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.
Showing posts with label European. Show all posts
Showing posts with label European. Show all posts
Sunday, 14 December 2014
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Wilde in Paris (1980)
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?
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?
Wednesday, 22 October 2014
The Spaceman of Alcatraz (1968)
D. Franc Violon
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
B&W
This is the inevitable consequence of so many producers slapping the words 'of Alcatraz' onto their films in the 1960s – movies which have absolutely nothing to do with the island and are seemingly just there to make a quick buck. This French film is a case in point, in that beyond some stock footage (which is clearly shot on grainer and older film than the movie itself) and a couple of mentions in the dialogue, it has precisely zilch, nada, nothing to do with Alcatraz. Indeed it imagines the inside of Alcatraz as being beautiful white and germless corridors, where scientists wander through speaking French. The concrete brutality of the original is nowhere, in fact I’m not entirely sure the film realises Alcatraz was a prison.
(Curiously the fact that everybody in the film is French but they’re all apparently in America is never addressed. It's set a little in the future and so maybe the French were hoping to get their empire back and then some. Or maybe having seen films where lots of Hollywood actors pretended to be French whilst speaking English, the makers just decided to return the favour. That second theory doesn’t really explain why the lead scientist is called ‘Pierre Rouge’ though.)
In the walls of Alcatraz is kept one prisoner, the only survivor of a spaceship which crashed to Earth. The survivor is humanoid but hairless, and he speaks terrible premonitions of what will happen on Earth shortly if the governments don't change their ways. Nobody knows if these premonitions are accurate and so nobody acts. The prisoner talks and broods and smiles a very knowing smile from time to time, and the scientists start to realise that because the same exclusive group are left to examine the prisoner in perpetuity on Alcatraz, they’re as much prisoners as he is. The question then becomes: who’s experimenting on whom?
Although the fact our alien is being played by an alternatively kindly and glowering Donald Pleasance, does give away that his intentions might not be totally benign.
The version I saw was subtitled which meant Pleasance’s dialogue is dubbed into French. Once you’ve seen this great English actor seemingly speak all his lines in lilting, slightly high from helium French voice, at the end of each sentence letting out a little gasp of air like a balloon deflating, it’s hard to view him in the same way again. Certainly all those Halloween sequels he did would have benefited from such inspired craziness.
Really, it’s hard to criticise 'The Spaceman of Alcatraz', even though it's grabbed its title dishonestly, as this is the most compulsive 'of Alcatraz' film we've seen so far. A slow burner certainly, but one which is looking at Stockholm syndrome, the nature of man and the future of the planet - all whilst being trapped in one building. It has no answers of course, but it has a great aesthetic and French scientists speaking on camera just sound far smarter than their English speaking counterparts.
Wednesday, 23 July 2014
Gransel & Hetel (1958)
D. Jago Mirelles
B&W
Much like ‘The Third Man’, a film in which Orson Welles only really makes a brief appearance, but which looks from every lop-sided camera-shot and stark black and white image like your actual Orson Welles movie; this is another film in which Welles does little more than cameo, but which seems like Orson Welles directing at his most menacing. Of course ‘Gransel & Hetel’ is a lot more obscure and nowhere near as good as ‘The Third Man’ (that’s fine though, it’s hardly a badge of shame to be less good than ‘The Third Man’), but one which in its Grimm Brothers gothic stands out as being possibly the most Welles films the great Orson never directed.
A boy named Gransel and a girl named Hetel wander too far into the woods one day where they meet a wicked witch who makes no secret of the fact she’d like to eat them. Actually this is one damned scary witch. Imagine the bleached face of a worm with the razor-like teeth of a tiger shark, then picture that looming out of black & white darkness and we have here the kind of evil queen Alvy Singer is never ever going to fall in love with. The plucky kids make their escape, but are trapped in the increasingly dark wood with their would-be devourer in pursuit. A terrified elf tells them that the only way they can save themselves is to head to the ogre’s castle at the centre of the woods.
The ogre is, of course, Orson Welles, shot constantly from low angles to make him look twice as big and three times as menacing. He looms into frame, dominates it, his big and bushy beard seems to jut right out of the screen, he laughs twice as loud as any other sound in the film. Of course this opens up a lot of fat jokes at poor Orson’s expense (he after all looks more likely to eat the kids than the scrawny witch), but I’m going to (mostly) rise above that and just say how great his performance is: ‘The Wizard of Oz’ played not as a kindly charlatan, but as a malevolent and changeable monster who can help you on a whim, but easily destroy you too.
(It amuses me to do this film right next to Peter Sellers in ‘Mr Hargreaves’, as part of the reason production on the original ‘Casino Royale’ went so badly awry was the spectacular falling out between the two men. In these films each seems to be playing versions of their public personas. Sellers is outwardly affable and witty, but underneath something distinctly more unpleasant; while Welles is a quixotic, occasionally charming, walking appetite. If I had to pick, I think I’d rather have an evening out with Orson.)
Like an earlier, less well-formed ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, this is a movie which takes European fairy tales and decides not to downplay the horror elements Disney-style, but instead ramp them up so each of the ogres, witches and fairies is screaming at you. What we have is an Orson Welles’s children’s film – one that’s a compendium of creepy old books, scary backdrops, horrible monsters with horrible appetites, and a sense of doom that doesn’t really let up.
B&W
Much like ‘The Third Man’, a film in which Orson Welles only really makes a brief appearance, but which looks from every lop-sided camera-shot and stark black and white image like your actual Orson Welles movie; this is another film in which Welles does little more than cameo, but which seems like Orson Welles directing at his most menacing. Of course ‘Gransel & Hetel’ is a lot more obscure and nowhere near as good as ‘The Third Man’ (that’s fine though, it’s hardly a badge of shame to be less good than ‘The Third Man’), but one which in its Grimm Brothers gothic stands out as being possibly the most Welles films the great Orson never directed.
A boy named Gransel and a girl named Hetel wander too far into the woods one day where they meet a wicked witch who makes no secret of the fact she’d like to eat them. Actually this is one damned scary witch. Imagine the bleached face of a worm with the razor-like teeth of a tiger shark, then picture that looming out of black & white darkness and we have here the kind of evil queen Alvy Singer is never ever going to fall in love with. The plucky kids make their escape, but are trapped in the increasingly dark wood with their would-be devourer in pursuit. A terrified elf tells them that the only way they can save themselves is to head to the ogre’s castle at the centre of the woods.
The ogre is, of course, Orson Welles, shot constantly from low angles to make him look twice as big and three times as menacing. He looms into frame, dominates it, his big and bushy beard seems to jut right out of the screen, he laughs twice as loud as any other sound in the film. Of course this opens up a lot of fat jokes at poor Orson’s expense (he after all looks more likely to eat the kids than the scrawny witch), but I’m going to (mostly) rise above that and just say how great his performance is: ‘The Wizard of Oz’ played not as a kindly charlatan, but as a malevolent and changeable monster who can help you on a whim, but easily destroy you too.
(It amuses me to do this film right next to Peter Sellers in ‘Mr Hargreaves’, as part of the reason production on the original ‘Casino Royale’ went so badly awry was the spectacular falling out between the two men. In these films each seems to be playing versions of their public personas. Sellers is outwardly affable and witty, but underneath something distinctly more unpleasant; while Welles is a quixotic, occasionally charming, walking appetite. If I had to pick, I think I’d rather have an evening out with Orson.)
Like an earlier, less well-formed ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, this is a movie which takes European fairy tales and decides not to downplay the horror elements Disney-style, but instead ramp them up so each of the ogres, witches and fairies is screaming at you. What we have is an Orson Welles’s children’s film – one that’s a compendium of creepy old books, scary backdrops, horrible monsters with horrible appetites, and a sense of doom that doesn’t really let up.
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.
Wednesday, 7 May 2014
The (Mis)Adventures of Kitty Spectacular (1966)
D. Ken Annakin
Colour
I like to think that Honor Blackman had more money shovelled in her direction than she’d ever seen before to get her to appear in this fluffy and unsatisfying Euro-meringue. A high-farce, broad James Bond spoof where she trades completely off her most famous cinema character seemingly without a hint of shame. Does that name in the title strike a chord with you? Does it look eerily familiar? Of course it does. It’s almost as if the producers couldn’t acquire the rights for the name of ‘Pussy Galore’ and so did the next best thing and just took a cat euphemism and a superlative and Bond’s your uncle. So of course it was a coup to get the actual Pussy Galore to play this completely new character. Actually in the first instance it would never have worked unless they had Honor Blackman smiling on the bright colour poster to let people know that, okay, they weren’t quite seeing a spin-off of ‘Goldfinger’, but they were seeing the next best thing.
This is one of a number of films that sprang up in the late 1960s to take advantage of James Bond’s popularity. The most famous is, of course, ‘Casino Royale’, the cultural memory of which has not at all been extinguished by the Daniel Craig version, we all still revel in David Niven/Peter Sellers/Woody Allen’s glory and the jaunty Burt Bacharach theme. However, the film this bears closest resemblance to is ‘OK Connery’, the bizarre spoof where Neil Connery plays a spy along with half of the Bond movies regular cast. I say that as showing up as the antagonist here, albeit in a small role, as a humourless and possibly frigid British spy is the one and only Neil Connery. When the British secret service gets the nod that Kitty Spectacular and her troupe of slim, attractive, sexually provocative female pilots are planning to rob the bank in Monte Carlo, they try to stop her. It’s up to Kitty to stay one step ahead and win the day with a saucy wiggle and a feline smile.
(Just as an aside, what must it have been like to be Neil Connery? You have such a resemblance to your famous big brother, but none of the excessive Y chromosome manliness which actually makes the Connery name work. I’m going to guess that the 1960s, although he clearly took advantage of Sean’s success, was a bit of a depressing time for young Neil.)
Much like ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’, this is bizarre, silly and all realised in bright Technicolor. Although here the film seems a lot more self-conscious, as if straining constantly for a higher level of ridiculousness that it has neither the wit nor intelligence to achieve. There are schoolboy assassins, a submarine shaped like a hot-dog, robot duplicates of the world’s leaders and the whole thing ends with the British government planning to stop Kitty Spectacular and her gal-pals by dropping large circus tents onto their planes – which is exactly the kind of scheme some tripping film executives might conceive, but you can’t believe it would really pass muster with the more stuffy mandarins in Whitehall.
I wrote last time about the lesbianism in that film maybe being a French thing, but here it shows up again. Predictably, much like Pussy Galore, Kitty Spectacular has an eye for the ladies. There she is admiring the tight jodhpurs of the girls and telling her favourites that she’ll miss them in a most fulsome way. We even have her waking up next to the young Felicity Kendall (although here the film is oddly coy and suggests they just cuddled). James Bond is obviously a male fantasy, but so are these ladies. It might look from the outside like these female led films are the stuff of feminism (without a doubt this would pass The Bechdel Test), but in reality they’re about tight and skimpy outfits, lipstick lesbianism and allowing boys to be boys. They might look like feminism, but they’ve as much interest in inspiring young women as Maxim Magazine.
Don’t be smug though, if you’ve ever seen either of McG’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies, you’ll know we haven’t moved on that far.
Colour
I like to think that Honor Blackman had more money shovelled in her direction than she’d ever seen before to get her to appear in this fluffy and unsatisfying Euro-meringue. A high-farce, broad James Bond spoof where she trades completely off her most famous cinema character seemingly without a hint of shame. Does that name in the title strike a chord with you? Does it look eerily familiar? Of course it does. It’s almost as if the producers couldn’t acquire the rights for the name of ‘Pussy Galore’ and so did the next best thing and just took a cat euphemism and a superlative and Bond’s your uncle. So of course it was a coup to get the actual Pussy Galore to play this completely new character. Actually in the first instance it would never have worked unless they had Honor Blackman smiling on the bright colour poster to let people know that, okay, they weren’t quite seeing a spin-off of ‘Goldfinger’, but they were seeing the next best thing.
This is one of a number of films that sprang up in the late 1960s to take advantage of James Bond’s popularity. The most famous is, of course, ‘Casino Royale’, the cultural memory of which has not at all been extinguished by the Daniel Craig version, we all still revel in David Niven/Peter Sellers/Woody Allen’s glory and the jaunty Burt Bacharach theme. However, the film this bears closest resemblance to is ‘OK Connery’, the bizarre spoof where Neil Connery plays a spy along with half of the Bond movies regular cast. I say that as showing up as the antagonist here, albeit in a small role, as a humourless and possibly frigid British spy is the one and only Neil Connery. When the British secret service gets the nod that Kitty Spectacular and her troupe of slim, attractive, sexually provocative female pilots are planning to rob the bank in Monte Carlo, they try to stop her. It’s up to Kitty to stay one step ahead and win the day with a saucy wiggle and a feline smile.
(Just as an aside, what must it have been like to be Neil Connery? You have such a resemblance to your famous big brother, but none of the excessive Y chromosome manliness which actually makes the Connery name work. I’m going to guess that the 1960s, although he clearly took advantage of Sean’s success, was a bit of a depressing time for young Neil.)
Much like ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’, this is bizarre, silly and all realised in bright Technicolor. Although here the film seems a lot more self-conscious, as if straining constantly for a higher level of ridiculousness that it has neither the wit nor intelligence to achieve. There are schoolboy assassins, a submarine shaped like a hot-dog, robot duplicates of the world’s leaders and the whole thing ends with the British government planning to stop Kitty Spectacular and her gal-pals by dropping large circus tents onto their planes – which is exactly the kind of scheme some tripping film executives might conceive, but you can’t believe it would really pass muster with the more stuffy mandarins in Whitehall.
I wrote last time about the lesbianism in that film maybe being a French thing, but here it shows up again. Predictably, much like Pussy Galore, Kitty Spectacular has an eye for the ladies. There she is admiring the tight jodhpurs of the girls and telling her favourites that she’ll miss them in a most fulsome way. We even have her waking up next to the young Felicity Kendall (although here the film is oddly coy and suggests they just cuddled). James Bond is obviously a male fantasy, but so are these ladies. It might look from the outside like these female led films are the stuff of feminism (without a doubt this would pass The Bechdel Test), but in reality they’re about tight and skimpy outfits, lipstick lesbianism and allowing boys to be boys. They might look like feminism, but they’ve as much interest in inspiring young women as Maxim Magazine.
Don’t be smug though, if you’ve ever seen either of McG’s ‘Charlie’s Angels’ movies, you’ll know we haven’t moved on that far.
Sunday, 4 May 2014
Agent Marie Lautrec (1964)
D. André Hunebelle
Colour
I’ve read in other guides that this is a French James Bond imitation/spoof, but surely it has as much to do with OSS 117 as it does with 007. We might not want to admit it in our smug Anglo-Saxon way, but Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath actually precedes James Bond in both books and films – so maybe we should salute the French for their own originality in this regard. Although given the popularity of the two franchises, let’s make it a small salute. I can see though why the James Bond element is concentrated on more than anything else; as in this zany, Technicolor, bright, loud, flashy and explosive film, we have not only the over the top quality of 1960s Bond spoofs, but also how untethered from reality and ridiculous James Bond would himself become.
Brigitte Bardot, here the sex symbol to end all sex symbols, is our title character: the stunning, super, secret-agent Marie Lautrec. We know how brilliant she is as everybody in the (unnamed) French secret service keeps telling us. However from watching the film, it seems that her main talent is wearing lots of ridiculously tight and skimpy outfits. There she is doing some espionage work while dressed as a French maid (or maybe in the context of this film, just a maid), a Catholic school girl, in a ridiculously low-cut top and tight shorts as a cow-girl, and even for a brief scene as the kind of dominatrix who would give Emma Peel a run for her money. Beyond taking the odd covert picture or listening in to other people’s conversations, there’s little in the way of espionage involved. But hey, ‘Diamonds are Forever’ or ‘Moonraker’ weren’t likely to be shown as MI6 training films either.
The plot is similarly full of Bond spoof ludicrousness, involving as it does flies with cameras on their backs, de-thawed hibernating Nazis who just can’t get their feet warm, robotic dragons piloted by midgets and an attempt to crash the moon into North America. It’s all stupendously and utterly bonkers. This is a movie which would look at the concept of a mad, bald super villain living in a hollowed out volcano and decide it wanted to steer away from such social realism. But then ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’ doesn’t want you to concentrate on the plot, it exists for loud colours, cackling villains and Brigitte Bardot pouting and playing with her hair while dressed in very little.
But elsewhere in the movie we have the odd contrast of the lovely French chanteuse, Francoise Hardy, as a colleague of Bardot’s and a possible double agent. In the restraint of her performance, in how demure her outfits are in comparison with the star, we have a glimpse of a whole other film.
Whereas Bardot is predicting Bond at its most unrestrained, Hardy seems to want to play a part in a particularly dour John Le Carre adaptation. Her more reigned in performance slows the film down and the scenes between her and Bardot are absolutely beautiful. Yes, its style clashing with brassiness, but it’s also that rare moment when the film allows itself to breathe, giving us something actually tense and interesting. Predictably these scenes also have a distinct lesbian edge, which at the time I thought it might just be the French being the French, although as we’ll see in the next film – it was a trait 1960s female-led adventure films seemed really eager to explore.
Colour
I’ve read in other guides that this is a French James Bond imitation/spoof, but surely it has as much to do with OSS 117 as it does with 007. We might not want to admit it in our smug Anglo-Saxon way, but Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath actually precedes James Bond in both books and films – so maybe we should salute the French for their own originality in this regard. Although given the popularity of the two franchises, let’s make it a small salute. I can see though why the James Bond element is concentrated on more than anything else; as in this zany, Technicolor, bright, loud, flashy and explosive film, we have not only the over the top quality of 1960s Bond spoofs, but also how untethered from reality and ridiculous James Bond would himself become.
Brigitte Bardot, here the sex symbol to end all sex symbols, is our title character: the stunning, super, secret-agent Marie Lautrec. We know how brilliant she is as everybody in the (unnamed) French secret service keeps telling us. However from watching the film, it seems that her main talent is wearing lots of ridiculously tight and skimpy outfits. There she is doing some espionage work while dressed as a French maid (or maybe in the context of this film, just a maid), a Catholic school girl, in a ridiculously low-cut top and tight shorts as a cow-girl, and even for a brief scene as the kind of dominatrix who would give Emma Peel a run for her money. Beyond taking the odd covert picture or listening in to other people’s conversations, there’s little in the way of espionage involved. But hey, ‘Diamonds are Forever’ or ‘Moonraker’ weren’t likely to be shown as MI6 training films either.
The plot is similarly full of Bond spoof ludicrousness, involving as it does flies with cameras on their backs, de-thawed hibernating Nazis who just can’t get their feet warm, robotic dragons piloted by midgets and an attempt to crash the moon into North America. It’s all stupendously and utterly bonkers. This is a movie which would look at the concept of a mad, bald super villain living in a hollowed out volcano and decide it wanted to steer away from such social realism. But then ‘Agent Marie Lautrec’ doesn’t want you to concentrate on the plot, it exists for loud colours, cackling villains and Brigitte Bardot pouting and playing with her hair while dressed in very little.
But elsewhere in the movie we have the odd contrast of the lovely French chanteuse, Francoise Hardy, as a colleague of Bardot’s and a possible double agent. In the restraint of her performance, in how demure her outfits are in comparison with the star, we have a glimpse of a whole other film.
Whereas Bardot is predicting Bond at its most unrestrained, Hardy seems to want to play a part in a particularly dour John Le Carre adaptation. Her more reigned in performance slows the film down and the scenes between her and Bardot are absolutely beautiful. Yes, its style clashing with brassiness, but it’s also that rare moment when the film allows itself to breathe, giving us something actually tense and interesting. Predictably these scenes also have a distinct lesbian edge, which at the time I thought it might just be the French being the French, although as we’ll see in the next film – it was a trait 1960s female-led adventure films seemed really eager to explore.
Sunday, 20 April 2014
The Chocolate Man (1974)
D. Antonio Falucci
Colour
A seminal Italian horror film and one of my favourite movies ever made. A film which takes childhood innocence, guileless delight, the places youthful imagination runs to, and makes something incredibly creepy and horrible out of them. Lots of film trade in on childhood horrors, but this takes the whole of childhood, all desires – good and bad – and pushes them to their outer limits. ‘The Chocolate Man’ gives our inner child a fairy godmother, one whose wishes will taste sweet at first bite but are destined to stick hard and jagged in the throat.
Imagine if you received a hand made of chocolate. It’s the life-size hand of an adult human and is sculpted of the finest chocolate so that when you bite into it, it tastes like heaven. A hand is a large amount of chocolate, but you know you will eat it all even if it makes you feel sick. Before long a slender arm arrives, also made of chocolate. You devour that too. Not long after a chocolate sculpture of the bottom half of a female torso goes on display in a local gallery. It’s beautiful and slim and so well carved, and the whole thing is just deliciously edible. Then a chocolate head shows up and it looks just like an ex of yours. She used to be a model so perhaps she has modelled for this. But then you begin to realise that you haven’t seen your ex for a while, and suddenly all these life-like body parts you’ve been eating are curdling in your stomach.
Of course when the story starts to open out, a wild and over the top mad scientist living in the catacombs of Rome is involved, played with lip-licking aplomb by Gian Maria Volonté. This is the mad scientist to end all, the apex of mad scientists, the kind of loopy test-tube pusher who would make James Bond pee his pants. His rationale is based on the standard tropes of revenge, thwarted ambition, egomania, broken love, vindictiveness, irrational hatreds and a derailed academic career. (It’s possible he also has a small penis.) But Volonté’s performance is so excessively bonkers as to be operatic. The film starts with childhood fantasies about everything made of chocolate, and ends with a man who is the epitome of a childhood monster. And that’s before we get to the final part of Volonté’s plan, where he intends to release a gas into the world which will turn every single living creature into chocolate. Yes, it will end all life, but at least everything will go out tasting sweet.
None of this makes much sense. How could you remove a human foot and turn it into a piece of confectionary which is so smooth and sweet throughout? Surely a severed foot dipped in chocolate is going to be the equivalent of crunchy frog. But the film is presented in such a wild, grand-guignol style, that all quibbles and questions of that nature are swiftly rolled aside in the powerful sweep of drama and tension. It’s all building to a conclusion of madness and confectionary where nothing is off the table, no plot twist is impossible and even if it will probably end with the villain drowned in chocolate, we know that it’s going to be an eye-popping journey to get there.
Colour
A seminal Italian horror film and one of my favourite movies ever made. A film which takes childhood innocence, guileless delight, the places youthful imagination runs to, and makes something incredibly creepy and horrible out of them. Lots of film trade in on childhood horrors, but this takes the whole of childhood, all desires – good and bad – and pushes them to their outer limits. ‘The Chocolate Man’ gives our inner child a fairy godmother, one whose wishes will taste sweet at first bite but are destined to stick hard and jagged in the throat.
Imagine if you received a hand made of chocolate. It’s the life-size hand of an adult human and is sculpted of the finest chocolate so that when you bite into it, it tastes like heaven. A hand is a large amount of chocolate, but you know you will eat it all even if it makes you feel sick. Before long a slender arm arrives, also made of chocolate. You devour that too. Not long after a chocolate sculpture of the bottom half of a female torso goes on display in a local gallery. It’s beautiful and slim and so well carved, and the whole thing is just deliciously edible. Then a chocolate head shows up and it looks just like an ex of yours. She used to be a model so perhaps she has modelled for this. But then you begin to realise that you haven’t seen your ex for a while, and suddenly all these life-like body parts you’ve been eating are curdling in your stomach.
Of course when the story starts to open out, a wild and over the top mad scientist living in the catacombs of Rome is involved, played with lip-licking aplomb by Gian Maria Volonté. This is the mad scientist to end all, the apex of mad scientists, the kind of loopy test-tube pusher who would make James Bond pee his pants. His rationale is based on the standard tropes of revenge, thwarted ambition, egomania, broken love, vindictiveness, irrational hatreds and a derailed academic career. (It’s possible he also has a small penis.) But Volonté’s performance is so excessively bonkers as to be operatic. The film starts with childhood fantasies about everything made of chocolate, and ends with a man who is the epitome of a childhood monster. And that’s before we get to the final part of Volonté’s plan, where he intends to release a gas into the world which will turn every single living creature into chocolate. Yes, it will end all life, but at least everything will go out tasting sweet.
None of this makes much sense. How could you remove a human foot and turn it into a piece of confectionary which is so smooth and sweet throughout? Surely a severed foot dipped in chocolate is going to be the equivalent of crunchy frog. But the film is presented in such a wild, grand-guignol style, that all quibbles and questions of that nature are swiftly rolled aside in the powerful sweep of drama and tension. It’s all building to a conclusion of madness and confectionary where nothing is off the table, no plot twist is impossible and even if it will probably end with the villain drowned in chocolate, we know that it’s going to be an eye-popping journey to get there.
Sunday, 30 March 2014
Pig Suckler (1994)
D. Olaf Signussen
Colour
I’ve been trying to work out how big a deal Tony Blair was in Scandinavia in 1994. As this film, made the year Blair became leader of the Labour Party, features an actor who looks like a taller, blonder version of the man himself. Anders Lindqvist seems to have spent the rest of his career in Swedish television or theatre, but for one brief moment in 1994 he was able to capture the future British Prime Minister in a way which is so physical and so precise it’d give Michael Sheen nightmares. But how deliberate is this? Surely Blair at this point was just one of many overseas politicians who wouldn’t be that a big noise in another country. He didn’t even become leader of his party until halfway through the year. So unless this film was put in rapid development, to try and capture a hitherto obscure overseas politician for a domestic audience (which I admit, seems a tad unlikely), then this is a case of fate and karma playing deliciously weird games. As the politician at the centre of this film not only looks like Blair, he could actually be Blair.
The politician we have here is smiling and obsequious to a fault. We follow him on the campaign trail as he meets supporters, debates with opponents, shakes hands and kisses babies. Throughout he is smiling the kind of big grin which would make you think twice about any used car salesman you encountered, let alone a bloody politician. He has a glint in his eye as he wheedles and obfuscates, telling people what a good man he is and how trustworthy; while at the time telling them exactly what they want to hear with lashings of snake oil. He is forever telling the world what a righteous man he is, what a committed churchgoer he is, but he is forever compromising and bending the truth backwards and forwards and even wiggling it side to side. Whatever his loyalists want to believe, he tells them; whatever the more unconvinced need him to do, he will do. Of course, he frequently tells one person X and another person Y, and the two things are mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t matter as he is one of life’s good guys and you can trust his word and he is someone you can rely on. As the campaign goes on, he demonstrates this incredible need to win, to get himself to a position of power.
Of course the title gives away where all this is going to end up, and that does mitigate against the shock somewhat. But it’s fascinating to watch the process whereby this Tony Blair figure glides by on his charm, states again and again how good a man he is and what a successful leader he will be, and in the face of cynicism performs this incredible demonstration of how far he’ll go to get the voters’ support. As this film ends with the lead character’s shirt undone and a piglet attached to his male nipple, but he still keeps grinning and talking and trying to tell the world what a good and trustworthy guy he is. He doesn’t actually say “pretty straight sort of guy”, but it’s close enough to send a shiver down the spine of anyone alive in Britain from 1997 onwards.
Tony apparently liked ‘The Queen’, I wonder if he ever saw this?
Colour
I’ve been trying to work out how big a deal Tony Blair was in Scandinavia in 1994. As this film, made the year Blair became leader of the Labour Party, features an actor who looks like a taller, blonder version of the man himself. Anders Lindqvist seems to have spent the rest of his career in Swedish television or theatre, but for one brief moment in 1994 he was able to capture the future British Prime Minister in a way which is so physical and so precise it’d give Michael Sheen nightmares. But how deliberate is this? Surely Blair at this point was just one of many overseas politicians who wouldn’t be that a big noise in another country. He didn’t even become leader of his party until halfway through the year. So unless this film was put in rapid development, to try and capture a hitherto obscure overseas politician for a domestic audience (which I admit, seems a tad unlikely), then this is a case of fate and karma playing deliciously weird games. As the politician at the centre of this film not only looks like Blair, he could actually be Blair.
The politician we have here is smiling and obsequious to a fault. We follow him on the campaign trail as he meets supporters, debates with opponents, shakes hands and kisses babies. Throughout he is smiling the kind of big grin which would make you think twice about any used car salesman you encountered, let alone a bloody politician. He has a glint in his eye as he wheedles and obfuscates, telling people what a good man he is and how trustworthy; while at the time telling them exactly what they want to hear with lashings of snake oil. He is forever telling the world what a righteous man he is, what a committed churchgoer he is, but he is forever compromising and bending the truth backwards and forwards and even wiggling it side to side. Whatever his loyalists want to believe, he tells them; whatever the more unconvinced need him to do, he will do. Of course, he frequently tells one person X and another person Y, and the two things are mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t matter as he is one of life’s good guys and you can trust his word and he is someone you can rely on. As the campaign goes on, he demonstrates this incredible need to win, to get himself to a position of power.
Of course the title gives away where all this is going to end up, and that does mitigate against the shock somewhat. But it’s fascinating to watch the process whereby this Tony Blair figure glides by on his charm, states again and again how good a man he is and what a successful leader he will be, and in the face of cynicism performs this incredible demonstration of how far he’ll go to get the voters’ support. As this film ends with the lead character’s shirt undone and a piglet attached to his male nipple, but he still keeps grinning and talking and trying to tell the world what a good and trustworthy guy he is. He doesn’t actually say “pretty straight sort of guy”, but it’s close enough to send a shiver down the spine of anyone alive in Britain from 1997 onwards.
Tony apparently liked ‘The Queen’, I wonder if he ever saw this?
Sunday, 9 March 2014
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.
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.
Wednesday, 19 February 2014
Shadows of the Aliens (1984)
D. Phillippe Noir
Colour
It’s sad that this French science fiction film didn’t garner a bigger audience, as it’s a visually innovative, sharply political, gripping thriller. Whether one would describe it as enjoyable is a question we’ll throw into the air with little heed to its safety, as there are car crashes which are less bleak. But how often do you get to pick up a croissant and a glass of red wine and sit down to a science fiction movie which has something to say and is saying it in a French accent?
Our setting, as the opening caption tells us is the future, although very little is done to indicate the future. The cars, the buildings, the haircuts all scream the 1980s, so that is where we are. (Clearly Goddard’s ‘Alphaville’ is an influence.) Our setting then is the present, but not quite the present. Jean Poiret, pulling on his policeman’s overcoat, is a government sanctioned hunter. He stalks the streets of Paris hunting down aliens, who are then rounded up and taken to who knows where. Of course this being science fiction, these aliens are humanoids from outer space (recognised by their two sets of eyelids and no toes) rather than immigrants. But for the social message of the film, these are one and the same. The aliens are not wanted by France, they have never been invited in and now they have to leave.
The first half of the film then is chasing these aliens (they are never given a name) around Paris, trying to catch them but sometimes being forced to terminate them with maximum force. In the first half hour alone we have a creature thrown off a tall building into the path of a juggernaut; and one dropped into a vat of handily placed acid (of the kind which only ever exist in the movies). Poiret seems to be the type of investigator Napoleon would like, as whenever an act of violence needs to be committed, a luckily placed fire-axe or lift-shaft is nearby.
Some movies would have been content with this cat and mouse, this human and humanoid alien, some movies would have left their ambition there. But ‘Shadows of the Aliens’ decides to push things much further.
Halfway through a giant spaceship arrives on Earth, or more precisely in Paris. (The film is French, therefore Paris is the centre of the world and quite probably the universe). These are the Vervoids, a powerful alien race which hates the original aliens as much as the French do. Initially we only see the Vervoid leader, a giant and sweaty ball of rippling flesh, unable to express the simplest emotion without its entire body rippling. Realised with the aid of a puppet, this is an alien leader who is striking and menacing and bears an unmistakable resemblance to the older Orson Welles. The Vervoids are hailed as saviours. (The fact that these first aliens are never named may cause problems in this review, but not in the film. We simply have The Humans, The Vervoids and – lastly – the aliens). With the French government’s approval – in the form of uber-efficient administrator, Gerard Depardieu – they take over Paris and work together to rid these aliens on a more industrial scale. Suddenly we have gone from problems of immigration to the Vichy government and everything has turned terrifying and strange.
There is no US/British allied force to the rescue this time (this isn’t ‘Adrienne and the Astronaut’ though, such creatures as Americans do still exist). We’re told that worried phone calls have been made by the President and Prime Minister, although the tone of Depardieu’s voice makes it seem like they’re easy to ignore. Instead the Vervoids and the humans are allowed in win. Indeed at the conclusion, with most of the original aliens dead, it’s clear how much the Vervoids and humans now look like each other. They are one and the same.
Post Star Wars there were a lot of science fiction films which didn’t really want to say anything, they just wanted to entertain with their brilliant light shows. This one though is desperate to say things, it wants to shout them from the rooftops, and is happy to bring in juggernauts, acid vats and rubbery Orson Welles just to get some attention. Maybe the end result is too dark to grab a huge audience, but this is undeniably a tense and thought provoking film.
And, really, where else are you going to see a giant rippling Orson Welles dominate Gerard Depardieu?
Colour
It’s sad that this French science fiction film didn’t garner a bigger audience, as it’s a visually innovative, sharply political, gripping thriller. Whether one would describe it as enjoyable is a question we’ll throw into the air with little heed to its safety, as there are car crashes which are less bleak. But how often do you get to pick up a croissant and a glass of red wine and sit down to a science fiction movie which has something to say and is saying it in a French accent?
Our setting, as the opening caption tells us is the future, although very little is done to indicate the future. The cars, the buildings, the haircuts all scream the 1980s, so that is where we are. (Clearly Goddard’s ‘Alphaville’ is an influence.) Our setting then is the present, but not quite the present. Jean Poiret, pulling on his policeman’s overcoat, is a government sanctioned hunter. He stalks the streets of Paris hunting down aliens, who are then rounded up and taken to who knows where. Of course this being science fiction, these aliens are humanoids from outer space (recognised by their two sets of eyelids and no toes) rather than immigrants. But for the social message of the film, these are one and the same. The aliens are not wanted by France, they have never been invited in and now they have to leave.
The first half of the film then is chasing these aliens (they are never given a name) around Paris, trying to catch them but sometimes being forced to terminate them with maximum force. In the first half hour alone we have a creature thrown off a tall building into the path of a juggernaut; and one dropped into a vat of handily placed acid (of the kind which only ever exist in the movies). Poiret seems to be the type of investigator Napoleon would like, as whenever an act of violence needs to be committed, a luckily placed fire-axe or lift-shaft is nearby.
Some movies would have been content with this cat and mouse, this human and humanoid alien, some movies would have left their ambition there. But ‘Shadows of the Aliens’ decides to push things much further.
Halfway through a giant spaceship arrives on Earth, or more precisely in Paris. (The film is French, therefore Paris is the centre of the world and quite probably the universe). These are the Vervoids, a powerful alien race which hates the original aliens as much as the French do. Initially we only see the Vervoid leader, a giant and sweaty ball of rippling flesh, unable to express the simplest emotion without its entire body rippling. Realised with the aid of a puppet, this is an alien leader who is striking and menacing and bears an unmistakable resemblance to the older Orson Welles. The Vervoids are hailed as saviours. (The fact that these first aliens are never named may cause problems in this review, but not in the film. We simply have The Humans, The Vervoids and – lastly – the aliens). With the French government’s approval – in the form of uber-efficient administrator, Gerard Depardieu – they take over Paris and work together to rid these aliens on a more industrial scale. Suddenly we have gone from problems of immigration to the Vichy government and everything has turned terrifying and strange.
There is no US/British allied force to the rescue this time (this isn’t ‘Adrienne and the Astronaut’ though, such creatures as Americans do still exist). We’re told that worried phone calls have been made by the President and Prime Minister, although the tone of Depardieu’s voice makes it seem like they’re easy to ignore. Instead the Vervoids and the humans are allowed in win. Indeed at the conclusion, with most of the original aliens dead, it’s clear how much the Vervoids and humans now look like each other. They are one and the same.
Post Star Wars there were a lot of science fiction films which didn’t really want to say anything, they just wanted to entertain with their brilliant light shows. This one though is desperate to say things, it wants to shout them from the rooftops, and is happy to bring in juggernauts, acid vats and rubbery Orson Welles just to get some attention. Maybe the end result is too dark to grab a huge audience, but this is undeniably a tense and thought provoking film.
And, really, where else are you going to see a giant rippling Orson Welles dominate Gerard Depardieu?
Sunday, 16 February 2014
Adrienne and the Astronaut (1967)
D.
Jean-Pierre Matisse
Colour
It’s odd that the French film ‘Le Cosmonaute Rend Visite à Adrienne’ was given the English title ‘Adele and the Astronaut’, as the future we are shown seems to be one where the Americans are completely wiped out. An astronaut is obviously a term for an American voyager to space, and yet the spaceman we meet is Terence Stamp and very British. (Very cockney in fact, so cockney that one briefly wonders whether the future will be a nightmare vision of jellied eels and rolling out the barrel). He isn’t remotely American. Indeed Americans aren’t mentioned at any point in the film and so the impression we get is that there are no Americans in the future. So this film, made at the height of the space race, two years before the moon landings, seems to go out of its way to suggest that in outer space there will be no room for the Yanks.
How are we to read this? To theorise that years from now all Americans will have been wiped out is probably a step too far. This is a film which posits a totally idyllic future in store for us, one where all citizens are happy, where their minds are totally open to new experiences, where love and contentment are universal rights. As such it would be odd if such a future was built on the total genocide of the whole American nation. It would be more than a tad icky to think of a future so beautiful built on such brutality to Uncle Sam. But the French film makers do seem to be saying – at the height of Vietnam, with riots right across The States – that true brotherly love can only take place without the Americans there. So if that’s the case, what happened to them? If we discount genocide, then what else is there? Maybe they flew in away in their spaceships and have headed to Mars, where they now have all the wars their blood thirsty souls could possibly desire. Or perhaps they have transcended to whatever giant shakes, chilli cheese dogs, large fries on the side place in the sky Americans call nirvana.
Whatever. The French are making this film and they have decided NO Americans. And that it makes it interesting. After having seen and read so much American science fiction, it is intriguing, as well as somewhat jarring, to see a version of the future from which Americans have been totally excluded.
Catherine Deneuve is a futurist living in swinging London. By any measure she has made quite a good life from this nebulous profession of predicting the future, kitting herself out with a good pad and the fanciest designer clothes. But there’s one thing missing from her life and that’s a lover. That all changes one sunny morning however, when a man arrives from the heavens (actually there’s a blinding light in her bathroom and he steps out of that. So rather than the heavens it’s a toilet, but the principle is the same). He is spaceman, Terrence Stamp. A creature from the future, part of the British stellar expedition force (which isn’t as mad as it sounds, the British were trying to make strides towards space in the late sixties), who has volunteered to be part of the new time travel programme. The technology is still in early days though and so Terrence has found himself transported back to the 1960s and Catherine. The reason for this is that she’s apparently is his true love - even though she was born a couple of hundred years before him, which suggests Cupid has one weird sense of humour.
Terrence takes Catherine to visit his time, so she can compare it to her visions. What we’re given is a very sixties version of the future, where the phones are still the clunky same (and people actually still use phone-boxes for calls, and not just urination), the skirts are much shorter and mop-top bands are very much in fashion. The Beatles though are passé, which must have looked an odd conclusion to reach in 1967. There are also zeppelins, and that’s actually one of the things Catherine predicted correctly. (Seriously, what is it with futurologists and zeppelins? Why do they believe that the future will be filled with them? It’s seventy years now since the zeppelin was last a serious mode of transport, face it: zeppelins aren’t making a comeback). This future is a very 1960s ideal of brotherly love and peace, and it’s all so wonderful and everybody is so happy, and it’s truly and remarkably dull. The future is bright and its lovely, but nothing actually bloody happens. Eventually to add a bit of drama, it’s realised that the gorgeous young lovers can’t sustain their relationship over the timelines and must separate. It’s sad as Terrence Stamp and Catherine Deneuve may be the best looking couple in cinema history, and through their peaceful and non-threatening and non-adventurous adventures, we’ve grown to kind of like them. For those who are still awake, it’s a little bit sad when they part. But at least when Catherine returns to her timeline, she knows that the future is safe and beautiful. And who knows? When she gets married and has kids and grandchildren and so on, maybe Terrence will turn out to be a descendent of hers. (Come on, I was bored. The film wasn’t offering me any spice, so I had to create my own).
It’s a pleasant film, an optimistic film, but it is the kind of film to make your eyelids beg for mercy. Say what you will about the yanks, at least they know to add a bit of action to these things.
Colour
It’s odd that the French film ‘Le Cosmonaute Rend Visite à Adrienne’ was given the English title ‘Adele and the Astronaut’, as the future we are shown seems to be one where the Americans are completely wiped out. An astronaut is obviously a term for an American voyager to space, and yet the spaceman we meet is Terence Stamp and very British. (Very cockney in fact, so cockney that one briefly wonders whether the future will be a nightmare vision of jellied eels and rolling out the barrel). He isn’t remotely American. Indeed Americans aren’t mentioned at any point in the film and so the impression we get is that there are no Americans in the future. So this film, made at the height of the space race, two years before the moon landings, seems to go out of its way to suggest that in outer space there will be no room for the Yanks.
How are we to read this? To theorise that years from now all Americans will have been wiped out is probably a step too far. This is a film which posits a totally idyllic future in store for us, one where all citizens are happy, where their minds are totally open to new experiences, where love and contentment are universal rights. As such it would be odd if such a future was built on the total genocide of the whole American nation. It would be more than a tad icky to think of a future so beautiful built on such brutality to Uncle Sam. But the French film makers do seem to be saying – at the height of Vietnam, with riots right across The States – that true brotherly love can only take place without the Americans there. So if that’s the case, what happened to them? If we discount genocide, then what else is there? Maybe they flew in away in their spaceships and have headed to Mars, where they now have all the wars their blood thirsty souls could possibly desire. Or perhaps they have transcended to whatever giant shakes, chilli cheese dogs, large fries on the side place in the sky Americans call nirvana.
Whatever. The French are making this film and they have decided NO Americans. And that it makes it interesting. After having seen and read so much American science fiction, it is intriguing, as well as somewhat jarring, to see a version of the future from which Americans have been totally excluded.
Catherine Deneuve is a futurist living in swinging London. By any measure she has made quite a good life from this nebulous profession of predicting the future, kitting herself out with a good pad and the fanciest designer clothes. But there’s one thing missing from her life and that’s a lover. That all changes one sunny morning however, when a man arrives from the heavens (actually there’s a blinding light in her bathroom and he steps out of that. So rather than the heavens it’s a toilet, but the principle is the same). He is spaceman, Terrence Stamp. A creature from the future, part of the British stellar expedition force (which isn’t as mad as it sounds, the British were trying to make strides towards space in the late sixties), who has volunteered to be part of the new time travel programme. The technology is still in early days though and so Terrence has found himself transported back to the 1960s and Catherine. The reason for this is that she’s apparently is his true love - even though she was born a couple of hundred years before him, which suggests Cupid has one weird sense of humour.
Terrence takes Catherine to visit his time, so she can compare it to her visions. What we’re given is a very sixties version of the future, where the phones are still the clunky same (and people actually still use phone-boxes for calls, and not just urination), the skirts are much shorter and mop-top bands are very much in fashion. The Beatles though are passé, which must have looked an odd conclusion to reach in 1967. There are also zeppelins, and that’s actually one of the things Catherine predicted correctly. (Seriously, what is it with futurologists and zeppelins? Why do they believe that the future will be filled with them? It’s seventy years now since the zeppelin was last a serious mode of transport, face it: zeppelins aren’t making a comeback). This future is a very 1960s ideal of brotherly love and peace, and it’s all so wonderful and everybody is so happy, and it’s truly and remarkably dull. The future is bright and its lovely, but nothing actually bloody happens. Eventually to add a bit of drama, it’s realised that the gorgeous young lovers can’t sustain their relationship over the timelines and must separate. It’s sad as Terrence Stamp and Catherine Deneuve may be the best looking couple in cinema history, and through their peaceful and non-threatening and non-adventurous adventures, we’ve grown to kind of like them. For those who are still awake, it’s a little bit sad when they part. But at least when Catherine returns to her timeline, she knows that the future is safe and beautiful. And who knows? When she gets married and has kids and grandchildren and so on, maybe Terrence will turn out to be a descendent of hers. (Come on, I was bored. The film wasn’t offering me any spice, so I had to create my own).
It’s a pleasant film, an optimistic film, but it is the kind of film to make your eyelids beg for mercy. Say what you will about the yanks, at least they know to add a bit of action to these things.
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
French Leave (1967)
D. Blake Edwards
Colour
Ah, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. The great fun of men in spats pretending to be girls in flapper dresses; gaping at Marilyn Monroe as she wiggles her way down a train platform; “Nobody’s perfect!” Seriously, who doesn’t love ‘Some Like It Hot’? As close to perfect as any film made by humans is going to get! But it’s curious how some films live long in the memory while others just fade away (this blog of course exists for films that fade away). For instance, for all the high praise lavished upon the Paul Newman and Robert Redford pairing, it’s forgotten that Redford has actually made more movies with Jane Fonda (go on, I bet you can’t name more than one). Similarly the great chemistry of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon was actually spread across three films. There was the magnificent and utterly unimpeachable ‘Some Like It Hot’, there was the really underwhelming and disappointing ‘The Great Race’ and then there was ‘French Leave’ – which sits more at ‘The Great Race’ end of the spectrum, but – given current events - is really worth taking another peek at.
Here’s the set up. On a promotional trip to France, married Hollywood star Tony Curtis encounters Italian sex kitten Claudia Cardinale and begins to pursue her for an affair. At much the same time, married French President Jack Lemmon (with a truly shocking accent, making Inspector Clouseau sound like he’s authentic to every tortured syllable) is introduced to Cardinale at a party and also tries to seduce her. The two men become aware of each other’s attentions and attempt to thwart each other at every turn, the grandeur of the French presidency put into conflict with the largesse of Hollywood as each vies to make Cardinale his bit on the side.
That’s right, they don’t want the gorgeous, delightful, pouting Claudia Cardinale to be their girlfriend or their wife – each man want hers to be his illicit mistress. The first time I saw this film it made me feel a bit “Uck!” This loud and brash farce where married men try to capture a woman to serve their sexual needs away from their wives, just felt like part of the swinging sixties we were happy to discard. The gender politics could be politely described as antediluvian. But looking at Francois Holland’s travails in the last few weeks has made me revisit ‘French Leave’. It seems that even today – even if you’re the socialist new broom there to clean up the system – it’s the done thing for French Presidents to keep mistresses. Mitterrand of course had his, there were always rumours about Chirac and now Holland finds himself an international scandal. (Not necessarily a national one though, the French press and the French public seem really accepting of this kind of thing. They just give a Gallic shrug and go back to their coffee and baguettes. Imagine, as a comparison, if this was David Cameron with a mistress and Sam Cameron in hospital after an overdose of sleeping pills. The tabloids would sing loud and ebullient praises to the god of mammon from the rooftops, and even Nick Robinson would tear out his remaining hair in excitement). On the other side of the coin nobody thinks movie stars are unimpeachable. It’s downright naïve to believe that Hollywood types don’t have affairs. And so suddenly this film, which I initially dismissed as a sexist relic of a less enlightened time, feels like it could be a free-wheeling docu-drama of NOW where the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
And if I’m honest it’s not that bad. I like Jack Lemmon a lot, but find he mugs too much in broad comedy (and I hate his over the top accent here, but I also hate his equally over the top accent in ‘The Great Race’). I like Tony Curtis a lot, but the laziness in his performance evident here would soon kill his big screen career. And in common with all straight men, I like Claudia Cardinale a lot and will not hear a word against her. So two thirds of the performances could be better, but Blake Edwards does execute the farce quite well. The old money of Versailles against the nouveau riche of Bel Air has good comic potential and everything gets bigger and bigger (if not necessarily that much funnier). It’s a very 1960s movie, which does have a few genuine laughs and has more to say about the morals and peccadillos of certain people today that I initially – in my prudish British way – realised.
Colour
Ah, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. The great fun of men in spats pretending to be girls in flapper dresses; gaping at Marilyn Monroe as she wiggles her way down a train platform; “Nobody’s perfect!” Seriously, who doesn’t love ‘Some Like It Hot’? As close to perfect as any film made by humans is going to get! But it’s curious how some films live long in the memory while others just fade away (this blog of course exists for films that fade away). For instance, for all the high praise lavished upon the Paul Newman and Robert Redford pairing, it’s forgotten that Redford has actually made more movies with Jane Fonda (go on, I bet you can’t name more than one). Similarly the great chemistry of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon was actually spread across three films. There was the magnificent and utterly unimpeachable ‘Some Like It Hot’, there was the really underwhelming and disappointing ‘The Great Race’ and then there was ‘French Leave’ – which sits more at ‘The Great Race’ end of the spectrum, but – given current events - is really worth taking another peek at.
Here’s the set up. On a promotional trip to France, married Hollywood star Tony Curtis encounters Italian sex kitten Claudia Cardinale and begins to pursue her for an affair. At much the same time, married French President Jack Lemmon (with a truly shocking accent, making Inspector Clouseau sound like he’s authentic to every tortured syllable) is introduced to Cardinale at a party and also tries to seduce her. The two men become aware of each other’s attentions and attempt to thwart each other at every turn, the grandeur of the French presidency put into conflict with the largesse of Hollywood as each vies to make Cardinale his bit on the side.
That’s right, they don’t want the gorgeous, delightful, pouting Claudia Cardinale to be their girlfriend or their wife – each man want hers to be his illicit mistress. The first time I saw this film it made me feel a bit “Uck!” This loud and brash farce where married men try to capture a woman to serve their sexual needs away from their wives, just felt like part of the swinging sixties we were happy to discard. The gender politics could be politely described as antediluvian. But looking at Francois Holland’s travails in the last few weeks has made me revisit ‘French Leave’. It seems that even today – even if you’re the socialist new broom there to clean up the system – it’s the done thing for French Presidents to keep mistresses. Mitterrand of course had his, there were always rumours about Chirac and now Holland finds himself an international scandal. (Not necessarily a national one though, the French press and the French public seem really accepting of this kind of thing. They just give a Gallic shrug and go back to their coffee and baguettes. Imagine, as a comparison, if this was David Cameron with a mistress and Sam Cameron in hospital after an overdose of sleeping pills. The tabloids would sing loud and ebullient praises to the god of mammon from the rooftops, and even Nick Robinson would tear out his remaining hair in excitement). On the other side of the coin nobody thinks movie stars are unimpeachable. It’s downright naïve to believe that Hollywood types don’t have affairs. And so suddenly this film, which I initially dismissed as a sexist relic of a less enlightened time, feels like it could be a free-wheeling docu-drama of NOW where the names have been changed to protect the guilty.
And if I’m honest it’s not that bad. I like Jack Lemmon a lot, but find he mugs too much in broad comedy (and I hate his over the top accent here, but I also hate his equally over the top accent in ‘The Great Race’). I like Tony Curtis a lot, but the laziness in his performance evident here would soon kill his big screen career. And in common with all straight men, I like Claudia Cardinale a lot and will not hear a word against her. So two thirds of the performances could be better, but Blake Edwards does execute the farce quite well. The old money of Versailles against the nouveau riche of Bel Air has good comic potential and everything gets bigger and bigger (if not necessarily that much funnier). It’s a very 1960s movie, which does have a few genuine laughs and has more to say about the morals and peccadillos of certain people today that I initially – in my prudish British way – realised.
Wednesday, 15 January 2014
The Caribou Caper (1978)
D. Clive Donner
Colour
Peter Sellers, that gifted and subtle character actor of the 1950s, had truly morphed into a monster of a performer by the latter half of the 1970s. One who was quite happy to crash through all his scenes with as broad a characterisation as possible and carrying a side of ham on a platter the whole way. This was the period where he had just returned to prominence thanks to 'The Pink Panther' movies, never the most understated (or by this point reliably funny) of films and Sellers now seemed to regard any movie he was in as an extension of Inspector Clouseau. Everything he did had to be as loud and brash and hi-hi-hi-larious as possible, except when Sellers is on the screen generally only the first two apply.
And that’s a shame as this is a film that really cries out for a subtler Peter Sellers, perhaps not the everyman performer of the 1950s, but the 1960s model who could glide through the original 'Pink Panther' without deliberately pushing over every apple cart he could find.
Peter Sellers and Michael Caine are brothers, I know it’s difficult to believe when you look at them, but then elsewhere in cinema history Sean Connery played Dustin Hoffman’s dad and a woman named Katy Elder managed to birth two sons with a 36 year age difference. Sometimes you just have to go with these things. They’re not just any brothers mind you, but high-end criminal brothers who have carried out a series of daring jewel thefts across Europe. Now they want one more job, Caine so he can have security on the yacht he plans to sail around the world, and Sellers because it will help him fulfil his life-long dream of buying Napoleon’s underpants. And to do this they target wealthy American movie star, Caribou Curvaluv, (played with her usual levels of bored adequacy by Raquel Welch), but what happens when they each fall in love with her?
First things first, this is a film way out of time. In the sixties Sellers had the original ‘Pink Panther’, Caine had ‘Gambit’ and Welch had ‘Fathom’ – but nobody was making this kind of high-class caper romp in 1978. It’s perversely, ridiculously out of time and no amount of jokes about OPEC, President Carter and the British letting a woman lead a political party is going to solve that. What’s more these are three actors who could easily have made this film ten years earlier, and now seem a bit – well – gone to seed. Sellers, as was starting to be apparent in ‘The Ideas Man’, can’t help but look like a creepy uncle as he ogles young women in bikinis; Caine has that red-faced, sweaty, over-done potato look that he would later wheel out for the likes of ‘Blame it on Rio’, while Welch does shape up well, but one wouldn’t want to leave her in front of a radiator for too long. Let’s be fair, the set-up, the script, the leads would all have appeared better and more fitting in 1968.
It’s an odd film then and that’s before we get to the Peter Sellers factor.
You can really see the importance of collaboration in a film when it isn’t happening properly. Here is a case in point. Sellers and Caine don’t actually have that many scenes together. In the few they do, there is an easy camaraderie between there, a mutual respect. One wouldn’t really believe they were brothers, but they certainly come across as two people who have known each other a long time. When they’re apart though it’s perfectly clear they’re in completely different films. Caine is a likeable cockney, a classy villain, who is looking for one final job to assuage his mid-life crisis; Sellers is a barnpot who speaks constantly in a loud, manic voice and dreams of owning Napoleon’s underpants. It seems that on getting the script for a ‘classy crime comedy’, Caine paid attention to the word ‘classy’, while Sellers blew up the word ‘comedy’ into eighteen foot high letters.
Sellers tramples over everything in his path in his desire to get a laugh. Clearly not listening to Welch’s lines so he can comically leer at her and mug to straight to camera – in addition we have raising of eyebrows, desperate hand gestures and jumping over other actor’s lines, even when they’re seemingly crucial to the plot. It’s clearly the performance of a man out of control. And Caine’s subtler take on his part just makes it look worse.
As such this is a strange out of place, utterly disjointed, film – but one which, I suppose makes you feel like you’re getting two movies for the price of one.
Colour
Peter Sellers, that gifted and subtle character actor of the 1950s, had truly morphed into a monster of a performer by the latter half of the 1970s. One who was quite happy to crash through all his scenes with as broad a characterisation as possible and carrying a side of ham on a platter the whole way. This was the period where he had just returned to prominence thanks to 'The Pink Panther' movies, never the most understated (or by this point reliably funny) of films and Sellers now seemed to regard any movie he was in as an extension of Inspector Clouseau. Everything he did had to be as loud and brash and hi-hi-hi-larious as possible, except when Sellers is on the screen generally only the first two apply.
And that’s a shame as this is a film that really cries out for a subtler Peter Sellers, perhaps not the everyman performer of the 1950s, but the 1960s model who could glide through the original 'Pink Panther' without deliberately pushing over every apple cart he could find.
Peter Sellers and Michael Caine are brothers, I know it’s difficult to believe when you look at them, but then elsewhere in cinema history Sean Connery played Dustin Hoffman’s dad and a woman named Katy Elder managed to birth two sons with a 36 year age difference. Sometimes you just have to go with these things. They’re not just any brothers mind you, but high-end criminal brothers who have carried out a series of daring jewel thefts across Europe. Now they want one more job, Caine so he can have security on the yacht he plans to sail around the world, and Sellers because it will help him fulfil his life-long dream of buying Napoleon’s underpants. And to do this they target wealthy American movie star, Caribou Curvaluv, (played with her usual levels of bored adequacy by Raquel Welch), but what happens when they each fall in love with her?
First things first, this is a film way out of time. In the sixties Sellers had the original ‘Pink Panther’, Caine had ‘Gambit’ and Welch had ‘Fathom’ – but nobody was making this kind of high-class caper romp in 1978. It’s perversely, ridiculously out of time and no amount of jokes about OPEC, President Carter and the British letting a woman lead a political party is going to solve that. What’s more these are three actors who could easily have made this film ten years earlier, and now seem a bit – well – gone to seed. Sellers, as was starting to be apparent in ‘The Ideas Man’, can’t help but look like a creepy uncle as he ogles young women in bikinis; Caine has that red-faced, sweaty, over-done potato look that he would later wheel out for the likes of ‘Blame it on Rio’, while Welch does shape up well, but one wouldn’t want to leave her in front of a radiator for too long. Let’s be fair, the set-up, the script, the leads would all have appeared better and more fitting in 1968.
It’s an odd film then and that’s before we get to the Peter Sellers factor.
You can really see the importance of collaboration in a film when it isn’t happening properly. Here is a case in point. Sellers and Caine don’t actually have that many scenes together. In the few they do, there is an easy camaraderie between there, a mutual respect. One wouldn’t really believe they were brothers, but they certainly come across as two people who have known each other a long time. When they’re apart though it’s perfectly clear they’re in completely different films. Caine is a likeable cockney, a classy villain, who is looking for one final job to assuage his mid-life crisis; Sellers is a barnpot who speaks constantly in a loud, manic voice and dreams of owning Napoleon’s underpants. It seems that on getting the script for a ‘classy crime comedy’, Caine paid attention to the word ‘classy’, while Sellers blew up the word ‘comedy’ into eighteen foot high letters.
Sellers tramples over everything in his path in his desire to get a laugh. Clearly not listening to Welch’s lines so he can comically leer at her and mug to straight to camera – in addition we have raising of eyebrows, desperate hand gestures and jumping over other actor’s lines, even when they’re seemingly crucial to the plot. It’s clearly the performance of a man out of control. And Caine’s subtler take on his part just makes it look worse.
As such this is a strange out of place, utterly disjointed, film – but one which, I suppose makes you feel like you’re getting two movies for the price of one.
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, 24 November 2013
Jarndyce vs Jarndyce (2002)
D.
Emil Bron
Colour/B&W
Sheets of white paper with indistinguishable, but official looking, writing tumble out of a large industrial printer. Swiftly ink-stained hands move in to attach stickers to them, some have red stickers, some have blue, some have yellow. Some of these papers are left unadorned and there’s a sense that these are the most important documents. They are the ones we follow anyway. They’re placed on a rackety old conveyer belt and make their way through a warren of dingy, poky offices. These documents do not remain unadorned for long, they are stamped and counter stamped. Some of them clearly have problems (although since what’s on them remains a total mystery, so do their problems) and stern, hard faced men send them back with an expression that doesn’t offer even a glimmer of hope that the problem will be fixed. The unmistakable deadness in these men’s eyes says that they know the document will come back exactly the same way again and again for the rest of their lives. Still these documents wind on and on, making their way through the system, presumably to some end point but the longer the film continues, the less sure the viewer is that this is some kind of circle. Perhaps this process doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, an end; maybe it’s just one endless odyssey and these papers will always stay in the system and their import will never be known or recognised.
It seems appropriate that it’s the country of Kafka which produced this love letter to administration, this ode to bureaucracy. As the papers move through the system, followed by the film beyond the point where surely sanity ends, then this stops being a mindless (government?) machine and becomes something oddly alive and wonderful. Watching papers flutter by, watching these sheets be sent back and forth, becoming more crumpled and stained by their passage through the system, becomes an almost compulsive sight. I mean that, this is a film about paperwork which is not infuriatingly tedious but is in fact pretty engrossing. And that’s an incredible feat, particularly as the human characters we meet are fleeting and only important in as far as they are dealing with the papers.
How is that done? How with no Joseph K figure, how with no heirs of Jarndyce, is it possible to create a functional and interesting film just out of paperwork alone? The answer is to throw the kitchen sink, the taps and all the fittings at it. This is a film with segments in colour and black and white; there are scenes which are animated – not only in a harsh Eastern European all angles and black lines way, but also in a cutesy Disney style and one segment in Manga. There is even more than one puppet sequence, with the film suggesting that at least one room in every large bureaucracy is staffed entirely by excited socks with swivel eyes. It takes a dull subject matter, purposefully makes it harder for itself by banning any real human characters, and then attacks it with huge amounts of vim and brio. It’s an extraordinary film and well worth seeking out. Although I can’t guarantee it will make you any less angry the next time your borough loses your council tax form.
Colour/B&W
Sheets of white paper with indistinguishable, but official looking, writing tumble out of a large industrial printer. Swiftly ink-stained hands move in to attach stickers to them, some have red stickers, some have blue, some have yellow. Some of these papers are left unadorned and there’s a sense that these are the most important documents. They are the ones we follow anyway. They’re placed on a rackety old conveyer belt and make their way through a warren of dingy, poky offices. These documents do not remain unadorned for long, they are stamped and counter stamped. Some of them clearly have problems (although since what’s on them remains a total mystery, so do their problems) and stern, hard faced men send them back with an expression that doesn’t offer even a glimmer of hope that the problem will be fixed. The unmistakable deadness in these men’s eyes says that they know the document will come back exactly the same way again and again for the rest of their lives. Still these documents wind on and on, making their way through the system, presumably to some end point but the longer the film continues, the less sure the viewer is that this is some kind of circle. Perhaps this process doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, an end; maybe it’s just one endless odyssey and these papers will always stay in the system and their import will never be known or recognised.
It seems appropriate that it’s the country of Kafka which produced this love letter to administration, this ode to bureaucracy. As the papers move through the system, followed by the film beyond the point where surely sanity ends, then this stops being a mindless (government?) machine and becomes something oddly alive and wonderful. Watching papers flutter by, watching these sheets be sent back and forth, becoming more crumpled and stained by their passage through the system, becomes an almost compulsive sight. I mean that, this is a film about paperwork which is not infuriatingly tedious but is in fact pretty engrossing. And that’s an incredible feat, particularly as the human characters we meet are fleeting and only important in as far as they are dealing with the papers.
How is that done? How with no Joseph K figure, how with no heirs of Jarndyce, is it possible to create a functional and interesting film just out of paperwork alone? The answer is to throw the kitchen sink, the taps and all the fittings at it. This is a film with segments in colour and black and white; there are scenes which are animated – not only in a harsh Eastern European all angles and black lines way, but also in a cutesy Disney style and one segment in Manga. There is even more than one puppet sequence, with the film suggesting that at least one room in every large bureaucracy is staffed entirely by excited socks with swivel eyes. It takes a dull subject matter, purposefully makes it harder for itself by banning any real human characters, and then attacks it with huge amounts of vim and brio. It’s an extraordinary film and well worth seeking out. Although I can’t guarantee it will make you any less angry the next time your borough loses your council tax form.
Saturday, 21 September 2013
Tarzan in Madrid (1960)
D. Miguel Ferrera
Colour
Exhibit A in the case that satire does not work in the hands of fascists.
I’m not as well versed in the history of Spanish cinema as I should be, though I’m aware that even under Franco’s dictatorship various films were made which looked at the way society actually worked. Even within the system there were films which picked up and examined (even poked fun at) the system.
This is decidedly not one of them.
To say that ‘Tarzan in Madrid’ is heavy handed is to put it mildly. It is a jack booted, full-on, completely blinkered, pro-government, anti-everything else but the proper authorities, screed. The Tarzan tale is of course one highly malleable and can be used in so many different ways – which is odd, as unlike Robin Hood, say, it’s generally used in the same way. Here, as normal, Tarzan (Edson de Nascimento, a Portuguese actor and a good looking charisma void) is found by explorers in the jungle and brought to civilisation. Normally when Tarzan makes that journey he heads to England or New York. Here though he goes to Spain, and not just some crappy package holiday to the Costa Del Sol, instead he gets to wow and wonder at the marvel of Franco’s Madrid.
But – and here is where if I was the barrister for the prosecution, I’d speak in my firmest voice – this is where things get decidedly strange. Rather than just marvelling at tall buildings and cars and indoor plumbing, none of which this noble savage has never seen, Tarzan instead goes to war against a socialist cell which is determined to bring down Spain. True, he does briefly flirt with their message, but after a stiff telling off from Juana (the Jane of the story), he becomes righteously pro-government and charges across the city dealing out fists and lectures, before tying up the insurgents with vine he always keeps around his person. Subtly is nowhere in the production’s vocabulary.
The message of this movie is that by even a primitive-like Tarzan can see that communists are evil cretins. Tarzan is forever referred to as ‘The Primitive’, to the point even he looks tired of it. There is also a running joke that everybody he speaks to thinks he sounds French (despite the actor clearly having a Portuguese accent) and apparently sounding French is a sign of mental negligibility. So this primitive from the deepest, darkest jungle, who speaks like a Frenchman for crying out loud, is able to see how ridiculous and against everybody’s interest communism is.
And if Tarzan can see it, certainly someone as bright as YOU can see it.
That’s not the end of the message though. The satire (if that's the right word) takes a further broad turn when a kidnapped Cheetah finds himself elected leader of the communist cell.
So the great hero Tarzan sees off the communists and rescues Spain and is feted as a hero at the end. And one has to wonder what the point of all this is. Clearly there’s an element of warning the audience against the dangers of socialism/communism (the two terms were interchangeable in the subtitles of the version I saw), but then the socialists/communists on screen are made to appear so ridiculous that they find themselves led by a chimpanzee. Their characters are never developed, their ideas are set up to be easily mocked and totally ridiculous, and of course it’s nonsense that anyone would ever follow them. Communism/socialism is bad and evil and everyone of the left is a complete idiot who deserves either a smack from a jungle ‘primitive’ or for a chimpanzee to fart in their face.
Except, of course, that all this overkill inevitably leads to another reading: one which suggests that a totalitarian government will see fit to hire any muscled, bully boy (even when he wears a loin cloth and supposedly sounds French) to throw his weight around and give beatings to those who disagree with it.
Colour
Exhibit A in the case that satire does not work in the hands of fascists.
I’m not as well versed in the history of Spanish cinema as I should be, though I’m aware that even under Franco’s dictatorship various films were made which looked at the way society actually worked. Even within the system there were films which picked up and examined (even poked fun at) the system.
This is decidedly not one of them.
To say that ‘Tarzan in Madrid’ is heavy handed is to put it mildly. It is a jack booted, full-on, completely blinkered, pro-government, anti-everything else but the proper authorities, screed. The Tarzan tale is of course one highly malleable and can be used in so many different ways – which is odd, as unlike Robin Hood, say, it’s generally used in the same way. Here, as normal, Tarzan (Edson de Nascimento, a Portuguese actor and a good looking charisma void) is found by explorers in the jungle and brought to civilisation. Normally when Tarzan makes that journey he heads to England or New York. Here though he goes to Spain, and not just some crappy package holiday to the Costa Del Sol, instead he gets to wow and wonder at the marvel of Franco’s Madrid.
But – and here is where if I was the barrister for the prosecution, I’d speak in my firmest voice – this is where things get decidedly strange. Rather than just marvelling at tall buildings and cars and indoor plumbing, none of which this noble savage has never seen, Tarzan instead goes to war against a socialist cell which is determined to bring down Spain. True, he does briefly flirt with their message, but after a stiff telling off from Juana (the Jane of the story), he becomes righteously pro-government and charges across the city dealing out fists and lectures, before tying up the insurgents with vine he always keeps around his person. Subtly is nowhere in the production’s vocabulary.
The message of this movie is that by even a primitive-like Tarzan can see that communists are evil cretins. Tarzan is forever referred to as ‘The Primitive’, to the point even he looks tired of it. There is also a running joke that everybody he speaks to thinks he sounds French (despite the actor clearly having a Portuguese accent) and apparently sounding French is a sign of mental negligibility. So this primitive from the deepest, darkest jungle, who speaks like a Frenchman for crying out loud, is able to see how ridiculous and against everybody’s interest communism is.
And if Tarzan can see it, certainly someone as bright as YOU can see it.
That’s not the end of the message though. The satire (if that's the right word) takes a further broad turn when a kidnapped Cheetah finds himself elected leader of the communist cell.
So the great hero Tarzan sees off the communists and rescues Spain and is feted as a hero at the end. And one has to wonder what the point of all this is. Clearly there’s an element of warning the audience against the dangers of socialism/communism (the two terms were interchangeable in the subtitles of the version I saw), but then the socialists/communists on screen are made to appear so ridiculous that they find themselves led by a chimpanzee. Their characters are never developed, their ideas are set up to be easily mocked and totally ridiculous, and of course it’s nonsense that anyone would ever follow them. Communism/socialism is bad and evil and everyone of the left is a complete idiot who deserves either a smack from a jungle ‘primitive’ or for a chimpanzee to fart in their face.
Except, of course, that all this overkill inevitably leads to another reading: one which suggests that a totalitarian government will see fit to hire any muscled, bully boy (even when he wears a loin cloth and supposedly sounds French) to throw his weight around and give beatings to those who disagree with it.
I think that second reading is
entirely accidental however, but it makes me smile that it doesn’t stretch too much of the imagination to find it there.
Apparently Franco loved this film
and laughed his head off each time he saw it. So at least ‘Tarzan in Madrid’
appealed to its target audience.
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