In Like Flint

 

Acting On Inflint

In Like Flint
20th Century Fox 1967
Directed by Gordon Douglas
French Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Light spoilers.

You have eyes that keep attracting me,
Dazzling and distracting me,
It’s your Zowie face.
You have a smile, this is disarming,
And style that is alarming,
And such a wowie face.
From Nelson RIddle’s lyrics to the greatest song in movie history, Jerry Goldsmith’s In Like Flint theme.


After the incredible success of Bond spoof/parody Our Man Flint the previous year (reviewed here), in fact, even before that film’s release it would seem, a sequel called In Like Flint was enthusiastically commissioned. It would appear however, according to lead actor James Coburn who played Derek Flint, that the filmmakers, including the director, were not that interested in the film they were making. Coburn has gone on record that it was himself and the stunt choreographer who directed a lot of the finished film between them. Not sure I totally believe that (and I may be prejudiced because I think Douglas has made some good movies) but there may be some truth in that, from a certain point of view, I would guess.

Either way, the lack of backing from the production team doesn’t really come across in the final product, which is another breezy and fun spy movie parody in the vein of the first film. Coburn is back and so is Lee J. Cobb as former boss Lloyd Cramden. After the president is switched under his nose using a special paralysing gas, Cramden is left with the mystery of why the president’s golf swing, which he was timing with his stop watch, took three minutes but only passed in a half a second from his point of view. And then, after a run in with one of the film’s main, soft antagonists played by Jean Hale, Cramden is discredited and suspended from his organisation. Flint believes the problem is coming from within ZOWIE (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage) itself and, he’s half right. The real problem is a network of women operating out of a chain of beauty parlours called Fabulous Face... they want to take control of the world and deliver it into the safer hands of women (and who can blame them), something Flint mocks openly when discovering the truth. Despite acknowledging that the real power in the world is really in the hands of secretaries and mistresses. 

And, yes, the women have been guilty of infiltrating various organisations and causing untold damage but, also, slowly brainwashing women to their ways of thinking and diminishing faith in men via thousands of subliminally loaded hairdryers in various salons around the world. However, when the men they’ve been working with in ZOWIE take the operation from their hands, the last quarter of the movie becomes about the ladies and Flint working together to stop the turncoats’ mad plan to dominate or destroy the world (or something). 

And it’s a great film, which always lands differently every time I revisit it. When I was a kid I always preferred this one slightly more than the excellent original but I’ve flip flopped on that as I’ve got older. In Like Flint is fantastic but, I think it’s just a little less ingenious than the first one. However there’s still a lot to recommend in this and much that’s worthy of note. 

Like actress Yvonne Craig, who plays a scene or two as Natasha the ballerina. Of course, this actress was ballet trained herself so is perfect in this role and that training must have helped her out considerably when she was playing her regular spot as Batgirl opposite Adam West and Burt Ward on the third series of the Batman TV show that same year. Genre fans will also know her for little roles in a couple of The Man From UNCLE episodes (and one of the film ‘assemblies’) and from a role in the third and final season of Star Trek, a couple of years later. 

Then there’s all the silly Flintisms and gadgets which pop up. It’s curious because recurring gags like the pulse arm watch to restart Flint’s heart are used without explaining them to the audience this time around and absolutely require knowledge of the first film. However, unlike the first one, where Flint’s arsenal of sleuthing props make their debut on use, mostly, this one goes for a more formulaic introduction of setting up things to bring them back in a deus ex machina capacity later in the film. 

For instance, the wonderfully comic scene where Flint is talking to a dolphin in his pool so he can compile a human/dolphin dictionary, has an absurd pay off later in he film when Flint calls out to any passing dolphins in their own language, to hitch a ride under the security barbed wire on the Fabulous Face beauty resort in the Virgin Islands. The people at the resort have Flint’s three women held hostage in cryogenic suspension. The point is made that they’re all new women, Flint having found his former four aides husbands to marry, earlier in the film. When Cramden asks why there are only three now, Flint replies that he’s ‘cutting down’. 

Another item is the sonic gizmo which Flint shows Cramden at the start of the film, when Cramden calls on Flint for help. This device which doubles as Flint’s belt buckle emits a variety of sonic notes which can either push objects around, like a billiard ball or, if turned up, cause an object to burst apart. Flint uses this device at least twice in the second half of the movie, both to break the glass in the suspended animation chamber in which he is being frozen and also to push himself through space towards the ship containing lady cosmonauts at the film’s conclusion. 

Other moments of fun are less advertised ahead of schedule... such as when Flint poses as the man on the ZOWIE recruitment poster to hide himself in plain sight via a ‘trompe l'oeil’ effect... or the moment when he starts a plane full of Russians he is hastily leaving, to singing a Russian song. Remember those films where the lyrics would pop up on screen and a bouncing ball would stress the word you were supposed to be singing to join in? Well, the Russian letters to the song pop up here with a bouncing red star. So, yeah, you get the idea, the film is still as silly and as entertaining as the previous Flint adventure. 

Once again, Jerry Goldsmith provides scoring duties and, if you think the score to Our Man Flint was one of the greatest film scores of all time (and if you didn’t then you’re not listening right), In Like Flint has a somehow vastly superior score to the original. Not only that but it also has the greatest song in cinematic movie history, some of the lyrics of which are reproduced at the opening of this review. If you want great music, In Like Flint is the movie to go for in soundtrack excellence.

And that just about wraps me up for In Like Flint and the Flint movies in general. In 1976 there was a TV pilot film for a series that never got made called Our Man Flint - Dead On Target, with a different actor and... it completely misses the point of what Flint is all about, even playing the character relatively poe faced and no longer the superman of the movies, relegated to kind of running a private detective agency. It’s truly dreadful and if you really want to see it, at least one DVD incarnation of the movies included it as an extra. I’d not bother though, if I were you. Meanwhile, the first two Flint cinema movies are still an absolute joy to watch and I shall certainly try to keep revisiting them regularly over the years. Trivia hounds might like to note that this is the last film that 20th Century Fox shot in actual Cinemascope. Highly recommended.

THEM!

Upping The Ante!

THEM!
USA 1954
Directed by Gordon Douglas
Warner Brothers
HMV Exclusive Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some ant sized spoilers.

THEM! is easily one of the very best of the 1950s Atomic Monster paranoia films ever to be made. It takes its ridiculous premise and, like the majority of the ‘monsters mutated by atomic age radiation’ films of the time, treats its subject absolutely seriously. But, this one just seems to go the extra mile with everything and, if anything, this film is more like watching a police procedural movie than anything else, just with the ‘embiggened’ monsters thrown in as the ‘whatdunnit’ element.

The film starts off very strongly with a lone girl of 5 or 6 (played by nine year old Sandy Descher) walking traumatised through the mojave desert with her broken, plastic doll. Two cops find her, among them one of the film’s main protagonists, Sergeant Ben Peterson, played by James Whitmore, who I always tend to think of as ‘the poor man’s Spencer Tracy’, somewhat, in looks at least. He and his partner pick up the ‘mute from shock’ girl and drive her in their car as they investigate a holiday trailer a stretch down the road, which eventually turns out to be the trailer the girl was using with her now deceased parents. They find nothing but carnage (no bodies) on the site and... drumroll... no money is gone but someone has raided the sugar cubes! Now what could possibly be interested in stealing the sugar, I hear you gasp.

When a mysterious, Doc Savage-like trilling is heard in the air, the traumatised girl sits bolt upright in the ambulance they have just loaded here onto, then settles down again when the sound goes, without anyone other than the audience realising she even moved. Then, the two cops leave the girl with the medics and more police who come to check out the scene, while they go to investigate a store in another part of the desert, in case the owner knows something about this mysterious case. Alas, the store is in the same bashed about state with the wall torn off. They find the owner, his rifle snapped in two, his body crushed and lifeless, thrown into the cellar of the shop. And, yeah you guessed it, a whole load of ransacked sugar. Ben leaves his partner behind to guard the crime scene but, after he does so, his partner hears the sound and goes out to check on it... we hear his gun shots and screams as he dies at the hands of... something big. And yes, fans of the Wilhelm Scream sound sample will identify it in a number of places in this movie.

Okay, when the body of the cop is found he, just like the owner, has died from, among other things, being injected with a large dose of formic acid. Hmm... sugar, formic acid... what can it be? It’s got Ben foxed, along with his new friend, FBI agent Robert Graham (played by The Thing itself, James Arness). They call in a scientist who thinks he may have a lead... so we have Dr. Howard Medford, played by Edmund Gwenn (who many remember as Kris Kringle from Miracle On 334th Street but who I found utterly captivating in a film he made for Hitchcock just a year after this one, The Trouble With Harry) and his equally scientific daughter Patricia, played by Joan Weldon, who is the female/barely hinted at love interest in the movie.

And it takes these two to reveal that the culprit in this ‘whatdunnit’ is, of course, giant sized ants that have been mutated by atomic bomb testing over the last nine years. This is further underpinned when, they are forced to reveal this far fetched theory after Patricia is menaced by a marauding ant and they have to shoot out its antenna to help kill it. But the ant problem is not a small one, if you’ll pardon the observation. If something isn’t done to stop the growth of the colony, it will be less than a year before man is no longer the dominant species on the Earth. Our intrepid heroes manage to find the nest, destroy it and poison the ants inside but many of them, the queen and some flying newborns, have already flown the coop for fresh pastures. And where this movie could easily have gone into the standard sci fi/monster melodrama by this point, it actually stays a police procedural, as the police and FBI, working far more co-operatively than I’ve seen them working together in most movies, start following leads and witnesses for sightings such as ant shaped flying saucers and big ‘sugar heists’. Eventually the film takes us to the nest of ants hiding in the storm drains under Los Angeles...so for a second time, the various factions including the military, arm themselves with flame throwers and seek the ants in their nest.

And it’s just a great movie. Originally it was to be shot in colour and 3D but a nervous studio changed that to 2D and black and white just days before filming commenced. That being said, the opening title letters of THEM! are coloured up red against the black and white background. But I suspect the black and white photography also helps disguise the worst aspects of the giant, animatronic ants and, as you’ll see in some of the deleted effects shots included on this Blu Ray, things were cut out when the ants were just standing there looking too clunky. And, yes, there are some silly bits, like when the police and FBI are using bazookas to heat up the top of the nest and these little cartooned on beams of light suddenly appear coming from the ends of the weapon. But it’s mostly pretty cool and, the flame throwers are certainly real. If you’re wondering how the actors such as Whitmore and Arness are so trained up on using these safely, well, apparently they were combat veterans who were used to using them during the second world war.

The film has a gutsy moment near the end also, when Sergeant Ben sacrifices his own life to giant ant mandibles rescuing two kids... so that’s not a nice thing to do to the audience but it’s very effective, because Arness is trapped on his own with the ants in the next scene and you’re wondering if the director will kill him off at this moment too.

Eagle eyed viewers may spot a young, pre-Spock Leonard Nimoy as one of the army men in one scene, if that’s of any interest to you. Also, when Walt Disney was looking at this film with a mind to cast James Arness as Davey Crocket, he saw Fess Parker in a scene and chose him instead. The film was directed, of course, by none other than Gordon Douglas who did some great films in his career, such as Rio Conchos (reviewed here), In Like Flint (review coming next year) and Frank Sinatra’s Tony Rome films. Also, he helmed the first of the two sequels to In The Heat Of The Night, namely They Call Me Mister Tibbs! So, I have to wonder, between that film and THEM!, is he the director who has made the most movies with an exclamation mark in the title. Surely not but, if you know, then please hit me up in the comments section below.

One last thing which I never hear mentioned but, well, I think it’s kind of an important observation. A traumatised little girl with a broken doll who has had a traumatic incident with some kind of exo-skeleton creature where the film’s main protagonist eventually has to track the threat back to their nest, armed with a flame thrower. Sound familiar? I’m pretty sure, given his interests, that James Cameron must have loved this film and absorbed it, either subconsciously or otherwise, when he was writing his big hit sequel movie ALIENS... yeah, think about traumatised Newt in that film with her broken, plastic doll and Sigourney Weaver with her flame thrower. I’m pretty sure THEM! must have been in the back of his mind at the very least.

So there you have it... THEM! is a great movie with a cast of really good actors making the ridiculous premise seem just about feasible (or at least giving it the required gravitas to keep the audience interested throughout the running time) and all aided by Bronislau Kaper’s fugue-tastic score (which is available on a very faithful re-recording on the first of the Monstrous Movie Music compilation CDs, which you can buy here). This film is still a load of fun and, to quote my dad who was watching this with me... “I don’t remember this film being so complex!” So there you have it folks... not just another atomic age monster movie (not that there’s anything wrong with that, they’re great) but easily one of the best and most iconic. Iconic enough that both the ants themselves and their eerie warbling sound effect would feature in at least one referential movie cameo, over the years (I’m thinking of the brilliant Looney Tunes Back In Action but there have probably been some others, for sure). 

The Falcon In Hollywood

Nitrate Death Rate

The Falcon In Hollywood
USA 1944
Directed by Gordon Douglas
RKO/Warner Archive DVD Region 1

Well here we have another interesting diversion in the successful Falcon series for RKO pictures. The Falcon In Hollywood is directed by none other than Gordon Douglas, one of those interesting American directors whose name comes up often associated with some quality films such as the second of the Flint movies, the Tony Rome movies, westerns such as the brilliant Rio Conchos (reviewed by me here) and not forgetting the classic giant ant movie THEM!

This one must have been fairly cheap to produce for RKO since, apart from the opening sequence set at the races and a brief interlude set in a deserted sports stadium, the whole of the film is pretty much set on the RKO back lot and, apparently, it still looks pretty much the same now as it did then. In the opening scene of the movie, we are introduced to a new Detective Inspector played by Emory Parnell and his sidekick played by Frank Jenks. I guess neither of these characters were considered strong enough to return to the franchise in a regular fashion as their predecessors had but, Parnell does reappear in another Falcon movie later as another character. They’re on the trail of an ex-con who The Falcon testified against, played by Sheldon Leonard (the ‘giving out wings’ guy from It’s A Wonderful Life) and they look up The Falcon, aka Tom Lawrence (once again played by Tom Conway) to see if he knows where he is.

Following on from a mix up with a couple of women and a bag, The Falcon finds himself travelling to the film studios with an over eager taxi cab driver, reflecting the wartime spirit of ‘jobs for gals’ by being a lady. She also becomes The Falcon’s ‘assistant’ for the movie and is played, quite brilliantly, by the remarkable Veda Ann Borg (I need to find some more of this lady’s movies but, apparently, I’ve already seen her at some point as she starred as Margot Lane in one of the serials about The Shadow). Borg and Conway make quite a team in this and it’s a shame her character didn’t become a regular role in the series after this.

So, anyway, The Falcon discovers a freshly murdered corpse on a set but, when he tries to show it to the studio security, the corpse has disappeared. He finds it again later and shows it to the police but, by then, a valuable ring which was already on the corpse the first time around has gone. So The Falcon becomes embroiled in the case and it’s the usual affair with almost every character in the film having a motive for the murder and then either dying or being put out of the picture before their guilt is proved. It also includes the now clichéd and, sadly, real life set up where someone is shot by an innocent actor because the blanks in her gun have been switched for live ammo.

The film doesn’t suffer from the usual studio conceit of having The Falcon assailed by various ‘real actors and actresses’ cameos to help promote themselves (and I’m sure I would have loved it even more if it had). Instead, it sticks to telling its mystery story with no real references although, in a couple of sequences, a black cat is highlighted (again, making me think of Conway’s role in Cat People and one of its sequels, The Seventh Victim).

And there’s not much more to be said about this one other than, there’s a really nice moment where we are told the characters are off to the ‘miniatures department’. We are then cut to a fairly typical establishing shot of a car parked outside a building but, then, a big hand comes into the frame and picks up the car, clueing us in that this is indeed the department in question. It’s a nice shot and even though I knew they were going to do it, it was literally only a second before it happened that I twigged it, which is nice.

So another short review but these really are fairly short and somewhat formulaic movies so there’s not always a great deal to say about each one. This is only the second of The Falcon movies that doesn’t have a cliffhanger lead in to an untold Falcon adventure and, I’m guessing this is something which would be the new normal for the series (I guess I’ll find out soon). The Falcon In Hollywood is certainly a fun and fast paced mystery adventure and, looking at the ‘more than healthy’ box office receipts, one of the more successful of the franchise. So, lots to recommend it.

Fortunes Of Captain Blood

Iron Pirate

Fortunes Of Captain Blood
USA 1950 Directed by Gordon Douglas
Columbia DVD Region 2

Okay, so this will probably turn out to be a fairly short review.

This is a film I watched with somebody on their birthday, sourced from a Spanish DVD but in the original English... well... American English at any rate. It’s the first of two movies made by Louis Hayward, top lining him as the title character of Rafael Sabatini’s Captain Blood novels. Now I can’t remember if I saw the much more famous Errol Flynn iteration of the character but, if I did, the last time I saw that would have been when I was less than six years old, I reckon and I have no real recollection of it nor, indeed, much knowledge of the character at all.

Now, as pirate films go, this is really not up there with the best of them. That being said, I do quite like Louis Hayward as an actor and it’s certainly not as bad as some modern pirate films I’ve seen in recent years.

Shot in black and white, Fortunes Of Captain Blood doesn’t really have much of a plot to it, in all honesty. That is to say, not a very complex one at least. Starting off with Captain Blood going to an island for supplies, some of his men are ambushed and held to be sold into slavery by an officer of the navy who has been commissioned to catch Captain Blood and rid the seas of him. Blood goes to the island where his six men are being held and, for the rest of the movie, negotiates his way... sometimes with a sword... to finding a way to free his men from the jail. This involves befriending a pretty woman played by Dona Drake, acquainting himself with a prison warder and getting him drunk and then getting into various bits of trouble and banter, all the while posing as a local fruit seller and falling in love with the richest lady on the island, Isabelita Sotomayor, played by Patricia Medina, an actress who has been in loads of things over the years and has quite striking eyes.

When his carefully laid plan goes a little wrong towards the end of the picture, the usual pirate movie things happen such as sword fighting, spiking the cannons and sacrificing his ship, The Avenger, to switch and take over the opposition’s vessel while they are busy trying to accept a surrender on the now empty vessel etc. And, although a lot of the film is more about delivering semi-sparkling, sometimes quite witty but sometimes quite hum-drum dialogue, the pacing is such that the film is livelier than it probably should be and Hayward is quite thoughtful in his acting, with the inner workings of his characters mind easily perceived on his features, even when he’s not wagging his lips at any enemy or ally who happens to be passing.

The man in the director’s chair on this one and, probably, the other reason why the pacing on a mainly 'talky' picture is a little lighter and fluffier than one might expect, is Gordon Douglas. Douglas, of course, directed many movies in his career, pretty much all of them notable for nobody really taking note of who the director was. However, this particular run of the mill director has some notable classics in his CV, as far as this audience member is concerned, such as the giant ant movie Them!, In Like Flint, Rio Conchos (reviewed by me here), Tony Rome and also its sequel, Lady In Cement. Once again, I couldn’t pick up on any directorial signatures from Gordon here but the whole thing is put together, mostly, competently with some good model work done (in places).

One thing I didn’t expect to see in a film from 1950 was blood... I mean, apart from the name of the title character, that is. This feels almost too early as even pre-code films didn’t feature that much blood in them and, although the inclusion of the red stuff... erm... black stuff in the case of this monochromatic motion picture... was totally new to films following the introduction of the Hayes code, I do find it strange that a film which has swordplay of the usual sort of a film from this time, where the hero can just run someone through with his blade and they will clasp their bloodless torso and fall over, has anything stronger. But there you have it, there are two instances here where actual fake blood is used. The first time is when Louis Hayward removes a musket ball from the wound of one of the characters and the ball and blood are clearly seen as he disposes of it and the other occurrence in the film is when somebody fires their pistol at one of Blood’s men and it misses its target but puts a bloody crease in the cheek of the intended victim. I really wasn’t expecting this but, thinking back now to my viewing a few years back of Rio Conchos by the same director, maybe it’s something I perhaps should have been on the look out for as these gory details seem almost unnecessary in context of the rest of the action and maybe this hints at a glimpse of directorial signature after all?

And that’s mostly all I have to say on the subject of Fortunes Of Captain Blood. I can’t tell you how well it measures up to the original 1936 novel, The Fortunes Of Captain Blood, but I can say that it’s well acted, less sluggish than one could expect from the somewhat tired script and it also has a surprisingly rousing score by Paul Sawtell,  someone who I usually associate with much less flamboyant scores than what he’s provided here. So, if you are a fan of either Louis Hayward or, indeed, one of Sabatini’s more well known characters, then you might want to give this one a look. It’s no The Crimson Pirate but it’s a nicely executed affair which makes for reasonable ‘afternoon viewing’. Maybe check this one out if you have nothing better on.

The Detective

Die Hard Zero Issue

The Detective
USA 1968
Directed by Gordon Douglas
20th Century Fox Region 2

Warning: Routine spoilers will be pursued and outed.

There are two reasons why I wanted to watch the Frank Sinatra movie The Detective. One is because the score is by Jerry Goldsmith... and it’s always worth seeing how his musical cues which you’ve lived with for a while match up to the images in context.

The other reason is that I could remember loving the Tony Rome films when I was a kid and when it came to eventually catching up to the movies on DVD I found that it was actually cheaper, at around the £8 mark, to buy the two films in a box set with The Detective than it was to buy the two films individually. If there’s a concept I like best with my movie purchases then it’s “value for money”.

Now then... there’s something very spooky about my choice of viewing when I sat down to watch this film because I found out something about it just before I wrote this review that I didn’t know before, to my knowledge, and therefore didn’t trigger my choice subconsciously. I was going to watch the first four Die Hard movies, more or less back to back, for one of those longish “film series in one gulp” reviews I occasionally do. For some reason, though, I reached for the Sinatra box instead and watched this. Which is very interesting because...

The Detective stars Frank Sinatra as policeman Joe Leland, the character in the book of the same name on which this film was based, written by  Roderick Thorp. So far, so good. However, the writer also wrote a sequel about this character called Nothing Lasts Forever and, Frank Sinatra was contracted to have first refusal on the part although, when they finally got around to making it, Sinatra was 76 years old and turned it down. The book apparently tells the story of what happens when Leland’s daughter gets trapped in the Claxxon Oil Corporation skyscraper because it is taken over by German terrorists and... yeah, you guessed it. They offered the part in the sequel to Bruce Willis, changed Joe Leland to John McClane, changed his daughter to his wife, changed the corporation name to Nakatomi and renamed the story Die Hard... and pretty much launched the career of Willis in film after he’d had such a successful time on television.

So there’s that... but I didn’t know any of that when I came to watch it.

The Detective is a very unusual movie in that, and this is especially true of the time in which it was made, the narrative is a little disjointed and spans a few years before wrapping up things which look like they don’t match up and adding a certain amount of downbeat closure to things.

Even the opening is unusual in that it starts with the standard shots of a US city skyline, but it’s all upside down. Now I saw the same thing done in the excellent horror movie, Devil, a few years back, but Devil didn’t seem to have any rationale to shooting this in this manner. The Detective is really neat because, about halfway through the upside down title shots, the camera suddenly pans up and you get the lower half of the screen still upside down with the city the right way up in the top half of the screen. This is because the camera has panned up to show you that what you’ve actually been looking at is the buildings reflected in the roof of Frank Sinatra’s car as he drives to the scene of the murder which kick starts the movie. This is pretty good and I was pleased that I’d seen this movie already, just from the titles.

It then goes straight into police procedure and it’s Sinatra and his team at the 19th Precinct working a horrendous murder case where a guy has been bashed in the head and his penis cut off and flung across the room. The sequence lasts for a good quarter of an hour or so and it seems everyone and their dog are in this movie... Sinatra, Ralph Meeker, Robert Duvall, Tom Atkins (his debut), Jack Clugman... heck, even boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson is in here. Alongside loads of “oh, it’s him/her” actors and actresses who will, no doubt, catch your attention.

However, after this scene, Joe goes to see his wife (from whom he has split up) and, as he leaves her to her friends at a party, the film then goes into an extended flashback set of sequences, lasting at least as long as the opening scenes, telling the story of Joe and his wife Karen, portrayed by the wonderful Lee Remick, and how they got together.

Then, after a while, the film goes back to the case which involves Joe's pursuit of a murderer in the gay community and this too is cut up with further flashbacks of Joe and Karen as they get married and have problems which can probably only be summed up as Karen suffering from a kind of extended nymphomania. Then Joe finds ‘the killer’, played brilliantly by Tony Musante, who some of my readers may know best from films like the spaghetti western Il Mercenario, Argento’s The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and The Last Run. I‘ve never had a great deal of time for the actor, to be honest, but he really gives a deranged and sympathetic, if short, performance here. Short because Joe presses him for a fast confession (because he’s eyeing a promotion) and he gets dealt with in the electric chair. Case closed... and we’re only halfway through the movie so far.

Then comes more flashbacks and non-flashbacks with Karen and then a second case, years later, which will end up bringing some interesting things to light, including some downbeat conclusions about the first case and a possible romantic attachment to another character played by Jacqueline Bisset.

The film is directed by Gordon Douglas who did such great work on films like THEM! and In Like Flint but who was never much one for making any elaborately attractive shots (except maybe with his work on Rio Conchos, reviewed here), or at least that’s how I’ve always thought of him. As I would expect, the mise-en-scene is adequate and the editing more than competent... nothing too special but very work-a-day and, in that sense at least, quite accomplished. You’re in the good hands of somebody who knows how to put a picture together.

There’s not a lot of action in this film... two small sequences, one involving a chase and another involving a brief but intense shoot out in an indoor car park, when Joe is targeted by people who don’t want him involved in the second case... but it’s not meant to be an action film, I suspect. It’s more of a character study of Joe and Karen’s relationship which uses the backdrop of Joes detective work and the politics of it, to further explore the way his mind works and the way that affects his home life.

Goldsmiths score is, at times, a bit bluesy and, in the action and suspense scenes, dynamic and propulsive in much the same kind of vein he used for his score to Escape From The Planet Of The Apes, only three years later, and maybe also foreshadowing his score to Chinatown too, in places. There’s not much of it in the movie. I’d guess less than 20 minutes of music scattered throughout the whole thing, but US filmmaking was a lot different in those days, and directors trusted that a lot of their movies didn’t have to be wall-to-wall score and only needed the enhancement of some good musical accompaniment at certain points. Goldsmith was a master of this talent of working out when to have music in the final cut of a film (called ‘spotting’ in the industry) and more than once argued for there to be a lot less music in a movie than was originally intended by the director. The music works pretty well here, although at certain places it gets a bit like it’s Mickey Mousing things a bit too much (Mickey Mousing is the practice of using sequences of musical notes and ‘stingers’ to directly reflect the actions taking place on screen) but at the end of the day underlines certain tensions and emotions in just the right way... not always an easy tightrope to walk.

So there you have it. Frank Sinatra in The Detective. All the performances by the cast are top notch, it’s gritty to the point of brutal in some places (for the time) and it’s a fine film. Now I need to go and watch the sequel, Die Hard, again sometime soon.

Rio Conchos

Regaining Conchosness


Rio Conchos USA 1964
Directed by Gordon Douglas
Shout Factory Region 1

Warning: Some slight spoilers in this one... 
mosey along if you want to avoid them.

A long crane shot of a desert, in cinemascope, which tracks down as a bunch of Apache Indians dismount their horses in foreground to bury one of their dead. After we’ve tracked down to watch them for a bit, we zoom slightly past them to catch the lone cowboy who is watching them from the distance. When we get to his point of view, he takes a rifle and massacres every last indian in the burial ceremnony and, as the camera tracks down to the spent cartridges ejected from his weapon in the wake of the slaughter, the rousing, “whip-crack punctuated” Jerry Goldsmith score propels us into the credit sequence as a small cavalry unit travel the desert looking for clues to the perpetrator of the slaughter...

Wow. So that’s a pretty good opener to a Western movie right there... I saw this about 15-20 years ago and didn’t think much of it at the time, but it was a TV broadcast in a clunky pan and scan aspect ratio and, thinking about some of the content in this one... I suspect it would have had censorship cuts too. This sparkly clean DVD print from Shout Factory (which is double billed with a blaxpolitation, kung fu Western called Take A Hard Ride) makes viewing this movie a much different experience. Straight away I could see director Gordon (Them, In LIke Flint) Douglas’ beautiful control of the 20th Century Fox scope canvass which he uses to achieve some really complex (but deceptively simple looking) and dynamic compositions. Here’s a man who’s not afraid to keep that camera moving on such a widescreen area and I really hope I get an opportunity to watch this film at a cinema someday... if only to prove to myself that I still wouldn’t get sea sick.

The cavalry catch up with Lassiter, the man who slaughtred the Indians at the start. He’s played by a guy called Richard Boone... who seems to be a pretty level headed guy and a nice actor, even when he’s portraying a man on the verge of madness and on an insane mision to kill all Indians after Apaches tortured his wife and child in a fate worse than death (which presumably ended in death anyway I reckon). Stuart Whitman, who seems to be a kind of watered down version of Glen Ford from what I see of him here, plays the main cavalry officer who is more interested in where Lassiter got his gun than actually arresting Lassiter for his, perhaps somewhat justified in his mind, crimes against the indians. He arrests him anyway and dumps him in a prison cell with Mexican Rodriguez, a lovable rogue played uncannily well and very differently to his usual on-screen persona by Anthony Franciosa (Tenebrae, Fathom). Add to the mix another cavalry officer played by Jim Brown and you soon have a crack (or maybe just cracked) team of people who don’t all get along trying to track the guns which were lost by Whitman’s character Captain Haven before they can be sold to the Indians.

This is quite an impressive little Western and, being as it was released in 1964, an unusual mix of both 1950s Americana Western charm thrown together with some quite ruthless moments, mostly personified by Boone’s Lassiter who is definitely this movie’s equivalent of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards from The Searchers (although the shirts aren’t as colourful here). This is perhaps epitomised by a scene where a woman is found groaning on her bed (you never see her, only the reactions of our colourful heroes to her) as she has been left to die after torture and gosh knows what else at the hands of the Indians. When Lassiter’s companions slip outside, Lassiter takes it upon himself to put a bullet in her to put her out of her misery. Then comes the sucker punch as the noise of the gun awakens a half mutilated baby (again, courtsy of the Indians, who are portrayed pretty badly in this particular western) which has a pretty bad effect on Boone. Luckily (or not) for Lassiter, the mother and child in the ransacked house have been left there for bait to attract people to the house for the Indians to have their evil ways with, which allows Boone to freak out and go all... err... go all Lassiter on their collective asses... leaving behind a young female squaw who is enlisted by our heros to look after the baby until it dies from its wounds a little later on in the picture.

The sequence I just described is all done quite matter-of-factly and its these kinds of scenes which give the film its strange attraction as the juxtaposition of death, torture, betrayal and violence with the banter and colour of something more closer to a 1950s, rather than a 1960s movie, is held together quite assuredly by a director who seems quite confident with his presentation of the onscreen events.

And of course, all this is accompanied by the late, great Jerry Goldsmith’s wicked-cool, propulsive and jazzy action scoring which acts for the film in much the same way that Elmer Bernstein’s score to The Magnificent Seven does. That is to say, on the slacker paced scenes, Goldsmith reigns in that slack with fast paced, jolting, melodic cues which artificially speed up the action on screen by association. Really good stuff and the main reason why I was here in the first place... I love the soundtrack to this one. Goldsmiths always good for a dependable piece of musical action shennanigans and Rio Conchos is certainly no exception to the rule...

And then you have that ending. I can’t tell you what it is because that would be a major spoiler but the style of filmmaking on display here is very different than it would be today... and for a few seconds I even failed to really register what had just happened. Then the film just quietly ends, without any added ballyhoo. These days I think it’s rare Hollywood would risk an ending like this one but, if they did, you can be sure there’d be lots of “post ending” epilogue to somehow justify it to the audience. Not here... here it’s all “said and done” and the score cranks up again for the final cast list.

So there you have it... a really great little western with some off-beat characters, some nice acting, some excellent shot design and gorgeous music... this one definitely gets a recommendation from me and I have to say that I’m surprised that this particular oater is not a little better known. It certainly deserves to be.