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 them to endure in 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 film  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 musicals that financially crashed and burned the studio yet again.

The running time is 174 minutes.

1933 - THE KEYHOLE, comedy/drama about marriage.

 1930's actress Kaye Johnson was pretty hot stuff for a few years before she became box office poison.  Johnson plays a married woman who falls in love with a private eye played by the rather stiff actor George Brent.  Brent’s been sent to spy on her to make sure she's not cheating on her husband.  Well that's about it for a plot for this film.

Really there isn't much to say about this film.  It has a comedic subplot involving actors Allen Jennings and everyone's favorite 1930's tough broad Glenda Farrell which isn't particularly funny. It does eat up the running time so we don't have to endure much of the Kaye Johnson/George Brent romance.

 

If there is anything that stands out about this film it's the involvement of Michael Curtiz one of the best Hollywood directors of the 1930's and 40's.  Curtiz keeps thing moving along at top speed and occasionally sticks in an interesting camera angle but that's about it.  Curtiz got a lot of the big film projects at Warner Brothers studio but he was a contract director and frequently get stuck directing stuff like this.  Sometimes Curtiz could make these kinds of films interesting but the screenplay was already old stuff even in 1933.

 

The film was written by Robert Presnell Sr,  the running time is a quick 69 minutes.

2012 - LOOPER, very entertaining time travel thriller.

 The writer/director Rian Johnson is a very clever fellow.  Lately he's been concentrating on mysteries involving his character Benoit Blanc a apparently gay upscale private detective.  Looper was Johnson's third film and it was a combination of a science fiction time travel story and a thriller. 

The plot involves a criminal organization with a time machine who use it to send people they want killed back in time.  After the victim arrives in the past a hit man is waiting to kill him which will in effect erase him from existing in the future.  One of the hit men  played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt awaits his next victim who when he arrives back in time turns out to be his older self played by Bruce Willis.  Willis manages to escape being killed by his younger self and as they say let the fun of this elaborate plot begin.

 

Joseph Gordon Lewis is very good as the younger assassin trying to sort out this time travel paradox mess.  Bruce Willis is Bruce Willis as usual apparently his motivation in this film was hie ten million dollar paycheck.  There is a subplot involving Emily Blunt playing a mother with a son who has powerful if undeveloped  telekinetic powers that eventually figures into the plot as well.

 

Rian Johnson's inspiration for this story probably was Brian DePalms's Carrie, the very clever Spanish thriller Timecrimes and Shane Carruth's Primer one of the most complicated time travel films I have ever seen.  If I have a criticism of this film it's mostly because it turns into another tiresome Bruce Willis Die Hard type shoot-em up.  Was this in the screenplay?  Did Bruce Willis insist on a large scale action scene as was usually the case with his films?  Anyway annoying as the Bruce Willis bloodbath is it is it doesn't ruin the film.

The film was a financial success and led to Rian Johnson's next film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the only one of the recent trilogy that was any good.  Looper is a very good commercial entertainment that doesn't insult the audience's intelligence for a change.

The running time for Looper is 118 minutes.

1996 - SPACE TRUCKERS, the return of the B-movie science fiction film

With his tongue and everything else firmly in cheek, the director Stuart Gordon films a B-movie space adventure film on a rather low but decent budget. However Gordon was a smart enough guy to add some humor to this funny and frequently dumb story.

Dennis Hopper is an independent space ship truck driver.  After dropping off a load of square pigs, (you read that right), he gets involved with a plot to take over the planet Earth with killer robots.  Along the way Hopper picks up some passengers, space station waitress Debbie Mazer and co-pilot Stephen Dorff.  A measure of the silliness of this film is that Hopper, Mazer and Dorff play a lot of scenes in their underwear for no real reason.  Hopper and his companions take on space pirates, killer robots and the evil C.E.O. of a company with plans to take over the world.

 

Well to put it mildly the critics did not get the jokes in this film or Gordon's clearly affectionate send up of old space movies like The Day The Sky Exploded,  Rocketship X-M, Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere, Lost Planet Airmen and Phantom from Space, to name a few.

 

Truth be told the film does kind of run out of gas towards the end but the good humor of the cast which is in on the joke does keep things amusing at the end.

The film was written by Ted Mann, the running time is 95 minutes.

1980 - THE MIROR CRACK'D, nice and boring Agatha Christie mystery

 The producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin go to the well once again with another Agatha Christie adaptation.  They had considerable financial success with Murder On The Orient Express starring Albert Finny as Hercule Poirot.  Their follow up was Death on the Nile another Hercule Poirot film made money but considerably less than Murder On The Orient Express.  Probably looking for a break from Poirot mysteries the producers hired director Guy Hanilton to film The Mirror Crack'd with Agatha Christie's other popular detective character Jane Marple.

 

At times the producers seemed like they were thumbing their noses up at the mystery. The cast was a real collection of Hollywood has beens. Elizabeth Taylor played an aging film star, Rock Hudson played her husband a hack film director. Kim Novak was cast as Taylor's movie star nemesis and Tony Curtis was the producer of a film that is being shot in Jane Marple's home town, this is an amazing cast of past their prime performers. 

 

Many scenes in the film featured Taylor and Novak trading quips about aging Hollywood movie stars. The film they are making appears to be about the life of Mary Queen of Scots a woman who died at the age of 44.  Taylor at the time was 48 but looked about 60 with years of partying finally starting to catch up with her.  The cameraman must have had his hands full photographing her.  I suspect Agatha Christie would have not been real thrilled by the changes made in her novel.  Angela Lansbury played Jane Marple a character she basically rehashed for her Jessica Fletcher character in her TV series Murder She Wrote.

 

Well anyway we see Miss Marple go through all the expected motions as she solves a couple of murders relating to the movie company.  Guy Hamilton's direction is competent enough. He was always a decent craftsman if not an "auteur" film maker.  The photography is nice and pretty and if you are in the mood to watch a bunch of has been actors hamming it up this film is as good a time killer as any.

The film was written by Jonathan Hales and Barry Sandler, the running time is 105 minutes.

2000 - BOILER ROOM, is Wall Street light

A fairly decent rehash of Oliver Stone's Wall Street with some plot points borrowed from David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.  This is the usual "money corrupts" story line as a clever young stockbroker cheats and swindles his way to making a fortune.  Come to think of it this is also the plot of The Wolf of Wall Street although Boiler Room came first.

Giovanni Ribisi is the up and coming stock broker working for a firm which is in reality just a place to screw clients over by selling them worthless "penny stocks."  At first he is okay with this operation but gradually his conscience begins to get the better of him and he eventually becomes an informer for the FBI in order to bring the company down.

 

The film has a few interesting characters of note, Vin Diesel is a sort of crooked stock broker with a sort of guilty conscience. Ben Affleck shows up occasionally channeling the Alec Baldwin character from Glengarry Glen Ross.  Ron Rifkin is Ribisi's Federal Judge father who gets dragged into his son's schemes. Of course because there has to be a woman in a story like this, Nia Long is the office secretary who becomes involved with Ribisi and adds absolutely nothing to this story.

For all the plagiarizing from other films Boiler Room is fairly entertaining mainly due to the performances of Giovanni Ribisi and Ron Rifkin.  I'm not sure why Ben Affleck is in this film?  His over the top performance contributes nothing to the story, it's just a silly show off role which is in the film for no particular reason but gives Affleck a chance to mug his way through his few scenes.

The film was written by Ben Younger.  The running time is 120 minutes.

1973 - SCORPIO, more mediocrity from Michael Winner

For a guy who didn't make very good movies, Michael Winner was an amazingly prolific filmmaker.  Scorpio is typical of Winner's skill behind a camera.  The film is loaded up with a couple of good leading men, Burt Lancaster and Alain Delon.  There is also a decent supporting cast with old stalwarts like Paul Scofield (what's he doing in this?), Gaye Hunnitcutt, Vladek Sheybal, John Colicos and J.D. Cannon.  The film however is nothing you haven't seen on television a million times.

Delon is Scorpio a hired killer for the CIA who has been ordered by them to kill his mentor played by Burt Lancaster.  Lancaster is suspected of being a double agent, so he's got to go apparently.  So begins a game of "cat and mouse" as Lancaster the old pro takes on Delon the cold blooded killer.  The film's plot is basically a rehash of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, one of those who's doing what to whom spy stories.

 

About the only reason to watch this is Burt Lancaster who was 60 years old at the time they made this and still running around doing his own stunts during an elaborate shoot out.  Try as much as he could a big French star like Delon could never get a Hollywood career going, for some reason,  Scorpio is just another failed attempt.

 

Scorpio has the usual Michael Winner touches.   On location filming to the point of viewer distraction. The sound in almost every scene has a weird hollowness  to it. The staging and photographing of the action scenes are conceived from about every uninteresting camera angle he can think of.  The whole film has that "let's just get this thing done" feel to it which isn't the greatest way to approach film making.

Scorptio was written by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson, the running time is 114 tedious minutes.

1983 - AN ENGLISHMAN ABROAD, a sidebar in British history

You have to know something about Great Britain in the 1930's, Cambridge and the Soviet Union's espionage efforts in Britain to appreciate this fascinating little film.  It seems during the 1930's the Soviets were able to recruit a group of disaffected upper class Cambridge students into spying on their own country.  As the years went by these students managed to make their way into the British intelligence service and in one case Buckingham palace.  None of them were exposed until the CIA broke a code naming them as Soviet agents.  Instead of being arrested by the authorities three of them managed to defect to Moscow.   It was a major scandal for British Intelligence who had managed to keep the exact circumstances of their spying secret from the public for years.

Jumping ahead a few years later. A touring company of actors went to Moscow to perform Hamlet as part of a cultural exchange program.  While there one of the defectors Guy Burgess approached Coral Browne one of the performers in Hamlet.  Burgess was looking for a favor.  It seemed he wanted Browne to get in contact with his old tailor in London and have the tailor make and send him a new and proper English three piece suit.  From this story, the director John Schlesinger and the writer Alan Bennett have dramatized Browne's encounter with the now ex-spy and ex-Englishman, Burgess.

 

The cast is a relatively small one with Alan Bates as the traitor Guy Burgess and Coral Browne playing herself.  Although supposedly a committed socialist and communist, Burgess is still a very proper Englishman.  The film is a clever and amusing look at a man now exiled from the country he grew up and lived in and the reality of his drab life in Moscow.  

 

This is one of the director John Schlesinger's better latter day efforts in his career after a series of less than interesting films.  When Schlesinger was on his game nobody was better at getting good performances out of his cast and filming interesting stories.  An Englishman Abroad turned out to be an excellent film about the English character and mentality.  Definitely worth a look.

The running time is 60 minutes. 

1978 - FINGERS, well it's certainly unusual

For a while in the 70's and 80's,  James Toback was a hot screenwriter.  Toback wrote The Gambler which got a lot of favorable reviews from the critics. As is usually the case, Toback moved into direction with as they like to say "mixed results."  Fingers certainly fits that description.

The film is about a concert pianist hopeful who is getting ready for an audition at Carnegie Hall.   The pianist is played by Harvey Keitel in a very intense performance.  It's safe to say he out acts Robert DeNiro's Taxi Driver weirdo character Travis Bikel .  Anyway as a favor to his father who is some kind of gangster the Keitel character is also a debt collector when his father's customers don't pay their loans back and he's a very violent debt collector at that.

 

 

In addition to all of that stuff,  Keitel is pretty good at getting sex out of women.  He screws a very young Tanya Roberts in the women's restroom in a kind of repellent scene.  However his chief obsession is with an artist played by the actor Tisa Farrow (sister of Mia).  The Farrow character is also involved with a character played by Jim Brown named Dreems.   In this film women in general appear to be attracted to Jim Brown's character and Brown pays them back by bashing their heads together in a brutal scene.  Toback must have been channeling  Brown's real life issues with women,  Brown at the time had a very extensive history of domestic violence.  

It's hard to know what to make of this film.  Frankly there are so many strange and pointless story lines The whole thing just comes off as a confusing mess, or make that a violent and confusing mess.  Keitel really doesn't seem like the concert pianist type although there is no denying he really gives it his all portraying this very strange protagonist. 

 

I'm impressed James Toback was able to raise the money for this film because as a main stream film it certainly wasn't going to appeal to the public.  Toback himself is what people call an "interesting character."  He is a Harvard graduate, summa cum laude (highest honors) and as of December of 2022 he was charged with the sexual abuse of 38 women.

Fingers runs 89 minutes and as they say no one probably wished it a minute longer.

2003 - SARABAND, Ingmar Bergman's final film.

At 84 years old Ingmar Bergman comes out of retirement and writes and directs this father /daughter drama and photographs it with a high definition video camera hardly the work of an old fuddy duddy.  In the supplemental content on the DVD, Bergman a man in his mid 80's is quite alert and spry.  In fact he looks better than Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann playing two of the four leads in this film.

Saraband has been called a sequel to Scenes From a Marriage but that's probably pushing it a bit.  True Josephson and Ullmann  are playing Johan and Marianne the names of their characters from Scenes From a Marriage but they don't really seem to act like the same people from that film.   Johan and Marianne are more observers than active participants in  this film.  But I suppose having two of his closest collaborators was important to Bergman for this film.

 

Saraband is basically focused on Johan's son Henrik and Henrik's daughter Karin.  Henrik is mentoring Karin on the cello in order for her to get a scholarship to a music academy.  However Henrik seems to have what they call an unhealthy interest in his daughter.  Henrik is also one of those tormented Bergman characters who you would probably call a loser.

 

This is a good Bergman film and I don't think anyone needs to make apologizes for Bergman's age.  Bergman was always good at portraying his characters thoughts, desires and insecurities throughout his career and this film is no exception.  There is also a prevailing feeling of death throughout the film which I suppose is not surprising coming from Bergman at this point in his life.  Saraband is an interesting and good film to wrap up his impressive film career.

Written by Ingmar Bergman, the running time is 112 minutes.

1991 - SHOWDOWN IN LITTLE TOKYO, so be it.

 Junk is junk and it doesn't get much more junky than this film.  The director Mark L Lester had made the amusing B-movie Commando with Arnold Schwarzenegger knocking heads, shooting people and cracking one liners like a Las Vegas comedian as he tried to save his daughter.  If it were possible to make a movie that was even dopier than Commando, it would probably turn out to be something like this thing.  Showdown in Little Tokyo has the poor man's Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren as the action star.

Dolph's your typical big city detective who doesn't follow the rules and doesn't want a partner.  Of course all the tropes are going to be carefully observed.  His boss sticks him with Brandon Lee, (son of Bruce) as a cop and Asian American who doesn't like Asian culture.  For some reason Swedish born Dolph does embrace the oriental world.  He has a collection of samurai swords and lives in a Dojo.  What they have in common is that they are both a couple of kick-ass martial arts guys who don't mind beating the stuffing out of any bad Asian gangster who gets in their way.

Let's go to the recap.  Dolph and Brandon are on the trail of a really bad Asian guy.  You know he is bad because when they capture one of his henchmen the guy breaks his own neck rather than inform on his boss. The big bad guy called Yoshida is so bad he kills the owner of a nightclub which he takes over and turns it into a perverted restaurant which probably doesn't even have takeout.  Naked women lay on tables while their bodies are used as nude placements. This is where his gang eats sushi off of the naked women placemats   Into this evilness comes Dolph and Brandon who rescue the lead singer played by Tia Carrera, 24 years old when she made this film.  She becomes Dolph's love interest and there's lots of nudity between the two of them, although close inspection reveals they are using a body double for Tia.  

 

It all comes down to a big duel with samurai swords between Dolph and the evil Yoshida, but there's really no question how this will all turn out.  I guess the best you can say about this film is that the action pieces are fairly well staged although I've seen them done better in other films.  Dolph has his shirt off a lot and he has sure been hitting the weight room at the YMCA.  Sadly Brandon Lee died young which was unfortunate.  He projects a winning personality and probably would have went far in the B-movie action genre.

 

The film was written by Stephen Glantz and Caliope Brattlestreet.  The running time is 79 minutes, apparently the studio took the film away from Mark L. Lester and significantly reedited it.

1956 - THE SEARCHERS - on the big screen.

John Ford's The Searchers is back in a new restoration and making the rounds at revival theaters.  This was probably John Ford's best film since The Quiet Man and probably his last masterpiece.

Ford certainly had his high and low points during the 1950's but with this film he finally had his best story in years,  Ford as was his custom loaded up the cast with a lot of his favorite actors, the famous John Ford stock company as it was called.  Ford also had John Wayne as the lead.  Ford and Wayne had been working together since Ford's silent film days.

 

Just as important as the cast was Ford's film crew.  Winton C. Hoch wsa a master technicolor cameraman who had worked on and off with Ford.  At times Hoch and Ford had a fairly stormy relationship since Hoch was a perfectionist when it came to cinematography but the results were certainly worth it.  Writing the screenplay was Frank S. Nugent who had worked with Ford starting in the 1940's.  Most importantly was the producer Meriam C. Cooper who found the property, raised the money for the production and brought Ford into it.  What all these men had in common was their ability to deal with the cantankerous and a times abusive director. not always an easy task.

 

Ford filmed much of The Searchers in Monument Valley Arizona a location he was very familiar with.  By this time in his career he knew every place that would feature the best locations while filming.  The on location photography is certainly spectacular. 

Although The Searchers is a western, the themes of racism, the treatment of Native Americans and miscegenation are present in the film.  In one of the only times in his career John Wayne  played a racist.  This was fairly tough stuff for the 1950's.  In many ways The Searchers was a career peak for John Ford who probably should have retired after this film but continued to work into the 1960's

The Searchers is not a perfect film but it is a great one. The running time is 119 minutes.

1995 - LOVE IN THE TIME OF TWILIGHT, a love story among other things

A big favorite of this blog, Tsui Hark films a love story/fantasy/comedy/ghost story/time travel film.  Hark mashes together about every film genre he can think of.  The main plot seems to be a love story about a young couple who can't stand each other but will eventually fall in love in the future.

 How do we know this?  Nicky Wu plays a bank teller named Kong who meets a woman who is a member of the Peking Opera.  The woman is Charlie Yan playing a character named Yan-Yan.  Early in the film Kong is killed during a bank robbery but comes back as a ghost who needs Yan-Yan to help him relive the last two weeks of his life so he can prevent getting killed. Since this is a Tsui Hark film, this is just the jumping off point for him and this story.

The film has a crazy time travel plot which probablaly puts any of that Back to the Future time travel stuff to shame.  Hark also indulges in some weird low brow humor involving toilets and vomiting.  The sets are colorful and the actors appear to enter into the spirit of this nutty story.

 

Needless to say Hark brings that dynamic and sometimes overly dynamic style of his to this film.  This is yet another entertaining film from the master director who appears to be having fun orchestrating all this chaos

The running time is 103 minutes the writers were Sharon Hui and Tsui Hark

1944 - MADEMOISELLE FIFI, producer Val Lewton's World War II propgranda films.

You weren't a Hollywood studio or producer worth your salt if you didn't crank out a propaganda film or two during World War II.  One of the oddest propaganda films to come out of RKO studios was from classy low budget horror movie producer Val Lewton.

Rather than kicking out another Allies vs the Nazis film with actors like Erroll Flynn, Humphrey Bogart and especially John Wayne.  Lewton and his director Robert Wise chose to film something a little more subtle.  Using the same source material as John Ford and his writer Dudley Nichols used for Stagecoach, Mademoiselle Fifi has a group of people with different backgrounds all riding a stagecoach.  In this case the stagecoach happens to be in France during the late 1800's when it was occupied by Prussians aka Germans.

The cast is a group of character actors which I can assure you no one has ever heard from.  John Emery (Rocketship X-M, The Girl Can't Help It), Kurt Kreuger (Sahara, Unfaithfully Yours) and Alan Napier ( Alfred in the original Batman TV series) to name a few.  Probably the biggest name in the cast was French actress Simone Simon who had a very spotty career in Hollywood in the 30's and 40's before she returned to France.  Simone Simon is remembered for her role as Irena in The Cat People.

 

Mademoiselle Fifi is essentially a rather talky drama about the role the French people had in dealing with the Prussian invaders occupying their county.  Simone Simon plays the only character who has the guts to stand up to the Prussians.  The film is very obviously a not so subtle comparison of  the Nazi occupation of France in the late 1940's.

 

The film is interesting especially if you are a fan of Val Lewton's films.  The dialog is literate and Robert Wise does a fairly good job making this very talkative script cinematic. Val Lewton always aimed for something a little more different than the regular movie stuff that Hollywood spit out during the 1940's.

The film was written by Josef Mischel and Peter Ruric although Lewton probably had his hands in it as well.  The running time is a brisk 69 minutes.