The Sexy Goth Girl in the Lake (2004)

D. Otto Van De Mille
Colour (although the sex scenes are in black & white, so we can pretend they’re art)

The first Sexy Goth Detective film was like an episode of ‘Columbo’, but the second one is like the weirdest episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ you’ll ever see. There’s the small town where everyone knows each other, the dramatic discovery of a body, a cavalcade of suspects, and one lone woman who is prying into everyone’s lives, rustling feathers and generally making sure she’s irritating as hell in her quest for the truth. But what differentiates this from Jessica Fletcher (or Jane Marple) is that this film screams modern.

And sexy.

Sexy and wild in a way that Jessica Fletcher never ever was.

 (Well, maybe in her younger days).

The corpse of a 22 year old goth girl is pulled from the lake in the charmingly named town of Girdle. She was an outsider so her death isn’t investigated as thoroughly as it might be by the chief of police, but she has a friend driving to town determined that justice must be done. Enter Liddy D’Eath as the sexy goth detective – there to turn heads and cause discomfort in every way she can.

It really is a tour de force for both her and Von De Mille’s dialogue. All those scenes we’ve seen so many times before: the tense interrogation in the booth of a cafeteria; the leaning on a post office counter to interrogate a witness who is cagy as hell; the car chase on the dark country lanes outside the town;  the screaming confrontation with the relative of the deceased who doesn’t think the detective is doing her right. All of that is here and all of it crackles. It of course helps that Liddy has gone full on goth for this, with every harsh line of make-up and elegantly torn piece of clothing screaming that she is part of an alternative culture.

Okay, this may sound tame as hell. “What happened to the edgy promise of the original sexy goth girls film?” you may ask. Well, to counter balance the softness we do have a small town femme fatale who Liddy falls hard for her and goes skinny dipping in the lake with before a long soft-focus sex scene. Those expecting  a movie to watch over their cocoa will no doubt choke on their marshmallows at this point. It sticks out as much as a full blown S&M scene would in the middle of Cabot Cove. I’ve always said De Mille would be happier making porn and now he has.

The other characters aren’t well drawn and the plot has not only run away from the director by the end, but gone and hidden, yet thanks to a classy performance by the heroine this is a much watch.

Bonfire Burns (2006)

D. Simon Olson
Colour

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fishman of Alcatraz (1965)

D. Harry Paddock
B&W


After the success of 'The Birdman of Alcatraz' (and maybe even the lesser success of 'The Jazzman of Alcatraz') lots of Hollywood producers felt the need to make a movie with the suffix 'of Alcaraz'. After all it was the most famous prison in the world, in the news because it had recently shut down and so rather than just making A.N. Other prison film, an ALCATRAZ film made sound of commercial sense of the kind that makes dollar signs flash in the eyes of Hollywood producers and thin lines of drool to run from the corners of their greedy fat mouths. Most of these films though had ridiculously little to actually do with Alcatraz (as we'll see in the next entry), this one does though - and clearly even managed to film some scenes on the island. Not great scenes admittedly, not even memorable scenes, but enough for the film to yell out “Hey bozos! We actually fucking went there!”

I'll be honest, when I first saw the title 'The Fishman of Alcatraz' I seriously misjudged the film’s content. My obviously distressingly adolescent mind, crammed full of images of Spiderman and Batman, just imagined that Alcatraz was a really stupid place to send the captured superhero, Fishman. This is after all a prison surrounded by water and so would be a terrible location in which to hold the mighty Fishman. (Clearly my mind is full of cut-price versions of Aquaman). If one was to have Fishman in custody a prison far in land would be miles better. On Alcatraz, Fishman’s escape is inevitable.

However my super hero fantasies proved to be as unfounded and inaccurate as mermaids, mermen and that whole Atlantis myth, as this film turned out to be about a man who just really liked fish.

Following all the beats of the Burt Lancaster movie, here a doggery Elisha Cook jr is a convict who really likes fish and through correspondence courses and careful examination of his surroundings, becomes an expert on them. Therefore Alcatraz becomes his salvation, as he has lots of time to examine fish and even discovers a new breed. Set in the 1930s, there are cameos from an overweight and sweating Al Capone and a Machine Gun Kelly who ends his sentences with “rat-tat-tat” just so we know who he is. Cook looks old, but is still convincing as a small crook who got in above his head, and the whole is in many ways quite a sweet film. However whereas birds have beautiful plumage and a distinct look on screen, fish either swim away or just flop about. And after 90 minutes watching a kindly old man pursue this Piscean interest, if you haven’t flopped limp to your seat yourself, you’ll almost certainly have swum hurriedly away.

Robin Hood and the Vampires (1962)

D. Henry Jagol
Gruesome and rich Colour, the way gothic should be

Putting Robin Hood in opposition to Dracula is actually a pretty good idea. After all vampires are the most aristocratic of all mythical monsters. Anybody can become a werewolf, but vampires have castles and huge tracts of land and servants and titles. They’re not the upwardly mobile screen monsters – that’s Frankenstein, who is self-making men wherever he goes; instead they’re the inherited wealth, excellent pedigree, Tatler-subscribing creatures of the undead. As such, who better to pit against them than a man who specialises in removing wealthy people from their wealth? A hero who has thrown away his own title and is now intent on making the aristocrats of this world more like the rest of us. Yes, true friend of the masses, Robin Hood, against serial exploiter of the blood of the proletariat, Count Dracula, makes loads of sense. Let’s bring on the ultimate class battle!

Unfortunately, this being a cheaply made AIP Hammer knock-off of the early Sixties, these kinds of issues are never raised. Indeed what the film is most interested in is shots of vampires with arrows bursting through their chests.

So we’re in the forest with Robin Hood (Stewart Granger, painfully aware that he’s slumming it) and his merry men. They’re having fun singing songs as they liberate the riches of the local aristocracy, but the nearby castle has a new tenant and he has plans for the region much darker than Robin Hood has ever imagined.

(Where all this is set is a bit up in the air. The word ‘Sherwood’ is never mentioned; neither is the word ‘Nottingham’. But presumably this is Robin Hood’s home-patch so this is Sherwood Forest and this is Nottingham and that’s a bizarrely gothic version of Nottingham Castle Dracula has just moved into. But then some of the locals know Dracula of old, which would suggest Transylvania. Whoever did the research for this movie really gave a slapdash effort.)

Before long the night time woods are filled with blood-suckers and the merry men are fighting to save every soul they can. This is fairly low-rent fun, but it’s not without moments of quality. Boris Karloff is clearly far too old to be Dracula (though it’s nice he finally got to play the old fangmeister), but Jack Nicholson as Reinfeld is there for the heavy lifting and does it with all the creepiness and malice as you’d expect from Jack; while some of the fight scenes have their moments – particularly Friar Tuck first trying to exorcise a female vampire, then waving his cross at her, then pleading with her about the rightness of God, then giving up on the holy stuff and simply setting fire to her.

So a film that misses the social message which should have been obvious in this story, is geographically confused and only just scrapes up to the level its ambition aims for. But in its Robin Hood/Dracula idea – even in an unambitious, ill thought out version of that idea – you just know it’s a movie Quentin Tarantino thinks is decidedly cool.

The Return of Lancelot (1974)

D. Ted Obery
Colour

You can see the thought processes at work here.

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

And so here we have it:

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

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

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

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

The Trials and Tribulations of Mister Henry Church (1984)

D. Russ Maybery
Colour

1984 seems as good a time as any to hire Simon MacCorkindale to appear in a blatant rip-off of ‘The Saint’. MacCorkindale was definitely up to the task; he more than had the charm and arrogance to pull off the role and if given a proper chance would have been a Simon Templar to match Roger Moore (or a James Bond for that matter). MacCorkindale’s other US foray was a legendary mess named ‘Manimal’. This, for the uninitiated, saw him play a doctor who could shape-shift into any animal of prey and who used his talents to help police with their investigations. Sounds brilliant, doesn’t it? Actually it was wildly mocked, but I’ll be honest I always rather enjoyed it as a small child. As such he needed a chance to get his career back on track, and it’s a shame it went nowhere as this is a role which fits him like a burglar’s glove.

The thing is though, MacCorkindale isn’t actually playing Simon Templar. Maybe there was a rights issue, or maybe Ian Ogilvy’s agent threw the mother of all hissy fits, but here MacCorkindale is Henry Church – a master thief, adventurer, charmer, a man about town and one of the most famous men of his age.

Except he isn’t in his age anymore, as well as all his other achievements, he’s become an inadvertent time traveller.

One can only guess that Adam Ant’s success as an international popstar was enough for the producers to  throw the premise of Sixties time travel show ‘Adam Adamant Lives’ in there as well. Or perhaps no one could think of any reason for a dashing 1930s English adventurer type to suddenly appear in 1980s LA, unless he was some kind of nostalgia fetishist – and nostalgia fetishists are hardly likely to appeal to that key demographic: the kids. So we have a prologue where Church fights his main adversary The Hood (a prologue so stuffed with terrible expositional dialogue that you wonder if the script is credited to one G. Lucas) before Church falls into a tank of dry ice where he’s frozen for nearly fifty years. Then one day Henry Church awakes in the 1980s, a curious place where even his unflappable English charm will be put sorely to the test.

There’s a lot of promise in this scenario, essentially a dapper English gentleman with self-assurance beyond anything that modern man can reach makes his way in the modern world. He hooks up with investigative reporter. Erin Gray, and the sparks do fly between him and this 1980s girl. (Gray I also watched as a small child in ‘Buck Rogers’, where she introduced me to the whole concept of withering looks – she really does have a fine selection of them). But the fact that this is a back-door pilot means that a lot of what’s promising about this scenario is lost in handling a case of the week. So we see Henry Church amazed by big TV sets and dealing with skinheads in leather jackets who play their music too loud on huge speakers, but most of what makes this so promising is lost among the tropes of a generic American detective show.

A promising and intriguing idea then, but a waste of talent and effort – and the first part of that sentence is more than could be said about ‘Manimal’ at least.

There Be Monsters!!! (1945)

D. Raoul Walsh
B&W

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

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

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

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

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

Tarzan in Hollywood (1978)

D. Frank Avanage
Colour


The King of the Jungle becomes the King of Hollywood?!


Where do we start?


We all know the Tarzan story.


Well, I think you know the Tarzan story.


Basically a good son of England finds himself stranded as a boy in the wilds of Africa and grows up to King of the Jungle. Eventually the Western world finds him again and the ensuing culture clash mines seams of drama or comedy (or a little of both), but certainly that big seam called adventure.
Every Tarzan adventure is basically the same, which means that filmmakers can do ANYTHING with them.


Here pretty freelance journalist, Stephanie Zimbalist (apparently one of those freelance journalists who just hang out in jungles for no apparent reason), stumbles across Tarzan and amidst swiftly arising passion between the two (he’s never seen a woman before; most of the guys she hangs out with are effete LA tossers) she introduces him to America.


So far, so Tarzan.


Here’s the twist though, such is the sensation her newspaper article causes and such are Tarzan’s good looks and obvious charisma, he becomes a major Hollywood star. Just like that.  A montage makes clear his rapid rise to fame, as well as making clear how ludicrous a proposition this is. We see some of the films he stars in: western, science fiction, romance, period drama; but in each he’s wearing a loin cloth and still talking in stilted half-learnt English. Now lots of actors get by just playing versions of themselves, but here Tarzan is literally playing himself in every single film and apparently it’s a recipe for huge success.


Being a jungle man who largely follows his own whims means Tarzan fits right in to his new Hollywood lifestyle. He and Cheetah both go a little wild (Cheetah a little wilder), and both do things they regret (Cheetah much more so). But eventually Tarzan misses the simple ways of his jungle home and heads back, promising to look after the accompanying Stephanie and teach her the law of the jungle. Having frowned for a good half an hour of the film’s length, as Tarzan slips away from Hollywood he beams a big triumphant grin. Cheetah seems fucking gutted though.


It’s the predictable message and good low stakes fun, but you could easily have made this film about a farm boy from Kansas. Tom Selleck makes an appropriate macho and alpha-male Tarzan though. (My colleague has a massive crush on Tom Selleck. My colleague is married man with small children. My colleague is straight, but still not at all shy about voicing his adoration for the Selleck. I really must introduce him to this film.)  As Tarzan, Selleck wears a loin cloth, an ill-fitting wig and delivers all his lines in comical stuttering English. He looks so right for the part, but also so deeply and obviously uncomfortable.


That Kansas reference has triggered something in me though.


When this Zach Snyder thing is finished, can we please have ‘Superman in Hollywood’? 


Can’t you just picture him playing all his roles in tights and cape, before realising that a simple life of fighting Lex Luther is more for him?


If it happens, I want a cut.

Over the Threshold (2004)

D. Mike Culumbus
Colour


Nicole Kidman should not be allowed to do comedy.


It’s a fact that should be as clear as the flipping moon by now.


Obviously she’s an extremely good dramatic actress and clearly a very attractive woman (there are blind man in lost tribes of the Amazon who fancy Nicole), but to cast her in a comedy is always huge and regrettable mistake. It’s as if she doesn’t understand the concept of jokes or laughter or punchlines, even prat-falls are beyond her – there’s just something too delicate and restrained about Nicole for her to ever fall over in a funny way. Evidently she thinks she can do it, but that’s because she has watched other people be funny and imagines she can copy them. But there isn’t an amusing, witty or humorous sinew in her whole body, so she just ends up working her way through comic scripts in dead-eyed incomprehension – and that is not good for the health of any comedy project. (For another red headed actress similarly affected, see Moore, Julianne). By all means cast her in drama, let her do big emotional, tragic, scenes with swelling scores that make Oscar voters sit up and salivate like juicy prunes, but just keep her away from comedy. There are some people who can get laughs and there are some who really, really can’t. She is the latter.


Here’s an example, with Nicole playing against Hugh Grant in a culture clash comedy that was actually released in 2004 but feels like it’s been sat on a shelf since about 1958. Giving an early sketch of her white trash role from ‘The Paperboy’, but this time broader and less subtle, NIcole is a Kentucky waffle waitress who is wooed and married by visiting English aristocrat Grant. After the wedding she’s whisked back to England where fish out of water comedy ensues. It’s not a particularly original scenario for a film, is it? And believe me the script does it no favours by being half-baked, underwritten and about an eighth as funny as a 1980’s ITV sitcom.


So we have comedy yokels, sniffy aristocratic relatives, cheerful barmen, flirty antique dealers, a brassy would-be mistress for Grant, and – as counter-balance – a sleazy aristo interested in the delectable Nicole. The jokes are asthmatic and seemingly riddled with hay-fever in the English sunshine, so Grant does what he always does in these situations and starts to flail wildly in an attempt to make things funny just through a kind of polite mania. It results in him playing every scene slightly too loud in an attempt to bring life to them, but really he just sucks all the fun away in his desperation. Yet because Nicole just doesn’t understand comedy and doesn’t understand that this won’t work, she starts to imitate him, as if believing that since Grant does know about comedy this must be the way to do it. And so we have both of them horribly over the top, both of them waving their arms and bulging their eyes, until the two of them are caught in a despairing and terrible death spiral of unfunniness.


It’s terrible to watch, and on a blog where I’m supposed to be recommending obscure films I have to say that you should avoid this one like a virulent plague-zone. I just bring it forth as Exhibit A in why Nicole most absolutely, totally and certainly shouldn’t do comedy.

The Female Boss (1964)

D. Valentine Woolf
B&W


Here's a moody black & white melodrama that was no doubt on Matthew Weiner's radar when he created ‘Mad Men’ (although since he oddly claims that he hadn't read Richard Yates's superb ‘Revolutionary Road’ – which looks, feels and smells like a full drawn out blueprint [bathrooms, windows and all fixtures included] for ‘Mad Men’ – then perhaps it actually, and slightly incredibly, wasn't). It’s set in New York in the early 1960s, centring on a high-flying business executive in a power suit, played with charismatic authority by a born star performer. This is a character who drinks and smokes far too much across the course of the day, there’s office intrigue and drama, and even the possibility of romance with a younger member of staff. Except, the twist here is that this executive is played by the divine Ms Joan Crawford.


Clearly latching on to Ms Crawford’s role at Pepsi Cola (she had married an executive and did a hell of a lot of work for the second of America’s fizzy drinks companies, and at his death wound up on the board); we have on the back of her marketability in ‘Whatever happened to Baby Jane’, Ms Crawford in corporate America. There she is in a dark tailored suit staring down subordinates (and particularly insubordinates) when she finds herself Acting President, steering the company through a crisis after the beloved old President dies. The industry she works in is left deliberately vague, but even if it’s not advertising she does get to stride around like a proto feminist Don Draper exuding ruthless arrogance or delicate feminine charm, depending on the encounter. As Don is far luckier than her, because she also has to face blatant sexism in the workplace: snide voices plot against her, believing her to be just as a token women who has risen too far, or refer to her as “the secretary”, or say that her power has come through some undescribed (but no doubt salacious) incident.


Unfortunately beyond 'a woman in the boardroom, that’s a crazy, new idea!' the film doesn’t seem to have anywhere else to go. She’s Acting President for most of the film, but the main thrust of the story is her trying to find the right candidate to be full time President and at the end she does and it’s a man (albeit a very liberal, modern sort of man). So the film isn’t ready yet to accept a woman as full-time head of the boardroom. But more than that it strives to show how hard this corporate life is, but it also strives to show that it's especially hard on a woman, which kind of undermines its supposed ‘sexes are equal’ ethos. Still the pressure of proving herself means we get lots of great scenes of Joan in angry meetings, steely-eyed confrontations, and then – afterwards – her jaw wobbling when she's back in her own office supping a much needed tumbler of whisky. Jon Hamm’s Don Draper may be many things, but he rarely lets his jaw wobble – and certainly not as divinely as Joan’s does here.


With an aesthetic borrowed straight from ‘The Apartment’ (so much so you expect a cameo from Jack Lemmon, talking to his wife on the phone and still calling her “Miss Kubelik”) this is without a doubt a well-intentioned film, but one which hasn't really thought through its convictions enough to have courage in them.

An American Gangster in Pall-Mall (1985)

D. Ted Kotcheff
Colour



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


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


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







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

The Man from Over the Pond (1958)

D, Charles Crichton
Colour

Let’s be honest, there are a lot of John Wayne films. Flicking around the TV over the last bank holiday weekend, I glimpsed him constructing a bridge, running a circus and indulging in a saloon fight alongside Stewart Granger. (Saloon fights, much like death on Ingmar Bergman films, are thematically important in John Wayne’s oeuvre). All those films I skipped past, but if ‘The Man from Over the Pond’ shows up on BBC2 on a wet Sunday afternoon, please do give it the time of day.

 

John Wayne plays a former conman trying to make a new start for himself in Victorian England. Without a doubt it’s lack of reputation has to do with its similarity to the much better ‘The Quiet Man’ (and possibly because the other John Wayne in England film people recall is the substantially more violent ‘Brannigan’), but for anyone British – or who has immersed themselves in British culture – then this is a giddily surreal film. A sweet and charming English comedy with a honking great American star in the middle

 

There’s John Wayne bickering friendly with his landlady, Thora Hird; there’s him being stood a drink in the pub by Peter Sellers, before stopping to chat with a tiny Arthur Askey; here he’s playing poker with Sid James, Kenneth Connor and (briefly) Bernard Bresslaw; before romancing singer with a bad reputation, Diana Dors, who’s best friend is Joan Sims; he enjoys a  running joke with exasperated tobacconist Tony Hancock; is measured for a suit by the over the top camp pairing of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry; and  – in perhaps one of the most remarkable images ever committed to celluloid – he is dragged onto stage to sing and dance next to a ukulele playing George Formby.

 

It’s like a whistle-stop tour of 1950’s light entertainment, with John Wayne as your guide.

 

And that’s what I truly love about this film, all these people are not altering their act to fit into a John Wayne movie, they are doing what they do and John Wayne seems to be having a ball watching them do it. Indeed there’s a grin on his face (a slightly befuddled one, but a definite beam) when he finds himself with the over the top, swishingly unabashed, Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtry. A scene which may hold the record for the most single, double and triple entendres ever crammed into four minutes. While elsewhere there’s a real chemistry between him and Thora Hird, a warmth and bright eyed affection which maybe suggests they played together as children or flirted as teens. I’m not joking, the sparks almost seems sexual at points and one can’t help thinking that if Thora had been just that little bit better looking they could have made one of those great, sizzling on-screen partnerships. She could have replaced Janet Leigh as the love interest in ‘Jet Pilot’, or Sophia Loren in ‘Legend of the Lost’; alternatively Wayne could have wound down his career playing Wesley in ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

What’s truly remarkable about ‘The Man From Over the Pond is that it’s taken me six paragraphs to mention that Alec Guinness is in it, playing the mark who Wayne eventually forms a friendship with. But then compared to everything else, the pairing of Alec Guinness and John Wayne is made to feel a bit run of the mill. The rest of the film is so colourful and incongruous, a bizarrely and magnificently enjoyable romp – especially in the scene where George Formby forces Wayne to speak “like a cockney does”. A watching Dick Van Dyke would have scoffed that if the chance ever arrived, he’d do a far better job.