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.

The Return of Lancelot (1974)

D. Ted Obery
Colour

You can see the thought processes at work here.

Someone, somewhere must have been pitching a version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. No doubt facing some dubious Hollywood exec in a riot of beige, who was wondering why the hell the kids of today would want to see anything about poncy, fruity Englishmen in tights and strange women in ponds distributing swords willy-nilly, the no doubt perspiring filmmaker uttered the line: “They were just like the cowboys of their day!” At that moment the meeting had a little jolt of electricity and some wet behind the sideburns bright young thing leapt up to say that rather than just claim Arthur, Lancelot and crew were the cowboys of their day, why don’t we bring them together with actual cowboys? “Excellent!” shouts everybody, and there are Cuban cigars and lines of coke all round. Of course the little filmmaker celebrated with everyone else, even as he saw his dreams of a great Arthurian epic die.

And so here we have it:

Lancelot is cursed by Mordred to sleep for a thousand years (the maths aren’t going to work here, but just go with it). But when he wakes up, he is no longer in Wales or Cornwall or wherever the hell Camelot is thought to have been these days, he’s in Arizona (the geography isn’t going to work here either, but just go with it). He’s still in his Arthurian garb, he’s still speaking a distinctly flowery form of olde Englishe, but there he is – a new warrior in the Wild West.
Richard Chamberlain plays Lancelot and does so with a certain steely prissiness. This man is fussy on manners and etiquette and will kill you if you go against his rules, but is a true hero. Geoffrey Lewis is Mad Bill, the first cowboy Lancelot encounters. He looks flea-bitten and sunburnt, and has rotten teeth as well a booze-filled cackle borrowed from Edmund O’Brien in ‘The Wild Bunch’. But after a stand-off played for both tension and laughs, mutual respect breaks out, and it becomes clear that underneath it all Mad Bill is a good man and not that mad at all (he might not even be called Bill).

Let the legendary tales of this mis-matched pair begin!

Unfortunately this time travel adventure with an English hero has exactly the same flaw as last week’s time travel adventure with an English hero, in that having set up a fantastic premise it then proceeds to follow normal genre tropes and becomes a western The two get involved with a villainous land barren (Richard Widmark) and after various skirmishes, win the day because one of their number is an expert swordsman (I don’t want to ruin the suspense, so won’t tell you which one). Obviously the fact that one of these characters is an Arthurian knight, spouting the kind of dialogue which only comes from a well-thumbed thesaurus, means it’s not totally devoid of fun. But it’s horribly and depressingly predictable and if it had turned into the TV series it so clearly wants to be, we’d have had week after week of this unambitious twaddle.

What it really needed was Mordred to have slept as well and the whole thing to be a showdown between these two ancient warriors, but that would have required a more ambitious film with an actual ending in mind, not one that seemed desperate to coast along for the next five years on just the one mutant of an idea.

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.

The Last of the Mohicans (1964)

D. Peter Potinstoff
Colour

Something I’ve rarely touched upon so far is how good an actor Elvis was. Okay, I can see you rolling your eyes and smirking, but let me finish. Clearly he wasn’t allowed to be a great actor, the material just wasn’t there for him to demonstrate that even if he’d had the talent. But often the material isn’t there for him to show himself to be a good actor either, and yet somehow Elvis mostly manages to turn in a good performance. And by good I don’t mean simply adequate, I mean he truly inhabits his character within the context of the world around him. That’s different from creating a fully rounded, living and breathing character – as most Elvis films would have been deeply unsettled by having a fully rounded, living and breathing character in their midst – but in the light and fluffy world that most Elvis movies inhabit, Elvis fills his role with aplomb. He never embarrasses himself, and even when he’s clearly bored by the music, his acting performance retains masses of grace and soul. Elvis was never allowed to be a great actor, but then he was rarely given the material to shine as a truly good actor, yet he nearly always showed himself to be inherently gifted and as a man who could have had a proper career in the cinema if he’d been given the chance.

That’s my really long winded prelude to saying that despite all of that, ‘The Last of the Mohicans’ stinks.

And Elvis is fucking terrible in it!

Even I’m not going to try and defend this one.

Actually casting Elvis as Hawkeye is a fantastic idea. After all Elvis was often reputed to have Native American heritage and he has the skin tone, the eyes and the cheekbones to pull it off. He also has a certain stillness about him on the screen, and stillness is a quality that American movies loved to use for braves and chiefs (seriously, why aren’t there any jittery and nervous Native Americans on the big screen?) In practice though Elvis has no idea what to do with the part and is deeply and obviously uncomfortable within it. I think as a young boy Elvis always wanted to be a cowboy rather than an Indian and it shows in every stilted movement. Many scenes go by with him standing arms crossed in his headdress, looking like one of those old statues – creating a lifeless immobility that is at times so convincing it surprises you when he speaks. His dialogue is no help at all though, it’s supposed to be wise aphorisms in pigeon-English but he actually comes across like a less convincing Yoda: “Speak English, proper, he cannot”. Okay, the character comes more alive in the stunt scenes, but that’s more to do with an enthusiastic stuntman than anything else.

‘Harum Scarum’ and this are the Elvis films that suffer most from being shot entirely within the confines of the studio, with a few leaves and unconvincing shrubs at Paramount unable to replicate the great American wilderness. And the supporting cast of Shelley Fabares (later seen again with Elvis in ‘Spinout’), and Deforest Kelly (looking stunned at the absurdity around him, and this is a man who managed to act like he believed in William Shatner’s toupee) don’t manage to lift things any higher. This is a strange misfiring film, where everything goes wrong and one can only be amazed that every copy of it wasn’t dramatically hurled off some waterfall in North Carolina.

A Bucket of Bolognese (1974)

D. Franco di Palma
Colour


We’re through the looking glass here, people. And it’s a looking glass which is cracked and dripping bright red with thick viscous blood, or – actually – is that pasta sauce? As today we’re looking at the bizarrely titled and utterly bizarre ‘A Bucket of Bolognese’, and I’m torn as to whether this is an attempt to make the weirdest Spaghetti Western of all time, or an attempt to spoof the whole genre, or simply a filmmaker taking his dream journal and making a very long and very silly movie from it.


The setting is a lost desert town which wears the name ‘Nowheresville’ on an old battered sign. It’s a small, ramshackle place, the kind you’ve seen in dozens of spaghetti westerns. Unmistakably it’s the type of town where the locals have earned deep lines on their faces, where the wind and wisdom of years has given them an interesting turn of phrase, yet where they speak English in a way which doesn’t quite match the movement of their mouths. Living in Nowhereville is stock character after stock character: there’s a corrupt sheriff; a sage and philosophical saloon owner; an earnest and good hearted whippersnapper; and a particularly lusty and buxom madam. Into town one day rides a stranger – Robert Vaughan, of all people – handsome, debonair and deadly. He clearly has the killer instinct to match his sharp get up. And he’s just in time, as the town is about to be besieged by an insane undertaker who has decided to build up his business by massacring the town folk.


(That last point is particularly interesting. Yes, for an undertaker, massacring a whole town would make him much busier in the short term – but who on Earth is going to pay him? There’s no financial gain in this. And what would the word of mouth about this undertaker be? Yes, it would undoubtedly give you more holes to dig, but this is not a sensible business building scheme.)


I’ve always admired the dream-like quality of ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’, the way, for example, a whole army can vanish from a destroyed bridge while Eastwood and Wallach sleep. Here that dream quality is turned up to some loud and proud, bright and brash, feverish hallucination. The undertaker is portrayed as a cackling lunatic of the kind The Grimm Brothers would have dismissed as a tad too broad. Around the town he sets up these coffin traps, where out of nowhere a full sized coffin springs up and starts spraying machine-gun fire. In town things are no better, with the lusty madam always in a state of undress and putting herself in the most ridiculous situations. You don’t expect to see a busty, sexy woman in a slip run right across the middle of a gunfight in slow motion for no real reason (well, apart from the obvious ones). Elsewhere the earnest youth is shot, but still acts as a gopher for Vaughan for the unfeasibly long amount of time it takes him to die – a good half of the movie’s length, I reckon. So what we have here is a really weird mixture and that’s before we get to the backroom of the saloon, where an incongruous party of dwarfs does nothing but play poker and eat a giant suckling pig – worrying little about the possible oncoming slaughter.


At the centre of it all, doing amazingly stoic and sterling work as the gunslinger, is Robert Vaughan. I like Robert Vaughan, I like how he uses his traditional Hollywood looks and charisma and gives them a sinister edge. It works amazingly well here, in a film where no one is sure what the gunfighter’s next move will be, that dubious morality is beautifully judged. But even more than that, by keeping a straight face and remaining calm no matter what piece of madness unfurls in front of him, he provides a centre which makes whatever the hell is happening in this movie appear almost normal.


How funny this is, I couldn’t tell you, nor whether it’s supposed to be funny. I can’t even tell you how good it is, but I know that once seen, it’s not forgotten.

The Voodoo Lady of Texas (1945)

D. Otto Preminger
B&W


The moon is high and yet it’s still an eerily dark night. The prairie plain seems desolate, what we would now liken to a moonscape. Only the odd cactus leads you to acknowledge there is any life whatsoever, and even then it doesn’t look comforting. There’s no sound (apart from the distant whirr of the projector) and that’s incredibly spooky as well; so much so that you’d welcome even the howl of a distant jackal, but none comes. Even though it’s just an image projected on a screen you can see that it’s a cold place, so freezing and airless in the darkness that even your bones start to shiver. This is a place of death, a vision of what hell must look like, and you are all alone within it – no comfort in sight. But wait, there’s movement. From somewhere deep in the prairie plain a figure is appearing, shambling and stumbling forward as if not fully in control of its limbs. You look closer and see that it’s a man, a cowboy dressed in full garb, but looking so bruised and beaten. He almost seems like a dead cowboy. He stumbles towards the camera, his head down, as if weeping or needing every ounce of strength to make one foot move in front of the other. His arm is wounded and there is blood on his shirt, but still he keeps coming – staggering his way towards you. And then as he is almost upon the camera he finally raises his head to let you see his dazed eyes, and – oh my god! – is that John Wayne?


And so begins one of the strangest movies The Duke ever participated in. His only horror and one of the few horror westerns I’ve found. Clearly influenced by the likes of Jacques Tournier’s ‘The Cat People’, this is a master class of dark shadows, suspense and things not being quite what they should be. Wayne plays Ellis Bob, a widower with a sick child. We join him out in the desert, mid-way through his quest to find the strange voodoo princess who lives just beyond the mountains. This voodoo lady, when he finds her, sets him several quests. She is arch, she seems foreign; she is the unmistakably exotic and dazzling form of Marlene Dietrich.


A virtual two hander, Dietrich purrs her lines and sets Wayne his challenge of fire, ice, air and earth and when he succeeds in each task gives him a bit more of the information he’ll need to save his son’s life. It is spooky, it is atmospheric. It’s dark and claustrophobic and also terrifying. Okay, with her accent it’s difficult to really believe that Dietrich grew up from a small child practicing New Orleans voodoo (although to be fair, she doesn’t even try to make a haphazard stab at the Louisiana accent), but her presence is so alien and exotic that you end up believing virtually everything of her. While Wayne is great at playing not too intelligent, superb as a slow and dutiful father who can only believe the evidence of his own eyes. It’s a great pairing, and the scenes between them are a hungry and smiling cat playing with a dim-witted toy mouse. This is a taut and claustrophobic western horror, which is definitely worth traipsing across a bleak landscape for.

Captain Dinsdale (1969)

D. Cy Endfield
Colour

For someone writing a blog about neglected films with that touch of quality, the career of Mr Michael Caine is a godsend. There are so many forgotten movies, spanning so many different genres, that one sees it as a possibly never ending bounty. On a recent visit to Ireland, I found in my in-law’s cottage a newspaper box-set of Michael Caine films from the 70s and 80s, half of which I had never heard of. It has long been a hobby of mine to seek out strange and little-remembered films, and half of them I hadn’t heard of. And the great thing is, even though quality control has never been particularly high on the agenda, Michael Caine is always a class actor. Rarely will you see him sleepwalk through a film. True, he may aim for a higher performance in some movies than others, but you don’t ever see him coast. There’s always a spark of quality, a glint of something worthwhile.

So we have dozens, if not a hundred-plus films that have been pretty much forgotten but are made worthwhile by Caine’s performance.

What are we waiting for?

Sean Connery had ‘Shalako’, Elvis Presley had ‘Charro’ and Caine had ‘Captain Dinsdale’, each of them an attempt by the Hollywood studios – for whom westerns had been a staple since John Wayne swapped his bib and dummy for a six-shooter – to tap into these new young stars and that Spaghetti Western vibe. No longer would the good guy wear a white hat, no longer would one hero bring justice to a righteous town, instead there would be moral anarchy, bloody chaos and nihilism in what was now the brutal wilderness of storybook America.

Caine is the eponymous Captain Dinsdale, a British soldier now working as a bounty hunter and charged with bringing three outlaws across the desert to a military stockade. Still dressed in the battered reds of Her Majesty’s uniform, Caine rides stern faced across the desert looking like his character from ‘Zulu’ gone west and gone to seed. The convicts in his charge are the over-qualified trio of Robert Duvall, Robert Wagner and Robert Stack – and the four of them bicker and fight as they make their way over this endless sand. (Throughout it, as befits a soldier of Her Majesty’s army, Caine refers to each of these convicts by his surname. I like to imagine though that each character kept his real first name and that in other – more perverse – hands this would have become a distinctly confusing film. Gus van Sant’s ‘Gerry’ with more kick-ass explosions.) The hot sun bakes down and our foursome looks likely to plod on forever, until one day they see a green train, and Caine hatches a plan.

It might sound silly written down to think that a captor would start plotting with his captives – the three Roberts – each of whom he has spent the first half an hour of the film bickering with, the moment some easily got loot arrives in the story. But Caine manages to sell it. He is this hard and unyielding soldier, a man of determination, but not one to miss an opportunity. Before long the four of them are working together in the desert heat and we all know that cross and double cross and most likely triple cross and even quadruple cross squared are all making their way up the track.

Neither of the aforementioned ‘Charro’ or ‘Shalako’ is worthy of any note, but ‘Captain Dinsdale’ is a tense and finger-nail biting thriller. Essentially a chamber piece for the four actors, the film manages to be claustrophobic even in the expanse of the desert. Of course Caine and Duvall are by far the best performers on show and it boils down to a clash between the two of them – with Duvall excelling as the shifty, lisping, possibly gay con with an eye for the chance. It’s a characterisation which is always going to clash with Caine’s faded martinet.

Sir Michael is equally superb as Her Majesty’s soldier transported to the Western desert and remaining ever-so British. More than that, he remains ever-so cockney. It’s a wonderful performance, because it’s so incongruous in that dusty setting. Yes, this is the Michael Caine who became a Hollywood star, but it’s also the one who was Alfie and he never lets you forget it. The name ‘Alabama’, for instance, is curled so delightfully out of his South London tongue that it ends up sounding like somewhere just beyond Tooting Bec and left.

I’d recommend ‘Captain Dinsdale’ for its tense set up, great acting and by the end loads of stuff just blowing up while Caine stares impassively on. I’d recommend it for Caine’s sandy battered uniform, Robert Duvall’s ginger wig and the look on Robert Stack’s face the moment he clearly realises that the two younger actors have much better parts than he does. I’d recommend it for the bright sunlight, the chaos of the conclusion and the way Duvall stretches out the word “casssshhhh” with such vainglorious glee. I’d recommend it for Caine’s unremitting Elephant and Castle tones and the look on his face which says he knows how far he has come. And finally I’d recommend it for the sight of Sir Michael’s skin in the desert heat, and how by the end of the film he genuinely and marvellously does look like an overdone baked potato in military uniform.