The Vikings (1958)

Warning: there’s more implied backstory and story rape in this one than on-screen in most pinkus

After Orson Welles and a pretty cool animation have schooled us about some Viking Facts™ – few of which were close to historical facts even when this was made – and the film has prologued us with fifteen minutes of information it’ll need to repeat anyway, because most of the characters have no clue about what’s going on in their lives, the film slowly comes to the actual meat of its tale.

Ragnar Lodbrok (Ernest Borgnine, I kid you not) rules a bunch of Vikings as their rapist king, helped out by his pretty-faced (and also rapist) son LL Einar (Kirk Douglas, who was actually a couple of months older then Borgnine, and not as you know not pretty). They rape, they pillage, they terrorize the British Isles, you know the deal. Three, ahem, I mean two decades ago, Ragnar captured himself a baby slave named Eric (now grown up to be played by Tony Curtis). Eric, as we know thanks to the pointless prologue but the characters will have to find out about throughout the film, is actually the product of one of Ragnar’s rape sprees, his mother being the former Queen of Northumbria. He’s also not at all friendly with his secret half-brother. Early in the movie, he’s going so far as attacking Einar with a falcon who comes from the Fulci school of falcons and promptly mutilates one of Einar’s eyes, also making him unpretty (the film indeed suggesting that Kirk Douglas was pretty before).

Attempts of getting rid of Eric afterwards are thwarted by Odin, who’d really rather want the film to be longer than fifty minutes. Relations do stay strained, though, and once Einar kidnaps Welsh princess Morgana (Janet Leigh) and both men fall for her, things certainly don’t improve. Morgana does prefer Eric (one supposes that him not wishing to rape her helps there too), even more so once he absconds with her in the direction of the British Isles. It could be the beginning of a wonderful love affair, if not for the fact that Morgana is promised to the – decidedly nasty – King of Northumbria, Aella (Frank Thring doing a wonderful Vincent Price imitation), and is not one to go back on the word of her father. Lots and lots of further melodramatic reversals of fate happen, until Eric and Einar even team up to rescue Morgana from Northumbria, before they go back to try and kill each other again.

After this, do I even have to say that Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings is a deeply silly movie, as well as the kind of film where playing a drinking game based on historical inaccuracies could be downright deadly? But then, who goes into a movie where Ernest Borgnine plays the father of Kirk Douglas, and all two, plus Tony Curtis (who is also meant to be kinda macho), are supposed to be Vikings expecting any kind of historical realism? This is the realm of pure adventure fantasy, and really needs to be approached as taking place on that much better plane.

Once you’ve put things into the proper perspective, you actually might get quite a bit of fun out of the whole affair. Sure, some contemporary tastes will certain shy away from the amount of sexual violence that must have happened in the backstory and which Einar would just love to commit onscreen. The film’s very heavily implying that Ragnar and Einar both can’t get it up properly with a willing partner and even have love and violence all mixed up in their tiny little brains. I’m honestly not at all sure how the filmmakers got away with that one.

However, the film is at least not pro rape at all (not necessarily a matter of course in 50s cinema), but clearly implying the problem with Ragnar and Einar isn’t that they’re not Christian, or barbarians (most Christian non-barbarians in the film are not much better going by modern, hell, even 50s morals than these two, in fact) but that they’re rapists.

This is of course all background matter for the film, and not even I would argue this is in any way, shape or form its main interest.

Which brings us to its main interest: rousing, swashbuckling adventure full of silly ideas (just look at the infamous boat rowing scene for the last one), cast with actors who really do know how to throw themselves into all kinds of on-screen derring-do. Fleischer does stage the big action set pieces very nicely indeed, making great use of the full Technicolor screen particular in the last half hour or so, and generally finds something interesting to film even when guys aren’t hitting each other with swords and axes.

The production design, while historically dubious, is often rather wonderful, too. There has clearly been some love put into the little details that make something look more impressive, so we get things like every Viking shield having its own, individual ornamentation and many other worldbuilding details hidden and not so hidden in the backgrounds. This helps make all the silly adventure and melodrama feel rooted, and provides The Vikings with quite a bit of visual magic even after all these decades.

Three Films Make A Post: Know the Mark

Mystery Road (2013): I am full of admiration for Ivan Sen’s rural Australian crime movie: admiration for the photography of huge, empty spaces that suggests a lot of what they mean to the people inhabiting them; admiration for the calm way it approaches rural power structures based on racism and disinterest, somehow managing to not yell about a truth and making it even starker by just telling it; admiration for the film’s unwillingness to look down; admiration for its calm and silent empathy; admiration for the way it tells so much through small gestures, glances and avoided glances; admiration for Aaron Pedersen’s central performance; admiration for the decision to not explain the crime plot to the smallest detail but let the audience sort it out for themselves; admiration, finally, for the sheer flow Sen gives his film without ever avoiding the fact he has something important to say about a very specific time and place.

Ice Station Zebra (1968): If you thought the bloated, overlong, substance-low Hollywood film is an invention of the blockbuster age, or at least of 70s disaster movies, think again. This two and a half hour thing directed by the usually – though not this time – brilliant John Sturges (who started having quite a few off-days at this point in his career) based on the inevitable Alistair MacLean novel is basically a fun, 90 minute cold war thriller bloated up to 150 minutes, mostly by things like an overture, a musical intermission (as if Michel Legrand’s annoyingly over-present score weren’t bad enough during the actual movie), and many a scene of rousing music playing while the camera stares at an atomic submarine for no dramatic reason at all, also dithering. Just imagine the first half hour of the first Star Trek movie trampling on your face forever.

There’s a great cast with Rock Hudson, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Brown and Patrick McGoohan but following the rules of this sort of film, they basically have sod all to do, which is something of an achievement in a film this long, but then, at least it manages to achieve something.

Spores (2011? 2013?): Clearly, if study of the cheap and the curious in world cinema has taught me anything, it’s that there is such a thing as a universal human tale speaking Deep Things about the Human Condition. Like Russian director Maksim Dyachuk’s Spores, these tales are all about a bunch of young people – clichés all - going to a remote place (in this case a ruined factory building) to mostly die by something evil (in this case alien CG creatures). I’m still not quite sure what exactly this says about the Human Condition but I’m working on it.

Be that as it may, I found this Russian version of the age-old story on the more entertaining side: the acting is semi-professional at best but at least the worst actors die first; the CG monsters look bad, but at least they are not badly designed; the film has a competent flow and decent photography, and doesn’t overstay its welcome. That’s a win in my book.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,australian movies,american movies,russian movies,crime,adventure,horror,ivan sen,aaron pedersen,john sturges,rock hudson,jim brown,ernest borgnine,patrick mcgoohan,maksim dyachuk

In short: The Revengers (1972)

Daniel Mann’s western attempts the – by 1972 well-worn – tale of a man (William Holden) driven by vengeance turning into something quite close to the man he is hunting, yet perhaps finding his old self again through the love of a Good Woman™. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t seem to have much of a clue about how to tell that kind of story effectively or believably.

Yet it starts out well enough, with Holden’s John Benedict driven to assemble a bunch of convicts (Woody Strode as the nicest of the bunch! Ernest Borgnine! Roger Hanin! Reinhard Kolldehoff, Jorge Luke and Jorge Martínez de Hoyos) to find and kill the man responsible for the slaughter of his family, telling that part of the tale with sparse gestures and economy. That keeps up until the first big shoot-out is over, when the film decides it can’t be bothered to show how Holden’s understandable search for vengeance slowly turns bitter but only lets us in at the end of that process, which not only leaves the impression the film is taking lazy shortcuts but also lets the whole redemption angle come quite out of nowhere by leaving out the part where Holden’s character actually becomes someone in need of redemption and just bluntly states certain things happened. While it’s at it, the film also never bothers to explain why half of Holden’s gang have stayed with him for what must have been years. It can’t certainly have been the money.

And don’t even start me up about the redemptive love Mann handles with all the subtlety, and none of the timing, of a bad daytime soap opera (most of which would actually be ashamed to use a plot ploy like the one involved here to get their characters to meet their romantic partners) with little about it that feels authentic to the characters involved. It’s really not a good sign for the quality of a western script’s central character when even William Holden can’t bring him to life.

Other problems the film’s second half suffers from are spotty pacing, and an ending that’s basically Mann (or writer Wendell Mayes who was involved in more than one better western) shrugging his shoulders and pasting “The End” on screen, not resolving any of the thematic questions the film purportedly asks. But then, that would have involved thinking the film through instead of throwing elements of and actors from better films on screen and hoping the audience doesn’t see the difference between them and the half-heartedness of what The Revengers has to offer.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,daniel mann,william holden,ernest borgnine,woody strode,roger hanin

In short: Blueberry (2004)

aka Renegade

Mike Blueberry (Vincent Cassel) and his buddy Jimmy McClure (Colm Meaney) are marshals in an Old West town bordering on the holy mountains of the Chiricahua. Despite carrying some personal demons around with him, Blueberry is friends with the Chiricahua shaman Runi (Temuera Morrison), and is doing his best to keep the peace between everyone in the area.

That job is rather more difficult because some of the local whites believe the holy mountains to be home to a treasure hoard, and men like local rich guy Greg Sullivan (Geoffrey Lewis) – who just happens to be the father of Blueberry’s spunky and intense love interest Maria (Juliette Lewis) - or the crazy German prospector Prosit (Eddie Izzard) – whose name by the way translates into “cheers!” - are willing to do some quite shitty things to get at that gold.

However, there’s an even greater threat to the Chiricahuas, the peace, and perhaps even Blueberry’s soul around, in form of Blueberry’s oldest enemy, one Wallace Sebastian Blount (Michael Madsen), who is looking for something in the holy mountains, too. Blount isn’t looking for gold, though, but wants to learn a way to kill with his spirit. Which makes him the sort of enemy who can only be conquered in a giant peyote trip/healing spirit journey.

As you can see, Jan Kounen’s (loose, the titles tell us, and given my lack of knowledge with the source material, I’m just going to believe that) adaptation of venerable French leftist Western comic series Blueberry isn’t exactly a straightforward Western. Rather, it’s the kind of film that doesn’t end in a climactic shootout but in a climactic, CGI heavy drug trip.

Unlike myself Blueberry takes the whole shamanism thing very seriously, attempting to turn what could be a relatively straightforward tale of revenge and redemption into one of spiritual enlightenment, seeming to mean every strange thing it does quite intensely, which really left me as a watcher who doesn’t share its convictions in the position of either pointing and laughing at the crazy people (and I’m not that kind of atheist), or just rolling with it and trying to get into the spirit (sorry) of things.

The latter approach is made rather more easy by the simple fact that Kounen is really, really good at making the whole film feel like a drug trip full of symbols you might or might not understand, or where understanding them might not even be the point, with every camera angle seemingly chosen for maximum confusion; and that’s before the really rather effective (or silly, or both, depending on your position) religious tripping even starts.

Consequently, the film’s plot – such as it is – meanders through various Western clichés seen from a sideways angle, stops, starts, and stops again, making circles and turns that don’t really lead anywhere only to get back to the beginning of things. For a viewer who likes her films plot heavy, Kounen’s approach will probably be infuriating, but if you’re willing to let things just flow over you, you might get a lot out of the film.

At the very least, Blueberry is pretty much a one of a kind film (I don’t think comparing it with Jodorowsky would be fair, despite the shared interest in shamanistic practices and utter weirdness); if it’s successful for any given viewer will depend on him as much as on the film, I think.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,mexican movies,british movies,in short,western,wtf,vincent cassel,juliette lewis,michael madsen,temuera morrison,colm meaney,ernest borgnine

In short: Hannie Caulder (1971)

When bandit brothers Emmett (Ernest Borgnine), Frank (Jack Elam) and Rufus (Strother Martin), murder her husband, rape her, burn down her home, and only leave her with a single blanket she’ll become rather found of as a shirt replacement for the rest of the film, young Hannie Caulder (Raquel Welch) decides vengeance is her goal now. As a very convenient turn of events will have it, the next man she meets is legendary bounty hunter Thomas Luther Price (Robert Culp).

At first, Tom declines teaching her the ways of the gun, but after repeated begging, he changes his mind. Soon, Tom finds himself falling in love, and Hannie gets to wear a gun made by legendary weapon smith Bailey (Christopher “Southern” Lee). After a bit of training, it’s off to the races.

And that’s really the film’s whole plot, if you even want to call it that. The way it is presented, it’s not as if director Burt Kennedy was aiming for anything archetypal with this lack of…well, anything. Because what Kennedy’s aiming at more often than not is Raquel Welch’s ass, or some of those coy shots of side thigh films who try try to mold themselves after Spaghetti Westerns but are actually too stuffy for anything as honest as actual nudity (plus, Welch didn’t really do nudity).

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, at least half of the film, and probably all of the reasons for its existence, is to show off Raquel Welch again, and while I’m not immune to her charms, I really wish the people involved – the main guilty party here being good old British Tigon productions – would have bothered with making an actual movie around her. Oh ,there are promising bits and pieces, particularly Edward Scaife’s often very pretty photography, but for every fine shot, there’s at least half a dozen wasted opportunities here, and many a puzzling script and direction decision.

Why, for example, play Hannie’s arch enemies like comedic freaks reminding me of the Three Stooges instead of as dangerous monstrous people? Why use the rape revenge angle when your film is neither prepared to get truly nasty or unpleasant about it, nor has the ability to become as emotionally harrowing as the matter needs? What’s up with the ridiculous slow motion in some of the shoot-outs? Why not hire a better actress for your lead? Oh, right, the answer to that last question is of course clear: because this isn’t a movie so much as a pretty boring and problematic way of showing off said lead.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,western,burt kennedy,raquel welch,robert culp,ernest borgnine,strother martin,jack elam

The Split (1968)

Career criminal McClain (Jim Brown) comes to Los Angeles looking for the opportunity for a big heist. His old acquaintance and money woman Gladys (Julie Harris) soon points him in the right direction. There's a lot of money flowing in a big football game, so if one could somehow skim off all of it, one could make half a million dollars with comparatively little effort.

Of course, this sort of job needs more than one participant, so McClain goes on the lookout for partners. Because he's apparently not a people person, he secretly tests his prospective partners' abilities before he makes them any offers, which doesn't exactly endear him to anyone. Still, once McClain has disclosed his plan and the potential loot to strongman Clinger (Ernest Borgnine), driver Kifka (Jack Klugman), racist electronics expert Gough (Warren Oates), and professional gunman Negli (Donald Sutherland), they're in. Once the heist is done, the money will be deposited with McClain's ex-wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) to be split up a few days later. Ellie of course still loves McClain so much he has no problem taking advantage of her in this way.

Yet even with the best of plans, a heist of this dimension isn't easy, and even if the team should get away with the money, they'll still have to cope with their mutual dislike, and a lot of trouble caused by Ellie's crazy neighbour (James Whitmore) and a corrupt cop (Gene Hackman).

Sometimes, all you really need to do is to point at a cast, the year a film was made in, and the writer of the book it is based on, to tell a film is worthy of a viewer's time. Of course, it's also a mixture that can promise more than it delivers, but that's not a problem I see with The Split.

The film was directed by Gordon Flemyng, whom I know best as the director of the two Doctor Who movies with Peter Cushing whose mere mention results in classic Who fans foaming at the mouth; which is a peculiar reaction to two perfectly entertaining films, but hey, what do I know. Much of Flemyng's work was for TV, and as is typical for TV directors of that era, there's really not much you can say about him based on his work there. Going by The Split, Flemyng as a director is more slick than stylish and more straightforward than flashy. This sort of direction seems ideal for a fast-paced and lean heist flick like this, particular one based on one of Donald E. Westlake's/Richard Stark's Parker novels. As always, The Split renames the character and makes him less sociopathic.

It is, in any case, very nice to see Parker portrayed by Jim Brown here, without any great gesture of "turning the character black". A ruthless bastard is after all a ruthless bastard quite independent of his skin colour. Brown's performance as Parker/McClain is quite fine, too, giving the deeply amoral character not-Parker is here a certain degree of allure without making him too sympathetic. The rest of the cast does the classic character actor job of turning their mostly rather one-dimensional characters into believable ciphers. Not that I have a problem with the characters being ciphers - this is a movie that thrives on leanness, and everything here standing in the way of its flow is radically pared down.

That technique works well for most of the time. Despite the leanness, most characters do not feel like the mere plot devices they are and rather like organic parts of the film's world. The big exception is Carroll's Ellie, whose only reason for existence is - in what alas isn't exactly a first for a supposed female lead - to look soulful into the camera and die to get the film's final acts running. A few more, or just some more convincing scenes, to build up her and McClain's relationship would have done wonders for an actual emotional effect, I think.

Still, if you ignore this flaw, The Split is an excellent example of the type of heist film that is just as interested in what comes after the heist than the heist itself.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,crime,gordon flemyng,jim brown,diahann carroll,ernest borgnine,julie harris,gene hackman,jack klugman,warren oates,donald sutherland

Ravagers (1979)

The world has ended again, though it's not quite clear if in a bang or a whimper. Be it as it may, what's left of the world is rather brown and barren. Nothing grows anymore; men and animals have become barren too.

What's left of humanity largely falls into two camps - there are the "flockers", who hide away in remote places, seeking safety in numbers, and then there are the "ravagers", whose hobbies seem to be quite self-explaining.

Our hero of the day, Falk (Richard Harris, laying it on even thicker than usual with him, probably to make up for his character being a total non-entity without a past beyond the one we see being made at the beginning, and without any discernible character traits) does not belong to either of these groups. At the beginning of the movie, he leads a scavenging nomad life with his wife who dreams of better days and things beginning to grow again. They have been lulled into a sense of security by things going rather well for them, and practice some good old-fashioned domesticity. Alas, the couple's happiness is short-lived. A group of ravagers led by a very tenacious man without a name (Anthony James) discovers them, and rapes and kills Falk's wife, while Falk manages to escape.

Falk ferrets out the hiding place of the gang, kills one of their members and then goes a-wandering through the wastelands again. For some reason, the nomad gets a minor entourage, first in form of an old soldier (Art Carney) taking him for his commanding officer. Later, Faina (Ann Turkel), a young woman from one of the flocks gets rather keen on our hero. Falk doesn't exactly want to travel with others, but it's not as if he could stop them. While the trio has not exactly riveting post-apocalyptic adventures, the ravagers follow Falk for no good reason at all wherever he goes, this being the sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland where following people is easy.

Things finally come to a head when Falk and his friends come to a not quite utopian community led by Rann (a wasted Ernest Borgnine) and the more sympathetic Brown (an equally wasted Woody Strode).

See that word "finally" I used in the last sentence? That's Ravagers problem right here. While I don't expect every film - not even my post-apocalyptic adventure movies - to be a fast-paced and exciting from beginning to end, Richard Compton's film puts even my patience to the test with one of the most uneventful post-apocalyptic travelogues I've seen.

The lack of outer events would be less of a problem if the film had anything much to say, but thematically, this neither adds to nor subtracts from the expected of the end of the world. If the film has a thesis, it's "people need hope, and they'll even turn to the most boring man alive - Richard Harris's character - to project it onto". Which would possibly work out better for the movie if Falk ever did anything at all to make everyone else's fixation on him believable. It's possible he is meant as the empty page everyone can project his on ideas onto, but it's not as if the film would do anything to explore that besides looking po-faced and having dramatic music (the only actually dramatic thing on screen, I'm afraid). From time to time, Falk and the ravagers meet again, but Compton does his humanly best to film these run-ins in the least exciting or disturbing way possible; and of course, he never answers the question why the ravager leader is so damn obsessed with Falk, because his actions go far beyond vengeance for a dead gang member.

The film's not a total wash, though. The photography is moody, and does its best to milk some dilapidated buildings and many different shades of brown for the proper post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Even though there isn't anything of interest happening on screen, at least the film looks like a proper non-generic end of the world happened. The other aspect I found well thought out and well done is how differently the body language of many of the film's characters is - the new world after the end has made most people visibly afraid and insecure, remembering how living as animals must have been, and their bodies show it.

It's just unfortunate that there is no story, no thesis, no interesting character to make any use of these flashes of something better in Ravagers. Watching it is like waiting for the actual film to happen. Alas, it never starts.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,sf,post-apocalypse,richard compton,richard harris,ann turkel,art carney,ernest borgnine,woody strode,anthony james

In short: The Last Match (1990)

Susan (Melissa Palmisano), the daughter of star quarterback Cliff Gaylor (Oliver Tobias), is arrested for drug smuggling when she tries to leave the South American (or is it Caribbean, as the plot description on IMDB says?) country she is vacationing in with her boyfriend.

Shortly after that, her father arrives in the mysterious country, willing and able to buy his daughter out with the good ol' American dollar. Alas, his money doesn't get him far. Neither do the American consul (Charles Napier), nor a sleazy local lawyer (Martin Balsam). It seems as if there is a certain degree of anti-American feeling in the air. Worse for Susan, her jailor is the mean and sadistic warden Yashin (Henry Silva), who likes the US even less than anyone else there.

Fortunately, Gaylor's football team (coached by Ernest Borgnine) arrives loaded with money to help him bribe his daughter out. No, sorry, I was joking, that would make sense. They arrive loaded with money to buy weapons to break their quarterback's daughter out. This will most certainly turn out well.

Quite at the end of the Italian jungle action cycle (chronologically as well as in quality), Fabrizio De Angelis produced this experiment in making a jungle action film without a jungle and without any action, and if that was his goal I have to say he succeeded admirably.

The Last Match is best known in cult film circles for some awesome stills of guys in football uniforms (including helmets) brandishing automatic weapons, and I won't say these pictures are lying. There are in fact at least ten minutes of uniformed footballers shooting people in here. The problem are the other 80 minutes of movie, 80 very long minutes someone less cruel (or cost-conscious) than De Angelis would have cut back to about 10 minutes. I can't even call it filler anymore, because the term "filler" suggests that something is in fact used to fill the running time between more exciting scenes, which would be stretching the truth a bit too much for the way The Last Match plays out.

What we get to see are endless scenes of airplanes landing and Oliver Tobias showing his single facial expression in scenes of him talking at excruciating length to aged actors who have seen better days and aren't even willing to pretend to be on screen for anything else than a paycheck. Not even Henry Silva seems awake in this one, and Martin Balsam was obviously already dead and performed his role as a zombie. The only one trying is poor old Ernest Borgnine. He is - of course - utterly dreadful, but at least in his usual interesting manner.

And that's all there is to say about The Last Match. It is best not to watch it, but to look wistfully at the machinegun footballer stills and dream of the silly entertaining piece of crap the film should have been, instead of the boring piece of crap it truly is.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,ernest borgnine,henry silva,in short

Re-watching Escape From New York

John Carpenter's Escape From New York (1981) has been one of my favorite movies seen I first saw it on German cable TV about twenty years ago.

There wouldn't be much sense in reviewing it - me using six hundred words to squee "I love it, I love it" looks like a waste of perfectly good blog space to me.

So I'm just going to list some of the details that made me especially happy this time:

• Parts of the music sound like further reduced E.S.G.!
• The relative disinterest the film takes in Snake's little gladiatorial match, which fits its anti-hero's poise perfectly. (And is exactly the thing some of Carpenter's later macho-fests like Vampires are missing)!
• The pure joy of having just about every single role cast with a b-movie hero(ine)!
• An ending that still says "Fuck you!" as beautifully as a perfect punk single!

Darling of the Day: "Snake Plissken!? I heard you were dead!"

Technorati-Tags: american movies,gushing,thoughts,action,post-apocalypse,kurt russell,lee van cleef,donald pleasance,adrienne barbeau,ernest borgnine,harry dean stanton,isaac hayes,tom atkins,john carpenter