2024 - SATURDAY NIGHT, lame comedy/drama about the famous TV Show.

Exactly who was this film made for and more importantly who would be going to see it. "Saturday Night Live" the long running late night comedy show is now fifty years old which probably makes its original audience in the seventy to eighty year age range, hardly the hip group of moviegoers the filmmakers were probably hoping to attract to their film

This is a  comedy with small pieces of drama and it's clearly a tribute to Lorne Michaels who at 80 years old is still running the show and to think they complained about Trump and Biden"s ages during the election.  I don't think this film is an especially positive treatment of Michaels who I understand was a pretty cool character under pressure.  The young Michaels looks like he is about to crack up dealing with a nervous bunch of NBC executives who are ready to run an old episode of The Johnny Carson show should he fall on his face and  a staff of pothead comedians and writers who are basically a bunch of malcontents.   Did all this stuff really happen?  Well sort of.

The film has been carefully cast with actors impersonating the "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" and the  goofy writing staff.   A standout is the actor Tommy Dewey playing Michael O'Donoghue.   O'Donoghue was probably the biggest misanthrope writer Saturday Night Live had on staff and was responsible for some of it's sickest and funniest skits until he was fired.

Saturday Night wants to say how important the show was to the cultural zeitgeist of the mid 70's but at times it also wants to get serious about the show's treatment of the only black performer Garrett Morris which was almost board line racist in real life.  However that's all brushed away as the film races to the premier of the first show which is treated like it was the second coming of the Ten Commandments.  If the filmmakers really wanted to get serious maybe the could have discussed the misogyny of John Belusi and some of Chevy Chase's less than sterling interactions with the cast. 

The film was written by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, the running time is 109 minues.

1974 - THE TERRORISTS aka RANSOM

Mediocre movie watching continues with this film.  The batting average for good film watching has not been great lately.

In order to get Sean Connery back in the role of James Bond for Diamonds Are Forever, United Artists agreed to several of his demands,  Connery wanted one million dollars for his return and the right to produce three films of his choosing.  Connery didn't have much success with the films he chose, The Terrorists was one of these films.

 

In The Terrorists,  Connery with his Scottish accent and really stretching credibility plays Col. Nils Tahlvik, the head of security for a fictitious Scandinavian country called uncleverly "Scandinavia".  When the British ambassador is kidnapped by terrorists and a plane is hijacked at the same time, Connery has his hands full dealing with both terrorist acts and government ineptitude.  If this sounds like an interesting idea for a plot it sort of is.  Unfortunately the director Casper Wrede and the screenwriter Paul Wheeler can't seem to work up any tension or even interest in these conflicts for that matter.  The film plods along with lots of poor acting and an incredible mishmash of unbelievable English and sort of Swedish accents for a country called "Scandinavia."  

Even the photography by one of the greatest cinematographers in the history of film, Sven Nykvist looks like it was filmed as a TV show, clearly this was just a paycheck for him.  The film sort of has a twist ending and very little action.  The best you can say about this film is it looks like it's on the cold side since this was shot on location in "Scandinavia",  This film is just about a complete waste of time even for Sean Connery die hards.

The running time is 94 minutes.

1990 - UNDECLARED WAR, disappointing action film from Ringo Lam

 Undeclared War is a big disappointment from Hong Kong action director Ringo Lam.  The plot has something to do with a world terrorist organization trying to destroy an international conference of nations, seen that one before.  The film has the American and Hong Kong police joining forces to stop the terrorists.

The Hong Kong cop is played by Danny Lee his girlfriend is Rosamund Kwan who has shown up in some Jackie Chan and Tsui Hark films.  They deliver a lot of their dialog in English for the benefit of the American cop and  American audience and do fairly well with it although at times it's a little shaky.  I don't know how many times Danny Lee has played a Hong Kong cop but it seems like every time I see him in a film that's the character he seems to be stuck with.

 

The bad guys are played by Olivia Hussey one time star of Romeo and Juliet and Vernon Wells, the "Wez" from The Road Warrior and the chief bad guy in that Schwarzenegger classic Commando.  Olivia Hussey seems completely out of place in this film she should be playing a nun or something in a Zeffirelli film.  Vernon Wells could do these really evil bad guy parts in his sleep by this point in his career and he seems very sleepy in this film.

 

Usually Ringo Lam could rev it up with some great action stuff even in his so-so films but in this case he doesn't seem to have had the inventiveness or energy to rise to the occasion.  It's just one boring gun fight after another.  Even a speedboat chase towards the end of the film is boring.  Undeclared War is a big tiresome letdown  from a usually reliable director

The film was written by Nam Yin, Timothy Lung, Deborah Grant and Louis Roth.  Four writers for a standard action film never a good sign.  The running time is 109 minutes.

1959 - OPERATION AMSTERDAM, is half a decent war movie.

 In 1940 as the Germans began their invasion of Holland,  British Intelligence sends three agents to Amsterdam to obtain all of the industrial diamonds located in the city to keep them out of the hands of the German military.  What we have here is yet another "based on a true story" film for better or worse.

This is a frustrating film.  The first half of the film spends time with the British agents as they attempt to persuade the diamond merchants in Amsterdam to turn their diamonds over to them.  There is la lot of talk and I mean a lot of talk which really drags the film down. 

Finally we get to about the halfway point in the film where the British with the aid of the Dutch underground break into a bank holding the diamonds in a fairly decent heist scene.  The action kicks in with a great shoot out between the Germans and the Dutch.  But you will have had  to sit through a lot of jabbering to get there.

Operation Amsterdam has a lot of on location work in Amsterdam which  gives it a documentary like feel.  The film was an early role for Peter Finch who is really about the only noticeable actor in the cast.  Unfortunately Operation Amsterdam is a missed opportunity to tell an interesting war story but the poor pacing in the first part of the film really hurts the film.

The film was written and directed by Michael McCarthy, the running time is 104 minutes.

1970 - CHISUM, an average if entertaining western film.

Towards the end of John Wayne's film career the "Duke" was basically keeping the traditional western genre film alive by himself after it had died out.  Chisum will never go down as one of the great western films but it entertains in it's weird old fashioned way.  John Wayne was at the icon phase of his long film career and there's no arguing that he had his "John Wayne" character down.

Chisum is set during the Lincoln County War which was an actual range war that was fought over land in New Mexico.  The film does feature a number of iconic characters that were involved.  Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett, Henry Tunsell, Lawrence Murphy and Wayne playing prominent rancher and land owner John Chisum.  As with all these "based on a true story" films the details and actual facts tend to get a little fuzzy. But when did a movie let facts get in the way.  I doubt John Chisum was the straight shooting  patriotic tough guy that Wayne portrayed him as.

 

The film was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen a charter member of this blog.  As I've said before McLaglen had been an assistant director for John Ford, Budd Boetticher and William Wellman so he was definitely familiar with working in the western film genre.  When he moved over to directing,  McLaglen while competent never seemed to have that special touch that a Ford or a Wellman could bring to a  film.  Chisum is fairly typical of his non style. McLaglen gets the job done even if there isn't a whole lot of artistry that he brings to a film.

As with any late period John Wayne film .  It;s loaded up with a lot of his old cronies.  Bruce Cabot, Forrest Tucker, Ben Johnson, Glen Corbett, John Agar and Hank Worden to name a few. These actors would frequently turn up in his 60's and 70's films.  A lot of them were drinking buddies of his.  It's rather comforting to know that these over the hill actors were still getting work thanks to the Duke.

Chisum is what you could call comfort food in movie watching.  There is nothing special about this story or the way it's told but it goes through the motions with it's  familiar fist fights, gun fights and cattle stampedes all of which are strangely entertaining in an odd mellow way. 

The film was written by Andrew J. Fenady, the running time is 111 minutes.

1958 - THE MAGICIAN - another interesting Bergman film.

It's science versus spiritualism, man vs woman, and Ingmar Bergman vs his previous films with a couple of pot shots at the existence of god that are frequently found in a Bergman film.

A near mute Max Von Sydow is the leader of a performance troupe touring Sweden in what appears to be the mid 1800's.  The troupe ends up a village where they are detained and questioned by the authorities particularity a doctor named Vergerus played by another Bergman regular Gunnar Björnstrand.

 

This films entertains because Bergman is such a good filmmaker.  He makes the encounters between the performers and the authorities interesting and at times thought provoking.  Bergman is also good at throwing in a little romance and sex courtesy of yet another one of his regular performers, Bibi Andersson who is always a very welcome addition in a Bergman film.

 

I don't think I would count The Magician as one of Bergman's greatest films like Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night or The Seventh Seal, but it is a very good film. 

Written by Ingmar Bergman, the running time is 107 minutes.

1965 - THE SOUND OF MUSIC, on the big screen

Revisited The Sound of Music at a revival theater on a fairly big screen, a few thoughts.

The film received bad reviews when it was released in 1965, apparently the combination of singing nuns and Nazis was just a little much for the critics to endure for a musical.  The film is incredibly saccharine and at times difficult to stomach.  Julie Andrew's character of Maria frequently grates on the nerves with her goody two shoes personality.  However I doubt any other actress could have played this part.  Christopher Plummer's sly performance as Captain Von Trapp does a lot to take the sting out of all the sentimentality and corniness of the film.

The film was produced and directed by Robert Wise and a production team that was basically the same group that had worked on West Side Story with him.  If anyone deserves credit for the success of this film, it's probably Wise who used just about cinematic trick in the book to put this film over.  Cinematography, editing and the on location filming all contributed to the success of the flm.

 

The screenplay was by a real pro Ernest Lehman,  Lehman had written North By Northwest for Hitchcock and the screenplay for the original version of West Side Story.  Lehman apparently performed some real surgery on the film's book taking out a lot of the real hackneyed stuff.

 

The Sound of Music saved 20th Century Fox Studios after the financial disaster of  Cleopatra.  However Daryl F. Zanuck got it in his head that family musicals were the future of the film business. He went on to greenlight, Hello Dolly, Dr. Doolittle and in particular Star the Julie Andrews musical disaster.  These musicals financially crashed and burned the studio yet again.

The running time is 174 minutes.