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Archive for the ‘ADVENTURE’ Category

Hatari

10 Oct

Hatari – Directed by Howard Hawks. Wild Animal Action Adventure. A company of animal collectors snares big game in Africa. 156 minutes Color 1962.

* * * *

Howard Hawks had no signature visual style, even when he used the same photographer. Nor was he much of a director of actors. His films are plainly shot in simple setups. What he had was a freewheeling attitude about scripts which in the morning he would make up among the actors or who ever passed through the shooting, and then film it later in the day. This openness and casualness produced a big permission for actors, so sometimes wonderful performances arrived. John Wayne’s, for instance. He is an actor who often chooses to “come from strength”, but here he pretty much lets that slide, and what comes to the fore is his wisdom, forgiveness, and rueful wit. He does not have any other actors in the picture who are on his level of artistry or humor, save Red Buttons, which is a shame, because that and their variety of foreign languages slows things down to the level of competence, which is a local train not a superchief; John Wayne is a superchief. However, what results here is a very amiable party indeed, casual, agreeable, and fun. This is not a movie you intently watch; it is a movie you hang out with. The story line is flimsy and contrived, and it all takes place indoors on Paramount sound stages, and looks it, as do the actors slathered in thick tan pancake. The story involves, if that is the right word, a couple of unconvincing romances, one of them between Wayne and the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli who is of all things called Dallas, the name Claire Trevor had in Stagecoach. (One must cover one’s eyes when John Wayne kisses anybody.) But, in the long and beautiful African scenes, Elsa Martinelli has such a terrific rapport with wild animals that I took her to be a professional trainer. She is remarkable with three baby elephants, and seems to harbor a leopard as a watchdog. The episode with the monkey tree is fascinating – evidently all the actors did the animal work in the picture – and wildebeest and rhinos and cheetahs and ostriches are caught in long and very exciting sequences. The chasing down and capturing of the wild animals feels authentic and was the raison d’etre for the film. These are interspersed with drunk scenes, which are not funny (at what moment in history did drunk scenes in Hollywood cease to be funny) and with sophomoric hijinks, which are not funny either. Hatari means danger in Swahili and the relaxed and genial nature of the story with its foolish excesses is just a necessary relaxation from the real and intense excitement of the hunts. Henry Mancini has written a brilliant score.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ADVENTURE, ANIMAL DOCUMENTARY, ANIMAL DRAMA, ANIMAL LOVERS, BROAD COMEDY, Directed by Howard Hawks, DOCUDRAMA, Filmed in Africa, John Wayne, Red Buttons

 

The Lost World: Jurassic Park

21 May

The Lost World: Jurassic Park – Directed by Steven Spielberg. Sci-Fi Action. Dinosaurs, still hanging around on a tropical island, draw competing scientists and developers. 2 hours 7 minutes Color 1997.

* * * * *

Pete Postlethwaite devours the screen like a brontosaurus rex whenever he is on it. This is wonderful to behold, because his ruthlessness outstrips the passion of any other character in the movie, and so one loves him for it. The others fare not so well. For the “action sequences” devour character as well as characters. This is true of all such films. David Koepp has written a brilliant script, which means that its wit compliments the wit of the director, and he has made for us characters who have a living eccentricity, in scenes that are beguiling and actable. But all of that is in the beginning of the film. As soon as the dinosaurs start competing with the humans all character is lost as the film bogs down in spectacle, escape, acts of derring-do, mayhem, terror, clumping and munching – in fact, in story- behavior in which, because it is minimally verbal, character, charm, eccentricity, and even motive are devoured. It’s no one’s fault. It’s simply a characteristic of the genre. They all end up this way. The chief consequence of this is that one ceases to love the characters – because they are characters no longer. And too bad too. Because we have the glorious Jeff Goldblum as one of a group of four heros (really five until our beloved Richard Schiff becomes an ors d’oeuvre for a rex). With his bright and wonderful face, and endearing tallness, and supple intelligence, he plays a character who disapproves of everything, in a role which almost becomes thankless because of that. Julianna Moore is delightful in a love scene walking away from him in the middle of a river; she plays a character who approves of everything. And the dewy Vince Vaughan plays a kind of side-car part which is actually underwritten and functions really only to make a certain defunct radio work to save the day (it’s actually night). Never mind. It’s a director’s film, and Spielberg has a witty mind. Never is he unprepared to entertain us. The action sequences unravel with imagination and care and stunning execution. And in this is he ably abetted by the camera of Janusz Kaminsky and the surprising editing of Michael Kahn, who will supply us with a sterling close-up of Moore’s face, for instance, just when you would never expect you would need the relief of it from the action in play. Spielberg always gets his endings wrong, and he does not fail us in this one. It’s a failure of value in him, as, for the wrong reason, he brings the tale around to a city he has not previously established, and so the big bus-wrecking sequences, and so forth, have no connection to us. The ending comes out of nowhere into nowhere. His wit does not fail him, as the rex clomps by an Animal Control vehicle, but his thinking does. This means that the value of actions floats free of the value of settings, streets, a harbor, a ship, and, most important, human inhabitants. However, the film has delivered so much “entertainment” one has to forgive him once again, simply on the grounds that our exhaustion forbids us from sustaining anything more than a sigh of relief that the entertainment is finally over.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, ACTION ADVENTURE, ADVENTURE, ANIMAL LOVERS, Directed by Steven Spielberg, ESCAPE STORY, Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite: ACTING GOD, Richard Schiff, Sci-Fi, Vince Vaughan

 

The Bravados

25 Mar

The Bravados – directed by Henry King – a western in which three loathsome bank robbers and their guide are pursued by a man bent on revenge – 98 minutes color 1958.

* * * *

This western looks like one of those movies aging movie stars engage in to prop up their work. But Gregory Peck was always an aging movie star. His chosen gravity caused no public alarm – but it also conveyed no mystery. So we have the case of a man of persistent and unvarying solemn righteousness tracking down three killers, led by a man far more fascinating than himself, the lusciously talented Stephen Boyd. Boyd was my reason to rent this film, and doing so was worth every scene he appears in. The direction is made one step past competent by the filming of the remarkable landscapes through which the pursuit ranges. These pictorial delights keep us away from the common face of Joan Collins, who is present as the old flame from New Orleans, although one cannot imagine Gregory Peck ever having lit a flame of his own sufficient to ignite her ever-ready tinder or having ever drifted into New Orleans to do it. She has all the aura of a not-quite-first-class call girl, and so one wonders at the possibility of His Righteousness getting down with her at the end. She is the sort of girl one does not bring home to meet your mother for fear your father would drag her up into the attic, and that she would prefer to go. She isn’t even pretty; merely beautiful, so beautiful she is grotesque: her eyes are more wide-spaced than her ears. No. Best look rather at the witty visage of Stephen Boyd whose gifts hold the screen like nobody’s business. He has a truly lecherous eye and a nastiness meant to lead even stiffs like Charlton Heston into hot water. What fun! What an actor! But, to turn back to Peck. His acting choice to be unvarying in his relentlessness is unabated by any inner doubt or struggle. So the entire conflict of the piece comes at the last moment, which he performs well, mind you, but, until then we have no outer or inner back-and-forth, and, worse, no humor in him, so the movie holds our interest but he does not. Imagine what Spencer Tracy would have done with this situation, and you’ll see what I mean. Peck looks to be one of those great big dismissible stars riding out their careers on the donkey of a chosen persona – like Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas. However! There was an actor inside Peck, and maybe even a great one, and it is visible once and once only, so far as I know, in and as the remarkable Old Gringo. Here Peck’s dull mania for justice is finally abandoned. Here he is willing to be no longer popular. It is the greatest swan song any major actor ever performed, and so, after all these years of respectability, one finally has to respect him.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, bank robbers, Gregory Peck, Stephen Boyd: acting god, screen god, WESTERN

 

The Big Red One

01 Feb

The Big Red One – directed by Samuel Fuller – Five men slog through adventures comic and perilous in WWII. 113 minutes color 1980.

* * * * *

The reason I like Sam Fuller’s films is that nothing in them intervenes between them and me. The story is right there, the characters are right there, that’s it. Thinking on it, another reason has to do with Fuller’s temperament, which is Tolstoian, by which I mean in one stroke of the brush the hard truth about a situation or an individual is rendered complete. That hard truth may be humorous or it may be tragic; Fuller’s treatment is the same. So we have nothing fancy to distract us from the material or to prevaricate a shallowness, nor anything fancy in the editing, score, or filming. This is a great boon in a war story, a genre I seldom watch. But here we see the war as Bill Mauldin saw it, and as the soldiers saw it. Here we have no Great Battles, no Heroes; instead we have the First Infantry Army doughboys and grunts quickly improvising to survive and to kill. The boys are less well drawn than they might be, reduced to characteristic gestures, but that is all right in my books because the story is held together by the Sargent, played by Lee Marvin, who is, of course, the very pineapple of self-possession. So, lying behind its remarkable episodes, the film is a rare example of the spiritual ritual of men as a group coming into their own masculinity under the aegis of a male mentor. They fall under the wing of his taciturnity, cunning, devotion, and care. He is willing to kill them to make them grow up. But he is not willing to sacrifice them. They breathe him in. Their pheromones grow on their own under his watchful eye, and what all the four actors in his group do, more than elucidate their own gestures, is to take this remarkable man in and mature by that act and by the acts that act of spiritual ingestion inspires. It is a movie with that rare thing, true subtext.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, Directed by Samuel Fuller, Lee Marvin, World War II

 

Blow

15 Dec

Blow – directed by Ted Demme – a young man grows into a big time drug dealer, then withers. 2 hours color 2001.

* * * * *

Johnny Depp can carry a film all right all right. The trouble is, as the film goes on, the burden gets lighter and as the burden gets lighter the film is harder for him to carry, because there’s nothing left to carry, until he almost staggers under the exhausting weight of nothing. And this is noticeable here. The material is actually quite thin. Its first thinness is that it is about drugs to begin with, and not really about any conflict or irresolution between the characters or even in the characters. For years Depp has played noble crooks and cranks doomed to betrayal by life and love and oh so many octopi. And he had made other films about drugs, but films about drugs, stories about drugs, always end up collapsed partly because drugs are not human and partly because drugs are a power larger than any human, no matter how successful one might be in doing business with them. So the final thinness is that all films about drugs become enfeebled by the foregone conclusion that they will not end well. Ray Liotto and Rachel Griffiths are especially good as Depp’s parents, and Griffiths, who is younger than Depp and Australian, nails her New England accent and character with one blow. This is a very well made, beautifully shot and written and filmed piece. The wigs are dreadful and in them Depp and Penelope Cruz look like … well, they look like they’re wearing wigs. As Elia Kazan said, “No wigs. Wigs always look like wigs.” And he was right. So there is never a single moment when the wigs here give character registration. All they give is: “Why is Johnny Depp wearing another peculiar wig?” Depp, of course, we root for, not because of his performance, but because it is inherent to his nature that we do so. Will It Work? is our suspense. Will He Get Away With It? How Will it Turn Out? Yes. Yes. And Badly.

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Posted in ADVENTURE, BIO-PIC, CRIME, DRAMA, DRUGS, Johnny Depp, Penelope Cruz, Rachel Griffiths, Ray Liotta

 

Who’ll Stop The Rain

14 Dec

Who’ll Stop The Rain – directed by Karel Reisz — action adventure drama about a man entering into a drug deal out of loyalty to his best friend – 2 hours 6 minutes, color, 1976.

* * * * *

I wanted to turn this off several times at the start. Drugs. I don’t take drugs and am fed up with the subject in films and won’t see movies about people dealing with them. And the reason is that Drugs steal the drama. They supplant the tensions, difficulties, and cross-purposes between people that make drama happen. But, I saw Kazan’s The Dark At The Top Of The Stairs on Broadway when Tuesday Weld was young. And something simple and straightforward in Nolte’s technique caught my attention. And eventually I saw that this film was not about slick crime but the reverse: about the tragedy of human professional ineptitude. Weld, like many Method actresses, suffers from failed vocal production, which makes her mousy and weak, where she needs to be in agony. Otherwise, she is fascinating. Michael Moriarty, playing her husband, is glassy-eyed and elsewhere, with a flat vocal affect that gives you Out To Lunch. He plays an ex-Marine gone back to Viet Nam as a photographer, and, though a clean cut chap, decides to export a load of smack to be carried by his best friend from the Marines, now a merchant seaman, played by Nick Nolte. They don’t know it, but they are out of their shallows as professional drug runners. And they come up against a series of similar incompetents. The story revolves around the mortal peril incompetence leads to, and the script brilliantly expands on this to give us a world run by inept decisions. Nolte is alone the warrior professional. The difficulty is that his main enemy is a Three Stooges trio whose slightly overplayed comic folly over shadows their ineptitude, resulting in a failure of tone. The motto is: If you can’t get anyone better, make do with what you’ve got, and then watch it kill you.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, Drugs, Michael Moriarty, Nick Nolte, SUBJECT, Tuesday Weld, Vietnam War

 

Three Came Home

13 Dec

Three Came Home – directed by Jean Negulesco – docu-drama about a woman in a Japanese prison camp in WWII. 106 minutes black and white 1950

* * * * *

Sessue Hayakawa gives a fine performance as a Japanese officer overseeing a prison camp in WWII. The doubt and strain of his situation are well worked out in honest scenes between himself and the star Claudette Colbert, who is a model of screen acting at its best. Inherently game, like so many actresses of her era —  Paulette Goddard, Rosalind Russell, Carol Lombard —  she gives all her scenes full value. We never feel cheated by this actress. The story is both true and convincing, as are the settings and the tensions. The ending is a relief of a difficult and gripping situation. The title gives it away, but never mind. It’s exciting nonetheless.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, BIO-PIC, Claudette Colbert, Sessue Hayakawa, World War II

 

The Next Three Days

20 Nov

The Next Three Days –– directed by Paul Haggis –– suspense thriller about a woman convicted of murder and her husband who is not at all convicted she did it. Color 2010.

* * * * *

Well, you may wonder if you are in your ripe forties and had the part Russell Crowe plays here how well could you play it? Not within a mile as well as Russell Crowe does, was my answer as I watched. He is in his scruffy three-days-unshaven mode here, and he is in the hands of rough story that carries us into its surprises without betraying our credulity. Crowe plays a man unexceptionally in love with his wife, well played by Elizabeth Banks, and the conviction he brings to his feeling for her is the carrying force of the film on an emotional level. This love is put to the test by his own foolish plans to rescue her which projects us into the level of action, where the film is never still, always thrusting us forward into its next frustration, calamity, conniption. Crowe is in virtually every scene, and his registration as an actor is sterling throughout. He is always on the emotional and physical money. The film, however, is grounded, not by this performance but by the writing and direction and playing of his son, who is quiet and calm and patient, and represents the unspoken value system of the piece therefore. True, the director takes us past certain improbabilities to reach its excitement, but they vanish swiftly as the plot parts and lets us in on it. Liam Neeson has one scene, and he is superb in it. Altogether a well-written, tightly told  action adventure piece, beautifully produced, costumed, cast, written, designed, and performed.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, Brian Dennehy, DRAMA, MATING, MURDER, Russell Crowe

 

Blessed Is The Match

17 Nov

Blessed Is The Match –– directed by Roberta Grossman –– a bio-doc about Hannah Senesh, a young Israeli woman who parachuted into Rumania to save lives from the final solution. 85 minutes color and black and white 2008.

* * * * *

We are blessed to have this video record of this woman’s, brought up in comfort in Hungary, then, as a grown-up, emigrating to Israel to labor on a kibbutz. Then volunteering to parachute into Rumania with an aim to help Hungarian Jews to escape. Hungary remained neutral, and so the Jews of that country remained untouched until late in 1944, when, although Germany was already losing the war, Hitler invaded, and 80% of the Jews were immediately and efficiently whisked off to death. The story takes her behind the lines and eventually into Hungary where she is caught, imprisoned, and tortured. A remarkable story about a woman who thought herself as a mere match lighting up a little piece of life. Joan Allen narrates part of her story.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, BIO-DOCUMENTARY, Filmed in Germany, Filmed in Israel, Hungary, Joan Allen: screen and acting goddess, POLITICAL, SPY STORY, World War II

 

Silver Streak

08 Nov

Silver Streak –– directed by Arthur Hiller –– romantic adventure comedy in which nefarious doings get let loose on a speeding train. 113 minutes color 1976.

* * * * *

Gene Wilder’s eyes are of such a pellucid teacup blue that you know their innocence must be polluted before long. And so it comes to pass. I wouldn’t call the great Jill Clayburg pollution, but she does seduce him with an ease smoother than finesse and swifter than the swift at dawn. Ned Beatty a great actor who must have won three dozen Oscars by now, or none, plays, as usual, a person who wandered out of a Sinclair Lewis novel. Presently, the skullduggery starts to boil up, guided suavely by the person of Patrick McGoohan. Into the train wreck he plans for these person’s lives, zooms Richard Pryor, and the bullets start to fly to the right and to the left, but never, O never, to the heart of our hero which is preserved by his ironclad devotion to our Jill. The film starts as a leaden streak until Mr. Pryor’s arrival, but watch his invention, his imagination, his beautiful, restless, and exquisitely beggarly dissatisfaction driving every scene to glory. Have there ever been any more than five elegant leading women to appear in American film? Was Kay Francis one? Gwyneth Paltrow is certainly one. Jill Clayburgh is absolutely one, and it is a treat to know it as a rare fact right here in this amusing escape by train.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, BROAD COMEDY, CRIME, Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh: screen and acting goddess, MATING, MURDER, MYSTERY, Richard Pryor, THRILLER

 

Roshamon

25 Oct

Roshamon –– directed by Akira Kurosawa –– murder mystery in which four versions of the event are related by those who were there, none of those versions agreeing. 88 minutes black and white 1960.

* * * * *

You will never forget it. And you will wonder what you really saw once it is over, for it never is over. When it was first shown, it entered into the consciousness of the world like scripture. I remember when it first appeared. The acting style was Japanese in one sense of the word in that it was intense, gutsy, highly emotional, contained, melodramatic, stylized; one had never seen humans like this before in a picture and never had one seen anyone oriental as the focus of a serious film. It opened up Asian film to the West. Toshiro Mifune was first seen by U.S. audiences in this picture, playing with bold, sudden, unaccountable strokes. The woodland scenes are completely free, the scenes on the two sets completely imprisoned. This time round all these 50 years later, I watch the commentary, and I recommend it highly; the critic is a master of his craft; he knows the picture in its 450 scenes, by heart. See it with your friends. If ever a film was a community experience, it is this one.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, Directed by Akira Kurosawa, DRAMA, FOREIGN LANDS, FOREIGN LANGUAGE WITH SUBTITLES:, In Japanese with English subtitles, MURDER, MUST SEE

 

The Far Country

24 Oct

The Far Country – directed by Anthony Mann – A Western in which our cranky hero delivers a herd of cattle to the Yukon only to be double crossed. 97 minutes color 1955

* * * * *

Jimmy Stewart plays a self-centered adventurer who lands on his feet in a series of astonishing Canadian Rocky settings outside Jasper. Walter Brennan without his teeth and Jay C. Flippen as a drunken gold-panner play his picturesque sidekicks. The story is episodic, but the episodes are attention-getting. John McIntyre as the law-gone-bad character is a study in self-confidence. The glorious mountains are a mess to negotiate but Ruth Roman’s hairdo is never mussed in the mountains, but that’s Hollywood for ya, idnt it?. One of several strong Westerns Stewart made with director Anthony Mann — always with the same horse, Pie. Worth seeing.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, ANIMAL LOVERS, Directed by Anthony Mann, DRAMA, Jimmy Stewart: Screen God: Acting God, MATING, Psychological Western, Turn of the 19th Century, WESTERN

 

Those Calloways

24 Oct

Those Calloways –– directed by Norman Tokar –– a family film in which a nature-loving man and his son contrive to thwart developers. 132 minutes color 1965

* * *

I rented it to see Brandon De Wilde. He was an angel as a young man, an actor ready for whatever came up, the boy in Shane and The Member of the Wedding. Here he is a young trapper. He has the same honorable, even noble demeanor; it comes from within. Vera Miles (as his mom) shows herself a very good actor, and Brian Keith is excellent as the rapscallion father. The picture is a Disney milk and cookies sort of picture, thrusting upon us a view of America that has nothing to do with actual Americans. Somehow the milk is homogenized and the cookies store-bought.

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Posted in ADVENTURE, Brandon de WIlde, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, WESTERN

 

A Yank In The RAF

24 Oct

A Yank In The RAF – directed by Henry King – a WW II romantic adventure story in which an American joins up in England, competes for a pretty dame, and saves the day on a bombing mission in Europe. 98 minutes black and white 1941.

* * * *

The power of the personalities of Betty Grable and Tyrone Power makes for romantic suspense and super entertainment. He plays a rogue with a roving eye, and she plays, as she often did in films, the lady of talent who is a sucker for a cad. They’re both up against Bruce Cabot the actor whose eyes are as evil as his moustaches. Because it was made during the war and is a bit of a hodgepodge, the picture is endearing and fun. Betty Grable was the star I most identified with at the time. Like me, she was open, blond, big hearted, hard working, and not loved as much as she deserved. Power is especially fine as the gum-chewing flirt, a different take for the actor who in that era was the most beautiful male in films. Here he’s a rascal who never takes it back. Usually cast in romance, action-adventure, or drama, he’s up for the necessary finesses and impenitence of light comedy. I wish he had done more of them.

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Posted in ADVENTURE, Betty Grable: screen goddess, DRAMA, FAMILY FILM, Farce, FOREIGN LANDS, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Light Comedy, Middle Class Comedy, MILITARY, World War II

 

RED

23 Oct

RED –– directed by Robert Schwentke–– an action spy comedy adventure in which a bouquet of experienced old-time CIA assassins come out of retirement when a past score starts to be settled against them. Color 2010

* * * * *

Ernest Borgnine at 94 is in fine form here as the keeper of the very most secret of all the files in the world. And our acting staff is all over 50, or is it 60? ––  and, like him, at the top of their game. Bruce Willis, always an excellent actor in the right roll, is particularly droll in registering the humor of the situation. Morgan Freeman plays the old reliable, and Helen Mirren and Brian Cox play former lovers rekindling their oomph amid the flames and firestorms of the genre. What makes the piece worth seeing is its unfolding until those firestorms start, at which time the wit stops, for it is impossible to be quite jolly and lighthearted while the Uzis fire. Or whatever that weaponry is. And besides the story then departs the arena of the possible and dashes into the arena of the improbable, and from that quickly seethes into the arena of the impossible, when Richard Dryfuss enters the picture and introduces the Vice-President of the United States as the man behind the man behind the man behind the woman, whom Rebecca Pidgeon plays with her usually chilling affect. It’s more than the comedy will bear. For the film is one step away in its fine early stages from an Abbott and Costello film, with Freeman, Willis, and Mirren all playing Costello and John Malkovich playing Abbott, the only serious lunatic in the bunch. Mary-Louse Parker is particular responsive and funny in the Dorothy Lamour role –– or is that from another series entirely? Oh, yes. But what then? She could have been in an Abbott and Costello film, couldn’t she? The piece is well written in its early stages of the preposterous, by which I mean in terms of narrative and dialogue and editing, and very well told by the director. It is when it devolves into the preposterously preposterous that expectations drop. But, never mind. Just expect them to.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, Bruce Willis, Farce, Helen Mirren: acting goddess, John Malkovich, Light Comedy, MATING, Morgan Freeman, MURDER, Richard Dreyfuss, SPY STORY, THRILLER

 

The Loves Of Carmen

17 Oct

The Loves Of Carmen –– directed by Charles Vidor –– tragedy when a naïve soldier falls in lust with a slatternly factory girl. 1948 color.

* * * * *

Spanish to her beautiful long and graceful fingertips, Rita Hayworth is the greatest Carmen ever to be filmed, in opera or out, the Carmen of Carmens. She could kill you with a click-clock of a castanet. Her opening appearance, teasing with an orange, is bravura acting at its best, easiest, and most fluid. This was the last picture she made before marrying Ali Kahn, her last picture as a young woman. The production is, of course, a Hollywood pastiche; the setting has nothing to do with Spain, or even with Mexico, where it is supposed to be placed. But so what –– with this provocative, saucy, witty, unpredictable, fiery, and bold woman brought to life with force, subtlety, and brazen confidence. There was nobody like Rita Hayworth. You couldn’t take your eyes off of her, and it’s still true. She made five films with Glen Ford, but he said he felt out of place in this one, and he does look foolish in his regimentals, but as soon as he gets out of the soldier suit he’s fine. Don Jose is gauche, awkward, inexperienced –– and Ford conveys all that and brings to his scenes a bandanna of terrifying violence and cruelty once that uniform is exchanged for a highwayman’s rig. Victor Jory is a drooling monster, and Luther Adler sound as the wise thief. But it’s Hayworth in full force whose radiant and astonishing femininity make this picture a treat. Look at her bearing as she moves. Absorb her intensity when she is still. Surrender to her when the music starts. For it is quite apparent that no one in films ever enjoyed herself so much as Rita Hayworth when she danced.

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Posted in ADVENTURE, Dance & Dancing, FOREIGN LANDS, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MATING, MILITARY, MURDER, Rita Hayworth: Screen Goddess, TRAGEDY

 

Carve Her Name With Pride

17 Oct

Carve Her Name With Pride — directed by Lewis GIlbert — a bio-pic in which a young WW II widow leaves her daughter and parents in London to risk great danger to help the French resistance. 1 hour 58 minutes black and white 1958.

* * * * *

A big star in her day, Virginia McKenna was not in possession of a great talent but rather of a popular one. Facially resembling Lizbeth Scott and with the vocal placement of Grace Kelly, in this piece she remains fixed within the virtues of its confines, and this serves the script very well. The story is told with cinematic economy and discretion, so doors close when they should, and the camera moves away from torture scenes better imagined than seen. Her steadfastness in the role is without neurosis or particularity, so it tells the story of a heroine rather than the story of an individual to whom these things happen. I do not complain. That is a legitimate mode of cinema acting-narration and, if not time-honored, certainly time-tested. Violette Szabo was a real English spy in France and did what we see, so when we witness her wipe out German after German, we have been well prepared by the fact that she was already a sharpshooter before she began, a veritable Annie Oakley. Her spy-partner is the redoubtable Paul Scofield. He had the most commanding presence of any actor on the English-speaking stage. And this is certainly in evidence here. Whether he was a great actor was obscured by his opacity and by his inveterate physical and especially vocal masculinity which carried all before it. I do not know whether he was a master actor because he was such a mysterious one. I saw him three times on the stage: King Lear in which he was effortfully boring; A Man For All Seasons in which he was effortlessly righteous; and Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing with John Gielgud, Diana Wynard, George Rose, Dorothy Tutin, in which, magnificent in furs, he dropped jaws of all beholders. Here he has already developed one trick of his personal trade: the secrete smile useful for passage work, such as getting across from the dance floor to the balcony. He has his moments: his face when she leaves;watch for it. Even when he is terrible he is just wonderful, and he’s far from terrible here in this simple, honest and well-told tale.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, BIO-PIC, DOCUDRAMA, FAMILY FILM, FOREIGN LANDS, MATING, MILITARY, Paul Scofield, SPY STORY, World War II

 

Tall In The Saddle

17 Oct

Tall In The Saddle–– directed by Edwin L. Marin –– a western in which a cowboy has to fight the enemies of the dead rancher who hired him and also fend off his comely hellcat neighbor. 87 minutes black and white 1944.

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Ella Raines generates a wild gypsy heat for Wayne, and looks great in chaps riding full bore into town to shoot him dead. Wayne had a great figure in those days, and his face begins to take on the wry humor that became his stock in trade and lent so much character and fun to his work as he grew older. The story is casual and episodic, which is just right if you want Gabby Hayes to give full value, which he does; an oddity, but a very good actor at what he did. I saw this when it first came out and fell in Love with Ella Raines. I have still not gotten over it.  Shoulder length dark hair, a dancer’s carriage, a direct and level look, she’s my type. I was 11, and I knew what I wanted . In my 20s I remained faithful to Ella Raines by falling in love with Janice Rule. To this day, any picture in which either of these beautiful women appear gets my full and biased attention. Altogether one of Wayne’s best middle period Westerns –– varied and likable and well told.

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Posted in ACTION, ADVENTURE, DRAMA, Ella Raines: screen goddess, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Turn of the 19th Century, WESTERN

 

They Came To Cordura

17 Oct

They Came To Cordura – directed by Robert Rosen – Period Western drama in which an officer must chaperone a pack of renegade men and a treacherous woman across the parching desert. 123 minutes color 1959.

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A better picture than it was thought to be at the time, the actual story of internal human values supervenes in our interest in the arduous trek. Rita Hayworth was a good screen actress and a knockout. The sight of her elegant dancer’s carriage sitting in a saddle in a wide-brimmed hat shading that incredible jaw-line is alone worth the price of admission. In support are a pack of first class stars, Richard Conte, Van Heflin, Tab Hunter. Gary Cooper is close to the end of his work in films. He seems too old for the part, at least he looks too old –– for the simple reason that the efficient cause of his being given this assignment would only obtain to a newcomer. The grueling haul of seven individuals of dubious character across the spectacular desert ranges of the Southwest is stunning. Robert Rossen of All The Kings Men wrote and directed, and the script demonstrates a gripping moral debate, the constituents of cowardice and courage, Cooper’s home territory. Better now than before, this film may grow into its proper audience. It was, and still is, the sort of picture no longer made by Hollywood: one with adult themes, made with adult stars, and intended for adult audiences. Well worth watching.

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Posted in ADVENTURE, Directed by Robert Rossen, DRAMA, Gary Cooper, MILITARY, Rita Hayworth: Screen Goddess, Tab Hunter, Turn of the 19th Century, Van Heflin, WESTERN

 
 
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