Drama – Page 22 – The Magnificent 60s

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) **

Hollywood isn’t known for its sensitivity, and this is one of those major misjudgements. An incredibly rich family, ripe with entitlement, find World War Two tough going, in the main because as in Counterpoint (1968), they consider themselves exempt. Being Argentinians, they are neutral.

Unfortunately, it just so happens, with that wealthy person’s penchant for flaunting their wealth in the world’s richest cities, they end up in Paris on the eve of war, ignoring the warning of family patriarch (Lee J. Cobb) who is convinced the titular “four horsemen of the apocalypse” (war, conquest, death and pestilence, in case you don’t know your Bible) are on the march. Not that we see much of that in the French capital, except in newsreel, details of the war delivered in snippets of dialog (“haven’t you heard about Dunkirk?”), and street-loads of refugees.

Because, don’t you know it, our major players, the Desnoyers and Laurient families, are largely immune. Man-about-town and Argentinian art connoisseur Julio Desnoyers (Glenn Ford) – ignoring the entreaties of his father Marcelo (Charles Boyer) to scarper – is making a move on married Frenchwoman Marguerite Laurient (Ingrid Thulin), bored by newspaper editor husband Etienne (Paul Heinreid) who spends way too much time worrying about impending war.

Julio is so rich that even after the German invasion sends the poor of the city – and its Jewish population – racing about terrified for their lives, he can swan around, enjoying fine food in top-class restaurants much as before and even has the temerity to tell a high-ranking German General von Kleig (George Dolenz) that his wealth makes him immune. The general reckons that his rank gives him any woman he wants. “She’s mine,” is Julio’s rather misogynistic retort when the general attempts to appropriate Marguerite.

Meanwhile, though Julio is still slow to catch on, his sister Chi Chi (Yvette Mimieux) has only gone and joined the Resistance and Etienne has also upset the new masters, so Julio has to go begging cousin Heinrich (Carl Boehm), who has exploited his German origins to achieve military high rank, to provide them with a get-out of-jail-free card.

When Etienne is released, Marguerite is initially inclined to stick with Julio until guilt gets the upper hand. Julio, with no lover to keep him happy, eventually throws his lot in with the Resistance, but there’s no happy ending for anyone.

Director Vincente Minnelli (Two Weeks in Another Town, 1962) is terrific at marshalling his set pieces, using widescreen to excellent advantage, cramming extra bodies in at the edges, but since these sequences tend to be little more than extended talk-fests – the activities that got Chi Chi and Etienne imprisoned are ignored – no amount of directorial skill in the world is going to salvage a movie so weighted down with dead wood.

Glenn Ford (Rage, 1966) does his very best to give the viewer something to hold onto. He avoids every shade of angst in his determination to have as much as fun as possible regardless of any situation. He’s scarcely had the chance to be so carefree on screen and he is at his charming best, and he does lift what is otherwise a somber encounter.

Ingrid Thulin (Return from the Ashes, 1965) has her moments, especially when her diplomatic skills prevent a party being ruined, and she enjoys some flighty repartee with Ford, but once the romance gets heavy her personality undergoes a U-turn and she’s holding onto angst for dear life. And there’s a twist in her character that makes no sense. When Etienne emerges from prison a broken man, she gives him both barrels, and declares her love for Julio only for shortly after to recant and dump Julio. Seems mighty insensitive and bordering on cruelty to deal her husband such a blow when he has been tortured by the Nazis. Though she might not have been so forgiving had she worked out just why Etienne was freed and Chi Chi not.

After the colossal success of Ben-Hur (1959), which set the roadshow ball rolling, MGM was on a remake crusade. As well as Ben-Hur, it had remade Cimarron (1960) – the original 1931 version an Oscar-winner and hot box office. The fact that that flopped didn’t deter the studio. The silent version of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), set against the background of World War I, transformed Rudolph Valentino into a superstar and netted MGM a fortune. The new version sank like a stone, perhaps because it was too wordy for roadshow, or perhaps, more likely, Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) had taken a bolder look at World War Two.

A mis-hit.

REVIEWED PREVIOUSLY IN THE BLOG: Glenn Ford in Experiment in Terror (1962), Love Is a Ball (1963), Advance to the Rear / Company of Cowards (1964), Fate Is the Hunter (1964), The Money Trap (1965), Is Paris Burning? (1966), Rage (1966), The Last Challenge / The Pistolero of Red River (1967), A Time for Killing (1967), Day of the Evil Gun (1968), Heaven with a Gun (1969; Ingrid Thulin in Return from the Ashes (1965); Yvette Mimieux in The Time Machine (1960), The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962), Diamond Head (1962), Joy in the Morning (1965), The Reward (1965), The Caper of the Golden Bulls (1967), Dark of the Sun (1968), The Picasso Summer (1969); Vincente Minnelli directed Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) and Goodbye Charlie (1964).

The Pawnbroker (1964) *****

Director Sidney Lumet (The Group, 1966) could have made an excellent film just about the customers of a pawn shop, the haunted individuals haggling for more cash than they will ever be paid, the sad sacks, junkies, lost souls and general losers whose stories are told in the items they pawn or redeem – candlesticks, lamps, radios, musical instruments, occasionally themselves. You don’t need to be a pawnbroker to know that three tough guys turning up with a pricey lawnmower are dealing in stolen property.

And it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the pawnbroker is involved in some kind of money-laundering scam for a local gangster. Clearly shot on location on a bustling low-rent area, north of 116^th St in East Harlem, New York, there’s enough going on in the streets – the markets, the tenements, poolrooms, the bustle, the eternal noise – to keep you hooked.

But you might think twice about positing as your hero an “absolute bastard” as Lumet himself described shop owner Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger). He is more haunted than any of his clientele, a Holocaust survivor, plagued by flashbacks to the concentration camp where he witnessed his son die and his wife raped. He is devoid of life, completely shut down to any emotion, rejecting overtures of friendship, and his life is played out in tiny elliptical shreds.

He does not even derive any enjoyment out of his affair with a widow and although he claims to worship money – according to him the only absolute outside of the speed of light – that brings no fulfillment either. He is accused of being among “the walking dead.” It is surprising he has lasted so long without imploding After his war experience, you would have to wonder at a man who spends his life behind the bars of the grille in his shop and just in case he considers escaping from his predicament designer Richard Sylbert (Chinatown, 1973) incorporates other visual aspects of imprisonment into the production.

Around Sol are a set of very lively characters, his ambitious assistant Jesus (Jaime Sanchez) trying to go straight and his girlfriend (Thelma Oliver), a very smooth and wealthy gay gangster (Brock Peters), and a trio of small-time hoods with whom the assistant is friendly. But also the deranged and the lonely. A widowed social worker Marilyn (Geraldine Fitzgerald) who suffers from the “malady of loneliness” offers him friendship but is rejected.

There is little plot to speak of but just enough to teeter him on the brink of self-destruction. So it is primarily a character study. Unusually, Lumet observes without any sentimentality those around Steiger. “Sol has buried himself in this,” Lumet wrote in Films and Filming magazine (October 1964, p17-20) “because he needs to be with people that he can despise…This is a man who is in such agony that he must feel nothing, or he will go to pieces.” There is no redemption and he lacks the courage to commit suicide. It’s a stunning, bold picture, as raw as you can get without turning into a bloodsucker.

The film had a few firsts. It was the only mainstream American picture to deal with the Holocaust from the perspective of a survivor (although films like Judgement at Nuremberg, 1961, had shown aspects of the camp victims). It broke mainstream conventions on nudity, bare breasts being seen for the first time. Lumet experimented with incredibly short cuts – just one-frame and two-frames in places (a technique he had first used in television)- when the standard assumption was that audiences required three frames to register an image.

Rod Steiger (No Way to Treat a Lady, 1968) gives a very restrained performance, especially for an actor known for his volubility and over-acting. He seems to sink into the role. Brock Peters (Major Dundee, 1965) plays not just the first openly gay person in a mainstream picture, but the first gay African American.

Excellent support includes Jaime Sanchez (The Wild Bunch, 1969), Thelma Oliver (Black Like Me, 1964) and Geraldine Fitzgerald (Rachel, Rachel, 1968). Quincy Jones made his debut as a movie composer. If you listen closely you might detect a piece of music later made famous by the Austin Powers pictures and if you look closely to might spot a debut sighting of Morgan Freeman. Screenplay by the writing team of David Friedkin and Morton Fine (The Fool Killer, 1965) based on the bestseller by Edward Lewis Wallant.

Unmissable.

Some People (1962) ***

Bet you didn’t know the Duke of Edinburgh (yep, that one, the recently deceased husband of the recently-deceased Queen Elizabeth II) was involved in the movies. Or that a film set up with the express purpose of promoting his Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme could actually be any good.

A slice-of-life British picture that steers clear of the “kitchen sink,” so lives not blighted by alcohol, sex, abuse, unemployment which means no single mothers, no out-of-their head drunks, no railing at the government, no bloody violence. Instead, you’ve got kids in dead end jobs, refusing to conform, and then finding responsibility isn’t such a trial after all.

Not sure this notion qualifies as a promo for the Duke’s Scheme, but the movie’s probably best known for showing young women how to shrink their jeans skin-tight and, surprisingly, passing on the notion that your father would happily tolerate such behavior.

Three tearaways involved in an accident with their motorbikes lose their licences and at a loose end stumble across a benevolent choir master Smith (Kenneth More) who lets them use his church hall to rehearse their band. This is pre-Beatles so no mop-tops and screaming, but music with shades of Helen Shapiro and The Shadows, and the fancy footwork that was all the rage at the time.

The line-up is Johnnie (Ray Brooks) on piano and third guitar, Bert (David Hemmings) and bespectacled Tim (Timothy Nightingale) – a replacement for the disgruntled Bill (David Andrews). And they are joined by drummer Jimmy (Frankie Dymon) and singer Terry (Angela Douglas). The Award Scheme – a way of giving young people something to do and encouraging them to try an activity outside their usual sphere – malarkey is eased cleverly into the script, eventually becoming a challenge, though it’s somewhat gender-defined, Terry taking up knitting, while Bert helps make a canoe and plans the kind of outbound expedition with which the scheme was most associated.

There’s a punch-up and (gosh!) tables and tablecloths and crockery are destroyed, but mostly it’s just teenagers getting rid of their angst in ways that don’t define their lives (i.e. pregnant girlfriend or spell in jail.) The bulk of the aggravation comes from Bill, who refuses to join in, gets cross at being called a “teddy boy” and that his girlfriend Terry is making a play for Johnnie.

However, Johnnie is sweet on Smith’s daughter Anne (Anneka Wills), so there’s some sexual tension. Though the sexual element, despite the jeans scene, is conspicuously underplayed. Johnnie doesn’t even get to what was misogynistically referred to as “first base” in those days, restricted to kissing and a gentle hug. His romance is inevitably doomed because Anne wants to go away to college, but, by this time, despite an initial angry response, he’s grown-up enough to accept it and realize how much he’s benefitted from the relationship.

Although the actual music is supplied by The Eagles (no, not those ones), it helps that the actors look as if they know their way around music, although what they play is hardly sophisticated by the later standards of the decade.

Critics might have preferred the more violent motorbikers of The Damned (1962) or The Leather Boys (1964) and the working class milieu of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), but this depiction of suburban life (it’s set in Bristol) is more in line with director Clive Donner’s later Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968).

You could have a high old time arguing which film is the more realistic, the ones over-teeming with violence, disillusionment and sex, or ones where real ordinary life rarely touches such dramatic heights and relies more on people working their way through real or imagined difficulties. The slice-of-life elements involve a cigarette factory, fish-and-chips, blaring television, a father (Harry H. Corbett) out of touch with this son (one of the best scenes), roller skating, youngsters drinking Coca Cola and not booze (Johnnie has to be introduced, against his wishes, to alcohol by his father), hire purchase and a deluge of advertising promising a better life.

And it’s anchored by Kenneth More (The Comedy Man, 1964), who did this film for nothing with the unexpected bonus of meeting his third wife, Angela Douglas. On the basis of this performance, you wouldn’t be expecting David Hemmings (Blow-Up, 1966) to become the break-out star – he’s billed sixth – rather than young male lead Ray Brooks (The Knack, 1965). Angela Douglas popped up in Maroc 7 (1967) but was better known as a Carry On semi-regular. Anneke Wilks was one of The Pleasure Girls (1965) but more at home in television.

On a side note, I realized that the council-run buses in every big city had their own primary colors. Red, obviously, for London, but Bristol chose a virulent green while I remember the vehicles in my home town of Glasgow being yellow-and-green and I wondered if there was some official body that assigned color in this fashion. An idle thought.

Much better than you might expect from a movie whose main aim was to promote a scheme set up to help teenagers find their feet.

Age of Consent (1969) ***

Reputations were made and broken on this tale of a jaded artist returning to his homeland to rediscover his mojo. Director Michael Powell had, in tandem with partner Emeric Pressburger, created some of the most acclaimed films of the 1940s – A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) – but the partnership had ended the next decade. Powell’s solo effort Peeping Tom (1960) was greeted with a revulsion from which his career never recovered. Age of Consent was his penultimate picture but the extensive nudity and the age gap between the principals left critics shaking their heads.

For Helen Mirren, on the other hand, it was a triumphant start to a career that has now spanned over half a century, one Oscar and three nominations. She was a burgeoning theatrical talent at the Royal Shakespeare Company when she made her movie debut as Mason’s muse. It should also be pointed out that when it came to scene-stealing she had a rival in the pooch Godfrey.

You would rightly be concerned that there was some grooming going on. Although 24 at the time of the film’s release, Cora (Helen Mirren), an under-age nymph, spends a great deal of time innocently cavorting naked in the sea off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. But there are a couple of provisos. In the first place, Cora was not swimming for pleasure, she was diving for seafood to augment her impoverished lifestyle. In the second place, she was so poor she would hardly have afforded a bikini and was the kind of free spirit anyway who might have shucked one off.

Thirdly, and more importantly, artist Bradley Morahan (James Mason) wasn’t interested. He wasn’t the kind of painter who needed to perve on young girls. An early scene showed him in bed with a girlfriend and it was clear that he was an object of lust elsewhere. Morahan, fit and tanned, obsessed like any other artist about his talent, and was in this remote stretch not to hunt for young naked girls but to find inspiration. As well as eventually painting Cora, he also transforms the shack he rents into something of beauty.

Morahan is vital to Cora’s self-development. The money he pays her for modelling goes towards her escape fund. Her mother being a useless thieving alcoholic, she has little in the way of role model. And the world of seafood supply is competitive. She is lost in paradise and the scene of her buying a tacky handbag demonstrates the extent of her initial ambition. Although her physical attributes attract male attention, it is only on forming a relationship with the painter that Cora begins to believe in herself. There’s not much more to the central story than the artist rediscovering his creative spark and helping Cora’s personal development along the way.

Morahan is a believable character. He is not an impoverished artist. Far from being self-deluded, he is a questing individual, turning his back on easy money and the temptations of big city life in order to reinvent himself. He isn’t going to starve and he has no problems with women. And he is perfectly capable of looking after himself. A more rounded artist would be hard to find. Precisely because there is no sexual relationship with Cora, the movie, as a film about character development, is ideally balanced.

The movie is gorgeously filmed, with many aerial shots of the reef and underwater photography by Ron and Valerie Taylor.

What does let the show down is a proliferation of cliched characters who over-act. Nat Kelly (Jack McGowran), sponging friend, ruthless seducer and thief, leads that list closely followed by Cora’s grandmother (Neva Carr-Glynn) who looks like a reject from a Dickens novel. There’s also a dumb and dumber cop and a neighbor so bent on sex that she falls for Kelly. It’s not the first time that comedy has got in the way of art, but it’s a shame it had to interrupt so often what is otherwise a touching film.

At its heart is a portrait of the artist as an older man and his sensitive relationship with a young girl. In later years, Powell married film editor Thelma Schoonmaker and after his death she oversaw the restoration of Age of Consent, with eight minutes added and the Stanley Myers score replaced by the original by Peter Sculthorpe.

Unusually sensitive screenplay from Peter Yeldham who, as my readers will know, is more usually associated with Harry Alan Towers productions like Bang! Bang! You’re Dead / Our Man in Marrakesh (1966), based on the novel by Norman Lindsay.

Intriguing, occasionally moving, superb debut from Mirren plus it works.

Model Shop (1969) ***

Surprising number of similarities to The Appointment (1969), including the aura of seediness, but lacking that film’s inherent tension or style. Lola (Anouk Aimee) is another model pursued by a another man who catches a glimpse of her in the street as in the Lumet affair. But it turns out a “model shop” is a tacky dive where men pay to take photographs of semi-naked women rather than anything to do with haute couture.

Lola is as depressed as Carla in The Appointment and for the same reason, abandoned by her boyfriend, who has gone off to gamble in Las Vegas. But new lover George (Gary Lockwood) is the antithesis of the successful Omar Sharif. You are inclined to give him a free pass because he’s got the draft hanging over him.

If he was disaffected, that could explain it. But he’s just bone idle, sponging off everyone in sight, musician friends and more ambitious girlfriend Gloria (Alexandra Hay), an actual model, though more in the commercial line than high fashion, but bringing in enough to pay his bills.

You might feel sorry for him that “the man” is trying to repossess his car until you see it’s an MG coupe that an unemployed guy could not afford and that when he does get enough cash to pay the outstanding payment he comes up with another excuse rather than parting with the money. He studied architecture but hasn’t the gumption to make his way in the adult world whereas Gloria accepts she might have to sit in a bathtub naked for a potential client if she wants to get on.

He won’t marry Gloria or give her a child so she’s full of empty threats to leave him but doesn’t carry that out until she discovers photos of Lola that he’s left lying around. There’s not much going on. It’s certainly a downmarket world. George and Gloria lived in a rundown suburb of Los Angeles with a pumpjack drilling for oil outside their front door.

A good chunk of time is spent on the road, not “out along the highway looking for adventure” as in Easy Rider (1969) and not in the great outdoors, but mindless drifting, or tailing Lola, around L.A.. There’s some kind of deadline on their romance – she’s headed home to France, his call-up is immediately imminent so unless there’s some expose of the seedier side of the city going on there’s not much else, just two people who lost their way finding brief solace in each other.

Anyone attracted by Anouk Aimee’s top billing is going to be disappointed, not in her performance, which reveals a markedly vulnerable gal beneath the glam (though she does dress haute couture). But Gary Lockwood (They Came to Rob Las Vegas, 1968) is front and central; she doesn’t turn up until about a third of the way through and only has a handful of scenes thereafter. So it’s that kind of slice-of-life movie, what the British used to term a “kitchen sink” picture, and takes place over a short time-span.

Gary Lockwood is excellent but he’s not asked to do very much, and you kind of get the impression he’s just being his charming self. Aimee seems to have cornered the market in playing “degrading” women, accused of being a sex worker in The Appointment and loaned out to high-class friends of her husband in Justine (1969). In some senses, bringing out the character behind the tawdry image appears her forte. Alexandra Hay (Skidoo, 1968) is equally good, the grit behind the glam, not just a pretty face.

But just nothing happens. The background – the draft, potential Vietnam peace talks, the occasional joint – is scarcely a visceral snapshot of America at the time. European director looks at America and doesn’t much like what he sees, but less obviously a commentary on society along the lines of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point the following year or even the home-grown Medium Cool (1969).

And lacking the style of Demy’s previous outing, the exuberant musical The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and you keep on expecting – hoping – the characters are going to burst into song. Oddly enough, it suffers from an unexpected culture clash. Relocate the same characters and the same story to Paris, speaking French with subtitles, and it would have worked better no matter how slight the story because it would automatically be infected by Gallic charm and even the poorer streets there would be interesting.

Carole Eastman (Five Easy Pieces, 1970) a.k.a. Adrien Joyce contributed to Demy’s screenplay. Members of rock band Spirit appear in the film and provide several tracks but there was no soundtrack album to take advantage of their involvement.

You might be interested to know that Harrison Ford was at one time up to play the lead. Hay was a starlet under contract to Columbia who financed the film. Equally oddly, it was not sufficiently arthouse to appeal to the cognoscenti and it was little surprise that the studio eventually chose to promote the seedier aspects in the marketing.

The Appointment (1969) ****

You can see why MGM dumped this. Just as easily as you can see its attraction for star Omar Sharif, his boldest-ever role, completely against type, burying the romantic hero in one fell swoop. It wasn’t just the arthouse pretensions – the absurdly long, by Hollywood standards, long shots held for an insanely long time and the greatest aerial shot, almost to the moon and back, ever devised – that made the studio cut and run faced with the impossibility of selling Omar Sharif as a creepy, repressed guy who drives his wife to suicide.

Luxuriant moustache trimmed to look like a ramrod British colonel, often bespectacled, unmarried middle-aged lawyer Federico (Omar Sharif) takes a fancy to the withdrawn Carla (Anouk Aimee), fiancée of legal buddy Renzo (Fausto Tozzi). She works as a model in a high-class fashion house.

So Federico is shocked to discover that Renzo has dumped her after discovering evidence, somewhat circumstantial it has to be said, that she moonlights as an equally high-class sex worker who takes occasional assignments from antiques dealer Emma (Lotte Lenya). Now that Carla is unencumbered in the marital stakes, Federico undertakes to discover whether the accusation is indeed correct. If not, then he reckons, she might well fall for him, if only on the rebound, after all he is very successful and, despite the geeky haircut and moustache, a handsome dude.

It’s left to your imagination whether Federico actually has sex with the young woman – who “could pass for 17” and arrives clutching schoolbooks – for whom he pays 100,000 lire (around $1,000) but my guess is he does, getting her to pretend he’s her Latin schoolmaster. So that’s the Omar Sharif romantic persona killed off right there and from then on it’s hard to muster any sympathy for the character, every bit as obsessive, say, as James Stewart in Vertigo (1958).

This has a Hitchcockian aura, an atmosphere of stealth and secrecy and chill. He ends up marrying her, turns into a control freak, refuses to let her go out to work, complains about her make-up, asks where she’s been. He gets it into his head that she’s back to her old tricks and rekindles the investigation. She becomes more withdrawn and eventually commits suicide. The ideal ending, the arthouse ending, would have left Federico forever puzzled, not knowing whether he had married a hooker or not, whether, for all his caution, he had been duped. But that’s not the way with what you would otherwise describe as a psychological thriller – calling it a big-budget arthouse picture from a major studio by a relatively unacclaimed (outside of The Pawnbroker, 1964) mainstream director would not be an option – so we get a twist at the end.

This isn’t your usual Italy either, it’s not set in a sun-drenched land with impeccable beaches and ladies wandering around with cleavage abounding. This is the Italy of traffic jams and rain and wind and huge brown waves battering the shore and buttoned-up women.

And audiences have rarely been presented with such a depressing insecure female character. You get the impression she wears fabulous clothes to hide, not glorify, her body. She might come across as playing with Federico, pretending to be asleep when he comes to bed during a romantic weekend on a remote island, the woman way out of his league who wants to keep him at a distance while she makes up her mind. But that interpretation would only be from Federico’s perspective. Otherwise, an attendant viewer would note that she doesn’t seem at all comfortable with life, and that abandoned by one lover without finding out why she can’t risk losing her heart to another.

Had this been made by Visconti or Antonioni (Blow-Up, 1966, went down a similar suspicious route) it might have been acceptable as a distribution vehicle for MGM (after all, they did pump millions into Zabriskie Point, 1970). The odd thing was, the arthouse mob didn’t like it either, showing disdain in the most publicly humiliating manner possible, audiences at Cannes booing it off the screen.

But once you accept the odd premise and equally fall in with the seedy character depicted by Omar Sharif, you begin to feel its power. The daring camerawork is exceptional, some of the scenes in extreme long shot contain as their essence elements of intimacy, and the world’s greatest aerial shot pulls away from the picture’s most romantic scene, as if giving indication of what is not well, rather than enveloping the characters with the usual background of nature at its most rapturous. And it’s pretty much silent, a John Barry theme dips in and out, but scarcely swells when it does, on a rare occasion, appear, so this plays out without much in the way of musical nods to the audience.

Outside of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), this is easily Omar Sharif’s greatest performance. His gamble in parlaying his box office marquee and universal romantic appeal (he appeared in Mayerling, the ultimate romantic tale, the same year) to take on this unappealing role showed a commitment to expanding his screen persona that went unrewarded. Anouk Aimee, anointed one of the screen’s biggest female romantic leads after the unexpected success of A Man and a Woman (1966), is also playing against type.

Sidney Lumet went through a distinctly lean period between The Pawnbroker and his 1970s output – The Anderson Tapes (1971), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) – and while The Pawnbroker presented an equally disaffected character he was crying out for your sympathy. You could almost view The Appointment as an exercise in style and the director trying to see, in terms of narrative and character, what he could get away with, and to become the director stars would trust when they wanted to shake up their screen persona – witness Sean Connery as a criminal and Al Pacino as a gay bank-robber.

Critics have avoided this like the plague – three reviews on imdb, only one on Rotten Tomatoes – so if that’s not a sign of being under-rated I don’t know what is.

It’s different for sure but that doesn’t make it any less worth seeing. And it would certainly fit in with the expectations of a contemporary audience.

C.C. and Company (1970) *

Just terrible. Not even the presence of Ann-Margret (The Swinger, 1966) can save this. Scarcely a single redeeming feature and nothing that might lend itself to shift it into the So Bad It’s Good category. In fact, you would probably put it in a lower class, the So Bad It’s Worse Than You Can Possibly Imagine strata. Little seen for over half a century, and small wonder.

And, boy, did Ann-Margret need a hit after a three-year self-imposed exile in Italy, where she earned big bucks for pictures that hardly got a sniff on the U.S. release circuit, putting an almighty dent in her marquee value. In theory, she should have returned home with a bang, as female lead in a Stanley Kramer production, R.P.M. (1970), the most prestigious picture she had ever been associated with, and easily the best director. But that, riding the counter-culture wave, was a big flop.

This was her second attempt at counter-culture. Motorbike sagas were bankable after the success of Easy Rider (1969) and even as B-pictures had attracted decent audiences for the likes of The Wild Angels (1967) and Run, Angel, Run (1969).

But this was saddled with a terrible star in Joe Namath, and a terrible script by Roger Smith (The First Time, 1969), Ann-Margret’s husband-manager, that puts the wild boys of the highways in a motocross competition, swapping their high-powered bikes for the much smaller Kawasaki engines used in that sport.

If you were American, Joe Namath was a god. If you were foreign, he was a nobody. One of the country’s greatest American football (not soccer!) players, he had made his movie debut in another flop, Norwood (1969). My guess is Ann-Margret was there to help out her husband, also the producer, and beef up the marquee.

But C.C. Ryder (Joe Namath) looks more like an overgrown schoolboy, hulking though he is, than a Hell’s Angel. For the lack of believability he invests in the role you would have done as well with pop star Fabian (Ten Little Indians, 1965).

Anyway, on with the barmy story. So, fashion director Ann (Ann-Margret) has the bright idea, as fashion directors did in those days, of setting up a shoot against the backdrop of a motocross event, kind of like Zabriskie Point (1970) but with bikes. On the way, her car breaks down. The two passing bikers who come to her rescue have something else in mind and she is only saved from rape by the intervention of Ryder.

He belongs to a biking troupe headed by Moon (William Smith), the misogynist’s misogynist, who slaps his women around and sends them out to prostitute themselves on the highways because unlike the enterprising chaps from Easy Rider he’s not got the brains to set up a drugs operation. Then he gets the inspired notion of picking up easy money by sending his guys to compete in the motocross competition because, surely, them being serious motorbike freaks they can beat the hell out of any professional motocross rider who does this for a living.

No doubt audiences will be rooting for the amateurs the way they do for the young kids in other movies that need to put on their own show to save an orphanage or the like.

Naturally, Ryder falls for Ann. Equally naturally, Moon doesn’t like that one bit. And so kidnaps Ann, ensuring Ryder comes to the rescue. Cue a showdown. No doubt we’ll see an almighty battle with chains and wrenches and surely there will be a flashing blade or two as this pair roll around in the dust.

Nope! Let’s just find a handy football stadium and race round the athletic dirt track. That’s bound to be more exciting. You would get more excitement watching goldfish in a bowl.

Theoretically, the combination of Namath and Ann-Margret should have reached the incendiary levels of football star Jim Brown’s sexual tussle with Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles (1969). Nope. Namath has all the screen charisma of a beetle and there’s nothing Ann-Margret can do to help that. You couldn’t have wasted her first nude scene on someone less deserving.

As you might expect, Ann-Margret does get to dance, but for some reason the camera is more focused on Namath who is lacking in the shake-your-booty department.

There is one decent scene and one interesting shot. Unfortunately, the only good scene is the opener, giving a false sense that this might be an interesting picture. It involves Namath “grazing” his way round a supermarket, making up a sandwich from easily available ingredients, even stealing a tissue from a box to wipe his lips. What a rascal, no wonder everyone would be terrified of such a biker. And in the climactic race one of the bikers hits a fence that collapses concertina style.

But that’s it, a 94-minute vanity project that killed off Namath’s movie career and nearly put the kibosh on Ann-Margret’s. You can’t really blame television director Seymour Robbie (Marco, 1973) for failing to improve the material or the stars.

Sometimes being a completist (in this case following Ann-Marget’s career) has its down side.

PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED IN THE BLOG: Ann-Margret in State Fair (1962), Viva Las Vegas (1964), Kitten with a Whip (1964), The Pleasure Seekers (1964), Bus Riley’s Back in Town (1965), Once a Thief (1965), The Cincinnati Kid (1965), Made in Paris (1966), The Swinger (1966), Stagecoach (1966), Appointment in Beirut/Rebus (1968), Criminal Affair/Criminal Symphony (1968).

Shock Corridor (1963) *****

Sam Fuller’s (The Naked Kiss, 1964) masterpiece, targeting every conceivable taboo subject – incest, sexual abuse, racism, the atomic bomb – under the guise, as with the later Shock Treatment (1964), of a sane man entering a mental asylum with the aim of uncovering criminality. In this case, uber-ambitious journalist Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), with his eyes on a Pulitzer Prize, undergoes training from psychiatrist Dr Fong (Philip Ahn) to pass himself off as insane in a bid to find the killer of an inmate called Sloane.

Apparently, in those days in the U.S., incest, while viewed as sexual deviation, was also considered a mental illness. So when Barrett’s girlfriend, stripper Cathy (Constance Towers), turns up at a police station masquerading as his sister and complaining of sexual molestation, he is packed off to the nearest asylum. That he passes muster is not only down to his acting (or over-acting) but to the release of his own inner demons.

Tormented by jealousy and insecurity, he imagines Cathy, dancing as a demonic miniature in his dreams, her mouth a “lush tunnel,” will abandon him for another man or just play the field, no shortage of unsuitable suitors in her line of work. For her part, Cathy finds it hard to maintain the pretence, and clearly starts to crumble under the pressure, almost giving the game away, and soon enough almost compelled to do so after seeing the impact of incarceration – and its various treatments including electric shock therapy – upon her lover.

But what a difference a director with an agenda and a knack for stunning imagery makes. While Denis Sanders with Shock Treatment (1964) and George Englund in Signpost to Murder (1964) take the melodramatic tack to mental illness, which robs the subject matter of some of its power, Sam Fuller takes a two-fisted approach. Sure, there are shades of noir in the lighting, and the internal corruption of personality, but this is a world twisted upside down, filled with intentional and accidental malevolence, often from people who don’t know the difference.

The simmering violence can explode from a minor tiff over vitamin pills, or from the wrong man entering the female quarters at the wrong time, or from deep-seated hatred, while torture is visited upon inmates from the best of intentions as psychiatrists attempt to subdue or quell the worst instincts. Best of all is the depiction of obsession. People are only committed to an asylum because they are a danger to themselves or others, in other words when what is going on in their minds has got out of control and they can think of little else but the thoughts that consume them and are condemned to play out again and again perverse versions of reality.

So we have the patient constantly singing opera who likes to stab inmates with his hands and stuff their mouths full of chewing gum, another obsessed with hide-and-seek, a third with the Civil War, yet another who steals pillowcases in order to turn them into Ku Klux Klan masks. Mental warping renders some relatively harmless and others lethal. But there are also those with nothing left on the surface, reduced to catatonic state, arms stretched out, bodies draped over a bed or a chair, and you can guess that those who still act out will eventually end up silent, helpless and rigidly comatose.

Soon you realize, as Barrett clearly does not, the futility of attempting to carry out an investigation under these circumstances. He has three witnesses to pursue, none of whom a prosecutor would ever consider putting into the witness box in a court, and eventually of course Barrett does find the murderer – the victim killed for threatening to expose an attendant preying on female patients – but by that point his mind is so jumbled up by a combination of treatment and his own psychiatric problems that he either can’t locate the name in his memory or finds himself struck dumb and hallucinating.

When he is mauled by a pack of predatory females he can just about retain his dignity, but once he visualises water pouring in from the ceiling and almost drowns in the subsequent flood, and struck by imaginary lightning to boot, he has only a few shreds of his personality left.

This is brutal stuff and even now an incredible shock to the cinematic system so you wonder how it ever managed to get released. In retrospect, not so much an expose of the treatment methods in asylums as an insight into the power of mental illness once it exerts control on hapless humans.

You won’t forget the long corridor either empty or filled with individuals bent out of shape, or Barrett battered by torrential downpour or buried under a mob of savage women, or the African American white supremacist hunting for a victim or the agony of the outsider Cathy forced into playing this terrible game.

One of those films that creates its own visual grammar. I remember the rediscovery of Sam Fuller by the cognoscenti, a director whose work stood so far outside the accepted masters of cinema like John Ford or Sergei Eisenstein or Howard Hawks that he was the very definition of cult. Critics (Phil Hardy in 1970 and Nicholas Garnham in 1972) even had the temerity to write books about him as if he was fitting company for directors who produced acknowledged masterpieces and he was lionised, in the words of Peter Cowie, “by a posse of film commandos at the Edinburgh Films Society” who hailed him as a cinematic god.

All that acclaim, driven by the French New Wave, was hard to accept because his movies were impossible to find outside of a festival retrospective, unlikely to be screened on television and in the days before VHS and DVD just nowhere to be seen. But eventually, as the books and critical articles accumulated and the films became more readily available, the attraction was obvious.

Without much in the way of Stuart Whitman’s sensitivity in Shock Treatment, Peter Breck (The Glory Guys, 1965) delivers a stunning performance, perhaps all the more so because he is blatantly on the make at the start. There’s nobody to equal Lauren Bacall for ice-cold heart in the later film, but Constance Towers (The Naked Kiss, 1964) quivering with vulnerability runs her close. Special mention in the acting stakes for Hari Rhodes (Mirage, 1965) as Trent.

Ever the multi-hyphenate, Fuller dreamed up the whole thing.

A must see.

PREVOUSLY REVIEWED IN THE BLOG: Sam Fuller’s Underworld USA (1961) and The Naked Kiss (1964); and Constance Towers in The Naked Kiss.

Shock Treatment (1964) ***

The Stuart Whitman (The Mark, 1961) retrospective sees another great performance as an inmate in a mental institution but perhaps put in the shade by Roddy McDowall (5 Card Stud, 1968) as a murderous gardener and Lauren Bacall, in her first movie in five years, as a psychiatrist in the Nurse Ratchet mold.

Though killing his wealthy boss earns Martin (Roddy MacDowall) a return to the mental asylum, the dead woman’s executor Harley Manning (Judson Laire) believes the gardener is faking it and has hidden a million dollars he says he burned. So Manning hires actor Dale (Stuart Whitman) to fake insanity, thus gaining entrance to the institution and finding out whether Martin is pretending.

Dale is pretty good at the mad act and appears initially to fool resident psychiatrist Dr Beighley (Lauren Bacall). On the other hand, he is sane enough to develop a relationship with another inmate Cynthia (Carol Lynley) whose rejection of men is equally an act.

Turns out Beighley is not fooled by either Martin or Dale. The former she takes under her wing, hoping to discover for herself the missing million bucks, the latter she had sussed out from the start, pointing to the obvious flaws in his role playing. She has a bunch of nasty medicines up her sleeve and when that doesn’t pipe Dale down she has the recourse of sending him in for electric shock treatment.

That doesn’t seem to go so far as the lobotomy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) but it renders our hero helpless, or put him out of the picture long enough for her to engage in her unscrupulous scheme of hypnotising Martin to get to the truth.

In reality, this isn’t so much an expose of the goings-on in mental hospitals so much as portrait of femme fatale going overboard. You might think Beighley would be better off getting treatment herself rather than dishing it out so deluded is she in convincing herself that Martin is sane. And there’s an absolutely fabulous pay-off in that department.

For the rest of it, she is the antithesis of the liberal psychiatrists we have mostly seen during this decade, the ones that try to find the good in their patients, helping them along to sanity, or at the very least getting them to understand the depth of their problems. That Beighley and Dr Fleming in Signpost of Murder (1964) conspire to give psychiatrists a bad name is an anomaly when mostly, as with The Mark (1961), they are of an encouraging rather than venal disposition.

Perhaps it was the very nature of the gentle psychiatrist as depicted in Hollywood that gave vent to movies that showed the darker side of the mental institutions where inmates are not only robbed of their freedom but are powerless to prevent being treated either as guinea pigs or being drugged to just shut them up or lobotomised to rid society of their unnerving instincts.

That said, seeing the patients strapped down in gurneys or incapacitated in other ways while the psychiatrist plays God is pretty strong stuff, even viewing it now nearly sixty years later. Some of the other inmates are cliché material, but by concentrating on the three characters with charisma, the enigmatic gardener, the actor attempting to put on the performance of his life and the charming duplicitous psychiatrist there’s enough meat for an entertaining drama with a powerful twist.

Of course, one of the tropes of any prison drama is that someone is innocent of their perceived guilt, and here only Dale really fits that bill, but equally since the rules relating to incarceration in this facility differ entirely from those of a prison, there is every chance that someone sane could be locked up for ever, especially if a powerful psychiatrist deems it so.

Stuart Whitman certainly plays around with his screen persona, the dandified actor entrancing a courtroom and police station with his performance, but fooling them proves easier work than duping the psychiatrist so there’s a couple of great scenes where he realizes this could be a trap of his own making – and there’s a twist in his tale, too. You might well accuse Roddy McDowall hamming it up, but actually, although he appears extrovert in fact he is introverted, concerned only with his flowers and plants, his violent side only emerging when that existence is threatened.

But Lauren Bacall (Harper, 1966) steals the show, cleverly concealing her true nature behind a convincing professional front and undone by greed.

Denis Sanders (One Man’s Way, 1964) directs from a screenplay by Sidney Boehm (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) based on the bestseller by Winifred von Atta.

Riveting performances drive this one more than the expose elements.

PREVIOUSLY REVIEWED IN THE BLOG: Stuart Whitman in Murder Inc (1960), The Mark (1961), Rio Conchos (1964), Signpost to Murder (1964) and Sands of the Kalahari (1965); Joanne Woodward in From the Terrace (1960) and A Fine Madness (1966); and Carol Lynley in The Cardinal (1963), The Pleasure Seekers (1964), Harlow (1965) Bunny Lake is Missing (1965); Danger Route (1967) and The Maltese Bippy (1969).

The Mark (1961) ****

Despite an exceptional and Oscar-nominated performance by Stuart Whitman (Rio Conchos, 1964) , I suspect modern audiences will take less kindly to this tale of convicted child molester trying to come to terms with his feelings. At least it’s considerably more honest than the creepier May December (2023) where the criminal steadfastly contended her innocence.

And I suspect, too, that Whitman’s square jaw and muscular physique got in the way of his attracting the parts for which the depths of vulnerability he was able to exhibit were most suited. He came to this straight after an action role, as the charming bad-good-guy of The Commancheros (1961) where, as far as audiences were concerned, what he did with his fists was more important that what he expressed through his eyes.

There’s a bit of a grey area that lends the convicted Jim Fuller (Stuart Whitman) the benefit of the doubt. He was found guilty of intent not of actual molestation and a goodly part of the picture is spend on examining why he went down that route, either in a group exercise in prison or one-on-one with a psychiatrist, chain-smoking Irishman Dr McNally (Rod Steiger) in both instances.

I’m not sure how the psychiatric evidence adds up, but basically, with a dominant mother who bullied his father, he grew up frightened of women, despite being attracted and attractive to them, and sought out someone with whom he felt more comfortable, less challenging, leading him to spend too much time watching children at play and eventually buying a young girl an ice cream and going out on walks with her.

It would have been too much for audiences of the time – as it even was with May December – to go into the technicalities of what he intended to do so we are left to trust his own word that he never intended to instigate anything sexual, though why kidnap a child in the first place. The second element that would fill modern audiences with alarm is that though he manages to begin a sexual relationship with a woman of his own age, secretary Ruth Leighton (Maria Schell), she is a widow with a young daughter. Most people would instantly come to the conclusion he was using mother to groom daughter.

However, the film takes the tack that he’s using the daughter to explore a normal relationship with a child, the joy of having a daughter, and the delight and happiness that a young person can bring into a dour repressed life. Dr McNally keeps on banging on that Fuller is “cured” but it’s a very uneasy watch trying to work out if he is or not.

In the event, the first time he’s alone with the girl he is photographed by a local journalist who sticks the photo on the front page, destroying the life Fuller has carefully rebuilt. He has found employment as an accountant with a sympathetic business owner Andrew Clive (Donald Wolfit), fitting in so well he is promoted, though at odds with another senior employee Roy Milne (Paul Rogers). He is chucked out of his accommodation, loses his job and although Ruth initially stands by him the minute she sees Fuller with her daughter her instincts are hostile.

There would be no point in an actor trying to gain sympathy for such an unsympathetic character by playing to the gallery with bouts of temper or floods of self-pitying tears, but even so, the vulnerable husk Whitman presents, his struggles with his self-contempt, his understanding of the feelings he must invoke, his determination to live as quietly as possible, almost in that determined English manner of never being heard nor seen, is what makes this film. Interestingly, he replaced Richard Burton, who pulled out at the last minute (as did Jean Simmons) and you could easily imagine with those trademark quick intakes of breath and deep growls how that actor would have played the part.

Whitman doesn’t go near any grandstanding. It’s just a heartfelt performance of a man who’s lost his way and knows he might never find his way back, haunted by his past, unable to trust himself, unable to believe that he is, in fact, cured. Probably, the biggest issue is that the movie comes down on his side, especially when he becomes one of the usual suspects in another crime involving children, though he did not commit that, and tries to suggest that a child molester will find salvation through living with a mother and child in the normal fashion. As I said, this is not my subject of expertise, thankfully, and that may be well what’s advocated rather than staying away from children altogether.

While the approach might be considered a shade naïve at the same time it does examine issues surrounding reintegration and avoids the obvious trap of attempting some kind of character redemption.

Apart from Whitman, there are good performances all round. Maria Schell, whose career within a decade would go from roadshow blockbuster Cimarron (1960) to WIP epic 99 Women (1969), subsumes her normal more glamorous persona to play a believable working mother. With his chain-smoking, Rod Steiger (The Pawnbroker, 1964) is allowed to fidget to his heart’s content but even such obvious scene-stealing only places more emphasis on the quieter Whitman. Donald Wolfit (Life at the Top, 1965), too, reins in his usual bluster.

Guy Green (The Magus, 1968) directed from a screenplay by Sidney Buchman (The Group, 1966) and Stanley Mann (The Collector, 1965) from the bestseller by Charles E. Israel.

In this instance, given the Oscar nom, Stuart Whitman could hardly be considered under-rated but over the years seems to have disappeared from sight.

Worth a look to see what he could do with the right material.