I saw it so you don't have to: The Happening (1967)

So the first surprise is that the frankly awful title "The Happening" was used for a movie before the 2008 version. The second is that the movie is still weird and not great: the tone is “what if the Monkees committed capital crimes on a whim.” This was a catch from PVRing weird stuff on late at night, and I got it because it stars Anthony Quinn and Faye Dunaway, and was produced partially by Sam Spiegel?! Spiegal produced On the Waterfront, Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia, that last of which is one of my all time favorite movies, where Quinn in that plays one of the all time movie badasses, Auda Abi Tayi. Of course, the next movie Spiegal produced was the it-stinks-out-loud The Chase (1966), which I'd recommend if you've ever said to yourself "I want to see an eye-rollingly pompous mid-century American Novel boringly told," with Marlon Brando doing a southern accent I'd characterize as "Steven Segal-esque", if I didn't think Segal is too lazy to attempt accents. The Chase was directed by Arthur Penn, who would prove he was better than the Chase in his next film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which turned Faye Dunaway into a star, among other things. For that matter, The Happening was directed by Elliot Silverstein, who's previous movie, Cat Ballou (1965), won Lee Marvin his academy award. Cat Ballou stars a young Jane Fonda, and has Nat King Cole functioning as a kind of Greek Chorus.



She-bangs, you say...?

My point is that The Happening is a bizarre stop for a bunch of people who had just done great things, were going on to do great things, or both. If the Chase clearly had a budget and eye-rolling pretension, then The Happening lacks the pretension but also the effort, making a comedy that in the end borders on nihilism.

Those are harsh words, and I don't know, maybe Silverstein is a genius for showing off the emptiness of the idle rich. Maybe my harsh words are for the era, instead. My contempt for the whole lot can start on the Wikipedia page, who cite period reviews dismissing Faye Dunaway as "another Jane Fonda type." What? What was that, 1967? Your world is so full of blondes so beautiful they border on the surreal that you are bored when they show up? Check your fucking privilege!



Our heroes, who are together because they fled on the same motor boat.

And that could be directed at our four idle rich characters, who are the Faye Dunaway character, Sandy, and three others who I think of as “three actors who were on popular tv shows at the time.” Sandy wakes up and says she is hungry to some guy she's met and may or may not have banged. (Note: Dunaway and the three boring guys are, I guess, some sort of hippies despite all being idle rich – they have the affect and the drugs, but none of the politics or dirt of the hippies.) She's not so much jaded as an actual solid jade statue; she hates her friends and has woken up in Florida everglades after an amazing party too many times. Although, Dunaway gives us early on a line of such legendary sadness I am compelled to link it here:

https://youtu.be/luc7zhO2yf0?t=601



Neolithic Rudger Hauer?

Sandy suggests robbing a house “to feel something”, which I think is the background to Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill! But before she can murder Moondoggie and pump Gidgit full of smack, they find some kids playing war. While playing with the kids, a hit song plays (and man, these kids have some toys) and our party accidentally invade a startlingly ugly house (and there's a reason for that we'll get back to), and meet the Anthony Quinn character in his pajamas, who decides he's being kidnapped.



“I'm being kidnapped!” Quinn shouts. I'm not sure "second degree kidnapping" is a thing

Taurus (red shirt, manwhore) loves the idea, the other three think it a fun notion. They immediately get stopped by a cop, and Taurus prepares his .45 in case he has to murder the cop Fargo style. This is somewhat softened when one of the dudes causes wacky chaos by insisting the cop give him the ticket for running the red light.

Our gang takes the mobster to a burned out shell of a Miami mansion that they know, and with some actual violence Taurus gets $8000 ransom out of our hapless mobster. Buddy realizes this is in danger of getting boring, and after checking to see that Sandy doesn't have anything till Tuesday, manages to get the price up to $200,000, which is most definitely that long green Varla was looking for.

This sets up a real weird dynamic because Quinn is taking this totally seriously, and his kidnappers really are not. This is also where Quinn takes over the movie, since his character is the relatable one, and Quinn is absolutely acting the shit out of the role. Quinn says “yeah this is a capital crime, kids, what the hell” and buddy gives him a spiel about oedipal urges which he then admits is complete bullshit. They then run from the cops (wacky music cue) where they get away because there happens to be another...Chrysler Imperial[?] That is identical to theirs.



Quinn's mob associates. I don't know what this is, nor do I want to

Quinn then turns the movie into practically a one man show, as he calls on a payphone everybody in his life to get the random payment, and everybody he calls has the money, but decide it's easier to just write him off instead. Starting with his wife. This is obviously totally crushing, while our hippie characters can only stand back, aghast. It's hilarious, simply because I think this is completely unintentional on the part of the filmmakers, but that's what you get when you have Anthony Quinn. This also makes the divide between the kids and Quinn even stronger; even at the start they might as well be four adorable Pomeranian dogs kidnapping a wolverine. Now the wolverine has existential despair and the four poms can only look on with sympathy. This act ends in a shack in the Florida swamps that I think both the Dreadnoks inhabit, and Rockstar games protagonists would end up sleeping in to save their game. There is a take where Quinn disassociates and stares at nothing unblinkingly for like three minutes. Somehow this movie has found a bridge between a late sixties silly comedy, and a early 1960s grim existentialist play.



Ugly, ugly house.

The third act is Quinn saying 'fuck it' and deciding to not only lean back into a kidnapping plot, he leverages everything he can to get a big of a payoff as possible. “First we're gonna get a new car. That lemon of my wife's is a whore's dream of paradise!” Then through a barrage of blackmail and extortion, he expertly frames his wife for murder. (She tries to get her son to tell the police about the hippie kidnapping, but he's still playing soldier and will only give them name, rank, and serial number.) This leads to a scene of “our marriage is bullshit” and a trashing of Quinn's house to wacky music.



Huh, maybe Sandy can hear the wacky music?

This leads to a quite funny scene where on the one hand, the Mob assumes Quinn's wife is part of this blackmail scheme and promises revenge, and on the other hand the police are completely convinced Quinn's wife murdered her husband and is now liquidating all his asserts to flee to Bermuda. The gang does a Jackie Brown style bag swap at the airport, just in time for Quinn's wife to be arrested for murder, (and presumably suspected by the mob of stealing a suitcase full of cash and later killed.) The gang does this at the Miami Airpot as it has appallingly shit security, with the gang fleeing in a stolen police car.

Quinn then turns the tables on the gang, first basically breaking the heart of Taurus by demonstrating he's still nothing and nobody as a criminal. He then lights the million dollars or similar on fire, so the kids don't make “the same mistakes he did.” He then disappears into the black swampy night, dead to all. Sandy says she is hungry. Wacky music outro!

So one man is completely crushed by random chance, and these doofuses have learned absolutely nothing. Sandy is gonna start eyeing up the kids at the beach...