Eagle in a Cage (1972)

          Less a fact-based recitation of historical events and more a poetic meditation on power, Eagle in a Cage explores the final phase of Napoleon Bonaparte’s extraordinary life. Granted asylum by the British Empire following his legendary defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon was exiled to the small island of St. Helena, where he died six years later. Millard Lampell’s script, a version of which was first produced for television in 1965 with Trevor Howard starring, condenses the early days of the St. Helena incarceration into a tight drama filled with political machinations and sexual intrigue. Lampell’s version of Napoleon is not a man resigned to ignominy, bur rather a virile conqueror scheming to reclaim his position as Emperor of France. Among the many liberties that Lampell takes is suggesting that Napoleon made a brazen escape attempt, even though history indicates that Napoleon suffered debilitating health problems throughout his time on St. Helena.

          Its relationship to the truth notwithstanding, Eagle in a Cage bursts with energy, ideas, and lofty language. Furthermore, UK actor Kenneth Haigh gives a lusty performance in the leading role, imbuing Napoleon with ego, lyricism, and malice. (The fact that Haigh doesn’t even attempt a French accent is distracting, and so is the unexplained casting of African-American actor Moses Gunn as Napoleon’s principal aide.)

          Much of the story concerns Napoleon’s friction with Sir Hudson Lowe (Ralph Richardson), the haughty soldier charged with supervising Napoleon’s incarceration. Emboldened by the opportunity to humiliate a legendary figure, Lowe represents the effect that proximity to greatness has on weak people. Conversely, Lord Sissal (John Gielgud), the British aristocrat who arrives late in the story to tempt Napoleon with the offer of a return to limited power, represents the sadistic application of leverage, since he’s a callous snob. Shown in contrast to these two characters, Napoleon occupies complicated middle ground. He evaluates everyone he meets on merit, belittling the craven and embracing the bold, and yet he succumbs to avarice whenever the promise of reclaiming lost glory appears.

          Haigh captures all of those nuances well, even when Lampell’s script wanders into such discursive bits as long scenes involving Madame Bertrand (Billie Whitelaw), a companion of Napoleon’s whose relationship with the deposed monarch is never clearly articulated. Scenes with Betty Balcombe (Georgina Hale), essentially a groupie infatuated by Napoleon’s charisma, are more pointed. Ultimately, Eagle in a Cage is an odd sort of a picture, because it has the iffy production values and jumpy editing of a low-budget production even though it also has the grown-up subject matter and sophisticated dialogue of a prestige film. One can’t help but wonder if plans to recruit a leading actor of greater notoriety, perhaps Richard Burton or someone of his ilk, ran aground. Whatever the backstory, Eagle in a Cage is consistently intelligent and thoughtful, a mannered study on the afterglow of conquest, with the specter of death never far away.

Eagle in a Cage: GROOVY

Night Watch (1973)

          Old-fashioned save for a gory finale, this adequate little thriller is hampered by leading lady Elizabeth Taylor’s overwrought performance—even though, by the outrageous standards of her usual style, she’s comparatively restrained in this picture. The problem, of course, is that Taylor rarely portrayed recognizable human beings, instead incarnating dream girls and harpies and vamps. Since the storyline of Night Watch is predicated on Taylor’s ability to believably convey the way her character teeters on the edge between madness and sanity, Taylor’s shortcomings nearly scuttle the whole endeavor. Thankfully, director Brian G. Hutton and his collaborators present the story with confident pacing and photography, while composer John Cameron provides an eerie score laden with theremin flourishes straight out of some vintage ’50s shocker.

          Set in England (where the film was produced), Night Watch concerns Ellen Wheeler (Taylor), a troubled woman struggling through a shaky second marriage. Her first husband died under traumatic circumstances, and now Ellen is wed to John (Laurence Harvey), who may or may not be trysting with Ellen’s best friend, Sarah Cooke (Billie Whitelaw). Already considered unhinged by everyone she knows, Ellen raises further worries about her mental state when she claims to have seen a murder committed in the house next door. This leads to all sorts of friction with Ellen’s neighbors and with the local police, who dig up gardens and search vacant houses while looking for clues that never materialize. Eventually, the story becomes a battle of wills between Ellen and John, because once John suggests that Ellen spend time in a sanitarium, she must prove her sanity in order to save her own freedom. Naturally, there’s a big twist toward the end of the picture.

          Most everything about Night Watch is executed at a fairly high level, from the general ambiance to the supporting performances, so Taylor’s acting is the only major weak spot. Furthermore, flashbacks to the time when Ellen’s first husband died are effectively gruesome, long scenes of characters probing mysterious hallways contain a measure of suspense, and the violent finale is exciting. As such, it’s wrong to categorize Night Watch as camp, since the leading lady’s flamboyance is the sole cartoonish element. Nonetheless, how much enjoyment each viewer can derive from Night Watch depends in large part upon each viewer’s Taylor tolerance.

Night Watch: FUNKY

Start the Revolution Without Me (1970)

            Stupidity reigns in Start the Revolution Without Me, a goofy riff on the French Revolution—and not just because the movie’s version of Louis XVI is a dolt preoccupied with his clock collection. Directed by Bud Yorkin and produced by Norman Lear—the formidable combo behind several big-budget comedy movies but especially known for their spectacular success in television (All in the Family, etc.)—Start the Revolution Without Me features a frenetically paced combination of farce, satire, slapstick, and verbal comedy. Most of the humor is broad, gentle, and obvious, more on the order of second-rate Carol Burnett Show gags than the kind of inspired lunacy that took root in movie comedies a few years later, following the ascent of Mel Brooks and the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker collective.

          Among other weak devices, Start the Revolution Without Me employs chaotic fight scenes filled with pratfalls, crude jokes about effeminate men, self-reflexive narration, silly gags predicated on mispronounced words, sped-up photography, and tawdry scenes of men groping and/or ogling women. Most of this stuff was already considered old-fashioned in the vaudeville era. Some scenes in Start the Revolution Without Me almost work, simply because the skills of the performers trump the shortcomings of the material, and the movie boasts amazing production values in terms of costumes, locations, and props. Plus, of course, the movie has Gene Wilder at the height of his powers, as well as an enthusiastic but miscast Donald Sutherland.

          The stars play two sets of twin brothers. In the convoluted narrative, one pair of brothers is raised poor, and the other is raised wealthy. Upon reaching adulthood, both pairs are drawn to intrigue surrounding the French Revolution. Naturally, the poor brothers get mistaken for the rich brothers, and vice versa, leading to trouble as the poor brothers exploit their newfound position in Louis XVI’s court, and as the rich brothers try to escape service in the rebel militia. There’s also a lot of bedroom comedy involving a character loosely modeled after Marie Antoinette, as well as a wink-wink framing device during which modern-day Orson Welles (playing himself) introduces the movie and “tells” the story to the audience.

          Costar Hugh Griffith scores some points playing Louis XVI as a nincompoop, Victor Spinettii contributes a fun villainous turn in the Harvey Korman mode, and Billie Whitelaw is alluring as the Antoinette character. Yet Wilder, naturally, has most of the best scenes—as well as many of the worst—because of his no-prisoners approach. He’s infinitely better playing the rich brother, since that role allows for Wilder’s signature psychotic slow burns, and the early running gag about the rich brother’s affection for the dead falcon he wears on his arm is pleasantly absurd. Alas, even though Start the Revolution Without Me has its partisans—the script, by Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Freeman, earned a Writers Guild nomination—the movie gets awfully tiresome after a while. The higher your tolerance for brainless humor, the longer you’re likely to stay engaged.

Start the Revolution Without Me: FUNKY

Gumshoe (1971)

          A peculiar byproduct of the ’70s film-noir revival, this British picture stars Albert Finney as a Liverpool everyman who works at a nightclub but aspires to be a private eye in the Chandler/Hammett mode. As a result, he regularly slips into a stilted American accent, talking about “dames” and “heaters” and such even though everyone around him speaks in normal early-‘70s British vernacular. Gumshoe is sort of a spoof, but because the storyline gets convoluted and dark, it’s also sort of a thriller and sort of a whodunnit. Oh, and sort of a character study, too. However, it’s worth noting that Gumshoe was the directorial debut of Stephen Frears, who has made a career out of mixing genres in such offbeat movies as The Grifters (1990) and Dirty Pretty Things (2002)—so it’s possible Gumshoe was deliberately conceived as self-reflexive satire. Whatever the intentions, the result is the same—Gumshoe is sluggish and unfocused, with a number of interesting scenes contributing to an underwhelming sum effect.

          Finney plays Eddie Ginley, a bitter man whose true love, Ellen (Billie Whitelaw), left him for his own brother, William (Frank Finlay). Worse, William is a successful businessman with influence at Eddie’s nightclub, so even though the siblings hate each other, Eddie depends on William’s goodwill for continued employment. When the movie begins, Eddie half-jokingly places a newspaper ad offering his services as a private eye. Soon afterward, a client shows up and gives Eddie a package containing a gun, money, and a photo of a woman—instructions for a paid murder? At first, Eddie thinks his brother is playing a cruel joke, but then he realizes he’s been drawn into a strange mystery involving debauchery, deceit, and drugs. Unfortunately, the mystery is nearly impenetrable, and Eddie’s not a sufficiently interesting character to justify the effort of slogging through the plot. (The actors’ thick blue-collar accents make comprehension even more difficult.) Finney’s performance is low-key to a fault, despite flashes of cynical charm, so Finlay’s seething malice and Whitelaw’s pained ambivalence command greater attention—a considerable problem since they’re only in the movie periodically, whereas Finney is in nearly every scene.

Gumshoe: FUNKY

Leo the Last (1970)

          British filmmaker John Boorman’s early career is dominated by intense action movies, from Point Blank (1967) to Deliverance (1972), but his initial output also includes some pictures so odd they approach surrealism. Leo the Last is the first such Boorman feature. Based on a George Tabori play titled The Prince, the film explores what happens when a modern-day European aristocrat returns to his family’s mansion in London after a long absence, only to discover that the streets surrounding the building have become a ghetto. The broad strokes of the storyline are simple: Prince Leo (Marcello Mastroianni) is a recluse who’s bewildered by the outside world, the craven machinations of his household staff, and the empty affections of his ambitious fiancée, Margaret (Billie Whitelaw). Therefore, Leo spends his days in an upstairs room, watching poor black neighbors though binoculars. Eventually, he develops sympathy for his neighbors’ difficult lives, so he leaves his mansion to offer assistance—an action that, naturally, upsets sycophants who value Leo’s passive status quo.

          While the story is straightforward, however, Boorman’s execution is anything but. Seemingly intent on replicating Federico Fellini’s dreamlike visual style—the presence in Leo the Last of Fellini collaborator Mastroianni is probably not coincidental—Boorman fills the screen with weird imagery. At its most overtly Fellini-esque, the movie descends into a silly orgy scene with grotesque characters mugging for the camera. Similarly, Boorman spotlights a bizarre health ritual involving naked people bouncing up and down in a pool, and the director zeroes in on unattractive, undulating body parts photographed through the distortion of underwater lenses. The excess also manifests in offbeat subplots, with Leo’s mysterious aide, Laszlo (Vladek Sheybal), organizing some sort of militaristic cult in the basement of Leo’s mansion. (Radical politics permeate the film, which can be interpreted as a somewhat trite collectivist tract.)

          Yet the movie’s oddest element is actually the protagonist’s characterization—Leo is one of those inexplicable freaks found only in the minds of overindulgent storytellers. Although Maastroianni’s handsome, healthy appearance suggests otherwise, Leo is portrayed as a terrified innocent who can’t communicate with other people, so Leo spends most of the movie looking perplexed when bad things happen, even whimpering impotently while observing assaults, a heart attack, and a rape. It’s therefore impossible to buy into Leo the Last as a credible narrative. Plus, with all due respect, Boorman’s admirable aspirations to metaphorical heft quickly descend into pretentious silliness. Nonetheless, some find greater virtue in this peculiar film than others; among other accolades, the movie received a Best Director prize at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival. (Available as part of the MGM Limited Collection on Amazon.com)

Leo the Last: FUNKY

The Omen (1976) & Damien—Omen II (1978)

          A massive box-office hit feeding the public’s post-Exorcist appetite for supernatural horror but opting for cartoonish violence over gut-wrenching realism, The Omen is fabulously entertaining nonsense. The film’s premise remains tantalizing even after years of underwhelming sequels and retreads, Jerry Goldsmith’s powerful score set the template for myriad lesser imitations, and some of the creatively staged deaths in the picture have entered the horror-cinema pantheon. So even though The Omen has undoubtedly lost much of its power to shock, the film’s shameless entertainment value survives. Like the previous year’s Jaws, the first Omen movie is a textbook example of pulp disguised as prestige thanks to glossy stars and impressive production values. (Among other parallels, Goldsmith acknowledged that the iconic score John Williams created for Jaws was an influence on his work for The Omen.) Yet while critical admiration for Jaws has only grown over the years, time has put The Omen in its proper place as a guilty pleasure.
          Here’s the backstory. Producer Harvey Bernhard saw dollar signs when a clergyman acquaintance pondered what might happen if the antichrist emerged in modern times, so Bernhard commissioned a script by David Seltzer and hired promising director Richard Donner (the success of this picture earned Donner a choice gig helming 1978’s Superman: The Movie). The story that Bernhard and his collaborators contrived involves American diplomat Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), who adopts a mysterious infant after his own son is stillborn. The ambassador unwisely hides the truth from everyone, including his wife, Kathy (Lee Remick), but once young Damien (Harvey Stephens) reaches his seventh year, things get messy. People around the child die gruesomely, raising Thorn’s suspicions, and then a crazed priest tries to convince the ambassador his “son” is an inhuman beast sired by a jackal.
          The beauty of the premise, in terms of generating spooky excitement, is the implication that Satan has both an endless supply of minions and nearly limitless power. Furthermore, the biggest challenge to embedding the antichrist in society is the possibility that someone might take Damien out before he’s old enough to defend himself. That last bit creates a potent moral dilemma for Peck’s character.
          Even though the plot crumbles under scrutiny, the movie’s operatic death scenes are enjoyably preposterous (“It’s all for you, Damien!”), and the made-up mythology (e.g., “the seven daggers of Meddigo”) casts an engrossing spell. Peck anchors the picture with anguished determination, while Leo McKern is memorably intense as the dude who says Damien’s gotta die, David Warner adds an enjoyable presence as a conspiracy-minded photographer, and Billie Whitelaw is all kinds of creepy as Damien’s nanny. With respect to Donner, who manages pace and tone expertly, and DP Gilbert Taylor, who provides a master class in the use of filters, the movie’s VIP is Goldsmith. His Oscar-winning score uses eerie chants such as “Ave Satani!” (Latin for “Hail Satan!”) to infuse the picture with palpable menace. His music is the film’s dark heart.
          One could argue that the picture’s first sequel, Damien—Omen II, actually makes more narrative sense than its predecessor, inasmuch as teenaged Damien’s circumstances seem better suited to future global conquest; Damien (played in the follow-up by Jonathan Scott-Taylor) accepts his destiny while being raised by his uncle (William Holden), a corporate giant whose empire the antichrist stands to inherit. Alas, Damien is less exciting than the previous picture. It’s not as if Bernhard and co. suddenly decided to take the franchise seriously, but director Don Taylor lacks Donner’s crowd-pleasing flair and Holden, though always watchable, is very much in paycheck mode, whereas Peck committed to the silliness of The Omen. Having said that, the perfectly cast Scott-Taylor is quite disturbing as he grows more and more comfortable in his unholy skin, and the death scene involving an icy lake is genuinely frightening; the scene might even surpass the gruesome kills that made the first Omen notorious. One great scene, alas, does not make a great picture. Neither does behind-the-scenes turmoil. British director Mike Hodges was discharged partway through production and replaced with American journeyman Taylor.
          The original Omen series concluded with The Final Conflict (1981), a grisly installment featuring Sam Neill as grown-up Damien trying to prevent the Second Coming, although a quasi-related telefilm called Omen IV: The Awakening followed ten years later. The original film was pointlessly remade in 2006, and a dreary prequel, The First Omen, appeared in 2024.

The Omen: GROOVY
Damien—Omen II: FUNKY