The Dead Pool

Harry’s Game

The Dead Pool
Directed by Buddy Van Horn
USA 1988
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers. 

I first saw the movie The Dead Pool on its original cinema release in the UK in 1989, slightly behind the US theatrical release. I really liked the Dirty Harry films by this point but... I really hated this one... at the time. I thought the robot car bomb chase was stupid (while now, when we’re living in an age of killer drones... well, it just seems quaint) and I thought the background of the horror movie production setting was too theatrical and colourful... which admittedly it is but, I’m way more forgiving now, it would seem.

Revisiting the movie, well I actually really enjoyed it this time around and, although it’s still my least favourite of Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan movies, I think it’s not actually letting the spirit of the other movies down... it’s just how it seemed to me at the time of its release.

Following on from the most boring opening title credits of any of the movies in the franchise, we get a story where Callahan is actually being lionised by the press for what is seen as a heroic deed. Running with it, the San Fransisco Police Department, who are unused to having Callahan being received in a positive light, want Harry to cooperate with the press, this time in the form of lovely lady journalist Samantha Walker, played here by the great Patricia Clarkson. She has good chemistry with Eastwood in this and, I think this may be the first time I saw her in anything. 

However, she picked a bad time to be associating with Harry Callahan because various killers of a jailed mob boss are after his blood and, on top of that, the latest case revolving around a horror film production, with a truly unlikeable incarnation of Liam Neeson as the young, luvvie director, involves a dead pool with Harry’s name on it.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of a dead pool, lots of places have them (or at least had them back in the day). You would basically bet on which celebrity would be the first to die and, after a number of years, if your one came up next, you would win the pool of cash for the bet. In this one, a killer close to the production of the film is mowing his way through the list in order to frame the director and it’s Callahan’s job to find him. 

Once again we have a fast paced story with a number of action scenes and also some great police procedural stuff thrown into the mix... and Harry ‘gets the gal’ too, by the end of the movie (I was betting that both her and Harry’s new partner, played by Evan C. Kim, wouldn’t make it to the closing credits alive). It’s also got a less bold but still nicely put together score by the franchise’s regular composer Lalo Schifrin, with a few nice call backs to a couple of his themes from the first movie (reviewed here). 

Oh, and one James Carrey... that’s Jim Carrey to you and I... plays one of the early victims, a rock star whose death is made to look like a drug overdose by the killer, who completely fails at that cover up too. Another thing worth noticing is that the movie critic who is stabbed to death by the killer is made up to look like legendary film critic Pauline Kael (who was quite critical of the first movie in the franchise). 

And that’s all I’ve got on The Dead Pool, I think. It looks nice enough but the cinematography and set dressing makes it feel more dated and mired in the 1980s, unlike the other four which seem to be somewhat timeless. I thought it was fine though and I’m certainly more into it than I was as a 21 year old, that’s for sure. It’s as shame this was the final one but at least Callahan walks off at the end with Patricia Clarkson, so it’s nice to think that was a long and happy partnership for the characters in their fictional life beyond the screen. Not as much of a dud as I’d originally thought and Mr. Eastwood does a fine job with it.

Sudden Impact

Dirty Law

Sudden Impact
Directed by Clint Eastwood
USA 1983
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. Big ones. Take a look at them... make my day!

The Enforcer (reviewed here) was supposed to be the last Dirty Harry movie but, a string of less than stellar box office performances and certain other factors brought about this sequel, Sudden Impact, seven years later. I think it was a good choice and it made the most money, I believe, out of the five movies in this sequence. Although he’d been offered the direction of at least one of the previous Dirty Harry movies and had directed numerous other films, even directing one of the scenes in the first in this series, Eastwood finally agreed to pick up the reigns on this one and he does not disappoint. It was also the last of six movies that he and his then girlfriend Sondra Locke made together. 

This one’s a little different than the others too and, many might say the character oversteps his moral parameters and elevates himself above the law... which, of course, he does but, it’s also a crowd pleaser because of that, I think. It tells the story of Jennifer Spencer, played by Locke, who was gang raped along with her sister ten years prior to the main action of this film. There are flashbacks to that sequence, which made her sister non-responsive and with her mind lost in hospital since... but I have to say the constant flashbacks to highlight characters who took part in this crime does seem a little heavy handed, especially by today’s standards, I think.

So, it’s ten years later and Jennifer is slowly seeking out each of the perpetrators and killing them with a gunshot to the genitals (her signature move) followed by a gunshot to the head. She travels to the coastal town to catch up with the perps one by one in their home territory but it’s also where Harry, played by Eastwood, ends up, primarily to get him out of San Francisco and partially to investigate the first of these crimes, as it’s the home town of the first of an ever increasing number of victims. This brings him into friendship and romantic entanglement with Jennifer and, the usual load of trouble with authority figures.

And it’s all good fun. 

There’s a nice line where Eastwood crashes a party to intimidate a suspect (he manages to accidentally intimidate him into a fatal heart attack) and he foreshadows the potential for harm to two bodyguards by asking the lady on the door to phone for an ambulance due to the two guys suffering multiple abrasions and lacerations. Of course, this is a nod back to A Fistful Of Dollars, by way of Kurosawa’s original template of that movie, Yojimbo, where the leads asks for a number of coffins to be prepared. A lot of the film takes place at night, which seems to give all the characters a more sinister tone and Jennifer is certainly no exception. The play of shadow and light in certain shots really hammers home the darkness, such as a shot where we are watching a front view of Locke working on a painting but the artificially created light throws the shadow of her arm painting into a small section of the screen behind her. There’s almost a German expressionist element to the shot. 

The film opens strongly, after we see Jennifer despatching her first victim, with Eastwood briefly attending a court case before going to a diner and being warned a hold up is in progress by the waitress, who has been serving his coffee for the last ten years, dumping a load of sugar into his cup. It’s in this scene where he first uses his latest  and most culturally influential catchphrase “Go ahead... make my day.” 

All well and good but let’s talk about the waitress in this scene. One of Clint’s early roles was a very brief, almost but not quite an extra level part in Tarantula (reviewed here). The film starred Mara Corday as the leading lady and she and Clint Eastwood had been good friends ever since. It’s she who plays the waitress here and she also turns up in a few other of his films over the years.  

Lalo Schifrin provides one of his best scores for the series, taking on contemporary percussion style orchestration into his usual fusion of jazz and suspense and... it’s really something. There are also a few nods to his original Dirty Harry score thrown into the mix. 

But lets finish up with the real elephant in the room here. The audience probably had a problematic unease building up when they first saw this movie... I know I did. The problem being that, while she’s clearly been disturbed and affected by her experiences, Locke’s character is absolutely who the audience is siding with. Up until now, Harry has always been about justice rather than the law but, it always came down to a line he wouldn’t cross. Justice must prevail but, only within the limitations of the law. Not here though. He finally crosses the line and does the right thing in spite of the law... breaking it and muddying the waters with a specific piece of evidence so Jennifer can go free at the end. I’m still not sure how I feel about it all these years later, in all honesty. It’s a moment which severely compromises the Harry Callahan character but, at the same time, nobody wants to see Jennifer brought to justice for her own crimes either. Everyone she takes out is pretty horrible and her vigilante character is serving up revenge that seems to bring a real sense of justice to the piece. 

So yeah, Sudden Impact brings a taint on Clint Eastwood’s character but it makes it a very interesting entry in the series (although not my favourite... that will always be The Enforcer). After this... well nobody really expected Eastwood to do anymore of these things but, just five years later, what is now the last of the series was released at the cinema. In all honesty, I remember hating that one when I went to see it but, let’s see if it’s improved any over time. I’ll be revisiting that one next.

The Enforcer

Tyne To Die

The Enforcer
Directed by James Fargo
USA 1976
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Okay... more spoilers. 

The Enforcer... not to be confused with either the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name and, nor indeed, the many films which came after this with the exact same title... is the third of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callahan movies. It’s also easily my favourite one, mainly because his leading co-star in this is just so good and adds a whole other dynamic to the character. 

The film opens with a pre-credits sequence this time around, before going onto the clichéd San Francisco skyline kind of shots you usually get on films of this ilk. Here we see a bunch of ‘terrorists’ (but not really, they’re just in it for the money), who are the main villains of the piece, take out two gas board officials and steal their truck to use for a scene later in the movie. We then, post credits, go into a couple of incidents with Eastwood’s Harry Callahan during his daily patrol, one of which he gets demoted to personnel for, for a few days, before being drafted back into homicide. It’s in personnel that he learns that the mayor is trying to encourage women police officers and he meets and tries to rattle a young female officer who is trying to become an inspector.

When he gets brought back to homicide again, after his partner gets killed investigating a robbery in progress while Harry was cooling his heels in personnel, he finds that the same female officer is his new partner. And this is the movie’s trump card because it manages to deal with inherent sexism in the police force in a positive way... not that we’d had any reason to suspect that Callahan was in any way sexist from the previous movies... but it also gives Clint Eastwood the best co-star he’s ever had (with probably some of the best chemistry too)... 

None other than the, then relatively unknown, Tyne Daly... the great Tyne Daly... plays his new partner Inspector Kate Moore and, boy, does she make an impression in this movie. She does an absolutely fantastic job here as a newcomer to homicide trying to deal with stuff like an autopsy and Harry’s chilly reception but, not only that, she does a great job almost stealing the limelight from Eastwood and credibly working with the actor too, in relatively few scenes (it’s a fairly short movie in the series). We see them create a working relationship which blossoms into a partnership of mutual respect and friendship. So much so that, when she saves Harry’s life for the second time in the movie, during the climactic stalk, chase and shoot finale, she dies from taking a few bullets intended for Harry... and the audience really feels it. Along with Harry of course, who literally blows the body of her killer to bits in the next scene.

So yeah, that unique partnership of Eastwood and Daly, never repeated as far as I can remember, absolutely makes this movie the best of the Dirty Harry films in my book. Once again, Harry has a different catchphrase... this one a sarcastic ‘Marvellous’ every time Inspector Moore does or says something questionable. But, Moore is also given her own catchphrase in this, “Don’t concern yourself Inspector Callahan” which she paraphrases with her last words at the end of the picture.  Now in the previous picture in the series, Magnum Force (reviewed by me here), David Soul was spotted and given the role of Hutch in the hugely successful TV show Starsky And Hutch. Similarly, Tyne Daly does such a good job in this movie it finally led to her hugely successful TV show, as Mary Beth Lacey in Cagney And Lacey, five years later. I like to think of Inspector Moore as a younger, more loose spirited version of Daly’s future signature role. 

Once again, the film is nicely lensed and has some good, creative shot design. One nice touch, for example, is when Harry leaves the hospital room, where his former partner is dying, to go out into the lobby to talk to his boss. As that set of information is conveyed with a conversation between the two men, more information is beings simultaneously given via the big intensive care observation window between the two characters, as we watch Harry’s partner die in the background through the window. 

The music in this one is pretty great too. This is the only Dirty Harry film which doesn’t have a score by composer Lalo Schifrin. I don’t know why but the producers enlisted the help of veteran composer Jerry Fielding instead and, it has to be said, he does an excellent job of keeping the tone of the movies set up by Schifrin. It doesn’t veer too far, I reckon, to the kind of score Schifrin would have provided with the assignment and I’m sure Fielding was probably asked to keep to the same kind of sound scape with his music. It was really nice when, starting in 2004, Donna Schifrin founded record label Aleph primarily to release and showcase her husband’s scores... the Dirty Harry soundtracks finally became commercially available on CD and, even though Schifrin didn’t compose the third, they were nice enough to release Fielding’s score for The Enforcer. So I guess they must have liked it too and it’s a nice thing to do for the fans of this series of movies.

And that’s me done on this third entry in the franchise. The film ends grimly with Harry standing over the corpse of his new partner on Alcatraz island while a helicopter lands to pay the ransom to the kidnappers that Harry has just wiped out. The Enforcer was intended to be the final Dirty Harry film but, seven years later, after a string of box office flops for the actor, he was persuaded to play Harry again. So I’ll be revisiting that one again soon. 

Magnum Force

Soul Reaver

Magnum Force
Directed by Ted Post
USA 1973
Warner Brothers
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoiler.

For the second Dirty Harry movie, Ted Post took over direction although, it’s been said more than once that things on set were bad between him and Eastwood and, allegedly, Eastwood ended up directing a fair amount of the picture himself. I’m assuming there may be some truth to that and Eastwood certainly had proven himself a good director already, with his masterpiece Play Misty For Me (reviewed here). 

Magnum Force takes an idea for one of the rejected scripts for the original Dirty Harry (which I reviewed here) about a rogue team of killer cops, meting out their own lethal brand of justice, when the bad guys get away or are allowed to walk due to  the stupidity of the legal system. This was inspired by the Brazilian death squads that were in the news at the time. 

There was a good reason why Eastwood particularly wanted to bring this story idea to the screen. The huge positive reaction to the first movie was more than tempered by an outcry that his central character was some kind of vigilante, taking the law into his own hands. While this isn’t actually true if you pay attention on that first movie, that was how the film was being perceived and criticised by some and so Eastwood liked the idea of Harry Callahan using the system he hates so much to align himself against a group of conspirators within the same department he works for. And the guy who co-wrote the screenplay was... John Milius (future director of Conan The Barbarian, reviewed here).

Now anyone who’s seen Milius talk in an interview will know the director is not shy about his love of heavy artillery and war and this certainly comes to the fore in the film, with a lot of talk about the various guns the police are using and the way Harry matches up the shells from the bodies at the crime scene with one he manages to ‘stage vanish’ during a shooting competition. 

And it’s especially prevalent in the opening credits, where Lalo Schifrin’s excellent score (probably his best of the four of the five films he provided for the series) plays out against a hand holding a Magnum pistol in profile against a vivid red background... which looks especially good on Blu Ray. Then as the credits end, there’s Clint Eastwood’s voice performing a heavily truncated voice over of his famous “do you feel lucky” speech as the gun is turned towards the audience and fired at them, presumably a nod by Milius to a similar moment in the 1903 silent film The Great Train Robbery, which scared audiences so much at the time. 

We then move onto the story and we have the relatively recently deceased David Soul playing one of the four cops who are going around executing criminals. It’s said... and this is almost certainly true... that he was spotted to play Hutch in Starsky And Hutch (which debuted on TV in 1975) because of this film. We also have Hal Holbrook (who many readers may best remember as the priest in John Carpenter’s The Fog, reviewed here) as an obstacle of a superior officer who is also embroiled in what’s going on... you’ll probably figure out his part in all this before it gets revealed on screen.

No mention is made of Harry Callahan’s end scene in Dirty Harry, where he throws away his badge and walks away from policing. I guess he must have changed his mind. Mention is made of his partner in that film retiring but this is the first film where his partner gets killed... quite possibly because of him, or at least, because of what he finds out. 

It’s not a particularly action packed film but it is nicely put together and the pace never really feels slow. As a kid I always liked this one the least (until The Dead Pool came out) but these days I actually quite like it. Again, it benefits hugely from being able to watch it in its original aspect ratio, as opposed to the pan and scan versions we would have seen on TV in the late 1970s. It’s also very much a seventies film in that little details of shots which are aesthetically pleasing are dwelled on, even though they don’t contribute to the unfolding of the story in any major way. So, for instance, there’s a wonderful shot of one of the killer’s police boots splashing through a wet puddle, followed by a shot highlighting the wet footprints of those boots on some steps. It’s a pleasure to watch things like this which are just catching little elements of life, rather than having to have everything leading into something else in the story, to be honest. 

Harry’s catchphrase in this movie is “A man has to know his limitations” but I can’t remember if this made it into any of the other movies. Certainly, although Schifrin’s score is excellent and using a more frenetic melodic palette, the orchestration is the same and, although there’s not a lot of it in the movie, Harry’s theme does make the occasional appearance in at least one scene (I think it’s only one scene actually but, it’s certainly there).

The final showdown between Harry and the motorcycle cops is lengthy but doesn't really feel particularly climactic. The bikers seem to go down too easily (these days they’d get up for another few rounds of fighting) and David Soul’s villain especially, left to last (well, almost last... but again, that gets into spoiler territory), literally just drives his bike off a ship into some water and, well, the fall supposedly kills him. That’s probably true to life but, yeah, you wouldn’t get away with that in Hollywoodland these days, that’s for sure.

The film is pretty good though. Certainly bleak but also with a certain charm and Eastwood in particular is very good as the lead here. And Schifrin’s score really picks up the pace and follows through, creating tension in shots which might not work if it wasn’t for his persistent half jazz, half suspense stylings. Magnum Force further cements Eastwood’s international superstar status and it’s revisiting films like this that reminds me why he has that reputation. I’m looking forward now to revisiting the third one in the series next, as that one was always my favourite (even without Schifrin on scoring duties). 

Dirty Harry

Punk, rocked!

Dirty Harry
USA 1971 Directed by Don Siegel
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Dirty Harry and the homicidal maniac. Harry’s the one with the badge.
Poster Tagline.

You don't assign him to murder cases - you just turn him loose.
Alternate Poster Tagline.

Well okay then. I’ve not seen Dirty Harry in about 40 years so it was due time for a revisit, I think. I’m a little more impressed with it now than I was when I first saw it in the late 1970s/early 80s on television but, I liked it enough to see all the sequels at the time (catching the last two of the five on their first run cinema releases). This one’s directed by classic Hollywood director Don Siegel (who I will always remember best for the original 1950s version of Invasion Of The Bodysnatchers... reviewed here) and stars Clint Eastwood as the titular Inspector Harry Callahan... who these days, in real life, probably wouldn’t be on a police force for very long (although, since writing this and seeing what’s going on with ICE in the US of late... maybe he would).

With the background turmoil of a load of assassinations, the Miranda rights, the Vietnam war and a general feeling of overall descent in the USA... Dirty Harry came out just at the right time. The character was, perhaps, not necessarily an antidote to the political turmoil of the times but certainly someone who highlighted the increasing sense of futility the general public were feeling at the time. At least that’s what I think and I certainly suspect that would account for the high box office take on this one. 

Harry is a judge, jury and executioner who is much more concerned with cutting through the red tape and upholding justice, rather than doggedly following the law (which anyone who has done any time on jury service, would recognise are two entirely different things). Clint Eastwood does really well in this one and deserves the iconic status that this film cemented for him in American cinema (following the equally iconic portrayals of his spaghetti western characters for director Sergio Leone in the 1960s). Dirty Harry, like most detective and crime stories, transplants the lone hero figure associated with the mythic American western and continues to lionise this style of character at a time which was ripe to challenge authority in an urban setting. To say the film and lead character was influential is perhaps, an understatement. Not just in films either. The comic book character Judge Dredd, for example, would surely not exist in the form he first appeared in without the legacy of Dirty Harry... just as Johnny Alpha, aka Strontium Dog, would not have existed without the influence of those Leone westerns.

The film looks great, too. Starting off with a series of scroll downs on a memorial stone to represent the San Francisco police who have given their lives in the line of duty, the film quickly establishes the villain, the Scorpio killer (inspired by the real life Zodiac killer), played by Andrew Robinson (who Star Trek fans will be know for his regular role of Garrick in Deep Space Nine, of course). We get the sniper rifle panning around the urban jungle where he shoots a woman swimming in a roof top pool, Lalo Shifrin’s landmark score already doing some heavy lifting in establishing an off-kilter theme to represent the twisted mind of the killer. When Harry goes to investigate, through the opening credits, there are some really nice, unusual angles as we watch Clint Eastwood’s character climb a cooling tower to figure out where the shot came from. Seeing it in its intended wide screen aspect ratio, which I probably wouldn’t have when it was first screened on TV, the film’s beautiful shot design and fluid camera movement is really effective.

This continues throughout the course of the film as Clint’s gum chewing hero goes about his business. The director also pitches different textures against each other in aesthetically pleasing ways, such as when half of the screen is the front of a building with nothing going on, while the other half is Clint walking away from the character, up an alleyway in long shot. It’s good stuff. 

There are also some nice instances of visual shorthand in the movie, cleverly built to tell a piece of story with no dialogue or further clarification needed, such as when a shot of a cigarette falling into a pile outside a car door shows us instantly that the driver has been sitting in the car, with the motor running, for a substantial amount of time. There are a few regrettable moments where, for instance, various people are standing still in the street to watch the shooting of the film, which the director presumably hopes the audience won’t notice but, even so, it’s a tremendously good looking movie and, seeing it in its original aspect ratio really helps it. 

It’s become a cliche now but, this may well have been one of the first movies to feature a character running around from phone booth to phone booth in a city, reacting to the demands of the killer... although I suspect this was a phenomenon on TV before this. It’s well done though, with the majority of the sequence utilising no music until, in a nice piece of soundtrack spotting, Schifrin’s powerful score kicks in for the climax of that particular sequence. And even the ending of the film, where Harry repeats his famous “Did he fire five shots or six?” speech, has a final result which mirrors the corpse in the water at the aftermath of the first bullet shot fired at the start of the picture. 

At the end of the film, Harry mimics Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon (reviewed by me here) by throwing away his cop badge into the same river as the bad guy he’s just dispatched and turning his back on authority for good. One wonders, if the studio would have known the film would be so popular as to require a sequel which kinda ignores this final act, whether that sequence would have stayed in. Several actors including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Steve McQueen and Frank Sinatra turned down the main lead on this one and, one also wonders if they would have, if they’d known how much the film would capture the zeitgeist of the times, declined the role as they did. Certainly, John Wayne obviously regretted it, compensating by making his own versions of the urban western with McQ and Brannigan. 

This film didn’t put Clint Eastwood on the map, he was there already but, it certainly cemented his reputation as a number one box office draw and, honestly, I’m really looking forward to revisiting the other four movies in this series, which I got for my birthday* in the Blu Ray box set Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry Collection so, yeah, more to come here. 

*over a year ago now, since time of writing.

Tarantula

Firefox VS Spider

Tarantula
USA 1955
Directed by Jack Arnold
Universal/101 Films 
Blu Ray Zone B/DVD Region 2

Warning: Small, eight legged spoilers coming your way. 

“I’d say you were the biggest liar since Baron Munchhausen”
quote from Tarantula

Well Tarantula is a film I wasn’t that impressed with when I first saw it, although I absolutely adore 1950s, atomic age B-movies and... revisiting it now on a very good Blu Ray transfer put out by 101 Films as part of a dual edition (yeah, some companies are still putting both the Blu Ray and DVD in the same set combinations)... I’d have to say I’m still not all that swayed over by it. Jack Arnold was an absolute master of these kinds of films with things like the first two Creature From The Black Lagoon films, The Incredible Shrinking Man and, even uncredited work on the classic This Island Earth. This one falls fairly flat though, especially when you compare it to, say, the absolute masterpiece that was THEM! (reviewed by me here). It does have a couple of things going for it though...

One is that some (but not quite all) of the special effects and make up effects in this one are handled pretty well, for the most part. The other thing is that the script does nothing to make light of the ridiculous plot (although the make up in one scene may well make you laugh) and the actors are all very good at projecting a certain amount of gravitas around the story. These actors include monster movie regular John Agar as the perpetually smiley, heroic Dr. Matt Hastings, Leo G. Carrol as the resident mad scientist Prof. Gerald Deemer and the sensuous Mara Corday as the professor’s new work experience student (as we’d express it these days) and love interest for Agar, Stephanie 'Steve' Clayton (who would go on to play a few supporting roles for her friend Clint Eastwood in The Gauntlet, Sudden Impact, Pink Cadillac and The Rookie but, I’m getting ahead of myself... I’ll get to Clint in a little while). 

Also in the cast, as the sherif of the small town of Desert Rock and friend to Agar’s Hastings, is Nestor Paiva. Regular readers may remember Paiva as the boat captain in both Creature From The Black Lagoon (reviewed here) and Revenge Of The Creature (reviewed here)... and also for his role in The Falcon In Mexico (reviewed here). I almost didn’t recognise him at first because, although he was born in California, I always associate him with playing roles with a strong, sometimes Mexican accent and, also, his almost bald head here is prominently displayed, rather than covered with a hat. Hearing him speak perfect American English was a bit of a shock, to be honest. 

The film opens quite starkly and effectively. A camera pans around the bleak desert landscape until it fixes on a man wandering through and then collapsing. He dies but by then we can see he has deformed features. This is because, as we later find out, the serum Professor Deemer is working on to make animals grow to giant sizes in order to solve the world’s food shortage problems, causes an unnaturally quick manifestation of the rare disease acromegaly when injected into a human. Acromegaly, is of course, the famous rare condition contracted by famous character actor Rondo Hatton, which pushes the bones and muscles around the face to give everything a warped look (something which gave him good work in various villainous roles in his short, painful life... the Rondo Awards are named after him).  

Anyway, the professor buries another of his initially willing human victims, after being attacked by him and... the laboratory is partially burned down. What he doesn’t realise is that, while he was rendered unconscious in the fight, the dying human lab rat injected him with the formula as well... not to mention the fact that the professor’s already unnaturally huge tarantula has escaped and, of course, it roams the desert killing cattle, horses and humans until everybody can put two and two together... mostly as a not bad special effect superimposition of a real tarantula interacting with miniature sets and being projected against real life actors in some sequences. I think there’s probably some puppet work here too but, in regards to the big spider’s many on screen appearances, the puppetry is kept to a minimum.

So that’s the set up and, it’s not a terrible film to be sure (fourth biggest box office hit of the year) but, I have to say, the storyline and lack of any real twists and turns leaves me a little cold when compared to other movies like this. However, some of the make up effects, such as when Leo G. Carrol first shows signs of acromegaly, are put together extremely well. Alas, on the last time you see him, just before he is injected with venom by the tarantula so it can eat him, the make up is so over the top that he appears to have one eyeball that has melted all the way down the side of his face. If this sounds silly, it is.

What also sounds silly but, really isn’t, is the way the live footage of a real tarantula is scaled up and inserted into the shots. This kind of approach rarely looks good but, in Tarantula, Jack Arnold just about gets away with it... it looks quite acceptable and decent. I say almost because, on one tell tale shot where the big guy is one again clambering over a small mountain, some of its legs disappear behind the sky so, you can definitely see where the live action and the miniature were badly lined up, in that instance. 

And, big spoiler here, the Tarantula is finally put down in the final reel by a jet fighter pilot firing rockets or napalm or some such. The close up shots of the pilots eyes (pretty much the only thing visible of his face) combined with his voice, made me sit up straight. I looked it up and this is, indeed, the second uncredited screen role in a Jack Arnold film for a young Clint Eastwood, seen here piloting a jet long before his stint in Firefox. And, of course, this film’s leading lady would, as I said earlier, play a supporting part in four of Clint’s movies too. I wonder if this film is the first time they met... or even if they did meet as, I don’t think Clint shares a screen with anyone in this film... just sits in the cockpit, talking into his radio. 

And that’s me pretty much done with the quite entertaining but, really not great, Tarantula. The score is a mix of original and old rerecorded and tracked in pieces, from the sound of it... the opening Universal logo was the tip off for me on that front, which begins with the same opening bars as Creature From The Black Lagoon. It’s all quite effective though and very much of its time. Let’s face it, though, while Tarantula may not have the thrills and spills of certain other, more thoughtful atomic age monster movies, it’s still quite watchable and, if you have a hankering for spending time with this kind of thing (and who doesn’t?), then you’ll certainly want to be adding Tarantula to your list, if you’ve not seen it before. 

Play Misty For Me

Fatal Distraction

Play Misty For Me
USA 1971 Directed by Clint Eastwood
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

You know, I hadn’t seen this movie since I watched it on TV in the late 1970s. I don’t know why I never revisited before now because my impressions of it as a 9 or 10 year old were that it was a well made movie, despite my young reservations that it wouldn’t be because it was being directed by the main lead. So I remembered liking this one, even though I find Eastwood a bit hit and miss in terms of movies he appears in and also as a director. So it was a no brainer when I saw the Blu Ray going for £4 a few years back in Fopp records, for me to pick this one up and add it to the ‘to be watched’ pile.

Play Misty For Me was Eastwood’s directorial debut. He’s helmed a fair few movies now as opposed to just starring in them (and staring in them), although obviously not as many as he’s acted in for sure. This one starts off very strongly with an overhead, helicopter tracking shot which was something which became a cliché in 1970s and 80s cinema but this one is a little different because it starts out at the sea and creeps up on some cliffs to set up an establishing shot of Eastwood outside a cliff-side apartment. We join him briefly looking for someone who isn’t around and then he gets into his open top car and shots of him driving are intercut with the return of the overhead helicopter shot tracking his progress into the small town of Carmel-By-The-Sea (where Eastwood, many years later, would become Mayor). The music is jazzy and cool and there’s a wonderful looking font in bright green which really gives the titles a distinctive ‘old Hollywood’ feel... more on that atmosphere later.

He then turns up and takes over from his friend and co-worker as the local radio DJ. It’s established from early on that one of his callers is known for ringing up and asking him to “Play Misty for me”, at which point he obliges by playing Errol Garner’s recording. So the source of all his troubles in the movie is set up quite early on. Very soon after, he goes to his local bar, which features director Don Siegel (who, directed Eastwood in various movies including Dirty Harry and who also helmed the classic, original version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, which I reviewed here) as the bar tender. A girl is waiting at the bar who Dave, that’s Eastwood’s character, is told is impossible to pick up. So Dave and the bartender play this wonderful, completely made up, ridiculous game which is intended to spark interest in those watching. The rules of the game are that when an onlooking girl has joined Dave for a drink, he wins. It’s a fun sequence but the character needn’t have bothered because, as it transpires later, the woman waiting is the ‘Misty’ girl and she was there specifically to meet him and try to win his heart and attention. The overbearing fan is called Evelyn and she’s played here extremely well by Jessica Walter. After Eastwood’s character sleeps with her in a ‘casual’ manner, she suddenly becomes his clutching, stifling, true love... which is awkward for Eastwood, he is trying to reignite the flames with his recent ex-girlfriend Tobie, played here by Donna Mills.

From here on things get dark, as Dave can’t shake Evelyn’s persistent attentions and people get injured or killed, not to mention a scene where Evelyn deliberately slits both her own wrists so Dave won’t send her away and make good on his date with Tobie. If you’re wondering if this feels a little familiar then, yes, I remember going to see a 1980s movie called Fatal Attraction which was, pretty much, the same movie in different clothes. I think a few films have used this as a template now but I think this is probably the strongest version of this kind of tale I’ve seen. At least from the United States.

Eastwood does really well in this, I have to say. Not just as an actor, which you kind of expect by this point and he’s got a large, screen presence... but as a director. This is not in any way a stumbling effort, this is a very strong directorial piece and I can see why he was able to carry on directing stuff. Although there’s no one or two things which are absolutely stand out on this, it isn’t shabbily done and all the compositions are cleanly framed with people meticulously placed within the design. Because of this and combined with the jazzy soundtrack, the film almost feels like a throwback to a more ‘classic Hollywood’ time. I already mentioned the font used on the opening credits and that just provides another layer to the veneer of 1950s style to the proceedings. This one almost feels like what Hitchcock might have done with the same material ten or fifteen years prior to the release of this movie. Also, Eastwood shot the whole thing in a month and considerably under budget, is my understanding.

While Eastwood is pretty good in the role of DJ Dave, Jessica Walter’s performance in this is just amazing. She manages to ‘play crazy’ really well, coming off as normal a lot of the time at first but giving tell tale moments of psychopathic behaviour from very early on which blossom into full scale ‘murder maven’ by about three quarters of the way through. I’d say a lot of the movie is hinging on this performance work and she really is pitch perfect through this. The audience learns to be wary of her a lot quicker than Eastwood’s character does, I would say. She makes a fine nutter (sorry, meant to say she makes a fine sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder).

If I had one negative thing I could possibly say that there’s a part of the movie, about three quarters of the way through when Evelyn has been arrested and taken into custody for psychiatric treatment, where the movie just kinda stops dead for a while. This involves a long, poetic love scene of Eastwood and Donna Mills making love in the forest (nowadays we’d call it dogging) set to a Roberta Flack recording of The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face which, is okay... but then the film goes ito an extended sequence of various bands playing their sets at the Monterey Jazz Festival where Dave and his fellow DJ take their gals, which leaves a little clue as to the twist awaiting Eastwood’s character towards the end of the movie but, it’s mostly just people watching and enjoying the music as the camera explores the crowd.

Now, I was puzzled as to why this extended ‘break’ from the movie was here to be honest and I realise, on reflection, that this scene does serve an important purpose and I also suspect it might have been added at some stage as a ‘rescue’ moment. You see, the scenes after Evelyn has been arrested make up the denouement of the movie and can only take place once Evelyn has been discharged from psychiatric observation. If that had followed in sequence directly after her arrest or even after the love scene, the audience would possibly think the pacing of the movie was a little too fast to get there, is my guess. I think this long pause in the story is a deliberate thing to give the audience a feeling of some considerable time having passed, to make the final set pieces arrive at a more natural point in the narrative. So keeping the right tone almost by stealth, as it were. It might even have been added after a rough cut of the rushes highlighted this problem for all I know. And I don’t know... that’s for sure. But looking back on it, it really works for the film so... yeah, Eastwood really seemed to know what he was doing here.

And that’s my main take away from the movie I think. With Play Misty For Me, Eastwood proved, in no uncertain terms, that he was just as good behind a camera as he is in front of it. It’s a brilliant movie and one I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone into the technical art of film. I possibly prefer his movie The Eiger Sanction to this one but Play Misty For Me is phenomenal and I hope they show this one in film school. It’s a neatly put together movie and I think the various imitations of it over the years, like the aforementioned Fatal Attraction, are a testament to the power of this one. Definitely a highlight of Eastwood’s long career, as far as I’m concerned.

Revenge Of The Creature

The Giller Memorandum

Revenge Of The Creature
USA 1955
Directed by Jack Arnold
Universal Blu Ray Zone A

After the incredible success of Creature From The Black Lagoon in 1954 (which I reviewed here), a sequel was inevitable and director Jack Arnold returned for the gig. If you’re into your trivia, this one was released (less widely is my understanding) in 3D in selected venues and so this one counts as the very first time a 3D movie had received a sequel shot in the same process.

Now, although this was reportedly the most successful of the three Creature features in terms of box office receipts, Revenge Of The Creature is not nearly as good as the first movie and the quality does tend to go down in terms of the three pictures as they go forward (the posters on the next one in the series promised much but had a huge drawback and is the most disappointing of the series). There are almost no characters joining the returning director from the first movie in this one. We basically have the titular Gill-man, who we last saw floating into the depths of the Black Lagoon as quite possibly a lifeless corpse (played by various actors, at least one of whom was the same as in the first picture) and we have, for about the first 15 minutes but in a much larger role than he had in the first one, Nestor Paiva as Captain Lucas, who takes the two man ‘safari expedition’ into the same area that he previously encountered the creature.

The story line is not nearly as punchy as the original but actually delivers a lot more on the expectations of the original picture. That is to say, this time around it’s more or less a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong (reviewed here). So, man brings creature back to be experimented on, trained and exhibited at Florida’s Marineland (see some of my early Al Adamson reviews for more mention of Marineland) and, even though the scientists are a bit mean to it (giving electric shocks to obey the command of “No” or “Stop”), it develops a kind of fish-man equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome, escapes and then stalks the lead female scientist while she’s out having a good time with her new leading man. Of course, all comes right at the end and we’re left with a conclusion which perfectly mirrors the final shot of the last movie. That’s about all of the story I need to cover right here.

In terms of actors we have the human ‘almost-villain’, who is a much lighter character and is the one responsible for bringing back the creature to civilisation... Joe, played by John Bromfield. We also have the leading lady Helen, played by the charming Lori Nelson and the real leading man, Professor Clete, played by John Agar. These last two, even though they spend a lot of the movie trying to shock condition the creature, thus ensuring the audience are fully sympathetic to the Gill-Man’s plight, are actually pretty sympathetic characters so we can completely root for John Agar as he runs around Florida with the police in a desperate attempt to retrieve his girlfriend from the clutches of the creature.

And, it’s an okay film but, like I said, nowhere near as good as the first movie. I’m not sure if there was any new score written for this one as a lot of it seems to be tracked in from the first movie, including the use of that three note creature theme probably even more often than in the previous installment. It has a certain mood or atmosphere that the first one doesn’t have which, due to the differences in the plot and the stalking of the creature running around Florida with Helen, as he tries to stay close to a water source, takes on an almost ‘slasher film’ atmosphere to it, it seems to me. Like I said, it’s a step down but in mimicking King Kong’s idea of a monster brought to civilisation and then breaking loose, it’s not just a retread of the first one, which I guess we can be thankful for. For that matter, neither is the third in the series but... yeah, I don’t really want to say too much about the third yet. I’ll get there on another review.

Of course, by now, Millicent Patrick, who had designed the original version of the title character, had already had her career ruined by Bud Westmore and was not around to work on the picture. I think where this really falls down for Universal is in the next film where... oh yeah... not talking about that one yet. One person who is around on this is a very young, uncredited Clint Eastwood in his first movie role, as a lab technician in one scene (see pictured above). That always makes me laugh.

So, anyway, this is one short review but it’s really not the movie the first one was and, I’d not recommend seeing Revenge Of The Creature (who has no real revenge issues at all, from what I can make out) without having first watched the glorious Creature From The Black Lagoon. So definitely check out the first one if you’re thinking of watching this one at some point.

Yurusarezaru Mono (Unforgiven)

Ronin Scared

Yurusarezaru Mono (Unforgiven)
2013 Japan
Directed by Sang-il Lee
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Okay then.

Yurusarezaru Mono is a new Japanese samurai remake of Clint Eastwood’s film Unforgiven. I should probably warn you of the fact that the IMDB is reminding me that it’s 22 years since I last saw that film at my local cinema... Cinema: now deceased. Reviewer: Not quite deceased yet.

Bearing in mind I saw the film only once, I’m remembering that I thought it was an okay film but not enough to ever bother watching again. As such, I really can’t remember much of anything about it so, if you’re after a review which can compare and contrast this new version to the original, then you might want to go and read somebody else’s review with that specific agenda instead.

Now then, the fact that this is a chambara remake of a gritty American Western, which in itself was a throwback, in some ways, to the old revisionist Westerns by the likes of director Sam Pekinpah, is a bit of a twist. Usually it’s the other way around, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no, to be honest... in fairly equal measures.

Let me take the example of Akira Kurosawa because, quite apart from him being my favourite director, some of his films have quite famously been remade as Westerns... and also because some of his work seems to be directly referenced in Yurusarezaru Mono... but I’ll get to that part later.

Three of Kurosawa’s chambara were famously remade as Westerns. The Italian giant Sergio Leone remade Kurosawa’s Yojimbo as A Fistful Of Dollars (which hugely helped establish Clint Eastwood as a movie star and helped him make the crossover from television) and two American directors remade Rashomon (as The Outrage) and Seven Samurai (as The Magnificent Seven)... so there is an established and easily recognisable legacy of period samurai and ronin movies being recast into an “old West” setting (in fact, Yojimbo was also later remade again, as a 1930s gangster movie starring Bruce Willis in the role originally played by Toshiro Mifune and then Clint Eastwood, in a film called Last Man Standing). However, you might want to ask yourself just why these films, especially those of Kurosawa, have been picked on as source material in this manner.

Well, one reason may be the similarity in the village/wilderness setting and the commonality of the archetypal hero/outsider who travels to a place, fixes things and then leaves it behind as he/she goes on to the next port of call... or dies trying. That’s one thing these two genres have in common, to a certain extent. But let me get back to Kurosawa for a minute...

To the Japanese people, certainly in the 1950s and 1960s at any rate, after the global recognition bestowed on Rashomon at various film festivals including, famously, the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival... Kurosawa was always looked on as a bit of an outsider. In his own country, his films were perceived as having a very Western flavour to them (in the sense of not seeming like they were a product of the East). This attitude was best summed up by one of his friends, Donald Ritchie, who I was lucky to catch as part of an all day Kurosawa seminar event at least a decade or so ago at the National Film Theatre. He basically said that this attitude from Kurosawa’s Japanese audience seemed to stem purely from the point of view that Rashomon, and much of his later work, was such a success worldwide. The Japanese had always thought of themselves as inscrutable and incomprehensible to the Western mind, and were proud of that part of their worldwide reputation. The fact that Kurosawa was acclaimed on a global scale meant, to them, that he must be directing his films in a way which was compatible to the tastes of Western audiences and, therefore, not truly Japanese.

Which is kind of a load of hogwash when you think about it. All directors are influenced by the huge range of films they have seen from all kinds of countries and the Japanese, including Kurosawa, were no exception. This is as it should be with an artist.

Now indulge me for a minute while I get back to Kurosawa again because it is, I promise, relevant to the film in question... somewhat.

Kurosawa was a life long fan of the famous Western director John Ford. When they met once, Ford said to Kurosawa of his films... “You really like rain.” The two got on famously and, from what I understand, Kurosawa even started to dress like Ford did on set after this meeting. So the point I’m trying to make here is that all directors are equal in their multi-cultural influences and, though it’s not been done that often in reverse (at least not being identified as such... I’m sure a lot of Japanese films may have been influenced by things such as the classic Hollywood Western), the fact that we have a samurai film which is a remake of a 1990s Hollywood Western, especially one which was originally directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, really shouldn’t be a surprise and certainly not an issue. So now I’ve spent all that time pointing out that there’s nothing new here... let’s just forget about that for a while, yeah?

Yurusarezaru Mono is quite spectacular in its execution. It’s a small story of a group of prostitutes who want revenge on the two men who cut up their colleague and who are blocked on the reward they are offering by the local “sheriff” who has his own agenda. This includes beating up and making an example of anyone who wanders into his village to try to make good on claiming that reward and killing the two men who he let go.

Ken Watanabe plays Jubei, the Eastwood character who is pulled out of retirement to kill the two men and claim the reward by an old war buddy. He is backed up by some fantastic character actors who I know I’ve seen many times before... but I have no idea who they are because the IMDB, appallingly, rarely puts photo avatars next to the names of actors and actresses unless they’re English, American or “extremely famous”. But everyone in this is absolutely excellent and, although it’s a small story, it’s a visual treat which, coupled with the excellent acting and sense of drama, maintains a certain pace that ensures you are not going to be getting tired of any of the on screen antics while it’s playing out.

Now, it doesn’t contain a great deal of action in terms of spectacular swordplay, which many of the chambara lionised by Western audiences tend to display, with the few action scenes in this one being much more up close and personal than you might expect from this kind of cinema. And also, there’s a strong emphasis on gunplay too, which goes hand in hand with the use of swords and daggers (this is set early on in the Meji period in Japan) but this, also, is something of a tradition in this kind of cinema and, although the gun play is pushed a lot more forward into the mix, this movie is definitely an Eastern, as opposed to a Western.

Two scenes echo famous scenes by Kurosawa... the first being the introduction of a character who accompanies Ken Watanabe’s character Jubei and his friend (depending on which translation you are reading of the names). An introduction which mirrors the boisterous and drunken antics of Toshiro Mifune’s character in Seven Samurai to a great extent (and later Horst Buchholz in The Magnificent Seven). The character is even from a certain clan/race of people who are seen as primitive and out of step with the other protagonists in the film... just like the alienated Mifune character was in Kurosawa’s classic.

The other big reference to Kurosawa goes back to the weaponry used in this one. In Yojimbo, much is made by Tatsuya Nakadai’s character Unosuke about the bullet being faster than the sword. It’s all about the contrast and the battle between the new age of weaponry pitted against the “old guard”, represented in Yurusarezaru Mono by Jubei and his war buddy but, more specifically in this instance, by a bounty hunter who is used in the first half of the film to demonstrate the deadly ruthlessness of the main antagonist. This is good stuff but definitely a nod to classic Kurosawa... which is nice actually and not something which would have come up in the original 1992 version of Unforgiven.

Like most films of this type, the character building and dramatic tension is ratcheted up to a resolution expressing itself in a final conflict, where Jubei faces down the villain and a whole roomful of his henchmen on his own (and that’s not a spoiler, honest guv!). I won’t tell you the circumstances leading up to this small scale battle royale, nor the final outcome, but I will say that, as I touched upon earlier, that this is not the spectacular ballet of kinetic violence you would expect from, say, a Zatoichi or Sleepy Eyes Of Death or Lone Wolf and Cub movie... or even a Hanzo The Razor installment. Nor is it the swift and deadly final cut of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo sequel Sanjuro. This is a battle which, like most in this film, is all shot tight in on the main protagonist and which dislocates you by not showing the periphery of his battle, as he hacks and punches his way through it, to any great degree.

Also, the director plays with slowing down and speeding up the action at will, altering and enhancing the sound design as he does this and, although that sounds like it’s a hard line to walk, the director manages to pull off this kind of fight choreography exceptionally well, against all odds, with the result that... although maybe not as pretty to look at, it’s certainly a kind of violent conflict that you, as an audience, feel more in your gut. It’s not my preferred choice, by a long shot, but it’s a perfectly valid artistic direction to take and, as I said, the man in charge manages to really make it work well.

So there you have it. A quite lovely, sometimes gritty film with a surprizingly American style soundtrack which, again against all odds, works unusually well with the on screen action. Most everything about this movie works, to be honest. It’s damn near perfect. Whether you’ll like it or not depends on your appreciation of the conventions of either the chambara or Hollywood Western film genres but, as far as I’m concerned, this ones got everything going for it. Unlike the original movie it’s based on, this one is definitely a film I’ll happily pay a few return visits to in the coming years.

Le Streghe (The Witches)

Streghe Counter

Le Streghe (The Witches)
Italy/France 1967
Directed by Mauro Bolognini, Vittorio De Sica, 
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi and Luchino Visconti
Warner Archives Edition Region 1

You know... I’ve been trying to see this film for quite a few years now.

It’s somewhat ironic to me that I can now, finally, buy a copy on US Region 1 DVD when it turns out that the reason I’ve not been able to see it for all these years is that United Artists have kept it suppressed all this time outside the European market (of which I am technically a part of, but our DVD and VHS releases have always been dominated by what’s available stateside). The reason, apparently, is that they didn’t want it to interfere with their new rising star Clint Eastwood’s career in his native country. Although, personally, I don’t think he did that bad a job in it.

In the absence of the film itself, I’ve had to make do with both the official soundtrack, finally released a couple of years ago in a limited edition from Digitmovies, which contains the majority of the score as composed by Piero Piccioni... and it’s a real toe tapper (I’m listening to it again as I type these words) and a hard to get compilation album of scores Morricone composed for Pasolini movies, which contains a 9 minute suite of the music from his section of the movie.

The reason I have wanted to see this movie for so long is because I read that it had Clint Eastwood taking on such famous comic book characters as Flash Gordon, Batman, The Phantom, Mandrake The Magician and Diabolik. In fact, he gets bashed about by them quite a bit.

Let me clarify that, just to let that sink in... Clint Eastwood gets beaten up by Flash Gordon, Batman, The Phantom, Mandrake The Magician and Diabolik.

So... you can totally understand why I’ve been so eager to see this one, right?

Anyway... Le Streghe is finally “out of prison” and it's made up of five separate stories directed by such luminaries as Mauro Bolognini, Vittorio De Sica, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi and Luchino Visconti. Seriously people! How do you take it upon yourself to suppress a movie and let it rot in a vault somewhere when its directors include De Sica, Pasolini and Visconti? What the actual bleepity bleep bleep?

So... um... keeping my rage under control here... I’m pretty sure I can understand why a studio would want to suppress a movie like this, having watched it and finding it almost unwatchable... but even so... people need to see these directors’ work on this.

The five stories in this movie... The Witch Burned Alive, Civic Sense, The Earth As Seen From The Moon, The Girl From Sicily and A Night Like Any Other... all have a director apiece and all have one thing in common, which is the fantastic actress Silvana Mangano, who I’m guessing this film was built around as some kind of showcase to her acting talent. In terms of showing the versatility and, as it happens, great beauty of this actress, the film succeeds well. I don’t recall ever seeing her in anything before (unless you count her much later role in Lynch’s Dune) but I now want to see her in anything I can because she’s just hypnotic whenever she is on screen by herself.

This is especially true of the segment directed by Pasolini and which stars and ageing Toto, an actor who was a “big deal” in his native Italy but who is not such a big name, it seems to me, over here. This segment requires Mangano to play a funny, deaf mute and she does it with such feeling, fragility and passion that you just want to watch this silent performance forever... and turn the wretched movie off whenever she’s not on. The make up and hair in this sequence is unbelievably stylised, deliberately looking like a comic strip... and even the statues in the graveyard look like something drawn by the artists of Asterix. Toto and the actor playing his son wear “big, orange hair” and the whole segment is played for laughs. Laughs which don’t come (I didn’t crack a smile too often, it has to be said) but played for laughs, nevertheless.

The only other dubious pleasure on offer, which is the reason why I wanted to see it in the first place, is the segment where Clint Eastwood plays Mangano’s boring beyond belief "square Johnny" of a husband. The character of the wife is so unfulfilled in her marriage that she keeps slipping into a dreamlike fantasy land where she takes revenge on her husband’s straight-laced ways and indifference to her. Hence, the sequence featuring the various comic book characters. The film gets ironically referential in a way that most movies weren’t in the era this one was produced... in that Clint reads a list of possible cinema trips for the evening and one of the potential films he reads out is A Fistful Of Dollars. Similarly, in one of the later fantasy sequences, he is seen in a costume which is kind of a multi-referencing parody of the costumes he wears in Leone’s films and the ones from his Rawhide days. It’s probably not something he was that happy to have done and one can see how he, and various studio executives, may have felt this role may have compromised his career a little... that and the fact that the film really is, as one person who was in the same room as me when I was watching it said... interminable.

Yeah. Interminable is pretty much right on this one, I’m afraid. Interminable with an upper case I.

Am I glad I saw it? Yeah, because if I hadn’t seen it I would have been chasing it for years, maybe decades. Also, I might never have discovered the young Silvana Mangano if I hadn’t seen this. Although Theroem is still on my “to buy” pile.

Can I recommend it? No. It’s incredibly dull, long winded and tedious. There are a few really great moments in it but these are just so anaesthetised by the creeping monotony that, most times, you won’t really care.

Would I watch it again? I’d say no, for now, but Mangano is beginning to haunt me a little... and the music during the Piccioni scored segments is pretty cool... as is the stupid, 60s cartoon opening credits sequence which matches the name of the film well but manages, like the title, to have nothing to do with the actual movie (there’s a metaphorical witch burning, if you look at it through a deeply skewed lens, in the first segment I suppose).

All in all I’d say stay away from this one unless, like me, you can’t die without having seen it once. And also, be warned, that screening it might kill you... as it slowly erodes your spirit. :-)

Daring Eagles

Where Eagles Dare 1968 US

Directed by Richard G. Hutton

Warner Brothers DVD Region 2

I should have probably seen this movie already but I’m really not big on War films and when I was a kid it seemed to be playing every other week on TV back then... so I sort of avoided it like the plague. My curiosity was piqued, however, when I bought the limited edition Film Score Monthly soundtrack release a few years back. I was quite impressed with Goodwin’s score and the write up of the film in the always excellent liner notes that FSM put out really made me want to give the movie a watch.

Fast forward to my holiday this year and it turns out the house I’d rented had, not only two DVD players, but also a copy of Where Eagles Dare. So made some time on my holiday to sit down and watch what I’d assumed would be a 90 minute movie... only to find the beast was at least two and a half hours long. And it really didn’t need to be.

For the few people other than me who have never bothered to watch this movie, Where Eagles Dare stars Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood and assorted other high profile character actors in the story of a unit that go on a rescue mission to a snowbound German castle behind enemy lines to pull out a British soldier who’s supposedly been shot down by the Nazi’s. But really, this film gets so convoluted and twisty-turny that by the end of the film I had no idea who to trust and who not to. Almost everyone in the film other than Clint Eastwood seems to be not what they seem and I almost lost track of the double agents who turned out to be treble agents etc. Ha! Shot down plane my ass!

Though impressive in intent and scope, I did find this epic movie a bit of a drag and quite unnecessary in some of its ponderous action and suspense sequences, especially towards the last half hour.

The acting by Burton and Eastwood was good (although Eastwood had a deliberately minimalist kind of role, more in keeping with the image he’d recently cultivated in his films for Sergio Leone) but I didn’t really think much of the silliness of some of the things happening. This reached it’s apex for me quite early in the film when Burton and Eastwood decide to get rid of their crashed jeep by pushing it off a cliff edge. Even before the guys have finished pushing it almost, the thing caught fire and burst into flames. Why? For what reason do things burst into flames in these 70s movies? There’s really no need and it defies physics!

I think, at the end of the day, my verdict on Where Eagles Dare is that it’s an overlong but not unentertaining movie which could have used some judicious pruning.

Oh... and it’s got a great score!