stephen mchattie double feature from another era

the People Next Door: (1970. dir: David Greene) This was originally a "CBS Playhouse" production, refilmed as a television movie two years later with the same director and a few people from the cast. It's an examination of a generational war, with its focus on drug use (mom and dad deplore acid and pot while partaking thoughtlessly of sleeping pills, diet pills, cigarettes, alcohol). McHattie is the hippie son who plays in a groovy rock band. Hal Holbrook and Chloris Leachman (as the couple next door whose clean-cut son turns out to be the dastardly pusher-man) give such lovely, nuanced performances that they make leads Eli Wallach and Julie Harris look clumsy and hamfisted. McHattie, of course, already feels practised and relaxed in his charismatic intensity.

It's a morality tale from an era that feels far more distant than it is, and it's interesting from an anthropological view.

Search for the Gods: (1975. dir: Jud Taylor) Seventies teledramas have an unmistakable flavor all their own. The production values are uniformly awful, the scripts are generally as bad (this was the era in which M*A*S*H was considered great TV. Try and watch it now, I dare you), and in those days actors were either in the movies or on television: you didn't do both. You chose, or you got stuck, and switching was rare. That changed in the eighties when Hollywood started mining the soaps and sitcoms for its next generation of stars (Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Demi Moore), but this was before that particular flood.

This is a pilot that never found a home, and it gives Kurt Russell top billing because he was at that awkward stage between the Disney Wunderkind of the '60s and his beloved reinvention as Snake Plisskin. It's McHattie who plays the true lead, though, in this pre-Shirley-MacLaine delving into what would ten years later be called New Age spirituality in New Mexico. Castaneda is the Great Father whose shadow hangs benignly over the proceedings; Journey to Ixtlan is lovingly brandished in more than one scene. There is hushed talk of visits from ancient astronauts. A rich-guy villain sits in London, forever obscured in shadow, trying to track down and procure "by any means" the nine sections of an ancient, broken amulet ("medallion", I think they keep calling it). Willie Longfellow (McHattie) is a young spiritual searcher, escaping the expectations of his wealthy upbringing amongst the Boston Brahmins, who stumbles into a piece of the puzzle by jumping into the fray when an old Indian is attacked. Ralph Bellamy is the congenial artificates-expert who digs up the information McHattie needs to decipher his puzzle-piece. There is, wonderfully, a ten-minute peyote trip, in which Longfellow proves himself worthy (to a god called "Willow Lane", the "Night-Spirit, the Power of the Smoke").

There's also a lot of rappelling, verbal sparring over the fair Indian maiden, soaking in natural hot-springs while contemplating Native American genesis stories, dynamiting heedlessly into ancient tombs and, of course, killing the bad guys, sometimes after protracted and sadly dated car chases through the desert. And, yet, who can resist it? I wish they'd made a whole season.