Force 10 From Navarone

May The Force
Be With You

Force 10 From Navarone
UK 1978 Directed by Guy Hamilton
Indicator  Blu Ray Zone B

As a rule, I’m not the biggest fan of war films (at least not terrestrial based ones). I’m not particularly worried that a lot of them make light of the war and are usually fun filled shoot ‘em ups which amount to not much more than Boy’s Own stories. Heck, even the serious and more conscientious ones have a certain degree of that to them. I just don’t like them all that much and can probably count on the fingers of one hand the ones I do enjoy (I even have a few I haven’t seen yet in my ‘to watch’ pile, courtesy of director Sam Fuller). That being said, Force 10 From Navarone is one of those films which I like above and beyond my ability to explain why although, when I first saw it on the television back in the 1980s (I don’t remember catching this one at the cinema... but I might be wrong on that count), the main draw would have been the inclusion of Harrison Ford in the cast, whose star was about to rise to meteoric proportions thanks to films like The Empire Strikes Back (reviewed here), Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Blade Runner (reviewed by me here).

The film is actually a sequel to a classic war film made 17 years before, The Guns Of Navarone, which I had seen a couple of times in my childhood but it never really struck a chord with me (although, if I watched it now, I’d probably find it’s a masterpiece). This one did though and... now that the fabulous Indicator label have given us a new Blu Ray transfer of, not just the theatrical cut but also the extended edition, nicely packaged with a bound book about the production, some stills from the film and a gazillion extras all in a nice slip case for a surprisingly low cost (in this day of overpriced limited editions)... I couldn’t wait to re-watch it again after all those years. I wasn’t disappointed although, truth be told, there’s not a heck of a lot that special about the movie either.

After an opening recap of the first film’s ending, with the guns of Navarone being destroyed by explosives (and with the original cast kept out of camera), we hitch up with two of the main characters from that film but, instead of being played by Gregory Peck and David Niven, they are replaced by Robert Shaw and Edward Fox. Now, the original plan was to have the cast back from the first movie, which was to be made soon after but, since there was a large gap as pre-production flailed then failed, they were too old to play the roles again by the time the film finally made its way into production and so we have, in some ways, a poor man’s cast replacement... although Shaw and Fox are obviously great actors in their own right. Here they team up with Harrison Ford’s ‘Force 10 Squad’, to get dropped off enroute on his mission in order to identify and kill a traitorous character from the first movie, who is played here by Franco Nero. The film’s main cast are rounded out by Barbara Bach and Richard Kiel, who were both, presumably, relatively fresh off the set of The Spy Who Loved Me (reviewed here) and who would soon be making the Italian sci-fi film The Humanoid together. So three major Bond actors along with a couple of other minor Bond character actors in the cast, not to mention the film being directed by Guy Hamilton... who directed three of the Bond movies too.

Okay, so, as soon as their plane is shot down and their numbers are thinned out, the film becomes a proper adventure romp, with various shoot outs and explosions, as the main players join forces properly to help complete each other’s missions and save the day... which they do but, not necessarily in the way they thought they would.

If anything, the thing that struck me about watching the movie this time around was the way the suspense sequences were milked for every drop, such as the parachuted Edward Fox being rescued by another main member of the team played by Carl Weathers (that’s Appollo Creed to you) as he gets stuck in a tree and dangles above a German soldiers head... you know the kind of thing. This film is full of it and it’s also weighted with a lot of dramatic moments devised to second guess the audience which, over the years, dates it maybe a little. Such as characters revealed that aren’t dead after all and various ‘deus ex machina’ rescues from an unexpected (ish) source just at the last second. That being said, clichéd as the movie is, it’s all done with a tremendous sense of fun and I couldn’t help but be thoroughly entertained by it once again. Especially when you throw in Ron Goodwin, the composer of such famous military scores as 633 Squadron, The Battle Of Britain and Where Eagles Dare (among others), providing a strong march and incidental music which, as far as I’m concerned, is certainly one of his most whistleable scores. This one’s been heard issuing shrilly from my lips on many occasions over the years, I can tell you that.

Indicator’s new release is amazing and includes a number of extras, one of the highlights of which is a 20 minutes plus look at the huge differences between the Theatrical and Extended cuts... both of which contain various things not in the other version. This valuable extra shows you things like the vast differences in the opening narration, the completely different title sequences, the various lines which have been re-dubbed and added or subtracted in each version (I think the extended version is a little more family friendly, too, when it comes to alternate dialogue), the difference in the sound design in certain scenes (details like the sounds of birds and insects either timed differently or absent in one cut or the other) and even the absence of music in certain places in one of the cuts. One of those extras which really is worth having.

Another extra which is worth the cost of admission, although I’ve only watched the first ten minutes or so at time of writing this, is an hour and a half archival interview with the composer from the 1990s, which absolutely transports you back to his time growing up in the 40s and 50s, from what I’ve heard of it so far.

So, yeah, not much more to add on this except, Force 10 From Navarone has absolutely nothing to do with Navarone (Alistair McLean’s original and much different sequel novel may well have more to do with the first one) but it’s certainly an enjoyable movie and this new limited edition Indicator Blu Ray set is absolutely the best way to see it outside of a cinema presentation. One I’ll no doubt be dipping into again at some point in the next ten years or so and certainly value for money. I’m absolutely delighted to be reacquainted with this old friend again, no matter how corny some of the dialogue and situations are. A welcome return to the home video format.

The Spy Who Loved Me

That Winking Feeling

The Spy Who Loved Me
1977 UK
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

Okay, so here’s the deal with this movie.

I loved The Spy Who Loved Me as a kid but, as I look at it nowadays, I think it’s where the rot really did set in for the Roger Moore Bond films. I don’t think it’s particularly his fault but the character of Bond was definitely softened down in this movie and although I can see the reasoning behind it... it really takes the Bond films way too far into another realm for me. But there are still some really enjoyable things in this one so... let’s have a look at it.

The Spy Who Loved Me is a Bond movie with a number of “firsts” for the series. For example, it was the first of the EON Bond movies to be produced solo by Cubby Broccoli after his business partner on the previous nine movies, Harry Saltzman, had to bow out due to some extreme financial difficulties. It was also the first Bond movie to be recorded and presented in stereo sound and it also, while I’m talking technical details, marked a return to a full 2.35:1 aspect ratio in the Bond films (the previous two movies had been released in 1.85:1).

The first film, as well, to feature three new regular characters who would appear in the films a number of times later. The first of these is the character of General Gogol, played by Walter Gotell (who had played a villanous SPECTRE agent in From Russia With Love), a character who stays with the Bond series up to and including Timothy Dalton’s first stab at the role in The Living Daylights.

The second character is only glimpsed for a few shots, doing a drink inspired double take when observing Bond’s exploits, and whom I can only refer to as... “dodgy, drinking tourist”. He appears for the first time in a Bond film here observing Bond’s submarine car (which I’ll talk about in a bit) as it emerges from the water. He would also be seen in the next couple of Bond movies too... playing the same character and doing pretty much the same thing for a couple of shots.

The third new “regular” is, of course, Richard Kiel as the steel toothed comedy assassin Jaws, who is always popular with fans of this and the next Bond movie.

It’s also the first appearance (to my knowledge) of Robert Brown in the franchise, playing a completely different character to the one he would go on to play later in the series... replacing Bernard Lee as “M” after Lee’s last appearance in the sequence in the next film, Moonraker. Another noteworthy acting appearance would be the reappearance of George Baker in the series, although not playing the same role as he played in his previous appearance in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. 

Asides from the lovely Barbara Bach as the leading Bond lady, there are also a couple of appearances by famous Hammer Horror girls in this movie, namely the gorgeous Valerie Leon and... oh yeah, I’ll get to the other one a little later. She’s really special.

This film, in all fairness, is a bit of a dumb movie in comparison to some of the previous films in the series. The “detective” work done by Bond and the British and Russian secret service is not exactly spectacular, brain teasing stuff as it just relies on the main villain’s people making mistakes and pointing out that they are the bad guys... to all intents and purposes. Also, there’s a certainly jumpiness to the editing in relation to seguing from one scene to the next and, although I thought this may have been due to missing footage when I recently looked at this film again for this review, I realised that the other time I had picked up on something similar was in my review of You Only Live Twice... which I now remember is by the same director. So I think I’m just picking up on a stylistic signature which I don’t quite like, rather than anything particularly bad (so I’m kinda pleased about that).

Maybe the problems I have with the story comes from the fact that this movie did not have any of the elements from the original novel in it. Ian Fleming had insisted that the story in the novel would not be made in to a film and he really didn’t think much of this novel. It wasn’t even published until after his death, as he had not wanted it released during is lifetime... which it wasn’t. This is a shame, in my opinion as, from what I can remember of it when I read it, it’s definitely one of the best novels in the series... maybe even the best. It’s also the most unusual, told through the eyes of the lead female character and including James Bond in only a few chapters. Definitely worth a read.

This film itself is, perhaps, remembered so well today because it has two of the greatest 007 gadgets in Bond history since the introduction of the Aston Martin DB5 in Goldfinger.

The first of these gadgets is, of course, the white Lotus Esprit which turns into a submarine at the flick of a switch. It’s a marvellous and sleek looking vehicle and every boy my age (I was 9 at the time) wanted one... and probably most boys my age did have one, in a miniature form. Corgi’s Lotus Esprit car was, I believe, in shops even before this movie came out and, I expect, was the second biggest selling Corgi Bond toy ever. It had rockets that fired out of the back windshield when you wiggled the top periscope thingy (if you’d remembered to pre-load the rockets) and submarine fins and rudder etc that came out the sides and back when you pressed the black “vent” on the front of the car. Cool stuff.

Unfortunately there was a big design flaw with this particular Corgi model and I don’t know a single kid who didn’t have exactly the same problem with their Corgi Lotus, and it was this... the bloody fins would hardly stay in! Anything you did with the car would immediately trigger those damn fins to shoot out the sides and back (which could be quite painful, depending on how you were holding it) and you would spend ages then trying to push the damn things back in and actually get them to “catch” on whatever was supposed to be holding them inside the car... only to be frustrated less than a minute later when something else triggered their unwanted release.

This was such a frustrating toy!

Fire the rockets out the back of the car by wiggling the periscope... and the fins would be released. Roll your car along on its wheels for more than two seconds... and the fins would be released. Look at your car in a funny way while it was sitting on a shelf on the far side of the room... and the fins would be released. In the end you’d have to resort to pushing bits of paper back into the housing to try to get the damn things to stay in but this was never a satisfactory arrangement either.

In Corgi’s defence, I will say that when they released special anniversary editions of their Bond cars a couple of decades ago, I purchased a new version of the Lotus (along with anniversary editions of the Aston Martin, the open top car from You Only Live Twice and the slightly remodelled Moon Buggy from Diamonds Are Forever) and this design problem has obviously been fixed for this edition. The fins finally stayed in!

The other big “gadget” in this movie is, of course, one of the loveliest creatures to ever walk the earth who is a special supervillain’s secret weapon in her own right! Yeah, you guessed it, Britain’s “First Lady Of Fantasy”, the gorgeous Caroline Munro is in this movie and just her presence in a few scenes adds so much to this film. Unfortunately, she is overdubbed with another voice (a fate which befell an unbelievably large amount of actors and actresses in the Bond series) but she is all you can watch in the scenes she is in and, as the assassin Naomi, she gives the Moore Bond films their one big iconic moment. As she is flying her black helicopter and riddling Bond’s Lotus with a hail of machine gun fire she winks slowly at Bond, viewed by the audience’s camera-eye, and it’s a wink I’ll always remember and think of when I think of this era of James Bond movies... a wink that could launch a thousand ships.

Ken Adam’s set design is marvellous, especially the look of Stromberg’s aquatic lair and a big, super ship which swallows submarines up in much the same way that spaceships are swallowed up in director Lewis Gilbert’s previous Bond adventure, You Only Live Twice. Ken Adams even had Stanley Kubrik secretly visit this particular set (for which an entire studio was built at Pinewood to hold it) in order to give tips on how to actually light the thing... which is something the press didn’t pick up on at the time.

The music is of note in some ways too. Composed by Oscar winner Marvin Hamlisch, the title song Nobody Does It Better, is easily one of the greatest Bond songs in the series and, the action music from the opening ski chase and parts of the helicopter chase with the aforementioned Caroline Munro is fantastic... although more so in the reworked album version of the music as Bond ‘77 than the film presentation of it, it has to be said. The rest of the music in the film, however, is absolutely dire and, surprisingly, for what is quite a long Bond movie, there’s not a heck of a lot of it either... vast stretches of it are left unscored and, asides from a couple of minutes in an Egyptian ruin which sounds like it must have originally been temp tracked by John Barry’s pre-credits music from From Russia With Love, is pretty unmemorable and unremarkable. Wallpaper music as opposed to the kind of souped up dramatic scoring the film so needs in certain sequences.

And that’s about all I got to say on this one. Certainly, by no means, the weakest of the Moore films... The Spy Who Loved Me certainly represents a sea change in the tone of the character and has not, in my opinion, aged all that well. Definitely worth the price of admission though because, if the Lotus Esprit doesn’t arouse your interest, the presence of the wonderful Caroline Munro is bound to do the trick. That wink will always be with me... nobody does it better.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E

Death Fish

Island of the Fishmen 1979 Italy

Directed by Sergio Martino

Mya Communication DVD Region 0

Over the past 6 or 7 years I’ve been exploring all kinds of different strands of cinema, mostly trash cinema (and I burden it with that label only for the purposes of this article) because, frankly, since the advent of multiregion DVD players we are finally able to see all the stuff which wasn’t allowed in the country in an unmutilated form before... so I'm kinda making up for lost time after all the classic movies I've seen over the years. Admittedly, a lot of it still isn’t sold in this country, which is why a lot of the film fiends I know import their movies from other countries.

During my inquisitive wanderings of this much maligned genre of film-making I’ve discovered that what people tend to label as "trash cinema" can take roughly four subjective forms (at present count, I’m sure that will change when I see a movie that demands a new way of looking at it from me). Here are my “four forms” so far...

1. The trashy exploitation movie that actually transcends - via use of music, cinematography, general atmosphere - the misplaced labelling it’s had to put up with and rise above this as a piece of great cinematic art that deserves to be taken seriously (in my opinion a lot of giallo belong in this category).

2. The trashy exploitation movie which is really not trying to be that trashy but tolerates the trash element (aka Zombies in Zombi aka Zombi 2 aka Zombie Flesh Eaters), does the best it can with the material, tells the story very seriously and tries to rise above it all. It’s not an artistic masterpiece... but it manages to maintain a certain gravitas despite the exploitation ingredients.

3. The trashy exploitation movie which possibly didn’t even start off that way but is just so stupid and fun and ticks all the right boxes that you can just laugh along with the sheer stupidity of it and be entertained for hours. I love these ones almost as much as category 1.

4. The trashy exploitation movie that tries to tell the story it’s got but really does it so badly that even the entertainment value vanishes and you’re just left with a genuinely bad, almost unwatchable movie. Haven’t seen too many of these but the century is young.

Okay, so that’s my four categories... I’m using that set up so you can see exactly where I stand on Sergio Martino’s Island of the Fishmen!

Now Sergio Martino is actually a director that I have a lot of time for because I really like gialli and he’s made some of the better entries in giallo films in general with great movies like The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, The Case of the Scorpions Tale, All the Colours of the Dark and Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key. One of many directors who disprove the popular misconception that all the best gialli were made by either Mario Bava or Dario Argento.

Island of the Fishmen is probably the least entertaining and certainly my least favourite of the films I’ve seen by this director... but it does try hard and it has some excellent actors in it to try to keep it afloat - the always excellent Richard Johnson (one of the more interesting Bulldog Drummond actors and a consummate professional), Barbara Bach and, in some brief scenes, Joseph Cotton. I think though, for me, the film falls firmly into Category 2 and you can tell that this film was targetting the same kind of marks as Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (as I’ll refer to it for any confused British readers)... I don’t know which movie was shot first that year but it wouldn’t surprise me if Richard Johnson (who plays a prominent role in both) just walked from the set of one movie to the set of the other in the same location... in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if he was shooting both at the same time! Not that his performance is "off" in any way because it isn’t.

The film starts off with a small boat full of convicts and a prison doctor as survivors of a sinking ship... their boat is wrecked by the titular Fishmen and they wash up on an island where Richard Johnson is exploiting Joseph Cotton’s experiments to turn men into fish people so they can dive the depths of the ocean and gather treasure from the lost city of Atlantis... and that really sounds like a tongue in cheek film doesn’t it? Kind of a Mysterious Island deal with Richard Johnson playing a more villainous version of Nemo and with some “hot fish action” thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately... everything is taken deadly seriously and it really does share the same kind of atmosphere as Fulci’s infamous Zombie flick... but instead of shuffling zombies you have shuffling fish people with not very convincing costumes (which look a little bit like the Sea Devils from the Pertwee era of Doctor Who) slicing and dicing random characters whenever the director feels like we need a thrill kill to get us past the unfeasibly sombre scripting.

Also, it kinda lacks some of the visual style of Fulci’s film... when I first saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s I was startled about how similar it was to Zombie Flesh Eaters in terms of the cinematographers preference for vertical compositions (something I may bring up again in my next blog review... stay tuned readers). I kinda missed that kind of focussed art direction on this picture... I’m not saying it doesn’t have any... I just didn’t notice it and when you’re watching these kinds of films it’s quite often the appreciation of the shot design where the most pleasure is to be found.

All in all though... I’m glad I cottoned on to Island of the Fishmen and it is a film I would watch again (probably as a double with the Fulci) and am pleased to own... I just wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else!

Warning! Apparently Martino directed a confused sequel to this movie in 1995 called The Fishmen And Their Queen... gotta get this one!