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"The Movie on the Marquee Across the Street" in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

posted a year ago by ecarle (14979)
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"Pendulum" is now famous for being the movie title on the marquee "across the street"(at the Westwood Village theater near UCLA) in QT's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." That marquee faces the marquee at the Westwood Bruin(named for the UCLA Bruin sports teams) in which Sharon Tate(Margot Robbie) goes to see herself in the Dean Martin/Matt Helm spy spoof "The Wrecking Crew."

Turns out that both Pendulum and The Wrecking Crew were released in February of 1969 -- and it is a February day in 1969 that Sharon Tate is specifically said to be seeing her movie(a screen title quotes "February 9, 1969.")

QATIH made me curious to see Pendulum some day; the chance came last week on Amazon Prime. Its an oddball little movie with an oddball little cast:

George Peppard: In 1969, his days as a movie star were about over. Came the 70's, he would be a TV detective on Banacek, and came the 80's, after getting fired from the John Forsythe role in Dynasty, he got his own hit in "The A Team."
But in Pendulum, he's kinda/sort of a movie star -- looking great in longish 1969 hair, tempermental, smooth voice, I guess he COULD have stayed a star(Breakfast at Tiffany's launched him in '61) but it just didn't happen.

Jean Seberg: Blonde, beautiful. Discovered in the 50's by Otto Preminger(St. Joan, Bonjour Tristeste), made famous by Godard in "Breathless" (1960, the year of Psycho with a title almost used for "North by Northwest") and alternating American films with foreign films for her whole career -- which was cut short by suicide age 40(a movie was made called "Seberg" in 2019 starring Kristen Stewart.) Jean Seberg had romantic entanglements and political alliances(like with the Black Panthers) that made her notorious, but her film career was always iffy. Except in a weird one-two punch with Paint Your Wagon in 1969 and Airport right after that in 1970. They were both BIG movies -- Wagon famously flopped and Airport famously hit and ....Seberg faded right away.

Pendulum is right before those two.

Richard Kiley: Kiley has real star presence in Pendulum --a booming voice, manly features, strapping -- but I checked IMDb and he hardly worked in movies at all. He was a Broadway guy("Man of La Mancha.") He played a great Columbo villain -- he was Columbo's police commissioner BOSS. Famously, Michael Crichton wrote Richard Kiley as "the voice of Jurassic Park" in his novel and Spielberg hired Kilely's voice for the movie.

Those are the names on the marquee in OATIH -- Peppard, Seberg, and Kiley -- and now they are forgotten.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Its funny: as the clips shown in OATIH attest, The Wrecking Crew was a really bad movie -- the WORST of Dino's four Matt Helm movies -- he refused to do anymore and got sued. As it turns out "Pendulum" wasn't a REALLY bad movie, but it was a PRETTY bad movie...I guess in the year of The Wild Bunch and Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy, bad and/or mediocre movies were still getting green lit.

Jean Seberg is Marion Crane in Pendulum, but this time, I saw it coming, because the plot summary on the Amazon Prime screen said:

"When police captain Frank Matthews is accused of murdering his adulterous wife and her lover, he avoids arrest and sets out to find the real killer."

Jean is the adulterous wife, natch and gets about 1/3 of the movie alive (ala Marion Crane) before getting shot at home in her OWN bedroom with her male lover in bed with her. Peppard is out of town on a trip. Peppard is accused of that murder, but there is a clever twist, actually: because she was in bed with her lover in her OWN marital bed, the killer thought he was killing her HUSBAND(Peppard) and her. Wrong.

Whereas The Wrecking Crew is just plain bad -- badly written, acted, and stunt choreographed(the fights are ridiculous) - Pendulum starts strong and runs out of gas -- you could say it was "just a TV movie" but back then TV movies never looked this GOOD -- they had shorter shooting schedules and lesser production values and cinematography care.

CONT

[–] ecarle (14979) a year ago

Pendulum is about a psycho rapist-killer (Robert F. Lyons, who in 1969 is rather a dead ringer for Young Jack Nicholson -- probably hurt his career) who is released "on a technicality" by the US Supreme Court. Cop Peppard arrested him and wants him back behind bars; defense attorney Kiley defended him but wants him to "get help." Peppard ends up hiring Kiley to defend him(natch) and the movie (in its first half) has a serious enough contemplation of "the nature of justice": Richard Kiley defends a psycho rapist and a wrongfully accused man(Peppard) with the same constitutional fervor.

Pendulum has some Hitchcock angles:

Marnie angles: (1) The judge who sets the psycho free is the same guy who played Marnie's boss at Sean Connery's firm in Marnie and (2) the psycho rapist has a mother who worked as a prostitute out of their home.

The Birds: Charles McGraw(fishing boat captain Sebastian Sholes at the Tides) is Peppard's cop boss.

Psycho: Jean Seberg is the blonde leading lady who gets killed before the film is halfway over, like Janet Leigh.

Frenzy: The Amazon summary for Frenzy is almost exactly like that for Pendulum:

"When police captain Frank Matthews is accused of murdering his adulterous wife and her lover, he avoids arrest and sets out to find the real killer."

"When out-of-work London bartender Richard Blaney is accused of murdering his ex-wife, he avoids arrest and sets out to find the real killer."

Goes to show you: a good movie and a bad movie can be made out of the same basic premise.