The Sand Pebbles

Arsan Pebbles

The Sand Pebbles
USA 1966 
Directed by Robert Wise 
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight, implied spoilers.

CHINA 1926 . . . RAVAGED FROM WITHIN BY CORRUPT WARLORDS... OPPRESSED FROM WITHOUT BY THE GREAT WORLD POWERS WHO HAD BEATEN CHINA TO HER KNEES A CENTURY BEFORE... CHINA...A COUNTRY OF FACTIONS TRYING TO UNITE TO BECOME A NATION . . . THROUGH REVOLUTION.
from The Sand Pebbles

Based on a book by Richard McKenna, The Sand Pebbles is a story about the Chinese revolution of 1926 and the xenophobic relations, on both sides, between China and the USA. Steve McQueen plays Jake Holman, a navy engineer who is transferred to the USS San Pablo to join up with them and run their engines, in order to continue to take the boat running up and down the river, in order to demonstrate an American presence on Chinese waters. However, the catch is that, unless an American life is endangered, they are not allowed to shoot against the Chinese, just stay neutral so they don’t incite a war. 

The film mostly takes place on board the ship but also goes off shore to a bar and whorehouse where the navy men go at night. Shenanigans ensue with a sub-plot for a virgin sex worker who is asking a very unaffordable $200 in order to get her some place else and, also, Holman’s day-to-day trying to work around an engineering section controlled by local Chinese people... and also inadvertently starting a romance with the film’s lead actress, not to mention trying to raise money for his friend Frenchy to free and ultimately marry the sex worker. Everything piles up and, consequence after consequence of various bad decisions bring th film to a fairly bleak climax, it has to be said. 

Now, I’ve never seen this film before but I’ve ben very well aware of it, primarily due to the fantastic score by Jerry Goldsmith (which I own in a couple of versions and have also heard him do excerpts in concerts over the years... I sure miss going to see Goldsmith when he hit town in London). Luckily for me, the Blu Ray includes his opening Overture and also keeps in his Intermission music. So good for them. 

The cast is phenomenal. In addition to McQueen you have Candice Bergen playing his missionary love interest, Richard Attenborough as Frenchy (who would later cast Bergen in one of the films he directed, namely Gandhi), Richard Crenna who is the captain of the ship, the great Simon Oakland, Mako (playing the engineer McQueen trains up to help run the engine room), Joe Turkell and James Hong. Turkell and Hong, of course, would later appear as Dr. Eldon Tyrell and Chew the Eye Maker in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (reviewed by me here). 

And, the sex worker known as Maily is played by Marayat Andriane... which is, of course, the name used by Emmanuelle Arsan for this (or probably vice versa actually, since her actual name was Marryat Rollett-Andriane), the first of her three acting roles - one in a TV episode, this one and, based on her novel, Laure (reviews of both the book and the movie adaptation will be coming to this blog as part of this series of reviews). So she’s the reason why I’ve finally given some retina time to The Sand Pebbles and, of her performance, I’d have to say it’s a pretty strong supporting role and she has a lot of presence. 

There have been rumours, never actually confirmed as far as I can find out (although I wish they’d translate that new biography that came out last year in France into English at some point) that she had an affair with McQueen. If that’s ever confirmed, judging from what I’ve found out about her from my readings and a smidgeon of research, reading between the lines, I would guess that McQueen would have been seeing both her and her husband and probably the various members from the swinging scene in Thailand that allegedly sprang up around her and her husband. But, as I said, the reports are completely unconfirmed and just rumours (as far as I know). That being said, McQueen gave up acting for a year due to the turmoil and the physical and emotional stress of a difficult shoot. Whether Arsan had anything to do with that stress is anybody’s guess. 

Either way, I’m glad I finally caught up to this film because it’s excellent, which is what I should have expected from a director with the calibre of Robert Wise, who uses certain elements of the original source as a metaphor for what was going on in Vietnam at the time. Even I could see the parallels. 

The film is intriguing with the dialogue, well performed by a cast of very good actors, has you on the edge of your seat for quite a lot of its running time and has some beautiful photography and compositions. It’s like Robert Wise can’t help himself on that last point. Even a shot of the crewmen repelling borders by unleashing hoses full of water on Chinese people trying to board the vessel conjures up a fair few rainbows in the water they are pumping. It’s great stuff.

And then there’s Jerry Goldsmith’s wonderful score. Goldsmith was always good at spotting a movie, which is the process of deciding where to position the musical cues in a movie and when to leave it silent. The Sand Pebbles is pared back quite a bit in the scoring, with long sequences playing without any music, which of course allows the music to do some heavy lifting when it suddenly rushes back in to fill that void. And it works like a charm here. On the strength of this score, Jerry was given the assignment of Planet Of The Apes (reviewed here) and didn’t look back. 

It’s a long film and certainly a satisfying one, considerably of the variety of ‘they don’t make movies like that anymore’. Indeed, I can’t imagine a project like this one would ever get greenlit in today’s, much less interesting climate of Hollywood movies, for sure. And the transfer from a gorgeous print found on the Blu Ray is something I wasn’t expecting from a major Hollywood studio, from whom I expect much less of a good job than from a proper, independent boutique label. But that’s me done with The Sand Pebbles and I’m glad I’ve finally ticked it off the long standing list, even if the ending is one you’ll see coming a long way off. 

 

EMMANUELLE ARSAN AT NUTS4R2

Novels
Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle L’Anti-Vierge
Laure

Movies
The Sand Pebbles 
I, Emmanuelle
Emmanuelle (1974)
Emmanuelle 2 
Good Bye Emmanuelle
Laure
Emmanuelle (2024)

Saga Erotica - The Emmanuelle Collection 

The Dynamite Brothers

TNT Smacks On

The Dynamite Brothers
aka Stud Brown
USA 1974 Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: This one’s got some major spoilerage in it.
There is a genuinely cool twist in the tail of this
movie which I didn’t see coming.

Well this Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection really is a rollercoaster ride in terms of just how good or, typically, how terrible some of the films in this collection are going to be. Because I’m watching and writing these films up in the order they’ve been packaged into the box, as opposed to the release or production dates (both of which are completely different things anyway), my previous review of an Adamson film was Black Heat (reviewed here), which utilised one of the same leading men as in this one, in a shot at catching some cash from the blaxploitation market. You’ll also remember I didn’t think much of it.

This film, however, is absolutely marvellous. It’s a greatly entertaining flick that I could happily rewatch every seven years or so. The Dynamite Brothers is basically a mash up of two genres which were still just about a big thing at the time this was released... blaxploitation and kung fu movies. It made some money and Adamson was able to re-release the film targeted at just the blaxploitation market a year later, by excising the kung-fu part of the trailer and re-christening it Stud Brown.

After a kung fu training session to show how lethal some of the bad guy’s henchmen are, we meet the main antagonist of the film himself and... it’s James Hong! I love the fact that James Hong turns up in an Adamson movie. He plays ‘over the top but sophisticated Asian villain’ really well, it has to be said. That’s the pre-credits sequence of the movie out of the way, leading to an animated title sequence featuring the two leads, Alan Tang and Timothy Brown... and a load of kung fu people, with Charles Earland’s kick ass score playing out over the titles. Actually, this is the only Al Adamson film I’ve found to date, other than his Dracula VS Frankenstein (reviewed here), which has had a CD soundtrack release so, that’s something.

After this, film starts off proper... with martial arts star Alan Tang as Larry Chin. He is illegally entering the country on a boat but, as he jumps off the ship, a bunch of Hong’s henchmen are waiting for him to persuade him to go back to Japan (under the watchful eye of ‘bent copper in the pay of the bad guys’ Burke, played by Aldo Ray). So straight away we have a big chase/kung fu fight on the harbour which establishes how outclassed the bad guys are compared to Larry, who leaves a trail of unconscious bodies in his wake as he runs off to... to what? Well, it turns out he’s come to America to find his lost brother. There are also hints of a back story in some, it has to be said, shoddily timed little flashbacks to a dead woman at various moments in the film. I'll get to that later.

Meanwhile, Burke is escorting the newly arrested Stud Brown (Timothy Brown) in a police car, to be charged for ‘unimportant and never really made clear’ crimes. However, he also finds Larry Chin and so he handcuffs him together with Stud. Of course, the two of them together are presumably spiritually sympathetic so, you know, in a daring escape they presumably become... The Dynamite Brothers... of the title. Anyway, there must be some spiritual connection because, after freeing themselves from handcuffs, the two stay together for absolutely no reason at all. Larry is headed to San Fransisco and Stud takes him to work for his boss, a mobster called Smilin’ Man, played by Don Oliver, so he can support himself while he looks for his brother.

And, of course, this is a blaxploitation movie of the 1970s... so there are evil, bad mobsters like James Hong’s kung fu crew... contrasted with ‘good mobsters’ like Smilin’ Man’s mob, who don’t want any drugs coming into their territory because ‘drugs are bad’ and people shouldn’t do them. Right on brother! It’s here that, in another ‘character with a strange quirk in a 1970s movie moment’, Stud meets a mute lady on Similin’ Man’s payroll called Sarah, played by the title role actress from black exorcist movie Abby... Carol Speed. She becomes Stud’s gal. There’s also a potential girlfriend for Larry when he meets an Asian lady who helps him find a lead to his brother but, she kinda just drops out of the movie once Larry is told that his brother is dead.

So the rest of the movie is about both how Larry’s missing brother and the mob war is all connected and there are various shoot outs and kung fu fights and... the whole thing is a pretty entertaining and surprisingly coherent movie (for Al Adamson) which entertains a lot. Although, it’s a shame that Carol Speed’s character is killed by having her face horribly slashed up by the bad guys to give Stud even extra motivation to end the violent mob reign of her killers.

It all leads to a big fight in Hong’s mansion where we finally find out that those flashbacks were him remembering his wife, who was killed by Hong for rejecting his lustful advances before fleeing to America. Not only that but, in a twist I didn’t see coming, somehow, it turns out that not only is Larry’s brother not dead... but James Hong’s character is also his brother. So, anyway, all the good guys and bad guys converge on the house and a big battle royale ensues while the Hongster makes a break for it in his open topped car, with Larry pursuing on a motor bike. As soon as I saw it was an open topped car I realised that I was once again going to have to watch, possibly from a different angle, that same scene of the open topped car rolling off a cliff edge and killing the driver that I’ve seen now in, it has to be said, a fair few of Adamson’s movies. I honestly can’t be watching this footage again in another movie... but saying that, it’ll probably be coming back to haunt me again before this boxed set is finished, I would imagine. There’s also a stunt fall in this movie, during a gun battle on the streets (surprisingly, there were no Adamson rooftop chases in this picture, he must have had a bigger budget) which I’m pretty sure he recycled into Black Heat but, it certainly packs more power here.

And it’s a fairly joyful film to watch, it has to be said. There are some great fights which use some hand held stuff and some frenetic pacing... but not so much so that you can’t see that Alan Tang can actually do all the stunt fighting himself (unlike a lot of modern American movies where they sometimes have to cut around the actors to hide the fact that they can’t really do the physical stuff that well). Actually, I noticed that in some of the fight scenes, Alan Tang seems to be mouthing a lot of words that are just not coming out on the soundtrack at all. I can only conclude that, like Bruce Lee in the fight scenes in Enter The Dragon, he was probably making a lot of silly, whoop and wahaaah noises but, on hearing the results, the producers decided to cut that audio element for whatever reason (like it sounded totally silly, perhaps).

Added to this we have a good cast of actors doing their thing with a script that really isn’t all that bad and, also, the good guys and gals all have good on-screen chemistry and are pretty likeable. There are even some nicely creative shots in here, where Adamson and the cinematographer use the negative shapes created by various elements of the environment overhanging the foreground of the camera to shoot the action through, which gives the film a more creative edge than a fair few of the films I’ve reviewed from this boxed set here. Add to this a totally redundant snake scene and a silly but underwhelming ‘death by acupuncture’ moment and The Dynamite Brothers comes up trumps when it comes to excelling in explosive excitement. Definitely something I’d recommend for lovers of blaxploitation, kung fu movies and, you know, those rare times both elements come together in the same film. One of Adamson’s best movies, I think.

The Satan Bug

Bug’s Bonhomie

The Satan Bug
USA 1965 Directed by John Sturges
Kino Lorber/20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A

I mentioned recently in my review of The Andromeda Strain (which you can read here) that The Satan Bug was another of those great virus themed movies I’d never seen which, given that I am writing this in a semi-lockdown status in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic, is perfect viewing for this time. I also didn’t realise that Alistair MacLean, under a pen name, had written the book on which it was based and nor was I aware that one of the co-writers of the script was none other than famous novelist James Clavell (who also wrote the screenplay to the original version of The Fly, if memory serves).

So I managed to get a US Blu Ray sent over and, I have to say that, while the film isn’t exactly perfect, I was much more impressed with it than I thought I would be.

One of the reasons for that is Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the film, of course, which starts the movie off just right as we go into one of those animated title sequences which could almost have been designed by Saul Bass (but wasn’t, it was by DePatie-Freleng). It’s edgy and sinister with the perfect music to push the kind of expressionistic simplifications of an animated virus depicted and certainly gives you a sense of foreboding before going into the main film...

And then, once we start the movie proper, we get some fairly typical clean looking but interesting 20th Century Fox style art direction and cinematography. I don’t know why all films in this widescreen aspect ratio by this company at the time felt like this but it certainly has a recognisable style and it actually helps with the sterile, laboratory settings of the opening movie.

The plot is simple. We start off with an extremely restrained, almost abstract in what it doesn’t show, heist on a lab (relocated to America for the movie version). After a diversion as special agent Lee Barrett (as played by George Maharis) is recruited to help out as a consultant on the robbery and its fall out, we are made aware by co-star Richard Basehart (who you might remember as the Admiral in the TV version of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea) of just how dangerous The Satan Bug of the title, which the robbers have escaped with, is.

After this, the shenanigans begin, as a psychopathic terrorist holds the world to ransom unless all war research finishes (or some such) and Lee, aided by such great actors as Dana Andrews, Anne Francis and Simon Oakland, has to try and track down where the various lethal viruses have been taken before, after witnessing the death of everybody in Florida by a milder stolen virus, Los Angeles is taken down the next day. At this point the movie kind of devolves into a standard track and chase adventure as the 'good guys' rush to keep this from happening but it keeps up the atmosphere of slow burning anxiety for most of the film although, I’ll be honest, the film does start to drag somewhat before its conclusion.

However, there is a lot which is brilliant about the film. Jerry Goldsmith’s pulsating and driven score is one of those things. Like a lot of his films where the director actually listened to him, the film is quite sparsely ‘spotted’, Goldsmith was a master of knowing when to hold the silence and only bring the music in when it was really needed... it’s mostly great stuff and you can totally hear how he would develop into his brilliant Planet Of The Apes score just a few years later. He uses those wonderful musical phrases throughout too which, I can’t really pinpoint in terms of an accurate musical reference, since I really don’t know much about music but I always think of it as his ‘bouncing ball drops’. Little musical phrases of repeat notes which last a few seconds but which get faster as they go and which remind me of a ball dropping and the thuds getting faster as they hit nearer the ground on each bounce. Sorry, that’s the only way I can think to describe it but he uses this kind of musical phrase on a number of his scores from around the period and I can always tell it’s him when I hear them.

Also, those shot set ups early on in the first twenty or so minutes of the film where everything is confined to the labs look absolutely gorgeous. It’s all so well lit with lots of pinky oranges in the lighting schemes to add contrast to the dull, clinical whites and, on occasion, the shots will cut to offices with wooden panels which pretty much mirror the same colour scheme. Since the majority of the labs are made of glass walls, we also have shots mostly made up of vertical struts which Sturges uses to split up his canvass and highlight various characters in their own slats of the screen. Again, he does this with other environments too and where a glass door may slide open to push the emphasis of one of these rectangular slabs that comprise the frame design, he will sometimes cross-cut to a shot of a solid door (such as a vault door) in another room being opened in exactly the same part of the screen. Nice stuff and it was this ‘crowded verticals’ pitched against the later shots of lone or small groups of standing figures against a sterile, US highway desert landscape that kept me interested throughout.

So... lots of visual hooks and musical candy to engage the brain for most of the film.

There are a few clunky bits too though and I especially got annoyed with something George Maharis says into a phone at one point. Interestingly, the two deaths at the start of the movie in terms of the heist sequence show no bodies or aftermath... it’s all alluded to by other characters and the focus of their attention is kept out of shot. However, when Maharis and Anne Francis find a dead body sunk and weighted down (presumably) in a swimming pool a little later, Maharis reports that they found someone... “floating at the bottom of the pool.’ Seriously? If they’re at the bottom of a pool then they’re really not floating are they? And this was written by James Clavell?

One thing which did cause me delight though was spotting some of the smaller actors who would later become much more well known. For example, a young James Hong plays one of the doctors seen at the start of the movie. It doesn’t amount to much more than a cameo but it’s nice to see how he looked back then. Similarly, one of the agents who is following George Maharis and Anne Francis when they have been captured by ‘the bad guys’ is none other than James Doohan, literally the year  before he would become a household name playing Scotty on the very first incarnation of the Star Trek TV show. It’s interesting that he has a bit of a role to play but, since actors are payed more if they have any lines to say, he manages to remain silent throughout... even though he both gets into a gunfight and then has a dramatic moment where he drops dead when exposed to a virus. It was nice to see him in a pre-Scotty role though. And, yes, a waitress in a jazz bar near the start of the film is a young Lee Remick.

And that's pretty much all I’m going to say here about The Satan Bug (or risk getting into spoiler territory)... nice shot design and lighting, a highly competent ensemble cast, some truly catchy music and, as it nears the end, maybe just a little bit dull in places. I loved it though and am planning to be watching this again some day. A good slice of mid-sixties cinematic treasure which is well worth the time of any fan of the cinematic arts... so check it out when you’ve got a moment. Watch it during a pandemic for an extra sense of authenticity.

Safe

Safe No Chaser


Safe USA  2012
Directed by Boaz Yakin
Playing at UK cinemas now

Safe is another in the series of in-yer-face action thrillers which have successfully, and deservedly, turned Jason Statham into a household name. Those of you, however, who are expecting the over-the-top silliness of The Transporter and Crank movies blended in with the high octane car chases and blisteringly unsurvivable body hits kind of action these characters shrug off so lightly may be best advised to alter their expectations.

That is to say...

Yeah, of course it’s over the top. The majority of action movies are. There’s no way anybody would be able to survive stunts and action like this in real life... but it hasn’t got that way-beyond-reality sense of humour that often accompanies a Jason Statham vehicle. Statham himself is, of course, as charming as he always is in these things... but you won’t find him stripping himself topless and covering himself in black oil so people can’t grab onto him in a fight... nor will you see him kick a gun up out of a man’s hand and then kill a gazillion people with his breathless martial arts skills and do three somersaults in the time it takes for the gun to fall back down so he can catch it and shoot somebody else.

To be sure, he does do quite a lot of kicking, punching and jumping in this one... but the stupidity of the action choreography has been pared back quite a bit in this case so the audience don’t have to suspend their collective disbelief quite so much. The action sequences all still pack a fair amount of wallop though and action-fest fans won’t regret taking a look at this one.

Like I said, however, the humour is mostly eradicated in this movie...

The set up starts with a point when Statham is just about to come into contact with the little girl he spends the rest of the movie protecting. We then get a series of reverse flashbacks like somebody is cinematically opening a stack of Russian Dolls. Each of the two character’s back stories are revealed and they’re both extremely dark for this kind of seemingly light-hearted Hollywood fare. For example, Statham’s wife and unborn child are brutally murdered and he is forced to live his life with no money and no friends for a year before the little girl inadvertently stops him from taking his own life and gives him a sense of purpose to go and kick some ass. Luckily for them both, the ass-kicking involves “bad guys” from both his and her past, as rivals to the possession of a Safe combination memorised by the girl with her photographic memory and, also, the police (who also have reason to hate Statham’s character)... and, of course, Statham gets to go at it like an avenging angel to kill the evil antagonists from his past as he redeems himself by becoming a guardian to the child who everybody wants to either extract the information from or kill.

The plot is that simple... but appears complex, at first, because of the initial narrative structure... which then packs the Russian dolls of the cinematic flashback  back up into the right order before the action kicks off properly. This must take a good 20 minutes of running time and it’s unusually dense in detail for a modern action movie but certainly does no harm to the basic entertainment value of the piece and helps give a focussed motivation for the characters.

Statham is ably supported by a really excellent cast including some heavyweight character actors such as Blade Runner’s James Hong and the always excellent Robert John Burke (as he’s billed here) who was so great in the Hal Hartley movies The Unbelievable Truth, Simple Men, Flirt and No Such Thing... not to mention Dust Devil (and possibly his action credentials playing the title character in Robocop 3). Everybody is really excellent in this film and, because everyone is so credible in it, it allows the director to deftly pad some of the bone crunching, bullet play sequences with a matter-of-fact layer of pseudo-truth which is of immense help when carrying off some of the more unbelievable set pieces... as I said before, most people wouldn’t be able to just walk away from the kind of physical punishment depicted in these kinds of stories.

Also... the action sequences are, for the most part, not as badly edited as a lot of these kinds of sequences have been in the balletic world of modern action cinema. A distinct lack of confusing juxtapositions means that I can tell just who is shooting or punching who, who is being kicked or chopped and the rough geographic location of these shots (although there was a little sleight of hand practiced in a sequence where Statham has to throw someone out of a car where the shots didn’t quite match up... luckily, they’ve cunningly distracted or softened this with an “outraged” sound edit which implies a visual link where the visual continuity has failed... I’ll let ‘em get away with it because action movies are so hard to shoot and edit).

If you like modern day action movies and don’t mind them infused with a certain amount of dark and, in the case of a lot of the characters in this one, a more ambiguous moral sensibility, then you’ll probably enjoy this movie for what it is. It’s not the best of Statham’s action movies by a long chalk, but it’s certainly not the worst and the pounding, driving rhythm of the movie will probably pull you in and take you on the kind of ride you might like. It won’t be to everyone’s taste but there are a lot worse action entertainments out there and this one has a certain heart to it (something which Statham always delivers) and a certain honesty to it which won’t leave you feeling the movie lacks a solid base. Give it a go. This one’s pretty Safe!