Tanks for Everything

It’s a guy thing. We don’t know exactly why, but there’s something about the unmistakable clinking and clanking of a tank’s metal track rolling under the roadwheels that thrills the male animal.

The tread-heads in the Moviehouse just didn’t get their fill with the World II tank movies at the previous showing, so let’s diesel up these cement-mixers for another roll across the screen.

In the mid 1980s, James Garner, not unlike his earlier television incarnation, Bret Maverick, was at the top of his game and could do no wrong. He had walked away at the peak of his popularity as TV’s iconoclastic antihero-private eye on “The Rockford Files” and was between noteworthy big-screen appearances in the box office hits “Victor Victoria” and “Murphy’s Romance” (the latter earning him a Best Actor Oscar nomination) when he starred in a dismissible drive-in distraction and future HBO favorite, “Tank” (1984).

Garner portrays a U.S. Army Command Sergeant Major on the brink of retirement who arrives for his last post in rural Georgia with his wife (the lovely Shirley Jones, TV’s “The Partridge Family” matriarch, pretty much ill-used here in a throwaway role but nonetheless easy on the eyes) and son (“The Outsider’s” Ponyboy, C. Thomas Howell, now a familiar face in a number of cheesy flicks on SyFy Channel) in tow, along with – foreshadow wink-wink! – his own personal Sherman tank (on loan to the filmmakers from the Indiana Museum of Military History). When asked, “Why in the hell would anybody want a Sherman tank?” Garner (attention Jose Conseco!) replies, “Because it’s very hard to shoot yourself while you’re cleaning it.”

All Garner wants to do is finish his career, buy a sailboat, and mend a strained relationship with his son, whose older brother had died years earlier in an Army training accident, but when he steps in to stop a local deputy from abusing a young prostitute, he runs afoul of the town’s crooked sheriff, who frames Garner’s son and sentences him to hard labor at a county work farm. When a lawyer and bribery prove ineffective, Garner takes matters in his own hands and fires up his trusty Sherman.

The producers of "Tank" acknowledged the cooperation of the Dept. of Defense,
the Dept. of the Army, and the U.S. Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia.

“Tank” was only the third feature film directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, the four-time Emmy Award-winning director of the miniseries “Holocaust,” “Attica,” “Inside the Third Reich,” and “Peter the Great.” His previous big-screen offerings were 1971’s “Evel Knievel,” starring George Hamilton, and 1975’s “Mackintosh and T.J.,” the final film for Roy Rogers (who boasted, “There’s no leading lady, no shooting, some fights, but no blood spurting, and that’s the way I wanted it”).

 

James Cromwell (far left) watches as G.D. Spradlin speaks softly and carries
a big bazooka in "Tank." Spradlin's last screen role before he retired was as
The Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in the Nixon-era comedy "Dick" (1999).

The characterizations in “Tank” are TV-movie-one-dimensional, particularly the racist sheriff, portrayed by G.D. Spradlin (a veteran at playing unsavory types, like the Tom Landry-like football coach in “The Longest Yard” and the oily senator in “The Godfather Part II”), and his dimwitted deputy, played by James Cromwell (best known for such roles as kindlyfarmer Hoggett in “Babe,” the sympathetic warden in “The Green Mile,” and an ornery NASA project manager in “Space Cowboys,” which reunited him with “Tank” star James Garner 16 years later). The hooker with the heart of gold (of course) is portrayed by Jenilee Harrison (familiar to fans of ‘80s television as one of Suzanne Somers’ replacement as the “dumb blonde” on “Three’s Company”).

Jenilee Harrison shows off her -um, heart of gold in "Tank."

Garner does what he can with the cardboard character, which is impressive, but in his memoir, The Garner Files, he recalled “Tank” as “just a workaday movie with nothing outstanding in it.” He did, however, enjoy the opportunity to drive a tank in some shots.

The year 1984 also saw an alleged comedy called “Best Defense” in theaters. What can we say about “Best Defense” better than critic Leonard Maltin: “Unpleasant and unfunny comedy about defense-industry designer who inadvertently acquires blueprint sought by the KGB.” Dudley Moore stars as the incompetent (what else?) engineer developing a new targeting system for U.S. Army tanks.

Eddie Murphy's super-tank in "Best Defense," the so-called XM-10 Annihilator,
is a modified Chrysler M60 Magach 7, commonly in service in Israel at the time.

Preview screenings were received so poorly that the studio suggested filming a role for Eddie Murphy, who was at the height of his popularity following breakout performances in “48 Hrs.” and “Trading Places.” Murphy was cast as a wisecracking (what else?) American tank commander when Iraq invades Kuwait, a fictitious conflict then, eerily foreshadowing the actual Gulf War by six years. Murphy, credited as “Strategic Guest Star,” was oddly connected with little else in the movie, and his character never interacted with the main cast, which also included Kate Capshaw, George Dzundza, Helen Shaver, David Rasche, and Tom Noonan. The one scene shot with Moore and Murphy together was edited from the final cut.

Missing in action: Dudley Moore meets Eddie Murphy in "Best Defense."

This mess can be blamed on the directing-writing team of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who wrote the screenplays for “American Graffiti” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.” Huyck and Katz went on to make an even worse movie than “Best Defense,” 1986’s “Howard the Duck.”

Eddie Murphy recovered five months later in the box-office smash “Beverly Hills Cop.” Hosting “Saturday Night Live,” Murphy mocked his decision to appear in “Best Defense,” declaring indignantly, “What?! How dare you give me a script like this! Oh, that much money? Let’s go!”

From the inane to utterly ridiculous, 1988’s “Bulletproof” featured a secret weapon called the NBT-90 “Thunderblast,” a super-tank (not unlike the absurd EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle in “Stripes”) hijacked south of the border by a cluster of Cuban, Nicaraguan, Libyan, and Soviet terrorists. It’s up to “one-man suicide squad” Gary Busey, a rogue cop/ex-CIA operative nicknamed “Bulletproof” (he collects the bullets from his wounds – 38 so far – in a mason jar) to retrieve Thunderblast and rescue abducted ex-girlfriend/Army captain Darlanne Fluegel in the process.

Separated by a couple decades: Gary Busey, the sensitive, sax-playing
maverick cop in "Bulletproof," and the derailed D-list train wreck...

Fit and trim, Busey, who had been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in “The Buddy Holly Story” (1978) was enjoying a brief stint as a reliable action costar in such pictures as “Lethal Weapon,” “Predator 2,” “Point Break,” and “Under Siege,” and here he definitely studied Mel Gibson’s “Lethal Weapon” playbook as, in the words of The New York Times reviewer Caryn James, “one of those daredevil cops who can only survive on film.” When he’s not groaning, “You know this bulletproof act is gettin’ a little old,” he’s coining a new name for the bad guys: “butt-horn.”

Gary Busey takes aim in "Bulletproof."

Directed by a former Roger Corman protégé, Steve Carver (“Big Bad Mama,” “Lone Wolf McQuade”), “Bulletproof” has plot-holes big enough to drive a Thunderblast through, but the game cast of genre favorites Henry Silva, William Smith, L.Q. Jones, R.G. Armstrong, Luke Askew, Mills Watson, and a pre-Tarantino Danny Trejo keep the silliness entertaining. As for the cheaply slapped-together NBT-90 (pictured below), its shimmying, glued-on plastic parts always seem in danger of falling off at any moment.

The same year as “Bulletproof,” director Kevin Reynolds (best known for working with Kevin Costner in “Fandango,” “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “Waterworld,” and “Hatfields & McCoys”) made a cerebral drama about a Soviet tank, “The Beast.” The nine-year Soviet war in Afghanistan, which pitted Russian-led Afghan forces against insurgents called the Mujahideen, has been likened to America’s conflict in Vietnam, as Soviets found themselves outwitted and outgunned at every turn in guerilla warfare they couldn’t win, until it ended in a stalemate in February 1989.

Actress Shoshi Marciano plays Sherina, a Mujahideen, in "The Beast."

In an early year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a Russian tank crew that participates in the brutal assault on a Pashtun village harboring Mujahideen rebels finds themselves separated from their unit and pursued through blind canyons by a handful of surviving insurgents. (Shot in Israel, the film’s Soviet T-62 tank was “portrayed” by an Israeli modification of a captured Soviet T-55.) The certifiably crackbrained Captain Ahab of a tank commander is played effectively against type by George Dzundza (who was also in “Best Defense”), fondly remembered for his motion picture debut as the jovial bar owner in 1978’s “The Deer Hunter.”

George Dzundza looms over Stephen Baldwin and Don Harvey in "The Beast."
Dzundza is a German-born actor whose Ukranian father and Polish mother
were forced into factory labor by the Nazis before moving to Amsterdam
and then the U.S. in 1956.

The screenplay was written by William Mastrosimone, based on his two-act play “Nanawatai,” a word used by the Pashtun people of Aghanistan as part of their code of honor to denote “sanctuary,” which becomes particularly important to the survival of the Soviet tank driver (played by Jason Patric), whose sympathies find him abandoned by his former comrades. In an inspired twist on the David and Goliath story, the “enemy of their enemy” joins the ragtag Afghan rebels’ pursuit of the lost tank, armed with the pathetic slingshot of a broken rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Steven Bauer (best known as Manny Ray in 1983's "Scarface")
and Jason Patric walk away from a tank wreck in "The Beast."

Fans of the original “Indiana Jones” trilogy, produced by George Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg (“Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”?...never happened), will recall the crackerjack tank chase and fight in 1989’s “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.” The tank (pictured below), designed by George Gibbs (who shared Best Visual Effects Oscars for “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”), was a replica of a World War I Mark VIII Liberty tank constructed over a lumbering hunk of heavy construction called an excavator. The main difference between the historical tank and its movie counterpart is that the latter had a rotating turret, dropped the side-machine guns, and maneuvered much faster than the historic Mark VIII.

The planned two-day shoot for the tank chase extended to ten days, as cast and crew continued improvising business for the sequence. Harrison Ford’s stunt double, Vic Armstrong, who accomplished the remarkable twelve-foot sideways leap from a galloping horse onto the speeding tank, also doubled for George Lazenby as James Bond in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” and for Christopher Reeve in the first two “Superman” pictures. In 2014, Armstrong directed “Left Behind,” starring Nicolas Cage.

Vic Armstrong earns his paycheck in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade."

Two of filmdom’s most outrageous use of tanks occurred in “The A-Team” (2010) and “Fast & Furious 6” (2013). “The A-Team” was, of course, a big-screen retread of the popular ‘80s cartoonish action series, featuring George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Mr. T, and Dwight Schultz as soldiers of fortune-for-hire who also happen to be fugitives for a crime they didn’t commit. Network executive Brandon Tartikoff apparently asked for “’Mission: Impossible,’ ‘The Dirty Dozen’ and ‘The Magnificent Seven’ all rolled into one, and Mr. T drives the car.” The movie, directed by Joe Carnahan (who made the frenetic Quentin Tarantino knock-off “Smokin’ Aces” and has directed episodes of the hit series “The Blacklist”), starred Liam Neeson, Bradley Cooper, Sharlto Copley, and UFC Heavyweight Champion Quinton “Rampage” Jackson.

Roger Ebert called the film “an incomprehensible mess," adding, “At over two hours of queasy-cam anarchy, it’s punishment.” Apparently, however, he did enjoy the show-stopping spectacle of a two-ton, armed-and-ready M8 Buford tank escaping a disabled C-130 Hercules cargo plane and managing a safe landing in a mountain lake after two of its three airdrop parachutes have been destroyed. Ebert wrote, “’The A-Team’ has an action scene that admirably demonstrates Newton’s Third Law, which instructs us that for every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction. The movie illustrates this as the heroes fall from an exploding airplane while inside an armored tank. As the tank hurtles to the ground, the team leader, Hannibal Smith (Liam Neeson)…barks out commands for the tank’s gun…to direct the fall of the tank and save their lives. This is very funny.”

Believe it or not, the science behind such a far-fetched stunt was proven viable, in fast-paced math and data, on the web series “Reel Physics.” Cohost Jason Dean proclaimed, “What you saw onscreen could actually happen. I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s plausible.”

The over-the-top action sequence in “Fast & Furious 6” can best be summed up by a character who sputters, “Somebody better do something! I’ve got a tank on my ass!” The logic-bending scene of a wrong-way tank squashing autos on a Spanish highway was originally designed for computer-generated imagery, but the filmmakers ultimately utilized live effects as the tank crushed car after car on a three-mile stretch of road on the Spanish island of Tenerife, although the climactic tank flip was created digitally.

Reviewer Steven Boone, on RogerEbert.com, commented, “Until ‘Fast 6,’ I never imagined a tank speeding the wrong way down a highway could give me that Benadryl feeling.”

Speaking of increased heart rate, excitability, dizziness, disrupted coordination, visual disturbances, delirium, and other Benadryl feelings, our favorite punk, post-apocalyptic, anarchic, absurdist tank movie has to be 1995’s “Tank Girl,” loosely based on the cult British comic series created by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin.

Lori Petty brings Tank Girl to life.

A comet that smacked into the Earth in 2022 (only eight years away, folks!) caused an eleven-year drought, and the scant water supply is monopolized by the insidious Water & Power corporation, headed by the evil Malcolm McDowell (who was into portraying hammy villains at the time, like the insane Dr. Soran in “Star Trek Generations”). Sassy, smartass resistance fighter Lori Petty (best known then as Geena Davis’ envious kid sister in “A League of Their Own”) and her hippie band of renegade desert rats illegally siphon water from Water & Power to grow hydroponic crops before she finds herself captured and tortured by McDowell. (Three different Spice Girls auditioned for the lead role.)

Malcolm McDowell shares an intimate moment
with Lori Petty.

Well, you can’t keep a riot grrrl down, and it isn’t long before Petty hooks up with Jet Girl, a shy but ace ordnance mechanic portrayed by Naomi Watts (who played the Fay Wray role in director Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of “King Kong” and a Broadway actress in 2014’s “Birdman,” starring Michael Keaton), and a ragtag rebel gang of super-soldiers mutated with kangaroo DNA called Rippers to take on the Water & Power baddies. The Washington Post critic Richard Harrington called Petty’s character a “spiky-haired, post-punk slacker heroine…clearly a child of the MTV generation” with “a short attention span and attitude to spare.”

Lori Petty and Naomi Watts watch the sky in "Tank Girl."
Reportedly, Naomi Watts is ashamed of the film. 

In his review, Roger Ebert noted, “Whatever the faults of ‘Tank Girl,’ lack of ambition is not one of them. Here is a movie that dives into the bag of filmmaking tricks and chooses all of them. Trying to re-create the multimedia effect of the comic books it’s based on, the film employs live action, animation, montages of still graphics, animatronic makeup, prosthetics, song-and-dance routines, models, fake backdrops, holography, title cards, matte drawings, and computerized special effects. All I really missed were 3-D and Smell-O-Vision.”

Tank Girl: "I'm too young for this shit!" Tank Girl's favorite mode of transportation
is a modified M5A1 Light Tank "Stuart."

What could’ve been…Both Steven Spielberg and James Cameron were considered at one time to helm the “Tank Girl.” Instead, Rachel Talalay, a onetime production assistant and a producer (1988’s “Hairspray,” 1990’s “Cry-Baby”) for director John Waters who struck out on her own as the director of “Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare,” claimed she fell in love with the comic after receiving an issue as a Christmas present and set out to make “the ultimate grrrl movie.” Although the film successfully broadened the comic’s fanbase to an international audience, the creators both remembered their show business experience as “a bit of a sore point.”

Alan Martin recalled, “They made a lot of noise as though they did know what they were doing, but when it came down to it, it didn’t look that way.” He said, “They argued over what was cool and what wasn’t cool. When you go to Hollywood and you see a bunch of fat businessmen sitting in offices arguing what’s cool, you just think…’Whatever you come up with, you’re wrong.’”

The original screenplay was written by Tedi Sarafian, son of “Vanishing Point” director Richard C. Sarafian. Jamie Hewlett, who went on to co-create the virtual alternative rock band Gorillaz, recounted, “The script was lousy.” He and Martin kept rewriting it, putting “Benny Hill jokes in, and they obviously weren’t getting it. They forgot to film about ten major scenes so we had to animate them…It was a horrible experience.” “We sold them the rights,” Martin said. “It was as much our fault as it was theirs.”

Academy Award-winning special effects makeup wizard Stan Winston was so
impressed with the notion of the kangaroo-human mutants, the Rippers, that his
studio only charged half their price. When describing their previous incarnations,
one Ripper says he was an assistant manager at Chief Auto Parts in Cincinnati,
Jeff Kober (center) says he used to be a dog, and Ice-T (far left) explains he was a cop.
Coincidentally, five years later, Ice-T started portraying Detective Tutuola on
"Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." When ridiculed for appearing in "Tank Girl,"
Ice-T bluntly replied, "I was paid $800,000 for that movie."

Nonetheless, “Tank Girl” has gained a cult following over the years, thanks to an eclectic cast including Ice-T, Don Harvey (who was also in “The Beast”), Jeff Kober, Ann Cusack, Iggy Pop, and Ann Magnuson, and thanks in no small part to the tireless audacity of Lori Petty, who wears 18 different outfits and hairstyles throughout the picture. The film’s costume designer, Arianne Phillips, who won an Oscar for “Walk the Line,” was Madonna’s stylist and also worked with No Doubt and Courtney Love. Speaking of Courtney Love, she was the movie’s music coordinator, assembling a soundtrack featuring Ice-T, Bush, Devo, Scott Weiland, Hole, Iggy Pop, Veruca Salt, Bjork, and Joan Jett and Paul Westerberg dueting on Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It.”

"And that's why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let's do it, let's fall in love."
- Cole Porter's "Let's Do It"