A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
"J ack Palance is very upset over the plight of American actors," Hal Humphrey reported in 1967. Earlier that year, Palance had played his role in Antonio Isasi's caper film on location -- in Spain. "Now obviously there's no need except a financial one to make a movie about Las Vegas in Spain," he complained to Humphrey. He thought American studios were taking work away from American actors, stars like himself excepted, in pursuit of profit. Palance wished that the Screen Actors Guild would show more backbone, as if they could stop the trend. "Why should American actors sit and watch their living go down the drain while American producers either import foreign actors or go overseas and hire them?" he protested. Palance plays a good guy in the picture and seems to have been one in real life, at least at that moment.
At least he had the company of fellow Americans Lee J. Cobb and Gary Lockwood for this project, and at least Isasi sent a second-unit crew to Vegas for some money-shot scenes of the film's superdeluxe armored car rolling down the Sunset Strip. Around the same time, Elizabeth Taylor, who apparently had less scruples on the subject than Palance, insisted on having the Strip recreated on a Paris soundstage for one of her pictures. But despite Palance's griping, I can't help but be impressed by the pictorial results Isasi got in the Spanish desert. The contrast with Vegas is perhaps more stark than could have been illustrated by Nevada itself, and it pays off in one ingenious transition from that shot I mentioned of the armored car cruising by the casinos to a small troop of men trudging from the upper right corner of the widescreen frame into a wasteland of dunes. There's a hint of Lawrence of Arabia in those desert scenes, but They Came to Rob Las Vegas is basically the bastard child of The War Wagon and Takumi Furakawa's Nikkatsu noir Cruel Gun Story. It's a mobile caper film with a revenge/redemption element. Tony Ferris (Lockwood) rebuffs his gangster brother Gino (French actor Jean Servais) who, having just broken out of prison, wants to take one Steve Skorsky's (Cobb) armored cars, which the casinos use to transport their money and the Mob uses, or so suspects Treasury agent Douglas (Palance), to transport contraband. Tony says no to his brother because Skorsky has an overwhelming technological advantage with his armed and armored vehicles, his hi-def surveillance system (everyone has widescreen monitors), and his computerized security network. Gino tries anyway, and despite wielding bazookas the Skorsky vehicle wipes them out. Somehow Isasi and composer Georges Garvantez wring pathos from a failed armored-car robbery, and Gino's corpse face-down and alone in the street is a poignant sight, especially if you watch from Tony's point of view. Now he owes it to his dead brother to prove that a Skorsky car can be broken into and humble Skorsky himself in the bargain.
With a job as a blackjack dealer Tony starts an affair with Ann Bennett (German Elke Sommer, but who cares about the nationality when you look at her?), a high roller who happens to work for Skorsky and may be more than an employee to him. Through her Tony expects to get information on schedules and personnel so he can plan his desert assault precisely with his ragtag team of misfits. This means keeping a lot of balls in the air: convincing Ann that he loves her and isn't just using her; dissuading his gang from simply blowing up the armored car, should they catch it, so he can prove that the impenetrable machine can be cracked. Little does he know that Douglas will throw an extra ball at him by nabbing Skorsky's drivers on the very route Tony intends to intercept and replacing them with his own agents, who expect to find proof of illegal transactions. That doesn't stop the first stage of Tony's plan -- I won't spoil it -- but the car, with Skorsky's men still in the main compartment, remains a tough nut to crack as tensions build within the gang....
Palance might have been peeved because his good-guy role doesn't exactly play to his strengths, though it does allow for some suspicion of Douglas's ultimate motives to complicate matters further. This is really Lockwood's picture, the nearest thing he had to a star role in his best year in movies, and Isasi does his best to give him a star presence. Behind his shades Lockwood has something of the cool calculating demeanor of spaghetti western heroes, and in Sommer he has more woman to handle than his western counterparts normally did. They make a handsome couple, and Lockwood even gets to hold his own with the mighty Cobb in a climactic desert showdown as Tony tauntingly urges a hidden colleague to help Skorsky find his truck. Pictorially and musically the film is uneven in tone. Impressive location work in Vegas and the Spanish desert alternates with patently fake looking interior sets. Garvantez alternates between the poignant simplicity of Gino's requiem and spooky-sounding vocalise more suited to a giallo -- playing some on a stereo, Lockwood comments implausibly on how the music really gets you. Either way, the music definitely seems to fit the time, even if it's Euro genre rather than American pop time. Overall, there's enough going on visually and the story works well enough as a thiller (with something of a heart) to make this worth a look despite its underutilization of an apparently unhappy Palance. He probably wouldn't have been better off had the whole thing been filmed in Nevada, but he might have felt better about it all.
Raoul Walsh's High Sierra is my favorite Humphrey Bogart movie. The first of Bogart's 1941 breakthrough pictures that made him a leading-man star, it's overshadowed by the other one, The Maltese Falcon. So successful was Falcon that Warner Bros. stopped making films of Dashiell Hammett's novel after that third try. The studio did not retire W. R. Burnett's source novel for High Sierra, however. Walsh himself put it in western dress as Colorado Territory in 1948, and seven years later Stuart Heisler brought the story back into the 20th century with a brand new title that suggests something closer to despair than the tragic grandeur of the original movie. Admittedly, the High Sierra story could benefit from color and Cinemascope in ways not obviously beneficial to The Maltese Falcon. While the location work often looks good, Heisler lack's Walsh's more poetic sensibility and his feel for atmosphere. He makes a mistake right out of the gate, dispensing with the opening scene in which Roy Earle, an aging Dillinger type, is released from prison. In the original, you immediately get the contrast between imprisonment and the freedom that matters so much to Earle -- not to mention the mockery of freedom resulting from his surprise pardon, engineered only so he can take part in a hotel heist. Heisler's film opens with Earle already on the road to the tourist camp where his partners await him. Blame that on the script or on studio editing, but Heisler lacks visual flare. He usually stages scenes in long shots that emphasize the wide screen in a way that makes the sets, particularly the criminals' quarters, look oversized and artificial. The color throughout is overly bright and garish. The most interestingly thing Heisler does occasionally is tilt his camera, but you get the impression that he does that mainly so he can fit the heads of tall actors into shots where other performers are laying down. That and the actors are what you'll most likely remember about this film.
The actors face a greater challenge than Heisler. The biggest challenge faces Jack Palance, the remake's Roy Earle. I Died comes from the brief period when Hollywood contemplated making Palance not just a star but a leading man, maybe a Bogart for his time. He's just a little too young for the role, however -- bear in mind that Bogart himself was made to look older to play Earle. Palance is too strange a figure with his height and his angular face to match Bogart's everyman gravitas -- in his dark suits in the film's bright settings he becomes something like a piece of abstract animation. There's an odd serenity about him, when he isn't shooting people or keeping his punk partners in line, exemplified by his line, "I'm not angry at anybody." Maybe coldness is the word I'm looking for, but his co-star is partly to blame for that. If Palance is no replacement for Bogart he's at least an honorable alternative, but in place of High Sierra's Ida Lupino I Died casts Shelley Winters, and it's game over right there. If Palance seems too young for his part Winters definitely seems too old for the role Lupino played. She's too intense, compared to Lupino's slow burn, yet without achieving any real chemistry with Palance. I suppose her performance does help you understand why this film's Earle is initially more interested in the clubfooted but pretty Velma (Lori Nelson replaces Joan Leslie), whose surgery he pays for only to be rebuffed by the shallow girl. But you believed it anyway the first time, while it's harder to understand Earle's attraction to the Winters character. You really shouldn't have that problem watching this story.
Otherwise, this film is a feast of familiar faces, from Lon Chaney Jr. having an easy time (and a good scene) as a bedridden, boozing gangster to Lee Marvin implausibly cast as a mere "punk" whom Palance pistol-whips in one of the few scenes more impressively staged here than by Walsh, to fleeting glances of Warners prospects Dennis Hopper and Nick Adams. The cast deserves a better film than Heisler made, and the idea of remaking High Sierra with modern movie technology wasn't a bad one. But if Heisler was just going to plant Palance in soundstage mountains during the climax while the second unit romps on the real mountain, you can't help asking why anyone bothered.
Companeros is a thematic remake of Sergio Corbucci's Il Mercenario, with Franco Nero in a similar role as an archetypal foreign expert -- Polish before, he's a Swede now -- and Jack Palance as an even more eccentric antagonist: a Scottish (I think) pot smoker and bird fancier with an artificial hand. Added to the mix in place of Mercenario's Tony Musante is Tomas Milian, as much a spaghetti-western stalwart as Nero, as the archetypal primitive bandit. Corbucci gives him a Che Guevara look, complete with beret, but Milian's Vasco is no ideologue, but the usual self-interested, ignorant brute who almost by accident becomes an officer in the insurgent army of the retroactively regrettably named General Mongo (Jose Modalo). Mongo wears a fiery red tunic but is no leftist. His is one of at least two rival forces battling the Porfirio Diaz government in Mexico circa 1910. His main rival, for this movie's purposes, is the intellectual Professor Xantos (Fernando Rey), who has built a mass movement despite his personal nonviolence. Xantos was naive enough to seek support in the U.S., where he remains an involuntary guest as the story opens. The Americans are willing to support him against Diaz and Mongo, but only if he agrees to grant oil concessions to U.S. firms. While the Americans work on him, Mongo has taken a town from his followers. Xantos's treasury is inside a safe, but only he knows the combination. If Mongo is to pay the Swede for his boxcar full of weapons and explosives (disguised as a quarantined car), he needs the Swede and Vasco to cross the border and break his rival out of captivity. Once he has the information he needs, Mongo plans to put Xantos on trial and execute him.
For his natty attire the Swede (Franco Nero, above) earns the nickname "Penguin" from Vasco (Tomas Milian, below) who's never been warned about drinking while shooting.
This is a more broadly comical and less pictorially ambitious film than Il Mercenario, but Corbucci and cinematographer Alexander Ulloa still put together an attractive picture. Like most of the foreign expert/primitive bandit buddy films from Italy, Companeros is still a consciousness-raising exercise, but it shows characters changing in different ways. In the most predictable scenario, Vasco evolves from one of Mongo's goons to a supporter of Xantos, taking the side of his sometime girlfriend (Iris Berben) whom he transforms from long-haired beauty to pixie revolutionary by hacking off most of her hair after finding her in bed with the Swede. The native usually gets the girl in these pictures, while the foreign expert either dies (sometimes deservingly) or gains revolutionary consciousness himself. Sometimes his new loyalty is just a matter of friendship, and that seems partly the case with Nero here, despite the impending duel with Vasco that serves as a framing device for the Italian edition of the film. Xantos himself evolves during the picture, finally abandoning his implausible insistence (given the situation) on non-violence when he's in a no-alternative position to rescue the good guys from Palance. Given the time and the likely audiences, non-violence was never going to get far in spaghetti westerns.
Xantos (Fernando Rey, above) hopes to convince you of the justice of his cause, while Mongo (Jose Modalo, below) would just as soon shoot you as look at you.
As the new element in the Corbucci scheme, Milian makes the best impression. Even playing an ignorant brute as he often does -- Vasco starts a gunfight when he mistakes the flash of a camera for an attack -- the Cuban actor always manages to convey that his character's mind is working on some level. Nero isn't exactly challenged by his role but at least he seems to enjoy it, while Palance is in his own special place as an almost superfluous and certainly gratuitous villain.
Let's leave Jack Palance (above) alone with his bird and his bliss while acknowledging Iris Berben (below) and her ambivalent band of rebels.
For a Corbucci film, Companeros has little obvious influence on Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino's Corbucci homage, apart from a humorous tone that was also present, in a more moderate degree, in the more influential Mercenario. If anything, Companeros is Corbucci's homage to himself -- Vasco gets to drag a coffin around Django-style briefly -- or to Mercenario specifically. Its derivative nature keeps it from the top rank of Corbucci's westerns, but on its own terms it's an entertaining adventure that could be enjoyed easily enough by people who've never heard of the director or his earlier work.
What is it about Jack Palance that typed him as a barbarian? We saw him just last week as a Lombard, and now Schenectady NY sees him as a Mongol.
Let's take a closer look, thanks to SomethingWeird's YouTube channel.
Now for a high-toned literary adaptation, of a sort, in Palm Beach.
So it's the nudie-cutie answer to Gunga Din, I guess.
And here's a double-feature opening in Salt Lake City.
It's always interesting to see how a sad little picture like Phantom Planet gets ballyhooed as a "Science Shocker of the Space Age."It's still amazing sometimes to imagine something like that actually playing somewhere as a first-run attraction. Back to SomethingWeird for the trailer; remember, this is the film putting its best foot forward.
It isn't even in color! But Assignment: Outer Space is, as The FearChannel demonstrates.
Back in the innocent Sixties, Americans apparently didn't know what a mercenary was. Or so film distributors may have thought. As a result, a film known in Great Britain as The Mercenaries was called Dark of the Sun here, though the latter, to be fair, was also the name of the movie's source novel. Likewise, when the time came to translate Sergio Corbucci's Il Mercenario for American audiences, the original U.S. distributor opted for the title A Professional Gun. Another possible explanation is that, if Americans knew what mercenary meant, they might assume that a film of that name would deal with violence in contemporary Africa, as Dark of the Sun did, rather than horseback action during the Mexican Revolution. The word Gun probably did more than anything else to identify Corbucci's film as a western, if not a spaghetti western, for those first U.S. audiences. But could any tweaking of the title prepare those people for the dazzling experience they were about to see? The year is 1968, and Il Mercenario is already in many ways self-consciously derivative of past Italian westerns. At moments the picture borders on parody, but Corbucci and five co-writers achieve a kind of transcendent parody that winks at the subgenre's conventions while remaining a sincere, authentic cinematic experience.
Il Mercenario is what some call a "Zapata Western," one of the many Italian westerns set primarily in Mexico rather than the U.S. Set during the Revolution of the 1910s, it anticipates the end-of-the-West atmosphere of similarly set The Wild Bunch, but does without the elegiac tone. The Italian filmmakers are too interested in revolution to worry about the end of things. Mercenario resembles Wild Bunch less than it does its major Italian precursors: Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General, which established the motif of the ambivalent team-up of Mexican bandit/rebel and Gringo specialist, and Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which set the three-character pattern repeated here. In addition, Mercenario references Leone's For A Few Dollars More in its climactic staging by the "good" hero of a fair-fight showdown between the "bad" and "ugly" characters. For A Few Dollars More itself doesn't yet have the good-bad-ugly formula down -- it's really two goods vs. a bad-ugly -- so Mercenario's climax seems more generically perfect. But in discussing the climax I'm getting ahead of myself.
The Gringo is Kowalski (Franco Nero, star of Corbucci's genre breakthrough Django), an erstwhile Polish revolutionary who's hired by a family of Mexican mine owners to transport their silver to the U.S. Before setting out for the mine, he has a shootout with a gambler and by killing him earns the enmity of Curly (Jack Palance), our Bad character. If the story has a weakness, it's that Corbucci never really builds Curly up as a super gunfighter or even a particularly tough guy. Curly usually has other people do his dirty work for him. Corbucci illustrates this by having his camera follow Palance while his goons beat or kill people offscreen, only returning to the scene of violence when Curly inspects their handiwork. Palance makes up for this with a performance that grows stranger, without really going over the top, as the film goes on.
Arriving at the mine, Kowalski finds that the proprietors have been captured and hanged by Paco Roman (Tony Musante), a small-time bandit first scene rebelling against his wretched existence as a mine worker and barely escaping execution by trampling. Paco is the Ugly character: uneducated and crude, resentful toward inequality but constantly tempted by self-interest. But self-interest defines Kowalski. When the army descends on the mine, he offers to aid the bandits with the machine gun he brought along to defend the silver -- but only if Paco pays him from the plunder. The army routed, Kowalski goes his way -- only to run into Curly's gang. Paco rescues him, having realized that Kowalski's weapons and wits will make his a more formidable rebel force. Inexplicably, they spare Curly after killing his men, though they probably expect him to die after they strip him down to his shirt (leaving no bottoms) to make his way back to civilization. Curly shows his true character under adversity, however, defiantly tossing the shirt at his enemies' feet and marching off stark naked after promising that he'll meet both men again.
With Kowalski's aid, Paco becomes a terror, sacking towns and acquiring a girlfriend, Columba (Giovanna Ralli) who may be the most cynical of all the characters, having no illusions about either of her liberators. The two protagonists are constantly renegotiating their alliance. Kowalski is always ready to walk away, but every time Paco realizes anew that he can't do without the "Polack," the mercenary demands more pay and gets it. Whatever idealism he had in Europe seems long gone, while Paco's experiences of power as he judges between rich and poor make him more ambitious and less tolerant of Kowalski's greed. Finally, he decides that the Pole can't leave Mexico without surrendering all his plunder to "the revolution" and throws him in prison to prove his point. Now, however, Curly reappears, apparently as an adviser to the regular Army. What advice can he offer? The same kind Carl Denham offers... airplanes! Actually, it's one biplane, but it does devastating damage to Paco's base of operations, and it's a shocking intervention of modernity into our familiar spaghetti-western fantasyland. As usual, it's up to Kowalksi to save the day, and the Pole may be the ultimate spaghetti western hero. How many others ever shot down an airplane?
Kowalski's victory is just one round in a fight Paco can't win, and both men have to flee. Months later, Paco is a clown in a circus fighting a pantomime bull when Kowalksi finds him. Curly finds him at the same time, but as always, Curly is soon short of sidekicks and it's time for the climax. It's one of the greatest showdowns in spaghetti westerns. Kowalski has the upper hand and makes Paco and Curly fight a duel with rifles, each with one bullet. They walk to opposite ends of the bull ring and wait for the Pole to ring a bell three times before turning and firing. The bell punctuates an unusually upbeat theme from Ennio Morricone; it's the same music you hear when Uma Thurman punches her way out of the grave in Kill Bill Vol. 2. It seems to be the music playing in Curly's head. As the moment of truth approaches, while Paco is stuck out there in clown makeup, Palance puts on an beatific expression, and you get the eerie feeling that he may not care whether he wins or loses. He's put his fate in the hands of a higher power. Superficially it looks like a mockery of Leone's showdowns; one of the combatants literally is a clown. But the overall effect, between the music and Palance's ecstatic anticipation, is like something sacred. Earlier, Paco's gang had desecrated a Catholic street festival by disguising themselves as saints on a float so they can assassinate a podium full of watching army officers, with Columba as a bearded, machine-gun firing angel or saint. The duel is their true sacrament, or their auto-da-fe -- or if it's not theirs, it's ours.
Unfortunately, the film has nearly 15 minutes left to go and no hope of topping that showdown. The final twists and reversals all seem anticlimactic, but the whole story has really been little more than a pretext for cinematic sensation. Django and the bleak, wintry Great Silence are regarded as the two towers of Corbucci's work in the western genre, but on the pictorial level, at least, The Mercenary may be his masterpiece. I've mentioned the fluid camera movements over long takes as the director actually avoids violence to follow Palance around, but practically every frame of the picture is a brilliant composition. Cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa has a lot to do with that. Mercenario has a richer palate than many spaghettis; you're more aware of the sky in all its colors than you are in many genre films that foreground blasted earth, stark mountains or mud.
This film has the sweep of high adventure, and Morricone rises to the occasion with an epic score. Nero is more a presence than a personality, but that works just fine for this picture, while Musante somehow manages to underplay his Ugly role, making Paco thoughtful if not necessarily intelligent. And as I've suggested, in an underwritten part Palance is amazing. The Mercenary may not be among the greatest spaghetti westerns, but it's certainly one of the most enjoyable I've seen in a long time.
* * *
Footnote on the word mercenary: After posting this review I watched The Treasure of Pancho Villa, a 1955 film directed by George Sherman, on my DVR. In one scene Shelley Winters, playing a bluestocking turned Villista, calls Rory Calhoun's character a mercenary. Calhoun calls "mercenary" a "two-dollar word" ($2 were worth more in 1916) and adds, unrepentantly "If that means a gun for hire, sure, that's me." Consider that a historical vocabulary lesson.
In what country -- on what planet? -- are Alain Delon and Jack Palance brothers? The answer proposed by director Ralph Nelson and screenwriter Zekial Marko, who adapted his own novel, is long-disputed multicultural Trieste, where the presumably Slavic-heritaged Pedaks would speak fluent Italian. Walter (Palance) is a full-time criminal, but Eddie (Delon) has gone straight after a stay in stir for shooting a cop, also from the old country (Van Heflin) in mid-robbery. The cop still carries a grudge against Eddie, so when someone driving a car that matches the description of Eddie's vehicle, and wearing a coat that matches the description of Eddie's garment, robs a Chinatown corner store in San Francisco and kills the owner's wife, Inspector Vido's natural assumption is that Eddie is to blame. But the way the robbery was filmed automatically tells us differently. In any event, Vido's suspicions lead Eddie's arrest at his warehouse workplace and his losing his job. Without a job to support his wife (Ann-Margret) and daughter, and too proud to let his wife work as a scantily-clad waitress, Eddie's ready to listen when Walter proposes robbing the warehouse where millions in lightweight platinum are stored. A modest caper ensues, involving tapping the phone line from the warehouse and intercepting a call from purposefully spooked security guards so Delon and an accomplice can show up in cop costumes and get let in. By this time Vido is starting to realize that Eddie had been framed for the grocery job, but can he and Eddie trust each other to get Eddie and his family out alive as Walter's gang falls apart and one sinister accomplice (John David Chandler) decides he doesn't want to share the loot with anyone?...
Once a Thief marked Delon's first job in Hollywood. Studio publicity touted his Gallic rebellious streak, reporting that he'd scandalized M-G-M veterans by smuggling wine into the studio commissary. In a more peculiar bit of publicity, gossip columnists reported that Delon and Ann-Margret had briefly feuded after he had hit her too hard for one of several slapping scenes. The Frenchman reportedly resolved the situation by sending the actress flowers, but there followed an item reporting that A-M was vetoing cheesecake publicity shots for the film on the ground that those undercut the film's dramatic vibe. Seems like an unhappy experience for her, and probably not too happy for most involved in the picture.
Nelson's picture -- his follow-up to Lilies of the Field and Father Goose -- arguably qualifies as a late-noir or neo-noir picture. It boasts nice location cinematography (apart from the occasional process shot) by Robert Burks and obvious noir situations, from the ex-con victim of circumstance to the obsessed, misguided, bullying cop. It adds a sheen of Sixties sleaze with explicit references to lesbians and the aforementioned outbursts of Delon's macho brutality. The worst of those comes when Eddie invades the club where his wife is waitressing. He slams her into a wall, then tries to rip her costume off, saying: "Don't cheat your customers, show them everything!" before dragging her into the street. This comes with the territory of the story but there's something slightly gratuitous about it as well. It means to be a nasty movie -- Chandler's character comes across as a crypto child molester, for instance, -- but it also wants to play for pathos by putting a child in jeopardy and becomes merely pathetic in the mawkish sense at the end.
Apart from Chandler, who is effectively creepy, no one's really in top form here. Heflin's performance is by-the-book predictable. Palance has little to do and is so eclipsed as a villain by Chandler that you wonder finally which character actually framed Eddie. Ann-Margret's response to the rough circumstances of her role is to ramp up her performance to unmodulated hysteria for the final reels. As for Delon, his foreigner's English is adequate as usual, but the role seems wrong for him, especially in hindsight. Nelson clearly saw him as a stereotype fiery Mediterranean type and set him to work chewing scenery, whether when whaling on A-M or in a showoff scene at an unemployment office that seemed better suited for Jack Nicholson. You could have sent Once a Thief to Jean-Pierre Melville before he shot Le Samourai as a primer on how not to use Alain Delon in a crime movie. The cool that Melville did so much to make part of Delon's persona is simply not there. But I'm probably exaggerating my disappointments a little because this whole package clearly had the potential to be much better, and I think people who come across Once a Thief without the high expectations I had for Delon, Palance et al might find it not so bad. Crime film fans with an eye for the genre's evolution will probably get the most out of it, but most people should get at least a few good jolts out of it.
Did you ever have one of those days? One moment Tom Lewis (Keir Dullea) is stuck in traffic in the middle of some sort of evacuation, and in the next he finds himself dressed in prison garb in the middle of a wilderness. He meets a woman, Martine (Hollis McLaren), and several men, all similarly dressed. They tell him to consult a card in his pocket which tells him how many people he's killed. It seems that they're all murderers, though that's news to Lewis, and they seem to have escaped from prison with no idea of where to go. While they ponder their predicament, random letters appear on screen and the camera pans and scans desperately to keep up with them. These reveal that we're looking at an EMI production of a Peter Sasdy film with butchered cinematography, courtesy of Mill Creek Entertainment's Sci-Fi Invasion collection. The presentation doesn't inspire confidence, and that's probably for the best. This film would probably be just as stupid in all its original widescreen splendor.
Our wanderers are soon beset at a creekside by a potbellied road agent and his sidekick who confiscate everyone's boots and rape Martine. Observing from a discreet distance is Jack Palance on horseback, a man in black with a silver cross for a badge. After the rebooted desperadoes go their way, he identifies himself as Sheriff Friendlander and herds the barefoot victims into his town, Blood City, and deposits them in a secure house in advance of their choosing day. Blood City is a place with its own laws, imposed, from the look of things, by the totalitarian dictatorship of the Red Cross.
At the choosing day, Lewis and his new friends will be -- you guessed it -- chosen for a period of indentured servitude. Until that time, they're eligible to be killed by established citizens or their bodyguards, and they're not entitled to bear arms to defend themselves. Citizens themselves are entitled to kill one another until someone has killed twenty people. Such a person becomes an "Immortal," like Friendlander, whom no one may shoot at. Lewis isn't having this. When he wants footwear, he goes to a bootmaker and beats the man into providing what he needs. In general, he's full of gripes. He fails to understand why everything in Blood City boils down to "kill, kill, kill!" His complaints get to the sheriff, who suddenly flashes back to a better time when he (or Jack Palance) was a benign academic of some sort. This reverie sets off alarms in a distant laboratory where technicians in modern dress monitor a mannequin on a hospital bed. One of the technicians, Katherine (Samantha Eggar) pushes some buttons and Friedlander promptly forgets what he was trying to remember.
Above, the fantasy of the Blood City Slickers tour package. Below, the sad reality.
At this point, Welcome to Blood City veers away from its apparent destiny as a Westworld ripoff and reveals itself as an even more specific ripoff of that old Prisoner episode where Number Six and his tormentors dress up as cowboys. The ripoff is so thorough that Lewis is at one point informed, apropos of nothing, that he is "Number Nine." Gradually, tortuously, Blood City reveals its purpose. The citizens, prisoners, slaves, bodyguards, etc. are being cultivated or culled in the hope of finding a "Killmaster" to do an unidentified government's dirty work in distant parts of the globe. As an Immortal, Friendlander has been the most likely candidate so far (his scholarly background notwithstanding), but Katherine believes that Lewis is something special. She advances his cause by programming herself into Blood City as a citizen who throws Lewis a rifle so he can save his life, kill a man, become a citizen, join the Red Cross, and acquire his own bodyguards from the man he killed. While the real Katherine is in no way hooked up to the virtual reality (avant la lettre) simulation, she gets off watching video footage of her Blood City self done up as a saloon girl getting it on with Lewis, while a colleague complains that her interest borders on the pornographic. Forget about scientific objectivity. Instead, Katherine grows murderously jealous of Lewis's continuing interest in poor Martine. When Lewis plots to liberate her from slavery to the fat robber from the early scenes, Katherine and her posse intervene, and when the big slob uses Martine as a human shield, she coolly puts a bullet in her virtual (?) rival's brain.
Not satisfied with this result, Katherine resolves to terminate Lewis once and for all. From her control post in the lab, she can manipulate reality in Blood City to make Friendlander appear out of nowhere like Droopy Dog whenever Lewis tries to elude him. When Friendlander isn't sufficient to her purpose, she empowers one of Lewis's erstwhile fellow victims to whack the renegade. But something goes wrong here as well. Lewis is killed fair and square in Blood City, but he wakes up in the real world -- that's not supposed to happen, at least not so soon. But before Katherine can follow through terminating the man, her boss (Barry Morse) appears to insist that Lewis be retained to lead an Elite Force. In the meantime, in Sasdy's big would-be mindfuck finish, Lewis staggers around his room (where he'd at first looked a lot like the dummy previously playing Jack Palance), discovering first a bunch of TV monitors showing atrocity footage from around the world, and then a reject room where the real Friendlander, Martine, etc. stagger about in a white-clad stupor. Confronted with such horror, Lewis takes the only escape route available to him, somehow reprogramming himself into Blood City and riding off into the sunset.
Pay no attention to the people behind the curtain.
I see what Sasdy and his writers were trying to say, but no -- no one in their right mind, and compared to those other poor souls Lewis is in his right mind, would put themselves back in the idiot universe of Blood City. Hell, given a choice between becoming a Killmaster, or getting an apparent lobotomy, and watching Welcome to Blood City, I can cut the choice down to two pretty quickly. Sasdy finishes a remarkable two-part cinematic coup here; after making one of the worst horror films of the 1970s in the form of The Devil Within Her/Sharon's Baby/ I Don't Want to Be Born, he bounces right back to make one of the worst sci-fi films of the decade. It qualifies for that ranking because it confuses incoherence for originality when it isn't brazenly stealing used ideas and wastes an otherwise capable cast of stars. If anything, Blood City is worse than the baby movie because its ineptitude is less amusing. It's no surprise that it was television from then on for Sasdy, with the somehow fitting exception of the Pia Zadora vehicle The Lonely Lady. Need I add that Mill Creek's atrocious rendering does the film no favors? Since it does none for itself, I guess you can't blame Mill Creek too much.
Between 1968 and 1974, Charles Bronson occupied an ambiguous position in the movie business. In Europe and much of the world, Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time in the West had made the veteran character actor a real star. But Leone's film had flopped in the U.S., and Bronson would not really become a superstar in his homeland until Michael Winner's Death Wish appeared six years later. Nevertheless, global demand for Bronson meant work for him in Hollywood. Winner was an important part of Bronson's American build-up, directing him in The Mechanic, The Stone Killer and this Spanish-shot western before the team struck paydirt with their urban-vigilante tale. The title role in Chato's Land seems relatively thankless from an acting standpoint -- Bronson has no more than a couple of lines in English, and not many more in Apache -- but the film anticipates Death Wish in its emphasis on revenge, albeit in a manner designed to disturb rather than gratify American audiences.
Chato's Land is the story of a posse's pursuit of a half-breed who killed a racist sheriff and the breed's turning of the tables on his pursuers. Chato shot the sheriff to save himself from summary execution for the crime of drinking in a white man's saloon. As he flees the scene, Gerry Wilson's screenplay takes its time introducing us to the members of the posse. Most prominent and flamboyant, at first, is Quincey (Jack Palance), a former Confederate soldier and more recent U.S. Army scout and Indian fighter. His donning of his old Rebel coat is a sign of bad new, especially given when this movie was made, but Palance's performance is one of many ways the film defies our expectations. We expect him to play a racist fanatic leading the posse to doom, but while Quincey certainly sees the hunt for Chato as a nostalgic chance for fresh military glory, the film is very much the story of his disillusionment. Compared to many of his fellow westerners -- especially the crew led by Jubal Hooker (Simon Oakland), Quincey comes across as an intelligent, moderate and ultimately weak man. The hunt evolves into a power struggle between Quincey and Jubal, in which Jubal's unrelenting hatred for Indians and the loyalty of his kinfolk give him advantages that outweigh Quincey's experience and wisdom. Along with these, the posse picks up a number of people, played by a formidable gang of character actors, who join with different degrees of enthusiasm -- many have work to do on their land -- but a common sense of communal obligation to fight Indians. One family refuses to join, their barechested patriarch chasing the posse away at gunpoint. He makes such a forceful impression that you expect to see him again, but you won't. His sole purpose in the film is to show us the only way anyone could avoid what's to come.
Chato doesn't go out of his way to kill his pursuers. In the first half of the film, he's only interested in getting them off his back. If he can do that by sabotaging their water supply or scaring off their horses, fine. He just wants to get back to his family and back to work catching wild horses. He makes it, but the posse, helped by a half-Yacqui tracker, never falls too far behind. While Chato hunts horses, the posse finds his wife. Jubal's boys are determined to rape her, while Quincey and the others who are plainly appalled by the idea find themselves powerless -- or simply lacking the will -- to stop the atrocity. A posse is not an army, Quincey concedes, and his uniform gives him no special authority over Jubal or his kin. When the rapists stake the wife out naked to insult and lure Chato into an ambush, Quincey insists on covering her with a blanket, but Jubal's crew won't have it. As it happens, Chato creates a distraction that enables him to free his wife, but his partner in the horse business is killed in the fighting. He now has two offenses to avenge, and now he fights to kill.
Along the way, Wilson and Winner have tempted us to differentiate between the real scumbags like Jubal and the men with remnants or rudiments of decency like Quincey. Viewers are likely to divide the posse into those they want to see die and those they'd rather see live. The problem is, Chato doesn't differentiate. As far as we know, he wants to see the whole posse dead, not knowing who did or didn't rape his wife. As the hunted becomes the hunter and the fiftysomething Bronson strips down to wiry, loinclothed virility, the movie becomes a stark, unsettling parable of collective responsibility. If the first half of the film was a fairly familiar Vietnam metaphor, the second half is a nightmare of revolutionary retribution, a rage and a reckoning that'll spare no one. It belies the logic of the traditional western, which is spelled out in lines lifted nearly verbatim from John Ford's The Searchers about how an Indian will only keep after something for only so long, while the American will keep at it to the bitter end. In Chato's Land it's the Indian, the breed -- the Other -- who is unrelenting, just as the posse turns upon itself. The film grows unpredictable as the confrontations we've been long expecting -- Quincey vs. Chato or Jubal vs. Chato -- are denied us, until we're left with the two most sympathetic or least offensive members of the posse, one of whom is killed with sudden bluntness, falling face-first into a fire. The film closes with one man desperately stumbling through hopeless terrain as Chato watches like an impassive, implacable pagan god.
Bronson doesn't have to do much more than be a presence here, but to be such a presence at his age, at that time, is an impressive feat. Among his antagonists, Palance clearly stands out with what may be one of his best performances, but the ensemble that includes Oakland, James Whitmore, Richard Basehart, Richard Jordan and others is uniformly interesting, each developing a distinctive personality grounded in the life he left behind. Some, like Oakland and Jordan, are over-the-top monsters, but that's necessary for the film to have its effect by making other characters more likable but no less vulnerable.
Chato's Land is an American western filmed in spaghetti territory, and maybe a director who is neither American nor Italian is ideally suited to split the difference, combining the brutality and stark landscapes of the spaghettis with the American commitment to more rounded character development and an introspective quality characteristic of the Seventies. The film may look Italian to an extent, but Jerry Fielding's score reinforces its American essence. Audiences in 1972 may have cheered Bronson on here as they would when Death Wish played, but Chato's Land is, in a sense, a more politically correct vigilante movie and a more honestly disturbing one for daring Americans to imagine themselves, to the extent that they identify with any of the posse members, as targets for a revenge that isn't fair, but might be just.
Notice how the trailer makes the posse look like complete aggressors, leaving no hint of Chato's original offense. It comes from the VideoDetective website.
Meet Jack Palance, international man of adventure.
Not for our hero the high-class world of the Sixties superspy. In Michael D. Moore's movie Palance plays Rick Masters, a smuggler and salvager who lives on his own boat with his pool-hustler girlfriend (Alizia Nur). Their happy repose is interrupted one day when a trio of elderly Chinese gentlemen seek shelter on the boat. They're being pursued by agents of Nico Patrai (Fernando Lamas), a Portuguese who runs the so-called "Mafia of Macao." We were introduced to him earlier as he negotiated in typical hardball style with the Chinese elders on their native island. A ship carrying precious "Nitra-II" explosives has run aground on the island. It belongs to the islanders by right of salvage, but Patrai demands it for himself, or else. The islanders can't move it themselves and can't defend themselves against Patrai's goons. But after seeing a shirtless, shoeless Masters defend himself quite well against several of the goons who storm aboard the boat, they invite him to pick up the Nitra II and move it to Hong Kong. They offer him 1/4 of the take, but he negotiates it up to 1/3.
Fernando Lamas (finger upraised, right) would be a Bond villain if he could.
Masters puts together a motley team including a Scots-Chinese duo who stage fixed boxing-karate exhibition matches and his old pal Vigo (Aldo Ray), now an unenthusiastic tour guide. They battle their way into Patrai's compound to rescue the kidnapped island elders, then finesse their way to the island and the Nitra II. For a while, there's a little suspense over whether the crew will sell the islanders out to Patrai, or whether Palance will score with the island girl who persists in calling him her brother. But in time, of course, the gang will have to fight their way back to Hong Kong....
Don't let the "Dragon" in the title fool you. This isn't a martial arts film unless you count the art of brawling. The title actually refers to the legend of St. George, with whom a surprisingly cosmopolitan island elder equates Rick Masters, Patrai being the dragon. This is really an enthusiastic adventure film with a lot of old-timey pulp flavor, the stuff of contemporary "men's adventure" or "sweat" magazines. It has to be considered a B movie, but vivid location work in Hong Kong and environs and the help of an island full of extras enhance Kill a Dragon's production values beyond its budget. The virtual tourist in me thrills to the Hong Kong footage and the complete lack of fakery involved in filming them. The story itself is silly, the dialogue corny. The elders are prone to proverbs like "Every dragon give birth to St. George who slay it" or "It is the honor of the murdered that he is not the murderer." Even the villain has a hard time taking the story seriously; Lamas can't seem to help cracking smiles or smirks when he's in the power of his enemies. But the story here doesn't have to be taken seriously. It's the star performances that carry the film, whether they're intentionally or unintentionally entertaining.
Above, tourists appear to flinch from the breath of Your Tour Guide, Aldo Ray. Below: "Look, limey, you swish your way, and I'll swish mine!" is authentic dialogue from the movie.
Palance is clearly having fun playing the hero and doing all his own fight scenes in manly fashion, while Lamas is endearingly ludicrous as a vicious criminal overlord in a club jacket and loafers. Aldo Ray seems to have been hammered for the entire production, and that's a shame considering where his career had been, but I can't deny that his shameless turn here, including some time in a dress, added to my admittedly guilty enjoyment of this savory chunk of cinematic junk food. Kill a Dragon is a wild world of cinema campground I'll recommend to anyone who shares my pleasure in the cityscapes of the past, the meta-drama of troubled careers, and Jack Palance kicking ass. Oldtrailer09 has imported the Kill a Dragon trailer from TCM to YouTube. Check it out.
Over the past two weeks my friend Wendigo and I have noticed many differences between Tod Browning's 1931 film of Dracula and Jess Franco's purportedly more faithful version from 1970. Despite the great gulf in time, Franco's film is closer in spirit to Browning's than it is to a TV movie made just three years later by Dan Curtis. It's a film we both saw on its original broadcast as kids, and watching it again brought back strong memories of a sometimes-impressive production that's had considerable influence on vampire movies ever since.
The influence of Curtis's Dracula is really an extension of the influence of Curtis's famous gothic soap opera of the 1960s, Dark Shadows. As Curtis says in a DVD interview, he ripped himself off in encouraging Richard Matheson to incorporate a reincarnation angle based on Barnabas Collins's great love for Josette, whom he discovers reborn centuries later as Maggie Evans. Curtis also ripped himself off by borrowing some of the soap's musical cues for this film. Thematically, Dark Shadows built on the romantic vibe that Christopher Lee had reignited with Horror of Dracula, but over time Curtis built up Barnabas, originally introduced as a pure villain, as a sympathetic character based on audience response to the vampire's tragic longing for lost love. With Dark Shadows, Wendigo saw a variation of the demon-lover rape/seduction scenario that attracted women to vampires. The soap is more of a "Beauty and the Beast" concept, allowing women to fantasize about redeeming a monster through selfless love. In his Dracula, Curtis goes with the reincarnation plot again, having Dracula somehow come across a newspaper clipping of Lucy Westenra before he meets Jonathan Harker to give him a motivation for going to England that Curtis didn't perceive in Stoker's novel.
Two kinds of art direction: an important painting (above) and an eerie seascape with the beached Demeter and crew in the foreground while Dracula waits for a cab on the strand.
Wendigo doesn't agree with Curtis about Dracula's lack of motivation. Anyone in 1897 would be drawn to England, he says, because it was the center and capital of the world. Simply put, the island empire gave him the widest selection of victims. Most importantly, as Stoker suggests, Dracula needs to find someplace where not everyone has taken a vampire-defense course, where folks are unlikely to believe in such a thing as him. Lacking the anglocentric focus, as an American producer, Curtis was probably wondering why Dracula bothered with such a backwater. He probably also felt that the novel's motivation didn't give the vampire enough of a story arc, but it might be anachronistic of us to say so. As far as Wendigo is concerned, Curtis simply can't cope with the fact that Dracula more or less randomly targeted Lucy Westenra because of the awkward coincidence of his arrival near the house where Jonathan Harker's fiancee is a guest. In the novel, Lucy is no more than a target of opportunity, for whom Dracula feels nothing. Curtis clearly felt a need to amp up the drama by making Lucy meaningful to Dracula somehow. The same logic leads other adapters to tie Renfield to Dracula more closely (though Curtis dispenses with the character altogether).
The reincarnation angle may seem like a natural for vampires, but in cinema history Curtis most likely owes his idea to Karl Freund's The Mummy, which in turn borrows it from H. Rider Haggard's She. But The Mummy didn't make women swoon over Boris Karloff, to our knowledge, though that may have been the actor's handicap. There's probably a reason why Karloff didn't play vampires much. His Imhotep comes off as little more than a creepy stalker. Even though the film reveals that he is right to believe the romantic lead to be his lost love reincarnated, she finally refuses to reciprocate his love because she will not pay the price of the "one moment of agony" that means her physical death. Vampires go about the same business more subtly and seductively, visiting your bedroom and not with a knife out. A reincarnation angle helps humanize a vampire, but in a way that Wendigo feels undercuts his horror. It's an invitation to pity of a kind typical of American monster movies since the time of Lon Chaney Sr., but Wendigo insists that vampires aren't properly pitiable creatures. Audiences miss the point of a vampire when they forget that all the seduction is just a camouflage facade, beneath which a grim beast plans his kill. Of course, we realize that vampires have taken new archetypal life as some higher form of humanity; whether that's a good thing remains subject to debate. "Real" vampires are more like the Volturii, let's say, than the Cullens.
Maybe because this is Dracula and not Dark Shadows, Curtis, Matheson and Jack Palance don't go overboard with the romantic aspect of the reincarnation angle. We see Palance in the past mourning over "Maryam's" death, but his discovery of her reincarnation as Lucy doesn't inspire the sort of courtship we see in Francis Coppola's Dracula. Dracula puts the bite on Lucy with little foreplay that we can see, without any hint that he's told her about her "past," and without her consent for all we know. He isn't out to redeem himself through love. He just wants what he wants and has a big tantrum when he loses it. Palance is good with the tantrums; he gets another after the vampire hunters ransack his crib and wreck his coffins. The tantrums arguably underscore Dracula's essential selfishness, reminding us that the reincarnation angle is his fantasy, not Lucy's -- and it isn't necessarily true, either.
Both Dracula and his brides play rough, or as rough as TV allowed back in 1973.
Above all, Palance brings menace to the part. He's more convincingly powerful physically than the relatively gawky Christopher Lee, and Curtis intended to sell more strongly than ever that Dracula has superhuman strength. You don't doubt that he's a mighty man, which makes it apropos that this film, hard on the heels of Florescu and McNally's In Search of Dracula, is the first movie to our knowledge that explicitly identifies Dracula with Vlad (the Impaler) Tepes. Palance you can believe as a leader of armies, and the whole voivode angle has a great payoff at the very end when we hear the martial music of the past and soldiers chanting Dracula's name as the vampire is left in ultimate defeat, impaled in an act of poetic justice or simply dead with his boots on as a warrior may have preferred. Palance can also be civilized, and comes across as quite urbane in his early encounter with Harker. He's at his best in these scenes as he struggles to control his killer instincts while prodding Harker to hurry up with the paperwork on the Carfax sale. It's an intensely physical performance in the manner of a coiled serpent, with less emphasis on the Count's mesmeric charisma. Wendigo suggests that Palance, like Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins, relies more on the hint of telepathic control than on Lugosi-like hypnotic power. Where Lugosi tries to stare you down, Palance concentrates visibly on projecting his power across distances. Match close-ups of the two and it may look like Lugosi has something Palance lacks, but Wendigo says that Palance is giving Curtis exactly what he wants. He may not have Dracula's essential foreignness, but there's something alien somehow about Palance himself that makes him nearly an ideal vampire.
Curtis's film, like Franco's and Coppola's is sometimes advertised as "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Like those, it finds unique ways to deviate from the novel, though the reincarnation angle stops well short of where Coppola will take it. The major omission, as we've mentioned, is Renfield, whom this movie doesn't need because it has no insane asylum. Renfield is often the most entertaining thing in a Dracula movie, but he isn't really essential to the story. He's susceptible to Dracula's influence because of his pre-existing mania, but Lucy's own vulnerability proves the same point. Surprising as it may seem, Wendigo didn't really miss Renfield this time -- it may have helped that we'd seen arguably the worst Renfield ever last week -- nor did we miss Dr. Seward and the usually-omitted Quincey Morris. More disturbing to Wendigo was the early elimination of Jonathan Harker from the story; he is the hero of the novel, after all, and taking him out of the equation reduces Mina's relevance. In this version especially, Wendigo found himself wondering why Mina (pronounced Minna this time) still hung around the Westenra place after her friend had died. Worse yet for Harker, Curtis's treatment of him isn't even original; it's just a do-over of Horror of Dracula, as is a big part of the ending. On the other hand, once Dracula targets Mina Curtis sticks considerably closer to Stoker's plot than he had before. He limits himself to two vampire hunters -- Van Helsing and Arthur Holmwood -- but Simon Ward at least makes an adequate lead by default. The two lead actresses, Pamela Brown and Fiona Lewis, left something to be desired, unfortunately. They looked a little too old and a little too frumpy, but let's remember that this was made for TV.
The film's major if not shocking casting failure is Nigel Davenport, an actor Wendigo has liked in many other roles, as Van Helsing. Davenport is simply too British for the role, when it seems important in the novel that Van Helsing is as foreign as Dracula himself. The whole point, Wendigo thinks, was that Britain had purged itself of the spirituality and superstition that would have alerted Britons to Dracula's menace. Folkloric vampires are foreign to British culture, and Britons need a foreign informant to clarify the nature of the threat they face. Davenport comports himself well enough and wields a lance with authority at the end, but he may be the worst Van Helsing ever due to one scene. He and Holmwood have found Dracula preparing to ravish Mina. Van Helsing produces a cross. Dracula tells him to throw it away. Van Helsing does so. You've got to be shittin' us! That does not happen! Wendigo isn't quite ready to name Davenport the very worst, but he'll call him one of them.
Wendigo gives Curtis credit for not trying what he can't pull off, keeping special effects to the barest minimum, i.e. no bats. He feels compelled to complain again, however, about the substitution of dogs for wolves, although the animals look a little more convincing this time. Jess Franco made the same mistake, only more blatantly, but he outdid Curtis in his use of locations, Palance's castle looking a little too recent inside and out for its owner. Curtis has a big-time cinematographer in Oswald Morris, so the picture looks more vivid and moody than Franco's, but too many sets still seem too brightly lit for Wendigo's taste. It's surprising to find a TV film (one admittedly released theatrically in many countries) that looks so much better than a theatrical film from a reputed cinematic stylist, but the Curtis Dracula is better than Franco's on nearly every level. Ask Wendigo for a Top 20 list of vampire films and he'd most likely put this one on it. It's on a level with the John Badham/Frank Langella version from 1979 and can stand comparison with its partial inspiration, Horror of Dracula. For those who haven't seen the Curtis version, Wendigo readily recommends it as one of the best Draculas of the Seventies.
Since it was released theatrically in places, here's a trailer, uploaded to YouTube by OCPCommunications.