James Goldstone – The Magnificent 60s

The Director’s Cut, can you believe? Or less pompously, The Expanded Version. An extra 30 minutes added to the general release version that traveled the world to general disfavor. (The original 121-minute cut was edited to 109 minutes and this version clocks in at 144 minutes.) Was it a sense of disgruntlement – or sheer opportunism – that led to the Director’s Cut, so many of which scarcely improved on the original version. How many versions can an audience take of The Exorcist (1973) or Blade Runner (1982)? And even where extra length definitely added depth to Kingdom of Heaven (2005) that couldn’t overcome its major flaw, in a massive case of hubris, director Ridley Scott believing he could get away with casting Orlando Bloom instead of waiting till Russell Crowe became available.

When Time Ran Out killed off the disaster cycle and the Hollywood career of uber-producer Irwin Allen who had started that particular ball rolling with The Poseidon Adventure (1972), upped the ante with The Towering Inferno (1974) and dropped the ball with The Swarm (1978) and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979).

This doesn’t feel so much like a disaster movie as a picture tying up all the knots, various relationships coming asunder, and having to accommodate a bunch of well-known supporting actors of dubious all-star-cast status before they suddenly spring into dramatic narrative view. Audiences had never been particularly keen on volcanic pictures, after all what can the trapped characters do but dodge a sludge of soup and hope they don’t run straight into a tidal wave or, worse, have to negotiate a rickety/rope bridge. The chances of you having a tightrope walker coming to the rescue would generally be remote but that’s what we have here (step forward Burgess Meredith).

I had thought from the title and some guy in a hazmat suit wandering over a desolate area that this might be a prophetic eco-disaster, but excepting that there’s, for reasons best known to the scriptwriters, an oil well being drilled close to a volcano and that hotel investor Shelby (William Holden) has the bright idea of using the volcano as a marketing prop, there’s nothing much going on. The special effects are okay on the small screen, but even if they had been spectacular on the big screen their effect on the much smaller environs of DVD would in any case have been diminished.

So, basically, it’s reliant on working up sufficient audience interest in the relationships to make us care for the characters. We’re offered a pair of two-timing teams. First up, we’ve got Shelby’s secretary and marketing guru Kay (Jacqueline Bisset) who’s just turned down the offer to become his sixth “or seventh” wife, but who, presumably is enjoying, this being the 1980s and not the 1930s, some kind of sexual dalliance with him. When Kay meets up with oil driller old flame Hank (Paul Newman), they rekindle their romance, although with doom impending there’s not much time to take it forward beyond a picnic on the beach.

Next up, hotelier Bob (James Franciscus) is cheating on wife Nikki (Veronica Hamel), Shelby’s god-daughter, with staff member Iolani (Barbara Carerra) who is due to be married to childhood sweetheart hotel manager Brian (Edward Albert). To flesh out the tale, both Shelby and Bob have daddy issues, Tom (Ernest Borgnine) is a New York cop on the tail of swindler Francis (Red Buttons), and no doubt audiences will be desperate to find who wins a cockfighting contest being held in a local saloon.

Modern transport proves no match for an eruption, so in quick succession we see a car and a helicopter tumbling down the mountainside. The tsunami wipes out a good chunk of the actors that didn’t make it into the all-star-cast bracket and everyone else takes to the hills, no doubt hoping they won’t encounter a rickety/rope bridge. Disaster turns enemies into pals, Tom and Francis, for example, though it’s only now that Nikki comes across her husband’s infidelity.

And this would be a disaster all round except that having hooked myself into watching this, courtesy of a freebie on YouTube, and nothing of real dramatic interest going on, I found myself, oddly enough, concentrating on the three principals and was treated, even more odd I guess, to fine examples of just what these stars do to earn their crust. Paul Newman (The Prize, 1963) in particular, with very little to react to, does very little but with incredible facial agility, to genuine effect, portraying emotion with infinitesimal gesture. Sure, he’s always had the shrug and the walk, both far more suggestive of inner turmoil than any other actor I can name, but here, with very little dialog coming to his aid, you can tell exactly what’s going on in those baby blues.

Jacqueline Bisset (The Cape Town Affair, 1969), too, dressed a good bit less suggestively than in the posters, essays a confident woman coming unstuck when confronted with a romantic error. The scenes between the pair are not meant to be scorching, so there’s none of the screen charisma audiences might feel they’ve been sold, but instead it’s a slow-burn, a couple trying to come to terms with each other, passing through disappointment and hopefully onto something better. And you can’t find anyone better to carry disillusion than William Holden (The Devil’s Brigade, 1968).

Abject swansong for director James Goldstone (Winning, 1969) and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Carl Foreman (The Guns of Navarone, 1961) but Oscar-winning co-writer Stirling Silliphant (Marlowe, 1969) carried on longer. Who wrote the most effective scenes, Shelby’s engagement ploy and Hank’s initial rejection of Kay, is anybody’s guess but there is some quality writing here. Probably the strangest part of the whole debacle was that the source was a piece of non-fiction, The Day the World Ended by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts, about a 1902 eruption on Martinique that had nothing to do with oil wells or hotel construction.

There’s always something wrong with a disaster picture if you suggest watching it for the acting, but happily, this is the case.

Red faces all round. Uneasy pirate spoof that misses all its targets, coming close to resembling the kind of movie that gives turkeys a bad name and saved only by a spirited performance by Genevieve Bujold. Uber-producers Jennings Lang (Rollercoaster, 1977) and Elliott Kastner (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) should have known better but were seduced by the tantalizing returns for Richard Donner’s The Three Musketeers (1974) and its sequel which had revived the moribund swashbuckling genre.

Robert Shaw (Custer of the West, 1967) was nailed-on for the leading role since had made his name playing a pirate in British television series The Buccaneers (1956-1957) and was as hot as he was going to get after the double whammy of The Sting (1973) and Jaws (1975). However, the movie takes its cue from one of the chief supporting actors Major Folly (Beau Bridges).

It’s color-coded. In case we can’t tell a good guy from a bad guy, we’ve got the Man in Red, pirate Ned Lynch (Robert Shaw), shaping up against the Man in Black, unscrupulous Jamaican governor Lord Durant (Peter Boyle). Ned is presented as a seagoing Robin Hood, Durant as the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham, his ruthlessness somewhat undermined by his predilection for playing with toy boats in his bath and for getting his hairy back waxed.

Twin narratives quickly unspool. Ned rescues from being hanged shipmate Nick Debrett (James Earl Jones) while Durant jails island chief justice Sir James Barnet (Bernard Behrens) and steals his treasure.

Stolen treasure being fair game, Ned and Nick hijack a coach-load of it, while Sir James’s on-the-run daughter Jane (Genevieve Bujold) ends up in their hands. Not being as black-hearted as his nemesis, Ned puts Jane ashore, but still a bit black-hearted humiliates her in a swordfight, and is disinclined to help her save her imprisoned father.

However, Jane has a trump card. For reasons unknown, Durant is heading back to England with a cargo of 10,000 dubloons, too tempting a target for any pirate. Naturally, nothing goes as planned but, as you might expect, there is a happy ending.

This might have worked, since all the ingredients are there, the laughing cavalier, the spirited woman, the humorous sidekick, the unprincipled villain. You’ve got an historically-accurate pirate ship for once, unlikely romance between high-born woman and charming scallywag, simple rescue-imprisonment-rescue scenario, and ample scope for swordplay.

Except the dialog is awful, the ship too small to accommodate any fighting so the pirates are landlubbers for the most part, and except for the duels between Ned and Jane and Ned and Durant, the swordfights are all kind of bundled together, and every now and then the action stops so we can hear a verse or two of a sea shanty sung by nobody in particular.

Though Ned and Nick trade cringeworthy, and in one case downright offensive, limericks, the best (only) laugh comes when Ned chucks Jane off a roof onto a canopy and follows up with the line “It worked.” It doesn’t help that Durant’s pederastic tendences are played as a joke. Everywhere you look people are turning cartwheels or are “blithering idiots” or “pawns” and as you might expect there’s a cat-fight and a monkey around to relieve a jailer of his keys. You are just praying for a shark to come along to put the cast out of their misery.

In the midst of this feast of over-acting along comes Genevieve Bujold (Anne of the Thousand Days, 1969) who must think she’s in a different picture. She is a feisty one all right, not above putting a knife to a man’s cojones, or kneeing them in that region, and, given the lawless state of the island, branded a criminal for wounding a rapist. At least she takes the whole thing seriously rather than as if being in a Mel Brooks picture.

It’s hard to know who to blame: the stars for acting as if enjoying a holiday from more serious fare; director James Goldstone (Winning, 1969) for failing to get the recipe right and employing a jaunty score that undercut everything, or writers Jeffrey Bloom (11 Harrowhouse, 1974) and Paul Wheeler (Caravan to Vaccares, 1974) for making a mess of the ingredients in the first place.

Of course, I am hardly blameless in drawing your attention to this, a sudden enthusiasm for pirate pictures sending me dashing into the wrong decade.

Watch for: Robert Shaw making a bid for the all-time Golden Raspberry; an unrecognizable Peter Boyle (Taxi Driver, 1976); Beau Bridges (Gaily, Gaily, 1969) doing his best Frankie Howerd impression; James Earl Jones (The Comedians, 1967) sounding normal, minus the deep-throated vocal tic on which he made his name; and so many inanities it falls easily into the So Bad It’s Good category.

Tag: James Goldstone

When Time Ran Out (1980) / Earth’s Final Fury ***

Swashbuckler (1976) **