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.

1994 - THE LEGEND OF THE DRUNKEN MASTER aka DRUNKEN MASTER II

 Jackie Chan's sequel to Drunken Master was a mixed bag.  It has two splendid fight sequences, some cheap sentimentality and a lot of the silly slapstick humor he seems so fond of.  Yet the film is Jackie Chan in his prime as an athlete.

The story is loosely based on the legend of Wong Fei-hung a famous martial arts expert and physician.  However Jackie Chan has chosen to play him as a guy who can't fight unless he gets really drunk. It's all kind of stupid after a while.  Chan has loaded the film up with his usual stock company.  Chief among them is Anita Mui a legendary cantonese singer who Chan has cast as his stepmother of all people. 

The film was directed by Lau Kar-leung who was a martial arts choreographer and director.  Apparently he and Jackie Chan had a lot of disagreements during the making of the film but it's clear from the final form of the film Jackie Chan was calling most of the shots behind the camera.

 

A key film in the Jackie Chan filmography, the film does have some amazing martial arts scenes. 

The film was written by Edward Tang, Tong Man-ming and Yuen Chieh-chi it runs 102 minutes.

1984 - DUNE, alternate edition redux

This is a fascinating film floating around the internet.  Someone took the deleted scenes from David Lynch's failed science fiction epic, reedited them and supposedly following Lynch's original script put them in the proper context.  The end result is a much more coherent and frankly more interesting and entertaining adaptation of the Frank Herbert book than the recently released 2021 version.

Lynch's film version of Dune was considered a critical and commercial disaster.  Lynch had to deal with studio interference and a lot of pressure to make a Christmas release.  Clearly Universal Studios was looking for a Star Wars type of film but by hiring the idiosyncratic Lynch instead of a more conventional filmmaker they really should have known better.

 

This film has impressive set design and probably one of the most incredible casts ever assembled for a science fiction film.  Herbert's book was a long slog but in reality the story is actually rather simple to follow.  In this version some of the characters are really something to see.  Kenneth McMillian is Baron  Vladimir Harkonnen the chief bad guy who floats around in some sort of flying suit and has disgusting puss pouring out of his face.  The singer Sting shows up as one of Harkonnen's family who is presented  almost as a psychotic running around in what looks like a futuristic diaper.  Sian Phillips, Francesca Annis and Silvana Mangano are members of some mysterious group called the Bene Gesserit a group of mysterious psychic women dressed in black with bald heads.  And so it goes, after all this is a David Lynch film.

 

I doubt that we will ever have a definitive David Lynch version of Dune, but this film reedit is very good.  Lynch wrote the screenplay.  The released version of the original studio cut was 139 minutes.  This alternate version runs close to three hours.

1964 - THE TRAIN, excellent action film from Burt Lancaster and John Frankenheimer

Usually considered one of the last black and white photographed action films, The Train is an exciting story with all of the action sequences staged with real trains and hardware. Amazingly, Burt Lancaster at 51 years old is still doing his own stunts.

Frankenheimer took over the direction of the film from Arthur Penn who Lancaster always something of a "director killer" had fired.  Frankenheimer and Lancaster had worked together before, so Frankenheimer knew what he was getting into.  Apparently the film was made with a lot of input from Lancaster who didn't have a problem throwing his power around on this production.

 

The Train was originally going to be a story about uneducated Frenchmen attempting to stop the Nazis from stealing the national art treasures of France.  Why would men who probably had never stepped in a museum even care about art?   Well we will never see that version of this film.  Frankenheimer and Lancaster reconfigured the script and turned it into an action epic and the action is pretty amazing.  Real trains crash into each other, a train yard is bombed, just incredible stuff.

 

 Lancaster and Frankenheimer put together an amazing cast of French actors, people who had been associated with filmmakers like Francois Truffaut and Jean Renoir, Michel Simon, Suzanne Flon Albert Rémy and Jeanne Moreau.  This is an impressive action film.

The credited screenplay is by Franklin Coen, Frank Davis and Walter Bernstein.  The runs 133 minutes.

2017 - VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS, a large scale science fiction film

A very expensive science fiction film from the writer/director Luc Besson.  The film did not really find favor with the critcs and audiences stayed away basically bankrupting Besson's production company.

I don't really understand why the film flopped.  It seems better to me that the recent Star Wars films and the action scenes and special effects are very good.  I think the problem may have been in the casting with the two leads Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne who don't seem to have any type of chemistry between them, their love scenes are very stilted.

 

The film certainly has an eccentric cast, Rihanna, Ethan Hawke, the voice of John Goodman and Herbie Hancock.  

 

I enjoyed the film, I liked the world building, enjoyed the story line and was impressed with the visuals.

Running time, 137 minutes.

1992 - THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS - 11th remake of this story

Michael Mann known for his crime thrillers dusts off James Fenimore Cooper's story for another shot.  This time with more "open minded" attitudes about Native Americans the film seems to have a little more depth to it.  Anyway we meet Daniel Day Lewis who is constantly on the run thoroughout the film.  For a while this got to be a big joke with stand-up comedians.  Lewis is Cooper's famous character Natty Bumpo a man with a lot of alias's (Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and the Deerslayer).  The setting is the French/Indian war in American which ran about eight years I believe.  Bumpo is off to save the lives of two daughters of a British Colonel, of course he falls in love with one of them.

Daniel Day Lewis is the epitome of the movie star with his handsome looks and his clearly pumped up body.  His love interest is Madeline Stowe playing Cora Munro and their love scenes are bathed in either amber light of soft misty water from a waterfall. No question they are a very good looking couple.  There is also a sort of secondary love story between Natty Bumpo's adopted Native American brother Uncas who clearly is attracted to Cora Munro's sister Alice.  But nobody paid their money to watch a couple of supporting players fall in love, so their scenes are given pretty short shrift.

 

The battle scenes are quite exciting as is to be expected from Michael Mann.  The film was shot in North Carolina on some spectacular forest locations.  The soundtrack is epic and the photography from Dante Spinotti is excellent.

 

The film is very entertaining if a little to violent at times.  Christopher Crowe and Michael Mann wrote the screenplay the film runs either 112 minutes or 117 minutes or 114 minutes due to Michael Mann's tendency to constantly reedit his films after they are finished.

1970 - WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH, the 2nd film in Hammer's prehistoric trilogy.

 A followup to the Raquel Welch/Ray Harryhausen film One Million Years B.C..

The film has excellent stop motion dinosaur special effects from Jim Danforth who also did the matte paintings and for want of a better phrase "eye popping" views of model Victoria Verdi.  

The director and screenwriter Val Guest who also seemed game for trying out something different has cooked up a story from J. G. Ballard and he has crammed so much action into it that the fact that the cast can only speak in monosyllabic words doesn't distract from the happenings one single bit.

 

I doubt that Victoria Verdi was ever much of an actress since I see a credit for her in that classic film Invasion of the Bee Girls. But nobody at Hammer hired her because they saw her on the stage performing Hedda Gabler.

 

The film was shot on location in the Canary Islands which from the looks of it probably isn't much of a vacation spot.  

 

The film made money for Hammer studios and was followed by Creatures the World Forgot, which was a real step down from the two previous films.

The running time is 100 minutes.  96 minutes in the U.S. because the frontal nudity was cut out.

2013 - THE LONE RANGER, another revisionist western

 Somewhere in this mess of a movie is a decent film trying to get out.   White guy Johnny Depp, apparently wanting to add another off beat character to his resume is Tonto.  Disgraced actor Armie  Hammer is The Lone Ranger.  The white horse Silver does make an appearance and there are silver bullets involved.  That's about it for the legend of The Lone Ranger.

The film has so many subplots and for want of a better word, stuff going on that after a while it is almost impossible to track what is going on and who is doing what to whom.

The film wants to be a comedy, then takes a turn as a violent western almost like Peckinpah.  At some point the film is about the plight of the Native Americans and how they are victimized by the United States Army.  Then the film decides it wants to go down some sort of supernatural story line with The Lone Ranger and Tonto having visions about their futures. Moving along we have a plot involving the building of the transcontinental railroad and finally there is a love story between The Lone Ranger and his late brother's wife.

 

Obviously the screenplay is really the chief problem here.  There are at least three writers (Jusine Haythe, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio), that I know about involved in this mess and I would suspect probably more that I don't know about.  

I'm a little surprised this film is so messed up.  The producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the director Gore Verbinski are experienced commercial filmmakers.  It 's hard to believe they didn't see the problems with this film.

 

Anything to recommend it?  Well the action scenes are generally well done.  The film has some nice scenery of the Southwestern United States and it's fun to hear the William Tell Overture played over the action climax.

Running time an incredible 149 minutes.  I guarantee there will be no sequels to this film.