House of Cards (1968)

These last few years, American Reno Davis (George Peppard) has made his living as a middling boxer on the European circuit. He’s coming to the end of his rope here, though. So it’s an ironically nice twist of fate when a little boy (Barnaby Shaw) we will soon enough learn to be called Paul de Villemont nearly shoots Davis by accident. Well, perhaps the nearly dying bit’s not that nice, but Paul’s mother likes the cut of Davis’s jib, and certainly his American manliness, and decides he’s just the kind of man who should be her son’s new tutor, and rock of sanity against the family of her late husband.

Turns out the family is the core of an international fascist conspiracy out to create a new world order of particular shittiness; whereas Davis is pretty good at punching Nazis.

John Guillermin’s House of Cards never gets quite as crazy as the spy movies his Italian colleagues made in the wake of James Bond Mania, and its hipness and fashion sense is more on the down to Earth side of the late 60s, so I wouldn’t exactly compare this to a Eurospy movie, though the film certainly is part of the family. Nominally, this is a US production, but directed by a Brit and shot in France and Italy with a cast mostly consisting of Europeans, the vibe isn’t exactly Hollywood.

After a somewhat slow start, the film becomes increasingly fun. Guillermin first makes an enjoyable time out of Peppard acting like the proverbial hammer in search of a nail in any situation where subtlety would be called for, pretending horrible male chauvinist nonsense is charm in so drastic a manner I couldn’t help but see the film making fun of it when nobody’s looking, only to then turn up the paranoia. Why, for twenty minutes or so, this even seems to prefigure the paranoia of 70s conspiracy thrillers, to surprisingly gripping effect. After which, because this certainly isn’t a film made to bore anyone by staying too constant in tone and mood, our hero finds himself captured and encounters a parade of dysfunctional fascists, whose portrayal is about as sardonic as possible. The bad guy actors do milk their scenery chewing opportunities with excellence, so Davis eventually getting the better of them is very satisfying indeed, particularly since Peppard manages to make his somewhat thuggish and pretty misogynistic character likeable beyond the “everybody is better than a Nazi” rule. I’m still not quite sure how he does it, but it certainly works.

The only one looking a bit bored on screen is Orson Welles, who clearly only pops in for a couple of scenes to collect a pay check for alimonies or doomed film projects, but at least he’s trying to convince George Peppard’s little tutee to gun our hero down for real this time, while being all hypnotic and malevolently low-angled.

House of Cards’ production values are higher than you’d get from the more cardboard oriented Italian Eurospy arm, so Guillermin has quite a few opportunities to impress the audience with very pretty shots of France and Italy. Particularly the castle our hero finds himself trapped in for quite a stretch looks rather impressive. But as an old veteran of these things, I’m already delighted when doors at least look as if they were made of wood, and the same shot of a car isn’t repeated ad nauseam throughout a chase, so sane viewers’ mileage may vary.

Speaking of chases, while this wasn’t made with the set piece loving heart of even the early Bond movies, the action sequences generally flow very well and have a nice sense of physicality to them, even though all Nazi goons do have glass chins. The last point only adds to the fun, of course, for what is more entertaining than seeing a Nazi getting punched by George Peppard in action hero mode?

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.

In short: The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960)

It’s 1901, and the cause of Irish independence needs money. So what better plan could there be than to break into the nigh impregnable Bank of England and steal the King’s gold bullion? Because a bunch of people with dubious Irish accents won’t be able to plan this sort of heist on their own, the cause’s upper echelons import US-Irish criminal mastermind Charles Norgate (Aldo Ray).

Norgate does need a bit of time to come up with a good plan, but does some fine preparation work breaking into a museum, befriending alcoholic sewer experts as well as Monty Fitch (Peter O’Toole) the upper-class sportsman type Captain of the part (insert correct military jargon here) of the Royal Guards responsible for protecting the Bank. He also finds time for the important business of romancing widow and boss of the cause’s spy operations Iris Muldoon (Elizabeth Sellars). Once the plan’s ready, there certainly won’t be anything that could go wrong, right?

John Guillerman’s The Day They Robbed the Bank of England is a surprisingly entertaining film despite a rather dubious script that doesn’t bother to flesh its characters out properly and includes a painfully awkwardly realized romance. This good impression is particularly surprising in a film that additionally has to try and pretend Aldo Ray is any kind of mastermind as well as really rather attractive, both things even I can’t bring myself to suspend my disbelief for.

Characterisation beyond presenting someone as a slightly whimsical comic relief figure isn’t the script’s forte. In fact, the only character here with an actual, interesting arc is O’Toole’s Fitch. As the actor plays him, he’s a man hiding his disgust at himself for being really not more than a tin soldier without anything going for him except his upbringing and his uniform under much alcohol and bluster who finds a chance to prove himself and grows through it. I’m not even sure how much of this is thanks to the script – whose other characters you could sum up with names like Whiny O’Malley without being unfair – and how much to O’Toole; I very much suspect the latter, O’Toole making much out of the tiniest hints of an inner life the script provides.

The plot tends to digress into the wrong directions too – the romance between Norgate and Muldoon and Whiny’s jealousy really doesn’t add anything to the film, and the last act turn-around of the Cause against the robbery doesn’t do much but add a distraction to what was until that point a half hour of very tightly directed heist suspense with the film cutting between Norgate and his buddies digging (well, and Whiny whining) and avoiding discovery, and Fitch slowly realizing what’s going on right below his feet.

Apart from O’Toole, it is Guillermin’s often clever – and always good-looking – direction that turns this one from just a badly written film without much to say or do into an interesting little heist movie. The director grabs every opportunity to create little moments of suspense and our old paradoxical buddy, mild excitement, that very aptly distract from the various failings of script and casting; though even he doesn’t manage to convince me to think of Aldo Ray’s love life with anything but a shudder.

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!

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