THE WILD GEESE (1978)

In The Dogs of War "everybody comes home" is the motto of Christopher Walken's mercenary hero, and he abides by that to the point of seating corpses on planes. In Andrew V. McLaglen's Wild Geese, the film that started a mercenary subgenre and arguably made Dogs of War possible, Richard Burton's mercenary hero orders the corpse of one of his men dumped from a plane to lighten its load and save fuel. That's probably the only instance in which Geese is more realistic than Dogs. In general thematic terms the pictures are similar: mostly white mercenaries get to run amok in an African dictatorship, paid by shady British business interests. In Geese retired General Allen Faulkner (Burton) is hired by a powerful businessman (Stewart Granger) to break a deposed president out of his prison. This businessman is powerful enough to persuade the British mafia to give up a vendetta against mercenary Shaun Fynn (Roger Moore), who has whacked a gangster for tricking him into becoming a drug mule. Faulkner wants Fynn on his team, along with logistics expert Rafer Janders (Richard Harris) and some other dependable colleagues. Despite repeated compressions of their schedule, the operation to free President Limbani (Winston Ntshona) goes off smoothly until the plane sent to pick up the team takes off again without them. Granger has cut a deal with the current regime and has no more use for Limbani or the mercenaries, who seem doomed to destruction by the ruler's crack Simba troops. Their only way out may be to start the civil war that Granger had apparently intended to incite....

 

Note: the liquor bottle above is for acting purposes only -- Drink Responsibly.

Below: Roger Moore can't stand the criminal environment he finds himself stuck in.

While the synopsis sounds grim and cynical the actual movie is less grim in tone than Dogs of War. There's a "Boy's Own Adventure" air to the project that may be inescapable given the fantastical images of Burton et al waging war in Africa. It's hard to imagine them as mercenaries because it's hard to imagine them as anyone but the stars they are. Their characters are one-dimensional. Janders pines for his son off at boarding school; Fynn is arrogant; Faulkner is practically a cipher. The most character development he gets is an art-imitates-life indication that the Burton character does nothing but fight or drink. But we're meant to believe that they're all inspired by the nobility of the suffering Limbani. In fact, none is more impressed than the Afrikaaner mercenary Pieter Coetzee (Hardy Kruger), who despises "kaffirs" but spends much of the picture symbolically carrying Limbani on his back. Screenwriter Reginald (Ten Angry Men) Rose aspires to political relevance in the dialogue scenes between Kruger and Ntshona, which amount to a plea for peace and reconciliation in the South Africa where the picture was shot. McGlaglen can only manage to make the scenes feel heavyhanded and superfluous. The film's pretensions of relevance also show glaringly in Maurice Binder's title sequence, scored by Joan Armatrading's ponderous theme song. Binder is the man who did the title bits in the old James Bond films, and while no naked women cavort across the map of Africa here, there's something about his style and the reminders of Bond in the song-and-symbols combination that gives a bad taste to this opening earnestness. In any event, you'll probably have forgotten about suffering Africa after the second act's tedious service-comedy training sequences. Also part of this alleged comedy are the mincing mannerisms of a homosexual medic (Kenneth Griffith), but to be fair this character gets a heroic death scene later and his fitness for duty under fire is never questioned.

 

 

 

McLaglen didn't have Jack Cardiff shooting his film, so Wild Geese lacks the dark grandeur of Dogs of War's night assault scenes. Once the film becomes a pursuit of the mercs by the Simbas it develops some momentum, but McGlaglen too self-consciously inserts bits of still-modest gore (a slit throat, characters spitting up blood) to make the action seem more "adult." He only makes those bits look like exploitation in the worst sense of the word. Neither he nor Rose really do much to make the most of the master thespians in their employ. When Burton and Harris (both cold sober, reportedly) yell at one another, it only makes their characters look less professional. It makes you more appreciative of the casting of an aloof Christopher Walken in Dogs of War; his emotional self-limitation makes him more convincing as an all-business merc. The films end similarly, however, with the protagonists committing bridge-burning acts of violence, as if cinema couldn't yet accept mercenaries in their true businesslike amorality. Wild Geese may not exactly be a moral picture, but it upholds an old ideal of heroism invoked in the poster's description of the mercenaries as "Modern Musketeers." While it started something somewhat new in cinema, it's really part of an older tradition of exotic adventure movies. If it wasn't instantly dated by its attitude or its aging stars, it would soon look very dated alongside the films it inspired. But if you like the stars and, as many must have, you like the idea of people like Burton, Harris and Moore kicking ass and mowing down multitudes, Wild Geese can still be an enjoyable if also slightly campy experience.

THE DOGS OF WAR (1980)

Christopher Walken won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor of 1978 for his role in The Deer Hunter. As if often the case when a fresh face wins such an award, an attempt was made to make him a true movie star, if not a leading man. Having made his name as a Vietnam vet in Deer Hunter, he was ideally positioned to take part in the new fad for films about mercenaries following the international success of The Wild Geese. Walken was made the Americanized hero of John Irvin's adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's bestselling novel. The screenplay by Gary DeVore and George Malko strives to turn Forsyth's merc procedural into a late Seventies picture, emphasizing the working-class alienation of Walken's character, Jamie Shannon. Master cinematographer Jack Cardiff maximizes the visual contrasts between the exotic locations where Shannon plies his lethal trade and the drab domestic locations where Shannon lives or looks up a lost love between missions. Irvin aims for some sort of pathos in depicting Shannon's loneliness and his befriending of a black street kid, but there's no real payoff to it. When Shannon, having failed to reconcile with his wife, makes the kid his insurance beneficiary before taking on a new mission, you expect a grim fate that might at least give the kid a future, but our hero makes it through the picture alive.

 

The plot deals with a conspiracy to overthrow the dictatorship of the fictional African nation of Zangaro. The country once had a troika of independence leaders, but one was imprisoned, one fled into exile, and the last man standing, General Kimba, is a despot with a cult of personality. British business interests want to replace him with Col. Bobi, the exile, who'll sign over mineral rights to them. They want Shannon to scout out the country and judge the prospects for an overthrow. His reconnaissance is slightly sloppy and he ends up beaten and imprisoned. In stir, he befriends the imprisoned leader Dr. Okoye. Released, he decides to make that last try with his wife and start a new life. When that fails, he takes on the task of organizing a small force to topple Kimba and clear the way for Bobi to take power.

 

The climactic storming of Kimba's garrison should impress viewers more recently captivated by the raid on Osama bin Laden's home in Zero Dark Thirty. Irvin and Cardiff paint the scene in explosive chiaroscuro and the action has that visceral CGI-free vitality that's so refreshing in older films. They frame everything so effectively that you might believe there's more to the picture than there actually is. Actually, the problem isn't so much what's lacking but the extraneous expectations created by what the writers put into the story. The emphasis they give to Shannon's personal character arc seems to point to an inevitable death. Yet Shannon lives to fight another day, though an unexpected action he takes at the end should throw his future as a mercenary into question. This ending apparently follows the novel, but the novel does bring Shannon's career to an end while the movie leaves him locked in life's longest, lousiest commute, less a soldier than a simple working stiff with a license to kill and a target on his back.

 

What to make of Walken? It's shocking to remember how smooth or almost baby-faced he was back then, the eternally dead eyes notwithstanding. He conveys Shannon's alienation effortlessly, but whether his is the alienation of the perpetual (or periodic) soldier or whether his alienation itself seeks such a trade remains an open question. We never really know the character well enough to recognize his alienation as much more than a cliche of the period. Walken's scenes with JoBeth Williams as his wife seem more perfunctory in retrospect, once you lose the feeling that that was his absolutely final chance with her. For all you know, had there been a sequel he might have tried yet again with her. Instead of a tragic or heroic finish the hero seems stuck in some cycle, and a point might have been made more definitely about his perpetual hopelessness if the film didn't seem to just stop at a point.

Dogs of War is less dated than it could have been. Wisely, the filmmakers did away with much of the novel's Cold War trappings. The events could have happened yesterday, one suspects, instead of more than thirty years ago, and Irvin's happy reliance -- admittedly, he had no alternative -- on reality adds to the action's enduring immediacy. In our age of limitless CGI fantasy it can be thrilling simply to see a real plane taking off amid real explosions on the landing strip. If that's how you feel then regardless of any dramatic flaws The Dogs of War is a film for you.

DVR Diary: PROFESSIONAL SOLDIER (1935)

If there had been an Expendables in the 1930s, Victor McLaglen would have been part of it. More to the point, had there been one in the 1950s McLaglen would have been there. For a generation after the coming of sound, he was Hollywood's idea of a tough man, so that no one seemed to consider it implausible that his character could brawl with John Wayne when McLaglen was in his mid-sixties. He had a record to back up his reputation, having been a heavyweight boxing champion of the British Army during World War I. But he represented a different idea of physical power than we envision today. For men like McLaglen or Wallace Beery, it was all about bulk, with a little bit of attitude thrown in. They would have found it ludicrous to need to get the kind of definition Sylvester Stallone aspires to, or Arnold Schwarzenegger achieved, in order to be taken seriously as action heroes. In a way, Liam Neeson during his midlife renaissance as an action hero comes closer to the McLaglen model. We don't assume that Neeson is ripped, but we know that he's a big old man with cunning and a mean streak. So with McLaglen. If you asked audiences of the 1930s who'd win between McLaglen and, say, Johnny Weissmuller, a body beautiful type, and my hunch is that people'd pick Vic. Hollywood envisioned McLaglen as a one-man army half a century before that became a common movie concept -- and they assumed he could act, too. He closed out the year in which he earned an Oscar for John Ford's The Informer with Tay Garnett's Professional Soldier -- so called, I presume, because the word "mercenary" wasn't yet part of the pop-culture lexicon -- for Twentieth Century-Fox, where he was paired with fast-rising child star Freddy Bartholomew in what the studio apparently imagined as a more male-oriented and violent version of Little Miss Marker.
Like that Shirley Temple hit, Garnett's film is based on a Damon Runyon story, and Runyon's story has a similar "tough guy bonds with cute kid" focus, following the well-established Wallace Beery-Jackie Cooper model. McLaglen plays Michael Donovan, an ex-Marine whose past exploits seem partially based on the career of Smedley Butler. His known involvement in the toppling of governments makes him a person of interest to would-be revolutionaries in a Balkan kingdom. They want him to kidnap, but not kill, the country's monarch, assisted only by his protege, George Foster (Michael Whalen). Together, Donovan and the revolutionists -- who assure our hero that they're neither Bolsheviks nor Nazis -- make up history's most incompetent conspirators. They do not provide, and Donovan never asks for a description of the monarch to be snatched. So when Donovan and Foster sneak into the palace during a costume party, they immediate pounce on the first old guy the find sleeping in a big bed. They are interrupted in their assault by a boy who seems more intrigued than alarmed by the mayhem. Fortunately, the lad quickly corrects their mistake. The old fellow isn't the king -- he is. And having convinced himself that the intruders are American gangsters ("Are you Dillinger?" he asks Donovan) he eagerly wants to follow wherever they're going -- though his nanny Countess Sonia (Gloria Stuart), whom Foster had met cute with earlier, is less eager when she stumbles onto the scene.

The revolutionists don't expect to take over as soon as the little king is gone. They know that Peter II is but a figurehead for a clique of corrupt nobles led by Gino (the always-repulsive C. Henry Gordon), and that the boy's popularity has shielded Gino's clique from proper scrutiny. Donovan's employers mean to restore the king as soon as Gino's government collapses, as they expect it to once it shows its true face. In the meantime, Peter enjoys the adventure of his life with adult playmates who can show him how American sports are actually played -- his own notion is a bizarre jumble of uniforms and equipment. Countess Sonia doesn't trust the revolutionists, however, and manages to get the location of the safe house to the authorities. But when the troops sweep in Donovan escapes with the king. While they remain on the run Gino's government falls and the revolutionists take over with promises of reform. Running out of money and food, Donovan figures he can now deliver Peter to the palace, but Gino's men intercept them and imprisons them in the villain's private fortress. Now the shoe is on the other foot, with the revolutionists' credibility in question during the king's continued absence, while Gino schemes to make that absence permanent.

McLaglen's physical power has been emphasized throughout the picture. During an early brawl in a Paris cabaret, he wields what may be history's flimsiest balsa-wood chair; flung across the room, it explodes into splinters upon hitting a victim's head. At the climax, he becomes not just a one-man army but nearly a one-man Wild Bunch. In one of the most violent sequences of the first years of Code Enforcement, Donovan gets control of a machine-gun nest after breaking out of jail and rescuing Peter from a firing squad. He gleefully mows down at least a dozen of Gino's soldiers, but he's just getting started. Growing impatient from waiting for more men to charge into firing range, he uproots the 88-lb. weapon and goes on an amoklauf through Gino's compound, mowing men down left and right. Soon the mere sight of him wielding the weapon suffices to make hundreds more soldiers surrender, and the day is saved. Solo heroism on that scale is uncommon in the Classic-Hollywood era apart from war-hero biopics. It's a moment of exuberant fury that just about makes the ever-predictable and often idiotic story worth sitting through. McLaglen doesn't exactly vindicate the Academy, playing a type rather than a character in a role Beery might have done just as plausibly. He doesn't have the strong personalities to play against that produced what I consider McLaglen's best work in Gunga Din, while Bartholomew gives a one-note performance, which is all his role really requires. He'd accomplish more with the clash of childish privilege and working-class savvy in Captains Courageous soon enough. Professional Soldier is no one's finest hour, but it's interesting from a genre-history standpoint as a virtual "action movie" long before that was a meaningful category in Hollywood. Its downfall may have been that it had to be something else instead.

Joe D'Amato's TOUGH TO KILL (Duri a Morire,1978)

"You were the ones at each other's throats like wild geese," one character tells a mercenary toward the end of Joe D'Amato's movie in an apparent nod (by the English dub scripter, at least) toward the film's obvious inspiration. Tough to Kill most likely made it to America after and because of the international success of Andrew V. McLaglen's The Wild Geese, and may have been made in anticipation of a demand for mercenary movies following the bigger-budgeted star-packed film. It's not inconsistent with D'Amato's globetrotting filmography, however. According to IMDB, this was his next project after Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, aka Trap Them And Kill Them, and from the tainted evidence of the BCI DVD, it's a much more modest effort.


It opens with Luc Merenda arriving in an African city. Signs are in (I'm guessing) Portuguese, and since Merenda's character later says he had recently been in Angola, this must be Mozambique. He rents out a safe-deposit box, puts a slip of paper in it, sticks the key in his necklace, and leaves his briefcase behind in a market. He applies for a $1,200 a month job as a mercenary and identifies himself only as Martin. He gets the job despite not speaking the local language ("I only shot'em," he explains, "I didn't have to talk to them.") and is quickly flown to a military base, after which his plane is promptly blown up.


On his way to the base, his new buddy Mike takes him to Papadino's, where a "Levantine son of a whore" holds court and where Martin seems to befriend a ragged native with a Pepsi bottle. A bottle opener might have helped, but the thought counts. The base is run by Major Haggerty, nicknamed "Ex-Lax." There are two reasons for the name. First, he'll tie men to posts for hours for disrespecting his flag-raising ceremony, and one victim finishes his ordeal with a heavy load in his pants. Second, he likes to challenge potential officers or loudmouths to the fifteen-second test. We see him take one such person into a sandbagged circle, where he pulls a pin out of a grenade and drops it between them. It's basically a game of chicken: the man dives for cover before Haggerty does, and that proves he isn't officer material.

Donal O'Brien as Major "Ex-Lax" in Joe D'Amato's TOUGH TO KILL
(screen capture from www.b-movies.gr )

"This is a very special sort of army," Haggerty tells Martin later, "I'll stay in command as long as I'm capable of snapping the spine of any presumptuous young upstart like yourself." He hits Martin in the gut with his rifle butt for emphasis, ostensibly to chastise Martin for preferring a revolver to the standard-issue weapon. Haggerty puts him to another early test with an obstacle course. With his remote controls, Haggerty can create firewalls, blow dust in men's faces with giant fans, and open trapdoors beneath them. This last trick costs Martin the victory while the ragged gentleman from earlier looks on. The native attracts hostile attention from Leon, one of Haggerty's minions, a sort of sadist who gets kicks from stunts like dripping hot wax on another soldier's pet rabbit. Leon forces the native into a vat of waste, then threatens to chop his head off, forcing the poor man to dip his head all the way into the sewage. "Now you're back to your natural color," Leon laughs.

Undeterred, the native (apparently named Wavu) begs to become Martin's water boy or all-around flunky. He passes Martin's test by not flinching when Martin pulls a gun on him and threatens to shoot him. Martin has a mysterious agenda. A local woman realizes this, telling him, "You seem to mind your own business, but you don't miss a thing." He's working on a sketch of Leon, as if adding a beard to a pre-existing image.

Haggerty wants volunteers for a suicide mission to capture an enemy-held dam. It takes the promise of 500 pounds, 10,000 pounds in insurance, plus the even split of shares of anyone who dies in the mission, to get a sufficient number to go. Along the way, Martin saves the clumsy Leon from sinking in quicksand. This arouses Haggerty's suspicions, since who'd care if a creep like Leon dies? The answer: as Haggerty well knows, since that's why he's here, there's a $1,000,000 price on Leon's head. Martin has a customer prepared to pay if Leon is delivered to a certain rendezvous point. How about a two-way split? For that matter, how about a four-way, as Mike and Polansky, the guy with the rabbit, overhear the negotiations? Done: they all desert with a captive Leon in tow before the battle gets hot. The rest of the mercs are wiped out, including the man who'd failed the fifteen-second test earlier. I guess Haggerty was right about him.

Our group of five, plus Wavu who had loyally followed Martin into battle, find themselves under attack. They get into a giant metal barrel and roll their way into a mine tunnel which takes them to safety. Alas, Mike is gut-shot, a goner. He asks to be left a gun to slow down the inevitable pursuit and take care of himself. "When they come through that tunnel it'll be like shooting rabbits," he says bravely, "No offense, Polansky."

Polansky proves strangely compliant when a hungry Leon suggests killing and cooking the rabbit. Once it's done, however, Polansky insists that Leon eat it all, after it's nicely laced with the cyanide that the mercs were issued before the battle. No harm, no foul: Martin's friends will accept a corpse, but now the survivors are going to have to drag the dead weight the rest of the way. That doesn't last as Leon starts to stink. Then they realize that they really only need the man's head for identification. "Bring Us the Head of Leon Whatsisname," if you like.

Haggerty hopes to eliminate the others and collect all the bounty. He and Polansky stage a duel in the forest, but Polansky succumbs to a booby-trap. Martin was wounded in the leg during the earlier attack, and as he falters, Haggerty pressures him to reveal the rendezvous site, alternately promising to share the proceeds or threatening to give up on the money altogether and abandon him in the wild. He beats up Wavu, leaving it down to him and Martin, who finally tells him where to go, but claims that no one can collect without him. Haggerty heads off, but Wavu reappears to help him to the edge of Georgeville, where Haggerty awaits his payday pending confirmation based on Leon's dental records. Everything's in order, and Martin's employers have no reason not to trust Haggerty, but the Major is in for a few rude surprises before the end of the picture....


I hesitate to pass judgment on what I've seen because BCI has unwittingly admitted that their print of Tough to Kill is compromised. On the company's Maximum Action Collection set, the movie's running time is listed as 90 minutes. As presented, it was barely 84 minutes. Quite a bit of material is most likely missing, and probably plenty of the stuff that would make this more like a typical Joe D'Amato film. As it stands now, this is a D'Amato film where a man is gut-shot, and we never see the guts. Nor is there any real gore or nudity. The grossest thing in the picture is Leon forcing Wavu into the vat of crap. But BCI wants us to understand that this is an R-rated film.

Worse, while the film is letterboxed, the image is of varying bad quality, with some sections murkier than others. As one moment of bad tracking betrays, this is a dupe from a videotape. This disappointed me given what I thought was BCI's good record with recent releases. I wasn't clear whether Crown International, BCI's usual source, released Tough To Kill in America, or whether BCI just snapped up a public-domain print to pad out Maximum Action, which also includes a fullscreen version of Carlo Lizzani's The Last Four Days and six widescreen action films from the 80s, including Nine Deaths of the Ninja.


But based on what I'm saw, I doubt whether Duri a Morire was ever that good. It seems uninspired either on the conventional literary level or on the exploitation level. For a mercenary movie it's terribly low on gunplay and body count, and Luc Merenda's Martin is a dull hero without an agenda of compelling interest to me. Also, from the moment Wavu was introduced I had an inkling of how the movie would end, and D'Amato didn't disappoint me except with the predictability of the outcome. Nor was Stelvio Cipriani's score particularly inspired; his jungle-disco stylings lacked the forcefulness or menace that the movie needed. Something more like what he came up with for Cross Mission would have worked better. But he and D'Amato were busy men in those days, and both can be excused for off efforts occasionally. The only person who really rose to the occasion was Donal O'Brien as Major Haggerty. He has to ratchet up his performance to make up for Merenda's dullness, and he ends up the most convincing badass in the cast. The location shooting by D'Amato under his real name is also well-done, but the atmosphere is somewhat undermined by Cipriani's too-jaunty music.


Overall, Tough To Kill is neither shocking nor laughable, and thus falls short as an exploitation item. It isn't prominent in D'Amato's filmography for precisely that reason, -- and is obscure enough that no one has posted a trailer or clips online -- but his fans and fans of Merenda's Italian crime films will probably want to take a look at this at some point.