In short: Sweeney 2 (1978)

Flying Squad coppers Regan (John Thaw) and Carter (Dennis Waterman) have to cope with a number of cases that are as brutal as they are peculiar. A series of particularly murderous bank robberies committed by well-armed men rocks London. There’s something more peculiar to the deeds than just their often needless brutality: for some reason, the gangsters like to leave their getaway drivers – and only them - for dead, and only ever take sums of about sixty thousand pounds with them, even when there’s more money to grab.

Eventually, clues will lead our policemen out of their natural habitat to the continent. But don’t worry, this is not a movie about evil criminal foreigners.

For my tastes, Sweeney 2, the second and final movie spin-off of the the popular and somewhat important ITV police show, this time directed by Tom Clegg, is a marked improvement over the already highly entertaining first one. The film keeps to the grubby and grainy 70s aesthetics of the first one, but has a rather more engaging plot, as well as rather more interesting side characters. Regan and Carter encounter all kinds of peculiar customers during their investigation, like a semi-nude model with a Nazi fetish – or a fetish for Nazis? – and other semi-probable weirdoes, and have rather more interesting times with them than in the first movie as well.

While the violence stays as pleasantly brutal and effective as in the first one, this sequel seems rather more interested in the effects this violence has on its protagonists, so there are scenes of hardened coppers Regan and Carter spattered with blood, going into shock. Which not only makes enjoying the violence on display rather more precarious for a viewer, but also makes the macho types we are supposed to root for more human and sympathetic.

Also rather interesting is how much the film portrays dramatic versions of working class cultures: the cops and the robbers are both very visibly from the same kinds of social stratum with comparable social mores and energies – at least up to a point, for these policeman certainly wouldn’t go around complaining about England having run its course (which is code for exactly what you think it is code for), emigrate, and then only ever return home for a bit of murder and mayhem, for there’s being working class and then there’s being a murderous shit, a fine point this film understands in all of its subtlety.

Maroc 7 (1967)

Jewel thief Simon Grant (Gene Barry) finds out that fashion impresaria Louise Henderson (Cyd Charisse) uses all the jetting around the world to do fashion shoots that come with her occupation as a cover for her activities as head of a high stakes thieving operation. She’s got a photographer (Leslie Phillips) with a rap sheet as her man for the rough stuff, and one of her models, Claudia (Elsa Martinelli), as walking, talking, distraction and gopher. If things go as Simon wants them to, she’ll also acquire an aging jewel thief as a partner for her big photo shoot in Morocco, where she’s pairing grave robbing with her more typical thievery shtick, looking to steal a medallion from a hidden tomb. He’s not planning to give her a choice, obviously.

Simon has several problems to cope with: firstly, Louise doesn’t react too well to a guy muscling in on her through blackmail. Secondly, she’s as ruthless as any hardened gang boss, and not afraid to frame blackmailers for murders she and her henchman commit in the course of her operations. Thirdly, Claudia is apparently really into older men like him. And lastly, nobody can be trusted. In fact, not even Simon himself is what he pretends to be: rather, he is a police agent gone undercover to break up Louise’s operation in strenuous cooperation with the local police under one Inspector Barrada (Denholm “The Frenchman” Elliott). Clearly, bouts of violence and a fistful of double crosses can be expected.

Despite on paper belonging to a somewhat different genre, Gerry O’Hara’s Maroc 7 is very much a film in the same vein as most Eurospy movies. As the spy movies of its time do, it puts a manly-man protagonist with dubious ideas about personal space when he encounters women and an inflated idea of his own irresistibility through a series of action and suspense set pieces in front of “exotic” (that is to say, non-Western) locations.

Not being an Italian movie but a British one, this never gets quite as crazy as the more out there continental movies of the style, really less crazy than the later Connery Bond movies (not to speak of Roger Moore, as we prefer it around here anyway). I wouldn’t exactly call anything happening “realistic”, but this certainly isn’t a film to wallow in the bizarre, the outlandish or the just plain weird. At the same time it’s never attempting to be a “serious” crime thriller. There are certainly elements here that suggest a thematical closeness to more noirish fare – what with the amount of double crosses and the inclusion of three femme fatales (at least if you stretch the definition a little) – but the film never treats these betrayals as emotionally heavy or morally interesting and prefers to handle them as parts of a fun genre romp.

“Fun romp” is certainly the tone the filmmakers have decided on, and they stick to it throughout the film, letting Barry’s character take betrayals, attempts at his life and romancing a beautiful young woman he doesn’t trust completely in stride, with little suggestion he’s ever in much actual physical or emotional danger. This isn’t really a criticism, mind you: Maroc 7 simply isn’t a film that aims for anything more, and it does hit what it is actually aiming for competently enough, if, perhaps, not quite with the amount of style one would ideally hope for.

O’Hara certainly is a somewhat too unassuming director. He tends to shoot things by the book – straightforward and mostly effective but never with particular flair. Which is perfectly fine for the film this wants to be, always keeping things exciting enough to make for a diverting time, but never quite as exciting as you’d wish them to be. Though, to be fair, the Moroccan locations are rather nicer to look at than “just fine”. On the acting side, most of the cast seems satisfied with aiming for the same satisfying but not too satisfying level as well. Only Martinelli aims a little higher than only being very beautiful and perhaps also very treacherous, but Barry, Charisse and Elliott pretty much level out at the same upper middle of enthusiasm as the rest of the film.

That’s not meant as too much of a criticism against Maroc 7. Being a fun, traditional bit of entertainment is nothing to sneeze at.

Three Films Make A Post: Just how far will a government go to hide the truth?

Defence of the Realm (1985): This British conspiracy thriller by David Drury makes an interesting contrast to comparable American films where journalism beats a government conspiracy in that the British view on journalists is much less heroic than the American one – at least once the 60s rolled in - often is. Which is what a press dominated by various models of scandal rags will do to one’s opinions. Our protagonist, wonderfully embodied by Gabriel Byrne, is a bit of a shit, perfectly willing to lie, cheat and probably steal, to then turn what he writes into melodrama; but as it turns out, he’s also – to his own surprise - unable to let the lies and injustices committed by those in power go, and turns heroic despite of himself. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a movie.

And it’s a bit of a classic, probably a bit slow-paced for many, I’d assume, but very good at portraying the process of research, and the looming understanding of how big and at once petty this thing that’s being violently suppressed actually is. Drury’s dry but effective direction works very well with the material, and the cast includes greats like Greta Scacchi, Denholm Elliott and Ian Bannen even in the smallest roles.

Bell Book and Candle (1958): For its first two thirds, Richard Quine’s fantastical romantic comedy is pretty much the sort of delight you’d expect this sort of thing to be, with so many clever script and staging ideas one can get a bit drunk watching it. Yet it also turns into a film that seems to be not too fond of its own supposed happy ending, something that equates romantic love with pain, and can see the process of an independent woman becoming part of a couple only in a way where the woman becomes lesser. There’s certainly a feminist perspective at the way this time and place treats women and romance buried rather shallowly in the film, but it’s also too conservative a thing (plus, a big studio movie from the late 50s) to go somewhere different than the times tell it to go.

Which leaves us with a film that tries selling a woman losing her magic, her fashion sense, and her taste in exchange for tears and fifty year old James Stewart as an actual happy end, something that leaves this heterosexual male viewer rather sceptical.

Death Comes at High Noon aka Døden kommer til middag (1964): If you want to look at it that way, you can find the influence of the giallo – or influences on the giallo – everywhere. Case in point is this Danish mystery directed by Erik Balling, where an amateur detective (Poul Reichhardt) – he’s a crime writer – stumbles upon a corpse and then a whole series of other crimes committed by a very honourable citizen indeed. Its political subtext, its stylish production, and the intense way Sander flirts with female lead Helle Virkner’s character – and vice versa, in a way that would have had contemporary censors in my native Germany screaming in horror – all seem to parallel developments elsewhere in European film while also having enough regional specificity to delight friends of the regionally specific like me.

Three Films Make A Post: War. It's A Dying Business.

Nightshot (2018): This French POV horror piece directed by Hugo König concerns the misadventures of an urban exploration streamer played by Nathalie Couturier, and her camera dude when they do a nightly visit to a creepy old sanatorium and asylum with a history of dubious experiments on its patients. The film does try to stand out from the dozens of other POV sanatorium indies by taking on a one take gimmick. Which also shows an admirable willingness from the filmmakers to put extra work, given that the choreography needed to pull something like that off is considerable.

Unfortunately, the one take/one shot business doesn’t really achieve much for the film; on paper, it’s “more realistic” for what is supposed to be a live stream but in practice, there’s little here that makes much of a difference between this and other POV sanatorium movies, so things never get terribly exciting. To be fair, there are couple of pretty clever shocks, and the practical (and live) effects are certainly fun to behold.

Sleepwalk (1986): This is the tale of a woman whose life is slowly being made weirder thanks to an ancient Chinese manuscript she is translating for a dubious Chinese doctor (whose henchmen is a young Tony Todd). In tone and style, Sara Driver’s movie is a very typical piece of mid-80s New York independent filmmaking, so expect a sense of the surreal, good taste in music, and a lot of beautiful shots of dirty city streets, as well as a floating and meandering plot carried by actors – in this case it’s mostly Suzanne Fletcher doing the work – who love making strange, deadpan acting decisions.

Too Late the Hero (1970): A few years of a wonderfully idiosyncratic career after The Dirty Dozen, director Robert Aldrich returned to the men on a mission style of war movie. Where some viewers – not me, mind you - read the brutal finale of the earlier movie as pure action movie glorification of violence, really nobody will be able to interpret this war movie that way. Too emotionally brutal is Aldrich’s portrayal of a group of soldiers (including Michaela Caine, Cliff Robertson as the mandatory American, Ian Bannen and Denholm Elliott) to get confused about the film’s anti-war stance here. Apart from being honest and bitter about the way war compromises all human ethics, this is very much a meditation on fear, the concept of Cowardice, and the sometimes necessary irrationality of heroism committed by cowardly men.

It’s not a film that judges cowardice and fear like certain old-school war movies would have, but seems more interested in understanding what these words actually mean, and how different the breaking points of different men are.