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Archive for the ‘Lee Marvin’ Category

Seven Men From Now

27 Mar

Seven Men From Now — directed by Budd Boettecher. Western. A widower on a mission of retaliation. 78 minutes Black and White 1956.

★★★★★

A really extraordinary piece, beautifully directed and filmed in the Alabama Hills of California with their astounding rock formations and bosky river and desert and stupendous views of the Sierras, all of which adds the frame of indifferent nature to the stark story. Randolph Scott, a vision of rectitude and reticence almost psychopathic, meets up with a couple on their way to California. Both parties have their mission, but neither know what it is. The secret is revealed as the journey progresses through a landscape which no one registers and which influences everything. Lee Marvin is brilliant as the antagonist who meets up with these three. His confidence as an actor is amazing, and watch for the bit of business he executes after he shoots his last man down. The heart of the picture lies with Gail Russell, a wonderful actor of great beauty, so soft and endearing; no actress of her day had a more natural appeal. The simplicity of the material and the economical handling of the story and the wit of the writing and the consistently imaginative narration of the photographer and the great skill of the performers make it one of the best Westerns ever made. Be prepared for a pleasant surprise as you watch it. Suitable for the whole family, as films were in those days. (The additional material is excellent. too.)

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, DIRECTED BY Budd Boetticher, Gail Russell, Lee Marvin, Psychological Western, Randolph Scott: Movie God

 

Gorky Park

24 Jul

Gorky Park – Directed by Michael Apted. Police Procedural. A Russian cop discovers an international smuggling plot and his true love in it. 2 hours 8 minutes Color 1983.

* * * * *

William Hurt certainly is a curious bloke. He gives off the same brain-dead emanation as John Malkovich. This quality serves him perfectly in the plot of this superbly suspenseful and remarkably well-directed piece. Filmed in Moscow itself, Helsinki, and Stockholm, we are never on the pinpoint of a sound-stage but always believe we are in the full impersonal latitudes where the film shows us to be. This is not film noir in color. Film noir is mostly every-spare-has-been-expensed, made on the cheap, that black lighting arranged to shade out the paltry sets. Here instead we have the big and unsettling panoramas of foreign unvisited countries and the ominous fall of snow. All exquisitely filmed by Ralf T. Bode. The set decoration by Michael Seirton and the costumes by Richard Bruno are splendid. And all this fortifies the distractions needed to veer us off course as the characters veer off course in proving what we know from his first appearance before us that Lee Marvin is the evil doer. How could it be otherwise? His self-possession is unequalled in all Christendom. I liked the way the story spreads out. It’s not based on concentration of scent, as in Sherlock Holmes, but on the appearance of random elements in a landscape ultimately making sense as belonging there. Michael Dennehy and Richard Griffiths lend their substance to the doings, and one roots for them. Ian Bannen brings his kindly presence to the task, and Ian Mcdiarmid nibbles the scenery nicely as the strange professor. I felt well-treated by the movie. As I opened its continually unexpected wrappings, I was always held by the next unfoldment, and the next, and the one after that.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, CRIME DRAMA, Ian Bannen, Lee Marvin, Michael Apted, MURDER MYSTERY, Police Procedural, Richard Griffiths, William Hurt

 

Seven Men From Now

15 Jun

Seven Men From Now  Directed by Budd Boetticher. Western. A former sherif stalks the men who shot down his wife. 78 minutes Color 1956.

* * * * *

A really extraordinary piece, beautifully directed and filmed in the Alabama Hills of California with their astounding rock formations and bosky river and desert and stupendous views of the Sierras, all of which adds the frame of indifferent nature to the stark story. Randolph Scott, a vision of rectitude and reticence almost psychopathic, meets up with a couple on their way to California. Both parties have their mission, but neither know what it is. The secret is revealed as the journey progresses through a landscape which no one registers and which influences everything. Lee Marvin is brilliant as the antagonist who meets up with these three. His confidence as an actor is amazing, and watch for the bit of business he executes after he shoots his last man down. The heart of the picture lies with Gail Russell, a wonderful actor of great beauty, so soft and endearing; no actress of her day had a more natural appeal. The simplicity of the material and the economical handling of the story and the wit of the writing and the consistently imaginative narration of the photographer and the great skill of the performers make it one of the best Westerns ever made. Be prepared for a pleasant surprise as you watch it. Suitable for the whole family, as films were in those days. (The additional material is excellent. too.)

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, DIRECTED BY Budd Boetticher, Gail Russell: SCREEN BEAUTY, Lee Marvin, Randolph Scott: Movie 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

 
 
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