1967 - THE ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN, a very good Shaw Brothers film

Growing up, a person could usually find something called Kung Fu Theater on your afternoon television lineup.  Kung Fu Theater was usually some poorly dubbed marital arts film from the Shaw Brothers  or some other company which had a lot of weird mannered Kung Fu fighting that was usually filmed on some phony studio sets.  Rarely did these films actually film on outside locations.

For all the poor quality of many of these films some of them did actually stand out as good films, The One Armed Swordsman is one of the best.  The plot in a nutshell, Fang Kang a promising student of the The Golden Sword school ends up losing his arm after he rejects the daughter of the school.  In a jealous rage, she manages to wack one of his arms off.  Fang Kang ends up being nursed back to health by a farmer and his daughter.   While recovering he learns to cope with his disability and becomes a talented and formidable martial arts swordsman.  

This film is well directed by one of the masters of the genre,  Chang Cheh.  The film has plenty of the usual martial arts action but in this film there is a decent amount of attention payed to the motives of the characters  for a change. The viewer comes away with a  pretty entertaining film which for once deepens and creates a context for the motivations of the various people in the story.  Usually in these films it's just a lot of silly flying through the air and jumping around for no particular reason.

The One Armed Swordsman is one the best films in the wuxia genre.

The film was written by Chang Cheh and Ni Kuang.  The running time is 117 minutes

1987 - A TAXING WOMAN, a film about an heroic tax auditor

This is Juzo Itami's follow up to his ramen noodle epic Tampopo and is equally as entertaining.  The film again stars Tsutomu Yamazaki and Nobuko Miyamoto although this time playing very different characters than they did in Tampopo. 

It seems in the 1980's the Japanese government had some of the highest tax rates in the world.  This fostered a climate where many Japanese citizens attempted to hid their wealth from the government instead of being taxed to death.  The plot of A Taxing Woman is basically Nobuko Miyamoto playing a very sharp tax inspector who matches wits with Tsutomu Tamazaki a business man who owns a series of for want of a better word "sex hotels."  

 

You would have to give Juzo Itami credit, it would seem almost impossible that a film could be made out of not paying your taxes and have the heroic tax inspector detective played by a woman.  The film has a lot of interesting and amusing encounters with the Japanese public as they attempt to outsmart the Japanese National Tax Agency.  A high recommendation for this film.

 

A Taxing Woman was a big hit in Japan and unsurprisingly led to a sequel called what else, A Taxing Woman Returns.

Written by  Juzo Itami, the running time is 127 minutes.

1974 - KILLDOZER!, the possessed bulldozer classic

 Deliriously goofy made for TV movie from the mid 1970's. The ABC network had something on their schedule called "The Movie of the Week."  Essentially they were low budget films that fit a 90 minute time slot on Tuesday nights.  The stories skewed heavily towards low rent science fiction and/or horror genre plots.  Killdozer! managed to cover both of these genres.

In brief, an alien entity comes down to earth and happens to crash on an island where a construction crew is building a landing strip.  The entity possesses a bulldozer which proceeds to kill the construction crew one at a time.  This film was clearly trolling in the same waters as Duel the made for TV classic that put Steven Spielberg on the map as a director to watch.  I would even venture to say that Stephen King in his B-movie classic Maximum Overdrive took a good long look at this film before he created that classic.

The movie has a to die for cast of television actors, Clint Walker uttering the immortal line "come and get me dozer," Carl Betz, Neville Brand and James Wainwright as the leads.  The film also includes two supporting players, a young Robert Urich, future star of the film Ice Pirates and James A Watson Jr, the only black guy in the cast so you know he's gonna get it right away.

 

The film lists Theodore Sturgeon a noted science fiction author as one of the screenwriters. Sturgeon had seen better assignments writing for the original Star Trek television series.  The director Jerry London was basically a TV guy who graduated to high class assignments like the miniseries Shogun, The Scarlet and the Black and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman to name just a few.  You have to give Jerry London credit, he manages to stage the death scenes for most of the cast in creative ways. The killer bulldozer moves at such an incredibly slow pace, it makes you wonder how nobody could stay out of it's way. 

 

Killdozer! was written by Ed MacKillop and Theodore Sturgeon, the running time is 76 minutes, 45 minutes of it are spent setting up this ridiculous but entertaining situation.  Killdozer! is on YouTube in a fairly decent copy.

1928 - THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN, aka La Coquille et le Clergyman

 This surrealistic (avant guarde?) film runs only forty minutes and to paraphrase Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) " a great piece of art but nobody ever wished it a minute longer."  This early film is one of those mystifying things that show up with artists with pretensions get their hands on a canvas or in this case a movie camera.

The appears to have something to do with a clergyman who is attempting to stop maybe a love affair between maybe his wife and maybe an army general.  There is much running around and the symbolism is apparently rampant. Glass is broken, the clergyman drags himself down the street, the maybe wife ends up having to expose herself and the army general runs around for no particular reason.   

 

The author of The Seashell and the Clergyman Antonin Artaud claimed it was an attempt to photograph a dream and one has to give the director Germaine Dulac credit.  For an old movie she was certainly inventive when it came to weird camera angles and lighting effects.

 

This is the film where some British critic coined the phrase, that the film was "so cryptic as to be almost meaningless. If there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable".  The Seashell and the Clergyman is practically a companion piece to Bunuel's Un Chien Andalou another short film that is an obscure piece of confusing surrealism.  As another critic said "it's gotta be art because it sure as hell isn't entertainment."  If you so desire the film is on YouTube in a good copy

1964 - THE YELLOW ROLLS ROYCE, one of those all star film stories

Considering the talent involved and there is a lot of big name talent involved in this multi character drama,  it should have been a lot better.  As it is it's just a passable old fashioned British time killer of a film.  The film consists of three short stories all tied together with the gimmick being that in each story at one time or another a character owns The Yellow Rolls Royce which is featured in the film.

The first story stars Rex Harrison and Jeanne Moreau as an English Lord who slowly comes to realize that his wife has been cheating on him.  Harrison is good as always and manages to make this very conventional story interesting.

Then it's off to Italy where the Rolls Royce ends up being owned by an American gangster played by George C. Scott in a hammy performance. Scott is engaged to a chorus girl played by a very shrill Shirley MacLaine.  While touring, Italy MacLaine falls in love with French guy Alain Delon who when he goes swimming wears a very ridiculous swimming cap.  Probably the only performance of note in this segment is Art Carney as Scott's right hand man.

 

Finally the last segment with the car stars Ingrid Bergman as a rich American tourist who happens to arrive in Yugoslavia just as World War II breaks out.  Bergman ends up getting involved with the Yugoslavian partisans in particular Omar Sharif.  Bergman and Sharif certainly make a good looking couple.  Their love story is probably the best segment in the film.

 

The film was made by the same team who had done another multi character film called The V.I.P.s.  That film surprisingly made money so this film was a matter of getting lighting to strike twice.

 The producer was Anatole de Grunwald who had an impressive career in the British cinema. The director Anthony Asquith was a reliable craftsman and the writer Terence Rattigan was an important playwright and screenwriter.  However it's safe to say no one involved was trying very hard on this production.  The film has that lazy shot in the studio look to it and it's kind of a clueless show considering 1964 was the year of films like A Hard Day's Night, Dr. Strangelove and From Russia with Love.

The running time is 122 minutes.

2005 - LADY VENGEANCE, excellent crime thriller from Korea

This is an excellent crime thriller from the director Park Chan-Wook who also took a credit on the screenplay.  Park Chan-Wood is one of Korea's most interesting directors with films like Oldboy, Stoker, Snowpiercer, and Joint Security Area to name a few. Park Chan-Wook makes very original films which are on the intense side.

Lady Vengeance is frankly a very extreme film.  The story involves a woman who has gone to prison for the murder of a five year old boy.  While serving her time in prison she develops an elaborate scheme to reek vengeance in what turns out to be a more complicated situation than was originally thought.

 

The film is flamboyantly directed and the acting is of a very high caliber with a standout performance from Lee Young-ae as the titular character.  I would have to say that the plot twists are at times surprising and quite shocking.  As I indicated before this is a very intense film.  I've been avoiding discussing the plot of this film because I am very reluctant to spoil any of the story.

The film was written by Jeong Seo-kyeong and Park Chan-wook.  The running time is 115 minutes.

1941 -THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE, charming comedy

Looking for a change of pace from all the action films that he had been making.  Raoul Walsh was able to get Jack Warner the head of Warner Brother's studios to let him make this lightweight but very charming comedy with James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland.  The plot has Cagney playing a man taking a dental correspondent course by mail all the while pining for Rita Hayworth who is the titular character, a neighborhood beauty.

Cagney gets involved with perennial character actor Jack Carlson who also has a thing for Hayworth, but ends up being the fall guy for Carlson's construction business which has been using inferior materials to build homes.  One thing leads to another and Carlson manages to marry Hayworth much to Cagney's disappointment.  However Cagney finally sees the light and ends up marrying the charming de Havilland.   Finally realizing he got the better deal when it came to a spouse. 

The film is really a nostalgia wallow.  The entire film score seems to be made up of old songs from the 1900's. The photography by the legendary James Wong Howe helps set the mood of the story and Raoul Walsh probably the last guy in the world you would think of when it came to directing a romantic comedy does his usual excellent job staging the scenes.

 

The film clearly appealed to an audience that was looking to romanticize a simpler time.  All of the performances are good and Warner Brothers didn't cheapen out on the production.  This is the kind of film that the "Hollywood Dream" factory could turn out when it was firing on all cylinders.

The screenplay was by Julius J. Epstein and Philip Epstein a couple of real pros.  They wrote Casablanca, the movie versions of Arsenic and Old Lace and The Man Who Came to Dinner.  The running time is 97 minutes.

1983 - THE SURVIVORS, redneck/right wing satire doesn't really work.

The director Michael Ritchie had a reasonably successful career in Hollywood, he could move between mainstream comedies but probably the genre he really excelled at was satire.  The problem with satire is that it's not a particularly popular theme in movies.  Ritchie's film The Survivors is kind of a case in point.

The Survivors is about a couple of New Yorkers who are essentially beaten down by the city and the system.  Walter Matthau owns a gas station and ends up losing it.  Robin Williams is an office worker who gets laid off by a parrot of all things.  Down on their luck, they happen to get mixed up with a robbery at a diner.  The robber is played by Jerry Reed star of many Burt Reynolds redneck comedies.   After identifying Jerry Reed to the police who eventually release him for reasons I can't remember. They go on the run from Reed who now wants to kill them. Fed up with being a victim Williams joins a survivalist group in Vermont where he embraces their philosophy of self reliance and shooting people.

 

The story is a lot for a film that wants to be a comedy and particularly a satire on this country's mania for guns and the right wing self reliance philosophy.  Some of the comedy works some of the time but for the most part it fumbles along while attempting to score some fairly obvious points about the silliness of the survivalist movement. There may be a place for taking pot shots at right wingers in a comedy, but this film ain't it. 

 

Part of the problem with the movie beside the uneven comedy in the script, is the performance of Robin Williams in this film.  It's been a while since I've watched Williams in anything and I have to say he's a lot more "Johnny One Note," than I remember.  He seems to be in only one gear the manic childlike character he created in Mork and Mindy.  After a while he gets very tiresome.  Walter Matthau the old comedy pro barely has to move a muscle to steal the scenes they appear in together.  Even Jerry Reed is funnier than Williams.  In the end the whole thing just kind of sinks into one of those Vermont snowbanks where the film is set.

The film was written by Michael J. Leeson, the running time is 102 minutes.

1940 - FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT - one of Hitchcock's best films

Rebecca was Alfred Hitchcock's first American film. Hitchcock had been contacted by independent producer David Selznick the mastermind behind Gone With The Wind.  Selznick had recently purchased the novel Rebecca which had been a best seller. Hitchcock signed on with Selznick to direct the film version and the rest as they say was history.  Although Rebecca was a success, Hitchcock was under the very close supervision of Selznick who always believed the producer was the author of a film.  The resulting finished film seemed more like a high class Hollywood movie than a Hitchcock film.

Selznick loaned Hitchcock out to another independent producer Walter Wanger who turned out to be a more hands off executive than Selznick.  Wanger essentially left Hitchcock alone to make his movie.  Given more control over the script and production,  Hitchcock turned out his first real American Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent.  This was the real start of the American phase of Hitchcock's  career.

 

Foreign Correspondent bares some relation to Hitchcock's 39 Steps and the later North By Northwest with it's whirlwind plot and dazzling set pieces.  Unlike his English films he was working with a large budget and some of Hollywood's best technicians courtesy of Wanger.  In later interviews Hitchcock complained about the casting of Joel McCrea and Laraine Day but in many ways they are the prototypes for future Hitchcock protagonists and they both give charming performances.

 

This is the master director in his prime about to create some of the best pictures of his career using the superior technical resources of the Hollywood studio system while at the same time bringing his personal style to his films. 

The film was written by Charles Bennett and Joan Harrison with contributions from James Hilton and Robert Benchley.  The running time is 120 minutes.

2004 - D.E.B.S., silly spy satire with a gimmick

D.E.B.S. stands for "Discipline, Energy, Beauty, Strength,"  it's a secret organization that recruits high school students through the SAT exam which has buried questions that ascertain if the student is possible secret agent material.  The students recruited by the  D.E.B.S., seem to be mostly beautiful high school girls who wear tight tops and very short skirts.  The story involves the D.E.B.S. attempting to stop an evil villain called Lucy Diamond also played by a gorgeous young girl.  The plot twist or gimmick in this film is that one of the D.E.B.S., Amy falls in love with Lucy Diamond and vice versa.  Will Amy stop Lucy Diamond or run away with her instead?

The humor is very dumb in this movie.  For the most part a few of the gags come off but it's just a lot of silly shenanigans going on throughout the film.  The actors playing the girl spies in training seem to struggle with finding their comic timing throughout the film.  None of the girls really stands out with the exception of  Jordana Brewster as the evil Lucy Diamond.  Brewster's claim to fame is as the 10th or 11th banana in all those Fast and Furious movies.  Only Holland Taylor as the head of the school knows how to make a line funny in a script that really isn't all that funny.

 

D.E.B.S. actually exists in two versions.  A short film that the writer/director Angela Robinson filmed which made the rounds at film festivals. It was seen by some studio executive who green lighted turning it into a feature film.  I haven't seen the short version of  D.E.B.S. but I have a feeling it probably played better than the feature film which took it's one joke premise and kind of beat it into the ground.  I know that girls running around in short skirts with guns is supposed to be funny but it did seem a little exploitive after a while. 

 

The running time is 92 minutes.

1981 - ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, Carpenter's cult classic

Recently saw this as a revival in one of those upscale theaters that serves booze and delivers pizza to your seat as you watch the film. The digital copy looked fairly decent and it was sort of a relief not to have the film bathed in pink on an old 35 mm print when I saw this film a couple of years ago.

It always appeared to me that John Carpenter was trying to make a "B" movie action type of picture when this first came out.  As I recall a lot of the critics weren't very impressed with the film.  What were they expecting Wild Strawberries?

The film played fairly well, some of it was a little dated particularly the screenplay which chose 1997 as the date that the United States sealed off New York City and turned it into a maximum security prison.  Carpenter had worked with Kurt Russell before and choose him to play Snake Plissken an ex special forces guy.  Russell kind of channels him as a variation of Clint Eastwood for better or worse.

 

Carpenter also put together an entertaining cast starting with Donald Pleasance, Ernest Borgnine, Harry Dean Stanton, Isaac Hayes, Lee Van Cleef and Adrienne Barbeau as the big breasted girl. In keeping with the tone of the film it's a cast straight out of a "B" movie.  Carpenter's direction is good, he was in his prime as a film director.  He and his associate Alan Howarth created the effective pulse pounding score.

The cinematographer  Dean Cundy had been working with Carpenter since Halloween and he went on to an impressive career working on films like Jurassic Park, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Carpenter's The Thing.  Escape From New York still entertains because it never pretended to be more that what it was an entertaining summer action film.

The film was written by John Carpenter and Nick Castle, the running time is 99 minutes.

1952 - THE WHITE SHEIK, early Fellini film

The White Sheik was made early in the career of Fellini, it's the second film that he directed.  The story is a simple one.  A married couple traveling to Rome are selected for an audience with the Pope. However the wife secretly wants to meet the hero of a comic book called The White Sheik.  In Italy at that time some comic books were actually posed picture books with actors being hired to stage scenes instead of artists drawing  graphic panels.  The wife essentially runs away from her husband and as is typical, she finds that the fantasy of the comic book hero and the reality are a big contrast.  Meanwhile the husband desperately searchers Rome for her before the audience with the Pope.

Interestingly one of the characters the husband runs into is a prostitute named Cabiria, who about five years later will get her own film.  The prostitute is played by Fellini's long suffering wife Giulietta Masina, in what is essentially a cameo performance.

 

I suppose The White Sheik would be considered a minor Fellini film but compared to some of his almost unwatchable films like City of Women, And the Ship Sails On and Fellini Satyricon this film actually plays pretty well.  This simple story is in a lot of ways preferable to some of the overstuffed films he directed in the 1970's.

The film was written by Federico Fellini, Tullio Pinelli and Ennio Flaiano.  The running time is 83 minutes.