movie review – Page 84 – The Magnificent 60s

In Cold Blood (1967) *****

Unfairly overlooked in favor of the Coppola/Scorsese grandiose perspective on gangsters, this changed the shape of the crime picture as much as the best-selling book altered the way readers regarded murderers. Neither whodunit, whydunit nor film noir, nonetheless it invites us into the world of the senseless crime, providing an extremely human portrayal of two men if not natural born killers then their pitiful lives always going to lead them in the wrong direction.

Although Perry Smith (Robert Blake) is a fantasist, dreaming of becoming a singing star in Las Vegas, determined to find the lost treasure of Cortez, and convinced a giant bird protected him from vicious nuns in an orphanage, his life did already verge on the fantastical. His mother, a Cherokee, was a star rodeo performer, his father a gold prospector in Alaska, but the mother, an alcoholic, choked to death on her own vomit and the father (Charles McGraw), a hobo in all but name, is astonished that the child he brought up, so he believes, to recognise right from wrong, would stoop to crime. As a child Perry and siblings watched his mother have sex with clients and his father viciously beat her with a belt. Perry is addicted to aspirin to minimize pain from a leg injury, and you can’t help but feel sorry for this otherwise fit young man massaging the massive disfiguring scar, the result of a motorbike accident.

Dick Hickock (Scott Wilson) is a very charming cocky personable con man, leaving a trail of bad checks behind him as he masquerades as a best man who has come out without enough cash to buy a wedding outfit for his buddy and, with his convincing patter, hoodwinking store clerks not just into accepting a check for the goods, later to be sold, but also cashing a personal check. His father, too, is stunned to hear his son had criminal tendencies.

Fatherhood is represented as a holy grail. Hickock enjoyed being a parent until he was caught with another girl and had to do “the decent thing” i.e. abandon existing wife and child. The parents of both boys have wonderful, emotion-filled, memories of loving and being loved by their children.

From another prisoner, Hickock has been told of the “perfect score,” a rich farmer called Clutter in Kansas with $10,000 in his safe. The plan, to which Smith has only momentary objection, is to leave no witnesses. Even muttered in grandiose manner, this phrase surely, in anybody’s mind, conjures up slaughter, Smith’s only saving grace that he prevents Hickock raping the daughter Nancy (Benda C. Currin). Their haul amounting to $43 and a radio, you could imagine the thieves wiping out the family in a fit of fury. But that’s not the case, it’s just cold-blooded thinking, an element of leaving no trace behind.

And that’s just what they do, committing an almost perfect crime, no fingerprints, just the mark of the sole of a shoe imprinted in blood. There’s a red herring – old man Clutter had just signed off on an insurance policy worth $80,000. But detective Alvin Dewey (John Forsythe) has to solve the crime the old-fashioned way, with inter-state cooperation and months (years in reality) of footslogging. Dewey could have been straight out of film noir with his nippy one-liners and epigrams.

*Other than Alfred Hitchcock, it was unusual for a reissue double bill to comprise*
*two films by the same director.*

Unlike the novel which concentrated as much on the aftermath among the shocked townspeople, the film focuses on the manhunt and Dewey’s deft way with newspapermen and colleagues. The four murders occur off-camera, but by that point we already know the outcome. There’s a virtue-signalling coda that shows the inhumane conditions in which murders were kept on Death Row, but that is countered by a marvellous speech by Dewey on the inequities of being a cop: hounded by media and public for letting someone get away with heinous crime, generally getting a tough time over police methods, lambasted after catching them for not doing it quickly enough, and then having to stand by while media and public launch an outcry to prevent the killers being executed.

All shade, the documentary style achieves the contradiction of appearing sparingly told yet with a wealth of character detail (location and time are ignored) and none of the grandeur and faux community spirit invested in gangsterdom by the likes of Coppola and Scorsese. Smith and Hickock would never pass the entry test for the Mafia given that at least required discipline and the ability to follow orders. Minus the killing spree, these characters might have survived a little longer in the underclass before ending up inside again.

All three principals are brilliant in the understated manner demanded. Robert Blake (Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here, 1969) is the pick, tormented by future dreams and past nightmares, but Scott Wilson (In the Heat of the Night, 1967) has the stand-out scene, gulling store salesmen with his finely worked con, and there is a sense of the big brother in the way he looks after his friend. This might well be the best work by John Forsythe (Topaz, 1969).

And it certainly is one of the finest movies made by writer-director Richard Brooks (The Professionals, 1966) who handles a very difficult subject with at times such delicacy it is almost a complete departure in style.

The Cape Town Affair (1967) **

It was too much to hope that a remake of Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) could match the original. Universal had made a decent job of a second bash at Beau Geste (1966) and Madame X (1966) and Twentieth Century Fox should be applauded for having the cojones to even attempt a reimagining of the John Ford classic when it tackled Stagecoach (1966). Generally speaking, remakes were seen as opportunities to feature up-and-coming talent rather than established marquee names.

So it was no surprise that Fox opted for rising stars in James Brolin (The Boston Strangler, 1968) and Jacqueline Bisset (The Detective, 1968), graduates of its talent school, though perhaps more of a stretch to relocate the Fuller classic to South Africa’s Cape Town. Interestingly, the key role of the informer went to Claire Trevor, star of the original Stagecoach (1939). But while she is a decent replacement for six-time Oscar nominee Thelma Ritter (Move Over, Darling), Brolin was no match for the snarling Richard Widmark (The Bedford Incident, 1964) and Bisset pales when set against Jean Peters (Viva Zapata, 1952).

It’s really the acting that lets it down because it’s virtually the same plot as Pickup on South Street. On a bus in Cape Town pickpocket Skip McCoy (James Brolin) steals a wallet from the purse of Candy (Jacqueline Bisset). Unknown to him, she’s a courier, the wallet containing microfilm of a state secret. Unknown to her, she’s working for the Communists. Unknown to either of them she’s being tailed.

Sometime tie salesman, sometime hooker, sometime police informant Sam (Claire Trevor) identifies Skip as the most likely suspect. Secret service agents investigating his beach shack find nothing. Candy has better luck, Skip a sucker for a pretty face – and a sucker punch. She’s a bit quick in falling in love, he’s a bit too ready to ask for money, but eventually they work together to sniff out the Commies, not that that takes much. The fights are somewhat desultory and the only decent twist comes at the end when, by now loved-up, he is treating her to a romantic dinner, but still up to his pickpocketing tricks purloins the cash to pay from her handbag.

Brolin doesn’t do much but shout and come over like a male model while Bisset turns on the waterworks at the drop of a hat. If it wasn’t for the title, you wouldn’t even know this was set in Cape Town, no focus on city landmarks. There doesn’t look as if there was any budget to speak of.

Robert D. Webb (Pirates of Tortuga, 1961) directed without a hint of the comedy he injected into the swashbuckler. You can’t really blame Harold Medford (Fate Is the Hunter, 1964) for the actors messing up his screenplay.

Worth seeing if you want an example of how a rising star can surmount a debacle. Bisset went straight from this into The Sweet Ride (1968), The Detective (1968) and Bullitt (1968). But Brolin had no such luck. After a supporting role in The Boston Strangler he wouldn’t make another picture for four years and not win another starring role until Gable and Lombard (1976).

I had come at it, as is the undoing of many a movie fan, with the idea of finding a hidden gem, the long lost film of stars at the outset of the careers. Beyond the fact that Bissett looked classy and had a steal of a voice, and Brolin had at least looks, there was little worth finding. But, hey, you might be a completist and think this worth the effort.

Pretty Poison (1968) *****

Faultessly prophetic. Acquiring significantly greater power than at initial release. You can easily imagine Dennis (Anthony Perkins) these days as a conspiracy theorist on social media. You can picture Sue Ann (Tuesday Weld) as the impressionable acolyte learning at his feet. What she picks up most is the art of manipulation. And it’s done with marvelous flair, disturbing information slipped in at the right moment, and so focused are we on Dennis we scarcely notice Sue Ann’s transformation.

There’s a sense of Big Brother – Dennis evades his probation officer for a year to prevent his activities being overseen – and untrammelled big business, the chemical factory nonchalantly poisoning the local river. And it all takes place in Humdrum U.S.A.: hot dog stands, teenagers practising for parades, evenings at the movies, necking in the woods, mindless jobs in factories, with just a hint of overbearing police wielding a moral big stick.

*Classic example of the marketing team getting cold feet. Fox didn’t know how to sell this*
*in the subtle fashion it required so it came over in the bulk of the advertising*
*materials as second cousin to “Bonnie and Clyde.”*

The 1960s had taken a new line on the wicked women of the 1930s and the femme fatales of film noir. They might be mentally disturbed like Lilith (1964) or scrapheap fodder like Bonnie Parker (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), but more likely to be cartoon villains decorating spy movies. This follows a completely different path, exploring latent tendency that might have remained hidden forever except for encountering the right spark.

Dennis is an outright oddball, a fantasist who has created for himself another world of being a secret agent intent on thwarting an alien plot. (Less intense than A Beautiful Mind, 2001) Some people, the next door neighbor, for example, who without question drops in spools of microfilm at the chemist for development under her own name, are easily taken in. Others are not, his employer at the chemical factory itching for an excuse to fire him, Sue Ann’s mother (Beverly Garland) who catches him out too easily.

Dennis snares gullible bouncy blonde Sue Ann in textbook style. He elicits mystery, popping in and out of her life, peppering her with secret codes, tradecraft, warnings, a farrago of information that would appeal to the insecure. She goes from girlfriend to accomplice, an eager participant in Dennis’s admittedly clever plan to cause the plant to shut down. But when he is rumbled by the nightwatchman and rooted to the spot in fear, it’s Sue Ann who comes to the rescue, clubbing the interloper, pushing his body in the river, sitting triumphantly aside her still conscious victim holding his head under the water.

The twist is: reality has paid a visit. Dennis is shocked at the murder. Although his past is now revealed, he is remorseful that it caused unfortunate consequence. Sue Ann’s reaction is the opposite. She wants post-murder sex. Cool to the point of calculating, remorse scarcely entering her vocabulary, taking command, spinning a web Dennis doesn’t see coming.

It plays out brilliantly, even to the point of Dennis taking comfort in the fact that he has spawned a murderess, one who might embark on an endless killing spree, such is the attractive innocent mask she hides behind.

You would put down Anthony Perkins (Psycho, 1960) as warped the minute his lop-sided grin slips into place. But there’s a youthfulness to this nutcase, always sprinting away, and he’s not, like Norman Bates, sitting in a lair awaiting potential victims, and, in a sense, he’s humanized by a beautiful woman falling in love with him. He’s out there like a con man with the practised patter that’s going to snare the pliable. If he was planning to wage war on the chemical polluters we’d be on his side immediately, and although that kind of action wasn’t yet going to turn anyone into an automatic screen hero, it does now, so a contemporary audience would be inclined to view him through an entirely different, and more sympathetic, prism.

Perkins’s playing is perfectly judged. He takes the mickey out of stuffy superiors, smart enough to elude the probation officer for a year, astute enough to find a job that gives credence to his secret identity, ingenious enough to come up with the perfect crime, and certainly his vulnerability evokes audience sympathy, especially when it transpires he may be the subject of unlawful judgement.

But Tuesday Weld (The Cincinnati Kid, 1965) is this movie’s gift. She is stunningly believable, both as the innocent dupe and the calculating killer. Yet she never emerges from her teenage dream. Even when her actions are clearly more grown-up she remains winsome and youthful. If Perkins is revealed as a child who had never grown up, Perkins becomes an adult in teenager’s clothing.

It’s only at the end you think perhaps this movie should be read back-to-front and that Perkins was the victim all along. (Arthouse filmmakers have been more celebrated for less.) Which would make her the mother (or perhaps daughter) of all femme fatales. There is no limit to what she going to get away with. If it was made today, there would be a sequel a year.

Noel Black (Run, Shadow, Run/Cover Me Babe, 1970) was the cult director’s cult director, eventually making a living in television, and only occasionally managing a big screen effort. This would have been a twisty enough number at the time but has rightly grown into a cult.

The Chalk Garden (1964) ***

You couldn’t make a movie like this now because (plot spoiler, I’m afraid) even the dottiest of old ladies would make at least a better attempt at collecting a reference from a prospective employee for fear she might be hiring someone disreputable. Though I doubt if many employers would expect a governess to turn out to be a murderess.

That this movie chimes with a contemporary trope – the criminal wanting to prevent others from following in their footsteps – makes it far ahead of its time. Made today, of course, the unruly child rather than merely threatening to unleash her arson impulses would probably have burned the house down.

So it’s more a drama of manners, if you like. Very presentable but clearly down-on-her-luck Miss Madrigal (Deborah Kerr) is taken on by Mrs St Maugham (Edith Evans) as governess for her grandchild Laurel (Hayley Mills) because nobody else wants the job. Laurel’s outrageous behavior has sent a score perfectly well qualified ladies scurrying. Madrigal is hardly fazed by anything Laurel can get up to.

But the child is clearly suffering abandonment issues, her beautiful mother Olivia (Elizabeth Sellars) having gone off with another man. Grandmother incites grandchild to hate the mother. But Olivia’s maternal instincts have kicked in and she wants her child back. While Madrigal can deal with Laurel’s tantrums she is less fortified against the child’s inveterate snooping. Finding a mysterious suitcase leads Laurel to fantasize about Madrigal’s past.

Mostly the film is a four-hander, butler Maitland (John Mills) playing a significant role in proceedings, not least in his effortless management of the wild child. Quite why a such a pragmatic and assured gentleman should end up in this remote mansion is another mystery and thankfully there is no attempt made at playing up the cliff-top location in a suspenseful manner.

Mrs St Maugham is imperious but not entirely practical, either in setting child against mother or in trying to grow flowers in such chalky soil, though Madrigal appears to have sufficient horticultural knowledge to set her straight on the latter and attempt to intervene on the former.

There’s a deadline of sorts. Olivia is coming to remove the child. Whether she goes willingly or not doesn’t matter. Madrigal sees her role as trying to prepare a child to love her mother and be more grown-up than the adults around her and forgive her.

Madrigal’s guilt unnecessarily causes her to reveal that she had been jailed for murdering her stepsister, having been as resentful and jealous of the girl as Laurel currently is of her mother. Mrs St Maugham had called on old acquaintance Judge (Felix Aylmer ) for legal advice on how to prevent Olivia getting the child. He was the presiding judge in Madrigal’s case. Imagining he had not forgotten the trial – which of course he has – she feels duty bound to blurt out the truth before she is humiliated. The confession helps Laurel realise how dangerous a path she is on and pushes her towards reconciliation rather than revenge.

It has all the making of a well-made play which is hardly surprising since it is based on Enid Bagnold’s Broadway success, at one time mooted as a film to star Joanne Woodward and Sandra Dee. So it moves along in the traditional three-act manner, plenty space given to establishing characters, introducing the undercurrents and leading to revelation and resolution.

So, mostly, it depends on the acting. Luckily, it is excellent. This was Hayley Mills in transition, far removed from Disney saccharine of The Parent Trap (1961) and about the same distance from the full-blown adult bottom-baring of The Family Way (1966). She projects a great deal more torment than in either of those films and comes across as believable, not exactly a young hoodlum but left to her own devices and starved of parental love only a matter of time before she would commit a crime of some kind.

Deborah Kerr hadn’t made a film in three years but her screen persona had shifted from the passionate – From Here to Eternity (1953), An Affair to Remember (1957), The Sundowners (1960) – to the repressed. Her spinster introduced in The Innocents (1961) had a great deal in common with her spinster of The Night of the Iguana (1965). But this is a different kettle of fish. Here, she exudes capability but with a self-awareness that undercuts such confidence, trying to keep a lid of emotions she struggles to handle.

John Mills (Tunes of Glory, 1960) casts a sardonic eye on the household while Edith Evans (The Whisperers) portrays a sorely wounded matriarch. Director Ronald Neame (Gambit, 1966) cleverly opens up the play, using the cliffs, gardens and rocky beach to considerable effect, but keeps the drama taut. John Michael Hayes (Nevada Smith, 1966) produced a workable screenplay.

Apologies for giving away the story, a good watch more for the acting than the twist.

Lilith (1964) *****

You couldn’t make this now. What top-ranked actor would be willing to play a character who takes sexual advantage of a vulnerable young woman? You’d find it even harder to get a marquee name to play a female with paedophiliac tendencies, predatory sexual instincts and thinks it fine to drive a lovelorn young man to suicide.

That it was feasible back in the day was largely due to the restraints imposed by the much-maligned Production Code. Most of the issues are delicately probed, the problematic themes only touched upon, so that the result is quite amazing, the director turning to the lyrical, rendered by its intensity a metaphor for internal conflict.

War veteran Vincent (Warren Beatty) takes a job as an occupational therapist at an upmarket mental institution, the kind that looks more like a country club or grand hotel with extensive manicured grounds. Few of the inmates are of the type found in the normal hospitals for the insane, the worst cases a woman with a maniacal laugh and another who treats a doll like a baby, but he is warned insane women are more “sinister” than crazy men.

One of his charges is the withdrawn Lilith (Jean Seberg) whom he gradually coaxes out of her shell, soon believing that it is his innate skill that brings about the possibility that such a high-risk individual could possibly achieve something akin to cure, or at least a greater degree of normality. You can hardly blame him for missing the obvious – that Lilith is using him – for the young woman is every inch the winsome innocent seeking guidance from the more mature responsible male.

It’s mostly shorn of obvious metaphor but there is one scene, compelling in itself, where Vincent plays the knight on horseback, complete with lance, winning a contest of skills for his lady, that completes his idealisation in her eyes. But he is already halfway there, with unexpected dexterity he frees her hair caught in loom, the kind of scene that in an otherwise more romantically-inclined movie would be the meet-cute.

And this isn’t one of those films about a madwoman in an attic or an apparently sane person turning demented. Instead, considerable time is spent analysing the condition of the schizophrenic, either through clinical lead Dr Lavrier (James Patterson) expounding his theories or through Vincent discussing individual patients with his boss Dr Brice (Kim Hunter). The idea of opening up a new realm to an audience is crystallised in one scene where Lavrier explains that even spiders go mad, resulting in asymmetrical webs rather than the typical formations to which we are more accustomed.

And by using one of the oldest tricks in the book, an inexperienced young man negotiating a new world, disbelief is suspended. But just when we think we are seeing everything from Vincent’s perspective, we are thrown into a heightened intensity linked to the lyrical – a river, a waterfall – the madness of ecstasy, what used to be called rapture, as Lilith stares and stares at nature.

But there are warnings about the personality of both characters. Lilith bears a startling resemblance to Vincent’s dead mother. He has difficulty committing, lack of communication while away at war resulting in girlfriend Yvonne (Anne Meacham) marrying someone else.

And there is plenty that is disconcerting about Lilith that only the besotted would overlook. She leads on lovelorn Stephen (Peter Fonda) to potential disasters he cannot foresee. Angry at Vincent, “I show my love for all of you and you despise me,” she seduces vulnerable older patient Laura (Jessica Walter). But the worst aspect of her character is that she perceives no boundaries to behavior. She exhibits inappropriate attitudes to young boys, inviting one to rub his finger along her lower lip.

However, for most of the film the skilful direction of Robert Rossen (The Hustler, 1961) has you rooting for the young lovers. Even while never falling back on the cliché of the doctor-type saving the ill person, there is enough in Vincent’s earnestness and Lilith’s innocence to make that a distinct possibility, were it not for the other discordant elements of her character. The picture is wrapped in natural sound – the river, waterfall, a flute playing mournful tune, ping-pong ball hitting bat, reeds or branches parting, rain, footsteps, a ticking clock, and the bulk of the music emanates from Stephen’s radio. And then he will twist it slightly, reflections are seen upside-down in the river, or a shot of the waterfall is held for too long, the sound of water increasing, or Lilith standing in the river bends down to kiss the surface, or at a picnic she eats a leaf irrespective of whether it might be poisonous.

Usually, when you get so much detail it’s a surfeit, and ends up drowning the viewer. But that’s not the case here. Either it builds or expands. And there is even a throwaway that mocks the notion of containing madness in an institution. The best, most revealing, line in the picture is not spoken by either of the two principals, but secondary character Yvonne, seen only at the beginning and end. When for unspecified reasons Vincent turns up at her house and her husband (Gene Hackman) leaves them on their own, she says, “I told you I’d never really let you make love to me until I was married,” (pause), “well, I’m married now.”

Jean Seberg (Moment to Moment, 1966) is just superb, coming across as a young woman entering adulthood full of fears and insecurities, only suggesting the darker side of her character, and never giving in to the temptation of overplaying. Warren Beatty (Kaleidoscope, 1966) can’t quite match her for subtlety or kick those acting mannerisms – lowered head, looking away – but his stupefied expression towards the end as he realizes just what he has taken on is priceless.

There’s an outstanding cast of rising stars. Peter Fonda (Easy Rider) as the preppy insecure victim is excellent while Jessica Walter suggests the qualities that would make her the prime candidate for the femme fatale in Play Misty for Me (1971). Gene Hackman, in his movie debut and still working on his trademark chuckle, provides early evidence of his immense talent.

Robert Rossen, who wrote the screenplay (from the novel by J.R. Salamanca) and also produced, couldn’t have wished for a better epitaph. This was his final film in a relatively short career – he only directed 10 films.

Despite contemporary reservations about the content this is a beautifully observed piece and well worth a look.

Plane (2023) **** – Seen at the Cinema

Gerard Butler is pure Ronseal. “It does what it says on the tin” goes that advert. And so does Butler. You want action, he is first in the queue, and he delivers. But our Gerard is no Bruce Willis and doesn’t pretend he can do it all on his own. Not only does he enlist a murderer, an elite military force is also in due course on his side. You’d think that would leave Gerard with little to do, but you’d be wrong.

He’s the moral center and the driving force and of course he’s the pilot. the only one who can get them in and out. Just as well there’s someone to do things by the book because his employers, desperate to make PR spin their way, are as cynical as they come, sending a pilot to fly through a storm to save a few bucks on fuel.

So, New Year’s Eve, widower Brodie (Gerard Butler) on a plane with only a handful of passengers crash lands on a remote island in the South China Seas where cut-throat separatists run a hostage business. Brodie frees murderer and ex-Foreign Legionnaire Louis (Mike Colter) and sets out to make contact with home. Meanwhile, back at the office, troubleshooter du jour Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn) sends in a bunch of mercenaries. So it’s mostly escape and capture, you know the drill.

At least, at last, it’s not an airplane picture about apportioning blame after a disaster or stitching up the captain (Flight, 2012/Sully, 2016). There’s no ballast: no pregnant woman or child on board, not even a nun, and the pilot doesn’t have the hots for a stewardess and the criminal doesn’t hunker down at night and home in on audience sympathies with a heartrending tale, and there’s no retired airman called into service one last time, and it’s not the pilot’s final trip before retirement and there’s no wizard engineer who can put back together a broken machine and it’s not about everyone pulling their weight in a tight spot.

The passengers, those that survive that is, might be mildly annoying on the plane but once landed they’re too busy being terrified to make a nuisance of themselves. So it’s pretty realistic for what could otherwise have been a pure gung-ho actioner. When Brodie does get through to his company, he gets treated as a time-waster. And there’s really no way, realistically, without the intervention of mercenaries that he’s going to get the passengers off the island on his own.

In some senses it’s kind of two different movies jammed together in occasional clunky fashion and you wonder if initially it was devised as a pure rescue number before someone had the bright idea of bringing a star in as the pilot.

Brodie might be a rough diamond, but he sure can fly, witness two crash landings and a take-off hindered by enemy rocket launchers. He’s a true Scot, wouldn’t “lower himself” to be tabbed English, although the scriptwriters make an elementary howler in imagining that the traditional New Year dinner is haggis, neeps and tatties when it’s actually steak-and-kidney pie.

And the myth that a Scottish accent will get you through more doors than an English one, and that you’ll soon be nattering away convivially with your captors about Sir Sean and wee drams and kilts, is quickly exploded. Nationality in international war zones is mere currency. Brodie, of course, has to take one (more than one, actually) for the team but is happy to put himself in harm’s way to safeguard his charges.

Luckily, Louis has no such reservations, primarily with his own interests at heart, intent on escaping official clutches and disappearing into the jungle with a cache of cash.

This is Butler reinvented as Everyman. Yep, action abungo but humane with depths. With an astonishing 70 credits and too many supposedly star-making outings to count he has an equally diverse range, can hold his own against top female stars like Angeline Jolie (Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life), Katharine Heigl (The Ugly Truth, 2009) and Jennifer Aniston (The Bounty Hunter, 2010) but these days is more likely to be the go-to actioneer. I am hoping that some Hollywood producer might recognise his other qualities and pitch him a drama like A Man Called Otto. Imagine that snarl in your neighborhood.

You get exactly what you pay for here, for workmanlike read spare and lean, for reimagining previous rescue pictures read tension-filled character-driven edge-of-your-seat action. Butler brings tremendous humanity to a role that could as easily have been muscle-bound.

I’m less familiar with Mike Colter (Carter, 2022) but sensibly he underplays his role. Danielle Pineda (Jurassic World: Dominion, 2022) is good as the level-headed chief stewardess and Tony Goldwyn (Ghost, 1990) makes a sinister troubleshooter. MTA Kelly Gale makes her debut.

A welcome return to pedal-to-the-metal form for director Jean-Francois Richet (Mesrine, 2008) who employs hand-held cameras to great effect. Marks the screen debut of thriller writer Charles Cumming along with J.P. Walsh (The Contractor, 2022).

This is ideal counter-programming when we’re mired down in the Oscar-worthy.

You can’t go wrong with Butler.

Passport to China / Visa to Canton (1961) **

Marked down for sheer laziness. Another Hammer “thriller,” this time with fading American star Richard Basehart and Italian glamor puss Lisa Gastoni. But mostly a hodge-podge travelog of stock footage with dialog taking the place of action, a tedious voice-over far removed from the snappy one-liners we are accustomed to getting from Chandleresque investigators. And let’s forget the red-eyed Chinese replete with drooping moustaches who pepper the picture.

A plane has gone down in Red China with an American courier carrying vital “scientific” information, Approached to help by US government personnel, snappily-dressed Hong Kong travel agent Benton (Richard Basehart) refuses. But when he discovers the pilot is Jimmy (Burt Kwouk), a member of a Chinese family he has befriended during World War Two, he mounts his own rescue mission. Which consists, by the way, of nothing more than floating a sampan up a river, avoiding a few bullets and whisking the lad away.

But he is blackmailed into rescuing the courier when Hong Kong police imprison Jimmy. So off he trots to Macao and then Canton aided along the way, in the opulent back room of a casino, by Chinese businessman Kong (Eric Pohlmann) who you might mistake for a James Bond villain such is his fondness for being surrounded by women – or such is his girth mistake him for a Robert Morley lookalike. Kong happens to be a Russian spy.

No sneaking into China by parachute or perhaps motor boat is required, Kong simply furnishes him with the visa of the title. Benton, vaguely assisted by a maker of fake porcelain, has clues – Three Fishes, The Stream of the Willows.

In his hotel bedroom sits the courier, blonde Lola (Lisa Gastoni), held prisoner. But no sooner have they kissed, as you might expect of any self-respecting travel agent doubling as a spy, than they are interrupted by Kong. She disappears. Naturally, Benton finds her easily enough. She doesn’t have papers, instead a photographic memory.

But she’s not working for the Americans. She’s an espionage freelance, working for the highest bidder. She does it for the danger, perhaps like a certain James Bond, danger is the drug, heightens her senses.

But she’s also pretty damn clever. Knowing Kong is a double agent and can’t just snatch her out of China, she starts an auction for her information. Benton offers more. Therefore she is his property. To get over the tickly issue of Kong, in revenge, keeping her prisoner in China, he is conveniently accidentally shot.

So now they have to escape. But in the shoot-out at the docks (in a barn full of hay for some reason she gets shot) so the movie suddenly turns into one of those post-Bond thrillers where all that effort has been expended for no result.

But you might have thought a producer (Michael Carreras) would have introduced Lola much earlier in femme fatale fashion. But then this producer who, as it happens was also the director, seems to think that voice-over will solve all the tedious problems of actually creating a screenplay that works.

You shouldn’t have cared less about a snappy-suited character such as the one played by Gene Barry in his informal espionage trilogy – Maroc 7 (1967), Istanbul Express (1968) and Subterfuge (1968) – he’s about on a par as an actor as Basehart. But those movies at least had proper stories that made sense and were not just a series of jumps explained by voice-over, the hero neither having to undertake any shamus digging or go into harm’s way, or battle his way out of perilous situation.

It’s not even bad enough to eventually win over a cult audience. The problem is it’s well-made up to a point and the story is intriguing up to a point, but that mark is very low.

Richard Basehart (The Satan Bug, 1965) isn’t called upon to do much except act as the storyteller he’s okay and Lisa Gastoni (Maddalena, 1971) isn’t accorded sufficient screen time to really make a mark. Which is the biggest shame because an amoral spy like her would have made a brilliant femme fatale had she been introduced early on and then turned out to be the mercenary she was.

The rest of the cast are caricatures, though interesting to see Burt Kwouk in pre-Pink Panther persona but cringe-worthy to see Bernard Cribbins (You Must Be Joking, 1965) mangle a foreign accent. Clearly Carreras learned a lesson from this implosion of talent and story because two pictures on he directed taut thriller Maniac (1963).

King’s Pirate (1967) ****

Swell show. Virtually every movie Doug McClure (Beau Geste, 1966) made was under-rated, mostly due to his presence, but here he is at his impish cavalier best in a swashbuckler that rather than offering a re-tread goes in for clever reversals, running jokes and a healthy dose of the flashing blade. While McClure is no Errol Flynn (Against All Flags, 1952) he would be a safe match for Tyrone Power and Jill St John (Come Blow Your Horn, 1963) as his nemesis/lover could give the pirate picture’s most reliable spitfire, Maureen O’Hara (Against All Flags), a run for her money.

Well, actually, it is a bit of a re-tread, a spirited good-humored remake of Against All Flags, and follows the same story as Pirates of Tortuga (1961) of good guy infiltrating a pirate stronghold by pretending to be a buccaneer. But the locale has shifted a good three thousand miles to Madagascar, ideally placed to plunder cargo ships en route to India, and it would be hard to argue that Lt Brian Fleming’s (Doug McClure) motivation is pure, given he is expecting major financial reward for risking his life.

Still, to complete his disguise, he submits to a flogging. His task is to incapacitate the cannons that protect the island from Royal Navy invasion. But his team is somewhat unusual, a bunch of acrobats headed by Zucco (Kurt Kasznar) which ensures he can avoid the wall/cliff-climbing normally associated with such endeavors. Having just about convinced pirate king John Avery (Guy Stockwell), Fleming’s mission runs into trouble when Mogul’s daughter Princess Patna (Mary Ann Mobley) falls in love with him after he saves her from a burning ship, though admittedly one he had helped set on fire. He falls foul, too, of “Mistress” Jessica (Jill St John), the island’s de facto ruler and accomplished femme fatale, expert swordswoman, but a la Pirates of Tortuga with a yen to be a “lady.”

So, basically, he has to dodge the suspicious Avery, and put off the princess while trying to woo Jessica in order to find a secret map of the cannon locations.

The island’s preferred style of execution is staking men at the water’s edge and letting the rising tide do the rest. When Fleming, on initial arrival on the island, gulps at this demonstration of barbarity, you probably don’t guess this will happen to him. It’s just one a litany of reversals that make this a delight.

Talking of reversals and delights, how about the Indian princess speaking in a Scottish accent, courtesy of her governess, the fearsome Miss MacGregor (Diana Chesney)?

Not to mention Jessica’s habit of making her romantic inclinations known at gunpoint. Unusually lacking in the female ability of expressing her emotions, Jessica’s actions tend to be the opposite of her stated intention, resulting in, having given Fleming the brush-off, bidding against him in the slave market for Princess Patna to avoid the Indian lass getting her romantic claws into him. But not only is Jessica expert with the sword she is a crack shot and can shoot the end off a rapier.

Of course, when his sword can’t do the talking. Fleming has to weasel his way out of many a dicey situation with an inventiveness that would do Scheherazade proud.

All in all the best pirate film of the decade – though there wasn’t much competition. Competently made with McClure and St John striking cinematic sparks with former Miss America Mary Ann Mobley (Istanbul Express, 1968) happily cooperating in turning her character into a comedic gem.

While there’s certainly a touch of the Tony Curtis in McClure’s portrayal it is also his stab at carving out a position as a jaunty leading man. Jill St John, given a lot more to do than in most of her pictures, takes the opportunity to shine. Guy Stockwell (Beau Geste) delivers another villain.

Don Weiss (Billie, 1965) directed and does exceptionally well steering audiences away from unfulfillable expectation, given the low budget, by focusing on the qualities of the stars and a ripping tale knocked out by television comedy writer Paul Wayne, who rewrote or incorporated material from Aeneas MacKenzie and Joseph Hoffman responsible for the original.

Catch it on YouTube.

Tormented (1960) ***

Effective island-based thriller. The marriage plans of jazz piano “genius” Tom (Richard Carlson) are thrown into disarray by the sudden arrival of old flame Vi (Juli Reding). A tryst atop an abandoned lighthouse ends in disaster when Vi tumbles over a railing and Tom refuses to rescue her. Fishing her corpse out of the water the next day he finds instead he is holding wet seaweed.

Cue all sorts of strange events: footprints on the beach, a lingering smell of perfume, a vinyl platter recorded by Vi playing all on its own, missing wedding ring, wilting flowers, wedding dress is covered in seaweed, ghostly apparitions of the dead woman.

Initially denying his guilt, Tom soon finds himself consumed by it. Blind Mrs Ellis (Lillian Adams) suspects the supernatural. Fiancee Meg (Lugene Sanders) is soon on red alert, the situation exacerbated by her younger sister Sandy (Susan Hubbard) who develops an unhealthy crush on Tom and has a creepy hold over him.

Tension is racked up by the arrival of boatman Nick (Joe Turkel) intent on blackmailing Tom ahead of the imminent wedding. It doesn’t end the way you’d expect, but Tom proves a darker character. This kind of thriller you’d expect a final twist but you’d have to be very savvy to guess this one.

It’s a bold enterprise for a B-picture. Director Bert I. Gordon had made his name on special-effects-driven pictures like The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) but here that element is underplayed, the main focus on the gradual disintegration of Tom as he succumbs to guilt and the voices and sights he imagines. Some images are clearly inside his head, but Mrs Ellis and Meg detect the perfume scent, the flowers wilt in full view of everyone, and Sandy is present when the ring vanishes. Gordon employs the Hitchcockian technique of having subsidiary characters propose various unsettling possibilities to the guilty party. The jazz soundtrack is not the cool music you might expect but a more jangly score. And any time there’s a quiet moment you can hear thundering surf in the background.

B-picture and sci-fi veteran Richard Carlson (The Power, 1968) isn’t quite able to suggest sufficient internal anguish, you’d need a James Stewart in Vertigo mode to manage the kind of obsession required. But Carlsen goes neatly enough from composed epitome of “cool” to nervous wreck, likely to land himself in trouble from reacting too violently to the unreal.

And there’s enough peripheral tension, Meg’s wealthy father (Harry Fleer) opposes the wedding, believing a jazz musician a poor candidate for his daughter’s hand. Mrs Ellis probing a little too close to the bone, the innocent Sandy unwittingly endangers herself. Virgin Meg is oblivious to the fact the man she is marrying is scarcely in the same category.

It’s a chamber piece, a few characters rattling round each other, uneasiness emanating from Tom visualizing phantoms. And it’s short, barely 75 minutes, classic length for a supporting feature, and it’s to the director’s credit he makes no attempt to puff it out. One twist after another and specters everywhere, all the template you need. It set some sort of record for killing off careers. It was the last movie for Juli Reding, Susan Gordon and Lugene Sanders but you might recall Joe Turkel from The Shining (1980).

Very good example of what you can do with a low budget, an edgy script and a director who doesn’t lean too heavily on the special effects.

Burn / Quiemada (1969) *****

May have lost its allegorical power now that Vietnam is no longer a cause but even more compelling for standing as a generic condemnation of imperialism. The Vietnam connection is invoked immediately as Englishman Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) on arrival is told that the Portuguese conquered the island hundreds of years before simply by setting fire to it until all the natives had perished or fled and restocking it with slaves from elsewhere. For a 1960s audience, that summoned up images of U.S. military use of napalm and carpet bombing.

The idea must have stuck in Walker’s head because that’s exactly the strategy he devises towards the end of the movie. Beyond his title, and the fact that he looks and talks like an upper-class Englishman of the mid 1800s, Walker is one of these shady characters you often found in the Colonies doing shady work for the British government. While this island is ruled by the Portuguese rather than the British, that’s about to change since the British find Portuguese attitudes to free trade too restrictive.

So Walker sets about creating the spark for an explosion. Having earmarked the local bank for an easy heist, he recruits Jose Dolores (Evaristo Marquez) to head a team of locals. Of course, such a large-scale robbery ensures pursuit. Capture is evaded when Walker produces a cache of rifles aware that in defending themselves the natives will trigger revolution. Walker then goes to work on the upper-classes, explaining how much better off they would be if they could side with the rebellion and overthrow the Portuguese.

Mission accomplished, he scoots off home, only to return when corruption has so destroyed the island, now a British colony, that Jose Dolores is back creating rebellion. Old friend becomes foe and is ruthlessly hunted down.

You can’t help but admire Walker’s guile. To create a large enough distraction to pull off the robbery he simply gets the entire town population drunk on free booze, giving soldiers more than enough rioting to cope with. To provide the circumstances to assassinate the President, he takes advantage of the costuming for a festival, allowing people to sneak past guards in any disguise. But when cunning doesn’t work, it’s down to brute force. The group with the biggest army, more weapons and the greater degree of ruthlessness will always win.

This isn’t one of those movies that sets out to idolise a rebel leader or where a small band of outlaws outwit the ruling power with clever ruses or filled with duels or ambushes or full-on battles. This is about the puppeteers, the men who use violence for their own commercial ends.

Like General Custer, Walker is a man with a job to do, even while he might despise it and certainly is filled with disgust at the ruling party. He claims he is not the author of either group’s misfortune but merely “the instrument.” On his return, he argues, “I didn’t start it; when I arrived you were already butchering each other.” In other words, blameless, just following the orders of either government or employer. But he takes pride in doing his job “well,” no matter the cost.

Every action has consequence. Even attempting to save Jose Dolores’s life, it is with consequence in mind. Let him live and set him free elsewhere and he will be viewed as a traitor. Kill him and he will be seen as a martyr, the most dangerous currency for incipient rebellion.

He knows exactly what buttons to press. In order to convince the ruling band of natives to support revolution in the first place, he makes a comparison with prostitution. You hire a sex worker by the hour to fulfil a need, you are not required, as with a wife, to dress her and feed her and look after her for her entire life. Should the employers free their slaves, that would eliminate the need for a lifetime of care (no matter how little) but could hire them as required.

The brutality is not dwelt upon, no The Wild Bunch-style bloody carnage, just a growing number of corpses on either side depending which group has the upper hand. The difference between the brutal Portuguese and the sedate English is in their approach to execution. The Portuguese rely on the garotte, by which a steel band fixed round the neck is slowly twisted until life is extinguished. The English prefer the speed of the gallows.

Marlon Brando considered this one of his finest performances and I am inclined to agree. There is no showboating either way, neither inflating a character nor deflating him, as the actor was apt to do when playing a loser. Instead, Walker never loses a grip on his emotions, no temper, no tears, just saying whatever someone wanted to hear, guiding with a hidden hand, a man who might have invented the term “results-based.” It is the calmest you will ever see Brando, and you might catch elements of this portrayal in his Godfather pushing pawns into place. But you won’t see here a single explosion of anger. For a non-actor, Evaristo Marquez gives a superb performance, though mostly he is also restrained, as if he was learning from a master.

Director Gillo Pontecorvo (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) takes a semi-documentary approach to the subject, concentrating on the machinations, no attempt to pull audience heartstrings with images of poverty. The garotte death does the work of explaining the brutality to come.

But there are three brilliant scenes that showcase the unstoppable character of war. In the best, the rebels, trying to escape an island ablaze, seek shelter on the higher ground. But this arid region is also exposed, no jungle here to provide cover, and scrambling up the naked slopes they are picked off, in long shot, one by one.

In the second example, the closest Walker comes to emotion is waking up one morning to the sound of a gallows being built. He takes a moment, listening, aware perhaps, though unwilling to admit it, that the harvest of a seed sown is about to be reaped. Brando is such a good actor that sadness only appears as a flicker of regret that the rebellion he began took a wrong turn once it was taken over by the wrong hands.

And, technically, his hands are clean. He is never seen firing a weapon. In the last of this trio of scenes, the English introduce hanging to the island. But since no one possesses the expertise to make a noose strong enough to support a head, Walker shows how.

There are two versions of this movie. It was filmed as Quiemada and this version is 17 minutes longer than the one released as Burn! I would urge you to see the far more atmospheric former. Editing down the picture, the distributors took out much of the background material. As a plus, there is a score by Ennio Morricone.

One of the best films ever made about the politics of war and the destructive force of commerce.