1978 - THE GREEN ROOM, a Truffaut misfire.

 I'm not sure what went wrong with this Truffaut film. Francois Truffaut was usually a reliable director/writer but his instincts really deserted him on this film.  The Green Room, is about a man's obsession with death.  He constantly dwells on death and finally creates a memorial to people he knows who have passed on.  This is not exactly going to be a fun film like Day For Night.

In  fairness, this was clearly a very personal film for Truffaut.  He plays the lead and unfortunately he does not do a very good job as an actor.  I can't help thinking a better actor would have helped this film's theme about the effect the dead have on the living.  Playing opposite Truffaut is the actor Natalie Baye who is sort of his partner who has an equal obsession with the deceased.

Frankly the whole film just didn't work for me.  Truffaut always seemed to have a light touch when it came to making films.  But that certainly abandoned or he chose to abandon it in this film.

 The running time is 94 minutes and probably nobody would want it to run a minute longer.  Truffaut wrote the screenplay.

1956 - AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, one of those 50's super spectaculars

 This was the big one for 1956,  It won many awards and was very popular with movie going audiences.  The producer was a man called Michael Todd who was apparently quite the showman.  He was also known for his chutzpah a man so brash he somehow got Elizabeth Taylor then in her mid twenties to marry him.  Todd was forty seven years old at the time.

Todd was one of the original founders of Cinerama, the wide screen movie process.  He split from that company and patented his own widescreen format called Todd-AO.  Looking for a suitable movie to showcase his widescreen miracle,  Todd decided to make a film out of Jules Verne's Around The World in 80 Days.  Basically pumping all of his money into the film Todd actually found himself with a substantial hit. 

 

The film today looks very much like a widescreen super spectacle.  Lots of photography of scenery, (the film was shot in a lot of different locations) at the expense of a well paced story.  The actors, particularly David Niven have to work hard to have some kind of a presence in the film.  The Mexican actor known as Cantinflas, was hired to play Niven's faithful servant. Cantinflas carries much of the load in the film with lots of unfunny physical comedy.  Cantinflas is unsual casting in that he was primarily known as a verbal comedian in Mexico.

The film is entertaining when the viewer isn't being bombarded with lots of scenic vistas.  The last hour of the film is entertaining. This film is so over the top that the ending credits by Saul Bass run six minutes. 

 

To ensure box office success, Todd loaded the film up with lots of Hollywood actors in parts he called cameos.  The film is almost a record over 1950's actors.

The running time is a whopping 182 minutes.  The screenwriters were James Poe,  John Farrow and S.J. Perelman.

1997 - MR NICE GUY, non stop action from Jackie Chan

Lots of action and beautiful women with a silly plot to sort of tie it together.  This is Jackie Chan and director Sammo Hung at their peak.

Jackie is a television chef who used to be a cop,  He gets involved with a reporter who has a video tape which incriminates some drug dealers.  Start the action which doesn't let up for 101 minutes.

As usual Jackie does a lot of his own stunts.  The humor is kind of silly also as usual but the action is extremely impressive.

 

Written by Edward Tang and Ma Fibe, but don't go looking for any deep characterization or plotting. The running time is 101 minutes.

1998 - RONIN, good action thriller

Probably a return to the glory days for director John Frankenheimer.  This is essentially an action thriller with decent dialog from uncredited writer David Mamet and lots of double and triple crosses that would make Alistair MacLean proud.

The film was well cast with Robert DeNIro and Jean Reno leading a team of for hire mercenaries who are after a mysterious suitcase which the IRA wants to get their hands on.  Frankenheimer had filmed Grand Prix the very long auto racing saga with a lot of skill during the racing scenes.  Ronin contains two very good car chases which Frankenheimer staged, he clearly knew a thing or two about filming speeding cars crashing into each other.

 

John Frankenheimer was one of the 1960's top directors but personal problems had derailed his career.  Ronin was a film that saw him more engaged than usual towards the end of his career after a string of fairly bad to mediocre films.

 The film was written by J.D. Zeik and David Mamet writing under the pseudo name of Richard Weisz.  Ronin runs 121 minutes.

2003 - HOLLYWOOD HOMICIDE, can't miss cop buddy movie really misses.

Hard to know what happened with this one.  The writer director/writer Ron Shelton was an old pro.  Harrison Ford was a top star.  The cop buddy movie was usually a money in the bank genre for the movie studios.  But this one did miss.

Apparently Ford and his costar Josh Hartnett didn't get along and it shows.   They have absolutely no chemistry together. The film is redeemed by a decent action climax but it's probably a little late by then.  The film does have Lena Olin in it for the love interest which is sort of a compensation.

 

The film runs 116 minutes.  Shelton and his police advisor Robert Souza wrote it.

1981 - RACE FOR THE YANKEE ZEPHYR, passable action flick time killer.

There's a missing World War II plane.  It was full of gold.  It landed somewhere in the wilderness of New Zealand. Goofy drunk Donald Pleasence and his buddy Ken Wahl have found it.  Along with Pleasence's daughter played by Lesley Ann Warren the chase is on as they try to avoid a gang of evil guys lead by George Peppard. And so it goes.

This a seen it all before film. Pleasence plays another one of his oddball characters, Ken Wahl was a TV actor whose career never really took off on the big screen as they say and Lesley Ann Warren who was primarily a singer and a dancer is improbably cast as Pleasence's daughter. George Pepppard is also in this film for some reason camping it up as the head bad guy.

 

I guess if you are trapped in your house on a Saturday night and can't find anything to watch this will probably get you by.  The action is OK and there is a lot of it. The film's chief selling point is the on location filming in the wilds of New Zealand.

The film runs 91 minutes and was written by Everett De Roche. 

1960 - SINK THE BISMARK! - the stiff upper lip of the British Navy film

This is one of those films where navy officers, in this case the British, push little models around a table top map while the audience tries to figure out what is going on and who is doing what to whom.  Sink The Bismark is in the tradition of the British stiff upper lip school, where nobody is allowed to show any emotions and everything is very proper and dignified.

 

Kenneth More is the lead stiff upper lipper, he doesn't dare show any emotion because he thinks it's a sign of weakness.  Of course by the end of the film he is a sobbing crybaby. Dana Wynter is his hot British assistant.  The rest of the case is the usual bunch of British actors found in these types of movies. Laurence Naismith, Michael Horden, Esmond Knight etc.  

 

The film stays fairly close to the facts as the British Navy hunts down the pride of the Nazi navy,  battleship Bismark. The model and miniature work is at a very high caliber.  The director Lewis Gilbert does a good job of moving the story along.  Overall, a fairly decent war film.

 

Written by Edmund H. North, the running time is 97 minutes.

1943 - THE GANG'S ALL HERE - Busby Berkley in color

Busby Berkley the great surrealist when it came to the film musical got a shot at directing this film which had a silly mistaken identity love story for a plot that probably no  one ever cared about.  This film is really all about Berkley and his visual imagination.  Berkley's type of musical staging was becoming outdated by the 1940's but The Gang's All Here allowed Berkley to film the musical numbers with his usual crazy ideas this time with the added bonus of color.

 

Some of the results were truly amazing.  The Carmen Miranda number "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat" were loaded with  sexual innuendo and the final number "The Polka Dot Ballet" in technicolor reached a new level in film surrealism.

 

One must mention the contribution of the lead, Alice Faye.  She was one of 20th Century Fox's biggest stars and had a very pleasing singing voice.  Faye kind of walks through the film frequently with a look of amusement.  She's probably wondering what kind of crazy Berkley stuff she was mixed up in.

The film is a high point in the Hollywood musical and certainly is more than just some "camp classic."

The so called screenplay was by Walter Bullock, Harry Warren and Leo Robin a couple of pros wrote the music and lyrics.  The film runs 103 minutes.

1938 - HOLIDAY - very good 30's comedy

 Cary Grant is the "free spirit" who falls in love with rich Manhattan socialite Julia Seton.  While being introduced to her family he meets her unconventional sister Linda and finds that she is actually more simpatico to his beliefs and lifestyle.

 Holiday was directed by George Cukor and in addition to Cary Grant, the film stars Katharine Hepburn as Linda Seton.  The film also has a very good supporting cast, Edward Everett Horton, Jean Dixon and Lew Ayers.  Cukor had previously directed Grant and Hepburn in a film called Sylvia Scarlett which was about cross dressing of all things and not a success unsurprisingly.  However Cukor was one of Hollywood's finest directors when it came to working with actors and he had a very successful collaboration with Hepburn on nine films during their careers.

Holiday was written by Philip Barry who wasn't above skewering the upper class.  The play was adapted by a couple of good screenwriters, Sidney Buchman and Donald Ogden Stewart.  The film has some witty dialog and makes it's points about the "idle rich" in an entertaining fashion.

 

Katharine Hepburn is definitely a unique personality and performer but I've always found her to be a little over the top.  Grant is excellent and was always a very good comedian.  He started his career in vaudeville and was something of an acrobat.  In this film he does some amazing back flips, lets see some leading men try that today.

The film runs 95 minutes. 

1968 -HAWAII FIVE-O - Original series, season one

 Of all the TV cop shows from the 1960's this is one of the few that stands out as being rather good.

Created by Leonard Freeman and starring Jack Lord.  The show had the advantage of being filmed entirely in the state of Hawaii.  This was no small accomplishment as the entertainment industry in Hawaii at the time was rather lacking for production facilities. In addition, virtually no one in the film crew had production experience, it was a build from the ground up television production.

In a way this worked to the advantage of the series.  Most of the episodes were shot on locations throughout Hawaii which gave the show the dual advantages of realism and a location that had not been really exploited to death by Hollywood. A lot of the actors in supporting and featured roles were actually natives.  

 

The show starred Jack Lord played the head of the elite police unit, Steve McGarrett.  This was an actor who was completely immersed in his part and dominated every scene that he was in.  James MacArthur a Disney film alumni took the part of Danny Williams, who was essentially Steve McGarrett's sidekick.  MacArthur was smart enough to know who was in charge and lasted 11 seasons.  After the producer Leonard Freeman died during season five, Lord essentially took over running the show.  Apparently he was a pretty demanding guy but he kept the series production standards  high for the entire 12 season run.

 

Story episode wise the demands of shooting 24 episodes resulted in the usual mix of good, indifferent and bad episodes.  Still many of the show's episodes hold up pretty well and as I stated before the Hawaiian locations are still a major asset for this series.