I hadn't seen this classic before tonight for some reason. For those who don't know it's about a jury trying to decide if an eighteen year old boy is guilty of stabbing his father to death. The movie is directed by Sidney Lumet (Dog day afternoon, Serpico, Network, Death on the Nile, The hill) and starring Henry Fonda. Lumet really knows how to create tension, that's for sure. There's a lot of sweathing in that jury room! The acting is very good and in spite of a story that amost exclusively takes place in one room with twelve actors it's a feat to make it suspenceful up to the end. There are a couple of scenes where the theatre roots of the story can be felt, but mos tof the time I found it convincing. The movie is more a character study than a precedural story. At the end of the movie the viewer can't be 100% sure the boy is guilty or not. "12 angry men" is a classic for good reason.
I was really impressed by The Hill, and surprised Lumet's career started so early. Judging by those mid70s films he made I'd assumed he was a scrappy young New Hollywood radical, but he was subverting impressionable minds a good decade before that, and I see from his bio he was doing teevee work since the early 50s.
Now what surprises me is he also did those Agatha Christie adaptations, because those don't seem that subversive at all. Maybe I better rewatch them too.
after posting the above, I googled my phrase "scrappy young New Hollywood radical" to see if its really a thing. Nope, I'm the first person in the history of the internet to put those five words together. but the three word "New Hollywood radical" gets lots of hits, including one page I thought might be of interest to us SpyFlick fans:
I've seen films 2 through 5 but never heard of the rest. What do folks think of these choices? Any more that should be added? the Comments on that article offer some more worthy suggestions, including Chinatown and the original version of Tinker Tailor..., and even Soylent Green: sci-fi was also paranoid in this era!
12 Angry Men is one of my favourite films. Brilliant acting. The camera gets ever closer to the characters as the film progresses, which makes the film more claustrophobic and tense as it builds to its climax.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Chinatown isn't really a conspiracy thriller. It does have overtones of big business interfering in local affairs for profit, but the pales into insignificance as the film progresses.
It's better than any of the films on that conspiracy list but a country mile, one of the very best movies of the seventies,
I like the conspiracy in Chinatown because its about a municipal engineering department! Having once worked in such an office, an exciting film on such a topic makes my life feel more glamourous. But its true, by the final scenes the villains most evil act has turned out to be something quite different
I know I once filed a report on Chinatown too, but cant find it now. Chinatown is good-good, like academy award worthy Official good yet still worth watching (also one of my favourite films of the 70s), whereas Boys from Brazil is more like trashy b-movie good.
The best part of this film is a scene during which Caine and Eric Portman do a daring robbery while an orchestra (conducted by John Barry himself) perform his "Romance For Guitar And Orchestra"
Finally got round to seeing this - in a matinee of sorts with one other viewer.
I wanted some uncomplicated popcorn movie after my last two trips - No Time To Die and Licorice Pizza - and in the main this is what I got. The jokes were good if not quite Big Bang Theory standard, they helped ease things along. It's true you don't need to have seen the previous one to enjoy it but it helps to have a broad idea of the pop culture universe. The plot was perhaps a bit of a holding operation and seems to aim to undo or fob off the development of the last movie, there is a surprise twist late on hat I hadn't been aware of, it makes the film a bit self-referential but there you go. Different.
Tom Holland is quite similar to Michael J Fox in looks and certainly voice so maybe that's the reason he calls Dr Strange 'Sir' or 'Steven' but not 'Doc' - it would all become a bit Back to the Future. Then again, doesn't he call Doc Ock 'Doc'?
Again, the trailers beforehand didn't seem to want to set the world of cinema alight, another buried treasure vehicle this time with Mark Wahlberg.
from Spider-Man's first meeting with Dr Strange, Amazing Spider-Man Annual 2, 1965
Spider-Man most definitely calls Dr Strange "Doc". but I think Tom Holland plays the character much nerdierthan how Stan Lee wrote him: Spider-Man should be an irreverent smart-aleck
as well as getting Spider-Man's character slightly wrong, I feel these Marvel films get the Dr Strange alternate dimensions totally wrong. the splash panel from the same issue gives a feel for how Steve Ditko used to draw this stuff
and check out this panel where Spider-Man first enters the alternate dimension! I'm not going to see this new movie unless it looks like this:
and since @Napoleon Plural mentioned Doctor Octopus, Spidey most definitely calls him Doc, in their first meeting in Amazing Spider-Man 3, July 1963. But Spidey doesnt respect Doctor Octopus.
Napster if youve never seen them, I thought the first two Spider-Man films with Tobey Maguire were much better than these new ones. out of any superhero comic, Spider-Man should be character driven. The third film was a stinker though.
yeh thats pretty trippy and captures the feel of some of the "typical" Ditko shapes, but still ... I dont think i've ever seen anything in film that really looked like those drawings, it may not be possible. its those windows floating in air I like, all at different angles and curling and folding, and the pipelike shapes that wind through the windows that characters walk on...
Tilda Swinton is not the Ancient One from the comics, but I liked her performance a lot, probably more interesting than a more faithful interpretation would have been. Dr Strange himself however I always thought should talk like Vincent Price.
and just because I have open this all-important folder on my harddrive, here's a good example
from Strange Tales 126 November 1964, the first appearance of Dormammu ... what is definitively solid vs negative space in this place? theres one door with shutters floating in the middle of the negative space of a corridor that itself is penetrating a folded two dimensional surface, and behind it some sort of light beam that itself is punctured by several other openings yet those openings are bounded by the curls of a ribbon floating in front of the light beam... its like ideas from Dali and Escher yet also a concept of impossible space that only Ditko could have come up with, and may only work in a two-dimensional graphic, playing with our assumptions of perspective and what is solid or void.
Give me an entertaining ‘trashy B-movie’ like Race With The Devil, any day of the week, over a turgid piece of ‘worthy Oscar winning art’ like There Will Be Blood!
RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975)
This low budget actioner stars Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as friends and business partners who take their wives on holiday in their new state of the art RV. On the first night they disturb a group of Satanists sacrificing a girl and are chased relentlessly thereafter. Tautly directed by Jack Starrett this little gem serves tension and thrills by the bucketload as the friends try to escape. B-movies don’t come much better than this.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
RE Spidey, I take it @caractacus potts you haven't seen the latest one? It seems that title No Way Home may be misleading if you think that kind of scenario takes place, I guess it sort of does in one action-packed scene but it's not like anyone gets trapped beyond the Looking Glass in a nightmarish scenario. The pictures you post are of a kind, Dali-like as you say and of their time, I'm not sure it's going to fly in the world of CGI where they'll do other stuff. I am no authority on any of this, however.
When you say the Spidey guy is different in the comics, did you mean his physique? It strikes me if they did it this way he may just end up seeming like Deadpool, who is also irreverent and full bodied (when it's not getting chopped up). It's been years since I saw the Toby McGuire origins story and I think I saw his Doc Oc sequel, I never saw the Andrew Garfield ones, not even sure how many there are.
RE Spidey, I take it @caractacus potts you haven't seen the latest one?
nope, No Time to Die's the only film I've seen in a theatre in a couple years. I will wait til my library gets the DVD. Even before the pandemic, big city megaplexes were too expensive for me to justify the cost.
actually I only just finally watched the previous SpiderMan movie a couple weeks ago, I'm years behind!
Arthur Kennedy was an actor in demand in the early 1950s. His best performances were probably in his two Anthony Mann westerns The Man from Laramie and Bend of the River, both of which starred James Stewart. In this dark and impressive western, Kennedy is paired with Stewart’s co-star from the classic Destry Rides Again, Marlene Dietrich. He’s not quite so able to match her fire with brimstone, but he gives a nuanced performance which switches from eager to wretched to solemn. Several times his Vern Haskell curls his lip and stares with an all-encompassing over-hooded gleam, like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, saying nothing, observing everything. As Dietrich’s Altar Keane says when they first meet: “He uses his eyes.”
The film starts the brutal rape and murder of Beth Forbes, Vern’s fiancé. We don’t see it, but the assault is heavily implied, more so than many similar scenes in movies of a much later time. Consumed with revenge, Vern embarks on a lonesome search for the man who committed the dark deed. He finds the murderer’s dying accomplice and the whispered word of Chuck-A-Luck deepens his search, his danger and hatred. A chance encounter with a wanted man puts Vern on the trail of Altar Keane. This particular brawl is one of the most impressive fights I’ve seen in a western for a long time, all swirling movement, kinky camera angles and close ups. I was instantly reminded of Jason Bourne or James Bond in Quantum of Solace. Brilliant stuff.
Altar Keane is a whiskey drinking, tough as nails, showgirl gone bad. Chasing her tail leads him to Frenchy Fairmont, a gunslinger waiting to hang. Rescuing Frenchy, Vern is taken to Chuck-A-Luck, the notorious ranch of the title, where Altar breeds horses and has a money-spinning side line sheltering bandits, outlaws, rustlers and killers for 10% of their spoils. Vern suspects one of the assorted bad hands was Beth’s murderer, but his troubles have only just started with Altar top of the pile.
Fritz Lang isn’t everybody’s idea of a director of westerns, though he made a few. What he does so well in Rancho Notorious is give the story pace and vividity. The narrative barely pauses for breath. Vern’s motives and his single-minded attitudes are laid bare within the first few minutes. We follow him with baited breath on the hazardous trail, through town and country, bathed in Hal Mohr’s ravishing fifties technicolour, all deep ruby reds, fiery golds and verdant emeralds. Vern scowls and scamps. When he wants to be ingratiating, he can be, but Kennedy’s avenger prefers to grimace. When his eagle-stare affixes on a brooch he gave his fiancé, but which now resides on Altar’s breast, his lips curl again, almost as if he’s about to weep, before the anger comes seething out in a desperate rage. Kennedy’s all pent-up aggression, paired with a steely intelligence which deceives his new ‘friends’ and makes Altar wish he’d “Go away and come back ten years ago.”
Dietrich was probably too old for this kind of role, which is a reimaging of her turn as Frenchie in Destry. There’s two marvellous flash back scenes which form her character, one a crazy drunken human steeplechase across a saloon floor, the other her dismissal from Baldy Gunder’s casino, where she expresses her disdain for her profession. Winning big on the gambling tables – they call it chuck-a-luck, but I thought that was a dice game – she disappears forever, not only into Frenchy’s jealous arms, but into her secret business and a life outside of the world, so much so she becomes almost unreal: “a woman who’s sometimes cold like ice, sometimes burning like the sun, a pipe dream in blue jeans and a birthday dress.”
The sparks of sexual attraction rise in Dietrich’s portrayal. She was always great expressing developing emotions through a series of small movements, and she continues that habit here: shaking when Vern kisses her, the looks which seem to drift anywhere but Vern’s direction, the awkward realisation he’s a decent man in a dirty place, jumping over fences to get something he wants. Her reactions to Vern are far better than the staid convenient attachment to Mel Ferrer’s Frenchy. Dietrich makes us believe Altar is falling for this young, arrogant, impressionable man. When Vern ill-advisably returns to provide an alibi for a suspicious posse, the walls metaphorically come down. They never consummate the attraction, because Vern is faking it, a deceit he uses to his advantage to uncover the murderer within. Moral vitriol pours forth from Vern, his hatred clouding him to the desire before his eyes. Altar suddenly recognises the shameful decrepit life she’s chosen, but it’s too late to abandon the Chuck-A-Luck and tragedy lurks where once there might have been love, an ill-advised, sensual reimagining of those youthful glories singing, carousing and winning steeplechases.
There’s a climatic gunfight – it’s a western, there has to be – but the real battle has been won already and not always for the good. Vern, having achieved his revenge, cannot return to the life of a cattle hand. He too becomes a bandit like Frenchy Fairmont, their shared debt to Altar joining them by gun belt. The two ride into the sunset, joined at the hip by the love of a woman neither ever truly owned.
Rancho Notorious is a prototype spaghetti western, featuring as it does the recurring narrative of a wronged man on a revenge quest. Daniel Taradash’s inventive script does not stick to wild west stereotypes. Consider this:
- The movie has an anti-hero in Kennedy’s Vern, a man prepared to kill anyone who prevents him achieving his vengeance, who tortures a dying man to his last breath, who uses and destroys Altar for his benefit.
- It has a despicable villain, or villainess, who although she exposes our natural sympathy towards oppressed women, has manipulated a position of strength for herself based on the spoils of butchery.
- The film questions the traditional values of the western: Altar Keane is in control, even of her lover, who has risked arrest for a bottle of perfume; the hero has no respect for the law, perfectly happy to commit murder and robbery to achieve his end; the noblest character is the gunslinger, who is loyal and realistic.
- There’s even a disparaging attitude to politics: locked in a cell with three corrupt councillors, Vern chooses to side with Frenchy: “Give me an outlaw to these thieves anytime. At least he takes his chances in the open.” The councillors a grubby, greedy lot who quibble and quarrel, who even have the sheriff in their pocket, a man as unscrupulous as Vern and Frenchy and Altar.
- The band of mismatched, identifiably different outlaws.
- The robbery gone wrong. This scene will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Peckinpah’s masterpiece The Wild Bunch, itself an anti-spaghetti western spaghetti western.
- There is no happy ending.
Howard Hughes, as RKO Pictures Studio Head and owner, had some input into the lurid nature of the material, but it isn't a cheap production, being full of incident, performance and visuals which raise the film above the ordinary, despite being predominantly studio bound. The ballad which hangs the threads of the film together, while unpopular with some viewers, is important because it qualifies Vern’s intentions of “hate, murder and revenge.” By the end, as he rides beside Frenchy, hate has so consumed the hero we know there will only more of the same for Vern Haskell.
When you say the Spidey guy is different in the comics, did you mean his physique? It strikes me if they did it this way he may just end up seeming like Deadpool, who is also irreverent and full bodied (when it's not getting chopped up).
I meant his dialog and attitude. But Stan Lee wrote all the dialog in those early comics, so its sort of his voice, his sense of humour. and all comic book superheroes made wisecracks as they fought the bad guys, but SpiderMan did so more so than most. Not like Deadpool though, Deadpool says really gross nasty things. More like an early 1960s suburban teenager giving attitude to the grownups, not because he's disrespectful but because he's young (and has been bullied) and suddenly finds himself superpowered and is relied upon to save the day, so he's got a bit of 'tood. And, in the comics, he's still not respected by the public when he does save the day but feared, so that gives him extra attitude. The dialogs between Spiderman and newspaper publisher J Jonah Jameson were always particularly hilarious
I'll try to find some typical sample panels maybe this weekend, just cuz I love these original Lee/Ditko comics. The movies are alright, but they're just adaptations, its those classic comics I believe should be part of the Official Canon of Fine Western Literature, alongside Fleming and Tolkien.
The character of J Jonah Jameson is one thing those first three Toby Maguire films got absolutely right, and the new films have been missing.
As I say, I havent seen the new film, but the last one ended with J Jonah Jameson appearing on a giant teevee screen, and I thought "waitaminnit, J.J.J. hasnt been a character in these new movies so far, whats he doing here?" but now I know the new movie has a multiverse concept, his surprise appearance makes complete sense!
FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975, Directed By Dick Richards)
A genuine film noir made in the mid-70s, this is a remake of the 1944 Murder My Sweet. It’s a Raymond Chandler story- in the earlier version, Dick Powell played Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s iconic private eye (Powell had previously been known as a song & dance man, hence the change of title in case audiences thought it was a musical).
Here, Marlowe is played by Robert Mitchum and better casting I cannot think of bar his age at the time (almost 60). There had been several Marlowe films over the years, including one with no less than Humphrey Bogart, but to my mind Mitchum beats them all. It’s just a pity that he hadn’t played the part in the 40s or 50s, but it’s easily overlooked- he could pass for several years younger.
The atmosphere is perfect, aided by David Shore’s evocative music. The supporting cast is headed by Charlotte Rampling as an excellent femme fatale. Her entrance was spoofed in The Naked Gun (1988) but unlike Priscilla Presley in that movie she doesn’t walk into a wall.
Down the cast list is a pre-fame Sylvester Stallone, as a henchman*. Curiously enough, in the preceding Marlowe film (The Long Goodbye, 1973) a pre-fame Arnold Schwarzenegger also played a henchman. And even more curiously, in the one before that (Marlowe, 1969) a pre-fame Bruce Lee played a henchman, too.
Mitchum carries the film. His pitch-perfect, world weary voiceover is the very spirit of Chandler. Once again, it’s a shame he didn’t play the part in an earlier Marlowe movie. At the time, he stated that he hadn’t played a private eye before. He was technically correct, though in Out Of The Past (1947) he had played a retired private eye dragged back for one more assignment. That was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds, remembered today mainly for the title song by Phil Collins.
Mitchum would play Marlowe again in the 1978 version of The Big Sleep. He’s still fine, but with the film suffering under the twin handicaps of being set in the then modern day and in England, most of the atmosphere was lost. There’s a starry supporting cast (I’ll only mention James Stewart and Oliver Reed) but it doesn’t hold a candle to the 1946 original.
Edit- * It's odd to see how small Sylvester Stallone appears in this movie, before he was a star. Normally, he seems a big man, six foot or more, but here before directors (including himself) give him favourable angles, etc, he looks short next to Mitchum and others.
Tommy Lee Jones stars in this distinctly average disaster movie released in the same year as the superior, similarly themed, Dante’s Peak. Earthquakes in Los Angeles cause a volcano to form and erupt in the famous Tar Pits. Jones has to find ways of averting the lava flow from destroying the city. Cue the usual scenes of pandemonium, some of which are even more ludicrous than usual. The only plus is that some of the model shots (although sometimes obvious) are great to look at, they are so much better than poorly conceived CGI.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Mystify - a documentary about Michael Hutchence, lead singer of INXS.
I found this to be an unhappy documentary. There's little to explain how the band went from meeting in college to suddenly playing to thousands in their homeland of Australia. I know not every band has the 'met at a fete, played at the local church hall, headed for Hamburg's clubs then returned to the Liverpool Cavern' back story but something seemed to be missing, perhaps I left the room at that point.
Something is made of Hutchence being a sensitive young lad who got into books and art, but you don't see it in his conversation or maybe his songs either, it almost seems a ruse to pick up a better quality type of woman, not a bad reason to get into Sartre but even so. There's none of the high-minded mischief you see in other bands some of us grew up with, still. Later his early life is revisited and we find out some bad stuff, different to the usual story. His Dad was an itinerant albeit highly paid, not quite sure what he did for a living, but he had a David Niven charm - and looks, while his mother was a former model not quite up to looking after kids, and Michael got farmed out to his older sister. There's stuff to unpack there, however I must have left the room when they got onto Kick, the mega INXS album which stands up so well today and is packed with great songs. Because of this, you don't ever quite get the sense of the band ever really enjoying itself. It bangs on about Hutchence's sensual tastes - this is foreshadowing of course for those who know - but this doesn't convey itself to the viewer. There's a lot of filmed footage mostly by Hutchence which reveals a bloke anxious to live his life and record it.
It turns nasty. After he breaks up with Kylie, he winds up breaking up the marriage of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates though you do sense she was totally ready to jump. The UK media get in there, feeling morally justified to hack their phones presumably, doorstep their hotel and create the kind of bullying climate the dogged the Hillsborough families, occasional celebs such as Hugh Grant and Amy Winehouse, among others such as the journalist Daniel Morgan, said to be murdered via a collusion of The Sun newspaper and the currently under fire Metropolitian Police. Key to this is an assault by a Rome taxi driver that left Hutchence with brain damage and cut his sense of smell and taste for ever. No mention is made of his identity or any charges pressed, seems he got away with it.
Yates' husband Bob Geldof doesn't come across too well in this and in no mood to play happy families with his wife's new beau, that said if she was doing drugs and kids were around you can see his point of view. He applied for custody. It's odd to hear how Bono pitches in with his affectionate memories of Hutchence though he's presumably good mates with Geldof too, still, there you go.
It's mean to say that the band didn't have that many hits after Kick and didn't seem to develop much musically either, one anecdote suggests the main co-writer getting nasty when another in the band tried to take his place on one song, Disappear, which went on to be their biggest off that album. You can't help but despise Oasis' Noel Gallagher for his jibe at the Brit Awards, though he maintained at the time that Hutchence had jibed at his band previously and went on to play it down - it's all down to the narrative backstory, eh?
Things come to a head and Hutchence kills himself, hanged in his hotel room - later it emerges he had extensive brain damage that he'd kept to himself so his suicide seems similar to that of Robin Williams who also felt his brain was just disintegrating. One nasty postscript is omitted - that his lover Paula Yates not too long after OD'd and died. On top of a very nasty situation she'd had it revealed to her that her father was not who she thought it was but actually the slightly odd, insincere appearing 1970s showbiz celebrity Hughie Greene who hosted Opportunity Knocks. This revelation - aired by a mourner getting up to talk at Greene's funeral and in no mood to keep a secret - was reinforced by the fact that Paula did facially resemble him, though he was generally loathed by the family so it would have taken its toll. Now, Greene's offspring were well aware of their father's unpleasant side - not on a par with other seedy 70s celebs, just a bit edgy and nasty I think - and embraced Paula Yates as their own sort of but even so, you'd rather not find that out. Yates' mother tried to go with the story that she must have been drugged by Greene for her to have had sex with him, pretty much pleading the 5th.
On top of all this, of course, Peaches Geldof, daughter of Paula and Bob, died of an overdose in 2014. All in all this is a tragic tale and much of it would have unfolded simply because of an oafish and violent cabbie's behaviour in Rome late one night.
This is a lighthearted western starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ursula Andress, Anita Ekberg, Charles Bronson and The Three Stooges. The action starts immediately with a group of bandits attacking a stage coach. The coach gets away, but only Sinatra and Martin's characters survive. The coach also carried 100 000 $ that didn't belong to either of them. Both display greed and moral flexibility to get the money, but it's Martin's character who rides away with it. He teams up with Maxine (Andress) to open a casino on the river boat she owns. Sinatra's character works for a banker who wants the money and to stop the casino plans. He meets Elya (Ekberg) and hooks up with her. Matson (Bronson) also works for the banker. He's a gunslinger who was the leader of the bandits who attacked the stage coach. Actually there are more fistfights than gunfights in this movie, and while there is action the fun, glamour and starpower is what you remember. For the first time in Hollywood the two female leads had to screentest nude (!), but in the end their nude scenes were cut by the censors. The casting people must've kicked themselves for going through the trouble for no reason 😁. The two actresses look fantastic in clothes too, but the attitudes to and of their two characters must have seemed old-fashioned even in 1963. When Martin's character offers Maxine to be his equal partner in the casino she refuses because she wants him to be "the master"! But if you don't get too worked up by that type of scenes in a western comedy you'll have a great time watching it.
I think quite a few of us have reviewed this already, but it was on last night as tribute to the late Sidney poitier, so
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967)
The late great Sidney Poitier in a career defining role as Virgil Tibbs, a Police Homicide Detective stuck in the two-bit two-lane southern town of Sparta investigating against his wishes and judgement the murder of a local businessman. Rod Steiger won an Oscar as the put upon Sheriff, Gillespie, whose bigoted opinions alter as the story progresses.
The usual prejudices abound. After over fifty years, what was once shocking feels rather subdued. Even the sudden moment where Tibbs delivers a backhanded slap to the face of a racist plantation owner seems less revolutionary than it would have done in the era of the black civil rights movement. These days we kinda know old Endicott deserves it. The most interesting reaction is from Gillespie, who having been asked by an outraged Endicott what he was going to do about the ‘assault’, rather than say the obvious and very modern view point of: “I saw you strike a police officer” merely raises his tired eyes and mutters: “I don’t know.”
There’s a car chase which adds excitement where there needn’t be any and the editing goes awry a few times as the evidence mounts up. Tibbs doesn’t so much solve the investigation as stumble on it. He’s lucky the real murderer turns up where and when he wants him. Good visuals and direction. Quincy Jones provides a slam dunk of a feisty score.
The film is best seen as an examination of two opposite personalities. Tibbs is upright, honest, but egotistical and as bigoted towards white men as they are to him; he battles prejudice daily, one assumes, and displays calm assurance even when the police or witnesses refuse to assist him. It’s a phenomenal turn by Poitier and he commands the screen whenever he’s on it. Haskell Wexler, the photographer tones down the brightness to keep his skin tonally dark, without reflected light. This makes Poitier visually stronger than he would normally be.
Steiger is all sweaty arrogance, a weak man with a rough tongue and a slow mind. Equally arrogant, he finally recognises the deficiencies in himself which he already knew were there. Steiger does his best work when he says nothing at all, his brooding menace ebbing away to nothing every time Virgil Tibbs out thinks him. The scene and speech where he persuades Tibbs to stay and prove he’s better than the white folk of Sparta is probably the moment which won him the Academy Award. It’s often forgotten how good Poitier is, giving the space and time to his co-star. They should both have been nominated, IMO, although 1967 was an exceedingly strong year for male lead actors.
Thanks for that review. I didn't watch the documentary as I didn't think it was going to tell me more than I already knew. I was a big INXS fan in the early '90s. However I remember telling all my mates when I saw the band live in 1998, promoting the Elegantly Wasted album, that I thought he was on drugs, so apathetic was his performance. When I later read all the stuff you describe, I felt rather guilty. He was in some bad places sometimes. However, at the risk of adding injury, I don't believe he's as great a loss as Elvis, George Michael, Hendrix, James Dean, Marilyn, and few others who popped off too early.
This movie is a "eastern western" and directed by Terrance Young. It also stars Ursuala Andress, nine years after they made DN. Here's some of the plot summary from Wikipedia;
"Link Stuart and Gauche are the ruthless co-leaders of a gang of bandits who rob a train of its $400,000 payload. On the train is the Japanese ambassador, on his way to Washington, who has with him a ceremonial tachi, a gift to the American president. Gauche steals the gold-handled sword and shoots dead one of the ambassador's two samurai guards. At the same time, by Gauche's order, other members of the gang double-cross Link by throwing dynamite into the train car he occupies and leave him for dead. Before the gang departs, the surviving samurai guard, Kuroda, tells Gauche he intends to track him down and kill him, but Gauche is dismissive of the threat.
The Japanese ambassador instructs Link, who was not injured in the attempt to kill him, but who has been disarmed, to assist Kuroda in tracking down Gauche. Kuroda is given one week to kill Gauche and recover the sword. If he fails, both Kuroda and the ambassador will have to commit harakiri for having lost their honor in allowing the sword to be stolen and the samurai's death to go unavenged. Link reluctantly agrees, but he realizes that Kuroda will kill Gauche immediately, which Link does not want because he knows Gauche will have hidden the loot. Once they set off in pursuit of the gang, Link repeatedly attempts to elude Kuroda, only to be thwarted by the irrepressible samurai."
Link is played by Charles Bronson, Gauche by Alain Delon and Toshiro Mifune plays Kuroda. Both Bronson's a and Delon's character names mean 'left". The samurai is clearly much more honourable than the other characters and the visual of a samurai fighting in the wild west is great. But why does Link attack Kuroda with a wooden stick when the samurai has sword? That takes a special kind of stupid.
The fight between a Commanche with a spear and Kuroda with his sword on the other hand is a standout. But why doesn't Kuroda pick up a rifle? The sword is great for close fighting, but Kuroda has to resort to throwing knives at a distance. The movie gives the impression the samurai doesn't want to or know how to use a gun, but at that time the samurai had used guns for three hundred years. Here's two photos from the time period the movie is set;
But the movie is well made, has two strong Bond connections, the Spanish locations look great and the premise is very unusual. I enjoyed it a lot!
Although a caption at the beginning of the movie states that this isn’t about the infamous Cynthia Payne, suburban brothel keeper, it does say it was inspired by her story which it clearly is.
Julie Walters plays an initially sexually naive waitress who illegally sublets flats to hookers, but when one of her tenants absconds without paying the rent she provides a sexual service for her real landlord which leads her onto the path of providing sexual services to older men who require kinky services.
Its not as good as I remember it from when I first saw it all those years ago, probably because Walters has played the same style of acting so many times since, but it’s entertaining enough to pass a couple of hours away. Mind you, it does make you wonder what makes some men tick 😂
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
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12 angry men (1957)
I hadn't seen this classic before tonight for some reason. For those who don't know it's about a jury trying to decide if an eighteen year old boy is guilty of stabbing his father to death. The movie is directed by Sidney Lumet (Dog day afternoon, Serpico, Network, Death on the Nile, The hill) and starring Henry Fonda. Lumet really knows how to create tension, that's for sure. There's a lot of sweathing in that jury room! The acting is very good and in spite of a story that amost exclusively takes place in one room with twelve actors it's a feat to make it suspenceful up to the end. There are a couple of scenes where the theatre roots of the story can be felt, but mos tof the time I found it convincing. The movie is more a character study than a precedural story. At the end of the movie the viewer can't be 100% sure the boy is guilty or not. "12 angry men" is a classic for good reason.
You can watch it here for free: 12 Angry Men 1957 - Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, Martin Balsam, Jack Klugman - Bing video
thanks for the 12 Angry Men link Twofour!
I was really impressed by The Hill, and surprised Lumet's career started so early. Judging by those mid70s films he made I'd assumed he was a scrappy young New Hollywood radical, but he was subverting impressionable minds a good decade before that, and I see from his bio he was doing teevee work since the early 50s.
Now what surprises me is he also did those Agatha Christie adaptations, because those don't seem that subversive at all. Maybe I better rewatch them too.
after posting the above, I googled my phrase "scrappy young New Hollywood radical" to see if its really a thing. Nope, I'm the first person in the history of the internet to put those five words together. but the three word "New Hollywood radical" gets lots of hits, including one page I thought might be of interest to us SpyFlick fans:
10 Most Essential 1970s Conspiracy Thrillers, by Jesse Walker
these are Mr Walker's choices:
1. Executive Action (1973)
2. The Parallax View (1974)
3. The Conversation (1974)
4. Three Days of the Condor (1975)
5. All the President's Men (1976)
6. Telefon (1977)
7. The Domino Principle (1977)
8. Good Guys Wear Black (1978)
9. Winter Kills (1979)
10. Cutter's Way (1981)
I've seen films 2 through 5 but never heard of the rest. What do folks think of these choices? Any more that should be added? the Comments on that article offer some more worthy suggestions, including Chinatown and the original version of Tinker Tailor..., and even Soylent Green: sci-fi was also paranoid in this era!
12 Angry Men is one of my favourite films. Brilliant acting. The camera gets ever closer to the characters as the film progresses, which makes the film more claustrophobic and tense as it builds to its climax.
Chinatown isn't really a conspiracy thriller. It does have overtones of big business interfering in local affairs for profit, but the pales into insignificance as the film progresses.
It's better than any of the films on that conspiracy list but a country mile, one of the very best movies of the seventies,
Boys from Brazil was very good, I filed a report on it a few hundred pages back, Walter (Gogol) Gotell's in it!
EDIT: here is my report on Boys from Brazil, sir
I like the conspiracy in Chinatown because its about a municipal engineering department! Having once worked in such an office, an exciting film on such a topic makes my life feel more glamourous. But its true, by the final scenes the villains most evil act has turned out to be something quite different
I know I once filed a report on Chinatown too, but cant find it now. Chinatown is good-good, like academy award worthy Official good yet still worth watching (also one of my favourite films of the 70s), whereas Boys from Brazil is more like trashy b-movie good.
Each to his own, I suppose. I've never seen it live.
Deadfall (1968, Bryan Forbes)
Short version- Michael Caine plays a jewel thief.
My main interest in this film is that John Barry wrote the music. The main title theme, "My Love Has Two Faces", sung by Shirley Bassey-
John Barry, Shirley Bassey - "My Love Has Two Faces" (Deadfall, 1968) - YouTube
Very Bondian- listen to that intro!
The best part of this film is a scene during which Caine and Eric Portman do a daring robbery while an orchestra (conducted by John Barry himself) perform his "Romance For Guitar And Orchestra"
John Barry conducts "Guitar Concierto De Juan Barri" (after Rodrigo) pt.1 of 2 - HQ - YouTube
John Barry conducts "Guitar Concierto De Juan Barri" (after Rodrigo) pt.2 of 2 - HQ - YouTube
The music doubles as diegetic and background. Barry and Forbes worked closely on this, and IMHO successfully too.
Earlier Barry tries out his diamond motif that we'll come to know in DAF.
Don't bother about the rest of the movie!
woah, its maybe a bit slow and introspective, but otherwise could be the great missing Bond theme!
especially when she pauses for breath and the strings rise, and the last couple of notes where it resolves at the end, all very familiar sounds
speaking of Shirley Bassey singing the great missing Bond theme, I like the theme from The Liquidator.
Its not Barry, and its not subtle, but it satisfyingly replicates that sound
Spiderman - No Way Back
Finally got round to seeing this - in a matinee of sorts with one other viewer.
I wanted some uncomplicated popcorn movie after my last two trips - No Time To Die and Licorice Pizza - and in the main this is what I got. The jokes were good if not quite Big Bang Theory standard, they helped ease things along. It's true you don't need to have seen the previous one to enjoy it but it helps to have a broad idea of the pop culture universe. The plot was perhaps a bit of a holding operation and seems to aim to undo or fob off the development of the last movie, there is a surprise twist late on hat I hadn't been aware of, it makes the film a bit self-referential but there you go. Different.
Tom Holland is quite similar to Michael J Fox in looks and certainly voice so maybe that's the reason he calls Dr Strange 'Sir' or 'Steven' but not 'Doc' - it would all become a bit Back to the Future. Then again, doesn't he call Doc Ock 'Doc'?
Again, the trailers beforehand didn't seem to want to set the world of cinema alight, another buried treasure vehicle this time with Mark Wahlberg.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
from Spider-Man's first meeting with Dr Strange, Amazing Spider-Man Annual 2, 1965
Spider-Man most definitely calls Dr Strange "Doc". but I think Tom Holland plays the character much nerdierthan how Stan Lee wrote him: Spider-Man should be an irreverent smart-aleck
as well as getting Spider-Man's character slightly wrong, I feel these Marvel films get the Dr Strange alternate dimensions totally wrong. the splash panel from the same issue gives a feel for how Steve Ditko used to draw this stuff
and check out this panel where Spider-Man first enters the alternate dimension! I'm not going to see this new movie unless it looks like this:
and since @Napoleon Plural mentioned Doctor Octopus, Spidey most definitely calls him Doc, in their first meeting in Amazing Spider-Man 3, July 1963. But Spidey doesnt respect Doctor Octopus.
Napster if youve never seen them, I thought the first two Spider-Man films with Tobey Maguire were much better than these new ones. out of any superhero comic, Spider-Man should be character driven. The third film was a stinker though.
yeh thats pretty trippy and captures the feel of some of the "typical" Ditko shapes, but still ... I dont think i've ever seen anything in film that really looked like those drawings, it may not be possible. its those windows floating in air I like, all at different angles and curling and folding, and the pipelike shapes that wind through the windows that characters walk on...
Tilda Swinton is not the Ancient One from the comics, but I liked her performance a lot, probably more interesting than a more faithful interpretation would have been. Dr Strange himself however I always thought should talk like Vincent Price.
and just because I have open this all-important folder on my harddrive, here's a good example
from Strange Tales 126 November 1964, the first appearance of Dormammu ... what is definitively solid vs negative space in this place? theres one door with shutters floating in the middle of the negative space of a corridor that itself is penetrating a folded two dimensional surface, and behind it some sort of light beam that itself is punctured by several other openings yet those openings are bounded by the curls of a ribbon floating in front of the light beam... its like ideas from Dali and Escher yet also a concept of impossible space that only Ditko could have come up with, and may only work in a two-dimensional graphic, playing with our assumptions of perspective and what is solid or void.
Give me an entertaining ‘trashy B-movie’ like Race With The Devil, any day of the week, over a turgid piece of ‘worthy Oscar winning art’ like There Will Be Blood!
RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975)
This low budget actioner stars Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as friends and business partners who take their wives on holiday in their new state of the art RV. On the first night they disturb a group of Satanists sacrificing a girl and are chased relentlessly thereafter. Tautly directed by Jack Starrett this little gem serves tension and thrills by the bucketload as the friends try to escape. B-movies don’t come much better than this.
Oddly enough, that film was my alternate choice for viewing last night. Yes, that song's a guilty pleasure of mine too.
RE Spidey, I take it @caractacus potts you haven't seen the latest one? It seems that title No Way Home may be misleading if you think that kind of scenario takes place, I guess it sort of does in one action-packed scene but it's not like anyone gets trapped beyond the Looking Glass in a nightmarish scenario. The pictures you post are of a kind, Dali-like as you say and of their time, I'm not sure it's going to fly in the world of CGI where they'll do other stuff. I am no authority on any of this, however.
When you say the Spidey guy is different in the comics, did you mean his physique? It strikes me if they did it this way he may just end up seeming like Deadpool, who is also irreverent and full bodied (when it's not getting chopped up). It's been years since I saw the Toby McGuire origins story and I think I saw his Doc Oc sequel, I never saw the Andrew Garfield ones, not even sure how many there are.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
napoleon said:
RE Spidey, I take it @caractacus potts you haven't seen the latest one?
nope, No Time to Die's the only film I've seen in a theatre in a couple years. I will wait til my library gets the DVD. Even before the pandemic, big city megaplexes were too expensive for me to justify the cost.
actually I only just finally watched the previous SpiderMan movie a couple weeks ago, I'm years behind!
RANCHO NOTORIOUS (1952)
Arthur Kennedy was an actor in demand in the early 1950s. His best performances were probably in his two Anthony Mann westerns The Man from Laramie and Bend of the River, both of which starred James Stewart. In this dark and impressive western, Kennedy is paired with Stewart’s co-star from the classic Destry Rides Again, Marlene Dietrich. He’s not quite so able to match her fire with brimstone, but he gives a nuanced performance which switches from eager to wretched to solemn. Several times his Vern Haskell curls his lip and stares with an all-encompassing over-hooded gleam, like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name in A Fistful of Dollars, saying nothing, observing everything. As Dietrich’s Altar Keane says when they first meet: “He uses his eyes.”
The film starts the brutal rape and murder of Beth Forbes, Vern’s fiancé. We don’t see it, but the assault is heavily implied, more so than many similar scenes in movies of a much later time. Consumed with revenge, Vern embarks on a lonesome search for the man who committed the dark deed. He finds the murderer’s dying accomplice and the whispered word of Chuck-A-Luck deepens his search, his danger and hatred. A chance encounter with a wanted man puts Vern on the trail of Altar Keane. This particular brawl is one of the most impressive fights I’ve seen in a western for a long time, all swirling movement, kinky camera angles and close ups. I was instantly reminded of Jason Bourne or James Bond in Quantum of Solace. Brilliant stuff.
Altar Keane is a whiskey drinking, tough as nails, showgirl gone bad. Chasing her tail leads him to Frenchy Fairmont, a gunslinger waiting to hang. Rescuing Frenchy, Vern is taken to Chuck-A-Luck, the notorious ranch of the title, where Altar breeds horses and has a money-spinning side line sheltering bandits, outlaws, rustlers and killers for 10% of their spoils. Vern suspects one of the assorted bad hands was Beth’s murderer, but his troubles have only just started with Altar top of the pile.
Fritz Lang isn’t everybody’s idea of a director of westerns, though he made a few. What he does so well in Rancho Notorious is give the story pace and vividity. The narrative barely pauses for breath. Vern’s motives and his single-minded attitudes are laid bare within the first few minutes. We follow him with baited breath on the hazardous trail, through town and country, bathed in Hal Mohr’s ravishing fifties technicolour, all deep ruby reds, fiery golds and verdant emeralds. Vern scowls and scamps. When he wants to be ingratiating, he can be, but Kennedy’s avenger prefers to grimace. When his eagle-stare affixes on a brooch he gave his fiancé, but which now resides on Altar’s breast, his lips curl again, almost as if he’s about to weep, before the anger comes seething out in a desperate rage. Kennedy’s all pent-up aggression, paired with a steely intelligence which deceives his new ‘friends’ and makes Altar wish he’d “Go away and come back ten years ago.”
Dietrich was probably too old for this kind of role, which is a reimaging of her turn as Frenchie in Destry. There’s two marvellous flash back scenes which form her character, one a crazy drunken human steeplechase across a saloon floor, the other her dismissal from Baldy Gunder’s casino, where she expresses her disdain for her profession. Winning big on the gambling tables – they call it chuck-a-luck, but I thought that was a dice game – she disappears forever, not only into Frenchy’s jealous arms, but into her secret business and a life outside of the world, so much so she becomes almost unreal: “a woman who’s sometimes cold like ice, sometimes burning like the sun, a pipe dream in blue jeans and a birthday dress.”
The sparks of sexual attraction rise in Dietrich’s portrayal. She was always great expressing developing emotions through a series of small movements, and she continues that habit here: shaking when Vern kisses her, the looks which seem to drift anywhere but Vern’s direction, the awkward realisation he’s a decent man in a dirty place, jumping over fences to get something he wants. Her reactions to Vern are far better than the staid convenient attachment to Mel Ferrer’s Frenchy. Dietrich makes us believe Altar is falling for this young, arrogant, impressionable man. When Vern ill-advisably returns to provide an alibi for a suspicious posse, the walls metaphorically come down. They never consummate the attraction, because Vern is faking it, a deceit he uses to his advantage to uncover the murderer within. Moral vitriol pours forth from Vern, his hatred clouding him to the desire before his eyes. Altar suddenly recognises the shameful decrepit life she’s chosen, but it’s too late to abandon the Chuck-A-Luck and tragedy lurks where once there might have been love, an ill-advised, sensual reimagining of those youthful glories singing, carousing and winning steeplechases.
There’s a climatic gunfight – it’s a western, there has to be – but the real battle has been won already and not always for the good. Vern, having achieved his revenge, cannot return to the life of a cattle hand. He too becomes a bandit like Frenchy Fairmont, their shared debt to Altar joining them by gun belt. The two ride into the sunset, joined at the hip by the love of a woman neither ever truly owned.
Rancho Notorious is a prototype spaghetti western, featuring as it does the recurring narrative of a wronged man on a revenge quest. Daniel Taradash’s inventive script does not stick to wild west stereotypes. Consider this:
- The movie has an anti-hero in Kennedy’s Vern, a man prepared to kill anyone who prevents him achieving his vengeance, who tortures a dying man to his last breath, who uses and destroys Altar for his benefit.
- It has a despicable villain, or villainess, who although she exposes our natural sympathy towards oppressed women, has manipulated a position of strength for herself based on the spoils of butchery.
- The film questions the traditional values of the western: Altar Keane is in control, even of her lover, who has risked arrest for a bottle of perfume; the hero has no respect for the law, perfectly happy to commit murder and robbery to achieve his end; the noblest character is the gunslinger, who is loyal and realistic.
- There’s even a disparaging attitude to politics: locked in a cell with three corrupt councillors, Vern chooses to side with Frenchy: “Give me an outlaw to these thieves anytime. At least he takes his chances in the open.” The councillors a grubby, greedy lot who quibble and quarrel, who even have the sheriff in their pocket, a man as unscrupulous as Vern and Frenchy and Altar.
- The band of mismatched, identifiably different outlaws.
- The robbery gone wrong. This scene will be familiar to anyone who’s watched Peckinpah’s masterpiece The Wild Bunch, itself an anti-spaghetti western spaghetti western.
- There is no happy ending.
Howard Hughes, as RKO Pictures Studio Head and owner, had some input into the lurid nature of the material, but it isn't a cheap production, being full of incident, performance and visuals which raise the film above the ordinary, despite being predominantly studio bound. The ballad which hangs the threads of the film together, while unpopular with some viewers, is important because it qualifies Vern’s intentions of “hate, murder and revenge.” By the end, as he rides beside Frenchy, hate has so consumed the hero we know there will only more of the same for Vern Haskell.
A marvellous and important western.
napoleon said:
When you say the Spidey guy is different in the comics, did you mean his physique? It strikes me if they did it this way he may just end up seeming like Deadpool, who is also irreverent and full bodied (when it's not getting chopped up).
I meant his dialog and attitude. But Stan Lee wrote all the dialog in those early comics, so its sort of his voice, his sense of humour. and all comic book superheroes made wisecracks as they fought the bad guys, but SpiderMan did so more so than most. Not like Deadpool though, Deadpool says really gross nasty things. More like an early 1960s suburban teenager giving attitude to the grownups, not because he's disrespectful but because he's young (and has been bullied) and suddenly finds himself superpowered and is relied upon to save the day, so he's got a bit of 'tood. And, in the comics, he's still not respected by the public when he does save the day but feared, so that gives him extra attitude. The dialogs between Spiderman and newspaper publisher J Jonah Jameson were always particularly hilarious
I'll try to find some typical sample panels maybe this weekend, just cuz I love these original Lee/Ditko comics. The movies are alright, but they're just adaptations, its those classic comics I believe should be part of the Official Canon of Fine Western Literature, alongside Fleming and Tolkien.
The character of J Jonah Jameson is one thing those first three Toby Maguire films got absolutely right, and the new films have been missing.
As I say, I havent seen the new film, but the last one ended with J Jonah Jameson appearing on a giant teevee screen, and I thought "waitaminnit, J.J.J. hasnt been a character in these new movies so far, whats he doing here?" but now I know the new movie has a multiverse concept, his surprise appearance makes complete sense!
FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975, Directed By Dick Richards)
A genuine film noir made in the mid-70s, this is a remake of the 1944 Murder My Sweet. It’s a Raymond Chandler story- in the earlier version, Dick Powell played Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s iconic private eye (Powell had previously been known as a song & dance man, hence the change of title in case audiences thought it was a musical).
Here, Marlowe is played by Robert Mitchum and better casting I cannot think of bar his age at the time (almost 60). There had been several Marlowe films over the years, including one with no less than Humphrey Bogart, but to my mind Mitchum beats them all. It’s just a pity that he hadn’t played the part in the 40s or 50s, but it’s easily overlooked- he could pass for several years younger.
The atmosphere is perfect, aided by David Shore’s evocative music. The supporting cast is headed by Charlotte Rampling as an excellent femme fatale. Her entrance was spoofed in The Naked Gun (1988) but unlike Priscilla Presley in that movie she doesn’t walk into a wall.
Down the cast list is a pre-fame Sylvester Stallone, as a henchman*. Curiously enough, in the preceding Marlowe film (The Long Goodbye, 1973) a pre-fame Arnold Schwarzenegger also played a henchman. And even more curiously, in the one before that (Marlowe, 1969) a pre-fame Bruce Lee played a henchman, too.
Mitchum carries the film. His pitch-perfect, world weary voiceover is the very spirit of Chandler. Once again, it’s a shame he didn’t play the part in an earlier Marlowe movie. At the time, he stated that he hadn’t played a private eye before. He was technically correct, though in Out Of The Past (1947) he had played a retired private eye dragged back for one more assignment. That was remade in 1984 as Against All Odds, remembered today mainly for the title song by Phil Collins.
Mitchum would play Marlowe again in the 1978 version of The Big Sleep. He’s still fine, but with the film suffering under the twin handicaps of being set in the then modern day and in England, most of the atmosphere was lost. There’s a starry supporting cast (I’ll only mention James Stewart and Oliver Reed) but it doesn’t hold a candle to the 1946 original.
Edit- * It's odd to see how small Sylvester Stallone appears in this movie, before he was a star. Normally, he seems a big man, six foot or more, but here before directors (including himself) give him favourable angles, etc, he looks short next to Mitchum and others.
VOLCANO (1997)
Tommy Lee Jones stars in this distinctly average disaster movie released in the same year as the superior, similarly themed, Dante’s Peak. Earthquakes in Los Angeles cause a volcano to form and erupt in the famous Tar Pits. Jones has to find ways of averting the lava flow from destroying the city. Cue the usual scenes of pandemonium, some of which are even more ludicrous than usual. The only plus is that some of the model shots (although sometimes obvious) are great to look at, they are so much better than poorly conceived CGI.
Mystify - a documentary about Michael Hutchence, lead singer of INXS.
I found this to be an unhappy documentary. There's little to explain how the band went from meeting in college to suddenly playing to thousands in their homeland of Australia. I know not every band has the 'met at a fete, played at the local church hall, headed for Hamburg's clubs then returned to the Liverpool Cavern' back story but something seemed to be missing, perhaps I left the room at that point.
Something is made of Hutchence being a sensitive young lad who got into books and art, but you don't see it in his conversation or maybe his songs either, it almost seems a ruse to pick up a better quality type of woman, not a bad reason to get into Sartre but even so. There's none of the high-minded mischief you see in other bands some of us grew up with, still. Later his early life is revisited and we find out some bad stuff, different to the usual story. His Dad was an itinerant albeit highly paid, not quite sure what he did for a living, but he had a David Niven charm - and looks, while his mother was a former model not quite up to looking after kids, and Michael got farmed out to his older sister. There's stuff to unpack there, however I must have left the room when they got onto Kick, the mega INXS album which stands up so well today and is packed with great songs. Because of this, you don't ever quite get the sense of the band ever really enjoying itself. It bangs on about Hutchence's sensual tastes - this is foreshadowing of course for those who know - but this doesn't convey itself to the viewer. There's a lot of filmed footage mostly by Hutchence which reveals a bloke anxious to live his life and record it.
It turns nasty. After he breaks up with Kylie, he winds up breaking up the marriage of Bob Geldof and Paula Yates though you do sense she was totally ready to jump. The UK media get in there, feeling morally justified to hack their phones presumably, doorstep their hotel and create the kind of bullying climate the dogged the Hillsborough families, occasional celebs such as Hugh Grant and Amy Winehouse, among others such as the journalist Daniel Morgan, said to be murdered via a collusion of The Sun newspaper and the currently under fire Metropolitian Police. Key to this is an assault by a Rome taxi driver that left Hutchence with brain damage and cut his sense of smell and taste for ever. No mention is made of his identity or any charges pressed, seems he got away with it.
Yates' husband Bob Geldof doesn't come across too well in this and in no mood to play happy families with his wife's new beau, that said if she was doing drugs and kids were around you can see his point of view. He applied for custody. It's odd to hear how Bono pitches in with his affectionate memories of Hutchence though he's presumably good mates with Geldof too, still, there you go.
It's mean to say that the band didn't have that many hits after Kick and didn't seem to develop much musically either, one anecdote suggests the main co-writer getting nasty when another in the band tried to take his place on one song, Disappear, which went on to be their biggest off that album. You can't help but despise Oasis' Noel Gallagher for his jibe at the Brit Awards, though he maintained at the time that Hutchence had jibed at his band previously and went on to play it down - it's all down to the narrative backstory, eh?
Things come to a head and Hutchence kills himself, hanged in his hotel room - later it emerges he had extensive brain damage that he'd kept to himself so his suicide seems similar to that of Robin Williams who also felt his brain was just disintegrating. One nasty postscript is omitted - that his lover Paula Yates not too long after OD'd and died. On top of a very nasty situation she'd had it revealed to her that her father was not who she thought it was but actually the slightly odd, insincere appearing 1970s showbiz celebrity Hughie Greene who hosted Opportunity Knocks. This revelation - aired by a mourner getting up to talk at Greene's funeral and in no mood to keep a secret - was reinforced by the fact that Paula did facially resemble him, though he was generally loathed by the family so it would have taken its toll. Now, Greene's offspring were well aware of their father's unpleasant side - not on a par with other seedy 70s celebs, just a bit edgy and nasty I think - and embraced Paula Yates as their own sort of but even so, you'd rather not find that out. Yates' mother tried to go with the story that she must have been drugged by Greene for her to have had sex with him, pretty much pleading the 5th.
On top of all this, of course, Peaches Geldof, daughter of Paula and Bob, died of an overdose in 2014. All in all this is a tragic tale and much of it would have unfolded simply because of an oafish and violent cabbie's behaviour in Rome late one night.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
This Edit button doesn't seem to work btw.
Does for me 😎🤣 (Sir Miles)….
And me (Barbel)....
Roger Moore 1927-2017
4 for Texas (1963)
This is a lighthearted western starring Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Ursula Andress, Anita Ekberg, Charles Bronson and The Three Stooges. The action starts immediately with a group of bandits attacking a stage coach. The coach gets away, but only Sinatra and Martin's characters survive. The coach also carried 100 000 $ that didn't belong to either of them. Both display greed and moral flexibility to get the money, but it's Martin's character who rides away with it. He teams up with Maxine (Andress) to open a casino on the river boat she owns. Sinatra's character works for a banker who wants the money and to stop the casino plans. He meets Elya (Ekberg) and hooks up with her. Matson (Bronson) also works for the banker. He's a gunslinger who was the leader of the bandits who attacked the stage coach. Actually there are more fistfights than gunfights in this movie, and while there is action the fun, glamour and starpower is what you remember. For the first time in Hollywood the two female leads had to screentest nude (!), but in the end their nude scenes were cut by the censors. The casting people must've kicked themselves for going through the trouble for no reason 😁. The two actresses look fantastic in clothes too, but the attitudes to and of their two characters must have seemed old-fashioned even in 1963. When Martin's character offers Maxine to be his equal partner in the casino she refuses because she wants him to be "the master"! But if you don't get too worked up by that type of scenes in a western comedy you'll have a great time watching it.
You can watch the movie for free here: 4 for Texas 1963 (ok.ru)
I'm a fan of strong women, but at the same time I'm also a fan of beautiful women. That's why I'm sharing this "4 for Texas" photo of Ursula Andress:
I think quite a few of us have reviewed this already, but it was on last night as tribute to the late Sidney poitier, so
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT (1967)
The late great Sidney Poitier in a career defining role as Virgil Tibbs, a Police Homicide Detective stuck in the two-bit two-lane southern town of Sparta investigating against his wishes and judgement the murder of a local businessman. Rod Steiger won an Oscar as the put upon Sheriff, Gillespie, whose bigoted opinions alter as the story progresses.
The usual prejudices abound. After over fifty years, what was once shocking feels rather subdued. Even the sudden moment where Tibbs delivers a backhanded slap to the face of a racist plantation owner seems less revolutionary than it would have done in the era of the black civil rights movement. These days we kinda know old Endicott deserves it. The most interesting reaction is from Gillespie, who having been asked by an outraged Endicott what he was going to do about the ‘assault’, rather than say the obvious and very modern view point of: “I saw you strike a police officer” merely raises his tired eyes and mutters: “I don’t know.”
There’s a car chase which adds excitement where there needn’t be any and the editing goes awry a few times as the evidence mounts up. Tibbs doesn’t so much solve the investigation as stumble on it. He’s lucky the real murderer turns up where and when he wants him. Good visuals and direction. Quincy Jones provides a slam dunk of a feisty score.
The film is best seen as an examination of two opposite personalities. Tibbs is upright, honest, but egotistical and as bigoted towards white men as they are to him; he battles prejudice daily, one assumes, and displays calm assurance even when the police or witnesses refuse to assist him. It’s a phenomenal turn by Poitier and he commands the screen whenever he’s on it. Haskell Wexler, the photographer tones down the brightness to keep his skin tonally dark, without reflected light. This makes Poitier visually stronger than he would normally be.
Steiger is all sweaty arrogance, a weak man with a rough tongue and a slow mind. Equally arrogant, he finally recognises the deficiencies in himself which he already knew were there. Steiger does his best work when he says nothing at all, his brooding menace ebbing away to nothing every time Virgil Tibbs out thinks him. The scene and speech where he persuades Tibbs to stay and prove he’s better than the white folk of Sparta is probably the moment which won him the Academy Award. It’s often forgotten how good Poitier is, giving the space and time to his co-star. They should both have been nominated, IMO, although 1967 was an exceedingly strong year for male lead actors.
If you haven’t seen it, do.
Thanks for that review. I didn't watch the documentary as I didn't think it was going to tell me more than I already knew. I was a big INXS fan in the early '90s. However I remember telling all my mates when I saw the band live in 1998, promoting the Elegantly Wasted album, that I thought he was on drugs, so apathetic was his performance. When I later read all the stuff you describe, I felt rather guilty. He was in some bad places sometimes. However, at the risk of adding injury, I don't believe he's as great a loss as Elvis, George Michael, Hendrix, James Dean, Marilyn, and few others who popped off too early.
Red sun (1971)
This movie is a "eastern western" and directed by Terrance Young. It also stars Ursuala Andress, nine years after they made DN. Here's some of the plot summary from Wikipedia;
"Link Stuart and Gauche are the ruthless co-leaders of a gang of bandits who rob a train of its $400,000 payload. On the train is the Japanese ambassador, on his way to Washington, who has with him a ceremonial tachi, a gift to the American president. Gauche steals the gold-handled sword and shoots dead one of the ambassador's two samurai guards. At the same time, by Gauche's order, other members of the gang double-cross Link by throwing dynamite into the train car he occupies and leave him for dead. Before the gang departs, the surviving samurai guard, Kuroda, tells Gauche he intends to track him down and kill him, but Gauche is dismissive of the threat.
The Japanese ambassador instructs Link, who was not injured in the attempt to kill him, but who has been disarmed, to assist Kuroda in tracking down Gauche. Kuroda is given one week to kill Gauche and recover the sword. If he fails, both Kuroda and the ambassador will have to commit harakiri for having lost their honor in allowing the sword to be stolen and the samurai's death to go unavenged. Link reluctantly agrees, but he realizes that Kuroda will kill Gauche immediately, which Link does not want because he knows Gauche will have hidden the loot. Once they set off in pursuit of the gang, Link repeatedly attempts to elude Kuroda, only to be thwarted by the irrepressible samurai."
Link is played by Charles Bronson, Gauche by Alain Delon and Toshiro Mifune plays Kuroda. Both Bronson's a and Delon's character names mean 'left". The samurai is clearly much more honourable than the other characters and the visual of a samurai fighting in the wild west is great. But why does Link attack Kuroda with a wooden stick when the samurai has sword? That takes a special kind of stupid.
The fight between a Commanche with a spear and Kuroda with his sword on the other hand is a standout. But why doesn't Kuroda pick up a rifle? The sword is great for close fighting, but Kuroda has to resort to throwing knives at a distance. The movie gives the impression the samurai doesn't want to or know how to use a gun, but at that time the samurai had used guns for three hundred years. Here's two photos from the time period the movie is set;
But the movie is well made, has two strong Bond connections, the Spanish locations look great and the premise is very unusual. I enjoyed it a lot!
It looks like it's Terrance Young's only western. He dabbled in many generes.
Antony Dawson who played professor Dent in DN also appears in Red Sun.
PERSONAL SERVICES (1987)
Although a caption at the beginning of the movie states that this isn’t about the infamous Cynthia Payne, suburban brothel keeper, it does say it was inspired by her story which it clearly is.
Julie Walters plays an initially sexually naive waitress who illegally sublets flats to hookers, but when one of her tenants absconds without paying the rent she provides a sexual service for her real landlord which leads her onto the path of providing sexual services to older men who require kinky services.
Its not as good as I remember it from when I first saw it all those years ago, probably because Walters has played the same style of acting so many times since, but it’s entertaining enough to pass a couple of hours away. Mind you, it does make you wonder what makes some men tick 😂