I've stated a love for post-apocalyptic stories elsewhere on Phantom Empires, as well as an affinity for the 1970's;  my fondness for the TV movies of that era is also something that I blab on about quite often.  Well,  1974's WHERE HAVE ALL THE PEOPLE GONE? is the best of all these worlds.  Starring prolific 70's TV actor Peter Graves,  this is surprisingly uncompromising and grim coming from the small screen, though it was a time when the TV movie was often quite serious;  it was a decade of adult issues and stark visions, and here we have a theme that meets that mark.

Graves plays Steven Anders,  a man on a mountain camping trip with his family.  His wife, played by character actor Jay MacIntosh, needs to return home early, leaving him with his teen children David and Deborah, played by George O'Hanlon jr. (most recently seen in LOST) and Kathleen Quinlan (in everything from Ironside to CSI), respectively.  While exploring a cave,  mysterious waves of light (ostensibly freakish solar flares) flashed across the California sky.  The three come out of the mountain to a changed world.  As the mother had taken the vehicle,  they are forced to hike home to Malibu, on a quest to reunite with her.

The first thing they find is a near-complete lack of people.  The light flashes somehow have reduced the bulk of the human race to dust;  only a few survivors,  like themselves, seem to have a genetic immunity.  The few survivors encountered, as in most apocalyptic fiction,  are either frightened or hostile,  with a desperation that makes them dangerous.  Animals also seem to have been negatively effected, making any interaction with any living thing rife with deadly possibilities. To make things worse, the flares have rendered most running electronic devices useless.  Steven drives the family toward home with a steely determination...navigating danger while safeguarding his children's emotional stability.

This is a fantastic picture.  It sits in a special category of mine, with other such post-apocalyptic gems as the stark Ray Milland doomsday film PANIC IN THE YEAR ZERO, and well-known classics like THE OMEGA MAN and THE PLANET OF THE APES.  Peter Graves is a surprisingly strong figure here (much as Milland was in the aforementioned),  and the kids were both very good.  Verna Bloom is captivating as a distraught mother.  It's an unusual plot for television, and I think they pull it off memorably.

It's on Youtube for those that wish to see it;  I'd love to see a DVD release.

It took me quite a while to watch the commonly-held classic, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, and by "a while", I mean decades. Why?  It was that stupid song.  Yep,  and the stupid bicycle scene.  I'm a western fan,  and I was pretty sure that the film was so popular in the mainstream because it was barely western-like in nature.  It's a pet peeve of mine,  I have to admit; things in a genre that get mainstream attention for all the things that sit well outside of what made the genre great in the first place.

Well, some years ago I watched it,  and you know what?  It was pretty good.  Maybe a bit too fluffy at times,  too goofy-buddy (a big thing in 70's westerns),  but overall I feel that it's a very credible western...in spite of the accursed bicycle song.

Mrs. Sundance, it must be said,  isn't in the same league as that famous film.  In any way. But,  as a fun TV movie (a 1974 ABC Movie of the Week), mapped out as a sequel of sorts,  it was very entertaining and worth watching. It features the classic TV "Bewitched" star Elizabeth Montgomery as Etta Place, the character in the famous bicycle scene (played so charmingly by Katherine Ross, who played her again in the film Wanted: The Sundance Woman), and titular Mrs. Sundance.

She has been on the run from the law since the events portrayed in the original film,  hiding out in a small-ish cowtown in the guise of the local school teacher.  Things had been skaky of late,  with various people asking what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like that...a bit of panic sets in. So, when a moving stage production came through, acting out her earlier life with the Sundance kid and the Wild Bunch, she begins to think that it might be time to move on. She goes to that show, and at the theater she sees the lawman that has been on her trail; immediately she dresses up in men's clothes and jumps a train. Feeling like she had just dodged a bullet, another hobo (played by Robert Foxworth) hops into the railcar with her.

The chase is on, and from then on, nothing is what it seems.

I'm a sucker for TV-type movies from the 70's, a sucker for westerns in general,  and,  it must be confessed,  I've had a minor crush on Elizabeth Montgomery since I started to notice girls...a very long time ago. This was great fun for me. Sure, it was a teeny bit cheesy at times, and it did it's best to connect itself with it's superior parent film (you even see the bike from the original film,  bent and rusted from unuse),  but Montgomery is so serious and interesting, giving it her all, that I tossed my critical eye out the window. Robert Foxworth was good too; humorous and rakish, with a bit of a nebbish quality. Having only seen him as the apostle Peter in the incredible Peter & Paul miniseries (with a fiery Anthony Hopkins),  it was nice to add a different angle to my (thus far) favourable impression of his work. It's worht noting that he and Montgomery began a romance during this film, and that they lived together for twenty years before finally marrying;  he was he fourth and final husband.

If you watch it,  don't expect to compare it with the famous one; it's its own thing, and quite a fun thing when viewed with an eye receptive to fun.  It has only a wobbly connection to the actual events or the people involved,  but I enjoyed it quite a lot.

In honour of the sad, recent death of Dan Haggerty,  best known from his role as Grizzly Adams on the show of the same name,  I thought I'd put a marker here on Phantom Empires as a small testament to his effect on my young life.  To be honest,  Haggerty's passing was a bit of a shock.  I'd  got the DVD sets of two seasons of the show within the last couple of years, and his influence had just recently become clear to me.  I grew up in the pacific northwest, surrounded by fields and forest, on a farm between two small towns.  I very much saw Grizzly Adams as one of my own.  To me he stood tall with chaps like Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone, and with families like the Waltons, The Wilderness Family, (and especially) the Ingalls family in their little house on the prairie.  Grizzly Adams was a major friend of my imagination in the 70's.  That was the decade of my formative years, beginning at age three and ending at age thirteen, at just the time in one's life when personal values are best developed, and Haggerty's Adams was one of my many good teachers. I dreamed about his sort of life. I stalked the forests looking for bears to befriend (never found one, but my dog Smokey was just as good, and probably a bit more feral),  camped out in the wild forest (populated by fiercely docile cattle and lots of crows), and substituted a tobacco-chewing, banjo-playing neighbor for Adams' mountain man friend Mad Jack (played with the appropriate grizzle by the charismatic Denver Pyle). 

I watched the series religiously...it was cool.   

Initially I considered doing a review of the GRIZZLY ADAMS series for this occasion (I may still),  but that's not generally my style...I prefer less a direct sort of a eulogy. So,  in this spirit,  I present the fun and wholesome 1977 (or 1976, depending on whether you believe the titles or the credits) film BUFFALO RIDER.  Released under the "Starfire films" banner (of which I haven't heard),  it was directed by George Lauris and/or Dick Robinson and John Fabian (depending on whether you believe the titles or the credits).  It has a strong TV movie feel...and by that I mean a 70's TV movie feel,  which is very much a good thing in my book. At the core it's very wholesome.  That's the key here...wholesomeness. The 70's were the real beginnings of the mainstreaming of postmodernism,  and certain factions of the American public didn't (don't) like how fast (and where) this process was leading them.  I believe that shows like LITTLE HOUSE and THE WALTONS started cropping up as a refuge for those people to rest in.  GRIZZLY ADAMS was certainly one of these shows,  and no less so was BUFFALO RIDER.

Set in the late 1880's (otherwise known as the 'olden days'),  it centers around the subject of Buffalo hunters and the mass hunting of the Buffalo for hides.  As the film itself tells,  new techniques for the processing of the soft hides of Buffalo had made it more useful (as the hide of cattle had been),  which was bad news for the existence of those beautiful critters.  Before that era was finished,  herds of millions were brutally and wastefully whittled to hundreds.  

It was in this world that Jake Jones lived.  

Based on a real person,  the Jake Jones in the film was called "Buffalo Jones"  by both the Indians and the settlers.  He left a life in Texas, according to the narrator (rustically rasped by C. Lindsay Workman),  disgusted by the mass butchery of the southern Buffalo herds, and headed up north,  to live life of a wilderness hermit.  His character was known to be honest and respectful;  our wilderness hermits, as Grizzly Adams shows,  should be thus.  He wore the appropriate leather mountain man clothes,  and his long hair and bushy mustache would have been the envy of every trapper and "Griz" hunter from Colorado to Alaska.

It's exactly this sort of fellow that would tame and ride a Buffalo.

After saving a baby Buffalo from attack by hungry coyotes (which he doesn't kill, btw),  Jones takes him under his wing and keeps him safe for the winter.  During that time, the Buffalo,  by this time (appropriately) named Samson,  has grown into quite a beast...six feet at the hump,  and around two thousand pounds.  A bit bigger than Grizzly Adams' pet bear Ben,  wot?  So, Jones gets the crazy idea to put a saddle on his new critter,  and after a bit of creative negotiating,  they become a lean, mean, wilderness-hopping machine.  Cue banjo music.  Yep, banjo music.

Great fun.

The pair have some rollickin' adventures;  they fight a wolf,  chase a bear (a sort of dig at Grizzly Adams, if indirectly, I think),  get shot at by Indians (Samson is seen as 'big magic', so he's in great demand), champion a woman and her infant child, brave rough rivers, and, in much of the plot, get harassed by the evil Buff Hunter Frank Nesbitt (John Freeman), and his shaggy, mean, (and quite ugly) hide-skinners Ralph Pierce and Ted Clayborn (played by Rich Scheeland and George Sager, respectively). The climax is a gunfight in a saloon, and if you haven't seen a bar fight including a Buffalo,  I think you must. Shot in various wild locales,  it made me want to pack up and head right up into the wild country (if, in fact, that still exists anywhere).  This simple and relatively innocent story was, relative to what one sees these days,  quite refreshing and jolly (if a tad silly...and probably BECAUSE it was a tad silly),  and it was interesting enough for me to track down the historical Jake Jones...which is exactly what I did for the historical Grizzly Adams.

Full Circle.

I live in North Dakota,  and last year I visited a place where Buffaloes are kept (they have a white one there,  and a giant Buffalo statue...they're serious), and also was fortunate enough to go to South Dakota and experience a small herd of the big, beautiful, beasts.  In my imagination I tied these experiences together with this film,  which made for great memories of both. I recommend THE BUFFALO RIDER for that lazy Sunday morning (or afternoon, if you're church-folk) in which you crave something light and frisky to spend the time between breakfast and later plans.  I predict you'll want to go hiking afterward,  or maybe you'll try to find a way to pet a Buffalo.

...which is exactly what I did after I saw it;  North Dakota is good like that.

Recently I read a few nice reviews of 70's cop shows on a blog...I didn't know it, but it was going to start a crazed frenzy of watching.  BARETTA, KOJAK, MCCLOUD, BANACEK,  MANNIX and a legion of others have scorched my TV screen the last week,  and I'm loving it!  For a year or so the broadcast retro stations have been showing these things...I've seen an episode here and there and have enjoyed them.    I think those have just been prepping me for the madness to come!  Jeez, these things are fun!  They really bring back memories;  I was just the right age to watch these shows when they came on, and was left unsupervised and mostly free to watch whatever I wanted...a lucky kid!  I decided to review the TV movie SEE THE MAN RUN.  This television thriller aired  in 1971, and it starred a quartet of television heavy-hitters of the time:  Robert Culp,  Angie Dickinson(hubba, hubba), Eddie Albert & June Allyson.  To tell the truth,  because of the casting, I was a bit skeptical of the possibilities here.  I mean...June Allyson?  Eddie Albert?  I don't have all that many great memories of their acting. I'm really glad I took the chance;  both of them were very good, and Culp, playing off Dickinson, was SO good.  So good. 

Here's a basic rundown:

Culp,  an out of work, some- what spineless actor, is in bed with his wife, played by Dick- inson (lucky!).  He mistakenly receives a call from a kidnapper, who apparently doesn't know that the couple had just moved in...and were assigned the old number of the victim's father. The harsh voice on the phone demands $50,000 for the return of the girl, and Culp is told that if he says a word to the cops, "his" daughter would die. At first he thinks it's a joke, but then he realises the mistake and calls the real father, a doctor, played by Eddie Albert.  He relays the information the kidnappers had given him, but the father and mother misunderstand and panic,  causing Culp to hang up.

After that,  at the goading of the shrewish Dickinson(look at those pics to the left...nasty!),  he gets the idea to pretend to be the kidnapper.  The plan?  To take the $50,000 that the kidnappers demanded, add $100,000 to the total, pretend to be the kidnapper, pick up the money from Eddie Albert, skim off the $100,000, THEN pretend to be the doctor, deliver the $50,000 to the baddies, and finally, to rescue the daughter.  Simple, right?  No.  June Allyson, the crazy old biddy, has to blab.  The cops get involved...the fun begins.

I was on the edge of my couch cushion for the last half of this!  It had the pacing of a very good episode of ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, down to the stinger ending.  Robert Culp and Angie Dickinson were really impressive here;  Culp was both convincingly weak and  extremely intense, and Angie...let's just say that that gal could play a total bitch extremely well!  This was a very satisfying movie.  I was impressed by how well everything tied together, and by how well everyone worked to tighten the knot.  Awesome.