1981 - CONDORMAN, another mediocre live action Disney film

My survey of live action Disney films continues with this "thing."  Condorman was an attempt by the Disney Studio to up their game with a bigger budget and better behind the camera talent.  In this case stunt arranger Remy Julian was responsible for the chase scenes and Henry Mancini did the music and it looks like a lot of the film was actually shot in Europe instead of Disney's back lot.

The cast is certainly a bizarre one.  British actor and singer Michael Crawford plays an American (?) comic book artist called Woody Wilkins. Wilkins helps the CIA  smuggle a Russian defector played by Nicaraguan actor Barbara Carrera out of the Soviet Union.  Apparently there were no Eastern European performers available to play the femme fatale so the production cast someone from South America.  James Hampton is Crawford's friend he's about the most relaxed person in the film.  But talk about really weird, I never thought I would see British actor Oliver Reed as the chief bad guy in a Disney film.

 

Condorman is James Bond lite for most part.  Crawford has a series of Bondian gadgets to use against the bad guys and Barbara Carrera was supposed to supply the sexy "Bond girl" stuff for this film.  However this is a Disney film and be assured that Carrera did not trot out her sensual girl spy persona, in fact she's actually kind of a nothing character

 

In spite of the presence of Remy Julian smashing cars up and down a mountain and even with the larger than usual budget, this is still a very lame film.  You know you're in trouble when the best part of the film is the credit sequence.  A constant theme that runs throughout these live action Disney films are the very poor scripts that got approved.  Condorman is no exception to the substandard screenplay rule of these films.

The film was written by Marc Stirdivant and not very well.  The running time is 90 minutes.  I suppose indiscriminate children might enjoy this film with all of the silly comedy and stunts although I kind of doubt it.

1973 - LOST HORIZON, fascinating musical remake of the Capra classic

Remaking Lost Horizon as a musical was a pretty gutsy move that was probably doomed to fail.  As usual with this decade in film musicals those singing sensations Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann were hired to perform the songs from the original Bacharach/David score which was typical of the anyone can be in a musical attitude of Hollywood that included non singer musical stars such as Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, Burt Reynolds and Cybil Sheppard.

When you think about it a little bit, the philosophy of better living in Shangri-La is naive and insulting.  The whole idea that just being nice to each other will solve everyone's problems  is a little ridiculous.  Even when Capra's version came out, the world was a very complicated place, naive sentiments rarely help solve the world's problems.  The valley ruled over by the grand lama of  Shanrgi-La is really a dictatorship run by a religious elite, hardly the Disneyland the film is trying to sell to the audience.

But, getting back to the film.  Lost Horizon probably had a fighting chance as a remake, but the songs really killed it.  Burt Bacharach and Hal David really outdid themselves with one horrible song after the other. Apparently no one bothered to actually listen to the score before they filmed their songs.

Finch and Ullmann's singing voices were dubbed for their duets and soliloquy's.  You think  Liv Ullmann in particular would have been about the last person to show up in a musical especially after  her performance in Face to Face, but there she is merrily skipping and singing with her little Asian school children to the song "The World Is A Circle,"  it's almost as disturbing as watching her performance as the creepy mute in Persona.

A sign that the film was probably destined for trouble was the producer Ross Hunter's brilliant idea to reuse the castle set from that other musical disaster Camelot as the monastery Shangri-La, that should have been a big omen.

150 minutes, written by Larry Kramer.