THE PIRATES (2014)

The idea was probably more like The Good, The Bad, The Weird at sea than Pirates of the Caribbean Korean style but whatever the motive the results were fun. Lee Seok-Hoon has made a good old-fashioned adventure flick with modern effects and an Asian attitude toward human prowess that would make Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn gape with envy at the antics of these Korean pirates and bandits. I think they'd recognize the film's spirit as kin to their own, however.

Two parallel storylines eventually converge as we follow a 14th century hero and heroine who become treasure-hunting rivals and, inevitably, partners and lovers. Jang Sa-jung (Kim Nam-gil) is an army officer who doesn't go along when his general supports a coup d'etat. Jang fights his way out of immediate peril to become a forest bandit, the Crazy Tiger, complete with a comedy-relief monk with a big appetite. Yeo-wol (Son Ye-jin) is a pirate princess who leads an uprising against her mentor Captain Soma (Lee Geung-young) when he conspires with officials to save his own ass by selling out loyal crewmates.

 

The bad guys (above) and the good guys (below)

 

The coup being successful, the new regime receives legitimacy from "Ming," aka China. Legitimacy comes with a new country name, Joeson, and a new royal seal. The latter gets lost at sea and swallowed by a whale. The new ruler offers a huge reward for the recovery of the great seal, attracting both pirate Yeo-wol and bandit Crazy Tiger to the treasure hunt. Crazy Tiger is a total lubber but he has the expertise of ex-pirate Cheol-bong (Yoo Hae-jin), who quit Soma's crew due to chronic seasickness but often falls landsick as well. He proves helpful to the bandits even though he has a hard time making them understand just how big a whale is. Yeo-wol has a competitive advantage not just because she's a pirate but because she has an affinity with whales going back to her childhood. But she finds herself fighting with Crazy Tiger over equipment, most importantly over imported European explosives. Meanwhile -- wouldn't you know? -- the vengeful Soma and Crazy Tiger's old commander have joined forces to catch the whale and take the treasure for themselves.

 

That's the framework for some oldschool swashbuckling with a wuxia edge as well as FX setpieces more reminiscent of the Caribbean movies. The main such event comes fairly early: an urban chase scene with Yeo-wol pursuing Crazy Tiger, using an aqueduct as a flume ride until Tiger wrecks it with an antique rocket, setting an attached giant water wheel rolling through town, in and out of the heroes' path. I'm not sure of the physical logic of the wheel's wanderings but it's an amusing spectacle. There's good comic chemistry between the leads, too, who go through a lot of adventure tropes together, from Defiant Ones style shackling to mutual seduction through boastful comparison of battle scars. The comic relief is solid throughout, especially the award-winning Yoo Hae-jin as the cantankerous misfit who bridges the pirate-bandit divide, but the monk is cool as well. There's also some presumably veiled political satire, with the usurping Joeson regime an analogue for North Korea, though the usurper is offered redemption with advice to shun the influence of Ming that seems directed at modern China. For foreigners, the film doesn't suffer if you don't get any of that. The spirit of high adventure that prevails translates pretty well into any language.

DVR Diary: THE GOLDEN ARROW (La freccia d'oro, 1962)

It took five credited writers to give Antonio Margheriti something to film while he had the services of fast-declining star Tab Hunter -- who as it happened, had already filmed an episode of his short-lived TV series with the "Golden Arrow" title -- but more than five writers deserve credit for what we see on screen. Add to the official list of five Italian scribes the names of Lotta Woods, Achmed Abdullah and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., since La freccia d'oro is for the most part a remake of Fairbanks's epic fantasy, Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad. In short, a rogue with a noble heart competes with three princes, one an unscrupulous conqueror, for the hand of a princess. While the rogue embarks on a quest, the princess tasks the princes with finding the rarest of treasures. They find what their counterparts found in 1924: a crystal ball, a flying carpet and a magic cure-all. The most militant of the princes conspires to take Damascus and the princess, but our hero saves the day with his own hard-won magic. Instead of a winged horse, the Thief of Damascus, clean-shaven Hassan (Hunter) has the title weapon, briefly at first and more decisively later. He wins it initially as the one contestant who can pull a heavy bow -- it's apparently a birthright -- but loses it because he meant to use it for selfish purposes. His quest to retrieve it is his atonement for various deadly sins of attitude. He has help, in this film's major deviation from the Fairbanks story, in the form of three comedy-relief genii, one old and bossy, one rather stupid and clumsy, the third rotund but otherwise nondescript.  They ground the Italian fantasy (which wasn't released in the U.S. until 1964, by which time Hunter's stardom had dimmed still further) as a kiddie picture and finally subvert whatever chance Margheriti and an ambitious art-direction and effects team to make a fantasy film worthy of its American model.

Margheriti took a long time shooting La freccia -- a contemporary news report marked six months that Hunter had spent on the production -- and the locations were worth the time spent locating them. A lot of the film was shot in Egypt at authentic ruins that give the picture just the sense of epic grandeur it needs without spending too much money on sets. When sets and effects are needed Margheriti's team goes to town. The highlight of their work is a hair-raising scene when Hassan visits an underground kingdom, is condemned by its queen for trespassing, and is chased by men on fire. Throughout, art director Flavio Mogherini and set designer Massimo Tavazzi keep things vivid and lavish. They still try hard when they fall short; their flying-carpet effects aren't much of an advance over Walsh's work and they end up skipping what seemed to be set up as the film's big finish: a fight between carpet-borne enemies. They're at their worst when the film becomes most childish. In the Fairbanks Thief of Baghdad, the hero summons an armed multitude to fend off the villains' attack. In Golden Arrow Hassan can use his weapon to dismantle the enemy's weapons, from bows to catapaults, and to tear a flying carpet apart in strips, but most of the damage is done by the three comedy genii, who rout the invaders by gathering up a lot of ash-filled urns and dropping them on soldiers' heads. While we see impressive airborne shots of two armies clashing, the hero and his buddies turn the tide without killing anyone. Even the evil prince and his traitorous ally are dispatched by dumping them into a pool of oil once their flying carpet goes to pieces. We leave them trashing about in frustration; whether anyone bothers to capture them remains a mystery.

Add Gabor Pogany and Giovanni Raffaldi's cinematography to the mix and Golden Arrow is nearly always ravishing to look at in a proper widescreen presentation. Listening to it is another story. Hunter didn't stick around to dub in his own dialogue, and the usual flat dub work by voice actors overfamiliar from countless peplum movies deprives the film of much of the verve and flamboyance it needs. The same goes for Mario Nascimbene's score, likewise overfamiliar in its repetition of too-familiar peplum motifs.  A lot of trouble was taken to finally make this picture sound like just another imported B movie. Margheriti might have been better off had he, like Douglas Fairbanks, made a silent film. Instead, Golden Arrow is an often attractive spectacle that ends up being less than meets the eye.

TCM showed it last week, and TCM has the trailer -- now so do you.

KILL A DRAGON (1967)

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.

Quickies: LORD JIM (1965)

Like a lot of my fellow bloggers, I watch many more movies than I write about. There are some I don't feel inspired to write about at all, whether I liked them or not, and some that might be worth a comment, but not worth a full-length review or even an "In Brief." For such films, I hope to keep "Quickies" to some minimal length that would let me do several a day, depending on my mood, or at least have something new every day.

I'll start with Richard Brooks's adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novel, starring Peter O'Toole in a role that reminded too many early reviewers of his T. E. Lawrence for David Lean. Looking at it now, I'm reminded less of O'Toole's past than of Conrad's future as raw material for cinema. This is, after all, a Conrad story largely set somewhere in Southeast Asia -- it was filmed in Cambodia -- so you can imagine Francis Coppola or John Milius or George Lucas watching Lord Jim and experiencing the first hint of Apocalypse Now in his imagination. That might be the film's only real contribution to movie history. On it's own, Brooks's film starts strong with the hero's moral crisis aboard the supposedly-doomed steamship Patna, but once the story settles down in beleaguered Patusan it turns into a ponderously pretentious action film. The villains ruin the film. The first is Eli Wallach, back when Hollywood considered him the next J. Carroll Naish, in one of his more ludicrous portrayals of an ethnic villain. He struts about in a variety of silly outfits, most unforgettably in a black sleeveless vest that suggests an imminent invasion of Times Square circa 1980 rather than the conquest of a Buddhist village. Worse, his every utterance is some sort of thematic statement tied in to our hero's concerns with courage and honor. His sidekick, Curt Jurgens, is treated as if he were some truly loathsome wretch, but the actor confines himself to moping and grumbling. Later, after Wallach is eliminated, Jurgens seeks out a new master, a greater badass than the last, to salvage Wallach's loot. He summons a bearded, bowler-hatted James Mason, who simply seems lost. None of the villains acts broadly enough to live up to their silly costumes or their roles in the plot. When they aren't bloviating or philosophizing they utter such complete cliches as "A calm night...too calm." O'Toole acquits himself well by comparison, but is trapped by the story's requirement that he face one moral crisis too many. Brooks, writing as well as directing, isn't satisfied with demonstrating Jim's dilemmas through action. He must hammer the theme home until your head hurts, the action stops making sense, and you no longer really care what happens to Jim. I read the novel long ago, and I don't remember it ending as stupidly as this movie does. The film is nearly watchable for its widescreen location work and its antique ships, but most of that's out of the way by the time we reach Patusan, and it's not enough to justify sticking around for the rest of the picture. I often think of myself as a sucker for the epic films of the Fifties and Sixties, and in this case sucker sounds exactly right.

Discovering UNCIVILISED

The Internet Archive describes this film by pioneer Australian director Charles Chauvel as his attempt to break into the international market. Such an aspiration may explain the weird generic mix Uncivilised presents to the unprepared viewer. In 78 minutes it contains scenes of violent action and almost horrific suspense, lurid romance, fantasies of primtivism, drug addiction and race mixing, and songs. It's as if MGM replaced Johnny Weissmuller in the role of Tarzan with Nelson Eddy or Walter Woolf King, or if Chauvel envisioned his star, Dennis Hoey, as a white Paul Robeson. I don't want to go overboard and call Uncivilised a musical, but it's a very musical film. That's just part of the whole delirious package.

The setting is the northwest part of Australia, "still embalmed in mystery" in 1936. There are rumors that a "wild white man," the orphaned son of missionaries, rules an aboriginal tribe in the region. The authorities wonder whether this mystery man might be involved in the pituri trade. Pituri is "a narcotic desert plant that induces a voluptuous condition," as author Beatrice Lynn is horrified to learn. Her publisher, Mr. Hemmingway, is pushing her to visit the region and write a book about the WWM. She needs fresh subject matter after her last few duds, he insists. "Get a new angle on life," he tells her, "Find this wild white man. Hypnotize him. Make him fall in love with you. Bring back his scalp."

Beatrice is to be escorted into the wild country by Radcliffe, a mounted policeman. Care must be taken because Moopil the Black Killer, mad son of Vitchi the Witch Doctor, is on the prowl. You know he's near when you hear a huge scream; whether its his or a victim's, I couldn't tell you. But Moopil proves to be the least of Bea's problems. The first night out, she's snatched out of her tent by a man in a turban. This film is seventy years ahead of its time in picking an Afghan as its initial villain. This is Akbar Jan, who sells pituri to the aborigines but would like to get in on the more lucrative opium trade. The wild white man doesn't care much for Akbar, but a white woman (that is, a white loobra) may be the Afghan's ticket into a new market. If Bea doesn't like the plan, she could try her luck with Moopil. "If he caught you, you would not live," Akbar advises, "and maybe you would not die, for week." We've seen Moopil do his stuff on a couple of white guys who protest impotently, "Come out, you black devils! Come out, you black hounds of hell!" before getting speared -- just so you keep the threat in mind.

Soon Akbar's gang of snake-eating tribesmen rendezvous with the coneheaded minions of the wild white man. "Well, Miss book writer," Akbar says, "You fat in fire now." We look down on the party as it approaches, from the lofty vantage of Mara, the wild white man himself. Classic movie fans could only reel at the thought I planted in my last post, that this is none other than Dennis Hoey, who played Inspector Lestrade in several of Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes pictures for Universal in the 1940s. Here he is barefoot, bare chested, and in full voice as he gives some love call along the lines of "Oh, eye-oh, EYE-OHH!" When Akbar and Bea arrive in his village of bare-breasted women, he ceremoniously lays hands on the white woman. "I put hand on shoulder, tribe know you're mine," he explains.

An awkward courtship begins. Mara is very much a savage, noble or not. He has a Tarzan-like power word to command people, "kilowati" (in my approximation) translating roughly to "ungaawa." His table matters are atrocious, provoking the otherwise terrified Bea to laugh her head off. Akbar needs to explain things to the white chief. "White mens and white womans have many different customs," he relates, "It is for the white woman to speak. She must say no or yes....Do not forget, Mara, you are white."

"Sometimes I do forget," Mara confesses. But something holds him back when he might otherwise manhandle the defiant Beatrice. He throws her to the floor when she slaps him, but he softens quickly and promises that no one will hurt her. Grabbing on to this glimmer of hope, Bea writes in her journal, "He is not all savage. Can I rely upon his white instincts for protection?"

The plot thickens with the arrival of Trask, a white opium dealer. He's been an occasional visitor in Mara's village, without revealing his real objective. Mara's parents were rather rich for missionaries. Among their unaccounted-for possessions, beside Mara himself (nee Marvin), are the Van Druyten rubies, "worth more than all the opium in China" in Trask's estimate. Akbar has been trying to find the rubies in order to trade them with Trask for opium. Trask is trying to avoid the middleman by getting the rubies from Sondra, the resident half-caste. Now follow the trail of drama: Beatrice Lynn resists the advances of Mara, for whom Sondra pines jealously, she herself being the love object of both Akbar and Vitchi the witch doctor (who has threatened to choke her if Mara won't let him have her), the latter of whom is inciting his son Moopil the Black Killer to attack the village to avenge himself on Mara for various slights. Do you have all that? Very good. Now you can watch Bea take a skinny dip.

Did I mention that Sondra is jealous? Don't take my word for it. "I hate the white woman," she says, "You hear me, I want her to die, to die, but first to go like fire inside, go mad!" This she confides in a witch who hands her some pituri to spike Bea's food with. Recall that pituri induces a "voluptuous" state in users. Up to this point the courtship has been developing gradually, though it is complicated by Mara's ignorance of the word "love." But when Bea suddenly comes on too strong he catches the stink of pituri on her and doesn't like it. He is disillusioned. "I no think of you as woman," he tells her, "I think of you as black men do their totem, their gods. But I fool. You just like other loobras. You eat thing I hate....Pituri woman!" The poor man probably doesn't realize that he's done the right thing. But Bea sets him straight later, after he sobers up: "If you had listened to that pituri," she says, "I would have killed myself."

But things are approaching the breaking point. Moopil the Black Killer is closing in, and the Van Druyten rubies have been found. Mara has been keeping the tribe in line with his charismatic singing in native lingo, like a dancing Mussolini. But the mood grows inexorably darker and the natives get spookier looking, almost fluorescent in their body paint in the black and white cinematography, which looks good even in the Internet Archive copy. There's going to be a showdown or two, or three, as grudges are resolved, secret agendas are revealed, and Beatrice faces a Jane's Choice between the acclaim of civilization and her growing love for the WWM. Of course her struggle is moot if Mara can't survive the big battle between his tribe and Moopil's band -- actually quite the fierce affair with plenty of spear effects, including a fleeting spear-to-the-eye shot.

Again, this is a film I had not heard of until last night. I chose to look at it almost at random while trawling through the Archive's movie holdings. It was a revelation if not an outright apocalypse. Its feverish presentation of aborigines comes as a jolt to someone used to the quite benign portrayal of them in current product. The film's racism gives it a transgressive kick that might be intolerable to some people, but it's not as if we're talking about The Eternal Jew or The Birth of A Nation here. In any event, the movie is so strange in so many ways that the racist bits recede in memory compared to the crowning oddity of Dennis Hoey's extraordinary performance. I can't speak for Uncivilised's box-office success, if it had any abroad, but I have to give Charles Chauvel credit for putting Australia on the map of the wild world of cinema.

Note: the illustrations are thumbnails taken from the Internet Archive. I would have made screen captures myself, but when you pause the Archive player you get a start-button graphic that mars the image. In any event, you can watch the film itself by referring to my previous post, or by visiting the Internet Archive.

UNCIVILISED (1936)

Surfing through the movie collection over at the admirable Internet Archive, I stumbled tonight upon a landmark in the wild world of cinema, an utterly mad movie in classic pulp style out of Australia. It's the earliest Australian movie I've ever seen, and it makes quite the exotic impression, though probably an embarrassing one as well for sensitive souls.

Here's how the archive itself describes the film: "A white novelist, looking for a story in the outback, is kidnapped by an Afghan slaver, betrothed to a white jungle-man, and menaced by a jealous half-caste rival, a hostile witch-doctor, his crazed-killer son, and opium smugglers!" The exclamation point is theirs, and it's well-earned. But they forgot to mention the tribal warfare and brutal violence, the snake eating, the jewel thieves, the bare-breasted natives, the skinny-dipping white woman (two years after Tarzan and His Mate, and after the Code crackdown in America), the stupendous racism (though that was probably implied) and Australia's answer to the singing cowboy: Dennis Hoey, the Inspector Lestrade of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, as a singing white aborigine chieftain. Trust me on this: this number has just about everything a movie cultist might want -- though some might miss the color.

Take a look at the complete 78 minute wonder yourself, either here or at the Archive. I'll have more to say about this barbaric little treasure in a subsequent post.

THE ADVENTURES OF JUAN QUIN QUIN (1967)

A spectre haunts the neophyte contemplating the cinema of Communist countries: the spectre of socialist realism. Ever since Stalin cracked down on the Soviet avant-garde, we've come to expect a certain dogmatic artlessness from lands where Leninism rules: storytelling simple enough for peasants to understand along with mandatory optimism and adulation about leaders. I expected as much from the early years of Castro's Cuba, but should have known better. Totalitarianism is rarely as total as some folks fear. Even the Nazis cranked out the occasional cool film like Munchhausen, so the Cubans were owed a chance to prove themselves. Also, my first sample of Cuban cinema was billed as a comedy, so how totalitarian could it be?

Julio Garcia Espinosa's mock-epic opens with Western style shots of revolutionaries on horseback over a soundtrack by Leo Brouwer that can hold its own with the most energetic pop-cinema scores of the 60s. This leads into the pursuit of the rebel leader Juan Quin Quin on a sugar cane plantation. The landlord orders the cane fields burnt to kill or flush the man out, but Juan survives by digging in. We abruptly cut to what proves to be an earlier episode in Juan's career. He seems to be an altar boy to an obnoxious priest. He goes to the cockfights, where his pal has a rooster entered, hoping to raise money for a sick kid with the proceeds. Juan is asked to intervene when his pal accuses his opponent of using poison to win the fight. He expresses his judgment by slapping the offender in the face with the dead rooster, sparking a brawl in the crowd, through which Juan escapes.

We next see a buxom black woman bound onto a beach, joined shortly by an equally buxom blonde companion. They are circus folk, and Juan and his pal Jachero have a scheme to make money staging bullfights. This leads to them acquiring the circus's lion and hauling its cage up a steep hill. At the top, Jachero leans on the cage to rest, sending it speeding down into an easily panicked town -- good publicity for "the first corrida ever in Cuba." Having acquired a bull, Juan sets about fighting it. The bull wins and escapes through the stands into the village, but Juan isn't really worse for wear until the authorities show up to collect a fine for an illegally staged event. It may be the law, but Juan objects that "Laws are meant to protect poor people." Speaking of the poor, once they get their bull back the next stop is a village so poor that no one can afford admission and the bull is slaughtered and picked clean while Juan isn't looking.

Now back to the revolution. Things are looking bad for the bearded Juan as the army surrounds his plucky band. He needs Jachero to get through the last pocket to alert an ally before the noose is closed. Jachero is obliged to ride the side of a cow through enemy lines, then make a mad dash across a railway bridge to catch a train. Finding suspicious characters on board, he dashes off the other way at heightened speed. The army is on the lookout. A soldier prods a wagonload of hay, hoping that Jachero is inside. His commander uses a machine gun. It turns out that Jachero was inside, but he was only shot in the leg. He accomplishes his mission, then resolves to make his rendezvous with Juan under his own lame power.

Here's where the film becomes eccentric. As Jachero limps through the landscape, he thinks "What a beautiful countryside...from a distance." How do I know what he was thinking? Because a cartoon thought balloon appears to tell me, that's how. He has further recourse to this mode of communication when a friendly farm woman aids him and feeds him some sardine pie. Despite her efforts, Jachero is captured in the morning and about to be hanged when the revolutionaries ride to the rescue. At this point a title card appears: "ENOUGH OF THIS TOMFOOLERY! At this point some scenes of Latin American family life could be inserted." They could, but aren't, and we're back to the battle. Juan rescues Jachero in the nick of time, and the next card comments, "It would also be possible to put this or that pointless UN meeting here." Yes, but no.

Instead, Juan's reunion with the woman Teresa leads us to an official flashback to Juan's days as a circus Jesus, uttering the last sacred words before reminding the audience to come back tomorrow for another show. "Jesus" signs a photo for a young fan, then tips his crown of thorns in respect when Teresa's father chides him for flirting with her. He has other roles in the circus, which is the same one with the two ladies we met earlier in the picture. Most dramatically, he is "the Man of a Thousand Lives." A Cuban David Blaine, he is buried alive and must remain underground for half an hour while the ladies dance and Jachero appears as "the Cuban Fakir" who dares audience members to jump on his chest while he lays, with visible discomfort, on a bed of broken glass. One man loses his nerve, but when a big Army guy wants to try, Jachero loses his nerve and runs away as Teresa storms the ring to dig Juan out of his tomb.

Here's an extended clip of the circus scene and its aftermath. The synchronization and aspect ratio are better on the DVD, but you can see the whole movie in ten installments on You Tube.

We next see Juan and Jachero as aspiring sharecroppers. They agree to clear some land for an eccentric landowner to start a coffee plantation. The landowner is a serene type; dressed in a kimono, he meditates daily by contemplating the fish in his aquarium. He also rips off our heroes after they labor at great speed to clear the land. This seems to be when our heroes are radicalized once and for all. They study the art of guerrilla warfare, as a narrator elaborates the essentials of infiltration and surprise, with Jachero often illustrating by negative examples. There's a long, almost inexplicably funny sequence, in which he annoys an officer who's fond of singing while he's drunk, that serves as prelude to the climactic attack, rendered in large part as slapstick comedy. There are bits of cartoonish action. Half a dozen army guys dogpile on top of Juan. He crawls out from under them with their weapons, which he hands to Teresa. He then crawls back into the dogpile, in order to get more weapons. It's hardly a spoiler for a comedy to tell you that victory is assured....

From this source I learn that Julio Garcia Espinosa espoused something that he called "imperfect cinema." Basically it's the Brechtian thing: a rejection of the seamless storytelling and easy audience identification with characters allegedly typical of Hollywood in the hope that, rather than wallow in an illusory realism, audiences will see that they're supposed to learn something. What the Cuban audience is meant to learn, however, is unclear. The academic critics see Juan Quin Quin as a send-up of Hollywood genres, but acknowledge that Espinosa doesn't really transcend the generic conventions he was supposedly satirizing. He seems to be having too much fun. The film itself is simply too irreverent in every aspect to have any didactic effect. It trounced my expectation of a Cuban cinema trapped in dogmatic isolation from the rest of the world. Itself part of a Hispanic picaresque tradition that goes back to Don Quixote if not earlier, Juan Quin Quin seems fully engaged with global pop culture, from spaghetti westerns to the silents-influenced slapstick of AIP comedies. Leo Brouwer's score adds to that impression. On this small evidence, he may have been in the same league as Les Baxter, John Barry and all their Italian peers. There's also some 60s-style stunt casting, with Enrique Santiesteban playing all the villainous roles in the story, though with less diversity of visage than Peter Sellers might offer. As our heroes, Julio Martinez and Erdwin Fernandez are consistently entertaining; they would've made a good team on a more regular basis. But as it happens, Fernandez only made one more film (according to IMDB) while Martinez ended up as a stuntman and worked in that capacity on James Cameron's Titanic.

I shouldn't jump to conclusions before watching more Cuban films (and this is one in a five-film Cuban Masterworks set available at the Albany Public Library), but I want to say that it's doubly to Cuba's credit that Juan Quin Quin was reportedly the country's most popular film of the 1960s. It's first to the credit of Cubans for patronizing the film, and it's also to the credit of the Cuban government for giving them the chance. Revolutionaries with thinner skins might not have seen all the humor on hand here, but the Castro brothers seem like good sports on this occasion for indulging a film that makes revolution itself, along with much else, look a little silly. I recommend it as an almost lost puzzle piece that makes our picture of global pop cinema of the 1960s more complete.

SANDOKAN, PIRATE OF MALAYSIA (I Pirati de Malesia,1964)

The year of Blood and Black Lace and A Fistful of Dollars finds Umberto Lenzi in Singapore filming a follow-up to a Steve Reeves vehicle. Reeves is near the end of his run in Europe; he'll make just one more movie, a spaghetti western four years later. At the brink of the obsolescence of his specialty peplum genre, Reeves is moving away from flaunting his body, opting for more conventional adventure stories. This is his second outing as a character who is hugely popular in Italy, and presumably elsewhere in the world, but is nearly unknown in the United States.

Sandokan is the creation of Emilio Salgari, who seems to have been Italy's answer to Jules Verne, Karl May and H. Rider Haggard. Salgari wrote eleven Sandokan novels, along with many others, before killing himself at the age of 48 in 1911. Sandokan is a heroic Malaysian pirate who thwarts the imperial ambitions of Europe in the South Seas. He has a Portuguese sidekick, Yanez, whose primary characteristic, as far as Pirate of Malaysia will tell you, is his cigarette addiction. Their arch-enemy is a historical figure, James Brooke, known as the White Rajah of Sarawak. From Wikipedia's survey of Brooke's career, Pirate of Malaysia appears to be set around 1851, when a royal commission was appointed to investigate his activities on the island. If so, there has been a telescoping of events, since Brooke is said to have only recently overthrown the rightful ruler, when in fact he had been named Rajah back in 1842. In history, Brooke died in bed, still in power, and succeeded by a nephew. In the Lenzi movie he fares less well.

Pirate of Malaysia presumes some familiarity with the characters, or at least with the preceeding movie, which was released in the U.S. as Sandokan the Great. There's little in the way of introduction. Sandokan, looking pretty swanky and well-fed for a pirate, saves someone adrift on the sea who proves to be a friend of his from the earlier film. This man, Tremal-Naik, is played by Mimmo Palmara, who often plays subordinate strongmen in the genre. He reports the conquest of Sarawak by the infamous Brooke and the flight of the island's princess, a person of interest to Sandokan. We see her trying to make good her escape with the aid of a faithful servant.

Sandokan heads to Sarawak to initiate guerilla warfare, demonstrated by Lenzi on the cheap with much offscreen mayhem and sound effects. It's too bad that he had to scrimp here, since the film benefits so much from the location shooting in Singapore and other exotic sites. Our hero learns that Brooke is sending a gold shipment to India with which to buy guns to suppress the insurgency. He decides to take the ship by subterfuge, hiring on as a humble cabin boy. In the meantime, Tremal-Naik is arrested during a botched rendezvous, while Sandokan fights his way out. Reeves doesn't have to be superhuman here, and his stiff roundhouse punches look pretty convincing just due to the size of his arms.

On the ship, the Young India (Lenzi uses a real ship to good effect) Sandokan is told, unsurprisingly, that he looks more like a pirate than a cabin boy. I suppose Reeves could pass for a cabin boy on some cruises, but that's a question for another time. For now, Sandokan wins the good will of the British commanding officer, who isn't too happy having Brooke's minions, headed by main underling Lt. Clintock, prowling around the ship. As it happens, the princess Hada is also on board. Sandokan conducts some sabotage to make the ship easier for his men to attack by swimming en masse with a rowboat of weapons in tow. In the struggle, Lt. Clintock is knocked overboard.

The first Sandokan novel first appeared in serial form, and it wouldn't surprise me if others did as well, since Pirate of Malaysia has a very episodic structure. For his next trick, Sandokan will pretend to be a shipwrecked prince in order to receive Brooke's hospitality, learn more about his schemes, and find a way to free Tremal-Naik, who's a prisoner there. This guy's a rebellious prisoner, and Sandokan is invited to witness his death by alligator. "I find that the thirst for liberty is best cured by salt water," Brooke remarks. Sandokan saves the day by grabbing a gun and shooting the animal, and excuses himself for failing to suppress his hunting impulse. He sneaks his friends some drugs so he can feign death. Sandokan then arranges for him to be buried in the local cemetery, since Tremal-Naik's people allegedly abhor burial at sea. That way Sandokan's minions can dig him up and free him. The ruse works well until Lt. Clintock reappears and rats out Sandokan. He and his men fight their way free, only to be captured quite easily in the next sequence, in which they're sentenced to slave in the mines. Sandokan promptly marks his territory by beating up a Chinese bully, and then it's on to further exploits leading to a climactic battle at a fortress on a high plateau....

I must confess to dozing off at moments during Pirate of Malaysia. Apart from the nice location work, Lenzi's direction is uninspired here. I was also not seeing it at its best, since this is the DVD from Mill Creek Entertainment's Warriors collection. It is incorrectly letterboxed, as is sadly illustrated by a scene where Sandokan and Brooke sit at opposite ends of a long dinner table and chat, but we see neither of them. On top of that, the image is cropped at top and bottom so that some of the opening credits are unreadable. Thanks to the location work (which strikes me as a preview of Lenzi's cannibal epics to come), the film has a visual quality that can't be denied even in this truncated form. The more serious problem is the acting (or voice acting). It renders this English version of the film pretty lifeless. I also felt handicapped by my unfamiliarity with the characters. This is the sort of film where familiar characters don't really need to be developed, but for a stranger that means little effort is made to make them interesting, apart from the oddity of Yanez's perpetual nicotine fit.

Just for the sake of its visuals, I'd recommend Pirate of Malaysia for a proper remastered DVD release in the correct aspect ratio. I'm unlikely ever to see it on Region 1, however, because of the lack of interest in the Sandokan character and the general disdain for the peplum genre. The peplum is the idiot stepchild of Italian genres, with less prestige even than the crazy uncle of the cannibal genre or the crazier uncle of Nazi porn. Why is that? Most likely because peplums seem childish, which is perhaps a handicap of the time they were made. They lack that certain edginess that emerges in every other Italo genre. The TV theme song probably sums up the problem: "These men of steel could never feel the curse of a coward's fears." Peplum heroes -- Hercules and all his sons, Maciste, Ursus, etc., are too good, too flawless, for their own good, compared to spaghetti western, giallo or police thriller protagonists. They ought to have a more honored place in the history of movie fantasy, but in the wild world of cinema they seem all too tame. Pirate of Malaysia barely qualifies as a peplum, and literally wouldn't due to its period, but Steve Reeves's presence probably makes it easier for people to dismiss a film that at least deserves a better first look than we get today, if not necessarily a second.

There doesn't seem to be any video footage from Pirate of Malaysia available online, so here's another poster.