Drama – Page 9 – The Magnificent 60s

Satan Never Sleeps (1962) **

Of all the misguided sentimental anti-Communist drivel, this is a very poor swansong for triple Oscar-winning director Leo McCarey (Going My Way, 1944). A tone that’s awkward enough all the way through goes straight through the wringer when we are asked to accept without question the actions of a rapist. Such genocidal rape as the conqueror visits on the conquered would sit less comfortably with a contemporary audience.

Most of the problem is the set-up. Apart from those pesky Communists invading a Christian Mission, in other circumstances this would have settled into a verbal sparring match between about-to-retire old priest Fr Bovard (Clifton Webb minus trademark moustache), full of tetchy quips, and his younger replacement Fr O’Banion (William Holden) trying to shake off the unwelcome advances of even younger native Siu Lan (France Nuyen). There would be a servant or maybe a more high-flown doctor whom O’Banion could push Siu Lan onto.

There’s laffs aplenty if you’re easily satisfied with the likes of a servant (Burt Kwouk in an early role) who believes thieving is compatible with Christianity, O’Banion’s woeful attempts at cooking and his inability to shoo away the ardent Siu Lan, and the priests risking breaking a golden rule of their religion to enjoy a glass of wine before the clock strikes midnight.

The arrival of the Communists is not initially too tiresome, Bovard doing his best headmaster impression keeps them in line, Communist leader Chung Ren (Robert Lee), an ex-Christian, sweet on Siu Lan. Things get tricky when Chung Ren’s attempts to forcefully claim the woman are deterred by O’Banion who is tested several times on the old Christian principle of turning the other cheek before resorting to unchristian violence.

Chung Ren then rapes Siu Lan anyway. But when she stabs him in the back and the rapist is forced to ask O’Banion to go to another mission to fetch the necessary penicillin to prevent infection spreading, the older priest is inclined to ignore the request and let him die. O’Banion thinks he has struck a deal to free the old priest in exchange for fetching the medicine, but Chung Ren reneges on the agreement and the priests are tortured and stand trial.

Meanwhile, Chung Ren has a change of heart, or so it seems, after Siu Lan gives birth to his son. But, actually, this might be more to do with the fact that he has been demoted for not being a good Communist, inclined to enjoy the finer things in life rather than share them out with his comrades. And it’s only when he’s told he’s going to be sent away to some kind of Chinese Gulag that his principles make an appearance and he helps the two priests and Siu Lan and her baby to escape.

I could see maybe Siu Lan being forced into marriage by Chung Ren in the Communist state while he was in a position of importance; she would have no choice in the matter. But for her to show the same acceptance in a democracy outside China smacks of the worst kind of wishful thinking. Sure, the Christian God is all-forgiving and, technically, all Chung Ren would have to do was confess the sin of rape and equally technically he would receive absolution and therefore in the Church’s eyes be free to marry.

But O’Banion overheard the rape. He’s a witness. That’s no use in the Communist society, but in a democracy you would have thought he would have been seeking prosecution. As he was a witness and this was not something protected by the sanctuary of the confession, he would not just be perfectly within his rights but would have to seek out rule of law.

I have never heard of a rapist and the woman he raped living happily ever after and I doubt if it would ever have been considered conceivable even in the early 1960s.

That aside, William Holden (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968) and Clifford Webb, in his last picture, are good value as the squabbling priests, less so when they venture into dubious morality. France Nuyen (A Girl Named Tamiko, 1962) doesn’t get a fair shake, required to be the cliché happy grinning native and then provided with no opportunity to state her case against her rapist before she’s pushed, for the sake of a fairy tale ending, into marriage.

Written by the director and Claude Binyon (North to Alaska, 1960) from the bestseller by Pearl S. Buck.

A Dream of Kings (1969) *****

Sometimes great movies just disappear. Even if they pick up some critical traction on initial release, as here, they flop at the box office. And they are not revived because the production company goes bust or the rights are complicated. Or, more likely, they don’t fit into audience expectation. All three stars here completely play against type, outliers in career portfolios. We have become so accustomed to the attraction of stars according to their screen personas that unless they are known to completely change their screen characters with every outing anything that’s different to the norm becomes unacceptable.

Director Daniel Mann (Ada, 1961) was best known for producing Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated performances from female stars. He was immensely skilled at making audiences sympathize with the most flawed women. Here, he does the same for Anthony Quinn, in a performance that should have had Oscar voters lining up but was dismissed for all the wrong reasons. Theoretically, one of the film’s problems is the dialog. We are so used to a script full of cut-and-thrust or witty putdowns that we fail to recognize a screenplay, that in much the same way as a stage play – but without that form’s inherent artificiality – lets characters live and breathe, explore depths that are just not possible except in fleeting moments in the normal construction of a movie.

Most scenes here begin one way and then move in all sorts of directions, sometimes ending up back where they started, but most often going somewhere unexpected, not in the sense of a sudden twist, but in digging deeper into relationships and understanding that marriages are built on shifting sands, and not all of them perilous. There’s a lot of dialog and when you get a lot of long speeches it can make the actors look as though they’re hamming it up when in fact what they’re doing is opening up the character.

We shouldn’t like Matsoukas (Anthony Quinn) at all. He’s a gambler, a womanizer, drinks, comes home at sunrise, has nothing you’d call a real job.

And yet.

In his company you enter a world of possibility. By sheer force of personality he lifts gloom, even when it’s his actions that have caused it. He can convince the most downtrodden weaklings that they have something of worth.

When nobody has anything good to say about old drunk Cicero (Sam Levene), Matsoukas tells him he has a poker dealer’s graceful hands and provides solace just by befriending him. He convinces a 72-year-old man that the loss of his libido is not down to the old guy’s age but because in four years of marriage he has lost interest in his 31-year-old wife because she’s the one who has aged, physically less appealing, and then he teaches the desperate soul the gentle art of seduction, how to win a woman’s heart by putting her on a pedestal, treating her like a goddess, kissing her softly on eyes and ears rather than pawing her in frantic passion.

Just what Matsoukas’s job is – on the door it says “counsellor” which would suggest something legal – but in fact he’s a male version of an old wife and provides solutions to odd problems, a mother worried that her teenage son masturbates, for example.

He is the sort of guy who can wring triumph from disaster. He has just lost a bundle of dough at poker but the way he tells it you’d think he’d won. Instead, he appreciates the drama of it all, the way it makes a great tale even if he’s the loser. Naturally, wife Caliope (Irene Papas) doesn’t see it his way. She’s on her knees with trying to feed her three children from the scraps that fall from his gambling. Though when he wins big, they live like kings.

Although he still has a lusty sex life with Calope, and can mostly coax her round, he has fallen for widowed baker Anna (Inger Stevens), attracted to her in part to alleviate her grief, pull her out of the darkness.

And he cannot face up to the potential loss of his young son who has three months to live and has it fixed in his own mind that the boy will be cured if Matsoukas can expose him to the sunshine and the ancient gods of his Greek homeland, though he lacks the $700 required for the air fare.

Each sequence is long, carefully calibrated, giving time for the exploration of a wealth of emotions. Outside of the three main narratives are two other stand-out scenes. In his sermon a priest rails against the evils of life insurance that makes people welcome death yet argues, ironically, that death is a great joy and should not be feared. And there’s a party where Matsoukas on the dance floor is a magnet for every woman in the room.

This is an Anthony Quinn (The Shoes of the Fisherman, 1968) devoid of all trademark abrasiveness, the loud voice gone, trying to gouge every ounce of joy from a forbidding world. He has a very tender relationship with his dying son, inventing a game with fake telephones to deal with the boy’s fears, and is very playful with his two daughters. He is constantly wooing his wife, in part to ease the pain he causes her, but mostly because he wants them to get the most out of life.

This is a different Irene Papas (The Brotherhood, 1968) too, not the fiery woman or dutiful wife of her screen persona. Whatever anger she feels is subsumed by sorrow and she is always willing to let her husband fire up her heart as in the old days. Actresses don’t get such complex roles these days.

And all the pent-up fragility of Inger Stevens (Five Card Stud, 1968) is suddenly let loose as she twists her entire screen persona of tough woman in a man’s world – usually a western – on its head. Her scenes with Quinn are breathtaking. Unfortunately, this was her final film – she committed suicide shortly after. But she could not have found a better swansong, one that extended her range.

As he always does, Daniel Mann doesn’t take his main character’s side, but while extracting sympathy for character predicament and perspective, still lets the audience make up his mind. This could easily have gone all maudlin, the child miraculously recovering, the flight to Greece to find a rare cure, all Matsoukas’s delusion revealed as nothing more than true faith, but it’s more hard-edged than that. At the end Matsoukas has his exterior carapace ripped apart, beaten up, ostracized for committing the worst crime of a gambler – cheating – in dire straits.

And yet.

Written by Ian McLellan Hunter (Roman Holiday, 1953) from the bestseller by Harry Mark Petrakis.

I just adored this.

The New Interns (1964) ***

Columbia had turned this series into a glorified New Talent Contest. It didn’t spend much cash buffing up the sequel in terms of narrative or characters, so it’s mostly enjoyable to see just how well the studio was at spotting talent. In that regard this outing was as profitable as the original. This marked the debut of George Segal (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) who quickly became a major marquee name. Also brought into the mainstream was Inger Stevens (Five Card Stud, 1968). Receiving a welcome career boost was rising star Dean Jones, though Disney (The Love Bug, 1967) rather than Columbia took better advantage of his skills, and in the comedic rather than the dramatic vein.

Various stars reprised their roles including top-billed Michael Callan (You Must Be Joking, 1965), signed up to a long-term deal. But most of the others in this category made their names through television. Telly Savalas (The Assassination Bureau, 1969) was the cop Kojak (1973-1978); Stefanie Powers (Warning Shot, 1967) flourished as The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (1966-1967) and in Hart to Hart (1979-1984); and Barbara Eden went quickly into I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970).

The upshot is that, depending on your taste, you might end up talent spotting yourself, shrieking with glee at spotting an old favorite, or perhaps so many of them, in what was, effectively, an all-star (of the minor kind) cast and paying less attention to the various storylines.

Most of the narrative energy revolves around various characters coming together in romantic entanglement – Dr Alec Considine (Michael Callan), while more inclined to play the field, ends up with Nurse Laura Rogers (Barbara Eden); despite initially being at odds Dr Tony Pirelli (George Segal) and social worker Nancy Terman (Inger Stevens) hook up; and various other romances are short-lived.

Outside of this, newlyweds Dr Lew Worship (Dean Jones) and wife Gloria (Stefanie Powers) discover he is sterile. The more powerful sequence relates to Nancy being sexually assaulted by juvenile delinquents who grew up in the same tough neighbourhood as Tony. As you might expect, the thugs end up in hospital and cause a fracas in which Alec is injured.

Tony has all the best lines. Invited to chance his arm with the nurses, he snaps that he didn’t come to the hospital to “learn to kiss.” Pushed out of the way by resident Dr Riccio (Telly Savalas) he retorts that he didn’t come to deliver messages. And so on, the most driven of the new intake, and the most surly, his initial encounter with Nancy has him upbraiding her for crying in front of a patient.

Decent soap opera as soap operas go, but without the more challenging aspects of the original. In an era when the series movie was beginning to take shape – primarily in the espionage arena – you can see why Columbia thought this might run and run and eventually the studio had another go at the concept, but this time as a television series.

Directed by John Rich (Boeing, Boeing, 1965) and written by big screen debutant Wilton Schiller from the bestseller by Richard Frede.

George Segal and Inger Stevens are the standouts.

Unstoppable (2010) ****

Fitting swansong for director Tony Scott (The Hunger, 1983). Throwback to the disaster movie of the 1970s when something enormous is going to be decimated, and lives, in this case three-quarters of a million citizens, are put at deadly risk. Distant cousin to Speed (1994), which bears no comparison in the potential mayhem department, since an ordinary bus carries a fraction of the power of a train with 30-odd train cars (carriages to the English) filled with deadly toxic cargo barreling along at 60mph. Basically, “a missile.” And while other trains can be sidelined to get out of its way, it’s headed for an unavoidable obstacle, a piece of raised track in a major city which bends so sharply it can only be safely negotiated at 20mph or thereabouts.

And while said train is a wrecking ball when it comes to anything that happens to be on the track at the same time, the tail end of another train for example or a horse-box, it runs not so much on action as character. The various explosions are just there to remind us how dangerous the damn thing is and to raise tension by perilous degrees.

On board are two opposites, veteran driver Frank (Denzel Washington) and entitled surly know-it-all rookie Will (Chris Pine), who’s the train conductor and technically, I guess, in charge. Not quite open hostility but not far off it.

Frank’s a widower with two daughters who work, as he shamefacedly admits, in Hooters (look it up) while Will has been slapped with a restraining order from his wife and lucky not to be facing a jail sentence for pulling a gun on a cop. On top of that, in a money-saving ploy, Will’s the kind of employee recruited by the company to replace Frank, who, it turns out, is only three weeks away from enforced retirement. So that’s a twist on the gangster trope of the character planning one last big job.

I should point out that thanks to a lazy employee, this is a runaway train, no driver on board, air brakes unconnected, other safety elements unharnessed, nothing to stop it picking up speed and heading straight to hell. Luckily, it’s not full of passengers. I’m being a bit cynical here because a trainload of shrieking passengers and back stories to take account of would have dissipated, rather than increased, the tension.

But there’s also in the back office boss Connie (Rosario Dawson) trying to do her job in the face of the corporate greed, money-grabbing chief executive Galvin (Kevin Dunn) more concerned about the $100 million the company will lose if this goes belly-up, not to mention the catastrophic effect on the share price, so he’s full-on in on barmy schemes to stop the train, including parachuting someone onto the train and trying to bring it to a halt in a much smaller town which can be more easily evacuated than one with a 750,000 population.

Needless to say, none of these dumb ideas work, but it’s fun to watch the high-ups get egg on their faces and watch the cost of the collateral damage escalate. All the while, this being Tony Scott, we’ve got helicopters whizzing around, a huge flotilla of cop cars on blue light duty, uniforms everywhere, and that amazing technical trick that Scott has mastered of having the camera racing past characters who are stock still.

Frank and Will operate like a tag team when it comes to saving the day, Frank hopping from car roof to car roof having come up with the great wheeze of applying the brakes on each individual train car (carriage to you English) and Will at a lower level engaged on similar hazardous enterprise and then not just leaping from a train doing 60mph to a vehicle racing alongside doing 60mph but leaping back onto the train from said car going at an even higher speed.

Denzel Washington (Gladiator II, 2024) – who had been train bound the year before in Scott’s remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009) – and Chris Pine (Don’t Worry, Darling, 2022) are on top form. As too is Rosario Dawson (Trance, 2013), for once given a decent role rather than just as a sidekick/love interest/femme fatale.

Written by Mark Bomback (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, 2014). It’s worth noting that actors looking for career longevity could do worse than follow the example of Denzel Washington who, since he became a top-billed star, has worked consistently with three directors, Tony Scott, Ridley Scott and Antoine Fuqua.

A cracker.

I Thank a Fool (1962) ***

One of those bonkers pictures whose nuttiness is initially irritating but ends up being thoroughly enjoyable once you give in to the barmy plot and overheated melodrama. Murder, suicide, madness, illicit sex, blackmail – and that’s just the start of this farrago of nonsense. And set in Liverpool before The Beatles made it famous.

Christine (Susan Hayward), a doctor, is jailed when she kills her married seriously ill lover in a mercy killing. She’s not convicted of the murder but of the lesser crime of medical malpractice, but after serving an 18-month sentence finds she is unemployable, even in more lowly professions where her prison stretch counts against her.

When she is hired by the attorney Stephen (Peter Finch) who prosecuted her to look after his mentally ill wife Liane (Diane Cilento), the audience will already smell a rat given that Christine has changed her name and therefore the lawyer must have made considerable effort to track her down. His argument is that since she is no longer a qualified practitioner, she cannot advocate to have his wife committed to a mental institute, as a proper doctor would be required to, since Liane is clearly a danger to herself and other people. Your immediate suspicion is that Christine has been hired to take the rap once Liane is bumped off.

And it doesn’t take long for Christine to work out that not everything adds up. Liane is given enough rope to hang herself, access to a car to cause an accident, access to a horse which could easily bolt or fall.

Liane has been told her Irish father died in an accident where she was driving, the incident that triggered her madness. But when we discover the father, Captain Ferris (Cyril Cusack), is very much alive that’s the cue for a slew of unlikely events. When Liane finds her father, he’s not in the least a candidate for canonization, but an alcoholic. That triggers further mental trauma. And another accident, self-inflicted. After Christine administers pills, the young woman is found dead.

*Bit of a stretch to compare it to the movies*
*mentioned in this poster.*

Naturally, an inquest brings up Christine’s past and suspicion falls on her. And that would be par for the course, and it would be up to the condemned woman to find a way to prove her innocence. But that takes us into even murkier depths.

There’s bad blood between Capt Ferris and Stephen and the inference that this was only resolved by the father offering his underage daughter to the lawyer to be followed by the unscrupulous father blackmailing Stephen. Then it turns out there’s no case to answer and that Christine is innocent because, blow me down, Liane committed suicide.

But what should have been a straightforward, if unlikely, murder plot comes unstuck because it can’t make up its mind what it wants to be. Too many ingredients are thrown into the pot and the result is a mess.

Even the queen of melodrama Susan Hayward (Stolen Hours, 1963) can’t rescue this. And the pairing with Peter Finch (Accident, 1966) doesn’t produce the necessary sparks. Despite a variable Irish accent, Diane Cilento (Hombre, 1967) comes off best as the wayward deluded young woman.

Robert Stevens (In the Cool of the Day, 1963) directs from a screenplay by Oscar-nominated Karl Tunberg (The 7^th Dawn, 1964) adapting the bestseller by Audrey Erskine-Lindop.

Had every opportunity to be a star attraction in the So Bad It’s Good sub-genre but fails miserably. Still, if you enter into the swing of things, remarkably tolerable.

Of Love and Desire (1963) ***

As contemporary as you could get with the core theme of a sexually independent woman picking and choosing her men. Otherwise, a smorgasbord of talent. Star Merle Oberon (Hotel, 1966) hadn’t appeared in a movie in seven years, for co-star Steve Cochran (Tell Me in the Sunlight, 1967) the screen absence was two years, Curd Jurgens (Psyche 59, 1964) was still very much a jobbing actor restricted to playing good and bad Germans, and director Richard Rush (Psych-Out, 1968), in his sophomore effort, was as erratic in the early part of his career as he would be in his later (six years between Freebie and the Bean, 1974, and The Stunt Man).

Of course, this being a somewhat mealy-mouthed decade, psychological mumbo-jumbo was required to explain the woman’s actions rather than the notion that a woman could enjoy being sexually unrepressed and free of desire for marital security. So if you manage to separate the actual movie from the required fitting-in to moral standards, it’s a darned interesting examination of the kind of free spirit later exemplified by Darling (1965) or Modesty Blaise (1966).

Mining engineer Steve (Steve Cochran) on a job in Mexico begins an affair with wealthy Katherine (Merle Oberon), half-sister of his employer Paul (Curt Jurgens). There’s nothing of the usual will-she-won’t-she in this romance, she virtually flings herself at him. Not only that, the morning after, she arranges for all his belongings to be shipped to her splendid mansion, proof of who is usually in control. Just as, more traditionally, males are instantly aroused by beautiful women, she is excited in the presence of an attractive man and makes no bones about it, not too bothered about consequent scandal even though she does her best to keep her activities discreet.

Paul isn’t so happy with the affair. He clearly prefers her unhappy and dependent on him for emotional support. And a bit like Julie in Steve Cochran’s later picture Tell Me in the Sunlight, there’s certainly an assumption that she jumps from man to man, though out of boredom rather than financial security.

So Paul sets out to sabotage the affair by putting in Katharine’s way previous boyfriend Gus (John Agar) who feels he is owed some sex and is determined she repay the debt. Although she almost succumbs and is subsequently ashamed of how easily her desire is inflamed, she resists and after he has had his way with her attempts to commit suicide.

But the question of rape is never raised and to Steve it appears she has merely resorted to type, falling into bed with the closest man. And in the time it takes to resolve the situation, we are treated to the psychological mumbo-jumbo which falls into two parts. In the first place, there has clearly been a strong sexual attraction between Paul and Katharine, and the strength of their emotional bond is in some ways a substitute for not indulging in incest. Secondly, her fiancé, a fighter pilot, was killed in the Second World War. Based on no evidence whatsoever, she has convinced herself that he committed suicide because she refused to have sex with him before marriage. To make up for that, she gives herself to any man who comes along. Yep, claptrap with a capital C. Which somewhat torpedoes the picture, which had been heading comfortably towards a feminist highpoint.

Merle Oberon almost turns the clock back a couple of decades to Wuthering Heights (1939) and her role there in physically expressing forbidden desire. You can almost feel her quivering with pent-up sexuality and she is unexpectedly superb, in what is essentially a B-picture, especially as the opportunity to tumble into melodrama – which she can’t escape in the final act – so obviously beckons. That the first two acts work so well is primarily down to her believable characterization. And Steve Cochran is no slouch either, shaking off the coil of his pervious incarnation as a tough guy. Curt Jurgens is creepy and sinister.

Director Richard Rush manages to hold his nerve until the end and then it all runs away from him into turgid melodrama. Screenplay contributions from the director, producer Victor Stoloff, Jacquine Delessert in his debut and Laszlo Gorog (Too Soon to Love, 1960, Richard Rush’s debut)

Nearly but not quite a feminist breakout.

Sinners (2025) ***** – Seen (Three Times) at the Cinema

A great movie is more than the sum of its parts. There’s something indefinable, something as they used to say “in the ether”, or “hits the zeitgeist” or, more aptly “hits the spot” because the area in question can never be defined, yet somehow we know it’s there. A writer from several generations past came up with “only connect.” And that’s a pretty food summation. Audiences are not really interested in movies that connect with critics – we’ve been served up too much dross too often to trust critics, Anora (2024) a recent case in point. When movies scarcely drop any percentage of revenue at the box office in the second weekend it’s not because of a ramped-up advertising budget, but because movies have hit the spot, connected with audiences, acquired that elusive word-of-mouth quality. For sure, this is going to be an Oscar contender, which probably means all the fun will be knocked, as its supporters get all preachy on us about its importance as a social document.

But a great movie comes from nowhere and sets up its own tent, creates its world, its own logic. There were gangster pictures before The Godfather (1972), westerns before The Searchers (1956) or Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) and sci fi before Avatar (2009) but what such pictures owe to their genres is derivative in a minor key. And so it here, Sinners takes the vampire movie and tosses it every which way but loose.

You got the blues, the most appealing vampires you’ll ever come across (and not in the svelte style of another game-changer, The Hunger, 1983), the need for community, the duping of the poor through religion, music than can summon up Heaven and Hell, raw sexuality, belonging, mothers, orphans, genius, cotton, a world where African Americans who fought for their country discovered their country didn’t want to fight for them, where the white man is going to take your money and then, for sport, kill you, and the plaintive despair of never feeling the warmth of the sun again as long as you live – which is forever. And connections – there’s myriad connections that will hit home.

In fact, you might not be aware you’re watching a vampire movie for roughly the first half. You might imagine this is more akin to The Godfather Part II (1974) with gangsters trying to go straight. First World War veterans identical twins Smoke and Stack – I have to confess right till the credits I didn’t realize these were both played by Michael B. Jordan (Creed, 2015) – descend on a small southern town intending to make an honest buck from a dance hall, convinced they have acquired the necessary business acumen. The motley bunch enrolled in this endeavor include neophyte bluesman Sammie (Miles Caton), veteran alcoholic bluesman (Delroy Lindo), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), storekeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao), bouncer Cornbread (Omar Miller), Smoke’s estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Musaki), who has knowledge of the occult, and Stack’s ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). Coming a-calling is Irish immigrant Remmick (Jack O’Connell) recruiting new members for his vampire flock.

The movie doesn’t take flight so much in the unwinding of intertwined lives, or with the rocking action, as with two dance sequences that transcend anything you’ve seen before in the cinema, the first conjuring up music of the past, present and future, the second a routine by the vampires. Trying to save himself from vampires, Sammie begins reciting the Lord’s Prayer only to hear the sacred words echoed by the undead. A guitar is buried in Remmick’s head. And there’s a fascinating coda, if you wait through the credits.

Michael B. Jordan is the obvious pick, striding across both characterizations with immense aplomb (the Oscars will be calling) but Miles Caton in his debut, Delroy Lindo (Point Break, 2025), Hailee Stainfield (The Marvels, 2023), and especially the seductive blood-lusting Jack O’Connell (Ferrari, 2023) give him a run for his money,

Writer-director Ryan Coogler came of age with Creed and the Black Panther duo but this takes him into the stratosphere, a genuine original talent, not just with something to say but the visual smarts to match. He could have harked on a lot more. Too many worthy pictures have turned virtue-signaling into an art form, but one boring beyond belief. Coogler is much more subtle, he slips in his points.

But all the subtlety in the world wouldn’t count for a hill of beans if he couldn’t tell a story in way that connected big-time with the audience who wanted to tell their friends to go-see.

The Nightcomers (1972) ****

Originally dismissed as meretricious trash, contemporary re-evaluation reveals it as uncommonly prophetic. You can start with the feral children, abandoned by their guardian, lack of parenting allowing space for pernicious ideas to foment. Or with the pornography correlative, the young, posited as unruly voyeurs, conditioned by the internet into believing that violent sex is the norm. Or with the influencer seeding notions that demolish the accepted Establishment views. Or impressionable children creating a distorted world view based on their interpretation of adult behavior.

Audiences and critics back in the day were taken in by the most cunning Maguffin of all, that this was some kind of more realistic Downton Abbey/Upstairs, Downstairs power struggle played out among the servants against the background of a sadistic/masochistic affair. Lives can be ruined on a whim. A letter to the absent landlord can destroy a career. Remember from Downton Abbey the importance in the servant hierarchy of the role of the owner’s valet. To be summarily demoted from that lofty position to gardener, forced to tug your forelock in gratitude at not being cast out, and you can see where power lies.

Instead, consider this a slow-burn, deliberately understated drama where, against the style of the usual horror picture, the score (by Jerry Fielding) offers no clues, a virtually anonymous piece to lull you into thinking this is a pastoral setting where genuine evil, as opposed to acts of mean inconsideration, can flourish.

Watching it entirely from the perspective of the children, ignoring the appeal of the top-billed Marlon Brando engaging in licentious and disturbing sex with the governess Miss Jessel (Stephanie Beacham) he has groomed, and a completely different movie emerges. It reveals more than any other study of children unexpectedly grown violent how vulnerable young minds are to suggestion and that in the absence of adult intervention how easy it is for them to devise a fantasy whose fabric is drawn from their misinterpretation of the real world.

My guess is that back in the day the attempts by teenage Miles (Christopher Ellis) and younger sister Flora (Verna Harvey) to copy the bondage scenes and violent sex witnessed by the voyeuristic boy would have had the audience in stitches rather than reeling in shock. There would have been very little in the audience experience beyond teenage gangs to suggest that young children could be guilty of such depravity – this is long before the murder of Jamie Bulger in England or the mass shootings by teenagers in America. So laughter would be the natural response.

But times are different now. We know that children existing outwith genuine adult supervision are prone to suggestion and acting on impulse. Miles and Flora have been taught by gardener Quint (Marlon Brando) to ignore traditional views of Heaven and Hell, to imagine that torture of small creatures is acceptable, and that love is hate, and that only in death can true lovers be united. Miles has been taught to shoot with a bow-and-arrow by Quint and there’s more than a touch of irony in how quickly the young fellow masters this skill that leads to a grisly climax.

While the adults largely ignore the children, the children are not ignoring the adults. They are in thrall to what they see and hear and make up their own minds about how to put the world to rights. Had the children been adults driven by loneliness and abandonment to such acts, they would viewed simply as evil monsters. But here they are demonstrably not evil, just misguided, and by the very people who should be guiding them. Quint takes inherent joy in corrupting the young, it’s the simplest type of revenge he can enact against his master, filling the heads of the next generation of overseers with information that runs counter to the accepted.

The British censor left largely untouched the rape scenes in The Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange out the same year. He was much tougher on this, excising the bondage sequences, as if such prurience would diminish the impact. Certainly, that did the trick at the box office for audiences, denied shock content, ignored it.

If all this isn’t enough to trigger reconsideration of the picture, then the grooming of the governess (Stephanie Beacham), her submission to male control, will strike a contemporary chord. Despite the respectability of her position, she is revealed as eminently vulnerable, born out of wedlock, witnessing how tough life was at home without a protective male figure, not just prone to accepting Quint’s brutality but conditioned herself to wait in a more romantic setting for the gentler lover of her imagination who never arrives. While the housekeeper (Thora Hird) comes over as any powerless functionary exerting what little power she has.

Marlon Brando (The Chase, 1966) is especially good and the scene where he blackens his teeth to amuse the children might have been a dress rehearsal for the sequence in The Godfather where, unintentionally, he frightens the child. Except for Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) in Italian crime tale Mafia Junction (1973), rising star Stephanie Beacham’s star failed to significantly rise, and she never again enjoyed such an important, and difficult, screen role, especially in those scenes where she attempts to exert control.

Written by Michael Hastings (The Adventurers, 1970).

It might be a contradiction in terms to suggest that much-maligned British director Michael Winner (Hannibal Brooks, 1969) ever came close to producing what you might term a masterpiece, but within his own portfolio this is surely the chief contender.

You can catch in on Talking Pictures for free.

Well worth a look.

The Young Savages (1961) ****

You have to put out of your mind any thoughts about West Side Story, released the same year and also dealing with teenage gangs in New York. But whereas the musical tapped into Shakespeare and tugged at audience heartstrings with a tragic love story, The Young Savages is what used to be called an “issue picture,” a realistic portrayal of a growing problem in society.

Rather than the sullen relatively harmless rebels of Rebel without a Cause (1955) or this decade’s Easy Rider (1969), the question of youth disenfranchisement and the growth of a culture, here majoring in violence, at an opposite extreme to social norms, was beginning to take hold. Where earlier immigrants emerging from New York housing hellholes had tended to graduate to straightforward crime, which occasionally spilled over into the main street, now youths were engaging in turf wars, knives rather than machine guns the weapon of choice, which took place in full view of a terrified population.

Oddly enough the movie opens with the same motif as West Side Story, the feet of a gang, but rather than expressing their frustration through dancing, these feet, belonging to three members of the Italian-American Thunderbirds mob, are marching through the streets of New York, brushing aside passersby, knocking over toy prams, on their way to kill a member of the rival Puerto Rican Horseman gang.

When arrested, they claim self-defense. The only flaw in that argument is the victim Roberto Escalante (Jose Perez) is blind. Naturally, there is a public outcry and calls for the death penalty. Prosecutor Hank Bell (Burt Lancaster), who had grown up in the same streets as the gangs but managed to make a life for himself outside its confines, is hellbent on extracting the maximum punishment. Bell was born Bellini but changed his name to hide his background, make it easier for him to serenade Vassar graduates and advance his career.

That leads to complications, and it’s hard to say which is the more compelling. His more liberal wife Karin (Dina Merrill), the Vassar item, is appalled. District attorney Dan Cole (Edward Andrews), who fancies his chances as a politician, faces public backlash if he doesn’t take tough action. And Hank had a romantic fling in the past with the mother Mary DiPace (Shelley Winters) of one of the accused.

But Hank hasn’t quite thrown off the shackles of his upbringing, and though currently an upstanding member of society, he finds his principles taking a battering when he is himself attacked and discovers just how easy it is to resort to violence. Karin, too, finds her liberal attitude shot to pieces when she is also attacked.

Even without personal involvement of the husband and wife in being forced to face up individually to the violence pervading the city, the focus is on the exploration of how such violence becomes endemic in those parts of society left behind in the pursuit of the Great American Dream.

There’s plenty issues to deal with: poverty for a start, lack of ethnic tolerance, hatred of one immigrant group to another, politicians making capital out of the situation, parents powerless to prevent their children growing up as hoodlums, youngsters seeking identity and respect from joining a gang, and the growth of the gangs themselves as a social dynamic.

As you might expect, there are no easy answers. In fact, there are no answers at all. A movie like this can only lift the stone without being able to effect what’s happening underneath. But in some respects, that’s the aim of the issue picture, an early type of virtue-signaling. None of the issues raised have gone away, more likely they’ve just got worse.

But that’s not to downplay the film’s impact. There’s an inherent honesty here in the decision of debutant director John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, 1962) not to take sides.

Burt Lancaster (The Swimmer, 1969) delivers another excellent performance. Dina Merill (Butterfield 8, 1960) thrives in a solid role and Shelley Winters (A House Is Not a Home, 1964) is effective. Watch out for the debut also of Telly Savalas (The Assassination Bureau, 1969). Written by Edward Anhalt (Becket, 1964) and J.P. Miller (Days of Wine and Roses, 1962) from the bestseller by Evan Hunter, who had explored similar youth issues in The Blackboard Jungle filmed in 1955.

Still powerful stuff.

Tell Me in the Sunlight (1967) ****

Had this emanated from France or Italy or arrived bearing an arthouse imprimatur it might well have gained some critical traction. Not just because it is as far from the screen persona of star Steve Cochran (Mozambique, 1964) as you could get, but since this is largely a tale of loneliness and with some quite imaginative touches.

In a cramped apartment so small there’s nowhere to sit and eat Julie (Shary Marshall) sets out a picnic on the floor for merchant seaman Dave (Steve Cochran), the fare modest in the extreme, nothing more than heated-up soup from a tin. There’s an unlikely trigger point – a light switch that doesn’t work. In anticipation of Dave’s return, she not only bakes a “Welcome Home” cake but has painted on the walls an idyllic scene of the house she expects the couple to occupy.

But there’s a central issue. They’re both itinerants, Dave due to his job, and presumably not having an ounce of the settling-down bug, and Julie because she drifts from man to man, primarily out of necessity. She’s an exotic dancer and although she initially denies it – and he has to pretend to believe her in order to grease the wheels of incipient romance – she accepts financial favor from customers to the nightclub. In fact, she has a current boyfriend, Paul (Harry Franklin), a distinguished-looking doctor, an older man much fussed over by the club management due to the amount he spends.

The meet-cute’s been done before – they are both at the scene of an accident involving a young boy. They stroll away together. Their conversation is not intense, and the only way we realize that he has struck a spark is when she returns to her night-time gig sand is fined for arriving late. He watches her striptease act, and waits for her and they do some more strolling before returning to her flat, where she rustles up the picnic but before affairs can take a sexual turn she falls asleep in his arms.

*More in keeping with the Steve Cochran screen persona.*

This is very desultory stuff, no nudity or even obvious sex, and in the context of Hollywood output scarcely qualifying as a romantic drama, but place it in the European arthouse sphere and it proves much more rewarding from the very fact that nothing is overplayed. Little is even outwardly stated. Without a word suggesting this, both realize this is a chance to change random lives.

While there’s no commitment either side, when he leaves for a temporary job on another ship, he asks her to see him off on his midnight flight. That would mean her skipping a shift and to do so would risk being fired. At the last minute, she turns up. When she leaves as his plane is announced as imminently departing, he follows her for one last fleeting kiss and spots her outside in the arms of another man.

Unaware of this, she decorates her apartment in the manner described. He returns in a bad mood, gets drunk and on appearing at her apartment notices someone else must have fixed the light switch, tosses money on the floor and they make love as a financial transaction.

In the morning while she is distraught, he remains furious, scoffing at her painting on the wall and the cake. She explains that while the man at the airport was indeed her former lover Paul, he was only there in the capacity of a friend, who had driven her out, the only way she had of skipping out of the club and returning before being spotted and fined or dismissed. In any case she has been fired because the rejected Paul has abandoned the club and his absence has reduced the nightly take. And she paid for the light switch to be fixed.

Theoretically, in the hope of a happy ending, they reconcile. But a future together seems unlikely after the events of the previous night, which showed both in their true character, he as a paying customer, she as a paid sex worker. Neither show capacity for change, certainly not to find the kind of work that might bring marital stability.

Loneliness is the theme, how to cover up the cracks in fragile lives. In his job, women are non-existent, the only time he will meet one is on shore leave, and if he’s not shelling out for sex, he’s trying to pick up a vulnerable woman as is shown in the opening scene. As much as she needs extra dough to buffer her existence, she also needs someone to hold her at night.

This should have received some recognition at the time. Steve Cochran’s directorial debut was not accorded the same interest as other actors who had turned to direction such as Frank Sinatra (None but the Brave, 1965), Laurence Harvey (The Ceremony, 1963) or John Wayne (The Alamo, 1960). As an actor Cochran wasn’t on the critical radar, his tough guy roles hardly on a par with those of Humphrey Bogart or Richard Widmark who found greater fame.

However, the biggest obstacle to critical recognition was that Cochran died before they movie could be released and it took another two years before it hit movie screens by which time he was long forgotten.

Not only is the direction tone perfect but so is Cochran’s acting. Although strictly a B-movie actress, Shary Marshall (The Street Is My Beat, 1966) is very effective.

An unsentimental realistic drama that doesn’t fall into the traps of either into exploitation or melodrama

This is one of those forgotten pictures that is well worth a look.