Three Films Make A Post: They dare to climb a terrifying new peak in suspense... all the way up to hell!

Where Eagles Dare (1968): For quite a few people, this war adventure directed by Brian G. Hutton and written by Alistair MacLean is a bit of a classic of men’s adventure cinema. I’ve never seen that in the film, and a recent re-watch unfortunately did not improve my impression. Mostly, the film feels bloated beyond all comprehension, taking up two and a half hours of one’s time for a series of plot twists and improbable plans that makes the most of our contemporary blockbusters look downright sane. Brian G. Hutton’s direction is bland, wasting many a theoretically cool set piece through tedious pacing, the script just goes on and on about everything, and the cast, well…This is as bland a performance as you’ll encounter by Clint Eastwood, and Richard Burton does his usual Richard Burton slumming thing that just doesn’t do it for me, just longer, in this case.

Falcon’s Gold aka Robbers of the Sacred Mountain (1982): I have a lot of room in my heart for Indiana Jones knock-offs (particularly of the Italian persuasion) but this cable TV movie – ergo, breasts – which is the understandably only directing credit for one Bob Schulz, really doesn’t even seem to try to grasp for an adventuring crown forever out of its reach. Instead of cheap thrills and silly ideas, we get Simon MacCorkindale making rubber faces that must go for human expressions on his planet, atrocious editing that ruins the few moments of theoretical excitement the film has on offer, and a script that doesn’t actually manage to hit even the simplest adventure movie tropes decently but does find space to include a pretty problematic “romance” between MacCorkindale and a character we first meet wearing her school uniform. Though, to be fair to the nudity does come not from her.

Romancing the Stone (1984): It is of course a bit unfair to compare a cheap TV movie to a decently budgeted studio production like Robert Zemeckis’s adventure romance with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, but still, this one shows how to trot classical adventure movie paths well. And thanks to its organic mix of slightly updated romance tropes and a lot of very well done adventure stuff, it doesn’t feel like much of an attempt to catch that Indiana Jones money at all, but rather like what it is: a film inspired by many of the same sources as Lucas and Spielberg that goes its own, frequently funny, always crowd-pleasing and very fun way from there. Diane Thomas’s script mostly manages the difficult task of having her heroine grow and finding that big roguish love without the latter destroying the former fantastically well; that Turner and Douglas where both in a phase where they could do little wrong certainly helps here too.


The film is also perfectly paced, looks and just feels fantastic thanks to Zemeckis and photography by the great Dean Cundey. Sure, one might complain this is film as candy, but when it’s as good as any candy you’ll get your hands on, who’s going to?

In short: Caboblanco (1980)

1948. A bunch of characters of dubious morals and shifting allegiances – as played by Charles Bronson, Jason Robards and his ever disappearing and reappearing bad German accent, Dominique Sanda, Fernando Ray and Simon MacCorkindale – are after a ship full of Nazi gold that was sunk somewhere close to the deeply corrupt Peruvian town of Cabo Blanco. Shenanigans, melodramatic outbreaks, and random stuff happens.

This is one of the many Charles Bronson films directed by J. Lee Thompson, but it certainly isn’t one of their best team-ups. The film’s main problem is the screenplay. The script doesn’t really seem to know what it wants, and throws in all kinds of adventure and spy movie tropes without ever bothering to do much with them for longer than one scene or so. Which is too bad, for some of these scenes taken for themselves are rather effective or entertaining; they just don’t add up to a whole.

Parts of the film play as an attempt at an homage to classic Hollywood adventure and romance movies, but Bronson, as much as I love him, sure ain’t no Bogart (or Cary Grant, for that matter), and worse, the script never quite grasps what actually makes something like Casablanca work, so it includes a lot of cargo cult style writing that copies the surface but clearly doesn’t get what the surface elements are actually good for. The actors all seem to be in different films, stylistically: Robards – as is his wont – wildly swings between scenery chewing and moments where he is chilling and pathetic, Bronson is Bronson and therefore completely fails to convince as a romantic lead, something that certainly isn’t helped by the obvious trouble Sanda has acting in English which leaves her in turns wooden and overly melodramatic. MacCorkindale’s just plain bad and looks like he’s not even trying, while Fernando Rey obviously knows he’s Claude Rains’s character from Casablanca and acts appropriately.


On the positive side for the lover of strange films like me, this lends the whole affair a disjointed non-sequitur quality that threatens to reach a dream-like quality more often than not, and sometimes actually does. The best bit of the film when it comes to this sort of thing is certainly the climactic confrontation between the four main characters (fortunately without MacCorkindale) in the bar of Bronson’s hotel that involves full-on Italian-style lighting, a potentially explosive jukebox and a parrot, among rather more normal accoutrements like guns. It’s the sort of scene that would have made wading through a much more boring film worthwhile; in the context of Caboblanco’s general strangeness, it’s the cherry on the cake.