We tried watching Top Gun last night, which doesn't get shown much on telly and I've never seen it in its entirety - but had to switch over after 40 or so minutes because we couldn't hear the dialogue and there was no subtitles option. That said, I was quickly going off it - the fondly remembered 'iconic' scene in which Cruise's Maverick serenades Kelly McGuillis' stranger in a bar was just cringey for so many reasons; you'd imagine other poor women having to put up with the same thing for years after and being branded a 'bitch' if she didn't respond with McGuiil's admittedly beguiling bewilderment, embarrassment and sense of fun. It makes me recall with a shudder the antics I myself felt I had to conjur up just to get it on with the opposite sex - the sort of move that, if you were ever a contender, would have had you struck out immediately. It makes me wonder if such movies aren't written by losers for losers, the implication being that to get anywhere with an attractive woman you had to do something out of the ordinary or dramatic rather than just going up to engage with her and see if you occupy any shared happy head space. Back then it was like every encounter was fraught with potential humiliation owing to the implicit fact you were facing a knock back from someone of a lower social status, along with the usual repressed attitudes about sex, like to procure it required some con trick upon an unsuspecting 'target' so was worthy of rejection anyway.
That said I suppose a bar occupied by elite young pilots might be a more competitive context, requiring a stand-out move.
I assumed they hadn't shown this film to tie in with the sequel to preserve it for pay TV but now I wonder if it wasn't more because it would put people off, better to stay with their memories.
Anyway, switched over for the start of The Untouchables which I always enjoy, even if as one critic said, it's a bit like Batman the TV series with a body count. I liked David Mamet's script but a couple of things I never get and overlook because I like the film; when Connery talks of having made a 'blood oath' with Ness, what does that mean? Is it because he shook hands with the bracelet or key hub in his hand? We don't really see that, do we? We see it when Ness shakes hands with one of his colleagues in the final scene, which I guess is a nod back to that. When Connery gets Ness to agree terms, it doesn't seem to me he's got Ness to agree to do anything outside the law so why is there a deal? Why does Connery say 'Well, the Lord hates a coward' - how is that relevant, is it directed at himself or Ness? There are a few little things like that. I suppose the scene were Ness coerces the judge into switching the jury is a mirror of the time Ness asks his colleagues to excuse him, then asks them to come back in when it's clear he's being bribed. I feel the moral degradation of Ness isn't quite deplored in the way the script wants, then again this was the era of Lethal Weapon when the cops take the law into their own hands to get the necessary result, and this is approved. But why would telling the judge his name was in the ledger when it wasn't be effective, it's done very shortly, and why would the judge be unwilling to switch the juries anyway? Why would he need coercion? The final scene when Ness says goodbye to a colleague seems a bit abrupt, 'Okay, bye then!' only redeemed by a sentimental moment that follows.
Over Christmas I prefer to watch familiar favourites with family memories of going to the cinema rather than engage with challenging fare. I never saw Top Gun at the cinema though as I've pointed out, the gap between that and Top Gun: Maverick is so wide, it's as if Connery made Dr No in 62 and then no other Bond movie until returning in GoldenEye in 1996. Or, if you prefer, if Dalton made The Living Daylights and then no other Bond movie until returning for No Time To Die.
A busy animated film that spawned a franchise and put Dreamworks Animation on the cartoon map, as it were, alongside Disney and Pixar. The film is based on a children’s book, but is remarkably adult in its scripting, poking fun at a whole slew of fairy tales as well as the troublesome but adorably twee relationships between the characters. Mike Myers gives a Scottish accent to Shrek, a green-skinned antisocial ogre, but he also gives him character depth, strength and some verbal dexterity. He spars brilliantly with sidekick Eddie Murphy, who interprets the donkey Donkey with fast talking gusto and a healthy kick against the heroic. Cameron Diaz, as the heroine Princess Fiona, is also far more accomplished than you would expect. It helps they are all rather playing to type. The plot is a mish mash and reinvention of fairy story stereotypes and is entirely superfluous to the fun – it is basically Prince not-so-Charming rescues Princess not-so-Perfect – but the award winning screenplay laces all its machinations with lashings of good-humour, both verbal and visual. Essentially, you are watching a pantomime. You can almost sense an audience booing and hissing whenever the villainous Lord Faarquad is on screen. The female dragon is a lovely touch. The animation sometimes looks a bit obvious, but it holds up well enough and a few sequences are exceptionally vivid.
Very funny and very good. Well observed, of both fairy stories and real life. Definitely one for all the family.
Rounding up the Christmas TV movies, when I am sat with a glass of wine or Champagne on New Year's Day, some Xmas dinner leftovers on the stove ready to eat, then Mary Poppins is the best film ever, better than any Bond film (thought it came out the same year as contender Goldfinger).
Everything about it is brilliant.
Love the music, the characters, the comedy especially and it looks brilliant. Okay, same with Goldfinger tbf.
With a drink in hand, I get all choked up at various scenes - this time the arrival of Poppins via umbrella, surely as great a cinematic entrance as Omar Sharif on camel in Lawrence of Arabia, or Andrews herself in The Sound of Music. Another choker is Mr Banks' evening walk across Edwardian (that's right, isn't it?) London for his appointment at the bank for his dressing down. It's the orchestral music and the visuals.
Nice to think its two stars, Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke, are still alive - you can't say that about Goldfinger now, though I suppose you can about that year's A Hard Day's Night if you count Ringo and Paul as the stars, That said, Poppins' Glynis Johns was also alive this time last year.
Van Dyke's mannerisms put me in mind of a young Suggs from Madness.
Unlike other classics, its attitudes haven't dated as much, say as the Bond films or a few classic musicals. There isn't much sexism for instance, though Poppins herself seems a bit manipulative. Of course, it was set 50 years in the past so had a knowing attitude - like sitcoms such as Dad's Army they tend not to date because they're dated already, and they have a clear-sighted, cleaned up attitude to the situation unfolding, it's like they can self-edit.
That all said, like the Christmas dinner, I'm not sure I'd want to sit down with Mary Poppins for the long haul at other times of the year, unlike Bond. Then again, not like Bond, there seems to be a strict rationing of Poppins along with The Sound of Music - you can't say that about Bond films, they flog them to death. Returning to the theme I think really all those 60s Bonds have unacceptable sexism really, I think Dr No might be the exception but some of Bond's seductions in that seem a bit cool and callous. Then again, same applies now through the 70s movies - Bond's trickery of Solitaire into losing her virginity, his 'delving deeply into Egyptian treasures' in Spy is just horrible... I guess when Brosnan took over the films started to have a knowing edge as if they were depicting the past instead, but I don't think his films are classics really. And the Craig movies don't have that family viewing brief.
I didn't care to watch Casablanca because sometimes these films lose something when you're used to watching it with your parents but... anyway, I tuned in and got swept away by the witty script.
Another triumph was the Wallace & Gromit movie, Vengeance Most Fowl, which had numerous nods to Bond films and other things that I sort of semi-registered but was too tipsy to realise, even on second viewing. Again, some good jokes there keep it bubbling over. In that I'm English and have never been to Yorkshire, it seems a bit odd to feel patriotic about it - then again, the past is a foreign country too and the London of Mary Poppins seems somewhat fictional now, I've even less chance of getting to visit that, it exists only in the movies.
Where Eagles Dare may be my Next Film Seen... it's on tomorrow (or today) 5 January BBC2 2.50pm after Kelly's Heroes at 12.30, a double bill of historically inaccurate WWII mayhem.
I plug this cos WED is a loooooong film and the Beeb doesn't do ad breaks. Usually it's no a channel where the ad breaks make it take up half a day to watch.
And some argue that Eagles is a Xmas film, don't know but it's got that OHMSS vibe with cable cars and snow and whatnot. Nazis too, OHMSS would have worked better with a subtle Nazi vibe.
This passed a few minutes after breakfast on Christmas Eve.
An Oscar nominated short animated film from Aardman Animations and the creative mind and fingers of Nick Park, A Grand Day Out is the first adventure to feature cheese loving Yorkshireman and creatively chaotic inventor Wallace and his faithful, sensible dog Gromit. On discovering there is no cheese in the fridge, the hungry twosome decide the best way to get more of the hard stuff is to fly to the moon [naturally] because the moon is made of cheese [of course it is…]. Rocket quickly constructed, the pair spend a grand day picnicking on the lunar surface and stealing cheese. An abandoned soda machine [abandoned by whom?] goes crazy with indignation and attempts to prevent the rocket from making a swift exit. Foiled, the tin antagonist takes up skiing [as you would…].
It’s all a bit LSD for me, but quite charming, very short and packed full of clever humorous detail and well-observed incident. Peter Sallis voices Wallace and while he is a bit of a social dunce, this early incarnation at least seems in fair control of his inventions. Things went awry later on in the franchise. Interesting to note how few people are involved in the filmmaking process for this 23 minute short – it was almost entirely animated by Nick Park himself, working in his spare time. Subsequently, there is a rugged, almost unfinished quality to the film, mostly reflected in how lumpy the Claymation figures are.
This film is not as refined a project as the later ‘bigger’ episodes, however it is remarkably funny and extremely clever, in content and execution, it isn’t just A Grand Day Out but a grand slice of entertainment. Very good indeed.
I've got BBC2 on in the background this afternoon for this double bill while I crack on with stuff I need to do. Telly Savalas is arguably more at home in his loudmouth 'Kelly's Heroes' role than in OHMSS, but I do like his bruiser- inflected Blofeld with noble pretensions. Despite Savalas being an American Blofeld, and Draco's complaint than some of his Union Corse men have defected to SPECTRE, the personnel at Piz Gloria largely do look like Wehrmacht types, alongside the snowy and cable-car connections with 'Where Eagles Dare'.
I'm enjoying 'Kelly's Heroes', especially Donald Sutherland's anachronistic sixties-type character, a hippy dude in a Sherman. Clint Eastwood is Clint Eastwood: Kelly hunts bounty as a freelancer while retaining his G.I. uniform. The Leone parody towards the end of the film, with Eastwood flanked by Sutherland and Savalas walking like gunslingers towards Karl-Otto Alberty's Tiger tank, mock-Morricone music in the background, is good fun; Alberty is co-opted to the gold-robbing gang in the name of private enterprise. The bipatisan gold theft represents a deliberately problematic ideological resolution to a film which is as much about Vietnam, anti-establishment attitudes and amoral entrepreneurism as it is about the thrills and spills of conventional WWII-movie action, with a largely ineffectual Wehrmacht having provided copious cannon fodder along the way.
The Richard Burton/ Clint Eastwood team-up in 'Where Eagles Dare' is very effective. (For this outing Eastwood is, with Burton, mostly donning the nattier German uniform.) The dour cynicism of Burton's paycheck performance is exactly right for the overall tone of the film and blends well with Eastwood's trademark heroism for a jaded, post-heroic cinema. You're right; WED is much better experienced without ad breaks.
That was a hell of a lot of movie carnage for one BBC2 afternoon!
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
] Made for television film starring the popular stop-motion animated characters Wallace and Gromit. Since A Grand Day Out [see above] these two cheery individuals have had a series of adventures which both amuse and astound. The last full-length animated feature was The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, almost twenty years ago. It was underwhelming. While A Matter of Loaf and Death restored some wounded pride, the yearning for the extravagant and fast paced antics of the earlier short movies The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, where terrific invention mixed freely with observational comedy to tremendous effect and resounding popular success, has never quite deserted Wallace and Gromit audiences. So here it is then, a sequel to The Wrong Trousers that is certainly inventive and ticks all the boxes for acutely noted hilarity, yet it doesn’t make one laugh the way it should. Occasionally we yelp and chuckle uproariously, such as when the animation displays homage to genre movies and TV shows past and present, or the well-projected verbal dexterity of the voice cast, but mostly we are waiting for the action to pick up. If feels very laborious. Perhaps I’m getting on a bit.
Feathers MacGraw escapes from zoological prison and attempts to steal the Blue Diamond once more and once more Gromit sees-through the folly of Wallace’s ridiculous inventions and sees Feathers MacGraw back behind bars. Wallace isn’t very charming. His treatment of his lovable pooch borders on abuse. If Gromit was a child, he’d be in care. Fun is being had for sure, but it aches to get there and I wasn’t over impressed with the humour count, which is mostly only smile inducing. There is a lot going on in the animation, too much sometimes, and I miss the simplicity of the earliest, streamlined films. This clever exercise has a coolness to it that seems to miss the joy, replacing it with menace and a knowing wink at an audience, who will all be reacting to different jokes at different times. Yeh, maybe I am getting on a bit. They say that happens when you yearn for the past.
Fascinatingly good, but a long watch that creates some niggling reservations.
I’m a lot older than you Chris, but I found this great viewing, funny, inventive and with lots of nostalgia. Maybe it’s because my mind still feels young, even though my body creaks like hell.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Under-the-radar Bond spinoff in which Ralph Fiennes reprises his role as M, forced to make amends for the Heracles debacle. and with 007 missing in action, compelled by shadowy Government forces to reenter the field to undertake one last mission. This entails infiltration of the Vatican on a surveillance task to uncover rogue cardinals' secret activities and, if possible, influence the choice of the next Pope.
It's stunning stuff, in particular I was impressed with how Fiennes' M learns to speak Latin and Italian to pass himself off as a cardinal - unlike Bond in OHMSS, who never quite convinced as a heraldry expert, this time we see it as a work In progress. The claustrophobia as the shutters come down 'We are impregnable' as one of the papal powerbroker announces, it all recalls Bond's undercover mission in OHMSS, and there's even a nod to Spectre in one of the locations, reprising Bond's first meeting in a long time with his stepbrother, in Rome.
As other reviewers have noted, to say more would be to spoil it, but I enjoyed the helicopter gunship terrorist attack on the Vatican, redolent of both Piz Gloria and the scene in Godfather III but visually arresting nonetheless.
Best of all, for me, was the return of the Thunderball jet pack, used to escape the confines of the Vatican walls in a brilliant piece of coup de cinema.
This WWII caper movie was oft on telly when I was growing up but I never quite caught it or got the hang of it, so I watched it for the first time tonight, on as a Clint Eastwood double bill with Where Eagles Dare, currently on right now.
I didn't get the hang of it tonight, either. It's pretty bad, in poor taste. It's a cross genre movie of the type Tarantino sort of employs, but I'm not sure you can do this with a war movie and a heist film. Eastwood's platoon, inc Telly Savalas, go AWOL to venture behind enemy lines in Italy, when they hear about a bank full of gold bars nobody else knows about. I admit it's intriguing that they figure they can do this and nobody in command will figure out where they are because a lot of it is chaos by this point anyway.
But they use tanks to kill lots of Germans and while in a war movie they are sort of expendable it made me uneasy because the soldiers are not following orders or doing it for the greater good but just for their own lust for money - a lust that is justified in other films but not quite here, you can't have it both ways. I suppose Eastwood and Savalas had form for this sort of movie thanks to Where Eagles Dare - quite ludicrous and a high body count - and The Dirty Dozen, also a high body count and quite nasty, but this one tries to be funny. Caine might have done something like this - and the script is by a Brit who did his film The Italian Job - and maybe Connery with Alfie Lynch in On the Fiddle, who were two chancers. but it's tricky to sell. Of course, both Connery and Caine did The Man Who Would Be King and I found that an uneasy watch too, because in an army context, it's often hard to immediately sympathise with two conmen who are out for themselves, it goes against the flow.
The film just wasn't that funny to be a comedy, either, though I think Americans might enjoy it more because I understand it has a lot of TV actors from sitcoms in supporting roles. Donald Sutherland is meant to be a hoot as a hippy tank commander but, y'know, it's not that funny.
Where Eagles Dare is rubbish too but it does play it with a straight face. A Gestapo officer arriving in a Spectre-style helicopter from Berlin in the freezing winter weather, he'd be frozen stiff! Helicopters barely existed then, though that's an arguable point I think. Then again, some people think the Nazis had a base in the moon in the last months of the war, so I suppose they might have been able to rustle up a helicopter.
William Wyler’s pacifist western sees Gregory Peck’s Eastern-raised navy captain Jim McKay arrive in Texas to marry Carroll Baker’s spoilt brat of an heiress. He’s a bit self-obsessed and dull as western heroes go and his amiable and efficient qualities are not projected enough to make him the most sympathetic of characters. We too wonder why he performs so many great feats of skill to an audience of one or none. It doesn’t endear him to anyone, not even the watching cinematic audience. Miss Baker’s Patricia Terrill gets the hump real sturdy and quick. Luckily for her, brutish Charlton Heston is on hand to offer a different kind of courting. As ranch foreman Steve Leech, Heston smoulders with all the repressed lust and fury you’d expect a big Texan to exhibit. Peck’s gentlemanly turn seems to have dropped in from Horatio Hornblower. It’s no wonder he fares better quoting literature with Jean Simmons’s prim school mistress. Odd that there are no children at her school. Or anywhere. Miss Simmons’s Julie spends most of her time avoiding Buck Hannassey [a great role for Chuck Connors], the mean but cowardly son of bloated canyon farmer, Rufus. Burl Ives nailed the patriarchal role in 1958. He’s outstanding both here and in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Rufus’s nemesis is Charles Bickford’s equally brutal Major Terrill, a craggy, single-minded cattle baron with aims to take over the state. Quite what happened to turn these two men so viciously against each other is not made clear, but hate each other they do and that hate permeates through their families and affects every decision everyone makes.
This bigger than big western is mightily imposing, in length, look and deed. It is more stately than slow. The long, extended action sequences – scenes where very little pure action happens – anticipate the whipcrack tension that pervades spaghetti westerns, all those close ups of eyes, hands and beads of sweat. The story, for all its big talk, is quite small in scale, it is simply staged on an enormous landscape. Some outstanding scenes live in the memory – Burl Ives arriving uninvited at the Tirrell’s engagement party; the fist fight between Peck and Heston; the sweeping opening credits; the timidity of Alfonso Bedoya’s Mexican ranch hand; Rufus battling his errant son – and you can’t fault the immaculate production qualities. The music score is better than fine, the Jerome Moross theme is uplifting in a symphonic fashion. The photography is superb. The script is based on a short story written by, curiously, Donald Hamilton, who would later write the Matt Helm spy novels.
I enjoy The Big Country because it was one of the first westerns I saw where I began to understand the genre and how it reflected generational changes, both historically and in contemporary society; along with similarly challenging 1950s films such as Shane, The Naked Spur and Rancho Notorious, I find The Big Country epitomises much of how cinema would treat the genre in the next decade and further forward. The patriarchal gloating, romantic misunderstandings and anti-war themes still strike chords today. Modern audiences may find it a trifle dull, like its hero, and the gloss is burnished some by later more extravagantly presented and directed movies. However, for a straightish take on movie western lore, The Big Country is big and impressive indeed.
One of those movies where the title is never properly explained or referred to, John Huston’s western The Unforgiven is an interesting failure, a film that sets its stall out as a revisionist piece, but ends up as the same old Cowboy v Indian set to that we have seen for years. In an era when television western serials were stealing the black hat / white hat staple of western movies, The Unforgiven tries in a muscley fashion to address instead racism towards Native Americans, but loses its way once the truth is out and descends into a homestead under fire cliché, a violent stand-off between white settlers and a Kiowa war party; exciting, but uninvolving.
Burt Lancaster is half-decent as Ben Zachary, eldest of three brothers who farm cattle in Texas. Their sister, Rachel, is a headstrong, dusky whippet of a woman and she’s played with some spunk by Audrey Hepburn, who suffered a miscarriage during filming and rarely spoke about the production. She’s very good in fact, portraying a flighty, impulsive and passionate ingenue. The problem is that Hepburn’s about ten years too old for the role, which clearly should be played by a teenager. You don’t for one moment buy into her unspoken naïve desires, particularly as those for her step-brother [Lancaster] border on the embarrassingly indecent. Filling out the cast is Indian-hater Audie Murphy and doleful Doug McClure as the other brothers; Lilian Gish is their mother. Charles Bickford reinvents his patriarchal role from The Big Country as another rancher, Zeb Rawlins. Zeb’s son is killed by Kiowas, who are searching for a squaw baby raised as a white woman. Joseph Wiseman’s crazy-eyed cavalry trooper puts about rumours that the squaw is Rachel and tensions rise between the Zachary’s and the other white families. The film, up to this point, has been well acted by the miscast cast, but they have nothing to work with once the truth comes out and the story fades into the stereotypical. An interesting subplot around a Kiowa cattle drover is shunted aside mid-way. The love story that replaces it seems shoe-horned in to give the stars something to play with.
The film is good to look at – thank you Franz Planer – and culturally interesting for the time, but not entirely successful. Like The Big Country [see above] some of its visual tropes would be seized upon by Sergio Leone for his grandiose spaghetti westerns. The famous shot of Lancaster hauling Hepburn across the prairie is a publicity photo and does not feature in the film at all.
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN (2011)
Let’s forget about the monstrous title.
Instead, let’s remember that motion-capture animation is here given a neat spin by Steven Spielberg who ensures that Tintin, Captain Haddock et al retain a semblance of Herge’s original comic book drawings. Spielberg had long cherished making a film of the diminutive Belgian reporter – he’d held the rights since 1983 – and I can only assume it took him almost thirty years because he could never quite fathom how to present the titular hero. By 2011, that was solved with a photorealist presentation of the actors. There was also the more knotty problem of Tintin’s pooch, Snowy, who if he’d been a real dog might never have been as affecting as he is; the SFX crew created a fully animated Snowy for the film, introducing quizzical human expressions to give him character. The movie took seven years to complete, thanks in part to funding issues, and wasn’t fully up and running until Oscar winning SFX maestro director / producer Peter Jackson came on board offering Weta Digital technology to reproduce the blue-screened actors. Advice was offered from many industry experts, writers and fellow directors in how to present the film to best reflect Herge’s imitable style.
The finished movie is quite a hoot.
Written by a bunch of Englishmen and starring another bunch of Englishmen, there is an inherent ‘Englishness’ to proceedings which seems to fit the character of Tintin even though he’s from Brussels. The Thomson & Thompson Twins, two hopeless Interpol detectives, also have that air of Chaplinesque idiocy that marks them as distinctly British. And there is nothing quite so quintessentially English as a drunken sea captain who owns an enormous stately pile in the country and trades one-liners with his dress-suited butler. The film is smart enough early on to pay homage to Herge himself [a representation of the artist is shown painting Tintin’s portrait on the street] as well as some of the earlier comic novels not featured [newspaper clippings pepper Tintin’s study referencing King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Tintin in America and The Blue Lotus]. The reproduction of the original comic strips and novels goes for a darker, more modern noir style, which seems to suit the material. Tintin is presented as an elder teenager, as he was from the midway stage of the comic book series. This too gives the character ample scope for the more athletic highlights, such as motorbike riding, seaplane piloting and fist fights galore.
The plot borrows liberally from many Tintin books, but mostly from The Secret of the Unicorn and its follow up Red Rackham’s Treasure. As these two adventures straddle the family ancestry of Captain Archibald Haddock, they serve as a good introduction to Tintin’s barnacle blistering bearded inebriated inconsequential imbecilic friend. In the books, they first encountered each other in The Crab with the Golden Claws, and sections of that adventure are lifted and slotted into the action too. The joins are seamless. It would be fair to say the story feels a bit like a missing Indiana Jones episode and Spielberg does rather present it that way, albeit with less pontificating, no sexual innuendo and little terror. This perhaps reflects Herge’s own intent as a writer, for the original strips often saw Tintin hunting treasure or unveiling a dark secret in a hidden country, much like Dr Jones, but with youthful abandon. Jamie Bell is vocally very assured as the hero and he is well matched by Andy Serkis’s shouty Haddock and Daniel Craig’s sophisticated villain Sakharine. Daniel Mays scores too as First-Mate Allan, a recurring villain’s sidekick in the books.
The film trots along quite amicably and quite noisily, resolving itself with a moment of calm. The scene where Captain Haddock ignores a pile of priceless jewels to put on his ancestor’s cavalier hat was a moment of rarely seen pathos in an animated movie, helped no doubt by the relative normality of the protagonists. There are no gross, ugly, diseased or alien looking-characters in Tintin’s world, just exaggerated ordinariness. John Williams provides one of his most accessible scores for a long time; no histrionics here, the melodies are a light and breezy accompaniment to the action.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, although whoever plastered the film with such an excruciatingly long title deserves shooting, especially as the proposed sequels never came about, making the subtitle superfluous.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirim (2024)
This story takes place less than two hundred years before LotR. King Helm Hammerhand of Rohan accidentally kills a lesser king in a fight. The son son of the dead king is named Wulf and sweats to get revenge over the house of Hammerhand. King Helm has two son and a daughter named Hèra. She is the main hero of the movie.
This is an animated movie, and I've never seen an animated movie not aimed at a family audience at the cinema before. I think it works. Among other things I think the animation makes this movie distinct from the original trilogy. While there are a small number of links and references to the trilogy it's very much a standalone movie. Hèra is a good hero. At the begining of the movie she's not required to do much more than to marry into another royal family for political purposes, but she skepsis up to the challenges. While she's a skilled fighter Héra doesn't become the great hero because she's a stronger and better fighter than the rest. Instead she uses her brain to think outside the box, she's brave and had a strong moral backbone. Unlike some other modern movies with a female lead the filmakers understand not to make the men around her weak to make her look strong. In fact she looks better and more impressive because she manages to be the lead even though there are several strong and capable men around her.
I haven't seen the TV series "The rings of power", but I hear it's not as good as it should be. Perhaps you'd be better off watching this movie?
There has been a host of stuff on the telly recently surrounding the 90th anniversay of Elvis Presley's birth. I had seen most of the movies recently so I didn't bother, although I dipped into Blue Hawaii while taking down Christmas decorations.
My interest was peaked only by these:
ELVIS – ’68 COMEBACK SPECIAL (1968)
I am not certain what qualifies this two part television concert special – originally shown over two nights – as a ‘movie’. I am equally puzzled why the BBC or the producer of this 2018 commemorative edition chose to edit out some of the numbers – the Christmas songs are missing, replaced by Tiger Man which similarly aired during a non-seasonal repeat, although all songs appear listed on the credits; is this that repeat show? – but I am glad someone is at least attempting to recreate something of the complete excitement of Elvis Presley singing live. Dressed in black leather, looking fitter than he had for ages, and visibly enjoying himself, laughing, joking and fooling around, a 34 year old Elvis displays all the verve and sexual vibrations that made him the King of Rock n Roll in 1956. The moniker stuck, has always stuck, even if a tad of the gloss has been etched away by time and too many flabby seventies Las Vegas concerts. The memories of energetic, tantalising performances like this that make your spine tingle, live longer in the memory than the bad films and the extravagant jumpsuits.
I could list a whole bunch of reasons to watch this concert / TV theatre show, but I think I will settle for telling you it genuinely is a performance for the ages, maybe not in stagecraft, but for certain vocally, for Elvis belts out hit after hit, until you almost think he’s going to bust his vocal chords. The ‘in the round’ sections are a powerhouse of a one man show, the band away to his left, the audience surrounding the boxing-ring-sized stage. They stare amazed and in admiration; barely a scream or even a whisper, almost overcome by the drama and the tension of the occasion. Has a comeback ever been so magnificent? Probably not. Kate Bush disappeared for ages, but her wispy style is not a patch on Elvis’s sheer guts and gusto and gratuitousness. He howls and he prowls and her wears that mother down…
Even the theatre-style numbers, rehearsed and sung prerecorded, are better conceptualised than anything you see in a sixties Elvis movie. It just demonstrates what a spark of imagination could have done for Elvis’s cinema career. The TV show is bookended by Guitar Man, a seminal song for the King, and climaxed in the tribute to Martin Luther King If I Can Dream. Quite how these songs failed to deliver him number ones remains a complete mystery [to me anyway…]. Well, he was soon back on top with Suspicious Minds and others, but there is something stupendous about this ‘concert’ which draws one in again and again. I have seen it almost a dozen times, listened to the CD probably hundreds and I love it.
It may not be a proper ‘movie’ but by golly the intensity and the excitement that Elvis must have generated seems to hum across the airwaves and right into your living room.
Simply superb.
Five Stars and Much Much More
I have an original copy of this.
Note:
The original soundtrack album was released in 1969 under the title NBC T.V. Special but it doesn’t feature all the music. A 1998 release Memories: The ’68 Comeback Special pitched the originals with the missing tracks and some rehearsal takes. Was this the first time the show was recognised as a comeback? In 1968 it might be fair to say while Elvis was not exactly in favour, he hadn’t ever been away. Tiger Man, also from 1998, features all of the songs played in the ‘sit down’ shows from June 28th 1968. Can @Barbel help me out and tell me if the June 29th ‘stand up show’ songs feature in entirety on any album?
SPINOUT (1966)
a.k.a California Holiday
A lumpy musical from Elvis Presley that is as bad as it is good. Writers Theodore Flicker and George Kirgo poke fun at Presley’s cinematic persona by having him be a race car driver who sings with a club band while romancing girl after girl after girl – although the one he ought to love is right under his nose, a tomboyish Deborah Whalley, who plays Les, the drummer in the King’s rock n roll combo. She’s quite a dish, but he doesn’t fancy her, other than her cordon bleu campfire cooking. Nor is he taken with Diane MacBain’s elder seductress, an author out to pin down America’s favourite single man. Shelley Fabares’s cute spoilt heiress doesn’t fit the bill either. So where does he turn – back to his first love: music!
The movie replicates tropes from several previous Elvis vehicles: a grand prix style race, a rich bitchy heiress, a swindling multimillionaire, a travelling rock band, beach parties, rock concerts, terrible songs, etc. You sense the screenwriters wanted something akin to the sophistication of a Doris Day / Rock Hudson movie, but they ended up only part of the way there, coming all mud-stuck in a dated pre-swinging sixties vibe of amiable docility when Elvis really needed something more dangerous, like his ’rebel with no scruples’ turns of Jailhouse Rock and King Creole. The King himself looks disinterested, especially during the musical numbers. The crown was undeniably slipping.
Spinout was retitled for the UK market for no apparent reason. The film was a fair success at the box office everywhere. Viewed now, it looks a bit creaky and creepy at once. Contemporary reviews were quite kind and although Spinout is better than some, it isn’t as good as many others. The uneven humour has a repetitive, television feel to it [George Kirgo wrote many sketches for The Mary Tyler Moore show] and is only saved by rather good supporting performers, who show more interest than Elvis in the material.
Perhaps Elvis was smarter than he looks and recognised the satire at work. Early on in the film he gives a speech mocking the cult of celebrity and pop star fame, citing the influence of The Ed Sullivan Show. Another scene has a stray labrador sit beside him at a campfire and the King exclaims: “Look! A hound dog!” A little more of this knowing humour might have made the film more enjoyable, but I sense it would have royally pissed off Elvis and probably given Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, a heart attack. Hmm, pity.
I have the soundtrack to this movie and it is abysmal. I sympathise with Elvis for not trying very hard where the songs are concerned, although I do wonder why director Norman Taurog has him strutting around at a ‘wild’ party strumming a guitar when he ought to be getting it on down and dirty with the young chicks, as it were. Smorgasbord of women indeed! Embarrassment of lyric and melody, is more like it. Without a decent song on the LP and shy of three numbers, RCA tagged on three non-film studio takes. I’ll Remember You [later to appear as one of the best tracks on the Aloha from Hawaii concert], Down in the Alley [an old Jesse Stone r n b number] and Tomorrow is a Long Time [a Bob Dylan song from his early years that he toyed with on and off for a decade but never officially released] are a darn sight better than almost anything Elvis had released for number of years. It proved the King of Rock n Roll still had it in him and led the way to his eventual return to studio albums and live concerts.
So while Spinout could be a better film than it is if the producer and director – and I guess the Colonel – had been braver with their script choices, in a wider musical context, Elvis Presley and his fans probably do have something to indirectly thank the film for.
Lovely reviews, thank you. I'm not tempted to watch "Spinout" again but need no prompting to watch the 68 Special.
It was referred to as the Comeback Special in the notes to the 1980 Silver Box, and possibly in the notes to one of the Legendary Performer series before that.
I'm pretty sure that to get the stand up complete you'll need either a box set or the by now expensive Burbank '68, the first FTD release. Of course you could also go the bootleg route if that appeals.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 28,035Chief of Staff
I remember when I saw the 68 Comeback Special for the first time - I was blown away…my mum is a massive Elvis fan, so I’d always heard his music - but seeing him in this, I understood what all the fuss was about. Mesmerising.
That '68 comeback special was a 'lightning in a bottle' moment. He was dressed cool, the setting was inspired, the vibe was right, and Elvis was in the pocket with his song selection and delivery. Even if you're not a fan of the guy (and I'm honestly not), it's hard not to watch that and go 'yeah, I get it.'
The meeting between Elvis and the Beatles, in 65 I believe, didn't go too well, was a bit strained, in particular when Lennon asked straight out why Elvis didn't go back to his rock n roll roots, implying that he'd been wasting his time musically of late.
But perhaps Elvis heeded his advice with his 68 'comeback' concert.
Comments
We tried watching Top Gun last night, which doesn't get shown much on telly and I've never seen it in its entirety - but had to switch over after 40 or so minutes because we couldn't hear the dialogue and there was no subtitles option. That said, I was quickly going off it - the fondly remembered 'iconic' scene in which Cruise's Maverick serenades Kelly McGuillis' stranger in a bar was just cringey for so many reasons; you'd imagine other poor women having to put up with the same thing for years after and being branded a 'bitch' if she didn't respond with McGuiil's admittedly beguiling bewilderment, embarrassment and sense of fun. It makes me recall with a shudder the antics I myself felt I had to conjur up just to get it on with the opposite sex - the sort of move that, if you were ever a contender, would have had you struck out immediately. It makes me wonder if such movies aren't written by losers for losers, the implication being that to get anywhere with an attractive woman you had to do something out of the ordinary or dramatic rather than just going up to engage with her and see if you occupy any shared happy head space. Back then it was like every encounter was fraught with potential humiliation owing to the implicit fact you were facing a knock back from someone of a lower social status, along with the usual repressed attitudes about sex, like to procure it required some con trick upon an unsuspecting 'target' so was worthy of rejection anyway.
That said I suppose a bar occupied by elite young pilots might be a more competitive context, requiring a stand-out move.
I assumed they hadn't shown this film to tie in with the sequel to preserve it for pay TV but now I wonder if it wasn't more because it would put people off, better to stay with their memories.
Anyway, switched over for the start of The Untouchables which I always enjoy, even if as one critic said, it's a bit like Batman the TV series with a body count. I liked David Mamet's script but a couple of things I never get and overlook because I like the film; when Connery talks of having made a 'blood oath' with Ness, what does that mean? Is it because he shook hands with the bracelet or key hub in his hand? We don't really see that, do we? We see it when Ness shakes hands with one of his colleagues in the final scene, which I guess is a nod back to that. When Connery gets Ness to agree terms, it doesn't seem to me he's got Ness to agree to do anything outside the law so why is there a deal? Why does Connery say 'Well, the Lord hates a coward' - how is that relevant, is it directed at himself or Ness? There are a few little things like that. I suppose the scene were Ness coerces the judge into switching the jury is a mirror of the time Ness asks his colleagues to excuse him, then asks them to come back in when it's clear he's being bribed. I feel the moral degradation of Ness isn't quite deplored in the way the script wants, then again this was the era of Lethal Weapon when the cops take the law into their own hands to get the necessary result, and this is approved. But why would telling the judge his name was in the ledger when it wasn't be effective, it's done very shortly, and why would the judge be unwilling to switch the juries anyway? Why would he need coercion? The final scene when Ness says goodbye to a colleague seems a bit abrupt, 'Okay, bye then!' only redeemed by a sentimental moment that follows.
Over Christmas I prefer to watch familiar favourites with family memories of going to the cinema rather than engage with challenging fare. I never saw Top Gun at the cinema though as I've pointed out, the gap between that and Top Gun: Maverick is so wide, it's as if Connery made Dr No in 62 and then no other Bond movie until returning in GoldenEye in 1996. Or, if you prefer, if Dalton made The Living Daylights and then no other Bond movie until returning for No Time To Die.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
+1, I think so too.
SHREK (1999)
A busy animated film that spawned a franchise and put Dreamworks Animation on the cartoon map, as it were, alongside Disney and Pixar. The film is based on a children’s book, but is remarkably adult in its scripting, poking fun at a whole slew of fairy tales as well as the troublesome but adorably twee relationships between the characters. Mike Myers gives a Scottish accent to Shrek, a green-skinned antisocial ogre, but he also gives him character depth, strength and some verbal dexterity. He spars brilliantly with sidekick Eddie Murphy, who interprets the donkey Donkey with fast talking gusto and a healthy kick against the heroic. Cameron Diaz, as the heroine Princess Fiona, is also far more accomplished than you would expect. It helps they are all rather playing to type. The plot is a mish mash and reinvention of fairy story stereotypes and is entirely superfluous to the fun – it is basically Prince not-so-Charming rescues Princess not-so-Perfect – but the award winning screenplay laces all its machinations with lashings of good-humour, both verbal and visual. Essentially, you are watching a pantomime. You can almost sense an audience booing and hissing whenever the villainous Lord Faarquad is on screen. The female dragon is a lovely touch. The animation sometimes looks a bit obvious, but it holds up well enough and a few sequences are exceptionally vivid.
Very funny and very good. Well observed, of both fairy stories and real life. Definitely one for all the family.
The Shrek theme park ride at Universal Studios Florida is a blast, too. Totally unrelated, I know.
Rounding up the Christmas TV movies, when I am sat with a glass of wine or Champagne on New Year's Day, some Xmas dinner leftovers on the stove ready to eat, then Mary Poppins is the best film ever, better than any Bond film (thought it came out the same year as contender Goldfinger).
Everything about it is brilliant.
Love the music, the characters, the comedy especially and it looks brilliant. Okay, same with Goldfinger tbf.
With a drink in hand, I get all choked up at various scenes - this time the arrival of Poppins via umbrella, surely as great a cinematic entrance as Omar Sharif on camel in Lawrence of Arabia, or Andrews herself in The Sound of Music. Another choker is Mr Banks' evening walk across Edwardian (that's right, isn't it?) London for his appointment at the bank for his dressing down. It's the orchestral music and the visuals.
Nice to think its two stars, Julie Andrews and Dick van Dyke, are still alive - you can't say that about Goldfinger now, though I suppose you can about that year's A Hard Day's Night if you count Ringo and Paul as the stars, That said, Poppins' Glynis Johns was also alive this time last year.
Van Dyke's mannerisms put me in mind of a young Suggs from Madness.
Unlike other classics, its attitudes haven't dated as much, say as the Bond films or a few classic musicals. There isn't much sexism for instance, though Poppins herself seems a bit manipulative. Of course, it was set 50 years in the past so had a knowing attitude - like sitcoms such as Dad's Army they tend not to date because they're dated already, and they have a clear-sighted, cleaned up attitude to the situation unfolding, it's like they can self-edit.
That all said, like the Christmas dinner, I'm not sure I'd want to sit down with Mary Poppins for the long haul at other times of the year, unlike Bond. Then again, not like Bond, there seems to be a strict rationing of Poppins along with The Sound of Music - you can't say that about Bond films, they flog them to death. Returning to the theme I think really all those 60s Bonds have unacceptable sexism really, I think Dr No might be the exception but some of Bond's seductions in that seem a bit cool and callous. Then again, same applies now through the 70s movies - Bond's trickery of Solitaire into losing her virginity, his 'delving deeply into Egyptian treasures' in Spy is just horrible... I guess when Brosnan took over the films started to have a knowing edge as if they were depicting the past instead, but I don't think his films are classics really. And the Craig movies don't have that family viewing brief.
I didn't care to watch Casablanca because sometimes these films lose something when you're used to watching it with your parents but... anyway, I tuned in and got swept away by the witty script.
Another triumph was the Wallace & Gromit movie, Vengeance Most Fowl, which had numerous nods to Bond films and other things that I sort of semi-registered but was too tipsy to realise, even on second viewing. Again, some good jokes there keep it bubbling over. In that I'm English and have never been to Yorkshire, it seems a bit odd to feel patriotic about it - then again, the past is a foreign country too and the London of Mary Poppins seems somewhat fictional now, I've even less chance of getting to visit that, it exists only in the movies.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Where Eagles Dare may be my Next Film Seen... it's on tomorrow (or today) 5 January BBC2 2.50pm after Kelly's Heroes at 12.30, a double bill of historically inaccurate WWII mayhem.
I plug this cos WED is a loooooong film and the Beeb doesn't do ad breaks. Usually it's no a channel where the ad breaks make it take up half a day to watch.
And some argue that Eagles is a Xmas film, don't know but it's got that OHMSS vibe with cable cars and snow and whatnot. Nazis too, OHMSS would have worked better with a subtle Nazi vibe.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
WALLACE AND GROMIT: A GRAND DAY OUT (1989)
This passed a few minutes after breakfast on Christmas Eve.
An Oscar nominated short animated film from Aardman Animations and the creative mind and fingers of Nick Park, A Grand Day Out is the first adventure to feature cheese loving Yorkshireman and creatively chaotic inventor Wallace and his faithful, sensible dog Gromit. On discovering there is no cheese in the fridge, the hungry twosome decide the best way to get more of the hard stuff is to fly to the moon [naturally] because the moon is made of cheese [of course it is…]. Rocket quickly constructed, the pair spend a grand day picnicking on the lunar surface and stealing cheese. An abandoned soda machine [abandoned by whom?] goes crazy with indignation and attempts to prevent the rocket from making a swift exit. Foiled, the tin antagonist takes up skiing [as you would…].
It’s all a bit LSD for me, but quite charming, very short and packed full of clever humorous detail and well-observed incident. Peter Sallis voices Wallace and while he is a bit of a social dunce, this early incarnation at least seems in fair control of his inventions. Things went awry later on in the franchise. Interesting to note how few people are involved in the filmmaking process for this 23 minute short – it was almost entirely animated by Nick Park himself, working in his spare time. Subsequently, there is a rugged, almost unfinished quality to the film, mostly reflected in how lumpy the Claymation figures are.
This film is not as refined a project as the later ‘bigger’ episodes, however it is remarkably funny and extremely clever, in content and execution, it isn’t just A Grand Day Out but a grand slice of entertainment. Very good indeed.
My personal favorite 'men on a mission' film.
I've got BBC2 on in the background this afternoon for this double bill while I crack on with stuff I need to do. Telly Savalas is arguably more at home in his loudmouth 'Kelly's Heroes' role than in OHMSS, but I do like his bruiser- inflected Blofeld with noble pretensions. Despite Savalas being an American Blofeld, and Draco's complaint than some of his Union Corse men have defected to SPECTRE, the personnel at Piz Gloria largely do look like Wehrmacht types, alongside the snowy and cable-car connections with 'Where Eagles Dare'.
I'm enjoying 'Kelly's Heroes', especially Donald Sutherland's anachronistic sixties-type character, a hippy dude in a Sherman. Clint Eastwood is Clint Eastwood: Kelly hunts bounty as a freelancer while retaining his G.I. uniform. The Leone parody towards the end of the film, with Eastwood flanked by Sutherland and Savalas walking like gunslingers towards Karl-Otto Alberty's Tiger tank, mock-Morricone music in the background, is good fun; Alberty is co-opted to the gold-robbing gang in the name of private enterprise. The bipatisan gold theft represents a deliberately problematic ideological resolution to a film which is as much about Vietnam, anti-establishment attitudes and amoral entrepreneurism as it is about the thrills and spills of conventional WWII-movie action, with a largely ineffectual Wehrmacht having provided copious cannon fodder along the way.
The Richard Burton/ Clint Eastwood team-up in 'Where Eagles Dare' is very effective. (For this outing Eastwood is, with Burton, mostly donning the nattier German uniform.) The dour cynicism of Burton's paycheck performance is exactly right for the overall tone of the film and blends well with Eastwood's trademark heroism for a jaded, post-heroic cinema. You're right; WED is much better experienced without ad breaks.
That was a hell of a lot of movie carnage for one BBC2 afternoon!
WALLACE AND GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL (2024)
] Made for television film starring the popular stop-motion animated characters Wallace and Gromit. Since A Grand Day Out [see above] these two cheery individuals have had a series of adventures which both amuse and astound. The last full-length animated feature was The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, almost twenty years ago. It was underwhelming. While A Matter of Loaf and Death restored some wounded pride, the yearning for the extravagant and fast paced antics of the earlier short movies The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, where terrific invention mixed freely with observational comedy to tremendous effect and resounding popular success, has never quite deserted Wallace and Gromit audiences. So here it is then, a sequel to The Wrong Trousers that is certainly inventive and ticks all the boxes for acutely noted hilarity, yet it doesn’t make one laugh the way it should. Occasionally we yelp and chuckle uproariously, such as when the animation displays homage to genre movies and TV shows past and present, or the well-projected verbal dexterity of the voice cast, but mostly we are waiting for the action to pick up. If feels very laborious. Perhaps I’m getting on a bit.
Feathers MacGraw escapes from zoological prison and attempts to steal the Blue Diamond once more and once more Gromit sees-through the folly of Wallace’s ridiculous inventions and sees Feathers MacGraw back behind bars. Wallace isn’t very charming. His treatment of his lovable pooch borders on abuse. If Gromit was a child, he’d be in care. Fun is being had for sure, but it aches to get there and I wasn’t over impressed with the humour count, which is mostly only smile inducing. There is a lot going on in the animation, too much sometimes, and I miss the simplicity of the earliest, streamlined films. This clever exercise has a coolness to it that seems to miss the joy, replacing it with menace and a knowing wink at an audience, who will all be reacting to different jokes at different times. Yeh, maybe I am getting on a bit. They say that happens when you yearn for the past.
Fascinatingly good, but a long watch that creates some niggling reservations.
And yet, I would argue, pure genius when placed next to the recent Bond sequels.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I’m a lot older than you Chris, but I found this great viewing, funny, inventive and with lots of nostalgia. Maybe it’s because my mind still feels young, even though my body creaks like hell.
Conclave
Under-the-radar Bond spinoff in which Ralph Fiennes reprises his role as M, forced to make amends for the Heracles debacle. and with 007 missing in action, compelled by shadowy Government forces to reenter the field to undertake one last mission. This entails infiltration of the Vatican on a surveillance task to uncover rogue cardinals' secret activities and, if possible, influence the choice of the next Pope.
It's stunning stuff, in particular I was impressed with how Fiennes' M learns to speak Latin and Italian to pass himself off as a cardinal - unlike Bond in OHMSS, who never quite convinced as a heraldry expert, this time we see it as a work In progress. The claustrophobia as the shutters come down 'We are impregnable' as one of the papal powerbroker announces, it all recalls Bond's undercover mission in OHMSS, and there's even a nod to Spectre in one of the locations, reprising Bond's first meeting in a long time with his stepbrother, in Rome.
As other reviewers have noted, to say more would be to spoil it, but I enjoyed the helicopter gunship terrorist attack on the Vatican, redolent of both Piz Gloria and the scene in Godfather III but visually arresting nonetheless.
Best of all, for me, was the return of the Thunderball jet pack, used to escape the confines of the Vatican walls in a brilliant piece of coup de cinema.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I haven't seen "Conclave" yet, but you have clearly seen the subtexts and character backgrounds in the movie like no one has before. Brilliant! 👍
I thought Jaws appearing at the third vote was a little much.
😅🤣😂
Kelly's Heroes (1970)
This WWII caper movie was oft on telly when I was growing up but I never quite caught it or got the hang of it, so I watched it for the first time tonight, on as a Clint Eastwood double bill with Where Eagles Dare, currently on right now.
I didn't get the hang of it tonight, either. It's pretty bad, in poor taste. It's a cross genre movie of the type Tarantino sort of employs, but I'm not sure you can do this with a war movie and a heist film. Eastwood's platoon, inc Telly Savalas, go AWOL to venture behind enemy lines in Italy, when they hear about a bank full of gold bars nobody else knows about. I admit it's intriguing that they figure they can do this and nobody in command will figure out where they are because a lot of it is chaos by this point anyway.
But they use tanks to kill lots of Germans and while in a war movie they are sort of expendable it made me uneasy because the soldiers are not following orders or doing it for the greater good but just for their own lust for money - a lust that is justified in other films but not quite here, you can't have it both ways. I suppose Eastwood and Savalas had form for this sort of movie thanks to Where Eagles Dare - quite ludicrous and a high body count - and The Dirty Dozen, also a high body count and quite nasty, but this one tries to be funny. Caine might have done something like this - and the script is by a Brit who did his film The Italian Job - and maybe Connery with Alfie Lynch in On the Fiddle, who were two chancers. but it's tricky to sell. Of course, both Connery and Caine did The Man Who Would Be King and I found that an uneasy watch too, because in an army context, it's often hard to immediately sympathise with two conmen who are out for themselves, it goes against the flow.
The film just wasn't that funny to be a comedy, either, though I think Americans might enjoy it more because I understand it has a lot of TV actors from sitcoms in supporting roles. Donald Sutherland is meant to be a hoot as a hippy tank commander but, y'know, it's not that funny.
Where Eagles Dare is rubbish too but it does play it with a straight face. A Gestapo officer arriving in a Spectre-style helicopter from Berlin in the freezing winter weather, he'd be frozen stiff! Helicopters barely existed then, though that's an arguable point I think. Then again, some people think the Nazis had a base in the moon in the last months of the war, so I suppose they might have been able to rustle up a helicopter.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
THE BIG COUNTRY (1958)
William Wyler’s pacifist western sees Gregory Peck’s Eastern-raised navy captain Jim McKay arrive in Texas to marry Carroll Baker’s spoilt brat of an heiress. He’s a bit self-obsessed and dull as western heroes go and his amiable and efficient qualities are not projected enough to make him the most sympathetic of characters. We too wonder why he performs so many great feats of skill to an audience of one or none. It doesn’t endear him to anyone, not even the watching cinematic audience. Miss Baker’s Patricia Terrill gets the hump real sturdy and quick. Luckily for her, brutish Charlton Heston is on hand to offer a different kind of courting. As ranch foreman Steve Leech, Heston smoulders with all the repressed lust and fury you’d expect a big Texan to exhibit. Peck’s gentlemanly turn seems to have dropped in from Horatio Hornblower. It’s no wonder he fares better quoting literature with Jean Simmons’s prim school mistress. Odd that there are no children at her school. Or anywhere. Miss Simmons’s Julie spends most of her time avoiding Buck Hannassey [a great role for Chuck Connors], the mean but cowardly son of bloated canyon farmer, Rufus. Burl Ives nailed the patriarchal role in 1958. He’s outstanding both here and in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Rufus’s nemesis is Charles Bickford’s equally brutal Major Terrill, a craggy, single-minded cattle baron with aims to take over the state. Quite what happened to turn these two men so viciously against each other is not made clear, but hate each other they do and that hate permeates through their families and affects every decision everyone makes.
This bigger than big western is mightily imposing, in length, look and deed. It is more stately than slow. The long, extended action sequences – scenes where very little pure action happens – anticipate the whipcrack tension that pervades spaghetti westerns, all those close ups of eyes, hands and beads of sweat. The story, for all its big talk, is quite small in scale, it is simply staged on an enormous landscape. Some outstanding scenes live in the memory – Burl Ives arriving uninvited at the Tirrell’s engagement party; the fist fight between Peck and Heston; the sweeping opening credits; the timidity of Alfonso Bedoya’s Mexican ranch hand; Rufus battling his errant son – and you can’t fault the immaculate production qualities. The music score is better than fine, the Jerome Moross theme is uplifting in a symphonic fashion. The photography is superb. The script is based on a short story written by, curiously, Donald Hamilton, who would later write the Matt Helm spy novels.
I enjoy The Big Country because it was one of the first westerns I saw where I began to understand the genre and how it reflected generational changes, both historically and in contemporary society; along with similarly challenging 1950s films such as Shane, The Naked Spur and Rancho Notorious, I find The Big Country epitomises much of how cinema would treat the genre in the next decade and further forward. The patriarchal gloating, romantic misunderstandings and anti-war themes still strike chords today. Modern audiences may find it a trifle dull, like its hero, and the gloss is burnished some by later more extravagantly presented and directed movies. However, for a straightish take on movie western lore, The Big Country is big and impressive indeed.
THE UNFORGIVEN (1960)
One of those movies where the title is never properly explained or referred to, John Huston’s western The Unforgiven is an interesting failure, a film that sets its stall out as a revisionist piece, but ends up as the same old Cowboy v Indian set to that we have seen for years. In an era when television western serials were stealing the black hat / white hat staple of western movies, The Unforgiven tries in a muscley fashion to address instead racism towards Native Americans, but loses its way once the truth is out and descends into a homestead under fire cliché, a violent stand-off between white settlers and a Kiowa war party; exciting, but uninvolving.
Burt Lancaster is half-decent as Ben Zachary, eldest of three brothers who farm cattle in Texas. Their sister, Rachel, is a headstrong, dusky whippet of a woman and she’s played with some spunk by Audrey Hepburn, who suffered a miscarriage during filming and rarely spoke about the production. She’s very good in fact, portraying a flighty, impulsive and passionate ingenue. The problem is that Hepburn’s about ten years too old for the role, which clearly should be played by a teenager. You don’t for one moment buy into her unspoken naïve desires, particularly as those for her step-brother [Lancaster] border on the embarrassingly indecent. Filling out the cast is Indian-hater Audie Murphy and doleful Doug McClure as the other brothers; Lilian Gish is their mother. Charles Bickford reinvents his patriarchal role from The Big Country as another rancher, Zeb Rawlins. Zeb’s son is killed by Kiowas, who are searching for a squaw baby raised as a white woman. Joseph Wiseman’s crazy-eyed cavalry trooper puts about rumours that the squaw is Rachel and tensions rise between the Zachary’s and the other white families. The film, up to this point, has been well acted by the miscast cast, but they have nothing to work with once the truth comes out and the story fades into the stereotypical. An interesting subplot around a Kiowa cattle drover is shunted aside mid-way. The love story that replaces it seems shoe-horned in to give the stars something to play with.
The film is good to look at – thank you Franz Planer – and culturally interesting for the time, but not entirely successful. Like The Big Country [see above] some of its visual tropes would be seized upon by Sergio Leone for his grandiose spaghetti westerns. The famous shot of Lancaster hauling Hepburn across the prairie is a publicity photo and does not feature in the film at all.
THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN (2011)
Let’s forget about the monstrous title.
Instead, let’s remember that motion-capture animation is here given a neat spin by Steven Spielberg who ensures that Tintin, Captain Haddock et al retain a semblance of Herge’s original comic book drawings. Spielberg had long cherished making a film of the diminutive Belgian reporter – he’d held the rights since 1983 – and I can only assume it took him almost thirty years because he could never quite fathom how to present the titular hero. By 2011, that was solved with a photorealist presentation of the actors. There was also the more knotty problem of Tintin’s pooch, Snowy, who if he’d been a real dog might never have been as affecting as he is; the SFX crew created a fully animated Snowy for the film, introducing quizzical human expressions to give him character. The movie took seven years to complete, thanks in part to funding issues, and wasn’t fully up and running until Oscar winning SFX maestro director / producer Peter Jackson came on board offering Weta Digital technology to reproduce the blue-screened actors. Advice was offered from many industry experts, writers and fellow directors in how to present the film to best reflect Herge’s imitable style.
The finished movie is quite a hoot.
Written by a bunch of Englishmen and starring another bunch of Englishmen, there is an inherent ‘Englishness’ to proceedings which seems to fit the character of Tintin even though he’s from Brussels. The Thomson & Thompson Twins, two hopeless Interpol detectives, also have that air of Chaplinesque idiocy that marks them as distinctly British. And there is nothing quite so quintessentially English as a drunken sea captain who owns an enormous stately pile in the country and trades one-liners with his dress-suited butler. The film is smart enough early on to pay homage to Herge himself [a representation of the artist is shown painting Tintin’s portrait on the street] as well as some of the earlier comic novels not featured [newspaper clippings pepper Tintin’s study referencing King Ottokar’s Sceptre, Tintin in America and The Blue Lotus]. The reproduction of the original comic strips and novels goes for a darker, more modern noir style, which seems to suit the material. Tintin is presented as an elder teenager, as he was from the midway stage of the comic book series. This too gives the character ample scope for the more athletic highlights, such as motorbike riding, seaplane piloting and fist fights galore.
The plot borrows liberally from many Tintin books, but mostly from The Secret of the Unicorn and its follow up Red Rackham’s Treasure. As these two adventures straddle the family ancestry of Captain Archibald Haddock, they serve as a good introduction to Tintin’s barnacle blistering bearded inebriated inconsequential imbecilic friend. In the books, they first encountered each other in The Crab with the Golden Claws, and sections of that adventure are lifted and slotted into the action too. The joins are seamless. It would be fair to say the story feels a bit like a missing Indiana Jones episode and Spielberg does rather present it that way, albeit with less pontificating, no sexual innuendo and little terror. This perhaps reflects Herge’s own intent as a writer, for the original strips often saw Tintin hunting treasure or unveiling a dark secret in a hidden country, much like Dr Jones, but with youthful abandon. Jamie Bell is vocally very assured as the hero and he is well matched by Andy Serkis’s shouty Haddock and Daniel Craig’s sophisticated villain Sakharine. Daniel Mays scores too as First-Mate Allan, a recurring villain’s sidekick in the books.
The film trots along quite amicably and quite noisily, resolving itself with a moment of calm. The scene where Captain Haddock ignores a pile of priceless jewels to put on his ancestor’s cavalier hat was a moment of rarely seen pathos in an animated movie, helped no doubt by the relative normality of the protagonists. There are no gross, ugly, diseased or alien looking-characters in Tintin’s world, just exaggerated ordinariness. John Williams provides one of his most accessible scores for a long time; no histrionics here, the melodies are a light and breezy accompaniment to the action.
Overall, I really enjoyed this, although whoever plastered the film with such an excruciatingly long title deserves shooting, especially as the proposed sequels never came about, making the subtitle superfluous.
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirim (2024)
This story takes place less than two hundred years before LotR. King Helm Hammerhand of Rohan accidentally kills a lesser king in a fight. The son son of the dead king is named Wulf and sweats to get revenge over the house of Hammerhand. King Helm has two son and a daughter named Hèra. She is the main hero of the movie.
This is an animated movie, and I've never seen an animated movie not aimed at a family audience at the cinema before. I think it works. Among other things I think the animation makes this movie distinct from the original trilogy. While there are a small number of links and references to the trilogy it's very much a standalone movie. Hèra is a good hero. At the begining of the movie she's not required to do much more than to marry into another royal family for political purposes, but she skepsis up to the challenges. While she's a skilled fighter Héra doesn't become the great hero because she's a stronger and better fighter than the rest. Instead she uses her brain to think outside the box, she's brave and had a strong moral backbone. Unlike some other modern movies with a female lead the filmakers understand not to make the men around her weak to make her look strong. In fact she looks better and more impressive because she manages to be the lead even though there are several strong and capable men around her.
I haven't seen the TV series "The rings of power", but I hear it's not as good as it should be. Perhaps you'd be better off watching this movie?
"Nr.24" was the most popular non-English language movie on Netflix in the first week of 2025!
Yea…I was flicking through Netflix and saw that 😁
........ and? 😄
There has been a host of stuff on the telly recently surrounding the 90th anniversay of Elvis Presley's birth. I had seen most of the movies recently so I didn't bother, although I dipped into Blue Hawaii while taking down Christmas decorations.
My interest was peaked only by these:
ELVIS – ’68 COMEBACK SPECIAL (1968)
I am not certain what qualifies this two part television concert special – originally shown over two nights – as a ‘movie’. I am equally puzzled why the BBC or the producer of this 2018 commemorative edition chose to edit out some of the numbers – the Christmas songs are missing, replaced by Tiger Man which similarly aired during a non-seasonal repeat, although all songs appear listed on the credits; is this that repeat show? – but I am glad someone is at least attempting to recreate something of the complete excitement of Elvis Presley singing live. Dressed in black leather, looking fitter than he had for ages, and visibly enjoying himself, laughing, joking and fooling around, a 34 year old Elvis displays all the verve and sexual vibrations that made him the King of Rock n Roll in 1956. The moniker stuck, has always stuck, even if a tad of the gloss has been etched away by time and too many flabby seventies Las Vegas concerts. The memories of energetic, tantalising performances like this that make your spine tingle, live longer in the memory than the bad films and the extravagant jumpsuits.
I could list a whole bunch of reasons to watch this concert / TV theatre show, but I think I will settle for telling you it genuinely is a performance for the ages, maybe not in stagecraft, but for certain vocally, for Elvis belts out hit after hit, until you almost think he’s going to bust his vocal chords. The ‘in the round’ sections are a powerhouse of a one man show, the band away to his left, the audience surrounding the boxing-ring-sized stage. They stare amazed and in admiration; barely a scream or even a whisper, almost overcome by the drama and the tension of the occasion. Has a comeback ever been so magnificent? Probably not. Kate Bush disappeared for ages, but her wispy style is not a patch on Elvis’s sheer guts and gusto and gratuitousness. He howls and he prowls and her wears that mother down…
Even the theatre-style numbers, rehearsed and sung prerecorded, are better conceptualised than anything you see in a sixties Elvis movie. It just demonstrates what a spark of imagination could have done for Elvis’s cinema career. The TV show is bookended by Guitar Man, a seminal song for the King, and climaxed in the tribute to Martin Luther King If I Can Dream. Quite how these songs failed to deliver him number ones remains a complete mystery [to me anyway…]. Well, he was soon back on top with Suspicious Minds and others, but there is something stupendous about this ‘concert’ which draws one in again and again. I have seen it almost a dozen times, listened to the CD probably hundreds and I love it.
It may not be a proper ‘movie’ but by golly the intensity and the excitement that Elvis must have generated seems to hum across the airwaves and right into your living room.
Simply superb.
Five Stars and Much Much More
I have an original copy of this.
Note:
The original soundtrack album was released in 1969 under the title NBC T.V. Special but it doesn’t feature all the music. A 1998 release Memories: The ’68 Comeback Special pitched the originals with the missing tracks and some rehearsal takes. Was this the first time the show was recognised as a comeback? In 1968 it might be fair to say while Elvis was not exactly in favour, he hadn’t ever been away. Tiger Man, also from 1998, features all of the songs played in the ‘sit down’ shows from June 28th 1968. Can @Barbel help me out and tell me if the June 29th ‘stand up show’ songs feature in entirety on any album?
SPINOUT (1966)
a.k.a California Holiday
A lumpy musical from Elvis Presley that is as bad as it is good. Writers Theodore Flicker and George Kirgo poke fun at Presley’s cinematic persona by having him be a race car driver who sings with a club band while romancing girl after girl after girl – although the one he ought to love is right under his nose, a tomboyish Deborah Whalley, who plays Les, the drummer in the King’s rock n roll combo. She’s quite a dish, but he doesn’t fancy her, other than her cordon bleu campfire cooking. Nor is he taken with Diane MacBain’s elder seductress, an author out to pin down America’s favourite single man. Shelley Fabares’s cute spoilt heiress doesn’t fit the bill either. So where does he turn – back to his first love: music!
The movie replicates tropes from several previous Elvis vehicles: a grand prix style race, a rich bitchy heiress, a swindling multimillionaire, a travelling rock band, beach parties, rock concerts, terrible songs, etc. You sense the screenwriters wanted something akin to the sophistication of a Doris Day / Rock Hudson movie, but they ended up only part of the way there, coming all mud-stuck in a dated pre-swinging sixties vibe of amiable docility when Elvis really needed something more dangerous, like his ’rebel with no scruples’ turns of Jailhouse Rock and King Creole. The King himself looks disinterested, especially during the musical numbers. The crown was undeniably slipping.
Spinout was retitled for the UK market for no apparent reason. The film was a fair success at the box office everywhere. Viewed now, it looks a bit creaky and creepy at once. Contemporary reviews were quite kind and although Spinout is better than some, it isn’t as good as many others. The uneven humour has a repetitive, television feel to it [George Kirgo wrote many sketches for The Mary Tyler Moore show] and is only saved by rather good supporting performers, who show more interest than Elvis in the material.
Perhaps Elvis was smarter than he looks and recognised the satire at work. Early on in the film he gives a speech mocking the cult of celebrity and pop star fame, citing the influence of The Ed Sullivan Show. Another scene has a stray labrador sit beside him at a campfire and the King exclaims: “Look! A hound dog!” A little more of this knowing humour might have made the film more enjoyable, but I sense it would have royally pissed off Elvis and probably given Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, a heart attack. Hmm, pity.
I have the soundtrack to this movie and it is abysmal. I sympathise with Elvis for not trying very hard where the songs are concerned, although I do wonder why director Norman Taurog has him strutting around at a ‘wild’ party strumming a guitar when he ought to be getting it on down and dirty with the young chicks, as it were. Smorgasbord of women indeed! Embarrassment of lyric and melody, is more like it. Without a decent song on the LP and shy of three numbers, RCA tagged on three non-film studio takes. I’ll Remember You [later to appear as one of the best tracks on the Aloha from Hawaii concert], Down in the Alley [an old Jesse Stone r n b number] and Tomorrow is a Long Time [a Bob Dylan song from his early years that he toyed with on and off for a decade but never officially released] are a darn sight better than almost anything Elvis had released for number of years. It proved the King of Rock n Roll still had it in him and led the way to his eventual return to studio albums and live concerts.
So while Spinout could be a better film than it is if the producer and director – and I guess the Colonel – had been braver with their script choices, in a wider musical context, Elvis Presley and his fans probably do have something to indirectly thank the film for.
I bow, slightly. Thank you.
Lovely reviews, thank you. I'm not tempted to watch "Spinout" again but need no prompting to watch the 68 Special.
It was referred to as the Comeback Special in the notes to the 1980 Silver Box, and possibly in the notes to one of the Legendary Performer series before that.
I'm pretty sure that to get the stand up complete you'll need either a box set or the by now expensive Burbank '68, the first FTD release. Of course you could also go the bootleg route if that appeals.
And….? I probably will watch it sometime 😁
I remember when I saw the 68 Comeback Special for the first time - I was blown away…my mum is a massive Elvis fan, so I’d always heard his music - but seeing him in this, I understood what all the fuss was about. Mesmerising.
That '68 comeback special was a 'lightning in a bottle' moment. He was dressed cool, the setting was inspired, the vibe was right, and Elvis was in the pocket with his song selection and delivery. Even if you're not a fan of the guy (and I'm honestly not), it's hard not to watch that and go 'yeah, I get it.'
The meeting between Elvis and the Beatles, in 65 I believe, didn't go too well, was a bit strained, in particular when Lennon asked straight out why Elvis didn't go back to his rock n roll roots, implying that he'd been wasting his time musically of late.
But perhaps Elvis heeded his advice with his 68 'comeback' concert.
Roger Moore 1927-2017