I just knew this film would be my cup of tea when I saw it was coming up on Film4 but that fact I'd never heard of it should have rung alarm bells. It's some kind of Nikita/Lucy hybrid, I guess some of his films are based on names aren't they, Leon is another... what snags it is it's a series of episodic five years earlier/two years earlier scenes about a woman drawn into being a spy for mother Russia while doubling as a top fashion model, it's too much hokum really given her violent line of work and there's a glaring lack of taste somehow early on in the film. Maybe Scarlett Johnannson was lined up to play the lead role but bailed, the star here is okay but a bit of a blank.
The film is very hard to get into or even want to, that said it gets better as it goes on and Helen Mirren is good as a Russian Rosa Klebb type operative, Cillian Murphy turns up as a CIA man taking an interest in her. Eric Serra does the score, it's a bit better in the action than GoldenEye but this is about 20 years later. Ultimately you don't care too much about anyone in this and it's not even clear what the denouement is in the fullest sense. But there are nice shots of Moscow and Paris. One good thing about how the lead character has no attachments, she is regarded by the KGB as less use as an operative as they have no leverage on her - can't threaten to bump off family members etc. This is in contrast to Craig's Bond, whose appeal as a signing was precisely that he was an orphan with no attachments. It does tap into the idea beloved by the British State it seems to me that if they have dirt on you, you are an asset, and if you know the dirty secrets you're an asset too, so long as it's clear you won't spill the beans.
Really? Hmm. I thought Anna was substandard Luc Besson. I wrote a review of it somewhere on here which is similar in reaction to yours. Can't be bothered to track it down right now. Helen Mirren was okay in it. The idea if the spy being a fashion model had legs [!!!] But overall it's a weak entry in the espionage genre.
Have any of these female spy films been more than of passing interest? Red Sparrow, Atomic Blonde, Salt, this one, the one with the teenaged girl avenging her dad etc, even the Stig Larsen stuff, all seem to want to be ultra violent Bond imitators instead of attempting something more thoughtful, intuitive and charismatic. Which is what I'd expect from a woman. Maybe I demand too much.
I agree with your comment Gymkata: "The main thing to watch it for is George C. Scott." His performance is terrific, and another major attraction for me is Jerry Goldsmith's rousing Patton march and several other really enjoyable parts of the score. I have this soundtrack on LP and find myself listening to it quite often.
After a conversation with @Barbel I was inspired to watch a Universal Monster movie, but which one, a classic or a lesser known one, so I chose The Invisible Man’s Revenge, one that I hadn’t seen for quite some time. It stars the marvellous John Carradine as a scientist who tests his serum on a psychiatric escapee who then goes on to commit several crimes.
The invisibility effects are pretty decent and the revenge storyline is engaging. I’m very much a fan of the Universal Monster franchise and the Invisible series always strike a chord with me.
Good.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Like several other films of this era, this a movie trying hard to be “Casablanca”- three of the same stars (Peter Lorre, Claude Raines, Paul Henreid), similar locations (a lot of it takes place in a bar very like Rick's), etc. Burt Lancaster is the protagonist, and likeable as he always is (except when playing a villain, and even then you can see him struggling not to be likeable!) he’s not a patch on Bogart. The female lead is a charisma-free zone, which is probably why I can’t remember her name.
The plot is to do with diamonds blah blah, double crosses blah blah, though it tries to rely on atmosphere so that the actual plot doesn’t matter much (like, er, “Casablanca”) but doesn’t succeed.
The director, William Dieterle, does his best with second-rate material. I hadn't heard of him so I checked him out and he had a distinguished career. The 1939 version of "Hunchback of Notre Dame" with Charles Laughton, the 1936 "The Maltese Falcon" (not the famous one- this is sometimes known as "Satan Met A Lady" and isn't a patch on the other one), and many others.
Liam Neeson stars as a paid assassin who declines a hit on a teenaged girl and becomes a mark himself, he also has early signs of alzheimer’s. Capably directed by our own Martin Campbell this is a standard action flick that keeps the interest going. There’s an interesting cast including a couple of Brit’s from TV series and Guy Pearce, who was very good in the excellent LA Confidential, turns up as a detective.
I don’t know if Leeson was ever considered to play Bond in his early days (he only really became an action star with Taken in 2008) but I think he could have made a decent stab at it instead of Brosnan.
OK/Good.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Steven Spielberg's oft overlooked 1980s adaptation of JG Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel about being a kid left behind in Shanghai when World War II kicks off, separated from his parents and forced to fend for himself.
I'd not seen this before, it passed me by a bit and never charmed me in but I was mighty impressed by catching this on the still low definition BBC4 last week, on my slightly larger widescreen telly. Many years ago my Mum said she and Dad had watched it and found the ending quite affecting, I guess as she was a wartime evacuee - sent to live with on a farm somewhere - I just realised that might have been a factor for her.
I can see why this film might not reel you in if you caught it on telly by accident. The opening spiel is important because it tells how the English occupied Shanghai for decades and indeed built the city in their image so many parts of it looked like it could have been lifted wholesale from Liverpool or Surrey. This captured my imagination, because at once you see shots of Liverpool's famous waterfront and think, well, okay but why start with a flashback to Liverpool then? Then you gradually realise that indeed this IS Shanghai, ditto the shots of the apparent Liverpool Cathedral, which you assume it is until you see the Japanese faces there. This is a great bit of storytelling slight of hand by Spielberg.
The staging of the fall of the city and the turmoil it unleashes is very well done, the director really captures the chaos and it looks magnificent too, you feel you're looking at a terrific epic, and there's a nod to 1939's Gone with the Wind and its similar events of turmoil with a huge poster advert of the film of that year on display.
The film hold interest and just builds and builds. The kid is played by Christian Bale, and he's very good, not really a wrong note, though this is not a 'charming' performance and he is meant to be a bit of a brat, also belonging to a very well to do English family with a big house, chauffeur-driven car and servants. When, following riots, he returns to the eerily empty family home as instructed, it's not just the later presence of Joe Pantoliano that made me think of Joel in his empty house in Risky Business eating his lonely meal, someone with access to a big house and a 10-year-old kid could restage Cruise's famous scene in white shirt and Y-fronts dancing around the house to That Old Time Rock n Roll.
Spielberg overplays his hand at times. One flourish repeated is to see the kid seemingly on his own or in limited company only for the camera to pan up and we see he is not, over the hill there is a large gathering, or a horde representing some threat - all very well but the kid would surely have heard the hubbub so it wouldn't be that much of a surprise.
Stuff does go wrong. The character doesn't engage with the adults much. His parents seem anonymous, but this might be deliberate because later, when the boy says he can't remember their faces, it is more plausible whereas if his parents were played by famous actors or more personable, we'd imagine them later popping up, here is is not a given.
The kid hangs out with John Malkovich, who is a scavenger about the city and depicted unsentimentally. A mistake by the kid sees him wind up in an internment camp but when the two meet up this is not referenced and there's a sense of scenes being cut. I think the whole thing might have worked better as a six-parter though I suppose we'd have Andrew Davies all over it. At the camp he meets an old family friend, a big deal given he's not seen any of them for - what, days or weeks? while he's been by himself in the city, It's not clear - but there's no 'Ah, there you are Jamie, what has happened to you?!' talk. Later a key adult disappears but we don't learn what happened to him. Some of this stuff works well because it does lend to the sense of bewilderment you'd feel in that situation, otherwise again it suggests scenes being cut for length.
Worse, the key actors here - Leslie Phillips, Nigel Havers and Miranda Richardson - don't massively interact in a useful way with the kid. It's mean and wrong to say the film is a massive big budget trailer but there is something in that. It almost reminded me of Paul McCartney's Give My Regards to Broad Street, in which Macca just ables along through the film as if in his own universe. The kid doesn't get many setbacks, he isn't torn off a strip for any wrongdoing ever by the adults. In fact, even Joel in Risky Business underwent more of a learning curve in his parents' absence. I also contrast the film with the 1930s film Captains Courageous with Freddie Bartholomew and Spencer Tracy, here Bartholomew really does play a brat who is separated from his parents after falling off a posh cruise ship. But he learns the error of his ways thanks to Tracy's trawler fisherman. There's not much like this here and our hero seems to go from strength to strength, being a sort of fixer who can acquire items for various people about the prison camp, with nods to King Rat and other PoW films. But unlike these other films, Empire of the Sun doesn't quite settle as it's always on the move. One actor who could make an impression is Joe Pantoliano who is a welcome arrival for the kid in Shanghai - a wise guy Yank with a truck - but at soon as we meet his boss Basie - Malkovich - he is depicted as very much second fiddle and a lackey - all very well, but what happened to the charismatic welcome American we knew for five minutes or so? We don't see him again, instead he is there to be humiliated by young Jim it seems. Early on, Malkovich tries to sell young Jim , who despite being an assertive kid goes along with it, but fails because the kid is 'skin and bone'. Really? He's a rich kid with a larder full of food at home, how long has he been scavenging for? Some early scenes like this could have been jettisoned a bit I think, especially as we find not a lot comes from them.
In fairness, the main drift of the film seems to be how the kid reveres the Japanese fighter pilots and their planes, despite their being officially the enemy now, and Spielberg is interested in depicting how his youthful attitude bridges such divides. This allows for some moving and affecting moments. But there is little corresponding between our young hero and his British adult friends so he doesn't quite seem to relate to anyone much in the film. Time Out magazine reviewed how the film is meant to depict how you have to be a right so-and-so to survive but I don't seem the kid cross the line much if at all. I never lived through a war, stayed at my private school and have more to regret about personal transgressions though in the end neither the police, Derby and Joan club nor the local crematorium opted to press charges.
Spielberg overplays his hand by trying for a few David Lean scenes towards the end. One doesn't quite make sense to me, the refugees enter an open-air stadium full of luxury items from the elite English bygone days - one moment anticipates another from Schindler's List - but it isn't quite credible how all this plunder got stored here and why. I must say at the time watching this wash over me late at night, it was all highly affecting and impressive. In some ways the film reminds me of Kenneth Branagh's Belfast of last year in that really bad things keep threatening to happen but never quite do. But the kid in Belfast does seem to interact with the adults more, it's in many ways a better movie though the scale can't be compared. In other ways, some scenes remind me of Spectre - sort of emptily epic and visually impressive but it could leave you cold if you haven't bought into it.
One suspenseful scene has young Jim creeping about behind barbed wire outside the prison camp behind enemy lines but I have no idea what he was doing here or trying to achieve. Another has our young choir singer creating a moving impromptu moment for prisoners and enemy both and one sees why Spielberg was later so annoyed with Life is Beautiful which contained a similar scene and bagged a few Oscars while his earlier movie got none.
One senses the screenplay writer - Tom Stoppard, who helped with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade I think - wanted a chillier ending with the kid not able to relate to his key adults at the end but as with his Kubrick sci-fi adaptation, went another way. I may seek out my copy of Ballard's book, I think I have it somewhere but I haven't read it.
Empire of the Sun is well worth catching if you have not seen it. Despite some perceived flaws, it is affecting to watch a movie that is so determined to enthral, move and entertain, and so often succeeds.
A company selling arms sends a group of workers to Hungary on a team building exercise where they encounter poachers who set out to kill them. Tim McInnery and our own Toby Stephens are pretty good in this and Danny Dyer is um….Danny Dyer. It’s violent and strangely watchable, it’s a damned sight better than it should be and that’s down to Christopher Smith’s pithy direction.
Good.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I enjoyed 'Prey' a lot. Tbh, Naru and her world are interesting enough that the film could almost have done without a Predator pitching up. The bear attack and face-off with the mountain lion are at least as scary as the 80s sci-fi monster, and there may have been enough drama for an entire movie in Naru's efforts to establish her place as a hunter in a patriarchal community and in the threat posed by the French Canadian trappers. Still, it's inspired me to take another look at the 1987 movie, '2' - and I've heard that 'Predators' was a good one, as well.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
Yes, I picked up the soundtrack cheap on vinyl a few years ago, it's not a great copy but the final version of 'Somewhere in Time' is a great one. As with Out of Africa, I'd have to suggest there's a bit of repetition in the main theme, excellent as it is. They don't have the tunes of his Bond soundtracks. SIT 's side 2 has 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Rachmaninoff)' which some may recall as being the piece Bill Murray learns to play in Groundhog Day (say something about my frame of reference) and it very much enhances the album, it's not Barry of course, similarly there's a classic piece on Out of Africa's soundtrack. That one got Barry an Oscar but I do wonder if that sort of thing is allowed, I mean it's not the actual composer, is it? What if Marvin Hamlisch had allowed some of those classical pieces used in The Spy Who Loved Me to be on his soundtrack album? What's the etiquette here?
Cult musical comedy with Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi. I'd say it doesn't past the half hour test, it's got a very lowkey opening though that allows the film to get better as it goes on. You have to tap into the comedy, it's not a given that you will but that's what makes it a cult. Kudos to its creators though as it's not an obvious premise - two brothers in black suit and tie with a hat who sing the old classics. Useful cameos by Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles and John Lee Hooker liven things up but I have to say the film only really gets going when some Nazis turn up and the itinerant pair annoy them, this means the Chicago police AND the Illinois Nazis are after them. 'Illinois Nazis, I just hate them!' says Belushi which is a line possibly borrowed for Indy in the Last Crusade directed by Spielberg who shows up in an unexpected cameo here.
The premise is slender, I compared it to McCartney's dud Give My Regards to Broad Street four years later. There, the premise was also slender - the master tapes to his album had gone missing, prompting a takeover bid of the record company by a villainous businessman - but that doesn't really stack up because a) You don't feel millionaire Macca is going to be adversely affected b) You don't quite see how his album would rake in mega sales to tide things over, he wasn't trading on past glories at this point but he wasn't Duran Duran or Michael Jackson either c) It doesn't affect us, we don't know the record label staff and d) It's meant to be all a dream anyway, so who cares?
In this film, the pair are trying to raise money to fund an orphanage as one of them has comically seen a 'sign from God', after that it's your basic chase movie with Carrie Fisher there as a vengeful ex-girlfriend in a fine running joke. It's quite simple really, so with a bit of tweaking maybe Macca's movie might have worked. But even if he included other classic bygone era stars, you struggle to see how it might - Billy Fury (was he still alive then?), Cliff Richard or Tommy Steele? Doesn't quite work, does it. It could have had more flair like Absolute Beginners but then of course that tanked too. It's not a fair comparison but Macca's film doesn't have a McGuffin that really flies while this one - slight as it is - does.
I re-watched The Blues Brothers a couple of weeks ago. To me the movie hasn't lost any of it's appeal. The humor, the great music, the charm ..... it's a classic!
I revisited these two Alfred Hitchcock films last night in a double bill. The 39 Steps involves Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, who unwittingly gets mixed up with spies who are stealing secrets from the military. The movie clips along at a cracking pace and the tension never lets up.
Excellent.
The Lady Vanishes concerns an old lady who disappears on a train and the attempts of a young socialite and a musician to solve the mystery. Part of the charm is the obvious model shots which even in 1938 must have been plain as day. Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as Charters and Caldicott are a highlight of the movie playing two cricket obsessed men trying to get back to England for the test match. They went on to play those characters many times in other films, and other characters based on them. Once again, Hitchcock amps up the tension as the other people on the train deny seeing the old lady. I love movies set in trains and this is probably my favourite , along with the FRWL sequence.
Excellent.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I’d never heard of this film before it turned up on the BritBox streaming app and as it starred Steve Carell, who I like a lot, I thought I would give it a chance. Carell and Keira Knightley live in the same apartment block and both have relationship problems, Carell’s wife has just left him and Knightley has just broken up with her boyfriend. News has just broken that a 70-mile wide asteroid heading for Earth has failed to be destroyed by a mission and that it will impact in three weeks time, meaning the end of the world. They begin a road trip together and gradually become romantically involved.
The film is engaging and emotional, some good acting, Carell does this sort of character excellently, but I cared about all the characters, even the ones in it for a short time, like Martin Sheen towards the end of the film. Directed in a low-key fashion it shows how such a cataclysmic event effects different sort of people. It’s an understated film, no special effects, we don’t ever get to see the asteroid, and that’s a good thing.
Very good, recommended.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,757Chief of Staff
I did indeed watch The Northman on my flight home…first off - it’s ‘macho central’ 🤣 very homo-erotic…I enjoyed most of it, but it’s got just about every filmic trope in there 🙄 Claes Bang is excellent - as usual, Nicole Kidman is awful, as usual 🙈 I really enjoyed this film when it stuck to the authentic (as far as I’m aware) times it’s set in…then you get a few scenes which dragged me ‘out’ of the film - every time Kidman is in it and the appearance of Björk 😖 oh, and I didn’t care for the ending 👀
I also watched…
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Way too complicated for me to try and explain the plot - I think someone on here has already done this? 🤔 Just watch it, it’s excellent…and Jamie Lee Curtis is fabulous in it 👏🏻
And…
The Marksman
Liam Neeson is in this…he turns up for his paycheque then promptly buggers off with it…a steaming pile of 💩 avoid. I only watched to the end because I’m a masochist 👀
I have a question about the Michelle Yeah film which I've yet to see... London's Prince Charles is showing the EV - Extended Version. Anyone know if this is significantly better than the normal one?
Late-night Friday night showing on Channel 5, letterbox version made this appealing. I suppose only a moron could take its 'politics' seriously - the no-nonsense Law and Order Frisco cop is set up against a series of Straw Men arguments and Straw Men characters, his fellow cops generally being more boring and humourless than him. But only a bore or stick in the mud could deny its celluloid appeal.
Frank Sinatra lobbied to play the lead role, I suppose it follows on from his Lady in Cement stuff but he was really too old to pull this stuff off, you can't see him on top of a school bus doing Living Daylight pre-credit stunts. Sinatra also lobbied hard to be in the Newman legal thriller in the early 80s I understand (name escapes me temporarily) but lost out.
Filmed in 1971, the year of Diamonds are Forever, a scene puts one in mind of that as Harry Callaghan rises up by crane above the night streets and we hear the hubbub of traffic below against the neon backdrop. This is the year that movies got a bit nastier and sleazier, or alternatively chose to get sillier. (Eastwood later went on to be in stuff like Anywhcih Way But Loose), the Bonds generally dropped nasty bikini strangulations and savage lift punch ups in favour of the penny whistle and so on....
A film is as good as its villain they say and the actor here does a great job, though his resemblance to the late Michael Hutchence of INXS I now find a bit distracting. It's all nonsense - he arranges for himself to be beaten up and hospitalised but in the next scene is largely facially unblemished, Harry himself is athletic after two broken ribs, much like Brozzer's Bond in TWINE. The film in real life would end with a busload of dead school kids due to Harry's intervention, though due to recent events in the States where cops hide out for an hour in the school corridor, even utilising hand cleaner sidspenser while a gunman takes out a classroom of kids, it's all gone full circle.
Because of the horrible nature of some of the deaths in this - one really nasty one - this film can't quite me chalked up as a guilty pleasure. It's one of those movies where you wonder if it isn't creating the appetite it then attempts to sate - hey, you could get a gun and pick off civilians in a big city if you want! Sort of puts ideas into people's heads.
I suppose if you want a contrast between the way cinema went in just 12 years, you could look at 1959's North by Northwest and then 1971's Dirty Harry. The former is old-style America, with something a bit unsettling under the surface, the villainy shadowy and external - foreign forces - but generally the worst you get in the great US of A is something paranoid, pre-JFK, otherwise the tailored suits and gentlemanly conduct remain. Fast-forward to 1971, and we've gone from Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint's subtle and elegant sexual banter on the train, all toying with the Hayes' Code, just as Hitch did with Grant and Bergman's extended kiss in Notorious, to Dirty Harry visiting strip clubs where it's all tits out on display, or being accused of being a Peeping Tom, talking of which perhaps it was Hitch's own Psycho that changed the tone in US cinema for good or ill. Indeed, you can look at Hitch's oevre itself to make the point, going from North by Northwest to Frenzy in the early 70s, where bare breasts are on display during a character's rape and then murder, it's odd and gruesome e to see from Hitch, it's as though in finally getting to show and do what he's always wanted, the whole thing collapses, the veneer of old-time respectability no longer there, it's thrown off balance.
Some critics dislike the final shot of NBNW, the phallic joke of the train entering the tunnel. I know what they mean, it's kind of crass now. But at the time, the whole toying with cinema restraints between the two leads, the flirtation on the train, her giving him her room number as a casual pick-up, but later insisting he sleep on the floor - all this would be knocked into a cocked hat (edit cocked then, ajb) by the time of Bond and Tanya on the train in FRWL - but audiences would have enjoyed seeing the film flirt with the parameters of what two leads could do in a movie then. So Grant doesn't cop off with Eve Marie Saint on the bunk in the train (the scene anticipates that of Bond and Solitaire of course) because they're not married, we have to wait to the final scene where Grant calls her 'Mrs Thornhill' and pulls her up. In this context, in a packed cinema in the late 50s, Hitch's final joke - as if to say, I'm not even bothering any more - would have brought the house down.
Fleming name checked the movie in Thunderball but said he found the sillier aspects of the film undermined the tension so I guess we can see what he'd have thought of the Bond series as it went on where they became comedies really, indeed the fine Bond writer Sinclair McKay points out what Fleming hadn't noticed - the film is a comedy. Approached in that way, it works but otherwise I admit I prefer the similar The 39 Steps. Of course this is a comedy - I mean the crop dusting scene is great but according to the subtitles it has 'machine gun fire' - well, if so, why not use the guns straight off when he's unsuspecting as it swoops in? What is it really trying to do? All Grant has to do is lie flat, surely or is it attempting to land on him? Why not just drive by and shoot him? This is the silly realm of Bond, like Jaws getting on a cable car to kill his prey.
One great, minor joke towards the end of the movie - Grant in spy mode is forced to break into a woman's bedroom en route to some place else. 'Stop!' shouts the shrill young woman with horn rim glasses. Then, clocking the handsome, slim Grant and seeing him moving on, repeats 'Stop...' in a different tone. 'A-ha!' fingerwags Grant. It's a top, top moment, acknowledging how handsome the star is without an ounce of obnoxiousness. It's not so different to Connery's break-ins with the Miami Beach hotel room service lady, or Brogan's greeting to the Cuban lady - 'Hola!' in DAD, but if this exact scene were in a Bond film it would be too much, it needs an actor of Gran'ts relaxed self-effacement.
The movie looked great and I'd like to see this on the big screen.
I saw this at a cinema, aged 15, some cinemas didn’t care about the age restrictions of films, as long as you looked reasonably old enough they wanted the ticket income. I thought it was brilliant, and I think it’s brilliant now. It launched a whole series of maverick cop movies, a bit like how Bond inspired the plethora of secret agent movies in the 60’s. Partly based on the true life Zodiac killings of the time, Andy Robinson is awesome as the psychopath, an urban myth arose at the time that he was the son of Edward G Robinson.
There are many great lines in this movie but the best has to be when the mayor asks Callahan how did he know that someone he shot was attempting to rape a woman and he replies “ When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he’s not out collecting for the Red Cross.’ Superb!!
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I love '71: 'Dirty Harry' is a great movie for all its nastiness and reactionary agenda. The inferior follow-up, 'Magnum Force', interestingly inverts the politics of the original to the extent that Callahan goes after vigilante cops, having presumably recovered his own badge from the lake into which he'd tossed it.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
I thought I would enjoy this. It has good reviews in Radio Rimes and I have fond memories watching it a couple of times as a teenager. Reluctantly, I must concede my memory has played tricks on me.
Elvis Presley is a young gun on the park, arrogant, smouldering and devious. He also happens to be a half-way decent singer. What holds him back is his criminal past and a bad attitude to anyone who keeps him from his money. This nasty little ninety minute exposé of a singer’s seedy climb up the ladder of success doesn’t have any kind of good heart and struggles to find a moral compass. Love is in there somewhere, but it seems to be misinterpreted by the cast so many times it’s worthless as any kind of conscience leveller.
Vince Everett kills a man in bar brawl, gets time in the slammer for manslaughter, gets exploited by his cell mate, gets famous through an unlikely prison T.V. show and when released decides to make it in the music biz. He fortuitously bumps into plain-Jane advertising executive Peggy Van Alden [Judy Tyler] and impresses her with his wrist action [swinging a guitar, guys] while he wants to reveal “the beast in me” to the poor deluded girl. Vince seems better suited to the blonde starlet he picks up in Hollywood, a woman as vacant as he is and chasing the dollars with the same tawdry appetite. After a couple of disastrous set-backs, Vince and Peggy form a record company and success rolls their way, only for ex-cell mate Hunk Houghton to get in the way. Mickey Shaughnessy bagged this forgettable role. At least he gets to lamp one on that miserable wretch Vince.
Jailhouse Rock is generally considered one of Presley’s better films, but I’d beg to differ. The King certainly has some swagger to him. His performance is the most in-your-face, rebellious one he ever gave. He’s curt, rude, lazy, exudes a certain wary confidence and basically gets what he wants and needs through the age old story of hard knocks. He learns street survival in the penitentiary and he puts the knowledge to good use on the very streets he prowls on release. This attitude might have had some attraction in 1957, when guys like James Dean and Marlon Brando were anti-establishment, monosyllabic heroes, but in this film we need to feel sympathy for the main character, and Elvis demands and receives none. There’s barely a good word to describe Vince Everett.
I can only assume director Richard Thorpe decided on this tack. It’s a bold move, but in fairness, rather like his slightly overwrought debut of Love Me Tender, the angry, rough and ready stuff doesn’t quite suit Elvis. He seems to need the softer, lighter side. His next outing King Creole would blend the two to greater acclaim, here the performance is a one note struggle. He isn’t helped either by the condensed story, which runs like an old James Cagney gangster flick, only with the music business replacing the Mob. It runs very fast and hardly pauses for breath. Even in real life Elvis’ ‘overnight’ success was a couple of years in the making; Vince Everett’s rise is speedier than a greyhound.
Musically it’s okay. The title track takes all the plaudits and the dance sequence to accompany it is often cited as the first devised ‘video’ or ‘promo’ for a pop single. Baby I Don’t Care and Treat Me Nice are fine, but the constant repetition of the dreary ballad Young and Beautiful slows the pace whenever Elvis sings it. Jeff Alexander’s incidental score even recycles the theme for the romantic overtures.
Jailhouse Rock is still a fans’ favourite, but to be brutally honest, the movie feels horribly dated in 2022 and it’s lack of a sympathetic lead shows.
Comments
Luc Besson's Anna.
I just knew this film would be my cup of tea when I saw it was coming up on Film4 but that fact I'd never heard of it should have rung alarm bells. It's some kind of Nikita/Lucy hybrid, I guess some of his films are based on names aren't they, Leon is another... what snags it is it's a series of episodic five years earlier/two years earlier scenes about a woman drawn into being a spy for mother Russia while doubling as a top fashion model, it's too much hokum really given her violent line of work and there's a glaring lack of taste somehow early on in the film. Maybe Scarlett Johnannson was lined up to play the lead role but bailed, the star here is okay but a bit of a blank.
The film is very hard to get into or even want to, that said it gets better as it goes on and Helen Mirren is good as a Russian Rosa Klebb type operative, Cillian Murphy turns up as a CIA man taking an interest in her. Eric Serra does the score, it's a bit better in the action than GoldenEye but this is about 20 years later. Ultimately you don't care too much about anyone in this and it's not even clear what the denouement is in the fullest sense. But there are nice shots of Moscow and Paris. One good thing about how the lead character has no attachments, she is regarded by the KGB as less use as an operative as they have no leverage on her - can't threaten to bump off family members etc. This is in contrast to Craig's Bond, whose appeal as a signing was precisely that he was an orphan with no attachments. It does tap into the idea beloved by the British State it seems to me that if they have dirt on you, you are an asset, and if you know the dirty secrets you're an asset too, so long as it's clear you won't spill the beans.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
What's more, it gave me unpleasant dreams.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Really? Hmm. I thought Anna was substandard Luc Besson. I wrote a review of it somewhere on here which is similar in reaction to yours. Can't be bothered to track it down right now. Helen Mirren was okay in it. The idea if the spy being a fashion model had legs [!!!] But overall it's a weak entry in the espionage genre.
Have any of these female spy films been more than of passing interest? Red Sparrow, Atomic Blonde, Salt, this one, the one with the teenaged girl avenging her dad etc, even the Stig Larsen stuff, all seem to want to be ultra violent Bond imitators instead of attempting something more thoughtful, intuitive and charismatic. Which is what I'd expect from a woman. Maybe I demand too much.
I agree with your comment Gymkata: "The main thing to watch it for is George C. Scott." His performance is terrific, and another major attraction for me is Jerry Goldsmith's rousing Patton march and several other really enjoyable parts of the score. I have this soundtrack on LP and find myself listening to it quite often.
THE INVISIBLE MAN’S REVENGE (1944)
After a conversation with @Barbel I was inspired to watch a Universal Monster movie, but which one, a classic or a lesser known one, so I chose The Invisible Man’s Revenge, one that I hadn’t seen for quite some time. It stars the marvellous John Carradine as a scientist who tests his serum on a psychiatric escapee who then goes on to commit several crimes.
The invisibility effects are pretty decent and the revenge storyline is engaging. I’m very much a fan of the Universal Monster franchise and the Invisible series always strike a chord with me.
Good.
Glad you enjoyed it, CHB!
Rope of Sand (1949) Dir: William Dieterle
Like several other films of this era, this a movie trying hard to be “Casablanca”- three of the same stars (Peter Lorre, Claude Raines, Paul Henreid), similar locations (a lot of it takes place in a bar very like Rick's), etc. Burt Lancaster is the protagonist, and likeable as he always is (except when playing a villain, and even then you can see him struggling not to be likeable!) he’s not a patch on Bogart. The female lead is a charisma-free zone, which is probably why I can’t remember her name.
The plot is to do with diamonds blah blah, double crosses blah blah, though it tries to rely on atmosphere so that the actual plot doesn’t matter much (like, er, “Casablanca”) but doesn’t succeed.
The director, William Dieterle, does his best with second-rate material. I hadn't heard of him so I checked him out and he had a distinguished career. The 1939 version of "Hunchback of Notre Dame" with Charles Laughton, the 1936 "The Maltese Falcon" (not the famous one- this is sometimes known as "Satan Met A Lady" and isn't a patch on the other one), and many others.
MEMORY (2022)
Liam Neeson stars as a paid assassin who declines a hit on a teenaged girl and becomes a mark himself, he also has early signs of alzheimer’s. Capably directed by our own Martin Campbell this is a standard action flick that keeps the interest going. There’s an interesting cast including a couple of Brit’s from TV series and Guy Pearce, who was very good in the excellent LA Confidential, turns up as a detective.
I don’t know if Leeson was ever considered to play Bond in his early days (he only really became an action star with Taken in 2008) but I think he could have made a decent stab at it instead of Brosnan.
OK/Good.
Liam Neeson was offered the role for GE, but his girlfriend Natasha Richardson put a lot of pressure on him to decline.
Thanks for the review. I have this earmarked for the weekend.
The last couple of Neeson films I've watched I've turned off but saw Martin Campbell and Guy Pearce were involved so thought I'd give it a go.
You’ve surely seen Leeson in Bob Boy 😁😁😁
I think you’ll enjoy it @Lady Rose a glass of Pinot Grigio will help 🥂
Yes, the sword fight was terrific, a great movie.
I didn't watch Memory last night, I went for Downton Abbey: A New Era instead.
Very watchable if you like Downton Abbey but they unashamedly stole the script of Singing In The Rain. I enjoyed it non the less.
Empire of the Sun
Steven Spielberg's oft overlooked 1980s adaptation of JG Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel about being a kid left behind in Shanghai when World War II kicks off, separated from his parents and forced to fend for himself.
I'd not seen this before, it passed me by a bit and never charmed me in but I was mighty impressed by catching this on the still low definition BBC4 last week, on my slightly larger widescreen telly. Many years ago my Mum said she and Dad had watched it and found the ending quite affecting, I guess as she was a wartime evacuee - sent to live with on a farm somewhere - I just realised that might have been a factor for her.
I can see why this film might not reel you in if you caught it on telly by accident. The opening spiel is important because it tells how the English occupied Shanghai for decades and indeed built the city in their image so many parts of it looked like it could have been lifted wholesale from Liverpool or Surrey. This captured my imagination, because at once you see shots of Liverpool's famous waterfront and think, well, okay but why start with a flashback to Liverpool then? Then you gradually realise that indeed this IS Shanghai, ditto the shots of the apparent Liverpool Cathedral, which you assume it is until you see the Japanese faces there. This is a great bit of storytelling slight of hand by Spielberg.
The staging of the fall of the city and the turmoil it unleashes is very well done, the director really captures the chaos and it looks magnificent too, you feel you're looking at a terrific epic, and there's a nod to 1939's Gone with the Wind and its similar events of turmoil with a huge poster advert of the film of that year on display.
The film hold interest and just builds and builds. The kid is played by Christian Bale, and he's very good, not really a wrong note, though this is not a 'charming' performance and he is meant to be a bit of a brat, also belonging to a very well to do English family with a big house, chauffeur-driven car and servants. When, following riots, he returns to the eerily empty family home as instructed, it's not just the later presence of Joe Pantoliano that made me think of Joel in his empty house in Risky Business eating his lonely meal, someone with access to a big house and a 10-year-old kid could restage Cruise's famous scene in white shirt and Y-fronts dancing around the house to That Old Time Rock n Roll.
Spielberg overplays his hand at times. One flourish repeated is to see the kid seemingly on his own or in limited company only for the camera to pan up and we see he is not, over the hill there is a large gathering, or a horde representing some threat - all very well but the kid would surely have heard the hubbub so it wouldn't be that much of a surprise.
Stuff does go wrong. The character doesn't engage with the adults much. His parents seem anonymous, but this might be deliberate because later, when the boy says he can't remember their faces, it is more plausible whereas if his parents were played by famous actors or more personable, we'd imagine them later popping up, here is is not a given.
The kid hangs out with John Malkovich, who is a scavenger about the city and depicted unsentimentally. A mistake by the kid sees him wind up in an internment camp but when the two meet up this is not referenced and there's a sense of scenes being cut. I think the whole thing might have worked better as a six-parter though I suppose we'd have Andrew Davies all over it. At the camp he meets an old family friend, a big deal given he's not seen any of them for - what, days or weeks? while he's been by himself in the city, It's not clear - but there's no 'Ah, there you are Jamie, what has happened to you?!' talk. Later a key adult disappears but we don't learn what happened to him. Some of this stuff works well because it does lend to the sense of bewilderment you'd feel in that situation, otherwise again it suggests scenes being cut for length.
Worse, the key actors here - Leslie Phillips, Nigel Havers and Miranda Richardson - don't massively interact in a useful way with the kid. It's mean and wrong to say the film is a massive big budget trailer but there is something in that. It almost reminded me of Paul McCartney's Give My Regards to Broad Street, in which Macca just ables along through the film as if in his own universe. The kid doesn't get many setbacks, he isn't torn off a strip for any wrongdoing ever by the adults. In fact, even Joel in Risky Business underwent more of a learning curve in his parents' absence. I also contrast the film with the 1930s film Captains Courageous with Freddie Bartholomew and Spencer Tracy, here Bartholomew really does play a brat who is separated from his parents after falling off a posh cruise ship. But he learns the error of his ways thanks to Tracy's trawler fisherman. There's not much like this here and our hero seems to go from strength to strength, being a sort of fixer who can acquire items for various people about the prison camp, with nods to King Rat and other PoW films. But unlike these other films, Empire of the Sun doesn't quite settle as it's always on the move. One actor who could make an impression is Joe Pantoliano who is a welcome arrival for the kid in Shanghai - a wise guy Yank with a truck - but at soon as we meet his boss Basie - Malkovich - he is depicted as very much second fiddle and a lackey - all very well, but what happened to the charismatic welcome American we knew for five minutes or so? We don't see him again, instead he is there to be humiliated by young Jim it seems. Early on, Malkovich tries to sell young Jim , who despite being an assertive kid goes along with it, but fails because the kid is 'skin and bone'. Really? He's a rich kid with a larder full of food at home, how long has he been scavenging for? Some early scenes like this could have been jettisoned a bit I think, especially as we find not a lot comes from them.
In fairness, the main drift of the film seems to be how the kid reveres the Japanese fighter pilots and their planes, despite their being officially the enemy now, and Spielberg is interested in depicting how his youthful attitude bridges such divides. This allows for some moving and affecting moments. But there is little corresponding between our young hero and his British adult friends so he doesn't quite seem to relate to anyone much in the film. Time Out magazine reviewed how the film is meant to depict how you have to be a right so-and-so to survive but I don't seem the kid cross the line much if at all. I never lived through a war, stayed at my private school and have more to regret about personal transgressions though in the end neither the police, Derby and Joan club nor the local crematorium opted to press charges.
Spielberg overplays his hand by trying for a few David Lean scenes towards the end. One doesn't quite make sense to me, the refugees enter an open-air stadium full of luxury items from the elite English bygone days - one moment anticipates another from Schindler's List - but it isn't quite credible how all this plunder got stored here and why. I must say at the time watching this wash over me late at night, it was all highly affecting and impressive. In some ways the film reminds me of Kenneth Branagh's Belfast of last year in that really bad things keep threatening to happen but never quite do. But the kid in Belfast does seem to interact with the adults more, it's in many ways a better movie though the scale can't be compared. In other ways, some scenes remind me of Spectre - sort of emptily epic and visually impressive but it could leave you cold if you haven't bought into it.
One suspenseful scene has young Jim creeping about behind barbed wire outside the prison camp behind enemy lines but I have no idea what he was doing here or trying to achieve. Another has our young choir singer creating a moving impromptu moment for prisoners and enemy both and one sees why Spielberg was later so annoyed with Life is Beautiful which contained a similar scene and bagged a few Oscars while his earlier movie got none.
One senses the screenplay writer - Tom Stoppard, who helped with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade I think - wanted a chillier ending with the kid not able to relate to his key adults at the end but as with his Kubrick sci-fi adaptation, went another way. I may seek out my copy of Ballard's book, I think I have it somewhere but I haven't read it.
Empire of the Sun is well worth catching if you have not seen it. Despite some perceived flaws, it is affecting to watch a movie that is so determined to enthral, move and entertain, and so often succeeds.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
SEVERANCE (2006)
A company selling arms sends a group of workers to Hungary on a team building exercise where they encounter poachers who set out to kill them. Tim McInnery and our own Toby Stephens are pretty good in this and Danny Dyer is um….Danny Dyer. It’s violent and strangely watchable, it’s a damned sight better than it should be and that’s down to Christopher Smith’s pithy direction.
Good.
I enjoyed 'Prey' a lot. Tbh, Naru and her world are interesting enough that the film could almost have done without a Predator pitching up. The bear attack and face-off with the mountain lion are at least as scary as the 80s sci-fi monster, and there may have been enough drama for an entire movie in Naru's efforts to establish her place as a hunter in a patriarchal community and in the threat posed by the French Canadian trappers. Still, it's inspired me to take another look at the 1987 movie, '2' - and I've heard that 'Predators' was a good one, as well.
Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Not the best SW installment, but it's my favourite of the 9 Skywalker movies. The droid BB-8 easily steals the movie.
I give it 7/10.
I've never seen Rogue One or Solo. My rankings of the Skywalker films goes:
Yes, I picked up the soundtrack cheap on vinyl a few years ago, it's not a great copy but the final version of 'Somewhere in Time' is a great one. As with Out of Africa, I'd have to suggest there's a bit of repetition in the main theme, excellent as it is. They don't have the tunes of his Bond soundtracks. SIT 's side 2 has 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Rachmaninoff)' which some may recall as being the piece Bill Murray learns to play in Groundhog Day (say something about my frame of reference) and it very much enhances the album, it's not Barry of course, similarly there's a classic piece on Out of Africa's soundtrack. That one got Barry an Oscar but I do wonder if that sort of thing is allowed, I mean it's not the actual composer, is it? What if Marvin Hamlisch had allowed some of those classical pieces used in The Spy Who Loved Me to be on his soundtrack album? What's the etiquette here?
I've yet to see the film.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The Blues Brothers
Cult musical comedy with Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi. I'd say it doesn't past the half hour test, it's got a very lowkey opening though that allows the film to get better as it goes on. You have to tap into the comedy, it's not a given that you will but that's what makes it a cult. Kudos to its creators though as it's not an obvious premise - two brothers in black suit and tie with a hat who sing the old classics. Useful cameos by Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Ray Charles and John Lee Hooker liven things up but I have to say the film only really gets going when some Nazis turn up and the itinerant pair annoy them, this means the Chicago police AND the Illinois Nazis are after them. 'Illinois Nazis, I just hate them!' says Belushi which is a line possibly borrowed for Indy in the Last Crusade directed by Spielberg who shows up in an unexpected cameo here.
The premise is slender, I compared it to McCartney's dud Give My Regards to Broad Street four years later. There, the premise was also slender - the master tapes to his album had gone missing, prompting a takeover bid of the record company by a villainous businessman - but that doesn't really stack up because a) You don't feel millionaire Macca is going to be adversely affected b) You don't quite see how his album would rake in mega sales to tide things over, he wasn't trading on past glories at this point but he wasn't Duran Duran or Michael Jackson either c) It doesn't affect us, we don't know the record label staff and d) It's meant to be all a dream anyway, so who cares?
In this film, the pair are trying to raise money to fund an orphanage as one of them has comically seen a 'sign from God', after that it's your basic chase movie with Carrie Fisher there as a vengeful ex-girlfriend in a fine running joke. It's quite simple really, so with a bit of tweaking maybe Macca's movie might have worked. But even if he included other classic bygone era stars, you struggle to see how it might - Billy Fury (was he still alive then?), Cliff Richard or Tommy Steele? Doesn't quite work, does it. It could have had more flair like Absolute Beginners but then of course that tanked too. It's not a fair comparison but Macca's film doesn't have a McGuffin that really flies while this one - slight as it is - does.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I re-watched The Blues Brothers a couple of weeks ago. To me the movie hasn't lost any of it's appeal. The humor, the great music, the charm ..... it's a classic!
THE 39 STEPS (1935) and THE LADY VANISHES (1938)
I revisited these two Alfred Hitchcock films last night in a double bill. The 39 Steps involves Robert Donat as Richard Hannay, who unwittingly gets mixed up with spies who are stealing secrets from the military. The movie clips along at a cracking pace and the tension never lets up.
Excellent.
The Lady Vanishes concerns an old lady who disappears on a train and the attempts of a young socialite and a musician to solve the mystery. Part of the charm is the obvious model shots which even in 1938 must have been plain as day. Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as Charters and Caldicott are a highlight of the movie playing two cricket obsessed men trying to get back to England for the test match. They went on to play those characters many times in other films, and other characters based on them. Once again, Hitchcock amps up the tension as the other people on the train deny seeing the old lady. I love movies set in trains and this is probably my favourite , along with the FRWL sequence.
Excellent.
SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD (2012)
I’d never heard of this film before it turned up on the BritBox streaming app and as it starred Steve Carell, who I like a lot, I thought I would give it a chance. Carell and Keira Knightley live in the same apartment block and both have relationship problems, Carell’s wife has just left him and Knightley has just broken up with her boyfriend. News has just broken that a 70-mile wide asteroid heading for Earth has failed to be destroyed by a mission and that it will impact in three weeks time, meaning the end of the world. They begin a road trip together and gradually become romantically involved.
The film is engaging and emotional, some good acting, Carell does this sort of character excellently, but I cared about all the characters, even the ones in it for a short time, like Martin Sheen towards the end of the film. Directed in a low-key fashion it shows how such a cataclysmic event effects different sort of people. It’s an understated film, no special effects, we don’t ever get to see the asteroid, and that’s a good thing.
Very good, recommended.
I did indeed watch The Northman on my flight home…first off - it’s ‘macho central’ 🤣 very homo-erotic…I enjoyed most of it, but it’s got just about every filmic trope in there 🙄 Claes Bang is excellent - as usual, Nicole Kidman is awful, as usual 🙈 I really enjoyed this film when it stuck to the authentic (as far as I’m aware) times it’s set in…then you get a few scenes which dragged me ‘out’ of the film - every time Kidman is in it and the appearance of Björk 😖 oh, and I didn’t care for the ending 👀
I also watched…
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Way too complicated for me to try and explain the plot - I think someone on here has already done this? 🤔 Just watch it, it’s excellent…and Jamie Lee Curtis is fabulous in it 👏🏻
And…
The Marksman
Liam Neeson is in this…he turns up for his paycheque then promptly buggers off with it…a steaming pile of 💩 avoid. I only watched to the end because I’m a masochist 👀
I have a question about the Michelle Yeah film which I've yet to see... London's Prince Charles is showing the EV - Extended Version. Anyone know if this is significantly better than the normal one?
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Ta, Gymkata...
Dirty Harry
Late-night Friday night showing on Channel 5, letterbox version made this appealing. I suppose only a moron could take its 'politics' seriously - the no-nonsense Law and Order Frisco cop is set up against a series of Straw Men arguments and Straw Men characters, his fellow cops generally being more boring and humourless than him. But only a bore or stick in the mud could deny its celluloid appeal.
Frank Sinatra lobbied to play the lead role, I suppose it follows on from his Lady in Cement stuff but he was really too old to pull this stuff off, you can't see him on top of a school bus doing Living Daylight pre-credit stunts. Sinatra also lobbied hard to be in the Newman legal thriller in the early 80s I understand (name escapes me temporarily) but lost out.
Filmed in 1971, the year of Diamonds are Forever, a scene puts one in mind of that as Harry Callaghan rises up by crane above the night streets and we hear the hubbub of traffic below against the neon backdrop. This is the year that movies got a bit nastier and sleazier, or alternatively chose to get sillier. (Eastwood later went on to be in stuff like Anywhcih Way But Loose), the Bonds generally dropped nasty bikini strangulations and savage lift punch ups in favour of the penny whistle and so on....
A film is as good as its villain they say and the actor here does a great job, though his resemblance to the late Michael Hutchence of INXS I now find a bit distracting. It's all nonsense - he arranges for himself to be beaten up and hospitalised but in the next scene is largely facially unblemished, Harry himself is athletic after two broken ribs, much like Brozzer's Bond in TWINE. The film in real life would end with a busload of dead school kids due to Harry's intervention, though due to recent events in the States where cops hide out for an hour in the school corridor, even utilising hand cleaner sidspenser while a gunman takes out a classroom of kids, it's all gone full circle.
Because of the horrible nature of some of the deaths in this - one really nasty one - this film can't quite me chalked up as a guilty pleasure. It's one of those movies where you wonder if it isn't creating the appetite it then attempts to sate - hey, you could get a gun and pick off civilians in a big city if you want! Sort of puts ideas into people's heads.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
North by Northwest
I suppose if you want a contrast between the way cinema went in just 12 years, you could look at 1959's North by Northwest and then 1971's Dirty Harry. The former is old-style America, with something a bit unsettling under the surface, the villainy shadowy and external - foreign forces - but generally the worst you get in the great US of A is something paranoid, pre-JFK, otherwise the tailored suits and gentlemanly conduct remain. Fast-forward to 1971, and we've gone from Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint's subtle and elegant sexual banter on the train, all toying with the Hayes' Code, just as Hitch did with Grant and Bergman's extended kiss in Notorious, to Dirty Harry visiting strip clubs where it's all tits out on display, or being accused of being a Peeping Tom, talking of which perhaps it was Hitch's own Psycho that changed the tone in US cinema for good or ill. Indeed, you can look at Hitch's oevre itself to make the point, going from North by Northwest to Frenzy in the early 70s, where bare breasts are on display during a character's rape and then murder, it's odd and gruesome e to see from Hitch, it's as though in finally getting to show and do what he's always wanted, the whole thing collapses, the veneer of old-time respectability no longer there, it's thrown off balance.
Some critics dislike the final shot of NBNW, the phallic joke of the train entering the tunnel. I know what they mean, it's kind of crass now. But at the time, the whole toying with cinema restraints between the two leads, the flirtation on the train, her giving him her room number as a casual pick-up, but later insisting he sleep on the floor - all this would be knocked into a cocked hat (edit cocked then, ajb) by the time of Bond and Tanya on the train in FRWL - but audiences would have enjoyed seeing the film flirt with the parameters of what two leads could do in a movie then. So Grant doesn't cop off with Eve Marie Saint on the bunk in the train (the scene anticipates that of Bond and Solitaire of course) because they're not married, we have to wait to the final scene where Grant calls her 'Mrs Thornhill' and pulls her up. In this context, in a packed cinema in the late 50s, Hitch's final joke - as if to say, I'm not even bothering any more - would have brought the house down.
Fleming name checked the movie in Thunderball but said he found the sillier aspects of the film undermined the tension so I guess we can see what he'd have thought of the Bond series as it went on where they became comedies really, indeed the fine Bond writer Sinclair McKay points out what Fleming hadn't noticed - the film is a comedy. Approached in that way, it works but otherwise I admit I prefer the similar The 39 Steps. Of course this is a comedy - I mean the crop dusting scene is great but according to the subtitles it has 'machine gun fire' - well, if so, why not use the guns straight off when he's unsuspecting as it swoops in? What is it really trying to do? All Grant has to do is lie flat, surely or is it attempting to land on him? Why not just drive by and shoot him? This is the silly realm of Bond, like Jaws getting on a cable car to kill his prey.
One great, minor joke towards the end of the movie - Grant in spy mode is forced to break into a woman's bedroom en route to some place else. 'Stop!' shouts the shrill young woman with horn rim glasses. Then, clocking the handsome, slim Grant and seeing him moving on, repeats 'Stop...' in a different tone. 'A-ha!' fingerwags Grant. It's a top, top moment, acknowledging how handsome the star is without an ounce of obnoxiousness. It's not so different to Connery's break-ins with the Miami Beach hotel room service lady, or Brogan's greeting to the Cuban lady - 'Hola!' in DAD, but if this exact scene were in a Bond film it would be too much, it needs an actor of Gran'ts relaxed self-effacement.
The movie looked great and I'd like to see this on the big screen.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I saw this at a cinema, aged 15, some cinemas didn’t care about the age restrictions of films, as long as you looked reasonably old enough they wanted the ticket income. I thought it was brilliant, and I think it’s brilliant now. It launched a whole series of maverick cop movies, a bit like how Bond inspired the plethora of secret agent movies in the 60’s. Partly based on the true life Zodiac killings of the time, Andy Robinson is awesome as the psychopath, an urban myth arose at the time that he was the son of Edward G Robinson.
There are many great lines in this movie but the best has to be when the mayor asks Callahan how did he know that someone he shot was attempting to rape a woman and he replies “ When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he’s not out collecting for the Red Cross.’ Superb!!
I love '71: 'Dirty Harry' is a great movie for all its nastiness and reactionary agenda. The inferior follow-up, 'Magnum Force', interestingly inverts the politics of the original to the extent that Callahan goes after vigilante cops, having presumably recovered his own badge from the lake into which he'd tossed it.
JAILHOUSE ROCK (1957)
I thought I would enjoy this. It has good reviews in Radio Rimes and I have fond memories watching it a couple of times as a teenager. Reluctantly, I must concede my memory has played tricks on me.
Elvis Presley is a young gun on the park, arrogant, smouldering and devious. He also happens to be a half-way decent singer. What holds him back is his criminal past and a bad attitude to anyone who keeps him from his money. This nasty little ninety minute exposé of a singer’s seedy climb up the ladder of success doesn’t have any kind of good heart and struggles to find a moral compass. Love is in there somewhere, but it seems to be misinterpreted by the cast so many times it’s worthless as any kind of conscience leveller.
Vince Everett kills a man in bar brawl, gets time in the slammer for manslaughter, gets exploited by his cell mate, gets famous through an unlikely prison T.V. show and when released decides to make it in the music biz. He fortuitously bumps into plain-Jane advertising executive Peggy Van Alden [Judy Tyler] and impresses her with his wrist action [swinging a guitar, guys] while he wants to reveal “the beast in me” to the poor deluded girl. Vince seems better suited to the blonde starlet he picks up in Hollywood, a woman as vacant as he is and chasing the dollars with the same tawdry appetite. After a couple of disastrous set-backs, Vince and Peggy form a record company and success rolls their way, only for ex-cell mate Hunk Houghton to get in the way. Mickey Shaughnessy bagged this forgettable role. At least he gets to lamp one on that miserable wretch Vince.
Jailhouse Rock is generally considered one of Presley’s better films, but I’d beg to differ. The King certainly has some swagger to him. His performance is the most in-your-face, rebellious one he ever gave. He’s curt, rude, lazy, exudes a certain wary confidence and basically gets what he wants and needs through the age old story of hard knocks. He learns street survival in the penitentiary and he puts the knowledge to good use on the very streets he prowls on release. This attitude might have had some attraction in 1957, when guys like James Dean and Marlon Brando were anti-establishment, monosyllabic heroes, but in this film we need to feel sympathy for the main character, and Elvis demands and receives none. There’s barely a good word to describe Vince Everett.
I can only assume director Richard Thorpe decided on this tack. It’s a bold move, but in fairness, rather like his slightly overwrought debut of Love Me Tender, the angry, rough and ready stuff doesn’t quite suit Elvis. He seems to need the softer, lighter side. His next outing King Creole would blend the two to greater acclaim, here the performance is a one note struggle. He isn’t helped either by the condensed story, which runs like an old James Cagney gangster flick, only with the music business replacing the Mob. It runs very fast and hardly pauses for breath. Even in real life Elvis’ ‘overnight’ success was a couple of years in the making; Vince Everett’s rise is speedier than a greyhound.
Musically it’s okay. The title track takes all the plaudits and the dance sequence to accompany it is often cited as the first devised ‘video’ or ‘promo’ for a pop single. Baby I Don’t Care and Treat Me Nice are fine, but the constant repetition of the dreary ballad Young and Beautiful slows the pace whenever Elvis sings it. Jeff Alexander’s incidental score even recycles the theme for the romantic overtures.
Jailhouse Rock is still a fans’ favourite, but to be brutally honest, the movie feels horribly dated in 2022 and it’s lack of a sympathetic lead shows.