The Glove (1979)

Sam Kellog (John Saxon), something of a loveable loser, works as a bounty hunter to – barely, if at all – pay the child support he owes his ex-wife for their daughter. While he’s perfectly willing and able to beat you up when he’s trying to catch you, he’s a bit too soft to be a proper money-grubbing bastard, bound to let a target go if their particular true sob-story is too much for his feelings.

Right now, a very large man we’ll soon know as Victor Hale (Rosey Grier), dressed in body armour, is using the titular steel glove to occasionally but heavily beat up a specific group of former and current prison guards. It’s gotten so bad, the local prison guard union has put out a bounty of $20,000 to whoever catches Victor, preferably dead instead of alive. Sam would really rather like that money, but finding and catching Victor is much more difficult than you’d think. Turns out the supposed violent maniac is otherwise a genuinely lovely person with a tragic backstory who is nice to neighbours and kids, and has a surprisingly pleasant singing voice. So it’s not that easy to find anyone willing to sell information on him, even more so when the guy trying to buy is white like Sam.

While marketing and title suggest a bit of fun and brutal exploitation, in reality Ross Hagen’s The Glove is quite a different film that mixes a couple of brutal gloved-based beatings with many a scene of Rosey Grier (in a much better performance than he gave as racist Ray Milland’s second head) being nice to people, and many more scenes of Sam episodically going through his sad sack bounty hunter daily life, letting a nice elderly lady go, learning that gay people can hit you really hard as well, and philosophizing about the evils of a world that’s all about the dollar, while having to hustle for it himself. Also, going through a lot of off-screen monologuing to somehow stitch this thing together.

Which does of course mean that the film mostly doesn’t work as a thriller, crime, or action movie – apart from that couple of genuinely effective beatings – but is more like a road movie that takes place in a single city, with John Saxon encountering various characters and having fun interactions with them that reveal his flaws and virtues as well as, perhaps, some of the flaws of the world he lives in. Thanks to what must have been quite a bit of adlibbing and a cast that for some reason managed to attract everyone from Saxon to Grier to Joanna Cassidy, from Joan Blondell(!) to Aldo Ray the result is rather fun to watch, at least if you’re like me and just like to see interesting characters interact.

The film goes about its business so charmingly, I’m even willing to believe its somewhat anti-capitalist and anti-racist agenda to be genuine, though not thought through or argued well.

Technically, The Glove is all over the place: there’s a lot of standard competent 70s exploitation filmmaking here, but also improbable stuff like an incredible moment where the actors obviously flub not just a line but a whole dialogue interchange, but the camera just rolls on through the grins and the suppressed giggles. It’s pretty shoddy in that regard, but in context of the leisurely rest of the film, this just adds to The Glove’s curiously companionable quality. It’s as if you’re not watching a product or a work of art, but simply a group of people doing stuff while a camera happens to roll.

The Package (1989)

In what now looks like an alternative version of 1989, the USA and the USSR have decided on complete nuclear disarmament and an official end to the Cold War. Veteran Green Beret Sergeant Johnny Gallagher (Gene Hackman) belongs to the mass of soldiers running security at the final negotiations concerning the matter. Or in his case, securing an outer perimeter.

After he and his men stumble into the assassination of a US officer by what the audience already knows is a conspiracy between Soviet and US hardliners to stop the peace process at any cost, he is very suddenly ordered to transport a military prisoner, one supposed Walter Henke (Tommy Lee Jones), to the US. Once arrived on US soil, Gallagher is attacked and knocked out while his charge absconds. Gallagher, being old, stubborn, and Gene Hackman, is smelling bullshit, and soon teams up with his also military ex-wife (Joanna Cassidy), and later a Chicago vice cop (Dennis Franz) to find his prisoner. Since he quickly realizes the man he brought to the US isn’t actually Walter Henke, and finds himself framed for murder to boot, Gallagher’s soon concentrating on finding out what the hell’s actually going on, perhaps saving world peace in the process. That’ll teach conspirators to screw with old school sergeants, I suppose.

The plot of Andrew Davis’s conspiracy/action thriller The Package is actually a bit more complicated than that, but thanks to a clear presentation by Davis and a script by John Bishop that usually focuses on providing the audience with the right information at the right time, it actually feels rather straightforward, in a good way. Now, you might argue that the conspiracy seems needlessly complicated, actually includes too many people who need to get killed for it to work, and really stops working as a plan at all once the public shoot-outs start, but its execution on screen works fine and never feels terribly preposterous even when it should.

The film’s plausibility is certainly increased by the resonances it has with the greatest hits of violent US politics like the Kennedy assassination and the nasty stuff US intelligence services have gotten up to throughout their existence. The cast helps there, too, with Hackman probably playing this sort of thing in his sleep yet still providing Gallagher with enough personality and sheer stubbornness to absolutely make him the guy to root for here; it’s also fascinating to watch a late 80s action movie whose hero isn’t a violent asshole but only ever kills in absolutely self-defence. The rest of the actors are as dependable and convincing as expected, with Cassidy, Jones, Franz, John Heard and Pam Grier in a way too small role all fleshing out what are at their core pretty plot functional roles.

From time to time, the film does look a little like an enhanced TV movie. As a rule – and for my tastes – Davis is a competent and effective but also somewhat too functional kind of director, absolutely able to direct this sort of thing effectively but keeping things a bit too tidy and controlled when a bit more chaos might make things more exciting or simply more interesting.


Still, The Package is a well done film that moves through its particular genre space with a degree of intelligence while providing a healthy dose of excitement. Which may sound like me damning with faint praise again, but is actually me complimenting a movie on a job well done.

The Night Child (1975)

Original title: Il medaglione insanguinato

Little Emily Williams (Italian horror's favourite red-headed child Nicoletta Elmi) hasn't been quite alright since her mother died in a mysterious burning incident. Although Emily's father, BBC documentarian Michael (Richard Johnson), and her nanny Jill Perkins (Evelyn Stewart) are doing their best to keep her safe and sane, the girl is still plagued by horrible nightmares and suffers from fits the family doctor diagnoses as "mental breakdowns". Emily has another one of those just before her Dad is supposed to travel to Italy for a documentary about paintings of the devil. Following a recommendation of said genius doctor, Michael takes Emily and Jill with him to Italy.

There, very strange things begin to happen. Emily's nightmares turn into daytime visions of herself - or a girl looking like herself - fleeing from badly made-up medieval peasants in full-on angry mob mode. It's a scene right out of a mysterious painting also containing a burning woman falling to her death just like Emily's mum did that her father has become fascinated with. The girl sometimes acts as if she were not herself, suddenly playing piano much better than she should be able to, or doing some of that "devil child" shtick. An amulet that belonged to the Emily's mother seems to have a strange influence on her, as if someone else would take possession of the girl's body sometimes. Might the amulet and the painting have something to do with each other?

The owner of the painting, Contessa Cappelli (Lila Kedrova), who fancies herself as something of a medium, utters dire warnings, at least.

Emily's mental health surely doesn't improve when Daddy falls for his local production assistant, Joanna Morgan (Joanna Cassidy), and it seems only to be a question of time until something violent will happen. When it does, it doesn't exactly hit the first person you'd have expected.

Massimo Dallamano's The Night Child is a bit of a problem child itself. While about half of the film shows Dallamano's great abilities at putting thematic weight behind the pictures of his film and making them beautiful at the same time, the film's other half is visually peculiarly bland and generic, even insecure, as if half the film had been directed by someone on the level of, well, Sergio Martino at his best, but the other half by Sergio Bland. For every brilliantly composed scene that uses real locations to conjure up a sense of the unreal and shows the film's setting in Italy as a place where the irrational and the supernatural seem perfectly natural, there's another scene done in the blandest of point and shoot styles to drag the film's elevated mood down again. The Night Child permanently wavers between a highly stylized aesthetic and the careless shrugging of a directing hack-job, never settling down into a mood or tone, therefore never becoming as immersive and dream-like as it would need to be to actually work. Then there are special effects so miserably bad even I am not able and willing to look beyond them.

The same puzzling schizophrenia also is at work in the film's script. There are some highly clever touches in the way Dallamano presents the past and the present mirroring each other, some moments of psychology that ring absolutely true, but there's also just as much useless back and forth - especially between Johnson and Cassidy - that does not have much of a function besides making the film longer. I'm quite used to European horror films of this era having pacing problems, or being uneven in tone, but The Night Child suffers much more from these problems than its peers, because it not only lacks focus, but also seems unsure what it wants to be about. There's a fantastic film about a very ill girl unable to cope with reality in there, and about a past that resonates so strongly with the present that the present can't help but take on its form, but watching The Night Child, I'm unsure if Dallamano wanted to make that film.

I'm pretty sure he didn't tell his actors either way: Johnson and Cassidy come over as just terribly bland (yes, that word again), unable to carry their part of the movie. This is especially problematic in Johnson's case because it would have been his job to help make Nicoletta Elmi's performance look better. Visually, the girl is quite right for her role, but her acting is as mawkish and fake as you'd expect from a child actor who's mostly left to cope for herself by her co-actors; although it has to be said that the scenes between Stewart and her are generally a bit better. Stewart and Lila Kedrova are the only two actors on screen (and I don't blame Elmi, she was after all only ten years old) who really seem interested in what they're doing.

Of course, given the parts of it that are beautiful and clever, The Night Child is far from being a bad film; it just feels like a failed effort at achieving something.

 

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