1940 - THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES, the sequel to Jesse James

 The followup to Jesse James with Henry Fonda back as Jesse's brother Frank out to avenge the death of Jesse who died at the hands of Bob Ford.

 

The film starred Henry Fonda and in her first role Gene Tierney.  It was directed by Fritz Lang, and anyone looking for some touches of Lang's themes in this film will have to look very hard.  This in many ways a strictly by the numbers western with some beautiful technicolor photography.

Lang to put it mildly was not a director that Fonda liked working with, he was very much the European bully on the set.  

 

Still for what it is the film is fairly entertaining, it moves along and is only 90 minutes long.

The film was written by Sam Hellman.

1968 - KRAKATOA EAST OF JAVA, a special effects bonanza

 If you like old school special effects, this is the film for you.

 

131 minutes of things blowing up, particularly in the 2nd half of the film.

 

The film was shot in 70 mm which probably won't mean much for home viewing.

 

The chief fault of the film is the screenplay which is credited to Bernard Gordon and Clifford Newton Gould.  It is all over the place.  A search for a sunken treasure, a mother's search for her lost child, a musical number of all things and the usual ridiculous Cinerama type effects with the camera spinning around at inopportune minutes bring the action to a halt.

 

The film has a decent cast but they are at the mercy of a very bad story and indifferent direction.

 

The special effects sequences directed by Eugene Lourie provide the entertainment value for this film.

1961 - ONE EYED JACKS, Marlon Brando's only film as director

Marlon Brando was the driving force behind this revenge themed western.  His production company found the story and developed it.  Besides directing the film, Brando also starred in it and cast a lot of actors he had previously worked with.

The film has beautiful photography courtesy of Charles Lang a veteran Hollywood cinematographer and the decision to film on locations near the Pacific Ocean gave the film a very unusual setting for a western

 

Brando wasn't afraid to mix his cast with method and non method actors.  Karl Malden who had worked with Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire played Dad Longworth the man who betrays him during a bank robbery. Ben Johnson and Slim Pickens hardly ever though of as method actors much less actors at certain times, gave very impressive performances under Brando's direction.

For his leading lady as they like to say, Brando cast Pina Pellicer a Hispanic actor who was a rather troubled individual and committed suicide at age 30.

 

The original cut of the film was five hours, Paramount ended up reducing it to a running time of 141 minutes. The film had an extensive list of screenwriters including, Stanley Kubrick, Sam Peckinpah, Guy Walter Trosper,  Calder Baynard Willingham and Brando himself.

1960 - THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS, Le testament d'Orphée

 Jean Cocteau's final film is sort of a rehash or best hits of his past films. The film is loaded with his trick camera work, actors he has worked with from previous films and god only knows what obsessions he had been carrying around with him during his lifetime.

As always to look for any type of plot or meaning in a film like this is pretty worthless. It's best to sit back and absorb the film's visuals and Cocteau's musing on art and life.

In the cast I spotted Charles Aznavour, Yul Brynner,  Jean-Pierre Léaud, María Casares, Jean Marais and I think Francois Truffaut peeked his head around the corner of a building at one point.

 

The film was written by Cocteau and runs 80 minutes.

1944 - AN AMERICAN ROMANCE, a tribute to industrial America

This expensive MGM film was a labor of love for the director King Vidor who not only produced the film but also wrote the story.  The film was filmed in technicolor by Harold Rossen so it couldn't have been cheap to make.  MGM  professed to like the film but went ahead and cut 30 minutes out of Vidor's finished film.  Vidor was so angry that he ended his association with MGM a studio he had worked at since 1923.

The film is rather unsatisfactory cast with Brian Donlevy playing the lead, an immigrant who rises to the top of a company he has built.  Vidor shoots a lot of scenes of factories assembling cars and planes and it's all kind of interesting up to a point.  

 

It would have been interesting to see how the film would have played if it hadn't been hacked to pieces.  As it is it's kind of fascinating.

Written by  Herbert Dalmas and William Ludwig, running time 121 minutes.

1968 - 5 CARD STUD, an entertaining western

Here's something you don't see everyday, a mystery film set in the old west.  Dean Martin is the card shark who gets involved with a group that lynches a man they suspect of cheating at cards.  One by one the group starts dying off while Deano tries to figure out what's going on.

Robert Mitchum shows up as the Reverend Jonathan Rudd, essentially repeating his character from The Night Of The Hunter.  The producer Hal Wallis and the director  Henry Hathaway load the rest of the cast up with a familiar bunch of names. Inger Stevens, Roddy McDowell, Yaphet Kotto, Denver Pyle and everyone's favorite character actor Whit Bissell.

 

As with any Hal Wallis production the film looks good and Henry Hathaway does his usual excellent job staging the action scenes.

 

Written by Marguerite Roberts the film runs 103 minutes.

1951 - HALLS OF MONTEZUMA, a World War II film with a rather odd antiwar subtext

This film is supposed to be a tribute to the fighting spirit of the United States Marines during World War II. It has the usual rah rah action and flag waving stuff but there is a strange subtext to the film involving the lives of the marines in a platoon trying to take a Japanese controlled island.

For a film about the tough guy marines there certainly seem to be a lot of emotional problems among this group.  Richard Widmark is the squad leader who is taking pills because he is suffering from "psychological migraines."  The company corporal is a coward, one marine loses his eyesight, another is a gun nut who goes out of control and tries to murder some Japanese prisoners.  This bunch is hardly the pride of the marines.  One wonders in the Pentagon actually read this script before agreeing to provide technical support to the production.

 

The film was directed by Lewis Milestone who was probably past his prime as an important director but is still professionally assembled by him.  As I said an odd bird of a gung ho fighting movie.

Written by Michael  Blankfort, running time 113 minutes.

1953 - FAIR WIND TO JAVA, adventure on the high seas

Cheapskate Republic studios made this film which has an unusually large budget for them.  Shot in color and with at times lavish sets the film is almost a blueprint for the kind of escapist entertainment Hollywood could turn out in their prime.

The story involves heroic sea captain Fred MacMurry (!) in charge of a ship searching for the proverbial fortune in diamonds.  Along the way he picks up dancer named Kim Kim played by Vera Ralston.  Ralston was an actor who just happened to be married to the head or Republic studios Herbert Yates and was generally derided for her lack of talent. Also in the cast are Victor McLaglen, Paul Fix and Claude Jarman Jr amongst others.

The film has enough action for about 3 films.  Fred and his crew have to fight off pirates, deal with a mutiny and to wind it all up keep from getting blown up by the legendary volcano Krakatoa.  Definitely never a dull moment.

Probably the standout feature of this film is the special effects work by Howard and Theodore Lydecker, two brothers who pioneered the use of models and miniatures in Hollywood films.  In fact the Lydecker brother's techniques were still being used in Steven Spielberg's 1941.

The film is extremely entertaining and they certainly don't make them like this anymore.

Screenplay by Richard Tregaskis,  the running time is 92 minutes.

2005 - BUBBLE, a fascinating film on small time life amongst other things

 Steven Soderbergh who always walks a line between personal films and mainstream film making sets his sights on the story of three people who work in a doll factory in a small town in West Virginia. We observe the interaction between a woman who takes care of her aged father, a young man who clearly has a social anxiety disorder and a single mother who comes to work at the doll factor.  To give away anymore would be a crime.

 Soderbergh's production team literally found three people from the local area where the film was shot and had them improvise their dialog based on an outline prepared by the screenwriter Coleman Hough. None of the cast was a professional actor.  The result is a fascinating film experience.  This film is about audacious as a film can get to put it mildly

Running time,  73 minutes

1985 - THE EMERALD FOREST, an interesting blend of many genre films.

 I can't even begin to guess what the director John Boorman had to deal with filming in the Amazon Jungle.  The film is a mix of many different films, The Searchers, Deliverance, some sort of ecological statement and finally a family drama.  The film ends up leading to a scene cribbed from the ending of another film Rolling Thunder.

Could a talented filmmaker like John Boorman pull it off?  Many critics thought so although a few found it a ponderous mess.

 

I thought the film was very good.  Say what you want about John Boorman but the guy always strives to tell a story that certainly isn't in any sense conventional.  At times this got him in trouble, witness Zardoz and Exorcist II:  The Heretic.

 

 The film was written by Boorman's long time associate Rospo Pallenberg and runs 114 minutes.

2005 - SAHARA, an undemanding action film

 One of the biggest flops that Paramount Pictures was ever associated with.  The plan was to start up a new series with an action hero in the manner of James Bond or Indiana Jones.  What started out as a film with an 80 million dollar budget literally ended up costing $160 million dollars, not counting the $60 million dollars that was poured into marketing the film.

In addition, the author of the book the film was based on, Clive Cussler sued the production for failing to consult him on the script. As if his far fetched tale of a Civil War Confederate ship ending up in the middle of the Sahara desert was some type of documentary.

Apparently there were at some point 10 screenwriters who attempted to hammer the film's story into shape.  In the end 4 writers, Jame V Hart, Thomas Dean Donnelly, Joshua Oppenheimer and John C. Richards got screen credit.

 

How's the film?  Well for an over produced mess it's entertaining.  The leads Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz are a good looking couple.  The photography is nice and the action elements are fairly well done. There are some attempts at humor which is probably a good thing since the filmmakers are telling a very tall tale.

 

Really not a bad time killer, but the major flop status of the film insured there would be no more sequels.

 Running time 124 minutes.

1969 - BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID - a slick film

 20th Century Fox's big hit.  It was directed by George Roy Hill a fairly decent director.  William Goldman wrote the script which he sold for $400,000 dollars, one of the highest paid scripts at the time.

The film is supposed to be the story of two real life bank robbers and it sort of follows the facts of their lives. Goldman added a lot of humor to the story and at times the film has a real case of the cutes.

Paul Newman mugs shamelessly, Robert Redford finally becomes a leading man in Hollywood and Katherine Ross looks pretty but doesn't really make an impression as Etta Place, who is playing the Sundance Kid's girlfriend.

 

All and all this is a very slick film extremely well made and kind of heartless.  Everyone is having so much fun goofing on this story that maybe a little more substance would have been nice.  Still the film does have a lot of the entertainment qualities that made it an audience favorite back in the late 60's

Running time 110 minutes.