Escape to Athena (1979)

Greece during World War II, shortly before the Allied invasion. Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore with a really weird accent) is not your typical Nazi, he only plays one to get what he wants, and tries to keep victims to a minimum. Having worked as a shady art dealer before the war, what Hecht wants is to plunder the ancient treasures of Greece, as he has done with those of other countries before. For this, he’s acquired his own little collection of POWs useful in this sort of thing, like archaeologist Professor Blake (David Niven), climber and all-around athletic wonder Nat Judson (Richard Roundtree), and non-cooking cook Bruno Rotelli (Sonny Bono, but don’t worry). The plus for these guys is that they are kept on a comparatively long leash by a man who’s not going to shoot or torture them for the smallest affront. As they well should, they use this to make the Nazis’ life in Greece as difficult as possible with repeated escape attempts and small and large sabotages.

Things get even more lively when Hecht acquires stand-up comic Charlie Dane (Elliott Gould) as his new scribe (don’t ask), and Charlie’s burlesque dancing partner Dottie Del Mar (Stefanie Powers) as the woman he wishes to convince of sleeping with him. These two bring with them even more anarchic energy then the rest of Hecht’s crew, as well as contact with the Greek resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas). Following various acts of repression by the SS, and because there’s a submarine station that needs to be destroyed before the Allied landing, Zeno and Hecht’s crazy kids decide to simply take over the Nazi base.

Afterwards, there’s perhaps time to steal some art treasures from a nearby mountain cloister, unless there’s something more relevant to the war effort there, of course.

At times, George Pan Cosmatos’s Escape to Athena has a tone comparable to the great World War II action comedy Kelly’s Heroes. It’s never quite as brilliant, mind you, but if you can live with a less than serious approach to World War II, this is still one of the better examples of the form. Particularly the film’s first half is full of off the cuff, often clearly adlibbed, humour that can get so bizarre to border on the nonsensical. House favourite Elliott Gould has some of the best absurd non-sequitur lines here, of course (and I’m pretty sure he’s come up with them himself). Those often make little sense but are outrageously funny as the man delivers them. In the more scripted feeling bits, Moore – at the height of being James Bond – actually manages to turn an art-stealing Wehrmacht officer into so charming a rogue, I’m even perfectly willing to buy into his later changing of sides to the good guys; whereas Powers really does the traditional role of the perhaps not quite as ditzy stripper with the best of ‘em.

Even in the early and lighter parts of the film, there are moments that are perfectly honest about the actual experience of Nazi occupation and resistance work. Cosmatos portrays cruelties and senseless slaughter matter-of-factly and with no misguided attempts at squeezing humour in there as well; these are the things that happen around them while our POWs are in their private little comedy, and this comedy, for one, is not going to pretend otherwise.

As little as it’s going to pretend that developments like finding that Dottie is an expert diver perfectly fit for the business of blowing up submarines, or the bizarre show our heroes put on to distract the Nazis once it’s time to take over their base, are anything less than great, goofy fun.

Eventually, everybody does land in a somewhat harsher bit of war action than they were before in scenes of action movie mayhem that late 70s style Cosmatos handles with the expected panache. The big battle in the town’s streets and the grand finale on the mountain are particularly great. So great that it seems fair to director and characters that they are allowed to go out like they came in with some hot dance moves by Savalas and various bits of funny business.

Why this extremely entertaining, goofy but not stupid piece of filmmaking has landed on more than one list of the worst films ever made, I have no idea.

In short: The Dirty Dozen (1967)

Two months or so before D-Day. Deeply impolitic Major Reisman (Lee Marvin) is given the mission to quickly turn a dozen men convicted to death or decades of hard labour into a small commando unit that will parachute behind enemy lines on the day of the Allied invasion and attack a castle full of high-ranking Wehrmacht officers on R&R. All in exchange for the possibility of a commuted sentence. Reisman’s men (among them characters played by Charles Bronson, Jim Brown, John Cassavetes, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland and Clint Walker) range from the unlucky over the socially maladjusted, to guys who shouldn’t be in any army even at wartime, and the downright homicidally maniacal, so he has his work cut out for him turning them into some kind of team.

Because that and the suicide mission just aren’t enough to fill two and a half hours of movie, Reisman also has to cope with the obstructionism of the excellently named Colonel Everett Dasher Breed (Robert Ryan).

Given how many Italian, Japanese, and other movies I’ve seen that operate on this film’s basic plot - though they are usually an hour shorter and more focussed on the climactic mission - it’s a bit of a surprise I have only now come around to watching Robert Aldrich’s original “men of dubious moral fibre on a suicide mission” film. Well, it does make a degree of sense to keep something good for last.

And say what you want about The Dirty Dozen, it’s impossible not to at least call it a good film. I’d even go with excellent, but then I have a weakness for quite this well-developed machismo.
The cast is of course brilliant, and they turn what could be a bunch of boring clichés into a lively crew of misfits whose interactions are generally a joy to watch, even in the handful of moments when the film goes off for a bit of unfunny humour (of a sort that is certainly not improved by the score just barely avoiding slide whistles after each joke). These are the only moments in the film that do feel like filler, otherwise this two and a half hour movie feels much shorter, and rather more personal than epic.

Among the film’s other pleasures are a deep disregard for authority and generals not played by Ernest Borgnine, a cynical view on war as well the self-consciousness to know that the mission the audience wants their heroes to fulfil is indeed brutal and rather horrible. Aldrich does manage to make us root for the characters without pretending the things they heroically do are in itself heroic or all of them are particularly nice people.

Which is pretty much the holy grail of action movies and films about cool violence, a having its cake and eating it too that shouldn’t work at all but does so rather brilliantly. It’s a film that tells a war adventure story without wanting to lie too much about what a war adventure actually entails.

The Assassination Bureau (1969)

1914. Suffragette and all-purpose feminist Sonya Winter (Diana Rigg) attempts to break into that vestige of the patriarchy we know as journalism. To reach her goal, she finds out how to contact the elusive international group of assassin’s known as The Assassination Bureau, and proposes to make contact with them and write about it to Lord Bostwick (Telly “Most British Man Alive” Savalas), owner of quite a popular London newspaper. Even a bit to Miss Winter’s surprise, Bostwick agrees.

Soon, Miss Winter finds herself in front of the boss of The Assassination Bureau (Limited), charming crazy man Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed). Because she’s a public minded person with a sarcastic streak, Miss Winter declares she wishes to hire the Assassination Bureau to kill one Ivan Dragomiloff. Dragomiloff agrees to take on the job, because he thinks his organization has fallen far from its former ideal of just killings for money to just killing for money, and having a kind of mass duel between himself and the regional leaders of the organization – as played by people like Curd Jürgens and Philippe Noiret – would be a good way to clean up their act.

What Miss Winter doesn’t know is that Lord Bostwick is actually the vice chairman of the Bureau and this is his – rather idiotic – plan to get himself on the chairman’s seat. From here on out, it’s all Miss Winter following and romancing Ivan around the world (he’s no fool though, and soon just takes her with him, because she’s Diana Rigg in 1969), Ivan donning ridiculous costumes to kill people in ridiculous ways, and Telly Savalas and Curd Jürgens chewing scenery in the most enthusiastic manner.

The Assassination Bureau isn’t one of director Basil Dearden’s best works, but it is quite an entertaining black comedy that generally is at its best when it lets house favourites Oliver Reed and Diana Rigg – here quite at the heights of their powers - do their respective things while various European character actors around them gloat, die, and explode (not necessarily in this order) in more or less effective ways.

All this takes place in fine, stylized and colourful sets and locations,  with Dearden milking everything he gets his camera on for purposefully ridiculous and clichéd local and temporal colour, clearly basing the film’s world not on the actual 1910s but on the pop cultural idea of them, leaving us with a film that contains an awesome (in the old sense of the word) bordello that defies description in – of course – Paris, a pretty gondolier who sings a pre-recorded piece of schmaltz after dropping off the bodies his lover (frequent giallo actress Annabella Incontrera) has poisoned, and a finale that sees a European peace conference threatened by a bomb carrying zeppelin. It’s quite impossible for me to argue with these things, particularly when they are presented with as much ironic delight and verve as Dearden shows here.

In fact, Dearden is so convincing a director I found it easy to ignore two of the film’s three main flaws. Firstly, the fact that the film’s idea of humour can be more broad and slapstick-y than I generally prefer, with rather a lot of these “comical chases” I usually only read about; though most of them end with dead people, so that’s still quite alright.

Secondly, it’s a bit of a shame how little the film really does with its historical background. Even when it (rather tastelessly) integrates the actual starting occasion of World War I in slightly fictionalized form (with added blood sausage), there’s never the impression it actually has something to say about the historical era it is taking place in. Again, it seems to be more interested in the era as pop cultural colour than as anything deeper.

Thirdly, and quite impossible to overlook, is the sad fact that the film gives all the swashbuckling action scenes (and, despite the wrong historical era, this is very much a swashbuckling comedy in its nature) to Reed, with Rigg fortunately not cast as a helpless girlie yet also generally side-lined when it comes to the action. Which is a bit (or a mountain) of a shame, really.

Still, The Assassination Bureau is a highly enjoyable bit of British humour that doesn’t contain one boring second, and that certainly counts for a lot in my book, flaws or no flaws.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,comedy,adventure,basil dearden,oliver reed,diana rigg,telly savalas,curd jürgens,philippe noiret,annabella incontrera

L'assassino… è al telefono (1972)

aka The Killer Is On The Phone

aka The Killer Is On The Telephone

Warning: spoilers are unavoidable in this case

When successful theatre actress Eleanor Loraine (Anne Heywood) arrives at the Bruges airport she accidentally meets a bald gentleman (Telly Savallas) whose mere appearance causes her to scream and faint. When Eleanor awakes, she has lost the memory of the last five years of her life. She neither remembers the supposedly accidental death of her boyfriend Peter five years earlier, nor the fact that she's married now, nor the reason for her sudden breakdown. Eleanor seems to have had a more minor case of amnesia after Peter's death, too, and clearly hasn't been in the best mental health despite professional success during the past few years, so her family and her acting partner Thomas Brown (Osvaldo Ruggieri) are rather slick and practiced in their attempts to help her come back to the present again, but Eleanor is understandably unwilling to trust anyone.

The only thing Eleanor is sure of is that she not only needs to remember the life she led in the past five years but finally has to remember the circumstances of Peter's death she repressed five years ago. This project would become all the more urgent for her if she knew what the audience knows - that the bald gentleman who caused all this is a professional killer, and that he is now stalking her, as if he'd feel the need to get rid of a witness to one of his murders…

Alberto De Martino's L'assassino (whose titular telephone habits aren't actually important to the movie's plot, by the way) is a giallo about confusion and uncertainty. Eleanor - as picture-perfectly played by Heywood - spends the largest part of the film utterly confounded by what is going on around her, unsure not only of the meaning and truth of her surroundings, but also of her own identity, trying to interpret herself and her life through what other people tell her and her fragmentarily returning memory. While the audience knows a bit more than Eleanor does, and can guess even more, that surplus knowledge is never concrete enough for us to feel superior and secure in that knowledge. We may be pretty sure that Telly Savalas's sneer is that of a killer, but we know as little as Eleanor does about how the world she tries to understand truly works.

One of the film's more ridiculous but effective moments comes when Eleanor confuses her real life with elements of a theatre role she was playing, an idea that is absolutely fantastic on a thematic level but becomes more problematic if one attempts to apply the rules of normal reality to it. Realistically, Eleanor should remember playing a femme fatale in a stage play, not being a femme fatale, even if one takes Eleanor as an intense lover of the Method.

It is, however, this feeling of irreality, of a lingering, dream-like confusion that makes it difficult to separate truth, dream, memory, and stage play from each other that is L'assassino's great strength. It's not about being realistic, but about sucking the audience into the same state of mind Eleanor - and sometimes, it seems, also the killer - is in. Here, the giallo is an engine of confusion and doubt that only works all the better because it leaves consensus reality behind.

De Martino's often stylish, sometimes melodramatic and sometimes surprisingly subtle direction furthers the project of turning the movie into something close to a dream. As photographed by Joe D'Amato in a very good mood, Bruges looks like the least real place on Earth, and therefore the perfect place for Heywood to look in turns confused and determined in while the Stelvio Cipriani score swoons rather hypnotically.

On the negative side, I could well have done without the evil lesbian explanation at the film's end, but then I'm not living in Italy in 1972. On the other hand (I think it's number three), this is a giallo where the heroine solves her problems under her own powers in the end, so L'assassino's politics aren't quite as conservative as one would fear. I'm not even sure that should come as much of a surprise in a film this devoted to letting its audience share the state of mind of said heroine.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,belgian movies,reviews,giallo,alberto de martino,anne heywood,telly savalas