War of the Wildcats stars John Wayne as Dan Somers, a man with military connections as high as the US President, who cadges a lift in oil magnate Jim Gardner’s fancy caboose. There he meets Martha Scott’s idealised dreamy very pretty schoolteacher who is fleeing her sod-busting hometown having written a racy romantic novel. She gets torn between Gardner’s money, status and brusqueness and Somers’s homespun niceties, torn leather chaps and brusqueness. Not much choice at all really. Naturally she graduates towards the taller man – Wayne was 6’4”. Albert Dekker makes a decent stab at playing the unscrupulous businessman.
When oil is discovered on a Cherokee reservation, the Chief offers the land claim to Somers and what was once a fledgling, good-natured rivalry over a girl begins to become something far more menacing as Gardner employs saboteurs to stop the opposition from fulfilling the conditions of a binding Presidential Contract. The movie is good-looking, well designed and costumed and has a trio of welcome performances that err towards the comic rather than the sturdily dramatic. Wayne in particular displays some of that comedic, quizzical ungrace which would later become a hallmark of his acting. The dramatic moments seem to occasionally swamp him. Marjorie Rambeau and George ‘Gubby’ Haynes provide ample good-natured support. The climatic crazy wagon train stampede to a Tulsa oil refinery takes some believing but has its spectacular moments. Everything ends very sweetly.
On release, the movie was titled In Old Oklahoma, but when reissued for the UK market in 1947 it was given the name of Thomson Burtis’s original source novel and that has stuck ever since. Republic Studios were so impressed by the substantial returns they decided to move away from ‘poverty row’ cinema and make more prestigious productions.
The sequel to Planet of the Apes is a decent effort that is a hit and miss affair. Charlton Heston agreed to a small role for his Taylor character and bookends the movie. The opening sequence sees Taylor mysteriously disappear into the Forbidden zone. In a case of deja vu, lookalike Heston astronaut James Franciscus retraces his predecessor’s footsteps from Earth’s past to the future and he encounters the two kind scientists in a rerun of the first movie. To save being a complete copycat it then throw a few added ingredients into the mix - the ape city is on the verge of martial law with the powerful gorilla militia bent on invading the Forbidden Zone. Awaiting the invasion is a race of underground telepathic mutants, who happen to be holding Taylor captive, and who also worship the last remaining doomsday bomb as a god. But in keeping with the spirit of the original movie, things do not go well. Taylor detonates the bomb and the whole planet is somewhat unbelievably totally destroyed. Goldfinger scriptwriter Paul Dehn pens the screenplay but he needed Rod Serling’s help to be honest (maybe he was too expensive for the reduced budget). TV director Ted Post (who also directed a couple of Clint Eastwood movies) directs efficiently without bringing much more to the screen than what was on the written page.
It’s the least of the quintuplet but still worth a look.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I appreciated the completely nihilistic ending to BENEATH... but the overall execution of the film felt subpar on the whole. This is not helped by the absurd plot mechanics required to buy into 'Absolutely Not Taylor' (James Franciscus) being on the planet at the same time. I mean, I get it...Heston didn't want to do the sequel. Maybe a bigger paycheck or a 3 movie deal would have encouraged him to be the lead again, who knows. But following Franciscus around when it's clearly, clearly supposed to be Heston ruins immersion.
Thankfully, the next film (ESCAPE) is one of the best of the franchise.
Forgive me Movie gods for i have Minned. Until this weekend i hadn't seen British movie classic "Whitnail & I". I repent because the movie is worthy is its classic status, especially because if the very quotable dialogue.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 26,904Chief of Staff
No, it isn't. I haven't seen it either. Chiefly because everyone keeps telling me I should.
Never seen Star Wars is a radio show over here. I have seen that, but I have not seen Grease, Dirty Dancing or E.T. and those films crop up on 'never seen' lists quite a lot also.
Bad guys Vs Bad guys in Burt Kennedy’s robust western about a gang of rascals who plan to steal a shipment of gold from an armed and armoured wagon train.
John Wayne plays Taw Jackson, an affable ex-con out on parole who returns to his home town to find capitalist mining magnate Frank Pierce living on his ranch and making a fortune from the gold claim that by rights ought to be Taw’s. Pierce has put a $10k price on Taw’s head and wants Kirk Douglas’s gunslinger Lomax to do the deadly deed. Trouble is, Taw has got to Lomax first and suggested they rob Pierce’s War Wagon and steal half-a-million in gold. Howard Keel’s friendly Kiawah, Robert Walker’s drunk greenhorn explosive’s expert and Keenan Wynn’s wife beater team up with the two big name stars to derail Bruce Cabot’s snarling Frank Pierce. Cliché’s abound.
The film is at its best during the first half when cheerful self-effacing humour shows Wayne and Douglas at something like their post-peak best. Kirk Douglas guiding his Chinese girl entourage around his boudoir while discussing death, glory and gold with the Duke was priceless. There isn’t much you don’t expect and everything is done with a minimum of fuss and an entertaining air. Dimitri Tiomkin writes an energetic score, bookended with an old time style C&W tune that feels entirely out of place. Crisply edited. The scenery is gorgeous. So is Valora Noland as Kate Fletcher, Wynn’s battered and mostly silent wife; you’d think this would be a chance for Wayne’s or the womanising Douglas’s characters to leap to the rescue, but sensibly writer Clair Huffaker [who adapted his own novel] allows the younger Robert Walker to get the girl.
There is nothing to offend, nothing to contemplate, nothing to confuse. Better than workmanlike due to the winning performances and the good, albeit expected, action sequences. The final robbery and chase is worth the wait. The War Wagon was a big hit in 1967. It’s very good.
Withnail and I is an excellent movie. Richard Griffiths as the homosexual Uncle Monty steals the show.
ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES (1971)
If destroying the Earth was meant to end the series, they didn’t take into account the studio executives who suddenly found that they had a profitable franchise on their hands. So Paul Dehn was tasked to somehow continue the series. Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the series’ curve-ball, altering its mood and trajectory. What had been a dystopian nightmare for humans would now become a reverse of fortunes as our two friendly ape scientists and an assistant (who have impossibly recovered and repaired Heston’s spaceship from the bottom of the lake in unseen scenes) travel back in time to Earth.
Initially being treated well, the apes gradually encounter the same reactions of fear and loathing their human counterparts met with in the first two films. Cornelius and the pregnant Zira's fates (Milo is unfortunately disposed of rather quickly) foreshadow mankind’s eventual downfall and suppression by apes. Cornelius and Zira are hunted down and eventually killed, but their newborn son is taken in by kindly circus owner Ricardo Montalban, paving the way for the series' final two entries. While ostensibly a reversal of the earlier two films, director Don Taylor handles the screenplay well with some nice humorous scenes followed by increasing tension up to the rather neat ending. Roddy McDowall makes a welcome return as Cornelius, and Kim Hunter (again as Zira) radiates tremendous charm through the make-up.
This is the best of the sequels.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
This beautifully photographed western set in the Ozark Mountains was John Wayne’s first Technicolor picture. Wayne looks phenomenally young in it [he was 33] and cameramen Charles Lang and W. Howard Greene make the most of the wonderful scenery around Big Bear Lake, California, which stands in for the Ozarks, as well as ensuring Betty Field’s homespun prettiness keep us more than astounded. The American frontier and Miss Field look truly ravishing under these lenses. I was quite astonished at some sequences, the vibrancy and depth of colour pallet is glorious, almost an oil painting at times, while the natural light offers shadowing that imitates the very best of Italian chiaroscuro. The story is virtually an afterthought compared to the marvellous visuals.
Based nominally and extremely loosely on a bestselling 1907 novel by Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills sees Harry Carey’s Daniel Howitt arrive in a small Ozark community. He’s seeking to graze sheep, but the land he earmarks belongs to the Matthews Clan, an extended family of moonshiners. Their adopted son, Matt [Wayne] is in love with feral beauty Sammy Lane [Field] but his dark soul is living only until he finds and kills the father who abandoned his mother in childbirth. A surprisingly literate screenplay, packed full of primal oaths, countryside philosophy and a fair dose of witchery, almost makes the dialogue anachronistic, but it works, just about, thanks to straight-laced playing and unusually close attention to extra-curricular details – such as the general store, post office and off-licence rolled into one, the community assisting in Howitt’s renovation plans, Sammy running around mostly barefoot, a chilling self-cremation of some sorcery, the up-down-up-down-hillside construction of the homesteads.
Wayne is exceptional as the soulless, doomed anti-hero, while Harry Carey offers experience and compassion as the aging mentor, Howitt, who begins to transform the rowdy, unkind estates into a more functional society. Betty Field burst on the film scene in 1939’s Of Mice and Men and while she never quite attained star-status she continued to make good movies even into the 1960s. She is outstanding in Shepherd, her character being the moral and romantic centre of the story. She plays excellently against Wayne; the scene where she considers the implications of wearing a lace collar he has bought her is exceptional, so too a duplicate moment when Carey presents her with a scarf. The implications of that gift discompose her and lead to Sammy unravelling a dangerous truth about the stranger in town. Beulah Bondi cuts a rough line as the matriarch of the Matthews Clan, all spit and curses and hellfire hate. Her death scene is a stunning peak of high melodrama. The film’s climax is like a piece of grand opera, it is so well framed among the mountains, the soaring music and in our rapt minds.
Henry Hathaway directs with one eye quite obviously on the surroundings. Their rugged magnificence translates to the robust performances, a reflection of the hardy, physical environment. The excellent music score, which borrows from Brahms, is by Gerard Carbonara, who worked uncredited on the Oscar winning themes for Stagecoach.
An underrated, slow-burn of a western of much grandeur and surprise. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
English action director J. Lee Thompson was a good choice to take the reins of the last two Ape films, his work on Conquest is one of his best after GunsOfNavarone. Conquest is the most political (and savage) of the Ape series, with Thompson perfectly capturing the primal rage and brutality of the ape revolution. It is 1991 and eighteen years have elapsed between Escape and Conquest— a pandemic has wiped out the entire population of cats and dogs, so apes have been adopted as household pets. They have been trained to perform menial tasks, like mopping floors, and are treated as slaves. Enter Caesar (played by Roddy McDowall), the son of Cornelius and Zira, now 18 and a fervent radical who leads the apes into revolution. Apes running through the streets, seething gorilla faces, armed riot police nervously waiting, all contribute to the film’s central themes of rage, tension, and the inevitability of violence. It’s tense and exciting and expertly directed.
I’ve had second thoughts about my previous statement of Escape being the best sequel, I’m placing this as the best sequel now.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
this is why I cant think in terms of rankings: theyre both good sequels, for very different reasons. Escape is funny and satirical, and as you say an inversion of the original, thus underlining some of its themes. also introduces the notion of alternate timelines, which I like to think explains some of the contradictions between the five films
Conquest is literally incendiary, released at a very volatile time in America, when there were similar looking riots in the big cities.
you know there was a teevee show, you might want to watch once done with the five movies
Roddy McDowell should have received an Oscar nomination for his work in this film. By this point, he's absolutely mastered acting through the makeup, but in this film the actual range of emotions that he's asked to convey is astounding. This is career best work from him and yes, it's absolutely the best of the sequels.
Shockingly, I have to admit to never having seen Erik Skjoldbaerg’s 1997 Norwegian original, despite DVD copies sitting in the foreign language section of every Blockbuster store I managed. Still, Skjoldbaerf is on record as stating: “It was quite close, stylistically. I felt lucky that it’s such a well-crafted, smart film and that it had a really good director handling it, because as a remake I think it did really well and it doesn’t hurt any original if a remake is well done.”
So that’s okay then.
Insomnia takes place in and around the fictionalised Alaskan town of Nightmute. Two L.A. homicide detectives have been dispatched from the ‘big city’ to assist in a murder case. The younger of them, Hap Eckhart, is under pressure from Internal Affairs to welch on his colleagues, one of whom will be his older, grizzled partner Will Dormer. Tensions rise between the two when Hap reveals his intentions over a sparse dinner of halibut and halibut in a sparse restaurant in the sparse hotel in the sparse fishing town. Will’s difficulties are compounded when, during a fog-bound chase to arrest a suspect, he accidentally shoots and kills Hap. Suffering from acute insomnia due to the constant midnight sun, guilt bearing on his already tired shoulders, Will begins to hallucinate. His problems are complicated further when local writer, Walter Finch, contacts him claiming to have witnessed the shooting. During their telephone conversation, Will realises Finch might just be the suspect he was seeking and devises an elaborate ruse to cover his own guilt and convict a killer. Unfortunately, his state of mind is slipping as quickly as the wheels come off the road to his redemption.
A thoroughly anguished performance from Al Pacino as Will Dormer lends a mark of gravitas to proceedings, his gravelled voice speaking for thousands of weary cops and insomniacs, the punch of pressure telling more with every minute of screen time. He is ably supported by an enthusiastic turn from Hilary Swank as the novice cop asked to escort him around the wood-and-tarmac town. Martin Donovan makes a decent stab at decent cop, Hap Eckhart. The revelatory turn is Robin Williams, cast totally against type as creepy Walter Finch, a man who psychologically understands both his own precarious legal situation and that of Will Dormer’s. He uses this knowledge, allied with that gained from years researching pulp exploitation police thrillers, to exploit and manipulate Will’s already weakened defences. The sheer calm brutality of his performance is magnificent and reflects beautifully with the twitchy suddenness of Pacino’s nervy detective. The psychological battle the two play out is brilliantly rendered in only a half-dozen scenes, yet they hover above the remainder, eagles on the wing, waiting to sink metaphoric talons into the prey below. Even an actress as accomplished as Hilary Swank can’t do much against these guys, hence the ending and the resolution feels half-baked. Director Christopher Nolan sensibly doesn’t bother explaining her motivations or any ensuing fallout.
What we really have here is Nolan’s cinematic view of a man’s mind drifting apart under the stress and fracture of a career dealing with lowlifes, a ripple of discontent brought on by the intensity of the twenty-four hour Arctic days. Told it is ten o’clock at night, his eyes widen to take in the brightness outside the window; later in his hotel room, he attempts to block out the daylight, cursing and staring at shadows; he vomits at his own subterfuge; a dead dog bleeds on his shoes; he shuffles, slouches and skews his way around the town and the surrounding countryside. He only begins to focus when confronted by potential evil: an abusive boyfriend of the murdered teenage girl is treated with scant regard, Finch is spoken to in clipped, decisive sentences, a commiserating phone call from the investigating I.A. officer is curtailed. The fact each of these moments is undercut by the sense he is not handling the case with authority – driven first by Swank’s obvious anxiety, then by Nolan’s switching oblique camera angles – allows Pacino’s interpretation to feel extremely real. The credit sequence features blood seeping through the fibres of clothing and holds a portent of the unfolding drama that follows. Maura Tierney has a small but important role as a sympathetic hotelier who finally settles Pacino’s oozing, ailed and addled mind bringing on a dénouement of welcome brio.
Coupled with Robin Williams’ tour de force and you are watching a classic two-hander. Memories of Strangers on a Train spring to mind, where a murderer manipulates an innocent party; more recently and more explosively perhaps good meets bad in Heat. Nolan didn’t write Insomnia. He has subsequently authored or co-authored every other film he has made and I wonder if, correspondingly, that is why I enjoy the film so much compared to his more overblown epic science fiction canon. I also wonder if writing with a sibling [Jonathon Nolan] doesn’t hinder his ability to drill down through a narrative and remove what is unnecessary. Would that be why these early films are so much more impulsive and compulsive compared to the longueur of stuff like Tenet? There is something broodingly satisfying about Memento, Following and indeed Insomnia which is missing from all Nolan’s subsequent films [at least those I have seen]. Maybe, maybe not.
Photography excellent. Script very good. Editing crisp. Music understated.
In retrospect, Conquest could easily have made a fitting conclusion to the series. But 20th Century Fox decided that there was more juice to be squeezed from the lemon so commissioned another one which proved to be the final entry. Battle is a plodding effort that, while not without interest, is a disappointing end to the series. Changing Paul Dehn’s original concept - human/ape race-relations as an endless loop of violence and counter-violence - Fox opted for a more optimistic conclusion, hiring Joyce and John Corrington to bring the series full circle. Caesar - now leader of a peaceful community of apes who now have the power of speech - attempts to bring about harmony between the apes and humans. But the resentful General Aldo and his gorilla militia sees more use in using humans as target-practice. Caesar must also contend with mutants from a recent nuclear war who are intent on invading the ape city. Once again, ongoing events result in violence. But what separates Battle from its predecessors is its willingness to propose a peaceful resolution. In the film’s closing moments, 600 years after the death of Caesar, the ape Lawgiver (John Huston) talks of peace and harmony between humans and apes.
Director J Lee Thompson obviously felt that the laborious script wasn’t worth the effort and this is a somewhat lacklustre end to the series.
My ranking of the series is 1 4 3 5 2
@caractacus potts I have seen the TV series and there are some good episodes, but I think the budgetary limitations hampered its progress and of course it was curtailed early.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Great retrospective. My main issue with BATTLE... is with the fact that there is zero budget for the film itself. The entire endeavor looks like it was held together with duct tape and bailing wire, giving everything a 'last gasp for cash' patina to it. It's a series that is clearly out of gas.
My personal ranking would be similar to yours: 1, 4, 3, 2, 5. BENEATH... at least had a budget and really went for it with the ending.
@HarryCanyon On another day I wouldn’t disagree with your ranking of the series - the last two are interchangeable depending on mood. It’s nice to see an old classic series create discussion 🍻
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
It would be fair to say that spaghetti westerns lifted Lee Van Cleef from starring as bit part heavies (including High Noon, Gunfight At The OK Corral and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) into leading roles in a host of action pictures. His performance here in this superior spaghetti outing is excellent. Van Cleef as Ryan, gives an ornery, sometimes humorous, performance as an outlaw-tumed-bounty hunter helping Bill (John Phillip Law) track down the gang who massacred his family when he was a child. Giulio Petroni’s cramped, confined direction is marvellous, as is Ennio Morricone's eccentric score, full of shrieking chants and tribal percussion. Our own Anthony Dawson, as one of the gang, winds up on the wrong end of Ryan and Bill’s bullets. Bill Kills, indeed. Scriptwriter Luciano Vincenzoni worked on some of the best entries in the genre, including Sergio Leone’s A Fistful Of Dynamite.
If you like European westerns they don’t come much better than this.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Terence Fisher brings nothing more than a workmanlike air to this Hammer remake of several previous attempts to interpret Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 gothic horror classic. Not much remains of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Wolf Mankiewicz’s script liberally reinvents the story as a crime of passion. Here, Paul Massie’s obsessive, clunky scientist has neglected his beautiful wife Kitty [Dawn Addams – oh, how could he!] and she has flown into the arms of shifty gambler Christopher Lee. So, Dr Jekyll decides to use his miracle potion to transform himself into Mr Hyde, a good-looking, scheming, passionate lothario of an alter-ego. In this version, Jekyll actively encourages himself to experiment more and more as Hyde, particularly when he sees a way to ruin Paul Allen [Lee] and gain the respect of his wife. However for these two adulterous lovers, desire truly runs deep, deeper than Jekyll or Hyde comprehends, which is the flaw in both of their makeups, giving a unique twist on the usual Good vs Bad plot line.
The movie has the usual Hammer lurid colours for the period, but there are few shocks, unless you include the extended frilly knickers can-can dance which just goes on and on and on. To be frank, the film feels like an exercise in cheap 1960s titillation rather than an exercise in terror. Despite a couple of decent death scenes, the action is rather flaccid and no fancy can-can can restore it to life. The Two Faces of… should have been a great advertisement for Hammer Pictures, but they fluffed it big time. They did better a decade later with the gender swap hilarity and tacit horror of Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde.
This is now notable for Christopher Lee and Nigel Green as strip club owners, Oliver Reed as one of the beatniks and John Barry’s first film score. Gillian Hills belongs to a gang of London teens who attempt to copy the cool culture of American beatniks, they talk about jazz and dance to rock and roll. Her father has a new wife, not much older than herself and a chance encounter between the stepmother and a stripper sends Gillian on a mission to bring her stepmother's questionable past to light. The film is plainly on the side of the adults, which assumes they have the right to deny their wild years, while the teenagers are seen as bad no matter what they do. Adam Faith gamely imitates Elvis. Beat Girl is an interesting example of how British filmmakers modelled the American bad girl exploitation drive-in flicks and is extremely evocative of the era.
Well worth catching.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
@chrisno1 Yes, I agree that Hammer didn't do a great job with this one. And Lee was established by this point (after Frankenstein, Dracula, etc) so why wasn't he playing the title part? Or parts, of course.
@CoolHandBond I've never seen "Beat Girl" but play the OST often 😁
Director Michael Winner gets a lot of mauling from so-called movie critics but I’ve always found his direction to be economically straightforward and delivering entertaining no-frills movies starring some of the greatest names in cinema, including Marlon Brando. Lawman is one of his best and it rises above average by creating a haunting vision of the lawless west paradoxically entwining the mysticism of the revisionist Western with the genre’s more classic style. Burt Lancaster is a marshal, he’s looking to extradite a group of ranch hands for shooting up his town and accidentally killing an old man. Standing in his way are cattle baron Lee J Cobb and cowardly sheriff Robert Ryan. The classic showdown is inevitable from the first scene, and what happens in-between is neatly predictable. What makes Lawman so compelling, though, is its characters’ tattered moral fabric. Cobb and his minions are not merely two-dimensional villains; they are men with families who have worked hard to get where they are and it’s only through a drunken fracas that they find themselves on the other side of the law. Then there’s Ryan, a once feared gunslinger who has since lost his nerve and is at Cobb’s beck and call. The most intoxicating character is Lancaster’s unwavering lawman. He's a ruthless killer who never backs down, and as the film unwinds, he becomes the most menacing presence onscreen. Winner directs this in his own style, whilst acknowledging some influences from Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.
An above-par western with a great cast including Robert Duvall, Albert Salmi, JD Cannon and in a rare cinematic outing our very own Dr No Joseph Wiseman.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Comments
We mostly talk bollocks on AJB don't we? 😄
An auspicious start to page 417...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
WAR OF THE WILDCATS (1943)
(a.k.a In Old Oklahoma)
An Oil Rush western set in 1906 and in Oklahoma.
War of the Wildcats stars John Wayne as Dan Somers, a man with military connections as high as the US President, who cadges a lift in oil magnate Jim Gardner’s fancy caboose. There he meets Martha Scott’s idealised dreamy very pretty schoolteacher who is fleeing her sod-busting hometown having written a racy romantic novel. She gets torn between Gardner’s money, status and brusqueness and Somers’s homespun niceties, torn leather chaps and brusqueness. Not much choice at all really. Naturally she graduates towards the taller man – Wayne was 6’4”. Albert Dekker makes a decent stab at playing the unscrupulous businessman.
When oil is discovered on a Cherokee reservation, the Chief offers the land claim to Somers and what was once a fledgling, good-natured rivalry over a girl begins to become something far more menacing as Gardner employs saboteurs to stop the opposition from fulfilling the conditions of a binding Presidential Contract. The movie is good-looking, well designed and costumed and has a trio of welcome performances that err towards the comic rather than the sturdily dramatic. Wayne in particular displays some of that comedic, quizzical ungrace which would later become a hallmark of his acting. The dramatic moments seem to occasionally swamp him. Marjorie Rambeau and George ‘Gubby’ Haynes provide ample good-natured support. The climatic crazy wagon train stampede to a Tulsa oil refinery takes some believing but has its spectacular moments. Everything ends very sweetly.
On release, the movie was titled In Old Oklahoma, but when reissued for the UK market in 1947 it was given the name of Thomson Burtis’s original source novel and that has stuck ever since. Republic Studios were so impressed by the substantial returns they decided to move away from ‘poverty row’ cinema and make more prestigious productions.
BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)
The sequel to Planet of the Apes is a decent effort that is a hit and miss affair. Charlton Heston agreed to a small role for his Taylor character and bookends the movie. The opening sequence sees Taylor mysteriously disappear into the Forbidden zone. In a case of deja vu, lookalike Heston astronaut James Franciscus retraces his predecessor’s footsteps from Earth’s past to the future and he encounters the two kind scientists in a rerun of the first movie. To save being a complete copycat it then throw a few added ingredients into the mix - the ape city is on the verge of martial law with the powerful gorilla militia bent on invading the Forbidden Zone. Awaiting the invasion is a race of underground telepathic mutants, who happen to be holding Taylor captive, and who also worship the last remaining doomsday bomb as a god. But in keeping with the spirit of the original movie, things do not go well. Taylor detonates the bomb and the whole planet is somewhat unbelievably totally destroyed. Goldfinger scriptwriter Paul Dehn pens the screenplay but he needed Rod Serling’s help to be honest (maybe he was too expensive for the reduced budget). TV director Ted Post (who also directed a couple of Clint Eastwood movies) directs efficiently without bringing much more to the screen than what was on the written page.
It’s the least of the quintuplet but still worth a look.
I appreciated the completely nihilistic ending to BENEATH... but the overall execution of the film felt subpar on the whole. This is not helped by the absurd plot mechanics required to buy into 'Absolutely Not Taylor' (James Franciscus) being on the planet at the same time. I mean, I get it...Heston didn't want to do the sequel. Maybe a bigger paycheck or a 3 movie deal would have encouraged him to be the lead again, who knows. But following Franciscus around when it's clearly, clearly supposed to be Heston ruins immersion.
Thankfully, the next film (ESCAPE) is one of the best of the franchise.
Whitnail & I
Forgive me Movie gods for i have Minned. Until this weekend i hadn't seen British movie classic "Whitnail & I". I repent because the movie is worthy is its classic status, especially because if the very quotable dialogue.
Don’t sweat it…I’ve still never seen it 🤷🏻♂️
Move over, Sir Miles. I'll join you on the fail bus. I haven't seen it either.
I thought watching the movie was a national obligation for a Brit, bit like skiing for us?
No, it isn't. I haven't seen it either. Chiefly because everyone keeps telling me I should.
Never seen Star Wars is a radio show over here. I have seen that, but I have not seen Grease, Dirty Dancing or E.T. and those films crop up on 'never seen' lists quite a lot also.
THE WAR WAGON (1967)
Bad guys Vs Bad guys in Burt Kennedy’s robust western about a gang of rascals who plan to steal a shipment of gold from an armed and armoured wagon train.
John Wayne plays Taw Jackson, an affable ex-con out on parole who returns to his home town to find capitalist mining magnate Frank Pierce living on his ranch and making a fortune from the gold claim that by rights ought to be Taw’s. Pierce has put a $10k price on Taw’s head and wants Kirk Douglas’s gunslinger Lomax to do the deadly deed. Trouble is, Taw has got to Lomax first and suggested they rob Pierce’s War Wagon and steal half-a-million in gold. Howard Keel’s friendly Kiawah, Robert Walker’s drunk greenhorn explosive’s expert and Keenan Wynn’s wife beater team up with the two big name stars to derail Bruce Cabot’s snarling Frank Pierce. Cliché’s abound.
The film is at its best during the first half when cheerful self-effacing humour shows Wayne and Douglas at something like their post-peak best. Kirk Douglas guiding his Chinese girl entourage around his boudoir while discussing death, glory and gold with the Duke was priceless. There isn’t much you don’t expect and everything is done with a minimum of fuss and an entertaining air. Dimitri Tiomkin writes an energetic score, bookended with an old time style C&W tune that feels entirely out of place. Crisply edited. The scenery is gorgeous. So is Valora Noland as Kate Fletcher, Wynn’s battered and mostly silent wife; you’d think this would be a chance for Wayne’s or the womanising Douglas’s characters to leap to the rescue, but sensibly writer Clair Huffaker [who adapted his own novel] allows the younger Robert Walker to get the girl.
There is nothing to offend, nothing to contemplate, nothing to confuse. Better than workmanlike due to the winning performances and the good, albeit expected, action sequences. The final robbery and chase is worth the wait. The War Wagon was a big hit in 1967. It’s very good.
Shocking! You're not doing what the majority says you must do, even thought the majority says so. 😲
Withnail and I is an excellent movie. Richard Griffiths as the homosexual Uncle Monty steals the show.
ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES (1971)
If destroying the Earth was meant to end the series, they didn’t take into account the studio executives who suddenly found that they had a profitable franchise on their hands. So Paul Dehn was tasked to somehow continue the series. Escape from the Planet of the Apes is the series’ curve-ball, altering its mood and trajectory. What had been a dystopian nightmare for humans would now become a reverse of fortunes as our two friendly ape scientists and an assistant (who have impossibly recovered and repaired Heston’s spaceship from the bottom of the lake in unseen scenes) travel back in time to Earth.
Initially being treated well, the apes gradually encounter the same reactions of fear and loathing their human counterparts met with in the first two films. Cornelius and the pregnant Zira's fates (Milo is unfortunately disposed of rather quickly) foreshadow mankind’s eventual downfall and suppression by apes. Cornelius and Zira are hunted down and eventually killed, but their newborn son is taken in by kindly circus owner Ricardo Montalban, paving the way for the series' final two entries. While ostensibly a reversal of the earlier two films, director Don Taylor handles the screenplay well with some nice humorous scenes followed by increasing tension up to the rather neat ending. Roddy McDowall makes a welcome return as Cornelius, and Kim Hunter (again as Zira) radiates tremendous charm through the make-up.
This is the best of the sequels.
THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS (1941)
This beautifully photographed western set in the Ozark Mountains was John Wayne’s first Technicolor picture. Wayne looks phenomenally young in it [he was 33] and cameramen Charles Lang and W. Howard Greene make the most of the wonderful scenery around Big Bear Lake, California, which stands in for the Ozarks, as well as ensuring Betty Field’s homespun prettiness keep us more than astounded. The American frontier and Miss Field look truly ravishing under these lenses. I was quite astonished at some sequences, the vibrancy and depth of colour pallet is glorious, almost an oil painting at times, while the natural light offers shadowing that imitates the very best of Italian chiaroscuro. The story is virtually an afterthought compared to the marvellous visuals.
Based nominally and extremely loosely on a bestselling 1907 novel by Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills sees Harry Carey’s Daniel Howitt arrive in a small Ozark community. He’s seeking to graze sheep, but the land he earmarks belongs to the Matthews Clan, an extended family of moonshiners. Their adopted son, Matt [Wayne] is in love with feral beauty Sammy Lane [Field] but his dark soul is living only until he finds and kills the father who abandoned his mother in childbirth. A surprisingly literate screenplay, packed full of primal oaths, countryside philosophy and a fair dose of witchery, almost makes the dialogue anachronistic, but it works, just about, thanks to straight-laced playing and unusually close attention to extra-curricular details – such as the general store, post office and off-licence rolled into one, the community assisting in Howitt’s renovation plans, Sammy running around mostly barefoot, a chilling self-cremation of some sorcery, the up-down-up-down-hillside construction of the homesteads.
Wayne is exceptional as the soulless, doomed anti-hero, while Harry Carey offers experience and compassion as the aging mentor, Howitt, who begins to transform the rowdy, unkind estates into a more functional society. Betty Field burst on the film scene in 1939’s Of Mice and Men and while she never quite attained star-status she continued to make good movies even into the 1960s. She is outstanding in Shepherd, her character being the moral and romantic centre of the story. She plays excellently against Wayne; the scene where she considers the implications of wearing a lace collar he has bought her is exceptional, so too a duplicate moment when Carey presents her with a scarf. The implications of that gift discompose her and lead to Sammy unravelling a dangerous truth about the stranger in town. Beulah Bondi cuts a rough line as the matriarch of the Matthews Clan, all spit and curses and hellfire hate. Her death scene is a stunning peak of high melodrama. The film’s climax is like a piece of grand opera, it is so well framed among the mountains, the soaring music and in our rapt minds.
Henry Hathaway directs with one eye quite obviously on the surroundings. Their rugged magnificence translates to the robust performances, a reflection of the hardy, physical environment. The excellent music score, which borrows from Brahms, is by Gerard Carbonara, who worked uncredited on the Oscar winning themes for Stagecoach.
An underrated, slow-burn of a western of much grandeur and surprise. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972)
English action director J. Lee Thompson was a good choice to take the reins of the last two Ape films, his work on Conquest is one of his best after Guns Of Navarone. Conquest is the most political (and savage) of the Ape series, with Thompson perfectly capturing the primal rage and brutality of the ape revolution. It is 1991 and eighteen years have elapsed between Escape and Conquest— a pandemic has wiped out the entire population of cats and dogs, so apes have been adopted as household pets. They have been trained to perform menial tasks, like mopping floors, and are treated as slaves. Enter Caesar (played by Roddy McDowall), the son of Cornelius and Zira, now 18 and a fervent radical who leads the apes into revolution. Apes running through the streets, seething gorilla faces, armed riot police nervously waiting, all contribute to the film’s central themes of rage, tension, and the inevitability of violence. It’s tense and exciting and expertly directed.
I’ve had second thoughts about my previous statement of Escape being the best sequel, I’m placing this as the best sequel now.
Kommisar Rex , austrian cop show.....its decent
coolhand said:
I’ve had second thoughts about my previous statement of Escape being the best sequel, I’m placing this as the best sequel now.
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this is why I cant think in terms of rankings: theyre both good sequels, for very different reasons. Escape is funny and satirical, and as you say an inversion of the original, thus underlining some of its themes. also introduces the notion of alternate timelines, which I like to think explains some of the contradictions between the five films
Conquest is literally incendiary, released at a very volatile time in America, when there were similar looking riots in the big cities.
you know there was a teevee show, you might want to watch once done with the five movies
Roddy McDowell should have received an Oscar nomination for his work in this film. By this point, he's absolutely mastered acting through the makeup, but in this film the actual range of emotions that he's asked to convey is astounding. This is career best work from him and yes, it's absolutely the best of the sequels.
INSOMNIA (2002)
Shockingly, I have to admit to never having seen Erik Skjoldbaerg’s 1997 Norwegian original, despite DVD copies sitting in the foreign language section of every Blockbuster store I managed. Still, Skjoldbaerf is on record as stating: “It was quite close, stylistically. I felt lucky that it’s such a well-crafted, smart film and that it had a really good director handling it, because as a remake I think it did really well and it doesn’t hurt any original if a remake is well done.”
So that’s okay then.
Insomnia takes place in and around the fictionalised Alaskan town of Nightmute. Two L.A. homicide detectives have been dispatched from the ‘big city’ to assist in a murder case. The younger of them, Hap Eckhart, is under pressure from Internal Affairs to welch on his colleagues, one of whom will be his older, grizzled partner Will Dormer. Tensions rise between the two when Hap reveals his intentions over a sparse dinner of halibut and halibut in a sparse restaurant in the sparse hotel in the sparse fishing town. Will’s difficulties are compounded when, during a fog-bound chase to arrest a suspect, he accidentally shoots and kills Hap. Suffering from acute insomnia due to the constant midnight sun, guilt bearing on his already tired shoulders, Will begins to hallucinate. His problems are complicated further when local writer, Walter Finch, contacts him claiming to have witnessed the shooting. During their telephone conversation, Will realises Finch might just be the suspect he was seeking and devises an elaborate ruse to cover his own guilt and convict a killer. Unfortunately, his state of mind is slipping as quickly as the wheels come off the road to his redemption.
A thoroughly anguished performance from Al Pacino as Will Dormer lends a mark of gravitas to proceedings, his gravelled voice speaking for thousands of weary cops and insomniacs, the punch of pressure telling more with every minute of screen time. He is ably supported by an enthusiastic turn from Hilary Swank as the novice cop asked to escort him around the wood-and-tarmac town. Martin Donovan makes a decent stab at decent cop, Hap Eckhart. The revelatory turn is Robin Williams, cast totally against type as creepy Walter Finch, a man who psychologically understands both his own precarious legal situation and that of Will Dormer’s. He uses this knowledge, allied with that gained from years researching pulp exploitation police thrillers, to exploit and manipulate Will’s already weakened defences. The sheer calm brutality of his performance is magnificent and reflects beautifully with the twitchy suddenness of Pacino’s nervy detective. The psychological battle the two play out is brilliantly rendered in only a half-dozen scenes, yet they hover above the remainder, eagles on the wing, waiting to sink metaphoric talons into the prey below. Even an actress as accomplished as Hilary Swank can’t do much against these guys, hence the ending and the resolution feels half-baked. Director Christopher Nolan sensibly doesn’t bother explaining her motivations or any ensuing fallout.
What we really have here is Nolan’s cinematic view of a man’s mind drifting apart under the stress and fracture of a career dealing with lowlifes, a ripple of discontent brought on by the intensity of the twenty-four hour Arctic days. Told it is ten o’clock at night, his eyes widen to take in the brightness outside the window; later in his hotel room, he attempts to block out the daylight, cursing and staring at shadows; he vomits at his own subterfuge; a dead dog bleeds on his shoes; he shuffles, slouches and skews his way around the town and the surrounding countryside. He only begins to focus when confronted by potential evil: an abusive boyfriend of the murdered teenage girl is treated with scant regard, Finch is spoken to in clipped, decisive sentences, a commiserating phone call from the investigating I.A. officer is curtailed. The fact each of these moments is undercut by the sense he is not handling the case with authority – driven first by Swank’s obvious anxiety, then by Nolan’s switching oblique camera angles – allows Pacino’s interpretation to feel extremely real. The credit sequence features blood seeping through the fibres of clothing and holds a portent of the unfolding drama that follows. Maura Tierney has a small but important role as a sympathetic hotelier who finally settles Pacino’s oozing, ailed and addled mind bringing on a dénouement of welcome brio.
Coupled with Robin Williams’ tour de force and you are watching a classic two-hander. Memories of Strangers on a Train spring to mind, where a murderer manipulates an innocent party; more recently and more explosively perhaps good meets bad in Heat. Nolan didn’t write Insomnia. He has subsequently authored or co-authored every other film he has made and I wonder if, correspondingly, that is why I enjoy the film so much compared to his more overblown epic science fiction canon. I also wonder if writing with a sibling [Jonathon Nolan] doesn’t hinder his ability to drill down through a narrative and remove what is unnecessary. Would that be why these early films are so much more impulsive and compulsive compared to the longueur of stuff like Tenet? There is something broodingly satisfying about Memento, Following and indeed Insomnia which is missing from all Nolan’s subsequent films [at least those I have seen]. Maybe, maybe not.
Photography excellent. Script very good. Editing crisp. Music understated.
Very, very good indeed.
BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973)
In retrospect, Conquest could easily have made a fitting conclusion to the series. But 20th Century Fox decided that there was more juice to be squeezed from the lemon so commissioned another one which proved to be the final entry. Battle is a plodding effort that, while not without interest, is a disappointing end to the series. Changing Paul Dehn’s original concept - human/ape race-relations as an endless loop of violence and counter-violence - Fox opted for a more optimistic conclusion, hiring Joyce and John Corrington to bring the series full circle. Caesar - now leader of a peaceful community of apes who now have the power of speech - attempts to bring about harmony between the apes and humans. But the resentful General Aldo and his gorilla militia sees more use in using humans as target-practice. Caesar must also contend with mutants from a recent nuclear war who are intent on invading the ape city. Once again, ongoing events result in violence. But what separates Battle from its predecessors is its willingness to propose a peaceful resolution. In the film’s closing moments, 600 years after the death of Caesar, the ape Lawgiver (John Huston) talks of peace and harmony between humans and apes.
Director J Lee Thompson obviously felt that the laborious script wasn’t worth the effort and this is a somewhat lacklustre end to the series.
My ranking of the series is 1 4 3 5 2
@caractacus potts I have seen the TV series and there are some good episodes, but I think the budgetary limitations hampered its progress and of course it was curtailed early.
Great retrospective. My main issue with BATTLE... is with the fact that there is zero budget for the film itself. The entire endeavor looks like it was held together with duct tape and bailing wire, giving everything a 'last gasp for cash' patina to it. It's a series that is clearly out of gas.
My personal ranking would be similar to yours: 1, 4, 3, 2, 5. BENEATH... at least had a budget and really went for it with the ending.
@HarryCanyon On another day I wouldn’t disagree with your ranking of the series - the last two are interchangeable depending on mood. It’s nice to see an old classic series create discussion 🍻
DEATH RIDES A HORSE (1967)
It would be fair to say that spaghetti westerns lifted Lee Van Cleef from starring as bit part heavies (including High Noon, Gunfight At The OK Corral and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) into leading roles in a host of action pictures. His performance here in this superior spaghetti outing is excellent. Van Cleef as Ryan, gives an ornery, sometimes humorous, performance as an outlaw-tumed-bounty hunter helping Bill (John Phillip Law) track down the gang who massacred his family when he was a child. Giulio Petroni’s cramped, confined direction is marvellous, as is Ennio Morricone's eccentric score, full of shrieking chants and tribal percussion. Our own Anthony Dawson, as one of the gang, winds up on the wrong end of Ryan and Bill’s bullets. Bill Kills, indeed. Scriptwriter Luciano Vincenzoni worked on some of the best entries in the genre, including Sergio Leone’s A Fistful Of Dynamite.
If you like European westerns they don’t come much better than this.
THE TWO FACES OF DR JEKYLL (1960)
Terence Fisher brings nothing more than a workmanlike air to this Hammer remake of several previous attempts to interpret Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 gothic horror classic. Not much remains of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Wolf Mankiewicz’s script liberally reinvents the story as a crime of passion. Here, Paul Massie’s obsessive, clunky scientist has neglected his beautiful wife Kitty [Dawn Addams – oh, how could he!] and she has flown into the arms of shifty gambler Christopher Lee. So, Dr Jekyll decides to use his miracle potion to transform himself into Mr Hyde, a good-looking, scheming, passionate lothario of an alter-ego. In this version, Jekyll actively encourages himself to experiment more and more as Hyde, particularly when he sees a way to ruin Paul Allen [Lee] and gain the respect of his wife. However for these two adulterous lovers, desire truly runs deep, deeper than Jekyll or Hyde comprehends, which is the flaw in both of their makeups, giving a unique twist on the usual Good vs Bad plot line.
The movie has the usual Hammer lurid colours for the period, but there are few shocks, unless you include the extended frilly knickers can-can dance which just goes on and on and on. To be frank, the film feels like an exercise in cheap 1960s titillation rather than an exercise in terror. Despite a couple of decent death scenes, the action is rather flaccid and no fancy can-can can restore it to life. The Two Faces of… should have been a great advertisement for Hammer Pictures, but they fluffed it big time. They did better a decade later with the gender swap hilarity and tacit horror of Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde.
BEAT GIRL (I960)
This is now notable for Christopher Lee and Nigel Green as strip club owners, Oliver Reed as one of the beatniks and John Barry’s first film score. Gillian Hills belongs to a gang of London teens who attempt to copy the cool culture of American beatniks, they talk about jazz and dance to rock and roll. Her father has a new wife, not much older than herself and a chance encounter between the stepmother and a stripper sends Gillian on a mission to bring her stepmother's questionable past to light. The film is plainly on the side of the adults, which assumes they have the right to deny their wild years, while the teenagers are seen as bad no matter what they do. Adam Faith gamely imitates Elvis. Beat Girl is an interesting example of how British filmmakers modelled the American bad girl exploitation drive-in flicks and is extremely evocative of the era.
Well worth catching.
@chrisno1 Yes, I agree that Hammer didn't do a great job with this one. And Lee was established by this point (after Frankenstein, Dracula, etc) so why wasn't he playing the title part? Or parts, of course.
@CoolHandBond I've never seen "Beat Girl" but play the OST often 😁
LAWMAN (1971)
Director Michael Winner gets a lot of mauling from so-called movie critics but I’ve always found his direction to be economically straightforward and delivering entertaining no-frills movies starring some of the greatest names in cinema, including Marlon Brando. Lawman is one of his best and it rises above average by creating a haunting vision of the lawless west paradoxically entwining the mysticism of the revisionist Western with the genre’s more classic style. Burt Lancaster is a marshal, he’s looking to extradite a group of ranch hands for shooting up his town and accidentally killing an old man. Standing in his way are cattle baron Lee J Cobb and cowardly sheriff Robert Ryan. The classic showdown is inevitable from the first scene, and what happens in-between is neatly predictable. What makes Lawman so compelling, though, is its characters’ tattered moral fabric. Cobb and his minions are not merely two-dimensional villains; they are men with families who have worked hard to get where they are and it’s only through a drunken fracas that they find themselves on the other side of the law. Then there’s Ryan, a once feared gunslinger who has since lost his nerve and is at Cobb’s beck and call. The most intoxicating character is Lancaster’s unwavering lawman. He's a ruthless killer who never backs down, and as the film unwinds, he becomes the most menacing presence onscreen. Winner directs this in his own style, whilst acknowledging some influences from Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone.
An above-par western with a great cast including Robert Duvall, Albert Salmi, JD Cannon and in a rare cinematic outing our very own Dr No Joseph Wiseman.
A bit late ( still catching up after my holiday) but I haven't seen "Withnail And I" either.
Awesome! Come join us on the Fail bus, we saved a seat for you. Open bar in the back!
👍