Poseidon Quickies: Let's Go "Home"

I haven't been posting a frequently as I might like and it's partly due to my usual level of "busy-ness," but it's also due in part to just not finding the right projects to post about. I will record and watch something, certain that it will be perfect for a tribute here, and then it just won't grab me enough to do the trick. One movie I did catch not long ago, Going Home (1971), is along those lines although there were a few details I wanted to share nonetheless. So here we are.

At the time of this movie, Robert Mitchum had retired from the screen following his well-received turn in Ryan's Daughter (1970), but he quickly grew bored and began looking for a new film to do. Allegedly, he was choosing between two location projects and got tipsy at lunch and signed on for the wrong one, this one! He'd intended to head to San Francisco to play a jazz musician, but instead wound up in some shopworn suburbs of Pittsburgh, playing a man reuniting with his son after having killed his mother years before. (Mitchum really had done more than a month of time back in 1949 after a marijuana sting operation.)

The now-grown son was played by Jan-Michael Vincent, who has been the subject of at least one eye-popping post here before. Vincent's career was on the ascent, having done a fair amount of TV (including having survived Lana Turner's The Survivors!) along with a few movies like Journey to Shiloh (1968) and The Undefeated (1969.)

Playing a rather haunted teen, he was already 27 (!), but had maintained his fresh, wholesome looks nonetheless.

Helping in some ways to mend the chasm between father and son is Mitchum's perky girlfriend in the movie, Brenda Vaccaro. She was more than two decades younger than Mitchum and only about five years older than Vincent.

A TV veteran herself since 1961, she'd made a successful move to films including Where It's At (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Summertree (1971), with more to come. She and Mitchum established great chemistry in their unlikely pairing here.

Though it's brief, we're treated to a shower scene with Vincent as he uses the trailer park bathhouse to get cleaned up soon after arriving.

Physical display was a key component of his work for the better part of his career. Two year's later, he'd be sporting a loincloth for part of The World's Greatest Athlete (1973.)

And, needless to say, no one who ever saw Buster and Billie (1974) ever forgot the sight of him emerging from the woods to skinny dip!

Vincent in his prime was in amazing shape with what had to be a low BMI.

Papa Mitchum had a couple of shirtless scenes, too. His sleepy-eyed looks were still discernible despite the passage of time.

And even though he claimed to accept this role by accident, he is excellent throughout. He never liked to talk about it much, or even admit it really, but he was a pro at portraying most of his roles.  

There's a hooty sequence in the film, too, which finds Vincent shaking his ass on the dance floor in some figure-hugging pants.

He and his date in the film (Barbara Brownell) really boogie down in this scene.

What might have been a really memorable and considerable movie for Mitchum and Vincent was demonstrably altered by MGM studio head James Aubrey (the "Smiling Cobra"), who cut - depending on what you read - either 12 or 21 minutes from the picture, excising things that might give it an R rating and then dumping the movie with virtually no fanfare into just four cities before pulling it. The director Herbert Leonard, who'd worked on a deferred salary to keep costs at bay said, "He unilaterally and arbitrarily raped the picture."

On the subject of rape, there is an already gut-wrenching assault against Vaccaro in the film, which was once even more violent judging by this lobby card. The pitchfork does not appear in the final cut.

Likewise, an entire scene with Sylvia Miles as a prostitute is missing from the final print despite appearing on a card. Miles had not only also worked on Midnight Cowboy (1969), but also was Oscar-nominated for that and yet had her worked ruthlessly excised from Going Home. As a long time sucker for tan lines, I would love to have seen this sequence in the movie.

The moment depicted here does show up in the film, though the framing is totally different. All we ever see is Mitchum's scarred knee (from a war injury) and then his face. Next, he's seem with his pants pulled up and fastened.

Both Mitchum and Vincent worked hard to craft the complicated roles they play in this uneven film. We may never know if the unedited version allowed their relationship to play out more believably. But this was not the end of their working together...

A dozen years later, they would once again play father and son in the mammoth TV miniseries The Winds of War.

The sprawling, epic production saw Mitchum as the head of a family that included Vincent and Ben Murphy as his sons, Polly Bergen as his wife and Lisa Eilbacher as his daughter.

I had to grin at the discombobulated nature of this publicity shot. Vincent is distracted one way, Mitchum another, and Eilbacher is all in with no idea that her costars have other things on their mind! Vincent and his on-screen love interest Ali MacGraw had all the spark of an extinguished campfire and were recast (with Hart Bochner and Jane Seymour) in the sequel War and Remembrance.

This very brief moment in Going Homs depicts an undie-clad Mitchum standing over the body of his deceased wife as his little boy looks on in tears.

A still photo of the moment (without that pesky post from the bed in the way) made its way into the world, to be seen many times. The sequence was used in the poster art for the movie as shown at the top of the post, but with models re-staging the action.

However, for Italian audiences, the sight of Mitchum in his mutande was apparently deemed too much...! So some trousers were superimposed over the 53 year-old's jockey shorts.

Said pants were appropriated from this other, later scene outside Mitchum's ramshackle trailer. And with that I am zipping up this quickie. Till next time!

Howling About "Airwolf!"

Don't fret, my children. I'm not about to go into some dissertation on the merits of the series Airwolf, which ran from 1984-1986 (with a retooled Canadian rendition appearing in 1987.) I never once watched the hardware-heavy action series in its initial run and really am not tremendously interested in it now apart from seeing the occasional name guest star (Diane McBain, John Ericson and Leann Hunley, to name a few.)

This post will focus squarely on one aspect of the show which some of you may find compelling. In the last (nearly) 13 years of this blog, I've received e-mails from various readers on a wide berth of topics. But the one that stands out, so to speak, from the rest in terms of frequency is the physicality of one Jan-Michael Vincent in Airwolf. The actor, having played youthful leads on TV and in quite a few movies, was now forty and apparently had decided to ditch anything so annoying as underwear for the filming of the show! This being the 1980s, the pinnacle of tight jeans and clingy pants, he kept the airbrushers busy when it came to publicity photos like this one!

However, in un-retouched shots like the one at left, every little curvature and tumescence could be detected. And, this being the days prior to digital manipulation on screen, whatever was captured by the television cameras was what then hit the airwaves, unless the series' editors could somehow snip certain moments out and still have a cohesive flow to the story lines. (As you'll see, though they did make some obvious cutaways here and there, mostly they proceeded to let it all hang out... literally!)

Vincent had costarred in movies like The Undefeated (1969), with John Wayne, and The Mechanic (1972), with Charles Bronson. He'd also shown off a wiry, tight physique in many projects from The World's Greatest Athlete (1973) and the surfing flick Big Wednesday (1978.) In 1974's Buster and Billie, he gave his fans a start when he appeared frontally nude. It's quite a natural, frolicsome moment, but strangely enough we'd see even more, in a way, on Airwolf! Stay tuned...

Vincent had starred in Damnation Alley (1977) and costarred with Burt Reynolds in Hooper (1978), but a dependence on alcohol and cocaine (and beyond) had begun to cause issues for him by the early-1980s. He had a featured role in the gargantuan miniseries The Winds of War, but his performance opposite a truly dreadful Ali MacGraw was difficult to salvage in the editing room thanks to substance abuse. Nevertheless, he soon found himself starring in the grueling weekly series Airwolf!

Even this simple moment of him arising, putting on a sweater and coming downstairs to greet costar Ernest Borgnine, gives an indic(k)ation that this was not going to be your everyday presentation of an actor on TV. (As we go along, don't forget to click to engorge enlarge.)

There was no way to properly capture this fleeting moment of Vincent in his flight suit, almost posing for the camera with a "semi." But never fear. There's more to come. I will be attempting to work my way "up" from the less "pressing" examples to the most eye-popping of all...

Throughout the series' run, he's religiously "dressed right."

He's on display whether in loose pants...

...snug ones...

...or white ones.

Stiff, brand-new jeans might obscure some of the specifics, but were unable to stop the bulge.

Long walks towards the camera seemed to be a hallmark of the show's direction and often offered some incredible sights.

The plot lines of the show often seemed to be pretty stimulating to its leading man.

In this episode Vincent was showing in some loose cargo pants...

...But later turned up half-drowned in some wet jeans.

This led to a scene of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, though I hesitate to wonder whether he had alcohol on his breath that day?

Occasionally there would be a close-up.

And sometimes, as in this case with Christopher Stone, a guest star would make his own contribution to the cause...!

Generally, though, the special effects were left to Vincent to provide. Are you skeptical? Think I've already made too much of this? Keep hangin' in before you decide.

I've touched on (heh heh) the new, constricting blue jeans. What about a pair that's been distressed (probably deliberately)?

I'm gonna give my vote to the "Soft 'n Fade' style, myself!

There's also "the cowboy way." Now this angle isn't all that bronco-busting...

...but how 'bout this?!

This scene is probably THE most talked about one of all. I bet that no viewer on the night that this aired even noticed that a female was also in the sequence! LOL

"Impressive...!" In more than one way.

You know what, though? As eye-popping as this incident was, I swear I think I found one even more amazing....! Are we supposed to believe that no one on set took notice of this stuff, er junk, er....

He casually meanders through this scene with an obvious BONER. Did the ratings go up that night?!

He keeps coming towards the camera and it's just plain unbelievable. I have spent all of my adult life avoiding drugs, so I can't claim to be in the know. However... The one time I inadvertently found myself with someone on coke, he could not achieve an erection. And I've never known excessive alcohol to help on that score either. So I don't know what was happening here.

I almost didn't do this post because, on some level, Mr. Vincent was not exactly firing on all cylinders and I didn't want to exploit that. But he was still a working actor and actually continued to be until 2002 when his string of issues and accidents finally led to permanent retirement. It's very sad since at the time Airwolf was put together, he was the highest-paid actor on television (at $200,000/episode) and could have had it all. Such a job is taxing on a person who's at the top of his game. I can't imagine what it was like with the added strain of addiction. Mr. Vincent passed away of cardiac arrest in 2019 at age 74. By that time he'd endured quite a bit of personal deterioration and legal squalor (as well as an amputation, due to infection.) So while we do salute his contribution to bulge-watching, we can't help but feel pangs of sadness for him and whatever it was that led him to such excesses.

The (Front) End!