1940, NIGHT TRAIN TO MUNICH, not a sequel to THE LADY VANISHES

Carol Reed directed this comedy thriller, which used the same leading lady and the same two supporting British boob characters Charters and Caldicott from The Lady Vanishes.  But the film was not a sequel to the Hitchcock film.  Carol Reed was about four years away from hitting his peak period as a filmmaker, the real auteur's of this film were the writers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder who had written The Lady Vanishes and were none to happy that Hitchcock got most of the credit for that film.

This is a very 1930's film with a lot of plot.  The basic story is about the Nazi's capturing an important scientist and his daughter from the British, and a British spy's attempts to get them back.  It is a pretty dated but clever story, with the writers mixing in comedy and suspense.  The film uses a lot of model and miniature work which gives  the whole thing a kind of quaint charm.

The acting is very good with a young Rex Harrison standing out as the British master spy trying to save the scientist and his daughter.  Harrison gets to sing a couple of music hall songs and really hams it up in disguise as a Nazi officer, in a lot of ways he's the whole show.  Margaret Lockwood gets the very thankless role of the daughter of the scientist but she looks pretty good in that English actress kind of way.

The finale features a shoot out on a cable car between Harrison and the Nazis which is a combination of more miniatures and rear projection, yeah it looks pretty phony but it's a lot of silly fun. 

Carol Reed was a very talented director but at this stage in his career he was no Hitchcock, he just didn't seem to be able to stage this spy stuff the way "The Master of Suspense" could.  Reed always liked working with actors and he did get pretty good performances out of the cast but visually the film is pretty dull for the most part. In 1944, Carol Reed kicks it into gear and has a very impressive run of films for the next 10 years. 

An entertaining if rather unmemorable film, proabably best to stick with Hitchcock's British thrillers instead.  The running time is 95 minutes.

1965 - DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, David Lean's Russian soap opera

The second in David Lean's trilogy of super epics, Doctor Zhivago was at the time of filming  10 months in actual production.  This larger scale production has everything great photography, big sets, and crowds, an impressive film to watch.

At the time of release in 1965, the film got some of the worst reviews that David Lean had ever received, the chief focus was on Robert Bolt's screenplay which many critics felt cheapened and simplified Boris Pasternak's book.  The reality probably was that not a lot of people had actually read this very long and difficult novel.

What appears to have appealed to David Lean about Doctor Zhivago was the story of the gifted poet tormented by his love for two women.  Lean himself had a very messy personal life, so he probably could relate to the basic situation.

This was the film where I discovered how important photography could be in a film.  The cinematographer F.A. Young really outdid himself.  You could probably pull a still out of almost any part of the film and frame it.  Young filmed in 35 mm and blew it up to 70mm, you couldn't even tell, it's that good  Watching the film today, the photography's impressive if maybe a little glossy, still it's a real pleasure to watch this gorgeous film. 

After all the careful filming and planning, MGM forced Lean to rush through the post production and editing process to get the film into theaters due to their poor financial position.  The composer Maurice Jarre had very little time to score the film, he ended up writing a love theme called "Lara's Theme" which they used a lot throughout the film.   The song became very popular and was covered by just about every mainstream crooner in the world.

Doctor Zhivago's a very fine film that  didn't really turn out to be the masterpiece that David Lean had hoped for.   But he really knew how to put a film together and move the story along. Not a boring moment can be found in the entire 3 hours and 20 minutes. 

This film was extremely popular with audiences at the time of release and made a lot of money.

2005 - A BITTERSWEET LIFE, is a philosophical revenge fantasy

Another one of these violent Asian action films where everyone gets blasted with lots of bullets or repeatedly bashed in the head over and over and over and over and over and over.

A Bittersweet Life is very well made, the action scenes are at a high caliber, the acting is good and the story is pretty interesting.  For reasons I can't exactly understand these types of films always seem to have scenes where the protagonist gets all philosophical about the meaning of life and his  place and relationship to it in the world.  I call this The Guns of Navarone syndrome.

The Guns of Navarone was a large scale World War II action adventure where every so often Gregory Peck and David Niven would stop to debate the relative merits of the war they were fighting.   I believe the purpose of these scenes were to make the film seem more important than what it actually was, just another World War II movie. 

A Bittersweet Life has The Guns of Navarone syndrome in spades, there is lots of time to reflect on the meaning of life before somebody gets a burning stick shoved into his eye, or shot in the chest or has his head rammed through a car window, etc.

The film is not without a sense of humor, there is a long scene with a gun dealer that is very funny. Our so called hero and the gun dealer race to put together the guns they have taken apart so they can shoot each other, funny stuff.

Still, you get what you pay for with this film lots of over the top violence that for some reason Asian cinema is really good at pulling off.

120 minutes.

1958 - THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, children's fantasy with some sick stuff thrown in for fun

An acknowledged classic from Ray Harryhausen, his first film in color which was not a film stock he was anxious to work in since he had perfected his technique of merging previously photographed live action with his stop motion animation monster in black and white.

Watching the film last week, a lot of the shots do look a little rough particularly during the famous skeleton fight sequence where Sindbad's action clearly looks like a rear projection screen fighting a more substantial monster. 

Still a good film overall, the monsters look pretty impressive and have lots of that famous personality in their animation that Ray Harryhausen was known for.  The acting is probably what it should be for a children's fantasy film.  Sinbad played by Kerwin Matthews is a classic true blue hero in the traditional sense, the evil magician played by Torin Thacher is just about perfect with just enough larger than life acting in his performance without going completely over the top.

The director was Nathan Juran, whose credits were pretty ordinary as he straddled between directing unimpressive films and TV shows throughout his career.  Somehow Juran always managed to crank it up a notch when he worked with Harryhausen, it was like he understood how to integrate the special effects in the Harryhausen films he worked on.

Ray Harryhausen and his producer Charles H. Schneer managed to get the composer Bernard Herrmann to score the film.  Apparently the always very crabby Herrmann watched a very beat up work print of the film on a movieola, not the best condition to see the film and signed on. The film's fantasy aspects must have appealed to him and gave him a chance to indulge himself with some of his unusual musical arrangements.

What jumped out at me on this viewing were the number of sick touches that Harryhausen stuck into the film.  The dance of the Cobra Woman ends up with her own snake tail trying to strangle her.  The Cyclops captures Sinbad's men and cooks them like they were on a rotisserie, a very funny joke since rotisserie grilling was all the rage in 50's suburban households. 

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is a very entertaining film in the fantasy genre even after 40 years.

88 minutes, written by Kenneth Kolb.

1960 - THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is really the pretty good seven or maybe OK seven

Not much to add here, everyone knows that this is a remake of the Kurosawa film transported to Mexico as a western.  The director is John Sturges and while Sturges is a good director, he's no Kurosawa. 

At  over two hours watching the film was kind of a long slog.  Sturges strong points as a director were always in staging action and working with composition in wide screen.  Unfortunately Sturges probably should have put a little more time into the screenplay.  The film mostly takes the Seven Samurai plot line and condenses a  lot of that film's story structure which makes some of the film look a little choppy in places.  Towards the end the bandit leader traps the "Seven" and then lets them go with their guns.   The reasons the Mexican bandit leader gives for not killing the "Seven" make absolutely no sense and the scene itself really has no reason to even be in the film.

The dialog also leaves a lot to be desired,  there are some pretty corny lines that come out of the mouths of these tough guys.  The gunfighters in this film are so nice they would fit right into a Mary Kate and Ashley Olson movie.  The Seven Samurai runs over three hours so it probably should be expected that The Magnificent Seven would lose a lot of the emotion and characterization that the Kurosawa film had. 

What the film does have going for it besides excellent action scenes, is the super cool cast, almost iconic roles for every actor playing the "Seven."

The German actor Horst Buchholz plays a Mexican named Chico in a very silly piece of casting.  Horst Buchholz got stuck playing the inexperienced and reckless kid and he's OK although it's a pretty impossible part for any actor much less a German pretending to be a Mexican to play.

In the end the film is probably to mired in it's early 1960's conventionality to be the classic that a lot of people think it is.  Everything is spelled out and every plot point is very obvious throughout the film in that 1960's kind of way.

Sergio Leone must have watched this film a few times before he made the first of his spaghetti westerns.  The Mexican bandit leader played by Eli Wallach is clearly a warm up for Wallach's Mexican outlaw "Tuco" character in The Good The Bad and The Ugly.

128 minutes, either overlong or not long enough. Written by William Roberts and uncredited writers, Walter Bernstein and Walter Newman.

1956 - RUN FOR THE SUN, remake of a story that has been remade about 30 times

The basic situation of the big game hunter tired with hunting animals and now trapping humans as game has been remade a lot starting with The Most Dangerous Game and currently the 2010 release of  Predators.  Even an episode of Gilligan's Island used this plot line. 

This version was shot on location in Mexico and features every one's favorite movie villains, the Nazis. 

This is a very good thoughtful remake.  The screenplay is by Dudley Nichols, who was an old Hollywood professional when it came to putting together something with entertainment and substance.

Richard Widmark was always Mr Intense in his films and he doesn't disappoint here basically playing Ernest Hemingway if Hemingway were to get stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of Nazis trying to kill him.  Jane Greer who played femme fatales when she was a teenager in the 1940's is the love interest.  Trevor Howard is cleverly cast as a traitorous Englishman hiding out in Mexico.  The film is directed by Roy Boulting who was usually known for directing comedies.  Everyone's on top of their game for this film. 

The film comes in at a tight 90 minutes with strong emphasis on characters and story situations along with the action scenes.

1956 - THE BURMESE HARP a good anti war film

Kon Ichikawa filmed this thoughtful film about the end of World War II and how death profoundly affects one of the soldiers who has surrendered to the Allies. 

After witnessing the deaths of a company of Japanese soldiers who refuse to surrender to the Allies after the war, the Japanese private Mizushima,  steals a Buddhist monk's robes. While wandering around the countryside he has a spiritual crisis which results in his decision to stay in Burma and bury the bodies of all the dead Japanese soldiers laying around there.

The film has beautiful black and white photography, particularly of the temples and the landscape of the country.  It's a very well made film.

The Burmese Harp is kind of a product of it's time. The antiwar theme is really hammered into the audience in that 1950's kind of way. and the film has a lot of sentimentality throughout. Still in spite or maybe because of this approach it's a very moving film. 

A quiet sense of resigned sadness about the aftermath of war and death  hangs over the film which probably could have only come out of a country that had payed a big  price in the loss of life during World War II.

1972 - THE STONE TAPE, Nigel Kneale rehashes Nigel Kneale

Pretty big letdown from Nigel Kneale.  This story is about a team of scientists trying to track down the nature of an occult phenomena occurring in a mysterious castle,  basically a reworking of Quartermass and the Pit. 

All of Kneale's favorite situations are here; the Quartermass like leader bullying everyone around as they try to get to the bottom of the mystery.  A female scientist who is psychically linked to the ghost and Kneale's usual theme of science vs the supernatural. 

This story was filmed by the BBC on videotape, which always tended to make their productions look kind of cheap.  For some reason videotape makes sets look very fake and even when scenes are filmed outside those scenes look like they belong in a home movie.

The chief problem with this film is Nigel Kneale.  His characters are pretty much stereotypes from earlier science fiction films.  His attempts at humor, in particular an ongoing joke about a completely automated washing machine are not funny.  Even the concept of the ghostly images isn't really that interesting.

A big disappointment.

1968 - THE ODD COUPLE, Matthau's great Lemmon's not great

Walter Matthau is funny as Oscar Madison, but Jack Lemmon is way off with his very mechanical performance as Felix Unger in the famous Neil Simon stage comedy.  This film adaptation is not much of a film adaptation, there are fade outs where the acts of the play clearly ended and the scenes in New York City are obviously padded to try to make this film actually seem like a film.

It's easy to dislike Neil Simon's tiresome gag loaded dialog, it all plays like an extended boring sitcom.  The situation is funny enough but Neil Simon who started in television writing sketch comedy writes all his dialog like it is sketch comedy.  Still he was a very popular playwright on Broadway for many years with his brand of humor.

The chief offender in The Odd Couple is Jack Lemmon.  He was once considered one of the best comedians in the entertainment business.  Lemmon  started in films in 1954 as a pretty funny guy but by 1964 the bloom was definitely off the rose.  Lemmon's performance is so poor that he makes it impossible to believe he would be in a weekly poker game with anyone, much less be friends with anyone.

This film is a good contrast to the TV series which ran a long time on ABC.  Tony Randall and Jack Klugman played the leads in the series,and they were skilled enough actors to make viewers believe that Felix and Oscar could be close friends if very different individuals.

For as bad as The Odd Couple is, and at times it is very bad.  This is an important film.  Neil Simon's success with this play and film was a direct inspiration for almost every mismatched roommate, buddy comedy, or buddy comedy cop film that has come out in the last forty years.

 106 so so comedy minutes.

1957, STOPOVER TOKYO, a Mr Moto adventure without Mr Moto

Probably one of the lamest spy thrillers ever filmed.  Stopover Tokyo has American intelligence agent Robert Wagner, showing up in Japan to keep the "vodka and caviar" crowd from killing the Japanese ambassador.  While in Japan he gets mixed up with travel agent Joan Collins and spends a lot of time with the cute little Japanese girl of a police officer who is killed by the commies.  He occasionally wanders around looking for communist spies, that's about it.

This film is about as dull as dishwater. If the Cold War was anything like this the Russians apparently planned to bore everyone to death to take over the world.  Robert Wagner is the American agent and he looks like he should really be selling used cars.  Joan Collins is the love interest and this is the period in her career when someone got the brilliant idea that she could play nice girls which contrasts with her later career as the witchy ex-wife on Dynasty.

What this film is really about is Cinemascope, 20th Century Fox's wide screen process.  Cinemascope was the answer to 1950's black and white TV  the lure to get people back into the theater.  The whole idea was to film a lot of scenic shots on location in some foreign country with the actors occasionally running around in front of the scenery.  Even in this area someone screwed up.  The audience gets stunning shots of a golf course and an airport.  Occasionally Mt Fuji shows up in the background, as if it accidentally got into the shot.

Incompetently directed and poorly acted, the almost nonexistent action scenes are so poorly staged it's as if these filmmakers had never actually seen a movie at all much less been trusted to photograph this film in Cinemascope.

The film was based on a Mr Moto story, by John Marquand who wrote mystery stories about a Japanese detective.  However Mr Moto has been removed from this film apparently someone must have thought be would be to dull and uninteresting.

This film is a total failure.

1961- ATLANTIS, THE LOST CONTINENT George Pal's entertaining fantasy for adolescent boys.

The legendary science fiction/fantasy producer George Pal occasionally tried directing films as well.  This has to be one of his goofiest efforts, even more ridiculous than his final film Doc Savage The Man of Bronze. 

The writer of this opus  Daniel Mainwaring, had actually written good films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Phenix City Story and Out of the Past.

Here we go.  A princess from the lost continent of Atlantis which is stuck in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean washes up in Greece where she is rescued by a handsome Greek fisherman.  She persuades him to take her back to Atlantis where he is forced to become a slave.  He witnesses the superior technology and strange scientific experiments turning men in to half man half pigs that go on in Atlantis.  He faces off in mortal combat with a really big bulky guy in the test of  "Fire and Water" which is some kind of glorified barbecue pit that turns into a swimming pool.

The head guy of Atlantis wants to take over the world with some wacky crystal ray gun, the bad guy is played by John Dall who was one of the homosexual killers in Hitchock's Rope.  Speaking for the voice of reason in Atlantis is Edward Platt as the high priest.  Platt was the chief of Control on Get Smart, which is hard to get past when you watch him in this film.

George Pal was known for his special effects and for an early 60's film which involves miniatures they aren't that bad.  Pal was criticized for sticking a lot of stock footage into Atlantis The Lost Continent, and the scenes from Quo Vadis are pretty noticeable.  But really, who was going to give Pal a lot of money for what is really a juvenile fantasy film which in 1961 had a limited fan base, today it would be a different story.
 

For all the silliness involved in this film and there is a lot of silliness.  Atlantis The Lost Continent,  does have an entertaining narrative drive to it.  There is not a dull moment in the entire 90 minutes of the film.  George Pal knows his audience and knows what they want, lots of cool action, a giant ray gun and stuff blowing up. 

I have to believe all of the scenes and situations were carefully worked out to achieve the effect Pal was looking for, an entertaining fantasy film.

90 entertaining minutes.

1962 - NIGHT OF THE EAGLE, women really are witches

A film version of Fritz Leiber's horror/science fiction classic novel called Conjure Wife, Night of the Eagle is an excellent film about witchcraft and the occult.

The film was written by Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, two very good writers who had worked with Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone.  The director was Sidney Hayers and the producer was Albert Fennell, these two men were associated with the original Avengers TV show in England. 

The beauty of this film is that for the most part the occult and witchcraft stuff is played very seriously but left open in such a way that you could make an argument that the witchcraft is basically a manifestation of the characters psychological state, the "it's all in their head thing."  The film gets away with this trick with clever writing and good acting.


I haven't really heard of any of these actors but that also works in favor of the film, no big name stars to muddy up the narrative of the story, their acting is also very good too.

The filmmakers add an action climax towards the end and kind of wrap up things a little to neatly, but this is a film after all and audiences like action in their films, otherwise this would be an occult chamber piece.  They do manage to retain the overall mood of creepiness throughout the story.

The director Sidney Hayers did a good job on this film but his career never really went anywhere.  He ended up in the United States directing lots of crappy TV shows like Lobo, Baywatch and Knight Rider.

90 minutes.

1960 - THE VIRGIN SPRING, Ingmar Bergman shows how to make a film

Ingmar Bergman's story of revenge shows a filmmaker completely on top of his game.  The Virgin Spring was Bergman's version of an old Swedish legend about a young girl raped and murdered and her father's subsequent act of vengeance against her killers.

Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nyquist didn't do anything wrong in this film.  Each image and edit were carefully chosen to tell the story and get the point of view across to the viewer.  Ingmar Bergman also was smart enough to use one of favorite actors Max Von Sydow.  Von Sydow brings his  brooding acting style to the part of the father.  It became fashionable to make fun of Von Sydow for a certain kind of acting in a Bergman film but very few actors could bring his kind of authority to a film role as intense as this. 

Bergman was always a filmmaker who thought big when it came to themes in his films.  The Virgin Spring has his usual interests in religion and his character's mixed response to it.  But Bergman was also a smart enough man not to let his interests overwhelm the film.  Even the final scene with the miracle of the actual spring flowing from the dead girl is carefully under played. 

A lot has been made about the father's vengeance on the three killers being more horrible than their actual rape and murder of his daughter, but Bergman kept the film very tough, the killers are not remotely sympathetic individuals.  It was hard not to see how Von Sydow would not want revenge. 

A lot of discussion has been wasted about how Last House On The Left is a remake of The Virgin Spring.  Last House On The Left is strictly a horror film. The Virgin Spring is a greater horror film since it deals with how justice, vengeance and violence get wrapped up in an uncomfortable mix of Christianity.
 
Another excellent film made by a person who knew what he was doing behind the camera.

89 minutes.

1980 - CRUSING, Al Pacino great performance but can't hold the film together

102Al Pacino an undercover cop looking for a serial killer in the gay S&M New York City scene of the late 1970's.  Pacino definitely goes for it and takes it out about as far as a big time Hollywood actor ever would in a role like this.

Cruising was directed by William Friedkin a notorious director.  Friedkin's films are pretty strong, he directed The French Connection and The Exorcist.  On the set he's tough on the actors and the crew.  For Cruising, Frieidkin also wrote the screenplay and that's where the film runs into big trouble.  The murder mystery becomes completely unfocused and the screenplay spins off in so many directions that it finally brings this interesting film down.

Friedkin has so many sub plots that he starts and drops, it finally harms the main focus of the film, the search for the serial killer.  It's almost like he couldn't stay focused on what he wanted his film to be. 

Pacino doesn't have any such problem, he builds his character of the sexually conflicted cop carefully from clueless undercover officer to a guy who starts to embrace the gay scene.

Friedkin and Pacino pushed the limits of this R rated film about as far as the general public could probably have actually handled it.  The film contains no real hard core stuff but also not a whole lot left to the imagination.  A sleazy film in many ways but there does seem to be an effort made to show the gay lifestyle in somewhat of a sympathetic light.

I have no idea if this is even a remotely realistic depiction of the gay bar scene in New York around the late 1970's,  but you have to give Al Pacino full credit for this great performance.  Pacino's acting in Cruising is a real contrast from his over top craziness as a cop in Heat.

102 minutes.

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1940 - SANTA FE TRAIL, very good action but a mess of a plot

Very large scale pre Civil War film that has one of the messiest points of view I have ever seen in a 40's Western.

Southerners and Yankees train together at West Point to become future military leaders, the problem of slavery becomes a hotbed issue among them.  Upon graduation two of the new officers, Jeb Stuart played by Errol Flynn and George Armstrong Custer played by Ronald Reagan, get assigned to the Kansas territories where they get involved with tea party leader abolitionist leader John Brown. As is typical for these kind of films, Flynn and Regan both have the hots for the very pretty Olivia De Havilland playing one of those girl roles she came to despise early in her career.  Reagan competing against Flynn for De Havilland never stood a chance as he was always a 2nd string actor in Hollywood.

Clearly the plan for the film was not to antagonize any Southern audiences, since about every half hour we  get a  speech from Errol Flynn as the southerner Jeb Stuart saying things like, "the south will eventually get rid of slavery in their own way" or "a soldier's job is to not get involved in politics."  Since the real Jeb Stuart ended up fighting for the confederate army and Flynn in real life was from Australia, the whole thing seems pretty suspect.

The bad guy John Brown is a more interesting character than the three leads.  Raymond Massey plays John Brown with a lot of force and compassion for the slave cause certainly more than anyone else in the cast can even pretend to muster up. 

What this film really has going for it is the outstanding direction by one of the greatest studio directors in Hollywood, Michael Curtiz.  Curtiz had a great visual sense and was a master at directing action scenes on an intimate or large scale setting. A fight in an army barracks or a large scale shoot out with the military and John Brown's abolitionists are so excitingly shot that they make up for a lot problems and shortcomings with the film.

The cast, the photography the large scale production values and especially the direction hold this film together.