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.

Three Films Make A Post: War. It's A Dying Business.

Nightshot (2018): This French POV horror piece directed by Hugo König concerns the misadventures of an urban exploration streamer played by Nathalie Couturier, and her camera dude when they do a nightly visit to a creepy old sanatorium and asylum with a history of dubious experiments on its patients. The film does try to stand out from the dozens of other POV sanatorium indies by taking on a one take gimmick. Which also shows an admirable willingness from the filmmakers to put extra work, given that the choreography needed to pull something like that off is considerable.

Unfortunately, the one take/one shot business doesn’t really achieve much for the film; on paper, it’s “more realistic” for what is supposed to be a live stream but in practice, there’s little here that makes much of a difference between this and other POV sanatorium movies, so things never get terribly exciting. To be fair, there are couple of pretty clever shocks, and the practical (and live) effects are certainly fun to behold.

Sleepwalk (1986): This is the tale of a woman whose life is slowly being made weirder thanks to an ancient Chinese manuscript she is translating for a dubious Chinese doctor (whose henchmen is a young Tony Todd). In tone and style, Sara Driver’s movie is a very typical piece of mid-80s New York independent filmmaking, so expect a sense of the surreal, good taste in music, and a lot of beautiful shots of dirty city streets, as well as a floating and meandering plot carried by actors – in this case it’s mostly Suzanne Fletcher doing the work – who love making strange, deadpan acting decisions.

Too Late the Hero (1970): A few years of a wonderfully idiosyncratic career after The Dirty Dozen, director Robert Aldrich returned to the men on a mission style of war movie. Where some viewers – not me, mind you - read the brutal finale of the earlier movie as pure action movie glorification of violence, really nobody will be able to interpret this war movie that way. Too emotionally brutal is Aldrich’s portrayal of a group of soldiers (including Michaela Caine, Cliff Robertson as the mandatory American, Ian Bannen and Denholm Elliott) to get confused about the film’s anti-war stance here. Apart from being honest and bitter about the way war compromises all human ethics, this is very much a meditation on fear, the concept of Cowardice, and the sometimes necessary irrationality of heroism committed by cowardly men.

It’s not a film that judges cowardice and fear like certain old-school war movies would have, but seems more interested in understanding what these words actually mean, and how different the breaking points of different men are.

The Deserter

aka Devil’s Backbone

aka Ride to Glory

When US cavalry captain Victor Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) loses his wife in an Apache attack on a catholic mission, he holds his superior Major Brown (Richard Crenna) just as responsible for her death as the people who killed her. So, after an altercation with Brown that just barely ends with Kaleb deciding not to kill his superior, he deserts, going native in the desert bordering Mexico.

There he probably would have stayed, if not for the arrival of General Miles (John Huston) at Brown’s fort. Miles is convinced that the apache war chief Durango (Mimmo Palmara) is staying in the border countries of Mexico preparing an attack that would drench the whole Southwest of the US in blood – Native American and white alike. Of course, Miles can’t just waltz an army over the border of Mexico to try and stop Durango, and has decided on an alternative plan of attack. To fetch Kaleb – a man made for guerrilla war – give him a handful of men, and use him and these men to scout out and perhaps resolve the situation.

So Kaleb soon finds himself working for the US cavalry again, turning the obligatory rag-tag bunch of fighting men – among them his old Native American scout friend Natachai (Ricardo Montalban), British import Crawford (Ian Bannen), explosives-loving chaplain Reynolds (Chuck Connors), big angry black man Jackson (Woody Strode) and professional asshole Schmidt (Albert Salmi) – into an effective guerrilla force. Afterwards, the bloodshed starts.

Burt Kennedy’s The Deserter (going by the IMDB with directorial contributions of Yugoslavian Niksa Fulgosi, but I wouldn’t know) is yet another of those early 70s international co-productions – this time under the auspices of Dino de Laurentiis – that finds itself trying to mimic many elements of the Spaghetti Western, probably on a budget much superior to most anything Italian and Spanish productions companies who didn’t have a leg in Hollywood like Dino did could come up with. At the very least, there was enough money involved to lavish it on quite a cast of actors who mostly never quite made the big time but are – at least in my home – always a pleasure to watch. Bekim Fehmiu was quite the star in his native Yugoslavia and across Eastern Europe, though, and this film was a fruitless attempt to give him a foothold in Hollywood or at least Western Europe.

Of course, this being a de Laurentiis film, it then goes and doesn’t really do much with these actors, using a script that is decidedly one-note in characterisation, with the little character development that is there so underwritten it’s often difficult to make out why the film thinks the characters act like they act, or change when they do. Fortunately, the ensemble consists of men (and this is as much of a sausage assembly as you’ll ever find) quite used to, if they aren’t given much to work with, at least making the little they have count, always giving the impression the viewer is watching quite interesting people, even if there’s never anything visible on screen that would actually make them interesting.

Characterisation really is the weakest point of The Deserter’s script, though it is generally more serviceable than strong, providing a Man’s Adventure style men on a mission western. From time to time, writer Clair Huffaker – who was responsible for quite a few better scripts for westerns – does add some interesting flourishes to the proceedings, though. While the Apaches are the enemy of the day, and not given luxuries like characterisation or names, the film does more than once suggest that their grievances are very much justified. The film even, as much as a film very much in love with its own violence can, the way the conflict between Apache and post-settlers is fought: full of atrocities committed by both sides, one cruelty always leading to the next, with no side seeing itself in the position to ever stop escalating. Men of peace aren’t to be found on both sides anyhow, so the only thing they’ll use to resolve their conflict will be violence. Moral right and wrong don’t ever come into play. In the film’s world, a morally decent action can lead to as horrible consequences as a morally abhorrent one. In the very end, after quite a bit of slaughter, the film does suddenly start to argue doing “the right thing” might be important and worthwhile in itself even when the consequences are dire, but then it’s a bit too underwritten to really convince me of anything more than its good intentions. Which, come to think of it, is more than a lot of films bother with showing, so it’s still a point in The Deserter’s favour.

If you take the film for what it is, though, you can have a good time with it. Even though Kennedy is the archetype of a hired gun director never bringing any visible personal touches to anything he’s working on, he does his job well enough here, pacing things well, often letting the actors’ faces and the impressive landscape of Arispainia speak for themselves, getting the action done in professionally exciting manner. The resulting film is not exactly one of the greatest pseudo-Spaghetti Westerns ever made but it’s an entertaining time, if you can cope with a lot of unpleasant violence in your entertainment.

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