The Mad Bomber Story Revisited: Director Bert I. Gordon & Exploitation Promoter Jerry Gross Connect to Blow Minds

 

NOTE: This essay first appeared in Severin’s 2024 Blu-ray release of The Mad Bomber, which belongs in each and every home!

In his autobiography, The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.IG., Bert I. Gordon describes how The Mad Bomber was his ticket to acceptance into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the director category. It was no doubt a proud moment for the man from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who got his Hollywood start two decades earlier as an assistant on the 1952-53 western series Cowboy G-Men, starring Russell Hayden and Jackie Coogan. Acceptance from the mainstream was rare for a filmmaker best known for his monster movies featuring massive creatures. Gordon might only ring a bell for some people through his movies’ many appearances on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a record eight in all, two more than Roger Corman.

But Gordon had reached a personal career high point in 1972 after working with Orson Welles, also a native of Kenosha, on the currently hard-to-see Necromancy. A photo from the set shows the two men smiling broadly at each other, and Gordon writes of enjoying many “fine dinners and interesting conversations.” Meanwhile, in interviews, co-star Pamela Franklin describes a much less friendly relationship with Welles during filming of the movie, which also existed as The Witching, a version that included nude inserts featuring Brinke Stevens filmed a decade later.

Starting the ‘70s with the silly but kind of fun, kind of adventurous X-rated sex romp How to Succeed with Sex, his first movie after the Hays Code officially fell in 1968, Gordon didn’t seem to need to be introduced to sleaze by legendary exploitation promoter Jerry Gross for The Mad Bomber. Gordon writes in his autobiography that Gross (he avoids using his actual name) came to him with an idea for Gordon to write, produce, and direct what became The Mad Bomber with Chuck Connors and Vince Edwards. Gordon would also serve as cinematographer for the movie, which was based on a story by novelist Marc Behm. As part of the agreement, Gordon, Connors, and Edwards would work for scale, but the four of them would split the distribution profits 25 percent each. According to an undated news brief in the Hollywood Reporter during this time (per the American Film Institute), shooting for The Mad Bomber was to begin in April 1972.

Connors and Edwards both came to The Mad Bomber after their respective hugely successful television shows, “The Rifleman” and “Ben Casey,” were in the rear-view mirror. Edwards was in a few post-Ben Casey movies in the late ‘60s, including The Devil’s Brigade in 1968, but he did many television movies in the years before and after The Mad Bomber. During the ‘60s, Edwards also continued his music career and recorded six music albums while performing around the country. In 1973, Edwards directed his first and only television movie, “Maneater,” a cool riff on The Most Dangerous Game starring Ben Gazzara and Sheree North that appeared on ABC in December. He divorced his second wife, English actress Linda Foster, in 1972. Connors had a busier movie career after The Rifleman ended, starring in westerns like Ride Beyond Vengeance, Enzo Castellari’s Kill Them All and Come Back Alone, and the Proud and the Dammed. He also was briefly featured in another western TV show, the Larry Cohen-created “Branded.” He divorced his second wife, Indian actress Kamala Devi, in 1972. Besides going through divorces at the same time, Connors and Edwards also were in 1957’s The Hired Gun together, but both played a secondary role to star/producer Rory Calhoun. Meanwhile, Connors might have fallen out of the arms of Devi, but he would soon hold Leonid Brezhnev tightly in June 1973, lifting the then-Soviet leader into the air in a bear hug. The two met at a party hosted by Richard Nixon for Brezhnev at the now decommissioned Marine Corps El Toro Air Station in Orange County, California. Connors presented Brezhnev with two matching Colt. 45s, just like the ones used by “The Rifleman.”

Producer and distributor Jerry Gross helped to bless the world with the unforgettable likes of I Drink Your Blood, I Eat Your Skin, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Teenage Mother, Zombie, The Cheerleaders, and many more, with newspaper ads featuring the magic words “Jerry Gross Presents” promising sex, violence, and more. The ambitions of Gross and his Cinemation Industries were increasing in 1972. An article appeared in The New York Times in February announcing Cinemation planned to release 16 to 20 movies in 1972, “comparing favorably” with major film companies and with Gross touting their recent profits. Cinemation’s biggest 1972 release was the X-rated Fritz the Cat in April. In Jan. 1973, A.H. Weiler of the Times reported Cinemation was planning a sequel to Fritz the Cat after it “grossed in excess of $10 million,” according to Gross and producer Steve Krantz. The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat would be released in June 1974 and not involve director Ralph Bakshi or R. Crumb, who had killed off Fritz in a comic strip (with an ice-pick to the skull) to voice his disgust with the original film. It also didn’t involve Cinemation; American International Pictures would ultimately distribute the sequel, which received mostly negative reviews. Gross would distribute and promote 56 films during a 25-year career, according to his obituary published in Variety on Dec. 5, 2002.

Just as she had done since her husband’s first movie, King Dinosaur, Flora Gordon (née Lang, a name would return to later) served on the crew (as production coordinator) for The Mad Bomber. For a time, it was Bert and Flora against creatures big and small as they worked together on visual and special effects in low-budget movies like Attack of the Puppet People, The Spider, and Village of the Giants. After The Mad Bomber, Flora would only work on one more movie with Bert, 1976’s The Food of the Goods, before they divorced in 1979. That year she would also help form the Directors Guild of America’s Women’s Committee, which played an essential role in advancing women’s opportunities to direct in Hollywood. Flora, who died in 2016 at 90, also served as a production manager on Dogs (on which she also was assistant director) and The Great Smokey Roadblock, and she was a unit production manager for four seasons on “Dynasty.”

After premiering as The Mad Bomber, the movie also did business as Confessions of a Dirty Cop, Detective Geronimo, just Geronimo, and finally in September 1973 it was re-released as The Police Connection. Across its various names, the movie played on double bills with movies like The Daredevil, a stock car racing movie set in the South, Don Sharp’s The Death Wheelers (doing business as Maniacs on Wheels), Skyjacked, and Pretty Maids All in a Row. At a Troy, New York, drive-in it even played on a double bill with Teenage Mother. Interestingly, several newspapers articles in spring 1973 indicate that another movie was changing its name to The Police Connection: Badge 373, starring Robert Duvall. The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph even called it the “new and final title.” The Mad Bomber had a few taglines: “It Will Blow Your Mind,” and as The Police Connection, the wonderfully insane: “In Handcuffs or a Paper Bag, They Don’t Care How They Bring Them in!” For Detective Geronimo, dots were connected fully: “Where French Connection and Dirty Harry Stop, Geronimo Begins.”

A monumental year for movies, 1973 stands tall in the ‘70s and looms large across movie history. The year brought us The Exorcist, Mean Streets, The Last Detail, Coffy, and many more all-timers. In April alone, the month The Mad Bomber premiered on the 4^th, a Wednesday (the same day the World Trade Center opened in NYC), theaters and drive-ins hosted The Candy Snatchers, Theatre of Blood, The Baby, Soylent Green, and Sisters, to name just a few. Two members of The Mad Bomber cast also appeared in Soylent Green: Connors and Faith Quabius, who plays George Fromley’s (Neville Brand) first victim, Martha, in The Mad Bomber. These would be Quabius’s only two movie roles, but she and Connors obviously hit it off. They got hitched in 1977 – and divorced in 1980.

In January 1973, Mary Murphy reported in the L.A. Times in her “Movie Call Sheet” column that Bert I. Gordon would next be working on Scarface Al Capone as part of a two-picture deal with the notorious Philip Yordan, who helped in an uncredited role on The Mad Bomber. Meanwhile, according to Gordon’s autobiography, The Mad Bomber did “exceptionally well” at the box office in the United States and beyond, but he, Connors, and Edwards never saw a cent from Gross and Cinemation, which filed for bankruptcy in 1975. Variety reported in April 1973 that a sequel to the movie called Stake Out was being considered. An earlier article by the Copley News Service, published in October 1972, indicates ambitions for The Mad Bomber were even higher. The article (“Star Denies Nags Stirred Home Rift”) features an interview with Edwards, discussing his on again/off again divorce with Foster. He denies gambling on horses caused their marriage issues and describes his belief that “the man should be the head of the house.” Edwards also talks about The Mad Bomber and his role as an “Indian-Italian policeman, Geronimo Minelli.” The article says the movie will be the first of six (!) flicks about the “ethnically interesting cop who may become hero of a television series.” Says Edwards about his character: “He’s like Ben Casey in many ways. He’s a good cop obsessed with the law. And he’s a tough cop, real tough, manically tough.”

Quentin Tarantino singles out Neville Brand for praise in his brief mention about The Mad Bomber in Cinema Speculation in the chapter about The Getaway as he describes why he doesn’t like Al Lettieri in the Peckinpah movie. He calls George Fromley “one sick son of a bitch” but believes Brand gives the most enjoyable performance in The Mad Bomber, one that connects to the audience despite him playing a “grotesque bad guy.” By comparison, Tarantino says Lettieri’s performance causes audiences to disengage from the movie. Indeed, Brand is outstanding – and all in as a photography hobbyist/husband/ police harassment victim/serial rapist. His death scene, as Fromley masturbates delightedly to sexy, arty photographs of his wife, is impossible to forget – in a movie filled with explosions, rapes, frequent nudity, and intense violence. Connors is less believable in his role as the anal-retentive maniac Willaim Dorn. In his various “manners” confrontations, he plays Dorn like a bully more than someone unhinged or unpredictable and lets his tiny glasses do a lot of the work. Edwards is better, if a little too sleepy, except when he’s threatening to blow out Fromley’s brains or yelling at his partner for eating shelled pistachios on a stakeout.

In his 1985 book, The B-Directors: A Biographical Directory, genre and experimental movie expert W. Winston Wheeler concludes his entry on Gordon with this analysis: “Gordon persists, but he does not succeed.” And it’s true that in a career that covered seven decades, Gordon, who died at 100 in 2023, never stop persisting. But The Mad Bomber shows that Gordon should have taken more chances like he did with this movie, and maybe he would have liked to do just that. His daughter Patricia said in an interview with me celebrating the life of Gordon for Wisconsin Public Radio that Gordon’s best screenplay was for a “subtle” unpublished anti-war movie.

 

Ramblin' Fever: The Playlist Pounder

 

I entered my heavy Hag phase when Merle Haggard’s career-spanning box set came out in 1996, Down Every Road: 1962-1994. I even remember where I first heard about the box: on the late, great Carol Taylor’s “Defenestration 89.5”freeform radio show on WHRV in Norfolk, Virginia (sadly the show ended soon after that, and Taylor was dead of cancer at 32 later that year). Before buying the box, I think I had only had bought a couple of Haggard’s budget-line greatest hits collections and some random late ‘80s and early ‘90s efforts, all on cassette.

“Ramblin’ Fever” (the title track for his 1977 MCA debut) became a quick favorite for me on the box. The opening drums and guitar revs up into something funky and lowdown and grabs you right off: turn up the volume, roll down the windows—we’re getting out of here. The first line is a simple but timeless-sounding declaration: “My hat don’t hang on the same nail for too long.” It sounds like something Hank Williams might have written 30 years earlier, or words from a cowboy hundred years before that (ironic because the next line is “My ears can’t stand to hear the same old song”). We learn that the narrator sure has this fever bad. It’s uncurable. It’s “in his blood,” and “it can’t be measured be degrees.” No woman will tie him down, and he’ll never be too old to ramble. Haggard sings, “I want to die along the highway and rot away like some old high-line pole.” Imagine coming to that line and feeling it, the miles it would take.

I love the way Haggard sings “pretty lady” when he offers these lines: “There’s times I’d like to bed down on a sofa/And let some pretty lady rub my back/And spend the early morning drinking coffee/ And talkin’ about when I’ll be coming back.” I was just rewatching Paul Newman in Harper, and there’s a part that almost plays out similarly to what Haggard describes when a battered Newman as Lew Harper returns home to his wife played by Janet Leigh, who is divorcing him, who is trying to stop loving him, and convinces her to give him another chance, to spend the night, but Harper slinks away again the in the morning as she’s making him bacon and eggs.

In November 1976, news came that Haggard and his wife of 11 years, country music singer Bonnie Owens, were divorcing. In the same archived newspaper where I read about the Haggard-Owens split, there was also an article from Utah’s death row about Gary Gilmore hoping to get married to 21-year-old Nicole Barrett before his date with the firing squad, a relationship “destined to achieve melodramatic status.” A few weeks earlier in November, the Associated Press reported that Haggard had canceled shows in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno and had gone missing. Utah police had been trying to locate him, and their search had become more intensified after they received an anonymous call that “Haggard’s body could be found in a Nevada gully.” But manager Fuzzy Owen told the reporter Haggard was OK and “somewhere between Arizona and Los Angeles.” “He’s be under quite a strain,” Owen said.

After the divorce, Bonnie Owens continued to perform in Haggard’s band into the early ‘80s. She even served as a bridesmaid for Leona Williams, another country musician, when Williams and Haggard married in 1978. “Ramblin’ Fever” was only one of two songs Haggard wrote on Ramblin’ Fever, which marked his switch from Capitol to MCA, motivated in part by Haggard’s desire to cross over to new audiences. The other song, “I Think It’s Gone Forever,” was a co-write with Williams. They divorced in 1983. Here’s a great live version of “Ramblin’ Fever” recorded in the Netherlands in 1978. Watch, it almost seems like Owens is smiling when he sings those lines about the pretty lady and back rubbing.

View the entire playlist for the Dec. 5 Zero Hour (scroll to the correct date) and listen to the archived audio.

 

Corman's 1980 Sci-Fi Hit: Battle Beyond the Stars

 

Note: This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum’s 1980 Yearbook published in March 2025. You can find the zine on Etsy.

Roger Corman entered the ‘80s with great ambition and sci-fi on his brain, opening a new studio at the site of a former lumberyard in Venice, where the new studio’s first movie, 1980’s big-budgeted (for Corman), John Sayles-scripted BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, would be filmed.

The movie is said to have cost about $5 million with Corman, who passed away at 98 on May 9, 2024, providing $2.5 million and Orion Pictures putting up the other half to distribute BATTLE BEYOND to the rest of the world outside of the United States and Canada. According to the Hollywood Reporter (via the American Film Institute), the movie made $1.3 million in just three days of limited release during the summer of 1980 and would go onto to make about $11 million, according to Beverly Gray in Roger Corman: Blood-sucking Vampires, Flesh-eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers.

In a New York Times article, “The Golden Age of Junk,” published Aug. 17, 1980, film critic Vincent Camby bemoaned the state of the movie industry, describing a trend of what he considered excessive movie budgets (“giddy and dangerous times”) and aiming his fire at movies in the current box office top 10 he considered basically junk: CHEECH & CHONG’s NEXT MOVIE, BLUES BROTHERS, BLUE LAGOON (“a joke”), CADDYSHACK, ZOMBIE (“an even bigger joke” ha!) and others (THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was on his junk borderline.) Camby also included BATTLE BEYOND, because it too was in the box office top 10. He admitted he had not seen it but still made a negative STAR WARS comparison.

But despite being lumped in with the supposedly spendthrift proprietors of the junkpile, Corman was still a cheap SOB at heart. He famously left the lumberyard sign up at his new studio for years afterward because he didn’t want to pay to have it taken down. “I found out it would cost $200 to take the sign down. I couldn’t see a profit in that so I left it up,” he told the LA Times in 1980. In the same article, Corman also expressed dismay at the $20 to $30 million price tags for movies like the BLUES BROTHERS and 1941. He called the prices offensive: logically, efficiently, and morally so. Nevertheless, the low-budget legend was apparently ready to embrace sci-fi and slightly bigger budgets than he had in the past. He told the newspaper New World was going to become a “very heavy science-fiction company.”

The article described several upcoming movies from the company in the sci-fi genre: “Among the future projects are PLANET OF HORRORS (made with United Artists), where visitors come face-to-face with things that scare them the most; JOURNEY BEYOND THE GALAXY, (this time a $7 million budget in partnership again with Orion) and NIGHTFALL, based on a short story by science-fiction writer Issac Asimov that will cost $6 million, shared with a Germany company.” PLANET OF HORRORS, aka GALAXY OF TERROR, came out in 1981, and Corman made NIGHTFALL twice, with Julie Corman producing in 1988 and a straight-to-video version in 2000. What exactly happened to JOURNEY BEYOND THE GALAXY is uncertain, but Corman told Starburst magazine in Britian in 1982 about the movie, which was described as “the biggest science fiction movie he’s ever tackled”: “It will be comparable, state-of-the-art in special effects, to what George Lucas is doing.”

Corman was optimistic with good reason after the success of the Jimmy Murakami-directed BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, which focuses on a peaceful planet named Akir that must defend itself and the recruitment of mercenaries (of delightfully different forms) throughout the galaxy to take on the evil Sador of the Malmori, the twisted but shrewd leader of an “army full of genetic mistakes.” Written by Sayles with his noted sharp humor and intelligence, the movie is modeled on the SEVEN SAMURAI and THE MAGNIFICIENT SEVEN with influences including the WIZARD OF OZ, Asian and American West philosophy, and science fiction and fantasy literature.

The movie boasts a variety of very good performances from a strong cast of character actors, especially John Saxon as Sador, George Peppard as Cowboy, and Sybil Danning as St. Exmin, a Valkryie warrior, who wears an unforgettable, uncomprehensible outfit, and says things like, “Live fast, fight well, and have a beautiful ending.” Faron Young, eat your heart out. Robert Vaughan plays Gelt, a similar character to his role in THE MAGNIFICIENT SEVEN, and Jeff Corey is Zed, leader of Akir. Corey, also a famous acting teacher, had taught Corman back in the ‘50s, in a class where Corman was introduced to Jack Nicholson, Corman says on the commentary track.

Director/ artistic mastermind James Cameron famously got his start creating the limited but well-executed special effects on BATTLE BEYOND, where his impressive work landed him a promotion to art director. On the movie, he also met Gale Ann Hurd, with whom he would make THE TERMINATOR in 1984, and marry and divorce. Corman would reuse several of the Cameron-constructed spaceships from the BATTLE BEYOND in his other movies (as well as getting his money’s worth from the title sequence and James Horner score. Horner would go onto win an Academy award for Best Original Score on Cameron’s TITANTIC.)

Critic Gene Siskel panned BATTLE BEYOND in his Chicago Tribune review (1½ stars) and named it his “Dog of the Week” on Sneak Previews, claiming it ripped off teenagers who thought they were going to see another STAR WARS. Amazingly, in his newspaper review, Siskel raged that he had been distracted while watching BATTLE BEYOND by a crying baby who had been put in a stroller that had been placed in the theater aisle. He announced he was upping his standing offer from $5 (for merely tossing out ma or pa & tyke) to $10 for any theater ushers who bounced the baby, guardian, and stroller right out into the street. Said ejection needed to occur in the film critic’s presence. In my mind, I imagine Siskel bitching to Roger Ebert outside the theater after the movie and telling him about the $10 idea, and Ebert calling Russ Meyer on a payphone, and they giggle about Siskel before they talk about BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA VIXENS or something.

Kevin Thomas in the LA Times called BATTLE BEYOND “the most elaborate but most derivative production” pursued by New World and Corman. “While BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS is quite acceptable to the youngsters and less discerning space freaks it’s disappointing to anyone who has admired its innovative and talented principle creators.”

BATTLE BEYOND, which hit theaters regionally and then widespread in July and August 1980 was joined on drive-in double bills with were THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977, as GOLIATHON), METEOR (1979, which uses footage from New World’s AVALANCHE and also features Danning) and the New World-distributed THE PRIVATE EYES (1980), staring Don Knotts and Tim Conway. According to Corman on the commentary track, BATTLE BEYOND was New World’s widest release and the company had to twice order extra prints to satisfy demand.

Thomas, well cast and engaging as the straight man, was described as “ineffectual and limp” and at his “neurotic wimpiest” in Tom Shales’ Washington Post review. He would head back to the stage and TV after BATTLE BEYOND. Thomas would perform in a long line of TV movies, including WALTON THANKSGIVING REUNION (1993), WALTON WEDDING (1995), and WALTON EASTER (1997), not to mention playing Hank Williams, Jr. in LIVING PROOF: THE HANK WILLIAMS JR. STORY (1983), a movie he also executive produced, before landing in the WONDER BOYS in 2000.

The Arlington Heights Daily Herald interviewed Thomas shortly before the movie came out. Thomas told the reporter he had a blast making the movie: “All I had to do was go in and wave my space gun around. I just sit around and drive my spaceship. It’s terrific. Can you imagine sitting behind one of those things. Everyone should try it once.” A spirit that no doubt resonated with Corman.