I first saw this as part of the a double-bill called Grindhouse, where it played with another film called Death Proof directed by Quentin Tarantino. This was definitely the superior of the two. Grindhouse portrayed a cinema-going experience like in the 70’s where 2 exploitation movies played in one performance, you also had the commercials and previews of upcoming films - it was all done superbly.
Planet Terror was directed by Robert Rodriguez and starred Rose McGowan and Michael Biehn. A bio-chemical outbreak causes a towns population to turn into zombies and a rogue military unit try to restore order. Naveen Andrews and Jeff Fahey from the Lost TV series have major roles and very good they are, too. Bruce Willis turns up as well, I don’t remember seeing his name on the credits so maybe he was uncredited but he’s great in this. It’s very violent and has all the attributes of a 70’s exploitation flick, including scratchy film stock, jerky editing and breaks in sound, it’s wonderful stuff to those who experienced this sort of cinema going.
Very good, especially more so if you like the genre.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Grindhouse used to be a staple of London's Prince Charles cinema, not sure why they don't show it ever now as it's right up their alley, I had a great evening seeing it. It's odd the stuff they choose to recycle instead.
Rita Tushingham’s virgin Nancy arrives in London and gets seduced by Ray Brooks’ ladies’ man Tolen while his infatuated landlord Colin, a youthful Michael Crawford, watches on, appalled and fascinated.
This audience was appalled and fascinated too by this archetypal swinging sixties movie which benefits from a jazzy John Barry score and some excellent photography from David Watkin. Fresh from A Hard Day’s Night and the Beatles, Richard Lester adapts Ann Jellicoe’s frank stage play as if he’s still got the Fab Four in front of the camera. Two sequences stand out: Crawford and Donal Donnelly’s extended walk around London whilst pushing Rita Tushingham on an iron bed frame and a cleverly edited shuffle of opening and closing doors. Both could easily have been dropped into a Beatles’ movie. [The Monkees reinterpreted the former in an episode of their T.V. series – an obvious homage to Lester, not the Beatles.] The film hasn’t got much going for it other than an excellent performance from Rita Tushingham – a quirkily beautiful actress who should really have achieved more but became slightly typecast as the naïve waif. Jellicoe’s angle that the sexually dominant modern male can be made impotent when threatened gets buried under a raft of silliness and absurdities. The Greek Chorus of disapproving older generation observers doesn’t help matters. Nor does the use of the word r-a-p-e to represent sex. This is very unsettling to the modern ear. The nominal hero, Colin, eventually gets his girl, and Tolen, a beastly lothario in any era, gets a suitable intellectually satisfying comeuppance.
Despite its classy, black and white look, and a host of excellent contemporary notices, including a Palm D’Or at Cannes, The Knack exhibits some troublesome one dimensional opinions, because of which it has not aged well.
I've never sat down and watched that film from start to finish. Actor Ray Brooks of course went on to be the voice of 1970s children's TV character Mr Benn.
Harum Scarum is one of the oddest entries into the Elvis Presley canon. It’s a mangled version of an Arabian Night’s tale only instead of Ali Baba or Sinbad we have Johnny Tyrone, a singing film star who endures a series of escapades while visiting the ancient middle eastern kingdom of Lunarkan. Tyrone is on a goodwill mission for the U.S. government, who want to purchase the rights to the country’s oil fields, located in the Valley of the Mountains of the Moon. Unfortunately for Johnny, Lunarkan has been so isolated his trip becomes “a journey two thousand years into the past.” The country really is packed full of camels, dancing girls, exotic gardens, exotic girls, thieves, pretty girls, market places, slave girls, splendid buildings, bosomy girls busting all over, you get the idea. The movie really does feel like its escaped from Cecil B. De Mille’s roster of sword, sex and scandal entertainment. Indeed, the sets were originally used for his 1927 Biblical epic The King of Kings, so cinematically we really are heading back to a couple of millennia. Well, not quite that far, for one villainous heavy continually sports a sub-machine gun, the sole concession to the modern era.
Unused to the magic of cinema, the enemies of Lunarkan’s chess-playing King mistake Johnny’s performance karate skills for a professional deadly martial art, and kidnap him, hoping first to bribe then blackmail the star into assassinating the monarch. Unknown to the League of Assassins, Johnny has fallen in love with the King’s daughter and, after a series of captures, fights, narrow escapes and song-and-dance numbers, the devious plot is foiled and Johnny returns to Las Vegas with his Arab bride and troupe of dancing girls to entertain the gambling crowds.
Harum Scarum is listed as one of The 100 Most Entertaining Bad Films and you can see why. It genuinely has epic sweep and if it wasn’t for a hopelessly out-of-place lead and the need to fulfil his manager’s insatiable need for Elvis to sing, it might just have passed muster as an actual Arabian Night’s flick. Director Gene Nelson and writer Gerald Drayson Adams try really hard to create something different. The movie starts as a movie within a movie, Elvis saves a stranded beauty, battles a gang of Bedouin thieves and knocks out a leopard with a judo chop. I assume the poor animal wasn’t harmed. He sings My Desert Serenade and the camera pans back to reveal an audience of watching dignitaries, one of whom is the King’s brother and another the slinky double agent Ayesha.
She drugs Johnny on a desert safari after promising him a ravishing experience: “There are not too many nights like this – This one’s not over yet.” When Johnny recovers he’s singing Mirage in a harem, but genuinely believes he’s dreaming, until one of the girls tries to kiss him. He’s trapped in the villain’s sumptuous Summer Palace. Jay Novello always makes a decent villain – how can we ever forget his deranged Caligula in The Robe? – but he’s dreadful here, putting in a turn which wouldn’t look out of place in Batman. He’s out acted by Fran Jeffries as Ayesha, who, since we’re on the subject of Batman, wears a catsuit which would rival Lee Merriweather. Where would you get a catsuit in a country stuck two-thousand years in the past?
Johnny / Elvis – they’re virtually inseparable – escapes with the help of a sneaky thief who insists on referring to the American as “my honest / rich / humble / wonderful / exalted… client”. You can fill in the blanks. His obsequiousness is a horrendous bore. Falling in with this gang of thieves, Elvis meets the Princess Shalimar, but believes her to be a slave girl. The two fall in love with the speed of a flying carpet. This proves handy as she recognises Elvis when he attempts to carry out the assassination [or does he?]. Thrown in jail with his band of thieving brothers, Elvis manages to escape yet again and convince the King of his innocence. Revolution and counter-revolution occur and the oil fields bring riches to all.
At the end, I was rather hoping the director would pan back and reveal an audience watching a movie within a movie again, but no one's that clever here. It would be nice to say the thing has sparkle and charm, but it really doesn’t. Elvis is sleepwalking through the motion picture, not even coming alive for the fight scenes, especially as they descend into farce. The supporting cast is doing a terrible day’s work. No, it really does look as if they filmed Harum Scarum in a few days. Mary Ann Mobly [Princess Shalimar] was Miss America in 1959 and no doubt used to wearing swimsuits, so she fills out her tiny costumes appropriately well. She featured as the bikini clad ‘bad girl’ in the same year’s Girl Happy. A glutton for Elvis punishment then. Her career nosedived from here and she ended up on T.V.’s Different Strokes, which hits about the same infantile level as this movie. No one else is worthy of note, partly because the screenplay, such as it is, features cliché after cliché and only serves as a signpost for songs.
And what of those ‘songs’? Elvis runs through five numbers in the first eighteen minutes which must be a record. The songs have a vague middle-eastern flavour and are all half-paced and slightly swing, more suited to The Andy Williams Show. Elvis is crooning hard here: on Go East Young Man he dons a tux and serenades an audience in a cocktail lounge. It’s like watching an inferior Sinatra at the Sands. Elvis tries, but his material is so terrible, he’s made to look a singing fool. Shake That Tambourine is a rock n roll dirge of such inferior quality it’s no surprise the director cuts it short for another fight and chase scene. The moment where Elvis sings Hey Little Girl to a twelve-year old who gyrates amorously in a dress slit to the hip is distinctly unsettling in 2022; I’m not sure what they made of it in 1965. Kismet at least attempts to be imaginative in its staging, having Princess Shalimar imagine Elvis singing to her from the palace’s fountain pool. The song however is sub-It’s Now Or Never; very poor. Another disastrous slow roller, Harem Holiday, bookends the film and was used as the movie’s U.K. title, probably because no one knew what a Harum Scarum was. I had to look it up: daredevil, reckless, foolhardy, irresponsible.
This Dario Argento movie is about an American girl (Jennifer Connelly) who becomes a pupil at a girls' school in Switzerland. A serial killer is murdering girls her age in the area, which is very unfortunate. Connelly's character has a special connection to insects. They never hurt her and she can even command them. She meets a professor who's an expert on insects, especially the use of insects to date dead bodies. He is also wheelchair-bound and a chimpanzee helps him in his daily tasks. The professor is played by Donald Pleasant who plays him Scottish and friendly. I like how the movie changes the overused serial killer story by focusing on insects and the supernatural connection the lead has to them. In my opinion Phenomena could've been even better by dailing down the gore we get in a few scenes and focusing more on the crime mystery and the lead's special abilities. This is Jennifer Connelly's first lead role and she was only fifteen.at the time, but it's clear she had the talent and looks to become a star. The score contains music by several bands including Iron Maiden and Motorhead. With the exception of a scene were we get a song I think this works well.
(At first I thought the first spoken lines in the movie were in Norwegian, but it turned out it was a Dane with clear diction)
There are bodies being found drained of blood around Paris. Suspicion falls on a local theatre, especially the director. Since he's played by Christopher Lee that seems inevitable, but there are a few twists to the plot to work through...
As well as Lee, we have two more actors who would later be in Bond films - Julian Glover, uncharacteristically playing the hero (or is he...?), and Joseph Furst who would play Professor Dr Metz in DAF.
It's not a Hammer film though several Hammer regulars worked on it. Oddly paced but enjoyable for horror fans.
A UK channel called London Live punches beneath its weight, tonight it featured the first two opening episodes of the classic 1970s sitcom Rising Damp, with a disclaimer onscreen explaining its outdated attitudes. Unlike with the Talking Pictures TV channel, you wouldn't know it was on even if you followed the channel on Twitter. They were followed by the conspiracy thriller Capricorn One starring would be Bond James Brolin and Elliot Gould.
The premise borrows from the idea that the moon landings were faked, and that various people associated with the project died in mysterious circumstances - nowadays it's anyone associated with Putin whose death appears suspect - oh, and the likes of Jeffery Epstein I guess - and the film outlines how less attention is paid by the President and the public to space exploration, and how this trip to Mars is intended to change all that. However, a cost-cutting fault is exposed in the run-up and rather than cancel, the three astronauts are strong armed into faking the Mars landing in the studio.
Eilliot Gould plays the investigative reporter who smells a rat but finds his mate on the space program - the one who usually says, 'You'll never believe this, we've got Willard Whyte on the line wanting to speak to you...' disappears. Gould provides some much needed humour against the astronauts' straight faced heroics, would be or otherwise.
Do you find some films have a mental age? I enjoyed this as a teenager and I enjoyed it again tonight, but it doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny, even leaving aside the difficulty of a trip to Mars just a few years ahead of the moon landings. Films for kids like Peter Pan and The Jungle Book don't have a mental age, adults can enjoy it just as much, you don't suddenly think, rubbish, to believe in Peter Pan and that he can fly, or how come a kid is talking with jungle animals. But here, it's not plausible that a big conspiracy such as this - it's not quite clear how far it goes up and how many it encompasses - can see folk disappear but our loner journalist friend doesn't just get a bullet in the back of his head during the course of his investigations. It's a sort of comedy conspiracy thriller, which you don't often get, do you? I suppose you could argue Moonraker came close. I remember the funny moments, not least courtesy of one of our own, Telly Zavala's' (autocorrect) crop-dusting pilot but it doesn't much meet up with the serious stuff in the other part of the movie.
There are some eerie moments and the finale of the film will put you in mind of 60s Bond films, namely the helicopter chase in You Only Live Twice and the Nevada section of Diamonds are Forever. The music drives it along, the direction is good.
No, not the superhero, it’s the true life tale of Donald Neilson, nicknamed The Black Panther, who killed several post office masters during robberies and kidnapped heiress Lesley Whittle for ransom. Donald Sumpter is excellent as the cold, domineering villain who slays his victims without compunction. The movie was controversial at the time because little time was left between the actual happenings and the movie being produced, it is tautly directed and well acted. Usually in true life stories the villain has some redeeming feature or two but Neilson has none and treats his wife and daughter appallingly. Now showing on Amazon.
Very Good.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A big hit in 1953, particularly in France for some reason. A rather timid exposé of Salome, step-daughter of Herod who according to the Bible danced for the king and received John the Baptist’s severed head as reward.
Rita Hayworth seems too old to play the part and offers too modern an interpretation. The scenes where she’s chastising Stewart Granger’s Roman centurion sound as if they are mixing genres: the words are all historical hokum but the acting would be more at home in a film noir domestic. The cast is high powered, but no one’s really trying, except perhaps Charles Laughton who’s very watchable as a nervy, obsessed Herod, a man in thrall to his physical lusts and in fear of his preordained death. Judith Anderson overacts as Herodias. Her scheming comes across as extremely devious and slightly hysterical. Nobody, not even her own daughter, is excluded from exploitation. Because it was made in the fifties, the film can’t quite tell what it wants to, although we can easily read between the lines, just like Rita Hayworth does when Herodias suggests she dance for Herod: “Every woman who dances for the king becomes his possession” she breathes but with only a hint of fear crossing her eyes. Having suddenly become a follower of Jesus Christ, like her lover Claudius [Granger], she unfathomably decides to dance for Herod in the vain hope she’ll distract the King long enough for the Baptist to be rescued. Skewing a fabled story for the purposes of making your lead actress appear to be a good girl doesn’t cut it here. Salome’s always been a bad one all-round and trying to paint a different portrait doesn’t really hold water. Quite why anyone would be convinced to swap religions by newcomer Alan Badel’s bug-eyed John the Baptist remains to be explained; he looks as if insanity not Godliness has infected him.
So acting is rough, script a bit dodgy, the sets are fine if a bit clean, cinematography gaudy, music a bit naff – lots of trumpet voluntaries – costumes completely inauthentic, a lot of very dull sermons are delivered; I’d like to say it’s fun, but it’s not. The whole thing is undercooked and even the fabled Dance of the Seven Veils can’t raise the temperature. Salome rode on the back of Quo Vadis and was one of the first in Hollywood’s cycle of sword and sandal epics, which climaxed a decade later with Cleopatra and The Fall of the Roman Empire. There were worse Biblical / historical epics to come than this, but there were also much, much better ones.
The UK's Channel 5 continues its Dirty Harry season with this sequel from 1973, keeping pace with the Bond films. Likewise there are a couple of scenes that nod to that year's Live and Let Die so you wonder if the Broccoli and Saltzman camp didn't have spies on set. Could the awful tsunami scene in Die Another Day have been inspired by a snow avalanche scene in that year's competitor, xXx?
This is an odd film in some ways. It's more episodic than the first it seems, because that one had isolated scenes to show us what our man was like, here it's a case of let's see him put through his paces, it's exciting, bigger budget but contrived. At times I was reminded of the scene in Superman: The Movie where he spends an evening around Metropolis - but surely really New York City - doing good deeds by taking out criminals.
Yet the film aims to redeem the Frisco cop too. His lack of love life in the first film is not quite addressed. Yet in one scene it's said that a group of rookie cops were thought to be - using the parlance of the time - 'queers' and Harry replies 'I'd have all the police department queers if they shot as good as that' which earns an odd stray look from a passing cop. Soon, as if to address that and the fact he passed over the advances of a fellow cop's estranged wife, an Oriental young lady makes a pass that he takes her up on, but it makes little obvious sense. She is in the flat downstairs, she claims not to know him or have seen him in several months so why is she immediately saying 'What does it take for you to go to bed with a woman?' It's as if the scene is there to 'reassure' the audience that our man isn't gay.
Likewise, he has an about turn with the whole renegade right-wing approach to law and order, as he is contrasted with someone or someones on the street looking to take the law into their own hands by wiping out known criminals. Harry has no such 'ideals' about joining them. We also see him hang out with kids by a fellow cop's wife.
The actor who played the villain in last night's Capricorn One also pops up here as Harry's superior and I'm not sure any of the other cast in the first film returns for this one. I enjoyed it, it's good to see how much was cribbed for the later Lethal Weapon films - scenes of soft porn debauchery with bare breasts in luxury penthouse settings, reference to a leading man's tragic romantic past, the shooting range, nasty objects going through car windscreens etc. David Soul pops up in a small role, very different in persona to his Starsky one. The murders are very brutal and it's not convincing there'd be no witnesses but I guess then you have no movie.
I have vague knowledge of the others. One has the brunette woman from the series Cagney and Lacey, I guess like David Soul in Magnum Force doing a sort of audition for their later TV cop roles. Another I think I saw in the mid 1980s, some lecherous serial killer on the loose, in one scene a man's tanned hands rub themselves over a compliant woman's full naked breasts in the bath - the sort of thing that stays with you - and the lead lady makes some 'come on' to Harry, as if to say... oh why am I writing this at midnight, I should go to bed, but my point is it all seemed a bit pre-Basic Instinct, well would have done had I any fore knowledge if you see what I mean. Didn't quite hit the spot at the time and Clint Eastwood seemed past his sell by as an actor, he was considering Mel Gibbons was on his way up, and Clint would up doing crap like Pink Cadillac, but then like Connery he had a career renaissance with films like Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire, which was really a superior Dirty Harry movie.
The other was the one with Liam Neeson and a toy car with a bomb in it, that seemed pretty rubbish.
A bit of a Hitchock-like comedy thriller set on a cross-country train with Gene Wilder on good form up against Patrick McGoohan and others, including Richard Kiel (with metal adorned teeth and all). The first half is primarily concerned with Wilder flirting with an attractive fellow passenger and suspecting a murder has taken place. He also manages to get ejected from the train twice and has to catch up with it in memorable ways including a flight in a Tiger Moth with a crazy old woman. Also, there's a very amusing scene with Clifton James playing a policeman who isn't far removed from Sheriff JW Pepper. All great stuff. He then hooks up with Richard Pryor who joins him for the second half of the film, culminating in a nice runaway train climax. I first saw this on TV in mid 2000s, and have wanted to go back and rewatch it for a long time. It's currently streaming on The Criterion Channel (leaving at the end of the month).
I saw Casino Royale in the cinema thanks to the 60th Anniversary re-release events. I think we all know how effective this film can be and Craig gives a fantastically steely, cold performance, while Eva Green is sublime. There's an undercurrent of dry wit which balances the savage yet clinical nature of the film's violence, while the relatively grounded stuntwork is another bonus; seeing the Miami airport sequence play out on the big screen is a treat and a half. The film's not perfect, though; some of the pacing, with the Miami and Madagascar action scenes crammed into the first act, could be improved and the plot twist that Mathis is a traitor is undermined by the subsequent developments which take place regarding this character in Quantum of Solace. Still, these are minor flaws and what the audience is left with is a supremely confident and complex Bond film, one of the series' highlights.
The new neighbours in the downstairs apartment seem ideal. They spruce up the garden and redecorate. Both wives are pregnant and become friends, an accident on the stairs after a dinner together causes tension and then Kate becomes paranoid that the new couple are not what they seem. This is a well worn theme but it’s handled very well, David Morrisey as the uptight new neighbour is, as usual, excellent. There is no padding in this well constructed thriller, it comes in at under 90 minutes and is all the more better for it. The ending doesn’t really have a twist because it’s fairly obvious what will happen, but the portrayal of mystery and paranoia is well done.
7/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Tom Selleck stars as an honest cop who is framed by two bent cops and rather than go for a mitigating plea, argues 'Not Guilty' and is sent to jail for 8 years. He is released on parole after 3 but during that time we see him endure the injustices and brutality of jail. On his exit, he sets out to win justice. Not so much the Shawshank Redemption as The Shawshank Revenge though watchable. The arrogant bent cops do much of the heavy lifting here so you want to see their comeuppance but I think the actor's Abel Ferraro who is the wily con in whom Selleck confides eventually. As I wrote earlier, films have a mental age and this one is in its late teens it seems. no two bent cops would be in a situation where they would get caught out, it's rarely a case of two bad apples. It's a bit simplistic and low budget then but it's fun to compare the villains with those other two cops of the late 80s, Riggs and Murtaph.
I’ve been meaning to see this renowned movie for years, an Agatha Christie murder style mystery with a stellar ensemble cast and directed by Robert Altman of MASH and McCABE & MRS MILLER fame, what’s not to like? Well, for a start it crawls along at a snails pace and the murder doesn’t take place until 75 minutes into the movie. Up to then we are treated to a sumptuous version of tv’s Upstairs, Downstairs and it’s all extremely boring as we learn of the troubles of the rich upstairs and the servants downstairs. Most of them have cause to hate the host of shooting party at the country estate Gosford Park, and after he has been murdered inept police Inspector Stephen Fry comes along to try and solve the mystery but by then it’s far too late to save this turgid movie which for some unknown reason has been feted by film critics around the world. There are far too many characters and it becomes confusing and nothing remotely interesting happens and by the end I couldn’t care less about who had fathered who and who was rogering who. Very disappointing.
3/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Two criminals kidnap a young woman for ransom. Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston are convincing as the ex-cons and our own Gemma Arterton is excellent in the difficult role of the kidnapped woman. There are no other actors in the entire film and mainly takes place in the secured room where they keep her awaiting the payoff. There are some twists and turns along the way and a couple of plot holes but in the main this is a taut thriller which holds the attention.
6/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
At long last I’ve managed to see this and to be honest it wasn’t worth the wait. The action scenes are great but everything else is ho-hum. Tom Cruise is in his “aren’t I marvellous” mode, the bar scene with Kelly McGillis is so embarrassingly cringeworthy that even the American Pie movie franchise would have rejected the idea. I was 30 when this was released and even then I would have been 15 years too old for this. I know this film gets a lot of praise on this site so I’ll just say that I’ve come to the party too late, maybe another time, another place, I’d have liked it.
The action scenes earn this all the points given, they are terrific.
5/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
A whodunnit with some nicely meta touches. Without wanting to say too much, it has an excellent cast (inc our own John Cleese in a very small but naturally amusing part) and naturally lots of twists and turns. It revolves around Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" without actually being a film of it, and that's about all I can say without giving things away.
For those who don’t know, The Sweeney is cockney rhyming slang for Flying Squad (Sweeney Todd - Flying Squad), the elite department within the metropolitan police force. This is a television spin-off from the popular series which ran for 4 seasons between 1975-1978 and is basically a double length episode albeit with added nudity and stronger bad language. Inspector Regan and Sergeant Carter lead the squad as they foil armed robberies and investigate a political scandal involving OPEC which leads to Regan being hunted down by assassins. The squad are a hard drinking, womanising bunch, it’s difficult to imagine Regan and Carter dancing the macarena with a group of woke activists in this day and age, their favourite line is “We’re the Sweeney and we haven’t had any breakfast, so get your trousers on, you’re nicked!”
Its nostalgic to see London in the 70’s, this is a rough, tough movie and made enough money to gain a sequel the following year.
7/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
For a mid-1950s crime drama, Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo looks and feels much more like a mid-1960s international thriller. It's set in Japan, and I think was shot entirely on location, with eyepopping colours and widescreen CinemaScope visuals to rival any of the glamorous spy capers of the next decade. Yet this is a far more street level tale than that, as a miltary police detective goes undercover with a gang of Americans led by always great Robert Ryan. The plot unfolds at a steady, but well judged pace and builds to a memorable climax in a Tokyo amusement park, with those great compositions that remind me of some of the Hitchcock films which come to a head atop a striking monument. The authentic location work also gives the film an added edge of a travelogue element a bit like You Only Live Twice would attempt over a decade later. In an age of many a studio-bound film noir, this is a refreshingly exotic take on the subgenre.
Charles Bronson stars as Wild Bill Hickok who is travelling incognito, he is haunted by dreams of a white buffalo and teams up with Sioux Chief Crazy Horse to kill it. There’s a good supporting cast including Jack Warden, Clint Walker, Stuart Whitman, Ed Lauter, John Carradine, Kim Novak and Cuckoo’s Nest Will Sampson as Crazy Horse. The problem is the animatronic buffalo is not very good and is only used in obvious studio shots with close-ups and quick editing. It’s directed by long time Bronson collaborator J. Lee Thompson who is no stranger to action movies but it’s all a bit flat. Without any rousing action John Barry presumably found it was difficult to write a Magnificent Seven/ Big Country style score and it remains an oddity in his filmography. I don’t know, but perhaps the reason he didn’t score TSWLM was because he was engaged on this film?
Bronson is good in his role and it’s reasonably interesting but ultimately, just so-so.
5/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
After a week's break, Channel 5 continues its run off Dirty Harry films - reverting to HD letterbox presentation too!
Another stupid and offensive instalment of this dumb and offensive series then. Which I enjoyed...
Missed the first half hour because I thought they'd stopped running them - then remembered Five + 1 so I caught it on that, not HD though. However, I remembered to wear my little-worn upgraded specs, so I sort of remedied it that way. I impress myself sometimes.
Now, tbf, this series was more enjoyable a few weeks ago in the midst of a heatwave, hot evenings with a glass of beer in my hand. That seems a long time ago now, and it's not so much a week of mourning Her Majesty - or rather the TV mourning her - that has changed my mood, it just autumnal now and a beer feels less right, I'm less into my heatwave guilty pleasures, being tempted by gimmick T-shirts on Amazon, soft core top shelf magazines at the local newsagents, seaside attractions... Not saying I yield to such temptations, but...
Also, tbf, these films were a year or more apart so without video or DVD or having had them shown on TV yet, the obvious formula would have been less obvious. In fact, typing this I called the film Magnum Force, which was the second one, the titles tend to blend in. Anyway, instead of being put up against straw men arguments and superiors, our hero is up against a straw woman, a matron-like pompous type who wants to introduce more women into the police force, sort of positive discrimination. Harry objects - not because he's a sexist pig, natch - but because the one presented has no experience in the field so will get shot dead and be a danger to her partner. Fair enough, but it's hopeless straw man argument, I mean it wouldn't have to be like that, a novice paired up on a hugely dangerous case with a maverick cop.
It's funny how Harry's bosses seem to change from film to film, so he's always having the same arguments, different people. Eastwood is looking older here, his hair is receding a bit, he seems tall and creaky, he's not quite like his old self in the poster above. So he seems to strike an avuncular look with some of his younger partners, sort of protective. That has him risk looking more like an old reactionary than a young buck with an uncomplicated attitude to law enforcement and the film seems aware of that, treading a fine balancing act. He liaises almost with a black supercool gangster of sorts and has a kind of rapport. The young radical terrorists have vaguely defined agendas - later we find actually they're just in it for the money, so Harry Callaghan can go after them without qualms. As Broccoli shrewdly noted with the original villains in The Spy Who Loved Me a year after this, you don't want scrambled sympathies from the audience, esp when your leading man is not so young any more.
The film is dumb. The villains' kills are nasty and sadistic. It's odd, a film like Goldfinger is more far-fetched and outrageous but is not dumb, here the milieu if that's the right word is realistic. It's a cop on the Frisco streets, no fantastic car chases, just guns and stuff but the dialogue and set-ups are dumb. Some films have a mental age it seems, this one's is 17 or 18 if that, sort of an insult except of course if you're that age, this is the film for you. Other movies, as you get older, you start to see through them.
The main advantage here is Harry's new partner - 'a woman!' as Bond might say - and she's played by Tess Daly (oops! I mean Tyne Daly) who went on to be in TV's Cagney & Lacey. She's great in that and here - sort of nervy, eager to please, a bit like a young Judy Garland, she works well with the unimpressed Callaghan. Again, the film toys with Harry's single status - a cool guy yet with no mates and no sex life it seems. You can't see him down the pub with a gang, so he's the loner in splendid isolation, appealing perhaps to other loners who like to see their situation cast in a happier light. Bond is a bit the same - you never see him with a peer group waiting his turn to speak, etc. Not great role models and you have to ask yourself, if they were not played by charismatic actors, how appealing with their modus operandi really be? Not very.
So Callaghan is shown going in with his studs up in various situations which really could end up going either way but because it's in the script, he wins. Again, some scenes reminded me of the much later In the Line of Fire, which is really a Dirty Harry movie with a superior presentation. The ultimate stupid scene is the finale, where our hero does something so dumb - takes his young partner with him to attack a gang of terrorists on Alcatraz island with no back up or notifying anyone. It's not the woman cop's fault it goes the way it does, it's all done for some phoney emotional finale.
What's annoying is, a few tweaks and they could have accounted for this train of events more convincingly. Anyway, I enjoyed Eastwood's performance and will tune in for the next one anyway. This film lacked the eeriness of its two predecessors, it's all increasingly straightforward stuff and it doesn't want to alienate. I wonder how that old cop film Freebie and the Bean compares? It's been years since I saw that. Alan Arkin and James Caan I think. That's not been on for years.
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PLANET TERROR (2007)
I first saw this as part of the a double-bill called Grindhouse, where it played with another film called Death Proof directed by Quentin Tarantino. This was definitely the superior of the two. Grindhouse portrayed a cinema-going experience like in the 70’s where 2 exploitation movies played in one performance, you also had the commercials and previews of upcoming films - it was all done superbly.
Planet Terror was directed by Robert Rodriguez and starred Rose McGowan and Michael Biehn. A bio-chemical outbreak causes a towns population to turn into zombies and a rogue military unit try to restore order. Naveen Andrews and Jeff Fahey from the Lost TV series have major roles and very good they are, too. Bruce Willis turns up as well, I don’t remember seeing his name on the credits so maybe he was uncredited but he’s great in this. It’s very violent and has all the attributes of a 70’s exploitation flick, including scratchy film stock, jerky editing and breaks in sound, it’s wonderful stuff to those who experienced this sort of cinema going.
Very good, especially more so if you like the genre.
Grindhouse used to be a staple of London's Prince Charles cinema, not sure why they don't show it ever now as it's right up their alley, I had a great evening seeing it. It's odd the stuff they choose to recycle instead.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE KNACK AND HOW TO GET IT (1965)
Rita Tushingham’s virgin Nancy arrives in London and gets seduced by Ray Brooks’ ladies’ man Tolen while his infatuated landlord Colin, a youthful Michael Crawford, watches on, appalled and fascinated.
This audience was appalled and fascinated too by this archetypal swinging sixties movie which benefits from a jazzy John Barry score and some excellent photography from David Watkin. Fresh from A Hard Day’s Night and the Beatles, Richard Lester adapts Ann Jellicoe’s frank stage play as if he’s still got the Fab Four in front of the camera. Two sequences stand out: Crawford and Donal Donnelly’s extended walk around London whilst pushing Rita Tushingham on an iron bed frame and a cleverly edited shuffle of opening and closing doors. Both could easily have been dropped into a Beatles’ movie. [The Monkees reinterpreted the former in an episode of their T.V. series – an obvious homage to Lester, not the Beatles.] The film hasn’t got much going for it other than an excellent performance from Rita Tushingham – a quirkily beautiful actress who should really have achieved more but became slightly typecast as the naïve waif. Jellicoe’s angle that the sexually dominant modern male can be made impotent when threatened gets buried under a raft of silliness and absurdities. The Greek Chorus of disapproving older generation observers doesn’t help matters. Nor does the use of the word r-a-p-e to represent sex. This is very unsettling to the modern ear. The nominal hero, Colin, eventually gets his girl, and Tolen, a beastly lothario in any era, gets a suitable intellectually satisfying comeuppance.
Despite its classy, black and white look, and a host of excellent contemporary notices, including a Palm D’Or at Cannes, The Knack exhibits some troublesome one dimensional opinions, because of which it has not aged well.
I've never sat down and watched that film from start to finish. Actor Ray Brooks of course went on to be the voice of 1970s children's TV character Mr Benn.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Ray Brooks was also in the brilliant TV series Big Deal about a compulsive gambler.
HARUM SCARUM (1965)
Harum Scarum is one of the oddest entries into the Elvis Presley canon. It’s a mangled version of an Arabian Night’s tale only instead of Ali Baba or Sinbad we have Johnny Tyrone, a singing film star who endures a series of escapades while visiting the ancient middle eastern kingdom of Lunarkan. Tyrone is on a goodwill mission for the U.S. government, who want to purchase the rights to the country’s oil fields, located in the Valley of the Mountains of the Moon. Unfortunately for Johnny, Lunarkan has been so isolated his trip becomes “a journey two thousand years into the past.” The country really is packed full of camels, dancing girls, exotic gardens, exotic girls, thieves, pretty girls, market places, slave girls, splendid buildings, bosomy girls busting all over, you get the idea. The movie really does feel like its escaped from Cecil B. De Mille’s roster of sword, sex and scandal entertainment. Indeed, the sets were originally used for his 1927 Biblical epic The King of Kings, so cinematically we really are heading back to a couple of millennia. Well, not quite that far, for one villainous heavy continually sports a sub-machine gun, the sole concession to the modern era.
Unused to the magic of cinema, the enemies of Lunarkan’s chess-playing King mistake Johnny’s performance karate skills for a professional deadly martial art, and kidnap him, hoping first to bribe then blackmail the star into assassinating the monarch. Unknown to the League of Assassins, Johnny has fallen in love with the King’s daughter and, after a series of captures, fights, narrow escapes and song-and-dance numbers, the devious plot is foiled and Johnny returns to Las Vegas with his Arab bride and troupe of dancing girls to entertain the gambling crowds.
Harum Scarum is listed as one of The 100 Most Entertaining Bad Films and you can see why. It genuinely has epic sweep and if it wasn’t for a hopelessly out-of-place lead and the need to fulfil his manager’s insatiable need for Elvis to sing, it might just have passed muster as an actual Arabian Night’s flick. Director Gene Nelson and writer Gerald Drayson Adams try really hard to create something different. The movie starts as a movie within a movie, Elvis saves a stranded beauty, battles a gang of Bedouin thieves and knocks out a leopard with a judo chop. I assume the poor animal wasn’t harmed. He sings My Desert Serenade and the camera pans back to reveal an audience of watching dignitaries, one of whom is the King’s brother and another the slinky double agent Ayesha.
She drugs Johnny on a desert safari after promising him a ravishing experience: “There are not too many nights like this – This one’s not over yet.” When Johnny recovers he’s singing Mirage in a harem, but genuinely believes he’s dreaming, until one of the girls tries to kiss him. He’s trapped in the villain’s sumptuous Summer Palace. Jay Novello always makes a decent villain – how can we ever forget his deranged Caligula in The Robe? – but he’s dreadful here, putting in a turn which wouldn’t look out of place in Batman. He’s out acted by Fran Jeffries as Ayesha, who, since we’re on the subject of Batman, wears a catsuit which would rival Lee Merriweather. Where would you get a catsuit in a country stuck two-thousand years in the past?
Johnny / Elvis – they’re virtually inseparable – escapes with the help of a sneaky thief who insists on referring to the American as “my honest / rich / humble / wonderful / exalted… client”. You can fill in the blanks. His obsequiousness is a horrendous bore. Falling in with this gang of thieves, Elvis meets the Princess Shalimar, but believes her to be a slave girl. The two fall in love with the speed of a flying carpet. This proves handy as she recognises Elvis when he attempts to carry out the assassination [or does he?]. Thrown in jail with his band of thieving brothers, Elvis manages to escape yet again and convince the King of his innocence. Revolution and counter-revolution occur and the oil fields bring riches to all.
At the end, I was rather hoping the director would pan back and reveal an audience watching a movie within a movie again, but no one's that clever here. It would be nice to say the thing has sparkle and charm, but it really doesn’t. Elvis is sleepwalking through the motion picture, not even coming alive for the fight scenes, especially as they descend into farce. The supporting cast is doing a terrible day’s work. No, it really does look as if they filmed Harum Scarum in a few days. Mary Ann Mobly [Princess Shalimar] was Miss America in 1959 and no doubt used to wearing swimsuits, so she fills out her tiny costumes appropriately well. She featured as the bikini clad ‘bad girl’ in the same year’s Girl Happy. A glutton for Elvis punishment then. Her career nosedived from here and she ended up on T.V.’s Different Strokes, which hits about the same infantile level as this movie. No one else is worthy of note, partly because the screenplay, such as it is, features cliché after cliché and only serves as a signpost for songs.
And what of those ‘songs’? Elvis runs through five numbers in the first eighteen minutes which must be a record. The songs have a vague middle-eastern flavour and are all half-paced and slightly swing, more suited to The Andy Williams Show. Elvis is crooning hard here: on Go East Young Man he dons a tux and serenades an audience in a cocktail lounge. It’s like watching an inferior Sinatra at the Sands. Elvis tries, but his material is so terrible, he’s made to look a singing fool. Shake That Tambourine is a rock n roll dirge of such inferior quality it’s no surprise the director cuts it short for another fight and chase scene. The moment where Elvis sings Hey Little Girl to a twelve-year old who gyrates amorously in a dress slit to the hip is distinctly unsettling in 2022; I’m not sure what they made of it in 1965. Kismet at least attempts to be imaginative in its staging, having Princess Shalimar imagine Elvis singing to her from the palace’s fountain pool. The song however is sub-It’s Now Or Never; very poor. Another disastrous slow roller, Harem Holiday, bookends the film and was used as the movie’s U.K. title, probably because no one knew what a Harum Scarum was. I had to look it up: daredevil, reckless, foolhardy, irresponsible.
Humph. Much like the producers of this film.
Phenomena (1985)
This Dario Argento movie is about an American girl (Jennifer Connelly) who becomes a pupil at a girls' school in Switzerland. A serial killer is murdering girls her age in the area, which is very unfortunate. Connelly's character has a special connection to insects. They never hurt her and she can even command them. She meets a professor who's an expert on insects, especially the use of insects to date dead bodies. He is also wheelchair-bound and a chimpanzee helps him in his daily tasks. The professor is played by Donald Pleasant who plays him Scottish and friendly. I like how the movie changes the overused serial killer story by focusing on insects and the supernatural connection the lead has to them. In my opinion Phenomena could've been even better by dailing down the gore we get in a few scenes and focusing more on the crime mystery and the lead's special abilities. This is Jennifer Connelly's first lead role and she was only fifteen.at the time, but it's clear she had the talent and looks to become a star. The score contains music by several bands including Iron Maiden and Motorhead. With the exception of a scene were we get a song I think this works well.
(At first I thought the first spoken lines in the movie were in Norwegian, but it turned out it was a Dane with clear diction)
I’m sure this is the movie that we got taken to on a friends birthday party outing, it put me off Elvis movies for life 😂
I've managed somehow to avoid ever seeing it, having the album (possibly his worst) put me off completely. So thanks Chris for confirming my view.
"Theatre Of Death" (1967)
Spoiler free!
There are bodies being found drained of blood around Paris. Suspicion falls on a local theatre, especially the director. Since he's played by Christopher Lee that seems inevitable, but there are a few twists to the plot to work through...
As well as Lee, we have two more actors who would later be in Bond films - Julian Glover, uncharacteristically playing the hero (or is he...?), and Joseph Furst who would play Professor Dr Metz in DAF.
It's not a Hammer film though several Hammer regulars worked on it. Oddly paced but enjoyable for horror fans.
Capricorn One
A UK channel called London Live punches beneath its weight, tonight it featured the first two opening episodes of the classic 1970s sitcom Rising Damp, with a disclaimer onscreen explaining its outdated attitudes. Unlike with the Talking Pictures TV channel, you wouldn't know it was on even if you followed the channel on Twitter. They were followed by the conspiracy thriller Capricorn One starring would be Bond James Brolin and Elliot Gould.
The premise borrows from the idea that the moon landings were faked, and that various people associated with the project died in mysterious circumstances - nowadays it's anyone associated with Putin whose death appears suspect - oh, and the likes of Jeffery Epstein I guess - and the film outlines how less attention is paid by the President and the public to space exploration, and how this trip to Mars is intended to change all that. However, a cost-cutting fault is exposed in the run-up and rather than cancel, the three astronauts are strong armed into faking the Mars landing in the studio.
Eilliot Gould plays the investigative reporter who smells a rat but finds his mate on the space program - the one who usually says, 'You'll never believe this, we've got Willard Whyte on the line wanting to speak to you...' disappears. Gould provides some much needed humour against the astronauts' straight faced heroics, would be or otherwise.
Do you find some films have a mental age? I enjoyed this as a teenager and I enjoyed it again tonight, but it doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny, even leaving aside the difficulty of a trip to Mars just a few years ahead of the moon landings. Films for kids like Peter Pan and The Jungle Book don't have a mental age, adults can enjoy it just as much, you don't suddenly think, rubbish, to believe in Peter Pan and that he can fly, or how come a kid is talking with jungle animals. But here, it's not plausible that a big conspiracy such as this - it's not quite clear how far it goes up and how many it encompasses - can see folk disappear but our loner journalist friend doesn't just get a bullet in the back of his head during the course of his investigations. It's a sort of comedy conspiracy thriller, which you don't often get, do you? I suppose you could argue Moonraker came close. I remember the funny moments, not least courtesy of one of our own, Telly Zavala's' (autocorrect) crop-dusting pilot but it doesn't much meet up with the serious stuff in the other part of the movie.
There are some eerie moments and the finale of the film will put you in mind of 60s Bond films, namely the helicopter chase in You Only Live Twice and the Nevada section of Diamonds are Forever. The music drives it along, the direction is good.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE BLACK PANTHER (1977)
No, not the superhero, it’s the true life tale of Donald Neilson, nicknamed The Black Panther, who killed several post office masters during robberies and kidnapped heiress Lesley Whittle for ransom. Donald Sumpter is excellent as the cold, domineering villain who slays his victims without compunction. The movie was controversial at the time because little time was left between the actual happenings and the movie being produced, it is tautly directed and well acted. Usually in true life stories the villain has some redeeming feature or two but Neilson has none and treats his wife and daughter appallingly. Now showing on Amazon.
Very Good.
SALOME (1953)
A big hit in 1953, particularly in France for some reason. A rather timid exposé of Salome, step-daughter of Herod who according to the Bible danced for the king and received John the Baptist’s severed head as reward.
Rita Hayworth seems too old to play the part and offers too modern an interpretation. The scenes where she’s chastising Stewart Granger’s Roman centurion sound as if they are mixing genres: the words are all historical hokum but the acting would be more at home in a film noir domestic. The cast is high powered, but no one’s really trying, except perhaps Charles Laughton who’s very watchable as a nervy, obsessed Herod, a man in thrall to his physical lusts and in fear of his preordained death. Judith Anderson overacts as Herodias. Her scheming comes across as extremely devious and slightly hysterical. Nobody, not even her own daughter, is excluded from exploitation. Because it was made in the fifties, the film can’t quite tell what it wants to, although we can easily read between the lines, just like Rita Hayworth does when Herodias suggests she dance for Herod: “Every woman who dances for the king becomes his possession” she breathes but with only a hint of fear crossing her eyes. Having suddenly become a follower of Jesus Christ, like her lover Claudius [Granger], she unfathomably decides to dance for Herod in the vain hope she’ll distract the King long enough for the Baptist to be rescued. Skewing a fabled story for the purposes of making your lead actress appear to be a good girl doesn’t cut it here. Salome’s always been a bad one all-round and trying to paint a different portrait doesn’t really hold water. Quite why anyone would be convinced to swap religions by newcomer Alan Badel’s bug-eyed John the Baptist remains to be explained; he looks as if insanity not Godliness has infected him.
So acting is rough, script a bit dodgy, the sets are fine if a bit clean, cinematography gaudy, music a bit naff – lots of trumpet voluntaries – costumes completely inauthentic, a lot of very dull sermons are delivered; I’d like to say it’s fun, but it’s not. The whole thing is undercooked and even the fabled Dance of the Seven Veils can’t raise the temperature. Salome rode on the back of Quo Vadis and was one of the first in Hollywood’s cycle of sword and sandal epics, which climaxed a decade later with Cleopatra and The Fall of the Roman Empire. There were worse Biblical / historical epics to come than this, but there were also much, much better ones.
Magnum Force
The UK's Channel 5 continues its Dirty Harry season with this sequel from 1973, keeping pace with the Bond films. Likewise there are a couple of scenes that nod to that year's Live and Let Die so you wonder if the Broccoli and Saltzman camp didn't have spies on set. Could the awful tsunami scene in Die Another Day have been inspired by a snow avalanche scene in that year's competitor, xXx?
This is an odd film in some ways. It's more episodic than the first it seems, because that one had isolated scenes to show us what our man was like, here it's a case of let's see him put through his paces, it's exciting, bigger budget but contrived. At times I was reminded of the scene in Superman: The Movie where he spends an evening around Metropolis - but surely really New York City - doing good deeds by taking out criminals.
Yet the film aims to redeem the Frisco cop too. His lack of love life in the first film is not quite addressed. Yet in one scene it's said that a group of rookie cops were thought to be - using the parlance of the time - 'queers' and Harry replies 'I'd have all the police department queers if they shot as good as that' which earns an odd stray look from a passing cop. Soon, as if to address that and the fact he passed over the advances of a fellow cop's estranged wife, an Oriental young lady makes a pass that he takes her up on, but it makes little obvious sense. She is in the flat downstairs, she claims not to know him or have seen him in several months so why is she immediately saying 'What does it take for you to go to bed with a woman?' It's as if the scene is there to 'reassure' the audience that our man isn't gay.
Likewise, he has an about turn with the whole renegade right-wing approach to law and order, as he is contrasted with someone or someones on the street looking to take the law into their own hands by wiping out known criminals. Harry has no such 'ideals' about joining them. We also see him hang out with kids by a fellow cop's wife.
The actor who played the villain in last night's Capricorn One also pops up here as Harry's superior and I'm not sure any of the other cast in the first film returns for this one. I enjoyed it, it's good to see how much was cribbed for the later Lethal Weapon films - scenes of soft porn debauchery with bare breasts in luxury penthouse settings, reference to a leading man's tragic romantic past, the shooting range, nasty objects going through car windscreens etc. David Soul pops up in a small role, very different in persona to his Starsky one. The murders are very brutal and it's not convincing there'd be no witnesses but I guess then you have no movie.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I have vague knowledge of the others. One has the brunette woman from the series Cagney and Lacey, I guess like David Soul in Magnum Force doing a sort of audition for their later TV cop roles. Another I think I saw in the mid 1980s, some lecherous serial killer on the loose, in one scene a man's tanned hands rub themselves over a compliant woman's full naked breasts in the bath - the sort of thing that stays with you - and the lead lady makes some 'come on' to Harry, as if to say... oh why am I writing this at midnight, I should go to bed, but my point is it all seemed a bit pre-Basic Instinct, well would have done had I any fore knowledge if you see what I mean. Didn't quite hit the spot at the time and Clint Eastwood seemed past his sell by as an actor, he was considering Mel Gibbons was on his way up, and Clint would up doing crap like Pink Cadillac, but then like Connery he had a career renaissance with films like Unforgiven and In the Line of Fire, which was really a superior Dirty Harry movie.
The other was the one with Liam Neeson and a toy car with a bomb in it, that seemed pretty rubbish.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
SILVER STREAK (1976)
A bit of a Hitchock-like comedy thriller set on a cross-country train with Gene Wilder on good form up against Patrick McGoohan and others, including Richard Kiel (with metal adorned teeth and all). The first half is primarily concerned with Wilder flirting with an attractive fellow passenger and suspecting a murder has taken place. He also manages to get ejected from the train twice and has to catch up with it in memorable ways including a flight in a Tiger Moth with a crazy old woman. Also, there's a very amusing scene with Clifton James playing a policeman who isn't far removed from Sheriff JW Pepper. All great stuff. He then hooks up with Richard Pryor who joins him for the second half of the film, culminating in a nice runaway train climax. I first saw this on TV in mid 2000s, and have wanted to go back and rewatch it for a long time. It's currently streaming on The Criterion Channel (leaving at the end of the month).
CASINO ROYALE (2006)
I saw Casino Royale in the cinema thanks to the 60th Anniversary re-release events. I think we all know how effective this film can be and Craig gives a fantastically steely, cold performance, while Eva Green is sublime. There's an undercurrent of dry wit which balances the savage yet clinical nature of the film's violence, while the relatively grounded stuntwork is another bonus; seeing the Miami airport sequence play out on the big screen is a treat and a half. The film's not perfect, though; some of the pacing, with the Miami and Madagascar action scenes crammed into the first act, could be improved and the plot twist that Mathis is a traitor is undermined by the subsequent developments which take place regarding this character in Quantum of Solace. Still, these are minor flaws and what the audience is left with is a supremely confident and complex Bond film, one of the series' highlights.
"The spectre of defeat..."
THE ONES BELOW (2015)
The new neighbours in the downstairs apartment seem ideal. They spruce up the garden and redecorate. Both wives are pregnant and become friends, an accident on the stairs after a dinner together causes tension and then Kate becomes paranoid that the new couple are not what they seem. This is a well worn theme but it’s handled very well, David Morrisey as the uptight new neighbour is, as usual, excellent. There is no padding in this well constructed thriller, it comes in at under 90 minutes and is all the more better for it. The ending doesn’t really have a twist because it’s fairly obvious what will happen, but the portrayal of mystery and paranoia is well done.
7/10
An Innocent Man (1989)
Tom Selleck stars as an honest cop who is framed by two bent cops and rather than go for a mitigating plea, argues 'Not Guilty' and is sent to jail for 8 years. He is released on parole after 3 but during that time we see him endure the injustices and brutality of jail. On his exit, he sets out to win justice. Not so much the Shawshank Redemption as The Shawshank Revenge though watchable. The arrogant bent cops do much of the heavy lifting here so you want to see their comeuppance but I think the actor's Abel Ferraro who is the wily con in whom Selleck confides eventually. As I wrote earlier, films have a mental age and this one is in its late teens it seems. no two bent cops would be in a situation where they would get caught out, it's rarely a case of two bad apples. It's a bit simplistic and low budget then but it's fun to compare the villains with those other two cops of the late 80s, Riggs and Murtaph.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
GOSFORD PARK (2001)
I’ve been meaning to see this renowned movie for years, an Agatha Christie murder style mystery with a stellar ensemble cast and directed by Robert Altman of MASH and McCABE & MRS MILLER fame, what’s not to like? Well, for a start it crawls along at a snails pace and the murder doesn’t take place until 75 minutes into the movie. Up to then we are treated to a sumptuous version of tv’s Upstairs, Downstairs and it’s all extremely boring as we learn of the troubles of the rich upstairs and the servants downstairs. Most of them have cause to hate the host of shooting party at the country estate Gosford Park, and after he has been murdered inept police Inspector Stephen Fry comes along to try and solve the mystery but by then it’s far too late to save this turgid movie which for some unknown reason has been feted by film critics around the world. There are far too many characters and it becomes confusing and nothing remotely interesting happens and by the end I couldn’t care less about who had fathered who and who was rogering who. Very disappointing.
3/10
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED (2009)
Two criminals kidnap a young woman for ransom. Eddie Marsan and Martin Compston are convincing as the ex-cons and our own Gemma Arterton is excellent in the difficult role of the kidnapped woman. There are no other actors in the entire film and mainly takes place in the secured room where they keep her awaiting the payoff. There are some twists and turns along the way and a couple of plot holes but in the main this is a taut thriller which holds the attention.
6/10
The Old Ways on Netflix.
Pretty awful really. I can't add much more than that.
TOP GUN (1986)
At long last I’ve managed to see this and to be honest it wasn’t worth the wait. The action scenes are great but everything else is ho-hum. Tom Cruise is in his “aren’t I marvellous” mode, the bar scene with Kelly McGillis is so embarrassingly cringeworthy that even the American Pie movie franchise would have rejected the idea. I was 30 when this was released and even then I would have been 15 years too old for this. I know this film gets a lot of praise on this site so I’ll just say that I’ve come to the party too late, maybe another time, another place, I’d have liked it.
The action scenes earn this all the points given, they are terrific.
5/10
SEE HOW THEY RUN (2022) Dir: Tom George
A whodunnit with some nicely meta touches. Without wanting to say too much, it has an excellent cast (inc our own John Cleese in a very small but naturally amusing part) and naturally lots of twists and turns. It revolves around Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" without actually being a film of it, and that's about all I can say without giving things away.
I read your review some weeks ago and put it on my watch list, I wanted to see the original one first though, so I knew the background to the sequel.
They ran the trailer for this when I watched CR06 recently…it did look rather good 🍸
SWEENEY! (1977)
For those who don’t know, The Sweeney is cockney rhyming slang for Flying Squad (Sweeney Todd - Flying Squad), the elite department within the metropolitan police force. This is a television spin-off from the popular series which ran for 4 seasons between 1975-1978 and is basically a double length episode albeit with added nudity and stronger bad language. Inspector Regan and Sergeant Carter lead the squad as they foil armed robberies and investigate a political scandal involving OPEC which leads to Regan being hunted down by assassins. The squad are a hard drinking, womanising bunch, it’s difficult to imagine Regan and Carter dancing the macarena with a group of woke activists in this day and age, their favourite line is “We’re the Sweeney and we haven’t had any breakfast, so get your trousers on, you’re nicked!”
Its nostalgic to see London in the 70’s, this is a rough, tough movie and made enough money to gain a sequel the following year.
7/10
House of Bamboo (1955)
For a mid-1950s crime drama, Samuel Fuller's House of Bamboo looks and feels much more like a mid-1960s international thriller. It's set in Japan, and I think was shot entirely on location, with eyepopping colours and widescreen CinemaScope visuals to rival any of the glamorous spy capers of the next decade. Yet this is a far more street level tale than that, as a miltary police detective goes undercover with a gang of Americans led by always great Robert Ryan. The plot unfolds at a steady, but well judged pace and builds to a memorable climax in a Tokyo amusement park, with those great compositions that remind me of some of the Hitchcock films which come to a head atop a striking monument. The authentic location work also gives the film an added edge of a travelogue element a bit like You Only Live Twice would attempt over a decade later. In an age of many a studio-bound film noir, this is a refreshingly exotic take on the subgenre.
THE WHITE BUFFALO (1977)
Charles Bronson stars as Wild Bill Hickok who is travelling incognito, he is haunted by dreams of a white buffalo and teams up with Sioux Chief Crazy Horse to kill it. There’s a good supporting cast including Jack Warden, Clint Walker, Stuart Whitman, Ed Lauter, John Carradine, Kim Novak and Cuckoo’s Nest Will Sampson as Crazy Horse. The problem is the animatronic buffalo is not very good and is only used in obvious studio shots with close-ups and quick editing. It’s directed by long time Bronson collaborator J. Lee Thompson who is no stranger to action movies but it’s all a bit flat. Without any rousing action John Barry presumably found it was difficult to write a Magnificent Seven/ Big Country style score and it remains an oddity in his filmography. I don’t know, but perhaps the reason he didn’t score TSWLM was because he was engaged on this film?
Bronson is good in his role and it’s reasonably interesting but ultimately, just so-so.
5/10
After a week's break, Channel 5 continues its run off Dirty Harry films - reverting to HD letterbox presentation too!
Another stupid and offensive instalment of this dumb and offensive series then. Which I enjoyed...
Missed the first half hour because I thought they'd stopped running them - then remembered Five + 1 so I caught it on that, not HD though. However, I remembered to wear my little-worn upgraded specs, so I sort of remedied it that way. I impress myself sometimes.
Now, tbf, this series was more enjoyable a few weeks ago in the midst of a heatwave, hot evenings with a glass of beer in my hand. That seems a long time ago now, and it's not so much a week of mourning Her Majesty - or rather the TV mourning her - that has changed my mood, it just autumnal now and a beer feels less right, I'm less into my heatwave guilty pleasures, being tempted by gimmick T-shirts on Amazon, soft core top shelf magazines at the local newsagents, seaside attractions... Not saying I yield to such temptations, but...
Also, tbf, these films were a year or more apart so without video or DVD or having had them shown on TV yet, the obvious formula would have been less obvious. In fact, typing this I called the film Magnum Force, which was the second one, the titles tend to blend in. Anyway, instead of being put up against straw men arguments and superiors, our hero is up against a straw woman, a matron-like pompous type who wants to introduce more women into the police force, sort of positive discrimination. Harry objects - not because he's a sexist pig, natch - but because the one presented has no experience in the field so will get shot dead and be a danger to her partner. Fair enough, but it's hopeless straw man argument, I mean it wouldn't have to be like that, a novice paired up on a hugely dangerous case with a maverick cop.
It's funny how Harry's bosses seem to change from film to film, so he's always having the same arguments, different people. Eastwood is looking older here, his hair is receding a bit, he seems tall and creaky, he's not quite like his old self in the poster above. So he seems to strike an avuncular look with some of his younger partners, sort of protective. That has him risk looking more like an old reactionary than a young buck with an uncomplicated attitude to law enforcement and the film seems aware of that, treading a fine balancing act. He liaises almost with a black supercool gangster of sorts and has a kind of rapport. The young radical terrorists have vaguely defined agendas - later we find actually they're just in it for the money, so Harry Callaghan can go after them without qualms. As Broccoli shrewdly noted with the original villains in The Spy Who Loved Me a year after this, you don't want scrambled sympathies from the audience, esp when your leading man is not so young any more.
The film is dumb. The villains' kills are nasty and sadistic. It's odd, a film like Goldfinger is more far-fetched and outrageous but is not dumb, here the milieu if that's the right word is realistic. It's a cop on the Frisco streets, no fantastic car chases, just guns and stuff but the dialogue and set-ups are dumb. Some films have a mental age it seems, this one's is 17 or 18 if that, sort of an insult except of course if you're that age, this is the film for you. Other movies, as you get older, you start to see through them.
The main advantage here is Harry's new partner - 'a woman!' as Bond might say - and she's played by Tess Daly (oops! I mean Tyne Daly) who went on to be in TV's Cagney & Lacey. She's great in that and here - sort of nervy, eager to please, a bit like a young Judy Garland, she works well with the unimpressed Callaghan. Again, the film toys with Harry's single status - a cool guy yet with no mates and no sex life it seems. You can't see him down the pub with a gang, so he's the loner in splendid isolation, appealing perhaps to other loners who like to see their situation cast in a happier light. Bond is a bit the same - you never see him with a peer group waiting his turn to speak, etc. Not great role models and you have to ask yourself, if they were not played by charismatic actors, how appealing with their modus operandi really be? Not very.
So Callaghan is shown going in with his studs up in various situations which really could end up going either way but because it's in the script, he wins. Again, some scenes reminded me of the much later In the Line of Fire, which is really a Dirty Harry movie with a superior presentation. The ultimate stupid scene is the finale, where our hero does something so dumb - takes his young partner with him to attack a gang of terrorists on Alcatraz island with no back up or notifying anyone. It's not the woman cop's fault it goes the way it does, it's all done for some phoney emotional finale.
What's annoying is, a few tweaks and they could have accounted for this train of events more convincingly. Anyway, I enjoyed Eastwood's performance and will tune in for the next one anyway. This film lacked the eeriness of its two predecessors, it's all increasingly straightforward stuff and it doesn't want to alienate. I wonder how that old cop film Freebie and the Bean compares? It's been years since I saw that. Alan Arkin and James Caan I think. That's not been on for years.
Roger Moore 1927-2017