Die Hard Christmas Double

Merry Yippee-Ki-Ay

Die Hard
1988 USA
Directed by John McTiernan
20th Century Fox DVD Region 2

Die Hard 2: Die Harder
1990 USA
Directed by Renny Harlin
20th Century Fox DVD Region 1

Okay. So I thought, rather than hook up with Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life for Christmas again this year, I’d watch a few alternative Christmas movies to celebrate the festivities instead. Rare Exports you already know about (reviewed here) and my next choice this year was to take another, long overdue, look at the first two Die Hard movies, both of which are set during the Christmas period.

Before I go into these, however, I just want to make one thing clear... I really like Bruce Willis.

I understand, from stories I’ve heard told by co-stars and directors alike (James Garner and Kevin Smith) that he can be a real pain to work with. I’d even gleaned that myself from documentary material I watched years ago on Terry Gilliam’s excellent 12 Monkeys, where Bruce was questioning the direction of a scene with Gilliam. To which my initial reaction was, “Shut up Bruce, he’s a director and you’re just an actor who’s not doing what he’s told you. Do what he tells you to!” Which is probably a less actor-friendly reaction than I maybe should have had, actually, and I probably wouldn’t have the same take on that these days... but when it’s Gilliam you have to recognise directing genius and so... anyway... enough of that...

Bruce Willis is one of the very few modern actors who would have fitted right in with the old studio star system. It may sound obvious but most modern actors and actresses are usually just really good (or bad) modern actors and actresses, period. They are not the larger than life personalities who were seen regularly performing or abusing their craft back in the 20’s, 30s, 40s, 50s and even the 60s. There are very few these days, for example, who could stand head and shoulders with the likes of John Wayne, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, Charlton Heston, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and the like. These weren’t just actors, they were stars... they had a large following of fans for many decades and their names brought the audiences to their movies in droves. These days, there are just a handful who can sustain that kind of interest over a long period of time and be popular enough to be caricatured for their specific personalities and character traits. I’d say, off the top of my head, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Jack Nicholson, Kathleen Turner... maybe Johnny Depp... and Bruce Willis is very much a part of this very exclusive set of the modern equivalent of old-time studio “stars”. At least that’s how I see him.

As for Die Hard... well my perception was always quite contrary to most people’s opinions in that I actually thought they got better each movie, with number 3 being the greatest, and then dropping back slightly with 4, which I still enjoyed better than the first one... except... looking at the first two now, I don’t things are quite that simple.

I’ve told this story before in my review of the Frank Sinatra film The Detective (see here) but Die Hard is an adaptation of the sequel novel to The Detective and when Frank Sinatra, after being given first option to replay the character in the sequel, refused that option, the character’s name was changed to John McLane and tailored to give the rising star Bruce Willis (who I and probably most people only knew from his stint on the excellent TV show Moonlighting at the time... although I’m not sure how that show would hold up these days) a shot at big screen stardom. Die Hard, and a few other movies he did, really cemented his reputation and kick started his big screen movie career... a career in which, even when he’s playing a parody of himself in films such as The Expendables 2, shows no signs of letting up (indeed, his fifth Die Hard movie is due to open here next year, at time of writing).

The first Die Hard was originally something of a disappointment to me twice, I’m afraid. I first saw this maybe 6 months to a year before it actually got released at cinemas. A friend of mine who I used to visit had one of those “very 80s” dodgy videos-to-your-door, pirate services (which is why I saw the original, uncut version of Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left when I was in my teens). We all sat and watched this fairly fuzzy copy of Die Hard and my friends all loved it. I thought it was nothing special but, by the time it was released in cinemas and my friends were still going nuts about it, I’d convinced myself that maybe I’d just seen it in the wrong frame of mind, on a fuzzy pirate, and that maybe I was missing something. So when a bunch of friends went to take another look at the movie when it hit the big screens, I went with them. My verdict? it really was nothing special... I’d been right.

Then I remember going to see the second one when that came out and thinking that it was much better than the first... and I was very impressed with the third one. Watching the first two again I realise that my perceptions of the films have changed and I think I prefer the original over the sequel now... and I think it’s because I can better appreciate the design of the shots now than I could previously.

Die Hard
Die Hard is a much better action movie than I thought... but it’s a film which takes away from itself even as it gives. To explain: visually the film is actually pretty good. The film can, in many cases, work with an absolute minimum of extraneous detail but it’s like the producers got worried about it and looped in unnecessary dialogue and exposition which detracts from the films obvious visual strengths.

For example, a shot near the start is a perfect way to demonstrate this. We already have established that Bruce Willis is playing somebody called John McLane and that he’s there to visit his wife and kids. A little while later we get a female character who goes into her office to get the phone and sits with her back to us, talking to John McLane. She is on the extreme left of screen and the camera is focusing on the photographs on the shelf behind her which take up the rest of the screen and, as the camera pans and dollies to show more of these details, we finally see a photograph of her and Bruce Willis together, signifying to the audience that this, is indeed, Mrs. McClane. This is an impressive use of visual shorthand to establish characters and their relationship to each other without actually having to spell things out in as dumb a fashion as possible to the audience.

But then, of course, the movie does then spend the next ten minutes or so spelling it out less subtly and in no uncertain terms that these two are actually married (although living apart). This takes away all the strength of the visual material and dilutes it down while at the same time re-enforcing the concept. Which is a shame because the movie is full of visual flourishes like this. John McClane’s lack of shoes is elaborated on twice visually before the camera decides that the shoes he’s left in his wake are not enough of a clue to the bad guy (played by Alan Rickman, one of the more intelligent presences in Hollywoodland screen villains) and so throw in a shot or two where he notices John McClane is not wearing shoes and then gives the order to shoot out the glass on a floor. They really didn’t need to do that as it then makes no sense to establish this earlier in the film and give it such an elaborate set-up with a conversation that takes place on a plane. So that’s a bit of a problem for me.

A small problem, too, is Willis’ early screen performance where either he, improvising, or the script writers, were not willing to allow him to relax into the role without cracking a steady stream of Moonlighting-style one liners. This doesn’t really help the movie and, since he’s on his own for most of the film, these little monologues come off less as James Bond-cleverness and a lot lamer than the producers probably realised. When he’s not wise-cracking, though, Willis does a really good job and you can see how the writers got the ingredients right and why he was propelled to big screen success from this movie.

The score is fantastic too, although I understand there was a lot of “management intervention” on this one (there's a moment which bugged me right from the first time I saw it where James Horner's score for ALIENS is tracked in). The late, great Michael Kamen goes for what would be his typical action-writing sound but because of the film being set at Christmas, introduces quite a few seasonal touches which are woven into the underscore and work at, for most people, an unconscious level. Trust me, you’ve never heard the opening of Winter Wonderland orchestrated so sinisterly as it is in here. He’s also used quotes from Beethoven’s Ninth to establish the origins of the villain in this one and, for some reason less obvious to me, unless it’s foreshadowing a scene involving a sprinkler much later in the movie, musical quotes from Singin’ In The Rain. Whatever... it all works very well and is fittingly regarded as an all time action classic in regards to scoring as well as it’s similar status as a movie in its own right.

With its claustrophobic setting, with only infrequent breaks to show what is going on outside the “tower block under siege” element of the story, Die Hard is a much more enjoyable film than I’d originally thought it and, because of the strength of the holiday spirit in both the dialogue and the score, is a great little action movie to watch in the run up to Christmas.

Die Hard 2: Die Harder
Die Hard 2: Die Harder is a different story. John McTIernan is replaced as director by Renny Harlin (a director I actually quite like for action films, despite his reputation) but, perhaps because it’s based on a book by a totally different author - 58 Minutes by Walter Wager - the film does not plunge the John McLane character (who was again, obviously, not the character who was in the original novel) into a “single player” claustrophobic situation like the first. In this one the action takes place in an airport one snowy Christmas while he, aided and abetted at various times by people he finds along the way, fights to stop a team of crack mercenaries and a team of professional soldiers (who they are in cahoots with) from freeing an important political prisoner when he lands.

To do this, the bad guys knock out communication and leave loads of planes circling in the skies above the airport, ready to crash when they run out of fuel, and the tension and suspense of this movie is about whether John McClane can take the bad guys out and find a way of getting the planes to land safely, before his wife’s plane crashes into the runway.

Well, I say tension and suspense and I suppose it’s fair to say that these elements are present in the movie, but they are just not tightened up to screaming point as they were in the hands of director McTiernan in the first movie. Harlin makes movies which are action spectacles for the sake of the guns and explosions, I think, and while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this very valid approach to making movies... it’s just not quite as effective as the first in the sequence. Although, as I said earlier, when this one first came out, I was singing a different song.

Saying that, though, there’s still some nice things in this movie. Willis is still spewing unwanted monologues everywhere but, also, is consistent in the role and very watchable. The iconic legend who was Django, Franco Nero, is also in this one as the political prisoner villain, but I have to say he was really wasted in this. I wish he’d have been playing the main villain on this one because I still see Nero as a man of action and it was only three years prior to this movie that he’d made his “official” Django sequel, Django Strikes Again... and so he could still do all the physical stuff. He does, though, add a certain weight to the role... so maybe that’s why they picked him. Whatever reason, it’s certainly good to see him and this element, along with plenty of action sequences from Willis and another, out-the-park musical score from Kamen (which is, alas, not as Christmassy in spirit as the tone of his first Die Hard score), make for a very entertaining Christmas action movie.... if not quite as taut as the first.

So that’s one of my Christmas doubles then... after which I watched... ahh, you’ll find out.

Die Hard and Die Hard 2: Die Harder have both dated quite a bit... this is the age of the pager, not the mobile phone, when these movies were made. In fact, it strikes me as I write this now that you just  couldn’t make these movies with this kind of story anymore because the invention of the common-or-garden-everybody-has-one mobile phone would kind of make the necessary communication limitations on the plot redundant. However, with the franchise still going strong, the films will be well thought of in “action-thriller” circles for quite some time, methinks, so if you haven’t seen these ones then it’s probably worth checking them out, if only to have an opinion of them.

I’m going to watch the third and fourth on BluRay sometime after the new edition of the box set comes out with an extra disc at the end of January, so I’ll let you know what I think of those two when I watch them... not to mention my verdict on the fifth one when it hits our cinemas next year.

Happy New Yippee-Ki-Ay!

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.