I described THE PINK PANTHER on here back in 2021 as "good all-round entertainment" - a fair summary.
Onwards...
WONDER BOYS (2000)
A witty campus comedy for grown-ups.
Michael Douglas is prize-winning author Grady Tripp, university lecturer and pot head who is in self-denial about his permanent writer’s block. The film follows one weekend in his chaotic life when his wife leaves him, his agent demands his latest [enormous] book, his mistress informs him she is pregnant, he shoots a dog, steals Marilyn Monroe’s jacket, is threatened with the sack and attempts to rehabilitate a socially inept student [Tobey McGuire] who is both a compulsive liar and a genius fledgling writer. A slight tale of emotional redemption and career comeuppance is enlivened by odd goings on and sterling work from its cast, notably Douglas who leads the show with a ramshackle lumbering performance of truth and despair. There is some snazzy wintery photography. The music box soundtrack harkens back to the early seventies and is a delight. I am not a Bob Dylan fan, but even I recognise his output of the eighties and nineties was patchy. However, he deservedly won an Oscar for the excellent theme song Things Have Changed. Steve Kloves probably should have won for his screen adaptation. Curtis Hanson directs with his usual assured but unremarkable touch.
Very, very good. Amusing and excellently observed. An underrated film.
A Real Pain directed by and starring Jesse Eisenberg, and co-starring Kieran Culkin. They play mismatched cousins - it's an 'Odd Couple' comedy who bond and fall out on a group excursion to Poland.
What adds a different slant is that it's a group trip to revisit their late grandmother's home and homeland in Lublin, Poland, which includes a visit to the concentration camp there, and the film neatly encompasses the awkwardness of mixing with the other group members - one of whom includes a divorcee played by a post-nose job Jennifer Gray of Dirty Dancing/Ferris Bueller fame.
It's a comedy, it works well, I enjoyed it. It did induce feelings of melancholy in me - Eisenberg plays the uptight, married with a kid in a full-time job character while his cousin is a waster who smokes weed yet is on the face of it an uncomplicated, upbeat, worry-free fellow. It does seem he 's on the near-diverse, bipolar, narcissistic spectrum somewhere and the film does explore what it's like to be around that kind of 'sunshine' guy where you always feel in the shadow somehow, the sort of bloke who can out of the blue come out with a putdown or a comment that kills the mood. They'll often be charm personified to any passing stranger but you will be left standing there like a morose mug in comparison, these types can really jinx you and I've met a few in my time, though not lately.
The film has an interesting bit of symmetry, how it starts and how it ends.
The trailers all induced a bit of melancholy too really, including the one about a family whose male breadwinner is abducted by the far-right Brazilian state in the 1970s and the one about the 1970s Munich Olympics where the Israelis were held hostage - I'm not sure it's easy to go to the pictures for escapism these days....
This, the eleventh Carry On saga, is generally considered to be one of the team’s better efforts. Kenneth Williams liked it. Although it creaks and groans quite a bit, as do we watching, you can’t fault the effort and it is interesting to see the usual saucy and silly shenanigans relocated to the wild west of America, actually Chobham Common. It would always be a hard act to follow Carry On Cleo.
Sid James plays Johnny Finger aka the Rumpo Kid, a gunslinger and cattle rustler who takes over the sleepy, temperance and law abiding town of Stodge City. Williams’s Judge Burke is outraged, but Joan Sims’s saloon owner, Belle, takes a shine to rascally Sid and soon all hell is breaking loose, providing plenty of business for Davy Kaye’s undertaker. Just as the film gets bogged down, Jim Dale’s sanitary engineer Marshall P. Knutt turns up and brightens proceedings no end. Confusing him for a real U.S. Marshall, poor Jim has been sent to Stodge to clean it up – only he’s from England and never fired a gun in his life.
The film works in fits and starts. The bedroom scene where Jim Dale is repetitively seduced by three women was probably the highlight. Charles Hawtrey’s turn as a Native American chief is by turns amusing and mildly insulting. Angela Douglas looks pretty. The accents are all over the place: the actors who either don’t try [Jon Pertwee, Peter Butterworth] or who don’t need to [Jim Dale, Charles Hawtrey] come off best. There’s an Eric Rogers composed song sung over the titles, which is unusual, and the score itself shows some originality and quite nods to western themes. Despite being filmed in England the movie passes muster for the old west – I mean most of the real thing was prairie land, so to see acres of greenery isn’t that far wrong. Talbot Rothwell’s script predominantly borrows from Destry and High Noon.
Carry On Cowboy isn’t too bad. On a brighter day after a couple of shandies it’d probably be more amusing than I found it on a dry overcast February evening, so there you go.
Somebody reviewed this movie recently; I caught it last night...
SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)
The phrase ‘classic movie’ is well overused, but if any film deserves the right to be regarded as one, it ought to be a product as sparkling and enjoyable as this. Billy Wilder was in the midst of a run of great form when he came to script this comic gangster piece packed full of witty lines and ridiculous situations that shouldn’t succeed at all, but does because the three main players give everything they can to ensure we empathise, sympathise and eulogise with their characters.
Marilyn Monroe is top-billed – she was very rarely top-billed, so it is worthy of note – as Sugar Kane, a ukelele strumming singer in a 1920s Prohibition era all-girl dance band who keeps falling for tenor sax players. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon star as Joe and Gerry, two musicians down on their luck and unexpected witnesses to a mob hit in Chicago. Fleeing the scene, they enrol in the same all-girl band, impersonating two inelegant posh birds Josephine and Daphne. Joe / Josephine happens to be a tenor sax player, but can’t get his way with Sugar unless he impersonates a billionaire oil magnate, who looks and sounds like a ham-fisted Cary Grant. Gerry / Daphne snags a genuine billionaire. As if life isn’t suddenly complicated enough, the mascara really starts to run, as do the fake-girl’s stockings, when Mafia boss Spats Colombo [George Raft] turns up for a crime convention and recognises the boys / girls as his witnesses.
Superbly funny from start to finish – ‘Mozzarella’s Funeral Parlour’ come Italian Mafia speakeasy kicks proceedings off – the story bounds along with energy and a sense of outrageousness which keeps you watching and makes you [almost] forget the slightly dodgy motives of all the people concerned. Joe E. Brown’s billionaire Osgood Fielding III is probably the most honest character of the lot, everyone else seems to be swinging for money or seduction. It is worth noting that in almost every ‘classic’ screwball-style comedy there is a distinct element of amorality which marks the main persons as slightly unworthy of their ultimate successes [His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, The Apartment, What’s Up Doc, Annie Hall, Four Weddings…] but this doesn’t seem to hurt their success. Maybe people like that element of unsavouriness, drawing characters closer to real life, or maybe I am reading too much into cultural behaviours.
Back to Some Like It Hot.
Monroe is superb, never better, in a career and person defining role. Lemmon nabbed an Oscar nomination for his dual role as the nervy Gerry and the flirtatious all-girls together over-feminine Daphne. Tony Curtis was at the peak of his career and matches him almost all the way; his turn as Junior, an oil magnate’s son, is way better than the straight laced turn as Josephine, which hints at a man-in-a-dress than Lemmon’s more flighty depiction. In a year of many very good films, Some Like It Hot was consistently overlooked for awards, except at the Golden Globes where movie, Lemmon and Monroe all won their categories. Time has been more than kind to the film, which retains its humour and its deftness even after sixty-odd years. It’s impossible not to raise at least a smile at much of the brilliant dialogue. Unlike some of Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond’s other films, Some Like It Hot doesn’t try to score any political or social comment, it sets out a daft premise in the first few scenes and runs with that until the very end. The director and writers are so confident they don’t even have the star grace the show until twenty five minutes have elapsed. However, Monroe’s jello-on-springs stride down a railway platform became one of the greatest entrances on film, a reward helped no doubt by first-time watchers wondering when the hell she was going to put in an appearance.
Excellent black and white photography from Charles Lang – it had to be in monochrome to hide the men’s pasty make up and shaving shadows – grand Orry-Kelly dresses, crisp editing [Arthur Schmidt] and a whimsical jazz score from Adolph Deutsch. It all adds up to a superb slice of cinema which remains undimmed over the years and long may it remain a shining light in the dark.
Probably one of my favourite ten films of all-time.
Steven Soderbergh brings his class of cool cinema to the modern espionage movie. Gina Carano stars as Mallory Kane a Black Ops assassin set up for a fall by shadowy superior agents. Most of the time, I had no idea what was happening. The film is slick and fast and everyone does their bit to make it an enjoyable if blurry experience. The film isn’t as violent as you might expect, and when it is the violence is longwinded and rather dull. Soderbergh is better with the suspense, when he orchestrates scenes effectively to generate the necessary tension. The whole sequence set in Dublin was really impressive for that reason, editing, music, camera placement, all excellent up until a weary climatic chase. The flashback narrative doesn’t really work, other than as a startling opening. A starry cast is worth looking at, although other than Ms Carano, who is a martial arts expert, there are no women featured. This isn’t necessarily a narrative problem, but it is noticeable. Plus, I never understood the title.
Arrowhead is a highly fictionalised reworking of the exploits of real life US Cavalry Chief Indian Scout Al Sieber. There is a dedication both before and after the opening and closing titles. The director filmed the exteriors at the real location of Fort Clark, near Brackettville, Texas, where Sieber spent most of his scouting life.
For the cinema, Sieber becomes Ed Bannon, or rather he becomes Charlton Heston. Heston was already a star thanks to Cecil B. DeMille and The Greatest Show On Earth, but he hadn’t mastered the art of screen acting yet, although his muscular brand of stagey realism is already in evidence: that louche shoulders back stance, a sly glance from the corner of his eye, the clasped corner of his mouth. Basically it’s Charlton Heston whichever way you look at him, the nuances he introduced for Ben Hur and El Cid haven’t materialised yet.
Arrowhead was the third western the star had made in eighteen months and revisits the ‘white man raised as an Apache’ role he played in The Savage. Here, the white man has abandoned the Native American way of life and reverted to civilisation, which means the US Cavalry, seducing married women and half-breed squaws, shooting people at random and being generally argumentative. Ed Bannon is also an Indian-hater first-class. In this very traditional style frontier western, the Apache are the bad guys through and through, as Heston keeps reminding us. When Jack Palance turns up as an educated Indian chief, looking as if he’s stepped off the set of Shane and straight into buck skins, swapping guns for tomahawks, it can only mean these Indians are up to no damn good. So it proves.
A no surprises western with plenty of action and a lot of talk that borders on the racist. It isn’t very interesting. You can work out the eventual outcome from the moment Jack Palance appears. Charles Marquis Warren writes and directs and the film suffers from his repetitive overindulgences, the same fate that buried Elvis Presley’s non-singing spaghetti western Charro. Warren was most successful on TV, producing Gunsmoke and Rawhide.
A Shot in the Dark (1964) starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau and two actors who appeared in that year's Goldfinger, namely Martin Benson who played Mr Solo ('I'll take my money now if you don't mind Mr Goldfinger!') and Bert Kwouk who has a bit more to do this time than simply look queryingly at the titular star. Its opening song is also quite similar to David Arnold's languid Only Myself to Blame from TWINE.
I caught this many years ago and wasn't too impressed but at the time I was a subscriber to LoveFilm - a DVD rental thing which would allow you to order three films at a time and they would send a DVD out in the post, you would watch it and send it back via prepaid envelope, whereupon they would send the next one out. Great value but addictive in a dismal sort of way, you would have 20 movies backed up on a waiting list and some would be dispatched pronto and others might take months to arrive, due to demand I suppose. Its advantage lay in the fact you could watch 'for free' well sort of all manner of obscurities without having to fork out £15 to actually buy it, things like saucy Tinto Brass films or that Italian director's The Canterbury Tales or Il Cameron or whatever it was called. I suppose it's testimony to a wasted life that I can't recall too many of the movies I watched but I did get into a rut with it, buying a TV dinner from Tesco and a small bottle or rose making up a large glass most nights, no wonder I never got into shape. So maybe I wasn't in the right mood for A Shot in the Dark.
Maybe I'm still in a rut and I hate to disagree with my fellow Bond fans but this viewing didn't raise much of a laugh. Like The Pink Panther it sort of suffers from the fact that it wasn't intended as a vehicle for Sellers, the first film was meant to be Niven's movie with Peter Ustinov originally slated in as Clouseau, very much a subsidiary role but when he dropped out, Sellers came in and scenes were added to spotlight his talent. A sequel was fast-tracked but director Blake Edwards utilised an existing play and retailored it for Clouseau, again adding scenes and pratfalls. There's no reference to the previous film, no mention of Clouseau's jail time or his presumably ex-wife indeed the whole thing might be a prequel given how it ends with his boss Dreyfuss, played by an excellent Herbert Lom ditching his hairpiece from TV series The Human Jungle (maybe it was on loan to Sean Connery that year, it's strikingly similar to the one he has in Goldfinger).
The lovely Alpine settings of the first film, the apres-ski mood and jaunty songs are gone and we don't see much of Paris, the phrase 'it doesn't escape its stage setting' mostly applies here though there are good comedy additions such as the increasingly enraged Dreyfuss and Clouseau's stoical and unimpressed sidekick Hercule, also Cato of course, this is all good. Elke Sommers doesn't appeal to me in the same way as the women in PP, - if Capucinini was reminiscent of Christine Keeler, well, Sommer's is more like the other one in the then recent Profumo Affair, the blonde, and there's not much chemistry between her and Sellers. The central mystery doesn't really grip, I mean the set up is kind of funny - Sommers is caught with a dead body, holding a gun, but Sellers insists she cannot have done it, allowing her to leave jail and the body count rises each time. But I didn't really care who did it, or for the victim, or anything much, while I got tired of watching Sellers's mishaps with snooker balls and cues, it's fairly a one-joke movie where you are laughing at someone, not with them. That may have been a rare surprise in the 1960s, with so many films with middle-class stately home scenes with polite middle-class residents, to have a character like Clouseau acting as a human hand grenade. Especially as he's the police, an authority figure, but I'm not sure laughing at authority figures is so risqué now, rare it doesn't happen with out politicians, and now the police exist almost as an abstract, they don't exactly inspire fear in wrongdoers, more in whistleblowers or the like. We see them on the telly, or in the papers associated with some disgrace, we don't see them 'on the beat' or in real life.
The scenes were Clouseau's disguise each time draws the attention of the police is amusing but I felt in the mood to say, yes, but that wouldn't happen the second or third time, they'd know who he is... I don't know, maybe as one reviewer on imdb said, I need to go back in time to see it in a packed cinema in 1964. I don't even remember what happens to the Elke Sommer character in the end, nothing much seems at stake. The repeated attempted assassination on her and Clouseau as the music builds to a climax seems to been nicked by Thunderball with the death of Fiona Volpe, you can imagine Clouseau saying the line 'She's just dead' and making off apologetically, you can imagine him in the pre-credits too actually. 'Madame, may I offer my sincere condolences....' before whacking a real woman, I guess they did that in Austin Powers. Much of Sellers' schtick was used by the English gendarme in the sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, of course.
George Saunders is in this but doesn't seem to have much to do, you don't grow to dislike him or anything much, unlike the Fantasy Island actor in the first Naked Gun film, where you want to see him undone.
As the film was a hit, I'm surprised there wasn't another immediate sequel - I'm guessing Edwards and his bothersome star fell out. There was a movie in 1968 called Inspector Clouseau with Alan Arkin as the lead, it bombed, and I think Sellers returned in 1975 in The Return of the Pink Panther, followed by a few others. Odd with hindsight, like Connery doing his first two Bonds then returning for The Man With the Golden Gun.
If you'd like to read a better negative review, go on imdb and click on the 5-star ratings (out of 10) as they read very well. Rather like AI, it's a bit dispiriting to find others have said it much better than you before but there you go.
Both Sellers and Edwards needed a hit when they did the third one. They got one. Issues are issues but nobody in their right mind would turn down that kind of crazy money.
I don't know, my question was why they didn't knock off a third early on when the going was good rather than wait 10 years.
Blue Velvet
Somewhat similar to A Shot in the Dark, in that the leading man develops an obsession with a mysterious woman and is prepared to overlook her dangerous aspects to gain entrance to her abode and get to the heart of his investigation, however he is stymied by her unwillingness to open up as to what has really happened, also some in and out of closet nonsense albeit that was in The Pink Panther. Some nudity, though this being 1986 not 1964 it goes a bit further.
Shown as a tribute to the late David Lynch, again I found this film easy enough to pick apart - Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern looked too old to be high-school teenagers, like mid 20s at least, they were young adults so there wasn't that kind of jeopardy of kids in over their heads. Some continuity errors really, like the lead has his boxers on suddenly when a previous scene he was butt naked. I guess it's all meant to be dreamlike and all primary colours but I couldn't really go with it or figure out the conclusion - what happened to the husband?
I don't like Blue Velvet. Distasteful antics from a director who confuses the profound with the peculiar. Nice take on A Shot In The Dark by the Napster there, a film I quite enjoy, but each to their own.
An interesting John Wayne production / starring vehicle that covers similar territory to Arrowhead, the Charlton Heston film I saw the other day. Both films cover the Apache wars and attempt to tell them from the viewpoint of a cavalry scout who has spent time being raised and / or living with the Native Americans. So both Heston and Wayne spout lines about the way of the Apache world and spout them in a similarly brusque fashion. Whereas Heston seems to drawl the words out to give them some kind of gravitas, Wayne relies on his sheer star magnetism. He’s helped by being given a love story that starts off awkward and never gets easy, but he responds to the material with some alacrity and much empathy, which was totally missing from Heston’s more physical offering.
That isn’t to suggest Hondo is a quiet western. Far from it. The action is brutal, brutally masculine and virtually non-stop. Wayne’s character is as tough as any he played. The film was story boarded for 3D, but only a few cinemas were capable to running the Warner Brothers’ version of a 3D projector, so most fans watched it in 2D. Director John Farrow, who was a tough old bird himself, used the 3D images to deliver depth to the landscapes and corridors through the homesteads and forts. It’s a remarkably well composed film, so good that when the shoot overran and Wayne begged John Ford a favour to come and finish it [Farrow was scheduled elsewhere] you barely see any joins. The screenplay is surprisingly literate, but then you learn it was lifted from a Louis L’Amour short story. He wrote a novelisation and scored a big hit with it, as the film was.
Not much more to say. Wayne’s scout Hondo Lane arrives at Angela Lowe’s homestead, falls in love with her and over the next few weeks attempts to persuade her to leave frontier territory before the ‘Apache Wars’ begin. The cavalry is mustering; so too the natives, led by Vittorio, who has so far given the Lowe’s a stay of grace. Much excitement, many plot holes and a some love proceed as we haste with speed towards the stampeding climax. The movie certainly feels rushed, a feeling not helped by the noisy music score that interferes with so many scenes it was sometimes impossible to watch without subtitles. Geraldine Page was curious modern casting for a very traditional role, but she’s good enough to get Oscar nominated.
Hondo is probably more intriguing and less straightforward in its themes than Arrowhead, but suffers from the same lopsided outcome. I quite enjoyed it though.
This spaghetti western was directed by Sergio Corbucci, one of Quentin Tarantino's heroes. This is a "snow western" with lots of beautiful shots of snow and mountains. To me the influence on "The hateful eight" is very clear. The main character is Silence, man who hates bounty hunters. This is because bounty hunters killed his parents and cut his throat when he was a boy. As a result Silence is a mute. the real reason is that the actor playing him (Jean-Luis Trintigant) didn't speak English, but really wanted to be in a western. A mute hero works really well I think. I find Trintigant to look to much like a model to play a brutal cynic who provokes bounty hunters to draw first so he can legally kill them, but he does a good job. Silence carries a Mauser C96 pistol, best known to many as Han Solo's blaster. It's a cool-looking gun, but as the name implies the pistol wasn't on the market until 1896, it simply looks (and is) too modern next to everything else on screen. The main villain is played by Klaus Kinski as really evil bounty hunter. He's a very memorable villain and I found myself imagining him as Max Zorin in AVTAK. To sum up the positives: unusual hero, unusual and stunning locations, a hateable villain, good soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and a good story. The ending is not what you expect, but that's up to the viewer if he likes it or not. The camerawork seems a bit ..... not jittery, but to unstable for me. At times the scenes are shot like a documentary and I think a stable camera mounted on a dolly track or a crane would've been better. I still recommend it.
Just to let you all know that Sky Arts is continuing its Pink Panther season, omitting the 1968 oddity Inspector Clouseau with Alan Arkin in place of Sellers as the French detective, nor director Blake Edwards or Henry Mancini's music, showing The Return of the Pink Panther from 1975 co-starring Christopher Plummer as the famed jewel thief originally played by David Niven (maybe Niven was a bit too old for the role then, or maybe he couldn't face co-starring with Sellers after the Casino Royale debacle; it's odd how Niv completely omits mention of this in his fabled memoirs, possibly because they were all about Old Hollywood or as likely because Sellers was still alive and a player in the 70s and Niven didn't like to alienate the living, being something of a social climber.)
It's on at 8 again, I don't know if the season will continue, far less to the bitter end with posthumous Sellers efforts such as The Curse of the Pink Panther which has a cameo from Roger Moore, I understand.
A likeable if bloody comedy gangster flick about a dog who swallows a stolen 86-carat diamond. Guy Ritchie directs with his [now] customary swift edits and nifty camera angles, a style that was fresh and exciting back in 2000. Jason Statham plays Turkish, an out of luck bare-knuckle boxing promoter, whose week goes from bad to worse to terrible as he mixes it with Brad Pitt’s unintelligible Irish gypsy and Alan Ford’s literate menacing murderous kingpin ‘Brick-Top’ Pulford. A gaggle of eager faces from US or UK television round out the watchable cast, people like Dennis Farina, our own pair in Benicio del Toro and Goldie, comedian Mike Reid, footballer Vinnie Jones and one of the regular customers from Desmond’s. Stephen Graham impresses as Statham’s useless sidekick Tommy; so too Brad Pitt, proving he really can act when he has to.
Utter nonsense, bleakly funny, memorably violent in an ambivalent graphic-novel style, well-written and constructed. A big hit in its day, but not as big a profit as the preceding Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells. Snatch is probably the slicker product when you watch them back-to-back, but four hours of this kind of physical entertainment might wear one out by the time you get to the very end. Snatch does share much of the earlier movie’s whiplash quick convoluted plot. Overall, an excellent piece of Brit-Pop moviemaking with all the shabby coolness and arty-farty YBA fluff that invokes.
Comments
I certainly agree that A Shot In The Dark is the best Panther film…it’s definitely the most consistent 😁
I described THE PINK PANTHER on here back in 2021 as "good all-round entertainment" - a fair summary.
Onwards...
WONDER BOYS (2000)
A witty campus comedy for grown-ups.
Michael Douglas is prize-winning author Grady Tripp, university lecturer and pot head who is in self-denial about his permanent writer’s block. The film follows one weekend in his chaotic life when his wife leaves him, his agent demands his latest [enormous] book, his mistress informs him she is pregnant, he shoots a dog, steals Marilyn Monroe’s jacket, is threatened with the sack and attempts to rehabilitate a socially inept student [Tobey McGuire] who is both a compulsive liar and a genius fledgling writer. A slight tale of emotional redemption and career comeuppance is enlivened by odd goings on and sterling work from its cast, notably Douglas who leads the show with a ramshackle lumbering performance of truth and despair. There is some snazzy wintery photography. The music box soundtrack harkens back to the early seventies and is a delight. I am not a Bob Dylan fan, but even I recognise his output of the eighties and nineties was patchy. However, he deservedly won an Oscar for the excellent theme song Things Have Changed. Steve Kloves probably should have won for his screen adaptation. Curtis Hanson directs with his usual assured but unremarkable touch.
Very, very good. Amusing and excellently observed. An underrated film.
A Real Pain directed by and starring Jesse Eisenberg, and co-starring Kieran Culkin. They play mismatched cousins - it's an 'Odd Couple' comedy who bond and fall out on a group excursion to Poland.
What adds a different slant is that it's a group trip to revisit their late grandmother's home and homeland in Lublin, Poland, which includes a visit to the concentration camp there, and the film neatly encompasses the awkwardness of mixing with the other group members - one of whom includes a divorcee played by a post-nose job Jennifer Gray of Dirty Dancing/Ferris Bueller fame.
It's a comedy, it works well, I enjoyed it. It did induce feelings of melancholy in me - Eisenberg plays the uptight, married with a kid in a full-time job character while his cousin is a waster who smokes weed yet is on the face of it an uncomplicated, upbeat, worry-free fellow. It does seem he 's on the near-diverse, bipolar, narcissistic spectrum somewhere and the film does explore what it's like to be around that kind of 'sunshine' guy where you always feel in the shadow somehow, the sort of bloke who can out of the blue come out with a putdown or a comment that kills the mood. They'll often be charm personified to any passing stranger but you will be left standing there like a morose mug in comparison, these types can really jinx you and I've met a few in my time, though not lately.
The film has an interesting bit of symmetry, how it starts and how it ends.
The trailers all induced a bit of melancholy too really, including the one about a family whose male breadwinner is abducted by the far-right Brazilian state in the 1970s and the one about the 1970s Munich Olympics where the Israelis were held hostage - I'm not sure it's easy to go to the pictures for escapism these days....
Roger Moore 1927-2017
CARRY ON COWBOY (1965)
This, the eleventh Carry On saga, is generally considered to be one of the team’s better efforts. Kenneth Williams liked it. Although it creaks and groans quite a bit, as do we watching, you can’t fault the effort and it is interesting to see the usual saucy and silly shenanigans relocated to the wild west of America, actually Chobham Common. It would always be a hard act to follow Carry On Cleo.
Sid James plays Johnny Finger aka the Rumpo Kid, a gunslinger and cattle rustler who takes over the sleepy, temperance and law abiding town of Stodge City. Williams’s Judge Burke is outraged, but Joan Sims’s saloon owner, Belle, takes a shine to rascally Sid and soon all hell is breaking loose, providing plenty of business for Davy Kaye’s undertaker. Just as the film gets bogged down, Jim Dale’s sanitary engineer Marshall P. Knutt turns up and brightens proceedings no end. Confusing him for a real U.S. Marshall, poor Jim has been sent to Stodge to clean it up – only he’s from England and never fired a gun in his life.
The film works in fits and starts. The bedroom scene where Jim Dale is repetitively seduced by three women was probably the highlight. Charles Hawtrey’s turn as a Native American chief is by turns amusing and mildly insulting. Angela Douglas looks pretty. The accents are all over the place: the actors who either don’t try [Jon Pertwee, Peter Butterworth] or who don’t need to [Jim Dale, Charles Hawtrey] come off best. There’s an Eric Rogers composed song sung over the titles, which is unusual, and the score itself shows some originality and quite nods to western themes. Despite being filmed in England the movie passes muster for the old west – I mean most of the real thing was prairie land, so to see acres of greenery isn’t that far wrong. Talbot Rothwell’s script predominantly borrows from Destry and High Noon.
Carry On Cowboy isn’t too bad. On a brighter day after a couple of shandies it’d probably be more amusing than I found it on a dry overcast February evening, so there you go.
Somebody reviewed this movie recently; I caught it last night...
SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959)
The phrase ‘classic movie’ is well overused, but if any film deserves the right to be regarded as one, it ought to be a product as sparkling and enjoyable as this. Billy Wilder was in the midst of a run of great form when he came to script this comic gangster piece packed full of witty lines and ridiculous situations that shouldn’t succeed at all, but does because the three main players give everything they can to ensure we empathise, sympathise and eulogise with their characters.
Marilyn Monroe is top-billed – she was very rarely top-billed, so it is worthy of note – as Sugar Kane, a ukelele strumming singer in a 1920s Prohibition era all-girl dance band who keeps falling for tenor sax players. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon star as Joe and Gerry, two musicians down on their luck and unexpected witnesses to a mob hit in Chicago. Fleeing the scene, they enrol in the same all-girl band, impersonating two inelegant posh birds Josephine and Daphne. Joe / Josephine happens to be a tenor sax player, but can’t get his way with Sugar unless he impersonates a billionaire oil magnate, who looks and sounds like a ham-fisted Cary Grant. Gerry / Daphne snags a genuine billionaire. As if life isn’t suddenly complicated enough, the mascara really starts to run, as do the fake-girl’s stockings, when Mafia boss Spats Colombo [George Raft] turns up for a crime convention and recognises the boys / girls as his witnesses.
Superbly funny from start to finish – ‘Mozzarella’s Funeral Parlour’ come Italian Mafia speakeasy kicks proceedings off – the story bounds along with energy and a sense of outrageousness which keeps you watching and makes you [almost] forget the slightly dodgy motives of all the people concerned. Joe E. Brown’s billionaire Osgood Fielding III is probably the most honest character of the lot, everyone else seems to be swinging for money or seduction. It is worth noting that in almost every ‘classic’ screwball-style comedy there is a distinct element of amorality which marks the main persons as slightly unworthy of their ultimate successes [His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, The Apartment, What’s Up Doc, Annie Hall, Four Weddings…] but this doesn’t seem to hurt their success. Maybe people like that element of unsavouriness, drawing characters closer to real life, or maybe I am reading too much into cultural behaviours.
Back to Some Like It Hot.
Monroe is superb, never better, in a career and person defining role. Lemmon nabbed an Oscar nomination for his dual role as the nervy Gerry and the flirtatious all-girls together over-feminine Daphne. Tony Curtis was at the peak of his career and matches him almost all the way; his turn as Junior, an oil magnate’s son, is way better than the straight laced turn as Josephine, which hints at a man-in-a-dress than Lemmon’s more flighty depiction. In a year of many very good films, Some Like It Hot was consistently overlooked for awards, except at the Golden Globes where movie, Lemmon and Monroe all won their categories. Time has been more than kind to the film, which retains its humour and its deftness even after sixty-odd years. It’s impossible not to raise at least a smile at much of the brilliant dialogue. Unlike some of Wilder and co-writer I.A.L. Diamond’s other films, Some Like It Hot doesn’t try to score any political or social comment, it sets out a daft premise in the first few scenes and runs with that until the very end. The director and writers are so confident they don’t even have the star grace the show until twenty five minutes have elapsed. However, Monroe’s jello-on-springs stride down a railway platform became one of the greatest entrances on film, a reward helped no doubt by first-time watchers wondering when the hell she was going to put in an appearance.
Excellent black and white photography from Charles Lang – it had to be in monochrome to hide the men’s pasty make up and shaving shadows – grand Orry-Kelly dresses, crisp editing [Arthur Schmidt] and a whimsical jazz score from Adolph Deutsch. It all adds up to a superb slice of cinema which remains undimmed over the years and long may it remain a shining light in the dark.
Probably one of my favourite ten films of all-time.
Having shown The Pink Panther last Sunday, Sky Arts is screening its sequel A Shot In The Dark at the same time, 8pm tomorrow (Sunday).
Roger Moore 1927-2017
HAYWIRE (2011)
Steven Soderbergh brings his class of cool cinema to the modern espionage movie. Gina Carano stars as Mallory Kane a Black Ops assassin set up for a fall by shadowy superior agents. Most of the time, I had no idea what was happening. The film is slick and fast and everyone does their bit to make it an enjoyable if blurry experience. The film isn’t as violent as you might expect, and when it is the violence is longwinded and rather dull. Soderbergh is better with the suspense, when he orchestrates scenes effectively to generate the necessary tension. The whole sequence set in Dublin was really impressive for that reason, editing, music, camera placement, all excellent up until a weary climatic chase. The flashback narrative doesn’t really work, other than as a startling opening. A starry cast is worth looking at, although other than Ms Carano, who is a martial arts expert, there are no women featured. This isn’t necessarily a narrative problem, but it is noticeable. Plus, I never understood the title.
ARROWHEAD (1953)
Arrowhead is a highly fictionalised reworking of the exploits of real life US Cavalry Chief Indian Scout Al Sieber. There is a dedication both before and after the opening and closing titles. The director filmed the exteriors at the real location of Fort Clark, near Brackettville, Texas, where Sieber spent most of his scouting life.
For the cinema, Sieber becomes Ed Bannon, or rather he becomes Charlton Heston. Heston was already a star thanks to Cecil B. DeMille and The Greatest Show On Earth, but he hadn’t mastered the art of screen acting yet, although his muscular brand of stagey realism is already in evidence: that louche shoulders back stance, a sly glance from the corner of his eye, the clasped corner of his mouth. Basically it’s Charlton Heston whichever way you look at him, the nuances he introduced for Ben Hur and El Cid haven’t materialised yet.
Arrowhead was the third western the star had made in eighteen months and revisits the ‘white man raised as an Apache’ role he played in The Savage. Here, the white man has abandoned the Native American way of life and reverted to civilisation, which means the US Cavalry, seducing married women and half-breed squaws, shooting people at random and being generally argumentative. Ed Bannon is also an Indian-hater first-class. In this very traditional style frontier western, the Apache are the bad guys through and through, as Heston keeps reminding us. When Jack Palance turns up as an educated Indian chief, looking as if he’s stepped off the set of Shane and straight into buck skins, swapping guns for tomahawks, it can only mean these Indians are up to no damn good. So it proves.
A no surprises western with plenty of action and a lot of talk that borders on the racist. It isn’t very interesting. You can work out the eventual outcome from the moment Jack Palance appears. Charles Marquis Warren writes and directs and the film suffers from his repetitive overindulgences, the same fate that buried Elvis Presley’s non-singing spaghetti western Charro. Warren was most successful on TV, producing Gunsmoke and Rawhide.
A Shot in the Dark (1964) starring Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau and two actors who appeared in that year's Goldfinger, namely Martin Benson who played Mr Solo ('I'll take my money now if you don't mind Mr Goldfinger!') and Bert Kwouk who has a bit more to do this time than simply look queryingly at the titular star. Its opening song is also quite similar to David Arnold's languid Only Myself to Blame from TWINE.
I caught this many years ago and wasn't too impressed but at the time I was a subscriber to LoveFilm - a DVD rental thing which would allow you to order three films at a time and they would send a DVD out in the post, you would watch it and send it back via prepaid envelope, whereupon they would send the next one out. Great value but addictive in a dismal sort of way, you would have 20 movies backed up on a waiting list and some would be dispatched pronto and others might take months to arrive, due to demand I suppose. Its advantage lay in the fact you could watch 'for free' well sort of all manner of obscurities without having to fork out £15 to actually buy it, things like saucy Tinto Brass films or that Italian director's The Canterbury Tales or Il Cameron or whatever it was called. I suppose it's testimony to a wasted life that I can't recall too many of the movies I watched but I did get into a rut with it, buying a TV dinner from Tesco and a small bottle or rose making up a large glass most nights, no wonder I never got into shape. So maybe I wasn't in the right mood for A Shot in the Dark.
Maybe I'm still in a rut and I hate to disagree with my fellow Bond fans but this viewing didn't raise much of a laugh. Like The Pink Panther it sort of suffers from the fact that it wasn't intended as a vehicle for Sellers, the first film was meant to be Niven's movie with Peter Ustinov originally slated in as Clouseau, very much a subsidiary role but when he dropped out, Sellers came in and scenes were added to spotlight his talent. A sequel was fast-tracked but director Blake Edwards utilised an existing play and retailored it for Clouseau, again adding scenes and pratfalls. There's no reference to the previous film, no mention of Clouseau's jail time or his presumably ex-wife indeed the whole thing might be a prequel given how it ends with his boss Dreyfuss, played by an excellent Herbert Lom ditching his hairpiece from TV series The Human Jungle (maybe it was on loan to Sean Connery that year, it's strikingly similar to the one he has in Goldfinger).
The lovely Alpine settings of the first film, the apres-ski mood and jaunty songs are gone and we don't see much of Paris, the phrase 'it doesn't escape its stage setting' mostly applies here though there are good comedy additions such as the increasingly enraged Dreyfuss and Clouseau's stoical and unimpressed sidekick Hercule, also Cato of course, this is all good. Elke Sommers doesn't appeal to me in the same way as the women in PP, - if Capucinini was reminiscent of Christine Keeler, well, Sommer's is more like the other one in the then recent Profumo Affair, the blonde, and there's not much chemistry between her and Sellers. The central mystery doesn't really grip, I mean the set up is kind of funny - Sommers is caught with a dead body, holding a gun, but Sellers insists she cannot have done it, allowing her to leave jail and the body count rises each time. But I didn't really care who did it, or for the victim, or anything much, while I got tired of watching Sellers's mishaps with snooker balls and cues, it's fairly a one-joke movie where you are laughing at someone, not with them. That may have been a rare surprise in the 1960s, with so many films with middle-class stately home scenes with polite middle-class residents, to have a character like Clouseau acting as a human hand grenade. Especially as he's the police, an authority figure, but I'm not sure laughing at authority figures is so risqué now, rare it doesn't happen with out politicians, and now the police exist almost as an abstract, they don't exactly inspire fear in wrongdoers, more in whistleblowers or the like. We see them on the telly, or in the papers associated with some disgrace, we don't see them 'on the beat' or in real life.
The scenes were Clouseau's disguise each time draws the attention of the police is amusing but I felt in the mood to say, yes, but that wouldn't happen the second or third time, they'd know who he is... I don't know, maybe as one reviewer on imdb said, I need to go back in time to see it in a packed cinema in 1964. I don't even remember what happens to the Elke Sommer character in the end, nothing much seems at stake. The repeated attempted assassination on her and Clouseau as the music builds to a climax seems to been nicked by Thunderball with the death of Fiona Volpe, you can imagine Clouseau saying the line 'She's just dead' and making off apologetically, you can imagine him in the pre-credits too actually. 'Madame, may I offer my sincere condolences....' before whacking a real woman, I guess they did that in Austin Powers. Much of Sellers' schtick was used by the English gendarme in the sitcom 'Allo 'Allo, of course.
George Saunders is in this but doesn't seem to have much to do, you don't grow to dislike him or anything much, unlike the Fantasy Island actor in the first Naked Gun film, where you want to see him undone.
As the film was a hit, I'm surprised there wasn't another immediate sequel - I'm guessing Edwards and his bothersome star fell out. There was a movie in 1968 called Inspector Clouseau with Alan Arkin as the lead, it bombed, and I think Sellers returned in 1975 in The Return of the Pink Panther, followed by a few others. Odd with hindsight, like Connery doing his first two Bonds then returning for The Man With the Golden Gun.
If you'd like to read a better negative review, go on imdb and click on the 5-star ratings (out of 10) as they read very well. Rather like AI, it's a bit dispiriting to find others have said it much better than you before but there you go.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Both Sellers and Edwards needed a hit when they did the third one. They got one. Issues are issues but nobody in their right mind would turn down that kind of crazy money.
I don't know, my question was why they didn't knock off a third early on when the going was good rather than wait 10 years.
Blue Velvet
Somewhat similar to A Shot in the Dark, in that the leading man develops an obsession with a mysterious woman and is prepared to overlook her dangerous aspects to gain entrance to her abode and get to the heart of his investigation, however he is stymied by her unwillingness to open up as to what has really happened, also some in and out of closet nonsense albeit that was in The Pink Panther. Some nudity, though this being 1986 not 1964 it goes a bit further.
Shown as a tribute to the late David Lynch, again I found this film easy enough to pick apart - Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern looked too old to be high-school teenagers, like mid 20s at least, they were young adults so there wasn't that kind of jeopardy of kids in over their heads. Some continuity errors really, like the lead has his boxers on suddenly when a previous scene he was butt naked. I guess it's all meant to be dreamlike and all primary colours but I couldn't really go with it or figure out the conclusion - what happened to the husband?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I don't like Blue Velvet. Distasteful antics from a director who confuses the profound with the peculiar. Nice take on A Shot In The Dark by the Napster there, a film I quite enjoy, but each to their own.
HONDO (1953)
An interesting John Wayne production / starring vehicle that covers similar territory to Arrowhead, the Charlton Heston film I saw the other day. Both films cover the Apache wars and attempt to tell them from the viewpoint of a cavalry scout who has spent time being raised and / or living with the Native Americans. So both Heston and Wayne spout lines about the way of the Apache world and spout them in a similarly brusque fashion. Whereas Heston seems to drawl the words out to give them some kind of gravitas, Wayne relies on his sheer star magnetism. He’s helped by being given a love story that starts off awkward and never gets easy, but he responds to the material with some alacrity and much empathy, which was totally missing from Heston’s more physical offering.
That isn’t to suggest Hondo is a quiet western. Far from it. The action is brutal, brutally masculine and virtually non-stop. Wayne’s character is as tough as any he played. The film was story boarded for 3D, but only a few cinemas were capable to running the Warner Brothers’ version of a 3D projector, so most fans watched it in 2D. Director John Farrow, who was a tough old bird himself, used the 3D images to deliver depth to the landscapes and corridors through the homesteads and forts. It’s a remarkably well composed film, so good that when the shoot overran and Wayne begged John Ford a favour to come and finish it [Farrow was scheduled elsewhere] you barely see any joins. The screenplay is surprisingly literate, but then you learn it was lifted from a Louis L’Amour short story. He wrote a novelisation and scored a big hit with it, as the film was.
Not much more to say. Wayne’s scout Hondo Lane arrives at Angela Lowe’s homestead, falls in love with her and over the next few weeks attempts to persuade her to leave frontier territory before the ‘Apache Wars’ begin. The cavalry is mustering; so too the natives, led by Vittorio, who has so far given the Lowe’s a stay of grace. Much excitement, many plot holes and a some love proceed as we haste with speed towards the stampeding climax. The movie certainly feels rushed, a feeling not helped by the noisy music score that interferes with so many scenes it was sometimes impossible to watch without subtitles. Geraldine Page was curious modern casting for a very traditional role, but she’s good enough to get Oscar nominated.
Hondo is probably more intriguing and less straightforward in its themes than Arrowhead, but suffers from the same lopsided outcome. I quite enjoyed it though.
The Great Silence (1968)
This spaghetti western was directed by Sergio Corbucci, one of Quentin Tarantino's heroes. This is a "snow western" with lots of beautiful shots of snow and mountains. To me the influence on "The hateful eight" is very clear. The main character is Silence, man who hates bounty hunters. This is because bounty hunters killed his parents and cut his throat when he was a boy. As a result Silence is a mute. the real reason is that the actor playing him (Jean-Luis Trintigant) didn't speak English, but really wanted to be in a western. A mute hero works really well I think. I find Trintigant to look to much like a model to play a brutal cynic who provokes bounty hunters to draw first so he can legally kill them, but he does a good job. Silence carries a Mauser C96 pistol, best known to many as Han Solo's blaster. It's a cool-looking gun, but as the name implies the pistol wasn't on the market until 1896, it simply looks (and is) too modern next to everything else on screen. The main villain is played by Klaus Kinski as really evil bounty hunter. He's a very memorable villain and I found myself imagining him as Max Zorin in AVTAK. To sum up the positives: unusual hero, unusual and stunning locations, a hateable villain, good soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and a good story. The ending is not what you expect, but that's up to the viewer if he likes it or not. The camerawork seems a bit ..... not jittery, but to unstable for me. At times the scenes are shot like a documentary and I think a stable camera mounted on a dolly track or a crane would've been better. I still recommend it.
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VG1jiRRDeCM
Just to let you all know that Sky Arts is continuing its Pink Panther season, omitting the 1968 oddity Inspector Clouseau with Alan Arkin in place of Sellers as the French detective, nor director Blake Edwards or Henry Mancini's music, showing The Return of the Pink Panther from 1975 co-starring Christopher Plummer as the famed jewel thief originally played by David Niven (maybe Niven was a bit too old for the role then, or maybe he couldn't face co-starring with Sellers after the Casino Royale debacle; it's odd how Niv completely omits mention of this in his fabled memoirs, possibly because they were all about Old Hollywood or as likely because Sellers was still alive and a player in the 70s and Niven didn't like to alienate the living, being something of a social climber.)
It's on at 8 again, I don't know if the season will continue, far less to the bitter end with posthumous Sellers efforts such as The Curse of the Pink Panther which has a cameo from Roger Moore, I understand.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
SNATCH (2000)
A likeable if bloody comedy gangster flick about a dog who swallows a stolen 86-carat diamond. Guy Ritchie directs with his [now] customary swift edits and nifty camera angles, a style that was fresh and exciting back in 2000. Jason Statham plays Turkish, an out of luck bare-knuckle boxing promoter, whose week goes from bad to worse to terrible as he mixes it with Brad Pitt’s unintelligible Irish gypsy and Alan Ford’s literate menacing murderous kingpin ‘Brick-Top’ Pulford. A gaggle of eager faces from US or UK television round out the watchable cast, people like Dennis Farina, our own pair in Benicio del Toro and Goldie, comedian Mike Reid, footballer Vinnie Jones and one of the regular customers from Desmond’s. Stephen Graham impresses as Statham’s useless sidekick Tommy; so too Brad Pitt, proving he really can act when he has to.
Utter nonsense, bleakly funny, memorably violent in an ambivalent graphic-novel style, well-written and constructed. A big hit in its day, but not as big a profit as the preceding Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells. Snatch is probably the slicker product when you watch them back-to-back, but four hours of this kind of physical entertainment might wear one out by the time you get to the very end. Snatch does share much of the earlier movie’s whiplash quick convoluted plot. Overall, an excellent piece of Brit-Pop moviemaking with all the shabby coolness and arty-farty YBA fluff that invokes.
SNATCH is a blast. Great fun, probably my favorite Guy Ritchie film.