The Pink Panther is a long-time favourite of mine. I enjoy how the first film in the series balances the slapstick elements with a fairly glamorous and sophisticated high society caper. Things go off in a different in later films with mixed results. I also really like the follow up A Shot in the Dark, and agree with Gymkata that The Pink Panther Strikes Again works really well. The others are a bit forgettable in my opinion. I remember Return of the Pink Panther being decent but a little bit dull. I think I just enjoyed Christopher Plummer's take on Sir Charles in that film, but I've never gone back to rewatch it - mainly because the film is not included in the MGM Pink Panther boxset because it belongs to another studio and I've never got my hands on the standalone DVD.
I had no idea until reading up about this film that it was based on a French farce called L'Idiote written by Marcel Achard. While the plot is basically the same, Archard's bumbling idiot is an investigating magistrate [the French legal system is not the same as the UK one; many crimes are not investigated by the police at all but by magistrates trained in police and legal processes]. The film adaptation was running into trouble, so the producers brought in Blake Edwards, basically because he'd worked well with Sellers on The Pink Panther. It was Edwards who saw the similarities between Sevigne and Clouseau and switched the characters. It's also amazing to see the writer of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, up there as co-author. I had no idea he had a sense of humour at all.
Ponderings aside, what do we have? Well, A Shot in the Dark is more a out and out farce than The Pink Panther. It focusses almost exclusively on Sellers' imbecilic Inspector as he attempts to lead the investigation into the murder of the chauffeur to an influential aristocrat. Sellers gets able support from Elke Sommer as the beautiful accused maid Marie, George Sanders as the urbane millionaire Ballon and a host of minor characters played with efficiency and immensely straight faces by Burt Kwouk, Graham Stark, Tracy Reed and Martin Benson. Even better - possibly even better than Sellers - is Herbert Lom's Commissioner Dreyfuss - a man who gradually descends into murderous insanity such is the ineptitude of Clouseau's investigation.
There is more verbal jousting, a few neat repetitions - Clouseau is constantly arrested, Marie appears to keep killing people - and three extended scenes of high hilarity: Clouseau's summary of the case delivered to a mute, stupefied Hercule Laroy (Graham Stark), a disastrous game of billiards and a visit to the Sunshine Nature Camp. These demonstrate how Sellers best plays the character: insecure, yet well-meaning, out of his depth yet curiously confident, misunderstood and naïve. The close up of Sellers expression when Clouseau learns that Sunshine is a nudist colony was for me probably the funniest moment in the film. There are plenty of assorted hapless incidents throughout the movie and they don't detract from the smoothness of the piece, which is very well constructed.
There's a long silent introductory scene conducted at night, where we are introduced to all the suspects in the murder case as they tiptoe around a grand chateau, in and out of bedrooms and lover's arms. The plot is simple to follow, augmented by the shenanigans not reliant on them. It has an adroit resolution. It helps that the film is amusing all the way through, not in bursts, although some of the scenes lack a little sparkle witnessed through the modern eye.
Production values are fine. Henry Mancini again works wonders with the music score. The movie possibly overstays its welcome by twenty minutes, but you can forgive that. Peter Sellers had just completed probably his very best performance on screen - the triple roles in Doctor Strangelove - so this was probably something of a holiday for him. Apparently his relationship with the director who made him an international star was already under strain, but it doesn't show. Sellers was once again in prime form and if it can be argued other films in the Pink Panther series are better overall, I don't think the star ever offered a better example of his stock in trade than here.
There was a late 60s Pink Panther with Alan Arkin wasn't there? It wasn't done by Blake Edwards, no Peter Sellers, no Mancini and slinky credits either, if I recall. Very odd though one laugh out loud scene at a funeral. I watched it years ago when I rented DVDs out from LoveFilm, in retrospect a rather miserable, never-ending chore.
I should namecheck Deadpool 2 as the funniest thing I've seen in a year or more. Carry on watching thru the end credits too, it's brilliant stuff, perhaps in the vein of Family Guy type stuff, breaking the fourth wall and so on.
Lady Macbeth
Acclaimed sexy period drama starring the actress who was in Midsomer in her breakout role. It's dark stuff. Hammer would have done it decades ago, I guess. Story is not that original - a young woman married into a rich Scottish family to a dour man who does not seem romantically drawn to her at all but he gets her family's land. He goes off, she begins an affair with the home help.
The treatment is unusual, however, It's quite eerie. Also the servants tend to be actors of colour, which alters the dynamic. Hammer would have had it so the home help was a white, working class lad of course. Here, actually, the lead actress is not quite so posh, not so Lady Chatterley so that wouldn't have worked so well.
The story has nothing to do with Macbeth.
Worth a watch. Oddly, again, it's rarely seen on TV. And when it is shown, it's put on around 11.30pm. I do get the feeling someone out there is trying to run down the BBC, much as is happening to the NHS.
this weekend's vintage spyfilm obscurity at Cinema Potts:
The MiniKillers, 1969
starring Diana Rigg
For those who think OHMSS was not a good enough reason to quit the Avengers, here's another spy-saga Diana Rigg worked on in 1969.
Close-to-zero budget four part serial, adding up to 45 minutes total, released on super8!!
Its actually a silent film too, with a hip jazz-pop/psychedelic soundtrack.
And rather psychedelic in visuals and logic too. I don't believe the four parts add up to a plot, more like fleeting dreamlike glimpses of a plot.
Filmed somewhere on the Spanish coast (imdb says Costa Brava) (Chrisno1 do you recognise these locations?), our heroine is lounging round the hotel pools and beaches as a swinging 60s super-spy is supposed to do, and observes a gang of assassins who use robotic dolls as their murder weapon. Later chapters reveal they are drug dealers.
Each chapter features Rigg demonstrating her cool martial arts moves at least once.
If these were sold mail-order, were they maybe sold one by one and purchasers needed to collect them all? in which case if they only ever got one, they'd need one martial arts scene per chapter to give the purchaser his money's worth.
Second chapter features Rigg climbing onto the villains yacht in a skimpy bikini. Rigg never did the requisite bikini scene/underwear scene in OHMSS required of most other 60s BondGirls, so this will have to compensate. (so thatd be the chapter to get if you can only get one)
Why did an established actress of Rigg's status do a series of films like this after quitting such a popular show? artistic integrity as opposed to profits? wikipedia has no entry on The MiniKillers at all, but some blogs have theories. Most logical one I can find argues she had purchased property in Mallorca round this time, but had to prove she was working in Spain to own property, so this was her legal obligation fulfillment.
There is also the similar the Diadem. That's all I can find of that one, unfortunately.
"Filmed somewhere on the Spanish coast (imdb says Costa Brava) (Chrisno1 do you recognise these locations?), our heroine is lounging round the hotel pools and beaches as a swinging 60s super-spy is supposed to do"
caractacus, I'll take a peek and let you know.
My latest offering - of many - I'm watching the box all day today - is one I think Napoleon reviewed a couple of months ago. I caught it this morning on Sony Movies Action. I'd not seen it since the BBC did a Humphrey Bogart season way back in the 1980s.
SAHARA (1943)
Humphrey Bogart was in the middle of a string of hits (The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, Casablanca, The Big Shot, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Passage to Marseilles, etc.) when he made this thrilling war movie. As with almost all his most famous roles, Bogie was not the first choice of the producers, who really wanted Gary Cooper. What Bogie did so well through his whole career was take these rough cast offs and turn them into shiny gems of delight.
Taking real events as its launch pad, the film opens at the end of the Battle of Gazalan where a superior force of British troops and tanks, supported by a ‘combat green’ American armoured division were defeated by Rommel’s Africa Corps. We are thrown straight into the action with no preamble. Cut off from the main force, Bogart’s single tank crew decide to make the journey to Tobruk, unaware the city has fallen to the Germans. On the way they encounter a devastated British field hospital, a Sudanese soldier and his Italian prisoner and are attacked by a strafing enemy warplane. They pick up an assorted group of multi-national allies and a die-hard Nazi pilot. On reaching an abandoned well, they first dig for water, which is sparingly rationed, before capturing a scouting party of Germans who inform them a battalion is on its way, also seeking water. There commences a tense stand off in the desert. The beleaguered allies are picked off one by one until, their own numbers depleted and consumed with thirst under the baking sun, the Germans surrender. The survivors learn that the British held firm at El Alemain, allowing them a clear passage to the Allied lines.
This is an extraordinarily good, gritty war film. Filmed by Zoltan Korda at the height of the conflict, with California’s desert substituting effectively for the Sahara and using an actual US Army M8 tank, the film has a vivid, visceral feel to it. The artillery and weapons were all borrowed from the military, so they are genuine and look it. The battle scenes are staged using wide angles and long shots, allowing us to envisage what the soldiers see. The effects guys work wonders making sand shift and faces glow with sweat. The photography – deservedly Oscar nominated – is sublime. At one point a hallucinating soldier imagines the drifts to be waves of a river and the sloping, icelike look is stupendous, letting us visually inside the mind of a man turning mad. The uniforms, vehicles, tents and buildings are turned as bleak and forbidding as the stark whites of the sand dunes. There’s an indoor scene where the Italian and German prisoners are arguing over the merits of totalitarianism, and cameraman Rudolph Maté shrouds the players more darkness than necessary. The two actors give it their all; on his knees J. Carrol Naish seems to be praying into the light, while Kurt Kreuger’s German is looming among the darkness. The sudden killing fades abruptly to black. The devil has won out.
Korda, who helmed The Thief of Bagdad and The Four Feathers, knows a thing or two about deserts. What he also does in Sahara is capture brilliantly the core values of the story’s characters. He draws superb performances from Bogart, as Sgt Joe Gunn, Richard Nugent as the British Medical Corps Captain Halliday and Naish, who as Giuseppe, was also nominated for an Academy Award. He shares probably the most haunting moment of the film, when Gunn decides to abandon him to the desert, claiming he cannot carry a prisoner on the tank. Naish pleads for his life; the American remains unmoved. As the tank trundles away, Korda holds the shot for much longer than you’d expect. The audience really does believe Gunn will drive away and leave the man to his death. Guiseppe – or Naish, if you like – believes it too; his vain, tearful, scrabbling in the dust for pictures of his wife and family is tremendously powerful. A single sly glance from Gunn’s driver changes the sergeant’s mind at the very moment the audience senses doom for the Italian. Brilliant storytelling.
It’s worth noting too Bogart’s contribution to the scene, and several others where he allows his supporting players to take centre stage, even if the role is tiny. He elicits Gunn’s emotional state of mind simply by turning away from Giuseppe, avoiding eye contact. His replies are straight forward, practical, monotone. This is a man making a tough decision for all men. He’s careful with his movements and mannerisms, undramatic, and allows the dialogue do the talking. He doesn’t need close-ups or long speeches. As a stage actor, Bogart knew how props and mannerisms can be beneficial, yet also distracting. When not required, he never uses them. It’s interesting to note the number of fine performances he helps extract from the casts around him – not just here but in many other films – Casablanca, Key Largo, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Knock on Any Door, In a Lonely Place, Beat the Devil, even as early as The Petrified Forest. It is perhaps this aspect of his acting make-up, his willingness to share and offer the stage, to make his performance enhance others and therefore the entire project, which made the AFI rank him the greatest movie star of all time. That and the fact his films never lost money.
There is an element of flag-waving, a few speeches delivered to remind the contemporary audience of the very real threat faced by the world in 1943. Bogart delivers them with his customary aplomb. There is also time for quiet moments: Rex Ingram’s Sudanese warrior sharing a cigarette with a Texan, Bogart discussing poetry with the Captain and the difference between ‘missing’ and ‘dead’ with Patrick O’Moore’s Ossie Bates. Neither aspect over awes the other, both help guide the tension and the story as characters overcome obstacles and help thwart the advancing Axis pack. There is little time for sentiment. These are men among men and they act it. Sahara is a tough actioner, a superior war film from an era when these kind of movies were churned out a dozen a month, and most were reprehensible chalk-to-cheese interpretations of the struggle. While still subscribing to the necessary bias, Sahara does much more, by concentrating on a man’s not a soldier’s basic freedoms: freedom, life, shelter, food and water.
This is probably one of the best movies ever made by the British Film Industry and deserves to be right-up-there on all those ‘top-ten-of…’ lists we read.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have fashioned a fantasy love story, set during the war and packed full of marvellous performances from the likes of David Niven, Kim Hunter and especially Marius Goring as the facetious Conductor 71. It is excellently written and realised with the most gorgeous settings and designs and has superb imaginations, particularly by reversing the visual switch of The Wizard of Oz and having a technicolour earth and a monochrome heaven.
The initial transfer from colour to black and white is performed with the minimum of fuss, a fade through the clouds; but the second cut, performing the reverse, is achieved brilliantly as Conductor 71 sighs: “One is so starved of colour up there” and a carnation rose gradually tints from black to deep crimson. It’s worth noting the strip film used was not monochrome but colour. It was only in the developing lab that the scenes were tinted, lending the filmmaker’s heaven a pearly, misty environment. The stop-time sequences also are magnificently-executed; no fancy photographic effects here, mannequins are used instead. The fateful stairway to heaven – constructed by London Underground engineers – really does feel as if it stretches up into the sky.
The movie constantly surprises you. It starts with a dramatic ‘end’ as Niven’s pilot Peter Carter survives a crash landing, is washed up on a beach and considers himself to be in heaven. It is only when he fortuitously meets the American radio operator who spoke to him as he gave his last testament, that realises he has survived. They kiss. Allen Gray’s music soars. And yet this ‘happy ending’ fills the opening ten minutes.
Heaven has been disturbed. The receipts do not match the invoices. A dead body is missing. Something must be done. Conductor 71 is dispatched to earth to correct his mistake.
The depiction of heaven as an enormous, imposing, cubist tyrannical environment, which – we learn – encompasses the whole of the stars is excellent. No men in long flowing robes with beards, no wispy clouds, no God. It feels as real and probable as the intricate, small, confined landscapes of Earth. Roger Livesey plays the sympathetic psychiatrist assigned to help Carter recover and, when the heaven-bound trial begins, he is provided the opportunity to save his patient, the enigmatic stairway providing the scene of a fitting climax. If you’ve never seen it, despite the formulaic romanticism, I’d defy anyone not to shed a tear. If you don’t, you must have the hardest of hearts.
Director and writer Michael Powell and producer and writer Emeric Pressburger were at the height of their powers and were making films which could comfortably compete with American titles on the international circuit. Coupled with David Lean’s Noel Coward and Charles Dickens adaptations this cache of greats from the 1940s to the early 50s really put the U.K. on the film making map. A Matter of Life and Death, both in ambition and execution outshines them all. I’d go so far as to say it’s probably the best film ever to come out of these shores, but that’s a debate for another time.
A beautiful, thoughtful, impressive and impressively acted achievement. Wonderful.
I'd have preferred to see the Carry On team do A Matter of Life and Death, starting with Jim Dale in the David Niven role, and Anita Baker as his intended. Take it from there, with Kenneth Williams as Raymond Massey of course.
There are some nice touches in the Powell and Pressburger film - but they're hacks really.
I have a lot of free time on my hands at the moment...
THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI (1954)
A prestige Paramount production, The Bridges at Toko-Ri had a lot thrown at it: Oscar favourites William Holden and Grace Kelly, Loyal Griggs photographing, Mark Robson directing, a screenplay based on one of James A. Michener’s shorter novels, airborne battle scenes, good music, good sets, costumes, award winning special effects, they even throw in a brief skinny dipping scene.
So why does it all feel a little bit flat?
Oddly, I think it has something to do with moments like that bathing scene. This is a very serious film, set around the Korean War and the navy pilots who carried out raids on Communist strongholds. We witness their fears, their foibles and their strength and comradeship. The movie ends in tragedy. What sits-so-ill is the unnecessary emphasis on comedy, as epitomised by Mickey Rooney’s brawling Irish helicopter pilot, who seems to have been dropped into the film from a completely different era. Similarly, the ridiculous bath scene – a family experienced in oriental behaviours should know about bathing rituals – feels out-of-step. I wasn’t sure who the script was poking fun at, the Japanese or Holden-Kelly et al. These are the kind of scenes John Ford manipulated into all his movies, a sort of folksy, brawny, traditional play designed to remind the audience everything is always going to be all right as long as you are American – except here, where Holden’s Harry Brubaker is prophetically told: “Men have had to fight the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place.”
The movie does the war stuff really well. We have a palpable sense of a pilot’s dread. The chain of command is seen as both competent and insufferably inflexible. The action leading up to the fateful bombing mission is mostly hearsay, but the mission itself and the failed rescue is based on Michener’s own reports from the Korean War and the bombing of the Majon and Samdong rail bridges. Despite the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, director Mark Robson fails to deliver much aerial excitement; the real tension takes place when the pilots are shot down and attempt to scramble to safety.
A thorough, deserving, film which needed a stronger hand on the tiller to guide it out of choppy waters.
starring George Segal as a rather dullwitted easily duped spy investigating a NeoNazi movement in Berlin. Though he is an American, he is working for Alec Guiness, who in turn works for George Sanders.
Big baddy is Max von Sydow, he's one of ours.
Leading Lady is Senta Berger, a onetime UNCLE girl.
This is one of the shorter list of straight serious spy films from the height of spymania. No shoe-phones or backwards guns in this one.
Film is all shot on location, depicting Berlin as an ugly grey utilitarian city, all cheap crumbling concrete surfaces without a blade of grass in sight. I've been to Berlin and there are actually big parks and some nice architecture, but those were all cropped out of the frame for this one.
Early shot in Hitler's Olympic Stadium is visually the highlight of the film, with Guinness' character introducing himself with some dark philosophising about how the next generation of Nazis will know not to dress the part and be all the more dangerous to society for their seeming normalcy.
(by coincidence I had just been reading some Hannah Arendt quotes earlier the same day, and this speech and its context depressed the hell outta me. Damned humans never going to learn.)
Rest of the film not nearly so noteworthy except for an interrogation scene led by Sydow. Segal stumbles randomly round Berlin for a couple of scenes before getting captured by the bad guys, and we cant really tell if he's just playing dumb or he actually is as dumb as he acts. On screen evidence points to the latter.
Soundtrack by John Barry, definitely one of ours. Title song by Matt Monro, but it only appears halfway through the movie played over a staticky radio Segal is walking past for a moment, just the way Matt Monro sung theme songs are meant to be heard in spy movies of this era.
Screenplay by Harold Pinter, who I thought wrote mostly absurdist stageplays. Well this one is kind of absurdist, with the hero's inept behaviour and ultimately futile ending. Good dialog though, especially as spoken by Sydow or Guiness.
Another FRwL commonality is a password routine ("why dont you try one of my cigarettes") that develops into a leitmotif with variations.
Directed in somnambulent style by Michael Anderson, who I'd never heard of. Turns out he also directed The Dam Busters, Around the World in 80 Days and Logan's Run, and I have seen all of these.
(You know Logan's Run actually has an exciting spythriller type plot underneath the scifi trappings?)
The feature directing debut of Oscar-winning actress Regina King, this is a fictionalized account of a February 1964 meeting among Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a Miami hotel room immediately following Clay's first defeat of Sonny Liston, in which he won the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. All four men were indeed at the fight, but there is no evidence that this meeting took place afterword.
As I said to my wife when it was over, this was the New York theater experience I have been missing since the pandemic started. Indeed, it was originally a stage play, and it is filmed similarly -- mostly, four people in a single room.
The Civil Rights movement was coming to a head, and all four men were dealing with it in their own difficult ways. Malcolm was in the throes of a break with the Nation of Islam and especially what he viewed as Elijah Muhammad's moral hypocrisy. Clay, being spiritually mentored by Malcolm, was about to renounce his name and become a Muslim as Muhammad Ali. Brown (to this day, considered by many as the best American football player of all time) was weary of feeling like a glorified slave in the NFL and had begun to feel the allure of Hollywood. And Cooke, despite his success as a singer and songwriter, was struggling to find a way to protest injustice without alienating the white audience on which much of his success was derived.
Basically, these guys get together and talk about the issues in front of them. The primary tension is between Malcolm -- a straight-laced, militant black man with little use for any white culture -- and Cooke, who enjoys worldly pleasures and prefers working within a white system rather than tearing it down. But everyone has a role to play here, and all the characters are well-drawn. It is no spoiler to note that both Cooke and Malcolm would be dead within a year of this night, which adds even more emotional weight to our view of the proceedings.
The actors are superb. Kingsley Ben-Adir (a Londoner whom I had never heard of before) is absolutely brilliant as Malcolm -- this is the type of performance that wins Oscars. As Sam Cooke, Leslie Odom Jr. (perhaps best known as Aaron Burr in the original cast of "Hamilton") shows acting chops that match his silky singing voice. Eli Goree and Aldis Hodge have a little less to do as Clay and Brown, respectively, but they are both very good. Beau Bridges has a cameo, delivering what was to me the most devastating line in the film -- one that I definitely did not see coming.
I cannot overstate how much I liked this film. It's all talk for sure, so stay away if that's not your cuppa. But if you like well-written dialogue on topics that really matter, I highly recommend this.
Anthony Mann made big, brutal, beautiful westerns where the boundaries of life and love among the natural world are not clearly defined. His heroes invariably wrestle attempting to cross from animal instinct to civilisation or vice versa.
In The Last Frontier Victor Mature, an actor not renowned for his thespian skills, gives one of his best performances as Jed Cooper, a fur trapper taken on as an army scout in return for food and shelter. He’s aided by his ruffian pals Gus (James Whitmore) and Mungo (Pat Hogan). Unfortunately, Jed takes a shine to haughty Corrina Marston, the absent Colonel’s wife. When Marston returns, following an attack by the Sioux on another fort, Jed begins to doubt his superior’s competence in dealing with the marauding tribes. Mature is helped immeasurably in his portrayal by the character’s illiteracy and crude, wild playfulness which enables him to be at turns immensely provocative or horribly boorish or surprisingly tender. He’s both a monstrous egoist and the quiet conscience of the film.
Although the Sioux natives do become the usual cannon fodder, this movie proves more interesting than most as they are not the villains. That is Robert Preston’s mentally unstable colonel, a man intent on redeeming his soured reputation at whatever cost, including the massacre of innocent women and children. He is an unstable tyrant, over the soldiers, the Indians and his wife. Can Jed stop his madness before it threatens slaughter on an enormous scale?
This is a western almost totally devoid of romance; even Anne Bancroft’s Corrina seems to be more in lust than love. She visits Jed for an assignation of intense amour even though he physically lashes out at her. Despite his overtures, Jed seems more interested in wearing a blue uniform than indulging in any kind of personal commitment. He’s more in love with the idea of being a cavalryman and the prestige the job provides. He eventually gets all his rewards, but the road is littered with death and conflict.
Anthony Mann directs with his usual emphasis on macho posturing, but ties it to some superb location scenery (actually Mexico, not Oregon) including a series of gorgeous landscapes, which emphasise the immensity of the frontier, the sky god-like watching over everything, the figures small and lonesome in the foreground. William C. Mellor was one of the great exponents of cinemascope features and he once again creates vistas so stunning the actors are virtually lost against the wilderness. Philip Yordan, a screenwriter who fronted for several blacklisted writers in the fifties, may or may not have contributed to the script, but he gets the credit and Mature’s character does inhabit the hallmarks of his stock in trade: loneliness, resourcefulness and dignity.
Violent, thoughtful, passionate and wholly watchable.
I'll add it to my watchlist. Anthony Mann has become one of my favourite directors in the last few years. I've recently watched a number of his movies, and his string of westerns with Jimmy Stewart are now among my favourite films in the western genre, especially Winchester 73 and Bend of the River.
I always thought George Segal played the character as slightly dull-witted just to blindside the opposition. It's a well cast movie, and while say Robert Vaughn would perhaps have played a more traditionally handsome, smooth agent, Segal's 'everyman' looking agent is better suited to this role.
Have you read the novel by Adam Hall? It's full of tradecraft and zips along at a good pace - it's not Fleming by a long shot, but still very enjoyable.
This is going back a bit - 1937, to be precise. My Dad talked about it so I thought I'd find it for him on eBay, only just got around to watching it this week.
In what was his last film in his 70s, George Arliss (who had also played Disraeli, in another film never ever shown on telly these days) plays the titular character, a benevolent parson in the Sussex coastal town of Rye, which is thought to be harbouring smugglers.
The film opens in 1780 with a pirate scene before fast-forwarding to 1800, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
We also see the young Graham Moffat, whom comedy fans will recognise as the chubby cheeky chappie from the Will Hay films, and a young Margaret Lockwood, who would go on to be in The Lady Vanishes and period drama The Wicked Lady.
It's quite good fun, with mystery surrounding the smugglers' head 'the Scarecrow' who directs the operations (though it's not kept under wraps for long) and of course it's a bunch of sailors landing on shore to root out the smugglers.
Arliss is almost certain to be the type that young comic Kenneth Williams would impersonate and even the music has a Carry On vibe to it. Much is set at night time, not helped by my dark creaky old print. Pseudo supernatural aspects remind us why both Dr No and LALD were so enjoyable. In one scene, Lockwood sings the mice's 'We Will Fix It' song from Bagpuss, while also wearing the exact same outfit as Madeline the doll from that kids' TV classic.
This was an enjoyable romp, moving at a cracking pace, and a part of British history now erased from our public life. I'm not particularly suggesting anyone should root it out, but unless my Dad had mentioned it you'd never know it existed. It seems as if there's some Orwellian plan not merely to erase these films from the schedules but also from the collective memory.
The film would make a good double bill with Lloyds of London - another one never shown these days.
I always thought George Segal played the character as slightly dull-witted just to blindside the opposition. It's a well cast movie, and while say Robert Vaughn would perhaps have played a more traditionally handsome, smooth agent, Segal's 'everyman' looking agent is better suited to this role.
Have you read the novel by Adam Hall? It's full of tradecraft and zips along at a good pace - it's not Fleming by a long shot, but still very enjoyable.
thanks C & D. I didnt know about the book. If you recommend it I'll look for it once I start haunting used book stores again, I need some new spy novels for my To-Read pile. Did Hall write other spy novels?
if no-one minds me posting more followup thoughts on this film,
Having pondered it a couple days, your interpretation is probably correct. I say probably because the film does leave it ambiguous, which in itself clever storytelling, more interesting than telegraphing a character's inner thoughts. Segal's character seems to make some naive choices in the middle of the film, especially in regards to the leading lady, and there is of course that twist ending. So his strange choices could either be because he really is as dumb as he acts, or because he is patiently playing a long game (and he does say early on his plan is to draw the neoNazis to him).
There's also the bit where he suddenly speaks perfectly good German, after half an hour of making the locals speak English with him, revealing he does indeed know more than he's letting on.
But when the twist ending comes, those "naive" choices make complete sense if they were all part of his plan. Its probably a film worth rewatching just to see if it adds up differently knowing the ending.
as for that twist ending, that's clever too:
He succeeded in rounding up a rather obvious gang of neoNazi torturers, they look exactly how we expect bad guys to look. He failed to notice the real threat, that the neoNazis had infiltrated the elementary school system, and that's really scary. At the very beginning Guinness warned him the next generation of Nazis will be all the more dangerous because they look like everybody else!
I just noticed you suggested Robert Vaughn!
I'm presently halfway though season 2 of the Man from UNCLE, and think Napoleon Solo definitely would have been distracted by the sexy lady and when he caught the Nazis at the end would have done it by accident despite all his mistakes, while Ilya shakes his head in disgust!
Its kind of fun it to imagine how one vintage 60s spy character would have handled another character's adventure!
thanks C & D. I didnt know about the book. If you recommend it I'll look for it once I start haunting used book stores again, I need some new spy novels for my To-Read pile. Did Hall write other spy novels?
Adam Hall is one of the many pen names of the prolific author Elleston Trevor. The Flight of the Phoenix is one of his most famous novels.
As for the Quiller series, I think there are 19 novels and they are a very highly regarded series. I've read 3 of them so far, and would heartily recommend the series to anybody looking for an excellent spy novel. The Quiller Memorandum is the first (it was originally title The Berlin Memorandum) and it is a very good read, although the style changes slightly in the later books. This style is quite different to other spy books I've read - being a sort of stream-of-consciousness approach and the best that I have read so far is The Warsaw Document. I think the quality of writing is easily the equal of any other spy fiction that I've read, Fleming included. By all means give the Quiller books a try.
Thanks, Golrush - I knew they were a series but had no idea there were 19 novels. I'll have to look out for more. There was a British TV series called Quiller in the mid 70s - I wonder if the episodes were based on the other novels?
Spybrary podcast had a 2 episode Quiller special a year or two back where the TV series was discussed but I don't recall any of the details of what books they may have been based on.
I'll add it to my watchlist. Anthony Mann has become one of my favourite directors in the last few years. I've recently watched a number of his movies, and his string of westerns with Jimmy Stewart are now among my favourite films in the western genre, especially Winchester 73 and Bend of the River.
Don’t forget the best Mann/Stewart collaboration, The Man From Laramie.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I've got free AppleTV for a while, so I watched the Tom Hanks-scripted-and-starred WWII adventure, Greyhound. It's technically impressive, and that's the problem--this is a tech film that focuses on ships and subs and pretty well forgets character and plot. It's a bit like looking over the shoulder of someone playing a video game. It turns out the film is based on C. S. Forester's novel The Good Shepherd, and the original title may explain another problem--Hanks's character is often seen praying before he eats and before he goes to bed, but religion plays no real role in the film. I get the feeling that in Forester's novel the captain sees shipping supplies to war-weary Britain as a religious duty. . .but in our cynical age even perpetual nice-guy Hanks can't carry that theme.
Have you read the novel ( The Quiller Memorandum ) by Adam Hall? It's full of tradecraft and zips along at a good pace - it's not Fleming by a long shot, but still very enjoyable.
thanks C & D. I didnt know about the book . If you recommend it I'll look for it once I start haunting used book stores again, I need some new spy novels for my To-Read pile. Did Hall write other spy novels?
Adam Hall is one of the many pen names of the prolific author Elleston Trevor. The Flight of the Phoenix is one of his most famous novels.
As for the Quiller series, I think there are 19 novels and they are a very highly regarded series. I've read 3 of them so far, and would heartily recommend the series to anybody looking for an excellent spy novel. The Quiller Memorandum is the first (it was originally title The Berlin Memorandum) and it is a very good read, although the style changes slightly in the later books. This style is quite different to other spy books I've read - being a sort of stream-of-consciousness approach and the best that I have read so far is The Warsaw Document. I think the quality of writing is easily the equal of any other spy fiction that I've read, Fleming included. By all means give the Quiller books a try.
definitely shall look for his books then. I wonder if book stores will file him under Hall or Trevor?
looking at wikipedia, I see:
1) Quiller is described as a very capable character, not dull-witted as I assumed while watching the film
2) the books are first person narrative, so no ambiguity about Quiller's thought processes, whereas the Segal's performance was very opaque
and
3) all volumes involve interrogation scenes, which Quiller is good at resisting. That part was central to the film and very well played, so that aspect was faithfully done.
I Care A Lot, on Netflix. Anyone who thinks Rosamund Pike isn't one of the best performers working today needs to check this out. She plays a truly EVIL character--a woman who, working with a shady doctor and compliant judge, gets herself named "guardian" of elderly people whom she promptly throws into a nursing home, cuts off their communication with family, and proceeds to loot their assets. The movie's plot kicks in when she locks up a seeming docile old lady (Dianne Wiest) who's connected with a Russian mobster (Peter Dinklage, again showing he should be a Bond villain). Pike goes into Shakespearean levels of wickedness, so you both want her to fail--and root for her. Give Pike an Oscar already. . .
That sounds like a busman's holiday to me, Ms Pike's character might get a job working for Surrey County Council, and throw in the shady doctors who work for care homes on a retainer worth anything up to £20K a year so are in they're pocket. Why it's almost as if care homes know they have a backlog of elderly to work through and can get blacklisted if they don't comply. (Not sure if this is necessary now after Covid-19 was deliberately seeded into care homes by NHS Chief Executives - Ker-ching!)
Anyway! Stan & Ollie is one I recall Hardyboy reviewing when it came out, this week it was on telly.
If you were going to do a film about Laurel and Hardy attempting a comeback tour in the UK in the 50s, you could hardly do better than this and the two actors are very good, they go beyond impersonation. it's good to see Coogan pull it off so well, esp as he missed out on The Life and Death of Peter Sellers to Geoffrey Rush, and Frost v Nixon where he could have had a bash at the chat show host were it not Michael Sheen's already, and of course chat show host = Partridge.
For all that, and I took my Dad to see Stan & Ollie when it was in the cinemas, it is one of those few films that actually make me feel ill when I watch it. It's depressing, okay, I get that, though it plays upon the pathos a bit too heavily for my liking, so we are rooting for our comic heroes. Perhaps it's the way it's meant to depict dreary 50s Britain while still trying to project itself as a lush looking cinematic film so cinemagoers don't feel cheated at their night out. Consequently, it doesn't quite convince for me. To be fair, it doesn't insist on spoon-feeding us back knowledge all the way along like other movies might. But the dialogue, while not actually bad, doesn't quite convince and the arrival of their wives, while it sort of provides an alternative to stuff, again I just find it all stressful rather than dramatic, it does make me ill. Can't argue with the moving finale dance however, though the tune will give you earworm all next day, though British fans will carry the memory of Tommy Cooper or Eric Morecambe's final performances, so again it's all a bit stress to worry about an obese comic having a heart attack on stage.
It may be a sign of the hit Covid had given to programming that this movie was shown on BBC 1 on Friday evening in lieu of any dramas or so on, it was like being back in the 1970s.
"This is where we leave you Mr Bond."
Roger Moore 1927-2017
PPK 7.65mmSaratoga Springs NY USAPosts: 1,256MI6 Agent
@Gymkata: Yes, ILM was really busying going into 1989, since they were working on both Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Ghostbusters II both of which were aiming to bank big at the summer Box Office. Ghostbusters II really kept them busy since Columbia Pictures ended up cutting down the SFX work schedule from what ILM was originally promised, as a result they had to work around the clock just before the films opening in June. On the recent Blu Ray release of Ghostbusters II, star/writer Dan Aykroyd even commented how the slime shell covering the art museum at the climax looked really rough since ILM ran short on time and did not get to finish it as it was intended.
Randolph Scott made several westerns with the director Budd Boetticher. This is my first, but I think I'll try to watch more of them. The plot is basically a tense hostage situation on a wagon station out in the wilderness. Three bandits hold hostage Scott's character who's an independent ranch er who accidentally hitches a ride with a wagon anewlywed couple. We spend time with the six people and I like how the tension works to reveal the people involved. Early in the movie I thought this was a pretty lighthearted western, but I was really wrong. I actually think the early scenes could have been cut. The movie should have started with the main character on the road carrying his rifle and saddle. It's still a very good western with a tense plot, unusually good characters and the hard and stark landscape working well with the people and story.
three films screened at Cinema Potts last weekend:
Escape from New York
I was inspired to watch it because of a gif posted by @Gymkata. I'd actually never seen it before, turns out it's exactly the sort of thing I like.
Awesome low budget creative special effects, representing a postapocalyptic vision of New York City, starring Kurt Russel, Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau and her two jiggly friends, Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine and Donald Pleasance! (the last named being one of ours)
I always say New York was cooler when it still looked like Taxi Driver, well this is New York looking even cooler still, like I always imagined Hunger City from Diamond Dogs! though turns out it was all filmed in St Louis, which recently had a major fire destroy several blocks...
however, Russell does look like a middle school kid dressed up for Battle of the Bands, even with the eyepatch and the Eastwood inspired voice.
Jason and the Argonauts
Ray Harryhausen's masterpiece, with Honor Blackman (one of ours) as Hera, Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor) as a blind prophet, and Nigel Green (from the Ipcress File, so he's kinda sorta one of ours) as Hercules, amongst others I didn't recognise.
The mythology is actually pretty faithfully adapted, moreso than most adaptations from written fiction never mind historical dramas. Honor Blackman makes for a nice Goddess interfering with man's destiny.
Hound of the Baskervilles
the version that introduced the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce team. Great scenery on those moors. They did one sequel still set in Victorian times, then updated the Holmes concept to then-present WWII setting (why? so audiences could relate? to save money? for WWII propaganda purposes?). I may try to watch the whole series over the next couple of weeks.
Caractacus, love Jason and the Argonauts. How did that not win an Oscar for special effects? Good score from Bernard Herrmann too.
Also love the original Hound of the Baskervilles. Rathbone was excellent as Holmes and shared great chemistry with Nigel Bruce. As a kid I was terrified by the dogs ! The BBC ran a Friday tea-time series of Sherlock Holmes movies (in about 1979 I think) and I watched the whole lot. The best were this one, the follow up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, & later ones The Scarlet Claw and The Pearl of Death. There was one set on a train as well, but the title escapes me. I much prefer Rathbone's version to Cushing's Hammer cut. Tom Baker made a good Holmes in a BBC adaptation of Baskervilles.
@caractacus potts I highly recommend checking out the whole series of Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films. I found pretty much all of them to be enjoyable. As you say, only the first two are set in the original time period of Doyle's stories. I think at that time the norm was to set Sherlock Holmes adaptations in the contemporary period. I seem to recall reading that Hound of the Baskervilles was the first Sherlock Holmes film done as a period piece which is quite strane considering how many times Holmes had already been put on screen before this.
The shift from period pieces to contemporary 1940s-set films co-incided with the series being taken over by Universal, who I assume had a different vision of what they wanted to do with Holmes on screen. I'm really glad they stuck with Rathbone and Bruce in the lead roles. Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are probably two of the best in the series, however, I personally have more of a soft spot for the WWII set ones, such as The Voice of Terror and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (which is a nice little spy thriller despite it's very boring sounding title). My other personal picks are The Scarlet Claw (possibly my favourite of the series) and The Spider Woman. But as I said, all of the films are enjoyable, and most of the Universal films are just over an hour in length so they are short and snappy little adventures. And of course Rathbone is superb in his portrayal of Holmes...definitive one might say. Highly enjoyable stuff!
Comments
A SHOT IN THE DARK (1964)
I had no idea until reading up about this film that it was based on a French farce called L'Idiote written by Marcel Achard. While the plot is basically the same, Archard's bumbling idiot is an investigating magistrate [the French legal system is not the same as the UK one; many crimes are not investigated by the police at all but by magistrates trained in police and legal processes]. The film adaptation was running into trouble, so the producers brought in Blake Edwards, basically because he'd worked well with Sellers on The Pink Panther. It was Edwards who saw the similarities between Sevigne and Clouseau and switched the characters. It's also amazing to see the writer of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, up there as co-author. I had no idea he had a sense of humour at all.
Ponderings aside, what do we have? Well, A Shot in the Dark is more a out and out farce than The Pink Panther. It focusses almost exclusively on Sellers' imbecilic Inspector as he attempts to lead the investigation into the murder of the chauffeur to an influential aristocrat. Sellers gets able support from Elke Sommer as the beautiful accused maid Marie, George Sanders as the urbane millionaire Ballon and a host of minor characters played with efficiency and immensely straight faces by Burt Kwouk, Graham Stark, Tracy Reed and Martin Benson. Even better - possibly even better than Sellers - is Herbert Lom's Commissioner Dreyfuss - a man who gradually descends into murderous insanity such is the ineptitude of Clouseau's investigation.
There is more verbal jousting, a few neat repetitions - Clouseau is constantly arrested, Marie appears to keep killing people - and three extended scenes of high hilarity: Clouseau's summary of the case delivered to a mute, stupefied Hercule Laroy (Graham Stark), a disastrous game of billiards and a visit to the Sunshine Nature Camp. These demonstrate how Sellers best plays the character: insecure, yet well-meaning, out of his depth yet curiously confident, misunderstood and naïve. The close up of Sellers expression when Clouseau learns that Sunshine is a nudist colony was for me probably the funniest moment in the film. There are plenty of assorted hapless incidents throughout the movie and they don't detract from the smoothness of the piece, which is very well constructed.
There's a long silent introductory scene conducted at night, where we are introduced to all the suspects in the murder case as they tiptoe around a grand chateau, in and out of bedrooms and lover's arms. The plot is simple to follow, augmented by the shenanigans not reliant on them. It has an adroit resolution. It helps that the film is amusing all the way through, not in bursts, although some of the scenes lack a little sparkle witnessed through the modern eye.
Production values are fine. Henry Mancini again works wonders with the music score. The movie possibly overstays its welcome by twenty minutes, but you can forgive that. Peter Sellers had just completed probably his very best performance on screen - the triple roles in Doctor Strangelove - so this was probably something of a holiday for him. Apparently his relationship with the director who made him an international star was already under strain, but it doesn't show. Sellers was once again in prime form and if it can be argued other films in the Pink Panther series are better overall, I don't think the star ever offered a better example of his stock in trade than here.
Very good, funny and well worth a look.
I should namecheck Deadpool 2 as the funniest thing I've seen in a year or more. Carry on watching thru the end credits too, it's brilliant stuff, perhaps in the vein of Family Guy type stuff, breaking the fourth wall and so on.
Lady Macbeth
Acclaimed sexy period drama starring the actress who was in Midsomer in her breakout role. It's dark stuff. Hammer would have done it decades ago, I guess. Story is not that original - a young woman married into a rich Scottish family to a dour man who does not seem romantically drawn to her at all but he gets her family's land. He goes off, she begins an affair with the home help.
The treatment is unusual, however, It's quite eerie. Also the servants tend to be actors of colour, which alters the dynamic. Hammer would have had it so the home help was a white, working class lad of course. Here, actually, the lead actress is not quite so posh, not so Lady Chatterley so that wouldn't have worked so well.
The story has nothing to do with Macbeth.
Worth a watch. Oddly, again, it's rarely seen on TV. And when it is shown, it's put on around 11.30pm. I do get the feeling someone out there is trying to run down the BBC, much as is happening to the NHS.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The MiniKillers, 1969
starring Diana Rigg
For those who think OHMSS was not a good enough reason to quit the Avengers, here's another spy-saga Diana Rigg worked on in 1969.
Close-to-zero budget four part serial, adding up to 45 minutes total, released on super8!!
Its actually a silent film too, with a hip jazz-pop/psychedelic soundtrack.
And rather psychedelic in visuals and logic too. I don't believe the four parts add up to a plot, more like fleeting dreamlike glimpses of a plot.
Filmed somewhere on the Spanish coast (imdb says Costa Brava) (Chrisno1 do you recognise these locations?), our heroine is lounging round the hotel pools and beaches as a swinging 60s super-spy is supposed to do, and observes a gang of assassins who use robotic dolls as their murder weapon. Later chapters reveal they are drug dealers.
Each chapter features Rigg demonstrating her cool martial arts moves at least once.
If these were sold mail-order, were they maybe sold one by one and purchasers needed to collect them all? in which case if they only ever got one, they'd need one martial arts scene per chapter to give the purchaser his money's worth.
Second chapter features Rigg climbing onto the villains yacht in a skimpy bikini. Rigg never did the requisite bikini scene/underwear scene in OHMSS required of most other 60s BondGirls, so this will have to compensate. (so thatd be the chapter to get if you can only get one)
Why did an established actress of Rigg's status do a series of films like this after quitting such a popular show? artistic integrity as opposed to profits? wikipedia has no entry on The MiniKillers at all, but some blogs have theories. Most logical one I can find argues she had purchased property in Mallorca round this time, but had to prove she was working in Spain to own property, so this was her legal obligation fulfillment.
There is also the similar the Diadem. That's all I can find of that one, unfortunately.
caractacus, I'll take a peek and let you know.
My latest offering - of many - I'm watching the box all day today - is one I think Napoleon reviewed a couple of months ago. I caught it this morning on Sony Movies Action. I'd not seen it since the BBC did a Humphrey Bogart season way back in the 1980s.
SAHARA (1943)
Humphrey Bogart was in the middle of a string of hits (The Maltese Falcon, High Sierra, Casablanca, The Big Shot, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Passage to Marseilles, etc.) when he made this thrilling war movie. As with almost all his most famous roles, Bogie was not the first choice of the producers, who really wanted Gary Cooper. What Bogie did so well through his whole career was take these rough cast offs and turn them into shiny gems of delight.
Taking real events as its launch pad, the film opens at the end of the Battle of Gazalan where a superior force of British troops and tanks, supported by a ‘combat green’ American armoured division were defeated by Rommel’s Africa Corps. We are thrown straight into the action with no preamble. Cut off from the main force, Bogart’s single tank crew decide to make the journey to Tobruk, unaware the city has fallen to the Germans. On the way they encounter a devastated British field hospital, a Sudanese soldier and his Italian prisoner and are attacked by a strafing enemy warplane. They pick up an assorted group of multi-national allies and a die-hard Nazi pilot. On reaching an abandoned well, they first dig for water, which is sparingly rationed, before capturing a scouting party of Germans who inform them a battalion is on its way, also seeking water. There commences a tense stand off in the desert. The beleaguered allies are picked off one by one until, their own numbers depleted and consumed with thirst under the baking sun, the Germans surrender. The survivors learn that the British held firm at El Alemain, allowing them a clear passage to the Allied lines.
This is an extraordinarily good, gritty war film. Filmed by Zoltan Korda at the height of the conflict, with California’s desert substituting effectively for the Sahara and using an actual US Army M8 tank, the film has a vivid, visceral feel to it. The artillery and weapons were all borrowed from the military, so they are genuine and look it. The battle scenes are staged using wide angles and long shots, allowing us to envisage what the soldiers see. The effects guys work wonders making sand shift and faces glow with sweat. The photography – deservedly Oscar nominated – is sublime. At one point a hallucinating soldier imagines the drifts to be waves of a river and the sloping, icelike look is stupendous, letting us visually inside the mind of a man turning mad. The uniforms, vehicles, tents and buildings are turned as bleak and forbidding as the stark whites of the sand dunes. There’s an indoor scene where the Italian and German prisoners are arguing over the merits of totalitarianism, and cameraman Rudolph Maté shrouds the players more darkness than necessary. The two actors give it their all; on his knees J. Carrol Naish seems to be praying into the light, while Kurt Kreuger’s German is looming among the darkness. The sudden killing fades abruptly to black. The devil has won out.
Korda, who helmed The Thief of Bagdad and The Four Feathers, knows a thing or two about deserts. What he also does in Sahara is capture brilliantly the core values of the story’s characters. He draws superb performances from Bogart, as Sgt Joe Gunn, Richard Nugent as the British Medical Corps Captain Halliday and Naish, who as Giuseppe, was also nominated for an Academy Award. He shares probably the most haunting moment of the film, when Gunn decides to abandon him to the desert, claiming he cannot carry a prisoner on the tank. Naish pleads for his life; the American remains unmoved. As the tank trundles away, Korda holds the shot for much longer than you’d expect. The audience really does believe Gunn will drive away and leave the man to his death. Guiseppe – or Naish, if you like – believes it too; his vain, tearful, scrabbling in the dust for pictures of his wife and family is tremendously powerful. A single sly glance from Gunn’s driver changes the sergeant’s mind at the very moment the audience senses doom for the Italian. Brilliant storytelling.
It’s worth noting too Bogart’s contribution to the scene, and several others where he allows his supporting players to take centre stage, even if the role is tiny. He elicits Gunn’s emotional state of mind simply by turning away from Giuseppe, avoiding eye contact. His replies are straight forward, practical, monotone. This is a man making a tough decision for all men. He’s careful with his movements and mannerisms, undramatic, and allows the dialogue do the talking. He doesn’t need close-ups or long speeches. As a stage actor, Bogart knew how props and mannerisms can be beneficial, yet also distracting. When not required, he never uses them. It’s interesting to note the number of fine performances he helps extract from the casts around him – not just here but in many other films – Casablanca, Key Largo, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Knock on Any Door, In a Lonely Place, Beat the Devil, even as early as The Petrified Forest. It is perhaps this aspect of his acting make-up, his willingness to share and offer the stage, to make his performance enhance others and therefore the entire project, which made the AFI rank him the greatest movie star of all time. That and the fact his films never lost money.
There is an element of flag-waving, a few speeches delivered to remind the contemporary audience of the very real threat faced by the world in 1943. Bogart delivers them with his customary aplomb. There is also time for quiet moments: Rex Ingram’s Sudanese warrior sharing a cigarette with a Texan, Bogart discussing poetry with the Captain and the difference between ‘missing’ and ‘dead’ with Patrick O’Moore’s Ossie Bates. Neither aspect over awes the other, both help guide the tension and the story as characters overcome obstacles and help thwart the advancing Axis pack. There is little time for sentiment. These are men among men and they act it. Sahara is a tough actioner, a superior war film from an era when these kind of movies were churned out a dozen a month, and most were reprehensible chalk-to-cheese interpretations of the struggle. While still subscribing to the necessary bias, Sahara does much more, by concentrating on a man’s not a soldier’s basic freedoms: freedom, life, shelter, food and water.
Brilliant. Loved it.
A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH (1944)
This is probably one of the best movies ever made by the British Film Industry and deserves to be right-up-there on all those ‘top-ten-of…’ lists we read.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have fashioned a fantasy love story, set during the war and packed full of marvellous performances from the likes of David Niven, Kim Hunter and especially Marius Goring as the facetious Conductor 71. It is excellently written and realised with the most gorgeous settings and designs and has superb imaginations, particularly by reversing the visual switch of The Wizard of Oz and having a technicolour earth and a monochrome heaven.
The initial transfer from colour to black and white is performed with the minimum of fuss, a fade through the clouds; but the second cut, performing the reverse, is achieved brilliantly as Conductor 71 sighs: “One is so starved of colour up there” and a carnation rose gradually tints from black to deep crimson. It’s worth noting the strip film used was not monochrome but colour. It was only in the developing lab that the scenes were tinted, lending the filmmaker’s heaven a pearly, misty environment. The stop-time sequences also are magnificently-executed; no fancy photographic effects here, mannequins are used instead. The fateful stairway to heaven – constructed by London Underground engineers – really does feel as if it stretches up into the sky.
The movie constantly surprises you. It starts with a dramatic ‘end’ as Niven’s pilot Peter Carter survives a crash landing, is washed up on a beach and considers himself to be in heaven. It is only when he fortuitously meets the American radio operator who spoke to him as he gave his last testament, that realises he has survived. They kiss. Allen Gray’s music soars. And yet this ‘happy ending’ fills the opening ten minutes.
Heaven has been disturbed. The receipts do not match the invoices. A dead body is missing. Something must be done. Conductor 71 is dispatched to earth to correct his mistake.
The depiction of heaven as an enormous, imposing, cubist tyrannical environment, which – we learn – encompasses the whole of the stars is excellent. No men in long flowing robes with beards, no wispy clouds, no God. It feels as real and probable as the intricate, small, confined landscapes of Earth. Roger Livesey plays the sympathetic psychiatrist assigned to help Carter recover and, when the heaven-bound trial begins, he is provided the opportunity to save his patient, the enigmatic stairway providing the scene of a fitting climax. If you’ve never seen it, despite the formulaic romanticism, I’d defy anyone not to shed a tear. If you don’t, you must have the hardest of hearts.
Director and writer Michael Powell and producer and writer Emeric Pressburger were at the height of their powers and were making films which could comfortably compete with American titles on the international circuit. Coupled with David Lean’s Noel Coward and Charles Dickens adaptations this cache of greats from the 1940s to the early 50s really put the U.K. on the film making map. A Matter of Life and Death, both in ambition and execution outshines them all. I’d go so far as to say it’s probably the best film ever to come out of these shores, but that’s a debate for another time.
A beautiful, thoughtful, impressive and impressively acted achievement. Wonderful.
There are some nice touches in the Powell and Pressburger film - but they're hacks really.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI (1954)
A prestige Paramount production, The Bridges at Toko-Ri had a lot thrown at it: Oscar favourites William Holden and Grace Kelly, Loyal Griggs photographing, Mark Robson directing, a screenplay based on one of James A. Michener’s shorter novels, airborne battle scenes, good music, good sets, costumes, award winning special effects, they even throw in a brief skinny dipping scene.
So why does it all feel a little bit flat?
Oddly, I think it has something to do with moments like that bathing scene. This is a very serious film, set around the Korean War and the navy pilots who carried out raids on Communist strongholds. We witness their fears, their foibles and their strength and comradeship. The movie ends in tragedy. What sits-so-ill is the unnecessary emphasis on comedy, as epitomised by Mickey Rooney’s brawling Irish helicopter pilot, who seems to have been dropped into the film from a completely different era. Similarly, the ridiculous bath scene – a family experienced in oriental behaviours should know about bathing rituals – feels out-of-step. I wasn’t sure who the script was poking fun at, the Japanese or Holden-Kelly et al. These are the kind of scenes John Ford manipulated into all his movies, a sort of folksy, brawny, traditional play designed to remind the audience everything is always going to be all right as long as you are American – except here, where Holden’s Harry Brubaker is prophetically told: “Men have had to fight the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place.”
The movie does the war stuff really well. We have a palpable sense of a pilot’s dread. The chain of command is seen as both competent and insufferably inflexible. The action leading up to the fateful bombing mission is mostly hearsay, but the mission itself and the failed rescue is based on Michener’s own reports from the Korean War and the bombing of the Majon and Samdong rail bridges. Despite the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, director Mark Robson fails to deliver much aerial excitement; the real tension takes place when the pilots are shot down and attempt to scramble to safety.
A thorough, deserving, film which needed a stronger hand on the tiller to guide it out of choppy waters.
starring George Segal as a rather dullwitted easily duped spy investigating a NeoNazi movement in Berlin. Though he is an American, he is working for Alec Guiness, who in turn works for George Sanders.
Big baddy is Max von Sydow, he's one of ours.
Leading Lady is Senta Berger, a onetime UNCLE girl.
This is one of the shorter list of straight serious spy films from the height of spymania. No shoe-phones or backwards guns in this one.
Film is all shot on location, depicting Berlin as an ugly grey utilitarian city, all cheap crumbling concrete surfaces without a blade of grass in sight. I've been to Berlin and there are actually big parks and some nice architecture, but those were all cropped out of the frame for this one.
Early shot in Hitler's Olympic Stadium is visually the highlight of the film, with Guinness' character introducing himself with some dark philosophising about how the next generation of Nazis will know not to dress the part and be all the more dangerous to society for their seeming normalcy.
(by coincidence I had just been reading some Hannah Arendt quotes earlier the same day, and this speech and its context depressed the hell outta me. Damned humans never going to learn.)
Rest of the film not nearly so noteworthy except for an interrogation scene led by Sydow. Segal stumbles randomly round Berlin for a couple of scenes before getting captured by the bad guys, and we cant really tell if he's just playing dumb or he actually is as dumb as he acts. On screen evidence points to the latter.
Soundtrack by John Barry, definitely one of ours. Title song by Matt Monro, but it only appears halfway through the movie played over a staticky radio Segal is walking past for a moment, just the way Matt Monro sung theme songs are meant to be heard in spy movies of this era.
Screenplay by Harold Pinter, who I thought wrote mostly absurdist stageplays. Well this one is kind of absurdist, with the hero's inept behaviour and ultimately futile ending. Good dialog though, especially as spoken by Sydow or Guiness.
Another FRwL commonality is a password routine ("why dont you try one of my cigarettes") that develops into a leitmotif with variations.
Directed in somnambulent style by Michael Anderson, who I'd never heard of. Turns out he also directed The Dam Busters, Around the World in 80 Days and Logan's Run, and I have seen all of these.
(You know Logan's Run actually has an exciting spythriller type plot underneath the scifi trappings?)
The feature directing debut of Oscar-winning actress Regina King, this is a fictionalized account of a February 1964 meeting among Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke in a Miami hotel room immediately following Clay's first defeat of Sonny Liston, in which he won the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. All four men were indeed at the fight, but there is no evidence that this meeting took place afterword.
As I said to my wife when it was over, this was the New York theater experience I have been missing since the pandemic started. Indeed, it was originally a stage play, and it is filmed similarly -- mostly, four people in a single room.
The Civil Rights movement was coming to a head, and all four men were dealing with it in their own difficult ways. Malcolm was in the throes of a break with the Nation of Islam and especially what he viewed as Elijah Muhammad's moral hypocrisy. Clay, being spiritually mentored by Malcolm, was about to renounce his name and become a Muslim as Muhammad Ali. Brown (to this day, considered by many as the best American football player of all time) was weary of feeling like a glorified slave in the NFL and had begun to feel the allure of Hollywood. And Cooke, despite his success as a singer and songwriter, was struggling to find a way to protest injustice without alienating the white audience on which much of his success was derived.
Basically, these guys get together and talk about the issues in front of them. The primary tension is between Malcolm -- a straight-laced, militant black man with little use for any white culture -- and Cooke, who enjoys worldly pleasures and prefers working within a white system rather than tearing it down. But everyone has a role to play here, and all the characters are well-drawn. It is no spoiler to note that both Cooke and Malcolm would be dead within a year of this night, which adds even more emotional weight to our view of the proceedings.
The actors are superb. Kingsley Ben-Adir (a Londoner whom I had never heard of before) is absolutely brilliant as Malcolm -- this is the type of performance that wins Oscars. As Sam Cooke, Leslie Odom Jr. (perhaps best known as Aaron Burr in the original cast of "Hamilton") shows acting chops that match his silky singing voice. Eli Goree and Aldis Hodge have a little less to do as Clay and Brown, respectively, but they are both very good. Beau Bridges has a cameo, delivering what was to me the most devastating line in the film -- one that I definitely did not see coming.
I cannot overstate how much I liked this film. It's all talk for sure, so stay away if that's not your cuppa. But if you like well-written dialogue on topics that really matter, I highly recommend this.
Anthony Mann made big, brutal, beautiful westerns where the boundaries of life and love among the natural world are not clearly defined. His heroes invariably wrestle attempting to cross from animal instinct to civilisation or vice versa.
In The Last Frontier Victor Mature, an actor not renowned for his thespian skills, gives one of his best performances as Jed Cooper, a fur trapper taken on as an army scout in return for food and shelter. He’s aided by his ruffian pals Gus (James Whitmore) and Mungo (Pat Hogan). Unfortunately, Jed takes a shine to haughty Corrina Marston, the absent Colonel’s wife. When Marston returns, following an attack by the Sioux on another fort, Jed begins to doubt his superior’s competence in dealing with the marauding tribes. Mature is helped immeasurably in his portrayal by the character’s illiteracy and crude, wild playfulness which enables him to be at turns immensely provocative or horribly boorish or surprisingly tender. He’s both a monstrous egoist and the quiet conscience of the film.
Although the Sioux natives do become the usual cannon fodder, this movie proves more interesting than most as they are not the villains. That is Robert Preston’s mentally unstable colonel, a man intent on redeeming his soured reputation at whatever cost, including the massacre of innocent women and children. He is an unstable tyrant, over the soldiers, the Indians and his wife. Can Jed stop his madness before it threatens slaughter on an enormous scale?
This is a western almost totally devoid of romance; even Anne Bancroft’s Corrina seems to be more in lust than love. She visits Jed for an assignation of intense amour even though he physically lashes out at her. Despite his overtures, Jed seems more interested in wearing a blue uniform than indulging in any kind of personal commitment. He’s more in love with the idea of being a cavalryman and the prestige the job provides. He eventually gets all his rewards, but the road is littered with death and conflict.
Anthony Mann directs with his usual emphasis on macho posturing, but ties it to some superb location scenery (actually Mexico, not Oregon) including a series of gorgeous landscapes, which emphasise the immensity of the frontier, the sky god-like watching over everything, the figures small and lonesome in the foreground. William C. Mellor was one of the great exponents of cinemascope features and he once again creates vistas so stunning the actors are virtually lost against the wilderness. Philip Yordan, a screenwriter who fronted for several blacklisted writers in the fifties, may or may not have contributed to the script, but he gets the credit and Mature’s character does inhabit the hallmarks of his stock in trade: loneliness, resourcefulness and dignity.
Violent, thoughtful, passionate and wholly watchable.
I'll add it to my watchlist. Anthony Mann has become one of my favourite directors in the last few years. I've recently watched a number of his movies, and his string of westerns with Jimmy Stewart are now among my favourite films in the western genre, especially Winchester 73 and Bend of the River.
I enjoyed your review, CP. -{
I always thought George Segal played the character as slightly dull-witted just to blindside the opposition. It's a well cast movie, and while say Robert Vaughn would perhaps have played a more traditionally handsome, smooth agent, Segal's 'everyman' looking agent is better suited to this role.
Have you read the novel by Adam Hall? It's full of tradecraft and zips along at a good pace - it's not Fleming by a long shot, but still very enjoyable.
This is going back a bit - 1937, to be precise. My Dad talked about it so I thought I'd find it for him on eBay, only just got around to watching it this week.
In what was his last film in his 70s, George Arliss (who had also played Disraeli, in another film never ever shown on telly these days) plays the titular character, a benevolent parson in the Sussex coastal town of Rye, which is thought to be harbouring smugglers.
The film opens in 1780 with a pirate scene before fast-forwarding to 1800, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
We also see the young Graham Moffat, whom comedy fans will recognise as the chubby cheeky chappie from the Will Hay films, and a young Margaret Lockwood, who would go on to be in The Lady Vanishes and period drama The Wicked Lady.
It's quite good fun, with mystery surrounding the smugglers' head 'the Scarecrow' who directs the operations (though it's not kept under wraps for long) and of course it's a bunch of sailors landing on shore to root out the smugglers.
Arliss is almost certain to be the type that young comic Kenneth Williams would impersonate and even the music has a Carry On vibe to it. Much is set at night time, not helped by my dark creaky old print. Pseudo supernatural aspects remind us why both Dr No and LALD were so enjoyable. In one scene, Lockwood sings the mice's 'We Will Fix It' song from Bagpuss, while also wearing the exact same outfit as Madeline the doll from that kids' TV classic.
This was an enjoyable romp, moving at a cracking pace, and a part of British history now erased from our public life. I'm not particularly suggesting anyone should root it out, but unless my Dad had mentioned it you'd never know it existed. It seems as if there's some Orwellian plan not merely to erase these films from the schedules but also from the collective memory.
The film would make a good double bill with Lloyds of London - another one never shown these days.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
if no-one minds me posting more followup thoughts on this film,
Having pondered it a couple days, your interpretation is probably correct. I say probably because the film does leave it ambiguous, which in itself clever storytelling, more interesting than telegraphing a character's inner thoughts. Segal's character seems to make some naive choices in the middle of the film, especially in regards to the leading lady, and there is of course that twist ending. So his strange choices could either be because he really is as dumb as he acts, or because he is patiently playing a long game (and he does say early on his plan is to draw the neoNazis to him).
There's also the bit where he suddenly speaks perfectly good German, after half an hour of making the locals speak English with him, revealing he does indeed know more than he's letting on.
But when the twist ending comes, those "naive" choices make complete sense if they were all part of his plan. Its probably a film worth rewatching just to see if it adds up differently knowing the ending.
as for that twist ending, that's clever too:
I just noticed you suggested Robert Vaughn!
I'm presently halfway though season 2 of the Man from UNCLE, and think Napoleon Solo definitely would have been distracted by the sexy lady and when he caught the Nazis at the end would have done it by accident despite all his mistakes, while Ilya shakes his head in disgust!
Its kind of fun it to imagine how one vintage 60s spy character would have handled another character's adventure!
Adam Hall is one of the many pen names of the prolific author Elleston Trevor. The Flight of the Phoenix is one of his most famous novels.
As for the Quiller series, I think there are 19 novels and they are a very highly regarded series. I've read 3 of them so far, and would heartily recommend the series to anybody looking for an excellent spy novel. The Quiller Memorandum is the first (it was originally title The Berlin Memorandum) and it is a very good read, although the style changes slightly in the later books. This style is quite different to other spy books I've read - being a sort of stream-of-consciousness approach and the best that I have read so far is The Warsaw Document. I think the quality of writing is easily the equal of any other spy fiction that I've read, Fleming included. By all means give the Quiller books a try.
Don’t forget the best Mann/Stewart collaboration, The Man From Laramie.
Also a very good film, but it's my third-favourite.
looking at wikipedia, I see:
1) Quiller is described as a very capable character, not dull-witted as I assumed while watching the film
2) the books are first person narrative, so no ambiguity about Quiller's thought processes, whereas the Segal's performance was very opaque
and
3) all volumes involve interrogation scenes, which Quiller is good at resisting. That part was central to the film and very well played, so that aspect was faithfully done.
Hall I suspect, although I think they're out of print so will most likely only be found in the used bookshops.
Anyway! Stan & Ollie is one I recall Hardyboy reviewing when it came out, this week it was on telly.
If you were going to do a film about Laurel and Hardy attempting a comeback tour in the UK in the 50s, you could hardly do better than this and the two actors are very good, they go beyond impersonation. it's good to see Coogan pull it off so well, esp as he missed out on The Life and Death of Peter Sellers to Geoffrey Rush, and Frost v Nixon where he could have had a bash at the chat show host were it not Michael Sheen's already, and of course chat show host = Partridge.
For all that, and I took my Dad to see Stan & Ollie when it was in the cinemas, it is one of those few films that actually make me feel ill when I watch it. It's depressing, okay, I get that, though it plays upon the pathos a bit too heavily for my liking, so we are rooting for our comic heroes. Perhaps it's the way it's meant to depict dreary 50s Britain while still trying to project itself as a lush looking cinematic film so cinemagoers don't feel cheated at their night out. Consequently, it doesn't quite convince for me. To be fair, it doesn't insist on spoon-feeding us back knowledge all the way along like other movies might. But the dialogue, while not actually bad, doesn't quite convince and the arrival of their wives, while it sort of provides an alternative to stuff, again I just find it all stressful rather than dramatic, it does make me ill. Can't argue with the moving finale dance however, though the tune will give you earworm all next day, though British fans will carry the memory of Tommy Cooper or Eric Morecambe's final performances, so again it's all a bit stress to worry about an obese comic having a heart attack on stage.
It may be a sign of the hit Covid had given to programming that this movie was shown on BBC 1 on Friday evening in lieu of any dramas or so on, it was like being back in the 1970s.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@Gymkata: Yes, ILM was really busying going into 1989, since they were working on both Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Ghostbusters II both of which were aiming to bank big at the summer Box Office. Ghostbusters II really kept them busy since Columbia Pictures ended up cutting down the SFX work schedule from what ILM was originally promised, as a result they had to work around the clock just before the films opening in June. On the recent Blu Ray release of Ghostbusters II, star/writer Dan Aykroyd even commented how the slime shell covering the art museum at the climax looked really rough since ILM ran short on time and did not get to finish it as it was intended.
The tall T (1957)
Randolph Scott made several westerns with the director Budd Boetticher. This is my first, but I think I'll try to watch more of them. The plot is basically a tense hostage situation on a wagon station out in the wilderness. Three bandits hold hostage Scott's character who's an independent ranch er who accidentally hitches a ride with a wagon anewlywed couple. We spend time with the six people and I like how the tension works to reveal the people involved. Early in the movie I thought this was a pretty lighthearted western, but I was really wrong. I actually think the early scenes could have been cut. The movie should have started with the main character on the road carrying his rifle and saddle. It's still a very good western with a tense plot, unusually good characters and the hard and stark landscape working well with the people and story.
three films screened at Cinema Potts last weekend:
Escape from New York
I was inspired to watch it because of a gif posted by @Gymkata. I'd actually never seen it before, turns out it's exactly the sort of thing I like.
Awesome low budget creative special effects, representing a postapocalyptic vision of New York City, starring Kurt Russel, Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau and her two jiggly friends, Harry Dean Stanton, Ernest Borgnine and Donald Pleasance! (the last named being one of ours)
I always say New York was cooler when it still looked like Taxi Driver, well this is New York looking even cooler still, like I always imagined Hunger City from Diamond Dogs! though turns out it was all filmed in St Louis, which recently had a major fire destroy several blocks...
however, Russell does look like a middle school kid dressed up for Battle of the Bands, even with the eyepatch and the Eastwood inspired voice.
Jason and the Argonauts
Ray Harryhausen's masterpiece, with Honor Blackman (one of ours) as Hera, Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor) as a blind prophet, and Nigel Green (from the Ipcress File, so he's kinda sorta one of ours) as Hercules, amongst others I didn't recognise.
The mythology is actually pretty faithfully adapted, moreso than most adaptations from written fiction never mind historical dramas. Honor Blackman makes for a nice Goddess interfering with man's destiny.
Hound of the Baskervilles
the version that introduced the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce team. Great scenery on those moors. They did one sequel still set in Victorian times, then updated the Holmes concept to then-present WWII setting (why? so audiences could relate? to save money? for WWII propaganda purposes?). I may try to watch the whole series over the next couple of weeks.
Wow this quote thing sure is weird.
Caractacus, love Jason and the Argonauts. How did that not win an Oscar for special effects? Good score from Bernard Herrmann too.
Also love the original Hound of the Baskervilles. Rathbone was excellent as Holmes and shared great chemistry with Nigel Bruce. As a kid I was terrified by the dogs ! The BBC ran a Friday tea-time series of Sherlock Holmes movies (in about 1979 I think) and I watched the whole lot. The best were this one, the follow up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, & later ones The Scarlet Claw and The Pearl of Death. There was one set on a train as well, but the title escapes me. I much prefer Rathbone's version to Cushing's Hammer cut. Tom Baker made a good Holmes in a BBC adaptation of Baskervilles.
@caractacus potts I highly recommend checking out the whole series of Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films. I found pretty much all of them to be enjoyable. As you say, only the first two are set in the original time period of Doyle's stories. I think at that time the norm was to set Sherlock Holmes adaptations in the contemporary period. I seem to recall reading that Hound of the Baskervilles was the first Sherlock Holmes film done as a period piece which is quite strane considering how many times Holmes had already been put on screen before this.
The shift from period pieces to contemporary 1940s-set films co-incided with the series being taken over by Universal, who I assume had a different vision of what they wanted to do with Holmes on screen. I'm really glad they stuck with Rathbone and Bruce in the lead roles. Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are probably two of the best in the series, however, I personally have more of a soft spot for the WWII set ones, such as The Voice of Terror and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (which is a nice little spy thriller despite it's very boring sounding title). My other personal picks are The Scarlet Claw (possibly my favourite of the series) and The Spider Woman. But as I said, all of the films are enjoyable, and most of the Universal films are just over an hour in length so they are short and snappy little adventures. And of course Rathbone is superb in his portrayal of Holmes...definitive one might say. Highly enjoyable stuff!