1966 - TARZAN AND THE VALLEY OF GOLD, another entertaining Tarzan film.

Probably time to take a break from the ape man after this Tarzan film.  Once again the producer Sy Weintraub shoots a film on location, in this case Mexico.  Weintraub made some major tweeks to the Tarzan character this time.  It's been pointed out that Tarzan is now acting more like James Bond then the jungle ape man created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.  There is also a really annoying 1960's jazz score to have to put up with.

 

Weintraub also had a new actor playing Tarzan, former NFL football player Mike Henry who is needless to say is in very good shape and in these Tarzan movies these actors don't wear a whole lot of clothes.  With the exception of character actor David Opatoshu playing the chief bad guy like he was Auric Goldfinger and model/actress Nancy Kovack, the rest of the cast and the film crew were Mexicans.

The film is an entertaining action adventure. Tarzan travels to Mexico to save a young Mexican boy from an evil bad guy. The bad guy wants the boy to lead him to his jungle city which is loaded with gold.  Fortunately Tarzan is on the case and the film has lots of action.  The final part of the film was photographed at the magnificent Teotihuacan pyramids, nothing beats on location filming.

Mike Henry as Tarzan isn't much of an actor but then again he doesn't have to be.  Viewers watching this film and especially adolescent boys are here for the action highlights not Shakespearean soliloquies.  This Tarzan movie has Tarzan with his animal friends, a chimp named Dinky and a lion named Major helping out.  Apparently Mike Henry and Dinky didn't get along to well, Dinky ended up biting Henry which resulted in him getting stitches.  Henry ended up suing the producers for creating an unsafe work environment.

The film was written by Clair Huffaker who was frequently associated with John Wayne movies and other western films.  The running time is 90 entertaining minutes.

1966 - FANTASTIC VOYAGE, dated but fascinating science fiction film

Two years before Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released, a film that upped the game when it came to showing special effects in the movies, came this bizarre, fascinating and unique film.  It seems that the United States and the Soviet Union (although they are never called that), have developed a process of miniaturization.  They cane shrink a person or even an army down to the size of atoms.  The process only lasts one hour and wouldn't you know it the only scientist who knows how to make the process longer has been the victim of an assassination attempt which has put him in a coma.

The plan is to shrink a group of scientists and insert them into his body, where they will repair the damage and get out before they start to enlarge.  So begins our film.  The story is certainly on the rather ludicrous side but is it any more stupid than the ridiculous Twisters that is currently in the theaters?

20th Century Fox really didn't spare any expensive in the making of this film.   The sets were built on a fairly lavish scale.  The very cool looking shrunken submarine "Proteus" was designed by Harper Goff who had designed the Nautilus for Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

 The film actually has a fairly decent cast of Hollywood mainstays, Stephen Boyd is the secret agent assigned to the mission to make sure there is no sabotage good idea to bring him along.  Raquel Welch in one of her first mainstream films is the medical assistant to Arthur Kennedy playing a surgeon.  Arthur O'Connell  and Edmund O' Brien are the military guys in charge of the mission.  They are basically around to provide exposition and shout out orders.  Also on the team is Donald Pleasence an expert on the human body, watch out for him everyone.

 

Richard Fleischer who was kind of the house director for 20th Century Fox was behind the camera and I would guess this film was a big technical challenge at the time it was made.  Fleischer always seemed to get the difficult films at Fox.  He notably had to straighten out the big scale production of Tora Tora Tora after Kurosawa was fired from that film.  Truth be told the special effects don't really look that great but I guess they get the job done.  Apparently the film did make money.

Fantastic Voyage was written by Harry Kleiner a reliable mainstream screenwriter, the running time is 100 minutes.

1966 - GAMBIT, a heist comedy

Gambit is a comedic variation on the famous Jules Dassin film Rififi.  In that film we meet a group of professional criminals who plan and execute a jewelry store heist with almost military precision.  In fact the heist runs about 30 minutes.  Rififi is considered a classic in the crime thriller genre, while not a classic on the level of Rififi, Gambiit is a clever and at times very funny spin on the Rififi heist idea.

The film stars Michael Caine in one of his early roles as the would be master criminal.  Shirley MacClaine is his chattering accomplice who just won't stop talking.  Herbert Lom is the rich guy they intend to steal a priceless statue from.  Even though this film is almost 60 years old it's best not to reveal to many of the entertaining plot details or spoilers.

 

The director was Ronald Neame who was a solid professional behind the camera.  He had originally worked with the mercurial David Lean as a cinematographer .  From there he worked himself up in the British film industry as a producer, screenwriter and finally director.  He was a no nonsense kind of a guy, always very well organized and prepared when on a film set.

 

 Neame had a long career in the film industry and is chiefly remembered as the guy who got a film out of what was apparently a disorganized mess of a production called The Poseidon Adventure.  Neame also directed Judy Garland in her final film, Garland was at this time in her career, difficult to work with.  Neame was a battle scared veteran of the film business.  Gambit must have seemed like a vacation.

The film has an excellent screenplay by Alvin Sargant and Jack Davis,  the running time is 109 minutes.

1966 - WHO WANTS TO KILL JESSIE?, crazy sci-fi/fantasy from Czechoslovakia

This screwball film from Czechoslovakia has to be seen to be believed.  The wife of a scientist has invented a device that can make a person's dreams come true.  She uses it on her husband while he is asleep and out comes a blonde bombshell named Jessie who is the featured character in a comic book series he has been reading called "Who Wants to Kill Jessie?".  Along with the blonde, a couple of her antagonists also materialize, a strongman and his henchman who is dressed as a cowboy.  The comedic situations arise when people in the real world have to deal with imaginary comic book characters who continue to act like they are in a comic book story.

The film is full of sight gags and slapstick.  The two comic book bad guys chase after Jessie all through the city.  They create havoc where ever they go, and their are many scenes of stuff getting destroyed.  The comic book characters don't actually speak in the real world.  They communicate with dialog balloons and everyone eventually reacts to this as it is completely normal thing.

 

The film is short and sweet, it sets up it's comic situation and then milks it for some laughs without overdoing it.  A funny and very weird film.

 

Co-written by the director Václav Vorlíček along with Miloš Macourek.  The running time is 81 minutes.

1966 -THE GOLDEN BAT, comic book Japanese stuff

It's easy to sneer at this film.  The bad special effects, the goofy subtitles, the laughable villain and finally our weird superhero The Golden Bat.

The Golden Bat looks like it was primarily made for kids because as an adult I was a little embarrassed to be watching it.  The plot has something to do with an evil guy known as "The Ruler of the Universe," out to destroy the world.  To the rescue comes superhero The Golden Bat, who has one evil laugh when he's taking on the bad guys.

 

Sonny Chiba, who I knew as "The Street Fighter" in that very violent series is a heroic scientist who is working with The Golden Bat to save the planet earth.

 

That's enough on this film.  One can laugh at this goofy stuff, but is it that much different than the crap D.C. and Marvel are subjecting the audiences to these days?  Silly superhero junk is still junk regardless of when it was made.

The running time is a brisk 73 minutes, the film was written by Susumu Takaku.

1966 - THE TIME TUNNEL, RENDEZVOUS WITH YESTERDAY, pilot episode for the series

 One of the greatest "12 year old boy" TV shows of the mid 1960's The Time Tunnel was a series created by producer Irwin Allen, which had a couple of scientists traveling through time meeting various historical personalities and having lots of improbable adventures.  The pilot for the series Rendezvous With Yesterday has all of the good and bad traits of an Irwin Allen production.

To begin with the actual set of The Time Tunnel, the tunnel itself is very cool.  The models and miniature work for the secret base called "Operation Tic Toc," in the pilot were up to a very high standard.  Irwin Allen also cast the show with lots of character actors such as Whit Bissell, Robert Colbert, James Darren and Lee Meriwether because there always has to be a woman in a TV series.  Allen also didn't skimp on the guest stars for the pilot episode, Gary Merrill, Michael Rennie and Susan Hampshire appear.  The pilot has the two scientists traveling back to the Titanic before it sank and trying to persuade the captain to avoid the infamous iceberg that the ship hit.  It's a decent enough story for the initial episode.

 

The conceit of this series was that Irwin Allen was able to use stock footage from the 20th Century studios vault as the scientists traveled through different times.  In this way he was able to give the series a rather epic look while not spending a whole lot of money.  In the case of Rendezvous With Yesterday, it's clear Allen was using stock footage from the 1953 film Titanic.

However the real star of this series was always the Time Tunnel set itself.  Sitting in front of their control panels the cast playing scientists rattles off lots of ridiculous science talk jargon involving the "image area, radiation baths," and other silly time travel mumble jumbo.  All of this is highly entertaining.

 

As the series went on Irwin Allen's propensity to start incorporating cheaper production values and lazy storytelling finally started to catch up with the series. Some of the later episodes are truely awful.  The series only lasted one season but amazingly filmed 30 episodes.

Harold Jack Bloom wrote the script for the pilot episode and the running time is about 53 minutes.

1966 - ONE SPY TOO MANY, hard not to review

What we have here are two episodes of the old Man From U.N.C.L.E., TV series repackaged as a quasi movie.  This was an attempt by MGM to squeeze money out of the then popular spy series as much as possible.  Since it was the 1960's and the height of the spy movie craze, I guess this shouldn't have been a complete surprise that something like this would get released.

Considering that the film was shot on the back lot of the once formidable MGM studios and no one even bothered to edit out the TV transitions, the film is actually entertaining.  Rip Torn amusingly plays an evil industrialist bent on taking over the world with a mind control gas.  Dorothy Provine, who was a very underrated actor and comedian, is his wife trying to obtain a divorce.  Robert Vaughn and David McCallum are the U.N.C.L.E agents assigned to stop Torn by their boss played by Leo G Carroll.  Carroll was an expert at playing the head of secret spy agencies, he had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on a number of films.

 

The film does have that cheap TV look to it but the director Joseph Sargent keeps the plot moving and the writer Dean Hargrove had his tongue firmly in cheek as the story rolls along.

 

One Spy Too Many is at times almost a nostalgia piece for another time and world in movies that has now turned into an age of computer generated images and formula comic book stories.

The running time is 102 minutes.

1966 - THE FIGHTING PRINCE OF DONGEAL, a Disney swashbuckler

 The Disney company films another British based swashbuckler along the lines of their earlier film The Story of Robin Hood.  This film supposedly is based on an actual Irish clan leader, Hugh Roe O'Donnell. As is usually the case, a quick scan of the internet reveals that the real Hugh Roe O'Donnell came to a very different end than the one in the Disney film.

The film is essentially about the British repression of the Irish and O'Donell's attempts to rally the various Irish clans to oppose the British.  The film has fairly decent action and is a typically good production from the Disney British studios.

 

The cast of the film is also fairly decent, Peter McEnery is the "Fighting Prince,"  McEnery wasn't apparently the biggest fan of appearing in Disney movies and was an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company later in his career.  Susan Hampshire is the love interest, she was always a reliable presence in film and television.  Gordan Jackson is the bad guy and he seemed like he was in about every other British film in the 50's and 60's.

 

Anyway the running time is a brisk 110 minutes, the film was written by  Robert Westerby and Robert T. Reilly.

1966 - DUEL AT DIABLO, tough violent western

James Garner is the frontier scout on a mission to find the men who killed and scalped his Native American wife, Sidney Poitier is a former Army Sergent who is now some kind of gunslinger, Bill Travers is the army lieutenant looking to make a name for himself, Dennis Weaver is the racist owner business man looking to make a buck and Bibi Andersson is Weaver's wife who was kidnapped by native American Indians.  That's a strange cast to put it mildly.

Besides the tough violence, the film was noted for Poitier's color blind casting and the odd sight of Ingmar Bergman regular Bibi Andersson showing up in a western of all things.

 

The film wants to make a reasonable statement about the treatment of Native Americans but it basically descends into just another shoot em up western, although a well done shoot em up western.

 

The film was shot on impressive Utah locations, the rather strange score is by Neal Hefti of The Odd Couple fame.

The film was written by Marvin H. Albert and Michael M. Grilikhes the running time is 103 minutes

1966 - A MAN AND A WOMAN, Claude Lelouch's big hit.

Claude Lelouch had a lot riding on this film, his company was near bankruptcy and he had yet to establish himself as a filmmaker.  Working fast, he shot the film in three weeks and allowed only three weeks for editing.  The film switches between black and white and color stock, the budget was that tight.  The end result, a big hit film.

A Man and a Woman is in many ways the ultimate romantic swoon.  The characters are very attractive, Anouk Aimee has a job working on film crews sitting next to the camera doing who knows what, but it looks cool.  Jean-Louis Trintignant is the handsome race car driver so we get a lot of scenes of him zipping around roads and racetracks.  The memorable soundtrack is by Francis Lai and was a big hit.

There's no mistaking this film for The Rules of the Game but the film does seem to be the last word in overblown love stories.  A very entertaining film.

The film was written by Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven the running time is 102 minutes.

1966 - WHERE THE SPIES ARE, another spy film from 1960's

 MGM studios looking to get a piece of the pie of the James Bond spy crazy hired Val Guest to direct this story from a novel by thriller writer Jame Leasor.  

It's all here, the beautiful girls, the spy gadgets, the exotic locations and the usual amount of spy vs spy action.  But Val Guest and his screenwriter have a little more on their mind than just another James Bond rehash.  People in this film actually get hurt and die as opposed to the usual callous disregard for human life found in these films.

The film is well cast with the proper English gentlemen David Niven as the reluctant spy Dr. James Love.  His love interest is played by Françoise Dorléac sister of Catherine Deneuve.  Dorleac's career was just starting to take off when she died in a tragic car accident.

 

Where The Spies Are lacks the frenetic and outlandish action of the James Bond series but a more realistic espionage film is actually a relief to watch in this case.

 

An entertaining 110 minutes.  Val Guest's next challenge was bringing some coherency to the overblown James Bond satire Casino Royale (1967) which he should have been given some kind of special award for.

1966 - ONE MILLION YEARS BC, the dinosaurs and bikini epic

Hammer Studios remake of the rather shoddy original film from the 1940's is an adolescent male fantasy.

The film has some of Ray Harryhausen's best animation work with some great monsters.

The film also was a breakout part for an ungrateful Raquel Welch who apparently didn't want to have anything to do with the film.  Well she still looks great with her cave girl false eyelashes and makeup job.

The film was patronized by the critics when it was released but it is an entertaining "B" movie adventure film.

100 minutes. Written by producer Michael Carreras who has his name all over a lot of these Hammer Films.

1966 - AGENT 505: DEATH TRAP IN BEIRUT - Eurospy stuff part 2

Entertaining if completely forgettable foolishness.  Fredrick Stafford, star of Alfred Hitchcock's dullest film Topaz is the spy who has to save Beirut from being destroyed.  Somehow the chief bad guy has got it in his head that if he destroys Beirut he can take over the world.

Stafford definitely is copying Connery's Bond.  He walks around in a suit knocking off enemy agents without barely breaking a sweat like he was snacking on a bag of peanuts.

The film has some good action sequences and a "boat car" which predates James Bond's submarine Lotus. 

 

There's always a lot of action and shooting of enemy agents going on in these films, but this one has a couple of sequences to lift it out of mediocrity.  An action scene involving a helicopter is extremely well done in particular.  However a big problem with film is Stafford who is as stiff as a board.  The other issue I have with this film is that a lot of the scenes are clearly reworked from previous James Bond films.  Imitation is not always the sincerest form of flattery frequently it's just plain stealing.

93 minutes written by Manfred R. Köhler.

1966 - REQUIEM FOR A SECRET AGENT - Italian Eurospy stuff part 1

During the height of the 60's James Bond film craze almost every studio and production company had to get in on the act.  The movie going audience was assaulted with spy movies in about every language possible.  Almost every major star had to make a spy thriller.  Few of the films actually captured the special qualities of the Sean Connery Bond films but it certainly wasn't for a lack of trying.

Chief among those making these ripoff James Bond films were the Italians.  Their formula seemed to be copy and rework as many scenes from the James Bond movies that they could.  In most cases imitation was not the sincerest form of flattery.  The films had too many girls, too many guns and too many car chases.  The leading men usually had a passing resemblance to Sean Connery.

Requiem for a Secret Agent is a good a place to start with this stuff as any.  The film starred Stewart Granger a one time star in the 1950's particularly at MGM.  The producers also were able to lure one of the James Bond women Daniela Bianchi in to the film as well. 

These films are basically critic proof.  I think it's safe to say they are what they are, cheap and kind of lame reworkings of the James Bond series.  Still the films have shall we say I certain charm to them.  One can't help but admire the blatant recycling of scenes from the better Bond films.  Let's begin the journey.

102 minutes, written by Sergio Donati, Antonio del Amo and Sergio Sollima.

1966 - PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES, not bad Hammer horror film.

A not bad zombie film.  Considering the subject matter, Hammer studios did a very good job producing this film. Acting, direction and production design are at a very high standard.  The story is interesting and doesn't run to long.  

Since the plot involves turning turning dead people into zombies for the purpose of mining coal in Cornwall during the 1800's.  One perceptive critic whose name escapes me, made the point that it would have been easier to just hire people to dig up coal. 

Still the film is entertaining the film has that well photographed look that Hammer brought to their films.   But it's important to remember this is a film about zombies for god sake.

The running time is 90 minutes, the film was written by Peter Bryan.

1966 - AROUND THE WORLD UNDER THE SEA, a retro TV star reunion from the 1960's.

This cheesy underwater drama is from Ivan Tors the man responsible for such TV classics as Flipper and that film classic Zebra in the Kitchen.  The submarine "Hydronaunt" is on a mission to plant sensors on the ocean floor that will alert scientists to the presence of earthquakes.  But really this film is a 60's TV star gathering.  Let's go to the cast:

Lloyd Bridges - star of one of TV's first syndicated shows Sea Hunt.

Brian Kelly -  star of Flipper he played Ranger Ricks.

Marshall Thompson - star of Daktari.

David McCallum - Ilya Kuryakan from The Man From UNCLE.

Gary Merrill - a character actor from the 1950's.

Keenan Wynn -  who had been kicking around the film business since the mid 30's in just about every MGM film I can think of.

Shirley Eaton -  a good looking 60's blonde who appeared in a number of crappy British comedies.  She was hired because she looked good in a bikini.

OK obviously you would have to be in your late 50's or early 60's to remember these actors but these people were all over the TV screen during the 1960's.  This film is a real nostalgia wallow.

110 minutes.

1966 - KISS KISS KILL KILL or KOMISSAR X

Dubbed Eurospy stuff.  The print I saw was so poorly prepared some scenes slipped into German before they switched back to dubbed English very annoying but kind of funny. 

We're deep in the spy movie craze of the 1960's with this Eurospy trash featuring yet another super villain, prototypes for the Austin Power's "fembots" and the world's greatest private eye "Joe Walker" teaming up with a really ripped police captain to stop another evil mastermind from taking over the world.

The action is silly, our hero only has to kiss an evil woman to make her see the light and there are the usual spy gadgets so all is as it is supposed to be in the 1960's spy world.

Seven films were made featuring this Joe Walker private detective guy and the whole series is based on a bunch of novels by an author named Paul Alfred Mueller who wrote an amazing 620 crime novels featuring this character.

92  minutes.

1966 - THE FORTUNE COOKIE, another cynical Billy Wilder comedy.

Billy Wilder comes to the end of his box office run with this contemptuous comedy about a CBS cameraman injured at a football game who decides to sue the NFL for bodily injuries.  Jack Lemmon is the cameraman and Walter Matthau is his shyster attorney "Whiplash Willie"  who is also his brother-in-law.

Jack Lemmon is playing the likable everyman with a touch of corruption in him that Wilder liked to write.  Lemmon could play these kind of roles in his sleep after appearing in films like Days of Wine and Roses, The Apartment, Irma La Douce and How to Murder Your Wife.  However the real star is Walter Matthau as the crooked attorney.  Matthau gets all of the good lines and blusters and overacts all over the place so of course he won and Academy Award for this over the top and obvious performance. 

This was the film that critics began to notice that Wilder's comedy style was getting harsher with characters so nasty they were impossible to even remotely sympathize with.  While most films were being filmed in color in the mid 1960's Wilder perversely shot this film in black and white to give it an ugly look.

In spite of working with his usual writing partner I.A.L. Diamond, The Fortune Cookie's jokes are not really that funny or witty.  Sure it has a few funny situations but for the most part the humor found in a lot of Billy Wilder's older films is missing.   The film also seems to have a rather nasty misogynist streak running through it as well.

125 minutes.