Ah, I see. I think I've seen clips of them in action before but not seen much of the show itself. I also remember seeing them parodied with latex faces on the truly mad Bo' Selecta! 🙂
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
were they meant to be based on Siskel and Ebert? who had their own teevee show round the same time and a rapport much as @Barbel is describing.
you know there were a couple of early80s season premieres of Saturday Night Live where the real Siskel and Ebert sat in the middle of the studio audience and delivered brutally honest live reviews of the show in progress as it was broadcast? maybe every show should incorporate critics as part of its content, Like what if No Time to Die had inserts of Waldorf and Statler or Siskel and Ebert at the end of each Act? "worst Bond ever! Bond has a license to kill, not be killed!" "well I think CraigBond had it coming to him, since frankly all his films stunk!"
sounds like we need an episode-by-episode Muppet Show review thread just to educate @Silhouette Man !
Stately black and white John Ford mini-epic about the mythology of the American west and by extension the legitimacy of the western movie genre.
James Stewart is Ransome Stoddard, an idealistic lawyer who arrives in Shinbone and begats a war with the cattle ranchers and their enforcer, the rustler, stage robber and psychopath Liberty Valance. Lee Marvin scowls his way impressively through every scene as the titular villain. John Wayne is Stewart’s rival in love for Vera Miles’ Swedish waitress. The two leads were flattered by the monochrome photography which allows them to appear thirty years younger than their respective ages (53 and 54). Fordian support is provided by Woody Strode’s dignified black ranch hand, Andy Devine’s hapless Sheriff and Edmond O’Brien’s town drunk. Many similarities with Destry Rides Again, but for the most part played deadly serious.
The film evolves through a series of eight tension building extended scenes: the prologue, the stage robbery, the Swedish cantina, the schoolroom, the vote, the showdown, the reveal, the epilogue. Each scene delves deeper into the characters’ make-up and relationship, but there’s something missing from the overall landscape. Perhaps it is in Stewart’s motives, which seem to be coiled in anger. He claims to want peace through the rule of efficient, proactive law, but never once appears to recognise the town has an ineffectual Sheriff. Instead he takes up gunslinging, badly, and puts his life in danger seeking a duel with a man clearly more disposed to the rule of the gun. We know he’s doomed. His escape, through chance, is well drafted and complies with the other western ideal of self-sacrifice, but it’s all very bitter by the end. You wonder, if Vera Miles’ entrenched silences are because she knows all along she’s married to the wrong man.
The film’s epitaph “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” seems apt as reinterpreting fact is basically what the western genre has attempted to do on film since the earliest days of cinema.
Curious vehicle for Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe and Anne Bancroft. Everyone feels miscast. Widmark plays a pilot whose romance with Bancroft is under strain due to his obvious indifference. When he gets dumped, you don’t feel sorry for him. So when he spies Marilyn Monroe parading in her smalls across the hotel courtyard, his intentions are distinctly creepy. When Monroe’s overtly sensual behaviour begins to unravel, what started as a rebound flirtation develops into an evening of unhinged tension.
Monroe’s very good as the damaged young woman, but it’s not a role you’d immediately associate with her. She’d been on a run of mostly light comedies and this was an opportunity for her to shine in a big, dramatic leading part. She doesn’t disappoint, but I can imagine early fans being unsettled. I was too, and I knew about the movie and its plot.
British director Roy Ward Baker helms the show and does a competent job, ranking the suspense up at the appropriate moment. Black and white, noirish photography helps immensely. There’s a fine section late on when the child who Monroe is charged to babysit becomes physically threatened and Baker, along with Daniel Taradash’s sparse screenplay, ratches up the suspense and darkens the palette. The subject matter is quite upsetting and the film as a whole is a very uncomfortable experience, touching on child abuse, rape, neglect, bereavement, trauma, mental instability, suicide and murder. These adult, intensely difficult themes, are not given sufficient depth. Having presented them, the script does a runner in the last quarter and turns conventional on us. The over-simplified ending doesn’t do justice to what came before. The story which almost veered to the preposterous, suddenly becomes so ordinary all those intense flavours are lost.
Despite this, I’d urge people to watch it, chiefly to see Marilyn Monroe acting outside of her comfort zone.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,866MI6 Agent
I like to think I am ahead of the Prince Charles' game !
Spent the day with friends and the kids wanted to watch this:
THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS! (2012)
What fun!
I’m not predisposed towards animation movies, there are too many of them and I sense some of the magic has gone. I can’t understand why essentially life-affirming stories need to be played out by fish, toy cowboys or freezing princesses.
Occasionally though, one does strike gold and this brilliant British made tale of daring-don’ts on the high seas is a full-on treat with excellent animated characters, fun situations that do not make you roll your eyes in astonishment and a crackling script, sparklingly voiced by Hugh Grant, Matin Freeman and Imelda Staunton among others. There’s also Bobo the Monkey and Polly the Dodo, so the kids can keep up if the adult dialogue loses the their attention.
And what a villainess we have in Queen Victoria – that rapacious carnivorous collector of extinct animals!
Aardmann has rarely been better, perhaps only in The Wrong Trousers. I haven’t laughed so much at a film in ages. Or maybe it was the beer.
The mid-sixties was an era of big war movies, but Operation Crossbow doesn’t feel quite ‘big’ enough, despite a starry cast and some superb visuals. Based on fact but highly fictionalising actual events, the movie relates a tale of resistance espionage and undercover heroics in and around Germany’s Peenemunde Air Research facilities, relocated from the Baltic to Holland for narrative convenience.
As D-Day approaches, Duncan Sandys [Richard Johnson, putting on an authentic limp] is worried about a change in Nazi tactics from short range bombing to long range missile attacks. Proved right he initiates a response, initially bombing raids on the V-1 ‘ski ramps’, which are mostly unsuccessful. This is all embellished truth, as is the later horror of the ‘silent’ V-2 rockets launched in early 1945. An interesting [unrecognised] fact is that Britain’s last official civilian fatality of the war was the sole casualty of the last V-2 rocket which exploded in Orpington 27/3/1945. Cinematically it is more interesting to follow the fictional adventures of George Peppard, Tom Courtney and Jeremy Kemp as they infiltrate the underground research and launch facility for the ‘New York Rocket’.
While there is evidence of German research into the A9/A10 two stage rocket, experiments never got as far as we see here. The filmic set up is much more like a prototype James Bond movie, with huge underground cavernous sets, murder, betrayal, double-agents and heroic derring-do. The great Emeric Pressburger contributed to the script and director Michael Anderson studiously studied the subject to obtain some authenticity. They do a splendid job recreating the period and an atmosphere of fear, loathing and desperation is well captured. Early suspense is created by a well filmed test launch of a piloted V-1, when Barbara Rutting’s Hanna Reitsch discovers the trim flaw in the rocket design. Reitsch was a real person, a famed German test pilot, but the trim fault was detected on the non-piloted V-2 not the V-1. Still, it’s unusual for a war film saluting Allied victory to treat the triumphs of the Axis with integrity and some excitement. This is tempered, of course, by an air raid during the celebration soiree. Other points of genuine insight are when the S.S. take over Peenemunde, which really happened, as well as the ruthlessness of both sides in the war game. The grit of the spies under pressure is finely tuned, although the nuances of dread displayed by Kemp and Courtney might have benefitted Peppard’s far less complicated performance.
It’s always good to have characters speaking in native tongues, although apparently Paul Henreid’s accent was so bad they cut most of his scenes. Anthony Quayle is particularly good as an S.S. interrogator who snaffles Tom Courtney’s low-key heroic spy. Lili Palmer won European awards for her small role as a tough Dutch resistance agent. Sophia Loren is a support player with lead billing specifically employed by producer Carlo Ponti to boost the film’s profile. Ponti was also Loren’s husband, so you can figure the math. Loren shines as the wife of Erik Van Ostabeck, a dead scientist whose identity Peppard is using. Their brief flirtation and her last scenes have genuine emotional pull, which can’t be said of most of the action, stuck as it is in the committee rooms of Blighty. Things pick up almost too fast in the final quarter and it all ends in something of an unlikely, albeit exciting rush.
An underrated war film, Operation Crossbow has been one of my favourites for many years because, despite its defects, the film attempts to tap into the machinations of war and the difficult decisions reached by individuals in the service of their country. Like A Bridge Too Far, it takes some pain to point this out and while Crossbow ends on a more optimistic note, the film has some of the same epic sweep and understanding of its subject that, coupled with unexpectedly good performances and tension racked scenes keeps an audience watching.
Operation Crossbow is one of the few wartime sequels, as Ice Cold in Alex stars reprise their roles - Anthony Quayle's Nazi - emboldened by having pulled the wool over the eyes of the gullible British soldiers, who later freed him - now infiltrates the English to find out how how much they know about their secret rockets. Sylvia Sims's character is reassigned to desk duty and discovers there is something fishy going on with the Germans' aerial plans. John Mills' dogged work in the desert earns him a promotion - though he's behind a desk again.
Don't think they found a role for Harry Andrews' character.
'Yes indeed!' Stromberg financier appears as the hotel factotum.
As it happens I'm listening to an audiobook about Sverre Bergh who spied for SIS while he was a student in Germany. He actually saw the Penemünde facilty at a distance in 1941. Bergh sent a report to the UK, but his bosses ignored it and asked him to stop reading science fiction. When the Nazis started launching rockets the SIS changed their minds and told him to read "more of that science fiction".
Tacky enterprise based on a tawdry true story about four strippers who exploit customers, stealing credit cards and drugging them with little remorse. Writer / director Lorene Scararia makes a low-rent existence appear entirely glamourous. I didn’t believe in either the good or the bad times as presented to me. The cliché of dollar bills being tossed at half naked dancers just isn’t inventive enough; worse, it’s all done in aching, semi-porn slow motion. This slice of a life in crime is used an extended excuse for female bonding of the most puerile kind: much dancing and drinking, extravagant present giving and endless hugs. It is such a woman dominated world the protagonists only give birth to girls, there’s not a male child in sight. Despite the luxury, the girls can’t help looking like hookers all the time which just adds to the expected formula. Too simply told in extended flashbacks, another filmic cliché, and featuring the barest of character development. A very ordinary movie which is not saved by a decent performance from Jennifer Lopez as the ring leader.
Unlike the 1980 remake there’s no extended prologue. Two scientists watch the skies through a powerful telescope. A rogue planet is drawing steadily closer to Earth. They predict it will collide with and destroy Earth. Only Dr Zarkov has foreseen the encounter, but he has vanished along with his fabled rocket ship. One of the scientists is Professor Gordon and he receives a telegram from his son, Flash, who is flying to join him for the planet’s last days.
That’s depressing.
Flash Gordon himself is on a passenger plane experiencing the worst flight ever. Not only is the weather terrible, but he has to crane his neck to see the beautiful blonde sat two rows back. Dale Arden has no trouble inspecting him. The plane is struck by lightning and hurtles out of control. The pilot tells everyone to abandon the plane and parachute to safety. Flash and Dale discover there is only one parachute remaining and jump together. They land near Prof Zarkov’s rocket ship. Flash knows of the great man’s reputation and instinctively trusts him, agreeing to help him on his mission to the stars. Dale comes along for the ride.
That’s the first five minutes done then.
This is such a fast narrative I was chuckling at the silliness of it all. Things don’t slow down on the planet Mongo. There is a spectacular city on a mountain top. The surface of Mongo is a rock strewn desert inhabited by giant lizards who fight each other when it would be easier to eat the humans. The travellers are saved by a native rocket ship which resembles Zarkov’s rocket ship. Unfortunately, the crew are armour clad unfriendly space soldiers out to capture the humans.
Flash puts up a fight and he doesn’t stop fighting from here on. Buster Crabbe may not be able to act, but he can throw a decent right hook and has the physique for an action movie star. As an Olympic gold medal swimmer he has the form and skills for the later water based battles.
Charles Middleton is a scrupulous and intense Ming the Merciless. He’s hamstrung only by the contemptable script and a director who is interested in nothing more than propelling the story from one fight to another. Nobody uses guile and wit, it is fists and ire only. Flash is a very angry young man. During their first audience with Ming, he assaults Mongo’s Emperor and gets thrown into the Arena, where he battles three vicious Fang Men for his shirt.
Meanwhile Princess Aura, an all buxom and brawn Priscilla Lawson, not so much alluring as frightening, has taken a shine to Flash and saves him from certain death. The more dainty Jean Rogers practices the first of many screams…
Episode one ends on a cliff hanger of some success – but goodness it passes in a blur.
Episode 2
The Tunnel of Terror
There is a miraculous escape from the arena. Aura hides Flash in her personal rocket ship. The hairy faced Lion Men attack the citadel in their Gyro Ships. Flash has studied the Mongo pilots, “just in case I need to fly one of these things”, and launches the rocket ship, going on the attack as he fears the citadel will be destroyed and he’ll lose Dale and Zarkov forever. The Lion Men are led by Prince Thun, who sports monumental hair and beard. Thun and Flash team up, hoping to defeat Ming, and access a temple complex via a secret tunnel.
Meanwhile Dale Arden is being stripped for action – sorry, a wedding – and kitted out in a next to nothing bridal outfit. Jean Rogers looks stunning in the tiny bikini top and slinky sarong, hard nipples showing. She’s the only person dressed in white, a virgin angel among all these black garbed beasts. Saturday morning kids must have been having indecent fantasies throughout the summer of 1936.
Zarkov is staring at the amazing equipment in Ming’s laboratories. Maybe he saw Frankenstein and remembered what it looked like. He learns that Ming can control the orbit of the planet. He also learns that Dale has been drugged by Ming’s superintendent to ensure she complies meekly to a marriage ceremony. My one burning question is: why are all the good guys forced to wear swimming trunks?
Like the enormous, but empty, throne room we saw in episode one, the cave cut Temple of the Great God Tao is well designed, but this set feels too small for the action, too cramped.
Flash and Thun become trapped in the tunnel by a fearsome dragon…
Episode 3
Captured by the Shark Men
Tell it like it is.
More fighting and chasing. Flash and Thun rescue Dale, but become separated. The fugitives accidentally enter the underwater realm of the Shark Men, through a trap door in the floor, naturally. There’s an impressive shot of the Shark Men closing in on Flash and Dale with a very aggressive breast stroke. That’s not a euphemism, they really are swimming the breast stroke. Captured, the twosome are taken to a submarine, which looks just like a rocket ship. The underwater trip passes by two warring gigantic Octo-sacs. Finally on dry land, or dry somewhere, Flash engages King Kala in one-to-one combat. Beaten and humbled, Kala offers them the run of his private quarters. We know something is up, because he separates our hero and heroine. Even Buster Crabbe manages a pensive little look about the arrangement. Too right, matey. Dale gets a big bed, diaphanous curtains and fluffy pillows. Flash gets thrown in a water tank.
Suspicious, Dale creeps into Kala’s quarters and overhears him on the spaceograph with Ming. Flash has been imprisoned awaiting Ming’s wrath! As she watches, water is poured into the tank and an enormous sea beast engages our hero in a many tentacled underwater battle…
Episode 4
Battling the Sea Beast
You have to hand it to the ingenuity of the writers and the designers who are working minor miracles with virtually no money. Ralph Berger’s sets are fairly impressive and the ambition is crazily off the scale. Hollywood was famous for making historical epics [Intolerance, The Sign of the Cross, etc] but they rarely ventured into sci-fi territory, if ever. Alexander Korda had the backing of a whole British film studio to make Things to Come. Impressive as that movie is to look at, the narrative is dull as ditch water. You can’t say that about Flash Gordon, although a little less aggression and a little more discussion might have made the telling less repetitive. The film people at Universal really do attempt to picture and present an alien environment and a vision of a ‘future’ with lasers, rocket ships and aliens. It’s a pity there’s no conciliation in outer space.
Not much underwater either. Aura and Thun appear in time to save Flash and the jealousy between the two women in his life, blonde and brunette, rears its head again: Aura deliberately sabotage’s Kala’s undersea kingdom hoping to kill Dale. The silly so-and-so hasn’t banked on Flash’s chivalric instincts.
Meanwhile Zarkov uses Ming’s laboratory equipment to contact Earth…
Episode 5
The Destroying Ray
Less fist fighting than usual. Ming shows a compassionate streak, perhaps because his daughter is in Kala’s palace but more likely because he spies an opportunity to conquer the undersea kingdom for himself. He releases the magnet ray holding the palace underwater. As it rises to the surface, the fugitives escape. The dried out surrounds of the sea palace exactly resemble that of Mongo. They even have lizards. How did they survive underwater?
I watched this episode in a colourised print. Not so much technicolour as techni-tint, but Jean Rogers looks delightful and the skyscapes are especially vivid.
Prince Barin turns up, infiltrating Ming’s palace with commendable ease and absconding with Zarkov. Meanwhile, Thun and Dale have been kidnapped by marauding Hawk Men, whose first appearance sweeping through the mountains is quite striking. Jack Lipson’s King Vultan is a great villain, laughing and cracking inopportune jokes much like Brian Blessed. He menaces poor Dale with a beastly pet he calls Urso. She looks scared and curiously eroticised all at once. Vultan’s uniform has breast plates which actually make him look like he has breasts. They are bigger than Miss Rogers’, which might be upsetting for her, hence Dale’s likely curiosity. How does a birdman get such a large bosom? And why does he keep a striped bear as a pet? At least he keeps his hands to himself – unlike Prince Thun who is seen clearly grasping Dale’s left boob as they attempt to flee the Hawk Men.
Ming knows Vultan will try to make Dale his bride – “it’s in his nature” – and flies to the Sky City to stop any impending nuptials.
Meanwhile, Flash, Zarkov, Aura and Barin are speeding to the rescue, until Vultan’s melting ray strikes the ship and causes it to crash…
The gravitational influence of the Sky City saves Barin’s rocket ship, but everyone ends up in King Vultan’s custody. Flash, Thun and Barin are sent to the Atom Furnace where they feed uranium ore to the ovens which power the gravitational rays keeping the city afloat. Vultan wants Zarkov to discover a new method of propulsion as the uranium is running low. Aura persuades Dale to pretend she’s fallen for Vultan and initially the ruse appears to work as, during an elaborate feast, his attitude starts to soften.
Unfortunately, Flash’s tendency towards violence interferes with Aura’s schemes. He initiates a riot in the Furnace Room. His punishment is electric zap torture. Dale can’t suffer the scene and breaks down screaming, revealing her true emotions. Flash can’t take it either and faints…
James Pierce plays Prince Thun. He was the fourth man to play Tarzan [Tarzan and the Golden Lion, 1927]. He’s pretty terrible. Frank Shannon is Zarkov. He’s terrible too. James Alexander’s Prince Barin is probably the worst of the lot. Given Buster Crabbe’s continued woodenness, this episode really allows the ladies to shine. Dale attempting to seduce Vultan with her blonde hair and big eyes [it has to be eyes, the best of her isn’t big enough to challenge Vultan] is a hoot and Aura’s nefarious plans show no sign of wavering. I’m enjoying Jack Lipsom’s boisterous bird monarch too.
The Sky City is a great design, much more impressive than the similar looking undersea palace. It is supported by searchlights. There’s an exotic floor show taking place at the far end of Vultan’s state dining room. I’m not certain but, like the music which was pinched from The Invisible Man, I have the impression this art deco designed dance number has been culled from a different movie altogether. [I checked later, it was, The Midnight Sun, 1927.]
Episode 7
Shattering Doom
A change of pace, thank goodness.
A little respite for Flash, who survives the torture thanks to Aura’s timely intervention and the resuscitative properties of a electroscope, which resembles a futuristic oxygen tent. Dale is presented with new clothes and jewels and treated to a shadow play by the ever laughing Vultan.
When Flash rejects Aura’s overtures, she attempts to blind him with a blow torch [yikes!] but can’t go through with it. Perhaps her heart is not as dark as her hair after all.
Meanwhile, Ming lands on the Sky City and Vultan parlays for peace. Zarkov boobytraps a shovel and Flash uses it to ignite the Furnace Room in a ball of fire…
Episode 8
Tournament of Death
And back to the rough stuff…
As the Sky City lurches off its pedestal, Zarkov bargains with Vultan: free Flash and his friends and he’ll activate the new electric ray which will save the city. Vultan agrees, but once the city is rebalanced, Ming activates his right as Emperor to only allow the fugitives freedom if they engage in the Tournament of Death. Flash is nominated as their Champion. The other swordsman turns out to be Prince Barin, forced to take part by Ming, and hoping to prevent further fighting by producing a satisfying but non-fatal victory. Instead, Flash wins the duel – and refuses to continue once he realises it is Barin beneath the mask. Shamed, Barin believes he has lost the love of Princess Aura for good. Meanwhile Flash re-enters the arena barehanded to battle the giant Orangapoid. After playing Tarzan, Buster Crabbe ought to be used to fighting men in ape suits – or was that Johnny Weissmuller? – I forget. An all action episode of little merit other than to remind me how much more sense the Flash v Barin conflict made in the movie.
Episode 9
Fighting the Fire Dragon
It’s the same man in a dragon suit we saw in episode 2 and 3, only this one breathes fire…
Flash kills the Orangapoid, thanks to Aura’s intervention. She keeps saving him and keeps not getting her reward. You’d think she’d learn. Ming turns all magnanimous in defeat, but nobody trusts him an inch – except poor naive Flash who reassures Dale “it’ll be alright” – about as reassuring as standing in a tunnel occupied by a fire dragon.
The High Priest of Tao gives Aura a forgetfulness drug which will put Flash to sleep, allowing her to ferret the Earthman to the Sacred Palace of Tao, where she can start a secret life with him. A second drug will wake him, but his memory will be empty. The movie played a similar scenario, but at the opposite end of the drama. There is much mugging and astonishment in every scene. Director Frederick Stephani isn’t doing much with his actors. You sense the money was spent on the detail. The acting got third billing behind the designers and the effects crews. The assembled cast really tries, but it’s like watching mud dry. Painfully slow.
Episode 10
The Unseen Peril
“This Earthman has disturbed the affairs of my empire too long,” declares Ming the Merciless. Too right.
Aura attempts to quell his ire, but to no avail. Zarkov again attempts to contact the Earth. Meanwhile, Flash, having lost his memory, spends most of the episode looking distinctly glum. The fact he vanishes into thin air by the end of it seems highly appropriate…
Zarkov has saved Flash from an execution squad using his invisibility machine. Blessed with a sudden power of invisibility, Flash exploits the situation and threatens Ming, before freeing King Vultan. Universal’s special effects teams have had fun with this scenario before and Jack Lipsom’s Vultan enjoys it as much as they do.
Ming decides to wreak vengeance, but as no one can see the rogue Earthman the task is impossible. Ming’s patience is running low, if it ever had a high. He even snaps at his daughter, who still desires Flash despite every sign he isn’t remotely interested in her. Sensing danger, Barin takes Dale to the safety of the catacombs. Aura sets a trap using the sacred Tigron. While Vultan holds off Ming’s troops with his enormous bulk and breast plates – much to Zarkov’s astonishment – Flash and Barin rush to Dale’s rescue. Too late! The tigron has already leapt to the attack…
And it looks like a real tiger too.
Episode 12
Trapped in the Turret
Flash arrives in time to save Dale. He slaughters the sacred tigron with his bare hands. Goodness. But you wonder what happened to Prince Barin, he was right behind him when they entered the catacombs. Still, a swift word in Aura’s ear changes her attitude. Flash seems as gullible as he was earlier. He must stop trusting people, it’ll get him into whole heaps of trouble.
Ming too has yet another change of heart, which seems unlikely. He appears to be temporarily forgetting the previous few episodes and returning the stage back to where we were in Episode 8: Tournament of Death. After that experience, Flash, amazingly, is learning not to trust the Merciless One. Zarkov makes contact with Earth, although Ming hasn’t promised to call off any attack.
Aura finally comes through, agreeing that it would be safer to stay in Vultan’s Sky Palace as her father can’t be trusted. Charles Middleton lowers his voice like all good villains and ponders his next moves while sitting on his enormous oyster shaped throne. Prince Thun, who hasn’t shown his face since Episode 8, turns up on the spaceograph and agrees to bring help. Barin tells Flash and his friends to meet them in the Turret House, but their conversation has been overheard by Ming’s spies…
Probably the dullest chapter of the serial so far. A genuine filler of little quality and lots of plot holes. Given that Zarkov’s rocket ship has been loaded with power batteries, it must be nearby, so why is Prince Barin having to fetch his own rocket ship? And if he can walk to it, why is everyone else not walking to it also? Hopeless.
Episode 13
Rocketing to the Earth
Escaping Ming’s trap, Flash sees Barin being transported to prison. While Thun and his Lion Men attack the citadel with his gyro ships, Flash, Dale, Zarkov, Barin, Vultan and Aura are captured. Ming finally reveals himself as utterly merciless. Revealing his true colours, even Aura recognises the evil in her father. As the battle rages, Ming decides there is only one way to escape the rebels…
The history of Flash Gordon is long and complicated, like most cultural fictional heroes. It is astonishing to learn the comic strip, which started in 1934 as a Sunday paper strip to rival Buck Rogers, was still being drawn in 1993. Its influence on science fiction, along with those seminal novels by Verne, Wells and Burroughs can’t be underestimated. While this serial certainly entertains and contains much material featured in the earliest stories and reused in most future versions [mostly television adaptations], it is decidedly creaky. The acting in particular is wooden. Where it wins is the design and the energy of the narrative. A lot of thought clearly went into how to best translate Alex Raymond’s fantasy images from newspaper to celluloid. The studio producers opted for broad strokes, with big sets and an array of dazzling effects [dazzling for 1936]. Occasionally, it touches on visual brilliance and is certainly inventive. It hasn’t exactly stood the test of time, but it remains entertaining and an important landmark in cinematic history. The public liked it. The serial was Universal’s second biggest money spinner of the year.
The chapters are easy to track down on You Tube if you want to get all nostalgic about an era very few of us will remember first hand. If nothing else, it’s fun to spot where the 1980 movie version and the serial coincide.
This Irish movie is written and directed by Martin McDonaugh who also did "Seven psycopaths", "In Bruges" and "Three billboards outside Ebbings, Missouri". He is also married to Phobee Waller-Bridge. This is a man who delivers brilliant and original stories.
Banshees is about two seemingly lifelong friends on a fictional Island off the coast of Ireland one hundred years ago, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. Farrell's character is a happy and simple. The other one is a fiddler. In the first scene the fiddler has decided not to be friend with his less smart companion. He even threathens to cut off one of his fingers for each time his simpelton ex-friend talks to him. Why, and how does this develop? I won't say, but I can say the movie is moving, funny and dark. You know those movies about grumpy old men who gradually learns to be open and love the world? (from Scrooge to the recent "A man called Otto") This isn't one of those movies. It's different and better. Banshees has been nominated to nine Oscars, and I can see why. Everything is done well here in my opinion, perhaps especially the script and acting. Colin Ferrell has rarely been better. Kerry Condon plays Farrell's sister. I can't recall seing her in anything before, but I would really like to see her as Miss Moneypenny.
In a time when so many movies seem to be made for twelve year olds and look like computer games, it's nice to experience quality movies made for adults.
Snowbound (1948) - a black and white thriller set in the winter Alps where an assortment of characters are thrown together, many it emerges are there on a competitive mission to uncover a hidden horde of Nazi gold. Among them are Dennis Price - still looking young as as he did in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Robert Newton, Herbert Lom and Stanley Holloway. A lot of it anticipates Bond - mostly OHMSS including skiers holding torches in the night, but also TWINE with a male and female downhill skier against magnificent music.
The credits reveal Dr No's Zena Marshall is in it, though I didn't notice her at the time.
The set-up and atmosphere is great - only a couple of drawbacks; too much of it latterly relies on explanatory flashback which bucks the rule of show don't tell (though I suppose flashbacks to show, still it's a bit much), also it is a bit of a Maltese Falcon shaggy dog story. Oh - another thing, it's rubbish. Not individual scenes, just the overall arc. Characters try to kill off another then unaccountably don't succeed or you think they're dead then they recover, you think an Alpine hut has only them, then two other extras pop out of nowhere for no reason and the ending is a cop out. It's like it's made up as they went along. Shame.
I dare say Talking Pictures TV will repeat it at some point.
SMILE. I'd heard good things about this horror flick, and they don't cover it. This is an EXCELLENT shocker, involving an entity or ghost that travels from host to host and drives them to suicide. The affected woman--herself a psychiatrist--is driven literally insane, and so of course the question comes up: is this all real, or is it in her head? Whichever, it's a fine chiller.
Much-touted 1980 thriller by John Cassavetes in which a blowsy woman has to go on the run with a kid whose family has been wiped out by the mob, shades of the famous Leon here but less stylish for sure - and the kid is a six -year-old boy and kind of annoying.
Bill Conti does the music, some historic tragic stuff of the kind we got a year later.
It's gritty and excitingly directed but not always credible, one of those films were you think, well, if they're after you do you want to get the kid a new shirt, maybe not wear the same pink outfit all the time? Lots of little things make it implausible, like they seem to be unable to lose themselves in New York despite it being a pretty easy place to get lost in. She tries to book into a hotel but it's too plush so they turn her away, so she next goes to a slop house about two bucks a night - I mean, wasn't there anything in between? What happened to her cat? How come she has two apartments - or what was the second place she went to? How come if she knows the mob - and this turns out to be true, she's not just telling the kid that to calm him down - how come she was in the very same apartment as the accountant who was ratting on them? Is that coincidence or because they all hang out in the same run-down joint?
It's as though New York is restricted to one postcode.
Good performance by Gina Rowlands, though. Kid quite unsympathetic though that makes for it being more realistic.
The writer Xiaolu Guo once described western cinema as fast and materialistic, while Eastern cinema is slow and spiritual. That’s a fair point, but this interpretation seems to wrap all western cinema under the umbrella of English speaking cinema. Italian cinema has almost always been about displays of emotion, the turmoil decisions create and how individuals cope or do not cope. Even a director as self-absorbed as Fellini presents his characters in an endless contemplative struggle with their lot in life. Frequently, these emotions are played out against a background of obscure normality. Something unnoticed and unseen is always afoot in Italian cinema, prying at the edges of the action we watch, hawking at people’s passions and compunctions.
This happens in Emma Dante’s The Malcaluso Sisters, a low-key drama about five sisters and how an impulsive trip to the local beach beckons tragedy, the effect of which resonates with them for the rest of their lives. The action is set around a low rent apartment in Palermo, where the Macalusos scratch a living selling and renting rock doves for racing, funerals and weddings. The eldest sister, Maria, has ambitions to be a ballerina; Penuccia wants to sleep with boys; the mentally unstable Lia loves books; the overweight Katia is practical; the youngest, Antonella, idolises them all. Dante recreates their small, hollow world in a series of quick bustling scenes full of energy and detail. We sense, without minimal words, how these girls interact, evolve and strive. Only a brief mention of their parents tells us they are orphans and that Maria has taken on responsibility for the household upkeep and the pigeon business. Making ends meet tires her; we see it in her face and her attitudes: when we first meet Maria, she is asleep, dreaming, her hands in the extended posture of a ballerina.
Later, as a mature woman, those hands scrape dead animal remains from a zoologist’s work bench. The vibrant dancing girl has vanished, replaced by a wan, limp portrait. Meanwhile, Penuccia is still f***g, now for kicks and cash and Lia has become almost brutally feral, even at home. The interaction between the characters is harsh, stunted almost, the decrepit nature of their existence stuck at the time of tragedy, deepening their regrets, petty jealousies and blind, animal loyalties. Even as they argue, bicker and fight, you sense how underlying familiarity breeds vicious contempt, yet still binds these warring siblings. As one tragedy builds upon another, the sisters come to realise how much they truly mean to each other. The last scenes, as Lia bids farewell to the apartment she has lived in her whole life, are torn with a great wound of melancholy, played out in virtual silence, where emotion must be seen and not heard.
It is no surprise the film is based on a stage play – Emma Dante’s own – as it has the claustrophobic feel of a theatrical production. The scenes at the Charleston Restaurant and Beach Club feel ‘opened out’ from the original, providing colour and brightness beyond the grey of the apartment. The three act structure isn’t strong enough to provide a resolution – spoiler: there isn’t one – and the overall impact becomes shrouded in retrospective grief. That may be the intent, but occasionally the director is so concerned with emotions, she forgets to explain. The scene where Maria gluttonously eats all the pastries is befuddling by its intensity of close up and length. The effect bores rather than enthrals. The sisters constant aggravations become wearisome. Having set the place and the emotional conundrum, the centre act doesn’t go anywhere accept to introduce more of the same. This is disappointing as the visually strong beginning and climax both display subtlety and integrity of character and landscape. The middle is moribund in the extreme.
There are other missteps. Lia’s illness is not well addressed; she seems a caricature and the make up team revel in having her resemble Linda Blair’s crazed child from The Exorcist. The film starts in 1985, lurches suddenly twenty years forward and then again over an unspecified gap, possibly to an imminent time. A reference is made to the film Back to the Future and the movie simplistically suggests the characters want to turn back the clock and change the past, believing it will change their lives. Not so, and that isn’t what Back to the Future tells us. The emphasis on literature and storytelling, which seems at odds with the fantastical adventure of Marty McFly, is diluted because we don’t know which books Lia is reading. There’s a poignant song played over the final shots of the rock doves escaping the empty apartment, but there are no subtitles so we don’t understand the significance of the lyrical content. A lesbian under-theme is introduced for no apparent reason.
For all that, the film does have a certain pull. The actors are passionate. The camerawork is controlled. The editing is confident, choosing not to puzzle by obscurity. We see too much. The expectation is for us to emote with our characters’ behaviour rather than their dialogue and while this ought to be lauded, here it is what causes our confusion. The opening scene has the girls drilling a peep hole through the wall of their apartment, a telescopic view to the world outside, and we are looking back through the telescope at the lives within, yet we need far more than torrid arguments and enigmatic, prettily arranged cinematic canvases to explain the emotional chasms between the women.
The Macaluso Sisters is well regarded in Italy and won a host of awards.
Sort of biopic of legless pilot Douglas Bader directed by three-time Bond man Lewis Gilbert and starring Kenneth More. Alexander Knox is Bader's GP early on in the film, he popped up in a brief role as the Defence Minister in You Only Live Twice, the one who says something like, 'Well, that's World War III averted' as they appear to head off to the golf course.
A couple of other Bond stars in minor roles I think, plus Nigel Green who went on to be Dalby in The Ipcress File.
Enjoyable movie, skirts around the idea that Bader might not have been such a great laugh to be around, a bit like Guy Mitchell in The Dam Busters, it's said. Surprised to see his crash was attributed to some snide goading comments from some others in the forces, rather than his own pure tomfoolery.
Tar
Now, I did enjoy this at the cinema today. It's the Cate Blanchett film in which she's up for all the awards, as a demanding conductor whose life catches up with her. First 10 minutes - after some highly minimalistic credits - consist of her being interviewed, where she is highly articulate and charismatic, yet you see glimpses of danger.
It's a slow burn. Loved the look of the film, the decor etc. Great performances all round and it's nice to see Mark Strong turn on his acting credentials in stuff like this rather than Kingsman and Shazam, where he is also good but they're not meant to be great movies, they're not meant to build a legacy, a body of work. A notable Bond alumni shows up too, but you'll have to see it to find out who (or just look up on imdb).
Some thought provoking problems. I sound awful, but the character Lydia Tar didn't seem THAT bad. It's like the argument about Govt minister Dominic Raab, I mean being an awful person doesn't quite make you a sociopathic bully. One suspects if it had been a bloke in the role, all sorts of excuses would have been made for the character, say Jack Nicholson, contrast with his 'Here's Johnny!" in The Shining where he is a complete nutter and yet.... he's almost held up as a humorous heroic figure in popular culture whereas the woman is just a bitch, end of.
At time my mind wandered... it's a shame Bruce is out of action now because you could see Blanchett as the long-lost Die Hard villain based on this. 'My name is Lydia Gruber. I believe you knew my father, Hans...'
'I want you to take out the entire string section... Do it NOW. You can take it this will be an Unfinished symphony.'
Not quite sure that the finale of Tar made sense really given her earnings - then again look how Harvey Weinstein ended up. Not really sure the case against her stacked up. There's also a mystery gaslighting subplot suggestive of the French film Hidden but it doesn't seem to go anywhere, at least nowhere conclusive. It's a bit of a shaggy dog subplot.
It is gradually somewhat similar to the film Notes on a Scandal, which I've not seen but I've read Zoe Heller's book - Judi Dench starred as a misanthropic teacher who develops an unhealthy friendship with a younger work colleague, gradually we find out Dench's character is not as she presents herself, there are skeletons in the closet. The younger colleague? Why, played by Cate Blanchett.
Exuberant Hammer production from Michael Carreras and director Don Chaffey with special creature effects wizard Ray Harryhausen doing what he does best with his plasticine dinosaurs. It’s a load of historical claptrap but once you throw that in the bin and accept the stupidity of the premise, One Million Years B.C. is a half decent adventure yarn, albeit one with little dialogue to explain what everyone’s thinking. Grunts and the odd fantasised word is about the level of it. Ultimately, who cares when you have Raquel Welch parading around in an animal skin bikini?
The film is probably more famous now for its posters and production photos than the film itself which fits neatly into the ‘prehistoric monster’ genre – that of Godzilla, 20000 Fathoms, The Lost World, etc – and blends the silly creature stuff with a tale of rivalry between early men and women. John Richardson plays the hero Tumak, who is exiled from the Rock People after quarrelling with his father Akhoba. He leaves his mate, Nupondi, to the wiles of his brother Sakana and ventures into the desert where he encounters and escapes strange beasts before staggering into the realm of the Shell People, a far more civilised outfit than his cave dwelling, black haired, hairy, meat chewing home-folk. These blonde Amazonian warriors bid him a cautious welcome and Tumak attempts domestication, before a battle with an allosaurus gives him ideas of revenge – the effectiveness of the hunting spear enthrals him. Having romanced Raquel Welch’s Loana, the two return to the mountains in a futile attempt to gain mastery over his old tribe. Man’s first war erupts at the same time as a belching volcano.
Of note are the two screeching pterodactyls which fight over Miss Welch and the attention to detail in a dinosaur’s death scenes: twice they are breathing long after defeat and in a particularly good effect a spear stuck in a creature’s heart vibrates slower and slower as the animal dies. It’s interesting for a low-brow film such as this to suggest that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted; which they did, although I’m not sure it was scientifically proved at the time. The scene where Tomak and Loana hide in the Neanderthal’s secret cave, surrounded by skulls and fighting primitives was remarkably gripping. The film does have flashes of directorial style which keep the viewer alert. The prologue is very good, evoking memories of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle or seventies Dr Who, adding a frisson of precredit excitement. The title cards are enormous. Hammer showed real confidence and flair with this one, even if the end result errs to the mundane occasionally. Martine Beswick is the wronged Rock woman and Robert Brown a surprisingly muscular Akobha – so that’s two of our alumni. Miss Welch didn’t get the gig for Thunderball, but she certainly gives Claudine Auger a run for her money in the bikini-body stakes.
Very well filmed – in the Canary Islands – and surprisingly well-constructed despite the obvious historical flaws and a curious decision from Harryhausen to use real reptiles in some scenes, which rather divides the magic. I haven’t ever seen the forties original, which has retrospectively come under fire for animal cruelty, and starred Victor Mature, Lon Chaney and men in dinosaur suits. The Talking Pictures channel showed this 1966 version and ended the film with a picture card of the star and the moniker: Rachel Welch: Rest in Peace 1940 – 2023. Nice touch that.
Okay. Deep breath. A very deep breath before I put my fingers to the keyboard.
I have three points to make about this film:
1. For a family movie the scenes of torture, abuse and death are startlingly bloodthirsty. I see less shocking incidents is supposed horrific Hammer Productions. Under no circumstances is this kind of blood curdling content acceptable for kids. I am not surprised to learn the U.S. board of certification had to create a new category for this movie: PG13. Not acceptable, not at all, especially when…
2. The content is so slanted towards the infantile. George Lucas hinted strongly at a shift in his filmmaking emphasis to the childish with those daft Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. He’s done something similar here with a sidekick for Indy in an annoying all-too-bloody-clever Chinese boy called Short Round. Yes, honestly, Short Round. He saves Indy’s life several times and engages in kiddish fisticuffs with an adolescent Maharajah. Then there is a whole underground mine full of children. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All being whipped and chained and God knows what. Indy wants to rescue them all. I was more intrigued how the mine could exist so close to a pit full of molten lava – there is no volcano in sight – this is one of the stupidest geological hiccups in cinema history. It is simply bizarre the filmmakers didn’t think we’d notice. Maybe they thought we’d be distracted by all those bloody kids. There are other quite appalling errors in continuity, narrative, fact, fiction, special effects, etc, etc. I can’t be bothered to list them. I am fairly certain the good people at IMDB will have an extensive list.
3. This film is insulting to Chinese, Indians, children, women, archaeologists, the British Raj, Sikhs, chefs, elephants, the audience and even Busby Berkley. The film kicks off with the daftest of preludes set in an extravagant art deco night club on the fourth floor of a Shanghai gongyu. The movie runs a shade over two hours, but I was bored within ten minutes. It feels about two hours too long.
I had never seen this film before. I had heard it isn’t good. It isn’t. It is one of the very worst ‘blockbuster’ films I have ever watched. A misstep in every direction, from writing, to directing, acting, photography, editing, effects and music. There are many great artists associated with the project, but none of them emerge with any credit whatsoever. A dreadful experience from the too cheerful beginning to the chummy ending via a Thuggie cult of excruciating fantasy. Midway Harrison Ford as the titular Dr Jones says: “You have a vivid imagination.” He must have been referring to the filmmakers.
I love this quintet of Apes movies. The first one is a genuine classic. I would rank them slightly differently, 1-3-4-2-5. Escape has great performances from Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter with an exciting climax and neat ending. I also binge watch them every few years - great entertainment.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Comments
One criticises, the other praises, then as they talk they switch positions.
Ah, I see. I think I've seen clips of them in action before but not seen much of the show itself. I also remember seeing them parodied with latex faces on the truly mad Bo' Selecta! 🙂
were they meant to be based on Siskel and Ebert? who had their own teevee show round the same time and a rapport much as @Barbel is describing.
you know there were a couple of early80s season premieres of Saturday Night Live where the real Siskel and Ebert sat in the middle of the studio audience and delivered brutally honest live reviews of the show in progress as it was broadcast? maybe every show should incorporate critics as part of its content, Like what if No Time to Die had inserts of Waldorf and Statler or Siskel and Ebert at the end of each Act? "worst Bond ever! Bond has a license to kill, not be killed!" "well I think CraigBond had it coming to him, since frankly all his films stunk!"
sounds like we need an episode-by-episode Muppet Show review thread just to educate @Silhouette Man !
EDIT: theres a Muppet Show wiki, heres the entry for Waldorf and Statler
(and I'm mad at that site because it wont let me imagelink to it!)
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962)
Stately black and white John Ford mini-epic about the mythology of the American west and by extension the legitimacy of the western movie genre.
James Stewart is Ransome Stoddard, an idealistic lawyer who arrives in Shinbone and begats a war with the cattle ranchers and their enforcer, the rustler, stage robber and psychopath Liberty Valance. Lee Marvin scowls his way impressively through every scene as the titular villain. John Wayne is Stewart’s rival in love for Vera Miles’ Swedish waitress. The two leads were flattered by the monochrome photography which allows them to appear thirty years younger than their respective ages (53 and 54). Fordian support is provided by Woody Strode’s dignified black ranch hand, Andy Devine’s hapless Sheriff and Edmond O’Brien’s town drunk. Many similarities with Destry Rides Again, but for the most part played deadly serious.
The film evolves through a series of eight tension building extended scenes: the prologue, the stage robbery, the Swedish cantina, the schoolroom, the vote, the showdown, the reveal, the epilogue. Each scene delves deeper into the characters’ make-up and relationship, but there’s something missing from the overall landscape. Perhaps it is in Stewart’s motives, which seem to be coiled in anger. He claims to want peace through the rule of efficient, proactive law, but never once appears to recognise the town has an ineffectual Sheriff. Instead he takes up gunslinging, badly, and puts his life in danger seeking a duel with a man clearly more disposed to the rule of the gun. We know he’s doomed. His escape, through chance, is well drafted and complies with the other western ideal of self-sacrifice, but it’s all very bitter by the end. You wonder, if Vera Miles’ entrenched silences are because she knows all along she’s married to the wrong man.
The film’s epitaph “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” seems apt as reinterpreting fact is basically what the western genre has attempted to do on film since the earliest days of cinema.
DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK (1952)
Curious vehicle for Richard Widmark, Marilyn Monroe and Anne Bancroft. Everyone feels miscast. Widmark plays a pilot whose romance with Bancroft is under strain due to his obvious indifference. When he gets dumped, you don’t feel sorry for him. So when he spies Marilyn Monroe parading in her smalls across the hotel courtyard, his intentions are distinctly creepy. When Monroe’s overtly sensual behaviour begins to unravel, what started as a rebound flirtation develops into an evening of unhinged tension.
Monroe’s very good as the damaged young woman, but it’s not a role you’d immediately associate with her. She’d been on a run of mostly light comedies and this was an opportunity for her to shine in a big, dramatic leading part. She doesn’t disappoint, but I can imagine early fans being unsettled. I was too, and I knew about the movie and its plot.
British director Roy Ward Baker helms the show and does a competent job, ranking the suspense up at the appropriate moment. Black and white, noirish photography helps immensely. There’s a fine section late on when the child who Monroe is charged to babysit becomes physically threatened and Baker, along with Daniel Taradash’s sparse screenplay, ratches up the suspense and darkens the palette. The subject matter is quite upsetting and the film as a whole is a very uncomfortable experience, touching on child abuse, rape, neglect, bereavement, trauma, mental instability, suicide and murder. These adult, intensely difficult themes, are not given sufficient depth. Having presented them, the script does a runner in the last quarter and turns conventional on us. The over-simplified ending doesn’t do justice to what came before. The story which almost veered to the preposterous, suddenly becomes so ordinary all those intense flavours are lost.
Despite this, I’d urge people to watch it, chiefly to see Marilyn Monroe acting outside of her comfort zone.
What else would one come to AJB for if not to be educated on the Muppet Show?
Good to see you back at your fave London cinema!
https://princecharlescinema.com/PrinceCharlesCinema.dll/WhatsOn?f=25247521
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I like to think I am ahead of the Prince Charles' game !
Spent the day with friends and the kids wanted to watch this:
THE PIRATES! IN AN ADVENTURE WITH SCIENTISTS! (2012)
What fun!
I’m not predisposed towards animation movies, there are too many of them and I sense some of the magic has gone. I can’t understand why essentially life-affirming stories need to be played out by fish, toy cowboys or freezing princesses.
Occasionally though, one does strike gold and this brilliant British made tale of daring-don’ts on the high seas is a full-on treat with excellent animated characters, fun situations that do not make you roll your eyes in astonishment and a crackling script, sparklingly voiced by Hugh Grant, Matin Freeman and Imelda Staunton among others. There’s also Bobo the Monkey and Polly the Dodo, so the kids can keep up if the adult dialogue loses the their attention.
And what a villainess we have in Queen Victoria – that rapacious carnivorous collector of extinct animals!
Aardmann has rarely been better, perhaps only in The Wrong Trousers. I haven’t laughed so much at a film in ages. Or maybe it was the beer.
OPERATION CROSSBOW (1965)
The mid-sixties was an era of big war movies, but Operation Crossbow doesn’t feel quite ‘big’ enough, despite a starry cast and some superb visuals. Based on fact but highly fictionalising actual events, the movie relates a tale of resistance espionage and undercover heroics in and around Germany’s Peenemunde Air Research facilities, relocated from the Baltic to Holland for narrative convenience.
As D-Day approaches, Duncan Sandys [Richard Johnson, putting on an authentic limp] is worried about a change in Nazi tactics from short range bombing to long range missile attacks. Proved right he initiates a response, initially bombing raids on the V-1 ‘ski ramps’, which are mostly unsuccessful. This is all embellished truth, as is the later horror of the ‘silent’ V-2 rockets launched in early 1945. An interesting [unrecognised] fact is that Britain’s last official civilian fatality of the war was the sole casualty of the last V-2 rocket which exploded in Orpington 27/3/1945. Cinematically it is more interesting to follow the fictional adventures of George Peppard, Tom Courtney and Jeremy Kemp as they infiltrate the underground research and launch facility for the ‘New York Rocket’.
While there is evidence of German research into the A9/A10 two stage rocket, experiments never got as far as we see here. The filmic set up is much more like a prototype James Bond movie, with huge underground cavernous sets, murder, betrayal, double-agents and heroic derring-do. The great Emeric Pressburger contributed to the script and director Michael Anderson studiously studied the subject to obtain some authenticity. They do a splendid job recreating the period and an atmosphere of fear, loathing and desperation is well captured. Early suspense is created by a well filmed test launch of a piloted V-1, when Barbara Rutting’s Hanna Reitsch discovers the trim flaw in the rocket design. Reitsch was a real person, a famed German test pilot, but the trim fault was detected on the non-piloted V-2 not the V-1. Still, it’s unusual for a war film saluting Allied victory to treat the triumphs of the Axis with integrity and some excitement. This is tempered, of course, by an air raid during the celebration soiree. Other points of genuine insight are when the S.S. take over Peenemunde, which really happened, as well as the ruthlessness of both sides in the war game. The grit of the spies under pressure is finely tuned, although the nuances of dread displayed by Kemp and Courtney might have benefitted Peppard’s far less complicated performance.
It’s always good to have characters speaking in native tongues, although apparently Paul Henreid’s accent was so bad they cut most of his scenes. Anthony Quayle is particularly good as an S.S. interrogator who snaffles Tom Courtney’s low-key heroic spy. Lili Palmer won European awards for her small role as a tough Dutch resistance agent. Sophia Loren is a support player with lead billing specifically employed by producer Carlo Ponti to boost the film’s profile. Ponti was also Loren’s husband, so you can figure the math. Loren shines as the wife of Erik Van Ostabeck, a dead scientist whose identity Peppard is using. Their brief flirtation and her last scenes have genuine emotional pull, which can’t be said of most of the action, stuck as it is in the committee rooms of Blighty. Things pick up almost too fast in the final quarter and it all ends in something of an unlikely, albeit exciting rush.
An underrated war film, Operation Crossbow has been one of my favourites for many years because, despite its defects, the film attempts to tap into the machinations of war and the difficult decisions reached by individuals in the service of their country. Like A Bridge Too Far, it takes some pain to point this out and while Crossbow ends on a more optimistic note, the film has some of the same epic sweep and understanding of its subject that, coupled with unexpectedly good performances and tension racked scenes keeps an audience watching.
Operation Crossbow is one of the few wartime sequels, as Ice Cold in Alex stars reprise their roles - Anthony Quayle's Nazi - emboldened by having pulled the wool over the eyes of the gullible British soldiers, who later freed him - now infiltrates the English to find out how how much they know about their secret rockets. Sylvia Sims's character is reassigned to desk duty and discovers there is something fishy going on with the Germans' aerial plans. John Mills' dogged work in the desert earns him a promotion - though he's behind a desk again.
Don't think they found a role for Harry Andrews' character.
'Yes indeed!' Stromberg financier appears as the hotel factotum.
Think Tom Courtney is the only one still alive?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
As it happens I'm listening to an audiobook about Sverre Bergh who spied for SIS while he was a student in Germany. He actually saw the Penemünde facilty at a distance in 1941. Bergh sent a report to the UK, but his bosses ignored it and asked him to stop reading science fiction. When the Nazis started launching rockets the SIS changed their minds and told him to read "more of that science fiction".
HUSTLERS (2019)
Tacky enterprise based on a tawdry true story about four strippers who exploit customers, stealing credit cards and drugging them with little remorse. Writer / director Lorene Scararia makes a low-rent existence appear entirely glamourous. I didn’t believe in either the good or the bad times as presented to me. The cliché of dollar bills being tossed at half naked dancers just isn’t inventive enough; worse, it’s all done in aching, semi-porn slow motion. This slice of a life in crime is used an extended excuse for female bonding of the most puerile kind: much dancing and drinking, extravagant present giving and endless hugs. It is such a woman dominated world the protagonists only give birth to girls, there’s not a male child in sight. Despite the luxury, the girls can’t help looking like hookers all the time which just adds to the expected formula. Too simply told in extended flashbacks, another filmic cliché, and featuring the barest of character development. A very ordinary movie which is not saved by a decent performance from Jennifer Lopez as the ring leader.
FLASH GORDON (1936)
Episode 1
The Planet of Peril
Blimey, this doesn’t hang about.
Unlike the 1980 remake there’s no extended prologue. Two scientists watch the skies through a powerful telescope. A rogue planet is drawing steadily closer to Earth. They predict it will collide with and destroy Earth. Only Dr Zarkov has foreseen the encounter, but he has vanished along with his fabled rocket ship. One of the scientists is Professor Gordon and he receives a telegram from his son, Flash, who is flying to join him for the planet’s last days.
That’s depressing.
Flash Gordon himself is on a passenger plane experiencing the worst flight ever. Not only is the weather terrible, but he has to crane his neck to see the beautiful blonde sat two rows back. Dale Arden has no trouble inspecting him. The plane is struck by lightning and hurtles out of control. The pilot tells everyone to abandon the plane and parachute to safety. Flash and Dale discover there is only one parachute remaining and jump together. They land near Prof Zarkov’s rocket ship. Flash knows of the great man’s reputation and instinctively trusts him, agreeing to help him on his mission to the stars. Dale comes along for the ride.
That’s the first five minutes done then.
This is such a fast narrative I was chuckling at the silliness of it all. Things don’t slow down on the planet Mongo. There is a spectacular city on a mountain top. The surface of Mongo is a rock strewn desert inhabited by giant lizards who fight each other when it would be easier to eat the humans. The travellers are saved by a native rocket ship which resembles Zarkov’s rocket ship. Unfortunately, the crew are armour clad unfriendly space soldiers out to capture the humans.
Flash puts up a fight and he doesn’t stop fighting from here on. Buster Crabbe may not be able to act, but he can throw a decent right hook and has the physique for an action movie star. As an Olympic gold medal swimmer he has the form and skills for the later water based battles.
Charles Middleton is a scrupulous and intense Ming the Merciless. He’s hamstrung only by the contemptable script and a director who is interested in nothing more than propelling the story from one fight to another. Nobody uses guile and wit, it is fists and ire only. Flash is a very angry young man. During their first audience with Ming, he assaults Mongo’s Emperor and gets thrown into the Arena, where he battles three vicious Fang Men for his shirt.
Meanwhile Princess Aura, an all buxom and brawn Priscilla Lawson, not so much alluring as frightening, has taken a shine to Flash and saves him from certain death. The more dainty Jean Rogers practices the first of many screams…
Episode one ends on a cliff hanger of some success – but goodness it passes in a blur.
Episode 2
The Tunnel of Terror
There is a miraculous escape from the arena. Aura hides Flash in her personal rocket ship. The hairy faced Lion Men attack the citadel in their Gyro Ships. Flash has studied the Mongo pilots, “just in case I need to fly one of these things”, and launches the rocket ship, going on the attack as he fears the citadel will be destroyed and he’ll lose Dale and Zarkov forever. The Lion Men are led by Prince Thun, who sports monumental hair and beard. Thun and Flash team up, hoping to defeat Ming, and access a temple complex via a secret tunnel.
Meanwhile Dale Arden is being stripped for action – sorry, a wedding – and kitted out in a next to nothing bridal outfit. Jean Rogers looks stunning in the tiny bikini top and slinky sarong, hard nipples showing. She’s the only person dressed in white, a virgin angel among all these black garbed beasts. Saturday morning kids must have been having indecent fantasies throughout the summer of 1936.
Zarkov is staring at the amazing equipment in Ming’s laboratories. Maybe he saw Frankenstein and remembered what it looked like. He learns that Ming can control the orbit of the planet. He also learns that Dale has been drugged by Ming’s superintendent to ensure she complies meekly to a marriage ceremony. My one burning question is: why are all the good guys forced to wear swimming trunks?
Like the enormous, but empty, throne room we saw in episode one, the cave cut Temple of the Great God Tao is well designed, but this set feels too small for the action, too cramped.
Flash and Thun become trapped in the tunnel by a fearsome dragon…
Episode 3
Captured by the Shark Men
Tell it like it is.
More fighting and chasing. Flash and Thun rescue Dale, but become separated. The fugitives accidentally enter the underwater realm of the Shark Men, through a trap door in the floor, naturally. There’s an impressive shot of the Shark Men closing in on Flash and Dale with a very aggressive breast stroke. That’s not a euphemism, they really are swimming the breast stroke. Captured, the twosome are taken to a submarine, which looks just like a rocket ship. The underwater trip passes by two warring gigantic Octo-sacs. Finally on dry land, or dry somewhere, Flash engages King Kala in one-to-one combat. Beaten and humbled, Kala offers them the run of his private quarters. We know something is up, because he separates our hero and heroine. Even Buster Crabbe manages a pensive little look about the arrangement. Too right, matey. Dale gets a big bed, diaphanous curtains and fluffy pillows. Flash gets thrown in a water tank.
Suspicious, Dale creeps into Kala’s quarters and overhears him on the spaceograph with Ming. Flash has been imprisoned awaiting Ming’s wrath! As she watches, water is poured into the tank and an enormous sea beast engages our hero in a many tentacled underwater battle…
Episode 4
Battling the Sea Beast
You have to hand it to the ingenuity of the writers and the designers who are working minor miracles with virtually no money. Ralph Berger’s sets are fairly impressive and the ambition is crazily off the scale. Hollywood was famous for making historical epics [Intolerance, The Sign of the Cross, etc] but they rarely ventured into sci-fi territory, if ever. Alexander Korda had the backing of a whole British film studio to make Things to Come. Impressive as that movie is to look at, the narrative is dull as ditch water. You can’t say that about Flash Gordon, although a little less aggression and a little more discussion might have made the telling less repetitive. The film people at Universal really do attempt to picture and present an alien environment and a vision of a ‘future’ with lasers, rocket ships and aliens. It’s a pity there’s no conciliation in outer space.
Not much underwater either. Aura and Thun appear in time to save Flash and the jealousy between the two women in his life, blonde and brunette, rears its head again: Aura deliberately sabotage’s Kala’s undersea kingdom hoping to kill Dale. The silly so-and-so hasn’t banked on Flash’s chivalric instincts.
Meanwhile Zarkov uses Ming’s laboratory equipment to contact Earth…
Episode 5
The Destroying Ray
Less fist fighting than usual. Ming shows a compassionate streak, perhaps because his daughter is in Kala’s palace but more likely because he spies an opportunity to conquer the undersea kingdom for himself. He releases the magnet ray holding the palace underwater. As it rises to the surface, the fugitives escape. The dried out surrounds of the sea palace exactly resemble that of Mongo. They even have lizards. How did they survive underwater?
I watched this episode in a colourised print. Not so much technicolour as techni-tint, but Jean Rogers looks delightful and the skyscapes are especially vivid.
Prince Barin turns up, infiltrating Ming’s palace with commendable ease and absconding with Zarkov. Meanwhile, Thun and Dale have been kidnapped by marauding Hawk Men, whose first appearance sweeping through the mountains is quite striking. Jack Lipson’s King Vultan is a great villain, laughing and cracking inopportune jokes much like Brian Blessed. He menaces poor Dale with a beastly pet he calls Urso. She looks scared and curiously eroticised all at once. Vultan’s uniform has breast plates which actually make him look like he has breasts. They are bigger than Miss Rogers’, which might be upsetting for her, hence Dale’s likely curiosity. How does a birdman get such a large bosom? And why does he keep a striped bear as a pet? At least he keeps his hands to himself – unlike Prince Thun who is seen clearly grasping Dale’s left boob as they attempt to flee the Hawk Men.
Ming knows Vultan will try to make Dale his bride – “it’s in his nature” – and flies to the Sky City to stop any impending nuptials.
Meanwhile, Flash, Zarkov, Aura and Barin are speeding to the rescue, until Vultan’s melting ray strikes the ship and causes it to crash…
(continued below...)
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Episode 6:
Flaming Torture
The gravitational influence of the Sky City saves Barin’s rocket ship, but everyone ends up in King Vultan’s custody. Flash, Thun and Barin are sent to the Atom Furnace where they feed uranium ore to the ovens which power the gravitational rays keeping the city afloat. Vultan wants Zarkov to discover a new method of propulsion as the uranium is running low. Aura persuades Dale to pretend she’s fallen for Vultan and initially the ruse appears to work as, during an elaborate feast, his attitude starts to soften.
Unfortunately, Flash’s tendency towards violence interferes with Aura’s schemes. He initiates a riot in the Furnace Room. His punishment is electric zap torture. Dale can’t suffer the scene and breaks down screaming, revealing her true emotions. Flash can’t take it either and faints…
James Pierce plays Prince Thun. He was the fourth man to play Tarzan [Tarzan and the Golden Lion, 1927]. He’s pretty terrible. Frank Shannon is Zarkov. He’s terrible too. James Alexander’s Prince Barin is probably the worst of the lot. Given Buster Crabbe’s continued woodenness, this episode really allows the ladies to shine. Dale attempting to seduce Vultan with her blonde hair and big eyes [it has to be eyes, the best of her isn’t big enough to challenge Vultan] is a hoot and Aura’s nefarious plans show no sign of wavering. I’m enjoying Jack Lipsom’s boisterous bird monarch too.
The Sky City is a great design, much more impressive than the similar looking undersea palace. It is supported by searchlights. There’s an exotic floor show taking place at the far end of Vultan’s state dining room. I’m not certain but, like the music which was pinched from The Invisible Man, I have the impression this art deco designed dance number has been culled from a different movie altogether. [I checked later, it was, The Midnight Sun, 1927.]
Episode 7
Shattering Doom
A change of pace, thank goodness.
A little respite for Flash, who survives the torture thanks to Aura’s timely intervention and the resuscitative properties of a electroscope, which resembles a futuristic oxygen tent. Dale is presented with new clothes and jewels and treated to a shadow play by the ever laughing Vultan.
When Flash rejects Aura’s overtures, she attempts to blind him with a blow torch [yikes!] but can’t go through with it. Perhaps her heart is not as dark as her hair after all.
Meanwhile, Ming lands on the Sky City and Vultan parlays for peace. Zarkov boobytraps a shovel and Flash uses it to ignite the Furnace Room in a ball of fire…
Episode 8
Tournament of Death
And back to the rough stuff…
As the Sky City lurches off its pedestal, Zarkov bargains with Vultan: free Flash and his friends and he’ll activate the new electric ray which will save the city. Vultan agrees, but once the city is rebalanced, Ming activates his right as Emperor to only allow the fugitives freedom if they engage in the Tournament of Death. Flash is nominated as their Champion. The other swordsman turns out to be Prince Barin, forced to take part by Ming, and hoping to prevent further fighting by producing a satisfying but non-fatal victory. Instead, Flash wins the duel – and refuses to continue once he realises it is Barin beneath the mask. Shamed, Barin believes he has lost the love of Princess Aura for good. Meanwhile Flash re-enters the arena barehanded to battle the giant Orangapoid. After playing Tarzan, Buster Crabbe ought to be used to fighting men in ape suits – or was that Johnny Weissmuller? – I forget. An all action episode of little merit other than to remind me how much more sense the Flash v Barin conflict made in the movie.
Episode 9
Fighting the Fire Dragon
It’s the same man in a dragon suit we saw in episode 2 and 3, only this one breathes fire…
Flash kills the Orangapoid, thanks to Aura’s intervention. She keeps saving him and keeps not getting her reward. You’d think she’d learn. Ming turns all magnanimous in defeat, but nobody trusts him an inch – except poor naive Flash who reassures Dale “it’ll be alright” – about as reassuring as standing in a tunnel occupied by a fire dragon.
The High Priest of Tao gives Aura a forgetfulness drug which will put Flash to sleep, allowing her to ferret the Earthman to the Sacred Palace of Tao, where she can start a secret life with him. A second drug will wake him, but his memory will be empty. The movie played a similar scenario, but at the opposite end of the drama. There is much mugging and astonishment in every scene. Director Frederick Stephani isn’t doing much with his actors. You sense the money was spent on the detail. The acting got third billing behind the designers and the effects crews. The assembled cast really tries, but it’s like watching mud dry. Painfully slow.
Episode 10
The Unseen Peril
“This Earthman has disturbed the affairs of my empire too long,” declares Ming the Merciless. Too right.
Aura attempts to quell his ire, but to no avail. Zarkov again attempts to contact the Earth. Meanwhile, Flash, having lost his memory, spends most of the episode looking distinctly glum. The fact he vanishes into thin air by the end of it seems highly appropriate…
(continued below...)
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Episode 11
In the Claws of the Tigron
Zarkov has saved Flash from an execution squad using his invisibility machine. Blessed with a sudden power of invisibility, Flash exploits the situation and threatens Ming, before freeing King Vultan. Universal’s special effects teams have had fun with this scenario before and Jack Lipsom’s Vultan enjoys it as much as they do.
Ming decides to wreak vengeance, but as no one can see the rogue Earthman the task is impossible. Ming’s patience is running low, if it ever had a high. He even snaps at his daughter, who still desires Flash despite every sign he isn’t remotely interested in her. Sensing danger, Barin takes Dale to the safety of the catacombs. Aura sets a trap using the sacred Tigron. While Vultan holds off Ming’s troops with his enormous bulk and breast plates – much to Zarkov’s astonishment – Flash and Barin rush to Dale’s rescue. Too late! The tigron has already leapt to the attack…
And it looks like a real tiger too.
Episode 12
Trapped in the Turret
Flash arrives in time to save Dale. He slaughters the sacred tigron with his bare hands. Goodness. But you wonder what happened to Prince Barin, he was right behind him when they entered the catacombs. Still, a swift word in Aura’s ear changes her attitude. Flash seems as gullible as he was earlier. He must stop trusting people, it’ll get him into whole heaps of trouble.
Ming too has yet another change of heart, which seems unlikely. He appears to be temporarily forgetting the previous few episodes and returning the stage back to where we were in Episode 8: Tournament of Death. After that experience, Flash, amazingly, is learning not to trust the Merciless One. Zarkov makes contact with Earth, although Ming hasn’t promised to call off any attack.
Aura finally comes through, agreeing that it would be safer to stay in Vultan’s Sky Palace as her father can’t be trusted. Charles Middleton lowers his voice like all good villains and ponders his next moves while sitting on his enormous oyster shaped throne. Prince Thun, who hasn’t shown his face since Episode 8, turns up on the spaceograph and agrees to bring help. Barin tells Flash and his friends to meet them in the Turret House, but their conversation has been overheard by Ming’s spies…
Probably the dullest chapter of the serial so far. A genuine filler of little quality and lots of plot holes. Given that Zarkov’s rocket ship has been loaded with power batteries, it must be nearby, so why is Prince Barin having to fetch his own rocket ship? And if he can walk to it, why is everyone else not walking to it also? Hopeless.
Episode 13
Rocketing to the Earth
Escaping Ming’s trap, Flash sees Barin being transported to prison. While Thun and his Lion Men attack the citadel with his gyro ships, Flash, Dale, Zarkov, Barin, Vultan and Aura are captured. Ming finally reveals himself as utterly merciless. Revealing his true colours, even Aura recognises the evil in her father. As the battle rages, Ming decides there is only one way to escape the rebels…
The history of Flash Gordon is long and complicated, like most cultural fictional heroes. It is astonishing to learn the comic strip, which started in 1934 as a Sunday paper strip to rival Buck Rogers, was still being drawn in 1993. Its influence on science fiction, along with those seminal novels by Verne, Wells and Burroughs can’t be underestimated. While this serial certainly entertains and contains much material featured in the earliest stories and reused in most future versions [mostly television adaptations], it is decidedly creaky. The acting in particular is wooden. Where it wins is the design and the energy of the narrative. A lot of thought clearly went into how to best translate Alex Raymond’s fantasy images from newspaper to celluloid. The studio producers opted for broad strokes, with big sets and an array of dazzling effects [dazzling for 1936]. Occasionally, it touches on visual brilliance and is certainly inventive. It hasn’t exactly stood the test of time, but it remains entertaining and an important landmark in cinematic history. The public liked it. The serial was Universal’s second biggest money spinner of the year.
The chapters are easy to track down on You Tube if you want to get all nostalgic about an era very few of us will remember first hand. If nothing else, it’s fun to spot where the 1980 movie version and the serial coincide.
Banshees of Insherin (2022)
This Irish movie is written and directed by Martin McDonaugh who also did "Seven psycopaths", "In Bruges" and "Three billboards outside Ebbings, Missouri". He is also married to Phobee Waller-Bridge. This is a man who delivers brilliant and original stories.
Banshees is about two seemingly lifelong friends on a fictional Island off the coast of Ireland one hundred years ago, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. Farrell's character is a happy and simple. The other one is a fiddler. In the first scene the fiddler has decided not to be friend with his less smart companion. He even threathens to cut off one of his fingers for each time his simpelton ex-friend talks to him. Why, and how does this develop? I won't say, but I can say the movie is moving, funny and dark. You know those movies about grumpy old men who gradually learns to be open and love the world? (from Scrooge to the recent "A man called Otto") This isn't one of those movies. It's different and better. Banshees has been nominated to nine Oscars, and I can see why. Everything is done well here in my opinion, perhaps especially the script and acting. Colin Ferrell has rarely been better. Kerry Condon plays Farrell's sister. I can't recall seing her in anything before, but I would really like to see her as Miss Moneypenny.
In a time when so many movies seem to be made for twelve year olds and look like computer games, it's nice to experience quality movies made for adults.
@chrisno1 , I am always amazed at the breadth of your choices.
Snowbound (1948) - a black and white thriller set in the winter Alps where an assortment of characters are thrown together, many it emerges are there on a competitive mission to uncover a hidden horde of Nazi gold. Among them are Dennis Price - still looking young as as he did in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Robert Newton, Herbert Lom and Stanley Holloway. A lot of it anticipates Bond - mostly OHMSS including skiers holding torches in the night, but also TWINE with a male and female downhill skier against magnificent music.
The credits reveal Dr No's Zena Marshall is in it, though I didn't notice her at the time.
The set-up and atmosphere is great - only a couple of drawbacks; too much of it latterly relies on explanatory flashback which bucks the rule of show don't tell (though I suppose flashbacks to show, still it's a bit much), also it is a bit of a Maltese Falcon shaggy dog story. Oh - another thing, it's rubbish. Not individual scenes, just the overall arc. Characters try to kill off another then unaccountably don't succeed or you think they're dead then they recover, you think an Alpine hut has only them, then two other extras pop out of nowhere for no reason and the ending is a cop out. It's like it's made up as they went along. Shame.
I dare say Talking Pictures TV will repeat it at some point.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Yes, must have ...... 🙂
SMILE. I'd heard good things about this horror flick, and they don't cover it. This is an EXCELLENT shocker, involving an entity or ghost that travels from host to host and drives them to suicide. The affected woman--herself a psychiatrist--is driven literally insane, and so of course the question comes up: is this all real, or is it in her head? Whichever, it's a fine chiller.
The Menu
I enjoyed it but I don't know how I would categorise it. Seemed to be in a genre all of it own. 😁
Gloria
Much-touted 1980 thriller by John Cassavetes in which a blowsy woman has to go on the run with a kid whose family has been wiped out by the mob, shades of the famous Leon here but less stylish for sure - and the kid is a six -year-old boy and kind of annoying.
Bill Conti does the music, some historic tragic stuff of the kind we got a year later.
It's gritty and excitingly directed but not always credible, one of those films were you think, well, if they're after you do you want to get the kid a new shirt, maybe not wear the same pink outfit all the time? Lots of little things make it implausible, like they seem to be unable to lose themselves in New York despite it being a pretty easy place to get lost in. She tries to book into a hotel but it's too plush so they turn her away, so she next goes to a slop house about two bucks a night - I mean, wasn't there anything in between? What happened to her cat? How come she has two apartments - or what was the second place she went to? How come if she knows the mob - and this turns out to be true, she's not just telling the kid that to calm him down - how come she was in the very same apartment as the accountant who was ratting on them? Is that coincidence or because they all hang out in the same run-down joint?
It's as though New York is restricted to one postcode.
Good performance by Gina Rowlands, though. Kid quite unsympathetic though that makes for it being more realistic.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE MACALUSO SISTERS (2020)
The writer Xiaolu Guo once described western cinema as fast and materialistic, while Eastern cinema is slow and spiritual. That’s a fair point, but this interpretation seems to wrap all western cinema under the umbrella of English speaking cinema. Italian cinema has almost always been about displays of emotion, the turmoil decisions create and how individuals cope or do not cope. Even a director as self-absorbed as Fellini presents his characters in an endless contemplative struggle with their lot in life. Frequently, these emotions are played out against a background of obscure normality. Something unnoticed and unseen is always afoot in Italian cinema, prying at the edges of the action we watch, hawking at people’s passions and compunctions.
This happens in Emma Dante’s The Malcaluso Sisters, a low-key drama about five sisters and how an impulsive trip to the local beach beckons tragedy, the effect of which resonates with them for the rest of their lives. The action is set around a low rent apartment in Palermo, where the Macalusos scratch a living selling and renting rock doves for racing, funerals and weddings. The eldest sister, Maria, has ambitions to be a ballerina; Penuccia wants to sleep with boys; the mentally unstable Lia loves books; the overweight Katia is practical; the youngest, Antonella, idolises them all. Dante recreates their small, hollow world in a series of quick bustling scenes full of energy and detail. We sense, without minimal words, how these girls interact, evolve and strive. Only a brief mention of their parents tells us they are orphans and that Maria has taken on responsibility for the household upkeep and the pigeon business. Making ends meet tires her; we see it in her face and her attitudes: when we first meet Maria, she is asleep, dreaming, her hands in the extended posture of a ballerina.
Later, as a mature woman, those hands scrape dead animal remains from a zoologist’s work bench. The vibrant dancing girl has vanished, replaced by a wan, limp portrait. Meanwhile, Penuccia is still f***g, now for kicks and cash and Lia has become almost brutally feral, even at home. The interaction between the characters is harsh, stunted almost, the decrepit nature of their existence stuck at the time of tragedy, deepening their regrets, petty jealousies and blind, animal loyalties. Even as they argue, bicker and fight, you sense how underlying familiarity breeds vicious contempt, yet still binds these warring siblings. As one tragedy builds upon another, the sisters come to realise how much they truly mean to each other. The last scenes, as Lia bids farewell to the apartment she has lived in her whole life, are torn with a great wound of melancholy, played out in virtual silence, where emotion must be seen and not heard.
It is no surprise the film is based on a stage play – Emma Dante’s own – as it has the claustrophobic feel of a theatrical production. The scenes at the Charleston Restaurant and Beach Club feel ‘opened out’ from the original, providing colour and brightness beyond the grey of the apartment. The three act structure isn’t strong enough to provide a resolution – spoiler: there isn’t one – and the overall impact becomes shrouded in retrospective grief. That may be the intent, but occasionally the director is so concerned with emotions, she forgets to explain. The scene where Maria gluttonously eats all the pastries is befuddling by its intensity of close up and length. The effect bores rather than enthrals. The sisters constant aggravations become wearisome. Having set the place and the emotional conundrum, the centre act doesn’t go anywhere accept to introduce more of the same. This is disappointing as the visually strong beginning and climax both display subtlety and integrity of character and landscape. The middle is moribund in the extreme.
There are other missteps. Lia’s illness is not well addressed; she seems a caricature and the make up team revel in having her resemble Linda Blair’s crazed child from The Exorcist. The film starts in 1985, lurches suddenly twenty years forward and then again over an unspecified gap, possibly to an imminent time. A reference is made to the film Back to the Future and the movie simplistically suggests the characters want to turn back the clock and change the past, believing it will change their lives. Not so, and that isn’t what Back to the Future tells us. The emphasis on literature and storytelling, which seems at odds with the fantastical adventure of Marty McFly, is diluted because we don’t know which books Lia is reading. There’s a poignant song played over the final shots of the rock doves escaping the empty apartment, but there are no subtitles so we don’t understand the significance of the lyrical content. A lesbian under-theme is introduced for no apparent reason.
For all that, the film does have a certain pull. The actors are passionate. The camerawork is controlled. The editing is confident, choosing not to puzzle by obscurity. We see too much. The expectation is for us to emote with our characters’ behaviour rather than their dialogue and while this ought to be lauded, here it is what causes our confusion. The opening scene has the girls drilling a peep hole through the wall of their apartment, a telescopic view to the world outside, and we are looking back through the telescope at the lives within, yet we need far more than torrid arguments and enigmatic, prettily arranged cinematic canvases to explain the emotional chasms between the women.
The Macaluso Sisters is well regarded in Italy and won a host of awards.
I like all kinds of movies and dislike even more 😉
Reach for the Sky
Sort of biopic of legless pilot Douglas Bader directed by three-time Bond man Lewis Gilbert and starring Kenneth More. Alexander Knox is Bader's GP early on in the film, he popped up in a brief role as the Defence Minister in You Only Live Twice, the one who says something like, 'Well, that's World War III averted' as they appear to head off to the golf course.
A couple of other Bond stars in minor roles I think, plus Nigel Green who went on to be Dalby in The Ipcress File.
Enjoyable movie, skirts around the idea that Bader might not have been such a great laugh to be around, a bit like Guy Mitchell in The Dam Busters, it's said. Surprised to see his crash was attributed to some snide goading comments from some others in the forces, rather than his own pure tomfoolery.
Tar
Now, I did enjoy this at the cinema today. It's the Cate Blanchett film in which she's up for all the awards, as a demanding conductor whose life catches up with her. First 10 minutes - after some highly minimalistic credits - consist of her being interviewed, where she is highly articulate and charismatic, yet you see glimpses of danger.
It's a slow burn. Loved the look of the film, the decor etc. Great performances all round and it's nice to see Mark Strong turn on his acting credentials in stuff like this rather than Kingsman and Shazam, where he is also good but they're not meant to be great movies, they're not meant to build a legacy, a body of work. A notable Bond alumni shows up too, but you'll have to see it to find out who (or just look up on imdb).
Some thought provoking problems. I sound awful, but the character Lydia Tar didn't seem THAT bad. It's like the argument about Govt minister Dominic Raab, I mean being an awful person doesn't quite make you a sociopathic bully. One suspects if it had been a bloke in the role, all sorts of excuses would have been made for the character, say Jack Nicholson, contrast with his 'Here's Johnny!" in The Shining where he is a complete nutter and yet.... he's almost held up as a humorous heroic figure in popular culture whereas the woman is just a bitch, end of.
At time my mind wandered... it's a shame Bruce is out of action now because you could see Blanchett as the long-lost Die Hard villain based on this. 'My name is Lydia Gruber. I believe you knew my father, Hans...'
'I want you to take out the entire string section... Do it NOW. You can take it this will be an Unfinished symphony.'
Not quite sure that the finale of Tar made sense really given her earnings - then again look how Harvey Weinstein ended up. Not really sure the case against her stacked up. There's also a mystery gaslighting subplot suggestive of the French film Hidden but it doesn't seem to go anywhere, at least nowhere conclusive. It's a bit of a shaggy dog subplot.
It is gradually somewhat similar to the film Notes on a Scandal, which I've not seen but I've read Zoe Heller's book - Judi Dench starred as a misanthropic teacher who develops an unhealthy friendship with a younger work colleague, gradually we find out Dench's character is not as she presents herself, there are skeletons in the closet. The younger colleague? Why, played by Cate Blanchett.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks for those @Gymkata I enjoy the first two, but haven't seen the others for decades. I do recall not liking the last one.
ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966)
Exuberant Hammer production from Michael Carreras and director Don Chaffey with special creature effects wizard Ray Harryhausen doing what he does best with his plasticine dinosaurs. It’s a load of historical claptrap but once you throw that in the bin and accept the stupidity of the premise, One Million Years B.C. is a half decent adventure yarn, albeit one with little dialogue to explain what everyone’s thinking. Grunts and the odd fantasised word is about the level of it. Ultimately, who cares when you have Raquel Welch parading around in an animal skin bikini?
The film is probably more famous now for its posters and production photos than the film itself which fits neatly into the ‘prehistoric monster’ genre – that of Godzilla, 20000 Fathoms, The Lost World, etc – and blends the silly creature stuff with a tale of rivalry between early men and women. John Richardson plays the hero Tumak, who is exiled from the Rock People after quarrelling with his father Akhoba. He leaves his mate, Nupondi, to the wiles of his brother Sakana and ventures into the desert where he encounters and escapes strange beasts before staggering into the realm of the Shell People, a far more civilised outfit than his cave dwelling, black haired, hairy, meat chewing home-folk. These blonde Amazonian warriors bid him a cautious welcome and Tumak attempts domestication, before a battle with an allosaurus gives him ideas of revenge – the effectiveness of the hunting spear enthrals him. Having romanced Raquel Welch’s Loana, the two return to the mountains in a futile attempt to gain mastery over his old tribe. Man’s first war erupts at the same time as a belching volcano.
Of note are the two screeching pterodactyls which fight over Miss Welch and the attention to detail in a dinosaur’s death scenes: twice they are breathing long after defeat and in a particularly good effect a spear stuck in a creature’s heart vibrates slower and slower as the animal dies. It’s interesting for a low-brow film such as this to suggest that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted; which they did, although I’m not sure it was scientifically proved at the time. The scene where Tomak and Loana hide in the Neanderthal’s secret cave, surrounded by skulls and fighting primitives was remarkably gripping. The film does have flashes of directorial style which keep the viewer alert. The prologue is very good, evoking memories of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle or seventies Dr Who, adding a frisson of precredit excitement. The title cards are enormous. Hammer showed real confidence and flair with this one, even if the end result errs to the mundane occasionally. Martine Beswick is the wronged Rock woman and Robert Brown a surprisingly muscular Akobha – so that’s two of our alumni. Miss Welch didn’t get the gig for Thunderball, but she certainly gives Claudine Auger a run for her money in the bikini-body stakes.
Very well filmed – in the Canary Islands – and surprisingly well-constructed despite the obvious historical flaws and a curious decision from Harryhausen to use real reptiles in some scenes, which rather divides the magic. I haven’t ever seen the forties original, which has retrospectively come under fire for animal cruelty, and starred Victor Mature, Lon Chaney and men in dinosaur suits. The Talking Pictures channel showed this 1966 version and ended the film with a picture card of the star and the moniker: Rachel Welch: Rest in Peace 1940 – 2023. Nice touch that.
INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
Okay. Deep breath. A very deep breath before I put my fingers to the keyboard.
I have three points to make about this film:
1. For a family movie the scenes of torture, abuse and death are startlingly bloodthirsty. I see less shocking incidents is supposed horrific Hammer Productions. Under no circumstances is this kind of blood curdling content acceptable for kids. I am not surprised to learn the U.S. board of certification had to create a new category for this movie: PG13. Not acceptable, not at all, especially when…
2. The content is so slanted towards the infantile. George Lucas hinted strongly at a shift in his filmmaking emphasis to the childish with those daft Ewoks in Return of the Jedi. He’s done something similar here with a sidekick for Indy in an annoying all-too-bloody-clever Chinese boy called Short Round. Yes, honestly, Short Round. He saves Indy’s life several times and engages in kiddish fisticuffs with an adolescent Maharajah. Then there is a whole underground mine full of children. Hundreds of them. Thousands. All being whipped and chained and God knows what. Indy wants to rescue them all. I was more intrigued how the mine could exist so close to a pit full of molten lava – there is no volcano in sight – this is one of the stupidest geological hiccups in cinema history. It is simply bizarre the filmmakers didn’t think we’d notice. Maybe they thought we’d be distracted by all those bloody kids. There are other quite appalling errors in continuity, narrative, fact, fiction, special effects, etc, etc. I can’t be bothered to list them. I am fairly certain the good people at IMDB will have an extensive list.
3. This film is insulting to Chinese, Indians, children, women, archaeologists, the British Raj, Sikhs, chefs, elephants, the audience and even Busby Berkley. The film kicks off with the daftest of preludes set in an extravagant art deco night club on the fourth floor of a Shanghai gongyu. The movie runs a shade over two hours, but I was bored within ten minutes. It feels about two hours too long.
I had never seen this film before. I had heard it isn’t good. It isn’t. It is one of the very worst ‘blockbuster’ films I have ever watched. A misstep in every direction, from writing, to directing, acting, photography, editing, effects and music. There are many great artists associated with the project, but none of them emerge with any credit whatsoever. A dreadful experience from the too cheerful beginning to the chummy ending via a Thuggie cult of excruciating fantasy. Midway Harrison Ford as the titular Dr Jones says: “You have a vivid imagination.” He must have been referring to the filmmakers.
Rubbish.
I love this quintet of Apes movies. The first one is a genuine classic. I would rank them slightly differently, 1-3-4-2-5. Escape has great performances from Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter with an exciting climax and neat ending. I also binge watch them every few years - great entertainment.
Ray Harryhausen added the scene with real reptiles as a tribute to the original 1940 One Million B.C.
As @chrisno1 points out, the Neanderthal cave scene is very tense, and as a 10 year old in a cinema in 1966, seeing that was terrifying!