Ten Reasons THE LEGACY (1978)

In interviews Sam Elliott called THE LEGACY (1978), a film he co-starred in with Katherine Ross (they met and fell in love on set) "fifteen years behind its time." Well, as so often happens, thirty years later and we're all the way around again to where this weird 30s old dark house 70s devil movie hybrid is right in the moment, eternal as the gleam in Sam Elliott's cowboy eye. Trailing Satanist glory as it descends the stairs, THE LEGACY (1978) has recently been given a genuinely gorgeous Blu-ray upgrade courtesy Scream Factory and, like Elliott's sturdy mustache and his co-star (and future wife) Katherine Ross's shiny auburn hair, it turns out to be right painterly, the kind of film any man would be proud to hang behind his gun rack in the den.

I'd never seen this film until this Blu-ray, but I do recall being pleasantly spooked by its TV spots and the cover of the novel at the grocery check-out as a 12 year-old kid back in '78. I remember the white cat, the creepy hand, the marble pool and the endangered hero's awesome mustache (though in my memory it belonged to Nick Nolte). I never looked for it later on VHS because so many critics at the time had panned it. Well, fifteen or so years later, it turns out those people were wrong! Turns out I love most everything about this great, great terrible movie. I love its roiling roster of British characters, all playing eccentrics, libertines, war criminals, and rock stars that start dropping like flies in various OMEN-like ways almost as soon as Ross and Elliott are shown to their room (like they've been... expected). Far from the dreary drawing room gore slog it's been painted as, this turns out to be a treat for anyone who loves James Whale's OLD DARK HOUSE, Hammer's THE DEVIL RIDES OUT and ROSEMARY'S BABY, in that order.

And most of all, those of us who love badass bitches. This ain't no goddamned Stepford, sister.

(Mild Spoilers ahead)

1. Katharine Ross

Never more beautiful or assured, with that great long straight chestnut hair and autumnal wardrobe, Ross in LEGACY is like the 70s incarnation of Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Babalon Working's Marjorie Cameron, Isis, and Paulette Goddard in CAT AND THE CANARY. And unlike so many of the 70s iconic beauties, she could act when the situation demanded it yet also knew when it was best not to. Mature (she was 38!) and intelligent, swept along in this weird tide of a tale, there's no whining about her wanting a baby or not having one or getting too much sex or not enough or whatever some weak-ass male writer's idea of character development happens to be. She's equal partners with old Sam and when she SPOILER, inherits her powers, her her whole face seems to change shape, expanding into an uncanny extra dimension of glacial stillness which shows why she was so effective in THE STEPFORD WIVES.

2. Sam Elliott

From their very first kiss you can see he's falling for this chick, Sam is--not his character--he's not that great an actor. If he was acting it, he'd be Brando. Instead he's a good-hearted lug of the cowboy mould, who's totally unprepared for the beguiling force behind Ross's witchy magnetism.

This is the era of some real strides in depicting assertive hot women who can believably order men around and sleep with them without emasculating them. If their mustaches were on straight, and they'd smoked enough to get a nice deep live-in voice, such men could even forge a new path, one uniquely 70s, one that's been sadly untraveled the last 30 or 40 years, one of true equality based on individuality and mutual respect for each other's archetypal gender power. It's inspiring as a man watching Elliott slowly bring his American white cowboy male character back from the brink of British black magic feminism's emasculating abyss. A foreigner at a strange party he can never leave, he is--as in some supernatural version of Maurice Chevalier in The Love Parade--considered purely ornamental. At first his crankiness seems to indicate he's destined for death or irrelevance, or that his macho genes are straining at being considered the weaker sex (and temper tantrums--the natural male response--only prove the bitches right!). Smashing through windows and wrecking equipment at the big climax, he becomes almost the monster of the piece, like he's going to kill his lady in order to ensure she doesn't outgrow him.

Well, I should have given more credit to old Sam. A warrior from the Iron Age of Manly beauty, Sam's part of the Kris Kristofferson / Jon Voight school of sensitive ass-kickers, a group of men so cool and badass they blazed a whole new trail of how to be macho while helping--purely by not hindering-- the breakout of women's lib, which was erupting all around them and even right in their own beds. These dudes might feel left out and sidelined as whole swaths of their once undisputed power changed hands but--instead of staying sulky and sheepish--they recognized their sulkiness as immaturity rather than something they needed to act on in order to preserve the status quo. At the same time instead of being completely whipped and beaten, they had guts enough to throw down their security blankets and smash their way back to parity, Mary Tyler Moore hat-throwing-style. When it came to learning how to cast off gender oppression, they weren't too proud to take their cue from the girls who'd just cast off theirs.

3. The dusky beautiful cinematography 

brought to vivid 3-D clarity via the Shout Blu-ray

The 3D clarity and glistening deep colors are perfect for the setting, a big weird English mansion with a very bizarre all-white marble swimming pool room. There are a few moments when the couple are wearing all white in this white room, when one think perhaps this is an allegory for heaven, or a halfway limbo ala CARNIVAL OF SOULS. Sometimes a sort of waxiness takes over but overall the dusky great Allan Hume / Dick Bush photography is given full resonant expression: magic hour shadows, deep blacks, extreme angles, vertical and diagonal POVs, lots of looking down from ornate stairs, the creepy nurse's face bleeding into the myriad portraits. I usually hate the way rural England looks in daytime shots--the uniformly sickly grey sky, the landscape all washed out, dreary and depressingly still--but here that same landscape and sky looks plenty ominous, sexy, and cool. I'm so happy to finally make peace with British exterior shots! You don't even know how I suffered, all those sad, washed-out Hammer villages on old UHF TV creature features when I should have been out playing whiffle ball. And that Bentley is hypnotizing in the pristine HD cleanliness.

That said, don't judge by the pics here which I scrounged around the web, for you, Marianne!

And to cement the British Hammer link, Jimmy Sangster co-wrote Legacy's screenplay!

Guts, glory... Ram

4.  Michael J. Lewis' Score

Orchestral and at times predictable, Lewis incorporates synths with stunning affect, and doesn't get too up into the helicoptering 'Mickey Mouse' scoring. Percolating and ooze and sly menace in the Carpenter 'carpet' style, Lewis sometimes browses around a giallo vibe with barbed guitar stings and echo-drenched female vocalizing (that soars briefly into a melody Streitenfeld co-opted for Prometheus). In other words, Lewis keeps it simple and cool rather than showing off his symphonic training every five seconds like certain others who shall be nameless. And there's even a great tacky 70s theme song sung by someone named Kiki Dee.

This is from DEVIL RIDES OUT, but you get the picture

5. Charles Gray

So good as the high priest Mocata in THE DEVIL RIDES OUT and as Blofeldt in Bond films and in ROCKY HORROR and... everything - those steely blue eyes, that face like a disguise he's about to tear off, the lordly (but immanently down for a fight) voice, he's one of a kind. And he's grand here as a man "decorated three times by the Nazis." When he's shooting his crossbow with fellow unholy ringbearer Lee Montague while noting Eliot's arrival as 'the uninvited guest' you'll be reminded of Lugosi and Karloff playing chess while David Manners frantically checks the exit doors in THE BLACK CAT. 

 6. Old Dark House Ambience + Giallo-esque Deaths

 A mysterious dying monster behind a white curtain (like the old witch in SUSPIRIA --which came out the same year of THE LEGACY and has more than a few similarities) announcing only one of the assembled six will wield the ring of ultimate black magic power (a Tolkien boom was also in full effect); Katharine Ross it seems is the designated one, and 'Satan's power' isn't just the vast and unfathomable wealth of his sprawling estate, if you get my meaning. And giallo + old dark house is a combo sadly underused in the 70s (SEVEN DEATHS IN A CAT'S EYE, but what else?)

7.  Hauntological British Occult conspiracy and Telekinesis

Reincarnation, witchy genes, unholy ghost power, telekinesis, remote viewing, and a refreshing lack of viable Christian options or outright clarifications of just what sort of black magic is at work (no hail Satan chants and goat horns); it's left to the imagination without being too concerned with subtlety either. A rare combination to get right: bombast and restraint. Even the white nurse / white cat thing is done with minimal glare and Margaret Tyzack brings just the right mood of calm professionalism.

8.  Roger Daltrey chokes to Death

This strange being with the tiny body, little carny hands, huge head and wild mane of hair, is here playing a rock icon much like himself, whose links to this weird ghostly mansion estate indicates black magic got him where he is today - as if  we didn't bloody know. And leave it to a nouveau riche Acton guttersnipe like Roger to give us most of the exposition on how rich and powerful everyone there is. So naturally he dies, choking to death at the buffet. Not that you asked but THE LEGACY is actually the second film from the 70s I've seen where someone dies from choking to death and no one gives him/her the Heimlich maneuver. My own grandmother knew to give me the Heimlich when I was just a child -i.e. the 70s. She saved my life with it, years before this movie was even made! So it was not unknown, at least in Sweden, though according to CNN:

"In August 1974, editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association contacted the doctor who had developed a new method to save someone from choking -- then a major cause of death in the United States. His new technique was saving lives across the country, and they wanted to tell him they were publishing a story about it, and were going to name the procedure after him" (CNN)"

Either way, watching Daltrey choke to death at the buffet table is twice as agonizing as everyone just stands around freaking out. Is that really what they did back then? Heimlich, you saved my life a dozen times, me alone!

9. Town and country weapons and adventure

There's some solidly imagined escape attempt sequences with the estate vividly depicted from the towers down to the stables. All the rustic one lane roads lead back to the mansion; they try to escape via horses, saddled on the sly which Sam does with a relaxed quick assurance of the real cowboy, and their mad ride to freedom manages to be 70s rustic lovely while also scary (the way the score slowly shifts from an orchestral western-style ride along back to menacing again is letter-perfect); the near mauling by the hunting dogs, the crossbow vs. shotgun duel--all very town and country (where double barrel shotgun and crossbow must be continually reloaded as they would be in real life, a truth which seldom engages less imaginative screenwriters). The weapons all fit the location perfectly, creating a much tighter unified whole than EYE OF THE DEVIL which loped along a similar track but--the Sharon Tate scenes aside, was a snooze.

10. Great Ending

(SPOILER)

  I didn't know whether to hope for Sam's bloody death or root for him. The last thing I wanted was to see him instill some last minute bad faith 'better my girlfriend be dead than a Satanist' edict, or convince her to return unto old patriarchal hierarchies because all she really wants in life is to be bossed around and gotten pregnant. It didn't happen! This was the age of feminist horror and this fits the bill admirably.

It also makes sense that Elliott and Ross met on the shoot, married, had a kid and went on to a groovy life, and are still going strong. I'm not sayin' it takes occult magic to keep a Hollywood couple together for so long but to use one of his LEGACY lines back at him, "whatever he's doin'.... he's doin' it right."

And that's how you play get the guests: SCORE (1974)

The title above is a line from WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (1966), delivered by Richard Burton after he demolishes the entire foundation of another couple's marriage (my review here). One thing that's nigh un-demolishable is the WOOLF itself, a great film based on a great Edward Albee play, which proved a reliable blueprint for Jerry Douglas's all-nude 1970s stage play version. Score AKA No One's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, (no doubt jumping into the foamy after-ripples from the splash of Oh, Calcutta!) answered Albee's titular question, at least for the pre-AIDS era. Douglas' play must have been a success too, however relatively minor, because, like Albee's original, it had a film adaptation. Via artsy provocauteur Radley Metzger, SCORE takes the same 'all night musical beds' pair of married couples structure and reimagines it for the age of swinging. This is what would happen if George and Martha were druggy ex-pat bisexuals instead of bitchy drunks, and Liz Taylor went after Sandy Dennis and Burton punked out George Segal and they all got high and did poppers and Valium and god knows what else...

SCORE, like most of Metzger's works, transcends the problems that so often result in tediously boring 1970s softcore erotica. In the age of hardcore we've become used to 'using' sexual imagery for a quick release, then forgetting about it. As a result, unless we have 'matters' in hand, sex is seldom sexy once its 'present' onscreen. It can be a forbidden thrill to think about, but without special skill behind the camera and maybe half a roofie chased with a quart of whiskey you may either fall asleep or find yourself having an anything-but-sexual fantasy while waiting for the soft focus and slow gropes to die away and an actual movie to appear. The 'wallpaper' camp factor lasts around ten minutes, and unless the music is good, like sitars and bongos trippy level good, it can grate on your nerves. Radley Metzger, though, is that rare diamond in the horny rose bush. He's classy but visceral, witty but earthy, human and warm but not sappy or daft, smart enough to know you can put Shakespeare into smut just as easy as you can put smut into Shakespeare.

As a result of Metzger's care (and the tenor of the trippy times), SCORE is a genuinely subversive high water mark above the usual lowbrow hetero-male-centric sexual rubric. It's a gay seduction film for straight men, or a bi-curious film that satisfies curiosity how other quarters halve. Like a cat killer that raises cats from the dead, this is the movie that should have gone on while Elliot Gould was brushing his teeth at the end of BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE (1969). He'd have run screaming from the screen!

A look at the stars begins with the ladies: the head hedonist Martha-type, Claire Wilbur is strangely reserved (she played her role originally onstage) and kind of manly, but that suits the role. As the hotter younger gamin, Lynn Lowry is cat-eyed (she was 'Ruthie' in the 1982 CAT PEOPLE remake!) and convincing. She seems to be really having fun and rolling along with the story wherever it may go. Her squeamish new "straight" husband (Calvin Culver -- I'm sure it's his real name) is kind of too gay from the get-go to convincingly resistant to cross-pollination, but he looks good without a shirt and has a sweet smile (sadly, he died of AIDS in 1987). Gerald Grant is the worldly, knowing Jack (the Georgie-Boy). He was in only a handful of other films: both his haircut and acting are unnervingly uneven, but Metzger's tart dialogue carries him through and he seduces Calvin like he's played 'get the guests' all his life. In this case, that means he and Claire each have until midnight to seduce their same-gendered 'newbie' opposite.

All in all, regardless of your current marital status, not only is SCORE an important movie for anyone anxious to learn the ABC's of seduction, it's also a feel good movie for the gay matchmaker in us all. Many's the night I've helped counter the odds as a lesbian wingman back in the 00's. Between my hot AA lesbian sponsee and me in my peak condition, all the exits were covered. Still, that didn't mean we always caught our quarry, especially if she sniffed out our Dangerous Liason-style game like a frightened deer. Sometimes you can turn 'em, most times you can't, but it's a great team-building exercise. Before all that, whilst still drinking, I lived in Hoboken with a hot bisexual swinger, and I'd feel a vested interest in her seduction stratagem as well. I'd work to keep her prey entertained but when said prey ran hurriedly off with mixed signals and tedious straightness intact to catch the midnight Path train back to Manhattan, we'd drown our collective sorrows.

Watching SCORE reminded me a lot of that, except, well, the title says it all! Path trains not an option.

So while on the one hand you are rooting for this pair to seduce this younger couple, on the other hand, 'gulp' if you are a straight male you are kind of put in the position of having to imagine all sorts of 'new sensations' which straight males are not often forced to reckon with while being too high to object and too vulnerable to being ceaselessly flattered by some hot hairy... shirtless... male. If you're not gay, maybe this movie will prove you wrong. And at least do your hosts the credit of inhaling some freakin' poppers before you make up your mind.

What are poppers like? I've never done one!

Could part of 'straight' middle America's rabid hate/fear of gay marriage and openly gay soldiers be similar to the reticence and denial of the younger couple in this film? Is it a metaphor? Or is it that our reign on our straight imaginations is so tenuous we can't help imagining acts that then freak us out and repel us yet we can't stop obsessing about them, like a poison ivy itch of the mind? We don't like to imagine our parents doing 'it' either, for example, and generally they respect that by not talking about their sex life in our presence. Can we put two and two together and realize fear of homosexuality is fear of our own imagination, of the way we can't let mental images go, the way we become obsessed by threats that don't exist, all tied into our own conception of our verboten primal scene? Thus, by subconscious illogic, if f we don't repress our cultural gayness (in accordance with our subconscious' bundled anxiety portfolio), we may have to watch our parents have sex, and that would be horrific. Better to not be born, better to inhale our own amyl nitrate birth and exhale into a whole new self, one more open... and more opened.

As for the SCORE score, an obnoxiously off-key Yardbirds impression song "Where is the Girl" repeats way too much in the beginning but the big climax scene that's the last 20 minutes or so rocks with a funky bongo and distorted electric cello score that gets the blood racing. Similarly, the actors are also a bit stilted in the beginning but come into their own pretty quick once that cello starts, especially cat-eyed Lowry, who taps into a kind of sensational wickedness as she begins to take some control and play along; a natural born swinger just now blossoming as the pot, pills and poppers help her shucker loose from her old limited shell.

And of course that slow coming into her own also parallels WOOLF, wherein Burton's character starts out all old and tired and set in his set fusty history prof ways and as the night heats up and the drinks fly down, he catches fire and comes alive with wit-fueled malice. SCORE though, is in the end much nicer. Because no one is bemoaning lack of children, or being mean to one another. The games of 'get the guests' here have no malice, just a kind of refreshingly even-keeled bravado, by which husband and wife stand as well-matched opponents in a friendly game of 'turn the newbie on and out'. Nothing warms my heart more than seeing someone 'open up' into new realms of being... while doing weird drugs.

And SCORE's big finale climax is methodical and ingeniously edited so that when the seductors agree, each in their separate killing chambers, that midnight will be the 'game's' deadline, everything begins to heat up in crazy crosscuts, to the point of no-return right at the stroke of twelve, cooking like no one's business, until the separate seductions bleed together and the will-they-or-won't-they becomes a tied-up, twirling funhouse mirror blur of identity that rockets SCORE out of the WOOLF-ish woods and right into the rarefied air of menage-a-troisteur Donald Cammell's PERFORMANCE! 

I also love that the film follows only one 24-hour period in these people's lives, starting during one hung-over morning/afternoon picking up ashtrays, spent popper tubes and flung underwear from the orgy the night before,and ending during the morning clean-up of the next one. I love those kind of parties! People sing about goin' on and on to the "breaka dawn," but don't often show it in movies. With his attention to the real-time rhythms of seduction and horizon-widening and the pink lips of early dawn along the black skin sky, Metzger shows his love not only of WOOLF but of Eric Rohmer in-the-moment lyricism, and druggy orgies. Like the best of Rohmer's sun-dappled moral tales, the chase and the near-misses become so hot with SCORE that even after hooking up (scoring) the passion still undulates. And like all the best drug movies, the contact high is potent.

Incidentally, the stunning new DVD being released this week from Cult Epics is fully restored and uncut, which means... oh I shan't spoil the surprise. Let's just say, if you see just one 1970s uncut sex movie this semester, make it SCORE. And since this is a time for new things, my friend, just relax... relax... and when that first popper comes rushing through your brain, keep repeating "it's only a movie, it's only a movie.." being projected.. onto my tight sailor pants.

Look closer...at far right.. for the Metzger termite touch.