Okay, so you guys rapped so much about this mini-modern-epic, I broke a vow and decided to watch this Quentin Tarantino exploitation flick.
I should point out that in my social circle, Tarantino and I have previous. That’s not a guarantee of any qualified critical analysis; I am but an amateur. However, there is something disconcerting about watching a QT movie in the 2000s, as if the director / writer / producer has forgotten how to make an engaging emotional product and decided instead to pursue vignettes of conversational rationale which he believes will create the necessary depth of character and narrative insight. Clue to my dilemma: they don’t. You can have all the flashy direction, extravagant pop music backgrounds, vibrant photography, naturalistic performances, etc, etc, you want, but if you aren’t constructing something that caresses deeper than the pliant surface then you are not making great art, you are only impersonating it.
I noted this trait as early as QT’s failed double bill Grindhouse, which he made with his matey Robert Rodrigues – another director who seems to have lost his way. What exactly was supposed be happening there? I asked. Two completely unrelated haphazardly exercised dumbly plotted and trashily expunged films tagged onto each other as if this in itself was enough to make an audience bay with delight. The situation deepened with the Kill Bill franchise. An involving, rapid-fire first film dipped badly and quickly into a second, ponderous epic which turned into a dull pastiche of chop-suey movies; worse, it even mocked David Carradine’s own cult classic TV show Kung Fu, which itself satirised the Bruce Lee craze. Things got worse and worse with Inglorious… a film that had the blundering audacity to bend history for kicks. Borrowing Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone motifs merely made the process all the more galling. Perhaps an audience not versed in cinema history might enjoy these signals, but they stank of an unoriginal mind. Django Unchained was even worse. I’m all for evening out the square and slapping the face of slavery, but this was a misplaced venture which seemed to venerate its white characters as some sort of comic throwback, as if their behaviour is okay because it’s all a bit of mindless historical fun. The final confrontation completely misunderstands the lyrics of Richie Havens’ Freedom and instead uses the rhythm for a tirade of violence, black on white. I was so upset by the decline in this director’s output, I haven’t viewed a QT movie since.
This is a shame as his first three works are exceptional, revealing a rare insight into the modern [1990s] world and the people who inhabit its lesser auspices. These movies dealt with crime and criminals. They didn’t fantasise the life style. Yes, there were instances of complete farce and stylised violence, but there was an abstract undercurrent of natural order, which made you accept the bizarre. When Samuel L. Jackson riffs the Bible before a summary gangland execution, or Travolta expounds the delight of Le Royale with Cheese, dances clandestinely with his bosses wife, or Bruce Willis wearily throws a fight, these feel completely normal interactions for the characters; when De Niro’s ex-con loses patience with Brigit Fonda and shoots her stone dead in a car park, we almost expected it, we know he’s unhinged, QT has hinted at his latent madness; the dancing and parading to Steeler’s Wheels while men lie dying is a moment of psychotic mania that pulls us into the field, identifies the character in our mind, forever as a grinning maniac. Why, I asked myself, had all this disappeared? Where was the genuine adult relationship as exemplified by Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, a friendship which developed through mutual need, not mutual exploitation, through a series of clever scenes which showed us their dependency rather than constantly rammed it down our throats with pretentious dialogue?
Inglorious… was insufferable in this. The extended café scene chief culprit. QT never scratched further than the surface of his characters. He gave them a host of fancy lines which would result in laughter if they were not featured in a movie. In real life, if someone tried to say his dialogue, they’d be told to piss off and not be so pompous. No one talks like this. In Once Upon A Time.. there’s a scene where Leonardo Di Caprio’s loser TV star is both informed and consoled by a precocious 8-year old starlet. No eight year old talks like she does. I don’t blame the actress. She’s very good [and also in a later scene where she plays victim to his baddie] but why does she have to be so much the barometer of sensibilities? Is QT trying to tell us that all his characters – all of Hollywood – are characters in a children's fairy tale [Once Upon A Time… get it?] or is he simply inserting this scene and its dialogue because it looks good and therefore in his mind must be included?
The same feeling occurs over and over in this movie. I won’t go into depth over the plot, which is an irrelevance as it bears only a passing relation to the real events of the Sharon Tate murder in 1969 which the writer has chosen to set it in. Like Inglorious… QT has seized a moment of time and twisted it to create an alternative future which suits his emblematic cover story. There’s no substance here. His characters are ciphers. The showbiz types are self-absorbed, money grabbing, introspective, material stereotypes. They drink, they talk nothings to nobodies, they expect their fame to encompass their lives, to open doors and when it doesn’t they resort to desperate measures. Nothing so desperate as the titular Jackie Brown though: she ran drugs, these guys get to fly to Rome and make spaghetti westerns. That’s the …in Hollywood version of a fairy tale gone wrong. Meanwhile the ‘hippies’, who seem to all be sexy comely women, are treated like some witches coven. The final scenes where a threesome of crazed ‘hippies’ – that’s the writer’s descriptive word, not mine – set out to kill someone, anyone, is hopelessly over-the-top as if everyone acting dumb can excuse such moments of bloodletting and fiery abandon. Their lack of afforded motivation makes their incursion into the Beverly Hills quiet life immaterial. Why are they there? Who is this Charlie they speak of? How did they end up so crazed – drugs, hypnosis, politics? Nothing. Not a jot of evidence. And I waited almost three hours to see this resolve itself by having Brad Pitt bash a woman’s face onto a mantel piece six times [I shut my eyes after the third bash].
I waited and waited for something to happen that grabbed my interest, but there simply wasn’t. The opening salvo of scenes craved my attention, but singularly failed to deliver it, so concerned they were with looking and sounding good, that someone forgot to instil any substance. All this cross cutting / flashback / movie footage was a diversion designed to disorientate the viewer without purpose. This annoying non-linear format continues through the whole film. Normally, I enjoy this kind of deception, but here I kept asking myself why things were happening, began to be intrigued, only to be informed without a single whiff of irony that I was watching a flashback or an imagination. It was cinematic mechanics without the love. Even the ‘real’ stuff irked: why does Brad Pitt’s down-at-heel stunt man have to see the Lolita hitch-hiker three times before he picks her up? what on earth is happening at the ‘hippie’ ranch? if it’s so important why do we never find out? why are they so suspicious, is that meant to suggest the mesmeric qualities of Charles Manson’s brood? why do we need to be told by the 8-yr old that De Caprio is a rubbish actor when we established that in the opening scene? why do both youngsters take up positions of prospective oral sex, is there a subtext I’m missing, or am I just a pervert, or is that what the director / writer want us to think, that we are all perverts, [like Polanski, if you like]? why must we see Margot Robbie’s mini-skirted Sharon Tate watching her own movie to learn she is insecure, that the outward performance is a stunt, when we gathered it from the actresses performance? oh, wait, it’s an excuse to shove in some Dean Martin clips, like we couldn’t fathom this out in our own minds? why is Bruce Lee portrayed as and treated like an imbecile, you’d think QT would revere him given the cult of his persona? do I need to see De Caprio berate himself to learn he knows his career has dive-bombed? why are so many real life characters blended with the imaginary, what is QT attempting to do, divide reality from his own fantasy? Questions, questions, questions, but I already know the answers, QT has pretty much told us everything from the off, he even includes a handy narration at effective points just to jog our memory, in case we are dumb enough not to figure it out. This occurs most obviously towards the end of the movie and seems to be included to edit the run time from four to three hours. The Italian sojourn is curtailed as fast as the drinks get drunk on the Pan Am plane.
Is there anything worth my while? Or your while? Well, look, Robert Richardson is a great cinematographer and the movie looks good. I loved the soundtrack, a funky homage to all things 1968/9, Margot Robbie looks gorgeous and is excellent in a very small role, Di Caprio looks fat, Pitt succeeds by underplaying, the film felt like it represented the era very well. Yet, did I get anything emotionally from this almost three hours of entertainment?
Quentin Tarantino is marmite. You either get him or you don’t. I get him, mostly. Pulp Fiction I don’t get, most people seem to get it, I don’t. What am I missing? I don’t know, it’s just unexplainable, but for this work I get it, and for me OUATIH is brilliant, but I love the 60’s, I was a kid in the 60’s and that’s probably the reason I give most things of, and about, that era a pass.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
What, even the Elvis films that @chrisno1 reviews?
I liked the cool fun of Hollywood, but here's the thing, they're less than the sum of some very good parts. I mean, the opening of Inglorious is superb, as is the conversation and expose in the German cellar later. Great scenes, but yep, it gets thrown away later. I feel like a middle-aged Bond fan who doesn't 'get' films like Moonraker where a gondola turns into a hovercraft, what's the point of making it silly? If you can't believe it, what's the point - yet I got it as a kid at the time and do now. Some people don't watch films to believe in them, it's just a diversion. Likewise, I don't really 'get' the modern Bond films in the way that others do. others really don't care about lack of logic or plot holes, to them it's like complaining candy isn't nourishing.
One of my favourite films of all time. I've written about it in this thread before, primarily when I had the rare opportunity to see it on the big screen, so I won't say too much. For a movie well on its way to 100 years old, it still holds up, especially the groundbreaking special effects- I've seen worse in much more recent films. It knocks spots off the 1976 version and doesn't suffer in comparison to the (l-o-n-g) 2005 Peter Jackson take on the same story.
The point I'd like to make here is that the "leading man" part (ie the love interest for Fay Wray) is played by an actor called Bruce Cabot, here in his first leading role in a major film. Here he is-
No, the one clinging to the rope. Here's a better shot, colourised, of him with Fay Wray-
I find it interesting that this is his first leading role in a major film while his last was in a Bond movie, "Diamonds Are Forever" to be exact-
Seen here telling the croupier that "Mr Franks' credit's good", he's Burt Saxby (or as his nameplate calls him "Albert R. Saxby", a little in-joke at the film's producer).
Perhaps the gorilla that terrifies the kids in Circus Circus is a tribute to Cabot and Kong!
Wasn't Bruce Cabot the actor said to have betrayed Errol Flynn - according to Flynn and David Niven's memoirs, the former in print long before Cabot died shortly after DAF.
Hot Fuzz
See, we were all talking about Tarantino's way of paying homage to his favourite films and how it divided people, but Edgar Wright does it too, and often far better if this is anything to go by.
It's the opposite approach though - this is totally a comedy but latterly it 'pays homage' to these emotional connecting moments in Hollywood cop films and even though it's taking the Mickey, something Pavlovian happens and I feel myself all affected by it anyway! Hot Fuzz works on both those levels, you can almost take it 'seriously' too if you want or just laugh at every aspect of it. Whereas Tarantino I find starts off engrossing and inspiring and then throws it away in the final act, we must all sponsor Chris No 1 to watch The Hateful Eight because it's the same thing really, some great dialogue, great scenes, great set-up and then the final 20 minutes, I don't know, the same sense of evaporation, of disappointment.
Dalton in this one of course, and a couple of Bond homages I think, one of them the shooting practice range at the fete. Simply loads of great British stars in this, one after the other.
I did say MOST things, Nap, Elvis films are in the no-no list 😂
And I hadn’t thought of the gorilla link in DAF before - it’s an interesting point, and seeing the Cubby in-joke that barbel mentioned, I think you could be well be right.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The second film version of the novel by Thomas Harris of the same name. The first was Manhunter in 1986 and this remake was part of the Hannibal Lecter series starring Anthony Hopkins. Manhunter had Brian Cox as Lecter (spelled Lecktor there).
It's very close to the novel, probably closer than the first version except that Hopkins gets more to do than Cox since his Lecter was the selling point of the film. I'm not going to get into the game of mentioning which actor (not just Lecter, the whole cast) was better in which film but overall I prefer Manhunter.
Being Bond fans, though, I'll mention that Ralph Fiennes makes a disturbing villain, carefully acted as one would expect.
@chrisno1 I've been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe's short fiction since I was a teenager and have read most of his stories so many times I can practically recite them from memory. Coming at it from that perspective, I was never a fan of Corman's adaptations. While the look of his movies was appropriately gothic, most of them always devolved into trite tales of adultery, veering way off from the actual stories. The two main exceptions are House of Usher, where the first and last 20 minutes are very faithful to the source material and Masque of the Red Death which merges the titular story with another of Poe's works called Hop Frog.
An interesting take on Poe is Spirits of the Dead, a French/Italian co-production that adapted three stories. Metzegerstein was directed by Roger Vadim; it stars Jane Fonda, flipping the gender of the main character and adding in Vadim's signature eroticism and debauchery which was only hinted at in the original text. Alan Delon stars in a version of William Wilson directed by Louis Malle that follows most of the beats of the original story. The last one is Toby Dammit, a story very loosely based on the satirical Never Bet The Devil Your Head and directed by Federico Fellini in his classic surreal style; very eerie but the furthest of all the stories from the original texts.
If you are a Poe fan, I'd also suggest checking out an adaptation of The Cask of Amontillado that was shown on the PBS show American Masters. It's only 16 minutes long but is a great adaptation despite its modest trappings and for my money the best attempt at putting a Poe story to film. I found a pretty low res version on YouTube linked below and continue to try to find a better version:
@TonyDP I think Poe's A Cask of Amontillado is partly adapted by Corman in The Black Cat which features in Tales Of Terror. That short adaptation was good. I am not a Poe fan, just dipped in a couple of times, but I agree hands down about Masque of the Red Death which is a fantastic movie all ways around.
Taking Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla as inspiration, this Hammer production marked the final sprint of success for the erstwhile British horror movie company. Released in 1970 it’s a mixture of the terrific and the mundane with a glimpse of lesbian fetishism thrown in for the contemporary market. Madeleine Smith, who plays the heroine Emma Morton, was mortified by the topless and lesbian love scenes, which she didn’t think were necessary; the movie had plenty of suggestive sensuality and enough gory staking’s to be a success, she reckoned.
Ms Smith’s got a confused recollection of events. In some interviews, she seems merely embarrassed, in still more believes she was exploited, in yet more thinks the production crew were more ill-at-ease than she, and provides odd justification in another by suggesting having lived through her teenage anorexia she was proud of her voluptuous curves; the film did mean her career stalled a little as she was constantly being offered roles which involved her de-robing all the time: cue Live and Let Die…
Conversely Ingrid Pitt, who performed full frontal nudity, doesn’t appear remotely bothered by the impact the scenes made on her career; she claims to be something of an exhibitionist and remembers drinking champagne with Madeleine Smith to relax before they frolicked around and on the bed.
At the risk of sounding distinctly chauvinist, both women look absolutely gorgeous in that slightly kooky, late-sixties, flower-child impression. They are both effective and affecting. Pitt is all smouldering permissive sensuality, her expressive, inquisitive, exquisite face making you wonder if she’s going to bite a girl’s neck or kiss her to an orgasm. You’re driven to believe her Carmilla Karnstien is more interested in the sexual aspects of her conquest than drinking her victim’s blood.
Smith, meanwhile, has the wide-eyed innocence of the naïve coquette, adoring the romantic fantasy stories Carmilla reads her, in love with a man once betrothed to her suddenly dead best friend, and falling helplessly in lust with her new best friend, the aforementioned Carmilla [who is also dead, as it were]. When she’s suffering the blood sickness, Smith’s not as blatantly crazed as Pippa Steel [the initial victim]. Her screams and lip-trembling wails of desperate desire are all the more haunting because of their relative calmness, as if she’s trying to confront and rationalise her fears, both of the mortal and the sinful.
There is excellent support work from two other females. Dawn Addams has a small, important and sinister role as Carmilla’s guardian, the Countess. It’s unclear if she is a vampire or not, but she certainly works for the Karnstein’s, introducing her ‘niece’ to prospective noble families where, having ingratiated herself, the young lass can get to her blood-drinking work. She and the wandering black-robed horseman who watches over Carmilla both survive the final slaughter and set up the potential for sequels, which did come. And Kate O’Mara is splendid as the watchful, then devious, house tutor to young Emma, herself seduced by Pitt’s glamorous, eager siren. As she struggles with her changing soul, O’Mara becomes openly distraught; the scene where she reels away from the garlic flowers is particularly striking.
Carmilla, meanwhile, continues to murder and seduce her way around the countryside, a rapacious individual whose night-time roaming in sheer negligées is the stuff of Dracula fantasy. The gored throat of Ferdy Mayne’s knowing Doctor is testament to Carmilla’s gut instincts. There’s a splendid early scene where she vanishes mist-like into her grave which has all the mystery of the best of Hammer, without the blood and gore and tits.
In fact, there isn’t very much nudity, despite the film being specifically tailored for the American exploitation market, and most of the sex is implied. There’s a fair dose of staking and decapitation, but The Vampire Lovers isn’t the most shocking of horrors either. It’s rather tame in all regards. The male roles, which might have provided some solidity, are numerous and too light handed. George Cole’s concerned father, Robert Morton, is probably the best of an average bunch.
The film starts with a pointless flashback [we see the episode again towards the end and it lowers the temperature at a time when the movie had been reaching a boiling point] and then embarks on an extended ballroom scene which introduces the main villainess and some of the subsidiary characters. This is like some horror version of Pride and Prejudice. “That woman’s looking at you,” says Pippa Steel’s Laura to her beau; “It’s me who should be jealous. She’s looking at you,” he replies, so we know where this one’s heading from the off. A lot of time is wasted on Peter Cushing’s General, whose daughter’s vampiric seduction is the first of a good half dozen or so. These scenes are repeated almost verbatim and to much better effect at the Morton household. The usual unveiling of the vampire and discovering how to defeat it is curtailed as we already know someone’s done it before, in the opening flashback, and the two gentlemen simply employ him to do the dirty work. After all these beastly women bare fangs and breasts, it comes as a shame it’s the men who do all the avenging and demon killing. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have some girl-on-girl heart stabbing action instead?
The script is serviceable, the direction okay, photography worthwhile. It doesn’t disgrace Hammer films, although it did lead them into the sex and fangs market, which didn’t bring the rewards the studio might have hoped, although some of the films in the cycle – very much like this one – remain watchable even if the quality’s a bit shaky.
one of my friends was trying to persuade me to watch a film and it was quickly obvious it was one of these artyfarty plotless wonders I never need to see again. I said "just tell me this: does the villains headquarters explode at the end or doesnt it? it doesnt? well what the hell kind of film is this anyway?" and of course he dared to mock me for having lowbrow tastes.
@chrisno1 , You're right. It's been ages since I saw Tales of Terror but elements of The Cask of Amontillado were definitely incorporated into the story. Vincent Price's character was even called Fortunato Luchesi, an amalgamation of two characters from the story; and Peter Lorre was Montresor, who was the villain of the story as well.
Harryhausen is always awesome, but I wish to file a brief report because it stars Jane Seymour as leading lady Princess Farah, stunningly beautiful throughout, in a wardrobe both skimpy and flowing, suitable for warm climate. And to answer the pressing question of one film scholar up above, yes she takes off all her clothes, though only photographed from discrete tasteful angles.
Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor) is also in this as a friendly wizard, I'll let you do your own google image search for his costumes in the film. but since Seymour is a BondGirl, in the name of Bond scholarship it is my responsibility to post these.
which makes me wonder, how many BondGirls have been in Harryhausen movies? here's who I remember
Jason and the Argonauts 1963 - Honor Blackman as the goddess Hera
One Million Years B.C. 1967 - Martine Beswick as a rival cavegirl. I've forgotten how this film goes, but if I'm reading Wikipedia right, our gypsy girl Zora gets in a catfight with Raquel Welch?!!?
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad 1973 - Caroline Munro as a slave-girl
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger 1977 - Jane Seymour as Princess Farah
Clash of the Titans 1981 - Ursula Andress as the goddess Aphrodite (she barely gets any lines, Olympus is crowded with better actors when she's onscreen)
have I missed any? thats a good excuse to watch some more Harryhausen!
THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD for me, a really great old fashioned sword & sorcery movie. I reviewed it a few months back. But yeah, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS takes some beating. However, Jane Seymour and Taryn Power sunbathing 'topless' / 'backless' was the stuff of matinee movie dreams when I was a kid in 1977.
Spanish writer-director Jesus Franco takes some getting used to. For many lovers of European exploitation cinema, he’s an auteur akin to someone like Welles or Truffaut. He really isn’t. He made cheap horror flicks, laced with blood and nudity. Some of his early output, when he teamed up with Harry Alan Towers, showed touches of class – Venus in Furs, a couple of Fu Manchu movies, Justine – but later efforts tended to dip far into the realm of pornography.
The Female Vampire, which he made quickly in Madeira in 1973, but never got released until 1975, is chief among his more salacious output. The movie stars the lovely Lina Romay as Countess Irina von Karlstein, an obvious cash-in on Le Fanu’s Karnsteins, and inspired no doubt by Hammer’s trilogy of blood curdlers: The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Franco reduces the gore content and ups the sex. Romay spends the entire film naked or dressed in the flimsiest of see-through garments. Her vampire technique is to hypnotise a victim, make love to and suck the life force from them, basically through their genitals, male or female. This allows plenty of scope for the sort of scenes which try to give pornography class but only succeed in lowering the tone of regular cinema. Curiously, despite this, the movie occasionally treads ever so close to actually being spine chilling and features has some marvellous cinematic images which wouldn’t look out of place in the premier horror market.
Romay plays her mute role remarkably well. She’s careful, almost stately, hauntingly beautiful, silent, expressing emotion through her eyes and the merest hint of a smile. Two scenes in particular stand out. During the first, the Countess is being interviewed by a young female journalist, and rebuffs her inquisitive questions, the journo seeming to be receiving the answers telepathically. In the second, the Countess appears spectre-like in the same reporter’s apartment, rolls her tongue erotically across her teeth and simultaneously makes her host orgasm; throughout the extended scene she comes and goes and moves with an audible flurry of bat wings. At these moments, Franco’s clever enough to simply have her disappear, which is much how Dracula and Co are described as manifesting in the books.
Sadly the rest of the movie really isn’t up to much. It’s mostly a miss, and descends into a bloody wallow of emotional guilt. There are several versions of the movie including one with more fangs and another with more f-g. I think I saw the in-between version, but the film’s been cut about so much over the years I’m not entirely certain.
Fans of Franco’s work include it among his best. A footnote is worth writing about Miss Romay. She was only nineteen at the time the movie was made, was married to the film editor while openly having an affair with the director. She and Franco went on to make dozens of films together, eventually marrying. She died at the relatively young age of 57 in 2012 and Franco followed her the next year. Despite the dubious quality of their movies, they certainly did love their lives together.
I'm tempted to go watch "Hopper - the hunt for the hamster of darkness" (I think it's Belgian) at the cinema! If only NTTD had a title half as good ...
I started watching THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) tonight. Those first forty five minutes are cinematic OO7 pleasure. Unfortunately, I have things to do, so I clawed myself away.
Elvis Presley’s debut movie is a melodramatic romantic musical western which touches vaguely on the lives of the Reno Brothers and the Jackson Gang, a group of vicious outlaws, robbers and murderers who terrorised Midwest America in the years immediately after the Civil War. These career criminals were so violent and their behaviour outraged so many, that when the Pinkertons Agency final caught them and prepared to transport them to prison, vigilantes broke into gaols and halted steam trains to haul out the criminals and lynch them. You’d never know this from watching Love Me Tender.
In fact, the initial few Reno Brothers raids are quite well represented by the opening train robbery, although literary license is used, suggesting the gang were still members of the Confederate army and did not know the war had ended. This is untrue. The Reno Brothers and their hanger’s on were deserters and serial enlisters, what were known as bounty jumpers. They’d enlist, take the sign on money and promptly desert. Their first robbery was of a post office where the post master was shot [in the movie it’s the station telegraph operator, who would nominally be employed by the U.S. postal service at the time]. After their first train robbery, a witness identifies them – as happens in the movie – leading to the Brothers arrest. The witness was shot dead and the Brothers acquitted, whereupon they continued their life of crime.
This sanitised version attempts to so thoroughly obscure the true story it even changes the character names. It does a fairly good job of pretending the real Reno Brothers never existed. It also throws in a few songs for Elvis to sing. I don’t know if there is any documented evidence to suggest any of the gang could sing. Here, the foursome are portrayed as honourable, wholesome farm boys. Vance, Brett and Ray, the war veterans, display dignity, a respect for their kin and community, of the decent way of living. The only one of the four who sticks out is Elvis Presley’s Clint. Too young to go to join General Lee [although apparently he’s twenty-two, so that seems unlikely] Clint has been stuck on the farm, protecting his aging mother and his older, pretty, practical wife, Cathy. Unknown to Clint, Cathy was deliriously in love and planning to marry Vance, but a letter informing the family incorrectly of his death threw her into the King’s welcoming youthful arms. Vance’s return resets her fires a-burning.
I can’t figure out why. Compared to the hip swivelling, ball of fire and sexual inferno cast by Elvis, Richard Egan’s Vance is steadfast, loyal, true and ever so dull. I can’t image what Cathy must be thinking. There’s an oblique reference to the central quandary when she asks Vance what he’s thinking every night when he knows she and Clint are lying “side by side.” He ain’t thinking side-by-side, honey, I can almost hear Elvis sneer.
The King’s really good in this supporting, but essential role. He’s great playing the slightly spoilt youngster, a man who clearly wanted to go to war, playing like a big kid with his brother’s sabre, asking about the battles, bored with farming. A little more of this might have created a character dynamic and familial conflict for him and the cast to work with. But because he was a singer, real life took over and, after the announcement of his casting provoked such a phenomenal fan response, executives at 20th Century Fox decided to include a few musical numbers and expand his part. Thus he gets to strut his stuff a couple of times, once on the homestead’s front porch, a peculiar scene where We Gotta Move amuses everyone but his wife – Debra Paget, beautiful as always, doesn’t even tap her foot – and Love Me Tender seems sung to the audience instead of her. When the lovelorn Vance walks off mid-recital, you’d think Clint might follow him, understanding the meaning of the song for his brother, but Elvis ‘The King’ has to finish the number.
Later on, we get to see him show off some signature hip and leg-shaking moves to Poor Boy and Let Me. These two songs are more a reflection of the bluegrass inspired country tracks he recorded for Sun Records between 1954 – 55 than the uproarious rock n rollers he captured teenagers hearts and minds and sex lives with in 1956, all that Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me and Don’t Be Cruel. It’s disappointing to remember that as Elvis’ career continued he became more and more deported against these improvised jive moves. I don’t know if that was his choice, the director’s, or the guidance of ‘technical advisor’ Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ manager and the man responsible for both his meteoritic rise and subsequent long fall.
The film passes amiably enough. Elvis kicks off when he discovers his wife still has feelings for Vance – oh, how could she! audiences must have been stunned by that development – and the little bruiser gets so mad he even dispatches a swift jab to the poor girl’s jaw, you can see the bruise [make-up, of course]. It’s too late for a happy ending. The Reno Brothers are being chased by the army, Elvis turns on Vance, it all gets mighty ugly and the King takes a bullet for his mistaken, but well-founded, trouble [and strife].
Elvis didn’t want to die in his debut acting role, but his then girlfriend, June Juanico, said audiences remember the people who die in a tragedy. She was right too. Who remembers Richard Egan and Debra Paget? Everyone knows Elvis Presley sung Love Me Tender. They changed the name of the movie late on, after the single had shot to number one, his fourth in eight months. It doesn’t matter much, but it doesn’t really make any sense.
The movie’s okay. No great shakes. It could have made a reasonable western, but the songs throw it off kilter a little, although they are not numerous enough to disturb the tragic tone. Even if you don’t know how it ends, you can sense it coming the moment Clint reveals he’s Cathy’s wife. Still a pleasant afternoon of nostalgia for when the King seemed to have the world at his feet.
Tom Clancy’s doorstep bestselling Cold War thriller was the perfect piece to adapt for a Glasnost-seized Hollywood, as filmmakers suddenly wanted to treat the Soviets a little kinder. Relating vaguely to conspiracy theories about a couple of historical incidents involving missing Russian submarines, Clancy’s narrative involves his CIA pen pusher Jack Ryan persuading various levels of the US military that an experienced Soviet Admiral plans to defect using his country’s sleek new submarine as bait.
John McTierman’s impressive movie doesn’t bear too much close examination. Sean Connery plays the stately Admiral featuring his trademark Scottish-Russian accent [similar to his trademark English-Scots, Norwegian-Scots, Irish-Scots, American-Scots, Arab-Scots – you see where I’m going with this]. Alec Baldwin is about right as Jack Ryan. When Harrison Ford took over the role, he looked too old. The support cast is long. Women don’t feature. Lots of silliness in subs ensues and some of the underwater manoeuvres look and feel impossible. The film succeeds by creating moments of high tension, even if overall the story doesn’t make any sense.
I have been told that the first Rambo film is good. It can't be any worse than the last one. It seems to be on ITV4 regularly so I will probably watch when it comes on again.
Comments
ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD (2019)
Okay, so you guys rapped so much about this mini-modern-epic, I broke a vow and decided to watch this Quentin Tarantino exploitation flick.
I should point out that in my social circle, Tarantino and I have previous. That’s not a guarantee of any qualified critical analysis; I am but an amateur. However, there is something disconcerting about watching a QT movie in the 2000s, as if the director / writer / producer has forgotten how to make an engaging emotional product and decided instead to pursue vignettes of conversational rationale which he believes will create the necessary depth of character and narrative insight. Clue to my dilemma: they don’t. You can have all the flashy direction, extravagant pop music backgrounds, vibrant photography, naturalistic performances, etc, etc, you want, but if you aren’t constructing something that caresses deeper than the pliant surface then you are not making great art, you are only impersonating it.
I noted this trait as early as QT’s failed double bill Grindhouse, which he made with his matey Robert Rodrigues – another director who seems to have lost his way. What exactly was supposed be happening there? I asked. Two completely unrelated haphazardly exercised dumbly plotted and trashily expunged films tagged onto each other as if this in itself was enough to make an audience bay with delight. The situation deepened with the Kill Bill franchise. An involving, rapid-fire first film dipped badly and quickly into a second, ponderous epic which turned into a dull pastiche of chop-suey movies; worse, it even mocked David Carradine’s own cult classic TV show Kung Fu, which itself satirised the Bruce Lee craze. Things got worse and worse with Inglorious… a film that had the blundering audacity to bend history for kicks. Borrowing Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone motifs merely made the process all the more galling. Perhaps an audience not versed in cinema history might enjoy these signals, but they stank of an unoriginal mind. Django Unchained was even worse. I’m all for evening out the square and slapping the face of slavery, but this was a misplaced venture which seemed to venerate its white characters as some sort of comic throwback, as if their behaviour is okay because it’s all a bit of mindless historical fun. The final confrontation completely misunderstands the lyrics of Richie Havens’ Freedom and instead uses the rhythm for a tirade of violence, black on white. I was so upset by the decline in this director’s output, I haven’t viewed a QT movie since.
This is a shame as his first three works are exceptional, revealing a rare insight into the modern [1990s] world and the people who inhabit its lesser auspices. These movies dealt with crime and criminals. They didn’t fantasise the life style. Yes, there were instances of complete farce and stylised violence, but there was an abstract undercurrent of natural order, which made you accept the bizarre. When Samuel L. Jackson riffs the Bible before a summary gangland execution, or Travolta expounds the delight of Le Royale with Cheese, dances clandestinely with his bosses wife, or Bruce Willis wearily throws a fight, these feel completely normal interactions for the characters; when De Niro’s ex-con loses patience with Brigit Fonda and shoots her stone dead in a car park, we almost expected it, we know he’s unhinged, QT has hinted at his latent madness; the dancing and parading to Steeler’s Wheels while men lie dying is a moment of psychotic mania that pulls us into the field, identifies the character in our mind, forever as a grinning maniac. Why, I asked myself, had all this disappeared? Where was the genuine adult relationship as exemplified by Robert Forster and Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, a friendship which developed through mutual need, not mutual exploitation, through a series of clever scenes which showed us their dependency rather than constantly rammed it down our throats with pretentious dialogue?
Inglorious… was insufferable in this. The extended café scene chief culprit. QT never scratched further than the surface of his characters. He gave them a host of fancy lines which would result in laughter if they were not featured in a movie. In real life, if someone tried to say his dialogue, they’d be told to piss off and not be so pompous. No one talks like this. In Once Upon A Time.. there’s a scene where Leonardo Di Caprio’s loser TV star is both informed and consoled by a precocious 8-year old starlet. No eight year old talks like she does. I don’t blame the actress. She’s very good [and also in a later scene where she plays victim to his baddie] but why does she have to be so much the barometer of sensibilities? Is QT trying to tell us that all his characters – all of Hollywood – are characters in a children's fairy tale [Once Upon A Time… get it?] or is he simply inserting this scene and its dialogue because it looks good and therefore in his mind must be included?
The same feeling occurs over and over in this movie. I won’t go into depth over the plot, which is an irrelevance as it bears only a passing relation to the real events of the Sharon Tate murder in 1969 which the writer has chosen to set it in. Like Inglorious… QT has seized a moment of time and twisted it to create an alternative future which suits his emblematic cover story. There’s no substance here. His characters are ciphers. The showbiz types are self-absorbed, money grabbing, introspective, material stereotypes. They drink, they talk nothings to nobodies, they expect their fame to encompass their lives, to open doors and when it doesn’t they resort to desperate measures. Nothing so desperate as the titular Jackie Brown though: she ran drugs, these guys get to fly to Rome and make spaghetti westerns. That’s the …in Hollywood version of a fairy tale gone wrong. Meanwhile the ‘hippies’, who seem to all be sexy comely women, are treated like some witches coven. The final scenes where a threesome of crazed ‘hippies’ – that’s the writer’s descriptive word, not mine – set out to kill someone, anyone, is hopelessly over-the-top as if everyone acting dumb can excuse such moments of bloodletting and fiery abandon. Their lack of afforded motivation makes their incursion into the Beverly Hills quiet life immaterial. Why are they there? Who is this Charlie they speak of? How did they end up so crazed – drugs, hypnosis, politics? Nothing. Not a jot of evidence. And I waited almost three hours to see this resolve itself by having Brad Pitt bash a woman’s face onto a mantel piece six times [I shut my eyes after the third bash].
I waited and waited for something to happen that grabbed my interest, but there simply wasn’t. The opening salvo of scenes craved my attention, but singularly failed to deliver it, so concerned they were with looking and sounding good, that someone forgot to instil any substance. All this cross cutting / flashback / movie footage was a diversion designed to disorientate the viewer without purpose. This annoying non-linear format continues through the whole film. Normally, I enjoy this kind of deception, but here I kept asking myself why things were happening, began to be intrigued, only to be informed without a single whiff of irony that I was watching a flashback or an imagination. It was cinematic mechanics without the love. Even the ‘real’ stuff irked: why does Brad Pitt’s down-at-heel stunt man have to see the Lolita hitch-hiker three times before he picks her up? what on earth is happening at the ‘hippie’ ranch? if it’s so important why do we never find out? why are they so suspicious, is that meant to suggest the mesmeric qualities of Charles Manson’s brood? why do we need to be told by the 8-yr old that De Caprio is a rubbish actor when we established that in the opening scene? why do both youngsters take up positions of prospective oral sex, is there a subtext I’m missing, or am I just a pervert, or is that what the director / writer want us to think, that we are all perverts, [like Polanski, if you like]? why must we see Margot Robbie’s mini-skirted Sharon Tate watching her own movie to learn she is insecure, that the outward performance is a stunt, when we gathered it from the actresses performance? oh, wait, it’s an excuse to shove in some Dean Martin clips, like we couldn’t fathom this out in our own minds? why is Bruce Lee portrayed as and treated like an imbecile, you’d think QT would revere him given the cult of his persona? do I need to see De Caprio berate himself to learn he knows his career has dive-bombed? why are so many real life characters blended with the imaginary, what is QT attempting to do, divide reality from his own fantasy? Questions, questions, questions, but I already know the answers, QT has pretty much told us everything from the off, he even includes a handy narration at effective points just to jog our memory, in case we are dumb enough not to figure it out. This occurs most obviously towards the end of the movie and seems to be included to edit the run time from four to three hours. The Italian sojourn is curtailed as fast as the drinks get drunk on the Pan Am plane.
Is there anything worth my while? Or your while? Well, look, Robert Richardson is a great cinematographer and the movie looks good. I loved the soundtrack, a funky homage to all things 1968/9, Margot Robbie looks gorgeous and is excellent in a very small role, Di Caprio looks fat, Pitt succeeds by underplaying, the film felt like it represented the era very well. Yet, did I get anything emotionally from this almost three hours of entertainment?
___ ___
You can fill in the blank.
Quentin Tarantino is marmite. You either get him or you don’t. I get him, mostly. Pulp Fiction I don’t get, most people seem to get it, I don’t. What am I missing? I don’t know, it’s just unexplainable, but for this work I get it, and for me OUATIH is brilliant, but I love the 60’s, I was a kid in the 60’s and that’s probably the reason I give most things of, and about, that era a pass.
What, even the Elvis films that @chrisno1 reviews?
I liked the cool fun of Hollywood, but here's the thing, they're less than the sum of some very good parts. I mean, the opening of Inglorious is superb, as is the conversation and expose in the German cellar later. Great scenes, but yep, it gets thrown away later. I feel like a middle-aged Bond fan who doesn't 'get' films like Moonraker where a gondola turns into a hovercraft, what's the point of making it silly? If you can't believe it, what's the point - yet I got it as a kid at the time and do now. Some people don't watch films to believe in them, it's just a diversion. Likewise, I don't really 'get' the modern Bond films in the way that others do. others really don't care about lack of logic or plot holes, to them it's like complaining candy isn't nourishing.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
KING KONG (1933)
One of my favourite films of all time. I've written about it in this thread before, primarily when I had the rare opportunity to see it on the big screen, so I won't say too much. For a movie well on its way to 100 years old, it still holds up, especially the groundbreaking special effects- I've seen worse in much more recent films. It knocks spots off the 1976 version and doesn't suffer in comparison to the (l-o-n-g) 2005 Peter Jackson take on the same story.
The point I'd like to make here is that the "leading man" part (ie the love interest for Fay Wray) is played by an actor called Bruce Cabot, here in his first leading role in a major film. Here he is-
No, the one clinging to the rope. Here's a better shot, colourised, of him with Fay Wray-
I find it interesting that this is his first leading role in a major film while his last was in a Bond movie, "Diamonds Are Forever" to be exact-
Seen here telling the croupier that "Mr Franks' credit's good", he's Burt Saxby (or as his nameplate calls him "Albert R. Saxby", a little in-joke at the film's producer).
"Saxby"
"Burt Saxby?"
"Yeah"
"Tell him he's fired"
Perhaps the gorilla that terrifies the kids in Circus Circus is a tribute to Cabot and Kong!
Wasn't Bruce Cabot the actor said to have betrayed Errol Flynn - according to Flynn and David Niven's memoirs, the former in print long before Cabot died shortly after DAF.
Hot Fuzz
See, we were all talking about Tarantino's way of paying homage to his favourite films and how it divided people, but Edgar Wright does it too, and often far better if this is anything to go by.
It's the opposite approach though - this is totally a comedy but latterly it 'pays homage' to these emotional connecting moments in Hollywood cop films and even though it's taking the Mickey, something Pavlovian happens and I feel myself all affected by it anyway! Hot Fuzz works on both those levels, you can almost take it 'seriously' too if you want or just laugh at every aspect of it. Whereas Tarantino I find starts off engrossing and inspiring and then throws it away in the final act, we must all sponsor Chris No 1 to watch The Hateful Eight because it's the same thing really, some great dialogue, great scenes, great set-up and then the final 20 minutes, I don't know, the same sense of evaporation, of disappointment.
Dalton in this one of course, and a couple of Bond homages I think, one of them the shooting practice range at the fete. Simply loads of great British stars in this, one after the other.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I did say MOST things, Nap, Elvis films are in the no-no list 😂
And I hadn’t thought of the gorilla link in DAF before - it’s an interesting point, and seeing the Cubby in-joke that barbel mentioned, I think you could be well be right.
NP- yes, that's him.
Red Dragon (2002)
The second film version of the novel by Thomas Harris of the same name. The first was Manhunter in 1986 and this remake was part of the Hannibal Lecter series starring Anthony Hopkins. Manhunter had Brian Cox as Lecter (spelled Lecktor there).
It's very close to the novel, probably closer than the first version except that Hopkins gets more to do than Cox since his Lecter was the selling point of the film. I'm not going to get into the game of mentioning which actor (not just Lecter, the whole cast) was better in which film but overall I prefer Manhunter.
Being Bond fans, though, I'll mention that Ralph Fiennes makes a disturbing villain, carefully acted as one would expect.
@chrisno1 I've been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe's short fiction since I was a teenager and have read most of his stories so many times I can practically recite them from memory. Coming at it from that perspective, I was never a fan of Corman's adaptations. While the look of his movies was appropriately gothic, most of them always devolved into trite tales of adultery, veering way off from the actual stories. The two main exceptions are House of Usher, where the first and last 20 minutes are very faithful to the source material and Masque of the Red Death which merges the titular story with another of Poe's works called Hop Frog.
An interesting take on Poe is Spirits of the Dead, a French/Italian co-production that adapted three stories. Metzegerstein was directed by Roger Vadim; it stars Jane Fonda, flipping the gender of the main character and adding in Vadim's signature eroticism and debauchery which was only hinted at in the original text. Alan Delon stars in a version of William Wilson directed by Louis Malle that follows most of the beats of the original story. The last one is Toby Dammit, a story very loosely based on the satirical Never Bet The Devil Your Head and directed by Federico Fellini in his classic surreal style; very eerie but the furthest of all the stories from the original texts.
If you are a Poe fan, I'd also suggest checking out an adaptation of The Cask of Amontillado that was shown on the PBS show American Masters. It's only 16 minutes long but is a great adaptation despite its modest trappings and for my money the best attempt at putting a Poe story to film. I found a pretty low res version on YouTube linked below and continue to try to find a better version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TF_sMg5pKI&t=3s
@TonyDP I think Poe's A Cask of Amontillado is partly adapted by Corman in The Black Cat which features in Tales Of Terror. That short adaptation was good. I am not a Poe fan, just dipped in a couple of times, but I agree hands down about Masque of the Red Death which is a fantastic movie all ways around.
THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970)
Taking Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla as inspiration, this Hammer production marked the final sprint of success for the erstwhile British horror movie company. Released in 1970 it’s a mixture of the terrific and the mundane with a glimpse of lesbian fetishism thrown in for the contemporary market. Madeleine Smith, who plays the heroine Emma Morton, was mortified by the topless and lesbian love scenes, which she didn’t think were necessary; the movie had plenty of suggestive sensuality and enough gory staking’s to be a success, she reckoned.
Ms Smith’s got a confused recollection of events. In some interviews, she seems merely embarrassed, in still more believes she was exploited, in yet more thinks the production crew were more ill-at-ease than she, and provides odd justification in another by suggesting having lived through her teenage anorexia she was proud of her voluptuous curves; the film did mean her career stalled a little as she was constantly being offered roles which involved her de-robing all the time: cue Live and Let Die…
Conversely Ingrid Pitt, who performed full frontal nudity, doesn’t appear remotely bothered by the impact the scenes made on her career; she claims to be something of an exhibitionist and remembers drinking champagne with Madeleine Smith to relax before they frolicked around and on the bed.
At the risk of sounding distinctly chauvinist, both women look absolutely gorgeous in that slightly kooky, late-sixties, flower-child impression. They are both effective and affecting. Pitt is all smouldering permissive sensuality, her expressive, inquisitive, exquisite face making you wonder if she’s going to bite a girl’s neck or kiss her to an orgasm. You’re driven to believe her Carmilla Karnstien is more interested in the sexual aspects of her conquest than drinking her victim’s blood.
Smith, meanwhile, has the wide-eyed innocence of the naïve coquette, adoring the romantic fantasy stories Carmilla reads her, in love with a man once betrothed to her suddenly dead best friend, and falling helplessly in lust with her new best friend, the aforementioned Carmilla [who is also dead, as it were]. When she’s suffering the blood sickness, Smith’s not as blatantly crazed as Pippa Steel [the initial victim]. Her screams and lip-trembling wails of desperate desire are all the more haunting because of their relative calmness, as if she’s trying to confront and rationalise her fears, both of the mortal and the sinful.
There is excellent support work from two other females. Dawn Addams has a small, important and sinister role as Carmilla’s guardian, the Countess. It’s unclear if she is a vampire or not, but she certainly works for the Karnstein’s, introducing her ‘niece’ to prospective noble families where, having ingratiated herself, the young lass can get to her blood-drinking work. She and the wandering black-robed horseman who watches over Carmilla both survive the final slaughter and set up the potential for sequels, which did come. And Kate O’Mara is splendid as the watchful, then devious, house tutor to young Emma, herself seduced by Pitt’s glamorous, eager siren. As she struggles with her changing soul, O’Mara becomes openly distraught; the scene where she reels away from the garlic flowers is particularly striking.
Carmilla, meanwhile, continues to murder and seduce her way around the countryside, a rapacious individual whose night-time roaming in sheer negligées is the stuff of Dracula fantasy. The gored throat of Ferdy Mayne’s knowing Doctor is testament to Carmilla’s gut instincts. There’s a splendid early scene where she vanishes mist-like into her grave which has all the mystery of the best of Hammer, without the blood and gore and tits.
In fact, there isn’t very much nudity, despite the film being specifically tailored for the American exploitation market, and most of the sex is implied. There’s a fair dose of staking and decapitation, but The Vampire Lovers isn’t the most shocking of horrors either. It’s rather tame in all regards. The male roles, which might have provided some solidity, are numerous and too light handed. George Cole’s concerned father, Robert Morton, is probably the best of an average bunch.
The film starts with a pointless flashback [we see the episode again towards the end and it lowers the temperature at a time when the movie had been reaching a boiling point] and then embarks on an extended ballroom scene which introduces the main villainess and some of the subsidiary characters. This is like some horror version of Pride and Prejudice. “That woman’s looking at you,” says Pippa Steel’s Laura to her beau; “It’s me who should be jealous. She’s looking at you,” he replies, so we know where this one’s heading from the off. A lot of time is wasted on Peter Cushing’s General, whose daughter’s vampiric seduction is the first of a good half dozen or so. These scenes are repeated almost verbatim and to much better effect at the Morton household. The usual unveiling of the vampire and discovering how to defeat it is curtailed as we already know someone’s done it before, in the opening flashback, and the two gentlemen simply employ him to do the dirty work. After all these beastly women bare fangs and breasts, it comes as a shame it’s the men who do all the avenging and demon killing. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have some girl-on-girl heart stabbing action instead?
The script is serviceable, the direction okay, photography worthwhile. It doesn’t disgrace Hammer films, although it did lead them into the sex and fangs market, which didn’t bring the rewards the studio might have hoped, although some of the films in the cycle – very much like this one – remain watchable even if the quality’s a bit shaky.
There's nudity?
haha, number24 cuts straight to the bottom line! are there or are there not bare naked boobies in any of these films?
Explosions are also important!
one of my friends was trying to persuade me to watch a film and it was quickly obvious it was one of these artyfarty plotless wonders I never need to see again. I said "just tell me this: does the villains headquarters explode at the end or doesnt it? it doesnt? well what the hell kind of film is this anyway?" and of course he dared to mock me for having lowbrow tastes.
There are movies that heavily favour boobies and explosions, and on the other end of the scale there is ........ 😂
Ylvis - Jacues et Florine: a story about nothing (English subtitles) - YouTube
"Writing on the Wall" is easy. Just fill your mouth with marbles and put your testicles in a vice.
@chrisno1 , You're right. It's been ages since I saw Tales of Terror but elements of The Cask of Amontillado were definitely incorporated into the story. Vincent Price's character was even called Fortunato Luchesi, an amalgamation of two characters from the story; and Peter Lorre was Montresor, who was the villain of the story as well.
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
Ray Harryhausen 1977
Harryhausen is always awesome, but I wish to file a brief report because it stars Jane Seymour as leading lady Princess Farah, stunningly beautiful throughout, in a wardrobe both skimpy and flowing, suitable for warm climate. And to answer the pressing question of one film scholar up above, yes she takes off all her clothes, though only photographed from discrete tasteful angles.
Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor) is also in this as a friendly wizard, I'll let you do your own google image search for his costumes in the film. but since Seymour is a BondGirl, in the name of Bond scholarship it is my responsibility to post these.
which makes me wonder, how many BondGirls have been in Harryhausen movies? here's who I remember
Jason and the Argonauts 1963 - Honor Blackman as the goddess Hera
One Million Years B.C. 1967 - Martine Beswick as a rival cavegirl. I've forgotten how this film goes, but if I'm reading Wikipedia right, our gypsy girl Zora gets in a catfight with Raquel Welch?!!?
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad 1973 - Caroline Munro as a slave-girl
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger 1977 - Jane Seymour as Princess Farah
Clash of the Titans 1981 - Ursula Andress as the goddess Aphrodite (she barely gets any lines, Olympus is crowded with better actors when she's onscreen)
have I missed any? thats a good excuse to watch some more Harryhausen!
THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD for me, a really great old fashioned sword & sorcery movie. I reviewed it a few months back. But yeah, JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS takes some beating. However, Jane Seymour and Taryn Power sunbathing 'topless' / 'backless' was the stuff of matinee movie dreams when I was a kid in 1977.
THE FEMALE VAMPIRE (1973)
Spanish writer-director Jesus Franco takes some getting used to. For many lovers of European exploitation cinema, he’s an auteur akin to someone like Welles or Truffaut. He really isn’t. He made cheap horror flicks, laced with blood and nudity. Some of his early output, when he teamed up with Harry Alan Towers, showed touches of class – Venus in Furs, a couple of Fu Manchu movies, Justine – but later efforts tended to dip far into the realm of pornography.
The Female Vampire, which he made quickly in Madeira in 1973, but never got released until 1975, is chief among his more salacious output. The movie stars the lovely Lina Romay as Countess Irina von Karlstein, an obvious cash-in on Le Fanu’s Karnsteins, and inspired no doubt by Hammer’s trilogy of blood curdlers: The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Franco reduces the gore content and ups the sex. Romay spends the entire film naked or dressed in the flimsiest of see-through garments. Her vampire technique is to hypnotise a victim, make love to and suck the life force from them, basically through their genitals, male or female. This allows plenty of scope for the sort of scenes which try to give pornography class but only succeed in lowering the tone of regular cinema. Curiously, despite this, the movie occasionally treads ever so close to actually being spine chilling and features has some marvellous cinematic images which wouldn’t look out of place in the premier horror market.
Romay plays her mute role remarkably well. She’s careful, almost stately, hauntingly beautiful, silent, expressing emotion through her eyes and the merest hint of a smile. Two scenes in particular stand out. During the first, the Countess is being interviewed by a young female journalist, and rebuffs her inquisitive questions, the journo seeming to be receiving the answers telepathically. In the second, the Countess appears spectre-like in the same reporter’s apartment, rolls her tongue erotically across her teeth and simultaneously makes her host orgasm; throughout the extended scene she comes and goes and moves with an audible flurry of bat wings. At these moments, Franco’s clever enough to simply have her disappear, which is much how Dracula and Co are described as manifesting in the books.
Sadly the rest of the movie really isn’t up to much. It’s mostly a miss, and descends into a bloody wallow of emotional guilt. There are several versions of the movie including one with more fangs and another with more f-g. I think I saw the in-between version, but the film’s been cut about so much over the years I’m not entirely certain.
Fans of Franco’s work include it among his best. A footnote is worth writing about Miss Romay. She was only nineteen at the time the movie was made, was married to the film editor while openly having an affair with the director. She and Franco went on to make dozens of films together, eventually marrying. She died at the relatively young age of 57 in 2012 and Franco followed her the next year. Despite the dubious quality of their movies, they certainly did love their lives together.
I'm tempted to go watch "Hopper - the hunt for the hamster of darkness" (I think it's Belgian) at the cinema! If only NTTD had a title half as good ...
Think about it. "James Bond - the hunt for the nanobots of darkness"!
Or even better: "James Bond - the hunt for the DouDou of darkness"! Dark and gritty .....😁
I started watching THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) tonight. Those first forty five minutes are cinematic OO7 pleasure. Unfortunately, I have things to do, so I clawed myself away.
Instead, especially for @Napoleon Plural
LOVE ME TENDER (1956)
Elvis Presley’s debut movie is a melodramatic romantic musical western which touches vaguely on the lives of the Reno Brothers and the Jackson Gang, a group of vicious outlaws, robbers and murderers who terrorised Midwest America in the years immediately after the Civil War. These career criminals were so violent and their behaviour outraged so many, that when the Pinkertons Agency final caught them and prepared to transport them to prison, vigilantes broke into gaols and halted steam trains to haul out the criminals and lynch them. You’d never know this from watching Love Me Tender.
In fact, the initial few Reno Brothers raids are quite well represented by the opening train robbery, although literary license is used, suggesting the gang were still members of the Confederate army and did not know the war had ended. This is untrue. The Reno Brothers and their hanger’s on were deserters and serial enlisters, what were known as bounty jumpers. They’d enlist, take the sign on money and promptly desert. Their first robbery was of a post office where the post master was shot [in the movie it’s the station telegraph operator, who would nominally be employed by the U.S. postal service at the time]. After their first train robbery, a witness identifies them – as happens in the movie – leading to the Brothers arrest. The witness was shot dead and the Brothers acquitted, whereupon they continued their life of crime.
This sanitised version attempts to so thoroughly obscure the true story it even changes the character names. It does a fairly good job of pretending the real Reno Brothers never existed. It also throws in a few songs for Elvis to sing. I don’t know if there is any documented evidence to suggest any of the gang could sing. Here, the foursome are portrayed as honourable, wholesome farm boys. Vance, Brett and Ray, the war veterans, display dignity, a respect for their kin and community, of the decent way of living. The only one of the four who sticks out is Elvis Presley’s Clint. Too young to go to join General Lee [although apparently he’s twenty-two, so that seems unlikely] Clint has been stuck on the farm, protecting his aging mother and his older, pretty, practical wife, Cathy. Unknown to Clint, Cathy was deliriously in love and planning to marry Vance, but a letter informing the family incorrectly of his death threw her into the King’s welcoming youthful arms. Vance’s return resets her fires a-burning.
I can’t figure out why. Compared to the hip swivelling, ball of fire and sexual inferno cast by Elvis, Richard Egan’s Vance is steadfast, loyal, true and ever so dull. I can’t image what Cathy must be thinking. There’s an oblique reference to the central quandary when she asks Vance what he’s thinking every night when he knows she and Clint are lying “side by side.” He ain’t thinking side-by-side, honey, I can almost hear Elvis sneer.
The King’s really good in this supporting, but essential role. He’s great playing the slightly spoilt youngster, a man who clearly wanted to go to war, playing like a big kid with his brother’s sabre, asking about the battles, bored with farming. A little more of this might have created a character dynamic and familial conflict for him and the cast to work with. But because he was a singer, real life took over and, after the announcement of his casting provoked such a phenomenal fan response, executives at 20th Century Fox decided to include a few musical numbers and expand his part. Thus he gets to strut his stuff a couple of times, once on the homestead’s front porch, a peculiar scene where We Gotta Move amuses everyone but his wife – Debra Paget, beautiful as always, doesn’t even tap her foot – and Love Me Tender seems sung to the audience instead of her. When the lovelorn Vance walks off mid-recital, you’d think Clint might follow him, understanding the meaning of the song for his brother, but Elvis ‘The King’ has to finish the number.
Later on, we get to see him show off some signature hip and leg-shaking moves to Poor Boy and Let Me. These two songs are more a reflection of the bluegrass inspired country tracks he recorded for Sun Records between 1954 – 55 than the uproarious rock n rollers he captured teenagers hearts and minds and sex lives with in 1956, all that Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me and Don’t Be Cruel. It’s disappointing to remember that as Elvis’ career continued he became more and more deported against these improvised jive moves. I don’t know if that was his choice, the director’s, or the guidance of ‘technical advisor’ Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ manager and the man responsible for both his meteoritic rise and subsequent long fall.
The film passes amiably enough. Elvis kicks off when he discovers his wife still has feelings for Vance – oh, how could she! audiences must have been stunned by that development – and the little bruiser gets so mad he even dispatches a swift jab to the poor girl’s jaw, you can see the bruise [make-up, of course]. It’s too late for a happy ending. The Reno Brothers are being chased by the army, Elvis turns on Vance, it all gets mighty ugly and the King takes a bullet for his mistaken, but well-founded, trouble [and strife].
Elvis didn’t want to die in his debut acting role, but his then girlfriend, June Juanico, said audiences remember the people who die in a tragedy. She was right too. Who remembers Richard Egan and Debra Paget? Everyone knows Elvis Presley sung Love Me Tender. They changed the name of the movie late on, after the single had shot to number one, his fourth in eight months. It doesn’t matter much, but it doesn’t really make any sense.
The movie’s okay. No great shakes. It could have made a reasonable western, but the songs throw it off kilter a little, although they are not numerous enough to disturb the tragic tone. Even if you don’t know how it ends, you can sense it coming the moment Clint reveals he’s Cathy’s wife. Still a pleasant afternoon of nostalgia for when the King seemed to have the world at his feet.
After a long day at work I decided to watch 'Rambo Last Blood'. I have heard of the character but not seen any of the other films.
Oh dear!
I found it to be mindless rubbish held together by a very flimsy story.
I don't know if the other Rambo films are as bad as that one but I think I'll not bother to find out!
I've never seen Sylvester Stalone in any other film except 'Escape To Victory' (which I actually quite enjoyed).
Monty Python's Flying Circus is being shown on 'That's TV' in the UK.
You should watch the original Rambo film - First Blood - all the others are just cash-ins 🙈
I’ve tuned in to watch a couple of these as well…brings back happy memories 😀
THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990)
Tom Clancy’s doorstep bestselling Cold War thriller was the perfect piece to adapt for a Glasnost-seized Hollywood, as filmmakers suddenly wanted to treat the Soviets a little kinder. Relating vaguely to conspiracy theories about a couple of historical incidents involving missing Russian submarines, Clancy’s narrative involves his CIA pen pusher Jack Ryan persuading various levels of the US military that an experienced Soviet Admiral plans to defect using his country’s sleek new submarine as bait.
John McTierman’s impressive movie doesn’t bear too much close examination. Sean Connery plays the stately Admiral featuring his trademark Scottish-Russian accent [similar to his trademark English-Scots, Norwegian-Scots, Irish-Scots, American-Scots, Arab-Scots – you see where I’m going with this]. Alec Baldwin is about right as Jack Ryan. When Harrison Ford took over the role, he looked too old. The support cast is long. Women don’t feature. Lots of silliness in subs ensues and some of the underwater manoeuvres look and feel impossible. The film succeeds by creating moments of high tension, even if overall the story doesn’t make any sense.
I have been told that the first Rambo film is good. It can't be any worse than the last one. It seems to be on ITV4 regularly so I will probably watch when it comes on again.