Saturday, December 08, 2007

What Happens When Cannon Rips Off Lethal Weapon?

One black, one white, many bullets. Yes, it's true. Cannon made a wacky, violent buddy-cop movie starring Robert Carradine (after REVENGE OF THE NERDS) and Billy Dee Williams (three years after his previous feature film, the sleazy FEAR CITY). I actually saw this in a theater in Carbondale, Illinois in 1987. Carradine's love interest is none other than super-cute Valerie Bertinelli from ONE DAY AT A TIME! And the pissed off captain who yells at the boys for destroying public property is Peter Graves! Graves is a close personal friend of director Jack Smight, which explains what he's doing in a Cannon movie.

Smight was a journeyman who bounced back and forth between films and television for decades without really making a memorable film; some of his credits include MIDWAY, AIRPORT 1975, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN and HARPER. Some of his films are decent (I've seen HARPER several times), but nothing you'd cross a busy street to see. Well, except NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET, of course... DIRTY HARRY's Gail Morgan Hickman wrote it, and one wonders whether it was a dusty draft of a proposed sequel.

1 comment:

Hal said...

Marty, you really should see Smight's FAST BREAK at least once. A WHITE SHADOW fan would certainly love it, I'd think. Plus it is highly derivative of THE BAD NEWS BEARS, and how many times are you going to see Gabe Kaplan and NCAA women's superstar Mavis Washington in the same film?