywood was unaware of the smash successes of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964) and Help! (1965).  While Elvis and beach Blanket movies played well, it was clear their time had passed and a newer, more vibrant youth culture was flourishing -- and as it flourished, changing American tastes and values.

In 1966 Universal released their first Don Knotts feature, The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, your standard haunted house comedy.  They also released their equivalent of a Beach Blanket movie only set in a ski resort, Wild Wild Winter, a cheap James Bond / Man From U.N.C.L.E. knock-off, Agent Of H.A.R.M., and a cheap Beach Blanket / 007 mash-up, Out Of Sight.  In addition to these films they also released a slew of Westerns, several thriller / crime / suspense films, Munster, Go Home to cash in on the recently revived monster craze, and two other noteworthy films:  The Pad (And How To Use It) and Fahrenheit 451.

While The Pad… clearly seeks to emulate 1964’s The Knack …And How To Get It (directed by Richard Lester, who also directed The Beatles two smash hits), it actually plows the same field Billy Wilder’s The Apartment did six years earlier but reflect the sensibilities of a new era:  In this version the nebbish loses the girl to his more worldly mentor.

The film did not do well with critics or audiences.  Universal took note. Fahrenheit 451 did better critically though it did lackluster box office.  However, it came out a few months after Fantastic Voyage and Star Trek’s premiere on TV.  The back-to-back-to-back releases of three more thoughtful and series sci-fi projects did much to prime audiences’ pumps for 1968…but more on that in a bit.

In 1967 Universal released more of their standard fare spies edging out Westerns, but they also released the successful 1920s spoof Thoroughly Modern Millie and the decidedly unsuccessful 1920s spoof The Perils Of Pauline, both of which served as call backs to previous generations of American movies -- or rather, previous generations of American movie audiences.

They also released three sci-fi films, The Projected Man, Privilege, and The Reluctant Astronaut with Don Knotts.

The Projected Man is a by-the-number futz-around-and-find-out film, yet another variant on The Fly.  Privilege, directed by Peter Watkins, is a rock & roll look at near-future youth culture, but again the cynicism of the hippie generation dominated (for all their love and communal happiness, youth were a notoriously suspicious group when it came to anything involving the establishment).

Ironically, two years later AIP would cover pretty much the same topic with their near-future youth culture film Wild In The Streets to far more raucous success.

In 1968 Universal released a number of theatrical films, many of them either busted TV pilots or edited together episodes of short run TV series.  Universal tried to penetrate the rising youth market to varying success with imported British films like Charlie Bubbles and I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Isname (both of which offered implied oral sex scenes to audiences) and Work Is A Four Letter Word (which failed so miserably it never received a home media release), and their own domestics efforts Don’t Just Stand There and What’s So bad About Feeling Good?, both with Mary Tyler Moore.

That year’s Don Knotts film was The Shakiest Gun In The West.

Universal never knew what to do with either Knotts or Moore, and when they would up in good films it proved to be by chance (Moore taking third female lead billing in a light, airy role for Thoroughly Modern Millie). What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? demonstrates Universal’s inability to take the pulse of contemporary audiences, focusing on a group of beatniks -- already a passe’ concept by the mid 1960s -- whose gloom-and-doom nihilistic lifestyle is upended by a talking toucan bearing a virus that produces euphoria in those infected by it.  They cast George Peppard and Mary Tyler Moore as the two main characters, presumably because Peppard was in Breakfast At Tiffany’s and Moore had been in the extremely popular The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Moore’s abilities as a performer -- later demonstrated to their full extent with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Ordinary People -- aren’t enough to let her play a convincing nihilistic beatnik; she comes across like Laura Petrie after a sleepless night caused by Rob’s snoring.

The basic plot idea behind What’s So Bad… was put to much better use by sci-fi novelist John Brunner in his 1973 novel The Stone That Never Came Down.

I belabor Universal’s inability to figure out what contemporary audiences wanted because when they did hit the sweet spot in 1969, it seems to be entirely by chance.

Beyond the standard Universal fare (which played better for rural and older audiences than younger urban ones), they imported Three Into Two Won’t Go, the originally rated X Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (which actually led to the divorce of star Anthony Newley from his then wife Joan Collins), and the borderline fantasy The Adding Machine, all of which flopped (another sci-fi British import, the Gerry & Sylvia Anderson produced Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun a.k.a. Doppelganger, failed to capture the 2001: A Space Odyssey / Planet Of The Apes audience since despite its impressive miniatures it was less about space adventure and more about the Andersons’ own failing marriage).

Domestically they produced Bob Fosse’s motion picture directorial debut Sweet Charity, which managed to both torpedo the hippie movement with the musical number “The Rhythm Of Life” yet bring them back at the end as a symbol of hope and acceptance, A Change Of Habit, originally intended as a vehicle for Mary Tyler Moore but that got blown out of the water when Elvis signed on opposite her as a doctor in a ghetto clinic (in fairness, Elvis was having one helluva good year in 1969, and at the time got good reviews for this role), Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, a revisionist Western banking on Robert Redford and Katherine Ross attracting Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid fans despite not sharing any scenes together, and The Love God?, the object of this exercise.

They also released Angel In My Pocket with Andy Griffith, a film so tone deaf to the times it will be cover in our next segment.

Universal didn’t release another Don Knotts picture until How To Frame A Figg in 1971, the final film in his contract.  1970 proved disastrous for Universal, redeemed only by Airport, an old fashioned star-studded melodrama, and the modest success of Clint Eastwood’s Two Mules For Sister Sara.  Their fortunes improved significantly in 1971, finally cracking the code to reach younger audiences, which marks Figg as an oddity in so many ways.

Why go on to such length about Universal’s slapdash approach to the youth audience in the late 1960s?

Because that’s germane to The Love God? and how Don Knotts best film also turned out to be his most disliked.

© Buzz Dixon