D. Carol Reed
B&W
Like all right minded people, I love Alec Guinness to bloody pieces. Clearly he was one of the greatest actors Britain ever produced, with a body of cinematic work unmatched by any of his similarly titled peers. One can appreciate why he'd get so phenomenally stroppy with idiot ‘Star Wars’ fans, as – really – who wants such a glorious career boiled down to "Use the force, Luke"? But I can also see that there was something incredible diffident about Alec Guinness. There was, even through his brilliance, an unbreachable reserve. That’s part of the reason why one can’t imagine him successfully playing the lead in a love story (even though he did more than once play the lead in a love story), but it’s also the reason why he actually makes an incredibly good movie serial killer.
Alec Guinness was superb in most roles, but charming, polite but ultimately ruthless killer is clearly one that makes him lick his lips with real relish.
In this blacker than the blackest black British black comedy, we have him as Walter Witkins, an ice cream man who drives his cart from seaside town to seaside town and when he gets the opportunity bumps off young ladies he meets, His murders are ridiculously creepy in their politeness and deference. Walter is so solicitous to make sure that he isn't hurting his victims or causing them discomfort, sometimes even beyond the point he has his hands around their throat and is choking the sheer life out of them. (There’s something fantastically creepy about your killer telling you: “Don’t worry, this will all work out fine. I promise it will all be over in a moment.” as your windpipe is crushed and your eyes roll back in your head.) When we meet him he's had a successful summer with lots of ice creams sold and a fair number of young ladies murdered and the Old Bill – as far as we can tell – nowhere to be seen. Then in one particularly sunny and busy seaside resort he runs into Hayley Mills. She’s all sweetness and innocence, golden curls and childhood purity. But she is not only much older than she looks, she has the habit of knocking off lascivious middle-aged men.
The stage is set for a deliciously deadly duel.
Released the year after ‘Psycho’, this movie is the equivalent of Norman Bates meeting a Marian Crane who is travelling the highways with a dead body in her boot. What’s more, it contains a scene the equivalent of Norman Bates bursting into the shower to find it empty and then starting to wonder why that glass of milk he had earlier tasted so funny. In many ways then this is a more disturbing film than ‘Psycho’, as in the Hitchcock classic we know even on first viewing that Norman is going to be caught. Here we don't know who will come out on top, who will die, who will be captured, or whether the two of them will overcome their differences and set up a magnificent murderous home together. We just get the strange beauty of an old killer and a young killer staring at each other with deadly adoration before doing some genuinely creepy flirting over ice cream cones.
Wednesday 29 October 2014
Sunday 26 October 2014
G-Man! (1953)
D. Richard McCarthy
Brutal, torn from the headlines, B&W
Here's a film strangely neglected in Ronald Reagan's oeuvre, which is peculiar as it’s clearly and utterly so perfectly him. In fact it's so amazingly and absolutely him that this is probably what his wet dreams looked like.
Here he is as John ‘Duke’ Calhoun, a tough and uncompromising FBI agent running a hard-nosed operation against vicious gangsters in some unnamed American city. These gangsters are evil with a capital EVIL. You can tell from the way they sneer, or menace shopkeepers, or casually gun down one of their molls. Or you can tell by the way they run jazz clubs and sell reefer to further corrupt the wastrel patrons. Or you can tell by the way they have a comic book factory where soulless, conscience-less artists turn out violent and filthy comic strips to corrupt the young. Or you can tell by the truly damning fact that each night they salute the hammer and sickle and say thanks to their beloved Mother Russia.
Yes, Ronald Reagan is taking on communists, gangsters, jazz musicians (a couple of years later it would have been rock'n'roll) and comic books all wrapped up in one tight little bundle. Yes, he is on a crusade against everything a good right winger hates.
Part of that of course needs unpacking, as how could organised crime ever really be perceived as a communist activity? Surely the mafia is all about the profit margin, all about the bottom line, all about ruthlessness to keep their cash flow gushing. The cosa-nostra is really not interested in some higher principle or changing the world, they just want to be shady little capitalists and make lots of dough. If anything Ronald Reagan (government employee taking a paycheque from the state) is much more of a communist than they are. But it’s indicative of the muddy thinking of this film that everything bad has to be put into one pile, and everything good has to take one incredibly righteous Ronald Reagan shape. So even though these mobsters are clearly into gambling and prostitution, and obviously being creative with their revenue streams by publishing “disgusting and cruel” comic books (Reagan’s character’s description), they are still somehow men of the far left who despise the free market. They are working to destabilise all that’s good in America, i.e. capitalism, in the aid of communism, and they’re doing it by being the best capitalists they possibly can be. Please, don’t hurt your head by trying to get all this to make sense – it really, really doesn’t.
Ronald pushes the whole thing along – from every raid on a seedy nightclub, to the numerous interminable self-righteous speeches about the glory of America – in what is irrefutably one of his angriest and most committed performances. I can't say it’s a work of acting art, or even really that good, but evidently he believed furiously and wholeheartedly in it.
Brutal, torn from the headlines, B&W
Here's a film strangely neglected in Ronald Reagan's oeuvre, which is peculiar as it’s clearly and utterly so perfectly him. In fact it's so amazingly and absolutely him that this is probably what his wet dreams looked like.
Here he is as John ‘Duke’ Calhoun, a tough and uncompromising FBI agent running a hard-nosed operation against vicious gangsters in some unnamed American city. These gangsters are evil with a capital EVIL. You can tell from the way they sneer, or menace shopkeepers, or casually gun down one of their molls. Or you can tell by the way they run jazz clubs and sell reefer to further corrupt the wastrel patrons. Or you can tell by the way they have a comic book factory where soulless, conscience-less artists turn out violent and filthy comic strips to corrupt the young. Or you can tell by the truly damning fact that each night they salute the hammer and sickle and say thanks to their beloved Mother Russia.
Yes, Ronald Reagan is taking on communists, gangsters, jazz musicians (a couple of years later it would have been rock'n'roll) and comic books all wrapped up in one tight little bundle. Yes, he is on a crusade against everything a good right winger hates.
Part of that of course needs unpacking, as how could organised crime ever really be perceived as a communist activity? Surely the mafia is all about the profit margin, all about the bottom line, all about ruthlessness to keep their cash flow gushing. The cosa-nostra is really not interested in some higher principle or changing the world, they just want to be shady little capitalists and make lots of dough. If anything Ronald Reagan (government employee taking a paycheque from the state) is much more of a communist than they are. But it’s indicative of the muddy thinking of this film that everything bad has to be put into one pile, and everything good has to take one incredibly righteous Ronald Reagan shape. So even though these mobsters are clearly into gambling and prostitution, and obviously being creative with their revenue streams by publishing “disgusting and cruel” comic books (Reagan’s character’s description), they are still somehow men of the far left who despise the free market. They are working to destabilise all that’s good in America, i.e. capitalism, in the aid of communism, and they’re doing it by being the best capitalists they possibly can be. Please, don’t hurt your head by trying to get all this to make sense – it really, really doesn’t.
Ronald pushes the whole thing along – from every raid on a seedy nightclub, to the numerous interminable self-righteous speeches about the glory of America – in what is irrefutably one of his angriest and most committed performances. I can't say it’s a work of acting art, or even really that good, but evidently he believed furiously and wholeheartedly in it.
Wednesday 22 October 2014
The Spaceman of Alcatraz (1968)
D. Franc Violon
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
Sunday 19 October 2014
The Fishman of Alcatraz (1965)
D. Harry Paddock
B&W
After the success of 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' (and maybe even the lesser success of 'The Jazzman of Alcatraz') lots of Hollywood producers felt the need to make a movie with the suffix 'of Alcaraz'. After all it was the most famous prison in the world, in the news because it had recently shut down and so rather than just making A.N. Other prison film, an ALCATRAZ film made sound of commercial sense of the kind that makes dollar signs flash in the eyes of Hollywood producers and thin lines of drool to run from the corners of their greedy fat mouths. Most of these films though had ridiculously little to actually do with Alcatraz (as we'll see in the next entry), this one does though - and clearly even managed to film some scenes on the island. Not great scenes admittedly, not even memorable scenes, but enough for the film to yell out “Hey bozos! We actually fucking went there!”
I'll be honest, when I first saw the title 'The Fishman of Alcatraz' I seriously misjudged the film’s content. My obviously distressingly adolescent mind, crammed full of images of Spiderman and Batman, just imagined that Alcatraz was a really stupid place to send the captured superhero, Fishman. This is after all a prison surrounded by water and so would be a terrible location in which to hold the mighty Fishman. (Clearly my mind is full of cut-price versions of Aquaman). If one was to have Fishman in custody a prison far in land would be miles better. On Alcatraz, Fishman’s escape is inevitable.
However my super hero fantasies proved to be as unfounded and inaccurate as mermaids, mermen and that whole Atlantis myth, as this film turned out to be about a man who just really liked fish.
Following all the beats of the Burt Lancaster movie, here a doggery Elisha Cook jr is a convict who really likes fish and through correspondence courses and careful examination of his surroundings, becomes an expert on them. Therefore Alcatraz becomes his salvation, as he has lots of time to examine fish and even discovers a new breed. Set in the 1930s, there are cameos from an overweight and sweating Al Capone and a Machine Gun Kelly who ends his sentences with “rat-tat-tat” just so we know who he is. Cook looks old, but is still convincing as a small crook who got in above his head, and the whole is in many ways quite a sweet film. However whereas birds have beautiful plumage and a distinct look on screen, fish either swim away or just flop about. And after 90 minutes watching a kindly old man pursue this Piscean interest, if you haven’t flopped limp to your seat yourself, you’ll almost certainly have swum hurriedly away.
B&W
After the success of 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' (and maybe even the lesser success of 'The Jazzman of Alcatraz') lots of Hollywood producers felt the need to make a movie with the suffix 'of Alcaraz'. After all it was the most famous prison in the world, in the news because it had recently shut down and so rather than just making A.N. Other prison film, an ALCATRAZ film made sound of commercial sense of the kind that makes dollar signs flash in the eyes of Hollywood producers and thin lines of drool to run from the corners of their greedy fat mouths. Most of these films though had ridiculously little to actually do with Alcatraz (as we'll see in the next entry), this one does though - and clearly even managed to film some scenes on the island. Not great scenes admittedly, not even memorable scenes, but enough for the film to yell out “Hey bozos! We actually fucking went there!”
I'll be honest, when I first saw the title 'The Fishman of Alcatraz' I seriously misjudged the film’s content. My obviously distressingly adolescent mind, crammed full of images of Spiderman and Batman, just imagined that Alcatraz was a really stupid place to send the captured superhero, Fishman. This is after all a prison surrounded by water and so would be a terrible location in which to hold the mighty Fishman. (Clearly my mind is full of cut-price versions of Aquaman). If one was to have Fishman in custody a prison far in land would be miles better. On Alcatraz, Fishman’s escape is inevitable.
However my super hero fantasies proved to be as unfounded and inaccurate as mermaids, mermen and that whole Atlantis myth, as this film turned out to be about a man who just really liked fish.
Following all the beats of the Burt Lancaster movie, here a doggery Elisha Cook jr is a convict who really likes fish and through correspondence courses and careful examination of his surroundings, becomes an expert on them. Therefore Alcatraz becomes his salvation, as he has lots of time to examine fish and even discovers a new breed. Set in the 1930s, there are cameos from an overweight and sweating Al Capone and a Machine Gun Kelly who ends his sentences with “rat-tat-tat” just so we know who he is. Cook looks old, but is still convincing as a small crook who got in above his head, and the whole is in many ways quite a sweet film. However whereas birds have beautiful plumage and a distinct look on screen, fish either swim away or just flop about. And after 90 minutes watching a kindly old man pursue this Piscean interest, if you haven’t flopped limp to your seat yourself, you’ll almost certainly have swum hurriedly away.
Wednesday 15 October 2014
The Jazzman of Alcatraz (1962)
D. Quentin Hofstetter
B&W
White corporate America’s ability to either sanitise or remake everything in its own image always astounds me. Here we get a double jackpot, with a bleached and cleaned up version not just of the hardest nastiest prison in the United States; but much more than that, the absolute whitest version of jazz music human eyes and ears have ever had the misfortune to endure.
The altogether much too clean-cut and distinctly unblemished Robert Vaughan plays an incarcerated jazz musician. It’s hinted that he’s the victim of a miscarriage of justice and I can believe that, as a more honest, decent, grown up boy-scout boring, sickeningly saintly character one couldn’t possibly meet. Whilst enjoying a stint in Alcatraz he starts to write a piece in his head based on the sounds of life, laughter and love drifting across the bay from San Francisco. This isn’t a bad idea for a story, in the right hands those sounds of freedom would surely be both an inspiration and an exquisite torture. However the not bad idea at the centre is decidedly hamstrung by the fact that this is a film which wants to do nothing to upset middle America. And things which might upset middle America clearly include both jazz and Alcatraz.
I actually went to Alcatraz recently and if ever a film fails to capture the grim bleakness of it, it's ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’. There are moments when the director and designer seem to trying to make it look grim, but not wanting to scare off the punters means it mostly comes across as homely. It’s like a hotel that you would never want to stay in again, but still actually a three star hotel. There's a nice autumnal light to the cellblock, helpful and articulate fellow prisoners and guards who are not only courteous but actually encouraging. In fact the version in the film seems a great place to pursue an artistic endeavour, as a writer myself I almost wanted to check in there.
More alarmingly though, Robert Vaughan is the nicest, sweetest, most upstanding – non-drinking, non-smoking (absolutely no drugs!) – jazz musician to ever grace the silver screen. Even his prison uniform looks freshly starched and laundered each morning. Given the actual history of jazz music, he is painfully white and so his casting feels amazingly anachronistic in what is a contemporary film. Remember that unfortunate scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where Marty McFly inadvertently inspired Chuck Berry? Well imagine that cultural appropriation spread out to eighty three minutes of length and you have ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’.
Except not quite.
Vaughan broods about his quite nice cellblock playing jazzman (playing rather than being, it’s an important distinction), he stares moodily out while composing in his head, but what we get here is nowhere near ‘Johnny B Goode’. It's not really a surprise that after all the inspired looks and beauty struck words he uses to describe his opus, on unveiling it is so lacklustre and insipid that to describe it as elevator music would be far too kind.
B&W
White corporate America’s ability to either sanitise or remake everything in its own image always astounds me. Here we get a double jackpot, with a bleached and cleaned up version not just of the hardest nastiest prison in the United States; but much more than that, the absolute whitest version of jazz music human eyes and ears have ever had the misfortune to endure.
The altogether much too clean-cut and distinctly unblemished Robert Vaughan plays an incarcerated jazz musician. It’s hinted that he’s the victim of a miscarriage of justice and I can believe that, as a more honest, decent, grown up boy-scout boring, sickeningly saintly character one couldn’t possibly meet. Whilst enjoying a stint in Alcatraz he starts to write a piece in his head based on the sounds of life, laughter and love drifting across the bay from San Francisco. This isn’t a bad idea for a story, in the right hands those sounds of freedom would surely be both an inspiration and an exquisite torture. However the not bad idea at the centre is decidedly hamstrung by the fact that this is a film which wants to do nothing to upset middle America. And things which might upset middle America clearly include both jazz and Alcatraz.
I actually went to Alcatraz recently and if ever a film fails to capture the grim bleakness of it, it's ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’. There are moments when the director and designer seem to trying to make it look grim, but not wanting to scare off the punters means it mostly comes across as homely. It’s like a hotel that you would never want to stay in again, but still actually a three star hotel. There's a nice autumnal light to the cellblock, helpful and articulate fellow prisoners and guards who are not only courteous but actually encouraging. In fact the version in the film seems a great place to pursue an artistic endeavour, as a writer myself I almost wanted to check in there.
More alarmingly though, Robert Vaughan is the nicest, sweetest, most upstanding – non-drinking, non-smoking (absolutely no drugs!) – jazz musician to ever grace the silver screen. Even his prison uniform looks freshly starched and laundered each morning. Given the actual history of jazz music, he is painfully white and so his casting feels amazingly anachronistic in what is a contemporary film. Remember that unfortunate scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where Marty McFly inadvertently inspired Chuck Berry? Well imagine that cultural appropriation spread out to eighty three minutes of length and you have ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’.
Except not quite.
Vaughan broods about his quite nice cellblock playing jazzman (playing rather than being, it’s an important distinction), he stares moodily out while composing in his head, but what we get here is nowhere near ‘Johnny B Goode’. It's not really a surprise that after all the inspired looks and beauty struck words he uses to describe his opus, on unveiling it is so lacklustre and insipid that to describe it as elevator music would be far too kind.
Sunday 12 October 2014
Juan Wayne - Hollywood Superstar (2004)
D. Roberto Martinez (although, disappointingly, not the one who now manages Everton)
Colour
I like ‘Juan Wayne – Hollywood Superstar’, a film which exists in bright sunshine but also manages a harsh grittiness that Ken Loach would actually salivate over. It’s a film with dreams of Hollywood stardom (could that title scream ‘wannabe’ anymore?) but also has its fingers dirty with the drudgery of hard low paid work. It’s a film which very much positions itself as lying in the gutter and staring at the stars – although these aren’t the kind of stars you’d generally see from Griffith Observatory.
Part expose of the underclass that exists in the shadows of the bright lights in Beverly Hills; part satire of Hollywood and the fame hungry; part raucous sex comedy: the micro budget ‘Juan Wayne – Hollywood Superstar’ is not short of ambition, it has bags of ambition, sacks of ambition, bulging suitcases of ambition. Unfortunately that’s way too much ambition for such a small film and so it frequently overreaches. But then a film which has too many ideas is always more fun than a film meandering along on too few.
Juan works three jobs, one as a pool boy for a wealthy Hollywood producer who seems to be on the skids, one as a tour guide driving people to the outside of houses he can only dream of going into, and one as a barman in a gay club. His ability to juggle these jobs, the stoic way he accepts every insult and piece of shit that's thrown at him is the best of the film. Hector Gonzalez, who plays the lead, carries it off with a great deal of charm and panache, smiling a never dented grin even when clearly aware that he’s clinging onto the scabby underside of the Hollywood dream.
Less successful are the Hollywood satire sequences, with Juan going for auditions for crap looking acting roles and suffering embarrassing incidents in front of casting agents. I'm sure these scenes come from a real place, the kind of place where jobbing Hollywood actors sit around and discuss the sheer living hell of their existences, but really they're the kind of thing Joey on ‘Friends’ used to get up to every four weeks or so. We've seen it all before (and can see it again and again on Comedy Central, who make E4’s use of ‘Friends’ seem sparing) and really YOU CAN have too much of a good thing.
The worst though are the sections devoted to his illicit and snatched liaisons with the wife of the Hollywood producer whose career may very well be on the skids. If for whatever odd reason you wanted to see a bawdy low-stakes comedy with plenty of nearly being caught with the trousers down moments, then you've come to the right place. It’s tedious and disappointing in a film which elsewhere is so very much alive. But then I suppose even this is representative of Hollywood as a whole: there may just be a market for social expose, there sometimes is a market for satire, but sex most definitely sells.
Colour
I like ‘Juan Wayne – Hollywood Superstar’, a film which exists in bright sunshine but also manages a harsh grittiness that Ken Loach would actually salivate over. It’s a film with dreams of Hollywood stardom (could that title scream ‘wannabe’ anymore?) but also has its fingers dirty with the drudgery of hard low paid work. It’s a film which very much positions itself as lying in the gutter and staring at the stars – although these aren’t the kind of stars you’d generally see from Griffith Observatory.
Part expose of the underclass that exists in the shadows of the bright lights in Beverly Hills; part satire of Hollywood and the fame hungry; part raucous sex comedy: the micro budget ‘Juan Wayne – Hollywood Superstar’ is not short of ambition, it has bags of ambition, sacks of ambition, bulging suitcases of ambition. Unfortunately that’s way too much ambition for such a small film and so it frequently overreaches. But then a film which has too many ideas is always more fun than a film meandering along on too few.
Juan works three jobs, one as a pool boy for a wealthy Hollywood producer who seems to be on the skids, one as a tour guide driving people to the outside of houses he can only dream of going into, and one as a barman in a gay club. His ability to juggle these jobs, the stoic way he accepts every insult and piece of shit that's thrown at him is the best of the film. Hector Gonzalez, who plays the lead, carries it off with a great deal of charm and panache, smiling a never dented grin even when clearly aware that he’s clinging onto the scabby underside of the Hollywood dream.
Less successful are the Hollywood satire sequences, with Juan going for auditions for crap looking acting roles and suffering embarrassing incidents in front of casting agents. I'm sure these scenes come from a real place, the kind of place where jobbing Hollywood actors sit around and discuss the sheer living hell of their existences, but really they're the kind of thing Joey on ‘Friends’ used to get up to every four weeks or so. We've seen it all before (and can see it again and again on Comedy Central, who make E4’s use of ‘Friends’ seem sparing) and really YOU CAN have too much of a good thing.
The worst though are the sections devoted to his illicit and snatched liaisons with the wife of the Hollywood producer whose career may very well be on the skids. If for whatever odd reason you wanted to see a bawdy low-stakes comedy with plenty of nearly being caught with the trousers down moments, then you've come to the right place. It’s tedious and disappointing in a film which elsewhere is so very much alive. But then I suppose even this is representative of Hollywood as a whole: there may just be a market for social expose, there sometimes is a market for satire, but sex most definitely sells.
Wednesday 8 October 2014
Robin Hood and the Vampires (1962)
D. Henry Jagol
Gruesome and rich Colour, the way gothic should be
Putting Robin Hood in opposition to Dracula is actually a pretty good idea. After all vampires are the most aristocratic of all mythical monsters. Anybody can become a werewolf, but vampires have castles and huge tracts of land and servants and titles. They’re not the upwardly mobile screen monsters – that’s Frankenstein, who is self-making men wherever he goes; instead they’re the inherited wealth, excellent pedigree, Tatler-subscribing creatures of the undead. As such, who better to pit against them than a man who specialises in removing wealthy people from their wealth? A hero who has thrown away his own title and is now intent on making the aristocrats of this world more like the rest of us. Yes, true friend of the masses, Robin Hood, against serial exploiter of the blood of the proletariat, Count Dracula, makes loads of sense. Let’s bring on the ultimate class battle!
Unfortunately, this being a cheaply made AIP Hammer knock-off of the early Sixties, these kinds of issues are never raised. Indeed what the film is most interested in is shots of vampires with arrows bursting through their chests.
So we’re in the forest with Robin Hood (Stewart Granger, painfully aware that he’s slumming it) and his merry men. They’re having fun singing songs as they liberate the riches of the local aristocracy, but the nearby castle has a new tenant and he has plans for the region much darker than Robin Hood has ever imagined.
(Where all this is set is a bit up in the air. The word ‘Sherwood’ is never mentioned; neither is the word ‘Nottingham’. But presumably this is Robin Hood’s home-patch so this is Sherwood Forest and this is Nottingham and that’s a bizarrely gothic version of Nottingham Castle Dracula has just moved into. But then some of the locals know Dracula of old, which would suggest Transylvania. Whoever did the research for this movie really gave a slapdash effort.)
Before long the night time woods are filled with blood-suckers and the merry men are fighting to save every soul they can. This is fairly low-rent fun, but it’s not without moments of quality. Boris Karloff is clearly far too old to be Dracula (though it’s nice he finally got to play the old fangmeister), but Jack Nicholson as Reinfeld is there for the heavy lifting and does it with all the creepiness and malice as you’d expect from Jack; while some of the fight scenes have their moments – particularly Friar Tuck first trying to exorcise a female vampire, then waving his cross at her, then pleading with her about the rightness of God, then giving up on the holy stuff and simply setting fire to her.
So a film that misses the social message which should have been obvious in this story, is geographically confused and only just scrapes up to the level its ambition aims for. But in its Robin Hood/Dracula idea – even in an unambitious, ill thought out version of that idea – you just know it’s a movie Quentin Tarantino thinks is decidedly cool.
Gruesome and rich Colour, the way gothic should be
Putting Robin Hood in opposition to Dracula is actually a pretty good idea. After all vampires are the most aristocratic of all mythical monsters. Anybody can become a werewolf, but vampires have castles and huge tracts of land and servants and titles. They’re not the upwardly mobile screen monsters – that’s Frankenstein, who is self-making men wherever he goes; instead they’re the inherited wealth, excellent pedigree, Tatler-subscribing creatures of the undead. As such, who better to pit against them than a man who specialises in removing wealthy people from their wealth? A hero who has thrown away his own title and is now intent on making the aristocrats of this world more like the rest of us. Yes, true friend of the masses, Robin Hood, against serial exploiter of the blood of the proletariat, Count Dracula, makes loads of sense. Let’s bring on the ultimate class battle!
Unfortunately, this being a cheaply made AIP Hammer knock-off of the early Sixties, these kinds of issues are never raised. Indeed what the film is most interested in is shots of vampires with arrows bursting through their chests.
So we’re in the forest with Robin Hood (Stewart Granger, painfully aware that he’s slumming it) and his merry men. They’re having fun singing songs as they liberate the riches of the local aristocracy, but the nearby castle has a new tenant and he has plans for the region much darker than Robin Hood has ever imagined.
(Where all this is set is a bit up in the air. The word ‘Sherwood’ is never mentioned; neither is the word ‘Nottingham’. But presumably this is Robin Hood’s home-patch so this is Sherwood Forest and this is Nottingham and that’s a bizarrely gothic version of Nottingham Castle Dracula has just moved into. But then some of the locals know Dracula of old, which would suggest Transylvania. Whoever did the research for this movie really gave a slapdash effort.)
Before long the night time woods are filled with blood-suckers and the merry men are fighting to save every soul they can. This is fairly low-rent fun, but it’s not without moments of quality. Boris Karloff is clearly far too old to be Dracula (though it’s nice he finally got to play the old fangmeister), but Jack Nicholson as Reinfeld is there for the heavy lifting and does it with all the creepiness and malice as you’d expect from Jack; while some of the fight scenes have their moments – particularly Friar Tuck first trying to exorcise a female vampire, then waving his cross at her, then pleading with her about the rightness of God, then giving up on the holy stuff and simply setting fire to her.
So a film that misses the social message which should have been obvious in this story, is geographically confused and only just scrapes up to the level its ambition aims for. But in its Robin Hood/Dracula idea – even in an unambitious, ill thought out version of that idea – you just know it’s a movie Quentin Tarantino thinks is decidedly cool.
Sunday 5 October 2014
The Return of Lancelot (1974)
D. Ted Obery
Colour
You can see the thought processes at work here.
Someone, somewhere must have been pitching a version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. No doubt facing some dubious Hollywood exec in a riot of beige, who was wondering why the hell the kids of today would want to see anything about poncy, fruity Englishmen in tights and strange women in ponds distributing swords willy-nilly, the no doubt perspiring filmmaker uttered the line: “They were just like the cowboys of their day!” At that moment the meeting had a little jolt of electricity and some wet behind the sideburns bright young thing leapt up to say that rather than just claim Arthur, Lancelot and crew were the cowboys of their day, why don’t we bring them together with actual cowboys? “Excellent!” shouts everybody, and there are Cuban cigars and lines of coke all round. Of course the little filmmaker celebrated with everyone else, even as he saw his dreams of a great Arthurian epic die.
And so here we have it:
Lancelot is cursed by Mordred to sleep for a thousand years (the maths aren’t going to work here, but just go with it). But when he wakes up, he is no longer in Wales or Cornwall or wherever the hell Camelot is thought to have been these days, he’s in Arizona (the geography isn’t going to work here either, but just go with it). He’s still in his Arthurian garb, he’s still speaking a distinctly flowery form of olde Englishe, but there he is – a new warrior in the Wild West.
Richard Chamberlain plays Lancelot and does so with a certain steely prissiness. This man is fussy on manners and etiquette and will kill you if you go against his rules, but is a true hero. Geoffrey Lewis is Mad Bill, the first cowboy Lancelot encounters. He looks flea-bitten and sunburnt, and has rotten teeth as well a booze-filled cackle borrowed from Edmund O’Brien in ‘The Wild Bunch’. But after a stand-off played for both tension and laughs, mutual respect breaks out, and it becomes clear that underneath it all Mad Bill is a good man and not that mad at all (he might not even be called Bill).
Let the legendary tales of this mis-matched pair begin!
Unfortunately this time travel adventure with an English hero has exactly the same flaw as last week’s time travel adventure with an English hero, in that having set up a fantastic premise it then proceeds to follow normal genre tropes and becomes a western The two get involved with a villainous land barren (Richard Widmark) and after various skirmishes, win the day because one of their number is an expert swordsman (I don’t want to ruin the suspense, so won’t tell you which one). Obviously the fact that one of these characters is an Arthurian knight, spouting the kind of dialogue which only comes from a well-thumbed thesaurus, means it’s not totally devoid of fun. But it’s horribly and depressingly predictable and if it had turned into the TV series it so clearly wants to be, we’d have had week after week of this unambitious twaddle.
What it really needed was Mordred to have slept as well and the whole thing to be a showdown between these two ancient warriors, but that would have required a more ambitious film with an actual ending in mind, not one that seemed desperate to coast along for the next five years on just the one mutant of an idea.
Colour
You can see the thought processes at work here.
Someone, somewhere must have been pitching a version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. No doubt facing some dubious Hollywood exec in a riot of beige, who was wondering why the hell the kids of today would want to see anything about poncy, fruity Englishmen in tights and strange women in ponds distributing swords willy-nilly, the no doubt perspiring filmmaker uttered the line: “They were just like the cowboys of their day!” At that moment the meeting had a little jolt of electricity and some wet behind the sideburns bright young thing leapt up to say that rather than just claim Arthur, Lancelot and crew were the cowboys of their day, why don’t we bring them together with actual cowboys? “Excellent!” shouts everybody, and there are Cuban cigars and lines of coke all round. Of course the little filmmaker celebrated with everyone else, even as he saw his dreams of a great Arthurian epic die.
And so here we have it:
Lancelot is cursed by Mordred to sleep for a thousand years (the maths aren’t going to work here, but just go with it). But when he wakes up, he is no longer in Wales or Cornwall or wherever the hell Camelot is thought to have been these days, he’s in Arizona (the geography isn’t going to work here either, but just go with it). He’s still in his Arthurian garb, he’s still speaking a distinctly flowery form of olde Englishe, but there he is – a new warrior in the Wild West.
Richard Chamberlain plays Lancelot and does so with a certain steely prissiness. This man is fussy on manners and etiquette and will kill you if you go against his rules, but is a true hero. Geoffrey Lewis is Mad Bill, the first cowboy Lancelot encounters. He looks flea-bitten and sunburnt, and has rotten teeth as well a booze-filled cackle borrowed from Edmund O’Brien in ‘The Wild Bunch’. But after a stand-off played for both tension and laughs, mutual respect breaks out, and it becomes clear that underneath it all Mad Bill is a good man and not that mad at all (he might not even be called Bill).
Let the legendary tales of this mis-matched pair begin!
Unfortunately this time travel adventure with an English hero has exactly the same flaw as last week’s time travel adventure with an English hero, in that having set up a fantastic premise it then proceeds to follow normal genre tropes and becomes a western The two get involved with a villainous land barren (Richard Widmark) and after various skirmishes, win the day because one of their number is an expert swordsman (I don’t want to ruin the suspense, so won’t tell you which one). Obviously the fact that one of these characters is an Arthurian knight, spouting the kind of dialogue which only comes from a well-thumbed thesaurus, means it’s not totally devoid of fun. But it’s horribly and depressingly predictable and if it had turned into the TV series it so clearly wants to be, we’d have had week after week of this unambitious twaddle.
What it really needed was Mordred to have slept as well and the whole thing to be a showdown between these two ancient warriors, but that would have required a more ambitious film with an actual ending in mind, not one that seemed desperate to coast along for the next five years on just the one mutant of an idea.
Wednesday 1 October 2014
The Trials and Tribulations of Mister Henry Church (1984)
D. Russ Maybery
Colour
1984 seems as good a time as any to hire Simon MacCorkindale to appear in a blatant rip-off of ‘The Saint’. MacCorkindale was definitely up to the task; he more than had the charm and arrogance to pull off the role and if given a proper chance would have been a Simon Templar to match Roger Moore (or a James Bond for that matter). MacCorkindale’s other US foray was a legendary mess named ‘Manimal’. This, for the uninitiated, saw him play a doctor who could shape-shift into any animal of prey and who used his talents to help police with their investigations. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Actually it was wildly mocked, but I’ll be honest I always rather enjoyed it as a small child. As such he needed a chance to get his career back on track, and it’s a shame it went nowhere as this is a role which fits him like a burglar’s glove.
The thing is though, MacCorkindale isn’t actually playing Simon Templar. Maybe there was a rights issue, or maybe Ian Ogilvy’s agent threw the mother of all hissy fits, but here MacCorkindale is Henry Church – a master thief, adventurer, charmer, a man about town and one of the most famous men of his age.
Except he isn’t in his age anymore, as well as all his other achievements, he’s become an inadvertent time traveller.
One can only guess that Adam Ant’s success as an international popstar was enough for the producers to throw the premise of Sixties time travel show ‘Adam Adamant Lives’ in there as well. Or perhaps no one could think of any reason for a dashing 1930s English adventurer type to suddenly appear in 1980s LA, unless he was some kind of nostalgia fetishist – and nostalgia fetishists are hardly likely to appeal to that key demographic: the kids. So we have a prologue where Church fights his main adversary The Hood (a prologue so stuffed with terrible expositional dialogue that you wonder if the script is credited to one G. Lucas) before Church falls into a tank of dry ice where he’s frozen for nearly fifty years. Then one day Henry Church awakes in the 1980s, a curious place where even his unflappable English charm will be put sorely to the test.
There’s a lot of promise in this scenario, essentially a dapper English gentleman with self-assurance beyond anything that modern man can reach makes his way in the modern world. He hooks up with investigative reporter. Erin Gray, and the sparks do fly between him and this 1980s girl. (Gray I also watched as a small child in ‘Buck Rogers’, where she introduced me to the whole concept of withering looks – she really does have a fine selection of them). But the fact that this is a back-door pilot means that a lot of what’s promising about this scenario is lost in handling a case of the week. So we see Henry Church amazed by big TV sets and dealing with skinheads in leather jackets who play their music too loud on huge speakers, but most of what makes this so promising is lost among the tropes of a generic American detective show.
A promising and intriguing idea then, but a waste of talent and effort – and the first part of that sentence is more than could be said about ‘Manimal’ at least.
Colour
1984 seems as good a time as any to hire Simon MacCorkindale to appear in a blatant rip-off of ‘The Saint’. MacCorkindale was definitely up to the task; he more than had the charm and arrogance to pull off the role and if given a proper chance would have been a Simon Templar to match Roger Moore (or a James Bond for that matter). MacCorkindale’s other US foray was a legendary mess named ‘Manimal’. This, for the uninitiated, saw him play a doctor who could shape-shift into any animal of prey and who used his talents to help police with their investigations. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Actually it was wildly mocked, but I’ll be honest I always rather enjoyed it as a small child. As such he needed a chance to get his career back on track, and it’s a shame it went nowhere as this is a role which fits him like a burglar’s glove.
The thing is though, MacCorkindale isn’t actually playing Simon Templar. Maybe there was a rights issue, or maybe Ian Ogilvy’s agent threw the mother of all hissy fits, but here MacCorkindale is Henry Church – a master thief, adventurer, charmer, a man about town and one of the most famous men of his age.
Except he isn’t in his age anymore, as well as all his other achievements, he’s become an inadvertent time traveller.
One can only guess that Adam Ant’s success as an international popstar was enough for the producers to throw the premise of Sixties time travel show ‘Adam Adamant Lives’ in there as well. Or perhaps no one could think of any reason for a dashing 1930s English adventurer type to suddenly appear in 1980s LA, unless he was some kind of nostalgia fetishist – and nostalgia fetishists are hardly likely to appeal to that key demographic: the kids. So we have a prologue where Church fights his main adversary The Hood (a prologue so stuffed with terrible expositional dialogue that you wonder if the script is credited to one G. Lucas) before Church falls into a tank of dry ice where he’s frozen for nearly fifty years. Then one day Henry Church awakes in the 1980s, a curious place where even his unflappable English charm will be put sorely to the test.
There’s a lot of promise in this scenario, essentially a dapper English gentleman with self-assurance beyond anything that modern man can reach makes his way in the modern world. He hooks up with investigative reporter. Erin Gray, and the sparks do fly between him and this 1980s girl. (Gray I also watched as a small child in ‘Buck Rogers’, where she introduced me to the whole concept of withering looks – she really does have a fine selection of them). But the fact that this is a back-door pilot means that a lot of what’s promising about this scenario is lost in handling a case of the week. So we see Henry Church amazed by big TV sets and dealing with skinheads in leather jackets who play their music too loud on huge speakers, but most of what makes this so promising is lost among the tropes of a generic American detective show.
A promising and intriguing idea then, but a waste of talent and effort – and the first part of that sentence is more than could be said about ‘Manimal’ at least.
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