With a cast of some well known names and an exploitative theme I thought I was onto a winner here. I was wrong.
It’s the last days of the African slave trade and arms dealer Trevor Howard lives in a compound complete with a missionary station. Our own Britt Ekland, her German husband Jurgen Goslar and Howard’s nephew, Ron Ely (TV’s Tarzan) arrive by riverboat just in time for a mass native attack. All three male leads want Britt (can’t blame them). Ely is captured by Mexican slaver Cameron Mitchell who has natives branded. Ely escapes in blackface. Arab slaver Ray Milland (yes, really!) has naked natives shot for sport. The story is incomprehensible, the direction non-existent, the editing is shocking (it would appear that some scenes were either unusable or not filmed) as the story lurches awkwardly forward. The actors look embarrassed and are obviously just there to collect their paycheck.
Contemptible.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A powerful Holocaust movie directed by Jonathan Glazer, loosely based on a novel by Martin Amis, 'Zone Of Interest' focuses on the SS commandment of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel); his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and the idyllic family life they sought to maintain for themselves in a home and garden located right next to the wall of the death camp. The film's not so much about the banality of evil - the phrase used by Hannah Arendt to characterise Adolf Eichmann at his trial - as about the evil of looking away, a deliberate and dehumanising process of desensitation. Glazer never takes us inside the camp itself, nor is a single death depicted on screen. The film instead generates a palpable sense of horror about everything that's unseen. Only a billowing funnel of smoke, visible over the wall, is a visual signifier of the mass murder taking place.
Glazer is careful to keep us at a distance from the Hoss family, his camera never capturing them in close up: we view them only in wide shot. An almost documentary style is created, partly by use of hidden cameras in the house, as if for reality TV; and also by a sound mix which includes the home's ambient noises. Yet there's nothing on-the-fly about Glazer's compositions; there's a detached formality throughout. The Hoss house was a set constructed on location for the film, the original building having been modernised. Beyond the house and garden, several family scenes are shot in the surrounding countryside by lakes and rivers, reflecting the Hosses' ideological valorisation of life in the rural outdoors.
At one level the story is straightforward. Having arranged for the installation at Auschwitz-Birkenau of more efficient crematoria, capable of processing greater "load", Hoss is temporarily transferred to Oranienberg and tasked with acting as inspector of all the Nazi concentration camps. Inconvenienced by her husband's promotion, Hedwig insists that she and the children should be allowed to remain in their Auschwitz home for the duration. At the end of the film, Hoss is ready to return, to oversee the mass murder of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz.
Just occasionally the disgusting reality of the camp impinges on Hoss family life. Rudolf takes his children for a day out to enjoy some fishing and rowing. Discovering human remains in the water, he pulls his family out: we next see the children at home, wailing; painfully scrubbed down in the bath and leaving trails of ash behind them in the basin. Hedwig's mother comes to visit. She's at first impressed by the house and garden but, after a few days, she leaves in the middle of the night, apparently sickened - unlike her daughter - by the incessant distant sounds of the atrocities perpetrated on the other side of the wall and the endless columns of smoke.
Christian Friedel plays Rudolf Hoss as a personally bland figure who compartmentalises his life with chilling ease, acting as both family man and workaholic mass murderer. This compartmentalising strategy seems to fail Hoss only once, towards the end of the film, when he dry-retches alone on a grand stairway in Oranienberg and then stares at the camera in long shot, as if briefly foreseeing the judgement of history. Before returning to Hoss's stare, the sequence ranges away to scenes of cleaning staff working at the Auschwitz Museum today, methodically mopping a gas chamber and the rooms exhibiting piles of victims' personal belongings: the style here is suddenly reminiscient of Claude Lanzmann's documentary film, 'Shoah', taking time and investing even the trundling sounds of cleaning apparatus with an echoing kind of significance.
Sandra Huller's performance as Frau Hoss is no less disturbing. Hedwig's preoccupation with cultivating a life of perfect domesticity is offset against her blithe anti-semitism and childlike tantrums. While she's completely indifferent to the sounds of horror coming from over the wall, her children are disturbed, their play skewed by hinterland awareness of what's going on. Hedwig is nowhere more despicable than at the breakfast table, in her nervily casual threat to a dehumanised servant girl once she, Hedwig, has realised, to her frustration, that her mother has departed overnight: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice."
There is some space for hope. In sequences which break the realist style of the film, creating an almost fairytale effect, a local Polish girl is repeatedly seen in thermal photo-imagery, going out at night to hide fruit in earth mounds where she knows camp prisoners will be forced to work during the day. The girl's nocturnal missions amount to the only act of compassion shown in the film.
Soundscape is crucial to the way the film works. Although we never see inside the camp, we hear a lot of harrowing noise in the background, distant but audible sounds counterpointing the everyday banalities of Hoss family life. The mix includes constant industrial rumblings, an occasional revving of motorbike engines, steam trains, the shouting of camp guards, the frequent report of pistol shots and muffled - sometimes raw - cries of anguish and pain. Sound designer Johnnie Burn apparently spent seven years researching the sounds of the camp, meticulously getting the details right. For example, the popping shots we hear are the gunfire of First World War pistols, the kind which camp guards actually used. (Modern firearms were reserved for use by the Wehrmacht on front lines.) Even birdsong is authentically location-specific.
Part of Burn's brief was to avoid using actors for background voices where possible, sourcing real-life material instead. Thus the cries of French victims are drawn from recordings he'd made of anti-Macron street protestors in Paris; the rowdiness of groups of men on drunken nights out on Hamburg's the Reeperbahn pass for the jeering of intoxicated camp guards.
The other, equally disturbing aspect of the film's sound is Mica Levi's atonal musical score, pared back to the film's beginning and ending and the sequences of the Polish girl leaving out fruit for camp prisoners. Levi's use of a choral crescendo over the end credits, like a cacophony of anguished souls, is difficult to sit through but is an integral part of the film. It puts me in mind of Kubrick's use of Bartok in 'The Shining', a film of which I'm also reminded when Hoss, in a spartan office, beckons forth a Jewish prisoner for sex while he finishes an official telephone call: the dehumanised girl's otherwordly look of misery as she sits waiting in long shot, loosening her long hair for the despot, is filmed in a similar haunting style to Jack Nicholson's encounter with the ghost woman in Room 237. But the scene ends there, and I mean no disrespect to victims by drawing a comparison between these sequences in the different genres. Despite the overall realist tenor of Glazer's film, there's something of a gothic conception of hell about it at times.
I'd recommend 'Zone Of Interest'. Aside from Lanzmann's documentary 'Shoah', this is probably the most affecting Holocaust film I've seen. It's certainly the most disturbing dramatisation, adhering as it does to Lanzmann's contention that the atrocities of the Holocaust are so horrific as to be inappropriate for direct visual recreation.
'Zone Of Interest' is currently available to view on Amazon Prime, with no surcharge for Prime members. It's still occasionally screening in London's Curzon cinemas, too.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
That's a fine review. Zone of Interest is showing at London's Prince Charles a fair bit also.
City Lights
Classic Charlie Chaplin movie shown on Sky Arts channel. Good stuff, of its time, some laugh out loud moments. It's the one where the lead befriends a blind flower girl, who mistakenly assumes he's a big shot with a car when in fact he's a tramp, or homeless guy in today's parlance. This impression is reinforced when Chaplin is befriended by a drunk rich guy. The action is episodic, almost a series of sketches but it hangs together. I had a yearning to have The Untouchables on the back burner while watching this.
Thanks for that review of The Zone of Interest and other Shady Special @Shady Tree .
I am an admirer of Jonathon Glazer, who makes thoughtful and intense films that benefit from repeated viewing. Unfortunately, it hasn't had a decent run anywhere and I have struggled to catch it. [I'm aware as @Napoleon Plural says that the Prince Charles features it on and off]. I'm surprised the BFI didn't give TZOI an extended run. Is it an Amazon financed film? Maybe there's a distribution issue because of it going onto Prime; I don't know. Still, I am sure I will catch it and admire it in much the same vein as you have.
I would also recommend Son of Saul as an outstanding Holocaust film, although very much the reverse of the situation described so eloquently above. I notice The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also streaming, although while dealing with a harrowing subject, that story counters it with a love affair in extreme adversity, ultimately uplifting.
A reboot of the intermittent Jack Ryan series, based on the books by Tom Clancy that featured his CIA analytics expert getting into and out of various scrapes. This one ignores all that went before and kicks us off in real time with Chris Pine’s youthful Jack Ryan enlisting as a Marine following the 9/11 terror attacks. He’s injured in Afghanistan and meets the love of his life during rehab. No, not Kiera Knightley, who is certainly lovely, but Kevin Costner, a CIA division head who employs young(ish) Jack as a Wall Street analyst in disguise.
Ten years on, a still remarkably young looking Jack Ryan uncovers a secret plot by a Russian oligarch to cause a US financial meltdown. It’s a bit Casino Royale at this point and director Kenneth Branagh nicely underplays everything; perhaps realising the similarities he too goes for a lean, sparkly, nighttime look of shadows, black marble and darkness. I like it like that. Very swish and Bond-like, all huge sets, shady figures and computer whiz kids. A fantastic fight in a hotel bathroom [James Bond, see?] catapults Jack into the very deep end of things and Costner, his crack team of operatives and Miss Knightley spring to the rescue.
I’m making it sound lightweight, and it is, but it is very well-made for something so lightweight. Well-acted too. Branagh himself gives a delightful turn as the terminally ill villain seeking valediction. The first hour passes by in a whirl of intrigue and neat scenes of half-truths and lies. The extended dining sequence ramps up the tension, but after this point the movie starts to spiral into Action Hero territory and is less interesting and considerably less amusing. It’s hard for characters to be funny when they are running, punching or shooting. I guess the writers / producers felt audiences would want a slam-bang-thank-you-man kind of climax, but given it’s so preposterous, you wonder if they couldn’t have constructed something better. The movie isn’t based on a Clancy novel, so there is no form book to go by, but given the amount of time the film invests in getting Miss Knightley’s character into the espionage game, it seems silly to abandon her in the last twenty minutes in favour of chases and fist fights. Where’s a woman in peril when you really need her?
It’s a minor black mark on a good, old-fashioned style movie. Kenneth Branagh to helm Bond 26 anyone?
Note:
I think they adapted the scenario of Shadow Recruit for the opening story of the Jack Ryan television series.
This was Roger Vadim’s first American feature. At the time it was not common knowledge that Rock Hudson was gay so he was perfectly cast as a trendy married high school counsellor and football coach who has many sexual liaisons with female students. To keep them quiet he resorts to murdering them (so he’s knocking them off in more ways than one). The storyline is a bit unexpected from STAR TREK creator Gene Roddenberry and it’s a strange mix of black comedy, murder mystery and sexy hi-jinks. Telly Savalas is a police captain and James “Scotty" Doohan (keeping the STAR TREK) connection) is his partner. Sexy Angie Dickinson as a substitute teacher takes her clothes off once again (not that I’m complaining about that), and there is good support from Roddy McDowall and Keenan Wynn.
For some reason this one passed me by until now, was it worth a 50-odd year wait? Yes, even if it’s just to see those 70’s fashions.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
This one was always a bit of a guilty pleasure for me as I adored Angie Dickinson back in the 1970s. One of the students was played by Joanna Cameron, who would go on to play the superheroine Isis in a Saturday morning show that aired alongside Shazam! in the 1970s.
Reading some of the behind the scenes memoirs on the making of the original Star Trek, it turns out Gene Roddenberry always had a kinky streak to him and was quite the womanizer; in that light, it's kind of less surprising that he made a movie like this. Another of his efforts from the period is called Spectre, a pretty entertaining supernatural movie about a pair of paranormal sleuths (Robert Culp and Gig Young) investigating strange goings on at the estate of a high ranking British politician (play by Bond alum James Villiers). The movie also starred John Hurt, Ann Bell and Mrs. Roddenberry herself Majel Barrett. This one also had a high kink factor including orgies, S&M, succubi, demonic creatures and all other sorts of mischief, even though it was technically a made for TV movie that was a pilot for a TV show that never got picked up.
Fontaine, A member of the French resistance during WWII gets caught and sent to prison. The prison is full of members of the resisitance and security is tight, but Fontaine soon starts plotting his escape. The movie is closesly based on real events. The real Fontaine was a technical advisor, the actual prison is used and Fontaine even let the production borrow the tools he used to escape. A Man Escaped is very low-key and tense, showing the slow progress and planning, the secret communication between the prisoners and the paranoia of who to trust.
I think this works very well and the movie is tense until litterally the last minute. I'm not sure about the voiceover. Ona few occations it's really helpful, but I wonder if trusting in show don't tell would've been better. Don't get me wrong: this is one of the better prison escape movies I've ever seen.
An unbelievably tense thriller from director Jonathon Demme who hasn’t made a film anywhere near as good as this either before or since. The Silence of the Lambs kicks off with a curious and awkward psychoanalysis assignment for novice agent Clarice Starling [Jodie Foster], an ambitious, intelligent but panicky woman plucked without explanation from her police training school and clearly out of her depth dealing with the frighteningly static serial killer Hannibal Lecter [Anthony Hopkins]. Already we sense a dark agenda from her boss Crawford [Scott Glen], a man not disposed to long explanations. From here the pace, scene by scene, is slow-quick, slow-quick, slow-quick throughout, each individual moment and sequence of interconnected moments stretched to extreme tautness before being released in a sudden flood of revelation. What makes Silence so exceptional is that the thrills and the intrigue isn’t generated by the action – of which there is little, most of it implied – but by character.
Screenwriter Ted Tally must take the plaudits here for developing a narrative that protects its personalities in the face of sensationalism. Perhaps he is reliant on Thomas Harris' best selling novel; having not read it, I cannot tell. What develops on screen however emerges organically, through the interaction of characters. Hence, as we learn more about Clarice, understanding her inner motives of family loss, yet also her fears and social anxieties that stem from the same point of abandonment, our affections grow. The confrontations she has with the cannibal killer Lecter are life affirming for her, but also reveal much about his supreme intellect, his gentle persuasions, his desires, manners and murderous capabilities. As supporting characters come and go, Tally ensures each of them, however insignificant, is treated with the same due regard. So moments such as a post mortem, or an investigation of a moth’s chrysalis, or a mother’s plea for the return of her kidnapped child, become snapshots of human nature and provide a tension all of their own as Starling, Lecter or Crawford permits or submits to enquiry and investigation.
Oscars rightfully went to the two leading players. While Hopkins dominates the film with a portrayal of terrifying stillness, it is Foster’s Clarice Starling who has our sympathies, suffering indignities, horrors and crises, but emerging a fully-fledged hero. The climax plays out against a demented soundscape of screeching noise and cawing music, the kidnapped woman wailing, the dog barking, the killer’s heavy breathing, reminding us of the screaming lambs from Clarice’s childhood memories,: can she once again save the stray animal trapped in its pen?
Buffalo Bill is the nominal villain, but you can take your pick of any number of unscrupulous or nefarious individuals. Howard Shore’s marvellous heartbeat of an incidental score accompanies the narrative with the same slow-quick build, right from the off as Starling tackles an assault course, testing her resolve and physical strength, to the climax where those skills are vindicated, to the coda where Lecter’s Panama-hatted silhouette blends into the crowds, his prodigious mind plotting his next human meal; Shore never lets the suspense audibly drop. The editing is crisp and unflashy. The film is exceptional on many technical levels, but it really is the writing that wins it and allows Foster and Hopkins to shine brightly.
Ah, yes, an oversight on my part. Not sure what I was thinking there. Perhaps because I haven't read the book... Amendment duly inserted into the second paragraph.
This is one of many films from this era taken from a Stephen King short story. Set in a small New England town, a depressed cop tries to find out how and why a big industrial laundry pressing machine is grinding up local workers to bloody pulp. Robert (Freddy Krueger) Englund is the crippled sweat shop owner with a voice box and an eye patch. It’s all to do with virginal sacrifices but to be honest the whole thing was such a bore that I lost interest very quickly. Director Tobe Hooper obviously did too as the film is a total mess. Incredibly this apparently spawned two sequels.
Avoid at all costs.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The early hours posting of @CoolHandBond 's movie reviews - and the types of movies too - suggest a brand image - you sort of imagine him in a cool LA den with low slung leather chairs, a 1970s Sony turntable and vinyl, a decanter of whisky and a cool voice message answerphone as he settles down for some late-night viewing of a cult classic.
Why am I reviewing a silent movie that starts with a Lening quote? This Soviet movie about a mutiny on a naval ship in 1905 is clearly a propaganda piece, but the reason it's still important are the qulities of the movie. This was the favourite movie of Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder and Michael Mann. The Odessa stairs sequence was clearly ripped off in The Untouchables. If you look at the editing and framing of the shots this movie was decades ahead of most other movies, and that's probably the reason Potemkin is one of the few non-comedies from the 1920's that's still being watched.
This homage to Sergio Leone was well worth a revisit, I enjoyed it immensely. I’ve always liked Sam Raimi’s comicstrip style of direction and the violence is well handled with amusing giant bullet holes in heads etc. There are also many closeups of guns of the period, as a lover of pulp Western novels I appreciated seeing some of the guns I’ve read about in detail. Sharon Stone stars as the vengeance seeking Ellen. Gene Hackman owns the corrupt town of Redemption where he is holding a deadly kill-or-be-killed shooting tournament. Stone looks great and plays her role seriously. The support cast with Russell Crowe, Leonard DiCaprio, Lance Henriksen, Tobin Bell, Roberts Blossom, Pat Hingle, Bruce Campbell and Woody Strode all on excellent form.
Sit back and be thoroughly entertained.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
The Bat is a unknown criminal on the trail of one million dollars embezzled out of a local bank. The money has been hidden in an “old dark house” style abode, currently leased by Agnes Moorehead, and that's where all the folks who might be the Bat converge and collude to find the haul. Coroner Vincent Price, local police chief Gavin Gordon and mysterious chauffeur/valet John Sutton and some more characters are all possibilities to be the Bat as they tread on over-lit sets. I’m a sucker for these set-bound “things-that-go-bump-in-the-night’ scenarios and I’ve probably been a bit lenient with this review. Price surprisingly gives a laid-back performance against the scene chewing theatrics of Moorehead, but he quickly becomes a too obvious candidate for being the Bat, (he commits a murder early on) which makes it unlikely that he'll also be responsible for The Bat's murders that ensue. Price is duly shot and killed as he wrestles over a gun and from then on the movie centres on some old biddies as they scurry around the house in nightclothes, on the trail and on the run from the Bat.
Its worth a look if you like this sort of thing.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A very fun movie that's underrated and underseen. It was a pretty big flop when it was released but a lot of people have discovered it over the years and kept the fanbase building.
A muscular western from director Delmer Daves that revisits the Native American question he posed in the James Stewart classic Broken Arrow. The Last Wagon isn’t quite such a nuanced movie, but it serves its purpose well enough and is tremendously good looking, with superb cinemascope photography from Wilfred Cline. Early on the scenery is simply awe inspiring. There’s a shot where Richard Widmark’s Comanche Todd is virtually invisible, his leather hide jerkin vanishing into the enveloping mountains, he moves like a tiny speck on the enormous landscape; a few minutes further on he disappears into a sea of emerald pines reaching for the horizons and beyond. The sense of a wilderness untamed is evident and it is the untamed nature of Widmark’s hero as well as his enemies – nominally a vicious sheriff and a scouting party of Apaches – that set the tone for this brutish entry into the genre. Lionel Newman’s music is suitably cutthroat.
Widmark is on the run. We learn he killed four brothers, the rapists and murderers of his squaw wife and children. His real crime though seems to be that he has been reared by the Comanche and lives like them, off the land and susceptible to its fortunes, favours and ill-winds. He’s captured but while the sheriff escorts him to the nearest courthouse they come across a Quaker wagon train in need of protection. Cue scenes of an exhausted and dehydrated Widmark tied to a tree or a wagon wheel as imprisonment. Felicia Farr’s lonely teenager Jenny takes a shine to him. When the wagon train is attacked, only a group of youngsters and Widmark survive and he persuades them to free him so he can assist in their return to the civilised world. As Jenny and Comanche’s feelings develop, an emotional tussle between the tamed and untamed evolves. The latter wins out, but not before she too has a civilising effect on the hero.
There’s a long winded coda at the courthouse where Widmark has an opportunity to spout some vitriol towards the white man’s way, the difference between hot and cold blooded murder and the need for living, not killing. At this point Daves, James Edward Grant & Gwen Bagni Gielgud’s script attempts to be more important than the film needs to be, but that’s a minor concern in an otherwise fine genre movie that tackles the subject of cross-cultural boundaries with some dexterity. You sense if they made it these days, they would dwell a mite too long on the socio-politics and make the thing a trifle dull. Here, the emotional and moral turmoil is played swift and certain, leaving the strong scenery and muscular action to carry the story effectively.
This comedy is about three friends at a engineering college in India. The framing device is two if them (and a third former student who isn't a friend) who years later searches for the third, Rancho. Rancho is a very talented engineer who questione the eduction system that he finds only teaches learning by heart and only cares about grades and not real learning and understanding. The message and parts of the plot reminds me of "Dead poets society", but 3 idiots is far more comical. I found both the dramatic parts and the comedy largely works. Even the song and dance sequences worked for me. I'm far from the only one. 3 Idiots is the most sucessful Bollywood movie ever! All izz well!
I'd been meaning to see this for a while and caught up with it this evening. The central performance, in particular, makes it work, especially in the set piece recreations of AW's stage performances. That said, the documentary film 'Amy' is more powerful/ moving. Crucially, 'Amy' is more convincing in its representation of Blake and Mitch, with a challenging take on both men.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
A colourful adventure romance set in pre-revolutionary France and the jungles of Guatemala. Jean-Paul is an orphan outcast living with his gunsmith grandfather. When his evil uncle arrives to claim him, the twelve-year-old Jean-Paul starts a decade of drudgery as a stable hand, aware he is the rightful heir to the St Malo estate but unable to break the yoke that binds him. After declaring his love for Marie, his cousin, Jean-Paul is whipped by his uncle and decides to flee the country, pairing up with crazy Scottish explorer MacDougal who has a map which shows the location of a fabled Mayan treasure, the Golden Condor.
Guatemalan locations shoots enhance the mid-section of a fairly humdrum movie. The scenic benefits are offset by generally poor acting honours. Cornel Wilde is an appalling hero, Anne Bancroft seems disinterested as his scheming French lover, while Constance Smith is a non-entity as the good-hearted Clara MacDougal. Finlay Currie, Leo G Carroll, George Macready, Konstantin Shane and Fay Wray [still looking lovely twenty years on from King Kong] provide support, although the script creaks and groans so much it feels as if the whole enterprise is about to collapse.
Good photography from Edward Cronjager can’t elevate the Mills & Boon antics. Writer-director Delmer Daves seems all at sea, so much so he condenses the story enough to require a narrator, except the movie starts off without one, preferring scrolls of faded parchment, abandoned midway in favour of Cornel Wilde’s dutiful tones.
Outland (1981) - and I assume readers of a certain age will be going 'High Noon in space!' right now. Well, it isn't quite like that for most of it, it's a story of a decent cop sniffing out corruption in a mining space colony and finds himself up against it.
It's a fine star vehicle for our man Sean Connery as it plays to his strengths. Watching this, you would have felt he'd be fine to come back into the James Bond role if only that were possible, why, from the bare bones of this you and I could craft a decent Bond script for him in half an hour! It makes NSNA all the more disappointing, not least that Connery is middle-aged in this but not in any way creaky, unlike in the actual Bond film. That said, some things appear borrowed - the extended fight scene in the canteen is staged like the finale of a similar fight in Shrublands, that said it's all played for laughs in the Bond film, likewise the stand-off between Bond and M (Fox) is just silly stuff - once you take realism out of a Connery thriller, you don't have much left really.
There's a good sense of realism in this, a hint of the grimness of The Offence but it's not overwhelming. Oh, there's other Bond crew in there - Steven Berkoff as a resident who goes nuts on drugs, and editor Stuart Baird who did Casino Royale.
The villain in this is good, interesting - the guy who runs the show. He's not your usual silky smooth snarling type - he's a schmuck! Nicely effective against Connery. The whole setting is credible, it's designed as a real world in itself.
Kudos for not giving Connery a blonde buxom wife - that said (and gripes do accumulate) - the pair don't have great chemistry exactly, you can't quite see how their courtship would have gone. I never see Connery as a great romantic lead, he tends to spark off his co-stars, not lean into them or evolve into them. He's too much his own man - which makes him better in this film when he's on his own, up against it, albeit with a couple of enablers. The script suggests the marriage is on the skids - via video message she says 'I love you' but he doesn't reciprocate, though he does when his - also not terribly convincing - son says it. It's not quite played that way though.
He pals up with the ship's doctor played by Frances Sternhagen (who died only last year), who is a Frances McDormand-type character, highly praised on imdb though I felt her line readings were a bit off. Kudos having her as cranky middle-aged and not some alternative love interest. That said, another possible love interest might have ramped up our own and generated some tension given the plot is fairly straightforward. Then you could have us wonder if Connery would go off with her instead, only to have him do the dutiful thing and go back to his wife which is never in doubt in this film.
Connery's back story isn't consistent. He realises he got hired for the job because it's thought he's cruddy and wouldn't stand up to anything going on. But it's also said he gets moved on from every job because he's got a big mouth and challenged authority - so which is it? The boss annoys him in his opening intro to his co-staff but I'm not sure he said anything that humiliating to set Connery on the warpath. It's nicely played for dramatic effect but...
The High Noon part of it in the second half doesn't quite work for me - the bad guy calls in a couple of hitmen to arrive at the colony to take Connery out. I mean, it's been established one ally got bumped off, presumably made to look like a suicide - though nothing comes of this incident, it is not followed up - so surely that would be the way to get Connery's character, rather than have a couple of men with shotguns, it's not exactly subtle. It would be easily done - his wife and kid have left him, so say he was feeling depressed and all alone, you have the motive; he took his own life. Rigged investigation. It doesn't quite stack up. Perhaps I'm more cynical these days given the political landscape of the last decade.
I was too young to see Outland when it first came out but I would have found it a grim watch at the time, much of it would have passed me by. Last night on telly I enjoyed it a lot, even if it is the sort of thing Arnie did in a more fun and formulaic way later in the decade. Apart from Zardoz, I think this is the only sci-ti film Connery did, unless you count The Time Bandits.
I noticed in the end credits that the naked prostitute attacked by Berkoff was Sharon Duce, who played the wife in 1980s gambling drama Big Deal. Like Kika Markham, who played Connery's wife in this, both have had very consistent and regular careers in various TV dramas over the decades.
The comparisons with Fred Zinneman’s classic western High Noon don’t harm Outland, nor do they help it. The story of a lone sheriff facing an outlaw posse does take some time to emerge from the darkness of intrigue at an enormous titanium mine facility on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. The impressive external model work and claustrophobic interiors go some way towards effectively conveying the grim experience of living and working on a corporate industrial mine. Mineral extraction is hell whatever century you are living in.
Sean Connery is very understated in a suitably heroic role as O’Neill, the Federal Marshall who uncovers an illegal drug smuggling operation that has helped increase productivity but results in paranoic side effects for the extensive user. Twenty-eight victims have been summarily shipped out and ‘buried in sea space’. O’Neill wants to know why, but taking on the corporation that employs you does not go down well with the facility’s management, his colleagues and the general population.
Writer / director Peter Hyams has had a decent career and made several interesting science fiction pictures, starting with the conspiracy thriller Capricorn One in 1977. Outland was his second sci-fi mini-epic and this one touches on the idea of big business taking over law and order, although Hymans doesn’t exactly run with the premise, preferring the easier route of fights and chases. Well-presented for sure, but the formulaic homage of the second half isn’t as unusual as the intriguing first. Briefly flirting with the concepts of societal corruption and corporate greed is about as deep as Hymans is prepared to scratch. The space suited climax at least seems worthwhile, although the murders, suicides and killings all felt a bit repetitive.
Outland isn’t great movie, it is merely a good one, but worth it to witness Connery in serious and slightly unsympathetic mode given a script and director that do not play to his established star persona. The grouchiness of the turn, certainly in the early sections, anticipates his Oscar winning role in The Untouchables. I enjoyed it.
This has long been derided by Hammer fans and even though it’s not a patch on the Peter Cushing series it does have some decent scenes, if ultimately pointless. Horror Of Frankenstein attempts to be both straight horror and comedy and it doesn’t quite gel. Ralph Bates plays Victor Frankenstein. We return to the beginning of the saga once again, he is a young student who knows far more than his tutors, and isn't afraid to show them up. Baron Frankenstein refuses to let his son Victor go away to University in Vienna, so Victor decides to murder him, consequently acquiring his father's title and money. This is a highly sexed Victor, he gets the Dean’s daughter up the spout as well as seeing to the very sexy housekeeper, Kate O’Mara (and who can blame him?). The Dean is played by our own James Cossins.
With his friend Wilhelm, they experiment into reanimating a turtle and then into building a being from spare parts, when Wilhelm threatens to expose Victor he is done away with in an electrifying manner. Soon the monster is alive, causing havoc across the countryside and killing anyone who gets in Victor’s way. The creature is played by Dave Prowse, the square-shaped head and bolts giving him a passing resemblance to Boris Karloff’s monster, but with little facial expressions Prowse's creature has no personality, his Monster From Hell rendition would be far superior.
It concludes disappointingly, the monster is done in by sheer luck and we are left wondering what was the point of it all. I’m not sure if director Jimmy Sangster’s heart was really in this.
For Hammer completists only.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
“Saddle up!” cries John Wayne as if he’s never left the wild west. Don’t be fooled. Sands of Iwo Jima is one of his best films of the 1940s, a decade when he starred in over thirty pictures and every single one of them made money.
The Pacific War was still raw for the Americans in 1949 and Sands of Iwo Jima represents a one-sided heroic attitude which feels entirely appropriate for the time, although it seems somewhat stale and unremarkable over seventy years later. The story involves tough US Marine sergeant John Stryker polishing up a squad of raw recruits. He’s a career soldier whose been through Guadalcanal, lost his family to divorce and loses his self-respect to the bottle every furlough. The appearance of the scholarly, but bolshie, Pvt Pete Conway – son of Stryker’s previous Colonel-in-Chief – drives a wedge between the sergeant and his men. Not such a huge wedge it can’t be solved by a few fists, tough words and armed combat against the Japanese at Tarawa. Having won over his men, Stryker and the squad head for Iwo Jima where the fighting and the introspective reflections become even more intense.
John Wayne is suitably commanding as Stryker. Once again he displays an ability to empathise with his characters, revealing the softness inside the hard outer casing. Several of the Duke’s performances of the period, such as Angel and the Badman, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man, are similarly nuanced. The sequence where Stryker meets a girl in a bar, goes home with her anticipating a night of passion but learns instead she’d be screwing him for money to feed her baby son is a prime example of his much underrated skill as a multilayered actor, conveying his emotions and his opinions mostly through expression and physical demonstration. His muted response to Conway’s words of aggressive disdain is similarly artful. It is these quiet moments of Wayne’s performance that probably earned him an Oscar nomination, although I wouldn’t suggest this is any better or worse than Wayne’s acting in, say, the three movies I listed above. The rest of the cast are a mixed bag of enthusiastic stereotypes, although they may not have appeared so in 1949.
The film is now most notable for its recreation of battle. The scenes set at Tarawa and the Iwo Jima are terrific indeed. Steven Spielberg knows his movies and I would be stunned if he hadn’t had this film partly in mind when recreating D-Day for Saving Private Ryan. Allan Dwan, who was never in the first rank of directors, conducts with a smooth, shrewd eye, blending his location footage with realistic studio sets and genuine Pacific War footage as captured by the US Navy Film Department. By attempting and mostly succeeding to match one with the other, Dwan gains an undercurrent of realism unusual for 1940s flag wavers. The movie ends with another reproduction, this time of Joe Rosenthal’s famous and now much disputed Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. This itself would become the subject of the book and subsequent Clint Eastwood film Flags of Our Fathers.
While it isn’t firm in the story or character stakes, Sands of Iwo Jima is a splendid example of the type of war movie actioner that became de rigour in the fifties and sixties. It certainly keeps one interested and never threatens to do anything more than it says on the film reel tin. The movie was a prestige release for Republic Pictures and made a huge bunce of money for the era. Editing, Sound Recording and Original Story were also honoured with Academy Award nominations.
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SLAVERS (1976)
With a cast of some well known names and an exploitative theme I thought I was onto a winner here. I was wrong.
It’s the last days of the African slave trade and arms dealer Trevor Howard lives in a compound complete with a missionary station. Our own Britt Ekland, her German husband Jurgen Goslar and Howard’s nephew, Ron Ely (TV’s Tarzan) arrive by riverboat just in time for a mass native attack. All three male leads want Britt (can’t blame them). Ely is captured by Mexican slaver Cameron Mitchell who has natives branded. Ely escapes in blackface. Arab slaver Ray Milland (yes, really!) has naked natives shot for sport. The story is incomprehensible, the direction non-existent, the editing is shocking (it would appear that some scenes were either unusable or not filmed) as the story lurches awkwardly forward. The actors look embarrassed and are obviously just there to collect their paycheck.
Contemptible.
'Zone Of Interest' (2023)
A powerful Holocaust movie directed by Jonathan Glazer, loosely based on a novel by Martin Amis, 'Zone Of Interest' focuses on the SS commandment of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss (Christian Friedel); his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) and the idyllic family life they sought to maintain for themselves in a home and garden located right next to the wall of the death camp. The film's not so much about the banality of evil - the phrase used by Hannah Arendt to characterise Adolf Eichmann at his trial - as about the evil of looking away, a deliberate and dehumanising process of desensitation. Glazer never takes us inside the camp itself, nor is a single death depicted on screen. The film instead generates a palpable sense of horror about everything that's unseen. Only a billowing funnel of smoke, visible over the wall, is a visual signifier of the mass murder taking place.
Glazer is careful to keep us at a distance from the Hoss family, his camera never capturing them in close up: we view them only in wide shot. An almost documentary style is created, partly by use of hidden cameras in the house, as if for reality TV; and also by a sound mix which includes the home's ambient noises. Yet there's nothing on-the-fly about Glazer's compositions; there's a detached formality throughout. The Hoss house was a set constructed on location for the film, the original building having been modernised. Beyond the house and garden, several family scenes are shot in the surrounding countryside by lakes and rivers, reflecting the Hosses' ideological valorisation of life in the rural outdoors.
At one level the story is straightforward. Having arranged for the installation at Auschwitz-Birkenau of more efficient crematoria, capable of processing greater "load", Hoss is temporarily transferred to Oranienberg and tasked with acting as inspector of all the Nazi concentration camps. Inconvenienced by her husband's promotion, Hedwig insists that she and the children should be allowed to remain in their Auschwitz home for the duration. At the end of the film, Hoss is ready to return, to oversee the mass murder of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz.
Just occasionally the disgusting reality of the camp impinges on Hoss family life. Rudolf takes his children for a day out to enjoy some fishing and rowing. Discovering human remains in the water, he pulls his family out: we next see the children at home, wailing; painfully scrubbed down in the bath and leaving trails of ash behind them in the basin. Hedwig's mother comes to visit. She's at first impressed by the house and garden but, after a few days, she leaves in the middle of the night, apparently sickened - unlike her daughter - by the incessant distant sounds of the atrocities perpetrated on the other side of the wall and the endless columns of smoke.
Christian Friedel plays Rudolf Hoss as a personally bland figure who compartmentalises his life with chilling ease, acting as both family man and workaholic mass murderer. This compartmentalising strategy seems to fail Hoss only once, towards the end of the film, when he dry-retches alone on a grand stairway in Oranienberg and then stares at the camera in long shot, as if briefly foreseeing the judgement of history. Before returning to Hoss's stare, the sequence ranges away to scenes of cleaning staff working at the Auschwitz Museum today, methodically mopping a gas chamber and the rooms exhibiting piles of victims' personal belongings: the style here is suddenly reminiscient of Claude Lanzmann's documentary film, 'Shoah', taking time and investing even the trundling sounds of cleaning apparatus with an echoing kind of significance.
Sandra Huller's performance as Frau Hoss is no less disturbing. Hedwig's preoccupation with cultivating a life of perfect domesticity is offset against her blithe anti-semitism and childlike tantrums. While she's completely indifferent to the sounds of horror coming from over the wall, her children are disturbed, their play skewed by hinterland awareness of what's going on. Hedwig is nowhere more despicable than at the breakfast table, in her nervily casual threat to a dehumanised servant girl once she, Hedwig, has realised, to her frustration, that her mother has departed overnight: “I could have my husband spread your ashes across the fields of Babice."
There is some space for hope. In sequences which break the realist style of the film, creating an almost fairytale effect, a local Polish girl is repeatedly seen in thermal photo-imagery, going out at night to hide fruit in earth mounds where she knows camp prisoners will be forced to work during the day. The girl's nocturnal missions amount to the only act of compassion shown in the film.
Soundscape is crucial to the way the film works. Although we never see inside the camp, we hear a lot of harrowing noise in the background, distant but audible sounds counterpointing the everyday banalities of Hoss family life. The mix includes constant industrial rumblings, an occasional revving of motorbike engines, steam trains, the shouting of camp guards, the frequent report of pistol shots and muffled - sometimes raw - cries of anguish and pain. Sound designer Johnnie Burn apparently spent seven years researching the sounds of the camp, meticulously getting the details right. For example, the popping shots we hear are the gunfire of First World War pistols, the kind which camp guards actually used. (Modern firearms were reserved for use by the Wehrmacht on front lines.) Even birdsong is authentically location-specific.
Part of Burn's brief was to avoid using actors for background voices where possible, sourcing real-life material instead. Thus the cries of French victims are drawn from recordings he'd made of anti-Macron street protestors in Paris; the rowdiness of groups of men on drunken nights out on Hamburg's the Reeperbahn pass for the jeering of intoxicated camp guards.
The other, equally disturbing aspect of the film's sound is Mica Levi's atonal musical score, pared back to the film's beginning and ending and the sequences of the Polish girl leaving out fruit for camp prisoners. Levi's use of a choral crescendo over the end credits, like a cacophony of anguished souls, is difficult to sit through but is an integral part of the film. It puts me in mind of Kubrick's use of Bartok in 'The Shining', a film of which I'm also reminded when Hoss, in a spartan office, beckons forth a Jewish prisoner for sex while he finishes an official telephone call: the dehumanised girl's otherwordly look of misery as she sits waiting in long shot, loosening her long hair for the despot, is filmed in a similar haunting style to Jack Nicholson's encounter with the ghost woman in Room 237. But the scene ends there, and I mean no disrespect to victims by drawing a comparison between these sequences in the different genres. Despite the overall realist tenor of Glazer's film, there's something of a gothic conception of hell about it at times.
I'd recommend 'Zone Of Interest'. Aside from Lanzmann's documentary 'Shoah', this is probably the most affecting Holocaust film I've seen. It's certainly the most disturbing dramatisation, adhering as it does to Lanzmann's contention that the atrocities of the Holocaust are so horrific as to be inappropriate for direct visual recreation.
'Zone Of Interest' is currently available to view on Amazon Prime, with no surcharge for Prime members. It's still occasionally screening in London's Curzon cinemas, too.
That's a fine review. Zone of Interest is showing at London's Prince Charles a fair bit also.
City Lights
Classic Charlie Chaplin movie shown on Sky Arts channel. Good stuff, of its time, some laugh out loud moments. It's the one where the lead befriends a blind flower girl, who mistakenly assumes he's a big shot with a car when in fact he's a tramp, or homeless guy in today's parlance. This impression is reinforced when Chaplin is befriended by a drunk rich guy. The action is episodic, almost a series of sketches but it hangs together. I had a yearning to have The Untouchables on the back burner while watching this.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks for that review of The Zone of Interest and other Shady Special @Shady Tree .
I am an admirer of Jonathon Glazer, who makes thoughtful and intense films that benefit from repeated viewing. Unfortunately, it hasn't had a decent run anywhere and I have struggled to catch it. [I'm aware as @Napoleon Plural says that the Prince Charles features it on and off]. I'm surprised the BFI didn't give TZOI an extended run. Is it an Amazon financed film? Maybe there's a distribution issue because of it going onto Prime; I don't know. Still, I am sure I will catch it and admire it in much the same vein as you have.
I would also recommend Son of Saul as an outstanding Holocaust film, although very much the reverse of the situation described so eloquently above. I notice The Tattooist of Auschwitz is also streaming, although while dealing with a harrowing subject, that story counters it with a love affair in extreme adversity, ultimately uplifting.
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT (2014)
A reboot of the intermittent Jack Ryan series, based on the books by Tom Clancy that featured his CIA analytics expert getting into and out of various scrapes. This one ignores all that went before and kicks us off in real time with Chris Pine’s youthful Jack Ryan enlisting as a Marine following the 9/11 terror attacks. He’s injured in Afghanistan and meets the love of his life during rehab. No, not Kiera Knightley, who is certainly lovely, but Kevin Costner, a CIA division head who employs young(ish) Jack as a Wall Street analyst in disguise.
Ten years on, a still remarkably young looking Jack Ryan uncovers a secret plot by a Russian oligarch to cause a US financial meltdown. It’s a bit Casino Royale at this point and director Kenneth Branagh nicely underplays everything; perhaps realising the similarities he too goes for a lean, sparkly, nighttime look of shadows, black marble and darkness. I like it like that. Very swish and Bond-like, all huge sets, shady figures and computer whiz kids. A fantastic fight in a hotel bathroom [James Bond, see?] catapults Jack into the very deep end of things and Costner, his crack team of operatives and Miss Knightley spring to the rescue.
I’m making it sound lightweight, and it is, but it is very well-made for something so lightweight. Well-acted too. Branagh himself gives a delightful turn as the terminally ill villain seeking valediction. The first hour passes by in a whirl of intrigue and neat scenes of half-truths and lies. The extended dining sequence ramps up the tension, but after this point the movie starts to spiral into Action Hero territory and is less interesting and considerably less amusing. It’s hard for characters to be funny when they are running, punching or shooting. I guess the writers / producers felt audiences would want a slam-bang-thank-you-man kind of climax, but given it’s so preposterous, you wonder if they couldn’t have constructed something better. The movie isn’t based on a Clancy novel, so there is no form book to go by, but given the amount of time the film invests in getting Miss Knightley’s character into the espionage game, it seems silly to abandon her in the last twenty minutes in favour of chases and fist fights. Where’s a woman in peril when you really need her?
It’s a minor black mark on a good, old-fashioned style movie. Kenneth Branagh to helm Bond 26 anyone?
Note:
I think they adapted the scenario of Shadow Recruit for the opening story of the Jack Ryan television series.
PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW (1971)
This was Roger Vadim’s first American feature. At the time it was not common knowledge that Rock Hudson was gay so he was perfectly cast as a trendy married high school counsellor and football coach who has many sexual liaisons with female students. To keep them quiet he resorts to murdering them (so he’s knocking them off in more ways than one). The storyline is a bit unexpected from STAR TREK creator Gene Roddenberry and it’s a strange mix of black comedy, murder mystery and sexy hi-jinks. Telly Savalas is a police captain and James “Scotty" Doohan (keeping the STAR TREK) connection) is his partner. Sexy Angie Dickinson as a substitute teacher takes her clothes off once again (not that I’m complaining about that), and there is good support from Roddy McDowall and Keenan Wynn.
For some reason this one passed me by until now, was it worth a 50-odd year wait? Yes, even if it’s just to see those 70’s fashions.
I read the book of that many years ago, but have never seen the film.
This one was always a bit of a guilty pleasure for me as I adored Angie Dickinson back in the 1970s. One of the students was played by Joanna Cameron, who would go on to play the superheroine Isis in a Saturday morning show that aired alongside Shazam! in the 1970s.
Reading some of the behind the scenes memoirs on the making of the original Star Trek, it turns out Gene Roddenberry always had a kinky streak to him and was quite the womanizer; in that light, it's kind of less surprising that he made a movie like this. Another of his efforts from the period is called Spectre, a pretty entertaining supernatural movie about a pair of paranormal sleuths (Robert Culp and Gig Young) investigating strange goings on at the estate of a high ranking British politician (play by Bond alum James Villiers). The movie also starred John Hurt, Ann Bell and Mrs. Roddenberry herself Majel Barrett. This one also had a high kink factor including orgies, S&M, succubi, demonic creatures and all other sorts of mischief, even though it was technically a made for TV movie that was a pilot for a TV show that never got picked up.
A man escaped (1956)
Fontaine, A member of the French resistance during WWII gets caught and sent to prison. The prison is full of members of the resisitance and security is tight, but Fontaine soon starts plotting his escape. The movie is closesly based on real events. The real Fontaine was a technical advisor, the actual prison is used and Fontaine even let the production borrow the tools he used to escape. A Man Escaped is very low-key and tense, showing the slow progress and planning, the secret communication between the prisoners and the paranoia of who to trust.
I think this works very well and the movie is tense until litterally the last minute. I'm not sure about the voiceover. Ona few occations it's really helpful, but I wonder if trusting in show don't tell would've been better. Don't get me wrong: this is one of the better prison escape movies I've ever seen.
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
An unbelievably tense thriller from director Jonathon Demme who hasn’t made a film anywhere near as good as this either before or since. The Silence of the Lambs kicks off with a curious and awkward psychoanalysis assignment for novice agent Clarice Starling [Jodie Foster], an ambitious, intelligent but panicky woman plucked without explanation from her police training school and clearly out of her depth dealing with the frighteningly static serial killer Hannibal Lecter [Anthony Hopkins]. Already we sense a dark agenda from her boss Crawford [Scott Glen], a man not disposed to long explanations. From here the pace, scene by scene, is slow-quick, slow-quick, slow-quick throughout, each individual moment and sequence of interconnected moments stretched to extreme tautness before being released in a sudden flood of revelation. What makes Silence so exceptional is that the thrills and the intrigue isn’t generated by the action – of which there is little, most of it implied – but by character.
Screenwriter Ted Tally must take the plaudits here for developing a narrative that protects its personalities in the face of sensationalism. Perhaps he is reliant on Thomas Harris' best selling novel; having not read it, I cannot tell. What develops on screen however emerges organically, through the interaction of characters. Hence, as we learn more about Clarice, understanding her inner motives of family loss, yet also her fears and social anxieties that stem from the same point of abandonment, our affections grow. The confrontations she has with the cannibal killer Lecter are life affirming for her, but also reveal much about his supreme intellect, his gentle persuasions, his desires, manners and murderous capabilities. As supporting characters come and go, Tally ensures each of them, however insignificant, is treated with the same due regard. So moments such as a post mortem, or an investigation of a moth’s chrysalis, or a mother’s plea for the return of her kidnapped child, become snapshots of human nature and provide a tension all of their own as Starling, Lecter or Crawford permits or submits to enquiry and investigation.
Oscars rightfully went to the two leading players. While Hopkins dominates the film with a portrayal of terrifying stillness, it is Foster’s Clarice Starling who has our sympathies, suffering indignities, horrors and crises, but emerging a fully-fledged hero. The climax plays out against a demented soundscape of screeching noise and cawing music, the kidnapped woman wailing, the dog barking, the killer’s heavy breathing, reminding us of the screaming lambs from Clarice’s childhood memories,: can she once again save the stray animal trapped in its pen?
Buffalo Bill is the nominal villain, but you can take your pick of any number of unscrupulous or nefarious individuals. Howard Shore’s marvellous heartbeat of an incidental score accompanies the narrative with the same slow-quick build, right from the off as Starling tackles an assault course, testing her resolve and physical strength, to the climax where those skills are vindicated, to the coda where Lecter’s Panama-hatted silhouette blends into the crowds, his prodigious mind plotting his next human meal; Shore never lets the suspense audibly drop. The editing is crisp and unflashy. The film is exceptional on many technical levels, but it really is the writing that wins it and allows Foster and Hopkins to shine brightly.
Quite brilliant.
Intelligent review of a truly magnificent film- but no mention of author Thomas Harris? There isn't too much difference from the book.
Ah, yes, an oversight on my part. Not sure what I was thinking there. Perhaps because I haven't read the book... Amendment duly inserted into the second paragraph.
THE MANGLER (1995)
This is one of many films from this era taken from a Stephen King short story. Set in a small New England town, a depressed cop tries to find out how and why a big industrial laundry pressing machine is grinding up local workers to bloody pulp. Robert (Freddy Krueger) Englund is the crippled sweat shop owner with a voice box and an eye patch. It’s all to do with virginal sacrifices but to be honest the whole thing was such a bore that I lost interest very quickly. Director Tobe Hooper obviously did too as the film is a total mess. Incredibly this apparently spawned two sequels.
Avoid at all costs.
The early hours posting of @CoolHandBond 's movie reviews - and the types of movies too - suggest a brand image - you sort of imagine him in a cool LA den with low slung leather chairs, a 1970s Sony turntable and vinyl, a decanter of whisky and a cool voice message answerphone as he settles down for some late-night viewing of a cult classic.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Why am I reviewing a silent movie that starts with a Lening quote? This Soviet movie about a mutiny on a naval ship in 1905 is clearly a propaganda piece, but the reason it's still important are the qulities of the movie. This was the favourite movie of Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder and Michael Mann. The Odessa stairs sequence was clearly ripped off in The Untouchables. If you look at the editing and framing of the shots this movie was decades ahead of most other movies, and that's probably the reason Potemkin is one of the few non-comedies from the 1920's that's still being watched.
I like that image of me 😁😂 how do you perceive other contributors on this thread?
THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (1995)
This homage to Sergio Leone was well worth a revisit, I enjoyed it immensely. I’ve always liked Sam Raimi’s comicstrip style of direction and the violence is well handled with amusing giant bullet holes in heads etc. There are also many closeups of guns of the period, as a lover of pulp Western novels I appreciated seeing some of the guns I’ve read about in detail. Sharon Stone stars as the vengeance seeking Ellen. Gene Hackman owns the corrupt town of Redemption where he is holding a deadly kill-or-be-killed shooting tournament. Stone looks great and plays her role seriously. The support cast with Russell Crowe, Leonard DiCaprio, Lance Henriksen, Tobin Bell, Roberts Blossom, Pat Hingle, Bruce Campbell and Woody Strode all on excellent form.
Sit back and be thoroughly entertained.
THE BAT (1959)
The Bat is a unknown criminal on the trail of one million dollars embezzled out of a local bank. The money has been hidden in an “old dark house” style abode, currently leased by Agnes Moorehead, and that's where all the folks who might be the Bat converge and collude to find the haul. Coroner Vincent Price, local police chief Gavin Gordon and mysterious chauffeur/valet John Sutton and some more characters are all possibilities to be the Bat as they tread on over-lit sets. I’m a sucker for these set-bound “things-that-go-bump-in-the-night’ scenarios and I’ve probably been a bit lenient with this review. Price surprisingly gives a laid-back performance against the scene chewing theatrics of Moorehead, but he quickly becomes a too obvious candidate for being the Bat, (he commits a murder early on) which makes it unlikely that he'll also be responsible for The Bat's murders that ensue. Price is duly shot and killed as he wrestles over a gun and from then on the movie centres on some old biddies as they scurry around the house in nightclothes, on the trail and on the run from the Bat.
Its worth a look if you like this sort of thing.
Violent Naples 4/6 (poor mans Dirty Harry)
Fearless 3.5/6 (Joan Collins & filmed in Vienna)
From Corleone to Brooklyn 4/6 (Van Johnson guest stars)
Italian cop films starring Merli , just average fare......Saxon plays bad guy in a few
A very fun movie that's underrated and underseen. It was a pretty big flop when it was released but a lot of people have discovered it over the years and kept the fanbase building.
THE LAST WAGON (1956)
A muscular western from director Delmer Daves that revisits the Native American question he posed in the James Stewart classic Broken Arrow. The Last Wagon isn’t quite such a nuanced movie, but it serves its purpose well enough and is tremendously good looking, with superb cinemascope photography from Wilfred Cline. Early on the scenery is simply awe inspiring. There’s a shot where Richard Widmark’s Comanche Todd is virtually invisible, his leather hide jerkin vanishing into the enveloping mountains, he moves like a tiny speck on the enormous landscape; a few minutes further on he disappears into a sea of emerald pines reaching for the horizons and beyond. The sense of a wilderness untamed is evident and it is the untamed nature of Widmark’s hero as well as his enemies – nominally a vicious sheriff and a scouting party of Apaches – that set the tone for this brutish entry into the genre. Lionel Newman’s music is suitably cutthroat.
Widmark is on the run. We learn he killed four brothers, the rapists and murderers of his squaw wife and children. His real crime though seems to be that he has been reared by the Comanche and lives like them, off the land and susceptible to its fortunes, favours and ill-winds. He’s captured but while the sheriff escorts him to the nearest courthouse they come across a Quaker wagon train in need of protection. Cue scenes of an exhausted and dehydrated Widmark tied to a tree or a wagon wheel as imprisonment. Felicia Farr’s lonely teenager Jenny takes a shine to him. When the wagon train is attacked, only a group of youngsters and Widmark survive and he persuades them to free him so he can assist in their return to the civilised world. As Jenny and Comanche’s feelings develop, an emotional tussle between the tamed and untamed evolves. The latter wins out, but not before she too has a civilising effect on the hero.
There’s a long winded coda at the courthouse where Widmark has an opportunity to spout some vitriol towards the white man’s way, the difference between hot and cold blooded murder and the need for living, not killing. At this point Daves, James Edward Grant & Gwen Bagni Gielgud’s script attempts to be more important than the film needs to be, but that’s a minor concern in an otherwise fine genre movie that tackles the subject of cross-cultural boundaries with some dexterity. You sense if they made it these days, they would dwell a mite too long on the socio-politics and make the thing a trifle dull. Here, the emotional and moral turmoil is played swift and certain, leaving the strong scenery and muscular action to carry the story effectively.
Very good.
3 Idiots (2009)
This comedy is about three friends at a engineering college in India. The framing device is two if them (and a third former student who isn't a friend) who years later searches for the third, Rancho. Rancho is a very talented engineer who questione the eduction system that he finds only teaches learning by heart and only cares about grades and not real learning and understanding. The message and parts of the plot reminds me of "Dead poets society", but 3 idiots is far more comical. I found both the dramatic parts and the comedy largely works. Even the song and dance sequences worked for me. I'm far from the only one. 3 Idiots is the most sucessful Bollywood movie ever! All izz well!
I'd been meaning to see this for a while and caught up with it this evening. The central performance, in particular, makes it work, especially in the set piece recreations of AW's stage performances. That said, the documentary film 'Amy' is more powerful/ moving. Crucially, 'Amy' is more convincing in its representation of Blake and Mitch, with a challenging take on both men.
And while I am on the subject fo Delmer Daves...
TREASURE OF THE GOLDEN CONDOR (1953)
A colourful adventure romance set in pre-revolutionary France and the jungles of Guatemala. Jean-Paul is an orphan outcast living with his gunsmith grandfather. When his evil uncle arrives to claim him, the twelve-year-old Jean-Paul starts a decade of drudgery as a stable hand, aware he is the rightful heir to the St Malo estate but unable to break the yoke that binds him. After declaring his love for Marie, his cousin, Jean-Paul is whipped by his uncle and decides to flee the country, pairing up with crazy Scottish explorer MacDougal who has a map which shows the location of a fabled Mayan treasure, the Golden Condor.
Guatemalan locations shoots enhance the mid-section of a fairly humdrum movie. The scenic benefits are offset by generally poor acting honours. Cornel Wilde is an appalling hero, Anne Bancroft seems disinterested as his scheming French lover, while Constance Smith is a non-entity as the good-hearted Clara MacDougal. Finlay Currie, Leo G Carroll, George Macready, Konstantin Shane and Fay Wray [still looking lovely twenty years on from King Kong] provide support, although the script creaks and groans so much it feels as if the whole enterprise is about to collapse.
Good photography from Edward Cronjager can’t elevate the Mills & Boon antics. Writer-director Delmer Daves seems all at sea, so much so he condenses the story enough to require a narrator, except the movie starts off without one, preferring scrolls of faded parchment, abandoned midway in favour of Cornel Wilde’s dutiful tones.
A yarn, I guess. Good natured, but a bit turgid.
Outland (1981) - and I assume readers of a certain age will be going 'High Noon in space!' right now. Well, it isn't quite like that for most of it, it's a story of a decent cop sniffing out corruption in a mining space colony and finds himself up against it.
It's a fine star vehicle for our man Sean Connery as it plays to his strengths. Watching this, you would have felt he'd be fine to come back into the James Bond role if only that were possible, why, from the bare bones of this you and I could craft a decent Bond script for him in half an hour! It makes NSNA all the more disappointing, not least that Connery is middle-aged in this but not in any way creaky, unlike in the actual Bond film. That said, some things appear borrowed - the extended fight scene in the canteen is staged like the finale of a similar fight in Shrublands, that said it's all played for laughs in the Bond film, likewise the stand-off between Bond and M (Fox) is just silly stuff - once you take realism out of a Connery thriller, you don't have much left really.
There's a good sense of realism in this, a hint of the grimness of The Offence but it's not overwhelming. Oh, there's other Bond crew in there - Steven Berkoff as a resident who goes nuts on drugs, and editor Stuart Baird who did Casino Royale.
The villain in this is good, interesting - the guy who runs the show. He's not your usual silky smooth snarling type - he's a schmuck! Nicely effective against Connery. The whole setting is credible, it's designed as a real world in itself.
Kudos for not giving Connery a blonde buxom wife - that said (and gripes do accumulate) - the pair don't have great chemistry exactly, you can't quite see how their courtship would have gone. I never see Connery as a great romantic lead, he tends to spark off his co-stars, not lean into them or evolve into them. He's too much his own man - which makes him better in this film when he's on his own, up against it, albeit with a couple of enablers. The script suggests the marriage is on the skids - via video message she says 'I love you' but he doesn't reciprocate, though he does when his - also not terribly convincing - son says it. It's not quite played that way though.
He pals up with the ship's doctor played by Frances Sternhagen (who died only last year), who is a Frances McDormand-type character, highly praised on imdb though I felt her line readings were a bit off. Kudos having her as cranky middle-aged and not some alternative love interest. That said, another possible love interest might have ramped up our own and generated some tension given the plot is fairly straightforward. Then you could have us wonder if Connery would go off with her instead, only to have him do the dutiful thing and go back to his wife which is never in doubt in this film.
Connery's back story isn't consistent. He realises he got hired for the job because it's thought he's cruddy and wouldn't stand up to anything going on. But it's also said he gets moved on from every job because he's got a big mouth and challenged authority - so which is it? The boss annoys him in his opening intro to his co-staff but I'm not sure he said anything that humiliating to set Connery on the warpath. It's nicely played for dramatic effect but...
The High Noon part of it in the second half doesn't quite work for me - the bad guy calls in a couple of hitmen to arrive at the colony to take Connery out. I mean, it's been established one ally got bumped off, presumably made to look like a suicide - though nothing comes of this incident, it is not followed up - so surely that would be the way to get Connery's character, rather than have a couple of men with shotguns, it's not exactly subtle. It would be easily done - his wife and kid have left him, so say he was feeling depressed and all alone, you have the motive; he took his own life. Rigged investigation. It doesn't quite stack up. Perhaps I'm more cynical these days given the political landscape of the last decade.
I was too young to see Outland when it first came out but I would have found it a grim watch at the time, much of it would have passed me by. Last night on telly I enjoyed it a lot, even if it is the sort of thing Arnie did in a more fun and formulaic way later in the decade. Apart from Zardoz, I think this is the only sci-ti film Connery did, unless you count The Time Bandits.
I noticed in the end credits that the naked prostitute attacked by Berkoff was Sharon Duce, who played the wife in 1980s gambling drama Big Deal. Like Kika Markham, who played Connery's wife in this, both have had very consistent and regular careers in various TV dramas over the decades.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Really enjoyed OUTLAND. I wish they'd cast his son better but that's the only real mistep.
Frances Sternhagen steals the movie.
And on the subject of...
OUTLAND (1981)
The comparisons with Fred Zinneman’s classic western High Noon don’t harm Outland, nor do they help it. The story of a lone sheriff facing an outlaw posse does take some time to emerge from the darkness of intrigue at an enormous titanium mine facility on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. The impressive external model work and claustrophobic interiors go some way towards effectively conveying the grim experience of living and working on a corporate industrial mine. Mineral extraction is hell whatever century you are living in.
Sean Connery is very understated in a suitably heroic role as O’Neill, the Federal Marshall who uncovers an illegal drug smuggling operation that has helped increase productivity but results in paranoic side effects for the extensive user. Twenty-eight victims have been summarily shipped out and ‘buried in sea space’. O’Neill wants to know why, but taking on the corporation that employs you does not go down well with the facility’s management, his colleagues and the general population.
Writer / director Peter Hyams has had a decent career and made several interesting science fiction pictures, starting with the conspiracy thriller Capricorn One in 1977. Outland was his second sci-fi mini-epic and this one touches on the idea of big business taking over law and order, although Hymans doesn’t exactly run with the premise, preferring the easier route of fights and chases. Well-presented for sure, but the formulaic homage of the second half isn’t as unusual as the intriguing first. Briefly flirting with the concepts of societal corruption and corporate greed is about as deep as Hymans is prepared to scratch. The space suited climax at least seems worthwhile, although the murders, suicides and killings all felt a bit repetitive.
Outland isn’t great movie, it is merely a good one, but worth it to witness Connery in serious and slightly unsympathetic mode given a script and director that do not play to his established star persona. The grouchiness of the turn, certainly in the early sections, anticipates his Oscar winning role in The Untouchables. I enjoyed it.
HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1970)
This has long been derided by Hammer fans and even though it’s not a patch on the Peter Cushing series it does have some decent scenes, if ultimately pointless. Horror Of Frankenstein attempts to be both straight horror and comedy and it doesn’t quite gel. Ralph Bates plays Victor Frankenstein. We return to the beginning of the saga once again, he is a young student who knows far more than his tutors, and isn't afraid to show them up. Baron Frankenstein refuses to let his son Victor go away to University in Vienna, so Victor decides to murder him, consequently acquiring his father's title and money. This is a highly sexed Victor, he gets the Dean’s daughter up the spout as well as seeing to the very sexy housekeeper, Kate O’Mara (and who can blame him?). The Dean is played by our own James Cossins.
With his friend Wilhelm, they experiment into reanimating a turtle and then into building a being from spare parts, when Wilhelm threatens to expose Victor he is done away with in an electrifying manner. Soon the monster is alive, causing havoc across the countryside and killing anyone who gets in Victor’s way. The creature is played by Dave Prowse, the square-shaped head and bolts giving him a passing resemblance to Boris Karloff’s monster, but with little facial expressions Prowse's creature has no personality, his Monster From Hell rendition would be far superior.
It concludes disappointingly, the monster is done in by sheer luck and we are left wondering what was the point of it all. I’m not sure if director Jimmy Sangster’s heart was really in this.
For Hammer completists only.
SANDS OF IWO JIMA (1949)
“Saddle up!” cries John Wayne as if he’s never left the wild west. Don’t be fooled. Sands of Iwo Jima is one of his best films of the 1940s, a decade when he starred in over thirty pictures and every single one of them made money.
The Pacific War was still raw for the Americans in 1949 and Sands of Iwo Jima represents a one-sided heroic attitude which feels entirely appropriate for the time, although it seems somewhat stale and unremarkable over seventy years later. The story involves tough US Marine sergeant John Stryker polishing up a squad of raw recruits. He’s a career soldier whose been through Guadalcanal, lost his family to divorce and loses his self-respect to the bottle every furlough. The appearance of the scholarly, but bolshie, Pvt Pete Conway – son of Stryker’s previous Colonel-in-Chief – drives a wedge between the sergeant and his men. Not such a huge wedge it can’t be solved by a few fists, tough words and armed combat against the Japanese at Tarawa. Having won over his men, Stryker and the squad head for Iwo Jima where the fighting and the introspective reflections become even more intense.
John Wayne is suitably commanding as Stryker. Once again he displays an ability to empathise with his characters, revealing the softness inside the hard outer casing. Several of the Duke’s performances of the period, such as Angel and the Badman, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man, are similarly nuanced. The sequence where Stryker meets a girl in a bar, goes home with her anticipating a night of passion but learns instead she’d be screwing him for money to feed her baby son is a prime example of his much underrated skill as a multilayered actor, conveying his emotions and his opinions mostly through expression and physical demonstration. His muted response to Conway’s words of aggressive disdain is similarly artful. It is these quiet moments of Wayne’s performance that probably earned him an Oscar nomination, although I wouldn’t suggest this is any better or worse than Wayne’s acting in, say, the three movies I listed above. The rest of the cast are a mixed bag of enthusiastic stereotypes, although they may not have appeared so in 1949.
The film is now most notable for its recreation of battle. The scenes set at Tarawa and the Iwo Jima are terrific indeed. Steven Spielberg knows his movies and I would be stunned if he hadn’t had this film partly in mind when recreating D-Day for Saving Private Ryan. Allan Dwan, who was never in the first rank of directors, conducts with a smooth, shrewd eye, blending his location footage with realistic studio sets and genuine Pacific War footage as captured by the US Navy Film Department. By attempting and mostly succeeding to match one with the other, Dwan gains an undercurrent of realism unusual for 1940s flag wavers. The movie ends with another reproduction, this time of Joe Rosenthal’s famous and now much disputed Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. This itself would become the subject of the book and subsequent Clint Eastwood film Flags of Our Fathers.
While it isn’t firm in the story or character stakes, Sands of Iwo Jima is a splendid example of the type of war movie actioner that became de rigour in the fifties and sixties. It certainly keeps one interested and never threatens to do anything more than it says on the film reel tin. The movie was a prestige release for Republic Pictures and made a huge bunce of money for the era. Editing, Sound Recording and Original Story were also honoured with Academy Award nominations.
I enjoyed it. “Lock and load!”
I haven’t seen Iwo Jima for a long, long time. I’ve just added it to my viewing list, thanks for the great review @chrisno1