Visceral home invasion thriller that ignited the genre and triggered later more controversial offerings like The Straw Dogs (1971) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). Made virtually on one set for the indescribably minute sum of £100,000, it is charged with Pinteresque dialog and aberrant philosophy. The genre splits into those pictures where the occupants have more than a good chance of avoiding their fate, the focus on the invaded pitting their wits against the invaders – classic examples being The Straw Dogs or more recently Panic Room (2002) – and those where the victims are mercilessly tormented, such as, in grueling detail, here.
As one of the perks of his job cocky married real estate agent Bruce (Terence Morgan) takes advantage of an expensive unoccupied apartment on his company’s books – “in the happy position to take advantage of my clients’ generosity in their absence” as he puts it – to enjoy an illicit tryst with mistress Barbara (Suzy Kendall). But when she answers to the door to two men coming to read the gas meter, their lives are turned upside down.
Tom (Tony Beckley) and Dick (Norman Rodway) are, of course, bogus and armed with a knife quickly take control, trying up Bruce and pouring alcohol down Barbara’s throat. As part of the overall creepiness, there is a sense that this is no casual visit, but that it has been planned, as if someone somewhere is familiar with the set-up, and there a debt, if only a moralistic one, to pay as a deterrent to the era’s permissiveness. Minus the knife, they would have passed as harmless. But never was their such difference between word and action, except for what they are capable of you could easily be persuaded that are in fact camp and bitchy.
The bound Bruce’s is spun round in a chair and can only watch as the men begin to strip Barbara. His only defence is verbal, trying to set the two men against each other, suggesting that Tom treats Dick as his assistant. But the relationship between the two criminals constantly shifts as if they were in passive-aggressive relationship. You don’t learn much about them until the end, so basically you have to rely on what they say about themselves, which is very little. They are prone to philosophic observation or interrogate Bruce about his possessions or extract from Barbara an unexpected ambition to be a painter.
One of the oddest pieces of promotional material ever produced. Studios were keen on this kind of jokey cartoon in the hope that it would be picked up by newspaper editors who might be less inclined to run a still from the picture. But it is completely out of touch with the tone of the movie.
The men take it in turns to torment Bruce while the other is in the bedroom with Barbara. Where Bruce resists verbally, Barbara gives in almost right away, but there is never the sense that this is in any way consensual, just that she is too drunk to defend herself – the first drink is a full glass of whisky forced down her throat – and the men have a knife. The invaders make constant reference to a character called Harry. That person’s eventual appearance provides a whole new range of twists.
It’s a film full of menace. Sexual tension, mind games, claustrophobia and the threat of physical violence never dissipate. Because it is rationed out, the brutality is all the more shocking. But it is brilliantly directed. In his debut British director Peter Collinson (The Italian Job, 1969) uses the camera to suggest we are in anything but an enclosed space. In one long sequence the camera does not move, in another scene it turns 360 degrees – Antonioni’s use of this device in The Passenger (1975) was credited as innovative – and at other times it twists and turns as if turning the characters inside out, suggesting some of the dizziness, the dramatic speed of change of feelings, that the stunned victims are enduring. At times it feels like an arthouse movie. At other times like a deranged B-picture.
The cast are all excellent. Tony Beckley (The Lost Continent, 1968) makes the best of a role of a lifetime, Norman Rodway (Four in the Morning, 1965) the more quietly psychotic sidekick. Terence Morgan (The Sea Pirate, 1966) has less to do but Suzy Kendall (Fraulein Doktor, 1969) is superb as the enigmatic girlfriend. Look out for Martine Beswick (Prehistoric Women, 1967) in a small part. Collinson wrote the screenplay based on a play The Meter Men by Scott Forbes.
Cultural note: “Tom, Dick and Harry” are considered such quintessentially British names that anyone familiar with this would understand immediately that they were a) pseudonyms and b) intended as a twisted kind of joke.
No sign of this being available on Amazon. Ebay is probably your best bet. There’s a copy on YouTube but it ain’t a good print.
Nobody told me this was a musical and a dire one at that, characters breaking into dirge-like tunes at any opportunity and throwing themselves about as if choreographed by Bob Fosse on speed. The kind of film where visual imagination is so limited that every now and then when a snake hoves into view, tongue tipping out, that we’re supposed to realize it’s an image from the Garden of Eden.
It’s such a mess that the director tries to rescue the narrative by imposing a dreadful voice-over commentary that tells us what the screen should have made abundantly clear. This device either robs sequences of any potency or avoids creating any scenes of note by relying on the voice-over to fill in the blanks.
And that’s a shame because there is a good story here to tell. A feminist one for a start, a woman by her own merit achieving a position of considerable importance in eighteenth century Britain and America. If you only knew the term “Shaker” in terms of furniture, then this is the one to disabuse of that notion. However, that term seemed to be one of contempt, an offshoot of the Quakers, who believed a woman would lead the Second Coming, which espoused a religion where they were shaking all over as an essential part of their worship of God, in part related to confessing their sins, but in part, I would guess, because singing and dancing with abandon offered pure physical – not to say sexual – release.
It was a particularly noisy religion. The stomping and yelping attracted so much attention that they were liable to be arrested for being too noisy. But there was a bright side to languishing in prison, at least for our heroine Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried), who, on the brink of starvation, saw visions that elevated her to a position of leadership – the new Messiah – among her clique.
One of the tenets of the religion – no doubt caused by her being in a state of endless pregnancy with no progeny to show for it, all four offspring dead at birth or soon after – was celibacy. Fornication was strictly forbidden. While nobody gave mind to how that might prevent a new generation carrying on the religion, no doubt it contributed to its popularity amongst women who had to give in to their husband’s sexual demands even though continuous pregnancy wore them out.
Never mind the pregnancies, Ann had a particularly good reason for wanting to stop having sex with her husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott). He was fond of pornography (yes, the printed stuff existed then and was even illustrated so it appears), and of giving her a good whipping as a prelude to sex and he was also bisexual.
They take their singing and dancing to America. The lack of sex leaves Abraham to abandon his wife, which is just as well because she’s too busy setting up Shaker communities to be involved in any intimacy with a perverted male.
The singing and dancing aspect doesn’t go down so well in the New World, it being too close to witchcraft for some, and accusations of witchcraft being the easiest way for the male hierarchy to keep women in their place. For every believer there are a ton of angry disbelievers who don’t want anyone shaking all over.
I saw this as part of my usual Monday triple bill that had got off to a very good start with the interesting, though far from superlative, Elvis Presley in Concert, followed by a more than tolerable Scream 7 with Neve Campbell (returning now that the producers had acceded to her salary demands) introducing her daughter to the delights of being chased by Ghostface. I was looking forward to having enjoyed a very decent day out at the cinema. Alas, the final picture torpedoed that notion.
I should have known better than to avoid films that were touted as more than worthwhile on the back of critical acclamation and an Oscar nomination for the lead. If Oscar nominations were handed out for people debasing themselves or not using make up such as Demi Moore (The Substance, 2025), then Clint Eastwood should have been more in line for similar recognition given the number of times he was whipped or beaten up.
Certainly Amanda Seyfried (The Housemaid, 2025) goes through the hoops here but, frankly, the movie is such a shambles and the voice-over kills off much of the narrative structure that she’s wasted.
Another “visionary” director in the form of Mona Fastvold (The World to Come, 2020) who with husband Brady Corbett (The Brutalist, 2024) wrote the screenplay and who, having been given too much rope by indulgent financiers, proceeds to hand herself.
It might have worked minus the singing and eternal dancing and with the voice-over stripped out and the picture trimmed by a good 20 minutes. Who knows, we might get a director’s cut where the director sees the error of her ways and delivers a more sensible version.
The person sitting next to me in the multiplex gave up after a mere 20 minutes. I wish I had followed suit.
Randolph Scott went out on a high – or at least that was the plan, his intended retirement derailed when Sam Peckinpah made him an offer he couldn’t refuse for Ride the High Country / Guns in the Afternoon (1962). But if this was his planned final movie, he couldn’t have wished for a better last hurrah.
Director Budd Boetticher (A Time for Dying, 1969) became something of a cult item once the fashionista critics of the 1960s and 1970s got their hands on him, and pulled out the stops for low-budget pictures made with tight artistic vision in preference to an overload of bloated big budget efforts. This was the last of a western quintet starring Scott.
Boetticher exercises remarkable restraint throughout, very little in the way of emotion, or close-ups, and his use of widescreen follows the classic composition, relevant movement taking place to the side of the screen or in a corner or instead of left to right the action snakes top to bottom.
The story is exceptionally lean but in that simplicity carries enormous power. A man of principle Jefferson Cody (Randolph Scott) is up against the unscrupulous Ben Lane (Claude Akins), the situation complicated by the fact that the good guy isn’t going to make it out of Indian Territory without the help of the bad guy. At stake is a cool $5,000 (worth $125,000) today. Or put another way, a young woman’s life. There’s bad blood between Cody and Lane, the former court-martialing the latter while in the Army.
Cody has rescued kidnapped rancher’s wife Nancy (Nancy Gates), not by raiding the Comanche camp and pulling off the kind of action that used to take a well-practised team of experts (see The Professionals, 1966), but by hoving into view and offering to trade various goods, including a rifle, for the woman. She’s not as grateful as you might expect, fearing the reaction of her husband on her return (it’s unspoken but she would have been raped by her captors) and subsequent public humiliation.
When Comanches reappear, it looks like they’ve reneged on their deal. But they’ve not. They’ve been baited by Lane and his accomplices who, seeking the reward money, have gone in all guns blazing. Nancy turns against Cody because she imagines he, too, was after her for the money and not out of the goodness of his heart.
Lane fuels the fire by casting doubts on her husband not coming after her on his own, and pointing out that women thus rescued often rewarded their rescuer with sexual favors. Lane and his two younger buddies, Frank (Skip Homeier) and Dobie (Richard Rust), briefly discuss robbing Cody once he’s been handed the reward. But Lane has a better idea. Kill them both. The husband wants his wife back dead or alive.
Lane has the sense not to perve on the woman and the director resists the opportunity to pander to the audience by showing Nancy bathing naked in a river. Outside of the gunplay, the three outstanding scenes are smaller potatoes. One of the young lads proves he can read much to the amazement of his friend. When Frank is killed by an arrow he’s left to float down the river because nobody can afford the time to give him a proper burial. And when under attack, Cody dumps Nancy in a water trough to keep her hidden, from which she occasionally pops up sodden only to dive down again.
It’s pretty unusual for western to end on the kind of twist you’d find in film noir or a thriller. But this one is terrific. All the way through Nancy’s husband has been derided for not coming after her in person, but in the last scene we discover why. Her husband is, in fact, blind. Cody, who hasn’t been in it for the money anyway, turns away without taking a cent.
The running time is so lean – just 73 minutes – it would have been released as a supporting feature and it’s testament to the director’s principles that he didn’t try to puff out the length by sticking in some sub plots or encouraging romance.
Beautifully filmed and with a compact script by future director Burt Kennedy (The War Wagon, 1967). This was also the swansong for Nancy Gates. Claude Akins was cast by Kennedy for Return of the Seven (1966). Skip Homeier was the male lead in one of my low-budget faves Stark Fear (1962).
Compelling work and worth reassessment if you’ve not already climbed aboard the Boetticher/Scott bandwagon.
Template for The Godfather (1972) and Succession. King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) has to choose an heir from Richard (Anthony Hopkins), Geoffrey (John Castle) and John (Nigel Terry). Helping set the Machiavellian tone are Henry’s wife Eleanor (Katharine Hepburn), his mistress Alais (Jane Merrow) and French King Philip II (Timothy Dalton). Cue plotting, confrontation, double-crossing, rage and lust.
Some other complications: the queen is actually a prisoner, the result of organising a failed coup against her husband, the sons participating in this attempt to overthrow their father, and with Henry willing to sacrifice his mistress in order to achieve an alliance with Philip, relations are less than cordial all round. Eldest son Richard, strong and aggressive, would be the obvious choice, and should be the only choice I would guess by law, but Henry prefers the youngest son John, who is weak, while the middle son Geoffrey is the most savvy (see if you can guess how easily these characters fit The Godfather scenario, or Succession for that matter). Geoffrey reckons that even if passed over for the top job, he will rule from behind the scenes as John’s chancellor.
This is not your normal historical picture with battles, romance and, let’s be honest, costumes, taking central stage. And there’s little in the way of rousing speeches. Virtually all the dialog is plotting. And, like Succession, there are elements of vitriol and pure comedy. In five crisp opening scenes we know everything we need to know. The King brings his family together for Xmas, the Queen freed for the occasion, to decide the succession. Richard is shown in hand-to-hand combat, the wily John leading a cavalry attack, the whiny John pouting and complaining, Alais realizing just how much a pawn she is in the game as Henry explains she is to be married off to Richard.
And if you are not the chosen one, your only chance of gaining the throne is by the back door, by having a powerful ally in your pocket, one whose armies would threaten the King, which is where Philip comes into the equation as potential kingmaker. Let the intrigue begin, especially as those who ought to be little more than bystanders – the women – have ideas of their own. “I’m the only pawn,” says Alais, “that makes me dangerous.” Despite her current status, Eleanor still owns the French province of Aquitaine and taunts her husband by revealing that she slept with his father.
The plot twists and turns as new alliances are formed between the conspiring individuals. The overbearing Henry will certainly remind you of Logan Roy, “When I bellow, bellow back.” And there is a Hitchcockian element in that we, the audience, know far more than the participants and wait for them to fall into traps. Richard is revealed as homosexual, having had an affair with Philip.
The dialogue is superb, brittle, witty, and it could have been all bombast and rage except that emotion carries the day. Henry clearly could not have wished for a better Queen than Eleanor, more than capable of standing up to him, more capable than any of his sons, and he probably wishes she was by his side rather than confined, as by law, to prison. Eleanor still retains romantic notions towards him, even as she forces him to kiss his mistress in front of her – only the audience sees the truth revealed in her eyes, not Henry who is too busy kissing. The uber-male Richard complains to Philip that he never told him he loved him.
Maternal and paternal bonds ebb and flow and throughout it all is the dereliction caused by power. A father will lose the love of the children he rejects. Or, realizing they are more powerful together than as individuals, they could turn against him. The mother faces the same fate – she risks losing the love of the ones she does not back.
Unlike Alfred the Great, the monarchs have stately castles, so the backdrops are more commanding, but once an early battle is out of the way, it is down to the nitty-gritty of plot and counter-plot. A truly satisfying intelligent historical drama.
Peter O’Toole (Lawrence of Arabia, 1962) had played Henry II before in Becket (1964) and is in terrific form. Katharine Hepburn (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, 1967) won her second successive Oscar – and her third overall – in a tremendous performance that revealed the inner troubles of a powerful woman, Anthony Hopkins (When Eight Bells Toll, 1971) gave an insight into his talent with his first major role.
John Castle (Blow Up, 1966), Nigel Terry (Excalibur, 1981), Jane Merrow (Assignment K, 1968) and future James Bond Timothy Dalton, in his movie debut, provide sterling support, Dalton and Castle especially good as a sneaky, conniving pair.
This was an odd choice for a roadshow – at just over two hours considerably shorter than most of the genre. But the 600-seat Odeon Haymarket in London’s West End was an ideal venue for building word-of-mouth and it ran for over a year.
Modern audiences might bristle at the idea of woman as commodity, but women in those days were the makeweights in alliances of powerful men, though the fact that they bristle at the notion as well evens up proceedings, Eleanor in particular happy to jeopardize Henry’s ambitions in favor of her own, Alais warning Henry to beware of the woman scorned.
Director Anthony Harvey (Dutchman, 1966 ) was deservedly Oscar-nominated. James Goldman (Robin and Marian, 1976) won the Oscar for his screenplay based on his Broadway play which had not been in fact a runaway Broadway hit, only lasting 92 performances, less than three months. John Barry (Zulu, 1963) was the other Oscar-winner for his superb score.
In theory a cult film in the making. In reality, how is it even possible for a film to achieve cult status these days? Back in the day, there were a variety of routes. Reissue, for example, saved The Magnificent Seven (1960) from box office oblivion in the United States – but as a tool for building cult from a genuine revival wide release that’s gone. When was the last time you saw an arthouse event revival as epitomized by Metropolis (1927) or Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927)? Does anyone even run midnight screenings any more – the way The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) wormed its way into huge profit? Could a DVD release work its magic the way it did for box office flop The Shawshank Redemption (1994).
The “long tail” that kept movies in circulation for decades is long gone. How long do movies even survive on streaming? No streamer has the technology to literally keep thousands of movies available online for the time it would take for an underrated movie to pick up the head of steam necessary for reassessment.
For sure, this isn’t the greatest film ever made and it could certainly due with trimming, lop off the 15-20 minutes devoted to tedious exposition and cut down on the need to get reaction shots from each of its main characters any time anyone says something interesting. But it has certainly misfired at the box office, in part I guess because it was set up as Valentine’s Day counter programming but is so wacky that it didn’t stand a chance against the romantic box office powerhouse of Wuthering Heights.
Forget about the main storyline of AI taking over the world and concentrate on the other aspects which make this an enticing number. Its antecedents are appealing. For a start it draws on Groundhog Day (1993), The Twilight Zone (1959-1964), The Magnificent Seven (1960), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – twice I should add, once in technological rebellion and once in a version of the “star child”- the cover art from Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon, Interstellar (2014), Back to the Future (1985), reimagines the zombie movie if you imagine the zombies as a horde without the slime and teeth, and finishes with the kind of stinger that the best sci fi movies deliver – think the original Planet of the Apes (1968) or the original Carrie (1976).
Intrigued? You should be. Some of the concepts here are just terrific especially when it slips into flashback and we discover what kind of world the characters inhabit. School shootings are so common that the U.S. Government helps finance clones to replace your dead child. Dare switch off any teenager’s mobile phone and they come after you in a predatory pack. You can choose to live in virtual reality over the real world.
Someone being sent back from the future to save the world from apocalypse is a fairly straightforward sci fi trope. But this time, the threat emanates from a nine-year-old child. In any other picture, especially in this genre, you would just send a crack military outfit to eliminate the kid. But people here have principles. So instead The Man from the Future (Sam Rockwell), decked out like a homeless dude except with a bomb, has to recruit a team of individuals, most of whom you wouldn’t trust to form a community baseball team, from a diner.
So we’ve got grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), lovelorn Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) decked out in a princess outfit who’s medically allergic to mobile phones, ineffective substitute teacher Mark (Michael Pena) and potential girlfriend Janet (Zazie Beets), and your standard grumpy guy Scott (Asim Chaudry). Their mission doesn’t look that complicated – they’ve hardly got to cover a mile to reach their destination – which is just as well because you wouldn’t trust any of them to get your back much less expect them to clamber over a fence. Not all are going to make it. The Man from the Future has done this before – 117 times it transpires – but never achieved his mission.
It does need to get quicker to the brilliant climax and the stinger scenes that follow. The truth vs reality vibe is a bit over complicated. And I doubt if anyone has been waiting with bated breath – that would be a nearly decade-long wait – for the latest effort from director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean franchise).
Sam Rockwell (Argylle, 2024) is covered in a beard and all sorts of stuff which conceals all his annoying acting tics, Juno Temple (Roofman, 2025) has the most emotional part and Michael Pena the most baffled and Zazie Beets (Bullet Train, 2022), Haley Lu Richardson (Love at First Sight, 2024) and Asim Chaudry (People Just Do Nothing: Big in Japan, 2021) do well and in his movie debut creepy kid Artie Wilkinson-Hunt is in the top bracket of creepy kids. Written by Matthew Robinson (Love and Monsters, 2020).
Not as wacky as it sounds, especially when all the apparently random themes start adding up and connect into terrifying logic.
It was much better than I expected. And probably the first potential cult film denied such status by the onset of streaming.
An old-style western with a modernized anti-hero in Rooster Cogburn (John Wayne), nearly as “rapaciously brutal” as the same year’s The Wild Bunch, a script with language that captured the period, a heroine Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) who falls into the robust Barbara Stanwyck/Maureen O’Hara mold, humor and action in equal measure, and an unfussy director (Henry Hathaway) who loved the panorama even more than John Ford.
Although still critically rated as not as good as The Wild Bunch, and still mostly disdained by academics, I would argue that it has been grossly under-rated and fully deserving of a re-evaluation. In the first place, despite direction very much in the old school, Hathaway exhibits many stylistic flourishes, not least the very long shot which has rarely been used to such effect. He also utilizes the shaky-camera point-of-view in a much more effective manner than Mackenna’s Gold (1969) to record Cogburn’s charge at the outlaws and there is even a zoom, to pick out the villain Tom Chaney.
Also, you know exactly where you are in a Hathaway picture, not just in the narrative sense, but in terms of how people lived and where the towns and farms were in relation to each other (the Ross farm is 70 miles from Fort Smith, the hamlet of McAllister 60 miles from the villains’ hideout). He liked to show many aspects of a town, so we see where the courthouse is in relation to the jail and the stable by the simple expedient of having the characters walk past them. And the movie is littered with sound effects of the most ordinary kind (blacksmith’s hammer, train whistle, footsteps). The film is as much about progress as Once Upon a Time in the West and The Wild Bunch, the name of the town, Fort Smith, where much of the initial action takes place, indicates it was once a frontier town.
Rooster Cogburn feels crowded out by a new generation of lawyers challenging swift justice, and Mattie Ross, hunting the killers of her father, is well schooled in argument, winning many a confrontation with apparently more experienced and wily men by being more adept at negotiation and like a chess player always one move ahead. The aftermath of the Civil War lingers in the background, demonstrated by Mattie’s weapon and Cogburn’s antipathy to Texas Ranger LaBeef (Glen Campbell). But the story strikes an even balance, no matter how assured Mattie Ross comes across in civilization she almost comes apart in the wilds and without the protection of Cogburn would have met the kind of fate at the hands of men undergone by female characters in The Stalking Moon (1969), Mackenna’s Gold and The Wild Bunch.
It should be said here that the movie is full of audience direction, we are always told where Mattie will go next or where Cogburn is intending to go, with accompanying plausible reason, especially when later Cogburn calls off the hunt for the outlaws. There is no exploration of mystery, the characters are always upfront, and where characters express regret is it minus the self-pitying of The Wild Bunch. Nobody is defined by something they should have done instead, so, in that respect, the narrative is as clear as the overall direction.
We hear Cogburn’s voice before we see him, as if the director is preparing us for a different John Wayne. This is the actor in a new timbre, the usual slow drawl replaced by a raucous bark. And it is a different Wayne, one eye covered in a black patch, giving him a piratical look. He hustles the prisoners out, kicking one straggler viciously in the butt. Wayne walks differently, too. Instead of the famous slow walk, Cogburn is a man in a hurry, pushing forward with purposeful stride, ignoring Mattie as she comes racing after him, slamming the basement door in her face.
LeBeef is another dreamer, “nobody yet” but aiming to “marry well”, in this case “a well-placed young lady in Waco” who would “look with favor” on him for bringing back Chaney who has also killed a senator. His charm fails to convince Mattie to join forces. She sees right through him: “I have no regard for you but I’m sure you have enough for yourself to go around.”
Then comes a four-minute Mattie tour de force as she confronts Col Stonehill (Strother Martin) and demands $300 in reparation for the loss of her father’s saddle and for selling him dodgy horses. She threatens him with the law in the shape of Daggett, her secret weapon, and she knows enough about legality to beat Stonehill at his own game. Even better, this is no meek woman. It is one thing to be able to score points off an old lawman like Cogburn, who would have been putty in the hands of any capable woman of the Stanwyck/O’Hara variety, but another to outwit a wily old horse-dealer like Stonehill (his title a hangover from the Civil War and one which ensures a measure of respect). Even better again, she knows she will win, so confident that she has already drawn up the papers to sign.
Now neither Cogburn nor LeBeef are witness to this demonstration of her capability, so they will, naturally, treat her as a young girl, “baby sister” in Cogburn’s dismissive term. But Hathaway is setting a trap for the audience. Having witnessed this display, we think she will be able to hold her own in the wilderness, mistaking her willfulness for sagacity, and so are on her side in her attempts to win over the two men, when, in fact, she will prove to be so out of her depth as to endanger herself and others.
The pursuit is dogged, and everyone at some point is found wanting. Cogburn smokes the villains out from their cabin and would kill the others without warning except LaBeef objects out of principle and Mattie wants Chaney alive.
At Mattie’s prompting, we hear Cogburn’s mostly unvarnished, but never maudlin, history, he lost his eye in the war, committed a robbery to fund the purchase of an eating place that had a billiard table, married a grass widow, until she left him for her first husband, taking their son, Horace, hiding his sorrow at the boy’s departure in a grumpy “he never liked me anyway” and berating him as “clumsy.” When she lies down to sleep, he gazes at her fondly for the first time, perhaps prompted by memory of his loss.
In the climactic shoot-out, in the most famous John Wayne image since his character’s introduction in Stagecoach (1969), first in long shot then from his point-of-view with a shaky camera, he grasps the reins in his teeth and fires two-handed. He kills two but Pepper shoots his horse from under him and Cogburn, in a sign of his age when otherwise traditionally cowboys leap free of a falling horse, is trapped on the ground under the weight of the animal, unable to reach his gun or to shift. The wounded Pepper advances. He towers over Cogburn until LaBeef, whose marksmanship had previously been in question, saves his life.
And that should pretty much have been the end of the picture, roll credits with Chaney being hung, but there is still nearly 15 minutes to go. Returning to collect Chaney, LaBeef is ambushed, cracked on the head by a rock. Mattie shoots Chaney but the recoil sends her into the snake pit. Cogburn arrives in time to kill the wanted man, also sending him into the pit. She has damaged her shoulder and cannot pull herself up on a rope so Cogburn has to descend. He shoots a rattlesnake but another bites her.
She still had enough presence of mind to demand he first collect her fallen gun and her father’s gold piece from Chaney’s corpse. As he hauls himself up, a dazed LaBeef, mounted on a horse, pulls on the tope to ease their ascent, but the effort is too much, and he keels over and dies.
Mattie strokes his head, the first sign of her changed feelings towards him. Alternatively, this could be guilt because it was her wrong-headedness that caused his death, but that seems unlikely, she is not one to covet regret. Cogburn slaps saliva on the wound (rather than, as we might expect from watching other westerns, sucking out the poison), puts her arm in a sling, and sticks her on Blackie, her horse, despite her protests about the little horse carrying such a weight. Cogburn is ruthless, riding the horse so hard it dies. Then he carries her and finally steals a buggy.
Where previously most of the journey had been rendered in long shot, now Hathaway reverts to medium shot and close up of the haggard Cogburn racing desperately to save the girl’s life. When we cut to Cogburn and Chen Lee instinctively we know she has been saved. The lawyer Daggett appears to pay Cogburn what he is owed plus $200 for saving her life, though, typically, she has prepared a receipt for him to sign.
Then she is home. It is winter. Snow lies on the ground. Cogburn explains there was no woman waiting for LaBeef, though the marshal has collected the reward. She shows him her father’s grave and wants Cogburn, the father she has adopted, to be buried in the same burial ground. She gives him her father’s gun and in a final triumphant moment the “fat old man” gloriously rides over a four-bar fence waving his hat in the air.
John Wayne received just reward with his Oscar, Glen Campbell (The Cool Ones, 1967) does better than we might expect from a singer. Kim Darby (Bus Riley’s Back in Town, 1965) was ignored by Oscar voters but she certainly holds her own. Terrific direction by Henry Hathaway (5 Card Stud, 1968) from a script by Marguerite Roberts (5 Card Stud) based on the bestseller by Charles Portis (Norwood, 1970).
Ann-Margret was taking a leap into the unknown when she decided, temporarily, to turn her back on Hollywood and revive her fading fortunes – and buttress her bank account – by heading to Italy. By the time she made that decision, Clint Eastwood would not have been deemed to set a sparkling template since his spaghetti westerns were not released in the USA until after she had departed for Italy. She may well have had her head turned by such critically acclaimed fare as the Oscar-nominated Marriage Italian Style (1964) or perhaps the prospect, like Burt Lancaster in The Leopard (1963), of being taken up by critically-acclaimed director.
At one point she had easily been the fastest-rising star in Hollywood, with contracts for movies from rival studios, at one time balancing the demands of around a dozen movies. Had she been born in the previous decade she would have headlined any number of pieces of fluff that attracted box office. Even so, after making a number of pictures that scarcely challenged her – from Bye, Bye Birdie (1963) to The Swinger (1966) by way of a couple efforts that stretched her screen person (Once a Thief and The Cincinnati Kid, both 1965) – she had discovered that she was still perceived as little more than a Bond Girl, or the Matt Helm equivalent in Murderers’ Row (1966).
Quite what she expected to find in Italy is anybody’s guess. Probably not a standard Italian comedy. Nor to be playing second banana to Italian star Vittorio Gassman (A Virgin for the Prince, 1965) – three-time winner of a David (the Italian equivalent of the Oscars) – who knew how to frame his performance for an Italian audience. But while a huge star in his homeland he had not crossed-over like Marcello Mastroianni to win international favor.
Top executive Francesco (Vittorio Gassman), alarmed at becoming a grandfather at the age of 45, and believing life has now passed him by, begins a relationship with Carolina (Ann-Margret), an art student less than half his age. She makes a good bit of the running, being attracted to older men.
So a fair chunk of the picture is Francesco unable to make up his mind, or then suffering guilt from an illicit affair, worrying that his wife will find out and at the same time considering running away with the decidedly energetic girl.
The scenario will be more familiar to Italian audiences than American. Affairs were often seen as opportunities for comedy rather than, as in Hollywood, drama and angst. Francesco has the example of his friend Tazio (Fiorenzi Fionrentina), brought to financial ruin by an affair, and all the friends of his wife Esperia (Dorothy Parker) are divorcees after their husbands have run off with younger women.
Despite his excuses for being away from home mounting up, Esperia is not suspicious. You would have thought his colleagues would have more of an inkling given the number of times he dodges work commitments.
If you are a fan of Italian comedy, this will be right up your street, a number of sequences where Gassman falls back on physical comedy or stretches his features every which way but loose and gives the impression of not being able to follow his dreams at the same time as being suffocated by them.
If you’re here for Ann-Margret, you’ll be baffled. Sure, she has the occasional opportunity to shake her trademark booty, and she has lost none of her screen presence, but the role, effectively of second banana to the male lead, could have been played by a dozen other actresses, and Ann-Margret doesn’t bring anything particularly innovative or exciting to the role.
She went into Italian exile for three years and the movies she made all bombed at the American box office so in effect, as far as Hollywood and American audiences were concerned, she had inexplicably disappeared and there wasn’t exactly a long queue seeking her signature when she returned.
Directed by Dino Risi (Treasure of San Gennaro, 1966) from a script by himself, Enni De Concini (A Place for Lovers, 1968), Adriano Baracco (Treasure of San Gennaro) and Nino Manfredi (Treasure of San Gennaro).
A decent enough comedy. Gassman runs off with the picture but Ann-Margret completists will find little to enjoy.
Hypocrisy runs rampant as an entitled medical hierarchy effectively condones vile practice. Of course it wouldn’t do to have Peter Cushing, who generally hounded demonic fiends like Dracula, to be tabbed a villain so with a little bit of jiggery-pokery he gets off scot-free and, in fact, is considered so much above other mortals that he receives a standing ovation at the end.
The self-justification, or deification if you like, of Edinburgh surgeon Dr Knox (Peter Cushing) is promoted on the back of primitive medicine, whereby, through sheer ignorance and laziness surgeons were more apt to kill than to cure.
Dr Knox is an advocate of using recently interred corpses to teach his students the real fundamentals of anatomy. However, his colleagues feel that the use of fresh corpses goes against the grain and there was no such thing in the early 19th century of donating your body to medical science. Grave-robbing was a crime.
Enterprising duo Burke (George Rose) and Hare (Donald Pleasance) get round that problem by skipping the burial aspect, murdering assorted drunks and vagabonds and delivering fresh meat to the good doctor, who turns a blind eye to their actions, determined as he is to improve teaching standards. He’s not the only one who believes that a streetwalker, killed in this fashion, has achieved more in death than life.
The good doctor has a conscience in the shape of Dr Mitchell (Dermot Walsh) who is wooing his daughter Martha (June Laverick), but he eventually comes round Knox’s way of thinking. The hierarchy in the shape of the Medical Council would get their claws into Knox were it not for the fact that in their incompetence they inflict more damage than good.
As a sub-plot, and as a way of weaselling into the lower classes who provide the bulk of Burke and Hare’s supply chain, earnest medical student Chris Jackson (John Cairney) falls for drunken goodtime girl Mary (Billie Whitelaw) who spends as much time making fun of him as she does sharing his bed.
You would have thought the high mortality rate of the period would not have made the local populace suspicious of a few extra deaths, but when Burke and Hare kill too close to home – Mary, Jackson and Daft Jamie – townspeople like a regular Transylvanian village mob light their torches and head off in pursuit.
The question of whether Knox was in collusion with Burke and Hare becomes the crux. But given the medical profession does not want to bring itself into disrepute, he is given a free pass and declared not guilty.
The high-mindedness which Peter Cushing (The Skull, 1965) usually brings to a role works in his favor here and, until the death rate mushrooms, audiences may be inclined to go along with his thesis that fresher corpses should be made available as a matter of course to doctors. His pinpoint arrogance brooks no quarter. He’s in entitlement heaven. And that his superiors back off informs you that hierarchies were as good at closing ranks and defending themselves then as now.
This was the first venture of Donald Pleasance (Soldier Blue, 1970) into the sleazy characterizations which would become a trademark. The nervous tics were a later addition. Here’s he’s mostly sweaty.
I should profess an interest. John Cairney was a relative of our family but acknowledging his work in our household was limited to such less contentious material as Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Along with Billie Whitelaw (The Comedy Man, 1964), he was in the rising star category. Both deliver solid performances. You might also spot Melvyn Hayes of the It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum series (1974-1981).
Dodgy accents abound, Pleasance and Rose affect Irish accents and Whitelaw makes a stab at a Scottish one. I was surprised, given the date, to see a deal of nudity, but it transpires I was watching the “continental version.”
Directed by John Gilling (The Reptile, 1966) from a screenplay by himself and Leon Griffiths (The Hellfire Club, 1961).
Hugely enjoyable. Takes high concept to the Moon and back. Deliriously wild idea that, as with the best of movies that riff on the imagination, sticks to its own internal logic. The notion sounds so barmy it shouldn’t work – but it does. I enjoyed it even more than Vendetta for the Saint (1969), which it preceded, because it’s a lot more fun.
A criminal mastermind has taken the work of mysterious bestselling thriller author Amos Klein and not only adopted the characteristics of the author’s characters but follows the plot of the books and utilizes many of the clever ideas. For example, the author has invented a second ignition starter button for cars. And also invented a way to stop cars by fitting them with a technological device. People are so taken with being characters in these books that they want to know what happens to them next. I know, shouldn’t have worked, but it does, and it’s not even really set up as fitting into the sci-fi genre any more than James Bond with all its out-of-this-world machines and gadgets is.
Simon Templar (Roger Moore), aka The Saint, is hired to protect Amos Klein whose publisher believes the author is in danger. It doesn’t help that Klein lives in such anonymity that nobody knows the real name, not even the publisher. Turns out she’s a woman (Sylvia Syms), presumably adopting a male name because she writes such male-oriented books, filled with ingenious ideas.
She nearly shoots Templar because he arrives in the middle of her testing out scenarios for her new book – everything she writes has to work and she’s the one that tries them out. Anyway, Templar proves to be little defense against Warlock (Kenneth J. Warren), who has adopted the main villain of her book who runs a criminal organization called S.W.O.R.D. Warlock assumes Templar is Amos Klein and that she is his secretary.
The members of Sword, excepting Warlock, are an indifferent bunch apart from femme fatale Galaxy Rose (Justine Lord) who not only, following the premise of the books, intends to seduce Templar but believes that he, as the author, can alter her future, by making it a plot point in an as-yet-unwritten book that they fall in love that she will then marry him and live happily ever after.
Using Klein’s imaginative brain, Warlock wants the author’s help to plot a major heist from Hermetico, a giant secret vault which is to diamonds what Fort Knox is for gold. Hermetico is thief-proof, packed with amazing security devices including infra-red beams.
Although watched via CCTV cameras, Templar and Klein make a decent attempt at escape from Warlock’s mansion, tunneling upwards if you like, through the ceiling and the roof, clambering down a drainpipe and escaping in the car containing the second starter button, but also the one, it transpires, with the tech device that can stop it.
When they turn up at a remote cottage covered in mud and seeking help, the inhabitants think they are lunatics and delay them long enough till Warlock and his gang arrive to sedate them. Klein is kept prisoner, threatened with laser extinction, so Templar is coerced in assisting in the heist. In fact, Klein has come up with an ingenious method of ensuring they can find their way through the maze of infra-red beams.
This sequence is really well done, especially the method of getting all the gang through once Templar has negotiated it. Using an oxy-acetylene torch, they cut the top off an extractor vent and enter the vault, overcome the guards, and using another clever device one person manages to do something that usually requires two people.
Naturally, Templar is intent on spoiling the operation, which he does, but then has to get back to the mansion before the alarm is raised and Klein is incinerated. There’s a fisticuffs climax and a very fitting payoff for the villain.
I never thought this would work. It seemed such an improbable idea. But then Hollywood’s full of those. The fact that the S.W.O.R.D. gang are entirely believable as physical incarnations of Klein’s imagination is what makes it work. Plus Klein herself. Instead of being the standard moll or helpless heroine of so many spy pictures, she’s central to the story, and halfway between slinky and sensible.
Roger Moore (Vendetta for the Saint) – and his raised eyebrows – is, as usual, excellent in a role that very much suits his screen persona, and Sylvia Syms (Run Wild, Run Free, 1969) has a ball. Kenneth J. Warren (A High Wind in Jamaica, 1965) is given a more varied character than the normal villain while Justine Lord (Night after Night after Night, 1969) exerts a winsome appeal outside her overt sexiness.
Directed by Roy Ward Baker (Moon Zero Two, 1969) from a script by John Kruse (Vendetta for the Saint) and Harry W. Junkin (Vendetta for the Saint) adapting a novel by Leslie Charteris.
This was originally conceived as a two-parter for television that was then released as a movie instead of someone just editing together two random episodes as was usually the case with The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Television hadn’t produced the goods in terms of furnishing Hollywood with an abundance of new talent. We were still only talking about Steve McQueen (Bullitt, 1968) and James Garner (Buddwing/Mister Buddwing, 1966) in the 1960s as having made a successful transition from small-screen to big-screen stardom with occasional brief flurries from the likes of Clint Walker (The Dirty Dozen, 1967). Though Hollywood kept trying – Universal had tossed thirty-two of its contracted players into Airport (1970) in the hope one would catch audience attention.
But it turned out Hollywood had been looking in the wrong direction. Expecting to unearth actors who could carry dramas or thrillers or westerns, Hollywood had, in general, not considered comedy as a source of new talent. Dick Van Dyke (Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang, 1968) was considered an anomaly because he could morph into a song-and-dance man and his comedy was based on the physical.
So the industry was astonished when Goldie Hawn emerged from what was essentially a comedy skit show, The Rowan and Martin Laugh-In, to become a genuine screen box office comedienne and over the next decades there would be an excellent harvest from television comedy including Robin Williams, Chevy Chase and a whole troupe of others.
But it’s a shame that Goldie Hawn got all the glory – she won an Oscar – because this was the picture that established Walter Matthau as a genuine star as opposed to part of a double act with Jack Lemmon (The Fortune Cookie, 1966, and The Odd Couple, 1968). John Wayne once made the point that most acting is actually reacting to what someone else has said and in that regard there’s a masterclass from Ingrid Bergman (The Visit, 1964), playing determinedly against type.
Deceit drives the narrative. Just like Dean Martin in Airport (1970), upscale dentist Dr Julian Winston (Walter Matthau) has cottoned onto the fact that he can keep marital interest from mistress Toni (Goldie Hawn) at bay by the fact that he’s married. Except he isn’t and has to rustle up a fake wife to keep Toni on the hook. So he turns to spinster nurse Stephanie (Ingrid Bergman), a Swede cut from the repressed Bergmanesque cloth rather than the free loving spirit of popular (male) imagination, who has been carrying a torch for him for years, so, despite the notion that it’s not real, she goes full-tilt-boogie into the pretense. She’s even got a couple of nephews in tow who can masquerade, unknowingly, as Winston’s own kids.
Meanwhile, Winston rethinks his position, realizes he doesn’t want to lose Toni and reckons the only way he can get himself out of the sticky situation of his own creation is to pretend that his imaginary wife is also having an affair, so he has to set Stephanie up on dates with some of his customers so Toni can get a peek at them.
Assuming from its stage origins – France before being adapted for Broadway – this had more farce in the original production, that aspect has been trimmed back to concentrate on the various degrees of deceit. Instead of trying to force laffs from opening and closing doors and men being caught with their trousers down, this follows the simpler plotline of maintaining the deceits while inserting a potential twist when Toni develops an interest in her neighbor, author Igor (Rick Lenz).
The three principals are excellent, all bringing something fresh to the table, Walter Matthau as a lothario rather than a crafty conniver a distinct change of pace, Goldie Hawn a refreshing new face who was soon able to carry pictures on her own, and, especially, to my mind Ingrid Bergman. She has two absolutely marvelous reactions to information received – in the first her elbow literally falls from a table, in the second she is overwhelmed at the thought of receiving a gift, and she has the best scene of all, cutting loose on the dance floor.
As you might expect, the romantic entanglements are resolved.
Director Gene Saks (A Thousand Clowns, 1965) sticks to the knitting, extracting weighted performances from the cast without resorting to insipid extras. I.A.L. Diamond (The Fortune Cookie) adapted the Broadway play by Abe Burrows (Can-Can, 1960) who in turn had borrowed the French play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy.
Most 1960s comedies have lost their verve but this still plays exquisitely.
The Magnificent 60s 