1986 - PIRATES, Roman Polanski's idea of a fun pirate movie

 After a well regarded literary adaption called Tess.  Roman Polanski wanted his next film to be a fun pirate romp for younger audiences.  Taking inspiration from his favorite Disneyland ride, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Polanski decided on making a swashbuckler.

But Polanski being Polanski this fun film is very strange.  It has scenes of attempted cannibalism, people vomiting, stepping on dog poop and a very odd rat eating scene.  Just the kind of stuff to induce an audience to see it.

The film also has a beautiful damsel in distress who at the end of the film doesn't get rescued and looks to end up marrying the chief villain of the film.

Walter Matthau is the lead playing a character called Captain Red and in spite of the strange casting he's actually pretty good as a pirate.  Polanski had intended to play Captain Red's sidekick a Frenchman called "The Frog,"  but instead the part actually went to a French actor.  

The film has lots of action and it's an impressive production, the film does have some weird funny stuff in it and if you are a fan of this director's sense of humor,  you might laugh out loud at some of the scenes Polanski has staged.

The film was unsurprisingly a big flop.  Roman Polanski and his frequent collaborators Gerard Bach and John Brownjohn wrote the screenplay.  The running time is 112 very weird minutes.

1047 - CROSSFIRE, interesting social conscience film noir

Expecting the worse, a 1940's film noir with a lot of touchy feely stuff about antisemitism, Crossfire as it turns out is a pretty good film. The death of a man who is Jewish starts an investigation of some demobilized army soldiers who had some interaction with the man.  The film features a rather preachy detective played by Robert Young who is there as the conscience of the audience.  Surprisingly this actually kind of works as part of the film's plot line.

Robert Mitchum is one of the soldiers helping the police to understand how the murder happened, Robert Ryan in another of his bad guy roles is the bigot who the police focus on.

 

Crossfire is considered a film noir, lots of shadows and expressive lighting. The studio was RKO who was quite good at putting together these types of films.  This time the subject of antisemitism was an interesting approach to what could have been yet another standard film noir. 

 

John Paxton wrote the screenplay from Richard Brook's novel, the running time is an efficient 86 minutes.

1965 - MASQUERADE - entertaining comedy thriller

Entertaining comedy thriller from Basil Dearden.  Cliff Robertson and Jack Hawkins are pressed into service by the British Government to save a young Arab prince from being assassinated.  It seems the British need the oil rights in the prince's country to keep their own economy running.  

Lots of crosses and double crosses, some decent action, location filming in Spain.  This is an entertaining film that knows not to take itself very seriously.  The film also features the one of the stars of Danger: Diabolik,  Marisia Mell who is very easy on the eyes.

Since Cliff Robertson was hired on as one of the leads, writer William Goldman was called in to rework his dialog.  Probably Goldman had a lot to do with the comedic bits in the film.

Written by William Goldman and producer Michael Relph, the running time is 102 minutes

1956 - THE BATTLE OF THE RIVER PLATE aka The Pursuit of the Graf Spee.

Powell and Pressburger towards the end of their run as a production team known as, The Archers.  The Battle of the River Plate may not be as good as their 1940's masterpieces but it is still a very good war film

During the beginning of World War II the German battle ship, "Admiral Graf Spee" is sinking British merchant ships in the southern hemisphere.  The British Navy sends out a task force to stop the Graf Spee and the film consists of a large scale battle followed by some clever intelligence tricks on the part of the British that eventually stops the run of Graf Spee.

The film as always has a strong focus on characterization particularly adding some depth and complexity to the German captain of the Graf Spee,  Captain Hans Langsdorff a rather sympathetic character.

Powell and Pressburger had real battleships to play with while filming.  Obviously models were used in the actual battles but the battle scenes are exciting.

The film is in many ways in the great tradition of "stiff upper lip" British War films.  But Powell and Pressburger are smart enough to tweak the troupes.

As with every film by The Archers, Powell and Pressburger share screenplay and directing credits.  The film runs 119 minutes.

1944 - MURDER MY SWEET, first shot at a Chandler mystery

The first shot at translating a Raymond Chandler mystery, in this case the film based on Chandler's  Farewell My Lovely came off fairly well.  The screen writer John Paxton used a framing device of Chandler's private detective Philip Marlow being interrogated by the police.  This allowed the Marlow character to narrate the story in a flashback using a lot of Raymond Chandler's hard boiled dialog.  Probably the only misstep was having to work a last minute love story into the film at the end.

The big news with this film was the transformation of singer Dick Powell from one of Busby Berkley's performing pawns in his extravagant Warner Brother's musicals.  Powell does a very good job playing Marlowe.  He gets able assistance from a decent supporting cast, Mike Mazurki as the dumb brute of a gangster, Moose Malone.  Claire Trevor as Helen Grayle the "femme fatal" and Otto Kruger as some sort of phony psychic healer Jules Amthor.  The actor Anne Shirley, real name Dawn Evelyn Paris is Marlowe's love interest Ann Grayle a rather weak role in the film.

 

Considering how confusing these Raymond Chandler stories can be the director Edward Dmytryk does a pretty good job of keeping the plot straight.  The film has lots of noir touches which actually became murder mystery cliches  copied by other detective films.  However Murder My Sweet used them first.

 

The film runs an entertaining 95 minutes, screenplay by John Paxton.

1966 - A MAN AND A WOMAN, Claude Lelouch's big hit.

Claude Lelouch had a lot riding on this film, his company was near bankruptcy and he had yet to establish himself as a filmmaker.  Working fast, he shot the film in three weeks and allowed only three weeks for editing.  The film switches between black and white and color stock, the budget was that tight.  The end result, a big hit film.

A Man and a Woman is in many ways the ultimate romantic swoon.  The characters are very attractive, Anouk Aimee has a job working on film crews sitting next to the camera doing who knows what, but it looks cool.  Jean-Louis Trintignant is the handsome race car driver so we get a lot of scenes of him zipping around roads and racetracks.  The memorable soundtrack is by Francis Lai and was a big hit.

There's no mistaking this film for The Rules of the Game but the film does seem to be the last word in overblown love stories.  A very entertaining film.

The film was written by Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven the running time is 102 minutes.

1994 - THE LEGEND OF THE DRUNKEN MASTER aka DRUNKEN MASTER II

 Jackie Chan's sequel to Drunken Master was a mixed bag.  It has two splendid fight sequences, some cheap sentimentality and a lot of the silly slapstick humor he seems so fond of.  Yet the film is Jackie Chan in his prime as an athlete.

The story is loosely based on the legend of Wong Fei-hung a famous martial arts expert and physician.  However Jackie Chan has chosen to play him as a guy who can't fight unless he gets really drunk. It's all kind of stupid after a while.  Chan has loaded the film up with his usual stock company.  Chief among them is Anita Mui a legendary cantonese singer who Chan has cast as his stepmother of all people. 

The film was directed by Lau Kar-leung who was a martial arts choreographer and director.  Apparently he and Jackie Chan had a lot of disagreements during the making of the film but it's clear from the final form of the film Jackie Chan was calling most of the shots behind the camera.

 

A key film in the Jackie Chan filmography, the film does have some amazing martial arts scenes. 

The film was written by Edward Tang, Tong Man-ming and Yuen Chieh-chi it runs 102 minutes.

1984 - DUNE, alternate edition redux

This is a fascinating film floating around the internet.  Someone took the deleted scenes from David Lynch's failed science fiction epic, reedited them and supposedly following Lynch's original script put them in the proper context.  The end result is a much more coherent and frankly more interesting and entertaining adaptation of the Frank Herbert book than the recently released 2021 version.

Lynch's film version of Dune was considered a critical and commercial disaster.  Lynch had to deal with studio interference and a lot of pressure to make a Christmas release.  Clearly Universal Studios was looking for a Star Wars type of film but by hiring the idiosyncratic Lynch instead of a more conventional filmmaker they really should have known better.

 

This film has impressive set design and probably one of the most incredible casts ever assembled for a science fiction film.  Herbert's book was a long slog but in reality the story is actually rather simple to follow.  In this version some of the characters are really something to see.  Kenneth McMillian is Baron  Vladimir Harkonnen the chief bad guy who floats around in some sort of flying suit and has disgusting puss pouring out of his face.  The singer Sting shows up as one of Harkonnen's family who is presented  almost as a psychotic running around in what looks like a futuristic diaper.  Sian Phillips, Francesca Annis and Silvana Mangano are members of some mysterious group called the Bene Gesserit a group of mysterious psychic women dressed in black with bald heads.  And so it goes, after all this is a David Lynch film.

 

I doubt that we will ever have a definitive David Lynch version of Dune, but this film reedit is very good.  Lynch wrote the screenplay.  The released version of the original studio cut was 139 minutes.  This alternate version runs close to three hours.

1964 - THE TRAIN, excellent action film from Burt Lancaster and John Frankenheimer

Usually considered one of the last black and white photographed action films, The Train is an exciting story with all of the action sequences staged with real trains and hardware. Amazingly, Burt Lancaster at 51 years old is still doing his own stunts.

Frankenheimer took over the direction of the film from Arthur Penn who Lancaster always something of a "director killer" had fired.  Frankenheimer and Lancaster had worked together before, so Frankenheimer knew what he was getting into.  Apparently the film was made with a lot of input from Lancaster who didn't have a problem throwing his power around on this production.

 

The Train was originally going to be a story about uneducated Frenchmen attempting to stop the Nazis from stealing the national art treasures of France.  Why would men who probably had never stepped in a museum even care about art?   Well we will never see that version of this film.  Frankenheimer and Lancaster reconfigured the script and turned it into an action epic and the action is pretty amazing.  Real trains crash into each other, a train yard is bombed, just incredible stuff.

 

 Lancaster and Frankenheimer put together an amazing cast of French actors, people who had been associated with filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean Renoir, Michel Simon, Suzanne Flon Albert Rémy and Jeanne Moreau.  This is an impressive action film.

The credited screenplay is by Franklin Coen, Frank Davis and Walter Bernstein.  The runs 133 minutes.

2017 - VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS, a large scale science fiction film

A very expensive science fiction film from the writer/director Luc Besson.  The film did not really find favor with the critcs and audiences stayed away basically bankrupting Besson's production company.

I don't really understand why the film flopped.  It seems better to me that the recent Star Wars films and the action scenes and special effects are very good.  I think the problem may have been in the casting with the two leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne who don't seem to have any type of chemistry between them, their love scenes are very stilted.

 

The film certainly has an eccentric cast, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, the voice of John Goodman and Herbie Hancock.  

 

I enjoyed the film, I liked the world building, enjoyed the story line and was impressed with the visuals.

Running time, 137 minutes.

1992 - THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS - 11th remake of this story

Michael Mann known for his crime thrillers dusts off James Fenimore Cooper's story for another shot.  This time with more "open minded" attitudes about Native Americans the film seems to have a little more depth to it.  Anyway we meet Daniel Day Lewis who is constantly on the run thoroughout the film.  For a while this got to be a big joke with stand-up comedians.  Lewis is Cooper's famous character Natty Bumpo a man with a lot of alias's (Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and the Deerslayer).  The setting is the French/Indian war in American which ran about eight years I believe.  Bumpo is off to save the lives of two daughters of a British Colonel, of course he falls in love with one of them.

Daniel Day Lewis is the epitome of the movie star with his handsome looks and his clearly pumped up body.  His love interest is Madeline Stowe playing Cora Munro and their love scenes are bathed in either amber light of soft misty water from a waterfall. No question they are a very good looking couple.  There is also a sort of secondary love story between Natty Bumpo's adopted Native American brother Uncas who clearly is attracted to Cora Munro's sister Alice.  But nobody paid their money to watch a couple of supporting players fall in love, so their scenes are given pretty short shrift.

 

The battle scenes are quite exciting as is to be expected from Michael Mann.  The film was shot in North Carolina on some spectacular forest locations.  The soundtrack is epic and the photography from Dante Spinotti is excellent.

 

The film is very entertaining if a little to violent at times.  Christopher Crowe and Michael Mann wrote the screenplay the film runs either 112 minutes or 117 minutes or 114 minutes due to Michael Mann's tendency to constantly reedit his films after they are finished.

1970 - WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, the 2nd film in Hammer's prehistoric trilogy.

 A followup to the Raquel Welch/Ray Harryhausen film One Million Years B.C..

The film has excellent stop motion dinosaur special effects from Jim Danforth who also did the matte paintings and for want of a better phrase "eye popping" views of model Victoria Verdi.  

The director and screenwriter Val Guest who also seemed game for trying out something different has cooked up a story from J. G. Ballard and he has crammed so much action into it that the fact that the cast can only speak in monosyllabic words doesn't distract from the happenings one single bit.

 

I doubt that Victoria Verdi was ever much of an actress since I see a credit for her in that classic film Invasion of the Bee Girls. But nobody at Hammer hired her because they saw her on the stage performing Hedda Gabler.

 

The film was shot on location in the Canary Islands which from the looks of it probably isn't much of a vacation spot.  

 

The film made money for Hammer studios and was followed by Creatures the World Forgot, which was a real step down from the two previous films.

The running time is 100 minutes.  96 minutes in the U.S. because the frontal nudity was cut out.

2013 - THE LONE RANGER, another revisionist western

 Somewhere in this mess of a movie is a decent film trying to get out.   White guy Johnny Depp, apparently wanting to add another off beat character to his resume is Tonto.  Disgraced actor Armie  Hammer is The Lone Ranger.  The white horse Silver does make an appearance and there are silver bullets involved.  That's about it for the legend of The Lone Ranger.

The film has so many subplots and for want of a better word, stuff going on that after a while it is almost impossible to track what is going on and who is doing what to whom.

The film wants to be a comedy, then takes a turn as a violent western almost like Peckinpah.  At some point the film is about the plight of the Native Americans and how they are victimized by the United States Army.  Then the film decides it wants to go down some sort of supernatural story line with The Lone Ranger and Tonto having visions about their futures. Moving along we have a plot involving the building of the transcontinental railroad and finally there is a love story between The Lone Ranger and his late brother's wife.

 

Obviously the screenplay is really the chief problem here.  There are at least three writers (Jusine Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio), that I know about involved in this mess and I would suspect probably more that I don't know about.  

I'm a little surprised this film is so messed up.  The producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the director Gore Verbinski are experienced commercial filmmakers.  It 's hard to believe they didn't see the problems with this film.

 

Anything to recommend it?  Well the action scenes are generally well done.  The film has some nice scenery of the Southwestern United States and it's fun to hear the William Tell Overture played over the action climax.

Running time an incredible 149 minutes.  I guarantee there will be no sequels to this film.

1989 - THE BURBS, an underated Joe Dante film.

Dante's funny black comedy about life in the suburbs has seen it's reputation grow since it was originally released.  Tom Hanks is the everyman character Ray Peterson who along with his neighbors Art Weingartner and Lt. Mark Rumsfield are spying on their very creepy new neighbors, the Klopeks.

Dante put together a great cast staring with Tom Hanks who has never been a slouch in the comedy department.  Bruce Dern is his right wing nut neighbor and Richard Ducommun is his just plain nuts neighbor.  Throw in Dante's usual stock company which consists of Corey Feldman, Dick Miller and Robert Picardo.  I also have to mention Gale Gordon, Henry Gibson, Wendy Schaal, Rance Howard and Carrie Fischer.  It's just a fun cast.

 

This film is one of Dante's most underrated films.  For once he isn't dealing with Gremlins or Warner Brother's cartoon characters. Dante allows his sense of humor to shine through dealing with real people for a change.  It's still somewhat of a cartoon like atmosphere but at least it's a little more real world identifiable before the craziness sets in.

 

The film was written by Dana Olson and runs 101 minutes.

1977 - SINBAD AND THE EYE OF THE TIGER, the weakest of the Harryhausen Sinbad films.

Probably the most disappointing of the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad films.  This time Sinbad is in search of a cure for a Baghdad prince who has been turned into a baboon by an evil sorceress.  This film is strictly a rehash of earlier and better Harryhausen films. Even the encounters with the monsters are "seen it all before" situations

The cast is generally a disappointment, Patrick Wayne and Taryn Power respectively the childern of John Wayne and Tyrone Power can't seem to generate much chemistry.  Jane Seymour playing Princess Farah somehow ended up in a supporting role but she certainly would have been a more interesting leading lady for Wayne. Also in the film is one time "Dr. Who," Patrick Troughton who at least livens the plot up.  Margaret Whiting as the evil Sorceress Zenobia is to put it kindly larger than life in her performance.

 

Ray Harryhausen's special effects don't seem all that special in this film.  The minotaur is a mixture of a guy in a gold suit and Harryhausen's animated figure but it's easy to tell where the live action actor and the animated figure switch between scenes.  The three ghouls that Sinbad battles are entirely to reminiscent of the skeltons from Jason and the Argonauts, and the fur on the tiger is all over the place a common challenge when animating creatures with hair.

 

The usually reliable screenwriter Beverly Cross put together a by the numbers story.  The running time is 113 minutes.

1981 - AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, a horror/comedy film

The big deal on this film was the actual physical transformation of a man into a werewolf courtesy of special effects artist Rick Baker and his team.  The Howling had apparently beat An American Werewolf In London with the same type of physical effects earlier in the year.  Still this was a milestone in film effects which were eventually superseded by computer generated imaging.

The writer/director John Landis had a fondness for this genre and since it was the 1980's he updated it with a lot more violence, blood and of course sex.  Landis cast a couple of unknowns in the main roles and the rest of the cast was made of up British actors.

The film is effective in parts but I think a big issue with this film was the story.  Landis was good at writing the set pieces but he really didn't have much of a plot to tie them all together. Even the character development is on the weak side.  Exactly what does Jenny Agutter see in David Naughton anyway? When you got down to it, even at 97 minutes the story kind of dragged.  If you saw one werewolf killing with someone getting their throat ripped out, you kind of saw them all.

 

In the end the film comes down to watching Rick Baker's monster makeup.

Running time,  97 minutes.

1954 - VERA CRUZ, cynical western from director Robert Aldrich

Burt Lancaster is grinning away in Robert Aldrich's Vera Cruz.  Along with Gary Cooper, Lancaster is mixed up in the Mexican Revolution as a soldier of fortune.

The movie was noted for a new level of cynicism that hadn't been seen in westerns before.  Gary Cooper is I guess the nominal hero of the film but even he is a lot more interested in his own situation than helping out the Mexican revolutionaries

 

Robert Aldrich directed the film on location in Mexico but couldn't seem to rein Lancaster in with all of his goofy grinning.  After all, Lancaster was one of the producers.

 

The film runs 94 minutes and has some decent action.  Lancaster as usual does all of his own stunts.  Vera Cruz was written by Roland Kibbee and James Webb