The Happening

Four Miami beach bums find they've kidnapped cleaned up gangster Quinn in this dated excuse for an anti-establishment comedy, which gave Dunaway her first role, as one of the abductors (a few months later she was to play Bonnie Parker), and The Supremes a chart-topping hit. Infuriated that his wife Martha Hyer, partner Berle, Mafia boss Homolka, and his mother won't pay up for his release, the gangster blows his top, takes over his own kidnapping, secures the ransom by a faked death and blackmail, and then, to the horror of the purblind hippies, who he's turned into his soldiers, burns the supposedly marked loot. Co-scripted by Frank R Pierson, with evocative camerawork by Philip Lathrop.