This movie is about the female war correspondent Lee Miller: Kate Winslet plays Lee. This movie has been a passion project for Winslet, and it's easy to see why. Lee Miller was a fashion model who later shifted her career to photography. As the US became involved in the war she managed to become the war correspondent of Vogue. I wonder who's vogue's war correspondent in Ukraine these days? 😉
She covered several aspects of the war, including the holocaust. Obviously this affected her mentally, but she showed great professionalism. Several of her best known photos is reproduced in the movie. I think seeing the war thru the eyes of a female American journalism is a new and fascinating way to show WWII in a movie. I liked the movie and there are several fine acting performances, especially from Kate Winslet. This could be her best performance. I think she would make a fine M for James Bond, or possibly Moneypenny if we get a more mature and powerful version of the character. Or perhaps a villain?
I think this photo shows the intelligence and intensity Winslet can bring to the Bond franchise:
Maybe the most famous photo Lee Miller was responsible for (even though she didn't technically take the photo) is shown below. That's Lee washing off dirt after spending weeks in the field. She's in Hitler's bathtub in his apartment in Munich, taken on the day Hitler took his own life.
But Lee was rarely in the photos she sent home. She focused on other people being affected by war:
A sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep reunites us with Danny, the little boy with psychic abilities, now all grown up and trying to come to terms with his alcoholism. Drifting his way up to New Hampshire and finding work in a hospice center, Dan uses his gifts to help terminally ill people pass on peacefully. After befriending a little girl named Abra who also has the Shine, they confront The True Knot, a group of ancient beings who torture, kill and feed on children who have the Shine.
Doctor Sleep is based in part on the Stephen King novel of the same name while also trying to be a follow-up to the Stanley Kubrick movie. This attempt at being a sequel to two very different stories is what ultimately undoes the movie for me.
The first two-thirds of the movie are fairly faithful to the book without really stepping on the events of the movie. The third act however decides to return us to the Overlook Hotel (destroyed in the original novel but not the movie) and instead of simply trying to tell it's own story or following the events of the book, the filmmakers decided to just ape the Kubrick film (with a dash of The Sixth Sense for good measure), going so far as to even give us a Jack Nicholson lookalike and repeating key scenes from the climax of the first movie. It made, for me at least, a very unsatisfying conclusion to a movie that was to that point fairly entertaining. It also wastes a really good performance by Ewan McGregor as an adult Danny.
I know it's impossible to cram a 500+ page book into a two or three hour movie but I'll never understand why a filmmaker would feel the need to jettison so much of a perfectly good narrative in favor of just repeating something that somebody else already did (and did better, frankly). The novel Doctor Sleep was at its core a story of redemption and finding purpose in life. The movie ultimately just wants to show us scary monsters and gruesome special effects, completely undermining the themes of its source.
I saw this a couple of days ago and really liked it - in fact I enjoyed it more than the book because it the links to The Shining movie. It also reflects the ending of The Shining book, which in itself, is a good twist.
The Jack Nicholson lookalike is Henry Thomas who played the kid in E.T. I thought all the lookalike characters were good and played their roles well. Also the reconstruction of the now dilapidated Overlook Hotel was excellent. Director Mike Flanagan does a decent job of this sequel.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Abra and Dan's final scene together in the hotel is almost word for word from The Shining. Truthfully I thought it was a strange inclusion that bordered on fan service for me. I'm glad you enjoyed it; my brother, who's never read any of the novels also enjoyed it a lot. I guess I'm just too hung up on the books but I've always been this way when it comes to these adaptations.
A peculiar British thriller about counterfeit money laundering that seems caught between any number of stools. It wants to be a hardboiled detective thriller of the type recently peddled by Coogan’s Bluff or those Tony Rome movies. It wants to be a kitchen sink, lower class, fly-on-the-wall docu-drama. It wants to be a grim gangland exploitation, a descendant of Brighton Rock or a precursor of Get Carter. It wants to be a window onto Britain’s permissive swinging sixties society. It wants to be exciting. It wants to be profound. It fails on almost all measures, right from the off, even, with that dreadful title.
Yul Brynner is tough US treasury detective Jim Novak who travels to London to infiltrate a network of counterfeiters. Along with Edward Woodward’s equally hard northern cop, he seems to make progress. Eventually, via Walter Gotell’s warehouse smuggling setup and Charles Gray’s snazzy, hippy chic distribution centre, Brynner uncovers the millionaire antique dealer behind the operation. Cue chaos at a country house.
I had no idea what was happening most of the time. The scenes feel bolted together without any thought. Individually they sometimes work. Strung together, the film becomes a hopeless mess as tension ebbs and flows faster than a tide, action takes precedence over explanation, and the characters become increasingly absurd. For instance, Charles Gray’s effete top man sees him wearing Saville Row and visiting gay saunas by day, while hosting trippy drug fuelled sex-parties at night, decked out in kaftans and rosary beads. Weird. On the plus side, a rare one indeed, Brynner and Woodward’s antagonistic relationship is well portrayed.
It doesn’t do to dwell on this kind of offering. Surprisingly it was directed by Sam Wannamaker.
TRAP (2024), directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Josh Hartnett.
The premise: Josh Hartnett is a father bringing his daughter to see a concert by Lady Raven. His daughter got great grades so he's fulfilling his parental promise to bring her to the show, where they have floor seats. While there, Josh notices that the police presence is really heavy...guards everywhere, outside and inside of the arena. While buying a t-shirt for his daughter, he asks the salesman what's going on. It turns out, the police know that a local serial killer is inside of the arena, and they're all there to catch him.
That's the first 10 minutes of the film. I won't go any further with the plot just in case you aren't aware of it.
It's solid in a 'one and done' kind of way, nice and suspenseful with a lot of good twists in it. My major complaint is that I've been to many, many concerts in my life, and this film doesn't feel like it captures an authentic experience (it happens during the day, they leave their seats too often, stuff like that). Suspension of disbelief is critical. I'm happy to also say that I thought the ending worked, unlike a lot of recent Shyamalan films.
Josh Hartnett is really quite excellent in this. He's really grown as an actor in the past 8 years or so. If you didn't see PENNY DREADFUL, give it a go...that's where his career resurgence kinda began.
Recommended if you're wanting a quick thriller. My wife and I were entertained.
The big twist happens right away and is essential to the overall premise. Everything else in the film builds upon that. It's a lot more straightforward than a lot of his other films.
To be clear, my recommendation for TRAP is if you're looking for something to fill time. Don't go out of your way on it...it's pretty stupid if you give it any scrutiny but it's fun in the moment. The first act is filled with some head scratching moments to set up the overall premise, but the film gets into a fun groove in the second act. The third act goes on for too long but it ends in a satisfying way.
A group of cancer scientists working in a remote laboratory on Petrie Island off the east coast of Ireland accidentally create a mutant life form, which survives on ingesting Calcium Phosphate present in the bones of living animals.
A grotesque discovery of a boneless corpse of a local farmer begins the story.
Local police constable John Harris alerts the island's physician Dr. Reginald Landers, who unable to determine the cause of death in this absurd case seeks the help of a well respected British pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing).
Dr. Landers and Dr. Stanley further seek the aid of Dr. David West, an expert on bone related diseases and this team of doctors along with Dr. West's girlfriend Toni Merrill, head back to the island to investigate the case.
What they find is a most horrific life form, that is rapidly multiplying on the island and is resistant to all forms of weapons.
A chance discovery enables them to find a weakness in the metabolism of this life form and they implement a plan to get rid of this menace.
Directed by legendary Hammer Films director Mr. Terence Fisher, this 89 minute movie is an entertaining sci-fi horror film.
To be enjoyed with friends and family on Halloween's Day.
The problem I have with John Ford’s lionised western My Darling Clementine isn’t the presentation of film itself, which as a noir tinged cowboy-town-frontier-cattle-rustling-revenge-romance-tragedy works well, but the story as told by scriptwriters Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller, which basically reinterprets history for its own ends.
According to this movie, the Earp Brothers drove cattle [they never did], the youngest brother – James – is murdered by rustlers [he was the eldest and lived until 1926], Warren Earp is never mentioned at all, Doc Holiday is a surgeon [he was a dentist], Old Man Clanton is present at the gunfight at the OK Corall [he died the year before], Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday both romance a beautiful winsome Bostoner named Clementine Carter [an amalgamation of several women in both men’s lives, as is Holliday’s Mexican mistress Chihuahua], the McLaury Brothers are never mentioned, Tombstone is a one street town without a church [it was almost fully developed by 1882], Billy Clanton dies before the gunfight [he didn’t, he died during it], Virgil Earp dies before the gunfight [he didn’t], Wyatt Earp was Marshall of Tombstone [he wasn’t, his brother Virgil was].
There may be more inconsistencies. When this film was released, the now famous ‘Gunfight at the OK Corall’ was barely known at all, usually only to those who had read Stuart Lake’s biographical novel Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall. This film’s apparent authentic reproduction of the action launched much interest in the wild west’s most famous six-gun shoot out. Having read much about it myself, and not just on the Wiki pages, it saddens me that this movie version violates almost every historical facet of the true story, its characters, the extended feuding which lead to the battle, the aftermath and the battle itself. I’d go so far as to say that in terms of an honest truth it is an abomination.
Putting that to one side, My Darling Clementine remains an exceptionally good movie, particularly in its shadowy, doom filled visuals. Victor Mature as Doc Holliday gives probably the best performance of his career as a dying man trying to forget his past in full knowledge he also has no future. He’s matched by Linda Darnell as the envious Mexican bar singer Chihuahua, all spitfire and fury. Walter Brennan impresses too as ‘Old Man’ Clanton, as casual a killer as you’ll find in a western: “When you draw a gun on a man,” he scowls at his disobedient brood, “you kill him.” Henry Fonda, Ward Bond and Tim Holt are, unfortunately, rather bland as the Earp Brothers Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil. Fonda in particular disappoints, his performance being nothing more than a series of stylised ‘moments’ – swinging back on his chair, a galloping dance, a cigar chomping poker game, a tension filled first confrontation with Doc Holliday, an awkward introduction to the beautiful Clementine [Cathy Downs].
Apparently, John Ford didn’t want to make the film, but did so to cancel his 20th Century Fox contract. Daryl F. Zanuck was not pleased with the results and had much of the movie reshot and reedited by an uncredited Lloyd Bacon, whose best movies were musicals.
I enjoyed a new release, Anora, at the cinema last night. It's a film by Sean Baker, and it's about a Brooklyn sex worker (dancer, private dancer on request in a booth type thing) who one evening as the young son of a Russian oligarch (actual Russian actor Mark Eidelshstein) pitch up. They befriend each other outside work (by 'befriend' I mean agree to have sex for payment at his luxury apartment overlooking the river) and it's all a bit Pretty Woman - only thing is, in the Richard Gere film Julia Roberts only had to contend with his jealous work colleague, whereas with the titular - so to speak - sex worker, it's very much a case of Wait Til Your Parents Get Home.
It's best I don't reveal much more as the film's enjoyment is about how the plot develops. Lots of full on simulated sex, however. From a Bond centric pov, there are elements to draw upon here for future reference, if anyone can be bothered.
One snag is that while Mikey Madison (who was one of the hippy chicks in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) puts in a great performance, I'm not sure it's quite as written, as the character does seem quite naive to not appear to realise that her involvement with her new beau may generate issues with his family. I mean, the character is 23 - about the age the actress is in the film - so she might be, but I think she was meant to be a bit more kooky or daft. Thing is, many Western movies do not like to have the main protagonist as obviously unaware or thick given that the idea is the audience like to identify with them along the way.
One exception would be Risky Business, and this is the flip side to that film - one wonders, decades later, if Joel's family would have been charmed to have their only son get involved long term with a prostitute - or would that have been kept from them? All the same, Tom Cruise's Joel is shown to be a bit dim at times, but it's indulged, we still like him a fair bit, whereas while there is all manner of sexism in the movies, we don't see women depicted as thick in any way that is shown as admirable or part of the learning process. Or do we? Answers on a postcard.
There are other minor potholes but this is a fast, funny, frenetic and highly sexed slice of celluloid - it's a bit wish-fulfilment re the Russians, from a Western perspective, given the situation in Ukraine and the way Putin's enemies exit from high windows. It moves more into Breaking Bad territory in its humour.
There are thirty-one Carry On movies. This is number five and [for me] it is one of the worst five of the series – along with England, Emmanuelle, Jack and Loving. The main problem is the absence of a storyline. Sid James runs an odd-job agency called Helping Hands and for ninety or so minutes we follow the misadventures of its employees, a series of increasingly tedious sketches of misunderstandings and pratfalls. It’s simply awful.
Liz Fraser looks pretty. Kenneth Conner has too much to do and over-eggs every single scene he’s in. Terence Longdon is wasted. Occasionally I might have chuckled – for instance, the scenes set in a hospital when Sid James accidentally impersonates a leading surgeon were mildly amusing, chiefly because they looked like cast offs from Carry On Nurse – but the whole exercise is a sorry excuse for entertainment. It might have been funny in 1961, but it is an appalling, almost unwatchable spectacle today.
Finally they made this film! Now we wait for "Barbel - the movie", "sir Miles the valiant", "emtiem" and other AJB-related movies. 😂
Joking aside, This is the movie about the Special Operations Operations agent Gunnar Sønsteby, who is nothing less than a legend in Norway. The British SOE ranked him as their best agent in Europe, and they also ranked Sønsteby's sabotage outfit "The Oslo Gang" as the best in Europe. He's the only resipient of the highest ranked medal in the country. It's worth mentioning that "Nr. 24" shares three scenes with the 2008 film "Max Manus - man of war" since Sønsteby was Manus' boss. But Max manus was a hothead while Sønsteby was very calm and calculating.
I noticed how the movie was geared towards a younger audience. Hand-held camera, modern sound track and young and a talk to modern school pupils is used as a framing device. The movie also brings up the topic of assassinations, something that hasn't really been brought up in public in connection to Gunnar Sønsteby before. he even had to order the assassination of a former classmate who was turning Gestapo informer. He was in many ways the Norwegian James Bond, but other than being a real historical person he also had a very different personality from 007. I think the scene (written from memory) where he gets debriefed by the MI5 when he first goes to England makes this clear as well as showcasing Sønsteby's personality:
MI5: You have survived two years in the resistance, something very few do. Why is that?
Sønsteby: I'm very thorough.
MI5: Is that enough? Some manage to stay alive in ..... other ways. (suggesting he played both sides)
Sønsteby: Every waking hour I plan ahead.
MI5: How do you handle the pressure? Do you drink?
Sønsteby: Not since the war started. I find it to be counterproductive.
MI5: Do you smoke?
Sønsteby: No.
MI5: How many of your contacts are women?
Sønsteby: Five
MI5: Have you slept with many of them?
Sønsteby: None of them.
MI5: Don't you like women?
Sønsteby: I do. But I haven't slept with any women since the war started.
An ordinary western from John Wayne and director Andrew V. McLaglen. Like Ford’s My Darling Clementine which I watched earlier this week, Chisum is based only ostensibly around true events: the Lincoln County War of 1878. A host of real life characters such as John Chisum, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are played by an amiable cast. Wayne spars brilliantly with Ben Johnson as two aging cowhands who’ve seen it all and try not to do it all again, but end up with no other choice. Sporadically interesting, generally not, the film is sumptuously photographed and could be summed up as ‘senseless bloodletting with a cheerful demeanour.’ It made money. Not much else to report.
I was quite unkind to Christopher Nolan’s remake when I reviewed it on here a couple of years back. While Leslie Norman’s original effort is no great shakes – sturdy would describe it well – he, at least, provides a workable narrative that switches easily between its three major protagonists. John Mills is the insecure Lance Corporal leading a half-dozen soldiers through Belgium and France only to find themselves shored up, as it were, on the Dunkirk beaches. Bernard Lee is a journalist suspicious of the British government’s motives for providing misleading military briefings. He’s pals with Richard Attenborough’s company director who is reaping the financial benefits of war contracts to create belt buckles and dress uniforms on the cheap. The vast differences between the three men’s outlook on war and responsibility, how they confront it and overcome their fears and concerns, developing leadership qualities and community responsibility even to the detriment of their colleagues and families, is what drives this version. It doesn’t mince dialogue. The British military is portrayed as inefficient, outdated and over-confident, fighting the war in isolated bubbles instead of as a complete mobile unit. It is interesting to note that when one admiral is pleading with his command to ensure enough destroyers are available to transport the fleeing soldiers, Mills’s corporal is pleading with his patrol to continue the fight against the odds – the two men express the same consistent opinion, yet they never meet, are hundreds of miles apart and at different ends of the leadership spectrum. Bernard Lee is the most affecting cast member, his doubtful, but patriotic writer coming to understand the futility of war. Attenborough’s homelife is seen as his Achilles Heel – an anxious wife and a squealing baby are his priorities; it is shame that forces him to join the civilian armada. Curiously, while the soldiering is intense and effective [Mills’s tribulations as his patrol attempt to reach Dunkirk appear now as a forerunner of Saving Private Ryan as incident follows incident, much of it under the eye of the enemy] and the homeland scenes have a grip of sincerity about how civilians reacted to the ‘phoney’ war, the film itself misses the boat, as it were, when portraying the great nationalistic story of Dunkirk: all those little maritime craft bobbing to the rescue of a hundred thousand soldiers. That barely features here. Still, a worthy war film that touches the head as well as the heart. Perhaps its failure is the same as Nolan’s 2017 version and is one that neither film can avoid: it is very hard to make an uplifting movie about a military defeat.
The very first Powell and Pressburger collaboration, The Spy in Black is a World War I espionage thriller starring Conrad Veidt as Captain Hardt, a German U-boat commander who is sent on a secret mission to the Orkney Islands.
The target...the British Fleet stationed in Scapa Flow.
The contact...Fräulein Tiel, a German agent who has taken over the identity of a local schoolteacher Anne Burnett.
The method...get critical information from a disgruntled Royal Navy officer who is willing to work for the other side.
All seems to go well for Captain Hardt until he realizes that he has been ensnared in a counter-espionage trap by British intelligence.
Filled with sharp plot twists and fine acting, this 78 minute movie is a well made spy fiction film.
Yes, a very good prototype spy thriller, a little dated now, but worth a look. Alexander Korda produced, I believe, or at least his production company did. Pressburger only wrote the screenplay and Powell directed. These early movies were all 'spy' films and owe a debt to Hitchcock. The P & P Archers company where the two nominally shared writing and production duties wasn't formed until 1942 and features their best work.
Indeed Sir...and what beautiful works of art these two gentlemen gifted to British cinema. Another masterpiece created by The Archers production company was 'The Battle of the River Plate'.
THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE (1956)
A very fine naval film, 'The Battle of the River Plate' details the skirmishes between the Royal Navy cruisers HMS Ajax, HMS Achilles and HMS Exeter with the Kriegsmarine heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee on December 13, 1939 in the South Atlantic.
HMS Exeter was severely damaged in the fight and headed for the Falkland Islands with HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles incurring moderate damage. Admiral Graf Spee also moderately damaged, headed for the neutral port of Montevideo, Uruguay for repairs while being followed by Ajax and Achilles.
On arrival at the port, the commander of the German warship Captain Hans Langsdorf was ordered to evacuate within 72 hours by the Uruguayan authorities. Fearing that the British Navy cruisers, lying in wait would decimate the ship, the captain decided to scuttle his boat and later committed suicide.
Featuring top-notch performances by John Gregson, Anthony Quayle, Bernard Lee and Peter Finch and running at 119 minutes, The Battle of the River Plate is an excellent war film and a treat for WWII buffs.
Well, that isn't their best, but I understand you liking it. Battle of the River Plate has a docu-drama feel to it @Sonero which is a subgenre of several genres of cinema. At a time when movies were getting bigger and more spectacular it suffers a little from being relatively small in production scale. Not so with these:
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP - a magnificent performance from Robert Livesey, a brilliant achievement of storytelling
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH - quite possibly one of the greatest war movies ever made IMHO, a brilliant achievement of storytelling
BLACK NARCISSUS - seriously intense, brazenly melodramatic, gothic in the tropics, a brilliant achievement of storytelling
THE RED SHOES - frantic and almost hysterical, but, by god, the dancing
GONE TO EARTH - sumptuous to look at, another intense romantic saga
THE TALES OF HOFFMAN - underrated dance movie, it just looks fabulous
Maybe I'll give River Plate another go on your recommendation. It's been a couple of decades.
Made at the tail end of the ‘epic’ craze in Hollywood, this good-looking treat is based on a doorstep blockbuster of a bestseller by James A. Michener. Writers Daniel Taradash and Dalton Trumbo dispense with almost all of the novel. The first two chapters, about the indigenous founding of the archipelago and its associated gods, are covered by a pre-titles narration; the film concentrates on the mid-1800s missionary zeal of the Americas and the slow Christian conversion of the Hawaiian peoples. The second half of Michener’s narrative is dispensed with completely [a sequel movie, 1970’s Tom Gries’s The Hawaiians, would deal with that]. Hawaii is directed by George Roy Hill who sets a slow pace for most of the tale, which the serious subject matter seems to require, encompassing as it does religious pride, conflicting emotions of the heart, culture-clash, economic greed, promiscuity, and ultimately death and self-sacrifice. There are moments of joy and humour which relieve the obvious pain. Yes, there is much obvious pain, both physical and spiritual. George Roy Hill was an unusual choice for this material, having mostly been involved in broad comedy-dramas. Generally, he is successful by not overplaying his hand and letting the story and dialogues speak for themselves.
Max Von Sydow is very good as Abner Hale, a stubborn and blinkered Calvinist preacher; he ought to be, he’d just spent over a year playing Jesus Christ for George Stevens in The Greatest Story Ever Told, a titanic epic that virtually slammed the nail in the coffin of enormous expensive projects such as this. Working for a lesser George, such as Mr Hill, must have been a comparative holiday for the Swede. Julie Andrews plays his compassionate and tragic wife and is more than believable as a missionary spouse who brings a touch of earthly passion, love, sympathy and substance to her husband’s fiery god-fearing demeanour. Andrews defies the belief she could only play singing nannies, although to be fair, she spends most of her time here as a mother, teacher and nurse, so she may as well be playing another nanny – and she darn-well sings! Richard Harris scowls as a wronged whaleship captain. Jocelyn Le Garde earned an Academy Award nomination for her excellent performance as the Hawaiian god-monarch, Alii Nui.
Performances aside, the script hacks about with its subject, and with history, but retains just enough elements of tension and pathos to keep us interested, for there is not much in the way of action. Sailors rioting, a moment of self-harm and a portentous hurricane is about your lot. However, the performances would be worth an admission fee and you can see the spend on the screen: beautiful photography of the Hawaiian islands from Russell Harlan, excellent costumes from Dorothy Jeakins, half-decent sets built on location with good, rustic interiors, plus an emotive music score from Elmer Bernstein. Dialogue and character has to keep us interested and that is unusual in epics; I suppose one should thank the writers, director and performers for making it so. There is enough compassion towards the plight of the native to remind us we are essentially in colonial territory, and enough devilishness from the colonists and obtuseness from the religious to explain the early settler failures and the conflicts which arise between natives and whites.
In 1942, Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Corp had pushed the Commonwealth forces into retreat following the defeat at the battle of Gazala. Rommel now wants to send two spies into Cairo to provide intelligence on the Commonwealth forces next move.
By using the services of Laszlo Almasy, an experienced desert explorer, two German Spies Johannes Eppler and Hans Gerd Sandstede are dropped at the edge of Cairo, using captured British vehicles and forged identity papers.
Eppler under the name of Hussein Gaffar and Sandstede disguised as American Peter Monkaster meet up with a local belly dancer in Cairo, who will now be used to entice a British officer into leaking classified military documents.
At the same time Captain Robertson of British Intelligence is hot on the trail of the two spies and needs to unmask them before Rommel gets his hands on the British battle plans.
Based on the novel by Geoffrey Jenkins, this maritime thriller stars Richard Johnson as Commander Geoffrey Peace, a discredited British submarine officer now working as a smuggler in the Mediterranean.
After being busted for smuggling weapons off the coast of Malta, Peace is provided with an opportunity to recoup his losses.
An old time associate Harry Riker shows up with the wife of a diamond prospector.
The job...retrieve a stash of uncut diamonds hidden in a secret location along Namibia's Skeleton Coast.
The catch...steer the boat through one the most dangerous coast lines filled with razor sharp rocks.
Interspersed in the film are flashback sequences of a mission Peace undertook in WWII which links to the main story in a profound way.
Directed by Don Chaffey (Danger Man, The Prisoner) and featuring commendable performances by its actors (need I say the legendary Ms. Honor Blackman), this 1 hour 27 minute movie is a very well made adventure film.
An influential crime thriller starring Steve McQueen as reticent cop Frank Bullitt, who loses a state’s witness and falls foul of prosecutor Robert Vaughn. On the way to solving the mystery of Johnny Ross, he finds time to have a heart-to-heart with his girlfriend Jacqueline Bissett and kill a couple of heavies at the climax of a ten minute car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Crisply edited by Frank Keller and shot with a mostly documentary feel by British director Peter Yates, the film marks a high point in McQueen’s stop-start career. His performance as a cop sliding towards indifference and noncommunication has been remodelled to better or lesser effect by stars like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Bruce Willis in more violent and less cultured affairs. The screenplay is a bit slap dash, cut to the bone, one feels, in favour of a hip and trendy ‘look’. The visuals provide plenty of snazzy camera angles and these are aided by shifty performances. Both keep the eye peeled: the film is interesting to look at even if the content is dreary. Lalo Schifrin wrote a jazz inspired score that sounds as if it escaped from that Sinatra album with Carlos Jobim which was released the same year. Weirdly, a club trio combo of drum, guitar and flute impersonates Jethro Tull in a swanky restaurant. The film is enjoyable without the joy. The rough edges show and an undercurrent theme of sleazy corruption is neglected in favour of the ‘chase’ format. The ending takes place at San Francisco airport and is confused and confusing.
Bullitt frequently crops up on those ‘classic’ or ‘best’ lists. It is certainly worth a look although the movie is revered more for the impact it caused and how its innovative cinematic ‘visuals’ continue to evolve rather than the story material itself, which is paper thin and barely scratches the surface of its characters.
A fast paced and engaging Cold War thriller set in London.
A recently retired RAF airman is coerced into working for a clandestine communist cell operating in the heart of the city. After an explosion in the London Docks destroys the SS Asia Star, killing 9 and injuring 17...things take on a dark tone.
As the story progresses, the shadows start to converge.
New faces manifest as the investigation becomes a fine dissection.
Scotland Yard's Special Branch, in due time unveils an intricate network of accomplices, gangsters, intellectuals and high ranking members of society, all working in tandem to create social unrest in the country.
The saboteur's next target...London's power grid.
Directed and co-written by Roy Boulting and starring Liam Redmond, Andre Morrell, Joan Hickson, and Patric Doonan, this 1 hour 30 minute film with its multifaceted plot and intelligent story-telling, is a gem of a movie.
I especially liked this quote from Voltaire mentioned near the end.
"Perfection walks slowly...hand in hand with time."
Comments
Lee (2023)
This movie is about the female war correspondent Lee Miller: Kate Winslet plays Lee. This movie has been a passion project for Winslet, and it's easy to see why. Lee Miller was a fashion model who later shifted her career to photography. As the US became involved in the war she managed to become the war correspondent of Vogue. I wonder who's vogue's war correspondent in Ukraine these days? 😉
She covered several aspects of the war, including the holocaust. Obviously this affected her mentally, but she showed great professionalism. Several of her best known photos is reproduced in the movie. I think seeing the war thru the eyes of a female American journalism is a new and fascinating way to show WWII in a movie. I liked the movie and there are several fine acting performances, especially from Kate Winslet. This could be her best performance. I think she would make a fine M for James Bond, or possibly Moneypenny if we get a more mature and powerful version of the character. Or perhaps a villain?
I think this photo shows the intelligence and intensity Winslet can bring to the Bond franchise:
Maybe the most famous photo Lee Miller was responsible for (even though she didn't technically take the photo) is shown below. That's Lee washing off dirt after spending weeks in the field. She's in Hitler's bathtub in his apartment in Munich, taken on the day Hitler took his own life.
But Lee was rarely in the photos she sent home. She focused on other people being affected by war:
Doctor Sleep (2019 - Director's Cut)
A sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep reunites us with Danny, the little boy with psychic abilities, now all grown up and trying to come to terms with his alcoholism. Drifting his way up to New Hampshire and finding work in a hospice center, Dan uses his gifts to help terminally ill people pass on peacefully. After befriending a little girl named Abra who also has the Shine, they confront The True Knot, a group of ancient beings who torture, kill and feed on children who have the Shine.
Doctor Sleep is based in part on the Stephen King novel of the same name while also trying to be a follow-up to the Stanley Kubrick movie. This attempt at being a sequel to two very different stories is what ultimately undoes the movie for me.
The first two-thirds of the movie are fairly faithful to the book without really stepping on the events of the movie. The third act however decides to return us to the Overlook Hotel (destroyed in the original novel but not the movie) and instead of simply trying to tell it's own story or following the events of the book, the filmmakers decided to just ape the Kubrick film (with a dash of The Sixth Sense for good measure), going so far as to even give us a Jack Nicholson lookalike and repeating key scenes from the climax of the first movie. It made, for me at least, a very unsatisfying conclusion to a movie that was to that point fairly entertaining. It also wastes a really good performance by Ewan McGregor as an adult Danny.
I know it's impossible to cram a 500+ page book into a two or three hour movie but I'll never understand why a filmmaker would feel the need to jettison so much of a perfectly good narrative in favor of just repeating something that somebody else already did (and did better, frankly). The novel Doctor Sleep was at its core a story of redemption and finding purpose in life. The movie ultimately just wants to show us scary monsters and gruesome special effects, completely undermining the themes of its source.
I saw this a couple of days ago and really liked it - in fact I enjoyed it more than the book because it the links to The Shining movie. It also reflects the ending of The Shining book, which in itself, is a good twist.
The Jack Nicholson lookalike is Henry Thomas who played the kid in E.T. I thought all the lookalike characters were good and played their roles well. Also the reconstruction of the now dilapidated Overlook Hotel was excellent. Director Mike Flanagan does a decent job of this sequel.
Abra and Dan's final scene together in the hotel is almost word for word from The Shining. Truthfully I thought it was a strange inclusion that bordered on fan service for me. I'm glad you enjoyed it; my brother, who's never read any of the novels also enjoyed it a lot. I guess I'm just too hung up on the books but I've always been this way when it comes to these adaptations.
THE FILE OF THE GOLDEN GOOSE (1969)
A peculiar British thriller about counterfeit money laundering that seems caught between any number of stools. It wants to be a hardboiled detective thriller of the type recently peddled by Coogan’s Bluff or those Tony Rome movies. It wants to be a kitchen sink, lower class, fly-on-the-wall docu-drama. It wants to be a grim gangland exploitation, a descendant of Brighton Rock or a precursor of Get Carter. It wants to be a window onto Britain’s permissive swinging sixties society. It wants to be exciting. It wants to be profound. It fails on almost all measures, right from the off, even, with that dreadful title.
Yul Brynner is tough US treasury detective Jim Novak who travels to London to infiltrate a network of counterfeiters. Along with Edward Woodward’s equally hard northern cop, he seems to make progress. Eventually, via Walter Gotell’s warehouse smuggling setup and Charles Gray’s snazzy, hippy chic distribution centre, Brynner uncovers the millionaire antique dealer behind the operation. Cue chaos at a country house.
I had no idea what was happening most of the time. The scenes feel bolted together without any thought. Individually they sometimes work. Strung together, the film becomes a hopeless mess as tension ebbs and flows faster than a tide, action takes precedence over explanation, and the characters become increasingly absurd. For instance, Charles Gray’s effete top man sees him wearing Saville Row and visiting gay saunas by day, while hosting trippy drug fuelled sex-parties at night, decked out in kaftans and rosary beads. Weird. On the plus side, a rare one indeed, Brynner and Woodward’s antagonistic relationship is well portrayed.
It doesn’t do to dwell on this kind of offering. Surprisingly it was directed by Sam Wannamaker.
TRAP (2024), directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Josh Hartnett.
The premise: Josh Hartnett is a father bringing his daughter to see a concert by Lady Raven. His daughter got great grades so he's fulfilling his parental promise to bring her to the show, where they have floor seats. While there, Josh notices that the police presence is really heavy...guards everywhere, outside and inside of the arena. While buying a t-shirt for his daughter, he asks the salesman what's going on. It turns out, the police know that a local serial killer is inside of the arena, and they're all there to catch him.
That's the first 10 minutes of the film. I won't go any further with the plot just in case you aren't aware of it.
It's solid in a 'one and done' kind of way, nice and suspenseful with a lot of good twists in it. My major complaint is that I've been to many, many concerts in my life, and this film doesn't feel like it captures an authentic experience (it happens during the day, they leave their seats too often, stuff like that). Suspension of disbelief is critical. I'm happy to also say that I thought the ending worked, unlike a lot of recent Shyamalan films.
Josh Hartnett is really quite excellent in this. He's really grown as an actor in the past 8 years or so. If you didn't see PENNY DREADFUL, give it a go...that's where his career resurgence kinda began.
Recommended if you're wanting a quick thriller. My wife and I were entertained.
If M. Night Shyamalan wants to have a really shocking twist in his next movie - there's no twists at all!
The big twist happens right away and is essential to the overall premise. Everything else in the film builds upon that. It's a lot more straightforward than a lot of his other films.
To be clear, my recommendation for TRAP is if you're looking for something to fill time. Don't go out of your way on it...it's pretty stupid if you give it any scrutiny but it's fun in the moment. The first act is filled with some head scratching moments to set up the overall premise, but the film gets into a fun groove in the second act. The third act goes on for too long but it ends in a satisfying way.
ISLAND OF TERROR (1966)
A group of cancer scientists working in a remote laboratory on Petrie Island off the east coast of Ireland accidentally create a mutant life form, which survives on ingesting Calcium Phosphate present in the bones of living animals.
A grotesque discovery of a boneless corpse of a local farmer begins the story.
Local police constable John Harris alerts the island's physician Dr. Reginald Landers, who unable to determine the cause of death in this absurd case seeks the help of a well respected British pathologist Dr. Brian Stanley (Peter Cushing).
Dr. Landers and Dr. Stanley further seek the aid of Dr. David West, an expert on bone related diseases and this team of doctors along with Dr. West's girlfriend Toni Merrill, head back to the island to investigate the case.
What they find is a most horrific life form, that is rapidly multiplying on the island and is resistant to all forms of weapons.
A chance discovery enables them to find a weakness in the metabolism of this life form and they implement a plan to get rid of this menace.
Directed by legendary Hammer Films director Mr. Terence Fisher, this 89 minute movie is an entertaining sci-fi horror film.
To be enjoyed with friends and family on Halloween's Day.
is that actually a Hammer movie @Sonero ?
anyway, returning to my westerns...
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946)
The problem I have with John Ford’s lionised western My Darling Clementine isn’t the presentation of film itself, which as a noir tinged cowboy-town-frontier-cattle-rustling-revenge-romance-tragedy works well, but the story as told by scriptwriters Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller, which basically reinterprets history for its own ends.
According to this movie, the Earp Brothers drove cattle [they never did], the youngest brother – James – is murdered by rustlers [he was the eldest and lived until 1926], Warren Earp is never mentioned at all, Doc Holiday is a surgeon [he was a dentist], Old Man Clanton is present at the gunfight at the OK Corall [he died the year before], Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday both romance a beautiful winsome Bostoner named Clementine Carter [an amalgamation of several women in both men’s lives, as is Holliday’s Mexican mistress Chihuahua], the McLaury Brothers are never mentioned, Tombstone is a one street town without a church [it was almost fully developed by 1882], Billy Clanton dies before the gunfight [he didn’t, he died during it], Virgil Earp dies before the gunfight [he didn’t], Wyatt Earp was Marshall of Tombstone [he wasn’t, his brother Virgil was].
There may be more inconsistencies. When this film was released, the now famous ‘Gunfight at the OK Corall’ was barely known at all, usually only to those who had read Stuart Lake’s biographical novel Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall. This film’s apparent authentic reproduction of the action launched much interest in the wild west’s most famous six-gun shoot out. Having read much about it myself, and not just on the Wiki pages, it saddens me that this movie version violates almost every historical facet of the true story, its characters, the extended feuding which lead to the battle, the aftermath and the battle itself. I’d go so far as to say that in terms of an honest truth it is an abomination.
Putting that to one side, My Darling Clementine remains an exceptionally good movie, particularly in its shadowy, doom filled visuals. Victor Mature as Doc Holliday gives probably the best performance of his career as a dying man trying to forget his past in full knowledge he also has no future. He’s matched by Linda Darnell as the envious Mexican bar singer Chihuahua, all spitfire and fury. Walter Brennan impresses too as ‘Old Man’ Clanton, as casual a killer as you’ll find in a western: “When you draw a gun on a man,” he scowls at his disobedient brood, “you kill him.” Henry Fonda, Ward Bond and Tim Holt are, unfortunately, rather bland as the Earp Brothers Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil. Fonda in particular disappoints, his performance being nothing more than a series of stylised ‘moments’ – swinging back on his chair, a galloping dance, a cigar chomping poker game, a tension filled first confrontation with Doc Holliday, an awkward introduction to the beautiful Clementine [Cathy Downs].
Apparently, John Ford didn’t want to make the film, but did so to cancel his 20th Century Fox contract. Daryl F. Zanuck was not pleased with the results and had much of the movie reshot and reedited by an uncredited Lloyd Bacon, whose best movies were musicals.
Worth a look.
@chrisno1
No Sir, it is not.
'Island of Terror' is a Planet Films production.
Mr. Terence Fisher directed the following Hammer Films: (source Wikipedia)
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Kill Me Tomorrow (1957)
Dracula (1958)
The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)
The Mummy (1959)
The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
The Stranglers of Bombay (1959)
The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)
The Brides of Dracula (1960)
Sword of Sherwood Forest (1960)
The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
The Phantom of the Opera (1962)
The Gorgon (1964)
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
The Devil Rides Out (1968)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Island of Terror (1966) and Night of the Big Heat (1967) were made by Planet Films Productions and directed by Mr. Fisher.
Planet Film Productions was a short lived production and distribution company that made 5 films in the 60's.
Thanks @Sonero saves me a visit to Wiki World
@chrisno1
You are most welcome.
I enjoyed a new release, Anora, at the cinema last night. It's a film by Sean Baker, and it's about a Brooklyn sex worker (dancer, private dancer on request in a booth type thing) who one evening as the young son of a Russian oligarch (actual Russian actor Mark Eidelshstein) pitch up. They befriend each other outside work (by 'befriend' I mean agree to have sex for payment at his luxury apartment overlooking the river) and it's all a bit Pretty Woman - only thing is, in the Richard Gere film Julia Roberts only had to contend with his jealous work colleague, whereas with the titular - so to speak - sex worker, it's very much a case of Wait Til Your Parents Get Home.
It's best I don't reveal much more as the film's enjoyment is about how the plot develops. Lots of full on simulated sex, however. From a Bond centric pov, there are elements to draw upon here for future reference, if anyone can be bothered.
One snag is that while Mikey Madison (who was one of the hippy chicks in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) puts in a great performance, I'm not sure it's quite as written, as the character does seem quite naive to not appear to realise that her involvement with her new beau may generate issues with his family. I mean, the character is 23 - about the age the actress is in the film - so she might be, but I think she was meant to be a bit more kooky or daft. Thing is, many Western movies do not like to have the main protagonist as obviously unaware or thick given that the idea is the audience like to identify with them along the way.
One exception would be Risky Business, and this is the flip side to that film - one wonders, decades later, if Joel's family would have been charmed to have their only son get involved long term with a prostitute - or would that have been kept from them? All the same, Tom Cruise's Joel is shown to be a bit dim at times, but it's indulged, we still like him a fair bit, whereas while there is all manner of sexism in the movies, we don't see women depicted as thick in any way that is shown as admirable or part of the learning process. Or do we? Answers on a postcard.
There are other minor potholes but this is a fast, funny, frenetic and highly sexed slice of celluloid - it's a bit wish-fulfilment re the Russians, from a Western perspective, given the situation in Ukraine and the way Putin's enemies exit from high windows. It moves more into Breaking Bad territory in its humour.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
CARRY ON REGARDLESS (1961)
There are thirty-one Carry On movies. This is number five and [for me] it is one of the worst five of the series – along with England, Emmanuelle, Jack and Loving. The main problem is the absence of a storyline. Sid James runs an odd-job agency called Helping Hands and for ninety or so minutes we follow the misadventures of its employees, a series of increasingly tedious sketches of misunderstandings and pratfalls. It’s simply awful.
Liz Fraser looks pretty. Kenneth Conner has too much to do and over-eggs every single scene he’s in. Terence Longdon is wasted. Occasionally I might have chuckled – for instance, the scenes set in a hospital when Sid James accidentally impersonates a leading surgeon were mildly amusing, chiefly because they looked like cast offs from Carry On Nurse – but the whole exercise is a sorry excuse for entertainment. It might have been funny in 1961, but it is an appalling, almost unwatchable spectacle today.
Nr. 24 (2024)
Finally they made this film! Now we wait for "Barbel - the movie", "sir Miles the valiant", "emtiem" and other AJB-related movies. 😂
Joking aside, This is the movie about the Special Operations Operations agent Gunnar Sønsteby, who is nothing less than a legend in Norway. The British SOE ranked him as their best agent in Europe, and they also ranked Sønsteby's sabotage outfit "The Oslo Gang" as the best in Europe. He's the only resipient of the highest ranked medal in the country. It's worth mentioning that "Nr. 24" shares three scenes with the 2008 film "Max Manus - man of war" since Sønsteby was Manus' boss. But Max manus was a hothead while Sønsteby was very calm and calculating.
I noticed how the movie was geared towards a younger audience. Hand-held camera, modern sound track and young and a talk to modern school pupils is used as a framing device. The movie also brings up the topic of assassinations, something that hasn't really been brought up in public in connection to Gunnar Sønsteby before. he even had to order the assassination of a former classmate who was turning Gestapo informer. He was in many ways the Norwegian James Bond, but other than being a real historical person he also had a very different personality from 007. I think the scene (written from memory) where he gets debriefed by the MI5 when he first goes to England makes this clear as well as showcasing Sønsteby's personality:
MI5: You have survived two years in the resistance, something very few do. Why is that?
Sønsteby: I'm very thorough.
MI5: Is that enough? Some manage to stay alive in ..... other ways. (suggesting he played both sides)
Sønsteby: Every waking hour I plan ahead.
MI5: How do you handle the pressure? Do you drink?
Sønsteby: Not since the war started. I find it to be counterproductive.
MI5: Do you smoke?
Sønsteby: No.
MI5: How many of your contacts are women?
Sønsteby: Five
MI5: Have you slept with many of them?
Sønsteby: None of them.
MI5: Don't you like women?
Sønsteby: I do. But I haven't slept with any women since the war started.
MI5: So how then do you handle the pressure?
Sønsteby: I plan ....
I hope I can catch a subtitled version.
Meanwhile...
CHISUM (1970)
An ordinary western from John Wayne and director Andrew V. McLaglen. Like Ford’s My Darling Clementine which I watched earlier this week, Chisum is based only ostensibly around true events: the Lincoln County War of 1878. A host of real life characters such as John Chisum, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid are played by an amiable cast. Wayne spars brilliantly with Ben Johnson as two aging cowhands who’ve seen it all and try not to do it all again, but end up with no other choice. Sporadically interesting, generally not, the film is sumptuously photographed and could be summed up as ‘senseless bloodletting with a cheerful demeanour.’ It made money. Not much else to report.
DUNKIRK (1958)
I was quite unkind to Christopher Nolan’s remake when I reviewed it on here a couple of years back. While Leslie Norman’s original effort is no great shakes – sturdy would describe it well – he, at least, provides a workable narrative that switches easily between its three major protagonists. John Mills is the insecure Lance Corporal leading a half-dozen soldiers through Belgium and France only to find themselves shored up, as it were, on the Dunkirk beaches. Bernard Lee is a journalist suspicious of the British government’s motives for providing misleading military briefings. He’s pals with Richard Attenborough’s company director who is reaping the financial benefits of war contracts to create belt buckles and dress uniforms on the cheap. The vast differences between the three men’s outlook on war and responsibility, how they confront it and overcome their fears and concerns, developing leadership qualities and community responsibility even to the detriment of their colleagues and families, is what drives this version. It doesn’t mince dialogue. The British military is portrayed as inefficient, outdated and over-confident, fighting the war in isolated bubbles instead of as a complete mobile unit. It is interesting to note that when one admiral is pleading with his command to ensure enough destroyers are available to transport the fleeing soldiers, Mills’s corporal is pleading with his patrol to continue the fight against the odds – the two men express the same consistent opinion, yet they never meet, are hundreds of miles apart and at different ends of the leadership spectrum. Bernard Lee is the most affecting cast member, his doubtful, but patriotic writer coming to understand the futility of war. Attenborough’s homelife is seen as his Achilles Heel – an anxious wife and a squealing baby are his priorities; it is shame that forces him to join the civilian armada. Curiously, while the soldiering is intense and effective [Mills’s tribulations as his patrol attempt to reach Dunkirk appear now as a forerunner of Saving Private Ryan as incident follows incident, much of it under the eye of the enemy] and the homeland scenes have a grip of sincerity about how civilians reacted to the ‘phoney’ war, the film itself misses the boat, as it were, when portraying the great nationalistic story of Dunkirk: all those little maritime craft bobbing to the rescue of a hundred thousand soldiers. That barely features here. Still, a worthy war film that touches the head as well as the heart. Perhaps its failure is the same as Nolan’s 2017 version and is one that neither film can avoid: it is very hard to make an uplifting movie about a military defeat.
THE SPY IN BLACK (1939)
The very first Powell and Pressburger collaboration, The Spy in Black is a World War I espionage thriller starring Conrad Veidt as Captain Hardt, a German U-boat commander who is sent on a secret mission to the Orkney Islands.
The target...the British Fleet stationed in Scapa Flow.
The contact...Fräulein Tiel, a German agent who has taken over the identity of a local schoolteacher Anne Burnett.
The method...get critical information from a disgruntled Royal Navy officer who is willing to work for the other side.
All seems to go well for Captain Hardt until he realizes that he has been ensnared in a counter-espionage trap by British intelligence.
Filled with sharp plot twists and fine acting, this 78 minute movie is a well made spy fiction film.
😀 @Sonero
Yes, a very good prototype spy thriller, a little dated now, but worth a look. Alexander Korda produced, I believe, or at least his production company did. Pressburger only wrote the screenplay and Powell directed. These early movies were all 'spy' films and owe a debt to Hitchcock. The P & P Archers company where the two nominally shared writing and production duties wasn't formed until 1942 and features their best work.
@chrisno1
Indeed Sir...and what beautiful works of art these two gentlemen gifted to British cinema. Another masterpiece created by The Archers production company was 'The Battle of the River Plate'.
THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE (1956)
A very fine naval film, 'The Battle of the River Plate' details the skirmishes between the Royal Navy cruisers HMS Ajax, HMS Achilles and HMS Exeter with the Kriegsmarine heavy cruiser Admiral Graf Spee on December 13, 1939 in the South Atlantic.
HMS Exeter was severely damaged in the fight and headed for the Falkland Islands with HMS Ajax and HMS Achilles incurring moderate damage. Admiral Graf Spee also moderately damaged, headed for the neutral port of Montevideo, Uruguay for repairs while being followed by Ajax and Achilles.
On arrival at the port, the commander of the German warship Captain Hans Langsdorf was ordered to evacuate within 72 hours by the Uruguayan authorities. Fearing that the British Navy cruisers, lying in wait would decimate the ship, the captain decided to scuttle his boat and later committed suicide.
Featuring top-notch performances by John Gregson, Anthony Quayle, Bernard Lee and Peter Finch and running at 119 minutes, The Battle of the River Plate is an excellent war film and a treat for WWII buffs.
Well, that isn't their best, but I understand you liking it. Battle of the River Plate has a docu-drama feel to it @Sonero which is a subgenre of several genres of cinema. At a time when movies were getting bigger and more spectacular it suffers a little from being relatively small in production scale. Not so with these:
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP - a magnificent performance from Robert Livesey, a brilliant achievement of storytelling
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH - quite possibly one of the greatest war movies ever made IMHO, a brilliant achievement of storytelling
BLACK NARCISSUS - seriously intense, brazenly melodramatic, gothic in the tropics, a brilliant achievement of storytelling
THE RED SHOES - frantic and almost hysterical, but, by god, the dancing
GONE TO EARTH - sumptuous to look at, another intense romantic saga
THE TALES OF HOFFMAN - underrated dance movie, it just looks fabulous
Maybe I'll give River Plate another go on your recommendation. It's been a couple of decades.
HAWAII (1966)
Made at the tail end of the ‘epic’ craze in Hollywood, this good-looking treat is based on a doorstep blockbuster of a bestseller by James A. Michener. Writers Daniel Taradash and Dalton Trumbo dispense with almost all of the novel. The first two chapters, about the indigenous founding of the archipelago and its associated gods, are covered by a pre-titles narration; the film concentrates on the mid-1800s missionary zeal of the Americas and the slow Christian conversion of the Hawaiian peoples. The second half of Michener’s narrative is dispensed with completely [a sequel movie, 1970’s Tom Gries’s The Hawaiians, would deal with that]. Hawaii is directed by George Roy Hill who sets a slow pace for most of the tale, which the serious subject matter seems to require, encompassing as it does religious pride, conflicting emotions of the heart, culture-clash, economic greed, promiscuity, and ultimately death and self-sacrifice. There are moments of joy and humour which relieve the obvious pain. Yes, there is much obvious pain, both physical and spiritual. George Roy Hill was an unusual choice for this material, having mostly been involved in broad comedy-dramas. Generally, he is successful by not overplaying his hand and letting the story and dialogues speak for themselves.
Max Von Sydow is very good as Abner Hale, a stubborn and blinkered Calvinist preacher; he ought to be, he’d just spent over a year playing Jesus Christ for George Stevens in The Greatest Story Ever Told, a titanic epic that virtually slammed the nail in the coffin of enormous expensive projects such as this. Working for a lesser George, such as Mr Hill, must have been a comparative holiday for the Swede. Julie Andrews plays his compassionate and tragic wife and is more than believable as a missionary spouse who brings a touch of earthly passion, love, sympathy and substance to her husband’s fiery god-fearing demeanour. Andrews defies the belief she could only play singing nannies, although to be fair, she spends most of her time here as a mother, teacher and nurse, so she may as well be playing another nanny – and she darn-well sings! Richard Harris scowls as a wronged whaleship captain. Jocelyn Le Garde earned an Academy Award nomination for her excellent performance as the Hawaiian god-monarch, Alii Nui.
Performances aside, the script hacks about with its subject, and with history, but retains just enough elements of tension and pathos to keep us interested, for there is not much in the way of action. Sailors rioting, a moment of self-harm and a portentous hurricane is about your lot. However, the performances would be worth an admission fee and you can see the spend on the screen: beautiful photography of the Hawaiian islands from Russell Harlan, excellent costumes from Dorothy Jeakins, half-decent sets built on location with good, rustic interiors, plus an emotive music score from Elmer Bernstein. Dialogue and character has to keep us interested and that is unusual in epics; I suppose one should thank the writers, director and performers for making it so. There is enough compassion towards the plight of the native to remind us we are essentially in colonial territory, and enough devilishness from the colonists and obtuseness from the religious to explain the early settler failures and the conflicts which arise between natives and whites.
Overall, I enjoyed it.
@chrisno1 Thank you for the kind suggestions.
FOXHOLE IN CAIRO (1960)
Now here is a unique film based on actual events.
In 1942, Field Marshal Rommel's Afrika Corp had pushed the Commonwealth forces into retreat following the defeat at the battle of Gazala. Rommel now wants to send two spies into Cairo to provide intelligence on the Commonwealth forces next move.
By using the services of Laszlo Almasy, an experienced desert explorer, two German Spies Johannes Eppler and Hans Gerd Sandstede are dropped at the edge of Cairo, using captured British vehicles and forged identity papers.
Eppler under the name of Hussein Gaffar and Sandstede disguised as American Peter Monkaster meet up with a local belly dancer in Cairo, who will now be used to entice a British officer into leaking classified military documents.
At the same time Captain Robertson of British Intelligence is hot on the trail of the two spies and needs to unmask them before Rommel gets his hands on the British battle plans.
Based on the real life WW-II Operation SALAM / CONDOR, this 1 hour 17 minute movie is an entertaining film.
You will spot a young Sir Micheal Caine in it as well.
Ralph Fiennes's character in "The English patient" is named Laszlo Almasy and is very, very losely based on the real man.
Ken Follett's novel is a bit closer to the real story in his novel " The key to Rebecca".
A TWIST OF SAND (1968)
Based on the novel by Geoffrey Jenkins, this maritime thriller stars Richard Johnson as Commander Geoffrey Peace, a discredited British submarine officer now working as a smuggler in the Mediterranean.
After being busted for smuggling weapons off the coast of Malta, Peace is provided with an opportunity to recoup his losses.
An old time associate Harry Riker shows up with the wife of a diamond prospector.
The job...retrieve a stash of uncut diamonds hidden in a secret location along Namibia's Skeleton Coast.
The catch...steer the boat through one the most dangerous coast lines filled with razor sharp rocks.
Interspersed in the film are flashback sequences of a mission Peace undertook in WWII which links to the main story in a profound way.
Directed by Don Chaffey (Danger Man, The Prisoner) and featuring commendable performances by its actors (need I say the legendary Ms. Honor Blackman), this 1 hour 27 minute movie is a very well made adventure film.
Coming back to Mr. Geoffrey Jenkins...
I have heard he was originally tapped to write the first non-Fleming James Bond novel, an honor which eventually went to Sir Kingsley Amis.
Fantastic author nevertheless.
@Number24 Thank you for the information.
I will read Mr. Follett's novel on your kind suggestion.
BULLITT (1968)
An influential crime thriller starring Steve McQueen as reticent cop Frank Bullitt, who loses a state’s witness and falls foul of prosecutor Robert Vaughn. On the way to solving the mystery of Johnny Ross, he finds time to have a heart-to-heart with his girlfriend Jacqueline Bissett and kill a couple of heavies at the climax of a ten minute car chase through the streets of San Francisco. Crisply edited by Frank Keller and shot with a mostly documentary feel by British director Peter Yates, the film marks a high point in McQueen’s stop-start career. His performance as a cop sliding towards indifference and noncommunication has been remodelled to better or lesser effect by stars like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Bruce Willis in more violent and less cultured affairs. The screenplay is a bit slap dash, cut to the bone, one feels, in favour of a hip and trendy ‘look’. The visuals provide plenty of snazzy camera angles and these are aided by shifty performances. Both keep the eye peeled: the film is interesting to look at even if the content is dreary. Lalo Schifrin wrote a jazz inspired score that sounds as if it escaped from that Sinatra album with Carlos Jobim which was released the same year. Weirdly, a club trio combo of drum, guitar and flute impersonates Jethro Tull in a swanky restaurant. The film is enjoyable without the joy. The rough edges show and an undercurrent theme of sleazy corruption is neglected in favour of the ‘chase’ format. The ending takes place at San Francisco airport and is confused and confusing.
Bullitt frequently crops up on those ‘classic’ or ‘best’ lists. It is certainly worth a look although the movie is revered more for the impact it caused and how its innovative cinematic ‘visuals’ continue to evolve rather than the story material itself, which is paper thin and barely scratches the surface of its characters.
HIGH TREASON (1951)
A fast paced and engaging Cold War thriller set in London.
A recently retired RAF airman is coerced into working for a clandestine communist cell operating in the heart of the city. After an explosion in the London Docks destroys the SS Asia Star, killing 9 and injuring 17...things take on a dark tone.
As the story progresses, the shadows start to converge.
New faces manifest as the investigation becomes a fine dissection.
Scotland Yard's Special Branch, in due time unveils an intricate network of accomplices, gangsters, intellectuals and high ranking members of society, all working in tandem to create social unrest in the country.
The saboteur's next target...London's power grid.
Directed and co-written by Roy Boulting and starring Liam Redmond, Andre Morrell, Joan Hickson, and Patric Doonan, this 1 hour 30 minute film with its multifaceted plot and intelligent story-telling, is a gem of a movie.
I especially liked this quote from Voltaire mentioned near the end.
"Perfection walks slowly...hand in hand with time."
Exceptional film.