Little has dated as badly as this male supremacy sexist hogwash. While Billy Wilder can manage to inject some sophistication and even elegance into the thorny subject of adultery and male philandering (The Apartment, 1960), director Gene Kelly has little to offer but crudity.
Walter Matthau (The Fortune Cookie, 1966), top-billed for the first time, does little more than act as listener to neighbour Ed (Robert Morse), supposed expert on wifely deception and link man to a series of lame unconnected sketches featuring a battalion of cameo stars.
It’s more likely to be remembered for being the final film Jayne Mansfield (Playgirl after Dark/Too Hot to Handle, 1960) made before her premature death. Her episode might well sum up the depths of hilarity this opus stoops to – the compelling issue of what to do when your illicit companion loses her bra in your bedroom.
Perhaps the only amusing note is the notion that this has come from the pen of the Oscar-winning Frank Tarloff (Father Goose, 1964), responsible also for the source novel, drawing on the experiences of a bunch of “swingers” reputedly enjoying to the full the sexual excesses of the decade, a decidedly middle-aged gang intent on not leaving all the fun to the hippies and the liberated young
The women here are straight out of The Stepford Wives template of female docility, existing only to please their men, any passing woman automatically in the stunner bracket intent on demonstrating every wiggle possible. Worse, one is so weak that she can be easily manipulated into believing that she did not, in fact, catch her husband in bed with another woman once the wily man falls back on that old political adage of plausible deniability.
What makes the antics of Paul (Matthau) and Ed so reprehensible is that their wives are trusting knock-outs in the first place. Ruth (Inger Stevens), Paul’s other half, not just a keep-fit fanatic but a fabulous cook, able to present a superb meal on a miniscule budget.
So we are meant, I suppose, to sympathize with Paul’s flawed efforts at beginning an extra-marital affair. Or at the very least laugh at his failures, rather than mock his inadequacies as a husband. Paul’s main target is divorcee Irma (Sue Anne Langdon) but it’s no surprise Ed beats him to the punch. There’s an old-fashioned morality lesson at the end but I was hoping, instead, for a twist whereby smug Paul discovered his wife was playing away from home. Although, admittedly, that would be out of character for Ruth.
You might get through this if cameos are your thing and you want to spent a whole movie waiting for an appearance by It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) alumni Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, Phil Silvers and Terry-Thomas plus the likes of Lucille Ball (Yours, Mine and Ours, 1968), Polly Bergen (Kisses for My President, 1964), Art Carney (Harry and Tonto, 1974), Carl Reiner (The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, 1966), Linda Harrison (Planet of the Apes, 1968) and Jeffrey Hunter (Custer of the West, 1967).
Walter Matthau just about keeps this afloat and lucky for his career he had The Odd Couple (1968) up next. Inger Stevens (Firecreek, 1968) is wasted.
This was a box office riot on initial release, but times have changed. Gene Kelly (Hello, Dolly!, 1969) directs with a leaden hand.
Once you get over the notion of Jason Statham as an eco-warrior, and alternating between grumpy and cuddly step-dad, and that the eco-goodies are actually hypocritical eco-baddies, pillaging the depths of the ocean for the equivalent of Avatar’s unobtainium, and the top scientist who keeps a captive Megaladon in check by what looks like dog-training techniques, and the usual gobbledegook sci-fi anomalies, you are in for a hell of a ride as a trio of Megs start chomping down on the kind of witless holidaymakers who peppered the likes of Piranha 3D.
There are neat references to Jurassic Park and nods to Chinese rather than American culture, especially in veneration of the old, and the action, once it surfaces from the gloomy depths, is breath-taking. Perfect summer popcorn material. You can pretty much ignore the MacGuffin, whose sole purpose is to ensure the Megaladons are freed from climactic imprisonment – the “thermoclime” – in the Mariana Trench.
Given there’s a fair bit of plotty-plot-plot to get through it’s just as well we kick off with action. Jonas (Jason Statham) ingeniously bursts out of a container on a merchant ship dumping hazardous waste and having captured on film the evidence he requires is scooped from the ocean like a drowned rat by a seaplane with giant jaws. Deep-sea exploration company owner Jaining (Wu Jin) has teamed up with billionaire investor Hillary (Sienna Guillory) to make further forays into the aforementioned trench.
On a routine dive in a far-from-routine submersible, Jonas’s teenage step-daughter Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai) stows away so when the crew discover an illicit mining operation and that the captive Meg has escaped and teamed up two other Megs, the stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s a bit murky down below and despite the various oohs and aahs of the explorers nothing really stunning on view. Still, that’s not what we’re here for, and luckily Avatar-style visuals take second place to more action as Jonas, striding along the trench floor in exosuit, has to save all from the ruthless mercenary Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta).
But, really, this a mere prelude to what’s going to happen once everyone, creatures included, surface. The Megs are slick operators, keeping tight formation as they tear through the water. Fancying a tourist snack, the creatures home in on Fun Island. Jonas has his work cut out saving the innocent rich from the quartet of predators and a bunch of nasty prehistoric amphibians while fending off Hillary and her gang of thugs.
It’s certainly inventive enough and occasionally light-hearted and the action is spread out among the various participants, Meiying proving a chip off the old block, and no romance this time getting in the way. Heartless villain Hillary is despatched in the most obvious homage to Jurassic Park and the climax, as you might expect, is Jonas going one-on-one with any alpha male, whether Montes or the gigantic creatures. Explosives taped to harpoons, explosives made out of fertilizer, and helicopter rotors are among the improvised weapons.
While you couldn’t accuse it of being thoughtful, and you might even consider it a shade cynical in its use of eco-activism, it never takes itself seriously, which means it’s just a whole load of fun. Go looking for anything more meaningful or more cinematic (a la Steven Spielberg) and you’re wasting your time. But who, really, would make such a mistake. The popcorn is calling.
Certainly, compared to arthouse cop-put The Dive it’s a work of genius. This purported anti-blockbuster resorts to info-dumps to create any sort of suspense. By the time you’re halfway through you’re desperate for a shark, octopus, manta-ray, demon of the deep, to gobble up this hapless pair of divers, sisters Drew (Sophie Lowe) and May (Louisa Krause). If it had the conviction of its arthouse credentials, there would have been a tragic ending, the incompetent Drew unable to save the resourceful, efficient, May, trapped underwater by an unexplained rockfall.
The falling rocks manage to bury their rucksacks, including car keys, but magically miss the jetty yards away. For no earthly reason except it fits the story, May can’t open the car boot to find a tire lever. For no earthly reason, as an experienced diver, and although her life depends on it, she doesn’t know how to properly attach an oxygen tank. And quite how, in her bewilderment, and in murky depths, she manages to find the trapped sister time and again is baffling. And when she does find the solution to releasing her sister it’s one of those daft ideas straight out of Apollo 13 that you sit there questioning. Naturally, there’s a pocket of trapped air underground just when it’s most needed.
But, mostly, Drew’s running around like a headless chicken and for some reason that detracts rather than builds suspense. Half the time we’re getting info dumps, not of the time-running-out variety, but on how far down they are and what you’ve got to do avoid the bends. But you discover less about the characters than in The Meg 2, and care even less. Drew is grumpy, disillusioned for some reason, while May is sparky and enthusiastic and any time the supposed suspense gets too much director Maximilian Erlenwein cuts away to their carefree childhood or to a conversation that is meant to have hidden meaning.
Rotten Tomatoes critics rate The Dive (69%) above Meg 2 (30%) but audiences, who know better, go the other way, 73% for the monster-filled concoction, 50% for the monster-free bore.
By all that Hollywood held sacred, The Stalking Moon should never have got off the ground, at least not by National General Cinemas, the latest addition to the burgeoning mini-major roster. For National General, in keeping with the company name, had been set up to run theaters. And operating theaters and making movies ran counter to the Consent Decree of 1948 which had not only forced the major studios to jettison their chains of cinemas but also prevented them in the future from functioning in that manner.
As a legal device, the Consent Decree had more than done its job; it had almost brought the entire industry to its knees since studios could no longer rely on the substantial profits generated from exhibition to bolster their movie-making programs, causing the industry to fall into a decade-long downward spiral. Although revenues had recovered throughout the 1960s as a result of the promulgation of the roadshow, the Bond films and variety of other audience-winning efforts, the underlying effect of the Consent Decree, that of reducing studio output, still had a radical impact on theater owners.
Simply put, there were not enough movies to go round. A smaller number of movies corresponded to higher rentals, putting exhibitors under even more pressure to make a decent buck. In order to make the most of what was available, owners of first run houses, even outwith the standard lengthy contracts for roadshows, took to running ordinary movies for longer than before, resulting in meagre pickings for theaters further down the food chain. So when National General proposed upending the principles of the Consent Decree, there were few in the industry determined to stand in their way.
National General Corporation owed its inception to the Consent Decree. It had been established in 1951 with the express purpose of taken over the running of the 550 theaters which Twentieth Century Fox was being forced to relinquish. That number of cinemas was considered too high and a court order cut the number in half six years later. By 1963, with earnings of $3.4 million, the organisation ran 217 theaters as well as having real estate holdings and a sideline in renting equipment for mobile concerts, by which time it had already instigated court proceedings in order to annul or bypass the Consent Decree.
It was not the first theater chain to aim to set aside the binding conditions of the Decree. Howco, owning 60 theaters, began low-budget production in 1954. American Broadcasting-Paramount Theaters had made modest forays in this direction, primarily with program fillers of the sci-fi/horror variety, in the late 1950s, and regional theater owner McLendon Films entered the production arena with My Dog Buddy (1960). But these were viewed as minor aberrations and not considered to breach the stout defences of the Decree.
National General had bigger ambitions that could not be fulfilled without some alteration of the original Decree and in 1963 it went to court to seek a modification of the Decree ruling which, while safeguarding anti-trust measures, would nonetheless help arrest the rapid decline in production, which had seen output tumble from 408 features in 1942 to just 138 movies two decades later. As an “experiment”, the government permitted NGC a three-year window.
NGC’s new enterprise was to be called Carthay Center Productions and nine months later announced its first movie would be What Are Little Girls Made Of, a $2.5 million comedy produced by the Bud Yorkin-Norman Lear Tandem shingle, and that it was in talks with Stanley Donen (Singing’ in the Rain, Charade). (The Girl in the Turquoise Bikini was also mooted, but never made.) A few months later, the infant outfit projected that it was on course to make four-six pictures a year with budgets in the $2 million-$4 million range, with Divorce-American Style now scheduled as its first offering.
The hopes of expectant exhibitors were kept alive throughout the entire three-year period granted by the government. A three-picture deal was made with director Fielder Cook who lined up prominent British playwright Harold Pinter to write Flight and Pursuit. Two years after receiving the governmental green light, none of these projects had come to fruition and to speed up production Carthay sought to take advantage of the British government’s Eady Levy (which subsidised film production in the UK) by making The Berlin Memorandum (later re-titled The Quiller Memorandum), based on the spy thriller by Adam Hall (aka Elleston Trevor, Flight of the Phoenix), on a $2.5 million budget as the first volley in a six-film 18-month production schedule.
The picture would be a joint production with British company Rank, which offered instant distribution in Britain. The other pictures covered in the announcement were: Divorce-American Style, What Are Little Girls Made Of and John Henry Goes to New York (all under the Tandem aegis); plus Flight and Pursuit and Careful, They’re Our Allies from Charles K. Peck Films. By 1966, Tandem’s Divorce-American Style starring Dick van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds had begun shooting as had The Quiller Memorandum, with George Segal and Alec Guinness as the marquee names, but without the involvement of Carthay. There was no great immediate interest in Divorce American Style from distributors and it sat on the shelf until June 1967 when it was distributed by Columbia. It was a surprise hit at the box office, ranking 17th on the annual chart with $5.1 million in rentals – above In Like Flint and just below the John Wayne pair ElDorado and The War Wagon.
However, by 1966, NGC was in buoyant mood, underlining its ambitions by announcing a $10 million business-building loan. More importantly, at the beginning of the year it had signed up its first major star. Gregory Peck was to headline The Stalking Moon, with a $3.5 million budget and shooting to begin in spring 1967. There was even talk at this stage that it “may be a hard ticket picture;” there was little more prestigious for a new company than to enter the roadshow field.
Although this was, technically, the eighth movie –A Dream of Kings was the seventh – on the NGC roster (and had previously been announced as such when movie rights to the Theodore V. Olsen western had been acquired pre-publication in December 1965) it now, with Peck’s involvement, shot up the production ladder. Although screenwriter Wendell Mayes (Von Ryan’s Express, 1965) had been scheduled to act as producer, Peck’s production company Brentwood was also involved. The picture acquired further cachet with the announcement that George Stevens (Shane, 1953) was to direct as well as produce.
There were now five co-producers: Stevens, Universal, Peck, NGP, and Mayes. In theory, at least, the arrival of heavyweights such as Peck and Stevens should have speeded up production. Instead, an endless series of delays/ postponements ensued. The April 3, 1967, start date fell by the wayside when Stevens dropped out. Although there was speculation that Stevens’ departure would lead to the movie being shelved, Universal remained on board, at least for the time being, as distributor. Meanwhile, NGP took over production duties and reunited Peck with To Kill a Mockingbird director Robert Mulligan and producer Alan J. Pakula. Before Stevens left, the start date had already been shifted to May 28 and when the dust on that had settled it was set for an October 15 start.
But that proved over-optimistic and when it began rolling on January 5, 1968, the budget had increased to $4 million. However, the movie still failed to meet other deadlines set for summer and autumn and did not finally roll until 1968.
By then, NGP was facing other difficulties. For a start, the battle to remain in the production business precipitated another round of legal and governmental negotiations. The original three-year waiver that had expired in 1966 had been extended by a further three years and although, by this point the second largest movie chain in the country, NGC had clearly failed to fill the production gap that it was set up specifically to do, but its position was bolstered by CBS television launching its Cinema Center movie production arm and ABC television its Cinerama vehicle.
The Pacific Coast Theater circuit had taken over Cinerama in 1963. ABC had 418 theaters, the largest in the country, and set up Circle Films. In 1967 Cinerama Releasing Corporation was established to distribute the films of both Cinerama and ABC Circle and, in fact, had been, at least in terms of output, more prolific than NGC, releases comprising Custer of the West (1967), Hell in the Pacific (1968), Charly (1968), The Killing of Sister George (1968), They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) and Krakatoa East of Java (1969). ABC Circle closed down in 1973 despite registering its biggest-ever hit Cabaret in 1972. In fact, most CRC releases were flops.
National General was so worried about another government waiver not being forthcoming that it was considering a merger with Warner Brothers as a means of safeguarding production. The Carthay name itself soon became defunct, the company reverting to National General Pictures (NGP) in order to identify, in the words of president Eugene V. Klein, “our picture making activities as a major part of our company program.” In addition, it had fallen far short of its production schedule. Instead of releasing movies at the rate of one per month throughout 1968, only six films were ready for distribution – and none of them were actually made by NGC. Poor Cow, Twisted Nerve, and All Neat in Black Stockings were British; How Sweet It Is was made by Cinema Center; With Six You Get Eggroll by Doris Day’s production company; and A Quiet Place in the Country was Italian. And none boasted stars of the Gregory Peck caliber. By year end, the company’s entire production fortune was riding on The Stalking Moon.
By the beginning of 1969 Gregory Peck looked a spent force. He had not made a film in three years, a dangerous length of exile in fickle Hollywood. The commercial and artistic peaks of the early 1960s – The Guns of Navarone (1961) and How the West Was Won (1962) both topping the annual box office charts in addition to winning the Oscar for Best Actor, at the fifth attempt, with To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) – were long gone. None of his other pictures came close to matching these in either commercial or artistic terms: Captain NewmanM.D. (1963) ranked 21st for the year, and Stanley Donen thriller Arabesque (1966) with Sophia Loren, 16th.
Most performed substantially below expectations. Cape Fear (1962), despite the involvement of Navarone director J. Lee Thompson and co-star Robert Mitchum fell foul of the Production Code. The censors demanded the word “rape” be excised from the finished film and other changes made to the script. British censors demanded a total of 161 cuts, provoking co-star Polly Bergen to complain there was no point in her promoting the film in the UK since she was now hardly in it. The star was not perturbed. “An adult audience will understand the theme,” he said. The movie ranked 47th in the annual box office race. In Peck’s entire canon only Beloved Infidel had done worse.
Prestige offering Behold A Pale Horse (1964) directed by Fred Zinnemann (From Here To Eternity) and co-starring Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif, proved an unexpected flop, 63rd for the year, while thriller Mirage (1965), directed by veteran Edward Dymytryk, was 74th. With his commercial status in question, the actor shuttered his production company Brentwood, although in an image-conscious industry, he came up with a more respectable reason: “We are far better holding ourselves available for acting jobs, and then producing only when the right elements happen to be there.”
From 1964 onwards, he was more commonly associated with films that did not get made. That year, Cinerama announced with considerable fanfare that he was going to star in grand sci-fi project The Martian Chronicles, directed by Robert Mulligan, adapted from the Ray Bradbury bestseller, with a $10 million budget. Also failing to get off the ground was The Night of the Short Knives, planned as a co-production with veteran Walter Wanger (Cleopatra, 1963). At one point Steve McQueen was mooted as a co-star until MGM’s rival production 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) killed the idea stone dead.
In 1965 MGM signed Peck up, along with David Niven (another Navarone alumnus), James Stewart, James Coburn and George Segal for Ice Station Zebra, based on another Alistair MacLean thriller, with a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky; but when the movie finally appeared several years later none of these names were involved. In 1965, he also lost out on They’re a Weird Mob when the rights which he had held since 1959 elapsed. Across the River and into the Trees, based on the Ernest Hemingway novel, with Virna Lisi did not get beyond the development stage.
It was hard to say what was worse, movies shelved before a foot of film was exposed, or pictures halted in mid-production, as was the case in 1966 when filming in Switzerland of The Bells of Hell Go Ting A Ling A Ling was suspended after five weeks due to unexpectedly harsh weather conditions in Europe. It was indicative of doubts about Peck’s commercial standing that the movie did not continue shooting, despite a budget outlay by this point of over $2 million, once the weather had cleared.
A total of 12 minutes were completed before filming ended. Peck played a British Army colonel charged in World War One with leading a team to ferry aircraft parts across Switzerland to Lake Constance and then reassemble them to bomb a Zeppelin base. Ian McKellen (Lord Of The Rings), making his movie debut, began to correct Peck’s American pronunciation of “lieutenant” only to be told by director David Miller that Peck could pronounce it any way he liked because “Britain was only five per cent of the world market.”
In 1967 it was the turn of After Navarone, The Mudskipper and Strangers on the Bridge with Alec Guinness to stall on the starting grid. Although the reissue in 1966 of The Guns of Navarone (1961) kept him in public view, during this period of enforced idleness Peck was more likely to be heard rather than seen, taking on narration duties for an ABC television documentary on Africa, and the John F. Kennedy documentary, although he enjoyed considerable publicity as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and as the inaugural chairman of the American Film Institute, taking up both roles in 1967.
Although Peck was still a big marquee name when initially signed up for The Stalking Moon, there remained a massive question mark, given nearly three years cinematic inactivity, over his ability to open a picture. In addition, the more obvious problem was whether a marketplace still existed for the Gregory Peck western given that, with the exception of How the West Was Won (1962), he had not been in the saddle since The Bravados and The Big Country in 1958, neither of which had turned a profit at the U.S. ticket wickets, and prior to those, The Gunfighter in 1950 another box office disappointment. He was hardly in the league of John Wayne or James Stewart, for whom the western was the default setting, both of whom had recently turned in strong commercial returns in the genre.
What the cast and crew for The Stalking Moon had in common was Oscars. Director Robert Mulligan had been nominated for an Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird. A graduate of live television, he was comfortable in a variety of fields, comedy in The Rat Race (1960), romance in Come September (1961), and dramas like Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) and Inside Daisy Clover (1965). Under his watch, Peck had won the Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird, Natalie Wood had been Oscar nominated for Love with the Proper Stranger and Ruth Gordon for Inside Daisy Clover.
Producing partner Alan J. Pakula had also been nominated for To Kill a Mockingbird. The Stalking Moon was their seventh film together. Eva Marie Saint, who played Sarah Carver, the white woman on the run from her Apache husband, won an Oscar in her first movie role opposite Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) after seven years in television. Over the following dozen years, she appeared in only 13 more pictures, but they were a diverse bunch including the female leads in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), comedy The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) and John Frankenheimer’s epic Grand Prix (1966).
Her apparent fragility concealed inner strength, although her deft comedic touch and passionate clinch with Cary Grant in North by Northwest, and her frantic reaction to the death of racing driver Yves Montand in Grand Prix belied her reputation for onscreen coolness. In the Oscar stakes, cinematographer Charles Lang (aka Charles Lang Jr.) eclipsed them all with one win for A Farewell to Arms (1934) and 15 further nominations including Some like It Hot (1959) and One Eyed Jacks (1961).
Although this represented a western debut for director, producer and leading actress, Lang had been the cinematographer for The Man from Laramie (1955), Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960) and How the West Was Won. Sound editor Jack Solomon had been nominated in 1960 and editor Aaron Steel twice, in 1962 and 1965. Screenwriter Wendell Mayes had been nominated for Otto Preminger’s courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Horton Foote, who worked on The Stalking Moon without receiving a credit, had won the Oscar for To Kill a Mockingbird.
However, the final screenplay credit went to Alvin Sargent, in television since 1957. Gambit (1966) had marked his movie debut, The Stalking Moon his second picture. Actor Robert Forster had made his debut in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) and followed up with the role of Nick Tana in The Stalking Moon. Forster had a keen idea of his abilities, telling Variety that he only took roles that “would not compromise me or my wife or my agent. I don’t know how an actor can agree to play a role that he doesn’t feel he can do something special with.” His principles led him to turning down a four-picture deal with Universal.
The Stalking Moon was the first and only picture for Noland Clay, who played Eva Marie Saint’s son, as it was for Nathaniel Narcisco in the role of her husband Salvaje. This was composer Fred Karlin’s third movie score after Up the Down Staircase (1967) and Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) and the music alternated between a lilting motif for the more idyllic sections and an urgent repetitive sound for the thrilling elements. Most of the picture was shot on location in Arizona (Wolf Hole, Wolf Hole Valley, Moccasin Mountains and the Pauite Wilderness Area), Nevada (Red Rock Canyon and Valley of Fire State Park) and Bavispe in Mexico with interiors at the Samuel Goldwyn Studios.
The Theodore V. Olsen book is quite different to the film. In the novel Sam Vatch (not Varner) has married Sarah without knowing that she has once been Salvaje’s woman. Sarah Carver has two children not one, the other being an ill younger brother. In the book, she talks lot. On the other hand, Sam Varner is looking for a home and, in any other kind of picture, her loquaciousness coupled with his need for domestic security, would have brought them together emotionally. In the Olsen version, it is Salvaje not Sarah who is the sole survivor of a massacre. But the film takes an entirely different approach.
In the movie version, instead of presenting the audience with a dialogue-heavy picture where emotional need is clearly stated, Mulligan is more interested in people who kept their feelings to themselves, who scarcely had a word to say, who lacked the dexterity to build up any lasting relationship. As much as the film is about the silences that can swamp individuals, it is also about characters watching each other for any sign of impending change, the kind that would normally be signaled by more vocal means. Such behavior is normally designated as brooding.
Varney broods on what he should do, whether to help the woman or not, and just how far should he help, and when will helping her intrude on his privacy. Sarah Carver broods on the inevitability of her capture and while that is temporarily postponed by the presence of Varney it does not prevent her watching him for any sign that his attitude to her will change in a positive or, more likely, negative fashion. It is a revolutionary western indeed where the main characters do not exchange a kiss. Here, they hardly exchange a look. The one time they do come together could scarcely be termed a hug, more a gentle enfolding in his chest, minus his big manly arms around her.
Reviews of The Stalking Moon were decidedly mixed, although initially it looked to have got off to a critical flyer. From the outset, NGC considered it a major Oscar contender, rather a risky proposition for a western, and one whose temerity was likely to inflame the critics since only five in the last 20 years had been nominated – How the West Was Won (1962), The Alamo (1960), Friendly Persuasion (1955), Shane (1953), and High Noon (1952).
The trades were divided: International Motion Picture Exhibitor called the movie “excellent” overall. Variety took the opposite view, complaining about the slow development and poor pacing, “clumsy plot structuring and dialog, limp Robert Mulligan direction” and “ineffective” stars, arriving at the conclusion that the movie was “109 numbing minutes.” Motion Picture Daily deemed it a “rewarding experience” and Film Daily called it “exceptionally fine.” Life declared it “transcends the externals of the western genre to become one of the great scare films of all time”; Playboy asserted it was “a tingle all the way,” and Parents Magazine termed it a “gripping melodrama.” “Western in character, universal in theme,” was the summation in The Showmen’s Servisection. But Roger Ebert complained the movie “doesn’t work as a thriller…and doesn’t hold together as a western, either” while Vincent Canby in the New York Times complained it was “pious” and “unimaginative.”
Strangely, nobody commented on the other link between Sarah Carver and her pursuer. In turning the heroine into the prey, in making the woman helpless, never knowing when the invisible hand would strike, Mulligan drew a clear parallel with the experience of the Indians, hunting down by the U.S. Cavalry, harried off their lands, for no reason that could be understood.
The Stalking Moon has not exactly been subject to critical reappraisal in the intervening years since its release, but French director Betrand Tavernier in 50 Years of American Cinema called it Mulligan’s masterpiece. Writing in the March/April issue of Film Comment in 2009, Kent Jones cast more light on what the director was trying to achieve, thus putting the movie in more perspective, and aligning it closer than anyone thought at the time to the period in which the movie was made. Jones believed that the western aptly reflected the bewilderment of the times when, according to Mulligan: “We were in the process of a nightmare that I didn’t understand. I mean the riots were going on, the campuses were being burnt, the ghettos were being burnt, the marches that were going on, people were getting killed. It just didn’t make any sense.”
Mulligan took a pessimistic view of the outcome. “It just didn’t work,” he opined, “and a lot of that may have had to do with the basic silence of the movie.” But what Mulligan actually means is that the movie did not connect sufficiently with either audience nor critics at the time. In fact, in my opinion, it is precisely because of the silences and the unwillingness of the director to tone down its emotional aspects and his refusal to play around with typical genre ploys that make The Stalking Moon, on second viewing today, such a rewarding experience. Reflecting on the movie’s connection to Vietnam and the late 1960s riots, Kent Jones summed up his experience of the movie thus: “Robert Mulligan was the only filmmaker to wade into such painfully vexing and frightfully bourgeois territory and come out with a truly great film.”
The release date for The Stalking Moon had already been set for its general release January in 1969, but, figuring it had a critical winner on its hands, NGC, having put winning an Oscar at the top of its promotional agenda, was faced with the problem of getting it out into a couple of theaters (one would have been enough, as long as it was in Los Angeles, according to the rules) in order to qualify for Academy Award consideration, and so it was deposited in a couple of first-run theaters (New York as well as Los Angeles, so that the New York market would not think it was being overlooked) just before Xmas 1968.
The film ranked 47th in the annual chart with $2.6 million in rentals – “no better than fair, considering its cost” grumbled Variety – above Once Upon a Time in the West, but below other rivals in the genre. It was reissued the following year as support for Universal’s Hellfighters (1968) and NGC’s The Cheyenne Social Club (1970). It received a warmer reception in Paris, where, for the 1968-1969 season, it outgrossed Mackenna’s Gold (1969) and The Undefeated (1969) as well as Hang ‘Em High (1968) and Five Card Stud (1968), and did surprisingly well in Switzerland where its grosses were seen as indicative of a “box office upsurge.”
NOTE: This is an edited version of a chapter devoted to the film which appeared in my book The Gunslingers of ’69, Western Movies’ Greatest Year (McFarland, 2019.
SOURCES: Brian Hannan, The Gunslingers of ’69, Western Movies’ Greatest Year (McFarland, 2019); Brian Hannan, The Making of The Guns of Navarone (Baroliant Press, 2015); Cook, David A., Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979. (University of California Press, 2000), 400; Kevin Hefferman, Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, (Duke University Press: 2004), 72; “See Three-Year OK for Nat’l General To Produce and Distribute Films under Trust Decree Modification,” Variety, June 19, 1963, 3; “National General Earnings Up 31%,” Variety, December 18, 1963, 11; “Peck for Cinerama,” Variety, February 19, 1964, 6; “National Circuit (217 Theaters) Readying to Produce Features,” Variety, March 4, 1964, 5; “Walter Wanger’s Return To Producer Activity,” Variety, April 19, 1964, 4; “Nat’l General Producing Features Shuns Hazards of Live Concerts,” Variety, Jun 30, 1964, 20; “Colony on Mars as U’s Top Costing Feature To Date,” Variety, Jul 22, 1964, 3; “Metro’s 27 Finished Features Give It Exceptionally Long Market Slotting,” Variety, Jun 16, 1965, 5; “Virna Lisi Signatured To Star in Germi’s New Pic But Sans Glamour,” Variety, July 7, 1965, 22; “Carthay (Nat’l General) in 3-Film Deal with Fielder Cook’s Eden Prods,” Variety, July 28, 1965, 3; “Aussie Film Cameras To Turn Again This Month After Lengthy Layoff,” Variety, October 13, 1965, 28; “1st Feature Rolls Under Eady Plan for Carthay (Nat’l General-Rank),” Variety, October 20, 1965, 7; “Circuit’s Prod’n Arm Acquires 8th Story with Olsen’s Stalking Moon,” Variety, December 8, 1965, 11; “NGC’s $10m Loan,” Variety, January 12, 1966, 21; “Greg Peck and His Corporate Shadow Comprise Nat’l General’s 3d Feature,” Variety, January 22, 1966, 5; “Wendell Mayes Hotel Then Stalking Moon,” Variety, Apr 13, 1966, 17; “Drop Carthay Center Tag for NGC Films,” Variety, May 25, 1966, 13; “Swiss Dewdrops O. O. The Bells of Hell,” Variety, August 10, 1966, 7; “Mirisch’s Bells Won’t Peal Till 1967,” Variety, August 24, 1966, 22; “George Stevens to U for 3 Features,” Variety, November 16, 1966, 11; “Peck in Africa,” Variety, January 25, 1967, 27; “16 of U’s 24 in ’67 Get Shooting Dates,” Variety, February 1, 1967, 28; “Inside Stuff – Pictures,” Variety, March 29, 1967, p21; “Nat’l Gen’l Prod, Again Party To Peck’s Moon Which U Will Release,” Variety, April 5, 1967, 15; “After Navarone,” Variety, April 19, 1967, 9; Advert, Years of Lightning, Day of Drums, Variety, April 19, 1967, 42; “Off-&-Ballyhooing at NGC,” Variety, November 27, 1967, 3; “Cinerama Rolls 1st Int’l Sales Meet In Link With London Bow of Custer,” Variety, November 8, 1967, 2; “Cinerama Revs Up,” Variety, December 6, 1967 18; “NG Not Up To Intended Pic Per Month Release Rate for ’68,” Variety, March 20, 1968, 214; “National’s Chain: 263,” Variety, May 27, 1968, 7; Lee Beaupre, “Today’s Independent Actor,” Variety, Jul 17, 1968, 3; “NGC, WB-7 Merger Plans Unveiled; Industry Waiting For Details,” International Motion PictureExhibitor, August 21, 1968, 5; Review, International Motion Picture Exhibitor, December 18, 1968, 6; Review, Variety, December 18, 1968, 26.“NGC Will Tailor Deal to Fit Merger with WB,” Variety, December 25, 1968, 3; Review, New York Times, January 23, 1969; Review, Chicago Sun Times, February 11, 1969; “NGC Pleas for Tenure in Its Film Production Calculations,” Variety, February 19, 1969, 15; Review, The Showmen’s Servisection, November 19, 1969, 2; “Year’s Surprise: Family Films Did Best,” Variety, January 7, 1970, 15; “Swiss Pix May Top ’68 Biz,” Variety, January 7, 1970, 112; “Paris First Runs: Recent Months, ‘68-‘69 Estimate,” Variety, April 29, 1970, 76.
About-to-retire Indian scout Sam Varner (Gregory Peck) helps the U.S. Cavalry round up Indians to take to reservations. One of these is American Sarah Carver (Eva Marie Saint) who, with her Apache son, is attempting to escape her vengeful Apache husband Salvaje (Nathaniel Narcisco). Varner agrees to take her to the nearest stage coach post, and then to a train depot, and, finally, to his ranch in New Mexico where they enjoy a period of security. But wherever she goes, death follows, culminating in a shootout in the hills around his ranch.
But the treatment by director Robert Mulligan (Up the Down Staircase, 1967) is far more complicated, often asking questions that cannot be answered, and placing the principals in situations that cannot be easily resolved. Sarah Carver has not gone running in order to find a man to save her; she does not think she can be saved and accepts the inevitable. She feels guilty for “lacking the courage to die,” of accepting Salvaje as her husband instead of dying along with the rest of her family when attacked a decade before by Indians.
She is weak in other ways, hiding the identity of her husband from the Army and everyone else in case she is abandoned. She shows no great bond with her son, who, several times, attempts to escape.
Sam Varner is very much an ordinary guy, just wanting to quit the Army and work his ranch. He is not the traditional extrovert western hero, nor the man who reluctantly takes up arms. He has no wish to get involved with Carver and each time he does agree to help it is with a time-limited condition attached and these scenes lack any sense of meet-cuteness, no romantic interplay hastening him to a decision, little expectation that either party is angling to fall in love.
It is practicality rather than intimacy that makes them share a blanket during a dust storm and he asks her to come to his ranch because he will get on with the work quicker if he has someone to cook. In fact, his honesty prevents that: he confronts her over the fact that she “put us out here knowing all the time that he’d come after us” and making her face the corpses of men who died because she hid the truth. He is honest with his emotions and he is determined (“I got a place to go and I’m going”). But he bears none of the normal western hero’s traits, neither a hard drinker, loner, or gunman. He is not gauche like James Stewart or malevolent like Clint Eastwood.
Even more unusual is the treatment of Salvaje. Despite the savagery of his actions, there is within him a sense of honor. He only chases his wife because she has stolen his son; there could be no greater affront to his dignity. The story is told from the point of view of the pursued i.e. Sarah Carver. But, by turning that perspective on its head, The Stalking Moon more easily fits into the category of revenge western, characteristically a picture concerning chase and pursuit by someone who has been wronged.
The director takes a bold step in the presentation of Salvaje. He is not seen at all in the first hour, then in just a few glimpses of a shape, his face only revealed at the climax. He is a ghost and a killing machine combined. Like a latter-day “Terminator,” he cannot be stopped, so skilful he evades capture, and relentless.
It is also, unusually for a western, a thriller. The tension mounts from the discovery, at the 10-minute mark, of Salvaje’s first three victims, all fully-armed soldiers, and the news, one minute later, that he single-handedly killed four troopers previously. At Hennessy, a staging post, when Varner and Carver go out into a dust-storm to search for her son who has run away, they return to find all dead. Everyone they left behind at Silverton, a train depot, is also killed.
Initially, Carver appears impatient, not willing to wait five days for an Army escort, but once she reveals who the boy’s father is, the reason becomes clear, and her desire for speedier transition creates more tension. Even in New Mexico, the death toll mounts, once Salvaje arrives. Now the trap closes in on them. Even the ranch house cannot prevent Salvaje from sneaking in and kidnapping his wife, leaving her for dead outside.
When Varner and a fellow scout, the half-breed Nick Tana (Robert Forster), attempt to turn the tables on Salvaje and track him down, it ends in Tana’s death. Although most of the tension comes from the will- he-won’t-he dynamic, there are number of Hitchcockian touches such as offscreen sound cues triggering alarm in characters. In two instances, a door provides shock.
Far from providing the expected relief, the ranch house merely provides a claustrophobic setting for the characters. Varner is trapped with an inarticulate pair. Instead of arrival at the ranch house precipitating emotional response and romantic interlude, as would be par for the course for other westerns, Varner finds himself stuck with a woman who refuses to talk and a boy who does not understand a word he says. The seven-minute scene where he sits down to eat and then has to virtually command mother and son to join him and encourage them to talk even if it is just to say “pass the peas” is one of the most awkward ever filmed.
The movie is so darned awkward that you never laugh even at the few moments of comedy, the complicated issuing of train tickets, Varner keeping up a one-sided conversation at the table, Nick’s attempts to teach the boy poker. Relationships are more likely to remain in limbo than move on to any romantic or sentimental plane.
The film has a tight structure, the first 40-odd minutes setting up the story and tracing Varner and Sarah’s journey to the ranch house, the next 20 minutes at the ranch alternating between comfort and discomfort as emotional release battles with restraint, the final 40 minutes the physical battle between the mostly unseen enemy and the farm occupants.
Stylistically, it is exceptional. The first section is all open vistas, characters minute figures on vast landscapes, the middle section suggests harmony with nature, and the final battle alternating between being the hunter and the hunted. When we first see Varner he is picked out along the edges of the screen as he leaps up or down or across rocky hillsides. That he appears and disappears at will could almost be the motif for the film.
Virtually everyone is in long shot or medium shot for the first half. Varner appears on the periphery of the screen and the action. He enters scenes where something important is being discussed, such as Sarah’s pleading to be allowed to leave the Army camp quickly. Most directors present Gregory Peck with aura intact, keeping him motionless on the screen to maintain his authority, but here he is always on the move, walking across open ground or confined spaces or darting across hillsides or through bushes, dashing on foot down slopes or racing on horseback.
Although the script – by Alvin Sargent (Gambit, 1966) and Wendell Mayes (Von Ryan’s Express, 1965) based on the T.V. Olson (Soldier Blue, 1970) novel – was viewed in many quarters as being underwritten, in particular Sarah’s role, and that there were too many silences for comfort, in the view of many that is the strength of the picture. There is none of the easy dialogue, crackling lines, coarse confrontation, sentiment or raw emotion of other westerns.
The movie hardly even skirts a cliché. This is in a class of its own in terms of the distance characters maintain between each other. Varner has very little to say, Sarah’s guilt restricts her vocabulary. In one regard the thriller element gets in the way of a study of two remote characters.
If I have any reservations about The Stalking Moon it is that is neither enough of a thriller nor enough of a character study. George Stevens might have sought emotional resolution and producer Alan J. Pakula, who later went on to direct Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974), might have proved more adept at marrying the thriller elements to personal anguish. Although The Stalking Moon may not have entered the pantheon of the greatest westerns, it is a very noble effort indeed, its slow pace and lack of dialogue providing it with a very modern appeal.
Angie Dickinson (Jessica, 1962) is the standout as the cold-blooded double-crossing femme fatale in this slick tale of a double heist. Sure, Lee Marvin (The Professionals, 1966) attracted the bulk of the critical attention as the no-nonsense hitman and John Cassavetes (Machine Gun McCain, 1969) attempts to steal the show as the dupe, but Dickinson walks away with it. Although he makes a vicious entrance, Marvin really only tops and tails the movie.
Violence wasn’t the marketable commodity it proved later in the decade, and this was initially made with television in mind, so it’s surprising how stunning the brutality remains today. In the opening sequence, set in a home for the blind, hitmen Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager) knock around a sightless receptionist before moving on to shooting at point-blank range their victim, ex-racing driver Johnny North (John Cassavettes). But when they get to thinking why they were paid way over the odds to shoot North, they discover he was involved in a million-dollar heist and before you can say flashback we tumble into the story of how gangster’s moll Sheila (Angie Dickinson) lured him into participating in the robbery organized by boyfriend Jack (Ronald Reagan).
There’s nothing particularly complicated about Jack’s plan – hijacking a mail truck on a remote road – but the movie takes its sweet time getting there, focusing on Johnny’s racetrack antics and on Sheila nudging Johnny into the illegal kind of pole position. She’s pretty convincing as the all het-up lover to the extent of persuading Johnny to double-cross Jack but her convictions only run one way – to whatever best suits herself.
Eventually, it appears as if the million bucks has disappeared into thin air. Jack presents himself as an honest businessman, but Sheila only holds to the party line for as long as it takes the hitmen to dangle her from a fourth-storey window. But gangsters are rarely as amenable or as dumb as the schmucks they snooker, so Jack is more than able to take care of himself and his property (counting the loot and Sheila in that category).
There might be twists a-plenty but the main narrative thrust is which way will Sheila spin? Was she ever even in love with Johnny? Or having snared Johnny and then managed to convince him to double-cross Jack did she plan to run off with the money herself? Or was she going to double-cross him all along once his usefulness was over?
And even if her heart is in the right place, then that’s plain tragic, stuck with the lout, unable to break free, perhaps playing all the alpha males off against each other her only hope of maintaining her fine lifestyle while not ending up another casualty.
A surprising chunk of time is spent on the racecourse, not just building up the romance and endorsing Johnny’s driving skills, and as well as the tension of a specific race – and the possibility that too much loving could fatally damage the driver’s track ambitions – you are kept in some kind of narrative limbo as you keep wondering when the heck the killers are going to re-enter the equation.
Don (here credited as Donald) Siegel (Coogan’s Bluff, 1968) directs with considerable aplomb, especially as this carries a television-movie-sized budget and that he hadn’t had a stab at a decent picture since making his initial mark with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). From the iconic opening shot of a pair of dark sunglasses to the sad greed-soaked finale, Siegel’s brilliant use of sound and movement plays in stark contrast to moments of stillness and silence. Throw in aerial tracking sequences, realistic race scenes, and one bold shot of a handgun being pointed at the audience (a similar shot in his Dirty Harry, 1971, ruffled more feathers and generated more critical note).
But the director’s cleverest ploy is to introduce the hitman, then dive elsewhere, leaving audiences begging for more. So it’s just as well that Angie Dickinson delivers in spades. You need to believe she could be as conniving as she is seductive for the entire tale to work. She is the linchpin far more than Lee Marvin.
And that’s to take nothing away from his performance, a far cry from the over-the-top villains of The Commancheros (1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), setting up the template for the later quiet-spoken thug of Point Blank (1967).
As highly watchable as this is, it wasn’t a career breakout for any concerned. Lee Marvin was just a supporting actor on Ship of Fools (1965) and far from first choice for Cat Ballou (1965), the movie that did make his name. Don Siegel wasn’t offered another movie for four years. Angie Dickinson tumbled down the credits, reduced to second female lead in The Art of Love (1965) and working in television or in movies as a supporting actor until the low-budget The Last Challenge/Pistolero of Red River (1967).
Ronald Reagan bowed out of the movies after this. Clu Gulager, who had a running role in The Virginian (1963-1968) only made three movies in the next seven years.
Gene Coon (Journey to Shiloh, 1968) adapted the short story by Ernest Hemingway which when previously filmed in 1946 marked the debut of Burt Lancaster with the sultry Ava Gardner as the femme fatale.
Striking, tense, and a must for fans of Dickinson, Marvin and Siegel.
Throwback to It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), prelude to Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and in the middle of the car chases and town wrecking a character study of a pair of grifters, one veteran, the other his pupil.
U.S. Army deserter Curley (Michael Sarrazin) teams up with veteran con man Mordecai (George C Scott) who teaches him the tricks of the trade. There’s nothing particularly innovative about the older man’s techniques – Find the Queen, The Lost Wallet, selling hooch as genuine whiskey – and the rewards are not particularly rewarding unless you are living at scavenger level in whatever run-down habitat you can find.
The dumb cops, Sheriff Slade (Harry Morgan) and Deputy Meshaw (Albert Salmi), aren’t quite so stupid otherwise they wouldn’t occasionally happen upon their quarry. And the larcenous duo offer nothing more clever by way of escape except to hijack vehicles.
So once you get past the aforementioned car chases and town wrecking it settles down into a gentle old-fashioned drama. Luckily all the good ol’ boy shenanigans are limited to the police, and neither main character is afflicted by over-emphatic accents.
Mordecai ain’t no Robin Hood nor a criminal mastermind who might have his eyes on a big- money heist. His ethos is stealing not so much from the gullible but the greedy. All his suckers think they can make an easy killing from a guy who appears a harmless old duffer.
He’s not looking for a big score because he’s got nobody to settle down with and because, although on a wanted list (as “The Flim-Flam Man” of local legend) he’s not going to exercise the authorities except cops with very little otherwise to do. He is as laid-back a drifter as they come.
Curley offers the drama. He starts to have qualms not so much about stealing from the greedy but about the repair bills for the cars they wrecked, especially one belonging to the young innocent Bonnie Lee (Sue Lyon), to whom he takes a fancy. While she reciprocates it’s only up to a point, having the good sense not to hook up with a criminal, so eventually he has to choose between giving himself up and serving time in the hope Bonnie Lee will hang around and severing his links with Mordecai, whom he treats as a father figure.
How he works that out is probably the best scene, especially given his temporary profession. Whether this is the first picture to feature so prominently incompetent cops rather than either the tough or corrupt kind I’m not sure but Slade and Meshaw take some beating.
In his first starring role, Michael Sarrazin (Eye of the Cat, 1969) is the cinematic catch. All the more so because director Irvin Kershner doesn’t take the easy route of focusing on his soulful eyes, permitting the actor to deliver a more rounded performance. He’s certainly more natural here than any future movie where he clearly relied far more on the aforementioned soulful eyes.
While I’m not sure the ageing make-up does much for him, George C. Scott (Petulia, 1968), in his first top-billed role, tones down the usual operatics and makes a convincing loner who can make one good romantic memory last a lifetime. He switches between completely relaxed to, on spotting a likely victim, sharp as a tack. The harmless old man guise falls away once he smells greed, replaced by cunning small-time ruthlessness.
Sue Lyon (Night of the Iguana, 1964) has little to do except not be the sex-pot of her usual screen incarnation and that’s to the good of the picture. By this stage of his career Harry Morgan was more likely to be found in television so it’s a treat to see him make the most of a meaty supporting part. Look out for Strother Martin (Cool Hand Luke, 1967) and Slim Pickens (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967).
Irvin Kershner (A Fine Madness, 1966) appears on firmer ground with the drama than the wild car chase/town wrecking but I suspect it takes more skills to pull off the latter than the former where the actors can help you out. Though I notice Yakima Canutt is down as second unit director so he might be due more of the credit. Screenwriter William Rose had already plundered the greed theme and, to that extent the car chase, for his seminal It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
The outlandish elements, fun though they are, give this an uneven quality that gets in the way of a tidy little picture.
Producer Harry Alan Towers, himself something of a legend, had put together a quite superb cast – rising Eurostar Klaus Kinski (A Bullet for the General, 1967), Hollywood veterans Robert Cummings (Dial M for Murder, 1954), George Raft (Scarface, 1932), Dan Duryea (Black Bart, 1948) and Brian Donlevy (The Great McGinty, 1940) plus British horrormeister Christopher Lee and Rupert Davies (television’s Maigret). Throw in Margaret Lee (Secret Agent, Super Dragon, 1966) and Austrians Maria Perschy (Kiss, Kiss, Kill, Kill, 1966) and Maria Rohm (Venus in Furs, 1969).
And all in aid of an enjoyable thriller set in Hong Kong that dances between genuine danger and spoof. I mean, what can you make of a chase involving rickshaws? Or a race over bobbing houseboats parked in a harbor? There’s a Shakespeare-quoting cop Sanders (Rupert Davies) whose sidekick Inspector Chiao (Tom Chiao) often out-quotes him. And there’s British-born Margaret Lee, a cult figure in Italian circles, belting out the title song and just for the hell of it Japanese actress Yukari Ito in a cameo as a nightclub singer.
A newly arrived businessman is chucked off the top of a building by an associate of gangster Gert (Klaus Kinski) but not before leaving a note that falls into the hands of the police. The note says, “Five Golden Dragons” and is addressed to playboy Bob (Robert Cummings) for no particular reason. No matter. A MacGuffin is still a MacGuffin, and probably best if left unexplained.
Bob is soon involved anyway after falling for two beautiful sisters, Ingrid (Maria Rohm) and Margret (Maria Perschy). Turns out Margret knows more about Bob than he would like, and knows too much for her own good, namely that the titular dragons are the heads of an evil syndicate, specializing in gold trafficking, meeting for the first time in Hong Kong in order to organize the handover of their empire to the Mafia for a cool $50 million
In a nod at the spy genre, there are secret chambers opened by secret levers. There are double-crosses, chases, confrontations, not to mention a a trope of sunglasses being whipped off, voluntarily I might add. Apart from breaks here and there for a song or two, director Jeremy Summers (Ferry Across the Mersey, 1964) keeps the whole enterprise zipping along, even if he is stuck with Cummings.
In truth, Cummings (Stagecoach, 1966) is a bit of a liability, acting-wise. While the rest of the cast takes the film seriously, he acts as if he’s a Bob Hope throwback, cracking wisecracks when confronted with danger or beautiful women, or, in fact, most of the time, which would be fine if he wasn’t a couple of decades too old (he was 57) to carry off the part of a playboy and if the jokes were funny.
Towers (under the pseudonym Peter Welbeck responsible for the screenplay, loosely based on an Edgar Wallace story) was a maverick but prolific British producer who would graduate to the likes of Call of the Wild (1972) with Charlton Heston but at this point was churning out exotic thrillers (The Face of Fu Manchu, 1965) and mysteries (Ten Little Indians, 1965) and had a good eye for what made a movie tick. This one ticks along quite nicely never mind the bonus of a sinister George Raft and the likes of Margaret Lee and Maria Rohm (Towers’ wife).
Cult contender that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Stylish cat-and-mouse thriller that fits into the relatively small sub-genre of intelligent spy pictures. George Segal was a difficult actor to cast. He had a kind of shiftiness that lent credibility to a movie like King Rat (1965), a cockiness that found a good home in The Southern Star (1969) and an earnestness ideal for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966).
But Quiller fit his screen persona like a glove. The part called for charm to the point of smarminess and courage to the point of callousness. A lone wolf for whom relationships were a means to an end, he adopted identities – journalist, swimming coach etc– as the occasion suited. His undercover mission is to expose a neo-Nazi organisation. But just as he seeks to discover the location of this secret enterprise, so his quarry attempts to find out where his operation is based.
Michael Anderson (The Dam Busters, 1955) had just finished his first spy effort, Operation Crossbow (1966) and that film’s documentary-style approach was carried on here but with a great deal more style. There is consistent use of the tracking shot, often from the point-of-view of one of the protagonists, that gives the film added tension, since you never know where a tracking shot will end. Although the film boasts one of John Barry’s best themes, Wednesday’s Child, there was a remarkable lack of music throughout. Many chase scenes begin in silence, with just natural sounds as a background, then spill out into music, and then back into silence.
But much of the heavy lifting is done by playwright Harold Pinter (The Servant, 1963) in adapting Adam Hall’s prize-winning novel. Hall was one of the pseudonyms used by Trevor Dudley-Smith who wrote The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) under the name Elleston Trevor. The Quiller Memorandum involved wholesale change, from the title (the book was called The Berlin Memorandum) onwards. Quiller is now an American, not British, drafted in from the Middle East.
The book is set against the background of war crime trials; Quiller a British wartime rescuer of Jews now tracking down war criminals; the main female character (played in the film by Senta Berger) had, as a child, been in Hitler’s bunker; and there is a subplot concerning a bubonic plague; there was a preponderance of obscure (though interesting for a reader) tradecraft; plus the Nazi organisation was named “Phoenix.”
While retaining the harsh realities of the spy business, Pinter junks most of this in favour of a more contemporary approach. Instead of meeting his superior Pol (Alec Guinness) in a theater, this takes place in the Olympiad stadium. Guinness’s upper crust bosses, Gibbs (George Sanders) and Rushington (Robert Flemyng), are more interested in one-upmanship. Berlin still showed the after-effects of the war and Pinter exploits these locales.
One lead takes him to Inge (Senta Berger), an apparently innocent teacher in a school where a known war criminal had worked.
But the core remains the same, Quiller prodding for weaknesses in the Nazi organisation. his opposite number Oktober (Max von Sydow) allows him to come close in the hope of reeling him in and forcing him to reveal the whereabouts of his operation. Quiller plays along in order to infiltrate the Nazis.
There is a lot of tradecraft: “do you smoke this brand” (of cigarettes) is the way spies identify themselves; Quiller followed on foot turns the tables on his quarry; the American is poisoned after being prodded by a suitcase; Quiller employs word associations to avoid giving away real information.
Having flushed out his adversaries, Quiller is now dangerously exposed. But that’s his job. He’s just a pawn to both sides. He’s virtually never on top unlike the fantasy espionage worlds inhabited by James Bond, Matt Helm and Derek Flint.
The structure is brilliant. Quiller spends most of the picture in dogged bafflement. The supercilious Pol flits in and out, as if such work is beneath him.Quiller is stalked and stalks in return. There are exciting car chases but the foot chases (if they can be called that) are far more tense.
But the core is a bold thirteen-minute interrogation scene where Quiller s confronted by Oktober. As an antidote to the thuggery and danger to which he is exposed, Quiller becomes involved with Inge.
Segal is a revelation, grown vastly more mature as an actor after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) for which he was Oscar-nominated, confident enough to abandon the showy carapace of previous pictures. This is a picture where he sheds layers, from the opening brashness to the sense of defeat in surviving the interrogation ordeal, knowing the only reason he is still alive is to lead the enemy to his own headquarters, buoyed only by inner grit. He hangs on to his identity by his fingertips.
And it’s a revelation, too, or perhaps a backward step for Max von Sydow, who presented a less clichéd character in The Reward (1965). While dangerous enough, it looks like he is already slipping into the category of foreign villain.
Senta Berger (The Secret Ways, 1961) is hugely under-rated as an actress. She was in the second tier of the European sex bombs who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, the top league dominated by Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. On screen she is not as lively as those three, but the quiet intensity of her luminous beauty draws the camera in.
Here, she is utterly believable as the innocent women who, in falling for Segal, is dragged into his dangerous world. She was criminally under-used by Hollywood, often in over-glamourous roles such as The Ambushers (1967) or as the kind of leading lady whose role is often superfluous.
Discussion of Alec Guinness as a spy inevitably turns to his role as George Smiley in the BBC series Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (19790 and its sequel three years later, but this is a less dour portrayal, almost whimsical in a way.
Not that Red. Not that Brian Cox. In fact, this slow-burn low-key character-driven revenge drama preceded both the Bruce Willis-Morgan Freeman-Helen Mirren-Brian Cox actioner and the elevation of Cox to small-screen megastar via Succession. And, of course, it was made long before everyone was selling their soul to streamers. So, it’s odd just what a perfect fit it makes for watching on television.
Don’t expect the loud-mouthed arrogant bully of Succession or the sometime scene-stealing that went with being an under-employed supporting actor for most of Cox’s career and think back to the quiet intensity of Manhunter (1986) and you get a pretty good idea of how this is pitched.
Widower Avery (Brian Cox) is enjoying a quiet spot of fishing accompanied by his dog Red when his idyll is interrupted by shotgun-toting tearaway Danny (Noel Fisher), his brother Pete (Shiloh Fernandez) and buddy Harold (Kyle Gallner). On finding the old man doesn’t have enough cash on him to fund a decent meal, Danny shoots the dog.
Now, legally, there’s not much you can do Stateside when someone murders a dog, bearing in mind this is in the days before John Wick found an illegal solution to the problem. Pinning a $100 fine or a few days jail time is as much as Avery could reasonably expect. But in Smalltown USA when the culprit’s father is well-connected unreasonable businessman McCormick (Tom Sizemore), legal recourse or even journalistic exposure is going to be hard to come by. An apology, any sign of remorse, might swing it as far as Avery is concerned but not only is McCormick disinclined to believe his son is guilty of such a misdemeanor, he’s likely to come out fighting.
Although an ex-soldier, and despite possessing a neat little armory of his own, Avery isn’t Rambo-inclined. But he can’t let the random death alone, especially because the dog was a gift – again John Wick-style – from his wife before her unexpected death. And even this would probably not trigger much more than a severe grinding of the teeth or hitting the bottle except McCormick ramps up the stakes, driving Avery off the road and burning down his business. Even then, Avery would probably settle for a smattering of justice, not a fire-fight.
If McCormick or the kid had any idea just how diligent Avery is – he does his own detective work and proves an expert in hand-to-hand combat – he might have backed off but then that would have meant acknowledging parental responsibility and a son going awry. What’s so interesting about this picture beyond that it avoids the slam-bang approach, is the subtlety. Avery knows all about wayward children and that tragedy from his own life is seeded into the narrative without taking it over.
Similarly, it doesn’t dive down the rabbit-hole of a crusading journalist. When small-time reporter Carrie (Kim Dickens) does come into the scene, she’s not promising Pulitzer Prize glory, recognizes that McCormick will have more pull than her with her bosses, and for the most part she’s the necessary ear for the reclusive Avery to unload his pain.
Social media might well have done the narrative trick. Imagine local horror at seeing a well-to-do businessman tarred-and-feathered across social media, the do-gooders would be up in arms. But that’s not an option here. And although Carrie is more hard-bitten than Avery would like, she’s not hard-bitten enough to exploit his previous tragedy as a way of getting her story on the front pages of every newspaper in the country, even if it was only for the irony of the situation.
Nor, despite them sharing a companionable drink, and Carrie clearly liking the old buffer, is there any suggestion of budding romance, or if there is, that’s also hovering on the periphery. One glance at John Wick and you note the dramatic traps skipped over. Only one false step – the trite ending.
So, instead of full-tilt boogie action, we have a thoughtful drama presenting the various deeper shades of Brian Cox that generally remained hidden for the bulk of his career.
When it turned up in the “new release” section of Amazon Prime, I mistakenly imagined this was a new movie cashing in on Cox’s late-career newfound fame and imagined it was another project churned out in Streamerland. I tuned in with expectations of Cox cashing in on said fame, but was surprised to find a finely-wrought drama rather than a crime thriller.
Kim Dickens (Gone Girl, 2014) follows Cox’s low-key approach but Tom Sizemore (Breakout, 2023) can’t resist over-acting. Noel Fisher, in case you wondered, found fame in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014 iteration).
Two directors were involved so I’m assuming Lucky McKee (The Woman, 2011), who was fired, wasn’t so much responsible for the dark-lit look as Trygve Allister Deisen, in his only movie so far. Jack Ketchum (The Woman ) and Stephen Susco (The Grudge, 2004) worked out the screenplay.
Fascinating performance by Brian Cox in an story that takes the interesting rather than easy route.
Unfairly maligned on release. Part throwback screwball comedy, part farce, part satire and in low-key fashion the first disaster movie. Oddly enough, that wild combination hits the mark. Tony Curtis makes amends for Boeing Boeing (1965). Claudia Cardinale on top form as a ditzy brunette. Last hurrah for Ealing Comedy grey eminence Alexander Mackendrick (A High Wind in Jamaica, 1965). Plus Sharon Tate as a sky-diver. What’s not to like?
Hardly surprising though at the time it got the thumbs-down from critics and the cold shoulder from audiences. A very late arrival to the short-lived beach movie cycle and unlikely to compete with the harder-edged satires like The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966) and Divorce American Style (1967) or the latest off the Neil Simon conveyor belt Barefoot in the Park (1967).
Marvelous opening with sight gags galore sees vacationer Carlo (Tony Curtis) wrestling with a runaway car then seeing hapless wannabe artist Laura (Claudia Cardinale) accidentally setting fire to the vehicle. To make amends for destroying all his belongings, she invites him to stay the night. Unfortunately, her married lover Rod (Robert Webber) turns up, cueing a whole layer of farce, traditional bedroom-style here but later even better in the office, properly done this time compared to Boeing Boeing.
The next day Carlo is rescued from drowning by Malibu (Sharon Tate) with whom he promptly falls in love and attempts to separate her from her hulk of a boyfriend Harry (David Draper), all muscle but little brain and prone to easily-exploited bouts of depression.
Carlo is the smarter younger brother of the character in Boeing Boeing, managing to muscle in on Rod’s swimming pool business and demonstrating his sharp salesmanship skills. Except that Laura is so shrill and a kept woman, you’d expect him to be more interested in her than Malibu, but then where would be we be without a love triangle. In an odd sub-plot involving an astrologer (Ed Bergen), Carlo manages to win over Malibu. Meanwhile, Rod’s smarter wife Diane (Joanna Barnes) infiltrates her husband’s cosy love nest.
Although Carlo is effectively set up as somewhat shifty hero he undergoes a series of humiliations, brought down to earth by being repeatedly picked up and carried like a doll by Harry, and being drowned in mud. Other times he lives high on the hog, realizing he could make a killing here.
There’s no great plot, just the usual misunderstandings, but, unusually, characters are given moments of self-reflection and self-deprecation, and the satire focuses on the self-involvement of the beautiful people. There’s a fair bit of ogling but the camera is gender-equal, the toned bodies of the muscle men given as much attention as any passing female in a bikini.
I found myself chuckling all over the place, mostly at the antics of Carlo. This is a pretty good performance by Tony Curtis, mugging kept well under control but adept at physical comedy. And Claudia Cardinale (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968) is equally game, drenched for a good chunk of time, and hit by sudden self-awareness as the tale unfolds. You might balk at her high-tempo performance but otherwise the set-up wouldn’t work. If she wasn’t so annoying why would Carlo look elsewhere for romance?
The disaster element involves a runaway clifftop house, a situation created by the unlucky Laura, and it doesn’t take much to see what elements The Poseidon Adventure filched, playing it for drama rather than comedy.
While not in the same category Mackendrick classics The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Ladykillers (1955) or even The Sweet Smell of Success (1957) – co-starring Curtis – this is not to so far off. Mackendrick excels at building the comedy, confidently marshals the farce, but, more importantly, doesn’t lose sight of the characters in the ensuing chaos.
Producer Marty Ransohoff tries to pull a fast one by slapping an “introducing” credit on Sharon Tate, conveniently ignoring her performance in the previous year’s Eye of the Devil (1966). She’s less iconic here – unless you imagine that with her bronzed face she’s a distant cousin of George Hamilton – but she’s far from the dizzy blonde, much more pragmatic, the one who switches electricity back on after the blackout, and with her own oddball ways. Trivia note: they modelled “Malibu Barbie” on Tate.
The Magnificent 60s 