1945 - DILLINGER a film starring a real life bad guy

B studio, Monogram pictures put together this mostly fictional account of the life of John Dillinger the notorious 1930's gangster.  They hired an actor who was practically a gangster himself, Lawrence Tierney.

Lawrence Tierney was a real piece of work.  Arrested many times for assault and being drunk and disorderly,  he was a handful for most directors to work with.  Towards the end of his career he worked with Quentin Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs who didn't have a lot of good things to say about him. Watching this film is like watching a real train wreck of an actor in action.

 The film has a dream cast of bad guys, Edmund Lowe, Marc Lawrence, and Elisha Cook Jr.

 The film was written early in his career by Philip Yordan and the music score was by Dimitri Tiomkin also at the beginning of his career. It runs 70 minutes.

2005 - THE PROTECTOR aka TOM-YUM-GOONG

The bone crunching followup  to Ong-Bak, with the star of that film Tony Jaa.  The story is about Jaa's love for an elephant (?) which takes him to Sydney, Australia after the elephant is stolen. 

Well, what can you say.  A lot of people get beaten up.  If you are a martial arts action fan I guess this film is for you.  I just found the whole thing to be rather silly.  Full credit should be given to Jaa and the stuntmen for the very violent action scenes.

 

Unbelievably it took four writers to put this screenplay together Napalee, Piyaros Thongdee, Joe Wannapin and  Kongdej Jaturanrasamee. the running time is 110 minutes.

1993 - THE LAST ACTION HERO, Arnold spoofs his films and himself.

 Columbia pictures lured Arnold Schwarzenegger with a big salary to star in a summer movie.  The choice interestingly enough was to make a film poking fun at Arnold's action star image and in a very strange way a tribute to Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr.  

In this film a young boy who is an avid fan of Arnold's screen hero Detective Jack Slater is magically transported into the current Jack Slater sequel he is watching.  Here he is confronted with being a character witnessing every action movie cliche in the book. As the boy tries to persuade Slater that he is really only a character in a movie the audience is treated to a list of cameos and tributes to movies like Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal of all things.

This movie was a big critical and commercial failure.  Critics felt the film never found the right tone for the story and all the bad publicity regarding the difficulties in making the film probably kept the audience away.

The director John McTiernan worked under intense pressure to meet the studio's release date which probably affected the final form of the film.

 

Seen today the film is actually very funny, Arnold was game to make fun of himself and in a way it was almost the pinacle of Arnold's career as his projects got less and less interesting after this film.

The film's listed writers were Shane Black and David Arnott but a number of uncredited writers worked on this film including William Goldman, the running time was 131 minutes.

1992 - SUPERCOP aka POLICE STORY 3: SUPERCOP

 Jackie Chan finds his perfect action partner in Michelle Yeoh in the third installment of the Police Story series.  Along for the ride are Chan actors Bill Tung  and in her final appearance in the Police Story series Maggie Cheung as Chan's very stupid girlfriend May.

The plot has something to do with stopping a drug cartel in China and Hong Kong.  But the picture is really about Jackie Chan and his amazing stunt team taking on crazier and crazier stunts as the picture goes along.

The film's climax has Chan dangling from a helicopter and Yeoh on a motorcycle jumping onto the top of a train.  

 

A great action film from Jackie Chan at his peak

Written by Edward Tang, Ma Fibe and Yee Lee Wai.  The running time is 95 minutes.

1968 - SUBMARINE X-1, very lame war movie

 James Caan is the American star in this very British and corny war movie.  He's leading a team of elite volunteers in mini subs off to blow up Nazi ships in Norway or someplace. All the usual cliches are here, the training sequences, the commander who has to prove himself to the men, the sailors that sacrifice themselves for their comrades etc.

In the old days Caan's American accent would have been explained away as having growing up in Canada or something like that but this film doesn't even bother with that level of characterization.  Given that I would have to say that Caan was a true star even in 1968.  He's about the only one who holds the screen in the midst of a bunch of boring British actors.

 

Still, the film is pretty much a waste of time.

Written by Donald S. Sanford and Guy Elmes, the running time is 90 minutes.

1949 - I SHOT JESSE JAMES, Sam Fuller's first film.

The beginning of Sam Fuller's directing career.  With the exception of a few scenes this film really isn't that interesting.  Fuller wrote the screenplay about Bob Ford, the man who shot Jesse James in the back and interested the producer  Robert Lippert in it.  He basically gave the screenplay to Lippert for free providing he be allowed to direct it.

The film is actually a conventional love triangle story made on a small budget.  The film lacks Fuller's flamboyant camera style and kind of plods along to its inevitable conclusion.

 

The running time is 81 minutes.

1972 - THE HEARTBREAK KID, is a comedy of supreme discomfort.

Charles Grodin plays a man who decides it's time to get married.  He hooks up with a woman and after the marriage ceremony heads down to Florida for their honeymoon.  On the drive down he decides that the woman he married is really annoying the crap out of him. He runs into a beautiful blonde played by Cybill Shepherd probably at the peak of her beauty.  He begins to formulate a plan to dump his new wife and hook up with the Cybill Shepherd character instead.

 

This film has some big time comedy talent behind the camera.  Elaine May is the director and Neil Simon wrote the screenplay.  Simon gets sole screenplay credit, but I find it had to believe that May didn't have considerable input into the story.

 

The film is a real showcase for Charles Grodin's talent as an actor.

Running time, 106 minutes.

1987 - JAWS THE REVENGE aka Jaws 4

Jaws The Revenge is what happens when a good director, in the case Joseph Sargent goes horribly wrong.

Clearly made at the insistence of the studio in order to squeeze every last dollar out of the giant man eating shark franchise.  The film is enjoyable in a stupid sort of way.  The whole premise that the giant shark is on a mission of revenge against the Brody Family from the first film is to ridiculous to be believed.  

As one critic put it, if a giant shark is trying to eat all the members of your family, maybe you should move to North Dakota.

 

The film runs 90 minutes.  Michael de Guzman wrote this film but he should probably leave it off his resume.  The damn thing did make money apparently.

1963 - THE GREAT ESCAPE, entertaining semi fictional account of a real event

 Probably the high point in director John Sturges's career.  The Great Escape was a passion project for him for many years.

Sturges probably assembled one of the best casts ever.  Steve McQueen, James Garner, Richard Attenborough, Donald Pleasence, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, James Donald and David McCallum to name a few.

The film does take liberties with the actual events. But overall it is surprisingly faithful to the true story.

The credited writers were James Clavell and W. R. Burnett but the film apparently had a lot of uncredited writers.  In any case, this is an excellent war film.  Running time 172 minutes.

1941 - A YANK IN THE R.A.F., a well made studio WWII propaganda film.

20th Century Fox and all the other Hollywood studios for that matter released lots of World War 2 propaganda films to rally the American public in the fight against fascism and what the heck make a few dollars as well.

A Yank In The R.A.F. is a pretty good example of this type of film.  Fox had two of their biggest stars Tyrone Power and Betty Grable as the romantic leads and Henry King one of their best studio directors sheparding this stuff.

The film is basically a romantic triangle with Betty torn between the upstanding British Officer in love with her and the bad boy American flyer played by Power,  who she is obviously attracted to. Throw in a little shoot em up airplane action and lots of romantic fluff with two attractive stars and how could you miss with this film.

 

Tyrone Power to his credit does try to make his character interesting.  Betty Grable is Betty Grable.  In a film with Betty Grable it's all about her famous legs, so the audience is treated to several musical numbers where she performs in a nightclub while volunteering in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force by day.

 

Anyway, the film is entertaining and runs 98 minutes.  It was written by Karl Tunberg and Darryl Ware, but it has all the imprints of the producer Daryl F. Zanuck all over it. 

2008 - ME AND ORSON WELLES, a tribute to the theater

 To bad this very good film about a young man's first experience in the theater didn't find an audience.  The director Richard Linklater and his team did an excellent job recreating the New York theater scene of the late 1930's. This is a considerable achievement considering a lot of the film was shot at Pinewood studios in England.

The cast is very good particularly Christian McKay as the brilliant and flamboyant Orson Welles, trying to pull off a modern interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar while juggling a wife, lovers,  jittery actors and a career in radio.  McKay also plays Welles as a man not lacking in an ego to put it mildly.

 

I suppose the subject matter was just a little to inside for the general movie going public.  Still, a very good film from a director who usually takes on interesting projects.

 The screenplay was by Holly Gent and Vincent Palmo, Jr., the running time is 113 minutes.

1958 - THE H MAN or Bijo to Ekitai-ningen, 'Beauty and the Liquid People'

 It's almost strange to see Ishiro Honda direct a film where he actually directs actors instead of people dressed up in Godzilla suits stomping on models of Japanese cities.  But here it is, The H Man.

The film is a rather strange mixture of science fiction and gangster epic.  It seems the H men were created from hydrogen bomb testing and swim around in the water in the form of a bunch of green goo.  While this stuff is going on, the Tokyo police are in pursuit of a gang of thieves who make their headquarters at a nightclub.  The nightclub setting allows Honda to actually stage a couple of musical numbers.  So what we have here is a science fiction / gangster / musical film all rolled into one.

 

As usual with Toho productions the color is lush and the special effects while now seeming rather primitive, are very entertaining courtesy of frequent Honda collaborator  Eiji Tsuburaya a master of building intricate models and miniatures.

 The film is an entertaining and quick 87 minutes.  Takeo Murata and Ishirō Honda wrote the screenplay.

1936 - THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND, the story of Dr. Samuel Mudd

John Ford brings his sophisticated visual skills to the true story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, the man who treated John Wilkes Booth after his assassination of  President Abraham Lincoln.  The film presents Mudd as a man caught up in circumstances beyond his control a victim of a vengeful United States Government.  Mudd was sentenced to Shark Island a penitentiary in Florida where he ended up having to deal with a yellow fever epidemic in the prison. 

The real life story of Dr. Mudd is considerably more complicated.  He apparently did have some contact with three of the conspirators of the Lincoln assassination and didn't report John Wilkes Booth's visit for at least a day.  Never let the truth get in the way of a movie I guess.

In any case, Ford used all of his visual composition skills and along with the skill of his cinematographer Bert Glennon, the film is very impressive to look at.  Ford also got some good performances out of Warner Baxter as Dr. Mudd and in his first appearance in a John Ford film, John Carradine as a sadistic prison guard.   The film is an excellent civil war drama directed by a master director at the peak of his abilities.

 

 

The film was written by Nunnally Johnson one of Hollywood's top screenwriters who had a lot to do with the high quality of the film.  It runs 96 minutes.