1963 - PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND the Warner Brothers contract players party down

The family was sick last night, so I thought it would be nice to put a mindless film from the early 1960's on for our viewing pleasure. I choose Palm Springs Weekend which was a movie I remembered seeing on the CBS Thursday Night movie many years ago.

Palm Springs Weekend is one of those college kids go away on spring break for a weekend of fun and frivolity things. It was made mostly because MGM had made a film called Where The Boys Are, which was a similar themed movie about college kids on break in Ft. Lauderdale. The movies have a lot in common, they both feature actors that look way too old to play college students, and they both hint at the idea of pre-martial sex (without actually mentioning it by name) as something that goes on in college, but is probably a very bad and messy thing.

Warner Brother's wasn't fooling around when they made this film, they used actors from their TV series and shot most of it on studio sets, with a little location filming in the desert. There was a particularly lame backdrop on a set that was supposed to be a parking lot for a Casino which looked pretty cheesy.  However the awesome Palm Springs Motel set is pretty retro cool.

Troy Donohue (and his awesome hair),  played the captain of the college basketball team who is studying to be a doctor. He hooks up with Stephanie Powers in her career defining role as "Bunny" the daughter of the Chief of Police of Palm Springs. When Stephanie throws herself at Troy toward the end of the film for some pre martial dirty stuff, Troy the future Doctor turns her down. What a gentleman.

A couple of other cast members to take note of are Jerry Van Dyke as the zany friend of Troy Donohue. His shtick gets old pretty fast since his performance consists of mugging for the camera every chance he can get. Jack Weston plays the coach of the basketball team and he was no small scene stealer himself, the difference between a Jack Weston and a Jerry Van Dyke is that Weston actually had some acting talent. But probably the best performance in the movie is by Robert Conrad from the The Wild Wild West. He gives a pretty decent performance as a spoiled rich kid with some significant father issues. Who would have thought that he had it in him.

This is the kind of a movie where someone's idea of being real cool is to whip out their banjo and play it for all the hot 60's babes around the pool. There is also a pretty decent fight between the college guys and a gang of street toughs at a party. The party is a little to square to be believed even for 1963, the hostess announces "there is beer in the kitchen and the bed rooms are off limits."

I still found the film very enjoyable after all these years and don't kid yourself, they still pop out junk like this in Hollywood even today.

100 minutes.

Ealing Studio's DEAD OF NIGHT defeated by flat visual style

This is generally considered a classic film of British Horror, but it looked pretty dated to me. A framing device involving a man who dreams of traveling to a house where he meets a group of strangers who tell him their stories of supernatural encounters probably comes off best. The film's reputation is based on the final story, which is about a ventriloquist played by Michael Redgrave and his possibly possessed dummy named Hugo. Redgrave gives a good performance as a wacko nutcase (or is schizophrenic?) and appears to be enjoying hamming it up. However I think the problem with this film is that television shows like "The Twilight Zone" have gone down this road so many times that the novelty of these stories has pretty much worn off. The film also lacks visual flair, unlike almost any Universal horror film, which is an important element in setting a mood for a horror film. The film relies on the actors and with the exception of Redgrave and Mervyn Johns they all kind of seem like they are overacting frequently and not in particularly good ways. Probably the framing device comes off best in the film and the situation of how the repeating dream sequence is finally resolved is pretty clever.

1963 - Mario Bava's WHIP AND THE BODY is an S&M love story featuring the color green

Mario Bava was a cult director in Italy specializing in Gothic horror films.

Whip and the Body features Christopher Lee as an evil guy involved in a sado masochist relationship with his brother's fiancee played by Dali Lavi. Their fun and games involve him whipping her into a sexual frenzy on the family castle beach front while saying things like "you always loved violence." When he turns up dead, the film moves into the supernatural area. Is he actually dead or has he come back as a ghost?

Bava was a photographer before he was a director so he loads the film up with lots of Gothic trappings, he particularly seems to enjoy using the color green to cast a mood of mystery throughout the many nighttime scenes, and the look of the film is kind of interesting in a garish kind of way. I guess you would call this kind of film lurid.

If you have a taste for a version of Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff beats the crap out of Cathy with a whip, this is the film for you.

85 minutes.

1944 - Unseen Hitchcock BON VOYAGE

Guilt tripped by the British film establishment into contributing to the Allied war effort during World War II, Hitchcock returned to England and directed a couple of propaganda shorts, one of them called Bon Voyage was released in 1944.

It's a short film at 26 minutes and it plays like an episode of an Alfred Hitchcock presents TV show. The story is about an RAF officer escaping with another prisoner through France with the help of the French Resistance. The film doesn't have very many Hitchcock touches and Hitchcock appeared to be working with a very small budget.

No undiscovered masterpiece here and probably not worth the viewer's time, for Hitchcock completists only I guess. Watch Foreign Correspondent instead.

 

Written by Angus MacPhail and J.O.C. Orton.

2003 - Am I too old for ARAGAMI?

The director Ryuhei Kitamura, took a dare, make a film about a duel, between two men and only use one set. Kitamura is from the razzle dazzle school of filmmaking, lots of stylish action, editing and wild camera angles mixed with a rather cynical tone. This is a movie that in theory should have been fun for a young film geek, lots of samurai sword fighting, flying and jumping around, yet the movie seemed mighty dull to me. I sat through at least 45 minutes of talking, lots of talking. Kitamura tried to set up a situation where a samurai does battle with an immortal god in some sort of an epic battle. When the two combatants finally get around to actually hacking away at each during the big sword fight it was nothing I hadn't seen before. Hate to sound like an oldster but Kurosawa's "Sanjuro" sword fights were a lot more exciting and that film was made over 40 years ago. Kitamura kept the film to about 75 minutes, but it seemed mighty long. Kitamura had better luck with his Godzilla film "Godzilla: Final Wars" which was a lot more entertaining.

1979 - STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE

With the restart of the series coming out in May, it's time for a few comments on the first Star Trek movie with the original cast. My anticipation was high when the film was announced although the film was clearly being made to cash in on all the money Star Wars had made. In spite of that albatross, I had a strong interest in seeing the film. They had the original cast back, Gene Roddenberry the creator of the original series was the producer and Robert Wise a very good director was hired to direct.

What went wrong:
1. Basically the script had no dramatic tension, and was pretty much a rehash of a Star Trek episode called The Changeling and that wasn't a particularly good episode.

2. Robert Wise had apparently never seen an episode of Star Trek and didn't understand the mythology of the series.

3. Apparently nobody liked Roddenberry who as it turned out was a second rate talent at best and somewhat of a jerk overall.

4. Paramount rushed the production because of worries that the science fiction craze started by Star Wars would be over by the time the movie came out.

5. The actors were never able to modulate their television style acting for the film.

6. There was an over reliance on spectacular special effects which was used to cover up the weak script, this lead to many long boring "flying thru space" scenes particularly the V'ger flyover which was endless ( in fact I got up and went out for a potty break, came back and still hadn't missed anything).

7. Some weird bald chick who was supposed to be the hot sexy thing in the movie . There was always a hot sexy thing in a Star Trek episode, but she just looked strange and struggled big time to act. Her running around in a short skirt at the end of the film actually distracted from the revelation of the V'Ger entity.

 

As they say the list is unfortunately, endless. Paramount let Robert Wise rework the movie a few years later and while it mostly involved cleaning up the special effects and tightening some of the scenes, I don't think it was is a major improvement to the film, it does look and play a lot better. This is the edition I own.

 132 minutes, the screenplay was written by Harold Livingston.

1964 - TOPKAPI, Jules Dassin remakes RifIfi calls it TOPKAPI.

Topaki, is Dassin's remake of Rififi which was the first of the big heist caper films, in which a team of professional criminals plan and execute an elaborate robbery only to have it go wrong due to some unforeseen circumstance.

 

Rififi was a very influential crime film that looks a little dated today, however films like the Ocean's 11 series and every big caper film ever made were heavily influenced by this film. Dassin himself decided to remake Rififi as Topkapi, with the heist set in Turkey.  Dassin also went for a much lighter touch this time, he was smart enough to know that this wasn't to be taken very seriously.

   

Dassin also decided to cast his wife, Melina Mercouri a very very Greek actress, as the femme fatale, and she brings a very very Medea like intensity to what probably needed somewhat of a lighter touch. I will say however that she definitely has a personality.

The big heist scene at the end of the film is very well done, and the on location photography in Turkey and Greece with the cast running around on the rooftop of the Topkapi palace in Istanbul is pretty cool. This is the kind of film that the Ocean's 11 films couldn't begin to replicate much less surpass, and it's certainly more entertaining than that junk.

 119 minutes.

Budd Boetticher's Randy Scott Westerns

This series is out on DVD, with introductions by Clint Eastwood, motormouth Quentin Tarentino, and Taylor Hackford, who had personally known Boetticher before his death. It also contains a documentary on Boetticher who was apparently somewhat of a hell raiser particularly with women.  

 

Comanche Station-The final western in the series is Boetticher and Scott's version of John Ford's, The Searchers. This was a good film made as a "B" western in about 2 weeks with lots of location filming. This has excellent photography in some good scenic locations without all of the pretentious compositions that Ford stuck into The Searchers.  Randolph Scott actually looks like a cowboy, and doesn't overdo it with the strong silent type routine.

   

Decision at Sundown-Probably the most conventional of the series, this film appeared to be filmed mainly on a studio western set. Scott is good in this one, but the story is disappointing and the lack of location filming makes the film look kind of cheap. Doesn't appear that Boetticher and Scott had much interest in this one.
 
   






The Tall T coming soon

Seven Men From Now - Scott is on a mission of revenge in this one.  The film has all of the best virtues of this series.  A tight script for Burt Kennedy, good Lone Pine California locations and it doesn't push it running only 78 minutes.  A good cast supporting Scott, Lee Marvin, Stuart Whitman, Gail Russell and John Beradino.

 
Buchanan Rides Alone-Good looking film with exceptional photography, a somewhat complicated story about a western border town under the control of one family. Boetticher stages an exciting shootout at the end of the film. The film reminds me of "Yojimbo" with all of the double dealing involved. Well made really good film.

 

   



Ride Lonesome-Scott is the avenger in this one. This one is pretty grim and serious for the most part. Not a lot of action for a western, but the story and the actors move the film along to a strong climax. Definitely another high point for the series.

 

1969 - THE SIREN OF THE MISSISSIPPI, Francois Truffaut's version of Vertigo

Truffaut the champion of Hitchcock, made 4 films which were sort of a tribute to Hitchcock with various degrees of success.  The Siren of Mississippi is one of them.   Truffaut admired Hitchcock, but he was temperamentally unsuited to make films like Hitchcock. Truffaut always had too much empathy for his characters. Hitchcock generally used the characters in his films to interact with his set pieces which kind of tended to make them seem like cardboard cutouts. Truffaut wasn't above improvising with his stars while making his films, something Hitchcock would never have done.

 

The Siren of the Mississippi is about a mail order bride who arrives on a tropical island to marry the owner of a cigarette factory. As it turns out she is not the person she appears to be from her letters and she ends up stealing her husband's money

From this starting point the story becomes a tale of obsessive love. Truffaut had major stars in this film, Jean Paul Belmondo and Catherine Denevue. He also had a bigger budget than usual and apparently shot in sequence, which is not the most economical way to make a film.

The film at times has that funny look that French films have when they shoot on location, kind of a hollow and bare,  it's almost like no one thought to buy any furniture for the rooms they are supposed to be living in.  It's still a Truffaut film so it's worth a viewing although it is something of a disappointment.

 123 minutes, written by Truffaut

POINT BREAK, Oh Brother

Ridiculous macho fantasy bullshit well directed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow, which only proves that women can play at the same game of making stupid action movies that their male counterparts have been doing for years Keanu Reeves plays FBI agent Johnny Utah on the trail of some surfers, robbing banks to finance their surfing lifestyle. Patrick Swayze is Bodhi the mystical head of the surfer/bank robber group. Keanu goes undercover to catch the gang in action with the help of his partner Gary Busey playing agent Angelo Pappas. The names of these characters kill me. Anyway, they give Keanu a girlfriend played by the actress Lori Petty, before she turned into a complete freak later in her career. But, she is basically the movie "beard" for Johnny Utah and Bodhi, because the love story is really about the two guys. If the filmmakers had any guts at all they would have included a love scene between them. The action scenes are well done if rather ridiculous, the most goofy has to be the skydiving sequence between Johnny Utah and Bodhi. Loaded with cliches, the film is enjoyable as an example of complete junk filmed with high technical skill.

1956 - Disney remakes Buster Keaton-THE GREAT LOCOMOTIVE CHASE

Every biography of Disney refers to the model train and track that he had built around his home in Hollywood. Not surprisingly, in 1956 he released his version of the Buster Keaton train classic "The General". This film was based on the true civil war story of Andrews Raiders, 22 union soldiers who attempted to destroy a railway line in Georgia during the Civil War. Keaton's version of the story is a classic. Disney's version isn't up to that standard, but it has many things to recommend it. The on location filming with actual period trains through rural Georgia is pretty darn cool. The performances are decent and a lot of the shots show them actually riding around on the trains, probably something that you wouldn't see much of today. There must have been a lot of work involved filming the scenes of the trains chasing each other it is impressive. Disney's version of this story doesn't cop out with a happy ending and sticks pretty close to the facts of the story

. A good Disney film from of Hollywood's best producers, Walt Disney.

1966 - THE SINGING NUN

I have a few movies to write about, but this week's entry will be about The Singing Nun a movie about a nun who sings.  Released in 1966, this is supposedly based on the life of an actual nun who was known as Soeur Sourire (Sister Smile). She had a hit song called "Dominique" and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hollywood will be Hollywood, and it was decided to make a movie out of her life. Being that she was a Belgium nun living in Europe they put together an eclectic cast to say the least.

The perky Debbie Reynolds played Soeur Sourire zipping around Europe on her motor scooter with a guitar strapped to her back. The amazing supporting cast included Ricardo Montalban, Agnes Moorehead, Greer Garson, Chad Everett, Tom Drake, Ed Sullivan and Katherine Ross, probably not a group you would think of as particularly Belgium.

The movie was directed by Henry Koster and written by Sally Benson, two people who should have been good at presenting tripe like this. The plot had something to do with Sister Debbie having to decide between being a nun or taking up with a hunky old boyfriend, Chad Everett. This is the traditional trauma faced by every nun in the movies, pledging one's self to God or Chad Everett. It's not hard to guess who wins. By the end of the movie, Sister Debbie is in fantasy Africa inoculating little black babies while being surrounded by lots of black people. In her superhero nun outfit she looks very white. This struck me as a particularly tasteless white person's fantasy about another culture.

The climatic scene in The Singing Nun has Sister Debbie  appearing on a TV show where her song will be broadcast throughout the world. As she sings we see scenes of the various cultures grooving out to her song. It's an interesting scene because it's hard to believe that by the mid 1960's this kind of stuff could still be filmed with a straight face.

It's easy to sneer at junk like this 30 plus years later, but the real singing nun Jeannine Deckers' committed suicide with her lover Annie Pecher in 1985 which kind of takes the camp fun out of it.

97 minutes.

1980 - HEAVEN'S GATE-The film that I can't finish

Looking over one of my favorite film websites this week, Jeffrey Welles's "Hollywood Elsewhere". Welles ran a brief article about the death of Steven Bach a United Artists executive who got caught up in the fiasco of Heaven's Gate.  In 1980 Heaven's Gate was THE most expensive film ever produced by a Hollywood studio at a cost of 40 million dollars. Today that seems almost like pocket change for a typical Hollywood popcorn movie.

One of the most interesting things about Welles's article is the you tube link to a documentary about the film in 8 parts.  The documentary talks to many of the principles involved in the making of the film, and recounts the obsessiveness of the director Michael Cimino in making the film. Almost everyone in the film discusses the incredible attention to detail and the amount of work that goes into the film, but no one in the film mentions the outrageously poor quality of the finished film.

Another film for serious insomnia sufferers like just about any Andrei Tarkovsky film. The photography is amazing although it goes pretty heavy on the sepia lens filter at times. The production design is something to see, the Montana locations are magnificent.  The major problems with the film were the acting and the story.

Kris Kristofferson, was the lead in the film, and his style of underacting was poorly suited for a film that was shooting for an epic scope. He did achieve at least one effect, he helped me fall asleep with his relentless mumbling. Isabelle Huppert seems to have been cast as the female lead because she was willing to run around topless for the director for no particular reason.  Christopher Walken probably gave the best performance in the film, but his character was such an underdeveloped and contradictory mess by the time he died it was difficult to figure out what exactly his role in the story was supposed to be,  good guy or bad guy.

If the acting didn't completely kill Heaven's Gate, the horrible script finished the job.   This was an anti-western made at a time when westerns were a dead art form. The story is a simple one, it's cattle barons versus the sod busters. Viewing it, requires sitting through lots of incredibly dull exposition and dialog, real film killers. The film got an R rating. The nudity and the violence also helped to doom it from ever being seen by a wide audience. Someone should have realized that before they released it.

Michael Cimino who wanted to be an epic film maker like David Lean had only realized part of his vision, he was an epic hack.  Incredibly this film has actually found some film scholars who think it's a masterpiece.  They clearly haven't watched it in awhile. 

228 minutes!