1960s film – Page 69 – The Magnificent 60s

The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl / La Louve Solitaire (1968) ****

A sheer delight, a twisty thriller with a standout sexy burglar. It might put you immediately in mind of To Catch a Thief (1955) but this takes the Hitchcock embryo and molds it in something effortlessly stylish and not just to keep the audience on the hop. A second viewing has raised it in my estimation.

Unless you were a fan of the more permissive pictures at the end of the 1960s or kept a close eye on the gossip columns – or for that matter Playboy magazine – you were unlikely to have come across slinky blonde Daniele Gaubert. A former teen model and supporting actress in a number of French and Italian films at the start of the 1960s, she had a brief brush with Hollywood as Yul Brynner’s girlfriend in United Artists’ Flight from Ashiya (1964) but then married Rhadames Trujillo, son of the Dominican Republic dictator.

The year after The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl she starred in Radley Metzger’s provocative Camille 2000 which set pulses racing especially at the censor’s office. Then marriage beckoned again, this time to French Olympic triple gold medallist skier Jean-Claude Killy with whom she made her last picture The Snow Job (1972) also known, depending on where you lived, as The Ski Raiders and The Great Ski Caper.

She only made eighteen movies but The Golden Claws of the Cat Girl is by far the standout. A taut thriller with plenty of twists and stylish action scenes, the French-Italian co-production was the only film of documentary film maker Edouard Logerau and that background helps shape the movie with many of the most thrilling sequences lacking musical accompaniment.

Female empowerment is not normally associated with crime, given that organized crime is generally organized by men. But burglary is a different matter, lending itself to non-gender-specific individual enterprise. Though there are safes to break, there’s no glass ceiling in this brand of thievery.

Gaubert plays a cat burglar ironically known as “the lone wolf” (as in the original title) who is forced to trade her freedom by stealing a cache of drugs for the police in order to apprehend a criminal mastermind (Sacha Pitoeff). (Maybe this notion inspired Luc Besson’s Nikita.) Her sidekick is Michael Duchaussoy, seconded from his usual job as an embassy press attache, on the grounds that he can lip-read (which proves more than a gimmick as the plot unfolds).

Given that this was all shot “in camera” – Christopher Nolan’s favourite phrase – without the benefit of CGI or, so it would appear, much in the way of bluescreen, the burglary scenes are pretty impressive. For a kick-off, Gaubert is a sexy as you can get in a skin-tight cat-suit. Furthermore, her character calls on skills from her previous occupation as a trapeze artist. While the director doesn’t match Hitchcock’s in the tension-racking stakes, the sheer verve of the burglary takes the breath away.

The first burglary – before she is caught – takes place at a fancy chateau where a party is in full swing (owners in residence less likely to take extra precautions to hide their valuables), Gaubert nips over a wall, slips up a tree, uses a line thrower (a type of harpoon) to connect tree to building, and then proceeds to walk along the tightrope. Mission accomplished, she zooms off in a sports car, only stopping to remove false tyre treads and strip out of her costume before hiding her ill-gotten gains in a secret compartment at the back of the fridge.

The police burglary is in an office block. She and the lip-reader are holed up in an apartment opposite watching via a telescope. Although they pass the time in gentle flirtation, especially as she favours revealing outfits, she is not quite as imprisoned as it might seem and is already hatching her own plans to outwit her captors. This burglary is even more dangerous, in the pouring rain for a start, across Parisian rooftops, and involving a trapeze and ropes.

Thereafter, plot twists come thick and fast after this. She escapes to Switzerland, pursued by lip-reader (to whom she has clearly formed an attachment), cops and furious drug runners. Eventually re-captured she agree to another official burglary as a way of finally trapping Mr Big.

The tone is lightened by repartee and some interesting characterization. The lone wolf turns out to have very strong principles that prevent her just running off. Mr Big is a stamp aficionado. A lava lamp is turned into a weapon. Instead of counting to five before killing someone, a bad guy does the countdown according to the number of people diving into a swimming pool. Gaubert fools her captors into thinking they have a flat tyre by dangling her handbag over the edge of the door until it bumps into the tyre and makes the thwock-thwock of a burst tyre. “Survivors give me goose flesh,” quips a thug.

The closest comparison is not Hitchcock but Danger: Diabolik (1968) featuring John Philip Law which has a definite comic book riff. And you might also point to Joseph Losey’s Modesty Blaise (1966) or even, for a self-contained independent woman, to Raquel Welch’s Fathom (1967. But this lone wolf is ice-cold. Blonde is not enough. She is one step ahead of the law and the criminals. There are hints of a tragic past – a trapeze artists requires a partner, for example.

The last shot has Genault triumphant on a Paris rooftop. There is a nod to Hitchcock (think Rear Window) in the use of a telescopic framing device for many scenes, giving them a voyeuristic aspect. Sure, a bigger budget and a better supporting cast – and perhaps a more obvious romance – might have lifted the picture but Genault’s presence ensures that the film does not lack style. Gaubert dominates so much you could imagine she harldy needed direction but it is the cleverness of Edourd Logerau (Paris Secret, 1965) that makes it appear seamless.

Definitely deserves a more appreciative audience.

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) *****

The most celebrated of the conspiracy thrillers and rightly so. But I’m not going to start with the Korean brainwashing, extraordinary cinematic sequence that that is, but with the scene on the train, the pickup scene as it might be known in those days, meet-cute now. There is little cute about this picture which stretches the bounds of normality. And I guess I was already so unsettled, and perhaps settling into film noir mode when an easily available woman was always to be distrusted, and thought that the sudden appearance of Eugenie (Janet Leigh) was a plant.

But that wasn’t in itself what lodged that scene in the caboose so firmly in my mind. But the superlative acting of Frank Sinatra as the investigative Major Marco. Sure, we’ve seen good, sometimes great acting before from Sinatra, generally under-rated due to the myth that nobody could seriously give a good performance after just one take, as if stage actors do not do this every night of the week. But this is above and beyond.

What makes this so outstanding is the depth. Whatever he is saying, that’s not what he’s thinking. He is so dislocated his mind is elsewhere.

Now you give an actor punchy dialog and that’s the way he’s going to treat it, like a punchball, zing zing zing, but that’s not the case here. You can see from his expression that while he is responding well enough to this apparently sympathetic dame that his mind is not completely gone, but that he is barely holding himself together. Another actor would have shown greater signs of mental collapse, signs of a tear perhaps or using an artefact for support, a glass to crush in his hands. But not here. It’s all in the face.

He’s helped of course that the dialog is all about identity. Who is Eugenie? Not as in, who is she really, which would be a good question to ask at this point in the proceedings, but how does someone cope with a name like Eugenie and so the dialog rambles around the various shortenings of her name, while at the same time, recognising he desperately needs a port in a storm, she ensures she knows her address.

The way this movie is going that could be code, too, or a trigger, or that when he turns up at her apartment he’s going to encounter some obstacle, but it doesn’t turn out that way either, even though this is a movie where no one is what he or she seems. Insanely ambitious politician’s wife Eleanor (Angela Lansbury) double crosses her country, the Koreans double cross her by turning her son (rather than any old grunt) into an assassin, and in the end the son, the rather effete Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), turns on the mother in the most murderous way imaginable. Much as she loves her son, she is willing to sacrifice him for the chance of becoming the President’s wife and when she does will exert her revenge on the Koreans.

The “exchange” is an old industry term, literally like a library, meaning where you would take the movie you had just screened and swap it for your next movie. You would pick up all your advertising material and campaign manual at the same time. Certainly saved on the postage. And the exchange manager, meanwhile, would try to sweet talk you into taking another movie you had never heard of.

I’ve gone on before about the beauty of the single-take movie (Grenfell, 2023) but here I’m in raptures at the single scene, how a movie pivots on superb acting. I could have used the brainwashing as an example, but that’s not about acting, but about directing, about perception, about how the audience as much as the participants is being led around by the nose by director John Frankenheimer, who would return to questions of identity and voluntary brainwashing in Seconds (1966).

But back to the brainwashing. This hits the mother lode. A troop of captured U.S. soldiers face an audience with a ringmaster demonstrating just how much they are under his command and can be hypnotised into carrying out any order, even cold-blooded murder. But each of the soldiers sees a different audience. That’s the cinematic coup. I would have loved to have been part of the original audience back in the day, brought up on war movies or thrillers that followed a straightforward narrative arc. Even critics singing the praises of the French New Wave would have never seen anything like this.

Anyway, it soon occurs to Major Marco that his ongoing nightmares are part of a deeper problem especially as his memory of Shaw does not tally with what he finds himself saying about his troop leader.

We follow two parallel stories, Marco trying to get to the truth before he fries his brain, and the audience being let in on much of the truth by tracking Shaw, who, to spite his hated mother, has taken a job with, effectively, the opposition and has fallen in love again with Jocelyn (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of one of her husband’s most implacable foes.

You couldn’t get a more twisty movie, set against the backdrop of the Communist witch hunt, when a politician could garner headlines just by pretending to name Communists in high office. The political element is just as cynical as the same year’s Advise and Consent and savage as the ineffectual Senator Iselin (James Gregory) is, he’s not much worse than the clowns in the Preminger picture. So it all rings true.

There’s scarcely a moment wasted as the movie screams towards a terrifying climax. The built-in control trigger I didn’t see coming, and Shaw’s transformation from strict man-in-charge to bumbling romantic fool is a joy.

Frank Sinatra (The Detective, 1968) gives the performance of his life, Laurence Harvey (Life at the Top, 1965) proof of the power of love, Angela Lansbury (In the Cool of the Day, 1963), the mother from Hell, are all outstanding. The support cast includes Janet Leigh (Psycho, 1960), Henry Silva (The Secret Invasion, 1964) and John McGiver (Breakfast at Tiffanys, 1961).

Frankenheimer directs with elan from the script by George Axelrod (Breakfast at Tiffanys) based on the Richard Condon (The Happy Thieves, 1961) bestseller.

An absolute must.

Behind the Scenes: “The Happy Ending” (1969)

You had to be a mean son-of-a-bitch to cast your alcoholic wife in a movie about an alcoholic wife. The title of Douglass K. Daniel’s biography of director Richard Brooks, Tough As Nails, did not specifically refer to The Happy Ending but it might as well have. But on top of what you might from the outside consider a somewhat callous attitude, you would also have to reflect on the movie’s message: that a man might be implicit in the woman turning towards the bottle and that a woman can break free of a stultifying marriage.

Marriage to Brooks in 1960 meant Jean Simmons, until then a huge star, leading lady to opposite Marlon Brando (Desiree, 1954), Frank Sinatra (Guys and Dolls, 1956), Gregory Peck (The Big Country, 1958), Burt Lancaster (Elmer Gantry, 1960) and Kirk Douglas (Spartacus, 1960), dialled back on her career, opting instead for wifedom and motherhood. Six movies in eight years, compared to 14 pictures in the previous comparable period, spelled the extent of her commitment.

Both had been riding high at the time of their marriage. Despite the setback of Lord Jim (1965), Brooks regained favor through the commercial and critical success of The Professionals (1966) and In Cold Blood (1967). But Simmons tumbled down the pecking order with little compensation on the marital side. As single-minded a director as Brooks spent far more time on his movies than his marriage. The long separations caused by his work took their toll. Like the middle-aged character she played in The Happy Ending, “I started sitting around,” Simmons told her husband’s biographer, “looking in the mirror, feeling sorry for myself a lot. I was slugging down a lot more than anyone should. Sometimes it would bring out the ugly side – when you want to hurt people. And who do you want to hurt? Why, it’s always the one who is closest to you.”

Recognizing she was an alcoholic Simmons began a battle against the disease. Her husband came up with an unusual way of helping, one that would, in some senses, help bridge the gap between them, by writing a movie in which she would star and he would direct. I doubt if she was so far down the pecking order by that stage that if a director of Brooks’ commercial caliber had decided to cast her in a more commercial project, his heist picture $ (1971) for example, I would be surprised if he did not get his way.

However, he had set his mind on a more personal project. Though he was writer-director to trade, had tended to adapt other people’s novels or plays, he hadn’t come up with an original screenplay in nearly two decades, since Deadline U.S.A (1952). So it was odd in some respects that it was his wife’s alcoholism that fired up his creative juices.

“He was trying to help me understand alcoholics,” explained Simmons. “and he would go to (AA) meetings, too, just to find out what people talk about and what people do and didn’t do.” Even so, it was a hard part to envisage. There was too much of herself in the script, Brooks using words she had spoken in real life. “It suddenly hit me as more personal – and it hurt quite a bit to feel so exposed. It was too close to home.”

But the movie proved an original piece of therapy. “He pulled me out of it, made me straighten up, so to speak.” And it was certainly a courageous role to play, knowing that this was something you had experienced yourself and that audiences, should her alcoholism become public knowledge, might judge her as they judged the character.

Brooks softened the potential risk for a major studio by keeping the budget low – incredibly low, in fact, just $1.7 million in the end. The movie was made mostly on location in Denver and the Bahamas, deliberately steering clear of Hollywood back lots. The cast was solid rather than costly – John Forsythe still best known for Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry (1955), Shirley Jones (Two Rode Together, 1961) another fading star, Teresa Wright (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943) in only her second movie in a decade, television star Lloyd Bridges in only his fourth movie in 11 years, comedian Dick Shawn, out-of-favor Bobby Darin (Pressure Point, 1962) and Tina Louise (The Warrior Empress, 1960).

Simmons had to endure worse than she had suffered as an actual alcoholic – Brooks filmed her going through having her stomach pumped. The director employed a trick to get a reaction from Forsythe at the movie’s end. He has Simmons ask Forsythe an unexpected question and his response, in character, was just right.

Brooks saw the movie as a critique of marriage rather than a rallying call for feminism. “All I wanted to say was that marriage was not for everybody and, by itself, certainly isn’t a solution to anything,” said Brooks, clearly unaware of the impact the harm that putting such a point-of-view on screen might do to his wife.

By and large critics murdered the movie, it was cited as one of the ten worst of the year by the New York Times. Only Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times and Rex Reed were its only champions. Even though the Academy members recognized the strength of Simmons’ performance to give an Oscar nod, the movie, despite the meagre budget, still proved a flop.

Astonishingly, even today it is routinely ignored, only a handful of review for example on Imdb and a 33 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

SOURCES: Douglas K. Daniels, Tough As Nails( University of Wisconsin Press, 2011) p187-190

The Happy Ending (1969) ****

Vastly under-rated, critically dismissed at the time, this early reflection on feminism has now come into its own. Yet it starts out as a completely different picture. At first it appears as ruthless a depiction of the self-destructive alcoholic as the later Leaving Las Vegas (1995). In passing, skewering the conventions of marriage in an era or strata of society where divorce was not a convenient option. And a time when women, chained to the home but craving attention, might risk the humiliation of being turned away by a secretary on visiting their husband at the office.

When love had turned into transactional sex. Where women hid out in beauty parlors, sanctuaries which men would dare not invade, to drink and play cards in peace. Or, indulging in the working aspect of such places, underwent breast augmentation or brutal hair removal or other procedures with a view to holding on to their men, seen as daily riding a wave of temptation in the Mad Men world of cocktails and expense account living. For this class of men the word “inappropriate” has never been invented as they paw at any female within reach.

*From snow-kissed romance and champagne to….*

A largely redundant and lengthy (eight minutes, for goodness sake) montage (including credits and a post-credits – what! – theme song) serves to emphasize the part Hollywood played in reinforcing the celluloid image of initial romance being the mere prelude to happy ever after. The reality was a much whiter shade of pale.

Facing up to their sixteenth wedding anniversary – their marriage, topically, spanning the birth of Prince Charles and his anointing as Prince of Wales, seen via cinema newsreel and television news – alcoholic middle-aged housewife Mary (Jean Simmons) re-evaluates her stultifying life. Lawyer husband Fred (John Forsythe) jokingly refers to himself as “the F.B.I.” but the surveillance he undertakes to ensure his wife has not fallen off the wagon would have earned him a gold star in that particular organization. He has housemaid Agnes (Nanette Fabray) snoop on his wife, goes through all her drawers and clothes until he finds the mercifully unopened bottle of vodka hidden in a boot, checks up on her movements at the hairdresser and even knows which bar she is likely to frequent.

Although managing to refrain from drinking anything alcoholic, Mary’s behavior take her perilously close. She drinks tomato juice from a champagne glass, buys a fellow alcoholic a whisky in a bar just to savor him drinking it. And for all her husband’s attempts to keep her away from the stuff gets pretty loaded himself at times and the catering table at a previous anniversary party fairly groaning with booze has proved a temptation too far. She’s been an extreme player – her stomach pumped out in flashback.

*…anything that comes in a glass or a bottle. She even has booze secreted in a bottle of perfume.*

Husband’s control extends to finance. She is denied credit card, cheque book and ready cash. Even her mother (Teresa Wright) refuses to lend her money. Unable to go through with putting another good face on their marriage via the anniversary party she pawns a necklace and jaunts off to the Bahamas. On the plane she meets old buddy Flo (Shirley Jones) who is enjoying a clandestine affair with a married man. Mary dips her toe in those illicit waters but her flight has sobered her up enough to face up to her dilemma and not cover all the wounds with alcohol.

I’m not planning to spoil the story by telling you the ending but the ending is the whole point. While the movie’s title is initially perceived as an ironic tilt at the state of marriage – the traditional movie “happy ending” – in reality the ending Mary chooses for herself is the feminist one of self-determination, independent of a man, her self-worth not tied up in his appreciation of her, and she takes the extremely bold decision to quit the marriage, not for another man as might have been de rigeur and in some ways more acceptable within society, but to find herself.

This was a terrible flop, the worst in director Richard Brooks’ career which at the time had reached the commercial and critical peaks of The Professionals (1966) and In Cold Blood (1967), for which he was Oscar-nominated. Audiences failed to respond despite Jean Simmons (Rough Night in Jericho, 1967) receiving her second Oscar nomination.

And you can see why it sank. If people didn’t walk out during the interminable montage sequence, then for the most part it was interminably depressing. The only thing worse than watching an alcoholic getting drunk is watching an alcoholic desperate to get drunk, holding back from indulging as if standing on the edge of a precipice, almost willing themselves to fall over for the sheer relief of oblivion.

And yet it is extremely watchable as the couple play out their marital game, Fred, the ostensible loving husband, protecting his wife from herself, Mary blaming her drinking for their marital problems rather than the other way round.

Jean Simmons is a compelling watch. This is really a tremendous performance and a shame she lost out to the more showy acting of Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. As good as that was, it was pretty much all surface, Smith playing a character who was pure invention, for the most part sashaying through life by force of her incredible personality, not a woman grasping at straws from the outset, damned by all in sight who were only too aware of her affliction, unable to come to terms with herself, denied all that was casually tossed to often worthless men.

John Forsythe (Topaz, 1969), who grits his teeth so much they appear likely to puncture his cheeks, is as good as I’ve ever seen him in a whale of a part that calls upon him to play two roles effectively, the dutiful husband restrained by having to watch over his errant wife, and a man who, out of her sight, can still enjoy himself, and, it is hinted, has been illicit himself with colleague’s wife Helen (Tina Louise).

Structurally, it’s very cleverly done, and Richard Brooks continues with the façade of the happy marriage and the wife’s drinking being the root cause of their dual unhappiness before letting rip late on with the incipient feminism.

A tremendous movie and well worth seeing.

Behind the Scenes: “Shalako” (1968)

If you ever wondered just how a producer earns his crust, the convoluted process to make Shalako would provide a test case. British publicist turned producer Euan Lloyd had little on his calling card to gain entry to Hollywood, not even with the stars in tow for the project. Having worked for several years as a production assistant with Warwick Films, the British-based outfit headed by Cubby Broccoli and Irving Allen, he transitioned to associate producer on The Secret Ways (1961) but didn’t earn the moniker of producer until he pulled together an all-star cast for The Poppy Is Also A Flower (1966). Although released theatrically in Europe it was in reality a made-for-television number and screened as such in the United States.

So, actually, he was very much a neophyte producer. But early in his career he had become fast friends with Alan Ladd (Shane, 1953) and since they shared a love of westerns the actor had put him in touch with bestselling western author Louis L’Amour who was so taken with the Englishman’s enthusiasm he granted him a free option on any one of his un-filmed novels. Lloyd chose Shalako. “I could identify with that subject as it’s about a bunch of Europeans on safari in the West,” said Lloyd. (In fact, though as yet unfilmed, it was not as though nobody had tried. A report in Box Office magazine dated August 19, 1963, stated that Richard Carr was working on a screenplay for producer George Golitsin set for Universal).

*No connection to Shalako but little excuse necessary to showcase BB’s figure apparently.*

On the production side, it would give him the excuse he required to put together a cast of non-Americans, stars from different nationalities who could open the distribution doors to significant European countries like France and Germany. His original starring pair were Henry Fonda (Firecreek, 1968) and Senta Berger, whom he knew from The Secret Ways and The Poppy Is Also A Flower. “Privately, she was the antithesis of the character she played in The Secret Ways…she came to mind as a very likely countess.”

He recruited Edward Dymytrk (Mirage, 1965), having got to know the director, a fugitive from the Communist witch hunt in the U.S., on the set of the British-made So Well Remembered (1947). Dmytryk had worked with Fonda on Warlock (1959). While appreciating Lloyd’s interest and keen to work again with Dmytryk, Fonda warned that he was not a strong enough marquee name to get the project off the ground.

To cover his back and using the names of his two stars and director, Lloyd set about pulling together finance from European sources. Although such co-productions were becoming more common, Lloyd must have set some kind of record by pre-selling the movie, in the end, to 36 different bodies. But still it wasn’t enough. Without an American partner, the movie was no-go. Fonda proved the sticking point and in 1967 Lloyd decided to go for broke with a bigger cast (Fonda was pretty gracious about being dumped, “I did warn you,” he said).

Sean Connery was not even initially on the list of proposed stars until Louis L’Amour alerted Lloyd to the length of the queues to see the latest Bond blockbuster (quite how a producer didn’t know that might be considered a mystery). Connery was incommunicado, filming a documentary in Scotland, but Lloyd managed to get in touch and seven weeks later he had what he believed, based on the Bond box office, was the biggest star in the world.

Part of the attraction for Connery of course was that for the first time he was receiving a salary ($1.2 million in total) commensurate with his box office. But it turned out as far as Hollywood was concerned, Connery had been taken in by his own publicity, studios pointing out that his non-Bond movies, Marnie (1964), The Hill (1965) and A Fine Madness (1966) had not approached his Bond box office.

Nor was Brigitte Bardot a golden name on the U.S. cinema scene. Until the mid-decade reissue of La Dolce Vita (1960), her first starring role And God Created Woman (1956) held the record for the biggest imported movie. But since them, except for Viva Maria (1966), her movies had been relegated to arthouses, hardly worth risking for a $400,000 salary – she was in Variety’s list of Top Ten Overpriced Stars.

Three major studios rejected the movie. Assuming all the majors would take the same view that “Connery will never make it away from Bond,” Lloyd targeted a mini-major, the kind of neophyte outfit that might pony up to get a big name on its forthcoming schedule, a way of proving it could play with the big boys. ABC, an offshoot of the television network, was hooked, paying $1.4 million for the privilege.

Trevor Howard, Karl Malden, Claire Bloom and Ingrid Pitt was all considered for roles. Even without them, as well as Bardot, the movie, in terms of credits, had the look of one of those all-star epics so beloved in the 1960s: Jack Hawkins (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962), Stephen Boyd whom Lloyd knew from being associate producer on Genghis Khan (1965) and German star Peter van Eyck (Station Six Sahara, 1963). And if Bardot wasn’t enough to get journalist tongues wagging, Connery would also be reunited with Honor Blackman from Goldfinger (1964). The cast also included Woody Strode (The Professionals, 1966), famed 1940s western star Don ‘Red’ Barry (The Adventures of Red Ryder, 1940) and English comedian Eric Sykes (The Plank, 1967).

Mexico was first choice of location until the devalued peso rendered it too expensive. Almeria in Spain, location of choice of many a spaghetti western, was the alternative. The biggest problem pre-shooting was that, to get into character, Connery had decided to grow a Mexican moustache, presumably not aware that moustaches were verboten for stars after The Gunfighter (1950) sank at the box office reputedly because Gregory Peck wore one. In the end, without the subject becoming a thorny issue, Connery shaved it off. He spent two weeks learning to ride under the tuition of Bob Simmons, a stunt arranger on the Bond pictures, so he could, indeed, sit as tall in the saddle as the great western stars. “He was a very proficient horseman by the time we started,” commented co-star Eric Sykes, “He looked as if he had been riding all his life.”

Meanwhile, Jack Hawkins (Masquerade, 1965) had undergone an operation for throat cancer and though he could speak his words were accompanied by a kind of belch and the voice for which he was so famous had disappeared. By coincidence Lloyd heard what he thought was Hawkins voicing a beer commercial. The distinctive tones belonged to Charles Gray (The Devil Rides Out, 1968) and he re-voiced Hawkins’ lines.

Despite Connery’s assertions to the contrary – his famous quote “she’s all girl but…all on the outside” was viewed as a detractory statement – Lloyd insisted it was a happy set. “I had absolutely no trouble from the cast during shooting and Sean and Brigitte performed perfectly and in harmony. Eddie Dmytryk was a man who knew exactly what he wanted and how to get it. The co-stars liked him enormously.”

Other sources paint a different picture, pointing to tension between Connery and Bardot over who was the bigger star, between Bardot and former lover Boyd, and between Connery and Dmytryk over the script. According to Eric Sykes, sitting beside Connery in between takes, the actor “would tear half a page or even a whole page of dialog out of his script…He was editing his part as he went along, apparently without reference to the director…One scene in particular with him and Brigitte Bardot, a long scene where they were sitting around a pool….it went on and on for about eight minutes…Sean’s editing turned it not a slick two- or three-minute scene…Eddie (Dmytryk) did not challenge it because when he saw what Sean had done he knew it was right.”

A big success in UK and Europe, it was a flop in the U.S. where ABC recorded a $1.2 million loss, but since every area was sold separately it is doubtful this shortfall would need to be repaid by the producer so counting the income from other sources it would have gone into profit. Incidentally, Connery was pictured wearing a moustache when the movie had its premiere and he was actually one of the few major stars who regularly wore a moustache in pictures and there are those who attribute his career longevity to cultivating a beard while still in his prime.

SOURCES: John Parker, Sean Connery, 1930-2020, The Definitive Biography (Bonnier Books, 2020) p171-176; Mac Mcsharry and Terry Hine, “The Way West,” Cinema Retro, Issue #2 May 2005, p38-42.

Shalako (1968) ***

It’s a gripping and unusual opening. The jangling noise of metal beating upon metal. A trapped mountain lion surrounded by a posse of unkempt men. The beast driven into a killing zone. The camera ends up on a classy blonde in a top hat, Irina (Brigitte Bardot), drawing a bead on the animal. But as she shoots so does rugged cowboy Bosky (Stephen Boyd) and you can be sure his aim is more deadly. It wouldn’t do to have an upper-class European lady to be mauled to death by a vicious creature just because her ego got the better of her.

Except that’s not the opening. Instead, that’s sacrificed for a dumb theme tune and a few minutes over the credits watching titular hero Shalako (Sean Connery) doing what exactly? Nothing exciting that for sure. We see him riding I guess to prove he can sit as tall in the saddle as the stars of the genre like Alan Ladd, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, James Stewart, as if nobody expected James Bond to be able to complete such a transition. There’s a bit of waking up, more riding, drinking from a dirty stream, and more riding while composer Jim Dale struggles to find lyrics that rhyme with Shalako.

There’s a bit more exposition before Shalako does anything meaningful. We are introduced to a fistful of Europeans on a hunting party complete with butler (Eric Sykes) and guzzling champagne and escorted by a bunch of mean-looking cowboys looking on in envy though I doubt any would acquire a taste for champagne.

Then the real action starts. A bit’s been missed out explaining just why Irina took off on her own with just one man as escort to continue hunting and nobody thought fit to warn her this was Apache country. We know she’s in trouble because her escort is just about dead and Apaches are gathering. Enter Shalako to save the day. The first piece of dialogue between the most handsome man in the world and the screen’s most beautiful woman, a movie made just so Connery, at his Bond peak, and Bardot, in her most expensive picture, could strike sparks off each other, is hardly something to treasure. It’s almost priceless for its mundanity. “You all right?” grunts Shalako. “Yes,” replies the breathless heroine.

But trust the British to bring that epitome of British moviemaking, the class war, to that most democratic of movie species, the western. It’s ironic that in the country where freedom is a given – slavery long since abolished in the period this movie was set – members of the hunting party are fettered. Irina is little more than bait. You might as well have staked her out, hoping to snare German aristocrat von Hallstatt (Peter van Eyck). Marriage would cure the financial woes of her debt-ridden sister Lady Daggett (Honor Blackman) and husband Sir Charles (Jack Jawkins). Von Hallstatt doesn’t believe in making romantic overtures, it would be, like so many aristocratic marriages, a contract of convenience; he acquires beauty, she gets wealth.

To complicate matters Lady Daggett has a roving eye which has settled on Bosky, and to complicate matters even further, nobody should be firing rifles, even if only for sport, in Apache territory. It’s not long before the Apaches take umbrage and launch an attack. And it takes even less time for Bosky and his buddies to take off, leaving their charges poorly defended in a makeshift fort.

It takes way too long to sort out all these plot machinations and get to the meat of the story which is finding a way of putting Connery and Bardot together and when they are not the movie trundles along without much in the way of screen sparks. It could have done with an entirely different scenario. Something akin to Soldier Blue (1970) would have worked a treat, with roles reversed of course back to the traditional of experienced male tending the inexperienced female as they battle through enemy territory.

You needed to get this pair together – and quick – for the movie to find any steam at all. As it is, it’s somewhat laborious. While the action sequences are well done and Shalako scores in the western lore department, you wouldn’t have thought a mountaineering subplot could have produced so few thrills, its only purpose, plot-wise, to ensure that von Hallstatt acquires some credibility (he’s the mountaineer) and that the group can reach a plateau whose main attraction, as lovers of westerns will already be aware, is a pool where in the great Hollywood tradition a woman can disport herself half-naked. Shalako, in sneaking up on her, comes across like a bit of a peeping tom.

Sean Connery (The Hill, 1965) is convincing enough as a cowboy. He certainly doesn’t look out of place on a horse but it takes far too long for the expected romance to begin. Brigitte Bardot (Viva Maria!, 1965) is better than you might expect as a sharpshooter, but not quite in the fiery class of a Claudia Cardinale (The Professionals, 1966) or even Maureen O’Hara (The Rare Breed, 1965) and she’s not really given the dialog necessary to fully establish the independence of her character.

Director Edward Dmytryk (Mirage, 1965) does his best with an overly-complicated script and some cumbersome set-pieces and it would have worked far better if a few characters and reams of sub-plot had been chucked aside to bring the stars together quicker. While Connery does the riding and shooting well enough he lacks the grizzled lived-in face of his famed western predecessors and I get a sense of him trying too hard. And, as I said, it wouldn’t have taken much to pep up Bardot.

Having complained about the subsidiary characters, they are all well-drawn. Stephen Boyd (The Big Gamble, 1961) makes on helluva mean cowboy, Honor Blackman (Moment to Moment, 1966) is excellent as a predatory female. Aristocratic pair Peter van Eyck (Station Six Sahara, 1963) and Jack Hawkins (Masquerade, 1965) are the kind of actors who can denote fallen status with facial expression rather than requiring lumps of dialog. But Eric Sykes (The Plank, 1967) is really a British in-joke.

James Griffith and screenwriting partner Hal Hopper had previously worked on Russ Meyer epics like Lorna (1965). The original story came from a novel by Louis L’Amour (Catlow, 1971).

Out-with his guise as James Bond, Connery – excepting Robin and Marian (1976) and Cuba (1979) – was not one of the screen’s great lovers so this would have been the perfect chance to hone those particular credentials. But like the entire picture this was a missed opportunity. When the best scene is the brutal suffocation of Honor Blackman and not the two stars canoodling, you can see the target was missed by miles.

The Oblong Box (1969) ***

Vincent Price and Christopher Lee – two scions of 1960s horror – together, yet anyone expecting a clash of the giants would be sorely disappointed as they only share one short scene. This is a typical American International Pictures venture, based even more typically on an Edgar Allan Poe story, with some stylistic direction – the extreme close-up never more effectively utilized – from Gordon Hessler in his third feature.

Given that German-born Hessler (Catacombs/The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die, 1965) was a last-minute substitute for English director Michael Reeves (Witchfinder General, 1968), he made an exceptionally good job of a complicated plot. The production was even more complicated than that since it was originally intended as a Spanish co-production to be shot in Spain. And at one point writer Lawrence Huntingdon (The Vulture, 1966), who did have form as a director (Death Drums Along the River, 1963), was reportedly also carrying out producer-director duties.

What seems like a mishmash of different stories – African sorcery, grave-robbing, disfigurement, forgery, blackmail, lifetime imprisonment, medical experiment, buried alive, a monster in a scarlet mask – soon comes together in a tense tale of retribution and revenge.

Nineteenth century English aristocrat Julain Markham (Vincent Price) has withdrawn to his country manor, for unknown reasons distancing himself from his fiancée Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer), but in reality to conceal from the world the fact that he has locked up his own brother, Sir Edward (Alister Williamson). When the brother, a disfigured monster, escapes he embarks on a murder spree.

The various storylines keep the narrative sufficiently entangled to sustain tension. Despite what may appear to a modern audience as primitive special effects, several scenes are bone-chilling largely through directorial manipulation. The Gothic look – graveyards, castles, the village – adds to the atmosphere. The violence was trimmed in America to avoid an “R” rating, but led to the film being banned in Australia.

There is more overt sexuality than normal, a scheming whore Heidi (Uta Levka) tempting a man with her bare breasts, and maid Sally (Sally Geeson) entranced by the monster.

The various plot strands appeared to confuse critics at the time and even now the film receives comments that it is “vague” but at a time when Hammer’s output usually comprised a straightforward – and somewhat limited narrative – I found AIP’s approach to this picture a welcome development. The slowly emerging story set the film up as much as a thriller as a horror.

It’s a bit of a reversal for Vincent Price (Witchfinder General, 1968) to be playing the good guy but that works to the movie’s advantage because you spent most of the time thinking this is just a scam and at some point he will show his true colors. Hilary Dwyer (Witchfinder General) is excellent and Sally Geeson (What’s Good for the Goose, 1969) is an example of the type of woman attracted to rather than revulsed by a killer.

Well worth a look if only to enjoy the distinctive Hessler style.

Blow-Up (1966) ****

Movies can break all sorts of rules but they can’t cheat.

A film has to stick to an internal logic. For example, it can’t portray a photographer so obsessed with his calling that he even takes a camera with him to an antique shop and starts shooting off roll and after roll capturing the area’s rundown streets but then the one time he really could do with a camera – to prove there is a corpse at his feet – he is somewhat remiss. Especially when that the movie turns on that plot point.

Setting aside what’s a somewhat contrived snapshot of “Swinging London” there’s a lot to admire here. The absence of music for one thing. Most of the movie runs without musical accompaniment, a bold move since so often we rely on the soundtrack to provide guidance for a scene or an overlay for the entire film. Here, Michelangelo Antonioni (Zabriskie Point, 1970) makes us falls back on our own interpretation.

David Hemmings (The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1968), all mop-top and intense stare, is a high-flying high-living fashion photographer in the David Bailey mold (casual sex with wannabe models a perk) who turns investigator on being confronted in a park by Vanessa Redgrave (Hemmings’ adulterous love interest in The Charge of the Light Brigade) after taking snaps she wants back. Tension is sustained by her sudden appearance at his studio, willing to pay with her body for the return of the photos, and then by Hemmings’ careful, photo-by-photo blow-up-by-blow-up analysis that slowly comes closer to the truth.

Everything in his world is judged through a lens, as if he can capture elusive truths, and he has aspirations to being more than a mere fashion adjunct, having spent time taking portraits of down-and-outs. He judges Redgrave as he would a model, she has a good stance and sitting posture. Even by the standards of the permissive society, he is a bit of sexual predator, taking advantage of two giggly model wannabes – Jane Birkin (Wonderwall, 1968) and Gillian Hills (Three, 1969).

But the photography scenes are well done and Antonioni captures the intimacy between model and photographer that create the best images. If you want to see what a model brings to modeling check out real-life model Veruschka posing in an outfit held together by the thinnest of threads, bringing to life the much-touted notion that a model makes love to a camera. If you can get past the cheat and the deliberate obtuseness this creates – and the tsunami of artistic interpretations it inspired about the director’s intent – then it remains intriguing.

This isn’t Hemmings’ greatest work – Fragment of Fear is much better – but it certainly provided him with a marketable movie persona. Redgrave is excellent as the nervy woman willing to do what is required and the movie might have worked better had she had been allocated more screen time and their duel had continued through other scenes. But then that would have been Hitchcock and not Antonioni.

Sarah Miles (The Ceremony, 1963), Peter Bowles (The Charge of the Light Brigade) and John Castle (The Lion in Winter, 1968) have small parts. The film certainly captures the electricity of a photo shoot between a skilled photographer and pliant model, but it also works as an extended metaphor about the elusiveness of cinematic truth.

Despite my misgivings about the “cheat,” an intriguing and satisfying exploration of an artist seeking to jettison the fripperies of his art yet unable to avoid the temptation of enjoying the easy sexual benefits.

Nightmare (1964) ****

Now this is what you’re looking for when you take an unguided tour into the British B-movie. A tight gripping thriller with a parcel of twists, clever character perspective, some stunning cinematography, and pivoting on perception of insanity.

The opening is a cracker. Teenager Janet (Jennie Linden) stumbles along a dark prison-like corridor with little light hearing someone call her name. Entering a door, she spies a woman in a white nightgown lurking in the corner. She responds to the gentle calling. But once she lets the door close behind her and can’t get out, the woman screams that now they are both mad. And that’s just the first, atmospherically brilliant, nightmare.

Janet is soon removed from her posh boarding school, her constant nightmares too frightening for the other pupils. Driven home in a Rolls-Royce, accompanied by teacher Mary (Brenda Bruce) she passes the asylum where her mother is an inmate, but is surprised to find her legal guardian, charming lawyer Henry (David Knight), isn’t there to greet her. Instead there’s a nurse, Grace (Moira Redmond).

We soon learn she’s been effectively orphaned by her mother, who killed her father, Janet, eleven at the time, witnessing the murder. But without any proper home life, looked after primarily by kindly chauffeur John (George A. Cooper) and maternal maid Anne (Julie Samuel) and with the married Henry often absent, there’s little done to quieten down her obsession that she will follow her mother into madness.

The movie takes her perspective, watching her watching out for mystery, or in her point of view as she catches fleeting glimpses of a woman in white. The apparition looking only too realistic, not dashing out of view but turning and apparently beckoning Janet on and it doesn’t take much to push a disordered mind further out of kilter, leading to attempted suicide. Imagining Henry’s wife is the ghost, she stabs her to death.

End of Act One. Start of Twist No 1. You would expect the movie to follow Janet to the asylum where she would be reunited with her mother, knowing she had inherited those terrible genes, trapped in her insanity. But it goes somewhere more delicious instead.

Turns out nice Henry is not very nice at all. He contrived a situation to be rid of his wife and marry lover Grace instead. But, once married, it is Grace who becomes disturbed and the movie follows a similar arc in the second half. Unexplained goings-on. She believes Henry has another, secret, lover and is trying to drive his new wife crazy. She finds strange cigarettes in his pocket, a barman at a hotel recognizes him even though he claims never to have been there before.

The marriage quickly deteriorates although she stands her ground, telling him in no uncertain terms that she won’t put up with any philandering and slapping his face. He is charm itself, easily turning aside her insinuations and from his casual and disarming manner it’s easy to believe he is perfectly innocent. Of course, that’s before Janet’s doll turns up and locked doors open and there’s an apparition.

The beauty of this picture is the atmosphere, the intensity of the camera, the concentration on two vulnerable females, convinced by genuine or imagined guilt that they will succumb to the madness that appears to pervade this particular house. You think it’s going down one route and are annoyed you didn’t see the next twist coming.

There’s the kind of cinematic repetition that enamored critics of more critically acclaimed pieces like The Searchers (1956). It’s almost as though there’s a beam of insanity identifying the next victim. And that’s helped immeasurably by the lighting which allows no shadow on faces. Like an inverted film noir, where the light has nowhere to go, no atmospheric shadow to create, except to land square on the faces of those involved. This would be the Old Dark House except never has a building been so illuminated, not bright throughout, the illumination predisposed to land on faces rather than rooms.

There are a couple of finely composed scenes, one viewed through a staircase, neat revelations, visual and verbal, a fabulous ending with one character screaming and a telephone dangling off the hook.

You might be astonished to discover this is a Hammer picture. Nary a monster in sight. But then little is scarier than what happens inside the mind, when imagination runs riot without external assistance. That the victim is a teenager, prone to the mood swings of that age, makes it easier for Jennie Linden (Women in Love, 1969) to ramp up the emotions without her seeming too barmy from the outset. David Knight (The Devil’s Agent, 1962) is excellent, conniving he may be but the general demeanor of bonhomie never slips into stage villain. But Moira Redmond (The Limbo Line, 1968) is the pick as she morphs from accomplished accomplice to prospective victim.

Tightly written by Jimmy Sangster (Maniac, 1963), characters fully evolved, twists cleverly concealed, and with excellent direction by Freddie Francis (The Skull, 1965), not just the visuals but in drawing out of a fairly standard set of actors exactly what he needs to make this tick.

Well worth a look. A much under-rated B-picture.

Youtube has an excellent print.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJizyBez6A0&t=1064s

Shadow of Treason (1963) **

Tracking down forgotten B-pictures it’s easy to convince yourself you’re going to uncover an under-rated gem. Sadly, despite mixing film noir with espionage and a treasure hunt, this fails dismally at getting over the line.

And that’s a shame because the credits roll over a background of long shadows, recalling instantly to mind not a film noir trope but the later famed poster of The Wild Bunch (1969). And there’s an excellent repetitive theme by Martin Slavin (Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), an interesting striptease involving a bear, and a superb chase sequence where the pursuer is in a wheelchair. Otherwise, it’s got such a convoluted storyline you wished someone could get on top of it sooner rather than dragging the audience from Trieste to Dubrovnik to Somaliland.

*Femme fatale No 1 Anita West literally in a hole with John Bentley.*

In his final movie British star John Bentley, who brought to life both Paul Temple and The Toff, plays Steve, a drifter of unspecified means, who saves cabaret singer/stripper Tina (Anita West) from assassination. Hired by her as bodyguard/detective, he learns her father was a German spy who has left her a list of names and a map to hidden treasure and strangely enough she has been receiving regular anonymous donations of cash. It soon becomes obvious to Steve that blackmail is the source of this unexpected bounty. And that he is caught in the middle. Some people want to pay him off, others to kill him off.

It doesn’t help that he is seduced by both Tina and Nadia (Faten Hamamah), daughter of Litov (Vladimir Leib), one of those being blackmailed but now confined to a wheelchair.

Along with Mario (Ferdy Mayne) and Michel (John Gabriel) they are all soon convinced that the solution to all their problems will be joining Steve on a trip to Somaliland to find the hidden treasure, cash the father was reportedly carrying to pay his team of spies.

*Femme fatale No 2 Faten Hammamah looking disgruntled.* *You could say the same about Bentley.*

Usually, with any kind of picture involving hunting for treasure, the audience is invited to be baffled by various clues, but here none are offered and the audience simply remains baffled. Once in Africa, of course, the action hots up, courtesy of stock footage of stampeding elephants and a variety of dangerous animals and by the double-crossing that appears essential to such schemes. Eventually, they end up in a cave, where the only bit of treasure detecting actually takes place. Assume more double cross and you’re just about there.

Director George P. Breaksaton (The White Huntress, 1954) must take full responsibility for this mess since he was also the writer and producer. Apart from the various sequences previously mentioned, he has little idea of narrative drive or even narrative. None of the characters connect with each other and certainly not with the audience.

John Bentley does his best but that’s mostly down to frowning and grunting and trying to get a share of everyone’s spoils. He’s intended as some kind of James Bond lounge lizard given the movie begins simply because he follows an attractive woman in a nightclub. But he really has very thin material to work with. Neither of the femme fatales, Anita West (Shadow of Fear,1963) and Egyptian star Faten Hamamah, has enough in the smouldering department and if they did weren’t inclined to waste it on the likes of Steve.

Hardly a fitting end to Bentley’s career. More of a curiosity than an entertaining watch.