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  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent
    edited January 2022

    RANCHO NOTORIOUS (1952)

    Arthur Kennedy was an actor in demand in the early 1950s. His best performances were probably in his two Anthony Mann westerns The Man from Laramie and Bend of the River, both of which starred James Stewart. In this dark and impressive western, Kennedy is paired with Stewart’s co-star from the classic Destry Rides Again, Marlene Dietrich. He’s not quite so able to match her fire with brimstone, but he gives a nuanced performance which switches from eager to wretched to solemn. Several times his Vern Haskell curls his lip and stares with an all-encompassing over-hooded gleam, like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, saying nothing, observing everything. As Dietrich’s Altar Keane says when they first meet: “He uses his eyes.”  

    The film starts the brutal rape and murder of Beth Forbes, Vern’s fiancé. We don’t see it, but the assault is heavily implied, more so than many similar scenes in movies of a much later time. Consumed with revenge, Vern embarks on a lonesome search for the man who committed the dark deed. He finds the murderer’s dying accomplice and the whispered word of Chuck-A-Luck deepens his search, his danger and hatred. A chance encounter with a wanted man puts Vern on the trail of Altar Keane. This particular brawl is one of the most impressive fights I’ve seen in a western for a long time, all swirling movement, kinky camera angles and close ups. I was instantly reminded of Jason Bourne or James Bond in Quantum of Solace. Brilliant stuff.

    Altar Keane is a whiskey drinking, tough as nails, showgirl gone bad. Chasing her tail leads him to Frenchy Fairmont, a gunslinger waiting to hang. Rescuing Frenchy, Vern is taken to Chuck-A-Luck, the notorious ranch of the title, where Altar breeds horses and has a money-spinning side line sheltering bandits, outlaws, rustlers and killers for 10% of their spoils. Vern suspects one of the assorted bad hands was Beth’s murderer, but his troubles have only just started with Altar top of the pile.

    Fritz Lang isn’t everybody’s idea of a director of westerns, though he made a few. What he does so well in Rancho Notorious is give the story pace and vividity. The narrative barely pauses for breath. Vern’s motives and his single-minded attitudes are laid bare within the first few minutes. We follow him with baited breath on the hazardous trail, through town and country, bathed in Hal Mohr’s ravishing fifties technicolour, all deep ruby reds, fiery golds and verdant emeralds. Vern scowls and scamps. When he wants to be ingratiating, he can be, but Kennedy’s avenger prefers to grimace. When his eagle-stare affixes on a brooch he gave his fiancé, but which now resides on Altar’s breast, his lips curl again, almost as if he’s about to weep, before the anger comes seething out in a desperate rage. Kennedy’s all pent-up aggression, paired with a steely intelligence which deceives his new ‘friends’ and makes Altar wish he’d “Go away and come back ten years ago.”

    Dietrich was probably too old for this kind of role, which is a reimaging of her turn as Frenchie in Destry. There’s two marvellous flash back scenes which form her character, one a crazy drunken human steeplechase across a saloon floor, the other her dismissal from Baldy Gunder’s casino, where she expresses her disdain for her profession. Winning big on the gambling tables – they call it chuck-a-luck, but I thought that was a dice game – she disappears forever, not only into Frenchy’s jealous arms, but into her secret business and a life outside of the world, so much so she becomes almost unreal: “a woman who’s sometimes cold like ice, sometimes burning like the sun, a pipe dream in blue jeans and a birthday dress.”

    The sparks of sexual attraction rise in Dietrich’s portrayal. She was always great expressing developing emotions through a series of small movements, and she continues that habit here: shaking when Vern kisses her, the looks which seem to drift anywhere but Vern’s direction, the awkward realisation he’s a decent man in a dirty place, jumping over fences to get something he wants. Her reactions to Vern are far better than the staid convenient attachment to Mel Ferrer’s Frenchy. Dietrich makes us believe Altar is falling for this young, arrogant, impressionable man. When Vern ill-advisably returns to provide an alibi for a suspicious posse, the walls metaphorically come down. They never consummate the attraction, because Vern is faking it, a deceit he uses to his advantage to uncover the murderer within. Moral vitriol pours forth from Vern, his hatred clouding him to the desire before his eyes. Altar suddenly recognises the shameful decrepit life she’s chosen, but it’s too late to abandon the Chuck-A-Luck and tragedy lurks where once there might have been love, an ill-advised, sensual reimagining of those youthful glories singing, carousing and winning steeplechases.

    There’s a climatic gunfight – it’s a western, there has to be – but the real battle has been won already and not always for the good. Vern, having achieved his revenge, cannot return to the life of a cattle hand. He too becomes a bandit like Frenchy Fairmont, their shared debt to Altar joining them by gun belt. The two ride into the sunset, joined at the hip by the love of a woman neither ever truly owned.

    Rancho Notorious is a prototype spaghetti western, featuring as it does the recurring narrative of a wronged man on a revenge quest. Daniel Taradash’s inventive script does not stick to wild west stereotypes. Consider this:

    -         The movie has an anti-hero in Kennedy’s Vern, a man prepared to kill anyone who prevents him achieving his vengeance, who tortures a dying man to his last breath, who uses and destroys Altar for his benefit.

    -         It has a despicable villain, or villainess, who although she exposes our natural sympathy towards oppressed women, has manipulated a position of strength for herself based on the spoils of butchery.  

    -         The film questions the traditional values of the western: Altar Keane is in control, even of her lover, who has risked arrest for a bottle of perfume; the hero has no respect for the law, perfectly happy to commit murder and robbery to achieve his end; the noblest character is the gunslinger, who is loyal and realistic.

    -         There’s even a disparaging attitude to politics: locked in a cell with three corrupt councillors, Vern chooses to side with Frenchy: “Give me an outlaw to these thieves anytime. At least he takes his chances in the open.” The councillors a grubby, greedy lot who quibble and quarrel, who even have the sheriff in their pocket, a man as unscrupulous as Vern and Frenchy and Altar.

    -         The band of mismatched, identifiably different outlaws.

    -         The robbery gone wrong. This scene will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Peckinpah’s masterpiece The Wild Bunch, itself an anti-spaghetti western spaghetti western.

    -         There is no happy ending.

    Howard Hughes, as RKO Pictures Studio Head and owner, had some input into the lurid nature of the material, but it isn't a cheap production, being full of incident, performance and visuals which raise the film above the ordinary, despite being predominantly studio bound. The ballad which hangs the threads of the film together, while unpopular with some viewers, is important because it qualifies Vern’s intentions of  “hate, murder and revenge.” By the end, as he rides beside Frenchy, hate has so consumed the hero we know there will only more of the same for Vern Haskell.

    A marvellous and important western.

  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,907MI6 Agent
    edited January 2022

    napoleon said:

    When you say the Spidey guy is different in the comics, did you mean his physique? It strikes me if they did it this way he may just end up seeming like Deadpool, who is also irreverent and full bodied (when it's not getting chopped up).

    I meant his dialog and attitude. But Stan Lee wrote all the dialog in those early comics, so its sort of his voice, his sense of humour. and all comic book superheroes made wisecracks as they fought the bad guys, but SpiderMan did so more so than most. Not like Deadpool though, Deadpool says really gross nasty things. More like an early 1960s suburban teenager giving attitude to the grownups, not because he's disrespectful but because he's young (and has been bullied) and suddenly finds himself superpowered and is relied upon to save the day, so he's got a bit of 'tood. And, in the comics, he's still not respected by the public when he does save the day but feared, so that gives him extra attitude. The dialogs between Spiderman and newspaper publisher J Jonah Jameson were always particularly hilarious

    I'll try to find some typical sample panels maybe this weekend, just cuz I love these original Lee/Ditko comics. The movies are alright, but they're just adaptations, its those classic comics I believe should be part of the Official Canon of Fine Western Literature, alongside Fleming and Tolkien.


    The character of J Jonah Jameson is one thing those first three Toby Maguire films got absolutely right, and the new films have been missing.

    As I say, I havent seen the new film, but the last one ended with J Jonah Jameson appearing on a giant teevee screen, and I thought "waitaminnit, J.J.J. hasnt been a character in these new movies so far, whats he doing here?" but now I know the new movie has a multiverse concept, his surprise appearance makes complete sense!

  • BarbelBarbel ScotlandPosts: 36,053Chief of Staff
    edited January 2022

    FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975, Directed By Dick Richards)

    A genuine film noir made in the mid-70s, this is a remake of the 1944 Murder My Sweet. It’s a Raymond Chandler story- in the earlier version, Dick Powell played Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s iconic private eye (Powell had previously been known as a song & dance man, hence the change of title in case audiences thought it was a musical).

    Here, Marlowe is played by Robert Mitchum and better casting I cannot think of bar his age at the time (almost 60). There had been several Marlowe films over the years, including one with no less than Humphrey Bogart, but to my mind Mitchum beats them all. It’s just a pity that he hadn’t played the part in the 40s or 50s, but it’s easily overlooked- he could pass for several years younger.

    The atmosphere is perfect, aided by David Shore’s evocative music. The supporting cast is headed by Charlotte Rampling as an excellent femme fatale. Her entrance was spoofed in The Naked Gun (1988) but unlike Priscilla Presley in that movie she doesn’t walk into a wall.

    Down the cast list is a pre-fame Sylvester Stallone, as a henchman*. Curiously enough, in the preceding Marlowe film (The Long Goodbye, 1973) a pre-fame Arnold Schwarzenegger also played a henchman. And even more curiously, in the one before that (Marlowe, 1969) a pre-fame Bruce Lee played a henchman, too.

    Mitchum carries the film. His pitch-perfect, world weary voiceover is the very spirit of Chandler. Once again, it’s a shame he didn’t play the part in an earlier Marlowe movie. At the time, he stated that he hadn’t played a private eye before. He was technically correct, though in Out Of The Past (1947) he had played a retired private eye dragged back for one more assignment. That was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds, remembered today mainly for the title song by Phil Collins.

    Mitchum would play Marlowe again in the 1978 version of The Big Sleep. He’s still fine, but with the film suffering under the twin handicaps of being set in the then modern day and in England, most of the atmosphere was lost. There’s a starry supporting cast (I’ll only mention James Stewart and Oliver Reed) but it doesn’t hold a candle to the 1946 original.


    Edit- * It's odd to see how small Sylvester Stallone appears in this movie, before he was a star. Normally, he seems a big man, six foot or more, but here before directors (including himself) give him favourable angles, etc, he looks short next to Mitchum and others.

  • CoolHandBondCoolHandBond Mactan IslandPosts: 6,030MI6 Agent

    VOLCANO (1997)

    Tommy Lee Jones stars in this distinctly average disaster movie released in the same year as the superior, similarly themed, Dante’s Peak. Earthquakes in Los Angeles cause a volcano to form and erupt in the famous Tar Pits. Jones has to find ways of averting the lava flow from destroying the city. Cue the usual scenes of pandemonium, some of which are even more ludicrous than usual. The only plus is that some of the model shots (although sometimes obvious) are great to look at, they are so much better than poorly conceived CGI.

    Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,239MI6 Agent

    Mystify - a documentary about Michael Hutchence, lead singer of INXS.

    I found this to be an unhappy documentary. There's little to explain how the band went from meeting in college to suddenly playing to thousands in their homeland of Australia. I know not every band has the 'met at a fete, played at the local church hall, headed for Hamburg's clubs then returned to the Liverpool Cavern' back story but something seemed to be missing, perhaps I left the room at that point.

    Something is made of Hutchence being a sensitive young lad who got into books and art, but you don't see it in his conversation or maybe his songs either, it almost seems a ruse to pick up a better quality type of woman, not a bad reason to get into Sartre but even so. There's none of the high-minded mischief you see in other bands some of us grew up with, still. Later his early life is revisited and we find out some bad stuff, different to the usual story. His Dad was an itinerant albeit highly paid, not quite sure what he did for a living, but he had a David Niven charm - and looks, while his mother was a former model not quite up to looking after kids, and Michael got farmed out to his older sister. There's stuff to unpack there, however I must have left the room when they got onto Kick, the mega INXS album which stands up so well today and is packed with great songs. Because of this, you don't ever quite get the sense of the band ever really enjoying itself. It bangs on about Hutchence's sensual tastes - this is foreshadowing of course for those who know - but this doesn't convey itself to the viewer. There's a lot of filmed footage mostly by Hutchence which reveals a bloke anxious to live his life and record it.

    It turns nasty. After he breaks up with Kylie, he winds up breaking up the marriage of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates though you do sense she was totally ready to jump. The UK media get in there, feeling morally justified to hack their phones presumably, doorstep their hotel and create the kind of bullying climate the dogged the Hillsborough families, occasional celebs such as Hugh Grant and Amy Winehouse, among others such as the journalist Daniel Morgan, said to be murdered via a collusion of The Sun newspaper and the currently under fire Metropolitian Police. Key to this is an assault by a Rome taxi driver that left Hutchence with brain damage and cut his sense of smell and taste for ever. No mention is made of his identity or any charges pressed, seems he got away with it.

    Yates' husband Bob Geldof doesn't come across too well in this and in no mood to play happy families with his wife's new beau, that said if she was doing drugs and kids were around you can see his point of view. He applied for custody. It's odd to hear how Bono pitches in with his affectionate memories of Hutchence though he's presumably good mates with Geldof too, still, there you go.

    It's mean to say that the band didn't have that many hits after Kick and didn't seem to develop much musically either, one anecdote suggests the main co-writer getting nasty when another in the band tried to take his place on one song, Disappear, which went on to be their biggest off that album. You can't help but despise Oasis' Noel Gallagher for his jibe at the Brit Awards, though he maintained at the time that Hutchence had jibed at his band previously and went on to play it down - it's all down to the narrative backstory, eh?

    Things come to a head and Hutchence kills himself, hanged in his hotel room - later it emerges he had extensive brain damage that he'd kept to himself so his suicide seems similar to that of Robin Williams who also felt his brain was just disintegrating. One nasty postscript is omitted - that his lover Paula Yates not too long after OD'd and died. On top of a very nasty situation she'd had it revealed to her that her father was not who she thought it was but actually the slightly odd, insincere appearing 1970s showbiz celebrity Hughie Greene who hosted Opportunity Knocks. This revelation - aired by a mourner getting up to talk at Greene's funeral and in no mood to keep a secret - was reinforced by the fact that Paula did facially resemble him, though he was generally loathed by the family so it would have taken its toll. Now, Greene's offspring were well aware of their father's unpleasant side - not on a par with other seedy 70s celebs, just a bit edgy and nasty I think - and embraced Paula Yates as their own sort of but even so, you'd rather not find that out. Yates' mother tried to go with the story that she must have been drugged by Greene for her to have had sex with him, pretty much pleading the 5th.

    On top of all this, of course, Peaches Geldof, daughter of Paula and Bob, died of an overdose in 2014. All in all this is a tragic tale and much of it would have unfolded simply because of an oafish and violent cabbie's behaviour in Rome late one night.

    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,239MI6 Agent
    edited January 2022

    This Edit button doesn't seem to work btw.


    Does for me 😎🤣 (Sir Miles)….

    And me (Barbel)....

    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent
    edited January 2022

    4 for Texas (1963)

    This is a lighthearted western starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ursula Andress, Anita Ekberg, Charles Bronson and The Three Stooges. The action starts immediately with a group of bandits attacking a stage coach. The coach gets away, but only Sinatra and Martin's characters survive. The coach also carried 100 000 $ that didn't belong to either of them. Both display greed and moral flexibility to get the money, but it's Martin's character who rides away with it. He teams up with Maxine (Andress) to open a casino on the river boat she owns. Sinatra's character works for a banker who wants the money and to stop the casino plans. He meets Elya (Ekberg) and hooks up with her. Matson (Bronson) also works for the banker. He's a gunslinger who was the leader of the bandits who attacked the stage coach. Actually there are more fistfights than gunfights in this movie, and while there is action the fun, glamour and starpower is what you remember. For the first time in Hollywood the two female leads had to screentest nude (!), but in the end their nude scenes were cut by the censors. The casting people must've kicked themselves for going through the trouble for no reason 😁. The two actresses look fantastic in clothes too, but the attitudes to and of their two characters must have seemed old-fashioned even in 1963. When Martin's character offers Maxine to be his equal partner in the casino she refuses because she wants him to be "the master"! But if you don't get too worked up by that type of scenes in a western comedy you'll have a great time watching it.

    You can watch the movie for free here: 4 for Texas 1963 (ok.ru)

    I'm a fan of strong women, but at the same time I'm also a fan of beautiful women. That's why I'm sharing this "4 for Texas" photo of Ursula Andress:


  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent

    I think quite a few of us have reviewed this already, but it was on last night as tribute to the late Sidney poitier, so

    IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967)

    The late great Sidney Poitier in a career defining role as Virgil Tibbs, a Police Homicide Detective stuck in the two-bit two-lane southern town of Sparta investigating against his wishes and judgement the murder of a local businessman. Rod Steiger won an Oscar as the put upon Sheriff, Gillespie, whose bigoted opinions alter as the story progresses.

    The usual prejudices abound. After over fifty years, what was once shocking feels rather subdued. Even the sudden moment where Tibbs delivers a backhanded slap to the face of a  racist plantation owner seems less revolutionary than it would have done in the era of the black civil rights movement. These days we kinda know old Endicott deserves it. The most interesting reaction is from Gillespie, who having been asked by an outraged Endicott what he was going to do about the ‘assault’, rather than say the obvious and very modern view point of: “I saw you strike a police officer” merely raises his tired eyes and mutters: “I don’t know.”

    There’s a car chase which adds excitement where there needn’t be any and the editing goes awry a few times as the evidence mounts up. Tibbs doesn’t so much solve the investigation as stumble on it. He’s lucky the real murderer turns up where and when he wants him. Good visuals and direction. Quincy Jones provides a slam dunk of a feisty score.   

    The film is best seen as an examination of two opposite personalities. Tibbs is upright, honest, but egotistical and as bigoted towards white men as they are to him; he battles prejudice daily, one assumes, and displays calm assurance even when the police or witnesses refuse to assist him. It’s a phenomenal turn by Poitier and he commands the screen whenever he’s on it. Haskell Wexler, the photographer tones down the brightness to keep his skin tonally dark, without reflected light. This makes Poitier visually stronger than he would normally be.

    Steiger is all sweaty arrogance, a weak man with a rough tongue and a slow mind. Equally arrogant, he finally recognises the deficiencies in himself which he already knew were there. Steiger does his best work when he says nothing at all, his brooding menace ebbing away to nothing every time Virgil Tibbs out thinks him. The scene and speech where he persuades Tibbs to stay and prove he’s better than the white folk of Sparta is probably the moment which won him the Academy Award. It’s often forgotten how good Poitier is, giving the space and time to his co-star. They should both have been nominated, IMO, although 1967 was an exceedingly strong year for male lead actors.

    If you haven’t seen it, do.

     

        

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent


    Thanks for that review. I didn't watch the documentary as I didn't think it was going to tell me more than I already knew. I was a big INXS fan in the early '90s. However I remember telling all my mates when I saw the band live in 1998, promoting the Elegantly Wasted album, that I thought he was on drugs, so apathetic was his performance. When I later read all the stuff you describe, I felt rather guilty. He was in some bad places sometimes. However, at the risk of adding injury, I don't believe he's as great a loss as Elvis, George Michael, Hendrix, James Dean, Marilyn, and few others who popped off too early.

  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent
    edited January 2022

    Red sun (1971)

    This movie is a "eastern western" and directed by Terrance Young. It also stars Ursuala Andress, nine years after they made DN. Here's some of the plot summary from Wikipedia;

    "Link Stuart and Gauche are the ruthless co-leaders of a gang of bandits who rob a train of its $400,000 payload. On the train is the Japanese ambassador, on his way to Washington, who has with him a ceremonial tachi, a gift to the American president. Gauche steals the gold-handled sword and shoots dead one of the ambassador's two samurai guards. At the same time, by Gauche's order, other members of the gang double-cross Link by throwing dynamite into the train car he occupies and leave him for dead. Before the gang departs, the surviving samurai guard, Kuroda, tells Gauche he intends to track him down and kill him, but Gauche is dismissive of the threat.

    The Japanese ambassador instructs Link, who was not injured in the attempt to kill him, but who has been disarmed, to assist Kuroda in tracking down Gauche. Kuroda is given one week to kill Gauche and recover the sword. If he fails, both Kuroda and the ambassador will have to commit harakiri for having lost their honor in allowing the sword to be stolen and the samurai's death to go unavenged. Link reluctantly agrees, but he realizes that Kuroda will kill Gauche immediately, which Link does not want because he knows Gauche will have hidden the loot. Once they set off in pursuit of the gang, Link repeatedly attempts to elude Kuroda, only to be thwarted by the irrepressible samurai."

    Link is played by Charles Bronson, Gauche by Alain Delon and Toshiro Mifune plays Kuroda. Both Bronson's a and Delon's character names mean 'left". The samurai is clearly much more honourable than the other characters and the visual of a samurai fighting in the wild west is great. But why does Link attack Kuroda with a wooden stick when the samurai has sword? That takes a special kind of stupid.

    The fight between a Commanche with a spear and Kuroda with his sword on the other hand is a standout. But why doesn't Kuroda pick up a rifle? The sword is great for close fighting, but Kuroda has to resort to throwing knives at a distance. The movie gives the impression the samurai doesn't want to or know how to use a gun, but at that time the samurai had used guns for three hundred years. Here's two photos from the time period the movie is set;



    But the movie is well made, has two strong Bond connections, the Spanish locations look great and the premise is very unusual. I enjoyed it a lot!

  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent

    It looks like it's Terrance Young's only western. He dabbled in many generes.

  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent

    Antony Dawson who played professor Dent in DN also appears in Red Sun.

  • CoolHandBondCoolHandBond Mactan IslandPosts: 6,030MI6 Agent

    PERSONAL SERVICES (1987)

    Although a caption at the beginning of the movie states that this isn’t about the infamous Cynthia Payne, suburban brothel keeper, it does say it was inspired by her story which it clearly is.

    Julie Walters plays an initially sexually naive waitress who illegally sublets flats to hookers, but when one of her tenants absconds without paying the rent she provides a sexual service for her real landlord which leads her onto the path of providing sexual services to older men who require kinky services.

    Its not as good as I remember it from when I first saw it all those years ago, probably because Walters has played the same style of acting so many times since, but it’s entertaining enough to pass a couple of hours away. Mind you, it does make you wonder what makes some men tick 😂

    Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent
    edited February 2022

    Zarak (1956)

    IMDB plot summary: On the mountainous frontier between British India and Afghanistan, circa 1860s, Zarak Khan kisses Salma, the youngest wife of his father, Haji Khan. Outraged, his father orders Zarak to be flogged to death but spares his life at the urging of an elderly Mullah. Zarak now leaves his village and becomes a notorious outlaw, prompting the British to assign a Major Ingram to capture him. Zarak and Ingram have several encounters, developing a grudging respect for each other.

    This movie has several Bond connections. It was produced by Warwick Films, co-owned by Cubby Broccoli. It was directed by Terrance Young and written by Richard Maibaum. Bob Simmons was the main stuntman and Ted Moore was the cinematographer. Aunice Gayson who plays the wife of the main British officer was the first ever Bond girl. Anita Ekberg should have kept her mouth shut in FRWL. Patric MacGoohan was offered the part of James Bond, but turned it down on religious reasons. The leads Victor Mature and Michael Wilding are on the other hand unknown to me.

    Zarak is actually based on a real man. According to a book Zarak fought the British in the Northwest Frontier in the 1920s and 30s until he was captured. He fought with the British against the Japanese in WWII. According to Wikipedia "In 1943 he was leading a patrol when its British officer was killed in an ambush. He watched another British patrol be attacked by the Japanese and sent messengers to summon a Gurkha force. To stop the Japanese from escaping with their prisoners before the Gurkhas arrived, he attacked them single-handed, and killed or wounded six soldiers before being overpowered. He refused to be beheaded and insisted on being flayed alive to buy time to enable the Gurkhas to arrive." That's commitment!

    This movie probably has more in common with 1001 Nights than the real Northern Frontier and Afghanistan in the 1860s. It's colourful in every way. There are half-naked harem girls and borownface actors everywhere, but one wonders how Anita Ekberg's character managed to end up in Afghanistan. I don't think the filmmakers can be critisized for all the brownface on display considering how very few actors with the right etnicity worked in Britain at the time. It must have been brownface or no movie a tall. The House of Lords had issues with the half-naked harem girls. The original film poster was criticised by the House of Lords for "bordering on the obscene" and banned in the United Kingdom. Here it is:



    I can see some of the seeds of the James Bond movies in Zarak. There is of cource the shared talent on screen and off. We can also see the interest in adventure, exotic locations (Morocco stood in for Afghanistan like it did in TLD) and a mix of violence and stunning women. But even though Zarak was made only six years before DN it looks old-fashioned compared to the first Bond movies in the way it's acted, edited and shot. But if you're looking for an old-fashioned action adventure movie you can do a lot worse than Zarak. I had fun watching it.

    Youtube; Zarak: 1956 Adventure Drama with Victor Mature and Michael Wilding - YouTube

  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent

    Fun fact: Terrance Young actually directed Ian Fleming! I'm not talking about the questionable shot of a man next to the train in FRWL, But in "Too hot to handle" (1960) directed by Young, an Australian actor named Ian Fleming plays a pawnbroker.

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent

    Last night I over indulged and watched three horrors from the seventies. I spent all afternoon writing these up. I suspect some have been reviewed before:

    #1

    THE ABOMINABLE DR PHIBES (1971)

    The Abominable Dr Phibes has one of the most astonishing beginnings I’ve ever seen for a horror film: a black garbed figure rises from the depths of his art deco mansion playing Mendelssohn’s War March of the Priests on his opulent Wurlitzer stage organ, turns to his unseen audience, dismounts and winds up a mechanical band who begin to recite a waltz, to which he dances across an enormous ballroom with an angelic white robed young woman. This bizarre romantic overture is broken a few moments later as the black-and-white twosome distribute a cage full of deadly flesh eating bats through the sky light of a soon-to-be deceased surgeon.

    The film goes all camp on us after that, a series of increasingly peculiar assassinations linked by the ten plagues of Egypt – neither the right plagues nor in the correct order – and confounding a useless constabulary, led by a confused-looking Peter Jeffery. Joseph Cotton is the unsympathetic ‘hero’ of the piece, a surgeon whose team operated on and failed to save the life of Victoria Phibes. Vincent Price takes on a role odd even for him: a renowned concert musician and theologian who, having lost his wife and almost killing himself in a car crash, has brought himself back from the dead, fixing his vocal chords and repairing his seared flesh to the point he can adequately function and exact his revenge. He uses an amplifier to speak and takes sustenance through a hole in his neck. The final reveal of his tattered features beneath the prosthetic theatrical make up was chilling indeed, but unfortunately by then I’d ceased to be very interested in what was happening.

    The grisly murders were delivered and then revealed in an increasingly laughable Carry On manner. I almost expected Kenneth’s Williams or Connor to play the victims it’s that hammy. Terry-Thomas was amusing as a pornography watching Doctor whose blood is drained from his body, a quite chilling method of disposal, which certainly got my interest. Yet director Robert Fuest has this slice of genuine horror accompanied by Vulnavia, the white robed woman, playing an intermezzo on a violin. This kind of auteur touch marks the film as unique, but doesn’t help the overall atmosphere of the piece, which continues to veer maniacally from terror to merriment. It’s fascinatingly watchable because of it. Price seems to inhabit a totally different platform to the rest of the cast and the constant jarring juxtapositions between horror and humour simply don’t work. I sat there engrossed, but I wasn’t sure if I kept watching because I was thrilled or because I merely wanted to see the next ridiculousness.

    The very beautiful Virginia North, who of course graced On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as Draco’s chess-mate, has the silent role of Vulnavia. Her motivation is never explained. Another of our alumni, Caroline Munro, is Dr Phibe’s dead wife, seen only in photographs [I don’t think it’s Munro in the coffin, I wasn’t sure]. The film is set in the mid-1920s, but the music mostly stems from the 1930s and 40s, which is another peculiarity. I kept thinking it was a seventies reworking of Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, but it lacks the epic scale. The whole murderous curiosity ends in an underground lair, on a moment of nightmarish pathos. Before the police can intervene, the nightscape black marble of Phibe’s tomb descends on his prostrate body, he rests at peace among the ravages of the final plague: darkness.

    I was left completely dumb and, hours on, still have no idea whether I enjoyed the film or not.    

     

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent

    #2

    TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER (1976)

    The penultimate Hammer production, 1976’s To the Devil a Daughter isn’t considered any great shakes by most critics. That’s a trifle unfair. It follows on the newly trodden path of the possession terror, as exemplified by The Exorcist. It’s often compared unfavourably with that other London-centric but American-starred shocker The Omen. It predates that classic by several months and is based on a much older novel, Dennis Wheatley’s from 1953.

    It also features an excellent Hammer swansong from Christopher Lee as the obsessed and possessed defrocked priest Father Michael Rayner, whose life has been given over to serving the Lord of Chaos, Astaroth. Lee rarely gives a bad performance in anything, but he’s especially effectively cold-hearted in this one, never better than in two scenes where he responds to death in a completely ambivalent fashion. Firstly, a woman gives birth to the swollen, deformed foetus of Astaroth, the monster scratching and biting its way through her womb; Rayner’s companions are aghast at the horror, Lee’s expression suggests blissful admiration and devotion; this is a man completely enthral to his heretical compose. Latterly, one of the same companions, bleeds herself to death so her blood can be used to form a sacred boundary to the final satanic baptism. Rayner is unmoved. There is no sympathy for her husband, only a terse understanding of her sacrifice.

    Director Peter Sykes had a chequered career. He ended up working in T.V. land, filming the popular Peter Bowles comedy-drama The Irish R.M. Here, he’s very constrained, but stokes the fire aplenty with those curious camera angles and scenes delivered in long shots. For instance, the initial confrontation between the cowardly Henry Beddows [Denholm Eliot] and Richard Widmark’s upright occult writer John Verney is played out in silence and watched through the people and wine glasses present at a book launch. Peter Sykes cleverly shoots Lee consistently from below or in close up, so he appears huge and menacing in every shot. The scene where he petrifies the luckless Beddows while speaking to him on the phone and twisting a chord around the handle – the poor man visualises a serpent slithering about his wrist – identifies Rayner’s power and his devil-incarnate nature.

    Widmark’s the films Achilles heel. He’s not dynamic enough, preferring to play Verney as a solitary, resigned, bookish man. He doesn’t even want to be at his own launch party, and only takes on Beddows’ request out of blithe curiosity. Beddows is part of a satanic cult, the Children of the Lord. The cult have raised his daughter Catherine. She’s played by a young and prettily delicate Nastassja Kinski, whose rather good as the confused, enchanted and captivating teenager, displaying just the right amount of graciousness, while clearly offering a glint of seething adolescent trauma. She’s been raised in isolation at a Bavarian monastery awaiting her sixteenth birthday when she will be baptised in Astaroth’s new-born blood, allowing her to take on the power of the demon. For some obscure reason, this must be carried out at a deconsecrated mausoleum just outside Guildford. That handily transposes the action to London. To be brutal, the plot is all hocus pocus and doesn’t bear close examination. Sadly, Widmark simply isn’t au fait with Hammer Pictures and he’s ill-suited to the summary killings and witchery, looking mostly perplexed. He seems decidedly out of breath when forced to do any violent action.

    The role seems to deserve a younger man, I feel. Anthony Valentine, who plays one of Rayner’s victims might have made a better stab at it, what with all that burgeoning anger he flourishes. Additionally he’s got youth on his side. When Verney travels to Heathrow to pick up Beddows’ daughter, you can’t understand why she travels with this crinkly old man so docilly. A younger version of Verney would have introduced the frisson of physical attraction, which doesn’t exist in the slightly creepy guardian-protector to naïve-virgin relationship we do have. It’s no wonder Catherine decides to escape.

    In fact, increasing that sexual element would not have been out of place in a film which clearly introduced it as a means to sensationalise, yet also as a measure of the control Michael Rayner exerts over his flock. Rayner is surrounded by devoted nuns, conducts orgiastic love-rites, uses love and lust as a mystical weapon of fear, and derives untold pleasure from watching the women around him die; through this it’s clear he’s a masochistic trope of devil worshipper, utilising a powerful sexual magnetism to beguile and seduce his followers. However, while the narrative does involve these scenes – including some extremely youthful full-frontal nudity of Ms Kinski – in another the ugly blood-soaked Astaroth foetus appears to administer oral sex to the stupefied teen – their insertion seems somewhat arbitrary and the notion of sex as power is never driven home.

    There are better sequences: a juxtaposition of scenes where a nun, Margaret, bores Astaroth while Catherine writhes in agony, experiencing for herself the demon’s birthing torment; the murder of Honor Blackman’s kittenish literary editor Anna; the confrontation with a sensuous evil spirit in an abandoned church; Catherine’s breathless escape; her longing, coquettish glances; all these seem to suggest the rapacious power of Michael Rayner and his devils far better than any nude orgy. Interestingly, the moral page is written in quite an old-fashioned way, for Verney, a single, solitary, studious man resists all efforts of satanic seduction, while all those around him are victims to the thrall of sexual awakenings.

    There are some bloody murders, some spooky stuff with pentagrams and some spontaneous combustion. Paul Glass provides atmospheric, chiming music. David Watkin, who always did excellent cinematography for Richard Lester, comes up trumps again, giving the scenes urgency and a slanting eerie placement. The script is passable. The movie climaxes [😁] in a windy, gloomy, rather simplistic one-to-one between Lee and Widmark and you wonder how much better this might have been with Lee and Peter Cushing, sparring like the good old days, Hammer’s two stalwarts at it hammer and tongs, as it were. There was some criticism of the truncated end from contemporary audiences, but I rather like it. Less, sometimes is more.

    Overall, however, I think both Sykes and Hammer missed a trick here and really ought to have created a more perceptive genre piece, instead they rather sensationalised all the sexual aspects without knowing where to take them. To the Devil a Daughter feels unlike any other Hammer Picture, a much more modern project, and this should be applauded, but the writers ought to have assembled something better than what we ended up with. The good performances from the support players and especially Christopher Lee try to save it, but the whole project teeters close to the moribund whenever Richard Widmark’s weary frame appears. The closing quote from Dennis Wheatley is rather a thumb up the author’s nose. He hated the film.        

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent

    #3

    BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW (1971)

    Blood on Satan’s Claw begins scrolling its titles through a frame of blackthorns. The world of the early eighteenth century is already crawling with barbs and thickets. A young man plough’s the furrows of a dilapidated field. Ravens and crows, the blackest of black creatures, peck at the detritus. His pauper’s lunch remains abandoned, half-eaten, a blood sausage and an apple. He turns up parts of a corpse, manked with fur and a still-staring eye. Into what fresh hell has director Piers Haggard launched us?

    Part of the short-lived ‘folk horror’ cycle, which began as early as Hammer’s The Reptile and proceeded to reach highs in Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw was crammed in between those two seminal works and doesn’t quite reach the same summits. It inhabits the typical gloomy, overcast, mud soaked, superstitious surrounds of Witchfinder… and purports to the similar moral certainty of The Wicker Man’s protagonist Neil Howie, that sin, specifically carnal sin, breeds evil.

    Here, a visiting Judge, played astutely by Patrick Wymark, investigates the ‘corpse’, only to find it missing. Unknown to the Judge and the farmer, Ralph Gower, it’s been stolen by a local hussy, the brazen Angel Blake and she’s unleashed its demonic power. First, Peter Edmonton brings his fiancé Rosalind to meet his aunt. He wants to spend the night with her, and she with him, but he’s forced to wait, politely drinking port with the Judge, who tacitly admits he knows the young man’s intentions, explaining that he once loved Peter’s aunt. This admission in the puritanical times is highlighted when he toasts King Charles III, the Young Pretender, a man he considers of the enlightenment, who will banish the superstitions of the peasant folk. Yet it is exactly the two men’s intentions of desire which fuel the resurgent satanic demon.

    Forced by convention to spend the night in the eerie attic of the lodge, Rosalind aroused by the prospect of Peter’s arrival, is suddenly driven insane, attacking the petrified aunt with what appears to be a claw-hand. Later, Peter imagines a beast creeping from under the floorboards and attacks the creature with a knife, only to awake from the nightmare to find he’s hacked off his own hand. The local doctor too prefers to believe in legends: “Why should I help you?” he scolds Ralph, “It wasn’t me who ploughed the field.”

    Meanwhile, the children are behaving strangely, teasing and insulting the local pastor, Angel Blake at their helm. Two cheeky adolescents entice Mark Vespers into becoming a blood sacrifice. To deflect blame, Angel attempts to seduce the pastor, accusing him of being both perpetrator and predator. The rape and murder of Mark’s sister Cathy [Wendy Padbury, looking even younger than she did in Dr Who] eventually persuades the foolish, pompous and supercilious Squire that only the learned Judge can save them from an impending contagion.

    The children are a scheming, euphoric brood. Aroused by pain, they see the act of playing games as a prelude to sin, ultimately sex and sacrificial death. Constantly photographed in close up, their lost, swollen eyes and still mouths elicit thoughts of abuse victims. The more rabid among them are callous, silent heavy breathers. All are afflicted by a strange growth of fur, which they flay from their bodies to help reconstitute the demon they call Behemoth. They recite ritual verse as meaninglessly as they do the Lord’s Prayer. Amongst the coven is Margaret, who villagers try to drown, thinking her a witch. Ralph misguidedly saves her, hoping the removal of the fur will redeem her soul. Instead she tries to convert him to the satanic cause, promising the delights of fornication. The Judge returns, interrogates Margaret, and leads an attack on the demon’s lair, a ruined church in the blackthorn woods.

    The film is remarkably rich in its interpretation of religious uncertainty. The Pastor believes the way to convert and educate is through repetition and rote. The Judge sees religion as a battle of learned science against unwitting fantasy. Angel considers it to be malevolent desire. When overlaid with the unsettling images of youths engaged in carnal behaviour, watched over by two aged crones, who grin and snigger and sing as the deeds unfold in more graphic detail – bonfires, bondage, naked dancing, insinuated masturbation and sexual initiations – at one point Angel is clearly delivering oral sex to the mighty Behemoth – the experience of viewing Blood on Satan’s Claw is rather like becoming one of those anxious, haunted, confused teenagers, wondering how they got embroiled in this sickly ritual, yet unable to escape from it, so enthralled are they to the Behemoth’s fleshly practices.      

    The film doesn’t quite have the courage of its conviction. It has to remain fairly sly on the sexual content, although a young Linda Hayden’s marvellous creeping performance as the wanton seductress Angel doesn’t pull back, becoming more intensely feral as the moment of manifestation nears, a spitting viper of evil. She’s matched by the more desperate, almost simpering impertinence of Michele Dotrice’s Margaret [a million miles from Frank Spencer’s missus] who even after betraying her master retains an air of contempt for the uninitiated. “You can lay with me,” she pleads to Ralph, “You can lay with Angel” as if sex will cure all ill. The confusion is not apparent to the Judge, who leaves her tied to a stake, a meal for his slavering hunter dogs.    

    The film struggles with its depiction of evil because we actually see this beast, although only in a glimmering half-light. One of the delights is cinematographer Dick Bush’s use of natural light, giving every scene a breathy, slightly overcast look, but you can’t do much with a hairy creature costume, even in shadow. It appears to have a goat’s head, but the revelation scene is just deceptive enough. To not show the satanic creature at all might have heightened the notion of latent evil, which is clearly the intent, suggesting the power of the truly supernatural. Here it’s just a horny old goat. The original ending was meant to show the Judge and his outriders laying waste the village, killing good, evil and indifferent alike. I rather prefer that, but it was considered an ending too bleak.

    Blood on Satan’s Claw is an intriguing film which delivers some expected thrills and tremors without ever quite fulfilling its promising intentions.  

  • CoolHandBondCoolHandBond Mactan IslandPosts: 6,030MI6 Agent

    I like both the Phibes films, high camp horror with dodgy special effects, and made in the 70’s, what could be more perfect? 😁

    Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent
    edited February 2022

    Modesty Blaise (1966)

    I watched this movie because the star, Monica Vitti died this week. We also get Terrence Stamp as Willie Garvin and Dirk Bogarde as Gabriel.

    This is a very strange movie! If you don't know who Modesty Blaise, she's an ex-criminal who starts working for MI6. If the character was given better movies Modesty Blaise had the potential to rival The Bond series, I think.

    But they do so many strange things in this movie. Why is Modesty blonde in most of the movie? Why does Modesty behave like a giddy schoolgirl much of the time? Why are the fight scenes sh*t? Why does Modesty seem incompetent much of the time? Why is a copy of the Modesty Blaise comic book next to Modesty on the sofa? Why is Lob replaced by an Arab? What's the facination with wigs? Why does Modesty look and dress like Modesty Blaise for about two minutes? And why .... oh WHY do Modesty and Garvin break out in (out of tune) song during the big final action scene, singing about getting married????? 🤣

    But the movie isn't all bad. The locations are really good. Stamp and Bogarde are often good. I like the stylish and often trippy sets. The score is fun. I enjoy the bizarre tone of the movie, it's even somewhat in tone with the comics. Most of all I was never bored and I often had fun watching it.

    It's on youtube: Modesty Blaise (Dirk Bogarde) (1966) - YouTube

  • BarbelBarbel ScotlandPosts: 36,053Chief of Staff

    I totally agree that Lee is good in this (when isn't he?) and that Widmark is dreadful. Apparently, that extended to offscreen as well with him being rude and disdainful to the crew. Casting him was a big mistake, one dating back to Hammer's early days when they felt they had to have an American star to sell their films in the USA. Surely by now Christopher Lee in a horror film was enough?

    The ending was a major problem, and was cobbled together from what they had shot, what they were allowed to show, and what was actually intended. IMHO, it doesn't work.

    There were censorship problems as well, with the then 14-year old Nastassja Kinski being full-frontal naked.

    Dennis Wheatley was horrified (in the wrong way) and refused permission for more films of his work- after being very pleased with The Devil Rides Out some years earlier.

  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,239MI6 Agent
    edited February 2022

    The Untouchables

    An almost always pleasing film to rewatch. This time, my 93-year-old Dad joined me and kept awake for this showing that began on telly at 9pm. I'd encouraged Mum and Dad to see it back when it was released - we saw it at the Ewell cinema I was telling you about a few posts ago, now defunct. But there were loads of local teenagers making a noise and going 'gross!' when there was blood, of which there was a lot.

    In truth, some of the sniping they made, while disrespectful, sometimes made sense. Costner as Ness going into his friend's apartment and seeing blood everywhere - but then being suddenly shocked to see his body (I'm keeping it vague because some haven't seen the film, perhaps.) Some I still don't quite understand http://[spoiler] If he gets the Attorney General to switch the juries at the end by telling him his name is on the ledger when it isn't, how is that leverage? The judge will just say, no it isn't, get lost! http://[/spoiler]

    In view of party gate in the UK, I don't understand how no political commenters have failed to point out the similarity between Sir Keir 'Elliot Ness' Starmer and Boris 'Al Capone' Johnson, in view of the Prohibition themes during Lockdown and the contrasting personalities of the men. That said, it only occurred to me tonight!

    Guess I haven't figured out how to do spoiler alerts! 😣

    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent

    My guess is the judge knows he's taken bribes, so he can't know his name isn't in the ledger.

  • Napoleon PluralNapoleon Plural LondonPosts: 10,239MI6 Agent

    Ah, okay!

    "This is where we leave you Mr Bond."

    Roger Moore 1927-2017
  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent

    @Number24 Yes, Modesty Blaise is an odd one. It's hopelessly miscast all-round and director Joseph Losey seems completely ill at ease among spies and spying. I recall a very good sequence where Garvin (and Modesty? I forget) go skin diving underneath a yacht and perform a jewel heist or something - it was the best bit in the whole thing. Monica Vitti is gorgeous, but she's no fan's idea of Modesty Blaise, brunette wig or not. To best appreciate Miss Vitti's talents you really need to watch L'Avventura - which also stars our own Gabriele Ferzetti.

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent

    I spent the last couple of evenings watching two war films. These are long reviews, so hold tight:

    #1

    IS PARIS BURNING? (1966)

    Rene Clement’s huge, almost forgotten, war epic about the resistance and the eventual breaching of Paris in August 1944 is worth a look if you can stomach almost three hours of longwinded distinctly amorphic action.

    Ah, the film isn’t so bad and garnered decent reviews on release, but Clement doesn’t seem to understand what sort of film he wants to make. The first half revolves around the political infighting between the various French factions in Paris. Not being familiar with the exact history, I had no idea who was who and who represented who, and there is no subtitle to aid clarity [as there was for instance in The Longest Day, which trod a similar semi-documentary path]. Putting that to one side, some of the scenes proceed with vim and vigour.

    Gert Frobe commands attention in his every scene as the sympathetic General Von Choltitz, ordered by Hitler to burn Paris to the ground if necessary. His turn of allegiance is delicately played; when he discovers two SS officers in his quarters he prepares to shoot them, before realising they have orders to steal the Bayeux Tapestry for Himmler, which provokes his giggling disdain. Frobe reveals how good and subtle an actor he is, not just a gratuitous Bond villain. Orson Welles crops up as the Swedish ambassador, Nordling, mediating for political prisoners and, later, for a cease fire. He’s rather understated for a change. The roster of stars ploughs on: Jean Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Alain Delon, Glenn Ford, Yves Montand, Robert Stack, Simone Signoret, Jean Pierre Cassel, Michel Piccoli, etc. Kirk Douglas crops up unexpectedly as General Patton and you wonder if he’d have made a decent stab at it had he been cast in that man’s biopic. A great cast generally not doing a lot. I’d have preferred the film not to be dubbed. 

    Action wise, the film never gets going. There’s a splendid early scene at a railway station which evokes all the dread of the concentration camp as prisoners are forced screaming onto transports. The one man Nordling wants to save is slaughtered on the platform and Clement organises a magnificent backwards tracking shot past the bleeding corpse as the train disappears in the opposite direction. Maurice Jarre’s overzealous score is memorably muted. Later on Anthony Perkins’ doomed G.I. dreamer has an affective death scene in a Parisian café. Some moments of bizarre comedy feel so unusual they must be based on real incidents. There’s decent monochrome photography from Marcel Grignon which blends well with the documentary footage. I spent much time wondering why Clement’s wartime Paris was so deserted, but then you see the guerrilla movie shots and realise that’s exactly how it was.

    The film is a story told by winners. While Gert Frobe’s character may be stereotypically sympathetic, Clement and his writer’s present an overarched, bleached view of the war. There’s no suggestion of collaborators or spies, or even the Vichy government, and, other than one occasion, no suggestion of atrocities. The antisemitic element of Nazism isn’t mentioned at all. It’s as if all Parisians were all for the resistance and that too represents all of France. Co-writer Francis Ford Coppola blamed French President Charles de Gaulle, who reportedly interfered in the production, particularly insisting the role of the Communists – who launched the initial resurgence in Paris and seized most of the municipal buildings – was downplayed. Coppola considered de Gaulle’s actions to be political censorship. 

    Mad Magazine satirised the movie as Is Paris Boring? A trifle unfair, although I did have to wait three hours for Maurice Jarre’s splendid accordion based theme tune to finally materialise while aerial views of Paris germinate from black and white to technicolour as the end titles roll. Is Paris Burning? fits into that slew of sixties war films, like Anzio or Battle of Britain, which attempted to tell true stories at length and in depth. It’s long, but lacks depth because it doesn’t present its characters clearly enough to provoke our interest, excepting the ones who perhaps shouldn’t matter to us so much: the Swede and the German.

    Good, but not great.


    #2

    THE SORROW AND THE PITY (1968 / 1971)

    This monumental documentary work is a film which deserves inclusion on any list of great war films, though accepting some newsreel footage, it doesn’t feature any scenes of fighting through its entire four hour and ten minute length.

    Made less than twenty five years after the cessation of hostilities, when memories and wounds were still raw, Marcel Ophuls’ masterpiece attempts to explain the Occupation and the Vichy administration through the words of the people who experienced it, soldiers, politicians, farmers, chemists, aristocrats, cinema owners, spies, Germans, Jews and French alike. Ophuls takes as his fulcrum the town of Clermont-Ferrand in the Auvergne, close to Vichy where the government sat, in what was known as the Free Zone. Conditions in the Clermont of 1968 don’t look much better than those of 1940. You can understand why these farmers refused to be subdued. They really had nothing to lose except their soil and during the war over 50% of their toil was being exported to Germany in aid, which was part of the Armistice agreement, but resulted in increased poverty.

    The film opens with the pharmacist, Marcel Verdier, discussing the Occupation with his many children. He’s asked what people thought at the time and replies: “…the two emotions I experienced the most were sorrow and pity.” The film neatly divides itself in half following his statement. The Collapse is the sorrow and The Choice is the pity. The nature of the French army’s capitulation, its unpreparedness for war is underlined in several of the early interviews. There is certainly sorrow at being occupied, matched by bitterness towards the British after the unprovoked sinking of the French navy at Mers-el-Kepis. Former British P.M. Anthony Eden explains how the French Admirals were offered the opportunity to sail to the UK and join the Allied forces, but they refused. Even the merchant ships in Britain preferred to skulk. They had, he implies, completely surrendered, physically and mentally. Eden considered Marshal Petain, who assumed power after Paul Reynard was ousted, to be a defeatist and a reactionary. “They were not an elected government in exile, like the Belgians and the Dutch,” he regrets, suggesting the ultimate tragedy for France was this de facto dictatorship.

    Petain’s government was a fascist one in all but name, authoritarian, xenophobic, antisemitic, violently traditionalist and steeped in Catholicism. The Vichy regime’s leading slogan was Work, Family, Nation, uncomfortably similar to the Nazi Work and Bread or One People, One Empire, One Leader. Petain’s personal history of antisemitism and Anglophobia does not however prevent him from having admirers, even in 1968. The film does not shirk from discussing the uncomfortable issues of torture, imprisonment, deportation, concentration camps and, eventually, military collaboration, issue which had rarely spoken of in the previous decades.

    “Some tendencies in human behaviour will grow like weeds unless we tend to our youth,” continues a conciliatory Verdier. Some observers saw France’s capitulation as an inevitable consequence of divisive French politics, which had seen a far-left government attempting to remove a stifling complacency. They shrug their shoulders with resigned acceptance. One aristocrat, Christian de la Maizière, discusses the combustible atmosphere in schools and colleges, how in-fighting became more important than the greater good of the nation. Even more surprising is the organic nature of French resistance. While Charles De Gaulle made much of his famous ‘call to arms’, it hardly registered in France. Most of the interviewees never heard it and had no idea who he was in 1940. Soldiers who returned from the short war were gaoled as undesirables, fuelling anti-Vichy resentment. A future Prime Minister, Pierre Mendes, goes at some length to explain his show trail, imprisonment, escape and eventual reunion with De Gaulle. As a Jew, the racist nature of the establishment became all too clear to him, and he’s remarkably stoic about it. Another interviewee attempts to use statistics to wriggle an explanation for summary deportations; when they are thrown back at him as incorrect, he holds his head in shameful silence. The defining story of Petain’s and President Pierre Laval’s complicity is the enforced deportation of over 4000 Jewish children to Auschwitz, an order unusually not requested by the German command. None of the children survived the war.   

    The resistance itself is described as classless and dignified. “The problems of everyday life ceased. We were all outcasts of society, free from social structure,” admits Emanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, the upper-class leader of one of the resistance groups in Clermont. “Most of us were failures with Quixotic ideas.” His attitude, as an outsider of the elite, was completely different to the bourgeoisie, who had much more to lose, and used the circumstances of occupation to profit from it. The ordinary man or woman gained nothing from Vichy and instead took to arms. One leader, known affectionately as Gaspar, explains how the war propelled him to local prominence, a place he would never have attained otherwise. He admits to having been raised on crime, yet also has a striking ability to sense the unsettling nature of the contemporary times, comparing it to the attitudes of the Vichy regime: “A type of neo-Nazism is slowly rearing its ugly head. This is why we need these discussions.”

    Gaspar grasps the political situation far more earnestly than the television executives and governmental ministers who banned the documentary. In fact, it’s fair to say his comment still holds much resonance today. This film ought to be required viewing for schools, to help students understand the implications of surrender and the ease with which a minority of sympathisers can exert powerful control and extreme policy over a massed population. The passivity of the general French public is frequently put on trial here. The victims of denouncements are and were many. “He was denounced by bad French people. That’s the only reason he went to prison,” bemoans a shrewish wife when her husband shrugs his shoulders and utters: “Revenge isn’t worth it.” The men around the table all know who the perpetrator was and is. Their own silence on the matter seems sentence enough. This really is being ‘sent to Coventry.’

    The British attitude to the resistance was that it had a split personality: De Gaulle organising from afar, a reluctant, nervous right-wing and the proactive communists. While De Gaulle might have been glad of the Communists at the time, he had no love for them. British spy Dennis Rake considered the Communists the better end of the organisation. You sense the antagonism between the factions still festering years after the events. The idea of a unified resistance is a celebrated lie. The version of it presented in Rene Clement’s Is Paris Burning? is quite obviously a convenient narrative fallacy.

    Rake himself provides an interesting story. As a homosexual, he found being a spy allowed him to hide his true identity. Ultimately, his pretence didn’t last and he risked exposure by building a relationship with a German officer. Rake doesn’t mention if he obtained any military secrets from his lover, but his situation and personality as a homosexual appears to have been accepted by his contacts in the resistance more than it would had he remained in London.  

    Latterly, the interviewer returns to the ornate mansion owned by Christian de la Maizière, once the seat of the Vichy administration. He was barred from his own home as an embarrassment to the regime having been enrolled in the Charlemagne Division, a branch of the Waffen SS. French soldiers were forced to join because it was part of the armistice agreement, part of Vichy policy and “a full sign of collaboration and integration.” Yet Petain and Laval couldn’t admit it. The role of the Charlemagne Division is still rarely spoken of by historians. They fought in the retreat from Russia and the last three hundred of them, including Maizière, took part in the siege of Berlin. He saw his allegiance as a political one: he couldn’t be a communist, his privileged background virtually forbade it, and as an adolescent it was easier to side with the people you were surrounded with, who were mostly antisemites. It wasn’t a religious or a political ideology, he suggests, it was more a rebellion against, yet adhering to the rules of, his upbringing. For his sins he won a two Iron Crosses, but seems remarkably repentant and liberal in the footage. By all accounts, his personal views did change dramatically.

    Not so the Germans who are interviewed, one of whom sits resplendent with his SS insignia on his lapel, smoking cigars at his daughter’s wedding. They seem to tacitly agree with the old propaganda. They never saw anything. They never heard anything. They committed no crime. Everyone was very nice to us. The other side of the coin tells it very differently. Just occasionally you sense the curtain start to be pulled from their eyes, but something makes them yank it shut again. It makes for uncomfortable viewing. You wonder how the residents of Clermont might react to the Germans’ interpretation of events. Near the end of the film, Marcel Verdier relates a story of how as liberation approached he almost shot a defenceless German guard, but refused to do so as the man’s plea for clemency was so pathetic. We had the sorrow; that was pity of a sort, I suppose.

    What makes The Sorrow and the Pity so powerful is the film maker’s intent not to make any judgement. He carefully interviews collaborators, resistance fighters, opponents and allies alike with a detached, scholarly bent. He allows the answers and stories and justifications to stand without responsive comment. There is not even a narration; a few minor title cards remind us where we are and who we are listening to. Audience reaction becomes entirely individual and uninfluenced. It is this more than anything which frightened those in power in 1968, that to allow people to draw their own conclusions without editorial input might just be a step to anarchy. The events on Parisian streets in 1968 might suggest anarchy was upper most in their minds, and Ophuls’ film does nothing to dispel the myth that the hierarchy of France in the 1940s were collaborators and neo-fascists: the people who lived through it openly admit it.

    I urge anyone with an interest in the Second World War and its impact on communities and individuals to watch this film which is an essential document of a past still familiar to many living today.

       

  • chrisno1chrisno1 LondonPosts: 3,177MI6 Agent

    THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1992)

    After a decade of Hollywood making important pictures which were small in stature, Michael Mann chose to go epic in scale and reintroduce audiences to Fenimore Cooper’s hoary old story of the Indian woodsman Hawkeye. Along with Kevin Costner ‘s Dances with Wolves, The Last of the Mohicans reinvented interpretations of the western for a modern audience, although this is more of an Eastern and pre-dates the period of the ‘wild west’ by some one hundred years. The executives sat up, took notice and remembered, for a short while at least, that movies should be big and broad and beautiful, even if the action is brutal.

    There’s not a lot of character development in this film. You need to take a lot on trust and Trevor Jones & Randy Edelman’s piercing music score helps place your emotions better than the acting. When the romance – or the lust – kicks in, they recreate the same pulsing beat as the violence: this is a wild romance driven by desperate times. Mann’s not over bothered about the emotional side of things, to be fair, nor is he inventive with conversations, which tend to take place face to face, flat on, side on, with little cinematic imagination. He saves all that for the tough action scenes, of which there are many: fighting, stabbing, running, shooting, scalping, etc.

    Daniel Day Lewis confirmed his star status, but his accent is all over the place. He’s given terrific support from Wes Studi as the villainous, vengeful Mohawk, Magua, and Russell Means as the thoughtful, Chingachgook, the last Mohican of the title. Madeleine Stowe and Jodhi May are helplessly one-dimensional, but lovely to look at.

    The film improves as it progresses and the final confrontation between Magua’s Huron rebels and the three sympathetic Mohicans is suitably satisfying and heart breakingly intense , all the more successful for being conducted in virtual silence. There are no long speeches to tell the audience what the characters are experiencing, Mann is showing us and his perseverance pays off with one of the bleakest heroic battles in film history, for the fight of the Mohicans is already lost by the time the last axe descends.

    Fittingly, like a great poem, Mann draws the audience back to the fabulous opening landscapes of New York state [actually the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina] allowing us to remember that life will still continue, despite the deaths which surrounds us. Fabulous entertainment. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I almost hesitate to say, they don’t make films like this much these days.      

  • Bond fan from OzBond fan from Oz Posts: 88MI6 Agent

    Black Sunday (1977)

    Not-bad thrilller with FRWL's Robert Shaw and semi-Bond regular Walter Gotell in the cast.

    Members of the Black September group plot a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl; Shaw plays a Mossad agent who aligns with US intelligence and law enforcement agencies to thwart the attack.

    Reasonably entertaining escapist film 2.5/5

  • Number24Number24 NorwayPosts: 21,702MI6 Agent
    edited February 2022

    Hell's angels (1930)

    Who spends their Saturday night watching a movie from 1930 on Youtube? My friend and I, that's who! 😀

    We didn't regret it at all. It's about two brothers Monte and Ray join the Royal Flying Corps in WWI, Ray falls in love with the Faithless Helen (Jean Harlow who at 19 had only had uncredited parts earlier). In fact several of the main cast are morally dubious, but brave in combat. The movie was know as the Titanic of its day: huge spectacle, huge budget, huge production problems and finally huge boxoffice. We were surprised by how modern the movie seemed compared to other movies of the age. Most of the acting wasn't overly theatrical, the main characters seem modern and the action is very good. The action scenes are still spectacular! There are at least thirthy fighter scenes in a single shot in some scenes and the zeppelin sequence is great: Howard Hughes Hells Angels - The Zeppelin Part - YouTube

    I also noticed the movie used real German speakers to play Germans. Hollywood still hire people of the wrong nationailty to play and speak as foreigners, even as recently as last year's Black Widow. I also found it facinating to see how bombing (both from airships and bomber planes) was done in WWI, something I haven't seen anywhere before. It's rare to watch a big budget action movie that's ninty years old for enjoyment, but that's what we did.

    Here it is: Hell's Angels - A Howard Hughes Production (1930) - YouTube



  • caractacus pottscaractacus potts Orbital communicator, level 10Posts: 3,907MI6 Agent

    I too watched Modesty Blaise (1966) over the weekend and filed a full report over in the Modesty Blaise thread.

    its better than I remembered, you just have to forget everything you know about Peter O'Donnell's characters, and soak up the lush visuals. I accidentally typed the malaplopism "spychedelic" as I was writing, which ought to be a thing. This is better spy-chedelia than Casino Royale at any rate.

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