I Can't Die Yet, I Haven't Seen The Jolson Story

A few days ago there was a report that Jamie Foxx was up for playing Sinatra in a biopic of the Chairman of the Board. I took it with a grain of salt. It's like those periodic rumours that turn up about a black actor playing the half-Scottish half-Swiss character known as James Bond.

Okay, so Jamie Foxx is going to play the child of two Sicilian-Americans... okay... lemme think this through. Is this a delayed backlash against all those white Shakespearean actors who played Othello with burnt cork on their faces? Particularly Olivier's rendition in the 1960s?

Weird stuff. Maybe they can CGI Foxx into looking more Italianate, much in the manner that they de-aged Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart in the rather shitty third X-Men movie. Leaving aside the issue of race, perhaps this is one of those cases of very famous actor hubris. Very successful actors can have a tendency to think they can do anything. Very few people say "No" to them, so they develop a belief in their own entitlement.

If that's the case, here's an enormous artistic challenge for Jamie Foxx. Perhaps he could star in a remake of the movie in the youtube clip below.

Paleo-Cinema Podcast #31 - Child Safe Movies

RSS SUBSCRIPTION LINK - Right click and save

DIRECT DOWNLOAD - right click and save



This time around, I'll be suggesting movies to watch with children.

Not necessarily childrens' films but movies that might generate a passion for cinema in the minds of the young, so they don't grow up to say things like "Rob Schneider Is A Genius" or "I don't like black and white movies, I can't get into them" or other things that would make people doubt the integrity of their genetic structure. I offer this as a public service to the children of the world.*



*Tongue in cheek, of course

Paleo-Cinema Podcast Special #1 - Terry's Mixtape

Direct Download Link - Right Click To Save

RSS Feed Link


In this 'cast I'm doing something different. A mixtape of sorts where I share some of my favourite movie music. Not much else to say, but enjoy it :-) Back to a full podcast next week.

Terry

Movie Cataloguing Software

I just had a question from Cerpts over at The Land Of Cerpts And Honey about movie-collection databases, so I thought I'd share the software that we use for our DB. It's Movie Organizer and it works fairly simply. Type in a movie name, hit F7 and it searches both Movie Organizer's own database as well as The Internet Movie Data Base for the film. Printing out a listing is fairly simple, too. It's freeware and has been around for over 10 years.

Of course, not every bit of software suits everyone, and this one is PC only, so give it a go if you like and let me know what you think.

Bazura Is Back!

My favourite low-budget community tv show about movies, The Bazura Project is back. Shannon Marinko and Lee Zachariah educate the masses about, and take the piss out of, movies and movie culture. They're funny, not the usual Ken Doll clones you see on television and extremely entertaining, even if Lee doesn't know how to pronounce Maciste. The first episode of series three is up here and it's chock full of fillumic goodness.

Movies, TV Etc

I've been doing some intense media stuff lately. Partly as research for the podcast (which comes out next weekend) and partly because the temperature here in Melbourne has been pretty high lately and I can't be stuffed doing much else.

So what have I been hitting my retinas with?

The first three episodes of the second series of the tv series "Primeval", which I highly recommend you watch even if you have to torrent it as I did. The premise of this one is simple - anomalies in time are opening up all over London and a team of scientists lead by Professor Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) have the job of returning whatever comes through the anomalies to their original time periods. His job is complicated by the fact that his wife Helen (Juliet Aubrey) who disappeared into an anomaly eight years before, has returned and seems to a) know how to predict where an anomaly will appear and b) is playing around with changing the time lines. Raptors, pteradons, smilodons, pre-Cambrian worms the size of large dogs and highly intelligent ambush predators from the future all come through and menace the team. It's a good solid adventure series with engaging characters, a story arc that hooks you in and it's a lot more fun than the nihilistic, virally-hyped shaky-cam of a movie like "Cloverfield" - which we also saw. A week after viewing "Cloverfield" (dumb name, why not call it Pastel Pony Wonderland Movie) my reaction is that it's a godzilla flick for youtube reality tv junkies. Nice monster but its' physics are all fucked. You can't get a tentacular calimari-textured thingie that big. The Inverse Cube Law makes even a muscular endoskeletal daikaju like Godzilla ludicrous. Someone should do a giant monster with carbon-fibre bones and muscles like braided ships hawsers. Gimme a pre-Cambrian worm anyday.

I've also been nibbling away at Series One of Have Gun-Will Travel, the late 50s western series starring Richard Boone as Paladin, the knight-gunfighter who solves problems more often with his brain than his perfectly balanced 45 caliber Colt Single Action Army revolver. The episodes are slightly less than 30 minutes and the writing and acting are wonderful. Watching Boone carry a live rattlesnake at arm's length into an indian encampment was one of the greatest bits of tv actor bravery I've ever seen. The guest actors are pretty good too - Charles Bronson, Strother Martin, June Lockhart, Warren Oates, James Coburn. Can't wait until I can afford series two and three from Amazon.



I also got out to the cinema to see No Country For Old Men, the new Coen Brothers movie based on a novel by Mr Comedy, Cormac McCarthy. Excellent film, even when there's a microcephalic tosser sitting in the row in front of you talking all the way through it. Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin are all excellent in this one. Add it to your list. While watching it we saw the preview of There Will Be Blood, the new Paul Thomas Anderson flick starring Daniel Day Lewis. I'll have to check it out even if DDL is doing a note-perfect imitiation of John Huston's Noah Cross from Chinatown.

That's all for now. Gotta watch some movies.

SHOOT 'EM UP

The movie opens Mr. Smith (Clive Owen) sitting at a bus stop chewing a carrot when a woman in labour staggers past. Seconds later, a car broadsides into another parked vehicle and a hard-case gets out and follows the woman into an alley while brandishing a gun. Reluctantly, Smith follows.

Mr. Smith is to gunfights what Bruce Lee was to kicking people in the back of the head while standing in front of them. He's the last person in the World you want to see if you're about to cut a baby out of a woman with a hunting knife and for the guy who is about to do just that, Mr Smith is the last person he sees. More villains turn up and Mr Smith handles the problem of shooting bad guys and delivering a baby simultaneously. When he severs the umbilical with a well aimed shot, the movie kicks into high gear. Paul Giamatti turns up as Hertz, the leader of the killers. Time was when the villain in an action movie was a suave Alan Rickman Eurotrash thief. Giamatti looks like the kind of guy who spends all day in the public library, which is possibly why his character is such a good hitman.

If Smith is the angriest man in the World, Hertz is the smartest killer. When it comes to following clues he makes Basil Rathbone look like Bill Murray in Caddyshack. When the mother of the baby is killed, Smith is left with the kid and recruits Donna, a lactating prostitute played by Monica Bellucci to wet-nurse the baby, who as the plot unfolds is revealed to be the intended subject of the original hit.

Like all good action films, this one creates its' own reality. If you buy in to the bit with the umbilicus, you're in the movie's zone. Giamatti, Owen and Bellucci are excellent in what are essentially a string of action sequences laced together with a plot that doesn't, and doesn't have to make much sense. There are some dark and icky bits in it, especially when Hertz tortures Smith, but in general, this is a great popcorn and beer movie. Stylish gun-porn.

Remake Madness

JoBlo.com has a report that the guy who produced Alexander for Oliver Stone, a twit called Thomas Schuehly wants to do a remake of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This is an extremely bad idea. It's even worse than the 1984 soundtrack for the film where Giorgio Moroder decided that it was a good idea to get Pat Benatar, Adam Ant, Billy Squier, Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler and Freddie Mercury to sing banal pop-songs in an attempt to enhance a silent movie classic. It wasn't a good idea and it wasn't enhancement.

Here's an open letter to Thomas Schuehly. Leave it the fuck alone. Go and do a movie based on Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash or Charlie Stross' Iron Sunrise or get someone to update Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron instead of drawing over masterpieces with cinematic crayons. Nobody's going to thank you for frigging up their memories of the original movie and you won't do it better than Fritz Lang did.
In his later years, Lang starred in a movie called Le Mepris and that title expresses my feelings about the idea of remaking Metropolis. Le Mepris means contempt.

Yet Another Great Movie Review Site

Boris Lugosi (not his real name) has been pubbing his movie review on the web since Jesus was a cowboy. The site, Girls, Guns and Ghouls is worth checking out as a checklist of DVD goodness for the discerning cult movie buff. It's yet another case of Australian quality cultural content in the great tradition of this and this and this.

Paleocinema Podcast #4 - Spy Movies Sans Bond

Podcast 4 is up and running.

In this podcast I look at the history of spy films, apart from James Bond, going back to the origins of the genre, revealing the longest running spy movie series of all time and dissing not only “Get Smart” but Austin Powers as well.

Extra music and sounds from archive.org and Soundsnap.
Download the file at this link.

Or play with the embedded player

Powered by Podbean.com

Thief Of Bagdad (1924) Available Online

Hi guys

The 1924 Thief of Bagdad (which I have yet to watch) is available from Archive Dot Org at the following link voila!. Enjoy!

Vincent Price Reads Poe's The Raven

The subject of Podcast #2 reads Edgar Allan Poe.

Podcast 2 Is Up and Running

The download link is here or else click on the embeddable player below.

Powered by Podbean.com

Wednesday at MUFF

Wednesday night I did the annual pilgrimmage to MUFF - the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. The usual group of MUFFers was attenuated because my wife Sally was ill as was Matt, the other regular. (Matt chose the MUFF movie we saw last year and it was a piece of shit, DOGME 95, John Cassevetes wannabe turd in the punch bowl piece of urban realism which was about as realistic as an episode of Neighbours. Matt doesn't get to choose the movie again until Lindsay Lohan dies of old age.)

So it was down to Alicia and I. We dined on the $10 steak night fare at the British Crown pub in Smith Street, Collingwood, where I lost a screw from my spectacles and was unable to find it on the floor, which while it wasn't as bad as the sticky carpet of the Espy, needed a touch of the mop. Wearing my prescription shades I managed to make it to a 7-11 for a MacGyver moment. I tied the lens into the frame using dental floss in place of the missing screw and Alicia and I headed down to The Toff In Town on Swanston Street for the session of MUFFage. The two movies we saw were Jason Turley's Welcome Stranger and Stuart Simpson's Demonsamongus with two of Stuart's short films Sickie and Greedy Guts.

MUFF can be a bit hit or miss. It's a festival of guerilla film making. Micro-budget films usually shot on high-def video with casts and crew who are the fringe-dwellers of the local film industry. Not that these are bad things, but we aren't talking about the kind of festival where David and Margaret are going to chat about Cate Blanchett giving a golden pot-plant award to Baz Luhrmann. But it is a lot of fun, the venues are non-traditional (last year the Spanish Club in Fitzroy, this year an art-deco-ey bar with a view over twenty five Thai Restaurants and Pho cafes on the uphill bit of Swanston Street) and the film makers talk about their work afterwards.

Welcome Stranger was good. A feature film about an 18 year old guy's potentially life changing weekend in the Western Suburbs of Melbourne, it was filmed on a $500 budget. It may sound dull but it isn't. Jason Turley's script is well-observed and the characterisations crisp in spite of the mostly non-professional cast. A few seasoned professional character actors like John Brumpton and John Flaus (who gets a Ben Johnson in The Last Picture Show moment of zen)work well with their less experience colleagues. Among the non-pros, Suzanne Barr was great as Sandra, the mother of the old school friend that Christian Poppi's Adam visits.

The two shorts were hilarious. Sickie being about a woman who calls in sick for work and quickly deteriorates from there. The punchline is silly but amusing. Greedy Guts shows the downside of trendy tattoos, especially when the tattooist and his female assistant look like they've been dead for a week. Again, the budgets were tiny but the effect and effects made them worthy of better exposure than they'll probably get.

Demonsamongus was an Australian zombie movie that owed a fair bit to the works of George Romero, Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and the Wodonga Abbatoir. It does overdose a little on the kooky camera effects and annoys when it tries to induce a feeling of disorientation, but I've seen many worse horror movies in the uptown cinemas and it didn't decide to go the route of modern American fare (and Wolf Creek) into the realms of Torture Porn. But it too was fun. Alicia and I skipped the Q & A session in the bar because the clock was heading toward midnight midweek, but both of us were satisfied with the quality of all four films and spending only $20 to see them.

Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957)

Starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas

I love a good blokey movie sometimes. This one starts great. Frankie Laine sings the theme song to Dimitri Tiomkin’s bombastic score as three cowboys ride across a prairie and the titles come up. Lots of good character actors here. Frank Faylen, Earl Holliman, Dennis Hopper, Whit Bissell…DeForest Kelley! Kenneth Tobey, Lee Van Cleef, Jack Elam. Wow. Leon Uris (the guy who wrote Exodus) penned the script and John Sturges directed. The horsemen ride past Boot Hill, which is a recurring motif in the movie.

The trio, lead by Van Cleef, enter a bar and ask the owner where Doc Holliday is. The barman has them check their guns in and we cut to an ageing dance hall girl Kate (Jo Van Fleet who’d just won a supporting actress Oscar for East of Eden) sitting in a hotel room with Holliday (Douglas) who is drunk and throwing knives into the door of the room. They argue until she tells him that he’s no better than her since the Civil War wiped out his family fortune. He throws a knife into the wall beside her head, she grabs it and tries to stab him… which she doesn’t as he grabs her by the head and tells her not to mention her family again. They kiss and make up. She wants to go to Laramie until his tubercular cough clears up, but he’s going to meet the three gunmen instead. This is Douglas at his melodramatic best. He was doing treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen before there was a name for it.

After dropping in to see the ageing sheriff of the town (Frank Fayden), Wyatt Earp (Lancaster) goes into the bar to get information on the Clanton Gang who passed through town recently. He sees the three and heads back to talk with Holliday to tell him that Van Cleef has a derringer in his left boot. Holliday has a chip on his shoulder the size of a redwood and refuses to answer when Earp asks him where Clanton was going. In the bar, Holliday kills the gunman by pulling a knife from inside the back of his shirt collar and nailing him with it before he can get to the derringer. Sturges uses this trick again in the Magnificent Seven where Britt (James Coburn) is called by a cowhand.

Earp helps Holliday escape from a lynch mob and they meet up again in Dodge City. Doc gets Earp to stake him for a poker game. Their friendship grows as they track down bank robbers and get involved with a female poker player (Rhonda Fleming). All this leads up to the titular gunfight with the Clantons.

For a guy who’s supposed to be tubercular, Kirk Douglas makes a pretty active Doc Holliday. He can’t seem to rein-in his natural athleticism. It’s as if he’s trying to compete with Lancaster, who with Nick Cravat was a professional acrobat. When he confronts Ringo (John Ireland), Kate’s new boyfriend, the repressed energy is palpable. Holliday has promised Earp he wouldn’t start a fight, and so he backs down on the confrontation. It’s hard to think of a modern actor who does rage better than Kirk Douglas. Tom Cruise does intensity, but there’s always an undercurrent of frat-boy whininess to him. He acts as if the World is being mean and it shouldn’t. Douglas’ anger is combined with a physical confidence and a worldliness that makes him unique in cinema. His son Michael is at least as good an actor, but his cinematic persona is a different one. Like Kirk, he plays bad and flawed characters very well, but he could never carry off a movie like this one. You need actors who are larger than life to play iconic heroes. That’s why Troy never worked as a movie. The actors playing Greek heroes were, in spite of the script’s attempts to pump them up, no more than human sized. The new movie 300 has the right idea, play them big and intense and don’t be scared to go over the top.

This iconic largeness is helped by the motif of having Frankie Laine sing during the transitions from one place and another. A balladeer doesn’t croon about ordinary people. Earp and Holliday go to Tombstone, where one if his brothers, Morgan is played by DeForrest Kelley. Kelley had a good character actor career in the 40s and 50s. He did westerns and film noir until fate hit him with a phaser and everyone started thinking that his career started in 1966 with Shatner and Nimoy.

Lancaster’s Earp is a solid, stolid presence. His intensity is pulled in, encased, until violence breaks out. “Next time you ride in armed, you ride out feet first!” is the kind of line only an actor like Lancaster can say without sounding ridiculous. Where Douglas’ Holliday is cracked wide with flaws and illnesses, Lancaster’s Earp is a coiled spring. He picks up Dennis Hopper, playing the youngest Clanton and slings him over his shoulder as he would an overcoat. That man was strong.

The original gunfight on the 29th of October 1881 took thirty seconds with 34 shots fired and three men dead. In the movie it took them four days to shoot and five minutes of screen time. It still makes exciting cinema. Sturges uses the dust, the fence rails, wagons, adobe walls, gullies and rough footbridges to give the action a good physical structure. He elaborated on this approach with The Magnificent Seven, but you can see it developing here. There’s a great moment when Burt Lancaster runs at full pelt, then does a shoulder roll into cover.

The historical accuracy of the movie is a little shaky, but this is 1950s Hollywood we are talking about. Entertainment was the name of the game and this one delivers. A little psychodrama but not too much, fight scenes at regular intervals and some good acting. (I think the Rhonda Fleming character is just there to make Earp look heterosexual.) Just the film for a blokey night of barbecuing and beer.

Notes:

Producer Hal Wallis originally wanted Humphrey Bogart to play Doc Holliday. Unfortunately, Bogie was dying of lung cancer at the time. Yeah, it might have added versimilitude to the role but it didn’t happen.

According to Douglas in his autobiography “The Ragman’s Son” Jo Van Fleet insisted that he slap her quite hard and repeatedly before takes of their climactic confrontation that triggers a severe tubercular attack in Holliday.

Twenty years later, here’s what Burt Lancaster said about the movie: “ I didn’t want to do the picture at first. It was too much of a talkie! Too much dialogue in the script. The picture is about two men of action, Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp. Men of few words, men who wouldn’t have gone around intellectuallizing about their lives.”

But it’s a western that delivers.

Night of the Demon (1957)

Based on Casting The Runes by M. R. James
Directed by Jacques Tourneur.

This movie begins with daylight shots of Stonehenge as a stentorious voice tells us that the builders of the monument understood the nature of good and evil and that certain symbols could conjure evil.

Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham) makes a hurried night-time car trip to Lufford Hall, the home of an Aleister Crowley-like sorcerer called Julian Karswell. Upon arriving, he begs Karswell to lift a curse, even offering a public recantation of his public utterances that have brought some notoriety to Karswell and his followers. While urbanely playing with a deck of cards, Karswell responds with, “You said do your worst and that’s precisely what I did.”

He sends Harrington home with a promise to do all he can, but as Harrington locks his garage at home, he’s attacked by a smoking winged ‘fire demon’ the size of a two storey building. At home Karswell burns a newspaper with a headline reading “Karswell Devil Cult Expose Promised at Scientists’ Convention”. The sorcerer had given Harrington a parchment with runic symbols on it: a magical death sentence.

Doctor John Holden (Dana Andrews), an eminent American psychologist and skeptic flies from the USA to London for the Convention. He finds that Harrington is dead and the only witness to any of Karswell’s cult activities is a catatonic farmer called Rand Hobart. He receives a threatening call from Karswell, suggesting that he butts out of Hobart and Karswell’s business. The next day, he bumps into Karswell at the British Museum library. The sorcerer offers him the use of a rare tome on magic and invites him to Lufford Hall. While picking up a dropped file, Karswell slips a parchment of runes into it, which he hands to Holden.

The Professor’s niece, Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins) meets Holden and suggests that he drop the investigation. She has her uncle’s diary and they discover that Harrington himself had been slipped a parchment by Karswell at a concert in Albert Hall. Holden, the rationalist, explains away the coincidence. He and Joanna visit Lufford Hall where Karswell, in a tramp costume and clown makeup is performing magic tricks for the local children at his annual Halloween party. Karswell confesses to having once made his living as a stage magician. While watching children play snakes and ladders, Karswell says that he always preferred sliding down the snakes to climbing the ladders.

Karswell: You’re a doctor of psychology. You ought to know the answer to that.

Holden: Maybe you’re a good loser.

Karswell: I’m not, you know. Not a bit…

(Later)

Karswell: You don’t believe in witchcraft.

Holden: Do you?

Karswell: Do I believe in witchcraft? What kind of witchcraft? The legendary witch that rides on the imaginary broom? The hex that tortures the thoughts of the victim? Pins stuck in the image that wastes away the mind and the body?

Holden: Also imaginary.

Karswell: But where does imagination end and reality begin? What is this twilight? This half-world of the mind that you profess to know so much about? How can we differentiate between the powers of darkness and the powers of the mind?

To prove his point, Karswell conjures a fierce windstorm with a moment’s concentration. The clown-magician has become the egotistical but powerful wizard who sends chairs and children scattering to the four winds. Inside the house, Karswell predicts that Holden will die three days hence, at 10 pm. After Holden and Joanna leave, Karswell explains to his mother that prices must be paid for his wealth and power. Either the lives of others, or his own.

Holden is a skeptic, but to his own detriment. Even when evidence manifests itself, he stays true to his rationalism until there is nowhere else to go except to accept a different kind of logic -- that the rune is a death warrant and that he needs to be smarter than Karswell to avoid being ripped apart.

His encounter with Karswell’s familiar, Grimalkin, during a break-in at Lufford Hall is a classic piece of Tourneur movie making. A cat transforms into a leopard with nothing more than subtle editing, perfect lighting and suggestion.

Jacques Tourneur was a master of black and white horror. Suggestion, sound effects, surprises and misdirection are familiar tools that he used as a master craftsman of horror. Working on small budgets for RKO in the 40s with producer Val Lewton, he created Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie, two of the best horror films of that, or any subsequent decade. These days, movie-makers network banks of PCs to create their monsters. In lieu of that, Tourneur harnessed the imaginations of the audience. Suggest rather than show, imply rather than state, a moving shadow is scarier than a clearly seen threat. Tourneur had the skill of drawing the audience into the world of his movies. His way of doing this was by making that world an interesting place, populated by people we also find interesting. When Holden visits Stonehenge and finds the runes on his paper inscribed on the stones, there’s an iconic feeling to it. A modern man threatened by the looming mysteries of a past age.

In this film, created over a decade after Tourneur’s RKO days and on another continent, his skills are undiminished. The demon itself, which the studio insisted be shown, is somewhat puppet-like but for me, it doesn’t spoil the film. Dana Andrews, never a subtle actor, has the staunchness needed for Holden’s pragmatism, but it’s Niall MacGinnis who steals the show. His Karswell is softly spoken, a stocky, balding man who lives with his mother but possesses and is possessed by, immense power. He’s oddly likeable and charismatic. At times like a naughty boy, at others a schoolmaster lecturing a student.

Q Planes (1939)

Starring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Valerie Hobson.
Written by Jack Whittingham, Brock Williams, Arthur Wimperis and Ian Dalrymple.
Directed by Tim Whelan
Genres: Action, Spy, Comedy.



Action films and in particular, action spy movies have come a long way in the 120 year history of cinema, but there's a kind of continuity to them. Each generation builds on the previous one. The burglary scene in the first Mission Impossible movie built on the MI TV series, which owed a debt to Jules Dassin's Topkapi, which built on Dassin's own Rififi. Caper movies beget more elaborate caper movies. Spy movies, starting with Fritz Lang's Spione have their own tropes, riffs and memes.

Q Planes starts with a bunch of Bobbies busting into an apartment to the accompaniment of dramatic orchestral music. "Sergeant, there's a body in here," says a cop. The sergeant finds Ralph Richardson snoozing on a divan with his trilby hat over his eyes and his brolly leaning against the backrest. They wake him "What is it, what's the matter? Tell her I'll ring her back in five minutes… (He wakes a little bit…) I say, this is a bit thick, a bit thick. Prancing without a word of warning into a man's private bedroom. (The cop tells him it's not a bedroom) The significance of that uniform doesn't escape me… oh, I see your point. (He forgets his own name, still waking up.) Am I Smith, am I Jones, I can't be Goldberg…"

The cops take him down to Scotland Yard. En route, he buys a newspaper from a kid and asks him what won the two o'clock horse race. He gets hustled to Inspector Hammond at the Air Ministry, DI5. Still reading the paper, he gives a significant look to Hammond's assistant and the cops leave. Turns out that he is Inspector Hammond and he's been faking comic amnesia to get out of the building without foreign spies seeing him. He immediately calls his girlfriend Daphne to apologize for missing afternoon tea with her. (This becomes a running gag throughout the movie.) Daphne has something veddy veddy important to tell him. He puts her off.

It seems that around the World, test aircraft are disappearing. No wreckage is ever found and all of the planes are carrying secret electronic equipment. Only Hammond, an American agent and an Italian policeman think there is more than coincidence to these vanishings. Hammond decides to investigate an aircraft manufacturing company where the latest test aircraft are being built.

One of the test pilots is Tony McVane (a young and dashing Larry Olivier) who asks his boss if he can take the next test flight. He's knocked back (the crew are chosen by lot), just as the Air Ministry plane lands and Hammond slips out in coveralls (still wearing the trilby). He asks a passing mechanic for a cigarette, then when he gets it, unfurls a secret typewritten message hidden inside. The airplane's supercharger is the enemy's objective.

McVane banters with the new girl at the plant canteen Kay Lawrence (Valerie Hobson) who is smart, sassy and beautiful.

McVane's not chosen for the flight, which disappears over the Atlantic after flying over a mysterious freighter, the S.S. Viking, which is carrying a secret weapon, a ray gun, which zaps the engine and electronics of the aircraft. Think of a projectable electro-magnetic pulse weapon and you have the idea. The plane ditches in the sea near the Viking, which uses a steam-derrick to haul the plane aboard. The crew disembark surrounded by sailors with tommy-guns.

Search aircraft fly over the Viking, which reports that they saw nothing. The authorities are baffled. But Inspector Hammond has had the supercharger removed from the plane to foil the enemy agents. The sassy canteen girl turns out to be a reporter, of course. McVane finds out and gets angry at her. The baddies are miffed because the supercharger wasn't onboard the flight. They're about to do a hit-and-run on their inside man Jenkins, when Inspector Hammond hauls him out of harms way with the hook of his brolly. He interrogates him very swiftly, then when Jenkins is shot in a drive-by, Hammond immediately grabs the telephone… to call Daphne again.

McVane meets Hammond and discovers that Kay is the latter's sister. They flirt a bit until his sexist ideas about female journalists put a chill on things for all of thirty seconds.

Eventually the missing plane is found 'washed up' in Cornwall. Hammond goes down to investigate the wreckage and discovers that the plane's engine was cut loose of the fuselage. Meanwhile McVane is the next victim of the S.S. Viking. He and the flight crews stage a breakout and using a gatling gun, wipe out half the crew and lock up the rest. Meanwhile Hammond is chasing the Viking in a naval destroyer… and the good guys win… and Daphne eloped with someone else.

If this sounds at all familiar, it's happened in five or six James Bond films over the years. Q Planes is the prototype for this kind of action movie, predating Sean Connery's first sojourn in Jamaica by twenty two years and the first James Bond novel by thirteen. One of the writers of Q Planes was Jack Whittingham. In the '60s he wrote a couple of episodes of Danger Man, and also helped Ian Fleming with the story treatment for a James Bond television series that was to become the Bond novel Thunderball.

The 1939 date on the movie tags it as a propaganda piece. Storm clouds were hovering over Europe. The foreigners lose, and eccentric gentlemen with trilbies and brollies, or leather flying jackets save the day. The secret weapon aboard the Viking looks great, with the clean slightly art-deco lines reminiscent of the futuristic scenes in William Cameron Menzies' Things To Come. The actors are all amusing, including Gus McNaughton as Blenkinsop, Hammond's butler. ("Come and meet Blenkinsop," Hammond says to McVane. "He's a perfect swine.")

According to some sources much of the banter was improvised by the actors and the American director, Tim Whelan encouraged it. (Whelan was also one of the directors on Alexander Korda's Thief of Baghdad a year later.) The pacing of this film is great, Richardson has some hilarious bits of business and while this isn't a classic in any sense, it is amusing, entertaining and memorable.

The Man From Hong Kong (1975)

Starring Jimmy Wang Yu, George Lazenby, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Sammo Hung and Roger Ward.
Written and Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith.



This movie and I have a history. I first saw it at the Rapallo Cinema in Pitt Street, Sydney where it had premiered a week before. In those days I was big into kung fu. I dabbled in jeet kune do training with a friend, I had seen the Bruce Lee movies in Chinatown cinemas before they hit the big time fleapits and I could swing nunchaku without giving myself a subdural haematoma. My Asian obsession also went to cuisine. I was also almost living on packet noodles from a Chinese supermarket on the corners of Hay and Pitt Streets, but that’s another story.

Made for $A450,000, TMFHK was a co-production between the Shaw Brothers’ Golden Harvest company in Hong Kong and The Movie Company in Australia. Kung Fu movies had hit the West like a spinning back kick and even the death of Bruce Lee didn’t slow it down for a long time. The press gave this film a lot of free publicity too. Australian films had just left the Menzies/Gorton/McMahon era doldrums when the Whitlam government got in and any co-production was big news, especially given that there were some spectacular stunts above the city.

TMFHK starts with Australia’s biggest geographical icon, Uluru. A drug deal between a rodent-like Australian and a Chinese tourist Win Chan (Sammo Hung – who was also the fight choreographer for the movie) is sussed out by Bob Taylor (Roger Ward) and Morrie Grosse (Hugh Keays-Byrne) two Federal Drug Enforcement cops. Taylor chases Sammo up the side of the inselberg and they have a stoush complete with flying kicks and enough biff to keep the discerning punter happy. Eventually Taylor drags Sammo off the rock and arrests him.

Inspector Fang Sing Leng of the Hong Kong police is brought in to interrogate Win Chan (don’t ask why Australia doesn’t have Cantonese translators) and he turns out to be a loose cannon. Taylor and Grosse spend a lot of the film explaining that you can't beat up suspects, smash assassins through the fish tank in a restaurant or go totally Mad Max on the highways of New South Wales. Fang beats Win Chan up in his cell while trying to get information out of him and when Win Chan is shot dead by an assassin in Taylor Square, he chases the killer (Grant Page) through the back streets of Darlinghurst before beating him (and a Chinese restaurant) to death. Fang is gravely injured while taking on an entire kung fu school run by the bad guy and rescued by Angelica (Rebecca Gilling) who with the help of her veterinarian father, patches him up. On their way back to the city from a country idyll, Angelica is killed by the endless flunkies of Jack Wilton (George Lazenby) and his off-sider Willard (Frank Thring). Wilton is (of course) a kung fu expert who likes to shoot apples off the head of his girlfriend at harbourside cocktail parties for the amusement of trendies and sycophants. In best wuxia style, Fang Sing Leng fights his way to Wilton. He, kills a couple of busloads of thugs and henchmen (some of which were played by the movie’s executives and director) until finally landing on the roof of Wilton’s penthouse under a hang-glider, he abseils down to his window in a move late emulated by Bruce Willis in “Die Hard”. Feng then kills Wilton in a manner that would be considered overkill by any reasonable person.

TMFHK was Brian Trenchard-Smith’s second feature film, the first being a kinda documentary on VD called “The Love Epidemic” which I saw at the time. It showed amongst other things, Grant Page squeezing pus out of his dick in the shower, which really grossed me out when I saw it at the tender age of 18. Trenchard-Smith has since become an unashamed schlockmeister as his IMDB filmography demonstrates. Just titles like “Atomic Dog”, “Leprechaun 4: In Space”, “The Paradise Virus” and “Dangerfreaks” give a bit of an idea of his ouevre. On the DVD release of TMFHK, his commentary track is amusing, self-critical and perceptive. Scorcese he ain’t, but he is the kind of film-maker who kept cars lined up outside drive-ins until the gates opened. He even directed Nicole Kidman once… in BMX Bandits.

Jimmy Wang Yu (or just Wang Yu) was a big star in Hong Kong. His One-Armed Swordsman movies were incredibly popular in Asia. The Australian PR for TMFKH called him “Hong Kong’s Steve McQueen”, an appellation that seems incredibly dated now for several reasons. (Maybe we could call George Clooney America’s Stephen Chow …) Sammo Hung has since become internationally known as both Jackie Chan’s sidekick and the star of Martial Law. He gets an extra bit of admiration for wearing a long-sleeved black skivvy while running up the side of Ayres Rock, even if he did lose the fight.

As an action film of the 1970s, TMFHK had it all on what was even then, a frugal budget. Car chases and crashes, explosions on the top floors of buildings in North Sydney, a nude scene by Rebecca Gilling , hang-gliding, stunts galore, and very little moral ambiguity. But for me, the coolest aspect of it was that I knew where a lot of the scenes were filmed. At the time I spent a lot of time wandering the inner city, so Taylor Square, North Sydney and Darlinghurst were all familiar to me. I even knew the alley beside the State Theatre where the ten-storey drain-pipe climb into the kung fu studio was done. Australians weren’t then accustomed to seeing their own country in the cinema. Movies like TMFHK and Stone (which also starred Hugh Keays-Byrne) were given an added verisimilitude by the fact that you could walk out of the cinema and be on one of the film’s locations in less than five minutes.

I have a great fondness for this movie. It is silly, sexist, slightly racist, illogical and replete with continuity errors and plot holes, but it is a part of Australian film history and a viewing of it gives a taste of what Australia has gained and lost since 1975.

Batman Begins (2005)

Hmm, first Batman Begins, then Superman Returns, what next? The Flash Flashes?

But seriously after viewing this flick, only an idiot or Adam West's stalker could doubt that this is the best Batman movie ever.

Christopher Nolan, who blew me away with Memento has done something that nobody (except maybe Alan Moore) has ever done with Batman. He (and his co-scriptwriter David Goyer) took the guy in the cowl seriously. They thought it through and looked at the concept of a costumed vigilante with more than a few issues, without flinching from the darker implications.

This Batman isn't a paragon of virtue. On his path from angry orphan to warrior for justice, he does some dumb things. (Getting locked in an Asian prison so you can rumble with some hard-arsed crims isn't the kind of thing one does in a moment of mental clarity.) And the conceit that the Dark Knight got most of his training from terrorist ninjas is an interesting one, too.

The scene where Batman furiously interrogates the corrupt cop Flass (Mark Boone Jr.) while dangling him like a fat pinata over a tenement alley was shocking. Batman's not supposed to lose his cool! But in the World that Nolan and Goyer create, that terrifying anger is right for Batman. Christian Bale has the perfect intensity for the role. Michael Caine's Alfred is the strong moral core of the movie-- in spite of some attempts by the script to thrust that task onto Katie Holmes' deputy DA character. (I'll make no comments about other recent attempts to place Ms. Holmes into a role for which she's not suited.) Gary Oldman is the perfect Lieutenant Jim Gordon. He looks right and he has mixture of compassion and street smarts for the future commissioner of police. Liam Neeson as Ducard, trains Bruce Wayne in a much more interesting way than he did Ewan McGregor in that execrable fourth Star Wars movie. Morgan Freeman plays Morgan Freeman as usual and Cillian Murphy as Dr. Jonathan Crane a.k.a. Scarecrow has a gaunt, blue-eyed intensity that captures the right insanity for a great Bat-villain.

I like this film a lot. An action film that doesn't assume that I'm a dribbling moron is a balmy breeze for a movie buff like me. Seeing this one in Gold Class with a foccacia, coffee, ice-cream, popcorn and a drink delivered to my seat just made the experience as good a cinematic event as I can remember having. See this, if you haven't already. It's the real deal.

(Originally posted Saturday, July 02, 2005)

Superman Returns (2006)

Well, I caught SR at the local ten cinema complex after a delicious home-cooked dinner and a glass of Hanwood Estate verdelho, so I was feeling mellow and ready to let a blockbuster movie wash over me. The fact that 90% of it was filmed in my home town didn't hurt, either.

Bryan Singer is the go-to director if you want to do a superhero movie. He paid his dues with X-Men, jumpstarting the subgenre in tandem with Sam Raimi's Spiderman, and consolidated his reputation with X-Men 2. But those films were ensemble-hero flicks. The focus was scattered among eight or nine characters. In SR, there's only the Kryptonian, the chick and the bald guy and that gives Singer the space to look into the idea of a single person with the powers of a god.

Brandon Routh does well as Kal-El. Superman is an iconic character. Strong, ethical, loyal, truthful (probably because if you're as powerful as he is, there's nothing you need to bullshit about) and good. Less is more in playing this character. The theatrics come from saving both a space shuttle and a 777 aircraft, doing damage control on an entire city as it suffers an earthquake and hurling a very large island into space. Routh does essay the controlled emotions of the character as he goes through some severe life changes. (Superman almost always has to keep his cool. If he gets miffed, really bad things can happen.)

Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor is of its' nature, a comic book turn. If you're a nutcase who wants to use Kryptonian technology to grow a new continent in the Atlantic, there's nowhere really to go with that except over the top. But he does it well, making the character larger than life and a creature of purest ego. Parker Posey as his girlfriend does have some slyly witty lines, but she's there as a foil for Luthor, someone for him to rant at. She steals some scenes, enough of them to make me wish she was in more of them. Kal Penn and Ian Roberts as his henchmen get little to do, though Penn is an engaging and funny actor as Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle showed. Here, he's used as a spear-carrier, so I hope he got well paid for the gig.

Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane is problematic. The actress is 23, way too young for the role, and too young to have a five year old kid (spoiler) to Superman unless he bonked her when she was in high school. She does okay, but maybe a more mature actress would have worked better, though Routh is 27 which doesn't make them a bad match age-wise.

In spite of these caveats, the film is a good summer blockbuster action flick. With the aid of some well used CGI, the movie carries off some audacious stunts. Even secondary characters are served well. Frank Langella is a great Perry White, taking the character from the apoplectic and bombastic shouter to a 21st Century hard but intelligent newspaper editor. James Marsden's Richard White (Lois' current partner) also gets to be more than a potential cuckold. There's been a lot of solid thought put into this one, and it was nice to see Noel Neill and Jack Larsen in cameos. Larsen as the bartender in the pub inside the daily planet building is a wry and likeable presence.

See this one on the big screen. It isn't perfect but it could have been a lot worse, as indeed the last two Christopher Reeve Superman movies were.
(Originally posted Saturday, July 01, 2006)