2000 - SMALL TIME CROOKS, minor but enjoyable Woody Allen film

Apparently taking his inspiration from the Italian caper film Big Deal On Madonna Street, Woody Allen wrote and directed this amusing crime comedy about a group of rather minor crooks who plan to rob a bank by tunneling into it from a shop than makes cookies. Naturally things don't go exactly to plan.

 

Allen put together his usual fine cast for this film.  Tracey Ullman plays his wife an ex stripper who finds out she has a real knack for baking gourmet cookies. Elaine May is her rather clueless cookie baking associate.  Hugh Grant is an art dealer who Ullman uses to gain access to the socially elite of New York City.

 

Woody Allen brings his usual film making skills to tell this story.  The film isn't laugh out loud funny but it does have it's moments and Ullman and Allen play off of each other very well.

 

This is the type of material Allen did early in his career before he moved onto what I guess would be  films with more substance.  In some ways it's almost a relief to see Allen do some that is not so pretentious and not shot in black and white.

The running time is 95 minutes. 

1960 - HOLIDAY IN SPAIN, Cinerama film without the "Smell -O-Vision."

 Holiday In Spain a film produced by Mike Todd Jr. and presented by Cinerama is partially a travelogue and partially a chase/thriller film.  The legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff signed on as the director of the film and considering all the challenges of filming in the widescreen format the film looks very good. Filmed in 70 mm instead of the three camera Cinerama system you can't even tell the difference in widescreen formats.

 The story is essentially a chase film with Denholm Elliott playing a British mystery writer attempting to protect an American heiress from being killed by a gang led by Paul Lucas as the heiress races around the Spanish countryside.  Assisting Elliott is the very welcome presence of Peter Lorre as a taxi driver.  A decent cast for the most part.  Holiday In Spain was filmed entirely on location and the film does make Spain look like a great place to take a vacation.

 

It's difficult to review a film like this, it's not really a conventional entertainment in the standard sense.  The film was originally released in a process called "Smell-O-Vision" which was essentially a process where odors were pumped into the theater during the film to enhance the viewing experience for some reason as if a gigantic widescreen film photographing British blonde bombshell Diana Dors wasn't enough of an experience.

 

The film is entertaining in an odd sort of way. It's certainly a great looking film probably due to Cardiff. The running time is 102 minutes.  The film was written by Gerald Kersh.

1984 - INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, viewed at a revival theater

 I saw this film when it was first released in 1984, nearly 40 years later I attended a revival showing of this film and I can say, I still don't like it. Everything about the film with the exception of the photography and John Williams score just does not work.  Spielberg was always the master at where to put the camera and when to edit a scene for maximum impact and that really didn't fail him here, but the story and screenplay are just terrible.

 Producer George Lucas along with his longtime collaborators Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz apparently had no idea how to construct a decent story with entertaining thrills and some interesting characters.  The film was apparently strung together from a bunch of leftover action scenes that didn't make it into Raiders Of The Lost Ark.  After the fun and lighthearted approach to the first film in the Indiana Jones series Lucas decided he wanted to go darker.  The result were a lot of scenes which were extremely violent and gross more so than the first film.  And this was supposedly a family film.

The characters were nothing to write home about as well.  Harrison Ford does what he can to prop the film up but Kate Capshaw who is the female lead in this film is pretty terrible, no fault of the actor. The script really let her down.  The film also has a cute little oriental kid nick named "Short Round" a character who originally showed up in Sam Fuller's The Steel Helmet.  The film spends a lot of time on his foolishness as Indiana Jone's sidekick.

 

If anyone comes out on top it's the veteran British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe.  Slocombe was one of Spielberg's most important collaborators for a while and in fact he is next to Spielberg in about every shot in the making of feature found on YouTube. This is a good looking film

The film was commercially successful but as a piece of commercial entertainment, a complete failure.

 The running time is 118 minutes.

1975 - DOC SAVAGE: THE MAN OF BRONZE, Producer George Pal's final film

Sadly the final feature film from George Pal is not one of his best.  Pal along with the director Michael Anderson decided to make a rather campy film of a 1930's pulp fiction hero.  Doc Savage was a character who went around righting wrongs with his team he called "The Fabulous Five."

Pal who was apparently hunting around for another film project settled on an original Doc Savage story instead of adopting one of the 67 stories that were already in paperback.  Producer Pal hired Michael Anderson a British director who had a rather proficient career directing such films as Around The World In 80 Days, Logan's Run and The Dam Busters.  Towards the end of his career Anderson ended up working in television.

 Supposedly a management change at the studio doomed the film and it languished at Warner Brothers, nobody knew how to market it.  A box office failure.  The bigger problem with the film was the campy tone that was just completely out of touch with the 1970's film audience.  The film was probably about 20 years to early.  Eventually films like Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark were able to mix camp with thrills

 

Doc Savage isn't the total disaster I've been led to believe it was.  The film does have a kind of cheap studio look to it, but the actor Ron Ely does make a fairly impressive Doc Savage. The film is entertaining in it's own modest way and as I have said before, "I've seen a lot worse."

 

The running time is 112 minutes, George Pal and Joe Morhaim wrote the screenplay.

1952 - THIS IS CINERAMA , first film in the Cinerama process

This film that introduced the widescreen Cinerama process to the public complete with an enhanced soundtrack.  John Ford's producer Meriam C. Cooper was involved in the process along with journalist Lowell Thomas who provided the introduction and was the narrator throughout the film.

Obviously no home screen television set up can compete with the Cinerama film going experience so the viewer has to somewhat imagine what it must have been like to see the film in the theater thanks to a formatting process called "smilevision"  essentially a curved picture.

The film itself gets off to a slow start after a point of view roller coaster ride.  The viewer has to sit through scenes of a boys choir singing Ave Marie and an excerpt from the opera Aida.  All very dull stuff

Finally after the intermission things kick up a considerable notch.  A water skiing show at Cypress Gardens and some impressive shots of the canals of Venice and a bullfight in Spain.  The film finishes up with a dramatic fly over of the American West.

This Is Cinerama is probably of interest as a period piece then and actual film.  As the filmmakers got used to working with the widescreen process  and the Cinerama films got better.

Running time 115 minutes.

1957 - I'LL MET BY MOONLIGHT, Powell and Pressburger towards the end of their run.

 Michael Powell has gone on record as expressing his dissatisfaction with this film. He was unhappy with his partner Emeric Pressburger's screenplay, dissatisfied with the lead actor Dirk Bogarde and forced to film in black and white Vista Vision in the Alpes-Maritimes region of France which was a location stand in for the island of Crete where this war story was set.

The film is based on the true story of Patrick Michael  Fermor a British commando who captured a German general on Crete and then smuggled him out to Cairo.  Quite the daring raid during the war.

 

I'll Met by Moonlight is certainly not Powell and Pressburger at their peak but it is still a very well made and entertining film. The mountains of the Alpes-Maritimes make for a spectacular backdrop and Dirk Bogarde does supply the light touch that Powell appears to have had in mind  telling this story.

 

The British have always had a thing about treating some of their war movies as some kind of boy scout romp and this film is no exception.  The film does have that strange Powell and Pressburger touch of making the German general a somewhat sympathetic villian, a character that shows up in many of their films.

The film runs 104 minutes and is certainly not a failure.

1987 - WALKER, strange doesn't begin to describe this film

It's hard to know where to begin with a film like this.  Walker is apparently a combination spaghetti western, comedy, and criticism of the United States foreign policy in Latin American during the Reagan Administration.

Ed Harris in what can only be described as a crazed performance is William Walker a "soldier of fortune" bent on taking over the country of Nicaragua.  William Walker was a real life individual who actually did overthrow the government of Nicaragua with the purpose of establishing slavery. Marlon Brando played the same character in Gilberto Pontecorvo's Burn.  That is about where the two films have any kind of commonality.

In Alex Cox's version of the William Walker story anything goes.  The film is so full of  anachronisms that it completely perplexed the critics at the time of it's release.  Cox's purpose was to point a finger at what the United States was doing to delegitimize the government of Nicaragua which Ronald Reagan saw as being a communist front. 

 

Well regardless, the film is quite the wild ride with it's shootouts and scenes of 1850's William Walker reading about himself in People magazine and being picked as Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."

 

Unsurprisingly the film was a commercial disaster.  Looking at the film today the surreal touches in the film are fascinating and the film maintains interest.

Written by Rudy Wurlitzer.  The film runs 95 minutes.