1999 - AN IDEAL HUSBAND, is Oscar Wilde updated for the modern audience

 If you are going to read or watch a play or movie written by Oscar Wilde you can't help but be impressed by all the witty one liners sprinkled throughout his writing.  You can drive yourself crazy trying to remember his best quotes

The writer /director Oliver Parker has streamlined the play a bit for modern audiences and added a love scene but the plot remains the same.  Sir Robert Chiltern would seem to be the perfect person.  An incorruptible politician and faithful husband particularity worshiped by his wife Lady Gertrude Chiltern.  Little does anyone know especially Lady Chiltern, Lord Chiltern has a dark secret in his past.  Enter Mrs. Laura Cheveley who knows about Lord Chiltern's past and wants some political favors in exchange for her silence.  Will Chiltern betray his principals to keep his good name or will he risk being exposed? That in a nutshell is the plot.

 

However in spite of this plot the real focus is on Chiltern's friend Lord Arthur Goring who is the consummate playboy. Lord Goring gets involved in helping Chiltern with the assistance of lots of amusing one liners that would make Woody Allen jealous.  Here is a sample:

"My dear father, when one pays a visit, it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time and not one's own."

"Well, there's nothing I like more than to be congratulated, though invariably I find the pleasure immeasurably increased when I know what for."

"Excuse me a moment. I'm in the middle of my performance of the attentive son."

"My dear father, if we men married the women we deserved, we should have a very bad time of it.” 

Well you get the idea.  You can have all the great dialog in the world but it takes a great performance to put it over.  In this case the actor Rupert Everett as Lord Goring steals the film even from gifted performers like Cate Blanchett, Julianne Moore and Minnie  Driver.   As good as they are, they not a match for this guy.

 

The film is very elegant to look at and Oliver Parker doesn't draw things, out the film comes in at 97 minutes.

1976 - ST. IVES, a Charles Bronson murder mystery

 Coming a few years after Charles Bronson's movie star making hit Death Wish.  St Ives is a change of pace film for a middle aged star who made his career shooting up lots of movie bad guys.  Bronson somewhat improbably plays a writer who gets involved with a shady businessman (crook?) who uses Bronson to get back some ledgers that will incriminate him to the police.  The businessman is played by of all people John Houseman.  Houseman's associates are played by Jacqueline Bisset in the femme fatale role and Maximillian Schell.

One thing leads to another and a simple exchange of money for the ledgers leads to lots of murders and double crosses.  Bronson is the smooth thinking and talking courier trying to figure things out.  Actually Bronson who doesn't waste a lot of people for a change does a good job playing the writer. The director J. Lee Thompson whose best days were behind him does a competent job putting the film together and the cinematographer Carroll Ballard was an old Hollywood professional who gave the film a nice noir look to it.

 

St. Ives has a good cast,besides the already mention leads.  Character actors, Harris Yulin, Harry Guardino, Dana Elcar and everyone's favorite 1940's actor Elisha Cook Jr. show up.  Bronson had been kicking around Hollywood since 1951 as a character actor himself.  By this time in his career all that experience had made him a very good film actor.

 

The mystery itself is no great shakes, it's the typical mix of obscure clues, lots of dead bodies and the usual withholding of information to the viewer until the very end making it essentially impossible to solve until Bronson explains everything.  Not a great film or a great mystery, however with this cast it's worth a look

The film was written by  Barry Beckerman, the running time is 94 minutes.

1977 - MR BILLION, the American film debut for Terence Hill

This should have been a slam dunk for director Jonathan Kaplan.  The Italian actor Terence Hill (aka Mario Girotti) made his American debut in this extremely lightweight action comedy.  The plot is very simple.  Hill has inherited millions of dollars and must travel to Los Angles from Italy to receive it in three days or else he forfeits it.  Into the picture comes crooked Jackie Gleason who is determined to cheat him out of his inheritance.  The film is a series of chases across the continental United States.

The cast is fairly decent.  Scene stealer Jackie Gleason does his amusing stuff and really he is about the only reason to sit through this film..  Valerie Perrine is the woman hired by Gleason to stop Hill but falls in love with him instead.  Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong and Dick Miller show up, had they been given decent material to work with this group would have been entertaining.

 

The problem is that the script is not very clever or funny. In Italy Terence Hill usually played a rather lovable con man type.  In Mr Billion the writers and producers have decided to make him the innocent abroad, a role that does not suit him. And let’s face it audiences probably missed seeing him with partner Bud Spencer (aka Carlo Pedersoli).   The film stumbles from one uninteresting chase scene to another and really none of these scenes are particularity exciting or funny.

This film was a critical and commercial flop.  It sent Terence Hill back to Italy where he continued to make the entertaining slap sticky kind of comedies with his partner Bud Spencer that audiences enjoyed seeing him him.

The film was written by Ken Friedman and Jonathan Kaplan, the running time is 89 minutes

2018 - Wes Anderson's tribute to Japanese film , or a dog ate my film.

Wes Anderson is nothing if not quirky.  This is the second time he is involved in a stop motion film.   Previously he produced, directed and wrote (along with Noah Baumbach),  Fantastic Mr Fox.  Nine years later he was at it again with a stop motion film set in Japan about an island full of abandoned dogs.  Fantastic Mr. Fox was at least based on a story by Roald Dahl, so there was a way into that film.  Isle of Dogs was an original story with a lot of writers and seemed to be loaded with lots of cliches about Japanese life and dog fights for some reason.  It  also is a rather lopsided tribute to Akira Kurosawa even using music from one of his films at one point.

The primary story line is about abandoned dogs stuck on an island who are infected with some virus.  They are all exiled to a trash heap of an island to fend for themselves.  Onto the island lands a Japanese kid who befriends the dogs and helps them return to main stream Japan after they find a cure for this dog virus.  The whole film with fighting dogs, evil politicians, robot dogs and a dog love story just never comes together in this mishmash of a story line.

As in all of Wes Anderson's movies, there is a very formal visual look to his films.  In this film the animation while carefully composed, is rather on the stiff side.  After a while, one longs for the days of  Ray Harryhausen or Phil Tippet who could have at least made the puppets seems a little more natural in what is already an artificial setting and situation.  This style of animation may play on old TV Christmas specials like Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer or The Year Without a Santa Claus but over an hour of watching this gets pretty tiring.  

 

As with the latest Wes Anderson films, he loads it up with lots of celebrity voices, so here we go.   Bryan Cranston,  Bill Murry, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDonald, F. Murray Abraham, Fisher Stevens, Bob Balabn, and Greta Gerwig.  I'm sure I missed  a few.

I usually only list screenplay credit but in this case I think it's important to see how many hands were involved in writing this film.  Wes Anderson takes the screenwriting credit.  But the story is credited to Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Kunichi Norma.  That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

  The running time is 101 minutes.

1983 - CHRISTINE, the possessed car horror film

Christine is an adaption of Stephen King's story of a classic car owned by a high school student which just happens to be possessed by an evil spirit or something.  The film is yet another variation of King's favorite theme possessed stuff.  In King's world, houses are possessed, dead pets are possessed, husbands are possessed, clowns are possessed etc.  John Carpenter was approached to direct this film and apparently it was just a job of work for him.  Not that he didn't bring his usual skill to the story but it sure seems like he didn't have much interest in it.

For a horror film nothing really happens for about an hour.  The viewer sits through a lot of plot about a nerd high school kid played by future director Keith Gordon who restores the possessed vintage  57 Plymouth.  The car then decides to go out on it's own to kill the mean high school shop boys who have been harassing him.   The nerd kid improbably gains confidence and starts dating the hot transfer student played by Alexandra Paul.  Alexandra Paul made a few movies but she is primarily remembered for running down a beach in a swimsuit in the TV series Baywatch.   I suppose it needs to be said that the mean high school shop boys don't exactly look like boys in this film, I would say they were probably pushing their early twenties.  Hollywood just can't get that high school age thing right in these teenager movies.

 

John Carpenter staged a few decent car kills particularity one where the car is on fire and chases one of the bad kids.  However the climax where a bulldozer battles Christine is anticlimactic.  It's just a scene where a bulldozer drives over the car for about ten minutes.

 

When you stop and think about it the premise of this film is a little lame.  It you want to make a film about the horrors of high school, just the basic situation of kids getting picked on by bullies should be enough to build a story around.   You don't need an evil vintage car to drive the point home.

The film was written by Bill Phillips, the running time is 110 minutes.

1958 - THE LAW AND JAKE WADE, disappointing but okay western

Considering the talent in front and behind the camera, this should have been a much better western.  Reformed bad guy turned sheriff Robert Taylor rides into another town to free his bank robber buddy Richard Widmark playing another psycho killer.    Taylor has seemed to forget the Widmark is a real bad guy,  Widmark takes Taylor prisoner along with Taylor's girlfriend.  The girlfriend seems a rather improbable plot device to get a woman into what is essentially an all male story.  They all set out for an abandoned ghost town to get the loot from the last robbery they pulled together.  It all ends predictably of course.

What this story has going for it is on location shooting in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, California This is a favorite place of the director John Sturges.  Sturges has also staged some decent gunfights and encounters with some Native Americans in a ghost town.  Sturges was at his peak as one of the best action directors in Hollywood.

The chief culprit in this film is the writer William Bowers whose best films were spoofs of the western genre in films like Support Your Local Sheriff and The Sheepman, Bowers seems a little out of his element scripting a film that is more a western action drama than a comedy.  Interesting enough Bowers played a Senator in The Godfather Part II.

 

John Sturges is a couple of years away from his masterpieces, The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, but his talent is very evident even in a rather tired western story like this one.  The film does have nice photography courtesy of old pro Robert Surtees.

The running time is a quick 88 minutes

1962 - ADVICE AND CONSENT, dated political drama but very entertaining

One of the better Otto Preminger films and he doesn't have a lot of good ones.  Advice and Consent is set in early 1960's Washington DC.  The story comes out of the President's desire to appoint a liberal to the Secretary of State position.  This starts a whole series of political maneuverings between the Democratic and Republican Senate.  Back in the 1960's being a "Liberal" was code for Communist.  Of course in today's political climate you could replace the word liberal with "immigrant."  

Henry Fonda is the Secretary of State candidate who seems to good to be true.  Walter Pidgeon is the Senate Majority Leader charged with getting him approved by the Senate. Charles Laughton (in his final performance before his death) plays a clever Republican Southern Senator out to defeat the nomination.  Actually the whole film is fairly well cast and it includes one of Preminger's favorite actors Burgess Meredith in a small role.

The film certainly has it's dated aspects particularly in it's treatment of as it was called back then homosexuality.  Preminger was a noted liberal but in the scenes set in a gay bar, there is certainly a large amount of sensationalized leering going on.

 

Preminger was also what was called an independent producer who for the most part kept complete control over his productions.  In fact Burgess Meredith has mentioned that between camera setups Preminger would be at his desk issuing paychecks for the cast and crew.  Preminger liked to shoot on location as much as possible so we get lots of vintage shots of 1960's Washington D.C.  He also liked to employ long extended takes.  For this film veteran cinematographer Sam Leavitt executed them with a high degree of skill considering on location photography isn't always the easiest thing to photograph.  At times Advice and Consent has the look of a documentary.  

 

Advice and Consent is a good political film which holds the viewer's interest with all the shenanigans that the senators have going on.  Does it portray a true picture of Washington D.C?  Probably not but it is a very entertaining political drama

Written by veteran screenwriter Wendell Mayes, the running time is 138 minutes.

1962 - THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, a film version of the famout Irish play

Written in the 1900's by Irish playwright John Millington Synge.  The Playboy of the Western World is in generally considered one of the highlights of the Irish theater.  In 1962 the director Brian Desmond Hurst released an adaption of the play that was filmed on location in Ireland with Irish actors.

The play is considered sort of a tragic comedy.  One night a mysterious stranger shows up at an Irish pub claiming that he killed his father after an argument.  If you think he is going to be turned into the authorities, guess again.  He becomes a hero to the village and has all the women of the village sighing over him particularly a strong willed woman named Pegeen Mike who wants to marry him.  Since this is a comedy, it turns out the father called " Da" is not dead after all.  He shows up looking for his son with the end result of shattering the Irish village's illusions about him.

 

Well the technical credits on this film are impressive.  Brian Desmond Hurst was a talented producer/director.  The cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth went on to film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cabaret and Murder on the Orient Express to name just a few. The actor Siobhán McKenna was an award winning performer.  Amusingly the titular character "Christy Mahon,"  the playboy was played by the actor Gary Raymond who I chiefly remember from Ray Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts where he gets killed by a seven headed Hydra monster.

 

So what's the problem with this film?  Well the Irish brogue and dialog are so thick that I had to turn on the subtitles to understand what was going on and thank god the disc had subtitles.  Even with the subtitles a viewer would probably have to stay very alert to the story.  Still there is no arguing that the dialog in the film has an incredible lyrical quality to it.  At times it is very pleasing to the ears.

The film was written by Brian Desmond Hurst and Roland Kibee, the running time is 100 minutes.