Brian Hannan

Blow-Up (1966)***

Movies can break all sorts of rules but they can’t cheat.

A film has to stick to an internal logic. For example, it can’t portray a photographer so obsessed with his calling that he even takes a camera with him to an antique shop and starts shooting off roll and after roll capturing the area’s rundown streets but then the one time he really could do with a camera – to prove there is a corpse at his feet – he is somewhat remiss. Especially when the movie turns on that plot point.

Setting aside what’s a somewhat contrived snapshot of “Swinging London” there’s a lot to admire here. The absence of music for one thing. Most of the movie runs without musical accompaniment, a bold move since so often we rely on the soundtrack to provide guidance for a scene or an overlay for the entire film. Here, Antonioni makes us falls back on our own interpretation.

David Hemmings, all mop-top and intense stare, is a high-flying high-living fashion photographer in the David Bailey mold (casual sex with wannabe models a perk) who turns investigator on being confronted in a park by Vanessa Redgrave after taking snaps she wants back. Tension is sustained by her sudden appearance at his studio, willing to pay with her body for the return of the photos, and then by Hemmings’ careful, photo-by-photo blow-up-by-blow-up analysis that slowly comes closer to the truth.

Everything in his world is judged through a lens, as if he can capture elusive truths, and he has aspirations to being more than a mere fashion adjunct, having spent time taking portraits of down-and-outs. He judges Redgrave as he would a model, she has a good stance and sitting posture. Even by the standards of the permissive society, he is a bit of sexual predator, taking advantage of two giggly model wannabes.

But the photography scenes are well done and Antonioni captures the intimacy between model and photographer that create the best images. If you can get past the cheat and the deliberate obtuseness this creates – and the tsunami of artistic interpretations it inspired about the director’s intent – then it remains intriguing.

This isn’t Hemmings’ greatest work – Fragment of Fear is much better – but it certainly provided him with a marketable movie persona. Redgrave is excellent as the nervy woman willing to do what is required and the movie might have worked better had she had been allocated more screen time and their duel had continued through other scenes. But then that would have been Hitchcock and not Antonioni. I’d have given it a higher score except for the cheat.

Hollywood vs. The Law

A week or so back a momentous decision probably passed you by. The United States Government repealed the Paramount Consent Decree of 1948. That was the law that forced studios to shed their chains of theaters. The unforeseen result was that it ended the studio system on which Hollywood had based its operational model, threw thousands of actors and hundreds of directors out of work and put the business in financial jeopardy for over a decade. Why it took so long for the Government to change its mind is anybody’s guess.

By the 1960s it was clear the Government’s action had been, to say the least, misguided. Without the guaranteed profits from exhibition, Hollywood could not afford to make so many pictures. And with no financial interest in exhibition, studios no longer felt any obligation to provide picture houses with the three or four hundred a year that some required to survive.

It only took 15 years for legal minds to consider a rethink. When, in 1963, the second largest theater chain in the country – National General – decided to take a stab at making movies, it was granted a three-year window to do so. National General, which had bought up half the Twentieth Century Fox circuit in 1951 and now also owned real estate and supplied equipment for concerts, set up Carthay Center Productions with a four-picture slate including Divorce American-Style.

The only people who objected to this development were the studios. The exhibitors who had been the driving force to get the Paramount Decree over the line welcomed the move. And for a simple reason – the collapse of the old Hollywood system had seen a substantial drop in output. There were not enough pictures to go round. Worse, the shortage meant the movies that were being made took much longer to reach the hinterlands. Big city center theaters held on to movies for far longer than when there had been more pictures to choose from. The arrival of roadshow had exacerbated the problem, tying up the biggest cinemas for months at a time thus preventing ordinary films from being released.

Prior to National General, there had been a few low-budget or regional attempts by cinema owners to enter production business, but not at a sufficient level to alarm Government. Howco, which owned 60 theaters, made a small number of B-films like Jail Bait (1954) and Girl with an Itch (1958). McLendon Theaters, which also owned a radio station, made the low-budget The Killer Shrews (1959 and My Dog Buddy (1960) mainly as a filler for its own cinemas.

It took more than three years for National General to get its act together and required a further three-year waiver, granted in 1966, going on to fund Divorce American-Style (1967) and Gregory Peck western The Stalking Moon (1968) among others. CBS Television entered the production arena with Cinema Center and carved out a deal with NGC that greenlit John Wayne in Rio Lobo (1970) and Big Jake (1971), Lee Marvin in Monte Walsh (1970), Pocket Money (1972) and Prime Cut (1972), and Steve McQueen in The Reivers (1969), Le Mans (1971) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972).

Meanwhile, American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres, the largest circuit in America, had already bypassed the strictures of the decree with a quartet of low budget films such as The Beginning of the End (1957) and Eighteen and Anxious (1958) before setting up the more ambitious ABC Pictures in 1965, its first production Good Times (1967) followed by pictures as diverse as Charly (1968), The Straw Dogs (1971), Robert Aldrich’s The Grissom Gang (1971), historical epic The Last Valley (1971), Ingmar Bergman drama The Touch (1971) and Oscar-winning musical Cabaret (1972). ABC also owned Palomar which made The Killing of Sister George (1968), Shalako (1968), and The Stepford Wives (1975).

The 1948 Decree, the result of embittered exhibitors egging on ambitious politicians, was probably the craziest decision the Government made in over 30 years of interference in the movie business. The first bit of interference was theoretically justified – the antitrust action of 1914. But the background to this was at the very least murky. The companies that actually invented the film and equipment from cameras to projectors realized a) that their patents could easily be pirated and b) that they could potentially be excluded from the massive revenues their ideas had created. As the business swiftly changed more money was being from exhibition than production.

Initially, movies were shown in peepshows in America, individual booths where the customer inserted a coin and saw flickering images for a few minutes. The booth owner would buy the movie outright. But then they came to realize that once interest in that particular movie had died away they would be left with a dud. So someone came up with the idea of renting movies rather than selling them outright. This was, in effect, a film library. These were called exchanges. The theater owner would rent a movie one week and take it back the next and pay far less than it cost to purchase a movie outright.

A group of manufacturers – known as the General Film Company – created a consortium and set about buying up all the exchanges. This would have resulted in a monopoly of distribution. And if the distributors were also the producers then they could guarantee that exchanges gave priority to the movies their companies.

One exchange owner challenged this in court. And won. That was the first anti-trust action against the industry and technically not against the Hollywood arm of film-making since Hollywood had not been invented at that point with most movies being made around New York.

Then, in sweet irony, exchange owners and exhibitors worked out that the GFC was right – you had to control all aspects of the business. Vertical integration became the basis of the Hollywood system. Studios made movies, distributed the movies through their own exchanges and owned chains of cinemas. In the 1920s a lot more money was made from exhibition than production, in part because rental percentages were heavily weighted in favor of the exhibitor.

No studio actually had a nationwide chain, they tended to be strong in a region, and the number of cinemas they owned was far from being monopolistic but in general they were in charge of operations in the centers of big cities rather than mom-and-pop picture houses in the hinterlands.

But independent exhibitors didn’t think this was fair and towards the end of the 1920s began to harass their local political representative to change what was known as “block booking.” This was where a cinema signed up with one studio for its entire annual output of 50 or 60 films, sight unseen. Exhibitors complained they had no idea what they were going to get. The contract they signed might simply point to three films with Joan Crawford, two from Greta Garbo and so on. Exhibitors conveniently ignored the fact that it was impossible for a studio tasked with making so many pictures to plan so far ahead. Studios would have to be working or two or three sets of 50-60 movies every year just to meet exhibitor demand.

Generally, however, Hollywood with its free-wheeling attitudes tended to mightily annoy politicians. Producers had become too casual in attitudes to morality. In the 1920s, there were hundreds of censorship bills being lined up to go through legislators while in towns and cities movies could be banned for a variety of reasons. Largely to the save money from defending itself against proposed bills and local censorship, Hollywood decided to go down the self-regulation route. An independent censorship body known as the Production Code was established in 1930.

Hollywood wealth also aggravated the government. Top stars could earn $300,000 a year at a time when millions were unemployed – amounting to 18 per cent of the working population in 1930 – and the average annual salary was $1,368. So in 1934 hoping to shame the industry to reducing salaries the Government forced studios to reveal the actual earnings of every star. It hoped a public backlash would produce a boycott that would make the industry see sense. However, although the bill afforded those inclined to demonstrate moral superiority the opportunity for outrage, the public did not take against the movie industry. (You can find out more about this in my book When Women Ruled Hollywood.)

But the Government plowed ahead in its intent of bringing the industry to heel. This time politicians returned to the original source of contention – block booking. And in 1939 Government legislation prevented companies forcing exhibitors to sign contracts for a year’s supply of movies sight unseen.

There were two major outcomes of the new law. Firstly, movies could not be released until seen by exhibitors. That resulted in studios at great expense setting up trade shows in cities all over America. While theoretically this was a good idea since now exhibitors would know what they were getting, in reality it was plainly preposterous. If an average movie house changed programs twice a week and showed double bills as was the norm then they would have to allocate around six hours a week, plus travelling time, to attend the trade shows. More time, in fact, because the studios did not run a stack of films back-to-back in a tidy preview; rather previewing one film at a time.

The second rule, to prevent studios lumping a heap of bad movies in with a smaller number of good ones was to limit the maximum number of films that could be sold in a block to five. The assumption was that in order to attract interest each block would have to contain one or two good pictures. And that a studio’s biggest-budgeted pictures would be included in such blocks.

But the legislators had left a couple of loopholes, so it didn’t go the way they expected. In the first place, there was nothing to prevent a studio putting one picture in its own block. That meant studios could protect their biggest productions, forcing exhibitors to pay far more for them from the outset than before. The second, and more serious point, was that the need to trade-show created a supply drought and studios showed no signs of speeding up the supply chain since in effect they had to make two years’ worth of movies in one year.

So they held back movies until they felt any batch had realized its potential. By the mid-1940s each studio was sitting on a back catalog of about 20-30 movies. To fill the gap, studios took to reviving old films, but charging top dollar for them. Whenever it looked like exhibitors were opting for cheaper older films rather than more expensive films, the studios simply cut off the supply of reissues.

Studios and cinemas faced a multiplicity of problems during the war, from the Government limiting the amount of raw stock to make prints to enforcing blackouts on front-of-house marquees , but even so there was full employment and theaters had to remain open for longer periods in order to cope with demand.

The fact that studios had taken everything the government could throw at them and still came up smiling enraged the powers-that-be. Now exhibitors were agitating for greater freedom to show films i.e not be told when they could and could not show a film and not have to wait a specified period of time as a movie shuttled down the food chain. Lawsuits were piling up. The studios had operated a self-regulating arbitration system since the 1920s, often paying out millions of dollars in reparation to hard-done-by exhibitors, but that system was rapidly descending into chaos.

Studios just had too much power, as far as the Government was concerned, and would have to choose between making movies and showing them. That resulted in the 1948 Decree. Interestingly, the exhibitors were not all pro-change. Some foresaw the potential devastation that lay ahead and complained that this was the kind of victory that put exhibitors out of business. The decree had been intended to create equality of opportunity, but it had the opposite effect as exhibitors battled with each other to obtain product from a steadily-diminishing supply. Most exhibitors came off worse as a result of a change in the law that they had instigated.

Getting rid of the law entirely now will open the doors for the likes of Netflix and Amazon to move big time into cinema ownership. This will help them fight any plans by the Oscar ruling class to stop their films being considered for these valuable statuettes. But it might also strengthen the potential for films initially intended for streaming to be given a longer or simultaneous run in theaters. At some point Netflix, which has been built entirely on debt, will see the value of a billion-dollar hit and what it can add to the bottom line while still benefiting from getting first bite at streaming. Most films made for streaming drop into the made-for-television feature film category that has been around since the 1960s. The Killers (1964) with Lee Marvin, for example, was shown first in cinemas though originally made for television. But just as television companies found then, the public just does not want to stay at home all the time watching the small screen, even when the movies have decent stars, and hopefully a similar sort of sanity will prevail today.

The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) ***

I’ve never gone out of my way to watch a Doris Day picture with the exception of musical Calamity Jane (1953) when it became a camp classic as well as Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and films where she happened to be co-starring with Cary Grant.

So I came to The Glass Bottom Boat with low expectations, especially as this was towards the end of her two-decade career and co-star Rod Taylor was a different level of star to Grant and Rock Hudson. By now, she had dropped the musical and dramatic string to her bow and concentrated on churning out romantic comedies and also been supplanted by Julie Andrews as Hollywood’s favourite cute star.

But on the evidence here I can certainly see her attraction. This is entertaining enough. And she sings – the theme song, one other and a riff on one of her most famous tunes “Que Sera Sera.” Unless there’s a symbolism I’ve missed, the title is misleading since the boat only appears in the opening section to perform the obligatory meet-cute with Taylor as a fishermen hooking Day’s mermaid costume.

The plot is on the preposterous side, Day suspected as a spy infiltrating Taylor’s aerospace research operation. It’s partly a James Bond spoof – when her dog is called Vladimir you can see where the movie is headed – with all sorts of crazy gadgets. But mostly the plot serves to illustrate Day’s substantial gifts as a comedienne. For an actress at the top of her game, she is never worried about looking foolish.

And that’s part of her appeal. She may look sophisticated even when, as here, playing an ordinary public relations girl, but turns clumsy and uncoordinated at the first scent of comedic opportunity. There’s some decent slapstick and pratfalls and some pretty good visual gags especially the one involving a soda water siphon. A chase scene is particularly inventive and there’s a runaway boat that pays dividends. But there are a couple of effective dramatic moments too, emotional beats, when the romance untangles.

She’s in safe hands, director Frank Tashlin responsible for Son of Paleface (1952) and The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). I also felt Taylor was both under-rated and under-used, never given much to do onscreen except stick out a chiseled jaw and turn on the charm. Although he had been Day’s sparring partner in her previous picture Do Not Disturb (1965) he’s not in the Cary Grant-Rock Hudson league.

It’s also worth remembering that the actress had her own production company, Arwin, which put together over a dozen of her pictures, including this one, so she would be playing to her strengths rather than those of her co-star. On the bonus side, watch out for a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo by Robert Vaughn (The Man from Uncle), a featured role by Dom DeLuise as a bumbling spy and, in a bit part as a neighbour, silent screen comedienne Mabel Normand.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Glass-Bottom-Boat-Doris-Day/dp/B089Q38254/ref=sr_1_2?crid=33N53Z2O4WYJB&dchild=1&keywords=the+glass+bottom+boat+dvd&qid=1595511843&s=dvd&sprefix=the+glass+bottom%2Caps%2C146&sr=1-2

The Greatest Movie Never Made

Forty Days at Musa Dagh was a strong contender by the end of the 1960s for The Greatest Movie Never Made. By then an eye-watering one million bucks had been spent without a foot of film being shot.

I came across it while writing my book about “The Making of The Guns of Navarone.” That film’s producer Carl Foreman was slated in the early 1960s to write what I soon discovered was a legendary lost project. It was subsequently fated to become the most high-profile casualty of MGM’s financial problems at the end of that decade.

Forty Days of Musa Dagh was based on the debut novel written in German by Prague-born poet Franz Werfel (who later wrote The Song of Bernadette filmed in 1942). It concerned the infamous Armenian genocide carried out by the Turks in World War One.

The novel had such advance buzz that news of its imminent publication in Germany in 1933 quickly crossed the Atlantic. After studio representatives read the book in the original German, MGM wunderkind Irving Thalberg bought the rights in 1934, prior to its American publication, for $35,000 (equivalent to $650,000 now).

Thalberg promised “one of the most staggering production undertakings of all motion picture history.” With Clark Gable and William Powell heading the cast (there would be 63 roles) and director William Wellman (Call of the Wild, 1935) assigned a million-dollar budget, an enormous amount for the time, and with screenwriter Talbot Jennings (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935) on board, Thalberg was intent on delivering a prestige product. In publicity material, MGM boasted: “What a picture it will make.”

The novel was a huge success with 170,000 copies sold in hardback even though, priced at $3, it was 50 cents or a dollar more expensive than other bestsellers. It was simultaneously snapped up by the Book of the Month Club and the Catholic Book club and only kept off the top of the bestseller lists by James Hilton’s Lost Horizon.

However, publication was shrouded in controversy. It was banned in Germany shortly after publication. In America, publisher Viking and the author faced a $200,000 libel lawsuit brought by Harutian Nokhudian and the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1936 – where it was dismissed. But that was only the beginning of its troubles.

Thalberg had not counted on opposition from Turkey. Or if such a possibility had been considered, it had been dismissed since that country was not a profitable outlet for Hollywood product. However, Turkey had very strong trading relationships and threatened to instigate a ban on all MGM releases in these European countries as well as the entire Muslim world, an action which if successful would put a huge hole in the studio’s foreign receipts.

For the first time studios “had begun to pay attention to foreign repercussions” after Paramount had been forced to withdraw from Spain and many other markets the final Josef von Sternberg-Marlene Dietrich collaboration The Devil Is A Woman (1935) when that movie ruffled the feathers of foreign powers. Unwilling to go ahead with a picture that might cost them heavily at the foreign box office, Thalberg shelved the movie (along with two others).

The idea remained dormant for 15 years until revived by independent producer Walter Wanger (Joan of Arc, 1948) who had originally competed with MGM for the rights and had Paramount waiting in the wings to provide backing should the Thalberg deal fall through. But even a seasoned a producer such as Wanger had no more success in placing it on the launch pad and it struggled along in development hell for another decade until, out of the blue, in 1961 MGM hooked writer-director Carl Foreman.

This was a considerable surprise because Foreman had an exclusive and lucrative deal with Columbia (they split profits on his films down the middle) but as he was coming off that studio’s most successful picture of all time The Guns of Navarone (1961) with a high-octane cast of Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn the studio cut him some slack.

Foreman did not come cheap. In addition to his $27,500 fee for writing the script, Foreman was entitled to 2.5 per cent of the gross after MGM had taken in twice the negative cost. After an arduous four-year slog delivering The Guns of Navarone, Foreman described his new venture as “a bit of a rest” which seemed an odd choice of phrase given that MGM was under pressure to greenlight the picture in 1962.

It was firmly in MGM’s production sights for most of the 1960s. In 1963 it was seen as one of the studio’s biggest upcoming projects along with Doctor Zhivago, the adaptation of James Michener’s Caravans and musical Say It with Music. By the following year it had been allocated a $7.5 million budget – the same as Zhivago – and was on course to be made in Greece in the spring of that year.

By 1965 it landed in the lap of Oscar-nominated British director Guy Green who had nurtured the $1.2 million A Patch of Blue (1965) starring Sidney Poitier into a substantial hit. Although the budget had by now dropped to $5 million it had attracted Omar Sharif, one of four big stars set. There was a new script by Scottish Oscar-winner Neil Paterson (Room at the Top, 1959) and best of all there was a top-flight producer in Pandro S. Berman (Father of the Bride, 1950) with over two decades experience at MGM. Filming, however, though still in Greece, had been pushed back to 1966.

Although Guy Green appeared to have the most solid lock on the project, other names associated with the movie included producer Carlo Ponti (Doctor Zhivago, 1965) and directors William Wyler (Ben Hur, 1959), Henri Verneuil (The 25^th Hour, 1967) and Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront, 1954), the last two both born in the former Ottoman Empire now known as Turkey.

It was listed as being on the MGM production schedules for every year till the end of the decade with names like Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston bandied about until it joined a massive bonfire of other expensive projects. By the end of the decade it had racked up over a million dollars in producer and screenwriter fees. According to Variety it was “the most off-again on-again major literary property in the history of American motion picture.”

But it was not alone in being dumped by a studio. Towards the end of the 1960s Hollywood was awash with abandoned projects. The rights to Broadway musical Coco had cost $2.25 million. Fred Zinnemann’s adaptation of Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate had a $12 million budget before the plug was pulled. A record $600,000 had been spent on acquiring the rights to William Styron bestseller The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Other high-priced acquisitions lumped in production limbo included The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) author John Le Carre’s A Small Town in Germany, Armageddon by Leon Uris of Exodus (1960) fame, Bullet Park by John Cheever who had written The Swimmer (1968), Caravans despite the success of the author’s Hawaii (1966) and The Inheritors by Harold Robbins who had churned out The Carpetbaggers (1964).

Hit plays were no more successful in reaching the starting grid – Arthur Miller’s After the Fall had George Cukor lined up to direct and Faye Dunaway as star and a total of $350,000 had been spent on Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

And there, surely, Forty Days of Musa Dagh should have been laid to rest. Of all these expensive projects, only Caravans would eventually see the light of day. But against all odds, interest in Forty Days of Musa Dagh remained high. Fresh from success with Where Eagles Dare (1968) producing team Elliott Kastner and Jerry Gershwin took a stab at the project, setting their sights on a new script and a 1970 start date. But the duo could not turn the idea into reality. And once again it sank to the bottom of the pile.

Armenian businessman and sometime producer John Kurkjian (The Tears of Happiness, 1974) picked up the rights through his vehicle High Investment and wooed MGM. And in 1976 the project was revived by the studio as a co-production with James B. Harris (Paths of Glory, 1957) overseeing production based on a new script by South African playwright Ronald Harwood (One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1970). This was viewed as “the last attempt to revive it” and for a time it appeared as if the project would at last see the light of day. But MGM’s optimism barely lasted the year and, concluding the movie was too rich for its blood, dropped out.

Kurkjian continued to try to interest other studios and was confident. With a new script by Clarke Reynolds (Shalako, 1968), he was convinced he could get the movie off the ground with the backing of the Yugoslavian government were the film to shoot there. United Artists announced the movie would be on its release slate for 1977-1978. But that, too, proved a false dawn.

Redemption came from the most unlikely of sources – American B-picture production outfit Cannon which had been taken over in 1979 for just $500,000 by Israeli writer-director Menahem Golem and his cousin Yoram Globus. Although this pair specialized in low-budget action pictures such as Death Wish sequels and martial arts efforts like Enter the Ninja (1981), they had artistic pretensions, borne out by The Magician of Lublin (1979) directed by Golan and starring Alan Arkin. That same year, a new version of Forty Days of Musa Dagh took shape, part-funded by High Investment and the West Berlin Senate. Charles Bronson was lined up as star. The budget was set at $10 million.

In the end, there was no Bronson and no $10 million budget, but the movie did get made in 1982 for $4 million by Transcontinental Picture Industries with the less stellar cast of Indian star Kabir Bedi (Sandokan mini-series, 1976), American television actress Ronnie Carol and character actor Guy Stockwell (Beau Geste, 1966). It was directed by Israeli Sarky Mouradian (Tears of Happiness). It did not reach the United States for another five years. And it was no epic, coming in at a trim 94 minutes. Nor was it a huge box office success. And it’s pretty impossible to find on DVD.

Footnote: The Promise (2016) covered the same ground. Directed by Terry George, it starred Chistian Bale, Oscar Isaac and Charlotte Le Bon. It was funded by Kirk Kerkorian.

SOURCES: “Double Pan for Reich,” Variety, Feb 27, 1934, 58; “Literati: Best Sellers,” Variety, Jan 1, 1935, 58; “Wellman’s Chore,” Variety, Apr 10, 1935, 2; Advertisement, MGM, Variety, Jun 12, 1935, 25-28; “Foreign Rights Bugaboo,” Variety, Nov 27, 1935, 2; “Thalberg’s Eight; Four at $1,000,000,” Variety, Dec 25, 1935, 4; “H’Wood Foreign Jams,” Variety, Mar 25, 1936, 3; “MGM Scraps Witch of Timbuctoo and Musa Dagh,” Variety Mar 25, 1936, 3; “Film Industry Watching Blockade as B.O. Cue on Provocative Themes,” Variety, Jun 22, 1938, 1; “Carl Foreman to Metro on Loan,” Variety, Feb 1, 1961, 3; “Columbia Waives Rights to Foreman for 40 Days,” Variety, Feb 8, 1961, 59; “Foreman’s Commitment: Doing 40 Days for MGM, Strength for Columbia,” Variety, Jul 5, 1961, 11; “Positive Side of Negatives,” Variety, May 30, 1962, 5; “Berman, 22-Year Man, Stays on MGM Lot,” Variety, Aug 1, 1962, 3; “Upcoming MG Slate May Number 30 Pix,” Variety, Jan 1, 1964, 16; “1965-1967 Will Be Roadshow Years” Variety, Sep 16, 1964, 4; “Pictures: Omar Sharif,” Variety, Dec 9, 1964, 21; “Guy Green Next Helms Musa Dagh,” Variety, Apr 14, 1965, 20; “Musa Dagh Nearer,” Variety, Jul 7, 1965, 9; “MGM Keeps Pledge of 26 Prods,” Variety, Aug 10, 1965, 5; “MGM’s (Hopefully) Final Loan,” Variety, Sep 14, 1966, 3; “3 Ponti Films on Metro O’Seas Slate,” Variety, Apr 19, 1967, 65; “Forty Days (and 34 Years) of Musa Dagh,” Variety, Apr 16, 1969, 19; “Acceptable Script As Invisible Cost Before Production,” Variety, Jul 14, 1971, 3; “Big Investment in Story Values Which Have Not Yet Been Filmed,” Variety, May 9, 1973, 28; “Werfel, After 40 years,” Variety, Jul 28, 1976, 6; “United Artists Looks Ahead; 13 from Metro Inventory,” Variety, Sep 22, 1976, 3; “Shepherd, As MGM Producer, Details Plans, Dropped Films, ” Variety, Dec 15, 1976,3; “Golan-Globus to Film 40 Days of Musa Dagh,” Variety, Feb 14, 1979, 27; “TPI Carves Out Sales Niche,” Variety, Oct 26, 1983, 69; “Film Review,” Variety, Nov 25, 1987, 19; “Cannon Completed Versus Unmade Films,” Variety, Oct 5, 1988, 52.

Assignment K (1968) ****

By the mid-1960s the screen was awash with spies so other than trying to invent a new hero in the Matt Helm/Derek Flint vein or revamping older characters such as Bulldog Drummond or sending up the entire genre in the style of Casino Royale (1967), it was difficult to find a fresh angle.

Assignment K does in some measure succeed, in part by going down the grimy route of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), in part by stuffing the picture full of glorious scenery – the Austrian Alps – and in part by turning Stephen Boyd into the kind of spy who has begun to question the entire business. For reasons unspecified, former racing driver turned toy salesman Boyd is running his own spy operation loosely linked into British intelligence but when the network is compromised his life and that of new love interest Camilla Sparv is endangered. Things get trickier when she is kidnapped and he has to save her while not compromising his own agents.

There is enough mystery to keep the plot, uncoiling like Russian dolls, ticking along and the entire effort is underwritten by some decent tradecraft, dead letter drops, microfilm hidden inside cigarette filters and so on. tension is surprisingly high. And Boyd is surprisingly human, falling properly in love for one thing, not just treating women in the James Bond/Matt Helm fashion as notches on a bedpost, not ice-cool under pressure either, face knotting in fury on occasion, and not so accomplished in the old fisticuffs department.

Michael Redgrave, Leo McKern and a pre-Please, Sir John Alderton provide decent support though Jeremy Kemp is somewhat subdued. But Boyd is a revelation, given a lot more to do than stick out his chin and growl. Here, his screen charm and charisma is at its best and while he was never going to attract the attention of the Oscar fraternity is entirely believable as a spy coming to wonder at decisions taken.

Sparv, too, is much better than I have ever seen her. Unlike her turn in Murderers Row (1966), her role is not merely decorative and the unfolding romance would work perfectly well just as a love story never mind tucked away in the guise of a spy thriller. There is a lovely demonstration of her acting skill, although an odd one to describe, as she pulls on a bathrobe and shimmies out of the towel underneath; I can’t believe that was ever scripted, but if you watch it you will see what I mean.

Director Val Guest was usually labelled a “journeyman” despite a repertoire that included The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and its sequel, Yesterday’s Enemy (1959) and sci-fi The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) and he had previous form in this genre with Where the Spies Are (1966) which played more to the comedy gallery and did some work on Casino Royale to boot. His work here falls into the efficient category, but it does zip along at the same time as allowing Boyd and Sparv to develop their characters and make their relationship believable. All in all quite enjoyable.

Manny Farber, Critic’s Critic

Gunning for You – Manny Farber

You wouldn’t want to pick a fight with Manny Farber, generally considered along with Andrew Sarris, the godfather of serious film criticism. “Visceral” was the word most commonly associated with his writings.

He came to movies from an unusual perspective. He was a painter, one of the most celebrated still life artists of his generation. He never worked for a big paper like the New York Times or a stylish magazine like the New Yorker. Instead, his work appeared in Film Culture, Artforum, The Nation and men’s magazine Cavalier.

An early advocate of the work of Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh, he was also inclined towards lean B-films over more profligate big-budget pictures.

Chances are you will disagree with everything he said, especially when he was slicing-and-dicing one of your favorites, but it is equally guaranteed that you will marvel at his prose. His work had punch and clarity and it might just make you laugh.

Here are some of his musings on the 1960s movie scene:

Easy Rider (1969): “Dennis Hopper’s lyrical, quirky film is better than good in its handling of death…The death scenes, much more heartbreaking, much less programmed than Peckinpah’s (The Wild Bunch), come out of nowhere…The finality and present-tense quality of the killings are remarkable: the beauty issues from the quiet, the damp green countryside and a spectacular last shot zooming up from a curving road and a burning cycle.”

Lawrence of Arabia (1962): “The most troublesome aspect of Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence is that the story moves faster and further than the actor who is not unlike the Tin Woodsman of Oz (O’Toole starts with a springing outward movement, to walk over the world, then turns into a pair of stilts walking in quick, short strides.)”

On Albert Finney: “The Big Eat is a growing factor in films, in effect probably invented by Finney in his Saturday Night. In his case, it was a combination effect, involving a big chomp, heavy breathing, slashes of braggadocio, a side swivel, and baring of teeth. This emphasized eating has been fined and slowed down in his latest work, but within the timespan of four Finneyfilms it has taken hold, cementing a new convention for giving an underside, the animalistic traits, to character.”

The Ipcress File (1965): “This is a Chandleresque thriller that has no thrills, with an antihero who is more like a sugary flavor than an actor doing a Philip Marlowe…the only suspense is how slowly a knight (non-played ‘superbly’ by Michael Caine) can put dimes in a parking meter, crack eggs in a skillet or flatfoot his way through a library.”

The Rounders (1965): “Fonda’s entry into a scene is of a man walking backward, slating himself away from the public eye. Once in a scene, the heavy jaw freezes, becomes like a concrete abutment, and he affects a clothes-hanger stance, no motion in either arm.”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966): “The most famous scene is an erotic nondancer, which is neither erotic nor dancelike, in which Elizabeth Taylor suggests a gyrating milk-bottling mechanism.”

The New York Film Festival 1968: “In the category called Bloody Bores, the Festival offered Capricious Summer, Hugo and Josefin and Twenty Four Hours in a Woman’s Life…Hugo and Josefin is life as seen through the eyes of a Kodak camera ad.”

On Rita Tushingham: “An even worse example of megalomaniac star who can make the simplest action have as many syllables as her name. The myth that a director makes or breaks a film is regularly disproved by this actress who…carries on a war of nerves against the other actors.”

The Graduate (1968): “Benjy…leads a split life on screen; half the time he’s hung up between Mrs. and Miss Robinson; the other half he’s at half mast; a flattened silhouette…Dustin Hoffman is laid out like an improbably menu. People are always darting into his periphery to point him out as a boy wonder…Benjamin, as it turns out, is Bill Bradley crossed with Denny Dimwit.”

It is unlikely you’ll get hold of this book Movies at a decent price since it is long out-of-print and a collector’s item but you can easily find Farber on Film, a whopping 800-page tome which covers his compete writings.

Cool Hand Luke (1967) *****

Lucas Jackson (Paul Newman) has none of the truculence of the ordinary rebel, consequence not part of his vocabulary, “it seemed a good idea at the time” his unfailing mantra. Outside of Butch Cassidy, a more amiable criminal you would struggle to find. He defies authority with a smirk, indiscriminate in opposing the system, whether devised by guards or prisoners and they are indiscriminate in return, swiftly punishing anyone who steps out of line.

First-time director Stuart Rosenberg’s meditation on martyrdom remains an iconic curiosity and one of a handful of great performances that showcase Paul Newman’s immense acting skills. It is about ten minutes too long, unremitting sequences of lorries travelling to and from work detail, in the morning or at night, and the work itself, way too repetitive, suggests a director who did not quite trust his audience to get it.

In a prison movie, the main narrative is always escape, but Luke is as much trying to escape from himself as his circumstances. There is a self-pitying aspect in him blaming God for making him the way he is. But beyond these gripes it remains an astonishing and involving work. This is a world reduced to a single common denominator – brutality. For a man who loathes rules, this is hell.

While no other character apart from Dragline (George Kennedy in an Oscar-winning role) and the Warden (Strother Martin in one of his best mean roles) is given much to do, nonetheless the rest of the cast do not merge into the background, facial expressions and tiny actions revealing character.

There are a number of terrific scenes – Newman refusing to give in when beaten to a pulp in a boxing match, the egg-eating contest, the digging-the-hole method of destroying a man’s spirit, the guard bewailing the death of his dog. But the movie also examines the universal need for hero worship, Dragline’s bewilderment when Luke eventually fails to live up to expectation is affecting.

Two other aspects stand out. With every prisoner in the same uniform and the countryside bleak and undistinguished, Conrad Hall’s cinematography is miraculous while Lalo Schifrin’s score, with the wonderfully evocative simple theme, is continuously inventive. As definitive an examination of the outsider as the later Easy Rider.

Marketing: Black Stamps

You might be tempted to fork out for the range of James Bond Commemorative Stamps being brought out to celebrate No Time to Die when it eventually sees the light of day on movie screens.

But stamps either as collector’s items or for trading purposes have been around since the silent era. A line of movie commemorative stamps issued in America in 1944 sold 1.1 million first day covers, the second highest-ever at the time, and in the late 1950s Movie Stamps Inc set up a business that worked in the same way as the Green Stamps given away in supermarkets and gas stations. In this system, if you collected enough you won a gift, usually, in regards to the movie business, a couple of free tickets.

So Columbia Pictures looking for a way to sell its Hammer double bill The Gorgon (1964) with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) starring the lesser-known Terence Morgan revived the idea.

Horror specialist Hammer was one of the British film studios going through a production boom – over 100 movies were being made in that country in that year – with The Secret of Blood Island (1965) in the works for Universal and She for MGM. But horror was still a difficult sell and Hammer had ignored the advice of Variety that The Gorgon would work best if teamed with “a lively comedy.”

American International had expanded the horror market away from the Frankenstein/Dracula axis by exploiting the Edgar Allan Poe back catalog and William Castle had achieved some success in modern tales of terror such as Dementia 13 (1963) and The Night Stalker (1964). But Castle could call upon the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, players with substantial marquee status despite their lately diminished careers, for radio and television interviews.

For Hammer the obvious exploitation options were limited to a spread in the quarterly Castle of Frankenstein magazine which could be purchased for 35 cents at newsstands.

So the marketing honchos dusted off the old movie stamps idea. In some advertisements, the studio offered free stamps to the first 10,000 ticket-buyers but in the advertisement shown above they appeared to be given away free to everyone. The faces of the various monsters and characters featured in both films were imprinted on the stamps. However, on the debit side, there was no sign of any redemption for the collected cards. You couldn’t, should you be so inclined, collect ten and get a guest ticket in return. You could probably trade them and build up a collection. I’m not sure they did much for the movie judging by the box office accounts that exist but if anyone remembers seeing them or collecting them let me know.

Sources: “Film Industry New 3c Stamps Sets Record,” Variety, Nov 15, 1944, 1; “Tease-In Kids with Movie Star Stamps,” Variety, Aug 21, 1957, 20; “Premium Stamp Set Up,” Variety, Aug 20, 1958, 7; Review of The Gorgon, Variety, Aug 26, 1964, 6; advert, Box Office, Nov 16, 1964, 2; “Film Plugs and Pluggers,” Variety, December 30, 1964, 21; Mark Thomas McGee, Beyond Ballyhoo: Motion Picture Promotion and Gimmicks, p125-131.

Easy Rider (1969) *****

You could be forgiven for thinking that the movie’s main influences were the early Cinerama pictures that focused on extensive tracking shots of scenery (in this case, the open road) and unusual customs (ditto, alternative lifestyles, dope-taking etc) and Mike Nichol’s use of contemporary pop music in The Graduate (1967). But it also drew on the assumption, as did Hitchcock in Vertigo (1958) and Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey a decade later, that a camera doing nothing can be hypnotic.

Selling a picture to the public and selling it to cinemas were two separate marketing skills. The easiest way to guarantee bookings for any film was to promote the box office figures through the trade press – as here in the British “Kine Weekly.” Columbia had cleverly booked the movie into one of the smallest cinemas in London’s West End where it was almost certainly guaranteed to break the box office record. But even the studio must have been taken aback by the way Easy Rider pulverized the previous record.

Message pictures were the remit of older directors like Stanley Kramer and Martin Ritt and films that had something to say about the human condition generally emanated from Europe and not low-budget efforts coming out of Hollywood. Easy Rider has a European sensibility, an almost random collection of unconnected episodes with no narrative connection to the main story, itself incredibly slight, of two mild-mannered dudes heading to New Orleans to see the Mardi Gras.

Road trips were not particularly unusual in American cinema but the form of previous locomotion was horse-related – westerns. The journey has been a central theme to movies. This is an 80-minute picture masquerading as a 95-minute one, a good fifteen minutes of screen time taken up with endless shots of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on bikes passing through the landscape, with a contemporary soundtrack as comment.

Unusually, it’s also a hymn to ancient values, heads bowed in prayer at meals as different as you could get, the Mexican family and the commune, a marching band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and the recitation of prayers in the cemetery.

Success in London was no guarantee that a movie would perform as well all over the country. Columbia continued to book it into smaller venues in the hope it would repeat the London experience of breaking box office records. When it did the studio took out another advert in Kine Weekly to let exhibitors know.

What marks the film out stylistically, perhaps enforced by the lean financing, is the sparing way it is told. The most dramatic scenes – the three murders – are filmed in shockingly simple fashion. There are often long pans along groups of characters. While innovative, the flash-cut flash-forward editing adds little to what is otherwise a very reflective film. Inspired use is made of natural sound, the muffled thumping of oil derricks at the cemetery, the soundtrack to one death is just the battering of unseen clubs by unseen assailants.

The dialogue could have been written by Tarantino, none of the confrontation or angst that drives most films, but odd musings that bring characters to life. At the beginning of the trip, Hopper and Fonda are welcomed wherever they travel, but towards the end resented, treated as though a pair of itinerant aliens. They entrance young girls but are vilified by authority, jailed for no reason except the threat to traditional values they apparently represent.

Elements not discussed at the time of release make this more rounded than you would imagine. The excitable Hopper, a nerd in hippie costume, is driven by the American dream of making money. The more reflective Fonda senses something is not only missing from his life but has been lost forever. He has the rare stillness of a top actor, face reflecting unspoken inner turmoil.

It remains an extraordinary film, a series of accumulated incidentals holding up a mirror to an America nobody wanted to acknowledge and the brutal climax no less powerful now.

Of course, the Easy Rider soundtrack itself summons up memories of the era and it is worth listening to just by itself and you might even want to go all the way and listen to it in the original vinyl.

Below is a link for the DVD.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Easy-Rider-DVD-Peter-Fonda/dp/B00LTK2Z44/ref=sr_1_1?crid=YSG6SCL8QQF9&dchild=1&keywords=easy+rider+dvd&qid=1596660339&s=dvd&sprefix=easy+rider%2Caps%2C153&sr=1-1

Selling Films Joe Levine Style

After the monumental success of Hercules, exhibitor-turned-distributor Joseph E. Levine pretty much thought he could sell pictures to theater owners on the basis of his name alone. Which explains the absence of any mention of star Steve Reeves (of Hercules fame, ironically enough) from the first seven pages of the Pressbook for Thief of Baghdad (1961).

The Pressbook itself was guaranteed to garner attention from its unusual shape and size. Most Pressbooks are standard A4 – roughly 8 inches wide and 12 inches high – but this easily exceeded the norm. The front page was 22 inches wide by 17 inches with a flap that extended the height to 29 inches. Turn the next page and it became bigger again – 33 inches wide by 22 inches high – and remained that size for another ten pages.

What the first seven pages sold was the Levine name and how he was going to promote the picture to moviegoers. He promised national television and radio advertising saturation. In addition, he supplied free of charge two trailers for television and four for radio which theater owners could use for supplementary local use.

Twenty thousand toy stores were lined up to sell merchandising – “an elaborate array of novelty items, hobby kits, puzzles and games.” Window displays were a key tool in marketing films to local moviegoers.

In addition, Dell had published two tie-ins – a full-color comic book for children and a novelization paperback for adults. In those days books such as these were sold on news stands and revolving racks in drug stores and five-and-dime outlets as well as bookshops. For only $25 (including delivery cost) movie theaters could buy a “double-flasher” eight-foot-high standee to promote the movie in advance.

Unusually, at a time when movies came with up to seven or eight different taglines intended to appeal to different types of audiences (the exhibitor would know which one held the most appeal), Thief of Baghdad limited itself to only four. The main tagline was: “The fantastic deeds…the incredible daring of the thief who defied an empire.”

There were two main alternatives: either “Opening wide a new world of screen wonders” or “the amazing becomes the incredible the fantastic becomes the real.” All three taglines were quantified with the addition of a number of “screen thrills” such as flying horses, faceless fighters, man-devouring trees, a one-faced army, the giant killer of the sea and a “harem of mystery.” Finally, there was the option of “he was a score of lovers…a hundred fighters…a thousand thieves…a man in a million.”

Costuming ushers in “typical Baghdad wear” and calling upon local muscle men to don similar garb was suggested as another marketing ploy.

Otherwise – which seemed the least of Levine’s concerns – there was actually quite a lot to write home about. It was filmed in Tunisia in the Mosque of the Barber – featuring 600 columns transported from Carthage – and the Mosque of the Sabre in the oasis city of Kairwan. The filmmakers had to devise their own ancient marketplaces since the ones in existence were too modernized. Local extras were used to add further authenticity. An ancient reservoir dating back to 700AD was drained and transformed into a prison.

The special effects by Thomas Howard included a winged horse and a forest of man-eating trees. To create the effect of a brigade of horsemen all in the image of the titular thief, Edwards achieved the illusion by having the men wear masks of Reeves’ face.

Italian female lead Georgia Moll made her Hollywood debut in The Quiet American (1958) while model Edy Vessel, who refused to give out her vital statistics for publicity purposes, was cast as a seductive temptress.

Reeves, famed for sticking to a particular diet, brought with him 24 jars of honey and 40 pounds of nuts and made yoghurt from camel’s milk.

This was the sixth version of the film, the first starring Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 followed sixteen years later by the British-made Alexander Korda iteration. Further versions from a variety of sources appeared in 1949, 1952 and 1960.