Pray for the Wildcats is so very good. This 1974 glory stomp through Baja features William Shatner, Robert Reed and Andy Griffith all playing against type, and they can’t even hold a candle to Angie Dickinson.
I just watched the first half hour, seated in my parked Dodge Dart in the rain, staring at the cracked screen of my aging iPhone, the perfect place and way to do so. I’ve seen it many times before. I can vouch for it as the greatest made-for-weekly-network-production film of all time.
Angie Dickinson is beyond masterful in this flick. She has a scene over breakfast with Robert Reed and you can just feel the 20th century crumbling behind them. It’s as if this movie is the undiscovered key to the fall of the American empire! We should’ve seen it coming. If we had paid enough attention to this movie, we would have seen it coming. We wasted our time watching Billy Jack when we should’ve been watching Pray for the Wildcats.
Angie Dickinson was just so amazingly beautiful, how could we not appreciate it at the time? Actually, I guess we did appreciate it at the time. At least most three legged men did. I may not have, but Johnny Carson certainly did.
Yes, she was hot. But not in that usual Hollywood “beach babe” way. She seemed to have special sway over middle aged men (or those even older men who THINK they may yet still have even the virility that they had when they actually were middle aged). Such men likely fantasized that Angie, with her sultry yet slightly weathered look and demeanor, might be a desirable prize they could POSSIBLY successfully hit on…maybe at the Youngstown (or Dallas, or Fresno, or Pittsburgh, or…??) Hilton hotel bar in dreary (“what the hell am I DOING with my life?!”) middle of their next sales trip.
My 8th grade Social Studies teacher was such a guy (in temperament if not age or circumstance) and he was obsessed with Angie Dickinson, openly extolling his lust for her IN Class. But it animated him. This teacher would also wax on with such gems of advice to the young men in class about feigning incompetence in all household tasks so as to achieve a tolerable, perhaps even enjoyable married life. Oh, and he also had some schtick where he (a kind of pudgy fellow) would do a running flying kick where he would knock a pencil out of the mouth of another Social Studies teacher! He was actually a quite amusing and well-liked teacher (in a mid 70s midwest high school), though he likely wouldn’t have lasted a year in today’s “educational” environment.
