Excellent movie and arguably Kirk Douglas' finest hour.
That said...the SPARTACUS series that ran on Starz for four seasons is my preferred take on the character. It's over the top on the sex/nudity/violence but the characters and the plotting in general really work beautifully.
IF you're going to give it a go, you need to be aware of two things.
The first few episodes of season 1 (titled BLOOD AND SAND) are really, really shaky. It looks and feels like a lame ripoff of the movie 300 with questionable looking CGI blood. Stick with it because the show turns from 'this is crap' to 'this is AWESOME' around episode 4.
The actor playing Spartacus, Andy Whitfield, got cancer after they finished filming season 1. The producers did season 0 (GODS OF THE ARENA) as a prequel season to buy him time to do cancer treatments and hopefully recover, but he unfortunately died. As such, they had to recast the lead role (with Liam McIntyre) for seasons 2 and 3. One other role got recast as well but she's a supporting role and easy to move forward with. Liam is good as Spartacus but Andy is on another level. Indeed, Andy would have made for a great Bond...he has that 'it' factor. Anyways, when you watch the show on streaming, you'll see that the seasons are 0, 1, 2, and 3. The correct order to watch them is 1, 0, 2, and 3.
Marlon Brando plays a German ex-patriot Robert Crain who is coerced by British Intelligence to disable scuttling charges on a cargo ship carrying rubber to Nazi occupied Bordeaux from Japan. By posing as a SS officer, Crain gains entry to the cargo ship 'Ingo' commanded by Captain Mueller (Yul Brenner), a disillusioned mariner and First Officer Kruse (Martin Benrath), a staunch card carrying Nazi.
Crain now has to figure out where the scuttling charges have been placed in the ship and disable them before they are to be ambushed by allied ships. The reason for this operation being that the allies are also desperately in need of rubber and Nazi authorities have ordered all merchant ships carrying precious cargoes to have scuttling charges placed on them, so as to deny the allies access to these resources in case of capture.
A tense and gripping espionage film, with great performances by Brando and Brenner.
Orson Welles’s surrealist’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s absurdist’s nightmare of a novel is striking in its bleakness of visual presentation and by the political overtures of the script. Whether it is any good – whether it is enjoyable as pure entertainment – will perhaps forever be open to long and protracted debate. Kafka’s masterpiece of the bizarre revolves around the ‘trial’ of Josef K, a bank clerk accused of no crime who is arrested and forced to endure the labyrinthine machinations of his unnamed country’s legal processes. After a fashion, a distinctly unique, withering and satirically paranoid fashion, Josef K’s story mimics that of the Victorian Chancery Court portrayed with contemptuous aloofness by Charles Dickens in Bleak House. There, and here, the law is not the theatre of justice but an unwieldy machine of money generation, moral decay and individual despair. Kafka, however, included an authoritarian overseer secret police, an inclusion that hints strongly of the one-party despotic workings of the new Soviet Union, as well as an overt sexual undercurrent that suggests lust plays a large part in people’s decision making processes, swayed not by sense but by physical presence.
Kafka’s novel is generally considered one of German literature’s great masterpieces. The same can’t quite be said of Welles’s film for western cinema; that says more about the source novel and the difficulties of adapting it than it does about the film itself, which is very good in parts, mystifying in others, and terrible in some. The soundtrack doesn’t help. Poorly recorded and with characters speaking over each other all the time, it is sometimes impossible to catch the dialogue leading to moments of uncertainty in the narrative [stupidly, I recorded it off Talking Pictures without the subtitles]. Despite this, the impressive look of the thing, all those long shadowy corridors, the huge trial hall and even bigger typist’s office – where hundreds of clerks sit tapping away at keyboards, a noisy European reimagination of Billy Wilders’ insurance office from The Apartment – in Welles’s vision industry even financial industry is enormous, specific, ordered and extremely noisy. Welles, as is his want, photographs from peculiar angles creating space where there is none and closing in on his characters when they are in the open spaces; the effect is a claustrophobia of mounting tension, climaxed by Josef’s visit to the court painter Titorelli, who lives imprisoned in an attic surrounded by scrabbling, voyeuristic children, an existence completely separate from the outside world. Similarly, the sudden resolution of the novel is enacted almost verbatim but is equally out of place – Welles’s version is worse than Kafka’s – and one feels that a more astute script writer may have adapted it better. Here, Welles in his desire to recreate the book so slavishly hasn’t thought through the possibilities of minor alteration.
The performances are noteworthy. Anthony Perkins has just the right amount of sturdiness and fallibility to portray the alternately confused and enlightened Josek K. A good looking actor of the time, he is able to present himself as an innocent, as well as a potential sexual quarry for the various women who seduce him. At the time Perkins’s homosexuality was not common knowledge, so retrospectively critics and commentators have speculated on the potential for pro- or anti-gay statements in the narrative. They are not there. Welles’s script focusses on the plight of the falsely accused and the peculiarities of justice system, how it misinforms and fractures relationships to the point of personal oblivion. Hence, the same men who came to arrest Josef K during the brilliant opening scene at Josef’s apartment, the same men he witnessed being whipped into submission for failing to apprehend him appropriately are also the men who return to lead him to his unratified sentence, as if the law men not the law ultimately please themselves, suggesting of course the vindictiveness of totalitarian regimes.
Welles bags the role of Albert Hastler, the Advocate, whose attitude to the law is to drag cases out to interminable length, thus no justice is ever meted, only invoices and bills and investigations – his offices are piled high with manuscripts, documents and reference books, an unholy mess that adds to the sense of a system at breaking point. The observant painter Titorelli might be surrounded by children aping his own actions, but Hastler is equally hemmed in by his own craft; like Titorelli his only real master is own warped conscience. We wonder, finally but not for the first time, if Josef K is not experiencing some horrific dream – for leaving Titorelli’s abode leads him directly to the courthouse, a geographical impossibility.
The various women are played with a scheming seductiveness by Jeanne Moreau, Romi Schneider [particularly good], Elsa Martinelli and Suzanne Flon. Akim Tamiroff is Hastler’s long attached client Bloch, whose case will never come to court because he pays the Advocate retainers to ensure it doesn’t. Our own Michael Lonsdale has a small part as a priest. Edmond Richard was a French cinematographer who would gain more renown in the 1970s. His work is brutally stark, giving the monochrome lighting an intense brooding palate. The music screeches at us mostly, before ascending to waves of Thomas Albinoni’s melancholic Adagio in G Minor. The beauty of the piece reminds us again of the dreamlike quality of the narrative: is Josef K asleep listening to the rise and fall of Albinoni’s string melodies? A bookending parable relates the purpose of law in this unnamed nation, to satisfy only individual curiosity.
Overall, while the film doesn’t quite succeed, it does raise questions of ethical practice. Josef K himself says: ‘I wanted to see if the inside of this legal system was as loathsome as I guessed it was.’ By the end he understands entirely the premise of the system, as M. Bloch notes: ‘People are saying from that expression on your lips, they could tell that you’d be found guilty.’ Justice is a foregone conclusion and Bloch’s statement mimics the behaviour of the inquisitive policemen that initially arrest Josef. His fate, whatever his answers, was sealed before they even entered his apartment. That cannot be justice in any form.
The central performance is good enough to evoke sympathy and the shifting, roving camera plus the sudden, unflashy editing, aids our sense of disorientation. There isn’t much wrong with The Trial and yet it is not quite as on the artistic money as Welles’s films of the forties. Watchable, just about, but not that much more, chiefly because it is so hard to comprehend. The Trial is an intellectual trial itself and simply doesn’t work as entertainment. Laudable then, and occasionally a brilliant spectacle, but the film really needs a big studio to have faith in its director and give him the tools to create his trade effectually and thus successfully. Instead, The Trial feels swamped in ambition with little informed realisation.
After having his submarine sunk in the Bungo Straits (area 7 / Japan) by the destroyer Akikaze, Commander P.J. Richardson (Clark Gable) is given command of the Balao-class submarine USS Nerka.
Richardson wants to go back to area 7 and take out the Akikaze, even though he has been forbidden from entering the Bungo Straits by the naval high command.
Richardson also has to deal with the misgivings of the new crew, who have doubts about his leadership and an executive officer Lieutenant Jim Bledsoe (Burt Lancaster), who is skeptical of his tactics.
What follows is a series of nerve-wracking naval battles, ending in a surreal standoff with a Japanese submarine.
A mightily impressive reboot of the ‘sword and sandal’ epic genre, so good it won plaudits, Oscars, earned a ton of money and rejuvenated a lost art of filmmaking, that of telling simple stories on an enormous scale.
Gladiator is based on a 1958 novel called Those About To Die, which I have not read, but the screen version feels familiar from a number of those 1950s and 60s epics, touching firstly on the German frontier we saw in The Fall of the Roman Empire, before morphing into the gladiatorial arenas of Spartacus – one scheming senator is even called Gracchus and Oliver Reed plays a more acerbic and worldly wise version of Peter Ustinov’s Batiatus. The film misses the overt religiosity of some of the genre’s more rigid period pieces, and that is probably a good thing. Instead we are wrapped up in bloody combat, political shenanigans, a hot bed of incest and familial rivalry, patricide, rebellion, squalor, glamour, death and glory. There is almost too much to fit in two and a half hours. As befits a director like Ridley Scott, who founded his early career with movies beholden to action, most specifically the one-to-one battles of The Duellists, the main thrust of Gladiator is how to present its characters in a vivid violent arena and yet still elicit our sympathy with performances of worldly gravitas and emotional impact.
Central to the film’s success is Russell Crowe as the doomed hero Maximus Decimus Meridius, whose revenge driven motivations are given an otherworldly condition by the use of ethereal visions and the constant referencing of the soil as his bedrock of soul [he is a farmer, he constantly fingers the soil to rough his hands before battle, he speaks constantly of home not as a place but as an existence, he dreams of it even at the point of death]. Interestingly, he is a Spaniard and there is some blending of history with Arab looking inhabitants in the deserts of Andalusia, but placing Maximus outside the confines of Rome makes him an invader rather than a rebel; this allows us to fully identify with his character, unburdened as he is by the confines and expectations of Roman history. The latter falls on Joaquin Pheonix as Emperor Commodus, whose reign is brutally condensed and includes much of the misrepresentations found in Samuel Bronston’s 1964 The Fall of the Roman Empire, that he murdered his father, was in love with his sister, fought in the Coliseum, etc. The condensed version of Commodus’s life thus neglects the fact he was a popular ruler with the Roman ‘mob’, got on well with ordinary soldiers and brought a period of peace to the empire; it was the senators and generals who despised him as peace brings no profit in trade, slaves, land, military glory, public recognition, etc. The narrative instead focusses on his final two years, recasting them as a few months, when he became paranoidal and homicidal, seeing insurrection at every corner. That aspect comes across brilliantly through Pheonix’s cultured playing and the nervy accompaniment of Connie Nielsen as his sister, Lucilla. A prime political schemer, Richard Harris’s Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, recognises Lucilla would make the perfect ruler if only she were a man. His preference for a Spanish general over his own son fosters a resentment only solved by bitter recrimination.
The scenes in the arena have a freshness and horrific value to them which has not diminished over the last twenty-five years. The blending of the CGI with the real is superbly orchestrated, much better than the virtual realities the cinema seems to prefer these days. The sound recording in particular is visceral and heart pumpingly loud. You can almost feel the sound of clashing swords, roaring tigers and galloping hooves. Hans Zimmer’s music score works mainly by surprising us. The quietude that climaxes the opening Germanic battle is notable in its restraint, for instance. The running theme of home is well carried in the main theme. The editing by Pietro Scalia is a tour de force in how to cut a historical film. He isn’t flashy, remembering the solid base this kind of project stems from, and pandering to Ridley Scott’s austere direction he instead relies on the empathetic long takes, the landscapes of countryside and city, the sudden jousts of action in the arena. Our swirling first view of the Coliseum is shivering to the spine, as it might have been for a genuine combatant. We perhaps might have preferred not to have moments of slow motion.
There is a tendency to overlook the epic genre as a piece of cinematic grand theatre with no human substance, and that is true of many films in the category, but Gladiator achieves much through its volume of violent intensity and insightful, if stereotypical, characters. The film looks and sounds glorious. It is easy to see why it won awards. Ultimately, if anything justifies the film, it is the financial result, which was as immense as the movie itself.
I finally caught up with Superman and really enjoyed it, it felt fresh and like a kids' movie and that's a compliment - the other comic book adaptations were less kids' movies and more, well, movies for fanboys who'd grown up and wanted something else on some level, I found them a bit heavy going and you can say the same for the Bond movies, they haven't been approached as kids' movies or perhaps I should say 'kids' movies for adults' for a long time, it's like they're all trying to be epic and Lawrence of Arabia instead.
I enjoyed this more than any other Superman film since Superman: The Movie in February 1979 which I saw on a loooong double bill with Death on the Nile. At least, we went to see DOTN for Mum's birthday but it was sold out so we saw Superman first, as there were seats free, then followed it up with that one.
That said, I didn't even bother with Superman 3 and 4 at the cinema, the series went off very quickly once Richard Donner's influence was gone. I did see Man of Steel.
This one had lots of jokes which really helped, and a fresh irreverent spirit. It solved the main problem with the Superman universe in that what works for a comic strip or TV serial which takes place over weeks or months just doesn't for a movie series which spans years. I mean, the whole idea of Clark Kent deceiving Lois Lane is fine for an episodic adventure but in a movie comes across as creepy and patronising. And that is one big difference between 1978 and now, because back then it was a big deal and okay to have a handsome, brilliant man as your hero, chiefly because that was the era - we had Elvis Presley, JFK, Cassius Clay, Connery as Bond, the Beatles, and so on - lots of handsome men standout in their field, the big mouth, the guy so Reeve as Superman was fine, now he'd be seen as asking for a smack.
Here we find out immediately that Lane is a thing with Clark Kent and she knows about him as Superman so she isn't kept in the dark - doesn't quite make it clear how they negotiate the fact he's an alien and it doesn't really go there, in fact at all. That was always the big problem with trying to adapt Superman to the adult universe because really it's tragic - an orphan in a world that is not his own, no one to mate with, it would be quite lonely but this film sidesteps a lot of that implied melancholic feeling though it flags the issues, simply cos it acts like a kids' movie.
This movie is more collegiate which may invite comparisons with the Scooby gang of Spectre.
The existence of other mutant superheroes solved another problem we saw in Supes 1 and 2 - that being so super, he doesn't really have much to pitch himself against, I mean in the first film it's a coming of age flick and they are often hard to pen sequels for imo because the original arc is an origins story and you can't replicate that. There is the surprise of his first appearance. But in the second one he has to fight the other Krypton refugees - which he accidentally freed - and then one starts thinking, okay, all round it's a bad idea that that crowd showed up at all. By the third one the series seems done, given that in the second film the romance between Clark and Lois was done too.
Here there are plenty of other characters to make Superman less of a lonely figure and Hoult's Luther comes across I am pleased to say as a very nasty piece of work.
It's said the story is a metaphor for Putin and Ukraine - with Trump as Luther, wanting a slice of territory which does sometimes suggest itself in his dealings with Putin but intentionally or not the whole film really does play out instead as Israel and Gaza - with Trump as Luther again, given its dusty Middle East setting, to the point where you would expect Mossad or Black Cube to be getting out a file on the director James Gunn and seeing if he ever made it out to Epstein Island.
I liked David Corenswet as Superman but what a name for an actor, couldn't he have changed it? I can't see how Cavill could have played this as this character was meant to be younger and more naive, anyway wasn't Cavill's character in a different cinematic universe? Liked his relationship with Lois in this too, though the action slugfest latterly became a bit much, not sure how Krpto the Dog came about and for most of us the arrival of a final character in the final scene is a real WTAF moment. Some fans may not appreciate the reworking of Superman's parents either though a theme of the movie is how you shouldn't believe what you're told, by any kind of State organisation either.
A brilliant 1980's techno-thriller, which remains relevant to the present day.
Computer whizz kid David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), who routinely hacks his high school's computer to replace his grades, comes across a gaming catalogue of a video game company and decides to hack their computer system to play their games.
He manages to enter their computer via a backdoor password and proceeds to play a game with the computer, not realizing that he has accidentally activated an advanced military computer system, which is now running a real world war game program.
What follows is a thrilling adventure of trying to set things right.
Created at the height of the Cold War, this gem of a film predicted self conscious artificial intelligence systems 42 years back.
Boy meets girl, falls in love and they live happily ever...
NOPE.
This isnot what happens in this film.
Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) seems to have met the girl of his dreams, Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) and they plan to meet up at the diner she works at, after her night shift is over.
Harry unfortunately wakes up late and drives up to the diner in a hurry.
While awaiting her return call on a payphone, Harry picks up the receiver to hear a desperate voice.
The man on the other end tells him that a nuclear war is about to break out in 70 minutes.
You can clearly imagine where the story goes on from there.
The cheesy romance film nose dives into a feverish nightmare.
I have never seen a movie quite like this.
The 80's aesthetic, the desperation, the sweet romance inter-twixt with nuclear armageddon and the hypnotic synth music of Tangerine Dream.
Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr, son of the Leslie Neilsen character from the original series of movies as well as 'Police Squad" (in colour). It's good casting and he does well, as does Pamela Anderson as the leading lady.
There are some terrific jokes plus a few bad ones, just as before, but the pacing lags in the middle and the craziness doesn't snowball as it used to. Perhaps too much plot which isn't necessary, though there is one good plot device.
For a short movie, it has more endings than "The Lord Of The Rings". I suspect a sequel will follow, and I'll go see that too.
Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) working in Naval Intelligence, falls in love with socialite Susan Atwell (Sean Young).
The problem is...she is having an affair with Farrell's boss, Secretary of Defence David Brice (Gene Hackman).
Tempers flare when Secretary Brice realizes that Susan has been seeing another man behind his back.
An accident happens.
I am not going to spoil the plot by going any further.
But let me tell you this...this is one of the finest suspense thriller movies you will ever see, with an incredible plot twist in the end.
Tight scripting, excellent acting (especially Will Patton who plays Scott Pritchard, Brice's general counsel) and a gripping story that keeps you at the edge of your seat.
I've never seen this Alfred Hitchcock classic before. Joan fountain plays Lina, a woman from the upper class. She meets Jonnie, played by Cary Grant, a charming playboy. As the marriage develops Lina becomes increasingly suspicious of Jannie, both his nature and plans. I have to say Grant plays the charmer with a dark side very well. Hitchcock elevates a story that would be pretty unremarkable in a lesser director's hands into a fine psychological thriller. it's also remarkable how stylish the two leads are. One thing I don't like very much is the film score. When any tension happens, the music suddenly swells into operatic heights only to calm down just as abruptly. I think the movie would benefit a lot from a more typical thriller score. I want to avoid any spoilers about the ending. What I can say is that several endings were filmed and in my opinion the best version wasn't chosen, but it works best if you see it as ambiguous. Just to be clear, this movie is well worth watching. There are some very good scenes in the movie, and the best (and best known) is probably this one:
The two-word expression ‘classic movie’ is an overused and overhyped one. Occasionally, however, a film is so good it transcends both the hype and the familiarity and truly rests is golden laurels firmly on the cushion of ‘classic cinema’. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve is a still relevant acerbic look at fame and fortune in the theatre world and matches a caustic and darkly humorous script to a cast full of brilliant performances. 'Classic' indeed.
Stand out among the cast in a career best showing is Bette Davis, who as Margo Channing, a fading but brilliant and gloriously catty Broadway actress, bestrides the film with her drawling delivery and the demonstrative neatness of her physical responses. There is a moment when while at dinner with her long term partner, the director Bill Sampson – Gary Merrill in a part clearly written with Humphrey Bogart in mind [Mankiewicz would eventually cast Bogart as a movie director in the similarly famed obsessed The Barefoot Contessa] – Davis raises her head an inch in mock salute to the critic and acid barbed socialite Addison de Witt. The simple act betrays all her contempt and loathing of the venomous de Witt. George Sanders is suitably smooth, suitably scheming as de Witt, a man who lusts after young starlets, first Miss Casswell from the “Copacabana school of acting” [Marilyn Monroe in an early star-making role] then the titular Eve Harrington, who he impresses with ambition and courtesy. Eve is played by Anne Baxter, first with nervous deference and then with a conniving nastiness as her career morphs into a modern version of Margo Channing, the actress who is her inspiration and becomes her rival. That relatively insignificant support acts such as Merrill, Monroe, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe and Gregory Ratoff can hold their own among this trio of excellence is a credit to a writer / director who knows exactly what he is doing with his characters and his plot, skilfully weaving them like a thread on a loom until the pattern is revealed and begins to repeat itself, not once but twice, the ingenue Pheobe impersonating Eve in the same fashion as Eve imitated Margo Channing. Here, there are lines of dialogue so deft as to be almost written by the comic gods, so smoothly delivered you don’t get the joke until a sentence is completely finished [a rarity in these days of turgid physical comedy], so delightful you fix a smile on your lips with sublime happiness.
The subject of freefalling careers, fading looks and forgotten histories is repeated to a degree in Billy Wilder’s take on fame and fandom, Sunset Boulevard. Released the same year, Sunset is a grandstand film all of its own, with a clever conceit about its narrator, but the story there concentrates on a single person, Gloria Swanson’s silent star Norma Desmond and her struggle with an unfulfilled retirement. Eve ponders the next generation and the next, how the ambitions of the present affect the relationships of those around them for the future, as well as how the outside influencers and promoters wreak havoc and harm while claiming a propensity to be doing nothing but good for their client. A rare counterpoint is Thelma Ritter’s Birdie Coonan, a wardrobe mistress with a firm head and an even rougher tongue than Margo; she sees all before her and tells it so. “She’s watching you,” she states, “learning your every move.” This just before Margo catches Eve pretending to act out a scene from her latest stage play. Davis pauses before delivering her line, the wait enough for us to recognise she too has her doubts about the naïve little madam from San Francisco. Curious that Ritter’s character disappears half way through, her suspicions justified to us, but she isn’t around to gloat.
The best written American movies of the era were all superb comedies, either of satire or screwball, all with a hint of darkness: Eve, Sunset, Capote’s Beat the Devil, MacKendrick’s, Odets’s and Lehman’s Sweet Smell of Success and Wilder’s and I. A. L. Diamond’s outrageous Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. With examples in past eras as good as this, one wonders why modern American cinema can’t seem to make a half decent comedy without resorting to fart and fanny jokes or animating the characters for us. All About Eve is a fantastic film of much joy, some devilment and from its characters hints of genuine hubris. It won a clutch of well-deserved Oscars, although shamefully Bette Davis lost out to Judy Holliday whose turn in Born Yesterday was a reimagining of a role she’d acted before, without recognition, in Adam’s Rib. A case of the Academy rewarding the right actress in the wrong film.
I instruct you all to watch All About Eve and learn how movies ought to be made, with clarity, sophistication, wit and intrigue. You know what, I think ‘genius’ might be a more appropriate word than ‘classic’.
Directed by Walter Grauman, 633 Squadron is a fictional WW2 movie based on real RAF operations against Nazi Germany in Norway.
Norwegian naval lieutenant Erik Bergman reports the location of a top secret V-2 rocket fueling station to the RAF, that is situated underneath an over hanging cliff at the end of a narrow fjord north of Bergen and heavily protected by anti-aircraft machine gun batteries.
Wing Commander Roy Grant (Cliff Robertson), commander of the 633 Squadron is tasked with destroying the facility by targeting the cliff above it with earthquake munitions (ground penetrators).
In order to achieve this feat, the squadron will have to fly their de Havilland Mosquitos (DH 98) in a very precise manner to secure the hit on the right spots to trigger an earthquake, leading to the collapse of the cliff straight onto the fueling station.
Bergman also volunteers to aid the Norwegian resistance in taking out the anti-aircraft guns prior to the planned strike, but things don't go according to plan. (As it always is...)
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Overall a very good war film with commendable special effects and aerial photography and an engaging story that keeps you hooked till the end.
Of the weird and wonderful strangeness that emanated from the cinema of Britian in the 1960s, performance is quite possibly the weirdest and most wonderful, to the point many contemporary observers found it impossible to describe, and many still do today. The general consensus back in 1970 was that Donald Cammell’s and Nicolas Roeg’s debut directing feature was a disjointed mess of ideas and visuals that failed to connect coherently and strained an initially interesting, tense and violent gangster narrative beyond reasonable measure. They may have a point, certainly for the casual viewer. However, performance, like Nicolas Roeg’s best films [Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth, etc] requires repeated viewing for clarity, allowing the thought process behind the story to germinate, allowing us to see through the violent splash of bloodied gangsters and the flash and dash of a musician’s bohemian, indolent lifestyle. The oddest facet to performance, is that it is writer-director Donald Cammell who is the driving force behind the disjointed, disruptive narrative. Cammell though became less influential over time and it is Nic Roeg who takes up the baton of disarray for his directorial journey
James Fox is Chas Devlin, gangster Harry Flower’s number one enforcer, a man who enjoys the work of intimidation and retribution a shade too much for comfort. Johnny Shannon’s Harry Flowers barks ineffectually at his young charge. Harry knows he risks trouble bringing Anthony Valentine’s Joey Maddocks into his umbrella organisation: although not explicitly stated, Chas has bisexual tendencies and Joey was once his lover. This is hinted at over and over through the lingering camera as it focusses on Fox’s physical movements, his neatness, his nervy tension, his denial of the unconventional; the repressed nature of his sexuality is both repulsive [to him] and attractive [to others]. Outwardly, Chas denies it: “I’m straight! I’m all man!” he declares loudly when Anita Pallenberg’s Pherber tempts him with discovering the inner woman inside his soul. She holds a mirror to his breast, revealing her own bosom as if it has transmogrified onto Chas’s body. Pherber has fed Chas a large quantity of magic mushrooms, dressed him up as a Persian mountain outlaw and taken his Polaroid portrait, essentially for a passport photograph – but the kinky cross dress and undress exercise is her preamble towards discovering what makes Chas appealing to her own lover, the decadent, ambivalent rock star Turner. Turner is a musician with composer’s block, tapping away at his piano, strumming his guitar, fiddling with his mixing desk; one whole room is given over to music, but he rarely goes there. “I’m bored,” he declares, “I wish I was dead” – this at the precise moment Chas walks into his mansion, wishing to rent the basement flat of 81 Powys Square, Notting Hill, a crap-hole of a bolt-hole to hide in until his murder of Joey Maddocks passes over.
Chas pretends to be a juggler, but Turner, a slyly, subtly vindictive Mick Jagger, sees through the lie. He may be a lazy musician, living off the past glory of “two number ones, three number twos and a number four” but he is also manipulative, coercive and, most importantly of all, fatalistic. He styles himself on the Spanish poet Borges, and claims to be “stuck” both artistically and personally. He doesn’t want any more layabouts in his basement, but something draws him to Chas – possibly the same homosexual undercurrents that drew Joey Maddocks into Chas’s bed. James Fox, whether beating people up, making rough love, barking at his clients, slapping on curly wigs and dresses or dying his hair with crimson paint never fails to look like a pretty boy, all sharp skin and stiff collars, cufflinks and kinky games, chiefly a little whiplashing with his women. Curiously, when he finally succumbs to the wiles of Turner’s brigade, it is not with the buxom, glamourous and intensely beautiful Pherber, played with a knowing comeliness by Anita Pallenberg, but the whippet thin, androgenous freckly Lucy, played by Michele Breton; it is no surprise to us, for Chas has followed her with his eyes even when she evades him: “You’re like a boy,” he says between kisses, “little titties, skinny little thing.” Quite unlike Joey Maddocks masculine broadness, but the desire is the same.
So too are Chas’s confrontations with Turner, a series of power wrangles between two men desperate to escape their similar trapped realities. Chas is supremely ordered. His apartment is pristine. His suits pressed. His manner clipped, efficient. He is never late. Only his lusts betray the vicious animal that lurks beneath the svelte exterior. Turner is all laziness, airy, forgetful, impulsive. And yet the two men have more in common with each other than they may believe. There’s the gay thing, sure, and there’s the creeping desperation of being “stuck”, as well as a willingness to escape, an acceptance ultimately of death. Eventually tracked down by the seemingly incompetent henchmen Rosie and Moody [Stanley Meadows and John Bindon, both excellent] Chas is forced to endure his escape from unreality in Harry Flowers’s Rolls Royce, the very moment we first entered the film, with Roeg’s camera wheeling away from the roadside and following the car through the countryside to Randy Newman’s carnage of a blues dirge Gone Dead Train. At this point, facing death, Chas suddenly morphs into Turner, whose own corpse has been shovelled unceremoniously beneath the stairs into the basement Chas had been renting. The two men, antagonistically close in life, are irrevocably chained through expiry.
The power of the film lies not only in its enduring myth – all those silly stories about Mick and Anita making a clip joint porn movie on the sly while her boyfriend, his bandmate Keith Richards, kept jealous watch in his car outside – or the legacy of Nic Roeg’s filmmaking biography, or the mysterious failure of Donald Cammell to achieve enduring success, or in its good-looking go-with-it stars, or in its pumping pounding music. No, it is intrinsically revealed in the whirl of editing, the decadent wastes of London and the stark photography. The film is a tour de force of visual impressions, as much a work of surrealist art as anything Dali put on canvas. The cutthroat experience of editing the footage fell to Cammell, not Roeg, which may strike us as odd given the esteemed director’s preference for beguiling narratives laced with intercutting so fast it doesn’t so much confuse as become an irrelevance. Not so here, where every two or three second shot is aimed at propelling us out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. Mike Molley’s cameras are barely still; along with Nic Roeg, who doubled as cinematographer, he allows the close up to take centre stage, ultra close in the case of Breton’s erect nipple, or Jagger’s snarling teddy boy impersonation as he rales against the establishment, mixing his own life on the rock star road with Chas’s gangster chic, the blues blast Memo from Turner allows Jagger to shift in and around the light, out of one form of darkness and into another. The mansion is huge but people snuggle against each other, compressed by the livid atmospheres, the heady smoky brew that boils beneath everyone’s skin, altering everyone’s identity.
Is that really what performance is about – a wild ride into the imaginations of its cast or a long wallow in death and debauchery? The truth, like Turner’s musical legacy and Chas’s gangster hipness, lies somewhere between, not to be explored verbally and with wit or erudite dialogue, but through action, ritual and visible force, gratifying and repulsive at once, how Chas Devlin sees his own existence, hovering between the man and the woman, dependent yet independent, choices swimming across his vision, a hall of mirrors where the reflections reveal not imaginations but real insatiable truths, every one of them leading to the inevitable end. As Turner sings it: “Come now, gentlemen / Your love is all I crave / You’ll still be in the circus / When I’m laughing, laughing in my grave…”
Based on the real 'great train robbery' of 1963, 'Robbery' directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt) is a very stylish British crime film starring Stanley Baker, Joanna Pettet and James Booth.
Criminal mastermind Paul Clifton (Baker) and his gang of robbers manage to successfully pull off a diamond heist in the middle of the day and evade police capture. Clifton, then uses the proceeds of this endeavor to assemble a professional team to rob a Royal Mail train carrying a huge payload of cash from Glasgow to London.
Do they manage to pull it off ?
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A terrific crime film with exciting car chases, wonderful acting and a great story.
Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský), a cremator in Prague, persecuted by bizarre delusions and hallucinations, believes he is saving mankind through cremation, by liberating their souls to the ether.
As his convictions get stronger by the day and get admixed with Nazi ideology, the man becomes a homicidal lunatic.
A very dark and creepy film...a black comedy of some sorts.
Some consider this to be the greatest Czech film ever made.
The transitions, the cinematography, the brilliant acting by Rudolf Hrušínský, the very dense and deep symbolism...
I can see why this is considered a masterpiece of cinema.
Trevor Howard plays a British Raj policeman sympathetic to the problems of the indigenous tribes of northern India police the end. He’s frustrated by Harry Andrews’s uncultured superintendent, and Laurence Naismith and Maurice Denham as governor and administrator. Charlotte Rampling is the chaste love interest. For the rebellious tribal leader, Sultan, Yul Brynner is cast in the kind of muscley role he occupied around this time; water off a duck’s back for our Yul. The Spanish locations are a decent (late) substitute for the Indian Himalayas. The Long Duel is sporadically interesting, has moments of violent incident, but is ultimately unrewarding.
Ken Annakin directs adequately. The fact the film quite clearly inhabits the same arguments and incidents as a Cowboys and Indians saga doesn’t aid its success either. For a late sixties big budget adventure, the whole thing feels a bit underdone, ideologically obvious and possibly miscast. The Long Duel is watchable without being particularly good.
A granddaddy of a movie, Grand Hotel is the first ‘soap opera’ of cinema, a portmanteau movie full of big stars, good and bad acting, a turgid but workable plot, sumptuous design and some decent dialogues to keep us amused or intrigued. Pre-Hays Code, the film is also quite racy in its depiction of physical relationships: Greta Garbo clearly spends the night with John Barrymore, Joan Crawford chooses to prostitute herself, drink, drunkenness and a love of money play a huge part in the storyline. Grand Hotel also holds a peculiar record in the Oscars, being the only film to win Best Picture with its only nomination.
But is it any good?
Well, probably.
The film looks grand, as the title suggests. The hotel is one of those art deco studio masterpieces, lush, large and sumptuous, and there is a super painted special effect looking down from the ceiling of the circular atrium, the balconies getting smaller and smaller, some figures moving, others not. The costumes, from Adrian, are a 1930s masterclass. The screenplay is based on a successful stage production and at points it still feels like it. The Barrymore Brothers, John and Lionel, are prone to under and over acting respectively. One feels Lionel hasn’t left the demonstrative style of the theatre behind him, while John has gone the opposite way, becoming so restrained he’s an unemotional clotheshorse. The best turns are from Wallace Beery and Joan Crawford as a rich industrialist and his secretary, whose performances are nuanced, active and understated enough to feel genuine. Beery, traditionally seen as a loud, blustering kind of performer, is phenomenally good, even putting on a thin German accent, which almost nobody else bothers to do. Crawford, basically playing a part-time whore, is sexy and contemporary; she sparkles while the Barrymore Brothers flounder. Speaking of sparkling, the opening titles are written over a skyscape of stars, bolstering MGM’s boast that the studio possessed more stars than there are in heaven. Top of the bill is Greta Garbo, who according to the posters for Anna Christie (1930) had only just begun to talk. Pity she forgot to act. A lot of undignified snivelling and aggravated arm movements abound here. Her famous line “I want to be alone” gets an airing, but having uttered it, the audience [this one at least] doesn’t believe the later sudden turn in her mood, as if one night of love cures all ills. Ah, well, maybe it did in 1932. John Gillbert should have played the part of the jewel thief known as The Baron; Barrymore simply isn’t a strong enough romantic presence beside the photogenic fantasy of Garbo. Grand Hotel, after all, is a movie of impressions, of charming vignettes, rather than any substance.
In fact, the film opens with a series of short overlapping scenes as cast member after cast member uses the hotel’s telephone exchange to contact loved ones, colleagues, friends, doctors, etc, providing the audience with background information aplenty in the first three minutes. The sequences closes with Lewis Stone’s weary doctor, a scarred World War veteran, uttering the line: “The Grand Hotel: people come, people go, nothing happens.” A slight exaggeration, given what follows. I quite enjoyed the film, forgiving the over-enthused acting, and while it doesn’t strike any kind of gold as an intellectual piece, it certainly entertains and is a clear forerunner of British TV fodder like The Duchess of Duke Street, or the recent Hotel Portofino, even to a certain extent American rich pickings like Dynasty, and the Arthur Hailey novel Hotel, locations where all secrets hold all the keys to the kingdoms.
Grand Hotel is a now mostly forgotten movie and it doesn’t have much to recommend it story wise, but it is an elaborate, well-constructed movie that at least isn’t dull, which most of those impersonating television shows are.
Master Sergeant Johnny Gallagher (Gene Hackman) is tasked to escort Sergeant Walter Henke (Tommy Lee Jones) back to the United States for court-martial.
The trouble is...the man is an imposter.
In the back drop, negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union are happening for nuclear disarmament, but certain elements within both nations are not too keen for these to go through.
Gallagher finds himself trapped in a sinister conspiracy, where only he can unlock the trap.
Directed by Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), 'The Package' is a very entertaining suspense thriller, with great performances by Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones.
This is of course the sequel to the Naked Gun movies from decades ago, but now staring Liam Neeson. What do I think? Neeson ad Frank Drebin jr and Pamela Anderson as his love interest are doing a great job. There are a lot of jokes in the movie, but not as many as the old ones. There are many good jokes too, but again not as many as in the old movies.
The Jury prize winner at Cannes 2023, Hounds is a Moroccan gangster picture packed full of curious incident, violence and darkly black humour. Hassan is a low-rent middle-aged hoodlum too old for his work and weary of living hand-to-mouth. His son, Issam, is a low-rent practical underachiever stuck in the hovels of Casablanca, living with his father and grandmother and aspiring to move just one rung up the ladder but despising the ‘quick route’ to the top taken his father, knowing it is a fallacy despite all the drug money he sees flashed around the coffee shops. When the local kingpin, Dib, loses his fighting hound to the new gangster on the block, he vows revenge and sends Assam to kidnap the man who assaulted him post-dogfight. Assam takes his son with him on what ought to be a simple task, but nothing goes according to plan and the two men spend the night driving from one location to another avoiding or engaging with the police, drug runners, drunks and queers before things take an exceptionally vicious turn.
Hassan is well played by Abdellatif Masstouri, an amateur actor, displaying the right amount of concern, fear and anger as each hour passes and the night gets tougher and tougher to resolve. Ayoub Elaïd as the son interprets Issam as a younger version of his dad, perhaps with more brains, but only those his father would have had at his age – it is the destitution and repetitive nature of life in the Moroccan slums that has made Hassan as wary and tortured as he is. Both men spend many moments locked in silence as they ponder themselves, their troubles and their little slice of a dreadful world.
Kamal Lazraq directs with some flair and the film is never dull, the action [using hand held cameras] feels tense and visceral. The fact we never know exactly what is happening in the men’s minds and in reality creates a sense of genuine confusion for the audience. The narrative runs a little like an Odyssean Quest, each event becoming a teaching post and a turning point; the film ends in family reconciliation, albeit a silent, wary one.
Hmmm... avoiding 'queers' - why, are the father and son exceptionally hot?
Assignment K (1968)
A repeat showing on Talking Pictures TV of this bland spy caper which manages to be interesting but not in any of the right ways. It stars a bland Stephen Boyd as an ex racing driver who after a fiery smash is now in another career, as head spy in his own freelance agency arranging to get information on behalf of MI6, where he reports to an M-like Michael Redgrave in or around Whitehall. Redgrave is probably in it for just two scenes, despite his high billing. It's said that Michael Redgrave got Boyd his big break in acting so maybe that's why he's in this.
Early scenes show our lead arranging 'drops' much like the kind 007 sees Auric Goldfinger do in the novel - but not in the film - as an agent of Smersh if I recall and that is interesting to see. But there's a fair bit of this spy craft going on and you soon realise why they Bond films don't do too much of this - it's actually pretty dull to watch, especially as there is no emotional involvement with our lead spy, we're given no reason to care about him. The attempt at the racing driver backstory hints of a racy nature but it's not exploited in the story, you don't see him ever test his motoring skills in a car chase later on, for instance.
Ski scenes and cable cars in the Austrian town beginning with K which Ian Fleming stayed at in his formative years anticipate next year's OHMSS but though Boyd is more polished than Lazenby, the Bond actor is actually more interesting in his performance. I feel bad because I later read on imdb that Boyd died aged only 45 of a heart attack while playing golf, and he did try to do movies that had some integrity; he admitted they'd tried to make him a leading man when in fact he was a character actor. This film is exhibit A for his failing, there is just nothing behind the eyes, no sense of emotional hinterland. But it gets worse when he does get emotionally involved with a Swedish blonde in Austria, because the dialogue is sappy - worse than that between Rigg and Lazenby, all that 'indubitably' rubbish and 'you have marvellous... earlobes', it is just cringe.
Enjoyment comes from tidbits in the supporting cast. A pre It Aint Half Hot Mum Windsor Davies as a workman in a Q-type laboratory, somehow making something of his tiny role, Q himself is Geoffrey Bayldon who may have been in Casino Royale - in which director Val Guest played a large part. There's a pre- Please Sir! John Alderton, a young actress called Jane Merrow who is still acting today, in a 2025 horror film, there is Jan Werich who was primed to play Blofeld the previous year but got ditched - they mystery being why he was ever cast given he really does look like Santa, or a tiny Austrian toymaker, not remotely threatening (though imdb has him down as being in YOLT, as 'the hands of Blofeld' - is this true, did those scenes get shot anyway before he got ditched, with Pleasance's voice dubbed over later? Or is that movie urban myth?) There is Jeremy Kemp who is recognisable from war movies of the time but also as the annoyed father in law in Four Weddings, the one who storms out after James Fleet's Best Man's foot-in-mouth speech: 'It's very disappointing!'
I expected more however because I'd got this mixed up with another dodgy 60s spy thriller of the same ilk shown on Talking Pictures TV, one that starred Tom Courtney and had a cameo from Peter Cook and maybe Leonard Rossiter, it's the same sort of thing. It even features a racing car track from what little I recall, which would have fitted into this movie.
As one review on imdb has it, the film can't make up its mind if it's James Bond or Harry Palmer and suffers accordingly; at times it's even The Pink Panther as it's dogged by some naff cocktail party music for much of the Austrian ski scenes, as if to imply the leads are so cool you don't really need to care about their situation.
That all said, if you saw this on the big screen back in the day, there would have been plenty of lovely ski locations and such scenes to keep you entertained. So it's not actually that bad, just nowhere near good enough. It's almost a bit like The Odessa File - the film not the brilliant novel - in that there's an overwhelming feeling of just going through the motions, it doesn't really click.
Hmmm... avoiding 'queers' - why, are the father and son exceptionally hot?@Napoleon Plural I wrote 'avoiding or engaging' - the young man is sort of hot in a puppyish way, if you are interested.
Anyhow, we must have been on the same wavelength last night...
ASSIGNMENT K (1968)
Philip Scott is a former racing driver turned toy tycoon whose extravagant and successful lifestyle hides a deadly espionage secret: his frequent journeys to West Germany and Austria are forays that enable him to maintain a network of anti-Soviet spies. Funded by the mysterious Department K of the British Secret Service, Scott has carried out four assignments with glowing results. The fifth involves smuggling out a microfilm list of deep cover East German Stasi agents. Unfortunately one of Scott’s contacts is murdered and suspicion falls on his new girlfriend, wealthy Swedish playgirl Antonia Peters. However, as Scott develops their relationship further, the affable foreign sleeper agent Mr Smith makes his presence felt and Scott becomes embroiled in a cat-and-mouse chase across London to Munich and back again.
Val Guest directs with his usual assured touch, although that doesn’t mean sparks are going to fly. He was on a run of spy thrillers, having just none-to-successfully aided a hand in Charles Feldman’s disastrous OO7 spoof Casino Royale and before that helming the Jason Love escapade Where The Spies Are. David Niven starred in both those films and in both he looks a shade too old to be the dashing, virulent and vicious hero. Same problem here, although the star is Stephen Boyd – an actor with very little screen charisma. He might have been a big star in the making in 1959 after Ben Hur, but Northern Irishman Boyd never quite made it. Fantastic Voyage sustained a late sixties surge, but films like this and The Oscar did not help his cause. The script, fashioned by Guest, from an original by Dr Who writer Bill Strutton, has the hero spouting dialogue David Niven would have died for. In Boyd’s hands, or mouth as it were, these lines of intrigue, wit and sophistication are uttered so dead-pan they are pretty much dead. I half smiled at them all. The love scenes had a cuteness to them that recalls James Bond, but isn’t half as erotically charged – although the slick cut to the empty glasses of glühwein beside a roaring ski chalet log fire was rather neat, a metaphor of hot empty love if ever there was one.
Boyd is given beautiful support by Camilla Sparv, quite possibly one of the sixties most gorgeous actresses, and the on-off romance has a Mills and Boon quality to it that feels contrived and genuine at once. Where else would two rich people meet and fall in love if not Kitzbuhel? It worked for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. The spy craft shenanigans are nicely downplayed and we are uncertain for long periods about exactly whose side who is on. There are many meetings in secret places, many nightclubs, hotel rooms and kidnappings, a couple of murders, low key – which is good – but lacking tension – which is bad. The eventual resolution, of which there are two, comes as something of a surprise.
The cast is peppered with soon to be famous faces like Catherine Schell, Jeremy Kemp, John Alderton, Leo McKern and Windsor Davies. Old stagers like Michael Redgrave are rolled up to play crusty superiors. Jan Werich plays an Austrian doctor; he was in line to star in You Only Live Twice as Blofeld and might have made a decent stab at it, although on this showing he would have been a tad chummy.
The film was based on Hartley Howard’s novel Department K. A sequel titled Assignment L was planned based on Howard’s second Scott novel The Eye of the Hurricane, but nothing came of it. I became aware of this movie only recently through Michael Richardson’s excellent book Guns, Girls and Gadgets, so I was very pleased to see this crop up randomly on Talking Pictures TV. It isn’t a great film, but it is worth a little look, chiefly for Miss Sparv and some of those scintillating lines of dialogue, completely out of place in the generally dull framework of the film’s narrative, structure and presentation, which is workmanlike at best. While Michael Richardson rates it one of the fifty spy thrillers of the 1960s to watch, Halliwell’s gives Assignment K short shift, Wiki a few lines, IMDB a rough ride – the film seems to have been almost universally dismissed. Pity that, but maybe the problem is one of Val Guest’s own making. As director, he isn’t providing enough ‘oomph’ to keep an audience interested. One should perhaps be thankful Guest didn’t over egg it – as even Bond was prone to do – maybe his experience with Casino Royale damped that idea – but a thriller lacking thrills is a hard sell in any era.
The Dirty Dozen relocated to the American Civil War.
James Coburn leads a gang of cutthroats rescued from the gallows in a covert attack on a mountain fort. Cue arguments, rebellions, a ton of killings and terrible dubbed dialogue.
I would like to say there is something of interest, but I couldn’t find anything. Coburn’s charisma seems too modern to sit with period films; even in The Magnificent Seven he was the most ‘modern’ of the sharpshooters, laconic, thoughtful and eschewing traditional weapons for the unexpected. Here, he reinterprets that smart-mouthed Irishman he played in Leone’s A Fistful of Dynamite, all smiling, hidden deadliness. Telly Savalas plays another villain holed up in a mountain top retreat. Occasionally decent to look at – the Almeria desert was a great place to make westerns – but A Reason… is a stereotypical spaghetti saga where the sauce has lost all its flavour. Even the climatic massacre lacks spice.
Directed by Roger Corman, X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, is a 1963 science fiction film that tells the story of Dr James Xavier (Ray Milland), who is researching ways of enhancing human vision.
Dr Xavier creates a compound, which when applied to the eyes gives tremendous power to the vision, enabling the person to see beyond substances, into the innards of things.
Dr Xavier experiments on his own eyes and uses his X-ray vision to save a patient's life.
But his quest for finding what lies beyond this material reality forces him to over use the compound on his eyes. This increase in the power of perception eventually leads the man down the spiral to insanity.
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A classic science fiction film, with a thought provoking story.
A brilliant western, packed full of tension, from director Budd Boetticher and writer Burt Kennedy. It is based on an Elmore Leonard novella, so the piece crackles with virulent intensity and hard bitten characters.
Randolph Scott is excellent as the lone rancher Pat Bannon, whose reputation as foreman at the Tenvoorde Ranch earned him the moniker ‘The Tall T’, but whose solo enterprise is weakening him, both physically and mentally. He’s making bad gambling choices and ends up losing his horse, is way too chummy with the downbeats in Contention, the local town, or the Way-Station Master and his cheery son, and he can’t even ride bulls the way he used to. Saddled with no horse and carrying his saddle, Bannon flags down a hired stagecoach, and is reluctantly offered a lift to his ranch by the passengers, newlyweds Willard and Doretta Mims. Doretta stands to inherit her father’s fortune and Willard has married her for the money. When the stagecoach is hijacked by Richard Boone’s menacing Frank Usher and his duo of nasties Chink and Billy Jack, Bannon must rediscover some of his old habits to rescue Doretta and himself from certain death.
The film is low on the kind of incident one might expect in a fifties western [the shootings, fistfights, homespun singalongs, Indians, arrows and whooping]. Instead it is high on dramatic stand offs. The first appearance of Frank and his gang, emerging from the shadows of the Way-Station is a fantastic few seconds of crafted tension [Tarantino noted it and replicated the scene in his proto-western Inglorious Bastards]. The ensuing dialogue is quite possibly one of the most suspenseful scenes in western movie history as Richard Boone scowls and sneers, almost mesmerised by Scott’s hero, who remains perfectly still throughout, both men’s responses measured, careful.
Meanwhile John Hubbard’s husband, Willard, is all panicky grovelling impatience, and Maureen O’Sullivan’s older, naïve wife a permanently frightened shrew; she only finds her voice later on when the situation becomes so bleak all she can do is sob. There is another wonderful scene in the half-light of a disused mine entrance, when Bannon attempts to comfort Doretta; his words and actions are the least comforting you’ll ever hear, yet Randolph Scott makes them honest, pertinent and tender. The kiss, when it comes, has the shock of rape to it; and in fact it is the single-minded villain, Frank, who displays most affection towards her plight, suggesting he wants her for himself, or least pities her situation. Bannon is never so subtle – he takes and he conquers – rediscovering that determined streak he lost while struggling to run a ranch singlehanded. At the start of the movie, he was attempting to buy a bull-sire, and here he metamorphoses metaphorically into the bull, with Doretta his unsuspecting but receptive cow. Doretta, on her part, shares some of his animal instinct, responding to his and Frank’s kind of soft ruthlessness while recoiling from the punishment and indifference of the gang members. There is something satisfying in seeing two older stars playing older, lonely people who meet in difficult circumstances and discover a mutual desire. Not something you see very often in these days of airbrushed movies.
The climax is bloody and taut.
Boetticher directs with a keen sense of grand drama; the words, their phrasing and delivery, the actions and body language that surrounds them, are far more important than the narrative, which is simplistic at best. Heinz Roemheld’s music fuses some Cole Porter jazz classics with prairie song, which makes for an intriguingly romantic score than one would not expect. The photography is wide and lush. Perhaps most pleasingly, the film does not overstay its welcome, coming in at a brief 80-odd minutes.
Comments
Excellent movie and arguably Kirk Douglas' finest hour.
That said...the SPARTACUS series that ran on Starz for four seasons is my preferred take on the character. It's over the top on the sex/nudity/violence but the characters and the plotting in general really work beautifully.
IF you're going to give it a go, you need to be aware of two things.
MORITURI (1965)
Marlon Brando plays a German ex-patriot Robert Crain who is coerced by British Intelligence to disable scuttling charges on a cargo ship carrying rubber to Nazi occupied Bordeaux from Japan. By posing as a SS officer, Crain gains entry to the cargo ship 'Ingo' commanded by Captain Mueller (Yul Brenner), a disillusioned mariner and First Officer Kruse (Martin Benrath), a staunch card carrying Nazi.
Crain now has to figure out where the scuttling charges have been placed in the ship and disable them before they are to be ambushed by allied ships. The reason for this operation being that the allies are also desperately in need of rubber and Nazi authorities have ordered all merchant ships carrying precious cargoes to have scuttling charges placed on them, so as to deny the allies access to these resources in case of capture.
A tense and gripping espionage film, with great performances by Brando and Brenner.
Recommended.
(Directed by Bernhard Wicki - 123 minutes)
I have never seen this but understand it is very good. Thanks for the review @Sonero
THE TRIAL (1962)
Orson Welles’s surrealist’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s absurdist’s nightmare of a novel is striking in its bleakness of visual presentation and by the political overtures of the script. Whether it is any good – whether it is enjoyable as pure entertainment – will perhaps forever be open to long and protracted debate. Kafka’s masterpiece of the bizarre revolves around the ‘trial’ of Josef K, a bank clerk accused of no crime who is arrested and forced to endure the labyrinthine machinations of his unnamed country’s legal processes. After a fashion, a distinctly unique, withering and satirically paranoid fashion, Josef K’s story mimics that of the Victorian Chancery Court portrayed with contemptuous aloofness by Charles Dickens in Bleak House. There, and here, the law is not the theatre of justice but an unwieldy machine of money generation, moral decay and individual despair. Kafka, however, included an authoritarian overseer secret police, an inclusion that hints strongly of the one-party despotic workings of the new Soviet Union, as well as an overt sexual undercurrent that suggests lust plays a large part in people’s decision making processes, swayed not by sense but by physical presence.
Kafka’s novel is generally considered one of German literature’s great masterpieces. The same can’t quite be said of Welles’s film for western cinema; that says more about the source novel and the difficulties of adapting it than it does about the film itself, which is very good in parts, mystifying in others, and terrible in some. The soundtrack doesn’t help. Poorly recorded and with characters speaking over each other all the time, it is sometimes impossible to catch the dialogue leading to moments of uncertainty in the narrative [stupidly, I recorded it off Talking Pictures without the subtitles]. Despite this, the impressive look of the thing, all those long shadowy corridors, the huge trial hall and even bigger typist’s office – where hundreds of clerks sit tapping away at keyboards, a noisy European reimagination of Billy Wilders’ insurance office from The Apartment – in Welles’s vision industry even financial industry is enormous, specific, ordered and extremely noisy. Welles, as is his want, photographs from peculiar angles creating space where there is none and closing in on his characters when they are in the open spaces; the effect is a claustrophobia of mounting tension, climaxed by Josef’s visit to the court painter Titorelli, who lives imprisoned in an attic surrounded by scrabbling, voyeuristic children, an existence completely separate from the outside world. Similarly, the sudden resolution of the novel is enacted almost verbatim but is equally out of place – Welles’s version is worse than Kafka’s – and one feels that a more astute script writer may have adapted it better. Here, Welles in his desire to recreate the book so slavishly hasn’t thought through the possibilities of minor alteration.
The performances are noteworthy. Anthony Perkins has just the right amount of sturdiness and fallibility to portray the alternately confused and enlightened Josek K. A good looking actor of the time, he is able to present himself as an innocent, as well as a potential sexual quarry for the various women who seduce him. At the time Perkins’s homosexuality was not common knowledge, so retrospectively critics and commentators have speculated on the potential for pro- or anti-gay statements in the narrative. They are not there. Welles’s script focusses on the plight of the falsely accused and the peculiarities of justice system, how it misinforms and fractures relationships to the point of personal oblivion. Hence, the same men who came to arrest Josef K during the brilliant opening scene at Josef’s apartment, the same men he witnessed being whipped into submission for failing to apprehend him appropriately are also the men who return to lead him to his unratified sentence, as if the law men not the law ultimately please themselves, suggesting of course the vindictiveness of totalitarian regimes.
Welles bags the role of Albert Hastler, the Advocate, whose attitude to the law is to drag cases out to interminable length, thus no justice is ever meted, only invoices and bills and investigations – his offices are piled high with manuscripts, documents and reference books, an unholy mess that adds to the sense of a system at breaking point. The observant painter Titorelli might be surrounded by children aping his own actions, but Hastler is equally hemmed in by his own craft; like Titorelli his only real master is own warped conscience. We wonder, finally but not for the first time, if Josef K is not experiencing some horrific dream – for leaving Titorelli’s abode leads him directly to the courthouse, a geographical impossibility.
The various women are played with a scheming seductiveness by Jeanne Moreau, Romi Schneider [particularly good], Elsa Martinelli and Suzanne Flon. Akim Tamiroff is Hastler’s long attached client Bloch, whose case will never come to court because he pays the Advocate retainers to ensure it doesn’t. Our own Michael Lonsdale has a small part as a priest. Edmond Richard was a French cinematographer who would gain more renown in the 1970s. His work is brutally stark, giving the monochrome lighting an intense brooding palate. The music screeches at us mostly, before ascending to waves of Thomas Albinoni’s melancholic Adagio in G Minor. The beauty of the piece reminds us again of the dreamlike quality of the narrative: is Josef K asleep listening to the rise and fall of Albinoni’s string melodies? A bookending parable relates the purpose of law in this unnamed nation, to satisfy only individual curiosity.
Overall, while the film doesn’t quite succeed, it does raise questions of ethical practice. Josef K himself says: ‘I wanted to see if the inside of this legal system was as loathsome as I guessed it was.’ By the end he understands entirely the premise of the system, as M. Bloch notes: ‘People are saying from that expression on your lips, they could tell that you’d be found guilty.’ Justice is a foregone conclusion and Bloch’s statement mimics the behaviour of the inquisitive policemen that initially arrest Josef. His fate, whatever his answers, was sealed before they even entered his apartment. That cannot be justice in any form.
The central performance is good enough to evoke sympathy and the shifting, roving camera plus the sudden, unflashy editing, aids our sense of disorientation. There isn’t much wrong with The Trial and yet it is not quite as on the artistic money as Welles’s films of the forties. Watchable, just about, but not that much more, chiefly because it is so hard to comprehend. The Trial is an intellectual trial itself and simply doesn’t work as entertainment. Laudable then, and occasionally a brilliant spectacle, but the film really needs a big studio to have faith in its director and give him the tools to create his trade effectually and thus successfully. Instead, The Trial feels swamped in ambition with little informed realisation.
A worthy disappointment then?
@chrisno1 You are most welcome.
RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP (1958)
After having his submarine sunk in the Bungo Straits (area 7 / Japan) by the destroyer Akikaze, Commander P.J. Richardson (Clark Gable) is given command of the Balao-class submarine USS Nerka.
Richardson wants to go back to area 7 and take out the Akikaze, even though he has been forbidden from entering the Bungo Straits by the naval high command.
Richardson also has to deal with the misgivings of the new crew, who have doubts about his leadership and an executive officer Lieutenant Jim Bledsoe (Burt Lancaster), who is skeptical of his tactics.
What follows is a series of nerve-wracking naval battles, ending in a surreal standoff with a Japanese submarine.
An excellent world war two film.
Recommended.
(Directed by Robert Wise - 93 minutes)
GLADIATOR (2000)
A mightily impressive reboot of the ‘sword and sandal’ epic genre, so good it won plaudits, Oscars, earned a ton of money and rejuvenated a lost art of filmmaking, that of telling simple stories on an enormous scale.
Gladiator is based on a 1958 novel called Those About To Die, which I have not read, but the screen version feels familiar from a number of those 1950s and 60s epics, touching firstly on the German frontier we saw in The Fall of the Roman Empire, before morphing into the gladiatorial arenas of Spartacus – one scheming senator is even called Gracchus and Oliver Reed plays a more acerbic and worldly wise version of Peter Ustinov’s Batiatus. The film misses the overt religiosity of some of the genre’s more rigid period pieces, and that is probably a good thing. Instead we are wrapped up in bloody combat, political shenanigans, a hot bed of incest and familial rivalry, patricide, rebellion, squalor, glamour, death and glory. There is almost too much to fit in two and a half hours. As befits a director like Ridley Scott, who founded his early career with movies beholden to action, most specifically the one-to-one battles of The Duellists, the main thrust of Gladiator is how to present its characters in a vivid violent arena and yet still elicit our sympathy with performances of worldly gravitas and emotional impact.
Central to the film’s success is Russell Crowe as the doomed hero Maximus Decimus Meridius, whose revenge driven motivations are given an otherworldly condition by the use of ethereal visions and the constant referencing of the soil as his bedrock of soul [he is a farmer, he constantly fingers the soil to rough his hands before battle, he speaks constantly of home not as a place but as an existence, he dreams of it even at the point of death]. Interestingly, he is a Spaniard and there is some blending of history with Arab looking inhabitants in the deserts of Andalusia, but placing Maximus outside the confines of Rome makes him an invader rather than a rebel; this allows us to fully identify with his character, unburdened as he is by the confines and expectations of Roman history. The latter falls on Joaquin Pheonix as Emperor Commodus, whose reign is brutally condensed and includes much of the misrepresentations found in Samuel Bronston’s 1964 The Fall of the Roman Empire, that he murdered his father, was in love with his sister, fought in the Coliseum, etc. The condensed version of Commodus’s life thus neglects the fact he was a popular ruler with the Roman ‘mob’, got on well with ordinary soldiers and brought a period of peace to the empire; it was the senators and generals who despised him as peace brings no profit in trade, slaves, land, military glory, public recognition, etc. The narrative instead focusses on his final two years, recasting them as a few months, when he became paranoidal and homicidal, seeing insurrection at every corner. That aspect comes across brilliantly through Pheonix’s cultured playing and the nervy accompaniment of Connie Nielsen as his sister, Lucilla. A prime political schemer, Richard Harris’s Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor, recognises Lucilla would make the perfect ruler if only she were a man. His preference for a Spanish general over his own son fosters a resentment only solved by bitter recrimination.
The scenes in the arena have a freshness and horrific value to them which has not diminished over the last twenty-five years. The blending of the CGI with the real is superbly orchestrated, much better than the virtual realities the cinema seems to prefer these days. The sound recording in particular is visceral and heart pumpingly loud. You can almost feel the sound of clashing swords, roaring tigers and galloping hooves. Hans Zimmer’s music score works mainly by surprising us. The quietude that climaxes the opening Germanic battle is notable in its restraint, for instance. The running theme of home is well carried in the main theme. The editing by Pietro Scalia is a tour de force in how to cut a historical film. He isn’t flashy, remembering the solid base this kind of project stems from, and pandering to Ridley Scott’s austere direction he instead relies on the empathetic long takes, the landscapes of countryside and city, the sudden jousts of action in the arena. Our swirling first view of the Coliseum is shivering to the spine, as it might have been for a genuine combatant. We perhaps might have preferred not to have moments of slow motion.
There is a tendency to overlook the epic genre as a piece of cinematic grand theatre with no human substance, and that is true of many films in the category, but Gladiator achieves much through its volume of violent intensity and insightful, if stereotypical, characters. The film looks and sounds glorious. It is easy to see why it won awards. Ultimately, if anything justifies the film, it is the financial result, which was as immense as the movie itself.
Very good.
I finally caught up with Superman and really enjoyed it, it felt fresh and like a kids' movie and that's a compliment - the other comic book adaptations were less kids' movies and more, well, movies for fanboys who'd grown up and wanted something else on some level, I found them a bit heavy going and you can say the same for the Bond movies, they haven't been approached as kids' movies or perhaps I should say 'kids' movies for adults' for a long time, it's like they're all trying to be epic and Lawrence of Arabia instead.
I enjoyed this more than any other Superman film since Superman: The Movie in February 1979 which I saw on a loooong double bill with Death on the Nile. At least, we went to see DOTN for Mum's birthday but it was sold out so we saw Superman first, as there were seats free, then followed it up with that one.
That said, I didn't even bother with Superman 3 and 4 at the cinema, the series went off very quickly once Richard Donner's influence was gone. I did see Man of Steel.
This one had lots of jokes which really helped, and a fresh irreverent spirit. It solved the main problem with the Superman universe in that what works for a comic strip or TV serial which takes place over weeks or months just doesn't for a movie series which spans years. I mean, the whole idea of Clark Kent deceiving Lois Lane is fine for an episodic adventure but in a movie comes across as creepy and patronising. And that is one big difference between 1978 and now, because back then it was a big deal and okay to have a handsome, brilliant man as your hero, chiefly because that was the era - we had Elvis Presley, JFK, Cassius Clay, Connery as Bond, the Beatles, and so on - lots of handsome men standout in their field, the big mouth, the guy so Reeve as Superman was fine, now he'd be seen as asking for a smack.
Here we find out immediately that Lane is a thing with Clark Kent and she knows about him as Superman so she isn't kept in the dark - doesn't quite make it clear how they negotiate the fact he's an alien and it doesn't really go there, in fact at all. That was always the big problem with trying to adapt Superman to the adult universe because really it's tragic - an orphan in a world that is not his own, no one to mate with, it would be quite lonely but this film sidesteps a lot of that implied melancholic feeling though it flags the issues, simply cos it acts like a kids' movie.
This movie is more collegiate which may invite comparisons with the Scooby gang of Spectre.
The existence of other mutant superheroes solved another problem we saw in Supes 1 and 2 - that being so super, he doesn't really have much to pitch himself against, I mean in the first film it's a coming of age flick and they are often hard to pen sequels for imo because the original arc is an origins story and you can't replicate that. There is the surprise of his first appearance. But in the second one he has to fight the other Krypton refugees - which he accidentally freed - and then one starts thinking, okay, all round it's a bad idea that that crowd showed up at all. By the third one the series seems done, given that in the second film the romance between Clark and Lois was done too.
Here there are plenty of other characters to make Superman less of a lonely figure and Hoult's Luther comes across I am pleased to say as a very nasty piece of work.
It's said the story is a metaphor for Putin and Ukraine - with Trump as Luther, wanting a slice of territory which does sometimes suggest itself in his dealings with Putin but intentionally or not the whole film really does play out instead as Israel and Gaza - with Trump as Luther again, given its dusty Middle East setting, to the point where you would expect Mossad or Black Cube to be getting out a file on the director James Gunn and seeing if he ever made it out to Epstein Island.
I liked David Corenswet as Superman but what a name for an actor, couldn't he have changed it? I can't see how Cavill could have played this as this character was meant to be younger and more naive, anyway wasn't Cavill's character in a different cinematic universe? Liked his relationship with Lois in this too, though the action slugfest latterly became a bit much, not sure how Krpto the Dog came about and for most of us the arrival of a final character in the final scene is a real WTAF moment. Some fans may not appreciate the reworking of Superman's parents either though a theme of the movie is how you shouldn't believe what you're told, by any kind of State organisation either.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
WARGAMES (1983)
A brilliant 1980's techno-thriller, which remains relevant to the present day.
Computer whizz kid David Lightman (Matthew Broderick), who routinely hacks his high school's computer to replace his grades, comes across a gaming catalogue of a video game company and decides to hack their computer system to play their games.
He manages to enter their computer via a backdoor password and proceeds to play a game with the computer, not realizing that he has accidentally activated an advanced military computer system, which is now running a real world war game program.
What follows is a thrilling adventure of trying to set things right.
Created at the height of the Cold War, this gem of a film predicted self conscious artificial intelligence systems 42 years back.
Remarkable film for its time.
Recommended.
(Directed by John Badham - 114 minutes)
MIRACLE MILE (1988)
Boy meets girl, falls in love and they live happily ever...
NOPE.
This is not what happens in this film.
Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards) seems to have met the girl of his dreams, Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) and they plan to meet up at the diner she works at, after her night shift is over.
Harry unfortunately wakes up late and drives up to the diner in a hurry.
While awaiting her return call on a payphone, Harry picks up the receiver to hear a desperate voice.
The man on the other end tells him that a nuclear war is about to break out in 70 minutes.
You can clearly imagine where the story goes on from there.
The cheesy romance film nose dives into a feverish nightmare.
I have never seen a movie quite like this.
The 80's aesthetic, the desperation, the sweet romance inter-twixt with nuclear armageddon and the hypnotic synth music of Tangerine Dream.
A hidden gem and a very unique film.
Recommended.
(Directed by Steve De Jarnatt - 87 minutes)
THE NAKED GUN (2025)
Liam Neeson plays Frank Drebin Jr, son of the Leslie Neilsen character from the original series of movies as well as 'Police Squad" (in colour). It's good casting and he does well, as does Pamela Anderson as the leading lady.
There are some terrific jokes plus a few bad ones, just as before, but the pacing lags in the middle and the craziness doesn't snowball as it used to. Perhaps too much plot which isn't necessary, though there is one good plot device.
For a short movie, it has more endings than "The Lord Of The Rings". I suspect a sequel will follow, and I'll go see that too.
NO WAY OUT (1987)
A first class thriller.
Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) working in Naval Intelligence, falls in love with socialite Susan Atwell (Sean Young).
The problem is...she is having an affair with Farrell's boss, Secretary of Defence David Brice (Gene Hackman).
Tempers flare when Secretary Brice realizes that Susan has been seeing another man behind his back.
An accident happens.
I am not going to spoil the plot by going any further.
But let me tell you this...this is one of the finest suspense thriller movies you will ever see, with an incredible plot twist in the end.
Tight scripting, excellent acting (especially Will Patton who plays Scott Pritchard, Brice's general counsel) and a gripping story that keeps you at the edge of your seat.
An underrated gem.
Recommended.
(Directed by Roger Donaldson - 114 minutes)
Suspicion (1941)
I've never seen this Alfred Hitchcock classic before. Joan fountain plays Lina, a woman from the upper class. She meets Jonnie, played by Cary Grant, a charming playboy. As the marriage develops Lina becomes increasingly suspicious of Jannie, both his nature and plans. I have to say Grant plays the charmer with a dark side very well. Hitchcock elevates a story that would be pretty unremarkable in a lesser director's hands into a fine psychological thriller. it's also remarkable how stylish the two leads are. One thing I don't like very much is the film score. When any tension happens, the music suddenly swells into operatic heights only to calm down just as abruptly. I think the movie would benefit a lot from a more typical thriller score. I want to avoid any spoilers about the ending. What I can say is that several endings were filmed and in my opinion the best version wasn't chosen, but it works best if you see it as ambiguous. Just to be clear, this movie is well worth watching. There are some very good scenes in the movie, and the best (and best known) is probably this one:
ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)
The two-word expression ‘classic movie’ is an overused and overhyped one. Occasionally, however, a film is so good it transcends both the hype and the familiarity and truly rests is golden laurels firmly on the cushion of ‘classic cinema’. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve is a still relevant acerbic look at fame and fortune in the theatre world and matches a caustic and darkly humorous script to a cast full of brilliant performances. 'Classic' indeed.
Stand out among the cast in a career best showing is Bette Davis, who as Margo Channing, a fading but brilliant and gloriously catty Broadway actress, bestrides the film with her drawling delivery and the demonstrative neatness of her physical responses. There is a moment when while at dinner with her long term partner, the director Bill Sampson – Gary Merrill in a part clearly written with Humphrey Bogart in mind [Mankiewicz would eventually cast Bogart as a movie director in the similarly famed obsessed The Barefoot Contessa] – Davis raises her head an inch in mock salute to the critic and acid barbed socialite Addison de Witt. The simple act betrays all her contempt and loathing of the venomous de Witt. George Sanders is suitably smooth, suitably scheming as de Witt, a man who lusts after young starlets, first Miss Casswell from the “Copacabana school of acting” [Marilyn Monroe in an early star-making role] then the titular Eve Harrington, who he impresses with ambition and courtesy. Eve is played by Anne Baxter, first with nervous deference and then with a conniving nastiness as her career morphs into a modern version of Margo Channing, the actress who is her inspiration and becomes her rival. That relatively insignificant support acts such as Merrill, Monroe, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe and Gregory Ratoff can hold their own among this trio of excellence is a credit to a writer / director who knows exactly what he is doing with his characters and his plot, skilfully weaving them like a thread on a loom until the pattern is revealed and begins to repeat itself, not once but twice, the ingenue Pheobe impersonating Eve in the same fashion as Eve imitated Margo Channing. Here, there are lines of dialogue so deft as to be almost written by the comic gods, so smoothly delivered you don’t get the joke until a sentence is completely finished [a rarity in these days of turgid physical comedy], so delightful you fix a smile on your lips with sublime happiness.
The subject of freefalling careers, fading looks and forgotten histories is repeated to a degree in Billy Wilder’s take on fame and fandom, Sunset Boulevard. Released the same year, Sunset is a grandstand film all of its own, with a clever conceit about its narrator, but the story there concentrates on a single person, Gloria Swanson’s silent star Norma Desmond and her struggle with an unfulfilled retirement. Eve ponders the next generation and the next, how the ambitions of the present affect the relationships of those around them for the future, as well as how the outside influencers and promoters wreak havoc and harm while claiming a propensity to be doing nothing but good for their client. A rare counterpoint is Thelma Ritter’s Birdie Coonan, a wardrobe mistress with a firm head and an even rougher tongue than Margo; she sees all before her and tells it so. “She’s watching you,” she states, “learning your every move.” This just before Margo catches Eve pretending to act out a scene from her latest stage play. Davis pauses before delivering her line, the wait enough for us to recognise she too has her doubts about the naïve little madam from San Francisco. Curious that Ritter’s character disappears half way through, her suspicions justified to us, but she isn’t around to gloat.
The best written American movies of the era were all superb comedies, either of satire or screwball, all with a hint of darkness: Eve, Sunset, Capote’s Beat the Devil, MacKendrick’s, Odets’s and Lehman’s Sweet Smell of Success and Wilder’s and I. A. L. Diamond’s outrageous Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. With examples in past eras as good as this, one wonders why modern American cinema can’t seem to make a half decent comedy without resorting to fart and fanny jokes or animating the characters for us. All About Eve is a fantastic film of much joy, some devilment and from its characters hints of genuine hubris. It won a clutch of well-deserved Oscars, although shamefully Bette Davis lost out to Judy Holliday whose turn in Born Yesterday was a reimagining of a role she’d acted before, without recognition, in Adam’s Rib. A case of the Academy rewarding the right actress in the wrong film.
I instruct you all to watch All About Eve and learn how movies ought to be made, with clarity, sophistication, wit and intrigue. You know what, I think ‘genius’ might be a more appropriate word than ‘classic’.
@chrisno1 Excellent review...Bravo!
Thank you @chrisno1 & @Number24 for the great movie suggestions.
I am going to watch both.
633 SQUADRON (1964)
Directed by Walter Grauman, 633 Squadron is a fictional WW2 movie based on real RAF operations against Nazi Germany in Norway.
Norwegian naval lieutenant Erik Bergman reports the location of a top secret V-2 rocket fueling station to the RAF, that is situated underneath an over hanging cliff at the end of a narrow fjord north of Bergen and heavily protected by anti-aircraft machine gun batteries.
Wing Commander Roy Grant (Cliff Robertson), commander of the 633 Squadron is tasked with destroying the facility by targeting the cliff above it with earthquake munitions (ground penetrators).
In order to achieve this feat, the squadron will have to fly their de Havilland Mosquitos (DH 98) in a very precise manner to secure the hit on the right spots to trigger an earthquake, leading to the collapse of the cliff straight onto the fueling station.
Bergman also volunteers to aid the Norwegian resistance in taking out the anti-aircraft guns prior to the planned strike, but things don't go according to plan. (As it always is...)
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Overall a very good war film with commendable special effects and aerial photography and an engaging story that keeps you hooked till the end.
Recommended.
(102 minutes)
PERFORMANCE (1970)
Of the weird and wonderful strangeness that emanated from the cinema of Britian in the 1960s, performance is quite possibly the weirdest and most wonderful, to the point many contemporary observers found it impossible to describe, and many still do today. The general consensus back in 1970 was that Donald Cammell’s and Nicolas Roeg’s debut directing feature was a disjointed mess of ideas and visuals that failed to connect coherently and strained an initially interesting, tense and violent gangster narrative beyond reasonable measure. They may have a point, certainly for the casual viewer. However, performance, like Nicolas Roeg’s best films [Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell To Earth, etc] requires repeated viewing for clarity, allowing the thought process behind the story to germinate, allowing us to see through the violent splash of bloodied gangsters and the flash and dash of a musician’s bohemian, indolent lifestyle. The oddest facet to performance, is that it is writer-director Donald Cammell who is the driving force behind the disjointed, disruptive narrative. Cammell though became less influential over time and it is Nic Roeg who takes up the baton of disarray for his directorial journey
James Fox is Chas Devlin, gangster Harry Flower’s number one enforcer, a man who enjoys the work of intimidation and retribution a shade too much for comfort. Johnny Shannon’s Harry Flowers barks ineffectually at his young charge. Harry knows he risks trouble bringing Anthony Valentine’s Joey Maddocks into his umbrella organisation: although not explicitly stated, Chas has bisexual tendencies and Joey was once his lover. This is hinted at over and over through the lingering camera as it focusses on Fox’s physical movements, his neatness, his nervy tension, his denial of the unconventional; the repressed nature of his sexuality is both repulsive [to him] and attractive [to others]. Outwardly, Chas denies it: “I’m straight! I’m all man!” he declares loudly when Anita Pallenberg’s Pherber tempts him with discovering the inner woman inside his soul. She holds a mirror to his breast, revealing her own bosom as if it has transmogrified onto Chas’s body. Pherber has fed Chas a large quantity of magic mushrooms, dressed him up as a Persian mountain outlaw and taken his Polaroid portrait, essentially for a passport photograph – but the kinky cross dress and undress exercise is her preamble towards discovering what makes Chas appealing to her own lover, the decadent, ambivalent rock star Turner. Turner is a musician with composer’s block, tapping away at his piano, strumming his guitar, fiddling with his mixing desk; one whole room is given over to music, but he rarely goes there. “I’m bored,” he declares, “I wish I was dead” – this at the precise moment Chas walks into his mansion, wishing to rent the basement flat of 81 Powys Square, Notting Hill, a crap-hole of a bolt-hole to hide in until his murder of Joey Maddocks passes over.
Chas pretends to be a juggler, but Turner, a slyly, subtly vindictive Mick Jagger, sees through the lie. He may be a lazy musician, living off the past glory of “two number ones, three number twos and a number four” but he is also manipulative, coercive and, most importantly of all, fatalistic. He styles himself on the Spanish poet Borges, and claims to be “stuck” both artistically and personally. He doesn’t want any more layabouts in his basement, but something draws him to Chas – possibly the same homosexual undercurrents that drew Joey Maddocks into Chas’s bed. James Fox, whether beating people up, making rough love, barking at his clients, slapping on curly wigs and dresses or dying his hair with crimson paint never fails to look like a pretty boy, all sharp skin and stiff collars, cufflinks and kinky games, chiefly a little whiplashing with his women. Curiously, when he finally succumbs to the wiles of Turner’s brigade, it is not with the buxom, glamourous and intensely beautiful Pherber, played with a knowing comeliness by Anita Pallenberg, but the whippet thin, androgenous freckly Lucy, played by Michele Breton; it is no surprise to us, for Chas has followed her with his eyes even when she evades him: “You’re like a boy,” he says between kisses, “little titties, skinny little thing.” Quite unlike Joey Maddocks masculine broadness, but the desire is the same.
So too are Chas’s confrontations with Turner, a series of power wrangles between two men desperate to escape their similar trapped realities. Chas is supremely ordered. His apartment is pristine. His suits pressed. His manner clipped, efficient. He is never late. Only his lusts betray the vicious animal that lurks beneath the svelte exterior. Turner is all laziness, airy, forgetful, impulsive. And yet the two men have more in common with each other than they may believe. There’s the gay thing, sure, and there’s the creeping desperation of being “stuck”, as well as a willingness to escape, an acceptance ultimately of death. Eventually tracked down by the seemingly incompetent henchmen Rosie and Moody [Stanley Meadows and John Bindon, both excellent] Chas is forced to endure his escape from unreality in Harry Flowers’s Rolls Royce, the very moment we first entered the film, with Roeg’s camera wheeling away from the roadside and following the car through the countryside to Randy Newman’s carnage of a blues dirge Gone Dead Train. At this point, facing death, Chas suddenly morphs into Turner, whose own corpse has been shovelled unceremoniously beneath the stairs into the basement Chas had been renting. The two men, antagonistically close in life, are irrevocably chained through expiry.
The power of the film lies not only in its enduring myth – all those silly stories about Mick and Anita making a clip joint porn movie on the sly while her boyfriend, his bandmate Keith Richards, kept jealous watch in his car outside – or the legacy of Nic Roeg’s filmmaking biography, or the mysterious failure of Donald Cammell to achieve enduring success, or in its good-looking go-with-it stars, or in its pumping pounding music. No, it is intrinsically revealed in the whirl of editing, the decadent wastes of London and the stark photography. The film is a tour de force of visual impressions, as much a work of surrealist art as anything Dali put on canvas. The cutthroat experience of editing the footage fell to Cammell, not Roeg, which may strike us as odd given the esteemed director’s preference for beguiling narratives laced with intercutting so fast it doesn’t so much confuse as become an irrelevance. Not so here, where every two or three second shot is aimed at propelling us out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. Mike Molley’s cameras are barely still; along with Nic Roeg, who doubled as cinematographer, he allows the close up to take centre stage, ultra close in the case of Breton’s erect nipple, or Jagger’s snarling teddy boy impersonation as he rales against the establishment, mixing his own life on the rock star road with Chas’s gangster chic, the blues blast Memo from Turner allows Jagger to shift in and around the light, out of one form of darkness and into another. The mansion is huge but people snuggle against each other, compressed by the livid atmospheres, the heady smoky brew that boils beneath everyone’s skin, altering everyone’s identity.
Is that really what performance is about – a wild ride into the imaginations of its cast or a long wallow in death and debauchery? The truth, like Turner’s musical legacy and Chas’s gangster hipness, lies somewhere between, not to be explored verbally and with wit or erudite dialogue, but through action, ritual and visible force, gratifying and repulsive at once, how Chas Devlin sees his own existence, hovering between the man and the woman, dependent yet independent, choices swimming across his vision, a hall of mirrors where the reflections reveal not imaginations but real insatiable truths, every one of them leading to the inevitable end. As Turner sings it: “Come now, gentlemen / Your love is all I crave / You’ll still be in the circus / When I’m laughing, laughing in my grave…”
Rivetingly brilliant - brilliantly riveting.
ROBBERY (1967)
Based on the real 'great train robbery' of 1963, 'Robbery' directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt) is a very stylish British crime film starring Stanley Baker, Joanna Pettet and James Booth.
Criminal mastermind Paul Clifton (Baker) and his gang of robbers manage to successfully pull off a diamond heist in the middle of the day and evade police capture. Clifton, then uses the proceeds of this endeavor to assemble a professional team to rob a Royal Mail train carrying a huge payload of cash from Glasgow to London.
Do they manage to pull it off ?
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A terrific crime film with exciting car chases, wonderful acting and a great story.
Recommended.
(114 minutes)
THE CREMATOR (1969)
A surreal story of a man's descent into madness.
Karel Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrušínský), a cremator in Prague, persecuted by bizarre delusions and hallucinations, believes he is saving mankind through cremation, by liberating their souls to the ether.
As his convictions get stronger by the day and get admixed with Nazi ideology, the man becomes a homicidal lunatic.
A very dark and creepy film...a black comedy of some sorts.
Some consider this to be the greatest Czech film ever made.
The transitions, the cinematography, the brilliant acting by Rudolf Hrušínský, the very dense and deep symbolism...
I can see why this is considered a masterpiece of cinema.
Recommended.
(Directed by Juraj Herz - 100 minutes)
THE LONG DUEL (1967)
A western set in 1920s India.
Trevor Howard plays a British Raj policeman sympathetic to the problems of the indigenous tribes of northern India police the end. He’s frustrated by Harry Andrews’s uncultured superintendent, and Laurence Naismith and Maurice Denham as governor and administrator. Charlotte Rampling is the chaste love interest. For the rebellious tribal leader, Sultan, Yul Brynner is cast in the kind of muscley role he occupied around this time; water off a duck’s back for our Yul. The Spanish locations are a decent (late) substitute for the Indian Himalayas. The Long Duel is sporadically interesting, has moments of violent incident, but is ultimately unrewarding.
Ken Annakin directs adequately. The fact the film quite clearly inhabits the same arguments and incidents as a Cowboys and Indians saga doesn’t aid its success either. For a late sixties big budget adventure, the whole thing feels a bit underdone, ideologically obvious and possibly miscast. The Long Duel is watchable without being particularly good.
Hadn't heard of that one; sounds interesting.
GRAND HOTEL (1932)
A granddaddy of a movie, Grand Hotel is the first ‘soap opera’ of cinema, a portmanteau movie full of big stars, good and bad acting, a turgid but workable plot, sumptuous design and some decent dialogues to keep us amused or intrigued. Pre-Hays Code, the film is also quite racy in its depiction of physical relationships: Greta Garbo clearly spends the night with John Barrymore, Joan Crawford chooses to prostitute herself, drink, drunkenness and a love of money play a huge part in the storyline. Grand Hotel also holds a peculiar record in the Oscars, being the only film to win Best Picture with its only nomination.
But is it any good?
Well, probably.
The film looks grand, as the title suggests. The hotel is one of those art deco studio masterpieces, lush, large and sumptuous, and there is a super painted special effect looking down from the ceiling of the circular atrium, the balconies getting smaller and smaller, some figures moving, others not. The costumes, from Adrian, are a 1930s masterclass. The screenplay is based on a successful stage production and at points it still feels like it. The Barrymore Brothers, John and Lionel, are prone to under and over acting respectively. One feels Lionel hasn’t left the demonstrative style of the theatre behind him, while John has gone the opposite way, becoming so restrained he’s an unemotional clotheshorse. The best turns are from Wallace Beery and Joan Crawford as a rich industrialist and his secretary, whose performances are nuanced, active and understated enough to feel genuine. Beery, traditionally seen as a loud, blustering kind of performer, is phenomenally good, even putting on a thin German accent, which almost nobody else bothers to do. Crawford, basically playing a part-time whore, is sexy and contemporary; she sparkles while the Barrymore Brothers flounder. Speaking of sparkling, the opening titles are written over a skyscape of stars, bolstering MGM’s boast that the studio possessed more stars than there are in heaven. Top of the bill is Greta Garbo, who according to the posters for Anna Christie (1930) had only just begun to talk. Pity she forgot to act. A lot of undignified snivelling and aggravated arm movements abound here. Her famous line “I want to be alone” gets an airing, but having uttered it, the audience [this one at least] doesn’t believe the later sudden turn in her mood, as if one night of love cures all ills. Ah, well, maybe it did in 1932. John Gillbert should have played the part of the jewel thief known as The Baron; Barrymore simply isn’t a strong enough romantic presence beside the photogenic fantasy of Garbo. Grand Hotel, after all, is a movie of impressions, of charming vignettes, rather than any substance.
In fact, the film opens with a series of short overlapping scenes as cast member after cast member uses the hotel’s telephone exchange to contact loved ones, colleagues, friends, doctors, etc, providing the audience with background information aplenty in the first three minutes. The sequences closes with Lewis Stone’s weary doctor, a scarred World War veteran, uttering the line: “The Grand Hotel: people come, people go, nothing happens.” A slight exaggeration, given what follows. I quite enjoyed the film, forgiving the over-enthused acting, and while it doesn’t strike any kind of gold as an intellectual piece, it certainly entertains and is a clear forerunner of British TV fodder like The Duchess of Duke Street, or the recent Hotel Portofino, even to a certain extent American rich pickings like Dynasty, and the Arthur Hailey novel Hotel, locations where all secrets hold all the keys to the kingdoms.
Grand Hotel is a now mostly forgotten movie and it doesn’t have much to recommend it story wise, but it is an elaborate, well-constructed movie that at least isn’t dull, which most of those impersonating television shows are.
Worth a look.
THE PACKAGE (1989)
A superb Cold War thriller.
Master Sergeant Johnny Gallagher (Gene Hackman) is tasked to escort Sergeant Walter Henke (Tommy Lee Jones) back to the United States for court-martial.
The trouble is...the man is an imposter.
In the back drop, negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union are happening for nuclear disarmament, but certain elements within both nations are not too keen for these to go through.
Gallagher finds himself trapped in a sinister conspiracy, where only he can unlock the trap.
Directed by Andrew Davis (The Fugitive), 'The Package' is a very entertaining suspense thriller, with great performances by Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones.
Recommended.
(108 minutes)
The naked gun (2025)
This is of course the sequel to the Naked Gun movies from decades ago, but now staring Liam Neeson. What do I think? Neeson ad Frank Drebin jr and Pamela Anderson as his love interest are doing a great job. There are a lot of jokes in the movie, but not as many as the old ones. There are many good jokes too, but again not as many as in the old movies.
HOUNDS (2023)
a.k.a. Les Meutes
The Jury prize winner at Cannes 2023, Hounds is a Moroccan gangster picture packed full of curious incident, violence and darkly black humour. Hassan is a low-rent middle-aged hoodlum too old for his work and weary of living hand-to-mouth. His son, Issam, is a low-rent practical underachiever stuck in the hovels of Casablanca, living with his father and grandmother and aspiring to move just one rung up the ladder but despising the ‘quick route’ to the top taken his father, knowing it is a fallacy despite all the drug money he sees flashed around the coffee shops. When the local kingpin, Dib, loses his fighting hound to the new gangster on the block, he vows revenge and sends Assam to kidnap the man who assaulted him post-dogfight. Assam takes his son with him on what ought to be a simple task, but nothing goes according to plan and the two men spend the night driving from one location to another avoiding or engaging with the police, drug runners, drunks and queers before things take an exceptionally vicious turn.
Hassan is well played by Abdellatif Masstouri, an amateur actor, displaying the right amount of concern, fear and anger as each hour passes and the night gets tougher and tougher to resolve. Ayoub Elaïd as the son interprets Issam as a younger version of his dad, perhaps with more brains, but only those his father would have had at his age – it is the destitution and repetitive nature of life in the Moroccan slums that has made Hassan as wary and tortured as he is. Both men spend many moments locked in silence as they ponder themselves, their troubles and their little slice of a dreadful world.
Kamal Lazraq directs with some flair and the film is never dull, the action [using hand held cameras] feels tense and visceral. The fact we never know exactly what is happening in the men’s minds and in reality creates a sense of genuine confusion for the audience. The narrative runs a little like an Odyssean Quest, each event becoming a teaching post and a turning point; the film ends in family reconciliation, albeit a silent, wary one.
Interesting and vivid.
Hmmm... avoiding 'queers' - why, are the father and son exceptionally hot?
Assignment K (1968)
A repeat showing on Talking Pictures TV of this bland spy caper which manages to be interesting but not in any of the right ways. It stars a bland Stephen Boyd as an ex racing driver who after a fiery smash is now in another career, as head spy in his own freelance agency arranging to get information on behalf of MI6, where he reports to an M-like Michael Redgrave in or around Whitehall. Redgrave is probably in it for just two scenes, despite his high billing. It's said that Michael Redgrave got Boyd his big break in acting so maybe that's why he's in this.
Early scenes show our lead arranging 'drops' much like the kind 007 sees Auric Goldfinger do in the novel - but not in the film - as an agent of Smersh if I recall and that is interesting to see. But there's a fair bit of this spy craft going on and you soon realise why they Bond films don't do too much of this - it's actually pretty dull to watch, especially as there is no emotional involvement with our lead spy, we're given no reason to care about him. The attempt at the racing driver backstory hints of a racy nature but it's not exploited in the story, you don't see him ever test his motoring skills in a car chase later on, for instance.
Ski scenes and cable cars in the Austrian town beginning with K which Ian Fleming stayed at in his formative years anticipate next year's OHMSS but though Boyd is more polished than Lazenby, the Bond actor is actually more interesting in his performance. I feel bad because I later read on imdb that Boyd died aged only 45 of a heart attack while playing golf, and he did try to do movies that had some integrity; he admitted they'd tried to make him a leading man when in fact he was a character actor. This film is exhibit A for his failing, there is just nothing behind the eyes, no sense of emotional hinterland. But it gets worse when he does get emotionally involved with a Swedish blonde in Austria, because the dialogue is sappy - worse than that between Rigg and Lazenby, all that 'indubitably' rubbish and 'you have marvellous... earlobes', it is just cringe.
Enjoyment comes from tidbits in the supporting cast. A pre It Aint Half Hot Mum Windsor Davies as a workman in a Q-type laboratory, somehow making something of his tiny role, Q himself is Geoffrey Bayldon who may have been in Casino Royale - in which director Val Guest played a large part. There's a pre- Please Sir! John Alderton, a young actress called Jane Merrow who is still acting today, in a 2025 horror film, there is Jan Werich who was primed to play Blofeld the previous year but got ditched - they mystery being why he was ever cast given he really does look like Santa, or a tiny Austrian toymaker, not remotely threatening (though imdb has him down as being in YOLT, as 'the hands of Blofeld' - is this true, did those scenes get shot anyway before he got ditched, with Pleasance's voice dubbed over later? Or is that movie urban myth?) There is Jeremy Kemp who is recognisable from war movies of the time but also as the annoyed father in law in Four Weddings, the one who storms out after James Fleet's Best Man's foot-in-mouth speech: 'It's very disappointing!'
I expected more however because I'd got this mixed up with another dodgy 60s spy thriller of the same ilk shown on Talking Pictures TV, one that starred Tom Courtney and had a cameo from Peter Cook and maybe Leonard Rossiter, it's the same sort of thing. It even features a racing car track from what little I recall, which would have fitted into this movie.
As one review on imdb has it, the film can't make up its mind if it's James Bond or Harry Palmer and suffers accordingly; at times it's even The Pink Panther as it's dogged by some naff cocktail party music for much of the Austrian ski scenes, as if to imply the leads are so cool you don't really need to care about their situation.
That all said, if you saw this on the big screen back in the day, there would have been plenty of lovely ski locations and such scenes to keep you entertained. So it's not actually that bad, just nowhere near good enough. It's almost a bit like The Odessa File - the film not the brilliant novel - in that there's an overwhelming feeling of just going through the motions, it doesn't really click.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It has some solid laughs in the first act but then kinda peters out. The snowman sequence is exceptional, though.
Yes, that's sequence that's set up very well and it pays off brilliantly. The same can't be said about the owl, I think.
Hmmm... avoiding 'queers' - why, are the father and son exceptionally hot? @Napoleon Plural I wrote 'avoiding or engaging' - the young man is sort of hot in a puppyish way, if you are interested.
Anyhow, we must have been on the same wavelength last night...
ASSIGNMENT K (1968)
Philip Scott is a former racing driver turned toy tycoon whose extravagant and successful lifestyle hides a deadly espionage secret: his frequent journeys to West Germany and Austria are forays that enable him to maintain a network of anti-Soviet spies. Funded by the mysterious Department K of the British Secret Service, Scott has carried out four assignments with glowing results. The fifth involves smuggling out a microfilm list of deep cover East German Stasi agents. Unfortunately one of Scott’s contacts is murdered and suspicion falls on his new girlfriend, wealthy Swedish playgirl Antonia Peters. However, as Scott develops their relationship further, the affable foreign sleeper agent Mr Smith makes his presence felt and Scott becomes embroiled in a cat-and-mouse chase across London to Munich and back again.
Val Guest directs with his usual assured touch, although that doesn’t mean sparks are going to fly. He was on a run of spy thrillers, having just none-to-successfully aided a hand in Charles Feldman’s disastrous OO7 spoof Casino Royale and before that helming the Jason Love escapade Where The Spies Are. David Niven starred in both those films and in both he looks a shade too old to be the dashing, virulent and vicious hero. Same problem here, although the star is Stephen Boyd – an actor with very little screen charisma. He might have been a big star in the making in 1959 after Ben Hur, but Northern Irishman Boyd never quite made it. Fantastic Voyage sustained a late sixties surge, but films like this and The Oscar did not help his cause. The script, fashioned by Guest, from an original by Dr Who writer Bill Strutton, has the hero spouting dialogue David Niven would have died for. In Boyd’s hands, or mouth as it were, these lines of intrigue, wit and sophistication are uttered so dead-pan they are pretty much dead. I half smiled at them all. The love scenes had a cuteness to them that recalls James Bond, but isn’t half as erotically charged – although the slick cut to the empty glasses of glühwein beside a roaring ski chalet log fire was rather neat, a metaphor of hot empty love if ever there was one.
Boyd is given beautiful support by Camilla Sparv, quite possibly one of the sixties most gorgeous actresses, and the on-off romance has a Mills and Boon quality to it that feels contrived and genuine at once. Where else would two rich people meet and fall in love if not Kitzbuhel? It worked for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. The spy craft shenanigans are nicely downplayed and we are uncertain for long periods about exactly whose side who is on. There are many meetings in secret places, many nightclubs, hotel rooms and kidnappings, a couple of murders, low key – which is good – but lacking tension – which is bad. The eventual resolution, of which there are two, comes as something of a surprise.
The cast is peppered with soon to be famous faces like Catherine Schell, Jeremy Kemp, John Alderton, Leo McKern and Windsor Davies. Old stagers like Michael Redgrave are rolled up to play crusty superiors. Jan Werich plays an Austrian doctor; he was in line to star in You Only Live Twice as Blofeld and might have made a decent stab at it, although on this showing he would have been a tad chummy.
The film was based on Hartley Howard’s novel Department K. A sequel titled Assignment L was planned based on Howard’s second Scott novel The Eye of the Hurricane, but nothing came of it. I became aware of this movie only recently through Michael Richardson’s excellent book Guns, Girls and Gadgets, so I was very pleased to see this crop up randomly on Talking Pictures TV. It isn’t a great film, but it is worth a little look, chiefly for Miss Sparv and some of those scintillating lines of dialogue, completely out of place in the generally dull framework of the film’s narrative, structure and presentation, which is workmanlike at best. While Michael Richardson rates it one of the fifty spy thrillers of the 1960s to watch, Halliwell’s gives Assignment K short shift, Wiki a few lines, IMDB a rough ride – the film seems to have been almost universally dismissed. Pity that, but maybe the problem is one of Val Guest’s own making. As director, he isn’t providing enough ‘oomph’ to keep an audience interested. One should perhaps be thankful Guest didn’t over egg it – as even Bond was prone to do – maybe his experience with Casino Royale damped that idea – but a thriller lacking thrills is a hard sell in any era.
Huge potential, but in the end a disappointment.
A REASON TO LIVE, A REASON TO DIE (1972)
The Dirty Dozen relocated to the American Civil War.
James Coburn leads a gang of cutthroats rescued from the gallows in a covert attack on a mountain fort. Cue arguments, rebellions, a ton of killings and terrible dubbed dialogue.
I would like to say there is something of interest, but I couldn’t find anything. Coburn’s charisma seems too modern to sit with period films; even in The Magnificent Seven he was the most ‘modern’ of the sharpshooters, laconic, thoughtful and eschewing traditional weapons for the unexpected. Here, he reinterprets that smart-mouthed Irishman he played in Leone’s A Fistful of Dynamite, all smiling, hidden deadliness. Telly Savalas plays another villain holed up in a mountain top retreat. Occasionally decent to look at – the Almeria desert was a great place to make westerns – but A Reason… is a stereotypical spaghetti saga where the sauce has lost all its flavour. Even the climatic massacre lacks spice.
X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES (1963)
Directed by Roger Corman, X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, is a 1963 science fiction film that tells the story of Dr James Xavier (Ray Milland), who is researching ways of enhancing human vision.
Dr Xavier creates a compound, which when applied to the eyes gives tremendous power to the vision, enabling the person to see beyond substances, into the innards of things.
Dr Xavier experiments on his own eyes and uses his X-ray vision to save a patient's life.
But his quest for finding what lies beyond this material reality forces him to over use the compound on his eyes. This increase in the power of perception eventually leads the man down the spiral to insanity.
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A classic science fiction film, with a thought provoking story.
An underrated gem.
Recommended.
(79 minutes)
THE TALL T (1957)
A brilliant western, packed full of tension, from director Budd Boetticher and writer Burt Kennedy. It is based on an Elmore Leonard novella, so the piece crackles with virulent intensity and hard bitten characters.
Randolph Scott is excellent as the lone rancher Pat Bannon, whose reputation as foreman at the Tenvoorde Ranch earned him the moniker ‘The Tall T’, but whose solo enterprise is weakening him, both physically and mentally. He’s making bad gambling choices and ends up losing his horse, is way too chummy with the downbeats in Contention, the local town, or the Way-Station Master and his cheery son, and he can’t even ride bulls the way he used to. Saddled with no horse and carrying his saddle, Bannon flags down a hired stagecoach, and is reluctantly offered a lift to his ranch by the passengers, newlyweds Willard and Doretta Mims. Doretta stands to inherit her father’s fortune and Willard has married her for the money. When the stagecoach is hijacked by Richard Boone’s menacing Frank Usher and his duo of nasties Chink and Billy Jack, Bannon must rediscover some of his old habits to rescue Doretta and himself from certain death.
The film is low on the kind of incident one might expect in a fifties western [the shootings, fistfights, homespun singalongs, Indians, arrows and whooping]. Instead it is high on dramatic stand offs. The first appearance of Frank and his gang, emerging from the shadows of the Way-Station is a fantastic few seconds of crafted tension [Tarantino noted it and replicated the scene in his proto-western Inglorious Bastards]. The ensuing dialogue is quite possibly one of the most suspenseful scenes in western movie history as Richard Boone scowls and sneers, almost mesmerised by Scott’s hero, who remains perfectly still throughout, both men’s responses measured, careful.
Meanwhile John Hubbard’s husband, Willard, is all panicky grovelling impatience, and Maureen O’Sullivan’s older, naïve wife a permanently frightened shrew; she only finds her voice later on when the situation becomes so bleak all she can do is sob. There is another wonderful scene in the half-light of a disused mine entrance, when Bannon attempts to comfort Doretta; his words and actions are the least comforting you’ll ever hear, yet Randolph Scott makes them honest, pertinent and tender. The kiss, when it comes, has the shock of rape to it; and in fact it is the single-minded villain, Frank, who displays most affection towards her plight, suggesting he wants her for himself, or least pities her situation. Bannon is never so subtle – he takes and he conquers – rediscovering that determined streak he lost while struggling to run a ranch singlehanded. At the start of the movie, he was attempting to buy a bull-sire, and here he metamorphoses metaphorically into the bull, with Doretta his unsuspecting but receptive cow. Doretta, on her part, shares some of his animal instinct, responding to his and Frank’s kind of soft ruthlessness while recoiling from the punishment and indifference of the gang members. There is something satisfying in seeing two older stars playing older, lonely people who meet in difficult circumstances and discover a mutual desire. Not something you see very often in these days of airbrushed movies.
The climax is bloody and taut.
Boetticher directs with a keen sense of grand drama; the words, their phrasing and delivery, the actions and body language that surrounds them, are far more important than the narrative, which is simplistic at best. Heinz Roemheld’s music fuses some Cole Porter jazz classics with prairie song, which makes for an intriguingly romantic score than one would not expect. The photography is wide and lush. Perhaps most pleasingly, the film does not overstay its welcome, coming in at a brief 80-odd minutes.
Very good indeed.