movie review – The Magnificent 60s

Disclosure Day (2026) *** – Seen at the Cinema

Thanks goodness other directors stepped up to the summer box office plate otherwise Hollywood would be left wringing its hands at this workmanlike, sanctimonious, effort. Like the recent Star Wars number, you get the impression the Steven Spielberg IP has long gone off the boil with the exception of sojourns into the prehistoric. He has not had a box office hit in years – The Fabelmans (2022) and West Side Story (2021) bit the dust along with The Post (2017) while Ready Player One (2018) only just made its money back.

Maybe it’s simply age (he’s pushing 80), but he’s lost that special magic that made him one of the all-time greats, the idea that he create something new, awesomely visual, rather than that he’s turned into an earnest lecturer.

Luckily, some other unexpected contenders – Project Hail Mary, Michael, Obsession, Backrooms – have stepped up the box office plate and Toy Story 5 is way ahead of initial projections while we we’ve still got another instalment of Minions and Spiderman to come, though judging from the trailers I’m less confident of Supergirl and The Odyssey delivering, though the latter may hit it big upfront judging from Imax advance bookings

This is a retread of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), with the same male-female characters – weatherperson Margaret (Emily Blunt) and ex-jailbird scientist Daniel (Josh O’Connor) – in search of something unknown, as though they are conduits to an alien world, one that serves up the same soup of aliens being wondrous beings, not to be illicitly tampered with. However, to peg all this on the Roswell “conspiracy” and to deck out almost every scene with men in black and men in black driving black cars seems an immense miscalculation.

The plot is full of holes, too, if you don’t mind me saying. How on earth did the rebels manage to snag a living alien from under the noses of the uber-security security forces of the quasi-government facility, or, even worse, have they made off with a baby creature and grown it themselves.

In social media world sure everyone is going to drop what they are doing and go past their bus stops or remain in situ to watch on their mobile phones “disclosure day” when an alien appears on their screen, but in the cinema world my guess is that audiences, like me, were staggered that after well nigh two-and-a-half-hours of a shaggy dog story this was all Mr. Spielberg could come up with.

Sure, there’s a bit of a chase scene here and there, and some form of telekinesis and people holding the kind of brick – that old-style mobile phones use to be made off – that has some kind of magical power, enough that Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) can be used as a conduit for Noah’s (Colin Firth) evil intentions, which is mainly to prevent “disclosure day.”

None of the supposed supernatural powers on show here are much to write home about, and there’s none of the wonder of Close Encounters and E.T. (1982), or even the more violent sci fi of Minority Report (2022) and War of the Worlds (2005) where aliens, whether artificially induced or not, are not on their best behavior. There’s not a single scene that you could say has the distinctive Spielberg stamp, rather a ramshackle screenplay that throws together a lot of different tangents in the hope, somehow, that they’ll all miraculously come together.

The only characters given any characterization are rootless Margaret and ex-novitiate Jane. Margaret is always on the look-out for something better, quite happy to wander from city to city to do so, the kind of ambitious also-ran who thinks they have a chance of grabbing the golden ring even if it means adding the occasional sexy shimmy to her weather-reading chores. Jane, Lord help us, is landed with the worst characterization I can remember, laden down with the idea that we might have to share the God-made universe with someone other than human beings. How on earth that 1950s idea made it into a contemporary movie is anybody’s guess and remember that Paul Schrader was yanked off screenwriting duties on Close Encounters for making it overtly religious.

Luckily, Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada 2, 2026) more than holds the picture together and there’s certainly something touching in the way, using her sudden special powers, she puts troubled people at their ease. Daniel is there as a plot conduit, tasked with little more than exposition.

Noah and rebel leader Hugo (Colman Domingo) come across like the grown-ups, one trying to keep the spook in the box, the other trying to let it out.

There’s probably enough going on to keep you hooked, but the big reveal is a big disappointment.

Steven Spielberg does not save summer.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) **

The word is that you can’t blame director (and producer and co-writer) Billy Wilder for this disaster because it was taken out of his hands by studio United Artists and drastically re-cut. But when you learn that Wilder’s version ran three hours and counting and even in the shortened version looks a preposterously bad bet, you can see why UA felt the need to take charge.

Wilder had been the poster boy for sexual identity after the frolics of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon as cross-dressing musicians hankering after Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot (1959). Whether Sherlock Holmes was a closet gay would have been a minor footnote to the author’s massive fanbase, and to put it so upfront looks, especially for a contemporary audience, like a massive misstep.

The first part of the movie largely consists of Dr Watson (Colin Blakely) being accused of over-mythification of Sherlock Holmes (Robert Stephens). Turns out (according to the Wilder version) that Holmes is a couple of inches shorter than Watson (his narrator in the Conan Doyle stories) had claimed and never wore the deerstalker. Blimey, lock that man up. Shock horror! Holmes’s other predilection, a regular injection of cocaine (I’ve no idea what a seven per cent solution would be in today’s money) is no invention, however.

But whether Holmes is attracted to the opposite sex forms the focus of the first section of this (even at just over two hours) unwieldy movie. A famous Russian ballerina Madame Petrova (Tamara Toumanova) wants to make him the father of her child. The only way Holmes can get out of this predicament is to pretend to be gay.

Eventually, after exhausting this joke (!), we get the proper mystery. Mysterious Belgian Gabrielle (Genevieve Page), just fished out of the Thames by a passing cab driver, turns up soaking wet at 221B Baker St and (eventually) Holmes is inveigled to find her missing husband.

In other circumstances this would have probably been a relatively straightforward case for the ace detective although there would have been, of necessity, ample opportunity for him to demonstrate his special set of skills. But this being of a more lumbering project, the investigation involves monks, midgets and the Loch Ness Monster. Yes, you heard right.

That should have killed off the project at the start. Like whether Holmes is gay or not, the Loch Ness Monster is another minor footnote. Apart from being a tourist attraction and keeping the conspiracy theorists going and competing with Roswell for public attention, it’s the dumbest of notions, even if, as the audience will expect, that it’s not the real monster (if there is such a thing) but a Macguffin of considerable dimensions.

I might have been happy to go along with a narrative that ran close to spoof except I didn’t take to either of the principal actors. I’ve no idea what made Billy Wilder believe that Robert Stephens (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969) would make a good Holmes. I’m not one of those traditionalists who believe a specific actor was the quintessential Holmes, but it’s a part that’s far easier to get wrong than get right. And I think Stephens with his wafting loose style got his characterization spectacularly wrong.

Colin Blakely (Alfred the Great, 1968) is one of those actors who generally knows how important it is to rein it in, because if the ham in him is given an inch he will most certainly take a mile and he’s so over-the-top you think he’s going to disappear over the nearest horizon.

This was a huge flop and no wonder. And Billy Wilder, given he wears the three hats vital to a film’s creativity, must take the blame. It’s a rubbish story badly done. Like any other great director, we tend to remember Wilder’s successes – Hollywood drama Sunset Boulevard (1950), media excoriation Ace in the Hole (1951), POW camp thriller Stalag 17 (1953), comedy The Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like it Hot and sexual satire The Apartment (1960) – and we tend to forget that he often, especially in the 1960s, fell flat on his face. One Two Three (1961) and Kiss Me Stupid (1964) were colossal miscalculations, the result as much of miscasting as of script.

This stands as even worse than that pair. Wilder had got way too big for his boots and at a point where a studio had to cut him down to size. But even the truncated version isn’t much cop. And the only thing that keeps it from attracting a one-star review is that it’s better than Orgy of the Dead (1965).

Steer clear.

The Walking Target (1960) ***

The Double Cross Olympics. Or the Twist After Twist After Twist World Championships. Either way you’re in for a rattling good time. This is a hard-boiled B-movie the way Hollywood makes them, so there’s virtually no one involved who’s on the side of good.

Nick Harvin (Ron Foster) leaves prison after serving a five-year sentence for stealing $260,000. The money’s never been recovered so, in the words of the warden, he’s a “walking target,” fair game for anyone seeking a share or all of the loot – “they can smell that green round corners.”

Step up blonde girlfriend Sue (Merry Anders) and best buddy Dave Prince (Robert Christopher), whose credentials in the loving and friendship department are in doubt given neither visited him in jail. Also on his tail – the media, hoping to put him back on the front page where he belongs and Detective Max Brodney (Harp Maguire) a pair of cops hoping to put him back inside where he belongs. The cop tells it straight, “You’re a louse, you’re smarter but you’re still a louse.”

Nick envisions a future that’s “fat and rich” while Dave reckons he’ll be able to “coast forever.” Nick drops a bombshell. He’s planning to give a one-third share of the dough to the wife Gail (Joan Evans) of one of his two partners in the heist, both dead. Although there’s another reason he needs Gail. The money was stashed in her car’s undercarriage and she’s long ago left town.

Meanwhile, Dave begins the two-timing game. He’s worse than Sue. She’s only making sweet with Dave behind her lover’s back. But Dave has also stitched up Nick by selling him out to a big time crook Hoffman (Barry Kroeger).

Nick can’t even hide out. Newspapermen have caught up with him and he’s splashed all over the front pages. The cops and the crooks are on his tail. Nick high-tails it to Gold City, where Gail runs a diner. He’s got a soft spot for Gail, she threw him over for her mechanic husband Sam because she reckoned Sam was a safer bet, not realizing he was dumb enough to get snookered into a robbery.

So here’s the real twist. Nick manages to sweet talk Gail. When she turns down his offer of a share of the loot, he tells her he’s going to give it all back. Being the trusting sort, and maybe thinking she would have been better off with someone who wasn’t as dumb as Sam, Gail takes him to her car and watches him pull out the hidden cash.

So, of course, he’s just playing her for a sap. Yeah, maybe he feels guilty about Sam and yeah maybe he does still have a soft spot for Gail, but he’s a thief and what chance is there that he’s going to turn into a good guy and return the stolen money.

Before Gail gets the opportunity to realize he’s playing her for a sap, in burst the crooks, whacking nick around and promising to do worse to Gail unless he hands over the money. In the confusion, Brodney appears, and takes one for the team, but not before the thugs have got their come-uppance.

Yep, there is one last twist, one I certainly wasn’t expecting. Nick is going to go straight after all.

How do you like that? Of all the mean narrative tricks, the bad guy turns into a good guy.

This must have a made a cracking supporting feature. All the characters, including Gail, can squeeze the last bit of juice out of a line. There’s nothing but snap and zing. Plenty temper, car chases, fisticuffs and shoot-outs. And did I mention it was aiming for the gold ring in the double-crossing league.

Great cast of B-movie troopers in Ron Foster (Cage of Evil, 1960), Joan Evans (Roseanna McCoy, 1949), Merry Anders (House of the Damned, 1963) and Harp Maguire (Incident in an Alley, 1962). Directed by Edward L. Cahn (Incident in an Alley) from a script by Stephen Kandel (Chamber of Horrors, 1966).

At a lean 75 minutes it’s story, story, story and belt along at a terrific pace.

Thunderbirds Are Go (1966) ****

Nostalgia – and reappraisal – rule. Every bit as worthy a contender for a Father’s Day crown as the more favored likes of The Great Escape, 1963), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Die Hard (1988). One of the reasons why Britain wasn’t in the thrall of DC and Marvel was that we had grown up with Dr Who and the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson portfolio of sci fi marionettes – Fireball XL5, Supercar, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Joe 90 and Captain Scarlet.

And while most of the nostalgia for the period goes the way of Ray Harryhausen, the Andersons’ achievements not so much with their puppetry but the miniaturization should not be underestimated.

It wouldn’t be too much of a call, for example, to guess that Stanley Kubrick learned a lot about the joy of spaceships coming together or moving around from Thunderbirds Are Go where a good chunk of the action is watching spaceships shift around one way or another. To top it all, and another one in the eye of Mr. Kubrick, the Andersons beat him to the psychedelia, a dream sequence set upon a “Swinging Star” and involving puppet versions of Cliff Richard and the Shadows, still a big noise in the pop world at the time despite the arrival of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Their appearance would be the equivalent to Bruce Willis, for example, doing a guest turn in Friends.

With a bigger budget, the Andersons made two crucial changes from the TV series on which this was based. They managed to erase all sight of the puppet strings and they stopped them walking around so much which always made them look most like just puppets.

This is space as we should adore it. None of the manky, worn-down, dirty cargo ships that litter modern sci fi epics. Not only is every ship gleaming but they are also colorful, not to mention color-coded. When they move it’s with the majesty that Kubrick used to great effect in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). And as Kubrick also proved, when it came to space, you didn’t need much in the way of characterization or narrative. He follows the same rule as monster pictures, focus on the big beasts as much as possible.

But Kubrick, in his wildest dreams, could never imagine as sultry a character as blonde goddess Lady Penelope, and though she’s on the side of the angels as cunning as any femme fatale. Equally iconic is her pink Rolls Royce and the chauffeur Parker which his obedient “Yes, m’ lady.” Not to mention the glorious catchphrase “eff ay bee” – in other words FAB, the catchphrase for a generation. There’s another catchphrase that only means something to Londoners who would hear this warning every day on the Underground – “mind the doors.”

The narrative is relatively thin. Zero-X is trying to fly to Mars but the flight is sabotaged and crash-lands. When a second flight is planned, this time International Rescue (the Thunderbirds team in case you are unaware) is on standby with Lady Penelope employed to seek out the saboteur.

This flight does succeed but on Mars encounters venomous snake-like rocks and scarpers quickly only to hit trouble on re-entry to Earth that requires Thunderbirds to the rescue. There are some modest attempts at characterization, Zero-X doesn’t like the idea of needing help, and the youngest of the Tracy family is frightened of failing.

I’ve never seen this before. I probably thought I was above such childish things when it first came out and it was only when I spotted it on Amazon Prime that I thought to give it go, remembering how much I had enjoyed the revamped Fireball XL5.

I sat enthralled. The first section has no sign of the International Rescue team and just like those mesmerizing minutes watching Kubrick’s spaceship revolve in space this simply involved putting together the constituent parts of the Zero-X rocket ship prior to launch.

You had to hand it to these sci-fi whizzes. You only needed one fella in the control room. Each of the Thunderbirds required only a solo pilot. You could be whisked electronically from a seat in the waiting area to the spaceship and arrive there on the same seat or go along some kind of travelator. These guys had thought of everything.

Directed by David Lane and written by the Andersons with Sylvia doubling up to provide the voice of Lady Penelope

With the removal of the strings and every miniaturization so stunning, this would look great on the big screen. The 60^th anni would be December this year so here’s a call-out to an enterprising cinema.

NOTE: today is British Father’s Day. It may not be Father’s Day where you are.

The Hills Run Red (1966) ****

Pretty decent revenge western boasting a couple of superb set pieces. No wonder Clint Eastwood made the decision to play down the emotions on The Man with No Name, because this is a good example of how pop-eyed emotions can get when restraint is missing especially when you’ve got Henry Silva in the mix. The lead Thomas Hunter is not, as you came to expect in spaghetti westerns, an Italian dude anglicizing his name, but a genuine Yank, heading to Europe to further his career whereas Hollywood veteran Dan Duryea is extending his. Bonus of an Ennio Morricone score.

A pair of Johnny Rebs, making off with Unionist loot, at the end of the Civil War, make an unusual pact. One, Jerry Brewster (Thomas Hunter), takes the rap for the heist, while his partner Ken Seagull (Nando Gazzallo) the other makes off with the loot, promising, as part of the deal, to look after his buddy’s wife and child. Five years later, the freed Jerry returns home to find his pal’s reneged on the deal, wife is dead, son Tim an orphan, and Ken, now a wealthy rancher, is more intent on muscling up and eliminating his rival than keeping to his side of the bargain.

Jerry teams up with drifter Winny Getz (Dan Duryea) who gets himself a job on the ranch where tough foreman Garcia (Henry Silva) enjoys handing out beatings. There’s a smidgeon of nascent romance, not enough to get in the way of the action, when Ken’s sister Mary Ann (Nicoletta Machiavelli) takes pity on the roughed-up Jerry.

But let’s cut to the chase. There’s a brilliant ambush by Ken’s rivals. His high-handed methods have upset the townspeople and other ranchers. So with the help of our hero they ambush Ken’s cowboys herd horses through a canyon by rolling down on them rolls of tumbleweed set aflame, decimating the cowboys by picking them off from the cliffs.

At the end a two-man army of Jerry and Winny (make it a two-and-a-half-man-army if we count in Tim, no mean shakes with a catapult) takes on a regiment of Garcia’s thugs in the town, fighting them on the rooftops and the streets, with the help of sticks of dynamite. This is tremendous stuff. I watched it immediately after seeing Dillinger (1973) and noted that I had automatically accorded the John Milius gangster picture top marks for the various shoot-outs whereas I was so used to shoot-outs in westerns that the tendency was to write them off. Whereas, this one, in particular, was easily on a par with the Milius, better in some ways because the two heroes had to be a good bit more inventive to outwit the enemy.

The climax at the ranch between Jerry and Ken is also well done, the pair employing clever tricks, and half the scene taking place in darkness.

The pace never lets up. The action is constant. Good plans become undone by spies. Saloons are wrecked. There are punch-ups and shoot-outs galore and some excellent lines and neat situations such as when the prison guards steal Jerry’s dough on release and send him off minus his gun.

Nobody who wasn’t already a star made much marquee headway from this and largely it’s been viewed as a western programmer, slotted into the lower half of a double bill, and largely forgotten. But perhaps because there’s no star requiring special treatment with slick lines and a denoted love interest and the kind of scene that always seems written just to give a big star a big moment, this falls into the leaner category, where the story is kept simple, the action continuous and whatever genuine emotion we require is limited to loss (of wife) and recovery (of son).

That still leaves room for Garcia to put on a whole show for himself and Winny to underplay him at every turn.

Thomas Hunter (The Magnificent Tony Carrera, 1968) might surprise in not offering the Yank equivalent of the traditional British upper lip, but sometimes we do under-do things by limiting male emotion, so you could view this as some kind of breakthrough for the incontinently emotional man. Henry Silva (Johnny Cool, 1963), with no restraint applied, just lets rip. Dan Duryea (Five Golden Dragons, 1967), in his last important role, enjoys a last hurrah.

Carlo Lizzani (The Violent Four, 1968) directs from a script by Piero Regnoli (Matchless, 1964).

Worth a look. Reassessment long overdue. What they used to call a rip-roaring western.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) ****

Highly atmospheric psychological gem that should appeal mightily to the current generation hooked on the new genre of scams – this one coming with a gut-wrenching twist. That it concerns a medium should add to the intrinsic appeal. And it turns on two terrific performances.

I have an unusual connection to this movie – and a whole bundle of others with music by John Barry. I heard the scores of this and the likes of King Rat (1965), The Chase (1966), Deadfall (1968) and The Lion in Winter (1968) long before I caught up with the movies. So I came at them with a kind of aural advance warning. The score John Barry wrote for this not only exemplifies the inherent creepiness but maximizes it.

Even before we get into any notion of criminality, you can see that this unlikely middle-aged marriage between the dominant Myra (Kim Stanley) and the weak Bill (Richard Attenborough) is unhealthy to say the least. She’s the kind of psychic who’s likely to swoon and get lost in ethereal otherworlds while hosting seances. He’s just trying to keep her from toppling over into insanity, driven by her conviction that she is conversing with their dead son.

In the kind of scam you could see someone coming up with today, she decides she’ll thrust herself into public consciousness by becoming the sort of psychic police tent to consult during kidnappings or murders. In this case it’s the kidnapping of Amanda (Judith Donner), daughter of wealthy businessman Mr Clayton (Mark Eden). This might sound like the usual wishful thinking for publicity by an over-earnest psychic, but, in fact, it’s Bill, at his wife’s behest, who’s carried out the kidnapping. To make it look kosher, the couple demand a ransom.

The lass is kept imprisoned in their house, in a room made up to look like a hospital with Myra playing the role of nurse. Mr Clayton is sceptical of the psychic’s claims but his wife (Nanette Newman) is duped.

Given that Bill generally looks impotent, the harried look of the weak hen-pecked husband, it’s quite astonishing how he rises to the occasion to collect the ransom money, dodging the cops on the underground. The plan comes undone, however, when Myra decides the dead Arthur wants a buddy in the afterlife, with Amanda the prime candidate and Bill called upon to step up to the murder plate.

So we’re knee-deep in tension. The key here is that our point-of-view is that of the couple rather than the child or the parents. Amanda is a bit more worldly-wise than Myra expects so she’s kept on her toes keeping the suspicious child in check. So you’ve got what would be a contemporary trope but unusual then of being forced to want the criminals to succeed. Everyone loves a psychic, even more these days after the whopping success of The Conjuring series, and everyone loves the downtrodden husband, so we’re hoping they can outwit the pompous wealthy businessman and fleece him of some dosh, awake the world to the powers of the medium and live happier ever after.

But that’s before Myra changes the plan and you’re wondering if Bill is going to be able to stand up to her. The cops come mighty close to smelling a rat, but the suckered wife appears to help their case.

The beauty of this is less in the plotting – but those twists would work as real zingers today – than in the playing. Critics were reaching for superlatives when two Daniel Day Lewis movies – Room with a View and My Beautiful Launderette – both opened on the same day in New York in 1985 and were astonished by the actor’s range. Richard Attenborough’s diffident mouse of a man in Séance on a Wet Afternoon appeared the same year as his bluff hard-nosed soldier in Guns at Batasi. The British Academy noticed, awarding him the Bafta Best Actor for the achievement.

He’s quite superb here, always on the verge of telling his wife what-for before sinking back into complaisant compliance. When we speak about edgy performances, we generally mean something else entirely, but this is an emotional edge that he’s always about to tip over into one way or the other.

American stage specialist Kim Stanley hardly made a movie, only one more this decade and none for another 16 years, but she carries this intense complicated character smothered by insecurities. Nanette Newman (The Wrong Box, 1966) is a believable mother. Mark Eden (The Pleasure Girls, 1965) crops up, as does Patrick Magee (The Skull, 1965) who tones down his trademark growl.

Written and directed by Bryan Forbes (King Rat) from the bestseller by Mark McShane.

The John Barry score not just sets the tone but helps carry the picture.

I understand plans are underway to remake this and I can see why

Dillinger (1973) ****

How to make a cult movie. Well, you can start with an uber-macho gun-loving director in the form of John Milius (instrumental in the making of Apocalypse Now, 1979, for which he wrote the script). Then throw in the kind of actor who would never have been a star except for the chisel-faced likes of Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson changing what audiences appreciated in a leading man, as opposed to a supporting character – step forward Warren Oates (Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, 1974).

Throw in two of the best supporting actors who ever lived. The first one, Ben Johnson, has by pure chance stepped up from the John Ford Stock Company and by golly snaffled himself an Oscar in The Last Picture Show (1971) and made the unlikely leap, in his mid-50s, to just about top-billed status. The second is Harry Dean Stanton (Cool Hand Luke, 1967), just about everyone’s favorite cult actor.

For good measure chuck in another actor, Cloris Leachman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 1969) who had barely had a movie career and now in her mid-1940s it was taking off thanks, oddly enough, also to an Oscar for The Last Picture Show. And a couple of fresh faces in Richard Dreyfuss (Jaws, 1975) and pop singer Michele Philips of The Mamas and the Papas.

That the tale happens to revolve around the second most popular – after Bonnie & Clyde – of the hero bandits of the Great Depression, John Dillinger, and cult is home and dry.

As with the later Michael Mann version, we’re telling two stories at once. Publicity hound John Dillinger (Warren Oates) would have been a social media god these days – you bet he would have filmed every damned bank robbery on his phone, not to mention all the innocent bystanders filming him on theirs. He just loved appearing on the front pages of newspapers and on wanted posters. And he had a set of terrific catch phrases, mostly revolving around thinking people would remember forever being in his presence.

Then we’re following F.B.I. kingpin Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson) tasked by J. Edgar Hoover to rid the country of these murderous varmints. All of this to the rat-a-tat-tat soundtrack of blazing machine guns mowing down gangsters and cops alike and the equally rat-a-tat-tat tones of a voice-over intent on creating high drama the way they used to on newsreels. The voice-over seemed particularly beloved by makers of gangster movies, though this avoid the biographical excesses of The St Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967).

Purvis and Dillinger are battling it out in more ways than one. Purvis appears equally determined to steal the headlines. He’s the one that goes in and captures single-handedly a bunch of notorious killers armed only with a bulletproof jacket and a cigar and weapon of some sort. He’s delighted when a gangster fashions the moniker “G-Men”, a nickname that seems to elevate the F.B.I. in the eyes of the media which have a tendency, for the sake of easier-to-write headlines, to shorten names.

You wouldn’t have needed an F.B.I. except for a peculiarity. In the U.S. state law meant that you could escape pursuit in one state if you hopped over into the next state where the law wouldn’t bother you one hoot because your crime wasn’t within your jurisdiction. If you were smart enough you could even evade the F.B.I. if you stuck to doing all your robbing in one state and all your hiding-out in another. But should you be dumb enough, as here, to truck a stolen car over the state line, then the F.B.I. could come gunning for you.

Dillinger isn’t likely to let the little matter of jurisdiction get in the way of his aim to become the best bank robber in the world, a claim that could be contested if he limited his sprees to one little state. Although his fame grows momentously when he escapes from a high-security prison that is supposed to be escape-proof.

Then Dillinger formed the gangster equivalent of the rock star Supergroup, bringing together Baby Face Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Pretty Boy Floyd (Steve Kanaly) and others. .

If anyone could improve on the Raymond Chandler adage of when a narrative is in trouble bring in a man with a gun, it’s here. Dozens of men with dozens of machine guns, shotguns and pistols are apt to arrive at any point – every male in any godforsaken town totes a shotgun into the bargain. Dillinger might have been a great robber but he wasn’t much good at hiding out – he was always getting ambushed.

The gun battles are certainly lively and occasionally inventive.

Dillinger is eventually captured because, as one of his crew cautions, he’s a sucker for women. With Billie (Michele Philips) in irons he gallivants around with illegal immigrant Anna (Cloris Leachman) who snitches him out to Purvis leading to the legendary shootout at the Biograph cinema in Chicago.

As now, media (including social media) has their cake and munches it down, giant headlines describe the robbers in detail to sell copies while at the same time hypocritical editorials complain about their exploits to satisfy the more moralistic readers.

Characterization is sketchy to the point of cartoonish, but the characters, including the cop, are so cocky they only need to chuck out a few catchphrases to keep our interest.

Warren Oates and Ben Johnson make a decent stab at stardom, Richard Dreyfuss steals a few scenes, Harry Dean Stanton has some great lines.

Given the derisory budget, this is a great debut by John Milius, who also wrote the script.

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter (1969) ***

The American equivalent of the kitchen sink drama. Awash with the dispossessed, rejected, oppressed and underprivileged. You’re not going to be more of an outsider in the U.S. of the 1930s than to be a deaf mute or, worse, a mentally challenged deaf mute who can’t see a tasty cake in a baker’s shop without indulging in a bit of smash-and-grab.

By this point the Deep South had fallen out of favour. Adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays were now bombing at the box office – even the Burton-Taylor combo couldn’t rescue Boom! (1968) and a previous adaptation of the work of acclaimed novelist Carson McCullers (who wrote this), John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), with Taylor again and Marlon Brando, had proved a commercial disappointment. Otto Preminger’s Hurry Sundown (1967) with Michael Caine and Jane Fonda did only marginally better.

While on paper it’s unremittingly bleak, in reality it’s loaded down with the mawkish and the sentimental, as the characters struggle to fit in, fail to establish lasting relationships or are abandoned. Given he is playing a character, John, who can’t talk, star Alan Arkin is forced to abandon those irritating vocal tics.

John, an engraver, has befriended Spiros (Chuck McCann), the deaf mute with the sweet tooth. When Spiros is institutionalized, John moves town to be near him, taking up residence in the Kelly household. As the result of a recent injury, Mr Kelly (Biff McGuire) is forced to take in a boarder, his teenage daughter Mick (Sandra Locke) giving up her bedroom to accommodate the stranger.

There’s not much of story, John acting as a narrative conduit around whom various situations and characters revolve. John mostly fails to win over the resentful Mick but befriends alcoholic drifter Jake (Stacy Keach) and African American cancer ridden Dr Copeland (Percy Rodriguez).

Copeland’s daughter’s husband has his leg amputated after being wrongly imprisoned. Mr Kelly ends up disabled, meaning Mick has to take a job to support the family rather than go to college. When she loses her virginity, you expect she’s going to end up pregnant, but, luckily she’s the only one whom fate favors. Unable to cope with the institute, Spiros rebuffs John’s friendship and, thoroughly depressed, gives up the ghost and dies. John commits suicide. We only later discover that Mick had fallen in love with his gentle nature.

So not what you’d call a feel-good picture. Nobody’s going to escape their situation. If anything, that’s only going to get worse. We’re talking two deaths here and another on the way, one fellow permanently disabled and a girl stuck in a cycle of poverty.

While I didn’t find it unrealistic or forced, I wasn’t as taken with it as I expected. It felt like a Charles Bukowski picture, minus the degradation, where the actors and director were given a free pass because they were putting the spotlight on an area of existence normally ignored by Hollywood. But it just felt too worthy. Beyond their indignities, none of the characters really took flight.

But don’t take my word for it. The Academy didn’t. Both Alan Arkin (The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, 1966) and Sondra Locke, in her debut, were Oscar-nominated.

Prior to this, only a handful of pictures dealt with deafness. James Stewart, deaf in one ear in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), Jane Wyman, winning an Oscar for Johnny Belinda (1948), and The Miracle Worker (1962), Anne Bancroft picking up an Oscar here, were the best known.

Robert Ellis Miller (Bachelor Girl Apartment/Any Wednesday, 1966) could have done better to steer clear of the obvious sentimentality. Written by Thomas C. Ryan (Hurry Sundown, 1967).

Burke and Hare (1972) **

There’s probably a thesis to be written about how Hammer subverted the traditional horror picture by inserting lashings of nudity. The studio’s female vampire trilogy, beginning with The Vampire Lovers (1970), was presumably made with an eye on attracting bigger box office rather than upending the status quo and taking the exceptionally feminist approach of making females the predators. Although in the first of the series, men were the eye candy, for the second and third it appeared to make more sense for the prey to be disrobed females, a double whammy, if you like, of female nudity.

That formula then appeared to be applied to any movie roughly in the horror genre, sometimes, as here, with just awful results. Young starlets who might previously have been expected to restrict their titillation to cleavage, were now going all-in. It helps if for no apparent narrative function you can set half the tale in a brothel and also ensure part of the attraction of such premises is voyeurism, peep-holes through which the clientele can view a couple having sex.

Two of the damsels on ample display were Francoise Pascal, hitherto one of those trapped into risque roles such as School for Sex (1969), and Yutte Stensgaard, who’s marquee value appeared to have been terminated despite all her nudity in Lust for a Vampire (1971) and now reduced to a supporting role.

Apologies for concentrating on the licentious, but the movie has little more to offer. Burke and Hare preceded Dr Jekyll as Edinburgh’s most famous villains, but it’s hard to get worked up about their activities. Audiences were inured to grave-robbing since without an steady supply of body parts Frankenstein would have struggled to make his monsters.

The idea of people donating their bodies to medical science was hardly a hidden secret in the 1970s and the idea that you could build a movie exposing the hypocrisy of doctors seeking to use corpses for anatomy lesson seems far-fetched. There was no law against using corpses. As eminent surgeon Dr Knox (Harry Andrews) explains in supercilious tones it was not a crime to cut open a dead body.

*It was more customary to pair one horror film with another but since the producers didn’t have another one to hand they latched onto a western.*

So we are left with our graverobbing tag team of Burke (Derren Nesbitt) and Hare (Glynn Edwards) and various other low lifes in Edinburgh in the 1820s whose main preoccupation seems to managing a Scottish accent. There’s little that’s particularly gruesome about the graverobbing and given the victims are all dead a complete lack of gore. Even the one legitimate opportunity to add frisson, the extraction of a heart by Dr Knox during a class, is ignored.

Graverobbing, however, doesn’t supply all the needs of Dr Knox, so our pair resort to murder. That has the specific advantage of delivering fresher corpses. Suffocation is the murderer’s tool, since already slashed bodies might suggest even to Dr Knox that the corpses had met a different kind of end.

Where does the brothel fit into all this you might wonder? Is Dr Knox a regular? ‘Fraid not. For our entrance to the brothel we have to rely on sketchily-drawn medical students. Sex worker Marie (Francoise Pascal) ends up on Dr Knox’s slab after an unwelcome encounter with Burke. At some point, a little bit of detective work takes over, as Marie’s medical student lover is not satisfied with the post mortem declaring she died of alcohol poisoning.

But since you hardly care about any of these characters, it’s more like a documentary with sex and nudity thrown in.

Derren Nesbitt (Where Eagles Dare, 1968) didn’t enhance his reputation but Glynn Edwards rolled out another of his sneaky characters that provided a lifetime of supporting roles.

Directed by Vernon Sewel; (Curse of the Crimson Altar, 1968) from a script by historian Ernle Bradford making his debut.

A bit better than Orgy of the Dead (1965) but not by much.

Two for the Seesaw (1962) ***

Whatever chemistry Robert Mitchum and Shirley MacLaine enjoyed in real life – they embarked on-set on an affair that lasted three years – does not come across on screen. Of course, we’re accustomed to the adage that opposites attract and this screen couple Jerry Ryan (Robert Mitchum), a lawyer running away from his marriage, and bohemian dancer Gittel Mosca (Shirley MacLaine) seem particularly ill-matched.

For a contemporary audience this gets off to the oddest of starts. There’s no meet-cute. If there’s something else we’re accustomed to these days it’s a clever, intriguing, smart or even dopey meet-cute. They barely acknowledge each other at first encounter, at the kind of party where intellectuals arguing obscure points of art or politics mingle with what would pass in those days for the in-crowd.

He couldn’t be more out of place, turning up at a trendy event in a trenchcoat, and he’s only there because he is friends with party host, artist Oscar. They exchange one line. It’s not as though that’s a zinger either. But, on an odd pretext, he pursues her.

Now any ditzy dame is going to run a mile from a stranger who has made virtually no impression on her and can hardly make up his mind whether he wants to see her or not and to whom she only relents when he tells her what a lonely spud he is. So it’s a big narrative hole to dig the audience out of. We establish that she’s good-hearted, but we already know he traipses around the streets of New York doing nothing and lives in a shoddy apartment.

This derived from a Broadway hit and although director Robert Wise attempts to open it up it appears acutely stage-bound, but lacking the dialog zip that marked out such numbers as Barefoot in the Park (1967).

Despite MacLaine’s appealing screen personality, and the tremendous work she did establishing herself as a marquee name via The Apartment (1960), this is more of a romantic drama than a comedy, two ships (somewhat distantly) that pass in the night only to discover not only have they little in common and with opposite personalities but that he is having second thoughts about his impending divorce.

He doesn’t quite settle in New York and she hasn’t made it there. In some respects, they are too similar, emotional losers. She lacks the zap to make this work and he’s just too aggressive and quick with the put-downers to come across as a lonely guy. Once he found work – as an attorney – he’d have a swathe of dames on his trail.

*Hard put to see the movie version qualifying as a “romantic delight”. On broadway it starred Henry Fonda and Anne Bancroft and was directed by Arthur Penn.*

He commits the mortal sin of the meet-cute romance by slapping her around. Although by this point I doubt if audiences went much for the idea of the unlikely couple getting it on. With a little financial help from him, she manages to make a success of herself, but in a business rather than an artistic sense, and you get the impression she’s going to end up as the joke in a tale he’s going to tell his buddies when he gets back home to Omaha, Nebraska.

It just seems too contrived a set-up to work. Turns out he’s going through a mid-life crisis – he spends a good deal of time just moping – and has been too indulged most of this life.

She’s more convincing, the type of free-spirited gal who, though street-smart is other ways, always falls for the wrong guy, unable to rein in her generosity of heart and waste her emotions on men who demand too much of her, including that she rein in that generosity of heart and free spiritedness.

For a May-December romance (she’s 17 years younger) it’s too weighted down by the dour. In recent years, Mitchum had appeared at his romantic best when up against a sprightly star like Deborah Kerr (Heaven Knows, Mr Allison, 1957, and The Sundowners, 1960) who could more than hold their own, rather than a relationship where, apart from his depression, he needs to have the upper hand.

Mitchum appears miscast and the flaw in the ointment. MacLaine, despite or because of the character’s flaws, is much more believable.

Robert Wise (The Sound of Music, 1965) directs from a script by Isobel Lennart (The Sundowners) based on the William Gibson play.

Hard going. Fans of MacLaine should be satisfied enough. Fans of Mitchum less so.