Three Films Make A Post: Money, Madness, Murder.

The Haunting of Sarah Hardy (1989): If you’re in the right mood, this thriller by Jerry London produced for the USA Network featuring Sela Ward, Morgan Fairchild and Polly Bergen recommends itself by a particularly preposterous plot construction. At first, it’s very much gaslighting business by the numbers, but soon enough, the film spends time in James M. Cain land and even does some reverse gaslighting (something too few films do) eventually. If only London’s direction had more of a zing to it, this would probably be either a perfect example of the virtues overwriting can sometimes achieve or a camp masterpiece (if only I liked camp). As it stands, it’s at least less boring a film than it at first appears.

Mortal aka Torden (2020): I’m a big admirer of the films of André Øvredal, but this mix of superhero tropes, vague attempts at religious parable, myth and Brightburn just doesn’t work at all, its different elements never really coming together into a whole once the film starts giving answers to the questions it has come up with in the first act. On the plot level, there’s simply too little of interest happening, Øvredal going through motions of high budget thrill rides instead of actually making a thrilling film, while the film’s more thoughtful elements never really go anywhere. It’s rather poignant that the characters read up on Thor in a children’s book.

Visually, it’s very pretty indeed, but the pacing is much too ponderous for a film with so few actual thoughts, the characters have little to grab one – there’s just a feeling of something important that would make this into an actual film having gone missing somewhere during the production. Worst is an ending that attempts to be a classic 70s downer, but only feels deeply dissatisfying on a narrative level as well as  disconnected to any of the thematic questions the film might have had.

Local Hero (1983): I’ve taken a decade or two of coming around to the charms and qualities of Bill Forsyth’s much loved comedy. It’s not an obvious film to gather as much love as it has, with its nearly complete abandonment of the fish out of water plot after its first act or so, an approach to characters that can feel distant when you haven’t quite understood how subtle and empathetic it rather is, and a sense of humour that’s often plain peculiar.
The picture postcard beautiful shots of Scotland are an obvious attraction, but what really makes this for me is the willingness to meet characters on their own terms, understanding that the good and the bad in people are inextricably intertwined and even (not a thing anyone seems to be willing in the here and now) suggests that you might get along with people who aren’t perfect embodiments of what you want them to be, quietly praising individuality and finding it in everyone.


It’s also a film willing to present and accept a non-perfect solution to character arcs, as well as its so-called plot. And life, one assumes.

Scorpio (1973)

Aging CIA agent Cross (Burt Lancaster) has been handling assassination business for the CIA for quite some years now, running freelancers and patsies to assist in the murders of heads of states and politicians the US would rather see dead. In the last couple of years, Cross has often used Jean Laurier (Alain Delon) – going under the codename of “Scorpio” as his freelance partner. The two men have grown somewhat fond of one another, as far as the age difference and the business they are in allows for this sort of thing at all.

So, when the CIA decides to get rid of Cross for some reason and decides to hire Jean to do the job after their own people have screwed things up rather badly, the younger man isn’t terribly enthusiastic about the job. It takes a faked case of heroin possession and a rather great job offer to convince Jean; but even then, his heart clearly isn’t in it, and he often seems to be outright looking for reasons not to kill Cross.

Cross for his part only wants out of the game completely. He could go over to the Soviets – he even has an actual friend there in the old school KGB operative Zharkov (Paul Scofield) – but there’s really no future in that. Plus, at a certain age, a guy just wants to live somewhere nice with his wife without having to think about death and destruction.

There are a lot of secrets and lies for both men to uncover during the whole affair, and eventually, both will pay with the last of their illusions about the world they move in, but also their illusions about the possibility of a normal life.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers know, I am not terribly fond of director/old sleazebag Michael Winner, and find many of his films unpleasant in a way that’s neither enjoyable nor instructive.

Scorpio, though, is definitely a film where this old criticism of mine doesn’t work, for everything here that’s brutal and unpleasant needs to be as brutal and unpleasant as it is to make the film work, to portray the world of spies and assassins the protagonists work in as cruel, cold and driven by an utilitarianism that has become so automatic it is now completely divorced from ideology, or passion, or even the idea that terrible things have to be done to reach a goal that is right. In this world, it’s obvious that Cross, as one of the last men standing of an old guard that still believed in things, needs to be destroyed; but then, as the film will eventually reveal, he has been corrupted as much as the rest of the world, he just wears a nicer face and perhaps tells himself that he is still different.

In fact, it’s Jean who will turn out to be the true innocent of the characters, still genuinely clinging to human feelings like love, and an idea of friendship that’s not secretly based on how useful his friends can eventually be to him. And of course, it’s this core of actual humanity that will be crushed during his hunt for Cross, until he has nobody and believes in nothing anymore.

Very atypical for its very cynical director, the film seems genuinely sad and angry about this state of affairs, treating the terrible things that eventually happen to all good people here with surprising dignity, giving them true emotional resonance by showing – a first in a Winner movie as far as I am concerned – a degree of restraint. The dialogue (script by David W. Rintels and Gerald Wilson) is uncommonly thoughtful too, meditating on things like the mechanisms of the spy world, but also the worth of ideology, or the relationship between aging men who have seen quite a few terrible things.


Which doesn’t mean that Scorpio is lacking in ruthlessness and brutality, Winner just manages to find the proper amount of both so he’s not losing the whole of the film to them. So no worries, fans of more traditional Winner outings, the action is still as brutal as it got in ‘73, the rest of Scorpio just isn’t buried under it.

Past Misdeeds: The Flame and the Arrow (1950)

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.

It's the 12th Century and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nations under Emperor Friedrich I. (aka Barbarossa) controls large parts of Europe, among them the Lombardy in what we now know as Italy. The Lombards are less than enthused about their new masters, and a resistance movement that seems to concentrate on throwing grim glances and urging people to join their cause without ever acting for said cause has come into existence.

Lombard and hunter Dardo (Burt Lancaster) is not into that whole revolution thing, though. The man prefers rugged individualism and sexual promiscuity as long as no feelings are involved (I'm being a bit more straightforward about the latter element of his character than the film can be, but it's as unsubtle about things as a film made in 1950 can be) to social responsibility, though he does take good care of his son Rudi (the atrocious Gordon Gebert) and is the sort of rugged individualist who still has friends like his childhood friend, the mute smith Piccolo (Nick Cravat who was Lancaster's real life partner as a circus acrobat as well as in the movies, and has pretty wonderful chemistry with him). Ironically, Dardo has more reason to hate the Germans than most, for the local potentate, Count Ulrich aka "The Hawk" (Frank Allenby) took Dardo's (consenting) wife as his concubine five years ago, leaving Dardo alone with his son and certain trust issues when it comes to women that do explain his sexual and emotional habits.

Things between Ulrich and Dardo finally come to a head when the hunter quite purposefully shoots one of Ulrich's hunting hawks. In retribution, Ulrich decides that it's best to take Rudi away from his father into his castle to live with his mother. Dardo disapproves of the idea quite violently, but all that gets him is a crossbow bolt in the back and a new status as an outlaw; at least he also learns that he has quite a few friends willing to become outlaws themselves to help him.

The rest of the movie does of course consist of various Robin Hood-like deeds, the difficult romance between Dardo and Ulrich's niece, the much more agreeable Anne de Hesse (Virginia Mayo). Important lessons are learned by the rugged individualist (the social sphere exists and can't and shouldn't be ignored unless you are a total jerk or a hermit) as well as by the lazy revolutionaries (you actually need to get off your ass when you want to get rid of Evil) alike.

Everyone reading this surely knows Jacques Tourneur as a master of subtle horror as well as the film noir, what with little, totally unknown movies like Cat People and Out of the Past on his résumé. As someone working inside the studio system for most of his career, Tourneur did of course direct films in various other genres too. With The Flame and the Arrow, the director created a fine (and pleasantly Technicolor) adventure movie/trapezoidal swashbuckler that isn't quite as deep in the Robin Hood mold as one would expect. Sure, many of the expected elements are there and accounted for, but blacklist victim Waldo Salt's script and Tourneur's sense of style give most of these standard tropes small twists and turns that keep the film more lively and surprising than expected. My description of the movie's "rugged individualism versus social responsibility" theme may sound rather sarcastic, but the film actually does interesting things with it, never forgetting that its characters are supposed to be people and not walking metaphors, which leads to more complexity in the characterisation of especially Dardo and Anne than you'd need in an adventure movie or a film arguing philosophy. As an additional bonus, Salt's script also shows a degree of class consciousness that is more than just a little useful when you want to talk about the Middle Ages yet always comes as a surprise in a US movie. One could even read the whole film as one about class struggle, if one had the intention to do so.

Because Tourneur knows what he's doing, he also never steps into the trap of forgetting The Flame's identity as an adventure movie above its various subtexts. This may be a film that wants to talk about the problems and attractions of rugged individualism but it's also one that wants to show off particularly acrobatic (at this point in his career, certainly still more of a reason why a studio would hire the former acrobat Burt Lancaster than not, as you will know) swashbuckling (historically speaking, it's of course not swashbuckling, but you know what I mean) fights, bad guys acting dastardly, good guys being clever and charming, and women having a mind of their own, in a good-natured and brilliant manner. In Tourneur's hands, this still leaves room for the philosophizing as well as for sudden bouts of directorial brilliance like a certain swordfight taking place in a very Tourneur darkness. Even better, it's a film that knows perfectly well how to do this, how to let its subtext sing and its surface action shine, probably leaving every thinkable audience with as big a smile on its face as it did with me.


My Bollywood-loving friends will perhaps be interested and surely just as delighted as I was to learn The Flame and the Arrow also contains a scene where Lancaster and Cravat disguise themselves as members of a circus troupe to enter Ulrich's castle, with all the non-existing subtlety of disguise you'd see in a Manmohan Desai film. It's a glorious thing even without a musical number. Good taste in plot tropes is obviously as timeless as it is international.

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

Some thoughts about Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957)

It’s among the mild ironies of film history that this film, a movie I don’t hesitate to call a masterpiece, is actually the lesser of director John Sturges’s Westerns about the (wait for it) gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Fortunately, despite being about the same historical moment, and concerning the same people, both films are also so different their existence as separate entities actually makes sense, particularly since the two films have quite different views of these people and these events. The later Hour of the Gun is most probably the slightly more historically accurate one (at the very least with a more realistically morally grey Wyatt Earp, where Lancaster’s Wyatt really does seem to go for the halo, though without ever being able to reconcile it with being a human being like we all are), though both films really aren’t about attempts to recreate history.

I don’t think it is necessary for me to go over Sturges’s virtues as a Western director, nor the particularly inspired quality of his efforts here, for that would be stating the very, very obvious. Instead, let me spend this sentence salivating about Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster (two of the very finest of their generation in Hollywood) doing what they do best, the fine rest of the ensemble, the often awe-inspiring photography, as well as Sturges’s artful sense of staging.

Beside being a film about a certain legendary shoot-out, Gunfight to me really seems to be a film about poisonous relationships, the way people tend to wallow in them, and the generally horrible consequences that come with them. Why, if you look at what’s happening in the film from a certain angle, you might even begin to think somebody involved in the film might have been of the opinion all human relationships in the end become poisonous and destructive, family ties strangling people in the end, and friendships not leaving people happier or less lonely and self-destructive (or would anyone want to argue that Holliday and Earp are good for each other any more than Holliday and Kate are?), at best giving them one thing more to die for.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,john sturges,burt lancaster,kirk douglas,rhonda fleming,jo van fleet

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

Valdez Is Coming (1971)

A decade or two after the remaining apaches have been driven into the reservations, Mexican Valdez (Burt Lancaster) works as a part-time shotgun rider, part-time constable, part-time speaker for the Mexican community in a frontier town in the US South-West. His hard work of taking his hat off to people who’d never deign to take theirs off to him, not looking white people in the eye and peacefully ignoring most slights has only paid off for him as much as the town’s white bourgeois can pride themselves in treating him paternistically decent (which of course is no actual human decency at all).

Valdez realizes that even this decency doesn’t go very far when the false accusation of rich gun runner Tanner (Jon Cypher) and the stupid craziness of young, racist would-be gunman Davis (Richard Jordan) cause him to, mostly accidentally, kill the innocent black man Tanner accused of murdering an old friend of his – the husband of his now girlfriend Gay (Susan Clark) – years ago. Because the man left an Apache wife (Juanita Penaloza), Valdez tries to raise two-hundred dollars for her as at least some sign of contrition for the whole shabby affair by the people involved in it. However, the good white people of the town won’t give him more than pennies until he manages to collect a hundred dollars from Tanner.

Tanner, not surprisingly, doesn’t care one single bit about his own guilt, and lets his men, or rather the men of his main henchman El Segundo (Barton Heyman), rough Valdez up. Valdez does get the message yet decides to ignore it, going to Tanner a second time to ask for the money. This time around Tanner lets his men tie Valdez to a cross he’ll have to drag through the wilderness behind him; it’s clearly expected he will die this way.

Yet survive Valdez does, unpacking his old gear from his time as a scout and sharpshooter for the US cavalry, and now starting to ask for the money rather more violently. In the end, a lot of people will die for a hundred dollars, or rather the thing these dollars stand for, some people will show their true colours, and just perhaps, one man of power and money will learn that his power and money will only bring him that far.

It’s a rather confusing fact that a film as staunchly and clearly anti-racist as Edwin Sherin’s Valdez is Coming (based on a novel by Elmore Leonard) sees more than one actor donning brown-face. On the other hand, Burt Lancaster’s performance here is fine, often subtle stuff, so I wouldn’t call him miscast otherwise.

Lancaster does a lot of acting by body language and posture, an absolute necessity with a character like Valdez who doesn’t explain himself verbally; possibly because he doesn’t have many people to explain himself to except for his friend Diego (Frank Silvera), and Diego seems to know all that’s important about and for Valdez without needing to hear it. Lancaster’s posture shows how years of assumed humility (or really, as the Mexican version of an Uncle Tom) have bent his shoulders down, possibly even more so because his eyes always tell the audience he doesn’t have any illusions about his actual position in the eyes of the white bourgeoisie he’s never allowed to look straight in the eye; and it’s quite the moment – subtly underplayed by Lancaster as well as by the director – when he finally does look up. Also never explicitly emphasised by direction or actor, yet clear, is how Valdez’s posture changes the longer he gets back to making use of his old skill set.

However, the film isn’t quite so much singing a song of the glories of vigilantism here as you might expect. Even though Valdez comes to life donning his old uniform and weapons and doing what he does best, he and the film he’s in know that it’s not necessarily a good thing to be best at, something that changes men for the worse, particularly men like Valdez who have come to understand the consequences of their actions (in one of the film’s sparse moments of explicitness close to the film’s end Valdez explains that he has experience “hunting Apache” from a time when “he didn’t know better”). There’s little joy in the violence here, only a calm businesslike attempt to somehow make up for things you can’t make up for, as well as a sad knowledge you actually can’t yet still have to try.

Most of this is carried by the posture of Lancaster’s shoulders, the look in his eyes, and Sherin’s compositions of Spain’s (as so often standing in for the US) landscapes that often dwarf the people moving through them.

Surprisingly, the film does end on a rather hopeful note, the idea that, perhaps, the inevitable can be evaded somehow, and things can turn around for the hopeless cause; though it also leaves the possibility open that perhaps, it might not.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,western,edwin sherin,burt lancaster,susan clark,frank silvera,jon cypher,richard jordan

On Exploder Button: The Flame And The Arrow (1950)

Things wise people like in their movies: colour, Jacques Tourneur, Burt Lancaster in an acrobatic mood, class consciousness, derring-do, philosophical subtexts, bad guys hiring a circus troupe.

Things The Flame and the Arrow includes: all of the above.

Ergo, wise people may want to click on through to this week's column on Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,adventure,jacques tourneur,burt lancaster,virginia mayo,robert douglas,other places