Brian Hannan

Nightmare in the Sun (1965) ***

Your first question is how did rookie director Marc Lawrence have the standing and the foresight to assemble such an amazing cast? Not just wife-and- husband team Ursula Andress and John Derek (Once Before I Die, 1966) upfront, but Rat Pack member Sammy Davis Jr (Sergeants 3, 1962), The Godfather (1972) alumni Robert Duvall and John Marley, Aldo Ray (The Power, 1968), Richard Jaeckel (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968), Keenan Wynn (Warning Shot, 1966) and Arthur O’Connell (Fantastic Voyage, 1966).

And it’s bold work, throwing the Psycho dice, playing the hell out of the noir tune, most of the time heading down a nihilistic road, and with a terrific twist for a climax. Some great scenes that with a more experienced director would be instantly memorable and managing to fit into what should be a straightforward thriller some intriguing oddball characters.

Anonymous drifter (John Derek) ends up in a small town in Nowheresville where Marsha (Ursula Andress) has a slew of lovers including the sheriff (Aldo Ray). Wealthy rancher husband Sam (Arthur O’Connell) is the jealous type who checks out her speedometer to see if her tales of out-of-town visits tally up. Naturally, a handsome stranger is easy prey to her seductive charms but when hubbie spots said stranger leaving his house he loses his rag and kills her.

Holy moly, talk about Psycho, getting rid of the sexy star one-third of the way through is a heck of a note. Who does this director think the audience is coming to see? But if he’s no Hitchcock, he’s got another trick up his sleeve. Sheriff won’t let the husband plead guilty, not when he can play that card for all it’s worth, rooking the rancher for thousands of bucks, so he decides to pin the blame on the man seen leaving the house. Not only that, he plants evidence, stolen jewellery etc, on the suspect and handcuffs him.

Suspect escapes, taking with him a cop car, but those handcuffs are tougher to remove than most cinemagoers have been led to believe from previous yarns. A hacksaw won’t do it nor will trying to burn them apart with an oxy-acetylene cutter. So he’s stuck with carrying about proof of guilt or at least suspicion and spends most of the time picking up cats or items to hide the evidence.

A couple of bikers (Robert Duvall and Richard Jaeckel) decide to chase the reward money, able to scoot through the desert in a way denied the cops’ four-wheelers. It’s a shame this pair are anonymous, as most characters here are, defined by occupation rather than slowing down the pace with introductions. So it’s the Robert Duvall character who we discover is more fragile than his appearance would suggest and lashes his bike with a chain when his character is questioned.

So here’s the oddball line-up: a couple (George Tobias and Lurene Tuttle) running a small-time animal-bird sanctuary, nursing back to health creatures peppered with gunshot or the wounded version of roadkill; a junkyard dealer (Keenan Wynn), one-time hoofer who can’t wait to demonstrate his moves; and a type of boy scout leader (Allyn Roslyn) whose troop gets lost in a sandstorm, one of whom our drifter rescues. The latter sequence has a touching aspect, rescued child, probably the only person in the whole movie with an understanding of law, accepting a suspect as innocent rather than guilty, is betrayed by the leader who instead of helping our escapee to safety, hands him over to the cops.

And to a final, quite unexpected, climax.

So it’s corruption all the way, even our innocent, supposedly heading home to a beloved wife, taking time out for a touch of adultery.

There’s something about these early low-budget films that brings out the best in Ursula Andress. She’s not just spouting lines to fill in some essential part in a story, but takes her time over delivery, essentially establishing character with what she does between talking and for a practised seducer there’s an innocence in her pleading, “Please take me somewhere nice.”

Aldo Ray is as odious as they come, sneaky too, and you sense he has practice on pinning the blame on the wrong person. And no wonder the wife plays around when her self-pitying husband gets so stoned he passes out.

I saw this on a very poor print on YouTube but even so its narrative qualities, if less so the direction, were obvious.

Worth a look.

Dark of the Sun / The Mercenaries (1968) ****

Rod Taylor made a brisk transition to two-fisted action hero from his previous forte of drama (Hotel, 1967) and comedy foil to Doris Day (The Glass Bottom Boat, 1966) in this violent adventure set in the Congo in the early 1960s. As Captain Curry, assisted by sidekick Sgt Ruffo (Jim Brown) and 40-man local outfit Striker Blue Force, he leads an ostensibly humanitarian mission to rescue settlers cut off by the Simba rebels as a cover for collecting $50 million in diamonds. The loot is essential to save the toppling regime of President Ubi (Calvin Lockhart). The only feasible transport is train. There is a three-day deadline.

Problems immediately ensue, not least a clash with Capt. Heinlein (Peter Carsten), former Nazi leader of Blue Force, who is even more ruthless than Curry, mowing down two native children who stray too close to the train, and apt to go into a fistfight with a chainsaw. The train is attacked by a United Nations plane and on reaching its destination Curry is forced to wait three hours until the time-controlled giant diamond vault can be opened, giving the rebels time to catch up. Then it’s an ongoing battle of one kind or another.

Although the worst of the violence is carried out by the rebels – rape, torture and massacre – a core element of the drama is how a lifetime of killing has affected Curry. Ruffo, a man of principle who grew up in a primitive tribe, acts as his conscience – and that of the audience – spelling out how violence is more than a money-making scheme and essential to upholding order in terrorist times. Curry has some redemptive features, saving widow Claire (Yvette Mimieux) from Heinlein, sending the alcoholic Doctor Wreid (Kenneth More) to help a woman give birth, and eventually acknowledging his strong bond with Ruffo. Although Curry would like to think he is the opposite of Heinlein, they are carved from the same stock and when the savage beast is loose blood lust takes over.

Claie is more or less there as bait, tempting Heinlein and any rebels in the vicinity, but coming into her own in convincing Wreid, paralytic by this stage, to carry out a section on the pregnant woman, and as a reminder of civilization for Curry.

The action scenes are terrific, particularly the plane strafing the train, and there is a particularly good ruse, instigated by Ruffo, to outwit the enemy. Hollywood never managed to portray the terror of the native Vietnamese on being overrun by Viet Cong, and this film could easily be that substitute, especially when some of the rescued white settlers realize they will not escape.

This is not one of those films like Born Free (1966) or Out of Africa (1985) which are scenic odes to the continent, in part because the picture was shot in Jamaica, but in the main because director Jack Cardiff (Our Mother’s House, 1967) chooses to focus on the mechanics of the mission. And in so doing, he writes a love letter to a train. There had a mini-vogue for war movies set on trains – Von Ryan’s Express (1965) and The Train (1965) come to mind – but none reveal an adoration for the power and perhaps the beauty of the locomotive. Every move it makes (to steal an idea from pop group The Police) is noted on screen and on the soundtrack, the hissing, the belching smoke, the wheels, cabooses, engine, the coupling and uncoupling of links, the screech of brakes, and various tracking and crane shots as the train snakes its way through enemy terrain.

Rod Taylor is excellent in the kind of role he is made for. Jim Brown in a major step up the billing after The Dirty Dozen (1967) is surprisingly good in a part that calls as much for reflection as action. Peter Carsten is the all-time Nazi scum. Yvette Mimieux, who had partnered Taylor in The Time Machine (1960), is also in transition mode, her role a meatier dramatic departure from the likes of the innocuous Monkeys, Go Home! (1967). In what was essentially his last major role – even though it doesn’t amount to much in screen time – Kenneth More (Sink the Bismarck!, 1960) wavers considerably from his stiff-upper-lip default.

The score by Jacques Loussier is particularly good, as Quentin Tarantino attested when he incorporated elements of it for Inglorious Bastards, which was a boon for the composer since up till then he was best remembered for the music accompanying the advert for Hamlet cigars. You might get a laugh out of the screenplay credits. Quentin Werty (i.e. Qwerty, the first six letters on a typewriter) the pseudonym of Ranald McDougall, Oscar-nominated for Mildred Pierce (1945), co-wrote the screenplay, adapted from the novel by Wilbur Smith, with television writer Adrian Spies.

An outstanding example of the all-out action mission picture, its occasional outdated attitudes do not get in the way of the picture and half a century later from what we now know of how wars are fought the levels of violence will appear realistic rather than exploitative.

When Time Ran Out (1980) / Earth’s Final Fury ***

The Director’s Cut, can you believe? Or less pompously, The Expanded Version. An extra 30 minutes added to the general release version that traveled the world to general disfavor. (The original 121-minute cut was edited to 109 minutes and this version clocks in at 144 minutes.) Was it a sense of disgruntlement – or sheer opportunism – that led to the Director’s Cut, so many of which scarcely improved on the original version. How many versions can an audience take of The Exorcist (1973) or Blade Runner (1982)? And even where extra length definitely added depth to Kingdom of Heaven (2005) that couldn’t overcome its major flaw, in a massive case of hubris, director Ridley Scott believing he could get away with casting Orlando Bloom instead of waiting till Russell Crowe became available.

When Time Ran Out killed off the disaster cycle and the Hollywood career of uber-producer Irwin Allen who had started that particular ball rolling with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), upped the ante with The Towering Inferno (1974) and dropped the ball with The Swarm (1978) and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979).

This doesn’t feel so much like a disaster movie as a picture tying up all the knots, various relationships coming asunder, and having to accommodate a bunch of well-known supporting actors of dubious all-star-cast status before they suddenly spring into dramatic narrative view. Audiences had never been particularly keen on volcanic pictures, after all what can the trapped characters do but dodge a sludge of soup and hope they don’t run straight into a tidal wave or, worse, have to negotiate a rickety/rope bridge. The chances of you having a tightrope walker coming to the rescue would generally be remote but that’s what we have here (step forward Burgess Meredith).

I had thought from the title and some guy in a hazmat suit wandering over a desolate area that this might be a prophetic eco-disaster, but excepting that there’s, for reasons best known to the scriptwriters, an oil well being drilled close to a volcano and that hotel investor Shelby (William Holden) has the bright idea of using the volcano as a marketing prop, there’s nothing much going on. The special effects are okay on the small screen, but even if they had been spectacular on the big screen their effect on the much smaller environs of DVD would in any case have been diminished.

So, basically, it’s reliant on working up sufficient audience interest in the relationships to make us care for the characters. We’re offered a pair of two-timing teams. First up, we’ve got Shelby’s secretary and marketing guru Kay (Jacqueline Bisset) who’s just turned down the offer to become his sixth “or seventh” wife, but who, presumably is enjoying, this being the 1980s and not the 1930s, some kind of sexual dalliance with him. When Kay meets up with oil driller old flame Hank (Paul Newman), they rekindle their romance, although with doom impending there’s not much time to take it forward beyond a picnic on the beach.

Next up, hotelier Bob (James Franciscus) is cheating on wife Nikki (Veronica Hamel), Shelby’s god-daughter, with staff member Iolani (Barbara Carerra) who is due to be married to childhood sweetheart hotel manager Brian (Edward Albert). To flesh out the tale, both Shelby and Bob have daddy issues, Tom (Ernest Borgnine) is a New York cop on the tail of swindler Francis (Red Buttons), and no doubt audiences will be desperate to find who wins a cockfighting contest being held in a local saloon.

Modern transport proves no match for an eruption, so in quick succession we see a car and a helicopter tumbling down the mountainside. The tsunami wipes out a good chunk of the actors that didn’t make it into the all-star-cast bracket and everyone else takes to the hills, no doubt hoping they won’t encounter a rickety/rope bridge. Disaster turns enemies into pals, Tom and Francis, for example, though it’s only now that Nikki comes across her husband’s infidelity.

And this would be a disaster all round except that having hooked myself into watching this, courtesy of a freebie on YouTube, and nothing of real dramatic interest going on, I found myself, oddly enough, concentrating on the three principals and was treated, even more odd I guess, to fine examples of just what these stars do to earn their crust. Paul Newman (The Prize, 1963) in particular, with very little to react to, does very little but with incredible facial agility, to genuine effect, portraying emotion with infinitesimal gesture. Sure, he’s always had the shrug and the walk, both far more suggestive of inner turmoil than any other actor I can name, but here, with very little dialog coming to his aid, you can tell exactly what’s going on in those baby blues.

Jacqueline Bisset (The Cape Town Affair, 1969), too, dressed a good bit less suggestively than in the posters, essays a confident woman coming unstuck when confronted with a romantic error. The scenes between the pair are not meant to be scorching, so there’s none of the screen charisma audiences might feel they’ve been sold, but instead it’s a slow-burn, a couple trying to come to terms with each other, passing through disappointment and hopefully onto something better. And you can’t find anyone better to carry disillusion than William Holden (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968).

Abject swansong for director James Goldstone (Winning, 1969) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Carl Foreman (The Guns of Navarone, 1961) but Oscar-winning co-writer Stirling Silliphant (Marlowe, 1969) carried on longer. Who wrote the most effective scenes, Shelby’s engagement ploy and Hank’s initial rejection of Kay, is anybody’s guess but there is some quality writing here. Probably the strangest part of the whole debacle was that the source was a piece of non-fiction, The Day the World Ended by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, about a 1902 eruption on Martinique that had nothing to do with oil wells or hotel construction.

There’s always something wrong with a disaster picture if you suggest watching it for the acting, but happily, this is the case.

Bachelor Flat (1961) ****

Stereotypical Englishman reinvented. Where the suited-and-booted traditional British gent, umbrella at the ready, moustache awaiting twirling, bristling with pomposity, usually of military background and inclined towards the pedantic, was treated as a figure of fun, here in a marvelous conceit he is instead catnip to the ladies. You could imagine this was somewhat prophetic given the imminent arrival on Hollywood shores of such testosterone-charged figures as Sean Connery, Richard Harris et al.

All the elements that previously pointed to mickey-taking – impeccable manners, a sense of fair play anathema in the cut-throat American world, respect extended towards the opposite sex – are here presented as such ideals that the entire female population of a small town is swooning at the feet of its only known Englishman.

What’s more, director Frank Tashlin (The Glass Bottom Boat, 1966) doesn’t ask star Terry-Thomas (Arabella, 1967) to lampoon himself, as would often later be the case, where the actor was called upon to play an overstuffed romantic fantasist of the Bob Hope variety or presented as comedic villain or overacting butler. Instead, Terry-Thomas plays it straight, oozing astonishing charm that allows the slapstick and farcical ingredients to work a treat.

Sure, it’s mostly a dressed-up farce, people hidden in cupboards and under beds, doors slamming in faces, faces drenched in cake, and in a sharp swipe-left on gender equality, the man, rather than the woman, mostly seen in a state of undress.

Professor Patterson (Terry-Thomas) throws his adoring mostly adorable students into a tizzy when they discover he is engaged to actress Helen (Celeste Holm) currently residing in Paris. They met when the academic rented her beach house which is where Libby (Tuesday Weld) comes in. Astonished to discover a stranger in her mother’s house, Libby doesn’t let on she’s Helen’s daughter and instead pretends to have escape from juvenile detention. Helen has so far balked at telling her lover she has a 17-year-old daughter by a previous marriage.

Professor’s young neighbor, law student Mike (Richard Beymer), takes a shine to his unwelcome guest, but he’s mostly there to add complication to complication.

Usually, in these farces, it’s the guilty man trying to hide his various lovers from one another, hence stowing them away in cupboards and beds and whatever. But here the professor is a determined innocent who has to stoop to such shenanigans to pretect his integrity. But not only is he assailed by Libby but also by student Liz (Ann Del Guercio) who lets down his tyres so she can run him home and neighbor Gladys (Francesca Bellini) who makes eyes at Mike as a way of infiltrating Patterson’s defences. Added complications are a suspicious cop and a rival academic.

So when Patterson is not trying to keep the various female invaders from discovering one another, or the cop or Mike from finding them stashed away, he’s trying to fruitlessly explain how he has been snagged by the aforesaid predatory women. And of course when his fiancee returns there’s no queston she’ll catch him in some questionable act.

In some senses this is pretty formulaic stuff but it is brightened immeasurably by some choice lines (“I don’t take money from strangers unless I steal it” and “either you get a smaller bone or I get a bigger dog”), the occasional madcap situation (one of his suitors eating a slice of cream came while on a vibrating slimming machine and Mike discovering how Libby fed him a line), but mostly by the spirited playing of Terry-Thomas and Tuesday Weld. Apart from a small part in Tom Thumb (1958) this was the actor’s introduction to Hollywood and it says a lot for his talent that he’s entirely believable as the kind of charmer that women flock to.

Tuesday Weld (Pretty Poison, 1968) is more than glamor on legs and finesses her first top-billed role into surprising depths beyond the obvious enthusiastic ingenue, especially given her Ann-Margret-style shake-your-booty introduction, suggesting talent to burn. Richard Beymer (West Side Story, 1961), who was holding a real-life candle for Ms Weld, is little more than eye candy for the female gaze. And if none of this trio is sufficient to hold your attention, there’s a cute dog.

Frank Tashlin occasionally made films with more acerbic bite, but this isn’t one of them. It sticks to a magic formula that works mostly thanks to the two principles.

Raised up a good notch by the revelatory performance by Terry-Thomas, his drunk scenes are just superb and unusually played, and you probably can guess from this where Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) got its rain-soaked proposal scene.

Tremendous fun.

In Search of Gregory (1969) ***

Off-beat examination of the fantasy vs. reality conundrum with an ever-watchable Julie Christie as the woman on the titular hunt. The only film of acclaimed British theater director Peter Wood is a more whimsical cousin to the more deliberately obscure works of Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) and Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966) which pivoted upon the question of whether events presented actually occur or exist only in the head of the leading character.

Catherine (Julie Christie) is enticed to Geneva by her father (Adolfo Celi) for his latest wedding on the basis that she will meet the impossibly handsome Gregory (Michael Sarrazin). On arrival she discovers the agoraphobia of younger brother Daniel (John Hurt) has been temporarily lifted by Gregory. Catherine appears set to meet Gregory on a number of occasions, but either he does not turn up (the wedding) or somehow, they miss each other, even at one point occupying adjoining phone booths. And it would have been a pretty dull picture if that was all that was going on. But whether the result of reality or Catherine’s imagination, the Gregory we see is a vivid screen presence. The world the characters inhabit is unusual to say the least, so unique that it is either obviously real or fake, but virtually impossible to determine which.

The best Gregory sequence, of which Steve McQueen would be proud, involves the character moving by means of the windscreen from one side to the other of a car driven at high speed. In another scene Gregory plays the equally perilous game of Autoball, a kind of polo with stock cars. As convincing is Gregory’s avant-garde orchestra consisting of two guitars, bottles, a bicycle wheel, a waste bin and coins in a glass.

The detail is so extraordinary that it must be real. The brother seems real enough, too real if anything, close to enjoying (or pining for) an incestuous relationship with his sister. But for every moment that appears questionable – did she really witness Gregory making love to her future mother-in-law – there are others where doubts are immediately quelled (an address which appears non-existent is not). And long before anybody came up with the idea of selling bottled water, Gregory is apparently in the business of selling tinned Alpine air. Other moments she does not witness – Daniel riding a Lambretta/Vespa with feet on the handlebars – add to the prospect of genuine reality.

Catherine might even have met Gregory except that in going to bed with the man who looks very much like what we believe Gregory to look like she determines that he shall remain anonymous. So it’s anybody’s guess whether Gregory is a figment or phantom of her imagination. And why, of course, should such invention be necessary? Does it mean that her father and brother do not exist either?

It’s an entertaining mystery. There’s no great angst. Antonioni had the sense or cunning to ensure that consequence mattered in Blow-Up – a murderer escaping justice. But there’s no such tension here. While Catherine is tabbed a nympho by her brother (who never questions her father’s predilection for multiple marriages), the suggestion that she’d fly from Rome (where she lives with her boyfriend) to Geneva is the hope of a hook-up seems too far-fetched.

Despite the presence of Julie Christie – who can certainly carry even as slight a picture as this – and a quixotic turn from John Hurt (Sinful Davy, 1969) it’s neither obscure enough to be arthouse nor sufficiently plot-driven to be mainstream and remains an oddity. If you are going to be irritated beyond belief that will occur in the first fifteen minutes or so, but if you stay the course, you may find it a worthwhile watch rather than a cinematic car crash. Written by Bonnie Golightly (her only screenplay), Oscar-nominated Tonino Guerra (Blow-Up, 1966), and Lucile Laks (The Black Belly of the Tarantula, 1971).

Once Before I Die (1966) ****

Nobody ever took Ursula Andress seriously as an actress. Ditto the directorial skills of her one-time husband John Derek (Bolero, 1984). Their combination was viewed as a cosmic joke. And it doesn’t start well here, the credits little more than a paean to her beauty, hair rippling in the wind etc, so much so you wouldn’t be surprised to find her later on running in slo-mo through a cornfield. The opening sequence couldn’t be more Raquel Welch, Andress sporting a white bikini as she shoots the rapids. And the premise looks like little more than a wartime western.

Instead…

Technically, this is surprising, ocasionally astounding, as the director makes use of the kind of image layering that attracted kudos for Francis Coppola in Apocalypse Now (1979) and with one stunning sequence shown entirely, in close-up, through the eyes of the actress. Andress is far from eye candy. Opportunities to show her naked or at least soaked to the skin, obligatory scenes set in water, are passed over. Instead, she is the camera’s conduit. The innocent bystander responding to war, and sharing in the shock of the youngsters, mostly virgins, who will never see a naked woman before they die.

Having to literally deal with the title should be the only false note and yet strangely enough there’s a haunting lyrical quality in the contrast between her, in the midst of battle, acquiescing to the shameful desire of a 22-year-old soldier to be kissed and his colleagues’ glee at burning to death the occupants of an enemy tank. An act of humanity set off against raw brutality.

The set-up is simple enough. Just after Pearl Harbor, a group of polo playing soldiers in the Phillippines are strafed by Japanese planes. Cavalry leader Bailey (John Derek) and his troop set off by horseback cross country for Manila. He sends his girlfriend Alex (Ursula Andress) off in the same direction in her ritzy car. Against instructions, she loads up her car with puppies and refugees, an old lady and a child, and when she gets stuck, Bailey allows the trio to accompany the soldiers to safety. When they reach a village, her linguistic skills come in handy, pinpointing a Frenchman and his native girl, purportedly translating, as lying about food supplies.

In rooting out a bloodied teddy bear, Bailey is accidentally killed and for the rest of the picture Alex is in something of a catatonic state, but doing her best to keep up soldier morale, as attendant to the worries of the young, fearing death, as to the more experienced gung-ho shaven-headed Custer (Richard Jaeckel) who welcomes a hero’s demise. By the end, she is a combatant, shooting an enemy soldier.

By taking Alex as the cinematic focus, the director can dispense with the usual tropes of a battle-weary squad in wartime. So, beyond the youngster’s confession, we learn nothing of the soldiers’ lives, and that, too, is somehow refreshing, as going down that route at best seems like a vain attempt to make audiences sympathize with unsympathetic characters, and at worst, is a delaying device.

All you need to know is that guys who would otherwise be larking about, drinking beer, telling tall stories or playing polo, are vicious in war, gunning down as if a communal firing squad a captured grunt, so trigger happy they shoot one of their own in the middle of the night, so careless they are liable to drop a grenade at their own feet.

And, much to my astonishment, there’s dialog and scenes Tarantino would be proud of. Custer explaining that he shaves his head “to get rid of every hair” is the kind of line that in a more acclaimed picture would be noted. Custer again, accused of making up a story that he has killed a bundle of Japs, looks initially as if he believes himself guilty of too fertile an imagination until he interrupts a chat between two disbelieving officers by chucking an enemy corpse onto their laps.

And there’s genuine screen charisma between Alex and Bailey, a wonderful scene where she takes gentle umbrage at being scolded for refusing to obey orders, but nothing played out to the brim, everything understated, the actions of a couple who don’t need to display their love to the world because they are already committed.

The Virgin Soldiers (1969) played the central theme for laffs but didn’t achieve an ounce of the truth expressed by the raw youngster, who’s ashamed to be revealing such fears to a woman, and to be even asking her to relieve them, and of the dumbness to be muddying his thoughts in a life-and-death situation with fantasies about sex. You can certainly argue with the notion that women in wartime are obliged to have sex with any passing soldier (who sometimes take without asking) who could die a virgin, and taking that into consideration, this shouldn’t work at all. It’s only a kiss and hand-holding after all, and she’s not maternal about it, or even pitying, and after all, deprived of a future husband, she also needs solace.

I mentioned before about finding suprises in my trawl through this decade’s movies and there couldn’t be a bigger surprise than this which must have lain unseen on my shelves for years as I dreaded inflicting upon myself another movie by the director of Tarzan the Ape Man (1981).

But astute direction and the determination to allow Andress to act, to show scenes through her eyes, the sign of any great actress, pay off. Career-best performance from Richard Jaeckel (The Devils’ Brigade, 1968), no show-boating here either. The budget restricts the action, but, oddly enough, that’s to the film’s benefit as it allows it to play off Andress more.

Well worth a watch.

The Liquidator (1965) ****

Brilliant premise, brilliant execution, brilliant acting. The best send-ups are driven by their own internal logic and this is no exception: spy boss, known simply as The Chief (Wilfred Hyde White), determines in most un-British fashion to get rid of a mole in the operation by eliminating all potential suspects. Bristling Colonel Mostyn (Trevor Howard) recruits Boysie Oakes (Rod Taylor) for the job, believing Oakes showed particular gallantry during World War Two, unaware this was pure accident. Oakes is given all the perks of a super spy – fast cars, fashionable apartment – and once realizing that being a killer is outside his comfort zone delegates the dirty work to another hit man Griffen (Eric Sykes).

The sweet life begins to unravel when Oakes takes a weekend abroad with Mostyn’s secretary Iris MacIntosh (Jill St John) and is kidnapped. Forced to battle for survival, another Oakes emerges, a proper killer. Cue the final section which involves trapping the mole.

Where films featuring Matt Helm and Derek Flint imitated the grand-scale espionage they aimed to spoof, the laughs here come from small-scale observation and attacks on bureaucracy. According to regulations, Oakes’ liaison with MacIntosh is illicit. There is endless paperwork. His kidnappers are over-enthusiastic bumbling fools. Apart from an aversion to needless killing, Oakes has terrible fear of flying. Nobody can remember code names or passwords. Oakes’ automobile numberplate is BO 1 (the letters in those days being a standard acronym for “body odor”). It is all logical lunacy. And even when the story gets serious, it follows logic, a ruse, a dupe, a climax pitting resolve against human weakness.

Best of all, the parts appear custom-made for the players. Rod Taylor (The Birds, 1963), in his first venture into comedy, displays a knack for the genre without resorting to the slapstick and double takes requisite in the Doris Day pictures to follow. And he is a definite screen charmer.

By this point in his career the screen persona of Trevor Howard (Von Ryan’s Express, 1965) had been shorn of subtlety. He was generally one choleric snort away from a heart attack. Here, while the narrative pricks his pomposity, he remains otherwise ramrod certain. The audience is in on the joke, but nonetheless his genuine ability as a spy master is not questionable.

On the other hand Jill St John (Who’s Minding the Store, 1963) is allowed considerable leeway in the subtlety department, as a demure English rose rather than the sexier roles into which she was later typecast. In some respects British television comedian Eric Sykes is miscast. It is a particular English joke to present him as a killer since on television (in shows unlikely to be shown in America) he was hapless. And it is worth mentioning Akim Tamiroff whose villainous stock-in-trade is allowed greater depth.

Director Jack Cardiff had tried his hand at comedy before with My Geisha (1962) starring Shirley Maclaine but was better known for Oscar-nominated drama Sons and Lovers (1960) and action picture The Long Ships (1964). John Gardner, who wrote seven books in the Boysie Oakes series, later penned James Bond novels.

It is well worth considering whether The Liquidator would have punctured the success of both Our Man Flint (1966) and The Silencers (1966) and sent spy spoofery in a different direction. It had premiered in the U.K. prior to both but litigation held up its American launch until long after this pair had gone on to hit box office heights.

Sting (2024) ****

Once in a while the stars align and, as luck would have it and given we are in stellar mode, a new star is born. Famously, Daniel Day-Lewis owed his instant elevation to arthouse marquee status to the opening on the same day in New York of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and A Room with a View (1985) playing such disparate characters that critics were in awe. While not necessarily on that scale I had the privilege of watching a new young talent unfold on my Monday double bill when taking in Sting and Furiosa. The common denominator being Alyla Browne (The Secret Kingdom, 2023), main character in the horror picture and the young Furiosa in the George Miller epic, who, again, essays completely different characters in an extremely convincing manner.

Quite why the horror picture acquired its title is something of a mystery, since nobody actually gets stung and there’s not a bee in sight and any other creepy-crawlies are limited to cameo appearances as lunch for our star creature, a giant spider. Quite why, too, our monster has to come from outer space is anyone’s guess given the Australian filmmakers must be well acquainted with giant spiders hiding in the dunny or other more conspicuous spots in their homeland.

And if you’re going to pretend your movie is actually set in Brooklyn, you’d better not give the game away by the credits forewarning that the picture is part-funded by the authorities in Australia and New South Wales which are hardly likely to pony up for a movie made six thousand miles away, or for suggesting that the country is awash with giant spiders. Setting aside the kind of nit-picking you get on imdb – doorknobs wrongly positioned, for example – this is prime horror.

The genre has shifted away from the dysfunctional family or teenagers high on sex and drugs to settled habitats which allows for more interesting and occasionally subtle character development. There a couple of neat twists, for starters wannabe young illustrator Charlotte (Alyla Browne) is an arachnaphile and her nose is put out of joint by the arrival of a new baby, a half-brother, and accommodating her mother’s new partner Ethan (Ryan Corr) in their lives. They should bond over their joint love of illustrating – he’s a semi-pro – but he’s a tad too critical.

*Not to be confused with the 1970s blokcbuster.*

Mother Heather’s (Penelope Mitchell) extended family adds complication, mean demanding immigrant aunt and dementia-ridden grandmother living in the same building.

Biggest complication is that when a spider appears out of nowhere, Charlotte adopts it as a pet, catching it live morsels, watching it grow, nicknaming it (presumably because the screenwriter was struggling for a snappy title) Sting and using it as model for her artwork. The creature is unaware that its role is to be fantasy and doesn’t take long to show its true nature, clever enough to twist the cap off the jar it’s contained in, then, after outgrowing such confinement, taking off into the crawl space and hunting down the building’s inhabitants.

That this is a good notch above recent offerings owes much to writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner (Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, 2021). He moves the camera confidently and often slowly, providing panorama where another helmsman would have opted for the cheap shot and quick shock. He takes time to develop the family dynamic, recognizably frazzled at the seams but not coming apart, with the older members exerting dominance through overt power or vulnerability, and there’s some neat comedy involving Frank (Jermaine Fowler) the cocky foul-mouthed pest controller.

The monster munching is well done, nothing that’s going to strain the low budget, carnage mostly kept off-screen, sightings of the beastie limited early on, consequence rather than action the draw.

But the real treat here is Charlotte, the most well-rounded teenage horror character in a long time. She’s hormonal, untidy and passionate, fights with her mother, tries to make peace with both newcomers, Ethan and infant, but is just this side of being creepy, catching beasties for her pet, delighted in its destructive power, but then having to confront all her angst and hostility as it falls to her to turn into rescuer. Alyla Browne is surely a talent for the radar. And there’s a good twist, alien-style, as the dead spider has just time to pop out a few eggs, so, hey, sequel alert, and one that shows all the signs of being more interesting than anything in the vein of The Strangers.

Worth a look.

Under Paris (2024) ****

That’s no ironic four-star rating either. While this would easily go straight into the Top Ten Guilty Pleasures the fact that it’s so darn good takes it out of the So Bad It’s Good bracket. Netflix has taken time off from beating down Oscar’s door with $200 million arthouse epics to steal summer. In a Hollywood galaxy a long long time ago this is the kind of unexpected blockbuster that would have sneaked into cinemas on Memorial Day as counter-programming and hit the jackpot.

As well as tearing up with astonishing confidence every trope in the monster playbook and not even stooping to attempt the kind of artistic kudos that lassooed so much critical acclaim for Godzilla Minus One, this is truly a terrific stomp. And it hoodwinks the audience along the way. From the onset it looked more like Jaws Goes Woke with eco warriors determined to save a thriller killer no matter how many humans he gulps down. And then there was a side helping of gaga science of the Moonfall variety, in this case that a shark had beaten evolution by being able to breathe freshwater as well as the saltwater of its natural habitat (in case you don’t know a shark should suffocate in freshwater). Plus it grows at an unprecedented rate and it don’t need no male to replicate and can get pregnant within a month or so of being born.

So it’s not just one shark swimming up the River Seine in Paris, France, and hiding out among the skull-sodden catacombs, but it’s hundreds of the darned monsters. And the mayor of Paris is all set with a giant lunch box when she fires the starting gun for the Triathlon. So you’ve got hundreds of red-hatted swimmers heading in the direction of a giant shark. Not to mention that there’s all these unexploded shells loitering at the bottom of the Seine and what with all the commotion one way or another they are apt to go off and bring down all the pretty bridges across the river, the apocalypse so stunning you’re pretty well astonished that in all the carnage the Eiffel Tower remains standing.

So how the heck did we get to this? Well, three years previously, oceanologist Sophia (Berenice Bejo) has been tracking a particular shark near Hawaii in (eco-nod number one) the Pacific Garbage Patch only to watch the beastie gobble up her husband and the rest of her diving team. So now, turns out the shark still has an electronic tag and somehow (gaga science of course) it has made its way 7,500 miles to Paris where the beacon is picked up by eco warrior and computer whiz Mika (Lea Leviant) and her girlfriend Ben (Nagisa Morimoto) who head up Save Our Seas which aims to stop sharks being slaughtered.

Sophia alerts disbelieving cops (who, by the way, are really nice to homeless guys) to the problem and eventually, minus cameras of course, they take to the water. Up to this point all we get are brief glimpses of a fin and a flashing shape but once Mika and Ben decide to put into action their own ploy and assemble dozens of their followers in the catacombs where the cops are chasing the shark then all hell breaks loose. The shark’s no respecter of eco-dopes and the eco-dopes prove no respecters of each other, trampling over each other in the water once the feeding bell rings. This is the kind of movie where nobody gets hauled out of water unless they’re going to be missing their legs.

Having assembled all the usual suspects – venal mayor desperate to hide the truth, river instead of beach teeming with potential victims, a great backdrop in the shape of the catacombs – then director Xavier Gens breaks all the rules. There’s no Jason Statham here to knock sense into the beast, and there’s no clever Quint, and there’s no keeping the public out of harm’s way. Instead this is Joe Dante with a bucket of style. Tangle with sharks and you’re gonna get yours is the message here not the usual let’s have a happy ending.

There’s are some stunning images. Torches of dead cops float down to a skull-strewn river bed, an underwater flare reveals just how many sharks there are, a shark dragging a string of yellow buoys heads towards swimmers decked out in red caps, the bridges tumbling down, the ensuing tsumani (bet you never expected that). And on top of that there are some neat scenes. Sophia’s pompous ecology lecture is punctured by giggling kids who, checking her up on social media, point out her credentials are somewhat tarnished given she lost her entire crew to sharks. One sensible cop doesn’t go along with the usual sacrificial nonsense as his colleagues put themselves in harm’s way because his family means more to him than a shark.

This should have been Netflix going DTV. Instead, it’s Netflix showing Hollywood where to go.

Unmissable. You gotta see this.

Behind the Scenes: “By Love Possessed” (1961)

Call it friendly persuasion. After The Magnificent Seven (1960), producer Walter Mirisch wanted to keep director John Sturges on-side. Other potential projects were falling by the wayside and Sturges needed, for financial reasons, to keep working while Mirisch wanted to ensure that when they finally licked the script for The Great Escape, still three years off as it happened, they would have a grateful director all set.

Especially, they did not want him to fall into the hands of rival producer Hal Wallis who was making a second attempt to set up The Sons of Katie Elder. Sturges had been the original director in 1955 with Alan Ladd in the leading role but a dodgy script. Although the script was in better shape, Wallis couldn’t get Paramount to bite (and wouldn’t until 1965). Another Sturges prospect was a remake of Vivacious Lady (1938) teaming Steve McQueen and Lee Remick in the Ginger Rogers-James Stewart roles, but that also fell through.

“I didn’t want John to go elsewhere and get tied up in another film,” admitted Mirisch. Partly as a means of finding a vehicle for Lana Turner, Mirisch had struck a deal with Seven Arts to make By Love Possessed by James Gould Cozzens, a 1957 bestseller for which producer Ray Stark had forked out $100,000 as a means of finessing his television-dependent company into the movies.

Essentially, Mirisch picked up the picture on the rebound. Seven Arts had fallen out with United Artists which had financed the acquisition of three expensive properties: Broadway hits West Side Story and Two for the Seesaw and the novel By Love Possessed, all of which fell into the Mirisch lap. Mirisch enthused about the two stage productions, interesting Robert Wise in the musical and Billy Wilder, at least initially, in the romantic drama. Prior to The Magnificent Seven, Mirisch had tied Sturges down to a long-term deal and now handed him the script for By Love Possessed. “He read it and said he would like to do it.”

Lana Turner had revived her career with an Oscar-nominated turn in Peyton Place (1957), a huge hit, and had hit gold with remake Imitiation of Life (1959). She seemed the ideal candidate for another adaptation of a seamy besteller. At this point the Mirisch company was still trying to make it way in Hollywood. Its prime method of getting its foot in the door was to pay stars over the odds and allow them greater say in their movies, sometimes backing pet projects. The price of working with big marquee names was often a lot of grief.

Like any other major producer, Walter Mirisch saw himself as a star-maker. Hiring talent on a long-term contract for a low fee was one way of ensuring he could ride on their inexpensive coat-tails in the future. Efrem Zimbalist Jr was the star of hit television series 77 Sunset Strip and the producer “hoped that casting him with Lana in our picture would make him a motion picture star.” He viewed the likes of Jason Robards and George Hamilton as merely supporting actors and not potential stars in their own right, although both would go on to have more stellar careers than Zimbalist.

Ketti Frings, Oscar-nominated for Come Back, Little Sheba (1952), had been paid $100,000 plus a percentage to write the screenplay of what was perceived as a difficult novel to adapt, given it was riddled with flashbacks and introspection. “If we told the book on the screen, we would be making an 18-hour picture,” said Sturges, derisively, as if blockbuster novels (From Here to Eternity etc) were not filetted all the time. Oscar-winner Charles Schnee (Red River, 1948) was drafted in for a rewrite – he had worked on Jeopardy (1953), though uncredited, a Sturges thriller starring Barbara Stanwyck.

Now the screenwriter was dogged with script changes demanded by Lana Turner. According to Mirisch, the actress “never let up” wanting script alterations. But Schnee’s work didn’t meet the director’s expectations and was doctored to such an extent the screenwriter removed his own name from the credits and substituted the pseudonym John Dennis. Mirisch initially brought in Isobel Lennart, who was adapting Two for the Seesaw, for a polish but eventually her version departed significantly from the Schnee original.

Novels could get away with a lot more blatant sexuality than books, though Peyton Place (1957) had made a very good stab at scorching the screen. But the finished script didn’t manage to match the novel’s carnality except in the character of Veronica (Yvonne Craig), the one-night stand who triggers the family downfall. Whatever the problems the script couldn’t nail, Sturges was clearly not the director to get round them with hot onscreen love scenes. Much as he admired strong women, couples getting it on were not his speciality.

The movie was filmed on the Columbia lot with a week on location.

“You get talked into it…or you need the money,” said Sturges. “I knew I had no business making that picture. Sure it was well-acted and staged …but I couldn’t care less about these people. I didn’t like ‘em, didn’t understand ‘em. And if you don’t understand people in a given situation, and you don’t like what’s happening, you shouldn’t try to make a movie out of it.”

Mirisch was as philosophical. “John Sturges was more at home with male-oriented, action pictures than soap opera. I was well aware of that, but I was guilty of ignoring my own misgivings and of wanting to keep him involved in one of our projects while we were doing the script preparation for The Great Escape.” The failure of the movie was, for Mirisch, “a psychological and emotional blow,” one that wasn’t softened by success at the box office.

SOURCES: Glenn Lovell, Escape Artist, The Life and Films of John Sturges (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) p218-220; Walter Mirisch, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History (The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) p99, 114-116, 119-120;