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Tick, Tick, Tick (1970) in the PNW

Details: Written by: Mortado; Category: The 1970s in Northwest Cinemas; Hits: 349

This is a collection of media from the initial runs of "Tick, Tick, Tick" (1970) in the Pacific Northwest.

Click on images for larger versions.

Tick, Tick, Tick (1970)
“Tick, Tick, Tick” is one of those late‑era civil‑rights dramas that pretends it’s walking into the room to negotiate peace, but really it’s there to show you how rotten the floorboards have always been. The film stages its small Southern town like a pressure cooker someone forgot on the stove: everything is already scorched, everyone already knows it, and the arrival of a newly elected Black sheriff simply forces the town to stop pretending the smoke isn’t coming from inside the house. What makes the film interesting, sometimes in spite of itself, is how it treats progress not as triumph but as a kind of civic ulcer, something that throbs and leaks and refuses to heal because the people around it keep picking at the scab.

The story moves with a grim, procedural inevitability. The new sheriff isn’t framed as a savior or a symbol; he’s a man who knows he’s walking into a job designed to break him. The white sheriff he replaces isn’t a cartoon villain, but a man who has spent years trying to keep the town’s ugliness from erupting into open violence, less out of moral conviction than out of exhausted pragmatism. Their uneasy dynamic becomes the film’s backbone: two men who understand that the town’s hatred is bigger than either of them, and that their own survival depends on a kind of mutual, unspoken resignation. The film’s cynicism comes from how little faith it has in institutions, or in the people who cling to them. The courthouse, the jail, the sheriff’s office, every space feels like a relic from a past that refuses to die, a past the town keeps embalmed because it’s easier than admitting it’s already a corpse.

Visually, the film leans into a dusty, sun‑bleached realism that makes the town feel both claustrophobic and hollow. Streets look wide but somehow airless, like the horizon is just another wall. The townspeople drift through scenes with the slack‑jawed hostility of people who’ve inherited a grudge they don’t fully understand but are determined to uphold anyway. The tension doesn’t build so much as simmer, the way resentment does when it’s been passed down like family silver. Even when the film gestures toward reconciliation, it does so with the weary shrug of a place that knows it’s only buying time before the next explosion.

“Tick, Tick, Tick” isn’t a hopeful film, and that’s its strength. It’s a portrait of a community that would rather implode than evolve, and of the men trapped inside its machinery, trying to keep the gears from grinding them into dust. It’s rough, blunt, and unromantic, an artifact from a moment when American cinema was finally willing to admit that the country’s wounds weren’t going to close just because someone said they should. If anything, the film suggests the ticking you hear isn’t a bomb waiting to go off; it’s the sound of a clock that’s been broken for generations, still pretending it keeps time.

Director: Ralph Nelson
Writer: James Lee Barrett
Stars: Jim Brown, George Kennedy, Fredric March
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February 3, 1970 ad (Portland)

February 4, 1970 ad (Portland)

February 5, 1970 ad (Portland)

February 6, 1970 ad (Portland)

February 24, 1970 ad (Seattle)

February 25, 1970 ad (Seattle)

February 27, 1970 ad (Seattle)

Tick, Tick, Tick (1970) poster

Tick, Tick, Tick (1970) trailer
Buy "Tick, Tick, Tick" (1970) DVD on Amazon (SPONSORED)

Shark (1969) in the PNW

Details: Written by: Mortado; Category: The 1970s in Northwest Cinemas; Hits: 337

This is a collection of media from the initial runs of "Shark" (1969) in the Pacific Northwest. This one didn't seem to make it to Seattle.

Click on images for larger versions.

Shark (1969)
Shark” is one of those late‑sixties adventure thrillers that feels like it was assembled from sun‑bleached scraps, held together mostly by the stubborn charisma of its lead and the film’s own misplaced confidence. It moves through its Red Sea setting with the swagger of a pulp novel that doesn’t realize the world has already grown tired of its bravado. The film circles around a drifter who treats danger like a currency he’s always short on, drifting into a job that promises quick money and delivers the usual cocktail of moral rot, double‑dealing, and heat‑struck desperation. What gives the film its bite isn’t the sharks so much as the human opportunism circling beneath every interaction.

There’s a constant sense that the production is wrestling with itself, as if the filmmakers wanted a gritty, hard‑edged thriller but kept tripping over their own limitations. The atmosphere is thick with sweat, suspicion, and the kind of casual cruelty that defined a lot of late‑sixties genre cinema trying to look tougher than it actually was. The characters move through the story like they’re all hiding something, but the film never digs deep enough to make their secrets feel dangerous—just grimy. Even the action has a strangely fatalistic quality, as if everyone involved knows the world they inhabit is too indifferent to reward heroism.

What lingers is the film’s rough, unvarnished texture. “Shark” feels like a relic from a cinematic moment when adventure films were shedding their glossy optimism and embracing a more cynical worldview, but hadn’t yet figured out how to make that cynicism meaningful. It’s a story about people chasing profit in a place that devours the greedy and the desperate alike, and the film’s own ragged edges end up reinforcing that theme more effectively than its plot ever does.

Directors: Samuel Fuller
Writers: Samuel Fuller, John T. Dugan, Victor Canning
Stars: Burt Reynolds, Arthur Kennedy, Barry Sullivan
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January 22, 1970 ad (Portland)