Crime/Thriller – Page 5 – The Magnificent 60s

Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) ***

There’s a reason this has largely slipped from view, why it’s rarely included in any examination of the Clint Eastwood canon. For the most part it’s plain dull. When the best thing in it for large periods of time is the screen composition, then you know this is going to be an odd, not to mention tough, watch.

It’s confused as hell. Starts out as a road movie – and a desultory one at that – with a side hustle of a shaggy dog story, straightens out enough to fit into the nascent buddy movie genre before settling down into a heist. And all the time director Michael Cimino, with his use of widescreen and traditional arranging of the sometimes majestic scenery into thirds, thinks he is making a western.

None of the characters seems to be much good at what they do. Thunderbolt (Clint Eastwood), on the run, doesn’t appear capable of evading the pursuing Red (George Kennedy), not a cop or bounty hunter as you’d expect, but an irate member of Thunderbolt’s former gang. And while Red seems excellent at tracking down his quarry, whose shifts of direction are almost whimsical, and even though he’s armed with the modern-day equivalent of a Gatling gun, he makes the basic mistake of not getting close enough to his target to make the bullets count.

The only one who comes out on top in the too-long opening section is Thunderbolt’s happy-go-lucky sidekick Lightfoot (Jeff Bridges) who has the knack of pulling the ladies and can drive. But their relationship is desultory, no zap, no funny lines in the vein of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), and while clearly like the pair in Midnight Cowboy (1969) inclined to hold onto each other in the absence of anyone else it lacks the emotional power of the latter.

It takes forever to get to the point. Or the three narrative triggers, one of which involves Eastwood committing the most grievous sin a major star can ever commit – to be the one who carries the exposition. And boy does he go on. Anyways, he’s a bank robber and he planked his haul in a small two-room schoolhouse. But, blow me down, someone’s demolished the schoolhouse, without presumably happening upon the cash, and built a brand new one in its place.

Then, just to annoy Thunderbolt, the police, because this is just how cunning they can be, have given out that they recovered the loot. Red hasn’t fallen for this ploy, believing Thunderbolt has duped the gang and made off with the stash. Eventually, Red and Thunderbolt reconcile and Lightfoot suggests they hit the bank that was originally robbed because nobody would expect it.

Thunderbolt has acquired his nickname because his idea of a heist is not to bring on board some clever dick safecracker and employ an ounce of patience but merely to barrel through any obstacle with the help of 20mm cannon.

So now – at last – we have a story, but that’s over halfway through the picture and way too late to save it. So, yes, there’s some decent action and excitement, a double cross, car chase, shoot-out, and just to complete the shaggy dog element one of the robbers is killed by a dog.

Once it gets going it’s within the Eastwood bailiwick. At the time there was a mini-trend, started off by Easy Rider (1969), for road movies so moviegoers back in the day would probably accept this more than a contemporary audience who, like me, is sitting there wondering when the heck are they going to get on with it.

Something of change of pace for Eastwood, in that he plays his age, the older man, one in not so good physical shape at that, and not catnip for the ladies. Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski, 1998) certainly brightens up the screen, but George Kennedy (Cool Hand Luke, 1967) overacts.

Writer-director Michael Cimino, in his debut, exhibits the strengths that would elevate The Deer Hunter (1978) and the self-indulgence that would cripple Heaven’s Gate (1980).

A long haul.

Que La Bete Meure / This Man Must Die (1969) ****

Heavily-layered Claude Chabrol revenge thriller that concentrates as much on the tricks the human mind can play rather a string of unusual twists. Self-justification and redemption go hand in hand. The director sucks us in to sympathize with an obsessed killer on the grounds that his victim deserves to die and then at the end makes us question everything we’ve been led to believe.

As usual, with this director, there’s more than enough atmosphere and his exposure of small-town life in France and the flaws in families and relationships almost serve to turn this into more of a drama than a thriller. But then that is Chabrol’s distinctive trademark.

When the police fail to track down the hit-and-run driver who has killed the young son of Charles Thenier (Michel Duchaussoy), the father, an author, determines to find the killer and, as he confides in his diary, not report him to the authorities, but finish him off himself. He makes the smart deduction that since there was no trace of a repair to a damaged car, the killer must own a garage. By a stroke of luck, he discovers a well-known actress Helen Lanson (Caroline Cellier) was a passenger in the car. Hiding behind his pen-name Marc, he seduces Helene, who has been hit by depression as a result of the incident, and discovers the driver was her brother-in-law Paul (Jean Yanne).

Convincing her to allow him to accompany her on a visit to his sister, his self-justification rises a notch as he notes that Paul is exactly the kind of guy who might well come to a sticky end given the detestable way he treats his wife Jeanne (Anouk Ferjac) and teenage son Phillippe (Marc Di Napoli) and is a womanizer to boot. While Charles bonds with Phillippe, who reveals he wants to kill his father, his relationship with Helene takes a knock when he discovers she’s had a brief affair with her brother-in-law.

So Charles plans to stage an accident at sea but Paul is one step ahead. The driver has found Charles’ diary and has taken a gun on the sailing trip to defend himself. But after Charles and Helene leave, Paul is discovered dead by poisoning. Charles’ diary makes him a suspect. And while he argues that it would be foolish of him to disclose his plans to a diary that is in the dead man’s possession, the police take the view that that would exactly what a clever murderer would do to deflect suspicion.

The police can’t find the poison so Charles is released. Phillippe confesses to the murder. But there is a further twist. The tale on which this is based was called The Beast Must Die, and from the various revelations we would be assuming that the beast in question, the remorseless despicable hit-and-run driver with not a single redeeming feature would be the most likely to fit this category.

But on reflecting on his own obsession, Charles clearly realizes that he is as likely a candidate to be termed a “beast.” It turns out he has let the son take responsibility for the murder and now he sets out to make amends, confessing to Helene that he did it and then heading off to sea presumably to jump overboard at a suitable spot.

Justified killing is never, it turns out, justifiable because in reality it turns the innocent into the guilty, and there’s little distinction between killers. When we cast our minds back, we become aware, as he does, that Charles has transitioned from grieving father to ruthless seducer of a vulnerable woman, preyed on a youngster who in consequence of their supposed friendship is happy to carry the can so Charles can escape, and is in any case going to complete his plan regardless of the cost to others.

Michel Duchaussoy (La Femme Infidele, 1969) steps up to the plate. The supporting cast are excellent. After the abysmal Road to Corinth (1967), Claude Chabrol established his name as the inheritor of the Hitchcock mantle after this and La Femme Infidele. Written by the director and Paul Gegauff (More, 1969) from the novel by Nicholas Blake (the pen-name of Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis, father of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis).

No shortage of tension, upends your expectations, totally involving.

Woman of Straw (1964) ***

In a plot worthy of Hitchcock without that director’s sly malice, rich playboy Tony (Sean Connery) conspires with not-so-innocent nurse Maria (Gina Lollobrigida) to rid himself of heinous upper-class racist misogynistic bully Charles (Ralph Richardson), his uncle. Beyond a savage case of entitlement, Tony has good reason to hate the wheelchair-bound multi-millionaire, blaming him for his father’s suicide and for seducing his widowed mother, now dead. Tony’s ploy, in part by opposing the very idea, is to get Maria to marry Charles, inherit his fortune and provide himself a £1 million finder’s fee when the seriously ill old man dies.

Maria’s refusal to kowtow to the old man and her initial resistance to Tony make her all the more desirable to both. When Maria saves the old man from a potential heart attack, he is moved enough to marry her and draw up exactly the will the pair want. But when he suddenly dies, Maria surprises herself by the depth of emotion she feels.

But that soon changes when she comes under suspicion. A bundle of complications swiftly change the expected outcome. A police inspector (Alexander Knox) doubts cause and place of death.

The first half is the set-up, the various figures being moved into place, not quite as easily as might have been anticipated, which adds another element of tension. Charles is such a hideous person nobody could lament his passing, but still his vulnerability, not just his wheelchair confinement but his love of music, his better qualities coming to the fore as the result of Maria’s presence, accord him greater sympathy than you would imagine.

That the otherwise gallant Tony’s entitled life depends entirely on his uncle’s good wishes lends him an appealing frailty. The nurse’s principles safeguard her against being taken in by riches alone, but there is a sense that she has used her physical attraction in the past to her advantage.

After the first two James Bond pictures, this was Sean Connery’s first attempt to move away from the secret agent stereotype and in large part he is successful. As amoral as Bond, he could as easily be a Bond villain, smooth and charming and larger than life and superbly gifted in the art of manipulation, the kind of putting all the pieces in place that Bond villains excelled in.

It will come as a surprise to contemporary viewers that he is merely the leading man, not the star. Gina Lollobrigida (Go Naked in the World, 1961) receives top-billing because she carries the emotional weight, initially perhaps as cold as Tony, but her attitude to Charles changing after marriage, meeting a need that Tony would not consider his to fulfill, and beginning to regret going along with any devious plan. That she then discovers she may merely be a pawn rather than a partner creates the dilemma on which the final section of the film depends for tension.

Both actors are excellent, exuding star wattage, the screen charisma between them evident, and audiences craving the pairing of Connery with an European female superstar will be well satisfied. Lollobrigida has the better role, requiring greater depth, but it is romance as duel most of the way. Ralph Richardson (Khartoum,1966) has never been better as one of the worst human beings ever to grace a screen. Johnny Sekka (The Southern Star, 1969) brings dignity to the maligned servant and Alexander Knox (Khartoum) is a crusty cop.

A slick offering from Basil Dearden (The Mind Benders, 1963), with one proviso – see seaparate article for the racism in this film. Written by Robert Muller (The Beauty Jungle, 1964) and Stanley Mann (The Collector, 1965) based on the novel by Catherine Arley.

Could have done with expending less time on the set-up and getting to the meat of the thriller quicker.

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) ** – Seen at the Cinema (out on Dec 12 on Netflix)

An unholy mess. Serve Netflix right for once again indulging one of their “visionary” directors. I’m assuming either director Rian Johnson is a true believer or he’s embarked on a spoof that doesn’t work. Either way it’s a bone-headed venture filled with the dullest characters you would ever come across and testing audience patience to the limit by keeping the star of the show, private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), out of the picture for the first 30 minutes, dumping all the exposition on Fr Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), the most cliched priest this side of Bing Crosby and relying on the “locked room” conceit, handled with some deadly ham-fistedness, to see the audience through an extremely trying time.

Once you work out that the title relates to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and that we’re entombed in a flummery of Christian jargon, you start hoping this is going to head down the satirical route and that at least you’ll get a few laughs for your hard-earned bucks. But, no, it’s so straitlaced it might as well have called on a corset to design the narrative. In order to help the director out of a whole series of cinematic cul de sacs everyone overacts and we skip over inconvenient plotholes.

The priest is sent to help out in a rundown parish run by nutcase Monsignor Jefferson Wilks (Josh Brolin) whose idea of fun is to relate in detail, under the guise of confession, how many times, and how, he has masturbated that week. There’s a godforsaken subplot about lost treasure and a mysterious child who you’ve guessed from the off is the son of Wilks.

When Wilks is done to death in church in a small room off the altar, then we get the standard roll-call of suspects. These include church manager Martha (Glenn Close), who specializes in letting out blood-curdling screams, alcoholic doctor Nat (Jeremy Renner), barmy novelist Lee (Andrew Scott), suffering from the opposite of writer’s block who can’t stop spewing out an interminable book, Vera (Kerry Washington) who’s been put in charge of bringing up mysterious boy Cy (Daryl McCormack), now a failed influencer, and crippled Simone (Caillee Spainey) who Wilks has bled dry. Every now and then local cop Geraldine (Mila Kunis) turns up to listen in awe to Blanc.

Fr Jud is the main suspect for no apparent reason that I could see except the writer says so and he’s the most handsome guy around and wouldn’t it be great if Blanc could recruit a priest sidekick in the way of the television series of yore.

So first of all we get a lecture on the “locked room” thesis with reference to Golden Age of Crime novelist John Dickson Carr who invented the term and then to the likes of Agatha Christie and others who took up the challenge. A variety of theories are presented by Blanc with the sole purpose of showing everyone how clever he is by knocking them all down.

Once we enter Resurrection territory it gets downright stupid, the dead man rising again on the third day in the manner of a certain religion, and then there’s another murder and because we’ve run out of things with which to add genuine tension a lot of the action now takes place in pouring rain and Fr Jud who looks like he is in the clear gets once again targeted as the main suspect.

And then we’re into scene after scene after scene of exposition and a ton of talk about “free will” and “grace” – religious terms you understand. Confession, you might not be surprised to learn, plays a key role.

This might have been more acceptable with a better cast. This is nothing like an all-star cast such as used to decorate Hercule Poirot epics and helped out with keeping an audience engrossed in the first two in the series. This is populated by over-the-hill stars like Glenn Close (Hillbilly Elegy, 2020), Mila Kunis (Bad Moms, 2016) and Jeremy Renner (Avengers: Endgame, 2019) and actors who wouldn’t be considered stars except in television like Andrew Scott (Blue Moon, 2025). Josh O’Connor (Challengers, 2024) is out of his depth. Josh Brolin (Weapons, 2025) would be closest we’ve got to what might constitute a genuine star but he was second-billed in that and only then because everyone else was a nobody.

The role of the star is to enliven a picture and those with an undiluted screen presence give audiences something to hang their hat on or direct their sympathies to. But none of this bedraggled lot, every character underwritten, would you care a fig for.

Rian Johnson ruins his own creation.

Pit of Darkness (1961) ****

Occasionally I get to wondering when one of these British crime B-pictures is exceptionally well-plotted, refreshing and above all logical, whether it might have benefitted from grander treatment Hollywood-style. You could easily see Cary Grant or Gregory Peck wriggling around in this one and with a Grant or Peck involved they’d be accompanied by a glamor puss of the Sophia Loren, Deborah Kerr vintage. And that would put the whole movie in an entirely different light and ensure it wasn’t lost for decades, as was the fate of this one.

What struck me most about the opening section here, an attitude maintained for about half the picture, was that the actress wife Julie (Moira Redmond) of amnesiac Richard (William Franklyn) didn’t believe for a minute his story that he couldn’t remember where he’d been for the last three weeks. There wasn’t an ounce of sympathy. That struck me as an entirely believable reaction. Rather than going all soppy at his return, she reckoned he’d run off with another woman and only came back because the affair had gone sour.

And it doesn’t help his case that he was found unconscious on a piece of London waste ground where four days before the private detective she had hired to find him was discovered murdered. Then there are the suspicious phone calls, leaving him to deny the existence of anyone called Mavis.

But just when we start to believe him, suddenly we don’t. He seems to be too familiar with the Mavis who calls him and agrees to meet her at a remote cottage. And then we’re back on his side, as he just avoids being blown up in the cottage. But he leaves his hat behind.

And he doesn’t own up to Mavis about being nearly killed and gives a spurious reason for buying a new hat and not keeping the old one. So we’re on her side, something is going on for sure. And then back on his, when someone tries to sideline him in a hit-and-run accident.

In turn, he’s suspicious of everyone, including his wife, and his colleagues at work, especially Ted (Anthony Booth) who seems an unlikely candidate to have won the heart of his delectable secretary Mary (Nanette Newman).

He works for a firm that makes safes and whatever’s going on appears to be linked to a burglary that occurred in his absence involving one of the safes the company made. Eventually, Julie comes round to his way of thinking. Clues lead him to a nightclub, whose mysterious owner Conrad (Leonard Sachs) somehow seems familiar. He encounters Mavis, a dance hostess, and she agrees to help him but when he goes round to her apartment finds a corpse. There’s something distinctly odd going on in the building across the street from his office. On further investigation, he uncovers an assassin. Luckily, our man is armed with the office pistol and the villain is chucked from the roof.

But, still, nothing makes much sense, even though bit by bit memory is returning. He realizes he shouldn’t have been found unconscious on the waste ground, but dead, murder only interrupted by the sudden arrival of a gang of boys.

But in retracing his steps in order to unlock the lost memories he finds himself undergoing a perilous process a second time. He works out that he was kidnapped and locked in a cellar in the club. When he confronts Conrad, that instigates a repeat.

Conrad locked him away and when bribery and the seductive wiles of Mavis didn’t work, Conrad convinced Richard that his wife was in danger if he didn’t go along with the burglary. And Conrad isn’t one to let a good opportunity go to waste, so second time around, using the same threat that worked the last time, he forces Richard to commit another burglary. But this time there’s a catch and one that Richard’s secretary hasn’t known about to pass on to Ted.

So the bad guys are caught, and in the way of the obligatory happy ending the audience is left to assume that the police will ignore his part in the robbery and the death of the man on the roof.

Not just exceptionally well-plotted, but the addition of the marital strife, the suspicious wife, adds not just to the tension but makes it all the more believable and turns the amnesia trope on its head.

Having wished for a Cary Grant or a Gregory Peck, I have to confess I was more than satisfied with William Franklyn (The Big Day, 1960) who managed to look innocent and guilty at the same time. Certainly Deborah Kerr would have managed more in the acerbic look department than Moira Redmond (The Limbo Line, 1968) but I have no complaints.

Interesting support cast at the start of their careers, so Anthony Booth (Corruption, 1968) displays just a hint of his later trademark sarcastic snarl and there’s no chance for Nigel Green (The Ipcress File, 1965) to put his steely stare into action or effect his drawl. Nanette Newman (Deadfall, 1968) has little to do except look fetching. Leonard Sachs was taking time off from presenting TV variety show The Good Old Days (1953-1983).

More kudos for the script than the direction this time for Lance Comfort (Blind Corner, 1964).

Given it’s from the Renown stable. I would normally have expected to come upon this picture on Talking Pictures TV, so I was surprised to find it as one of the latest additions to Amazon Prime.

First class.

Night of the Following Day (1969) ***

As his popularity in the 1960s faded, Marlon Brando was often called upon to save, or greenlight, a picture unworthy of his talent. Except that director Hubert Cornfield failed to extract enough tension from a kidnap thriller with an inbuilt deadline and a double-crossing sub-plot this might have been one to rise out of the mediocrity.

It’s not unknown for strangers working together on a robbery to adopt pseudonyms, colors in the case of Reservoir Dogs (1992) or cities as in Spanish television hit The Money Heist. Here they are known by their designated tasks, which seemed a nod towards artistic pretension at the time. Even so, the gang have too many frailties for taking on a caper like this, the pressure of a deadline and the publicity their crime attracts exacerbating the situation. So kidnapping a millionaire’s daughter (Pamela Franklin) are: Chauffeur (Marlon Brando), in on the job because he owes a favour to Friendly (Jess Hahn), whose sister Blonde (Rita Moreno) is also the chauffeur’s drug-addict girlfriend, the psychopathic Leer (Richard Boone) and a pilot (Al Lettieri).

All except the pilot are holed up in a remote beach house in France. The first signs of cracks show when Blonde is so drugged up she fails to collect her colleagues from a small local airport and, when suspecting the chauffeur of having sex with the girl, she explodes in a tantrum. And because she can’t get her story straight she attracts the attention of a local cop (Gerard Buhr). Despite making a good job of calming down the terrified girl, Leer has other plans for her which the Chauffeur is constantly trying to thwart. At various points various people try to quit. At various points romantic and family ties are pulled tight.

The details of the cash hand-over are well done as is the unexpected double-cross and the diversion allowing them to escape but about ten minutes of the running time is people driving around in cars, only at the later stages to any useful dramatic purpose, time that would been better spent filling us in on the characters. Most of the tension derives from a gang with two loose cannons and certainly the wait for the confrontation between Chauffeur and Leer is worthwhile.

The biggest plus point is Marlon Brando (The Chase, 1966) and even – perhaps because of – sporting a blonde wig and black tee-shirt remains a compelling screen presence. He might have been slumming it but he is certainly believable as the minor criminal way out of his depth. It’s a mistake to think of him as intended to exude menace along the line of Quint in The Nightcomers (1971) because this is actually a complicated role. On the one hand he clearly never wanted to be involved, participation triggered by a sense of honor, trying to keep his girlfriend and the kidnappee safe while at the same time happy to resort to considerable violence to achieve his ends.

The malevolent Boone (The Arrangement, 1969) almost steals the show, beginning as the voice of reason and gradually succumbing to his inner vices. The love interest benefits from Brando and Moreno (West Side Story, 1961), also in blonde wig, being ex-lovers in real life and it takes little to ignite the anger in Moreno. But her portrayal of the addict who cannot stay off her chosen poison long enough to carry out a simple task is excellent. Pamela Franklin (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1968) has little to do except look scared and she has one revealing scene when in attempting to seduce the Chauffeur sets up the prospect of a different kind of liaison with Leer.

Hubert Cornfield had not directed a picture since Pressure Point (1962) which acted as a decent calling-card and showed how good he was at creating tension between opposing individuals. Instead of focusing here on the characters, Cornfield seems more interested in the visuals, none of which as it turns out are particular arresting and in one instance virtually impossible to see what is going on.

Not so much a curiosity as a masterclass in how to blow a once-in-a-lifetime gig with Marlon Brando and what not to do with a thriller.

Brannigan (1975) ***

File under guilty pleasure. And bear in mind in the early 1970s there was no such thing as the police procedural, certainly not as we know it today, when cops have the benefits of DNA, increased forensics and computer technology. Hollywood in this era didn’t waste time with endless knocking on doors or collecting massive amounts of minutiae in the hope of uncovering a clue.

Generally speaking, cops of this period had two things in common. They were mavericks and they constantly fought authority usually represented by some dumb superior. Normally the narrative consisted of the character taking on the persona of a bull in a china shop and thundering towards a main objective, the more set pieces to demonstrate said bullish tendencies the better, and if in the course of apprehending a criminal he can deliver a catchphrase such as “make my day” or, as here, “knock, knock,” so much the better.

John Wayne had made eight westerns in a row and having turned down Dirty Harry (1971) ventured into the cop genre with McQ (1974) and came straight back for seconds here.

Brannigan (John Wayne) has been shipped over to London to bring back under the extradition treaty Mob gangster Larkin (John Vernon) which would be pretty straightforward except the Brits don’t keep such prisoners in custody – Larkin swans around in a white Rolls Royce – and in any case he’s in custody of another kind, having been kidnapped by some British hoods.

In terms of authority Brannigan battles the sappy Brits who won’t allow him to carry a gun and do things the Chicago way. Luckily, for the picture, top cop Commander Swann (Richard Attenborough) is not the standard stiff-upper-lip buffoon but as likely to pitch in when the fisticuffs begin. There are a couple of excellent car chases and one stunt of French Connection (1971) quality when two cars go sailing over the gap in a raised Tower Bridge. This is a London mixing glory and grit, posh residences and ancient buildings share screen time with rundown docklands. And the movie has the sense not to go all May-December on us and while a certain affection builds up between the U.S. cop and his driver Jennifer (Judy Gesson), it doesn’t teeter into unlikely romance.

The plot’s clever. While in a sauna having a massage Larkin is knocked out cold and bundled into a sweatbox by two apparent delivery guys and then smooth attorney Fields (Mel Ferrer) acts as the go-between, delivering Mob ransom money to the kidnappers, the price increasing with every failed rescue attempt, until the kidnappers are sitting on a cool million. Naturally, there’s some double-crossing and the cops have one tiny magic bullet to use to their advantage.

So mainly the fun is watching Brannigan charge around in a British china shop, mostly bypassing British rules. There’s a subplot involving a hitman hunting Brannigan and even when in a normal cop movie you might think, fair’s fair, the policeman should be able to defend himself with a weapon, that doesn’t equate with the British rules, so you have our hero able to point out that if he wasn’t armed to the teeth Jennifer would be dead, while Swann does his best to insist that it would be better for the young lass to end up on a mortuary slab than British cops go rampaging around with guns.

There’s some gentle fun in poking at British tradition – the obligatory wearing a tie in certain upmarket establishments – and in Swann having to translate to a waitperson Brannigan’s breakfast order.

Except when standing up for rules, Swann is great value, a good match for the American, both in tempering his ruthlessness, and matching him punch-for-punch in a brawl.

Apart from the action sequences, John Wayne is permitted to grow old gracefully, his dialog rarely filled with barbed retorts or salty words and there’s quite nice acting on the Duke’s part when he’s called upon to demonstrate his special skill, which is “reacting”.

Richard Attenborough (Only When I Larf, 1968) has a ball, and not before time, able to let some of the usual repressed intensity burst out. Judy Geeson (The Executioner, 1970) must have been delighted to find a part that didn’t involve her taking off her clothes and she’s afforded some of the best lines. John Vernon (Topaz, 1969) is his usual hardass but Mel Ferrer (The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964) has a good stab at a bad guy.

Not in the same league as director Douglas Hickox’s Sitting Target (1972). Written by Christopher Trumbo (The Don Is Dead, 1973), William McGivern (The Wrecking Crew, 1968), Michael Butler (The Gauntlet, 1977) and William Norton (The Scalphunters, 1968).

Erroneously tabbed as a box office disappointment, this was made on a budget of $2.6 million but cleared $7 million in rentals (the studio share of the box office) plus another $1.5 million from television.

Obviously, if you’re in the Clint Eastwood camp this falls short, but otherwise it’s enjoyable stuff.

Out of Time (2003) *****

The most tension-filled thriller this side of The Day of the Jackal (1973). Stone-cold classic in my book. Admittedly not a big box office success in its day nor critically acclaimed, but this nod to film noir with cop taking a stroll for his own convenience down the wrong mean streets and an old-fashioned femme-fatale male-dupe scenario coupled with witty dialog and terrific set pieces suggests to me this is long overdue for reappraisal.

This was really the start of Denzel Washington as action hero – Crimson Tide (1995) was more a straightforward drama albeit with characters facing the ultimate consequence – and it probably helps that I’m looking back at this through the prism of more than two decades of the actor whizzing along in the derring-do department especially in his turn as The Equalizer (2014) – and sequels – where he demolishes opponents in seconds. Apart from the occasional side hustle as a bad guy, he’s generally been a good guy, the sort of dependable hunk that Tom Hanks would aspire to if he wanted to add brawn to his guy-next-door persona.

Matt Whitlock is the top law enforcement officer in a Florida slumber town (pop 1300) but he’s not as clean-cut as he looks given his affair with married Ann Harrison (Sanaa Latham) who bursts his romantic bubble by announcing she has just six months to live thanks to a cancer so advanced that only some new-fangled treatment could save her. I smelled a rat, I have to confess, the minute she decided she was going to make him the beneficiary of her million-dollar insurance policy.

So what’s a decent guy to do but steal the $500,000 drugs money he’s holding in his police safe, that’s liable to sit untouched for years to come, in order to fund her treatment on the assumption that the insurance policy acts as his insurance. How dumb can you be?

So when Ann and husband Chris (Dean Cain) die in a horrific fire, his world unravels, especially as detective soon-to-be-ex-wife Alex (Eva Mendes) is in charge of the murder investigation and the Feds arrive out of the blue looking for the drugs cash. So basically he’s an old-fashioned “running man”, diving from one hole to the next, barely keeping ahead of the cops and the FBI, fingered twice by witnesses, discovering that the specialist who diagnosed the cancer is an imposter, and not just being made to look the biggest fool who ever fell in love with the wrong woman but liable to pay for his error with a lengthy jail sentence.

Alex begins to suspect he knows more than he’s letting on, he’s desperate to trace the bogus doctor, all the while, in a nod to No Way Out (1987), desperately trying to stop a tsunami of telephone evidence – arriving via fax and computer – that links him to the supposed dead woman.

There are verbal confrontations galore and a couple of physical ones, a chase through a hotel culminating in a brawl on a balcony, and possibly a second murder charge.

It’s not just a terrific tale, mostly consisting of twists and narrow escapes, I counted half a dozen twists in the last ten minutes alone, but offers some terrific dialog. In a diner, the relationship between Matt and Chris is spelled out in style: Matt recommends the crab, Chris points out he’s allergic to crab. “I know,” retorts Matt. The movie opens with some decidedly salty goings-on between Matt and his lover and the verbal duel between Matt and Alex has the underlying Tracy-Hepburn classic squabbling.

For all that Matt is smart enough to chase down the missing cash and hold the Feds at arm’s length long enough, he’s still, when you come down to it, only going from dumb to dumber and the shock when he realizes just how well he’s been duped is a cracker.

So, obviously, the key is that the audience wants him, guilty though he is of theft and stupidity, to get away with it or at least be thrown a get-out-of-jail-free card and that’s part of the hook, and that element is brilliantly done. I had no idea how he was going to get off with it, as one avenue of escape after another was rigorously shut down, until the very end.

There’s a whole stew of those reversals that screenwriters throw at audiences who think they are one step ahead of the game.

It’s a great cast. Denzel Washington is superb, Eva Mendes (Training Day, 2001) is an excellent sparring partner, Sanaa Latham (AVP: Alien vs Predator, 2004) as slinky as femme fatale as you’ll find. Look out for television’s Superman Dean Cain and especially character actor John Billingsley.

Director Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress, 1995) piles on the tension and kudos to screenwriter Dave Collard (Annapolis, 2006) for creating the blueprint.

I caught this on Amazon Prime but be quick about it because it’s in the section that the streamer calls “leaving in 30 days.”

An absolute classic.

Wait Until Dark (1967) ****

You wouldn’t have figured Audrey Hepburn – she of the model looks (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1961) and upmarket twang and belonging to the highest echelons of the movie business – for a Scream Queen. But there were precedents – Doris Day had at times been screaming fit to burst in Midnight Lace (1960) and Lee Remick, though not in either’s marquee league, had been terrified to bits in Experiment in Terror / The Grip of Fear (1962). By this point in pictures, the screen was awash with Scream Queens, courtesy of lower-budgeted efforts from Hammer, AIP and Amicus, so asking a top star to exercise her lungs in similar fashion might have been career suicide.

As it was, which would have come as a surprise to her legion of fans, this turned out to be pretty much the star’s swansong. She wouldn’t make another movie in nearly a decade and only another three after that. But here she certainly hits a dramatic peak.

The story’s a bit muddled and initially requires unraveling. Drug mule Lisa (Samantha Jones) passes a doll packed with heroin to fellow passenger Sam (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) on a plane. She had been planning to steal the dope and set up on her own with Mike (Richard Crenna) and former cop Carlino (Jack Weston). There’s a bit missing from the tale but you have to assume that somehow Lisa got talking to Sam and he gave her his address and that she has turned up at his apartment looking for the doll, which wasn’t there.

Mike and Carlino turn up and have no luck searching the apartment. They don’t look hard enough because if they’d looked in the closet they’d have found the corpse of Lisa, killed by her employer Roat (Alan Arkin) who arrives to confront the pair and then hire them to help him find the heroin and dispose of the body.

So with all that out of the way we come to the meat of the story. And it follows the same premise as Man in the Dark / Blind Corner (1964) – though, luckily, so few people saw that it wouldn’t be at the forefront of the audience mind at the time – of not so much a blind person being terrorized in their home but being largely played for a fool. The audience knows more than the blind person does and much of the story is not their vulnerability but just how long it will take for them to twig what’s going on.

In the case of Susy (Audrey Hepburn), as with the composer in Man in the Dark, her ears are her radar. She is on the alert after hearing the same pair of squeaky shoes on different people and wondering why people are opening and closing her blinds so often. Mike and Carlino masquerade as good guys, cops investigating the murder of Lisa for which her husband Sam is a suspect. She helps them tear apart the apartment looking for the doll.

She trusts Mike implicitly, less so Carlino, and when she starts to put two and two together she has an ally, teenager Gloria (Julie Herrod) who lives upstairs – they communicate like jailbirds by banging on the pipes. Although her eyes are denied sight, they still express her emotions – trust, relief, gratitude, fear.

But there’s not just one game of cat-and-mouse. There’s three. You know damn well that Mike and Carlino plan to squeeze Roat out of the equation just as you know damn well that he is planning to play them for patsies, apt to take revenge when double-crossed.

Gradually, her suspicions ramp up. She’s pretty smart working out the various clues. And then we hit two dramatic peaks. Firstly, when she discovers Mike is a bad guy. Secondly, when Roat kills Mike and turns on her, splashing petrol about the place, exploiting her terror of fire. She’s still got a couple of moves to turn the tables, at least temporarily but when absolute darkness does descend – she’s smashed all the lights out – and theoretically they are both in the same boat, and advantage her because of her keener hearing, it doesn’t quite work out the way she’s expected because he knows how to exploit sound.

I won’t tell you where the doll is hidden because that’s a very clever twist in itself, but apart from the few plotholes at the outset (how did Lisa manage to break into Susy’s apartment for a start and leave no trace, for example) once the narrative takes hold it exerts a very strong bite.

Audrey Hepburn is on top form. Alan Arkin (The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, 1966) and Jack Weston (Mirage, 1965) are a bit too obvious for me, but the smoother Richard Crenna (Marooned, 1969) is excellent.

Directed with both an eye to character and tension by Terence Young (Dr No, 1962) and adapted by Robert and Jane-Howard Carrington (Kaleidoscope, 1966) from the Broadway play by Frederick Knott (Dial M for Murder, 1954).

Top notch.

The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967) ***

I didn’t realise that the Prohibition gangsters who invented the drive-by shooting were perfectionists. Just to be make sure of completing the job, I found out here, they might send a dozen cars one after the other rolling past the chosen restaurant/cafe, machine guns spouting hundreds of bullets. Nobody could survive that, you would think. But there was a flaw to the idea. If someone just lay down on the floor, the bullets would pass over their head. Strangely enough, we never got a potted history of the drive-by shooting in this docu-drama because otherwise we found out just about everything we needed to know about the infamous massacre.

But I did wish that the narrator would shut up once in a while. I kept on thinking we were going to be examined afterwards. Every dumb schmuck that made even a brief appearance on screen got the full bio treatment, including when – and how (not always by violence) – they died. That annoying feature aside, it was certainly a forensic examination of the whys and wherefores of the infamous gangland slaying. Rival Chicago mobsters Al Capone (Jason Robards) and Bugs Moran (Ralph Meeker), both concluding that the other was not open to negotiation, decided instead to rub him out and the movie basically follows how each develops their murderous plan.

All the big gangster names are here – it’s like a hit man’s greatest hits – Frank Nitti (Harold J. Stone), massacre mastermind Jack McGurn (Clint Ritchie) and Capone enforcer Peter Gusenberg (George Segal) – and the movie reprises some of the classic genre tropes like mashing food (sandwich this time rather than grapefruit) in a woman’s face and Capone taking a baseball bat to a traitorous underling. And there’s the usual lopsided notion of “rules,” Capone incandescent that a ganster was murdered in his own home.

Capone’s plan is the cleverest, involving recruiting people with little or no criminal record including the likes of Johnny May (Bruce Dern in a part originally assigned to Jack Nicholson), renting a garage as the massacre venue, and dressing his hoods up as cops. The film occasionally tracks back to set the scene. And the ever-vigilant narrator makes sure to identify every passing gangster but come the climax seems to run out of things to say, a good many sentences beginning with “on the last morning of the last day of his life.”

Since there’s so much money washing around, it makes sense for the ladies to try and get their share. Gusenberg’s girlfriend (Jean Hale) casually, without seeking permission, swaps one fur for another four times as expensive. A sex worker as casually steals from her client’s wallet before demanding payment for services rendered.

The only problem with bringing in so many bit characters – either those doing the murdering or being murdered – into play is that it cuts down the time remaining to cover Capone and Moran, so, apart from the voice-over, we learn little of significance, most of the drama amounting to outbursts of one kind or another. But it’s certainly very entertaining and follows the Raymond Chandler maxim of when in doubt with your story introduce a man with a gun, or in this case machine gun. The violence is episodic throughout.

Despite the authenticity, punches are pulled when it comes to the physical depiction of Capone. The man universally known as “Scarface” shows no signs of such affliction as played by Jason Robards (Hour of the Gun, 1967). Certainly, Robards shows none of the brooding intensity with which we associate Godfather and son Michael in the Coppola epic, rather he has more in common with Sonny. He delivers a one-key performance of no subtlety but since the film has no subtlety either then it’s a good fit. Ralph Meeker (The Dirty Dozen, 1967) has the better role, since being the junior gangster in terms of power he has more to fear. I felt sorry for Oscar-nominated George Segal (No Way To Treat a Lady, 1968) since although his character is there for obvious reasons there is no obvious reason why he should be allocated more screen time. And given more screen time, nobody seems to know what to do with it.

There’s a superb supporting cast including Jean Hale (In Like Flint 1967), Bruce Dern (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, 1969), Frank Silvera (Uptight, 1969), Joseph Campanella (Murder Inc., 1960) Alex Rocco (The Godfather, 1972), future director Gus Trikonis and future superstar Jack Nicholson.

After over a decade of low-budget sci-fi, horror and biker pictures, this was director Roger Corman’s biggest movie to date – his first for a major studio – and, excepting the voice-over, he does an efficient job with the script by Howard Browne (Portrait of a Mobster, 1961) who was presumably responsible for the intrusive narration.

CATCH-UP: This isn’t really a good place to start with the acting of George Segal and you will get a better idea of his talent if you check out the following films covered so far in the Blog: Act One (1963), The New Interns (1964), Invitation to a Gunfighter (1964), King Rat (1965), Lost Command (1966), The Quiller Memorandum (1966), No Way to Treat a Lady (1968), The Bridge at Remagen (1969) and The Southern Star (1969).