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

Some thoughts about Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

It’s among the mild ironies of film history that this film, a movie I don’t hesitate to call a masterpiece, is actually the lesser of director John Sturges’s Westerns about the (wait for it) gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Fortunately, despite being about the same historical moment, and concerning the same people, both films are also so different their existence as separate entities actually makes sense, particularly since the two films have quite different views of these people and these events. The later Hour of the Gun is most probably the slightly more historically accurate one (at the very least with a more realistically morally grey Wyatt Earp, where Lancaster’s Wyatt really does seem to go for the halo, though without ever being able to reconcile it with being a human being like we all are), though both films really aren’t about attempts to recreate history.

I don’t think it is necessary for me to go over Sturges’s virtues as a Western director, nor the particularly inspired quality of his efforts here, for that would be stating the very, very obvious. Instead, let me spend this sentence salivating about Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster (two of the very finest of their generation in Hollywood) doing what they do best, the fine rest of the ensemble, the often awe-inspiring photography, as well as Sturges’s artful sense of staging.

Beside being a film about a certain legendary shoot-out, Gunfight to me really seems to be a film about poisonous relationships, the way people tend to wallow in them, and the generally horrible consequences that come with them. Why, if you look at what’s happening in the film from a certain angle, you might even begin to think somebody involved in the film might have been of the opinion all human relationships in the end become poisonous and destructive, family ties strangling people in the end, and friendships not leaving people happier or less lonely and self-destructive (or would anyone want to argue that Holliday and Earp are good for each other any more than Holliday and Kate are?), at best giving them one thing more to die for.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,john sturges,burt lancaster,kirk douglas,rhonda fleming,jo van fleet

The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

It’s 1943, and people like German general Canaris (Anthony Quayle) already see the writing on the wall. Hitler, on the other hand, still has plans, like, for example, kidnapping Winston Churchill. Himmler (Donald Pleasence, because why not), recognizes a nice way to put one over on the competition and boots the whole stupid project over to Canaris, who in his turn orders his Colonel Radl (Robert Duvall, because really, why not) to at the very least produce a feasibility study.

Ironically, Radl realizes the mad project might actually be feasible, for it just so happens that a German spy in Britain has just radioed in Churchill’s plans for a weekend stay in a small village neighbouring a practically undefended beach. After a bit of political back and forth – one has to blow up the film to a running time of more than two hours after all – Radl acquires the always dangerous help of Himmler for the project and sends out disgraced – like every German not in the SS in the movie, he’s not a real Nazi, you know – paratrooper commando Colonel Steiner (Michael Caine), his men, and Irish revolutionary Liam Devlin (a man so Irish he could only be played by Canadian Donald Sutherland) to do the deed in beautiful Norfolk. The men are disguised as Polish paratroopers and a marsh inspector, respectively, so whatever could go wrong?

If for some mysterious reasons it hasn’t become quite clear already, let me just emphasize that the plot of The Eagle Has Landed (based on a novel by Jack Higgins, which never bodes well), is utterly, preposterously stupid. Not necessarily because it is lacking in historical veracity (which it sure as hell does) but because the script’s (and I very much assume the book’s this is based on) handling of the whole affair just too stupid to bluff its way through. A lot of films get away with a stupid basic idea by thinking the results of that idea through in a logical and coherent manner; The Eagle Has Landed prefers to load stupid idea on improbability on ridiculous nonsense.

This is, after all, a film that finds Sutherland’s character, who is supposed to be some sort of vanguard for the Germans, one supposes, landing in Norfolk and at once romancing Jenny Agutter, in the sort of romance that goes from meeting someone to the willingness to murder for him in the course of about half an hour, or a day in movie time. Even worse, as much as I like Agutter, the subplot really has no business at all to be in the movie, and most certainly not in the completely pointless form it takes. To make matters sillier, there’s improbable crap like that happening in nearly every scene, as if writer Tom Mankiewicz had never heard of concepts like theme, or tonal coherence, or even pacing. For of course the film does stop and start early and often, sometimes meandering from one scene to the next, sometimes drunkenly jumping, leading to a structure you can’t even call episodic because that word suggests that there’s actually something happening, which is not how I’d describe at least The Eagle’s first half.

And still, watching the film I found myself not at all bored but enjoyed myself quite a bit. Not only because I wanted to see what stupid nonsense the film would come up next but because everyone involved not responsible for the script actually put a lot of effort in. Director John Sturges, a man who made much worthier and just plain better films to be sure, doesn’t exactly bring his A-game here, but a Sturges just doing his job (I cannot assume any real personal involvement in the film at hand, at least) is still a director bringing dignity and a degree of style to material that frankly doesn’t deserve it, even managing to turn the script’s absurd ideas about pacing into something that can look like charming distractibility.

The actors, for their part, bring a bunch of underwritten clichés to life in efforts a film that sees a predominantly British and American cast playing Germans speaking English among one another with bad German accents (except for Sutherland, of course, who does a bad Irish accent, and Caine, whose character studied in England and therefore doesn’t have an accent at all, which of course only makes sense if you actually assume these Nazi – and yes, sorry, Wehrmacht soldiers were Nazis too, just ask their victims – are indeed talking English among each other), and who are incapable of pronouncing German names like “Hans” with even minor correctness probably doesn’t even want, far less warrants. Duvall is particularly good here, bringing a mix of irony and subtlety to his role that I’m quite sure wasn’t in the script. The only negative stand-out among the cast is Larry Hagman as a US Colonel in a performance that is actually as bad as the script deserves.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,war,john sturges,michael caine,donald sutherland,robert duvall,jenny agutter,donald pleasence

Three Films Make A Post: HEXED BY THE EVIL EYE

The Scarlet Coat (1955): Like many of director John Sturges's films, this one about Cornel Wilde acting as a double agent during the US Revolutionary War and about the Arnold Conspiracy, is a more complex and emotionally grown-up film than one would expect. If most of the media concerning said Revolution you've consumed has been made during the last thirty years or so, you might also be delighted to find a film that doesn't treat the British as baby-eating Satanists and the Americans as glorious, flawless angels.

In fact, most of the film's complexity lies in its treatment of morals and ideals as a rather more personal thing; being in the right is complicated. Here, idealism depends on the beholder, and cruel and wrong things can and will be done for the best of causes. Added to this - really very spy movie-like - view of the world is dialogue that regularly reminds more of a film noir in its sharpness, and some fine acting by Wilde and Michael Wilding. The film gets a bit too morally upright and sentimental in the end for my tastes but it's much too interesting to ignore.

Green Jade Statuette aka Killer's Game aka Fists of Vengeance (1978): Lee Tso-Nam's movie falls under the thankless bracket of "just another decent Taiwanese martial arts film". Even though there's nothing to write home about except for the film's borrowing from certain Spaghetti Western soundtracks and - wonderfully - an orchestral version of "Greensleaves" for a moment right at its end, it's still an entertaining enough watch full of not inspired but professional fights, martial arts smack talk philosophy (one of the differences between Asian and Western action films is that Asian ones at least try to sound profound), and rather random twists and turns. It's fun enough.

Lupin III: Farewell to Nostradamus (1995): Speaking of films that don't move away from their genre base even one inch, this anime is exactly what you'd expect from a Lupin III movie (which are a genre for themselves), with characters you either love (you are a wonderful human being) or hate (I say thee nay), going through the usual hectic and over-blown adventures. Lupin is generally not at all about originality but about frenetic and loving execution and fulfilled expectations. Usually, I'd criticize the series for playing it safe, but when it's one of its better episodes/movies/OVAs like Farewell, I'm much too occupied with enjoying myself for that sort of thing.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,taiwanese movies,japanese movies,spies,adventure,martial arts,anime,sf,comedy,cornel wilde,john sturges