Three Films Make A Post: The Greatest High Adventure Ever Filmed!

Festival of the Living Dead (2024): After having started out strong, the Soska Sister Jen and Sylvia don’t seem to be able to get a movie together that’s even vaguely in the ballpark of American Mary. It’s all sequels, ill-advised remakes and cheap guff, typically decently enough made but well beyond the filmmakers’ talent levels.

This Tubi Original flirts a little with being an actual sequel to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, but mostly, it’s a movie of braindead idiots sleepwalking through zombie movie tropes. Energy levels are low, and there’s little on screen here to tell me why I should watch this above the other dozen crappy zombie movies coming out every month.

Companion (2025): If there’s one thing holding too many “progressive” horror movies back right now – and I say that as a socialist much closer to their political ideals than MAGAs, incels and other real life horrors – its the smug self-satisfaction about the rightness of their world view that reminds me of myself in my twenties, with its complete inability to realize that it’s all to easy to win arguments when all you ever do is argue against straw men. Worse, this brand of smugness tends to lend films a particular self-satisfied air with any little twist, any half-bright idea in their scripts, and an inability to look at one’s own work and see its flaws.

This goes very much for Companion, a film of middling twists it very clearly believes to be incredibly deep and intelligent, and a slick surface of ultra-competent filmmaking that has very little of any depth or interest going on below its polished surface.

The only thing this really has going for it is the rightfully admired Sophie Thatcher. Who also happens to be in Heretic, a great example of how to do progressive horror without intellectual shortcuts.

The Guns of Navarone (1961): Speaking of intellectual shortcuts, during the course of the German election, I really needed to watch a movie where a lot of Nazis are killed. J. Lee Thompson’s war/spy movie classic fit the bill nicely. It also has a starry cast playing your typical Alistair McLean bunch of competents, rather a lot of great action scenes – during which indeed a heart-warming amount of Nazis die – and a couple of absolutely icy war is hell moments.

Gregory Peck is particularly great in this one, mixing the reticence of a man who has already seen and done too much in this war with the coldness of a man willing to do even worse if necessary.

Escape to Athena (1979)

Greece during World War II, shortly before the Allied invasion. Major Otto Hecht (Roger Moore with a really weird accent) is not your typical Nazi, he only plays one to get what he wants, and tries to keep victims to a minimum. Having worked as a shady art dealer before the war, what Hecht wants is to plunder the ancient treasures of Greece, as he has done with those of other countries before. For this, he’s acquired his own little collection of POWs useful in this sort of thing, like archaeologist Professor Blake (David Niven), climber and all-around athletic wonder Nat Judson (Richard Roundtree), and non-cooking cook Bruno Rotelli (Sonny Bono, but don’t worry). The plus for these guys is that they are kept on a comparatively long leash by a man who’s not going to shoot or torture them for the smallest affront. As they well should, they use this to make the Nazis’ life in Greece as difficult as possible with repeated escape attempts and small and large sabotages.

Things get even more lively when Hecht acquires stand-up comic Charlie Dane (Elliott Gould) as his new scribe (don’t ask), and Charlie’s burlesque dancing partner Dottie Del Mar (Stefanie Powers) as the woman he wishes to convince of sleeping with him. These two bring with them even more anarchic energy then the rest of Hecht’s crew, as well as contact with the Greek resistance leader Zeno (Telly Savalas). Following various acts of repression by the SS, and because there’s a submarine station that needs to be destroyed before the Allied landing, Zeno and Hecht’s crazy kids decide to simply take over the Nazi base.

Afterwards, there’s perhaps time to steal some art treasures from a nearby mountain cloister, unless there’s something more relevant to the war effort there, of course.

At times, George Pan Cosmatos’s Escape to Athena has a tone comparable to the great World War II action comedy Kelly’s Heroes. It’s never quite as brilliant, mind you, but if you can live with a less than serious approach to World War II, this is still one of the better examples of the form. Particularly the film’s first half is full of off the cuff, often clearly adlibbed, humour that can get so bizarre to border on the nonsensical. House favourite Elliott Gould has some of the best absurd non-sequitur lines here, of course (and I’m pretty sure he’s come up with them himself). Those often make little sense but are outrageously funny as the man delivers them. In the more scripted feeling bits, Moore – at the height of being James Bond – actually manages to turn an art-stealing Wehrmacht officer into so charming a rogue, I’m even perfectly willing to buy into his later changing of sides to the good guys; whereas Powers really does the traditional role of the perhaps not quite as ditzy stripper with the best of ‘em.

Even in the early and lighter parts of the film, there are moments that are perfectly honest about the actual experience of Nazi occupation and resistance work. Cosmatos portrays cruelties and senseless slaughter matter-of-factly and with no misguided attempts at squeezing humour in there as well; these are the things that happen around them while our POWs are in their private little comedy, and this comedy, for one, is not going to pretend otherwise.

As little as it’s going to pretend that developments like finding that Dottie is an expert diver perfectly fit for the business of blowing up submarines, or the bizarre show our heroes put on to distract the Nazis once it’s time to take over their base, are anything less than great, goofy fun.

Eventually, everybody does land in a somewhat harsher bit of war action than they were before in scenes of action movie mayhem that late 70s style Cosmatos handles with the expected panache. The big battle in the town’s streets and the grand finale on the mountain are particularly great. So great that it seems fair to director and characters that they are allowed to go out like they came in with some hot dance moves by Savalas and various bits of funny business.

Why this extremely entertaining, goofy but not stupid piece of filmmaking has landed on more than one list of the worst films ever made, I have no idea.

The Prisoner of Zenda (1937)

Retired British officer Rudolf Rassendyll (Ronald Colman) is visiting one of those curious fictional Balkan countries that pop up so often in Hollywood, the pulps, and comics for a fishing trip. As a matter of fact, the country in Anthony Hope’s novel this is based on, called Ruritania there and not named in the film, is often seen as the earliest example of the made up Eastern-ish European country in popular culture.

In any case, a peaceful fishing trip it’s not going to be for the man, for he just happens to look exactly like the very soon to be crowned king of the country, also called Rudolf, and Rudolf the king is in a spot of bother no true Englishman of Rudolf the Brit’s type is going to let him hang in. Being a notorious carouser and alcoholic gadfly, the king isn’t well loved by his subjects, leaving the door wide open for his perpetually coldly angry and pretty evil brother “Black” Michael (Raymond Massey). Really, simply drugging Rudolf on the night before his coronation should do the trick, providing Michael with an opening to declare himself regent, marry Rudolf’s betrothed Princess Flavia (Madeleine Carroll), and probably rename the country into Latveria.

As it happens, said drugging is taking place right when Rudolf the Brit is present, palling around with the king after a chance encounter. Because nobody would believe the truth, the king’s oldest and most-suffering retainer, Colonel Zapt (C. Aubrey Smith) comes up with a plan: why not let his king’s virtual twin go through the coronation to thwart Michael’s plans, without anyone knowing any better?

This is of course only the beginning of a series of intrigues, romantic interludes and curious adventures for our Rudolf.

The Prisoner of Zenda is, in its nature and type, a kissing cousin – or really rather a making out heavily in the backyard cousin – of the swashbuckler, really only missing that particular genre descriptor in my eyes because its moments of physical derring-do are nearly completely relegated to the final act. It’s a very fine final act, though.

And really, this is me doing genre nit-picking and not me complaining about the actual film, for the adventure and romance movie we get here is indeed one of the great achievements of classic Hollywood. Not only because it puts quite a few of the British actors working in Hollywood at the time into one movie – for what is more continental European than guys from Oxbridge to American eyes, apart from lederhosen – but because it really does wonders with them.

This is one of those films that don’t just feature a perfectly cast hero in Ronald Colman, who does the wit, the romance and the physical demands of the role more than just justice. Nearly everyone else on screen is more than just fit to type, enhancing the traditionally flat characters in a film like this through mild ironies, charisma, and a hand for the telling details of body language and intonation. Even Raymond Massey’s Michael is only not considered one of the great screen villains because he’s overshadowed by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.’s Rudolf von Hentzau, the most fun to watch bastard imaginable, whom I left out of the plot synopsis as well the roles played by Mary Astor and David Niven because synopsising the film’s finely wrought net of dramatic interpersonal relations and improbable intrigue would have to go into novel, or at least movie, length.

Apparently, this was a bit of a difficult production, director John Cromwell having some kind of beef or the other with about half of the main cast – which sounds ridiculous going by what we see of them on screen – so that some scenes may or may not have been shot by someone else. George Cukor was supposedly shooting whatever, as well as, and more probably to my eyes, W.S. Van Dyke doing work on the fencing scene in the climax. Whoever told DP James Wong Howe in any given scene what to do (or was wise enough to let him get on with his business) did a bang-up job in any case, creating one of the best fairy-tale Europes of the American subconscious, built out of sumptuous, beautiful and exotic scenes gliding into another elegantly, everything culminating in a finale that visually seems to take place in the direct neighbourhood of Universal’s backlot Europe of shadows and expressionist castles.

It’s as perfect as anything you’ll see.