Grand Slam (1967)

Original title: Ad ogni costo

Retiring from his job as a professor at a Brazilian girl’s school, James Anders (Edward G. Robinson) goes to visit a childhood buddy of his, Mark Milford (Adolfo Celi), with a plan a lifetime in the making. On paper, the former academic has a complicated yet eminently feasible and thoroughly thought out idea for getting at a considerable amount of diamonds from a building right across from his old school. While the good Professor was teaching, Milford has become quite an exalted member of the mob, so he should be able to provide Anders with a specialized crew for the job.

In fact, Milford has an index catalogue worth of criminals on offer, sorted by keywords like “Playboy”, “Vatican”, or “Syndicate Killer”. So off Anders goes to instruct a military man (Klaus Kinski), a playboy (Robert Hoffman), an electronics expert (Riccardo Cucciolla) and a safe cracker (George Rigaud) in his plans.

Once in Rio, the Professor is mostly going to be hands-off, leaving his team to sort out various snatches in the plan – for example, it turns out seducing a Hollywood-frumpy middle-aged woman (Janet Leigh) is more difficult for our playboy than expected – and go through the old dance of shouty discussions and double-crosses without him.

Giuliano Montaldo’s Grand Slam is a somewhat typical example of the kind of crime and heist movie made as a European co-production – and therefore carrying a somewhat higher budget – that occurred pretty regularly in the latter half of the 60s. In this particular case it’s an Italian, Spanish and German co-production, but fortunately, the Italian side provides most of the behind the camera workforce. The money is otherwise well used in some globe-trotting location shots.

There’s the usual cast of European character actors and Hollywood stars on the downwards trajectories of their careers. All of them mix rather well here. Robinson nicely uses a certain grandfatherly quality to underplay how ruthless his character actually is. Leigh does more with the role of the seduced than you’d expect in this sort of thing. Everybody else is excellently cast to type, with Kinski for once not playing an outright psycho but a mostly calm, cool, and exceedingly dangerous professional, and he’s doing it rather well.

On the technical side, Grand Slam is utterly competent filmmaking that provides exactly the kind of suspense and the reversals of fortune you’ll expect going on in a satisfying and effective manner, without ever climbing quite the heights it should need for greatness. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, though it really leaves me with relatively little to write about.

Very little, that is, apart from the fact that Grand Slam quietly and off-handedly pulls no punches when it comes to showing how shitty our criminals actually are. The seduction plot most other films would play as a bit of a joke, for example, is deathly serious. Montaldo is very clear about the cruelty of this particular approach, and Leigh is only too happy to act accordingly. Because of this, the inevitable double crosses feel purposefully constructed to be such, instead of being a trope; and the film’s final, deeply cynical twist doesn’t come out of nowhere but is perfectly in keeping with everything Grand Slam taught us before about what kind of people we’re watching here.

The Vikings (1958)

Warning: there’s more implied backstory and story rape in this one than on-screen in most pinkus

After Orson Welles and a pretty cool animation have schooled us about some Viking Facts™ – few of which were close to historical facts even when this was made – and the film has prologued us with fifteen minutes of information it’ll need to repeat anyway, because most of the characters have no clue about what’s going on in their lives, the film slowly comes to the actual meat of its tale.

Ragnar Lodbrok (Ernest Borgnine, I kid you not) rules a bunch of Vikings as their rapist king, helped out by his pretty-faced (and also rapist) son LL Einar (Kirk Douglas, who was actually a couple of months older then Borgnine, and not as you know not pretty). They rape, they pillage, they terrorize the British Isles, you know the deal. Three, ahem, I mean two decades ago, Ragnar captured himself a baby slave named Eric (now grown up to be played by Tony Curtis). Eric, as we know thanks to the pointless prologue but the characters will have to find out about throughout the film, is actually the product of one of Ragnar’s rape sprees, his mother being the former Queen of Northumbria. He’s also not at all friendly with his secret half-brother. Early in the movie, he’s going so far as attacking Einar with a falcon who comes from the Fulci school of falcons and promptly mutilates one of Einar’s eyes, also making him unpretty (the film indeed suggesting that Kirk Douglas was pretty before).

Attempts of getting rid of Eric afterwards are thwarted by Odin, who’d really rather want the film to be longer than fifty minutes. Relations do stay strained, though, and once Einar kidnaps Welsh princess Morgana (Janet Leigh) and both men fall for her, things certainly don’t improve. Morgana does prefer Eric (one supposes that him not wishing to rape her helps there too), even more so once he absconds with her in the direction of the British Isles. It could be the beginning of a wonderful love affair, if not for the fact that Morgana is promised to the – decidedly nasty – King of Northumbria, Aella (Frank Thring doing a wonderful Vincent Price imitation), and is not one to go back on the word of her father. Lots and lots of further melodramatic reversals of fate happen, until Eric and Einar even team up to rescue Morgana from Northumbria, before they go back to try and kill each other again.

After this, do I even have to say that Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings is a deeply silly movie, as well as the kind of film where playing a drinking game based on historical inaccuracies could be downright deadly? But then, who goes into a movie where Ernest Borgnine plays the father of Kirk Douglas, and all two, plus Tony Curtis (who is also meant to be kinda macho), are supposed to be Vikings expecting any kind of historical realism? This is the realm of pure adventure fantasy, and really needs to be approached as taking place on that much better plane.

Once you’ve put things into the proper perspective, you actually might get quite a bit of fun out of the whole affair. Sure, some contemporary tastes will certain shy away from the amount of sexual violence that must have happened in the backstory and which Einar would just love to commit onscreen. The film’s very heavily implying that Ragnar and Einar both can’t get it up properly with a willing partner and even have love and violence all mixed up in their tiny little brains. I’m honestly not at all sure how the filmmakers got away with that one.

However, the film is at least not pro rape at all (not necessarily a matter of course in 50s cinema), but clearly implying the problem with Ragnar and Einar isn’t that they’re not Christian, or barbarians (most Christian non-barbarians in the film are not much better going by modern, hell, even 50s morals than these two, in fact) but that they’re rapists.

This is of course all background matter for the film, and not even I would argue this is in any way, shape or form its main interest.

Which brings us to its main interest: rousing, swashbuckling adventure full of silly ideas (just look at the infamous boat rowing scene for the last one), cast with actors who really do know how to throw themselves into all kinds of on-screen derring-do. Fleischer does stage the big action set pieces very nicely indeed, making great use of the full Technicolor screen particular in the last half hour or so, and generally finds something interesting to film even when guys aren’t hitting each other with swords and axes.

The production design, while historically dubious, is often rather wonderful, too. There has clearly been some love put into the little details that make something look more impressive, so we get things like every Viking shield having its own, individual ornamentation and many other worldbuilding details hidden and not so hidden in the backgrounds. This helps make all the silly adventure and melodrama feel rooted, and provides The Vikings with quite a bit of visual magic even after all these decades.

In short: Scaramouche (1952)

France, a few years before the Revolution. Actor and charming rogue Andre Moreau (Stewart Granger doing what he does best) has to confront the more serious sides of life when the Queen's (Nina Foch) cousin, the Marquis de Maynes (Mel Ferrer), slaughters his best friend and foster brother in a duel for having written a pamphlet in praise of certain soon to be revolutionary principles. The poor boy never stood a chance against de Maynes, who isn't just the best duelist in France but also a man quite willing to use his abilities to get rid of any political enemy he can provoke into a fight.

Not being a swordsman himself Andre barely escapes with his life when he attempts to avenge his brother right on the spot. From this point onward, Andre dedicates his life to taking revenge on de Maynes, learning the art of fencing from the man's own fencing teacher and getting in trouble. On the way, our hero stumbles into the commedia dell'arte role of Scaramouche.

Further complications ensue because of love, for Andre has fallen for de Maynes's ward Aline de Gavrillac (Janet Leigh), as does de Maynes himself soon enough. Aline actually reciprocates Andre's feelings, alas, Andre thinks she is his half-sister (it's complicated), so the romance is rather a no-go for him, and he spends most of his time on a rather complicated (obviously) relationship with the actress Lenore (Eleanor Parker). It's a wonder all these - and more - plot lines will get tied up in less than two hours of running time.

As every fool knows, the swashbuckling genre was one of the things 40s and 50s Hollywood was particularly good at, which comes as no surprise when one keeps in mind how exactly the mixture of a colourful view of the past, grand emotions, and light consequences many swashbucklers prefer also is what the studio movies at the time were particularly good at; in that sense, one can see the swashbuckling adventure as the slightly more violent sister to the musical. With that sentence, I've done my duty of giving film historians apoplexy.

George Sidney's Scaramouche (of course based on Rafael Sabatini's novel) is a particularly fine example of the form with a particularly deft hand at gliding from high melodrama to silliness to fine quipping in front of eye-poppingly colourful backgrounds and back again in a most organic way that does remind me of dancing; again, I think there's an obvious parallel to musicals and the wuxia film here, though that may just be me. Be that as it may, I don't think it's any question its flow creates large parts of Scaramouche's impressive charms as a film in a genre that is all about the flow.

Apart from this, there are of course also some fine moments of old-style Hollywood acting by Granger, Leigh, Parker and Ferrer to praise, fanciful art direction to admire, swashbuckling deeds to thrill at, and so on, and so forth, until the sympathetic viewer will be left with the happiest of grins on her face; or so I, and quite obviously the film itself also, hope. As a bonus, Scaramouche is one of those swashbucklers where the female characters - even though they don't buckle any swashes - have a certain degree of personality and agency. It's even one where the "bad" (not that the film moralizes at her) girl may let the hero go into the arms of the "good" girl but where she doesn't have to run into a sword for him, instead finding better prospects of a kind.

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