Cast:
Catherine Mary Stewart (Bibi Phillips; Mary Hylan as singing voice), George Gilmour (Alphie), Grace Kennedy (Pandi), Vladek Sheybal (Mr. Boogalow), Allan Love (Dandi), Joss Ackland (Hippie Leader/Mr. Topps), Ray Shell (Shake), Miriam Margolyes (Alphie's landlady), Derek Deadman (Bulldog), Michael Logan (James Clark), George S. Clinton (Joe Pittman), and Francesca Poston (Vampire/Star Rock/Mr. Boogalow's Receptionist/BiM band keyboard player/Lapmate Mr. Boogalow's Penthouse Party) Directed by Menahem Golan.
Review:
"I cannot be that wrong about the movie. They just don't understand what I was trying to do."
What would you say makes a proper turkey film candidate: a director who believed his film was going to vault him into the American film industry, or a director contemplating jumping off a balcony when he hears negative reviews of his film? I'll do you one better: try both for the same film. The original story was done by Coby Recht and Iris Recht. The long and short story of how things came to be is that Coby, a successful Israeli rock producer, was inspired by his experiences with Barclay Records, which was led by Eddie Barclay. He thought there was something odd about Barclay in the "looking like a villain" department that got him to write something with his wife that would be described as "1984, but music". This was developed in the course of 1977, complete with song demos ready before the pitch stage (in Hebrew). In the course of the grapevine, it came to the attention of none other than Menahem Golan. Born in British Mandate of Palestine (before it became Israel), Golan had done studying in directing and filmmaking abroad before staging plays in Israel. He became a director with El Dorado (1963). Operation Thunderbolt (1977) is probably the most noted of his films as director (the Israeli production ended up nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film), and it happened just before he became involved with his cousin Yoram Globus with ownership of the Cannon Group, which they purchased in 1979. Of course, with Recht, he knew Golan because the latter had been a director of children's theater stuff in Israel that Recht performed in. Apparently, a good deal of the actual script involved "Heaven", at least before Golan (the only screenplay writer) turned it into something less extreme for some sort of accessibility to the audiences. The budget ballooned from $4 million to $10 million, complete with a considerable cost to do the recording and mixing of the music. When it came time to the Montréal Film Festival, someone thought to make vinyl records to promote the film. The result was that when viewers saw said film, they ended up throwing the vinyls onto the screen. Golan would direct a handful of films after the failure of The Apple. Enter the Ninja (1981) was so successful for Cannon that it started a craze of ninja films (with Sho Kosugi being in two further Cannon ninja films). Golan did musical rom-coms with Mack the Knife (1989) and films with noted stars in The Delta Force (1986, which had Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin) and Over the Top (1987 - yes, the one about arm wrestling and Sylvester Stallone); Golan died at the age of 85 in 2014.
Okay, so we have a film involving the Faust legend being told through the record industry that has a great deal of, um, things in it. It has a lead actress in Stewart who came out of the blue from auditioning to be a dancer here to, well, being cast to act (with dubbed singing) and a lead actor in Gilmour that never appeared in another film. For a film that was 92 minutes long, it sure felt like two hours, because it is probably one of the most overbearing films to ever ooze onto a theater. Sure, if you look at the film closely from piece to piece, you can see the allegory in just how weird the industry of buying and selling folks seems straight from the Biblical times, but nothing can prepare you for the overall outcome that shows, and I kid you not, a Rolls-Royce in the sky. From what one knows about the edits made, there was a "Creation" song sequence that apparently gave some clarity to what the hell is going on with this film, but, well, somehow it had a bunch of mishaps in staging (complete with a brontosaurus costume collapse). And apparently Golan had come up with a four-hour cut of the film! I cannot imagine having the stones of Golan to believe that this really would be the ticket to the American film industry, and yet you can see it all blasted here. Stewart and Gilmour don't have a prayer when it comes to trying to give the film any sort of interest in trying to care about these people when contrasted with the costume hodgepodges. Squares don't make for fun, unless you are Kennedy trying to make the best of these costumes and uh, trying to sing "Coming" (take one guess). Sheybal, a fiercely proud Polish actor, is probably the only person one can a grip on because of the obvious Devil figure he plays, which is probably the best thing to say about the film when it comes to someone who has more focus on what to do than the people behind the camera (Shell is at least eccentric in that snide sense of support). This might be the kind of film you show people when they say the old days had all of the best music and say, "take this one on, sucker!" Golan thought he had a grip of what the 1960s were like to him, but really he made a movie that buried the 1970s into the finest paste imaginable. The fact that this and Xanadu were released in the same year is only a testament that aiming for the hip and wild in music really does come once in a full moon, but I have sympathy for that other film because that movie had Electric Light Orchestra on the soundtrack (others can say they like Olivia Newton-John, but no one messes with the electronic kings). This on the other hand is a film that involves gala events with crowd vital signs and hippies. As a whole, The Apple is a junky film that aims for the moon and explodes two feet off the launch pad to reveal termites everywhere. Golan may have been involved in plenty of films in varying quality, but perhaps none of them were as bizarre in ambition and resulting meltdown as this one turned out to be.
Overall, I give it 3 out of 10 stars.
Next: Happy Thanksgiving. Two of the previous three Thanksgivings have seen a doubleheader of crap, so enjoy the night with something really fun to call crap: The Trial of Billy Jack.
