Three Films Make A Post: Never have so few taken so much from so many.

The Great Train Robbery aka The First Great Train Robbery (1978): This Michael Crichton movie, also written by Crichton, and based on his own historical fiction bestseller, has a really fabulous climactic action scene in the titular robbery. To get there, the film slogs through what clearly is supposed to be a semi-comedic romp through mildly satirized Victorian period detail. Alas, the word that actually describes this is “dull”. Crichton, never a man to know which details to cut, shows no feel at all for pacing dialogue scenes – even a sure winner of an innuendo-laden scene between Sean Connery’s mastermind character and a married lady goes down like a lead balloon – or timing jokes, leaving the main cast of Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley-Anne Down to fend for themselves while they are crushed by all that – never telling – period detail. Even that trio can’t win against such odds.

Exist Within aka 사잇소리 (2022): This thriller by Kim Jung-wook about the noises a young woman hears from the apartment above her, and the nasty surprises that follow, is about as middle of the road as South Korean productions get. There’s not much of the subversion of tropes going on that most genre movies from the country eventually at least dabble in, the pacing is never quite as effective, and the tone never quite as surehanded as it could be.

However, making a thriller of this type entertaining can also be achieved by the simple virtue of technical expertise, and though that is not the way a classic is birthed, being a genuinely fun time is an achievement in itself.

The Old Way (2023): This revenge western directed by Brett Donowho manages something you don’t see every day – getting a performance from Nicolas Cage that makes the high energy thespian look unengaged. Much of Cage’s performance gives the impression of watching him doing a second run-through of the material rather than actually putting his full force into a scene. If you’ve seen Cage emoting loudly and sometimes quietly but distinctly, throwing himself into whatever a script has to offer for most of your movie watching life, this is a rather disquieting thing to watch, like a night sky turned hot pink for no reason.

There’s little else to distract here: the script is about as rote a revenge western as is possible, the performances are uneventful, and Donowho directs with the blandness of a shrug.

Three Films Make A Post: Some connections never die.

Conjuring Spirit aka Hush aka Chung Cu Ma (2014): This Vietnamese movie about a writer escaping her difficult marriage by removing herself into a cheap apartment only to find it haunted by a vengeful spirit, as directed by Van M. Pham, has some interesting ideas seeded into a too standard South East Asian horror tale. I like the way the ghost’s and our heroine Lan’s (played by Phuong Mai) troubles with shitty men mirror one another, as well as how the film suggests Lan is slowly taking on the role her series detective character has in her novels in the real world. Alas, the film is slower paced than the material allows and has some of the most ill-placed odious comic relief I’ve encountered in quite some time. The horror set pieces are decently directed but also suffer from being much too generic to hit.

Shadow of the Wraith aka Ikisudama (2001): Also a bit too sluggish in its pacing is this two story anthology movie by veteran horror (and other things) director Toshiharu “Evil Dead Trap” Ikeda. The tales also suffer under a clearly inexperienced cast with awesome hair and moments where the low budget wins out over Ikeda’s ambitions. While the material in the script and before the camera isn’t great, Ikeda does his best to fight these problems. Particularly in the first story, he does unsubtle but highly effective work with colour tinting, and both stories feature quite a few so wonderfully blocked shots, it’s difficult not to recommend the movie for them alone.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (2022): John Lee Hancock’s adaptation of a solid (but certainly not spectacular) Stephen King novella doesn’t only hold itself rather more closely to the story than these things often do, but also breathes the same air of solid, if mostly uninspired competence as the tale. It is well-shot, well-directed in a slightly old-fashioned and conservative way, earnest and serious as a coming-of-age tale with occasional off-screen murder, and a perfectly fine way to while a way an afternoon with a tale of the supernatural. That’s certainly not enough to get excited about the film, but I found myself enjoying this one’s solidness in every aspect of filmmaking and storytelling. At the very least, there’s a fine late period Donald Sutherland performance to enjoy.

In short: Eye of the Needle (1981)

World War II. A highly ruthless and dangerous spy known to British Intelligence only as “The Needle” (Donald Sutherland) has been doing the bad work without being caught for quite some time, leaking important information and leaving a line of dead bodies behind.

The British side – chiefly represented by one Godliman (Ian Bannen) – is getting closer to the Needle just when he manages to make photos that prove that the Allied Invasion can only occur in Normandy. Fortunately for the Allies, for some contrived reason that makes little sense, the German spy must deliver this information directly to Hitler, and so has to catch a ride on a German U-boat. Thanks to a storm, his attempt at reaching his ride via boat is rudely interrupted and he is stranded on a small island, population 4. From here on out, Needle stumbles right into an early D.H. Lawrence novel about the unhappy marriage between Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and the husband who lost his legs and the opportunity to die in the Battle of Britain on their marriage day in a car accident (Christopher Cazenove). Lucy lets herself be seduced by the mysterious stranger before you can even say “why, this is starting to get a bit improbable, old chap!”.

Though things might not end up to happily for our spy once Lucy cops to having been emotionally manipulated, her husband getting murdered and her child threatened.

Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle (based on a Ken Follett novel) is generally highly regarded by mid-brow critics, but I can’t say the film does much for me, independent of today’s eye-brow position. Sure, there’s an obvious high level of technical accomplishment on display, Marquand using old-fashioned and brand new cinematic techniques in tandem to create an artificial yet highly effective sense of time and place, but the film’s emotional content, as well as its slow, slow pacing does not work for me at all. Its tendency to repeat beats that are supposed to convince us how ruthless and shitty Faber/The Needle is, does not help there at all. I really got it the first two times around, so repeating this with a different victim after that just seems like a waste of my time. There’s a lack of subtlety here, as everywhere else in the movie, that just doesn’t connect with me, particularly not in combination with the pomposity of the film’s tone that confuses the pose of having depth with actually having it.

As central as it is, I never found the D.H. Lawrence with more melodrama marriage crisis of the Roses convincing or involving, either. Despite the actors doing their very best (which is considerable), the film replaces believable humanity with melodramatic posturing. Worse, it isn’t actually terribly good at this posturing, forgetting that good melodrama isn’t just meant to perform heightened emotion but also to draw the viewer into these emotional with the characters. Eye of the Needle never does, at least for me.

Citizen X (1995)

The early 80s in Soviet Russia. Policemen stumble upon a number of corpses in the woods. Most of the dead are children and teenagers, who have been stabbed, mutilated and raped before and after death. Nobody seems to care too much, but newly appointed forensics scientist Viktor Burakov doesn’t just care, he is convinced these are the victims of a serial killer (Jeffrey DeMunn) who picks out his victims from the young and the destitute in railway stations. He is even be able to convince his direct superior, Colonel Fetisov (Donald Sutherland) of the truth of his conclusion, so Fetisov makes Burakov an actual policeman and gives the case to him. However, this being the Soviet bureaucracy in its worst phase, Fetisov has other bureaucrats to appease. It doesn’t help that Burakov has somehow managed not to learn some basic techniques of survival, like never saying what one truly thinks to hard-line bureaucrats, so he early on actively antagonizes exactly the sort of people who’ll go out of their way to put stones in his way for the next decade, a mounting pile of bodies be damned.

Then there’s the little problem that serial killers are obviously a product of the decadent Western lifestyle and just don’t exist in the USSR, so there’s no infrastructure at all to deal with a case like this, even if the bureaucracy were able to accept it. Instead, Burakov is ordered to round up “known homosexuals” and has to listen to complaints about investigating party members in good standing. Despite a heavy psychological and personal toll, the hatred of his superiors except Fetisov - who increasingly becomes his ally and friend - and little resources, Burakov keeps on the case over years, until the dawning of perestroika makes it possible for him to take steps that can lead to the apprehension of the killer.

(Freely) based on the actual case of the serial killer Andrei Chikatilo and the men who tried to catch him, Chris Gerolmo’s HBO TV movie is an exceptional film. Well, except for the absurd – and given the high standards of the rest of the production patently ridiculous – decision to have the actors play their roles with fake Russian accents, the sort of thing that’s okay – yet still stupid – in a pulp fantasy context but that’s tonally completely out of whack with a film like this.

For the film plays out as a dark, earnest, character-based police procedural without action scenes and little on-screen violence, with the wrinkle that in its historical context, quite a bit of the procedural aspect is political in nature and concerned with Burakov’s first surprised, then angry and later depressed attempts to get the Soviet bureaucracy to see reason, something no bureaucracy tends to be well equipped for at the best of times and in the best of places – and the USSR in the 80s certainly was not the best of much. Through Burakov’s eyes, the film paints a picture of the USSR of the time as a place of quiet desperation where the greyness of the surroundings seems to wash into the minds of people who mostly seem beaten and bruised far before the end of the Soviet Union, living as they do in a country that seems a lot like a corpse that just hasn’t realized it is dead. Obviously, this isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to a specific time and place, and it is therefor not difficult at all to also apply the film’s view to other times and places – and not just under strictly totalitarian systems – where a culture of not seeing, not speaking, and scapegoating dominates; not always as obviously and heavily as in the film, but “not as bad as a utopian dream gone bad” isn’t much of a compliment.

However, despite its bleak portrayal of Soviet life, Citizen X isn’t a hopeless film. It also shows how Burakov’s tenacity and passion (and how Communist is the idea of this guy spending his whole life to improve that of his community?) slowly burns through Fetisov’s detached cynicism and turns that effective functionary into a human being again; and in the end, it also shows them catching Chikatilo.

Its treatment of Chikatilo – with whom we spend a few scenes from time to time during the investigation – is very typical of the film. Instead of going through melodramatic contortions and portraying him as a monster with the usual eye-rolling and “quid pro quo, Clarice”-ing, the film and DeMunn characterize him in a much more disturbing way: as a small, sad, pathetic man committing monstrous acts for reasons he clearly can’t fully comprehend, inadvertently enabled by a time and place that can’t even find enough passion to care about dozens of murdered children.


The acting is generally excellent, with half a dozen brilliant performances, all lacking in showiness yet full of nuance and a feeling of human veracity so strong, after twenty minutes or so I didn’t even hear the stupid accents anymore because I was too engrossed in what the characters were saying, what they could only express through their body languages, and why.

Three Films Make A Post: The flesh is weak. Wax is forever.

Death Race 2050 (2017): G.J. Echternkamp’s film isn’t another sequel to the direct-to-video films based on the idea - minus the satire and the humour - of the Roger Corman-produced Death Race 2000 but a Roger-Corman produced remake of the original. That means broad, crude and sometimes funny satire is back in again, the production design is cheap yet insane, and Malcolm McDowell is the chairman of the United Corporations of America and looking like he’s having fun hamming it up and talking nonsense.

I for one welcome the return of weirdness, though I still prefer the original movie with its rather more pointed satire and its much superior stunt work. However compared with the usually deplorable quality of contemporary Corman productions, this one works out rather well by being mostly entertaining and more often than not even funny.

Klute (1971): The first film in what is sometimes known as director Alan J. Pakula’s paranoia trilogy (the other films being The Parallax View and All the President’s Men) is a giallo plot treated through the lens of US 70s hyperrealism, leading to a film that’s much more interested in the female main character’s Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda doing a brilliant job) psychology than it is in its murder mystery or its titular character (Donald Sutherland working wonderfully as a foil for Fonda to work with/against), mostly using said mystery to further emphasise thematic connections concerning trust and self-knowledge and 70s big city malaise in  the mystery and in Bree’s life. In the case of Klute, this isn’t a criticism, mind you, for Pakula’s direction and Fonda’s acting really come together to form something special and harrowing. Plus, the suspense scenes that are there are a rather brilliant bonus. I could have gone without the scenes between Bree and her psychiatrist which only tell the audience directly what the acting has made clear all along but then I’ve never been much of a fan of therapy scenes in movies.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muire (1947): This somewhat well-known (he wrote ironically) romance with a ghost between Gene Tierney (beautiful, alive) and Rex Harrison (dead, and supposedly a crusty sea bear which does use up a lot of my ability to ignore the improbable, much more so than his being a ghost) is ahead of most horror films of its time by indeed featuring a real ghost. As directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (not showing much of the talkiness classic movie buffs seem to either love or loath him for), it’s a highly effective romance I’d call a tear-jerker if that wasn’t making light of its delicate sensibilities. It’s the sort of film classic Hollywood was excellent at, an escapist tale of beautiful people and heightened emotions that looks and feels effortlessly luxurious.


In fact, the film’s emotionally so convincing I can hardly bring myself to be annoyed by its dubious idea of waiting one’s whole life away for a love one doesn’t even remember as the height of romance. Having to buy George Sanders as really hot stuff still confuses the heck out of this heterosexual guy, though.

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.

Bear Island (1979)

A UN sponsored group of scientists of different nationalities – of course all played by English native speakers doing horrible fake accents – under the leadership of one Otto Gerran (Richard “Nein, hören Sie!!!!” Widmark) comes to arctic, Norwegian Bear Island for some vague studies concerning climate change. Apart from the small former Nazi base the scientists are making themselves at home in, there’s only an old Nazi submarine harbour and a NATO base that is so completely out of bounds for the scientists they are not even supposed to make radio contact with it. Even before most of the expedition arrived, there has been the first mysterious disappearance (well, it’s a mysterious disappearance for the characters, the audience knows full well the victim was murdered), and that’s just the beginning of a series of violent events.

American scientist Frank Lansing (Donald Sutherland, not attempting a Californian accent as far as I can make out), who is actually on the island because his father was a German submarine captain who probably died right there and he feels in need of some closure, quickly discovers that there’s a huge cache of gold hidden on the island. It’s a lot of the stuff, and there are a lot of people in the expedition willing to kill for it.

Finding out who these people are will become rather difficult, though, because nobody on the island actually seems to have come to do any science at all, everybody has a secret, and nobody is truly who he or she seems to be.

By 1979, Don Sharp – despite a career that would in stops and starts continue for a further ten years – was still the always at least dependable, sometimes brilliant director he had been for decades, but he didn’t exactly move with the times anymore. From this perspective, he’s a very good fit for Bear Island, a thriller inevitably based on an Alistair Maclean novel that seems to come from a different world in a movie landscape after Star Wars and Jaws as well as after much of 70s action and adventure cinema.

There’s something old-fashioned and stiff about the film, a certain lack of sharpness and focus that results in a rather draggy middle act, with a script that can’t seem to decide if it wants to be a more visceral thriller, a variation of an Agatha Christie style manor mystery, or both, or nothing of the sort. From time to time, the film finds its step for ten minutes or so, thanks to Sharp creating a set-piece that’s actually exciting (if you like snow mobile duels, that is), or moody and actually telling us something about the characters (like Lansing’s first secret visit to the submarine base). Of course, a few minutes later, everything becomes a bit lifeless again, because obvious red herrings (seriously, no self-respecting old-fashioned mystery would be this obvious) have to be laid, and anything interesting has to wait for a while.

At least Bear Island has quite the cast. Apart from Sutherland (giving a performance fluctuating between bored and amused), and Widmark, there are also Lloyd “Bad Ass” Bridges, Christopher “I’m Polish, really” Lee, and Vanessa “Oops, forgot my accent for a scene again” Redgrave (wasted on playing The Girl, of course), and while the script does its damndest to not give them much to do or puts many a clunky line in everyone’s mouth, you can’t quite put this assembly of talent down, so from time to time, tiny sparks are indeed flying between them.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,canadian movies,reviews,thriller,don sharp,donald sutherland,vanessa redgrave,richard widmark,christopher lee,lloyd bridges

The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

It’s 1943, and people like German general Canaris (Anthony Quayle) already see the writing on the wall. Hitler, on the other hand, still has plans, like, for example, kidnapping Winston Churchill. Himmler (Donald Pleasence, because why not), recognizes a nice way to put one over on the competition and boots the whole stupid project over to Canaris, who in his turn orders his Colonel Radl (Robert Duvall, because really, why not) to at the very least produce a feasibility study.

Ironically, Radl realizes the mad project might actually be feasible, for it just so happens that a German spy in Britain has just radioed in Churchill’s plans for a weekend stay in a small village neighbouring a practically undefended beach. After a bit of political back and forth – one has to blow up the film to a running time of more than two hours after all – Radl acquires the always dangerous help of Himmler for the project and sends out disgraced – like every German not in the SS in the movie, he’s not a real Nazi, you know – paratrooper commando Colonel Steiner (Michael Caine), his men, and Irish revolutionary Liam Devlin (a man so Irish he could only be played by Canadian Donald Sutherland) to do the deed in beautiful Norfolk. The men are disguised as Polish paratroopers and a marsh inspector, respectively, so whatever could go wrong?

If for some mysterious reasons it hasn’t become quite clear already, let me just emphasize that the plot of The Eagle Has Landed (based on a novel by Jack Higgins, which never bodes well), is utterly, preposterously stupid. Not necessarily because it is lacking in historical veracity (which it sure as hell does) but because the script’s (and I very much assume the book’s this is based on) handling of the whole affair just too stupid to bluff its way through. A lot of films get away with a stupid basic idea by thinking the results of that idea through in a logical and coherent manner; The Eagle Has Landed prefers to load stupid idea on improbability on ridiculous nonsense.

This is, after all, a film that finds Sutherland’s character, who is supposed to be some sort of vanguard for the Germans, one supposes, landing in Norfolk and at once romancing Jenny Agutter, in the sort of romance that goes from meeting someone to the willingness to murder for him in the course of about half an hour, or a day in movie time. Even worse, as much as I like Agutter, the subplot really has no business at all to be in the movie, and most certainly not in the completely pointless form it takes. To make matters sillier, there’s improbable crap like that happening in nearly every scene, as if writer Tom Mankiewicz had never heard of concepts like theme, or tonal coherence, or even pacing. For of course the film does stop and start early and often, sometimes meandering from one scene to the next, sometimes drunkenly jumping, leading to a structure you can’t even call episodic because that word suggests that there’s actually something happening, which is not how I’d describe at least The Eagle’s first half.

And still, watching the film I found myself not at all bored but enjoyed myself quite a bit. Not only because I wanted to see what stupid nonsense the film would come up next but because everyone involved not responsible for the script actually put a lot of effort in. Director John Sturges, a man who made much worthier and just plain better films to be sure, doesn’t exactly bring his A-game here, but a Sturges just doing his job (I cannot assume any real personal involvement in the film at hand, at least) is still a director bringing dignity and a degree of style to material that frankly doesn’t deserve it, even managing to turn the script’s absurd ideas about pacing into something that can look like charming distractibility.

The actors, for their part, bring a bunch of underwritten clichés to life in efforts a film that sees a predominantly British and American cast playing Germans speaking English among one another with bad German accents (except for Sutherland, of course, who does a bad Irish accent, and Caine, whose character studied in England and therefore doesn’t have an accent at all, which of course only makes sense if you actually assume these Nazi – and yes, sorry, Wehrmacht soldiers were Nazis too, just ask their victims – are indeed talking English among each other), and who are incapable of pronouncing German names like “Hans” with even minor correctness probably doesn’t even want, far less warrants. Duvall is particularly good here, bringing a mix of irony and subtlety to his role that I’m quite sure wasn’t in the script. The only negative stand-out among the cast is Larry Hagman as a US Colonel in a performance that is actually as bad as the script deserves.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,war,john sturges,michael caine,donald sutherland,robert duvall,jenny agutter,donald pleasence

The Puppet Masters (1994)

Warning: contains impolite thoughts about Robert A. Heinlein.

A UFO goes down over a small US town, and soon, the people there start to act a bit strangely, invite visitors into a fake UFO and are probably up to other shenanigans. Why, it’s as if they were controlled by alien parasites sitting on their backs!

An investigation by the USA’s scientific intelligence service under leadership of Andrew Nivens (Donald Sutherland) with his estranged son Sam (Eric Thal) and NASA xenobiologist Mary Sefton (Julie Warner) soon finds out that it is in fact alien invasion time. So many backs to ride on, so little time. Now, you’d think it would be rather easy to detect aliens slushing away on people’s backs, even before our heroes find out that infected humans have a heightened body temperature, but in this movie, the protagonists only like to check for this sort of thing at dramatically appropriate moments instead of, you know, regularly, so soon the whole of the US (which is of course the whole of the world for this sort of movie) is under threat.

Let’s start with the positive first: Stuart Orme’s The Puppet Masters is not a very close adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel, so it spares us the weird-ass nudism as well as Heinlein’s insufferable, endless smartass bullshitting, the author being one of those people who have to demonstrate to everyone willing to listen (and also to those who aren’t) that they are an authority on frigging everything, particularly those things they don’t actually have a clue about. Personally, I always thought that Heinlein was to SF was Ayn Rand is to philosophy, popular in the US, not taken all that seriously by anyone outside of it.

The film would really rather be Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or at least the lite, authority-trusting version of it (no unhappy or even ambiguous endings for this film). Considered from scene to scene, it’s not completely unsuccessful with this approach. There are a handful of effective scenes of paranoia, a smidgen of light body horror, and more than just an echo of Alien’s face hugger, and while Orme’s direction isn’t particularly exciting or inventive, it is perfectly competent.

Unfortunately, “competence” isn’t exactly what the film’s script spells to me. I’m not generally one to complain about or even just look for plot holes, but The Puppet Masters is just too sloppy and inconsistent to take seriously for me. The fact that our supposedly competent heroes seem always outgunned not because the aliens are so much more effective (they sure aren’t) but because humankind’s best hope are the sort of people unable to come up with a way to check each other for alien parasites on their backs, and who proceed to basically gift a whole army to the things in a particularly embarrassing sequence. Then there’s the film’s inconsistency towards the physical powers the parasites induce in their hosts: some get super powers and only go down after they have been shot repeatedly, others work on a classic goon power level and go down when someone looks at them wrong. It’s the same with the parasites – some seem to die with their hosts, other are sprightly as hell afterwards, and so on. Or talk about the psychological effects of getting separated from one’s parasite. What starts out as psychologically incredibly damaging in the film’s first acts turns into the sort of thing everybody is able to shrug off in a few minutes in the last.

And don’t for a second expect the film to think about the ethical implications all that shooting of infected our heroes do has, seeing as infected aren’t beyond help. But hey, this is a film that solves the alien problem with “hey, just infect everyone with encephalitis!”, so what do I expect?

It’s all a bit much (or rather too little) even for me to just shrug off in a film, so The Puppet Masters did not leave a very pleasing impression on me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,stuart orme,donald sutherland,sf,horror,eric thal,keith david,julie warner

The Split (1968)

Career criminal McClain (Jim Brown) comes to Los Angeles looking for the opportunity for a big heist. His old acquaintance and money woman Gladys (Julie Harris) soon points him in the right direction. There's a lot of money flowing in a big football game, so if one could somehow skim off all of it, one could make half a million dollars with comparatively little effort.

Of course, this sort of job needs more than one participant, so McClain goes on the lookout for partners. Because he's apparently not a people person, he secretly tests his prospective partners' abilities before he makes them any offers, which doesn't exactly endear him to anyone. Still, once McClain has disclosed his plan and the potential loot to strongman Clinger (Ernest Borgnine), driver Kifka (Jack Klugman), racist electronics expert Gough (Warren Oates), and professional gunman Negli (Donald Sutherland), they're in. Once the heist is done, the money will be deposited with McClain's ex-wife Ellie (Diahann Carroll) to be split up a few days later. Ellie of course still loves McClain so much he has no problem taking advantage of her in this way.

Yet even with the best of plans, a heist of this dimension isn't easy, and even if the team should get away with the money, they'll still have to cope with their mutual dislike, and a lot of trouble caused by Ellie's crazy neighbour (James Whitmore) and a corrupt cop (Gene Hackman).

Sometimes, all you really need to do is to point at a cast, the year a film was made in, and the writer of the book it is based on, to tell a film is worthy of a viewer's time. Of course, it's also a mixture that can promise more than it delivers, but that's not a problem I see with The Split.

The film was directed by Gordon Flemyng, whom I know best as the director of the two Doctor Who movies with Peter Cushing whose mere mention results in classic Who fans foaming at the mouth; which is a peculiar reaction to two perfectly entertaining films, but hey, what do I know. Much of Flemyng's work was for TV, and as is typical for TV directors of that era, there's really not much you can say about him based on his work there. Going by The Split, Flemyng as a director is more slick than stylish and more straightforward than flashy. This sort of direction seems ideal for a fast-paced and lean heist flick like this, particular one based on one of Donald E. Westlake's/Richard Stark's Parker novels. As always, The Split renames the character and makes him less sociopathic.

It is, in any case, very nice to see Parker portrayed by Jim Brown here, without any great gesture of "turning the character black". A ruthless bastard is after all a ruthless bastard quite independent of his skin colour. Brown's performance as Parker/McClain is quite fine, too, giving the deeply amoral character not-Parker is here a certain degree of allure without making him too sympathetic. The rest of the cast does the classic character actor job of turning their mostly rather one-dimensional characters into believable ciphers. Not that I have a problem with the characters being ciphers - this is a movie that thrives on leanness, and everything here standing in the way of its flow is radically pared down.

That technique works well for most of the time. Despite the leanness, most characters do not feel like the mere plot devices they are and rather like organic parts of the film's world. The big exception is Carroll's Ellie, whose only reason for existence is - in what alas isn't exactly a first for a supposed female lead - to look soulful into the camera and die to get the film's final acts running. A few more, or just some more convincing scenes, to build up her and McClain's relationship would have done wonders for an actual emotional effect, I think.

Still, if you ignore this flaw, The Split is an excellent example of the type of heist film that is just as interested in what comes after the heist than the heist itself.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,crime,gordon flemyng,jim brown,diahann carroll,ernest borgnine,julie harris,gene hackman,jack klugman,warren oates,donald sutherland