In short: Action Man (1967)

Original title: Le soleil des voyous

After a pretty successful career as a criminal (mostly in Indochina, it seems), Denis Farrand (Jean Gabin) has retired into the more or less straight life as a club and restaurant owner, married a woman who wouldn’t approve of his getting back to his old business, and is getting bored out of his mind. A plan to rob the payroll of the US forces in France is percolating in his brain – it’s one of those opportunities that just drops into a guy’s lap – but he’s not quite bored enough yet to act on it.

That changes when Farrand’s refusal to allow the underlings of the local crime bosses to sell drugs in his restaurant leads to a reunion with his old good buddy and crony Jim Beckley (Robert Stack). Which is to say, Beckley is part of the group of goons sent to convince Farrand otherwise, but obviously changes his mind on seeing his old buddy in trouble. With a partner, the whole bank and payroll thing looks too tempting to resist, particularly since Farrand’s plan is pretty great.

So great, the heist itself isn’t what goes wrong in this particular heist movie – it’s the aftermath, when said local crime bosses as well as a female partner the deeply misogynist Farrand never wanted (Margaret Lee) start making trouble that’s going to be the problem here.

The English language title for Jean Delannoy’s heist movie is pretty damn absurd – neither the now apparently touchable Robert Stack nor Jean Gabin in his 60s are any kind of action men (though giving that epithet to Gabin at this stage in his career is rather funny), and the film only has a couple of scenes that would qualify as action scenes. In truth, this is a calm, focussed and collected heist movie that stages its (pretty imaginative and fun) heist with the same precision it uses to portray an aftermath that sees the result of Gabin’s calm calculations destroyed by all of those pesky little human things like emotions and plain stupidity.

On the way, we get quite a few scenes of Gabin doing that curious Gabin thing where phlegmatic acting suddenly feels as if it were incredibly emotionally expressive, some neat variations on gangster movie standards, as well as one of the finer bloodless heists I’ve seen on screen. There’s also a thematic line running through the film – embodied in Gabin’s Farrand as well as Lee’s Betty - where boredom is the true enemy of happiness, the inability to live a boring life like everybody else (when they’re lucky) leading to doom and destruction.

Three Films Make A Post: A Blood Chilling-Gut Spilling Challenge To The Death

The Strange And Deadly Occurrence (1974): Totally solid mid-70s TV thriller by totally solid TV (and otherwise) director John Llewellyn Moxey. Lawyer Robert Stack (still using his Eliot Ness voice like in the old days), Vera Miles and her teenage daughter move into their dream home in the country. Strange (and later deadly) things occur that suggest the family's house may be haunted. Or is human interference behind everything?

Despite using one of my least favourite tropes in all of cinema as if it were an Old Dark House movie made in the late 30s, Moxey's film is still pretty entertaining, if not particularly exciting. You can see how it could have been much more effective if it hadn't gone all Scooby Doo on its audience, for the seemingly supernatural moments are clearly playing to Moxey's strength the most, but it's a nice enough way to waste 70 minutes of one's life.

I, Desire aka Desire, the Vampire (1982): Ironically, this later attempt at being all-out supernatural by Moxey is less successful than the older movie. A female vampire working as a hooker and as a nurse (and how's that for mixed signals and/or fetishism?) collides with overly nosy law student and morgue attendant David Naughton. It might be the fact that the script is often rather clumsy and obvious where it seems to think that it's clever and subtle, or that Moxey makes more than one directorial decision that hints at self sabotage (wildcat noises for the vampire? Really?), or that the whole affair just drags a bit too much; in any case, while it's certainly not a horrible effort, the film is nothing to write home about in its inoffensive TV movie way.

The film does, however, contain a bit of choice scenery chewing by good old Brad Dourif, so Dourif completists (I know you're out there) will need to have a look anyhow.

The Attic Expeditions (2001): I can see why and how this film has gained a certain amount of cult traction over the years, what with it playing like a homemade horror film version of David Lynch adapting Philip K. Dick with eternal fan favourites like Jeffrey Combs, Ted Raimi and Wendy Robie in the cast. Unfortunately, the whole affair never really gels for me and seems to assume that being weird for weirdness' sake while pretending to be clever and profound is enough to make me overlook less than elegant direction, an atrocious lead performance by Andras Jones, and the fact that the film really isn't as clever and profound as it would like to be. Of course, even in its state of not being very good at all, The Attic Expeditions is at least trying to be different and clever instead of - say - going the ultra-generic gore route, which makes it difficult to be all that annoyed about it.

 

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