Drama – Page 2 – The Magnificent 60s

Jaws 2 (1978) ***

When your movie is best remembered for its tagline “just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water” – you know it’s in trouble. And although this is the best of the sequels, that’s a low bar. Possibly, studio Universal couldn’t have care less, given its performance at the box office, setting the weekend record and topping the annual box office league, with more receipts due when it was paired with the original in a reissue double bill.

The main problem isn’t that wunderkind Steven Spielberg avoided the project and deprived the movie of visual class. Or that original director John Hancock (Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, 1971) was axed in favor of Jeannot Swarc (Bug, 1975). But that the screenwriters took their eye off a very interesting ball and placed the emphasis on the kind of really annoying screaming teenagers you were begging for the shark to gobble up.

We already knew that Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) couldn’t swim but it turns out he’s next to useless in handling a boat and has never learned the most basic navigational skills. In some sense not surprising given his last voyage was unadulterated terror. But you might have thought he’d try better to acclimatize himself to the island’s ways and take a basic seamanship course.

Already, the movie sets the tone of him shifting towards the demented as, obsessed with the arrival of another great sea beast, he scares the hell out of beachgoers by blazing his six-shooter at a harmless tuna, this setting him firmly at odds with the community hierarchy who are involved in some money-making construction project.

We’ve leaned in pretty much to his emotions, the fear of a repetition of the previous incident, and the dissolution of his character as he falls apart under the pressure. So what better than to strand him in the middle of the ocean, barely able to master a boat, and completely lost and having to go mano a mano against a great white in a downscale version of The Old Man and the Sea.

Instead, having not bothered to flesh out the characters of any of the boating youngsters beyond that they were in the main cast for their physical attributes and for passing with flying colors the scream test, we are stuck with them for too long. Of course, you can make the argument that all the audience wants to see is a lot of chomping and a bunch of teenagers fits the bill as abundant prey, but that’s to deny the impact of just threat rather than gore that Spielberg achieved with his masterpiece.

It’s obvious why composer John Williams steered clear of his iconic Jaws theme because there just wasn’t sufficient threat to pin it on. Of course, we don’t need a know-it-all shark expert because the audience already received as much education on that score as was required via the previous iteration. But we sure do miss an old seadog like Quint.

Half the way in, I thought – not having seen it since it came out and my memory of that restricted to the tag line – this has all the makings of a very decent sequel with the emphasis at that point on Brody’s disintegrating character. Heap it on, I was almost yelling at the screen, put him through more angst and terror, get him out there alone with the shark and figure out a way to survive.

Quite how Brody would have killed off the beast without a deux ex machina in the shape of a seabed electricity cable that somehow the shark with a whole lunch and dinner of helpless teenagers sitting in his immediate line of sight instead heads for said cable because the Chief is able to attract him by beating out a tune on the cable is anybody’s guess. If your screenwriters had exhausted every other notion of how to kill the shark, then for sure, a cable comes in handy, but again that’s a very low bar.

Roy Scheider (Jaws, 1975) gets to be even more swivel-eyed and anxious than before but nobody else makes a mark and even Murray Hamilton, reprising his role as the sleazy mayor, isn’t on screen long enough. I would have stuck him out in the boat with the Chief and let him go through some rite of passage so that he turns into a good guy.

Clearly, Universal was depending on lightning striking twice with neophyte director Jeannot Swarc but he only shows what he lacks compared to Spielberg stuck with a lame screenplay by Carl Gottlieb (Jaws) and Howard Sackler (Gray Lady Down, 1978) which is connected in name only to the Peter Benchley bestseller.

Good up to a point then abruptly capsizes.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964) ***

The feckless in movies usually have charm to see them through. The titular Ginger (Robert Shaw) is remarkably deficient on that front. He’s the wishful-thinker par excellence though his wishes are off the scale and he seems to be also deficient on the thinking front. After 14 years in the Army in Ireland, he’s emigrated with wife Vera (Mary Ure) and daughter Paulie (Libby McLintock) to Canada where he has notably failed the make the grade.

He’s eminently employable, just not at the type of job to which he thinks he is entitled, if not directly in the managerial line then something where promotion is guaranteed. He’s always got an excuse for quitting a job after a few weeks.

This would fall into the “kitchen sink drama” sub-genre except that Ginger is not exactly on the breadline and if poverty threatens it’s through his own self-destructive and selfish tendencies. His wife has given up so Ginger has to lie to her about having already bought the boat tickets home.

He’s so unsympathetic, self-deluded and dishonest that you are virtually shouting hurrah for Vera when she takes up with another man, Joe (Tom Harvey), a journalist and ostensibly Ginger’s best friend. That shocks him out of his malaise, and he takes up a job delivering diapers. Even getting in at the bottom of the newspaper business, working as a proofreader, isn’t enough for his inflated ambition. But he’s been kicked out his apartment, sleeping now at the YMCA. Further humiliations ensue, sufficient for him to accept his shortcomings and try to change.

While he’s confident in his own potential, nobody else is and the movie basically trudges along with him until he comes to his senses. This isn’t an emigrant’s tale in the normal cinematic sense because he’s not ostracized because of his nationality, not barred from jobs, in fact there’s a whole system set up by the Government to help him find a job.

It takes his wife quite a while to cotton on to his constant deception

Quite why such a downbeat picture ever got made is a mystery. The novel by Brian Moore, on which it was based was certainly a literary and commercial success, and it was funded by Frank Crawley, possibly the biggest of the Canadian independents, on a $500,000 budget. It ended up on arthouse release in the UK.

Richard Harris was originally nailed-on for the part but he swapped it for Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965). Harris would have brought more immediate physical energy and a sense of danger to the role, rather than the sense of an oaf just bumbling along.

Possibly the best thing about it is the realism. Yes, it’s really the star crossing icy roads, just avoiding oncoming traffic in scenes that were clearly set on Montreal roads and not on the safety of a sound stage.

Shaw and Ure were married, so were both tagged as rising stars, the husband coming off From Russia with Love (1963), but there was argument to put that she was already the bigger marquee name after Look Back in Anger (1959), Sons and Lovers (1960) and female lead in The Mind Benders (1963).

This really had not much going for it other than worthiness, the chance for a decent film with some reasonable names to come out of Canada, and to give another rising star, director Irvin Kershner (A Fine Madness, 1966), a chance. Written by Moore (Torn Curtain, 1966).

Well-made but too dour for me.

Amazon Prime has it. In fact, it was recommended to me on that channel because I had watched Two Gentlemen Sharing.

No Love for Johnnie (1960) ****

While hardly an excoriating view of British politics and lacking in the kind of high stakes narrative favored by the Americans in this sub-genre such as Advise and Consent (1961) or The Best Man (1964), it’s still an absorbing tale with a superb performance by Peter Finch, whose screen persona exudes power.

And while there’s plenty about the inside track, how the backroom deals are done, and the backstabbing, and the indifference of the politicians to those who elected them, it covers well the obsession with power.

If this is about power, it’s also about what lack of power does to a person. Politics is a pyramid game and even the most deluded politician believes that, with the right backing and a bit of luck, they can rise to the top. When they discover they are mere cannon fodder and recoil at the idea of spending all their time dealing with complaining constituents, they are prone to disillusion and seething disaffection.

Although the poster might suggests that re-elected MP Johnnie Byrne is a poor soul in the romantic stakes, his wife Alice (Rosalie Crutchley), who seems more attuned to the needs of the populace, having abandoned him just after he’s won an election, and friendly neighbor Mary (Billie Whitelaw) pushing him away when he answers the phone in the middle of a clinch – “save your kisses for the Prime Minister,” she snaps – it’s clear that domesticity takes a poor second place to politics.

He’s extremely disappointed to be passed over for a place in the Cabinet, even the more minor position of a Junior Minister, that leaves him prey to the kind of grumbling back benchers intent on fomenting rebellion. But the rebels are generally all flawed individuals, more inclined to stoke controversy to get noticed or as a way of nursing disappointment at being relegated to the back seats of power.

Byrne isn’t a particularly attractive proposition. You wouldn’t want to be one of his constituents no matter what promises he makes to be re-elected. In those days people could just turn up at Parliament and request to see their MP and a flunkey would carry literally a note to the MP which would state the nature of the request. If it was about housing he would inform the flunkey to tell the constituent he was unavailable when in fact he’s sitting having tea in the cozy House of Commons café overlooking the River Thames.

Housing was as hot an issue then as it is now, too many people living in overcrowded insanitary apartments, paying high rents to unscrupulous landlords. But getting to the top of the local Council housing list was a massive problem. While, privately, Johnnie realizes that pushing open that particular door is virtually impossible, even for an MP, he can’t be bothered to give his constituents the time of day.

But he is sufficiently embittered to join the rebels and lead the way in poking holes at the Government’s policies. But then he meets a young artist/model Pauline (Mary Peach) and falls for her. I find it a bit implausible that such an ambitious man, having determined to make a name for himself by being a thorn in his Party’s foot, would miss a vital debate, especially one where he was the key figure, would skip it for a bout of sex with his lover.

Still, ironically enough, that works in his favor, and that may have been his intent. For the Prime Minister (Geoffrey Keen) assumes Johnnie has seen the error of his ways, his failure to appear for said critical debate taking the wind out of the incipient rebellion, and rewards him with a Junior post.

There’s an irony, too, in that Alice, deemed way too left-wing in her Communist pursuits for the left-wing Labour Party, is noted as having been an obstacle to Johnnie’s rise. But now that she’s out of the way, he can move up.

Getting promoted clearly won’t shift Johnnie out his apathy towards his constituents, but then, why should he, when he believes he has moved out of their reach by being ensconced in the Prime Minister’s inner circle, even if only on the fringes of that.

Peter Finch (I Thank a Fool, 1961) has the charisma and the glower to carry this off. The supporting cast is littered with rising stars such as Mary Peach (A Gathering of Eagles, 1963), Donald Pleasance (Soldier Blue, 1970) and Billie Whitelaw (Twisted Nerve, 1968) and even Oliver Reed (Hannibal Brooks, 1968).

Director Ralph Thomas was better known for comedy (the Doctor movie series) and thrillers (Some Girls Do, 1969) but he was equally adept at drama and here he turns an unflinching eye. Mention should be made of his wife, Betty Box, who was a major British producer at a time when both in Hollywood and in Britain excluded females from such a role.

Written by Nicholas Phipps (Doctor in Distress, 1963) and Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler (The Luck of Ginger Coffey, 1964) from the novel by Wilfred Fienburgh.

Like the best of this sub-genre exposes shady dealings in politics.

The Devil’s Advocate (1997) *****

Ripe is not the word. Crank this up to 11, race on past full-tilt boogie and you’ll still need more in the tank to get anywhere near to how mad, bad (in a good way) and enormously entertaining is this trip into the murk. Not been such fun being bad on screen since Basic Instinct (1992).

You thought it was tough enough for Tom Cruise in The Firm (1993) trying to extricate himself from the job-of-a-lifetime handling business for the Mafia. That’s nothing to finding yourself hired by the Devil.

And all because – and what’s wrong with that – you can get any sleazeball off the terrible crimes they have committed. Principle be damned when it gets in the way of winning. It’s hardly enough to scorn your client afterwards when you know he’s guilty and going to keep on committing heinous crimes until a poorer defense attorney can’t keep him out of jail. As well as that skill, he’s a genius at jury selection, finding flaws others miss.

After getting a child abuser off, top lawyer Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), who’s never lost a case, is headhunted by a glitzy New York company, so swimming in loot that he’s parked in an enormous upscale apartment where wife Mary Ann (Charlize Theron) can spend her time drinking cocktails, hanging out with other glam wives and dedicate herself to deciding what color to paint the walls of their dwelling.

He’s pretty glad to get away from all that Florida sunshine and doom-laden mum (Judith Ivey), a hellfire Christian who pretty much sees damnation in just taking a breath, never mind hiving off to the Babylon of New York. Naturally, you’re talking long, long hours and a wife who’s beginning to feel neglected and worried that there’s just too many sexy women hanging around Kevin’s charismatic boss John Milton (Al Pacino), especially redhaired Christabella (Connie Nielsen) who might swing both ways and to whom hubby is inching dangerously close.

Never mind the drama played out in the courtroom, Kevin’s sudden arrival out of nowhere and the notion he might be the boss’s protégé sets tensions flaring in the firm especially with managing director Eddie Barzoom (Jeffrey Jones) who gets the notion his job is on a shoogly peg.

Virtually all of this is played out as if we’re in F1, so a bucket of shouting and finger pointing and for all his smarts it’s clear Kevin is dumb enough to get seduced by all the high-living. So let’s cut to the great scenes, of which there are many.

*Yep, the universal poster has arrived. Just change the title into your own language.*

Anyone who tries to betray Milton comes to a sticky end. Making love to his wife, Kevin fantasizes that he’s having sex with Christabella. A naked baby plays with bloody intestines. Mary Ann stands up naked in a church. Milton dipping a finger into holy water in a church sets it boiling. How does Kevin discover that another client on trying for murder is lying – it’s a matter of circumcision. The walls of Milton’s apartment come alive, ensuring a harmless fresco can turn into an orgy. Kevin’s mum isn’t quite the saint she pretends. His father isn’t who he’s been brought up to believe.

Mary Ann starts losing her marbles, gets visions, sees women turn ferocious and the naked baby is actually playing with removed ovaries, because she is infertile and pretty soon bonkers enough to get committed and pretty soon so over-the-top that she’s going to go the extra damnable mile.

Somehow in all this malarkey, you’re not particularly surprised to discover that Milton is actually Kevin’s father, though he’s been spreading his seed far and wide and it’s taken quite a while before he’s found any of his offspring capable of inheriting his empire. But you might balk at the notion that Milton wants to guarantee the continuity of his line through the small matter of incest.

Three twists at the end ensure the picture ends on the same bonkers high note that it began.

Al Pacino was on a hell of a roll. He’d become something of an elder statesman, helping bring through younger rising stars – Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco (1997), Russell Crowe in The Insider (1999) and Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx in Any Given Sunday (1999). He relishes this performance, sly, knowing, subtle, even sexy (though charismatic is probably a better description), a master of seduction, and giving vent in long speeches as he argues that God has abandoned Earth.

You wouldn’t think Keanu Reeves had it in him to go toe-to-toe with such an accomplished actor, but he does, and anyone who just thinks of him as the largely monosyllabic John Wick who lets violence do his talking had better think again. Charlize Theron (The Odyssey, 2026) is pretty good, too. This brought Connie Neilsen (Gladiator, 1999) to Hollywood’s attention.

Directed with zest by Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman, 1982) from a screenplay by Tony Gilroy (the Bourne series) and Jonathan Lemkin (Shooter, 2007) from the book by Andrew Neidelmann.

Hypnotic.

You can catch it on Amazon Prime.

Carnal Knowledge (1971) ****

You could argue that this is every bit as meretricious as Three in the Attic (1968). That the misogynism is every bit as rampant, the language considerably coarser, women judged by their physical attributes rather than their brains, men boasting about every little detail of their sex lives. More locker room than intelligentsia. You could argue that Porky’s (1981) and American Pie (1999) take exactly the same approach with no suggestion they have reached some exalted critical status.

There’s similar reliance here as in Three in the Attic on technical tricks, long monologues with the camera in a fixed position, and it would appear as if the person is indeed breaking the fourth wall and talking directly to the audience except for one shot, two at most, of a listener. Or the same fixed approach focusing on, for example, a girl laughing hysterically or a female skater, and background music that appears completely irrelevant except in the most perfunctory fashion depicting a time period.

Of course, there’s no comparison when it comes to the actors. This boasts a stellar cast – Jack Nicholson (Easy Rider, 1969) with one Oscar nomination already under his belt casting a spell on the audience, Candice Bergen (Soldier Blue, 1970), a standout among the new generation of female stars, and Ann-Margret (Stagecoach, 1966) at one point bigger than either in the Hollywood stratosphere making a comeback that would win her an Oscar nomination. Art Garfunkel, one half of the most potent double act in the recording business, was making his movie debut.

Director Mike Nichols was on a hell of a roll, his first two pictures – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967) – awash with Oscar kudos and unprecedented box office gravy.

And you could make the same double-handed argument about feminism. Susan (Candice Bergen) would certainly count as a liberated women given she’s stringing along best buddies Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel), not just having sex with both, but leading the way with the shy latter. And once married to Sandy she keeps him up to scratch in the bedroom, teaching him to make love the way she likes it.

Given Jonathan’s obsession with the inches on the female body that are so important to him, it’s amazing her was at all interested in Susan, except for his competitive streak, delighted to steal away the girl who is apparently his pal’s girl. While Sandy appears the more insecure, in fact Jonathan more than matches him, always comparing Susan’s gentler treatment of Sandy. He might even have invented the tale of his poor childhood in order to gain her sympathy.

Certainly, once Sandy and Susan are married, Jonathan’s jealousy goes up a notch, annoyed that his pal is greeted by his wife on return from work with a martini and dinner while his voluptuous girlfriend Bobbie (Ann-Margret) struggles to warm up a television dinner and can’t keep his apartment tidy.

While Jonathan avoids commitment, Arthur isn’t as committed as he seems, having a mistress Cindy (Cynthia O’Neal) in tow, whom Jonathan thinks it’s fair game to woo and even gives Arthur carte blanche to take a chance on Bobbie.

Even given the misogyny of the period, you’d struggle to find two more obnoxious men. Any woman that attempts to be their match or gives as good as she gets is deemed a “ball-buster” or just after men for their money. You’re almost thankful that, just like Three in the Attic, there’s a touch of morality at the end, with the impotent Jonathan reduced to paying sex workers to tell him how powerful he is in order to gain an erection. Though Sandy appears to get off scot-free – now dating 18-year-olds.

But the performances all round are superb. Susan could perhaps have done with her character being filled out rather than just seen through the eyes of the men. Ann-Margret revived her career with his performance, of a woman whose body has betrayed her, all her sexiness not winning her the security she desires. It’s as bold a move for Jack Nicholson to play such a loathsome arrogant character. I was never convinced by Art Garfunkel.

Despite the tricksy presentation, Mike Nichols, as with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, traps his characters under an intense microscope. Screenwriter Jules Feiffer, better known at the time as a cartoonist and playwright, excels in his debut.

Hard going at times given the repellant characters but still excellent.

In the Cool of the Day (1963) ***

Jane Fonda tagged this the worst film of her career but that’s a bit harsh and I suspect it owed a lot to the actress being dressed up Audrey Hepburn-style in outfits that scarcely suited her. While it’s certainly overheated, melodramatic moments indicated by thundering music, but a marvellous supporting cast, including a quite bitchy Angela Lansbury, provides ample compensation.

It’s romance in the Love Story vein, rich young flighty heroine Christine (Jane Fonda) at death’s door half her life, but feeling smothered by understandably over-protective husband Sam (Arthur Hill). When she falls for married publisher Murray (Peter Finch) and sets off on a trip to Greece, chaperoned it turns out by Murray’s bitter wife Sybil (Angela Lansbury), it takes a while for romance to physically bud. That it does at all is only because Sybil has taken off with suave traveling salesman Leonard (Nigel Davenport).

The movie takes a long time to heat up because, as in The Bramble Bush fashion, there’s overmuch character filling-in to do. Part of the interest in this picture is how the bad guys are effectively good guys, more victims of their partner’s behavior than anything else, though for story purposes, the audience has to be persuaded otherwise.

So besotted Sam, having dealt with umpteen bouts of his wife’s pneumonia and lung operations, a “slave” to her illnesses, is deemed as treating her like a child rather than a wife, preferring her ill rather than well, and denying her the adventure to which she feels entitled. When she meets Murray she has run away. Murray’s wife has a downer on her husband because, wait for it, he killed her child and left her facially scarred (hidden now by hair but she’s still very sensitive about it) in a car accident he caused.

But she’s portrayed as over-sensitive, worried about her appearance, snippy, blaming him for her distraught life, and worse, a philistine, hating being dragged around ancient Greek monuments. Aware of her husband’s proclivities, she mocks, “You’d be an idiot to fall in love with her.” And any time she ventures out, the music rises to a crescendo as if she is a character straight out of film noir.

When she goes off with Leonard, her love affair is viewed as sneaky rather than redemptive, even though he restores her faith in herself. Triumphantly, she tells Christine, “He’s all yours” and her husband “nobody need feel sorry for me any more.”Admittedly, she does take revenge by informing Christine’s husband, who has entrusted his wife to Murray’s care, of their affair. And you would be hard put to argue, although the film wants you to believe otherwise, that Sybil and Sam have been ill-treated by their partners, Sam, in particular, funding her trip to Greece in the hope that allowing her the freedom she needs will save their marriage.

Of course, the characters of both partners, even if their self-pitying is the result of circumstance, do mean that Christine and Murray are presented as people trapped in bad marriages and for whom love, however brief, provides sanctuary from tortured lives, her physical, his more mental, since he is not averse to guilt.

Sybil’s lack of interest in tourist Greece handily gives the prospective lovers plenty time to fall in love, amid gorgeous scenery, and breathing in air rich in culture. With all film made in the 1960s and set in foreign parts – Pretty Polly (1967) another example – sometimes the story takes second place to the scenery, so it’s lucky that the romance is played out against such an interesting background, an ideal combination, killing two birds with one stone if you like. Given this is prior to Zorba the Greek (1964), the filmmakers have even managed to sneak in some traditional Greek dancing, albeit on the deck of a ferryboat.

Dress-wise, the lovers are ill-matched, Murray plodding around in a suit while Christine parades the latest often clingy fashion. When Sybil departs the scene, that leaves one unhappy character of the unhappy couple free of marital encumbrance, but still leaves open the question of how Christine will rid herself of Sam and, more importantly, will Murray wish to take on the all-consuming job of nursing Christine. He never gets the chance to find out. When she does fall ill – as the result of Murray recklessly keeping her out in a thunderstorm – her mother Lily (Valerie Kendrick) swoops in to rush her to hospital.

Spoiler Alert – I’m telling you that she dies because it seems to me that the ending the filmmakers hoped for is not how the audience will perceive it. Beautiful young woman dies too young, yep that’s there, but the man, now free and able to shake off his dull life and start afresh as a writer, seems a long shot. Given he has now, thanks to the thunderstorm episode, killed two people, I would surprised if guilt was not uppermost in his mind.

Not so-good-it’s-bad, and despite the complications, and perhaps because of the Sybil-Leonard romance, it’s certainly an interesting picture as much, perhaps, because it fails to send the audience in the desired direction.

In only her fifth movie, Jane Fonda (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, 1969), exhibiting the nervous friskiness that would become a hallmark, does pretty well with a febrile, spoiled, character. If she falls down at all it’s that she appears uncomfortable wearing Orry Kelly’s fabulous gowns and it would take Hollywood some time to work out she was not a natural successor to Audrey Hepburn. Peter Finch (The Pumpkin Eater, 1964) is perfectly at ease with the illicit.

But Angela Lansbury (Harlow, 1965), a hoot as the wife who turns rejection into triumph, steals the show. Throw in Arthur Hill (Moment to Moment, 1966), Nigel Davenport (Sands of the Kalahari, 1965), for once neither smug nor snippy, Alexander Knox (Khartoum, 1966), veterans Constance Cummings (The Criminal Code, 1930) and Valerie Taylor (Went the Day Well, 1942), John Le Mesurier (The Liquidator, 1965) and Alec McCowan (Frenzy, 1972) and you have a movie where hardly a moment goes by without admiring a performance.

Robert Stevens (I Thank a Fool, 1962) directed from a screenplay by Meade Roberts (Danger Route, 1967) based on the novel by Susan Ertz.

Onibaba / The Hole (1964) ****

Female empowerment doesn’t come any sharper. Two women slaughter exhausted samurai trying to escape a civil war in feudal Japan, dump the corpses in a deep hole, and sell their weapons and armor for food. Into their midst comes a deserter and the action slips into the sexual jealousy mode of The Fox (1967) and then takes another sudden shift into horror. And it manages all three incarnations of the tale with dexterity.

I knew all about this film long before Seven Samurai (1954) was on my horizon. As one who scanned newspaper advertisements and read contemporary movie magazines, I was well aware – though forbidden by dint of age to see it – of its controversial nature. I wasn’t exactly privy to what the controversy involved except that it was initially banned by the censor and that British posters hinted at the controversy.

I would soon learn that “exotic” and “primitive” were code words for nudity. A double standard operated in the offices of the British censor. Until the late 1960s, the only movies that could get away with a glimpse of forbidden flesh were foreign pictures destined for an arthouse.

Coming to it now for the first time I was more aware of it as a horror movie so I wasn’t ready for the first two elements – the blatant murder of men by supposedly vulnerable women and the sexual jealousy.

An older woman (Nobuto Otawa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) share a hut in the middle of fields and make a living killing any soldiers that come their way, exchanging their loot to a dealer, Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama), for small sacks of millet. Into their lives comes deserter Hachi (Kei Sato), who brings news that the son/husband of the women is dead.

He proves useful in adding to their meager supply of food through fishing. After participating in their next killings, he also proves a more adept negotiator with Ushi and returns with a bigger bag of millet than the women ever secured plus some saki and a couple of birds.

He’s clearly got his eye on the younger woman and she responds, sneaking out for a sex. This makes the older woman furious. There’s more than jealousy at stake. If Hachi and the younger woman decide to leave together, the older woman will be unable to capture and kill any passing strangers. Perhaps hoping Hachi might be in the mood for a threesome, she attempts to seduce him but is rebuffed.

But then the older woman comes across a samurai wearing a demon mask. When he ends up down the pit, she climbs down and steals his mask, revealing the samurai’s disfigured face. She uses the mask to scare the younger woman away from Hachi, persuading her that the demon is punishment for her affair. At first it looks as if the scheme works, but the younger woman soon takes to sneaking out again at night.

But then the mask proves impossible to remove. When they finally get it off, the older woman’s face is as disfigured as the original wearer and the younger woman is convinced the older woman is actually a demon.

This is tremendously well done. In the first 10 minutes there’s no dialog as we watch the women hunt their prey. The reeds in the fields are taller than any human, and there’s a Hitchcockian element when they sway and conceal. A good chunk of the picture relies merely on facial expression. And the three changes of tone are well managed so that we move from mere murder to the sexual and then the demonic. The eeriness is hard to shift.

Hypocrisy and lust are strange bedfellows, the possessive mother-in-law loses her power, the daughter-in-law is freed by the death of her husband, bad deeds go unpunished.

Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo (The Naked Island, 1960) and based on an old Japanese legend, this is so starkly filmed, with a unique three-act structure, that you come away thinking this must be due for a remake.

Holds up very well.

Bye, Bye, Braverman (1968) ***

Director Sidney Lumet didn’t have an easy time of it in the late 1960s. Like The Appointment (1969), this went missing in action. And you can see why. While The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) was straightforward in mixing fantasy with reality, this is more tricksy – in a contemporary way. The fantasy elements verge so much on the realistic that it’s difficult at times to work out what is real.

And to add a bit of more substantial culture to the mix, there are shades of James Joyce, in the idea of someone going to a funeral and imagining their own death. And while there are actually a quartet of buddies in early middle age heading for the funeral of their friend, the titular Braverman, luckily there’s only one, Morroe Rieff (George Segal) who appears to live in his imagination.

Morroe makes a living working in public relations, his novels not sufficiently commercial. You don’t realize this at first because you think he’s the cop who’s had to bring the news of her husband’s death to his wife Inez (Jessica Walters). Then you might think that he and Inez have the hots for each other and literally the moment the road is clear, she’s jumping his bones. But it’s pretty clear, from the way his wife Etta (Zohra Lampert) is annoyed about him running to Inez’s side at the slightest emergency, that he’s got more (unrequited) interest in her than a married man should have.

That last is the trickier one. It seems like it could be real. After all, the husband was notorious for his philandering, while Inez has played the dutiful wife. But you soon realize that any time Morroe is outside the strict confines of talking to his mutinous girlfriend or with his pals, virtually every other scene he appears in is manufacture.

The other three are well-drawn. Their occupations are largely irrelevant, because in Seinfeld fashion what they actually mostly do is talk, and often about things that are as inconsequential as Seinfeld, and they bond over communal memory of even odder things.

Felix (Joseph Wiseman) is the pick, in part because he has the best lines. He tells his feckless son, “I wasn’t crazy about your mother, and I like you even less.” He refuses to get into a Volkswagen because he’s Jewish and the car was made in Germany.

So mostly what you’ve got is the kind of inconsequential chatter that a bunch of intellectuals will indulge in, some of it intellectual, some of it not. That’s just the kind of movie it is. And either you’re going to sit back and let it work, or you’re going to switch off early once you realize what type of picture it is.

There were a lot of movies back in the day that concentrated far more on dialog and character than story and moving a story along. In part this was due to Hollywood drawing far more on the talents of playwrights, when William Inge (Bus Riley’s Back in Town, 1965), Tennessee Williams (Night of the Iguana, 1964) and Arthur Miller (The Misfits, 1961) were considered marquee attractions. The kind of story-driven action picture that proliferated from the 1970s onwards didn’t exist to make spectacle more important than dialog or character.

Making up the quartet are Barnet Weinstein (Jack Warden) who sports a toupee that comes off in a crisis and Holly Levine (Sorrell Brooke) and they’re all past masters at niggling each other and trying to niggle out the meaning of life.

Getting to the funeral isn’t straightforward. Inez’s directions prove difficult to follow. There’s an interaction with a taxi driver (Godfrey Cambridge) and they turn up at the wrong funeral.

Sidney Lumet steers clear of the grandiose, he’s not trying to make any visual points, and the fantasy inserts take the place of the inner monolog of James Joyce.

But it’s all dialog, so be prepared.

George Segal (The Bridge at Remagen, 1968) almost reinvents his screen persona, Jack Warden (Blindfold, 1966) revels in a more outgoing less choleric character, but Joseph Wiseman (Dr No, 1962) steal the show. Look out for Jessica Walters (Number One, 1969) and Zohra Lampert (A Fine Madness, 1966).

Screenplay by Herbert Sargent, in his debut, from the novel by Wallace Markfield.

You can see why this has gone missing but if you know what you’re going into it’s worth a look.

I have my own copy but you can get a good flavor of it – the first hour at least – on YouTube.

Borderlines / The Caretakers (1963) ****

Two sequences set this apart from the mini-cycle of films Hollywood was temporarily producing on the theme of mental illness and the institutions set up to treat it such as the Frank Perry’s empathetic and occasionally lyrical David and Lisa (1962), Robert Rossen’s Lilith (1964) – both essentially romances – and Sam Fuller’s more brutal The Naked Kiss (1964).

Both sequences come early in the picture, setting, visually, the tone. In the first, crusading psychiatrist Dr Donovan MacLeod (Robert Stack) goes onto a ward to see a patient. It’s old-fashioned in the way of hospitals back then, patients in metal-framed beds. But as the camera pulls back, we see it’s not just a ward, it’s so big it’s a warehouse crammed full of sedated mental patients.

In the second scene, chief nurse Lucretia Terry (Joan Crawford) has her female staff in a room kitted out in leotards. And such attire is not for the titillation of the audience, equivalent to the kind of changing room sequence in later films designed to provide glimpses of female flesh. Instead, it’s a judo class. Terry is teaching the nurses how to defend themselves against attack.

The narrative focuses on MacLeod trying to change treatment of mental illness away from sticking patients full of sedatives or submitting them to the ubiquitous electroshock and locking them in a giant warehouse, keeping them well out of sight of the rest of the world who can’t understand why a loved one has gone mad. Terry wants to stick to the current method.

MacLeod crosses verbal swords all the way through with Terry and despite his persuasive tones no sign that she’s going to agree with his new idea of group therapy to attempt to cure those patients who have not yet fully succumbed to their illness, those who are still on the “borderline.”

There’s certainly plenty evidence to back up Terry’s fears that any slacking in security will result in harm to both nurses and patients given that among the group given substantial leeway by MacLeod are those who will try to stab people, set fire to the ward and break the golden rule of entering a male ward.

While the arguments are going on about the need to take a new approach to dealing with mental illness, the main focus is on the ragbag of patients in group therapy, people with much the same bunch of problems – although highly exacerbated – as you’d find within a group on a sinking ship or going to war. Issues with parents, children, sex and alcohol have brought these patients in the national care.

While there are moving moments, as you’d expect, there is no resolution at the end, and nothing in the way of miraculous cure. The best that can be hoped for is that if huge steps forward are made in patient’s understanding of their illness then perhaps they can be shifted from this appalling warehouse to a day center, spending nights at home, being treated during the day, much of their rehabilitation depending on reconnecting with the world rather than being shut off from it.

Lorna (Polly Bergen) hasn’t recovered from the death of her child, sees every consoling move from husband Jim (Robert Vaughn) as an attempt to instigate sex. Sex worker Marion (Janis Paige) is intent on getting drunk, from cocktails of any item that could contain alcohol, Edna (Barbara Barrie) is mute. New nurse Alison (Diane McBain), coming up against the old school Nurse Bracken (Constance Ford), is given a savage reality check.

Much of the tale is just about permitting the patients humanity, to see each other not as terminal victims of their illness, but to have human contact and interaction with others in the same boat. Naturally, feelings run high and the incidents I have mentioned recognize the dangers inherent in exploring new methods and the freedom that involves.

Joan Crawford (Berserk, 1967), permed within an inch of her life, has a ball as the tough cookie, the Nurse Ratched of her day, and would steal the show except for the sympathetic playing of Robert Stack (The Corrupt Ones/The Peking Medallion, 1967) and for the fact that Janis Paige (Welcome to Hard Times, 1967) is hellbent on stealing the show. It’s left to Polly Bergen (Kisses for My President, 1964) to put in the hard yards of showing the bewilderment and confusion that affects anyone struck down by mental illness.

Hall Bartlett (All the Young Men, 1960) is triple hyphenate here – writer, producer and director – and does a swell job of putting forth the argument without giving in to sentimentality.

Worth a watch.

Two Gentlemen Sharing (1969) ***

Shelved was a polite term for what happened to this picture. It was funded by Paramount but they didn’t like the look of the finished article. It could have gone straight into the bin, but it was reprieved, sold onto AIP which was looking to shift away from horror and biker movies into mainstream productions. But though it was made in Britain and therefore would qualify for both the Levy tax credit and the quota system, AIP couldn’t find a British distributor to take it on, not even after being selected as the official UK entry to the Venice Film Festival and impressing New York critics. It wasn’t shown on a British screen until 2017.

So what the heck was wrong with it? I had wrongly assumed that the title was a hint that the two gentlemen were gay, but that isn’t the case.

We open with a fellow with a plummy voice called Andrew Mackenzie (Hal Frederick) calling round London landlords looking for digs. He’s a solicitor, wears a bowler hat, was educated at Oxford University, even famously scored a century in a cricket match – and you can’t fit in any more than being a top-class cricketer. But doors which would open for anyone else with such a pedigree are closed to him.

Problem is – he’s Black. He’s of Jamaican descent. He’s not homeless, he’s got digs in Brixton, a noted Black community. Eventually, he finds accommodation in very posh Knightsbridge with ad man Roddy (Robin Philips).

Racism had been tackled in the movie world primarily through the aegis of Sidney Poitier. His three 1967 films – To Sir, With Love, In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, had all concluded on the upbeat. The Black man was accorded acceptance and respect.

That doesn’t happen here. The N-word is in common use. Andrew ends up being tossed out of the apartment by his landlady for essentially conforming to the cliché of being a “sexual degenerate,” i.e. for making too much noise while having sex. Eventually, he decides he’ll never fit in in Britain and returns to Jamaica.

But while the film deals bluntly with issues of endemic racism in British culture, it also tackles the problems facing the more socially aware, who tie themselves in knots trying to prove they are not racists. Although on the face of it accepting his flatmate’s color, Roddy has problems with his own beliefs. He’s certainly jealous of Andrew’s supposed sexual prowess, to the point of clearly believing he will enjoy more sexual freedom should he hitch up with a Black woman, and at various points exhibits inappropriate behavior towards them.

He also can’t come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend Jane (Judy Geeson) is not only very popular with Black men but has been brought up by a Black man after her own White father died when she was very young. To prove his liberal credentials once and for all, Andrew hosts a massive party in the apartment, inviting a crowd of Blacks, but when his drunken overtures to Black women are rejected, the party ends in disaster.

The characters are well drawn. Andrew is no saint. He’s misogynistic for a start, determining that his girlfriend Caroline (Esther Anderson) should do all the cooking and household chores. He’s arrogant and selfish, often grumpy. In other words, as human as the next guy.

Roddy is insecure. His job has none of the glamor we associate with advertising. His biggest decisions concern how many chips to have on a plate being photographed for an advertisement. Although coming from a wealthy background, his parents are now so impoverished they live in the squalid basement of a stately home. He has no understanding of women, tending to make too many of the wrong assumptions. So, just another young fella having problems growing up.

You’d think – and Roddy certainly thinks – that in the ad world he’d have a bevy of young women at his beck and call as does his colleague Phil (Norman Rossington) who, despite clearly taking advantage of his position in terms of seduction opportunities, is more enlightened – he has a Black girlfriend.

The movie’s very fair in determining when characters feel out of place. While Andrew struggles in the White world, Roddy and to a certain extent Phil struggle in the Black social world, bounding about awkwardly at a “jump-up”, the name given to a dance featuring Black music.

Given the actors are all primarily newcomers, showing promise is the extent of the acting. Reportedly Hal Frederick’s (Sandokan, 1964) plummy British accent was dubbed, but it is adequate for the task in hand which is to explore the minefield of the often unexplored aspects of British racism at a time when large-scale immigration was limited to certain cities and when the country still believed in “fair play” or convinced itself it did.

Robin Phillips (Decline and Fall…of a Birdwatcher, 1968) has a more complex part, needy, weak, his unformed unappealing character turning up at the edges. Judy Geeson (Three into Two Won’t Go, 1969) is better and Norman Rossington (Tobruk, 1967) throws himself into a peach of a part. Esther Anderson (The Touchables, 1968) is appreciated.

Canadian director Ted Kotcheff (Life at the Top, 1965) pulls no punches and certainly there is no sign of sentimentality or that, somehow, everything will all come good in the end. Screenplay by debutant David Stuart Leslie from the bestseller by Evan Jones.

Worth seeing if only to ask why we were kept from seeing it for so long. You can catch it on Amazon Prime at the moment.