Three Films Make A Post: You feel your Heart POUNDING, You know It's out there, You can't SCREAM, NOW IT'S AT YOUR THROAT

Le Serpent aka Night Flight From Moscow aka The Serpent (1973): Generally, this French film by Henri Verneuil with a very international cast is declared to be one of the better serious spy movies of its time, and I certainly can see the care that went into the construction of its plot, approve of the cast and so on and so forth. However, in practice, I find the film pretty much insufferable. It's ponderously in love with its own seriousness, and as self-important as the most pompous film one could imagine. I'm also not at all convinced its plot needed to be told in quite this slow manner, and be quite this concentrated on least important matters.

Time after Time (1979): Very much lacking in self-importance and pomposity, but not in intelligence and a great cast, Nicholas Meyer's generally delightful film about the fight of a time-travelling H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) against Jack the Ripper (David Warner) in 1979 San Francisco, may be the director's best film; in the very least, it's his most consistently entertaining one. Meyer spends much time and love on Wells's culture shock when he realizes the new time he's landed in is not the socialist utopia he was hoping for, but in some respects even worse than the time he came from (though, truth be told, when we compare the ages in more detail than a movie like this can or wants to, I'd rather stay in 1979) in its more humorous and its darker aspects. Surprisingly enough, the film also manages to make its plot-driving romance between Wells and bank teller Amy (Mary Steenburgen) kinda sweet in a not too contrived and not too unbelievable way, which is pretty helpful seeing that the film's basic pessimistic thesis is that life in any age sucks if not for love. And honestly, how could I not love a film that doesn't even attempt to hide this ideology behind its dapper time-travelling adventure?

The Burning (1981): When, oh when will you learn, America!? As horror movies have proven again and again, there's nothing more dangerous - well, except for your gun laws - than sending one's children to summer camp. If they're not indoctrinated by a cult or possessed by aliens there, they are sure as hell going to be killed by one of the large number of summer camp oriented slashers. Case in point is this documentary about a horde of poor summer camping teenagers (many of them actually played by teenagers, which gives some of the murders a rather more disturbing note than they deserve) falling ill of a garden scissor lover named Cropsy who is out to take revenge for his horrible summer camp accident related burn wounds.

The resulting film is of course a slasher very much by numbers, but in 1981, slashers by numbers still had a certain budget, and people with a degree of talent in front of and behind the camera, so it's decently realized, mildly exciting, and rather well shot, which makes The Burning an okay enough way to spend one's time. In "spot them before they were famous" news, say hallo to Jason Alexander with hair.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,in short,sf,spies,horror,slasher,nicholas meyer,henri verneuil,yul brynner,malcolm mcdowell,david warner,mary steenburgen,tony maylam

The Double Man (1967)

High ranking US intelligence agent Dan Slater (Yul Brynner) has given the education of his son into the hands of his old friend - as far as a man like Dan can have friends - and former intelligence man Frank Wheatley (Clive Revill) who is now running a school in the Austrian part of the Alps. Consequently, and because Dan's a jerk, he hasn't spoken to his teenage son in two years. Still, when news reach Washington that his son has been killed in a skiing accident, Slater takes the next flight to Austria in the conviction somebody murdered his son to get to him.

Slater is just too right with this theory: his son's death is the first step in a needlessly complicated plan of Stasi agent Berthold (Anton Diffring) with the goal of replacing Slater with a surgically enhanced double.

Very, very slowly, Slater begins to investigate the circumstances of his son's death, following clues to a woman named Gina (Britt Ekland) who may be a witness or may be part of communist spy ring. However that may be, Slater's whole investigation is part of Berthold's plan, and every step he takes only leads the US agent further in the direction his enemies want him to go.

On paper, The Double Man is sure-fire satisfaction. A spy film starring a customarily intense Yul Brunner playing an agent who is also an utter bastard with stunted emotional development (or who just has locked away all of his emotions so securely it's questionable if he's even still human), confronted with his failings as a father and falling victim to a complicated conspiracy sounds pretty awesome on paper to me; alas, large parts of the film turn out to be just dull. For too many scenes in the film's first hour nothing much of interest is happening, unless you're very interested in watching a scowling Yul Brunner traipsing through an Austrian ski resort and stalking Britt Ekland; it doesn't help that the bad guys' plans on how to kidnap Slater seem just needlessly complicated, and not in an interesting silly spy movie way (the film's tone is too earnest for that) but in a "how can we fill these twenty minutes without having anything actually happen" kind of way. Frankly, it's just not very interesting at all.

That part of the film - most of its first hour - isn't really helped by the more often than not intrusive soundtrack, nor by the fact that an Austrian ski resort is not a location that provides much visual excitement (and I say that as a lover of snowy landscapes).

Director Franklin J. Schaffner may have directed some memorable films, but The Double Man again shows him to be an unmemorable director, a man whose films are technically perfectly fine, yet which lack any kind of personality; the film might as well have been directed by a robot.

The Double Man gets better in its last thirty minutes, when things start happening that are at least a little exciting. Suddenly, Schaffner even puts the rather dull ski resort and its strange social rituals to somewhat effective use, and the film culminates in a climax that is as cynical as anything I've seen in a spy movie. In how many other spy films, after all, does the hero survive the final confrontation because he didn't even really love his own son, or would at least never admit it?

For my tastes, these final thirty minutes are not quite enough to rescue the movie as a whole. The first hour is just too dull, everything in it too needlessly stretched out to be excused by the climax. I just can't shake the impression that The Double Man's script only ever provided plot for an hour-long movie, and Schaffner decided to just add forty minutes of filler to get the film up to feature length.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,spies,franklin j. schaffner,yul brynner,britt ekland,clive revill,anton diffring,reviews