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 4th,
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.
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