In London, another opportunity with that particular one is the rare chance to see it again in its original theatrical version, which the BFI is planning to screen later this year.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I saw this recently in a 4K restoration on the occasion of its (the restoration's) UK theatrical premiere at The Prince Charles Cinema in London. Heretofore the film has rarely been screened in the UK because of the scarcity of prints and apparently complicated rights issues affecting distribution/ exhibition. There was a DVD release some time ago.
Having never seen it before, I thoroughly enjoyed it as an action film which anticipates better known movies like 'Rambo: First Blood' and 'Aliens' but which is more thoughtful than standard genre fare. A squad of soldiers of the Louisiana National Guard, making their way across the bayou, are ruthlessly picked off, one by one, by Cajun hunter-trappers whom they've managed to offend. Powers Booth and Keith Carradine are the last men standing. The film's 1973 setting and exploration of the vulnerabilities of alpha-masculinity-in-crisis imply political comment on the Vietnam War.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Deliverance is the infamous man versus nature horror thriller that launched Burt Reynolds to stardom. Director John Boorman rewrote chunks of author James Dickey’s script and chooses to go for shock value over logic.
Four men give up a weekend’s golf in Atlanta to canoe down the fictional Cahulawassee River, engaging in a ‘return to nature’ experience before the valley is swamped by an enormous dam-feeding lake. They come into contact with backwoods homesteaders and the expedition turns into violent male rape, murder and manhunt. Jon Voigt solidifies his own star qualities as a sympathetic reluctant hero forced to confront his suburban shortcomings. Reynolds’s role as Lewis is as broad as his shoulders and equally sturdy, a man truly at home with a human’s survival instinct, recognising that the civilised world is no match for the thunderous heart of nature. At one point, having rode some dangerous rapids, he solidly declares: “Nobody beats the river.” Reynolds is at his most forceful confronting debutant Ronny Cox over aspects of morality and law. Ned Beatty, also in his first cinema role, plays the fourth member of the injured party.
Terrifically tense, but half way through you begin to notice that the narrative ceases to make much sense. Although the canoe party’s encounters with local rednecks do not auger well, you do wonder why such fish-out-of-water people would embark on such a crazy escapade, especially given the dangerous rapids and comparative wilderness landscape of the river, which almost makes them shoulder the blame for the outcomes. It becomes a trifle unsettling, which was probably the point. Allegories of Vietnam and the dehumanising effects of war are given scant evidence, and the environmental theme is explored in only the most cursory manner.
Nice scenery is spoilt by some muddy photography. Boorman controls the action effectively, using the real actors rather than stuntmen. The psychology of survival is only briefly touched on. The nightmarish ending is shockingly scant. Boorman started his film career as a director on the Dave Clark cash-in Catch Us If You Can; his best work were to two Lee Marvin vehicles Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific. Like those two, Deliverance has drive and ambition in presenting a product, but it misses a soul, replacing any semblance of empathy for grand statements about the hunter’s instinct and the unforgiving callousness of nature. The characters are not very believable, their feats of great endeavour seemingly bound more by luck and misguidance than any personal accomplishment.
I didn’t enjoy it very much. Deliverance has a big reputation, but the filmmakers bully us into accepting the premise that people both surrender to and fight against the human instinct in an attempt to draw themselves away from the natural environment and into civilisation. It is the nature and necessity of killing that draws the men together, bonding them into their own ‘civilised’ existence. The constant referencing of the dam construction, as well as the suggestion of local interbreeding, rather forces the point home.
Afterwards, I considered Deliverance in comparison to Micheal Winner’s Death Wish which may seem peculiar, given the latter’s completely urban setting, but it fulfils the same basic ambition with more obvious success. Charles Bronson’s motivations are clearer, the implications more astute and the quasi-religious reactions of a revenge hungry public express better our own moral degradation. He is a man on a mission and is coldly efficient, entirely civilised in the manner of his judgements, as one might expect an architect to be. After the numbing assault on his family, Bronson’s Paul Kersey seethes inside and out and becomes dehumanised by the events he deliberately concludes. In John Boorman’s muscular telling, Voigt and Reynolds, even Ned Beatty, outwardly and inwardly panic, and their decisions aggravate situations which lead them into morally brutal places. The symbolic removal of a church and cemetery to represent the loss of their and humanity’s civilised moral fibre seems heavy handed. Death Wish eschews morality in favour of heroics of a vicious kind; Kersey’s acceptance of his sins is what makes him identifiable. Deliverance attempts to provide a moral fibre even when the characters fail to present one: “In three months this whole valley will be thirty feet underwater,” says Reynolds, contemplating a corpse, as if hiding the evidence vindicates him.
For all that, quite interesting.
P.S. @Shady Tree reviewed Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort recently, a film I have not seen; his summary of the plot sounds similar to Deliverance.
There are similarities but I'd say that 'Southern Comfort' is about the psyche of soldiers, specifically, when they know they're being bested by an enemy rooted in the natural environment and they're light on ammo; there's an interest in the military mind, its limits and limitations, but with an affirmation of a code of heroism when the last comrades standing are determined to survive despite the odds. There's a horror movie quality to some of it, while the final sequence is unexpectedly set against a Cajun festive celebration and feels semi-documentary in places.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
BBC drama that ran for three seasons from 1972 to 1975, detailing the investigations of a fictional counter-espionage unit called 'The Department' headed by Commander Paul Ryan (Paul Daneman).
A total of 61 episodes were made during this time period, but unfortunately only 14 episodes survive today.
Four black-and-white recordings from Season 1 ( 'Checkpoint' Parts 1, 2, 3, 4) and ten colour episodes from Season 3, which all exist on YouTube. (Please find the link to the playlist below.)
This is a terrific spy show, with story telling as good as 'The Sandbaggers' written by Lt. Cmdr Ian Mackintosh.
A talky, ponderous Roman epic of seemingly interminable length, The Robe is famous for being the first ever Cinemascope picture. Director Henry Koster points the camera, but there is so little movement, either from him or the actors, that the whole enterprise becomes a static bore. I genuinely drifted to sleep midway through, rumbled myself after a few minutes and realised quite quickly that I hadn’t missed anything of importance. The Robe is that sort of slow film.
Richard Burton rises above the morass, but only when he plays at being a Roman Tribune; when he has to affect the mannerisms of a Roman Christian convert he seems wholly uncomfortable. Burton’s efforts though were rewarded with one of his many unrewarded Academy Award nominations. Jean Simmons plays his stubborn yet delicate wife, displaying a glowing edge of maturity to her person. The remainder of the cast are universally terrible. Jay Robinson’s whiney Caligula especially gets on one’s nerves. Victor Mature’s face pulling is embarrassing.
So what of the plot?
Burton’s hard drinking, womanising Marcellus falls foul of Caligula and is exiled from Rome to Palestine. His chief sin seems to be lusting after the same woman as the Emperor. In Jerusalem, Marcellus witnesses Christ’s crucifixion and gets freaked out by the Messiah’s robe, which has magical healing qualities, and a rather nice furry down. Marcellus’s slave, Demetrius [Mature] is already a convert, so he steals the cloak and keeps it safe giving rise to the first ‘relic cult’ of Christianity. Seeing the error of his ways, Marcellus takes the Christian mantle and along with a solid St Peter makes his way secretly to Rome. A showdown with the Emperor becomes inevitable.
Historically inaccurate, too wordy and lacking both action and landscape spectacle, The Robe flaps around doing nice things without ever being subversive, questioning or even intelligent. The story is told straight, without humour and almost devoid of genuine emotion. The finale has an Alleluia Chorus blaring ineffectually as Burton and Simmons take their lonely walk to the scaffold. The effect might be uplifting to an evangelical, but to these eyes and mind, it felt comedic and rather sad. These heroes die too passively and with painful simpering smiles. For all its pacifistic overtures, I am fairly certain Christianity does not preach you should cease resistance under all menace. Or maybe it does. Whatever the religious implications, the film isn’t cheerful and the big Cinemascope screen feels wasted on all that dialogue.
I ought to counter that Lloyd Douglas’s novel, on which the film is based and which includes all the factual blunders you see here, was the New York Times bestseller for 1942. Hence, the film’s success was assured before production even started. So certain were 20th Century Fox, they used the same sets and costumes to film a sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators, before The Robe was even released. That film is a much more robust actioner and is probably easier viewing than The Robe. Lloyd Douglas’s literary follow up concentrates on St Peter and was titled The Big Fisherman. It too made big box-office around the same time as Ben-Hur, despite the horrendous miscasting of Howard Keel as the titular saint. It is enough to point out that all these religious epics seem to make money. Divine intervention perhaps, or the US Bible Belt claiming its own? Successful or not, The Robe is one of the lesser epics of the sword-and-sandal era.
It obviously taught my eye, or should I say ear. I thought it made a point in that the sophisticates think they are making a breakthrough in communicating with the backwoods people when Ronny Cox and the banjo guy do their duet and play happily together. When Cox goes over, all smiles, to talk to the banjo player when the "duel" is done the backwoods banjo boy immediately retreats into silence and their moment is over. There will be no friendship.
What's worse than THE ROBE? THE SILVER CHALICE (1954), Paul Newman's sorry debut as a movie star. He plays Basil, a Greek slave charged with creating the title device to hold the cup Christ used at the Last Supper. Alas, a scenery-chewing Jack Palance wants to take the cup and destroy it to show the falseness of this wacky new religion. It's ponderous and silly, and it's all acted against weird, two-dimensional sets that make you feel like you're on an acid trip. Maybe dropping acid while watching this would have been better.
Used to perform, NP. In these retired days we play once per month in a seaside inn just for our own satisfaction, rather than twice or three times a week for income.
By a curious coincidence, I turned up this old recording the day after I watched The Robe. Assassination of an entirely different kind inhabits this Shakespearian adaptation from Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a writer-director at the peak of his art in 1953. While The Robe sought to bring some gravitas to the early Christian converts and martyrs and pitted Richard Burton’s Shakespearian style Marcellus against an all-American Caligula in Jay Robinson, Julius Caesar offers Roman tragedy in the form of Shakespearians John Geilgud and James Mason [Cassius & Brutus] who side off against Marlon Brando’s brash Method Acting Mark Antony.
Brando has the three best speeches in the movie [“Cry Havoc!” – “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” – “Brutus was the noblest Roman of all”] but he is virtually a supporting player in terms of screen time. The titular dictator of Rome too is less a character than an over-arching theme of ambition, power and legacy. Louis Calhern is a tad underwhelming. Fawning for the masses, Julius Caesar has made himself unpopular with the Senate and many fear he will attempt to usurp their position and appoint himself King. A plot is hatched to assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March and so some of Rome’s most prominent and respected citizens plunge daggers into the stricken potentate. Thus begins civil war and ultimate tragedy for Brutus and Cassius and their co-conspirators. Shakespeare’s dialogue twists our sympathies back and forth between the genuinely honourable, if misguided, senators and the vengeful, tacitly ambitious, Mark Antony and Octavian. Politics was as confusing and confused in the Roman era as it is now.
Despite the presence of some stage greatness, this is an American version of Julius Caesar and feels like it, from the robust, seething energy of Brando, to the clawing, football crowd street scenes. Well filmed in monochrome, well-edited to bring the play down in length, decently scored by Miklos Rosza, the film also succeeds in all the acting departments that The Robe failed in and the characters, their motives and foibles come alive. It helps there is a good script to kick things off with. One of the better Shakespeare movies.
Note:
Richard Burton would play Mark Antony in Cleopatra, a movie directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz who refilmed a reimagined version of the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech, but cut it to reduce the film's already huge running time. John Geilgud would return to the play in Charlton Heston’s 1970 version, this time as Caesar. As a point of interest, although Shakespeare wrote a ‘sequel’ to this historical fiction with the romantic tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen and how her schemes affected Julius Caesar’s standing among the Roman nobles is never mentioned.
Two films from much the same era, dealing with similar themes of premature death...
The first is the movie sequel to Steptoe and Son, the spin-off from the much-loved Galton and Simpson TV series, that said the first movie is not well-regarded - as some episodes were wont to do, the old man's cruelty towards his son and upending of his future happiness - in this case, marriage to a good-looking young woman - goes too far. It doesn't help that what is acceptably depressing for a 30-min comedy becomes too much for a movie, especially when there's no laugh track to jolly things along.
That said, its 'sequel' which - like many a Bond film disowns its predecessor entirely - lacks the first's pulling power - there's no unique 'sell' to hang the film on ('Harold gets married!'), nor any sexy scenes either (in the first film, Harold successfully cops off with a stripper whom he goes on to marry, we get to see her act at a club compered by the late Mike Reid). Essentially it's a succession of sitcom scenes linked together and made into a movie - and all the better for it. Harold and Albert are generally mates again, struggling against economic penury and resorting to all manner of ways to get out of hoc. The film might make more of an effort to highlight a disappearing way of life, not to mention London in a way that Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads did, but otherwise it's japes galore, building up to a climax at a graveyard, perhaps not for the faint-hearted or for anyone who's lost a loved one recently. Some of this has an Only Fools quality to it, though that series never had a movie spin-off not least because it was the 1980s when UK cinema was negligible.
Accident
Arguably the superior film, this Joseph Losey production is made from the same team who did The Servant, the script is by Harold Pinter. It opens with the titular event, a night-time crash outside a well-to-do Oxford farmhouse owned by a university lecturer, played by Dirk Bogarde, doing his best to age himself away from the image of the youthful heartthrob of the Doctor films.
The rest of the film is mostly a flashback that fills us in and explores the background to the event. There's great support from a bespectacled Stanley Baker as a fellow lecturer, a young Michael York as a student, Vivien Merchant as Bogarde's wife and some Italian actress as the student all the blokes are after - she did a number of films but this seems to have been pretty much her last one.
It's beautifully shot, the camera lingers on events to ask you make up your mind about the characters - I thought it was similar to Far From the Madding Crowd but in fact Losey had a hand in another Christie movie, The Go Between, another tale of middle or upper class manners and dubious code of conduct. The more you learn about the characters the less you like them but it invites you to infer from what is not said.
Alexander Knox appears as the emotionally distant university provost - he had a tiny role as the US defence secretary in You Only Live Twice, who sits and watches the space capsule's progress, then seems ready to head off to the golf course once he finds it hasn't blown up.
I missed Accident because I was watching the rather decent Scottish set crime series Annika and Dad was recordimg something else on the player. Instead I caught up with this. Kinda wished I hadn't:
BULLET TRAIN (2022)
For half its runtime, David Leitch’s adaptation of Kotaro Isaka’s novel is an inventive, derivative, chucklesome, intriguing and enjoyable train ride. There is much mirth as Ladybug, a hitman with a well-being crisis, takes the Tokyo-Kyoto Bullet Train intending only to retrieve a briefcase full of money, but ends up embroiled in a feud of escalating violence and stupidity. So after a decent kick off, everyone starts killing, stabbing, poisoning and thumping everyone else and the whole set up becomes a tiresome bore. Brad Pitt re-impersonates his Oscar winning go from Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry do their best to replicate Travolta and Samuel J. Jackson from Pulp Fiction. There’s enough blood and gore to soak at least five Tarantino films. There’s enough profanities to make a monk weep. The end is a horrendous train wreck of CGI impossibilities. By then, it is fair to say, all pretence of seriousness has vanished in favour of killing sprees of the nastiest kind. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. Ultimately, disappointing.
Oh, I caught the Bullet Train. I enjoyed it a lot - I would have watched Maigret on Talking Pictures TV instead but that can be a bit disheartening - I fancied a beer watching this instead. That said, I'm glad I didn't catch it at the cinema. It does have that slightly odd, echoey feel of Covid movies, the slight sense of social distancing you got in quite a few of the films, the sense the actors are playing against a blue screen all the time, and the whole concept is an exercise in avoidance. Plus, it features the kind of actors who were game for cameos in films of this kind.
I don't see how anyone can say Aaron Taylor-Johnson could be Bond after this given he plays a sort of wide boy Guy Ritchie type character not unlike the bragger from The InBetweeners - it's a good performance, however, He and (checks above review) Brian Tyree Henry have their banter but it's not quite right, not quite comedic enough imo and in some ways the issue is more White and Pink arguing over their code names in Reservoir Dogs, it's fairly derivative. The repeated reference to Thomas the Tank Engine don't really ring true because I'm not sure anyone really grew up with those tales, I mean I sort of did but it's long forgotten.
I lost count of who'd killed each other as it's not helped by many of them coming back from the dead, anyone who didn't think how Bond had his train fight in Spectre without pissing off other passengers could go along with this I guess - actually in some ways Spectre felt like a Covid film didn't it? The finale is all CGI like the plane on fire climax of Die Another Day. And it goes on too long, it's around two and a half hours. Still, there was always something going on...
I wanted to watch that Elvis thing about Pricilla, but I got waylaid and missed the start, so I took charge of this instead:
THE YOUNG ONES (1961)
Cliff Richard may have been Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley, but after his first forays into rock n roll, he transformed himself, much like the King, into a vaguely family friendly institution. Cliff, for all his attributes, never had Elvis’s animal magnetism or his glimmer of grime and grunge. He’s as clean living a middle class lad as you can imagine, frankly, and his songs reflect that. Living Doll virtually trademarked him. The Young Ones is Cliff’s fourth appearance on film following bit parts in Serious Charge and Charlie Drake Stirs It Up and a larger supporting role to Laurence Harvey as a teen singer in Espresso Bongo. Those early movies don’t really prepare one for this British comedy musical, which is much more light-hearted and follows the age-old hard-luck story of staging a theatre show against the odds. And here its Cliff and his musical mates who are down on their luck. Nicky Black [Cliff] sings in the local youth club’s house band. Their ramshackle hall is suddenly purchased by Robert Morley’s pompous property magnate Hamilton Black. He wants to create a tower block. Trouble is, Hamilton Black happens to be Nicky Black’s father. You can write the rest.
Sidney J. Furie directs with half an eye on the star and the rest on the comedic mayhem that surrounds everything. For a genial song-and-dance movie, it’s all a bit frantic. Lots of rushing around. Lots of over excited acting. Things calm down more when the singing starts, but that’s chiefly because for the most part the numbers are designed with big stages in mind. Several go on elaborately for minutes and bore the pants off you. It doesn’t help that four of the songs are sung twice over. Repetition merely makes one feel the writers had run out of ideas. There is an interesting sequence midway where the youngsters break into a dilapidated Finsbury Park theatre and start an impromptu show, using props and costumes abandoned backstage; their persons magically increase from six to twelve. I thought: “Oh, hang on, that’s clever, this is demonstrating the kids gradually tidying and cleaning up the theatre, a sort of cinematic time shift.” Alas, I was wrong, the theatre remains unchanged; so the filmmakers are not that clever. That’s disappointing as one of the early songs, Nothing’s Impossible, incorporates various fantasy elements into the dance routine, and there is nothing so ingenious in the film again, which becomes straightforward and uninteresting. Ultimately, the comedy elements play better than the musical ones and fantasy is kicked into touch, the silly storyline accepted.
Cliff hasn’t got his voice quite into gear yet. Sometimes he sings in a deeper key. The songs are quite uneven. The best of them are the title track and When the Girl in Your Arms is the Girl in Your Heart. These were big hits for Cliff. The Savage, performed by the Shadows, also made the top 10. The movie closes with everyone reconciled and the youth club stage show selling out, making Nicky Black a star. All very neat, but not exactly dangerous. While Cliff never threatened to be as dangerous as Elvis, it is interesting to note that his movies at least attempted to tap into his ability as an entertainer, not just a pop star. Elvis’s myopic manager never cottoned onto the possibility his charge could handle a genuine musical with dance numbers, decent singing co-stars, choreography, etc. The closest he came was with the rather marvellous Viva Las Vegas and the disappointing Frankie and Johnny. The Young Ones goes all out to be a youthful version of The Band Wagon and in that regard it succeeds reasonably well, even if the music is inconsistent and occasionally longwinded. Robert Morley seems to enjoy himself, and while overall I can’t share his enthusiasm, at least I wasn’t embarrassed like I am watching some of those sixties Elvis movies.
Note:
In North America, the film was retitled Wonderful to be Young. A new opening sequence was shot showing Cliff and the Shadows [accompanied by the Mike Sammes Singers, lip synched by dancers] performing Bacharach & David’s Wonderful to be Young. The song was belatedly released in the UK on an obscure compilation box set of the 2000s.
Yeah, I caught 10 mins of The Young Ones - my sister has to go and wiki things to death and she found out the lead actress in that is still alive and in her 90s - that means she was a good few years older than Cliff in that film, as he's in his early 80s or so now. In those days if felt like they had to 'sell' a rock n roll movie as a musical like West Side Story to legitimise the thing, or in case this flash in the pan musical trend suddenly became old hat by the time it reached the cinema.
I caught Paris, Texas, the famous 1984 Wim Wenders film, on a reissue at the Picturehouse. It opens with a guy - played by Harry Dean Stanton - in a chocolate brown suit, battered shoes and a red baseball hat in the desert, sort of Monument Valley territory, walking somehow with a purpose and also no purpose, he enters a deserted gloomy small bar in the middle of nowhere and collapses. Who is he? Why is he mute? Why does he resemble a resentful late 1970s George Harrison recalling a slight on his guitar work from the Get Back sessions?
You might say it's best to go in cold on this so I shouldn't tell you more. Now, the term 'best you see this cold' oft implies that the film soon takes a wild, divergent path that you just didn't see coming, so one shouldn't spoil the surprise. Here the film is so slow-moving albeit involving that if I gave you a couple or so more sentences, I'd have given away the next entire hour of the film, and a lot of the enjoyment is from thinking, 'Where's this going? And how long will it take to get there?'
It's a long movie and at the end I heard a a cinema goer enthusing on exiting how he'd seen it all those years ago and it hadn't lost its mystique. Well, yes, some of the mystique is how a bloke who is mute and penniless can just wander in the desert for four years with no prospects of a job and not die. I suppose tramps are different in the US, there are freight trains they can get on to move across the country, such people are called hobos or panhandlers, they have a bit of the old Tom Sawyer glamour - but even so.
Those familiar with Midnight Run will recognise one scene from it, and the laid-back guitar work is much the same, albeit used to comic effect in the later film. Fans of that Tom Hanks films, jeez, oh, I know, Forrest Gump, will also pick up on how Forrest just took to running and running while on mute to get away from past trauma, there is something of that here.
Now you suppose you might think, wow, those later commercial films ripped this one off a bit, but honestly I'd say they were better and more successful on their own terms than this, though I enjoyed it, it did seem something of a shaggy dog story. Some scenes really didn't add up, you wouldn't for instance let a bloke like that who seemed to have had a breakdown behind the wheel of a car for a long-distance drive, for instance. Later scenes had me wanting to call out social services - and it would take me a lot to do that. The finale or resolution is very well done it must be said, when we find out what had happened but that all said some mysteries remain, such as a romantic age gap thing. Still, it is nice to see a film that doesn't kowtow to an audience but just unfolds at its own speed. You'd be better seeing at the cinema because on DVD you'd just want to forward it, that all said after a hard day's work you'd fall asleep in the cinema most likely.
It looks very beautiful and captures something of the US that somehow doesn't occur in most movies or at least not in the same way. Later scenes of night time urban alienation have something of an Edward Hopper painting.
John Ford was already famous and revered as a filmmaker before he came to make Stagecoach, which is probably the movie that defines him and his ‘style’ the closest. It also, by way of its careful framing, clear narrative and concentration on character at the expense of violent incident defined the look, feel and emotive impact of a ‘classic’ western, an overused term if ever there was one. Big budget and artistically important westerns had fallen by the wayside in the early years of sound in Hollywood. It isn’t entirely obvious why. They had been a staple of the silent era and one can only assume that the enormous budgets splashed on Cimmaron and the like didn’t financially add up. A western also suggested the outdoors, and that was an expensive way to film. New ‘talky’ actors from Broadway were employed for their vocal performance skills and good looks, not for their ability to ride horses, shoot guns and fist fight. It took a film such as Stagecoach, which united the ‘talking’ elements of Broadway with a smattering of the action from the wild west, to demonstrate the emotional places and deeper themes that could be epitomised by the frontier spirit.
Stagecoach takes place almost entirely on the titular journey from Tonto to Lordsburg. The six-horse carriage is driven by Andy Devine, a stock John Ford character actor of bumbling good humour. One of the [uncredited] performers is Chris Pinn-Martin who is a pigeon-English speaking Mexican, a second stock-in-trade. Thomas Mitchell is superb as the drunken, redemptive, Doc Boone, part-semi-hero, part comedy clown, and Louise Platt cuts an arrogant, yet repressed figure as Lucy Mallory, the pregnant wife of an absent Cavalry Captain; they also pre-empt iconic Ford characters, notably from his famous Cavalry Trilogy. Most of the other protagonists, however, are distinctly un-Fordian in their makeup, particularly the Ringo Kid, who is a monosyllabic, romantic dreamer of a gunslinger – a man caught between the tripod stools of loyalty, justice and freedom. Love solves all his problems, and a little bit of killing, mostly pesky Apache Indians.
John Wayne is remarkable in a role which could be termed his second debut. Way back in 1930, he starred in Raoul Walsh’s epic frontier film The Big Trail, which flopped because the projectors and screens needed to play it didn’t exist and hence nobody saw it. That’s a pity because The Big Trail is far better and more spectacular than most films of the decade and Wayne himself is not as bad in it as many commentators have you believe. Billed as a star for three more movies, he was quickly discarded and thrown into poverty row quickies and serials for studios like Monogram, of which he made over one hundred in a decade of effort. He was good friends and drinking partners with director John Ford, although they’d never made a movie together until this. Ford openly recruited Wayne for the part, insisted he took it, that producer Walter Wagner accepted it and then promptly bullied the six-foot four-inch ‘Duke’ into delivering his first bona fide ‘John Wayne performance’ where his lanky, half-limping walk, his long expressive glances, his cool inquisitive eyes, sudden sunny smile, robust physique and curt, cuttingly effective sentences create a youthful version of what would become his most recognisable persona, the amiable, slightly animalistic 1950s and 60s everyman, family man, six-gun shooting hero. He crossed off other genres too, but Stagecoach and John Ford pinpointed exactly what made John Wayne John Wayne. It was the silences, the pauses, the imposing delivery and the statuesque broad figure. He physically and psychologically towers over everyone in this film. Wayne’s Ringo Kid is the most assured character, certain of his role in the world, his demands, strengths and weaknesses. His arrival in the narrative comes at an opportune moment where, having met all the passengers on the stage run and beginning to weary of the small talk, a rifle shot echoes, Andy Devine’s Buck pulls up the horses and Bert Glennon’s camera zooms onto John Wayne's face, from longshot as he twirls his gun to a sudden impressive close up. It is one of cinema’s great introductions. Curious then, that Ringo is immediately put into a place of discomfort, riding on the floor of the carriage, at everyone’s feet, the lowest of the low. He is, of course, a man on the run, but what Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nicols are doing here is placing their hero at the position of their audience. Ringo becomes our eyes and ears, he sees and silently judges the behaviour of the passengers, he listens without comment unless it is to pass a remark that belittles the seated folks, visually his ‘betters’. From this point on, the audience has an identifiable hero, a man to instinctively trust and believe in.
Claire Trevor’s prostitute, Dallas, instinctively sees him that way too and offers surreptitious half-glances at the hulking Adonis in prairie hides who blithely accepts his position of lowliness, but retains an air of palpable yet guarded menace. She understands his point of view: we saw it when she boarded the stagecoach and the ladies of Tonto turn their backs. Mrs Mallory refuses her offers of dignified assistance in the coach, preferring the Southern courtesies of itinerate gambler Hatfield [John Carradine, also outstanding]. We detect a sneaking glimpse of physical attraction between the pair, but this is a McGuffin of which Hitchcock would be proud. Instead the romance involves Ringo and Dallas, an affair of such swiftness it could only occur on a two day stage ride, like the kids who bonded over a stick of Wrigley’s in that chewing gum ad. The romantic sections of the film come as a surprise and really needed more development; Ringo’s naivety seems wholly inappropriate for a rancher, killer and jailbird. The romance doesn’t harm Stagecoach very much, but in a movie of much impeccable storytelling, it is an unforgivable oversight. Ringo’s declaration of love seems impulsive. At least at this point Dallas rejects him, but later seems to change her mind without good reason. Well, Ringo has a ranch and a half-finished cabin. Women were easy to please on the western frontier.
Towards the climax of the movie, Ringo walks Dallas to her old home, a dilapidated slum in the cheap part of Lordsburg. Here Ford’s ability to show and not tell is bleakly spectacular as the couple walk past whore houses, bars, the destitute, drunk and seemingly dead, a gin alley dump of sordidness and squalor. Ringo’s straightforwardness endears him to us. He is unphased by her surroundings. He knows, as we do, that a fate worse than this awaits him: he is in town to exact revenge on the three men who killed his Pa and brother. Staring death in the face and accepting it is far worse than the foulness of living. As with all heroes he offers hope: “I'm still here, ain't I?" he drawls, "I’ll be back in a few minutes."
We don’t witness the gunfight, or the deaths, only its first shot. We already know Luke Plummer and his brothers are doomed for the arrogant, virtually silent killer has drawn two black aces and two black eights during a game of blackjack: a dead man’s hand. Ford carefully draws out the tension leading up to the gunfight, utilising silence as a metaphor for fear. Nobody says a word as Plummer rises from the card table, orders a whiskey, asks for his shotgun, waits for his siblings. Instead they shuffle awkwardly into the shadows, faces vanishing, and the three killers stand marooned among the fug and stench of a barroom, waiting for the real hell to envelop them. In fact, although the team of song writers and composer won the Academy Award for their evocative folk music inspired music score, the film is mostly a silent enterprise, reminding us that Ford was a great silent filmmaker, while also evoking the long, expressive and compassionate glances between Wayne and Trevor. Meanwhile Tom Tyler’s Luke Plummer has a face etched in stone, a murderer’s countenance, a man willing to kill, knowing he can be killed. Like Ringo, he accepts his fate: his brothers can’t even shoot a stray mangy dog, so he, like the audience, know exactly the outcome. The happy ending for [almost] everyone else feels entirely appropriate.
The screenplay is brilliant, encapsulating its characters succinctly and accurately. The only weak point may be Mr Benskin, a shouty dishonest bank clerk who is nothing more than a windy bore. The exterior cinematography is grand, especially those views of Monument Valley, a location Ford fell in love with, chiefly for its cliff cut vistas. Interiors, including the carriage itself, were built with ceilings, unusual at the time; the effect is to provide a sense of claustrophobia, both physically and emotionally. It is only when the characters exit the coach, for instance, that they are truly able to be themselves. Occasionally these essentially small spaces are photographed with too wide a frame, giving not just width but an unexpected extra depth, almost as if we are watching a living painting from outside the frame. The technique is so good Ford would revisit the look time and again until his retirement, especially for his westerns. Orson Welles rated the film so highly he watched it over forty times before making Citizen Kane as he considered it the best example of how to structure, interpret and shoot a movie. Famously, the Apaches attack the coach and there is a tense chase and gunbattle, orchestrated by stuntman Yakima Canutt, but Stagecoach isn’t really about the action, it is about quickly built, bonded and broken relationships, about decency and diligence and moral integrity.
I don’t like the word ‘classic’ but Stagecoach solidly falls into that category. Released in early 1939, it didn’t single-handedly relaunch the western, but it did prove to audiences that westerns could be intelligent and artistic. Often, they failed on one or the other or both. 1939 saw a slew of big western films Dodge City, Jesse James, Drums Along the Mohawk and Destry Rides Again among them. 1939 also spawned lesser fare, like The Oklahoma Kid with Cagney and Bogart playing at gangsters in cowboy gear. Stagecoach’s lasting legacy though simply has to be the star making turn of John Wayne, an actor not only huge in stature and personality, but also in his endearing commonality. There may have been prettier stars and better actors, but there hasn’t ever been one as popular.
@chrisno1 Thank you for the excellent review on Stagecoach. Please keep up the great work.
SHANE (1953)
Shane (Alan Ladd), a mysterious gunfighter rides into a remote town in the Wyoming Territory, where the local cattle baron Rufus Ryker is callously intimidating the local homesteaders to abandon their lands so that he can usurp them.
Shane, now working as a farmhand for a family of ranchers, will have none of it and confronts Ryker's goons. This sets off a chain of vendetta's with Ryker hiring a notorious gunslinger to dispose of Shane and the troublesome homesteaders.
Beautifully picturized in the high plains of Wyoming and now lovingly remastered for Bluray, Shane is a visual masterpiece.
In Stagecoach they’re playing poker not blackjack though. I’ve no problem with the word “classic” and as Chris says this thoroughly deserves that title. And John Wayne is one of the all time greats, whether the Hollywood chattering classes like it or not.
Though it’s not mentioned in Shane the movie reflects the events of the real life Johnson County War where homesteaders were routinely forced from their land by ranchers with ever increasing violence. The whole cast is awesome and the shooting of Elisha Cook Jr. by the evil Jack Palance heralded the beginning of graphic violence in westerns.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The thirteenth Carry On episode was the first made under a new production and distribution deal between producer Peter Rogers and the Rank Organisation. Previously the Carry On films had been made in association with Anglo Amalgamated and there was some uncertainty over the ownership of the Carry On logo. Hence, Rogers’s first productions – this one and Follow That Camel – did not initially have a Carry On label. It is fairly obvious that they are cut from the same cloth, and Rank even issued production and advertising materials that hinted at such. The public were not fooled either, so the moniker was back for Carry On Doctor.
On with Don’t Lose Your Head, which basically rips the piss out of The Scarlet Pimpernel and does a very fine job of it too. As with most Carry Ons, the script runs out of decent gags towards the end, replaced here by a long sword fight of chaos and destruction, but for most of the ninety minute run time, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Jim Dale, et al are on top form and cracking the crude jokes effectively and with some dexterity. Charles Hawtrey is particularly effete and obnoxious as a French aristocrat; under any other actor’s skills this would be a boorish interpretation, but Hawtrey makes the Duc de Pommfrit amusing and sympathetic [“He’s had his chips,” barks one wag]. Hawtrey also has the movie’s best line as he tries to seduce three impressionable young ladies with tall tales of his daring do. “Shall we continue this conversation outside,” he trills, “I know a nice little nook.” Cue disgusted glances from the girls who all absent the table. “Oh well,” he sighs, “Obviously not the nookie type.”
In fact, Talbot Rothwell’s screenplay is a gag-fest of much raucous mirth. Kenneth Williams’s revolutionary captain is called Citizen Camenbert [“The big cheese!”] and his sidekick is Peter Butterworth’s downtrodden Citizen Bidet. They share a master and servant relationship at odds with the revolutionary fervour and a testament to each man’s own stupidity. “Remember you must be circumspect,” suggests Williams, to which Butterworth replies deadpan: “Oh, I was, sir; as a baby.” Williams’s appalled glance is admonishment enough. He’s similarly irksome with Joan Sims, who plays his courtesan, Desiree. Hiccupping over a glass of champagne, she says: “I can’t help it. The bubbles get lodged in my chest.” Williams stares at her ample cleavage: “Yes. There’s room for quite a few lodgers in there.” Apparently he and Sims did not always get on, so the excellent repartee they share here is a welcome surprise.
So too the double straight man – comic routine of Sid James and Jim Dale as two bored British aristocrats who set out to rescue as many of the condemned entitled French as they can. James’s Sir Rodney Effing is an aging scamp, Dale his accompanying cheerful pooch. For all that, we know James will have plenty of opportunities to deliver his trademark filthy laugh. For instance, a guest at his lavish party declares “You’ve always had magnificent balls.” Cue a restrained cackle. Even better was the “act natural” line, delivered as he and Dale prance around in each other’s arms on the dance floor. There is an interesting moment midway through the film when James breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the camera, revealing his lustful and amusing emotions towards Dany Robin’s bounteous Jacqueline; she replies in kind.
The film looks marvellous. The budget was higher than previous efforts and it shows. Costumes were borrowed from Rank’s wardrobes and sets from Hammer’s Bray studios. They even found a British built French chateau to film the climatic sequence, which kicks off as Miss Robin plucks a harp [“I didn’t know she was good at plucking…”] to the tune and French lyrics of She Loves You. Miss Robin was quite famous in France and she cuts a pretty dash in a role which would otherwise have gone to Angela Douglas. Talbot Rothwell packs in plenty of jokes revolving around her marvellously attuned anatomy. It would be fair to say the film benefits from not having so many regular cast members, a feature that would drag down some later entries.
Don’t Lose Your Head isn’t a top-top Carry On, but it is very amusing and well-made and the cast seem to take it lightly without going over the top. I enjoyed rewatching this one and while I don’t quite rate it as highly as Follow That Camel, it certainly has a more professional feel to it, which even that later slice of hilarity seems to lack.
Very good.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 30,889Chief of Staff
I’m of an age where I love the Carry On…films. I think Peter Butterworth is underrated, he’s an absolute gift in these 😁
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In London, another opportunity with that particular one is the rare chance to see it again in its original theatrical version, which the BFI is planning to screen later this year.
They're talking about Star Wars, everybody.
Robots mincing about in the desert.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
'Southern Comfort' (dir. Walter Hill, 1981)
I saw this recently in a 4K restoration on the occasion of its (the restoration's) UK theatrical premiere at The Prince Charles Cinema in London. Heretofore the film has rarely been screened in the UK because of the scarcity of prints and apparently complicated rights issues affecting distribution/ exhibition. There was a DVD release some time ago.
Having never seen it before, I thoroughly enjoyed it as an action film which anticipates better known movies like 'Rambo: First Blood' and 'Aliens' but which is more thoughtful than standard genre fare. A squad of soldiers of the Louisiana National Guard, making their way across the bayou, are ruthlessly picked off, one by one, by Cajun hunter-trappers whom they've managed to offend. Powers Booth and Keith Carradine are the last men standing. The film's 1973 setting and exploration of the vulnerabilities of alpha-masculinity-in-crisis imply political comment on the Vietnam War.
SOUTHERN COMFORT is excellent. I'm due for a rewatch of that so thanks for the reminder.
It went straight to the same post it goes to now 🤔 the first of your ramblings 😁
The post after doesn’t really tackle the album as such either…but I enjoyed the post…I think 🤣
DELIVERANCE (1972)
Deliverance is the infamous man versus nature horror thriller that launched Burt Reynolds to stardom. Director John Boorman rewrote chunks of author James Dickey’s script and chooses to go for shock value over logic.
Four men give up a weekend’s golf in Atlanta to canoe down the fictional Cahulawassee River, engaging in a ‘return to nature’ experience before the valley is swamped by an enormous dam-feeding lake. They come into contact with backwoods homesteaders and the expedition turns into violent male rape, murder and manhunt. Jon Voigt solidifies his own star qualities as a sympathetic reluctant hero forced to confront his suburban shortcomings. Reynolds’s role as Lewis is as broad as his shoulders and equally sturdy, a man truly at home with a human’s survival instinct, recognising that the civilised world is no match for the thunderous heart of nature. At one point, having rode some dangerous rapids, he solidly declares: “Nobody beats the river.” Reynolds is at his most forceful confronting debutant Ronny Cox over aspects of morality and law. Ned Beatty, also in his first cinema role, plays the fourth member of the injured party.
Terrifically tense, but half way through you begin to notice that the narrative ceases to make much sense. Although the canoe party’s encounters with local rednecks do not auger well, you do wonder why such fish-out-of-water people would embark on such a crazy escapade, especially given the dangerous rapids and comparative wilderness landscape of the river, which almost makes them shoulder the blame for the outcomes. It becomes a trifle unsettling, which was probably the point. Allegories of Vietnam and the dehumanising effects of war are given scant evidence, and the environmental theme is explored in only the most cursory manner.
Nice scenery is spoilt by some muddy photography. Boorman controls the action effectively, using the real actors rather than stuntmen. The psychology of survival is only briefly touched on. The nightmarish ending is shockingly scant. Boorman started his film career as a director on the Dave Clark cash-in Catch Us If You Can; his best work were to two Lee Marvin vehicles Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific. Like those two, Deliverance has drive and ambition in presenting a product, but it misses a soul, replacing any semblance of empathy for grand statements about the hunter’s instinct and the unforgiving callousness of nature. The characters are not very believable, their feats of great endeavour seemingly bound more by luck and misguidance than any personal accomplishment.
I didn’t enjoy it very much. Deliverance has a big reputation, but the filmmakers bully us into accepting the premise that people both surrender to and fight against the human instinct in an attempt to draw themselves away from the natural environment and into civilisation. It is the nature and necessity of killing that draws the men together, bonding them into their own ‘civilised’ existence. The constant referencing of the dam construction, as well as the suggestion of local interbreeding, rather forces the point home.
Afterwards, I considered Deliverance in comparison to Micheal Winner’s Death Wish which may seem peculiar, given the latter’s completely urban setting, but it fulfils the same basic ambition with more obvious success. Charles Bronson’s motivations are clearer, the implications more astute and the quasi-religious reactions of a revenge hungry public express better our own moral degradation. He is a man on a mission and is coldly efficient, entirely civilised in the manner of his judgements, as one might expect an architect to be. After the numbing assault on his family, Bronson’s Paul Kersey seethes inside and out and becomes dehumanised by the events he deliberately concludes. In John Boorman’s muscular telling, Voigt and Reynolds, even Ned Beatty, outwardly and inwardly panic, and their decisions aggravate situations which lead them into morally brutal places. The symbolic removal of a church and cemetery to represent the loss of their and humanity’s civilised moral fibre seems heavy handed. Death Wish eschews morality in favour of heroics of a vicious kind; Kersey’s acceptance of his sins is what makes him identifiable. Deliverance attempts to provide a moral fibre even when the characters fail to present one: “In three months this whole valley will be thirty feet underwater,” says Reynolds, contemplating a corpse, as if hiding the evidence vindicates him.
For all that, quite interesting.
P.S. @Shady Tree reviewed Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort recently, a film I have not seen; his summary of the plot sounds similar to Deliverance.
There are similarities but I'd say that 'Southern Comfort' is about the psyche of soldiers, specifically, when they know they're being bested by an enemy rooted in the natural environment and they're light on ammo; there's an interest in the military mind, its limits and limitations, but with an affirmation of a code of heroism when the last comrades standing are determined to survive despite the odds. There's a horror movie quality to some of it, while the final sequence is unexpectedly set against a Cajun festive celebration and feels semi-documentary in places.
SPY TRAP (1972-1975)
BBC drama that ran for three seasons from 1972 to 1975, detailing the investigations of a fictional counter-espionage unit called 'The Department' headed by Commander Paul Ryan (Paul Daneman).
A total of 61 episodes were made during this time period, but unfortunately only 14 episodes survive today.
Four black-and-white recordings from Season 1 ( 'Checkpoint' Parts 1, 2, 3, 4) and ten colour episodes from Season 3, which all exist on YouTube. (Please find the link to the playlist below.)
This is a terrific spy show, with story telling as good as 'The Sandbaggers' written by Lt. Cmdr Ian Mackintosh.
Highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjVRVyRgpZFKAAZzu7saOhby-lpnvZrNg
That sounds really interesting. Trouble is, I never have the time to catch up on these things these days
@chrisno1 What, no mention of the Deliverance music? 😁 My band still plays "Duelling Banjos" occasionally and it goes down a storm.
Another reason why I have to make a trip to Scotland 😁
Sorry, I just didn't know what to say about Duelling Banjos in terms of the movie. I got wrapped up in other metaphors.
THE ROBE (1953)
A talky, ponderous Roman epic of seemingly interminable length, The Robe is famous for being the first ever Cinemascope picture. Director Henry Koster points the camera, but there is so little movement, either from him or the actors, that the whole enterprise becomes a static bore. I genuinely drifted to sleep midway through, rumbled myself after a few minutes and realised quite quickly that I hadn’t missed anything of importance. The Robe is that sort of slow film.
Richard Burton rises above the morass, but only when he plays at being a Roman Tribune; when he has to affect the mannerisms of a Roman Christian convert he seems wholly uncomfortable. Burton’s efforts though were rewarded with one of his many unrewarded Academy Award nominations. Jean Simmons plays his stubborn yet delicate wife, displaying a glowing edge of maturity to her person. The remainder of the cast are universally terrible. Jay Robinson’s whiney Caligula especially gets on one’s nerves. Victor Mature’s face pulling is embarrassing.
So what of the plot?
Burton’s hard drinking, womanising Marcellus falls foul of Caligula and is exiled from Rome to Palestine. His chief sin seems to be lusting after the same woman as the Emperor. In Jerusalem, Marcellus witnesses Christ’s crucifixion and gets freaked out by the Messiah’s robe, which has magical healing qualities, and a rather nice furry down. Marcellus’s slave, Demetrius [Mature] is already a convert, so he steals the cloak and keeps it safe giving rise to the first ‘relic cult’ of Christianity. Seeing the error of his ways, Marcellus takes the Christian mantle and along with a solid St Peter makes his way secretly to Rome. A showdown with the Emperor becomes inevitable.
Historically inaccurate, too wordy and lacking both action and landscape spectacle, The Robe flaps around doing nice things without ever being subversive, questioning or even intelligent. The story is told straight, without humour and almost devoid of genuine emotion. The finale has an Alleluia Chorus blaring ineffectually as Burton and Simmons take their lonely walk to the scaffold. The effect might be uplifting to an evangelical, but to these eyes and mind, it felt comedic and rather sad. These heroes die too passively and with painful simpering smiles. For all its pacifistic overtures, I am fairly certain Christianity does not preach you should cease resistance under all menace. Or maybe it does. Whatever the religious implications, the film isn’t cheerful and the big Cinemascope screen feels wasted on all that dialogue.
I ought to counter that Lloyd Douglas’s novel, on which the film is based and which includes all the factual blunders you see here, was the New York Times bestseller for 1942. Hence, the film’s success was assured before production even started. So certain were 20th Century Fox, they used the same sets and costumes to film a sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators, before The Robe was even released. That film is a much more robust actioner and is probably easier viewing than The Robe. Lloyd Douglas’s literary follow up concentrates on St Peter and was titled The Big Fisherman. It too made big box-office around the same time as Ben-Hur, despite the horrendous miscasting of Howard Keel as the titular saint. It is enough to point out that all these religious epics seem to make money. Divine intervention perhaps, or the US Bible Belt claiming its own? Successful or not, The Robe is one of the lesser epics of the sword-and-sandal era.
It obviously taught my eye, or should I say ear. I thought it made a point in that the sophisticates think they are making a breakthrough in communicating with the backwoods people when Ronny Cox and the banjo guy do their duet and play happily together. When Cox goes over, all smiles, to talk to the banjo player when the "duel" is done the backwoods banjo boy immediately retreats into silence and their moment is over. There will be no friendship.
It would be an appropriate tune to play to hapless tourists in one of the Slaughtered Lamb pubs Barbel doubtless performs.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
What's worse than THE ROBE? THE SILVER CHALICE (1954), Paul Newman's sorry debut as a movie star. He plays Basil, a Greek slave charged with creating the title device to hold the cup Christ used at the Last Supper. Alas, a scenery-chewing Jack Palance wants to take the cup and destroy it to show the falseness of this wacky new religion. It's ponderous and silly, and it's all acted against weird, two-dimensional sets that make you feel like you're on an acid trip. Maybe dropping acid while watching this would have been better.
Used to perform, NP. In these retired days we play once per month in a seaside inn just for our own satisfaction, rather than twice or three times a week for income.
JULIUS CAESAR (1953)
By a curious coincidence, I turned up this old recording the day after I watched The Robe. Assassination of an entirely different kind inhabits this Shakespearian adaptation from Joseph L. Mankiewicz, a writer-director at the peak of his art in 1953. While The Robe sought to bring some gravitas to the early Christian converts and martyrs and pitted Richard Burton’s Shakespearian style Marcellus against an all-American Caligula in Jay Robinson, Julius Caesar offers Roman tragedy in the form of Shakespearians John Geilgud and James Mason [Cassius & Brutus] who side off against Marlon Brando’s brash Method Acting Mark Antony.
Brando has the three best speeches in the movie [“Cry Havoc!” – “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” – “Brutus was the noblest Roman of all”] but he is virtually a supporting player in terms of screen time. The titular dictator of Rome too is less a character than an over-arching theme of ambition, power and legacy. Louis Calhern is a tad underwhelming. Fawning for the masses, Julius Caesar has made himself unpopular with the Senate and many fear he will attempt to usurp their position and appoint himself King. A plot is hatched to assassinate Caesar on the Ides of March and so some of Rome’s most prominent and respected citizens plunge daggers into the stricken potentate. Thus begins civil war and ultimate tragedy for Brutus and Cassius and their co-conspirators. Shakespeare’s dialogue twists our sympathies back and forth between the genuinely honourable, if misguided, senators and the vengeful, tacitly ambitious, Mark Antony and Octavian. Politics was as confusing and confused in the Roman era as it is now.
Despite the presence of some stage greatness, this is an American version of Julius Caesar and feels like it, from the robust, seething energy of Brando, to the clawing, football crowd street scenes. Well filmed in monochrome, well-edited to bring the play down in length, decently scored by Miklos Rosza, the film also succeeds in all the acting departments that The Robe failed in and the characters, their motives and foibles come alive. It helps there is a good script to kick things off with. One of the better Shakespeare movies.
Note:
Richard Burton would play Mark Antony in Cleopatra, a movie directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz who refilmed a reimagined version of the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech, but cut it to reduce the film's already huge running time. John Geilgud would return to the play in Charlton Heston’s 1970 version, this time as Caesar. As a point of interest, although Shakespeare wrote a ‘sequel’ to this historical fiction with the romantic tragedy Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen and how her schemes affected Julius Caesar’s standing among the Roman nobles is never mentioned.
Steptoe and Son Ride Again and Accident
Two films from much the same era, dealing with similar themes of premature death...
The first is the movie sequel to Steptoe and Son, the spin-off from the much-loved Galton and Simpson TV series, that said the first movie is not well-regarded - as some episodes were wont to do, the old man's cruelty towards his son and upending of his future happiness - in this case, marriage to a good-looking young woman - goes too far. It doesn't help that what is acceptably depressing for a 30-min comedy becomes too much for a movie, especially when there's no laugh track to jolly things along.
That said, its 'sequel' which - like many a Bond film disowns its predecessor entirely - lacks the first's pulling power - there's no unique 'sell' to hang the film on ('Harold gets married!'), nor any sexy scenes either (in the first film, Harold successfully cops off with a stripper whom he goes on to marry, we get to see her act at a club compered by the late Mike Reid). Essentially it's a succession of sitcom scenes linked together and made into a movie - and all the better for it. Harold and Albert are generally mates again, struggling against economic penury and resorting to all manner of ways to get out of hoc. The film might make more of an effort to highlight a disappearing way of life, not to mention London in a way that Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads did, but otherwise it's japes galore, building up to a climax at a graveyard, perhaps not for the faint-hearted or for anyone who's lost a loved one recently. Some of this has an Only Fools quality to it, though that series never had a movie spin-off not least because it was the 1980s when UK cinema was negligible.
Accident
Arguably the superior film, this Joseph Losey production is made from the same team who did The Servant, the script is by Harold Pinter. It opens with the titular event, a night-time crash outside a well-to-do Oxford farmhouse owned by a university lecturer, played by Dirk Bogarde, doing his best to age himself away from the image of the youthful heartthrob of the Doctor films.
The rest of the film is mostly a flashback that fills us in and explores the background to the event. There's great support from a bespectacled Stanley Baker as a fellow lecturer, a young Michael York as a student, Vivien Merchant as Bogarde's wife and some Italian actress as the student all the blokes are after - she did a number of films but this seems to have been pretty much her last one.
It's beautifully shot, the camera lingers on events to ask you make up your mind about the characters - I thought it was similar to Far From the Madding Crowd but in fact Losey had a hand in another Christie movie, The Go Between, another tale of middle or upper class manners and dubious code of conduct. The more you learn about the characters the less you like them but it invites you to infer from what is not said.
Alexander Knox appears as the emotionally distant university provost - he had a tiny role as the US defence secretary in You Only Live Twice, who sits and watches the space capsule's progress, then seems ready to head off to the golf course once he finds it hasn't blown up.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I missed Accident because I was watching the rather decent Scottish set crime series Annika and Dad was recordimg something else on the player. Instead I caught up with this. Kinda wished I hadn't:
BULLET TRAIN (2022)
For half its runtime, David Leitch’s adaptation of Kotaro Isaka’s novel is an inventive, derivative, chucklesome, intriguing and enjoyable train ride. There is much mirth as Ladybug, a hitman with a well-being crisis, takes the Tokyo-Kyoto Bullet Train intending only to retrieve a briefcase full of money, but ends up embroiled in a feud of escalating violence and stupidity. So after a decent kick off, everyone starts killing, stabbing, poisoning and thumping everyone else and the whole set up becomes a tiresome bore. Brad Pitt re-impersonates his Oscar winning go from Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Brian Tyree Henry do their best to replicate Travolta and Samuel J. Jackson from Pulp Fiction. There’s enough blood and gore to soak at least five Tarantino films. There’s enough profanities to make a monk weep. The end is a horrendous train wreck of CGI impossibilities. By then, it is fair to say, all pretence of seriousness has vanished in favour of killing sprees of the nastiest kind. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should. Ultimately, disappointing.
Oh, I caught the Bullet Train. I enjoyed it a lot - I would have watched Maigret on Talking Pictures TV instead but that can be a bit disheartening - I fancied a beer watching this instead. That said, I'm glad I didn't catch it at the cinema. It does have that slightly odd, echoey feel of Covid movies, the slight sense of social distancing you got in quite a few of the films, the sense the actors are playing against a blue screen all the time, and the whole concept is an exercise in avoidance. Plus, it features the kind of actors who were game for cameos in films of this kind.
I don't see how anyone can say Aaron Taylor-Johnson could be Bond after this given he plays a sort of wide boy Guy Ritchie type character not unlike the bragger from The InBetweeners - it's a good performance, however, He and (checks above review) Brian Tyree Henry have their banter but it's not quite right, not quite comedic enough imo and in some ways the issue is more White and Pink arguing over their code names in Reservoir Dogs, it's fairly derivative. The repeated reference to Thomas the Tank Engine don't really ring true because I'm not sure anyone really grew up with those tales, I mean I sort of did but it's long forgotten.
I lost count of who'd killed each other as it's not helped by many of them coming back from the dead, anyone who didn't think how Bond had his train fight in Spectre without pissing off other passengers could go along with this I guess - actually in some ways Spectre felt like a Covid film didn't it? The finale is all CGI like the plane on fire climax of Die Another Day. And it goes on too long, it's around two and a half hours. Still, there was always something going on...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I wanted to watch that Elvis thing about Pricilla, but I got waylaid and missed the start, so I took charge of this instead:
THE YOUNG ONES (1961)
Cliff Richard may have been Britain’s answer to Elvis Presley, but after his first forays into rock n roll, he transformed himself, much like the King, into a vaguely family friendly institution. Cliff, for all his attributes, never had Elvis’s animal magnetism or his glimmer of grime and grunge. He’s as clean living a middle class lad as you can imagine, frankly, and his songs reflect that. Living Doll virtually trademarked him. The Young Ones is Cliff’s fourth appearance on film following bit parts in Serious Charge and Charlie Drake Stirs It Up and a larger supporting role to Laurence Harvey as a teen singer in Espresso Bongo. Those early movies don’t really prepare one for this British comedy musical, which is much more light-hearted and follows the age-old hard-luck story of staging a theatre show against the odds. And here its Cliff and his musical mates who are down on their luck. Nicky Black [Cliff] sings in the local youth club’s house band. Their ramshackle hall is suddenly purchased by Robert Morley’s pompous property magnate Hamilton Black. He wants to create a tower block. Trouble is, Hamilton Black happens to be Nicky Black’s father. You can write the rest.
Sidney J. Furie directs with half an eye on the star and the rest on the comedic mayhem that surrounds everything. For a genial song-and-dance movie, it’s all a bit frantic. Lots of rushing around. Lots of over excited acting. Things calm down more when the singing starts, but that’s chiefly because for the most part the numbers are designed with big stages in mind. Several go on elaborately for minutes and bore the pants off you. It doesn’t help that four of the songs are sung twice over. Repetition merely makes one feel the writers had run out of ideas. There is an interesting sequence midway where the youngsters break into a dilapidated Finsbury Park theatre and start an impromptu show, using props and costumes abandoned backstage; their persons magically increase from six to twelve. I thought: “Oh, hang on, that’s clever, this is demonstrating the kids gradually tidying and cleaning up the theatre, a sort of cinematic time shift.” Alas, I was wrong, the theatre remains unchanged; so the filmmakers are not that clever. That’s disappointing as one of the early songs, Nothing’s Impossible, incorporates various fantasy elements into the dance routine, and there is nothing so ingenious in the film again, which becomes straightforward and uninteresting. Ultimately, the comedy elements play better than the musical ones and fantasy is kicked into touch, the silly storyline accepted.
Cliff hasn’t got his voice quite into gear yet. Sometimes he sings in a deeper key. The songs are quite uneven. The best of them are the title track and When the Girl in Your Arms is the Girl in Your Heart. These were big hits for Cliff. The Savage, performed by the Shadows, also made the top 10. The movie closes with everyone reconciled and the youth club stage show selling out, making Nicky Black a star. All very neat, but not exactly dangerous. While Cliff never threatened to be as dangerous as Elvis, it is interesting to note that his movies at least attempted to tap into his ability as an entertainer, not just a pop star. Elvis’s myopic manager never cottoned onto the possibility his charge could handle a genuine musical with dance numbers, decent singing co-stars, choreography, etc. The closest he came was with the rather marvellous Viva Las Vegas and the disappointing Frankie and Johnny. The Young Ones goes all out to be a youthful version of The Band Wagon and in that regard it succeeds reasonably well, even if the music is inconsistent and occasionally longwinded. Robert Morley seems to enjoy himself, and while overall I can’t share his enthusiasm, at least I wasn’t embarrassed like I am watching some of those sixties Elvis movies.
Note:
In North America, the film was retitled Wonderful to be Young. A new opening sequence was shot showing Cliff and the Shadows [accompanied by the Mike Sammes Singers, lip synched by dancers] performing Bacharach & David’s Wonderful to be Young. The song was belatedly released in the UK on an obscure compilation box set of the 2000s.
Yeah, I caught 10 mins of The Young Ones - my sister has to go and wiki things to death and she found out the lead actress in that is still alive and in her 90s - that means she was a good few years older than Cliff in that film, as he's in his early 80s or so now. In those days if felt like they had to 'sell' a rock n roll movie as a musical like West Side Story to legitimise the thing, or in case this flash in the pan musical trend suddenly became old hat by the time it reached the cinema.
I caught Paris, Texas, the famous 1984 Wim Wenders film, on a reissue at the Picturehouse. It opens with a guy - played by Harry Dean Stanton - in a chocolate brown suit, battered shoes and a red baseball hat in the desert, sort of Monument Valley territory, walking somehow with a purpose and also no purpose, he enters a deserted gloomy small bar in the middle of nowhere and collapses. Who is he? Why is he mute? Why does he resemble a resentful late 1970s George Harrison recalling a slight on his guitar work from the Get Back sessions?
You might say it's best to go in cold on this so I shouldn't tell you more. Now, the term 'best you see this cold' oft implies that the film soon takes a wild, divergent path that you just didn't see coming, so one shouldn't spoil the surprise. Here the film is so slow-moving albeit involving that if I gave you a couple or so more sentences, I'd have given away the next entire hour of the film, and a lot of the enjoyment is from thinking, 'Where's this going? And how long will it take to get there?'
It's a long movie and at the end I heard a a cinema goer enthusing on exiting how he'd seen it all those years ago and it hadn't lost its mystique. Well, yes, some of the mystique is how a bloke who is mute and penniless can just wander in the desert for four years with no prospects of a job and not die. I suppose tramps are different in the US, there are freight trains they can get on to move across the country, such people are called hobos or panhandlers, they have a bit of the old Tom Sawyer glamour - but even so.
Those familiar with Midnight Run will recognise one scene from it, and the laid-back guitar work is much the same, albeit used to comic effect in the later film. Fans of that Tom Hanks films, jeez, oh, I know, Forrest Gump, will also pick up on how Forrest just took to running and running while on mute to get away from past trauma, there is something of that here.
Now you suppose you might think, wow, those later commercial films ripped this one off a bit, but honestly I'd say they were better and more successful on their own terms than this, though I enjoyed it, it did seem something of a shaggy dog story. Some scenes really didn't add up, you wouldn't for instance let a bloke like that who seemed to have had a breakdown behind the wheel of a car for a long-distance drive, for instance. Later scenes had me wanting to call out social services - and it would take me a lot to do that. The finale or resolution is very well done it must be said, when we find out what had happened but that all said some mysteries remain, such as a romantic age gap thing. Still, it is nice to see a film that doesn't kowtow to an audience but just unfolds at its own speed. You'd be better seeing at the cinema because on DVD you'd just want to forward it, that all said after a hard day's work you'd fall asleep in the cinema most likely.
It looks very beautiful and captures something of the US that somehow doesn't occur in most movies or at least not in the same way. Later scenes of night time urban alienation have something of an Edward Hopper painting.
Maybe The Accountant 2 next week!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
BLOW-UP (1966)
Set in the Swinging London of the 60's, Blow-Up is a fascinating psychological mystery film.
Fashion photographer Thomas captures something very odd on his camera when he photographs two lovers in a park.
His incessant curiosity leads him into an absurd situation, where he ends up questioning his own reality.
A visual delight and a masterpiece.
(Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni - 111 mins)
STAGECOACH (1939)
John Ford was already famous and revered as a filmmaker before he came to make Stagecoach, which is probably the movie that defines him and his ‘style’ the closest. It also, by way of its careful framing, clear narrative and concentration on character at the expense of violent incident defined the look, feel and emotive impact of a ‘classic’ western, an overused term if ever there was one. Big budget and artistically important westerns had fallen by the wayside in the early years of sound in Hollywood. It isn’t entirely obvious why. They had been a staple of the silent era and one can only assume that the enormous budgets splashed on Cimmaron and the like didn’t financially add up. A western also suggested the outdoors, and that was an expensive way to film. New ‘talky’ actors from Broadway were employed for their vocal performance skills and good looks, not for their ability to ride horses, shoot guns and fist fight. It took a film such as Stagecoach, which united the ‘talking’ elements of Broadway with a smattering of the action from the wild west, to demonstrate the emotional places and deeper themes that could be epitomised by the frontier spirit.
Stagecoach takes place almost entirely on the titular journey from Tonto to Lordsburg. The six-horse carriage is driven by Andy Devine, a stock John Ford character actor of bumbling good humour. One of the [uncredited] performers is Chris Pinn-Martin who is a pigeon-English speaking Mexican, a second stock-in-trade. Thomas Mitchell is superb as the drunken, redemptive, Doc Boone, part-semi-hero, part comedy clown, and Louise Platt cuts an arrogant, yet repressed figure as Lucy Mallory, the pregnant wife of an absent Cavalry Captain; they also pre-empt iconic Ford characters, notably from his famous Cavalry Trilogy. Most of the other protagonists, however, are distinctly un-Fordian in their makeup, particularly the Ringo Kid, who is a monosyllabic, romantic dreamer of a gunslinger – a man caught between the tripod stools of loyalty, justice and freedom. Love solves all his problems, and a little bit of killing, mostly pesky Apache Indians.
John Wayne is remarkable in a role which could be termed his second debut. Way back in 1930, he starred in Raoul Walsh’s epic frontier film The Big Trail, which flopped because the projectors and screens needed to play it didn’t exist and hence nobody saw it. That’s a pity because The Big Trail is far better and more spectacular than most films of the decade and Wayne himself is not as bad in it as many commentators have you believe. Billed as a star for three more movies, he was quickly discarded and thrown into poverty row quickies and serials for studios like Monogram, of which he made over one hundred in a decade of effort. He was good friends and drinking partners with director John Ford, although they’d never made a movie together until this. Ford openly recruited Wayne for the part, insisted he took it, that producer Walter Wagner accepted it and then promptly bullied the six-foot four-inch ‘Duke’ into delivering his first bona fide ‘John Wayne performance’ where his lanky, half-limping walk, his long expressive glances, his cool inquisitive eyes, sudden sunny smile, robust physique and curt, cuttingly effective sentences create a youthful version of what would become his most recognisable persona, the amiable, slightly animalistic 1950s and 60s everyman, family man, six-gun shooting hero. He crossed off other genres too, but Stagecoach and John Ford pinpointed exactly what made John Wayne John Wayne. It was the silences, the pauses, the imposing delivery and the statuesque broad figure. He physically and psychologically towers over everyone in this film. Wayne’s Ringo Kid is the most assured character, certain of his role in the world, his demands, strengths and weaknesses. His arrival in the narrative comes at an opportune moment where, having met all the passengers on the stage run and beginning to weary of the small talk, a rifle shot echoes, Andy Devine’s Buck pulls up the horses and Bert Glennon’s camera zooms onto John Wayne's face, from longshot as he twirls his gun to a sudden impressive close up. It is one of cinema’s great introductions. Curious then, that Ringo is immediately put into a place of discomfort, riding on the floor of the carriage, at everyone’s feet, the lowest of the low. He is, of course, a man on the run, but what Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nicols are doing here is placing their hero at the position of their audience. Ringo becomes our eyes and ears, he sees and silently judges the behaviour of the passengers, he listens without comment unless it is to pass a remark that belittles the seated folks, visually his ‘betters’. From this point on, the audience has an identifiable hero, a man to instinctively trust and believe in.
Claire Trevor’s prostitute, Dallas, instinctively sees him that way too and offers surreptitious half-glances at the hulking Adonis in prairie hides who blithely accepts his position of lowliness, but retains an air of palpable yet guarded menace. She understands his point of view: we saw it when she boarded the stagecoach and the ladies of Tonto turn their backs. Mrs Mallory refuses her offers of dignified assistance in the coach, preferring the Southern courtesies of itinerate gambler Hatfield [John Carradine, also outstanding]. We detect a sneaking glimpse of physical attraction between the pair, but this is a McGuffin of which Hitchcock would be proud. Instead the romance involves Ringo and Dallas, an affair of such swiftness it could only occur on a two day stage ride, like the kids who bonded over a stick of Wrigley’s in that chewing gum ad. The romantic sections of the film come as a surprise and really needed more development; Ringo’s naivety seems wholly inappropriate for a rancher, killer and jailbird. The romance doesn’t harm Stagecoach very much, but in a movie of much impeccable storytelling, it is an unforgivable oversight. Ringo’s declaration of love seems impulsive. At least at this point Dallas rejects him, but later seems to change her mind without good reason. Well, Ringo has a ranch and a half-finished cabin. Women were easy to please on the western frontier.
Towards the climax of the movie, Ringo walks Dallas to her old home, a dilapidated slum in the cheap part of Lordsburg. Here Ford’s ability to show and not tell is bleakly spectacular as the couple walk past whore houses, bars, the destitute, drunk and seemingly dead, a gin alley dump of sordidness and squalor. Ringo’s straightforwardness endears him to us. He is unphased by her surroundings. He knows, as we do, that a fate worse than this awaits him: he is in town to exact revenge on the three men who killed his Pa and brother. Staring death in the face and accepting it is far worse than the foulness of living. As with all heroes he offers hope: “I'm still here, ain't I?" he drawls, "I’ll be back in a few minutes."
We don’t witness the gunfight, or the deaths, only its first shot. We already know Luke Plummer and his brothers are doomed for the arrogant, virtually silent killer has drawn two black aces and two black eights during a game of blackjack: a dead man’s hand. Ford carefully draws out the tension leading up to the gunfight, utilising silence as a metaphor for fear. Nobody says a word as Plummer rises from the card table, orders a whiskey, asks for his shotgun, waits for his siblings. Instead they shuffle awkwardly into the shadows, faces vanishing, and the three killers stand marooned among the fug and stench of a barroom, waiting for the real hell to envelop them. In fact, although the team of song writers and composer won the Academy Award for their evocative folk music inspired music score, the film is mostly a silent enterprise, reminding us that Ford was a great silent filmmaker, while also evoking the long, expressive and compassionate glances between Wayne and Trevor. Meanwhile Tom Tyler’s Luke Plummer has a face etched in stone, a murderer’s countenance, a man willing to kill, knowing he can be killed. Like Ringo, he accepts his fate: his brothers can’t even shoot a stray mangy dog, so he, like the audience, know exactly the outcome. The happy ending for [almost] everyone else feels entirely appropriate.
The screenplay is brilliant, encapsulating its characters succinctly and accurately. The only weak point may be Mr Benskin, a shouty dishonest bank clerk who is nothing more than a windy bore. The exterior cinematography is grand, especially those views of Monument Valley, a location Ford fell in love with, chiefly for its cliff cut vistas. Interiors, including the carriage itself, were built with ceilings, unusual at the time; the effect is to provide a sense of claustrophobia, both physically and emotionally. It is only when the characters exit the coach, for instance, that they are truly able to be themselves. Occasionally these essentially small spaces are photographed with too wide a frame, giving not just width but an unexpected extra depth, almost as if we are watching a living painting from outside the frame. The technique is so good Ford would revisit the look time and again until his retirement, especially for his westerns. Orson Welles rated the film so highly he watched it over forty times before making Citizen Kane as he considered it the best example of how to structure, interpret and shoot a movie. Famously, the Apaches attack the coach and there is a tense chase and gunbattle, orchestrated by stuntman Yakima Canutt, but Stagecoach isn’t really about the action, it is about quickly built, bonded and broken relationships, about decency and diligence and moral integrity.
I don’t like the word ‘classic’ but Stagecoach solidly falls into that category. Released in early 1939, it didn’t single-handedly relaunch the western, but it did prove to audiences that westerns could be intelligent and artistic. Often, they failed on one or the other or both. 1939 saw a slew of big western films Dodge City, Jesse James, Drums Along the Mohawk and Destry Rides Again among them. 1939 also spawned lesser fare, like The Oklahoma Kid with Cagney and Bogart playing at gangsters in cowboy gear. Stagecoach’s lasting legacy though simply has to be the star making turn of John Wayne, an actor not only huge in stature and personality, but also in his endearing commonality. There may have been prettier stars and better actors, but there hasn’t ever been one as popular.
@chrisno1 Thank you for the excellent review on Stagecoach. Please keep up the great work.
SHANE (1953)
Shane (Alan Ladd), a mysterious gunfighter rides into a remote town in the Wyoming Territory, where the local cattle baron Rufus Ryker is callously intimidating the local homesteaders to abandon their lands so that he can usurp them.
Shane, now working as a farmhand for a family of ranchers, will have none of it and confronts Ryker's goons. This sets off a chain of vendetta's with Ryker hiring a notorious gunslinger to dispose of Shane and the troublesome homesteaders.
Beautifully picturized in the high plains of Wyoming and now lovingly remastered for Bluray, Shane is a visual masterpiece.
Highly recommended.
(Directed by George Stevens - 118 minutes)
Two nice reviews of two of my favourite westerns.
In Stagecoach they’re playing poker not blackjack though. I’ve no problem with the word “classic” and as Chris says this thoroughly deserves that title. And John Wayne is one of the all time greats, whether the Hollywood chattering classes like it or not.
Though it’s not mentioned in Shane the movie reflects the events of the real life Johnson County War where homesteaders were routinely forced from their land by ranchers with ever increasing violence. The whole cast is awesome and the shooting of Elisha Cook Jr. by the evil Jack Palance heralded the beginning of graphic violence in westerns.
@CoolHandBond
Thank you for the kind words.
I never knew anything about the Johnson County War in Wyoming. I am going to read up on it. Thank you for the information.
DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD (1967)
a.k.a CARRY ON: DON’T LOSE YOUR HEAD
The thirteenth Carry On episode was the first made under a new production and distribution deal between producer Peter Rogers and the Rank Organisation. Previously the Carry On films had been made in association with Anglo Amalgamated and there was some uncertainty over the ownership of the Carry On logo. Hence, Rogers’s first productions – this one and Follow That Camel – did not initially have a Carry On label. It is fairly obvious that they are cut from the same cloth, and Rank even issued production and advertising materials that hinted at such. The public were not fooled either, so the moniker was back for Carry On Doctor.
On with Don’t Lose Your Head, which basically rips the piss out of The Scarlet Pimpernel and does a very fine job of it too. As with most Carry Ons, the script runs out of decent gags towards the end, replaced here by a long sword fight of chaos and destruction, but for most of the ninety minute run time, Sid James, Kenneth Williams, Jim Dale, et al are on top form and cracking the crude jokes effectively and with some dexterity. Charles Hawtrey is particularly effete and obnoxious as a French aristocrat; under any other actor’s skills this would be a boorish interpretation, but Hawtrey makes the Duc de Pommfrit amusing and sympathetic [“He’s had his chips,” barks one wag]. Hawtrey also has the movie’s best line as he tries to seduce three impressionable young ladies with tall tales of his daring do. “Shall we continue this conversation outside,” he trills, “I know a nice little nook.” Cue disgusted glances from the girls who all absent the table. “Oh well,” he sighs, “Obviously not the nookie type.”
In fact, Talbot Rothwell’s screenplay is a gag-fest of much raucous mirth. Kenneth Williams’s revolutionary captain is called Citizen Camenbert [“The big cheese!”] and his sidekick is Peter Butterworth’s downtrodden Citizen Bidet. They share a master and servant relationship at odds with the revolutionary fervour and a testament to each man’s own stupidity. “Remember you must be circumspect,” suggests Williams, to which Butterworth replies deadpan: “Oh, I was, sir; as a baby.” Williams’s appalled glance is admonishment enough. He’s similarly irksome with Joan Sims, who plays his courtesan, Desiree. Hiccupping over a glass of champagne, she says: “I can’t help it. The bubbles get lodged in my chest.” Williams stares at her ample cleavage: “Yes. There’s room for quite a few lodgers in there.” Apparently he and Sims did not always get on, so the excellent repartee they share here is a welcome surprise.
So too the double straight man – comic routine of Sid James and Jim Dale as two bored British aristocrats who set out to rescue as many of the condemned entitled French as they can. James’s Sir Rodney Effing is an aging scamp, Dale his accompanying cheerful pooch. For all that, we know James will have plenty of opportunities to deliver his trademark filthy laugh. For instance, a guest at his lavish party declares “You’ve always had magnificent balls.” Cue a restrained cackle. Even better was the “act natural” line, delivered as he and Dale prance around in each other’s arms on the dance floor. There is an interesting moment midway through the film when James breaks the fourth wall and speaks to the camera, revealing his lustful and amusing emotions towards Dany Robin’s bounteous Jacqueline; she replies in kind.
The film looks marvellous. The budget was higher than previous efforts and it shows. Costumes were borrowed from Rank’s wardrobes and sets from Hammer’s Bray studios. They even found a British built French chateau to film the climatic sequence, which kicks off as Miss Robin plucks a harp [“I didn’t know she was good at plucking…”] to the tune and French lyrics of She Loves You. Miss Robin was quite famous in France and she cuts a pretty dash in a role which would otherwise have gone to Angela Douglas. Talbot Rothwell packs in plenty of jokes revolving around her marvellously attuned anatomy. It would be fair to say the film benefits from not having so many regular cast members, a feature that would drag down some later entries.
Don’t Lose Your Head isn’t a top-top Carry On, but it is very amusing and well-made and the cast seem to take it lightly without going over the top. I enjoyed rewatching this one and while I don’t quite rate it as highly as Follow That Camel, it certainly has a more professional feel to it, which even that later slice of hilarity seems to lack.
Very good.
I’m of an age where I love the Carry On…films. I think Peter Butterworth is underrated, he’s an absolute gift in these 😁