As you probably know, the scene features in Kenneth Branagh's fine movie, Belfast, along with some wonderful Bond Xmas present moments, worth a watch.
Saw Indy and TOD as a teenager at Empire Leicester Square for my birthday with Mum, the sound in the cinema was off or muffled rather so it made for a jarring experience. Loads of kids at the screening, it failed to hold their attention. We then went to see The Man Who Knew Too Much at the cinema on Charing Cross Road which was running a Hitchcock season that summer.
It's odd isn't it, Spielberg struggled to get funding for Raiders after the box office disaster of 1941 but then Raiders knocks it out the ball park so he then does this, oh dear. But Temple wasn't a flop, it sort of wasn't allowed to be. But we forget the Indy strike miss is literally hit and miss, after this it was the excellent Last Crusade then the dreadful Crystal Skulls. The Craig tenure wasn't much better imo.
Personally I'd never noticed or bothered with a mine set next to molten lava but I guess it's like the dam on top of a mountain in the GE pre-credits.
While I agree Temple of Doom has an unfortunate mix of brutality and the childish, I have to disagree. Well. I don't HAVE TO, but I do. 😁
I really like the feeling of adventure and fun, the great locations and sets, the action and chase scenes, Harrison Ford's performance, the musical scene at the start and much more. Given the genere and style of the Indiana Jones movies I really don't mind the mine close to the lava. It's based in 1930's action/adventure movies, not documentaries. Temple of Doom is the least strong of the first three, but it's still great entertainment.
I don’t know very much about John Mills’ career. A well regarded thespian he’s of those pre / post war generations of Rank actors who always seemed to play the same role, matinee fodder, until by fluke or design they pulled a stupendous performance out of the locker. I’m talking Dirk Bogarde, Richard Johnson, Kenneth More, Dickie Attenborough, etc, actors who graced the screen over and over and rarely put a foot wrong, but rarely troubled the critics either.
I had no idea Mills had a brief flirtation with directing. Here, he’s got a family operation up and running. His wife [writer Mary Hayley Bell] wrote the story and screenplay and his daughter [Hayley] has the lead. The film concerns a naive, traumatised adolescent whose obsession with death leads her into conflict with her alcoholic mother, the local kindly sherry-drinking parson and a whisky sodden landowner grieving for his long dead son. There is an awful lot of drinking. Curiously the supposed ‘villains’ of the piece, a group of Romany gypsies, barely touch a drop. They prefer soup.
Miss Mills gives a half decent performance. She was trying to develop a more mature screen personality at the time, but she still looks about five or six years younger than her character’s age or her actual age (17 & 19). Having her surrounded by primary aged kids doesn’t help. The fact she’s clearly being portrayed and written as a simpleton makes the unfolding drama distinctly creepy. For two thirds of its length, the movie is virtually a horror show for kids, all those drunken adults, dead animal corpses, abusive parents, a series of heckling close-ups, sinister gypsies, etc, etc. When Ian McShane’s Roibin Krisenki plucks young Brydie from a river and keeps her for himself we are in Whistle Down the Wind territory in reverse, although there are no Christ-like overtures and childish wonder gives way to distinctly unsettling coercion. The romanticised ending seems unlikely.
Straightforward Terminator-style futuristic adventure (though I don't know if the date is specified, maybe it isn't futuristic, it's implied like in The Running Man) anyway it's redeemed by the witty satirical flair and subtle running jokes.
Isn't the main villain the one in Arnie's Total Recall?
Pleasingly straightforward, but it's not quite a plot hole to have this robot cop get machine gunned and smashed up and in the next scene simply be licking his wounds and ready to go again. On top of which, 'shoot in the face' might be a simple enough instruction for assailants, as that is uncovered.
Wittily prescient at the time, it is now depressingly topical. The ending I recalled had Murphy be allowed to die by his woman cop buddy but it's been years, decades even, and I got it wrong, it leaves the way open for a sequel, one directed by Irvin Kershner who gave it the same magic touch he did Never Say Never Again, in other words it was like Kick Ass 2 in that hit missed the funny, satirical slant of the original.
Dressed to Kill
Intensely pleasing Sherlock Holmes story with Basil Rathbone - short but satisfying, with a female nemesis on a par with the lovely Isabel Oakeshott. Lines like 'Praise coming from you is all the more gratifying' that sort of thing.
George A. Romero single-handedly started the modern zombie era in this groundbreaking horror outing. A small group of people take refuge in a farmhouse whilst under attack from flesh eating ghouls. The low budget and filming in black and white adds atmosphere to the proceedings and the amateur actors do well, especially the lead character Duane Jones. It’s the sort of film that Ed Wood was yearning to make if he had had the talent that Romero had. The special effects were gruesome for the time and the film has gone on to be rightly revered in the annals of horror movies.
I first saw this in about 1978 at an all night cinema which showed 5 horror films stating at 11pm and ending at breakfast time. One of the other films was Draculavs.Frankenstein with YOLT’s Karin Dor but I have forgotten what the others were.
Excellent and essential viewing for zombie fans.
8/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Olivia Colman is the only name most will have heard of here. The title is appropriate and has more than one meaning. Beautiful Irish scenery, an engaging boy acting opposite the ever-reliable Olivia, some laughs, some sentiment. Be warned, the Irish accents are heavy.
This film crops up fairly regularly on television these days, but if my memory serves it barely made it onto home screens for decades. The BBC presented it as a tribute to Sir Michael Caine, who is 90 years old this month. Far better I feel to watch The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin next week. A pity no channel is showing films like Alfie, Pulp or The Quiet American which demonstrate Caine’s acting chops, but here we have it:
in late autumn 1944 a company of rebellious German commandos are parachuted into the Norfolk village of Studley Constable. Their mission: to kidnap Winston Churchill. A local agent assists them and an IRA sympathiser ingratiates himself with the village milkmaid while assisting Col Steiner and his band of brothers. Only the priest’s daughter and her US Ranger boyfriend show any common sense among the townsfolk. It all ends in a suspenseful bloody climax.
Jack Higgins’ bestselling wartime escapist adventure transfers easily onto the big screen. Director John Sturges has form for this kind of outing, but the shine of his late fifties / early sixties success is waning. He’s most effective in the action scenes, which are palpably, realistically gory. The film has a sub-Alistair MacLean feel to it, although one would expect MacLean’s heroes to be kidnapping Hitler. To that end there is an effort to make the German protagonists sympathetic; these are loyal, dutiful men of war who have a moral code far above that of their nominal leaders. An excised scene would have demonstrated this well: the film should have opened with a top level Nazi meeting at Schloss Hohenschwangau. This would have explained the opening title shots of the schloss. There’s a DVD edition that features a whole twenty minutes of extra footage. As with most deleted scenes, some read as if they would bog the story down, others aid explanation. The whole storyline involving Liam Devlin – a character Jack Higgins liked so much he wrote more books involving him – his work in the village and relationship with Molly Prior needed significantly more attention than it receives here. The Germans are well catered for in that regard, their planning and people being treated with much respect, even including the wily Himmler.
Donald Pleasance is the S.S. top man and another of ours, Tom Mankiewicz, wrote the screenplay. The actors don’t do enough with it. Anne Coates edits strongly, but she can’t do much with the off-kilter performances of a stellar cast – Larry Hagman and Treat Williams as the Americans come across badly as comic caricatures, one is even called Col Pitts. Lalo Schifrin’s incidental music suggests he might have had a decent stab at a Bond movie score.
Good entertainment without being a top notch entry in the wartime espionage stakes.
The Caine double bill is on tomorrow, @chrisno1 on BBC2 at 1.30 with The Ipcress File, followed by Talking Pictures (presumably the Sylvia Syms narrated appraisal of Caine's career) then the Harry Palmer sequel Funeral in Berlin at 4.05pm.
In my youth channels like BBC2 would show a mini-season with the kind of films you've nominated but they don't do that stuff much, and the two movies they're showing have been seen in the last year in the same slot anyway. I've never actually seen Pulp.
The funny thing about Caine is while he always seems to be the same in his movies, you just can't compare his role in Ipcress with that in Mona Lisa or that of Hannah and her Sisters with, say, Little Voice. They're completely different, but he's a star, that's the common denominator.
Thanks for that @Napoleon Plural I'll be watching the Thursday repeat. Pith I didn't record Billion Dollar Brain on Tuesday, I could gave watched all three consecutively.
Thursday repeat? I thought as much and that's a good thing; despite my talk I missed Ipcress today. Tied up with other things but the glimpse I saw, I regretted missing it. It's such a classic and now I find it arguably finer than any 60s Bond movie which in a way means any Bond movie. Being down at heal and almost dated already, it hasn't dated.
I caught all of Funeral in Berlin, dubbed by famed Bond author John Brosnan as 'the best of the bunch'. I'd seen it before, of course. It seems to try a lot harder than its predecessor to far less effect. You have it set in East and West Berlin, chic photography emphasising the contest between the two, there's a defector, one defection that's similar to the Berne crane job in OHMSS, another involving a hearse and coffin - classic Harry Saltzman touch, that, as it was down to him that hearses showed up in so many Bond films (Moonraker's floating Venetian number the exception as it was a Broccoli film), double crosses, and women of dubious loyalty.
I'll cut to the chase - this may provoke a shudder from those of my own vintage - but the film is boring. It shouldn't be. It just is. Guy Hamilton is too smooth a director for this stuff, he lacks edge. John Barry is sorely needed but he's not there, there's an attempt to pastiche him at times but that's all it is. Why they couldn't get Barry back I don't know, or the Ipcress director either.
This should be the follow up in the same way that FRWL was to Dr No - yes, more adventurous, more plot driven whereas the first was mostly establishing the character's tropes. But key characters from Ipcress don't show again - Guy Doleman's Ross only briefly - so Harry Palmer seems a lonely character and a fish out of water in Berlin, meeting a new array of characters who don't charm or interest. He seems a cypher for the plot which soon becomes the usual turgid double cross thing where you don't believe what's presented to you, a trick of diminishing returns. It all seems going through the motions with no terribly interesting set pieces moments. There's a love interest of sorts, but writing this carefully I don't find Israeli spies terribly interesting, the whole thing seems to have a brand problem I can't put my finger on. Perhaps I'll watch Munich to have my mind changed. I think The Quiller Memorandum touched on this a bit and I never got into that either but at least it had a John Barry score. Maybe Barry thought this film would go over old ground so avoided it
I do think the Palmer films should have been a lot better - it seems the gimmick of his being insubordinate to his public school superiors might have been passe too soon and didn't travel well either. Once you take Palmer out of London and away from his posh superiors he slightly loses his definition and identity.
Thanks for that @Napoleon Plural I'll compare notes once I've done my Thursday re-watch.
Meanwhile, a J-Lo bonanza:
THE WEDDING PLANNER (2001)
Jennifer Lopez stretches her acting template a little with this deft [daft?] rom-com about a wedding planner who commits the ultimate professional faux pas and falls for the groom. Daft isn’t the half of it, chiefly because Matthew McConaughey is nobody’s idea of a romantic lead. He seemed to get handed these kind of roles over and over to less and less effect. Here, McConaughey best resembles a sick puppy about to be put down. I guess impending marriage to feisty go-getter Brigitte Wilson-Sampras [tennis Hall of Famer Pete Sampras’ wife] does that to a man. Everything is pleasant to look at, occasionally funny, occasionally touching and ends on the least eagerly anticipated reconciliation of all rom-coms. You saw it coming from the moment they first met. This kind of escapist entertainment used to star people like Cary Grant and Doris Day. It wasn’t much good in the forties or fifties and it’s a tough nut to revitalise for the 2000s. It’s okay and passes the time, I suppose.
On a side note, J-Lo’s second album J-Lo topped the Billboard Top 200 in the same week this movie was number one at the U.S. box office. Apparently this was a first. Who knew? Who cares?
MAID IN MANHATTAN (2002)
Quickly taking a lead from The Wedding Planner, one year on and Jennifer Lopez is cast again as a woman in love with an unobtainable man, this time Ralph Fiennes' politician. She’s a hotel maid. It has modern Cinderella elements to it, a sort of Pretty Woman for Latinos. Ah, that’s not fair. It’s a charming film which relies solely on J-Lo’s likeability to succeed because it sure as hell won’t get any likeability from Ralph Fiennes' dour turn. Extremely popular DVD when I worked for Blockbusters, it has ‘chick’s movie’ and ‘quiet night in with the boyfriend / dog / chardonnay’ printed all over it. Throw-away entertainment. It looks pretty.
They used to make this sort of thing with Cary Grant and Doris Day…
I was scathing about the first two Indy movies, but the similar ingredients fall neatly into place for this third episode, despite sharing the same pitfalls for topographic and geological nonsense as all the others – Venice cannot have catacombs – I mean, seriously??? – note three question marks, dear God – and lumping Petra into the climax is a slap in the face for all kinds of historical fact. The movie succeeds because the screenwriter understands characters. Unlike the first two efforts, where Harrison Ford’s Dr Jones was saddled with wimpy weepy women, here he has a meeting of minds with his learned father. So, midway an archaeologist’s buddy-buddy movie kicks off which proves far more enjoyable and enterprising than any screaming damsel in distress. Sir Sean Connery as Dr Henry Jones is anything but a damsel. Harrison Ford has difficulty keeping up with Sir Sean’s superior comic and dramatic timing. It’s throw-away stuff, but the cast is working magic with grail. Much like the last crusader who guards the Cup of Christ. Julian Glover’s closet Nazi antiquities hunter should really know better. Ditto Alison Doody’s hapless historian. A returning Jonathon Rhys Myers caps off a quartet of Bond alumni and it’d be nice to say they make the movie… well, they probably do. That and having the humour be created from the circumstances rather than from supposed character personalities. The jokes are more subtle than the previous two movies and they carry the audience with them, coaxing and cajoling rather than sitting barefaced and baying: “Laugh!” You only need to witness the scene with the two bickering Dr Jones tied together to get that. The fluff on the airship was sublime and the tank fight stupendous. The ending is as dumb as the other two movies, but it hurts less.
In the absence of Match of the Day and following on from a dispiriting last episode of the usually reliable Endeavour, this was pleasant light relief. I watched it drinking Colombian coffee and Haig over ice. Not a bad combination for the whip-wielding Dr Jones. I think he’d probably agree. Cheers!
Andrew V. McLaglen was an underrated director who made several decent movies including Shenandoah and TheWildGeese amongst others. This time around sees James Coburn’s villain make a bloody escape from a prison work detail and formulate a plan to get revenge on Charlton Heston’s retired lawman who put him away and killed his wife in the process. Both the leads are in fine form and Barbara Hershey looks gorgeous as Heston’s daughter and Clint Eastwood regular John Quade is excellent as one of the loathsome gang members. McLaglen ramps up the tension as Hershey is kidnapped by the gang and the chase scenes are tense as we get to the final shootout.
Good stuff.
7/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Are we to take it ChrisNo1 hadn't seen any of the Indy movies until now?
Anyway, Bond alumna Michelle Yeoh bags her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once which I caught at the Prince Charles a few weeks ago and didn't much care for personally, it was like an extended and frenetic episode of Red Dwarf. Big twist following on from the recent scathing review of Temple of Doom is that the annoying kid now has an Oscar - that's Yeoh's co-star Ke Huy Quan. It's odd that he wins in a year when a) Indy director Steven Spielberg presumably goes home empty handed for Capturing the Spelmans (is that the film's name? Didn't fancy It myself) and b) The newest Indy film is out this year, you wouldn't think they'd be kicking themselves not to have got that kid back for it. To be honest, I didn't find his character markedly less irritating in the Yeoh film but there you go. Arnie's wife in True Lies Jamie Lee Curtis gets her Oscar too, I like her but I now feel like a rat fink for saying how great it is she's scrubbed up for the ceremony cos she's looked rough for that movie and also Knives Out. All that stuff with the sausage fingers got on my nerves a bit. But I didn't like much about the Everything movie - I've been told it appeals to women because the strong characters in it are women while the husband is a wimp (charming!) - and with the exception of Top Gun sequel - a man's film I guess but not that macho - wasn't mad about this year's run of films generally, I don't think I want to watch The Whale and I might see All Quiet on the Western Front but... I know what it's going to be like really. These movies don't seem quite adventurous or bold in scope somehow. Rather meanly, I feel that some of the awards are going to highlight diversity though I don't feel in doing that anyone was particularly robbed.
Mainly because of Covid I feel it's literally been years since I sat in a cinema and had that collective group experience, I didn't even get that with the Bond film in its first week because it just didn't evoke that kind of response, I saw it with a lousy crowd on the first Monday at the BFI Imax, I think it was lousy because it was cheap so many were just cinema goers looking for a cheap deal not tip top Bond fans. It was packed out but the movie wasn't taking us anywhere collectively.
It feels like some of these movies are made and shown in a vacuum. Then again, in a way society feels a bit like that too these days, it's made up of little Twitter tribes rather than what feels ike a high-minded, forward thinking group mindset. It's like everyone's saying, hang on, wait for those groups to catch up and be incorporated.... not the refugees or boat people, mind. It's all, hey, inclusive but not that inclusive.
...... But then I started questioning why I questioned the catacombes in Venice. Much of the city is built on islands after all. I checked online and there really are catacombes.
@Number24 But not where he's exploring. Those are manmade islands in the centre of Venice, built on oak and pine beams slammed into the mud until they hit bedrock. They have to be extremely solid to support what is above them. Crypts were purposefully built underneath some churches. They often flood because basically they are an engineering folly. There is a big crypt in the basilica - purposely built - I went there when I visited - but I wouldn't call it a catacomb. I hold up my hands and say I may be wrong about this; I didn't research it before I posted and I haven't researched it now either. Thanks for the compliment on the review.
@Napoleon Plural I've seen them all before except that second one. I didn't have any memory of it, so I must have given it a pass both at the flicks and on TV.
But what I questioned at once is your claim that Indy's leading ladies in both the previous movies were weepy. Seriously - Marion Raven weepy
________________________________________
@TwoFour is correct: the two female leads could not be more different. I happened to catch the last half hour of Raiders and the first half hour of Temple this weekend when I was watching cable at my mum's house so the contrast was crystal clear. Karen Allen is introduced winning a drinking contest, she is a ruff tuff self-reliant outdoorsy woman of action.
She is also Katy, Boone's girlfriend from Animal House, and thus the dream girl of nerds and slobs everywhere, The Perfect Woman.
speaking of John Belushi movies: that opening sequence in Temple of Doom is similar to the USO Dance Hall sequence in 1941. Spielberg has a talent for these WWII period musical productions degenerating into chaos, was there perhaps a similar scene in Saving Private Ryan to complete the trilogy?
In other news Mission Impossible 8 was supposed to start three weeks of filming this week on Svalbard, but was denied by the Svalbard Shire to protect the local wildlife.
I hadn’t seen this since it was first released and I had forgotten how violent it was, considering the target young audience. An inventor purchases a strange animal from a Chinatown antique store as a gift to his son for Christmas. There are certain rules to maintain such as avoiding water and not eating after midnight which are, of course, accidentally broken causing an outbreak of vicious gremlins to be unleashed. Zach Galligan stars as the son and his insipid performance underlines the paucity of his later career. Hoyt Axton as the father is good and we are treated to some of his inventions which always go wrong. A couple of actors from BeverlyHillsCop turn up and it’s always good to see horror film stalwart Dick Miller.
Director Joe Dante keeps things running at a fast pace and it’s nice to see some classic movies being played on televisions in the background. The town set looks similar to what would be used in BackToTheFuture.
Not as good as I remembered, but still worth a look.
6/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Really enjoyed this film. I wasn't in a position to compare it to the Man Who Never Was but my Dad was and he said he preferred the new version because there was a lot more information in it. I suppose a lot more has come out since records have been released.
Great turn By Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen was excellent. I really like Macfadyen as an actor.
Earlier this winter I saw "White Hunter, black heart" and I enjoyed watching Clint Eastwood going outside his comfort zone as a director and actor. That's why I now watched Bridges of ...", a romantic drama where he co-stars with Meryl Streep. She plays an Italian-born housewife with a husband and two children back in the 1960's who falls in love with Eastwood's National Geographic photographer who takes photos of said bridges. This happens during a few days while her family are away.
In the present day (1990's) her two now adult children are given her will that said she wants her ashes to be spread from the bridge Eastwood and Streep's characters spent time twenty years earlier. Their discovery of the mother's secret affair works as a framing device.
As always Meryl Streep delivers a great performance, but Eastwood is able to match her pretty well. As far as I know this is the only example of a movie directed by and staring Eastwood where his leading lady is also a star.
I like his directing job in an unfamiliar genere. The story of mature and socially unacceptable love is engaging and it's shot well. This is an unusual, but worthwhile movie by Clint Eastwood.
Lee Marvin leads a big cast including Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Jim Brown on a mission behind enemy lines. The Dozen are all prisoners with death sentences and the lure of remission of the sentences provide them with the impetus to complete the impossible mission. Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan and George Kennedy are amongst the officers planning the mission.
The first half of the film concerns the selection of the dozen and their training. The second half is where we see the mission in action. Director Robert Aldrich manages to control the vast cast of big names all vying to get their share of screen time. It’s rough, tough and exciting - a perfect movie to watch with a cold beer and hot pizza.
7/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I have a liking for the Edgar Rice Burroughs jungle hero and the series of movies were regularly shown on British TV when I was a kid. Producer Sy Weintraub had bought the franchise from long-standing Tarzan producer Sol Lesser and this was his first production for the series. He kept Gordon Scott in the role from the previous four films and added a strong cast including Anthony Quayle and our own Sean Connery. Eschewing the comedy aspects of previous films Weintraub made Tarzan a more hardened character, as in the books. Directed by the capable John Guillermin this one sees Tarzan tracking down a bunch of mercenaries who have stolen explosives to excavate diamonds from a secret mine.
This is my favourite movie of the series, Connery is a standout villain and Quayle gives a strong performance as the leader. Gordon Scott is obviously relishing his newfound version of Tarzan and the whole thing works wonderfully.
8/10
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
This is short and a VR movie, so I guess that's two firsts for this thread. I was curious about what Kathrine Bigelow is up to these days and I found this gem. It's about the rangers in a national park in Kenya. Their job is a lot more dramatic than most park rangers. The park is in a war zone and guerillas who often have committed war crimes are poaching elephants and other wildlife for profit. The rangers carry AKs and are often in firefights. These are very brave people. The movie is VR, so point the smartphone in the direction you want to see.
I'll spend the weekend getting over the fact that The Protectors isn' short film reviewed here, but as a very nature person I'll be fine with it on Monday.
What's VR? Watch the movie on your smartphone. You can move the phone and see in any direction. When you hear a helicopter you can hold the phone facing up and see the helicopter. Or, if you feel like it, look at the Rangers around you or even face the phone down and look at the grass.
Comments
As you probably know, the scene features in Kenneth Branagh's fine movie, Belfast, along with some wonderful Bond Xmas present moments, worth a watch.
Saw Indy and TOD as a teenager at Empire Leicester Square for my birthday with Mum, the sound in the cinema was off or muffled rather so it made for a jarring experience. Loads of kids at the screening, it failed to hold their attention. We then went to see The Man Who Knew Too Much at the cinema on Charing Cross Road which was running a Hitchcock season that summer.
It's odd isn't it, Spielberg struggled to get funding for Raiders after the box office disaster of 1941 but then Raiders knocks it out the ball park so he then does this, oh dear. But Temple wasn't a flop, it sort of wasn't allowed to be. But we forget the Indy strike miss is literally hit and miss, after this it was the excellent Last Crusade then the dreadful Crystal Skulls. The Craig tenure wasn't much better imo.
Personally I'd never noticed or bothered with a mine set next to molten lava but I guess it's like the dam on top of a mountain in the GE pre-credits.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
While I agree Temple of Doom has an unfortunate mix of brutality and the childish, I have to disagree. Well. I don't HAVE TO, but I do. 😁
I really like the feeling of adventure and fun, the great locations and sets, the action and chase scenes, Harrison Ford's performance, the musical scene at the start and much more. Given the genere and style of the Indiana Jones movies I really don't mind the mine close to the lava. It's based in 1930's action/adventure movies, not documentaries. Temple of Doom is the least strong of the first three, but it's still great entertainment.
SKY WEST AND CROOKED (1966)
(a.k.a. Gypsy Girl)
I don’t know very much about John Mills’ career. A well regarded thespian he’s of those pre / post war generations of Rank actors who always seemed to play the same role, matinee fodder, until by fluke or design they pulled a stupendous performance out of the locker. I’m talking Dirk Bogarde, Richard Johnson, Kenneth More, Dickie Attenborough, etc, actors who graced the screen over and over and rarely put a foot wrong, but rarely troubled the critics either.
I had no idea Mills had a brief flirtation with directing. Here, he’s got a family operation up and running. His wife [writer Mary Hayley Bell] wrote the story and screenplay and his daughter [Hayley] has the lead. The film concerns a naive, traumatised adolescent whose obsession with death leads her into conflict with her alcoholic mother, the local kindly sherry-drinking parson and a whisky sodden landowner grieving for his long dead son. There is an awful lot of drinking. Curiously the supposed ‘villains’ of the piece, a group of Romany gypsies, barely touch a drop. They prefer soup.
Miss Mills gives a half decent performance. She was trying to develop a more mature screen personality at the time, but she still looks about five or six years younger than her character’s age or her actual age (17 & 19). Having her surrounded by primary aged kids doesn’t help. The fact she’s clearly being portrayed and written as a simpleton makes the unfolding drama distinctly creepy. For two thirds of its length, the movie is virtually a horror show for kids, all those drunken adults, dead animal corpses, abusive parents, a series of heckling close-ups, sinister gypsies, etc, etc. When Ian McShane’s Roibin Krisenki plucks young Brydie from a river and keeps her for himself we are in Whistle Down the Wind territory in reverse, although there are no Christ-like overtures and childish wonder gives way to distinctly unsettling coercion. The romanticised ending seems unlikely.
Very odd indeed.
Robocop (87)
Straightforward Terminator-style futuristic adventure (though I don't know if the date is specified, maybe it isn't futuristic, it's implied like in The Running Man) anyway it's redeemed by the witty satirical flair and subtle running jokes.
Isn't the main villain the one in Arnie's Total Recall?
Pleasingly straightforward, but it's not quite a plot hole to have this robot cop get machine gunned and smashed up and in the next scene simply be licking his wounds and ready to go again. On top of which, 'shoot in the face' might be a simple enough instruction for assailants, as that is uncovered.
Wittily prescient at the time, it is now depressingly topical. The ending I recalled had Murphy be allowed to die by his woman cop buddy but it's been years, decades even, and I got it wrong, it leaves the way open for a sequel, one directed by Irvin Kershner who gave it the same magic touch he did Never Say Never Again, in other words it was like Kick Ass 2 in that hit missed the funny, satirical slant of the original.
Dressed to Kill
Intensely pleasing Sherlock Holmes story with Basil Rathbone - short but satisfying, with a female nemesis on a par with the lovely Isabel Oakeshott. Lines like 'Praise coming from you is all the more gratifying' that sort of thing.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)
George A. Romero single-handedly started the modern zombie era in this groundbreaking horror outing. A small group of people take refuge in a farmhouse whilst under attack from flesh eating ghouls. The low budget and filming in black and white adds atmosphere to the proceedings and the amateur actors do well, especially the lead character Duane Jones. It’s the sort of film that Ed Wood was yearning to make if he had had the talent that Romero had. The special effects were gruesome for the time and the film has gone on to be rightly revered in the annals of horror movies.
I first saw this in about 1978 at an all night cinema which showed 5 horror films stating at 11pm and ending at breakfast time. One of the other films was Dracula vs. Frankenstein with YOLT’s Karin Dor but I have forgotten what the others were.
Excellent and essential viewing for zombie fans.
8/10
JOYRIDE (2022)
Olivia Colman is the only name most will have heard of here. The title is appropriate and has more than one meaning. Beautiful Irish scenery, an engaging boy acting opposite the ever-reliable Olivia, some laughs, some sentiment. Be warned, the Irish accents are heavy.
THE EAGLE HAS LANDED (1976)
This film crops up fairly regularly on television these days, but if my memory serves it barely made it onto home screens for decades. The BBC presented it as a tribute to Sir Michael Caine, who is 90 years old this month. Far better I feel to watch The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin next week. A pity no channel is showing films like Alfie, Pulp or The Quiet American which demonstrate Caine’s acting chops, but here we have it:
in late autumn 1944 a company of rebellious German commandos are parachuted into the Norfolk village of Studley Constable. Their mission: to kidnap Winston Churchill. A local agent assists them and an IRA sympathiser ingratiates himself with the village milkmaid while assisting Col Steiner and his band of brothers. Only the priest’s daughter and her US Ranger boyfriend show any common sense among the townsfolk. It all ends in a suspenseful bloody climax.
Jack Higgins’ bestselling wartime escapist adventure transfers easily onto the big screen. Director John Sturges has form for this kind of outing, but the shine of his late fifties / early sixties success is waning. He’s most effective in the action scenes, which are palpably, realistically gory. The film has a sub-Alistair MacLean feel to it, although one would expect MacLean’s heroes to be kidnapping Hitler. To that end there is an effort to make the German protagonists sympathetic; these are loyal, dutiful men of war who have a moral code far above that of their nominal leaders. An excised scene would have demonstrated this well: the film should have opened with a top level Nazi meeting at Schloss Hohenschwangau. This would have explained the opening title shots of the schloss. There’s a DVD edition that features a whole twenty minutes of extra footage. As with most deleted scenes, some read as if they would bog the story down, others aid explanation. The whole storyline involving Liam Devlin – a character Jack Higgins liked so much he wrote more books involving him – his work in the village and relationship with Molly Prior needed significantly more attention than it receives here. The Germans are well catered for in that regard, their planning and people being treated with much respect, even including the wily Himmler.
Donald Pleasance is the S.S. top man and another of ours, Tom Mankiewicz, wrote the screenplay. The actors don’t do enough with it. Anne Coates edits strongly, but she can’t do much with the off-kilter performances of a stellar cast – Larry Hagman and Treat Williams as the Americans come across badly as comic caricatures, one is even called Col Pitts. Lalo Schifrin’s incidental music suggests he might have had a decent stab at a Bond movie score.
Good entertainment without being a top notch entry in the wartime espionage stakes.
The Caine double bill is on tomorrow, @chrisno1 on BBC2 at 1.30 with The Ipcress File, followed by Talking Pictures (presumably the Sylvia Syms narrated appraisal of Caine's career) then the Harry Palmer sequel Funeral in Berlin at 4.05pm.
In my youth channels like BBC2 would show a mini-season with the kind of films you've nominated but they don't do that stuff much, and the two movies they're showing have been seen in the last year in the same slot anyway. I've never actually seen Pulp.
The funny thing about Caine is while he always seems to be the same in his movies, you just can't compare his role in Ipcress with that in Mona Lisa or that of Hannah and her Sisters with, say, Little Voice. They're completely different, but he's a star, that's the common denominator.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks for that @Napoleon Plural I'll be watching the Thursday repeat. Pith I didn't record Billion Dollar Brain on Tuesday, I could gave watched all three consecutively.
Thursday repeat? I thought as much and that's a good thing; despite my talk I missed Ipcress today. Tied up with other things but the glimpse I saw, I regretted missing it. It's such a classic and now I find it arguably finer than any 60s Bond movie which in a way means any Bond movie. Being down at heal and almost dated already, it hasn't dated.
I caught all of Funeral in Berlin, dubbed by famed Bond author John Brosnan as 'the best of the bunch'. I'd seen it before, of course. It seems to try a lot harder than its predecessor to far less effect. You have it set in East and West Berlin, chic photography emphasising the contest between the two, there's a defector, one defection that's similar to the Berne crane job in OHMSS, another involving a hearse and coffin - classic Harry Saltzman touch, that, as it was down to him that hearses showed up in so many Bond films (Moonraker's floating Venetian number the exception as it was a Broccoli film), double crosses, and women of dubious loyalty.
I'll cut to the chase - this may provoke a shudder from those of my own vintage - but the film is boring. It shouldn't be. It just is. Guy Hamilton is too smooth a director for this stuff, he lacks edge. John Barry is sorely needed but he's not there, there's an attempt to pastiche him at times but that's all it is. Why they couldn't get Barry back I don't know, or the Ipcress director either.
This should be the follow up in the same way that FRWL was to Dr No - yes, more adventurous, more plot driven whereas the first was mostly establishing the character's tropes. But key characters from Ipcress don't show again - Guy Doleman's Ross only briefly - so Harry Palmer seems a lonely character and a fish out of water in Berlin, meeting a new array of characters who don't charm or interest. He seems a cypher for the plot which soon becomes the usual turgid double cross thing where you don't believe what's presented to you, a trick of diminishing returns. It all seems going through the motions with no terribly interesting set pieces moments. There's a love interest of sorts, but writing this carefully I don't find Israeli spies terribly interesting, the whole thing seems to have a brand problem I can't put my finger on. Perhaps I'll watch Munich to have my mind changed. I think The Quiller Memorandum touched on this a bit and I never got into that either but at least it had a John Barry score. Maybe Barry thought this film would go over old ground so avoided it
I do think the Palmer films should have been a lot better - it seems the gimmick of his being insubordinate to his public school superiors might have been passe too soon and didn't travel well either. Once you take Palmer out of London and away from his posh superiors he slightly loses his definition and identity.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Thanks for that @Napoleon Plural I'll compare notes once I've done my Thursday re-watch.
Meanwhile, a J-Lo bonanza:
THE WEDDING PLANNER (2001)
Jennifer Lopez stretches her acting template a little with this deft [daft?] rom-com about a wedding planner who commits the ultimate professional faux pas and falls for the groom. Daft isn’t the half of it, chiefly because Matthew McConaughey is nobody’s idea of a romantic lead. He seemed to get handed these kind of roles over and over to less and less effect. Here, McConaughey best resembles a sick puppy about to be put down. I guess impending marriage to feisty go-getter Brigitte Wilson-Sampras [tennis Hall of Famer Pete Sampras’ wife] does that to a man. Everything is pleasant to look at, occasionally funny, occasionally touching and ends on the least eagerly anticipated reconciliation of all rom-coms. You saw it coming from the moment they first met. This kind of escapist entertainment used to star people like Cary Grant and Doris Day. It wasn’t much good in the forties or fifties and it’s a tough nut to revitalise for the 2000s. It’s okay and passes the time, I suppose.
On a side note, J-Lo’s second album J-Lo topped the Billboard Top 200 in the same week this movie was number one at the U.S. box office. Apparently this was a first. Who knew? Who cares?
MAID IN MANHATTAN (2002)
Quickly taking a lead from The Wedding Planner, one year on and Jennifer Lopez is cast again as a woman in love with an unobtainable man, this time Ralph Fiennes' politician. She’s a hotel maid. It has modern Cinderella elements to it, a sort of Pretty Woman for Latinos. Ah, that’s not fair. It’s a charming film which relies solely on J-Lo’s likeability to succeed because it sure as hell won’t get any likeability from Ralph Fiennes' dour turn. Extremely popular DVD when I worked for Blockbusters, it has ‘chick’s movie’ and ‘quiet night in with the boyfriend / dog / chardonnay’ printed all over it. Throw-away entertainment. It looks pretty.
They used to make this sort of thing with Cary Grant and Doris Day…
INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
I was scathing about the first two Indy movies, but the similar ingredients fall neatly into place for this third episode, despite sharing the same pitfalls for topographic and geological nonsense as all the others – Venice cannot have catacombs – I mean, seriously??? – note three question marks, dear God – and lumping Petra into the climax is a slap in the face for all kinds of historical fact. The movie succeeds because the screenwriter understands characters. Unlike the first two efforts, where Harrison Ford’s Dr Jones was saddled with wimpy weepy women, here he has a meeting of minds with his learned father. So, midway an archaeologist’s buddy-buddy movie kicks off which proves far more enjoyable and enterprising than any screaming damsel in distress. Sir Sean Connery as Dr Henry Jones is anything but a damsel. Harrison Ford has difficulty keeping up with Sir Sean’s superior comic and dramatic timing. It’s throw-away stuff, but the cast is working magic with grail. Much like the last crusader who guards the Cup of Christ. Julian Glover’s closet Nazi antiquities hunter should really know better. Ditto Alison Doody’s hapless historian. A returning Jonathon Rhys Myers caps off a quartet of Bond alumni and it’d be nice to say they make the movie… well, they probably do. That and having the humour be created from the circumstances rather than from supposed character personalities. The jokes are more subtle than the previous two movies and they carry the audience with them, coaxing and cajoling rather than sitting barefaced and baying: “Laugh!” You only need to witness the scene with the two bickering Dr Jones tied together to get that. The fluff on the airship was sublime and the tank fight stupendous. The ending is as dumb as the other two movies, but it hurts less.
In the absence of Match of the Day and following on from a dispiriting last episode of the usually reliable Endeavour, this was pleasant light relief. I watched it drinking Colombian coffee and Haig over ice. Not a bad combination for the whip-wielding Dr Jones. I think he’d probably agree. Cheers!
THE LAST HARD MEN (1976)
Andrew V. McLaglen was an underrated director who made several decent movies including Shenandoah and The Wild Geese amongst others. This time around sees James Coburn’s villain make a bloody escape from a prison work detail and formulate a plan to get revenge on Charlton Heston’s retired lawman who put him away and killed his wife in the process. Both the leads are in fine form and Barbara Hershey looks gorgeous as Heston’s daughter and Clint Eastwood regular John Quade is excellent as one of the loathsome gang members. McLaglen ramps up the tension as Hershey is kidnapped by the gang and the chase scenes are tense as we get to the final shootout.
Good stuff.
7/10
Are we to take it ChrisNo1 hadn't seen any of the Indy movies until now?
Anyway, Bond alumna Michelle Yeoh bags her Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once which I caught at the Prince Charles a few weeks ago and didn't much care for personally, it was like an extended and frenetic episode of Red Dwarf. Big twist following on from the recent scathing review of Temple of Doom is that the annoying kid now has an Oscar - that's Yeoh's co-star Ke Huy Quan. It's odd that he wins in a year when a) Indy director Steven Spielberg presumably goes home empty handed for Capturing the Spelmans (is that the film's name? Didn't fancy It myself) and b) The newest Indy film is out this year, you wouldn't think they'd be kicking themselves not to have got that kid back for it. To be honest, I didn't find his character markedly less irritating in the Yeoh film but there you go. Arnie's wife in True Lies Jamie Lee Curtis gets her Oscar too, I like her but I now feel like a rat fink for saying how great it is she's scrubbed up for the ceremony cos she's looked rough for that movie and also Knives Out. All that stuff with the sausage fingers got on my nerves a bit. But I didn't like much about the Everything movie - I've been told it appeals to women because the strong characters in it are women while the husband is a wimp (charming!) - and with the exception of Top Gun sequel - a man's film I guess but not that macho - wasn't mad about this year's run of films generally, I don't think I want to watch The Whale and I might see All Quiet on the Western Front but... I know what it's going to be like really. These movies don't seem quite adventurous or bold in scope somehow. Rather meanly, I feel that some of the awards are going to highlight diversity though I don't feel in doing that anyone was particularly robbed.
Mainly because of Covid I feel it's literally been years since I sat in a cinema and had that collective group experience, I didn't even get that with the Bond film in its first week because it just didn't evoke that kind of response, I saw it with a lousy crowd on the first Monday at the BFI Imax, I think it was lousy because it was cheap so many were just cinema goers looking for a cheap deal not tip top Bond fans. It was packed out but the movie wasn't taking us anywhere collectively.
It feels like some of these movies are made and shown in a vacuum. Then again, in a way society feels a bit like that too these days, it's made up of little Twitter tribes rather than what feels ike a high-minded, forward thinking group mindset. It's like everyone's saying, hang on, wait for those groups to catch up and be incorporated.... not the refugees or boat people, mind. It's all, hey, inclusive but not that inclusive.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Can you believe I've never questioned how Venice can have catacombes? 😂😂
But what I questioned at one is your claim that Indy's leading ladies in both the previous movies were weepy. Seriously - Marion Raven weepy?
But it's still a great review of a great movie, and the chemistry between Ford and Connery is perfect.
...... But then I started questioning why I questioned the catacombes in Venice. Much of the city is built on islands after all. I checked online and there really are catacombes.
@Number24 But not where he's exploring. Those are manmade islands in the centre of Venice, built on oak and pine beams slammed into the mud until they hit bedrock. They have to be extremely solid to support what is above them. Crypts were purposefully built underneath some churches. They often flood because basically they are an engineering folly. There is a big crypt in the basilica - purposely built - I went there when I visited - but I wouldn't call it a catacomb. I hold up my hands and say I may be wrong about this; I didn't research it before I posted and I haven't researched it now either. Thanks for the compliment on the review.
@Napoleon Plural I've seen them all before except that second one. I didn't have any memory of it, so I must have given it a pass both at the flicks and on TV.
TwoFour said:
But what I questioned at once is your claim that Indy's leading ladies in both the previous movies were weepy. Seriously - Marion Raven weepy
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@TwoFour is correct: the two female leads could not be more different. I happened to catch the last half hour of Raiders and the first half hour of Temple this weekend when I was watching cable at my mum's house so the contrast was crystal clear. Karen Allen is introduced winning a drinking contest, she is a ruff tuff self-reliant outdoorsy woman of action.
She is also Katy, Boone's girlfriend from Animal House, and thus the dream girl of nerds and slobs everywhere, The Perfect Woman.
speaking of John Belushi movies: that opening sequence in Temple of Doom is similar to the USO Dance Hall sequence in 1941. Spielberg has a talent for these WWII period musical productions degenerating into chaos, was there perhaps a similar scene in Saving Private Ryan to complete the trilogy?
That makes sense. But it's well inside the level of inaccuracy one can allow in a movie, especially in this genre.
In other news Mission Impossible 8 was supposed to start three weeks of filming this week on Svalbard, but was denied by the Svalbard Shire to protect the local wildlife.
GREMLINS (1984)
I hadn’t seen this since it was first released and I had forgotten how violent it was, considering the target young audience. An inventor purchases a strange animal from a Chinatown antique store as a gift to his son for Christmas. There are certain rules to maintain such as avoiding water and not eating after midnight which are, of course, accidentally broken causing an outbreak of vicious gremlins to be unleashed. Zach Galligan stars as the son and his insipid performance underlines the paucity of his later career. Hoyt Axton as the father is good and we are treated to some of his inventions which always go wrong. A couple of actors from Beverly Hills Cop turn up and it’s always good to see horror film stalwart Dick Miller.
Director Joe Dante keeps things running at a fast pace and it’s nice to see some classic movies being played on televisions in the background. The town set looks similar to what would be used in Back To The Future.
Not as good as I remembered, but still worth a look.
6/10
You won't be able to see the Harry Palmer double bill tomorrow night, @chrisno1 - ITV4 is showing The Man With The Golden Gun at the same time.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Operation Mincemeat.
Really enjoyed this film. I wasn't in a position to compare it to the Man Who Never Was but my Dad was and he said he preferred the new version because there was a lot more information in it. I suppose a lot more has come out since records have been released.
Great turn By Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen was excellent. I really like Macfadyen as an actor.
The bridges of Madison County (1995)
Earlier this winter I saw "White Hunter, black heart" and I enjoyed watching Clint Eastwood going outside his comfort zone as a director and actor. That's why I now watched Bridges of ...", a romantic drama where he co-stars with Meryl Streep. She plays an Italian-born housewife with a husband and two children back in the 1960's who falls in love with Eastwood's National Geographic photographer who takes photos of said bridges. This happens during a few days while her family are away.
In the present day (1990's) her two now adult children are given her will that said she wants her ashes to be spread from the bridge Eastwood and Streep's characters spent time twenty years earlier. Their discovery of the mother's secret affair works as a framing device.
As always Meryl Streep delivers a great performance, but Eastwood is able to match her pretty well. As far as I know this is the only example of a movie directed by and staring Eastwood where his leading lady is also a star.
I like his directing job in an unfamiliar genere. The story of mature and socially unacceptable love is engaging and it's shot well. This is an unusual, but worthwhile movie by Clint Eastwood.
THE DIRTY DOZEN (1967)
Lee Marvin leads a big cast including Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Jim Brown on a mission behind enemy lines. The Dozen are all prisoners with death sentences and the lure of remission of the sentences provide them with the impetus to complete the impossible mission. Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan and George Kennedy are amongst the officers planning the mission.
The first half of the film concerns the selection of the dozen and their training. The second half is where we see the mission in action. Director Robert Aldrich manages to control the vast cast of big names all vying to get their share of screen time. It’s rough, tough and exciting - a perfect movie to watch with a cold beer and hot pizza.
7/10
It’s available on Amazon Prime so I’ll give it a look as I haven’t seen it 👍🏻
TARZAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE (1959)
I have a liking for the Edgar Rice Burroughs jungle hero and the series of movies were regularly shown on British TV when I was a kid. Producer Sy Weintraub had bought the franchise from long-standing Tarzan producer Sol Lesser and this was his first production for the series. He kept Gordon Scott in the role from the previous four films and added a strong cast including Anthony Quayle and our own Sean Connery. Eschewing the comedy aspects of previous films Weintraub made Tarzan a more hardened character, as in the books. Directed by the capable John Guillermin this one sees Tarzan tracking down a bunch of mercenaries who have stolen explosives to excavate diamonds from a secret mine.
This is my favourite movie of the series, Connery is a standout villain and Quayle gives a strong performance as the leader. Gordon Scott is obviously relishing his newfound version of Tarzan and the whole thing works wonderfully.
8/10
The Protectors (2017)
This is short and a VR movie, so I guess that's two firsts for this thread. I was curious about what Kathrine Bigelow is up to these days and I found this gem. It's about the rangers in a national park in Kenya. Their job is a lot more dramatic than most park rangers. The park is in a war zone and guerillas who often have committed war crimes are poaching elephants and other wildlife for profit. The rangers carry AKs and are often in firefights. These are very brave people. The movie is VR, so point the smartphone in the direction you want to see.
The movie (about ten minutes): https://www.google.com/search?q=the+protectors+national+geographic&source=lmns&bih=969&biw=1920&rlz=1C1VDKB_noNO1030NO1030&hl=no&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjQwtbY6-L9AhUCsCoKHVuABfIQ_AUoAHoECAEQAA#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:d8d00ed1,vid:RuGeeGRdYlQ
TwoFour said
This is short and a VR movie, so I guess that's two firsts for this thread
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not the first short! I once filed a report on a series of mail order super8 films Diana Rigg made in 1969
but I grant you first VR, I'm not sure I even know what that is
I'll spend the weekend getting over the fact that The Protectors isn' short film reviewed here, but as a very nature person I'll be fine with it on Monday.
What's VR? Watch the movie on your smartphone. You can move the phone and see in any direction. When you hear a helicopter you can hold the phone facing up and see the helicopter. Or, if you feel like it, look at the Rangers around you or even face the phone down and look at the grass.