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Wednesday, June 11, 2008James Batman Release Year: 1966Country: Philippines Starring: Dolphy, Boy Alano, Shirley Moreno, Bella Flores, Diane Balen, Elsa Boufard, Nori Dalisay, Johnny Ysmail Jr., Lyn D'Arce, Jose Morelos, Ben Medina, Joy Del Sol, Tessa Concepcion Writers: Pepito Vera-Perez, Artemio Marquez Director: Artemio Marquez Cinematographer: Amaury Agra Music: Carding Cruz Producer: Jose O. Vera I've mentioned elsewhere that I find the Philippines' Tagalog language pop cinema of the 1960s strikingly similar to Turkish pulp cinema of the same period. The products of both are comparably rough hewn and action oriented and, by necessity of their staggering volume, bear the hallmarks of being churned out at a very brisk pace. Both are also brimming with fanciful costumed heroes, many of which are lifted directly from Western pop culture sources with little or no concern for matters of copyright. Of course, the Filipino's have their own rich comic book history to draw from, and the decade would also see numerous screen adaptations of homegrown superheroes such as Captain Barbell, Lastikman, and Mars Ravelo's Wonder Woman inspired Darna, but audiences at the time were just as likely to be treated to fare along the lines of Batman Fights Dracula or Zoom, Zoom, Superman! Filipino cinema had not always been that way, however. In fact, the previous decade had been what is now considered a golden age for the country's film industry, dominated by a quartet of major studios known as "The Big Four", who turned out relatively lavish prestige productions built around their respective stables of glamorous stars. Financial troubles and the resulting defection of contracted talent started to take their toll on those studios toward the end of the fifties, and by the mid sixties Sampaguita Productions was the last of the Big Four left standing.     And the landscape that Sampaguita found itself a part of was a markedly changed one, made up of dozens of scrappy independent production companies seeking to turn a quick profit by grinding out hastily produced imitations of whatever international product Filipino audiences were paying to see at the moment. This translated primarily into countless indigenous interpretations of the James Bond and Eurospy films (resulting, among others things, in the phenomenally successful and long running Tony Falcon: Agent X-44 series), Spaghetti Westerns. and, of course, the ubiquitous Batman television series and the numerous European costumed capers inspired by it. In this sense, Sampaguita's 1966 production James Batman can be seen as one of the studio's efforts to go with the dollar-chasing flow of this new industry environment. Another tendency in Filipino cinema that is at play in James Batman -- one that, in fact, can still be seen in the industry's current cinematic output -- is a fondness for broad, Mad Magazine-style lampoons of Western pop culture products. It doesn't take a cultural anthropologist to see this as reflecting some ambivalence on the part of the Filipino people regarding the inescapable cultural influence of their former occupiers, but, whatever the case, the result was that, alongside more earnest efforts such as the Agent X-44 films, Pinoy filmmakers were producing an equal number of spoofs along the lines of James Bone, which starred the emaciated comedian Palito as a skeletal superspy.     This particular trend was a boon to one performer born Rodolfo Vera Quizon, who, under the name Dolphy, would go on to become the most beloved screen comedian in the history of Pinoy cinema (such was his popularity at the time of making James Batman that he had recently had the gig of warming up the crowd for The Beatles during the mop-topped ones' ultimately disastrous visit to the islands). After initially rising to fame in the fifties in a series of cross-dressing roles (sure-fire comedic gold in the macho culture of the Philippines), Dolphy had, by the mid-sixties, reinvented himself somewhat in a series of secret agent spoofs such as Dr. Yes, Dolpinger, Genghis Bond: Agent 1-2-3 (all 1965) and Napoleon Doble and the Sexy Six (1966). Dolphy didn't limit himself to parodying the spy genre, and also lampooned comic characters such as Tarzan and Captain Barbell during this period -- and for James Batman combined the two with a dual performance as comedic versions of both James Bond and Batman. What makes James Batman such a strange animal -- aside from the obvious -- is that, in parodying the James Bond films of the mid sixties and the Adam West Batman television series, it's spoofing two things that are already spoofs themselves. On top of that, the film, in addition to delivering lots of very broad slapstick comedy, also strives to function as a proper action film, and as such features quite a lot of fairly soberly staged fight sequences and action set pieces. In fact, by the time we reach the final act, most of the comic antics have been dispensed with, and James Batman plays out its remaining length as a fairly straightforward action melodrama. The result is that the movie gets to have it both ways by presenting Batman and James Bond, as the objects of parody, as cowardly and preening, while still having them go on to perform the daring heroic feats that the audience expected of them.     James Batman's action starts at what is apparently some kind of congress of Asian nations, at which a Fu Manchu-like emissary of the criminal organization CLAW shows up to make extortion demands and threaten nuclear annihilation upon those who would not comply. What was most striking to me about this scene was the CLAW emissary's sidekick, who was played by a very elderly man who looked both disoriented and confused throughout, leading me to speculate that someone's grandfather had been put to work during furlough from the rest home. Anyway, the combined nations decide that the threat from CLAW is so great that the services of both Batman and James Bond are required. An actually kind of funny scene follows in which the movie's distinctly childish and self-regarding versions of both Batman and Bond, who are obviously none too fond of one another, sit before the committee and argue why each of them should be given the job exclusively -- an argument that quickly devolves into each of them shouting "pick me!" at the delegates. One of the perks of the job for Batman is that it will increase his proximity to the chairman's beautiful young daughter, Shirley. Unfortunately, while Shirley is crazy about Batman (exemplified by a shot of her gazing dreamy-eyed at a magazine that confusingly features a photo of Batman and Robin as portrayed by Adam West and Burt Ward), she has no time for Batman's alter ego, Dolpho, despite the insistence of her controlling older sister Delia that Dolpho, with his many millions, is a prime catch. Meanwhile, the members of CLAW -- which include a cloaked figure called Drago, an especially tall and roided-up interpretation of The Penguin, a guy with a spiked ball for a hand, and a masked female called The Black Rose who is clearly derived from the character in Chor Yuen's Cantonese film of the same name -- have learned that Bond, Batman and "Rubin" are on the case, and determine to eliminate them before they interfere with their plans.     In addition to former Sampaguita contract player Dolphy, the cast of James Batman serves as something of a showcase for Sampaguita's house talent at the time. Boy Alano, who plays Rubin, began his acting career at the age of ten, when he co-starred in the 1951 film Roberta, a smash hit that helped rescue the studio from bankruptcy following a fire that consumed a large part of its property. Bella Flores, who plays Delia, had portrayed the female heavy in that same film, and her performance was so iconic that it pretty much doomed her to the type of bad girl roles we see her essaying here. Finally, Shirley Moreno, who plays "Shirley", was a recent discovery whom Sampaguita head Dr. Jose Perez had that year included in a promotional launch of the studio's new faces dubbed "Stars 66". Despite the Spanish surname, the fair-skinned, conspicuously Anglo-looking Moreno serves as a perfect example of the Caucasian standard of feminine beauty that dominated in the Pinoy film industry at the time -- and still does to some extent today. With its simple set-up out of the way, James Batman proceeds along a trajectory not unsimilar to that of most spy films of its era, trotting out a succession of action set pieces based around the villain's serial attempts to pick off our heroes. Only, in this case, those set pieces are punctuated by gag scenes in which, to give a few examples, Batman gets pantsed and produces condiments from his utility belt, and James Bond gets bitten on his bare ass by a rubber centipede. Alano's portrayal of Rubin as somewhat of a cretin also provides the opportunity for some Three Stooges-style rough stuff, since Dolphy/Batman is frequently driven to violence by his idiocy. Elsewhere, the level of the movie's humor can best be summed up by the phrase "boobies... hee hee".     For the most part, Dolphy's scripted dialog is painfully unfunny, but what struck me as I watched James Batman is how he comes across as being a genuinely funny guy despite that. This is conveyed mostly through what appear to be throwaway bits of physical improv -- such as when, as Batman, he follows a pre-crime-fighting snack by casually wiping his hands on Rubin's cape -- and by a genuinely quirky repertoire of mannerisms and physical gestures that make the most of his spindly frame and boney, thin-lipped countenance. I think that what really works for Dolphy is his somewhat sadsack, sour-faced demeanor, an aspect that not only serves to distance him from the goofy obviousness of the humor he's perpetrating, but also provides a contrast to the type of desperate, googly-eyed antics so often seen in cinematic comic relief characters from this period. As mentioned before, Dolphy's portrayals of Bond and Batman veer toward the comically vain and juvenile -- an exercise in broad-stroke subversion that's aided by some equally unsubtle costuming choices. These include Batman/Dolphy's baggy long johns-based costume that continually slips to his knees, and which is adorned with a chest emblem that looks like a female silhouette better suited for a semi's mud flaps. Bond/Dolphy, for his part, is decked out in a stunning plaid three-piece suit with matching Trilby, an ensemble that is really shown to best advantage during a makeout scene that takes place on an identically patterned couch. (Though, to be honest, whether this outfit was actually intended to look ridiculous, or was instead someone's actual idea of high style was unclear to me.) Interestingly, despite being the only character to receive a satirical rechristening, "Rubin" gets to wear a costume that is entirely faithful to that of his inspiration.     Predictably, James Batman looks like it was made for about a dollar, but that doesn't mean that efforts weren't made to make it look as good as possible under the circumstances. Director Artemio Marquez and cinematographer Amaury Agra imbue the film throughout with fluid camera work and imaginative, comic book-influenced compositions, and the many action sequences are generally well staged and shot. Furthermore, the black and white photography serves to some extent to mask the heavy cardboard and construction paper content of the sets, and elements such as the modified Cadillac that serves as the Batmobile actually don't look too bad as long as the camera doesn't dwell on them for too long. Spicing things up further are some interesting location choices, including the operational processing plant in which the climactic battle scene is staged, which looks like it must have presented some very real hazards for the actors involved. James Batman comes to a dramatic head when the CLAW gang, in accordance with their supervillain mandate, kidnap Shirley and abscond with her to their secret headquarters. Bond, Batman and Rubin are close behind, of course, and, with the aid of two undercover agents working within the organization, lay siege to the compound, all the while dodging the deadly cartoon rays shooting from the giant lady fingers that ornament Drago's throne room. All leads to a dramatic reveal of the real brains behind the organization and, ultimately, some stock footage explosions. It's a climax that offers the type of crossover thrills that only a flagrant disregard for international copyrights can guaranty -- and if you're the type of fanboy for whom a fight between James Bond (or, at least, a malnourished-looking, Pacific Islander version of same) and The Penguin represents sheer nirvana, it should seal the deal on whether or not you are going to begin the long grey market search for a murky dub of the film.     Personally -- and much to my surprise, given my expectations going in -- I'm going to come down reservedly on the pro side of the James Batman argument. This is due in part to the fact that, given that the majority of Filipino films from its era have been lost, it is one of the few remaining examples of films of its type. But I also have to say that, despite it being every bit as stupid as I expected it to be, it was still entertaining, and proceeded at a fast enough clip that none of its potential irritants were with me long enough to do much damage. Points are also in order, I feel, for the fact that its humor, no matter how juvenile, really does have a subversive component to it; the underdog lover in me just has to feel a little warm and fuzzy about inhabitants of a downtrodden island nation like the Philippines so gleefully thumbing their noses at institutionalized symbols of Western might like James Bond and Batman. That in doing so they manage to make the voraciously plundering pulp cinema of Turkey seem reverent by comparison is even more impressive. Plus, you know, boobies... hee hee. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Philippines, Espionage, Year: 1966 posted by Todd at 12:04 AM | 1 Comments Friday, April 11, 2008The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Also reviewed: The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang (1966),Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell (1967) Release Year: 1966 Country: Hong Kong Starring: Suet Nei, Law Oi-Seung, Kenneth Tsang Kong, Roy Chiao Hung, David Chow Wing-Kwong, Sek Kin Director: Law Chi Writer: Lau Ling-Fung, Ni Kuang Cinematographer: Chan Kon Producer: Hoh Lai-Lai Availability: But it from YesAsia. Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us In the mid sixties, Hong Kong's Cantonese language film industry, faced with the emerging dominance of the considerably more well-funded and increasingly action-oriented Mandarin language Shaw Brothers Studio--as well as changing audience tastes in a rapidly modernizing society--found itself in need of retooling its output. Melodramas, romances and period martial arts films featuring heroic female swordsmen had been staples of the industry, but it now appeared that films reflecting the cosmopolitan tastes and hyperbolic pace of a more technologically driven age were in order. Of course, nothing celebrated speed, style and technology like the James Bond films, so it only made sense for Cantonese filmmakers to adapt the conventions of those films to their audience and capabilities. Furthermore, since Cantonese cinema was at the time largely driven by female stars--and appealed to a largely female audience--it also made sense that these culturally specific re-imaginings of the Bond film should feature young women as their protagonists. The resulting flood of films, made mostly between 1965 and 1968, left enough of a mark on their country's cinematic landscape to deserve a genre moniker all their own, and have since been retroactively dubbed the "Jane Bond" films by HK film critic Sam Ho. As anyone familiar with the names Cathy Gale or Emma Peel knows, the Jane Bond films didn't invent the idea of the high-kicking contemporary female action hero. Nor did they mark the beginning and end of such figures in Hong Kong cinema. In fact, these films can be seen as a clear precursor to the "Girls With Guns" genre that would become popular in HK during the late eighties and early nineties. But what makes them distinctive both from what came before and what followed is the fact that they were geared toward a predominately female audience and, as a result, presented their female protagonists more as role models than as repositories for male sexual fantasies. For proof of this, one need only compare the relatively chaste and buttoned-down heroine of the typical Jane Bond film to what's on view in the Shaw Brothers' anarchic Temptress of a Thousand Faces, a contemporary film that shares enough of those films' elements to seem like a pointed satire, but whose bawdy masculine sensibility plays out like a prolonged peek up Jane Bond's skirt.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa (1966) One of the earliest examples of the Jane Bond film was Chor Yuen's immensely popular The Black Rose. That 1965 film starred Connie Chan Po-Chu, a young Cantonese Opera-trained actress who would soon become the biggest star in Cantonese cinema. It would follow that Chan would go on to star in a large number of the subsequent Jane Bond films (virtually claiming the fledgling genre as her own with the film Lady Bond), with the slack taken up by Josephine Siao, the star whose popularity most closely approached Chan's. One notable exception to this pattern was a series of films based on the Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa pulp novels by author and prolific Shaw Brothers screenwriter Ni Kuang, which featured as their lead another young star of Cantonese cinema, Suet Nei. While still a star in her own right, Suet Nei was not the object of the type of mania that both Chan and Siao inspired (she was not, for instance, counted among the "Seven Cantonese Princesses", the official pantheon of Cantonese feminine screen royalty of which Chan and Siao were the primary members). She worked primarily in the wuxia genre, and on those occasions when she co-starred in such films with Connie Chan--such as in 1968's Dragon Fortress--she provided an effective counterpoint, projecting a grim, single-minded severity that starkly offset Chan's open-faced, swordsgirl-next-door persona. Though perhaps not quite as agile as some of her peers, her unsmiling intensity gave her a commanding physical presence that belied both her youth and diminutive stature. As such, there's a ruthlessness boiling just beneath the surface of her portrayal of the woman warrior that serves the Muk Lan-fa films well--especially as the series progressed and the producers figured out how to use her to best advantage.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa (1966) Suet Nei's intensity gives the Muk Lan-fa films a drive and consistency that, more than any other element, distinguishes them in a genre that, while prolific, is pretty rigid in its conventions. The Jane Bond films of Connie Chan and Josephine Siao, for instance, are above all else Connie Chan and Josephine Siao films, and as such place those stars' likeability above considerations of narrative or consistent tone--a fact well illustrated by Chan and Siao's readiness to break into a Cantonese version of some American pop hit to a crowd of frugging teens at whatever regular intervals commerce decreed necessary, regardless of the picture's overall mood. In contrast, you will not see Suet Nei singing "Wooly Bully"--or anything else--in any one of the three Muk Lan-fa films. By way of compensation, however, you will get, in place of such jaunty musical interludes, much more of Suet Nei doing what she clearly excels at: scowling and shooting people. This palpable mean streak serves the series well, as the Muk Lan-fa films, especially after the first entry, prove to be among the most ordnance-heavy and prone to wholesale violence of all the Jane Bond films. When I reflect upon these movies, the image that will undoubtedly most frequently come to mind is that of the petite Suet Nei casually grabbing a bazooka from a nearby soldier and summarily dispatching a fleeing evildoer in a hail of flaming shrapnel. The first film in the series, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa, establishes its hero as one based very closely on the template set by The Black Rose. Like the titular heroine of The Black Rose, Muk Lan-fa is a black-clad cat burglar who, with the help of her younger sister (played by Law Oi-Seung), steals from the corrupt rich to give to the poor. The film even goes so far as to have Muk Lan-fa, in a visual echo of The Black Rose's signature rose, leave an orchid ("lan") shaped dart at the scene of her crimes. However, once the police ask Muk Lan-fa to assist them in foiling some criminal interests intent on obtaining a powerful death ray watch, this Robin Hood aspect of her character promptly disappears, never to resurface again in the course of the three films. What emerges--in the case of this first effort--is a sort of a blood-and-guts take on the girl detective story. Both Muk Lan-fa and her sister, Muk Sau-jan, live at home with their mom, a circumstance which, combined with the girlish picture presented by the sisters' prim skirts and matching hair bands, contributes to the initial impression of Muk Lan-fa as either a more two-fisted version of Nancy Drew or one half of a well-armed, distaff Hardy Boys. This attempt to present the heroine as at once a wholesome teen, dutiful daughter and crime fighting badass may have been another attempt to follow the outline of Connie Chan's films--as, apparently, is a scene in which Suet Nei affects some pretty unconvincing male drag.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang (1966) The Jane Bond films, in most cases, were cheap, hastily-made affairs, and The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa is no exception. With its monochrome photography and Spartan sets, the film bears as much similarity to the Republic serials of the forties as it does to the spy films of its era, and while watching it, there are times when it's easy to forget that you're watching a film made in the mid sixties. This, happily, is remedied by the periodic appearance of odd pop art touches, like the comic book-inspired starburst wipes that take us from one scene to the next, and the cropping up here and there of unmistakably mod pieces of fashion and furniture. Another element that anchors The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa firmly in the 1960s is its soundtrack, which is almost entirely pilfered from John Barry's James Bond film scores (mostly Goldfinger, as far as I can tell). Of course, this was a pretty common practice in the Hong Kong film industry at the time--as it was in the film industries of many countries with lax enforcement of international copyrights, for that matter (Turkey and India are offenders who immediately come to mind)--for Barry's themes were such an immediately identifiable shorthand for the Bond franchise's presumed glamour, excitement and sophisticated modernity that appropriating them was an irresistible means for producers of low-budget action films to cost-efficiently hitch their rickety cinematic wagons to 007's supercharged engine. Because of this, not only the Cantonese Jane Bond films of Connie Chan and Josephine Siao, but also many of the Shaw Studios' Mandarin language spy efforts from the time are peppered with stolen pieces of Barry's instrumentals. Still, of all of these films that I've seen, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa makes by far the most profligate use of this music--and most eagerly courts the comparisons that doing so invites, going as far as to use the iconic James Bond theme itself to announce its heroine's entrances and exits. Though a bit rough and undeveloped in comparison to the films that would follow, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa at least serves to introduce us to the players--both behind and in front of the camera--who will be with us throughout the series. In the director's chair is Law Chi--aka Joe Law--who is probably best known to Hong Kong action fans for the 1979 kung fu oddity The Crippled Masters, which went Chang Cheh's The Crippled Avengers one better by featuring actors who were actually missing limbs in the starring roles. More impressive are the names behind Dark Heroine's fight scenes: Liu Chia-Liang and Tong Gai were two of the most innovative forces in Hong Kong action choreography during the sixties and seventies, and here--as in all three Muk Lan-fa films--do double duty, both directing the kinetic girl-on-guy beat downs from behind the camera and being on their receiving end in front of it in the roles of various criminal henchmen (a circumstance that was apparently conducive to romance, since Tong Gai would soon after become Suet Nei's husband). Lastly, in addition to series co-star Law Oi-Seung, Dark Heroine introduces us to police detective Ko Cheung, played in each film by Kenneth Tsang Kong, who in any other of the Jane Bond films would be the heroine's love interest, but who here gets left out in the cold due to the fact that Muk Lan-fa's single-minded pursuit of enemy blood never really allows for any such sparks to catch fire.     Scenes from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang (1966) One actor who did not appear in the following two Muk Lan-fa films, but who deserves mention none-the-less, is Sek Kin. Much like Bollywood's Amrish Puri, who, despite having appeared in hundreds of films in his native India, would be absolutely unknown to Western audiences if not for his appearance as Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Sek Kin's Western Q factor depends entirely on one iconic villain role, that of Han in Enter The Dragon. Much like Puri, Sek-kin built up a mammoth filmography while serving as a sort of in-house Simon Legree for his local film industry, menacing Connie Chan, Josephine Siao and a host of other righteous young heroines in film after film after film. That he was chosen to leer and snigger at Suet Nei in her initial outing as a Jane Bond heroine almost seems like a sort of right of passage for the actress, and the veteran, as usual, does not disappoint. Again like Puri, when Sek Kin is in a picture, there's no risk of you ever losing track of who the bad guy is; all you have to do is follow the twitching pencil mustache. Though The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa and its sequels were clearly made on a very tight schedule (all three were released within a few months of each other, between March of 1966 and March of 1967), this did not prevent the films' producers from making some obvious changes and refinements to the elements of the series as it progressed. In the second film, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang, mom is out of the picture, and the Muk sisters are now on their own, living in a palatial home with all the most stylish modern appointments. In addition to this, Law Oi-Seung's Muk Sau-jan is placed in a somewhat less active role, making Muk Lan-fa more of a lone wolf figure. Both of these changes bring the character of Muk Lan-fa much closer to the rootless and personally unconnected model of the Western espionage hero, whose actions are untethered by deep bonds of family and community, and as such render her considerably more free to explore heightened levels of risk, ruthlessness and mayhem. The filmmakers make the most of this character makeover by infusing Black Dragon Gang with an exponentially increased level of violence, as well as a conspicuous inflation of both the number and size of the armaments on display. While there is always a lot of gun waving going on in the Jane Bond films, when it comes down to settling things, the violence is more often than not in the form of hand-to-hand combat; in this instance, however--despite both the fight choreography talent on hand and the star's obvious gameness and physical ability--it's the automatic weapons (and the bazookas), rather than the fists, that do most of the talking. In this way, Black Dragon Gang, more than any other Jane Bond film that I've seen, places a hard wall between itself and the traditions of honor and chivalry played out in the stately wuxia films from which the genre's stars emerged.     Scenes from Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell (1967) In addition to this turn toward amoral bloodletting, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang abounds with visual evidence of the series' head first dive into the late 20th century. This includes not just the Muk sisters' aforementioned mod inflected digs, but also the distinctly Carnaby Street turn of their wardrobes, exemplified by the subtle substitution of slit-eyed, plastic wrap-around sunglasses for the matching hair bands they wore in the first picture. And the villains themselves, The Black Dragon Gang, are--especially in contrast to the more traditional, suit-wearing goons of the first movie--a walking, breathing embodiment of self consciously campy sixties excess: an army of pompadoured, scooter riding foot soldiers in matching metallic sport coats whose leader is distinguished mainly by the enormous size of his shoulder pads (think David Byrne's giant suit in Stop Making Sense and you'll pretty much get the picture). We meet that leader in classic over-the-top comic book fashion, as he throws darts into a life-sized portrait of Muk Lan-fa, while squirreled away in a space age super villain lair with all the trimmings, including dozens of superfluous control panels with flashing lights, two-way TV screens, secret corridors, hidden sliding doors and high tech booby traps. (Of course, not all of the film's attempts to bring us into the space age are as spirited; witness, for instance, the half-hearted pass at updating the police captain's office by placing a child's toy rocket on his desk.) With its confident direction, brisk pacing, and a performance by Suet Nei that makes the most of her steely-eyed mean girl persona, The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang shows all the signs of the Muk Lan-fa series coming into its own--and, as if in self-congratulatory acknowledgment of that, the film's soundtrack is almost completely free of stolen 007 music. There is also evidence of a somewhat more generous budget this time around, as the climactic battle at the Black Dragon Gang's HQ, stocked with a large number of high-flying and acrobatically dying extras, is pretty spectacular by Cantonese cinema standards. And while it's true that, in turning its back somewhat on the traditional values that inform other films from its genre, it loses some of the charm that still makes many of those films endearing, it can't be denied that it's a cracking entertainment, and comes closest of any Cantonese film I've seen to the more free-wheeling brand of excitement that was increasingly being peddled in the Mandarin language output from the Shaw Brothers' Movie Town.     Scenes from Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell (1967) The third and final film in the Muk Lan-fa series, Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell, doesn't make any essential changes to the formula established in the previous film, but does change the focus somewhat. It seems that there was a decision to feature Law Oi-Seung more prominently, and so we get to see Muk Sau-jan strike out on her own, conducting her own black-clad prowlings and even, at one point, rescuing the captive Muk Lan-fa and Ko Cheung from the villain's clutches. Despite her heroism, Muk Sau-jan is presented as a bit of a comic bumbler, and her prominence here seems to give rise to some whimsical touches, such as a last minute escape from a high-rise using an umbrella as a parachute and a cliffhanger in the office of an evil, eye-patch wearing dentist. Law Oi-Seung is a plenty appealing actress in her own right, with her own arsenal of distinctive quirks, so none of this takes away from the film's entertainment value--but coming to this film from The Dark Heroine Muk Lan-fa Shattered the Black Dragon Gang, it's hard not to feel the comparative lack of Suet Nei's commanding presence. Also contributing to Gate of Hell being a slightly less satisfying watch than its predecessor is the fact that the villains here are considerably less colorful than those in Black Dragon Gang (In fact, once the minions are dispatched, all we're left with is a fleeing fat guy in Bermuda shorts). Nonetheless, Gate of Hell fully delivers on the violent action, offering up a climax that's something of a flea market Thunderball, with Muk Lan-fa, Muk Sau-jan and Ko Cheung donning scuba gear to make an aquatic assault on the island on which the baddies are converging. When all is accounted for, the film maintains enough of a level of consistency with Black Dragon Gang to make you wonder what a fourth--or even a fifth--Muk Lan-fa film might have had to offer. Unfortunately, at the time of Lady in Black Cracks the Gate of Hell's release in 1967, the clock was ticking for the Cantonese film industry, and by 1970 it would cease to exist as a distinct entity within the larger context of HK cinema, succumbing to the pressures of competition with the Shaw Brothers juggernaut. With the industry's demise, some of its stars also decided to bow out, including Suet Nei, who retired from film at the rheumy old age of 22. One player who did remain on the public stage, however, is the Dark Heroine herself, thanks to the continued output of dozens of Muk Lan-fa novels, as well as a television series in the eighties. Of course, that Muk Lan-fa would persevere is not surprising; as Sam Ho points out, her name is derived from that of Hua Mulan, who, despite her cuddly treatment at the hands of Disney, was most likely the archetype for all the high-flying female badasses who would follow her in both Chinese folklore and Hong Kong cinema. It takes a lot more than a one armed swordsman to take out a lady warrior with a pedigree like that. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Espionage, Year: 1966 posted by Todd at 4:35 PM | 2 Comments Sunday, March 09, 2008Golden Bat Release Year: 1966Country: Japan Starring: Sonny Chiba, Hirohisa Nakata, Andrew Hughes, Wataru Yamagawa, Emily Paird, Hisako Tsukuba, Yoichi Numata, Koji Sekiyama, Kousaku Okano. Writer: Susumu Takahisa, Takeo Nagamatsu Director: Hajime Sato Cinematographer: Yoshikazu Yamasawa Music: Shunsuke Kikuchi Producer: Kaname Ougisawa Original Title: Ogon Batto Ogon Batto (Golden Bat) is in many ways typical of the type of films Sonny Chiba appeared in before he became an international action star with the Street Fighter movies. Under a long term contract with Toei Studios, he racked up an impressive slate of low budget B movies during the sixties, a good number of kiddie-themed science fiction films among them. His turn as Iron Sharp in Uchu Kaisokusen (aka Invasion of the Neptune Men), as well as his starring roles in the Toei TV series Nanairo Kamen and Ala-no Shishai, also made him a veteran of the costumed hero Tokusatsu genre of which Ogon Batto is squarely a part--though in Ogon he was, for once, spared having to be the guy in the silly super hero costume (an honor that went to actor Hirohisa Nakata). This might have provided a nice break for Chiba--as well as an opportunity to enjoy a bit of shadenfreude at Nakata's expense--but it also results in a rare instance in which the charismatic and energetic Chiba is rendered relatively low-key by all that is going on around him. For, while Ogon Batto may have little in terms of art that distinguishes it from other such films in Chiba's early filmography, it does have a certain energy to its presentation that clearly sets it apart. Ogon Batto begins with Akira (Wataru Yamakawa), a young amateur astronomer, making the shocking discovery that the planet Icarus has gone off course and is heading rapidly toward Earth. No sooner has Akira made his case to the disbelieving staff at a nearby observatory than he is whisked away by a cadre of Men In Black and taken to the headquarters, hidden in the Japanese Alps, of The Pearl Research Institute, a secret, UN-backed organization dedicated to studying strange space phenomena. Here he meets Capt. Yamatone (Chiba), who promptly asks Akira to join the institute--because, despite being a kid, he obviously knows a lot about science and stuff. Akira accepts, and is immediately introduced to Doctor Pearl (Andrew Hughes) and his granddaughter Emily (Emily Paird), a twelve-year-old child who, in classic Japanese sci fi movie fashion, obviously holds a position of some authority at the institute. Doctor Pearl shows Akira the Super Destruction Beam Cannon, a ray gun with the power of "1000 hydrogen bombs" designed to blast Icarus out of the sky before it can hit Earth. Unfortunately, Pearl tells him, the cannon is not yet operational, because a special mineral is needed to create its lens. No sooner has Pearl said this than the team receives word that an expedition searching for that very mineral has run into trouble and is not responding to contact. At this, the entire staff--man, woman and child--pours into the institute's flying Super Car and takes off over the ocean. Soon the location of the expedition is spotted: It's the lost continent of Atlantis! The team touches down on Atlantis and finds the entire expedition team dead, at which point a giant tower--looking like a mile high drill bit with a squid's head on it--rises up from the ocean and starts shooting cartoon laser beams at them.     This tower is the base of Nazo (Koji Sekiyama), the self-proclaimed Ruler of the Universe, who wants to destroy humanity because "No one else should exist except for me, Nazo!" With Nazo's foot soldiers hot on their heels, the team retreats into a temple, where they find an ornate sarcophagus. On the sarcophagus is an inscription stating that, 10,000 years from the date of that inscription, a crisis would erupt that would necessitate the aid of the Golden Bat, the occupant of the sarcophagus, who could conveniently be resuscitated by just adding water. As the foot soldiers close in, Emily follows those instructions and revives the Golden Bat, a hulking figure in Gold lycra and skull mask, who proceeds to beat the enemy into retreat with his Baton of Justice. With Nazo and his minions gone for the moment, Golden Bat informs Emily that, because it was she who revived him, only she can summon his aid--and with that makes his magic bat mascot affix itself to her uniform in the form of a bat-shaped broach. He also informs the team that, now that he has been revived, Atlantis will once again sink below the ocean. The team makes for the Super Car and manages to take off in the nick of time as Atlantis crashes back beneath the waves. And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: The first fifteen minutes of Ogon Batto. And things don't really slow down much from there. The film may be a pure, hastily made, low budget construction (just how many commercial Japanese features were still being made in black and white in 1966?), but there is one thing of which you can be guaranteed: By the time you reach the end of its seventy-minute running time, you will have seen an awful lot of stuff happen within a very short period of time.     While the Golden Bat is a lesser known Japanese super hero compared to the likes of Ultraman or Kamen Rider, he is no less a venerable one. The creation of one Takeo Nagamatsu, his origin dates back to the early thirties, and is attributed, depending on who you ask, to either pulp magazines or to kami-shibai, a practice of live storytelling with printed illustration cards that was popular with children in that era. Whichever is the case, he would later make the transition to manga, where he would, at one time, be rendered by the capable hands of the master himself, Osamu Tezuka (Tetsuwan Atom, aka Astroboy, and Jungle Emperor Leo, aka Kimba). A year after his feature incarnation in Ogon Batto, he would go on to make his debut in a popular animated television series, making this movie just one stop in his journey toward total Japanese media domination. A live action television series would follow in the early seventies. It is clear that the Bat's manga incarnation is the inspiration for Ogon Batto, and it's one of the film's most admirable qualities that it tries to stay true to the look of that source, even if with mixed results. The Nazo that appears in the comics, for instance, is a distinctly weird creation, sort of an amorphous black shape with bat ears and four-laser firing eyes who has a hovering flying saucer in place of a lower body. There is definitely an attempt to duplicate that look on the part of Ogon's art department, but with the resources they had to work with, Nazo just ends up looking like a man in a big floppy flannel sack--and because the effect of him hovering above the ground with no lower body was hopelessly beyond their means, the actor simply keeps his bottom half hidden within a stationary saucer-shaped control console.     Nazo's tower, on the other hand, really looks like a manga creation given real world dimensions, and it's one of the movie's visual treats. The model is put to its best use during the film's climax, in which the tower suddenly erupts from the bowels of the Earth directly below Tokyo and rises up to loom threateningly over the city's skyline (a scene closely parodied in the 2004 live-action film version of the 70s anime Cutey Honey). In fact, all of the film's models--from the tower to the shark-shaped flying submarine that Nazo's toadies use to travel between it and their various villainous assignations--are imaginative and fun, and none the less so for all the visible wires used to put them in motion. As for the Golden Bat himself, he seems here to be the kind of super hero whose super powers rely mostly on you being repeatedly told by the other characters in the movie just how super powerful he is. His preferred method of combat is running around and clubbing people one-by-one with his baton while stopping to strike highly stylized dramatic poses, which doesn't give the appearance of being that much more effective than the ray guns the members of the Pearl Institute are equipped with. Furthermore, he always announces himself with a laugh that is obviously meant to be ghostly and fear-inspiring, but which sounds more like the kind of chattering, forced laughter that just makes people uncomfortable. Whenever he does this, you kind of expect Sonny and company to start uneasily and halfheartedly laughing along while slipping each other nervous sideways glances. And when he flies it just looks ridiculous. All of this, of course, somehow combines to make the guy actually seem kind of lovable, though I don't think that was the intention.     The practice of striking highly stylized dramatic poses is a popular one in Ogon Batto, and it's not just limited to our titular hero. In fact, the whole cast gets in on that action at one point or other, most memorably when a whole group of them, reacting en masse to some shocking revelation or bit of off-screen business, will do it all at the same time. It comes across kind of like a cross between silent movie acting and Vogueing. I realize that this film was produced in an era when camp was a dominant aesthetic in popular culture. But, as campy as all of that comes across, I don't think that the intention of the makers of Ogon Batto was to poke fun at their subject matter, but rather to use that prevailing aesthetic as carte blanche for them to be absolutely as corny as they wanted to be. The result is a film that's the cinematic distillation of the spirit embodied in the phrase "Gee whiz!" As I indicated earlier, the remainder of Ogon Batto's plot unfolds with much the same breathless pacing as it's prologue, each frantic set piece practically stumbling over the next in the overall rush to cram everything in before the credits roll. Nazo, rallying after the whole Atlantis debacle, sends three of his evil emissaries to infiltrate the Pearl Institute headquarters. This trio includes Jackal, a wolf-man, Piranha, a woman in a scaly fish outfit, and Keloid (Yoichi Numata), a Grandpa Munster look-alike with oatmeal on his face. After a series of frantic ray gun battles and the Golden Bat showing up to run around and club people with his baton, the villains succeed in making off with the Super Destruction Beam Cannon, only to find that it is missing the crucial lens (which, by the way, has now been successfully fabricated by Doctor Pearl and company, thanks to a gem comprised of the necessary mineral being in the Golden Bat's hand when he was found in his sarcophagus at the beginning of the movie).     Taking on the appearance of Naomi (Hisako Tsukuba), another member of the institute, Piranha kidnaps Emily, and soon both Emily and Doctor Pearl are being held hostage by Nazo, with the lens stated as the price of their safe release. This leads to the final showdown between the Golden Bat and Nazo, held high above the streets of Tokyo (and involving, among other things, a dog fight with that cool shark-shaped flying submarine), as the rogue planet Icarus hurtles perilously ever closer to our seemingly doomed Earth. And just where is Sonny Chiba in all this, you may ask? Well, he does have his heroic moments, but the top-billed star seems mostly content to blend into the background and let all of the insanity just happen around him. Which is a very sensible attitude to take with Ogon Batto. It's an easy film to mock, but if you take the time to step back and appreciate just how furiously it's working to entertain you, you'll find that it's equally easy to love. Just don't expect it to be a showcase for the Street Fighter himself. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Japan, Guys Dressed as Skeletons, Science Fiction, Stars: Sonny Chiba, Tokusatsu, Year: 1966 posted by Todd at 1:34 PM | 4 Comments Friday, November 30, 2007Our Man in Marrakesh
1966, Italy. Starring Tony Randall, Senta Berger, Terry-Thomas, Herbert Lom, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Gregoire Aslan, John Le Mesurier, Klaus Kinski, Margaret Lee. Written by Harry Alan Towers and Peter Yeldham. Directed by Don Sharp.
I expounded recently, in my review of Throne of Fire, on the fact that I am still a sucker for cool cover/poster art, even though I know full well that the movie being advertised is rarely as good as the illustration advertising it. So let me now explore another of my sundry weaknesses: I have a weakness for cool-sounding team-ups. It probably started back when I was a wee sprout camped out in front of the television late at night, watching old Universal horror films. Frankenstein and the Wolfman, in the same movie? Boss! And while the high concept team-ups were generally slightly more dependable than poster art, that didn't mean that they still weren't, by and large, a bit disappointing most of the time. But still, come on! Frankenstein versus the Wolfman! Dev Anand versus hippies! And in the case of Our Man in Marrakesh, Tony Randall versus Klaus Kinski. Tell me that one isn't epic sounding. And while my gullible faith in the high-concept team-up often let me down, I was certain that Tony Randall versus Klaus Kinski in a lighthearted Eurospy adventure would live up to the promise. I'm happy to say that, unlike Throne of Fire, I was pleasantly rewarded this time around. Klaus Kinski is one of those actors whose mere presence in a film is enough to convince that I might as well go ahead and watch it. Even if the movie is no good, it's likely Kinski will be good for a laugh. He's sort of like Vincent Price in that way, and while people bemoan the fact that no one ever did a proper pairing of horror icons like Price with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee™ or Price with Peter Cushing (they were paired in movies -- Price and Lee in The Oblong Box, and Price, Lee, and Cushing in Scream and Scream Again -- but anyone who has seen those movies was sorely disappointed by the amount of time their horror heroes spent on-screen together), I think what really would have been something to behold would have been Vincent Price versus Klaus Kinski. I can scarcely even fathom how delicious it would have been. I would have cast them as, oh let's say a mortician and a deranged count who must...oh, I don't know, join forces to save the local community center from being bulldozed to make way for a shopping mall. And there would be a scene where Kinski has to pose as a shopping mall Santa (because, you know, Santa Klaus -- har har har) and makes children cry by telling them about medieval torture methods or something. And also there's a pie fight, and a scene where Vincent Price ends up on an out of control pair of roller skates.
So where was I? Oh yes, Klaus Kinski. Putting Kinski in your movie, even for a few minutes, is enough to make me think, "This movie doesn't look very good, but it's got Kinski in it, so what the hell?" And I've seen plenty of movies where it seems like they put Klaus Kinski specifically for that reason. In the cruddy James Glickenhaus espionage film The Soldier, Kinski shows up in a throw-away role that feels like they may have just happened to catch candid footage of Kinski on vacation in the Alps and decided to work it into the movie some how. He might not even know he was in The Soldier. And his presence in Codename: Wildgeese consists almost entirely of him being a jerk while playing golf with Ernest Borgnine -- once again, quite possibly nothing more than Knski vacation video that was inserted into the movie, since I assume Klaus Kinski's vacations consisted to a large degree of banging aspiring actresses and yelling at Ernest Borgnine. Still, even at his worst, Kinski was pretty good, and at his best, he was absolutely mesmerizing. He was, of course, also completely and totally batshit insane. His working relationship with German director and fellow batshit insane guy Werner Herzog has become the stuff of legend, involving as it supposedly did, stabbing, shooting, taking contracts out on each others lives, and lord knows what else. You know, total aside here, but as a kid, I always assumed that Werner Herzog looked like former St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog, who to me was just a big fat guy with a tremendous wad of tobacco in his cheek, as depicted in a baseball card I had of his from the 1980s. I can't remember which year it was, but he wasn't looking too good. I was obsessed with that card, one of four that I was obsessed with. The others I remember with more clarity. There was Oscar Gamble's 1976 "Ripped from the Headlines" card from Topps, famous among me and my friends because of the mind-blowing size of Gamble's afro and his ability to tuck part of it into a baseball cap. Then there was the 1981 Topps card for Gene Richards, who we dubbed "the ugliest man in baseball" thanks to his particularly unflattering photo that year. Seriously, dude looked like a hobo who just rolled off a train and into a Padres uniform. Actually, that Topps set from 1981 is chock full of great moments (what the hell was up with Steve Trout?) Then there was the 1976 "Bubble Gum Blowing Champ" card for Kurt Bevacqua. He's just standing there with his hands on his hips, blowing a giant bubble like it's the most bad-ass thing in the world to do.
Anyway, it turns out that Werner Herzog didn't look anything like Whitey Herzog; Werner Herzog looks more like Rollie Fingers. And as for the Oscar Gamble card -- I have that shit in a frame, hanging up on my wall. No joke. As kids, we used to pretend 1981 Gene Richards was waiting under the bed and would come out and kill us once the lights were out, which leads me to think that a team-up between Klaus Kinski and 1981 Gene Richards would have been pretty cool, too. So my point is, I like Klaus Kinski, and his mere presence is enough to creep up even the most innocent and/or boring of movies. I mean, I always fall asleep during Crawlspace, but while I asleep, I have nightmares thinking about Klaus Kinski peering down at me from within an AC vent, like some sour-pussed little angel, yelling insults at me in German. And now that I know Gene Richards is in there with him -- man! There is no way I'm getting to sleep tonight. And then there's Tony Randall. Good old neat and tidy Tony Randall. Good old effeminate (unlike the not at all effeminate Rod Taylor) Tony Randall. Good old bangin' hot chicks 'til he's 80 Tony Randall. Pitting him against Klaus Kinski seems like the perfect idea, and it pretty much is. Randall stars as Andrew Jessel, a mild-mannered traveler who finds himself on a tourist bus from Casablanca to Marrakesh along with a group of other travelers who are not what they seem. There's doddering old British guy Arthur Fairbrother (Wilfrid Hyde-White). There's less doddering old British guy George Lillywhite (John Le Mesurier). And there's scintillating Senta Berger (The Ambushers) as Kyra. One of them is a courier transporting two million dollars to local master criminal Casimer (Herbert Lom) to exchange for a case full of secret documents that are all part of some scheme to corrupt the United Nations, because lord knows the U.N. doesn't do well enough with that on its own. Casimer has the bus tailed, but due to over-zealous security concerns, he ho idea who the courier is. He just knows that everyone on the bus is lying about who they are.
Jessel winds up in Kyra's room, where the two of them discover the body of a man Kyra claims is her lover. It's right about here that Our Man in Marrakesh tips its hand and lets you know that, although it's going to have plenty of thrills and adventure, it's also going to play out with a fairly witty sense of humor. For instance, upon seeing a body with a knife protruding from its back tumble out of a closet, Jessel starts to panic and explain that he thinks there might be something suspicious about the body. Kyra uses her Senta Berger powers to convince him to help hide the body, spinning some vastly complex yarn about jealous parents, attempts to scandalize her, so on and so forth. All Jessel seems to know is that the longer he's with this woman, the more guys who pop up to shoot at him. Eventually, Jessel ends up with Casimer's cache of secret documents, and he and Kyra find themselves on the run across the Moroccan countryside, pursued by dogged henchman Klaus Kinski and aided at times by cop-hating truck driver Achmed (Gregoire Aslan) and adventure-seeking Eaton graduate turned Lawrence of Arabia, El Caid (Terry-Thomas). Our Man in Marrakesh has a lot going for it. First, the cast is top notch, relying on the dependable talents of a host of solid British character actors. Terry-Thomas is...well, he's Terry-Thomas. You know he's going to say "splendid" and "old chap" a whole lot while grinning his magnificent gap-toothed smile. Herbert Lom, last seen around these parts hassling Jason Robards -- and rightly so -- in Murders in the Rue Morgue), plays Casimer with a mix of sophistication and desperation, never going over the top even in a movie that would have tolerated it (there's plenty of over the top once Terry-Thomas shows up). No one in this movie phones it in, and no one comes across as a stiff, as was very common in Eurospy films, especially for the hero. But Tony Randall was hardly the typical Eurospy hero, and Our Man in Marrakesh trades in the predictable rock-jawed man of action for one who is constantly confused and terrified before ultimately rising, more or less, to the occasion. Randall turns in exactly the performance you'd expect. About the only thing he doesn't pull off is the obligatory "seducing the lady" scene, but that's played mostly for laughs anyway, and considering the fact that Randall was siring new kids well into old age, one has to assume that he just knows something I don't. Our Man in Marrakesh relies primarily on the appeal and charisma of Austrian bombshell Senta Berger to fulfill the femme fatale position, and she does so perfectly. Berger was one of my favorite dames of the 1960s, with outrageous curves and a smoky stare that would burn a hole right through a lesser man than Tony Randall. Even as the things she asks him to do for her become increasingly outlandish, I found it easy to believe that he would end up going along with her no matter what. She just has that sort of hypnotic appeal. On the opposite end of the law is Casimer's window dressing girlfriend, Samia, played by the drop-dead beauty Margaret Lee. Lee was a familiar face from all sorts of Eurospy productions in the 1960s, including many of the best and most enjoyable like Secret Agent Super Dragon, Agent 077 Fury in the Orient, Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, and Dick Smart 2007, among others. Even though Senta is the head-turner here, there's no denying that Margaret lee's parade of mini-dresses and bikinis is more than enough to keep the eye occupied. It's just that hers is a more comedic role, designed mostly to get Herbet Lom to either roll his eyes or jump up and run off to bed.
And then there's Kinski as the head henchman Jonquil. He spends most of the movie wearing a fedora and running around while yelling at other henchmen to come with him. It's not a big role, but it's crucial, and Kinski throws himself into it with his usual manic energy. In the end, it turns out the only way to defeat him is by making him wave his arms around wildly as he falls into a pond, accompanied by pratfall music. Spy spoofs were easy to come by the in the 1960s. In fact, most of the Eurospy films were made with a sense of humor. But then, so were most of the Bond films, so that shouldn't be a surprise. Our Man in Marrakesh is aided greatly by a spirited, witty, fast-moving script that perfectly balances thrills with laughs. It makes sure you are smiling, but not at the expense of wowing you with frequent chases, fist fights, and scenes of Tony Randall sliding off of rooftops. The action and comedy culminate in a finale that sees Casimer and his army of thugs pitted against Jessel and Achmed's army of street hustlers in a hurricane of guns, swords, curved knives, and guys falling into ponds. Our Man in Marrakesh comes to the world courtesy of the team of director Don Sharp and writer-producer Harry Alan Towers. If Sharp and Towers are a duo that sounds familiar to you, that's because the same men brought us the fabulously campy and energetic Face of Fu Manchu just a year earlier. British producer Towers was famous for throwing lots of money at somewhat ridiculous concepts, sort of like a British Dino De Laurentiis, except that Towers would also throw tiny amounts of money at stuff, too (thus the Fu Manchu films directed by Jess Franco). Sharp, aside from directing Face of Fu Manchu and Brides of Fu Manchu for Towers also directed the excellent occult thriller Witchcraft, one Hammer's better vampire outings, 1963's Kiss of the Vampire and then went on to direct episodes of The Avengers.
Between these two men, they give Our Man in Marrakesh a more ambitious scope and A-list feel. Sharp brings the same polish, crisp pace, and playful energy to Our Man in Marrakesh that he would bring to The Avengers and many of his other films, while Towers throws his weight and cash around enough to score a great cast and beautiful location work -- or anyway, I assume it's beautiful location work. Since the best you can hope for right now is a relatively washed out looking old print of this film, you have to infer how great it would look if it wasn't all tattered. Suffice it to say that Towers and crew make their most of the local color, taking us on an action-packed tour of Morocco. On top of that, the "no one is who they seem to be" plot works pretty well without ever becoming irritating or obvious. You really don't know exactly who is who until the very end. Even the "mistaken briefcase" complication that could have been a tired old "oh no, not this again" device works out pretty well. Plots in Eurospy films are usually either terrible, or just completely loopy. Our Man in Marrakesh has a plot that is actually quite good -- the difference between English spy films and continental spy films, I reckon, where the focus was more on the outlandish. However, I do have to point out one rather glaring gaffe in the film. It comes when Tony and Senta are fleeing from Casimer's men and the police. They burst into an open air market where the entire crowd is standing perfectly still on their marks. After a couple seconds of Tony Randall scrambling around, the crowd suddenly starts milling about. Although it's nothing more than a missed cue and a failure to edit it out of the film, it also lends the film a really bizarre, surreal couple of seconds. So Kinski and Randall didn't let me down. I had a blast watching this film. It's too bad Sharp didn't stick around to direct more spy films. He obviously had a knack for it. Although I hadn't heard very much about this movie, and there are almost no reviews online or in print (the indispensables Eurospy Guide is the only mention of it I found, and the only reason I even knew that it would be something worth looking for), I was completely satisfied. Randall makes for an excellent everyman hero, and he's supported by an able cast who act like they care rather than acting like they're above the material...like you, Jason Robards. For shame!
Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Stars: Klaus Kinski, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 6:26 PM | 4 Comments Monday, November 26, 2007So Darling, So Deadly Release Year: 1966Country: Italy/Germany Starring: Tony Kendall, Brad Harris, Barbara Frey, Luisa Rivelli, Ernst Fritz Furbringer, Gisela Hahn, Margaret Rose Keil, Jacques Bezard, Giuseppe Mattei, Carlo Tamberlani, Nikola Popovic, H. Amin, Gianfranco Parolini, M. Ojatirato, Sarah Abdullah. Writer: Stefan Gommermann and Gianfranco Parolini Director: Gianfranco Parolini Cinematographer: Francesco Izzarelli Music: Mladen Gutesa Producer: Hans Pfluger and Theo Maria Werner Original Title: Kommissar X - In den Klauen des goldenen Drachen Alternate Titles: Agent Joe Walker: Operation Far East Availability: Buy it from Amazon  It's time for another visit to that magical land where smarmy cheeseballs can sashay up to any hot dame that strikes their fancy and plant a kiss on her without getting slapped in the face or slapped with a lawsuit. The amazing kingdom where smart suits and cocktail dresses are the norm and endless explosive attempts at assassination are met with nothing more than a cocked eyebrow and a knowing smirk. It's the astounding universe of the Kommissar X films, among the most enjoyable and most bizarre entries into the spy craze that swept across the world in the 1960s thanks largely to the success of the James Bond films. The Kommissar X stories began life as a prolific series of espionage potboilers written by Bert F. Island -- a pseudonym that spanned hundreds of novels and who knows how many different authors. The first book was written by C.H. Guenter, but it's doubtful that he wrote all 1,700 plus novels that ended up as part of the series. That number, quite frankly, boggles my mind, and sometimes I look at it and think it can't possibly be right. I mean, Nick Carter operated under a similar multi-author assembly line model, and I think excluding the old pulp novels and restricting ourselves to the stories of the 60s and later, there were...what? A couple hundred novels? The Mack Bolan novels hit something like 670 entries, and I think that's about as high as we got here in the United States.
Anyway, I've never read any of the Kommissar X novels and don't know if any of them have been translated into English, so I can't judge how similar to the source material the movies that were based on them actually are. And really, it doesn't matter to me, because what's important for watching a movie is how much I enjoy the movies. The first film in the series, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill was a heady concoction of everything I love about Eurospy films and life: jetsetter locations, cool clothes, outlandish villains, mad schemes, and robotized women in lavender wigs and skimpy leather outfits. And lording over it all were co-stars Tony Kendall and Brad Harris, looking good and kicking a little ass. Having enjoyed the first film so much, I was looking forward to the other films in the series. So Darling, So Deadly did not let me down, and in fact, it might have even exceeded my expectations. For the first half hour or more of the film, you'll wonder if there's even a plot, but even if you decide there isn't, you're not going to care, because everything is just that cool. After a series of assassinations, we meet up with tough-as-nails police captain Tom Rowland (big Brad Harris) and sleazy, cheesy private investigator Joe Walker (Tony Kendall), in Singapore, where mysterious, often female assailants start attempting to assassinate the duo as soon as their plane lands. However, this is Rowland and Walker, we're talking about, so their plane exploding on the tarmac, their train exploding on the rails, or the multiple killers taking potshots at them aren't even close to enough to keep them from going water skiing or hitting on the chicks down by the pool at their hotel. Eventually, they get around to their case, which involves protecting a professor and his super secret weapon, which is yet another dumb laser beam that takes ten times as long and is ten times as complicated in performing a feat that would have been ten times more effective if you just used a missile or something. I guess that's why these secret weapons are always being stolen by crackpot criminal societies instead of actual governments. The Soviets probably knew enough to think to themselves, "Hmm, it takes like half an hour and involves all this crazy complex computation and aiming, and all it does is slowly burn a hole in metal. I think we'll stick with missiles." Thus, only the crazies would go after the idiotic super weapon, safely keeping them on the sidelines and out of the real game, in which people eschewed complicated slow-moving lasers in favor of bombs and bullets.
Lucky for us, the efficacy of the weapon being protected has never had much of a correlation to the enjoyment of the film in which the weapon appears, and really, So Darling, So Deadly is so much ridiculous fun that you'll hardly even worry about the super weapon. Tom and Joe certainly don't seem all that concerned about it. They're more interested in the scientist's beautiful daughter, among other hot tamales on parade. So Darling, So Deadly was shot on location in Singapore as a co-production with Cathay Studios, one of the biggest and most prestigious of Asian film studios. I'm not sure how much input they had in this crackpot adventure beyond throwing money at it and procuring shooting permits, but the film certainly makes good use of the location, sending Rowland and Walker on a variety of episodic adventures packed with travelogue footage that would be good material for the board of tourism if it didn't always end with Brad Harris karate chopping the hell out of people while stuff blows up. Still, I suppose even that works for certain types of tourists. The highlight of the Kommissar X sight-seeing tour of Singapore is a chase scene through some sort of theme park full of sculpted gardens and traditional architecture. Shots of hulking Brad Harris leaping with the gingerness of a ballet dancer from pillar to pillar across a fountain are both an amusing visual and a reminder that Harris, unlike many of his former sword and sandal co-stars, maintained a build that mixed bulk with flexibility and athleticism. The bulk of the film's action rests upon his shoulders, both as a performer and as a choreographer, and as he always did, Harris rises to the occasion with inventiveness and gusto. Harris was an accomplished martial artist, and he brings that to the film via a series of impressive, often bone-crunching judo and karate style fights that move fast and furious without the aid of undercranking or trick photography. Tony Kendall tend sot hang out on the sideline, making faces and occasionally punching some sucker in the jaw, but he is very much the more effeminate, Rod Taylor type smoothie contrasted with Brad Harris' gleeful machismo. Both actors are perfect in their roles, and it didn't take long for them to formulate amazing chemistry. The Kommissar X films would be good starring anyone, but they're great starring Harris and Kendall.
The stars are always surrounded by a bevy of sexy ladies who will attempt to kiss or kill -- often both. Sexy German actress Barbara Frey stars as the improbably gorgeous daughter of Professor Akron (E.F. Furbringer). How is it that every crazy scientist who creates a super weapon or an amazing new rocket/jet fuel always has a sexy daughter waiting in the wings to be romanced by the hero and kidnapped by the villain? Oh well, we should all be thankful, I guess, and not look gift horses in the mouth. On the opposite side of the espionage plot are the Golden Dragon Society's army of whip-wielding, machine-gun toting, hotpant-wearing female assassins led by...well, to be honest, the Kommissar X films love to outfit their women is similar costumes, and sometimes it can get hard to keep track given how quickly the film throws new gals up onto the screen. The ladies are led into battle by a mysterious mastermind in a red hood, though the eventual revelation of his identity will surprise absolutely no one. He makes his lair beneath a wax museum of mayhem and torture, which always strikes me as a pretty cool move if you can't afford an island or a hollowed-out volcano. He also employs a vast array of torture implements that are far less effective than just shooting your captives but afford the film ample opportunity to allow Kendall and Harris to escape certain doom after they have been stretched out by a variety of esoteric devices, often involving spikes and laughing evil women at the controls.
Outlandish villains were a staple of Eurospy films, thanks largely to the larger-than-life super-villains that populated Doctor No and Goldfinger. The leader of the Golden Dragons, however, is a character straight out of an old serial. His "house of horrors" lair, his torture devices, his ill-fitting red hood -- these are elements straight out of an old Republic serial. You have expect to catch a glimpse of Bela Lugosi lurking around in the background, winding up clockwork spiders or bossing around an ugly robot. Of course, the Bond movies and novels can trace their roots directly back to pulp series like the Bulldog Drummond stories, and without pulp stories, it's unlikely we would have all been as exited about serials. But Bond downplays these aspects, and in the movies you rarely get the feeling that you are watching a serial. So Darling, So Deadly, on the other hand, revels in its pulp serial trappings, and that helps make this and the whole Kommissar X series something unique within an often cookie cutter genre.
As fun as everything has been up to this point, as cool as the clothes are, as great as Brad Harris' action choreography is, the inarguable highlight of the entire film is the nightclub scene. It finds Harris, clad in his nightlife best, thrashing around like a teenage spazz as a groovy young band plays. Upon witnessing the flailing shenanigans of his partner, Kendall issues one of his two trademark facial expressions (he has "the knowing smirk" and the "pained look of disbelief") and proceeds to slink his way across the dance floor in his own style. I know making big guys do things like dance or tend flower gardens is a cheap and easy way to get a laugh, but it works. Plus, Brad Harris dances with such giddy abandon that you can't help but love the scene. American actor Brad Harris started his career as a football player at UCLA but soon found himself working as a stuntman in Hollywood. At the end of the 1950s, he found himself in Italy working first as a stunt choreographer and then as a second unit director. It was only a matter of time before he found himself in front of the camera again, but in more substantial roles. When Hercules starring Steve Reeves became an international phenomenon, Italian producers were desperate to cash in on the craze. Due to a lack of bodybuilders in Italy, Americans were often brought over to fill the tunics. Since Harris was already huge and in Europe, he was an obvious choice and became one of the early peplum stars. Unlike many of his sword and sandal cohorts, Harris was able to sustain a career once the genre faded from popularity. Harris was a big guy, no doubt, but he maintained his athleticism rather than sacrificing it to size. As such, he was able to adapt to other roles, the most successful of which was Captain Tom Rowland. Harris looks impressive in a smart suit, and he's invaluable as a stunt choreographer. The last Kommissar X film had it's fair share of action, but this one ups the ante. Harris' Tom Rowland seems to be perpetually beating the tar out of people in this movie. On top of that, he's a great actor in this role. It plays to all his strengths. Harris went on to work as a writer and producer
All in all, this is another top-notch, highly enjoyable entry into the series. It handles itself with tongue planted in cheek but never condescends to the audience or forgets to be an enjoyable example of what it's having a little fun with. Harris and Kendall click wonderfully, and the script by Stefan Gommermann and Gianfranco Parolini is breezy and fast-paced. Parolini, who also directed, was a solid Italian exploitation director who, like most of the men who plied their trade in Italy during the 60s, directed everything that was popular, including sword and sandal, espionage, and spaghetti westerns. He worked with Brad Harris on a couple peplum films, including 1961's Samson and 1962's Fury of Hercules. The two must have been pretty comfortable around one another by the time Parolini wrote and directed the first of the Kommissar X films, 1966's Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill (aka Hunting the Unknown). Parolini went on to lend his sure-handed writing and direction to So Darling, So Deadly, Death Trip, and Kill, Panther, Kill, lending the Kommissar X series a consistency in both cast and crew that was missing from many other Eurospy film series. Kids, this is good stuff. This is why we love movies, particularly batty spy movies. Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Series: Kommissar X, Stars: Brad Harris, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 12:19 AM | 3 Comments Friday, August 31, 2007Kriminal Release Year: 1966Country: Italy Starring: Glenn Saxson, Helga Line, Andrea Bosic, Ivano Staccioli, Esmeralda Ruspoli, Dante Posani, Franco Fantasia, Susan Baker, Armando Calvo, Mary Arden, Rossella Bergamonti. Director: Umberto Lenzi Writer: Umberto Lenzi and David Moreno Cinematographer: Angelo Lotti Music: Romano Mussolini Producer: Giancarlo Marchetti Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us Round about 1992 or so, when I was but a young sophomore in college, this guy Shannon started turning me on to all sorts of swanky adventure films which, in my myopic kungfu- and horror-centric worldview, I had yet to see. This was good stuff, the sort of films that would become the basis for my goals in life: The President's Analyst and the "Flint" movies starring James Coburn, Robin and the Seven Hoods starring the Rat Pack, Dean Martin's "Matt Helm" spy comedies, and a candy-colored slice of pop-art brilliance called Danger: Diabolik, directed by none other than acclaimed Italian horror master Mario Bava and based on an Italian comic book -- or fumetti if you are feeling all cultured and wantin' to use words from whatever the hell crazy moon-man language it is they speak in Italy (Yoruba, I believe). I vowed on that fateful night, with a thunderstorm raging through the heavens and the rain beating down mercilessly upon my half-clothed body (I was tan and didn't have a beer gut back then, so it's cool), that come hell or high water my life would one day reflect the lives of these heroes and anti-heroes, these capering criminals and swingin' spies who populated these Technicolor adventure confections, with the high-water mark for success being one of two -- preferably both -- scenes: either I would have a waterbed that would, at the press of a button, slide me and a chosen scantily clad bombshell (or two -- I'm a decadent libertine, after all) across the room, tilting as it goes so that we are dumped gracefully into a waiting Jacuzzi, at which time a fully stocked bar would conveniently lower itself from the ceiling (thank you, Matt Helm); or I would drive my black 1967 Jaguar E-Type Series I 4.2 Roadster down a ramp into my secret, underground space-age lair so I could go make love to me beautiful woman on a rotating circular bed covered in piles of recently stolen hundred dollar bills (a moment referenced so many times on Teleport City over the years that I shouldn't even need to tell you where it's from at this point). Truly, the inclusion of either or both of these elements into my daily schedule would signal that I had, indeed, made it. Anyway, it's a work still in progress. Seeing Diabolik was -- well, to call it life-altering is to be a bit overly dramatic, I think. But it was something like that, and the movie did have a curious influence on me. For years, there had been this certain look and style of movie playing in my head. I knew it existed, but I had no clue where to start looking for it. Keep in mind that this is some years before the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web, DVD, and the rise of digitally remastered two-disc special collectors' editions of Porno Holocaust. I knew these movies I wanted were very much like James Bond without being James Bond movies -- sometimes a little cheaper, often more fanciful and outlandish. But just as in those disconnected days with a dearth of information I was unable to find a manufacturer or store where I could purchase a black, slim-cut three-button suit (I'm quite particular about such things), so too was I at a lost as to where I might find these mythical movies I'd invented in my mind and filled with go-go dancing Eurobabes and dudes in fezzes and sunglasses throwing stiletto daggers at each others' backs. Diabolik realized many of these visions, and pointed in the direction I needed to face (Italy) to begin digging up the titles for which I'd been searching (though getting the movies associated with those titles, even in today's era of widespread easy availability, is still proving difficult). It was the key to unlocking a whole world I'd sort of known was out there but could never get to. In that sense, it was much the same as that fateful (oooh!) night that I, a confused teen in Buckner, Kentucky floundering for a sense of identity, stumbled across a broadcast of the USA Channel's Night Flight that was focusing on this stuff called punk rock. As corny -- or disturbed --as it sounds, there was much in this brightly-colored, fast-paced comic book of a movie that I found worth admiring. I appreciated Diabolik's amoral hedonism. He wasn't really a bad guy. He simply disregarded the agreed-upon rules of an over-governed society. He had his own code. And he had a bad-ass pad.
The years filed past, and with the spread of the World Wide Web in the latter half of the 1990s, I was able to start digging up bits and pieces of information about Eurospy films, Diabolik, and much to my elation, the many copycats and offshoots that, like me, had been inspired by this diabolical mastermind (I also found the right suit). Among these, and of particular interest to a guy who, even in his older age, still listens to The Misfits, was a cat named Kriminal, and he wore a skeleton suit. But lets turn the clock back even further, to the era of pulp stories, to where these super-criminals like Diabolik and Kriminal, and lots of other characters who wore cool masks and spelled their names with K's instead of C's (Krispy Kreme was among them, and possibly the most salacious -- certainly the most delicious), trace their roots. In 1911, France was introduced to the character of Fantomas, a suave master of disguise and, in stark contrast to many of the pulp characters with whom people were familiar (like Edgar Rice Burroughs' swashbuckling uber-man John Carter, or any number of smilin' cowboys), a thief. It wasn't the first case of a traditional villain being recast as a charismatic anti-hero, but it certainly opened the door for a wave of similar lawbreakers and misunderstood vigilantes. During the 1930s, there was an explosion in pulp culture of these mysterious costumed characters and anti-heroes, including The Shadow, The Spider, and Robert Howard's Conan the Barbarian. When superhero comic books made the scene in the 1930s, American tastes shifted toward brightly costumed do-gooders like Superman, though at least one notable character remained firmly rooted in the darker elements of the pulp stories: The Bat-Man. Inspired by Zorro and a character from the 1930 film The Bat Whispers, The Bat-Man, as his name was written at the time, is also heavily rooted in the amoral (or at least morally ambiguous) philosophy of pulp anti-heroes, and although Fantomas remains a great influence on the European comic market (and perhaps on The Bat-Man as well -- though both Fantomas and Batman seem to owe a debt to Dumas' Count of Monte Cristo), it's in the brutal origins of The Bat-Man that we can find many of the traits that would be commonplace among the fumetti stars of the 1960s. The tragic past, the vengeful mindset, the playboy alter ego, a distinct lack of superpowers compensated for by near superhuman levels of discipline and training, the willingness to kill and maim the guilty -- these things were in sharp contrast to Superman (though not entirely uncommon in early comic books) but would have been perfectly at home in the Italian comics of the 60s -- which is funny, in a way, considering that during the 60s, DC Comics turned Batman into a smiling boy scout.
Some combination of Batman and Fantomas (who would enjoy his own revival in the 1960s via a series of colorful French productions) cross-pollinated with James Bond beget Diabolik in 1962, the creation of sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani. As many post-war comics, Batman included, became more fantastical and juvenile, diabolic was a brash return to the seedy days of the pulps. He was an accomplished thief, a master of disguise, and an ace at killing anyone who meddles with his ambitions. Clad entirely in a black suit that show sonly his eyes, and accompanied by a beautiful woman who shares his vision, diabolic cut an audacious path through the otherwise sunny, happy era, reflecting no doubt the growing tension and frustration bubbling beneath the veneer of the perfect 50s and that would explode into a time of social upheaval and unrest during the latter half of the 60s. Diabolik's amoral mayhem struck a cord with readers, who quickly catapulted the master thief to the upper limits of pop culture stardom, thus making it obvious that others would follow in Diabolik's steps, each one trying to be more outrageous and offensive than the last. Among the many characters inspired by Diabolik was Kriminal, created by Luciano Secchi working under the pseudonym Max Bunker. Kriminal was a master thief from England, most notable for his curious choice in clothing for a grown man: a black and yellow skeleton suit with a creepy skull mask. It's a difficult look to pull off, but he makes it work. Kriminal -- whose alter ego was Anthony Logan -- did his best to one-up Diabolik, exhibiting sometimes absurd levels of cruelty and violence, as well a parade of increasingly scantily-clad females that he couldn't help but menace. I mean, the dude was wearing a skeleton suit. You either have to menace or be laughed at. It was this potent combination of violence and hitherto unheard of levels of near-nudity that got Kriminal in trouble with so many critics and censors -- and also made it such a hit with readers. Like Diabolik, Batman, Fantomas, and the Mexican luchadores lead by El Santo, Kriminal had no actual superpowers. He couldn't fly or run at super-speeds, and if he needed to kill you, he usually did it with a Luger. In time, as with Batman and Diabolik, Kriminal's sadistic streak was softened, until eventually he really only killed those who were asking for it anyway, though as far as I can tell, he never did get over his need to continually menace a buxom babe whose blouse was falling off. No worries, though, because another skeleton suit wearing anti-hero was waiting to take up the slack and commit depraved acts of which even Kriminal couldn't approve. But we'll come to him in a later review of a different movie.
Although he followed in the footsteps of Diabolik in print, Kriminal beat him to the big screen. In 1966, Kriminal made the jump to movies in a feature film directed by Umberto Lenzi. Among American fans of Italian cult films, Lenzi is probably one of the best known and most misunderstood directors. And in fact he's most misunderstood because of what he's best known for. Lenzi's two best known films in American happen to be his two worst films: 1981's grubby Make Them Die Slowly (aka Cannibal Ferox), a nonsensical cannibal exploitation film that exists for little more reason than to showcase a carnival of primitive tortures in the half hour; and 1980s City of the Walking Dead (aka Nightmare City), a giddily idiotic, totally incompetent, but highly entertaining zombie film. They're both terrible, though amusingly so. Judged on the merits of these two movies, Lenzi perhaps would deserve to placed at the bottom of the barrel. But these are barely his films, and it's obvious that he was just cashing a paycheck. Lenzi's true talent was in the crime film, and during the 1970s he directed a string of blistering hits that are brutal, fast-paced, and proof of what a phenomenal director he could be when the material moved him. If you've poked around Teleport City for any length of time, you know that , Violent Naples is one of my absolute favorites, but it's hardly the only great cop film he made. From Corleone to Brooklyn, The Cynic, The Rat, and The Fist, Gang War in Milan -- these are all top notch films, and alongside Enzo G. Castellari, Lenzi practically created the poliziotteschi genre. In 1966, Lenzi was already a veteran of the Italian exploitation market, having worked his way through Eurospy films, sword and sandal adventures, and historical hellraisers. Making the shift from Eurospy to comic book super-villain hijinks was no problem, as the fumetti-inspired films of the late 60s were a direct outgrowth of the espionage genre and shared many of the same trappings and stylistic flourishes. His big-screen adaptation of Kriminal looks very much like a big budget Eurospy film, taking the strangely clad anti-hero on a globe-trotting adventure that leads from the gallows of London to Spain, and finally to Istanbul in pursuit of some diamonds. Or something. To be honest, the DVD I have of this movie isn't subtitled, and I learned enough Italian to get by in the country on a two-week long road trip. So my grasping of some of the nuances of the plot -- if indeed Kriminal can be said to have nuances -- is tenuous in many spots.
Dutch actor Rolf Boes (under the pseudonym Glenn Saxson, which is Italian for "Son of Clarence Clemens") stars as the titular Kriminal, about to be hanged for attempted robbery of the Crown Jewels of England -- a fate he escapes by somehow turning out the lights. Look, if you go into a movie about a guy who runs around in a skeleton costume and immediately start complaining about the implausibility of his escape trick, then you're not going to get anywhere in life. He is pursued by Inspector Milton of Scotland Yard, because all costumed villains need an arch-nemesis at Scotland Yard, where they have a whole division dedicated to opposing garishly costumed super-villains from Italy (like Marco Materazzi). Kriminal then gets involved with a diamond heist, and along the way he romances ladies, kills people, and plants a bomb in the inspector's office that is specifically designed to blow off the shirts of attractive women (or so it seems when we witness the aftermath of his bomb). Kriminal doesn't need to steal -- he could just market this bomb to anyone who attended college in an 80s teen sex comedy, and he'd rake in millions. When Lenzi is at his best as director, his films are snappy and crisply paced. Kriminal is one of his best. It never slows down, but it never goes so fast that you can't stop to luxuriate in all the exotic location work or admire all the swank 60s fashion. It's a much more down-to-earth film than Danger: Diabolik, which two years later would take the genre to a level of pop-art gorgeousness unmatched even by the mighty Barbarella (herself another saucy comic book character), but being less phantasmagorical than Danger: Diabolik leaves plenty of room for swingin' style, and Kriminal has it in spades. The skeleton costume looks a bit ludicrous, but even Glenn Danzig could never really pull a skeleton body stocking off. Within the context of the film, set in such a bizarre universe as the one inhabited by all the fumetti anti-heroes, we can quickly learn to accept the skeleton costume. Plus, as goofy as it looks, it's also sort of awesome. I mean, he puts on a skeleton costume, throws daggers at people, steals from the Queen of England, and makes love to gorgeous Italian women. Truly, Kriminal leads THE LIFE. And Glenn Saxson looks suave and dashing as the lady-killer (among others he kills). Saxson had previously starred in Alberto De Martino's spaghetti western Django Shoots First (De Martino, incidentally, directed a number of great films, including the top notch Eurospy capers Special Mission Lady Chaplin and Operation Kid Brother starring Neil Connery, as well as the infamous poliziotteschi meets giallo , Blazing Magnum starring Stuart Whitman and John Saxon). He would go on to star in a follow-up Kriminal film (which I've yet to see), a couple other actioners, and then a string of saucy 70s erotica with titles like The Hostess Also Likes to Blow the Horn and School of Erotic Enjoyment. He's perfectly suited for the role of Kriminal, and somehow, he manages not to look completely ludicrous when he's strutting around with his mask off and the rest of the skeleton suit still on. Supporting him is a cast of Italian exploitation stalwarts lead by Andrea Bosic as the harried Scotland yard inspector (he would later be a harried bank manager endlessly hassled by Diabolik in that movie). Bosic had appeared previously in Lenzi's Sandokan the Pirate adventures starring American muscleman and Hercules star Steve Reeves, and he starred in something called Two Mafiosi Against Goldfinger, which sounds like something I really need to see. The bombshell factor is fulfilled by a couple of chicks whose character names I couldn't keep straight because I was too busy yelling, "Dove il bagno! I know what that means!" Look, when you speak like five lines of Italian, you get excited when you can understand what the hell someone says. But I do know German-born Helga Line plays ravishing twin sisters Inge and Trudy, hired to transport jewels so Kriminal won't know which one to follow (he still figures it out, because he wears a fuckin' skeleton costume). Line's been in tons of films where I caught myself admiring her: War Goddesses, Hercules and the Tyrants of Babylon, Mission Bloody Mary, Special Mission Lady Chaplin, Password: Kill Agent Gordon; she was even in another fumetti-inspired comic book adventure, 1968's Avenger X, as well as a Santo film! She also made a lot of horror films in the 70s, including Vampire's Night Orgy and some Paul Naschy films where he doesn't even turn into a werewolf. Far and away one of the all-time great Euro cult beauties, she looks painfully beautiful (in double, no less) here as the woman pursued by the diabolical master of evil.
Highlighting the wonderful art design and snappy pace is an incredible swinging score by Roberto Pregadio and Romano Mussolini. While I would still class Kriminal the movie slightly below Danger: Diabolik, the score for Kriminal is outstanding, going so far as to outclass and out-swank Ennio Morricone's great Diabolik score. It keeps perfect pace with the movie and, like the movie, is equal parts suave, menacing, and playful. Even working with the language barrier, Kriminal is a great movie. Lots of action, lots of wit, sexy ladies, and a guy in a skeleton outfit swimming around in ponds and stuff. It easily proves the equal of even the best espionage and comic book capers, qualifying for such rarefied company as Danger: Diabolik, Deadlier than the Male, the Flint movies, and the Connery Bonds. There wasn't a minute of the film that didn't thoroughly delight me, and if I had to drum up any sort of complaint, it would be the cliffhanger ending (Diabolik did the same thing). I know, I know. There's a sequel, with the lead cast all back in place (and directed by Fernando Cerchio). But I haven't been able to find that one yet. No matter -- Kriminal is incredibly cool and highly recommended, even if you don't speak a lick of Italian. Hot dames and a guy in a skeleton suit are, after all, the international language we can all understand. In addition to a sequel, the fact that much of this film was shot in Istanbul inspired Turkish filmmakers to launch their own Kriminal franchise. Kriminal the fumetti character was eventually succeeded by the even more brutal and irredeemable Killing in a series of photonovels -- comic books that use still photography of live-action scenes. As outraged as people were by the Kriminal comic books, Killing was even worse. Kriminal had been banned in France and eventually toned down even in Italy, but Killing more than made up for it, with our skeleton-clad evil-doer sometimes crossing the line into outright psychopathic terrorist and serial killer. In love with the Kriminal movie and inspired by the even more absurd Killing photonovels, Turkish producer-director Yilmaz Atadeniz made Kilink Istanbul'da, and our favorite murderous thief in a skeleton suit found a new home in Turkey. To be continued... Labels: Action: Superheroes, Director: Umberto Lenzi, Eurospies, Fumetti, Guys Dressed as Skeletons, Series: Kriminal and Kilink, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 5:53 PM | 4 Comments Friday, December 08, 2006Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill
Digg this article. 1966, Italy/Germany. Starring Tony Kendall, Brad Harris, Maria Perschy, Christa Linder, Ingrid Lotarius, Nikola Popovic, Giuseppe Mattei, Jacques Bezard, Danielle Godet, Olivera Vuco, Giovanni Simonelli, Liliane Dulovic. Directed by Gianfranco Parolini. Written by Werner Hauff, Gianfranco Parolini, Giovanni Simonelli. Buy it now from Amazon
.From time to time we accidentally wander into the realm of the nearly comprehensible, that no man's land where the movies almost make sense. Our journeys sometimes bring us to these uncharted waters, and when cast adrift in them, we do the best we can in such a strange sea. But always what guides us, our great hope on the horizon that forever propels us forward even when things are at their most sane and logical, is the knowledge that we shall one day, like Ulysses returning home to Ithica, return to a familiar port and once again watch the sun set slowly and with fiery bombast over an ocean littered with films that are completely and unequivocally batshit insane. And when we return to this port, to our home, then can rest assured that a smirking Tony Kendall and former peplum b-teamer Brad Harris will be waiting there with open arms, our sweet Penelope clad in a smart suit and ready to duke it out with any number of mad scientists, hooded assassins, or telekinetic donkeys we may have met on these, the legendary journeys of Teleport City. And so with the 1966 Eurospy adventure Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill -- aka Hunting the Unknown -- we here on the HMS Teleport City can raise a mug o' rum, drop anchor, and let loose with a content sigh. It's good to be home, lads. It's good to be home.
Although I rarely turn to quoting other critics and writers, I can't help but highlight the words of Matt Blake, author of The Eurospy Guide (an essential book, if you don't already own it) when he writes of Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill, "When God created man, He had no idea man would ever come up with anything quite this daft." Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill, which is an Italian-German co-production based on the Kommissar X espionage potboilers from Germany, exemplifies everything that was good and right and completely loopy about the more ambitious espionage capers of the 1960s. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill has everything of which you have ever dreamed in a spy film. It has two heroes -- one a cheeky, smart-ass ladies' man private eye (Tony Kendall), the other a hulking, straight-laced Interpol inspector (Brad Harris). It has smart suits in spades, not to mention dapper fedoras and dames in a vast array of skimpy outfits from bikinis to slinky cocktail dresses. It has fist fights, gun fights, and judo. It has boat chases and car chases and foot chases. It has a sprawling, space-age underground lair staffed by a team of robotized hot chicks in go-go boots. And of course, it has a megalomaniacal super-villain with a goofy plan to hold the world ransom. And unlike some films of the era that have all the ingredients but just invite too many chefs into the kitchen, resulting in a total confectionary disaster (1967 version of Casino Royale, I'm looking you your direction), Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill comes out of the oven smelling sweet as fresh baked pastry but twice as sweet. In other words, this is a damn good movie.
Super-sleuths Joe Walker (frequently accompanied by a theme song with the lyrics, "I, I, I love you, Joe Walker! Just like any woman would love you!") and Tom Rowland have one of those friendships best characterized by the cliche slogan, "Together, they just might save the world...if they don't kill each other first!" Walker is always smirking, always checking out the ladies, and always breaking the rules and regulations by which the uptight Rowland has sworn to operate. When Walker is hired by a beautiful woman whom he meets at random while driving down the road (this happens a lot when you're as suave as Joe Walker) to find her missing nuclear scientist brother, and Rowland is assigned to investigate the assassination (by explosives) of several prominent businessmen, it looks like the two will finally get out of one another's hair, which is especially good news for Joe Walker, as his hair takes considerable effort to style and maintain. Of course, this being a Eurospy film, we know way ahead of time that a convoluted and often times completely improbably chain of events will lead to the two cases being one and the same. And no nuclear scientist has ever disappeared in a Eurospy film without said disappearance being the result of his being kidnapped by some evil mastermind in an underground lair.
Although this is the sort of movie heavily spoofed by things like the Austin Powers series, it's pretty evident that at no point does this film ever take itself very seriously, and as such, it's already something of a parody itself. It feels like the writers just sat down one day with a big bottle of booze and tried to come up with a script that pushed every spy film cliche to the illogical extreme. Joe Walker isn't just a ladies' man. He actually seems to have almost supernatural power over them. His kisses are pretty tame to look at, but simply receiving one can make a woman he's just met and slapped on the bottom loan him her expensive Italian sportscar, no questions asked. A kiss from Joe Walker can make a hypnotized female judo master instantly dismiss her allegiance to her villainous master in favor of helping Joe Walker. He can't go a single scene without having some dame in a short skirt show up in his room. It's like every hot female on the planet, upon being identified as hot, is issued a key to Joe Walker's hotel room. And as Walker himself says when he returns to his room and finds a leggy bombshell he's never met before waiting for him, "The later the hour, the shorter the skirt, the lovelier the guest." Actor Tony Kendall's face is frozen throughout the entire movie in a smarmy smirk. His character is utterly ridiculous. Every line of dialog is a one liner or a corny come-on, and the skirts eat it up no matter how feeble the attempt may be in reality. He pours on the corniness thicker than the pomade in his hair, and believe me, there's a lot of pomade in that hair. He also plays Walker with a sort of disarming feyness. Yeah, Joe Walker is tough, and he bags the dames, but he's also not afraid to sashay if the mood hits him.
Kendall started out life as Luciano Stella, but changed his name just before appearing in Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body alongside Christopher Lee and Dahlia Lavi (who appeared in Casino Royale, alongside Dean Martin in the Matt Helm film The Silencers, and in Some Girls Do, the sequel to the fabulous Deadlier than the Male). Shortly before that, he appeared in the peplum film, Brennus, Enemy of Rome, which starred Gordon Mitchell, who worked the bizarre Mae West Revue alongside fellow bodybuilder and eventual movie star Brad Harris. Kendall starred in a couple more costumed adventures before director Gianfranco Parolini cast him as the oozing playboy private eye Joe Walker, turning Kendall into a European superstar.
His polar opposite is the anal, eternally put-upon Captain Tom Rowland, played by body builder turned peplum star Brad Harris. While Walker is blowing kisses and mixing cocktails and jumping over police barriers in the most dapper fashion possible, Rowland is concentrating on calling in to headquarters, reporting in, and doing that thing where he shakes his hands next to his head and makes the veins in his neck bulge out in exasperation over whatever impish mischief Joe Walker has gotten them into. Whether or not Harris is a good actor doesn't matter, because he was born to play Tom Rowland. Kendall is the smoothie, but as is often the case, Harris's Martin to Kendall's Lewis turns out to be the source of the real comedy. Brad Harris is totally convincing as a man who is being driven completely nuts by his sometimes-friend, and through facial expressions and body language (the two most important aspects of acting in an Italian film, especially one like this where the cast was speaking a mix of German, Italian, English, and Lord knows what else) he mines comedy gold. He's the perfect counterbalance to the lovable-yet-sleazy Joe Walker. Harris was one of the few peplum (those old Hercules movies, in case you missed out on the lingo lesson) stars who successfully transitioned out of the genre when it faltered around 1965 or so. At that time, the two most popular genres in Italy became the spy film, thanks to the success of the James Bond films, and a couple years later, the spaghetti western, thanks to the success of Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. Most of the stars of the sword and sandal films that ruled the first half of the 1960s with the iron grip of Hercules himself were unable to make the leap into these new genres. Some were just too big -- as Steve Reeves said, you put a bodybuilder in a gunslinger's clothes instead of a tunic, and it just looks silly. Some, like Reg Park, had made their money and decided to call it a day rather than try to adapt to the new films. But a couple -- specifically Brad Harris and Gordon Scott, both of whom had slightly leaner, more athletic builds -- were successful in extending their acting careers beyond the lifespan of the peplum genre (Scott was established before his time in peplum, as the star of a series of well-thought-of Tarzan films that sought to more closely reflect Edgar Rice Burrough's original source material and move the films away from the corniness with which they had become infected).
Harris was more than perfectly cast as Tom Rowland; he was also tapped to choreograph the action and stunts for the films, which results in Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill boasting more dynamic, faster moving action set pieces than many of its contemporaries. Harris was able to work everything out and tap the right men to pull the stunts off -- including himself. Harris looks great in action. The fist fights are fast and brutal, plus he gets to slide down a rope, run around with a machine gun, and kick guys in the nuts. Together, he and Kendall possess a wickedly entertaining chemistry that will keep you laughing and cheering for the duo no matter how harried Rowland becomes, and no matter how groan-inducing Walker's pick-up lines get. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is the rare Eurospy film that puts a lot of work into developing its lead characters and pinning the success of the film on their shoulders.
Luckily, they're up to the task, because without Harris and Kendall, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill would probably have ended up being just another goofy Eurospy film, along the lines of something like Operation Atlantis. Operation Atlantis is a pretty enjoyable espionage adventure, but only if you're already a fan of Eurospy films. If you're not, the combination of a completely insane and nonsensical plot and a lead actor apparently carved from solid granite and with all the command of facial expressions such a material gives you will probably keep you from ever cracking the surface of the movie or getting past the first inane come-on line. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill has a plot that is only marginally less nonsensical than Operation Atlantis (which we will be reviewing soon enough), but Kendall and Harris are so engaging and charismatic and funny that even someone not accustomed to the, ahh, peculiarities one frequently finds in Eurospy films can still find plenty to enjoy in this movie.
And if not, there's always the fact that this film is pretty to look at. Boasting a decent budget and a fair scope, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill may not look as lavish and polished as a James Bond film, but it still boasts a gorgeous pop-art sensibility in both set design and costuming. Every hotel room, every living room, is a swingin' pad. Every lobby, every bar, is a swank cocktail lounge full of smartly dressed patrons. The only thing skinnier than Joe Walker's slim-cut suit is his tie. And we get all this before we've even gotten to the villain's lair, which is a sprawling underground lair patrolled by hypnotized women in go-go boots, black catsuits, and metallic lavender-colored wigs, who do their patrolling in convertible stretch Caddies. The lair itself is an endless jumble of sci-spy stuff: multi-colored pipes, multi-colored liquids in beakers, multi-colored blinking lights, and of course, trap doors, drop-down cages, a corridor of fire, and other instruments of death. Our villain, Oberon (played by Jacques Bezard) prefers the posh look of a silly space tunic, while most of his men wear the black pants and tight-fitting shirts preferred by your finer henchmen. From time to time, someone will wander by in a radiation suit, purely so we can establish that people walk around in radiation suits from time to time, thus allowing Joe Walker to don one as a disguise, even though all he does once he has it on is walk up and start punching people. What's the point of a clever disguise if all you do is show up in, stand for two seconds with your arms crossed in a manly fashion, then you start punching everyone? Oh yeah -- the point is that it looks awesome, and Joe Walker is all about awesome. Sometimes he can barely see himself through the glare of his own awesomeness.
Two things get lost in this incredible jumble of cool: the plot, and the lead actresses. Oh, you won't fail to notice the actresses, who spend the entire film clad in whatever makes their bosoms look largest and their rumps look the juiciest, but good luck remembering anything about their characters -- or telling them apart, since half of them show up out of nowhere wearing the same metallic lavender-colored wigs and black catsuits. Maria Perschy plays Joan, the sister of the missing scientist, who also goes undercover as Oberon's secretary. Then there's Bobo, who wears a lavender wig and wants to hire Joe Walker to investigate something, and in so doing puts him in contact with another chick in a lavender wig. Then Joe slaps some dame on the butt and she loans him her car. She turns out to be the daughter of an admiral, and she goes along with Rowland for the big finale in which he and Walker raid Oberon's secret island and the robotized women are freed from their mind control and go on a rampage (a sexy rampage) throughout the lair. And they all have lavender wigs on, too, and sort of out of nowhere, their leader and judo master falls for Joe Walker after she tosses him around judo style for a spell and he responds by planting a big wet one on her lips. Man, look, you're just going to have to go with the flow, because chicks in lavender (and sometimes blonde) wigs are all over the place in this movie, and they're all sporting machine guns.
Somewhere in there is a plot about Oberon and his partners having possession of a large sum of gold, and Oberon offing his partners so he can have all the gold to himself, then irradiate it and use it somehow or other to hold the economies of the world ransom. As far as I know, the Kommissar X books have never been translated into English. I've certainly never read them, and these are the sorts of things I would read if I could. So I really have no idea how closely, if at all, this film reflects any of the books. And although James Bond is the obvious reason movies like this started getting made, Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill actually looks more toward the German Jerry Cotton films for inspiration -- that's Jerry Cotton the FBI agent played by George Nader, not Jerry Cotton the actor, who did not star in any of the Jerry Cotton films. I can't imagine hardly anyone going into Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill worried about the intricacies of the plot, which isn't so much thin as it is completely ludicrous. It's nice that they put it in there, but this is largely an exercise in swanky, swinging fun and attitude, and Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill boasts both of those attributes in spades. Director Parolini, who was a veteran of several peplum before he made the jump to spy films, keeps everything moving as fast as Joe Walker through a bevy of beauties. Even during scenes of exposition, what's being said is so weird, and the guys saying it are so cool, that the movie never loses its cool or falters in its snappy pace. Cinematographer Francesco Izzarelli was winding down a career that started in the 1930s (the Kommisar X series would be his last work), and he brings decades of experience and craftsmanship to the framing and photography of this film. It's absolutely gorgeous, drenched in candy-coloring and full of beautiful locales and wacky sets all filmed to great effect. And matching the jaunty look of the film is the score by Bobby Gutesha, which is a finger-snapping mix of cocktail lounge music and that godawful theme song that will be stuck in your head no matter how hard you fight it. Like Joe Walker's kiss and cocked eyebrow, you can try to deny it, but it will eventually consume you, and your co-workers will wonder why you are walking around the office crooning, "I, I, I love you Joe Walker!"
There are better Eurospy films than this, and there are more outlandish ones (some of the subsequent Kommissar X films, for example), but I don't know if there are any that are this much flat-out fun. Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is pure pop cinema. It wants nothing more than to look good, have a laugh and a wink, and entertain the viewer. And that it certainly does. Although it looks low budget by Bond standards (thanks in no small part to the dearth of a high quality print, leaving us with scratchy somewhat washed out prints that make the film look a lot cheaper than it actually does), Kiss Kiss, Kill Kill is still unadulterated eye-candy. Kendall and Harris are beyond cool, and the entire goofy, action-packed mess will leave you a with a big, stupid grin on your face even as you realize that Joe Walker, Rowland, and a bevy of bikini beauties reclining by the poolside can only mean one thing:
Someone is getting pushed into that pool, and everyone else is going to laugh as the credits roll. Why not be one of them? Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Series: Kommissar X, Stars: Brad Harris, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 2:49 AM | 7 Comments Thursday, July 21, 2005Paradise, Hawaiian Style
1966, United States. Starring Elvis Presley, Suzanna Leigh, James Shigeta, Donna Butterworth, Marianna Hill, Irene Tsu, Linda Wong, Julie Parrish, Jan Shepard, John Doucette, Philip Ahn, Mary Treen. Directed by Michael Moore.
It would be some time before they'd send Elvis to the Hawaiian well for a third time, and by then it was more of a desperation move to revitalize interest in the films. By the mid-1960s, people weren't being as kind to Elvis' films as they were in the beginning. Sure, they were still popular with the kids, but critics lost their patience somewhere around Harum Scarum and had to admit to themselves that Elvis had yet to become the next James Dean, and it was very likely that he wasn't going to be doing it any time soon. James Dean, after all, died before he could make a movie like Kissin' Cousins. Although Elvis movies made money, each subsequent film seemed to get saddled with a smaller and smaller budget. Producers figured that if people were going to see them anyway, why waste money on big budgets when you keep things inexpensive and reap even bigger profits off Elvis singing about shrimp and papayas. By the end of things, Elvis movies and Battle for the Planet of the Apes were no doubt sitting together in threadbare recliners wondering what went wrong. The decline in the quality of Elvis movies - if you can believe they could decline in the first place - was matched with a general decline in the popularity of The King. See, there was this ragged bunch of mop tops who blew across the Atlantic and took music by storm, becoming the only musical act that could go toe to toe with Elvis' classic popularity. When The Beatles broke, the King of Rock 'n' Roll must have felt a little like the King of England looking at a Parliament that now held most of the power. And while The Beatles turned in ground-breaking, often puzzling samples of cinema that were big on experimentation and the avant garde, the people behind Elvis decided it was time for more of the same old, same old. A Hard Day's Night came out in 1964, and Magical Mystery Tour hit theaters in 1967, leaving Presley's return to the beach for one more go-round sandwiched in between what most everyone considers two of the most influential and ground-breaking music-related movies ever made and leaving Presley himself looking outdated and, well, corny. The Beatles were aided by more caring and careful keepers who obviously learned lessons from the Elvis films. They weren't going to let their boys loose their edge by becoming something that parents could embrace instead of fear. The Mop Top movies employed avant garde narrative structure and direction, keeping them edgy and bizarre where Elvis films were content to tread well-worn teenie-bopper waters. Ironically, years later The Monkees would sink their careers when they attemped cinematic surrealism a la Beatles films when, really, all anyone wanted from them was a light Elvis-style comedy. Paradise, Hawaiian Style was producer Hal Wallis' attempt to capture lightning in a bottle for a third time. Elvis first romp around the islands of Hawaii was a huge success, the most successful Elvis movie of all time, as a matter of fact, and a thoroughly enjoyable film. His second Polynesian adventure was the more modest Girls! Girls! Girls!, which confined itself primarily to nightclub sets and hum-drum docks with only a few flirtations with the beauty of the islands. Although it wasn't exactly a pretty film, it was different enough from Blue Hawaii to remain interesting. By 1966, however, everyone figured it was time to trot the Blue Hawaii suit out again, but with a smaller budget, stupider jokes, and awful songs. The lack of appeal in the island photography -- we'd seen it all before and better executed in Blue Hawaii -- isn't half as shocking as the lack of appeal of Elvis photography. The never-ending fluff of his films had finally started taking its toll, and the Elvis we see here is most definitely not the fine looking specimen we saw back in Blue Hawaii. This Elvis is about twenty pounds overweight, with much of it being in his face. His hair is awful. In many of his scenes he has a glazed look in his eyes that says he's just as disappointed with the movie as you are. The Elvis that drove everyone wild, the Elvis that revolutionized the world and became one of the biggest icons in history, is here reduced to making bug eyes at a bunch of wacky dogs and singing about papayas to a precocious little girl. The better Elvis movies were always bubblegum, but they allowed some of Elvis charm, appeal, and energy to shine through despite the lightweight material. With Paradise, Hawaiian Style, the decline is painful because there's so little Elvis in what Elvis is doing. The tell-tale sign of Elvis' physical decline comes in comparing bare-chested bathing suit shots. In Blue Hawaii, Elvis can hardly keep his shirt on. We frequently see him cavorting about in the waves sans shirt, sunning himself on a surfboard, whatever it takes. When Elvis puts a shirt on, it's usually a sharp "aloha" deal. And he's always wearing those tiny little swimming trunks that were so popular back then and should not be worn by most men since most men do not look like Elvis or Burt Lancaster. Heck, most men don't even look like Frankie Avalon. Most men look more like Joe Don Baker, and cool as he may be, the world has never demanded Joe don skimpier swimwear. Paradise, Hawaiian Style knew better than to show what happened to Elvis. If his face is as fat as we see, then one can only shudder at what his out of control Southern boy diet had done to his waistline. We see Elvis without his shirt one time, and when it happens it looks like he's wearing swimwear with a built-in girdle. It only lasts a second too, and rather than linger on the King's form, they have him rush in and wrap himself in a towel while he puts on clothes. I'm not saying that to have a good Elvis movie you have to have the guy shirtless every ten minutes. But if you're going to make a movie set on the beaches of Hawaii, you should make sure your leading man can take his shirt off without evoking a reaction like, "I'd just as soon see a shirtless Gary Busey." I should also mention that Elvis' hair is doing something really weird and disagreeable. Sensing perhaps the defeated spirit of its owner, the King's trademark pompadour is looking particularly floppy and disheveled, like Free Willy's dorsal fin. Regardless, and even when he's looking out of shape and bored as he does here, he still oozes Elvis charm and appeal, and that's more than enough to carry him. Bad as the material may be, your stern criticism of a movie like this melts every time the King flashes his trademark smirk. It's just an example amid all the fluff of just how powerful Elvis was, even when he wasn't trying. Though he may not have his previous character's fashion sense or physical fitness, Elvis still plays the same guy as always. As difficult as it is to believe, Elvis plays Rick Richards, a decent guy just looking to make it on his own. This time out, he's an airline pilot freshly fired for an incident in which he did the right thing and was wrongly punished. After returning to Hawaii, he hatches a plot to open a helicopter tour company with his pal, Danny Kohana (James Shigeta). This is a lot different than the plot of Blue Hawaii, in which he returns to Hawaii and looks to start his own island tour company that is based entirely on the ground instead of in helicopters. Helping the boys out is the lovely Friday (Suzanna Leigh), whom Danny has said is married so Elvis won't ignore his duties in favor of tomcattin' about with the secretary. Much ado is made about the fact that Friday is actually an ace pilot and mechanic herself but still relegated to "women's work," but just as the movie comes up with something interesting if not terribly original, it fumbles about and never really goes anywhere with it. Filling out the cast is Danny's adorable daughter, Jan. By adorable, of course, I mean adorable in that same way stepping on a sea urchin is adorable. In the history of annoying child stars being crammed down our throats by a movie, she's nowhere near the worst of the bunch, but her loud kid singing really got on my nerves. Young actress Donna Butterworth actually does a fairly good job of playing the character, but the inclusion of a cute kid and a helicopter full of funny dogs really signals just how low this film will sink. Cute kids in movies just irritate me, even if they're not awful performers. So apologies to Donna. You're not a bad actress, and you're among the most tolerable of cute kids in movies that don't need cute kids. But those things still annoy me. Complications arise when Elvis agrees to chopper a load of dogs to a kennel club show for some snooty lady. I'm sure scriptwriters Anthony Lawrence and Allan Weiss thought it would be really funny to stick the guy who sang "Hound Dog" into a helicopter with a bunch of dogs, then have him sing to them and hurl doggie biscuits around. And maybe it is kind of funny in an obvious sort of way for a little while. But then the scene keeps going. And it keeps going. And before too long we start to wonder if the entire film is going to be comprised of nothing but lovely scenery shots intercut with shots of a pudgy-faced Elvis yelling, "You pooches settle down!" Eventually, the cockpit shenanigans cause Elvis to loose control of his whirlybird and force a car off the highway - a car which just happens to belong to the local FAA commissioner. Elvis is grounded until his friend Danny has a wreck and needs rescuing. Will Elvis break the rules, save his friend, and then give an impassioned speech about how he values friendship more than his pilot's license, thus convincing the FAA to only give him a warning? Will he get in a fight where he's forced to use some judo? Only time and Paradise, Hawaiian Style will tell. There's a lot wrong with this movie. But since I'm a generally positive guy and can't, in the end, say that I didn't find Paradise, Hawaiian Style to be enjoyable despite itself, I'll begin instead with what the film does right. First of all, the island scenery is lovely as always, though not as lovely as it was in the better photographed Blue Hawaii. That film simply seemed to have more vivid color and director Norman Taurog showcased a better eye for sweeping cinematography there than Michael Moore does this time out. Still, Hawaii is a gorgeous island, and you'd have to work pretty hard not to go up in a helicopter and come down with some sumptuous shots. The fact that Elvis is a helicopter pilot even gives the film added incentive to fly about photographing lush tropical jungles, beaches, and lagoons. The supporting cast is by no means an assembly of big names, but very few of them are bad performers. Co-star James Shigeta is probably best known as the Japanese businessman who gets executed by that evil Hans in Die Hard. He was also in Flower Drum Song, since there's apparently a law that all Asians in an Elvis film must have had at least something to do with Flower Drum Song. More recently, he did voicework on Disney's Mulan and had a part in Takeshi Kitano's cross-over film Brother. His character, like the Asian family in Girls! Girls! Girls! is another attempt by an Elvis movie to portray Asians not as exotic others, but as regular folks just like us. It's a much better effort this time around, as Danny is never presented to us as anything other than a pilot and father. At no point does he walk onto screen accompanied by the crashing of a gong, the whisper of flute music, or that snippet of "oriental" music they usually play. At no point does he refer to anyone as "honorable so-and-so," refer to his ancestors, or do martial arts (them's for Elvis to do). He's just a regular guy with a rich speaking voice. Inevitable love interest Suzanna Leigh is also not bad in her role as the frustrated female pilot forced by society to do bookkeeping and answer the phones. She had herself quite a career in horror and scifi films, including roles in The Deadly Bees, Lost Continent, Lust for a Vampire, and one of my favorite European caper films, Deadlier than the Male. Her character has about as much to do as any female character in an Elvis movie, which means she's just a place holder up until the point Elvis finally grabs her and gives her a kiss. The other woman in Elvis' life is Marianna Hill, who plays his on-again, off-again girlfriend Lani Kaimana. Elvis always has two women in his life. His destiny, and the girl he's with who may not be terrible, but certainly has some irksome character traits. Marianna fulfills that role pretty well. She also had a small uncredited role in a previous Elvis film, Roustabout, which also had small roles for Teri Garr and Raquel Welch. The quick-eyed will also catch a glimpe of Irene Tsu, who went on to star in cult faves such as Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Karate Killers, the Doris Day spy spoof Caprice, the goofball John Wayne Vietnam war flick The Green Berets, and more respectably the highly acclaimed Hong Kong romance Comrades, Almost a Love Story starring Maggie Cheung. If you're gonna watch an Elvis movie, you better enjoy listening to Elvis sing since he'll do a lot of it. Paradise, Hawaiian Style rarely takes a break from the musical festivities. This is another one of those movies where we sometimes get one musical number immediately followed by another musical number without any dialogue in between. This wouldn't be so bad if the songs here were as good as the songs in Blue Hawaii, but like all aspects of the film, even Elvis' singing, -- designed to recall the smooth Elvis exotica of Blue Hawaii -- only serves to remind us how much better that film was than this one. At the very least, we can at least hope for one good song. Girls! Girls! Girls! has "Return to Sender." No such luck here. The songs range from forgettable duds to embarrassing dogs - especially the one he sings to the dogs. That one was strictly for the dogs. "Queenie Wahine's Papayas" doesn't make things any better. One could almost convince oneself that Elvis is singing a thinly veiled song about breasts, which almost makes the song bearable. But then, one has to remember a couple things. First, he's singing the song to a ten year old girl, which makes thinking of it as a subversive ode to those wonderful parts of the female anatomy rather creepy. Second, I don't know about you, but I can't say as I'd find papaya-shaped breasts to be especially titillating. I guess as far as "tropical fruit as boobs" goes, a papaya at least beats a pineapple, though I'm sure there's at least one webpage out there dedicated to women whose breasts are covered in rough spines and sprout rigid leaves from the nipples. Ultimately, we're just going to have to chalk up "Queenie Wahine's Papayas" as one of those songs that goes well with "Song of the Shrimp" and that song from Clambake! about how they're all gonna bake some clams. What was it with people making Elvis sing about food? That's for Weird Al Yankovich and Shonen Knife. Director Michael Moore (no, not that Michael Moore) does a suitable job, though the film is definitely worse for the lack of Norman Taurog's involvement. Moore doesn't have the taste he does, and the resulting film seems a tad grubbier. Moore was an accomplished second unit director, which is one of the many great uncelebrated responsibilities in making a film. Second unit directors do a ton of work (in some cases shooting even more of a film than the director) and rarely get any recognition. Moore started his career as an assistant director on the apocalyptic sci-fi classic When Worlds Collide, worked as the same on the epic Ten Commandments, and then served as assistant director on five Elvis movies: King Creole, Blue Hawaii, Girls! Girls! Girls!, Roustabout, and Fun in Acapulco. Those were all pretty good films as far as Elvis fare goes, and with Taurog (who was directing another Elvis movie, Spinout, that same year) not involved with Paradise, Hawaiian Style, Moore was a natural choice to replace him. He does the best he can with the limited budget and an uninterested star. The experience seems to have soured him on being the lead director, because after a few more films, he went back to a long and successful career as an assistant director and second unit man, including work on Patton, Rooster Cogburn, the Indiana Jones trilogy, and Never Say Never Again. In fact, Paradise, Hawaiian Style was very much a second unit film. Not only was Moore a second unit director bumped up to head honcho duties, but cinematographer W. Wallace Kelley was the second unit photographer for Blue Hawaii under Charles Lang Jr. Lang went from Blue Hawaii to doing cinematography for films like How the West was Won and How to Marry a Millionaire (which came out the same year as Paradise, Hawaiian Style). Kelley, on the other hand, continued to work with Michael Moore on a number of Moore's directorial efforts throughout the 1960s but never really worked on anything held in high regard. His short-comings as a full-fledged cinematographer account for a portion of the film's failure to match Blue Hawaii in terms of beauty, though Paradise, Hawaiian Style still has some shining moments -- how can you not when your star is the Hawaiian Islands? But not all the blame can fall on Kelley, just as not all of it can fall on Moore. When you're short-changed in the budget department, technical aspects of the film are the first to have their corners cut. Paradise, Hawaiian Style's cheaper look has less to do with it relying on second unit guys and more to do with the fact that, well, it was cheaper. You can't have Blue Hawaii again if you're not willing to pay for it. As with most Elvis films, nothing here is very good, but everything here -- acting, direction, cinematography, and so forth -- is fairly entertaining, inoffensive, and fun. Elvis movies were never meant to be much more than Saturday matinee or drive-in fun for the family, and if that's all you want, then even a film from the lower end of the Elvis bell curve proves enjoyable. Since that was all I was looking for, I did indeed have a ball watching Paradise, Hawaiian Style. It's easy to harp on all the negatives in a film like this, but somewhere amid all the sniping I also realize that I'm actually having fun watching the movie, more than I am making cracks about it. Say what you will about what that says about my taste. Paradise, Hawaiian Style isn't good, but it's better than you might think. Paradise, Hawaiian Style strives for most of its running time to be Return to Blue Hawaii. It never succeeds, but like a scrappy little brother who discovers the one thing he can do better than his older, more talented brother the film does manage to do one thing better than Blue Hawaii, and that's throw a finale. Blue Hawaii ends with Elvis' lavish and respectable Hawaiian wedding. Paradise, Hawaiian Style, on the other hand, ends with a completely gratuitous tour of fire twirlers, hula dancers, waterfalls, and all sorts of "Polynesia, Martin Denny Style" type of celebration. It comes out of nowhere and has no logical explanation, but as with all problems in this film, who really cares? Anything that leaves me with a shot of Elvis singing his heart out surrounded by an army of hula girls with palm trees and South Seas beauty in the background makes up for any missteps we may have endured along the way. Labels: Beach Party Tonight, Musicals, Stars: Elvis, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 1:25 PM | 0 Comments Monday, November 22, 2004Deadlier than the Male
1966, Great Britain. Starring Richard Johnson, Elke Sommer, Sylva Koscina, Nigel Greene, Suzanna Leigh, Steve Carlsen, Virginia North, Justine Lord, Zia Mohyeddin, Yasuko Nagazumi, Laurence Naismith, George Pastell, Milton Reid, Leonard Rossiter. Directed by Ralph Thomas. Available on DVD (Amazon).
The phrase "in the wake of James Bond's success" is probably the single most over-used phrase in any examination of the flood of spy films that flowed freely onto screens worldwide in the wake of James Bond's success. Unfortunately, facts are facts and while the Bond films certainly were not the first espionage thrillers to grace the silver screen, they remain to this day the most popular and influential. While many of the films that followed Dr. No and From Russia with Love were very different from those two seminal Bond movies, there's little doubt that Bond opened the doors, paved the way, and made producers a lot more interested in green-lighting spy movies. Nowhere was this truer than in Europe, where spy mania swept the continent and resulted in hundreds of espionage and caper films taking full advantage of the wealth of gorgeous European locations and equally gorgeous European screen sirens. Italy and Spain had far and away the most audacious entries into the parade, which got underway shortly after the release of Dr. No in 1962 and really gained steam near the middle of the decade. England had already done its part by giving us James Bond but also fit to turn in an impressive array of spy movies that usually boasted more coherent and intelligent scripts than their continental brethren but also lacked the anything-goes bravado. France got in on the act as well with a few notable entries, the most fabulous of which was the Fantomas series, a pop art updating of a classic French anti-hero and master thief. Germany's biggest contribution was the long-running series of Jerry Cotton adventures - that's the character of Jerry Cotton, not the actor Jerry Cotton. All in all, it was a glorious cavalcade of men in turtlenecks or tuxedos, women in mini skirts or cocktail dresses, and assassins in slim-fit mod suits and fezzes.
Naturally, some of the films were better than others. Though none had the lavish production values and big budget look of the Bond films (which was attained thanks to the keenness of art director Ken Adam, as Dr. No was actually a fairly modestly budgeted affair), some were never the less quite good. Others were slapdash but approached the genre with such off-the-wall gusto and flat-out weirdness that they more than compensated for their shortcomings with energy, zeal, and insanity. And of course, some were just dreadful bores and cheap, slapped together nonsense. What is often overlooked in the stampede to dismiss the entirety of the Eurospy genre as a bunch of cheap and chintzy Bond knock-offs is the fact that not only were quite a few of the films exceedingly enjoyable, many of them used the Bond formula as a starting point but then took the spy story into wild and uncharted territory complete with unique approaches, ideas, and enough mod pop-art quirk to stay fresh and innovative even while dutifully fulfilling the genre requirements and expectations passed down from on high. Some of the twists were superficial, others were deeper, but the fact of the matter is that it's unfair to wave off the entire body of work as one big Bond imitation. One of the most frequent digressions from the Bond formula was to mix the film's story and sense of design with the pervading artistic and fashion trends of the time. James Bond was set up as a timeless figure, a man who exists above flash in the pan trends and fashion sensations. He is a classic, a conservative, and he looks damn good. Likewise the women he encountered were usually similarly dressed in clothing befitting someone with grace, class, and elegance. At least until Diamonds Are Forever, which is when Bond finally started giving in to fashion trends. By the Moore years, Bond had swapped the classics for flared tuxedo trousers and a safari suit -- which was still better than Timothy Dalton's Members Only, casual Friday Bond. But for the Connery years, Bond's appearance was the paramount of timeless male fashion, a paragon of men's style. For what it's worth, Pierce Brosnan has done his best to return Bond to his style roots. Many of the other European films, however, were more sympathetic to trends, and so we'd get heroes in slim-fit suits and turtlenecks, or women in mini skirts and go-go boots and fabulous mod dresses. Although I count myself as a lifetime fan of classic and conservative men's fashion, I'm also a bigger fan of the 60's mod look, which I think maintained elegance and class but mixed it with a rebel sensibility. With limitless funds, I'd choose to be equal parts Saville Row and Canarby Street. As such, I'm a huge fan of the psychedelic swingin' 60s look adopted by a lot of the spy films of the era. An elegant black evening dress or an orange and white mini - either one is fine with me on a gal. Likewise, give me a smart black Merc suit or a well-tailored tux, and I'll be a happy lad. As with clothing, a lot of the smaller budget films looked to appeal more to the pop-art sensibilities in art and design. As such, even some of the lowest budget films can boast gorgeously realized interiors full of eye-popping candy, a tendency toward the psychedelic and surreal that woudl reach its eternally unmatchable apex in 1968 with the sci-fi spectacular Barbarella. Throw into the mix the fact that in Europe you can score striking and historic locations simply by walking out your front door, and the end result is a lot of films that looked very jet-set despite budgets that would have limited a similarly financed American film to be restricted to one location and a bunch of cheap indoor sets. In other words, you'd end up with Agent for H.A.R.M.
Despite the fact that London was the swingin' center of the universe in the 1960s, as I said the British films tended to be ever so slightly more subdued than, say, their Italian counterparts. But then, being more subdued than the Italians still leaves plenty of room to blow minds. Its like saying, "Oh no, he's less violent than Vlad the Impaler." The two best British films besides the Bonds, which in my opinion are still the overall best of the 60s (yes, I even love You Only Live Twice), would be 1965's The Ipcress File and 1966's Deadlier than the Male. The films couldn't be further apart in tone and style, but along with the Bonds, they represent the cream of the crop in espionage actioners. The Ipcress File was producer Harry Saltzman's response to the fact that his Bond movies (which he co-produced with Albert "Cubby" Broccoli) were getting bigger and more cartoonish (often thanks to his own overzealous desire to throw anything and everything he could possibly think of). It introduced the character of Harry Palmer, as realized spectacularly by Michael Caine in one of the first and still best performances of his career. Palmer was a downbeat secret agent forced into service after some unpleasantness during his tenure in the military. His surroundings were the gritty, gray streets of London, and his biggest foe was actually the British bureaucracy and the endless barrage of forms that had to be filled out. He was, in many ways, a soul mate for American author Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm character, though when Helm made it to the screen, it was in the form of a goofball spoof filled by Dean Martin. Deadlier than the Male, by contrast, has more in common with James Coburn's Derek Flint films. It's jokey and clever but not outright slapstick the way Matt Helm tended to be. It's more reserved than a Bond film, but still plenty flashy, especially when compared to artfully distressed look of The Ipcress File (which incidentally allowed art designer Ken Adam from the Bond films to go just as wild but in the exact opposite direction as the Bonds, creating sets that were as gorgeously sparse as the Bond sets were complex). Consider that Deadlier that the Male opens with legendary Eurobabe Elke Sommer skydiving from a jet seconds before she blows it up, plunging into the water to be picked up by another devastating European beauty, Sylvia Koscina (from the first two Hercules films, among others), in a skimpy bikini. Seconds later, both bikini-clad women emerge from the ocean and find a man lounging on his seaside patio, whom they promptly impale with a shot from a spear gun. Now that is how you get the viewer's attention. The whole scene is obviously meant to spoof the iconic scene of Ursula Andress emerging from the sea clad in her skimpy white bikini and wielding a diving knife in Dr. No. For my money, any three of those women can emerge from the water and threaten me with bladed or pointy weapons. We soon learn that the girls are industrial assassins, hired ostensibly to broker difficult to close multi-billion dollar deals. The people who hire them are rarely aware that their most common means of persuasion involves bombs and spear guns. In one case, however, their actions attract the attention of ace investigator Bulldog Drummond, played with aplomb by Richard Johnson, who manages to artfully walk the line between hip modster and middle-aged square, taking the best of both worlds and making them into his own style. Since one of their most recent victims was a friend of his, Bulldog Drummond is especially keen to unearth what sort of disreputable deeds these two gorgeous women have been engaging in. Hampering him, and later helping him, in his mission is his hip young nephew, Robert. Contrary to that description of the character, Robert never becomes tedious or odious. And since he's usually accompanied by yet another comely lass, his appearances aren't the cringe-inducing events they might otherwise be if Steve Carlson had been a more irksome actor. It turns out that the girls are working for a mad genius who lives in a opulent castle high atop a cliff overlooking the ocean. Their current mission is to secure a nearly impossible-to-exploit oil contract from a country none to eager to have Europeans stealing their black gold. The man in charge of the yea or neigh on the matter, young King Fedra, happens to be good friends with Robert, meaning now Bulldog finds his own nephew in the position of being potential collateral damage in an assassination attempt.
Bulldog Drummond has, much like the character of Nick Carter (the detective and spy, not the boy band idol), a very long pedigree. He got his start in the 1920s in a series of stories revolving around a man who returns from the trenches of World War One to find peaceful intolerably dull. He begins to hire himself out as a private eye and all-around global adventurer. Written with breakneck action in mind and the pre-World War II British national pride, the stories were embraced by upper-class British schoolboys who would, soon enough, find themselves serving as officers on the front lines of World War II. In updating Bulldog for the 60s spy craze, screenwriters Liz Charles-Williams and David Osborn transform him into a high profile insurance investigator with a knack for involving himself in fighting schemes and scams orchestrated by international crime syndicates. I always thought insurance investigators did things like try to determine of some guy faked the theft of his Thunderbird and thus had to skulk around a lot in garages down South, but I guess they also jet set around the world and flirt with Elke Sommer, though I'm sure if I became one, I'd end up with the car theft case orchestrated by a big burly guy named Scout or Dakota. The story in Deadlier than the Male, like most stories if the truth were put bluntly, is not spectacularly original, but the execution is marvelous. The script is smartly written and packed with clever dialogue and double entendres that are actually funny and witty, unlike say, the often nonsensical sex joke ramblings spouted by Dean Martin in the Matt Helm film (which, don't get me wrong, are glorious in their own ragged way even if I constantly make fun of them). Bulldog Drummond is a determined and likeable lead, even though the real stars here are Elke and Sylvia. As was the case in the Matt Helm novels, the wicked women are often the most complex and best fleshed-out characters, and this movie does not prove to be the exception. Bulldog's the hero. We know what he's going to do and who he'll judo chop. But the girls are unpredictable, fierce, and perverse in the almost childlike pleasure they take in the business of killing and torturing men. Clad in an array of graceful cocktail wear, evening gowns, and bikinis, they are a sight most pleasing to the eye. Elke Sommer plays the more sultry Irma Eckman - not exactly the sexiest name you might think, but then, pretty much anything attached to Elke Sommer is going to fall victim to the woman's undeniable and near overwhelming sensuality. Elke Sommer - now this is a sexy woman, and she carries herself in this film with an easy and natural grace that makes it easy to believe any man would succumb to her charms even he expected to be harpooned at the end of things. And then there's Croatian beauty Sylvia Koscina, in my opinion one of the most beautiful women ever to walk the face of the earth (but not quite in the same class as Diana Rigg -- I don't thing anybody is or ever will be). Sylvia's Penelope is just as gorgeous but more playful and coquettish, more flirtatious and at the same time, infinitely more delighted by dealing pain that her more professional counterpart. Up until I saw Deadlier than the Male, I'd only seen Sylvia in her two Hercules films (Hercules and Hercules Unchained, both with Steve Reeves) and Mario Bava's delightfully bizarre Lisa and the Devil (also with Elke Sommer in the lead role). She was given very little to do in the Hercules films beyond cry and look out the window at the say and say, "Hercules my love, you've been gone these many years. When shall you return to my love?" Her part in Lisa and the Devil was relatively small but memorable, especially if you've seen the extra spicy uncut love scene between and her and well-known Italian genre actor Gabriele Tinti. Other than that though, the film focuses primarily, as the title would suggest, Lisa (Elke Sommer) and The Devil (Telly Savalas), and Koscina is little more than window dressing. With Deadlier than the Male, Sylvia really gets to flex her flirtatious sex appeal and showcase a comedic and charismatic acting skill that will suckerpunch you with how deliciously cute she is even when she's giggling to herself as she ties you up and cuts your throat. Together with Elke, they're one of the most devastating screen combinations ever. There is enough sex appeal and beauty on that screen to make a grown man weep. Not to leave the ladies out of things, Richard Johnson is wonderful as the stylishly square Bulldog Drummond. Although he hasn't Sean Connery's rough and edgy raw sex appeal, he's still a good-looking guy, the kind of good looking you can relate to the real world. I bet you could still depend on him to get the chores done even if he had to kill dastardly evil spies earlier that day. He's solid but not excessively spectacular, and his reserved manner hides the fact that if he needs to he can outshoot and out-judo any henchman who gets in his way - and plenty of henchmen will get in his way. Mastermind Nigel Green's castle lair is crawling with karate masters and a bevy of beautiful gals trained to pleasure or kill a man, or more likely, pleasure and kill a man. As Nigel Green, actor Carl Peterson is perfectly serviceable but ultimately overshadowed by his more flamboyant chief hitwomen. With ample eye candy of this caliber, one could forgive a film if it had a daft script and shoddy direction. Quite to the contrary, however, Deadlier than the Male has a smart script that moves along at a brisk pace and is full of crisp dialogue. Like Our Man Flint, it manages to spoof and poke fun at the spy genre without being disrespectful and while always remembering that spoof or not, it also has to be a very good film. Some films lived and died by their wit - well, died mostly - and it was always an important part of the spy genre. Deadlier than the Male acquits itself quite nicely in this regard, and Ralph Thomas's direction is snappy, taking full advantage of the locations and the ladies. There are some nice set-pieces too, especially in Nigel's booby-trap strewn castle, which culminate in a deadly game of chess with giant electronically controlled pieces and spaces on the board that open to reveal spiked pits. The film is dazzling, full of vibrant color and energy and well-deserved of its position as one of the most fondly remembered and best respected of the playful 1960s spy films. Labels: Espionage, Eurospies, Stars: Elke Sommer, Stars: Nigel Greene, Stars: Sylvia Koscina, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 2:18 PM | 0 Comments Monday, August 30, 2004Dracula, Prince of Darkness
1966, England. Starring Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, Francis Matthews, Suzan Farmer, Charles Tingwell, Thorley Walters, Philip Latham. Directed by Terence Fisher. Available on DVD (Amazon).
For many, the first official sequel to Hammer's groundbreaking Horror of Dracula, an oft-neglected film called Brides of Dracula, was little more than a pit stop on the road to this film, the second sequel but first to feature the return of Christopher Lee in the title role of Count Dracula. Hoping to avoid being typecast as Dracula, Lee resisted doing the sequel, and it was another eight years or so before he agreed to don the opera cape once again and reprise the role that made him famous. In that time, he'd built up a pretty solid and diverse career that would ensure he would not become "nothing but Dracula" to the audience. Of course, in the end, he was best known as Dracula, but what can you do? He would, I assume, remain cranky about people calling him Dracula until, some decades later, everyone just started calling him Saruman. Christopher Lee's return to the role was much celebrated, though fans were a bit disappointed to hear that peter Cushing, who had appeared in the first two films, would not be returning in the role of Professor Van Helsing, dedicated thorn in the side of Satan's spawn. Cushing, in fact, would not return to face Dracula again until Hammer's vampire films started getting really weird with Dracula A.D. 1972. He's sorely missed since none of the other fearless vampire killers could ever hope to measure up to his standards, but I reckon Hammer decided to make the Dracula movies a Christopher Lee affair in much the same way the Frankenstein movies belonged to Peter Cushing. The big difference is that in the Frankenstein movies, Frankenstein is on the screen and running his mouth for much of the duration of the film. In the Dracula movies, Lee often appears only slightly more regularly than he appeared in Brides of Dracula, and he didn't appear in that at all. But Horror of Dracula seemed to prove that, with the count, less is more. He was hardly in that film at all but managed to make an everlasting impression on people with just a few minutes screen time and only a few lines. So if he could do that much with that little, well then heck, imagine how much more he could do with even less! Or so the thinking seems to have gone, because in Dracula, Prince of Darkness he may show up screen a few more minutes than when last we saw him, but he says even less. In fact, Dracula says nothing at all. Christopher Lee doesn't have a single line in the entire movie unless you count that animalistic, seething hiss he does every now and then. According to director Terence Fisher and scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster - both of whom served in the same roles for the previous two films - it was because they thought the strong, silent approach made Dracula even more menacing, even more like an animal. Christopher Lee maintains that the script was full of dialogue, but that it was so ripe that he flat out refused to perform it, and so Dracula became a silent role. Frankly, Lee comes off as something of a dick in this regard. It may be the case that he's telling the truth, but then, it's not like he wasn't uttering corny dialogue in other films. Hey, Chris, do I need to remind you that you'd already starred in Asian drag as Fu Manchu? And hell, it's his job to say the lines. I know Lee takes the character of Dracula very seriously as a literary figure, but really now! Since Sangster is a good scriptwriter, and since no one else's lines are bad, one has to assume that maybe Lee is taking a slight bit of liberty with the truth here, unless I'm mistaken and Sangster had Dracula popping up and saying things like, "Blah! Blah! I vant to suck your blood!" or "One, two, three! Three giant fake rubber bats! Ah ah ah ah!" or perhaps even, "Welcome to Castle Dracula. You must be weary after your long journey. May I offer you a bowl of Count Chocula? It is a fine source of iron. Iron enriches.your blood!" Short of that, I can't possibly imagine what could have been so bad that it would cause Christopher Lee to throw a fit and refuse to say his lines. I prefer to believe Sangster and Fisher. It reflects better on the movie and makes Lee sound like less of a big crybaby. So when last we saw Christopher Lee as the count, he was crumbling into dust after Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) gives him the double whammy of blasting him with a room full of sunlight and harassing him with a cross. It would seem that would be that for the evil aristocrat, but ten years later we find the small burg of Carlsbad still reeling from the lingering specter of vampirism. Just about anyone who dies gets a stake through the heart just in case, at least until a wandering monk named Father Sandor (Andrew Kier, who'd starred in a couple Hammer pirate movies and would later play Professor Quatermass in the wonderful Quatermass and the Pit) happens by and tells everyone to stop being such a bunch of barbarians. He wanders without fear through this valley of darkness, for he knows he travels with beneath the protective mercy of the Lord, the mercy of the Lord taking, in this particular case, the form of a high powered rifle. Sandor later encounters two couples from England who are away on a holiday, Why exactly they've come to the blood-drenched middle of nowhere, Transylvania, is beyond me, but I figure they were probably taken in by some flashy brochure. That or they felt that a vacation isn't a vacation unless you can eat in a tavern full of those dirty peasants who get silent and stare at you as soon as you walk in. Sandor pleads with the couples not to go to Carlsbad, but they seem determined to go take that cave tour. Well, Sandor says, if you must go to Carlsbad, then for God's sake don't go to the hellishly creepy old abandoned castle up on the hill. Hey, guess where they go? Once up at the castle they must under no circumstances even think about visiting, they encounter the groundskeeper, Klove (Philip Latham), who welcomes them with some food, beautiful old rooms, and the usual sort of ultra-creepy "butler of evil" behavior you expect from these sorts. Up until this point, the movie has been building a sense of dread in spectacular fashion, using all the requisite Gothic horror chestnuts: the menacing warnings and portents of doom, the superstitious locals who refuse to acknowledge the existence of Castle Dracula even though they can see it out the window, the misty woods, dark crossroads, stranded travelers, mysterious black coaches, and of course, the skulking butler in the abandoned castle. It all culminates in a blockbuster moment in which one of our weary travelers is strung up in a crypt by Klove and has his throat slit, allowing the blood to gush down into Dracula's open casket, where Klove has lovingly piled all the ashes of his dead master. The result: well, you can probably figure that one out. Unfortunately, the movie falters after this spectacularly gruesome scene and fails to maintain an even pace. There are plenty of stand-out moments in the second half of the film - particularly the transformation of Helen Kent (Barbara Shelley, Rasputin, the Mad Monk and Quatermass and the Pit) from an uptight ice queen into a wanton creature of the night (who utters one of Hammer's earliest and most overt lesbian lines when she suggests to her female friend that they don't need the men to have a good time together). Helen's transformation from sensible, repressed Victorian woman to lustful libertine vampire is representative of the film's underlying theme of Victorian-era primness giving way to a more modern, "continental" attitude about sex. When Helen is finally captured by Sandor and his brotherhood of monks, the dispassionate way in which they dispatch Helen, who writhes and hisses as if in mid-orgasm before getting the ol' stake through the heart, is Hammer's most potent sexual image, at least until Ingrid Pitt started making out with other nubile ladies in The Vampire Lovers. The surviving travelers hole up in Sandor's monastery, but Dracula is intent on making Diana (Suzan Farmer. Rasputin, The Mad Monk) his next victim, and as you know, once Dracula sets his mind on a girl, there's just no stopping him. He sure is lucky that all the wayward maidens who stumble into his castle are big-breasted bombshell beauties. What are the chances? I'd imagine Dracula would be less persistent if Janet Reno showed up at his castle. Despite being a monastery full of religious icons, it doesn't prove an entirely foolproof haven from the power of Dracula, especially when he is aided from the inside by a feeble-minded madman who falls under the count's spell (Thorley Walters in a role that is obviously supposed to recall the fly-gobbling Renfield character from the original book). We are left, then, with the usual race against time to the castle so our heroes can rescue the maiden in distress and put an end to Dracula's reign of terror once and for all and for the second time. As seems to always be the case, Sandor and Alan Kent (Francis Matthews, who like lots of other people in this film, appeared the same year in Rasputin, the Mad Monk) end up confronting Dracula right at dusk. Now look, fighting a vampire is not easy, but there are certain things you can do that will make the task much simpler to accomplish. Chief among these would be to not try and fight him at sunset. Dracula, Prince of Darkness at least goes to some lengths to give the film a plausible excuse for having Sandor and Alan facing down the prince of darkness as night is falling and allowing him a chance to spring up out of his coffin and toss Alan around. In plenty of other films, however, vampire killers seem to dawdle around al day and never get to actually trying to stake the evil one until it's dark. It's as if I was the one trying to kill the vampire. I know if it was me, I'd set my alarm for seven in the morning. That way, I could get up, have a good breakfast of Count Chocula, then get on with the killing of the vampire and be back home and finished with the whole sordid affair by lunchtime. But then, you know, seven in the morning rolls around, and I hit the snooze button, figuring Dracula can't even get up until after, what? Seven at night? So I have like twelve hours to kill before the killing. By the time I roll out of bed, it's already noon, and well, I might as well wait for the mail to come at 12:30, then grab some lunch and run a few errands. Then, before anyone realizes it, it's three or four in the afternoon, and Dracula's castle is a good two hours from here, not even figuring in for traffic or murderous gypsies along the way. So I can see how vampire hunters would always end up fighting Dracula at night if they were like me, but they're supposed to be better at this than I am. They should be able to time this stuff out. Still, like I said, at least Dracula, Prince of Darkness takes pains to explain why we're facing off with the lord of the undead at sundown, which is more satisfying than something like in the first film where Jonathan Harker sneaks down to Dracula's crypt just before dark and decides to stake the far less menacing female vampire before dispatching with the most powerful undead creature ever to befoul the earth with his presence. This is another typically strong Hammer film that manages to get over the rough spots simply by having Christopher Lee show up. His portrayal of the count here, completely without words as I said, accounts for the most savage vampire we've seen on screen up until that point, and indeed for some time afterward. In fact, I don't know that it's ever been topped. Lee's Dracula in the later Scars of Dracula is certainly more sadistic, but he's never as menacing or terrifying on such a primal level. Lee manages to do quite a lot without dialogue, though I do think his character is undermined to some degree by the silence. A few lines here and there, as in the first film, would have lent more gravity to Dracula. However, even without uttering a word, Lee manages to outshine the entire cast except for Andrew Keir. Keir was one of the strongest performers Hammer had, and while he's no Peter Cushing, that fits the character since Sandor is no Van Helsing. Although he shares similar traits with Van Helsing - a respect for reason and common sense, an acceptance of unusual things not as the supernatural, but as ugly parts of the rational world, and a basic sense of compassion - he's also very different from Van Helsing. Sandor is possessed of a certain self-righteous bombast that comes from the power of his religion. Where Van Helsing was soft-spoken but determined, Sandor possesses a bellowing voice and a big gun. Keir is perfect for the role. He's not nearly as comforting as Van Helsing, nor as competent at killing vampires, but you could do worse when it comes to protectors. But then, he does manage to let the girl get stolen from right beneath his nose while in his own monastery, so maybe you could only do a little worse. Compared to Keir and Lee, the rest of the cast hardly registers. Klove has a moment or two, and Barbara Shelley has her wonderful moment in the sun, but everyone else is imminently forgettable though the acting is uniformly solid. Dracula, Prince of Darkness was filmed back-to-back with the historical horror film Rasputin, the Mad Monk, and many of the sets and members of the cast appear in both film - including Christopher Lee, who also appears as the raving Russian holy man. Terence Fisher's direction is as strong as ever and lends a sense of continuity to the three films despite the absence of Lee/Dracula from the second film and Cushing/Van Helsing from the third. Sets and costumes are, as usual, gorgeous, and the gore quotient is racheted up another couple notches, especially during the scene in which Klove does his throat-slitting. Unfortunately, Sangster's script stumbles between that scene and the finale on an ice-covered river. The film meanders from here to there after a tightly woven and smartly twisting first half, with too much time being spent doing too little in Sandor's monastery. The final showdown between the forces of good and evil is compelling, though nowhere in the league of the finale from the first or second film. There's just something about watching spry old Peter Cushing leap all over the set that adds that extra element of excitement to a battle with the undead. The showdown on the ice is also undermined by a horrible special effect which went unnoticeable in previous pan and scan versions of the movie. But seeing it for the first time in widescreen, the bit where the ice cracks beneath Dracula's feet, sending him plunging to an icy death since vampires will drown if submerged in running water, features an obvious tilting platform where you can even see the mechanism pivoting it upward. Then the ice swings closed again as if on, well, some sort of hinge, which it is. Shoddy special effect there, but Hammer movies have never been about the special effects - and for some reason, that effect bugged me though I seem perfectly at ease with giant rubber bats flopping about on bits of string. The rough patches aren't enough to ruin what is an otherwise enjoyable film. Although it lacks the pace and excitement of the first two films, Dracula, Prince of Darkness is still a pretty rollicking good time. It's great to see Christopher Lee back in action again as the count, and really, that alone is enough to make this film enjoyable. Lee swore this would be the final time he'd play Dracula for Hammer. He was, naturally, back again as the count very shortly there after, and several more times after that, each time griping more and more about the fact that he was playing Dracula. But we'll come to those bumps in the road when we cross them. For now, we can lie back and enjoy Dracula, Prince of Darkness -- an imperfect, uneven but never the less thoroughly enjoyable foray back into the world of Hammer horror. Labels: Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Stars: Christopher Lee, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 2:04 AM | 0 Comments Friday, August 27, 2004Plague of the Zombies Release Year: 1966Country: England Starring: Andre Morell, Diane Clare, Brook Williams, Jacqueline Pearce, John Carson, Alexander Davion, Michael Ripper, Marcus Hammond, Dennis Chinnery, Roy Royston, Ben Aris. Writer: Peter Bryan Director: John Gilling Cinematographer: Arthur Grant Music: James Bernard Producer: Anthony Nelson Keys Alternate Title: The Zombies Availability: Buy it from Amazon  .Hammer beats George Romero to the zombie punch by a year, but needless to say their effort, though perfectly respectable, was overshadowed by Romero's groundbreaking classic. I went into this film with mixed feelings. On the one hand, all the stills I'd seen from it looked incredible. Very spooky and atmospheric. On the other hand, my most recent experience with Hammer studio director John Gilling was the dry as a mummy's shroud The Mummy's Shroud. But I'm a sucker for pretty much any and every Hammer film that's been released, and I figure it certainly can't be any worse than Zombie Lake. It turns out, in fact, that Plague of the Zombies not only isn't any worse than Zombie Lake; it's much, much better. Okay, maybe saying something is better than Zombie Lake isn't saying a whole lot, so let's revise the praise. Plague of the Zombies is a damn good film, maybe not the caliber of film that is Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, but certainly on par with other great zombie films like Let Sleeping Corpses Lie and easily one of the best of Hammer's non-Dracula/Frankenstein films. Is that a mouthful? Along with Frankenstein Must be Destroyed, it's Hammer's best film of the 1960s. Dracula, Prince of Darkness runs close behind. And I guess I'd go ahead and put The Reptile on that list, too. Actually, there was a lot of good stuff from Hammer during that decade, but few are as consistently eerie and likeable as Plague of the Zombies. Although the film is, like most of Hammer's best films, slowly paced, it's not boring, and the sheer power of atmosphere keeps the film feeling brisk and yet another example of what I wish people today would learn, or remember, or whatever: a slower pace does not mean a boring movie, and sometimes "wall to wall 100% pure action" can be dull as three-day-old dishwater. Plague of the Zombies remembers what it is a horror film is supposed to: creep you out. It has very few startling moments, but the overall sense of mist-enshrouded dread is more than enough to keep a literate viewer on pins and needles.
We start off with the number one man on what some people refer to as Hammer's B-team - a team that people seem to assume consists of every single Hammer player except for Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The man in question is Andre Morrell as Sir James Forbes, and he's hardly B-team material. In fact, alongside Cushing, he was probably one of the studio's most solid and charismatic older leads. He exudes enlightened authority and invests every line, no matter how outlandish, with a sense of absolute conviction that makes you believe just as easily as you'd believe Peter Cushing. Did the two of them ever work together in a film? I would assume so, and if that's the case, I hope I come to that one soon. Oh wait. Idiot me. He was Dr. Watson to Cushing's Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. I haven't seen that movie since I was a little one and had one of the single greatest and most memorable days of movie viewing in my entire life, including as it did a late-night triple feature that began with Darby O'Gill and the Little People (remember when children's films could still be sinister and not revolve around children being sassy and making calls on a cell phone? When they could feature drunks and ghosts and Sean Connery punching someone in the face?), continued with The Hound of the Baskervilles, and finally concluded with Vincent Price in Cry of the Banshee. Curiously, Cry of the Banshee didn't have an actual banshee in it, but Darby O'Gill and the Little People did, and it was one hell of a scary ghost, to boot. Darby O'Gill and the Little People also held up surprising well over the years, and I still get a kick out of it today. Cry of the Banshee less so, though childhood nostalgia has kept my opinion of that film kinder than most. As for The Hound of the Baskervilles, I'm thinking I might just bump that up a spell on my Netflix queue. Well, what I was meaning to say is that Andre Morrell is one of Hammer's finest "men of reason," and he's in one of his best roles here as the seasoned doctor who is called upon by a former pupil to help solve the mystery of a deadly plague that is ravaging a small Cornish town. He certainly deserves to be regarded with as much adoration as Cushing, and frankly, perhaps even a dash more than Lee, though you'd never hear me say that in public. It's just that Lee so often played it evil or mute. I do like that he's become something a legend reborn thanks to The Lord of the Rings, the series of films that finally gave him his wish of no longer being thought of only as Dracula. Now he'll always be remembered as Sauron. Sure, he was in those worthless new Star Wars movies too, but the less said about those heaps of rubbish, the better. By comparison, they almost make some of the hammier entries in Lee's resume seem respectable. And yeah - no matter how revered he has become and indeed deserves to be, a little piece of me will always remember things like, "Christopher Lee is Fu Manchu!" or "Christopher Lee battles Chuck Norris!" or even, "Christopher Lee stars in The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf!" Of course, the funny thing about Christopher Lee is that he's not even in Plague of the Zombies. Neither is Peter "Grand Moff Tarkin" Cushing for that matter. So why don't I just can it about those two guys and get on with things? After all, my point was that Andre Morrell, who starred in other Hammer productions like She, Vengeance of She, and The Mummy's Shroud and probably best known for playing Quatermass in the original TV series, deserves to be as big a name, though I guess I'd balk and reconsider saying "bigger that Christopher Lee." So okay, let's just leave him as the bright shining light of the Hammer B-team, the actor who brought A-team credentials to his roles thanks to also appearing in substantial roles in non-Hammer blockbusters like Ben Hur and The Bridge over the River Kwai. And just to make one more Cushing/Lee/Morrell link, though Morrell is the odd man out for appearing in Star Wars films, he was involved in The Lord of the Rings -- the maligned Ralph Bakshi animated version, that is, where he did the voice of Elrond. Morrell's Sir James Forbes travels to the village with his insistent daughter, played by a real Hammer beauty with some real acting chops, Diane Clare (most recognizable to classic horror fans for her role in The Haunting, still hands down one of the best horror films ever made). He immediately surmises that this is no ordinary plague, if such things as ordinary plagues exist. His pupil, now colleague, Dr. Thompson (Brook Williams, who later starred in the superb WWII adventure film Where Eagles Dare alongside Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton) has been stymied in his attempts to understand the sickness since the locals are a superstitious lot (aren't they always) and refuse to allow him to perform an autopsy. Forbes, ever the gentleman but never bound by a gentleman's behavior when it comes to confronting the horrors of disease, figures the best way to solve this dilemma is by sneaking out to dig up a freshly buried corpse so they can perform a clandestine autopsy on it. Unfortunately the grave they pick is empty, even though they themselves saw the body buried earlier that very day. In fact, the entire cemetery seems to be full of empty coffins. Complicating matters, because matters always have to be complicated, is the fact that Thompson's own wife seems to be coming down with the plague. A local band of fox-hunting aristocratic thugs under the leadership of local town squire Clive Hamilton (John Carson, who went on to Taste the Blood of Dracula if you will) seem to tie into matters as well. Eventually, Forbes come sot the conclusion that, despite the irrationality of it, someone in the town is practicing voodoo to infect villagers then resurrect them as shuffling zombies. Thompson can hardly believe such a fantastical tale, but Forbes is a more world-aware and open-minded man of science. Of course, when Thompson sees a zombie actually crawling up out of the grave, he has to admit that there might be something to the whole undead theory.
There's so much going for this film that I don't even know where to begin. I guess since I've already started in on Andre Morrell, I'll continue from there. He's superb, striking just the right balance of academic detachment and genuine warmth. He is inquisitive, caring, and when the time calls for it, intrepid. I know a fair number of doctors, but I can't really think of any I'd trust to competently spearhead a fight against the hordes of the living dead and the Victorian-era frat boys with a voodoo fixation who summoned them from beyond the grave. Forbes is probably one of Hammer's most likeable "men of reason." Cushing's Van Helsing was likeable but a bit impersonal, and while his Frankenstein was charismatic, you wouldn't necessarily want to be on his bad side. But Forbes is a class act from beginning to end, and as I said, Andre Morrell's belief in the role is contagious. In an era and a genre where mad scientists were and sometimes still are all the rage (thought they've been replaced more or less by the far less interesting "amoral greedy corporate madman"), it's nice to see a legitimately likeable scientist for a change. And hooray for a character whose chief heroic traits are a sharp mind and a belief that intelligence can prevail. While Brook Williams doesn't make as much of an impression as the supporting Dr. Thompson, he's still a pretty good guy as well. Likewise for the rest of the supporting cast, including Diane Clare as Forbes' demure yet determined daughter. She has some great scenes and emerges as one of Hammer's stronger supporting women, even if she, like most other women, eventually gets carried over a misty set by one of the monsters. John Carson's squire is an exquisitely reprehensible character who oozes charm even when we all know he's a total bastard. The rest of the cast and extras perform with what you should now, after several of these Hammer film reviews, recognize as typically solid Hammer professionalism. The script by Peter Bryan, who also wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles and the under-rated and under-seen Brides of Dracula for Hammer, is another of the film's strong points, and you know, it's always good when the story in your story is one of the story's strong points. Hammer specialized in making outrageous and sometimes downright absurd situations seem wholly reasonable, and Bryan hits this one out of the park. Despite whatever wild stuff gets paraded across the screen, Gilling's direction, the casts' performances, and Bryan's sincere script make it plausible, even intelligent. Bryan knows we all know the obnoxious rich guy who spent time in Haiti is the one responsible for the zombies, so he doesn't make the "whodunit" central to the plot. We know early on who the culprit is, and the script draws its energy from making us see how Forbes and his rag tag little group of weary doctors, cranky constables, and the small town vicar will triumph over this seemingly all-powerful man of privilege who also just so happens to command the dark undead forces of evil. Because Plague of the Zombies takes time out to make you like the central core of characters, you in turn care about the movie, even when it's taking a breather in between digging up graves and being menaced by shrieking ghouls on the dark moors. The story also continues a favorite theme of Hammer horror films, that of the enlightened "literate" class struggling to drag the masses into the light while combating the upper class forces that profit by keeping them there. Forbes is a man of sophistication and culture, but he's hardly upper class. By contrast, the wealthy Squire and his crew of hooligans behave like lunatics and revel in the exemption from suspicion granted them by their position of power. The masses are too brow-beaten by the caste system to think that maybe the elites aren't as cultured as they seem, and it takes a man who values reason and inquiry and free thought over outdated notions of class and social standings to pull back the curtain and reveal the ugliness. He's a kindred spirit of Frankenstein, only without the acidic bad temper and homicidal tendencies. And he's certainly more sexually liberated than the misogynistic Frankenstein. Heck, he even gives his daughter a break and does the dishes himself!
But ultimately, Bryan's biggest accomplishment with the screenplay is how perfectly structured it is. Everything that happens is essential, but nothing is thin. It's a very dense, literary work, and despite not being based on a classic novel, perfectly conjures captures the ideal of "Gothic horror." There is no throw-away scene, no filler, and that's what keeps the film moving ahead so skillfully. Something is always happening, and that doesn't mean "action is always happening and stuff be blowing up all the time." It means that plot is always happening, which is a beautiful, beautiful thing to behold, especially when it's so smartly constructed as this. Man, do you know how good it feels to be able to ramble on and on about how good the script for a horror film is -- or any film, given current standards? So forgive me if I over-indulge. I was just happy to have a plot that's really worthy of sinking into. And hey! Characters you actually like and care about! What a novel concept! The final ace in the film's hand is Gilling's clever direction. As I said in the beginning, I had misgivings about him after viewing The Mummy's Shroud, which came out the same year and also starred Andre Morrell. It just shows what a good script can do for a movie. The Mummy's Shroud was a lumbering bore. Here, Gilling turns in one of Hammer's most thoughtful, inventive, and flat out spooky movies. For this film, at the very least, Gilling proves himself the equal of Hammer's legendary Terence Fisher, and perhaps even the more visionary of the two a he indulges in surreal dream sequences and some utterly horrific imagery that will stick with you long after the film is over. Gilling fills every shot with a palpable sense of menace and creeping doom, even when someone is just having a nip of Scotch. His exteriors - foggy forests, windswept moors, mazelike little country villages, dilapidated old mining works - are the stuff of nightmares. Where as Fisher's films are possessed of a very British, very rational approach to direction, Gilling seems willing to indulge more experimental techniques, and ultimately Plague of the Zombies feels like a perfect blend of British perfectionism and continental European surrealism. It exists somewhere between Fisher and Mario Bava. The shots of the atrocious, white-eyed, gray-faced ghoul screaming insanely as it lumbers across rotting moors with a dead woman in its hand is as chilling as anything Hammer has ever filmed, up there and perhaps even more striking than the shots of Christopher Lee's cadaverous creature stumbling across the bleak country forest in Curse of Frankenstein. Likewise, the scene of the zombies besieging Dr. Thompson in the cemetery is incredible. Dark, unnerving, and thoroughly beautiful in a sinister, macabre way. The creatures themselves are haunting but ultimately play little role. They are more akin to the undead slaves of earlier films like White Zombie than the aggressive and independent (if not particularly bright) zombies of Night of the Living Dead. They follow a master and do only what he bids them to do - at least, naturally, until the fiery climax of the film. Still, they're quite ghoulish in their appearance, and used and shot as they are, they remain menacing and creepy. They represent the final hurrah for the old guard before George Romero changed everything. It's certainly a hell of a way to go out, or pass the torch, or whatever it is zombies do when they shift paradigms. Plague of the Zombies was originally filmed back-to-back with another Gilling film, The Reptile. Both were exceptional endeavors despite being meant as the B-side of a horror double feature. Plague of the Zombies was paired with the higher profile Dracula, Prince of Darkness, which celebrated the return of Christopher Lee to the role of the bloodthirsty undead count a full decade after he starred in the original. Plague of the Zombies got lost in the large shadow of Hammer's vampire juggernaut, but later fans have had a chance to go back and re-evaluate the film. The result has been that many people discovered what I discovered - one of the great ignored gems of the horror world. Labels: Horror: Zombies, Netflix Diary, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 6:36 PM | 2 Comments Sunday, August 15, 2004The Bible...In the Beginning
1966, United States/Italy. Starring Michael Parks, Ulla Bergryd, Richard Harris, John Huston, Stephen Boyd, George C. Scott, Ava Gardner, Peter O'Toole, Zoe Sallis, Gabriele Ferzetti, Eleonora Rossi Drago, Franco Nero, Pupella Maggio, Robert Rietty, Peter Heinze. Directed by John Huston. Buy it from Amazon
 .Well, not every epic can be as fun as The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb. Although I'm not a Christian, I love Biblical epics and am fascinated by religious history. One would assume that when it comes to Biblical epics, nothing would be bigger and better than actually making an epic out of The Bible itself. The book is ripe for grandiose filmmaking, after all, full of betrayal and violence and love and warfare and sundry perversions that would have you branded a heretic if you made literal versions of them into films. The Good Book's not exactly what I would call well-written, but it manages to tell a compelling story never the less and regardless of your faith or lack there of. It's worth a film, anyway. It's worth a dozen films or more. And there in lies the initial problem with this movie. But we'll come to that soon enough. Right now we have to assume that this is going to be a breathtaking triumph. Not only is it a film adaptation of the Old Testament, it's being directed by one of the best directors in the history of film, one of my all-time favorites, John Huston. Heck, this should be just about the greatest film ever made. And hey! George C. Scott is Abraham! Okay, with that hope established, let's shine the beaming light of truth down upon our expectations and see what's really happening. And what's really happening is that this film isn't so much a testament of faith as it is a test of faith. Despite everything this film seems to have going for it, it's a chore, a bore, a snore, and just plain bad. At right around three hours, it's not nearly long enough to cover the entire Old Testament, and concentrates instead on teh Garden of Eden, the story of Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, and the trials of Abraham. No King David for me. No big Biblical battles. I guess we do get Nimrod and the Tower of Babel, and the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, but it's not enough. The Bible seems obsessed with the most boring stretches of its source material, recounted in the most horribly dull or laughable fashion possible. Whole swaths of film are shot without dialogue, with only John Huston reading from the Bible and bad Italian actors gesticulate wildly. It immediately makes the whole film feel cheap, like one of those Larry Buchanan quickies he used to shoot without synch sound so he could save money. This is particularly painful for the story of Cain and Abel, itself a great tale of the first murder and, perhaps, even the imperfection of God himself. Of course, nothing of that nature will be read into this version, which is simply Huston reading to us while two guys wave their arms at the camera until one of them hits the other with a jawbone. See here, I love Huston's voice. He had one of the great voices in the history of the world. And I'll always think of him as Gandalf thanks to those Rankin-Bass cartoons. As good as Ian McKellan is in the Peter Jackson movie, every time he speaks I automatically convert his voice into John "The Lawgiver" Huston's. I even always assumed God sounded like John Huston, so it's convenient that he voices God in this movie. But as much as I like the guy's voice, I don't necessarily want to listen to him read the Bible to me for three hours. But, of course, it all gets much worse. Much, much worse. Huston, who was as much an actor as he was director, appears as Noah in the film's most drawn-out and painful sequence. Someone decided that we couldn't just tell the story of Noah, not after we just watched some guy hit another guy with a jawbone. No, we have to give the world "wacky Noah!" Haw haw haw! Guffaw as he putters about and falls down to the accompaniment of Three Stooges sound effects and music, mere minutes before a wrathful God slaughters the whole of humanity with a violent flood. See! It's funny! I bet a monkey will grab his beard! And whimsical woodwind and string music will play as we watch ducks waddle up the ramp onto the Ark. As if to do penance for the Noah segment, the film trudges on with an even greater somberness as we watch the rise of man and the story of Abraham, another challenging and complicated Biblical tale. Abraham strikes many as a certifiable nutcase with his, "God told me to sacrifice my son" routine. It's supposed to be an uplifting story of one man's faith in The Lord, but the tale always creeped me out. Abraham comes across as some insane old man hearing voices that tell him to kill. Ont he other hand, it can also be seen as the moment God abolishes the practice of human sacrifice, thus being a good thing. Whatever the case, it's so utterly dry in this movie that no philosophical implications whatsoever are communicated beyond the puzzling question of, "How often can George C. Scott furrow and clutch at his brow?" Things threaten to pick up and become interesting when we get to Nimrod and to Sodom, but those are little more than asides really, and for the remainder of the film George C. Scott seems totally lifeless, falling into the trap that tangles up so many actors in Biblical epics. He's too afraid to act. The desire to be "reverent" to the story is so intense that it becomes tedium, boredom, anything and everything not worth watching. Charlton Heston - now there was a man who knew what to do with a Biblical character. Put him on a mountain and let the man bellow and over-act. That's what the story demands. The Old Testament is a lot of things, but subtle is rarely one of them. Biblical epics demand larger-than-life hamminess and scenery chewing. Yet George C. Scott, a man we know can overact with the best of them, practically sleepwalks through the role and, in an attempt to be "serious" about it, just makes it dull. Even in the end, when he has his son on a sacrificial altar and a knife above his head, his emotion is so listless, so false, that only the most easily moved of Christians could be touched by the scene, to say nothing of those of us who just wanted a good film. Scott's performance is indicative of the movie as a whole. It has no energy, no glory, no spirit. It has none of the guts and gusto of the Old Testament. And it gets worse still. The original rolls of film were apparently mishandled during shooting, and heat and other environmental factors wreaked havoc with them. The result was that huge chunks of the film are washed out, discolored, flicker, or are just plain too dark to see. The damage to the film was devastating, and it made what was already an intolerably dull film even worse. You weren't even afforded the simple pleasure of colorful spectacle and nice scenery. It's as if the film itself became a heavy-handed punishment sent down from God. "Watch this boring movie about my Creation." I know self-denial is a big part of religion, but come on! All I want is something, anything, in this movie to like. Is that so much to ask, O Lord? Mind you, I went into this film determined to like it. I'd already read plenty of bad things before I saw it, but I also read lots of bad things about other movies I ended up liking. I held out hope, had faith in Huston and in the stories he could tell from The Bible. My faith was unrewarded. After three-hours of mind-numbing dreariness, I found myself hard-pressed to say anything positive about the movie. "It was kind of a chore" is about the best I can come up with. The pacing is terrible. The acting is beyond terrible, and from people we know can deliver knockout performances. Even Huston's direction is plodding and uninspired. Genesis takes forever -- it seems to run the actual full six days it took God to create the universe -- and Noah's sequence is simply one of the worst things I've ever had to watch. Have they no self-respect? Nimrod and Sodom are maybe worth skipping ahead to, but that's it. And here I come to the big problem to which I alluded in the beginning (get it? In the beginning? Heh...well, it was funnier than Noah's antics, anyway): The Bible is simply too big to fit into a single movie. Even half the Old Testament is too big. Each figure can pretty much do with their own movie. To try and compress it all, then to utterly drain the life from it, is just a train wreck of a movie waiting to happen. I wanted epic stories and epic struggles and acting of the caliber of Hestona nd Yul Brynner doing a Biblical story proper. The words "A Dino De Laurentiis Production" don't help matters. Man, who ever thought that The Bible would become a Dino De Laurentiis production? The man who would later give us Barbarella and Conan? Bringing The Bible to life? What a world. Well, I guess you can hardly say he brings it to life, considering the quality of acting and storytelling on display. I think Dino's problem is that his knack is making big budget versions of small-budget ideas. I love both Conan the Barbarian and Barbarella, but they're both B-movies that got A-movie funding. It seems that when De Laurentiis has A-movie material for his A-movie budget, he just can't make the thing happen. Or maybe he was just thrown off by the lack of barbarians and Jane Fonda doing a zero gravity striptease. Dino should have taken his money and just made versions of various Bible stories instead of trying to tackle so much in one go. Preferably Biblical stories with Flash Gordon art design. Now that would be something. The Bible...In the Beginning isn't going to convert anyone, not to Christianity and not to thinking it's a good movie. The whole thing is embarrassingly shoddy, doubly so given the talent involved. De Laurentiis producing meant the film used a lot of Italian actors, and the language gap is probably another reason so much of the film skips out on dialogue, further adding to the threadbare and cheap feeling. As lame as it may be for me say it, The Bible is a disaster of Biblical proportions. Labels: Director: John Huston, Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 2:52 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, July 18, 2004Alfie
1966, England. Starring Michael Caine, Shelley Winters, Millicent Martin, Julia Foster, Jane Asher, Shirley Anne Field, Vivien Merchant, Eleanor Bron, Denholm Elliott, Alfie Bass, Graham Stark, Murray Melvin, Sydney Tafler. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Available on DVD from Amazon
Something that was a little more successful at seeming hip in more or less the same era is 1966's biting British comedy Alfie, though I guess one should point out that the switch from 1966 to 1967 is one of those points in history where almost everything seems to change within a year. Still, considering Elvis was still cavorting with beatniks as late as 1967, we can allow a bit of wiggle room for our social epochs. If Easy Come, Easy Go was a breezy, almost absurdist slapstick comedy look at a counter culture, then Alfie is a much meaner, critical, and demanding comedy about a different culture, this time England in the swingin 1960s -- but don't let that or other people's misguided comments fool you. This is no movie about swinging London. It is, in fact, very much the opposite, and our hero is far away from the wild, carefree swingers of Carnaby Street. Michael Caine, still fresh into his career as a leading man (despite many films prior to this, 1965's utterly superb Ipcress File was his first real leading role), stars as the titular character, a working class playboy who uses his considerable charms and charisma to seduce, use, and sometimes destroy a number of women. To relate it to some of the previous movies in this Parade, he's sort of the male interpretation of Brigitte Bardot's character in And God Created Woman. More malicious and deliberate in what he does and how he uses women, but also shockingly naïve about the negative consequences of what he does. "I don't mean to hurt people," he says in one scene, to which his friend responds, "But you do." Alfie's goals in life are simple. Seduce a woman, use her to get household chores done, maybe if she has money then buy him some sharp clothes or a new Rolls Royce, then ditch her as soon as he grows tired of her or can't think of another use for her. He's nasty, selfish, mean, and yet played by Michael Caine in a way that is so disarming and devilishly charismatic that you can't help but smile at him, even as you're thoroughly disgusted by what he's doing to the people around him. Caine is astounding in his ability to make you understand how it is he's able to pull of the things he does, how he's able to make the women he targets fall for him. Again, in that sense, he has a lot in common with Bardot's And God Created Woman, though this film is infinitely superior to hers. Making it even easier to like Alfie even when he's being completely unsympathetic and despicable is the film's approach of having its lead character address the camera and b y virtue the audience directly. In these asides, he is frank, naïve, and trusting. He never comes across as malevolent; it's as if he totally lacks the part of his brain that can discern good from atrocious behavior. He's almost childlike even during the nastiest of indiscretions. And he's also frequently quite funny in his observations. He is, I suppose, that person everyone knows, the one you hesitate to call a friend, who constantly does things -especially in relationships - that you find utterly reprehensible. Yet there is something about him that is funny, maybe even a bit pathetic, and that makes you keep him around. There are also little things he does that make him out to be less of a cad than he is. He's not the type to demand perfection in a woman, for instance, or profound physical beauty. Most of the women he pursues are not bad looking, but few of them are picture-perfect. "But I find I'm quite willing to overlook the odd blemish in a woman," he says to us, "providing she's got something to make up for it. Well, that's what we're all here for, innit - to help each other out in this life?" Still, when it comes to dealing responsibly with emotions beyond his own, Alfie is thoroughly unlikable. When he chases away the redheaded Annie and realizes he's made a mistake, it isn't because he's guilty over having crushed her feelings or used her. He's thinking about himself and his own comfort and feelings. When he gets an older married woman pregnant (a friend's wife, no less) and has to help her take care of the accident, the only way he can think of to deal with the situation, one that would make him face someone else's pain, is to take off for a walk and get away from things for a while. His return results in one of the film's most powerful dramatic moments, however. And when he finally gets his comeuppance of sorts when his relationship with the older, wiser, and just as cynical Ruby is brought into focus, we wonder if he's come to some sort of realization about what he does to others, or if he's just feeling sorry for himself. He's not so much regretful or remorseful as he is bewildered byt he fact that what he thought was his common-sense, no-nonsense approach to sex and relationships in the midsts of the sexual revolution ended up going so terribly awry for him. He simply doesn't understand what went wrong, and so seems doomed to wander around in his confused and lonely state.
The approach to Alfie is the same approach that would make Michael Caine an icon. He's not, as I said, a swinging hipster. He dresses sharp but never outrageous, and he lives in a typical, modest, slightly cluttered and dingy apartment that reminds me quite a lot of Harry Palmer's apartment in The Ipcress File. In short, it looks like an actual apartment, like something where someone would actually live rather than like a pop-art experiment. The city he inhabits is similarly blue collar. Truck drivers and hustlers and lost young women and pubs. No wild orgies or clubs full of convulsing go-go girls in psychedelic body paint. Alfie lives, more or less, in the real world, making the movie a pretty stark reaction to the tendency in films of the era to really indulge - and often over-indulge - in the most hyperbolic aspects of underground culture. Again, I can't help but draw a comparison to Michael Caine's previous role of beleaguered British spy Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, a movie made in response to the growing fantastic jet-set elements of the James Bond films (by Bond producer Harry Saltzman, no less) and determined squarely to place its spy in a realistic but no less intriguing world of having to fill out forms, deal with bureaucracy, and do the grocery shopping. Perhaps not coincidentally, Alfie director Lewis Gilbert would go on to direct James Bond films You Only Live Twice in 1969, The Spy Who Loved Me in '77, and the most fantastical and overblown of all James Bonds to date, 1979's Moonraker. But here he and the story keep things firmly planted in reality, and this being a movie based on a play, characters and dialogue rule the day. Though beautifully shot, Alfie doesn't engage in any of the wild avant garde approaches to set and shot that were reflected in contemporaries like Blow Up. Where as that film focuses primarily on a single unlikeable, somewhat misogynistic lead character who says almost nothing and drifts through a highly stylized and almost dreamlike vision of London, Alfie takes the same sort of character in exactly the opposite direction on a similar journey for some meaning in life. In Blow Up, the quest was primarily artistic. For Alfie, his search is very much concrete and real world, just as his London looks like an actual city and not a fanciful interpretation of a city. Like Thomas in Blow Up, he seeks and fails to find comfort and fulfillment in material wealth and so wanders from one exploit to the next, desperate to keep himself rational and in control of a life that is slipping beyond his ability to guide.
Of course, central to the film is its examination of women and, more accurately, ever-evolving male attitudes toward women. It goes about the business of this discussion without ever relying on the obvious. The women in the story often aren't much better people than Alfie, too quick to allow themselves to be taken for a ride and too immature to responsibly handle their own lives. Alfie, likewise, is never so thoroughly demonized so as to become some cartoon character sketch of a vile and evil man. He's basically a regular Joe who just treats women poorly, not even so much because he doesn't like them as because he's just more interested in getting whatever he wants. Sexually, it's most potent stabd seems to be not at the sexist adventures of its title character, but instead at the sexual revolution notion, and indeed one of the pirmary notions of the 1960s, that if it feels good, do it and never mind the consquences. Such an attitude was born partially out of reaction to an era as sexualyl and morally repressive as the 1950s (in England, no less!), under the understanding of Newton's law that every action results in an equal and opposite reaction. The harder you repress a population, the wilder the counter-culture will be (look at the current Japanese underground as a recent example). The attitude also comes partially fromt he belief, fostered by Cold War paranoia and stoked byt he fires of social and political upheaval throughout the world, that we needn't worry about anything, because the world will be ending pretty soon. Alfie's question, then, becomes, "Okay, so if the world doesn't end, what are you going to do then?" In this sense, Alfie is less a critique of sexism and gender than it is a criticism of the emerging lack of responsibility in the youth of the nation - and this, my friends, is something we've seen come to frightening fruition in recent years, something that keeps Alfie disturbingly relevant nearly forty years after its initial release. Because Blow Up was an art film and Alfie is a more logical character drama, the resolution of the film is more concrete. Alfie finds to his horror that he might actually be falling for one of his "birds," an attractive redhead he picks up in a roadside diner. His way of dealing with these feelings is, of course, to lash out at her. At the same time, he's feeling like he might want to settle down with a buxom, wild older woman played by Shelly Winters. Unlike the younger women, she's never taken in by Alfie's act but likes to have flings with him anyway. Naturally, just as Alfie is coming to think that this more seasoned, experienced, and less idealistic sort of woman might really be the dame for him, everything he's ever done is sort of turned back on him. Eventually, he turns to us and explains that through his use of women, he got money, sharp clothes, good meals, and even a car. "But I ain't got me peace of mind, "concludes Alfie, "and if you ain't got that, you ain't got nothing. I dunno. It seems to me if they ain't got you one way they've got you another. So what's the answer? That's what I keep asking myself - what's it all about? Know what I mean?" Caine is at his best here. He's equal parts destroyer of women and genuinely innocent in regards to any knowledge regarding the repercussions of what he does. "My understanding of women only goes as far as the pleasure. When it comes to the pain I'm like any other bloke - I don't want to know." The dialogue with which he works, both when interacting to other characters as well as when speaking directly to the audience - crackles with wit without ever sounding the least bit stilted or false. As per Caine's calling card, he brings a down-to-earth sensibility to the character and what he says, so nothing that comes out of Alfie's mouth ever seems scripted or unrealistic. It's the sort of talk you'd expect from an actual bloke. Not always smart, sometimes hovering on the verge of insight without ever letting Alfie come to a full-fledged revelation. Caine's supporting cast is up to his standard as well, especially Shelly Winters as the playful older female match for Alfie. Despite the tidier wrap-up than the more oblique Blow Up, Alfie still leaves you with plenty of questions and ideas to ponder. It never says anything as patronizing as "Alas, if only I'd settled down and been good!" It's unclear exactly what lesson Alfie has learned, if he's learned anything at all, and in the end he's still just thinking about himself. Will he be different from now on, or is his attitude toward women so stunted that he's hopeless? The answer is less important than the question. Labels: Drama, Netflix Diary, Stars: Michael Caine, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 11:18 PM | 0 Comments Monday, July 12, 2004Blow Up
UK/Italy, 1966. Starring David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle, Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, Peter Bowles, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Julian Chagrin, Claude Chagrin. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. Available on DVD from Amazon
There's a reason, however misguided, that we here at Teleport City have always avoided reviewing films like Blow Up, and as I explained in the preamble for this whole viewing journal experiment, that's part of the reason we are now doing what we're doing. The reason, as detailed there, was because films like this have so much said about them, spark so much conversation, that I always felt like you didn't need us chiming in as well, regardless of how terribly charming and witty we may be. What would we have to say that hasn't already been said and been said better? Discussing a movie like this is redundant, or so I thought. I reconsidered that position, however, and found it to be wholly misguided, especially these days. That was brought into crystal clear focus a few days ago when driving back from a hiking trip up to the White Mountains in New Hampshire (read about that elsewhere on the site!), I subjected myself to a brainless tirade from some talk radio nobody who, on the day of Marlon Brando's death announcement, insisted that he wasn't the greatest actor of his, the previous, and the next generation. The opinion is not in itself offensive to me. I don't think of Brando as the greatest actor who ever lived, either, though I do have a pretty high appreciation of him. What was offensive about what this guy said - and incidentally, he just kept repeating himself over and over and saying the same thing because, like all talk radio personalities, he doesn't actually have anything to say - was that Brando wasn't the greatest actor on account of his films are too weird and, with the exception of Godfather and Apocalypse Now, won't be remembered or seen by anyone younger than the current generation of thirty-somethings. And there in lies the heinous claim: that something or someone can't be considered great simply because modern teenagers aren't going to be interested in it. Yep, if the same people who make Britney Spears and boot rap popular don't appreciate your work, then it can't possibly be good. If Brando, or Jimmy Cagney, or any number of famous people aren't held in high esteem by people who recently appeared in a Girls Gone Wild video, then there can't possibly be any merit in the work. But rather than pontificate on the implications of what this radio guy said, especially since in all honesty he was probably just trying to get a rise out of people and get them to call in to cover the fact that he was just repeating the same couple of sentences over and over until I finally got bored to tears and just put in a Les Baxter CD, I thought we'd look at the one sliver of truth in what he was saying: that "kids these days" have no appreciation for or even knowledge of anything beyond what was made in the past few years, and most of them have no interest in investigating things further. Obviously, if you are here and have made it this far into my rambling nonsense, you can't be accused of not wanting to investigate things further. You're obviously not the typical member of young society that is being put under the microscope, though even you may find that you've been sorely lacking in the drive to delve into the past. That's no condemnation. After all, the goal again of this journal is to give me a public forum to discuss films that we might not discuss otherwise, and to give you a first hand account of my effort to plug the holes in my own cinematic education. So here we are, and what I realized is that by ignoring some older acclaimed films simply because they were acclaimed some decades ago, we were doing a disservice to our readers - an even greater disservice than the one we do simply by inflicting our writing on you. Although as someone in his thirties I can no longer set myself up as a credible spokesman for "the youth," I do know that Teleport City has a lot of readers in college, and more than a few who are still in high school. If they are here and ignorant of a lot of great films from the past, it's not because of a lack of interest or intelligence on their part; it' simply a lack of exposure. You can't know to try a certain film if no one ever tells you about it, and we were so busy reviewing Filipino midget spy films that we didn't realize no one was bothering with "the classics," which have been all but forgotten by the generations below my own, and by and large by my own generation as well.
And as an aside, nothing irritates me more than when someone's chief complaint about a film is that it "looks dated." This one truly baffles me. Only an utter buffoon couldn't understand or relate to a good movie simply because the clothing is from a different decade, or the music is old, or the style of filmmaking is not what is currently expected. I expect more from myself as a viewer than to be completely coddled and nestled into the safety of a film that looks exactly like what is currently surrounding me, and if I'm ever thrown for a loop simply because some of the lads have shaggy Beatles haircuts, then I figure I'll just hang it all up, grow a big beard with owls living in it, and go live in the mountains. Which brings us, in our usual roundabout way, to Blow Up. I wish I could be cool and say I'd seen this movie plenty of times before. It is considered to be one of the great important films of the 1960s, and someone who studied film, makes it his hobby, and has a love affair with all things swingin' sixties ought to know the movie inside and out. But truth be told, the first time I'd ever seen it was when I sat down to watch it for this review. That's going to be the case for a lot of the films that show up here from now on. Even with that mission in place, assembling thoughts around a film like this is daunting. It's been a long time since I had to try and write seriously about a serious film, or as the case may be, humorously about a serious film. And Blow Up is one of those films that is considered to be everything from a masterpiece to a ground-breaking avant-garde piece of art, not to mention "overrated" and "confusing." The last adjective I dismiss entirely, simply because it is the one people so often employ to criticize a film that challenges them or doesn't allow itself to be easily explained. It is the insult of the lazy and, for my money, is no better than people who think "it rocks" or "it sucks" is viable commentary on a film. I would agree that the movie is both a masterpiece and an avant-garde work of art, and I would also agree that, as is almost always the case with works of art and masterpieces, it is indeed overrated, though only ever so slightly and simply because much of the praise aimed at the film has been so hyperbolic. On the surface, Blow Up is a simple enough film about a fashion photographer who is popular among London's hipster mod crowd. While wandering through a park snapping candid shots of people to complete a photo book upon which he is working, he accidentally photographs a murder, though even he himself doesn't realize this until much later when a frantic woman from the photos shows up demanding he turn the film over to her. This is the plot that serves as the basic description for the film in many places, but frankly, anyone who goes in expecting a murder mystery or thriller because of it is going to be either pleasantly surprised or severely disappointed. The murder is much less of the film, and everything else is much more. David Hemmings stars as our photographer, Thomas. Though popular and seemingly successful, his life seems directionless and shallow. When he's not earning a living shooting emaciated waifs for fashion spreads, he wanders the streets of London in search of art with some sort of meaning. He never finds it, or really, seems to look particularly hard. Similar people, artists who seem to have no meaning or desire for meaning in what they do, surround him. Blow Up paints a stark picture of the so-called swingin' generation. Whereas it was and still is often portrayed as full of wild abandon, freedom, color, cuteness, and blossoming daring and adventure, director Antonioni paints it more as an aftermath. The city is washed out and gray. The hipster denizens often verge on a catatonic state, engaged in the excesses of freedom and youthful rebellion without actually enjoying any of them. They are listless, jaded, and look like their ten days into a two-week heroin binge. The women adorn themselves in cute and sexy mod fashion, but their bodies are waifish, bony, unhealthy and unattractive. Everyone looks tired, disinterested, and glum. Thomas stands at the center of it all, drifting in and out of one excess after another until finally this mystery in the park ignites in him a fire that none of swingin' London's decadent nightlife and counter-culture can match. His curiosity sparked by the strange woman's desperate plea to have the film he shot, Thomas begins scrutinizing the photos in ways he never would have otherwise. What looks at first to be a simple tryst in the park between a young woman and an older man, possibly of an adulterous nature, soon takes on different dimensions when Thomas notices the woman seems unduly preoccupied with something going on in the bushes near them. He enlarges the photo, then enlarges the enlargements, until what he's looking at is scarcely more than a series of abstract blobs of black and white. But there, in the bushes, he sees a gunman - or does he. Hard to tell. And in a later photo, is that a body lying near a tree? Impossible to tell, but that's what it looks like - at least to Thomas and, presumably, to us. Thomas investigates further and does indeed discover the body of the man with whom he had seen the mysterious woman. But is it a murder or something else? Perhaps he had simply died of a heart attack or some other common ailment while in the embrace of his young lover, and she had fled in fear of a scandal. Who is he? We don't really know. And we won't know, because Blow Up delights in a slow assembly of all the pieces of a thriller but never allows it to get going and never bothers to solve it. Thomas' interest in the corpse isn't moral. He doesn't want to solve the crime, if indeed a crime has been committed. He doesn't examine the body, comb over the scene, or even phone the police. His motivations are purely artistic. Here, finally, is something that has challenged him.
The murder is not the central plot. Instead, it is what it sparks in Thomas and how it calls into question the reality of what we perceive, or how reality is shaped by what we perceive. Almost, in a way, related to that old joke about ten different eyewitnesses having seen ten different things. All the drugs, the groupies, the sex - nothing matters much to Thomas, but as he tries to decipher what he has photographed in the park, he rediscovers passion. He becomes an artist lost in his art. But the closer he looks, the more abstract things become. Every step he takes toward decoding the images carries the solution even further away. Thomas will never understand what he is seeing, because like all of those around him, he survives at the surface and doesn't know how to dive deeper even when he wants to. Antonioni manages to both critique rather savagely the politics or lack thereof of this embryonic era and become one the shining examples of it. The mod crowds are seen as burnt out but unable to quite make that push to the next level of awareness - a society trapped between two worlds. They've managed to throw off the shackles of 1950s repression, but their freedom comes without meaning or direction, leaving them adrift, sitting listlessly and without passion at a Yardbirds concert or simply staring off into nothing a hashish party. The impetus that would push them forward - namely the war in Vietnam and large-scale social upheaval - is only just beginning to influence people, and even then in only the most cosmetic of ways. The characters are images without meaning. But just as he tears apart the culture around him, Antonioni builds it up again through the very existence of his film calling for some meaning to be applied to life, and doing so in a way that shocked, puzzled, delighted, and outraged viewers. His film pushes the boundaries of what was acceptable at the time, not just in the obvious way of onscreen sex and drugs and nudity but in the more meaningful ways of how one tells a story, or refuses to tell it, and how one photographs a film. Plenty of movies embrace the op-art vibrancy and colors of the early 1960s on the surface, which is the problem as far as Antonioni is concerned. Like the characters in the film, they are there for the spectacle. They need to grasp more than the pretty colors and nice dresses. They achieved their freedom; now they have to do something with it. Blow Up is one of those sharply divisive films that is as loved as it is hated. It demands the viewer do a lot of thinking and a lot of work, and then it refuses to give you any sort of obvious pay-off for what you contribute. The murder will never be solved. Thomas will never come to any sort of revelation about himself. No one will ever step forward and give some well-written soliloquy explaining the film's meaning. If you're not prepared for it, I would imagine the whole thing could be a bit of a let-down. What I found, however, is that the movie's power is in its ability to linger. It's sort of like how I felt watching Wicker Man for the first time, though I don't know that I would exactly put the two films up against one another. But like that film, Blow Up has the ability to stick in your mind, to make you feel as you are watching it like there is more at work than what you are seeing. And that, in my opinion, is absolutely bloody brilliant. Antonioni doesn't just make you ponder the theme; he makes you part of it. He makes you feel it. And like Wicker Man, which shares beautiful composition set in a curious and insular subculture, the film becomes increasingly haunting and hypnotic the further away from it you get. You become Thomas, only hopefully without the various aspects of his character that make him a bit of a prick. In this sense, Antonioni has made a movie about the movie he is making without it being one of those "film within a film" deals, and his final conclusion, if it is indeed a conclusion, is a bit sad. Thomas chases the meaning of the photographs he has taken, but he never gets there. And in the end, everything he has done vanishes. One of the subtlest yet astounding little tricks has Thomas catching a glimpse of his mysterious woman outside a club, only to watch her vanish seemingly into thin air. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert remarks on this same scene and says they sat there and watched it frame for frame and couldn't for the life of them figure out the exact moment she disappears. "There is an uncanny scene where he sees her standing outside a club, and then she turns and takes a few steps and simply disappears into thin air," Ebert writes. "We ran the sequence a frame at a time and could not discover the method of her disappearance; presumably she steps into a doorway, but we watched her legs, and they seemed somehow to attach themselves to another body." Once again, Antonioni has made the viewer into his subject, has us examining his film frame by frame to decipher how things were done, just as Thomas pores over his increasingly impossible-to-read enlarged photographs. Just as the woman disappears, so too does the body, and the photos. And eventually, even Thomas himself vanishes into thin air during the film's final sequence. In a rare moment in which one of my ramblings actually connects to something about the actual subject, my whole spiel in the beginning about how these older, astounding films are being forgotten fits squarely when with one of the over-arching themes of the movie. Antonioni seems to be acknowledging that everything will fade. His own film will one day cease to exist simply because it has been forgotten, or subsequent generations can't decode its meaning. Not only does Blow Up not solve this mystery; everyone and everything involved with it simply vanishes, though in a way much more creatively and artistically satisfying than, say, Monster A Go-Go's finale. And heck, the fact that Antonioni seems to resign his work of art to fading away is a good reason to keep it around just a little longer.
It's impossible, at least for me and perhaps for you, to avoid comparing this film to the one for which most cult films know David Hemmings, Dario Argento's Deep Red. In fact, the connections between this film and that run much deeper than the simple inclusion of David Hemmings as the central character: an artist who witnesses something crucial in a puzzle yet can't quite decipher what it is he has seen. The way the story goes, it was his frustration with Blow Up's lack of narrative resolution that drove then film critic Dario Argento to launch his own career, and Deep Red was his answer to Blow Up. Argento loves to play with perception and give audiences puzzles, but though his imagery is often fantastic and grotesque, he is at his heart a logical man who has to fit all the pieces together and solve the mystery in his films. Putting his film next to Antonioni's makes for interesting companion pieces. Personally, I think despite whatever criticism of Blow Up might exist that is thought-provoking and well-written, the best commentary on it remains Argento's reaction, which was to go out, hire the same actor, and make his own movie in response - which probably pleases Antonioni to no end, since that was sort of the reaction for which he was fishing. Thematic and artistic discussions of the merits of Blow Up have gone on for decades now, and with any luck the DVD re-issue will keep the movie from fading. Just like the movie, we're not going to be solving any of them here today. We just don't have the space and I, quite frankly, don't have the motivation (or skill) in this format to properly order my thoughts into a cohesive argument. So I will leave you with the various points, ask that you see the film, and allow you to go from there. We shall move, then, to more concrete discussions regarding the film. The performances are wonderful. Most of the people are props, and the only ones attempting to engage us are the arrogant Thomas and shady Jane (Vanessa Redgrave). They are the only two characters meant to seem the least bit alive. Hemmings became a 60s icon thanks to his role here, and he is indeed wonderful. Thomas is not a sympathetic character, but he's not a total bastard. He's rude, sometimes condescending, often irritable, but he acts less out of malice than out simply out of boredom. He is at once irked by the shallow world around him and unable or unwilling to detach himself from it. So he wanders from one party to the next in a state of ennui. Yeah, that's right, baby. You never thought you'd see the term ennui in Teleport City, did you? Well, it just never came up, but it's one of those words that will get you through film studies classes, like "juxtaposition" and "mise-en-scene." Did I spell that right? Like most art cinema of the 1960s, the look of the film is entirely gorgeous. Antonioni and cinematographer Carlo Di Palma paint a vivid landscape that wanders from featureless gray streets to vibrantly colored windswept parks. The city seems almost uninhabited. In a film about photography, filmmaking, and the elusive nature of reality and the image, composition is of the utmost importance, and every shot here is put together with the utmost care. It is through these images far more than the dialogue (which is sparse and simplistic) and the characters (which are thinly drawn) that the director pulls you into the story - only fitting given the themes of the film. Yet as hypnotic, vibrant, and arty as the film looks, it never sinks to the level of bombast. Everyone is, after all, too world-weary at such a young age to be garishly colorful and peppy. Antonioni was, like Takeshi Kitano later on, famous for his films' slow pace, long takes, and expansive stretches of silence. Though Blow Up is one of the director's more kinetic films, you wouldn't exactly call it a flurry of activity, which is fine by me. Years of rapid-fire, thrill-a-second MTV-era films have left me utterly numb and disinterested and feeling a bit like Thomas, so I've come to re-appreciate the value of a languidly paced, quieter film. Almost all the music here, and there isn't much of it, comes from within scenes. A radio playing or a band performing. Vast stretches of the film, are without music - crazy, I know. There are films made today that have music in every single scene, sometimes several songs in one scene, never allowing for a moment of rest or contemplation. Blow Up has some beautifully quiet scenes, culminating in the final scene of Thomas, stymied by the disappearance of the girl, the photos, and the body, watches a group of young art students engaged in a pantomime tennis match (once again indulging the notion of images that don't actually exist). When it does show up, the jazzy score by Herbie Hancock is superb, but this isn't a film that survives by filling itself with lots of timely hits. Just as the streets of London seem peculiarly empty, so too is the soundtrack strangely desolate. I think any lover of film has to see this. Make up your own mind about whether or not you liked it or whether or not it has any value or is simply a big load of pretentious garbage, but see it. Like me, your education will have a large hole in it until you've plugged it with this movie. As far as my opinion is concerned, I thoroughly loved the film. It becomes something of an obsession you want to visit over and over again. It is utterly captivating and sticks with you long after you've finished watching it. Though the characters are jaded and cynical, the movie itself is full of reserved energy and possibility. It earns its hype. And best of all, it gives you something to ponder without giving you answers. If it gave you answers, then the process would be over. But it's open, and you can think about it, have to think about it, and discuss it. With any luck, this and many more older films that still remain as cutting edge now as they were four or five decades ago, will continue to get discovered and discussed and won't simply vanish into thin air. Labels: Director: Michelangelo Antonioni, Drama, Netflix Diary, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 10:39 PM | 1 Comments Tuesday, May 04, 2004War of the Gargantuas
1966, Japan. Starring Russ Tamblyn, Kumi Mizuno, Kenji Sahara, Jun Tazaki, Kipp Hamilton, Haruo Nakajima, Nobuo Nakamura, Ikio Sawamura, Yoshifumi Tajima, Ren Yamamoto, Hiroshi Sekita, Nadao Kirino, Goro Mutsumi. Directed by Ishiro Honda.
Along with Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, my earliest kaiju eiga memories are of this wonderful film. I must have watched it a dozen times as I was growing up. I envied Russ Tamblyn and the fact that he got to run around with Kumi Mizuno (she and Lieutenant Uhuru were my earliest boyhood fantasy women) and a couple of giant monsters. Now that's a life for me! Age has not spoiled this movie one bit, at least not for me. I love it partly because of all the monster action, partly because of the humor, and partly because it's one of the few giant monster movies where the giant monsters just plain haul ass. Godzilla is the baddest and all, but it takes a gargantua to break out into a fleet-footed sprint across the Japanese landscape, hurtling trees and bridges like the Carl Lewis of the monster world. These guys book, plain and simple. War of the Gargantuas was originally meant to be a sequel to Frankenstein Conquers the World, but whatever tenuous ties it had to that film were lost entirely when the film was translated into English. Frankly, that's okay with me. Despite the fact that it starred one of my favorites, Nick Adams, I thought Frankenstein Conquers the World sucked. Like I want to see Chaka from Land of the Lost sitting in a tunnel for 90 minutes. So losing the connection is really quite alright with me, though if Gargantuas had starred Nick Adams instead of Russ "Chaki the man-shark" Tamblyn, it would have been that much better. Nothing against Russ; it's just that no one can spice up a role with frequent, enthusiastic use of the word' baby!" the way Nick could. War of the Gargantuas is about two big hairy Chewbaccas. If you look closely, you will see they don't look entirely unlike Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. So let's call the brown one "Steven" and the green one "Mick." No one knows quite where the gargantuas came from -- some sort of strange genetic mutation is the best the scientists could do. Did they get maid to come up with that? I'm pretty sure I could look at two giant behemoths and deduce they were some bizarre genetic mutation, and I'd do it for half the price of most other scientists. One of the gargantuas, the brown one we call Steven, seems well behaved and friendly. His brother, Mick, on the other hand, is a right bastard. He has a tendency to roam the coastline looking for sailors and bad lounge singers to eat. Said lounge singer provides the best joke of the film, as Mick the Green Gargantuas attacks an airport. The lounge singer is there doing a hideously off-key song, the only lyric of which seems to be "But the words get stuck in my throat!" She soon becomes lunch for Mick, and her clothes get stuck in his throat. Mick's marauding ways draw the ire of his peaceful brother, who comes out of the woods where he lives (damn hippy) to growl reason to his brother. Mick will hear none of it, however. He needs to eat people, plain and simple. The brothers have their ups and downs, but in the end, Steven realizes the only way to put a stop to Mick's murderous tendencies is via a fight to the death. This movie is full of pathos and heart-wrenching moments. Well, maybe that's overstating it a little, but the gargantua brothers are easily the most human monsters Toho ever created. Some of the scenes of the two estranged brothers together are really well executed, like the scene where Steven takes a maser blast for his wounded brother. Yes, there is some serious maser action in this film. You all know and love the maser. It's that thing the Japanese army always rolls out to fight a giant monster, the radar that shoots lightning bolt looking lasers. Those infernal contraptions never work, but they keep hauling them out. I guess the Japanese army bought a bunch of them, and upon realizing how useless they were, figured that if they at least got them destroyed during the course of battle, it could all be written off. But wait! Big shock! The maser cannons actually work here! For once in their sorry history, the masers do some damage. At least Japan knows if they ever have another run-in with gargantuas, they can wheel those masers out again and do some damage, if Godzilla hasn't melted them all by then. The finale is great, and it actually made a few people I know get all choked up. I guess I would do if I wasn't such a hardcore son of a bitch! Seriously though, it's a great finale. War of the Gargantuas remains and always will remain one of my favorite monster movies. It has tons of monster action, great writing, good effects, and monsters that you can actually connect with. Steven is the doomed hero, and Mick is the tragic villain. In this day and age of soulless computer animated crap, it's always good to look back at a monster movie with a soul. Labels: Country: Japan, Science Fiction: Kaiju, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 5:33 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, January 03, 2004The Golden Buddha
1966, Hong Kong. Starring Paul Chang Chung, Jeanette Lin Tsui, Fanny Fan Lai, Lo Wei, Wo Ma. Directed by Lo Wei. Available on DVD (HKFlix).
When one thinks of the myriad espionage exploitation films that flickered across movie screens in the wake of James Bond's unprecedented success as a film franchise, one generally thinks of the countless cheap though often entertaining Eurospy entries into the genre. After all, there were scores of them, and a lot of them weren't half bad. The ones that were half bad were at least halfway enjoyable. The ones that weren't even halfway enjoyable were called Agent for H.A.R.M. The desire to mimic James Bond and, in doing so, perhaps mimic a little of the success, was hardly the sole property of America and Europe, however. Bond was as big in Asia as he was everywhere else in the world, and Asian film industries were just as quick to cash in on the trend with their own particular twist on the superspy genre. As with their European counterparts, a good many of these films are impressive and fun despite having smaller budgets than Bond. The Asian spy films were able to compensate for the financial difference the same way European movies did, exploiting the one thing American films of the same nature did not have: location. Eurospy films could "trot the globe" for peanuts considering how easy it is to go to a different country in Europe. Since many of the films were often co-productions between two or more nations, even a modestly bankrolled Eurospy actioner could find itself in Paris, Rome, Venice, Milan, London, Berlin, Madrid, or any number of lavish locales in between. In Asia, it was much the same, and a production from Japan or Hong Kong could actually save money in many cases by trotting down south and shooting the exotic scenery of Thailand or Indonesia. Both continents had built-in globe-trotting at their disposal. Cheap American spy films, on the other hand, were stranded. Where were they going to go? New York, Los Angeles, and Vegas may seem exotic in an international context, but there was nothing in any of those cities Americans hadn't seen a million times before. Sure we had Hawaii, but shoestring budget exploitation films couldn't afford to fly there any more than they could fly to Tokyo or Copenhagen. Unlike Asian and European exploitation film crews, American crews were pretty much stuck, which is why so many of the American offerings in the genre are so dull, trying to pass California suburbs off as Prague or St. Petersburg. No one wants to watch a spy jet set off to Iowa or Toronto. Of the Asian countries who got in on the spy craze, Japan had the best-known films outside of their own market. The Japanese films tended to seize upon the most eye-catching pop-art aspects of the genre and blow them up tenfold into something that resembled a sumptuous blend of James Bond, Modesty Blaise, Alfred Hitchcock's many espionage thrillers, and Barbarella. Although less well-known than their Japanese brethren, and often slightly less polished, Hong Kong's entries into 1960s spymania are nothing to sneeze at, and some of them take the pop-art psychedelia even further than it was taken in Japan. Unfortunately, where finding old Japanese spy films can be difficult but eventually rewarding, digging up Hong Kong spy films was a study in unending frustration. The films simply weren't in circulation anymore - at least until recently. When the Shaw Brothers studio finally sold its vast film library for distribution on DVD, it meant that along with all the kungfu adventures for which the Shaws were best known in the West, we'd also be seeing some of their forays into espionage films, and if we were seeing what the Shaws had to offer, then we were doubtless seeing some of the best, or at least most expensive, examples of what Hong Kong had to offer. One of the first of the Shaw Brothers spy films to find its way back into the light is not exactly a spy film, but neither were a lot of the European films that became part of the genre. As long as someone was wearing a smart suit and being shot at by guys in sunglasses, then we can call it a spy film. Golden Buddha has more than enough of that to keep fans of cloak and dagger doings happy, not to mention the fact that it has sexy ladies, hidden treasure, exotic locales, and a fat guy in a gold lame super-villain outfit. And I haven't even begun to describe the lair. Golden Buddha begins with our dashing man Paul Chang Chung as Paul, which is convenient. Chang is a top notch "dashing" lead, certainly better than contemporary Peter Chan Ho, who was plenty likable but rarely believable as the suave ladies' man he often played. Chang is another one of those men they just don't seem to make anymore. He's not quite a Cary Grant, but he reminds me a lot of Toho Studio's number one super-suave leading man from the same era, Akira Takarada. What all three of those gents have in common (and what would later be embodied by men like Chow Yun-fat and...well, just Chow Yun-fat, I guess) is the ability to lend an everyman quality to sheer elegance, or maybe it's adding a touch of sheer elegance to an everyman character. As James Bond, Sean Connery had class to spare, but existed at an unobtainable level. No one could be James Bond. He never had to deal with the mundane aspects of life, like doing laundry or going grocery shopping. The elegant everyman, as defined by Cary Grant, was clever and sophisticated and charming, but he was also real, or at least more real than James Bond. Grant may still be jetting around fighting international villains, but you also see him staying in crummy hotel rooms, struggling to cook himself some dinner, going to a regular job, things of that nature. They were real-life flares that made Cary Grant's persona seem almost obtainable, because we saw him dealing with the normal stuff. The same goes for Akira Takarada and Paul Chang Chung. The characters they played were always smartly dressed and one step ahead of the game, but they also had everyman qualities and problems that made them seem more believable. James Bond created a myth, something one could aspire to but never hope to actually achieve. The elegant Everyman, on the other hand, was something that you could hope to one day become if you could just turn off the GameCube and stop scratching your ass while making lunch long enough to learn a little something about presenting yourself with a degree of class and respectability. Paul Chang Chung's Paul is a businessman on his way to Singapore to seal some manner of deal. On the flight, he meets and old friend from the judo club who is on his way to Bangkok to attend to some sort of family business. Both men carry the same briefcase. Can you guess what happens? When Paul is forced by inclement weather to stay an extra day in Bangkok, he discovers the mistaken briefcase identities and decides to use his time in Thailand to get the proper case back. Well, first he gets sidetracked to a massage parlor full of willing girls, then he goes to get the case back. I mean, a man's got to have his priorities straight, doesn't he? The problem with getting back his own briefcase gets complicated when he discovers his old friend with a rather large stiletto knife stuck in his chest. Paul isn't too terribly upset. I guess they weren't close friends, just old friends. He grabs the contents of his briefcase, shovels them into his friend's briefcase, and heads home intent to not get tangled up in the whole affair. That would be fine if it weren't for the fact that assassins and thugs are suddenly coming out of the woodwork and chasing after Paul, demanding that he turn over to them the secret of the Golden Buddha - a small statuette he discovered in his friend's briefcase. Before too long, Paul is on the run and trying to figure out the riddle that will, with aide from his friend's beautiful sister and portly brother, unlock a fortune in buried treasure. The key to the whole affair lies inside the Buddha, and inside the two Buddha's possessed by the victim's brother and sister. In a refreshing twist, the police are involved but Paul is not on the run from them or mistaken as his friend's killer or anything like that. The cops just sort of like to hang around and pretend they are reading papers. The premise is simple enough, but the thrill is always in the execution, and director Lo Wei delivers a tightly paced adventure film that never feels especially serious but also never veers into total comedy. In retrospect, it's tempting to apply the term "camp" to a film of this nature, but camp implies a certain degree of intention on behalf of the filmmaker to spoof a certain genre or turn the wackiness way up a la the old Batman television series. There's nothing in Golden Buddha to make one think they weren't taking the film seriously. It's outlandish, yes, and certainly garish and over the top, but it lacks the wink - and, thankfully, the smarminess - of most films that put themselves forward as camp. It doesn't matter, really, I suppose. Campy or not, all that counts is whether the film is enjoyable, and Golden Buddha definitely delivers the goods. Being able to make a film fast-paced but coherent, quick moving but not hyperactive and short of thought, seems to be a lost art form. Many contemporary films feel they must either be slow and ponderous or edited so choppily in that MTV style so as to cause seizures in a good many viewers, primarily because these films rely entirely on action scenes to propel the movie forward and provide the sense of pace. A film like Golden Buddha, or a James Bond film, knows that there are other ways to keep the plot feeling fast without relying on explosions and jump cuts set to blaring techno music. And of course few were better than Hitchcock at being able to inject non-action scenes with a sense of urgency and tension. Films from the 1960s in particular, knew how to use characters and dialogue to keep your interest. That's just what Golden Buddha does. There is plenty of action, most of it in the form of energetic but dreadfully choreographed fist fights, but the film doesn't rely solely on those scenes - which, given the quality of the fights, is probably wise. The character of Paul is, like many of the characters in this and similar films, one dimensional. But it's a good dimension, and the script makes the most of it. He's a good guy, handy with a gun or a judo throw, not above bedding a beautiful dame in the name of, well, bedding beautiful dames. He is, in a word, likable. He's charismatic, and that makes him interesting even he's not a deep and complex study of the human psyche. When you have interesting characters, it goes along way to giving you an interesting film, a film where you don't have to rely on special effects and explosions to keep the viewer's attention. The other characters are predictable, but that's not a negative. After all, spy films became popular because they followed a formula and found ways to tweak and alter the formula while still staying true to it, like how I started adding a dash of molasses to my recipe for Kentucky Derby Pie. Paul finds himself with two women in his life, as the hero in spy films often did - and remember, I realize this isn't a spy film per se, but it has enough of the genre clichés to keep it in the company of your finer Eurospy films. One woman is noble and good, the other is sinister and evil. Both are sexy. We start out with Fanny Fan, who is an absolute drop-dead bombshell of a vixen with sex appeal in spades. She starred in at least one other Lo Wei-directed spy caper for the Shaw's, 1967's wonderful Angel With Iron Fists. If she didn't make a lot more movies than I've turned up, then it's a real shame because she has a beauty and a body that will turn your head and keep it in that position. She's wonderful as the femme fatale of the piece, an operative of the mysterious Skeleton Gang who is out to steal the secret of the Golden Buddha before Paul and his allies can solve it. And she shows off her derrieres. That may sound base and piggish, but it's also worth noting since this film was made in 1966, a time when bare bottoms were still rare in anything but b-grade exploitation and those nudie cuties about Florida nudist colonies being menaced by a gorilla. Our introduction to Fanny's fanny while fully clothed in a tight mod dress and swaying provocatively back and forth as she sashays down the hallway is plenty good, to boot, or should I say to booty? Oh, that was just awful. Okay, enough about naked behinds. I can try and pass it off as my professional interest in Hong Kong cinema's willingness to pursue nudity in a mainstream film while the supposedly more liberated West was still playing things coy, but in the end - so to speak - you know the basic fact behind the matter is that I simply appreciate nudity. I appreciate Fanny Fan Lai. Put the two together, and well, you can figure it out. Our more modest heroine is Jeanette Lin Tsui as the sister of Paul's murdered friend and possessor of one third of the Golden Buddha's secret (her older brother has the other third). What Jeanette lacks in terms of Fanny Fan's bombshell appeal she more than makes up for with an enchanting beauty, graceful demeanor, and plenty of elegant 1960s dresses. For the most part, she's not nearly as actively involved in things as your better Bond girls from the same time. By 1966, we'd seen Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore doling out judo throws (Goldfinger) and Claudine Auger as Domino doling out harpoon guns to the chest (Thunderball). Jeanette's damsel-in-distress is less interesting for her lack of ability, but she's not entirely useless. She at least cracks a vase over a guy's head and, as far as I remember, never trips and falls while running away from the bad guys. That's got to count for something. The supporting cast rounds things out nicely. A young Wo Ma (or younger, anyway) plays one of the cops, who as I mentioned earlier, made me happy by being ineffectual (as always) for most of the film but not resorting to the tired old "mistaking the hero for the killer" routine. People know Wo Ma best for his parts later in life, such as the Taoist ghost slayer in Chinese Ghost Story. He spends most of his time here reading papers on the street corner. Director Lo Wei himself makes an appearance as the villain of the piece, and I have to say this is one of the greatest screen villains of all time, not so much for his character, which is typical and somewhat uninspired, but for his fashion sense, which would send even 1970s-style David Bowie or Elton John into a fit. The man wears amber sunglasses, a shiny gold foil suit (with standard "evil villain" high collar), black knee-high boots, and a cape with a giant pointy collar. Now that, my friends, is a quality megalomaniac villain's wardrobe. While Pierce Brosnan may have brought back the era of a hero with keen fashion sense, the villains of today are woefully inadequate when it comes to selecting the proper attire for trying to throttle the world with your iron grip. These days, they're all in dull brown military uniforms and business casual from J. Crew. Hardly any villains these days wear capes, let alone a gold foil Nehru jacket. Where's the style? Where's the flamboyant flare that lets the world know you are not a man to be trifled with? The leader of Golden Buddha's ruthless Skeleton Gang - now there is a man who knows how to dress the part. That, in fact, leads to what may very well be my favorite part in the entire film. I'm not going to spoil anything when I tell you Paul manages to foil the evil plans of the Skeleton Gang, which were pretty small considering what a lavish lair they have. For an organization with tentacles in all parts of the world, with a vast space age underground lair and hundreds of henchmen and attractive female agents, you'd think they'd set their heights a little higher than recovering a small chest of jewelry. I'm sure it was valuable stuff, but I bet the Skeleton Gang spent twice as much as it was worth just trying to get the thing, which is especially silly when you realize after the not entirely shocking twist that they could have basically had the thing for free with almost no effort. Anyway, once Paul foils their plans we get a lovely shot of the gang and their leader being hauled off like common crooks by the cops - still decked out in all his outrageous supervillain gear. I bet he'll be especially popular wearing that in some dark, dirty Bangkok jail cell. The leader's fabulous outfit is simply one part of the overall beautiful look of the film. The budget may have been smaller than a Bond budget, but it seems to have been larger than the budget for your average Eurospy film, or at least better utilized. The film looks grand, full of eye-popping color and space-age décor. The Skeleton Gang's lair is a thing of beauty. Ken Adam himself, the set designer for the Bond films, would be impressed by what Lo Wei and crew managed to pull of with much more limited resources. The thing is an amalgamation of every swanky space station, secret lair, and bachelor pad ever seen on the screen. When the film isn't traipsing about the labyrinthine corridors of the evil lair, it's reclining in an exotic lounge, parading around a series of gorgeous Thai travelogue footage, and otherwise taking advantage of the fact that Shaw Bros. productions threw together some of the most beautiful sets ever. Of course, not everything is perfect with Golden Buddha. The plot does have at least one major hole, which I mentioned above. Absolutely nothing in the movie was necessary. The Skeleton Gang could have recovered the treasure of the Golden Buddhas with almost no effort, but they chose instead to go running about shooting at things, getting into judo fights, and ruining a variety of lattice work. Luckily, the film is enough fun for you not to really care, and given the clothes the leader of the gang favors, it's possible he's simply not all there and the easy route never occurred to him. Of course, the easy route rarely makes for an interesting film, either. The other strike against the film is the abysmal fight choreography. There are a few shootouts, but most of the action comes via fisticuffs, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a worse example of how to stage fights. Even the fight scenes in those Frankie Avalon beach parties were better than the ones here. It's not that they aren't energetic - every time there is a fight, Paul Chang Chung and his opponents go at it with gusto, flinging each other across the room, through the windows, bouncing across the bed, things of that nature. The problem lies in the fact that not a single punch lands anywhere near its target, and everyone does that jerky "turn my head to the left, then to the right, then up, then down" movement when they're being hit. The film fares better when Paul breaks out his judo moves, and one fight scene between him and another judo master after Fanny Fan is drugged by her own treachery is actually decent. But most of the fights are straight-up fisticuffs, and they look really awful. It can't be excused by the film's date, either. By 1966, we'd seen plenty of superb fight scenes, many of them in other films from the Shaw Bros. studios. Golden Buddha loves a fight scene, but it can't execute one very well. Still, the energy and the fact that the film is basically one wild, outlandish ride make the awful fight choreography enjoyable despite itself. Finally, while the acting is relatively solid throughout, one has to question the matter-of-fact nonchalantness with which Paul handles the mysterious murder of his friend. We can assume at first that he simply wasn't all that close to the guy, and that would be understandable. But then he goes through all this crazy mess with the Golden Buddha statues, risks his life, and when asked why explains that it's because the dead guy was his friend, and he owes him. Ah well, nothing to get annoyed over. After all, do we want to watch Paul Chang Chung bed Fanny Fan, judo chop everyone in sight, and run around in a space-age secret lair, or do we want to watch him cry and question how life could be so cruel? Golden Buddha is tremendous fun and a real treat for fans of 1960s spy films despite there being no actual spies in the film. It's still got plenty of intrigue and sneaking about, and the production is sumptuous. Fans of zany 1960s art direction will be in heaven. The plot won't keep you guessing from beginning to end, and it does have that one giant hole, but otherwise it's fairly serviceable and keeps things moving at a brisk but not thoughtless pace. Best of all, the mysterious treasure turns out to be actual treasure, and not some note that says, "Peace on Earth" or something. Labels: Country: Hong Kong, Espionage, Studio: Shaw Bros, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 3:34 PM | 0 Comments Friday, January 05, 2001Agent for H.A.R.M. 1966, United States. Starring Mark Richman, Carl Esmond, Barbara Bouchet, Martin Kosleck, Wendell Corey, Robert Quarry, Rafael Campos, Aliza Gur, Donna Michelle, Marc Snegoff, Chris Anders, Steve Stevens, Horst Ebersberg, Ray Dannis, Robert Donner. Directed by Gerd Oswald.Think back for a moment to all the things that make cool, swanky spy movies just that: cool, swanky spy movies. You got the suave hero who probably wears lots of turtle necks, does karate and yoga, and only takes time out from killing so he can get it on with some go-go boot and miniskirt wearing female sidekick or spy. You've got the cool music full of offbeat avant garde jazz, fuzzed-out guitars, and psychedelia. You've got amazing and exotic locales, everything from Rome to Saigon to Hong Kong to New York to Rio to Moscow. You've got non-stop action, sex appeal, and high tech gadgetry. And all the best ones have a wonderful sense of tongue-in-cheek humor. They know they're being a bit silly, but that's all part of the fun. All of these elements combine perfectly in their total absence from the film Agent For HARM, a film about a spy who, rather than romancing Russian counter-spies in Czechoslovakia or bedding some Italian beauty in Milan before offing half a dozen Marxist terrorists, decides to simply spend most of the movie hanging around the living room while wearing his official Mr. Rogers brand cardigan sweater. I'm already hollerin' for joy! Mark Richman, who would go on to a long and prosperous career playing creepy fathers in bad horror films, plays Adam Chance. He's named Adam Chance because what are the chances of all spies having cool names like "Adam Chance" or Dominique Fortune or whatever? It's worse than the "ironic super villain name" conundrum where someone who is named Dr. Frieze or something will just happen to be in an accident that gives him super freezing powers and stuff. Come on! Adam Chance works for HARM, because all spies with cool names like Adam Chance also have to work for cool covert ops wings of the government who's names just happen (by chance) to have an acronym that spells out some cool, violent word. Adam Chance is an agent for HARM. Pulp novel superspy Nick Carter was the killmaster for AXE. In a wonderful spoof of the genre, as well as one of the best genre films, James Coburn as Derek Flint worked for ZOWIE. There must be a whole branch of the government that thinks up these names. You have your executive, your judicial, your legislative, and your "Ministry of Coming Up With Names That Have Cool Acronyms No Matter How Far You Have To Stretch Things." Myself, I am a member of the Secret Union of Proletariat European Radical Brigades Against Despots. Make your own! It's fun, and depending on your needs, you can either count or not count words like "of," "and," "the," and "is" as part of the acronym. But I'm getting ahead of myself, not to mention this film. But then, it's pretty easy to get ahead of this film since it never goes anywhere. We begin in "The Eastern Bloc," which looks a lot like, oh say, some neighborhood in Santa Monica or something. But all good spy movies have to take place at least in part in some Eastern Bloc nation. You post-Berlin Wall kids may not remember the Eastern Block, but those of us who grew up during the Cold War remember with fondness the old days. A professor who is probably German judging by the accent which he sometimes doesn't have, is escaping from the evil iron clutches of Communism with a super duper top secret weapon in tow. His ally is a French guy, complete with stupid goatee and a beret. They should have given him a loaf of French bread and had him say stuff like, "I am, how you say, French." At least that would have been funny on a sort of Jerry Lewis level. This guy looks like he went on later in the day to play some bongo drum pounding beatnik in a Frankie Avalon - Annette Funicello beach movie. But anyway, given the fact that the French are renown sell-outs to practically everyone else in the world, why would you trust one of them to help you escape from a country? Sure enough, the French guy betrays the scientist. A treacherous Frenchman! What will they throw at me next? A rude Frenchman? The professor's super secret weapon from hell is a spore gun. Okay. No wait, surely it must be some massive nuclear warhead or a disease that could wipe out all of New York. No, it's a spore gun. If you shoot it at your enemy, it splatters him with some green goo that slowly kills him, allowing him plenty of time to just get a regular gun and shoot your ass dead. A spore gun? That's it? I mean, geez, shouldn't a super-spy be fighting guys who do things like hijack airplanes and steal neutron bombs? I mean, the spore gun is a pretty lame ultimate weapon. But what do you expect from a professor who trusts the French in matters of espionage? Despite the evil ways of beret and goatee sporting Frenchman, the professor manages to escape. If you remember the wild car chases from many James Bond films, then you are a little off base in visualizing this escape sequence. If, however, you imagine, say, the 10 mph car "chase" scene from the Joe Don Baker film Mitchell, or if you simply imagine Joe Don Baker himself slowly plodding to the fridge to grab himself a beer, then you have a general idea of how exciting this whole escape sequence is. A quick aside -- when I was doing research on this film, I lazily typed in the string "agent for harm" in an internet search engine, and here's one of the results I got: "Our toilet bowl cleaning agent is designed to automatically clean bowl when flushing, giving a fresh and clean bowl after each use. It is convenient and saves time and energy." I was amazed to see that other people had reviewed this film as well! Anyway, back to this spore gun. I mean, what's the point? It's like five times more complicated to use than a regular gun, but half as effective. I mean, it'd be different if the spore killed one person, then went on to spread and consume countless others. But it just tosses some pond scum on someone's face, and that's it. Do we really need to send our best agent in the world to defend the spore gun? And if this was the zenith of the Communists' Cold War technology, then it's no wonder they lost. Cuban cigars probably kills more people per year than the stupid spore gun. What's next? Trying to pass that "spud gun" novelty potato shooter off as a secret weapon? My god, what if the Commies get a hold of our closely guarded slingshot technology? There would be a legion of pinko kids in rolled up jeans on little soapbox scooters rolling toward us bellowing Marxist slogans as they zing us with pebbles and deliver copies of Grit magazine. Actually, that's pretty scary. Agent for HARM would have been much cooler if it had been about Communist sympathizer newsies trying to disrupt the town's ice cream social. So eventually, and I mean eventually, we get to the rest of the film. Oh wait, it's only been like ten minutes. God damn. We're in for a bad one here, folks. Adam Chance is assigned to protect the professor once he makes it to the United States, where we set him up with a fancy beach-front bungalow. Damn, no wonder all those scientists tried to defect. Wendell Corey plays the boss for HARM, and he seems every bit as drunk as Jack Webb was stoic. I mean, if this guy is the leader, it's no wonder their star spy is a middle-aged made-for-tv movie actor in a cardigan sweater instead of James Coburn or Dean Martin. Most of Wendell's lines are slurred beyond the point of recognition. I guess they had to liquor him up in order to get him in this film. He assigns the job of protecting the professor to Chance, who promptly hops in his super-cool ultra-slick spy car to head for the coast. Oh wait, he gets in a station wagon. What the hell? What kind of loser super-spy drives a station wagon? I bet if he was a leprechaun, Adam Chance would be the one they make guard the Lucky Charms instead of getting a pot of gold like all the other leprechauns. I wonder if he knows how uncool he is, or if he is like the loser guy who hangs out in the gym as the "basketball team manager" or whatever and thinks that by associating himself with the athletic team he is as cool to everyone as they are. Does Adam Chance know other spies get to drive Stingrays and Lotuses and stuff like that? Upon arriving at the beach-house of the professor, Chance takes time out to flirt with he guy's sexy bikini-clad niece. This is sort of like watching the 45-year-old lounge lizard with a big medallion hitting on some high school girl. I guess we're supposed to see some sort of romantic flame there, but I really don't see what he does to make her fall so helplessly in love with him at first sight. He just sort of strolls around on the beach in his old man clothes pretending to be a brush salesman. Ooo, my panties are flying off just thinking about it! Adam Chance is the reason the kids coined the slang word "square." When he finally gets around to talking to the professor, the professor unveils the evil Commie plot to dust our crops with the deadly spore. Okay, so that's a little better than the gun, but it's still pretty stupid. They're going to dust the crops of the entire nation and no one is going to notice? And hey, like evil Commie spores are any worse than good ol' American DDT. In order to get the secret formula, spies from some country or other casually drop by the professor's pad, which might not happen if he was, oh, secretive or something. His beach house is about as covert and clever as hiding members of the federal witness protection program in a crowded Holiday Inn in a wing specifically marked "Members of Witness Protection Program only. All others must sign in at desk." Luckily, Adam Chance is there to, well, kick their ass, but he's such a weenie that it's not really ass kicking. It's like ... I don't know. Eddie Deezen could whup ass better than this guy, and he'd be twice as cool doing it. Meanwhile, we all learn that the niece is a Commie pinko spy. That was a big shock. Adam Chance spends most of his time hanging around in the guest house doing "spy stuff," and by "spy stuff" if you think I mean partaking in helicopter crashes and hovercraft chases, you'd be incorrect. Spy stuff for Adam Chance seems to consist mostly of taking apart common household appliances then putting them back together. While you may thrill to watching James Coburn jump from rooftop to rooftop while evading Russian hitmen, it pales in comparison to the excitement of watching Adam Chance sit in the floor and take apart a television set. It has all the tensely coiled energy of watching your dad try and fix the television reception. In fact, watching your dad maintain an appliance would be even more exciting than this. At least your dad might curse or knock something over. After what seems to be an eternity, the Commies finally kidnap the professor and take him to Mexico, which looks a lot like California and whatever Iron Curtain country it was this film started in. While some super villains have ultra-cool space-age lairs in hollowed-out mountains or tropical islands, these super villains seem to have just rented out one of those storage warehouses. Adam Chance mounts a motorbike and looks totally ridiculous. They might has well have had him ride in on a motor scooter. This leads to the exciting final shoot-out, which is exciting because it means this movie is finally over. Let's get one thing straight -- a chimp could shit out a halfways decent 1960s spy film. It's not that hard to do, even on a limited budget. I mean, there were crappy spy films, but most of them managed to still be entertaining, or at least entertainingly bad. The glory of Europe is that everything is really close, so you can shoot in Rome, Venice, Berlin, and Paris with relative ease, giving your film a tremendously exotic feel to it. Or you could film it at a Travel Lodge somewhere along the California Coast. The choice is yours. Agent For HARM is the type of film you might be forced to watch if you were captured by evil Communist agents. You wouldn't think that you could take sexy girls in bikinis, super spies, evil alien spores, and international espionage and make them boring, but you also wouldn't think you could have all those things but still spend most your time sitting around in a bungalow watching television. International men of mystery the world over hang their heads in shame at Adam Chance. You will hang your head as well, because you'll probably be asleep before the end of the film. Labels: Espionage, Year: 1966 posted by Keith at 10:47 PM | 0 Comments |
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