1974 - 11 HARROWHOUSE, a decent to good crime caper film

 This is the followup film for Charles Grodin after his success in The Heartbreak Kid.  11 Harrowhouse is the kind of lightweight comedy thriller that can be difficult to pull off and in this case that seems to be the problem at times.  Grodin plays a low level merchant who develops a plan to pull off a major diamond heist from a company called 11 Harrowhouse.  We are in Rififi territory here with an elaborate heist, split second timing and all the usual tropes of this genre.

Grodin is assisted by his spectacularly gorgeous girlfriend Candice Bergen.  James Mason in an excellent  performance is the low level employee who is the inside man helping Grodin with the heist.  John Gielgud is the the hiss-able bad guy running 11 Harrowhouse, and Trevor Howard in a rather flamboyant performance is the rich man financing Grodin's big caper.  This is a pretty good cast.

This should have been Grodin's big break as an actor, no one knew how to deliverer one liners like him.  However the film apparently tested badly with audiences. Grodin or someone got the inspired idea to add a narration which runs throughout the film.  This device works for about half the film but then becomes kind of tiresome.

 

Overall the film is entertaining with this cast and some of the action elements this is a very good  crime caper.

The film was written by Jeffrey Bloom with Charles Grodin taking an adaptation credit, (probably the narration).  The running time is 95 minutes.

1951 - THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE - interesting Civil War film

 This film is probably known more for the book "Picture," which was an account of the making of The Red Badge of Courage a film which got caught up in power struggles between MGM executives.  The director John Huston who also wrote the screenplay had been a veteran of World War II and had produced some interesting documentaries during that war.  He clearly wanted to articulate his very mixed feelings about war and battle.

Probably MGM was not the place to make this film.  By the early 1950's Hollywood was producing more films with serious content however MGM kind of stayed with the tried and true, pumping out musicals and lightweight entertainments.  Not to say that the other studios didn't generate these kinds of films but MGM was always kind of the glossy never land of films that were big on nostalgia for family values and the American way of life.

A strong director like John Huston was invariably going to clash with this type of corporate mentality.   To make a very long story short.  Huston filmed The Red Badge of Courage  and delivered a two hour cut.  After an apparently disastrous preview, MGM recut the film to it's present length of 69 minutes.  Clearly all the nuance of the story had been taken out and what was left were some very good battle scenes.  The motivations of the central character Henry Fleming who goes from coward to hero was probably left on the cutting room floor.  In the film Fleming runs from battle but then goes back to his regiment for the final fight for no apparent reason.

 

The film certainly had an interesting cast, Audie Murphy was cast as Henry Fleming.  Murphy was known as one of America's most decorated war heros.  He killed a lot of men during the war.  Murphy was one of the earliest victims of PTSD long before anyone knew what it was.  Bill Mauldin as Tom Wilson had been a cartoonist during the war for the Army newspaper " Stars and Stripes."  He had no acting experience but he did a good job playing Fleming's friend.  The rest of the cast was made up of character actors.  

 

What's left of the film is entirely watchable Huston and has cameraman Hal Rossen did an excellent job staging the scenes. The movie itself is hardly the disaster that the resulting extreme edit of the film ended up being as it's final form.

1965 - THE GREAT RACE, should have been called "The Barely Okay Race."

The director Blake Edwards had been on a roll with his successful Pink Panther films.  Edwards was considered one of the masters of screen comedy particularly when it came to slapstick humor.  Warner Brothers studios gave him a lot of money to film a tribute to the kind of physical comedy he was supposed to be an expert at.  The result was a critical and commercial flop.

Tony Curtis is "The Great Leslie," a virtuous hero always dressed in white.  His opponent is Jack Lemmon  the evil "Professor Fate," Leslie's mortal enemy.  Natalie Wood is "Maggie DuBois," a reporter and suffragette.  The film is set in the early 20th century, with Leslie and Professor Fate challenging each other to a round the world car race in early automobiles.  This setup allows Blake Edwards to load the film up with lots of gags that he probably borrowed from silent comedies.

However the film is just not that funny.  The viewer sits through one lame comedic bit after another.  The old time comics like Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd knew how to set up and pace a joke.  Edwards knows how to reuse a lot of their old situations but doesn't seem to be able to get the timing right to delivery the laughs.  This is particularly evident during an extended pie fight scene which should be hilarious but for the most part just lays there like a dying fish.

Another big issue with the film is Jack Lemmon.  Lemmon is supposed to be in the great tradition of the evil mustache twirling villain, sort of like Snidley Whiplash from the old Dudley Do Right cartoons.  But the best Lemmon can do is shout and role his eyes without actually being funny.  It's hard to believe that Lemmon was considered a gifted comedian at one time.

 

The film is supposed to be about a race but with an hour left to go in an already long film, Edwards decides to borrow the plot of The Prisoner of Zenda.  The race is completely forgotten about as the viewer watches scenes rehashed that were staged a whole lot better in the original Prisoner of Zenda film.  

To sum it up the film is almost a complete failure and kind of a mess.  To bad since this is a large scale and good looking production.  The actors with the exception of Jack Lemmon are good, the on-location photography across Europe must have been expensive, but the film's biggest issue the unfunny script finishes off the whatever fun there is to be had in watching this expensive disappointment.

 

The film was written by Arthur A. Ross with Blake Edwards taking a story credit.  For a comedy the film runs 160 minutes.

2012 - MEN IN BLACK 3, third in the series obviously.

 Considering the law of diminishing returns when it comes to sequels, Men in Black 3 is actually a fairly decent action comedy.  The film was notorious for being one of the most expensive comedies made when it was released.  Men in Black 3 started without a complete script and actually shut down while the script was finally completed.  For the mess the production was the film turned out well.  It got  decent reviews  and good box office results which must have been a relief to everyone involved.

This time Will Smith as Agent J, travels back in time to keep his partner Agent K,  played by Tommy Lee Jones from being killed by an evil alien.  Tommy Lee Jones is K in the present time and Josh Brolin is K back in the 1969 period during the last half of the film.  Brolin is actually fairly funny playing a younger version of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith does know a thing about comedy timing, he is funny.

 

Probably the real stars of the film are the special effects team.  Rick Baker was responsible for the actual physical aliens and the director Barry Sonnenfeld knows a thing or two about filming comedies.  I don't want to over praise this film, after all it's still a sequel as it does repeat the usual "aliens are among us"gags from the first two films.  Still, the film is entertaining 

 

Written By Etan Cohen, no relation to the Cohen brothers, the running time is 105 minutes.

1960 - MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN, Italian Giallo Film.

 For a horror film and especially an Italian horror film Mill of the Stone Women looks very nice with colorful sets and very bright and pretty photography.   The cast has a lot of good looking women and men although the bad guy is fairly easy to spot since he gives off that mad scientist vibe fairly early in the film.

The film owes a lot and I mean a lot of its plot to the old Warner Brother's film, Mystery of the Wax Museum.  In that film people are disappearing but eventually seem to  turn up in a wax museum posed as historical figures.  Frankly I wished I had been watching that film instead of this one.

 

This film is set in a windmill that has been converted into a museum and surprise surprise missing women possibly seem to be turning up as models in this museum.

The film was directed by Giorgo Ferroni who made a lot of spaghetti and gladiator movies for most of his career.

Written by Remigio Del Grosso, Ugo Liberatore, Giorgio Stegani and Giorgio Ferroni, that's a lot of writers for a fairly ordinary horror film.  The running time is 96 minutes.

1968 - DUFFY, journey back to the swinging 60's

A couple of actors that would probably be identified as charter members of the swinging 60's, Susannah York and especially James Coburn show up in one of those elaborate heist films that were kind of the rage for a while.  

The swinging 60's, particularly swinging 60's London probably only existed in the minds of entertainment reporters and TV and movie executives.  The era was frequently marked by a contempt for all things and members of the establishment, especially the older generation. Never mind that this group of 20 and 30 somethings were going to eventually age out and join their elders.

 Duffy has Coburn at his most zany, living in a hipster pad in Tangiers that is decorated with lots of weird artwork and stuff.  Duffy gets involved with a couple of brothers who want to rip off a bunch of money from their father played by the always reliable actor James Mason who in a lot of ways is really the most interesting character in the film.

 

Susannah York is one of the "birds" slang for a woman, of the brothers.  York was always a likable performer and exuded an appealing English sex appeal.  She turns up in a lot of films during the 60's and if you needed an English "hottie" you would hire her.

 The big caper takes place on Mason's yacht and it's reasonably clever the way they get the money off the boat.  The film has one of those twist endings that were popular.  I write it a lot in my posts but this is basically a decent time killer of a film.

Written by Donald Cammell and Harry Joe Brown Jr., the running time is 101 minutes.

1977 - THE WAR IN SPACE, Toho's dumb but inoffensive space opera

Obviously made to get a piece of the Star Wars action, this Toho outer space spectacle borrows (steals?)  a lot from it's 1963 science fiction film Atragon about a super submarine which can fly and  fought an evil undersea kingdom called the "Mu."  In the film the super spaceship  looks a lot like the Atragon complete with the power drill head.  This ship is called the Gohten.

 As creatures from the planet Venus invade Earth and blow up lots of cities, which are lots of stock shots from other Toho films.  The Gohten goes into battle.  So we're off with some fairly decent model and animation effects as both sides blast away at each other.

 

As far as the personal stories go there is a love triangle which resolves itself when one of the group conveniently does the heroic self sacrifice thing.  In fact it's safe to say that a lot of people sacrifice themselves during this big intergalactic war. 

Yes there are a few things lifted from Star Wars particularly the plucky female lead who somehow loses her uniform and runs around in a tight short outfit.  There is also a Chewbacca like hairy creature who the crew of the Gohten have to do battle with.  The whole thing is derivative but kind of inoffensive. 

 

 Written by Shuichi Nagahara and Ryuzo Nakanishi.  The running time is 91 minutes relatively painless minutes.

1962 - ILEKTRA aka Electra

If every film were made as well as Ilektra, maybe the idea of sitting through classic Greek dramas written in this case by Euripides (480 BC to 406 BC) wouldn't have such an odious whiff of being force fed a "classic" play and a classic ancient Greek play in this instance.

The film was written and directed by Michael Cacoyannis a Greek theater and film director who brought a lot of storytelling skill to his best films particularly the Greek tragedies that he filmed, Iphigenia and The Trojan Women.

For this version of the Electra legend Cacoyannis had the talents of British cinematographer Walter Lassally who knew how to make a film look really good on a tight budget. The other major part of the success of this film is the actor Irene Papas.  I guess movie goers would probably remember her as part of the acting ensemble in The Guns of Navarone. Papas apparently felt that Cacoyannis was the only director who brought out the best in her acting.  In any case it's an excellent intense performance.

 

If you are a little burned out on Superhero movies and are looking for a good intelligent drama, this film might be worth viewing.  Be advised, subtitles are involved.

The running time is 110 minutes.  

1995 - RENDEVOUS IN PARIS, aka Les Rendez-vous de Paris

 The brief description for this film was, " the film consists of three loosely connected episodes revolving around chance meetings in Paris," this was not a selling point for me.  As a film critic whose name escapes me once wrote.  "Love stories are easy to make, it's just two people saying a lot of dumb things to each other.

However in this case I shouldn't have been worried.  The writer/director is Eric Rohmer and if there is anyone who knows how to write love stories about young French people it's Rohmer.

 

The film consists of three separate stories. In the first story a student figures out that her boyfriend is cheating on her.  In the second story, a couple meet and talk about their relationship while wandering around a lot of beautiful parks.  Sort of a mini tour of Paris.  The third story is about an artist trying to pick up a woman at a museum who apparently was just recently married.

 

As with many of Rohmer's films the women are young, beautiful and smart.  Their boyfriends are all for the most part kind of clueless and stupid.

A very enjoyable and civilized film from a master filmmaker.

The running time is 94 minutes.

1968 - HOUSE OF CARDS reasonably entertaining thriller

George Peppard is a "down on his luck" Hemingway type of writer living in Paris.  He befriends a young boy and ends up as a tutor for the boy whose mother just happens to be gorgeous Inger Stevens who just happens to be a member of a fascist family that just happens to be a part of a large right wing conspiracy to take over Europe and ultimately the United States.

 The director is John Guillermin who was a decent enough filmmaker.  I guess he was kind of a go to studio guy for projects like King Kong (Jessica Lange version). The Towering Inferno, and one of the better Tarzan films, Tarzan's Greatest Adventure. Guillermin had done a couple of other films with Peppard so it was probably old home week for the two of them.

Back to the film, this is a reasonably entertaining thriller which probably could have used a little more focus in it's writing,  the story kind of meanders around.  However Guillermin does a good job keeping the action moving along which helps to cover up some really big holes in the story.  The on location filming in Paris and Rome also helps. Inger Stevens dressed by Edith Head, is easy on the eyes. Peppard does a reasonably good job as the "Hitchcockian" man on the run hero.  This is the usual inoffensive time killer of a film.

 

Oh yes, Orson Welles is third billed in the cast but he's barely in the film.  This was probably another one of his "paycheck films."

The film was written by the team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. under assumed names, which is never a good sign.  The running time is 105 minutes.