Bandits Three (1973)

D. Marco De Freitas
Colour

Even ignoring the obvious, cannibalism was big in Italian cinema in the 1970s

Here, for example, is Italian cinema strapping on a big napkin and cannibalising itself. Where one genius visionary took ideas from American cinema, made them his own and created cinema gold and his own genre, here is another much less talented Italian director taking those ideas second hand from the genius and just making pretty much the same film – but cheaper and far less good. Yes, just as real spaghetti begets pasta shapes in tins in supermarkets, so spaghetti westerns begets the kind of low grade-horse operas that spaghetti westerns were supposed to blow away.*

Actually in the 1970s, thanks to Sergio Leone’s success, Italian westerns were two a lira. This one is different though. This one is actually an unofficial remake of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’.
By ‘unofficial remake’. I mean it uses exactly the same story, exactly the same beats and even some of the exact same shots.

Only this one has English actors (and one Anglo-Australian) as the leads, English actors who only make a half-hearted attempt at the accent and are clearly so under invested it’s amazing they don’t check their anachronistic wrist watches to see how long it’s going to be before each scene ends.
We have George Lazenby (The Good), Stewart Grainger (The Bad) and Kenneth Moore (The Ugly), all wandering around the Spanish countryside in search of buried treasure. Yes, that’s as weird a combination as it sounds on paper. If Clint Eastwood thought he was low down the list of actors for ‘A Fistful of Dollars’, Lord knows what this list looked like.

‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ itself seems to take place in a dreamlike version of America, ‘Three Bandits’ however barely pretends to be America at all. The accents don’t help, with Moore all but giving up on his after about two scenes to be a creepy public school boy (of the minor type) wandering incongruously around the dessert, Granger is supposed to be from Tennessee but clearly sees the whole thing as far below him, and Lazenby skips between Chelsea and Canberra while trying to be hard arsed and charismatic and failing completely. There are crosses and double crosses, buried treasure, stock footage of a bridge blowing up (which looks alarmingly like it is the very footage from ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ – which is just cheeky) and a final graveyard Mexican stand-off where the cheap, tinkling score tries to find some way in which it can soar.

It’s in no way a great film, but it’s perversely interesting to watch what happens when similar ingredients go into the mix and cinematic alchemy triumphantly fails to happen.


* I know I’ve moved from a cannibalism metaphor to a spaghetti shaped metaphor in the space of one paragraph. They’re both food based though so I think I can get away with it. Suffice to say that this warmed up and stodgy rubbish, and I know from bitter experience that both human flesh and spaghetti lose their flavour after being whacked in the microwave.

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.

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.

Bonfire Burns (2006)

D. Simon Olson
Colour

As I sit here and type with the bangs and whizzes of early fireworks rattling and screeching through my study window, I can’t help thinking that surely Ray Winstone could make a good enough crust out of just appearing in big budget Hollywood movies. I know this seems a strange thought to be randomly popping into my head, but please bear with me. In the last few years alone, East London’s favourite big grizzly bear has popped up again and again in lavish stateside productions. I can think of ‘Noah’, ‘Edge of Darkness’ and ‘The Departed’ off the top of my head, all of which boasted the prominent Winstone scowl. But no, it seems any opportunity he gets Winstone will slot into some British film made for tuppence ha’penny with a script that knows gritty violence sells. Which brings me onto today’s subject, this Ray Winstone starring, undeniably British, Bonfire Night-set murder mystery. My thoughts are making a kind of sense now, aren’t they?

A burnt out detective inspector is called to investigate two murders at the start of Bonfire Night. As the darkness falls and the bonfires start up, the cop finds himself alone in a suburban wilderness, without back-up or a walkie-talkie, battling a serial killer who is like a tabby with a rodent. Around him are dead eyed Bonfire Night revellers, many dressed in scary masks and costumes, who offer him no help, aid or solace whatsoever.

Without a shadow of a doubt it’s cinematic. Normal film whodunnits involve a lot of sitting in rooms with people talking. Yes these scenes of people sat in rooms talking can be shot with great tension and skill, they can even be interspersed with car chases, but the modus operandi remains the same. Here however the whodunit takes place in the nightmare bleakness of suburbia, with most of the scenes illuminated by the flickering orange glow of nearby bonfires, thus giving them a savage dream-like quality. In the background there is the savage whizz and explosions of rockets and Catherine wheels, the dark sky suddenly illuminated by screaming lines of fire. It’s no surprise then that Winstone’s character is soon looking so woozy and disorientated, as the whole does look like some dreadful acid trip.

There’s a strange melding of Halloween and Bonfire Night here. Even though the film is truly and obviously British, there does seem to be misinformation about what Bonfire Night is actually like. I’ve not really partaken in awhile, but when I think of Bonfire Nights as a kid I remember huddling in the backgarden watching the fireworks my dad purchased from the newsagent, holding sparklers and eating cheesy jacket potatoes. We never dressed up in monster movie outfits, we never wore scary masks and aiding lunatic serial killers was scarcely ever on our agenda.

But then I guess the international markets wouldn’t know what Bonfire Night was, Halloween is international, they’re near each other – so why not add two to two and come up with the kind of scary Bonfire Night nobody in their right mind would ever want to take part in?

The chase at the end involving a London bus is a tad ridiculous as nobody ever tries to outrun anything on a London bus, but this is, despite the darkness and dialogue muffled by pops and fizzles, a roaring London thriller which – much like bonfire night itself – is not as good as you want it to be.

G-Man! (1953)

D. Richard McCarthy
Brutal, torn from the headlines, B&W

Here's a film strangely neglected in Ronald Reagan's oeuvre, which is peculiar as it’s clearly and utterly so perfectly him. In fact it's so amazingly and absolutely him that this is probably what his wet dreams looked like.

Here he is as John ‘Duke’ Calhoun, a tough and uncompromising FBI agent running a hard-nosed operation against vicious gangsters in some unnamed American city. These gangsters are evil with a capital EVIL. You can tell from the way they sneer, or menace shopkeepers, or casually gun down one of their molls. Or you can tell by the way they run jazz clubs and sell reefer to further corrupt the wastrel patrons. Or you can tell by the way they have a comic book factory where soulless, conscience-less artists turn out violent and filthy comic strips to corrupt the young. Or you can tell by the truly damning fact that each night they salute the hammer and sickle and say thanks to their beloved Mother Russia.

Yes, Ronald Reagan is taking on communists, gangsters, jazz musicians (a couple of years later it would have been rock'n'roll) and comic books all wrapped up in one tight little bundle. Yes, he is on a crusade against everything a good right winger hates.

Part of that of course needs unpacking, as how could organised crime ever really be perceived as a communist activity? Surely the mafia is all about the profit margin, all about the bottom line, all about ruthlessness to keep their cash flow gushing. The cosa-nostra is really not interested in some higher principle or changing the world, they just want to be shady little capitalists and make lots of dough. If anything Ronald Reagan (government employee taking a paycheque from the state) is much more of a communist than they are. But it’s indicative of the muddy thinking of this film that everything bad has to be put into one pile, and everything good has to take one incredibly righteous Ronald Reagan shape. So even though these mobsters are clearly into gambling and prostitution, and obviously being creative with their revenue streams by publishing “disgusting and cruel” comic books (Reagan’s character’s description), they are still somehow men of the far left who despise the free market. They are working to destabilise all that’s good in America, i.e. capitalism, in the aid of communism, and they’re doing it by being the best capitalists they possibly can be. Please, don’t hurt your head by trying to get all this to make sense – it really, really doesn’t.

Ronald pushes the whole thing along – from every raid on a seedy nightclub, to the numerous interminable self-righteous speeches about the glory of America – in what is irrefutably one of his angriest and most committed performances. I can't say it’s a work of acting art, or even really that good, but evidently he believed furiously and wholeheartedly in it.

There Be Monsters!!! (1945)

D. Raoul Walsh
B&W

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

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

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

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

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

Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon (1972)

D. Horatio Jason
Colour

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

Yes, werewolves.

Riding motorbikes.

Pretty cool, ay?

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

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

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

An American Gangster in Pall-Mall (1985)

D. Ted Kotcheff
Colour



Every so often Ernest Borgnine left his genial, bear-like presence behind and went back to being the tough guy of his younger days. (Have you seen ‘Bad Day at Black-Rock’? You really must.) He did old and grizzled in ‘The Wild Bunch’ and he did it before he died in ‘Red’. And here he does it in this bizarre 1980s British movie, as an American gangster, dressed in a pin stripe suit, fedora and with a toothpick constantly between his incisors – like a walking, out of time, homage to John Dillinger. His niece is dead in Mayfair, but Borgnine hasn’t come to London to avenge her, all he’s interested in are the jewels she was carrying. That’s what’s really got his attention. As next of kin the jewels are his, he reasons, and he is going to stomp around the West End – kicking ass and pancaking noses – until he gets them.


Like Robert Stark’s ‘Parker’, Borgnine’s unnamed character is an unfeeling machine. He doesn’t care who gets in his way or who he hurts, all he thinks about is the jewels. Now there are in the Parker series, entries where our lead character is a fish out of water, but he’s still in a locale that is very much America and he learns how to adapt quickly. Here though we have that same unstoppable and untouchable hard guy, but also a quirky ‘ain’t Brits strange’ London travelogue. It makes for an odd movie, with Borgnine’s toughness contrasting with comical cab drivers, unarmed policeman with whistles who can only run helplessly after any perpetrator and gangs of punk rockers lurking around most corners. (Seriously the similarly titled ‘An American Werewolf in London also has menacing punk rockers. Surely any punk rocker in London in 1985 would have felt like they belonged on the ‘Antique’s Roadshow’.) Most baffling is Prunella Scales as an incredibly posh, English divorcee Borgnine meets on the plane and who shows up to flirt with him every so often. Scales plays it with a certain comic charm, but in the face of which this hard as nails version of Borgnine looks actually panicked.


The film is at its best when its lead character is punching people. First off its his niece’s foppish boyfriend, who is forced to abandon his grieving of drinking and enjoying prostitutes to have his face bashed in until he starts spilling the secret life about the dead girl; then it’s onto her drug dealer, who makes the horrible mistake of calling Borgnine “an old fart” and receives a cricket bat repeatedly to his own personal cricket balls; then the drug supplier, who has to be dropped out of a window and through the windscreen of his pride and joy Jag before he’ll cooperate, and on and on. The look on Borgnine’s face says he’s having the time of his life, that all this violence is so much fun. Of course for the film the danger is that all that face-slapping, head-butting and knee-kicking might become a bit unremitting, which is no doubt why it has Scales show up every so often – although the scenes have such a jarringly different tone, they’re amongst the most disturbing here.







So far, so late night Channel 5. But what really elevates it, what takes it above so many other violent films of the 80s, is the final scenes – when Borgnine reaches the top of this criminal empire. And who does he finds there? None other than Lord bloody Olivier. That’s right darling Larry Is lying back on a chez lounge, looking so elderly and weak, but clearly relishing every line of villainous dialogue. And here these two older Oscar winning actors (the 1948 and 1955 vintages, if you’re interested) size each other up, pad around each other, recognise each other’s distinct styles and then play an elaborate game of acting one-upmanship.  They’re really tense and delicious scenes that ensures the film builds to a tense and beautifully written ending it in no way deserves.

The Bang-Bang Men (1972)

D. John Flynn
Colour


This is actually the movie Gene Wilder made directly after ‘Willy Wonka’ and in many ways it seems like the same performance. Once again he is quixotic, changeable and prone to bursts of rage, so much so it’s impossible to believe a word he says. Okay, that magical look has gone from his eyes. When he stares off into the distance in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ it’s like he’s contemplating not just shooting some fat kid up a tube, but torturing him a little first. But clearly, even before Gene Wilder’s portrayal of Willy Wonka became a cultural touchstone, Gene Wilder was doing his own riff on Willy Wonka – although a far more dangerous version. You see Gene Wilder’s character in ‘The Bang-Bang Men’ doesn’t have the heart of gold Willy Wonka has, instead he’s a hired killer who’d think nothing of blowing up a pleasant and picturesque (almost Germanic) little town if it would get him what he wants. There are some things that The Candyman can’t do, but The Bang-Bang Man certainly can.


Taking this Willy Wonka-esque performance and putting it in a far edgier film does make for a strange dissonance, and that’s before we’re introduced to Wilder’s co-star – the redoubtable Charlton Heston. It’s amazing to see them together. Of course their careers overlapped (Heston actually made his last big screen appearance after Wilder) but to say that a pixyish Gene Wilder and a stolid Charlton Heston is a clash of styles is like suggesting that strawberry jam and marmite really shouldn’t find themselves together in the same sandwich. By the 1970s Heston was a face of the glorious past now become the vision of the frightening future. America had grown up with him in all those historical/biblical epics, but now he was ‘The Omega Man’, now he was visiting ‘The Planet of the Apes’, now he was investigating ‘Solyent Green’. Everything was going swiftly to hell and Charlton Heston was our weather vane, showing us just how bad things were going to be. In ‘The Bang-Bang Man’ he is even saying that the present isn’t so brilliant – playing a CIA agent forced to hire Wilder’s psychotic assassin to clear up a mess after an agency wetjob goes wrong. But the plot is almost irrelevant, there just to facilitate granite faced with mercury; Heston’s manly snarl against Wilder trying a little too hard to be funny (and he does try a little too hard, which has the effect of making his character even more deranged and frightening). This is jittery and nervous young America facing off against its wonderful and macho history.


We are in the shadows here, with covert operations, counter covert operation and operations which are probably confused about whether they covert or not. There are assassinations, car chases and angry confrontations. There’s Susan George as a possibly rogue British agent, seemingly enjoying a highly unlikely sado-masochistic relationship with – of all people – Roy Kinnear (Veronica Salt’s father in ‘Willy Wonka’). There’s Angie Dickenson as the chanteuse with a secret and Joseph Cotton as the senator who probably commits three corrupt acts before breakfast. You get the picture. It’s moody and atmospheric, has no faith in any of the structures and players of government, and every single frame just drips with paranoia.


And it really says something for the paranoia of 1970s America cinema that even Gene Wilder and Charlton Heston could be affected by it.

The Hero Hour (1961)

D. Henry Hathaway
Colour


Ignore ‘The Expendables’, feel free to discard Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ – ‘The Hero Hour’ stands up there as perhaps the most macho and bloody film ever made.


Have a look at the cast list - or mug shots, which might be the best term in this instance. There’s John Wayne at the captain who breaks the rules; Robert Mitchum as his lieutenant, with whom he once had a falling out over a woman; Lee Marvin as the hard-case troublemaker; and Charles Bronson as the tough guy with a secret. Sterling Hayden (prefiguring his ‘Doctor Strangelove’ outing as a possibly barking mad senior officer) orders them behind enemy lines to rescue school teacher Elizabeth Montgomery and her charges. Montgomery has information which could aid the allies and it’s crucial she’s brought out within seventy-two hours.


(Elsewhere, if you’re interested, there are speaking cameos for Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra and John Huston. And one of the little boys in Montgomery’s class did indeed grow up to be Kurt Russell. No wonder he became an action star, all he’d have to do was breathe near this cast for the essence of manliness to just flood into him).


What follows are dead Nazis piled on top of dead Nazis piled on top of dead Nazis. Essentially the same plot as ‘Saving Private Ryan’, but whereas the modern war film comes with lashings of angst as to how terrible war is, this one revels in how damned great it is to kill Germans. The firm it most reminds me of is Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton machine gunning with aplomb in ‘Where Eagles Dare’, but this one undoubtedly has an even higher death toll. Here we have Germans machine-gunned, blown up, garrotted, knifed, strangled, shot in cold blood in the head, hanged, suffocated and even drowned in a bathtub of soapy water. The levels of actual blood aren’t that high (as befits its vintage), but if it was made now this would be a gruesome 18 certificate with an oddly starry cast.


Wayne and Mitchum look to have the better roles and each of them serves up fried machismo with a side order of boiled brutishness and a customary sprinkling of charm, but it’s Marvin and Bronson who have the most fun. At one point Marvin is seen juggling grenades with a big smile on his face and a match jammed between his teeth; while later on Bronson throws himself on top of dynamite to protect Elizabeth Montgomery, and still manages to survive and get the hell out of France. That’s the kind of man he is!


Of course it’s rubbish. Obviously it’s insensitive to death and war and the pain it causes. Evidently it’s macho bullshit crap of the worst American excesses. But in its brio and enthusiasm and belief in itself – in the fact that even it knows it’s a big macho cartoon that’s beyond ridiculousness – you can’t help but be swept along in a wave of bloody enjoyment.