1971@50: THE SEVEN MINUTES

A young clerk at a bookshop gets stung by detectives for selling obscene material. D.A. gets on to a hotshot lawyer and they work out a deal where everybody wins. Then the D.A. is courted by local political heavyweights who want to make an example of the book and raise their electoral profile. And then a savage rape occurs, implicating the son of one of the political shakers and the book is in the crosshairs and the deal is off the table. Hotshot is compelled by the social injustice and gets his slingshot ready for the stage entrance of Goliath.

This courtroom procedural has a few things on its plate that speak to its time. On the surface it's about the place of putting literature on trial like the titles it namechecks like Lady Chatterly's Lover or Tropic of Cancer. Just under that, though, is the suggestion that political pursuits can veil themselves in morality and, given enough clout, can steer a show trial like a speedboat. And through all of this is the intriguing pursuit of the author of the novel (which shares its title with the film) who committed suicide thirty years before.

All of that and it still manages to look and feel like a colour ad from a contemporary magazine, a kind of post-Manson Rennaisance man who dressed well and smoked the best and earned the love of the babe on his arm while leaning on the bonnet of the sleekest car available. Wayne Maunder as lawyer Mike Barrett makes that figure talk and move and care. It might sound sarcastic written out but there is a real gravity to his quest to prevent the damage of the sinister conservatives. While the steamy sexuality of his relationship with his fiance (seen while he is taking the call about the case in the beginning) has the sense of a living men's magazine, his later courtship of Maggie Russell feels accidental and so more genuine. You don't just want his case to be won you want him to win ... at all of life.

This is a Russ Meyer film which might have you imagining a clipshow of buxom nudity and exploitation but you might find yourself pleasantly surprised (or crestfallen) at seeing the film, after that phone call/sex scene, suddenly sober up and get to work. The rape and goading Wolfman Jack montage soon after begins salacious but quickly turns intentionally sickening, outrunning any preconceptions we might have about Russ's old tricks. If there is a fault here it is that the earnestness of the good or the naturally moral is played a little too dryly, as though the early sauciness needed an equal and opposite balance. It can get like the letters page of an old issue of Playboy that might run a goofy one about drugs next to a stark one about Vietnam. The courtroom tactic Barrett tries of extracting the word "fucking" from the coyness of a witness has the feel of the elder lords of liberalism scoring a touchdown.

I was hanging out to do this one for this series as it has a personal appeal for me. When I was a kid and joined the family in trips to the drive-in I saw the trailer for this movie. It mostly consisted of characters speaking the title in a snarl, including a clip from a quite poignant scene of one man assaulting Barrett for defending the book. I was completely intrigued. The title (which is explained in the end credits) posed a real mystery. A short space of time was revving people up so much they came to blows? What could the Seven Minutes be about? It bugged me but the movie was way out of the range of the kid that I was (though I think I would have enjoyed the trial) and I had no way of finding out what it was about. Later, as a media student with more resources at my disposal, I saw the Rus Meyer by line and left it where it was. It was only in the past few months, compiling a list of films released in 1971 that I saw it and said out loud: Bingo!

So, I was ready for trash and happy to sit through it if only for the pleasure of writing something snide and self-delighting. I did not expect the seriousness that I found nor the colour-blind casting nor the complexity of the women's roles. Even the lightly archaic solemnity of the cause was acceptable. And why not? This piece about bad politics and genuine decency, played with such appealing verve, gave me the kind of slap in the face I might have expected from being a touch too cheeky at a university party, a gentle affectionate pat that yet says: watch it.

1971@50: WILLARD

Young Willard Stiles still lives with his mum and gets daily bullied by his oaf of a boss. When his mother throws a birthday party for him she invites her own friends. He walks out and goes to frown at his life in the back of the crumbling mansion where they live. Seeing a rat he flinches but then feeds it some of his birthday cake and then as the rest of its pack arrives they get the rest of the slice. His mother isn't so open minded and wants him to kill them. Well, they're just rats so he organises a trap with food, a plank and water. It works until the water level stresses them and he puts the plank back so they can escape. It's possible they are the closest thing to friends he has ever had and he sets up a home for them in the cellar, training them to follow basic commands. Not so powerless and mild mannered now.

Daniel Mann, directorial all rounder, approached this horror scenario by underplaying its threat. Ernest Borgnine's sadistic boss is more terrifying than the rats and when his party is invaded by a pack of them at Willard's command we feel its just desserts. It's when Willard's personal impotence breaks against the force of his rage and he leads the rats to ever darker territory that we begin to feel uneasy and wonder how much he has come to love the animals and how much he just likes the power. The horror here doesn't have paws and tails.

And it wouldn't work without Bruce Davison's realisation of the title role. His Willard isn't just some sap who lets people walk all over him. He understands that he lets this happen and is most likely the way of a  world he will never be able to change. Even the possibilities fowarded by Sondra Locke's Joan seem unreal to him as he treats her sympathy more casually than he might if he were more of a Travis Bickle. Willard's conversations with Joan have a refreshing pleasantness but it's one that allows us to see the potential that his life has done its best to crush. So, while Travis' clunking misjudgements with Betsy make us cringe and he starts to look more and more like what we'd now call an incel, Willard really has only missed the opportunity. He really is a believable nice guy and knows the gravity of his deeds as much as the joys he might find with Joan.

The mansion sits in the ugliness of a part of the city that could be anywhere in the world. It's all forgotten glory and overgrowth, ruled by Elsa Lanchester's monster of need and bitterness. It is familiar rather than homely, a kind of Baby Jane meets the Addams Family on Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps a two bedroom flat might have provided more narrative stress but the old house does such a good job at being an escape worse than the world escaped from. Just as we groan for a little pushback from Willard we also might shiver from the mutual loathing between him and his mother.

At the end of a decade that destabilied confidence in a system and exposing it for the fantasy it always had been Willard's horror is that of the compliant Vietnam draftee, the whipping boy, the cipher. We might freeze at the torment of a Norman Bates but Willard knowingly won't give us the satisfaction. It's not the suspense of a psychological timebomb we fear in him but the patience of life's undeclared saints who, given the chance, might well lead armies of rats.

1971@50: THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN

WARNING: Potential spoiler in second last paragraph. I don't give away the ending but if you haven't seen the film and want to, you should skip over it to the final par.

A toy tank buzzes across the ground. It rolls over a toy car.  A real tank rolls over a real car, crushing it and the young family inside. A little boy walks up to the wreckage, inspects it and strolls off to meet some other kids. Titles.

A young family group at a multi-family picnic packs up when it starts to rain, and heads west in their car. The radio is getting weird. They pass the wreckage of the car at the beginning and drive to the next town to report it. No one at the sheriff's office is interested, not even to talk to them. The sheriff himself appears outside, marvelling at the newcomers. A small crowd of locals does the same, swamping the family car. They are not particularly sinister, just in wonder that anyone got through. Times are strange.

Stranger still, the town's kids are vanishing. We see them stop what they're doing and walk away in scene after scene. When the newcomer family try to leave to get help their borrowed car breaks down and it's back to square one. Meanwhile, the local charismatic retiree is marshalling up the elderly of the district, well thirteen of them, for some peculiar rejuvenative procedure.

This oddity of a supernatural horror film in a western setting is of its time in that it really isn't of anyone's time. Somewhere between the game changing Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist (with a a sprig of Rosemary's Baby) the genre rules of horror were in tatters and its practitioners again had to work out what might scare or at least disturb the modern viewer. The three films I just mentioned were remarkable for finding the darkness in the light of day, the evil in the every day. Romero's zombies weren't created in voodoo rituals they just appeared. Rosemary faced witches but they were the nice old couple in the next apartment. The gothic would reappear later as it's pretty dependable fun but for now the horror was as real as a flat tyre or a vending machine, it lived where you lived.

And there in the sheriff's office with the injured and the dead the remainder of the people of the town slowly figure out what is happening and what they need to do about it. They are as nonplussed as we would be to find a coven forming in our neighbourhood that had real earthly power. The coven is in the process of changing its skin and is as fascinating and horrifying to behold as a snake doing the same thing, and the more you look the more natural it seems. This is how this film works, despite the shocks in the infreuqent violence, the terror lies in the fact that this act of supernature will happen regardless of their inertia or resistance. I read in a book about the confronting northern Rennaisiance painter Hieronymous Bosch that to the theistic medieval mind the notion that God might be no match for the Devil. If you can put that in your thoughts and assume such a postition it will feel like a waking nightmare. Now imagine it as an earnest thought, day after day, for the rest of your life and beyond it.

The widescreen canvas and plain-as-day pallette serve this end, bringing the horror of the potential defeat to the doorstep. By contrast, the extended Californian gothic palour/lair of the coven is virtually psychedelic, the juxtaposition of the old folk revelling in what looks like an acid rock band's cover art shoot would have rubbed roughly. And then there are the children themselves, normal whiny American kids who would have played with the likes of Sonny from Skippy or anyone from Flipper or Gentle Ben. Their plain faced atrocities remind us of how casually our own peurile tempers could seize us at that age. What better vessels for the leathery old witches of the gulch? In fact, it is the breathtaking expressionlessness of their faces that crawls into our eyes as the credits roll and the sickly music box score kicks in.

While it doesn't have the universal love of a Harold and Maude or even the cultish adoration of a Little Murders, The Brotherhood of Satan is unjustly obscure, an underplaying but solidly performing tale of horror in a genre that was back in gestation at the time and didn't really look like anything predictable. If it refers to gothic imagery here and there, the constrast with the ondinary world is pleasantly jarring. Cinema would return to churning out more gothic and contrived fare in the name of horror and even the Venn diagram overlap in the '90s of crime and horror in the serial killer movies took on an increasingly old school spookfest look and feel. It wasn't until the end of that decade when The Blair Witch Project fulfilled for the genre TS Eliot's thought that any revolution in poetry should start with a return to the banal. That doesn't mean it should be featureless or bland, just that it should feel like home and that home should not be trusted.