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.

Killer on Sunset Boulevard (1982)

D. Wayne Hopkin
Colour

Johnny Cash was a pious man. A Christian who put a lot of stake in his faith in God and recorded many gospel tracks – as well as, of all things, a Man in Black Christmas album. But there was also something sinister about Johnny Cash. You don’t bill yourself ‘The Man in Black’ if you want to be loved by everyone. Just as you don’t spend hours practicing a brooding sneer in front of the mirror as a teenager (we don’t think that look just arrived on his face, do we?) if you’re planning to make it as a happy-clappy, Christian entertainer. A faithful man Johnny Cash may have been, but he knew as sure as Alice Cooper knew, that darkness sells. That’s doubly true in films. You can go so far with being pious and Christian on a cinema screen, but you can do a hell of a lot more with sinister.

Even more than the other Monkees, Micky Dolenz clearly craved fame. If you think of the gurning comedy, or the mugging at camera while pretending to play the drums, then clearly this is a man desperate to be noticed. He stood out much more than Took or Nesmith, and made Davy Jones look like a blandly English ex-Coronation Street actor in comparison. There was in Dolenz, an all-round entertainer trying to get out, a counter- culture Sammy Davis Jr – but in reality all he really got to be was drummer in The Monkees.

Here Cash and Dolenz come together in ‘Killer on Sunset Boulevard’. Although, to be fair, it’s hardly a meeting brimming with the anticipation of a Newman/Redford, De Niro/Pacino or even Godzilla/ King Ghidorah.

It’s 1982 and neither of them is at the height of their careers (although Cash would later climb the summit again; Dolenz is no longer able to see it even with high powered binoculars). So it’s an odd combination in an odd film, but one which specifically plays to who they are. From the outside Johnny Cash and Micky Dolenz look odd casting, but on closer examination it’s difficult to think of anyone else playing these roles.

This is a movie which combines ‘The Valley of the Dolls’ with ‘Desperate Hours’. Dolenz is a Hollywood star, an actor and musician extraordinaire, one of the most famous people on the planet according to the oddly fawning news broadcast we see (even the E network would consider it a little uncritical). His character is clearly leading the life Micky Dolenz himself has always dreamt of. There’s a gorgeous wife and two daughters, but more importantly the adulation of the world – who could ask for more? Except, Dolenz also has a deranged fan. This fan takes the form of Johnny Cash, who on this bright sunny day invades Dolenz’s home and holds him and his family hostage. What follows is a tense siege where Dolenz gets more and more desperate for his and his family’s safety in the face of his totally implacable opponent.

I’ll be honest, this is not a great film. Dolenz in no way has the acting chops to pull this off, and comes over more a whining child in a playground rather than a husband and father strung out to the very end of his tether. But Cash is extraordinary, so still and dangerous, with eyes that have years of fear and hurt deep within. Cash – unlike a certain Sun Records colleague – is never thought to have made that much impression of a film, but here we have an embryonic Hannibal Lector and the template for a million other screen psychos to follow.

Hell-Dogs of the Full Moon (1972)

D. Horatio Jason
Colour

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

Yes, werewolves.

Riding motorbikes.

Pretty cool, ay?

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

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

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

Malcolm on Wheels (1968)

D. Henry Schloss
B&W

There’s something much less intimidating about British bikers than their American counterparts. You see in films the American biker gangs, tearing up the American highways on their hogs, before tearing up American towns and then if they get the chance tearing up American womanhood. It’s all deliberately, unapologetically and provocatively intimidating; and because that image is so persuasive the belief becomes widespread that all American bikers are that way. Yet when you’re driving about the byways and highways of Blighty and you see British bikers, you don’t feel intimidated by them in the slightest. Even when there’s a group of them together, you can’t help thinking that they’re basically nice, if slightly oil-stained young men. No doubt they probably live at home with their mothers, they work as a bank clerk Monday to Friday and their favourite dinner is beef casserole. British bikers, even British bikers who dub themselves Hell’s Angels, just don’t have anywhere near the same air of menace about them.

This black & white British film seems to back up those prejudices. For the first half an hour the central character of Malcolm fits in exactly with what we imagine a British motorcyclist to be. Played by David Hemmings, still young, thin and cherubic, he does indeed live at home with his Mum (Beryl Reid), has what looks at first glance and incredibly boring job in an architect’s office and he has great trouble talking to pretty girls – be they the nice lass down the street, or the kind of sneering leather-clad good-time girl he sees when sitting by himself at biker stops. He is bland and inoffensive, a boy/man who just likes riding his motorcycle and doesn’t want to be a fuss to anyone. He is exactly what we all imagine British bikers to be.

But that’s before he takes a Stanley knife and slashes open the throat of the leader of the local biker gang.

What follows is a serial killer/chase film, where Malcolm rides around the country with good girl who just wants some dark thrills, Jane Asher, pinion behind him. In many ways this is your stereotypical 1960s dangerous bikers’ story, with our protagonist killing those who get in their way and always just about evading the police. But even with all the deaths and the violence, it manages to avoid the dark glamour of American biker movies. One really can’t picture Dennis Hopper sat down eating marmite sandwiches out of kitchen foil and moaning about how he wishes his mum would use mustard instead; just as you can’t imagine Peter Fonda having deeply inadequate sex with his young pouting lover, who just calmly tells him that it’s okay, they can practice when they get home.

This is a film about motorcyclists on the open road, about youthful rebellion; so it’s a film that steals tropes from an incredibly recognisable part of American culture, yet still manages to produce something so weirdly and bathetically British.

The Playboy (1968)

D. Harry Reilly
Colour

One of Roger Moore’s first stabs at big screen stardom, sees him never stray far from his established persona as Roger Moore The Saint on the TV, which was of course the same persona he later made famous as Roger Moore James Bond.


Despite a long career, acting was never Roger Moore’s strong point and so you’d expect him to bring nothing else but his normal bag of tricks. Yet, even though Roger Moore is still so clearly playing Roger Moore, if you actually watch the film, you’ll see that incredibly he’s both wheeling out his normal debonair persona, but also subverting it at every level. Here his charm, suavity and effortless English cool aren’t the products of excellent breeding and inherent style, they’re just a façade which hides something far darker and more disturbing.

For in ‘The Playboy’, Roger Moore isn’t a gentleman thief or a gentleman spy, he’s a screwed up would-be gentleman and genuine mummy’s boy who likes nothing better than to little murder old ladies.

It’s 1968 in swinging London and Roger Moore cruises the streets in a second hand jaguar looking to meet ladies of a certain age he can woo and charm. Like a much hornier Max Bialystock, Moore is adept at making these women feel special; romancing them, wining & dining them, looking so happy to be on their arm. But the moment the dear old thing’s will is changed to reflect her new found infatuation, she’s ushered to bed by her handsome young suitor and takes a long sleep from which she’ll never awake. Irene Handl is suitably charmed, Joan Hickson is equally charmed, even visiting American former cabaret artiste Shelley Winters finds it impossible to resist. All fall asleep so full of love and passion that they never wake up to realise their mistake. It isn’t long though before the trail of corpses arouses suspicion and Detective Alex McGowan (playing essentially the same character he later did in Hitchcock’s ‘Frenzy’, but without the stilted marital bickering), starts to track his man.

Released the same year as ‘Alfie’, in many ways this serves as a darker version of that film: both being about Londoners with a taste for the ladies (including Shelley Winters, for whom 1968 was clearly a randy year around London). Yet even though the murders give it a far darker edge than ‘Alfie’, it still feels like a far older and more conservative film.

From a 1968 perspective (actually from a 2014 perspective too), Michael Caine is better cast as a modern man than his near contemporary Roger Moore. Roger Moore reeks of public school, the good tailor, the brogues. He doesn’t feel like a 1960s man, more a throwback to the 1950s, who’s only cool and young in the way Frank Sinatra was still trying to be cool and young. If ‘The Playboy’ had been released ten years earlier, its blithe mixture of that charm and murder would have made this a disturbing and genuinely memorable British film. As it was, it feels like a strange anachronism wrapped in an un-hip suit and stinking of Brylcreem.

Although watching his performance, clearly Roger Moore had more murder in his soul than he was ever encouraged to show as James Bond – and the fact he never got to use it is a dying shame. By the end of his tenure, Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny was very much the right age group for this film’s version of Roger Moore. So it’s genuinely disappointing that she just disappeared from the screen, rather than being gently ushered to sleep by an OO7 gone very, very rogue.

Now, wouldn’t THAT have been a hell of an ending to ‘A View to a Kill’?

Night-Train to Budapest (1968)

D. Terrence Fisher
Colour

I like that there’s the odd film out there where Christopher Lee actually gets to play the hero. One is the Hammer semi-classic ‘The Devil Rides Out’, where for once he finds himself on the right side of satanic events; while this – from the very same year – is a much more 1960s steampunk effort. Here the now Sir Christopher Lee is Sir Michael Wooton, an Edwardian gentleman and adventurer. He’s a derring-do hero of the old school (no doubt the kind of very English place that never admitted oiks and bred distrust of greasy foreigners). He sports the natural grace and charm of a true aristocrat, all exuded through his exquisitely tailored suit and form-fitting topcoat. He’s undoubtedly the handsomest, best-dressed man in the room, but one who has more than a little danger about him.

We open swarmed with paperboys, all yelling stories of Sir Michael’s latest exploits. Clearly he’s a star of the Edwardian age and has hired Sherlock Holmes’s publicist to boot. An adoring crowd follows him to the train station and he waves to them and thanks them for all their cockney compliments (it’s good actually that this gang of extras got work, as they’d been roaming feral since the film of ‘My Fair Lady’). He then boards the train for what for anyone else would be a pleasant journey into Europe. But given what we know of his track record, this particular journey is not likely to be peaceful – and that no doubt suits him fine.

As I said I like Christopher Lee as a hero, he seems a lovely man in reality and so it’s great that he gets to have the odd heroic moment. But if I’m honest he makes a really odd hero. When he’s supposed to be bad, Sir Chris knows how to sink his teeth into the role (pun intended); but being good doesn’t suit him as well and his discomfort leads him to becoming stiff and patrician. It means we have a hero it’s often difficult to warm to, no matter how brave or noble he proves himself to be. Here that’s thrown into stark contrast by his train-raiding nemesis, played by Orson Welles at his most avuncular. There’s the bad guy roaring with laughter over drink and food, while the reserved hero stares on with a slightly supercilious air. In addition Orson’s scheme is pleasingly bizarre, involving as it does arming the train with “a photon coal engine” and some wrought iron warheads then turning it into a bomb. (The actual plan is too big to be anything other than hazy, but there also seem to be skis and livestock involved.) Such is the mad audacious brilliance it all, combined with Welles’ sparkle and charm, that the audience is really left wondering who exactly to root for.

But more than that, on top of this fascinating good/bad dichotomy of a concoction we find, perched fetchingly, a fascinator: as Sir Chris’s sidekick, the man helping him beat this overweight, over-loud, overly-charming bad guy, is a pre-Doctor Who Roger Delgado. The saturnine looks are there, as well the dark and menacingly hypnotic eyes; although here – along with Sir Chris – he’s supposed to be one of the good guys.

So we have Dracula and The Master teaming up to thwart Charles Foster Kane on a speeding train, what kind of freak wouldn’t want to watch this movie?

We Cease to Grow! (1972)

D. Damien Nostro
B&W

Much like the Doctor Who serial ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and the forthcoming ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’, this obscure grainy 1970s film features a mad environmentalist who decides that the best way to solve the population problem is to wipe out most of mankind. Obviously Paul R. Ehrlich’s ‘The Population Bomb’ has, and continues to have, some effect – although possibly not the one the good doctor was expecting. Let’s look at this closely, what kind of absolute nutter thinks that the best way to save the human population is to wipe out 99.9% of it? Okay, let’s say that there are people like that out there, misanthrope extremis, how would they persuade anyone else to go along with their scheme? Surely anyone propositioned to help implement this plan of mass slaughter, would back slowly away with a distinctly scared and freaked out look in their eyes. In both ‘The Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ and ‘Kingsman: Secret Service’ it’s the elite who are saved (although in the 1970s that meant intellectuals; in 2014 it apparently means celebrities), while in ‘We Cease to Grow!’ it’s less clear – but even then, surely members of any elite know people who aren’t in the elite? Surely they’re not so blasé in their lifestyle they’re happy to watch everyone else die just so they can hang out and procreate with people like themselves. Perhaps I’m being horribly naive, but I’d like to think that when some billionaire megalomaniac does come along and suggests this scheme, that most people (although certainly not all, I admit that) will say that they don’t want to be a party to the genocide of most of humanity, thank you very much.


Orson Welles plays the lead role – although even then he probably knocked out his part in about four days – as a wheelchair bound mad genius who has unleashed a terrible chemical bug into the world. Now locked down in his bunker, and resembling a bigger and scarier Raymond Burr, he ruminates on his reasons and rationale whilst chaos takes hold outside. Welles’s voice as he intones is like the rumble of the apocalypse, so it’s appropriate he’s there literally narrating the end of the world. Statistics purr out of this wounded lion, as he tells of how much food the world has left, the spread of diseases and the rise of the oceans. Outside we see the chaos starting, rioting on the streets; as well as more individual vignettes, where sad and desperate people come to the end of their sad and desperate lives. It’s not a film to make you feel good about yourself; in fact it’s difficult to work out what kind of mood the film makers want you to leave the cinema in, because as far as I can see Welles is supposed to be right here. Yes he has carried out this drastic act, but he is a sage, a seer, he is salvation. So who knows what the audience was supposed to do with it? Maybe the film makers just wanted enough people to see it so that if some megalomaniac did suggest killing most of humanity, somebody would actually say yes.