D. Pierre de Franc
Colour
Michael Caine recently stated that he chose his movies on two criteria: whether it was going to make him a lot of money, or whether it was likely to win him an Oscar. So who the fuck knows what the explanation is for him appearing in the 1979 drugged up, fantasy thriller? As no sane observer would ever look at this and think it had Oscar glory etched right through it. So maybe French cinema in the early 1980s was bizarrely well remunerated, or perhaps it just suited Caine for tax purposes to hang out in Paris for a few months. Then again maybe he just read the script and thought it’d be a great wheeze to play Oscar Wilde.
Yes, here is Michael Caine as Oscar Wilde. An Oscar Wilde after the disgrace, who is now living in Paris and drinking too much and doing too many drugs, but his mind is still sharp and he has a murder mystery to solve.
For you see, as well as being a playwright, poet, novelist, raconteur and the world acknowledged wittiest man alive, Oscar Wilde was apparently also the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. So, get your bon mots and deer stalker ready, as this is Oscar Wilde, dipso great detective.
To be fair Caine does acquit himself admirably as Wilde. Wilde was a big man and so Caine immediately looks the part, but adds a certain prissy delicacy of tone. His voice manages to stay neutral accent-wise and that’s great as it would have been a cockney calamity if some Smithfield Market had slipped in. Christopher Plummer has the thankless Watson role as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, assisting Wilde in his investigation, but being Christopher Plummer does a genius job with it; and Liza Minnelli does a good Liza Minnelli as the Moulin Rouge dancer who loves Wilde too tragically.
So the performances are good and the idea is certainly no worse than any other, so it’s frustrating how bad a film this is. Having a hero who is self-medicating is one thing, using it as an excuse to OD on addled weirdness is quite another. Animated angels appear to Welles and give him important clues before then seeming to perform fellatio on him off camera; our heroes hire a horse and cart, where the horse is driving and the man – naked with bridle jammed into his mouth – is pulling; while in a fake reveal the killer is revealed to be Wilde himself, which does let Michael Caine face off against Michael Caine – both of them absolutely astonished. Most surreally though, at the Moulin Rouge we get – for no apparent reason – to watch frock-coat wearing Bee-Gees performing a slowed down ‘Islands in the Stream’, while Pans People writhe in front of them. All of that makes it sound more fun than it actually is, as this an ill focused and frustrating film - to the point where having watched it I even now have no idea who the killer is.
So the question remains and it's probably a mystery the great Oscar Wilde himself couldn't solve, why did Sir Michael Caine make this movie?
Showing posts with label detective. Show all posts
Showing posts with label detective. Show all posts
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Sunday, 7 December 2014
Angels in Los Angeles (1975)
D. Ted Grimley
Colour
The trio of films made in the 1970s where Tom Jones at the height of his pomp played a swinging sex-bomb private detective do have a surreally 1970s gritty aesthetic to them. Okay, no actually hard edged, down and dirty movie ever employs the real, honest to goodness, Elvis Presley as a super villain; but if you squint hard enough you can just imagine – with its washed out palate and naturalistic lighting – that you were really watching one of those proper serious 1970s films that were a wow with the critics and the Top 100 lists. Indeed it wouldn’t be totally out of place for Gene Hackman to appear here as a surveillance man – although any scene between a downbeat Gene Hackman and a naturally exuberant (barely acting) Tom Jones would make the eyes of even the most blasé viewer actually boggle.
But what makes the third film so jarring, is that the makers have married this grittiness to the kind of ludicrous plot that a Roger Moore Bond film of the same vintage would have dismissed as just a bit silly. We’re in Los Angeles, where the murder of a poet hippy on Venice Beach leads Tom towards a man-hating, beautiful Russian spy who is planning to release an air-born bug into downtown LA that will remove the potency of all men and turn them into limp-wristed wimps. It’s up Tom Jones (as Wayne Wales) the most virile man in The City of Angels (and America, and Europe and almost certainly the world) to turn her head and stop her plan.
As the beautiful Russian spy we have Tippi Hedren, finally out of her Hitchcock contract and choosing this rather strange way to celebrate her freedom. Of course the audience already knows that she can do cool and aloof, but there’s no answer as to whether she can actually do anything else. That’s, to say the least, weird. Tom Jones is of course sex on legs, and here is a film where the beautiful Russian spy is supposed to fall in love with him, in lust with him and basically be over-whelmed by passion for her Welsh lover boy. But passion, or even mild interest, are emotions Tippi triumphantly fails to register. At least as Marnie she was supposed to be frigid when confronted by a smouldering Sean Connery, here she’s supposed to be swept of our feet by our Tom – yet it’s like watching a wet blanket take on a flame thrower and being told that the flame thrower won even though the evidence of our own eyes says that the wet blanket barely flickered.
And that – even beyond the fact that it’s a ludicrously 1960s plot (doesn’t Woody Allen in the original ‘Casino Royale’ want to do something similar? And that’s supposed to be a comedy, isn’t it?) is the film’s main problem; the fact that we have a movie here that ultimately hinges on these two being in love and never manages to make the audience believe such a thing is even slightly possible or conceivable.
The credits roll with the two of them settling down, Wayne Wales becoming a one woman man (yeah, that will last) and even for as ramshackle and jarring a series of films as this, it feels a bizarrely half-baked ending. And yet ‘bizarre’ and ‘half-baked’ would be good ways to describe the whole series so maybe it fits.
Colour
The trio of films made in the 1970s where Tom Jones at the height of his pomp played a swinging sex-bomb private detective do have a surreally 1970s gritty aesthetic to them. Okay, no actually hard edged, down and dirty movie ever employs the real, honest to goodness, Elvis Presley as a super villain; but if you squint hard enough you can just imagine – with its washed out palate and naturalistic lighting – that you were really watching one of those proper serious 1970s films that were a wow with the critics and the Top 100 lists. Indeed it wouldn’t be totally out of place for Gene Hackman to appear here as a surveillance man – although any scene between a downbeat Gene Hackman and a naturally exuberant (barely acting) Tom Jones would make the eyes of even the most blasé viewer actually boggle.
But what makes the third film so jarring, is that the makers have married this grittiness to the kind of ludicrous plot that a Roger Moore Bond film of the same vintage would have dismissed as just a bit silly. We’re in Los Angeles, where the murder of a poet hippy on Venice Beach leads Tom towards a man-hating, beautiful Russian spy who is planning to release an air-born bug into downtown LA that will remove the potency of all men and turn them into limp-wristed wimps. It’s up Tom Jones (as Wayne Wales) the most virile man in The City of Angels (and America, and Europe and almost certainly the world) to turn her head and stop her plan.
As the beautiful Russian spy we have Tippi Hedren, finally out of her Hitchcock contract and choosing this rather strange way to celebrate her freedom. Of course the audience already knows that she can do cool and aloof, but there’s no answer as to whether she can actually do anything else. That’s, to say the least, weird. Tom Jones is of course sex on legs, and here is a film where the beautiful Russian spy is supposed to fall in love with him, in lust with him and basically be over-whelmed by passion for her Welsh lover boy. But passion, or even mild interest, are emotions Tippi triumphantly fails to register. At least as Marnie she was supposed to be frigid when confronted by a smouldering Sean Connery, here she’s supposed to be swept of our feet by our Tom – yet it’s like watching a wet blanket take on a flame thrower and being told that the flame thrower won even though the evidence of our own eyes says that the wet blanket barely flickered.
And that – even beyond the fact that it’s a ludicrously 1960s plot (doesn’t Woody Allen in the original ‘Casino Royale’ want to do something similar? And that’s supposed to be a comedy, isn’t it?) is the film’s main problem; the fact that we have a movie here that ultimately hinges on these two being in love and never manages to make the audience believe such a thing is even slightly possible or conceivable.
The credits roll with the two of them settling down, Wayne Wales becoming a one woman man (yeah, that will last) and even for as ramshackle and jarring a series of films as this, it feels a bizarrely half-baked ending. And yet ‘bizarre’ and ‘half-baked’ would be good ways to describe the whole series so maybe it fits.
Wednesday, 26 November 2014
Mummy in Manhattan (1936)
D. Raoul Walsh
B&W
It made sense in 1936 to cast Jimmy Cagney as a tough hitting private detective. It meant that Cagney could do all the things he was good at, but actually do it on the right side of the law. So he could intimidate guys by yelling at them, as long as they were bad guys; he could slap guys about and shoot them with aplomb, as long as the guys with bruises and bullet wounds were bad; and he could cuddle up with dodgy dames, as long as he led them on the path to redemption rather than further down the rocky road to badness. What’s more he got to live at the end of the movie and the audience could cheer him as a hero. Yes, Cagney could be the same wild and violent and dangerous Cagney we all loved as long as he was being wild, violent and dangerous for the powers of truth and justice. It’s the American way.
Of course having gone down the road of making Cagney a big bad, but actually virtuous and good, detective in New York City, there’s no real explanation as why on Earth his antagonist is a long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.
Welcome to ‘Mummy in Manhattan’!
This is the kind of genre mesh-up which is common today but must have been like splitting the viewer’s skull open and stirring the contents around with a spoon back in the 1936 – a hard-hitting detective, supernatural horror movie, with some broad comedy thrown in just in case anyone felt short changed.
When the adopted daughter of the Egyptian ambassador disappears, Cagney is called into investigate. At first he thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend, but gradually his investigation leads him to the Museum of Natural History where a special exhibition is taken place – a tomb of the evil boy king “Totem-Munara’ has recently been discovered in Egypt and now the artefacts have made it to New York City. But it seems that old Totem is not as lifeless or as harmless as the smug museum administrators imagine.
It looks like noir in its shadowy black and white, but it’s also clearly channelling Boris Karloff in a way which must have had the lawyers at Universal twitching. (Although the fact that both were leaping on the recent discovery of Tutankhamun meant they didn’t have an artful hieroglyphic leg to stand on.) The film is stagey as hell with all the shocks signposted, but Cagney is having an absolute ball. It’s great to watch him sneer at his adversary, as who else would have the guts and gall to sneer: “Come on, bandage boy, you think you’re tough but I can take you down with scissors, see”?
At first glance this would look to take Cagney out of his comfort zone, but what makes it so brilliant is that Cagney just makes it his comfort zone.
B&W
It made sense in 1936 to cast Jimmy Cagney as a tough hitting private detective. It meant that Cagney could do all the things he was good at, but actually do it on the right side of the law. So he could intimidate guys by yelling at them, as long as they were bad guys; he could slap guys about and shoot them with aplomb, as long as the guys with bruises and bullet wounds were bad; and he could cuddle up with dodgy dames, as long as he led them on the path to redemption rather than further down the rocky road to badness. What’s more he got to live at the end of the movie and the audience could cheer him as a hero. Yes, Cagney could be the same wild and violent and dangerous Cagney we all loved as long as he was being wild, violent and dangerous for the powers of truth and justice. It’s the American way.
Of course having gone down the road of making Cagney a big bad, but actually virtuous and good, detective in New York City, there’s no real explanation as why on Earth his antagonist is a long dead Egyptian Pharaoh.
Welcome to ‘Mummy in Manhattan’!
This is the kind of genre mesh-up which is common today but must have been like splitting the viewer’s skull open and stirring the contents around with a spoon back in the 1936 – a hard-hitting detective, supernatural horror movie, with some broad comedy thrown in just in case anyone felt short changed.
When the adopted daughter of the Egyptian ambassador disappears, Cagney is called into investigate. At first he thinks it’s her ex-boyfriend, but gradually his investigation leads him to the Museum of Natural History where a special exhibition is taken place – a tomb of the evil boy king “Totem-Munara’ has recently been discovered in Egypt and now the artefacts have made it to New York City. But it seems that old Totem is not as lifeless or as harmless as the smug museum administrators imagine.
It looks like noir in its shadowy black and white, but it’s also clearly channelling Boris Karloff in a way which must have had the lawyers at Universal twitching. (Although the fact that both were leaping on the recent discovery of Tutankhamun meant they didn’t have an artful hieroglyphic leg to stand on.) The film is stagey as hell with all the shocks signposted, but Cagney is having an absolute ball. It’s great to watch him sneer at his adversary, as who else would have the guts and gall to sneer: “Come on, bandage boy, you think you’re tough but I can take you down with scissors, see”?
At first glance this would look to take Cagney out of his comfort zone, but what makes it so brilliant is that Cagney just makes it his comfort zone.
Sunday, 23 November 2014
The Sexy Goth Girl in the Lake (2004)
D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour (although the sex scenes are in black & white, so we can pretend they’re art)
The first Sexy Goth Detective film was like an episode of ‘Columbo’, but the second one is like the weirdest episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ you’ll ever see. There’s the small town where everyone knows each other, the dramatic discovery of a body, a cavalcade of suspects, and one lone woman who is prying into everyone’s lives, rustling feathers and generally making sure she’s irritating as hell in her quest for the truth. But what differentiates this from Jessica Fletcher (or Jane Marple) is that this film screams modern.
And sexy.
Sexy and wild in a way that Jessica Fletcher never ever was.
(Well, maybe in her younger days).
The corpse of a 22 year old goth girl is pulled from the lake in the charmingly named town of Girdle. She was an outsider so her death isn’t investigated as thoroughly as it might be by the chief of police, but she has a friend driving to town determined that justice must be done. Enter Liddy D’Eath as the sexy goth detective – there to turn heads and cause discomfort in every way she can.
It really is a tour de force for both her and Von De Mille’s dialogue. All those scenes we’ve seen so many times before: the tense interrogation in the booth of a cafeteria; the leaning on a post office counter to interrogate a witness who is cagy as hell; the car chase on the dark country lanes outside the town; the screaming confrontation with the relative of the deceased who doesn’t think the detective is doing her right. All of that is here and all of it crackles. It of course helps that Liddy has gone full on goth for this, with every harsh line of make-up and elegantly torn piece of clothing screaming that she is part of an alternative culture.
Okay, this may sound tame as hell. “What happened to the edgy promise of the original sexy goth girls film?” you may ask. Well, to counter balance the softness we do have a small town femme fatale who Liddy falls hard for her and goes skinny dipping in the lake with before a long soft-focus sex scene. Those expecting a movie to watch over their cocoa will no doubt choke on their marshmallows at this point. It sticks out as much as a full blown S&M scene would in the middle of Cabot Cove. I’ve always said De Mille would be happier making porn and now he has.
The other characters aren’t well drawn and the plot has not only run away from the director by the end, but gone and hidden, yet thanks to a classy performance by the heroine this is a much watch.
Colour (although the sex scenes are in black & white, so we can pretend they’re art)
The first Sexy Goth Detective film was like an episode of ‘Columbo’, but the second one is like the weirdest episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ you’ll ever see. There’s the small town where everyone knows each other, the dramatic discovery of a body, a cavalcade of suspects, and one lone woman who is prying into everyone’s lives, rustling feathers and generally making sure she’s irritating as hell in her quest for the truth. But what differentiates this from Jessica Fletcher (or Jane Marple) is that this film screams modern.
And sexy.
Sexy and wild in a way that Jessica Fletcher never ever was.
(Well, maybe in her younger days).
The corpse of a 22 year old goth girl is pulled from the lake in the charmingly named town of Girdle. She was an outsider so her death isn’t investigated as thoroughly as it might be by the chief of police, but she has a friend driving to town determined that justice must be done. Enter Liddy D’Eath as the sexy goth detective – there to turn heads and cause discomfort in every way she can.
It really is a tour de force for both her and Von De Mille’s dialogue. All those scenes we’ve seen so many times before: the tense interrogation in the booth of a cafeteria; the leaning on a post office counter to interrogate a witness who is cagy as hell; the car chase on the dark country lanes outside the town; the screaming confrontation with the relative of the deceased who doesn’t think the detective is doing her right. All of that is here and all of it crackles. It of course helps that Liddy has gone full on goth for this, with every harsh line of make-up and elegantly torn piece of clothing screaming that she is part of an alternative culture.
Okay, this may sound tame as hell. “What happened to the edgy promise of the original sexy goth girls film?” you may ask. Well, to counter balance the softness we do have a small town femme fatale who Liddy falls hard for her and goes skinny dipping in the lake with before a long soft-focus sex scene. Those expecting a movie to watch over their cocoa will no doubt choke on their marshmallows at this point. It sticks out as much as a full blown S&M scene would in the middle of Cabot Cove. I’ve always said De Mille would be happier making porn and now he has.
The other characters aren’t well drawn and the plot has not only run away from the director by the end, but gone and hidden, yet thanks to a classy performance by the heroine this is a much watch.
Sunday, 16 November 2014
Jack Malibu (1988)
D. Corey Dickshield
Colour
Jack the Ripper haunts the public imagination like no other killer. He is all mist, frightened women and a mystery which never ends (DNA discoveries will prove easy to ignore, mark my words). He’s a supernatural figure, one who lives inside the London fog and attacks like a knife wielding ghost. Yeah, his name might turn out to be Aaron Kosminski or he might be the dissolute son of a high-born family – it doesn’t matter. The mystique and odd romance of this (let’s not forget) particularly brutal killer will continue for centuries to come.
That’s how you can take the idea out of London and put it in a whole other geographic locale, as we understand how the Ripper works. Similarly you can set the tale nearly a hundred years after the events, as again we all understand how the Ripper works. You can even throw rock ballads in and make it a musical. Ah no, that might just be pushing things a little too far.
Here’s a genuine oddity. A musical set amongst affluent beach front property on the California coast, starring two Celtic singers, and centred around the return of England’s most famous serial killer.
Yes, this is Jack Malibu.
Bonnie Tyler (for it is she) is a Welsh-American singing star who now lives in a big house on the Coast and is at the height of her career. But she’s also the descendent of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and the ghost of that killer is coming back to wrap up unfinished business. A fog (borrowed from the occasion from John Carpenter) rolls in from the Pacific and suddenly there’s a dead prostitute lying on the patio of Bonnie’s house. Called in to investigate is Scottish-America detective, Sheena Eastern (for it is she), who also has a connection to the original Ripper case. And as the fog rolls in again, the two women try to work out what the hell is going on – all the while singing their lungs out.
The songs are over-blow 80s numbers, full of synths and echoing drums, but bizarrely all have titles stolen from great standards: so that ‘Strangers in the Night’ is nowhere near what you’d imagine it to be; neither is ‘Foggy Day’; nor ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. All have terrible tunes with lyrics seemingly scribbled out by a collective of sub-literate, goth obsessed, teenage boys. ‘Excruciating’ is the best word, and the only soundtrack albums bought were surely used to torture terrorists.
The hair is big, the shoulder pads could balance scaffolding, the acting is ludicrously bad (with the accents making some lines unintelligible even to a fellow Brit – and a fellow Welshie at that), the plot is ridiculous and the ending is just too Scooby Doo for words. It’s worth watching though as a ludicrous camp spectacular and the saving grace that at least they realised that if Jack was going to be scary he couldn’t be made to bloody sing.
Colour
Jack the Ripper haunts the public imagination like no other killer. He is all mist, frightened women and a mystery which never ends (DNA discoveries will prove easy to ignore, mark my words). He’s a supernatural figure, one who lives inside the London fog and attacks like a knife wielding ghost. Yeah, his name might turn out to be Aaron Kosminski or he might be the dissolute son of a high-born family – it doesn’t matter. The mystique and odd romance of this (let’s not forget) particularly brutal killer will continue for centuries to come.
That’s how you can take the idea out of London and put it in a whole other geographic locale, as we understand how the Ripper works. Similarly you can set the tale nearly a hundred years after the events, as again we all understand how the Ripper works. You can even throw rock ballads in and make it a musical. Ah no, that might just be pushing things a little too far.
Here’s a genuine oddity. A musical set amongst affluent beach front property on the California coast, starring two Celtic singers, and centred around the return of England’s most famous serial killer.
Yes, this is Jack Malibu.
Bonnie Tyler (for it is she) is a Welsh-American singing star who now lives in a big house on the Coast and is at the height of her career. But she’s also the descendent of Jack the Ripper’s last victim and the ghost of that killer is coming back to wrap up unfinished business. A fog (borrowed from the occasion from John Carpenter) rolls in from the Pacific and suddenly there’s a dead prostitute lying on the patio of Bonnie’s house. Called in to investigate is Scottish-America detective, Sheena Eastern (for it is she), who also has a connection to the original Ripper case. And as the fog rolls in again, the two women try to work out what the hell is going on – all the while singing their lungs out.
The songs are over-blow 80s numbers, full of synths and echoing drums, but bizarrely all have titles stolen from great standards: so that ‘Strangers in the Night’ is nowhere near what you’d imagine it to be; neither is ‘Foggy Day’; nor ‘The Lady is a Tramp’. All have terrible tunes with lyrics seemingly scribbled out by a collective of sub-literate, goth obsessed, teenage boys. ‘Excruciating’ is the best word, and the only soundtrack albums bought were surely used to torture terrorists.
The hair is big, the shoulder pads could balance scaffolding, the acting is ludicrously bad (with the accents making some lines unintelligible even to a fellow Brit – and a fellow Welshie at that), the plot is ridiculous and the ending is just too Scooby Doo for words. It’s worth watching though as a ludicrous camp spectacular and the saving grace that at least they realised that if Jack was going to be scary he couldn’t be made to bloody sing.
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.
Sunday, 24 August 2014
The Sexy Goth Detective (2003)
D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour
Liddy D’eath could undoubtedly scrub off that dark make-up, take out those intimidating piercings and sling on some loose fitting pastels, then leave all this sexy goth girl stuff behind forever. But really that would make her just another pretty girl in an entertainment industry full of pretty girls – all of whom are looking for that one break. So there’s no point her doing that, she has her niche and it’s a good niche, even if it isn’t that big a niche. And to help her exploit it she always seems to have Otto Van De Mille on hand, like some kind of faithful, salivating lap-dog with a viewfinder.
Rarely has such an enduring cinematic relationship been created by two such uneven talents. At his best Van De Mille looks like he’s directing adverts, he has a way of capturing the sharp, memorable, but ultimately meaningless image. At his worst though, he’s basically a porn director, voyeuristic with an alarming lack of subtlety. (Although, to be fair, the same criticisms could be made of Michael Bay, but at least he knows how to blow shit up). Whereas Liddy D’Eath can be a brilliant and transcendent and often darkly erotic actress, Van De Mille films her in such a way that at his best makes the actress look striking and incredible and you want whatever she’s selling; but at his worst it’s like she’s just going to hump whoever else happens to be in the room with her.
Fortunately Van De Mille’s skills with dialogue haven’t yet deserted him. And it’s double, roll-over fortunate that this time they seem to have been married to an actual grasp of plot (as if he’d spent the last two years sat at home reading a book entitled ‘How to Plot Your Way out of a Paper Bag’), making this movie their best since the first sexy goth girls film.
How best to describe what we have here? Well, think of ‘Columbo’, with the killer all smug as he commits the perfect crime and then high-handedly underestimates the shabby, trench-coated detective. Now think of a ‘Columbo’ with the same kind of recognisable guest villain (Eric Roberts, if you’re interested), but instead of a shabby cop investigating him, it’s a “goth, lesbian bitch with bad PMT.” And there you have ‘Sexy Goth Detective’.
Clearly Von De Mille is going for the mainstream, a lot of this film couldn’t be any more pitched at easy Sunday night viewing if John Nettles showed up as a put upon senior detective. But in his leading lady, he has a presence – which no matter how much he wants to sanitise it – remains spectacularly dark, weird and off-kilter. D’Eath dominates this film and even though she’s the heroine, she makes every scene she is in much more tense and scary than it ever need be. It’s a disturbing and fascinating performance which truly upsets Van De Mille’s stabs for some kind of respectability and creates a disturbing and fascinating movie.
Colour
Liddy D’eath could undoubtedly scrub off that dark make-up, take out those intimidating piercings and sling on some loose fitting pastels, then leave all this sexy goth girl stuff behind forever. But really that would make her just another pretty girl in an entertainment industry full of pretty girls – all of whom are looking for that one break. So there’s no point her doing that, she has her niche and it’s a good niche, even if it isn’t that big a niche. And to help her exploit it she always seems to have Otto Van De Mille on hand, like some kind of faithful, salivating lap-dog with a viewfinder.
Rarely has such an enduring cinematic relationship been created by two such uneven talents. At his best Van De Mille looks like he’s directing adverts, he has a way of capturing the sharp, memorable, but ultimately meaningless image. At his worst though, he’s basically a porn director, voyeuristic with an alarming lack of subtlety. (Although, to be fair, the same criticisms could be made of Michael Bay, but at least he knows how to blow shit up). Whereas Liddy D’Eath can be a brilliant and transcendent and often darkly erotic actress, Van De Mille films her in such a way that at his best makes the actress look striking and incredible and you want whatever she’s selling; but at his worst it’s like she’s just going to hump whoever else happens to be in the room with her.
Fortunately Van De Mille’s skills with dialogue haven’t yet deserted him. And it’s double, roll-over fortunate that this time they seem to have been married to an actual grasp of plot (as if he’d spent the last two years sat at home reading a book entitled ‘How to Plot Your Way out of a Paper Bag’), making this movie their best since the first sexy goth girls film.
How best to describe what we have here? Well, think of ‘Columbo’, with the killer all smug as he commits the perfect crime and then high-handedly underestimates the shabby, trench-coated detective. Now think of a ‘Columbo’ with the same kind of recognisable guest villain (Eric Roberts, if you’re interested), but instead of a shabby cop investigating him, it’s a “goth, lesbian bitch with bad PMT.” And there you have ‘Sexy Goth Detective’.
Clearly Von De Mille is going for the mainstream, a lot of this film couldn’t be any more pitched at easy Sunday night viewing if John Nettles showed up as a put upon senior detective. But in his leading lady, he has a presence – which no matter how much he wants to sanitise it – remains spectacularly dark, weird and off-kilter. D’Eath dominates this film and even though she’s the heroine, she makes every scene she is in much more tense and scary than it ever need be. It’s a disturbing and fascinating performance which truly upsets Van De Mille’s stabs for some kind of respectability and creates a disturbing and fascinating movie.
Wednesday, 25 June 2014
Munich Murder (1985)
D. Otto Haus
Colour
Oh crumbs, there’s a World Cup on, isn’t there? And that probably means I should be topical and write about some of the strange and curious football related films out there. So let’s try this one on for size, shall we? A European/German movie about a grizzled, hard-bitten detective investigating the murder of the left back of a Munich football club. (The club in question is named Borussia Munich, although they obviously play in Bayern Munich’s stadium and in Bayern Munich’s kit. Quite why this name change happened is not made clear, but it’d be like making a film about a North London football club, which play in red and white at Highbury, and are named The Gun Factory.) In the German version – which I have not seen – the detective is played by Maximillian Schell. I have no idea of what Mr Schell’s take on the role is, but here we have Jon Voight giving us a performance of such aggressive, intense boredom that it’s worth tracking down just to see Mr Voight scowl through every scene and to greet every emotion he’s called on to play with a glower. It’s as if he couldn’t be bothered to learn anything about football, detective work, Germany and possibly the whole continent of Europe itself before the film was made, and so strides around distinctly pissed off that he’s being forced to fake an interest in them. Normally an actor so disengaged from the film around him is said to be Zen, but Mr Voight is clearly so livid at being there that peace and calm are clearly not attributes anyone would associate with him.
The other problem with Jon Voight playing the role and the film being made in English to accommodate him, is that the other parts in the film are all played by Germans. Performing in another language would be hard for trained actors, but this film further makes it much more difficult by hiring footballers to play – well – footballers. So amusingly we have Franz Beckenbauer playing the retired captain of the club with all the charm of a haughty, out of touch, autocratic, blue-blooded despot; while Jürgen Grabowski manages the incredible feat of looking even less happy to be there than Jon Voight. His character is minor, so minor in fact that there’s no chance of him being a suspect – although in any other movie he’d have been lead henchman at least, if not someone who went on a murderous rampage before the end. Very, very amusingly there is also a cameo from Mighty Mouse himself, Kevin Keegan (or Keggy Keegle, as he’s sometimes known in his home country) – where he manages to demonstrate even less talent than he did on ‘Head Over Heals in Love’
The film plods along in rhythm with Mr Voight’s pissed off stride, throwing in herrings of red, pink and purple shades, until the killer is revealed. And it becomes clear, the more Mr Voight hangs around the football club, that this film could easily have been made about any sport or indeed any industry. As by the end the film has clearly joined Mr Voight’s disinterest in football, football players, as well as any and all round balls. This could easily have been a movie about a murder of a foreman in a diamond mine, or a welder at a dockyard – both of which would no doubt have elicited no more interest on Mr Voight’s face than the contents of his handkerchief on a wet Thursday afternoon. At the very end Mr Voight trudges off, presumably for a lie down, I hope he enjoyed it more than he did this movie.
Colour
Oh crumbs, there’s a World Cup on, isn’t there? And that probably means I should be topical and write about some of the strange and curious football related films out there. So let’s try this one on for size, shall we? A European/German movie about a grizzled, hard-bitten detective investigating the murder of the left back of a Munich football club. (The club in question is named Borussia Munich, although they obviously play in Bayern Munich’s stadium and in Bayern Munich’s kit. Quite why this name change happened is not made clear, but it’d be like making a film about a North London football club, which play in red and white at Highbury, and are named The Gun Factory.) In the German version – which I have not seen – the detective is played by Maximillian Schell. I have no idea of what Mr Schell’s take on the role is, but here we have Jon Voight giving us a performance of such aggressive, intense boredom that it’s worth tracking down just to see Mr Voight scowl through every scene and to greet every emotion he’s called on to play with a glower. It’s as if he couldn’t be bothered to learn anything about football, detective work, Germany and possibly the whole continent of Europe itself before the film was made, and so strides around distinctly pissed off that he’s being forced to fake an interest in them. Normally an actor so disengaged from the film around him is said to be Zen, but Mr Voight is clearly so livid at being there that peace and calm are clearly not attributes anyone would associate with him.
The other problem with Jon Voight playing the role and the film being made in English to accommodate him, is that the other parts in the film are all played by Germans. Performing in another language would be hard for trained actors, but this film further makes it much more difficult by hiring footballers to play – well – footballers. So amusingly we have Franz Beckenbauer playing the retired captain of the club with all the charm of a haughty, out of touch, autocratic, blue-blooded despot; while Jürgen Grabowski manages the incredible feat of looking even less happy to be there than Jon Voight. His character is minor, so minor in fact that there’s no chance of him being a suspect – although in any other movie he’d have been lead henchman at least, if not someone who went on a murderous rampage before the end. Very, very amusingly there is also a cameo from Mighty Mouse himself, Kevin Keegan (or Keggy Keegle, as he’s sometimes known in his home country) – where he manages to demonstrate even less talent than he did on ‘Head Over Heals in Love’
The film plods along in rhythm with Mr Voight’s pissed off stride, throwing in herrings of red, pink and purple shades, until the killer is revealed. And it becomes clear, the more Mr Voight hangs around the football club, that this film could easily have been made about any sport or indeed any industry. As by the end the film has clearly joined Mr Voight’s disinterest in football, football players, as well as any and all round balls. This could easily have been a movie about a murder of a foreman in a diamond mine, or a welder at a dockyard – both of which would no doubt have elicited no more interest on Mr Voight’s face than the contents of his handkerchief on a wet Thursday afternoon. At the very end Mr Voight trudges off, presumably for a lie down, I hope he enjoyed it more than he did this movie.
Sunday, 22 June 2014
Runaway! (1970)
D. Michael Winner
Colour (but a really washed out colour, as if it woke up hung-over that morning)
Reading Robert Galbrath/J.K. Rowling's tale of a down on his luck private eye in Soho, reminded me with sudden incredible clarity (like I’d just eaten a madeleine) of this neglected Michael Caine private eye movie. And that memory gave me particular satisfaction when I realised that Caine's character is actually named - and I'm not making this up - Barry Potter. Not that I’m suggesting for one second that Rowling based either of her recurring characters on this film. Having read ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, Michael Caine certainly isn’t Comoran Strike. Admittedly I’ve only seen the Harry Potter films rather than read the books, but unless there’s something in the novels about the teen wizard having a porn collection and liking rough sex, he’s not a student of Hogwarts either.
This is a tale about a down on his luck London private eye, but Comoran Strike has nothing on Barry Potter for rough living. Yes, both sleep in their offices and squander their money on booze and fags, but Strike doesn't steal a tenner from the elderly lady upstairs for electric metre money. Nor does he effectively mug a homeless man when said homeless man is cheeky. Nor, indeed, does he steal a chip from a nun in a chip-shop before suggesting flirtatiously that he remove her from the habit. There is an aggressive unpleasantness and seediness to this character - the anti-anti-anti-Philip Marlowe. It's almost as if the filmmakers looked at Caine as Harry Palmer and decided that he was still just too upwardly mobile for their tastes, it was time to bring him down several dirty and greasy pegs. And Caine relishes the part, clearly on paper this is an unpleasant man, but our favourite cockney knight uses all his charm to make sure he still deserves to be the hero.
Philip Marlowe is undoubtedly a (much more noble) background presence, as the plot isn’t far off Raymond Chandler's ‘The Little Sister’ (which had been filmed far more glamorously in Hollywood a few years earlier). A prim librarian type seeks out Potter's help to find her missing sibling, who’s disappeared into the Soho netherworld of strip clubs and pornographers. Before long Potter finds himself up to his neck in sleaze (not necessarily a problem, Potter admits to liking “a bit of naughty”), and murder (more of a problem, particularly when he finds himself the prime suspect). It's up to Potter to stay one step ahead of the police as he tries to solve the crime.
The audience stayed away en mass, which is why the British tough guy Michael Caine picture people remember from the early 1970s is ‘Get Carter’ and that’s fair enough as it’s much stronger and looks far better. However good performances abound: from Ray Milland as a disgraced former copper with an accent so very, very Welsh (so much so I couldn’t work out whether he was putting it on or that was indeed his real accent), surprise guest-star Frankie Avalon, hamming it up as a would be gangster even when he looks a little lost in seedy London, and most astonishing of all Cilla Black – of all people – as a hard as nails prostitute. If those punters who stood excited at her side in the ‘Blind Date’ and ‘Surprise, Surprise’ years had watched this, they’d probably have come armed.
(Casting Director-wise, the movie credits one Phyllis Dunfield, who clearly had a very left-field mind that’s hard not to admire.)
The Rowling/Galbrath book is better, as despite a not bad cast and a suitably muddy storyline, this is a film which – even with Sir Michael’s efforts – is so seedy and depressive it leaves you wanting to have a good scrub down afterwards.
Colour (but a really washed out colour, as if it woke up hung-over that morning)
Reading Robert Galbrath/J.K. Rowling's tale of a down on his luck private eye in Soho, reminded me with sudden incredible clarity (like I’d just eaten a madeleine) of this neglected Michael Caine private eye movie. And that memory gave me particular satisfaction when I realised that Caine's character is actually named - and I'm not making this up - Barry Potter. Not that I’m suggesting for one second that Rowling based either of her recurring characters on this film. Having read ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, Michael Caine certainly isn’t Comoran Strike. Admittedly I’ve only seen the Harry Potter films rather than read the books, but unless there’s something in the novels about the teen wizard having a porn collection and liking rough sex, he’s not a student of Hogwarts either.
This is a tale about a down on his luck London private eye, but Comoran Strike has nothing on Barry Potter for rough living. Yes, both sleep in their offices and squander their money on booze and fags, but Strike doesn't steal a tenner from the elderly lady upstairs for electric metre money. Nor does he effectively mug a homeless man when said homeless man is cheeky. Nor, indeed, does he steal a chip from a nun in a chip-shop before suggesting flirtatiously that he remove her from the habit. There is an aggressive unpleasantness and seediness to this character - the anti-anti-anti-Philip Marlowe. It's almost as if the filmmakers looked at Caine as Harry Palmer and decided that he was still just too upwardly mobile for their tastes, it was time to bring him down several dirty and greasy pegs. And Caine relishes the part, clearly on paper this is an unpleasant man, but our favourite cockney knight uses all his charm to make sure he still deserves to be the hero.
Philip Marlowe is undoubtedly a (much more noble) background presence, as the plot isn’t far off Raymond Chandler's ‘The Little Sister’ (which had been filmed far more glamorously in Hollywood a few years earlier). A prim librarian type seeks out Potter's help to find her missing sibling, who’s disappeared into the Soho netherworld of strip clubs and pornographers. Before long Potter finds himself up to his neck in sleaze (not necessarily a problem, Potter admits to liking “a bit of naughty”), and murder (more of a problem, particularly when he finds himself the prime suspect). It's up to Potter to stay one step ahead of the police as he tries to solve the crime.
The audience stayed away en mass, which is why the British tough guy Michael Caine picture people remember from the early 1970s is ‘Get Carter’ and that’s fair enough as it’s much stronger and looks far better. However good performances abound: from Ray Milland as a disgraced former copper with an accent so very, very Welsh (so much so I couldn’t work out whether he was putting it on or that was indeed his real accent), surprise guest-star Frankie Avalon, hamming it up as a would be gangster even when he looks a little lost in seedy London, and most astonishing of all Cilla Black – of all people – as a hard as nails prostitute. If those punters who stood excited at her side in the ‘Blind Date’ and ‘Surprise, Surprise’ years had watched this, they’d probably have come armed.
(Casting Director-wise, the movie credits one Phyllis Dunfield, who clearly had a very left-field mind that’s hard not to admire.)
The Rowling/Galbrath book is better, as despite a not bad cast and a suitably muddy storyline, this is a film which – even with Sir Michael’s efforts – is so seedy and depressive it leaves you wanting to have a good scrub down afterwards.
Sunday, 8 June 2014
Kiss Me Dangerous (1972)
D. Henry Levin
Colour
So here’s a question: why isn’t a series of film starring the one and only Tom Jones as an ultra-cool private detective in The City of Angels an almighty camp-fest? Those Matt Helm films made in the 1960s are far camper. Batman the TV series was off the scale campness compared to this, and that didn’t even have the added value of a singer smugly strutting his way through the lead part. Here we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales – but really just playing Tom Jones as a private detective – tackling crime in downtown Los Angeles, punching bad guys, showing off nifty gadgets, and even in this film sporting a brand new catchphrase (“Not bad for a lad from Ponty”) and yet it isn’t total over the top camp of the campest fashion.
Why, oh why, is this?
Partly I think the answer is because it’s made in the 1970s. Matt Helm, ‘The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular’ and all those other Bond knock-offs were shot in the bright shades of the 1960s, which was very much the in-palate back then; while these films have more 1970s hues which don’t lend themselves to sheer campness. (Try and imagine a camp comedy that looks like ‘The Conversation’. Not easy is it.) But more than that, we have as the star the ultimate macho-man; the muscled, hairy Welsh love god. A lad from Ponty made very good. Yes, Tom itself keeps it from being camp. In fact, if you were to tell this good boyo from the valleys – now apparently a private detective in LA – that he was camp, he’d probably punch you in the nose.
In much the same vein as ‘Vengeance Man’, Tom tours around LA, sorts out bad guys, foils an evil plot and gets it on with lots of nubile young nymphettes who are waiting like moist peaches for him to pluck. When Italian nuclear physicist, Claudia Cardinale, (not the most likely of nuclear physicists, I agree, but still doing a much better job than Denise Richards in ‘The World is not Enough’) is kidnapped on an LA stopover it’s up to Tom to spring into action and save the day before the knowledge inside her head is harnessed to create a new super weapon. His best source of information is bored party girl, Pamela Tiffin (still best known for dancing in a bikini in ‘Harper’), who Tom has the predictable frosty relationship with right until he seduces her. Along the way there are fistfights, gunfight, car-chases, more than one helicopter explosion and smooch after smooch after smooch. Until at the end when the gorgeous Claudia (in what is really a cameo) is so grateful for being rescued she makes her way to Tom’s bed. Of course she does.
The bad guy’s representative on Earth is played by Barry Nelson (himself a one-time James Bond), but what’s really interesting is who he seems to work for. We see this Mr Big in Las Vegas, in a distinctive rhinestone jumpsuit and barking orders in an unmistakable drawl. There’s big rings, the glimpsed side of an enormous pair of sunglasses and a medallion with the legend ‘TBC’. We never see his face and that’s led to some writers believing it isn’t really him – but no, this is Elvis, in his very last acting role, playing the supervillain against Tom Jones’s superhero.
So the ultimate boy’s adventure, getting it on with Claudia Cardinale, amongst many other gorgeous ladies, and to top it all, having Elvis fucking Presley in a guest appearance – not bad for a lad from Ponty indeed.
Colour
So here’s a question: why isn’t a series of film starring the one and only Tom Jones as an ultra-cool private detective in The City of Angels an almighty camp-fest? Those Matt Helm films made in the 1960s are far camper. Batman the TV series was off the scale campness compared to this, and that didn’t even have the added value of a singer smugly strutting his way through the lead part. Here we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales – but really just playing Tom Jones as a private detective – tackling crime in downtown Los Angeles, punching bad guys, showing off nifty gadgets, and even in this film sporting a brand new catchphrase (“Not bad for a lad from Ponty”) and yet it isn’t total over the top camp of the campest fashion.
Why, oh why, is this?
Partly I think the answer is because it’s made in the 1970s. Matt Helm, ‘The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular’ and all those other Bond knock-offs were shot in the bright shades of the 1960s, which was very much the in-palate back then; while these films have more 1970s hues which don’t lend themselves to sheer campness. (Try and imagine a camp comedy that looks like ‘The Conversation’. Not easy is it.) But more than that, we have as the star the ultimate macho-man; the muscled, hairy Welsh love god. A lad from Ponty made very good. Yes, Tom itself keeps it from being camp. In fact, if you were to tell this good boyo from the valleys – now apparently a private detective in LA – that he was camp, he’d probably punch you in the nose.
In much the same vein as ‘Vengeance Man’, Tom tours around LA, sorts out bad guys, foils an evil plot and gets it on with lots of nubile young nymphettes who are waiting like moist peaches for him to pluck. When Italian nuclear physicist, Claudia Cardinale, (not the most likely of nuclear physicists, I agree, but still doing a much better job than Denise Richards in ‘The World is not Enough’) is kidnapped on an LA stopover it’s up to Tom to spring into action and save the day before the knowledge inside her head is harnessed to create a new super weapon. His best source of information is bored party girl, Pamela Tiffin (still best known for dancing in a bikini in ‘Harper’), who Tom has the predictable frosty relationship with right until he seduces her. Along the way there are fistfights, gunfight, car-chases, more than one helicopter explosion and smooch after smooch after smooch. Until at the end when the gorgeous Claudia (in what is really a cameo) is so grateful for being rescued she makes her way to Tom’s bed. Of course she does.
The bad guy’s representative on Earth is played by Barry Nelson (himself a one-time James Bond), but what’s really interesting is who he seems to work for. We see this Mr Big in Las Vegas, in a distinctive rhinestone jumpsuit and barking orders in an unmistakable drawl. There’s big rings, the glimpsed side of an enormous pair of sunglasses and a medallion with the legend ‘TBC’. We never see his face and that’s led to some writers believing it isn’t really him – but no, this is Elvis, in his very last acting role, playing the supervillain against Tom Jones’s superhero.
So the ultimate boy’s adventure, getting it on with Claudia Cardinale, amongst many other gorgeous ladies, and to top it all, having Elvis fucking Presley in a guest appearance – not bad for a lad from Ponty indeed.
Wednesday, 14 May 2014
The Man from Budapest (1946)
D. Raoul Walsh
B&W
Ah, it must have been great to have an actor like Peter Lorre hanging around the studio. He could make any bog-standard scene 500% better, while if you gave him something really good he’d turn it into black & white gold. I guess Steve Buscemi would be the modern equivalent. Both are weedy tough guys, both are always better than their material and both occasionally had the chance to be a leading man. In Buscemi’s case television has moved on far enough that he can find himself the star of a lavish drama, while Lorre got ‘The Man from Budapest’. This is a remarkable movie: here’s Peter Lorre in the Bogart role: the ethically dubious detective, with love scenes, smacking down the villains, and being brilliant in the most unsettling way.
Lorre is Lazlo Tec, a famous Hungarian detective (this is a world where policeman in Eastern Europe can build up reputations which stretch across continents – just go with it). On a trip to Manhattan, Lazlo literally has murder drop into his lap in the form of the young Angela Lansbury. Even on holiday Lazlo is too much of a professional to let criminals get away, so he helps nice but dim NY police detective, George Reeves, solve the crime. Along the way he spars with bad girl gone good but maybe going bad again, Lana Turner; roughs up gangster Edward G. Robinson (himself born in Romania, but here playing very American) before revealing the killer at a big fireworks event in a truly bizarre scene where all the dialogue is interspersed by pops and bangs and the other characters look to be peering around Lorre to watch the thrills.
But by that point in the film we’ve got used to the bizarre, as all the way through we’ve had Lorre’s truly shifty and untrustworthy performance. The kind of performance no one usually gives as a hero, but which makes this film truly interesting. No doubt this was written for a Robert Montgomery or a Dana Andrews. That would have been a straightforward film, a run of the mill film, a boring film – this one though is fascinating.
There’s something so wrong about having Lorre as a hero. Every line he utters sounds like a lie, every assertion a misdirection, every accusation a fabrication to hide his own sins. There’s that snivelling voice, that weedy demeanour, those big wet eyes not designed for your straightforward detective. When he smiles at a suspect, one imagines he does so because he knows he’ll be murdering the suspect’s parents later. But what makes it truly great is that the script all the way through treats him as if he is of the highest repute, admired and loved by all, even though that doesn’t really work on the screen. Lana Turner’s character – for instance – falls for him hard, but Lana Turner the actress can’t quite pull off the burning desire for Peter Lorre she needs and so the love scenes feel like he’s paying her to be there.
All of this adds up to a really weird film which almost brings a big old unreliable narrator to the cinema. We’re told Lorre is a hero and he seems to behave decently and to solve the crime at the end. But what if he isn’t and he doesn’t? After all, Lansbury drops into his lap just after he’s been away from his seat to find a waiter. What if, rather than finding the waiter he was killing her for some unknown reason? Then when the police arrive he lays out his credentials (and he may be the real Lazlo Tec, or he might not – who would really know?) and leads the dim NY City police detective on a merry dance. He charges over NY blaming others for his crime, committing more in the cover up (or just for the hell of it), before finally landing on some dumb sap to take the heat for it all. Then at the end he heads back to Hungary with his new paid for floozy escort.
Pick your own version of what the hell is going on, but acknowledge that this is wonderfully subversive film which makes you doff your cap once again to the genius of Peter Lorre.
B&W
Ah, it must have been great to have an actor like Peter Lorre hanging around the studio. He could make any bog-standard scene 500% better, while if you gave him something really good he’d turn it into black & white gold. I guess Steve Buscemi would be the modern equivalent. Both are weedy tough guys, both are always better than their material and both occasionally had the chance to be a leading man. In Buscemi’s case television has moved on far enough that he can find himself the star of a lavish drama, while Lorre got ‘The Man from Budapest’. This is a remarkable movie: here’s Peter Lorre in the Bogart role: the ethically dubious detective, with love scenes, smacking down the villains, and being brilliant in the most unsettling way.
Lorre is Lazlo Tec, a famous Hungarian detective (this is a world where policeman in Eastern Europe can build up reputations which stretch across continents – just go with it). On a trip to Manhattan, Lazlo literally has murder drop into his lap in the form of the young Angela Lansbury. Even on holiday Lazlo is too much of a professional to let criminals get away, so he helps nice but dim NY police detective, George Reeves, solve the crime. Along the way he spars with bad girl gone good but maybe going bad again, Lana Turner; roughs up gangster Edward G. Robinson (himself born in Romania, but here playing very American) before revealing the killer at a big fireworks event in a truly bizarre scene where all the dialogue is interspersed by pops and bangs and the other characters look to be peering around Lorre to watch the thrills.
But by that point in the film we’ve got used to the bizarre, as all the way through we’ve had Lorre’s truly shifty and untrustworthy performance. The kind of performance no one usually gives as a hero, but which makes this film truly interesting. No doubt this was written for a Robert Montgomery or a Dana Andrews. That would have been a straightforward film, a run of the mill film, a boring film – this one though is fascinating.
There’s something so wrong about having Lorre as a hero. Every line he utters sounds like a lie, every assertion a misdirection, every accusation a fabrication to hide his own sins. There’s that snivelling voice, that weedy demeanour, those big wet eyes not designed for your straightforward detective. When he smiles at a suspect, one imagines he does so because he knows he’ll be murdering the suspect’s parents later. But what makes it truly great is that the script all the way through treats him as if he is of the highest repute, admired and loved by all, even though that doesn’t really work on the screen. Lana Turner’s character – for instance – falls for him hard, but Lana Turner the actress can’t quite pull off the burning desire for Peter Lorre she needs and so the love scenes feel like he’s paying her to be there.
All of this adds up to a really weird film which almost brings a big old unreliable narrator to the cinema. We’re told Lorre is a hero and he seems to behave decently and to solve the crime at the end. But what if he isn’t and he doesn’t? After all, Lansbury drops into his lap just after he’s been away from his seat to find a waiter. What if, rather than finding the waiter he was killing her for some unknown reason? Then when the police arrive he lays out his credentials (and he may be the real Lazlo Tec, or he might not – who would really know?) and leads the dim NY City police detective on a merry dance. He charges over NY blaming others for his crime, committing more in the cover up (or just for the hell of it), before finally landing on some dumb sap to take the heat for it all. Then at the end he heads back to Hungary with his new paid for floozy escort.
Pick your own version of what the hell is going on, but acknowledge that this is wonderfully subversive film which makes you doff your cap once again to the genius of Peter Lorre.
Wednesday, 9 April 2014
To Hunt A Victim (1992)
D. George Armitage
Colour
I’d say that right now Micky Rourke is our most endurably eccentric movie star. The long hair, the ludicrous muscles, the fact his face resembles a teak cabinet which has unaccountably learned to speak, the army of Chihuahuas he keeps to do his unholy bidding. All of this adds up to an impressive hand of quirks which I don’t think anyone still making major motion pictures can match. But even in the more handsome, early nineties, tail-end of his heyday, his eccentricity was always really close to the surface. Here he is as a Los Angeles detective, one of those guys in a not so good suit and a not so good car, trying to make a decent living as a knight in shining armour. He is a modern day Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer. (Actually, the young Mickey Rourke would have made a great Lew Archer, and a new Lew Archer is something the world needs. After all, if you take on Philip Marlowe you have to contend with Humphrey Bogart, but with Lew Archer you only have to go toe to toe with Paul Newman.) His name is Peter Locque, and he works the mean streets of Los Angeles. Except Locque has a crucial difference to set him apart from Marlowe and Archer, he hails from Provence, and that allows Rourke to spend the whole film working on the most ludicrous French accent heard since Peter Sellers’ passing. As I said, the eccentricity has never been that far from the surface.
Rourke is hired by the widow of a California land owner, Diane Ladd, to find her wayward daughter, Sherilyn Fenn. This being an early nineties Micky Rourke film, it isn’t long at all before things are getting very hot and heavy, with Rourke and Fenn finding themselves nude and locked in slow-mo artful love-making of the most soft focus kind. And that’s before her troubled friend, Erika Eleniak, gets involved. Fenn is tied in with hard-nosed gangster, the great J.T. Walsh, and it isn’t long before murder occurs and Rourke has to move quickly to clear her name. Amongst those who Rourke has to face off against on his search for the truth are such semi-forgotten luminaries as George Segal, Valerie Perrine, George Takei, Sandra Lockhart and most surreally of all, former Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy – who is great fun as a particularly cantankerous Scottish librarian. Possibly his appearance is there just to balance things out; saying to the audience that if you think the guy playing the detective is eccentric in this movie, wait until you see who’s in charge of the library.
All the way through Rourke gives us “bonjour”, “merci”, “mon cheri” and even a camply enthusiastic “ooh la la”. The result is to make his detective seem part Lew Archer, part Philip Marlowe, but with a sizeable dash of Hercule Poirot. Probably the presence of the far superior ‘Angel Heart’ persuaded Rourke to take this direction with his accent, to differentiate it from the earlier film. If we’re honest ‘To Hunt A Victim’ isn’t a patch on ‘Angel Heart’, but what could have been your bog-standard early 90s noir thriller – with the predictable lashings of nudity and violence – becomes in the crisp and clear direction of Armitage, and the wonderful over the top eccentricity of the star, something really strange and special indeed.
Colour
I’d say that right now Micky Rourke is our most endurably eccentric movie star. The long hair, the ludicrous muscles, the fact his face resembles a teak cabinet which has unaccountably learned to speak, the army of Chihuahuas he keeps to do his unholy bidding. All of this adds up to an impressive hand of quirks which I don’t think anyone still making major motion pictures can match. But even in the more handsome, early nineties, tail-end of his heyday, his eccentricity was always really close to the surface. Here he is as a Los Angeles detective, one of those guys in a not so good suit and a not so good car, trying to make a decent living as a knight in shining armour. He is a modern day Philip Marlowe or a Lew Archer. (Actually, the young Mickey Rourke would have made a great Lew Archer, and a new Lew Archer is something the world needs. After all, if you take on Philip Marlowe you have to contend with Humphrey Bogart, but with Lew Archer you only have to go toe to toe with Paul Newman.) His name is Peter Locque, and he works the mean streets of Los Angeles. Except Locque has a crucial difference to set him apart from Marlowe and Archer, he hails from Provence, and that allows Rourke to spend the whole film working on the most ludicrous French accent heard since Peter Sellers’ passing. As I said, the eccentricity has never been that far from the surface.
Rourke is hired by the widow of a California land owner, Diane Ladd, to find her wayward daughter, Sherilyn Fenn. This being an early nineties Micky Rourke film, it isn’t long at all before things are getting very hot and heavy, with Rourke and Fenn finding themselves nude and locked in slow-mo artful love-making of the most soft focus kind. And that’s before her troubled friend, Erika Eleniak, gets involved. Fenn is tied in with hard-nosed gangster, the great J.T. Walsh, and it isn’t long before murder occurs and Rourke has to move quickly to clear her name. Amongst those who Rourke has to face off against on his search for the truth are such semi-forgotten luminaries as George Segal, Valerie Perrine, George Takei, Sandra Lockhart and most surreally of all, former Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy – who is great fun as a particularly cantankerous Scottish librarian. Possibly his appearance is there just to balance things out; saying to the audience that if you think the guy playing the detective is eccentric in this movie, wait until you see who’s in charge of the library.
All the way through Rourke gives us “bonjour”, “merci”, “mon cheri” and even a camply enthusiastic “ooh la la”. The result is to make his detective seem part Lew Archer, part Philip Marlowe, but with a sizeable dash of Hercule Poirot. Probably the presence of the far superior ‘Angel Heart’ persuaded Rourke to take this direction with his accent, to differentiate it from the earlier film. If we’re honest ‘To Hunt A Victim’ isn’t a patch on ‘Angel Heart’, but what could have been your bog-standard early 90s noir thriller – with the predictable lashings of nudity and violence – becomes in the crisp and clear direction of Armitage, and the wonderful over the top eccentricity of the star, something really strange and special indeed.
Wednesday, 11 December 2013
Le Long Au Revoir (1978)
D.
Claude Chabrol
Colour
In cinema terms, the French are much cooler than the British, aren’t they? If you look at how grand and romantic Paris appears on the cinema screen, and then contrast it with how dingy and provincial London looks, you have to – and it pains me to admit this - say that France wins. It’s by far the most cinematic country with a much grander film tradition and many more great films. Of course as a citizen of these isles I will not admit French superiority in any other matter (our cheeses are much better than theirs, goddamnit!), to do so would see my British passport revoked and my bruised and battered body dumped off The White Cliffs of Dover. But when it comes to cinema, I feel I am on safer ground – they have the lead on us. Damn them!
A case in point, in the same year Robert Mitchum was playing an aged Philip Marlowe on the dank streets of London, Stéphane Audran was essaying a more original and yet still recognisable version of Marlowe on the lush and golden streets of Paris.
But whereas one was directed by the dread hand of Michael Winner, the other was being helmed by the French Hitchcock himself – the great and equally balding, Claude Chabrol.
Audran is Michelle, a socialite who it’s hinted has some kind of scandalous past. Outside a nightclub one evening (where she has pushed away the attentions of a particularly hirsute date – like that bloke from ‘The Joy of Sex’ made flesh), she encounters Veronique, an old acquaintance. The two of them share a cab home and say goodbye with a Parisian kiss on the cheek and a lingering embrace. Maybe the encounter would never have meant anything, but the following morning Veronique arrives at Michelle’s apartment and asks to be driven to Charles de Gaulle airport. Michelle senses that something is wrong, but does it anyway. It turns out that Veronique’s boyfriend is lying dead in their house, and having aided the main suspect’s escape, Michelle is questioned as an accessory. Once the police free her though, this one time party girl becomes Philip Marlowe in a tailored skirt and kitten heels, and starts to investigate. She gets to know Veronique’s neighbours, Henri Robery and his wife Sevine, and develops a flirtatious relationship with both – but also starts to get nearer to what really happened that fateful night.
‘The Long Goodbye’ is the only Chandler novel in which Marlowe manages to get his end away, for all the crackling dialogue and wanton women in the other books, he always somehow resists. It therefore seems appropriate that it was turned into the sexist and most sizzling Marlowe adaptation of them all. (I like the Robert Altman version as well, but without question Stéphane Audran is sexier than Elliot Gould.) There’s just something so French about it all – the careless flirtations and the passion of the affairs – which just suits this material so well. Paris in this film is a city where cross and double cross seem a matter of course, just like infidelity and wild homicidal passion – that’s the way of the world. The mystery therefore plays out against a background where there are a dozen similar mysteries taking place every day.
And Stéphane Audran makes a superb, if unorthodox, version of Marlowe. The gender swap may be controversial, but it works – having a sexy and somewhat mature woman ask these questions just adds a whole other frisson to the piece. And despite her wild past and how sexy she looks with her eyebrow raised, there is still a moral certainty to her that Chandler would have been proud of. A moral authority and an inner steel, and those are the essential ingredients every big screen Philip Marlowe needs.
Colour
In cinema terms, the French are much cooler than the British, aren’t they? If you look at how grand and romantic Paris appears on the cinema screen, and then contrast it with how dingy and provincial London looks, you have to – and it pains me to admit this - say that France wins. It’s by far the most cinematic country with a much grander film tradition and many more great films. Of course as a citizen of these isles I will not admit French superiority in any other matter (our cheeses are much better than theirs, goddamnit!), to do so would see my British passport revoked and my bruised and battered body dumped off The White Cliffs of Dover. But when it comes to cinema, I feel I am on safer ground – they have the lead on us. Damn them!
A case in point, in the same year Robert Mitchum was playing an aged Philip Marlowe on the dank streets of London, Stéphane Audran was essaying a more original and yet still recognisable version of Marlowe on the lush and golden streets of Paris.
But whereas one was directed by the dread hand of Michael Winner, the other was being helmed by the French Hitchcock himself – the great and equally balding, Claude Chabrol.
Audran is Michelle, a socialite who it’s hinted has some kind of scandalous past. Outside a nightclub one evening (where she has pushed away the attentions of a particularly hirsute date – like that bloke from ‘The Joy of Sex’ made flesh), she encounters Veronique, an old acquaintance. The two of them share a cab home and say goodbye with a Parisian kiss on the cheek and a lingering embrace. Maybe the encounter would never have meant anything, but the following morning Veronique arrives at Michelle’s apartment and asks to be driven to Charles de Gaulle airport. Michelle senses that something is wrong, but does it anyway. It turns out that Veronique’s boyfriend is lying dead in their house, and having aided the main suspect’s escape, Michelle is questioned as an accessory. Once the police free her though, this one time party girl becomes Philip Marlowe in a tailored skirt and kitten heels, and starts to investigate. She gets to know Veronique’s neighbours, Henri Robery and his wife Sevine, and develops a flirtatious relationship with both – but also starts to get nearer to what really happened that fateful night.
‘The Long Goodbye’ is the only Chandler novel in which Marlowe manages to get his end away, for all the crackling dialogue and wanton women in the other books, he always somehow resists. It therefore seems appropriate that it was turned into the sexist and most sizzling Marlowe adaptation of them all. (I like the Robert Altman version as well, but without question Stéphane Audran is sexier than Elliot Gould.) There’s just something so French about it all – the careless flirtations and the passion of the affairs – which just suits this material so well. Paris in this film is a city where cross and double cross seem a matter of course, just like infidelity and wild homicidal passion – that’s the way of the world. The mystery therefore plays out against a background where there are a dozen similar mysteries taking place every day.
And Stéphane Audran makes a superb, if unorthodox, version of Marlowe. The gender swap may be controversial, but it works – having a sexy and somewhat mature woman ask these questions just adds a whole other frisson to the piece. And despite her wild past and how sexy she looks with her eyebrow raised, there is still a moral certainty to her that Chandler would have been proud of. A moral authority and an inner steel, and those are the essential ingredients every big screen Philip Marlowe needs.
Sunday, 8 December 2013
Vengeance Man (1970)
D.
Henry Levin
Colour
I’m guessing that most people when they think of Tom Jones in the context of cinema, recall his not terribly good turn as himself in Tim Burton’s ‘Mars Attacks’. It’s an odd and deeply awkward performance, which gives the impression that the magnetic performer Tom Jones just isn’t very comfortable in his own skin. (It’s also so unusual that Tom would feel the need to specify that he saw a fight in “Cardiff, Wales” – are there any other well-known Cardiffs? Any other well-known Cardiffs that legendary Welshman Tom Jones would feel the need to differentiate his capital city from?) This is a shame, as ‘Mars Attacks’ is only the late echo of Tom’s big screen career. In the early seventies, at the height of his fame, he made three private detective films. If we’re honest at the outset, none of them are brilliant, all of them are cheap and cheerful and come pre-packed with some clunking moments. But Tom, although one would struggle to describe him as actively good, is certainly a lot more adequate than he was in ‘Mars Attacks’.
Really Tom Jones should be playing himself in these films as well. The image he portrays is entirely the medallion man, the lounge lizard – all chest hair, tight trousers and white smile. He‘s no different from his public persona at the time, no different from the clips you see of him in his TV show. Yes he’s a private detective now and he has an office with a sassy black secretary, but really he is still Tom Jones. And the film should have had the courage of its convictions and claimed that he was actually just playing himself. That in between concerts, recording sessions, TV shows and having lacy knickers thrown at his grinning face, Tom also ran his own detective agency and got into the most incredible adventures. That would have made a head-spinningly cool film, that would have ensured it was remembered. But instead we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales, solving crimes in downtown Los Angeles – and I suppose that’s fairly cool itself.
Here’s the plot. An old friend of Wayne’s is found dead, the coroner determines suicide but Wayne doesn’t buy it and sets out to investigate. It isn’t long before Wayne has uncovered murky depths, with a model agency and a criminal gang acting as a blackmail trap which threatens to ensnare the most powerful people in the city.
So far, so Mike Hammer knock-off. But let’s be honest, Tom Jones being a private detective investigating crimes at a model agency makes the whole thing sound a lot more fun than any generic private eye set-up has the right to be. The last time I watched this I did wonder how sexist a film it is. After all it’s loaded with dozens of nubile babes in bikinis, there to be ogled and lusted after by both leading man and camera. (One called Delilah, who our hero makes clear – with a wink – that he’s staying away from this time). Clearly it’s more than a little exploitative. But then none of these girls ever get topless and the only nipples we see have a matt of ruggish Welsh chest hair. Yes, this is all about Tom. There he is pouting and posing and showing off. There he is wooing the ladies (he has more conquests than a randy, sex starved James Bond would have whilst on Viagra) and punching out henchman and having car chases and generally being the ultimate heroic action man.
And he does, well, okay in this role. One would hardly call the performance dazzling. He fails to get impact from some of his dialogue and a number of scenes fall flatter than he probably would like, as for all his dynamism he just isn’t an experienced enough actor. But he has a certain charm, a twinkle in his eye and a wide smile which lets you carry him through. Okay he’s playing Wayne Wales, but really he’s being Tom Jones and if you think of it as a film where Tom Jones is a private eye who has amazing and sexy adventures in downtown LA, then you won’t be disappointed.
Colour
I’m guessing that most people when they think of Tom Jones in the context of cinema, recall his not terribly good turn as himself in Tim Burton’s ‘Mars Attacks’. It’s an odd and deeply awkward performance, which gives the impression that the magnetic performer Tom Jones just isn’t very comfortable in his own skin. (It’s also so unusual that Tom would feel the need to specify that he saw a fight in “Cardiff, Wales” – are there any other well-known Cardiffs? Any other well-known Cardiffs that legendary Welshman Tom Jones would feel the need to differentiate his capital city from?) This is a shame, as ‘Mars Attacks’ is only the late echo of Tom’s big screen career. In the early seventies, at the height of his fame, he made three private detective films. If we’re honest at the outset, none of them are brilliant, all of them are cheap and cheerful and come pre-packed with some clunking moments. But Tom, although one would struggle to describe him as actively good, is certainly a lot more adequate than he was in ‘Mars Attacks’.
Really Tom Jones should be playing himself in these films as well. The image he portrays is entirely the medallion man, the lounge lizard – all chest hair, tight trousers and white smile. He‘s no different from his public persona at the time, no different from the clips you see of him in his TV show. Yes he’s a private detective now and he has an office with a sassy black secretary, but really he is still Tom Jones. And the film should have had the courage of its convictions and claimed that he was actually just playing himself. That in between concerts, recording sessions, TV shows and having lacy knickers thrown at his grinning face, Tom also ran his own detective agency and got into the most incredible adventures. That would have made a head-spinningly cool film, that would have ensured it was remembered. But instead we have Tom Jones as private detective, Wayne Wales, solving crimes in downtown Los Angeles – and I suppose that’s fairly cool itself.
Here’s the plot. An old friend of Wayne’s is found dead, the coroner determines suicide but Wayne doesn’t buy it and sets out to investigate. It isn’t long before Wayne has uncovered murky depths, with a model agency and a criminal gang acting as a blackmail trap which threatens to ensnare the most powerful people in the city.
So far, so Mike Hammer knock-off. But let’s be honest, Tom Jones being a private detective investigating crimes at a model agency makes the whole thing sound a lot more fun than any generic private eye set-up has the right to be. The last time I watched this I did wonder how sexist a film it is. After all it’s loaded with dozens of nubile babes in bikinis, there to be ogled and lusted after by both leading man and camera. (One called Delilah, who our hero makes clear – with a wink – that he’s staying away from this time). Clearly it’s more than a little exploitative. But then none of these girls ever get topless and the only nipples we see have a matt of ruggish Welsh chest hair. Yes, this is all about Tom. There he is pouting and posing and showing off. There he is wooing the ladies (he has more conquests than a randy, sex starved James Bond would have whilst on Viagra) and punching out henchman and having car chases and generally being the ultimate heroic action man.
And he does, well, okay in this role. One would hardly call the performance dazzling. He fails to get impact from some of his dialogue and a number of scenes fall flatter than he probably would like, as for all his dynamism he just isn’t an experienced enough actor. But he has a certain charm, a twinkle in his eye and a wide smile which lets you carry him through. Okay he’s playing Wayne Wales, but really he’s being Tom Jones and if you think of it as a film where Tom Jones is a private eye who has amazing and sexy adventures in downtown LA, then you won’t be disappointed.
Sunday, 10 November 2013
The Tall Tower (1958)
D.
Otto Preminger
B&W
There are so few ideas in the world that it’s unsurprising some overlap. It’s unsurprising that some films look basically the same as later much more famous films, almost as if the latter was an unofficial remake. We shouldn’t be suspicious though, we shouldn’t accuse – some films just fade from the collective memory, while others crash down on bloodied feet before smirking laconically to ensure you can never forget them.
As I’ve said before, this blog is for the neglected orphans of cinema.
See if this scenario sounds familiar: a New York detective calls into a tower block and finds himself caught in a battle of wills with suave European criminal who has taken hostages as he and his gang attempt to rob a vault in the basement.
Ah, I can see you nodding now. It’s ‘Die Hard’, isn’t it? That great classic of macho blockbuster cinema. We’ve all seen ‘Die Hard’. In fact my dad insists on watching it every single Christmas Eve. But imagine it’s ‘Die Hard’ in black & White, ‘Die Hard’ without explosions, ‘Die Hard’ with James Stewart as the cop and George Sanders as the criminal – and then you realise you’re actually watching ‘The Tall Tower’.
The difference between films of the 40s/50s/60s, where Hitchcock was the biggest and most mischievous boy in the sandpit, and the later blockbusting age is largely a matter of volume. Whereas it was the case that entertainment was provided by the taut dragged out tension and some truly startling moments, it became the norm for thrills to come by the way of bigger and bigger things blowing up. Indie films are understated, low budget horror can be understated (although more often is just tediously crap); but if you want a big tent-pole film with a major Hollywood star, then you want to rank up the volume and make things go ‘Bang!’ Now in terms of quality ‘Die Hard’ is one of the absolute best examples of this loud things go ‘Bang!’ genre (for the flip-side of the coin, see the ‘Transformers’ films), but it’s still a film where things go ‘Bang’. And the fact that it’s so loud and exciting and thrilling and there are loads of ‘bang-bang-bang’ explosions, makes the really subdued and understated style of ‘The Tall Tower’ look weirdly unthrilling.
No doubt an Alfred Hitchcock would have ramped up the suspense with this material, but Preminger has chosen his theme here as sweat. As the film progresses and the situation becomes more and more dangerous, Stewart is almost having flop sweats. He is dripping. Seriously, he looks quite unwell and one keeps expecting a kindly nurse to wander into shot and plug a drip into his arm. Sanders, on the other hand, prefers to glisten. Even at his most menacing, most in control (and with that voice, he was born to play sinister control), there’s still a sheen of moisture on his brow to illustrate the danger of the situation. Even suave European crooks feel nervous.
But the odd thing is that sense of danger is never as keen as it should be. This is a film which moves at a glacial pace, one which doesn’t so much draw out the tension as strap it to a rack and slowly and idly turn the handle, before popping off to have tea and biscuits. It’s a film which for a modern audience, having seen ‘Die Hard’, lacks much in the way of real urgency and thrills. Although that’s maybe unfair to modern audiences; if you compare it to a ‘Rear Window’ or a ‘North or Northwest’, then this film seems weirdly unengaging. It’s a movie which is happier staring in at the classy actors, than giving momentum to its plot. Indeed (SPOILER ALERT) it doesn’t even hint at things going ‘Bang’. As a sign of how understated and subdued it is, the villain isn’t even killed at the end. He is merely shot in the stomach and taken into custody. Job well done for the NYPD.
And yet for all its slowness and lack of drama, I would still prefer to watch this rather than something like ‘Transformers’. Obviously ‘Die Hard’ is miles better, but despite that we clearly lost something when we decided that things going ‘Bang’ was the be all and end all.
B&W
There are so few ideas in the world that it’s unsurprising some overlap. It’s unsurprising that some films look basically the same as later much more famous films, almost as if the latter was an unofficial remake. We shouldn’t be suspicious though, we shouldn’t accuse – some films just fade from the collective memory, while others crash down on bloodied feet before smirking laconically to ensure you can never forget them.
As I’ve said before, this blog is for the neglected orphans of cinema.
See if this scenario sounds familiar: a New York detective calls into a tower block and finds himself caught in a battle of wills with suave European criminal who has taken hostages as he and his gang attempt to rob a vault in the basement.
Ah, I can see you nodding now. It’s ‘Die Hard’, isn’t it? That great classic of macho blockbuster cinema. We’ve all seen ‘Die Hard’. In fact my dad insists on watching it every single Christmas Eve. But imagine it’s ‘Die Hard’ in black & White, ‘Die Hard’ without explosions, ‘Die Hard’ with James Stewart as the cop and George Sanders as the criminal – and then you realise you’re actually watching ‘The Tall Tower’.
The difference between films of the 40s/50s/60s, where Hitchcock was the biggest and most mischievous boy in the sandpit, and the later blockbusting age is largely a matter of volume. Whereas it was the case that entertainment was provided by the taut dragged out tension and some truly startling moments, it became the norm for thrills to come by the way of bigger and bigger things blowing up. Indie films are understated, low budget horror can be understated (although more often is just tediously crap); but if you want a big tent-pole film with a major Hollywood star, then you want to rank up the volume and make things go ‘Bang!’ Now in terms of quality ‘Die Hard’ is one of the absolute best examples of this loud things go ‘Bang!’ genre (for the flip-side of the coin, see the ‘Transformers’ films), but it’s still a film where things go ‘Bang’. And the fact that it’s so loud and exciting and thrilling and there are loads of ‘bang-bang-bang’ explosions, makes the really subdued and understated style of ‘The Tall Tower’ look weirdly unthrilling.
No doubt an Alfred Hitchcock would have ramped up the suspense with this material, but Preminger has chosen his theme here as sweat. As the film progresses and the situation becomes more and more dangerous, Stewart is almost having flop sweats. He is dripping. Seriously, he looks quite unwell and one keeps expecting a kindly nurse to wander into shot and plug a drip into his arm. Sanders, on the other hand, prefers to glisten. Even at his most menacing, most in control (and with that voice, he was born to play sinister control), there’s still a sheen of moisture on his brow to illustrate the danger of the situation. Even suave European crooks feel nervous.
But the odd thing is that sense of danger is never as keen as it should be. This is a film which moves at a glacial pace, one which doesn’t so much draw out the tension as strap it to a rack and slowly and idly turn the handle, before popping off to have tea and biscuits. It’s a film which for a modern audience, having seen ‘Die Hard’, lacks much in the way of real urgency and thrills. Although that’s maybe unfair to modern audiences; if you compare it to a ‘Rear Window’ or a ‘North or Northwest’, then this film seems weirdly unengaging. It’s a movie which is happier staring in at the classy actors, than giving momentum to its plot. Indeed (SPOILER ALERT) it doesn’t even hint at things going ‘Bang’. As a sign of how understated and subdued it is, the villain isn’t even killed at the end. He is merely shot in the stomach and taken into custody. Job well done for the NYPD.
And yet for all its slowness and lack of drama, I would still prefer to watch this rather than something like ‘Transformers’. Obviously ‘Die Hard’ is miles better, but despite that we clearly lost something when we decided that things going ‘Bang’ was the be all and end all.
Wednesday, 23 October 2013
Dropper Harris and the Speeding Bullet (1937)
D. Ted Green
B&W
It’s no doubt Cary Grant’s later association with Alfred Hitchcock which ensures that the Dropper Harris films are now forgotten relics of a more dashing age. And that’s a shame, as they’re a bit creaky and stiff (but then a lot of films in 1937 are a bit creaky and stiff) but these are sharp and suspenseful movies, which are a lot more fun and free-wheeling than most American thrillers of the age. Yes, the plot doesn’t make much sense. Yes, the version of England it pedals couldn’t be any more obviously California unless the Hollywood sign appeared and all the houses of parliament started to sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, but I have a massive soft spot for this film and its sequels. Whatever their flaws, they’re a lot of fun. And Cary Grant is a great choice for the square jawed hero, as even when he’s playing it straight he can’t help but seem to subvert the whole concept.
We’re in London, the home of pea-soupers and cheerful cockneys and the occasional horse drawn hansom carriage (the last detail is particularly baffling, as otherwise this is set in what is then the present day). Grant is Hugh ‘Dropper’ Harris, the finest investigator in the British service. His job title is as vague as ‘consulting detective’ and it’s never clear throughout the series whether he’s a policeman or a spy, but it doesn’t really matter. He is Richard Hannay with a license, or Bulldog Drummond in spats. What he calls himself doesn’t matter, his job is to have adventures, and along with his sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison) he’s about to find that the case of the speeding bullet is one of the most dangerous he’s ever had.
The conductor of the London Philharmonic is gunned down mid performance (shades of the original ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’), but it seems that the bullet struck before the shot was fired. How is that possible and – more importantly – who did it? Dropper Harris is on the case. Of course this is just a creaky hat-stand on which to hang the whole thrilling adventure, and you may wonder if it’s actually sturdy enough or whether it will collapse with a thud and the swishing of tailored jackets – but, rest assured, it may wobble from time to time but there’s enough ballast to provide 84 minutes of top quality black & white hi-jinks.
So off we go: there’s Sylvia Sydney as the most fatale of femme fatales, smoking through a cigarette holder as if brandishing a weapon; there’s Madeline Carroll as the good girl possibly gone bad, clutching both pigtails and a revolver; there’s Spencer Tracey as the businessman who may be behind it all; and Humphrey Bogart as his menacing henchman. (Grant, Tracey and Bogart all in one film together, and still it’s only remembered by geeks like me. Go figure!) Most of them don’t even bother to tackle the accent, which combined with Grants transatlantic tones make this London one of the most international cities in the world.
It’s a film with some of the best scenes anywhere in cinema. Here’s Spencer Tracey trying to intimidate Cary Grant over cocktails – a triumph of cracking dialogue and clinking glasses and lots of good natured smiling. It’s two friends together, laughing and telling jokes, with one friend making it clear he’d like to murder the other. Elsewhere we have Bogart trying to do a bit of menacing while he and Grant try out pogo-sticks in a Bloomsbury toy shop. Just watching those two icons of cinema bouncing up and down while exchanging breathless dialogue is one of the most joyful sights I’ve ever witnessed. Clearly they felt that joy, as the camera is constantly cutting to obviously let them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, And finally there’s Sylvia Sydney cornering Grant in front of the monkey cage in private zoo in Kensington Palace, launching into a long and wide-eyed speech about how she likes thick and long lasting cigars, the kind only the right kind of handsome Englishman possesses. It’s a triumph of innuendo, double entendre, a shared bag of peanuts and a chimpanzee who mugs as if in a silent comedy, clearly wanting star-billing in his own right.
(On a side note, is there really a private zoo in Kensington Palace? I think The Tax Payer’s Alliance should investigate.)
It sounds exactly what it is, a very Manhattan film – not Bloomsbury or Chelsea or Waterloo or Mansion House or any of the other names the film’s characters drop in without having a clue what they’re talking about. But that doesn’t matter. This is set in London like Terry Gilliam’s film is set in Brazil, it’s a glamorous state of mind, a fantasy world of beautiful woman, guns, danger and an impossibly dashing leading man.
As its Grant who truly makes this film great. In the wrong hands it could have been po-faced, but Grant is so convincing as this super secret agent even as he has fun with the material. It’s what makes him the finest cinema leading man there ever was. Cary Grant always manages to be convincing in every role he does, even when he’s being Cary Grant. Here he winks at the audience to let them know that it’s all a joke, even as he carries us along with the excitement and danger. He know this isn’t a serious film, he know that the rope isn’t going to burn and that the safe is not going to drop on Dropper Harris’s handsome skull, but he takes us through and lets us both take it seriously and laugh at it and have an absolute whale of a time as we do.
B&W
It’s no doubt Cary Grant’s later association with Alfred Hitchcock which ensures that the Dropper Harris films are now forgotten relics of a more dashing age. And that’s a shame, as they’re a bit creaky and stiff (but then a lot of films in 1937 are a bit creaky and stiff) but these are sharp and suspenseful movies, which are a lot more fun and free-wheeling than most American thrillers of the age. Yes, the plot doesn’t make much sense. Yes, the version of England it pedals couldn’t be any more obviously California unless the Hollywood sign appeared and all the houses of parliament started to sing ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, but I have a massive soft spot for this film and its sequels. Whatever their flaws, they’re a lot of fun. And Cary Grant is a great choice for the square jawed hero, as even when he’s playing it straight he can’t help but seem to subvert the whole concept.
We’re in London, the home of pea-soupers and cheerful cockneys and the occasional horse drawn hansom carriage (the last detail is particularly baffling, as otherwise this is set in what is then the present day). Grant is Hugh ‘Dropper’ Harris, the finest investigator in the British service. His job title is as vague as ‘consulting detective’ and it’s never clear throughout the series whether he’s a policeman or a spy, but it doesn’t really matter. He is Richard Hannay with a license, or Bulldog Drummond in spats. What he calls himself doesn’t matter, his job is to have adventures, and along with his sidekick Binky (Tommy Harrison) he’s about to find that the case of the speeding bullet is one of the most dangerous he’s ever had.
The conductor of the London Philharmonic is gunned down mid performance (shades of the original ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much’), but it seems that the bullet struck before the shot was fired. How is that possible and – more importantly – who did it? Dropper Harris is on the case. Of course this is just a creaky hat-stand on which to hang the whole thrilling adventure, and you may wonder if it’s actually sturdy enough or whether it will collapse with a thud and the swishing of tailored jackets – but, rest assured, it may wobble from time to time but there’s enough ballast to provide 84 minutes of top quality black & white hi-jinks.
So off we go: there’s Sylvia Sydney as the most fatale of femme fatales, smoking through a cigarette holder as if brandishing a weapon; there’s Madeline Carroll as the good girl possibly gone bad, clutching both pigtails and a revolver; there’s Spencer Tracey as the businessman who may be behind it all; and Humphrey Bogart as his menacing henchman. (Grant, Tracey and Bogart all in one film together, and still it’s only remembered by geeks like me. Go figure!) Most of them don’t even bother to tackle the accent, which combined with Grants transatlantic tones make this London one of the most international cities in the world.
It’s a film with some of the best scenes anywhere in cinema. Here’s Spencer Tracey trying to intimidate Cary Grant over cocktails – a triumph of cracking dialogue and clinking glasses and lots of good natured smiling. It’s two friends together, laughing and telling jokes, with one friend making it clear he’d like to murder the other. Elsewhere we have Bogart trying to do a bit of menacing while he and Grant try out pogo-sticks in a Bloomsbury toy shop. Just watching those two icons of cinema bouncing up and down while exchanging breathless dialogue is one of the most joyful sights I’ve ever witnessed. Clearly they felt that joy, as the camera is constantly cutting to obviously let them laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, And finally there’s Sylvia Sydney cornering Grant in front of the monkey cage in private zoo in Kensington Palace, launching into a long and wide-eyed speech about how she likes thick and long lasting cigars, the kind only the right kind of handsome Englishman possesses. It’s a triumph of innuendo, double entendre, a shared bag of peanuts and a chimpanzee who mugs as if in a silent comedy, clearly wanting star-billing in his own right.
(On a side note, is there really a private zoo in Kensington Palace? I think The Tax Payer’s Alliance should investigate.)
It sounds exactly what it is, a very Manhattan film – not Bloomsbury or Chelsea or Waterloo or Mansion House or any of the other names the film’s characters drop in without having a clue what they’re talking about. But that doesn’t matter. This is set in London like Terry Gilliam’s film is set in Brazil, it’s a glamorous state of mind, a fantasy world of beautiful woman, guns, danger and an impossibly dashing leading man.
As its Grant who truly makes this film great. In the wrong hands it could have been po-faced, but Grant is so convincing as this super secret agent even as he has fun with the material. It’s what makes him the finest cinema leading man there ever was. Cary Grant always manages to be convincing in every role he does, even when he’s being Cary Grant. Here he winks at the audience to let them know that it’s all a joke, even as he carries us along with the excitement and danger. He know this isn’t a serious film, he know that the rope isn’t going to burn and that the safe is not going to drop on Dropper Harris’s handsome skull, but he takes us through and lets us both take it seriously and laugh at it and have an absolute whale of a time as we do.
Sunday, 20 October 2013
Roseanna (1974)
D. Jack Smight
Colour
Colour
It’s downright odd that one would take a bleak Scandinavian
crime thriller, full of gloomy and moody Swedes, and transport it to sunny and
bright Los Angeles.
It’s utterly peculiar that having taken this dark and
existential story, one would then cast a talented light comic actor like George
Segal in the lead.
No matter how witty the banter, one would normally be really
quite suspicious that the audience will find it distasteful to see male cops
wisecracking over a violent sex crime.
And it’s frankly and
maddeningly bizarre that amidst the bright Los Angeles sunshine (with all the
lingering shots of beautiful blondes in bikinis that implies), the charmingly
smiling leading man and all the jokes, one would not only keep the brutality of
the crime but try to hold onto some of the book’s existential angst as well.
All of the above makes the adaptation of ‘Roseanna’ a
distinctly head spinning experience.
Sometimes films are schizophrenic, sometimes films have two
distinct personalities struggling to get out. It’s not just that a film
struggles to find a tone, it’s that it’s so totally tonally deaf, so unable to
engage with its own subject matter, that it becomes a warped piece of cinema
that nobody is possibly going to get to handle on. I don’t want to mock the
mentally ill, I don’t want to joke about the poor souls who were hauled around
in cages a hundred years ago by shysters who charged the public a penny a
gander, but this is a freak film, a genuinely split personality, mad and
unstable movie.
And as you know by now, this website exists to put its arms
around genuinely split personality, mad and unstable movies.
In 1964 the Swedish crime writing team, Sjöwall and Wahlöö,
introduced their character Martin Beck In ‘Rosanna’. It’s a compulsive police
procedural, but a very dark and Swedish book which lays the miserabilism on hard.
It adopts a questioning and disorientated stand against the world, to the point
where there’s a police officer actually named Kafka. The story concentrates on
the sexually-motivated murder of a young tourist in Sweden and the way the case
gets under the skin of the team investigating it, obsessing them and torturing
them with the thought that the man who did this is still out there. In short,
it isn’t a crammed barrel full of chuckles. Whether when Sjöwall and Wahlöö wrote
this book they thought there was a film in it, I don’t know. But if they did,
they probably thought it would be made by Ingmar Bergman on one of his less
cheery days.
However, fast forward ten years and Hollywood decides to
take a bash at it.
At the time this wouldn’t have necessarily seemed such a bad
idea. A year earlier, Walter Matthau had scored a success with his version of
Martin Beck in ‘The Laughing Policeman’. That was also set in California (San
Francisco rather than LA), but managed to maintain the grim procedural
qualities of the book. Presumably Mr Matthau was unavailable for this second go
around, so instead another actor known for comedy roles was hired – George
Segal. Now this might also have been a good thing, it could have expanded his
range away from comedy to something with more depth. And as long as the plot
wasn’t messed around with (which substantially it isn’t) and the horror wasn’t
muted (which it is, but only slightly) then this may have been a gripping and
scary thriller.
Instead we get this bloody mess, a diluted thriller which just
wants to be loved and ends up being the awkward guy at a party – there to make
friends, but just a bit too creepy to succeed. I like George Segal, I think he’s
an engaging presence, but obsessive and moody brooding is not his thing. The
film does give him a few moments of staring at the Pacific with a furrow on his
brow, but it is only a moment – then the grin snaps into place and we’re back
to wisecracking. And that’s the problem, the film doesn’t trust itself to do
the serious material and so tries to make it more palatable with jokes. But because
it doesn’t actually tone down the serious material, the end result is either a harsh
film which inexplicable keeps racing off to do some clowning, or a comedy with
a far too dark and brutal heart.
Amongst Segal’s colleagues are an hilarious bunch of LA police
officers, forever telling jokes and joshing with each other – but more than
anything they show the warped and flawed sheer wrongness of this film. Watching
men stand over the naked body of a girl while joking about what their girlfriend
likes to do with ketchup is just too weird. Words cannot express how odd it is
to watch and how uncomfortable the audience feels as a consequence. The film
becomes even worse than the awkward guy at the party, now instead the awkward
guy at the funeral, trying to lighten the mood with some ill advised blue comedy.
The whole thing – the sunshine, George Segal, the jokes –
just twist what should be an unrelenting thriller completely out of shape . The
brutality of the plot is kept, but this film doesn’t have the palate to do
brutality, it can only do bright and primary colours. As such it fails at every
conceivable level. But then if ‘Dirty Harry’ had featured a scene in which
Harry Callaghan – just after having been to the mortuary – put on a Groucho mask, picked up a ukulele
and mugged frantically while singing a medley of show tunes to a simpering,
leggy, lab technician, that would have been something a fail as well.
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