1957 - HELL DRIVERS, the world of macho British truck drivers

Stanley Baker is an ex-con looking for work.  He ends up getting a job at a company that hauls gravel for a road construction project.  The catch is that the drivers are expected to drive really fast in order to meet their daily quota.  A young Patrick McGoohan is the leader of the truck drivers.  He's a nasty bully and we know this because he always has a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.  Peggy Cummins is the office secretary who knows where all the dirty secrets are buried at the trucking company,  Sean Connery and Gordon Jackson are also in the cast as truck drivers in smaller roles. 

As some critics pointed out at the time this was an unusual film since it was filled with lots of macho posturing and tough action.  Usually British films had a more shall we say refined approach to excitement as in the boring film The Scarlet Pimpernel.  For a change Hell Drivers was a rare film at this time that focused on the lives of the British working class.

The film was directed by a blacklisted American writer/director Cy Enfield.  Enfield relocated to England and filmed some tough crime and action films.  Enfield's big picture was Zulu which he produced with Stanley Baker.

Peggy Cummins had an aborted career in Hollywood after being recast in Forever Amber is in this film to sex it up.  Cummins most memorable film was the classic Gun Crazy.  Perennial British character actor Herbert Lom shows up playing Baker's Italian friend.  Ace cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth shot the exciting driving scenes.  Overall an entertaining action film. This film is dripping with testosterone and mano a mano fighting.  The action is rough and exciting.

The screenplay is by Cy Enfield and John Kruse, the running time is 108 minutes.

1961 - THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND Harryhausen, Verne, et all

Probably my umpteenth viewing of this film and it probably should be my last. I viewed the "making of" feature this time and learned a few things.

Apparently the original story was to going to have the balloonists crash on a "Skull Island" type of place where the characters would fight off prehistoric creatures in order to survive. Had they went down that path, The Mysterious Island would probably have ended up more like King Kong.
 

Harryhausen and his producer Charles H Schneer, hired a talented blacklisted director, Cy Enfield who had lots of input into the story and characters. Enfield was able to realign the story and get it back to its basic Jules Verne adventure roots.

The composer Bernard Herrmann obviously was tuned into this material. Herrmann was working with Hitchcock at the time and he would write scores like Psycho and then switch over to the Harryhausen fantasy films.

The Mysterious Island is one of the better cast and acted Harryhausen films. The characters actually seem like real people for a change instead of the usual human props for the monsters to attack.

When it came to the special effects, Ray Harryhausen was the whole show. Besides animating the monsters, he did the conceptual designs, worked on the miniatures and models and contributed to the optical and matte shots in the film.

101 minutes, written by John Prebble, Daniel B. Ullman and Crane Wilbur.