1979 - CITY ON FIRE, aka burning people

Why review a film called City on Fire?  Well it's a nostalgic look back to a time in my life when I was younger and forced to watch movies on television which were loaded with lots of commercials.  Well to get to the point, City On Fire was one on the earliest films that got the Mystery Science Theater 3000 comedic voice over treatment. 

MST3K originally aired on a Twin Cities UHF channel KTMA 23.  At the time much of the show's comedy revolved around references to Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Being a resident and younger I found all of this stuff quite funny.  Well the rest is history as they say.  The show got picked up and they were off and running.   Watching the unaltered (original) version of this movie was a chance to see if it was as dumb as it seemed in 1989.  The answer is a resounding yes.  

An extremely disgruntled employee of a large metropolitan city sabotages an oil refinery which ignites a fire that basically consumes the entire city.  Coming to the rescue is a group of television and past their prime actors trying to save the day.

And what a cast.  Henry Fonda in a where's my paycheck role is the fire chief.  Fonda probably shot this film in a couple of days since he never leaves the command center set.  Whoa, Ava Gardner one time screen queen is a television reporter and she's looking mighty rough after years of partying.  Leslie Nielson is the slimy mayor of the city.  Nielson was a Canadian by birth and that's only right because this film was shot in Canada.  Hammy actor Shelly Winters is a nurse.  

Finally there are the supposed leads of this film.  Barry Newman's career started out strong with the cult film Vanishing Point but descended into mediocre made for television films.  He's the lead playing the ER doctor running around saving people's lives.  His leading lady was played by Susan Clark who I swear was in just about every other piece of junk Universal Studios cranked out.  Seeing her in a television show was like visiting an old friend.  Clark actually started her career playing in the classics on the stage.

This post could go on and on but it's safe to say the plot, the dialog and the acting are shall we say not exactly something Harold Pinter would write.  Actually the burning city fire effects are fairy well done for this poor man's version of The Towering Inferno.

It took three writers to put this together,  Jack Hill, Dave Lewis and Céline La Frenière^.  

The running time is 106 minutes.

1979 - CONCORDE AFFAIRE '79 aka The Concorde Affair

Released in the same year as the ridiculous The Concorde... Airport '79.  This film was a typical attempt by the Italian film industry to do what they do best rip off current American films. Basically stealing their plot lines and loading them up with past their prime American performers.   In this case instead of releasing just another crappy rework of an American film this is actually more entertaining than The Concorde... Airport '79, well go figure.

There is a conspiracy by a nameless corporation to sabotage the then fashionable faster than sound Concorde airplane.  They want to sell their own version of that plane by blowing up Concordes apparently. An investigative journalist played by American actor James Franciscus manages to locate the last survivor of  the latest Concorde plan crash played by actor Mimsy Farmer.  (Now there's a woman who had an interesting career).  Well the chase is on as the two of them have to avoid being killed by assassins so they can reveal the truth of these Concorde plane crashes.

 

The film was directed by Ruggero Deodato who in his film career made the very extreme horror film Cannibal Holocaust and one of the craziest science fiction action films ever made Raiders of Atlantis.  Besides Franciscus, Joseph Cotton and Van Johnson show up in the film as is the way with casting in these Italian productions.

 

This is an entertaining action film that zips along at a decent pace and as I indicated at the top of this post is a lot more entertaining and believe it or not more plausible than The Concorde... Airport '79 which frankly wouldn't take all that much. 

The film was written by Ernesto Gastaldi and Renzo Genta, the running time is 96 minutes. 

1979 - ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN aka ISLAND OF MUTATIONS

A horror film as only the Italians could do it.  A survivor of a shipwreck ends up on an uncharted island that just happens to be near the underwater continent of Atlantis.  The island is ruled by a madman who has coerced a mad scientist to breed fish people in order to steal the gold from underwater Atlantis.  Needless to say the mad scientist has a beautiful daughter and somehow a voodoo priestess is mixed up in all of this.

This film borrowed from many other films.  The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Plague of the Zombies, The Island of Dr. Moreau and War Gods From the Deep.  The great thing about this film is that it just doesn't borrow (plagiarize) from all these other films, it takes scenes and situations from them and just bends them into it's own nutty story line.

 

The film stars model/actress Barbara Bach with the emphasis on model when it comes to her performance. The actor Claudio Cassinelli died young while working on another film for this director.  Then there are a couple of washed up English speaking actors, Richard Johnson and Joseph Cotton.  Johnson had acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company performing in Shakespeare but an actor still has to make the house payment.  

 

What can you say about Joseph Cotton?  The star of Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, and The Third Man.  Well Hollywood is not particularly kind to it's older actors.  I guess you take the work where you can get it.

The film was written by Sergio Martino, Sergio Donati and Cesare Frugoni, the running time is 100 minutes.

1979 - ELVIS, made for TV film on the life of Elvis Presley is really long

Probably not a lot of people know that John Carpenter's followup to his slasher film Halloween was this made for television film on the life of Elvis Presley.  Carpenter might have seemed like an odd choice for a film like this but he was a musician and had grown up in the South.  This was also Carpenter's first collaboration with Kurt Russell who was transitioning out of those Disney kid movies and into more mature film roles.

The cast for this film is interesting. Shelly Winters in all her hammy glory has the role Elvis's mother Gladys.  Bing Russell a character actor mostly in westerns and the father of Kurt plays the father.  Season Hubley is Priscilla Presley.  Hubley and Russell must have clicked because in real life they got married, well for a while anyway.  Also another favorite character actor Pat Hingle shows up as the legendary Col. Tom Parker.

 

This version of Presley's life was one of the most popular films on network TV.  It beat out showings of Gone With The Wind and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest on the other networks much to the surprise of everyone.  As a film this was a very respectful tribute to Elvis and left out the more troubling aspects of his life, i.e. his drug use.  The first half of the film is best with Carpenter doing a good job moving the story along.  However Carpenter seemed to lose interest in the second half of the movie.  He appears to be going through the motions to get to the end of the story Elvis's comeback in Las Vegas.  At the time Elvis was called the ultimate Vegas lounge act by the critics.  Even for John Carpenter who worked with tight budgets early in his career, this film must have been an intense production.  He had 30 days to shot what was essentially a three hour film a major challenge for any filmmaker

 

This was an important film for Kurt Russell it gave cred as a film star.  He moved into more adult roles and working with Carpenter again in films like Escape From New York and The Thing toughened him up in the eyes of movie going public.  Elvis isn't really a great film but it does have some decent scenes and Kurt Russell certainly doesn't embarrass himself in the title role.

The film was written by the producer Anthony Lawrence, the running time is a mind bending 168 minutes.

1979 - STALKER, on the big screen

Showing at a revival theater near near me was Tarkovsky's science fiction epic Stalker.  The film is long and very intense visually and story wise.  To recap, Stalker involves the travels of three individuals into an area called The Zone.  The Zone apparently contains a room that will grant the wishes of people that can find it and enter it.  The three men traveling to this mysterious room are the stalker who is the guide through the zone, a writer apparently suffering from writer's block and a professor on a mysterious mission.

The movie is long and probably what would today be called slow moving.  Andrei Tarkovsky the director was a very serious fellow when it came to his art and he approached each of his films with a deliberate approach when it came to making films.  The visual elements in a Tarkovsky film were always carefully planned out.

 

This was a difficult film for Tarkovsky to complete, he apparently had lots of technical issues with film stock and after a year of work the first version of the film was scrapped and was restarted with a revised screenplay.

What's the film about? Well part of it is definitely about having faith in your life although this is a very simple explanation.  The best thing that can be said about Stalker is that it is considered one of the greatest films ever made.  It's certainly a very fascinating and interesting film and was made by a master filmmaker.

The film was written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.  The running time is a daunting 161 minutes. 

1979 - YANKS, disappointing World War II love story

The love story is one of the hardest genres to make a good film out of.  YANKS would appear to have everything going for it.  The film had the then hot actor Richard Gere, Vanessa Redgrave was as usual no slouch in the acting department and John Schlesinger an Englishman of taste would seem the perfect person to direct a story about 1940's England during the war years. 

The film chronicles the romances between three American soldiers during World War II.  Richard Gere is the army cook who falls in love with a local girl who already has a fiance fighting the Germans.  Toothy William Devane get involved with upper class Englishwoman Vanessa Redgrave and Chick Vennera ends up marrying a local British woman. So much for a complicated story line.

An expensive production filmed on location in England.  It has good photography, a large scale cast and impressive production design. If all those things could make a great love story YANKS probably would have been a hit.  As it is the film moves along at a rather slow pace and good if understated acting and direction can't seem to generate any heat to make it a romantic classic,  everything is completely underplayed.

 

The major set piece in the film is a race riot at a dance hall between white and black American soldiers.  While this scene is interesting it  throws the entire picture out of wack.  It's becomes two different films at this point.  In order to teach the white American soldiers a lesson the British women end up dancing with the black soldiers.  However this really doesn't ring true, say what you want but the British are hardly what I would call that open minded when it comes to race relations.

 

YANKS  flopped badly,  John Schlesinger got one more shot at the big time with a dumb comedy called Honky Tonk Freeway which featured a water skiing elephant, another disaster.  That was it for him the A list projects dried up.

The film was written by Colin Welland and Walter Bernstein, the running time is an overlong 141 minutes.

1979 - SUNBURN, features a real life Barbie Doll Farrah Fawcett.

The Farrah Fawcett phenomenon was probably at it's peak with the release of Sunburn a comedy thriller.  Farrah was still billing herself as Farrah Fawcett-Majors until her divorce from actor Lee Majors after which she dropped the "Majors" part of her name.  Farrah was big stuff in the entertainment world for a while during the mid 1970's.  She was a California blonde who looked like a real life Barbie doll.  She had been working in the movie and TV business for a few years performing in bit parts until she hit the big time with the mediocre television show Charlie's Angels.  Not satisfied with being on TV,  Farrah made the jump to movies where she started in a couple of mediocre films, Sunburn being one of them.

Sunburn is a comedy/thriller which has Farrah and her co-stars Charles Grodin and Art Carney attempting to solve the death of a rich guy in Acapulco.  Farrah has been hired by private investigator Grodin to pretend to be his wife. Art Carney is Grodin's associate helping with the case.  Other actors that show up are Joan Collins, William Daniels, Keenan Wynn and Eleanor Parker.  Sunburn was designed to be a showpiece for Farrah but as it turned out Grodin and Carney with their comedy "chops" easily steal the movie away from her.

Farrah wears a number of outfits throughout the film to showcase her looks.  My favorite is a very impractical wet suit that would really be a rubber fetish weirdo's dream.  Farrah ends up helping Grodin and Carney solve the mystery while falling in love with Grodin. 

The film has some lame comedy bits, some shootouts and a car chase.  The director Richard C. Sarafian keeps things moving along but the screenplay really lacks wit and frankly at this point in her career Farrah really wasn't much of a performer.  I suppose the film is of historical importance as it's another case of Hollywood's ability to make a good looking woman into an icon for a while. 

This isn't much of a film,  Alfred Hitchcock was the kind of filmmaker who could do the "beautiful people, beautiful places" films of which this tries to be, when he worked at Paramount.  Hitchcock could bring a lot more style to these kind of comedy thrillers..  The film didn't do anything for Farrah's career and a few years later was appearing in The Cannonball Run.

The film was written by James Booth, John Daly and Stephen Oliver, the running time is 99 minutes. 

1979 - HOME MOVIES, Brian De Palma's home movie

Home Movies is certainly an unusual film to put it mildly.  As has been noted De Palma was teaching a film class at his Alma Matter, Sarah Lawrence college and got it into his head that he would give his students actual hands on filming making experience by producing a low budget film.  De Palma managed to get Kirk Douglas to do an extended cameo playing a film character called "The Mastro," apparently George Lucas invested in the project and De Palma cast his then wife Nancy Allen as what else, a prostitute who is the object of his protagonist's affection in a part played by Keith Gordon one of The Mastro's students.  De Palma regular Gerrit Graham also shows up as Gordon's brother and Allen's fiance.

The film is apparently somewhat autobiographical, Gordon follows his father around as he tries to expose his philandering and De Palma's mother was apparently known for emotional outbursts. Throughout the film Kirk Douglas keeps harping on Gordon to "not be an extra in your own life."  Nancy Allen for some reason has a hand puppet of a bunny which she talks to in a plot device which seems reminiscent of Michael Redgrave's story line in Dead Of Night.

 

Then there's Gerrit Graham who really hams it up as some kind of health food nut who is teaching a course in "Spartanetics" a course on macho manhood.  The title of the course is a not so subtle joke about Kirk Douglas's film Spartacus.  Graham also appears to be playing some kind of repressed homosexual character which probably would not be looked on very kindly today.

If all this sounds sort of funny it's really not.  It's more weird than funny.  The film is probably a must for De Palma's biggest fans.  Not to say the film doesn't have it's moments but they are rather scattered throughout the running time. This is after all a student film made by a bunch of college kids.

The film was written by Kim Ambler, Dana Edelman, Robert Harders, Stephen Le May, Charlie Loventhal and Gloria Norris.  The running time is 90 minutes

1979 - TIME AFTER TIME, deliberately old fashioned fantasy, romance

The writer and director Nicholas Meyer is about three years away from making the best of the Star Trek films, Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn.  He's six years away from contributing to the the time travel Star Trek film,  Star Trek:  The Voyage Home.  Time After Time is almost a warm up for those two films.

The plot has Malcolm McDowell (for once not playing some kind of cinematic psycho character) as H.G. Welles.  In this story, back in 1893 Welles invents a time machine which is stolen by Jack The Ripper who uses it to escape through time into the future.  The time machine automatically returns to Welles who also travels through time to find and stop Jack the Ripper from killing again.

Into this story is woven a love story as Welles meets a woman from the 20th century and has to confront the various challenges of understanding the future age he has traveled into.  It's a clever screenplay.

  

The acting by McDowell and David Warner as Jack The Ripper is tops,  however Mary Steenburgen plays McDowell's love interest and her performance is so low key it almost seems like she is barely awake in her scenes. Actually if there is a criticism to be made about this film it's Nicholas Meyer's direction which could have used a little more energy to it, the film is awfully low key at times.

 

The special effects and the music provided by Miklos Rosza (in his final score) deliberately evoke an old fashioned feel to the film.  All in all Time After Time is an entertaining film, the running time is 112 minutes.

1979 - 1941, attempt at a large scale comedy.

 Obviously the plan was to make a large scale comedy like It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World.  The film's critical failure probably had more to do with the screenplay then Spielberg's direction which in many scenes was quite inventive.

Spielberg by this point in his career could do no wrong, so two studios ponied up money for this very expensive film.  The large cast included John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Robert Stack, Ned Beatty, Tim Matheson and Toshiro Mifune to name a few.  Belushi and Matheson had been in Animal House so I suspect audiences were looking for that kind of irreverent humor.  But if anything Belushi's tiresome slob shtick had gotten very old by this point in his career. The same holds true with Dan Ackroyd.  

1941 was not the huge moneymaker that Spielberg and the studios intended but I believe it did make it's costs back.  The film is an old school production in many ways, with models and miniatures used in the special effects and action scenes.

 

The film appears to have had a profound change on Spielberg's career.  He entered into a period of good but somewhat safe crowd pleasers like Raiders of the Lost Ark.  1941 is an interesting film probably worth taking a look at but it's biggest problem is that it's just not funny.

The screenplay was by Robert Zemeckis, Robert Gale and John Milius, the running time in the extended version is 146 minutes which plays a little better than the theatrical cut of 118 minutes.

1979 - DON GIOVANNI, Mozart's opera on film

 Probably as good a version of a filmed opera as you are going to see anywhere.  The Blu Ray is an excellent transfer and the photography courtesy of Gerry Fisher is absolutely stunning.

 

Be forewarned that this is a 3 hour film.  However the nice thing about the Blu Ray disc is that you can pause it and take as many breaks as you want or need.

The director Joseph Losey has done an excellent job transferring this opera to film.  Amusingly enought he apparently fell asleep while attending a live performance of the opera.

 

It doesn't hurt to have a good filmed version of what is considered to be one of Mozart's greatest operas.

The screenplay was by Losey, Rolf Liebermann, Patricia Losey, Renzo Rossellini, and Frantz Salieri based on the libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music of course.

1979 - THE WARRIORS, on Blu Ray

The Warriors was always sort of a cartoon of a film to begin with. However Walter Hill,  the director decided for the Blu Ray release to make a director's cut of the film.

He didn't add new scenes.  Instead he got the brilliant idea to add comic book panes to many of the scenes.  I suppose this was an attempt to emphasize the graphic/comic art nature of the film.  In any case his need to fool around with his film actually kind of cheapens it.  The comic book pictures just make the film look kind of silly on the Blu Ray.

If possible it's probably best to stick with a DVD of the original cut of the film.  A great film messed up by a filmmaker who should have known better.

93 minutes, written by David Shaber and Walter Hill.

1979 - AN ALMOST PERFECT AFFAIR - pretty poor love story

A love story from a good but very erratic director, Michael Ritchie.  Ritchie has a very up and down list of films.  He would direct good films like Downhill Racer, The Candidate, Smile and The Bad News Bears and then there were the bad films.  Prime Cut, The Golden Child, Fletch Lives and The Island.  An Almost Perfect Affair is one of his bad films.

 

This is a love story set during the Cannes Film Festival.  A self involved independent film maker has a brief affair with the wife of an Italian film producer.  The independent film maker is at Cannes to peddle his dreary little 16mm film on the life of Gary Gilmore.  Through a  completely contrived circumstance he hooks up with an Italian producers wife.  The resulting romance is to put it mildly dull and very boring, Ritchie phoned this one.

The independent film maker is played by Keith Carradine who is essentially playing the same character he played in Altman's Nashville.  The wife is played by Monica Vitti as the usual larger than life Italian stereotype.  Vitti is definitely playing against type in this film.  Usually her best roles were as some angst ridden depressive woman in Antonioni's better films.  It's kind of dispiriting to watch her perform in this silly romantic comedy plus her English is not very good.

About the only fun to be had in this film are the background glimpses of film personalities such as entertainment reporter Rona Barrett, directors Sergio Leone and Paul Mazursky and actors George Peppard, Brooke Shields and Farrah Fawcett.  But these little cameos can't save this uninteresting film.

93 minutes, written by Walter Bernstein and Don Petersen.

1979 - CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO, Miyazaki's first feature.

Hayao Miyazaki, made the transition to features with this film based on an animated character named Arsene Lupin, a thief.  This was the second feature film featuring Lupin and it's an exciting action film.  

Miyazaki has taken stock action characters, the thief with a heart of gold, the evil Count, the bumbling police inspector and the innocent blonde girl in danger and somehow managed to make them work in a story about counterfeiters operating out of a castle with a dungeon no less.

The animation technique may look outdated and let's face it the characters are very cartoonish looking at times but Miyazaki turns these liabilities into  assets.  The pace of this film is so fast and the action scenes integrated into the plot are so well done,  a viewer will probably not be bothered by the rather primitive look that pervades the film at times.

Action movie directors could learn a thing or two about making these kinds of movies studying Castle of Cagliostro a few times

100 minutes, written by Haruya Yamazaki and Miyazaki.

1979 - THE BLACK HOLE, good looking science fiction film

Disney's attempt to grab some of the Star Wars money came up short.  The Black Hole has impressive special effects and production design like Star Wars.  It also had some of the worst aspects of that series, comical robots and lots of laser blasts. 

Disney also kind of blew it with their cast.  There was nothing particularly wrong with hiring Anthony Perkins, Ernest Borgnine, Yvette Mimieux, Robert Forrester, Timothy Bottoms and Maximilian Schell as a retread Captain Nemo character. However casting a bunch of middle aged actors wasn't going to seem very hip and cool to the targeted teenage audience.

The story was also very derivative as well.  The original Star Wars film may have borrowed from about every film that George Lucas could think of (Triumph of the Will, The Searchers etc) but at least he was able to steal and reuse ideas from those films in sort of clever ways.  The Black Hole's problem was that it was stealing ideas from Star Wars, so you had a situation where a film was stealing ideas from a film that had stolen ideas from other films.

Still the film looks good and has enough action and special effects to pass the time.  The robot battles are pretty lame with some very stiff robots shooting it out with our space heroes.  The comical robot V.I.N.C.E.N.T. gets all the good lines in the film and was voiced by Roddy McDowell who for some reason didn't receive any screen credit.  The voice of the robot B.O.B. was Slim Pickens in probably the only real clever joke in the film.

Written by  Gerry Day and Jeb Rosebrook the running time is 98 minutes.

1979 - NORTH SEA HIJACK or FFOLKES or ASSAULT FORCE

North Sea Hijack or whatever it's called is a real old school film.  The director Andrew V, McLaglen was an old TV director who ended up being John Wayne's go to guy towards the end of his film career.  Roger Moore, James Mason and Anthony Perkins were products of the old studio system and the whole production had a distinctly old fashioned feeling to it.

The film is actually kind of entertaining.   Anthony Perkins is the head of a gang attempting to extort money from the British government by threatening to blow up a couple of their North Sea oil platforms.  Roger Moore is the leader of a group of commandos assigned to stop them. 

Roger Moore is playing against his usual suave leading man type i.e. James Bond.  He's supposed to be an eccentric misogynist who only loves cats however Roger really doesn't have the acting chops to make that kind of character likable much less credible.

 

Andrew McLaglen shoots the film like every other film he's worked on, straightforward and with no imagination.  He barely gets the job done but he does get it done.

100 minutes, written by Jack Davis.

1979 - MOONRAKER, Bond in space

As some critic exclaimed at the time when Star Wars made a bunch of money,  it was inevitable the Bond producers would do a James Bond in space film.  Moonraker is Outer Space Bond, it's also a remake of You Only Live Twice, The Spy Who Loved Me and pieces of scenes lifted from about every other Bond film, a disjointed sloppy mess.  

Roger Moore is really walking through this film.  Even he can't seem to work up a lot of energy in this one.  The lead Bond girl isn't really much of a girl.  Lois Chiles is hopeless as an actor but I guess she fit the bill as an attractive age appropriate love interest for Moore.  The producer brought back the character "Jaws" for this film but they had to turn him into a good guy who helps Bond this time box office demands being what they were. 

Moonraker is a film that essentially just bumbles along from one action set piece to another, a boat chase, another boat chase, a fight, another fight, another fight, battle in space a la Star War the list is kind of endless.

However, Moonraker has a few things to keep a person watching.  The amazing skydiving fight scene done with real stunt men is very cool.  Ken Adam's sets particularly towards the end of the film with the space station and the Moonraker base.  The special effects by Derek Meddings are at a very high standard.  Music by John Barry.  Overall the production has that glossy expensive look that the producer Albert Broccoli brought to all of the Bond films there was never any cheapskate sets or locations while he was producing.

For all the work that went into the film, its too bad it wasn't just a little better.

126 minutes written by Christopher Wood.