I am a published author of books about film - over a dozen to my name, the latest being "When Women Ruled Hollywood." As the title of the blog suggests, this is a site devoted to movies of the 1960s but since I go to the movies twice a week - an old-fashioned double-bill of my own choosing - I might occasionally slip in a review of a contemporary picture.
Every now and then in the writing of my blog an event occurs which comes as a great surprise. Last year, I was contacted from Los Angeles by Claudia Pretelin, a producer working for DVD specialist Vinegar Syndrome. They were planning a 4K restoration of Five Card Stud (1968) and, alighting on my review of the movie, Claudia asked if I would do the audio commentary, especially as I had detected the strong feminist undercurrent that runs through the western.
Five years ago, McFarland had published my book The Gunslingers of ’69: The Westerns’ Greatest Year. But if I had been writing about 1968, Five Card Stud would be one of the standouts. For whatever reason, it’s so under-rated it’s almost been completely forgotten, overshadowed by the three other westerns Henry Hathaway made either side of it, most importantly True Grit (1969) and The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) . Overshadowed because it wasn’t made by John Ford or Howard Hawks. Together with Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood they were the directors most admired by critics. Overshadowed because it didn’t star John Wayne or James Stewart, both considered essential elements to any great western. Overshadowed because nobody gave a damn about Dean Martin (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) as a serious actor.
But from the outset, this is distinctive with recurrent motifs and a visual symmetry – overhead camera, water, strangulation, the card table – that seems to have gone unnoticed, unlike The Searchers. Given the testosterone on display – Robert Mitchum (Secret Ceremony, 1969) in addition to Dean Martin – this is unusually an extremely feminist western. The three female leads are far from docile and screenwriter Marguerite Roberts has changed the source book, Glory Gulch by Ray Gaulden, to exploit those elements.
Entrepreneur Lily (Inger Stevens) runs an upmarket barbershop – generally a male monopoly – with an interesting sideline, but when it comes to romance she’s in charge, choosing – and dumping – the men. Nora (Katherine Justice) is a rancher’s daughter so smart and effective that her father has already decided that he’s going to leave her a half-share in his business rather than, as would be the norm, leaving it all to his son Nick (Roddy McDowell). Mama Malone (Ruth Springford) owns the eponymous saloon and takes no sass from anybody.
Van (Dean Martin) likes to think he has the measure of women, when in fact they have the measure of him. The story avoids the obvious lure of a love triangle, of jealous women competing for Van’s affections. Both the young Nora and the more mature Lily are pretty well grounded and judge their men by the standard of their kissing – that’s equality for you.
The movie was one of the fastest ever made, just five months from the start of shooting to release – that’s efficiency for you. And for many critics that was how they regarded director Henry Hathaway. He wasn’t considered a stylist, but a studio workhorse, apt to take what was offered, work in too many genres. But this is one of his most stylish films. In some ways it harks back to film noir. The story is a mystery. And his extensive use of overhead camera would be considered innovative had it been made now.
This is in fact about a serial killer, a treatise on law and order, almost acting as a conduit between the decade’s previous westerns when the good guys and the bad guys are easily distinguished to the end of the decade when such distinctions were muddied. Here, we don’t know who the bad guy is. He’s not a hero saving a town or enforcing law and order. Not a detective either, trying to nail down a killer. He’s only trying to save his own skin. The whodunit is really a MacGuffin, an opportunity to examine the hypocrisies of the West.
The Sons of Katie Elder, Nevada Smith (1966) and Five Card Stud are all about revenge, justified in you like in the first two. Play this another way and the vengeful preacher Rudd (Robert Mitchum) would be the hero, vindicated as much as characters in Hang ‘Em High (1968), Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) or True Grit.
Producer Hal B. Wallis (True Grit) bought Ray Gaulden’s western Glory Gulch in May 1967, three months after publication by Berkeley Medallion as a paperback original. (Reprinted a year later, it was re-titled Five Card Stud). It came cheap. Nobody else was bidding. Robert Redford (Downhill Racer, 1969) turned down the role of Rudd – he thought the character too obvious and didn’t like the way the narrative developed – so Robert Mitchum was actually second choice.
Filming was due to start in October 1967 but was delayed till February 1968. It was shot in Durango – a popular locale also utilized for Guns for San Sebastian (1968), Shalako (1968) and The Scalphunters (1968) – and Churabasco Studios in Mexico City. There were 22 actors and 52 crew. The main location was 8,000ft up on the Sierra Madre mountains. The actors were billeted in a motel, but Mitchum, demanding peace and quiet, had the end room so got more of the cold and required a portable oxygen tank. Instead of privacy he was frozen. The boilers didn’t work and allocated a single blanket he ended up piling all his clothes on the bed. Roddy McDowell wasn’t hired until after shooting began and he modelled his somewhat hippie sideburns after George Harrison. Mitchum was nearly crushed to death by a falling 18th high camera pedestal. While the two stars didn’t particularly hit it off there was no animosity either.
Some of those involved scarcely needed to work. Dean Martin was one of the richest men in the business. At a time when the very top stars took home $750,000 a picture, say $1.5 million if they made two movies a year, Martin took home closer to $5 million a year when you totted up fees from his television show, movies, records and performing. McDowell was the co-owner of a thriving disco franchise. Hathaway had just sold his stake in an oil business for $18 million.
Marguerite Roberts had been one of the top-earning screenwriters in the Hollywood
Golden Age. Starting out in 1933, her credits included Honky Tonk (1941) with Clark Gable and Lana Turner, The Sea of Grass (1947) starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and MGM’s big-budget blockbuster Ivanhoe (1951) teaming Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor. Around the time of Five Card Stud she had two other projects on studio slates, Hero Suit and Flight and Pursuit, though neither was made and it was perhaps ironic that her next assignment concerned a lawman who took the same no-holds-barred approach to the criminal fraternity, namely True Grit, as the killer in this picture.
Filming began on February 7 and finished on April 14. It opened on July 12. That was a phenomenal turnaround for the period. A Time for a Killing/The Long Ride Home (1967), also starring Inger Stevens, took 16 months to reach the screen. In 1967 there were 125 films in studio backlogs – movies completed but no release date set as yet as yet, studios in no hurry, and often first run cinemas in the major cities clogged up by roadshows or long-running hits.
The western from mid-1960s had become the default for many stars. Where earlier in the decade stars might mix western and war with comedy and drama now for many top names for a period of three, four or five years they appeared either exclusively or almost exclusively in westerns. From 1965 to 1968 except for Matt Helm and one comedy Dean Martin had tackled five westerns. In the same period for James Stewart four out of five were westerns. For Mitchum it was four straight westerns from 1966 to 1968. In two years starting in 1967, four out of five Inger Stevens pictures were westerns. In three years, Glenn Ford made five straight westerns and after Battle of the Bulge (1965) Henry Fonda made four straight westerns. It was the same for directors: between 1965 and 1971 Andrew V. McLaglen made nothing but, and Burt Kennedy, in one year less, seven out of eight.
DVD with 4K restoration and audio commentary by yours truly available to pre-order and comes out in a few days.
Remembering this picture as a summer holiday matinee of stiff-upper-lip entangled in all sorts of Khartoumery, I came at this film with low expectations. Given producer Charles H. Schneer’s (First Men in the Moon, 1964) involvement, there were no Ray Harryhausen magical special effects. I was only aware of star Anthony Quayle as a bluff supporting actor in epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and Sylvia Syms as a willowy supporting actress (The World of Suzie Wong, 1960).
So I was in for a pleasant surprise. Take away the back projection, stock footage and the unlikely zoo of wild animals and there is a fairly decent action film set in the Sudan on the fringes of the Mahdi uprising (that story filmed as Khartoum the following year).
Baker (Anthony Quayle), former army sergeant awaiting court martial, escapes from a battle near Khartoum, saving governess Miss Woodville (Sylvia Syms), her charge Asua (Jenny Agutter making her debut), officer Muchison (Basil Fowlds) and a wounded soldier. The motley crew flees down the Nile in a boat. You know you are in for something quite different when the soldier dies and Baker wants to toss him overboard. Overruled by prim Miss Woodville and by-the-book Murchison, this good deed is rewarded by losing their beached boat while burying the dead.
A picture like this only survives on twists. Burning the remainder of their boat to attract the attention of the British relief force only brings in their wake a mob of Arabs, who we are informed, in a spicy exchange, don’t know the ten commandments, especially “thou shalt not kill.”
The movie turns into a battle of the sexes, with Woodville’s innocence and good breeding quickly eroded in the face of danger, her natural antipathy towards a scallywag like Baker softening. Lacking due deference, said scallywag is given some choice lines which spark up proceedings. It being Africa, the animals have nothing better to do than torment them, so cue snakes, crocodiles, charging rhinos, hippos, elephants without even a decent monkey to lighten proceedings. Baker sets his ruthless tendences to one side to take a tender, paternal interest in young Asua. Ongoing action prevents the usual male-female meet-cute African Queen-style banter and it’s all the better for it.
Capture by African tribesman takes the story on an interesting detour. Baker, attempting to make friends, shouts out despairingly, “Don’t any of you even speak English?” only for chieftain Kimrasi (Johnny Sekka) to stride out of the bushes with the reply, “I speak, English, Arabic and Swahili.” Baker explains, “We come in peace.” The chief retorts, “With gun in hand?”
Game on! The plot goes offbeat for w while when we become involved in Kimrasi’s life. A former slave, his village presents an unusually realistic alternative world not least for Asua, ill by this time, saved by an African witch doctor. There are further surprises, clever ruses to foil the enemy, revelations about Woodville and a surprising but very British ending.
Quayle is convincing, reveling in the opportunity to create a fully-formed character rather than confined to a small chunk of a picture. Syms, too, with more on offer than normal, Agutter (Walkabout, 1971) not a precocious Disney cut-out, and Fowlds revealing what did for all those years before turning up on television as puppet Basil Brush’s sidekick. As a British B-picture making do on a small budget, it overcomes this particular deficiency with some sparkling dialog and attitudes that go against both the time in which it was set and the era in which it was made. Directed by Nathan Juran (First Men in the Moon) from a screenplay by Jud Kinberg (Siege of the Saxons, 1963).
Another tricky one because, of course, I’m supposed to mock this colossal box office flop. Not least because, as later events proved, you couldn’t lift the Titanic off the seabed in one piece since it had actually broken in two. And there’s the dumb maguffin to end all dumb maguffins that kicks it all off in the first place, but you did need some excuse for the exercise. And, in fairness, in theory at least, it’s more cinematic to show the ship going down, and having lovelorn lovers to lament, than to see it coming up with no passengers to root for.
That said, the actual hunt for the lost vessel and the raising is stupendous stuff, even on the small screen, and with a director with greater visual flair than Jerry Jameson (Airport ’77, 1977) it could have been even better. But there can’t be a more iconic climactic shot than the Titanic steaming into New York, missing its scheduled arrival by a mere six decades.
Question is, does the technical stuff, the underwater photography, the raising, the impeccable model-work, make up for the lack of smarts elsewhere? Heck, who cares? No one is interested in whatever storyline the makers come up – and, let’s face it, not even DiCaprio and Winslet, good though they are, were the driving force for the James Cameron version – all they are interested is the recreation of the mythical ship, probably the only one everyone in the world can name. So get the nautical elements right and you’re pretty much there.
Critics, and crucially audiences, back in the day didn’t think so. But I disagree. I couldn’t begin to tell you much about the hare-brained narrative – some item so crucial to the present-day (1980, that is) ongoing Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R – and I couldn’t care less. Nor would you find many takers for a love triangle involved explorer Dirk Pitt (Richard Jordan), journalist Dana (Anne Archer) and all-purpose politico Gene (David Selby). And although an occasional acting heavyweight like Jason Robards (as an Admiral) and Alec Guinness (as a Titanic survivor) hoves into view, it’s the character actors like J.D. Cannon and M. Emmet Walsh who have more to do.
But that’s not much either, because anyone involved in the underwater stuff is required only to show two emotions, shock and awe, and to be honest they do a good job because really all we need are witnesses to the amazing. The picture tickles along for a bit while the principals argue about the right way to go about their task and where, specifically, to concentrate the search, and then about the actual mechnics of the raising, that aspect suddenly given the kind of self-imposed deadlines that seemed de facto for disaster pictures (they are always running out of time) because some guys are now trapped in the ship.
But just as James Cameron awed audiences with his reimagining of the interior of the mighty ship, it’s no less imposing here in its impoverished state, stripped of its glory, nothing but the naked façade of the still-amazing below decks. And when it finally does surface carries magical visual splendor.
In truth, I found I was tuning out of the human goings-on, waiting with bated breath for the next sighting – or the first – of the ship. And we’re spared the endless wittering-on about how the ship sank and who was responsible and you could argue the narrative trigger in Titanic (1997) of the old lady’s brooch is every bit as dumb as the rare mineral secretly stashed on board here.
Jerry Jameson’s cinematic career was sunk by the poor box office and he didn’t receive another movie credit for over a decade. But he does a decent enough job here in the absence of a genuine all-star cast and those sequences depicting the hunt and the triumph work very well indeed. None of the acting is awful, but the stars have been hired for obvious reasons – being inexpensive might have been the starting point – and neither Jason Robards (Hour of the Gun, 1967) nor Alec Guinness (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) attempts anything you’ve not seen before. While Richard Jordan (Logan’s Run, 1976) is too freshfaced for his character, Anne Archer (Fatal Attraction, 1987) suggests vivacity on legs.
Screenplay credited to Adam Kennedy (The Domino Principle, 1977) and Eric Hughes (Against All Odds, 1984) in reality went through a hatful of different hands. Based on the Clive Cussler bestseller.
Don’t believe the critics – and possibly not even me – on this one but I found it a surprisingly good watch.
A curiosity. Something of vanity project for star James Cagney (One, Two, Three, 1961) – in his penultimate leading role – who doubled up as producer. But more of a documentary than a war picture. Witness, no scenes of actual World War II combat for a start. And going down the same annoying route as The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) where the voice-over pretty much tells you what everyone had for breakfast and in that vein goes on to tell you whether or not they survived the conflict and maybe became a relatively famous politician thereafter.
Basically recounts the turnaround in U.S. fortunes at the Battle of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific in 1942-1943. The Americans had invaded the island but were coming under increasing pressure from the Japanese. In case you don’t know your Second World War history, this was the first major American land offensive following Pearl Harbor. Though the Americans had thwarted the Japanese at The Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway, these were nautical triumphs. Guadalcanal was the first objective in the American island-hopping strategy.
Here, I’m getting all information-overload myself, because all you really need to know is that the Americans parachuted in (actually, he landed by flying boat) Admiral “Bull” Halsey (James Cagney) at a critical moment to revitalize their operation and prevent the expected Japanese attack. The Japanese were so convinced that victory was imminent that they had drawn up operational details of the surrender ceremony they planned to impose on the vanquished Americans.
The Yanks managed to intercept and decode Japanese radio transmissions and in the only real dramatic moment, after capturing the surrender document, Halsey pins it to a tree so his troops can read it and stiffen their resolve.
But mostly this is a bunch of guys in a bunch of rooms talking about what they were going to do and how difficult, what with lack of support and casualties and low morale, their challenge was going to be. There’s no shortage of detail but every time a scene starts to become dramatically interesting up pops our resident voiceover (director and co-star Robert Montgomery if you want to know) to provide us with some unnecessary detail about some character in the room.
On the debit side, this is pretty irritating. On the plus side, it’s fascinating, a potted history of various personnel without having to resort to the usual sub-plots, often inane in themselves, often of the romantic persuasion, that crop up in an otherwise intriguing war picture so as to provide the audience with people to root for. If you were American, you would recognise some of the characters depicted, some true-life heroes (ace pilots, courageous soldiers) who made their name on the field of battle or contributed to the victory off it.
Of course, if you’re from anywhere else you won’t have a clue who anybody is – and not that much interested either, preferring the old-fashioned approach of sub-plot and romance – but stick with it because, once you realize this is a determinedly novel approach for the genre, it does become pretty interesting especially as Cagney, despite his character being nicknamed “Bull,” dispenses with his usual acting tricks, the strangulated voice and the aggressive demeanor, in favor of a more rounded personality.
Nobody tends to hold up a critical mirror to battles that end in victory, unlike Pearl Harbor, so it’s never going to degenerate into verbal fisticuffs, and much of the pressure the audience might detect comes from the other side, the cocky Japanese, who are presented in a very even-handed manner, despite, or perhaps because, their leader Admiral Yamamoto (James T. Goto), who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, was highly respected by the Americans. This is where maybe Violent City (1970) got the idea of ignoring subtitles, but at least here we can rely on Mr Voiceover to keep us posted on what the Japanese were actual up to.
Cagney holds it all together and you might spot Dennis Weaver (Duel, 1971) and Richard Jaeckal (The Dirty Dozen, 1967) among the supporting cast. Sixth and final directorial outing for star Robert Montgomery (though he limits his onscreen involvement here to just the narration) who had experimented with voiceover in Lady in the Lake (1945). Whether you fall in with his take on this one, he pretty much delivers what he intended, a semi-documentary account of leaders in battle. Screenplay by Beirne Lay Jr (The Young and the Brave, 1963) and Frank D. Gilroy (The Subject Was Roses, 1968).
Will Henry’s 1964 source novel was, by today’s standards, a slim volume. The principal idea of Mackenna being given a map by a dying Indian comes from the book, as does the capture of the white woman (named Francie in the novel), and the surprisingly erotic description of Hesh-Ke’s attempted seduction of Mackenna in the pool, the Apache mysticism, and, equally surprisingly, the earthquake denouement.
Some white men do join the party, but they are of rougher stock, the “Good Men” of Hadleyburg entirely producer Carl Foreman’s invention. Foreman turned Mackenna into a lawman rather than just a prospector, made the map more tangible (in the book it was drawn in the sand), gave Mackenna a past with Hesh-Ke and with the outlaw Colorado (named Pelon in the book), and, just as Sergio Leone did with Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West, realized that a handsome attractive villain was far more interesting than the “jug-eared, ugly man” described in Henry’s book.
First edition cover.
Foreman made Tibbs a sergeant and added 20 years to the raw-boned youngster of the book. But in the original, Hesh-Ke was killed, accidentally, just after the pool incident, and it was another of the outlaws, Hachita, who killed Colorado so that the climactic fight on the ledge was between the axe-wielding Hachita and the unarmed Mackenna rather than between Mackenna and Colorado, but Henry had the woman taken hostage kill the Indian.
The various shoot-outs and chases are primarily a Foreman invention. He gives Mackenna more depth, and the vices of gambling and alcohol. Most important of all, it was Foreman who added the visual grandeur. There is no Shaking Rock in the source material, and no waiting for sunrise or for a shadow to point the way to the entrance to the canyon.
A writer-producer was the worst kind of hyphenate as far as a director was concerned in that, as suggested previously, the producer might be more apt to protect his original vision and dialog than adapt the screenplay, which is always only ever intended as a blueprint, to other ideas as the movie went into production.
The opening of the picture is pure Foreman, on a par with the introductory section of The Guns of Navarone, and the extensive use of narration ran counter to a director who felt the camera should tell the story. The greed aspect is spelled out well enough in the original novel, and comparisons with the classic examination of how gold turns men inside out was portrayed best as far as most people were concerned in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) so quite why Foreman felt obliged to hammer the point home so obviously in Mackenna’s Gold is anybody’s guess, except that the producer saw himself as a man with a message, the anti-war themes of The Guns of Navarone (1961) and The Victors (1964) having eliciting critical approval. You get the impression the original novel didn’t require as much tampering as this to be turned into a more than adequate picture.
Will Henry was a pseudonym, one of two he used for writing westerns, the other being Clay Fisher. His real name was Henry Wilson Allen and he began in the movies, joining MGM in 1937 as a screenwriter for cartoon shorts. He also wrote screenplays for cartoon shorts under the pen names Heck Allen and Henry Allen. Many of these were Tex Avery cartoons written between 1944 and 1955 which were considered some of the funniest ever made. He also worked on Woody Woodpecker and other cartoon characters. When he started writing novels in the 1950s he did so under a pseudonym to avoid attracting unwanted attention from his studio employers. He was a five-time winner of The Spur Award including for From Where the Sun NowStands (1960) – which also won The Saddleman Award – and The Gates of the Mountains (1963).
Westerns made from his novels were Santa Fe Passage (1955) starring John Payne, The Tall Men (1955) directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Clark Gable and Jane Russell, Pillars of the Sky (1956) starring Jeff Chandler, and Yellowstone Kelly (1959) starring Clint Walker. At the same time as Mackenna’s Gold was sold, his 1960 book Journey to Shiloh was being set up under the title Fields of Honor to be directed by veteran Mervyn LeRoy and when this fell through was made into a film under the original title in 1969 with newcomer James Caan while Who Rides with Wyatt would be released as Young Billy Young starring Robert Mitchum in fall 1969.
I should mention the George Lucas connection right away because, for some, that is the movie’s main contemporary connection.
Mackenna’s Gold was originally intended as a three-hour movie[i] for roadshow release to be shot in early 1966 for Columbia Pictures by writer-producer Carl Foreman (Guns of Navarone, 1961) who would also be in the director’s chair.[ii] But outside of How the West Was Won (1962) westerns had foundered in roadshow. The Alamo (1960), John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964) and John Sturges The Hallelujah Trail (1965) were surprising roadshow flops. Foreman persuaded Columbia to increase the budget to $5 million – and then beyond – and film the movie in Cinerama, (over 25 percent of the budget was allocated to Cinerama to license the name and use the equipment – $1.35 million in total of initial negative costs[iii]).
In January 1967 Columbia launched the marketing campaign with full page advertisements in the trade papers promoting the fact that the movie would be filmed on location in the USA in Cinerama and that it would bring together the “creators of The Guns of Navarone,” meaning, at this point, Foreman and director J. Lee Thompson. The advertisement also highlighted author Will Henry, on whose novel the film was based (as the “author of San Juan Hill and From Where the Sun Now Stands”) and plugged the book as “a novel of Apache gold and Apache revenge based on the search for the fabulous Lost Adams Diggings.” By the following year, Foreman’s star was in the ascendant after the Parisian revival of High Noon[iv] and Columbia had another two major roadshows planned for the 1968-1969 season: Barbra Streisand’s movie debut in William Wyler’s Funny Girl also starring Omar Sharif and Carol Reed’s Oliver![v]
By this time, Columbia had reshaped its marketing effort to provide the specialist support required for promoting roadshows. In early 1967, it had poached sales guru Leo Greenfield from Buena Vista with the express aim of setting up an effective unit to market hard-ticket product – “first assignment Mackenna’s Gold, Oliver! and Funny Girl”[vi] – to the record number of Cinerama theaters[vii] and those desperate to accommodate roadshow. By the end of 1968, both Cinerama and Columbia had reported record revenues and profits, the former turning a $290,000 loss into a $679,000 profit,[viii] the latter on an unprecedented streak of success with a gross profit of $9.3 million profit on a gross income of $239 million.[ix] Columbia soon added another roadshow prospect to its slate, Sydney Pollack’s World War Two drama Castle Keep starring Burt Lancaster, and was so confident about the two non-musicals, for example, that it expected the western and the war picture to run consecutively from late spring 1969 well into the following year at Loews Hollywood in Los Angeles.[x]Funny Girl hit $550,000 in advance sales – $80,000 was the usual figure.[xi]Mackennas’s Gold’s was scheduled to premiere in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 15, 1969, with the roadshow launch set for the DeMille theater in New York five days later.
Within the next month, however, the world premiere was called off, work began on editing down the near-three-hour running time, and plans, two years in the making, for an ambitious roadshow release were quietly dropped. Public reaction to The Stalking Moon – also starring Gregory Peck – was one reason. Two other Cinerama movies, Custer of the West (1967) and Krakatoa – East of Java (1968) had also flopped. If Mackenna’s Gold was to be marketed as a drama in a western setting rather than a shoot-out in the tradition of 100 Rifles, then Columbia looked worryingly at Isadora, boasting a 177-minutes running time, whose roadshow run in Los Angeles was swiftly truncated, and the movie butchered in a bid to find an audience.[xii]
The studio took a different tack. The world premiere shifted to Munich, West Germany, in March[xiii] with most of the rest of the European capitals holding gala premieres (and running it as roadshow or at least 70mm) before the picture made its U.S. debut in Phoenix on May 10. But the picture unveiled in Phoenix was a ghost of the original. The running time technically came in at 128 minutes, but, in effect, was under two hours long, the introductory narration lasting eight minutes and the end credits accounting for further time. However, what was oddest of all was the 18-month gap between completion and world premiere. Filming had begun on May 16, 1967 and wrapped on September 29. Columbia had shelved one of its biggest budgeted movies for nearly 15 months.
The movie had a troubled history. For a start, Foreman didn’t own the rights to the Will Henry source novel. Dmitri Tiomkin, after a debilitating eye condition restricting his composing career, had in 1964 purchased the rights. Tiomkin agreed to sell the rights to Foreman in April 1965 in return not just for a fee and an agreement to compose the music[xiv] but also the vital producer’s credit necessary to launch him on a new career.[xv] Foreman was initially keen on filming the movie in Spain to take advantage of generous government subsidies.[xvi] But Foreman was demoted from director. His last picture as writer-producer-director The Victors (1964) had flopped. The studio did not want to offer the producer any distraction from the complex logistics of a location shoot where much of the time the crew would be 50 miles from the nearest town and where, despite the desert environment, could be subject to storms and flash floods. Instead, J. Lee Thompson (The Guns of Navarone) came on board as director. (Thompson was also at this point lined up to direct Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes, whose rights he co-owned.)
However, the Thompson-Foreman relationship did not run smoothly. Foreman recalled: ‘I was not very happy with the work of J. Lee Thompson on that film and entirely apart from that we still got into trouble in terms of scheduling and so forth and our relationship was always a problem.’[xvii] Logistics were always going to be an issue on a picture of this scale, shot almost exclusively on some of the most inhospitable places on Earth. The buzzard section was filmed in Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border, and other scenic wildernesses included the Glen Canyon of Utah, Spider Rock in Canon de Schelly in Arizona, Kanab Valley, Sink Valley, the Panguitch Fish Hatchery in Utah, and Medford in Oregon.
Gregory Peck was not first choice for the titular role in Mackenna’s Gold. He only got the part after Steve McQueen and then Clint Eastwood had turned it down[xviii] and even then Peck wavered, only agreeing after pressure from Foreman, and in recognition of their work together on The Guns of Navarone.[xix] Depending on your point of view, Omar Sharif was miscast or cast against type, a matinee idol whose character, in ruthless pursuit of gold, eschewed any element of romance. By the time the movie appeared, Sharif’s marquee appeal had taken a tumble. MGM’s Mayerling and Twentieth Century Fox’s Che had flopped, The Appointment (1969) shelved and Funny Girl’s success rightly attributed to Streisand.
Over the past few years, Telly Savalas had discovered the harsh reality of Hollywood. An Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) had done less for his career than the odious Maggott in The Dirty Dozen (1967) after which he was promptly promoted to third billing on Sol Madrid (1968), western The Scalphunters (1968) and The Assassination Bureau (1968). Although he retained that billing on Mackenna’s Gold, he did not appear until halfway through, suggesting that his role as Sgt Tibbs had been a casualty of the editing needed to reduce the running length. Camilla Sparv had been leading lady in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966), Assignment K (1968), and Nobody Runs Forever (1968). Newmar, a decade older, was best known for playing “Catwoman” in the television series Batman (1966-1967). Foreman had given her the leading female role opposite Zero Mostel in Monsieur Lecoq (1967) but the movie was unfinished, although Newmar still attracted attention after stills from the picture appeared in Playboy magazine. Mackenna’s Gold aimed to set a new standard in the quality of actors in supporting roles – the by now requisite roadshow all-star cast including Edward G. Robinson (The Biggest Bundle of Them All, 1968), twice-Oscar-nominated Lee J. Cobb (Coogan’s Bluff, 1968), Burgess Meredith (Skidoo, 1968), Anthony Quayle (The Guns of Navarone), Oscar nominee Raymond Massey (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1941), Keenan Wynn (How the West Was Won) and Ted Cassidy (“Lurch” in The Addams Family television series, 1964-1966).
The George Lucas Connection
In some respects, the involvement of George Lucas (Star Wars) in Mackenna’s Gold has overshadowed that of director J. Lee Thompson. Committed to bringing through a new generation of talent, Foreman had established an internship for the picture. Lucas was one of four winners and his entry was the first version of THX 1138 (1971). The internship funded the winners to shoot a short film on the location. Foreman became immediately a fan because of the quality of Lucas’s effort. Foreman explained: “He did the shortest one of the lot and the most technically accomplished. It ran only one minute and 47 seconds and it had no title – he gave it a date – and then we agreed we’d call it A Desert Poem because he went out on the desert and did a lot of stop-action photography. George really knew his camera and he played with his camera and it was around and about the film – he was doing the desert more than anything else but in the desert was the film company with its parasols and all that shimmering in the distance and he played around with little things where the sun was shining and the film company was working. And then it began to rain, and it rained like hell, and then the sun came out again. It was awfully good. He did a lot of trick stuff with his camera and that’s what the boys resented, that he could just go out by himself and do that.”[xx]
The “boys” resented Lucas for more than his technical accomplishment but Foreman’s admiration for the neophyte director increased after seeing a display of professionalism that put the other professionals to shame. “We were…in a very difficult location…near the place where we had painted in this great seam of gold…We got to the big scene, the scene where they (the actors) all discovered it (the gold), and they all started running towards it…But it (the location) was in a kind of ravine and there was a problem about the light – you could only shoot it…at that time of year when the sun was more or less directly overhead or had just begun to go down or had just passed the meridian…(but when Foreman arrived on location) the entire company was just sitting there. Lucas therefore pointed out in an indirect manner that the scene had not been rehearsed because J. Lee Thompson was waiting for the sun to rehearse it during the precious moments when the sun was there instead of being ready for when the sun was there.”[xxi]
Reception
Trade magazine Variety came out in overall favor of Mackenna’s Gold: “splendid western, stars plus special effects and grandeur should insure box office success.”[xxii]Hollywood Reporter predicted, “Audiences should queue up,” and Film Daily proclaimed “a fine, exciting western adventure.”[xxiii] However, Vincent Canby in the New York Times called it a “truly stunning absurdity,” The New York News, while generally positive, nonetheless complained it was “sprawling” and “pretentious.” New York magazine and the Washington Post were among the nay-sayers.[xxiv] Perhaps, Peck’s own opinion was the most damning: “Mackenna’s Gold was a terrible western, just wretched.”[xxv]
Star fatigue did not occur in the days of the studio system, when releases were carefully spaced out to give the public a breathing space between each release. Actor independence meant timing of releases was removed from studio control – Gregory Peck’s movies in 1969 came from three different studios, Universal (The Stalking Moon), Twentieth Century Fox (The Chairman) and Columbia (Mackenna’s Gold), and Omar Sharif was in the same position with MGM for Mayerling, Twentieth Century Fox for Che and the western from Columbia. As you might expect, releases were not coordinated, studios did not sit down around a table and discuss how to avoid each other’s movies clashing. So in the first six months of 1969 audiences were treated to three pictures apiece from the stars, the earlier ones flops though Mayerlingr was a big hit overseas.[xxvi] Whatever the reason, Mackenna’s Gold did not race out of the gate. Its final rentals tally of $3.1 million – 42nd spot in the annual chart,[xxvii] ahead of The Stalking Moon and Once Upon a Time in the West, but well below the much less expensive Support Your Local Sheriff and 100 Rifles. In budget terms it was close to a disaster. However, it was a huge hit in India, setting a record in Madras for the best showing for a foreign picture.[xxviii]
SOURCES:
This is an edited version of a much longer chapter from my book, The Gunslingers of ’69: Western Movies’ Greatest Year.
[i] Sheldon Hall has argued that the movie was never intended to be three hours long and that judging from a screenplay of 145 pages the film would have been roughly two-and-half-hours long. He identified a major sequence that was filmed but edited out – of another battle between the Apaches and the gold-seekers (“Film in Focus, Mackenna’s Gold,” Cinema Retro, Issue 43, 40.)
[ii] “Foreman to Start Gold, Delays Churchill Pic,” Variety, September 8, 1965, 4. The Churchill project would eventually become Young Winston made in 1972 for Columbia. The movie was originally postponed due to political unrest in the chosen movie locations.
[iii] Filmmakers licensing the Cinerama name had to pay $500,000 upfront and Foreman was committed to spend $875,000 for Cinerama camera equipment. The cost might escalate because Columbia also had to agree to pay Cinerama 10 percent of the gross (“C’rama Sets Major Int’l Expansion As More Pix, More Theaters Use Process,” Variety, November 15, 1967, 25).
[iv] “Junket for Noon Sparks Nostalgia,” Variety, April 24, 1968, 31. Not only was the revival a critical success but it was a box office hit all over again in Paris.
[v] “Leo Greenfield’s Chore,” Variety, May 31, 1967, 8. Wyler, of course, was the king of the roadshow, having directed Ben Hur. Reed had directed The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) after an initial chastening experience with roadshow having pulled out of MGM’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) after clashing with star Marlon Brando.
[xii] “Switching of Isadora,,” Variety. The film, which had opened on December 18, was set to close on February 8 and go straight into continuous performance.
[xiii] “Col Bows Gold in Munich to Spark Lagging Box Office,” Variety, March 26, 1969, 41; “Mackenna’s Gold Launching Pattern,” Variety, March 5, 1969, 28. While it was true the studios were concerned about falling box office in Europe, the true reason for launching the picture in Europe ahead of America was because Foreman was so much better known there courtesy of his major marketing blitz for The Guns of Navarone and The Victors. It opened in Paris and Rome in March and in April in London.
[xiv] By the time the movie came out, Tiomkin had given up composing and the score was done by Quincy Jones.
[xv] “Tiomkin-Foreman Partners for Col,” Variety, April 21, 1965, 19.
[xvii]The Carl Foreman Tapes, Transcripts of Tapes between Sidney Cohn and Carl Foreman, Carl Foreman Collection, ITM – 4408, (Tape V – A, December 20, 1977, British Film Institute, Reubens Library, London).
[xviii] Avery, Kevin ed, Conversations with Clint, Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood, 35 ; Neibaur, James L, The Clint Eastwood Westerns, 44.
[xix] Fishgall, Gary, Gregory Peck, A Biography (Scribner, New York, 2002), 264.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) set in the West – men driven mad by gold fever. Straightforward plot, however, complicated by an avalanche of characters. And for a two-hour running time it seemed perverse to waste the first six minutes on scenery, narration – explaining the Apache legend of a fabulous hidden seam of gold – and theme song.
The real film begins with a shoot-out between Marshall Mackenna (Gregory Peck and an Indian. “You will wish you never saw this map,” says the Indian before he dies, but Mackenna burns the map. That doesn’t go down well with villain Colorado (Omar Sharif), whose gang has taken Inga (Camilla Sparv) hostage. Convinced the lawman has memorized the map, Colorado adds Mackenna to his hostage quotient.
At Colorado’s hideout Hesh-Ke (Julie Newmar) has a hostile reaction to Mackenna. Like Colorado, they have history. Mackenna and Inga bond when he fends off an Indian intent on raping her. As if this isn’t a pretty straightforward set-up, old foes reunited, potential romance brewing, a treasure hunt, further complications arise in the shape of a posse led by Ben Baker (Eli Wallach), not hunting renegades but also chasing gold. As if that wasn’t already a complication too far now we have a Cavalry troop, who confuse the posse with outlaws thus mostly eliminating a complication before it gets too complicated – the pursuing Apaches finish them off.
And in a nearby pool, we get a deadly twist on the naked attraction, as Hesh-Ke, first trying to lure Mackenna then trying to drown the woman she views as her romantic rival. When the Cavalry reappear, they have turned rogue, led by Sgt Tibbs (Telly Savalas). So now we’ve got the narrative ironed out it’s three separate groups – outlaws, Cavalry and Apaches – searching for gold with various individual old scores to be settled. And, just in time, they’ve arrived at Shaking Rock, the tall pillar visualized in the poster, and a sunrise worth waiting for. It is a glorious scene.
After a close-up of the rising sun and the pillar, and the screen changing color, the shadow of the pillar creeps across the canyon floor and points to a crack in the canyon wall. The crack is a tunnel entrance and on the other side the sun is shining on a seam of bright gold. And that leaves only the various denouements to be played out. And some surprises – straightlaced Inga succumbing to gold fever, the supposedly barbarous Apaches revealed as good guys – treating pillar (and gold) with reverence – and (would you believe it) an earthquake.
The earthquake might just have been too big a temptation given this was filmed in Cinerama. But it’s the least effective use of the process. A fairly standard western trope, crossing a dodgy bridge, is heightened in Cinerama but it’s still a cliché. Much better is the river crossing, the camera’s dizzying effect echoing the rollercoaster ride in This Is Cinerama and the rapids and runaway train of How the West Was Won (1962), audiences pitched headlong into camera point-of-view, racing water, oncoming rapids, thundering waterfall. The final section is triggered by the Cinerama camera racing for two minutes down the twisting track leading to the gold. So, in Cinerama terms, the audience got its money’s worth.
And there should have been enough conflict to keep the narrative on track – Mackenna vs. Colorado, Hesh-Ke vs. Inga, Inga vs Colorado, Calvary vs. outlaws vs. Apaches, plus various fist, gun, knife and belt fights. The individual conflicts, Inga’s genuine fear over her fate, the romantic triangle and especially ruthless Colorado revealed (ditto Butch Cassidy) as a dreamer, imagining life in faraway lands (swap Butch’s Bolivia and Australia for Colorado’s Paris) were more than enough to be going on with without being drowned out by a simplistic message about greed. This is nothing more – or nothing worse – than a decent western wrapped up in the bloated shadow of a roadshow.
Gregory Peck (Arabesque, 1966) and Omar Sharif (Mayerling, 1969) are both pretty good in roles that play against type, both female roles are well-written and well played by Camilla Sparv (Downhill Racer, 1969) and Julie Newmar (The Maltese Bippy, 1969) but the film is overloaded with way too many cameos. As he had proven in The Guns of Navarone (1961) J. Lee Thompson was excellent at handling large casts especially in scenes featuring a host of characters and his visual and aural skills are superb but not so good at putting writer-producer Carl Foreman in his place.
Take away the Cinerama effects and the roadshow elements, and trim another 20 minutes off the picture, and you would have had a tight character-driven picture.
I hate it when a mystery movie so blatantly cheats. Sure, we expect some sleight of hand, some vital piece of evidence retained, for the purposes of maintaining high tension, till the very end. Or a twist, a la Jagged Edge (1985), when a murderer, having got off scot-free, is revealed as the killer after all.
And while the central performances of accused, bisexual respected author and mother Sandra (Sandra Hueller), and accuser, smug unnamed prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz), are excellent and the exposition of the psychology of a marriage is well done, still the omission of the kind of critical forensic evidence that a modern audience would require works against the end result. Because otherwise, it plays like a 1940s courtroom drama, where the emphasis is solely on character rather than the weight of evidence.
So, here’s my complaint. The dead man has fallen from a window. Did he jump or was he pushed? Using forensics, the prosecution maintains he was hit by a heavy blow and some of the blood spatters down below were consistent with him losing blood when he was falling rather than when he hit the ground.
So we spend a great deal of time on examining how the body might fall and accounting for the blood, all of which appears to go against the accused, who is revealed as a not-so-nice person, possibly a sexual predator, possibly controlling, certainly a cheat – taking lovers while married and a heinous spot of plagiarism from her unpublished wannabe writer husband.
Only at the very end, when the half-blind child enters the loft space from which the father fell, do we realize that it would be impossible for this to be murder unless there was more evidence pointing to that eventuality. If the movie – prosecution and defence equally guilty of overlooking the obvious – had spent a couple of minutes on the loft space both would have come to the conclusion not so much that murder could be counted out but that there would be clear evidence of it.
The window is pretty small and an odd shape. But there was no evidence of a struggle, no scratches on the wood or glass, no tiny shred of material, and for the questionable spatters to end up where they did, the victim had to fall out backwards. So that means he needs to be pushed from the front and make no effort to save himself. The more obvious means of disposing of him – being thumped on the head from the back – was not consistent with the way he fell. And in any case, the space available for the wife to hit him with some heavy object would have meant leaving some evidence of that.
So, while it was certainly overlong, and could do with losing a good 15-30 minutes, I was happy to go along with the tale, held together as it was by the superlative performances and the usual courtoom duelling, though taking the last-minute evidence presented by the young boy as conclusive proof the father committed suicide seemed a step too far.
As a dissection of a marriage, of expectations of roles, and especially of the propensity for a failure to blame everyone else for their failings, it gets top marks. But it wears out its arthouse credentials by ignoring the forensic obvious.
I can’t also be the only one really annoyed that this Oscar-nominated performance basically skipped cinematic release. As far as I can work out, it was shown for one week in an arthouse in my neck of the woods way back last year and despite the Oscar nomination didn’t resurface except for a money-grab one-day showing two days (i.e. last night) before the Oscar ceremony. Like Maestro, it’s taken the streaming dollar and run, rather than allowed cinematic word-of-mouth to do what cinematic word-of-mouth is meant to do and build a groundswell of positive opinion prior to the awards.
So, yes, watch it for the psychology and the Oscar-worthy performance but don’t expect a contemporary approach to the mystery.
A triumvirate of art thieves are blackmailed into stealing a famous Goya painting from the Prada museum in Madrid. Jimmy Bourne (Rex Harrison) is the actual thief, Eve Lewis (Rita Hayworth) smuggles the artworks out of the country and Jean-Marie (Joseph Wiseman, soon to be more famous as Dr No, 1962) creates the forgeries that replace the stolen masterpieces. Hayworth is the least reliable of the trio, her drinking (she had a problem in real life) jeopardizes their slick operation. Not only has the painting they have stolen slipped through their hands but the thief, Dr Victor Munoz (Gregoire Aslan), is not above a bit of murder on the side
Bourne is always one-step-ahead but never overbearing, and the thefts are carried out with military precision. Even when let down by colleagues, who are inclined to scarper when threatened, he takes it all in his stride, the calm center of any potential storm. His marriage proposal is just as cool, coming by way of dictation, “the new Mrs Bourne.”
Bourne is the archetypal gentleman thief (“there is a touch of larceny in all successful men”) and Eve does her earnest best to keep up (“I want so much to be a first-class crook for you, I’m trying to be dishonest, honestly I am.”). But there is never the remotest chance of them being confused with real gangsters. “I thought that stealing was the only honest way Jimmy could live with himself,” says Eve. In truth, their characters set the template for better-known later heist pictures like How to Steal a Million (1966), Gambit (1966) and A Fine Pair (1968) which couple one determined thief with one less so.
Of course, heist pictures rely for much of their success on the actual heist. And Bourne’s plan for the Prada is brilliantly simple and carried out, as mentioned, with military precision. The get-out clause, which, of course, is how such films reach their conclusion, is more realistic and human than the other movies I have mentioned.
What’s more, there are number of excellent sight gags and great throwaway lines, while Jean-Marie and Dr Munoz are well-written, the villain’s motivation is particularly good. Other incidentals lend weight – their apartment is opposite a prison, the security guards at the Prada are caring rather than the idiots of How to Steal a Million, and a sub-plot involving a bullfighter (Virgilio Teixeira, Return of the Seven, 1966) also sheds light on Bourne. There is a jaunty whistling theme tune by Mario Nascimbene (One Million Years B.C., 1966) which maintains levity throughout.
The movie does tilt from the gentleman thievery of the initial section into something much darker, but, so too, do the two principals and, unusually, rather than in the usual contrived fashion, Bourne and Eve undergo personal transition by the end.
Rex Harrison (Midnight Lace, 1960) and Hayworth are a delightful pairing. Hayworth has abandoned the sultry in favor of the winsome, Harrison shifted from sarcasm to dry wit. And there is genuine chemistry between them though his character’s matter-of-fact attitude tends to undercut the kind of passionate romance that moviegoers came to expect from top-class players thus paired. It would have been tempting for Hayworth to act as the ditzy blonde (brunette, actually) but instead she plays it straight, which is more effecting.
I found the whole exercise highly enjoyable. It’s very under-rated. My only quibbles are that it is shot in black-and-white, which seems bizarre when Spain is such a colorful location. The title, too, is an oddity. This was the only picture produced by Hayworth in partnership with husband James Hill. They split up before the picture was released which might explain its poor initial box office.
Hill was an experienced producer, part of Hill-Hecht-Lancaster (The Unforgiven, 1960), but this proved his final film. Hayworth, too, had previously worn the producer’s hat for The Loves of Carmen (1948), Affair in Trinidad (1952) and Salome (1953). Hayworth was still a marquee attraction at this point, taking top billing here, and second billing to John Wayne in Circus World/The Magnificent Showman (1963). But this is quite a different performance to her all-out-passionate persona or the slinky deviousness of Gilda (1946).
Director George Marshall (Advance to the Rear, 1964) knew how to stay out of the way and let his stars deliver the fireworks. John Gay (Soldier Blue, 1970) wrote the screenplay from the novel by Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962).
The gentlest of British comedies – a fading subgenre after the infiltration of the genre by the unsubtle Carry On pictures – that on the face of it appears a sequel to the very successful The Fast Lady (1962), featuring the same cast with the exception of Julie Christie. And with both Stanley Baxter (on television) and Leslie Phillips subsequently outpointing James Robertson Justice in the stardom stakes, contemporary audiences tend to come at this from a mistaken perspective.
James Robertson Justice was at the time very much a British institution and if not the star you cast him at your peril as he was likely to steal the picture from better-remembered actors such as Dirk Bogarde in the Doctor series, Margaret Rutherford in Murder, She Said (1961), David Niven in Guns of Darkness (1962) and Omar Sharif in Mayerling (1969). He was a big burly man with a bushy beard and a loud hectoring style, more Brian Blessed (Flash Gordon, 1960) than Robert Morley (Oscar Wilde, 1960).
Misleadingly, the posters suggest another motor-centered tale.
He wasn’t the star of The Fast Lady and if it hadn’t been for the presence of Julie Christie (In Search of Gregory, 1969) he would have stolen that movie too. But when he was the denoted star, as here, the picture is built around him, so it’s not, actually, the tale of a young couple buying a money pit of a house, but of the male version of the interfering mother-in-law who makes their life merry hell.
Just married Dexter (Stanley Baxter) and Juliet (Sally Smith) purchase what appears an idyllic cottage in the countryside only to discover it requires a great deal of work. Renowned actor Sir Beverly Grant (James Robertson Justice) resents losing his daughter to a man he distrusts and to her moving out of his very grand home (named Elsinore, though I wonder how many viewers got that connection).
His attempts to take over the re-building programme are rebuffed by his son-in-law who hires the kind of builders, led by Josh (Ronnie Corbett), who give builders a bad name, tearing more tiles off the roof than they replace, creating more work for themselves or proving incompetent wherever they go. There’s a subplot involving real estate agent Roddy (Leslie Phillips), a budding thespian, desperate for the actor’s seal of approval.
But mostly, it’s everything going wrong and the father getting in the way and making things worse. But the tale doesn’t revolve around the hapless hero but around the domineering father and audiences back in the day would have recognized this, revelling in the father’s performance rather than trying to get on the side of the son-in-law.
Mostly, too, the comedic trick is slapstick, foot in paint pots, falling through floors, ceilings and roofs, an invasion of cows (one with the inevitable bonnet), being drenched by as much water as you could get on a set, and Dexter wringing his hands as the calamities – and the budget – mount.
Usually, the young couple taking on the world scenario just results in them encountering trouble from neighbors or various representations of authority and generally the focus from the outset is on them. But, here, it’s the opposite, audiences of the time waiting, not so much to see what new disaster will befall the couple, but to enjoy the carnage the father visits upon them. And viewed from that perspective it becomes far more enjoyable.
He’s far removed from the interfering mother-in-law cliché because that element of any comedy was usually a subplot played by a character actor who rarely evoked any audience sympathy. But audiences came to a James Robertson Justice picture to enjoy the mayhem he caused. He had screen charisma in spades, and especially when the screenplay was tilted in his favor, was apt to totally dominate a movie. And this is him at his best.
Stanley Baxter was somewhat miscast as a whiny incompetent husband – or, rather, he was not given a part which best utilized his uncanny skill for impersonation as later shown in his eponymous hugely successful television show. Leslie Phillips plays against type, more of an ingratiating Uriah Heep type than the uber-confident lady killer. Sally Smith (Naked You Die, 1968) hasn’t a hope of emulating Julie Christie. A slew of television comics – apart from Barker you can spot Terry Scott, Hugh Lloyd, Fred Emney and Kenneth Cope – put in an appearance.
Director Peter Graham Scott (Subterfuge, 1968) lacks prequel director Ken Annakin’s madcap zest but keeps it going none the less. Jack Davies (North Sea Hijack, 1980) and Henry Blyth (The Fast Lady) are as inventive as the idea permits.
Good old-fashioned fun but requires to be viewed from the correct character perspective.
The Magnificent 60s 