1962 - TARAS BULBA macho Cossack stuff

Yul Brynner is Cossack tough guy Taras Bulba who along with his son Tony Curtis plan to kick the Poles out of the Ukrainian steppes.  Instead Curtis falls in love with vapid German actor Christine Kaufmann playing a polish princess.  Curtis turns against Yul and decides to fight for the Poles which pisses Yul off.

This is a large scale action adventure epic filmed in Argentina of course.  The film may be the final word in macho posturing performed on a large scale budget.  We have guys lifting horses, riding off of cliffs, getting whipped and lots of guys on horses waving swords in the air. About the only thing they don't do is eat nails for breakfast.

Films like this aren't really directed by anyone, the technicians pretty much run the show.  The 2nd unit directors stage the action and the stuntmen and special effects guys do their thing.  The fact that Yul Brynner can even make an impression is sort of impressive.  Pretty boy Tony Curtis and Christine Kaufmann are completely hopeless as the young lovers.

Tarus Bulba is fun to watch just to see the sheer number of people used in the large scale fight and riding scenes.  Towards the end the film ventures into Monty Python silliness with the immortal "bring out your dead" and burning witches as the stake scenes.

 The macho nonsense gets a little tiring after a while.

122 minutes.

1961 - THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, big budget, big stars, Alister Maclean story.

This film was another in a series of big budget all star cast films from the late 50's and early 1960's.  These types of films were usually war films with basically "everything but the kitchen sink." thrown into them. Lots of action and other stuff going on to keep the audience engaged.

Carl Foreman was the producer and writer.  Foreman was a blacklisted screenwriter, a quasi liberal hack at best.  Probably his most notable writing credits were for High Noon and Bridge on the River Kwai.  Kwai's director David Lean always felt that Foreman contributed next to nothing to that film.  For The Guns of Navarone, Foreman put together a screenplay that kept the basic plot of the Maclean novel with the usual additions of a completely unnecessary love story and some hokey dialog about "the futility of war" right before everyone starts getting shot or blown up.  Foreman also switched directors during the production firing Alexander Mackendrick and replacing him with a competent studio man,  J. Lee Thompson. 

For a big budget production The Guns of Navarone is kind of a shoddy looking film.  The model and miniature work can be pretty poor at times and the climbing scenes up the face of the cliff look extremely phony. But overall the action scenes are fairly well done and the score by Dimitri Tiomkin adds a lot to the film.

Probably the best thing in the film is the cast.  Gregory Peck is the fearless leader of the saboteurs and if Peck was always kind of a stiff he at least had some screen presence.  David Niven pretty much steals the film with his sly performance.  Anthony Quinn was always a larger than life presence in movies and he is relatively restrained for him.  The singer James Darrin shows up as a sop to the teenage crowd and the rest of the cast is made of up the usual bunch of British actors that were frequently trotted out to appear in war movies, Stanley Baker, James Robinson Justice, Anthony Quayle and Richard Harris.

Rather oddly,  Greek actress Irene Papas who usually showed up in films like Electra, The Trojan Women and Antigone is one of the resistance fighters I suppose actors specializing in Greek tragedies have to eat as well.

158 minutes.