1980 Week: The Sea Wolves

          Several veterans of the highly enjoyable military adventure The Wild Geese (1978)—including director Andrew V. McLaglen, star Roger Moore, and screenwriter Reginald Rose—reteamed for the offbeat World War II adventure The Sea Wolves. In fact, the original plan was to reunite all three main stars of The Wild Geese: Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Moore. Alas, it wasn’t to be, so Moore costars in The Sea Wolves with the considerably older David Niven and Gregory Peck. As it happens, Niven and Peck are more appropriate casting, notwithstanding Peck being an American, since the story dramatizes a real-life incident during which a group of retired British cavalry officers were recruited for an espionage mission against the Nazis. Additionally, Niven and Peck had collaborated to strong effect in a previous manly-man adventure picture, 1961’s The Guns of Navarone.

          The Sea Wolves has a certain genteel charm owing to its old-fashioned presentation of Allied heroism and Axis treachery. However, the absence of the modern tonalities that McLaglen and Rose utilized so well in The Wild Geese—angsty antiheroes, twisted international politics—makes The Sea Wolves seem overly tame. The filmmakers’ attempts at integrating lighthearted comedy into the mix further diminish the life-or-death gravitas needed to make the derring-do scenes work. At its worst, the movie is flat and forgettable.

          Set in India, the picture begins by showing U-boats sinking British tankers, thus interrupting key Allied supply lines. British spies determine that information about the tankers is emanating from a radio transmitter hidden somewhere a port controlled by the neutral country of Portugal, meaning that no official invasion force can be sent to dismantle the transmitter. This situation gives rise to the bold idea of recruiting soldiers from the Calcutta Light Horse, many of whom are retired and living in India. Eager for another shot at military action, aging enlisted men train for their mission while the Light Horse’s officers—played by Moore, Niven, and Peck—conduct espionage in order to learn the exact location of the transmitter.

          Despite the tremendous appeal of the leading actors, The Sea Wolves is bogged down with predictable plotting and uninspired staging. Furthermore, the chemistry between the leads never clicks quite the way it did between the stars of The Wild Geese. Moore seems like he’s a generation apart from his costars, Niven looks bored, and Peck seems frustrated at playing such a vapid role after getting so much room to stretch in his two previous films, MacArthur (1977) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). One also suspects that McLaglen was exhausted after having directed two elaborate films—the larky ffolkes and the leaden Breakthrough—in the year prior to making the equally complex The Sea Wolves. Whatever the reasons, The Sea Wolves is watchable but a disappointment nonetheless.

The Sea Wolves: FUNKY

Mitchell (1975)

One of the least interesting entries in the ’70s cycle of action movies about cops behaving as lawlessly as the criminals they pursue, Mitchell features a disjointed storyline, lackluster action scenes, and perfunctory acting. The movie is more or less coherent, but it’s also boring, clichéd, and stupid. Hulking B-movie star Joe Don Baker plays the title character, a dim-bulb detective who gets mixed up with sophisticated crooks, so the bulk of the story involves Baker’s character trying to outwit people whose intellects greatly surpass his own. This sort of premise worked well in a zillion other movies; for instance, Baker offered an entertaining, Southern-fried spin on similar material in Walking Tall (1973). Yet everything about Mitchell feels half-assed. Baker isn’t the right casting for a tough city cop, since he’s unmistakably a good ol’ boy from Texas, and he plays nearly every scene like light comedy, even though death and destruction follow in his wake. As directed by the normally reliable Andrew V. McLaglen, Mitchell wobbles between escapism and seriousness, so it seems likely that many of the film’s tonal problems emerged during postproduction. After all, there’s no excuse for the inclusion of cornpone country singer Hoyt Axton’s lackadaisical theme song during a lengthy love scene between Baker and leading lady Linda Evans—for several excruciating minutes, Mitchell becomes the equivalent of the worst type of Burt Reynolds romp. Future Dynasty star Evans is as forgettable as always, while the actors playing the villains—the great Martin Balsam and the emphatic John Saxon—are wasted in one-dimensional roles. (Saxon’s big scene is a silly chase involving dune buggies.) Virtually nothing in Mitchell works, and the climax is beyond ludicrous. Baker’s character commandeers a helicopter to chase after bad guys who are in a boat, transfers from the helicopter to the boat, and takes out a henchman with a metal hook. All the while, the main villain simply stands at the boat’s controls, waiting to get shot instead of taking defensive action. But then again, seeing as how he’s stuck in an awful movie, can you blame him?

Mitchell: LAME

Fools’ Parade (1971)

          A weird adventure story depicting the exploits of three ex-cons traveling through Depression-era West Virginia, Fools’ Parade features such a delicate combination of eccentric characterizations and literary contrivances that it would have taken a director of tremendous artistry to pull the pieces together into a coherent whole. Alas, Andrew V. McLaglen is not such a director. Because he presents the story with the same brisk, unvarnished style with which he made several entertaining action films, the peculiar nuances of Fools’ Parade end up feeling completely false. So while the movie is watchable thanks to the novelty of familiar actors playing offbeat scenes, Fools’ Parade isn’t satisfying—the execution is too straight for fans of idiosyncratic cinema, and the storyline is unlikely to thrill people who prefer conventional narratives.

          Jimmy Stewart stars as Mattie Appleyard, a recently paroled inmate who accrued $25,000 in back pay through 40 years of hard labor behind bars. Mattie has gathered a surrogate family of fellow ex-cons, including Lee Cottrill (Strother Martin), a nervous would-be storekeeper, and Johnny Jesus (Kurt Russell), a naïve youth. The trio’s goal of starting a business together hits a roadblock when they realize their former jailor, a psycho named “Doc” Council (George Kennedy), has conspired to prevent Mattie from safely cashing his $25,000 check. This circumstance precipitates a battle of wills between the ex-cons and their once and future oppressor, who chases after them with gun-toting henchmen. There’s also a subplot involving a blowsy madam (Anne Baxter) and a reluctant prostitute (Kathy Cannon), plus another subplot involving a corrupt banker (David Huddleston) who’s in cahoots with Council.

          Fools’ Parade was based on a book by Davis Grubb, who also wrote the source material for the 1955 cult classic The Night of the Hunter. This is arch material, but McLaglen plays the story straight, missing opportunities for irony, satire, and whimsy. Only the action scenes really work, at least in the conventional sense. Another issue is the clunky dialogue by screenwriter James Lee Barrett, much of which the normally excellent Huddleston is forced to deliver; Huddleston is little more than an exposition machine here.

          Despite these fatal flaws, Fools’ Parade is mildly arresting. Watching Stewart play a stately crook who does things like yank his glass eye from his skull in order to tell fortunes is bracing. Martin squirms through one of his signature performances as a Southern-fried oddball. And Russell plays every moment with the same gee-whiz sincerity he brought to myriad Disney flicks in the early ’70s. Yet Kennedy delivers the movie’s most extravagant performance. Wearing grime over his teeth and wire-rimmed glasses over his face, the bulky actor hunches over like a troglodyte and drags out utterances in the vocal style a tweaked country preacher. His acting is spectacularly bad. (Baxter almost matches him for over-the-top stagecraft, especially since she wears garish whore makeup.) It’s hard to imagine how or why Fools’ Parade got made, since it must have been nearly as strange on paper as it is on screen. After all, the climax features a sight gag involving a lovable dog fetching a stick of lit dynamite. However, these bizarre flourishes make Fools’ Parade a curio—one can only marvel that the movie exists.

Fools’ Parade: FREAKY

The Last Hard Men (1976)

          An enjoyable but forgettable Western thriller, The Last Hard Men combines a string of macho clichés. Circa the early 1900s, cold-blooded criminal Provo (James Coburn) is part of a prison labor crew until he stages a violent escape, enlisting several fellow convicts to form an outlaw gang. (Fans of cheesy TV will notice Larry Wilcox, later of CHiPs fame, as the youngest member of Provo’s gang.) Although Provo claims he wants to rob banks, his real motivation is hunting down the man who sent him to jail, square-jawed peacemaker Sam Burgade (Charlton Heston). Now a retired widower, Burgade is happily occupied with getting his beautiful daughter, Susan (Barbara Hershey), married off to her affectionate beau, Hal (Christopher Mitchum). Yet when Burgade learns about Provo’s escape and subsequent crime spree, he races to intercept the train on which Provo’s gang was spotted. Unfortunately, Provo arranged the train sighting as a decoy so he could kidnap Susan and draw Burgade out to the wilderness for a showdown. There’s a smidgen more to the story than this synopsis suggests, but The Last Hard Men is essentially a macho duel preceded by foreplay.
          Director Andrew V. McLaglen demonstrates his usual sure hand for this sort of material, keeping things moving at a steady pace and ensuring that the nastiest violence leaves a mark. However, at one point he awkwardly tries to channel Sam Peckinpah—late in the movie, as a means of provoking Burgade, Provo gives his thugs permission to rape Susan, and McLaglen stages the ensuing pursuit/assault in lurid slow-motion. Artsy flourishes don’t gel with McLaglen’s meat-and-potatoes style, so the scene feels weirdly dissonant and perverse. As for the movie’s acting, Coburn is genuinely frightening when his character gets crazed with bloodlust, but Heston is on autopilot. It doesn’t help that many of Heston’s scenes are designed to showcase supporting player Mitchum (son of Robert), whom various producers spent several years trying to transform into a star despite his lack of charisma. Hershey adds welcome toughness to an underwritten role, demonstrating how quickly she was outgrowing the ingénue style of her early-’70s performances.

The Last Hard Men: FUNKY

ffolkes (1979)

          Midway through his tenure playing a certain suave secret agent in Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Roger Moore was probably itching to do something different—which might explain why he attacks the leading role in this entertaining British thriller with ferocity noticeably absent from his acting in the 007 movies. Portraying an eccentric operative named Rufus Excalibur ffolkes (two lower-case letters at the beginning of the last name, thank you very much), Moore upends nearly every aspect of his James Bond characterization. Instead of a nightlife-loving rake, ffolkes is a recluse who prefers his cats to the company of women, and instead of being a charming sophisticate, he’s a tactless snob. Furthermore, rather than being a superhero capable of doing virtually anything, ffolkes is a specialist in just one tactic: underwater commando attacks.

          Thus, when three oil rigs located off the English coast get overtaken by terrorists, the British government knocks on the door of ffolkes’ castle—literally, because he lives in a decaying stone edifice—asking for help. Thereafter, the movie delivers tightly coiled excitement as the commandoes sneak onto the oil rigs with stealthy weapons like harpoons and knives, seeking to thwart the baddies before hostages are killed and the rigs are demolished with explosives. Written by Jack Davies from his own novel Esther, Ruth & Jennifer (the code names of the oil rigs), this picture was released as North Sea Hijack in the UK during 1979 before creeping onto American screens in early 1980 with the new title ffolkes. Although it didn’t do much business at the box office, it found a welcoming home on pay cable—and, as it turns out, ffolkes is nicely suited for home viewing.

          A brisk, workmanlike thriller with an entertaining mixture of bitchy banter and high-seas action, the movie has just enough zing in terms of production value and star power to feel like a major motion picture, but it’s so contained and straightforward it might as well be the pilot for a TV series. In fact, Moore is such a delight as ffolkes that it’s a shame no further adventures featuring the character were filmed: By the end of the movie, the character is so solidly established he could have swam the high seas for years afterward, foiling evildoers who dared to sully the world’s waters.

          Much of the credit for the picture’s Saturday-matinee vibe goes to director Andrew V. McLaglen, whose previous collaboration with Moore, The Wild Geese (1978), was another escapist winner. McLaglen and Moore are aided an efficient supporting cast, led by Anthony Perkins as the main hijacker—with typical aplomb, he weaves humor and perversity into a woefully underwritten role, and the dirty looks he and Moore exchange in their fleeting moments together are worth the price of admission. James Mason adds gravitas as the military official supervising ffolkes’ team of frogmen, while B-movie fave Michael Parks appears as Perkins’ principal henchman.

ffolkes: GROOVY

Cahill: United States Marshal (1973)

An entertaining but forgettable entry in John Wayne’s latter-day filmography, Cahill: United States Marshal lacks the tragic poetry of The Cowboys (1972) and The Shootist (1976), the elegiac Westerns that comprise the Duke’s farewell to his beloved cowboy genre. Instead, Cahill: United States Marshal briskly presents a by-the-numbers story punctuated with solid action. There’s nothing here that fans haven’t seen a gazillion times before—Wayne struts through hordes of enemy gunmen like a superhero with a six-gun, barely flinching whenever he’s shot—but then again, novelty and surprise aren’t what people expected (or wanted) when they bought tickets to cowboy movies starring John Wayne. In this flick, the Duke plays J.D. Cahill, a tough-as-nails U.S. Marshal whose young sons fall in with a bad element while he’s away on business. Fraser (George Kennedy), a two-dimensional villain with a tendency to snarl while standing outside in lightning storms, pressures Cahill’s boys Danny (Gary Grimes) and Billy Joe (Clay O’Brien) to help with a bank robbery. When the robbery leads to the murder of a local sheriff, the lads realize they’ve gotten involved with the wrong varmints and try to wrangle themselves free of their predicament without getting killed or letting Dad know what’s happening. Much of the picture comprises Cahill stalking the robbers with the aide of his cranky Indian guide, Lightfoot (Neville Brand), so the drama of the piece, such as it is, stems from the question of how long the Cahill boys can manage to deceive their father. Quite predictably, it all comes to a head when Cahill figures out the truth in time to dole out equal measures of hot lead and life lessons. Efficiently directed by Andrew V. McLaglen and adequately written by Harry Julian Fink and Rita M. Fink (who also penned the Duke’s 1971 Western Big Jake), Cahill: United States Marshal is pleasant entertainment and nothing more, a well-made but uninspired run through the usual tropes of last-minute rescues, ornery put-downs, tense shootouts, and tough talk about how a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

Cahill: United States Marshal: FUNKY

One More Train to Rob (1971)

Bland and slow-moving but harmless, the action/comedy Western One More Train to Rob benefits from the casting of leading man George Peppard in his natural idiom, because Peppard shines while alternating between smooth displays of virility and casually dispatched wisecracks. He plays Harker Fleet, a gentleman thief who gets double-crossed by his partner, Timothy Nolan (John Vernon), after a train robbery—Timothy steals not only Fleet’s loot but also his high-maintenance lady friend, Katy (Diana Muldaur), so Harker ends up in jail while Timothy enjoys the life that should have been Harker’s. Later, when Harker gets out of incarceration, he reconnects with his former friend and discovers that Timothy is scheming to rob gold from a group of Chinese miners. (The immigrants need the gold to support sick relatives living in San Francisco.) As should be obvious by now, the storyline of One More Train to Rob spins in a new direction with almost every scene as Harker’s characterization conveniently evolves from that of a charming rogue to that of an unlikely hero. To say that these narrative twists lack credibility misses the point, since the purpose of an escapist piffle like One More Train to Rob is stringing together fistfights and gunfights. However, there aren’t enough fistfights and gunfights; the film gets so mired in laying narrative pipe that much of the screen time is consumed by expository conversation. Furthermore, the themes are so generic that the picture feels like a highlight reel of Western tropes, and flat lighting gives the movie the look of bad episodic TV from the same era. (Even some of the supporting players, including Robert Donner, France Nuyen, and Soon-Tek Oh, are mostly familiar from small-screen fare of the early ’70s.) Peppard’s charisma and Andrew V. McLaglan’s efficient direction ensure that watching One More Train to Rob isn’t unpleasant, but everything about the movie is so artificial and irrelevant that the picture fades from memory the instant it’s over.

One More Train to Rob: FUNKY

The Wild Geese (1978)

          An old-fashioned adventure story that could have been made in the ‘50s or even earlier, if not for its focus on ’70s-era African politics, The Wild Geese is a rousing action thriller with just enough attention to characterization that its climax has an emotional punch. More importantly, the picture features a unique combination of larger-than-life Brits playing larger-than-life roles: Welshman Richard Burton, Irishman Richard Harris, and Englishman Roger Moore play a trio of aging mercenaries hired to rescue a revolutionary African leader from political imprisonment.

          The story unfolds in classic men-on-a-mission fashion. Nefarious banker Sir Edward Matherson (Stewart Granger) hires alcoholic ex-Army man Col. Allen Faulkner (Burton) to free African political prisoner Julius Limbani (Winston Ntshona) from an unnamed African country because Limbani is slated for execution. Distrustful of his new employer but in need of a paycheck, Faulkner recruits a team including pilot Shaun Flynn (Moore), strategist Rafer Janders (Harris), drill sergeant Sandy Young (Jack Watson), and displaced South African Pieter Coetzee (Hardy Kruger). The vignettes of Faulkner building his crew are breezily entertaining, though screenwriter Reginald Rose and director Andrew McLaglen layer ominous foreshadowing into the derring-do bits to lay the groundwork for what’s coming later.

          The rescue mission goes well, but then the group’s getaway plane takes off prematurely, leaving the mercenaries and the liberated Limbani alone in enemy territory. Damn that double-crossing Matherson! This juncture is when the picture gets really exciting, because the soldiers have to fight their way through a jungle filled with heavily armed troops in order to seize another plane and escape. The movie pays clumsy lip service to social consciousness when Coetzee becomes Limbani’s bodyguard, forcing a racist white man to learn grudging respect for a saintly black man, but The Wild Geese is less about politics and more about macho militarism: By the end of the movie, nearly every character has mowed down opponents to save his mates.

          With its corny musical score, which could have been lifted from an old RAF training film, The Wild Geese is unapologetically retro, and the storyline is so schematic that some will find it trite. Nonetheless, McLaglen’s sure hand with the action scenes, combined with the easy chemistry that the three leads have with each other and a surprisingly poignant climax, make The Wild Geese a fun romp with much more substance than the average shoot-’em-up.

The Wild Geese: GROOVY

Breakthrough (1979)

          Watching Richard Burton’s physical decline had been a spectator sport since the mid-’60s, when the ravages of his alcoholism really started to become evident, so by the late ’70s it was mostly just depressing to watch the once-virile actor sleepwalk through lame movies looking like the ghost of his former self. In the World War II thriller Breakthrough, Burton looks especially desiccated, an effect only worsened by the enervated feel of the whole project. A quasi-sequel to the Sam Peckinpah war story Cross of Iron (1977), this picture eschews the moral ambiguity of Peckinpah’s picture for old-fashioned melodrama about a good German trying to help the Americans win the war.

          In 1944, after the Nazis have suffered insurmountable losses in Russia, a German general (Curt Jurgens) joins a cabal of officers planning to kill Hitler and then negotiate peace, so he asks freethinking soldier Rolf Steiner (Burton) to convey information about the plan to Allied officers. Steiner connects with a sympathetic American colonel (Robert Mitchum), who then involves his superior officer (Rod Steiger). However fate intervenes, as does an odious Nazi (Helmut Griem) unwilling to acknowledge that the war is already lost.

          Everyone in this movie looks bored and disconnected, so each actor gives an isolated performance that director Andrew V. McLaglen doesn’t even bother to unify with the other performances. Burton spits out lines quickly, like he can’t wait to walk off camera and drink; Mitchum delivers dialogue flatly, as if he’s simply repeating words that were fed to him before the camera rolled; and Steiger bludgeons his scenes with characteristic bulging-vein intensity. The only moments that have flair are the buddy-movie exchanges between the lead characters and their second-in-command guys (Burton has Klaus Lowitsch and Mitchum has Michael Parks).

          To say that Breakthrough gets off to a slow start is an understatement: The first half-hour of the movie is borderline unwatchable because nothing happens. Steiner doesn’t even get hip to the big plan until the picture is well underway, and then, when things are supposed to get exciting, somnambulistic acting and rote combat scenes add up to tedium.

          It’s amazing that just a year before shooting this turkey, Burton and McLaglen collaborated on the robust action picture The Wild Geese (1978), but apparently their efforts shouldn’t be judged entirely on the evidence of the existing version of Breakthrough. After being released in Europe in 1979, the picture went through several edits (and titles) before limping onto a few American screens in 1982. The currently available version runs a scant 95 minutes (the original was closer to two hours), and the only thing more ghastly than the print quality is the amateurish music score. Given the lifeless performances, however, it’s hard to imagine than any amount of post-production sweetening could have turned this misbegotten flick into something special.

Breakthrough: LAME