A hilarious comedy from the usual team that mines the medical dictionary for as many double-entendres as possible. There is almost a joke or pun every 30 seconds in this movie, a hit rate so high it puts most modern comedy efforts to shame, four of them come in the credits: subtitles such as Womb at the Top or The Pregger’s Opera. The film is set at the fictional Finisham Maternity Hospital, presided over by Kenneth Williams’s hypochondriac chief surgeon Sir Bernard Cutting, ruled with a soft fist by Hattie Jacques’s Matron who swans effortlessly around Bunn Ward, locally known as the Pudding Club, where Terry Scott’s skirt chasing Dr Prodd seduces all and sundry and Charles Hawtrey’s psychiatrist Dr F.A. Goode hypnotises himself instead of his patients.
Talbot Rothwell outdoes himself with the sheer volume of humour, a screenplay as tight and clever as anything he wrote in the sixties Carry On ‘golden era’. Sid James continues a minor rehabilitation from At Your Convenience by playing a cheeky villain as opposed to a cackling, ogling, aging lothario. The role is reminiscent of the original radio series Hancock’s Half Hour where his spiv would constantly involve Tony in various dodgy dealings. James played many roles like this early in his career, think The Lavender Hill Mob, and the toned down antics here make for a better performance. He’s leading a hapless gang of thieves seeking to steal the hospital’s supply of birth control pills. Kenneth Cope plays his son Cyril who is forced to dress as a female nurse to scout the premises. Cue much confusion from hopeless hoodlums Bernard Bresslaw and Bill Maynard: “Cor, you look lovely – I’d like to see a bit more up top – He doesn’t want to draw attention to himself – I could stick an extra sock in it – You remind me of your mother.” Barbara Windsor’s cheeky nurse falls for Cyril and he falls into a bath full of bubbles and Gilly Grant. Our friends Margaret Nolan and Valerie Leon play pregnant patients. This exchange between Nolan and Terry Scott is particularly fine:
Mrs Tucker: “I was a little bit worried about my husband being able to have children.”
Dr Prodd: “Oh yes, he was a little older than you.”
M.T: “88… and you suggested it might be a good idea to take in a lodger a little nearer my own age…. Well, it worked! I’m pregnant.”
D.P: “What about your husband?”
M.T: “Oh, he’s over the moon?”
D.P: “And the lodger?”
M.T: “Well, that’s the problem. She’s pregnant too.”
Williams, Jacques, Scott and Hawtrey are on top form. Kennth Connor makes a reliable return as an expectant father whose wife, Joan Sims, is long overdue but does nothing except eat. The unlikely antics of this awful hospital’s life prove a fertile ground for scene after scene of confusion, misbehaviour and downright dirty slap-n-tickle fun: “You’re the medicine I’ve been wanting,” implores Williams, “Three times a day and shake before consumption.”
The film goes off the rails a little at the very end, when James impersonates a multi-lingual doctor named Zhivago and a silly chase around the hospital set ensues, but getting there was tremendous fun and the film ends on a note of hilarity when he unveils his next plan: to infiltrate a nudist camp. Now that’s a Carry On movie I’d have loved to have seen!
A British Film Institute retrospective named Carry On Matron one of the five finest Carry On movies, along with Cleo, Screaming, Up the Kyber and Camping. It is extremely hard to disagree with that assessment when script, performances and most importantly the final visual result are so in tune. Indeed, the BFI list sits well with me; I would probably substitute Follow That Camel for Carry On Camping as I find the latter tiresomely infantile – one memorable scene does not make a classic. Carry On Matron is without any doubt the last rush of blood to the flailing arm of a series which headed into less chucklesome territory from this point on.
This is a fictional account of a real gunfight that has been portrayed in several movies. Kirk Douglas is Doc Holiday, Burt Lancaster is Wyatt Earp, Rhonda Fleming and Jo Van Fleet are the female leads and a young Denis Hopper is in a supporting role. I think Douglas and Van Fleet as his romantic interest are superb! In their first scene Doc is in a foul mood in his hotel room, arguing with with Van fleet's character while he throws knives at the door. Both hav interesting characters and I wonder if I've ever seen Kirk Douglas deliver a better performance. The rest of the cast are rarely as good. Burt Lancaster seems like he's in a different movie at first, a sheriff from a white hat/black hat movie. He gets better, but I wonder what someone like Gregory Peck could've done with the part. I enjoyed the movie a lot with many good characters, a good plot and good action. The title song is painfully clichéd and was the inspiration to Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles down to using the same singer. Is it really that hard to ride past Boot Hill (the graveyard) without playing the verse about Boot Hill, even once?
Never got into Carry On Matron - I think it was the issue of birth control pills that made it a bit too adult, not coy enough to watch with your parents, a bit crude. That and having Kenneth Cope in drag - it just isn't convincing and, alright, funny - Bresslaw in drag is funny, plus Cope isn't quite a Carry On regular though technically I guess he is - but it didn't stick because in Convenience he's a different character, usually they sort of stay in character all the time, admittedly Bresslaw is an impressive exception, but you know what I mean.
Caught a Confessions movie in the early hours the other night... the pop star one, though he's just the drummer it seems. Pretty rough stuff though it had an appalling fascination. A two-part doc on Channel 5 recently said the series, and those like it, pretty much saved the British film industry in the mid 70s and gave work to comedy stars who might have struggled otherwise - Irene Handle, John le Mesieurer and so on.
I saw part one of that doc @Napoleon Plural but was too tired to watch the second. It was partway interesting. I expect the second part concentrated on Mary Millington. I am always suspicious of the claim these 'adult comedies' saved the British film industry. I think they mean they saved the cinema industry [temporarily]. Plenty of British movies were made in the 70s and many were cheap knock-off jobs; the demise of the sex comedy came at the same time Hammer and Rank collapsed production, so I'm not convinced. Maybe I need to do more research. Also a doc that talks at length about Barry Evans yet never mentioned the phenomenally popular but now profoundly un-PC Mind Your Language has to be taken with salt.
Anyone who has enjoyed @chrisno1 's highbrow reviews of lowbrow movies - and this includes @chrisno1 himself I suppose - should check out the imdb reviews for Barry Evans' Adventures of a Taxi Driver, which rates a lowly 4.4.
and better still, the imdb reviews of Come Play With Me, which I did rent when I was a member of LoveFilm (no, it wasn't a dirty movie film club...) and scores an even lower 3.7. It stars 'our' Alfie Bass (Moonraker is listed as one of the actor's key films!). I find these reviews highly entertaining and of course better than the actual film!
This movie by Oliver Stone is based on the experiences of journalist Richard Boyle and what happened to him during the civil war in El Salvador a few years earlier. James Woods plays the lead as Boyle, but it's really interesting to see Jim Belushi in a mostly serious role. I like movies that do a deep-dive into a place and time we don't see very often, and that certainly is the case here. The US were supporting the right-wing regime who again supported brutal death squads. Were they fighting Marxist guerillas or a peasant uprising? I'd say both. If it wasn't for one scene I'd be inclined to say the movie was to kind to the rebels, but the scene where a rebel commander shoots prisoner and Boyle yells: "You'll become just like them!" is very effective. Political movies getting a cinematic release and gets nominated for Oscars are extremely rare these days, and I sometimes wish them back. I say watch Salvador and get your own opinion. The movie is never dull, that's for sure.
@Napoleon Plural "and better still, the imdb reviews of Come Play With Me, which I did rent when I was a member of LoveFilm (no, it wasn't a dirty movie film club...) and scores an even lower 3.70"
I checked these out. I've seen the film - many years ago -- and I wouldn't waste as many words as those guys do on such low brow cinematic drivel.
For some reason the italics button stopped working 🤨
In a similar 'here's one someone wrote earlier' spirit, check out this Bond on Twitter type thing - a guy reviews George Lazenby's Man From Hong Kong or whatever it was, with enthusiasm:
@chrisno1@Napoleon Plural The ‘70’s British sex comedies didn’t “save” the film industry, but they did create employment for a raft of comedy actors who normally wouldn’t have touched these films with a barge pole if there had been other roles available, but the industry was in the doldrums at that time and they had to put bread on the table, so there was no alternative.
The “Confessions” movies were a smuttier version of “Carry On” and the “Adventures” series were a lower grade version of those (yes, it was possible). The Mary Millington movies were more soft-core porn comedy/crime features than out and out sex comedies.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
"No lectures Q - we're all familiar with the history of the 1970s soft porn sex comedy!"
One off thing about those times is the sexualisation of the media in a way that now seems entirely foreign, but is of course a staple of our own Movie Posters or Book Covers threads. So as a kid with that burgeoning sexuality leafing through a copy of the London Evening Standard - or Evening News as it was the probably known - you would come to the daily movie listings - again, they simply don't do that anymore now - and it would have grainy black and white ads for the posters be it Moonraker or Saturday Night Fever or of course any saucy soft porn film with a lurid title like 'What no pyjamas' while your mother - who had purchased the damn thing after all - sat on the train seat nearby.
It is odd how hardcore porn was illegal then but the mainstream depiction of lurid soft core porn was simply everywhere.
A revisionist western from an era when the genre was considered box-office poison.
Clint Eastwood directs himself as William Munny, an aged widowed retired gunslinger whose soul is full of deep regret and guilt for the killings he has perpetrated. Desperate for cash to support his farm and two young children, he takes on one last bounty hunt on behalf of a group of aggrieved prostitutes in the corrupt town of Big Whiskey. One of their number has been slashed and scarred for life by a volatile cowpoke, but the local law – ‘Little’ Bill Daggett – prefers to treat the guilty with kid gloves and even worse compensates the brothel owner for potential loss of earnings while ignoring the grievances of the injured. As portrayed by Gene Hackman, Little Bill is the antithesis of everything you would expect from the man with the silver star; as sheriff he is mean, vicious, fallible and without mercy. His home life is solitary. He shows no skill for anything other than antagonism. His reputation is built on fear – even travelling gunman ‘English Bob’ – a brilliant supporting role from Richard Harris – decides a confrontation with Little Bill is a step too far. Little Bill represents the angel of death William Munny dreams about, all the disease of a wretched life pouring from his skull. At the climax of the film, Munny shoots point blank into Bill’s face to obliterate his nightmares.
The film challenges our traditional perception of the western genre by ensuring our sympathies lie only with the stubborn prostitutes. All the gunfighters and the lawmen are low-down, dirty, exploitive, conniving cowards, some are unnaturally brutal killers. The three ‘heroes’ of Munny, his pal Ned Logan - a wonderfully erudite Morgan Freeman - and a short-sighted youngster who goes by the name the Schofield Kid, regret their lives administering summary justice, but regret alone does not prevent their continual descent into the murky, shivering world of blood money executions. The film is a slow burn of an actioner, developing like a hybrid of Shane, The Magnificent Seven and The Wild Bunch. It isn’t cinematically like any of those films, but it touches on similar themes of community, law and order and avenging dark angels. The screenplay acknowledges a debt to the spaghetti western by twisting its characters away from archetypes with contradictory unheroic behaviour. That the script focusses much on Little Bill’s environment, his affableness at odds with his psychopathic tendencies, only highlights the avenging trio’s awkwardness, in their dealings with the pursuit, each other and ultimately the resolution, an awkwardness which manifests itself as decency, although even here one senses decorum is only restored through tiredness and a sense of fair play mixed with embarrassment.
Brilliant performances from an aging cast, who like the decent(ish) blood-soaked heroes all feel and look very weary. Some pathos is added from Anna Thomson as the assaulted prostitute. Lovely cinematography, let down a little by the rain-soaked nighttime ending which plunges the gory stuff and its aftermath mostly into shadows. Evocative music from Lennie Niehaus. Joel Cox’s editing won an Oscar, probably for the whipcrack swiftness of the violent moments. So did Hackman and Eastwood [as director].
After only ever presenting one western with a Best Picture award [1931’s stagey old epic Cimmaron] the Academy delivered two in three years. Unforgiven is memorable, despite not possessing the epic sweep of Cimmaron or Dances With Wolves; it deconstructs and reconstructs the traditional western and deserves praise for not attempting to rewrap familiar themes, instead it borrows from numerous cinematic sources to create something entirely new and forthright. The homages are many but cleverly infiltrate the narrative so they feel new, or at least fresh, to the viewer. Many non-western fans won’t even notice the reverence.
Unforgiven won’t ever be my favourite western – it is too modern in that regard, missing an essential frontier goodness and frontloading gratuitousness as a substitute – but the film is a ruefully entertaining, taut piece of cinematic art that provides strong story, setting and character rather than blind action to provide the bleak thrills.
If there was an award for best film review of the year on this site then you would win hands down with this one @chrisno1 I watched this with my son a couple of weeks ago, it’s a marvellous movie.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I second that; a great review of a great movie. I, of course, have been down among the old b&w films of many years ago.....
CALLING DR DEATH (1943)
The first in a series of six films, based on a then popular radio series, which in turn were based on a then popular series of books (perhaps CoolHandBond knows more about that end of things). All of them star Lon Chaney Jr in between stints as the Wolf Man, Dracula, etc. They’re not horror stories, although they border on them, being more mysteries with a creepy edge. Chaney plays a neurologist (they say, anyway; he’s more like a psychiatrist) who may or may not have murdered his richly deserving wife. The detective is J. Carrol Naish who is very much a precursor to “Columbo” in his way of solving the crime. It’s not a shining work of art, being a definite B-movie, but it does the job although the mystery is not too hard to figure out. Chaney isn’t bad although it does show that this isn’t his home territory.
The films (except the last one, apparently, which I’ve still to see) are introduced by a disembodied head inside some sort of crystal ball who gives a rather “Twilight Zone” flavoured prologue to the action which I guess comes from the radio series.
You can. This is a brief summation of some of my favourites. If I watch a great movie or unusual movie I have forgotten about, it pops up onto a list like this. And there are many great westerns which are not on this list; for instance recently watching The Shepherd of the Hills for the first time was a revelation. I am not including comedy or musical westerns - otherwise Carry On Cowboy or Annie Get Your Gun might feature - but I hve included some modern westerns. In no order other than date:
I consider Once Upon A Time In The West to be the best western ever made - but that is only my opinion - glad you like it also, a stunning achievement of sound and vision seldom bettered on screen in any genre.
I saw Ride With The Devil at its London premier at the London Film Festival. I was disappointed with it and never watched it since. Maybe I am due a re-visit, it's been 25 years.
A deliriously daft action flick set on board a cargo freighter bound from Brazil to Puerto Rico. Nicolas Cage’s unscrupulous big game hunter is ferrying exotic animals to a San Diego zoo, including a rare albino jaguar. Meanwhile the US Feds are ferrying a crazy ex-NSA agent back to the States to stand trial for war crimes. Kevin Durand’s crazy killer goes all Hannibal Lecter on us in a frenzied bid to escape. When the animals are set free, they do the same and bodies turn up all over the ship killed by man and beast alike. It is left to Cage and perky Famke Janssen to save the day. Watching this makes one wonder how much lower Nic Cage can sink his career, which given his very fine acting ability is nowhere near as well-regarded as it could be. Bloody, violent, completely stupid and rather enjoyable, but it lacks tension, which it really shouldn’t, given the enclosed setting.
The second in the Inner Sanctum series (yes, I bought a box set of them) and better than the first. Here, Lon Chaney plays a university professor, a part for which he is even less suited than the neurologist in the first one. Apart from a brief look at how he met his bride on an obscure S. Pacific island, it’s set in the world of academia with the added ingredient of voodoo- which may be real or may not. Some people die, some others are wrongly suspected. The atmosphere is good, although as with the first one there’s not much difficulty in figuring out what’s going on. Evelyn Ankers, a regular co-star with Chaney, is very good and Chaney is not bad.
DEAD MAN’S EYES (1944)
This time round, Chaney is an artist and is more believable. What I haven’t mentioned so far is that most of the young, beautiful ladies in these films (eg students, models) find him irresistible in the way that, say, Cary Grant would be in the part. You can’t just shrug it off as an amusing sideline either, since much of the plots of this and the previous one revolve around two or three women chasing after him and causing trouble. Anyway, here he is blinded (maybe by his model who is jealous of his fiancée?) then accused of murdering the father of his fiancée who has willed his eyes to him after the old man dies. As you do. Once again, the villain isn’t hard to spot (I’m beginning to wonder if that’s standard for this series) and once again the investigating officer does the Columbo thing. Atmosphere is excellent, some of the acting isn’t (the model), Chaney is pretty good here.
Steve McQueen plays a version of Paul Newman’s pool room shark from The Hustler, though this time it’s poker that’s the game. The Kid is the hottest thing in New Orleans on the card tables but Edward G Robinson is the old time master of 5-Card stud and a game is set up so the champion can be decided. The cast is electrifying, from Karl Malden as the blackmailed dealer, Ann-Margret sizzling as Malden’s unfaithful wife, Tuesday Weld as The Kid’s girlfriend and Rip Torn superb as the snide wealthy businessman who wants to take Edward G down and win a fortune on the outcome. The actual poker game is Hollywood style where real betting practices are thrown out of the window to create tension, but that’s par for the course and doesn’t detract from the point of the plot. McQueen is his usual super-cool self and great support is given by the likes of Cab Calloway, Jack Weston, Jeff Corey and Joan Blondell as the reserve dealer. It helps if you know the rules of poker, but not essential, as it’s a character driven movie and dramatically excellent.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Back to basics. This showed in a censored version as it was transmitted at 11am on a Sunday morning, but I've seen it before and I know what they cut out!
CARRY ON ABROAD (1972)
A unsuccessful attempt to redo the boozy ‘worker’s outing’ sequence from Carry On at Your Convenience as a whole film. The Carry On regulars decamp to the Palace Els Bels on a weekend package tour organised by Kenneth Williams’s hapless tour guide. They discover a half finished hotel managed by eccentric Peter Butterworth and his loud, cantankerous mother [Hattie Jacques]. From the moment the guests check in, disaster begins and it never stops, from faulty toilets, to terrible cuisine, to marriage infidelities, to defrocking priests, to holes in the roofs, floors and doors, to a skirmish at the local brothel, to – of course – the appalling weather.
I would say cue laughter, but there really isn’t a lot. Talbot Rothwell tries to mix the traditional cheeky elements of the Carry On saga with a more liberated attitude to sex and sexual matters. The two simply don’t mix. We discussed on here the influence or not of the sex-comedy on British cinema and you can clearly see how the Carry On team were concerned they were losing ground to the lowest end of an already low-end market. Thing is, if they had included a few more boobs and bums and not just Barbara Windsor’s sneak-peek efforts, they might have sparked a modicum of interest. As it is, the movie isn’t titillating or very amusing, recycling jokes we’ve heard before and performances we’ve already seen. Butterworth redoes his nervous straight-man gig from Up the Kyber and the climax is a reinvention of that film’s dining scene as the hotel collapses around the randy guests, the latter fuelled by an aphrodisiac spiked punch.
The best turns come from June Whitfield and Kenneth Conner as a sex-starved starchy couple who rediscover their amour and Gail Grainger’s saucy hostess, determined to bed Kenneth Williams and whoever else she can to get there. Sally Geeson and Carol Hawkins add some more nice faces [ahem] to look at [the ‘this and that’ bikini was funny], but scenery aside, the film isn’t doing very much. The replacement male faces are a bunch of non-entities; even Kenneth Cope would do better than this lot. Ray Brooks, who excelled as a shady lothario in Richard Lester’s The Knack, has sunk a long way to end up in this kind of s##t-show. There’s also a condescending attitude to homosexuals which sits badly in today’s climate. To demonstrate the insensitive depths being mined, it seems very cruel to poke fun at Charles Hawtrey’s alcoholism by having his final role in the series being that of a drunk.
Blink and you’ll miss this fun credit: Technical Advisor – Sun Tan Lo Tion.
Directed by Terence Fisher, this a first viewing for me. It all begins very creepily in VillageOfTheDamned style, with cars and planes crashing and villagers dropping dead suddenly. There are a few survivors and they congregate at the local inn (well, you would, wouldn’t you?). Men in space suits are then spotted which turn out to be slow walking robots. As the villagers are killed one by one they turn into white eyed zombies. The American test pilot hatches a plot to destroy a transmitter that is controlling the robots. The remaining survivors fly off in a Boeing 707 to search for other survivors!
At just over an hour this clips along at a steady pace with good performances from Dennis Price and Thorley Walters. The American real life husband and wife duo of Willard Parker and Virginia Field show their B-movie credentials as they staggered to the end of their careers. Fisher handles it all competently but the spookiness of the opening twenty minutes dilutes into standard sci-fi fare when the zombies appear. Still, I’m glad I watched it, and the hour passed by happily enough.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Comments
@chrisno1 As a note to Bond fans, Margaret Nolan [Goldfinger] and Anouska Hemple [OHMSS] both have small roles as sexy dolly birds.
Small roles but big assets (cue cackle from Sid James)
I like this one, TV stalwart Geoffrey Hughes has an early role as well. Good review.
😉😉😉
CARRY ON MATRON (1972)
A hilarious comedy from the usual team that mines the medical dictionary for as many double-entendres as possible. There is almost a joke or pun every 30 seconds in this movie, a hit rate so high it puts most modern comedy efforts to shame, four of them come in the credits: subtitles such as Womb at the Top or The Pregger’s Opera. The film is set at the fictional Finisham Maternity Hospital, presided over by Kenneth Williams’s hypochondriac chief surgeon Sir Bernard Cutting, ruled with a soft fist by Hattie Jacques’s Matron who swans effortlessly around Bunn Ward, locally known as the Pudding Club, where Terry Scott’s skirt chasing Dr Prodd seduces all and sundry and Charles Hawtrey’s psychiatrist Dr F.A. Goode hypnotises himself instead of his patients.
Talbot Rothwell outdoes himself with the sheer volume of humour, a screenplay as tight and clever as anything he wrote in the sixties Carry On ‘golden era’. Sid James continues a minor rehabilitation from At Your Convenience by playing a cheeky villain as opposed to a cackling, ogling, aging lothario. The role is reminiscent of the original radio series Hancock’s Half Hour where his spiv would constantly involve Tony in various dodgy dealings. James played many roles like this early in his career, think The Lavender Hill Mob, and the toned down antics here make for a better performance. He’s leading a hapless gang of thieves seeking to steal the hospital’s supply of birth control pills. Kenneth Cope plays his son Cyril who is forced to dress as a female nurse to scout the premises. Cue much confusion from hopeless hoodlums Bernard Bresslaw and Bill Maynard: “Cor, you look lovely – I’d like to see a bit more up top – He doesn’t want to draw attention to himself – I could stick an extra sock in it – You remind me of your mother.” Barbara Windsor’s cheeky nurse falls for Cyril and he falls into a bath full of bubbles and Gilly Grant. Our friends Margaret Nolan and Valerie Leon play pregnant patients. This exchange between Nolan and Terry Scott is particularly fine:
Mrs Tucker: “I was a little bit worried about my husband being able to have children.”
Dr Prodd: “Oh yes, he was a little older than you.”
M.T: “88… and you suggested it might be a good idea to take in a lodger a little nearer my own age…. Well, it worked! I’m pregnant.”
D.P: “What about your husband?”
M.T: “Oh, he’s over the moon?”
D.P: “And the lodger?”
M.T: “Well, that’s the problem. She’s pregnant too.”
Williams, Jacques, Scott and Hawtrey are on top form. Kennth Connor makes a reliable return as an expectant father whose wife, Joan Sims, is long overdue but does nothing except eat. The unlikely antics of this awful hospital’s life prove a fertile ground for scene after scene of confusion, misbehaviour and downright dirty slap-n-tickle fun: “You’re the medicine I’ve been wanting,” implores Williams, “Three times a day and shake before consumption.”
The film goes off the rails a little at the very end, when James impersonates a multi-lingual doctor named Zhivago and a silly chase around the hospital set ensues, but getting there was tremendous fun and the film ends on a note of hilarity when he unveils his next plan: to infiltrate a nudist camp. Now that’s a Carry On movie I’d have loved to have seen!
A British Film Institute retrospective named Carry On Matron one of the five finest Carry On movies, along with Cleo, Screaming, Up the Kyber and Camping. It is extremely hard to disagree with that assessment when script, performances and most importantly the final visual result are so in tune. Indeed, the BFI list sits well with me; I would probably substitute Follow That Camel for Carry On Camping as I find the latter tiresomely infantile – one memorable scene does not make a classic. Carry On Matron is without any doubt the last rush of blood to the flailing arm of a series which headed into less chucklesome territory from this point on.
Gunfight at OK Corral (1957)
This is a fictional account of a real gunfight that has been portrayed in several movies. Kirk Douglas is Doc Holiday, Burt Lancaster is Wyatt Earp, Rhonda Fleming and Jo Van Fleet are the female leads and a young Denis Hopper is in a supporting role. I think Douglas and Van Fleet as his romantic interest are superb! In their first scene Doc is in a foul mood in his hotel room, arguing with with Van fleet's character while he throws knives at the door. Both hav interesting characters and I wonder if I've ever seen Kirk Douglas deliver a better performance. The rest of the cast are rarely as good. Burt Lancaster seems like he's in a different movie at first, a sheriff from a white hat/black hat movie. He gets better, but I wonder what someone like Gregory Peck could've done with the part. I enjoyed the movie a lot with many good characters, a good plot and good action. The title song is painfully clichéd and was the inspiration to Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles down to using the same singer. Is it really that hard to ride past Boot Hill (the graveyard) without playing the verse about Boot Hill, even once?
Never got into Carry On Matron - I think it was the issue of birth control pills that made it a bit too adult, not coy enough to watch with your parents, a bit crude. That and having Kenneth Cope in drag - it just isn't convincing and, alright, funny - Bresslaw in drag is funny, plus Cope isn't quite a Carry On regular though technically I guess he is - but it didn't stick because in Convenience he's a different character, usually they sort of stay in character all the time, admittedly Bresslaw is an impressive exception, but you know what I mean.
Caught a Confessions movie in the early hours the other night... the pop star one, though he's just the drummer it seems. Pretty rough stuff though it had an appalling fascination. A two-part doc on Channel 5 recently said the series, and those like it, pretty much saved the British film industry in the mid 70s and gave work to comedy stars who might have struggled otherwise - Irene Handle, John le Mesieurer and so on.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
See the Movie Posters thread #155
I saw part one of that doc @Napoleon Plural but was too tired to watch the second. It was partway interesting. I expect the second part concentrated on Mary Millington. I am always suspicious of the claim these 'adult comedies' saved the British film industry. I think they mean they saved the cinema industry [temporarily]. Plenty of British movies were made in the 70s and many were cheap knock-off jobs; the demise of the sex comedy came at the same time Hammer and Rank collapsed production, so I'm not convinced. Maybe I need to do more research. Also a doc that talks at length about Barry Evans yet never mentioned the phenomenally popular but now profoundly un-PC Mind Your Language has to be taken with salt.
Anyone who has enjoyed @chrisno1 's highbrow reviews of lowbrow movies - and this includes @chrisno1 himself I suppose - should check out the imdb reviews for Barry Evans' Adventures of a Taxi Driver, which rates a lowly 4.4.
and better still, the imdb reviews of Come Play With Me, which I did rent when I was a member of LoveFilm (no, it wasn't a dirty movie film club...) and scores an even lower 3.7. It stars 'our' Alfie Bass (Moonraker is listed as one of the actor's key films!). I find these reviews highly entertaining and of course better than the actual film!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075868/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_come%2520play%2520with%2520me
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Salvador (1986)
This movie by Oliver Stone is based on the experiences of journalist Richard Boyle and what happened to him during the civil war in El Salvador a few years earlier. James Woods plays the lead as Boyle, but it's really interesting to see Jim Belushi in a mostly serious role. I like movies that do a deep-dive into a place and time we don't see very often, and that certainly is the case here. The US were supporting the right-wing regime who again supported brutal death squads. Were they fighting Marxist guerillas or a peasant uprising? I'd say both. If it wasn't for one scene I'd be inclined to say the movie was to kind to the rebels, but the scene where a rebel commander shoots prisoner and Boyle yells: "You'll become just like them!" is very effective. Political movies getting a cinematic release and gets nominated for Oscars are extremely rare these days, and I sometimes wish them back. I say watch Salvador and get your own opinion. The movie is never dull, that's for sure.
@Napoleon Plural "and better still, the imdb reviews of Come Play With Me, which I did rent when I was a member of LoveFilm (no, it wasn't a dirty movie film club...) and scores an even lower 3.70"
I checked these out. I've seen the film - many years ago -- and I wouldn't waste as many words as those guys do on such low brow cinematic drivel.
For some reason the italics button stopped working 🤨
In a similar 'here's one someone wrote earlier' spirit, check out this Bond on Twitter type thing - a guy reviews George Lazenby's Man From Hong Kong or whatever it was, with enthusiasm:
https://x.com/Maindrian/status/1821291292078567903
Roger Moore 1927-2017
@chrisno1 @Napoleon Plural The ‘70’s British sex comedies didn’t “save” the film industry, but they did create employment for a raft of comedy actors who normally wouldn’t have touched these films with a barge pole if there had been other roles available, but the industry was in the doldrums at that time and they had to put bread on the table, so there was no alternative.
The “Confessions” movies were a smuttier version of “Carry On” and the “Adventures” series were a lower grade version of those (yes, it was possible). The Mary Millington movies were more soft-core porn comedy/crime features than out and out sex comedies.
"No lectures Q - we're all familiar with the history of the 1970s soft porn sex comedy!"
One off thing about those times is the sexualisation of the media in a way that now seems entirely foreign, but is of course a staple of our own Movie Posters or Book Covers threads. So as a kid with that burgeoning sexuality leafing through a copy of the London Evening Standard - or Evening News as it was the probably known - you would come to the daily movie listings - again, they simply don't do that anymore now - and it would have grainy black and white ads for the posters be it Moonraker or Saturday Night Fever or of course any saucy soft porn film with a lurid title like 'What no pyjamas' while your mother - who had purchased the damn thing after all - sat on the train seat nearby.
It is odd how hardcore porn was illegal then but the mainstream depiction of lurid soft core porn was simply everywhere.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I feel suitably chastised 🙄
UNFORGIVEN (1992)
A revisionist western from an era when the genre was considered box-office poison.
Clint Eastwood directs himself as William Munny, an aged widowed retired gunslinger whose soul is full of deep regret and guilt for the killings he has perpetrated. Desperate for cash to support his farm and two young children, he takes on one last bounty hunt on behalf of a group of aggrieved prostitutes in the corrupt town of Big Whiskey. One of their number has been slashed and scarred for life by a volatile cowpoke, but the local law – ‘Little’ Bill Daggett – prefers to treat the guilty with kid gloves and even worse compensates the brothel owner for potential loss of earnings while ignoring the grievances of the injured. As portrayed by Gene Hackman, Little Bill is the antithesis of everything you would expect from the man with the silver star; as sheriff he is mean, vicious, fallible and without mercy. His home life is solitary. He shows no skill for anything other than antagonism. His reputation is built on fear – even travelling gunman ‘English Bob’ – a brilliant supporting role from Richard Harris – decides a confrontation with Little Bill is a step too far. Little Bill represents the angel of death William Munny dreams about, all the disease of a wretched life pouring from his skull. At the climax of the film, Munny shoots point blank into Bill’s face to obliterate his nightmares.
The film challenges our traditional perception of the western genre by ensuring our sympathies lie only with the stubborn prostitutes. All the gunfighters and the lawmen are low-down, dirty, exploitive, conniving cowards, some are unnaturally brutal killers. The three ‘heroes’ of Munny, his pal Ned Logan - a wonderfully erudite Morgan Freeman - and a short-sighted youngster who goes by the name the Schofield Kid, regret their lives administering summary justice, but regret alone does not prevent their continual descent into the murky, shivering world of blood money executions. The film is a slow burn of an actioner, developing like a hybrid of Shane, The Magnificent Seven and The Wild Bunch. It isn’t cinematically like any of those films, but it touches on similar themes of community, law and order and avenging dark angels. The screenplay acknowledges a debt to the spaghetti western by twisting its characters away from archetypes with contradictory unheroic behaviour. That the script focusses much on Little Bill’s environment, his affableness at odds with his psychopathic tendencies, only highlights the avenging trio’s awkwardness, in their dealings with the pursuit, each other and ultimately the resolution, an awkwardness which manifests itself as decency, although even here one senses decorum is only restored through tiredness and a sense of fair play mixed with embarrassment.
Brilliant performances from an aging cast, who like the decent(ish) blood-soaked heroes all feel and look very weary. Some pathos is added from Anna Thomson as the assaulted prostitute. Lovely cinematography, let down a little by the rain-soaked nighttime ending which plunges the gory stuff and its aftermath mostly into shadows. Evocative music from Lennie Niehaus. Joel Cox’s editing won an Oscar, probably for the whipcrack swiftness of the violent moments. So did Hackman and Eastwood [as director].
After only ever presenting one western with a Best Picture award [1931’s stagey old epic Cimmaron] the Academy delivered two in three years. Unforgiven is memorable, despite not possessing the epic sweep of Cimmaron or Dances With Wolves; it deconstructs and reconstructs the traditional western and deserves praise for not attempting to rewrap familiar themes, instead it borrows from numerous cinematic sources to create something entirely new and forthright. The homages are many but cleverly infiltrate the narrative so they feel new, or at least fresh, to the viewer. Many non-western fans won’t even notice the reverence.
Unforgiven won’t ever be my favourite western – it is too modern in that regard, missing an essential frontier goodness and frontloading gratuitousness as a substitute – but the film is a ruefully entertaining, taut piece of cinematic art that provides strong story, setting and character rather than blind action to provide the bleak thrills.
Very good.
If there was an award for best film review of the year on this site then you would win hands down with this one @chrisno1 I watched this with my son a couple of weeks ago, it’s a marvellous movie.
I second that; a great review of a great movie. I, of course, have been down among the old b&w films of many years ago.....
CALLING DR DEATH (1943)
The first in a series of six films, based on a then popular radio series, which in turn were based on a then popular series of books (perhaps CoolHandBond knows more about that end of things). All of them star Lon Chaney Jr in between stints as the Wolf Man, Dracula, etc. They’re not horror stories, although they border on them, being more mysteries with a creepy edge. Chaney plays a neurologist (they say, anyway; he’s more like a psychiatrist) who may or may not have murdered his richly deserving wife. The detective is J. Carrol Naish who is very much a precursor to “Columbo” in his way of solving the crime. It’s not a shining work of art, being a definite B-movie, but it does the job although the mystery is not too hard to figure out. Chaney isn’t bad although it does show that this isn’t his home territory.
The films (except the last one, apparently, which I’ve still to see) are introduced by a disembodied head inside some sort of crystal ball who gives a rather “Twilight Zone” flavoured prologue to the action which I guess comes from the radio series.
Can I ask you what your favour western(s) are?
You can. This is a brief summation of some of my favourites. If I watch a great movie or unusual movie I have forgotten about, it pops up onto a list like this. And there are many great westerns which are not on this list; for instance recently watching The Shepherd of the Hills for the first time was a revelation. I am not including comedy or musical westerns - otherwise Carry On Cowboy or Annie Get Your Gun might feature - but I hve included some modern westerns. In no order other than date:
Stagecoach (1939)
Destry Rides Again (1939)
Fort Apache (1948)
High Noon (1952)
Rancho Notorious (1952)
The Naked Spur (1953)
The Big Country (1958)
Rio Bravo (1959)
The Magnificent Seven (1960)
The Misfits (1961)
Lonely Are The Brave (1962)
A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
For a Few Dollars More (1965)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
Django (1966)
Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)
Hang Em High (1968)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
True Grit (1969)
Little Big Man (1970)
El Condor (1970)
McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971)
Chato's Land (1972)
Posse (1975)
The Shootist (1976)
China 9 Liberty 37 (1978)
Comes A Horseman (1978)
Lonesome Dove (1989) (TV Series)
Young Guns (1990) (sentimental memories only)
Dances With Wolves (1990)
The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Wind River (2017)
The Power of the Dog (2021)
Great. I'll give you a shorter list, but I'm probably forgetting some:
- Once upon a time in the West
- The Searchers
- True grit (2010- yes, I think the Cohen brothers version is the better one)
- The good, the bad and the ugly
- Dances with wolves
- Ride with the devil
I consider Once Upon A Time In The West to be the best western ever made - but that is only my opinion - glad you like it also, a stunning achievement of sound and vision seldom bettered on screen in any genre.
I agree!
I saw Ride With The Devil at its London premier at the London Film Festival. I was disappointed with it and never watched it since. Maybe I am due a re-visit, it's been 25 years.
Unfortunately I’m unfamiliar with this series in both movie and book formats - I will search for it on my subscription channel.
PRIMAL (2019)
A deliriously daft action flick set on board a cargo freighter bound from Brazil to Puerto Rico. Nicolas Cage’s unscrupulous big game hunter is ferrying exotic animals to a San Diego zoo, including a rare albino jaguar. Meanwhile the US Feds are ferrying a crazy ex-NSA agent back to the States to stand trial for war crimes. Kevin Durand’s crazy killer goes all Hannibal Lecter on us in a frenzied bid to escape. When the animals are set free, they do the same and bodies turn up all over the ship killed by man and beast alike. It is left to Cage and perky Famke Janssen to save the day. Watching this makes one wonder how much lower Nic Cage can sink his career, which given his very fine acting ability is nowhere near as well-regarded as it could be. Bloody, violent, completely stupid and rather enjoyable, but it lacks tension, which it really shouldn’t, given the enclosed setting.
WEIRD WOMAN (1944)
The second in the Inner Sanctum series (yes, I bought a box set of them) and better than the first. Here, Lon Chaney plays a university professor, a part for which he is even less suited than the neurologist in the first one. Apart from a brief look at how he met his bride on an obscure S. Pacific island, it’s set in the world of academia with the added ingredient of voodoo- which may be real or may not. Some people die, some others are wrongly suspected. The atmosphere is good, although as with the first one there’s not much difficulty in figuring out what’s going on. Evelyn Ankers, a regular co-star with Chaney, is very good and Chaney is not bad.
DEAD MAN’S EYES (1944)
This time round, Chaney is an artist and is more believable. What I haven’t mentioned so far is that most of the young, beautiful ladies in these films (eg students, models) find him irresistible in the way that, say, Cary Grant would be in the part. You can’t just shrug it off as an amusing sideline either, since much of the plots of this and the previous one revolve around two or three women chasing after him and causing trouble. Anyway, here he is blinded (maybe by his model who is jealous of his fiancée?) then accused of murdering the father of his fiancée who has willed his eyes to him after the old man dies. As you do. Once again, the villain isn’t hard to spot (I’m beginning to wonder if that’s standard for this series) and once again the investigating officer does the Columbo thing. Atmosphere is excellent, some of the acting isn’t (the model), Chaney is pretty good here.
THE CINCINNATI KID (1965)
Steve McQueen plays a version of Paul Newman’s pool room shark from The Hustler, though this time it’s poker that’s the game. The Kid is the hottest thing in New Orleans on the card tables but Edward G Robinson is the old time master of 5-Card stud and a game is set up so the champion can be decided. The cast is electrifying, from Karl Malden as the blackmailed dealer, Ann-Margret sizzling as Malden’s unfaithful wife, Tuesday Weld as The Kid’s girlfriend and Rip Torn superb as the snide wealthy businessman who wants to take Edward G down and win a fortune on the outcome. The actual poker game is Hollywood style where real betting practices are thrown out of the window to create tension, but that’s par for the course and doesn’t detract from the point of the plot. McQueen is his usual super-cool self and great support is given by the likes of Cab Calloway, Jack Weston, Jeff Corey and Joan Blondell as the reserve dealer. It helps if you know the rules of poker, but not essential, as it’s a character driven movie and dramatically excellent.
I agree, that's a terrific movie with a dream cast. Edward G steals every scene he's in, like the old master he was.
Back to basics. This showed in a censored version as it was transmitted at 11am on a Sunday morning, but I've seen it before and I know what they cut out!
CARRY ON ABROAD (1972)
A unsuccessful attempt to redo the boozy ‘worker’s outing’ sequence from Carry On at Your Convenience as a whole film. The Carry On regulars decamp to the Palace Els Bels on a weekend package tour organised by Kenneth Williams’s hapless tour guide. They discover a half finished hotel managed by eccentric Peter Butterworth and his loud, cantankerous mother [Hattie Jacques]. From the moment the guests check in, disaster begins and it never stops, from faulty toilets, to terrible cuisine, to marriage infidelities, to defrocking priests, to holes in the roofs, floors and doors, to a skirmish at the local brothel, to – of course – the appalling weather.
I would say cue laughter, but there really isn’t a lot. Talbot Rothwell tries to mix the traditional cheeky elements of the Carry On saga with a more liberated attitude to sex and sexual matters. The two simply don’t mix. We discussed on here the influence or not of the sex-comedy on British cinema and you can clearly see how the Carry On team were concerned they were losing ground to the lowest end of an already low-end market. Thing is, if they had included a few more boobs and bums and not just Barbara Windsor’s sneak-peek efforts, they might have sparked a modicum of interest. As it is, the movie isn’t titillating or very amusing, recycling jokes we’ve heard before and performances we’ve already seen. Butterworth redoes his nervous straight-man gig from Up the Kyber and the climax is a reinvention of that film’s dining scene as the hotel collapses around the randy guests, the latter fuelled by an aphrodisiac spiked punch.
The best turns come from June Whitfield and Kenneth Conner as a sex-starved starchy couple who rediscover their amour and Gail Grainger’s saucy hostess, determined to bed Kenneth Williams and whoever else she can to get there. Sally Geeson and Carol Hawkins add some more nice faces [ahem] to look at [the ‘this and that’ bikini was funny], but scenery aside, the film isn’t doing very much. The replacement male faces are a bunch of non-entities; even Kenneth Cope would do better than this lot. Ray Brooks, who excelled as a shady lothario in Richard Lester’s The Knack, has sunk a long way to end up in this kind of s##t-show. There’s also a condescending attitude to homosexuals which sits badly in today’s climate. To demonstrate the insensitive depths being mined, it seems very cruel to poke fun at Charles Hawtrey’s alcoholism by having his final role in the series being that of a drunk.
Blink and you’ll miss this fun credit: Technical Advisor – Sun Tan Lo Tion.
Otherwise, a bit of a wet weekend in Els Bels.
THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING (1964)
Directed by Terence Fisher, this a first viewing for me. It all begins very creepily in Village Of The Damned style, with cars and planes crashing and villagers dropping dead suddenly. There are a few survivors and they congregate at the local inn (well, you would, wouldn’t you?). Men in space suits are then spotted which turn out to be slow walking robots. As the villagers are killed one by one they turn into white eyed zombies. The American test pilot hatches a plot to destroy a transmitter that is controlling the robots. The remaining survivors fly off in a Boeing 707 to search for other survivors!
At just over an hour this clips along at a steady pace with good performances from Dennis Price and Thorley Walters. The American real life husband and wife duo of Willard Parker and Virginia Field show their B-movie credentials as they staggered to the end of their careers. Fisher handles it all competently but the spookiness of the opening twenty minutes dilutes into standard sci-fi fare when the zombies appear. Still, I’m glad I watched it, and the hour passed by happily enough.