Three Films Make A Post: Take The Trip

Stone (1974): This Australian bikie (thanks for that term, Australia) exploitation movie is a weird thing. It starts out as a paranoid acid trip (that is to say, pretty awesome), turns into a nearly anthropological look at its version of bikie culture - with some added fun violence in between, of course – and ends with the sort of 70s downer business that really puts all that talk about honour in the scenes before into a rather brutal perspective.

One-time feature director and occasional actor Sandy Harbutt has quite the eye for going from 70s psychedelia, through the scenes that feel documentary, to the cheap and fun action, dropping some acerbic bits about class, and getting back to the bad trip quality while making things feel natural.

Hell Drivers (1957): There’s also quite a bit of class commentary in Cy Endfield’s curious mix of melodrama, truck action, and noir tropes. Unlike in many a 50s British movie, one can even imagine the director having met working class people before. The film also shows for its time surprising sympathy for its Italian “Gastarbeiter” character (though he is played by the decidedly not Italian Herbert Lom), and generally seems to have a good working idea of how a certain type of working class pride can easily be exploited to destructive ends.

On a less theoretical level, for my tastes, the film comes down a bit too hard on the side of the melodrama, putting the action and the noir elements sometimes too far in the back. The cast is pretty amazing however, not only featuring Lom, Patrick McGoohan, Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins in the leads, but having pop up William Hartnell, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, and even Sean Connery in small before they were famous parts.

The Comeback Trail (2020): George Gallo’s remake of the Harry Hurwitz movie is one of those comedies that sometimes go out of their way to repeat a joke for the slow audience members, likes to mistime perfectly fine punchlines, and often shows surprisingly little talent for staging its jokes as best as it could. Frome time to time, the script’s very funny indeed (particularly if you like your low budget movies), but just as often, it seems to coast on some basic ideas in it being funny without actually bothering with turning them into funny scenes.

That the resulting film is still watchable and entertaining enough (in an undemanding manner) is mostly the responsibility of the actors, well, really mostly Tommy Lee Jones, Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman (a trio frankly much too good for the film), who put quite a bit of effort into classing up the joint. As an addendum for your nightmares, please appreciate how much Emile Hirsch looks like a young, thin, Jack Black in this one.

In short: Mysterious Island (1961)

This adaptation of Jules Verne's novel whose plot will hardly need any synopsis is - like many a movie featuring the great Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animation - a childhood favourite of mine, so any idea of objectivity goes right out the window. However, I don't think Cy Endfield's movie actually needs the nostalgia factor to deserve praise.

After all, this is a film that begins with a rousing balloon escape, turns into a Robinsonade (and the kind of self-conscious Robinsonade that mentions Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to boot), shows off some dangerous giant stop motion animals - a crabby crab, a rude flightless bird, some peeved bees and a grabby chambered nautilus -, sinks a pirate ship, meets Captain Nemo (Herbert Lom), destroys a sunken city, blows up a volcano, and even finds time to invent what should be a steampunk fashion staple in form of the shortest goatskin dress of the 19th century; all in just 110 minutes of running time, directed by Enfield with a sense of excitement and an enthusiasm for the adventurous incident you don't get to see every day.

Somehow, the film even finds time to be silently progressive: Neb Nugent (Dan Jackson), the black member of our group of heroes, may not have as much agency as one would wish for looking back from times when this sort of this has become important, but is still treated as an actual person whose opinions and emotions are respected by his companions without any condescension, something that was not par for the course in 1961; the English noble woman (Joan Greenwood) is much more practical than her position in life or (again, in an adventure movie in 1961) her gender would lead to expect; in general class, gender and race lines are permanently being overstepped by the characters without it elucidating any comment, with the unspoken subtext that rational beings will overcome such artificial divisions when they have been given the opportunity to. One might find the film's politics naively optimistic, but if we don't even allow ourselves to dream of the improvability of humanity in our SF adventure movies, we might as well all step in line and pray to our corporate overlords. And isn't it a fine irony that Mysterious Island was in fact financed by some of those very same corporate overlords? But I digress.

On the level of pure filmmaking, there's little to criticize about Mysterious Island: Harryhausen's effects are pretty much perfect; Endfield's direction tight in that effective way that has no room for showing off and keeps brilliant direction all too easily from being called brilliant; the script is imaginative and more complex than it has any need to be; Bernard Herrmann's score is rousing and playful in turns. If I needed to find fault with something, it's probably the acting of Michael Craig and Michael Callan, respectively the movie's square-jawed hero and the teenage heartthrob, but they're not that bad, really. The rest of the cast fills their archetypal roles admirably.

So yeah, Mysterious Island. Watch it. It's still awesome.

 

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