In short: City Beneath the Sea (1953)

Two salvage divers – straight arrow Brad Carlton (Robert Ryan) and his friend and partner, the morally more flexible Tony Bartlett (Anthony Quinn) – travel to Jamaica for a rather delicate operation. They are tasked to salvage one million dollars in gold bouillon from a sunken ship. At first, they find nothing at the coordinates provided them by the local contact (Karel Stepanek) of their employer.

Instead of going home again, both men decide to stay on Jamaica and romance some ladies in that horrifying 50s style you don’t have to be particularly woke to raise all available eyebrows at. Brad takes time getting to know boat captain Terry McBride (Mala Powers), while Tony sets his eyes on a night club singer working under the nom de plume of Venita (Suzan Ball). Eventually, their dithering and many a scene of “romance” will lead our protagonists on the trail of the gold again. Turns out, that local contact is involved in a rather huge insurance fraud.

But what, one might ask, about the titular “City Beneath the Sea”? Well, our heroes use the awkward looking ruin to locate the gold, that’s all.

It is not only the title of Budd Boetticher’s City Beneath the Sea that emphasises the wrong things – unfortunately, what is sold as an adventure movie in the classic style really isn’t much of that. The search for the gold takes a back seat for most of the movie. Instead we have to endure Ryan’s and Quinn’s characters acting like traditional male chauvinists for what feels like hours, some unfunny comedy, a musical number and other distractions in a film that seems to have no interest at all in its purported plot. Which wouldn’t be as much of a problem if the distractions were actually interesting and fun, or would make use of Boetticher’s considerable talent for complex characterisation and explorations of human relationships. Alas, even with the considerable charm of Ryan and Quinn, the distractions never feel like anything but dithering, or desperate attempts at getting the film to feature length. From time to time there’s an interesting detail – like the way Tony very emphatically greets the black Dijon (house favourite Woody Strode) as a peer after having been introduced to him as their contact’s “boy” – but this is not a film where those details add up to very much, as much as I’d like them to.

Even the adventure scenes that are in the movie aren’t terribly great – the focus on slow, slow, oh so very slow diving sequences doesn’t play to Boetticher’s strengths as a director at all, what with it mostly showing our heroes bobbing up and down in their – now old-timey – diving gear.

All of which leaves City Beneath the Sea as a film only of minor interest even for Boetticher (or Ryan, or Quinn, etc) completists.

In short: Berlin Express (1948)

Europe, under occupation after World War II. After a prologue that informs the audience something nefarious is going to go down, we are introduced to a group of passengers, strangers all, boarding a US army train to Frankfurt.

Things start to become rather interesting when one of the passengers, supposedly a German peace activist with the Allieds’ ears called Dr Bernhardt, is killed by a bomb. It will eventually turn out that the man who was killed was only a decoy, but the real Heinrich Bernhardt (Paul Lukas) is soon kidnapped by Nazis still dreaming of rebuilding their bloody Reich. Apparently, we can never get rid of those completely. Bernhardt’s French secretary Lucienne (Merle Oberon), manages to convince some of the other passengers to stop their post-war squabbling for long enough to help her find him. When actually working together, these men – American Robert Lindley (Robert Ryan), British James Sterling (Robert Coote), Frenchman Perrot (Charles Korvin) and Soviet Lieutenant Kiroshilov (Roman Toporow) – might even manage to do some good.

Which is really rather the point of a movie that’s very clearly realizing the direction the world is going after the War, and suggesting that the old fashioned notion of people from all nations and walks of life working together to improve everyone’s lot might just lead to a better world than the old way of every nation for themselves. The film’s even mildly optimistic about this possibility, at least rather more optimistic than most of today’s news will make one.

Structurally, this is not one of director Jacques Tourneur’s masterpieces. The problems lie with a script that, clearly relishing the opportunity to use the ruins of Frankfurt and Berlin as thriller backdrops for reasons of excitement as well as enlightenment, still uses a sometimes never-ending off-screen monologue to stop the film dead in its tracks repeatedly and provide exposition and teachable moments in a tone somewhere between hardboiled narration and dry and only mildly clever documentary, informing the audience of 1948 of what one hopes they already knew from their newspapers. It’s a bit of a shame, really, for the shots of ruined cities, the desperate, real-life surrealism of post-war existence in Germany, and the film’s actual plot don’t really need this kind of help at all, providing as they do a much better picture of the world than the narration ever could.

In fact, whenever the big voice from nowhere pauses and allows the plot and the characters to move by their own volition, things turn into an actual Tourneur movie full of shadowy corners, men and women with complicated motives trying to navigate shadows metaphorical and real through thrilling set pieces.


The film really wants to believe what Bernhardt preaches even if the state of the world makes it sound utopian, keeping a bit of hope up even knowing the realities of life. It’s a bit sad looked at from today, too, for humanity clearly has learned little from any of the things Berlin Express is talking about, perpetuating childish squabbling that turns bloody more often than not, even opening doors and podiums to Nazis and their ilk again.

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.

Three Films Make A Post: SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN HIS MINDS "BLACKS OUT"!

All Cheerleaders Die (2013): I’m honestly not sure what to make of Lucky McKee’s and Chris Sivertson’s horror comedy about undead cheerleaders. The film is in turns funny, subversive, sleazy, weird, clever, dumb as a rock and the good as well as the bad kind of unpleasant, never managing to focus on any of these things, and more often than not emphasizing its worst elements.

A first watch suggests this to be an interesting mess, but then there are also quite a few moments when the film pats itself on the back for only it knows what that don’t make a second watch all that probable for me.

Lawman (1971): I’m pretty sure there’s an awesome Western about violence and the damage it causes in its victims as well as its perpetrators to be made from Gerald Wilson’s script, but Michael Winner sure wasn’t the man to make it. I know, Winner has had a minor critical resurgence in the last decade or so, with scattered writers here and there praising his films for their luridness, but to my eyes, said luridness was usually the result of the films’ subject matter, while Winner’s direction nearly always combined the blunt and the bland to me, robbing most of his films of any effect except annoying me.

Winner is a barely competent Western director, with little happening on the visual front that didn’t happen better in dozens of psychological westerns from the 50s. The director’s sledgehammer bluntness then proceeds to paste over all the subtleties the script seems to contain, until everything crashes down in an ending that is probably meant to be heavy and shocking but that really comes done more on the side of the ridiculous because Winner didn’t prepare what’s going to happen in it properly; there’s that lack of subtlety again. On the positive side, Lawman is held on a barely watchable level by a fine cast that only starts with Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, with every single actor on screen doing his or her best to act through Winner’s lack of inspiration.

Murder by the Clock (1931): Edward Sloman’s pre-code mystery with elements of the old dark house film is a bit creaky around the edges with a lot of the flaws I by now expect from early talkies – the stiff acting, the needs to shoot dialogue scenes in static ways, that sort of thing – but it is not without its charms. There’s some fun efforts at establishing the fake supernatural, a tough-minded cop in form of William “Stage” Boyd’s (I dunno about the name) Lt. Valcour I wouldn’t mind seeing more of, and a hysterical (in at least three meanings of the word) femme fatale performance by Lilyan Tashman that clearly only misses out on moustache-twirling because facial hair on women is frowned upon in many cultures.

It’s not much, but it’s enough to distract one from the slowly approaching heat death of the universe for seventy-four minutes, which is really all one can ask of a film from this time and place.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,comedy,western,mystery,lucky mckee,chris sivertson,michael winner,burt lancaster,robert ryan,edward sloman,william "stage" boyd,lilyan tashman

In short: The Professionals (1966)

Oil millionaire Grant (Ralph Bellamy), hires four professionals – former revolutionary Fardan (Lee Marvin), his explosives expert best buddy, the amoral Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), superior scout Jake (Woody Strode) and horse expert Ehrengard (Robert Ryan) – to return his wife Maria (Claudia Cardinale) to him who has been kidnapped by Mexican revolutionary/bandit Raza (Jack Palance) for a ransom of one hundred thousand dollars.

Raza is an old friend of Fardan’s and Dolworth’s but they still take on the job, first making a dangerous trip through the desert on the US/Mexican border, only to learn their employer just might not have told them the whole truth about the situation, and the kidnapping is anything but; not that this sort of thing matters all that much, one does have a contract with Grant, after all. On the other hand, long forgotten consciences might just be reawakened after a lot of people have died.

Quite a few reviewers on the net call Richard Brooks’s The Professional stuff like “an underseen classic” or even “one of the best westerns ever made” but frankly, I don’t see it. To earn any of these superlatives from me, a film needs a bit more than a slickly professional direction, a bunch of beloved (by me too!) aging tough guy actors going through the typical motions of this sort of thing, or picture postcard pretty photography.

What the film lacks for me are two things, and including just one of them might have been enough to turn this from perfectly watchable to great. Firstly, depth: sure, there’s a bit of moral deliberation about the uses and causes of revolutions and the men who fight in them, but the results the film arrives at aren’t exactly the stringent result of thematic work as they are in Leone’s and Corbucci’s revolutionary themed Spaghetti Westerns. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the moral conclusions the film draws aren’t actually convincing results of what happens in it at all, thanks to a script (also by Brooks) that tends to be desperately underwritten and leaves its inspired cast as ciphers. A Cipher, as you know, isn’t anything that does have any character or moral development per definition at all.

Secondly, the film’s very relaxed approach to storytelling does result in a certain lack of drama. Sure, there are shoot-outs, chases and an attack on a bandit fortification, and every single one of them is realized in perfectly competent manner, yet they all lack any sense of actual danger, the film never making a successful effort bringing home the stakes of any given situation.

Having said this, I don’t want to leave anyone reading in the impression I didn’t find watching The Professionals a perfectly enjoyable time; it just seems to lack in any ambition beyond being a pleasant time waster. Unfortunately there’s so much obvious talent before and behind the camera a pleasant time waster does seem like a bit of a waste of other things also.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,western,richard brooks,burt lancaster,lee marvin,robert ryan,woody strode,jack palance,claudia cardinale

A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die (1968)

Clay McCord (Alex Cord) is a man with problems - he's a very capable and rather good-natured outlaw, but so popular with the bounty hunters (who are all a bunch of amoral sadists) he can hardly find a place to rest for a second. He has been able to cope with a life on the run for quite some time now, yet he has also developed an ever increasing case of shaking fits that make his weapon hand very unreliable and - what's probably worse - bring traumatic memories of his epileptic father with them. Until now, Clay has been able to hide his weakness from those nice people around him, but his health has reached a point where this won't be possible for much longer. Of course, there's always the outlaw town of Escondido to hole up in. Trouble is, Escondido's sadistic town boss Krant (Mario Brega) and McCord aren't the best of friends, either and the doctor Clay put his hopes in is hanging from a noose.

How fortunate then that the governor of New Mexico has declared an amnesty for people like Clay. They only have to ride into the next town and deliver their guns. There's even fifty dollars in it for the amnesty-willing.

Alas, Clay's streak of bad luck continues, with "the next town" being a place called Tuscosa, full of good people who aren't much for giving others second chances. Tuscosa's sheriff Colby (Arthur Kennedy) does everything in his power to make sure nobody ever reaches his town alive to get his amnesty. He even goes so far as to set up a blockade around Escondido, that lets no-one in or out - women and little children dying of hunger be damned.

It looks very bad for Clay and the poor people of Escondido, until the the governor of New Mexico himself, Lem Carter (Robert Ryan, allowed some scenes of ridiculous but great bad-assitude), comes to town to ensure that his amnesty law does what it is supposed to do. He also takes a real and helpful interest in Clay.

 

Franco Giraldi's A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die is a rather strange film. It stands with one foot in the territory of the classic and morally clear-cut American western, while the other is planted firmly in the greyish mud of the Spaghetti Western.

This lends the film something of a schizophrenic mood of having two incompatible ways to look at the world at once - not in the productive way that would bring the two Western styles into some kind of dialogue, but rather by jumping from one tone to the next, sometimes in a single scene. Ryan's character is very much the traditional, honest and honorable cowboy character he seldom played in American films, while Cord and Kennedy are typical products of the Italian tradition.

I found it difficult to get a real grip on the film - I wouldn't dare to speculate about the position it tries to take in the Western genre; to be honest, I'm not even sure if its ending is supposed to be a happy end or not. Which would be less of a problem if I thought Giraldi was out to shake the viewer up. Instead I'm afraid he just wasn't all that sure himself.

This doesn't mean A Minute to Pray... isn't worth watching. If you are just going with the flow, you will find some rough but effective filmmaking, some of the muddiest towns in any Western and mostly solid acting. Cord is a little problematic when he tries to be the calculating gunman most of his peers fear, yet very convincing when he's crying, whining, having fits or being tortured, and since he's doing much more of the latter, his performance works out fine.

He's just fortunate he doesn't have to share many scenes with Robert Ryan, who is not doing much acting-wise, and is still making every scene he's in his own.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,robert ryan,alex cord,franco giraldi,reviews

Day of the Outlaw (1959)

The film takes place at the beginning of winter in the Old West, in a very small frontier town in Wyoming, right at the End of Trails (I think the mythical qualities of the snowy landscape warrant the use of a mythical term the film itself also uses, although probably without the capitalization). For years, the place has been dominated by the rancher Blaise Starrett (Robert Ryan, mixing the mythical dimensions of his character and the way it feels being an actual human being in an incredible performance), who is mainly responsible for the relative peace and stability in the region - he "cleaned" the place with his own gun, more or less.

But in the last year or two, farmers have begun to settle in the place, bringing with them a different notion of civilization and law as well as fences that make Starrett's life more difficult (and in his worldview presumably less free) than it used to be.

Matters aren't helped by the fact Starrett had an affair with Helen Crane (Tina Louise), the wife of the farmers' spokesman Hal Crane (Alan Marshall). She ended the affair and decided to stay with her husband, but seems to love both men, if in different ways. Starrett definitely still loves her and knows he can't have her as long as her husband is alive, giving him one more reason to want to see Crane dead, even if he never would admit this to himself.

Everybody knows that Crane hasn't got a chance in hell in a gunfight against Starrett. The showdown between the rivals comes unexpectedly fast. Or would come, if a gang of bandits wouldn't ride into town right when the shooting is about to start and turn the film into something quite different from what the beginning made me expect.

The bandits have no trouble in disarming the surprised townies - after all, the few armed men around (and the town is so small one has trouble calling it one) were lining up in the saloon to kill each other.

These bandits are of the unpleasant type that would later become dominant in the Spaghetti Western, sadistic maniacs who are more interested in the maiming and raping, but less in the pillaging part of their jobs. Still, they only plan on staying for a day to rest and find treatment for their leader "Captain" Bruhn (Burl Ives, in another great performance, seeming at once sympathetic and the cruel bastard who can keep the kind of men he employs in check), who was wounded in their last business excursion.

Bruhn knows very well that his men are maniacs and keeps them in line by pure force of will. Unfortunately he's so badly wounded the town's only doctor - a veterinarian - doesn't give him much time anymore.

What follows are some of the things you might expect, yet played out with the emphasis not on the moments and concepts you might expect. Starrett and Crane, for example, are not slowly growing to be friends, instead some very subtly done scenes between Starrett and Helen let him take a look at his motives for hating her husband so much and, as the film puts it "not liking what I see".

As already mentioned, much praise has to go to the actors who, while Ryan and Ives are especially impressive, all do some excellent work in showing their inner life more through small gestures than through dialogue.

It is of course quite possible that none of those gestures had made it into the film without director Andre De Toth, whose Western are products of a technically very proficient director without the kind of showoffishness that puts itself before the movie. Day of the Outlaw is a very strictly composed film, full of quiet and slow beauty and a passion that shows itself especially when not much seems to be happening on screen. There is a method to show the psychological dimension of occurrences through the rhythms of editing and the way the camera moves or sometimes doesn't move and De Toth seems to me to be one of this method's main protagonists in the Western movie, showing a confidence in his approach that leaves me in something like awe.

Over the whole running time, I didn't see anything on screen that wasn't supposed to be as I saw it. I don't use the word "perfection", unless I describe something as "perfectly awful", but Day of the Outlaw puts me on the brink of using it.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,western,robert ryan,burl ives,andre de toth