Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

A Spanish coastal town that harbours quite a number of British expats, between the wars. The local lush living is dominated by beautiful Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner). Every man wants to destroy himself for her, every woman hates her (secretly or loudly), yet Pandora is mostly bored and disenchanted. Even when she convinces a race car driver to push his self-built vehicle into the ocean to prove his love, or gets her very own love suicide going, this only provides her with some flickering excitement for a minute or two. She’s not only lacking in human compassion but also all deeper human connection.

Things change when Hendrick van der Zee (James Mason) arrives om town on his yacht, and a mythic pull develops between these two. The old tale of the Flying Dutchman might have more truth to it than most people would expect.

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman’s director Albert Lewin was a very successful Hollywood producer, first for MGM, then for Paramount. From time to time, he directed a movie himself. These aren’t the films of a dabbler, but of a director and scriptwriter very consciously aiming for art in a deeply earnest and just as deeply bourgeois manner that should make them pretty much unwatchable in their serious, classics-quoting way. Yet somehow, this member of the educated classes showing off his education didn’t just strain for art but actually manage to reach it, perhaps in spite of himself.

Case in point, and Lewin’s best movie as far as I know, is this incredibly ambitious concoction of bohemian melodrama, ancient Greek myth and somewhat more modern European legend. Often, Pandora feels like Powell and Pressburger – this is nominally a British film - at their most melodramatic seen through the lens of Hollywood with arthouse aspirations.

There’s a sensually languid quality to the film’s look and feel that stands in stark – and pretty magical – contrast to its literary and (sometimes too) knowing dialogue, its allusions to culture and cultural detritus, and its palpable love for all manner of cultural production – be it music, Shakespeare, the poetry of Omar Khayyam or Ava Gardner’s face (though the last might be the point where culture and languidness meet). The film’s straining for the mythical qualities of Pandora (very much an embodiment of the old hat of the destructive force of female sexuality that makes quite a bit of European bourgeois culture rather awkward) and the Flying Dutchman is often a visible and palpable effort but it is that uncommon kind of strain that eventually reaches and envelops (is enveloped by?) what it wants to touch, until the overload of allusion and emotion becomes magical and hypnotic.

Part of this magic most certainly lies in Jack Cardiff’s lush photography and Lewin’s fearless – of ridicule, of too much emotion, of the wrong emotion, of overload – direction, but there’s also the brilliance of the performances that hit the unreal notes the material needs again and again, and the willingness of Lewin’s script to go to places scripts (certainly not one written by big shot Hollywood producers) in 1951 simply didn’t go – neither in theme, nor in eroticism, nor in frank honesty about the harshness of mythic love.

Elements here leave me uncomfortable: the film, like its male characters, seems unable to admit to the existence of a kind of love that isn’t based on destruction, death and sacrifice; Pandora’s commitment to being the belle dame sans merci is disquieting, particularly in a film that so clearly wants us to find her tragic. Yet, like with all capital-A art Lewin’s film is in dialogue with, feeling uncomfortable with it isn’t an argument against it.

Cold Sweat (1970)

Original title: De la part des copains

Korean War veteran Joe Martin (Charles Bronson) is living with his wife Fabienne (Liv Ullmann) and her daughter Michèle (Yannick Delulle) at the Côte D’Azur, working his own small boat charter service. The marriage seems somewhat tense thanks to Joe suffering from what we’d now call PTSD. He’s drinking too much and holds back emotionally. As it turns out when one a rather nasty character from Joe’s past named Whitey (Michel Constantin) turns up one summer evening, Joe has also been holding back some facts from his past, as well as his actual name.

You see, seven years ago, he was part of break-out from a military prison organized by one of his former commanding officers, one Captain Ross (the very American James Mason). When Katanga (Jean Topart), one of the other members of the group, murdered a random cop for not much of a reason during the break-out, Joe was having none of it, simply taking off with the escape car, leaving the rest of the men to fend for themselves.

For some reason, Whitey really needs Joe’s boat now, to transport something to or from a Turkish vessel anchored somewhere in the area, and he’s certainly not the kind of guy unwilling to threaten a wife and a kid (if available). Joe, on the other hand, is not the kind of guy to tolerate that very well, killing Whitey and getting rid of his body rather efficiently – with a little help from Fabienne.

Of course, this is not he end of the couple’s problems, for soon enough, the rest of the former break-out gang – Ross, Katanga, and one Gelardi (Luigi Pistilli), turn up. They, too are very much into threatening families and really want Joe’s boat, as well as, probably, a bit of vengeance. So our protagonist agrees to their demands, until the right moment comes to make his displeasure known more violently.

In theory, Cold Sweat is a French production, but it’s one of those international joints that really don’t feel specifically regional apart from its setting. The cast is a merry mixture of people from all over the globe, as is good tradition in European genre filmmaking of this era. Rather less common in this sort of thing, the director isn’t French or Italian but veteran British filmmaker Terence Young.

The script, indeed written by two Frenchmen, is based on a novel by Richard Matheson and follows the Gold Medal paperback style of late 60s, early 70s thriller, something a lot of French filmmakers (and one assumes producers) seem to have admired quite a bit. For good reasons, too, because this style of the thriller, with focussed plots that still manage to squeeze in some surprisingly deep characterization, and an update of a noirish philosophical outlook tend to adapt really rather well to the screen, often without there being too big of a need for major changes. Unfortunately, I can’t say if the film at hand does actually make many changes to the plot, because this is one of the Matheson books I’ve never gotten around to reading.

As it stands on screen, it’s a fine bit of early 70s thriller in any case, with sharp plotting, not terribly deep but effective characterization and a real sense for the tense set-up followed by a follow-through that always escalates the drama of any given situation. As we all know, Young was a wonderful director for this kind of thing, usually not showing himself beholden to the stodgier style of some of his British contemporaries but using the increased technical possibilities of changing times in filmmaking to the fullest.

Particularly the film’s final act where is Joe racing and scrabbling to save his loved ones through ever increasing problems and dangers is absolutely fantastic. There’s a brilliantly done car race against the clock that isn’t even the film’s proper climax to enjoy, for example. The sequence is edited and shot so sharply, Young can even check in on the quieter tension between the surviving rest of the characters during it without lessening its impact, instead ratcheting up the suspense with this device, as it is meant to do but all too often doesn’t.

Acting-wise, Cold Sweat is mostly a fine proposition, the cast of character actors performing just as good as you can expect them to (which is why people like I love character actors often more than the proper movie stars – consistency and quiet capability is the thing), Bronson’s suggesting much about Joe’s inner life by tensing and untensing his shoulders (seriously) and also gets some pretty fun tough guy lines, while Ullmann provides a stock character with actual life. The only problem spot here is James Mason, or rather, James Mason as played by his bad, oh so bad, American accent, a thing so awesome (like giant tentacled monsters are awesome) it apparently does not leave room for much of an actual performance.

But then, he would have been dubbed by someone just as bad in most Italian movies, so we do at least get to experience what this great actor believed Americans sound like.

Cold Sweat is obviously still a wonderful piece of European/International thriller.

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.

The Deadly Affair (1966)

Shortly after intelligence officer Charles Dobbs (James Mason) interviews civil servant Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng) because of anonymous letters hinting at least at communist sympathies, Fennan commits suicide, supposedly driven by his talk with Dobbs. The thing is, though, Dobbs was quite convinced Fennan was perfectly innocent on anything beyond having ideals, and told him he was cleared of any suspicion of being a spy.

Dobbs is also less than happy to find his boss, The Adviser (Max Adrian), and the rest of the intelligence community all too willing to write the situation off as a suicide for which he is somewhat responsible. Particularly when Dobbs finds certain things about Fennan’s suicide as well as the behaviour of the man’s wife Elsa (Simone Signoret) do not add up as they should. Dobbs is so angry about the whole situation he even decides to step down from his position completely. At least, until he has investigated the suicide to his own satisfaction. With the help of retired copper Mendek (Harry Andrews) and his now former colleague Billy Appleby (Kenneth Haigh), Dobbs does stumble upon rather interesting facts, even while he’s living through another crisis in the marriage to his wife Ann (Harriet Andersson).

Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair is actually an adaptation of John Le Carré’s first George Smiley novel, Call for the Dead. Lumet couldn’t use the Smiley character name because Le Carré sold it off together with the rights to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which only goes to show that copyright can get pretty bizarre. At least we got some fine films out of the situation.

Tonally, the film still is very much a Le Carré adaptation, with all the sadness, the guilt, and betrayal that suggests. Smiley/Dobbs as performed by James Mason is clearly a man who has seen and done too much already to should have any illusions left about life but who is still trying to cling to a concept of human decency, in his business life as well as in a marriage that has become painful both him and Ann for reasons they both don’t really have control over.

In fact, the film is very good at not seeking any guilty party in the rather messed-up marriage but treats Dobbs’s and Ann’s respective helplessness with compassion. As it also does treat most of its other characters, all the betrayals and hurts and crimes notwithstanding. As always in Le Carré’s world, there are possibly moral and emotional grounds worth defending, yet his characters have lost any idea of moral certainty long ago, the best of them – like Dobbs – demonstrating a tired and sad way to go about the things that they think they have to do, even if they aren’t even sure why anymore.

Lumet films this in his concentrated mode (except for one or two lame jokes I could have lived without), keeping the camera and his eye close on the actors, while subtly supporting them without showing off. The cast is rather perfect for this approach too, full as it is of middle-aged and aging men and women who all look as if life had battered them in one way or another. In some cases, this is the consequence of some really fine acting, while in other’s, like Simone Signoret’s, the role and the actor’s actual state of mind seem to be rather close; perhaps even too close for comfort. While some of the actors may be tired, their performance aren’t, though.

What The Deadly Affair isn’t – of course, given the material it is based on, but people sometimes go into films with strange expectations – is much of a spy thriller of the more outwardly exciting kind. While the film’s two action scenes are staged by Lumet with perfect and appropriate ruthlessness, this isn’t a film whose spy story is meant to provide surface thrills as much as it is meant to enable a better look at life and what it does to some people.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,spies,sidney lumet,james mason,simone signoret,maximilian schell,harriet andersson,harry andrews

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.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,crime,thriller,robert parrish,michael caine,anthony quinn,james mason,in short

Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)

Freshly knighted Scottish geologist Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) more or less stumbles upon the last words (and pointer to an exciting adventure) of the Icelandic geologist Saknussem, who disappeared while trying to find an entrance to the centre of the Earth decades ago.

Despite his seeming unworldliness, Lindenbrook does not take too long to decide that giving fine lectures in Edinburgh is well and good, but finding an entrance to the hollow Earth would be something quite more exciting, so he makes his way to Iceland, accompanied by his insufferable favourite student Alec McKuen (Pat Boone, doing a Scottish accent about as authentic as his music is rough). Please ignore the romantic subplot about Al and Lindenbrook's daughter (Diane Baker).

After some to and fro, Lindenbrook actually finds the entrance to the planet's hollow core, and goes on his adventurous way accompanied by Alec, Carla (Arlene Dahl), the widow of his former rival Professor Göteborg (please ignore the subplot about Göteborg's mildly evil shenanigans, too), and a large Icelandic gentleman (Peter Ronson) of the peasant persuasion who has an unfortunate and clearly illegal relationship with a duck. There will be wonders, dinosaurs, and the mad great-great grandson of Saknussem (Thayer David) waiting for them.

Henry Levin's adaptation of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is a bit of a weird one: despite some horrible flaws in its early parts and a bloated running time, the quality of its second half turns the film into quite an admirable peace of 50s SF/adventure movie. One only needs patience to get through a first hour that could have been cut by about thirty minutes without actually losing anything of interest.

Especially the romance sub plot between Boone and Baker is horrible, seeing as it gives Boone an opportunity to musically mangle a Robert Burns poem, and provides the film even more opportunities for cutesy and desperately unfunny humour regarding the couple; later on, Jenny is used to cut away from the actually interesting parts of the film to give us some peeks at her looking sort of depressed. This would be bad enough with an actual actor playing the student, but Boone's acting is as atrocious as his Scottish accent, and it's utterly impossible to believe that this slick, emotionless guy is a poor Scottish student in love with a girl and science.

Because the film wastes so much time on this sub plot and other "funny" business, it takes nearly an hour until the extraordinary voyage it is supposed to be about actually begins. Fortunately, once the voyage does begin, the up to that point tiring movie turns into something that is a joy to watch. There is a sense of wonder and joy about scientific discovery and strange adventures running through the film's second half that is completely in the spirit of Verne's less pessimistic phase, the kind of feeling that turns the simple discovery of a glowing part of the underworld into a moment of beauty, and that lets the film's sillier moments glow with a sense of fun.

Journey's excellent set design certainly makes a large contribution to the film's mood and sense of awe; as unrealistic as the effects work might look to the modern eye, there is such a sense of excitement on display the question of realism just doesn't seem to matter, as is only proper for this sort of movie. Sure, the dinosaur attack scenes do suffer from the "dinosaurs"' reality as poor reptiles (animals were, alas, harmed during the making of the film) with glued on fins, and can't help but produce the wish somebody in charge had hired Ray Harryhausen instead, but a dinosaur attack is an intrinsically excellent thing in a movie, even if it looks less than probable and is morally dubious.

On the characterization side I was pretty surprised by two things. Firstly, the open way a film from the conservative 50s treats Hans's very alternative lifestyle, as if being in a (clearly sexual) relationship with a duck were no big thing; okay, the film just isn't realizing it argues for bestiality, but one can't help being surprised.

Secondly, an quite a bit more seriously, the film does manage to show Carla Göteborg as a headstrong, intelligent and independent woman without feeling the need to permanently dismantle her. If you're dreading the horrible scenes every 50s SF movie with an actual woman character has where she has a complete breakdown and surrenders to the alpha male forever, rejoice, for that scene doesn't actually come; I suspect after the way Dahl holds herself for the whole of the movie, nobody would have believed that sort of scene anyway. Of course, Carla still isn't allowed to do quite as much as her male companions, but for 1959, her role is quite a satisfying one.

The script, she, and Mason even salvage the usual "two people permanently at odds with each other must be in love" romance between Göteborg and Lindenbrook by actually managing to give a lot of their squabbling the feel of coming from two persons too stubborn and set in their ways to easily fall in love, and by not confusing romance and love with forever giving up one's personality. That's not too bad for an adventure movie that begins with Pat Boone pretending to be Scottish.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,adventure,sf,henry levin,james mason,arlene dahl