Drama – Page 15 – The Magnificent 60s

Stark Fear (1962) ***

Unless you were unfortunate enough to get mix up in an international conspiracy, or your wealth induced a husband towards your murder – or a la Gaslight towards your insanity – or had taken a shower in strange motel, a wife in American movies was unlikely to live in fear of a sadistic spouse. Wife-beating aka wife-battering had never been high on the Hollywood agenda as an appropriate subject matter, so this picture not only stands out for the period but also strikes a contemporary spark. While many marital dramas of the 1960s have quickly become outdated, this has not.

Opening with an audacious cut from a woman’s eyes seen in a car’s rear-view mirror to her face in a photograph being pelted, being smashed to pieces. Ellen (Beverly Garland) has committed the grievous sin not just of going out to work but of taking up the post of secretary to oil executive Cliff Kane (Kenneth Tobey), a previous rival of husband Gerry (Skip Homeier). But Gerry’s income had unexpectedly tumbled and the couple, married just three years, need her money. He pours a drink over the terrified woman’s head, demands a divorce and promptly disappears.

Her search for him takes her to Quehada, pop. 976, a rundown town she had never heard of and whose existence her husband made no mention despite the fact it was where he grew up. Her husband’s sleazy friend Harvey takes her to the grave of Gerry’s mother (also called Ellen) where he rapes and beats her while, unbeknownst to her, her husband watches.

Back at the office, she begins to fall for Cliff, but Gerry, even though he no longer wants her, sets out to destroy the budding romance.

Following the classic pattern of course Ellen blames herself for making Gerry unhappy and for getting raped. Her guilt fuels her husband’s sadistic streak. She is unsure whether the threat of divorce is just the most cruel taunt her husband can imagine or for real, which would be just as bad, given her low-self-esteem.

Once she realizes Gerry had an unhappy childhood and is mother-fixated, it makes it even harder for her to abandon him, regardless of the mental and physical torment he inflicts and despite the entreaties of social worker friend Ruth (Hannah Stone). Ruth, too, however, represents an alternative equally fearful future, the now-single woman who regrets separating too quickly from her husband and has no man in her life or none who come up to scratch.

This is not a picture where men come out well. Gerry is a fiend in a suit. On the way to Quehada she is groped by other men who clearly feel it is their right. Harvey has a history of just taking what he wants. Even the relatively gentle Cliff appears to have an underlying reason for taking an interest in her.

In a world and a time where marriage meant not just financial security, but a safe haven from all the other men who would like as not press themselves upon the opposite sex at any opportunity, and not necessarily with any delicacy, director Ned Hockman presents life as a succession of traps for women. And we know now that not much has changed, and that for women fear is a constant.

Hockman directs with some singularity. He uses black-and-white not quite in the film noir manner of shadows and shafts of light but sets the subject of any night scene in a pool of light with darkness all around, which makes for some striking images. A couple of unusual backdrops include Commanche tribal dancing and a chase in a jukebox museum help place this a couple of notches above the usual B-picture.

Beverly Garland was a 1950s B-picture sci-fi and horror scream queen in movies such as It Conquered the World (1956), Curucu, Beast of the Amazon (1956) and Not of This Earth (1957) so fear was something of a default. Here, she adds something else, desolation at the position she finds herself in, confusion that her marriage is in tatters, hunting for a solution that never emerges, and unable to summon up the anger that might free herself. Hannah Stone has an intriguing role, encouraging her friend to leave her husband, knowing that being single again is not all it is cracked up to be. Unusually for a minor character in this kind of picture, primarily there to shore up the star, she enjoys a spot of lifestyle reversal.

Heart-breaking.

The Rain People (1969) ****

You could argue that grandiose ambition sucked the life out of Francis Ford Coppola. That if he had continued along the more intimate trajectory suggested here there might have been a more consistent output, perhaps on an even higher plane. Even if grounded in American life, this has a distinct European sensibility and while you won’t find a single memorable image you will definitely find characters of substantial depth drowning in agonizing circumstance.

That’s not to say you won’t find outstanding sequences. I defy you to find a more cruel and character-defining scene than the one where our heroine Natalie (Shirley Knight), running away from the chains of domesticity, takes dominance to a new extreme by demanding that muscular ex-college footballer Jimmy (James Caan) crawl round on the floor beneath her feet.

There’s no excuse for such behavior except that she wants some kind of revenge on her husband, whom she accuses of trapping her into said domesticity by the old-fashioned route of making her pregnant. This is before she discovers that Jimmy is simple-minded as the result of brain damage following an American football injury, and that it’s easier now for him to obey people rather than as before argue and stand his ground.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said there were no second acts in American acts. What he failed to mention was that some people barely got to the end of the first act. Jimmy is an outcast, nobody willing to take responsibilty for him, everyone dodging such commitment. Because American scoiety has no place for losers, they fall through the cracks and stay there.

As a result of his injury Jimmy was given a thousand bucks and “told to leave.” So, he went. He’s got a destination in mind, salvation of some kind, I guess, heading towards a drive-in where he has been promised a job by the father, previously a huge fan, of his ex-girlfriend Ellen (Laura Crews).

Natalie is on a road trip to find herself, firstly at the very least just to escape, secondly requiring the seclusion to decide if she wants to keep the baby, but also to have fun, pick up other men for sex. That’s how she happens upon Jimmy. But there’s no sex, not with the shame she feels after humiliating him and realizing just how dumb he now is.

But the alpha horse-riding girlfriend doesn’t want him, she’s humiliated that anyone would associate her with this shambling hulk, and the promised job flies out the window. Natalie dumps him at a reptile zoo where the duplicitous owner appropriates his thousand bucks, leaving Natalie so delighted to be rid of him she races off and is pulled over for speeding by lovelorn cop Gordon (Robert Duvall). Circumstance forces a return to the zoo where Jimmy has caused chaos by freeing all the livestock.

But she’s taken enough by Gordon and desperate for the sense of freedom that illicit sex brings that she ends up in his trailer. Only his rebellious young daughter doesn’t take kindly to him bringing home his conquests and while he’s trying to bed Natalie, initially very complicit despite the awkward presence of the awkward child, causes a ruckus outside. Natalie would still be up for it except she takes umbrage that Gordon’s unable in his lovemaking to forget his dead wife, killed along with his son in a house fire.

The scene turns ugly and she’s rescued by Jimmy who proceeds to put his football playbook moves on Gordon, picking him up and throwing him to the ground and ramming him in the stomach, none of your standard fisticuffs here. But given Gordon’s a cop, there’s a gun on the loose and the daughter picks it up and shoots Jimmy stone dead.

That last scene comes out of nowhere and stops the audience as dead as it does Jimmy and in a bitter ironic twist wraps up a scenario where the lost never find what they’re looking for. You might find similar in, despite their power, later characters such as Michael in The Godfather (1972) and Col Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979).

Compare the Caan and Duvall of The Godfather and you’ll think they’ve swapped their personalities from here, Caan adopting the firmness and overt masculinity of Gordon and Duvall the soft-spoken tones of Jimmy.

I mispoke when I said there were no memorable images. There are, but their meaning comes later. We see Jimmy sweeping up leaves in playful fashion and only later discover that’s all he’s fit for. We see Natalie as trapped in a phone booth as in her marriage trying to talk her way out of returning to her husband, whose tone changes from angry to whining and desperate, and all we get of him is his voice. There are a few of those lingering shots of rainwater and drab early morning scenery that you would get in an arthouse picture but this quickly grows out of them and into the meat of the situation.

James Caan is particularly superb, completely altering is screen persona. Shirley Knight (The Group, 1966) delivers on previous promise and Robert Duvall demonstrates his range. Original screneplay also by Coppola.

Lost in the acclaim for Coppola’s more grandioise efforts but well worth digging out.

The Substance (2024) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Like Tar (2022) suffers from stylistic overkill and outstays its welcome by a good 30 minutes, but otherwise a perfect antidote to Barbie (2023). While not entirely original, owing much to the likes of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Stepford Wives and the doppelganger and split personality nrrative nonetheless a refreshing take on the ageing beauty syndrome. Shower fetish might be a homage to Brian DePalma and except that the movie is directed by Frenchwoman Coralie Fergeat (Revenge, 2017) we might be lambasting its rampant nudity for misogynistic reasons.

On the plus side, everything else about it feels new. The whole story plays out like a demonic fable, the participants only caught out because, in their greed, they refuse to play by the rules. But like all the best horror films this occupies its own world. Whoever offers this free drug and the chance to relive your life through the best possible you is a monosyllabic voice at the end of a telephone. Not only is there gruesome rebirth but a stitching-up process. The black market drug at the center of the tale can only be accessed in a deadbeat part of Los Angeles by crawling under a door, but then, suddenly we’re in a pristine room and the various constituent parts of the substance are laid out on the Ikea model with easy-to-follow instructions.

After surviving a horrific automobile accident, onetime movie star Elizabeth (Demi Moore), reduced to breakfast television exercise guru, is passed a mysterious note by an incredibly good-looking young man that takes her down this particular rabbit hole. Like Eve’s forbidden fruit or Cinderella’s toxic midnight, there’s a catch to reliving her beautiful youth. She must switch back “without exception” to her original persona every seven days.

Of course, that’s too much to ask, and as the double named Sue (Margaret Qualley) steals minutes then hours and days the effect is seen on Elizabeth, a monstrous aged finger appearing in her otherwise acceptable hands first sign that these rules cannot be broken. Warning that there are two sides to this singular personality goes ignored. Instead of acting in concert each prt of the split personality conspires againt each other until entitlement spills over into abhorrent violence.

Apart from the initial rebirth squence, and the toothless section, the best scenes are more toned down, in one Elizabeth is faced with an alternative future, the other when she re-does her make-up four times for a date, unable to decide on which face she wishes to present.

Demi Moore (Disclosure, 1994) is being touted as a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination, but that’s mostly on account of her willingness to appear without makeup and for long sections without clothing. I’m not convinced that there’s enough heartfelt acting beyond the bitterness that was often her trademark. Margaret Qualley (Poor Things, 2023) isn’t given much personality to deal with except for exuding shining beauty and horror when it starts to go wrong.

All the males are muppets, it has to be said, wheeler-dealer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) the worst kind of obnoxious male. But this doesn’t feel much like a feminist rant but a more considered examination of refusal to accept oncoming age. Everyone has the kind of vacuous personality that’s endemic in presenting the best face (and body) to the viewing (television, big screen) public.

The movie plays at such a high pitch that most of the time you can ignore the deficiencies, but the 140-minute running time is at odds with hooking a contemporary horror audience and the gore at odds with hooking the substantial arthouse crowd required to generate the returns needed to pay back acquisition rights. None of the characters has any depth, little backstory, virtually nothing in the way of the usual confrontation with others in their lives, but then Elizabeth already lives a life of isolation, clearly lamenting her longlost fame and the attention it brings.

This won at Cannes for the script and not the direction and that feels about right. Great idea in ultimately the wrong hands, too much of the repetition that was so annoying in Tar and the determination to make every single shot different, a movie beaten into style every inch of its running time.

Coralie Fergeat has a triumph of some kind on her hands, but one that might struggle, due to excessive length, to find an audience. Not sure, either, why tis is being sold as comedy-horror, a peculiar sub-genre in the first place to make work, but I don’t remember laughing once.

However, like Saltburn (2023) this has a good chance of attracting the young crowd via word-of-mouth, the kind who are just waiting to find their own cult material.

Both facinating and repellant.

Grand Prix (1966) *****

If ever there was a case to be made for six-track stereophonic sound or, for that matter, split screen Grand Prix would form the first line of defense. That it was made in Cinerama 70mm was merely a bonus. Most roadshow movies start with an overture, a ten-minute or so musical introduction that would thematically at least give the audience some indication of the picture they were about to watch. Thrumming and roaring engines formed the montage opening to Grand Prix, a noise that almost shook a cinema to its foundations.

Cinerama had been built on its ability to create almost primeval effects. There was always a downward rush, a runaway train, a roller coaster, something to set an audience on the edge of its seat in pure exhilaration. But the visual had nothing on the aural and what set Grand Prix apart was danger, that constant thrum of engines rising to impossible crescendos. Split screen allowed the director to tell several stories at once as competitors chased each other round perilous circuits at a time when death was a racing driver’s constant companion and in fact of the thirty-two professional participants including Graham Hill, Jim Clark, Juan Fangio and Jack Brabham five were dead within two years of the movie’s completion. Nobody needed to remind an audience how hazardous the sport was, they could read about the continuous carnage in the newspapers, but what was less easy to convey, although such events were well attended, was the pure thrill of being at a race meeting. Grand Prix set out to rectify that problem.

At nearly three hours long it had room to tell several stories and in that respect it was more of an ensemble picture than something like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) which took even more time to tell just one story. Many of these stories came to an abrupt end as the character died in an accident.

Steve McQueen and Paul Newman, both racing aficionados, were front runners for the leading role but it went instead to James Garner, also a racer who did all his own driving (though not necessarily at the speeds indicated). And to properly represent the competition it required an international flavor so other drivers were played by Yves Montand (The Wages of Fear, 1953) in a part first offered to Jean-Paul Belmondo and Antonio Sabato (in his second film) with Adolfo Celi (Thunderball, 1965) as the Ferrari boss and Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai, 1954) as a Japanese team owner. Swedish star Harriet Andersson (Through a Glass Darkly, 1961) was cast as the female lead but dropped in favour of Eva Marie Saint (Exodus, 1960) in a role turned down by Monica Vitti (Modesty Blaise, 1966).

Garner and Saint had previously worked together in thriller 36 Hours (1964) and it said a lot for his marquee credentials that he was still best known for The Great Escape (1963). Although he had reached top billing status, films like The Art of Love (1965) and Mister Buddwing (1966) did not deliver commercially. Saint’s career had been as peripatetic after Exodus (1960) as before, star of All Fall Down (1962) but third-billed in The Sandpiper (1965) and second-billed in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966), the latter two both big hits.

Frankenheimer had directed Saint in All Fall Down and enjoyed a distinguished career with The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964) although the high regard in which he was generally held was somewhat tarnished by The Train (1965) and thriller Seconds (1966), the latter a spectacular flop. Grand Prix was not only the biggest film of his career, though The Train had given him a grounding in action, but also his first in color. The movie was filmed on existing legendary circuits with Formula 3 racing cars adapted to look like Formula 1 and a thousand other incidental details including an appearance by a Shelby Mustang (with Carroll Shelby as technical adviser) that made it an accurate depiction of the sport. Eighteen cameras were used to film the races.

The narrative arc follows the Grand Prix season and while the actual competition dominates the movie it is against the background of the emotional turmoil the sport wreaks on the drivers and the wives and girlfriends who have to live with the knowledge that their partners might not come home at the end of the day. Garner is considered too reckless for the top spot in a racing team and in a bid for redemption signs for a new company. Former world champion Montand is coming to the end of his career. English actor Brian Bedford makes his mainstream movie debut as a driver recovering after a horrific crash caused by Garner. The emotional subplots comprise Garner having an affair with Bedford’s wife (Jessica Walter); Montand embarking on an affair with Saint who plays a magazine writer, with French actress Francoise Hardy (better known as a chanteuse) involved with Sabato. In addition, there are some telling sequences in which the drivers unload about their fears.

Frankenheimer does a terrific job in marshalling all the effects and the minute details, and the fact that there is no big star in the mix makes the battles between the characters more realistic.

Lee (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

Would have worked better as a documentary. Bit puzzled too by the deceit of the structural device, flashing back from her war years to being interviewed by an apparent journalist in old age at her country cottage. Seems an interesting conceit that he turns out to be her son Antony (Josh O’Connor) and she’s able to turn the tables and ask what she was like as a mother (not good, apparently, Antony grew up feeling he was an imposition). But also a standard biopic trope as he uses her famed photos to stimulate memories. But then, presumably in the interests of honesty (or who knows what) the credits blow these sequences to pieces by pointing out that her son didn’t have a scoobie about her war activities until after the death a forage in the attic turned up boxes of her photos. What the heck, artistic license and all that.

My other quibble, since I’m in that sort of mood, is that the ageing process seems to have passed our star Kate Winslet by. Sure, she’s dabbed on a bit of oldie make-up for her later years but the crow’s nest of lines around her eyes are noticeably prominent for a woman just turned thirty in the immediate pre-war year.

Still, on with the show, in which her pre-war fame as a surrealist is also ignored, as is her liaison with Man Ray, or that before she took up with another surrealist Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgard) she had been married to – and not divorced from – an Egyptian businessmen. The thrust of the movie is her war years as Vogue correspondent. There’s a bit of falling back on characters skitting around in the background (Cecil Beaton, for example) and keeping us up-to-scratch on timescale, invasion imminent etc.

Misogyny is fairly rampant, the British squeamish about sending women unnecessarily to the front line, the Yanks less so. Though Lee Miller is treated, for dramatic purposes, as the only female war correspondent, breaking through the usual class ceiling, in fact the Yanks had squads of them including Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh, third and fourth wives of Ernest Hemingway, respectively, Kathleen Harriman, Dixie Tighe and Helen Kirkpatrick, and Tania Long, none of whom would be unknown to Miller since she posed for a photo with the gang in 1943.

There was nothing subtle about Lee Miller, she said it like it was, a hard-drinking what used to be known as a free spirit, an euphemism for embracing a love-‘em-and-leave-‘em mentality. But there’s some subtlety here, a scene of her peeling potatoes revealing more about male expectation than any verbal punch-up with any officious male, being covered with supposedly invisible paint by Roland more effective in catching sexual attraction than the rest of her let-it-all-hang-out persona.

The only problem is that the concentration camp scenario has been dealt with by any number of far superior films and her staggering back with shock at the sight of the piled-up corpses not compensation enough. I don’t know enough about war photographers to compare what she captures through the lens with the dozens of others doing the same job. By the time her photos of the Holocaust were printed in American Vogue, Richard Dimbleby and Edward Murrow had delivered radio devastating reports and anonymous military photographers supplied tons of evidence against the Nazis.

I’m not sure it actually helps her case that she took a bath, naked, in Hitler’s bath.

Kate Winslet (Ammonite, 2020) almost single-handedly keeps the movie on course, but it lacks impact as a war picture, and the idea that nobody other than Lee was taking note of the suffering of the British during the Blitz seems a bit of a stretch. Pick of the support is most definitely Andrea Riseborough as the doughty British Vogue editor, every bit as tough if not as outspoken as Miller. Josh O’Connor (Challengers, 2024) spends all his time looking soulful for no reason I can divine. Marion Cottillard (La Vie en Rose, 2007) is wasted.

Ellen Kuras directed from a script by Liz Hannah (All the Bright Places, 2020), Marion Hume (movie debut) and John Collee (Monkey Man, 2024).

Movie not as hard-nosed as Winslet.

The Critic (2024) ** – Seen at the Cinema

Can we get over all this “national treasure” (a favorite of Britain) baloney, please? If we’re going to drag our esteemed acting knights of the realm out of their armchairs (you notice I didn’t say retirement because actors almost never officially retire, Kathy Bates and Gene Hackman to the contrary) could we please give them something more than an opportunity to overact and turn themselves into ripe old hams at the age of (in this case) eighty-five. Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf and Magneto to you and me) deserves better.

Because there’s nothing at all in this beyond Falstaffian monster Jimmy (Ian McKellen), the eponymous theater critic, relishing his power and taking revenge when’s on the verge of losing it. Frankly, if this was called The Tie-Pin Killer, the serial murderer in the book on which this is based, and Jimmy, as in that book, was relegated to a bit part, albeit a juicy one, it might have been a lot more interesting.

While it touches upon 1930s London Fascists and the plight of the homosexual (a criminal offence to participate) these are kind of tossed into the scenario as if to placate an audience who might complain this is very thin gruel indeed. Presumably, we are somehow meant sympathize with this cruel, odious, character because from time to time he finds himself confronted by blackshirts, who take a dislike to his black companion Tom (Alfred Enoch), who acts as his secretary and presumably not anything else because Jimmy prefers “rough trade.”

In revenge for being fired, he sets up actress Nina (Gemma Atterton) to seduce his employer David Brooke (Mark Strong). Blackmail’s the tool of reinstatement. Apart from general actor insecurity, it’s not entirely clear why Nina should be so determined to keep in Jimmy’s good books. There’s some unbelievable stuff about becoming attracted to acting through reading his articles, which seems quite bizarre since his nasty reviews would put people off going, as he proudly explains is one his aims.

So Nina prostitutes herself for a good review. Yep, must happen all the time. And despite her supposed success – these are, after all, West End plays she is starring in – she lives in a bedsit where hot water is rationed. But she is, romantically, in a bind. She’s just dumped her married lover Stephen (Ben Barnes) whose wife Cora (Romola Garai) just happens to be the daughter of Brooke.

And although Brooke’s wife is “bonkers” (though that’s very much on the periphery) he’s that old-fashioned upper class English gent who only feels shame at adultery when he’s caught out and then of course does the right thing which is to blow his brains out. Which leaves Nina racked with guilt which drives her, as it would, back into the arms of Stephen only for him (another adulterer with principles) to reject her on the grounds that she slept with his father-in-law. When Nina begins to talk about confessing to her role in conspiracy, what’s an upstanding chap to do but drown her in the bathtub?

*In the original book Jimmy was a minor character.*

Crikey, and we complain about the plotting in the multiverse. This is just bonkersverse. Presumably, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Patrick Marber (Notes on a Scandal, 2007) happened upon Anthony J. Quinn thriller Curtain Call in which Jimmy exists on the periphery of the actual narrative though as a larger-than-life character and decided to forget the whole tie-pin killer thing and rearrange the tale so it revolved around McKellen in the hope nobody would notice, in the midst of McKellen roistering and boistering to his heart’s content, the lack of any sensible tale.

You could certainly have more easily hooked it on Nina, who falls into the Patrick Hamilton category of easily-led character on the edge with impulse inclined to cut her adrift.

If you want ham, McKellen’s your man, none of the subtlety which has impelled other performances. Gemma Atterton (The King’s Man, 2021) has a few moments tormented by conscience but the part is woefully underwritten. This is the reined-in Mark Strong (Tar, 2022) rather the one with the veins standing out on his neck. Lesley Manville (Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, 2022), potentially another future national treasure, has a brief role as does Romola Garai (Atonement, 2007).

Maybe wanting to burnish his artistic credentials, director Anand Tucker (Leap Year, 2010) is predisposed to the extreme close-up and for viewing a scene in extreme long shot through a corridor, window or door.

Jimmy would give have slated this.

Number One / Pro (1969) ****

Quite possibly Charlton Heston’s best performance – as an ageing pro footballer refusing to bow down to the inevitable. Ron Catland (Heston) has much in common with Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) in The Swimmer (1968) as characters who believe they have been let down by the American Dream. And like that picture, plot is in short supply, it’s mostly a character study with sideswipes at the realities and inanities of American football.

An injury puts star quarterback Catland’s career in doubt. The media write him off, a younger quarterback Kelly (Richard Elkins) is waiting in line, while former colleague Ritchie Fowler (Bruce Dern) offers him a job in his car leasing business, or he could opt for a second career in computers, but Catland wants the only life he has ever known to go on forever.

There’s nothing inherently likeable about Catland. In fact, he’s downright mean most of the time, in part because of the falsity of his profession, management buttering you up when it’s contract time, then on your back once you have re-signed. He’s got a hero’s arrogance, has ignored from the outset the coach’s instructions, at odds with independent fashion-designer wife Julie (Jessica Walter), no children to shore up their marriage. Hardly surprising he drifts into another affair, “an occupational hazard” his wife calls it, this time with the fey Ann (Diana Muldaur) who owns a tennis shop.

You are probably familiar with the kind of football picture which climaxes with a last-minute touchdown or the more realistic movies like North Dallas Forty (1979) or the superlative Any Given Sunday (1999) where nonetheless the focus is on winning and characters are ramped up for dramatic effect. Or you might imagine Hollywood had been routinely churning out football movies like Knute Rockne All-American (1940) and Jim Thorpe All American (1951) for decades. But strangely enough the movie industry had not focused on this particular sport for well over a decade until the NFL documentary They Call It Pro Football (1967) and comedy Paper Lion (1968).

Number One sets out to set the record straight on the reality of being a football hero. And it’s by far the most realistic of the species. For every good-looking gal wanting to pass him a note on a napkin in a restaurant there are plenty fans turning on him for refusing to sign an autograph. For every sports reporter writing a puff piece, there are others tearing him to pieces in print.

The documentary-style approach by director Tom Gries (100 Rifles, 1969) serves the film well. This is a different kind of football team to the later fictional depictions. It’s a lonely life for a start. The players are rivals, not comrades. There’s little camaraderie. The dressing room is like a morgue. No practical jokes and tomfoolery. No over-the-top team talk by the coach and thank goodness no padre who pretends to walk every aching mile in their shoes. Any exhortation is almost a plea. Injury is mostly ignored. Legs are constantly strapped up. And when your career is over you might be reduced to bumming a loan from a current star. The politics are brutal.

New Orleans Saints cooperated with the production so the game scenes come across well though not obviously with the razzamatazz of Any Given Sunday and Heston has the physique for a sportsman. Primarily a television writer, David Moessinger (The Caper of the Golden Bulls, 1967) only crafted two films in the 1960s and this, the second and last, was an unusual effort, as the character twists and turns trying on the one hand to escape the cage of his career and on the other determined to squeeze the last drop out of his golden imprisonment.

Catlan still sees himself (at the age of 40, no less) as the best quarterback in the business and simmers with anger that his body is letting him down and that he has nothing in place to fill the gap that abandoning the game will create. Underneath the volatility is a hole of pain. There’s no sense either that he has enjoyed his time at the top, just that it has always one way or another been a struggle.

Although the movie was marketed with Heston as an aggressive individual, in fact it calls for a far wider range of emotions from Heston, and for this part he delivers in spades. Jessica Walter (Grand Prix, 1966) gives as good as she gets, Bruce Dern (Hang ‘Em High, 1968) as the fast-talking salesman and Diana Muldaur (The Swimmer, 1968) are excellent. But this is Heston’s film. It’s more of a reflective piece, none of the dramatic highs and lows of other football pictures.

Rob Peace (2024) *** – Seen at the Cinema

Breaking Bad Goes to Yale. Or Good Guy Does Bad In Order To Do Good. Can’t say the current title is any more inviting than those – I guess this character isn’t at all known outside the U.S. where a book was written about him (it’s “based” on a true story, we are told) – but at least gives more of an idea of the level of complication we’re dealing with. The film lacks the sharp ironic intelligence required to make such a complex tale work and direction is so shapeless, diffuse, at times that it’s hard to keep going. And it falls prey to the Martin Scorsese trope of the voice-over telling us more about what’s going on in a character’s mind than his interplay with other characters. Yet, this is an interesting story and you wish it had been better told.

On the one hand any time the eponymous character gets into a financial snit he just falls back on drug dealing. On the other, though you could argue his father is a victim of blatant racism, Rob (Jay Will) never plays this particular card. We are constantly told he has a special gift for bringing people together, but the only evidence of that is when weed is on the table and in his entrepreneurial dealings which revolve around making a fortune from refurbishing empty homes in the neighborhood.

Blame the structure for the fact it appears to bounce around all over the place. A few neatly-placed flashbacks would have solved the problem, focused on present, rather than taking us on a near 20-year stretch mapping out an entire life. Rob, mathematical whizzkid, growing up in a tough locale, gets sent to private school for black kids run by a white priest, courtesy of single mom (Mary J. Blige) working three jobs, and manages to get some sort of scholarship to Yale where he’s got the kind of brain apparently capable of the radical thinking scientific breakthroughs require. Unfortunately, the only breakthrough he makes is of the Breaking Bad kind, setting up a lab on the premises, selling a better class of dope to his classmates.

When his dope-dealing father Skeet (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who also directs) is jailed for murder, Rob – who, by the way, has changed his name so no one will make the connection with the jailbird – takes up his case, through a loophole gaining his father a few weeks of freedom. Then he turns to dope-dealing to fund a lawyer to argue his father’s case and also to fund the experimental drugs required to keep his old man alive when he succumbs to brain cancer.

Put front and center those two elements would have been enough for a very sharp drama, especially as Rob begins to doubt his father’s innocence after discovering he was physically abusive to his mother. The best scene in the movie, spoiled by some over-acting by Ejiofor, is when the dying father realizes his son has these doubts.

There’s an awful grey area at the heart of the movie. You’d have thought someone of Rob’s intelligence could have dug up the court records and presented more evidence pointing towards his father’s innocence and that he’s been the victim of a fit-up and it kind of skates over the supposed racist element here but common sense tells you it’s not going to be a white guy that’s infiltrated somehow this black enclave and shot dead two black women.

Towards the end of the picture one of his buddies points out that it’s not the duty of the son to look after the wayward father, and that aspect, the almost saintly aspect, isn’t dealt with much either.

A lot of scenes could be cut. One sequence of him playing water polo would be enough, one of him mooching around smoking dope, one of carving the turkey etc. Nobody appears honest enough. His mom doesn’t tell him her husband was a violent man or ask why the son is wasting his life, risking his future, for the man who after all abandoned him. And just exactly why is never gone in to. Rob himself doesn’t question his own ethics, returning to the life he is presumably trying to escape in order to fund the lawyer and the doctors suggests a lack of self-awareness. There’s none of the chutzpah that made American Gangster (2007) so riveting. You can see a life being thrown away through self-justified crime. He goes back to the drug-dealing when his real estate company goes bust during the sub-prime mortgage scandal, incurs the wrath of the full-time drug-dealers who fear he’s invading their turf and kill him.

I’m not sure how you deal with ambiguity in a movie but one way is not to ignore it.

On a poor day for moviegoing, on a double double bill, this was the second best picture I saw all day, way behind a return to the sumptuous Count of Monte Cristo, but way ahead of the buffoonish mess of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the nonsense of Afraid.

Could sure do with a remake so an interesting tale could be more sharply told.

Dear Heart (1964) ****

Big difference between the manufactured maudlin of a weepie and middle-aged characters so ill-at-ease and discomfited that they are painful to watch, circumstances not redeemed by comedy. Audiences and critics didn’t take too kindly to this because the two stars were way out of their comfort zones. Glenn Ford (Rage, 1966) dropped his take-charge quiet-tough-guy persona, and didn’t even play that for laughs, and Geraldine Page (The Sweet Bird of Youth, 1962) rid herself of the tragic face that sacrificed itself on the altar of Oscar (at this point she was three-eights into her Oscar nominations haul).

The whole unremittingly sad enterprise would have been made for today’s generations, more acceptable of the sour ending and the clunkiness of romance that fails to gell.

Harry (Glenn Ford), a greetings card salesman who falls back on his own profession in his chat-up lines, thinks he has achieved his goal of settling down with widow Phyllis (Angela Lansbury) and becoming father to her young son, enjoying domesticity, extended family round for dinner, playing baseball and larking about with the boy. Evie (Geraldine Page) is too much and not enough, too big in her personality, not enough of whatever it takes to make her a long-term proposition for the opposite sex. They meet at a convention, hers, she’s a postmaster, he’s just staying at the same hotel.

She’s at least the more self-aware, wants more than the one-night stand of convention life, reluctant to take her place among the singletons, can’t work out why if she’s the life and soul of the party that at party’s end she’s still sitting on the shelf. But she also wants recognition – of some kind – makes fictitious calls to hotel reception so that a bellboy will troop round the lobby calling out her name. She brings her own lightbulbs, to replace the low-wattage ones in a bedroom, forever trying to adjust the world o her own vision, teasing bedroom curtains out in a different fashion, mild invention that keeps her sane regardless of how insane some actions are, charging ahead to open every door in the expectation that she shouldn’t count on male gallantry (this is the 1960s after all).

Harry’s the guy who does open doors for women, but cursed with loneliness, caught in embarrassing gaffes, chatting up the dumb kiosk blonde who’s a good bit more savvy. Most of the comedy hurts. He’s late to meet his boss because he stopped off for a martini at the apartment of an occasional lover and when he trips out too many excuses is told, tartly, that while one excuse is acceptable, three or four (train late, weather, can’t get a taxi, taxi stuck in traffic etc) is the sign of a liar. He does the whole unnecessary explanation routine when booking a hotel room for a tryst with the blonde whom he pretends is his wife not noticing the receptionist’s cynical eyebrows, and brought down to earth when said blonde breezes in and calls out a greeting to the receptionist.

Evie works out how to get a table in a packed restaurant, passing onto Harry the clever trick of saying you are waiting for a date and then apologising when they don’t turn up. When he tries this out, the waitress upends him with, “Why not join this lady (Evie), she can’t imagine either what happened to her date.”

There’s nothing cute about either of them so no chance of a meet-cute. She’s continually awkward, independent, and he doesn’t know how to spell out his troubles or work out why he’s walking into an unsuitable marriage. The only room this movie has for comedy is the sudden appearance in Harry’s life of a bearded teenager who usurps his bedroom (girlfriend constantly in the bath). This lad is Phyllis’s grown-up son Patrick (Michael Anderson Jr.) yet Harry’s been led to believe, or thinks he has, that the boy would be much younger, judging by the treasured photo given him by his fiancée. On the one side is a slab of situation comedy, on the other an out-of-his-depth Harry not knowing if he’s been duped and realizing how little he knows of genuine fatherhood. He’s awkwardness grown ten feet tall.

It’s not as if Harry and Evie actually conduct a romance, there’s some kind of attraction that neither can fully recognize, every time it sparks up as likely to wilt, and he’s prone to letting her down, sudden arrangement with son taking precedence over pre-arranged dinner with her, except, she’s mollified because he left her a note at the desk, and she doesn’t get those unless she manufactures them herself and then in her ungainly way lets everyone know someone has tried to contact her, as if that’s a sign of importance, or explanation for her feeling of being so let-down.

Phyllis turns out not to be the smalltown housewife of whom Harry dreams. She’s had enough of being a housewife. She wants what she sees as the high life, living out of hotels, “From now on I just want to pick up the telephone” and order food, cocktails, laundry, newspapers, whatever. Just what different paths they are on is detailed in a killer of a line. When he complains – it would be an accusatory tone if he could muster up the courage – about why she gave him this particular photo of the boy, as a kid not a man, comes the rejoinder, “Because that’s the best picture of me that’s ever been taken.”

You’d be lucky to find romance in this sullen snarky version of New York, filled with uncivil, unhelpful staff, bursting with indifference, nary a touch of sympathy for any customer, whether they are seeking a room in a city jam-packed with conventions or just a cup of coffee.

If you believe in the tagged-on happy ending, you’ll believe in anything. This pair are so discordant, so jarring, that they are probably the most realistic couple to ever grace the screen. Ignored as their performances are, they are probably the best of their careers, in part because neither is central to the bigger story that a high-end drama or western or thriller might entail., in part because they go out on an acting limb, light years away from their established screen persona. They are just so darned realistic your heart bleeds because you just know they are doomed into making relationship mistakes, most likely with each other, and will remain among the jittery unfulfilled, wondering how everyone else manages it.

Director Delbert Mann’s been here before – Oscar-winner for Marty (1955), drawing an Oscar-winning performance from David Niven in Separate Tables (1958) and James Garner’s best performance in Buddwing (1966) – and makes acceptable viewing out of what in the hands of a Harold Pinter would be an impossible watch. But even so, it comes close. Tad Mosel (Up the Down Staircase, 1967) wrote the screenplay.

Had this been an an arthouse picture, it would be drenched in awards.

Fabulous performances, heartfelt situation.

The Interns (1962) ***

Patients are a nuisance to be tolerated on the route to wealth in this superior soap opera that sees young doctors wrestling with ambition and ethics. Although also concluding that impending lofty status will snare them an attractive bride, they find women less biddable than expected, romance proving the trickiest of all procedures.

The main cast of four men and one woman are played by a roster of hotly-tipped newcomers, including future Oscars winners and nominees and the elusive Haya Harareet (The Secret Partner, 1961). Director David Swift, accustomed to handling multiple characters in the likes of Pollyanna (1961), keeps the pot boiling and although some storylines lead to obvious conclusions the screenwriters bring sufficient imagination to the various strands.

The story unfolds over the one year the doctors spend in a general hospital, where the patients are liable to be drunk and obstreperous, before taking up residencies elsewhere. As you might expect, the main characters divide into the good and the arrogant. Heading the latter are Alec Considine (Michael Callan) who cheats on girlfriend Mildred (Anne Helm) with older nurse Vicky (Katharine Baird) in order to gain through her connections a residency at a highly prestigious hospital.

Matching him in the cocky stakes is John Paul Otis (Cliff Robertson), charming to old ladies but willing to risk his career to bed movie actress Lisa (Suzy Parker). The good guys are Lew Worship (James MacArthur) who is seduced into the supposed backwaters of obstetrics and Sid Lackland (Nick Adams), an all-round good egg who falls for a patient Loara (Ellen Davalos).

The most interesting of the young doctors, however, is single mother Madolyn Bruckner (Haya Harareet) who takes on surgeon Dominic Riccio (Telly Savalas) at every turn. Riccio spends his time berating his charges and, in particular, has a downer on female doctors. At every encounter, despite his vicious tongue, she refuses to back down.

But it is the patients, in particular Arnold Auer (Peter Brocco) and Loara, who blow a hole in the myth of hospitals. In the best scene in the film, Auer, suffering from a degenerative illness that will turn him into a vegetable, takes over from the doctor in giving his own awful diagnosis. His pleas for clemency from his ordeal, in essence assisted suicide, create an ethical dilemma for the young doctors who did not realize that modern medicine could prolong rather than curtail patient suffering.

Auer’s anguished wife Emma (Angela Clarke) flits in and out of the picture as she buttonholes any doctor willing to listen to a new cure she has discovered. While the more hard-hearted doctors can inure themselves to his agony, a savage turn of events finds them all caught up in a situation that could jeopardize their future careers.

Although Loara has an incurable disease and has more or less given up, Lackland’s effervescent good humor and determination that surgery can resolve all health issues brings her hope and if you were in her condition possibly the last thing you would want would be a cheerleading doctor on your side, but in this instance it brings succor and in the doctor’s case forces him to rethink his priorities.

Probably the last thing the doctors – and the audience – expected was to come up against such stubborn, free-thinking women. While Bruckner appears to fly the flag for female independence, she has solid support from Lisa who spends most of the picture rejecting Otis’s advances on the grounds that even when he becomes rich he will be too poor for her liking. Eventually, Vicky forces Considine to choose. Shy nurse Gloria (Stefanie Powers) shocks Worship by putting global travel ahead of marriage. But she’s not as shocking as the bespectacled inhibited Olga (Carroll Harrison) who loses her inhibitions in style at a wild party.

Theoretically, a film about young doctors having a romp, in reality a thoughtful and thought-provoking picture, tackling issues that would have been taboo at the time and removing the submissive tag that daunted most movie female characters in the movies.

Those who succeeded in later winning Oscar favor were Cliff Robertson, Best Actor for Charly (1968), and Nick Adams and Telly Savalas, both nominated for Best Supporting Actor, the former in Twilight of Honor (1963) and the latter in The Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).

Robertson was the pick of the bunch, a star in his own right graduating from 633 Squadron (1964) and Masquerade (1965) to J.W. Coop (1971) which he also directed. But largely, the stars did not fulfil initial promise. The peak of Michael Callan’s movie career was reprising his role in The New Interns (1964), star in British director Michael Winner’s You Must Be Joking! (1965) and second male lead in Cat Ballou (1965). James MacArthur had a steady movie career before an epic run in television series Hawaii Five-O (1968-1979). Nick Adams switched between film and television before his premature death in 1968. Haya Harareet made only one more film, The Last Charge (1962). In a bit part here, this is the same Brian G. Hutton who went on to greater things as a director, most notably Where Eagles Dare. (1968).

Although primarily in television, the less-heralded stars enjoyed greater ongoing success. Mainly a strong supporting actor, Telly Savalas had only one stab at a starring role (Land Raiders, 1970) before achieving worldwide fame as Kojak (1973-1978). Stefanie Powers was television’s The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (1966-1967) and later Hart to Hart (1979-1984). Buddy Ebsen (who plays the older Dr Sidney Wohl) went straight into a nine-year run of The Beverley Hillbillies.

Directed with considerable care and awareness of relevant issues by David Swift (Pollyanna, 1961) who co-wrote the screenplay with Water Newman (The Magnificent Seven, 1960) from the novel by Richard Frede. It spawned sequel The New Interns and a TV series. Some reports have The Interns as the biggest of the year for Columbia, but that would only be correct if you were only able to exclude the massive box office for Lawrence of Arabia.

Still a soap, but an interesting one.