Chief Zabu


            Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a private surveillance expert in San Francisco, has been hired by the Director to follow and record the actions of his wife, Ann (Cindy Williams), and her lover, Marc (Frederic Forrest). Using three separate microphones, Caul and his associates follow the couple around a park. Later, he pieces together a conversation that clearly indicates the two are in a relationship and that they fear being found out by the Director.Caul is a secretive, almost paranoid individual. He alienates his assistant, Stan (John Cazale), because he won't teach him more about audio surveillance, and his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr), because he won't share with her details about his career or personal life. He also refuses to hand over the tapes of Ann and Marc to the Director's assistant, Martin (Harrison Ford). The Director had specified that the tapes were to be turned over only to him. Martin protests but Caul keeps the tapes.Caul becomes increasingly concerned that, were he to turn the tapes over to the Director, that some harm would come to Ann and Marc. On the tapes, Marc can be heard to say "He'd kill us if he had the chance." When he worked on the East Coast, Caul had participated in a surveillance that led to the deaths of two persons. He worries that this might happen again, and goes to church to confess his sins.After Amy breaks off their relationship, Caul attends a surveillance convention. Martin also attends, and Caul confronts him and orders Martin to stop following him. He learns that Stan has gone to work for Moran (Alan Garfield), a Detroit-based surveillance expert looking to expand to the West Coast. Moran demonstrates to convention goers a new remote audio system that turns any telephone into a live microphone. Although Caul persuades Stan not to work for Moran after the convention is over, Moran is effusive in his praise for Caul. Lonely and enjoying the positive attention, Caul lets his guard down and takes Moran, Stan and several others back to his workroom for a post-convention party. Among the partygoers is Meredith (Elizabeth McRae), a showgirl who worked at Moran's convention booth. Meredith openly flirts with Caul and in a private moment, Caul opens up to her about his troubles with Amy. This conversation is recorded by Moran, who had earlier planted a bug on Caul. Caul is outraged and kicks everybody out. Meredith stays, helps Caul into bed, undresses herself and sleeps with him. Caul has a dream in which he pursues Ann through the fog, telling her about how he nearly died as a child. In this dream, he warns Ann that the Director plans to kill her. "I'm not afraid of death," he tells her as she disappears into the mist, "but I am afraid of murder."When Caul awakens in the morning, he discovers both Meredith and the tapes are gone. Frustrated and angry, he returns home and tries to call the Director. Caul has lied to many people that he doesn't have a home telephone and is surprised when Martin calls him back at home. Martin tells him that he took the tapes and delivered them to the Director. Caul should come to the office to pick up his fee ($15,000). Caul does as asked, and finds the seething Director (Robert Duvall) listening to the conversation. The Director curtly dismisses Caul after paying him.Disturbed, Caul goes to the hotel that Ann and Marc mentioned as meeting place in their conversation. He rents an adjoining room and inserts a microphone through the wall to listen to the conversation. He hears shouting. Rushing to the balcony, he sees bloody hand prints on the glass partition. Appalled and frightened, he collapses in his own room. Upon reviving, he breaks into the room Marc and Ann had rented. The room seems orderly, but the toilet is running. He gives it a flush and blood wells out.Caul goes to see the Director but security blocks his way. On the street, he is surprised to see Ann sitting in an idling car. A newspaper headline informs him that the Director has been killed in a car accident. Ann now controls the Director's company. Later, as Ann, Marc and Martin try to escape reporters asking them about an inquiry into the Director's death, they notice Caul watching them. Caul realizes that the bloody hand he saw in the hotel was the Director's; Marc's statement that the Director would kill them if he had the chance was a rationalization of their decision to kill him.Back in his apartment, Caul sits alone, playing his saxophone to his favorite jazz records. His phone rings. When he answers, no one is there. He hangs up and resumes playing. It rings again; this time, Martin tells him that Ann and Marc know he has deduced what happened, and that they will be listening to him. Martin then plays back a recording of Caul's saxophone playing. Completely consumed by paranoia and forgetful of Moran's demonstration at the convention, Caul demolishes his apartment looking for the bug. Unable to find it, he resumes playing his saxophone.
    

The Conversation


            
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The Patriots

Leave 'em Laughing


            Cameron (Steve Railsback), a Vietnam vet who's wanted for attempted murder, is caught by the police but escapes. Crossing a bridge, he dodges an antique car that seems to be trying to run him down; when he turns around, the car has disappeared. While he wonders whether it went into the river, a helicopter flies close to the bridge and a man inside looks intently at Cameron. Later, Cameron is attracted to a movie shoot -- a World War I battle scene -- on the beach. After the scene, he notices an old woman who walks through the set greeting the actors, then falls in the water. Cameron dives in to rescue her and is horrified when she pulls off her face -- a mask. She's not an old woman, but the movie's leading lady, Nina Franklin (Barbara Hershey), testing the costume and make-up for the scenes set late in her character's life.The director, Eli Cross (Peter O'Toole), descends from the sky on his camera crane. This is his second entrance from on high; Eli is the same man who stared at Cameron from the helicopter. He offers Cameron a job, explaining that their last stunt man just ran a car off a bridge. They haven't found the body, and Eli can't afford the production delays that will result if the police get involved. The local police chief is aware of the accident on the bridge and Eli has to do some fast talking to convince him that Cameron is Burt, the stunt man who went off the bridge into the river. (Eli claims divers pulled him out of the car, and Cameron is convincingly damp, having just pulled Nina out of the ocean.) Cameron's job is to pretend to be Burt and do his stunts -- a role within a role that allows both Eli and Cameron to avoid entanglements with the police.Cameron is rechristened "Lucky." Denise (Sharon Farrell), the film's hair stylist, dyes his hair and makes a pass at him. Ostensibly the color change is to make him resemble the blond leading man, Raymond Bailey (Adam Roarke) -- Lucky is Ray's stunt double -- but of course it also, conveniently, makes him harder to recognize. There's a running theme about how the movies are all about making things look like what they're not. When Cameron is convinced Eli's selling him out by showing the cops the film shot when Burt ran off the bridge -- because Cameron's in it -- Eli reassures him by telling him that the original King Kong from the 1933 movie "was just 3 foot 6 inches tall -- he only came up to Fay Wray's belly button. If God could do the tricks that we can do, he'd be a happy man." "How tall was King Kong?" becomes their catchphrase.Lucky learns stunt work under the tutelage of Chuck (Charles Bail), the stunt coordinator; there's some cool detail about how stunts are pulled off. (To film part of the wing-walking scene, they tether the plane to the ground and fly in circles at an altitude of about 6 feet.) There's an elaborate scene where Lucky, standing in for the leading man, is chased up and down the sloping red roofs of a large building (in real life, the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, California), shot at, and falls through a skylight into a bordello. Lucky is thrilled to learn he'll be paid $600 for the scene. At the same time, Lucky/Cameron's getting involved with Nina -- who, it turns out, once had a romance with Eli and still admires him tremendously. Eli admits to her that he's jealous of Lucky.The last shoot at the current location involves Lucky's most difficult stunt, driving a Duesenberg off a bridge and escaping under water -- the same scene Burt was shooting when he died. Lucky believes Eli is trying to kill him, and will use the stunt to make it look like an accident. It's plausible; killing Lucky would get him out of Nina's life and remove the most unreliable witness to the cover-up of Burt's death.In the wee hours of the morning before the shoot, Lucky and Nina have a heart-to-heart in the set shop and Lucky finally tells his story. He'd planned to open an ice cream shop with a friend when he got home from Vietnam, but the friend backed out -- he didn't want Cameron around because, Cameron realized, the friend was the guy Cameron's girlfriend had left him for. Cameron took out his fury one night on the ice cream shop (which he reenacts by trashing the set shop). When a cop turned up to see what was going on, Cameron threw a big tub of ice cream at him and fled. The cop was knocked out and spent several hours with his head in the ice cream, which didn't kill him but resulted in frostbite damage to his nose and ear and an attempted murder charge for Cameron, who's been on the run ever since. After Nina stops laughing, the couple plans to escape together: Nina hides in the trunk of the stunt car, which Cameron will drive away in the morning instead of driving off the bridge.Unbeknownst to Lucky, Chuck has planted an explosive in one of the Duesenberg's front tires to make the car's tumble off the bridge look more realistic. Lucky panics everyone by starting the scene too early. (He's in the Duesenberg with the windows rolled up and mistakes a question about the on-board camera for his cue.) The car goes into the water when Chuck triggers the exploding tire, and Lucky scrambles to reach Nina in the trunk -- until he happens to look up out of the sinking car's rear window to see Nina with Eli on the bridge. Lucky emerges, gasping, from the river and notices that there were divers in the water with him all the time. Nina tells him that she was found in the trunk hours before the shoot, and Eli told her that Lucky had changed his mind and decided to do the stunt. Lucky, of course, had done no such thing, but Nina's so pleased that he and Eli have made up that he doesn't set her straight. Eli, descending as usual from heaven on his crane, explains that he wouldn't let Lucky run off thinking that Eli was trying to kill him (and not incidentally leaving the film incomplete). The best way to convince Lucky of Eli's good will, Eli felt, was to make sure Lucky got through the stunt in one piece. Lucky, though furious -- not for the first time -- at Eli's high-handed manipulations, is amused in spite of himself and giddy with relief at surviving. As the movie ends, Cameron and Eli are bickering over Cameron's pay for the stunt and planning to catch a plane to the production's next location.
    

The Stunt Man

The Owl and the Pussycat

Busting


            This movie is a procedural film about a city guy who makes too many enemies and gets
sent out to the mountains. He meets a tough
girl who eventually falls in love with him. Unfortunately
they cannot live in the same environment. She comes to Chicago then has to go back to the mountain. They get married at an Amtrak station.Lots of funny sex on the train. In the end, they part ways, like oil and water.
    

Continental Divide

The Million Dollar Rip-Off

Hi, Mom!

The Black Stallion Returns

Skateboard

Gable and Lombard


            Cry Uncle!, based on the Michael Brett novel, "Lie a Little, Die a Little", follows the misadventures of a fat, hairy slob of a private eye named Jake Masters, who is hired to clear up a phony murder rap.The NYPD is hunting for an eccentric millionaire, Jason Dominic, in connection with the brutal murder of a cocktail waitress named Lucille Reynolds, and Dominic wants Masters to find the real killer. Masters is sent to La Guardia Airport to pick up Cora Merrill -- Dominic's trigger-happy troubleshooter. After an initial case of mistaken identity, Jake, his trainee nephew Keith and the statuesque Miss Merrill head out to Dominic's palatial (but shabby) yacht.Dominic tells them the police believe he killed Lucille because she had filmed an orgy featuring him with three drug-addicted whores, who then blackmailed him out of $50,000. But Masters thinks its a much bigger extortion scheme aimed at scaring a wealthy sucker with a phony murder rap.Armed with a printed frame from the film with which to identify the hookers, plus the names of a couple of guys who may be involved, Jake, Keith and Cora team up to work through the list of likely suspects.Jake tracks down Lucille's boyfriend, who's staying with two of the hookers, but he gets snuffed before Jake can learn anything. Jake next follows the hooker Connie Landfield to a sleazy apartment where he finds her sprawled naked on the bed. Thinking she's in a drug stupor, Jake "takes advantage of the opportunity", little realizing that she's dead. Then a gunfight erupts in the adjacent flat, and another hooker suspect, Lena Right, is seen fleeing the building.Jake eventually tumbles to the fact that cold-blooded Cora has been leading him on -- working on the orders of Jason Dominic to knock off the blackmailers after Masters has located them for her!
    

Cry Uncle


            In this children's adventure, Paco, an orphaned Colombian boy leaves the family farm to search for his uncle in the big city. Unfortunately, he discovers that his only living relative is running a youthful gang of jewel thieves. More trouble ensues when he forces poor Paco to join them. Source: Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide, The New York Times
    

Allen Garfield

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