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.

High Risk (1981)

After buying weapons from a cameo-ing Ernest Borgnine, a quartet of Americans (James Brolin, Bruce Davison, Cleavon Little and Chick Vennera) are flown into Colombia (Mexico) by a couple of ex Vietnam vets much more accustomed to this sort of affair. They plan to steal the ill-gotten gains of a local drug lord (James Coburn). Our protagonists’ main problem is that they are all perfectly unaccustomed to violence, have two brain cells going between all four of them (these are the kind of people who take a yappy family dog on their drug money heist) at the best of times, and may have read the word “planning” once on a toilet wall but were distracted by the drawing of a tit.

Still, after some misadventures and bad decisions our – ahem – heroes actually manage to steal a good five million dollars. Alas, two of them are captured very soon indeed (might have something to do with taking a whole night’s rest while actively hounded by the drug lord’s people; or not setting a watch), while the other two escape with most of the money but wake the interest of some local rebels/bandits/whatever under the demented leadership of one Mariano (Anthony Quinn, as we all know a member of every ethnicity on Earth that isn’t white in the US-sense of the word). Lots of tedious business ensues; Lindsay Wagner pops up.

Stewart Raffill’s High Risk is often listed as an action comedy, and if you’ve only ever read a plot synopsis or two and looked at the film posters, you may very well come to the conclusion that it indeed is one. Having actually gone through the experience of watching the film, I’ve rather come to the impression that the filmmakers were the same kind of bumbling incompetents their character turned out to be. There are a lot of elements in here that could by all rights only belong into a comedy - like the business with the dog, or Coburn having a little bull fight as an aperitif to a torture session. However, these are never presented in a way anyone would confuse with being funny or the film attempting to be funny. At the same time, it’s all just too dumb to be taken seriously by anyone.

And yet, the film presents its stupid ideas in so straight-faced a manner, it’s simply impossible to believe the filmmakers were seeing the joke there at all. Which is actually too bad, for an action comedy about people throwing themselves into the violent life without having the slightest capability or the lack of humanity needed for it bumbling through an action movie plot could be very funny indeed; in fact, given that this is about Americans doing the same in a Central American state, you might even turn this material into a pretty great political satire. None of this happens here, though. Instead, this is a film about a bunch of people who are very bad at what they do fighting against various groups of other people who aren’t terribly great at it either, full of dumb plot developments and underdevelopments, plotted so amateurishly, one might wish oneself back to the slickness of homegrown SOV horror movies.

The actors clearly have no idea what the hell this is supposed to be either: The lead quartet looks bored, Wagner mildly bemused, and Coburn just shrugs and shows his teeth while grimacing (his usual move when not wanting to apply any of his actual considerable talent). Quinn does of course chew the scenery like a madman, because what’s a guy to do when confronted with a project like this one?

The Passage (1979)

Some time during World War II. The resistance against the Germans hires a nameless grumpy old Basque shepherd (grumpy old Anthony Quinn, wearing the appropriate beret to prove his basqueness) to lead a Swedish scientist (James Mason, a very Swedish gentleman, as we all well know) sought by the Nazis through the Pyrenees. Of course, things will turn out more complicated than that. Firstly, it becomes soon clear the good Professor isn’t going to come alone but is bringing his whole family – his ill wife (Patricia Neal), his rebellious teenage son (Paul Clemens) and his soon-to be raped by Nazis daughter (Kay Lenz).

That’s enough to make the Basque even grumpier, but what’s worse is that the Germans have sent a guy after them who is insane even by the standards of the SS – Captain von Berkow (Malcolm McDowell), wearer of swastika underwear, torturer by kitchen implement and all-around murderous crazy bastard. And the whole “crossing the Pyrenees” bit? Well, the Basque will spend large parts of the film getting the family there from Paris.

If you’re interested in a film where the sensibilities of the more sensible of Charles Bronson’s main directors, J. Lee Thompson, seem to have magically turned into those of that other Bronson favourite, old sleazebag Michael Winner, this is the film to watch. Given the quality of the cast, one would expect The Passage to be a pretty serious adventure movie with moments of earnest drama; instead it is a lurid concoction of crazy ideas, bizarre bullshit, scenes right out of a Nazisploitation movie, and a couple of scenes one might buy as earnest if not for the tone of everything surrounding them, like a certain heroic sacrifice late in the film.

The most bizarre and the most entertaining part of the whole thing is certainly Malcolm McDowell’s performance. McDowell portrays his crazy cartoon Nazi as if his Alex from A Clockwork Orange had found a place and time where he truly belonged, torturing people, having at least four different kinds of murderous hissy fits, gloating, presenting his swastika underwear with crazy laughter, imitating Hitler in front of a mirror, and so on and so forth. Of course, the way the film goes, the laughter and amusement McDowell’s crazy capering produces crashes right into moments of intense discomfort. His very special underwear, for example, is positioned right in the middle of the scenes in which he first humiliates Lenz’s character and then rapes her. There’s also a comparable scene where cartoon Nazi strutting ends with an actually horrific massacre of the family of Christopher Lee’s character (inevitably, given the way this one casts nobody in an appropriate role, playing the leader of a group of Romani). It’s as if Thompson is doing his damndest to make a viewer uncomfortable in their enjoyment of evil cartoon Nazis.

The thing is, I’m honestly not sure at all if Thompson is doing this one purpose, perhaps trying the make a point about our enjoyment of atrocities in cinema if it is only presented with a wink, if McDowell is sabotaging/saving the film, or what the hell was going on behind the scenes here. It certainly is never boring to witness, but instead at times funny, at times unpleasant and at times bewildering. For the last one, there’s for example a highly peculiar fake-out ending that suggest a whopper of a 70s downer only to then explain that the combined powers of Quinn and Mason’s fatherly voices can put a dying Nazi into a hallucinatory state. I have no idea why that bit is in there, what anyone involved was thinking, or honestly, what the hell I was watching for half of the time.


Ironically enough, given how crazy parts of the film are, the cast apart from McDowell (who is not from planet Earth) makes usually surprisingly naturalistic acting choices for their surroundings, while Thompson works a lot with hand-held camera and set-ups that suggest a naturalistic/documentarian approach. Which, as should be obvious by now, is another choice that makes little sense whatsoever, but in the most interesting way possible. From time to time, Thompson also manages to slip in a couple of perfectly straightforward action and suspense sequences, as if this were your typical World War II adventure movie.

In short: The Marseille Contract (1974)

aka The Destructors

Parisian bureau US drug agency chief Steve Ventura (Anthony Quinn) could feel happy with his cushy little position: Paris is great, there's not much going on there, and he's sleeping with the wife of one of his men on a regular basis. Alas, over in Marseille, drug kingpin Jacques Brizard (James Mason) basically does what he wants. He's so well protected politically, he's now managed to have the second US agent after him murdered, and nothing at all will happen to him. Said second agent just happened to be a friend and the guy with whose wife Ventura sleeps, which may explain why he's all the more insistent on getting to Brizard somehow, be it legally or extralegally.

A helpful French cop (Maurice Ronet) is able to provide a contact for the latter solution in form of professional killer John Deray (Michael Caine). Ventura decides that hiring hitmen is just the thing to do for a cop, and is quite surprised when he recognizes Deray as an old buddy of his.

Deray is quite willing to take care of Brizard, but takes it upon himself to michael-caine himself into the man's confidence, as well as sleep with his daughter, before he does the deed. The situation becomes more complicated when Ventura finds a more cop-like way to handle Brizard, and needs to get in contact with Deray to call him off.

Robert Parrish's The Marseille Contract is a rather curious effort. For half of its running time, it's a rather indifferent crime thriller, and only comes to life in its action sequences and whenever Michael Caine is on screen. It often feels like two different films that were only stitched together halfway through the production, with little care taken for tonal consistency or decent pacing.

The film's lame half suffers from various problems. There is a rather dubious performance by Quinn, for once eschewing his usual mugging and scenery-chewing for portraying a man who is supposed to be intense and at the end of his moral and mental tether as if he were an elderly guy who just really really needs a nap. I'm also not very fond of James Mason's French accent, though his usual pompous smugness works rather well for Brizard. And then there's the script, full of interesting possibilities it never decides to think through or do much with, resulting in a film that seems to go out of its way not to involve its audience.

Parrish's direction outside of the action scenes is perfunctory without being truly bad. In fact, the action scenes, particularly the car chases, are filmed so differently one can't help but think that one of the film's assistant directors must have been rather instrumental in letting them turn out so well.

Still, half an hour of good 70s action and Michael Caine in his prime are enough to make The Marseille Contract something worth watching once, at least if you can get over its wasted chances.

 

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