1971 - THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, one of the best films of the 1970's

Peter Bogdanovich's follow up to Targets.  This film is about the lives of the  people in a small town, Anartene Texas. Filmed in black and white by old Hollywood veteran Robert Surtees, the film really captures the depressing feeling of watching a small town in the middle of nowhere slowly dying. The story follows mainly three characters, Sonny Crawford, Duane Jackson and the town beauty Jacy Farrow. 

 Whoever cast this film certainly made some excellent choices, Timothy Bottoms played Sonny Crawford a senior graduating from high school with absolutely no direction.  Jeff Bridges is his friend Duane Jackson a hot head.  Cybill Shepherd is Jacy Farrow the town beauty queen just about as lost as everyone else in the town. In a supporting role is Ben Johnson as "Sam the Lion."  Ellen Burnstyn plays Farrow's mother a fading beauty queen herself, frankly the film could have explored more of her story.

Bogdanovich an admirer of the old Hollywood system and the filmmakers who worked in it has absorbed their lessons and gets good performances and stages the scenes very well.

 

The film was almost immediately recognized as a classic and it set an impossibly high bar for Bogdanovich to follow and probably sent him down the road of remaking old Hollywood movies.

The film was written by Bogdanovich and the author of the novel which it was based on Larry McMurty it runs 118 minutes.

1982 - DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID, spoof of 40's film noir is more silly than funny.

 The second of four silly comedies that Steve Martin and Carl Reiner teamed up on.  Martin usually has a writing credit on these films and Reiner directed.  Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is a spoof of 1940's detective films with the gimmick being that excerpts from these old films which feature actors such as Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Fred MacMurry, Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster to name a few are blended with footage shot by Reiner featuring Steve Martin as private detective Rigby Reardon.

Reardon is trying to solve some confusing series of murders in a takeoff of one of those complicated plots that always seemed part of those old film noir stories.  Rachel Ward is the sexy female lead who Reardon falls in love with.  With her Australian accent and the glamorous film lighting she looks very good.  Ward is essentially the "straight man" for Steve Martin's silly character which she plays very well.

The real stars of this film are the group of old timers that Carl Reiner assembled as part of his production team.  Legendary costume designer Edith Head dressed Ward and Martin in 40's outfits.  John DeCuir was the production designer.  DeCuir had been in the business a long time and had done sets for films as diverse as Cleopatra and The Naked City.  Another  veteran was composer Miklos Rosza who wrote the score, this was Rosza's final film before he passed away.  Mention should also be made of editor Bud Molin and especially cinematographer Michael Chapman who had to blend Reiner's footage with black and white film scenes shot in the 1940's, an impressive achievement.

 

Frankly, the film isn't all that funny.  Martin works hard to find the silliness behind the supposed tough guy private character but a lot of the humor is pretty dumb.  Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid is probably more interesting for movie buffs than the general public.

Written by Carl Reiner, Steve Martin and George Gipe, the running time is 88 minutes.

1967 - POINT BLANK, excellent crime thriller from Lee Marvin and John Boorman

Donald Westlake's cool criminal character who is only known by his last name "Walker," is featured in several films, The Split, The Outfit, and Payback.  Probably the best film based on the Walker character is British director John Boorman's Point Blank.   This was Boorman's first American film and he brought and outsider's view to Southern California and took what could have been a conventional story of a criminal's revenge against a crime syndicate and filmed it incorporating flashbacks and strange dream like sequences.

Lee Marvin was perfect casting for the character of Walker who during a robbery is betrayed by his best friend Mel Reese played by John Vernon and his wife Lynne Walker played by Canadian actor Sharon Acker.  As Walker works his way up the crime syndicate that Reese is now a part of,  he is assisted by Angie Dickinson who is pretty good as Acker's sister in law.  Mention should also be made of Keenan Wynn as a mysterious character named "Yost," who provides Walker information by the syndicate.

 

John Boorman was always a highly individualist film director.  It's amazing he made as many films as he did because Boorman liked to push the narratives of films in unusual storytelling ways.  The Emerald Forest, Zardoz, The Exorcist II: The Heretic to name a few are very odd films.  Boorman had some decent commercial success with Deliverance, Excalibur and the autobiographical Hope and Glory which probably kept him in the movie making game during his career.

 

Point Blank was also a very successful film financially and is now recognized as one of the best films of the 1970's.

The screenplay was by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse.  The running time is 92 minutes.

1969 - PROBABILTA ZERO aka Probability Zero

You kind of have to love 60's and 70's Italian film making, they never meet a successful genre film that they couldn't rework and basically rip off.  The Italian film industry also had a thing about American actors in these films.  Some sort of semi famous American actor, in this case Henry Silva, would always show up in their films.

Probabilta Zero is fairly typical of these kinds of films.  It's plot is clearly stolen, borrowed from The Guns of Navarone and Operation Crossbow.  Henry Silva is the military guy in charge who leads of team of commandos to a secret underground Nazi base in Norway, but probably northern Italy as the actual locations.  His team has to blow up a downed Spitfire which has a special radar system.  If the system falls into the hands of the Nazis it could change the outcome of the war etc.

 

This film actually isn't half bad.  The action is fairly good, the mountainous scenery makes a good location for filming and the whole thing is a fairly decent action flick when all is said and done.

  

The film was written by Dario Argento, Maurizio Lucidi and Giuseppe Mangione.  The director Maurizio Lucidi filmed a lot of spaghetti westerns and eurocime thrillers so he certainly knew his way around an action scene.

The running time is a quick 95 minutes.

1936 - THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN, great title crummy film

Considering all of the talent involved in this film it should have been a whole lot better.  Gary Cooper is one of those "soldier of fortune" types they like in the movies.  He's supposed to deliver a bunch of money to an arms dealer in Shanghai. The people of a Chinese providence are under the thumb of an evil Chinese warlord called General Yang, played by Armenian actor Akim Tamaroff.  The plan is to start a civil war to throw Yang out of power.

Cooper runs into trouble when he gets mixed up with the beautiful English actress Madeline Carroll  and her father improbably played by comedic actor Porter Hall.  Throw in William Frawley, Fred Mertz of I Love Lucy fame, as a perennially drunk arms dealer and you have a very unusual cast to say the least.

The General Died At Dawn was directed by Lewis Milestone in his prime, photographed by one of Paramount's best cinematographers Victor Milner,  who in this film shot glamorous close ups of Madeline Carroll.  The film was written by leftie playwright Clifford Odets and not very well.  The screenplay seems like a poorly written stage play with actors entering and exiting the camera frame like they were on a proscenium stage.  The stuff that comes out of the mouths of these characters almost boarders on the ridiculous.  I think Clifford Odets the noted New York playwright would have been very critical of Clifford Odets the Hollywood screenwriter.  The General Died At Dawn has a particularly ridiculous end.

 

The running time is 98 minutes.

1998 - CELEBRITY, interesting Woody Allen film

Woody Allen had a great idea, a film about the prevailing fixation the public has with the celebrity culture.  Unfortunately he didn't really develop the story and screenplay very well.  The film follows a divorced couple who find themselves interacting with the famous and near famous in New York City.  The film is very disjointed with good scenes interlaced with some very indifferent and frankly unfunny moments.  The film also spends a lot of time on the love life of a celebrity profiler played by Kenneth Branagh which frankly is not very interesting.  One critic called Celebrity Woody's version of Fellini's La Dolce Vita.  But this film is a far cry from that one.

Also, chief among the problems  with this film are Kenneth Branagh and Judy Davis as the divorced couple.  Branagh probably with Woody Allen's encouragement apes Woody's mannerisms and speech patterns, it's a very strange and frankly kind of an annoying performance.  What I didn't realize until I spent a little time revisiting some past reviews, is that Judy Davis is also mimicking Woody Allen as well.  It's like the viewer is watching a Ying and Yang version of Woody Allen.

 

The film was photographed in black and white by Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's go to cinematographer.  Nykvist apparently wasn't comfortable working with Woody Allen and this was their final film together. Nykvist was also starting to show the effects of the disease progressive aphasia.

 

The supporting cast that was assembled by Allen certainly contributed to his film, Melanie Griffith, Winona Ryder, Leonard DiCapro (supposedly playing a fictionalized version of Johnny Depp), Charlize Theron and Donald Trump, they all knew a thing or two about constantly being in the spotlight.  It's surprising that Woody Allen didn't appear in Celebrity, he's certainly been a target for the gossip columns with his rather messy personal life.  In spite of it's flaws,  Celebrity is worth a look

Written by Woody Allen, the running time is 113 minutes.

1968 - GUNS FOR SAN SEBASTIAN, entertaining western.

This is a decent well made western.  It's not some classic of the western genre but it's a professional production with a good story, good action and good actors.  Anthony Quinn is am army deserter who disguises himself as a priest.  He ends up in a Mexican town called San Sebastian which is under siege from bad guy Charles Bronson.  Quinn rallies the villagers to fight off Bronson and his gang.

The director is a man called Henri Verneuil who specialized in traditional French film making.  He was not a member of the "new wave" bunch to put it mildly.  If you wanted solid dependable technique in the classic tradition of movie making, Verneuil was your man.

 

Guns For San Sebastian has a good score by Ennio Morricone and say what you want about Anthony Quinn, a larger than life actor.  He's a commanding presence in this film.

 

Written by Serge Gance,  Miguel Morayta, Ennio de Concini, and James R Webb who apparently did the engilish version of this film.  The running time is 111 minutes.

2007 - GONE BABY GONE, a good adaptation of a book for a change

In Boston, a four year old girl has vanished .  Along with the police, two private investigators are on the case attempting to trace the whereabouts of the child.  As the investigators get more involved in the search, it appears that the situation is a lot more complicated than they imagined.

The director and co-writer of this film is the actor Ben Affleck.  Affleck is a smart talented guy and in this film his storytelling skills are excellent.  Affleck has done a good job keeping the story straight while balancing all the subplots.

  

Affleck has a very talented group of actors to work with, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, John Ashton, Amy Ryan, Amy Madigan, Titus Welliver and Michelle Monaghan.  The surprise in this film was Ben Affleck casting his brother Casey Affleck.  He gives a very good performance as one of the private investigators who has to make some difficult decisions during this investigation.

Ben Affleck does a good job capturing a side of Boston that tourists probably never see, the blue collar neighborhoods of the city.  Frankly it's good to see a well made film like Gone Baby Gone that has some substance to it instead of the usual big budget drivel that comes out of Hollywood.

Written by Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard, the running time is 114 minutes.

2018 - MORTAL ENGINES, great visuals stupid story.

The director/producer Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame, bought this series of books about cities actually traveling around the world like they were souped up cars or something, he clearly hoped to turn the books into another film franchise.  Frankly the plot of the first book Mortal Engines is just plain stupid.  After some sort of apocalyptic war, cities called "Traction Cities" race around in what is left of the world gobbling up smaller traction cities and using them for fuel.

Once you get past the basic silliness of this setting you have to settle for what is essentially a rehash of story elements from Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi and The Terminator.  A teenage couple travel around in what's left of the world as they attempt to stop the Darth Vader stand-in, in this case the actor Hugo Weaving, who is building a Death Star like destructo ray to blow up stuff.  The couple is pursued by some kind of robot guy who is clearly a stand-in for the T-800 Terminator.  After a lot of explosions the question is will the teenage couple succeed?  

 

What the film has going for it are the special effects talents of Peter Jackson's WETA studio, the same bunch that did the effects for his Middle Earth series.  They certainly are talented artists.  Unfortunately that's about all this expensive film has going for it.  In a film like this the cast is secondary to all the special effects and action. Mortal Engines failed to find an audience probably because no one watching the film was engaged in the plights of the actors.  

 

Peter Jackson chose to sit this film out and turned over the directing duties to his visual effects supervisor Christian Rivers.  Probably as good a choice as anyone since the film is just completely loaded down with some amazing visuals.  But anyway you cut it the film as a piece of storytelling is a flop.

Written by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens with a heavy borrowing the the George Lucas Star Wars series.

The running time is 128 minutes.

1974 - THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, original version of this influencial horror film

Finally got around to watching this, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is basically an exploitation film which is fairly well made considering it's very tight budget of $140,000 dollars.  The film struck a cord with the film going public and made the investors a lot of money.  Even today almost 50 years later the film still has a number of effective scenes which shock.  The setting of the house where all the killing takes place is practically a grisly version of a nature museum.  The cannibalistic family of 4  seems like an extreme version of an American nuclear family, if that family happened to be totally insane.

The film certainly foretold the direction of the horror film, sick killings, the exploitation of women as victims and lots of blood and body parts. The film does effective ramp up the suspense and horror as the last teenager, Sally Hardesty is pursued and caught by the notorious "Leatherface," who just happens to be good at dismembering people with a chainsaw.

The director Tobe Hopper, considering the pressure he must have felt to wrap the filming up as quickly as possible and the small budget certainly got the job done.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is definitely some kind of horror film classic.  The is probably Hopper's best film.  

 

 The success of this film got him work in Hollywood where he directed several unremarkable films.  His film Poltergeist was allegedly directed by producer Steven Spielberg.  Hooper signed with the legendary team of Golan and Globus the head of Cannon studios and directed a film called Lifeforce, basically a vampires from space show that was a box office failure but also a seriously over the top and weird film.  His remake of Invaders From Mars was also a box office disappointment.

Written by Kim Henkel and Tobe Hooper, the running time is 83 minutes

1970 - Gas-s-s-s, Roger Corman's final film for American Internation Pictures.

Not going to spend a lot of time on this one.  Gas-s-s-s was the final film Corman made for American International Pictures (AIP).   Corman was unhappy with AIP after they cut several scenes which he felt were important to the film.  From the looks of what's left Corman did not direct some masterpiece.  The film is an unfunny mess of situations and characters.

The basic premise is interesting enough, a gas from a government laboratory has escaped and his killed everyone over 25.  This leaves a bunch of kids in charge of the country and probably the world.  the film could have been a jumping off point for some pointed satire about the state of the country but the so called comedy scenes never seem to work.  

The film has a Corman in-joke with the appearance of a character who is apparently Edgar Allen Poe on a motorcycle, a call back to Corman's Poe films for AIP.  That's about as clever as the film gets.  Roger  Corman has spent a lot of time trying to explain why the film failed, (studio interference, to intellectual, the black humor that runs throughout the film) but the reality is the film just never worked.

Written by George Armitage, the running time is 79 minutes

1971 - PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW, welcome to the 1970's

A nubile bunch of coeds are dying at Oceanfront High School in California.  A young man who isn't doing well with the teenage girls in his class is about to get an education from substitute teacher Angie Dickinson.   Rock Hudson is the football coach/guidance counselor who is bedding about every other short skirted teenage girl who comes into his office. Finally Telly Savalas basically playing his Kojak detective character is brought in to sort out exactly what is going on at this rather horny high school.  Oh yea, throw in Roddy McDowell and Keenan Wynn and you have this strange AIP studio like sex exploitation film made on a big budget by MGM no less.

 Gene Roddenberry the creator of Star Trek and French director Roger Vadim are responsible for this film if you can call it a film.  Both Roddenberry and Vadim had reputations to put it mildly as men who weren't above exploiting women in front of the camera.  In fact Vadim was quoted as saying the casting of the film was his favorite part of making the film.  Since the film is basically a parade of mini skirted young women you can see where Vadim's interests lie.

 

If anyone comes off decently in this film it's probably Savalas and Roddy McDowell as the clueless principal.  Angie Dickinson was apparently cast as a replacement for Brigitte Bardot.

 

I suppose it goes without saying that this type of film wouldn't be made today but then again can anyone be sure about that nobody went broke underestimating the taste of the movie going public.

 Gene Roddenberry wrote the script and the running time is 95 minutes.