It’s difficult to know if one should criticise a movie about a deity.
King of Kings relates the Biblical story of Jesus of Nazareth, but relegates the main man to a supporting role in his own movie. At first, this seems rather peculiar, especially as he barely features in the first third, but as proceedings unravel we can appreciate why and how the filmmakers’ took this route as it allows them to concentrate more on the context of Jesus life and death rather than the Christian teaching behind it.
Instead, we are treated to an elegant Orson Welles narration which joins the dots of the historical milieu by explaining what ended up on the cutting room floor [including a whole hour of footage featuring Richard Johnson, whose role as ‘David’ was designed to do exactly the same thing, but apparently slowed the pace of the movie to an absolute crawl]. What this gentle build does is to bend accepted antiquary history – that of Tacitus, Josephus and the Gospels – and include segments of myth and apocryphal writings, both of which blurs the line between good and evil, guilt and innocence, truth and legend. The Ethiopian history which states Pilate and his family converted to Christianity following his removal from office is clearly hinted at by the Prefect’s rising doubt and his wife’s clear absolution of the Messiah. There’s a large role for Hurd Hatfield as a centurion, Lucius, who also comes to understand the non-confrontational matter of Jesus’ teaching.
That’s not to say we haven’t got blame attached to someone. Mostly it’s thrust on the non-Jewish ruler Herod Antipas, a nominal king who succeeded his father Herod the Great. The imagined machinations of Herod’s court are where the film is most fruitful. Frank Thring makes a competent Herod: delightedly disposing of his scowling father [Gregoire Aslan] who cowers under the yoke of his sins, notably the Slaughter of the Innocents. Odd, though, all the baby children are clearly plastic dolls…
Still, the decisions faced by the two internecine kings are nicely compared; they both end up as sweaty, frightened rulers: the elder Herod fearing a usurper, the younger in thrall to his scheming wife and daughter. The script gives a fair lick to that triad relationship, gloriously revelling in the incestuous bath Antipas has chosen to swim in: married to his brother’s wife, lusting after his step-daughter. While Rita Gam’s Herodias panders to and mocks her ineffectual husband in equal measure, the young siren Salome slithers in her soft silken outfits, stares pernicious, seductive eyes at her stepfather, the imposing Roman consuls and the sheepskin clad John the Baptist, whose blood she believes is poison. Brigid Bazlen was only sixteen when she played this role and she never bettered it.
Nicholas Ray was a steady director, but like all big budget epics of the day the film struggles under the weight of its own expectation. Originally conceived by ardent Catholic and tough guy action director John Farrow [who was made a Knight of the Papal Seal or something… no, seriously, look it up] the project took off when Samuel Bronston and he collaborated over John Paul Jones. King of Kings, or Son of Man as the film was initially labelled, was to be their next project. Farrow’s script was unfilmable. Bronston sacked the director from his own pet project, brought in Ray and screenwriter Philip Yordan and set about building Jerusalem in Spain.
The film is big and bold. The main temple design is magnificent, as are the courtly surrounds. Apparently over 300 sets were built for the movie, but you don’t see anything like 300 sets [maybe they are featured in that lost footage] and most of what we do get is fairly standard material. The 70mm photography is superb. Miklos Rozsa’s music score is one of his best efforts, especially the main title theme. The costumes so-so. The battle scenes are decent; inserted without historical accuracy, but included one assumes to bolster the pace.
Ray and Yordan were both experienced makers of westerns and they bring some of that ‘lone hero’ worldliness to the proceedings. Christ is often featured alone: even when surrounded by his disciples, he’s apart, leading them, instructing; frequently he’s off-screen entirely. The familiar trope of Cowboys and Indians is played out between the Romans and the Jewish uprisers, most noticeably in a guerrilla attack outside Jerusalem. Joseph and Mary’s entry to Bethlehem has all the rollicking squalor and quarrel of a wild west town. Early on, the centurion Lucius visits Nazareth and the sequence is reminiscent of all those homestead scenes set around a well, the stranger calling at a remote cabin, the natives anxious. This time of course, those emotions are swapped, and it is Lucius who leaves nervous. By the time Jesus makes an appearance though, we are back to the rudiments of the Biblical movie.
The problem, as with most epics, is who to cast and how to perform it. Usually films like this turn into a game of spot the star, but there are barely any recognisable faces to be seen. Instead the cast is populated by middle-of-the-road supporting players and hastily employed Spanish actors, many of whom are dubbed. It’s worrying that all the ‘villains’ of the show: the Romans, the Herods, Harry Guardino’s Barabbas, even Ray Milland voicing the Devil, seem better equipped both in script and thespian experience than the ‘good guys’. Jeffrey Hunter is extremely bland as Jesus. The normally delightful Siobhan McKenna plays his mother. She shares a couple of deferential scenes with the Messiah and looks desperate to help young Jeff get on the acting track, but ends up stranded, like all Virgin Mary’s, chatting to her counterpart Miss Magdalene, not a good turn from Carmen Sevilia. There’s not much to be said for the disciples who are a tortured and silent lot. Robert Ryan is woefully miscast as John the Baptist. Even the normally reliable Judas Iscariot [Rip Torn] can’t raise our interest in this one. Ray and Yordan reduce Jesus’ input to a basic half-dozen Gospel stories and the rest of his preaching is reduced to several spies’ reports, either for Barabbas’ rebels or Pilate’s Romans, or first-hand accounts related after the events. The effect is to lessen the impact of Jesus’ religious message and increase the socio-political impression he had on the age. It makes for a disjointed epic, for when the obvious climax reaches us and the religious iconography kicks in, we’ve almost forgotten the film’s about the Messiah because the rest of the movie’s narrative has got so much more going for it.
Ray does sterling work creating some splendid images: John the Baptist in prison attempting to crawl to his saviour, their hands linking and separating like Michelangelo’s God and Man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; the aerial shot of Herod the Great being murdered by his son is replicated when the cross is raised on Calvary; Salome’s dance is always good for a whack and Frank Thring’s indecision, his ugly executioner waiting in shadow has all the sinister chiaroscuro of a Caravaggio; the conquering Pompey entering Solomon’s temple; the early establishing shots and the matte work are impeccable. Unfortunately for this King of Kings the good work just isn’t good enough and as interesting as the court intrigue is, it’s virtually a sin to make a movie about Jesus Christ and forget to put him in it.
Thought to be lost following a burglary at Andrew Loog Oldham’s offices, footage of the Rolling Stone’s brief tour of Ireland in 1965, ostensibly shot to test the band’s photogenic impact, turned up during a clear out of Alan Klein’s New York offices. Painstakingly pieced together the result is a mixture of documentary interviews, impromptu rehearsals and jam sessions and some exhilarating live footage. It was released to DVD following a run on the festival circuits to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary. Sky Arts showed it as a belated tribute to the late Charlie Watts.
It's always great to see a band in their formative years. It’s hard to believe people ever considered them rebellious; they look so well presented and kept, speak tremendously politely, and play some awesome blues inspired numbers. What on earth was there to fear? Ah, time is a great healer.
Some good off the cuff backstage sequences reveal the drudgery of life on the road in the sixties, the small venues, the tight corridors and changing rooms, the lack of security, the stage invasions – a gig in Dublin is stopped when three of the Stones are hauled to the ground by over eager fans – the weariness and wariness of the band. Dear Charlie, bless him, stating: “I’m not very talented. I can’t read [music]. I just sit there and play the drums.” Or Bill Wyman: “I’m not a musician. I’m a bass player in a band.” None of them expect anything to last. Mick Jagger cheerfully relates how they thought they might be together for a couple of years, “But here we still are.” A young vicar watching the Belfast gig doesn’t understand what all the fuss was about: “They seem like good boys. The music was good. Other people’s misbehaviour isn’t their fault.”
Of the live songs, The Last Time sounds terrific, while It’s Alright causes the mini riot. Everybody Needs Somebody is almost drowned by the screams. Satisfaction is played so fast it’s an audible blur. Round and Round is suitably rock n rolling epic. Jagger and Richards mock Elvis duetting on a version of Santa Bring My Baby Back To Me and the Beatles with Eight Days a Week. It was great to hear an early classic like Heart of Stone on the incidental track. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d love to get a copy of the live soundtrack if it’s available; the sixties live cuts [Got Live If You Want It etc] have a lot more energy and drive than the more sanitised later concerts like Still Life.
If you're in the UK, it's disconcerting reading @chrisno1 's posts because he'll have been watching what you did last night on the telly, it's a bit 'I had your wife last night and this is what I thought of her...'
I dipped in and out of this (!) thinking it was a tribute to Charlie Watts but of course the late drummer doesn't feature in this any more than the others. It alternated on the telly with the 1995 Top of the Pops revisit on BBC2 and as that was a stellar Britpop year, the Stones had tough competition not least cos this documentary had a lot of mundane clips of jaded, pasty-faced fans not being able to get tickets to see the band, all filmed in black and white of course. I mostly missed their probably affectionate backroom tribute to the Beatles' I've Just Seen a Face, followed by more mocking Eight Days a Week parody. There always was that tension of sorts between the two, listening to Dig A Pony you have Lennon singing 'Roll a Stoney... you can imitate anyone you want...' and only recently there was a strange war of words in the press between Macca and Jagger, the former preposterously deriding the Stones as only a blues cover band - not necessarily referring to them in their origins - and Jagger on record as dismissing the rivalry saying the Beatles ended decades ago while the Stones were still touring and still and entity.
As for the BBC2 tribute evening, well, Louise Weiner looks hot as ever, seems to be doing a Cassie from Skins tribute act now. Not sure why there isn't a channel devoted to this kind of stuff in the 90s rather than just 70s and 80s revisits. You could view in conjunction with the Gazza documentary now showing, doing the same era.
also Martine Beswick (one of ours) as a rival cavegirl, and Robert Brown (another one of ours) as leader of the caveman tribe
was Welch ever considered for a BondFilm? she shouldve been , she's better than a few of those 60s BondGirls. Maybe American which some folks don't like, but she's got an exotic look and also a good sense of humour and a physical style well suited to action movies (being a former ballerina)
Beswick does a naughty pagan dance, then gets in a kittykittycatfight with the topbilled star
you know theres a Seinfeld where Elaine gets in a catfight with guest star Raquel Welch? though in typical Seinfeld style the big event happens off camera and Elaine's smartass friends tell inappropriate jokes about it afterwards. Elaine: My life was in danger, why do you guys always talk about two women fighting like its so amusing? Jerry: Because there's a chance maybe the two girls will kiss! Never thought of it before, but maybe that Seinfeld dialog was a specific reference to this film. Beswick of course has prior experience in such performances.
in the name of equal time, here's our future M, also showing lots of flesh. His management style had mellowed out by the time he got promoted to head of MI6, his caveman tribe by comparison was a toxic workplace.
its on archive.org skip to 1:13:00 to see kittykittycatfight
would she have been Domino or one of the supporting characters? I think she would have made a better Domino, a better actor and she can make a swimsuit look good.
Beswick of course is Paula, itd be ironic of Welch had been considered for that part. I wonder if they let the two ladies fight for the role and the Zora the GypsyGirl won?
It's incredible how many good movies are avalilable for free on Youtube! This one is based on the semi-true story about Papillion (Steve McQueen) who gets sentenced to the brutal French penal colonies in south America. Papillion becomes friends with the forger Degas (Dustin Hoffman). We are used to impressive performances by Hoffman, so for me it's McQueen's Papillion that impresses me. This is the best performance I've ever seen from him. Steve McQueen forgets his vanity in many scenes, perhaps especially the isolation sequence. He's far from The Cooler King here. A positive portrayal of a gay character is also worth mentioning. Generally this is a really good movie and worth watching, especially to see Steve McQueen show us how good an actor he really was.
I love Claudine Auger as Domino, but by golly Raquel Welch would have got my pulse exploding. I wonder though if Eon would have had her dubbed like they seemed to do with every actress unless she was in The Avengers ?
Great film One Million Years B.C. BTW, caractacus, the best of Hammer's 'dinosaur' cycle.
I haven’t seen this since it was released and it’s a piece of superb British slapstick. Tommy Cooper and Eric Sykes are two workmen trying to transport a plank of wood to a job. Almost silent, it’s a brilliantly staged movie with a host of well known faces in supporting roles including, Hattie Jacques, Roy Castle, Kenny Lynch, Bill Oddie, Graham Stark and Stratford Johns. It’s a short movie but very, very funny.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
@Barbel She was dubbed???? You are kidding me ! She doesn't 'say' anything, all she has to do is grunt and moan and scream - and I'd listen to Ms Welch grunt and moan and scream any day...
(for those who've just tuned in, we're discussing Raquel Welch's performance in One Million Years BC)
actually she says quite a few words, she's from the more civilised tribe with a primitive language, she asks the runaway caveman his name and explains the names of various tools.
I wonder if there was so many exterior shots the voices didn't pick up and they needed to overdub in postproduction? still, I'm sure she could have done her own overdubs
I'd forgotten that. I haven't seen One Million Years BC for a good decade or so. To be honest, the dialogue is not top of my list of concerns when I watch this movie. That sounds awful, but it's true.
Antonia Banderas is Spanish and Spain was ruled by Arabs from the 8th to the 15th century. I don't think casting him as an Arab was baffiling at all. 🙂
In terms of etnicity and look he was a good choice playing an Arab I think. If it made him the right actor for the role is an open question. The critics didn't like the movie, so perhaps not.
A frankly insane thriller that kicks off with a hair and eyebrow raising and fight in a multi-storey car park and doesn’t let up its relentless pace for the whole 90 minutes.
Jason Statham returns as Frank Martin, the titular ‘transporter’ relocated to Miami and filling his time with the school run for an entitled little mite, the progeny of a big shot anti-narcotics politico whose having marriage difficulties. The wife turns to Frank for help when the son is kidnapped and a whole host of fights and car chases ensue, none of which make any sense narratively or logistically.
Unlike the debut movie, this one has to use CGI and it’s ropey, cheap looking SFX at that. Pity. Louis Leterrier is the director, but exactly what his task is except to point the camera blandly at faces while the actors retrieve risible dialogue, I don’t know. The effects, stunt men and second unit guys are doing all the work on this one; there’s even a specific credit for original The Transporter director Corey Yuen as martial arts choreographer and the film certainly needed him. It wears a heart on its sleeve: 190 credits for stunts and effects, but only 5 for script and continuity. Statham is briefly united with his old mate from Lock, Stock… Jason Flemyng, as well as Francois Berleand playing the weary Insp Tarconi. Kate Nauta catches the eye as an assassin who wears nothing but lingerie.
Hard on the eyes and ears, light on the mind because you just don’t care.
Note: Before making Transporter 2, Statham made a cameo as “Airport Man” in Michael Mann’s Collateral. Speculation abounds that Statham is playing Frank Martin. While it is fun to speculate, I don’t think the case is proven. Martin is always immaculately dressed when at work and never touches the package. In Collateral, Airport Man is not wearing a tie and is carrying the package. Also his hair is not so dramatically shaved. Nonetheless it’s fun to think of Michael Mann saying: “Just play it like you played the dude in Transporter.”
Records are meant to be broken, so after months of agonising whether to see NTTD before I’ve seen it in the cinema, I finally succumbed last night as this is now available to stream on Amazon free of charge. So, after 60 years of seeing Bond films in the cinema (I first saw DN aged 6 in 1962) due to the ongoing pandemic and with cinemas still closed here in Cebu, and me not even knowing if it will be shown when they do reopen anyway, I decided to watch it. I knew some spoilers, Bond and Leiter being killed and the new 007, for instance, and I don’t think it spoilt the experience.
There are a lot of faults, it’s far too long, a good 30 minutes could be shaved off to pace it properly. What is it with today’s movies having to be so bum achingly long? All of Craig’s tenure has been spoilt by them being too long, even QOS, which is about 80 minutes too long 😂. The PTS is like a mini movie in itself and becomes boring long before we see the title sequence which is good but embellished with a humdrum song. The premise is ok but the emphasis on Bond’s personal life is overdone and it’s pretty much all we’ve had over the 5 films and it’s become boring, boring, boring. The death of Leiter should have been poignant but it wasn’t, as the relationship hadn’t had time to develop into a proper friendship. Where the film scores is the island base, this is proper Bond stuff and what we have missed over Craig’s tenure. The ending is kind of sad, but because this Bond MkII, or Earth-2 Bond, has only been around for 5 films it doesn’t really have that OMG factor, Craig’s Bond hasn’t got into my heart like the Connery-Lazenby-Moore-Dalton era did. And to use the OHMSS music is sacrilege 🙁
Now that the 5 film reboot is over it’s time for a reassessment. CR is a brilliant film and stands alone as a genuine top Bond film in any era. QOS is a terrible movie, best forgotten. SK and SP are ok but too long and too much emphasis on Bond’s personal life. When I first saw SP I thought it was a fantastic entry but on further viewings it has paled somewhat. I think it was an experiment gone wrong. How much was influenced by Craig, I don’t know, he’s a decent actor but there has been far too much angst, I felt devastated for Lazenby’s Bond In OHMSS but cannot feel anywhere close to that for Craig’s Bond.
Was it worth the wait? Probably not. It’s ok, and aside from CR, that’s all it is for what followed.
I want Bond to have single missions, I want the villains to have nefarious plans to destroy the world, I want bases to be blown up at the end, I want Bond discarding lovers left right and centre, I want some fun back into the movies. Unless Amazon take it over I don’t think we will get it.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
@CoolHandBond You are not alone in your thoughts. Your last paragraph sums up my feelings exactly. I'm planning on taking in some of the Connery Bond films at my local Vue Cinema as an antidote to all this Craig-angst. SP and NTTD both have elements of Bond I love, but they have somehow contrived to ruin them both...
Any reason you didn't want to post the review in the NTTD thread?
congratulations @CoolHandBond on finally seeing the new Bondfilm. And with that, you are now qualified to read Ye Olde and Improved version Nay, Time to Die!
I've been encouraging others to use Spoiler tags for months because I knew you were the last regularly posting member who had not yet seen the film. But there are indoobitably a few lurkers out there who still dont know how it ends, so you might want to Spoiler tag some bits in your review
coolhand said;
... Earth-2 Bond ...
comic book reference! I approve! Perhaps in Bond26 we shall see CraigBond cross the dimensional barrier and team up with BrosnanBond to save the Multiverse, as the two Green Lanterns are doing in this classic scene. Except without the magic rings of course.
chris said:
Any reason you didn't want to post the review in the NTTD thread?
just looking at that subforum, the Reviews With Spoilers thread has sunk almost to the bottom of the first page, with many more specialised threads rising to the top. it may be hard to find now that its become less active?
@chrisno1 I didn’t really think about where to put my review - I might transpose it onto there as well.
@caractacus potts Please don’t give BB any more ideas about a multiverse 😂
I saw FRWL last night and this is probably old news but I’ve not noticed it before - in the PTS Morenzy says it took Grant 1 minute 52 seconds to kill the substitute James Bond, and that is the exact time of the real fight in the train, as I timed it!
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
An interesting double-header the other night. I think Barbel reviewed the first a couple of weeks back:
KING KONG (1933)
A film which virtually needs no introduction or explanation. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s classic stop-motion horror adventure still has the potential to thrill and delivers with some vibrancy and a healthy dose of technical sophistication. Bringing the monsters alive is the preserve of animator Willis O’Brien whose work inspired others, such as Ray Harryhausen. The magic is all up there on the screen. More modern viewers may find the whole rather quaint, but if you only wish to be entertained, rather than enthralled, King Kong works that magic all over again every time you see it.
Robert Armstrong’s Carl Denham is a maverick movie maker who enlists a ship’s company and a beautiful out-of-luck damsel in an effort to film the Eighth Wonder of the World: King Kong a giant gorilla whose domain is an unnamed Pacific island, identified only by its skull-like mountain. The natives live in fear of this godlike beast and have built an enormous wall to keep it at bay. When the filmmakers arrive and disturb a sacrificial ceremony, the tribal chief demands Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow replace the young native girl to compensate for this heresy. The interlopers refuse and later that night Ann is kidnapped and staked out for the gorilla’s dinner – except the beast takes a peculiar shine to Barbie doll sized Ann. There follows an extended chase sequence where Bruce Cabot’s ladies’ man Jack Driscoll pursues the ape-monster through the jungle and the only thing slowing up Kong are his fights with a tyrannosaurus rex, a gigantic lizard and a pterodactyl.
Rescue completed, Kong goes crackers and attacks the village hoping to find his fascinating blonde. Instead he’s gassed into unconsciousness and transported back to New York where, following a disastrous public unveiling, Kong runs amok, kidnaps Ann and climbs the Empire State Building where he’s finally brought to heel by a troop of flying aces who machine gun the poor beast to his doom.
Excitement galore, even if time-wise and logistics-wise the narrative makes no sense. The filmmakers famously claimed that the faster the picture moved the less likely an audience was to notice the continuity issues. They certainly succeed. Cooper was too meticulous, so his co-director insisted he only oversaw the miniature work – which took a year to complete – while Schoedsack himself dealt with the dialogue. They completed the live action work in a month and it shows. The performances are rushed and the characters underdeveloped. Chief among the raft of stereotypical players is Armstrong, whose Carl Denham is full of enthusiasm and brio, which might have been okay in 1933, but doesn’t work so well today when you just want him to shut up or slow down. He issues orders so fast you wonder how anyone ever understands what he wants them to do. It’s no wonder the expedition goes horrifically wrong.
Far better is Fay Wray, who famously screamed in a recording booth for a whole day to produce the soundtrack for Ann Darrow who emits the loudest and longest series of shrieks, cries and whelps the cinema has probably [still] ever heard. She’s believably naïve and quite gorgeous in that winsomely flapper style which was de rigour in Hollywood in the early thirties. She even shows some pre-Hays code daring by having the monster monkey dispose of most of her clothes, baring naked shoulders and, during Denham’s on-ship screen test, donning a diaphanous evening gown while quite obviously not wearing a brassiere. Bruce Cabot, who later found lasting fame as a villain in a film called Diamonds Are Forever, one of a small franchise based on some books by Ian Fleming, is competent as the rough neck who falls for her. He got the gig late as Joel McRea’s agent demanded too much money to make this thrill ride and The Most Dangerous Game back-to-back.
The giant gorilla is the best performer in the whole movie, although the close-ups of his face and right hand, both huge part-manoeuvrable mock-ups, leave something to be desired. Where Kong doesn’t disappoint is in the long distance shots, where his fur bristles and his roar – another splendid special effect – animate him even more than O’Brien’s model work. [The fur bristling is a technician's mistake; they are in fact the thumb and finger prints of the animator as he rearranged the model for the next frame; still, extremely life-like.] The battle with the T-Rex is probably the film’s high point among many high points. The two behemoths pound, crash and snap at each other while Kong roars, the dinosaur hisses, Fay Wray screams and Max Steiner’s orchestral music score compete for and assault our aural attention, a clamour of noise that audiences in 1933 must have considered deafening. In contrast the scene where Ann Darrow is kidnapped from the deck of the ship is carried out in complete silence, a moment of high drama and suspense before the blood-curdling screams and violence kick in.
By the time the movie reaches New York, it’s almost run out of puff. Switching the action from the jungle to the metropolis only just succeeds by virtue of its relative novelty value. They’d do this sort of thing with much more destructive tenacity in 21st century films, but those have less charm. Here, our sympathies switch from the imperilled Ann and Driscoll, to the captive Kong, displayed like a circus freak, chained up in a Broadway theatre for entertainment. Frightened by the camera flashes, he breaks free with ease – well, of course he would – and creates sufficient mayhem to make New York his own modern jungle. The climax is unusual for retaining our empathy for the monster, who is after all being horribly mistreated and only wants to protect poor Miss Darrow from the attentions of the public, be they sailors, natives or newspapermen. Carl Denham’s closing line that “It was beauty that killed the beast” has a neat ring of philosophical incongruity to it; he’s really absolving himself of blame: it was you who engineered it all along, Denham, you cruel, heartless, freakshow ringmaster.
King Kong is a fantastic film. There are misfortunes, but it’s really a technicians film: the visual and sound effects, the cinematography, set design, music and editing are all well above par. I’ve seen it in the cinema, where it looks and sounds even better. It loses something on the small screen – Kong just looks too wee on telly – but the film never ceases to be captivating. I know they make lists of ‘best this and that’ all the time these days, but King Kong is undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s greatest ever films and retains its glory despite a series of poor sequels, rip-offs and remakes.
Part creature feature, extended allegory on the dangers of science dabbling in affairs it doesn’t understand – here the genus of an organic alien – in reality the discovery and exploitation of the nuclear fission – The Thing from Another World doesn’t quite succeed in being either. It gets fabulous retrospective reviews these days, but I found it distinctly underwhelming.
The major issue for me, was the whip-crack fast overlapping dialogue, which was done for authenticity, thus resulting in a faster than fast pace, but also succeeding in not telling the audience what anyone is saying, thinking or doing. You can barely catch a sentence during most of the scenes. The movie is fairly typical of the era.
Having just watched King Kong, I was fascinated to see James Arness’ ‘Thing’ appear in the silhouette of a broken doorway much how Kong is envisioned through the massive doors of the native’s island fortress wall. Arness is equally impressive, but isn’t in such an impressive film. The resolution is obvious. There’s no tension because the action is toilet: the notion this alien could just come and go into and out of the research centre without anyone realising is plain daft. John Carpenter’s 1982 reimagining of J.W. Campbell’s story Who Goes There at least retains the central premise, that the alien can take on the outward look of other life forms. The alien we have here is distinctly ordinary. He could just as easily be a big Russian.
Over seventy years on, there is still debate about whether Howard Hawks directed the film or the listed helmsman Christian Nyby. It has the dramatic pacing and rapid fire dialogue of a Hawks, but seems to lack any of his wit and atmosphere. Russell Harlan’s photography is a treat though, making California look like the North Pole is a minor miracle. Good set design. Nothing more.
Following a disastrous attempt to catch FRWL at the local Vue, I watched this sixties spy thriller instead :
MASQUERADE (1965)
Continuing my vain attempt to watch the fifty movies listed in Michael Richardson’s Guns, Girls and Gadgets [luckily I’ve seen half of them anyway, it’s the remainder which are proving difficult] this little number cropped up on Talking Pictures TV, which meant I could record it and watch it from the comfort of a sofa rather than at my desk from a laptop.
Masquerade is based on Victor Canning’s 1954 thriller Castle Minerva. Canning was once one of Britain’s bestselling novelists. Like this film, he’s virtually forgotten now, but his output is probably due for reassessment. I’d like to suggest Masquerade is also. Not because it’s an outstanding thriller [it isn’t] but because it displays a certain eloquent vim which the much similar fare of the sixties spy genre miss by a long chalk. It’s primary crime isn’t the messy plot, or the lack of action, but the central casting of American Cliff Robertson as the hero David Frazer.
The film is quite an early entry into the sixties spy subgenre, being released in April 1965, half a year after Goldfinger and another half before Thunderball. Compared to those archetypal gadget laden spy thrillers, Masquerade feels old hat. It hasn’t aged well, but part of the reason for that is Cliff Robertson, who is as charmless as a funeral procession. The film’s set up, its quintessential Englishness, the gently effervescent dialogue, the double, triple and quadruple cross demanded a lighter touch than his. David Niven was originally attached to the project and he would have been perfect for the part. You can detect it in the script. The damn thing was written for him! Apparently William Goldman was brought in at Robertson’s request to Americanise his role, but I can’t detect anything other than an offhand comment to the beautiful, abused Sophie: “You’re pretty kinky, baby, that’s a big bruise.” Robertson isn’t helped by being surrounded by a succession of competent British thespians and enthusiastic Europeans who make his efforts appear paltry in comparison. Chief among them are Jack Hawkins and Charles Grey, who act like, look like and sound like twins. It is no surprise to learn that when Hawkins’ throat cancer prevented him from speaking, Grey dubbed all his lines [see movies like When Eight Bells Toll]. Their ability to outshine one another and everyone else is the movie’s highlight.
Not only is the dialogue not squared to the main performer, but turning him into an American has led to a series of rewrites which don’t always come off. This native comparison, the fish-out-of-water scenario should, surely, be the source of humour, but it’s laboured and incompetent, either badly written or horrendously delivered. When Robertson is seducing Marisa Mell’s gypsy moll Sophie in the cockpit of a speedboat, I couldn’t help thinking of Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Kinky isn’t the half of it. He later makes love to the nominal heroine in a circus truck surrounded by birds of prey. She turns out to be married, which raised my eyebrows; kinky and adulterous. Her husband doesn’t seem to mind and merely shrugs with indifference.
Sophie’s been aiding our hero all along, but she’s not too hot at it. She’s simply hot. Her gang of circus gypsies have been charged with rekidnapping an Arab prince and hope to extract a high ransom from the Anglo-Media Oil Corporation. Anglo-Media need the young prince to sign an extension to their drilling rights in his middle east kingdom; the prince’s uncle, a scheming Roger Delgado, favours the Soviet Bloc and Britain fears losing a valuable primary commodity if the rightful heir is ‘deposed’. Drexel [Hawkins] has already hit on a plan to keep the prince safe from any attempted assassination and recruits Frazer to babysit the young lad for a fortnight. Frazer thinks it’d be easier to take over the little Emirati.
“These days we only invade a country when we’re invited or when the American’s allow us,” answers au fait spymaster John Le Mesurier, a line which sound remarkably prescient to modern ears. Le Mesurier’s role is virtually identical to his turns in Hot Enough for June and Where the Spies Are – he’d have suited very well with James Bond, if the producers could have squeezed in his brand of diffidence – at the end of the movie he exonerates one bad guy’s diabolical behaviour by remarking: “We trained him, you know.”
In fact the whole oil, middle east, US, UK stitch up is a familiar historical context, which stretches further back than the 1960s and 50s. The suspicion Charles Grey’s Benson has of Frazer also has its roots in the old imperial school tie. And the Britishers behaviour towards the frankly over indulged and downright obnoxious prince has all the earmarks of colonial superiority written over it. So too the upright batman’s attitude towards his American co-host: “They weren’t thinking of you, Sir,” he says bluntly when Frazer expresses his pleasure at the surrounds of the beautiful exotic Spanish villa, “I understand we’re expecting royalty.”
Drexel has the measure of everyone. A weary secret agent, he despises modern espionage as “passionless and practical.” He’s more a man of action, but recognises he’s falling far behind the times: “I can’t spot the bad guys anymore. That’s why I miss the war. All the bad guys were visible then.” This sounds very much like a line lifted directly from Canning’s novel and as the movie progresses and cross and double cross becomes triple and recross, you begin to see his point. Equally confused, Frazer has a fine time separating good from bad and ends up in fix after fix once the prince gets captured.
There’s great tension at a grand dilapidated coastal castle as Frazer goes mountaineering around its crumbling battlements and some rather fine visuals from photographer Otto Heller who mists the camera lens when Frazer drunkenly explores the fortress, so we see everything through his intoxicated eye, confused, disorientated and off-kilter. The masquerade begins to unravel for Frazer when he discovers Drexel is double dealing. Hawkins delivers a brilliant soliloquy musing on the spy trade: “I had scruples, but believe me they had to go… The jobs they put me to. What’s a patriot, David? I think I’m one, but I’ve killed patriots like me, just because they are on the other side. Sometimes I don’t think I know who’s right or wrong anymore. I had to lose my scruples and what did I get: a pat on the back.” Later on, with full understanding, Frazer bitterly points to Drexel’s unconscious, treacherous form, “There’s your patriotism.”
Towards the end of the film, as events spiral out of control for the gypsies, their leader intones of the ‘heroes’: “I hope they all kill each other.” This seems highly appropriate, although in Frazer’s case this is only because poor Cliff Robertson is undermining the film almost every time he’s on screen. The adventure ends in a moment of redemption for all and high excitement for the audience with a gun battle and the rescue of the prince atop a half constructed dam.
Filmed in 1964, the film isn’t anything like the later outrageous sex and spying escapades of Matt Helm or the more down market Euro-Spy flicks, it’s trying to be suave and sophisticated, but it’s star is neither and it shows. A little scene where the prince is reading the movie tie-in of Goldfinger and says “A little farfetched, don’t you think?” seems to hint at where director Basil Dearden and producer Michael Relph wanted to take the story, but it never quite gets out of third gear, spending most of the time trundling in second. It’s a good natured, but a grumbling second.
I’d seen Masquerade once before, on it’s TV premier I think way back in the late seventies, and it gets extremely rare outings on any sort of channel these days, so I was pleased to be able to revisit the movie. I was slightly disappointed, as I remembered it being better than this, but when you’re ten, it probably seems a better than okay kind of film because you’d miss the jarring tones. The movie was marketed as a comedy thriller, but it isn’t funny enough and conversely not serious enough either so it rather falls into a metaphorical chasm, like the one the heroes flee across at the denouement. Still, a worthwhile effort and a more valiant and valid attempt at an espionage thriller than some.
Flashy and fast, Transporter 3 reverts back to the template of the original by virtue of performing all its stunts for real, putting some of the recent OO7 fare to shame. There is a final car jump which is both preposterous and impossible to perform without grandiose SFX, but they hide it very well.
The film has had mixed to poor reviews from the public, chiefly because it doesn’t utilise Jason Statham’s martial arts expertise enough, preferring endless car chases. That doesn’t bother me. I was more interested in the rapid fire editing and scene shifting, the stuttering camera work and the wholly incompetent plot, aspects of filmmaking which normally annoy the hell out of me, but seem not to matter here. I mean, it’s tosh, we all know it, and Transporter 3 really is a better experience if you leave your brain at the door.
There’s plenty to enjoy including Natalya Rudakova’s much maligned but provocatively slinky Valentina, the ‘package’ Statham’s Frank Martin has to escort to Odessa via Budapest. Rudakova’s been roundly heavily criticised, but the poor girl’s a novice and director Olivier Megaton doesn’t exactly help her, preferring moody glances out of car windows to any sort of character development. I rather like the way she softens towards the transporter as he gets her into and out of various scraps. Exactly why he’s escorting her isn’t made entirely clear – the biggest narrative error is the fact a transporter isn’t required – but it’s a boy-girl buddy movie thing and the two leads sparkle quite well with each other, although the strip tease in the meadow has to rank as one of the most uncomfortable erotic viewing experiences of recent years.
This Arnold Schwartzenegger actioner is better than I remember it from the VHS days of old. I suspect writer/director Walter Hill (The Long Riders, , 48 Hours, Extreme Prejudice) can be thanked for this. In many ways this is a gritty thriller with some action and dry humor. Schwartzenegger plays Ivan Danko, a Moscow police officer figthing a brutal organized crime that barely existed officially in the Soviet Union. He follows a criminal to the US where he teams up with the sweary cop Art Ridzik (Jim Beluchi). Lawrence Fishburn and Gina Gershon got early roles in Red Heat. We get a silenced revolver (!), punches that sound like cannon shots and Arnie, but generally the movie is pretty down to earth. With small changes Danko could've been played by Rutger Hauer, Stellan Skarsgård or Peter Weller. I also like how the Russian characters speak Russian to each other. Not a single word of English is spoken in the first 15-20 minutes. I enjoyed Red Heat.
C'mon @chrisno1 after your attempt to infiltrate Prince Charles Cinema to see OHMSS - about as sucessful as blondie's attempt to blag his way up to Piz Gloria - I can't be the only one who wants to know how you didn't make it to see FRWL when the cinema this time is just down the road from you...
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KING OF KINGS (1961)
It’s difficult to know if one should criticise a movie about a deity.
King of Kings relates the Biblical story of Jesus of Nazareth, but relegates the main man to a supporting role in his own movie. At first, this seems rather peculiar, especially as he barely features in the first third, but as proceedings unravel we can appreciate why and how the filmmakers’ took this route as it allows them to concentrate more on the context of Jesus life and death rather than the Christian teaching behind it.
Instead, we are treated to an elegant Orson Welles narration which joins the dots of the historical milieu by explaining what ended up on the cutting room floor [including a whole hour of footage featuring Richard Johnson, whose role as ‘David’ was designed to do exactly the same thing, but apparently slowed the pace of the movie to an absolute crawl]. What this gentle build does is to bend accepted antiquary history – that of Tacitus, Josephus and the Gospels – and include segments of myth and apocryphal writings, both of which blurs the line between good and evil, guilt and innocence, truth and legend. The Ethiopian history which states Pilate and his family converted to Christianity following his removal from office is clearly hinted at by the Prefect’s rising doubt and his wife’s clear absolution of the Messiah. There’s a large role for Hurd Hatfield as a centurion, Lucius, who also comes to understand the non-confrontational matter of Jesus’ teaching.
That’s not to say we haven’t got blame attached to someone. Mostly it’s thrust on the non-Jewish ruler Herod Antipas, a nominal king who succeeded his father Herod the Great. The imagined machinations of Herod’s court are where the film is most fruitful. Frank Thring makes a competent Herod: delightedly disposing of his scowling father [Gregoire Aslan] who cowers under the yoke of his sins, notably the Slaughter of the Innocents. Odd, though, all the baby children are clearly plastic dolls…
Still, the decisions faced by the two internecine kings are nicely compared; they both end up as sweaty, frightened rulers: the elder Herod fearing a usurper, the younger in thrall to his scheming wife and daughter. The script gives a fair lick to that triad relationship, gloriously revelling in the incestuous bath Antipas has chosen to swim in: married to his brother’s wife, lusting after his step-daughter. While Rita Gam’s Herodias panders to and mocks her ineffectual husband in equal measure, the young siren Salome slithers in her soft silken outfits, stares pernicious, seductive eyes at her stepfather, the imposing Roman consuls and the sheepskin clad John the Baptist, whose blood she believes is poison. Brigid Bazlen was only sixteen when she played this role and she never bettered it.
Nicholas Ray was a steady director, but like all big budget epics of the day the film struggles under the weight of its own expectation. Originally conceived by ardent Catholic and tough guy action director John Farrow [who was made a Knight of the Papal Seal or something… no, seriously, look it up] the project took off when Samuel Bronston and he collaborated over John Paul Jones. King of Kings, or Son of Man as the film was initially labelled, was to be their next project. Farrow’s script was unfilmable. Bronston sacked the director from his own pet project, brought in Ray and screenwriter Philip Yordan and set about building Jerusalem in Spain.
The film is big and bold. The main temple design is magnificent, as are the courtly surrounds. Apparently over 300 sets were built for the movie, but you don’t see anything like 300 sets [maybe they are featured in that lost footage] and most of what we do get is fairly standard material. The 70mm photography is superb. Miklos Rozsa’s music score is one of his best efforts, especially the main title theme. The costumes so-so. The battle scenes are decent; inserted without historical accuracy, but included one assumes to bolster the pace.
Ray and Yordan were both experienced makers of westerns and they bring some of that ‘lone hero’ worldliness to the proceedings. Christ is often featured alone: even when surrounded by his disciples, he’s apart, leading them, instructing; frequently he’s off-screen entirely. The familiar trope of Cowboys and Indians is played out between the Romans and the Jewish uprisers, most noticeably in a guerrilla attack outside Jerusalem. Joseph and Mary’s entry to Bethlehem has all the rollicking squalor and quarrel of a wild west town. Early on, the centurion Lucius visits Nazareth and the sequence is reminiscent of all those homestead scenes set around a well, the stranger calling at a remote cabin, the natives anxious. This time of course, those emotions are swapped, and it is Lucius who leaves nervous. By the time Jesus makes an appearance though, we are back to the rudiments of the Biblical movie.
The problem, as with most epics, is who to cast and how to perform it. Usually films like this turn into a game of spot the star, but there are barely any recognisable faces to be seen. Instead the cast is populated by middle-of-the-road supporting players and hastily employed Spanish actors, many of whom are dubbed. It’s worrying that all the ‘villains’ of the show: the Romans, the Herods, Harry Guardino’s Barabbas, even Ray Milland voicing the Devil, seem better equipped both in script and thespian experience than the ‘good guys’. Jeffrey Hunter is extremely bland as Jesus. The normally delightful Siobhan McKenna plays his mother. She shares a couple of deferential scenes with the Messiah and looks desperate to help young Jeff get on the acting track, but ends up stranded, like all Virgin Mary’s, chatting to her counterpart Miss Magdalene, not a good turn from Carmen Sevilia. There’s not much to be said for the disciples who are a tortured and silent lot. Robert Ryan is woefully miscast as John the Baptist. Even the normally reliable Judas Iscariot [Rip Torn] can’t raise our interest in this one. Ray and Yordan reduce Jesus’ input to a basic half-dozen Gospel stories and the rest of his preaching is reduced to several spies’ reports, either for Barabbas’ rebels or Pilate’s Romans, or first-hand accounts related after the events. The effect is to lessen the impact of Jesus’ religious message and increase the socio-political impression he had on the age. It makes for a disjointed epic, for when the obvious climax reaches us and the religious iconography kicks in, we’ve almost forgotten the film’s about the Messiah because the rest of the movie’s narrative has got so much more going for it.
Ray does sterling work creating some splendid images: John the Baptist in prison attempting to crawl to his saviour, their hands linking and separating like Michelangelo’s God and Man on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; the aerial shot of Herod the Great being murdered by his son is replicated when the cross is raised on Calvary; Salome’s dance is always good for a whack and Frank Thring’s indecision, his ugly executioner waiting in shadow has all the sinister chiaroscuro of a Caravaggio; the conquering Pompey entering Solomon’s temple; the early establishing shots and the matte work are impeccable. Unfortunately for this King of Kings the good work just isn’t good enough and as interesting as the court intrigue is, it’s virtually a sin to make a movie about Jesus Christ and forget to put him in it.
CHARLIE IS MY DARLING (1966 / 2012)
Thought to be lost following a burglary at Andrew Loog Oldham’s offices, footage of the Rolling Stone’s brief tour of Ireland in 1965, ostensibly shot to test the band’s photogenic impact, turned up during a clear out of Alan Klein’s New York offices. Painstakingly pieced together the result is a mixture of documentary interviews, impromptu rehearsals and jam sessions and some exhilarating live footage. It was released to DVD following a run on the festival circuits to celebrate the band’s 50th anniversary. Sky Arts showed it as a belated tribute to the late Charlie Watts.
It's always great to see a band in their formative years. It’s hard to believe people ever considered them rebellious; they look so well presented and kept, speak tremendously politely, and play some awesome blues inspired numbers. What on earth was there to fear? Ah, time is a great healer.
Some good off the cuff backstage sequences reveal the drudgery of life on the road in the sixties, the small venues, the tight corridors and changing rooms, the lack of security, the stage invasions – a gig in Dublin is stopped when three of the Stones are hauled to the ground by over eager fans – the weariness and wariness of the band. Dear Charlie, bless him, stating: “I’m not very talented. I can’t read [music]. I just sit there and play the drums.” Or Bill Wyman: “I’m not a musician. I’m a bass player in a band.” None of them expect anything to last. Mick Jagger cheerfully relates how they thought they might be together for a couple of years, “But here we still are.” A young vicar watching the Belfast gig doesn’t understand what all the fuss was about: “They seem like good boys. The music was good. Other people’s misbehaviour isn’t their fault.”
Of the live songs, The Last Time sounds terrific, while It’s Alright causes the mini riot. Everybody Needs Somebody is almost drowned by the screams. Satisfaction is played so fast it’s an audible blur. Round and Round is suitably rock n rolling epic. Jagger and Richards mock Elvis duetting on a version of Santa Bring My Baby Back To Me and the Beatles with Eight Days a Week. It was great to hear an early classic like Heart of Stone on the incidental track. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I’d love to get a copy of the live soundtrack if it’s available; the sixties live cuts [Got Live If You Want It etc] have a lot more energy and drive than the more sanitised later concerts like Still Life.
If you're in the UK, it's disconcerting reading @chrisno1 's posts because he'll have been watching what you did last night on the telly, it's a bit 'I had your wife last night and this is what I thought of her...'
I dipped in and out of this (!) thinking it was a tribute to Charlie Watts but of course the late drummer doesn't feature in this any more than the others. It alternated on the telly with the 1995 Top of the Pops revisit on BBC2 and as that was a stellar Britpop year, the Stones had tough competition not least cos this documentary had a lot of mundane clips of jaded, pasty-faced fans not being able to get tickets to see the band, all filmed in black and white of course. I mostly missed their probably affectionate backroom tribute to the Beatles' I've Just Seen a Face, followed by more mocking Eight Days a Week parody. There always was that tension of sorts between the two, listening to Dig A Pony you have Lennon singing 'Roll a Stoney... you can imitate anyone you want...' and only recently there was a strange war of words in the press between Macca and Jagger, the former preposterously deriding the Stones as only a blues cover band - not necessarily referring to them in their origins - and Jagger on record as dismissing the rivalry saying the Beatles ended decades ago while the Stones were still touring and still and entity.
As for the BBC2 tribute evening, well, Louise Weiner looks hot as ever, seems to be doing a Cassie from Skins tribute act now. Not sure why there isn't a channel devoted to this kind of stuff in the 90s rather than just 70s and 80s revisits. You could view in conjunction with the Gazza documentary now showing, doing the same era.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
One Million Years BC
Harryhausen, 1966
starring Raquel Welch and her fur bikini
also Martine Beswick (one of ours) as a rival cavegirl, and Robert Brown (another one of ours) as leader of the caveman tribe
was Welch ever considered for a BondFilm? she shouldve been , she's better than a few of those 60s BondGirls. Maybe American which some folks don't like, but she's got an exotic look and also a good sense of humour and a physical style well suited to action movies (being a former ballerina)
Beswick does a naughty pagan dance, then gets in a kittykittycatfight with the topbilled star
you know theres a Seinfeld where Elaine gets in a catfight with guest star Raquel Welch? though in typical Seinfeld style the big event happens off camera and Elaine's smartass friends tell inappropriate jokes about it afterwards. Elaine: My life was in danger, why do you guys always talk about two women fighting like its so amusing? Jerry: Because there's a chance maybe the two girls will kiss! Never thought of it before, but maybe that Seinfeld dialog was a specific reference to this film. Beswick of course has prior experience in such performances.
in the name of equal time, here's our future M, also showing lots of flesh. His management style had mellowed out by the time he got promoted to head of MI6, his caveman tribe by comparison was a toxic workplace.
its on archive.org skip to 1:13:00 to see kittykittycatfight
Yes, she was considered for TB. However, the producer of "Fantastic Voyage" persuaded Broccoli & co to let her appear in that film instead.
so before she became a star
would she have been Domino or one of the supporting characters? I think she would have made a better Domino, a better actor and she can make a swimsuit look good.
Beswick of course is Paula, itd be ironic of Welch had been considered for that part. I wonder if they let the two ladies fight for the role and the Zora the GypsyGirl won?
It was Domino, all right.
Papillion (1973)
It's incredible how many good movies are avalilable for free on Youtube! This one is based on the semi-true story about Papillion (Steve McQueen) who gets sentenced to the brutal French penal colonies in south America. Papillion becomes friends with the forger Degas (Dustin Hoffman). We are used to impressive performances by Hoffman, so for me it's McQueen's Papillion that impresses me. This is the best performance I've ever seen from him. Steve McQueen forgets his vanity in many scenes, perhaps especially the isolation sequence. He's far from The Cooler King here. A positive portrayal of a gay character is also worth mentioning. Generally this is a really good movie and worth watching, especially to see Steve McQueen show us how good an actor he really was.
Here it is: Papillon.1973 - Bing video
I love Claudine Auger as Domino, but by golly Raquel Welch would have got my pulse exploding. I wonder though if Eon would have had her dubbed like they seemed to do with every actress unless she was in The Avengers ?
Great film One Million Years B.C. BTW, caractacus, the best of Hammer's 'dinosaur' cycle.
THE PLANK (1967)
I haven’t seen this since it was released and it’s a piece of superb British slapstick. Tommy Cooper and Eric Sykes are two workmen trying to transport a plank of wood to a job. Almost silent, it’s a brilliantly staged movie with a host of well known faces in supporting roles including, Hattie Jacques, Roy Castle, Kenny Lynch, Bill Oddie, Graham Stark and Stratford Johns. It’s a short movie but very, very funny.
She was dubbed in "One Million Years BC" (by Bond regular Nikki van der Zyl) so I'd guess probably.
@Barbel She was dubbed???? You are kidding me ! She doesn't 'say' anything, all she has to do is grunt and moan and scream - and I'd listen to Ms Welch grunt and moan and scream any day...
(for those who've just tuned in, we're discussing Raquel Welch's performance in One Million Years BC)
actually she says quite a few words, she's from the more civilised tribe with a primitive language, she asks the runaway caveman his name and explains the names of various tools.
I wonder if there was so many exterior shots the voices didn't pick up and they needed to overdub in postproduction? still, I'm sure she could have done her own overdubs
I'd forgotten that. I haven't seen One Million Years BC for a good decade or so. To be honest, the dialogue is not top of my list of concerns when I watch this movie. That sounds awful, but it's true.
Antonia Banderas is Spanish and Spain was ruled by Arabs from the 8th to the 15th century. I don't think casting him as an Arab was baffiling at all. 🙂
In terms of etnicity and look he was a good choice playing an Arab I think. If it made him the right actor for the role is an open question. The critics didn't like the movie, so perhaps not.
Nope, no kidding. And as @caractacus potts says, she does say a few words.
TRANSPORTER 2 (2005)
A frankly insane thriller that kicks off with a hair and eyebrow raising and fight in a multi-storey car park and doesn’t let up its relentless pace for the whole 90 minutes.
Jason Statham returns as Frank Martin, the titular ‘transporter’ relocated to Miami and filling his time with the school run for an entitled little mite, the progeny of a big shot anti-narcotics politico whose having marriage difficulties. The wife turns to Frank for help when the son is kidnapped and a whole host of fights and car chases ensue, none of which make any sense narratively or logistically.
Unlike the debut movie, this one has to use CGI and it’s ropey, cheap looking SFX at that. Pity. Louis Leterrier is the director, but exactly what his task is except to point the camera blandly at faces while the actors retrieve risible dialogue, I don’t know. The effects, stunt men and second unit guys are doing all the work on this one; there’s even a specific credit for original The Transporter director Corey Yuen as martial arts choreographer and the film certainly needed him. It wears a heart on its sleeve: 190 credits for stunts and effects, but only 5 for script and continuity. Statham is briefly united with his old mate from Lock, Stock… Jason Flemyng, as well as Francois Berleand playing the weary Insp Tarconi. Kate Nauta catches the eye as an assassin who wears nothing but lingerie.
Hard on the eyes and ears, light on the mind because you just don’t care.
Note: Before making Transporter 2, Statham made a cameo as “Airport Man” in Michael Mann’s Collateral. Speculation abounds that Statham is playing Frank Martin. While it is fun to speculate, I don’t think the case is proven. Martin is always immaculately dressed when at work and never touches the package. In Collateral, Airport Man is not wearing a tie and is carrying the package. Also his hair is not so dramatically shaved. Nonetheless it’s fun to think of Michael Mann saying: “Just play it like you played the dude in Transporter.”
NO TIME TO DIE (2021)
Records are meant to be broken, so after months of agonising whether to see NTTD before I’ve seen it in the cinema, I finally succumbed last night as this is now available to stream on Amazon free of charge. So, after 60 years of seeing Bond films in the cinema (I first saw DN aged 6 in 1962) due to the ongoing pandemic and with cinemas still closed here in Cebu, and me not even knowing if it will be shown when they do reopen anyway, I decided to watch it. I knew some spoilers, Bond and Leiter being killed and the new 007, for instance, and I don’t think it spoilt the experience.
There are a lot of faults, it’s far too long, a good 30 minutes could be shaved off to pace it properly. What is it with today’s movies having to be so bum achingly long? All of Craig’s tenure has been spoilt by them being too long, even QOS, which is about 80 minutes too long 😂. The PTS is like a mini movie in itself and becomes boring long before we see the title sequence which is good but embellished with a humdrum song. The premise is ok but the emphasis on Bond’s personal life is overdone and it’s pretty much all we’ve had over the 5 films and it’s become boring, boring, boring. The death of Leiter should have been poignant but it wasn’t, as the relationship hadn’t had time to develop into a proper friendship. Where the film scores is the island base, this is proper Bond stuff and what we have missed over Craig’s tenure. The ending is kind of sad, but because this Bond MkII, or Earth-2 Bond, has only been around for 5 films it doesn’t really have that OMG factor, Craig’s Bond hasn’t got into my heart like the Connery-Lazenby-Moore-Dalton era did. And to use the OHMSS music is sacrilege 🙁
Now that the 5 film reboot is over it’s time for a reassessment. CR is a brilliant film and stands alone as a genuine top Bond film in any era. QOS is a terrible movie, best forgotten. SK and SP are ok but too long and too much emphasis on Bond’s personal life. When I first saw SP I thought it was a fantastic entry but on further viewings it has paled somewhat. I think it was an experiment gone wrong. How much was influenced by Craig, I don’t know, he’s a decent actor but there has been far too much angst, I felt devastated for Lazenby’s Bond In OHMSS but cannot feel anywhere close to that for Craig’s Bond.
Was it worth the wait? Probably not. It’s ok, and aside from CR, that’s all it is for what followed.
I want Bond to have single missions, I want the villains to have nefarious plans to destroy the world, I want bases to be blown up at the end, I want Bond discarding lovers left right and centre, I want some fun back into the movies. Unless Amazon take it over I don’t think we will get it.
👍👍👍👍👍
Well said, CHB. Glad you finally saw the film, though- you've been waiting for a long time!
I'm impressed you had the strength of character to wait this long -I doubt I would!
@CoolHandBond You are not alone in your thoughts. Your last paragraph sums up my feelings exactly. I'm planning on taking in some of the Connery Bond films at my local Vue Cinema as an antidote to all this Craig-angst. SP and NTTD both have elements of Bond I love, but they have somehow contrived to ruin them both...
Any reason you didn't want to post the review in the NTTD thread?
congratulations @CoolHandBond on finally seeing the new Bondfilm. And with that, you are now qualified to read Ye Olde and Improved version Nay, Time to Die!
I've been encouraging others to use Spoiler tags for months because I knew you were the last regularly posting member who had not yet seen the film. But there are indoobitably a few lurkers out there who still dont know how it ends, so you might want to Spoiler tag some bits in your review
coolhand said;
... Earth-2 Bond ...
comic book reference! I approve! Perhaps in Bond26 we shall see CraigBond cross the dimensional barrier and team up with BrosnanBond to save the Multiverse, as the two Green Lanterns are doing in this classic scene. Except without the magic rings of course.
chris said:
Any reason you didn't want to post the review in the NTTD thread?
just looking at that subforum, the Reviews With Spoilers thread has sunk almost to the bottom of the first page, with many more specialised threads rising to the top. it may be hard to find now that its become less active?
Nice to see that I’m not alone in my thoughts!
@chrisno1 I didn’t really think about where to put my review - I might transpose it onto there as well.
@caractacus potts Please don’t give BB any more ideas about a multiverse 😂
I saw FRWL last night and this is probably old news but I’ve not noticed it before - in the PTS Morenzy says it took Grant 1 minute 52 seconds to kill the substitute James Bond, and that is the exact time of the real fight in the train, as I timed it!
An interesting double-header the other night. I think Barbel reviewed the first a couple of weeks back:
KING KONG (1933)
A film which virtually needs no introduction or explanation. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s classic stop-motion horror adventure still has the potential to thrill and delivers with some vibrancy and a healthy dose of technical sophistication. Bringing the monsters alive is the preserve of animator Willis O’Brien whose work inspired others, such as Ray Harryhausen. The magic is all up there on the screen. More modern viewers may find the whole rather quaint, but if you only wish to be entertained, rather than enthralled, King Kong works that magic all over again every time you see it.
Robert Armstrong’s Carl Denham is a maverick movie maker who enlists a ship’s company and a beautiful out-of-luck damsel in an effort to film the Eighth Wonder of the World: King Kong a giant gorilla whose domain is an unnamed Pacific island, identified only by its skull-like mountain. The natives live in fear of this godlike beast and have built an enormous wall to keep it at bay. When the filmmakers arrive and disturb a sacrificial ceremony, the tribal chief demands Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow replace the young native girl to compensate for this heresy. The interlopers refuse and later that night Ann is kidnapped and staked out for the gorilla’s dinner – except the beast takes a peculiar shine to Barbie doll sized Ann. There follows an extended chase sequence where Bruce Cabot’s ladies’ man Jack Driscoll pursues the ape-monster through the jungle and the only thing slowing up Kong are his fights with a tyrannosaurus rex, a gigantic lizard and a pterodactyl.
Rescue completed, Kong goes crackers and attacks the village hoping to find his fascinating blonde. Instead he’s gassed into unconsciousness and transported back to New York where, following a disastrous public unveiling, Kong runs amok, kidnaps Ann and climbs the Empire State Building where he’s finally brought to heel by a troop of flying aces who machine gun the poor beast to his doom.
Excitement galore, even if time-wise and logistics-wise the narrative makes no sense. The filmmakers famously claimed that the faster the picture moved the less likely an audience was to notice the continuity issues. They certainly succeed. Cooper was too meticulous, so his co-director insisted he only oversaw the miniature work – which took a year to complete – while Schoedsack himself dealt with the dialogue. They completed the live action work in a month and it shows. The performances are rushed and the characters underdeveloped. Chief among the raft of stereotypical players is Armstrong, whose Carl Denham is full of enthusiasm and brio, which might have been okay in 1933, but doesn’t work so well today when you just want him to shut up or slow down. He issues orders so fast you wonder how anyone ever understands what he wants them to do. It’s no wonder the expedition goes horrifically wrong.
Far better is Fay Wray, who famously screamed in a recording booth for a whole day to produce the soundtrack for Ann Darrow who emits the loudest and longest series of shrieks, cries and whelps the cinema has probably [still] ever heard. She’s believably naïve and quite gorgeous in that winsomely flapper style which was de rigour in Hollywood in the early thirties. She even shows some pre-Hays code daring by having the monster monkey dispose of most of her clothes, baring naked shoulders and, during Denham’s on-ship screen test, donning a diaphanous evening gown while quite obviously not wearing a brassiere. Bruce Cabot, who later found lasting fame as a villain in a film called Diamonds Are Forever, one of a small franchise based on some books by Ian Fleming, is competent as the rough neck who falls for her. He got the gig late as Joel McRea’s agent demanded too much money to make this thrill ride and The Most Dangerous Game back-to-back.
The giant gorilla is the best performer in the whole movie, although the close-ups of his face and right hand, both huge part-manoeuvrable mock-ups, leave something to be desired. Where Kong doesn’t disappoint is in the long distance shots, where his fur bristles and his roar – another splendid special effect – animate him even more than O’Brien’s model work. [The fur bristling is a technician's mistake; they are in fact the thumb and finger prints of the animator as he rearranged the model for the next frame; still, extremely life-like.] The battle with the T-Rex is probably the film’s high point among many high points. The two behemoths pound, crash and snap at each other while Kong roars, the dinosaur hisses, Fay Wray screams and Max Steiner’s orchestral music score compete for and assault our aural attention, a clamour of noise that audiences in 1933 must have considered deafening. In contrast the scene where Ann Darrow is kidnapped from the deck of the ship is carried out in complete silence, a moment of high drama and suspense before the blood-curdling screams and violence kick in.
By the time the movie reaches New York, it’s almost run out of puff. Switching the action from the jungle to the metropolis only just succeeds by virtue of its relative novelty value. They’d do this sort of thing with much more destructive tenacity in 21st century films, but those have less charm. Here, our sympathies switch from the imperilled Ann and Driscoll, to the captive Kong, displayed like a circus freak, chained up in a Broadway theatre for entertainment. Frightened by the camera flashes, he breaks free with ease – well, of course he would – and creates sufficient mayhem to make New York his own modern jungle. The climax is unusual for retaining our empathy for the monster, who is after all being horribly mistreated and only wants to protect poor Miss Darrow from the attentions of the public, be they sailors, natives or newspapermen. Carl Denham’s closing line that “It was beauty that killed the beast” has a neat ring of philosophical incongruity to it; he’s really absolving himself of blame: it was you who engineered it all along, Denham, you cruel, heartless, freakshow ringmaster.
King Kong is a fantastic film. There are misfortunes, but it’s really a technicians film: the visual and sound effects, the cinematography, set design, music and editing are all well above par. I’ve seen it in the cinema, where it looks and sounds even better. It loses something on the small screen – Kong just looks too wee on telly – but the film never ceases to be captivating. I know they make lists of ‘best this and that’ all the time these days, but King Kong is undoubtedly one of Hollywood’s greatest ever films and retains its glory despite a series of poor sequels, rip-offs and remakes.
Followed by this:
THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)
Part creature feature, extended allegory on the dangers of science dabbling in affairs it doesn’t understand – here the genus of an organic alien – in reality the discovery and exploitation of the nuclear fission – The Thing from Another World doesn’t quite succeed in being either. It gets fabulous retrospective reviews these days, but I found it distinctly underwhelming.
The major issue for me, was the whip-crack fast overlapping dialogue, which was done for authenticity, thus resulting in a faster than fast pace, but also succeeding in not telling the audience what anyone is saying, thinking or doing. You can barely catch a sentence during most of the scenes. The movie is fairly typical of the era.
Having just watched King Kong, I was fascinated to see James Arness’ ‘Thing’ appear in the silhouette of a broken doorway much how Kong is envisioned through the massive doors of the native’s island fortress wall. Arness is equally impressive, but isn’t in such an impressive film. The resolution is obvious. There’s no tension because the action is toilet: the notion this alien could just come and go into and out of the research centre without anyone realising is plain daft. John Carpenter’s 1982 reimagining of J.W. Campbell’s story Who Goes There at least retains the central premise, that the alien can take on the outward look of other life forms. The alien we have here is distinctly ordinary. He could just as easily be a big Russian.
Over seventy years on, there is still debate about whether Howard Hawks directed the film or the listed helmsman Christian Nyby. It has the dramatic pacing and rapid fire dialogue of a Hawks, but seems to lack any of his wit and atmosphere. Russell Harlan’s photography is a treat though, making California look like the North Pole is a minor miracle. Good set design. Nothing more.
Following a disastrous attempt to catch FRWL at the local Vue, I watched this sixties spy thriller instead :
MASQUERADE (1965)
Continuing my vain attempt to watch the fifty movies listed in Michael Richardson’s Guns, Girls and Gadgets [luckily I’ve seen half of them anyway, it’s the remainder which are proving difficult] this little number cropped up on Talking Pictures TV, which meant I could record it and watch it from the comfort of a sofa rather than at my desk from a laptop.
Masquerade is based on Victor Canning’s 1954 thriller Castle Minerva. Canning was once one of Britain’s bestselling novelists. Like this film, he’s virtually forgotten now, but his output is probably due for reassessment. I’d like to suggest Masquerade is also. Not because it’s an outstanding thriller [it isn’t] but because it displays a certain eloquent vim which the much similar fare of the sixties spy genre miss by a long chalk. It’s primary crime isn’t the messy plot, or the lack of action, but the central casting of American Cliff Robertson as the hero David Frazer.
The film is quite an early entry into the sixties spy subgenre, being released in April 1965, half a year after Goldfinger and another half before Thunderball. Compared to those archetypal gadget laden spy thrillers, Masquerade feels old hat. It hasn’t aged well, but part of the reason for that is Cliff Robertson, who is as charmless as a funeral procession. The film’s set up, its quintessential Englishness, the gently effervescent dialogue, the double, triple and quadruple cross demanded a lighter touch than his. David Niven was originally attached to the project and he would have been perfect for the part. You can detect it in the script. The damn thing was written for him! Apparently William Goldman was brought in at Robertson’s request to Americanise his role, but I can’t detect anything other than an offhand comment to the beautiful, abused Sophie: “You’re pretty kinky, baby, that’s a big bruise.” Robertson isn’t helped by being surrounded by a succession of competent British thespians and enthusiastic Europeans who make his efforts appear paltry in comparison. Chief among them are Jack Hawkins and Charles Grey, who act like, look like and sound like twins. It is no surprise to learn that when Hawkins’ throat cancer prevented him from speaking, Grey dubbed all his lines [see movies like When Eight Bells Toll]. Their ability to outshine one another and everyone else is the movie’s highlight.
Not only is the dialogue not squared to the main performer, but turning him into an American has led to a series of rewrites which don’t always come off. This native comparison, the fish-out-of-water scenario should, surely, be the source of humour, but it’s laboured and incompetent, either badly written or horrendously delivered. When Robertson is seducing Marisa Mell’s gypsy moll Sophie in the cockpit of a speedboat, I couldn’t help thinking of Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Kinky isn’t the half of it. He later makes love to the nominal heroine in a circus truck surrounded by birds of prey. She turns out to be married, which raised my eyebrows; kinky and adulterous. Her husband doesn’t seem to mind and merely shrugs with indifference.
Sophie’s been aiding our hero all along, but she’s not too hot at it. She’s simply hot. Her gang of circus gypsies have been charged with rekidnapping an Arab prince and hope to extract a high ransom from the Anglo-Media Oil Corporation. Anglo-Media need the young prince to sign an extension to their drilling rights in his middle east kingdom; the prince’s uncle, a scheming Roger Delgado, favours the Soviet Bloc and Britain fears losing a valuable primary commodity if the rightful heir is ‘deposed’. Drexel [Hawkins] has already hit on a plan to keep the prince safe from any attempted assassination and recruits Frazer to babysit the young lad for a fortnight. Frazer thinks it’d be easier to take over the little Emirati.
“These days we only invade a country when we’re invited or when the American’s allow us,” answers au fait spymaster John Le Mesurier, a line which sound remarkably prescient to modern ears. Le Mesurier’s role is virtually identical to his turns in Hot Enough for June and Where the Spies Are – he’d have suited very well with James Bond, if the producers could have squeezed in his brand of diffidence – at the end of the movie he exonerates one bad guy’s diabolical behaviour by remarking: “We trained him, you know.”
In fact the whole oil, middle east, US, UK stitch up is a familiar historical context, which stretches further back than the 1960s and 50s. The suspicion Charles Grey’s Benson has of Frazer also has its roots in the old imperial school tie. And the Britishers behaviour towards the frankly over indulged and downright obnoxious prince has all the earmarks of colonial superiority written over it. So too the upright batman’s attitude towards his American co-host: “They weren’t thinking of you, Sir,” he says bluntly when Frazer expresses his pleasure at the surrounds of the beautiful exotic Spanish villa, “I understand we’re expecting royalty.”
Drexel has the measure of everyone. A weary secret agent, he despises modern espionage as “passionless and practical.” He’s more a man of action, but recognises he’s falling far behind the times: “I can’t spot the bad guys anymore. That’s why I miss the war. All the bad guys were visible then.” This sounds very much like a line lifted directly from Canning’s novel and as the movie progresses and cross and double cross becomes triple and recross, you begin to see his point. Equally confused, Frazer has a fine time separating good from bad and ends up in fix after fix once the prince gets captured.
There’s great tension at a grand dilapidated coastal castle as Frazer goes mountaineering around its crumbling battlements and some rather fine visuals from photographer Otto Heller who mists the camera lens when Frazer drunkenly explores the fortress, so we see everything through his intoxicated eye, confused, disorientated and off-kilter. The masquerade begins to unravel for Frazer when he discovers Drexel is double dealing. Hawkins delivers a brilliant soliloquy musing on the spy trade: “I had scruples, but believe me they had to go… The jobs they put me to. What’s a patriot, David? I think I’m one, but I’ve killed patriots like me, just because they are on the other side. Sometimes I don’t think I know who’s right or wrong anymore. I had to lose my scruples and what did I get: a pat on the back.” Later on, with full understanding, Frazer bitterly points to Drexel’s unconscious, treacherous form, “There’s your patriotism.”
Towards the end of the film, as events spiral out of control for the gypsies, their leader intones of the ‘heroes’: “I hope they all kill each other.” This seems highly appropriate, although in Frazer’s case this is only because poor Cliff Robertson is undermining the film almost every time he’s on screen. The adventure ends in a moment of redemption for all and high excitement for the audience with a gun battle and the rescue of the prince atop a half constructed dam.
Filmed in 1964, the film isn’t anything like the later outrageous sex and spying escapades of Matt Helm or the more down market Euro-Spy flicks, it’s trying to be suave and sophisticated, but it’s star is neither and it shows. A little scene where the prince is reading the movie tie-in of Goldfinger and says “A little farfetched, don’t you think?” seems to hint at where director Basil Dearden and producer Michael Relph wanted to take the story, but it never quite gets out of third gear, spending most of the time trundling in second. It’s a good natured, but a grumbling second.
I’d seen Masquerade once before, on it’s TV premier I think way back in the late seventies, and it gets extremely rare outings on any sort of channel these days, so I was pleased to be able to revisit the movie. I was slightly disappointed, as I remembered it being better than this, but when you’re ten, it probably seems a better than okay kind of film because you’d miss the jarring tones. The movie was marketed as a comedy thriller, but it isn’t funny enough and conversely not serious enough either so it rather falls into a metaphorical chasm, like the one the heroes flee across at the denouement. Still, a worthwhile effort and a more valiant and valid attempt at an espionage thriller than some.
TRANSPORTER 3 (2008)
Flashy and fast, Transporter 3 reverts back to the template of the original by virtue of performing all its stunts for real, putting some of the recent OO7 fare to shame. There is a final car jump which is both preposterous and impossible to perform without grandiose SFX, but they hide it very well.
The film has had mixed to poor reviews from the public, chiefly because it doesn’t utilise Jason Statham’s martial arts expertise enough, preferring endless car chases. That doesn’t bother me. I was more interested in the rapid fire editing and scene shifting, the stuttering camera work and the wholly incompetent plot, aspects of filmmaking which normally annoy the hell out of me, but seem not to matter here. I mean, it’s tosh, we all know it, and Transporter 3 really is a better experience if you leave your brain at the door.
There’s plenty to enjoy including Natalya Rudakova’s much maligned but provocatively slinky Valentina, the ‘package’ Statham’s Frank Martin has to escort to Odessa via Budapest. Rudakova’s been roundly heavily criticised, but the poor girl’s a novice and director Olivier Megaton doesn’t exactly help her, preferring moody glances out of car windows to any sort of character development. I rather like the way she softens towards the transporter as he gets her into and out of various scraps. Exactly why he’s escorting her isn’t made entirely clear – the biggest narrative error is the fact a transporter isn’t required – but it’s a boy-girl buddy movie thing and the two leads sparkle quite well with each other, although the strip tease in the meadow has to rank as one of the most uncomfortable erotic viewing experiences of recent years.
Good mindless fun.
Red Heat (1988)
This Arnold Schwartzenegger actioner is better than I remember it from the VHS days of old. I suspect writer/director Walter Hill (The Long Riders, , 48 Hours, Extreme Prejudice) can be thanked for this. In many ways this is a gritty thriller with some action and dry humor. Schwartzenegger plays Ivan Danko, a Moscow police officer figthing a brutal organized crime that barely existed officially in the Soviet Union. He follows a criminal to the US where he teams up with the sweary cop Art Ridzik (Jim Beluchi). Lawrence Fishburn and Gina Gershon got early roles in Red Heat. We get a silenced revolver (!), punches that sound like cannon shots and Arnie, but generally the movie is pretty down to earth. With small changes Danko could've been played by Rutger Hauer, Stellan Skarsgård or Peter Weller. I also like how the Russian characters speak Russian to each other. Not a single word of English is spoken in the first 15-20 minutes. I enjoyed Red Heat.
Red Heat (1988) full movie English : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
C'mon @chrisno1 after your attempt to infiltrate Prince Charles Cinema to see OHMSS - about as sucessful as blondie's attempt to blag his way up to Piz Gloria - I can't be the only one who wants to know how you didn't make it to see FRWL when the cinema this time is just down the road from you...
Roger Moore 1927-2017