1986 - MEETIN' WA Jean-Luc Godard sort of interviews Woody Allen

Jean-Luc Godard sits down with Woody Allen in Allen's New York townhouse (which has a very nice view of Central Park),  for an interview.

Godard  and Allen talk a little about film and the effects of television on the viewer.  Allen seems very nervous and tends to repeat a lot of the same answers he has given in previous interviews.  He talks about how dissatisfied he is with his films after he completes them, he reminisces about the good old days attending films in a theater before the advent of VHS tapes.  He really doesn't say anything interesting.

What's interesting about the film is what Godard does with it.  He plays around with it inserting titles throughout, slows it up, fades it to black and in one odd scene, films himself stacking boxes of what I presume are Woody Allen films.  Godard also puffs on a cigar throughout the film, for a non smoker like Allen that must have been a little annoying.  Godard looks like a scruffy bum.

This short film is actually kind of funny and was fun to watch, clearly Godard was having a good time making it.  Woody has a "deer in the headlights" look throughout it.  He's probably wondering how in the hell he got mixed up in all of this.

26 minutes.

1969 - FIVE MAN ARMY, is an entertaining spaghetti western.

Fun spaghetti western with kind of a bizarro cast to put it mildly.  Peter Graves star of Mission Impossible is the Dutchman who has a plan to steal $500,000 in gold from a moving train full of soldiers during the Mexican revolution.

The Dutchman recruits a team much like Graves always did for the IMF force missions.  There's Bud Spenser as the tough guy, James Daly who was Chad Everett's boss on Medical Center, Tetsuro Tanba who was Tanaka in You Only Live Twice and some Italian guy.

Lots of action, a pretty good robbery sequence, Bud Spenser busting heads as usual.

What more could you ask for in an action film.  Dario Argento wrote the story and Ennio Morricone has one of his typically weird themes.

105 minutes.

1968 - I AM CURIOUS BLUE, more from the comedy film team of Sjoman and Nyman

A companion piece/follow up/sequel, you name it to I Am Curious Yellow.

I Am Curious Blue is the further adventures of Lena Nyman on her personal self discovery of sex and  the evils of Swedish society.

Pretty much more of the same, Lena rides around on her bicycle, she has sex with some guys, she interviews people about what is wrong with Swedish society.  The director Vilgot Sjoman also appears in the film with his camera crew.  They talk or sing directly to the audience in that breaking the fourth wall thing.

This is just more quasi liberal garbage dressed up with a lot of titillation.

107 minutes, written by Vilgot Sjoman.

1980 - WHEN TIME RAN OUT extended edition, yikes

When Time Ran Out, is not a good film, but is it any worse than the 2011 summer releases, The Green Lantern, Cowboys and Aliens,  Zookeeper,  Transformers 3 Dark Side of the Moon,  Cars 2 and The Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides?

Well the answer is yes, it appears to be worse then those films.  This Irwin Allen production just looks plain cheap and terrible considering the 20 million dollars spent on it.  Allen was always a producer that would start strong with a concept for a TV show then invariably use the same stock shots over and over to save money after the series was picked up.  As a producer Allen was a real cheapskate.

In the case of When Time Ran Out everything is of a low or poor quality, the volcano model, the optical work in the disaster scenes and in particular the climactic escape across the collapsing bridge over the river of molten lava scene that looks laughably phoney.

I'm guessing the three big name stars Paul Newman, Jacqueline Bisset and William Holden made very sure they were well paid for this film particularly after reading the script.  The extensive on location filming in Hawaii probably didn't hurt.  Nobody ever turned their nose up at a free trip to Hawaii.

When Time Ran Out marks the end of Irwin Allen's run as a producer of mainstream Hollywood films it was back to schloky made for TV disaster films for rest of his career.

This film isn't even worth a laugh as a "so bad it's good" film.  

144 minutes

1988 - FRANTIC, and yet another would be Hitchcock thriller

A San Francisco doctor and his wife on vacation in Paris find themselves caught up in international intrigue after the wife is captured by spies for some unknown reason, etc etc.  This is a remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much for the most part.

Yet another Hitchcock wanna be. Frantic is directed  and co written by Roman Polanski in what is a pretty obvious attempt to make a more "normal" film for a more mainstream audience.  It's hard to know what is worse to watch this craven shot at mediocre mainstream film making from this director or the ultra weirdo Polanski who makes nutty and almost unwatchable films like Cul-Du-Sac and What? .

In spite of the film making skill and the presence of Polanski's wife in very short mini's you have to sit and watch the film's very obvious plot unfold as Harrison Ford goes through the motions of finding his wife.  There are a couple of attempts at some mild criticism about the bureaucracies of the government's of France and the United States being unable to help Ford but this subplot is half baked at best.

Frankly the film doesn't hold up plot wise,  when Ford begins to figure out what happened to his wife and why, he doesn't go back to the police even as the situation gets increasingly dangerous. If he did that, the film would be over in about 45 minutes, so the contrived situations continue to pile up.

Another underdeveloped film from a good filmmaker.

120 minutes

1965 - CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, is one or Orson Welles finest films.

Welles mixes pieces of 5 different plays by Shakespeare to achieve this one of a kind film.  The end result is one of his finest films and one of the best Shakespearean films ever made. 

Chimes at Midnight was a film made for under 1 million dollars, this is Orson Welles as the one man band, acting, directing, and financing the film himself.  Welles ran out of money and pieced the film together, dubbing a lot of the actors himself.  The stunning Battle of Shrewsbury scene was filmed with only 100 extras. 

How's the film?  Well pretty brilliant,  Welles is very good as Sir John Falstaff but equally impressive are John Gielgud as the king, Keith Baxter as his son Prince Hal, and just about everyone else which includes Jeannie Moreau and Margaret Rutherford of all people.  For a film with no budget Welles gets some visually impressive effects filming on location in a Spanish castle.  Editing was always a very important part of an Orson Welles film and Chimes at Midnight is a very well edited film.

This is actually a film based on Shakespeare where you aren't either trying to decode the bard's language or just sitting in front of the screen bored out of your mind waiting for it to come to an end.

Orson Welles directs Chimes at Midnight

An amazing achievement.

117 minutes.

1966 - GRAND PRIX, has extremely impressive racing sequences and not much else.

The lives and loves of Formula 1 race car drivers and their girlfriends/wives as they compete for the title of champion Grand Prix racer or something.

Grand Prix was directed by John Frankenheimer who filmed in 70mm.  Frankenheimer's team developed special camera mounts to attach to the Formula 1 cars with the actors actually in the cars zipping around the race tracks. When Grand Prix was released film critics were extremely impressed with the racing sequences.  However the soap opera plot that went on in between these sequences left these same critics extremely unimpressed. 

Watching this film 40 years later, it appears that the film critics at the time were pretty spot on about this film.  James Garner is the American driver trying to claw his way back to the top after losing a series of races.  Brian Bedford is a British driver who is recovering from an accident and has to use pain killers to get back in to the racing circuit.  Bedford's wife is played by Jessica Walter who doesn't want him to race any more, she demonstrates this by sleeping around with other drivers.  Some no name Italian actor Antonio Sabato is the cocky kid just asking for it  Finally there is French actor Yves Montand who played the old veteran who is starting to tire of the racing game.

Yves Montand is the conscious of the film as he blathers on about what it means to race and what racing means to the crowd.  In other words, Montand gets the absolute worst dialog in the film which makes him look like a shallow fool.  Montand has an affair with Eva Marie Saint who is a reporter for an an American magazine. Her role is to be the stand in for the audience as Montand explains the ins and outs of formula 1 racing which is essentially you get in a car and drive around the track really fast.

These personal stories are so bad and the dialog is so awful that it's very clear that Frankenheimer poured all of his energy into staging the racing sequences. 

Grand Prix is a film that wants to make auto racing into some kind of a grand statement about the need for men to test themselves under extreme conditions.  Frankenheimer never really pulls this theme off. 

The personal lives of the racers are just to stupid to care about. However the racing sequences which he filmed with his cinematographer Lionel Linden and visual consultant Saul Bass are spectacular to see especially on a widescreen TV since this film will never be shown in it's original 70 mm format.

179 minutes. Written by Robert Alan Arthur

1975 - THE KILLER ELITE, semi incoherent spy thriller from Sam Peckinpah

Spy vs spy double cross junk with James Caan and Robert Duvall as secret agent buddies who are now on opposite sides in the world of cut throat espionage. 

The Killer Elite was directed by Sam Peckinpah who doesn't appear to have had much interest in telling a coherent story.  The performances are very lazy, in fact the whole film seems pretty lazy.  By this time in the 1970's this "dirty side of the spy business" had run it's course as a plot line, the lack of originally about The Killer Elite is it's most notable feature.

The film has some of  Sam Peckinpah's flourish with an action scene and as usual nobody has ever really figured out how to film and edit fight scenes in slow motion the way he can.  In The Killer Elite, Peckinpah adapts his action technique to the martial arts genre, the results are interesting but not as outstanding as they are in some of his other films.

The Killer Elite is probably more notable for the beginning of Peckinpah's decline as a film maker which ended with his final film The Osterman Weekend.

122 minutes, written by Stirling Silliphant.

1955 - TO CATCH A THIEF, Hitchcock's light comedy thriller with the accent on light.

If you take away the on location filming on the French Riviera, the excellent cast and cinematography of Robert Burks you have a very lame Hitchcock comedy suspense thriller.  What To Catch A Thief has going for it is Cary Grant who has to carry the entire film. When film buffs talk about the effortless charm of Cary Grant, this is a good film to point to.

The screenplay by John Michael Hayes, is pretty weak and seems to mostly be an excuse to film some Hitchcock, set pieces like the scenic car chases in Vista Vision, the fireworks sex scene and the stunning costume ball sequence towards the end of the film.  All this is tied together with a weak story about Grant being an ex thief trying to stop a cat burglar stealing jewels from the wealthy.  Even Hayes who was a pro at writing good spicy dialog doesn't seem to be on his game.

To Catch A Thief also stars Grace Kelly who was Hitchcock's ultimate blond fantasy fetish.  Throughout the film Kelly is presented as a smoldering ice princess ready to pop, look but don't touch.  In real life Grace Kelly was known to have had affairs with just about every leading man she worked with,  a far cry from Hitchcock's creepy fantasies about her.

Hitchcock apparently had a lot of trouble filming To Catch A Thief.  Cary Grant's movie star ego was running amok during the shooting, the French actors struggled with the English dialog, the color photography in Vista Vision was difficult to work with and Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes fought over the screenplay.

Overall it's kind of amazing he was able to pull the whole thing together.  To Catch A Thief is a moderately entertaining but not great Hitchcock film.

Grace Kelly does look pretty good.

106 minutes.

1942 - ACROSS THE PACIFIC, the cast of The Maltese Falcon is reunited.

Humphrey Bogart is an undercover army officer on a slow boat to China Japan.  Also on board are Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet.  John Huston is the director and Arthur Edeson is the cinematographer which makes Across the Pacific a reunion of some of the major principals of The Maltese Falcon but this film is far below the class and quality of that one.

This is just another cookie cutter World War II film classed up with a good cast and director.  The first part of the film isn't that bad, with Bogart basically playing Sam Spade as he attempts to figure out what the  crew and passengers of a Japanese freighter are up to.  The last part of the film involves a plot to blow up the Panama Canal by some sneaky Japanese that is about as ridiculous as can be possible.

The film is full of racial stereotypes with buck toothed Japanese and Panamanian banana planters.  Greenstreet is the usual cultured slime ball working for the Japanese government and the whole thing was clearly filmed on fake jungle sets on the Warner Brother's lot. 

The film's high points are the romance between Astor and Bogart who are very good together, the photography of Arthur Edeson and some cool montage pieces from future director Don Siegel.  Other than that, Across the Pacific is really not deserving of much respect. 

97 minutes, screenplay by Richard Macaulay.

1957 - BOY ON A DOLPHIN, is yet another CinemaScope feature

Italian actor Sophia Loren in her American debut plays a Greek sponge diver named Phaedra.  She  discovers a golden statue of a boy on a dolphin while swimming around bra less in the Aegean Sea.

Loren is in full diva mode with lots of volatile yelling and shouting at just about everyone in the cast which includes Alan Ladd and Clifton Webb.  Ladd and Webb want the golden statue and Loren as well.  Clifton Webb was a closed actor who started his career pretending to lust after Gene Tierney in Laura and towards the end of it he pretended to lust after Loren in this film.

Boy on a Dolphin was directed by Jean Negulesco in 20th Century Fox's film process CinemaScope.  Negulesco was the first director who had to do battle with CinemaScope in How to Marry a Millionaire so he was somewhat of an expert with the process by the time he filmed Boy on a Dolphin.  Negulesco photographs lots of Greek scenery to fill up the scope frame and this film does look pretty spectacular.

Loren may be good to look at in this film but her constant over the top performance gets to be very grating after about 30 minutes.  Loren needed directors like Vittorio De Sica or George Cukor to keep her under control.

111 minutes.

1975 - RACE WITH THE DEVIL, entertaining B movie with Satanists and Warren Oates

Finally the truth that good liberals have known all along, southwest Texas is crawling with devil worshiping satanists who aren't above sacrificing a virgin now and then.

Into this mix comes two couples on their vacation in their very cool  new Winnebago which has all the modern conveniences among them a color TV and a microwave.  The film also has a couple of seriously iconic actors, Peter Fonda and Warren Oates.

The director is B movie pro Jack Starrett who makes sure there is lots of action and that at some point in the film, the female leads will show up in tiny swimsuits.

This film is essentially a car chase movie with the red neck devil worshippers in pursuit of the Winnebago after Oates and Fonda accidentally witness one of their satanical rituals.  The stunt work with the cars and Winnebago is very impressive and this is a car chase using a Winnebago of all things.

But really this film is about watching a couple of cool guy actors like Oates and Fonda deliver the goods in an entertaining B movie.

88 minutes

1963 - THE PRIZE, the term Hitchcock like thriller comes to mind.

An American writer accepting his Nobel prize in Sweden gets mixed up in cold war espionage in this very blatant borrowing (ripoff?) from some of Alfred Hitchcock's films.

Method actor Paul Newman tries for the light comedic touch of Cary Grant but seems to be smirking a lot.  Old school actor Edward G. Robinson and German model Elke Sommer are actually more credible then Newman and seem less affected in their performances.

The writer of The Prize is Ernest Lehman who had written Hitchcock's North By Northwest and he probably had a lot of explaining to do because in this case imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery it's more like stealing.  The director is Mark Robson a Hollywood veteran who made some good films and some mediocre ones in his career.  Their approach is to use the Hitchcock formula of suspense and comedy and if they "borrow" a scene or two so be it.

The Prize is a decent time killer of a film, it has nice glossy photography and a couple of actors who are easy on the eyes, it wasn't the first film to steal from Alfred Hitchock and it certainly wasn't the last.

134 minutes.

1927 - BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY, an attempt to capture the feeling of a large metroplitan city.

A silent film that wants to show life in Berlin from sunrise to sunset.

Clearly the film was filmed to give an impressionistic view of Berlin as a city constantly in motion.  Trains, cars, airplanes and people are seen always on the go.  The editing is also fairly frantic at times which adds to the theme of a city in constant activity.

This film is not character driven, the only character is the city itself. 

Berlin Symphony of a Great City is an interesting companion piece to People On Sunday.

65 minutes.

1942 - WENT THE DAY WELL? extremely fascinating British war propgranda film

British paratroopers arrive in a small English town during World War II, they are actually German saboteurs who are a vanguard for the Nazi invasion of Britain.

What we have here in Went The Day Well?  is nothing less than the plot to Die Hard which came out  46 years later.   This film sets up a nightmarish situation for ordinary small town British citizens and spins it into a very effective thriller. 

The film was produced by Ealing Studios who built their reputation on gentle comedies about English life like, The Lavender Hill Mob or The Man in the White Suit.  This film is extremely well directed by Alberto Cavalcanti and has some very clever Hitchcock like suspense situations as the British hostages try to escape from the Nazi saboteurs.

The film takes the traditional British stereotype of the lovable eccentric small town population and proceeds to really twist it around. An impressive film in the war propaganda genre.

92 minutes.

1961 - THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, big budget, big stars, Alister Maclean story.

This film was another in a series of big budget all star cast films from the late 50's and early 1960's.  These types of films were usually war films with basically "everything but the kitchen sink." thrown into them. Lots of action and other stuff going on to keep the audience engaged.

Carl Foreman was the producer and writer.  Foreman was a blacklisted screenwriter, a quasi liberal hack at best.  Probably his most notable writing credits were for High Noon and Bridge on the River Kwai.  Kwai's director David Lean always felt that Foreman contributed next to nothing to that film.  For The Guns of Navarone, Foreman put together a screenplay that kept the basic plot of the Maclean novel with the usual additions of a completely unnecessary love story and some hokey dialog about "the futility of war" right before everyone starts getting shot or blown up.  Foreman also switched directors during the production firing Alexander Mackendrick and replacing him with a competent studio man,  J. Lee Thompson. 

For a big budget production The Guns of Navarone is kind of a shoddy looking film.  The model and miniature work can be pretty poor at times and the climbing scenes up the face of the cliff look extremely phony. But overall the action scenes are fairly well done and the score by Dimitri Tiomkin adds a lot to the film.

Probably the best thing in the film is the cast.  Gregory Peck is the fearless leader of the saboteurs and if Peck was always kind of a stiff he at least had some screen presence.  David Niven pretty much steals the film with his sly performance.  Anthony Quinn was always a larger than life presence in movies and he is relatively restrained for him.  The singer James Darrin shows up as a sop to the teenage crowd and the rest of the cast is made of up the usual bunch of British actors that were frequently trotted out to appear in war movies, Stanley Baker, James Robinson Justice, Anthony Quayle and Richard Harris.

Rather oddly,  Greek actress Irene Papas who usually showed up in films like Electra, The Trojan Women and Antigone is one of the resistance fighters I suppose actors specializing in Greek tragedies have to eat as well.

158 minutes.