Everybody Hates This Movie But Me
Sometimes, you just find yourself on the wrong side, know what I mean?
"The Black Bird" (1975), got a "BOMB" rating in Leonard Maltin's book and has a poor imdb rating and got bad reviews and wasn't a hit and...
Look, sorry, but it made me laugh when I first saw it and it still does.
I'm sure part of the hatred towards the film is that it tosses itself off as a sequel to John Huston's sublime "The Maltese Falcon" of 1941 and proceeds to make fun of everything in the original.
But the WAY it makes the fun is, fun.
Start with George Segal, who spent the seventies as a top-billed star, not quite at the top level, but solid enough. "The Black Bird" gives us a look at Segal in his seventies prime: fit, handsome, with a nice head of longish hair and, above all, a sour, deadpan, put-upon and grouchy attitude that has me laughing from Scene One of this baby all the way to the end.
Segal is playing "Sam Spade, Jr." and he works out of his dad's old office in a San Franciso neighborhood which is now somewhat ghetto and the movie gets mileage of Segal having to plow down the street in angry humiliation as guys yell, "Hey,---" well, his last name, y'know. This was the 70's.
Segal stakes out a position of being pissed-off and put-upon for the whole movie, and he's funny, I tell ya. No more funny than when we see that Spade, Jr. has his dad's secretary (the REAL actress from the original, Lee Patrick), and she gives Jr. no respect, no respect at all ("Your father wouldn't screw up like this.") Funnier still, Segal's always yelling BACK at the secretary who hates him: "Aw, shut up, you old bat!" What we have here is a failure to communicate.
One more original "Falcon" cast member is here, and he's choice: Elisha Cook, Jr. -- the weaselly Wilmer the Gunsel from the original, who looks just as weaselly, just older. Wilmer exchanges some incoherent dialogue over spaghetti with Segal ("I can't make out a word you're saying"), and promptly falls dead into it, face first.
I offer three examples of scenes that made me laugh. You decide:
1. A group of machete-wielding, heavyset Hawaiian assassins in hawaiian shirts chase Segal all around a hotel kitchen and out onto the S.F. street, before getting tired as a group and just, stopping, as we hear some mumbles on the soundtrack. "Oh, forget it. We come back, get him later. Let's go, yeah,OK." Later, the same group reappears stalking Segal from a very slow convertable, playing ukeleles and singing traditional songs.
2. Every time Segal parks his old car on a typical vertical-hilly San Francisco street, it rolls away downhill and crashes into something...but a different way every time.
3. Another refugee from old gangster movies (and the Blacklist, and "Hart to Hart") gravel-voiced tough guy Lionel Stander, plays an amiable big thug who, upon being hit without effect on the jaw by Segal, good-naturedly punches his finger in Segal's chest, saying, "Don't...you...ever...do...that...to me again." Segal looks more pained with ever finger-pop.
I haven't seen this movie in years, but as I recall, there's a femme fatale who always serves Segal knock-out drops before sex that never happens (he's asleep) and a little bald Nazi who wears Speedos, and I THINK it was funny, it sure seemed funny at the time.
Try it. It's not a bomb, that much I can tell you. George Segal in his prime was a very funny man. And in watching a REAL star of the original "Maltese Falcon", Lee Patrick, continually yelling at Segal that he's not as good as the original is, well...a stand-in for all of us, considering all other sequels.