Wish I’d never watched Two Gentlemen Sharing on Amazon Prime if this is the kind of “recommendation” its algorithms throw up. It would be easy enough to dismiss it as the kind of rubbish that American International was famed for – it turned into their biggest hit in a decade – except I’ve a sneaky feeling that it’s the kind of rubbish that could get greenlit these days and sold as a feminist revenge drama.
The fact that it is just so badly made doesn’t help even with a leavening of decent middle-range stars like Christopher Jones (Privilege, 1967) and Yvette Mimieux (Dark of the Sun / The Mercenaries, 1968). It is full of montages, jump cuts, voice overs, slow-mo and any other technical experimentation that might liven up the dross rather than going to the effort of writing scenes that explore character.
The stars might well have carried it except the plot defies belief. College lothario Paxton Quigley (Christopher Jones) has three girls on the leash – middle class Tobey (Yvette Mimieux), teacher Eulice (Judy Pace) who yearns to be a chic biker chick, and way out artist Janet (Maggie Thrett). Paxton has sex with each of them twice a week on rotation and spends his spare time boasting to his pal Jake (John Beck).
The girls find out about his triple dealing and decide to take their revenge. How? By throwing all his clothes out into the street? Smashing up his Yamaha? Mixing him up a concoction that’s going to put him in bed for a week? Taking a sledgehammer to his private parts?
Nope. They reckon the best revenge is to “give him a taste of his own medicine.” Which is to lock him up in an attic and force on him non-stop sex?
So, setting aside the element of kidnapping, coercion and female rape, wearing a guy out by subjecting him to what he loves doing seems bizarre in the extreme. This could only be the kind of notion dreamed up by a guy (step forward screenwriter Stephen Yafa, whose screenplay had won a competition). It’s like one of those old-fashioned parental discipline notions where your old man makes you smoke a cigar till you’re sick after he’s caught you taking a puff of a cigarette as a teenager.
It’s just too coarse for words. Sure, Paxton initially has commitment issues, Tobey trying to hustle him too quickly into an apartment-share.
Honestly, I’ve no idea how anybody got talked into making this. Directed by Richard Wilson (Invitation to a Gunfighter, 1964). There’s a Tarantino connection if you’re interested.
Surprising to find so much moral complexity when it seemed we would be restricted to discussing the difference between good bad smugglers and bad bad smugglers and good good bad guys and bad bad guys. Given the limited running time (it clocks in at 82 minutes) we’ve also just got about enough time to take in hypocrisy.
Compromise, too, for that matter. Squire’s son Christopher (John Fraser) is inclined to warn girlfriend smuggler’s daughter Louise (Michele Mercier) that his father Squire Trevenyan (Peter Cushing) is setting soldiers on the local smugglers. The local highwayman known as The Captain (William Franklyn) is considered something of a decent fellow because once he’s robbed travellers going along the road one way he’ll make sure they’re not robbed on their return.
Trevenyan finds the most convenient way to prevent his son marrying beneath himself is to imprison Louise’s father Francois (George Coulouris) on the grounds of receiving stolen goods – his sentence is deportation to Australia. He’s helped by his son having to run off to London after killing one of the smugglers in self-defense, the father assuming anyone witness to the struggle will side with the smuggler.
Aware that maybe the plot’s getting a bit too cute for anyone’s liking, director John Gilling makes the most of the thunderous seas, boats getting battered to bits in the storm, waves hammering the wheelhouse, men swept overboard from vessels losing their way because rudimentary lighthouses have been shattered by predatory smugglers (known as “wreckers”). Stunning Cornwall scenery also helps though beaches being littered with heavy-duty rocks rather than glistening sand tends to inhibit action sequences.
The wreckers are the bad bad smugglers, the ordinary locals, dealing with a bit of rum and tobacco to avoid the exciseman or helping themselves to loot from legitimate shipwrecks, are the good bad smugglers.
You can always depend on a good bad highwayman to defend an innocent girl against a bad bad smuggler. As you might expect the Squire is deliberately ineffectual since he’s being blackmailed by Black John (Bernard Lee), leader of the wreckers, because Christopher is the result of an indiscretion. So it’s left to the son to race back from London and set things to rights.
Although there’s a bit of fenceplay – there is one good duel between Christopher and The Captain – it’s not really a swashbuckler, a knife or pistol or musket the more likely weapon of choice, and since the director’s enamored of the silhouette against the darkening sky quite often what takes place is obscured.
Which helps the final section of the plot, as Christopher puts abroad that he’s dead while secretly signing up with Black John. This could have fitted into the Renown portfolio given the number of twists. Traps backfire. Ruses fail. Falling for the tale that his son is dead, Trevenyan puts the boy in mortal danger by sending troops to the beaches. Various rivals have to team up for the good of the cause.
By the time it turns into high adventure most of the moral complexities have been resolved.
The only problem is it’s the bad guys who steal the picture. While Peter Cushing (The Skull, 1965) continues his evolution as an actor of considerable scope, John Fraser (Tamahine, 1963) is a cardboard cut-out of a hero. But Bernard Lee, before assuming the mantle of M in the James Bond series, cuts loose as the bad bad guy while William Franklyn (The Big Day, 1960) does a dastardly good job of creating a charming good bad guy. For a bonus there’s rising French star Michele Mercier (You Can’t Win ‘Em All/Dubious Patriots, 1970).
Written and directed, with some panache, by John Gilling (The Pirates of Blood River, 1962).
Entertaining matinee fare with a soupcon of complexity.
As far as the Brits and Americans were concerned the North African campaign of World War Two consisted of the former’s Field Marshal Montgomery knocking hell out of German General Rommel at El Alamein and the latter’s General Patton demolishing Panzer divisions at will. The fact that the British victory would not have occurred except for one largely forgotten battle has been completely ignored. The Brits were holed up in Tobruk with even less chance of escaping the combined German and Italian armies than at Dunkirk, no fleets of small boats likely to come to the rescue in the Mediterranean.
It took an incredible stand-off at a tiny desert post called Bir Hakeim to buy the British enough time to escape to Tobruk and regroup and eventually conquer Rommel at El Alamein.
Who inhabited this outpost and sacrificed thousands of lives? The nascent Free French Army of around 4,000 men, commanded by veteran General Koenig (Benoit Magimel,) with neither tanks nor airplanes holding out against the vastly superior forces of Rommel fully equipped with both tanks and airplanes.
Just one of the many nuggets in this totally absorbing film about the titular French general, exiled in London, who became the voice of French Resistance after Marshall Petain had surrendered to the invaders and set up the collaborative Vichy government.
It was a heck of a feat for De Gaulle because even in France nobody had a clue who he was. At the start of the war he was an insignificant colonel way down the pecking order and I doubt if any of the French people knew of his courageous counter-attack against the Germans. The Brits had even less of a clue about him and his arrogance certainly didn’t endear him to the British upper classes who were running the country.
Support for him among the various French officials living in London was negligible and for a good while he looked like a raving madman with his insistence that France had not surrendered. After the war, he was famously a thorn in the British side, and from this film you can see why as he was subjected to personal humiliation and betrayal by his supposed Allies. But he did have panache, chutzpah, and that was something Churchill, an old soldier himself, admired.
He launched what appeared the most bizarre offensive against the Germans, aiming to set off a tinderbox of revolt among the French colonies in Africa, beginning with Chad and Cameroon, hoping that such insurrection would spread to Dakar and Algiers on the North African coast and thus make it easier for the Allies to attempt a landing. Given that his forces on the ground numbered between one and six, this was either strategic genius or the work of a deluded lunatic.
Luckily, the colonies, thousands of miles away from the Germans, could ignore Petain and raise up the French flag in defense. The plan fell to pieces, however, when De Gaulle shot himself in the foot by refusing to allow the British Navy to attack Dakar since it was being held by French troops and he didn’t want to kill his own countrymen, as the British had done when it destroyed the French fleet to avoid it falling into German hands.
At various points, De Gaulle is stabbed in the back by Churchill and his own group in England, betrayed, exiled even in his exile, routinely treated as a nobody. He should have salvaged his reputation at Bir Hakeim, given the murderous action permitted the Brits to escape Tobruk, and while he was feted in the streets and praised in the British newspapers, he was still distrusted by the Allies and when Algiers was liberated it was collaborator Admiral Darlan (Mathieu Kassovitz) who was put in charge of all the French forces in Africa.
Luckily, there was a deus ex machine to hand, a young man called Fernand (Florian Lesieur), who appeared to interrupt general proceedings in the movie from time to time and whose sole role, it would appear, was to prove that there was resistance on the ground in Paris although at that point it merely took the form of demonstrations. Fernand was in many ways an echo of De Gaulle. When he first called upon Parisians to rise up in civil disobedience, only a handful responded. Later, he, too, entered exile, in Algiers. Fortunately, he was at hand to assassinate the French commander, leaving the way open for De Gaulle to regain command.
You’ll have to wait till Part Two of this epic epic (we’re talking nearly six hours in total) to discover what happened next.
You’ll find me in that audience. We’re familiar with Churchill’s struggles in World War Two, but although I knew De Gaulle was the self-proclaimed leader of the Free French, I had no idea who he was and what he actually did. In truth, the image most fixed in my mind about the man who later became the French President was that he was the guy who ducked to avoid an assassin’s bullet but that was merely a fiction – The Day of the Jackal.
A ton of this is just politics, but it’s the nerve-shredding politics of trying to hold your ground when you’re being hammered on all sides.
Simon Abkarin (Casino Royale, 2006) is superb in the title role, given the opportunity to express all sides of the General’s character – petulance, arrogance, cunning, loyalty, stoicism, determination, willpower, self-belief – and the moments when he realizes he is condemning his valiant Free French troops to death by insisting they do not attempt to escape Bir Hakeim, but fight a rearguard action to the bitter end (or until the British evacuated Tobruk), is immensely moving.
Simon Russell Beale (The Magic Faraway Tree, 2026) portrays the hard-drinking British leader, perplexed by De Gaulle’s behavior that threatens to ruin his relationship with the President Roosevelt (Campbell Scott). Florian Lesieur (Cassandre, 2024) has to touch on as many emotions as Abkarin. With Abkarin and Lesieur hogging the dramatic high notes, there’s not much room for another breakout performance but I suspect we’re going to see more of Anamaria Vartolomei (The Count of Monte Cristo, 2024) who plays Livia, the Jewish friend of Fernand.
Superbly directed by Antonin Baudry in only his second movie after The Wolf’s Call (2019). As much as we are looking in the direction of young bucks who can turn a million-dollar budget into sheer gold in horror pictures like Backrooms (2026), we should also be acknowledging someone who can handle a bigger-budgeted effort with such aplomb. He co-wrote the screenplay with Berenice Vale in her movie debut based on a book by Julian T. Jackson.
Glossy entry into the investigation business, no down’n’dirty private eyes this time round, racking up alimony, office the saloon of a bar, little in the way of fashionable attire, best friends with the bottle. Okay, so Jeff Dillon (Anthony Franciosa) is a newshound not a private dick – same difference.
Main problem is that the three main characters seem to be in different movies. Jeff, all teeth, comes over like he’d rather be down on the beach surfing, his unwanted assistant Peggy (Susan Saint James) like she’s auditioning for Nancy Drew, and artist Leona (Jill St John) like she’s in the femme fatale business.
Small-screen effort in the U.S., released on the big screen in the rest of the world, a fairly common move at the time.
And it takes forever for our intrepid newshound to work out that the dead girl Ellen found in an upmarket hotel room has been murdered rather than committing suicide. Any time the plot looks like slowing down up pops an interesting character. Gangster Ben Welcome’s (Jack Klugman) secretary (Myrna Ross) turns out to have a neat side hustle as a bodyguard, stiletto heels at the ready to pin a man to the ground.
Ex-baseball star Dizzy (Jay C. Flippen) is a massive fan of passive smoking, the only way, given his health condition, that he can get any smoke into his lungs. Telephone operator Pat (Nanette Fubray) uses her smiles for wiles while sticking it to the man. A beggar doesn’t bother to check if a corpse might be still alive before trying to steal his boots.
While the dialog isn’t exactly full of zingers, it does have some zip and repartee. For too long, though, the plot ambles along rather than anything else.
The dead woman had been married to loser Eddie (Robert Duvall) and befriended Dizzy before ending up as the mistress of billionaire Cruikshank (Lee Bowman). But once the dots begin to be joined, it takes on a seamier tone, sexual coercion, blackmail, murder.
There’s a terrific twist at the end which makes up for a lot of the aimlessness.
A shame this came out the same year as Harper/The Moving Target which reinvigorated the genre and had as its leading man a sex symbol who didn’t act – as Franciosa does here – as if he was a sex symbol. Anthony Franciosa (Fathom, 1967) is the main problem. He’s too full of himself, constantly flashing his teeth as if that’s a get-out-of-jail-free card, and lacks the edge the role requires.
Both Jill St John (Tony Rome, 1967) and Susan Saint James (New Face in Hell, 1967) fall into the rising star category, though the former is easily the more accomplished. Interesting supporting cast in Jack Klugman (The Graduate, 1967), Jack Weston (The Thomas Crown Affair, 1968), Robert Duvall (The Godfather, 1972) and Jay C. Flippen (Hellfighters, 1968).
Ably spun by director Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke, 1967) from a screenplay by Ranald MacDougall (Dark of the Sun/The Mercenaries, 1968).
This had an unusual genesis in that it was one of the first made-for-tv movies. Universal promoted the 90-minute feature as a world premiere and it turned into an unusual series with three different stars – the others were Gene Barry (Marco 7, 1967) and Robert Stack (Borderlines/ The Caretakers, 1963) – taking turns headlining an episode.
While classier fare than you might have expected from television during the 1960s, it came up short when compared to similar ideas played out on the big screen. Where it did end up in the cinema, it was as a supporting feature.
You can catch it on YouTube. The streamer even chucks in about 20 ads for free.
Female empowerment doesn’t come any sharper. Two women slaughter exhausted samurai trying to escape a civil war in feudal Japan, dump the corpses in a deep hole, and sell their weapons and armor for food. Into their midst comes a deserter and the action slips into the sexual jealousy mode of The Fox (1967) and then takes another sudden shift into horror. And it manages all three incarnations of the tale with dexterity.
I knew all about this film long before Seven Samurai (1954) was on my horizon. As one who scanned newspaper advertisements and read contemporary movie magazines, I was well aware – though forbidden by dint of age to see it – of its controversial nature. I wasn’t exactly privy to what the controversy involved except that it was initially banned by the censor and that British posters hinted at the controversy.
I would soon learn that “exotic” and “primitive” were code words for nudity. A double standard operated in the offices of the British censor. Until the late 1960s, the only movies that could get away with a glimpse of forbidden flesh were foreign pictures destined for an arthouse.
Coming to it now for the first time I was more aware of it as a horror movie so I wasn’t ready for the first two elements – the blatant murder of men by supposedly vulnerable women and the sexual jealousy.
An older woman (Nobuto Otawa) and her daughter-in-law (Jitsuko Yoshimura) share a hut in the middle of fields and make a living killing any soldiers that come their way, exchanging their loot to a dealer, Ushi (Taiji Tonoyama), for small sacks of millet. Into their lives comes deserter Hachi (Kei Sato), who brings news that the son/husband of the women is dead.
He proves useful in adding to their meager supply of food through fishing. After participating in their next killings, he also proves a more adept negotiator with Ushi and returns with a bigger bag of millet than the women ever secured plus some saki and a couple of birds.
He’s clearly got his eye on the younger woman and she responds, sneaking out for a sex. This makes the older woman furious. There’s more than jealousy at stake. If Hachi and the younger woman decide to leave together, the older woman will be unable to capture and kill any passing strangers. Perhaps hoping Hachi might be in the mood for a threesome, she attempts to seduce him but is rebuffed.
But then the older woman comes across a samurai wearing a demon mask. When he ends up down the pit, she climbs down and steals his mask, revealing the samurai’s disfigured face. She uses the mask to scare the younger woman away from Hachi, persuading her that the demon is punishment for her affair. At first it looks as if the scheme works, but the younger woman soon takes to sneaking out again at night.
But then the mask proves impossible to remove. When they finally get it off, the older woman’s face is as disfigured as the original wearer and the younger woman is convinced the older woman is actually a demon.
This is tremendously well done. In the first 10 minutes there’s no dialog as we watch the women hunt their prey. The reeds in the fields are taller than any human, and there’s a Hitchcockian element when they sway and conceal. A good chunk of the picture relies merely on facial expression. And the three changes of tone are well managed so that we move from mere murder to the sexual and then the demonic. The eeriness is hard to shift.
Hypocrisy and lust are strange bedfellows, the possessive mother-in-law loses her power, the daughter-in-law is freed by the death of her husband, bad deeds go unpunished.
Written and directed by Kaneto Shindo (The Naked Island, 1960) and based on an old Japanese legend, this is so starkly filmed, with a unique three-act structure, that you come away thinking this must be due for a remake.
Men had a hell of a time in the 1960s to judge from this riff on marital strife that starts off like Walter Mitty meets The Odd Couple. It’s one of those daft comedies that only work on their own terms – and for the most part this works very well.
Dedicated bachelor Stanley Ford (Jack Lemmon), enjoying a host of one-night stands, ensconced in almost a bromance with butler and kindred spirit, the very English Charles (Terry-Thomas), makes the mistake of getting hammered at a drunken party and ends up married to a beauty queen (Virna Lisi). Although she is gorgeous and very loving – most scenes end on a fade as she devours him in kisses – and a good cook (though a bit lax by the high housekeeping standards of Charles), Stanley resents being burdened with a wife, especially when it costs him the services of his butler.
The biggest casualty is his self-image. He has fashioned his persona after his Bash Brannigan comic strip, syndicated to hundreds of newspapers, that permitted him the fantasy of being secret agent/adventurer/detective, fighting off bad guys and rescuing damsels in distress. Marriage inflicts a devastating change in his mental state, and he transforms from hero into hen-pecked booby.
In a bid to restore his self-esteem, and provide a fictional glimpse of freedom, he plans to murder his wife, if only in the comic strip. It has been Stanley’s working practice to act out and have photographed all the elements of his stories so Charles records the whole episode, from getting advice on how to drug Mrs Ford to (using a dummy) incarcerating her in cement. Unfortunately, Mrs Ford, outraged on discovering the illustrations for this particular comic strip episode, vanishes, leaving no explanation for her disappearance, except that various people witnessed him carrying out the supposed murder. He is arrested and put on trial.
You couldn’t make this up, but strangely enough, it is all very believable. The opening section where Stanley enacts the part of his action man Bash Brannigan in “The Case of the Faberge Navel” is just a delight. When the future Mrs Ford comes to explain exactly why she came to be jumping out of a birthday cake in a bikini, it is as daft as everything else.
However, the picture’s overall theme, the war between men and women, where men feel controlled, is somewhat dated. You might expect such a war to go nuclear when Mrs Ford dares to infringe on the sanctuary of a men-only enclave. The trial scene is particularly laborious in trying to determine that men are victims of controlling women. Despite that, there are some very funny lines that hit the nail on the head – men “are always guilty about something” declares Mrs Ford’s confidante Edna (Claire Trevor) whose strategy is always to keep men off-balance.
Jack Lemmon (The Apartment, 1960) has ploughed this path before, conspirator to the illicit, although generally to be found in the loser camp rather than, as, effectively here, despite his complaints to the contrary, in the winner’s circle with an enviable lifestyle and willing girlfriends to hand. There’s a gleefulness in his performance, the little boy getting away with everything, that turns into a small boy’s sullenness when it is all apparently taken away.
Italian star Virna Lisi (Assault on a Queen, 1966), in her Hollywood debut, is a delight. Her frothy sexuality goes down a treat but she is far from a dumb blonde, learning English from television, excellent cook, and wise enough not to go down Edna’s route of dealing with men. Terry-Thomas (Bang! Bang! You’re Dead!, 1966) delivers just as interesting a confection, a touch of ruthlessness to the stiff upper lip, high chieftain of the Male Protection League, reveling in the prospect of ridding the world of insidious influences like Mrs Ford. And there’s a welcome role for Claire Trevor (Stagecoach, 1939), especially when, in a party scene, she really lets go.
The other males, ranging from dumb and dumber to dumbest, totally lacking in Jack Lemmon’s charm, perfectly illustrate the need for a woman’s firm hand, among them Eddie Mayehoff (Luv, 1967), Sidney Blackmer (A Covenant with Death, 1967) and Harold Wendell (My Blood Runs Cold, 1965).
Richard Quine (The World of Suzie Wong, 1960) directed from an original screenplay by George Axelrod (The Secret Life of an American Wife, 1968).
Pretentious rubbish. An almighty bore masquerading as a) a spoof on slash horror films and b) having something important to say while c) not coming anywhere close to achieving either. Another of the dumb propositions foisted upon us by the connivance of the film festival industry to chuck at the general public movies that hoity-toity festival progammers and audiences believe deserve wider attention.
The most annoying element of this is that the subtext is merely a variation of the Dracula hypothesis that women are sexually drawn to dangerous men who can drive them into ecstasies of fear and penetrate them with sharp weapons. Here, this is spelled out in more detail, “the heroine” only able to achieve orgasm through terror and after running terrified with her breasts bouncing around and her erect nipples visible through translucent material.
And if you can work out how anyone can walk around with a slab of metal stuck to their head, you’re better than me. Oh, and to keep the woke element happy, the killer transforms from male to female.
And while we’re at the barking mad end of the horror subgenre let’s ensure that it’s the monster who’s creating the movies from his lair deep under a lake and that everyone who appears in the movies are his creations.
This is in the Anora (2024) league for repetition. Where that was sex, sex, sex, until we got the point, and way after we had got the point, this is blood, blood, blood, gushing literally like fountains or explosions from what’s left of a body once the monster, known as Little Death (which as you’ll no doubt be aware is a sly nod to “le petit mort”, the French description of orgasm), has finished chopping off select body parts.
Too much of this film is bits of the Camp Miasma series of films, initially big hits but then fading to direct-to-video flops, and which contain little more than variations of blood, blood, blood and people being impaled or chopped up.
If there is any emotional element it’s frigid lesbian Kris (Hannah Einbinder), technically in a polyamory relationship but that’s only because she permits her female bisexual partner to regularly have sex with a male, finally managing to overcome her inhibitions, helped along by Billy (Gillian Anderson), the original star of the Camp Miasma picture who bowed out after the first episode, and now lives on an abandoned tourist attraction based on the original or the original set (I couldn’t work out which).
In between making eyes at Gillian and watching the old movies in a cinema at Camp Miasma, the full-of-herself Kris is pitching her barmy notion for a horror picture where all the characters are figments of the monster’s imagination. Actually, the movie business section is the only bit that works, although Kris fails to note the negative response from potential stars.
Given that blood is the dominant color scheme, it’s not surprising that Kris and Billy end up soaked in blood and wandering, in surreal splendour, around a service station where, with equal surreality, kids are more interested in shooting each other with water guns than any stray adults who haven’t bothered to change out of their blood-soaked Halloween costumes.
This has come at us with the glow of critical approval, but, actually beyond the very repetitive obvious and some smartass intellectual dialog, this is an over-inflated mess.
I felt sorry for Hannah Einbinder (Seekers of Infinite Love, 2026) who clearly can act but less so for X-Files star Gillian Anderson who draws too much on Sunset Boulevard (1950). Written and directed Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw The TV Glow, 2024) who should stop believing her own publicity.
Hooray! The Stath is back. After the turgid Shelter (2026) and the disappointing A Working Man (2025), and while this doesn’t reach the heights of The Beekeeper (2024), it’s a more than serviceable action thriller that will keep his fans – such as moi – happy. Though you’d need Alistair MacLean, “the king of the action thriller” (though I say so myself – see my latest book), to pump some novelty into a seagoing action piece.
This does have one other novelty for a Statham thriller in that it hands him a female buddy, a companion in arms I hasten to add rather than a lame love interest. I’m guessing that should this turn into a global hit, a sequel will be on the cards, where he is called into to help said lady who will transition into a damsel in distress, especially given she’s a single mom, a category which seems irresistible to screenwriters.
But, basically, Statham does what he does best, which is to crack heads, strangle, stab and shoot bad guys, solve a mystery and right whatever wrongs have been committed. On the strict confines of a cargo ship, there aren’t so many places to hide, not that our Jason is the hiding sort, so it’s a barrage of non-stop action as either the bad guys come after him or he goes after the bad guys. There’s some novelty too in the killing. As well as the standard weapons, our hero makes use of a ship’s hook and a handy harpoon, not to mention a Rolex watch.
I have to warn you the title is a bit of misnomer, but it serves its purpose, which is to warn of an armed uprising on board a ship.
Cole Reed (Jason Statham) ain’t a marine. He’s bodyguard to billionaire shipping magnate Tibu Campallo (Ramon Tikaram) who has just retired when he’s killed in Bangkok in an ambush organized by Jaran Daniles (Simon Kluth) for reasons that are unclear except that Tibu is on the point of selling his business. Naturally, corruption being what it is these days, Cole is figured for the murder.
A clue leads him to sneak aboard the Artemis, one of Campallo’s gigantic vessels. He hides out in a lifeboat, the modern kind that offers easy concealment not an antique of Titanic vintage. Also, on board, reluctantly, and at very short notice is replacement Third Mate Angie Ellis (Annabelle Wallis).
Cole’s investigations lead him to a hidden cargo of trafficked people. Angie finds the same but when she reports back to Captain Marko Madsen (Roland Moller) she quickly realizes he’s in on the game. So she skedaddles and eventually teams up with Cole, though they are at various times separated so that Cole can do what he does best which is to escape from impossible situations while it’s left to Angie to manage a wound and incapacitate various crew members on the bridge, from which she can send out a distress signal.
The signal is picked up by a passing U.S. naval vessel commanded by Capt Adam Spencer (Adrian Lester). You think the Yanks are going to get there and rescue Cole and the people, but there’s a twist, the trafficked people are due to be offloaded mid-ocean to another gang. So although Cole has already thinned out the competition, the new arrivals bulk it back up.
It’s preposterous to expect anything new in the action thriller game, even Die Hard (1988) simply played a new angle but was hardly more than a twist on various westerns and anything else where people needed rescued. So as long as the plot doesn’t drift into the maudlin like Shelter, and as long as the action races along, that’s about all you need, as well as an actor who’s a believable action hero.
Plus a director who knows his stuff. Jean-Francois Richet is of that ilk, having directed, most recently, Plane (2023) which follows a similar narrative, as well as superb pictures about criminals, The Emperor of Paris (2018) and especially the two Mesrine (2008) movies. He sticks to the knitting and that’s all you need. There’s a couple of twists to the tale, but that’s standard in today’s thrillers. Annabelle Wallis (Mercy, 2026) kicks ass with the best of them.
Written by Lindsay Michel. In his debut, and J.P. Davis (Plane).
Statham back on form which bodes well for The Beekeeper 2 out in the New Year.
Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Cimino between them put paid to the more traditional “high adventure” war picture. The realism of Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978), which came out months apart and gobbled up critical appreciation and Oscar nominations, spelled a more troubled release for the likes of Alistair MacLean’s Force 10 from Navarone (1979) and The Sea Wolves, which in part followed the MacLean template.
However, The Sea Wolves has never been properly appreciated for one important element – a more realistic portrayal of age and its limitations than was common in Hollywood. We tend to take it for granted that actors when not portraying superheroes can still in the action line have a special set of skills that allows them to throw themselves about or run and chase as if they were men 30 years younger. Liam Neeson was 73 when he was still taking down bad guys in Ice Road: Vengeance (2025), Tom Cruise a decade younger in the final episode of the Mission Impossible franchise in 2025 and Keanu Reeves a year short of 60 when committed to acrobatic action in John Wick Chapter 4 (2023). Jason Statham will be 60 when the sequel to The Beekeeper arrives next year.
In the action world, age never seemed to catch up with or limit the heroes. In The Sea Wolves age is by far the biggest obstacle. The three pre-eminent heroes are played by actors aged between 52 and 71. Their characters are fallible.
SOE operatives Col Lewis Pugh (Gregory Peck) and Capt Gavin Stewart (Roger Moore), going undercover in neutral Goa in World War Two, prove unable to unravel the mystery that results in German submarines destroying British destroyers. Any time they get hold of a likely suspect, they have the bad habit of killing them. And Stewart, prone to over-indulgence in the opposite sex even in the midst of a critical operation, is duped by femme fatale Mrs Cromwell (Barbara Kellerman) who proves not only to be the German spy they are hunting but capable of knifing men to death.
It’s only because the pair fail in their initial mission that Pugh is forced to call on a rag-bag bunch of ageing ex-soldiers from India led by Col Grice (David Niven) and undertake a more difficult operation to infiltrate a Goa harbor, sink German ships and silence radio communication. This bunch are never going to complete the kind of training program served up to The Dirty Dozen (1967) or The Devil’s Brigade (1968) so that aspect is mostly treated for laughs.
Vulnerabilities abound. They are violently seasick en route or they can’t get the boat’s engine to work or are likely to mistake a distant shark for a U-boat.
And there’s another unusual aspect of war that complicates proceedings. In most war films – and a feature of the current The Odyssey (2026) – the dead are left behind. Here, because the British are attacking a neutral territory, they can’t leave behind evidence of their involvement in the shape of corpses or wounded.
The actual plan is clever. Any sailors or officials in the target harbor who could possibly interfere are rendered incapable by the simple trick of getting them all drunk, a move sponsored by the British government. The battle itself is too long in coming and there are too many supporting characters involved for us to be committed to any of them and therefore the emotional impact of their deaths is minimal.
Sufficient tension is still generated but given the battle action only lasts about 20 minutes rather than the 150 minutes of Where Eagles Dare (1968), for example, it doesn’t quite qualify for the high adventure sub-genre.
Even the greatest of directors would fail to make work an action movie based on the type of people who should never be allowed near a machine gun or asked to join in fisticuffs, so that element is indeed a stretch. On the other hand, the frailties of those involved, determined not to admit to weakness, make this work.
By this point Gregory Peck’s career had received a second (or third) wind thanks to The Omen (1976) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). Roger Moore’s career had been revitalized by James Bond and he had just made Moonraker (1979), his most successful contribution to the series. David Niven was not in their marquee league but anyone who remembered him from The Guns of Navarone (1961) would go in with high expectations. Barbara Kellerman (The Quatermass Conclusion, 1979) is up to scratch as the cunning spy.
There’s a host of British supporting stars including Trevor Howard (Von Ryan’s Express, 1965), Patrick Macnee (The Avengers TV series 1961-1969), Patrick Allen (Puppet on a Chain, 1971) and Kenneth Griffith (The Lion in Winter, 1968).
Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen (Where Eagles Dare) from a script by Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men, 1957) based on the novel by James Leasor which recounted a true incident.
Not quite in the top drawer of the high adventure sub-genre but if you accept the approach and view this as something of an antidote to the standard war film you will find much to appreciate.
You probably haven’t heard of Judy Holliday. She had just broken through with an Oscar for Born Yesterday (1951) when her career hit the rocks after facing accusations of Communist sympathy in the HUAC trials early in that decade. That was the high point of her career and she only made six other movies. The Bells Are Ringing was the last and she died prematurely a few years later.
Holliday was odds-on to play on film the part she had originated on Broadway, and won the Tony for Best Actress (Musical). The musical ran for over two years on Broadway clocking up 924 performances. It was a class act, involving composer Jule Styne (Funny Girl, 1968), lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Singin’ in the Rain, 1952) and choreographers Jerome Robbins (West Side Story, 1961) and Bob Fosse (Sweet Charity, 1967).
Movie audiences would have heard about the musical and especially if they hadn’t been able to reach Broadway would have salivating at the prospect. Dean Martin (Bandolero, 1968) at that point in his career had lost the top-billing he’d enjoyed as part of the Martin-Lewis comedy partnership and the Rat Pack was yet to make its screen debut, so he was far from the main attraction. If this film was going to work, it depended on Holliday’s performance.
This was also a bit of a swansong for director Vincente Minelli (Gigi, 1958) and he’d only make one more musical, spending the rest of the 1960s knee deep in heavyweight dramas like The Sandpiper (1964). Minelli was a fresh pair of eyes for the musical as he hadn’t been involved in the Broadway show, but he doesn’t do much tinkering with the original set-up. About the only criticism you could make was that it doesn’t break out of the stage settings.
Like many musical confections of the period, the story is lightweight. Ella (Judy Holliday) works in a telephone answering service but becomes too attached to her clients, in particular struggling playwright Jeffrey (Dean Martin). She wants to help clients achieve their dreams.
A couple of subplots get in the way of a happy ending. A vice cop, Inspector Barnes (Dort Clark), is convinced the operation is a front for an escort service. The cop doesn’t spot the actual illegal activity taking place on the premises when music distribution boss J. Otto Prantz (Eddie Foy Jr.), romancing business owner Sue (Jean Stapleton), sets up a gambling racket.
There’s a further complication because Jeffrey thinks the person who answers his phone is 60 years old, so Ella has to use an assumed name to get close to him. But these complexities are of a light, frothy, comedic nature and luckily the star excels in just those departments.
To succeed, a musical needs more than hummable songs, it requires a star. As it happens, the star, if male – as proven by Yul Brynner in The King and I (1956), Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964) and Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon (1969) – doesn’t have to even have a good voice or even be able to sing at all (they can talk their way through their songs).
But the voice of the female equivalent has to capture an audience, even if it’s not her own voice and her singing is dubbed. One of the joys of having the Broadway star in your film is the guarantee that she’s using her own voice, she can’t possibly be dubbed on a stage show, and if her voice took a theater by storm it’s going to electrify a cinema.
Judy Holliday has such a voice. But she also has terrific comedic skills. She’s an impressionistic par excellence, inventing voices to go with the characters her clients think they’re conversing with, and she’s wonderful with physical comedy, the flailing of arms and butting of heads. We’re not in Pink Panther territory, but we’re not far off, and director Minnelli has the sense not to over-egg the pudding. There’s a wonderful scene in a restaurant where the climax is her dress catching fire. We see the flames just starting to appear around her derriere. But then we cut to her sneaking into her apartment, hiding the damage.
The songs are terrific. The lyrics work both as interior monologue and identifying dilemma. I’m not sure the score has survived so well as some of Styne’s other musicals, but I found the music very appealing.
The plot works, there’s a happy ending, and the whole effort results in an endearing confection. You won’t go away thinking Dean Martin was going to resuscitate his career but you will wonder why Holliday, even in her brief lifetime, never made more movies.
The Magnificent 60s 