C.C. & Company

     A year before C.C. & Company (1970), quarterback Joe Namath had taken the New York Jets to a surprise victory over the Baltimore Colts.  Hollywood beckoned.
     C.C. & Company, directed by TV director Seymour Robbie, was Namath's second film.  He plays motorcycle gang member, C.C. Ryder, in with The Heads, led by Moon (William Smith), for only a month when the film begins in an Arizona grocery store.
     Happy go lucky soundtrack music accompanies C.C. as he puts some canned foods in his cart, then pushes it around, taking ingredients to make himself a sandwich, enjoying the era of no surveillance cameras in grocery stores.  He drinks a small carton of milk to wash his lunch down, replaces the canned foods to their shelf, and buys a pack of chewing gum for ten cents.  Outside he gets on his motorcycle in the brilliant dry country southwest sunshine and drives off, theme song playing to a montage of images of the Heads, of Ann-Margret, who plays a fashion magazine writer, Ann McCalley, coordinating photographic shoots.
     Ann-Margret's presence in this low budget film indicates a willingness on her part to act in a variety of productions.  Throughout this film she's Ann-Margret, definitely the star, while Namath, star of a different medium--professional football--is an amateur actor with enough charisma to help him just pass through a minor film about motorcycle gangs (a commonly visited genre in the 1960s) while other experienced performers, Ann-Margret, William Smith and Sid Haig, are clearly more comfortable onscreen.
     Moon, head of the Heads, is a pseudo-dictator.  Their shaded camp, by a river, has a throne-like blue chair where the leader sits, ordering his followers to do various tasks.  The curvaceous and lanky women, all of their blouses tied above their beautiful bellies, their tight pants pulled down past hip bones and revealing panties, follow Moon's orders without objection, except for Pom Pom (Jennifer Billingsley), who has it bad for C.C. in spite of being Moon's main woman.  C.C. always rebuffs her except when he gets his share of dirt bike race money from her.  A misfit among the Heads, C.C. comes in third in a dirt bike race.  Moon demands the winnings.  The Heads share their money, dammit!  C.C. withholds a hundred bucks for himself, a fight follows.  By fucking her, C.C. gets the hundred back from Pom Pom and then takes off to find Ann McCalley, a woman he's run into a few times.
     C.C. and Ann spend a lot of time together; they dance, they laugh, they fuck.  They ride C.C.'s bike.  She puts off going back to New York for a while.  He goes grocery shopping one day, returns home to find three Heads in Ann's house.  Moon has had her kidnapped, she's at the river camp.  Moon wants a thousand bucks from C.C.  C.C. suggests two-thousand to be put up in a race with their own hogs on a flat track, winner taking all.  Moon, unwilling to seem chicken, agrees.
     At a university stadium at night with a track and field quarter mile track around the green the two race, the gang watching from the stands.  Moon cheats but near the end C.C. drives him against a fence, Moon flies into the air and apparently breaks enough bones to kill himself.  A final chase.  C.C. tricks the pursuers by making them think he and Ann crashed.  He sets fire to all but one of their bikes and takes off with Ann.
     Jets beat the Colts.
     It's a pretty bad film.  Sub-standard drive-in movie-type fare for 1970.  Ann-Margret's one piece swimsuit revealing her belly is one of the highlights.  It's interesting, too, to see the use of advertising links in a commercial film from that period.  Hamm's Beer is drunk and featured on a billboard.  Kawasaki motorcycles (the dirt bikes) are heavily shown.  C.C.'s sandwich uses Wonder Bread.  Namath himself, with his recent Super Bowl fame, was sold in this film to audiences wanting to see more of him.  It is curious and a sign of those times that Joe Namath, all-American, plays in this film a motorcycle gang member--what's more, as shown in the first scene, a thief.  If Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers act in films after they retire from football will they play outlaws, or go the wholesome route?  I suspect the latter is more likely than the former.
     Please look up my YouTube channel, John Berner.  There are twenty-eight of my own films on there, as by Rhombus--my filmmaker name.  The latest is a 91 minute science fiction film, What Was Useful Is Now Garbage.

                                                                              Vic Neptune
   
     
      

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