A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far concerns Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ ill-fated attempt of winning the World War II early via an ill-conceived operation in the Netherlands. Ill-fated because – at least in the film’s telling – valuable intel was ignored, important equipment was unusable and anyone at all managed to survive the waves of background incompetence because the men on the ground where particularly tenacious – and probably so used to the War’s combination of idiocy and horror by now, they had learned to cope with it.

Attenborough clearly wasn’t a fan of General Montgomery, and thus the man becomes an off-screen incarnation of bad planning and wilful ignorance – however much one reads this as historically accurate, it certainly isn’t an invalid opinion. In general, Attenborough has little time for those upper echelons whose boots never touch a war zone and let others do the dying, and focusses on characters – all played by an astonishing amount of acting talent – who live or – more often - die by those decisions. The film also spends some time on the impact Operation Market Garden had on the civilian population of the Netherlands, and eventually ends on a handful of survivors in a haunting shot that shows little enthusiasm for any war, even a just one.

Tonally, this is a very strange film: about a third of it feels and sounds like a stodgy but extremely high budget British war movie with a terrible score and performances of a style that belong in this sort of thing (old chap), even when it’s, for example, the usually not at all stodgy Michael Caine hired for it; another third is a series of very 70s New Hollywood style vignettes featuring guys like Gould, Caan, Redford and Hackman (with a bad Polish accent) doing their very different thing in the kind of scenes you’d expect them to be in. The final third mostly concerns the particularly unpleasant adventures of one Lt. Col. Frost having to go through a kind of synthesis of Old Britain and New Hollywood, with a measured and careful performance by Anthony Hopkins, full of moments that are just as bitter and human as those in the American part of the film yet still feel very British in perspective and manner.

Curiously enough, this disparate mix works for the A Bridge Too Far, at least to a degree. Perhaps because it mirrors the very different approaches to warfare brought by the different Allied fighting forces, or perhaps because it simply speaks to my sense of perversity.

Three Films Make A Post: Never have so few taken so much from so many.

The Great Train Robbery aka The First Great Train Robbery (1978): This Michael Crichton movie, also written by Crichton, and based on his own historical fiction bestseller, has a really fabulous climactic action scene in the titular robbery. To get there, the film slogs through what clearly is supposed to be a semi-comedic romp through mildly satirized Victorian period detail. Alas, the word that actually describes this is “dull”. Crichton, never a man to know which details to cut, shows no feel at all for pacing dialogue scenes – even a sure winner of an innuendo-laden scene between Sean Connery’s mastermind character and a married lady goes down like a lead balloon – or timing jokes, leaving the main cast of Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down to fend for themselves while they are crushed by all that – never telling – period detail. Even that trio can’t win against such odds.

Exist Within aka 사잇소리 (2022): This thriller by Kim Jung-wook about the noises a young woman hears from the apartment above her, and the nasty surprises that follow, is about as middle of the road as South Korean productions get. There’s not much of the subversion of tropes going on that most genre movies from the country eventually at least dabble in, the pacing is never quite as effective, and the tone never quite as surehanded as it could be.

However, making a thriller of this type entertaining can also be achieved by the simple virtue of technical expertise, and though that is not the way a classic is birthed, being a genuinely fun time is an achievement in itself.

The Old Way (2023): This revenge western directed by Brett Donowho manages something you don’t see every day – getting a performance from Nicolas Cage that makes the high energy thespian look unengaged. Much of Cage’s performance gives the impression of watching him doing a second run-through of the material rather than actually putting his full force into a scene. If you’ve seen Cage emoting loudly and sometimes quietly but distinctly, throwing himself into whatever a script has to offer for most of your movie watching life, this is a rather disquieting thing to watch, like a night sky turned hot pink for no reason.

There’s little else to distract here: the script is about as rote a revenge western as is possible, the performances are uneventful, and Donowho directs with the blandness of a shrug.

Three Films Make A Post: Long live adventure… and adventurers!

The Tank (2023): I’m not really sure why this movie from New Zealand directed by Scott Walker is trying to pretend it’s American, even though there’s no reason at all for this to be taking place anywhere specific. But then, I’m equally unsure why this has to be a period piece, either. Or, come to think of it, why the film has to drag its feet for nearly an hour until anything of interest happens in it – the character work certainly isn’t so deep it needs the time.

What the film has going from it – apart from a perfectly capable cast – is a really great monster design; the monster just comes in much too late.

Sideworld: Haunted Forests of England (2022): If I were a cynical man, I’d look down on George Popov’s documentary for being quite as cost-consciously produced as it obviously was: the film’s tales of dark folklore, myths and rural legend are told from the off, accompanied by creepy low angle shots of British forests and art from the public domain, and everything is accompanied by dark ambient – and that’s really all there is to it, formally.

However, the script by Jonathan Russell puts the well-worn and not not so well-worn tales the film tells into efficient little packages, and Popov applies his background in indie folk horror filmmaking of the more directly fictional variety nicely to the material, shaping the minimalist set-up into something effective and interesting.

The Man Who Would Be King (1975): John Huston’s adaptation of the Kipling tale is a well-loved classic, and that’s no wonder at all: not only is this one hell of a traditional colonialist adventure movie full of invention, charm, and one great damn thing after another; it is also a film that has a lot to say about what’s wrong about colonialist adventures and the mind-set they are born from, as well as the kind of men they tend to champion. Still, it never feels schizophrenic in its approach, but manages to be a film about the joys and the horrors of the same ideas at the same time.

That it also contains wonderfully larger-than-life performances by Sean Connery, Michael Caine and Christopher Plummer only adds to the film’s specific magic.

Past Misdeeds: Outland (1981)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

The near future. Federal Marshall O’Niel (Sean Connery in one of his neutral state performances where he’s neither applying himself particularly nor looking too bored) has just assumed his new position as the highest ranking law enforcement officer on a mining station on Jupiter’s moon Io, a position you don’t get because you’re exactly a high-flying star of your organization. In fact, O’Niel’s wife (Kika Markham) has gotten so sick of a series of jobs in horrible places and the effect that’ll have on the development of their son, she leaves O’Niel just two weeks after they have arrived, son in tow (which, given the horrible performance the poor child actor gives, is an excellent idea as far as this viewer’s nerves are concerned).

O’Niel stumbles upon the curiously high amount of suicides and self-created accidents on the station. After a bit of an investigation, O’Niel finds out the miners are supplied with a drug that increases their performance before slowly driving them mad, and it’s all done with more than just the approval of local mining corp head Sheppard (Peter Boyle). Everybody around is either looking away from the problem because they are paid off, or just because they don’t want to rock the boat and lose the tiny bit of the economic cake they can get. O’Niel, right in the middle of his own private existential crisis, realizes he won’t let himself be bought, or ignore what’s going on, whatever the consequences may be. Not surprisingly, there’s violence in the air.

I have always been rather fond of Peter Hyams’s Science Fiction variation on High Noon, and my recent re-watch only confirmed to me this is one of the seriously underrated genre films of its time. Not that there aren’t dubious scientific moments: at least people who understand physics much better than I do tell me that the film’s fixation on people exploding when coming into contact with the vacuum of space is entirely misguided, though it does make for some nice effects, and I don’t even want to think about how much else the film probably gets wrong about the potentials and hazards of space mining operations, the working of solar panels, and so on, and so forth. Fortunately, I’m too dumb to notice anyway.

On the other hand, Outland’s scientific accuracy doesn’t really matter much, because it gets the – in a work of fiction – much more important aspect of making the mining station feel believable right. The station feels like a real, and appropriately shabby, place a future working class might have to inhabit, with basically the same hardships, the same ugliness, and the same injustice as today, just with smaller cots, more artificial light and even less chances for a better life. The way the film, in its production design and its unspoken assumptions, tells it, there’s nothing glamorous about the work in space, only danger, mediocre pay, and a company who only cares for its earnings, space having become the place where dreams die and careers end instead of the place of hope and romance it once was (if only in our shared dreams). All this, the film never so much explains outright but suggests through the details of its production design, the only mildly bitter cynicism of its doctor character as played by Frances Sternhagen, and the way nobody ever quite meets anybody else’s eyes. Unlike in High Noon, even O’Niel’s attempt to ask the miners for help has something perfunctory about it, Connery’s posture carrying the knowledge he won’t get anything from these people before he even has to open his mouth. Pointedly, the film doesn’t even seem to judge the miners for not getting on O’Niel’s side, realizing that a cowed working class like that might just see the pointlessness in O’Niel’s struggle.

Because, sure, O’Niel gets his personal happy end – this is a movie after all – but there’s really no second here on screen that argues he has made much of an impact on how things are as a whole; he’s only ever been fighting a symptom of diseases it needs more than a gun and a badge to end. And he can flee to greener pastures now anyway, it seems (though the film pointedly avoids the economics of that decision).


Hyams, always at least a dependable director when it comes to action and suspense, and often a rather brilliant and unsung one, does tell this tale in a straightforward style, with some expectedly fine suspense scenes (the hostage sequence and the grand finale being the obvious examples). Hyams has found a way of turning the station into a real place by making use of great, grimy, production design (this was made at the moment when The Future in cinema became full of lived-in places populated by lived out people, after all), and some very impactful lighting decisions that sometimes even suggest a working knowledge of Bava to my eyes. Which, all in all, is quite a lot for a film whose high concept sell was probably “High Noon in Space, and get me that Connery guy!”.

Past Misdeeds: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A gang of four white men wearing blackface raids a village somewhere in the jungles of Africa – a part of Africa that seems to still lie under British colonial rule. While stealing some crates of explosives, the assailants also show no compunction against killing two men.

The deed happened in the territory where Tarzan (Gordon Scott) makes his home, and the fur-shorted one follows the men upriver to enact the Law of the Jungle on them. To add a bit of piquancy, the leader of the criminals, Slade (Anthony Quayle), is an old enemy of Tarzan’s (“I would have killed him, if not for the Law of Man”), and a bit of a brutal crazy thrill-seeker. Tarzan’s hunting job is complicated when he saves tough-talking Angie (Sara Shane) from a plane crash she suffers when she’s trying to impress him, and while Angie isn’t exactly the proverbial damsel in distress, she’s also not Sheena. Though she does appreciate a good nearly naked barbarian like Tarzan when she meets him.

With Tarzan ever closing in behind him, Slade has his own problems. He needed the explosives he stole to work an illegal diamond mine he has discovered, but his men – Irish thug O’Bannion (Sean “The Irishman” Connery), river boat captain Dino (Al Mulock) and diamond miner Krieger (Niall McGinnis) – and his girlfriend Toni (Scilla Gabel) are a rather problematic bunch that does half of his work for Tarzan. Shouldn’t you start on the infighting only after you’ve actually acquired your loot? These people disagree, and it’s quite probable they’d kill each other off quite without Tarzan’s help.

I’ve not been seeking out any of the Tarzan movies during these last few decades, for in my memory, I had the films pegged as more or less exclusively family friendly fare containing more chimpanzee shenanigans than jungle variations of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and seldom taking on the Lost Race stories and general strangeness of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books. John Guillermin’s fifth film of the Gordon Scott-starring Tarzan series turns out to be a noirish adventure movie rather than chimpanzee action, however, and of highly doubtful family friendliness, particularly for the time it was made in. To drive the point home, there’s an early scene where Tarzan leaves Cheetah behind at home that is an early signal (well, after the murders) what kind of film this is going to be.

Tarzan here is less the noble savage than a man who spends his life living a particular style of barbarism by choice. The film seems not completely sure if Tarzan’s brand of barbarism is really all that much different from the more civilized forms of barbarism Slade and his men stand for. It does, at least, not seem very satisfied when Tarzan finally conquers Slade, and quite dubious about the act’s morals, and looks equally askance at his rejection (after they quite obviously had sex, though) of Angie.

It’s only fitting in a film that spends about half of its running time on Tarzan’s antagonists, sure-handedly and effectively hitting all the beats of hard-boiled movies about small groups of criminals coming to blows, until the jungle, or Tarzan (this is probably the only film I’ll ever see where Sean Connery is killed with bow and arrow by Tarzan), or one of their own partners kills them. The film is really rather ruthless in its set-ups here, repeatedly demonstrating a hard edge that makes it impossible to not see this as the hard-boiled adventure film it was meant to be.

Guillermin isn’t only particularly good at directing his very competent cast in their scenes of infighting, he also gives the action itself a much harder edge than I would have expected from a Tarzan film. It’s not just that people actually bleed here, but the violence seems more brutish than you’d expect from any late 50s adventure movie, with a handful of moments I found rather astonishing in their directness. Guillermin really understands how to stage the action too, keeping a film that takes place in a mix of actual location shots and obvious sound stages quite dynamic, with much more movement than you’d usually see in the often stiff low budget adventure movies of this time and age.

Angie’s role in the film also comes as a bit of a surprise. While she does need rescuing by Tarzan from time to time, she isn’t a helpless, whining doll, with most of the dangers she gets herself into being the kind of thing someone who isn’t used to jungle survival would believably wander into, the film never suggesting she gets in trouble because she’s a woman. For someone who is basically an “adventuress”, to keep with the parlance of the time, the film treats her quite sympathetic too, even subtly suggesting that a woman with actual experiences of life would make a good partner – in the actual meaning of the word – for Tarzan, and mildly shaking his head at him for pushing her away to continue a jungle life the film is already dubious about too.


For how different is Tarzan truly from a violent thrill seeker like Quayle, once you get to counting the bodies either man leaves behind? Guillermin emphasises this question with some interesting variations on classical Tarzan elements. Here, Tarzan’s trademark yodel is not a quaint gimmick, but an expression of the wildness that lies at the core of the character, used just once at a dramatic moment that makes it that much more memorable and, if you think about it, even rather horrifying. Which, come to think of it, is not something I ever expected to write about a yodel, or in the context of a Tarzan movie.

The Rock (1996)

General Francis X. Hummel (Ed Harris) has had enough of the guv’mint not acknowledging the service of his black ops soldiers and not even paying their dependents any money when they get killed! Clearly, the best and most obvious way to change this once all official recourse has failed is to get together a gang of other military idiots, steal a chemical agent and a bunch of rockets, take hostages from a tourist tour on Alcatraz, hole up there and threaten San Francisco with a chemical holocaust. What would you have done, gone to the press!? This is a perfectly sensible plan, really.

Fortunately, the powers that be have kept former SAS man John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) secretly locked up for stealing the microfilms that contain stuff like the truth about Roswell and who shot JFK (that is seriously in the script), and Mason is the only man who ever escaped from Alcatraz. After a lot of farting around and the worst car chase ever, a team of soldiers accompanied by Mason and FBI biochemist Stanley Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage), who ain’t a slow man it seems, infiltrate Alcatraz only to be slaughtered by Hummel’s men. Well, you know who doesn’t get slaughtered, so now it’s on Mason and the not terribly excellent at violence Goodspeed to play Die Hard on Alcatraz.

Whenever a certain type of film fan wants to make a case for Michael Bay once having made non-horrible films, they dig up this Jerry Bruckheimer production, as well as Bad Boys II, which I’m not going to touch with a ten foot pole.

In The Rock’s case, I don’t believe these people are completely wrong. Sure, the film is dumb as a rock (tee-hee), and all attempts to try and sell me on Harris’s character as an action movie villain who isn’t an actual villain but more of a tragic figure really dies with me needing to believe in a character who actually expects this plan wouldn’t end with a lot of dead people and nothing else, his unwillingness to actually fire the rockets notwithstanding. Not that Harris doesn’t do his best (and that’s, him being the great Ed Harris, a lot) to sell this nonsense. There’s a lot of exciting tense staring, glowering and quoting Thomas Jefferson, and some really great dramatic shouting in Harris’s repertoire here, and while the script is just too dumb to actually pull this off, Harris is certainly providing a highly entertaining performance that is as close to a human being as anyone in the film.

Speaking of human beings or not, apart from an army of fine character actors (David Morse, William Forsythe, Tony Todd, and so on, and so forth), there’s a pretty embarrassing outing by Sean Connery on display who counteracts Harris’s acting by just barely bothering to show up and coasting on being Sean Connery. Which makes a hilarious contrast to the actor he’s interacting most, Nicolas Cage. Cage, as always when he’s in the hand of a director who doesn’t know how to direct actors that don’t do it themselves like Harris, goes completely insane, delivering line after line of the inane dialogue he’s cursed with with wild abandon, bizarre emphasis and all physical, bug-eyed tics he can come up with. It’s pretty awesome, actually, particularly in a film where an actor really needs to shout to be heard over all the explosions and what may very well be Hans Zimmer’s worst score, seeing as it consists exclusively of musical clichés. Though, come to think of it, that might actually be Zimmer making a comment on the rest of the film.

Fortunately for my poor beleaguered brain, the film’s explosions and stunts are mostly pretty great, and it’s here where we can indeed see a younger, more competent Michael Bay. Sure, he’s never heard of the concept of holding a shot, and he really rather cuts than moves the camera in any sensible direction, but most of the action is much more readable than is typical for later Bay. And when you can actually see the fast, loud, and slickly bombastic action, it becomes really rather entertaining. There is, however, a scene that already encapsulates everything that makes later Michael Bay films so unwatchable: the early car chase is a completely unparsable mess of shot-cut-shot-cut-shot-cut-cut where it’s never clear how the cars chasing each other are positioned, what obstacles they are actually facing, or why shit around them explodes. Actually, I’m convinced the car chase consists of random shots of cars, explosions, people in wheelchairs, the scrunched up faces of Cage and Connery just hacked together for no good reason.


All this adds up to a film that’s a complete mess, dumb as all hell but entertaining on that basic level that lets you waste your life in front of a TV drinking beer and belching rhythmically to the noises of explosions. I’m pretty happy contemporary blockbusters are actually made by thinking human beings now.

On ExB: Outland (1981)

You like High Noon but wish Gary Cooper was a bit more like Sean Connery? You like space? Then you just might want to pop over to my column on the not-exploding-in-a-vacuum Exploder Button and read a bit about a treat I’ve got for you.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,sf,peter hyams,sean connery,frances sternhagen,peter boyle

On ExB: Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure (1959)

I had the Tarzan movies down as a bit too family friendly to really hold the interest of decadent and cynical old me. This next-to-last of the Gordon Scott Tarzan films turned out to be something quite different than I expected, however, suggesting some curious cinematic precursors and offering a rather thoughtful approach to the question of civilization and barbarism.

Read more in my column at Exploder Button!

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,adventure,noir,john guillermin,gordon scott,sara shane,anthony quayle,sean connery

In short: The Anderson Tapes (1971)

aka The Anderson Clan

Professional thief Duke Anderson (Sean Connery) is being released from prison after a ten-year-stint that has left him wanting to make one last big score so he can finally retire. Duke finds a place to rob quickly enough: he wants to plunder every single apartment in the luxury building his former and now again girlfriend Ingrid (Dyan Cannon) lives in. Duke gets together a merry band of thieves consisting of old friends like the gay antique show owner Tommy Haskins (Martin Balsam), as well as a prison acquaintance only known as The Kid (a young Christopher Walken in his first major cinema role), and some fresh professionals. He does, however, need money and organisational help for the job, so Duke also puts his old mobster contacts into play. The help of bipolar mafioso Angelo (Alan King) has its price beyond the monetary, though, and Duke has to grudgingly agree to take a certain Socks (Ralph Meeker) - a guy too violent even for the tastes of organized crime - on and kill him when the heist is done. Of course, the heist always goes wrong anyway.

Despite my general dislike for that sort of thing, I think the best films by Sidney Lumet are those with a clear and consequent thesis holding the director's disparate impulses in check. The Anderson Tapes lacks that kind of throughline - I'm quite sure it's meant as some kind of comment on the ubiquitousness of surveillance and/or the vagaries of technology, but this aspect of the film seems vague and underdeveloped. The film shows a lot of scenes of Anderson being secretly filmed while crossing the paths of people government organizations are actually interested in, but that aspect is neither actually explored nor used in the plot beyond a last minute plot development that has nothing whatsoever to do with government surveillance, so it really feels like a wasted chance at actually taking a look at what permanent surveillance might mean.

What's left is a rather disparate film whose tone permanently meanders between hard-nosed realism, unfunny humour, and Lumet's customary sense for the absurd without ever either deciding on a tone or managing to make its tonal shifts feel organic. Consequently, The Anderson Tapes feels a bit disjointed and episodic, as if we were actually watching scenes from three or four different movies that just happen to share an acting ensemble and a basic plot. Viewed on their own, many of these scenes are actually as effective as one would expect from Lumet, full of small telling gestures, straight-faced weirdness, and fine acting that completely lacks showiness. However, these separate moments of accomplishment and interest never come together to build an actual whole, leaving The Anderson Tapes as a series of scenes which surely are worth seeing, but not as an effective movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sidney lumet,crime,sean connery,christopher walken