Category: Uncategorized

United Artists – one of the biggest box office hitters of the 1960s – should have emerged relatively unscathed from the financial tsunami of the end of the decade. While pictures like its The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968) certainly hit the buffers, it wasn’t in the position of having to swallow the titanic losses suffered by rivals Paramount (Darling Lili, 1968) or Twentieth Century Fox (Star!, 1968, Justine, 1969).  Even though the studio’s banker, the James Bond series, suffered a downturn in the absence of Sean Connery, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) still turned a decent profit.

However, when, in 1970, UA was staring down the barrel of a $50 million loss, the cause was more commonplace. Audiences worldwide had changed. Though every studio had followed trends taking them into youth-oriented pictures after Easy Rider (1969) and into more adult realms following Oscar-winner Midnight Cowboy (1969) and indulged the whims of a new generation of directors, something just did not add up. The studio believed it had, based on previous releases, invested in a solid range of movies, that overall would contain strong appeal.

For movies released between 1969 and 1971, UA had spent $80 million. But even before one-third of this output hit the screens in 1971, the studio was already projecting a colossal loss of $50 million, even after including sales to television.

Results in 1970 proved a shock to the system. “For the first time since the present management team assumed control of the company,” reported an internal memo dated February 28, 1971, “very few pictures released through the year showed promise of recouping their negative costs. It became clear that pictures which by our own experience would have brought back their costs or better in other years, would suffer severe losses in 1970. This was true of pictures in all cost brackets, high and low.”

And “after six uninterrupted years of substantial profits,” the studio was struggling to explain this sudden downturn. The situation was even more calamitous because the movies UA had readied for 1971 release were already expected to fare badly. In the light of changes in the marketplace, most of these movies would not have been greenlit in 1970 or made on reduced budgets.

Of course, the studio did not entirely blame itself. “The thirty-five films could not have been  fully and properly evaluated in 1969. The conditions revealing the need for reevaluation…did not occur until 1970.” And even then, the “ominous” signs were only obvious towards the end of the year. Adventurous and more formulaic pictures alike foundered at the global box office.

In an act of mea culpa, United Artists set out the reasons why their flops had flopped. Their output broke down into roughly three sectors – star-led product, risky projects investing in new directors, and movies that targeted critical acclaim or appealed at least initially to the arthouse brigade.

Audience rejection of movies featuring big stars was the biggest pill to swallow.

Of Hornet’s Nest (1969), the studio observed: “In the early and mid-1960s pictures with Rock Hudson as star would do global grosses justifying the cost at which this picture was made. A typical run-of-the-mill action picture of this nature used to be a sound commodity if made within this price range. Our experience with, for instance, The File of the Golden Goose (Yul Brynner, 1969) and Young Billy Young (Robert Mitchum, 1969) made it clear that the global audience for this kind of picture had shrunk considerably and that a substantial loss appeared inevitable.”  

Furthermore, the studio, commenting on the poor performance of Cannon for Cordoba (George Peppard, 1970), noted that “in 1970 there was a marked change in global acceptance of western and adventure films. The results of films of other companies – for instance Mackenna’s Gold (Columbia, 1969), Murphy’s War (Paramount, 1971), The Last Valley (ABC Pictures, 1971) – as well as our own Play Dirty (1968) and Bridge at Remagen (1969), indicated the need for a substantial downward revision in assessing proper budget costs for pictures in this category, even with the so-called big name action stars.”

All had boasted top marquee names – Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif, Michael Caine, Peter O’Toole and George Segal.

Others in this vein expected to suffer in the same way included The Hawaiians (1970) headlined by Charlton Heston, Doc (1971) starring Stacy Keach and Faye Dunaway and Burt Lancaster pair Valdez Is Coming (1971) and Lawman (1971) – though in fact the last-named was saved from box office ignominy by foreign receipts.

The studio concluded: “Pictures with this kind of star are still a commodity but at half the cost.”

Another category, exemplified by the British-made second Bulldog Drummond outing, Some Girls Do (1969) starring Richard Johnson, was equally affected. “When this picture was programmed,” noted the studio, “many low budget action adventure thrillers had enjoyed a certain global audience – enough to warrant making pictures of this type at this cost. By the end of 1970, this market had dwindled sharply. Whether it is a surfeit of TV programs of a similar nature or a greater selectivity generally – based probably on increasing alternatives for leisure time activity – the fact is that for this type of picture it has to be made at less than half the cost or not at all.”

Included in this category were films like Crossplot (1969) starring Roger Moore, and I Start Counting (1970) featuring Jenny Agutter. However, the latter was considered as much of an artistic failure, attracting the following comment: “An attempt to do a high quality suspense thriller turned out to be an unimaginative second feature of no importance in any market.”

SOURCE: “Comments supplementing notes to Balance Sheet and Statement of Operations of United Artists Corporation for 1970,” United Artists Archive, Box 1 Folder 12 (Wisconsin Center for Theater and Film Research).

“It never happened.” The most heinous words in the vocabulary of the powerful male casts a sharp contemporary light in the wake of MeToo and other scandals on the litany of personal and institutional abuse inflicted on woman. Speak up and careers will be ruined, institutions will be permanently damaged. Keep quiet and you’ll receive quiet reward, promotion maybe, a better job, some cash, all coming with the restrictions of an NDA, perhaps guilt and a guarantee that truth will remain hidden and  perpetrators go free.

In today’s society this carries far more emotional firepower than it did back in the day when the outcome was viewed as a typical twist in a better-than-average crime tale driven by an unexpectedly powerful performance by John Travolta, then in his prime.

It’s multiple rape and carried out in the most horrific manner, the victim staked out, the faces of the rapists concealed by camouflage and masks in a military exercise. And as always, it’s not about unsated lust, but power, the need of the male to bring down a rising female star cadet, general’s daughter Elisabeth Campbell (Leslie Stefanson) whose talent is putting them in the shade.   

That’s the discovery but it’s not the mystery. The mystery is why would this act be repeated a decade later, apparently as a voluntary act, as if the woman is so humiliated and has lost all her self-worth that she inflicts this act upon herself. It’s a single rape this time, but she’s still staked out, spreadeagled, and it’s on a spare piece of ground in a military barracks. But it’s the last time she’ll suffer in this particular fashion because she’s been murdered.

“Soldier first, cop second.” That’s the dilemma facing army detective Paul Brenner (John Travolta). Even though he’s revealed from the outset as a not-to-be-messed-with cop, that might work when he’s arresting minor criminals, but it’s going to be sorely tested when he’s confronted by the might of the U.S. Army which has already successfully buried the first crime.

Brenner teams up with ex-girlfriend rape specialist Sara Sunhill (Madeleine Stowe) and after some initial snippy conflict they soon work together as an effective team with flirting back on the agenda and Sara proving herself capable of the kind of deceit that clever cops require to snare suspects.  

There’s almost a roll-call of suspects because Elisabeth, now a captain in Psych-Ops, has left open to blackmail a whole bunch of married men after having sex with them. Her promiscuity can’t be called out because that would reflect badly on her father, about-to-retire war hero General Campbell (James Cromwell), base commander at Fort McCallum. But she is so indiscriminate in her choice of lovers that it appears like a campaign of psychological warfare against her father, who was stationed in Germany at the time of the initial rape.

So among those investigated are Col Kent (Timorthy Hutton), Col Moore (James Woods), Capt Ekby (Boyd Kestner) and the local police chief’s son. The general’s adjutant Col Fowler (Clarence Williams III) behaves in a threatening manner.

So while this follows some of the rules of the genre and invents others, with missing evidence, attacks on the investigators, charm and brute force part of Brenner’s make-up, as well as inveterate stubbornness, the core is an examination of power. Brenner is subjected to the same threat, maintaining a code of omerta for the good of the institution and its apparently good reputation in the area of female recruits.

Apart from the rapists who get off scot-free, the only other person to benefit from the horrific rape is the general, who receives a promotion for convincing his daughter that she imagined it. The general witnesses the second stake-out. That’s its whole point, to show him what she went through and to get him to admit he let her down. But he turns his back, leaving her staked out naked so someone else can come along, rape her and shut her up for good.

The implications of this are so venomous that you can hardly believe it except you know full well that running parallel to an ongoing epidemic of rape and abuse is an ongoing epidemic of cover-up. “You can’t handle the truth” was never more baldly stated.  

This doesn’t belong to the pantheon of great pictures due to the direction or acting, though that is more than solid on both counts, but because it reveals in brutal unsparing detail the impact of the crime upon the victim and the tendency for an institution to cover-up illegal act in order to protect itself and its personnel.

We are all more aware these days that rape is a weapon against women and hasn’t gone away although powerful figures – Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein, for example – are being indicted. The crime used to be seen as the act of an individual working alone but now we know that in many instances the perpetrators can’t get away with it unless other powerful people are turning a blind eye.

The scene where General Campbell, visiting his daughter in hospital, seeing her battered and bloodied and in emotional hell, and telling her effectively to turn the other cheek makes your blood run cold.

John Travolta, back on track following some lean years before pitching up in Pulp Fiction (1995), is excellent as is Madeleine Stowe (Bad Girls, 1994) while James Woods (Any Given Sunday, 1999) offers one of his better characterizations. When Leslie Stefanson (Unbreakable, 2000) calls out, “Daddy,” it’ll break your heart.

But for all the wrong reasons the picture belongs to James Cromwell. You’ll never forget this contemptible father.

Directed by Simon West (The Mechanic, 2011) from a screenplay by William Goldman (Harper, 1966) and Christopher Bertolini (Battle Los Angeles, 2011) from the Nelson DeMille bestseller.

I can’t get this out of my mind. Netflix has it.

Style is just about the only weapon in the directorial armory to mitigate against lack of budget. Or you can rely on a narrative twist. But in sci fi you’re inevitably going to come a cropper in this era and on a low budget when it comes to the special effects.

As director Alan Bridges would later prove in bigger budgeted efforts like The Hireling (1973) and Out of Season (1975) he was a genius at building atmosphere. Here, he also makes very effective use on the long shot. Not in the usual dramatic fashion of depicting a vista, but in building tension.

There’s a fabulous sequence which is superbly done given the budget. There’s a car crash. We see a window exploding. Next shot shows a man dead and bloodied sprawling over the hood. The car has crashed about a hundred yards away from a hospital where the main character Mike (Edward Judd) is standing outside. Instead of cutting to his face to register the shock, the camera stays where it is just to the side of the car so we can see the corpse and in the background watch Mike’s reaction. But he doesn’t race towards the camera. He moves in puzzled fashion, glancing around, even taking a step backward.

So where another director would in effect have speeded things up – crash, onlooker reaction – Bridges slows it all down. That’s the real purpose of the long shot. To waste vital seconds. To slow everything down.

There’s a reason why Mike is so slow on the uptake. Because there’s nothing for the car to crash into. There’s not a tree or a wall to get in the way of the moving car. This is the moment Mike works out there’s a force field surrounding the hospital, generated by the strange patient inside, who needs protection from his pursuers.

Sure Bridges uses long shot for budgetary reasons, to have all his characters in the same space without having to spend money on close-ups, but most of the time it’s for atmosphere and effect. There’s another great long shot of seated hospital patient Blackburn (Anthony Sharp) viewed from the other end of a long corridor. He’s in shock not just because he’s knocked down a pedestrian in unseasonal fog during the night but because he was with his mistress at the time and there is bound to be consequence.

And perhaps because his lover urged him not to stop, so that will change the dynamics of their relationship. And perhaps because the person he knocked done is so strange, walking around in some kind of plastic uniform in the middle of the road as if he didn’t know where he was going.

We’ve had decades now for movie makers to find ways of indicating the imminent arrival of aliens, and usually they’re able to call on bigger budgets and scenes of television reports to do so, witness Independence Day (1996) or Arrival (2106) and even have the luxury of delaying such action until they can introduce some of the characters.

Here, Bridges manages that in minimalist fashion. And without delay. Soldiers manning a radar station notice the radar misses a beat, on the road Blackburn’s vehicle inexplicably and momentarily stalls while in motion, in the hospital an iron lung inexplicably stops pumping oxygen into the inert patient for a moment. We don’t realize it until some time later but that’s the sign of arrival.

In the hospital the foreigner (Eric Young) is found to have a metal plate in his head. He appears surprised that women do as they’re told. The building begins to become unbearably hot. When the stranger awakens, we discover he is, in fact, an alien, from a distant planet, strayed from his course. He was escorting two female prisoners.

And sure enough every now and then we get a glimpse of the female pair outside in close-fitting uniforms. Phone lines are down. The rising heat threatens the chances of survival of the hospital’s 300 patients. Hospital chief Carter (Lyndon Brook), going for help, is the one who dies in the car crash.

Very snippy doctor Claire (Valerie Gearon), severe haircut indicating a no-nonsense personality, interrogates the alien and gets far more out of him than Mike or Carter. Meanwhile, Mike works out that the force field is less effective with water, so he escapes via the sewer, finds the alien’s power pack and returns so the alien can leave and find his spaceship, though by now they know he is an escaped convict not an officer of alien law.

And this is the kind of picture when a fellow undertaking superhuman activity, like crawling along a sewer and hauling himself out the other end, doesn’t do this in the blithe fashion of a hero. He is exhausted, staggering, completely wrung out.

Oddly enough, the special effects, given the budget, stand up. The alien takes off in his rocket but another alien craft shoots him down.

Despite the storyline with the feminist angle and the twist of alien being bad guy and not good guy, there’s not enough here sci fi-wise for it even to get an honorable mention in the list of great low-budget sci fi movies.

The fact that it deserves any mention at all – and it fully deserves one – is down to the direction. There’s a throbbing score by Bernard Ebbinghouse (Prudence and the Pill, 1968) that helps maintain tension. And the hospital staff, mostly called upon to sweat and be at the end of their tether, come over as very human, Edward Judd (First Men in the Moon, 1964) and Valerie Gearon (Nine Hours to Rama, 1963), especially. Roger Marshall (Theatre of Death, 1967) wrote the screenplay.

But Alan Bridges is the star.

Minor gem.

With all the (deserved) appreciation of Zulu, it’s hard to imagine it was a massive flop in the United States. Independent producer Joe Levine planned a double whammy for summer 1964 – The Carpetbaggers, an adaptation of the sizzling Harold Robbins bestseller, and Zulu. He even arranged for Zulu to follow The Carpetbaggers into the prestigious Palace first run cinema in New York. Spending big, Levine whipped up a huge marketing campaign for Zulu, which had notched up record grosses in the UK. There was a double-page spread in Variety in January 6 and again in February 10. One million promotional badges were distributed. A featurette “Great Battles in Film” was sent to 100 television stations.

Levine had a great line for the media. “I haven’t had time to read the script but I liked the title.” Subsequently, he told reporters he had read the script on a Friday and bought it the following Monday.

It had opened at the end of January at the Plaza in London’s West End and reports of its record-breaking $26,000 opening were expected to generate high hopes among U.S. cinema owners. Like The Carpetbaggers, it was distributed by Paramount. By April it had earned a record $638,000 in London alone, including $155,000 in a nine-week run at the Plaza.

Levine had form in finding success from the most unlikely projects. He had launched the low-budget Italian-made Hercules (1958) on the American public. Audiences weren’t quite unsuspecting given the fortune he had spent on promotion. It was money well spent and quickly went into profit. So the prospect of selling a British film about a battle nobody had ever heard of and, except for Jack Hawkins in a supporting role, starring unfamiliar names, did not faze Levine.

But the two films could not have been further apart. Where The Carpetbaggers stormed to $862,000 from 25 theatres in the New York area, Zulu could only manage $190,000 from 30 in Los Angeles. Zulu scored well in first run in Detroit – an $18,000 opening at the 2996-seater Palms, a second week of $16,000 and running two more weeks. There was a “smash” $15,000 in the 606-seater Loop in Chicago first run for starters and another three weeks but then it was quickly consigned to drive-ins. It registered $16,000 at the 1909-seat Pilgrim in Boston, $10,000 in openers in Cincinnati, $6,000 in Portland and $7,500 in Buffalo. It held well in Providence at the 2200-seat Majestic, first week of $7,000, second week of $5,000.

But there was only $8,000 from nine houses in Denver and $80,000 from 13 in Kansas City. Failure to find a niche was not for want of trying. In successive weeks in Los Angeles, it was supported by Nicholas Ray epic 55 Days At Peking, comedy Ensign Pulver, and Viking adventure The Long Ships.

To salvage something, Levine send it out, within a couple of months of initial release, as the support film to Italian-made Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow starring Italian sexpot Sophia Loren, possibly one of the strangest movie programs of all time.

In the annual box office rankings, The Carpetbaggers placed second. To get into the Variety annual chart, you needed to make more than $1m in rentals (the amount the studio received after the cinema had taken its cut). Seventy-eight movies managed this. Zulu was not one of them. 

But even the poorest box-office performer has an afterlife. So in 1965 Zulu was pushed out again anywhere that would have it. That meant it supported some odd, not to say ugly, bedfellows – exploitationer Taboos of the World in Kansas City, The Three Stooges in The Outlaws Is Coming in Phoenix, B-western Stage To Thunder Rock in Long Beach, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini in Des Moines and Rhino in Abilene. They liked it in Long Beach where it supported both Circus World and That Man from Rio. It was the second feature to None but the Brave in Provo, Utah, and to two more successful Joe E. Levine movies, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in Ironwood, Michigan, and Marriage, Italian Style in Corpus Christi, Texas. Triple bills being a staple of drive-ins, it was seen with Viva Las Vegas and Beach Party in Tucson.   

But it was not just support meat. Almost a year after its release, it topped the bill in Helena, Montana, with Robert Mitchum in Man in the Middle as support. In Chester it was the main attraction with Homicidal in support. In Weimar, Texas, it was supported by Tarzan the Magnificent and in Bridgeport by First Men on the Moon. At the Cecil theater in Mason City, Iowa, it played on its own, as it did in Colorado Springs where it was advertised as “in the great tradition of Beau Geste” (supply your own exclamation marks.)

But it was not done yet. Exhibitors in San Mateo had a soft spot for Zulu in 1966. It played there seven times, as support to The Great Race, Marlon Brando western Appaloosa, Fantastic Voyage (in two theaters), What’s Up Tiger Lily?,  The Leather Boys and Lawrence of Arabia. Abilene brought it back twice, for a re-match with Rhino and then in a double bill with Kimberley Jim starring singer Jim Reeves when it was promoted as “a true story of the Zulu tribe.” Fremont cinemas also ran in twice – with Return of the Seven and Fantastic Voyage. In Troy and Bennington it rode shotgun with Elvis in Harum Scarum. In Charleston it supported Arabesque, in Winona The Second Best Secret Agent  and in Long Beach What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?

The highlight of 1967 had to be a double bill with The Daleks (Dr Who and the Daleks) in Delaware, or perhaps the teaming with Batman in Cumberland, Maryland, or El Cid in Ottawa. Zulu returned twice to Fremont to support Africa Addio and John Sturges’ Hour of the Gun. In Modesto it played with Where The Spies Are. In Long Beach it was put on at a pop concert where the headline act was Organized Confusion (anybody remember them?). These three years of repeated showings hardly counted as a proper reissue, but it did cast an interesting light on what may – or may not – have turned into something of a cult film. In Britain, where it was a smash hit, it was reissued on the ABC circuit in 1967 and 1972. While it was largely unwelcome in the U.S., worldwide was a different story, bringing in $9 million in grosses.

SOURCES: 1964:  Variety – U.S. box office figures: June 24, July 1, July 8, July 15, July 22, July 29, august 5, September 2, October 6. Information about other bookings comes from local newspapers.

I’ve been revisiting this oddity in the hope that maybe I was too quick to condemn what was, in some respects, one of the quirkiest pictures ever made. Alas, time has been no kinder.

One of the biggest-ever movie follies, an overblown vanity project with Fellini-esque overtones – written, directed, produced and starring British crooner Anthony Newley (Doctor Dolittle, 1967) – that turned into the first X-rated musical. Bob Fosse mined a similar, almost as seedy, sex-obsessed autobiographical vein in All That Jazz (1979) to critical acclaim whereas the Newley effort met critical coruscation.

Although primary known as a Broadway star (Stop the World, I Want to Get Off), he had a small but reasonable movie portfolio, star of The Small World of Sammy Lee (1963) and male lead to Sandy Dennis in Sweet November (1968), so in a sense he was ready for the leap into movie stardom, though perhaps not in such grandiose fashion. Had the movie shown the slightest touch of irony, that might have been its saving grace, but the main theme is that women queue up to bed a star who is fed up with bedding women yet appears to revel in his own moral decadence.

The story is so slim it defies belief or arrogance. Hieronymus Merkin (Newley) is preparing to make a film about his own life though he feels he has been controlled from the outset, his child view is that of a marionette with someone else pulling the strings. Once Goodtime Eddie Filth (Milton Berle) sets him on a stage career beauties flock to his side. Although married to Polly Poontang (Joan Collins) he longs to be reunited with earlier lover Mercy Humpe (Connie Kreski). Basically, he keeps asking the universal question besetting all men – if I can all the sex in the world, why am I not happy?

On the plus side it is certainly audacious, surreal, pretentious, unconventional and gives a good idea of what would happen if a director turned up on a beach in Malta with a cast of whoever happened to be available plus assorted nudes and rolled the camera to see what would happen and then argued with his crew or critics about what was taking place. One big minus is the songs. Newley was a talented lyricist (Goldfinger) and composer as well as performer. But the material here is poor and Newley, despite his Broadway experience, has no idea how to stage a musical.

Cameos abound. You can spot famed comedian George Jessel, singer Stubby Kaye, British entertainer Bruce Forsyth, Tom Stern (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968), and British character actors Patricia Hayes (The Terrornauts, 1967) , Victor Spinetti and Judy Cornwell. You may be surprised to learn that the script written in tandem with Herman Raucher (Sweet November, 1968) was named Best British Original Screenplay by the Writers Guild of Great Britain.

Theoretically, this is now regarded as a cult classic but I’ve yet to come across a review that treats it as anything other than a self-indulgent curiosity rather than a must-see.

Studio Universal was so embarrassed by the final outcome that it released it in the U.S. under its Regional Film unit “which handles product Universal doesn’t care to go out under its own banner.” The $1.25 million picture was not quite the box office disaster many anticipated. After poor runs in New York and Los Angeles and helped along by a 10-page spread in Playboy, it scored substantial business in cities as diverse as Detroit, Louisville and Minneapolis. In the US it grossed $1.3 million and coupled with overseas income went into profit.

Given Newley did not make another picture for six years, you might have imagined Hieronymos Merkin spelled the death-knell for his career. But that was not so. After the film opened, he signed a $1 million four-year deal at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, was lining up a Broadway musical about Napoleon and Josephine with Barbra Streisand and was in talks to star in a movie adaptation of his hit musical The Roar of the Crowd.

SOURCES: “Newley Making Vegas Bow Aug 7 at Caesar’s Palace,” Variety, June 11, 1969, p76; “Newley-Streisand for B’way Tuner on Nappy-Josie,” Variety, July 2, 1969, p1; “Merkin Dates Overcome Jink,” Variety, July 9, 1969, p3; “Jack Haley Jr. Setup To Produce, Direct,” Variety, December 24, 1969, p6; “Variety B.O. Charts’ 1969 Results,” Variety, April 29, 1970, 26.   

There’s a fabulous story buried inside this box office disaster. A Mafia boss rats out his colleagues so he can enjoy retirement. Instead of dwelling on this and the dramatic opportunities it opens up, instead we are given an info-dump. The betrayal meant that the United States woke up to the fact that the Mafia was a nationwide organization and not, as proposed by J Edgar Hoover, merely a localized east coast outfit.

I wasn’t particularly bothered by the gimmick – though it’s surely “enough already” for fly-by-night technical tricks – of Robert De Niro playing two gangster rivals, Frank Costello who runs the empire handed on a plate to him by Vito Genovese while the latter was in exile. Two simple pieces of prosthetics, false nose for Frank, false chin for Vito, plus the more rudimentary disguise of hat and spectacles for Vito makes this notion work without any need to call it into question. The fake chin stiffens the actor’s lips and once he dispenses with the arm-waving that is key to the De Niro screen persona, the characters are portrayed with measurable differences.

What needs called into question is the ramshackle construction. Voice-over for me is lazy. You can’t fit information into the story in dramatic fashion? Then too bad, drop it. You can’t just shoehorn it in and hope for the best. And all this shifting about with timelines, WTF? It’s crazy to try and condense a history of the Mafia up till the late 1950s when the movie would work much better dumping the historical malarkey and concentrating on the main story.

Vito returns to New York after a long absence and wants to reclaim his kingdom. Frank is naturally reluctant to give up an empire he has expanded and controlled for so long. Frank is more temperate, Vito distinctly temperamental. The fact they were boyhood buddies and made their bones together should have merited a single line of dialog rather than drawn-out montages and a bucket of voice-over.

Frank is happily married to Bobbie (Debra Messing) with no kids. Vito marries Anna (Kathrine Narducci) then bumps off his wife’s ex-husband for the kind of slight a paranoid is prone to. Majoring in violence, Vito rebuilds his empire and for the last piece of the jigsaw organizes a hit on Frank. The hitman misses. That should have cued all-out warfare. Instead, Frank tries to keep the peace. His solution when all else fails and planned retirement is jeopardized is to tip the nod to the New York cops that representatives of every nationwide family is going to assemble in a particular place all at the same time. Cue the cops solving Frank’s problem by imprisoning Vito and tons of his (relatively-speaking, of course) innocent compadres.

But instead of sticking to the bones of what’s an interesting (and ironic if irony is your thing) narrative – insane hunger for power and revenge –  the story bounces around like it’s been chucked inside a lottery drum only for bits and pieces of a longer and more complicated but less interesting story to fly out at different times.

The movie does make the point that without battalions of crooked cops and politicians on the take the Mafia would never have mushroomed. There are a couple of outstanding sequences, the cocky Frank volunteering to testify rather than, like all the other gangsters, taking the Fifth at a Senatorial Inquiry and a marvellous scene about the golden Bible of the Mormons that stands alongside the “You Talkin’ to Me?” and “You think I’m funny?” scenes from previous gangster classics.

De Niro gets one thing wrong in his impersonation of the gangsters. It’s virtually impossible for an 81-year-old actor to carry off the physicality of the 66-year-old Frank and the 60-year-old Vito. At least there’s no attempt to portray gangsters as mythical characters.

Not the swansong director Barry Levinson (Rain Man, 1988) was hoping for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, 1990) wrote the script. 

Nobody’s going to bet $45 million on Robert De Niro again, no matter how many roles he plays.

Turns the POW sub-genre on its head. Nobody’s interested in escaping or, in the vein of Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), committing an audacious act of sabotage. It’s hard enough just surviving with any high-falautin’ notions of honor or courage getting in the way.

Imagine if the James Garner character in The Great Escape (1963) was wheeling-and-dealing to fill his own pockets or ease his confinement in the way of Morgan Freeman in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).

That’s what we’ve got here. American prisoner Corporal King (George Segal) hasn’t got the general good in mind. He’s only interested in number one. The British idea of “fair play” doesn’t register. But, of course, there being Brits involved, there’s the whole class thing. Officers are generally upper-class and speak with pronounced drawls and affect that this whole prisoner-of-war lark is merely tiresome. Throw into the equation as well as kind of Lord of the Flies scenario where ideas of civilization are rudely interrupted by desperate need to claw to the top.

Three narratives intertwine. King’s black market activities attract the ire of the British security chief Lt Grey (Tom Courtenay), who, despite his position is clearly working class. King befriends airman Lt Marlowe (James Fox) who, though occasionally sticking to some honor code, gradually drifts away from any notions of upright behavior into the seductive immorality implicit in dealings with the American. And while investigating the theft of rations, Grey comes up against the brick wall of camp commander Col Smedley-Taylor, who while distinctly upper-class, nonetheless is a realist and keeps the situation on an even keel.

In the background, of course, is deprivation. Men commit suicide if caught stealing – and in quite awful fashion, diving headfirst into the dung-hole and suffocating.

In due course, King, as the title of the picture suggests, hits upon the notion of breeding rats and selling the food to the other prisoners under the guise of calling it “mouse-deer,” a genuine species in the area.

Complicity in corruption lingers, Grey assuming that Smedley-Taylor is glossing over punishment for the thefts, while all the prisoners begin to view King in a better light once he becomes the source of much-needed nourishment.

Mostly, though it’s about the characters and therefore about the acting. Tom Courtenay (Otley, 1969) is the least interesting, we’ve seen this snarky grumpy screen persona too many times before. George Segal (The Quiller Memorandum, 1966) is the revelation. He’s so charming it’s sometimes difficult to realize that he’s the villain of the piece, the unscrupulous soldier taking advantage of circumstance. He might be like your local drug-dealer, the criminal aspect of his activity overlooked because people want so badly what’s he’s selling.

The impact of James Fox (Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1967) is largely down to the fact that he plays against officer type, that one of the supposed good guys goes along with King and junks his stiff-upper-lip when easier pickings are on offer. But John Mills (The Family Way, 1966) is the other standout, determined not to make waves that will only upset a delicate order. You’ll catch Patrick O’Neal (Stiletto, 1969) and Denholm Elliott (Maroc 7, 1967) in small parts and a whole host of British supporting actors.

Writer-director Bryan Forbes (Deadfall, 1968), adapting the James Clavell bestseller, keeps the package taut, allowing the actors to do their stuff.

Yep, another plug. I’m honored to have been invited to adapt my book The Making of The Magnificent Seven (McFarland, 2015) for this magnificent full issue, packed full of illustrations, of the iconic Cinema Retro magazine.

Anthony Quinn was convinced it was his idea.  In 1956 watching a new 155-minute Japanese film about seven samurai, which had won the Silver Lion at the annual Venice Film Festival, second only in global prestige to Cannes, and was astonishingly action-packed for a movie playing an arthouse theatre, it occurred to him this would make a good western. It already had a great title – The Magnificent Seven(as Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai was known in the US). Thinking it would be an ideal vehicle for them both, Quinn mentioned his samurai idea to Yul Brynner.

Brynner had been a star-in-waiting since appearing on stage in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I in 1951. Born on July 11, 1920, in Vladivostok in the USSR, reaching the USA in 1941 via Paris, he starred in one of the first U.S. television shows Mr Jones and His Neighbors (1944) but also directed over 1,000 programs. He briefly decamped to Broadway for Lute Song (1946), leading man to star Mary Martin, but turned down the film version, making his movie in Port of New York (1947). “You’ll be seeing plenty of him after this film break,” prophesied Variety. But television presented better opportunity, future director Martin Ritt dabbed him “ a brilliant tv producer” and the BBC sent over a team to study his innovations.

When Rodgers and Hammerstein went looking for a strong male presence to compete with star Gertrude’s Lawrence’s stage charisma in The King and I, Mary Martin pushed for him. The musical turned Brynner into a star.

Paramount signed him up, along with Audrey Hepburn, for its new talent roster. The first project, A New Kind Of Love, to be directed by Billy Wilder, would pair him with Greta Garbo. Sam Spiegel wanted him for a biopic of Nijinsky. When Garbo proved, as you might expect, disinterested, Audrey Hepburn stepped in and when she dropped out was replaced by namesake Katharine Hepburn. When that project died, Paramount shifted Brynner to South Seas Story in 3D. But that didn’t work out either. He was up against Charlton Heston and Mel Ferrer for Columbia’s Miss Sadie Thompson starring Rita Hayworth. He was wooed by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti for Lust for Life and then for Biblical drama Judith and Holofernes with Silvano Mangano.

At the interval of a performance of The King and I, Cecil B. DeMille went backstage. “In four years,” noted Brynner, “I have never had a visitor. There are only 7½ minutes between acts. By the time I had to go on stage again I had not only agreed to do The Ten Commandments with him but another picture following it.” Twentieth Century Fox ponied up $1m for movie rights to The King and I. Brynner pushed the studio to allow him to direct the musical.

Anthony Quinn was also hankering after going down the route of direction, or at least greater production control of his career. But while Brynner’s career was taking off, Quinn’s was at a standstill. Even winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Viva Zapata (1952) had not done much for this career and in a bid to revitalize that he had gone to Italy in 1954, but Attila, Ulysses and Fellini’s La Strada did not bring him  stardom, second-billed in all three. When top billing finally did arrive in film noir The Long Wait (1954) it sank without trace

By contrast, Brynner made a pampered entrance to screen stardom, flown to Egypt at the end of October, 1955, for just two days shooting on The Ten Commandments (1956) for a scene involving Pharaoh heading his army of 10,000 men, then whisked back to the U.S. and not required for shooting until six months later. While assigned the male lead in Fox big-budget drama Anastasia (1956), directed by Anatole Litvak, as with The King and I (1956) he was not top-billed. That honour went to Ingrid Bergman, making her Hollywood comeback after her scandalous affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, while Deborah Kerr’s name came first for the musical. Whatever way you cut it, in his first three movies, Brynner was not considered the main attraction.

So his thoughts turned once again from acting to directing. “Acting was only supposed to be a temporary job,” he complained and he hustled Paramount to give him an actor-director deal. “Directing is my baby. It is for me more satisfying than acting – it’s like leading a symphony orchestra compared to playing a fiddle.” As to genre, “I have a yen to make westerns,” he said. “Westerns are the poetry of films.” he said. His badgering paid off. In 1956 Paramount announced it had signed him up as an actor-director in a purported million-dollar deal.

To take more control of his career, Quinn had shifted gear and established  Antone Productions. But none of the fist six projects announced – including an MGM-backed El Cid – made it over the line. By contrast after the triple success of The King and I,  The Ten Commandments, and Anastasia, Brynner could not be flying higher. He was inundated with offers.

But he envisaged himself as a mogul, setting up production outfit Alciona. And won a unheard-of $25m deal with United Artists for eleven movies.  This was unprecedented. Nobody in the annals of Hollywood had ever been given such largesse, never mind a man with no experience of the two skills – producing and directing – which he would have to master. On his slate, the idea to turn Seven Samurai into a western.

Unbeknownst to Brynner and Quinn, ex-newspaperman and Columbia Studios story editor Lou Morheim snapped up the remake rights for $2,500 from International Toho Inc. Despite previous cooperation Brynner and Quinn became rivals in bidding for the project.  Brynner won, contract signed in February 1958.

Brynner had decided the movie was the ideal vehicle for his directing debut. But he wouldn’t act. The Magnificent Six, to be shot in Europe, was announced as Alciona’s first film, being made for United Artists with Brynner directing.

Brynner offered Quinn $125,000 plus a profit share to star. Despite various delays, Brynner, still intent on directing, in January 1959 went to Spain to scout locations. But there were problems with Quinn. Brynner handed over the directorial reins to Anatole Litvak, while remaining on board as star, Glenn Ford

drafted in as co-star. But with the budget rocketing to $2.4m, UA pulled the plug on Alciona, reimbursing Brynner’s $112,000 investment, turning the project over to Mirisch.  Mirisch had the ideal director in mind, one who was equally proficient in the genre  – John Sturges.

Yep, sorry, this is just a taster. You can read the whole story (or a condensed version of it) in Cinema Retro – see link below – and if you want the whole shebang check out my book.

https://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php/archives/12925-UPDATE-ON-CINEMA-RETROS-THE-MAGNIFICENT-SEVEN-SPECIAL-EDITION-ISSUE!.html