1966 - THE PROFESSIONALS, good cast in good looking film.

A cast of Hollywood veterans during the 1960's and the excellent photography from cinematographer Conrad Hall are two reasons to watch this "lets get together a team and rescue the woman" story. 

The writer/director Richard Brooks has loaded up the story with double crosses, triple crosses and quadruple crosses which make things needlessly complicated.  Also for an action film there is an awful lot of talk.  Fortunately, the film has all these old Hollywood pros to keep your attention even if they aren't exactly stretching themselves. 

Burt Lancaster recycles his Crimson Pirate character again.   Lee Marvin steals scenes with the super cool tough guy character, that he would repeat in Point Blank.  Woody Strode was in a few John Ford films and was always a commanding presence.  Strode was never much of an actor but as a former football player he certainly fit in with this testosterone filled crowd.  Robert Ryan was always an underrated actor and gives the best performance.  Finally, there is Italian actress Claudia Cardinale who is cast as a hot Mexican babe which is usually par for the course when it comes to Hollywood.

The film is at times kind of a slog at close to two hours.  However between the tough desert locations  which were probably no fun to film at and this cast of macho Hollywood male prima donas, Richard Brooks probably had his hands full just getting The Professionals made.

117 minutes.

1982 - WRONG IS RIGHT, amazingly prescient film about the media is amazingly poorly made.

Unfortunately the writer/director Richard Brooks really dropped the ball when it came to filming Wrong Is Right.  He certainly was almost 30 years ahead in his vision of a media obsessed world.  Brooks foresaw reality TV, suicide bombers, middle east oil sheiks, media pop stars, crazy conservative and left wing politicians, and an attack on the World Trade Center by Arabs.   It was almost as if all of these things were too much for one film, the whole thing turned out to be a disaster.

The idea in Wrong Is Right was to combine a political thriller with a satire on the news media using the same model as Network.  Throughout the film the audience gets long winded rants about what is wrong with the media and the United States in general.  But the skill to weave it all together isn't there.  The film is an incoherent mess of ideas and action scenes which finally add up to nothing.

The cast was certainly game starting with Sean Connery as a globe trotting superstar reporter more important than the actual story he is working on.  The rest of the cast is a once in a film bunch of actors featuring, John Saxon, Leslie Nielson, Dean Stockwell, Henry Silva, Hardy Kruger, Katherine Ross and Robert Conrad.  All of them completely wasted.

Richard Brooks was a writer before he was a director and it's hard to believe he would let something  so full of plot contrivances, dead end story points and incoherence scenes get past the script stage, then again he never wrote any comedies much less a film with satire in it.

A big sloppy mess of a movie.

117 minutes.