Jungle Jim (1984)

D. Hackworth Hopes
Colour

Ah, Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic swimmer turned Tarzan, who once the most famous period of his career was over, picked up a jungle suit and a paunch and became Jungle Jim on both film and TV. “Who’s Jungle Jim?” I hear you cry. Well, Jungle Jim was another character created by the same guy who dreamt up Flash Gordon and was kind of a fully dressed western version of Tarzan, but one who operated in Asia rather than Africa. So he’s a sanitised take on the great white hunter, suitable for kids of all ages – even if Weissmuller looked a bit too portly and the jungle couldn’t be any more fake if Johnny was just stood in front of a plain background with the words ‘Trees Go Here’ scrawled on it.

The same year that director Hugh Hudson gave us a truly self-serious version of Tarzan in ‘Greystoke’, we had the other side of the coin with a remake of ‘Jungle Jim’. Here was Flash Gordon himself, Sam Jones, tackling another of Alex Raymond’s creations and proving once again that he was born at completely the wrong time. If ever there was a one dimensional actor who was good at striking heroic poses in the face of all kinds of monster nonsense, it was Sam Jones. But he needed to either exist in the time of B movie madness or the kind of schlock the Sci-fi channel turns out week after week now. The 1980s were really no good for him.

Having been knocked out and dumped in the jungle, Jim awakes in the mythical country of Muthapetox wearing an outfit that makes him look like Indiana Jones just after he’s been to the dry cleaners. Ever the adventurer, it isn’t long before he’s earned the wrath of white jungle priestess, Barbara Carrera (another performer who screams the 1980s and another performer who wasn’t given proper chance to put her bad acting skills to good use), and then rescued damsel in distress, Emma Samms, and her incredible shrinking skirt. Samms and Jones bicker and fight and flirt and fall in love as they trek their way out of the jungle and towards ‘civilisation’. But Jim realises that the legendary lost city of Nig-taca is not far away and determines to visit it.

So we’re in the land of made up places with obviously made up names, but unlike the same year’s Tarzan movie, that means it doesn’t take itself at all seriously. Interestingly the film ends with an alien spaceship rising out of the lost city where it’s been buried for thousands of years. That’s of course the same ending as ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ and yet in this far more preposterous film such an occurrence doesn’t seem to so utterly preposterous. The Indiana Jones film spent its length stretching our credibility (fridges that survive nukes; Shia Le Bouef channelling Tarzan, the entire Shia Le Boeuf performance in fact) until it reached the point of tearing that credibility completely asunder. ‘Jungle Jim’ though doesn’t require any credibility, in fact it demands you leave your credibility at the door at the start, and it’s all the better for it.

There Be Monsters!!! (1945)

D. Raoul Walsh
B&W

James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart: two actors so much of their age. Two actors who specialised in ripped from the headlines dramas of the thirties, before the latter became the definitive leading man of the 1940s. If you think of either, it’s likely to be with sharp suits, spats, guns and snarling faces. That’s why ‘The Oklahoma Kid’, where the two play cowboys and try to send the whole thing up, is held as something of a cult classic. An example of how badly wrong casting can go. It’s odd then that their last onscreen appearance together, a film that makes ‘The Oklahoma Kid’ look like it has the gravitas of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ in comparison, is so obscure. As ‘There Be Monsters!!!’ isn’t just Cagney and Bogart as cowboys, it’s Cagney and Bogart as a proto Butch and Sundance taking on Nazis and dinosaurs in the Arizona desert.

Our heroes are cowboys at the turn of the Twentieth Century, rogues perhaps, but essentially that heart of gold type outlaw so prominent in the movies but markedly less visible in real life. Framed for a crime they didn’t commit by a ruthless sheriff (Lon Chaney Jr – playing it straight and probably delighted not to be playing the monster role in a film with ‘monster’ in the title), they break out of their latest prison cell, ride into the desert and straight into a mist which takes them to – who the hell knows? The film isn’t clear on that point and it will only hurt your head to think about it. But before long our heroes are battling pterodactyls, tyrannosauruses and an oddly ferocious brontosaurus. What’s more, they find themselves up against Nazis, who are trying to capture the biggest carnivore of all – the mighty Galactisaurous – and have it lead their army to victory.

So we have dinosaurs and Nazis, at which point we rub our aching heads and presume that our heroes have somehow gone simultaneously back and forward in time. What’s really peculiar though is that Cagney and Bogart – despite being turn of the century roughneck men – instantly recognise the Nazis. They know who they are, what they’re up to and set out to stop them with the help and hindrance of the various dinosaurs.

It really is ridiculously potty – but if you just go with it, a ridiculously potty and exciting ride. In the distance Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs are even more impressive than they were in ‘King Kong’. It’s when they’re up close that they cause problems, as it can only raise smiles to watch such tough guy actors (and various blokes faking German accents) pretending to be menaced by pieces of rubber. But they do give it their all even in those scenes. Bogart makes these monsters seem real by sneering them in much the same way he does Peter Lorre; while Cagney acts the hell out of a confrontation with the most ridiculous and rubbery snake seen this side of an Ed Wood movie, as if defying the audience to find anything at all silly in what he’s doing. And that commitment is what makes this film so wonderful; throughout it our two leads really do give their all. Even when they’re winking at the camera and saying: “Hey! We know this is nonsense, but it’s fun!”

Raoul Walsh directs with panache and a ceaseless sense of adventure, and if you remove your brain and your sneer at the start, it’s most entertaining. But clearly we needed special effects to advance and Steven Spielberg to arrive to make this kind of nonsense as beautiful and as gripping as it could be.

Bloody McDougall of the Black Seas (1955)

D. Alfred E. Green
B&W

What on Earth is ‘Bloody McDougall of the Black Seas’?
Well, you’re not going to believe this, but it’s Groucho Marx as a pirate.

Really? That seems an absurd film even for you to have found.
No, I’m being serious.

Tell me more!
Well, here’s the Marx Brother with the longest career (and one that actually makes sense to a modern audience) yukking it up in a puffy shirts, dark pantaloons and a nice triangular hat. Of course even as a pirate the very modern glasses, cigar and moustache stay in place.

Is it a real moustache?
Yes, by the 1950s Groucho was able to afford a real moustache.

Is he a good pirate?
I think so. Certainly he’s more of a precursor to Captain Jack Sparrow than a successor to Long John Silver. He’s, as you’d no doubt expect, more of a funny pirate, rather than a psychotic pirate. His heart is in the right place.

I actually meant good as in successful.
Oh, there are so many ways you can define the word ‘good’, aren’t there?

Don’t worry, we go back – I knew you’d pick the wrong one.
Sorry. Well that’s the thing, no he’s not a good pirate, or remotely adequate come to that. But he’s a braggart and a dreamer and so boasts about his pirate escapades, but these pirate escapades don’t really exist.

So he’s just saying them for larks?
Well, that and because they impress bad girl of the sea, Jane Russell.

Oh, Jane Russell is in it as well? I do like Jane Russell.
Don’t we all? She has a particularly fetching sneer in this film, which doesn’t leave her even in those moments when she is well disposed towards Groucho. As such she gives the impression of a cat toying with a mouse. Also, her cleavage here would undoubtedly have pleased Howard Hughes.

Um, a bit sexist, isn’t it?
Sorry, given the nature of her career break, one is always more inclined to discuss Jane Russell’s neckline than any other actress.

Okay, as long as you don’t make a habit out of it.
I promise I won’t.

So who’s the bad guy in this film?
Well, what passes as the bad guy is actually the force of authority, in the prim and prissy form of Claude Rains.

Claude Rains too? This just gets better and better.
I know. So the film is largely Groucho as Randell Q MacDougall, who is basically a land lubber, talking up his murderous exploits to impress Russell, then when he is arrested for said murderous exploits having to talk his way out of custody with Rains. It’s Groucho talking and insulting and wheedling and spinning nonsense in the way only Groucho can.

Sounds fun, if a little repetitive.
It is fun, if a little repetitive.

So are there any actual hi-jinx on the high seas?
It takes almost the whole length for Groucho, and the movie, to leave dry land. Once there it’s all played for laughs rather than drama though.

I’m guessing a happy ending then?
Kind of, Groucho gets the girl, but the fact that she’s still sneering means that she no doubt has other plans for him.

You’ve convinced me. I’ll have to check it out.
My work here is done!

Tarzan in Hollywood (1978)

D. Frank Avanage
Colour


The King of the Jungle becomes the King of Hollywood?!


Where do we start?


We all know the Tarzan story.


Well, I think you know the Tarzan story.


Basically a good son of England finds himself stranded as a boy in the wilds of Africa and grows up to King of the Jungle. Eventually the Western world finds him again and the ensuing culture clash mines seams of drama or comedy (or a little of both), but certainly that big seam called adventure.
Every Tarzan adventure is basically the same, which means that filmmakers can do ANYTHING with them.


Here pretty freelance journalist, Stephanie Zimbalist (apparently one of those freelance journalists who just hang out in jungles for no apparent reason), stumbles across Tarzan and amidst swiftly arising passion between the two (he’s never seen a woman before; most of the guys she hangs out with are effete LA tossers) she introduces him to America.


So far, so Tarzan.


Here’s the twist though, such is the sensation her newspaper article causes and such are Tarzan’s good looks and obvious charisma, he becomes a major Hollywood star. Just like that.  A montage makes clear his rapid rise to fame, as well as making clear how ludicrous a proposition this is. We see some of the films he stars in: western, science fiction, romance, period drama; but in each he’s wearing a loin cloth and still talking in stilted half-learnt English. Now lots of actors get by just playing versions of themselves, but here Tarzan is literally playing himself in every single film and apparently it’s a recipe for huge success.


Being a jungle man who largely follows his own whims means Tarzan fits right in to his new Hollywood lifestyle. He and Cheetah both go a little wild (Cheetah a little wilder), and both do things they regret (Cheetah much more so). But eventually Tarzan misses the simple ways of his jungle home and heads back, promising to look after the accompanying Stephanie and teach her the law of the jungle. Having frowned for a good half an hour of the film’s length, as Tarzan slips away from Hollywood he beams a big triumphant grin. Cheetah seems fucking gutted though.


It’s the predictable message and good low stakes fun, but you could easily have made this film about a farm boy from Kansas. Tom Selleck makes an appropriate macho and alpha-male Tarzan though. (My colleague has a massive crush on Tom Selleck. My colleague is married man with small children. My colleague is straight, but still not at all shy about voicing his adoration for the Selleck. I really must introduce him to this film.)  As Tarzan, Selleck wears a loin cloth, an ill-fitting wig and delivers all his lines in comical stuttering English. He looks so right for the part, but also so deeply and obviously uncomfortable.


That Kansas reference has triggered something in me though.


When this Zach Snyder thing is finished, can we please have ‘Superman in Hollywood’? 


Can’t you just picture him playing all his roles in tights and cape, before realising that a simple life of fighting Lex Luther is more for him?


If it happens, I want a cut.

Killer on Sunset Boulevard (1982)

D. Wayne Hopkin
Colour

Johnny Cash was a pious man. A Christian who put a lot of stake in his faith in God and recorded many gospel tracks – as well as, of all things, a Man in Black Christmas album. But there was also something sinister about Johnny Cash. You don’t bill yourself ‘The Man in Black’ if you want to be loved by everyone. Just as you don’t spend hours practicing a brooding sneer in front of the mirror as a teenager (we don’t think that look just arrived on his face, do we?) if you’re planning to make it as a happy-clappy, Christian entertainer. A faithful man Johnny Cash may have been, but he knew as sure as Alice Cooper knew, that darkness sells. That’s doubly true in films. You can go so far with being pious and Christian on a cinema screen, but you can do a hell of a lot more with sinister.

Even more than the other Monkees, Micky Dolenz clearly craved fame. If you think of the gurning comedy, or the mugging at camera while pretending to play the drums, then clearly this is a man desperate to be noticed. He stood out much more than Took or Nesmith, and made Davy Jones look like a blandly English ex-Coronation Street actor in comparison. There was in Dolenz, an all-round entertainer trying to get out, a counter- culture Sammy Davis Jr – but in reality all he really got to be was drummer in The Monkees.

Here Cash and Dolenz come together in ‘Killer on Sunset Boulevard’. Although, to be fair, it’s hardly a meeting brimming with the anticipation of a Newman/Redford, De Niro/Pacino or even Godzilla/ King Ghidorah.

It’s 1982 and neither of them is at the height of their careers (although Cash would later climb the summit again; Dolenz is no longer able to see it even with high powered binoculars). So it’s an odd combination in an odd film, but one which specifically plays to who they are. From the outside Johnny Cash and Micky Dolenz look odd casting, but on closer examination it’s difficult to think of anyone else playing these roles.

This is a movie which combines ‘The Valley of the Dolls’ with ‘Desperate Hours’. Dolenz is a Hollywood star, an actor and musician extraordinaire, one of the most famous people on the planet according to the oddly fawning news broadcast we see (even the E network would consider it a little uncritical). His character is clearly leading the life Micky Dolenz himself has always dreamt of. There’s a gorgeous wife and two daughters, but more importantly the adulation of the world – who could ask for more? Except, Dolenz also has a deranged fan. This fan takes the form of Johnny Cash, who on this bright sunny day invades Dolenz’s home and holds him and his family hostage. What follows is a tense siege where Dolenz gets more and more desperate for his and his family’s safety in the face of his totally implacable opponent.

I’ll be honest, this is not a great film. Dolenz in no way has the acting chops to pull this off, and comes over more a whining child in a playground rather than a husband and father strung out to the very end of his tether. But Cash is extraordinary, so still and dangerous, with eyes that have years of fear and hurt deep within. Cash – unlike a certain Sun Records colleague – is never thought to have made that much impression of a film, but here we have an embryonic Hannibal Lector and the template for a million other screen psychos to follow.

Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon (1972)

D. Horatio Jason
Colour

Having looked at ‘Malcolm on Wheels’ at the start of the week and made the point that British bikers are just far less scary than their American Hells Angel counterparts, I’m now going to make the point again by looking at perhaps THE scariest biker gang ever to grace American cinema. In ‘The Wild One’ Marlon Brando is asked what he’s rebelling against and famously responds with “Whadda you got?”. The Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon would see that as a weak and lily-livered answer. They aren’t just rebelling against what you’ve got, they’re rebelling against what you haven’t even thought of yet, what you haven’t even imagined. As this is not just the scariest biker gang in America (we’re told that more than once; so solid a fact is it within the film that I wonder if there was a little award ceremony where they received a plaque), but they’re actual werewolves.

Yes, werewolves.

Riding motorbikes.

Pretty cool, ay?

Interestingly this doesn’t follow the path of the normal werewolf film. In the normal werewolf film Lon Chaney is bitten and then strives against the rising animal urges within him. He is a human being, a civilised man and he doesn’t want the beast inside to take over. In the normal werewolf film the bite and the consequences thereof are terrible things to be fought against. Not here though, the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon are werewolves and fucking proud!

So we get incredible scenes of them pulling into trailer parts just at dusk, waiting for the sun to go down and then sating their appetites with huge amounts of blood and violence. This is a tremendously gory and gruesome film. It’s also an incredibly sexist film, the women are either chicks who want to be with the gang, or else they’re meat to feed the gang – no other roles but lovers or snacks, both requiring very little clothing. It fits well within the film’s viewpoint though as we see everything through the eyes of the gang; we never see anybody pursuing them, we never see any of their victims until briefly before the attacks. This is all about the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon and nothing but the Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon.

What defeats them is their own appetites, their own indulgences. The more they change, the harder it is to turn back and those more advanced in their lycanthropy end up on all fours scampering away into the woods, the part of them that was man totally lost. This does lead to a few scenes in daylight of men in werewolf make-up and leathers riding big motorbikes, and the filmmakers clearly don’t realise how funny a sight that is. But the message is that giving into your wildness means that your wildness subsumes you and you can never go back again. And the fact that they’re defeated by what’s within them, as opposed to some gunfight or narrative voodoo, makes this is a lot more subtle and clever a film than it pretends to be.

Malcolm on Wheels (1968)

D. Henry Schloss
B&W

There’s something much less intimidating about British bikers than their American counterparts. You see in films the American biker gangs, tearing up the American highways on their hogs, before tearing up American towns and then if they get the chance tearing up American womanhood. It’s all deliberately, unapologetically and provocatively intimidating; and because that image is so persuasive the belief becomes widespread that all American bikers are that way. Yet when you’re driving about the byways and highways of Blighty and you see British bikers, you don’t feel intimidated by them in the slightest. Even when there’s a group of them together, you can’t help thinking that they’re basically nice, if slightly oil-stained young men. No doubt they probably live at home with their mothers, they work as a bank clerk Monday to Friday and their favourite dinner is beef casserole. British bikers, even British bikers who dub themselves Hell’s Angels, just don’t have anywhere near the same air of menace about them.

This black & white British film seems to back up those prejudices. For the first half an hour the central character of Malcolm fits in exactly with what we imagine a British motorcyclist to be. Played by David Hemmings, still young, thin and cherubic, he does indeed live at home with his Mum (Beryl Reid), has what looks at first glance and incredibly boring job in an architect’s office and he has great trouble talking to pretty girls – be they the nice lass down the street, or the kind of sneering leather-clad good-time girl he sees when sitting by himself at biker stops. He is bland and inoffensive, a boy/man who just likes riding his motorcycle and doesn’t want to be a fuss to anyone. He is exactly what we all imagine British bikers to be.

But that’s before he takes a Stanley knife and slashes open the throat of the leader of the local biker gang.

What follows is a serial killer/chase film, where Malcolm rides around the country with good girl who just wants some dark thrills, Jane Asher, pinion behind him. In many ways this is your stereotypical 1960s dangerous bikers’ story, with our protagonist killing those who get in their way and always just about evading the police. But even with all the deaths and the violence, it manages to avoid the dark glamour of American biker movies. One really can’t picture Dennis Hopper sat down eating marmite sandwiches out of kitchen foil and moaning about how he wishes his mum would use mustard instead; just as you can’t imagine Peter Fonda having deeply inadequate sex with his young pouting lover, who just calmly tells him that it’s okay, they can practice when they get home.

This is a film about motorcyclists on the open road, about youthful rebellion; so it’s a film that steals tropes from an incredibly recognisable part of American culture, yet still manages to produce something so weirdly and bathetically British.

The Playboy (1968)

D. Harry Reilly
Colour

One of Roger Moore’s first stabs at big screen stardom, sees him never stray far from his established persona as Roger Moore The Saint on the TV, which was of course the same persona he later made famous as Roger Moore James Bond.


Despite a long career, acting was never Roger Moore’s strong point and so you’d expect him to bring nothing else but his normal bag of tricks. Yet, even though Roger Moore is still so clearly playing Roger Moore, if you actually watch the film, you’ll see that incredibly he’s both wheeling out his normal debonair persona, but also subverting it at every level. Here his charm, suavity and effortless English cool aren’t the products of excellent breeding and inherent style, they’re just a façade which hides something far darker and more disturbing.

For in ‘The Playboy’, Roger Moore isn’t a gentleman thief or a gentleman spy, he’s a screwed up would-be gentleman and genuine mummy’s boy who likes nothing better than to little murder old ladies.

It’s 1968 in swinging London and Roger Moore cruises the streets in a second hand jaguar looking to meet ladies of a certain age he can woo and charm. Like a much hornier Max Bialystock, Moore is adept at making these women feel special; romancing them, wining & dining them, looking so happy to be on their arm. But the moment the dear old thing’s will is changed to reflect her new found infatuation, she’s ushered to bed by her handsome young suitor and takes a long sleep from which she’ll never awake. Irene Handl is suitably charmed, Joan Hickson is equally charmed, even visiting American former cabaret artiste Shelley Winters finds it impossible to resist. All fall asleep so full of love and passion that they never wake up to realise their mistake. It isn’t long though before the trail of corpses arouses suspicion and Detective Alex McGowan (playing essentially the same character he later did in Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’, but without the stilted marital bickering), starts to track his man.

Released the same year as ‘Alfie’, in many ways this serves as a darker version of that film: both being about Londoners with a taste for the ladies (including Shelley Winters, for whom 1968 was clearly a randy year around London). Yet even though the murders give it a far darker edge than ‘Alfie’, it still feels like a far older and more conservative film.

From a 1968 perspective (actually from a 2014 perspective too), Michael Caine is better cast as a modern man than his near contemporary Roger Moore. Roger Moore reeks of public school, the good tailor, the brogues. He doesn’t feel like a 1960s man, more a throwback to the 1950s, who’s only cool and young in the way Frank Sinatra was still trying to be cool and young. If ‘The Playboy’ had been released ten years earlier, its blithe mixture of that charm and murder would have made this a disturbing and genuinely memorable British film. As it was, it feels like a strange anachronism wrapped in an un-hip suit and stinking of Brylcreem.

Although watching his performance, clearly Roger Moore had more murder in his soul than he was ever encouraged to show as James Bond – and the fact he never got to use it is a dying shame. By the end of his tenure, Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny was very much the right age group for this film’s version of Roger Moore. So it’s genuinely disappointing that she just disappeared from the screen, rather than being gently ushered to sleep by an OO7 gone very, very rogue.

Now, wouldn’t THAT have been a hell of an ending to ‘A View to a Kill’?