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.

The Heroes of Telemark (1965)

Nazi occupied Norway during World War II. Norwegian resistance fighter Knut Strand (Richard Harris) ropes scientist Rolf Pedersen (Kirk Douglas) into his attempts to destroy the German production of Heavy Water for their H-bomb projects. Pedersen would really rather spend the occupation tending his own garden and being a bit of a playboy, usually arguing that the Nazi repressions following an act of resistance aren’t actually worth what something like a destroyed Nazi truck wins. Obviously, this particular case is something different, so he at first reluctantly, then later somewhat heroically, helps in Strand’s struggle.

And wouldn’t you know it, turns out Pedersen’s ex-wife (Ulla Jacobsson) and ex-father-in-law are part of the resistance too.

The problem with the whole affair is that the Germans take their project as war-changingly serious as it is, so it is exceedingly difficult to destroy the heavy water production without getting a lot of innocent people killed.

Which, apart from being a World War II resistance adventure, is where the main interest of Anthony Mann’s Heroes of Telemark rests. In fact, much of the film’s running time does its best to work against the “hero” word in its title, talking about the decisions people in war time feel compelled to make, and exploring, horrified, fascinated and knowingly the kinds of inhuman equations these people believe they need to follow.

Again and again the film returns to this, showing its protagonists weighing up how many lives their mission is worth, whose lives it is worth, and how one can – and even if one should -compartmentalize the responsibility for the innocent lives destroyed in a good cause. It doesn’t come to any pat or simple answers here, never falling into the “The Cold Equations” style trap of embracing inhuman solutions wholeheartedly yet still finding itself as helpless as its characters not to use them. Though it is also clear that the film knows and understands but can’t fully approve; there’s a reason why the film’s most heroic act is in its final set piece when the protagonists risk their own lives to mitigate the cost in civilian lives their final desperate plan calls for. Inhumane decisions, the film argues, still need to be mitigated by actual humanity, if that humanity is costly, or not.

Mann practices a bit of humanity himself by not letting the characters fall into the obvious patterns you’d expect, so Pedersen may treat his life in his occupied country like a bit of a moral coward, and is often more careful in his approach, but the film does suggest that much of this is part of him looking at the cost more clearly than the more traditional man of action, Strand. And Strand for his part is actual softer and less ruthless than Pedersen when he has made a cruel decision he deems necessary. Nobody here’s just the asshole of the film, even though both men do act like one at times.

That Mann, pretty much at the end of his career here, is a rather sure hand at action sequences and their intelligent staging doesn’t exactly come as a surprise to anyone who knows his body of work. That he manages to integrate the action and the moral and ethical concerns of his script and his characters without weakening either side isn’t a surprise either. I found myself particularly impressed with the first, stealth, attack of the Norwegians on the Nazi production facility, a long sequence that is indeed shot only with the few natural noises the word “stealth” suggests, without dramatic music, only driven by tension, and all the more exciting for it.


And really, that’s The Heroes of Telemark for you, showing thought and care even in its big action set pieces.

Three Films Make A Post: THE END WAS NEAR. THEY KICKED ITS ASS.

Mindwarp (1992): I know I shouldn’t expect anything beyond fan service in form of KNB gore that often feels shoe-horned in for no good reason, horror fan favs Bruce Campbell and Angus Scrimm, and some moments that aim for taboo breaking but fall flat because they’re as pointless as a reality show from a Fangoria production. However, there’s just no excuse for this particular piece of crap to include all these things and be boring, surely. The script’s just terrible – and I mean terrible for the standards of a low budget post-apocalypse movie with added gore – moving at a snail’s pace and containing little that’s surprising or as freaky as the film pretends it to be. Director Steve Barnett does his work with all the panache and style of a full garbage can, Campbell and Scrimm get paid, and I had myself a nice little nap.

The Light at the Edge of the World (1971): Where Barnett's film is just crap, Kevin Billington’s very free adaptation of a Jules Verne novel is something of an intriguing mess. Sometimes, it’s a psychologically tense cat and mouse game between Kirk Douglas and Yul Brunner that makes excellent use of the (Catalonian?) piece of rock it has been shot on; sometimes, it’s a decent adventure movie; at other times again, it shows the same ruthless, pessimist spirit I love about early 70s horror. A few scenes later, it’s suddenly a meandering mess that just doesn’t seem to know what point it is trying to make about people in general or its characters, just pushing stuff in front of its audience without discernible rhyme or reason. The good parts do make this one very much worth watching, though.

Shame the Devil (2013): If you always dreamed of watching a British movie partially “inspired” by the Saw films with a bit more of the standard serial killer thriller thrown in, this one’s clearly your fault. I have to say, though, this thing does give me a new appreciation for the Saws, for while the entries in that particular franchise are as implausible as all get out, pretty tacky and directed with all the wrong fashionable direction tics, they do at least hang together as actual movies and do their best to make their implausibilities work in the context of their narratives. Shame the Devil, on the other hand, has some of the worst writing I’ve ever encountered, with dialogue that’s at once stilted and unnatural, dumb and lacking in flow, everyone talking at each other in non sequiturs. The plot is obvious, badly paced, full of ill used clichés and just plain disinteresting. The writing is so bad and hangs together so little, I can’t bring myself to actually criticize the actors for the way they stumble through their scenes, for it’s pretty damn clear that there’s nothing to work with in the script. Paul Tanter’s direction sure as hell doesn’t provide anything for them to hang their performances on. It’s just a dreadful mess of a movie, as far from being entertainingly bad as it is from being competent filmmaking.

In short: Man Without a Star (1955)

King Vidor’s western with Kirk Douglas is quite the thing. On the surface, it’s a very typical story about a cowboy who very literally can’t bear to be fenced in, adopts a young man (William Campbell), and gets into the middle of a range war; as such, it is an exciting and economically told tale, with Douglas – as was his wont – throwing himself physically into his performance like few other actors of his generation did.

However, just below the surface, is hidden something quite a bit more complex, not only in the portrayal of the psychology of Douglas’s Dempsey who at first seems to – badly – attempt to hide his humungous amount of compassion behind charm and bravado but actually hides his wounds behind all of these things. There’s an additional dimension to all of the film’s central characters – Jeanne Crain’s ruthless femme fatale turns out to be rather more complicated and human too and Dempsey’s prostitute friend Idonee (Claire Trevor) carries an analytical moral mind beyond the “whore with a heart of gold” thing (which, by the way, always seems to be one of the more humanist tropes in my eyes as far as such things go, turning the least respected members of a society into at least decent people, though unfortunately never granting them the happy ends they might deserve; but then, in Code Hollywood, only the very worst people actually get what they deserve). Okay, William Campbell’s Jeff has not dimensions beyond being a stupid kid, but then I’ve actually met a few of that type; given the film’s general tone, I don’t find it impossible it would argue he doesn’t have much of a personality because he hasn’t suffered much yet.

On the level where plot and character psychology collide, Man Without a Star makes some atypical decisions that see Dempsey in the end taking the side of the people whose fences represent all he has spent his life running away from because theirs is the only side he can pick once he realizes he can’t run away forever; on the socio-economic level as the film represents it (and yes, it actually has that level), he’s in the end fighting a kind of rampant capitalism whose greed doesn’t care that it destroys the future prospects of the things it touches. Yet afterwards, where most westerns would have their now redeemed hero settle down with a decent woman (and one written by me probably with Idonee), Dempsey takes off again; his psychological damage against the ways of Hollywood maybe alleviated but not healed.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,king vidor,kirk douglas,jeanne crain,claire trevor,wiliam campbell

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 Master Touch (1972)

Original title: Un Uomo Da Rispettare

aka A Man To Respect

High-tech (by standards of the early 70s) thief Steve Wallace (Kirk Douglas) has barely been released from a Hamburg prison when Miller (Wolfgang Preiss), an old associate - but surely no friend - of his, tries his hardest to convince him to just another heist. Miller entices Steve with the sheer impossibility of breaking into a vault so high-tech, it's controlled by one of those "computer" thingies.

Miller's technique, and a bit of a looksee, do indeed convince Steve that the vault is just the job for him, but he doesn't want anything to do with Miller, who, after all, would want half the take and tends to have faces smashed in by his enforcer (Romano Puppo) where Steve prefers a non-violent approach to his job. Still, Steve will need a partner for the plan he has developed. Consequently, the aging thief finds himself one in form of trapeze artist Marco (Giuliano Gemma). Marco doesn't know anything about safecracking, but is willing to learn.

Problems do of course arise. Steve's wife Anna (Florinda Bolkan) wants her husband to end his life as a criminal; it's not so much out of moral abhorrence (Steve is, after all, a non-violent criminal robbing banks and other institutions of that type) but because his jail time has been very hard on her, and she can't imagine going through another year or two without him. That's particularly bad because Steve's plan to rob the vault and keep Miller off his back absolutely includes further jail time. And as if that weren't enough, heists do have the tendency to go wrong.

In the fourth decade of his career, at a point where most other actors of his generation were either starting to rest on their laurels or take an early semi-retirement on TV, Kirk Douglas went weird, taking on roles in peculiar comedies, Italian end times movies, and Michele Lupo's The Master Touch.

The Master Touch isn't a particularly weird film in itself but it is also a far cry from the movies the actor could have starred in at this point in his career that'd see him just point his face in the direction of the camera and go through the motions. At its core, this is a very typical heist movie, containing everything you'd expect from such a film yet giving everything just enough of a little twist to make it a very good heist movie, even for a viewer more than used to what the genre has to offer; see, for example, the film's rejection of the femme fatale concept.

However, Lupo's movie also contains elements rather less typical of its genre, like an absolutely insane car chase between Gemma and Puppo through the streets of Hamburg that looks and feels incredibly dangerous, seeing as it ends with both cars involved nearly totally destroyed. Hamburg itself looks at its least appealing here, as it mainly seems to consist of the dirtiest part of its harbour, grey and brown streets, and grey industrial buildings sitting under the typically grey skies of Northern Germany. If the rules of the heist movie (quite in opposition to the caper movie) wouldn't nearly guarantee it already, Hamburg's rather noirish appearance does suggest things won't end well for anyone involved.

In contrast to Hamburg's ugly side, much of the film's interior action tends towards the modernist and semi-futuristic, with a vault and safe-cracking tools that involve all the polished silver, blinking lights, and emptiness the Future of 1972 had to offer. It's a curiously nostalgic feeling watching computers large as a room, a few video cameras and what amounts to a microphone-based alarm system treated as awe-inspiring technological advances only a genius thief could conquer, but the film treats this aspect with such reverence and care, it does never become ridiculous from my jaded perspective on technology. It helps that Steve's plan actually makes sense with the technology given. The use of music to distract the computer system also has a finely poetic touch, and just feels right even if it may be slightly absurd in practice. Of course, once you witness Douglas wearing a rather wonderful suit (I say this with the full conviction of a man who neither wears suits nor likes suits as a concept) oozing tension and charisma while going through the absurd and not so absurd elements of his heist, there's no room for doubting you're witnessing something very serious and exciting.

Clarity is a particularly important part of every good heist sequence, because the audience usually needs to have a clear picture of what's going on in several places at once. The Master Touch's heist sequence shows Lupo as a director very much in control of the pacing of his heist sequence. Lupo clearly knew the importance of every edit here, resulting in a sequence with a highly impressive flow that alone would be enough to recommend the film.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,crime,michele lupo,kirk douglas,florinda bolkan,giuliano gemma

Some Thoughts On Ace In The Hole (1951)

This is clearly another movie that's so much of a classic and that has been written about so extensively that there's no room for me to say anything new about it. Just as clearly, I can't let that stop me completely, for when have I ever been able to shut up about movies?

Anyhow, I'm not going to waste your time going into details about the obvious. The quality of the script (especially the fantastically sharp, darkly funny dialogue perfect for this, the least obvious of all film noirs), Billy Wilder's inventive and tight direction that makes a film that's nearly two hours long feel like seventy minutes, and Kirk Douglas' burningly intense performance, are as much a given as the whiteness of snow. Instead of the appropriate gushing, I just have two observations to make about the movie.

Firstly, there's something poignant (and a bit depressing) about the fact that Ace in the Hole has become less of a black comedy (and believe me, this is just as much a comedy as it is a drama; the difference between a black comedy and a drama lies only in the ability of a walking dead man to have a bitter laugh at his own cost in the former) as the years have passed. In 1951, having an actual carnival raised at the location of a catastrophe must have looked like a slightly surreal exaggeration. Today, that sort of thing has turned from a metaphor into business as usual; black humour has become documentation.

Secondly - and this is what I love most about the film - I'm again and again impressed by how right Wilder and Douglas do by a basic plot that could (and by all rights should) have become either a mawkish melodrama, or a film so moralizing nobody'd ever be interested in actually listening to its morals. Instead, the film is subtle even when its surface seems to play by the Hollywood rules, and knows the difference between having a moral outlook (and the bitterness that can - really does more often than not in Wilder's films - come with it) and hitting an audience over the head with what it is supposed to think and feel. Things and people are complicated, even when you want to sneer at the fact.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,billy wilder,thoughts,drama,comedy,film noir,kirk douglas